Fluoride? Boy, I didn't see this coming.

The combination of Trump and RFK Jr. is a toxic mix of arrogance and certainty

If the toxic mix of arrogance and certainty could be captured on film, it would look like the faces of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  The slang phrase, “I can’t even,” with its abrupt stop implying an expression of surprise or frustration, so perfectly fits the emergence of this “issue,” it’s as if the phrase was coined specifically with fluoride in mind.

It hardly matters whose collapsing brain pan the idea of removing fluoride from the nation’s water “on day one” came from.  There is already so much planned for “day one” of a potential Trump presidency that Trump will have to issue an additional executive order rejiggering the calendar to fit everything in.  That the fluoride thing landed on the list alongside proposed orders to deport tens of millions of immigrants and “round up” Trump enemies like special counsel Jack Smith and Rep. Nancy Pelosi adds a certain absurd perfection to the rest of those planned for Trump to sign.  Fluoridated water isn’t even a national policy.  Individual city or county water systems can decide whether to add it or not, and neither the president nor a cowed Congress has the authority to end the practice in the places where fluoride is added to the water.

The idea of putting fluoride in water systems started way back in the late 1940s and early 1950s after a dentist researching a dental condition involving mottled and discolored teeth called “Colorado brown stain” discovered that the cause was naturally occurring fluoride in the water.  It happened that people with the condition also had teeth that were largely cavity-free.  A chemist for the Alcoa Aluminum Company doing research on discolored teeth to determine whether it was caused by aluminum discovered that the cause was fluoride, not aluminum.  More research was done in Great Britain establishing a statistical connection between the presence of fluoride and reduced cavities.  Finally, in 1945, the newly created National Institutes of Health (NIH) did a controlled study of fluoridated water in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which in 1950 showed a significant reduction in cavities in those exposed to fluoridated drinking water.  More research was done in Canada, the Netherlands and Great Britain which largely replicated the Grand Rapids findings.  By the early 1950s a consensus emerged that fluoride in very small amounts in drinking water could reduce cavities, especially in children, so putting fluoride in water systems began to spread.

Also spreading throughout the United States at the same time was the Red Scare. Extremist right-wing groups like the John Birch Society and Ku Klux Klan looking for commies found them in the government, not only in the Department of State, but in the NIH, and began a campaign to end water fluoridation, which they saw as a Communist-inspired conspiracy to undermine the health of citizens and weaken the United States.

RFK Jr. appears to be a proud inheritor of the Bircher conspiracy theory about fluoride in the water.  On Saturday, Kennedy posted a tweet on Xitter, or whatever it’s called, calling fluoride an “industrial waste.”  It is in fact a naturally occurring mineral that is present in the water of 28 countries, including parts of the United States, where in places that fluoride is excessive, it must be removed or reduced through a process of defluorination.

This is an excerpt from my Tuesday column in Salon. Link to full column here:

RFK Jr. fluoride conspiracy