On September 29, a predicted one million people were going to show up for the Rescue the Republic event in Washington DC. Founded by the libertarian party chair, the Defeat the Mandates founder, and “professor in exile,” Bret Weinstein, about 1,500 mostly MAGA acolytes showed up. Yet the event represents something a long time building in America: the strange and at times uncomfortable merging of wellness and right-wing politics via MAHA and MAGA.
Sure, RFK Jr was there, but today we’re going to look at a few figures we haven’t covered in a while, or at all. As can be expected in conspiracy land, the C-list celebrities brought some of the most outlandish, and most dangerous, ideas along with them.
Show Notes
Orange Shirt Day | The Canadian Encyclopedia
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the History of Residential Schools - Foundry
Phyllis’ Story - Orange Shirt Society
More Than Anything Else, the Rally to Rescue the Republic Was Awkward
Are food dyes used in the US banned in other countries? No, not really.
IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Have no childhood vaccines ever been tested using double-blind placebo controlled trials?
Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" paintings vandalized hours after activists sentenced for similar incident - CBS News
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Music Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris. I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker. You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
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Also, your forbearance once in a while, I do have a correction to make in last Saturday's brief called RFK Jr.
Screws his followers. I mistakenly attributed an insensitive comment about a sexual abuse allegation against Bobby to a host on Majority Report.
But the outlet was actually breaking points and the dumb comment came from the reactionary pundit, Sagar and Jetty.
There's a correction in the show notes.
Apologies to all Majority Report fans out there.
It's my bad. Conspirituality 227 Rescue Remedy for the Republic.
On September 29th, a predicted 1 million people were going to show up for the Rescue the Republic event in Washington, D.C. Founded by the Libertarian Party chair, the Defeat the Mandates founder, and professor in exile, Brett Weinstein, about 1,500 mostly MAGA acolytes showed up.
Yet, the event represents something a long-time building in America.
The strange and at times uncomfortable merging of wellness and right-wing politics.
Now, via MAHA and MAGA. Sure, RFK Jr.
was there, but today we're going to look at a few figures we haven't covered in a while or at all.
As can be expected in conspiracy land, the C-list celebrities brought some of the most
outlandish and most dangerous ideas along with them.
So Julian and Derek, on September 30th, it was Orange Shirt Day here in Canada.
This is a day of remembrance for the First Nations children stolen away into residential schools beginning in the 1830s and ending with the closure of the last one in 1996.
I was 25 years old when the last one closed.
These are the schools at which Indigenous children were forced to speak English, attend Catholic rituals,
they suffered physical and sexual abuse, and when they died of neglect,
they were allegedly buried in unmarked graves.
Now, this history intersects with our beat because in May of 2021,
the Tukumlup Subtribal Headquarters in BC announced preliminary radar findings
of 215 unmarked graves on the site of the nearby Kamloops Residential School.
And that provoked great mourning, but also a fierce conspiratorial white backlash,
which Naomi Klein argued in Doppelganger, catalyzed the QAnon-inspired trucker convoy protest
in Ottawa the following winter.
Klein said that the real history of abused First Nations children in Canada was too abhorrent
for the right wing to absorb, and so they were compelled to colonize its narrative
and apply it to the fantasized abuse of white children by blood-drinking liberals.
And I had Julian Brave Noisecat on to discuss this, and his family is kind of central to the story because he's from Williams Lake.
That's the site of St.
Joseph's Mission. And Phyllis Webstad, who was the founder of Orange Shirt Day, went to that school in 1973.
Now, the backlash continues today with racist dipshits across Canada wearing orange shirts that say, I mean, the shirts are supposed to say, every child matters, but their shirts say, where are the graves?
And they're referring to the fact that the ground-penetrating radar results from these sites have yielded incomplete information.
And so far, there's a lack of funding, plus a reluctance on the part of some First Nations communities to exhume the dead, and that's placed the discovery process in limbo.
And of course, that reluctance has risen along with the backlash, right?
Here are these people who position Orange Shirt Day on the culture war spectrum.
They have taken up a further QAnon-style co-optation as well by saying that current educational policy towards LGBTQ youth that maintains privacy in certain cases where a young trans person, for example, confides in a guidance counselor is akin to residential schooling or tearing children away from their homes and heritage.
So for these folks, Orange Shirt Day Is another sign of woke culture run amok?
It's virtue signaling.
It's a hypocritical performance that's designed to accomplish nothing other than making white people feel bad.
So for them, like empathy for indigenous people is part of a conspiracy to devalue Euro exceptionalism so that the elites can take even more control over a universally demoralized and therefore passive population.
But there's a complication that Because the anti-indigenous activists are actually saying two things.
The first one is obvious and hateful, but the other is subtle and a little bit provocative.
The first thing they say is that we don't really care about the suffering of First Nations people or the broader legacy of colonialism.
We believe things turned out just fine, and all of you social justice pussies should just stop whining.
They're also saying another thing, which is, hey, look, Justin Trudeau.
Hey, look, you in the liberal center orthodoxy.
You don't actually care either about these people.
You just pretend you do.
You just want to make yourself feel righteous, and you're doing that by making us feel bad.
And I think that second thing can hit pretty hard if we let it because it reveals, I think,
the actual problem with so-called wokeism.
It's not that people with privilege are being asked to account for it, but that the neoliberal state can co-opt it to pretend that it's repairing things that it continues to break.
And on that level of discourse, wokeism is hypocrisy.
And so my down to earth example comes when I'm driving the 11-year-old home from school that day.
This is his seventh orange shirt day that he's attended.
He's worn all the shirts.
He's gone to all the presentations.
When he was younger, he was given shirts.
He was giving these coloring sheets to color in.
Now he's writing essays.
He's doing the program.
And then he asks me really directly, so how long are we going to do this orange shirt day thing while not giving First Nations people their land back?
Or if we can't do that because we're all living here together now, at least, why can't we figure out how to do reparations?
And I basically told him that that was the kind of question that would radicalize him if he thought about it for long enough because there's a difference between feeling sad and pious and reading the land acknowledgement before class and going out and blocking the development of an oil pipeline that crosses First Nations territory.
