7-Opinion
W
hen I turned 13, like
many Jews around the
United States and the
rest of the world, I was bar mitzvahed.
Upon the conclusion of my service,
after reciting blessings and reading
from the Torah, I was rushed to an
unmarked back room. The room was
small and consisted of just a single
chair facing a video monitor. It was
there where I received a call from
the Rothschild family. I was finally
old enough to be given my very first
Jewish space laser.
If it wasn’t clear that this did
not happen, I will tell you now. It
did not happen. There are no such
things as Jewish space lasers. Any
sane, sensible, respectful person
should know this, but none of those
adjectives apply to U.S. Rep. Marjorie
Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Greene has
become notorious over the last few
months for parroting all kinds of
bigoted conspiracies. Most famously,
her comments about Jewish space
lasers causing California’s 2018
wildfires.
However,
Greene’s
comments reflect a larger problem
within the Republican Party. Their
increasing acceptance of conspiracy
theories should worry everyone,
regardless of party affiliation, and
must be met face on and put to an end.
Greene’s conspiracy, which drew
some of the most intense backlashes,
came from one of her resurfaced
Facebook posts from 2018. She wrote
about how the California wildfires
were caused by a space laser and that
the “Vice Chairman of Rothschild Inc,
international investment banking firm”
was somehow involved. The rest of her
post rambled on about how alternative
energy panels in space were reflecting
rays from the sun back to earth in
order to increase stock prices and help
wealthy investors. Aside from making
zero scientific or logical sense, it is also
blatantly anti-Semitic, as blaming the
Rothschild family is a century-old anti-
Semitic tactic to scapegoat Jews for
society’s problems.
That was just the surface of
Greene’s conspiracies. Greene openly
supports QAnon, a discredited and
disproven
right-wing
conspiracy
theory that incorporates the “deep
state” and a global elite that consists
of pedophiles, Satan worshippers and
cannibals who plotted against former
President Donald Trump and has
gathered a cult-like following. She
also claims that no plane crashed into
the Pentagon on 9/11, the Parkland
shooting was a false flag event and
Sandy Hook was staged. On top of all
that, Greene “repeatedly indicated
support for executing prominent
Democratic politicians in 2018 and
2019 before being elected to Congress.”
Writing about all of Greene’s theories
is a daunting task but overall, they
largely all consist of the same
Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, anti-
Semitic and dangerous rhetoric.
As more and more of Greene’s
theories surfaced, House Democrats
called for her removal from her
assignments on the Education and
Budget Committees. In a 230-199 vote,
with just 11 Republicans joining all of
the Democrats, Greene was removed
from her committee seats, drastically
reducing her ability to enact and
contribute to policy making. While
her political power has been hindered,
what is still concerning are the 199
Republicans who did not believe
Greene deserved to be punished for
her comments. Yet, this should come
as no surprise. About a month after
voting to overturn the election results
and choosing to support Trump’s lies
about election fraud, the vast majority
of House Republicans still cannot hold
their own accountable.
The current Republican party
is
infused
with
conspiratorial
lies that contribute to hate and
violence. Last fall, in a vote to
condemn QAnon, 18 Republicans
voted against condemning the
dangerous conspiracy theory. In
other words, 18 Republicans refused
to denounce a disproven theory
that Democrats, celebrities and
a “global elite” conspire to traffic
children, drink children’s blood
and conspire against Trump and
his supporters. These beliefs are
not isolated within politicians either.
In a recent YouGov poll, 30% of
self-proclaimed Republicans had
a “favorable” opinion of QAnon. At
first glance, this seems like a polling
anomaly. An NPR/Ipsos poll found
that 17% of Americans, including
23% of Republicans, believe that a
“group of Satan-worshipping elites
who run a child sex ring are trying to
control our politics and media” — a
vital principle of QAnon. If this is the
direction that the Republican Party
is going in, they are going down a
path that cannot be followed.
So what can we all do to stop the
spread of threatening and harmful
conspiracies that have real-world
consequences? First things first
we have to understand how people
get sucked into believing these
things. The first mistake people
make is believing that only stupid
or unintelligent people become
followers of QAnon. Like many
cults, QAnon provides people with
a feeling that they belong to an elite
community, offering them a sense
of belonging. Although it is not an
easy task, and the tactics are widely
debated amongst extremism experts,
once more is understood about how
QAnon attracts new followers, the
work can be done to de-radicalize
them.
