Brief: RFK Jr Flirts with Body Fascism (w/Natalia Petrzela)
Friend of the pod and historian of American fitness culture, Natalia Petrzela, joins Matthew to shed light on a new development in RFK Jr’s campaign to disrupt the Democratic Party: his recent workout campaign videos from the barbell patio of Gold’s Gym in Venice beach.
Topics include the iconic status of Gold’s, why Bobby Muscles is in Wranglers rather than lycra, how he’s both drawing on and distorting the Kennedy fitness legacy, body mastery as the ultimate American frontier, political pissing contests, the ableist “sweatwashing” of complex health policy problems, the body-shaming of soft, flabby, unpatriotic liberals, and how the whole scene—pumped by biohackers and tech bros—has some alarming political echoes.
Show Notes
Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession
Matthew’s Twitter thread on Bobby Muscles echoing body fascism.
"Go, you chicken fat, go!" — Meredith Wilson
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Hello everybody, I'm Matthew Remsky with a Conspiratuality Podcast Brief called RFK Jr.
Flirts with Body Fascism with special return guest, Friend of the Pod, Historian of American Fitness Culture, Natalia Petrozzella, who will help me shed light on a new development in RFK Jr.' 's campaign to disrupt the Democratic Party.
Yes, we'll be talking about his recent workout campaign videos and political messaging from the benches of Gold's Gym in Venice Beach.
And as I posted to Twitter, the themes he's now made explicit belong to a long tradition of what we call body fascism, and I'll be asking Natalia about those roots, and also how they've been laundered and normalized down through the decades.
One bit of housekeeping before we dive in.
Our book is out.
As you know, it's available wherever you get books.
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
If you're reading it already, we have a humble request that you review it honestly on Amazon or Goodreads to help communicate its value because the book has predictably entered the information war battleground where people who obviously haven't read it are trying to tank it with one-star rants.
So, you don't have to do something this involved, but I will read you this endorsement from Stacey Stukin, a journalist and friend of the pod and expert in all things Guru Jagat.
She says, Over the last several years, as we doomscrolled social media watching the weird unraveling of the wellness community into a conspiratorial freakout, the Conspiratuality Podcast's deep dive analysis was a salve.
In their book, they go a step further, providing important context and histories, positing maybe the Great Awakening was realizing these beliefs were lurking beneath the surface all along.
So, thank you, Stacey.
And, Dr. Petruzzella, welcome back to Conspirituality.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm so glad to be here and congrats on the book.
It's so exciting to see this all come together this way.
I've been happy to see the warm reception of your own book, Fit Nation, in conferences and also it looks like you're doing launches in very brainy fitness venues, maybe with classes alongside the launches all over?
Yeah!
Yeah, I've been fortunate to be invited to lots of different kinds of places.
So yeah, I'm hitting like everything from academic conferences to Dr. Phil to like workout plus conversation.
So you invite me and you, you know, wanting to engage with fitness history, I am happy to make a customized experience.
Well, today I can't really think of anyone better to talk to about the emergence of Bobby Muscles on the campaign trail.
But we can set the stage a little.
I mentioned that RFK Jr.
released personal workout videos to Twitter.
But they're not just personal, they're also laden with history and meaning.
And maybe we can begin with a setting, which is Gold's Gym in Venice, California.
This is an iconic site, right?
Oh, absolutely.
It's known as the Mecca of bodybuilding.
I actually was just there the last time I was in Los Angeles, and if you can picture it, it's this big cavernous gym full of like squat racks and pictures of bodybuilding competitors cover the walls.
It has a big outdoor gym in the back and the front, so very California in that way.
But yeah, it is iconic, a word I usually don't use, but It was opened in 1965, so it really was a key site at the beginning of, like, that bodybuilding culture that gave us Pumping Iron, and it's really retained that status.
You know, I only saw the patio pictures, but I got the sense that it hasn't been updated, renovated.
It's not a swish place.
It has its 60s, 70s vibe still to it.
And that's the point in a lot of ways.
Like, you know, getting right to our topic at hand, it's no accident that RFK Jr.
didn't film himself at, like, a fancy Equinox or a Planet Fitness or a, God forbid, SoulCycle.
Like, Gold's gym with that kind of, like, old-fashioned equipment focused on weightlifting is, I think, in 2023, very consonant with the kind of agro-masculinity that he's trying to cultivate.
I do.
I am.
I do want to jump back to like why that's very much a contemporary association.
But yeah, let's let's stick with that for a sec.
Yeah, let's let's get to it.
