As two coronavirus vaccines roll out we’re being flooded with more disinformation than ever. Wellness gurus are cashing in on home-made “natural” remedies by spreading unjustified fears about this vaccine, and vaccines in general.This week, we look at Dr. Christiane Northrup’s “line in the sand,” Mikki Willis revealing that he recently helped out the kids of Covington High and Kyle Rittenhouse, JP Sears getting retweeted by Donald Trump, and the QAnon breeding ground that is the MMA. During The Jab, Julian looks at the newly emerged Covid mutation and investigates whether it nullifies the vaccines.For the main discussion, Julian and Derek sift through the piles of vaccine and health propaganda spread by Robert F Kennedy, Jr and Zach Bush on a recent Instagram Live. Derek interviews Jonathan Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement, about trying to build a bridge. Finally, Matthew reports from a family hospice experience on the generosity, discipline, and grace of frontline health care workers.Show NotesThe Coronavirus Is Mutating. What Does That Mean for Us?The Duesberg PhenomenonMikki Willis at the Red Pill ExpoMy Polio Story is an Inconvenient Truth to Those Who Refuse VaccinesHistory of PolioThe Denialist PlaybookPharmacies Partner With HHS to Provide COVID-19 Vaccines
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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But Matthew does chime in at the very end for this week's closer, which is a beautiful homage to the frontline healthcare workers.
So stay around after my interview with Jonathan Berman.
You will hear Matthew reflect on his current situation and on the situation of what healthcare workers are enduring right now.
Going on beyond that, you can find us at Facebook and Instagram at ConspiritualityPod on YouTube, as well as on our Patreon, which is patreon.com slash conspirituality, where we offer patrons bonus content every weekend, as well as a Monday bonus episode.
We did release this week's Monday's bonus episode to the wild, as Matthew calls it.
We just felt during the holiday season it was an appropriate move because I think it's a very important episode and I highly recommend listening.
Yeah, he also really brought it in terms of the content, right?
It's called Solstice Light in the Man Cave and it's a perfect one to get out there into the world right now.
And considering this episode is sort of a continuation of bro science, I think he really frames that term in a way that will help you understand what we're going for with that term as well as how we're investigating some of the statements by these bro scientists.
On that note, this is episode 31, bro science, anti-vaxxers.
As two coronavirus vaccines roll out, we're being flooded with more disinformation than ever.
Wellness gurus are cashing in on homemade natural remedies by spreading unjustified fears about these vaccines and vaccines in general.
This week, we look at Christiane Northrup's line in the sand, Mickey Willis revealing that he recently helped out the kids of Covington High and Kyle Rittenhouse, JP Sears getting retweeted by Donald Trump, and the QAnon breeding ground that is MMA.
During the jab, I'll be looking at the newly emerged COVID mutation and investigate whether it nullifies the vaccines.
For the main discussion, Derek and I will sift through the piles of vaccine and health propaganda spread prodigiously by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Zach Bush on a recent Instagram Live.
Derek interviews Jonathan Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers, how to challenge a misinformed movement about trying to build a bridge.
Finally, Matthew reports from a family hospice experience on the generosity, discipline, and grace of frontline healthcare workers.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
As is always the case with bold metaphysical prophecies, December 21 came and went, but the winter solstice does not appear to have ushered in a great awakening of the sort that our New Age red-pilled influencers have been predicting.
I do want to talk, though, Derek, about one sign of the apocalypse that did show up.
First While musical legends Eric Clapton and Van Morrison collaborated on an anti-lockdown track called Stand and Deliver that was released a few days ago.
It's over.
We've reached peak apocalypse.
It really does sound, you got to check out this song, I know you haven't heard it yet, it does sound like they watched a conspiritualist online conference to source the lyrics.
They say things like, do you want to be a free man or a slave?
Do you want to wear those chains till you're lying in the grave?
And this is not only like, you know, so Politically incorrect in the worst kind of way, but just banal.
They have a little verse here that says Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, the Constitution, what's it worth, right?
It's like they're listening to Sasha Stone and Christiane Northrup and co.
You know they're gonna grind us down until it really hurts.
Is this a sovereign nation or just a police state?
You better look out, people, before it gets too late.
As I mentioned before we started recording, my namesake comes from Derek and the Dominoes, so it's particularly troubling.
Not that I'm a huge Clapton fan recently, but still, Van Morrison I can do without.
Yeah, they're both musical heroes to me, especially as a guitar player.
Eric Clapton had a huge influence on me, and with regard to Derek and the Dominoes, we're a long way from Layla with this stuff.
The real kicker, the real kicker is the chorus that says, stand and deliver.
They put the fear on you.
Stand and deliver.
Not a word of it was true.
And you know, they're using this stand and deliver is a, some Americans are not as familiar with it, but it's a term that comes from sort of the old English, uh, uh,
archetype of the highway robberman who would who would stand out on the road who would jump out in front of the stagecoach and say stand and deliver and point his you know his his old-timey musket at you and then they reference at the very end of the song that a famous they say Dick Turpin wore a mask too and they're referencing a famous highway robber so wearing a mask is part of being on the side of the robbers who are stealing everything from the from the good people right now
In just that lyric, the opening lyric you talked about, it reminds me of how there's such a lack of nuance in all of these conversations right now.
I sent out my interview with Jonathan Berman, I had written it up for Big Think, and I sent it out To my newsletter, and I know anytime that I send anything to do with vaccinations on my newsletter, I'm going to get a number of replies, and I did.
But one, which I engaged in, which I usually don't, but sometimes I do, and I engaged in because it was so absurd, the follow-up email was letting me know that she has blocked me She was complaining that she couldn't see the giant unsubscribe button, and she doesn't know how she got on.
And I've never added anyone to my newsletter, like, personally.
Everyone signs up.
So, besides that, her last thing was, wear a mask now forever.
And I'm just like, why this complete lack of understanding about the situation we're in?
It's chronic.
Yeah, it feeds into this observation I've made before, which is just the reaction as if we are schoolchildren who've been sort of unfairly grounded.
And that's what it comes down to, as opposed to seeing that everyone is participating in an imperfect set of measures that suck to try and deal with a situation that we're just all in together.
It's just awful.
But let's get back to the failed prophecy.
So Trump lost.
The courts threw out his baseless claims of election fraud.
The science fiction, horror, fantasy, reptilian, pedophile vampires have not been brought to any kind of reckoning.
The pandemic has not been exposed as a hoax or a psyop, but the very real death count has continued to multiply.
Now we have a vaccine and it seems highly effective and safe so far.
So this is all stuff we're familiar with.
I made a couple long social posts about this and wondered out loud if any of the people we cover might be ready to walk some things back, to admit they were wrong, to have the spiritual integrity, the moral courage, the human decency to apologize to their hundreds of thousands of followers for having been duped and having led them into a very dark fever dream that did not turn out to have any basis in reality.
We're still waiting.
But my invitation is a sincere one.
The small-g, small-a Great Awakening back into doing the unglamorous work of rebuilding relationships, cleaning up your mess, making amends, and finding community in ordinary human vulnerability is still possible.
And if you're one of the red-pilled, not everyone will welcome you back with open arms, because some damage has been done, but many of your colleagues, friends, and family members, and some of the students, readers, and followers you lost are still here.
They will probably forgive you if you own up to it honestly.
In light of all of this and the solstice just having happened, I was very curious to see how our next up on the ticker, Dr. Christiane Northrup, would handle this week.
So Christiane Northrup has made frequent references to December 21st as the moment we come out of the chrysalis and that all of the prophecies, all of the Q influenced channeled information that she's constantly referencing, all of the spiritual and political fantasies, including the election results being overturned, would come true as we arrived on December 21st in the fifth dimensional transformation as light beings.
Still waiting.
Looking at her social media feeds, on the 19th, she posted a promo image for a live stream featuring her and someone called Oracle Girl on the 22nd, titled Planetary Purification, and here's that word again, Ending Slave Contracts.
I should say that listeners can look up Oracle Girl just to see whom Northrop is sharing her sizable megaphone with and talking about as a spiritual authority on this unseen reality.
But then, here on the 21st is Dr. Northrop on the big day, and she and all of her followers have been waiting for it, so let's hear how she approaches that moment.
Here we are, can you believe it?
December 21st.
When we're out of the cocoon, our wings are dry, we're gonna fly into the age of Aquarius.
That is freedom.
We're gonna take a stand.
If there are any doctors out there, darlings, take a stand.
If just a small percent of you had the courage to stand up and say what you know to be true, like a nurse friend of mine who gave a child a flu shot, Went home.
She felt terrible about it.
She said, this isn't informed consent.
She went home.
She threw up.
And she said, I can't do this anymore.
And she told them, I can't do this anymore.
I won't do this anymore.
And her supervisor said, well, then you can clean out your desk.
And she went back the next day for her review.
Why?
Because very often, when you put a line in the sand, providence moves in and you don't have to do.
But you have to be ready to do it.
So the 260,000 people, what were their line in the sand that have died so far in America?
Yeah, when you draw that line in the sand and you take a stand, Providence moves in to support you.
But here she is on December 21st, and honestly, I don't know what your impression is, Derek, but to me, she sounds exhausted.
She sounds defeated.
She sounds like she's going through the motions.
Here we are.
Can you believe it?
It's December 21st.
We're entering the age of Aquarius.
Like, I feel like even she has sort of lost some kind of enthusiasm for her narrative, right?
It also reminded me on, again, referencing Matthew's episode when he took the clip of Tommy Johns, a chiropractor in the San Diego area, and just talking about this constant bravado and egotism that exists with these declarations as if We've just hit this moment that all of societies have been waiting for, and this is the final battle.
That apocalyptic mindset has perpetuated throughout time because people have a limited time, but since we perpetuate ourselves through evolution, it kind of seems encoded in our DNA.
Which, of course, vaccines affect our DNA.
Well, that's what she put out on the day.
And when I, yeah, and that, at the very least, at least Tommy Johns has some, has some energy.
That was a very low energy clip that you chose, Julian.
Well, you know, that's what she put out on the day.
She goes on to speculate in that, um, in that IGTV video, uh, to her, what is it?
500,000, 400 and some thousand followers that genetically modified organisms that are supposedly in the vaccine will start to modify your DNA such that, and this is the new spin, such that you literally become the patented property of the evil scientists, right? such that you literally become the patented property of the This is the new thing.
If they can get enough of their genetically modified DNA into you, then they'll own you.
I don't understand what the endgame is for these influencers.
Obviously, with some of them, it's supplements.
We've gone over that.
Book sales, of course.
And just being out in the public.
But how far do you have to follow these conspiracy theories before you just realize the absurdity?
I mean, you might have nailed it right here with her saying she doesn't even seem invested.
invested in this anymore.
And this is one, I don't know, you pay attention to her more than I do for this podcast.
But is this something that you've been seeing over and over?
Does she seem to be losing that enthusiasm as this drags on?
Well, this will be purely speculative, but I feel like she's...
My sense is that she might be quite alone, quite isolated.
And more and more, the trend seems to be that these videos she makes for IGTV, she has a little bit of something she says in the beginning, but then she immediately starts referencing whatever her channel of the week is.
That she's listening to, so right now it's Oracle Girl, and she'll reference having listened for hours to one of these channels, and this is the amazing thing she learned from listening to the channel.
It'll be some, like, very, very out there, new-agey, you know, conspiritualist kind of idea.
And, yeah, it just seems like this is the new way of having something to talk about in these addresses to her public.
So next up in the ticker, we have J.P.
Sears.
Now, even if some influencers like Dr. Northrup seem to be having an anticlimactic holiday season, new father and perennial grifter J.P.
Sears seems to have had his climactic moment in the wintry sun.
The mac daddy trickster lightworker savior known to the world as Donald J. Trump retweeted a video of Sears' that looks almost about as panderingly teed up for the possibility of getting retweeted by Trump as one could imagine.
It features Sears direct to camera explaining in an unintended, excuse me, explaining in an intended parody of totalitarian state media that communist guideline number five, kind of random, instructs us to ignore any information published by enemies of the people before the censors have erased it or the fact checkers have had a chance to tell you not to believe it because, not to believe your own eyes, excuse me, because you're crazy.
You're right in the sense that that video is unlike anything he's ever done, the red floodlights behind him, the way it's shot, everything about it.
And I always try to find a balance, like either when I'm listening to you or Matthew speaking or my own thought patterns, of not getting sucked in by my own thoughts and trying not to perpetuate any sort of propaganda and understanding that
People have different intentions, but seeing that, just isolating that and seeing that and knowing it's not like anything else, when I watched it, I could not help but think that was made to try to get a Trump retweet, or at least get into the GOP in some capacity.
Absolutely.
Well, and even more to your point, what he does in the video then is he uses a fact-checked and debunked video that was promoted by Trump and his associates, including one Rudolph Giuliani, purporting to show suitcases filled with ballots being counted by Georgia poll workers after observers have mysteriously been asked to leave the room.
