I watched the testimony of former CDC official Susan Monarez on MSNBC. Watching MSNBC was my first mistake. The second was assuming I would hear plain truth; it was a congressional hearing after all. Her answers initially came off as sophisticated. It took me a while to see the substance wasn’t keeping up with the vocabulary.
As I listened, it became clear that Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had it right. He told her directly that she was lying, that she lied about details of her departure, about when she hired her lawyers, about conversations she had with HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. and others, and it appeared that she and her lawyers had spent time framing the whole situation.
What I saw did not look like accountability. It looked like an audition. She seemed to be applying for a job with the Democrats, presenting herself as a newly minted, highly credible anti-Trump warrior. She will likely be on CNN or MSNBC in a few months as a commentator, in line for a nice job with the Democrats should they get elected in 2028.
Monarez is a symbol of the problem I want RFK to fix. The culture she represents will not reform itself. It must be replaced.
Our health system is very expensive and getting worse. Sometimes you have to break something that is doing some good in order to build something better. And we need better. You cannot repair a captured institution by stapling on more slogans. You change people and incentives. Then you open the doors and let the light in.
Monarez is smart enough to maintain status quo and tough enough to fight to defend it. I don’t believe she is smart enough or open enough to rise above the consensus and the establishment to see the bigger picture.
The Dangers of Consensus
History is full of moments when establishment science was massively and brutally wrong. The pattern repeats.
Remember Galileo? He backed a sun-centered universe when authority demanded an Earth-centered one. He was tried and confined. He was right and brutally punished for it.
Ignaz Semmelweis told doctors to wash their hands and it would cut childbirth deaths. He was mocked and dismissed, and more babies died.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth said we had ten years before global warming would bring catastrophe. That was 2006. We are still here. In 2008, James Hansen marked twenty years since his 1988 warning and said “tipping points are near.” These were held up as consensus conclusions of the best scientific work in the field, that all scientists agreed (well, not quite…). Wrong.
Radical transparency is impossible when establishment scientists treat “consensus” as a gate that blocks dissent. So yes, fire them when they use consensus to muzzle questions. That is the heart of the issue. Consensus is not the same as truth. It is not even the same as openness. Consensus often acts like a filter that screens out minority evidence, minority questions, and minority hypotheses. It tells outsiders to sit down and be quiet while insiders decide what may be discussed. That is the opposite of transparency. Transparency means everyone can see the data, test the assumptions, and challenge the model. Consensus means the club sets the boundaries and punishes dissent that crosses the line.
The RFK Agenda
RFK is pressing the questions the establishment keeps dodging. He is asking whether autism could be linked to certain vaccines or other environmental factors. Consensus science says he is wrong. The immediate issue is not whether he is right today. The issue is whether the establishment will reopen the investigation or again declare the discussion closed – BECAUSE THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS NOT FOUND THE SOLUTION.
He is also asking about the policies and efficacy of automatically vaccinating newborns. He wants to know whether that policy could be pushing us down a harmful evolutionary path. That is not a forbidden question. It is a public health question. The right response is more open data, not more insults.
He is calling attention to the rise of childhood chronic diseases over the past two generations. He names the obvious: obesity, lack of fitness, depression. He says plainly that he is focused on food, screen time, and fitness. These are not fringe ideas. They are daily realities in American families. Yet despite the growing imporances of these issues over the LAST TWO GENERATIONS, the establishment HAS NOT SOLVED THESE PROBLEMS.
He is also pressing the question of over-medication. Do you think the medical establishment wants to reduce sales of expensive medicines? The incentives are misaligned. The safest path for insiders is to medicate symptoms and move on. The harder path is to confront causes and change behavior. If you want better health, you must choose the harder path. But the establishment KEEPS PUSHING HIGHER DOSES OF DANGEROUS DRUGS.
What Radical Transparency Really Looks Like
Radical transparency begins with a simple promise. No question is off-limits. No dataset is hidden. No minority view is ruled out before it is tested. In that world, RFK’s questions about autism, newborn vaccine policies, childhood disease trends, lifestyle factors, and over-medication are not threats. They are the starting point for learning. In that world, dissenters are not smeared. They are invited to present their case and meet the data in public.
Success is not a press release. It is healthier children. It is fewer chronic conditions across a generation. It is fewer expensive drugs taken for life to manage preventable disease. It is a system that tells the truth even when the truth embarrasses people in charge. It is a culture that admits error, changes course, and credits the dissenter who pointed out the problem in the first place.
Why RFK Is the Right Person Now
I support RFK because he is willing to do the uncomfortable work. He is not asking for blind faith in his conclusions. He is asking for the right to ask and the right to verify. He wants a health system measured by outcomes, not by how loudly it can chant the word “consensus.” He wants and needs to tear down establishment consensus in every aspect, starting with HHS and working his way down into industry. That is exactly what this moment requires.
There may indeed be some bad moves on RFK’s part. It could be that some of this ideas don’t pan out and the establishment will poke fun at him for it. If this is a problem for you, re-read the section “The Dangers of Consensus” above.
The establishment is full of people who have their place in the world and perhaps were even the pioneers of their day. But often those pioneers accumulate and become part of the bureaucracy, in essence a ruling class in their field. It is time to dismantle the bureaucracy that blocks minority dissent, rebuild the parts that serve the public, and set a new standard. The standard is simple: better health for America, delivered with honesty.
HHS Must Be Dismantled Before It Can Be Fixed
You do not rebuild trust by layering new memos on top of an old machine. You take the machine apart. I support RFK because he is willing to do that work. He wants to challenge the reflex that says debate is dangerous and silence is safe. He wants to replace the habit of protecting reputations with the habit of testing results. If that requires removing people who cannot or will not change, then remove them.
If a leadership class protects its colleagues, protects current regimens, defends the consensus, and ignores minority objections, it will not deliver change. It will deliver more of the same. After watching the smug, self-satisfied testimony of Monarez, I concluded she is exactly the kind of person who should be fired. Not because she is a villain. Because she is a tough, educated, qualified, true-believing guardian of a failing status quo.
RFK has fired a lot of people. Hopefully more will follow.
