Paragraph 1 Picture this: you’re scrolling through your social media feed late at night, half-awake, when a post catches your eye. It’s a dramatic headline—perhaps claiming that a common household ingredient causes cancer, or that a miracle fruit can cure arthritis overnight. Your heart skips a beat. You feel a wave of anxiety, then a flicker of anger at the “establishment” that’s hiding these “facts.” You almost share it to your private family group chat, because after all, your aunt’s neighbor’s cousin forwarded a similar thing, and they seem trustworthy. This is the daily reality of navigating health information in…

By now, most of us have probably seen the clips. On the morning of August 2, 2026, Secretary Kennedy appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and spent twenty minutes locked in a tense back-and-forth with Dana Bash. When I started talking to friends about it, the word we kept coming back to was vitriol. The mask had fallen. There was a kind of raw hostility in the way he dismissed her questions, and it felt familiar in an unsettling way. When Bash pressed him on how his language feeds vaccine hesitancy, he told her she was “repeating it like…