Now he controls the agency that controls EPA. That is a big win for anti-science progressives. And because they are playing chess, not checkers, anti-science Republicans think it's their idea.
It seems like a century ago but it was really only just a few years in the past that Democrats wanted to ban GMOs, processed foods, and vaccines. And claimed all chemicals cause cancer, using no science, only epidemiology. Now one of their own is doing it and Republicans are cheering. All it took was another former Democrat, President Donald Trump, legitimizing Kennedy in a way President Obama, who was in sync with Kennedy about the link between vaccines and autism when elected, thought too risky.
President Biden was the worst executive in charge of science since Nixon - until this year. A perfectly sensible first-term President Trump came back for his second chance at governance and gave himself a self-inflicted intellectual gunshot wound in Kennedy. It was unfathomable last December that Trump could be worse for science than Biden. The assumption by literate people was that Trump would do what Obama did in 2008 and tell Kennedy 'sorry, I tried, you don't have the votes' and give one of Kennedy's companies a billion dollars (1) and then carry on with the many positive things he did from 2017 through 2020.
He did not and so far, it's even worse than Biden. And Biden tried to declare that a manmade pond on a farm was a navigable water of the United States and in case an aircraft carrier needed to park there, armed federal marshals in masks had to be able to to terrify farmers who happened to be Republicans by conducting surprise visits.
Kennedy is worse.
Biden told EPA to go to court and bizarrely ask to vacate its own ruling about trace chemicals in the environment and make a new settlement with itself that science was going to take a backseat to epidemiology handed to EPA by the Services. Bans of science would be easy when the 90% of Democrats who dominate Services like Fish and Wildlife could hand EPA their own survey data claiming a weedkiller is turning frogs gay, and EPA could ban it. No Assessment or Congress needed.
Kennedy is worse.
Yesterday he handed all of his friends on the left a giant bag of money; using no science, only epidemiological claims, he had EPA designate PFOA and PFOS as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund law.
Let's be clear, for environmental lawyers in prestige positions 'accountability' is always and exclusively about funding their lifestyles. This is a lawsuit gift for Kennedy's friends and it will make the Big Tobacco settlement look like chump change.
Because science knows what Kennedy does not; PFAS alone are 12,000 chemicals, nearly all of them natural. None of them have ever caused as much as a headache in a clinical trial. His abuse of executive fiat does not distinguish between natural PFAS and synthetic, all it does is allow trial lawyers who can detect them near a DuPont plant file a lawsuit - even if there is no evidence of any harm.
They're still not going to vote for a Republican, but the kookiest activists in the Democratic party are thrilled that one of their own wormed his way into the brains of Republicans.
But it's terrible for America.
(1) President Obama made it all better by giving Kennedy's BrightSource, with only $17 million in revenue, $1.4 billion of your money.
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