Cleanse the soil! Purify the blood! Save the children! Make America Healthy Again!
On Sept 23, Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., rising alt-health stars Casey and Calley Means, and many other nutrition non-experts gathered for a live streamed event they called the American Health and Nutrition Roundtable, hosted by Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Their subtitle, A Second Opinion, was an apt description for the alternative fact-filled diatribes that ensued. The soil has been poisoned, everyone is fat and sick, the entire medical industry is corrupted by Big Pharma, and Big Food is enacting a genocide on the American people via metabolic dysfunction. COVID skepticism and anti-vax messaging lurked just beneath the surface.
The speakers painted a terrifying picture and then presented themselves as benevolent common-sense saviors. At the climax of her speech, Casey Means, fresh from her career-boosting Tucker Carlson appearance, took a deep breath before declaring that this is all actually a spiritual crisis.
Show Notes
Killers of the Flower Moon: The real history behind diabetes and Native Americans.
Special Report: QAnon Fantasies Look Like Colonial Realities (w/Julian Brave NoiseCat) — Conspirituality
Palestinians pampered”— Robert Kennedy Jr
CDC Sociodemographic Data on American chronic disease
Commonwealth Fund: Portrait of the Failing US Healthcare System
Mikhaila Fuller | Yeah, I get botox. From the latest Q&A, link in bio. | Instagram
Mikhaila Peterson’s life at the molten core of the culture wars - New Statesman
NPR on International Journal of Obesity Study
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Cleanse the soil, purify the blood, save the children, make America healthy again.
On September 23rd, Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., rising old health stars Casey and Kaylee Means, and many other nutrition non-experts gathered for a live-streamed event they called the American Health and Nutrition Roundtable, hosted by Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Their subtitle was A Second Opinion, which was an apt description for the alternative fact-filled diatribes that ensued.
The soil has been poisoned, everyone is fat and sick, the entire medical industry is corrupted by big pharma, and big food is enacting a genocide on the American people via metabolic dysfunction.
All the while, COVID skepticism and anti-vax messaging lurked just beneath the surface.
In classic conspiracy style, the speakers painted a terrifying picture and then presented themselves as benevolent, common-sense saviors.
At the climax of her speech, Casey Means, fresh from her career-boosting Tucker Carlson appearance, took a deep breath before declaring that what all of this really amounts to is a spiritual crisis.
Thankfully, Ron Johnson introduced each speaker by reading their website bio so viewers can
now go and buy their unproven cures.
This Week in Conspiratuality.
spirituality.
All right, guys, so one This Week in Conspirituality segment from me this week, because we have a lot to cover as we review the American Health and Nutrition Roundtable from our various angles.
I wanted to lift one seemingly small issue out of that tangle to spotlight, like Julian just flagged it in the intro, which is that panelists are claiming that, quote, big food is enacting a genocide on the American people via metabolic dysfunction, unquote. So two of the panelists...
Really did use the G word.
So here's Casey Means.
The message I'm here to share and reiterate is that American health is getting destroyed.
It's being destroyed because of chronic illness.
And if the current trends continue, if the graphs continue in the way that they're going, at best, we're going to face profound societal instability and decreased American competitiveness.
And at worst, we're going to be looking at a genocidal level.
These very dramatic statements, I think, might be a variation on Godwin's law of Nazi analogies, which, you know, that's the thing that says, you know, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Now, in this case, I think Means is using genocide as a maximal or peak example of horror.
And at some point, you know, she's just going to have to bring it up to make sure her view is taken seriously.
Yeah. About processed food.
I spent about 20% of my career working on issues for Native Americans, indigenous people in Canada and Latin America.
And the Pima example is a really good example.
On the reservations today, we've suffered more than any other population.
And the highest COVID deaths rates in our country suffered from chronic disease more than any other population.
And it's common to call To characterize as white death, white sugar, white flour, and white Crisco oil, which is ending the genocide of Native Americans in this country.
It's the completion of that genocide.
So first, Derek and Julian, I see a whole episode in our future evolving about COVID revisionism in this crowd, because did you hear how he pretended to care about the impacts of a disease he spent years minimizing and then combating every public health mitigation over?
I'll return to that, but that's incredible.
Yeah, but he was on the front lines trying to get vaccines onto the reservations, though.
Exactly. So, when it comes to the Pima, or the Akama Otham of Arizona and northern Mexico, these are traditionally subsistence farmers and incredible textile experts.
Bobby is pointing to the fact that because this is a fairly homogenous genetic group, they've been studied extensively for health markers.
And yeah, rates of diabetes and other diseases are higher on the US side of the border, but not significantly higher than amongst other Native American populations in the US. We're good to go.
Land theft and forced relocation in Mexico was just as brutal, but the food replacement programs weren't the same, and that's one hypothesis for lower rates of diabetes on the Mexican side.
They were less disconnected from their traditional food supply.
But Kennedy omits the thrifty gene hypothesis, which suggests that it's not the food so much as millennia of adaptation to famine cycles which prime certain populations to store calories via slower metabolism.
So did calorie-dense modern foods hit the Pima hard?
Most likely, but why?
What's the root cause?
It's land theft, forced relocation, alienation from farming, poverty, racism, unemployment, super high stress, you know, all of the things that are just sort of endemic to an ongoing colonization process.
But Bobby is making it sound like the modern foods that are available to every poor person in the U.S., which are being airlifted right now to folks in the Appalachians.
And distributed on reservations as a last-ditch band-aid over the horrors of genocide are an intentional continuation of that genocide.
But Whiteflower, I would argue, is just downstream of the broader colonial machine.
He's making it sound like soldiers in the U.S. Army became officials in the USDA. And unless he has a plan to repatriate the Akama Otham to their ancestral lands, unless he wants to fund the restoration of their soils and irrigation systems and pay them out reparations, he's not really talking about repairing genocide.