So, of course, this is security camera footage from inside the room that somehow they've isolated a little segment of it and they're like, Ah, there you see, that looks really suspicious.
So I guess, congratulations JP, both on winning the approval of your new father figure and on perpetuating dangerous lies that threaten the stability of our democracy and foment civil war.
I guess his following does keep growing.
It's actually, I mean, I'm looking on Parler right now, and when that was retweeted, his commentary was a cheeky little retweet of my socialist media video by President Trump with the prayer hands, and 260,000 people have viewed that Parler post already.
And then just scrolling down, though, or up, I noticed that his last two posts are called, A Communist Christmas?
Uh huh.
And then JP Sears hopes you have a very merry communist Christmas.
And like, what is this?
Like, do these people have any poli-sci background whatsoever?
Yeah, yeah.
We're going to talk about Mickey Willis a little bit later, and you have a great segment on him.
And it makes me think of him too, that these Superficial influencers who have sort of imagined themselves as being on the left, you know, in their sort of new age guise.
It seems like they have no basis for any kind of political context, and therefore they're ripe for these bizarre right-wing tropes that anything that's not, like, ultra right-wing is a step towards communism?
Like, where are the communists in this country?
You think the current Democratic mainstream are communists?
In another case of celebrity influencing politics, former UFC champion Tito Ortiz is now a councilman in Huntington Beach, despite having zero legislative experience on the show.
Obviously, that is not something that stops people from entering politics.
He's been out leading anti-lockdown, anti-mask rallies.
I was just watching before this a video of him at the council meeting being the only person refusing to wear a mask.
He's saying it's all a fraud and he believes a globalist conspiracy is underway to diminish American freedoms.
Ortiz owns a gym called Punishment Training Center and he believes in QAnon.
So, he isn't the only MMA fighter who's gone down the Q-Rabbit hole.
On Monday's bonus episode, again, Matthew discusses Tim Kennedy and his conversation with JP Sears, so it's a fitting segue from your last bit.
And veteran MMA journalist Luke Thomas offers this insight into why he believes the conspiracy theories seem to be taking hold of the MMA community.
It was the sport of outsiders who either rejected or were rejected by more mainstream interests and activities.
Conspiracy theory or thinking that was conspiracy adjacent has always been a part of the community.
It has hit overdrive with QAnon, but the groundwork in terms of a populace ready to believe these sorts of things has always been there.
And the author of the piece on that topic is in The Guardian, which is linked in the show notes.
He also speculates that UFC President Dana White's vocal support for Donald Trump and the fact that MMA fighters' social media handles are not regulated in the manner that other athletes in different sports could be playing a role in this.
So they're not looked over in any capacity like being in the NBA or Major League Baseball.
Now, interestingly though, MMA is quite mainstream these days, just like QAnon.
So I wonder how long these fringe communities can hold on to their outsider status as a foundational reason for their support of other fringe ideas.
It's like the guy with 50 million followers calling out mainstream media organizations that have 5 million followers and pretending like he's not actually the mainstream at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think MMA always has been this renegade territory, but it has gone quite mainstream.
I think, you know, given that Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world and, you know, he's a mainstay of the MMA landscape and has been since the beginning of the UFC, It's a very, you know, he's more influential than the quote unquote mainstream media sources that often get criticized by a lot of these folks.
And interestingly, and to be fair to him, he's evolved a lot over time.
But Joe Rogan in the beginning was a big time conspiracy theorist and a booster of Alex Jones.
And, you know, he has a complicated relationship with Jones.
But Joe Rogan's jujitsu coach and good friend Eddie Bravo, who's on the podcast all the time, is about as deep in the conspiracy rabbit hole as you can get.
One thing I want to point out with, you know, the three of us all have different backgrounds and different, you know, educations.
And Matthew made a comment about MMA that I just wanted to clarify something on.
Because MMA in its origins was Ideally going to be something that was about camaraderie and just understanding.
What the best martial art is.
Yeah.
It has, as anything happens when you get that much testosterone put injected in, you know, it has gone in weird directions, but it was really sort of like an Olympics in the beginning.
The intention of it to just be like, okay, we have all these fighting systems.
Let's, let's see, you know, they, we have the champions of each one of them.
Let's see when they fight each other what that looks like and can we start to, you know, engage and start to create new forms out of that.
So I do think in the origin myth of MMA, I don't think the intentions were bad, but I think it's gone off the rails in a few different ways.
For anyone who's not that familiar, it's also not just let's see what happens when they fight each other, it's let's see what happens when they have a contest with specific rules in a specific structure and try to ascertain who the best is.
It's super testosterone driven.
I think all martial arts do have an underlying kind of quote-unquote spiritual component or integrity, self-development, keeping the peace by having sort of control over your own abilities and knowing that you can protect yourself when needed.
But I think, as you said, when it's heavily flooded with testosterone, but also when it becomes something that is doing a ton of marketing.
Then you start to get into this sphere of spectacle and of what generates intense interest.
And what generates intense interest for people who are really into that is conflict and trash talk and violence.
What's amazing though is one thing that I learned from studying a few martial arts, whether it was Taekwondo or Capoeira or Jeet Kune Do, which are the three that I spent time with, Whenever you entered and left the space, you bowed.
Yeah.
So there was always a recognition that you're a student and that you are honoring the tradition and the teachers.
And I always wished in some capacity that could just be introduced to society at large.
Yeah.
And especially in the digital space, where even we had done this conversation, you and I, Julian, with Rick Archer and his group on Sunday, where there was some conflict with some of the members.
I know.
I personally treated it like a debate and I wasn't triggered by it.
It's healthy to debate.
But some of the other members were sort of triggered by it because they just wanted the space to be like everyone kind of get along.
And debate has a space.
Everywhere, but I think it's because the rules aren't introduced early that there can be conflict and yet everyone can still be respectful.
That doesn't exist broadly enough and I think the martial arts have always done a great job of instilling that in people.
Obviously, it doesn't always work as we see, but just as an underlying foundational philosophy, there's a lot to be learned there.
Yeah, as an immigrant to this country, I definitely found myself surprised by the lack of tolerance for adult disagreement, debate, making a case, you know, having the kind of back and forth that I grew up with in a society where I think we just maybe had no choice because there was so much conflict in the society.
But yeah, I think some of it, some of it too is an anti-intellectualism that is much more American than perhaps in other English, former English colonies where, yeah, there's just, there's a, there's a shying away from conflict and from sort of getting deeply into discussion.
And it would be great if the, if there were some cultural rules of engagement around, Hey, we're going to do this, but you know, we, we still risk, we still respect one another.
that we may not respect certain ideas. - Finally on the ticker this week, Mickey Willis.
He recently spoke at the Red Pill Expo and I want to thank Antonio Valadares for writing an article about this and pointing me to where I could find the video online.
I've linked to it in the show notes so you could watch the entire video for context if you'd like.
So there are two reasons I'm bringing this up this week.
First off, in January we're going to do an episode on the Hero's Journey and how red-pilled and right-wing figures are using the mythology of the Hero's Journey in their own self-styled narratives.
Which Willis does very effectively in this talk that he gives.
It's about 45 minutes long.
And he also discloses more of his political affiliations.
I know that's something that people are always thinking about his transformation from being more liberal-minded and some of his previous work up until what has happened with Plandemic and beyond.
He opens up his set with a bit of a joke, which I'll begin with here.
So my kids said, can I have my kids to stand up?
Azai and Zuri, where are you?
These beautiful little men right there.
Six and nine years old, and as I got out of the shower at our hotel, they came to me and they said, Daddy, we think you need to be funny today.
And I said, well, what do you mean?
I don't, I'm not a comedian.
And they said, you should tell a joke.
And I said, well, why do I need to tell a joke?
They said, because people like comedy, dad.
And they need it.
They need it right now.
And so I said, all right.
And I had to, on the way over here, I was thinking of a joke and I thought of a joke, a COVID-19 joke.
But then I realized the reality is that 99.9% of you just won't get it.
Okay, I got thumbs up.
Thumbs up seems to be what Willis is going for.
Matthew pointed out after we reported on the election evening party in Austin, and him reading his poetry at the end, that validation seems very important to Willis.
So to start in a very conservative, Trump-leaning, red-pilled expo, Joking about something that estimates have it over a half a million dead Americans in about three months from seems to be in great taste.
But the entire speech is about his journey from left-wing activism to being a Republican activist.
Of course, like with religions, there's a rupture in the Republican Party right now, so identifying what sort of conservative he's aspiring to at this moment is difficult.
But perhaps with some of the forthcoming samples of audio I'm going to play, you can discern that for yourself.
And I would like to say right now to all the Republicans in the room, I'm sorry.
I think we, a lot of us, owe a great deal of
Real reverence to the true heart of the Republicans who have been holding the ground and the Libertarians and the people that have been holding the ground for freedom and for family and for God and for love all this time while we've all been over here very distracted by other things.
So thank you for holding that. - Distracted?
Distracted by what?
Well, of course, he's going to divulge that information.
Again, the whole context is framed by his hero's journey from that left-wing activist, which he gets into a little bit more right here.
So I went on to become an activist.
A left-leaning, far-left, I would even say, activist.
And again, I was the hero of the left.
Okay, so there it is.
There's the hero myth.
He's coming up, he's gonna be a hero here, and now he's pivoting to be a hero somewhere else.
Now I've leaned left for a long time, and while I briefly worked as a creative director for a festival in 2011 that Mickey spoke at, I I had some relationship with him then.
I would hardly call him a hero of the left.
Now when he says far left, he's actually kind of right in the sense that his film company Elevate, his former company, made a splash because of some supposed work they did with The Secret.
And I do put that in air quotes for some reasons because I've had conversations with someone who worked directly on The Secret and they don't remember Mickey from that time.
I'm going to go with it, and of course the secret being about as far into the wellness rabbit hole as you can find.
But so, to a certain small yoga and wellness community in Los Angeles and Ojai, where I used to live, I guess you could present yourself as a hero of the left.
But honestly, it's a bit of a stretch considering that most liberals and most people didn't know of his name before Plandemic.
But you see, that narrative fits into his hero's mythos, so he has to make it seem like he was a towering figure to make his transition into being a right-wing activist more plausible.
From there, he goes on a long monologue about 9-11 and the idea that his brother, who tragically died of AIDS, was killed by Anthony Fauci.
And those are his words, you can again watch the video.
He also claims his mother, who tragically died of cancer around the same time as his brother, was killed by bad medicine.
And I'm not going to debate the validity of any of this, but I'll just note that he repeats this constantly as his motivation behind making Plandemic.
So it's become a piece of his narrative arc.
And from there, he goes on to discuss his time on the campaign trail with Bernie Sanders, which led to his waking up.
But I was really supporting Bernie because I was anti-Hillary.
That's the truth.
I knew enough to know that as much as I would love to see a woman in the White House, she's not the one.
So again, think of the crowd you're speaking in front of four years later.
Hillary jokes are still working with them, but here's where it gets even more interesting and, I would say, revealing.
Listening to him really carefully and I thought, has he ever said anything good about America?
He hasn't, has he?
That's a problem.
Hmm.
How's he gonna lead this country if he hates it?
That's interesting.
Oh, really?
Bernie hates America?
And at a time when we have three people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, while 500,000 people are sleeping out on the streets today, we think it is time for change, real change.
And by that I mean that healthcare, in my view, is a human right.
I believe that education is the future for this country.
And that is why I believe that we must make public colleges and universities tuition free and eliminate student debt.
Wow.
Universal health care and eliminating student debt.
That's some serious hatred for Americans there, especially given our problems with capitalism because it's working so well.
Now, post-Bernie, he has another revelation while he says he works with some indigenous communities.
So he goes through a list of the Native Americans he has worked with, but then something odd happened on the way to the Dakota Pipeline.
I'm sure you remember this infamous pipeline, which was planned to run through or near a number of Native American reservations.
And the protests were about those tribes, but it was really about the continued exploitation of indigenous communities.
Listen to how Mickey spins it to make it feel like it's an attack on white people.
I learned that 18 million people downstream drink the same water and they all cared about this pipeline.
And this narrative that had been created to demonize the white people was media's doing.
And that I was once again unwittingly serving that agenda.
Okay, so you have the hero being exploited by insidious forces, check, and you have the hero waking up to go to battle those forces, which is his next pivot here.
Where he goes next is Covington High School, and Let's be clear, there was a problem with the knee-jerk reaction by liberals on this incident.
But let's also recall the context which Mickey does not disclose.
And that is a group of white high school kids wearing MAGA hats that were leaving an anti-abortion rally in DC when they walked by a group of black nationalists.
And so a Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, who was there for another rally that day, he intervened to pray as he saw the tensions rising between the groups.
