Hi everyone and welcome to The Thursday Club. You're here because you're an official member of The Thursday Club – The Paradox Press's only paid tier. As you know, every Thursday we'll be sending out a note to you, our loyal subscribers, from the Editors (Andy and Jack) or a frequent contributor to The Paradox Press. These notes can be about anything: current events, Chesterton's essays, economics, theology, and more.
Most of the time, these articles are behind a paywall. But because of our recent letter to Secretary Kennedy and President Trump, we decided to send this Thursday Club Note out for free. If you like this, please consider subscribing to The Paradox Press and becoming a paid member of the Thursday Club.
You may have noticed that on Monday morning we released, along with Dr. Mary Talley Bowden and Americans for Health Freedom, an open letter to Secretary Kennedy and President Trump asking them to pull the mRNA COVID vaccines off the market. When we released the letter, it was signed by about 160 people including Tucker Carlson, Dr. Bret Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Dr. Robert Malone. Today, only three days later, it's at over 1,300 signatures in America and several hundred globally – most of these are doctors.
I've worked with doctors on many different projects in the past and I've also worked with politicians in the past. They each have one thing in common: ego (I have this issue too). Now, to be clear, I want to say that the majority of the people who signed on to this letter were extremely helpful, mission-focused, and gracious – and we're really grateful for that. But this letter was a political letter. And with political movements comes political (high school) drama.
For the sake of not giving certain people the attention they so desperately want, I'll keep all names anonymous. But I wanted to break down for you, the readers of this publication, the inner workings of the sabotage and self-focused motives of certain people within the movement.
If you can remember, the entire MAHA and Health Freedom movements were started for one thing: taking the COVID jab off the market. They saw the jab as a clear violation of CDC rules and guidelines and even experienced the dangerous and deadly fallout of this vaccine in their own lives. These were people whose children were severely injured and even killed by the vaccines. These were seriously angry and rightly angry people. They saw the tyrannical overreach of politicians and the passive attitudes of medical practitioners during the pandemic, and they wanted justice.
With that brief history stated, you would think that getting a group of doctors and media personalities who all apparently share the same convictions related to the COVID vaccine to sign a letter to the HHS Secretary demanding that he take the vaccines off the market or pay the political price would be easy. It actually wasn't.
As I worked on this with a small team of people, it became clear to all of us that some in the MAHA/Medical Freedom movement are much, much more interested in their associations and self-perceived status within the political swamp that we call Washington D.C than with the mission of the movement. The excuses given by several major leaders within the movement for why they wouldn't sign the letter were two things:
- Highly emotional. Meaning they were rooted in emotional attachments people had to Secretary Kennedy and thus they saw no way in which they could sign a letter demanding he do what he promised to do when Trump was elected. Or they were too scared to associate themselves with others on the list.
- Highly irrational. Meaning that they were rooted in logic that was, at its best, faulty and, at its worst, basically insane. They argued that Kennedy is doing enough and that the alternative is much worse.
Let me break these down a little further. To point one, there were several doctors who claimed that the language within the letter was "too aggressive" and that they couldn't sign onto the letter because Secretary Kennedy is their friend and they can't possibly tell a friend to do the right thing because it might hurt his feelings. (I obviously added the language at the end, but it's the same logic.) So their choice was to allow more and more Americans to die so as not to hurt the feelings of a grown man working in the highest medical office in the land.
Second, there were others who made the argument that though Secretary Kennedy isn't doing what he said he would do when elected, he is still doing a lot – like making food pyramids and signing billion-dollar deals with Pfizer allowing them to have a three-year tariff reprieve. Thank God for that.
The point here is simple: many, but not all, in the Medical Freedom movement have other interests. They may be purely emotional – we know how addicting it is to be in close proximity to power. They may be utterly irrational. But we know that their goals aren't to actually push for medical freedom. They're to maintain a certain status quo and not rock the boat.
But if you think back to 2020, the people who did nothing in the face of obvious government overreach had the exact same motives: never rock the boat. Never break the status quo. Unfortunately for them, that has never been the aim of true Liberty and Freedom.