He's co-opting the term for his own purposes in a parasitic way.
We should also point out that Project 2025 extensively goes into basically shunting all of the federal programs for Native Americans into other agencies so that they're no longer relevant.
So the fact that he is taking this name of Maha as a play on MAGA, and he's supporting, he's full in with Trump, and yet Trump's Yeah.
Yeah. And it can't be lost on anyone that genocide is currently a cultural flashpoint term given what's happening in Gaza.
And when Means casually throws it around she's performing the rhetorical theft that Naomi Klein detailed in Doppelganger in the passages on QAnon.
QAnon was a way, Klein argued, following on Julian Brave Noisecat, who we hosted last November, for white people to basically steal the victimhood mantle from indigenous populations who literally had their children kidnapped and abused.
So the chain of theft, like, continues.
There's the land, there's the resources, there's the spirituality, and now the persecution narrative is also sort of co-opted.
And for Bobby to use genocide at this particular moment to complain about the possible but also inflated problems with modern food supplies, Only really highlights his skill for insane inconsistency, because this is the guy who said this summer, while vigorously opposing a ceasefire, the Palestinian people are arguably the most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world.
So I'm just going to crystal ball something here before we get on with the show.
Just as Bobby is now hinting at his revisioning of COVID, a disease he pretended was no big deal, whenever the dust settles in the Middle East and the true death toll becomes clear— I'm going to bet he's going to say that international aid shipments to the refugee camps of white flour and seed oils and canned meat and whatever will keep starving people alive, which is actually the point, but that he doesn't approve of, are a continuation of the genocide that at this point he's brushing off.
Because I think that's how his maximal expression of just pure narcissistic opportunism tends to roll.
As we've been covering on social media and as I covered on this past Saturday's brief, Senator Ron Johnson used taxpayer dollars to hold a panel discussion last week called American Health and Nutrition, A Second Opinion.
Today we're going to talk about how the naturalistic fallacy that we've covered for years on this podcast was in full display during this event, as well as how pseudo-spirituality was included in what should have been a discussion about public health.
First, let me give a brief recap on the health misinformation that was involved and the blatant contradictions that were presented.
So while it was supposedly about nutrition, not one nutrition expert was invited to this panel.
Incredible, incredible.
And this is a sticky topic, as I covered on my Substack last Friday and on Saturday's brief, because America has no standardized national guidelines for calling yourself a nutritionist, and that's its own problem.
So in some states, you, Julian, you can call yourself a nutritionist or nutrition coach.
It's a side hustle. It's a side hustle for whatever other coaching type thing you do.
Yeah, you actually need no training and you can legally call yourself that.
So let me be really clear here about this panel.
No registered dietitians were invited because they are actually regulated federally and by states.
There were no toxicologists, food scientists, regulatory experts, farming experts, nutrition scientists, medical historians, or epidemiologists invited.
Instead, what you had was this gathering of right-wing pundits and wellness contrarians.
But that's because of institutional capture.
Yeah, they're not captured at all.
So by design, this event was not really about addressing the health and nutrition problems in America.
You don't let Jordan Peterson speak about study design and ketogenic carnivore diets for 25 minutes...
If you're actually concerned with addressing public health.
Julian, are you saying that institutional capture prevented them from showing up because they're actually in jail, they're kind of bound up, they can't leave their institutions?
They couldn't get to the Senate, to the building?
I'm saying all of those experts from those different fields are just so deeply suspect.
They're in the pockets of Big Farmer.
We need these renegade side hustle nutritionists to tell us the truth.
The truth. And we need Jordan Peterson to give us a weird Jungian analysis of the problems with science.
If you want to just really numb your brain, watch all 25 minutes of his speech and try to figure it out.
Ron Johnson, who hosted this, allowed the panel to demonize Big Food and Big Pharma for four hours But he's accepted money from both for decades.
He also voted to defund Obamacare.
He opposes Medicaid expansion.
He opposes federal funding for public housing or Section 8 vouchers.
He wants to restrict eligibility for SNAP, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
He opposes expanding unemployment benefits.
He wants to cut federal support to alleviate poverty.
He's fully on board with Project 2025 and wants to deregulate the agencies that oversee
quality of food production facilities.
So he is not actually interested in a solution to what is essentially a public health
and regulatory problem.
Okay, so I just have to pause to ask that with this entire event we're about to devote an hour to,
there's no indication that Ron Johnson, who is the sponsor, has any real personal
or ideological commitment to alternative medicine or wellness or even anti-pharma sentiment?
Like it appears rather that he's just seized upon some strain of populist outrage.
And he's just harnessing it.
Is that true?
Yes, with the caveat that he does have a commitment, which is to the dairy industry.
Being from Wisconsin.
So in June 2023, he co-sponsored legislation to allow schools participating in the National
School Lunch Program to serve whole milk under the presumption that it expands healthy milk
options in schools to improve students' nutrition intake.
You know, that's totally fine, but he's also being funded in part by these companies.
Going back to June of 2019, he introduced the Milk Act alongside Senator Pat Toomey, which allows school to serve all forms of milk, included flavored and unflavored whole milk and 2% milk.
Exactly. Because he's financially supported.
But ironically, many of the panelists would probably philosophically oppose things like flavored milk and Since it's processed, it contains artificial ingredients, but that never actually comes up.
Yeah, and with regard to what you were asking, Matthew, Johnson also, through the course of the pandemic, hosted roundtables just like this about vaccines and COVID contrarianism and those sorts of things.
And at the beginning of the proceedings, RFK Juney refers to him as a real hero in our government because of that.
Yeah, awesome. Nearly every panelist monetizes the very problems they were raging against for four hours.
So you have Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter.
She advocates for the Lion Diet, which is her trademark version of the all-meat diet.
She runs a podcast with a lot of supplement sponsors that fits into her uneducated narrative around nutrition.
