At darker moments, contesting this kind of stuff in the wake of the 2024 election—and all the shameless, shameful, unforgivable work the American media did to produce that election's outcome—feels as absurd as demanding the cannibal presently eating your legs use a knife and fork. In less dark moments, that contestation feels like just about the only form hope can take. The language still exists. Maybe someone will need it, someday, to accomplish some good in the world, while the world still exists. If that's ever to be possible, then our language has to retain some usefulness, too. It has to be tended.
"Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to be Head of Health and Human Services Dept.," reads the New York Times headline from Thursday, atop a story by health policy reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about, well, pretty much what the headline says. We're fine up to that point. Then there's the subhed (emphasis mine): "Whether the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has unorthodox views about medicine, is an open question." That formulation repeats in the lead paragraph (emphasis again mine):
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, setting up a debate over whether Mr. Kennedy, whose vaccine skepticism and unorthodox views about medicine make public health officials deeply uneasy, can be confirmed.
"Vaccine skeptic." "Vaccine skepticism." What the fuck are we talking about here? I would rather chew through my own wrist like Shelly in The Evil Dead than deploy one of those "Merriam-Webster defines 'skepticism' as ..." sentences in a blog. I won't damn do it. But you don't often encounter a word being used to describe its exact opposite in the pages of one of the English language's most prominent publications. It's difficult to imagine a place where you might encounter that sort of usage. That's not really how language works.
What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known "skepticism" to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and "common sense." A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They're the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.
There is no such thing as an adult "vaccine skeptic" in the year 2024. For all its factual value as a label, you might just as accurately call R.F.K. Jr. an esquilax. Any reasonable questions that a skeptical, critical-minded person might have about how and whether vaccines work can be answered by more hard, clear evidence than a person could exhaust in a year of nonstop research. To practice skepticism in this case, to approach the science of vaccination with a skeptic's demands, is to learn that vaccines work, and that vaccination as a practice has done incalculable good for humanity. The idea of a "vaccine skeptic" in 2024 is as nonsensical as the idea of a germ theory skeptic. A molecular biology skeptic. A heliocentricity skeptic. A spherical triangle.
How does a shit-for-brains like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. come to be described as a "vaccine skeptic" in the New York Times, in 2024, when he absolutely is not one, and when there is also no such thing as one? As a copy matter, "skeptic" certainly costs less column space than engaging with the question of whether Kennedy's anti-vax fear-mongering reflects the cynical calculus of a scumbag grifter or the sweaty but sincere raving of a dumb guy with grave mental illness, or both, or what. On the other hand, "skeptic" is one character longer than "denier," which is without question the more factually upstanding term here, as it merely describes what Kennedy does—he denies the efficacy of vaccines—and makes no claims about the basis of that denial.
Surely the incurable politeness of America's boneless legacy press plays a role in this. "Vaccine denier" simply is not flattering to Kennedy; "vaccine skeptic" makes him seem ... well, like the kind of person that antivaxxers like to think they are: serious, flinty-eyed question-askers, rather than stubborn assholes stamping their feet and refusing to learn what can be fully known because they want some special hidden truth of their own. At any rate, "vaccine skeptic" certainly is nicer and less contentious than calling Kennedy a motivated bullshitter, a peddler of antiscientific garbage, the type of dogshit-brained imbecile who will stiff-arm all that can be learned from centuries of medical research and practice because he preferred what he learned from a 25-second TikTok video made by a spiral-eyed homeschool casualty who'll be hospitalized next month with an illness that hasn't sickened a human being since the Bronze Age. That laundering does him a favor he doesn't remotely deserve, but it is especially egregious now that Kennedy seems very likely to end up holding a powerful position in national government. It's that last bit, as much as his famous name, that wins Kennedy that favor; if this clammy lummox is going to be in charge of something important, then the Times must do its customary job of dressing him for the part.
So much of what has brought us all to this unutterably bleak moment in American history—with eradicated diseases on the rise, the biosphere sweltering to death, a 34-times-convicted felon and twice-impeached rapist and bigot swept back into the presidency on a promise to exacerbate the real problems and fix the imaginary ones, all the levers of power in the hands of a tiny number of giddy sneering fascists, a shattered society eagerly transforming what's left of itself into a casino—seems crystallized in the decision to call a guy who thinks vaccines make your organs transparent a "vaccine skeptic," in an article about how he'll pretty soon be taking over what remains of the United States's woefully degraded public health apparatus. Wimpy deference to sneering bad actors and moneyed crackpots; slovenly ignorance and poisonous half-literacy; reflexive retconning of whoever and whatever attains power into the established forms of seriousness; and the narcotizing glaze of illusory continuity slathered over it all. It all comes together in this, in the cowardly refusal to see reality for what it is and describe it truthfully—to value skepticism, that is to say, and all that it demands.