I told him that, yeah, the government is basically happy for you to wear an orange shirt.
But if you go out and you chain yourself to a bulldozer clearing land for a pipeline, the Mounties are going to show up and crack your head.
They're going to throw you in jail.
They're going to fuck up your life.
So whether Trudeau and the school system intends this or not, and I did say to him as well, I'm sure your teachers have the best of intentions and probably feel this same sort of paradox that you're talking about.
What ends up happening is that the Orange Shirt Day becomes an acceptable performance of To the extent that it doesn't do anything.
It confuses psychology for action.
So, racists are racists, I said.
They should be ashamed. They should go to therapy or church.
But they also kind of do us a favor when they point out the hypocrisy of what they call the woke agenda, even if they use that hypocrisy to deny the entire issue and debase their own humanity.
But for people with actual values, I think the exposure of that hypocrisy can remind us that woke can't just be a feeling.
It has to be a plan. Over the weekend, Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped aboard the Maha train by posting a mason jar filled with a milky white substance and the caption, raw milk does a body good.
Make America healthy again.
This follows Q conspiracy theorists and the anti-Muslim activist Scott Pressler, who opened up for Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania this past weekend.
And here's what he said.
To our beautiful Amish and Lancaster and across the state, we will protect your raw milk,
your dairy, your farming, your school choice, your religious freedom, your ability to afford
to have 10 beautiful children per family.
Okay.
Oh.
And how are you going to protect this and how are you going to fund it?
Yeah, I've got some words.
Yeah. We've discussed raw milk on the pod before.
And even when I posted the above clip and Marjorie Teller Green tweet, some commenters noted that they drank raw milk for years with no problem.
And you know what? So did I. Well, I don't know there, Derek.
I don't know. It's totally possible.
I actually got it from the Amish delivered to Brooklyn.
But when someone writes that they've done it and so it's completely safe, that's just false because you are always rolling the dice.
So in a slight bit of hopeful news, Twitter readers added 11 community notes on Taylor Greene's tweet citing all the potential problems with drinking raw milk, including...
Bacterial infections like listeria, salmonella, and E. coli.
Bodily symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, cramping.
And severe cases can cause meningitis, kidney failure, even death.
It's not surprising that a predominantly anti-vax health crowd has once again turned against Louis Pasteur, who's the man who introduced pasteurization to the world as well as one of the men responsible for confirming the efficacy of vaccines.
And as a few commenters also noted, why does the Maha Meats I just want to follow up on what Julian, I think, was pointing to with three things that we can say about the Amish.
First of all, Protecting their raw milk might make sense in the context of supporting their traditional agricultural methods.
They're small-scale, regenerative, they're not based on monocultures and other soil-depleting methods.
Like, bacteria aside, it goes into that sort of throwback category.
But taking what Amish farmers do seriously, seeing what can be done to scale up those techniques,
requires like a lot of governmental commitment and attention, and this crowd actually campaigns
against all of that.
Then, if you advocate for like, super large families in the insular communities where English literacy rates
are low, it may not be advised when we know how desperately the Amish struggle with issues
of intergenerational neglect and sexual abuse.
Also poverty, educational deficits, almost no reproductive freedom for women,
in addition to like stifling gender roles.
But here's the funniest thing to me about this guy propping up, you know, co-opting the Amish, really,
is that they have largely collectivist economies, right?
Like farm tools, labor, silos, outbuildings, they're all shared.
The hilarious thing is that...
It's a commune. It's a commune.
And people think that they are Luddites because they fear the cultural losses that come with technological change in some Jordan Peterson sense.
That's part of it.
But also, more importantly, they are against motorized farm vehicles, for instance, because if one dude in the community manages to get a diesel tractor with a tiller and a cedar and a bucket on the front, he's instantly going to be richer than everyone else.
And that'll disturb their whole value of egalitarianism before God, which is why they dress in a uniform.
So focusing on raw milk is like saying...
We really need to protect their overalls and their wide-brimmed hats and not really looking more closely at who they actually are, what their lives are like.
They don't care about the Amish.
I just want to think it through with you a little bit, Matthew.
Like when you say bacteria aside, protecting the cultural practice of drinking raw milk— I'm just saying that it's one of a hundred different things that they do within their insular communities.
And it's found a market which is paradoxical because they do need money from the outside and they're doing it by exporting this thing that's actually dangerous or could be dangerous if you roll the dice.
But yeah, I'm just saying that it's a very small part of what they do.
Totally. They have no interest in protecting the Amish.
Yeah, so you're really lambasting the co-opting.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'll flag the new Mother Jones, which I received in the mail yesterday.
A friend of the pod, Kiera Butler, actually does, it's all in Christian nationalism, and she does an article where she talks about people like Lance Wildnew going into Amish communities to try to get the Trump vote.
Unfortunately, right now, the MAGA vote is working in that community, so the cooptation towards getting their vote appears to be effective, and that's something that is pretty dangerous.
And are they specifically selling, you'll have greater economic opportunities to sell your raw dairy products?
That is not cited in it.
I do have a little bit of family history because part of my family grew up Mennonite outside of Lancaster.
I don't want to take away agency from them.
Right. In terms of like, they do make pretty shitty decisions on certain things.
At the same time, it does feel pretty intentional that the Christian nationalists are targeting them for this election and will probably leave them behind.
Yeah. Another religious group who are being duped into thinking that Trump is somehow the right choice for their faith.
Yeah. So, Derek, you joked in our preview about the Rescue the Republic event that we did a couple weeks back that it would potentially draw tens of people to the National Mall.
Are you ready to issue a correction?
I am. I am. I vastly underestimated the power of stealing Star Wars logos and fonts and putting it all over your website.
And repurposing a famous ancient painting that represented a historical moment in the four of independence.
Well, that's why we titled this after a homeopathic remedy, actually, because the fewer people that attend, the more effective it's going to be.
How powerful it's going to be.
It's resonating. I can feel it right now.
Alright, so they got 1,500 people.
It did still feel and look underwhelming because I think about it and it's like, well, the collective social media followings of these superstar headliners, Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand, they combined for around 13 million.
