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Two years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rode the surprising success of his presidential campaign to the cabinet, where he was installed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. So he got to work, attacking all of his pet issues. As promised, he cut vaccine funding and pushed theories on childhood autism. He unveiled the Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy, focused on diet, chemical exposure, physical inactivity, and overmedicalization. He had a heated, viral Senate hearing about his ideas. What next?
Well, not much. Overshadowed by foreign wars and left to do the often boring job of managing a $3.3 trillion agency, Kennedy’s public visibility has diminished. This is a common predicament for cabinet heads—how much news did Pete Buttigieg make as Secretary of Transportation?
Then, on May 3, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rescued a trapped starling at the airport and posted a picture of it on X. Another user quote-tweeted him, saying, “This guy just has the most random encounters with animals of anyone you’ve ever heard of & it’s kind of incredible at this point.” The next day, Kennedy responded with an old photo of himself attempting to ride a rhinoceros. He must have enjoyed going through the photo album, because for the past three months, Kennedy has devoted his personal X account to pictures of him handling venomous snakes, hunting with hawks, scuba diving with sharks, rafting in glacial outflows, catching catfish in the Amazon, practicing kayak rolls, and rescuing a tangled sea turtle. He has captioned all of these with two new catchphrases: “#GetOutside #LiveRealLife.”
Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services Dua Lipa-posting? Of course, there must be satisfaction in fun-mogging the rest of us and reliving your genuinely epic youthful adventures for a national audience. Kennedy seemingly seeks to remind us, as Ye famously told Dave Chapelle: “My life is dope and I do dope shit.”
But, being in charge of our nation’s health policy, RFK Jr.’s fish photos mean a bit more than the ones you post on Hinge. For one, there is a long Internet tradition of mocking public health officials who are overweight, on the assumption that they are literally unfit to tell the rest of us how to live. With these posts, alongside others of him saunaing shirtlessly and doing push-ups in jeans, Kennedy is casting himself as healthy enough to be in charge of Health decisions. Others in the White House seem to feel similarly: Pete Hegseth sometimes collabs with Kennedy on workout posts, as if completing Murphs makes him more capable of running The Pentagon.
Get Outside and Live Real Life seems to be RFK Jr.’s new platform, and this months-long photo dump is the rollout. Perhaps Kennedy has screenagers in his life, and as he watches them waste their whole summer on the couch, he can’t help but tell the whole country what he’s telling them. (Can’t you hear your dad or uncle ordering you to get outside and live real life?). In doing so, he speaks to something many Americans are feeling. Unsupervised play for children has declined precipitously. Sixty percent of kids are not allowed to leave their neighborhood. Youth sports have become unattainably expensive, with costs rising 46% since 2019. Fewer teens than ever smoke weed or have sex. Somewhere deep down, most Americans feel that life used to be freer, wilder, more dangerous, more exciting. And like RFK Jr., we don’t seem to have any solutions beyond hectoring kids to leave the house.
Still, it is somewhat laughable that Kennedy uses his own outdoor exploits as examples of “real life.” While a few pictures show quaint family fishing trips in Westchester, the rest are from outlandish foreign vacations. Encouraging Americans to go hiking and fishing is a wonderful idea. Doing so by posting yourself on a Bhutanese mountain trek and angling in the Peruvian jungle only reinforces the idea that outdoor fun is out of reach for normal people. He even shows us family sailing trips on Nantucket Sound, lest you forget that he’s a Kennedy.
“Real” is an important word for RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department and Make America Healthy Again. The new food pyramid informs us to “eat real food” because “real food wins.” They are launching a cooking show called “The Real Food Show.” “Live Real Life” is a cornerstone of the department’s plan to combat chronic disease. With these pictures, Kennedy seeks to show us what real life looks like.
But Kennedy does not always embrace real stuff in his personal life. His philosophy might be described as anti-ultra processed food, and pro-ultra processed everything else. His active lifestyle is supported by synthetic testosterone. His ubiquitous suntan, which you’d think would be a great byproduct of a life lived outdoors, is achieved on a tanning bed. He has banned artificial dyes in food, but personally takes methylene blue as a supplement, literally drinking an artificial dye. In this way, RFK Jr. is a lot like the rest of us: with healthcare unaffordable and clear guidance hard to find, we each cobble together a proprietary regimen of dietary restrictions, supplements, and vices to get us through the day.
MAHA (and MAGA) is built on a false nostalgia. It’s something along the lines of a Boomer Facebook post: “I don’t remember anyone from my school having allergies or autism. We even drank from the hose!” The movement seeks to make us healthy again, clinging to a supposedly better time when these problems supposedly didn’t exist. A time when American food was so naturally good, so real, that nobody got sick.
In doing so, RFK and MAHA avoid the actual public health problems that keep kids inside. Yes, American children are eating too much processed food. They also say they feel hopeless about the future, commit suicide more than ever, and worry about being shot. Americans, especially young ones, are unhealthy, addicted, lonely, bored, and scared of the real world. Nobody seems to know why it’s happening or what to do about it. The best Kennedy can offer is something like: Retvrn to Sailing. In the absence of solutions or ideas or political will, some retreat to nostalgia for a time when we didn’t feel this way. And when you’re feeling nostalgic, you look at old pictures: Look at me when I was your age. I got outside. I lived real life. You kids should try it.