But I mean, it goes along with pounding out pushups shirtless, but also in his Wranglers.
Derek tells me that this is not that unusual for California, that he sees a lot of guys coming in in work clothes and taking off their shirts and pumping iron on the patio.
But this is also sort of like a historical throwback, too, don't you think?
Yeah, I think, like, on the one hand, like, Gold's is kind of a special place where you do see, like, guys walking in in work gear to pound out a few sets.
And I think that's, like, part of what, you know, part of the appeal that, like, this isn't some, like, you know, girly man in, like, fancy leggings.
This is, like, a guy who's wearing jeans and is just coming to, like, you know, pound out a few sets, not, like, do a dance aerobics class or something like that.
There's this trope of the so-called mammal, the middle-aged man in Lycra, which is very much not what he's trying to cultivate there.
And so I think that's really important.
It also reminded me, as a historian of fitness, so much of this spread that Ronald Reagan did when he was president about exercise, where he both showed himself working out on a Nautilus machine, which is a weightlifting machine, in a gym, which was very new for a president to do that.
And he showed himself in the same spread in jeans and a shirt, but chopping wood.
And he actually, you know, he makes a joke about how it's like pumping, um, like pumping firewood or something like that.
And I think he wanted to say like, look, I'm still like Teddy Roosevelt.
I've got that rugged masculinity and that strenuous life.
I'm not some like man in an air conditioned high tech gym.
And I think you see a lot of those themes still manifesting in like RFK's self-presentation.
Well, another sort of intergenerational point comes up with his comment that he makes, which is half tongue-in-cheek in the Twitter thread, that he's training for his debate with Biden, who's older.
And this is a debate, of course, that so far the DNC has said is not happening.
Are there precedents in U.S.
presidential campaign history for this kind of pissing contest stuff?
I mean, you know, I would really have to think about that one.
And I feel like if there were such overt exercise challenges, I probably would know about it by now.
But it does remind me, I mean, the most immediate thing that some others have brought up was like, you know, Joe Biden was getting questions in 2019 at some campaign event.
And this guy says, like, aren't you too old to run?
And he's like, you want to do a pushup contest right now.
And you know, so there's like a little bit of that of like, I'll show you that I'm presidentially fit.
But you know, in some ways, it evokes a much longer tradition that we thought it think of as long gone, like Hamilton and Burr, like showing their masculine honor by having a duel.
Even 1856, on the Congress floor, you have this famous caning event where Preston Brooks, who's pro-slavery, beats the hell out of Charles Sumner over this sectionalism argument about slavery.
So this idea of a physical battle to work out political beef between men, of course, is not so new.
But I'm actually not sure if there's ever been anything so overt about working out and a presidential contest.
But perhaps a listener will enlighten me.
Well, maybe, but I do think it is sort of like a storm of perfect circumstances.
I mean, we have Joe Rogan hosting him, we also have his entire sort of wellness contingent that he's carrying forward into the political sphere now, so this would be the moment for it.
But on a more serious note, the keynote statement from Bobby is that quote, this is in the Twitter
thread as president, I will restore America as the global example of health and well being,
not through pills or syringes, but through character and self discipline.
And I will continue to walk the walk and lead by example.
There is a lot going on in that statement.
But what jumps out at you?
Well, the first thing as a historian is the echoes of JFK, right?
So like fitness aside, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is really trading on his name, right?
This is like the American political dynasty.
And what a lot of people seem to forget is that JFK, a big part of his kind of public presentation, was his promotion of physical fitness.
Like, he was the guy who, as president-elect, wrote an article in Sports Illustrated
called The Soft American about the importance of exercise as a way to make America viable in the Cold War
and to kind of get away from the softness that leisure had created through exercise.
It was this huge booster of exercise, promoting physical fitness.
Anyone remembers the presidential fitness challenge that started with him?
So I think he's very much evoking that, that kind of like physical fitness as civic virtue that is, you know, his JFK was not the first one to promote that, but was a very important voice.
But on the other hand, I think it is so sad and disturbing the way that he wraps up the promotion of exercise, which, you know, is I think like a I think that's a pretty good thing.
Most people would say we should probably move more as a country, not only with that moralizing civic message, but also with this dismissal entirely and condemnation of medical intervention.
This idea that it's without pills and syringes, but purely through the sweat of the brow, we will restore our national superiority.
That is really, really disturbing.
And meaningfully, quite at odds with JFK.
Like, JFK was a booster of vaccines.