So, what Mickey's doing is saying, let's forget this group of privileged white boys bust in from a private Catholic school in Kentucky to raise their voices in saying women should not have the right to do what they want with their bodies.
And instead, let's focus on the oppression of white people in the context of, yet again, Native Americans.
This is who Mickey has aligned himself with.
And I made the video that won the lawsuit against CNN and Washington Post.
Thank you.
And I was no longer a darling of the left.
OK, so first off, two points of clarification.
There wasn't one lawsuit against Washington Post and CNN.
There were two lawsuits and they weren't won.
They were settled.
And I know in the arc of the picture, you can say that Sandman won because he probably got some money that wasn't disclosed.
So that's fine.
But it doesn't fit so neatly into the narrative arc of the hero.
If he says, I made the video in two lawsuits that helped a kid There's a video online right now of Kyle Rittenhouse.
he uses often and it's a necessary technique for him.
Finally, he reveals some information for the first time ever at the Red Pill Expo.
There's a video online right now of Kyle Rittenhouse.
We made that.
Now this is the first group that I've admitted that to and I'm sure I'm getting a lot of flack for the people that are online watching the live stream that will see this later because I usually keep this stuff privately but there's no time to be silent anymore.
And if there's anything else that's going to happen, And if there's an innocent citizen in this country, and I don't care what gender, what color, none of that motivates.
It's about truth, and truth only.
And I will not see a 17-year-old kid who may have made his own mistakes, perhaps by unlawfully carrying a gun into a situation for his own protection, but I have now seen every video of that young man.
And he's a very stand-up citizen who went there to help.
He went there to help the protestors.
And he was targeted, just like the Covington kids.
Wow, there is so much to unpack there.
First off, Rittenhouse did not go to help the protestors.
He had supported Blue Lives Matter on social media before.
He was there against the Black Lives Matter protestors.
And he may perhaps have committed a crime when he crossed state lines as a 17-year-old boy with an assault rifle?
And when he says he doesn't care what color or race or gender, it seems like he's very selective in the people he's helping out these days.
Rittenhouse killed Anthony Huber that evening, and he injured another man.
And you know what?
Rittenhouse was being chased by protesters before he tripped and fell, and then a man kicked him.
Kyle fired twice at him, and he missed both times.
And by this point, we can only imagine the disorientation and adrenaline that led him to kill one person and injure another.
He's probably really out of his mind at that point.
But what Mickey leaves out is that a teenager drove to another state with an assault weapon because he ordained himself a citizen police officer.
He was aspiring to be that.
And Mickey constantly blames the mainstream media for not telling the whole story.
But as his entire speech at the Red Pill Expo shows, he's extremely selective in his own narratives as well.
And it just so happens that his narratives that he chooses to tell makes him the hero of every story.
Okay, so my first observation is that Willis is great at working the crowd, but his political stance is it's empty of content.
What I mean by that is he gets to the standard confusion about patriotism being equated with not criticizing policies that are hurting most Americans, but then he also makes the banal all-lives-matter style observation about white people also caring about their drinking water, not just the natives.
To me, this is more of the same superficial environmental posturing he did in the past.
It's the same type of superficial spiritual posturing he was involved with when he was moving in agape circles.
I did know him then, but I didn't know him well enough.
But everything about the talk, and I watched the entire thing against my better judgment, and it's just, again, we try not to necessarily play armchair psychologists here.
You watch these things and part of our role is observation.
First off, he contradicts himself constantly, but that's sort of par for the course.
But I really can't help but feel like, and that's why I think we've kind of locked in on him and J.P.
Sears, that as their star has grown, they're just looking for entry points.
Like even that opening COVID joke.
Oh my God.
Like, it was pandering to the crowd, and he knew he would get a laugh, and then he even was proud of himself that he got a laugh.
It's kind of like the poem that Matthew referenced, you know, from the Austin election night party, where it's just like, it's just kind of like precious, am I accepted?
Oh, I am.
Okay, I can go on sort of vibe.
It's even worse here, right?
Because he's having his kids stand up in the audience and he's saying it was his kids idea to tell the joke, and maybe it was, and his kids then are laughing at this god-awful joke.
Right, and they're just looking up at Daddy on stage and being like, people love him, okay!
But to me, there was a lot in there and I tried to cover it in pieces, but the Covington and then the Kyle Rittenhouse reveal, and then also the Kyle Rittenhouse reveal
Followed by, I know I'm going to get skewered by this, but there's this sense that he, you know, I was talking to a friend behind on text who's also friends and still friends with Mickey and it's how I know Mickey and he's having a hard time because he cares about this guy and they still are in contact, but he's also seeing what's happening.
Yeah.
He asked me, what do you think the endgame is?
And I think there are a few things, but I said, I really believe just like one of the things is owning the libs.
It's this sort of just, okay, I was this guy and now I'm reformed and now I'm gonna just Poke at these people that I once was, and I don't really understand how you square that personally, but that does seem to be something that comes up over and over in his discussions that I've noticed at least since the fall.
Well, with any of these people, and I think it's perhaps even more so the case with, with Willis, you look at it and go, the types of pivots that you're doing over the course of your hero's journey all really seem to be driven by how do I stay in the spotlight more than anything else?
You know, my sense, I don't know him well either, but my sense is that he was quite involved with Agape.
He actually did direct a film in 2009 called Spiritual Liberation that was sort of a idealizing propaganda piece about Michael Beckwith, who is a big figure in Santa Monica in terms of the New Age community.
I cannot stand the guy.
He was very heavily involved with The Secret.
And I know you mentioned in what you were just saying that Willis sort of claims to have been part of the secret but may not have been?
Yeah, so when Plandemic came out, I had written an article for Big Think that got a lot of traction because it was kind of one of the first takedowns of it just because I think being around that circle, you get information quicker than bigger news sources.
So I published it the day after Plandemic came out.
And a person who worked on the film closely from beginning to end told me, she was like, I saw your thing and I have no idea who Mickey Willis is.
And I remember at the time that I met him in 2011.
His big thing was I helped to make the secret.
Okay.
And you know what?
I don't know.
And again, I can't, this is, I'm just telling you what I've experienced, but what I found out from talking to people since the time of pandemic is he does seem to have an overinflated sense of what he's accomplished.
I even mentioned that when he's like, I was a hero of the left.
Yeah.
Kind of like people outside of the west side of Los Angeles didn't know you.
Totally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I wanted to comment on that too.
I mean, he says that he was a darling of the left, but I don't think so.
I think, again, this is part of this lack of any kind of poli-sci background, as you named it, right?
Privileged LA New Age circles are not far left.
You know, these are establishment Democrats who happen to have delusional spiritual beliefs, but you know, going deeper and deeper into delusional spiritual beliefs does not, it does not indicate going further and further left.
In fact, those spiritual beliefs are usually, as we've covered many times on this podcast, super libertarian, super privileged, very much about like, how do I figure out how to use my spiritual power of intention to manifest a red sports car, to manifest a model with who's had a lot of Botox, right?
Like it's, it's, It's very superficial, materialist spirituality, and that's about as far from being actual left-wing as you can be.
I definitely felt that the yoga community was much more liberal in New York City where I trained and grew up.
Oh, I grew up in New Jersey, but my yoga practice began in New York.
And not that there's any perfect place, but I do remember moving to Los Angeles and knowing this as the epicenter of yoga in America and yoga in the world in some capacity.
I mean, in terms of the marketing of it and how it got out in the 1980s and beyond.
You know, you grew up with this idea of like, well, that that's the place where you'll really get into a practice and come in here and just being really just kind of surprised.
And there are fantastic teachers here and there are wonderful studios.
But the whole mystique of it was definitely I had my eyes open to what it really was.
And you nailed it when you the manifestation of what can I get is very much an underlying theme here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the lack of the lack of political depth, I think, is exemplified by, you know, I was I was following Bernie just because I didn't like Hillary.
And of course, that gets big applause lines, as you noticed.
But then I realized Bernie hates America.
Has he ever said anything good about America?
So if, and as you pointed out with the clip that you then shared, right, if he's actively talking about policies that are harming Americans and wanting to change that and talking about problems with American government, that somehow equates to hating America.
That's about as low on the sort of totem pole of conservative talking points as you get.
The same with Kyle Rittenhouse, you know, kind of turning him into some kind of heroic, innocent figure.
And the same with the Dakota Pipeline stuff, that somehow there's a, and he does it in this breathless way.
He's really good at working the crowd.
He does this whole, I realize I was serving the same narrative that made white people bad.
Oh my God.
Like this is his, this is his sort of, you know, profound, deep realization that because there are white people downstream who also care about their drinking water, The legacy of these Native people just continuously being given the wrong end of the stick is somehow just a narrative of the far left.
It's bullshit.
This is a very clip-heavy episode, I know that, but I think there's context for it and we're trying to bring that out.
But I couldn't clip everything, but two things I want to point out is that he also goes on to say that Bernie supporters all hate America.
And then, before that, talking about the Dakota Pipeline, he set up the Dakota Pipeline story by talking about all the work he was doing in the indigenous communities.
Yeah.
There's always this, like, you know, there's this thing, like, he talks about that viral video of his son and the doll that, you know, was probably his biggest moment up until now.
And, you know, he goes on to pivot and saying, like, but the left thought that that meant I was a transgender advocate, and I'm not!
I never said that!
And he always has to qualify everything, and that's what I've noticed.
Like, I'm not this, I'm not this, but, and then he goes on to basically disqualify himself for what he just said, and the indigenous community one was the big one in this talk.
Well, it's interesting, too.
I had forgotten about that particular moment and him playing that video.
But, you know, he's whichever stage he's on, he's using his kids as props for whatever half-baked, you know, pandering he's doing.
And there's something really sad to me about that.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
With our whole episode this week being very vaccine focused, I wanted to just mention one big news item, which most of you are probably aware of.
It's that the COVID mutation now seems to be accounting for a high percentage of new cases in the UK as well as in South Africa.
Now as with sensationalist reporting about allergic reactions or side effects, it's easy to form a pretty gloomy impression of what each new development means.
Don't get me wrong, this is important news and it's something that scientists are paying close attention to, but it's also to be expected.
This is just what viruses do.
They adapt and evolve via mutation.
Thousands of smaller mutations had already been tracked so far during the pandemic.
Some experts speculate that this particular strain may be more easily transmissible.
But others say not so fast.
The wave we're seeing right now may not reflect greater transmissibility, but rather the behavior of populations either coming out of lockdown before we went back in or just ignoring quarantine measures altogether a couple months ago.
So that part is still wait and see.
Obviously, if it's much more easily transmitted, that's not a good development.
But the really important thing I want to get to is that for the layperson, like myself, the immediate concern is, oh no, does this mean that the vaccines are now going to be ineffective or already obsolete?
And that's not the case.
A virus would need a period of years, not mere months, to mutate enough to be able to sidestep a current vaccine.
Quoted on December 20th in the New York Times, evolutionary biologist and medical researcher Dr. Jesse Bloom said, No one should worry that there's going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity, all antibodies useless. No one should worry that there's going to be a
Well, as I mentioned a little while ago, you know, I sat through the Mickey Willis talk and obviously we, you know, we do try to watch entire videos and clips here for context so that we're not missing anything.
And just to say, Julian took it upon himself to watch the Instagram Live between Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Zach Bush, which I would have let him do, but considering we were going to have this discussion, he then made me do, and I will never forgive him for that.
But I actually want to start off, and again, this is something we've dealt with since the inception of this podcast, which is this idea that everything is either or.
You know, we've been criticized for thinking that there's no such thing as a conspiracy theory, which is absurd.
We've already talked about that numerous times.
And I actually want to start this before we get into this talk, and we're going to play a few clips and discuss about things that I agreed from that conversation.
And the biggest one is that the environment plays a much greater role in our health than we give it credit for.
I've argued this for a long time.
Medicine should incorporate more knowledge about the environment.
Two studies that I think of...
Or the fact that there was one done in a hospital and half of the rooms faced the forest and half faced a brick wall, and they found that on average, people who were recovering from similar surgeries left the hospital a day earlier when their window faced the forest instead of a wall.
Another one from the 1970s, which is fascinating, is that researchers looked at a building And they found out that the children on the second floor did much worse in school because of all the street noise, whereas the children on the higher floors didn't have all that noise and so they could concentrate better.
the children on the second floor did much worse in school because of all the street noise, whereas the children on the higher floors didn't have all that noise and so they could concentrate better.
So a study just came out last week that there is now more man-made stuff on earth by weight than what nature produces.
Yeah.
So, these are all serious problems.
And I also agree, and Robert F. Kennedy goes on to this a lot, as does Bush, that we don't pay enough attention to chemistry.
For example, with the pandemic, I stopped using soap.
I haven't bathed with soap except for my hands and then as it's put the pits and bits sometimes.
But that's from James Hamblin's book, Clean.
