MAGA's Theory of Knowledge

It will always dead-end in autocracy and eugenics.

RFK, Jr: He can see mitochondria.

Sebastian Gorka just announced: “Conservatives don’t need a lens! All we are driven by is the truth! Truth doesn’t need a prism! It doesn’t need a lens! That is President Trump!”

That’s not Josef Goebbels. That’s Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s senior director of counterterrorism. He said it on Wednesday.

Of course, if the Trump administration were actually concerned about antisemitism—and not just kidnapping teens and brown people, and calling it counterterrorism—it would jail Sebastian Gorka. It’s long been an open secret that Gorka swore a lifelong oath of loyalty to none other than the Hungarian neo-Nazi party.

Gorka grew up on Goebbels, then. It’s no wonder he parrots the Nazi theory of knowing: All meaning, sense, and order in the universe come from the Führer.

(Goebbels: “Who could show the way save the Führer! His work is the work of order!”)

Likewise, Gorka has direct access to Truth because… “That is President Trump.” QED. Yes, it’s come to this.

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MAGA’s own theory of knowledge is really very weird. This is not just an academic inquiry. Once you understand MAGA’s epistemology, you’ll see better how Trump and his valets are consolidating power.

We’re going to look first at RFK Jr’s eugenics, because his creepy superstitions are exactly the “unfounded, fringe beliefs [that] could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world,” as 700 health professionals put it in a recent letter to the Senate.

So here’s some recent fringe from Kennedy:

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” he said last week.

“I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection.”

The MAGA theory of knowledge is all here.

First off, it’s very very important to MAGA that the primary locus of truth is concealed, and ideally invisible to the eyes of mere mortals. Second, it’s best if it’s measured in numbers that sound precise and can readily be fudged: dollars, attendance at rallies, IQ points, rank, inches, labor statistics.

(On Tuesday, to explain away a video showing stuff being thrown out a White House window, Trump grabbed chaotically for authority with a fudged number: “Each window weighs about 600 pounds.”)

For RFK, the false precision of “mitochondria” fit the bill.