While some conspiracy theories
can be harmless like Bigfoot or
the Loch Ness monster, other
conspiracies
have
real-world
consequences that should be taken
seriously by everyone. We have
already seen the damage that
election fraud conspiracies have had
when thousands of people stormed
the U.S. Capitol Building leaving
five dead and dozens more injured.
QAnon followers have already been
caught threatening to kidnap and
even assassinate public figures.
As QAnon grows in popularity
and edges closer to becoming
mainstream within the Republican
Party, even more violence will
accompany it. The time is now to
put an end to QAnon’s conspiratorial
influence within the GOP before
they become the GQP.
Opinion
NYLA BOORAS | COLUMNIST
ALEX NOBEL | COLUMNIST
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 — 11
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
More schools of public health at every size, please
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EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
The Grand Old Party of conspiracies
A
fter the first public health school
was established at Johns Hopkins
University a century ago, the
interdisciplinary practice has found a home
in universities nationwide. Without a doubt,
public health researchers and professionals
have led the charge in understanding what
a healthy society might look like, while
simultaneously striving to create it. Here at the
University of Michigan, the School of Public
Health is one of the best in the nation. This
doesn’t come as a surprise. What does come
as a surprise from a university that champions
itself as the “Leaders and the Best” is its
perpetuation of diet culture and fatphobia via
the weight-normative curriculum it bolsters.
The lack of awareness around how these roots
contradict its mission of promoting public
health needs to be addressed.
Fortunately, within the School of Public
Health, a professor is pioneering a public
health approach that forgoes beliefs born out
of diet culture and fatphobia, opting instead for
a weight-inclusive approach which encourages
healthy behaviors irrespective of one’s weight.
Dr. Kendrin Sonneville, Sc.D., R.D., is an
assistant professor in the Department of
Nutritional Sciences whose research focuses
on eating disorder prevention. To say her
background and current work is impressive is
an understatement.
Sonneville is one of a handful of public
health faculty members that align themselves
with the Health at Every Size framework,
and to her knowledge, she is the only faculty
member at the school who explicitly orients
herself as a weight-inclusive researcher. She
teaches a Weight Bias & Health course — the
first and only freestanding class on weight
bias at any public health school — and the
work she does with her team at the Sonneville
Lab for Weight-Inclusive Nutrition & Eating
Disorders Prevention is monumental.
Sonneville is undoubtedly leading the
charge here at the University’s School of Public
Health to transform the foundation of public
health into one that is weight inclusive and
challenges misconceptions surrounding weight
— namely that from weight alone, you can come
to conclusions about one’s health status. She
shared her thoughts on the state of the school’s
curriculum and mainstream public health
while providing suggestions on where to go
from here so that relevant programs can move
closer to achieving their mission.
Despite being a bit of an outsider within
a department where most faculty members
conform to the weight-normative model —
for example, holding the belief that people
classified as “overweight” or “obese” under
existing standards must lose weight to
become healthier — Sonneville has been met
with curiosity and open-mindedness from
colleagues and students intrigued by her
approach. “Even though my approach may
feel relatively radical within a department of
nutrition,” she said, “I think there’s an interest
in understanding this paradigm, so even
though people aren’t necessarily identifying
as ‘all-in,’ there is a curiosity that comes from
my presence.” Students in particular have been
receptive to the HAES approach and her classes
continue to draw more curious minds in.
It’s not lost on Sonneville that she has been
able to venture into new territory with classes
and research focusing on weight bias and
eating disorders prevention and treatment due
to support from her department chair and the
school as a whole. For that, she is grateful.
“I do think that the support my particular
teaching and research program is getting
speaks volumes about our School of Public
Health,” she said. The department’s approval
of her courses, which are nonexistent in other
places, has been their best decision yet.
Moreover, alumni of Sonneville’s courses
have gone on to do meaningful and highly
demanded work in the eating disorder
space. They are the ones changing the public
health landscape from weight-normative to
weight-inclusive — and for the better. Alyson
McAdams, M.P.H, RDN, graduated from
the School of Public Health in 2017 and
has established a career around the HAES
framework. As a registered dietician working
in pediatric primary care, McAdams credits
Sonneville for her exposure to this weight-
inclusive framework. At the same time, she
also acknowledges that the University as a
whole didn’t provide enough education on
this approach or eating disorders, instead
putting too much of an emphasis on weight
normativity and solving the obesity epidemic.