You have Jason Karp who spent his time screaming about processed foods, but he sold his last
company, Hugh Chocolate, to Mondelez for $340 million.
So I went and I found something on LinkedIn that he wrote when he sold it and he pulled
an R.B. Marcus.
He was like, look at me bringing natural food to the big food corporation, and now we're going to win by getting this natural food in there.
I'll add a caveat. I love Hugh Chocolate.
I've bought it for years.
Sometimes. It's actually twice as expensive as other brands, so I don't usually get to afford it.
But it is delicious.
I'll give him that. But the fact that he tried to pretend that he was making something, you know, he was changing the industry from the inside.
It's Aubrey Marcus level.
And his current company, which is called Human Co., owns processed food companies that make ice cream and pizza bites.
Yeah. So the list goes on.
We could talk about food, babe, the means, the brother and sister, all of them.
But before we get into this, I want to point out that they really do harness something important.
And we always reference this, but about getting the feelings right, but the facts wrong.
America does have issues with obesity and chronic disease.
We do have food problems.
We have supply chain issues.
We have food deserts.
There is an overwhelming amount of people who can't quite pinpoint their illness, and
I can understand how frustrating it is.
And I take people at their words when they say that they've changed their diet, and we'll
talk about this later, and it helped them.
Diet absolutely plays a role in your health overall.
But my contention here for today and this entire spectacle is watch what they say and watch what they sell, how they're demonizing things that sometimes are warranted, sometimes are not, but then selling solutions in order to try to make up that gap when they're untested and unregulated.
And anecdotes are not data.
So if a diet helped you with something you didn't understand, that does not automatically mean It's going to help someone else.
And both Michaela and Jordan Peterson advocated for implementing the ketogenic diet widespread for people from a range of diseases, including mental health diseases.
And that is my real contention today.
So, Ron Johnson says that the panel was inspired by hearing Casey and Callie Means on Tucker Carlson's podcast, which was the focus of our episode 223.
We've done a lot of groundwork the last few weeks, so I wanted to just give that broad overview, but let's dive into the actual panel now.
Yeah, as we get started here, I want to notice that this is the same arc that influencers in other spheres that we've covered take, right?
You have a personal story of overcoming adversity through some transformational experience, whether it is the alien spirit channels contacting you.
Or it is eating the lion diet, which you now sell incredibly overpriced courses for.
Either way, that's your qualification.
That's why you're on this stage.
You've been through something personal that has initiated you into wisdom.
To be fair, I think we have to note that because Jordan Peterson can't possibly help anybody's mental health with his psychotherapeutic practices, maybe the meat diet actually is a step up.
We just don't know, right? All right.
Our glorified emcee for the roundtable discussion, Ron Johnson, is the perfect place to start here.
To set the stage, all of this takes place in a caucus room of what is called the Russell Senate Office Building within the United States Capitol complex.
So, even though it kind of looks like it, this is not congressional testimony.
There won't be any hostile cross-examination by people from the other party.
It's more of an informal, live-streamed event with Johnson, kind of like a podcast host with his favorite pseudoscience health influencers.
And you can tell that this is the case because he introduces each of them by reading their marketing bio.
These are the things they've achieved.
This is where you can go to find out more.
And he says in talking about Casey Means, Dr.
Means does an excellent job Of simplifying the basic concept of how our bodies convert food to energy and how that miraculous process has been impaired.
There's so much there, but that's just the point.
We're about to be treated to four and a half hours of oversimplified and spiritualized fear-mongering generalizations about food, chronic disease, obesity, and toxic chemicals from a panel of unqualified charismatic experts.
Just a note here, just for my sake, it seems to me like metabolism is a very rich focal point for these folks because it's very complex, but then it's also like a microcosm of this primary concern that they have that is about individualism.
Like, is the government taking away my agency, my ability to do work, to metabolize the world, my ability to transform things into capital or meaning?
Like, I think that's what it points to to me.
It's very, very rich.
I've pointed this out, but Casey is not qualified to talk about metabolism.
She did graduate from Stanford Medical School with an MD, and then she did four of her five years of residency, but her focus was head and neck surgery.
So she has a book that came out earlier this year with her brother about metabolism.
It was panned by experts in metabolism for a number of reasons, which I went over on Saturday.
But Also, and we kind of touched on this.
Matthew, you brought it up during our Tucker episode.
Casey is extremely well-spoken.
She presents. She's a very good storyteller.
And she's now done this.
She did it on Tucker. I saw her do it on another podcast.
And then I saw her do it at this congressional panel where she'll go through the list of things that she was not taught in medical school.
Now, I went and I read Stanford's entire syllabus for their four-year medical program, and when she says, I was not taught these things, I found specific modules in which she would have been taught those things.
But she kind of concludes her moment by saying, the only thing I was taught at Stanford was how to bill a patient.
In the four-year module, there is not one module on billing and coding.
And I actually posted this on threads, and a few people who went through Stanford Medical School replied and told me that no, billing is not part of it.
And part of the reason... And this is about, again, getting the feelings right but the facts wrong.
Part of the reason is because insurance companies are always changing billing practices to pay out as little as possible.
So you need billing experts if you're at a hospital or medical system that only handles that.
Doctors never learn that.
The entire thing is a charade when she presents it, but people get caught up in the affect and the emotion of what she's saying, and then they're not able to discern that fact unless you do things like I did, which is find the modules, look at them, talk to people who went through it, and then realize she's bullshitting all the way through.
Yeah, she's grandstanding.
This is the Maha mood.
And we have Bobby Kennedy to thank for bringing it now under the Trump umbrella in what is really a red letter day for the intersection of holistic wellness grifting and high profile Republican politics.
Well, we've been talking about MAHA, which is Make America Healthy Again.
But after this past Sunday's Rescue the Republic event, which I'm sure we'll be covering in some capacity, it was a shit show.
I will own a fact check.
I said tens of people will show up last week.
