A tale of two tweets: Dark Horse podcast cohost and “conspiracy hypothesizer” Bret Weinstein took to Twitter twice this month, first dropping a video claiming that RFK Jr becoming Donald Trump’s running mate would make them “assassination proof,” then later floating the idea that an AI Joe Biden really phoned into Kamala Harris’s first conference as the presumptive presidential nominee. Or…is Biden even alive?
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What we need to do is unrig our system and refound the republic.
Peace.
President Trump, the country needs you to join forces with Bobby Kennedy and name him as your vice presidential running mate.
And Bobby, The country needs you to accept.
If you see the wisdom in this, you'll realize it solves a number of problems.
Maybe most importantly, it creates a kind of assassination insurance.
If you run independently and they take you out, they solve a problem from their perspective.
If you run together, they only make their problems worse.
Wow.
Assassination insurance.
Derek, that was Dark Horse podcast co-host Brett Weinstein, whose recent conspiracy theories are the subject of our brief today.
And he posted this short video to Twitter on July 15th.
It's actually before JD Vance became Trump's running mate.
And the video is ostensibly a response to the Trump assassination attempt.
Before Brett got to this bold proposal of RFK Jr.
as Trump's VP pick in the video, he told his followers they had to help save the republic by doing extraordinary things.
He described a media that bends over backwards to avoid reporting the news, institutions that have been weaponized against the public, universities that peddle radical nonsense, and how tax dollars are somehow poured into a hole carved into the universe for reasons that are never explained.
What was your first impression here, especially of this assassination insurance idea?
Well, Brett thinks very highly of himself.
The way he presents that information, Mr. President, you must do this.
It's very on brand for him, but it is kind of tremendous how self-important he always seems in these transmissions.
Before getting to the assassination assurance, I'm jumping ahead a little bit to the video we're going to cover.
You know, since Kamala's announcement That she's running and is the presumptive nominee.
There has just been a flood of racist and misogynistic sentiments about this.
And also just chaos.
It's really tremendous watching what the right is going through.
So it starts with Trump declaring that the Republican Party should be reimbursed because they thought they were running against Joe Biden.
Classic.
This is the most dishonest party that wants to dismantle every facet of government.
And then when democracy doesn't go their way, all of a sudden they're clutching their pearls about the democratic process.
It's kind of amazing.
Of course, there's been many charges of Kamala being a DEI candidate.
JD Vance called her a childless cat lady.
I am wearing my childless cat man shirt.
In honor of that today.
There's the notions that Biden, who's a supposed senile old man, is playing 4D chess by the announcement time, which is kind of tremendous.
Now, that's just transferring over to Kamala straight up by saying she's both out of it and completely nefarious.
And the right is mobilizing around Kamala, courting Palestine sympathizers, even though she did not attend Netanyahu's appearance in Congress yesterday.
And then others on the right are criticizing her for not attending.
So it's complete disarray.
And of course, we have all the conspiracy theorists flowing in.
Ben Shapiro is on it, Matt Walsh, Russell Brand.
We're going to get to that next week's episode in more depth.
But we get to Brett Weinstein and this idea that RFK should run for vice president.
I don't think that His ego would allow him to in the same way that Trump would never step aside for the good of the country.
So I don't think it's going to happen.
At the same time, I could actually see them coming together because masks are completely off and RFK hasn't been exactly unsympathetic toward the idea, especially since the leaked phone call.
So I think in a weird way, Brett taps into something outlandish.
And the overall boundaries of it aren't that crazy, given how insane the Republican Party is and the Independent Party right now.
But This idea that no one would go after them, that they'd have this sort of bulletproof ticket, is just indicative more of Brett's need to go as far outside the bounds of reality as possible to try to get attention.
And obviously it's working since we're discussing that right now.
Yeah, yeah, you'd have assassination insurance because you'd be in the same places at the same time.
So you just see how Brett Weinstein's mind works.
So this is all an appetizer in terms of his more recent social media posting, which advances a fascinating link.
Between how Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and somehow the Trump assassination.
But before we move on to that main course, there may be some listeners who are either unfamiliar or need a little bit of a refresher, like who is Brett Weinstein?
He's the former Evergreen College evolutionary biology professor.
He's famous for being kind of cancelled by a woke social justice student activist and then pocketing a half million dollar settlement on the way out the door while capitalizing on this idea of I've been censored, I've been cancelled, it's so terrible, poor me.
And then since rising that way to online prominence, he's continued this same style of grievance politics like decrying COVID regulations and vaccines, Declaring the lab leak hypothesis true on Bill Maher's show and then backing ivermectin as the cheap, effective solution to the pandemic.