JFK himself dealt with severe health issues and had a lot of, you know, pills and syringes that he was using himself and was very fit.
So I think that that is a really important kind of, like, mix of historical precedents that are coming through there.
Right.
Now, it's an amazing sort of track to follow from JFK to the present.
I do want to note, though, that Jack's own views on health care were of the time and, you know, not always the most enlightened.
I just wanted to play this for you here because I found him talking about the tragedy of chubby children.
There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have a soft, Chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week's exercise.
I hope that all of you will join and everybody in the United States to make sure that our children participate fully in a vigorous and adventurous life which is possible for them in this very rich country of ours.
So there he is.
Yeah.
Vigga, as a Massachusetts native myself, that accent really takes me back.
No, I'm so glad you played that because I occupy this really weird place, like, knowing this rhetoric very deeply of, like, both, hey, remember when at least, like, the federal government pretended that the state should have a responsibility for getting kids to exercise?
And, you know, that's what I say to some people.
But then there's this whole other world of, like, kind of golden age thinkers that think JFK had the best plan ever For fitness, and I'm like, those fitness plans were, first of all, total cold war, total cold warrior, like propaganda, and also were like the most fat shaming traumatizing thing out there.
The theme song was called Go You Chicken Fat Go.
You should play that in here.
It's an amazing song.
It'll never get out of your head.
Oh my, I've never heard it.
This is something that was like a nationally broadcast known jingle.
Oh yeah, so taking a step back, Eisenhower was the one who founded the Presidential Council on Youth Fitness.
And Eisenhower, having been a general, was very militaristic, really punishing, not fun at all.
JFK comes in, He takes over that committee as president.
He drops the youth and is like, this is presidential council on fitness for everybody.
And he also makes it such that like fitness is fun.
And so he's doing all these photo shoots and one and he has all these like celebrity boosters.
And one of the things that he does is he hires this songwriter to create this jingle called Go You Chicken Fat Go.
And it's distributed all over the country to different PE classes.
There's like, if you look it up on YouTube, there's like a seven minute like extended
version that's actually tells you how to do all the exercises.
So, oh, you sing the song while doing the chicken fat exercises?
Oh, yeah. They count you down. Go you chicken fat, go away.
And then they're like, girls, get in there too.
One to the right, two to the right.
Like it's very, it's like a military marching thing, but fun.
Like my students have a good time of it.
I don't make them do the exercises, don't worry.
But as a historical source.
But I say that, why?
Oh yeah, I say that because yes, absolutely, that clip and all of it, the soft American was, he equated flabbiness of the body with flabbiness of morality, of intellect, of civic commitment, all of that.
So, you know, I would take JFK over RFK Jr., but I'm like not exactly a propagandist for his version of physical fitness.
Well, it goes along with why I reached out to you immediately after seeing these posts, because after I published my own thread about some of the antecedents of strongman leadership that intersect with, you know, the anti-science, back-to-nature values of early physical culture coming out of, you know, the 1920s in Europe, and how those influences in turn were very important in fascist ideology, I got a lot of pushback.
But I mean, what do you think?
Is that an overreach?
I don't think it's an overreach because we know that different fascist governments have made kind of mass exercise and cultivation of the body and that kind of internal self-discipline core to their political project.
And let it be said that one of the reasons that JFK's physical fitness thing never really took off is because all of these people said, this is what fascist governments do.
This is what communists do.
This is totalitarian.
We don't want all these American children marching in lockstep together.
That's not American.
It's not individualistic.
It's veering into sort of like, group collective ideology.
So that's an interesting thing.
In the book, listeners read my book too, Fit Nation, but so that I think is super interesting
and that's always been a reason, paradoxically, that like state-funded fitness hasn't really gotten
a foothold in the United States.
Now, I think though that you're right, that even here in the United States,
when you see the kind of strong men and women, especially in the early 20th century,
who are promoting strength training and fitness at a time when it's really very strange.
Like that is not when everyone agreed, oh, you should go to the gym every day.
You did go to the gym every day.
You were considered a weirdo.
And one of the ways that these promoters actually advance it is with these really noxious ideas.
If you want the white race to survive and us to have more babies than all of these immigrants coming in or these now freed slaves, we need strong bodies and we need to reproduce.
That's why you need to exercise.
And they're very careful, also, at a time when the white collar service economy is expanding, where a lot of white people are working, to say, like, we're not encouraging you to do brute physical labor.
We are very different from mere breakers of stones, like, not like these louts.
This is about cultivated self-discipline and strength training in an intelligent way.
