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Yes, Virginia, There Are Brainworms
And some conspiracy theorists do have them
RFK Jr. brainworms? That’s today’s hot writhing mess of political gossip.
Only Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s doctors can give a high-quality assessment of whether he had brainworms. However, since the matter was raised this morning in the New York Times, you’ll hear people talking about it, and you should understand the meme.
“Brainworms” is commonly used as a synonym for transphobia. Of course there are reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories, moral panics, and falsehoods, but on some days, “brainworms” is the briefest possible, good-enough explanation of where transphobia comes from and why it’s so sticky in some people’s heads.
Among those with the figurative brainworms is RFK Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. He has claimed that “chemical exposures” in the water supply are making kids trans. As the Washington Blade reported last year, he said so in conversation with Jordan Peterson; Peterson’s involvement should be yet another clue to the transphobia level of such an unscientific theory.
On Monday, RFK Jr. wrote on X that he’s become “more troubled…about giving puberty blockers to youth.”
Perhaps it’s good, then, that he isn’t a physician whose job involves prescribing them.
Here’s the thing about the literal brainworms.
Fourteen years ago, RFK Jr. began experiencing memory loss and brain fog. A couple years after that, in a deposition related to his divorce, he said—as we’ve just learned today—that a doctor had scanned his brain and told him his symptoms may have been “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
We have been telling you all that this is where transphobia comes from.
“a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”—RFK Jr.
Literal brainworms are a serious health condition, and I would not jest about most people’s illnesses in most…
