On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson sponsored a congressional panel entitled "American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion." Unfortunately no actual health or nutrition experts were invited. Instead, the four-and-a-half hour event featured speakers like Robert F Kennedy Jr, Jordan Peterson, Jillian Michaels, Vani Hari (Food Babe), and a host of other influencers and contrarians. Derek investigates all the science that wasn't told—and all the products and services that were sold.
Note: Derek meant to compare aluminum fear-mongering with thimerasol (organomercury) but instead conflated them. Both are safe at the level used in vaccines as adjuvants, though most thimerasol was removed due to public outcries and an abundance of caution. Links added to Show Notes.
Show Notes
Mandela Barnes Says Sen. Ron Johnson 'Bought and Paid for' by Big Pharma
The Congressional "American Health and Nutrition Roundtable" was an egregious display of anti-science disinformation
MEDIA ADVISORY: Sen. Johnson to Lead Roundtable Discussion: “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion”
Thimerosal and Vaccines
Adjuvants and Vaccines
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My name is Jillian Michaels.
I am a health advocate, a fitness expert, and a nutritionist.
I have no political alliance because health transcends partisanship and ideology.
Here's the thing.
Jillian calls herself a nutritionist.
She actually has a certified nutrition and wellness consultant certification with the American Fitness Professionals and Associates, otherwise known as AFPA.
I did an AFPA fitness trainer certification a number of years ago when I was working in the industry.
I also did one with ACE.
They are basically meaningless.
There are some standards, but they're online certifications.
People usually get them to boost their resume.
I had been teaching group fitness for almost a decade before I even got these
as I was moving on to other certifications and I just used it to pad my resume.
To be able to call yourself a nutritionist in America is unfortunately way too easy.
There are no national standards.
Unlike most healthcare professions, there's nothing standardized across the nation to be able to say you're a nutritionist.
It's usually state by state.
And the problem is, regulations vary pretty widely.
Some states have no minimum education requirements at all to say you're a nutritionist.
Other states will require a master's degree or something like passing an exam, like an online certification.
Many states fall somewhere in there.
Some require supervised experience.
Some require ongoing education.
There's a non-licensed practice requirement in some states.
Point being, it's very easy to say you're a nutritionist.
It's not so easy to say you're a dietician or registered dietician, which actually does have standards.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because Jillian was one of about a dozen quote-unquote experts who presented at a congressional panel this past Monday.
It was called American Health and Nutrition, A Second Opinion.
It was sponsored by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
And the biggest issue that I have with this is that there were no dieticians on the panel, which seems pretty suspect if you're going to be in front of Congress presenting about nutrition.
But if you know anything about Ron Johnson, or if you know anything about most of the guests on this panel, You'll quickly realize the second part of Jillian's clip there is completely false.
This entire event was political, it was ideological, and interestingly, as I'll get to at the very end of this brief, Jillian was the only one who presented an ideology that went against everything else there, and I think she did it by mistake.
I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspiratuality Brief, The Actual Biggest Losers.
Ron Johnson put together this panel after listening to a Tucker Carlson podcast.
I'll get to that.
But it's pretty rich because the entire spectacle was an anti-pharma, anti-food industry charade and I believe propaganda event because almost every speaker who is on the panel is in some way monetizing what they're raging against.
Now, for Ron Johnson himself to be holding this big anti-pharma, anti-food industry event is pretty rich because among his donors, recently in the 2024 cycle, two of his biggest donors were Johnsonville Sausages, who are the largest sausage brand by revenue in the U.S.
and is very much a processed food manufacturer.
The irony being that every speaker raged against processed and ultra-processed foods, even though half of them sell things like energy bars and protein powders and highly, highly processed foods themselves.
And then there's Klondike Cheese, who sells lots of flavored yogurts and cheeses, which are also processed.
Now, I don't have anything against sausage or cheese, but again, this is someone who is sponsoring an event where the devil incarnate, and literally that's what they were called at times, is the food industry.
Johnson is the sixth richest member of Senate with a net worth of about $39.2 million.
And for him to sit there and pretend as if he cared about the healthcare system and all of these problems that the panelists were bringing up is pretty rich.