It was actually hundreds. Not the million that was promised, but I did see hundreds there.
But Bobby launched his new website, which is mahanow.org.
And it really has big Jared Kushner is going to save the Middle East energy here.
Because I want to just go through the four platforms of Maha so people actually know what it is.
Derek, though, has this actually replaced Kennedy24.org?
I don't know if that site's still up, but this is the new site.
He live-streamed the Rescue the Republic event from this site, and then so I looked through it and found his new pillars.
Oh man, he's found a groove.
Yes. So the first one, he is going to – and let me be clear again.
This is what Bobby is going to do when Trump wins and he becomes a cabinet member.
So he's going to reverse chronic disease by, quote, And that's going to be before his Monday morning workout on day one, right? Yeah. Before he hits Gold's Gym, yes.
That is one pillar.
Second pillar. End the forever wars by exerting a strong pro-peace influence on foreign policy and fortify President Trump's instinct to abstain from military interventions, regime change wars, and provocation of the world's other great powers.
Number three, protect our constitutional rights because, I want to Is a little less tangential, but you can also have a lot of arguments around it.
Get corruption out of Washington by ending corporate capture.
He says he will help the president unravel the web of secrecy, lies, cover-ups, and corruption that has enveloped our public institutions.
But, of course, there's been plenty of reporting that Trump was the most corporate-captured president in U.S. history.
So, again, all charade here.
Well, Kennedy does have to somehow shoehorn his presidential platforms into this new aspirational cabinet position.
So I think that's part of what's going on here is that three of the bullet points here are way beyond whatever he would do in health and human services or wherever he winds up.
But I think he's keeping those other subjects in play as part of what he describes as, well, you know, like, if I'm with the MAGA campaign, then I can influence all of these issues.
So I don't think he's going to give those things up, even though there's no chance that he would be influential in those categories.
So back to Ron Johnson.
The rhetorical tone that he sets from the start appeals to a tried and tested anti-science fallacy.
This has been employed by both religious apologists and alt-med champions alike for a long time.
He says, I'm truly amazed at how much knowledge mankind has accumulated over time and how rapidly the acquisition of knowledge has accelerated in our lifetimes.
With that said, however, I still believe that what we don't know vastly exceeds what we do know.
As we pursue a greater understanding of human health and seek answers to questions we've been discouraged to even ask, I sincerely hope that we approach our quest with the humility and modesty that that reality demands.
Go Packers! In technical terms, this is the argument from ignorance.
It's a version of which is sometimes called the god of the gaps argument.
You've heard it in the form.
But science doesn't know everything.
Like, science is amazing, but what about things that are true but either have not yet been proven or are somehow outside the domain of scientific method?
And in traditional religious or New Age or pseudoscience arguments, this reasonable-sounding gambit actually serves to both immunize certain arguments from having to be supported by evidence or even logical coherence, as well as to establish a false legitimacy for appeals to anecdote theory.
Intuition and other misleading claims, and we're going to hear plenty of that today.
When it comes to conspiracy arguments, this fallacy morphs into pointing out problems like well-established instances of corruption, say Vioxx or the opioid crisis, and then taking those and generalizing to whole industries or governing bodies, which by sleight of hand will then serve to open the door to presenting completely unevidenced cures as natural and noble alternatives.
So Derek, thank you for your service in reviewing this deluge of misinformation and selecting clips for us.
What do you have up first?
Okay, we have Casey Means talking about our spiritual crisis.
I didn't learn that if we address these root causes that all lead to metabolic dysfunction and help patients change their food and lifestyle patterns with united strong voice...
We could reverse the chronic disease crisis in America, save millions of lives, and trillions of dollars in healthcare costs per year.
Instead, doctors are learning that the body is a hundred separate parts, and we learn how to drug, we learn how to cut, and we learn how to bill.
I'll close by saying that what we are dealing with here is so much more than a physical Health crisis.
This is a spiritual crisis.
Yeah, I mean, you guys talk about how well she presents and what a good speaker she is, and I agree with you.
In these moments, I feel like she's kind of flustered, and I almost have this weird psychoanalytic sense that she knows she's out over her skis a bit here.
She gets flustered, perhaps, by the gravity of the connection she's drawing, but the crowd loves it.
Or she's emotional because she's getting to the existential heart of her argument.
She's saying that anxieties about medicine are proxies for anxieties about the soul.
I also think anybody who has any kind of social sense, social empathy at all, is going to feel a little bit awkward about slagging off all of their colleagues all at once.
What is that?
What What allows a person to say, you know, this is all that we do.
Like, this is what we learn to do.
Like, what an asshole thing to do.
Yeah, that's what I mean, is that she knows she's about to say something really oversimplified and intense and potentially slanderous.
But yeah, I think you're also right that there's an emotional intensity of like, this is my moment, I'm gonna say the thing.
Yeah, where I can distinguish myself from all of the other bad people that I went to school with who really didn't get it.
They didn't get me either. So awful.
And that's why she's big on Tucker Carlson and people who don't know medicine.
But anytime a medical expert reads her work...
They point out the fallacies and flaws and then she'll just revert to being like, well, you're captured because that's all they really have.
I also want to point out, I mean, I was saying about how she does, I wasn't taught this, I was taught this.
This is the very end of it. She had been doing that for almost 10 minutes, Julian.
So it could also just be exhaustion, but she went through a litany of things that she wasn't taught, which she probably actually was.
Yeah. So that's her spiritual crisis.
Let's listen to RFK now talk about his spiritual warfare.
If you have a child that's dependent on pharmaceutical medications for the rest of their lives, that is weakened, demoralized, dispirited, disheartened by these illnesses, it's going to inhibit our capacity to function in any meaningful way in the world.
If a foreign nation...
Did this to our country, we would consider an act of war.
It is un-American.
These companies have been allowed, through the profit motive, to destroy everything that we value in America.