Now, there's probably a significant overlap there, but that's a lot of people on YouTube.
combined for 16, 13 million on YouTube, 16 million on Twitter.
The other two headliners, RFK Jr.
And Tulsi Gabbard have the kinds of national profiles that come from pursuing
a presidential nomination in addition to being part of American royalty in
Kennedy's case.
And Kennedy is fresh from being the bell of the ball at the Michigan and Arizona
Trump rallies introduced on the stage to wild applause.
So I can only imagine that when they saw the turnout, the backstage
vibes were pretty anticlimactic, especially for those big egos.
Right?
Oh, well, that's okay because they had raw milk, kombucha.
Everybody had a great time in the green room.
It was fine. Ooh, raw milk and kombucha sounds like a terrible combination.
No, man. You got to try it.
It bubbles, it froths, it foams.
Maybe the bacteria and then the...
Right. It's a natural inoculant.
The probiotics, they kind of work against each other, yeah.
So this raises, though, Matthew, it's something you've brought up a lot, this interesting question about how motivated their content consumers actually are to participate in some kind of real-life gathering or protest or action.
Because we've done so much work in the past, and also quite recently with last week's Senate Roundtable, covering the people in this case who had top billing, Our approach today is going to be to scroll down the lineup a little and track who else was there, who's joined the ragtag coalition of the censored, where they're at in their particular conspirituality arcs,
and to also see if there are any rising stars we might want to be aware of.
I have one.
He felt more like the Hindenburg, to be honest.
But first off, the event is to me where Maha really merged into MAGA,
and that's why I felt we had to cover it.
Amanda Moore, who's an on-the-ground journalist who previously embedded undercover
with Christian nationalists for over a year, she attended the event for the nation.
And she's the one who said 1,500 was probably on the high end of attendance there.
And she also pointed out that the biggest cheer of the day occurred when comedian Jimmy
Doerr, comedian, I use that term lately at this point, he asked who was voting for Kamala
Harris and then he followed it by saying who's voting for Trump and that is when the crowd
actually exploded.
And I also noticed in the live stream that a lot of the speakers were explicitly MAGA,
which made for really strange bedfellows with some of the MAGA speakers like Food Bae, Vani
Hari for example.
She fell completely flat with the crowd, and I was glad Amanda Moore also pointed that out.
Now, one narrative that Doar and others shared And Julian, I know you'll discuss Matt Taibbi soon.
He also falls into this camp.
So the narrative is that they were former Democrats or liberals and the party left them.
So I have an example here, someone I'd never heard of before this event.
His name is Brandon Stracca.
He's a hairstylist from New York and he founded the hashtag walkaway campaign for Four former Democrats.
And his sentiment here that I'm going to share, it really offers a framework for this entire event.
There is one political party in this country that is seeking to divide us and tear us apart.
And we all must unite together.
I don't care if you're an RFK Jr.
fan. I don't care if you're a Trump fan.
I don't care if you're a Libertarian, an Independent, a Republican.
We must join forces, join hands, and fight the Democrat Party together.
Because that's what it means to rescue the Republic.
That's what we have to do.
I didn't mention that Straka is also a convicted insurrectionist who was there on January 6th.
Oh, man. While in DC that day, he urged protesters, and this is on January 6th, to take away a police officer's shield and he was caught on tape.
He was arrested on January 25th in Nebraska.
He's almost done serving three years of probation along with a $5,000 fine for that grievous day that he had.
He's a uniter, though.
He wants to bring people together to attack police officers.
In the lockup, he was giving everybody haircuts.
Everybody wanted a mullet.
It was great. Matt Taibbi But since then, Taibbi has been on a steady slide toward conspiracism and right-wing talking points over the last eight years or so.
And like other renegade journalists gone independent, the COVID and digital disinformation crises seem to have broken his brain.
It all started with his hot takes that the 2016 Russian interference investigation was mostly bullshit.
It wasn't. But that tracks because the last time we checked in with Matt, he was testifying to Jim Jordan before Congress about the so-called Twitter files and what they had dubbed the censorship industrial complex.
Which named actual friend of the pod and of democracy itself, René DiResta, as the scary spider in the center of the web of the censorship industrial complex.
The supposed censorship in question had to do with attempts to protect against foreign interference campaigns online in the run-up to 2020's election, and to manage the viral spread of baseless conspiracy theories and health disinformation during COVID. That's the thing they're requiring censorship about.
Now, listeners can go back to episode 147 for that story, as well as episode 209 for DiResta's response to the whole debacle.
But prior to being handpicked by Elon Musk to do investigative journalism...
He says, in quotes, using handpicked internal messages from the old regime at Twitter, and then being shitcanned and shadowbanned by the same Elon Musk, who told Taibbi in a tweet, you're dead to me, in retribution for the journalist siding with Substack, who had recently launched a Twitter competitor of sorts.
But Taibbi reportedly makes $500,000 a year now from his Substack called Racket News.
Which by all accounts is more than he ever made at Rolling Stone.
So now he finds himself as at the latest way station of the red-pilled pipeline, lending his voice to those brave and noble, principled, anti-corruption truth-tellers who obviously support Trump.
And this is how he starts.
What do we all have in common here at Rescue the Republic?
Nothing. Nothing.
In a pre-Trump universe, chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before
RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell, Brett Weinstein, and I would organically
get together for any reason, much less an event like this.
One thing we all have in common, or most of us have in common, is that most everybody
here has been censored.
The issues were all different, but pretty much everybody here disagreed with authoritative voices about something.
Saying no is very American, from Don't tread on me to nuts to you cannot be serious.
Defiance is in our DNA. So there's a candidness here that tells the truth.
In a post-Trump universe, political principles are less important than self-serving, defiant pseudo-populism.
He's acknowledging that the only thing he and all the other speakers have in common is they've been criticized for spreading disinformation and conspiracies.
And publicly shedding outraged martyr tears all the way to the bank as their supposedly cancelled star profiles rose to algorithmic renegade prominence.
But this is the price, Matt.
This is your new audience.
These are your new traveling companions.
This is the journey you've been on.
