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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Managing Editor

Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building

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CLAIRE HAO

Editor in Chief

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AND JOEL WEINER

Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

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Mary Rolfes

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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. 