For example, he appeared on the Brian Kilmeade show a number of years ago when he told the Fox host, when you start punishing the pharmaceutical industry, you're going to have less innovation.
You're going to have fewer life-saving drugs.
That's not a good thing.
Now, while he was chairing the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in 2018, he actually declined to subpoena Teva Pharmaceuticals because the Democrats were leading an investigation about that drug maker's role in the opioid epidemic.
A few months later, that very company donated both to Johnson's campaign and his affiliated political action committee.
Johnson opposes Obamacare.
He has voted to repeal or defund it.
He opposes expanding Medicaid, which of course provides health care for lower income people.
He opposes federal funding for public housing on Section 8 vouchers.
He wants to restrict eligibility for SNAP, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program.
He opposes expanding unemployment benefits.
He wants to cut federal support to alleviate poverty.
He would like to deregulate agencies that oversee quality of food production facilities because, of course, without federal inspections, foodborne illnesses become more common.
Finally, he is a MAGA Trump supporter, and if Trump wins this November and Project 2025 is implemented, things like the FDA and the CDC are going to be completely gutted.
Now, his main expert on this topic is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who kind of led the procession and invited many of the guests that were involved.
Which is also pretty rich because he's angling for a cabinet position in the Trump administration.
And the entire umbrella that this event was presented under was his MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, as if Trump is actually going to support what was presented in this event.
Ironically, Trump himself was recently asked about his own eating habits and whether he would support healthier foods, and his response was, I eat burgers, but the good burgers.
Now if you were going to hold a panel on health and nutrition in America and you wanted actual expert input, who would you invite?
Friend of the pod, Dr. Andrea Love, published on her Immunologic Substack the day that I'm recording this, and she gave a list of The proper experts you would have, toxicologists, molecular biologists, food scientists, regulatory experts, plant biologists, chemists, biomedical scientists, farming experts, microbiologists, dieticians, nutrition scientists, medical historians, epidemiologists.
It's a pretty good list.
None of the people involved have any of those qualifications.
They're predominantly influencers.
I'll get to the list in a moment, but let's listen to Ron Johnson explain a little bit about the event.
Those who seriously question the current orthodoxy or offer alternative treatments and approaches are generally ridiculed, vilified, and cancelled.
With concerted effort made to destroy their reputations and careers.
We all witnessed this during the pandemic, as eminently qualified and respected doctors who had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients using cheap, generic drugs were fired, sued, and either lost their medical licenses and certifications, or had them seriously threatened.
Unfortunately, this intimidation works.
As most doctors remain silent in order to maintain their good standing in the medical establishment.
Yeah, so if you're going to have RFK Jr.' 's spearhead event, you know there's going to be anti-vax talking points.
And in fact, that was presented often throughout the event.
I want to be clear here before I go on.
We often talk on the podcast about something that Naomi Klein mentioned in Doppelganger, which is that influencers often get the feelings right, but the facts wrong.
And I would apply that heuristic to this entire panel.
Someone had said in the comments on one of my posts this week about the panel that they felt that a number of the people speaking were well-meaning, and I actually agree with that.
We do have serious healthcare and health problems in America.
We do have problems with obesity.
We do have problems with chronic disease.
And we also have a healthcare system that is for-profit, which I talk about often, and I think that's an absolutely terrible system if you want to keep people healthy.
I'm not against for-profit medicine, provided there is a socialized medicine layer which everyone has access to.
500,000 people roughly every year declare medical bankruptcy in America, which is the richest nation in the world.
That should absolutely never happen.
And these people on the panel are not wrong when they talk about increases in diabetes, increases in obesity and chronic disease.
My problem here, again, is that they're all speaking about things that they're not actually trained to talk about.
And they're also selling products and services that exploit the very problems that they're bringing up.
I'll give a few examples as we go on.
But I really just want to point out that As frustrated as I am with the healthcare system, and as much as I appreciate all the incredible people who work within that healthcare system, we can't be blind to the fact that we do actually have health problems here.