And that is very much tied up with this kind of racial superiority narrative.
And so I think, yeah, there's like the state fascist project, which is kind of there.
And there's that sort of like individual racial project.
But all of this to say is that people and systems make meaning of exercise in different ways over the years.
So I don't think it's only that.
Right.
So, I mean, I'm sensitive on this because I've talked about this before and I ended up inspiring this like major right wing troll army.
including Donald Trump Jr. telling me that like, I think exercise is racist
and I'm trying to get Americans not to exercise anymore.
And I'm like, ah, not really.
There are many, many ways of reducing analysis to garbage like that.
And I'm sorry that you weathered that.
Now, the other thing that's going on with RFK Jr.
's display is that there's an element of the self-made or I would say the self-saved man here in that his exercise habits are implicitly, although he said, I think, some explicit things that link his habits to his own story of overcoming substance abuse.
Now, I'm wondering if this is another sort of strong keynote in the history of American fitness.
I've always said that exercise gets such a hold in the United States and we become this like exporter of commercial fitness culture because it coheres so well with these long-standing American ideologies of bootstrapping and individualism and kind of self-fashioning, right?
Like we believe all those things about wealth and success and happiness but where can you really see it?
Where's the perfect test case for having total control over your destiny?
Your own body!
Right? And so I think that absolutely there's that.
I also think the salvation piece as our discourse about exercise has become more and more moralizing.
This notion that I've saved myself through exercise, you know, also has really powerful roots
on both the right and the left, honestly.
Like you hear fundamental Christians talking about the self-discipline of daily exercise.
There are conservative Christian campuses where you need to commit to an exercise regime
in order to stay enrolled there because it's connected to kind of bodily self-discipline.
Very similar, you see people on the left who've been really disenchanted
with the medical establishment, being told they don't know their bodies,
seeing exercise and yoga and different forms of physical activity as really self-determination.
So I think that that's really important.
What really, and I also don't want to diminish the very real stories that people have of exercise being transformative in their life, whether it's getting them out of addiction, alcoholism, building confidence, etc.
So I believe it.
I'm not saying that's BS.
What really worries me, though, about the way RFK frames that is it is like, To the exclusion of all sorts of other interventions, which we also know are just as, if not more important.
Like, nothing, even as an exercise booster myself, makes me more uncomfortable than people saying, like, oh, well, I started running every day, so now I don't go to therapy.
Or like, now I'm gonna, like, you know, now I don't believe in vaccines.
Like, and that's exactly the kind of package that he's selling.
That might be reflective of his 40 years now in 12-step programs where the model is abstinence or self-reliance purely.
I mean, they're sponsors.
So, you know, I suppose in the Gold's Gym context, that would be your spotter, right?
Who is there to help and encourage you and you're with a community.
But there's no sense that you're going to favor a harm reduction policy that actually mixes the things that you're sort of using as therapy.
You're really going to rely upon one thing and that's yourself, that's your body.
Yeah, no, I think that that's right.
And I think that one of the things which is, you know, kind of troubling is that we are in this good place where pretty much everyone agrees exercise is good for you.
And I think that's really a good thing.
But what I see RFK engaging in here is what I've come to think of as like Sweat washing, which is using this kind of uncritical celebration of exercise to package a whole bunch of really troubling attitudes about everything that you're saying.
Total self-reliance, no harm reduction, anti-medical intervention, anti-vaccine, etc.
And so that I think is really something that we should really think about.
Well, I think this maybe brings us back to the contrast between JFK and RFK Jr.
and their policy differences.
I mean, we have this great series of pro-social projects that even if they're not very enlightened in terms of body positivity or, you know, how, you know, children are going to feel about doing the chicken fat song, His goals, JFK's goals for even pressing towards universal health care are very different from RFK Jr.'
's medical libertarianism.
And so what do you make of that shift?
Like, can he call himself a Kennedy Democrat and basically spend a career denigrating or pushing back against the advances of public health?
I don't think so.
I think that's really insincere and ahistorical.
I mean, exactly as you're saying, like if we start with the phys ed piece that we were discussing here, I mean, that never got the infrastructural roots that it needed, but that was about a public commitment to having access to fitness and recreation for children and for adults, like at the public level, community, not just federal, but also local and state.
JFK obviously came before Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society program, but he was part of that sense that we need to expand government to provide basic needs for, to meet the basic needs of all Americans.
This is not the kind of libertarianism that he's talking about.
And in a moment when polio had just ravaged the United States, he is out there promoting vaccination for polio, which is the number one kind of vaccine issue at that time.
