“Donald Trump is compromised,” Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens told former CNN news anchor Jim Acosta on January 19. “He’s acting as a functional asset of the Russian federation,” Stevens, who at one time served as Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist continued. “And if you are a Republican senator and you’re going along with Donald Trump, he is compromising you….

The degree to which the Republican party has been compromised by Russia, I think, is one of the great underreported, understudied stories of our time. And it's been going on for a while. I mean, you go back to early warning signs, the way that they [Russia] funneled all this money into the NRA, and they were compromised by this, and then they clearly compromised the Heritage Foundation. And now you have that consistently for decades the single greatest antagonist to the Soviet Union and then an expansive Russian Federation was the most conservative element of the Republican party. And now it's the beating heart of the pro-Putin [constituency].... You don't say that you're a Ronald Reagan Republican, the guy that stood in front of [the Berlin wall and said] "Tear down the wall Mr. Gorbachev," and you go along with Donald Trump. No.  Either you're lying then or you're lying now. I think all this stuff that we put out as principles for the party were just marketing slogans.

In 2018 two nurses in Samoa prepared what should have been routine measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccines with an expired anesthetic instead of water, and administered them to two infants, who died. The Samoan government suspended vaccinations for 10 months, and the nation was bombarded with anti-vaccination messages, including from RFK Jr. and his nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. That year only 31% of Samoan children received the MMR vaccine, leading to nearly 3,000 infections in the nation of 200,000, and 39 deaths by November 2019. Kate O’Brien, head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) immunization department at the time, told the Guardian that the effect of misinformation about vaccine safety was “being measured in the lives of children who had died” in the course of the outbreak. By January 2020 5,700 people had been infected, resulting in 83 deaths, with most of the victims under 5 years old.

Kennedy was an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024, but suspended his campaign August 23 throwing his support behind Donald Trump. On November 14, 2024 Trump announced that RFK Jr. would serve as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, contradicting then-Trump-spokesman Howard Lutnick’s denial to CNN that Kennedy would have a role in a Trump HHS department.

Today we start with a review of policies and procedures that are at cross purposes in the Trump administration. That leads to a discussion of a more general conflict between the beliefs underlying pronatalist policies on the one hand, which promote more babies, and the public health contrarianism of RFK Jr and his minions, which seem to want only people with certain traits to survive. We review some research on natalism and misogyny, and their connection to insecure masculinity, and then take a quick look at some of the influences on Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr. growing up. Finally we suggest what may connect the divergent views of population.