Don’t Vote for Trump … if you can’t bring yourself to do it
Rather Vote for America! A Prescription from the Doc of Last Resort.
If you are anything like me, then it is only somewhat late that you have begun to realize just how corrupt and just how captured our Federal government is. And I can’t blame you. Like me, you had an inkling that narratives were promoted over facts at times. And like me, you had an uneasy feeling that politicians would say one thing to get elected and then for some inexplicable reason, they never would quite be able to deliver. They really did try, right?! And like me, you listened to the news from the same mainstream sources as always … because, well, what else was there that wasn’t partisan?!
And so you believed ‘the narrative’ for lack of anything else. And yet it seemed a bit strange that Donald J Trump, the cultural icon who was worshiped by many in the black community and who was watched by millions on his show The Apprentice, was suddenly made into Darth Vader or worse. He had once been lauded by the ladies of ‘The View’ (true). He was besties with Oprah Winfrey. Jesse Jackson lauded Trump’s community service and dedication to raising up the black community. In fact he had a stellar record of going out of his way to help the least fortunate amongst us. And so he was the object of admiration and even adulation in our rap culture and seemingly everywhere … until suddenly (timed coincident with his announced presidential run) … a meticulous picture of crudeness, misogyny, racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia was carefully crafted. Sure it took a little editing of clips of his statements, but heck, what’s a little lying and deceit when an election is at stake?!
True, DJT did give the media portraitists unnecessary material with which to work, but certainly there was nothing there more than what any flawed human might exhibit in an off-script moment. Media really only left him with one way to communicate with his audience, and that was through social media. And somehow, he managed to do just that, and against all odds beat a political icon, Hillary Clinton. As I understand it, he was as surprised as anyone … and unprepared for his win.
Trump was unprepared largely because he was not the product of the political system. In fact, his ‘crime’ (and his appeal) was just that. He was not beholden to anyone. He was not running to benefit from the system. He genuinely wanted to change the corruption that he clearly saw, even before most of us did. But even he didn’t know how deep it ran and he unwittingly allowed himself to be controlled to a considerable extent by those he trusted to carry out his mandate. And yet he accomplished much considering the odds. The anti-outsider DC grifters were largely left intact during Trump’s term and they used their access and power to undermine his agenda and that of the average American who voted Trump into office precisely to deal with the permanent political class. They pretended to be his allies only to stab him in the back, over and over again.
Well, we now have to consider what a second Trump term might look like, were he to win? It might happen.
Well, being me, I will look at this largely from a healthcare standpoint but please feel free to extrapolate all across the board. Education, defense, foreign policy, trade, border security, manufacturing, farming, freedom of speech, and on and on - all are likely to undergo a significant metamorphosis … unless the swamp can stop it a second time.
Many of us are former Democrats. But today’s Democrat Party is not what it once was. It used to try, at least, to speak for the common man, champion civil rights, and espouse actual liberal principles like free speech and the right to speak ‘truth to power,’ as they used to say. Now they are much the opposite of that. In fact, although Kamala Harris still is saying that the Republican Party is the party of fat cats, that hasn’t been true in a long time. Think of the wealthiest Americans and except for Elon Musk, they are far more in the Democrat camp than on the right. Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Ellison, Buffet, Page, Brin, Ballmer and Slim. Of these top ten wealthiest Americans, 8 of 10 identify as Democrats. Only Ellison and Musk (former Democrat) now lean right. In fact, already 4 years ago, the roughly ½ of the country that voted for Trump controlled 30% of the nation’s wealth … 70% belonged to Biden’s supporters. This is truly an inversion. It has been underway for some time and has only intensified. And our wealthiest counties, mainly in the DC beltway, are also heavily Democrat. Government waste (er, largess) is how they make their living.
The presidential race has gradually morphed as well, reflecting this new realignment. Whereas it had been framed as right vs left, conservative vs liberal, that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny as much as in the past. So many have crossed over the political divide that a different paradigm must be described. It is actually looking more and more like a contest between ‘the people’ and their own government. Or put another way: those outside of the influence of the Washington ‘beltway’ (plus some principled insiders) vs those inside the beltway or inside its thrall … which would be those who depend on government largess and taxes and contracts for their power.
