The Social World

Tag: MAHA

  • The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    The Dr. Strangelove taxonomy of DC types

    I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types:

    Dr. Strangelove (The theorist)

    The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors. There might be room in the bunker.

    Commander Mandrake (The visiting British correspondent)

    Efficient. Relatively polite. A cultural anthropologist. Always calling the Uber, assembling the troops for the next pub – I mean, bar – and ordering a round of Guinness for the table. He’s here on duty to report on DC’s pomp and circumstance, endlessly teasing Americans about their earnestness while secretly searching for the nearest Waffle House. Washington isn’t that different from Westminster. It’s just a little more self-serious.

    Jack D. Ripper (MAHA’s strongest soldier)

    Walk into any bar on Capitol Hill and you’ll find a handful of these guys talking about what estrogenized water is doing to testosterone levels. What the great feminization is doing to the workplace. How the male essence must be preserved. Most likely to be a 40-year-old bachelor with the Red Scare podcast in his Hinge profile as an in-group signal to the based women of Washington. In fact, there may be more Jack D. Rippers in DC right now than at any other time in history. It’s a marvel Kubrick predicted their arrival back in the 1960s.

    President Muffley (The earnest liberal)

    Still believes in democracy and – bless his heart – due process. Reads the Atlantic like a moral instruction manual. Wants to be good. Wringing his hands at the degradation of decency, biding his time until the inevitable turning of the tides. In the meantime, he tends to his ficus plant and carefully curated coffee bar while stating “cautious optimism” over things that are already engulfed in flames. May have swung closer to the center since the last election, but still can’t quite stomach the rest of it. You’re faintly fond of him, in spite of the cloud of doom trailing his every word.

    Major Kong (Defense tech enthusiast)

    He works for Palantir or Anduril or something even more secret adjacent to the Department of War. Bicoastal (SF/DC) and proud of it. Certain that the average IQ is higher in the Bay, but Washington is where the decisions get made, so he begrudgingly keeps a Dupont apartment to schmooze with the shot-callers. You get a sense that he’d ride the drones he’s developing into the sunset if the job asked for it.

    Colonel Bat Guano (The staffer)

    Overworked. Pale. Nervous. Vibrating on Celsius and Zyn. He books the flights, he writes the speeches, he quietly holds the republic together with duct tape and WD-40 while everyone else is tweeting about it. Chain smokes like a ghost who died at inbox zero. When he says it’s been a “busy week,” he means he’s been sleeping on the floor of a congressional office for four days. The midnight oil never seems to run out. By the time he finally crashes, the other party might be in charge.

    The War Room (The groupchat)

    Where all decisions are made – or at least endlessly litigated. Less geopolitical influence than NATO, more emotional instability than a freshman dorm. All gossip, vice-signaling and purity-testing. Here you’ll find the middle managers of MAGA: men so high on their small-pond power they excommunicate anyone who threatens their crumb of relevance. If you ever find yourself added to one of their threads, don’t panic. Mute, pour yourself a drink and remember that empires fall, but receipts last forever.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • By order of the non-doctor

    By order of the non-doctor

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not say, in yesterday’s cabinet meeting, that circumcision causes autism. But the fact that we’d even consider that a real statement shows just how far down the rabbit hole into the MAHA Wonderland of his mind RFK has dragged us. In fact, RFK said that after doctors circumcise boys, they give them too much Tylenol, and that causes autism. President “Don’t Take Tylenol” responded, “there’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence. I would say as a non-doctor, but I’ve studied this a long time.” 

    A non-doctor is right, and I say this as someone who’s not a fan of male circumcision, a practice based on dated religious superstition. If we abhor female circumcision as a barbaric practice (and we should), then why is male circumcision any different? This is a personal issue for me. My wife didn’t want to circumcise our son more than 20 years ago, but my Jewish parents, now deceased, threatened to disown him, and me, if we didn’t do it. There was no bris. We didn’t enjoy wine and bagels afterwards. A urologist strapped our baby to a board and caused him untold pain, for no reason. I’ll never be able to unhear those screams.  

    Thank you for allowing me to process that trauma. But the point here is that the doctor probably gave our son Tylenol, and our son doesn’t have autism. I’m also circumcised, as are most men I know, or at least I assume they are. We don’t talk about such things. No one ever interviewed me for the studies that RFK cited at the cabinet meeting. “Circumcision leads to autism” is just embarrassing crankery that plays on people’s emotions.  

    Then, on the same day we saw “RFK claims circumcision causes autism” headlines, the Wall Street Journal decided to run a light feature story on RFK’s strange habit of working out wearing jeans. They show photos of him bench-pressing in denim and climbing Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain in denim. I grew up in Phoenix and did that Camelback hike many times. It’s no fun in workout shorts; hiking in jeans is suicide.  

