Prominent provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went viral in 2017 claiming there were “chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay.” The ridicule was swift and severe. Multiple remixes of the clip laying Jones’ rant atop club music were posted to YouTube, and crafters on Etsy sold merchandise depicting frogs frolicking among rainbows.
But today, nearly a decade later, someone who buys into the same conspiracy could soon be the nation’s top health official, with two Senate committees considering Robert F. Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services this week.
Kennedy has spread misinformation multiple times over the past three years claiming that herbicides and other chemicals are leading to “gender confusion” among kids and “destroying them.” That those claims have barely entered the public discourse over his nomination speaks to both the vast number of conspiracies Kennedy spreads, and also to the rise of alt-right groups and other conservatives twisting environmental science to justify restricting the rights of vulnerable populations.
Kennedy’s promotion of chemical conspiracies that demonize transgender people have helped him gain support among alt-right influencers online who push a mixture of “wellness” and far-right conspiracies.
“What concerns me about RFK Jr. is that he is so mobilizing for them,” said Cassie Miller, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks hate groups online. “They see him as someone promoting their own beliefs, who creates distrust in these chemicals and these systems and they can come in and feed off that to spread their more extreme views.”
Kennedy’s nomination comes as President Donald Trump has promised to “stop the transgender lunacy,” and, on his first day in office, issued executive orders to restrict trans peoples’ ability to access federal documents that match their gender identity. His administration has also promised to restrict trans peoples’ access to health care, and Kennedy himself has referred to puberty-blocking drugs used by some trans youth as “chemical castration,” contradicting the expertise of multiple medical associations.
“Each argument in the attempt to demean trans folks and compare us to contagions and toxins is basically an effort to give the appearance of legitimacy to their hate,” said Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Neither Kennedy nor the Trump administration responded to requests for comment.
The truth about atrazine
Atrazine, an endocrine-disrupting chemical, harms the body’s hormone systems and how they function. Its widespread use as a herbicide in industrial farming and corn production has been hotly contested over its environmental impacts.
European regulators have banned it for its impact on the environment. But the United States’ EPA still allows its use.
In fact, the last time Trump was president, EPA increased the amount of atrazine it considered safe for frogs and other aquatic organisms, in a move that the Biden-era EPA later criticized as politically motivated rather than science-based.
Chemical regulations are often a niche topic, debated only in environmental circles. But atrazine’s effects on amphibians made national headlines in 2010 after Tyrone Hayes, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, published an alarming study: One in 10 genetically male tadpoles that had been exposed to low-concentrations of atrazine in a lab had developed into female frogs with ovaries. Some of those even mated with other male frogs and produced viable eggs. Other male tadpoles exposed to atrazine remained male, but produced lower levels of testosterone and higher levels of estrogen than those that had not been exposed.
The results were the first indication that atrazine could be significantly harming frog populations writ-large. Since then, EPA has found that atrazine is “likely to adversely affect” some 54 percent of all animal species. Other studies have linked atrazine to early puberty in humans and preterm delivery. But there is nothing about the frog study — or any others — to suggest atrazine would change humans’ sex.
“I study frogs because I like frogs, not because they are a stand-in for humans,” Hayes told POLITICO’s E&E News.
Frogs, like other amphibians, are naturally much more susceptible to even minor changes in their environment than humans. Other studies have found some species of frogs change sex during their tadpole phase in reaction to changes in water temperature.
“Equating frog and human development is just plain stupid,” says Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity who has sued EPA to ban atrazine.
But Hayes’ study took on a life of its own soon after it was published. Fox News wrote a story about the study warning “LGBTF? Pesticide Turns Male Frogs into Females.” Other articles described the frogs in the study as “gender-bending.”
Far-right personalities like Jones were not far behind, arguing the study was evidence that chemicals could have similar effects on people. Jones spoke about the study multiple times on his show. First in 2015, when he went viral about “friggin frogs.”
By 2017, he was still using the study, and Hayes’ follow-up research, as “proof” that “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.”
“They’re putting chemicals in the food and water and you look at men and women and you can’t tell what’s what most of the time!” he said.
Those theories became more popular on the far-right after the lockdowns and vaccine mandates of the Covid-19 pandemic, said Joshua Malloy, a researcher who follows extremist digital subcultures at Malmö University in Sweden.
“All of a sudden we see radical right-wing groups emerging within wellness and spirituality-type communities in opposition to vaccines and the lockdowns, and through that there was a pivot towards masculine health and nutrition,” Malloy said.
The extremist wellness influencers claim that so-called globalists are using industrial chemicals, including atrazine, in agriculture and pharmaceuticals to weaken white men in order to replace them with non-white immigrants. These groups often demonize soy and other seed-oil products because of their natural estrogen content, and use the term “soy boy” as a slur for men they perceive as weak due to their overconsumption of tofu and other meat substitutes. They also promote drinking raw milk and eating raw eggs — foods they see as being more “natural” than those that have been heated up to stop the spread of diseases.