For any listeners unfamiliar, Taibi wrote an iconic and much-quoted sentence in a National Magazine award-winning article that called Goldman Sachs a vampire squid for driving people from their homes in 2008.
Pretty left-leaning.
His brash style of speaking truth to power made him a darling of that sector of the media.
But this last month, he was all over conservative news, claiming that there was a mainstream media conspiracy to pretend that Harris won the presidential debate by baiting Trump.
I guess you've got to go home with the one who brung you to the dance, right?
Yeah, so it's just the only thing that's consistent is the affect.
And here, like he's admitting that the only way they find common cause is through opposition
to some kind of monolithic regime, which is so incredible because it was clear
all the way through COVID, and I mean, it's clear going back to time out of mind,
that the logic of neoliberalism is at best inconsistent at really caring about what they do.
Like they get banned, and then they get left back on.
They get community noted, but who really cares?
They pretend that COVID policy was authoritarian, and not like this patchwork of just sort of partial fixes,
mainly driven by back to work austerities.
And now we have like governors in democratic states like Hochul in New York giving them exactly what they want by banning masks in public spaces.
So they're really struggling here to paint a recognizable picture of One particular governmental sort of strategy in the global north, having a unified politics beyond the necessity of facilitating capitalism.
Because that's really what the overriding logic and control mechanism is, if there is one.
But they're just too fond of money and competition to really rebel against that, I think.
I also want to say, Julian, that Taibbi's book, Grifftopia, which was based off the Vampire Squid article you cited, was excellent.
And the fact that he wrote a book called Grifftopia, which was completely, like, it's something we'd probably cover positively.
I mean, I read it when it came out, so it's been 15 years.
But remembering it, it's something we would be like, oh, this is the Griff.
This is what they're doing. And he has completely become that thing.
He continues, and to appreciative applause, Taibbi references his role in the Twitter files before decrying journalists being banned from social platforms, but then he doesn't mention that Elon basically did the same thing to him.
Elon ended up censoring him after Elon had employed him to investigate censorship on Twitter.
I mean, I'm not heartless.
I feel for Matt.
He seemed to have prepared for this event as if he was going to be given a commencement speech to the University of Austin.
He compared the villains of the French Revolution, no less, to America's snowflake deep state censorious aristocrats.
He quoted lines of poetry and literature.
He is a literary guy. He's written multiple books, long careers of journalists.
Most of it seemed to float right over the heads of the MAGA crowd, to your point, Derek, about the mismatch here for a lot of these speakers.
But they could tell when to bray for his populist appeals, like when he quoted Kurt Vonnegut calling the founding fathers sea pirates who stole a continent from the King of England and got away with it.
And then he tied this to a quote from Eminem.
I'm sure a lot of the people in the crowd listen to, when in turn, then he switched to James Madison's writing of the First Amendment, and then he took this into this kind of stumbling recitation, which he gave a caveat, I'm not really a religious person, And then tried to recite the opening passage of the biblical gospel of John, because in the beginning, the word was God, and the word was with God, and the word was God, etc.
And so censorship is an affront to the sacredness of words.
Again, as if speaking to a graduating class, Taibbi quoted the William Ernest Henley dog role.
You know, the one about being the master of my fate and the captain of my own soul.
The crowd really liked that one.
Then he told a story from his youth about doing an interview in a Moscow restaurant where a group of European diplomats had complained about a table of noisy Americans.
And the punchline to the story is that there's a little bit of an asshole in every American.
And that's a good thing.
So to the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored, or people who are suggesting that I'm saying that I'm encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or that I'm obstructing consensus, I'm not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority.
I'm encouraging you to defy authority.
That is the right word for this time.
Thank you.
And to all those snoops and nosy parkers sitting in their homeland security funded centers of excellence telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we're traitorous, Putin-loving fascists and enablers of dangerous disinformation.
Motherfucker, I'm an American.
Yeah, so who figured out the right tone to get the responses?
We're recording this a couple hours after it came out that Trump was sending Putin COVID tests via Bob Woodward's reporting.
And there's audio attached to it.
So when Americans couldn't get COVID tests, Trump was sending them to Putin saying, I hope you're okay.
Every time he says the Russiagate was nothing, it's just tremendous how much of a something, as we go on, we seem to piece back to look at.
How did he send them?
By FedEx? I don't understand.
How did Trump send them? I do not know.
I heard the audio and I read Woodward's.
I don't know how he actually, maybe it was FedEx, maybe Uber, I don't know.
There's audio of him telling Woodward that he did this.
Yes. If you're not a good friend in a time of need, what kind of person are you?
Alright, so one last clip from Matt.
This really illustrates the diagonalism at play in how he's thinking about orders.
Now, freedom of speech is a beautiful phrase.
It's strong. It's optimistic.
It has a ring to it, right?
But it's being replaced in the discourse by misinformation and disinformation.
And these words aren't beautiful at all.
But they're full of the small, petty-fogging bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain, the busybody, the prohibitionist, the nosy Parker, the Snoop.
H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, is happy.
That streak of our early European settlers survives in us and surfaces periodically through moral panics.
400 years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then it was the devil's music, then it was comic books, then it was booze, then it was communists, and now it's information.
Isn't that fascinating?
I mean, I just found that list of moral panics that are really connected to America's puritanical history, as he sort of implies.
Fascinating, because these are traditionally issues that conservatives were preoccupied with.
You know, witches, Catholics, immigrants, the devil's music, comic books, booze, the communists.
And somehow he's, it's like he's changed sides, but he's carrying over that same kind of poo-pooing of puritanical moral panic.
It's such a stressful contradiction, such a tough position, because he doesn't really have countercultural politics or any kind of point of view anymore.
Like the sole basis of this protest identity is the question of whether or not he's allowed to say whatever he wants, no matter what it's about.
And some of the people who he's in a coalition with, for people like Jonathan Pajot, who's always doing stuff with Jordan Peterson, he's concerned about witches and the devil and demons.
And a lot of people who are in this MAGA camp think a lot of these things are pretty worth being panicked about.
This is where it's coming to, though.
It's all they have. I mean, Trump bailed on the 60 Minutes interview because he said they were going to fact-check him, and that was a problem.