Humans survived for a long time without it.
It was mostly a marketing tool because you're actually buying scent, texture, and packaging.
I remember I used to work with a variety of companies and David Bronner once was talking to me about how most companies that make soap, they don't even actually make soap.
It's just all these chemicals that smell good and make you feel like you're doing something.
And soap kills bacteria that we need, and so our skin has a microbiome.
And when we're constantly scrubbing that microbiome on our skin, we're negatively impacting our immune systems.
I also, talking about environmental mismatches, I stopped using deodorant in the pandemic because I've lived in cities for my entire adult life, and why am I trying to smell like a pine forest?
So, those two things, the environmental role and the chemicals, I'm fully on board with them.
One final point that I thought was really important from this talk, Zack Bush says that governmental legislation is needed.
And I don't think he spends enough time talking about that, but I'm glad he mentioned it.
I personally don't know how we expect to live in a nation of over 300 million people and function without bureaucracy.
Yeah.
So I know we're sometimes criticized for being shills for an agency organization.
But I don't care.
First of all, none of that's true.
Our only immune support is Patreon and we appreciate that and it's just for our time we put in.
But I'm personally glad that public servants are out there doing the work that I don't have the time or patience to do.
I'm going through something with DMV right now that's blowing my mind and I'm losing my patience.
But you know what?
We need these structures.
So this idea that all government is absurd, and I'm glad Zach actually recognizes that when he says these things.
Well, let me say two things just in response to that before you roll the clip.
One is that, yeah, I'm glad that Zach mentions that too, and we need the structure of governmental oversight in responsible ways by qualified people who know what the hell they're doing.
Very, very, very much so.
There is a moment that we don't have clips on in the talk, in the discussion, where Zach talks about going to, I think he's going to Congress, He's going to some kind of legislative body and he and a group of his friends all bring their studies to try and show, I believe it's the problems with glyphosate in terms of people's health and well-being, and the legislators inform him that he has not submitted the documents
in the correct format, that there's a particular way they need to present it in order to be then taken into legal consideration.
And his response to that is not, oh, I screwed up.
I didn't have my shit together.
I didn't know that if I was going to interact with a government legislative body in this kind of way, I had to submit documents in the correct format and have the correct protocol.
He says, that's another example of government disempowering us.
So So that just had me shaking my head.
But the other thing I wanted to say is that, yeah, people come at us with this stuff all the time.
And I think it's really important just to put a pin in this observation that what makes a conspiracy theory is not that it's all false.
It's that it is taking a bunch of observations that are true And then distorting them, misinterpreting them, linking them to one another in ways that actually don't add up.
And that's always the problem is people will come at you and say, well, what about this?
It's like, well, yeah, that's true.
Of course, that is real.
There is evidence for that.
But that doesn't mean this other thing that they've jumped to.
And that's what we see throughout this conversation.
Yeah, and that's a really good point.
I have something more to add about Bush and his government thing, but I'll wait for a clip for that because it'll make more sense then.
But let's start off listening to them talk about, well, let's just say they're talking about AIDS.
You know, you mentioned sarcoma, and I'm reading one of Peter Duesberg's books right now.
And Peter Duesberg, as you know, had a fight with Tony Fauci at the beginning of the kind era.
And Peter Duesberg was one of the most brilliant virologists and scientists of our generation.
And his belief was that the HIV epidemic or the AIDS epidemic was not being caused by HIV.
The AIDS epidemic was not being caused by HIV, it was being caused by toxics, particularly toxics that gay men were exposing themselves to in this kind of party lifestyle.
And particularly amyl nitrate or poppers were probably the most clear culprit in the epidemic of Kaposi's sarcoma, which was the first signal of the AIDS
Issue and I don't know whether you have a you know, he believes that HIV does not cause AIDS that it's all caused by toxics And I don't know if you adopt that kind of orthodoxy, but I know I'd love to hear your opinions on that but also I know that's consistent with a lot of things that you talk about that the real problem is Offensive insults in the environment that are empowering
virus is to, you know, to do damage to us that normally would be benign.
If we had a healthy ecosystem inside and outside, polio wouldn't exist, and HIV wouldn't exist, and TB and all of these other that have these kind of environmental connections.
Yeah.
I mean, I should have mentioned it beforehand, but just for any listeners who have not heard RFK Jr's talk before, he does have a condition called spasmodic dysphonia.
That's not, that's still sort of a mysterious diagnosis.
It's probably a sort of a neurological thing that interferes with speech, but that's the clip was decent quality.
His voice just sounds like that.
He jumps right in really early on, and I want to break this down in this exchange by just Flat out repeating some AIDS denialism tropes that were popularized, and he references the guy, by scientific pariah Peter Duisburg in his 1996 book called Inventing the AIDS Virus.
Duisburg's claim that HIV does not cause AIDS, but that recreational drugs like paupers common in the gay community at the time of the AIDS epidemic were to blame, has been debunked.
By evidence showing that only infection with the virus, not being gay, which you know this whole section sounded a little bit off, right?
Not using poppers.
These things are not strongly correlated with developing AIDS.
The thing that is strongly correlated is being infected with the HIV virus.
Right, and yeah, there's some very dangerous terrain they're running on, and some of the things they say, well, let's just keep rolling.
Well, let me say a couple more things here.
Duisburg, it's important to know about this guy, especially given that RFK is referencing Super outdated and debunked book.
He also asserted that the epidemic in Africa had more to do with malnutrition and tainted drinking water and other infections than with HIV and this is important in terms of some of the other stuff we're going to get into.
It's all been examined very carefully since and found wanting.
His claims about HIV were debated back and forth in the pages of both of the eminent journals, preeminent journals, science and nature, since before the book was published, which was in 96, will include a link in the show notes here to a three-month-long investigation of his hypothesis.
So it's been taken seriously.
That gradually led to him no longer being published in those esteemed journals.
There was a 2009 book on the human cost of AIDS conspiracy theories, which identified Duisburg as the individual who has done the most damage in terms of perpetuating AIDS denialism.
Because of the weight of his medical credentials and his legitimate acclaim as a cancer researcher.
But you know, RFK just read this outdated and thoroughly discredited book, so why not bring it up to the 135,000 people watching this live stream and later replays.
Let's go into a little bit of Zach now talking about germ theory before we get back into AIDS.
So the science of the last 20 years has exploded the previous paradigm.
And the previous paradigm was one of adaptive immune system belief, is that humans are in conflict with the microbiome and the biorealm all the time, and we're always vulnerable to attack from viruses.
And so this dates back to the 1800s with the arguments between Besham and Pasteur in France who were arguing over germ theory versus strain theory.
And what Beauchamp was recognizing is he was watching twins of identical genetics be exposed to different environments and end up with completely different diseases.
And so his argument was it's not so much that it's like the genetic predisposition of the individual or some attacking marauder.
What is the condition and train within that specific human being when you put them in a greater macro environment?
So he was recognizing changes in vulnerability based on our macro environment and resilience against disease if we were in a healthy environment.
So he was the first to really put together long before we had the words genetics, microbiome, bacteria even.
He had already put together that the human body was reflecting this greater ecosystem around us.
And vulnerabilities here within the body were actually just symptomatic of our disconnect from a greater ecosystem around us.
So brilliant, brilliant science.
And that academic argument was supported by hundreds of academicians on both sides of the discussion for over 30 years.
And then with the advent of chemical industry towards late 1800s and the opportunity to start killing things and the observations of being able to kill germs and things like this, Pasteur went out.
And so we kind of fell down into this dogma rather than a debate between these two things.
Now you speed up 120 years later and you find out, shoot, we should have kept that debate going because in fact, both sides have some truth, right?
There are viruses and bacteria that can function as pathogens when the environment and ecosystem is perturbed.
But the new science of the last 20 years has really completely ended what we should think of as the old germ theory world.
You shared a link in the show notes by Sean Carroll and what I loved about, in Scientific American, what I loved about that article was how he It's actually something I've done for a long time, and seeing that and the way he laid it out, I was so happy to see that.
And what creation theorists did was they created a debate that there were both sides.
Is it evolutionary biology or is it creationism?
And the funny thing is, that is what Zach is doing right here.
Because he's saying, you know, Beauchamp, you know, there's still this argument.
And no, there's not.
There's not.
Pasteur ran out because his science was sound.
And terrain theory, again, this is why I opened with the segment that I did because we do need to pay more attention to environmental influence on our health.
I absolutely agree with that.
Of course.
But to say that germ theory is false, it's so patently absurd that I hear it and I don't, the more I research it and Beauchamp and what they believe, the more I'm just blown away that people are taking this seriously right now.
Yeah, the debate somehow still needs to be continued.
I mean, really, it's the same structure as what the quantum charlatans do, right?
We're going to talk about some idealized time in the past where we had access to special wisdom and being in touch with nature or being in touch with the mystical truth of the universe.
Then we're going to talk about science as sort of taking us away from that through some set of mistakes.
Even though those set of quote-unquote mistakes have led to, you know, all of the great advances of medical science including vaccines and antiseptics and hand-washing and antibiotics, right, all the things that have extended human lifespan and reduced the effects of horrible, horrible diseases, there was a wrong move back there and now There's a new paradigm, and the new paradigm is showing that what we thought back in the day was actually true.
And you know, this debate from, what is it, the 1860s between Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, it's long been settled.
Antoine Béchamp, who by the way also rejected cell theory.
He not only rejected germ theory, which is the basis of all modern medicine, he rejected cell theory, which is the basis of all fucking biology.
Like, but the debate needs, it's exactly like creationists.
Oh no, these things still, both sides have good points.
Well, here's what I wanted to get to before in the intro when we were talking about government legislation.
First off, it should be noticed that terrain theory advocates back in the day were responsible for creating the sanitary movement, which completely revolutionized America's public health infrastructure.
So, again, there isn't value in understanding that our environment matters.
I've always said this.
We've all always said this.
When these conspiracy theories and these critics are coming up, look at what they're selling.
And so, if you go to the mclinic.com, which is Zach Bush's website for his clinic, I look at the list of services and I see the first two, Integrative Nutrition and Ayurveda.
Okay, Matthew, and probably you could speak much more eloquently about Ayurveda than myself, These are sound practices in some capacities, integrated nutrition, very important.
The next down, GDV imaging.
That is an electrophotonic imaging system that provides non-invasive and immediate evaluation of the human energy field using a weak electrical current applied at the fingertips.
He sells hydration respiration.
And then we get back to more common territory, infrared sauna.
Okay, I love infrared saunas.
It feels good at the very least.
Integrative medicine, mobility, then we get to phase angle measurement, which you've brought up before.
Then you get to postural alignment, which sounds kind of like chiropractic in the sense that all disease comes from a misalignment in the body.
Subluxation.
Yeah.
Body talk, solid state.
Which is again this energy patterns and sound wave therapy and sound therapy is actually I think is important, but the way it's presented here.
I'm just like so all that's to say two things so Zach.
Calls for more governmental legislation.
What if the government said it and said, let's do some studies on GDV imaging and postural alignment?
Would he be so open to, or would that be interference at that point?
Would that be they just don't understand?
Because that's what he hints at constantly.
And actually in the first segment with Robert Kennedy talking, he's like a brilliant scientist, somebody who he agrees with and wants to put forward that idea.
So anytime it's like there's this, it's this constant thing.
There's this system that's against us and everyone in it is corrupt, except for the people who, who we agree with.
And you know what?
Then we're going to talk about their credentials all day because they did this and that.
Exactly, yeah.
He's a triple certified board, you know, whatever.
All of his qualifications, all of his experience.
The scientific model, of course, is completely lacking in humanity and spiritual wisdom and connection with nature.
But then here's this machine that I'm going to plug into your fingertips to measure the electrical current to tell you which supplements you need to buy from me.
Yeah.
Well, let's keep rolling.
Let's get back to AIDS.
And so as you start to point towards something like HIV, that's very much in the old germ theory model where we thought, oh, here's a virus that causes AIDS.
And if you read in the vast majority of peer-reviewed science journals that are about to speak to anything about HIV, The first sentence or two will be, HIV is the virus that causes the syndrome AIDS.
And unfortunately, that sentence never has a reference.
Not true.
You can never find a scientific reference for that.
Not true.
Because there's never been a scientific study to prove that giving something HIV caused AIDS.
We've given it to monkeys, we've given it to mice, we've given it to humans, and it doesn't cause anything in and of itself.
You actually have to put it into an organism and then destroy that organism's immune system before you start to see HIV, you know, partnered with anything else.
But all of the symptoms of AIDS are not caused by HIV, which is interesting.
You mentioned Kaposi's sarcoma, or the leukemias that are common in AIDS, or the skin disorders that happen with AIDS, or the pneumonias.
A lot of these are caused primarily by herpes viruses.
Not HIV at all.