My feeling, and a lot of the people that I talked to in that list of experts that I ran down that Dr. Andrea Love offered, and I'll link to her piece in the show notes here, is that you can solve these systemic problems with systemic solutions, but that falls under the purview of public health.
And one thing, the through line through these influencers and quote-unquote experts that were on this panel is that they are all in some way selling individualized solutions like supplements or continuous glucose monitors or programs.
They're not really concerned with actual public health solutions.
And I often get pushback from people when I say these things who will then say it's up to the individual to be healthy.
I'm not against individual health solutions.
Such as trying to eat healthy, trying to limit processed foods and ultra processed foods, trying to cook with whole foods as much as possible.
Exercise.
I taught group fitness for 17 years.
I am a huge fan of movement.
I also understand there are multivariate reasons for obesity.
There are many reasons for chronic diseases.
There are reasons why people can't always eat as healthy as they want to or exercise
as much as they want to.
It's one of the ironies of right-leaning politics right now.
You have this depopulation frenzy that's going on with people like Elon Musk who say, we
need to populate more and Trump has taken that on himself.
It's part of the pro-abortion argument.
You have this idea that people should be having kids all the time, but then you're saying,
hey, be as healthy as possible.
Now I am not a parent, but I am friends with many and I know how hard it is for them to
Cook and to exercise and to get in their healthy habits when they're also trying to raise children.
So that fundamental contradiction in what this messaging is is mind-boggling.
But again, that's not what really is being presented here.
Unfortunately, most of the people on this panel are also millionaires.
And I am not against making money in any capacity.
I mean, I don't like hypocrisy and that's sort of what I'm pointing out here.
But if you're a successful person, or even if you come from a successful family,
that's all good.
But when you have the means to always be healthy, and then you're yelling at other people
about why they can't be healthy, and you never actually understand that contradiction,
I think a lot of what we're gonna hear today in these clips and what we're experiencing
with this broader wellness influencer industry is exactly that.
People treat their own anecdotes as if everyone should have access to the things they have access to.
And that is simply bullshit.
I also want to flag that next Thursday, our main feed episode, episode 226, is also going to focus on this panel.
Specifically, we're going to focus on the sort of blood and soil and nationalist themes that were involved, especially as presented by RFK Jr.
and KC Means.
We'll be talking about the spiritual principles involved as well.
Today, I mostly want to focus on the health claims.
But let's go back to Ron Johnson and what led him to putting together this panel in the first place.
The catalyst for this event was an interview I saw with Dr. Casey Means and her brother, Callie.
When it comes to nutrition, we all face the same daunting variety of opinions, guidelines, and diet recommendations.
Dr. Means does an excellent job of simplifying the basic concept of how our bodies convert food to energy.
So that's where Johnson is referencing Tucker Carlson because it was Casey and Kaylee Means on Carlson's podcast.
I covered this in my last brief on this feed.
It was called Ultra Processed Pseudoscience.
We also covered that entire podcast in episode 223, Tucker Carlson's Toxic Cleanse.
I'll just say now that Casey Means is an MD from Stanford, but she never completed her residency, and she was focused on head and neck surgery.
So for Johnson to claim that she's a metabolic expert, which is what she's parading as, her last book that she co-wrote with Kaylee is called Good Energy is all about the idea that something like 90% of disease is metabolically related.
There are a lot of problems with this book.
There are extreme recommendations.
For example, there are very overly strict dietary restrictions.
She advocates for eliminating sugars and processed grains, which is really unrealistic for a lot of people.
It's also a way to trigger eating disorders.
openly talked about my orthorexia before and it comes from these sort of recommendations.
The idea that food, as she explicitly says, is either good or bad.
Toxicity was also brought up a lot during this panel.
And the idea that some food is inherently toxic is also very problematic and leads to eating disorders.
There was a lot of advice that lacked scientific evidence in her book.
It's very gimmicky in terms of the language.
It was very wellness influencer and that comes across even here in her presentation at this panel.
She presents a lot of information in a complex way that just like this panel, if you're not paying attention and you don't know the science, it's going to seem right without actually being right.
And again, there's just a conflict of interest.
She is railing against the systems that she says creates metabolic disease, but her company Levels sells continuous glucose monitors, which are made for diabetics, and she's selling them to the biohacking community.
