Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fringe anti-vaxxer who somehow became head of America’s health agencies under President Donald Trump, met with the president of Argentina and discussed establishing a new alternative to the World Health Organization, according to a tweet from Kennedy on Tuesday. And while the substance of their meeting is important, all anyone can notice on social media is their bizarre photoshoot.
Your eyes don’t deceive you. That’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services holding a chainsaw that belongs to Milei and reads “las fuerzas del cielo” in Portuguese. Translated into English, it means “the forces of heaven.”
Milei, a far-right ally of President Trump, campaigned on promises to deliver austerity to his country and slash government spending, often wielding his chainsaw. And ever since, people who meet with Milei will often hold the chainsaw themselves. Billionaire oligarch Elon Musk waved the chainsaw around earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where Musk looked absolutely blitzed out of his mind.
That conference in February, it should be noted, was the same CPAC gathering where two other speakers (including Steve Bannon) did Nazi-style salutes that mimicked Musk’s gestures on Jan. 20.
Elon Musk holds a chainsaw reading “Long live freedom, damn it” during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025.© Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
It’s particularly odd for Kennedy to be posing with a chainsaw, considering he was investigated for using a chainsaw to hack the head off a dead whale two decades ago. Kennedy’s daughter described how the head was strapped to the top of the family car and said that whale juice was streaming down into the open windows. Kennedy called the investigation a weaponization of the government, and it was later dropped.
Kennedy posted other photos from the strange meeting at Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Tuesday, including another where Milei is seated at the head of the table and the chainsaw is in the foreground. Needless to say, the vibes are straight out of The Shining.
A group of people seated around a table, including RFK Jr. and Javier Milei, with a chainsaw on the table in front of them. Photo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. / X
In another era, these photos would be mind-boggling and come to define the legacy of the politicians involved. But here in the year 2025, it’s just another day that ends in Y.
What did these guys actually discuss? Apparently the Milei and Trump governments want to create some kind of woo-woo public health body that competes with the World Health Organization. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the WHO on his first day back as the American president on Jan. 20, and and Milei followed suit on Feb. 5.
“I had a wonderful meeting with Argentine President @JMilei about our nations’ mutual withdrawal from the WHO and the creation of an alternative international health system based on gold-standard science and free from totalitarian impulses, corruption, and political control,” Kennedy wrote.
What makes the World Health Organization totalitarian? Kennedy doesn’t get into specifics. But some far-right figures have claimed that WHO colluded with China to hide the “real” origins of the covid-19 pandemic. The Trump regime’s gallery of health-adjacent weirdos insist covid-19 was created in a lab and unleashed upon the world either intentionally or accidentally. Most scientists still believe covid-19 has natural origins.
RFK Jr. holding a gadsen flag hat that reads “No Me Joda,” which means “don’t fuck with me,” alongside Javier Miliei. Photo: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. / X
Kennedy has been busy in recent weeks, firing vital employees of the agencies he runs, including the FDA and CDC, and rolling out new policies. The health secretary was on a podcast Tuesday called “Ultimate Human” where he suggested government scientists would no longer be allowed to publish in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet. Those are, of course, the most prestigious medical journals, but Kennedy called them “corrupt,” according to Politico.
Kennedy would instead like American scientists to publish their work in “in-house” journals. As luck would have it, FDA head Marty Makary and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya recently launched their own medical journal called the Journal of the Academy of Public Health. Science magazine called the journal’s editorial policies “unusual,” and real scientists have noted the journal seems to be comprised of “a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic.”