Even when faculty and other students
acknowledged that intentional weight loss
diets do not work in the long run for a majority
of people, when I interviewed McAdams, she
said the framing of larger-bodied people as a
problem in need of a solution remained. The
escape from this message for McAdams
was Sonneville’s courses. “Kendrin’s class
was definitely the only place where I felt like
weight-inclusive language and practices were
more overtly talked about,” McAdams said.
Even those around her who saw weight stigma
as a problem were missing the point.
“For many of us, we were still stuck in that
lens of, ‘weight stigma is a problem because it
contributes to weight gain, and weight gain
and larger bodies are a problem,’ ” McAdams
elaborated. Thus, further development is
needed in the curriculum so that students can
detach from the assumption that weight gain
is inherently negative.
Addressing weight stigma as a factor
contributing to weight gain while still viewing
weight gain as inherently in need of a solution
misses the point entirely. To dismantle weight
stigma means to reject the belief that efforts
targeted at improving health need to be
targeted at lowering one’s weight.
McAdams also confirmed that the bulk of
the required curriculum, specifically for the
dietetics track of the Master’s in Public Health
program, was extremely weight-normative
and fatphobic.
“For example, we had a pathophysiology of
obesity class that was required, but the eating
disorders class was an elective,” McAdams
said. Now in practice, she is bewildered by
this. “Eating disorders and disordered eating
show up all the time, and at the beginning
of my practice, that was something I had
to immediately seek continuing education
about.”
McAdams’ own initiative to self-educate
on the topic is applaudable, but soon-to-
be-dietitians ought to already have this
knowledge and a quality skillset surrounding
eating disorders, given their prevalence in
society. And, unfortunately, few dietetics
professionals are as proactive as McAdams.
On the whole, the dietetics field is saturated
with providers who spew harmful, fatphobic
messages about food and the body, not to
mention many actively struggling themselves
with their own disordered relationship with
the two. These messages are detrimental to all
who seek out their professional services, but
for those going to these dietitians to recover
from their eating disorder, it can be traumatic
and a major setback in their pursuit of recovery.
Clearly, there is still plenty of room for
profound changes in the curriculum. Only
when such changes are made can the School
of Public Health truly and accurately self-
identify as a leader in the public health field.
These changes will be no easy feat. With diet
culture beliefs about weight as embedded
in the research on health as they are today —
both in public health and medical research
— major shifts are needed in both spaces and
our broader culture before any substantial
improvements can be made.
Luckily, Sonneville has tangible first steps
in mind that are feasible with the support of
her department chairs, who are influential
players in curriculum development. She
finds that integrating the weight-inclusive
framework into core curriculum rather than
requiring classes that are solely HAES aligned
may be most effective because it would not
cast this framework as some niche field of
its own. Incorporating it into the existing
weight-normative curriculum also replicates
the context in which many graduates will
be working: one where weight stigma will
be present, and weight will be valued as an
independent health indicator.
Nyla Booras can be reached at
nbooras@umich.edu.
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Alex Nobel can be reached at
anobel@umich.edu.
JULIAN BARNARD | COLUMNIST
We’re #1?
T
his Super Bowl Sunday,
General Motors Co. aired
an advertisement for their
new electric vehicle battery, the
Ultium. This comes in the wake of
GM announcing that they will stop
producing
gas-powered
vehicles
by 2035. This was my favorite
advertisement of Super Bowl LV
and I would recommend giving it
a quick watch for context. The ad
starred Will Ferrell, Awkwafina
and Kenan Thompson. The plot is
that America is being trounced by
Norway when it comes to electric
vehicle implementation, and Ferrell
and his compatriots are on a mission
to change that. This ad, released on
one of the most competitive days on
the American calendar, supplies a
blueprint for using the American
competitive spirit as a vehicle for
positive change.
There is an incredible pool of
competitive energy in the United
States. I’m sure you have seen the
reports of rampant partying and
disorder in Tampa, Fla., after this
Super Bowl Sunday, and that’s just
energy from one American team
beating another. For a view of how
competitive we can get with other
countries just look to the Olympics.
