Tag: politics

“This Is Existential”: MAHA To Save the Nation

by greenpoweredlife

Hundreds of people turned out to watch a fireside chat with RFK Jr., Dr. Calley Means, and Dr. Phil in Pennsylvania last Thursday. The thread uniting the diverse audience was clear: a deep understanding that saving our country means making America healthy again.

One week ago I drove three hours south from my home in Pennsylvania deep into the heart of farmland country to attend a discussion between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Calley Means, moderated by Dr. Phil. The event was a taping for Dr. Phil’s new entertainment and news network, Merit Street Media.  I wondered who might attend the event, as it wasn’t specifically a “Trump” gathering, and I thought the content of the discussion was likely to lean more towards health and healing rather than the strictly political.  The crowd was made up of enthusiastic middle aged Trump supporters eager to welcome their new ally, RFK Jr., young people who might look more comfortable in a health food store or wandering a farmers market, and suspender-clad men only one religious step outside of the Amish sect. As the speakers took their seats amidst roars of approval and a standing ovation from the crowd, one thing became obvious: the right has enthusiastically embraced their newfound association with a nationwide health improvement push. RFK Jr. ‘s alignment with the Trump campaign was a conservative lightbulb moment, a realization that one of the most urgent and necessary ways in which the United States must improve is in the physical health of the majority of the country. We have some of  the worst healthcare in the developed world, pay the most for that mediocre healthcare, and remain some of the most unhealthy people. Our healthcare system is deeply flawed, the pharmaceutical industry is grotesquely corrupt, and people are suffering. On stage, Dr. Means and RFK Jr. declared their intentions to facilitate a top down restructuring of the FDA, NIH,  pharma lobbies, and the healthcare system. About our failing healthcare system, RFK Jr. said, “This is existential.” Improving the health of the nation isn’t just a life and death matter for individuals themselves, but for the longevity and success of the country as a whole. The United States thrives if its citizens thrive. The country declines when the health of its people declines. With both RFK Jr. and Dr. Means working on the transition team and influencing health policy within the Trump administration, there is hope for restoring health to our country, and Conservatives are ready to embrace this ambitious task.

A Regressing Population

The Flynn Effect is an observation that the average IQ of a population increases over time. As people are exposed to better education, a more complex and interesting world, and better nutrition, it makes sense that, collectively, IQ goes up in a small but significant degree over the course of decades. RFK Jr. described how, in the past decade, we’ve put the breaks on the Flynn Effect for the first time in human history. “Americans are losing IQ”, he said. During the Covid pandemic, American toddlers had a nauseating 22 point drop in IQ. Male school performance is lagging behind girls for the first time, and boys no longer perform better in subjects in which they used to traditionally outperform girls, like sciences and math. Unfortunately, it’s not because girls are more interested and invested in STEM that they’re outpacing their male counterparts, but simply that the population as a whole is regressing, and men and boys are declining at a more rapid rate than ever. 4 out of every 100 boys have autism, a staggering percentage representation for a disease that only recently seems to have emerged with a vengeance.  RFK Jr. highlighted how 40% of teenagers suffer from depression. 1 in 3 children are diabetic or prediabetic. Dr. Means noted that “The biggest building in every city is a pediatric hospital.” In terms of statistics, our country looks distressingly, unfathomably poor. Globally, we are weakening. This issue is “no longer partisan”, Dr. Means remarked. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the CDC dropped the guidelines and thresholds with which childhood development is measured against. Suddenly, milestones for talking, walking, pattern recognition, and general cognitive development dropped to meet the sharp developmental declines seen in children during 2020 and on. Dr. Means and RFK Jr. both expressed disgust that those responsible for detrimental Covid-19 policies were not only never reprimanded or held accountable in any capacity, but often promoted or celebrated within their fields. We are in the midst of a “societal collapsing health crisis”, Dr. Means said. “We’re sicker, more depressed, more infertile….Chronic lifestyle conditions are plaguing America.” Everywhere you look, there is sickness and unhealth. We seem to be unable, but more likely unwilling, to satisfactorily identify the causes of our country-wide illness epidemic. We’re at a societal tipping point, and RFK Jr. seems to be the only politician with enough courage to sound the alarm and demand action. As evidenced by the whoops and shouts of approval from the crowd at the discussion in Pennsylvania on Thursday, RFK Jr. has found compatriots and overwhelming support from the Republican party.

