RFK Jr. Blurs the Line Between Very Wrong and Batsh#t Crazy

Somewhere between the hot tub with Kid Rock and the FDA notice he signed, the Health Secretary stopped pretending.

Of all the indignities logged on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public record (the brain worm, the heroin years, the dead bear cub in Central Park, the prep-school noblesse, the vaccine theology), the thing that finally curdles my stomach is a tanning bed. Specifically, the FDA proposal he killed in March, which would have barred minors from indoor sunlamps and required adults to sign a waiver acknowledging skin cancer risk. The notice came out under his signature. The reasoning, lifted almost verbatim from Indoor Tanning Association lobbying language, invoked “personal choice and parental decision-making.” So much for the war on industry capture.

The reason this lands harder than the rest is that the pattern has flipped. Until now, Kennedy’s crusades have been crusades of subtraction. Don’t pasteurize the milk. Don’t vaccinate the child. Don’t medicate the depressive. The argument, whether you bought it or didn’t, had a logic: the natural body knows best, leave it alone. It was a posture aimed at people who couldn’t refuse him (older Americans on prescriptions, schoolchildren in line for shots) but the rhetoric was at least consistent.

The tanning bed pivot is something else. He has stopped telling Americans to stay out of the medicine cabinet. He’s now telling them to climb into the box.

Tanning beds are not sunshine. They are concentrated ultraviolet radiation, primarily UVA, fired at close range from inches away. The dose is up to fifteen times the strength of midday sun at the equator. UVA penetrates the dermis (deeper than UVB), generates reactive oxygen species, and corrupts the DNA in skin cells through cumulative oxidative stress. Repair mechanisms catch most of it. Not all. The mutations stack. The cells go rogue. That is melanoma. The World Health Organization classifies the radiation in the same carcinogenic group as tobacco and asbestos. Using a tanning bed before twenty raises melanoma risk by roughly fifty percent. A 2025 study put melanoma rates among regular users at more than double those of non-users.

The MAHA cosmology calls this health freedom.

The “sun callus” or “base tan” is the lie inside the lie. A pre-tan offers, at best, an SPF of around 3. The pigment is the damage. There is no inoculating dose of carcinogen. (The same alchemical reasoning, incidentally, that underwrites homeopathy, aboriginal medicine and the deep state of MAHA Twitter.)

The man selling all this is the proof of concept. Kennedy spent the spring shirtless and parboiled in a now-infamous official HHS video, sharing a hot tub with Kid Rock. He has the complexion of a roasted yam. Before his nomination, he posted on X about ending the federal government’s “aggressive suppression of sunshine,” a phrase that belongs on a Hare Krishna leaflet, not a cabinet desk. He insists he doesn’t use anabolic steroids, only “testosterone replacement,” apparently unaware that testosterone is classified as an anabolic steroid under the 1990 federal statute of that exact name. He insists he doesn’t endorse tanning beds. He just lifted the regulation that would have stopped fifteen-year-olds from climbing into them.

The throughline isn’t ideology. It’s denial as policy. Whatever the body is doing to him on the cellular level (and something is), he is now generalizing it to the country. The cabinet secretary in charge of American health has decided that the machine cooking his own DNA is a freedom the rest of us have been unjustly denied.

There is something very wrong with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It would not surprise me if it were a mutation. His type seems…unnatural.

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