And this is not just economic warfare.
It's not just chemical warfare.
We're all involved in spiritual warfare.
Yeah, the spiritual warfare...
That sort of tone to me also now implies that there's an evil agenda that we're going to connect the dots on somehow, but behind the scenes, right?
I'll tell you what's evil, which is that as someone with some personal experience, the idea that medications for children are categorically weakening and demoralizing when in fact they can literally rescue children in acute crises is just so incredibly disgusting.
And I can only hope that at some point he finally does the therapy he needs to realize that the drugs that almost destroyed his life Are not the same as the drugs that can rescue people from intolerable anxiety.
Like I've hinted at this before, but this is a guy who claims incredibly that autism basically didn't exist when he was a kid.
And yet he himself, in his feral obsession with wildlife, shows his own signs of special interest.
And that is one of 11 kids who was basically neglected from the time his father was murdered and who came from an Irish Catholic culture of total emotional repression to boot.
If someone had helped him manage his anxiety with actual care and maybe even fluoxetine, who knows, maybe he could have avoided 14 years of heroin, for fuck's sake.
It really is frustrating how often people use anecdotes as reality.
I saw it recently in someone who...
He fancies himself as an addiction recovery coach, and he had his own process of getting out of addiction, which is wonderful.
And to qualify it by saying that some people do need medication, which is great, but then to say, I believe most people don't need medication.
And you're just like, how do you make that call as someone who's not clinically trained in anything at all?
You've been a meditation coach and a yoga instructor your entire life.
And to just say, because you might have successfully helped people, and that is wonderful.
Nothing wrong with that.
But then to say things like, most people don't need this, that's when I really get pissed off.
If the medication worked, then the person couldn't make a totalizing claim about their bullshit, right?
If it worked for some people, then the solution that they came to wasn't somehow universal and special.
It's just narcissism.
Talk about narcissism.
This is also a new American revolution going on, so let's hear Bobby talk about that.
All of these advocates and the political leaders have all given us a reason for hope.
And they're leading a battle for the heart, for the soul of our country, and it's a spiritual battle, and that's something we all need to understand.
The American Revolution started with a very, very small core of activists who were able to articulate these new set of values, and they did something that nobody in the world could believe, a ragtag A group of people brought to its knees the greatest empire in the history of mankind.
we can take our country back from these industries and we can restore not only
our democracy and the integrity of it, most important of all we can begin
restoring our children's health.
Yeah, I mean once RFK gets going this Rebel Alliance rhetoric really escalates
because he's got a story to tell.
He's the hero. He's come to raise the alarm and save the day.
And each of the speakers are going to do a version of this routine, but Bobby really is the master.
His familiar grand narrative appeals to nature, to self-reliance, to religious faith, to combating corruption and cynical disregard for the lives of children.
Who is not on board with that?
Corporations and government agencies are involved in a massive and pervasive collusion against the health of Americans.
They manufacture and then rubber stamp vaccines that are ineffective and deadly and then they cover up the consequences.
They poison the environment and our food and then they lie about the safety of pesticides and other chemicals.
They have a vested interest in keeping people sick and fat and disempowered as the farming,
food, medicine and insurance agencies all wink at each other behind our backs to increase
their profits and stack the regulatory agencies with their corrupt lackeys.
And then this has led to an epidemic of obesity, chronic disease, autism, infertility and turnkey
totalitarianism that censors the truth and forces compliance.
This is really the grand narrative.
Going back against this will not only save America, it will strike a blow in what is
essentially a spiritual battle against forces of evil.
And there are so many appealing hooks in this story.
So, yeah, corporations are greedy and exploitive.
It would be better if everyone could eat healthy and exercise more regularly.
Junk food is engineered to elicit compulsive consumption, and yes, pollution of the environment is a massive concern.
Worst of all, there are real instances of corruption and institutional failure that have created mistrust and can be leveraged to manipulative ends.
But, as with all emotive and deceptive conspiracy theories or anti-science sales pitches, on closer examination, a lot of it just falls apart.
And the difficulty is that gish-gallop rhetoric like Bobby's spews lies, misleading statistics, and distorted facts in quick and easy ways that take much more time to carefully analyze lies.
And understand. And I have to tell you, that's not a bug.
It's a feature.
It projects the appearance of legitimacy onto a smokescreen of misinformation and then calls
any fact-checking censorship.
Well, let's look into some solutions here.
I mean, in fact, and I posted this online and people really got a kick out of it, Jillian Michaels was there because she's someone who yells at people on TV about exercising harder.
She gave a really good answer and Ron Johnson said, what's the number one thing that you would do to help overturn this?
And she said, overturn Citizens United and Bobby just sat there stone-faced and Ron Johnson tried to move on as quickly as possible.
The whole room was crickets. And you can't tell how much of it is that they're like, oh no, don't say that because that's our bread and butter.
And how much of it is that people have no idea what the fuck she's talking about.
But the thing is, that would actually start to help the problem that they're talking about today.
But no, no, no, no. Bobby has a different idea of what will really solve this problem.
Since 74% of Americans are obese...
The cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year.
This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe.
It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it.
It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise.
Virtually, Novo Nordic's entire value is based upon its projections of what Ozempic is going to sell to Americans.
For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic food for every American, three meals a day, and gym membership for every obese American.
Why are members of Congress doing the bidding of this Danish company?
So on that whole rant, Dr.
Spencer Nadolsky, who is an obesity and lipid specialist physician, he also co-hosts the Docs Who Lift podcast, and he does a lot of misinformation debunking online.
He got on Twitter and addressed that specifically, and just saying things like, People buying healthy whole foods will not fix obesity.
And he also mentioned that my medical school always promoted that lifestyle is the first-line treatment for lifestyle-related chronic disease.
Funnily, Michaela Peterson jumped in and tried to take him on by saying that focusing on low-carb whole foods does fix obesity.