And so I don't know about you, Derek.
I thought his first ever emergency episode on the Joe Rogan experience in which he breathlessly declared that the supposed suppression of ivermectin was the crime of the century.
I thought that was his peak moment of jumping the shark.
Well, it exposed him to a broader audience with Rogan and there's something about power and attention that drives people to constantly crave it.
So if that's where you are jumping the shark and you have to continue to up the ante every time in order to keep eyeballs on you, that's how we land at, you know, him in front of a lake talking about these things or in front of a bunch of Pacific Northwest trees as we'll get to in the next video.
I thought that was like his peak moment of jumping the shark, but then in late 2023, Brett went one better on a podcast, the Dark Horse Podcast, with his wife, Heather Haying.
He proposed that there's something called Goliath, a term that he coined, which is his name for the mysterious secret entity that controls world events and the media, and that they had orchestrated, Goliath this is, Israel allowing the October 7th attacks to happen.
Now, why would they do such a heinous thing?
You may well wonder.
Well, you see, Brett and his inner circle of renegade podcasters were apparently so unified in their anti-vaccine and COVID grievance, because that has never gone away, messaging that Goliath supposedly needed an issue that could divide and distract them.
And a bloody terrorist attack followed by a devastating Israeli retaliation against the Palestinian people somehow seemed like a good strategy.
Now, surely that wildly convoluted and self-important conspiracy theory could never be topped, right, Derek?
Well, if there's anything that I've learned over the last four years of this podcast is that there is truly no bottom.
They can always be topped.
I'm also a little bit upset with you, Julian, though, because you gave this explanation of who Brett is and you didn't mention Eric at all.
Ah, well, you see, Eric is his older brother.
And yeah, he's probably pretty mad, but we're not going to say too much else about him.
OK, so of course he can still top it.
And as you said, of course, there is no bottom.
So on July 23rd, Brett shared a 10 minute clip posted to Twitter that, believe it or not, has gone even further.
He starts off by observing that there are apparently odd events around President Biden disappearing from view.
Leaving the presidential race via what he calls a crude letter, oddly signed, not being seen in public after the announcement.
And then what Brett calls rampant rumors, he's talking about Alex Jones, that Biden was in hospice care or perhaps already dead.
I hadn't heard about the rampant rumors.
Some people argue that we're not out of a pandemic.
I believe we're in an endemic because that's what public health officials have stated.
But all that said, COVID is still killing a lot of people.
It's actually hospitalizing more people in certain states right now.
So the fact that someone who travels around the world and meets Who knows, hundreds of people a day would catch COVID isn't exactly surprising.
And the fact that an 81 year old man who has access to great health care but would also need to go be alone and isolate for a while is not wild.
So, you know, it's either looking at reality or Trusting Brett, who apparently knows the inside take on all of these things.
Yeah, Brett has his ear to the ground.
And as he tells us in this next clip, he has a hypothesis.
My hypothesis in this case is that the many different kinds of evidence that President Biden could not be seen in public Was actually a PSYOP and that that PSYOP had a likely target.
The target would be folks who take the possibility of conspiracy seriously and have been exploring the various potential explanations for the assassination attempt on President Trump online and especially on X slash Twitter.
This, to me, is the cursed legacy of Alex Jones.
Everything that happens has to be a conspiracy.
And immediately, as soon as it happens, you start looking at that.
And, you know, one of the three pillars of the foundational idea of conspirituality is nothing is as it ever seems.
And so therefore, in the attention economy, I mean, moments after Biden released a letter on Twitter saying that he was
dropping out.
Russell Brand was in his backyard filming a video and posting it.
That was just wild.
And it has to be that way because you can't just accept the fact that.
Some people showed Biden polls and fundraising numbers, and he actually did what someone like Trump or anyone on
the right is incapable of doing, which is doing something for the
good of the broader electorate or of the people or of the party
in this case.
Nope, it has to be a conspiracy.
So obviously Brett's mind is going to turn that right away.
Yeah, and he disappeared from view because he had COVID.
There really is a fairly straightforward explanation for this.
Now, for anyone who follows him, they'll know this is really like classic Brett Weinstein.
He loves to pedantically call himself and his friends conspiracy hypothesizers, right?
So that's why he's leaning on, I have a hypothesis.
And in the video, he sort of also leans into the sense that this is scientific, what I'm doing here.
What you'll notice in this next clip, he says that some knowledge of history is really important and Brett's going to help us out with that.
So he repeats the tired trope that the term conspiracy theory was first used in 1967 by the CIA to cynically discredit anyone who didn't accept the findings of the Warren Commission.