    We live in interesting health times, where the Health Secretary issues a joint “fitness challenge” with the Secretary of War, does a gym circuit wearing Levis, and claims that vaccines and Tylenol cause autism. At least there’s no more Red Dye #12 in our beef tallow Steak and Shake fries. And I have to wonder if this is actually making us healthier, or if we’re just fetishizing the lifestyle eccentricities of a wealthy bulked-up falconer from America’s most famous political family.  

    This movement is starting to feel like a mirror image of the “more doctors smoke Camels” ads that the tobacco industry used to produce. In 1930, Lucky Strike said that “20,679 Physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating” because of a “toasting” process. Millions of people died because of those campaigns. 

    It’s a long way down the path from that to MAHA claiming that sugar is poison (true) and that brief morning exposure to sunlight helps regulate our circadian rhythms (also true). So let’s bring it all together and list my true prescription for a healthy life: eat moderately, exercise often but not excessively, don’t smoke, don’t get circumcised, DON’T TAKE TYLENOL, and, for god’s sake, don’t climb a mountain in jeans.  

  • Tyl and error

    Tyl and error

    “DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said.

    It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz. Trump said that pregnant women should only take Tylenol in an emergency. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do,” Trump said. But any attempts to spin this as quackery unfounded in science are going to fall flat.

    In fact, the acetaminophen warnings come from a study that the Harvard School of Public Health, hardly a Trump-driven institution, published a month ago. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary also announced a push to give a drug called leucovorin to children with autism. Leucovorin is essentially a vitamin supplement used to address folate deficiency in cancer patients, and studies have found it’s effective in treating autism symptoms, which now affect approximately one in 31 of American children, and one in a dozen boys. That was the essential substance of the press conference, during which Trump showed a lot of sympathy for children with autism and their families. He also said that he has a lot of “fat friends” who take Ozempic. “Let me tell you,” he said. “They don’t look so good.”

    But beyond the President’s War On Tylenol, which will clearly grab all the headlines, this press conference signified something much more important. Appearing with Trump were RFK Jr. from HHS, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health, Makary from the FDA, and Dr. Oz, who these days only appears on TV to talk about his work in running the Medicaid program. They spoke in a unified voice about this issue.

    RFK said, “we have broken down barriers between agencies, and fast-tracked solutions.” This will be the first in a series of autism announcements that “will be a model to deliver the framework for similar results for other chronic conditions that plague Americans.” Makary said “this is The start of a historic shift in medical culture. A charge to identify root causes. We’re not going to stop until we address the root causes of this suffering. It may be entirely preventable.”

    This marks an extraordinary cultural shift. Typically, the FDA, HHS, NIH, and Centers for Disease Control have operated within silos of research and information. Their lack of coordination and communication have led to a massive public-health crisis that formed the basis for the MAHA movement. This is significant way beyond the President issuing the same warning about Tylenol for pregnant women a dozen times in an hour. He’s just the very loud messenger. But the health and medicine branch of his Administration is united with common purpose, and it’s going to yield extremely interesting and highly controversial results.

    Quite telling is the fact that the major voice speaking out against the Administration’s Tylenol warnings is Kenvue, the drug’s manufacturer. Oh, and also The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which issued a statement saying that Tylenol is safe for pregnant women. At the event, a reporter brought this up. After Trump was doing calling it a “nasty question,” he said, dismissively, “That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups. Maybe they’re right.”
    “But I don’t think they are.”


  • How has Gwyneth Paltrow borne so much ridicule?

    How has Gwyneth Paltrow borne so much ridicule?

    There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as Nineties as the next girl living in provincial Massachusetts and when I first saw Shakespeare in Love in 1998, Paltrow’s first and only Oscar-winning role as the late-16th-century actress-in-male-garb Viola de Lesseps, I’d never enjoyed anything as much in my life.

    And in 2025, Paltrow’s career’s Take Two fascinates the early middle-aged woman who finally gives in to the barrage of wellness marketing sent her way on Instagram. She now finds herself ordering “adaptogens” (plants that are meant to help the body adapt to stress) such as reishi mushroom powder “for immunity” and bovine collagen powder “for hormone balance and joints.”

    Naturally, Paltrow’s much-ridiculed lifestyle brand and newsletter Goop, which she founded in 2008 when good acting parts began to dry up, sells its own adaptogens: Paltrow was an early adopter and evangelist of almost every current wellness trend. As we learn here, she is extremely shrewd and, when it serves her, thick-skinned – a curious combination of entrepreneurial survivor and woo-woo artiste.