A Party-Wide Awakening

It used to be fringe and alarmist to believe that we’re all astonishingly ill, and that it’s our food, pharmaceuticals, and lifestyles that made us this way. Thanks to RFK Jr.’s massively successful grass-roots Independent campaign this year, not only have a greater number of people been exposed to the truth of our broken food and drug system, but they’re supporting the fight to improve it. The MAGA rallying cry has been joined with the MAHA declaration, and a new era of conservatism is being born in front of our eyes. “The old left”, as RFK called it, used to be the party fighting for the health interests of the people, and creating checks and balances on influences over food and drug manufacturing. Now it’s conservatives, arm in arm with RFK Jr., taking up the mantle to repair what corruption and cronyism has completely destroyed. According to Dr. Means, “Pharma is the largest funder of policies” in government, and our “institutions of trust”, like the FDA and NIH, have been bought and sold for profit and power, and not for health or healing. According to one study noted by Dr. Means, the NIH was found to have over 8,000 “significant” conflicts of interest since 2012, an internal industry of corruption totaling more than $188 million dollars. In one disturbing example of unfavorable test results being simply brushed away and the taxpayer dollars that funded them sent disappearing into thin air, Dr. Means cited a 10 million dollar study on the effects of puberty blockers on American children. The NIH found that puberty blockers given to gender dysphoric children had no positive effect on their mental health, and they subsequently refused to publish the study. “These agencies are corrupt to their core,” said RFK Jr. Dr. Means astutely noted that we can feel in our gut that “our institutions aren’t quite right”. This seems to be the nerve struck by RFK Jr. for conservative voters. We’ve long known that our high-level health institutions like the FDA, NIH, and CDC appear to work against the populations in which they are charged to protect and improve, and now suspicions are confirmed. RFK Jr. turned on the lights in what was once a dark room and illuminated all the shadows that we could feel but didn’t see. Our health systems are broken, and republican voters are ready and eager to begin the long road to fixing them.

A Vote For Action

RFK Jr. remains on the ballot in many states, but he expressed the importance of using would-be independent votes to vote for Trump and thereby bring RFK Jr. into office within that administration. If we believe in the goals and objectives of the MAHA movement, a vote for Trump ensures it’s advancement. Should Trump win the election, both Dr. Calley Means and RFK Jr. will work on the transition team and influence health policy within the White House. They stressed the need for top down dismantling of the FDA and NIH, with intentions of making personnel changes at these corrupt agencies and creating regulatory checks on how science is conducted and influenced. RFK Jr. noted the importance of creating changes through regulation and executive order rather than attempting to remove corruption by sending bills through congress. Changes must happen now, and without the capacity to be further corrupted. About their objectives, he said, “We’re not taking choice away from anybody…you’re an American”. But he believes that people have an immediate right to real, factual, uncorrupted studies about the foods they eat and the drugs they take, and how it’s affecting their health and lifespan. He believes Americans have a right to the truth about the causes of their poor health. RFK Jr.’s goals for his place in the Trump administration are lofty. “We’re going to find out what’s causing Autism in a couple of months,” he declared confidently. Dr. Means, referencing backlash from Trump’s recent viral McDonalds visit, dismissed the question of whether it was “healthy” or not for Trump to visit McDonalds, but rather asked why the United States allows McDonalds to serve “poison” to us and our children when other countries do not. These are the kinds of ambitions front of mind for the men ready to step into action if Trump becomes president for the second time: causation identification of our country’s most puzzling new disease and the massacre of the substances filling our country’s most popular fast food restaurant. To make America healthy again means dismantling many of the institutions and ideas that we’ve become habituated to accept over the decades. The health and future of our country depends on a few people being willing to put it all on the line for change. RFK Jr. endorsed Donald Trump as the right man for the job. Moderator Dr. Phil said we’re “fighting a huge institutional legacy”, but RFK Jr. had no qualms about Trump’s capacity to change those institutions if brought to office. He said what we all feel about Trump, why the nation is ready to bring him to office for a second time. About Trump, RFK Jr. stated simply, “He’s fearless”.

Moral Bankruptcy: Stealing Valor to Buy Credibility.

by greenpoweredlife

An examination of Governor Tim Walz.