On the JFK assassination, because of course things go back to the JFK assassination, he calls this his first piece of evidence.
It's like he's in a courtroom or something as he sits outdoors in front of the lake.
The second piece of evidence then is about how during the election campaign of George W. Bush, Journalist Dan Rather presented a document on 60 Minutes that reported on Bush's dereliction of duty whilst in the National Guard and the letter actually turned out to be a forgery and so Dan Rather lost his job.
It's kind of a famous episode.
We'll pick it up from there because what Brett has to say next as his second piece of evidence is that there's a twist in the tale.
That was too complex to rescue Dan Rather.
Dan Rather took the heat For having published a document that in retrospect he should have known was a forgery, even if what it reported was the truth.
Now, if you've tracked that whole story as I've described it here, what you'll come to understand is that somebody figured out a way to take a fact, which was that George W. Bush was not serious as a pilot when he was in the National Guard and didn't show up for work, A hypothesis comes before a theory.
So is Brett saying that he is actually taking more insane ideas in order to put them forward?
Because at least a theory has been ideally tested a little bit.
of this.
A hypothesis comes before a theory.
So is Brett saying that he is actually taking more insane ideas in order to put them forward?
Because at least the theory has been ideally tested a little bit.
So his thing is just like, no, fuck it.
Let's just go forward at stage one.
I guess that's one way of interpreting it.
I mean, this is so nuts, right?
It's like, OK, so we look at Dan Rather and Dan Rather had this document that was given to him that was forged.
But the forgery is actually an attempt to hide the true document.
And so they make the truth go away by creating this elaborate hoax.
And that's what's going on here with Biden.
So Brett goes on to say that the mysterious case of Biden not being seen in public is similar to the Dan Rather situation.
He lists the following clues, which he says they're all too easy to discover, almost like they've been put there for us like breadcrumbs.
There's the phone call that Biden supposedly had with Harris about stepping down, supposedly according to Brett.
And that was clearly off, like just obviously right.
And then she stumbles apparently in the video and seems to indicate that it's actually a recording, not a live phone call, but then
she recovers and corrects herself.
And that's fishy, almost like she's trying to mislead us.
Then there's his signature on the letter, which is obviously not consistent with other
signatures of his. There's no letterhead.
And him posting it on Twitter with no accompanying photograph or witness or press conference.
All of this, according to Brett, is carefully crafted to create wild speculation, conspiracy
hypotheses about why the president could not be seen in public. And what did it all mean?
The hypothesis is that all of those who are in a mindset to be exploring alternative explanations for events that we are currently witnessing in real time were lured into exploring the evidence here, which had been arrayed in a way that the dots would inevitably be connected, and then President Biden could emerge, and it would embarrass all of the people who had speculated about his coming demise, and it would cause a
A withdrawal of trust amongst those who had been listening to the many highly relevant critiques and explorations that have gone on surrounding the near assassination of President Trump.
Are you beginning to see the sober brilliance of this analysis yet, Derek?
I have a conspiracy hypothesis.
The dozen to 20 text messages I'm getting every day to donate to Kamala Harris actually all go to Brett's Patreon page.
It is all a psyop that he is part of to try to get me to sign up for his Patreon.
Do you think that one will land?
I can't prove that it's not true, and I don't want to discredit someone who's willing to think out of the box.
So, you know, we should look at it.
We should look at it.
We should look into this.
So Brett explains further here that this sophisticated psyop was not a distraction.
It was not people just imagining things.
It was people connecting dots that were placed there for them to be connected.
He describes it as being a trap and he says it was like, get in the van.
I've got some candy.
So bad.
All right, what's the payoff for this elaborate, you know, double reverse 5D chess psyop?
When Biden appears again, not dead and in relatively good health, it will be used as evidence that all of those who think about collusion and conspiracy are prone to wild fantasies and epiphania or seeing meaningful connections that are not really there.
But now Brett once again has to go one step further.
I would also point out that if this was a sophisticated PSYOP, some element of fifth generation warfare, that it is a clever operation, but that it implicates anybody who was in on it in, I guess it wouldn't be treason because presumably they're not working for a foreign government, but I guess it would be sedition because In portraying the president as incapable of being seen in public and possibly sedated at the end of his life,
This functioned as an invitation to our enemies abroad and to those who threaten our allies that this would be an excellent moment to take advantage of chaos in the American governmental and political landscape to get the jump on us while the Commander-in-Chief was incapacitated and powers had not been transferred to anyone else.
It's a double edged sword.
Mr. Bobby Kennedy, sir, you really should be Trump.
You should be running with Trump and allow my scintillating analysis to present me as your possible Secretary of State when you get in.
It gets really hard to follow all the threads.