Does anyone care about curling
any non-Olympic years? No! But
when it is framed as a competition
where America needs to take its
rightful place on the winner’s podium,
heads from Seattle to Sarasota, Fla.,
pop up, and the competitive fuse is lit.
The precise language of competing
with other countries has possibly
turned sour in the ears of many left-
leaning people throughout the last
few years. This is because former
President Donald Trump was an
avid user of winner-take-all rhetoric
in U.S. foreign policy. Specifically,
Trump’s
America
First
policies
explicitly relied on a competitive and
even confrontational lens to interpret
the rest of the world. However,
competitive rhetoric can be employed
in a responsible and positive way,
like Ferrell confidently talking about
his desire to “crush those lugers”
to engender a passion for a more
sustainable transportation system.
For an example of how this
competitive spirit has been harnessed
to pull political goals along, look
no further than the Space Race.
In 1962, former President John F.
Kennedy gave his famous address at
Rice University. Kennedy called on
Americans to keep their eye on the
ball: “For while we cannot guarantee
that we shall one day be first, we can
guarantee that any failure to make
this effort will make us last.”
Kennedy and Ferrell share a
strategy to motivate Americans. Not
only do they want us to covet winning,
but they also want us to loathe
losing. Kennedy was demonstrably
successful in using this strategy, as
his competitive rhetoric ensured
robust space program funding, which
resulted in an eventual victory in 1969
when Americans were the first to set
foot on the moon.
We have established that this is a
strategy, but what could it best be used
for today? Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
may have an idea. Whitmer ran on a
platform focused on fixing Michigan’s
roads. Currently, the U.S. gets a D+ in
infrastructure from the American
Society of Civil Engineers. Our national
infrastructure would be a perfect
target for a competitive strategy. After
all, the interstate highway system was
born out of a competitive spirit. Former
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
noticed that Germany had a fantastic
highway system and decided the U.S.
wouldn’t be relegated to second-tier
infrastructure — thus the Interstate
highway system was born.
Kyle Kulinski, a co-founder of the
progressive
organization
Justice
Democrats,
recently
tweeted
a
prescient
policy
prescription:
“The US should do a multi trillion
dollar infrastructure deal with the
expressed goal of being #1 in the world
on that front. … It’s a unifying national
project with countless upsides.”
This is exactly the type of strategy
we should be employing to move
the national conversation toward
significant infrastructure spending.
The innate pride in being American and
wanting to be number one in the world
is conditioned into someone from an
early age, and I feel it strongly as I write
this. Understanding and harnessing
this competitive spirit will be vital in
cutting through the cacophonous noise
of the modern political climate.
Of course, infrastructure is not the
only area where this strategy could
be effective. There are several areas
where the U.S. has fallen behind, and
many Americans might not even
realize it. Take our democracy for
example. Its weaknesses have already
been well explored by thinkers much
more in tune with the processes than
I, so I will simply say that cracks are
starting to show in institutions that
many Americans formerly perceived
as robust. Democracy isn’t something
that we think of competitively, but we
absolutely should — many countries do
elections better (and tastier) than we
do. One such country is Australia.
Elections in Australia are held on
Saturdays, as opposed to Tuesdays as
in the U.S. Australia has a compulsory
voting system, and you can get fined
about $15 for not doing your civic
duty. Voting is seen as a responsibility
and not just as a right, so about 96%
of Australians vote in each election,
compared to just 66.7% of Americans
who voted in the last election.
Finally, and most important to my
palate, at many Australian polling
places there will be a prominent
showing of democracy sausages —
basically a hot dog which voters can
purchase when they turn up to the
polls. Overall, voting is seen as more
of a block party than an errand. Both
the institutions and the culture around
voting in Australia are something that I
expect many Americans to both enjoy
and benefit from. But I don’t think we
should adopt their system and culture
because we need to do better. We need
to beat them — we need to be number
one — but only in a way that fits the
spirit of our nation.
Electric
cars,
democracy,
infrastructure and innovation. All
things that we as a nation should
strive to do better at, not just for our
own sake, but for our national sense
of pride. Will Ferrell, Kennedy and
Trump aren’t the most similar people,
but they all struck a fundamental
chord of what it means to be an
American. Americans like to win,
and when issues are framed as either
winning or losing to the rest of the
world, a lot can get done.
Design by Grace Aretakis
Julian Barnard can be reached at
jcbarn@umich.edu.