I was only seventeen when I enlisted in the military. I chose the Air Force National Guard because I planned to go to college on the dime of the Department of Defense and because my father, a former Marine, thought the Air Force might be the “gentler” branch for his young, petite oldest daughter. I had nothing to lose. The Air Force would pay for my education, and I could prove, to myself and everyone else, that I was actually as tough as I thought myself to be. From the moment my terrified feet took hesitant steps onto the bus that transported me to my basic training unit my fellow trainees and I began our indoctrination into the rites and rituals of the United States Military. In 8 weeks of intensive warfighter training, I was transformed from a civilian teenage know-it-all to a gun-toting Airmen in the greatest military on earth. I had the jargon, I had the physical military bearing, and I had the war time strategy and philosophies essentially implanted into my brain via a Military Training Instructor’s spitting, screaming repetition. We all did – all twenty or so members of my female military graduating class stood shoulder to shoulder at attention, and for that brief moment we were all young Airmen on the lowest rung of our career totem poles. Each of our brains was a well-programmed military encyclopedia, but our military experiences had no nuance yet. Soon our careers would launch, and the differences within each of our individual paths would emerge to tell a story about our accomplishments as veterans. But the way we talk about those accomplishments, whether we flaunt them, embellish them, keep them tight within us, or cloak them with humility, says something about who we are as people, and about our character. Our interpretation and recapitulation of our experiences, the way we recount them and reimagine them, is an effective moral barometer. For those who treat their military experience like a man narrating a fish tale, full of fanciful flourishes bordering on outright fabrications, it’s reasonable to ask, “How much of anything this individual says can be trusted?” If the person in question is someone of high political standing – say, a potential Vice President of the United States such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, we are wise to sound the alarm. When individuals conflate their service record, especially people in political positions, we are required to examine their character a little deeper. 

To have enlisted in the military at all and for any reason is brave and honorable. To embellish your service record, to pretend or insinuate that you’ve done more than is truthful, is shameful. Embellishing your service record is easy to do – that’s what makes it spineless. It’s often referred to as “stolen valor” – falsely claiming military position, awards, or recognition. I don’t believe Governor Tim Walz stole valor in the way it’s traditionally recognized. Certainly, he made shady claims about rank, insinuated experiences of war, and made a calculated career slither out of a potential deployment. Rather than full blown stolen valor, he did the next most egregious thing you can do publicly and expect to get away with: To buy credibility for himself, he bloated his rank and insinuated war zone experience, knowing all the while that he shadily sidestepped his chance at gaining real war experience. All branches of the United States Military retain a rigid code of ethics. You earn your rank. You earn your war stories. You earn your medals. There is a hierarchy to every component of the establishment, for good reason. It is one huge, churning conglomerate of individual human beings all working in perfect synchronicity to be a war machine. And while the machine needs each individual to function, it is the individual who risks life and limb. Young men and young women die. They are  maimed. They go far away from their families and come back changed. The United States Military is a sacred, reverent, fantastic, horrible machine. To look into the eyes of millions of Americans and claim to have played a bigger role in the functioning of the machine, no matter how trivial the fabrication, indicates a darkness of character that should give every one of us pause. We are used to politicians lying. To lie about something so sacrosanct, and also so disprovable, as military service is deeply concerning. What else are you willing to lie to the American people about? Do you expect yourself to be above logical and necessary scrutiny?

Governor Tim Walz did serve in the United States Army. He did honorably reach the rank of Master Sergeant, and retired at that rank. Walz however has claimed that he retired at the next highest rank, Command Sergeant Major. According to the Minnesota National Guard, Walz did not in fact complete the necessary coursework and paperwork to maintain the rank of Command Sergeant Major. In the military, your rank is your entirety. It determines your level of privilege, your capacity for responsibility, and your necessary degree of respect. It is cut and dry. It drives your pay. It showcases the power you wield and how scared of you the lower ranks should be. To claim a higher rank, especially when Governor Walz reached a desirable and high rank within the Army, is curiously unnecessary. Did he feel as though the Army owed him that rank, and simply decided to claim it as his own? I certainly do not know his motivations, but I am deeply dubious of an individual who can look the public in the eye and tell a needless and easily provable lie about military rank.