J.D. Vance during the VB debate said, we agreed there'd be no fact-checking.
And Douglas Murray last week wrote an op-ed in that beacon of journalism, the New York Post, And it's titled, Fact Check Has Become Just Another Word for Censorship.
And it basically takes on the tone that you just heard from Taidi.
There's no actual integrity to the article, but they're trying to position fact checking is now censorship.
Yeah, so we don't have free speech anymore.
It's been replaced by the words misinformation and disinformation.
Okay, I thought you had a background as a journalist.
Well, someone who has a different background altogether and who is somewhat familiar to our listeners is Brett Weinstein.
He's the other speaker I wanted to cover.
As you know, he's the co-host with his wife, Heather Haying, of the Dark Horse podcast.
We haven't checked in with him for a little bit since his social media videos suggesting
that Joe Biden, disappearing from public view briefly after dropping out of the presidential
race, might actually be part of a crafty psyop designed to lure conspiracy theorists.
And here he used the analogy of a pedophile with candy sitting in a van.
So weird.
Into speculating, we're going to lure the conspiracists into speculating that Biden
was actually dead.
And the purpose of this ruse was to then have the hail and hearty Biden reappear so that
conspiracists would look ridiculous.
And Weinstein's message to his followers was, don't take the bait on this one, guys.
It's a trick. So this unhinged but confident paranoia was just the latest in Brett's downward spiral, which has also included hypothesizing that Israel deliberately allowed the October 7th attacks to happen.
So it was just so... Division amongst his anti-vax COVID dissonant allies in the West because they were getting too powerful.
Well, he went farther than that.
Like, he also suggested that the IDF bungled things so that the true ravages of the COVID vaccines on their active duty members would remain hidden, right?
That's right. That's right.
Yeah. And so what?
You know, next he's going to say that the Apache helicopter pilots, they weren't actually guided by the Hannibal Directive to destroy 70 cars driving towards Gaza that day, regardless of whether they contained Israeli citizens.
Because, like, what Brett alone will find out is that the pilots actually knew
that the cars were full of vaccine-injured soldiers, and they needed to just blow them away.
Brett's backstory can be found on several episodes we've done with his name in the title.
But over the last few years, his standout role has been as the most vocal proponent of ivermectin
as a COVID treatment and even a prophylactic.
And he claimed this was being suppressed in what he called the crime of the century
by manufacturers of, of course, dangerous and ineffective vaccines.
For Weinstein, the Rescue the Republic rally was a daring stand against tyranny.
And he cast everyone there as being willing to risk their lives against murderous threats
in the name of free speech.
We must speak out loud about our doubts and fears as that old song would have it.
Now, as long as we're on the topic of fears, let's confront one directly.
If, as the event proceeds, you find yourself faced with someone displaying Nazi symbols, inciting violence or lawlessness, or you encounter a group of people dressed in paramilitary garb, those are assuredly federal agents.
Thank them for their service and move on!
Holy shit, so that's a direct reference to conspiracy disinformation about January 6th.
And it's characteristic of Brett's steadfastly melted worldview.
But then he weaves back into extolling the virtues of American democracy, acknowledging the stains of Native American genocide, slavery, and racial discrimination, and yet the noble push toward equality, freedom, and productive cooperation.
But watch out.
Because the woke Marxists are threatening to destroy Western civilization entirely.
The West is not a list of nations.
It's not a geographic description.
It's an ideal, the level playing field, and a set of agreements that point toward it.
And therein lies the rub.
The agreements are fragile.
There is progress and backsliding in every society that has joined the experiment.
And the West is, at this moment, in grave danger.
Some force that wishes to rig the world has clearly taken hold and targeted these agreements everywhere they have
been embraced.
In societies with weak constitutions, civil liberties have already given way.
In the United States, we have one of the strongest constitutions anywhere, and so our descent into tyranny is slower, but there is no time to lose.
We have to regain control of our system and return to the Founders' vision, or we will soon find the opportunity has slipped away.
We must rescue the Republic to save the West.
If I'm not mistaken, I think it's the Proud Boys that brought back the notion or the phrase Western chauvinism.
It was right in their manifesto.
It's part of the thing that you have to say when you get jumped into the gang.
I am a proud Western chauvinist.
Yeah, so either Brett's language is stuck in the 50s, or he doesn't know about this thing, he's just sort of absorbed this osmotically, or he's making a conscious choice here to bolster this kind of neocolonial moral panic around his own idealized role in leading and defending the world.
But I don't actually think any real American cheerleader can grasp the contradiction of the history that America is a revolutionary project that becomes its own colonial and now imperial power.
And that's why I think that the crossing the Potomac like dumbass AI painting thing is actually really important to these people because what they have to do is they have to freeze history at a certain point.
And then they have to inject themselves into it as revolutionaries and then forget about whether any of those founding ideals have actually been achieved.
Well, it's also just the grandiosity of deeply, deeply personal grievance, narcissistic wounding.
And you see this with, I think it's most prominent in the academics who fell foul of some kind of social justice issue.
Maybe going back six or seven years, somewhere in that period where they're so personally outraged by this that they have to extrapolate it into the whole world.
The whole world is falling under tyranny.
All democracies are in danger because of this anti-Western ethos that the woke represent.
And it's so blown out of proportion.
Are there things that...
Have needed to be sort of reformed or rethought through in different ways about some of that discourse?
Absolutely, we've been critical about some of it, but is it an absolute threat to democracy itself?
know those are the people that you're aligning yourself with.
I know I do. She is the president of Bobby Kennedy's nonprofit Children's Health Defense.
She is not an epidemiologist or a vaccinologist, but she is actually a lawyer.
Although she is not trained in anything medically related, she feels pretty confident sharing the following information about vaccines.
During pregnancy, moms are expected to get four shots.
Flu, Tdap, Covid and RSV. At birth, a baby is expected to get a Hepatitis B shot against a sexually transmitted disease.
By six months, a baby is expected to get 20 shots.
Hep B, RSV, DTaP, Hib, IPV, PCV, rotavirus, and COVID. By nine months, a baby is expected to get one or two more COVID shots.