And he replied, I wish that But we've done a lot of trials on this, and that is just not true.
He also posted, tell me you don't know anything about obesity without telling us because organic means nothing for weight loss, so who cares, he says.
And I agree with him on all these points, but this one, a gym membership would be awesome, but that is not going to fix the problem either.
And he also brings up the fact that no one brings up dysregulated appetites throughout this entire thing.
So again, they're not really talking about what we know about science, they're just performing.
That particular set of sentences from Bobby Kennedy is just, it's like watching a great jazz musician.
It's just the way he slips back and forth between the different, and now we're going to go here, and it all seems like it makes sense, but you're like, wait, what?
It's the weave. It's the weave, right?
It's a better version of Trump's weave because there is some seeming coherence.
Yep, yep, yep.
And he's got the factoids.
So I'm going to fact check him right out of the gate.
First thing he fucking said, are 74% of Americans obese?
Obviously, he misspoke because he's getting that number from the CDC, which, of course, he doesn't trust on other questions of medical science.
Yeah. But what it actually says is that 74% of Americans are overweight, which includes 43% who are obese.
And the difference between those two words is significant.
But what is that stat even based on?
Well, it's based on BMI. I've covered BMI a lot on the pod in terms of when I did the eating disorders episodes, but it's a population-level measurement tool.
It was founded by a Belgian astronomer and sociologist.
He had no background in medicine or physiology.
He co-founded a school of positivist criminology That explicitly stated people of other races are actually a different species.
So he never intended BMI to be used on individuals, but it was eventually picked up by some eugenicists in the early 19th century.
And it became a thing in medicine that was first a heuristic, but then it became the defining tool for measuring obesity and being overweight.
And that needs to change.
Yeah, so when we accept this highly questionable and deeply problematic oversimplified BMI calculation as referenced by RFK and others like him, it skews the data on obesity in ways that actually make no sense and create a lot of false assumptions and fertile ground for this kind of panic mongering.
It's a blunt tool at best.
A 2016 study in the International Journal of Obesity found that 47% of those designated as overweight actually tested in the healthy range for blood pressure, cholesterol, and the all-important metabolic factors that are such a big deal for these people at this event like insulin resistance.
Now, this is the same for 30% of those designated as obese.
They tested healthy on all those different indicators.
And reporting on this, NPR noted, I'll include this in the show notes, that because lean muscle mass confounds BMI ratios, most pro athletes, if they worked in the corporate world, would get in trouble with their workplace wellness plan because their BMI was not good.
So, anecdotally, I'm familiar with this.
I'm six foot one. I'm 197 pounds.
I walk about 9,000 steps a day.
I work out three times a week.
I teach three yoga classes and a dance event every week.
I eat in a way that all of these health influencers would actually applaud And my BMI is technically in the overweight range that is being decried by these folks, despite having 15% body fat.
My medical labs are good, but wouldn't you know it, I still get that friendly automatic notification every year on my doctor app that says I should try to exercise regularly and eat a balanced diet because my BMI is in the overweight range.
Cool. I mean, I'm glad we're doing body confessions after all of this time that are simply anecdotes and not meant to prove or sell anything.
Because I'm heavier than you.
6'2", 230 pounds.
Two to three miles of walking, sprinting per day.
I can stop for chin-ups on the bar down by the beach.
I swim a couple times per week.
Have you ever tried paintball?
Very rigorous, chasing the eight-year-old around in the forest.
Yeah. I don't drink or eat excessively.
My BMI puts me in the obese range anyway.
And for the first time in my life, I've actually tried to lose 10 pounds over the past six months because we got this trampoline in the back for the boys and it has a single person weight limit of 220 pounds.
And then in six months of trying to lose these 10 pounds, I haven't lost anything.
Because I know that to do it, I'd have to go into sustained calorie deficit in this really picky and hypervigilant way.
And I would just gain it back as soon as stress picked up.
And I can't afford to make my brain foggy by being hungry all the time.
And I don't want to be snappy and impatient with my kids so that I can use their trampoline.
So just, you know, whatever.
This is my body.
I love it. It loves me.
It serves me. And what does the BMI mean to me?
It just has never made sense.
Yeah, and so we are two anecdotal cases within the epidemic of obesity in the United States.
And Derek, you mentioned this.
I want to point out the straw man here that all of these speakers employ, which caricatures the entire medical community by lying about the fact that they're actually constantly emphasizing the importance of diet and exercise and lifestyle.
It's a big part of the mainstream push.
As is so often the case with conspiratorial frameworks, there are, of course, nuggets of truth here, too.
But they're being used to support the falsehoods.
The FDA and the EPA, that's the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, are chronically underfunded and understaffed.
They have a backlog of cases and too much industry meddling in influence.
In comparison to European agencies, they do utilize more shortcuts and safety heuristics, like they generally regard it as safe or grass designation.
European agencies, by contrast, are more strict about requiring that applicants prove the safety of any chemical additives.
That's a whole rabbit hole we could go down to maybe another time but what all of this means is that better funding and staffing and major reforms are needed to disentangle commerce and regulation but make no mistake that's not what Senator Ron Johnson and his guests are calling for.
Instead, they opportunistically present themselves and their entrepreneurial charismatic cures and pseudoscience worldview as the solution for these real problems.
And as you've mentioned, Derek, should Johnson's party win next month, it will usher in Project 2025, which only seeks to aggressively dismantle regulatory agencies and any limits on corporate exploitations of the public.
Yeah.
Yeah. His point is to eat healthy foods, which fixes obesity, which he's already contested, but you'd have to actually listen to RFK Jr.
rather than getting all your info from a clip.
Alternatively, you don't know anything other than what you learned by your pharma-funded med school.
Oh, sick burn. Yeah, and Ndolsky really keeps it professional.
He just, again, he goes back.
He's like... Look, there are trials.
