My thesis here isn’t that the secretary of health and human services acts like a crazy person because he takes drugs—it is that he takes drugs because he is, in fact, a crazy person, one whose career as public fraud, like his career as a private junkie, is characterized by “manic-like presentations defined by irritability, aggressiveness, euphoria, grandiose beliefs, hyperactivity, and reckless or dangerous behavior.”
Kennedy’s thinking is junkie thinking: When within the space of a few sentences he insisted that COVID vaccines kill peopleand that Donald Trump deserves a Nobel prize for his role in implementing Operation Warp Speed, which developed the COVID vaccines, Kennedy took umbrage (“defined by irritability, aggressiveness”) at the notion that these two positions must be mutually exclusive. He is very much like [David Foster] Wallace’s addicts with their sense of metaphysical uniqueness and specialness: Everything that he wants to be true must be true and true at the same time, simply because he is “exempt from the laws of physics and statistics”—and logic—“that ironly govern everybody else.”