“You go online, you do commercials to encourage people to sign up with Wisner Baum [a giant LA law firm] to join lawsuits against vaccine makers,” she said. “And for everyone who signs up, you personally get paid. And if they win their case, you get 10 percent of what they win,” she added, noting that “if you bring in somebody who gets 10 million you walk away with a million dollars.”

Kennedy accused Warren of making him “sound like a shill” before saying that he wouldn’t take any fees from drug companies during his time as secretary. But she was asking about what he ultimately would do with those fees. Kennedy, the scion of a wealthy family, demurred.

If you knew nothing about Kennedy, you might have come away impressed by his opening statement lamenting the poor health and chronic disease suffered by Americans, even as we pay more per capita for healthcare. We all agree there.

But later he falsely claimed that Americans prefer private insurance to Medicare, Medicaid, or the (private) marketplace governed by the ACA. In fact, a December Gallup poll reported that 62 percent of Americans believe it’s the “government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”

At 71, RFK Jr. uses Medicare Advantage, which is the privatized program that starts out generous when you’re the “young [or wealthy] old” and gets worse every year. Pushing us all into Medicare Advantage, which subjects participants to more scrutiny the older they get, was in Project 2025, so that shouldn’t have been surprising.

But on balance, the whole thing was depressing. I’ve written often about my reluctant contempt for him, but I still haven’t wanted to believe that he’s gone MAGA. Wednesday’s hearing proved that he has gone MAGA, in every way, though he occasionally tried to trick Democratic senators into believing he was kinda sorta with them. They might buy it, but clearly he is Opportunist MAGA, with a dose of old-fashioned Marin County faux-health promotion.

I started the day reading his cousin Caroline Kennedy’s shredding denunciation of him.

“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.” She had already summarized: “I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together. It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because he himself is a predator.”

If RFK Jr. doesn’t get confirmed, there will be many reasons. But that creepy image of the baby chicks and mice in his blender should be one of them. I watch hawks and owls all the time in Central Park. It’s not pretty. But they acquire their prey the old fashioned way—they work for it.

The sad Kennedy scion can’t relate. He’s had his life prepared for him since childhood. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn him into an upstanding citizen, as his disappointed siblings would attest. It turned him into a vicious, conspiracy peddling nut, trying to put our minds into a blender.