And like I said, in terms of personal example, yes, he's playing touch football in Hyannisport and has his own personal fitness regime, which is disconnected from any kind of public investment.
But he is somebody who is also not at all a critic of medical intervention and actually relied on it, as I said, himself.
Switching gears a little bit, one of the ugly aspects of this flexing is that it has provoked a tsunami of body shaming.
So my Twitter feed, I don't know about yours, but it's full of memes mocking Dr. Peter Hotez, mocking Bill Gates.
Hotez is the vaccine expert who RFK Jr.
invited to debate on Joe Rogan, and he's mocked for being fat, unfashionable, and being allegedly disinterested in his own personal health.
I don't know how that's ascertained.
But what can we learn from this discourse about demeaning stereotypes
as applied to the bodies of liberals?
I think that we can learn that everybody online is a total jerk when it comes to looking at people's bodies
and that that is the lowest hanging fruit.
And so people go for it, you know, without question.
And I mean, let's just start with RFK Jr.
Most of the analysis of that was not at the level of what you and I are talking about.
Most of it is like, he actually looks disgusting.
His reps are like, no, he's no full extension there.
And like, yes, well, I get that.
It reminds me of like when people would share those memes, like zooming in on Trump's butt of like, look at that ugly fat ass.
I'm like, this is not the worst problem.
You know what I mean?
This is not where we should be channeling our energy.
This degrades all of us.
But yes, to your more elevated point about the criticism that Hotez is getting, I mean, absolutely, this fits into a kind of dichotomy between the bookish liberal who doesn't care about his body, is only in his head, is effeminate and doesn't have any of that kind of like
masculine brawn or vigor, is paunchy versus like the true man, right? You know, R.F.K.
Jr. is kind of like ruddy and he's there shirtless and he's like lifting heavy stuff, not just like
books from the library. And so I think that that very much plays into that distinction.
What is so interesting though, sorry to keep bringing us back to history, and the Gold's Gym site is so relevant for this, is that when JFK was promoting all this fitness stuff, the reason that people mocked him was like, oh, you want us to be like some ditzy muscle beach bodybuilder?
You think that American kids should spend time building bulging muscles so they can pose
like these weird sissy men in Venice Beach?
And he was like, no, no, no, no, I'm talking about military calisthenics,
and not that at all.
I'm like, he was mocked.
There's a picture I have in my book someone made, kind of it was like a backhanded compliment,
but it's JFK in a bodybuilder pose, and it says Mr. America,
and that because he was always knocked for that because that kind of showboating,
keep in mind bodybuilding, which is about how you look, not weightlifting, which is about how much you can lift.
But that all of that was seen as like, so low class and so, you know, just like distasteful to everybody.
And so I think it's really interesting that by now we've like moved away from a lot of those associations and Gold's Gym can be the place to kind of peacock a very like brawny, macho, hetero masculinity when it was not that before at all.
Even during the, you know, it wasn't open in the Kennedy era, but Muscle Beach right there was.
What a wild transformation.
And speaking about how much you can lift versus what you look like, there has been speculation just through those pictures and videos about whether RFK Jr.
is using gear, whether it's steroids or testosterone replacement therapy.
Now, of course, we can't know.
I don't really care.
It's been interesting to watch critics and followers bat this one around because critics will say he's a hypocrite for running against Big Pharma while allegedly juicing, but followers don't see any hypocrisy.
What do you think this skirmish tells us about the types of pharma-based therapies that RFK Jr.' 's portion of wellness culture is open to?
You know, I don't really fully understand the rights argument that there's no hypocrisy there.
I mean, is there a coherent argument or they're just saying no?
There was a Twitter thread from a tech guru, I forget his name, who talked about how what's the problem with this form of optimization?
Let's say that he's using steroids.
Why not?
Why not figure out what works best so that we can actually all look exactly the way we want to?
Right, like the kind of biohacking for just using your body as a kind of laboratory.
And that's very appealing, obviously, to a certain kind of Silicon Valley bro.
Oh, absolutely.
Okay.
So I would say, well, you know, I think that part of it is like, you know, probably the Stronger legs that RFK has to stand on are the ones that are anti-mandate as opposed to, like, anti the medicine itself.
And he hasn't actually been so loud about vaccines recently on the trail, right, about the vaccine damage itself, because I think he doesn't want to be tarred as a kind of anti-vax loony, even though there's a demographic that is, like, very enthusiastic about that.