There's also a lot of controversial terms in her book.
She invokes leaky gut often, which is not a real diagnosis.
Don't confuse that with actual intestinal permeability, which is a problem for some people and it creates inflammation in the body.
And there are ways to work with that, including fiber and some targeted pre and probiotics.
But those aren't going to last very long.
There are dietary changes that are usually required when you're dealing with intestinal permeability but that is not leaky gut and that is not what it is presented as in this wellness jargon.
I'll get back to her.
First, I want to just go into a few of the guests, the experts that were involved.
There was Vani Hare, who is known as the food babe.
She built her name as a food activist that actually exploited people's ignorance of chemicals.
It's called chemophobia.
This fear is unwarranted fear of chemicals.
In order to decry products.
Her time was mostly spent in this panel running down her resume of companies that she got to comply with her demands.
But I found this quote by David Gorski back in 2014 about her work.
Quote, companies live and die by public perception.
It's far easier to give a blackmailer like Hari what she wants than to try to resist or to counter her propaganda by educating the public.
She was joined by her good friend Jason Karp, and he's the founder of Hugh Chocolate and now Human Co.
He spent his time screaming about ultra-processed foods.
But incredibly, he sold Hugh Chocolate to Mondelez in 2021 for $340 million.
Now, Karp is formerly a hedge fund manager.
He knows how to run companies, obviously.
But I find it ironic that he's yelling about processed foods, and Mondelez owns Nabisco, Sour Patch Kids, Oreo, Ritz, Chips Ahoy, hundreds of snack brands.
Human Co., as well as Current Company, also produces processed foods, and yet he posts things on social media like, quote, the energy that Taylor Swift fans have for her music I have for gluten-free foods without seed oils.
And yeah, seed oils were involved in this panel as well.
You have Courtney Swan, who positions herself as an integrative nutritionist.
She actually got her certificate from an alt-med university.
Her site she's known for is Real Foodology.
Almost Luke's story level in terms of what she's selling.
Supplements, beauty products, processed foods like energy bars, gummies, chips, bulletproof bars, salad dressings.
It's incredible how the processed foods that these influencers sell don't count against the processed foods they're really mad about.
There's Max Lugavere.
He's an optimizer and supplement salesman who cosplays as a science journalist.
He actually blames veganism for an uptick in dementia and mental health problems.
I found Jonathan Jerry, friend of the pod over at McGill University.
He wrote about Max in 2018.
Quote, Max Lugavere appears like a proponent of common sense solutions to ill health.
Better nutrition, exercise, and sleep.
But it's only when you start to trust him that he reveals himself to be a naive believer in anything that has a study behind it.
His book has received endorsements from people like Dr. Oz and functional medicine proponent Mark Hyman.
And this company is telling.
As I said, we're going to be covering the larger picture of this event on Thursday.
I want to spend the rest of the time running down some of the clips from other panelists and responding briefly.
So let's turn to a short one by RFK Jr.
Most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food, most of the school lunch program, about 70% of food stamps, Our processed foods.
He's not wrong.
But this is the problem with this entire event.
He doesn't explain why that is.
A couple weeks ago, John Oliver did an entire episode on school lunch programs.
And he talked with some people who have to design these programs that could be, in some schools, like 500 meals a day.
The majority of school districts have to work with a budget of under $2 per meal.
That's why they use processed foods.
In fact, they had a chef, I know Jamie Oliver had done this years ago, and they had someone else who was also a famous chef whose name I'm forgetting right now.
tried to design meals that were a whole foods based for under $2 and it's nearly impossible.
You can't do it on a regular basis.
So the reason that kids are getting a lot of processed food is because the governmental support to increase the budget
for kids to get better food is not there.
Now, does RFK offer that as a solution?
No, of course not.
He just yells about the fact that they're mostly processed foods.
Is that RFK's fault?
No, not really.
But he's sitting two feet from a man who opposes increasing budgets for SNAP and school voucher programs or school lunch programs.
So yeah, you got someone you can turn to.
He doesn't do that.
Next.
This is one of my favorites.