“Drinking raw milk is something that has always been around with cult followings, usually with groups you might characterize as hippies, but there has been a huge growth of it, and now it is often infused with white supremacy and other ideas,” Malloy said.
One of the most popular personalities promoting these views goes by the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist online, though in summer 2024 he was outed by a United Kingdom nonprofit as an Oxford and Cambridge-educated historian named Charles Cornish-Dale. He regularly promotes nutrition and health content alongside racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
His book, about “the globalist plan for food,” is published by Antelope Hill, a white nationalist publisher that also prints work by Adolf Hitler. Raw Egg Nationalist is one of a few popular anonymous social media accounts that has built up huge Republican followings by combining photos of bodybuilders and buff men alongside white nationalism and social Darwinism. Another account, called Bronze Age Pervert, was reportedly popular among Trump staffers at the end of his first term.
Miller, at SPLC, said homophobic and transphobic views are also at the heart of the wellness advice Cornish-Dale doles out through his Raw Egg Nationalist pseudonym.
“Raw Egg Nationalist and others like him say that the health of the nation is tied to the health of individuals, especially men, and they want men to be physically strong and to have stereotypically masculine physiques and occupy these stereotypically masculine roles,” she said. “It ties back to the current right-wing obsession with transgender people, because they are arguing that trans people are not real, essentially.
“They are saying that our food supply has been poisoned and that it is resulting in people believing they are transgender, and if only we could go back to this ‘natural’ way of life, there wouldn’t be things like the LGBTQ community,” Miller said.
For example, in a March column, Cornish-Dale acknowledged that the 2010 atrazine frog study cannot be applied to humans, but instead argued that it is “compassionate” toward transgender people to ask questions about whether exposure to endocrine disruptors, more broadly, can cause “gender trouble” because ending the “toxic legacy of medical science and modern industry” could “spare others their fate.”
In an email, Cornish-Dale clarified to E&E News that “nobody is saying that herbicide use is somehow ‘responsible’ for transgenderism,’” calling it a “complex phenomenon” that he also attributes to mental illness and “phobia,” along with exposure to endocrine disruptors.
As to whether such conspiracies could drum up hate against transgender people, Cornish-Dale wrote to E&E News, “I generally advocate for compassion for transgender people, but I don’t believe that compassion and indulgence are synonyms.”
The ‘End of Men’
Though he originated as a fringe influencer, Cornish-Dale’s Raw Egg Nationalist has grown in popularity since 2022, when he appeared on a Tucker Carlson special about industrial chemicals, which aired on Fox News.
The one-hour special, titled “The End of Men,” includes interviews with legitimate public health experts, like the former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Linda Birnbaum, who describes links between certain chemicals, like PFAS, and decreased sperm counts and testosterone.
It also veers into pseudoscience, interviewing conservative bodybuilders working out at a ranch owned by Jones, promoting practices like tanning one’s testicles to allegedly boost testosterone levels.
The show did not discuss atrazine specifically or transgender people, but it included extensive interviews with Kennedy, who said use of herbicides and other endocrine disruptors would continue to lower testosterone and sperm counts, threatening human’s reproductive abilities.
“You can do the math. We’re headed for a calamity,” Kennedy said. “It’s not a hyperbole; it’s just a mathematical fact, and you know this is a chemical warfare on our country.”
Cornish-Dale was also heavily featured in the show using his anonymous pseudonym, Raw Egg Nationalist.
“The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed and isolated, the better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you,” Raw Egg Nationalist says in the segment, his voice overlaying photos of people wearing masks. “That’s soy globalism in a nutshell: know nothing, live in the pod, eat the soy. The best response to this is a strong politics nationalism.”
Though it was roundly slammed by liberal and mainstream media as farcical, “The End of Men” helped elevate both Kennedy and Cornish-Dale to audiences they may not normally reach. Prior to the segment, Cornish-Dale estimates his Raw Egg Nationalist account on X had an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 followers. Today, he has more than 264,000.
As of July, Vice President JD Vance was one of them.
“The End of Men sent my popularity through the roof,” Cornish-Dale wrote in a statement to E&E News. “Things just went crazy afterwards. I’ve been on a steep upward trajectory ever since.”
Kennedy stands by the segment.
In August 2024, shortly after endorsing Trump for president, Kennedy appeared on Carlson’s current show for a wide-ranging interview. There, he talked about how, prior to “The End of Men,” conservatives were resistant to his concerns about chemicals.
“And then you do this incredible show on endocrine disruptors, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, Tucker Carlson has just done the best show that has ever been done,’” Kennedy said.
He lamented that the show had been misunderstood.
“They said, ‘Oh, he’s saying that chemicals turn people gay and he’s anti-gay’ and all this stuff, and that’s not what anybody said,” Kennedy complained. “What we are saying is we are destroying our children.”