Not one of these shots has been properly tested and each one is known to cause injury or death in some.
This is insane.
This is corrupt.
This is criminal.
So there's so much to unpack here.
I just want to cover the basics.
And Julie, and then you can unpack her last sentiment there.
But the hep V vaccine for babies, it provides immediate protection against hepatitis B infection, which can be transmitted from mother to child during birth.
Because if newborns are infected, about 90% develop chronic hepatitis B infection later in life.
And that can lead to serious liver problems such as cirrhosis and liver cancer.
And it's important to note that many people don't even know that they're infected.
So this idea that, oh, the mother would know when they're pregnant, that's absolutely not true.
We have to underline the QAnon dog whistle here too, which is the line where she suggests it's absurd to vaccinate an infant against a sexually transmitted disease.
This is low-key suggesting that the medical establishment, she lands on it, right?
She takes a beat there.
She's suggesting that the medical establishment has just normalized that babies will be sexually abused and infected.
That's what she's saying. Yeah, and that's why if you even go to Children's Health Defense, you see gender identity articles.
It's like, why is that there?
And that totally tracks.
There's the hemophilius influenza type B vaccine, which can cause, or the actual disease
can cause meningitis, epiglottis, pneumonia, septic arthritis, or sepsis if you're not
vaccinated against it.
You have the rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea, vomiting, fever, dehydration,
and abdominal pain. It comes with the risk of death if not treated.
You have diphtheria, that's a fun one, as it was one of the leading causes of death
in children before the vaccine.
So in 1921, 206,000 children contracted diphtheria, and that resulted in 15,520 deaths,
a fatality rate of 7.5%.
So yeah, let's not vaccinate against that.
Derek, Derek, what about overpopulation?
Weren't those 7.5% of diphtheria babies like the weak ones anyway?
Like... You say this, but this is also one of the biggest criticisms that we got for our book and from our earlier podcast in general was this idea of relating the wellness community to the practice of eugenics.
People have pushed back about that pretty consistently.
And just the last few days, Trump has come out and said that immigrants have weak genes.
Yeah. What more do you need to understand that this is what eugenics led to in the past?
These are the, you know, led to the Holocaust, led to a lot of genocides and crimes against humanity because of this very language.
So when people pretend it's not actually happening right in front of their eyes, I don't understand what else they would need in terms of proof.
Yeah, I want to just point out the glaring hypocrisy and confusion on display here too, like raising this kind of moral panic about vaccines when you're also appearing on stage with people who are all in favor of raw milk.
And over the course of this year, hundreds of people have been infected.
There was a salmonella outbreak in California, 165 people.
There are several other. I've covered it in the past.
The fact that...
Oh, and the other thing about raw milk this year is that it's had lots of avian flu.
The levels of avian flu in raw milk have been incredibly high.
So the fact that...
Maybe raw milk is mostly okay for most people to drink most of the time, but every now and again you have this terrible level of sickness that is just unheard of with regard to vaccines.
There's never a moment where you go, oh wow, actually this time the MMR vaccine actually did lead to all of these terrible problems.
It just doesn't happen. It happens with the raw milk.
The problem with Whole Foods moms buying raw milk, though, is that they don't have the hats, they don't have the overalls, and they're not collectivizing their farming.
Those are the protective measures against listeria and so on, right?
So, listen, maybe it could lead to some good things.
I don't know. Better outfits at least.
Yeah. Farming core, you approve.
Right. Yeah. Now, this classic anti-vax talking point is that there are no childhood vaccines that have ever been tested by double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.
You hear it all the time. You'll see it in online debates all the time.
It's very effective at creating mistrust, right?
It pushes you into the twilight zone.
What? They make it seem as if the whole vaccine industry is based on a lie because all of these vaccines are being given to kids, but they've never gone through the highest level of safety testing.
First of all, this is simply not true.
Many childhood vaccines, for example, measles, polio, flu, pneumococcus, and HPV have gone through exactly that process.
When double-blind placebo-controlled trials are not used, it's for very specific reasons.
With certain diseases, it is grossly unethical to leave the control group exposed to the virus, both for their health and for that of the broader community.
And then in other cases, if there's already an existing vaccine, that ends up being used as the contrast instead of a placebo, both for comparison and to keep protecting the control group against the illness.
Then there's also the practical issue of double-blinding turning out to be a bit of a farce because what is always demanded with placebo double-blinds is that it's a saline placebo.
And that actually will not create any of the standard safe side effects like soreness at the injection site, fever or headache.
And so it becomes obvious right away who's in the control group and who actually got the vaccine.
But when this is pointed out, then they'll switch gears and say, we need this real holistic kind of double-blind placebo-controlled testing where the entire vaccine schedule is tested at the same time against the placebo-controlled group.
And that's never happened.
And that is true.
But satisfying that demand is almost impossible logistically, and it raises profound ethical questions.
Most importantly, there's no existing body of scientific evidence that makes it a necessary thing to do.
Vaccines are rigorously tested for safety and efficacy, but activists always want to go back to square one for each new vaccine and make unrealistic demands based on a shoddy understanding of the science, which in many cases is deliberately misleading.
Ironically, these are often the same people who promote off-label use of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, colloidal silver, and may even sell a raft of supplements themselves along with alt-med cures that are completely untested.
Well, Del Bigtree would push back against you, Julian.
He speaks later during this event.
He makes the same exact argument as Mary Holland.
But I went back... Because I wanted to look at some of the Defeat the Mandates clips.
And Del Bigtree was a headliner there in Los Angeles in 2022.
He was making the same argument, but it was a much longer story.
And I didn't want to clip it for this episode.
But he talks about sitting down with Anthony Fauci in 2015, I think, with RFK Jr.
or 2016, something like that.
And saying that...
You know, these are not double-blind, placebo-controlled.
And he said Fauci just looked at him and said, huh, you're right, they're not.
As if it was a revelation to them at the time.
The way that these people just lie about these things.
Speaking of which, another person who uses that line of defense is Pierre Corey.
He is the critical care physician who became a big ivermectin champion during COVID. That's how his star rose.