Here's Ron Johnson introducing Michaela Peterson, who is Jordan Peterson's daughter.
Hawaiian diet is a therapeutic and plant-free ketogenic diet that can be used to treat autoimmunity and psychiatric disorders.
No.
No, it can't be.
That's never been proven.
Any sort of evidence of this diet helping people, which is an animal-based ketogenic diet, has been done in rats or in vitro.
There's no proof of that.
And for him to present it as if it's true is, again, just mind-boggling, but this entire four and a half hour panel that I watched was filled with shit like this.
Just pure misinformation.
So if you're not aware, Michaela Peterson, her star really rose because apparently she had chronic health conditions.
She says she healed it with an all-meat diet over the course of many years, which means Jordan Peterson then took up the diet and said he had miraculous recovery from it as well.
Michaela is a popular YouTuber and podcaster now, and if you're wondering if she monetizes those properties by selling tons of supplements, you would be correct.
But let's hear Michaela speak for herself.
We're currently encouraged to consume from the food pyramid and our doctors.
Our diets damage our gut barrier, which causes particles from the gut to leak into the bloodstream.
The food pyramid was replaced in 2011 by my plate.
McKellar wasn't the only one to use the term food pyramid in the present tense as if it's still a thing.
It hasn't been a thing for 13 years.
And again, there you hear leaky gut coming into play, which is, again, not a thing.
Also, when you say we're, you're Canadian.
I don't know the guidelines they have in Canada, but not sure why you're including yourself when you're talking about the American guidelines.
If you're wondering, though, was Jordan Peterson at this event, because obviously a psychologist with right-leaning tendencies would definitely have things to say on nutrition, of course he should be there.
Well, you're in luck.
What is the most logical, upward-aiming scientific approach to the problem of American health?
Identification of diet as the potential common mechanism.
Radical simplification of that diet.
Analysis of programmatic variation of that simplified diet as food items are added in by category, one by one.
Those with chronic and tractable illnesses could thus well be placed by default on a plant-free ketogenic diet for the several mere months that it would take to assess the consequences.
This is a revolutionary but manageable proposition.
Before it becomes a generalized standard of care, however, the relevant studies should be done.
We have more than sufficient anecdotal data pertaining to the positive effect of such simplified diets.
I appreciate the qualifiers, but he's not designing a very good study.
If you're just going to take people with a variety of either mental health or inflammatory diseases and just put them on a diet, that's not how studies are done.
You would need a control group.
And you would need to blind it, but he's not really thinking about that.
He spends 25 minutes talking.
It was so draining because the first 10 minutes were just him listing his credentials and attacking science as a discipline and saying it's all being done wrong.
It had big Brett and Eric Weinstein energy to him.
And again, why the fuck was he there in the first place?
Well, it's really good for social media.
I've been sharing it, so there's that, I guess, for Ron Johnson.
Let's move back to KC Means.
I want to play a clip here that really encapsulates the overall message that was presented at this event.
Metabolic dysfunction is largely not a genetic issue.
It's caused by toxic American ultra-processed industrial food, toxic American chemicals, toxic American medications, and our toxic sedentary indoor lifestyles.
I told you you'd be hearing about toxicity.
Casey is a very good speaker.
Matthew brought this up when we covered the Tucker Carlson episode because she's a little different than a lot of the ways that wellness people present, although the language still slips in.
She's done this thing before, I'm going to play a clip next of her doing it, where she talks about all the things that she wasn't taught in medical school.
Now, I made a video, I went and I looked at Stanford's curriculum and within the first two years, there's a curriculum of like 15 different categories that contradicts when she says, I wasn't taught these things.
If she made it through four years of Stanford Medical School and then four of the five years of her residency, she would definitely have been taught the things that she says she was never taught, but it's for affect.
It's not for actual good information and that's the problem.
She's very good at presenting it and seeming like she's taking the side of the common person.
So let's listen to an example.
I did not learn that 1 billion pounds of synthetic pesticides are being sprayed on our food every single year.
99% of the farmland in the United States.
is sprayed with synthetic pesticides, many from China and Germany.
These invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction, Alzheimer's, dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, female infertility, and more, all by hurting our metabolic health.
