How Burkean an HHS Secretary Choice Is RFK Jr.?

Jan 31, 2025

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How Burkean an HHS Secretary Choice Is RFK Jr.?

A figure whose observations are at the founding of what is now known as conservative Republicanism was Edmund Burke (1729-1797). His writings comment on the American Revolution, the Constitution, and civil society, as well as other countries’ destinies, and remain widely read to this day.

This week the U.S. Senate, with 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats, has the task of confirming President Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Like Burke, Kennedy is a prolific writer and a leading speaker of his time. There is a lot at stake for the nation hanging on whether Kennedy is confirmed or rejected. How far do Burke and Kennedy’s similarities in viewpoint go?

In his 1796 “Letter on a Regicide Peace,” Burke writes:

Never, no, never did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.

This reverence for nature, wisdom, and their interrelationship refers to the entirety of the studied cosmos, the Earth, human nature—and their essential bond to mankind’s collection of philosophy, knowledge, and wisdom. Human wisdom must be tethered to nature and nature’s God.

In the same letter, Burke writes:

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Sublimation of our freedom to the weight of wealth renders us poorer. Wealth has a weight, whether it be a load of precious metals, or obligations as a condition of the wealth. An entity under such conditions is impoverished.

An invented instrument, wealth can procure goods, potentially wisely and accountably, but not always so. Burke suggests that the complaint of a “bought” and “compromised” state will and should persist so long as instruments of government are captured by others’ wealth.

Thirdly, discussing mind, reason, and courage, Burke writes:

No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear… When you fear something, learn as much about it as you can. Knowledge conquers fear.

No lover of enduring fear was Burke. Rather he urged unflappable study to land upon courage.

Over two centuries later, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observes a divorce of thought from nature and a capture to instruments of wealth, in The Real Anthony Fauci (2021):

Those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.

Kennedy echoes Burke in that fear increases unreason. As emergency authorization collided with the First Amendment, critical thinking was suffocated. Kennedy cites evidence that mass experiments violated wisdom and were nonetheless shown advantages by their government funders.

Shielding from due liability is both a chain to the command of wealth, as well as a corrupting flattery, as Burke would say:

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Robert Kennedy agrees with Burke that institutions that flatter drugmakers engender corruption on both ends. RFK addresses HHS failures to defend Americans’ health and freedom:

“The Fauci generation”—children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984—the sickest generation in American history, and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet. His obsequious subservience to the Big Ag, Big Food, and pharmaceutical companies has left our children drowning in a toxic soup.

While quarterly reports guide the big institutions, Burke admonishes Americans to consider longer timeframes:

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Joining Burke, Kennedy speaks of patient alternatives to force:

America was a great force in the world, with immense prestige, long before we became a great military power… the real constructive force in the world comes not from bombs, but from imaginative ideas, warm sympathies, and a generous spirit.

Not force, but generosity and patience, was the hallmark of jurisdictions that never mandated distancing or drugs. These states excelled in outcomes over those states which rushed to lock people down by force and require shots in arms to participate.

“The march of the human mind is slow,” and “the essence of tyranny is the enforcement of stupid laws,” said Burke presaging conservative moderns.

In Washington, the impatient, unwise, and unconservative harms of the HHS have proceeded for decades. HHS may not make laws, but laws delegate enforceable powers to HHS bureaucracies. Kennedy holds that HHS policies should never infringe upon the people’s liberties, and that HHS must prevent any business objective from intruding by government on people’s lives, writing:

When you give a government a power, it will never voluntarily relinquish it.

If you give a government a power, it will ultimately abuse that power to the maximum extent possible.

Nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism.

To stay on the right side of his “Three Rules” as Secretary, Kennedy has spoken on the moral, spiritual discipline of the calling to office. Similarly, Burke remarked:

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

Public emoluments violate that morality, something Burke and Kennedy discuss in alignment. Burke says:

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.

Kennedy points out:

Health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines. NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials… receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.

Our posterity’s well-being requires gazing beyond the next biotech killer app, to generations of time. Burke said, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Our ancestors used unadulterated food to remain in good health. Medical research may proceed in an ordered and just way, but ancestral ways must be remembered and continued where they serve. As Kennedy has referenced, scientific proof is overwhelming that good unblemished meals, vitamins, minerals, and pure water help us have strong health.

In the face of public “capture,” Burke called for a response:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle…

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing… The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis…

The Fate of good men who refuse to become involved in politics is to be ruled by evil men.

Burke is the man who said:

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

These United States stand at a crossroads between good and evil. A response to the moral crisis that funds the people’s demise and disenfranchisement will be made when Kennedy is heard in the Senate on January 29.

Senators representing millions of Americans must look to Edmund Burke, and ask, when they hear RFK Jr., what fate they wish to experience.

Burke and Kennedy have two and a quarter centuries between them, but their principles strongly align.