    Altogether, Paltrow’s ability to fascinate and allure has served her very well, as this detailed, gossipy and slightly catty biography by the fashion journalist Amy Odell makes clear. There was something predestined about Paltrow’s success, for “as her parents and their world always taught her, she was just that special.” She was also just that talented, with her ear for languages. She learned fluent Spanish on a school exchange in just a few months and, despite being a New Yorker, managed different English accents for Sliding Doors (1998), Emma (1996) and Shakespeare in Love.

    Gwyneth is not just of interest to long-term viewers or followers of Paltrow, but to all students of celebrity, culture, media and the complex interactions between nepotism, talent and sex appeal. What makes it more than a repetitious biography of a movie icon is the subject’s obvious complexities, beginning with her background.

    Her parents, Blythe Danner, a stage actress of birdlike frame, was famous, and Bruce Paltrow, a producer, was rich. They were an unusual couple. Danner was anxious, reflective, introverted and always more interested in the art of theatre – stage – than celebrity and success. She was posh and Episcopalian, whereas Bruce was “brash” and Jewish, with a father called Buster. But they loved each other and stayed together – until Bruce, the “love of [Gwyneth’s] life,” died, aged 58, in 2002 from throat cancer. The parents had tried to give their daughter and her younger brother Jake a “normal” upbringing. Bruce cut Paltrow off financially when she dropped out of the University of Santa Barbara to pursue acting, and she waited tables out of necessity.

    The family was decidedly cultured, and when Gwyneth was a child went every year to the elite Williamstown theater festival in the Berkshires, where Blythe joined huge names on stage. Theater buffs will relish this roll call of late 1970s and 1980s acting aristocracy. Gwyneth the precocious child was popped into a range of parts, including one in a Chekhov play. Later, when a movie star, she returned in a highly acclaimed turn as Rosalind in As You Like It.

    She was born the definition of white privilege and has always been hated – and envied – for it. She got screen roles easily through connections, and with her love of partying, willowy frame and ethereal beauty soon became an haute couture clothes horse and It Girl. Much is made of the importance of being Brad Pitt’s girlfriend in the mid-1990s when he was the world’s biggest heart-throb, but it made her increasingly miserable because, in part, he just wasn’t good enough. He was from ultra-conservative Christians in Missouri and couldn’t understand her Upper East Side sophistication.

    There were bad parts and failed movies (Hush, Great Expectations, View From the Top), but her work with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax – she was the studio’s “muse” for a decade – clinched her reputation as a quality superstar. Somehow she survived Weinstein’s rapacity and manipulativeness, but her account of his predatory behavior when filming Emma, when she was 24 and he was 43, provided key early testimony for the first major #MeToo story, broken by Jodi Kantor in the New York Times in 2018.

    We see how Paltrow aggressively covets the fine things in life – demanding private jets and suites at the Ritz as a breakthrough star, and she can clearly be a cold, bitchy diva. This is a feature Odell returns to repeatedly, interviewing people who knew her at school, who worked with her on set at different times, and who went from being useful to not useful or, like erstwhile friends Madonna and Winona Ryder, somehow annoyed her.

    But for all the garbage, there is also an impressive resilience. Most people who endure half as much loathing and ridicule as Paltrow would be having public mental health struggles. She famously doesn’t care what most people think, and seems to concentrate mainly on her children and her next winning hand.

    There is a shrewd simplicity and perceptiveness to some of her pronouncements. Of the idea to start Goop, she says:

    I was privy to such good information, and I thought, “Well, if my girlfriends want to know this information, surely other girls and guys may want to know too. So, if they do, I’ll do it, I’ll just put out a newsletter.“

    This is perfectly sensible. “I would rather die than give my child a Cup-O-Soup,” she said in 2005, making everyone hate her, again. But her point, brand and personality was at least succinctly presented.

    And she can be wise. At one point when her star crested in the late 1990s, her father sat her down for a talk with his bratty daughter: “You know, you’re getting a little weird… you’re kind of an asshole.” Instead of blocking him, as her contemporary equivalent might have done, Paltrow felt “devastated” and thought: “Oh my God, I’m on the wrong track.” This led to an important reflection. By the age of 26, she didn’t:

    “…have to wait in line at a restaurant, and if a car doesn’t show up, someone else gives you theirs. There is nothing worse for the growth of a human being than not having obstacles and disappointments.”

    Her life in the 21st century as a businesswoman is less interesting than her late-20th-century one because it is a far more commonplace story. But her antennae for the next big thing are nonetheless remarkable. Long before MAHA czar Robert Kennedy Jr. was saying the sun “is good for you” – cancer be damned – Paltrow was saying the same. But few in the MAHA movement ever won an Oscar.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.