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When Utah lawmakers passed a law last month to ban fluoride from public drinking water, They say they have the reasons for doing it, but not one of those reasons was that fluoride in the water is bad for you. I mean, it might be. And some people did tell them it is, but that's not why they banned it. Lawmakers and the governor said it was about personal choice.

They didn't believe citizens should be forced to be medicated by the government.

So outside of the question of whether it's a dangerous industrial waste, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

says it is, fluoride has also been something of a cultural proxy for these deep anxieties about government overreach and public health mandates.

The historian Robert Dalek recently told us how this all began.

He said it was the far right organization, the John Birch Society, that first made fluoride a political flashpoint.

So the John Birch Society was a group of about 60 to 100,000 Americans.

And they styled themselves as this anti-communist shock force.

The animating idea behind the movement was that the United States was losing the Cold War.

The communists were making inroads not only overseas, but also domestically.

And so this kind of grassroots movement was formed in late 1958 in order ostensibly to

kind of educate, to tutor the country in what was happening under their noses and yet they

hadn't quite realized it.

The Birchers believed the civil rights movement was a comic plot,

just like the environmental movement and the UN and the Federal Reserve.

And one of the things they thought was happening right under Americans' noses,

the communists were poisoning our water.

Delick says there's a perfect illustration of this

in the classic black comedy

Dr. Strange Love from 1964.

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