But just four months before “End of Men” aired, Kennedy had spoken on his podcast about endocrine disruptors and specifically referenced Hayes’ atrazine study to blame chemicals for creating transgender people.
“The capacity for these chemicals that were just raining down on our children right now to introduce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society,” he said in June 2022.
Endocrine disruptors, he said, were causing “impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion.”
A year later, Kennedy again raised Hayes’ study with the Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, blaming “sexual dysphoria” on kids’ exposure to “a soup of toxic chemicals and endocrine disruptors.”
“If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well,” he said on the podcast, which was later pulled from YouTube due to violating the platform’s policies on vaccine misinformation.
Kennedy made similar claims in June 2023 while talking to popular podcaster Joe Rogan.
A ‘revolution’
Those comments, along with Kennedy’s own promotion of raw milk, have helped spur support for him among online extremists.
“These are things that have circulated on the far right for a really long time and are mainstays of their beliefs, and someone who now has a real shot of political control is now out there talking about them,” Miller said.
Cornish-Dale agreed, writing to E&E News, “RFK Jr. is jacked, tanned, smart and a hit with the ladies. What’s not to like?”
“He embodies the ideals he promotes — many of which we promote as well — and he’s brave enough to speak the truth to power,” he wrote. “He knows the truth and isn’t afraid to say it: that corporate control of the food supply and our growing dependency on Big Pharma have been a disaster for our health.”
Cornish-Dale has turned to other conservative media to drum up support for Kennedy. Just one day before Trump nominated Kennedy, Cornish-Dale appeared on a conservative podcast hosted by David Gornoski on an episode titled “Why RFK Jr Should Be HHS Secretary.”
On another podcast in December, Cornish-Dale described Trump’s electoral victory as a surge of “testosterone politics,” and recalled how “The End of Men” had been “greeted by the liberal media with howls of derision.”
“It was considered a joke issue by the mainstream media, but fast-forward to the election and testosterone is a separating issue between the parties,” he said. Two years later, however, he said, “Newspapers take us very seriously overseas.”
He also boasted that he had gained women supporters from “The End of Men” who were upset about “the species-wide problem” it had uncovered in industrial agriculture.
“It animates quite strongly the transgender issue,” he said.
“He believes that the health of the nation is a very important thing,” he said. “If he is successful with this Make America Healthy Again movement, I think it could very well become the kind of unifying issue actually that I think health should be.”
For his part, Hayes said he is dismayed to see his research be misused, both by contributing to transphobia, and by distracting from atrazine’s real environmental harms.
“We know that atrazine is bad, we know that it is doing these bad things in the environment, so why are we focusing on something else that is pure speculation, that is an attack on the LGBTQ community?” Hayes said.
Restrictions on trans health care
Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS comes as conservative lawmakers are threatening access to trans health care.
Multiple Republican state legislatures have tried to ban access to health care like medicines that can pause puberty and give young people time to assess their gender identities. They have also banned hormone therapies used to help kids transition. One such ban, in Tennessee, is currently being considered by the Supreme Court.
All of the country’s major medical societies consider the treatments to be safe and even medically necessary. But that hasn’t stopped Congress from limiting it.
A defense spending bill passed at the tail end of the year restricts gender-affirming care for active duty service members and their families. Transgender advocates fear Republicans are planning to implement a “Hyde-amendment style ban” on gender-affirming care that would prevent federal funds from going to hospitals that provide such health care.
“If you want to understand how they will go after trans health care, look at what they have used for abortion,” said Branstetter.
Kennedy, who himself receives testosterone replacement therapy as part of an “anti-aging protocol” from his doctor, has come out against gender-affirming care for minors, calling puberty blockers “repurposed castration drugs” in a post on X last May.
Gender-affirming care and trans rights more broadly were centerpieces of Trump’s campaign against former Vice President Kamala Harris. The campaign spent more money criticizing Harris’ support for transgender rights than any other issue, with ads that included images of Rachel Levine, the then-assistant secretary for health and the highest-ranking openly transgender person to ever serve in the federal government.
Kennedy is not the only Trump nominee to oppose transgender health care.
Andrew Ferguson, the president’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission, has said he will use the post to “fight back against the trans agenda” and investigate doctors and hospitals who have prescribed puberty blockers and hormone therapies. Trump himself said last month that he will “stop the transgender lunacy.”
It is likely that any Trump nominee to lead HHS would share similar views on trans health care. But Kennedy’s coupling of chemical-related conspiracies with his opposition to hormone therapies makes him especially dangerous, said Olivia Hunt, director of federal policy for Advocates for Trans Equity.
His comments about atrazine contributing to gender confusion is a means of “isolating our community and convincing people we are acceptable scapegoats for problems.”
Branstetter agreed.
“They are promising that if your child does not grow up to be quote-unquote normal, it is somebody’s fault and we can help you get that normal child by drinking the proverbial snake oil, except in this case it’s raw milk,” she said.