And in August 2023, his certifications were revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine for spreading misinformation.
So naturally, he lands on the MAGA slash MAHA stage to say this.
You know, ultimately through this journey and why I'm here is I've come to believe that our government has been fully captured by corporations and these industrial complexes.
They have every single one of our agencies, the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the EPA, you name it, big food.
They're letting all the immigrants come in, and they're surveilling us and censoring us.
All of our rights are being slowly stripped, and most of the country's not aware of this.
And as an educator, I'm trying to bring that message out.
And so that's why I'm here. I'm here for the same reason you guys are all here, to rescue the Republicans!
This is where MAGA and MAHA collide to me because what the fuck does immigration have to do with any of the rest of that sentiment?
Well, because he's seamlessly and mask-offing his white supremacy there because immigrants from the global south are grouped with pollutants and poisons.
He didn't even say illegal, right?
He said immigration. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't need to.
So last up here, I want to look at Vani Hari, the food babe.
One of the funniest things is when she appeared in front of Congress, the number one comment that I saw from people was, she's still around?
And she has.
She's somehow re-carved her niche here.
Still, she persisted.
Her chemical fear-mongering is attached to no medical or science training.
I want to flag that early. But she's long worked as an affiliate marketer for a number of natural food brands and supplements.
In terms of her own persona, here's some of her greatest hits.
She claimed that microwave ovens caused water molecules to form crystals that resemble negative thoughts.
And when you say Hitler or Satan to water, it pollutes it.
So that was 2014-ish, I think.
Changes the structure. Which one is worse, though, if you look at your water glass and say Hitler or Satan?
Are they correlated with different diseases?
Yeah. Be careful. I know you're drinking tea right now, Matthew.
You might not have a good day.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Hari claimed that the flu shot is more dangerous than getting the flu, yet the flu kills
between 290,000 and 650,000 people every year.
She also said that flu vaccines have been used as a genocidal tool in the past.
She deleted that tweet later, but yeah, that came out.
In her book, The Food Babe Way, I know you guys both read it.
She wrote, there is no acceptable level of chemical to ingest ever, so no water for anyone ever again or oxygen.
But all of this earns you a spot on the Rescue the Republic stage.
Let's listen to Food Babe.
There's something critical you need to know about the American food system.
It affects all of our lives and has been overlooked for decades.
Our government is letting U.S. food companies get away with serving American Citizens, harmful ingredients that are banned are heavily regulated in other countries.
Even worse, American food companies are selling the same product overseas without these chemicals, but choose to serve us the most toxic version.
Here we go. Okay, so first off, naming is a function of the regulatory agency, and the US and EU have different agencies.
So as it turns out, people claim things are banned when they're not.
So right there, in another circumstance, she specifically says red dye 3 is banned in the EU, but it's not.
It's just called E-127 there.
It's the same fucking chemical.
But no, no, hold on, hold on.
You're missing the fact that calling it a different name...
changes its molecular structure.
So I contacted Dr. Andrew.
So I contacted Dr.
Andrea Love after this event, and she published an article the other day listing all of the ingredients that these people say are banned when they're not.
She also points out that there are a number of ingredients in the EU that's banned in America.
You never hear these influencers talk about that exchange, however.
Now, the U.S. and EU really do have different risk assessment qualifications.
Michelle Wong told me earlier this year on the podcast that when the EU formed, they basically took every chemical from every country and banned them outright without doing further requisite testing.
So they are more cautious than the U.S., and you can debate the merits of that.
They're just different systems of weighing out risk.
Andrea Love, and I'll include that article in the show notes, she also specifically talks about that.
Now, Hari also talks elsewhere, and later during this talk, but elsewhere as well, about the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the IARC. And they're only actually classifying chemicals based on hazard, not risk. Hazard refers to something that can potentially cause cancer, while risk is the probability that some exposure to a substance can cause cancer.
And they also have four classifications.
Here's the thing. None of them consider dosage amounts.
They can say this chemical is a carcinogenic hazard, but But they don't tell you what sort of exposure puts you at risk.
And a lot of wellness people only see the hazard but they never consider the risk.
Well, understandably, that's a little bit confusing.
That sounds like specialist sort of stuff that would be hard for laypeople to understand, eh?
It is, but at the same time, you can drink too much water and die.
Water is a chemical. It's a dosage amount thing.
But you're absolutely right that that can be confusing.
The problem is that these influencers exploit that gap in knowledge and never explain that fact.
Yeah, I mean, dihydrogen monoxide has been shown to be incredibly toxic.
Yeah. You're stealing a later joke I have.
Oh, sorry. I should have read the script more closely.
I just threw it in near the end, but I'm going to save it.
Listener, forget I just said that.
It'll still work. It'll still work.
And sometimes they extrapolate from animal and in vivo and in vitro studies and applies them to humans even though testing hasn't been done on humans.
Cells in a petri dish do not act how cells in a human body act.
To your point, Matthew, influencers are always exploiting that as well when they're sharing PubMed links saying, look how bad this is and it's in a rat.
That does not necessarily mean it'll affect humans in the same way.
Also, finally, cancer is hundreds of diseases.
It is not one disease.
That is just a general category.
They all act differently, but people like Hari never mention specifics like that.
This is a little bit of a sociological digression, but I've heard Food Babes handle for years But I never saw her IG and I didn't realize that her parents were Punjabi.
And then I looked further and I expected her food content to like lean into South Asian traditionalism and ideas about herbs and spices and balancing the doshas and so on.
She doesn't do any of that, which makes sense because she's born in Charlotte, North Carolina.
But I also don't think that she would have crushed it so hard in the wellness world.
In 2014, apparently she got 54 million views on her blog.
I don't think she would have done that if she had pigeonholed herself as just sort of like ethnic Ayurvedic alone, even though the wellness world loves that kind of stuff.
There's a ceiling on it, I think.
But this made me think of how Usha Vance might be a heartbeat away from becoming First Lady
in January, and how the only way she's pulling that off is by concealing her religious and ethnic heritage.