And so when we say HIV causes AIDS, all we can really say is there's a correlation of events that when somebody presents with this broad immune deficiency that now has an abnormal relationship to all the herpes viruses, the hepatitis viruses are commonly also, and then this HIV, they all are this new, they're symptomatic of this new imbalance rather than a pathogenic attack.
He really relies on the probably correct assumption that most people listening to him have no idea what he's talking about.
So if he can string together these very jargon-laden and also sometimes poetic set of assertions and just keep building and building and building, it's intriguing.
Right, at the very least.
It's interesting, it's intriguing, he sounds like an expert.
He's mostly just repeating classic AIDS denialism of the sort that we talked about before, Peter Duesberg type stuff, all of it's been debunked.
But he blends that then with wholly uncontroversial accounts of how HIV damages immunity such that patients become vulnerable to a variety of other Pathogens, you don't die from AIDS, you die from all of the complications that arise as a result of your immune system being damaged by HIV.
We know that HIV attacks very specific aspects of your ability to create certain types of cells that give you immunity.
The scientific consensus in fact since 1988 has been that HIV causes AIDS.
Every page that you find on the internet that is reputable will have a citation for that.
The predictive factor for developing AIDS is always having been infected with HIV.
People without HIV do not develop AIDS.
Now are there some complicated things in there?
Sure.
Does the environment matter?
Sure.
But look at Magic Johnson for God's sake.
This is an elite world-class athlete who developed the syndrome.
And he had enough money to get the kind of treatment that kept him healthy for a long time.
And what amazes me about this when you tease it all apart, this is a very similar argument to that study that came out that said 94% of people aren't dying from COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, right?
They're dying from other things.
And what's so fascinating, particularly about Zach Bush, is he spends so much time talking about the microbes in the soil, and the ocean, and the air, and how we need to get back to nature, and the interconnectedness of everything.
And then you get to the virus and he's like, yeah, they're dying of other things as if the human body is in an interconnected series.
Exactly.
So it's absolute.
I mean, even the talk about glyphosate and all of the other chemicals they talk about being introduced in the environment that has downstream effects, that's all about interconnectedness.
So it gets back again and again to the same thing.
It's interconnectedness when it fits the narrative of what I want to sell you, but then when we're talking about the interconnectedness of biology and how biological systems work with viruses, then I'm going to take a completely different narrative approach to it.
And that's what he's doing in all of this trance talk, as Matthew would reference as he does on Monday's talk about the hypnotism that someone like Bush puts forward to make you think he knows what he's talking about.
Absolutely.
Well, let's move on to polio next.
Why not?
Because that was in this talk.
Well, you know, as you know, a lot of people look at polio as people who are kind of promoting vaccination and there's this mythology that the polio vaccine eliminated polio.
And there's other people who argue that polio has been around for thousands of years and that it was causing, maybe a mild cold.
Many people who had polio didn't know it, but something happened in the 1880s and 1890s that allowed polio virus to get into the spinal column and begin paralyzing a small percentage of people who were exposed to it.
One of the hypotheses is that that was the generalized use of pesticides, particularly early on of the arsenic and mercury-based pesticides.
Then later on to DDT and that polio, wild polio, generally disappeared on the same timeline as DDT was eliminated.
For example, in our country, DDT was banned in 1973.
And the last polio case occurred in 79.
And as you again know, polio usually affected people during the summer months, during the spring season.
The people who were most commonly affected were people who bathed in farm ponds.
And that, in fact, is where FDR apparently came down with it.
That's kind of consistent with what you're saying.
Okay, so some history here, and I'll have a little bit to say.
There is evidence that polio dates back to ancient Egypt at least, but it's not until 1931 that the three viruses which cause polio are identified.
In 1948, Weller and Robbins successfully grow polio cells in the lab and are given a Nobel Prize for that.
After a few years and seven years later, Jonas Salk develops a vaccine that gets us underway to being polio free in the United States by 1979.
So yes, on germ theory, yes, on cell theory and yes, on vaccines.
But Bush and Kennedy aren't going to let any of these facts interfere with their larger narrative.
Right.
Namely, that viruses are harmless and only become a problem when people are gay or using drugs or spraying pesticides or using flame retardants or somehow being compromised by vaccines.
The very thing that has helped us to deal with these terrible diseases.
These guys have some highly qualified.
Questionable sources, but here's what I'm able to glean and to be somewhat fair to them, okay?
Polio does seem to have existed at low levels of incidence for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
When the larger epidemic started around 1910 in the developed world, they were usually in cities.
And it was usually in the warmer months.
It's not precisely known why, because we don't fucking know everything about the world all the time.
That's not how science progresses.
But there is one speculative hypothesis that it was actually improved sanitation in cities that would have led to less exposure to the virus earlier in life and therefore less acquired immunity that led to it being more widespread in cities.
And that in the summer heat, the virus was naturally more transmissible because, disgusting as it is, it's an oral fecal disease.
So it's transmitted by somehow ingesting fecal matter in small amounts.
Flies were believed to be a vector of transmission.
And so yes, to get rid of the flies, DDT was sprayed to eradicate them.
But the disease was already a problem at that point.
And importantly, polio was rampant in the cities.
Not in the countryside where DDT was being widely used and other pesticides would have been widely used agriculturally.
And DDT actually did lead to other problems.
It's a notoriously toxic chemical.
Well, I have more comments after this next clip because they talk about polio.
But I will just mention that if you want to wrap your head about what polio did, I highly recommend Philip Roth's book, Nemesis, which talks about the polio outbreak and what people were experiencing in Newark.
In the 30s and 40s, I grew up about a half hour south of Newark.
There aren't any farm ponds in Newark.
That's one thing I can be maybe way back in the day, but not at that time.
Interesting idea.
Let me say one other thing about DDT.
The hypothesis that DDT caused polio to become more rampant carries very little scientific Wait.
And part of why I feel confident saying that is it's such a controversial and now banned substance, it's been found to have so many environmental and carcinogenic dangers, it's been super well studied.
And there's no strong case being made for it in relationship with polio, nor to the ending of it being in circulation, fitting with, you know, polio being eradicated instead of the vaccine being what we get to thank for that.
So this is really about that larger narrative, and these guys are just trying to shoehorn everything into that same story, using correlation as a basis for causation.
We can draw this timeline and say, well, DDT, polio, it must be a match.
I think they have to, I mean, because especially for Kennedy, I mean, everyone is pointing to the fact that polio vaccine intervention was hugely important.
And so if you're an anti-vaxxer, of course, you're going to go and be like, well, guess what?
I have this.
But let's hear them talk a little bit.
This wouldn't be a conversation of neutrality if we didn't talk about Bill Gates.
How do you anticipate that Bill Gates is going to be writing you a big check for that fund?
Bill Gates is a huge opportunity because if you look at two months before the outbreak of the pandemic, we get a big Netflix series on Bill's brain.
Incredible timing there.
This is the most public thing that Bill's ever done is this Netflix series on himself and all the books he reads and all the diet cokes he drinks.
And, you know, from a physician's standpoint, I watched that and said, wow, he is going to be very well preserved in the grave, because when you drink Diet Coke, it actually turns into formaldehyde, and so his tissues are full of formaldehyde, so he may never rot in the grave, enough Diet Coke there for preservation.
But from a bigger standpoint, when you see him sitting down with Warren Buffett in the cafe, and he's drawing out on his napkin, like, well, we went in and attacked polio over here, but then it popped up over here in Northern India, and so then we Put people on bikes and we infiltrate there, we got it suppressed there, but then it popped up over here and he's playing this whack-a-mole game with polio in Northern Italy right now or Northern India right now because he's, you know, got this mindset of like, I can outthink this virus.
I can outthink it if I can just do the right things and put enough money into it.
But what is obvious from my standpoint, you know, with my, the radical explosion that happened to my old paradigm, if I'd watched that 10 years ago, one of me hadn't thought about it.
Yeah, he's on a journey trying to beat Peleo.
What became so obvious while I'm watching that is the scientists that are advising Bill Gates and his funds,
handed him a two-dimensional chessboard and he's trying to move the checkers around on this board in this two-dimensional plane and he can't win because the microbiome is a three-dimensional ecosystem which is soil water and air the air we breathe 10 to the 31 viruses the water that we bathe in 10 to the 30 viruses the soil we eat from 10 to the 31 viruses 10 to the 31 is 10 million times more than stars in the entire universe like these are massive numbers of viruses and here he's trying to beat it out with this like little human strategy
there is no human strategy for balance with the viral it's it's a biology strategy it's a mother earth strategy humans are a tiny little piece of the puzzle and so i'm excited to hand build gates a three-dimensional model i say you know what you want to stop india of any type whether it's endemic polio or you know hiv or you pick your thing i I can show you how to beat that in less than a decade by changing the innate immune system of that population.
And we did it in the United States successfully to eradicate polio.
We didn't do that with a vaccine.
We did it through changing the ecosystem around those kids.
We put kids into an environment where they were no longer bathing in those warm environments that would proliferate the milieu for that virus to overexpress itself in the environment.
We stopped irradiating the tonsils of children.
We stopped cutting out the tonsils of children in the 1970s, finding out that Universal tonsillectomy was a terrible idea because that's the beginning of their innate immune system as well as their adaptive immune system and their upper respiratory system.
You give them back their tonsils and stop swimming in warm pools in the middle of summer, suddenly polio is gone.
Did you follow all that?
I mean, we started with Diet Cokes and we ended up with him somehow having been part of eradicating polio.
I just want to point out first, again, the trance style.
There were so many things in there that just were interconnected except for in Zach's brain.
And first of all, just what is that about Bill Gates?
He is the boogeyman they have to invoke.
There was a whole, on Monday's episode, on the bonus, with Tim Kennedy and J.P.
Throwing in Bill Gates just for no reason.
I have to get this in there.
And this idea that not swimming in warm pools and not getting your tonsils out cured polio.
That's what Bush is saying right there.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't even know what to say about it.
I mean, I mean, you kind of have to like break each phrase or sentence apart to try and to try and follow what he was saying before he changed the subject.
But this is the clearest conspiracy assertion I've heard from him.
Right?
What a coincidence that Netflix comes out with this documentary right before the pandemic.
Oh my goodness, if Bill Gates has this opportunity.
But you know what?
Your old paradigm was correct, Zach.
Bill Gates really is using his money and time trying to eradicate polio in poor countries like it has been eradicated in wealthy countries using a vaccine.
I really want to say shame on you to both of these guys because they're discrediting of this incredible philanthropist, who I see Bill Gates as being that.
He may have his flaws, he may also have been and still be a capitalist in certain ways, but it's just the smearing that goes on with him and then trying to fit it into this just BS grandiosity about claims of attunement to Mother Nature and how with his special 3D model he could He could solve the problems Bill Gates is having in a single decade because he's got the secret sauce.
It's just appalling.
Because we didn't even flesh all that out, but there was a moment where, I mean, Bush just says he can solve basically all diseases in a decade.
I mean, to that claim he makes, and it's just absurd.
And also this, again, getting back to Gates, First off, I hate Windows.
I've been a Mac user for a long time.
Yeah, me too, me too.
It's not like there's some big conspiracy.
But again, underlying all of this, what is the conspiracy?
I linked to an article that just came out today on JAMA that shows that right now the US Health and Human Services Department has announced that they are going to be covering vaccines in all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, 60% of pharmacies everywhere that America has a footprint, the vaccines are going to be made available for free to people.
It's a scam.
Yeah.
What is this?
What is the conspiracy theory leading to?
Paul Offit, who created the retrovirus vaccine that gets a lot of flack for, people often criticize him.
Oh, he was just a money monger.
Somebody broke down in a book and I should find it to reference it.
He spent 20 or 25 years working on that vaccine, and then the amount of money he made from that, if you broke it down per year, it was a nice salary.
It worked out to something like $200,000 a year or something over 25 years, but he didn't get that till after all of that work.
And this idea that vaccines are this giant moneymaker.
Jonathan Berman points out in our interview in the book that vaccines account for 2% of pharmaceutical profits every year.
And so, I just don't understand what the conspiracy theory is.
Like, look at opioids, look at antidepressants.
That's where the money making happens and that's where a lot of the shadiness happens.
I'm not fully happy with the way that they've rolled out.
I wrote an article about the AstraZeneca trials and how they flubbed them and that there needs to be more transparency by pharmaceutical companies.
But the idea that these figures like microchips, money, Over and over again, and when you get down to it, it's like they have to just put the name out there.
It doesn't matter.
It's just the image of the person that they're really just trying to, just notice how they did it.
Diet Coke, let's focus on Bill's Diet Coke.
What does that have to do with his philanthropy?
Yeah, it's kind of like the Mickey Willis pandering to get the laugh, right?
And it's also, Gates is like the, he's the conspiritualist version of George Soros.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what Willis' next documentary is on.
It's on Gates and Soros.