That is how we suddenly see two people who were very recently prominent Democrats joining forces with Donald Trump. Robert F Kennedy Jr tried to run in the primary against Joe Biden (as a Democrat naturally) … but was forced out through legal (and illegal) maneuvers. Tulsi Gabbard was co-chair of the DNC not that long ago (2013-16) … also demonized by the State, called a Russian asset and placed on a domestic terror watch list. To disagree with the government’s policy is no longer a right but a crime. And there are innumerable others who have awakened to the new divide including Bill Ackman, Elon Musk, Nicole Shanahan, etc. In a word, we have become something of an oligarchy and the key to power and wealth is sidling up to the government and its surrogates in business. The name of the game is bribery and corruption.
The healthcare industry is the exemplar of the corruption that now defines the USA. It is our fastest growing sector, faster than AI, faster than technology. And this mighty industry (the best in the world I am told) is somehow producing sicker, more depressed, fatter and more infertile Americans every year. How is that for bang-for-the-buck?! Life expectancy is down almost 3 years over the past decade or less. That alone is an indictment of the experts in medicine and health.
We ought to be concentrating on prevention but we don’t. There is money in medicine, but the most money is made when you have recurring income; that is when you have a chronically ill population that must remain medicated for life; and the more medications the better. This is especially true with kids - that’s a lifetime of income for all involved. Each chronically sick child is an annuity for pharma and other healthcare players. Some say that 9 out of the 10 greatest killers in America are food and/or lifestyle related illnesses. Our illnesses are too often self induced. And we still have an upside down food pyramid … thanks to cronyism.
This issue could be denied for a while … as long as our life expectancies were rising. But no more.
We are poisoning our kids. We are being told that a diet consisting of 93% processed food can be healthy for our kids. They say that a 12 year old should get Ozempic as a first line defense. SSRI rates have doubled in high schoolers. In the past we have witnessed ketchup being counted as a vegetable for school lunches. Despite the ‘Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,’ school meal quality is subpar and over processed. Our foods are laced with toxic dyes that other countries have banned.
But now, for the first time ever, a major party has made it part of its raison-detre to take back our health from the agencies that are destroying it. They are dedicated to reforming or replacing these corrupt institutions.
We, the wealthiest country, have the worst results. Our kids are for the first time growing up in worse financial straits than their parents and with worse health than their parents. We have AI and we have drugs for everything, yet our kids are way sicker.
Peanut allergies are new. Autism is essentially new. Kids with diabetes are a new phenomenon. Autism was 1 in 1500 to 10,000. Now it is 1 in 34 (1 in 22 in CA). Nobody is looking at why. Genes do not cause epidemics. There must be something environmental. Vaccines? Who knows - nobody will do the studies or if they do, they will not be published.
ADHD, and other neurologic entities are all vastly increased. It used to be that a pediatrician would see one case of Juvenile DM in his career. Now diabetes and prediabetes represent 1 in 3 visits to pediatricians. We are spending more on diabetes and mitochondrial disorders than on the military. In the 60’s about 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Now that number is 54% of kids (that was actually in 2006 - they’ve since stopped counting … too embarrassing I guess). The costs are escalating and will bankrupt us. The cost of chronic care is in the trillions of dollars already. I have seen a figure of 77% quoted as the rate of kids not eligible for the military because they don’t meet basic physical fitness requirements. We’re number 1 in the world … for chronic disease. That’s not a cause for bragging.
Somehow we have allowed our regulatory agencies to be captured by pharma. They let the manufacturers of new drugs do the sole testing via clinical trials and then rely on the honesty of the company rather than opening up the data to scrutiny and further verification. This was certainly true of the mRNA COVID shots … but has been true for a long time for other drugs as well. Pharma money is sprinkled across our agencies, our medical professional associations, our research universities and our journals. It is rained on our media as well. Corruption was inevitable … and now is entrenched.
Why did the US, with the supposed best minds and research agencies and regulatory offices end up with the worst Covid results? Partly it is true that it is due to our chronic illness burden. The average chronic disease burden of a COVID fatality is 3.8 chronic diagnoses. Also, we chose to ignore good (but inexpensive) treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and even just vitamin D. So we have 4% of the world’s population but 16% of the deaths. And we patted ourselves on our backs and said what a great job we did.
