Kennedy’s Confirmation Is a Game Changer

By Debra Sheldon and Leland Lehrman, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Kennedy represents way more than a political appointee. He embodies a movement that has courageously challenged the status quo, sacrificing wealth and popularity to protect what we consider sacred: the right of parents and individuals to make informed choices about their health and their children's well-being.

We are part of that movement and have been for years.

As a new mother, I, Debra, experienced a superhuman connection that fundamentally altered my perception of human capacity. My son's subtlest gestures would course through me like an electric current. A whimper so faint it would escape most ears stirred something primordial within me. More than maternal instinct, this is primal responsibility — an unbreakable bond that no external force can interrupt or comprehend.

Parents possess an intuitive understanding that cannot be replicated by institutions or systems. We know when a child is hungry, tired, or in need in ways that defy scientific measurement or bureaucratic intervention. Parenting is a spiritual journey like no other. From it, our impulse for profound responsibility is also born. When these healthy attachments are threatened — or interrupted — so is the health of our baby.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is our champion of this deeply personal responsibility.

For years, a growing community has been challenging systemic interference in personal health and parental rights. Rooted in the movement towards natural and home birth, natural medicine, and individual freedom, we have been investigating and challenging the historical roots of institutional power and its medical branches. The Flexner Report, systemic corporate collusion, and the intricate networks of special interests have been our battleground. Our resistance has been characterized by powerful mantras:

“I don't co-parent with the government.”

“We will not comply.”

“I am informed and I do not consent.”

“If it's forced, are we free?”

“Follow the money.”

The path forward starts with dismantling the unholy alliances. Kennedy will separate government from special interest influence and expose systemic corruption while protecting individual decision-making. This leads the way to re-establishing the holy alliances that have been interrupted or broken by the zealous authority of the state’s overreach. We call for the fundamental restoration of religious freedom, conscientious objection, and parental rights.

With our support and at our insistence, Kennedy will re-establish evidence-based criteria, prioritize the “do no harm” principle, and reconsecrate the ancient and unalterable hierarchy of human needs — clean air, food, and water; sleep, sunshine, and exercise, and the sanctity of family and cultural bonds.

Personal freedom will rise once more as a fundamental right. Informed consent will be the law again, as we reject forced medical interventions that currently act as illegitimate barriers to healthy community, vocational, and institutional life.

We feel America as our crying baby — vulnerable, needing protection, seeking comfort and understanding. Our devoted responsiveness is once again the basis for healthy attachment, and so necessary to the enduring health of our nation. This is not just a political movement. It is a spiritual awakening, a collective recognition that our deepest intuitions and personal connections matter more than any institutional mandate

So, you see, Bobby’s confirmation to lead the HHS is BIG — and resonant.

Perhaps no hero's journey has been so completely documented in plain view of all humanity. From pariah, to folk hero, to underdog, and finally to laurel-wreathed champion, Kennedy's fate not only provides an example for all of us, it clearly reveals the archetype itself. The true God of health and freedom has spoken in Kennedy's triumph, and we should expect nothing less than a historic revival and revolution in health, science, and governance.

Admittedly, for those of us in democratic states like New York, the fight has just begun. But we hear echoes of John F. Kennedy’s Alabama desegregation fight in the executive orders coming out of the White House today.

The latest order seeks to end federal funding for states and schools which mandate covid vaccines. And that’s just the beginning. We can see the future emerging in outline as the rest of the vaccine schedule finally gets put to a fair test. No longer do conflicted scientists and vaccine manufacturers seem forever beyond the reach of truth and justice, hiding behind authoritarian dogma and liability protection.

In leading states such as Florida and Idaho, the fight to ban the mRNA platform entirely proceeds in State Houses, putting the global biosecurity state on notice. These states will become control groups around the nation, able to quickly prove by example the difference in health outcomes that emerge when bad drugs get banned. If, as we have seen, such drugs cannot be made safe or effective, the pharmaceutical industry will have to pull these products on their own as liability shields collapse beneath the human cost of malfeasance.

But as important as these practical effects of Kennedy’s rise to Secretary of HHS are, its historic significance is bound up primarily with the sense that everything is possible again in our nation, and that the whole world has registered the same change with intent to participate. Throughout the period of lockdowns and mandates, urgent calls came from all over the world to American street-fighters. “Come on you guys!” we heard them saying. “You have the longest and strongest tradition of self-governance based on sacred first principles in the modern world. You have to lead this one for the world!”