Well, I want to conclude this with one more reference because I think this trans-hypnotic talk, I think nothing in this talk was more indicative of this last section of Bush talking about Mother Nature here.
So fast.
Mother Nature has got her hand and arms out to us.
She wants to welcome us back into a thriving state as a species within her womb again.
We don't need to solve the problem.
She already has the solutions.
We need to stop our banging our head against her.
And realize that we are from nature, not against nature.
We are the result of the microbiome.
We are not against the microbiome.
We are literally the adaptive experience of the virome itself.
We would not be human.
We in fact could not have mammals without the intelligence of the virome having built our genome.
Our genome is the result of a direct insert of viral data.
52% of the human genome directly inserted from viruses over the last few billion years.
So we would not be here without the virus.
We would not be here without the health of the microbiome within us.
The paradigm is already there.
The science is already proven out.
Now it's time for mobilization and a coherent plan for the public.
And so that's my excitement, is we can just shake it off.
It's so easy to get stressed out about the powers that be and you hear things about a deep state or a cabal or all these things.
We're in the driver's seat.
We can keep going down that fear and guilt paradigm and play into the whole thing.
Or we can just create an alternative pathway and the whole thing, no matter how powerful it feels, is going to fall apart instantaneously because we simply We extricated ourselves from that environment and we created the future that we want.
And so I'm excited that just like the innate immune system, different than the adaptive immune system, we don't have to fight against anything.
The innate immune system is an intelligent, adaptive machine that keeps us in a healthy relationship to biodiversity.
And in fact, it embraces biodiversity.
It never tries to kill a virus or kill a bacteria.
It looks to welcome that biodiversity into its environment.
We now just need to build socio-economic and political environments that look like that.
What if we invited every opportunity to create more biodiversity within our political thought process, in our societal patterns of behavior, and ultimately your dinner table.
When was the last time your dinner table became a native for fellowship with biodiversity?
Think about that for your socialization.
And so this is how we create the new future nearly instantaneously.
For all of these guys and their talk about nature, it took four to five million years for the Homo lineage to break off from the other apes.
And it's been, I reference this number a lot, but it's been 350,000 years since the Homo sapiens and the other Homo lineages that we've mostly killed off, there's probably 10 or 11 that we know of now, to get to the Industrial Revolution.
For all of that time, humans were in the middle of the food chain.
We were prey animals.
We were hunters, but we were also preyed upon by larger animals and then obviously by viruses.
Now, not pandemics.
That is a phenomenon that is associated with modern agricultural techniques from about 12,000 years on.
But viruses have always been something that killed us quickly.
Well, large predators killed us too, so we shouldn't fight against them because they're part of the holy tapestry of nature as well, right?
Well, that's exactly it.
And that's when I hear like speeches like this from Bush and others that nature, it's this idea that nature is benevolent and only here for us.
I mean, he references that by saying we are part, he's right, we are part of nature, but that doesn't mean nature won't kill us in an instant.
And has over and over again.
And so, this just really, this is why I think Bush has become sort of a darling, to use Willis' term, of the wellness community because it's pure ego.
It's this pure idea that humans are here.
We dominate the planet.
Nature is here for us.
Don't worry about the 80 billion animals we kill every year to sustain us.
Let's just focus on us.
And then when we get an insult at us like a virus, then we don't know how to handle it because we think we're the chosen child of some divine power.
Yeah, it's also the romanticism.
This romanticism of nature is huge in the wellness space, right?
It's huge in the ultimate space.
It's basically the narrative that we hear throughout this dialogue, which is that the only reason that viruses ever become a problem for large numbers of human beings is because of some sort of advance within human science and technology.
And that if we could just get back To some romantic time in the past where everything was perfect, then we would live in balance and in harmony with nature.
It's such an appealing idea.
I used to believe this idea.
I think most people in our space have some kind of affinity for this sort of idea and I agree with you.
It's why Zach has become so popular and it's why we hear in all of our conspiritualists, certain of his ideas get repeated like a kind of liturgy again and again and again.
In 1900, 30% of deaths were children under five.
One century later, it was 1.4% of all deaths.
Thank you, vaccines and antibiotics and hygiene practices.
And if we were in a state where 30% of deaths were, again, children, I don't think we'd have the grandiose beliefs that we now have.
And so we've had these technologies, we have this science, these advances, And we're now turning our back on them because there is problems with our systems, but the overall science and medicine is sound.
And you nailed it because this over-romantization of who we are is going to be at least part of our downfall.
Jonathan Berman is an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology in Arkansas.
He is an active science communicator, and he served as national co-chair of the 2017 March for Science.
I recently came by his book, Anti-Vaxxers, How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement.
And I was struck by the fact that as a medical professional who cares deeply about vaccination and understanding science and his advocacy, that he wanted to write a book that reaches out and tries to help educate people regardless of their beliefs of vaccines.
So I reached out to MIT Press and they sent me a copy and thankfully Jonathan had some time to talk to me about techniques to use to talk to anti-vaxxers, some basic vaccine science, as well as why we should not be fearing the current COVID-19 vaccines.
First off, congratulations and thank you for your book.
I think it came at the right time and it's an extremely important book considering where we are right now.
And it's very easy, I know from my own history of being caught up being combative towards anti-vaxxers, but you took a different approach, a more educational and informative take to put forward in your book.
And why did you choose to make a very educational and welcoming book as you did?
Um, so there's a long answer to that.
I guess we have an hour so I can kind of give it.
I kind of came up through in the world of skepticism in 2005 to 2010.
This is when I was sort of in college and learning about these things, thinking about these things.
And the people who were popular then were people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, people who were very intelligent, but they were kind of bullies.
I think that was appealing to people because when you have someone who's a bully on your side, that almost feels good and makes you want to be with them on their side.
Over time, I got a lot more disappointed with that approach.
I don't think it was working.
I don't think it was making people see skepticism in a positive light.
And then in this decade, or this past decade, there was kind of an implosion where it turned out a lot of the leaders in the skeptics movement had sort of regressive views and used the language of skepticism to reinforce regressive views.
And so I wanted to have a version of skepticism that kept what I think is the positive part, which is finding community in critical thinking and analyzing and being thoughtful about what's true and also maintains compassion and empathy and what's kind of good about being a person.
So when it was time to write the book, a lot of the anti-vaccine things I see online are things on Facebook or Twitter where I think it's called, I would call it dunking on Anti-vaxxers.
It's making fun of them, saying, well, that's so crazy a thing to believe that we must make fun of it, and never really engaging with what they're saying or why they believe it.
And it just didn't strike me as the compassionate way to analyze it.
So the original title for the book, while I was working on it, was Understanding the Anti-Vaccine Movement.
And the publisher thought how to challenge anti-vaxxers, how to challenge a misinformed movement was better.
So I said, okay, you're publishing me.
But I approached it as kind of a deep dive.
What's the research that's been done on it?
Why would someone take that position that seems to be anti-science?
And why would someone who is otherwise pro-science, someone who understands climate change is happening, or someone who makes use of science in their everyday life, why would they take on anti-vaccine views?
And it's not because they're stupid, right?
It's not because they're Malignant for the most part.
It's, you know, they have, they're responding to normal fears and concerns that all of us have.
Well, you go through some of the underlying beliefs of the vaccine-hesitant anti-vaxxers.
You mentioned social class, individual liberties, individual and collective rights, and changing ideas about health and medicine.
What do you think are the top ones that people who are pro-vaccine and want to address anti-vaxxers, like what should we understand most about the reasons why people are vaccine-hesitant?
I think we need to understand that they're making a risk evaluation just like we're making a risk evaluation.
They're making a decision for themselves or for their children, and they're trying to make the best decision they can.
Now, they're doing it differently, and I would say they're doing it in a less reasonable and healthy way, and arriving at the wrong decision.
Doesn't mean, um, that doesn't mean that we have to, you know, call them stupid or act like they're foolish.
It means we can sort of have that two-way conversation with them saying, well, why do you believe that?
Okay.
And then explain why we believe what we believe.
And then hopefully that's a more productive way to go about it.
Um, but yeah, I think I would want people to know that they're, they're trying to, Um, and that if we have, you know, a degree of compassion for them or a degree of empathy, then I think we can be a little bit more effective in communicating that vaccination is a good idea.
In your own conversations, I know in the book you write about a female friend of yours watching a movie and that you remained friends even though you had different ideas about vaccines, but in your own history, have you been able to convince people who are hesitant or anti-vax of the value of the efficacy of vaccines?
I don't see the project as being a spree of epistemology where I'm going out and trying to convince people.
I have had people say that Okay, this book helped allay some of my fears, things like that.
Or, you know, okay, this is pretty convincing.
But I've never gone on the project of one by one talking people out of anti-vaccine views, because I don't think that's necessarily the best way to go about it.
I think If I did that, I did one a month, I could convince 12 people to vaccinate in a year.
I think that for me, I want to be working on, you know, how do we send this message and, you know, what has worked in the past and those kinds of questions.
Um, but also, um, since the book came out and the six months prior to that, I've been stuck inside.
Well, you actually write, you write that the, you wrote the book before the pandemic hit and You do reference it a little bit, but you make sure to say that, you know, this is more of an evergreen book in a sense, historically.
But now that there is a coronavirus vaccine and it's starting to be distributed, what threats do you see that the anti-vaccination movement has on the health of our society, given this current situation?
Yeah, so since I wrote it, a lot has happened in the vaccine world.
Which sort of makes it out of date the instant it's published.
There has been a growth in the anti-vaccine movement since then and a number I saw said something like seven and a half million people had either joined anti-vaccine Facebook groups or subscribed to YouTube channels and those could be some of the same people but It's still, that sounds like a lot of growth.
And some of the people who have been actively working on anti-vaccine campaigns seem to be allying themselves with the anti-mask, anti-lockdown protests.
And I think the anti-vaxxers get out of that an audience.
And the anti-mask, anti-lockdown protesters get a set of tactics that have been honed and refined over decades for sort of anti-public health measures.
And then they can kind of brand themselves as public health freedom fighters or something like that.
I don't know that they'll prevent us from having enough people vaccinated to slow down the pandemic here.
Um, but I can see them there.
A lot of this strategy over the last decade has been finding individual communities to target.
Um, so you could see them crafting messaging to specific countries and specific subgroups.
And so we'll probably have outbreaks of coronavirus for a long time.
Humans were likely, and you referenced this, and I hear what you're saying about being outdated as soon as it's published, but at the same time I really feel that historical understanding of vaccination and the process that led us here is also always relevant and there isn't enough writing about that.
Now, you write that humans were likely to die from communicable diseases for most of history, I mean, especially since the dawn of agriculture through the 19th century.
But humans seem to have short memories or a lack of historical understanding sometimes, especially when it comes to science communication.
So do you think we're victims of our own success in some manner?
To some degree, yeah.
I mean, looking at some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric in the 1850s, one of the really striking things was that people had forgotten how bad smallpox was in the 1850s.
So they were saying, well, no, hardly anyone dies of smallpox anymore.
That's like 60 years ago.
It's kind of how we feel about polio now.
Polio isn't around.
Why would you get a polio virus?
Who's ever heard of someone getting measles?
Why would you get a measles?
Chickenpox?
What are you?
Some kind of dinosaur getting chickenpox?
So, you know, I mean, kind of once we've eliminated a disease or made it rare, It's harder to make the argument to people how important it is to get vaccinated for it because the disease isn't around and you're probably not going to get it either way.
So then that equation of personal benefits and personal risks versus collective benefits and collective risks, that shifts a little bit because there's fewer personal benefits and seemingly fewer collective benefits as well.
But if enough people make that calculation, then it comes back.
Yeah.
You know, there are aspects of science and vaccination specifically that I feel pretty well-versed on, given my history, but there are other aspects of it I don't, and one of them is As I'm not a parent, I don't plan on having children.
And some of my friends who are pro-science and even pro-vaccination, they're a little overwhelmed by the vaccine schedule for children.
And that seems to be a wedge issue in the anti-vaccination movement saying that, I'm 45, so the time I was growing up, you know, there was maybe a dozen or 20 vaccinations, if that.
And now they're, I don't know the numbers because I don't pay close enough attention to that.
How do you feel about The number of vaccines that have now, are now being given to children.
And how do you address a parent who, again, might be pro-science, but does have that concern that there's so many vaccinations their children has to get?
I mean, if it's a scheduling problem, pediatrician might work with you, I think, or catch you up on your next visit or whatever.
I think that it seemed, It seems like an intervention that say, well, I'm doing something to the child.
And so I'm making a choice to put that child at risk.
But the risk profiles for all of the vaccines that have been given are pretty well studied, right?
So you don't see huge, statistically discernible effects among the children who are getting vaccinated, even with even on the CDC recommended schedule.
And you also don't see huge outbreaks of infectious disease.
So there has been some alternative schedules recommended by people who have who have alternative medicines and things to sell.