More egregious and more shameful are the accusations surrounding Governor  Walz regarding his skirting of a deployment, then claiming in retrospect a wartime overseas service. Walz was never deployed to a Middle East location during wartime. His battalion had the opportunity to go, and as a senior non-commissioned officer, he would have been tasked with leading his troops in their overseas location. Reports are hazy and conflicting about when the official order for deployment to Iraq in 2005 for Walz’s battalion came down to the troops. However Walz, being a high ranking senior man, would unquestioningly have been hearing rumblings and scuttlebutt about the impending mobilization. Walz chose to retire at that time – a decision he was entitled to make after 24 years of dedicated service. He planned to run for congressional office. Although he could have deployed and made his congressional run at the same time, he chose not to. He walked away from his battalion and allowed his men to step into the theater of war without him. Was it cowardice? Strategy? Regardless, his retirement, and the careful timing of it, could all be quietly justified and glossed over, except for his later combat claims to come. Thanks to retirement, Walz did not have to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. It is confounding  that Walz would tell a crowd in 2018 that “we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” He did not carry weapons in war. He carried weapons of war, sure. But the distinction is important, and the word choice is calculated. It implies combat. A reasonable person, especially a civilian, would assume he carried a gun and engaged in combat. He similarly implied combat in a 9/11 commemoration speech where he spoke about his experience at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. He claimed he came back from Afghanistan a changed man due to his experiences there, like witnessing bodies being loaded onto an aircraft carrier. He was at Bagram on a congressional visit. He was undoubtedly flanked by security and never took a step off  the comfort of the base. His insinuations are purposeful. The man left the military before he could serve in combat, and then fabricated a combat experience to buy himself more credibility without having to put his life on the line to gain it. Walz did not necessarily steal valor, but he certainly pumped a degree of valor into his time in service that did not exist otherwise. The military is composed of men and women who have earned their war experience by making a gamble with God in service of the country. Governor Walz never had to make that gamble, and he knows it. To feel like a bigger man, he leads you to believe otherwise. There is nothing more egregious than ravaging the sanctity of real combat experience by fabricating your own for false prestige.

My own time in the military was straight forward. I did eight weeks in basic training and completed further specialized job training. After that, I served in my position as a member of the Security Forces, the Air Force’s version of  Military Police. When 6 years of enlistment came to pass and I had a brand new daughter to focus on, I was honorably discharged. My military accomplishments amounted to, essentially, nothing. I wasn’t good at the military. I felt no desire to climb rank. When the time to reenlist rolled around, not doing so was an easy decision. It simply wasn’t a good fit. Still, a twinge of jealousy comes over me when I see my former military peers leaving for interesting deployments or advancing their military schooling or rank. Having served at all though, whether I personally enjoyed my time or not, lends me a reasonable level of credibility. Any commitment to enlist, regardless of duration, allows a level of credibility shared by all military personnel. I realized that just mentioning my prior service gave me a little shining red, white, and blue halo over my head in the eyes of just about every civilian. There is a jolt of pride that comes along with that positive feedback. When people ask what I did during my time of enlistment, it’s hard to say “basically… not a thing.” For someone in a bland military career, it’s easy to see how the temptation might arise to insinuate grander experiences and accomplishments. When inquiries come up about whether I ever spent time overseas with the military, the answer is “yes”. The Air Force sent me on a cushy, small assignment to England, and a few other assignments in the continental United States. But when someone asks about time overseas, they are not asking about pseudo vacations to the UK. I know what they are actually asking: “Have you ever been deployed?” I could say yes. It would technically be true. I could leave them wondering, but not comfortable asking, about where, and under what circumstances. Their minds would go to movies and pop culture – deserts, guns, and explosives – and they would think highly of my dedication to the country. When someone asks about where I was stationed, the truth is a tiny but highly functioning National Guard unit in Pennsylvania, and only on my required one weekend a month at that. But what I could say, and what would also be the truth, is “I worked for an Air Force Special Operations Unit on the East Coast”. That sounds impressive, mysterious, and serious. That begs no follow up questions. That makes me sound like a total badass. When people ask about things I’ve done during my enlistment, I can talk about all of the time I spent in the presence of some quiet and kind but very scary Special Operations men from every branch of the United States Military and many from the UK as well. It’s all true. But aside from a polite passing “hello” every now and then, the majority of my interactions with these guys was sitting on airport tarmac alone in a car with a gun keeping watch over their parked airplanes for hours on end. I chose not to stay in the military because it didn’t fit me just as much as I didn’t fit it. Yet I still often wish I had done more, and had more to show for 6 years of enlistment. I imagine better stories to tell, higher rank to claim, a successful deployment to an overseas location to commiserate about with fellow vets. I could claim more than is fully truthful. No one would know the difference. Not only would doing so be slimy and dishonest, but to embellish my own experience is a cheapening of the sacrifice of those who actually did more – who did the most. People died for the American cause. Men and women put their lives on the line, and some lost the bargain. What kind of darkness of soul must you have to denigrate these men and women and their families by cutting and pasting yourself into the same situations that ended their lives in an effort to buy yourself more public credibility? Governor Tim Walz is an embellisher of valor and a careful liar. As a former Air Force Airmen myself, having just dipped my toe into the expansive lake of the military machine, I can tell you that we look at people like him with disgust. He might be among the ranks of the greatest military on earth on paper, but in spirit he lacks the backbone so crucial to the values of American service men and women. What the United States does not need, and what we must vote against in 2024, is another ethically bankrupt man in office. And to those members of the military who fight bravely and keep this great country safe and sound without question, we value you, and we thank you.