All these trillions spent on the ‘pandemic.’ But a true pandemic (before we started engineering more benign viruses to be lethal) normally comes only every 100 years or so. Where is the money to conquer chronic disease? We only mitigate. Not 10% of kids were overweight a mere 50 years ago. Now over 50% are. Auto-immune diseases in kids are a new phenomenon. Diabetes is as well. Childhood cancers are on the rise and since the mRNA shots were introduced, so is heart disease.
This is where Donald Trump comes in. His thesis is that government is corrupt. Our education gets worse and worse despite (again) having the most money thrown at it of any country in the world. Some schools can’t graduate anybody that can read at grade level. They are pretty good at pronouns though. I have to give them that. Rinse and repeat for sector after sector. But I digress …
Acute health care in the US is pretty good in terms of getting the surgery that you need or having your infection treated. But we are horrible at the debilitating chronic conditions. There is room however for optimism … we cannot do worse. Don’t you feel better already?
This is where MAHA - Make America Healthy Again comes into play. And if Robert Kennedy Jr gets a crack at this, he has announced some of his ideas.
Reform the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. This is the ‘Act’ that allows drug companies to provide 75% of our regulatory agencies’ funding including ‘royalties’ to individuals, making them employees of pharma and not the taxpayer, for all intents and purposes.
Similarly, prohibit employees of the USDA (Department of Agriculture) from accepting money from agricultural companies. 95% of those on a panel charged with coming up with our dietary recommendations are laboring under intense pressure due to conflicts of interest. How else did we get that Lucky Charms are healthier than ground beef (yes it happened).
Revisit our rules on ‘direct-to-consumer’ drug advertising. Actually, the damage done here is not so much that patients start asking their doctors for the drugs that they see advertised as much as it is that the media outlets taking money for these ads become dependent on the advertising dollars and refuse to publish or investigate any drug company problems. Hence a compliant media.
Federal regulations currently allow NIH research funds to go to folks with financial conflicts of interest such as being on pharma boards or having a financial stake in a pharma company that stands to benefit from their research. A 2019 study showed that some 8000 federally funded researchers were thus conflicted over a 7 year review.
Make it illegal for drug companies to gouge US customers while selling the same product overseas for a fraction of what they charge us. If we foot the bill for the research, we should actually have the best prices, not the worst.
SNAP recipients (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) should only be able to use their food stamps for nutritional foods, not junk. What if our poorest members of society ate the most healthy?
We go crazy over CO2 levels but allow all manner of poisons into our food chain. Pesticides and other chemicals all need to be reviewed by disinterested parties to get to the truth on potential harms that they may be causing.
Fix a glaring deficit in our medical schools by requiring courses on nutrition and functional medicine.
Crop subsidies make no sense nutritionally. Under 2% of current subsidies go to fruits and vegetables but they do prop up some unhealthy food additives like high-fructose corn syrup.
Reintroduce physical fitness into our schools in a meaningful way.
Half of our research budgets need to be redirected to preventative medicine and alternative and holistic medical choices. Many Americans are seeking out alternatives to our broken system but have no way to gauge what is truly useful alternative medicine and what is garbage. Why has our government totally ignored this sector?
Expand HSAs so that Americans have more choice in finding the kind of care that is right for them.
There is so much more that can be done as well. I would add doing some real research into non-ionizing radiofrequency radiation, and microplastics in our environment for starters. But RFK Jr’s ideas are a good starting point.
So I would say, don’t vote for Trump if you cannot bring yourself to do so. Vote for America. Vote for change. Vote for hope. Vote for replacing a compromised government with a fresh one made up of eager dedicated idealists. Vote to reestablish a voice for those who dissent from scientific orthodoxy. Vote for the 5 to 10 thousand people that will descend upon Washington with fresh ideas and who are not beholden to corporations or special interests.
Vote for Elon Musk to apply his considerable skills to making government more efficient. Vote for Tulsi Gabbard to help find our way with a better military program and policy. Vote for Kennedy to reform our health system. Vote for Vivek Ramaswamy to apply his considerable skills to the task.
That’s who you are actually voting for. That’s what this election is about. Vote for Truth, Rationality, Unity, Medical reform, Principled leaders - or TRUMP for short.
In health,
DocofLastResort