It doesn't work on a population basis, which also gets back to the BMI argument we were having.
And he goes, I'd love it if it actually did work, but sorry, it doesn't.
And he invited Michaela to be like, we can discuss this further, but she never replied after that.
You know, while we're mentioning Michaela Peterson, I'm going to risk just one comment on kind of an elephant in the room, which, you know, it's something to approach with care on a podcast run by three dudes.
But it's also something that's flagged enough by women on our social feeds.
I don't think it should be ignored.
It's in the category of RFK Jr.
taking testosterone therapy and likely a shit ton of supplements while braying about the corruptions of all pharmaceuticals and pretending that the world's problems can be solved at the local farmer's market.
But he gets the testosterone therapy from the testosterone tree at the Venice Farmer's Market.
So it's, you know, be careful.
Okay, so it's in this category, but it's more touchy because when we realize that Michaela Peterson is dispensing all natural health advice, Not only while eating only steak, but also while sporting Botox treatments and after more than a decade of cosmetic surgery that she talks about.
We're not just talking about hypocrisy.
We're talking about the trouble of being a 32-year-old woman who grew up with the patriarchal beauty standards that assholes like her dad and RFK Jr.
aid and abet and sometimes enforce.
Do you guys remember how Peterson just out of nowhere tweeted out the Sports Illustrated cover featuring the superstar model Yumi Nu in a swimsuit and complaining that he was being forced to accept her unapologetic thickness as beautiful?
Jordan, we should point out. Not Michaela, Jordan tweeted this out.
Oh, Jordan, yes, exactly. Right, yeah.
So this is her dad.
This is her dad. And things like that, you have to wonder, do they have nothing to do with the misogynistic cultural context in which, you know, a 20-year-old Michaela gets fat transfer surgery while having implants installed?
But then he turns around to castigate women for wearing makeup to the office because clearly they're asking for sex.
What is a daughter to think?
Or what about RFK Jr.
treating women like the candy bars he's not allowed to eat but just can't help himself?
You know, I think that Michaela Peterson is white and she's wealthy.
She'll be just fine. I don't want to reward her with any kind of victim trophy, but there is a paradoxical tragedy in watching someone complain about the medicalized and industrialized world that allows her to eat nothing but steak and shoot Botox into her face.
This is a world that she continues to rely on for self-esteem, while pretending that she's doing the work it takes to actually live in a world other than the one she's been conditioned into.
You know, and all of this is part of this broader theme that I'm pointing to a little bit earlier with RFK Jr.
It feels that with these people, we're usually getting just a torrent of externalized resentments and humiliations and internal contradictions.
So, woven throughout this Panel discussion.
We have claims about the chronic disease epidemic.
And I want to just look at this.
I flagged it earlier. According to the Commonwealth Fund, America does have the worst levels of chronic disease when compared to nine other countries.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. So America finishes last in terms of their chronic disease levels.
Interestingly, all of these other countries have socialized medicine, while our healthcare service is ranked bottom by comparison as well.
It's a correlation there that probably has some causative implications.
We also have to be clear about what constitutes chronic disease, because that list includes things like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity, and hypertension.
Technically, Chronic disease does not refer to the much less prevalent autoimmune conditions or autism or ADHD that people like Bobby Kennedy will lump into that same category.
Again, blurring the line with terminology like chronic illness, which Casey means referred to off the top, and then they will assert false causal claims about vaccines or pesticides.
So by contrast, More than half of Americans have at least one chronic disease of the ones that I listed, while the high end of autoimmune conditions is estimated to be perhaps 15% of the population.
The similarity of the two terms, chronic illness and chronic disease, allows for these often used misleading arguments.
It is true that scientists remain open to as yet undiscovered environmental factors, that would be all the chemical stuff that these people are raising panic about, playing a role in autoimmune conditions.
But it hasn't been proven yet, and they talk as if it has, and as if it then leads to the chronic disease epidemic.
Now, what about Well, the rates are now estimated to be around 1 in 36, and this has in fact tripled over the last 20 years, which makes sense given how much researchers and clinicians have learned about autism during this time.
It's a spectrum disorder, and both children and adults with versions of it That previously went undiagnosed are now getting diagnosed and helped.
Autism also presents very differently in females and so was previously much less recognized, diagnosed and treated.
But Kennedy and his crew will jumble all of these facts together to create a generalized and distorted picture of causal certainty that appeals to purification and back to the earth spiritual aesthetics about being in a holy war against these terrible attacks on our health, while giving the false appearance that all of this is based on strong evidence.
Julian, I also just want to underline that it seems to me to be a basic function of ableism to pathologize as many deviations from the norm as possible.
Like, in Bobby's world, for instance, he's lumping all of these things together, like cancer and autism appear just sort of like randomly in these gish gallops of despair and alarm, that You think they share the same etiology, and so it all sort of points towards this logic of purification, purification for everything.
Yeah, and its role all blames into one.
We've got the cure for what ails you, and the problem is we've deviated from our traditional ways of living in touch with the earth, and so that's the cause of everything from acne to prostate cancer.
It's all in the same continuum.
The major sin of omission here in terms of causality is that chronic disease has significantly higher prevalence amongst poor people.
Yeah, that's it. The numbers spike in the American Southeast where lower household income, lower prevalence of being insured or well-educated or having access to healthcare all play major roles.
Lower income neighborhoods, as we've noted, are often food deserts with cheap and convenient food sometimes being the only option.
There's no data to support the frequent claims made by multiple speakers here that toxic chemicals, pesticides or specialized, i.e.
not holistic enough medical care is actually to blame for America's health crisis.
But it sure does make the audience cheer every time it's asserted.
The chronic disease crisis in this country is a product of poverty.
Not this largely baseless fear-mongering about food coloring and vaccines and pesticides and vague phantom chemicals, which could be a problem, but You need to point to which ones you're talking about.
