Sign up for The Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Donald Trump has promised to allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild” in his new role as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The environmental lawyer, antivax conspiracist, and brainworm survivor chartered an oddly shaped coalition of COVID denialists and almond moms in his path to the White House, all of which was successfully marbled into the Trump platform during the waning months in the campaign. It’s hard to know exactly what Kennedy is cooking up for public health, or if some of his more radical ideas (like, say, removing fluoride from the water supply) will ever make it past the purgatory of “advisory boards.” But we do have at least one hint about how the man intends to structure his wing of the executive branch: a test ostensibly designed to locate potential employees for RFK’s reign at HHS. Among other things, Kennedy would like to know if you’ve ever experienced clairvoyance.
The whole assessment, which was first reported by Puck and was confirmed to be real by the Trump transition team, is available for anyone to take. Unlike more concrete examinations of one’s fitness to serve in a public health regime—like, for instance, any tangible background in medicine or health policy—the test reveals itself to be a free-associative chimera of IQ-ish logic puzzles and the sort of discredited Meyers-Briggs queries you used to take in Computer Lab. It would be a hilarious prank if its intentions weren’t seemingly dead serious.
As an American, I decided to determine my own fitness for a role in RFK Jr.’s cabinet of horrors. It was a disquieting experience. The first 17 (17!) questions in the test are all pattern recognition, where you’re asked to slot a geometrical graphic into a row of three without breaking order. After that, you’re ushered to some good old-fashioned word association, and asked to determine, through multiple choice, the closest definitional relative of a particular article of speech. (Like, say, matching “envy” up with “jealousy.”)
Remember those standardized tests you took in middle school? Where everyone was trapped in the basketball gym for six hours on a Monday afternoon? It’s kinda like that, except with, you know, the fate of the entire American medical apparatus on the line.
Things get even weirder once you get to the latter half of the test, which, in form and function, is a MySpace–style personality quiz. I was asked to rank a series of attributes, from 1 to 5, on how they gel with my psychic makeup. And given how disparate and unattached those attributes were, this proved to be an impossible task. Do I “make people feel at ease” more than I “spend time reflecting on things”? Do I feel like I “neglect my duties” more than either of those strengths? What? What kind of question is that! The whole thing reeked of neo-psychological quackery, in the Gladwell tradition, where the vast gradient of human experience can be neatly organized into, like, three smooth categories.
And yet, after that first round of personality disentangling, RFK’s assessment gets much more specific, and, somehow, even more bizarre. The quiz presented me with a lengthy list of strange personal insecurities, and asked me to highlight the five that I identified with most. That sounds straightforward enough, but the available choices coalesced into a majorly unwell person. One reads, “I tend to have unstable and intense personal relationships, where I alternate between extremes of idealizing and devaluing another.” Another adds, “I don’t have that much interest in having sexual experiences with another person,” which I choose to interpret as a smart bit of incel coalition management. Speaking for myself, I was self-aware enough to check off “I require excessive admiration,” but I made sure to leave out “I don’t feel much empathy for others” to ensure that the next regime doesn’t peg me as a sociopath. (This is also where the question about “having clairvoyance” surfaces, but honestly, compared to the other options, it might be among the least distressing of the bunch.)
And just like that, the test was over. I was presented no score or evaluation, just a terse “thank you” and the end of the line. I suppose I must live with the fact that the government now possesses a record of my darkest inclinations—an RFK-ified survey of my morality—but I don’t get the sense that he’s gotten any better sense of whether I’m a fit or not for Health and Human Services. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising, because when journalist Timothy Burke dug into who, exactly, is responsible for this deeply strange audit, he learned that the publishing company is called ExamCorp. ExamCorp’s president? None other than Jordan Peterson, the psychologist turned right-wing gadfly.
I know we’ve all grown numb to the outrageous stupidity of this political climate, but I don’t think we can hammer this point home hard enough. Robert F. Kennedy—a guy who dumped a bear carcass in Central Park—is set to take on a paramount role in the health policy of this country. Helping him round out his staff? Peterson, who is closer to the levers of power than ever before. What a horrific timeline. This carnival of MAGA grift will continue to blob out until it blocks out the sun. It can, and will, get worse from here. Hey, maybe I am clairvoyant after all.