She always ties it back to metabolic health.
Very good salesperson, I'll give her that.
Those links are not strongly correlated.
There are some study design problems.
I know I get into shit with people about pesticides and glyphosate.
Most of the science that I've read shows in low qualities that things like glyphosate are safe, but there are also cases of people who work directly with those chemicals who are getting more of them having health problems.
I think it should be studied.
I think it should continue to be studied because it is important and no chemical is benign.
What they're doing is extrapolating from weak data and making grandiose statements about it.
But that doesn't mean there aren't potential contraindications or problems with any sort of chemical,
which is called chemophobia.
And it very much tracks with the seed oil argument.
If you're eating a lot of ultra processed foods with some people are, seed oils are a component
as is high sugar, for example.
Eating too many of these products is problematic for a host of reasons, but what is going on here is this blunt hammer that's being taken to the products as if by themselves all the time, they're necessarily toxic
and that's just not true.
You might've caught something else in there and this next clip will really bring it home.
I didn't learn that heavy metals like aluminum and lead are present in our food, our baby formula,
personal care products, our soil, and many of the mandated medications like vaccines
and that these metals are neurotoxic and inflammatory.
Yeah, the way that the anti-vax rhetoric just seeps into everything here.
There's no lead in vaccines.
Sometimes trace levels of lead have been found because it was contaminated in some manner.
Just like the lead in the soil, sometimes there's lead in the soil or foods naturally and because of industry there are low levels and sometimes there are toxic levels and that's a real problem.
Aluminum, of course, is going back to thimerosal, which is used as an adjuvant in some vaccines.
It was mostly phased out of most vaccines because of the fervor around Andrew Wakefield's falsified study in the 1990s.
As of 99 or 2000, most aluminum was out.
But you see how it's just positioned to just remind you of that unnecessary fear that is throughout the entire 15 or 20
minutes that she's talking.
Speaking of unqualified to speak on the topic you're talking about, let's turn for one more
clip here before we close with the Jillian Michaels clip to Casey's brother, Kaylee Means,
who is not certified in anything health related. An employee of Rockefeller's was tasked to create
the Flexner Report, which outlined a vision for medical education that prioritized interventions
and stigmatized nutritional and holistic remedies.
Peace.
Congress affirmed the Flexner Report in 1910 to establish that any credentialed medical institution in the United States had to follow the Halstead Rockefeller intervention-based model that silos disease and to downplay viewing the body as an interconnected system.
It later came out that Dr. Halstead's cocaine and morphine addiction fueled his day-long surgical residencies, and most of the medical logic underlying the Flexion Report was wrong, but that hasn't prevented the report and the Halstead-Rockefeller engine-based brand of medicine from being the foundational document that Congress uses to regulate medical education today.
You might remember earlier I quoted Dr. Andrea Love saying medical historians would be an appropriate expert to be on this panel.
And this is why.
There's so much wrong in that brief quote.
Abraham Flexner was not employed by Rockefeller.
He was employed by Andrew Carnegie.
But Rockefeller is a bigger demon in the American mind and because Carnegie and Rockefeller both funded health care initiatives at the turn of the 20th century.
Kayleigh just feels okay to just confuse those.
The Flexner Report did not prove to be wrong.
And it is not used by Congress to mandate medical organizations.
What it was, was a survey of the medical schools at the time around 1906 to 1910 when this report was going on.
And there was no mandate.
Some colleges would certify doctors in two years, some in three years.
I think Johns Hopkins was the first to say, we're going to do three years no matter what.
And a lot of people were like, well, that's too long.
If I can get it for cheaper for two years over at this school, I'm going to go there.
And that was a real issue.
When he says that it was focused on not treating the person as a whole, person or body, that's also not true.
It was looking at the very roots of evidence-based medicine and they were trying to set standards
for evidence-based medicine and keep schools that were teaching it in business
while saying the schools that weren't actually living up to the standards had to be shut down.
In fact, Flexner only wanted something like 30 schools to remain in existence and Congress did step in and they said, no, there has to be at least one school per state.
So it ended up being almost 70 schools that were allowed to remain.
