I've seen some weird stuff in my life, but JFK Jr has go to be in the top 3% of lifetime weirdness achievement. He has posted a job application test that anyone can take online. The instructions basically were, don't cheat!
I took the 90 minute test in about 20. Not a single question asked about public health, infectious disease, health care or anything remotely related to relevant academic training or expertise. The whole thing was a bizarre deep dive into personality plus some stuff I have no clue about. Presumably, if one "passes" this abnormal test, there will be some actual relevant substance to the job application process. At least, one can hope for that.
I Took the Test RFK Jr. Is Using to Determine
Who Should Work at His Health Department
We are extremely doomed.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, anti-vax conspiracist, and brain-worm 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. .... 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 Myers-Briggs queries you used to take in Computer Lab. It would be a hilarious prank if its intentions weren’t seemingly dead serious.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. (emphases added)
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