Certifiable whackjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now claiming that there is “a lot of aborted fetus debris” in the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.
No there isn’t. This is tinfoil-hat bonkers nuttery. But it’s a time-tested, very popular form of tinfoil-hat bonkers nuttery. It’s a variation of the “Satanic Baby-Killers Are Putting Dead Babies in Pepsi!!1!” nonsense that has been bubbling around white evangelicalism ever since these pious segregationists were first shocked to realize that most of their neighbors did not regard Bull Connor as the obvious moral superior of the children he was training his police dogs to attack.
It is, like every form of Satanic baby-killerism, a desperate, foolish lie that desperate, foolish people tell themselves in the hopes of tricking themselves into believing that they are entitled to always identify as intrinsically Good People even when they’re obsessed with hating widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor. Satanic baby-killerism is the lie that lets you tell yourself you’re a Good Person and thereby ensure that you will never, ever need to stop being a Bad Person.
That takes you to absurd places where — in order to protect your self-regard as a Good Person and as The Better People while still being defiantly hateful — you declare yourself opposed to life-saving vaccines in the name of being “pro-life” and try not to listen too hard to yourself as you babble nonsensically about how they grind up dead babies so they’ll fit in a syringe.
By the way, Bobby Jr. also does not believe in the germ theory of disease. That’s not my characterization of his views or my criticism of him, it’s something he says — proudly and publicly — about himself.
The nonsense about “aborted fetus debris” in vaccines is his way of ensuring that “pro-lifers” will continue to support his explicitly eugenic agenda of allowing natural selection to weed out the botched and the bungled and the weak so that they do not become a burden to the ubermenschen.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In