You had originally sent this to me as the full two minute clip, and I had to cut it in half to tackle both.
But as I was listening to it now, live, as we're talking, it made me think about the conspiracy theories that came up immediately after Trump was shot.
And, you know, we were texting, I was texting probably a dozen people at that time.
That's what happens in these moments where you don't know what's going on, is there's a lot of room.
The difference being that most of us sit back and kind of wait to see what's going on, whereas some people just jump onto Twitter to immediately pontificate like that.
But what's interesting about that instance is just yesterday, Christopher Wray comes out and says, we can't Well, we're not sure if it was a bullet or shrapnel that hit Trump.
And given that the size of the bandage and the damage to the ear is not well known, and I've seen munitions experts talking about what an AR-15 bullet would do to an ear, you know what?
This is a situation where we should actually see what's happening.
And, you know, ultimately it doesn't matter.
He was definitely shot at.
It was tragic.
There's too much gun violence.
We know all of these things.
But I'm just talking about a particularity in a moment that actually takes some time and honesty to unpack.
And what Brett is doing here with this whole idea that Biden might either be dead or is playing some 5D chess is so disingenuous because this is a case where there are moving factors going on in terms of Understanding that he might not be the best person to run for the Democratic ticket right now, that plays into it.
But the man was run down.
We knew that.
He was sick a few weeks ago at the debate and he got COVID.
And sometimes things are the simplest, the simplest answers are what's reality.
And the fact that I listened to a minute like that, and there are probably five or six different things we have to unpack just to understand that minute, just shows you how How far they move away from the simplest explanation in order to just keep talking and to keep attention focused on the fact that they're really just trump stands.
Yeah.
You know, Occam's razor is often translated as the simplest explanation is probably the accurate one, but it's actually slightly more complicated than that.
What it really says is don't needlessly multiply sort of unknown hypotheses.
Don't keep stacking unknowns upon unknowns because where you end up is going to be like
out on a limb in nowhere land.
And so what do we have here?
The phone call didn't seem legit.
The signature looks a little fishy.
The man's disappeared from view while he has COVID.
Sedition.
Somebody has to go to jail.
It's like, what are you talking about?
And he's also starting from a correct place in the understanding that the number of people who would have to keep a conspiracy theory silent in order for it to be effective.
I mean, there were studies done on this after 9-11, and the number turned out to be like four to five thousand people who would have to have been in on it.
And the idea that None of them would have come forward and talked about it.
It's just absurd.
And when you're talking about supposed conspiracies at the presidential level like this, you're also talking of numbers at least in the hundreds.
So it really just seems inauthentic to me, even as a case study or as a use case that he's trying to present.
And it reminds me of Sam Harris's book, Lying, where he talks about Once you start lying, you have to keep track of all those lies, and liars always eventually out themselves because they create such tangled stories that even they lose themselves in it.
And that's the feeling I get when I watched the full 10-minute Brett video.
Well, can I just say I'm delighted that you've mentioned both Sam Harris and 9-11.
Let's have some fun in the comments.
Okay, let's wrap up with the last half of that last part of Brett's Twitter moment.
Now, I do think we need to look into this and figure out whether or not this was an operation.
If it was, if Kamala Harris was knowingly participating in this, speaking to an AI rendering of the president or a recording.
If her stumble was practiced, then she too is implicated and is obviously unfit to serve.
So let us please think Outside the box, we are up against an enemy that appears to be back on its heels, but it is an enemy with a very deep toolkit going back
At least as far as 1963.
And it is very important that we not underestimate them.
I am not adding in seagulls.
Just so you know, if you're not watching this on YouTube, if you're listening on your phone, he is he is recording at a lake.
Yeah, it goes back at least to 1963.
And I'm expecting Robert Duvall to come out of that helicopter and say, I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Did you notice when he said, if she practiced stumbling, that actually doesn't make sense because his hypothesis here is that she stumbled during the talk, which revealed that it was actually an AI.
And then he says, if she practiced stumbling, why would you practice stumbling?
Why would you purposely reveal it?
Or was it like a little shibboleth that like Brett found that she had put in there for someone to uncover?
That's what I mean about all of those steps involved.
It just doesn't make sense.
That's the hypothesis.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
That's the hypothesis.
The hypothesis is all of this was carefully placed as breadcrumbs or dots to be connected because they wanted to elicit conspiracy theories that they could then Rubbish by having Biden come out and then all of the people advancing the conspiracy theories would look bad so that their other conspiracy theories would not be taken seriously.
I'm just not a good conspiracy hypothesizer.
A word I can't fucking say, obviously, because that was one step too far for my brain to even tolerate.
