Watching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s congressional hearings this week made me think back to 2016 when President Trump publicly called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ineffective and questioned its purpose. His comments were met with snobbish mockery and outsized alarm by those who refused to entertain new ideas about old orthodoxies from the likes of someone without a Ph.D. That the president would even question NATO’s necessity was a clear indication that he wasn’t fit to assess it, according to his detractors.

The same phenomenon is happening now to RFK Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, because he — a man without a medical degree — is calling for institutional scrutiny. He questions the safety of our vaccines, our water, our food supply, and the systems responsible for them. Mr. Kennedy can’t be right, according to those with allegiances to the status quo, so he has to be crazy and unfit for office.