And we knew it was true. The tears still burn. Though we spurred ourselves into a gallop – lance forward – for a time it was uncertain if we would triumph, or at least how long it would take.

No longer. The world has seen the American people rise like the Phoenix. Our torch blazes brightly. Nature’s God has moved over the face of the deep, once again bestowing life, liberty and happiness to her children. The passionate enthusiasm of our national character once again lights brushfires in the imagination of people around the world. Certainly we still have the perennial political challenges of human nature: peace, hubris, and winding down the empire. And along with our health and freedom, we must find and manifest a vision of participatory culture and economics that isn’t stuck somewhere between bored billionaires and the bottomless despair of homelessness.

But at least the world will never be able to complain that America did not fight for her freedom, and it will never be able to say we did not fight for it worldwide, openly and delightedly sharing that torch with whoever cared to light their candle at ours.

Nowhere was that more clear than on August 29, 2020 in Berlin, where Bobby Kennedy electrified the world by declaring that if necessary he would “die with his boots on” for our health and freedom. Coming from a man in his family, the world knew exactly what he meant … and to whom he was issuing his challenge.

And boy did he ever follow through. When Jeremy Zogby called to tell him he was polling high enough to run for president, Bobby gathered his family and quickly jumped right in, careening wildly through a reluctant and polarized political landscape in the most unpredictable and fateful election of our lifetime.

Bobby's voice is not the only one through which the spirit moves today.

On final approach, during the senate confirmation proceedings, one of Bobby's closest Republican advisers told me, Leland, that “MAHA is both embraced by MAGA and reaches beyond MAGA, appealing to Americans of all political persuasions.” My mouth hung open as this thirty-year veteran of Republican party politics went on to deadpan that because of its broad and deep cross-party appeal, MAHA will drive the civic conversation for the next twenty-five years. I felt no resistance to this man’s words as I heard him say that MAHA will completely change the face of American politics.

The health freedom movement has launched dozens of leading voices, but his vision is one of the strongest. Coming from a man so deeply familiar with Washington’s ways, it was especially encouraging. Many of us imagined this might be possible, but now the voice of experience has confirmed it.

Another voice of experience, Jeffrey Tucker, picked up his pen early for the revolution. While most of us were still in the early phases of local organizing, he brought together leading scientific minds to throw down a global intellectual gauntlet, quickly gathering 60,000 signatures to the Great Barrington Declaration against mandates and lockdowns. His sometimes sober, sometimes ironic voice has only grown more enthusiastic, more innocent, and delighted with our every victory and emergent possibility.

In his recent article, “The Rise and Rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Tucker places a gentle hand right on the wingtips of the Zeitgeist: “No one could have predicted such dramatic events ten or even five years ago,” he writes. “In the larger picture, the triumph of Kennedy represents more than careful planning and clever politicking. It shows the extent to which the pandemic policy response continues to serve as the disruptive template that is shaking up conventional politics not just in the United States but all over the world and thereby building a new philosophical and ideological alignment that will disrupt nations, states, and industries for many generations.”

We have only one cautionary remark about Jeffrey's rightfully exuberant statement. That word “disrupt’ is a bit dangerous. In this context it is something of an artifact of the technological triumphalism relentlessly driving the American dream off a cliff. But now – in the DOGE era – it also means the effort to stop the even more dangerous and relentless drive towards globalized, authoritarian governance. And if the technophiles doing the disrupting are onboard with that, they at least deserve a seat at the table.

But make no mistake: the Moms belong at the head of that table. For they drove the message and the movement in the kitchen, on the streets, and in the schools. They work fast, deeply incorruptible in their instagram beehives, and at the social events they plan. They live in the bigger picture –– of home and family, truth, goodness, and beauty. If these disruptive young men are willing to serve us faithfully, victory is inevitable, and the hive will thrive along with the fruit trees and meadows.

And there will be no end to the honeyed blessings to come.

Debra Sheldon is Director of Special Operations at AMERICAN VALUES PAC.

Leland Lehrman supports health policy development for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at MAHA Action.