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Rachel Maddow stunned by Trump hiring form’s outrageous personal questions
December 16 2024, 08:15

Rachel Maddow could not contain her shock at the form job applicants to Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been asked to fill out.

Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes confirmed that Trump’s nominee to lead HHS – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – is actually using an intake form that asks would-be employees about their sex lives, body image, and even their beliefs in the paranormal.

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“They ask you to disclose on this intake form to your potential new employer if these specific personality characteristics, you think, apply to you,” Maddow told viewers, sharing the following examples: “‘I like to show off my body’; ‘I like to look at myself in the mirror’; ‘I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person.'”

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“Excuse me? Sorry?” Maddow said. “Again, this is from your boss, from your would-be boss, asking you these questions.”

She couldn’t help but list even more outrageous characteristics applicants must consider: “I consistently use my physical appearance to draw attention to myself”; “I have chronic feelings of emptiness”; “I love large parties”; “I leave a mess in my room”; “I do not enjoy going to art museums”; “I get upset when people don’t notice how I look when I go out in public.”

She then shared her favorite: “I believe in things and many others don’t, like having a sixth sense, clairvoyance and telepathy, and as an adolescent, I had bizarre fantasies or preoccupations.'”

Maddow could not believe that all of it was one question, and she wondered if the “and” meant that all of those things had to apply for someone to mark it as applying to them.

She then emphasized again just how strange the questions were.

“If your would-be boss asks you how interested you are in sex, and this would-be boss wants you to put this answer in writing and submit it to the company, call HR, right?… Maybe call the cops. Definitely don’t take that job. But that… is being administered to people who want to work for the U.S. government in the second term of Donald J. Trump.”

Kennedy has no background in medical science and is known for his wacky, anti-scientific approach to health, which includes opposition to vaccines and sunscreen, health interventions that have saved millions of lives. Kennedy himself has a history of poor health, which included a parasitic brain worm that resulted in “mental fogginess and memory loss.”

He’s also gotten attention for saying that COVID was engineered by China to target “Caucasians and Black people” and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people and for claiming the U.S. is sending money to Ukraine to fund other racial bioweapons.

Kennedy has been a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, which is based on pseudoscience and uses misinformation to spread the belief that vaccines don’t prevent disease. He is a member and the chair of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization that claims that autism, ADHD, food allergies, cancer, and autoimmune disease are caused by vaccines.

Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense spread misinformation in 2018 in Samoa that led to a decline in the vaccination rate, which was followed by an outbreak of measles in which 57,000 people were infected and 83 people – including children – died.

Kennedy opposes the fluorination of water, which is considered one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century. Fluoridation improves dental health and particularly benefits children who can’t regularly access dental care, but it has also long been the subject of conspiracy theories.

Kennedy is also an HIV denialist, including over 100 pages of quotes from people who deny the connection between HIV and AIDS in his book The Real Anthony Fauci. Kennedy has disparagingly referred to the “orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS” and the “theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.” He has called medications used to treat HIV “absolutely fatal.” He refers to himself as an “AIDS dissident.”

Kent State University public health professor Tara Smith notes that Kennedy has engaged in “germ theory denial,” or the idea that microbes don’t spread disease. He has disparagingly referred to the scientific consensus that many diseases are caused by microbes as “germ their aficionados,” who he contrasted with “miasmists,” or people who believe that a miasma over a certain terrain is the cause of infectious diseases.

He also once said chemicals in the water supply are turning kids trans.

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