Those alternative schedules sort of delay certain vaccines.
The trouble I have with that is that it doesn't give any benefit and it opens up the time window where the child is vulnerable.
So if you say, well, I won't do flu vaccine yet.
I'll start them on flu vaccine when they're seven.
Well, then maybe that child gets the flu and they're okay, but they pass it to Their infant sister who isn't yet capable of fighting off the flu, or they pass it to an elderly relative who has a weakened immune system.
Or you have a situation where you say, well, measles isn't around and they're already getting the flu shot, so let's hold off on measles until next year.
And then the kid gets measles because there's a measles outbreak.
Those kinds of things can happen.
And there just isn't a reason to make that delay.
Now, I guess I would rather have people do that than not vaccinate at all.
But I think what that's doing is it's kind of acting as a relief valve for people's desire to feel like they've made a choice and they have a choice in the system.
And so it's not the worst thing, which would be not vaccinating at all, but it's also not great.
Yeah.
Now, vaccine advocates don't really have the same level of, to put it in a word that you talk about briefly, celebrity that other sciences have.
Paul Offit will probably never be Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So you write I really appreciated the part where you say celebrities make their fame not as science advocates and then they sometimes spill over there.
But the anti-vaxx movement has Andrew Wakefield, Del Bigtree, RFK Jr., and more recently, Mickey Willis.
So how do we effectively fight against the propaganda that men like this are promoting and the cult of personality that's been built up around them?
Yeah, I don't know.
I have 300 something Twitter followers.
Celebrity is tough because you look at what celebrity is, it's a lot of people who know your name, know your face, and want something from you.
I think that's kind of universally what celebrity is because people want to have sex with you, they want your money, they want your attention, they want your time.
So I have some empathy for celebrities, too.
And I think once someone's in that position, it's really easy for them to hear the positive messages about themselves.
Things like, oh, you were brilliant in that movie, or you're so good, oh, you're the best.
I loved that thing you wrote about X and Y. And to start to think that Your platform is a qualification to talk about things that are outside of that field.
Now, I think people like Del Bigtree and Wakefield are more deliberate than that.
They've made a choice that they're going to be the anti-vaccine guys.
And so there's less of a degree to which People who are pro-science or celebrity-driven, they still are, because you do still see people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson as kind of science celebrities, Adam Savage.
And so they have a platform that's powerful they can use to spread the message, but that's also still kind of doing the same preaching to the choir that Andrew Wakefield is, or Delvick Tree is.
I think there's a degree of grift in what they're doing.
They're collecting donations from their audience of anti-vaccine people they've built up.
And, you know, you could call what science celebrities are doing similar.
They're preaching to the choir.
I'm preaching to the choir.
I'm not a celebrity, but I'm preaching to the choir, too.
I think reaching people The toughest thing you can do as a science communicator or advocate.
And I don't know how.
I've done it a few times.
I was one of the people running the March for Science a few years ago.
And that went viral.
I don't understand how it went viral.
I've done a lot of interviews for this book.
I was on MSNBC yesterday.
I don't know why they decided to put me on.
They did.
So I think the best you can do is put things out in the world and hope that people see them or appreciate them or want to spread them and kind of ignore the celebrity aspect of it.
I don't think that's something I would wish on someone.
Maybe we could use more science celebrities, but I don't know who I would want to punish that way.
Well, you say how MSNBHC chose you, but honestly, again, I've been writing about the anti-vaccination movement for a decade, and there isn't a plethora of really good literature.
A lot of my understanding comes from general medical books or science books that I've read that includes vaccination.
So having something that is just so handy and readable, I think, is very important and needed.
But talking about science journalism, how would you, as a communicator, advocate for journalists Trying to discuss vaccinations.
I want to give an example.
In one of the trials, two people died.
One three days after vaccination of, I forget what it was, and then someone else 62 days after the vaccination.
But I've noticed that some anti-vax newsletters are using this as evidence that you can die from it, even though they were completely unrelated deaths to the vaccination.
And the BBC covered it, which is important, but it was sort of a sensationalist headline.
And so you're getting into that problem again of two people die in vaccination problems.
So how would you advocate for journalists covering, especially right now as we go through these trials and the rollout of the vaccines?
Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the mindset of journalism.
It's so different from what I do.
I'm a lab guy, I'm in the lab most of the time, and so when I talk to journalists, usually I'm making the incorrect assumption that they're on my side and that I have a positive message to spread about vaccination or about climate change or whatever.
I mean, so, you know, the journalists, this is true, they'll want to spread it, right?
The hard lesson over time has been that that's not always the case.
Scientists do have agendas and journalists are aware of that, and journalists have agendas too, and scientists need to be aware of that.
And I think science and journalists are both interested in the truth.
We just have different ways of getting at it and sharing.
So, to take your example of the people who died, the way a scientist would look at that would be to say, okay, is this causative?
What is the relationship between the intervention and the outcome, which is a death?
Because this is a very serious negative indicator if we're killing someone with this vaccine.
And then you do statistics, you do a numerical analysis, you use the plausibility of mechanism as a tool as well, and you make the best determination you can.
And I think that's context that's hard to translate into a headline.
Because it's hard for me to imagine an editor saying that the headline would be, OK, two people died from Pfizer vaccine.
But statistical analysis shows that although there is a correlation, it's not positive.
It'd probably be too long.
So I don't want to advise journalists.
Because, you know, I'm not an expert in that.
I would hope that, you know, they would have caution when reporting that to, and I think most would have the sense to ask the people who are running the study and evaluating it, the question, is this related to the vaccine?
Is this causative?
And what context should this be put in as far as safety.
Now, I say that, but then this is a corporation.
These are the comfortable to be afflicted as well.
So I think there's also a, you know, reasonable distrust of Pfizer or Moderna to say, well, okay, should we believe what this press release says about these two people?
And I would say that we probably should be asking hard questions of Pfizer and Moderna and not taking their press releases at face value necessarily.
But we should, you know, get context from the companies and then context from outside regulators and outside scientists.
And if those are all in agreement, this is not correlative.
That's very telling to me.
So I guess it's just choosing who to listen to.
Which is a really hard problem.
Yeah.
And you're right.
One of the articles I published a few, two weeks ago was on the AstraZeneca press release.
And I think it was titled something like the problems with vaccine by press release for that reason, because of course they only gave half the dose by mistake to a certain cohort and then rearrange the, you know, rearrange the trials to match that.
And you'd want a little more transparency from companies, especially at a time like this.
At the same time, one thing I really appreciated that you pointed out is that vaccines are a very small part of pharmaceutical profits.
I think I read a different book, Ulo Biss's book on immunity, where she talks about Paul Offit and how much he actually made on the rotavirus vaccination.
And after it was sold and everything, it really It was a nice six-figure-a-year job if you average it all out, but it's not like he's making millions or even billions of dollars on vaccination.
So how do you successfully do that?
How do you weigh that out of being like, yes, these companies have problems, obviously opioids and antidepressants and many things in the public imagination that make us not trust them and at the same time be like, but we kind of need this right now.
So I'm never going to avoid shill accusations, just because that's the way the world is.
But for the record, I'm still in the negative on the book, just because of caffeine purchases while I was writing it.
Yeah, it's a really tough nut to crack.
And I don't think I did it in the book of saying, or maybe I tried to approach saying, Look, these are corporations, they have their own interests, which are profit and growth.
And they're producing vaccines.
And we have a government that's supposed to be on our side, and sometimes is.
And that government has a relationship with the industry that's probably too close.
And they're producing a product for the public, vaccines, which are not Very profitable, but they do have a monetary interest in the vaccine going well and having their name out there and so forth.
So it's really hard to say, yes, they have a monetary interest, but they should be trusted anyway.
Especially when the way they've chosen to communicate.
you.
statements by CEOs and press releases.
As an academic scientist, that's not how I would choose to communicate.
So I think everything should be in peer-reviewed publications, especially something like this.
And I'm not from the industry world, so I know it's very different there.
But since this is a public-private partnership, I think they need to do a better job on the public end of that.
So, as far as how do we responsibly send that message, I think, like you said, it's hard.
Someone said it.
It's a hard thing to do, and I think the best that can be done is to acknowledge the shortfalls of that partnership at the same time as being realistic and honest about what the benefits are and what the reasons to be optimistic are.
I would never say, well, we should only, or you should only report on the positive things about vaccines.
I think that would be dishonest.
I think that if they have the transparency to explain what mistakes they made and so forth, that would actually improve a lot of people's perception of the safety of the vaccine.
Because then they say, okay, well, when they did make mistakes, they owned up to it.
I want to ask one more communication question.
You touched on it when you were talking about alternative treatments.
I listen to a lot of these podcasts and watch videos of people who are in the anti-vaccination movement.
You will hear them during the podcast argue that we've only had three months of trials and there's no long-term evidence over what these vaccines are doing and yet at the very beginning of the podcast they're selling magnesium supplements for example and looked into the science and yeah it does have some benefits but what they're selling it for is definitely not something that's been proven.
I know anti-vaccination Advocates who do Botox and they complain about not knowing what the ingredients are doing in vaccinations.
I've come from the wellness world where it's a $40 billion a year industry where all sorts of supplements are sold that have never been clinically tested in any capacity.
When you come up against that, how do you communicate about the ingredients like the the fact that the levels of aluminum and thimerosal in the vaccines aren't going to harm you and that everyday products probably could harm you more than that?
Yeah, well, first of all, I think there's an inclination to point out hypocrisy when we find it.
So like, oh, well, the supplement people are the people who have a financial motive to say, well, you don't know what's in vaccines and then sell you totally unregulated pills full of something, right?
That's what I'm saying.
That's hypocritical.
But on the other hand, I don't think hypocrisy matters, because it doubles my chances of agreeing with them.
They're saying, If their argument that something is wrong in the vaccine or bad in the vaccine is valid, then we should consider it.
So I think it's important to take each of those claims at face value and fairly evaluate them.
Just kind of what I tried to do in the book is to look at the claims about aluminum, claims about bovine serum, claims about Mercury claims a doubt.
And you can kind of do that ad infinitum, right?
But I tried to pick the biggest ones.
Now, the coronavirus vaccine, these are actually very simple formulations as far as what's in them.
There's salt, there's RNA, and there's a lipid to help the RNA cross cell membranes.
So, if someone says, well, there's aluminum in that, you can say, well, not in this one.
They say, well, there's mercury in this vaccine.
Well, not in this one.
But I've already seen people saying that there's thimerosal in this vaccine.
Yeah.
That's out there now.
It's so impossible.
Well, tell them to read the inserts.
Yeah, I mean, it's misinformation and it's the same problem with any misinformation is you address it and then you say, well, okay, why do you believe that?
Or who has an interest in you believing that?
And we're not going to get everyone on board.
It just won't happen.
We just need to get enough people on board and, you know, positive messaging.
And I've said this before, and it hasn't happened yet, we need a vaccine confidence project from the government, or world governments.
And there's bits and pieces, the UN is working on some stuff, and I think the Ad Council is working on some stuff, but there needs to be strong, unified messaging.
But yeah, that's another hard problem with communication, is They're going to gishgallop us with a million things that are in vaccines.
Do we respond to all of them?
Which ones do we point to?
What do we address?
And it's a really tiring conversation to have to say, no, there's no aluminum in it.
No, there's no aborted fetuses in it.
No, there's no thimerosal in it.
No, there's no goblins in it.
It's a tiring conversation to have, but If you care about convincing people or assuaging or relieving people's fears somewhat, then you can have those conversations with your family and friends.
Like I said, I don't think people have to do the going out and doing street epistemology to convincing their neighbors and every single person.
I think it's a matter of having enough people in the public sphere and enough people Having, you know, one-off conversations to convince their friends and hopefully that's enough.
Yeah, hopefully.
I don't know if, because you do mostly spend your time in academic research and not like myself on listening to these podcasts, but have you noticed that one of the popular ideas that are now going around those circles is this idea that germ theory actually isn't true and terrain theory, as Zach Bush has really been the one who's been leading that, I see it often now.
Have you come across that at all?
I haven't heard of terrain theory.
What is the brain theory?
Well, when germ theory was being developed at the same time, there was a competing, this is coming off of miasma theory.
There was this idea that all sickness comes from the environment.
It's not germs.
It's specifically your relationship to the environment.
So it actually has a crossover with miasma theory and, you know, the vapors coming out of the air.
But this is a little more holistic in a sense that it's the sand and the sun and the oil.
It's the terroir.
Yes, yes, exactly. - Yeah, that's giving you illness.
I haven't heard that one in particular.
Ultimately, to go as far back as to say germ theory isn't true, and the mountains of evolution, that's just at the level of evolution denial, and climate change denial, and all of those other things.
You know, people who are living in a science-based worldview aren't going to be swayed by those arguments.
