One of the greatest challenges of the heightened misinformation environment we find ourselves digitally surrounded by is intellect is not a reliable indicator of who gets impacted and who doesn’t. Some of the smartest people I know either a) deliberately don’t follow the news and/or b) get certain news from communities on social media platforms…and therefore insulate from reasoning that isn’t factored into the opinions of those forums.

This is not a new phenomenon in 2026. We all are in this fractured media environment reading indie substacks, YouTubers, reddit posts, feeds from Meta/X(Twitter), podcasts, etc. Gone are the days you could point to a New York Times article or CNN and expect someone to have either read the story or knew of it. Or if you present if to them, they are likely to dismiss it or reject reading it in the first place (a point that comes up consistently in the book I’m read last year, The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer).

That said, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read stories and reports that help us separate fact from myth. And one of those examples I struggle with the most is the belief in Robert Kennedy Jr. as this individual that is “following the science” and leading this great Make America Healthy Again movement that relies on conspiracy and decades-old falsehoods around infectious diseases, vaccines and autism.

I started thinking about this after hearing a friend say last year that RFK was just following the science with his earliest moves as the head of HHS. I think the hardest part to accept this framing that he’s “following the science” is looking at all the steps that have come to pass since then such as with vaccines: messing with vaccine trials, vaccine approvals, the childhood vaccine schedule or gutting research funding for cancers, so on and so forth. It was obvious to myself and whatever this niche of news/journo-minded folks that the risks of destroying public health were real, and have come to pass.

I guess the place I’m left at is not so much convincing the people around me like I initially thought of where to source their information, but recognizing a more collective push is required, and will find more touch points to believing in public health, liberal democracy, education. The pillars that will get us out of authoritarianism and finding true community with each other that doesn’t mean putting out needs at the expense of someone else’s. This pollster substack post spoke as much on this point to me, and I hope it’s a guide for the future.