So I wonder if, like, Part of that is like, well, we're, I don't know, it's really hard to square.
I think maybe part of it is also like that he's really locked into this idea that medicine, especially maybe, you know, mental health interventions are about like a kind of laziness and an inability to solve your own problems through will, through hard work, through discipline and determination, using steroids Like that, they're not going to do anything on their own, right?
That's about enhancing someone who's theoretically already kind of doing the work of exercise, so it doesn't fly in the face in the same way that, you know, he might be against taking antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds, which I think some people of that medical libertarianism perspective, they think that that's like a cop-out on on like doing the actual work of character development and
all the rest.
So I think that might have something to do with it.
But I don't think there's a very strong argument for saying that there's not hypocrisy there.
If you're against big pharma, like these are, this is part of that.
Well, except from the angle maybe of health choice advocates.
So I suppose if he could make the argument that, you know, the gear that I'm taking is, has been evidence-based, you know, tested for safety and for results and so on, then that satisfies the same things that I'm asking, you know, childhood vaccines to go through, which of course can't happen in an ethical way.
Well, that's where I think the mandate question comes in, too, right?
Like, if this is something you're doing by your own free will and taking these, you know, growth hormones or steroids, like that's very different from having to go to school.
You can't go to school unless you have this vaccine, these vaccine requirements satisfied.
So I think maybe that that coheres with that, too.
But that piece of it, I'm like, you know, it's a developing story.
I don't have my take on it quite yet.
It is.
I can't imagine him also having the pragmatic approach of, this makes for good media, this makes for good PR.
He is very strong on, you know, I've mastered the podcast medium, just like JFK mastered television and kicked, you know, Richard Nixon's ass.
And if this helps me in this new media landscape to get my message out, then why wouldn't I do it, especially if I'm making the choice?
No, I think that's right, and especially in the space in the podcast world where he is, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, these are guys who are, if not openly championing, definitely not criticizing the use of some of these supplements and performance-enhancing drugs, and who are also very into the kind of brawn-building that he's showcasing there.
I'm just waiting for an MMA video or something of him to come out because I feel like that's
sort of the next frontier.
Actually the gold thing is a little bit old school.
To me that was a shout out to the people who remember the 70s and the 60s and stuff.
But I would say MMA is the next frontier if he's really going to learn into this fitness
as a form of political macho.
Zooming out and back onto policy to finish, it really seems that Bobby's gambit here is
a kind of peak expression of the American paradoxes in healthcare.
Like, first of all, you know, there's a rejection of pharmaceutical interventions, as we've said.
There's a criticism of agency capture.
Then there's the promotion of a universalist message of personal health responsibility, but we're going to stay away from universal health care as a topic of conversation while we claim that the free market will solve all problems.
Is there any way that any of that can make sense together?
Oh, yes.
I mean, exactly what you guys on conspirituality are so good at highlighting.
Like, I think that all of those those sort of like diverse ideas really converge in this kind of conspiracist mindset where you are just one is inherently skeptical of big organizations, of institutions, of the government, telling you to do things or even telling you that they've
got you taken care of, right? And that really the power and the responsibility and
almost the privilege resides in individuals to take control of their own health
and they're either lazy or a dupe if they're gonna rely on a pill or a
policy to fix their And I think that, you know, I've learned so much listening to you guys and reading you guys about the specific ways that that's manifesting in some individuals I've like never heard of.
Some of these people you pull out of Instagram but have like millions of followers.
But then in someone like this who obviously I've heard of, I think it's so interesting to see the way he's really Amplifying and sadly kind of legitimizing by making it now something people are seeing on CNN and on all of these big media, that kind of conspiracist mindset that brings together these diverse strands.
Natalia, we'll leave it there.
But thank you so much for all of your insight and all of your support over these last three years.
And I think it feels like it feels like the conversation that we began a long time ago is now manifesting into something more sort of, I don't know.
I mean, for you, it's for you, it's always been about policy and, you know, Political events.
For us, I feel like we have moved from looking at the strange things happening in a subculture that kind of got accelerated during the pandemic into impacts on the Democratic primaries.
It's like the book has manifested something, and not in a good way, but I'm really grateful that you've been around to help us understand it all.
Oh, likewise.
I think we're all doing our best to understand it and maybe even affect some change, which would be a good thing.
Thank you, Natalia.
Thank you.
Bye.
["The Man Who Killed the World"]
Touchdown.
Every morning.
Ten times.
Not just...
now and then.
I Give that chicken fat back to the chicken and don't be chicken again.