And people who aren't, I don't think that that particular argument is what's convincing them not to live in a science-based worldview.
I think they're in that worldview and this is a justification for a behavior that they want to take part in.
So if you knock down terrain theory for them, well, then they'll just move on to another idea, another idea, another idea.
There's a more fundamental problem than the terroir of whatever city you're living in.
Okay, well, the book is out again.
I really appreciate it.
I have a feeling I'm going to be referencing it a lot moving forward.
What are you working on now?
Any research or another book or anything of that nature?
I'm working on a lot of things.
Semester is winding down teaching wise.
In the lab, I have a COVID-19 related project going on.
So that should be interesting.
I have an idea for another book, and I have 10,000 or so words written about it.
This will sound crazy, but my idea is that a lot of the failures of the environmental movement can, I think, be traced back to some of the ideas of Thoreau and transcendentalists in the 19th century.
sort of this idea, this illusion we have of being totally independent and able to make our own way in the world without other people.
And I think that that mindset of people are bad and necessarily disruptive to nature, and therefore, nature is God, therefore we must protect nature has sort of
filtered forward into modern environmentalism, and I think modern wellness culture to a degree too, which is how we end up with things like anti-gmo activism and anti-nuclear activism as well, which are, I think, harmful to efforts to impede the world and fight climate change.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
The roots of Thoreau and Emerson are in Vedanta and Hindu literature.
Thoreau's father, I believe, was an editor who was translating some of the texts and that is very also related to the modern yoga and wellness sphere is their thought and that rugged individualism.
And the idea that nature is only benevolent.
That's something that persists as well, this idea that if you just drink a lot of green juice and take these supplements and then meditate that you're immune from disease.
That persists and that's constantly problematic.
Yeah, well, so there's also roots in Romanticism and the German Spraying Movement in Germany.
And there's a very telling passage in one of Thoreau's less-read books where he comes across a shipwreck and There's a bunch of dead people and, you know, he kind of looks at it and he's like, you know, I kind of take the ocean side here.
These people are ruining the landscape.
I see that as kind of like a really anti-humanist view of things and kind of like, I don't like that.
And so carrying that forward, we have like a really hard
challenge of humans are destroying the environment and we're encroaching and we're an invasive species and so we have to be more balanced between human needs and finding ways of maintaining and protecting the environment and balancing that against um balancing that balancing those two two things and
I think that if we have an environmental movement that's solely focused on the idea that certain things are unnatural, without a strong definition of what nature is, and certain things are natural, and natural is good and unnatural is bad, and what my company sells is natural, then I think that that slows down progress.
So those are the kind of ideas I'm thinking about right now and trying to turn into something over.
Hello, faithful listeners.
I want to thank Derek and Julian for taking the reins this week as I'm away from home, helping to take care of a family member at the end of life.
It's not an easy time, but I still want to contribute some, I guess you could call it field commentary, related to this episode's larger theme of who gets to say what about public health and about the people who work in it.
So, I'll take a few minutes to describe and pay tribute to what I'm seeing healthcare workers do, and I want to do this to counter what a lot of conspiritualists are saying about them.
I don't think any of us knew when we started this podcast that we'd be covering an absurd cruelty during the pandemic, that conspirituality would go so far as to cast the healthcare worker in general in a defamatory light.
In hindsight, it makes a kind of sense.
After all, nurses and doctors work within a highly regulated and difficult to understand process and discourse.
They work in a landscape that is homogenized by globalism and validated by institutions.
And encountering these workers generally means that something has gone very wrong in our lives.
And so their world is a complex space of disruption, which most people don't want to enter.
And then they feel helpless when they do.
There is no sovereignty in a hospital for anyone.
So, it's not surprising to watch new-agers find healthcare workers not only threatening but worse, as if they're walking proof that science and regulation and corporations and the state are all attempting to control our lives and even our deaths.
And I suppose it's not surprising to watch COVID denialists take that extra triumphant step and dehumanize healthcare workers as brainwashed or stooges for authoritarianism.
We are, after all, living in an age in which institutional abuse is being uncovered in so many sectors.
It's hard to trust the way that anything is ordered.
Now as a Canadian, I can't help but think that while many people have had traumatic encounters with conventional medicine, the center of alt-health libertarianism in the world really is the United States.
And at this point, anti-science rhetoric has now superseded QAnon as 2020's top U.S.
export.
Because in the US, predatory insurance automatically excludes so many people from regular empathetic engagement with healthcare workers.
And it could be that their antipathy for the healthcare system only grows in tandem with their isolation or their exclusion from it.
So, they live in a world in which the only heroic doctors are those who rebel against being doctors.
Those who have come to hate their profession, and often their colleagues.
Those who can confirm their suspicion that doctors are cold, uncaring, greedy, and even murderous.
But of course a lot of what they're really describing is just capitalism.
Not science.
Not doctoring.
Not caregiving.
But because it's inconceivable to challenge capitalism, the rage has to find somewhere to go.
Now I've already said a little bit in previous episodes about how it was three medical experiences that shook me out of my own low-grade wellness environment contempt for contemporary medicine.
So, two cesarean births in my own family, and then one deep vein thrombosis in my left leg.
Not only did I and my family get excellent care, not without bumps in the road, but excellent care, but more importantly, I witnessed excellent care being given all around me.
And for some strange psychological reason, I can't quite put my finger on.
Sometimes it's easier for me to appreciate the thing that I'm receiving if I really see how it impacts somebody else.
So just over the past four days, while this life event has unfolded, I've seen doctors and nurses and personal care workers retain composure and clarity and patience in the midst of a lot of chaos, fear and grief.
I've seen medical transport workers hold space and dignity as they bring the dying home, and as they turn the basic manual labor of lifting chairs and stretchers into acts of kindness and even nobility.
I've seen them all study their charts with discipline, but also puzzlement and humility.
I've seen personal care workers make things that might seem humiliating to a person feel utterly normal.
I've seen palliative nurses meticulously measure out pain medication into a little pump that pulses like a tiny little robot heart.
And this made me think, praise all the gods that Zach Bush isn't in my life to run some guilt trip on my family for choosing pain medication because he thinks it obstructs the passage to the next dimension or some bullshit like that.
It's unbelievable to me to think that that guy is a hospice doctor telling people what their deaths should be or should mean to them.
I haven't heard or felt any of that kind of emotional intrusiveness from the healthcare workers who have served me or my family.
That stuff seems to be a conspirituality specialty.
Now, I have heard a lot of the other stories that surgery has its share of egomaniacs, that nursing is plagued by disordered sleep and sometimes eating, that EMS folks are stressed to the breaking point and can develop trauma disorders and substance issues.
But my ongoing and continual impression is that even when these folks are having a bad night, Or maybe even a whole year of bad nights called a pandemic.
The vast majority pull off the job with grace and empathy.
What they do can be clinical, bureaucratic, difficult for lay people like me to understand, and sometimes it seems tone-deaf as family members can wind up discussing logistical or insurance plans details with medical personnel over their loved one as they struggle to breathe.
But the strange part is that the guiding structure of the whole thing really does seem to afford a kind of humility So, just for a moment returning to the claim that Charles Eisenstein made in our interview that conventional medicine fancies itself as conquering disease.
I'm just not seeing that.
What I see in the midst of it is a lot of people going through a lot of pressure-tested rules for thinking clearly about things.
I'm seeing an almost frustrating amount of shoulder shrugging, which I think people mistake for ambivalence.
They mistake not knowing the answer with not caring about it.
But I don't think it is ambivalence.
I think it's the honesty of people who know when they're at the limit of their knowledge, who know their lane, and who don't want to promise too much.
And as I've noted a number of times on the podcast, I think this is exactly what the charismatic wellness influencer cannot do.
In fact, they actually go viral in popularity to the extent that they break all of these scope of practice rules.
But when Charles remarks in our interview that modern medicine is religious in nature, built on beliefs and rituals and a priesthood, I'm kind of agreeing with him more these days, even if I come to very different conclusions.
Now to my understanding, the grounded parts of religion, the stuff that people actually practice every day to feel connected and help their world go around, have always been more about processes and rituals that provide community comfort, and very little about metaphysics or transcendent knowledge.
I mean, yeah, it does seem to me that healthcare workers are providing a kind of spiritual service, but it's actually in the form of material, daily, hourly care.
Now if you grew up Catholic like I did, you know that very few priests think much at all about doctrine or even God.
A huge chunk of them work primarily as community organizers, following rules, following management practices, deferring to a chain of command, for good or ill.
If you ask them about God, about the sacraments, about the subtler points of some epistle or, you know, papal bull or something like that, they would shrug.
And you would get the impression that they just don't think that much about ultimate questions because they've just got too much fucking work to do.
Of course I'm not saying that the Catholic search for truth or its process is comparable to that of medicine, but I am saying that when it comes to daily practice, I do see that healthcare workers, or at least the ones I've encountered, I see them practicing the same service in calming, treating, and co-regulating that isn't focused on some big story in the sky, but rather in the hard work of making tiny choices using the best information and knowledge available
to make life and death a little more welcoming.
And so maybe healthcare workers in a secular age represent a kind of perfection in this pastoral care in the sense that their humility with regard to ultimate answers is in good faith.
Unlike the Catholic priests I knew, however, they don't turn away from ultimate questions because those questions are for God to answer.
They turn away because they have not yet been answered by the shared effort of medicine.
So, their humility is not based in having been gaslighted by theologians talking about impenetrable mysteries, but rather knowing that knowledge is never complete.
I want to finish by saying something about the stress of navigating COVID through all of this stuff, through medical issues and end-of-life considerations.
It's awful.
I mean, at times it feels intellectually and emotionally unbearable.
When it became clear that my birth family member needed me in the hospital and then at their home, My partner and I had to decide, okay, well, that's it.
I'm not going to be with her or our two boys for Christmas and for 10 days after it's all over because I'll be exposed to the virus.
And I'll be exposed by who?
I'll be exposed by all of these good healthcare worker people who will be helping with the care through their daily activities.
It's just an unavoidable irony.
So, committing to nursing my family member by hand means separating from another part of my family, and this just does not feel right.
There's also this terrible part of the old phobia about the dying person.
The fear around death, the taboo around death is compounded by the virus.
So we wind up talking about the dying person as though they're openly, not just archetypally dangerous, even while the person is dying in a more or less less natural way.
So here's what I think.
I think that some anti-maskers and COVID denialists can foresee and feel all of these contingencies and implications.
I think that they are fully aware of the absurdity of being afraid or concerned about caring for a dying family member.
I imagine they can feel how this goes straight against the apparent natural order of things, how it deprives them of all their coping strategies, whether those strategies come from the primate world of grooming or the religious world of hymns.
I think that somewhere they get it.
But I also think that in their response, in their denialism, that they too are children, unable to accept this as the reality as given, difficult and mysterious.
And because we're not talking about a war or a hurricane, ironically because we can know so much about this disaster while only being able to be defensive against it, there is time and space for them to say, no, this can't be happening, and then to concoct bizarre rationales for saying so.
You know how on the podcast we're always wondering how conspiritualists can believe that the frontline doctors and nurses are lying?
I think it's because they deliver the worst and most ambivalent news in the most plausible way.
I'm talking with doctors and nurses and asking questions about COVID exposure as I go through this whole thing, and they're telling me, well, there are no easy answers here, but the best data says that safety increases when you take precautions X, Y, and Z. And because they can't actually force people to take the precautions, the advice feels not like the police state, but as though it's coming from a moral appeal.
And it makes me wonder that if the anti-masker can't deal with the cognitive dissonance, they will feel ashamed.
And they will act out against the very people who are ultimately helping the most.
I consider myself a sane person.
In some ways, but the main way is that I don't expect reality to conform to my wishes.
And that means that I have to be open to the hard work of risk calculus and that never really ends.
Part of what I hear Charles Eisenstein saying with a lot of poetry and sensitivity is that that risk calculus is making our lives unbearable.
But what I'm seeing through this experience is that no, it's the other way around.
That life itself can be unbearable in these ways.
And that means that you have to work with it and not pretend that some renegade doctor or thinker can relieve me of that responsibility by generating some so-called alternative view that is a majorly immature bypass.
So, I empathize with the COVID denialists.
There, I said it.
Because in some way, at least, they know the score, I think.
But they think the way out of it is to change reality, which is why the most sober reality givers, Fauci, nurses, doctors, are so despised.
It's not right that they do this.
I'm not here for it.
So what I wish most through this holiday of long nights is that everyone can witness or receive the care of a good and trained person and feel the blessing of some of the most complex and hard-won care in the world.
In this long history of caring for bodies, meal by meal, cold washcloth by cold washcloth, pain meds lovingly offered, and the shimmering needle dripping with the vaccine.
And behind these objects of care, which are sometimes fearful and which sometimes produce mistakes, that we're all able to see that beneath the rubber gloves and behind the face shields and masks,