Or the libertarian fat-shaming that says, put down the cheeseburger, get some exercise fatty in between your three minimum wage jobs.
They do point out which chemicals, but they never point out the fact that the dose levels are not toxic.
And that's the real problem here.
And it leads to what's called chemophobia, which is an unwarranted fear of chemicals.
Yeah, so even if they're pointing out specific chemicals, like where's the data on the causal chain of what you're actually claiming?
It all gets very jumbled.
Michelle Wong pointed that out to me, the fact that sometimes like a Vani Hari will say, oh, this is banned in Europe.
And sometimes that is true, but sometimes it's just named differently, but it's the same chemicals in America and they exploit that.
The truth is, there's plenty here for sincere reform advocates to sink their teeth into around big pharma, big food, and the regulatory agencies, as well as around issues like microplastics and other potentially dangerous pollutants.
But these influences are not really here to propose scientific research and agency reform.
They're selling their own pseudoscience products by further muddying the waters of mistrust.
And that puts people in a real bind.
Some of what is being said really resonates.
And so maybe the rest feels true enough to be accepted.
And some of what is being said seems clearly wrong, I bet, to some people who are listening.
It is unevidenced.
It may sound kind of paranoid.
But if you say that, does it mean you're rejecting everything else?
Guys, I have just a few closing thoughts.
The first is, I just want to reflect that Maha as a new branding for Kennedy and this wing of Trump's campaign, I think it's extremely effective.
Given the new blood that Bobby brings, the general GOP malaise over the MAGA brand, I think it also shifts focus from Trump's age and obvious cognitive decline while also making him some kind of, you know, champion of revitalization, almost as a kind of final old man aspiration, you know, like I could have, I would have if I could have.
But Everyone knows he has no personal interest in health and wellness, but this subject shift, it allows him to take on this new and positive goal, almost as if he's a convert, and I think that has some energy to it.
It also gives cover for all of the wellness and conspirituality contrarians that we cover to go full MAGA without ever actually owning up to it.
The other overall vibe that I want to share is summed up in the word just chaotic.
And I think that when Slobodian and Callison were on in episode 175 to talk about diagonalism, they gave us a real sort of gift there with that term with regard to the incoherence of the politics.
Because the whole shtick of this group is to acknowledge enough of a real problem or injustice to perform competence and indicate the right amount of moral outrage.
But they want to do it in a way that ensures they do nothing about it except serve their own self-interest.
It's a similar structure to, you know, if you understand enough of a catastrophe to be able to convincingly create a conspiracy theory about it to explain it, which does nothing but win you attention, you'll do it.
And so, they apply this logic to the exaggerated problem of vaccine injury, panic around rising
autism rates, saying carbon math comes from the devil, talking about soil depletion while
having no real plan or will for regenerative farming.
So, when we zoom out, it's always the theft of progressive, seemingly left-leaning sentiment
to cover over for libertarian self-satisfaction and defensiveness.
And the underlying driver just seems to be competition.
Each Johnson panelist, it's like they're wearing a trench coat and they're opening it at the right moment to reveal a display of supplements.
And we know now from your reporting, especially yours, Derek, that the supplement racket is huge, but it also suffers from the same anxiety of competitive wellness.
Because when you cannot prove the value of your product, charisma is your only marketing option.
But the last thing I want to talk about is just the chaos of this do-it-yourself eccentricity factor.
Dr. Andrea Love did this great write-up of the event that we'll post to the show notes because she runs down each and every one presenter in a really detailed way.
One of the things that stood out to me was that one of the He's not medically trained at all, but he founded a mail-order compounding pharmacy called ReviveRx.
There's been a product recall over some dangerously bad labeling.
But then there's this quote, Derek?
ReviveRx has also been warned by the FDA for poor manufacturing conditions and issues with quality.
In 2022, FDA sent an FDA Form 483 because of multiple violations, including blocked ventilation, lack of proper sterile technique, open beakers, and contamination issues, not using pharmaceutical-grade reagents, and more. So I hear all of that, and all I can think of is the pile of roadkill carcasses in RFK Jr.'s freezer.
I'm thinking about like Gary Lineham, who we covered last week.
He's the head of that culty wellness group, Human Garage.
I'm thinking about how he washes his hair with his own piss.
I'm thinking that if Jordan Peterson really only eats beef and salt and whiskey, he probably never has a satisfying bowel movement.
And I have to wonder about what weird things that each of these panelists might have in their homes that for them constitute their own private apothecaries that they have to believe are keeping them safe because institutional medicine is so bad.
I think, you know, when the word gets out that they're coming to Washington...
The drugstores know that they're going to sell out of enema kits.
The hotel cleaners are cursing under their breath because they're going to be cleaning up the oily splashes.
They're going to be digging up weird herbs from the hotel room, coffee maker filters.
I think part of the function of real institutions is Is that they filter out the neurotic noise that human beings come up with when they want to do stuff and they don't know how.
And that allows everybody to more or less be on the same page.
And one of the things that I think that we've shown pretty consistently is that while we can track the continuity of ideas that sort of motivate these folks, like ideas like humoral theory, pollution theory, pollution theory, Prana, life force, chi, meridians, the importance of gut health, you know, the miraculous nature of deep breathing.
So many of these disciplines draw on these shared methods, but what coheres them is not so much their surface similarities, but kind of a shared absence of method.
Because it's really a culture of making stuff up and just hoping it works.
And if it doesn't work, they just say that it works anyway because it's the best that they've got.
And while rebellion against institutions makes a lot of sense, and this crowd is often correct that it takes innovative thinking to shift institutional knowledge, You know, a gaggle of self-professed geniuses who each do different things with their pee every morning are not going to solve big problems in any kind of systematic way because that requires some basic social skills that are not just about attracting followers.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here on the main feed next week on Saturday for a Brief, or of course, we're always over on Patreon.
