Calm Before the Storm?

We've not even seen the beginning of a real anti-MAHA pushback yet. Will we?

On Thursday, Benny Johnson revealed details of an apparent plot within the Department of Health and Human Services to sabotage Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

“Whistleblowers Inside HHS and CDC have just sent me critical information on an ACTIVE sabotage operation taking place within the Federal Health Departments,” Johnson wrote on X.

“Left-wing career bureaucrats are in total panic over RFK Jr. shutting down their Big Pharma grift and are trying to take down the agencies from the inside. And they’re using the CIA to do it.”

Johnson describes how “career CDC bureaucrats” have begun circulating a CIA manual called “Simple Sabotage,” which provides guidance on how to frustrate and ultimately shut down an organization from within.

Always demanding written instructions and feigning incomprehension is one tactic they’re told to use, Johnson explains.

“The manual instructs employees to purposely slow operations by demanding written orders and pretending not to understand, while carrying out acts that spread blame across as many people as possible.”

Being obstructive and acting dumb, with the aim of lowering morale and sowing confusion, is another.

“Employees are encouraged to develop a “non-cooperative” attitude, and get others to do the same. Paired with this is “acting stupid” to lower morale, confuse the department, and undermine efficiency.”

Yet another stratagem is endless nitpicking: Ensuring nothing is ever good enough and work is never finished, or if it is finished, finished as late and as painfully as possible.

“Think that’s extreme? There’s more. The manual teaches staff to make perfection the enemy of good on even the simplest tasks. It directs them to over-criticize, drag out work, and deliberately submit illegible documents so they have to be redone.”

The manual also tells readers to propagandize at every turn, to create a “mass” movement within the organization. This benefits the morale of the “saboteurs,” because they feel part of a “large, though unseen, group.”

So far, so sinister—I guess. Much of what Johnson describes just sounds like the workings of the average bureaucratic institution, which is a morass of self-serving incompetence, petty politics and, most of all, disdain for the ordinary people whose interests it ultimately exists to serve.

Are we really dealing with organized sabotage? Or is this just a bunch of bureaucrats who’ve had their noses put out of joint and want to imagine themselves as the Rebel Alliance working against Emperor Trumpatine—or whichever capeshit Marvel heroes these kinds of people idolize right now?

It really could just be a bunch of disgruntled employees who’ve found a PDF on the internet and are sending it round in a vain attempt to continue taking part in the power process. As Ted Kaczynski reminds us, we all need to feel like we’re doing something, lest we sink into meaningless and despair.

And there’s nothing in the CIA manual you wouldn’t find in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals either. Anybody can find that shitty book on the internet with a few clicks or just buy it from Amazon for pennies. Which is to say, I don’t think the Deep State gave that CIA manual to Jenny from HR on a USB thumb drive via dead-drop. We’re not talking about MKULTRA or sophisticated psyop techniques.

Of course, I could be wrong. For one thing, there are signs of wider coordination. Johnson’s plot comes at the same time 1,000 current and former employees of HHS submitted a letter to Congress calling for RFK Jr. to resign. At the same time RFK Jr. faced the senate and was forced into fiery confrontations with usual suspects like Pocahontas Warren, Ron Wyden and Marian Cantwell, who called him a “charlatan” and said he shouldn’t be “within a million miles of this job.” At the same time RFK Jr.’s own nephew, former senator John Kennedy III, branded his uncle “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” and also called, unsurprisingly, for him to resign.

These may be coincidences, or they may not.

What is clear, at least, is that this is really just the beginning of the fightback against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his pet project to rescue America from its chronic-disease nightmare. This is not as bad as it’s going to get. Kennedy has already faced denunciations from his own family: Dozens of them held a press conference during the election and laid into him as a “traitor” to their family’s ideals and legacy. Kennedy knows he’s now the black sheep and so do the American public. Many will be glad of that.

No, things can get worse than this. Much worse.

Organized pushback on a massive scale and with a desperate intensity was always to be expected. The MAHA agenda is a radical agenda. Its priorities are totally at odds with those of the largest vested interests in the US, apart from the military-industrial complex—and even then, it’s debatable whether Eisenhower’s nemesis isn’t implicated too. Big Ag is heavily enmeshed in the working of US industrial power and foreign policy. Just look at the way American GMO corn has been used as a bludgeon against the Mexicans, and how they’ve fought back. Michael Pollan has written about this enmeshment at length in his wonderful book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.