Now there were problems with the Flexner report.
One of them was that it shut down women's colleges.
And believe it or not, in the 1880s and 1890s, there were entire colleges for women to become medical professionals.
And one of the unfortunate consequences of the Flexner Report is it shut a number of those down.
And that long drought of women being involved in medicine was primarily due to that report.
It also targeted schools in black areas and minority areas that were also shut down because those schools weren't up to the standards and that also limited minority participation in healthcare.
And so there were very real problems with this report.
But again, that's not what he was pointing to.
Finally, when he said it shut down holistic types of healing at the time, that's actually not what happened.
In the mid to late 19th century, so-called evidence-based medicine as it was forming was in competition with predominantly homeopathy and eclectic medicine, which is a form of herbal medicine, but also osteopathy and chiropractic.
At the turn of the 20th century, you had the widespread use of antibiotics.
You had vaccines being introduced that were actually making really good results with people who had been dying from things like diphtheria.
You had public health measures like handwashing and better sanitation being introduced.
The Flexner Report did not shut down those alt-med healing modalities.
They were already going out of fashion when the Flexner Report was being conducted, and many of the doctors in those disciplines turned to evidence-based medicine.
It would take until the 1960s for them to have a sort of resurgence in America, but it was not due to the Flexner Report.
And I think this is really important.
Because people like Kaylee Means exploit gaps in knowledge that people don't have.
So when they hear things like in the Tucker Carlson podcast, he said that Abraham Flexner was a lawyer.
He wasn't a lawyer.
He was a medical educator.
But you have to go read medical history in order to understand that.
So if you think of this lawyer going around hired by Rockefeller to shut down homeopathy, you think, Oh, that's terrible.
And what Congress still uses those guidelines?
No, none of that is true.
But he's relying beyond that gap in knowledge to create a narrative, to use
affect just like his sister does to sell a story.
And then once he sells the story and you're on board with this very nefarious set of organizations
that are all trying to keep us sick, you will then turn to TruMed, which uses pre-tax healthcare
spending dollars on things like unregulated, untested supplements and ice baths and red
light therapy.
And that is his company.
That is what he's selling you.
His sister is selling you continuous glucose monitors, and they're both selling you their book.
And they're not experts in any of the things that they claim to be.
And narratives are important, and here's another one.
The New York Times reported in June and July, Kelly Means was working with Tucker Carlson to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
out of the race and to move over into Trump's camp.
It was the conversations that Tucker and Kayleigh had with RFK Jr.
that convinced him to throw his weight behind Trump.
That directly led to this event because a few weeks later, Casey and Kayleigh were on Tucker Carlson's podcast, which is what Ron Johnson heard and decided to put together this panel.
Conspiratuality began as the study of this convergence of left-leaning wellness culture moving into right-wing politics.
And I didn't know how it would evolve or if it would even evolve out of the pandemic.
But obviously it has, and it's actually been given steroids.
It is gotten far greater and more influential than I thought it
would have and this is Just indicative of how that happens and yet it still fits
into the heuristic that I've been saying for over four years now
Watch what they say and then watch what they sell Casey and Kaylee means who I didn't know four years ago
but who were bubbling up have now reached a very influential level of
businessmanship by demonizing products and toxins and things they actually don't know
about or don't care to know about and then selling the Services and products that they say is going to fix that
but which there is no proof for There was, however, a glitch in the matrix at the event.
After Jillian Michaels finished talking, Ron Johnson asked her a question, and she gave an honest and really good reply.
And then you're going to hear what it was met with.
I know Callie would have a number of different suggestions legislatively, but I'd ask you just, you know, if there was one particular piece of legislation or one thing that we could do here in Washington, what would it be?
Get rid of Citizens United and get the money out of politics.
Okay.
Go Kelly, this is your area.
That's why you do what you do.
Any other questions for Jillian?
Meh is exactly what happened.
You heard one or two people in the audience start to clap and then realize other people weren't going to join in because they realize that fixing the problem is not what this is about.
Ron Johnson doesn't want to overturn Citizens United and the expert panel that was involved aren't really interested in those sorts of solutions.
