In today’s day and age, few freaky quirks define Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quite so succinctly as the fact that he seems to constantly be in a self-administered, one-man competition to make every week weirder and weirder and weirder than the last.
And, well, the man started off strong. In May 2024, while running for presidential office, Kennedy revealed that he once had a worm in his brain that had a bit of a meal in there before it died. Flash forward to November 2024, he and his little lifeless annelid went on to bid for the HHS role; stumble his (their?) way through a confirmation hearing that new reports are saying he (they?) lied during; and afterwards use his (their?) position at HHS to revive measles, endanger pregnant people with reckless policies, and say some of the most inane stuff imaginable.
Of course, Kennedy’s been checked here and there—and it’s been delicious. Such as! Earlier in August, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against his precious new HHS guidelines to police TPP (teen pregnancy prevention) programs, by changing their grant guidelines to focus less on sex education… and more on abstinence and building families. (Ew.) The judge, noting that some of the citations RFK (and his dead worm?) used had the “hallmark of AI-generated citations,” declared the new guidelines arbitrary and capricious.
Which, yes, is good news—but it was only after the revisions had already done their damage, not least of which has cost various TPP programs millions in grant cuts. It’s times like this that you start to think of “If only”s…
And that, my friend, brings us to our latest winner of the Comment of the Week, @WretchedGenius, who openly floated an equally bizarre timeline.