Because MAGA, Maha, is a white movement, and so I think it's really interesting to see how,
amidst all of the anti-immigrant aggression, they all have to negotiate this basic fact
that they are all ethnically and racially intermingled as well,
which means there has to be this ongoing construction of who the good immigrant or the good brown person is.
Using this heuristic, I really enjoy from Naomi Klein and others that she gets the feelings right,
but the facts wrong. This is always my contention, to be clear, with what's happening with this whole push
on wellness and food in general.
So, what I never hear from these people are how to actually solve the systemic problems
that they're pointing out.
They will sell you, as we've said, supplements and protocols and books and all sorts of things.
They will not talk about strengthening primary care.
They will not talk about expanding insurance coverage.
They will not talk about the social determinants of health.
We're recording this today before Hurricane Milton is about to possibly destroy the west coast of Florida.
They will never talk about climate change's effects on health and what the stress that does to people.
They will never talk about gun violence.
They talk about children all the time.
They will never talk about gun violence and the kind of stress that that must rage on a child's nervous system to have to conduct these tests and not knowing whether they'll get shot.
There are actual solutions to these problems.
Speaking specifically about their domain and what they do cover, is it better to eat whole foods as often as possible?
Yes, it absolutely is.
Is too much ultra-processed foods bad for you?
Yes, we know that.
Does she or any of the other Maha accolades distinguish between processed foods and ultra-processed foods?
Not really because most of them sell processed foods in the And drinks and energy bars.
I mean, Vani Hari's store is filled with processed foods.
So it hasn't stopped her fear-mongering from reaching the dawn of podcast pros, however, who just recently repeated her claims without actually doing the research.
What do you think about RFK's possibly getting in to investigate all that stuff?
I think it would be one of the best things for the health of the people in the United States.
If you really care about health, I think there's a lot of us, and it was me at one point in time, and I've gotten more educated about it, a lot of us are very ignorant about what we're doing to our bodies with food and with medications.
And I don't think we're being told the truth.
I think if RFK gets into office, he will expose a lot of this stuff, just like he did when he was an environmental attorney.
You know, people think of him as just the vaccine kook.
Listen, you got to look at that guy's, the history of that guy's work has all been about protecting people from corporations that are poisoning them.
That's literally what that guy did his whole career.
And if he can do that with health, particularly with things that we can avoid.
Look, one of the things they demonstrated is that Lucky Charms, as sold in the United States, they don't sell the same one in Canada.
In Canada, the dyes that we use to make it all pretty and exciting for kids, they don't allow that because it's Toxic.
Yeah. So we allow it.
Which means someone's corrupt.
Yeah. Someone's corrupt.
Probably the whole system, maybe.
I just want to say, I love how you added the viola there, Derek.
Yeah, the Vivaldi. It was really awesome TikTok stuff.
I've been practicing. Thank you.
I think I'm hearing a contradiction here, maybe for the first time, because Rogan isn't wrong, I think, when he talks about popular ignorance with regard to food manufacturer, like excluding his own.
He's not talking about that. But part of the reason that Food Babe can be alarmist is because I think a lot of us are lost when it comes to ingredients lists, chemical names.
But what I haven't really sort of clocked yet is that Rogan promises that RFK Jr.
will make all of that more comprehensible, as opposed to obscuring it
even more beneath layers of bullshit.
So there's this pretense that they are experts, but also there's something else in the sales pitch,
which is sort of like in the line of doing your own research.
They're promising to offer the individual the feeling of expertise and all that mastery.
Well, here's what Julian Preemt did.
And it's not even mine.
I think Jonathan Stea or one of the doctors I follow posted this once where they were like, what about things like chlorogenic acid and ethyl acetate and trans-2-hexanol?
Would you ever eat that? Oh, boy.
And it's just, those are ingredients in an apple.
That's what you pick from a tree.
Like there are chemical names that we have for things that you can blame the naming system, right?
Where experts use these things, but chemistry is everywhere.
And That is the most frustrating aspect about it, is they never distinguish those things.
And I'm sorry, but as actual chemists have pointed out over and over again, just because something is created in a laboratory does not make it necessarily worse or better than what nature provides already.
It's chemistry all the way down.
Yeah, and vice versa, right?
That arsenic occurs naturally.
Yes. Well, great work on the grifting, guys.
I had this zooming out thought.
We're perfecting. You know, I had one thought about how these events present themselves as protest events.
We've covered a bunch of them over the last several weeks.
I think a real measure of whether they are protest events is how the state responds.
And in this case, like exactly 0% of the state cares.
Like the only pushback this crowd has had is from tech platforms, which, you know, might have mild and inconsistent governmental pressure applied to them.
And so they'll enforce community standards on public health misinformation for a while.
Or, you know, We'll have Russell Brand credibly, credibly accused of being a serial sex assaulter.
No one cancels him.
He's free to do what he likes.
So I think if we want to measure what kind of power they're actually contesting and whether or not they are protesters...
I think we can compare them to things like, just this week, Phoebe Plummer, 23, and Anna Holland, 22.
They were the women who threw a can of Campbell's soup on the glass covering on a Van Gogh painting over in London's National Gallery.
So this is in 2022.
They were protesting the oil economy.
They were demanding a change to climate policy.
And as you've said, Derek, that's apropos today.
Like a few hours before this episode drops, Milton will make landfall, driven by overheated ocean water.
It's going to smash into Tampa and beyond.
Will this soup can protest do anything?
You know, lots of people will feel differently about that.
But in the end, the painting wasn't damaged.
The museum said that it took £10,000 to clean the frame, so there is damage.
But were they fined or asked to repay the damages?
No, they were sentenced to two years in prison in their mid-20s.
And I think we have to think about, like, what by contrast is the material cost of RFK Jr.'s anti-vax propaganda or anti-trans propaganda?
What's the material cost of climate denialism?
Or sort of disingenuously using climate as a talking point when you're not actually going to do anything about it.
Like, who really challenges power?
Because these guys at this Rescue the Republic thing, they are disrupting public health.
They're going to cause polio outbreaks.
But I think it says something.
That our governments are not actually set up to defend the common good, but if you want to disrupt the momentum of something like oil dependency, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here on the main feed next Thursday, on Saturday for a brief, and we're always over on Patreon.
