As of recording time, RFK Jr has not yet been confirmed to the HHS Secretary position by the Senate. That might change by publication date. But if we were setting odds on this confirmation, we’d say put your money on Bobby.
So, WTF. Bobby Brainworms will be in charge of US public health, and its influence around the world. Our years of reporting on him have been defeated by the influencer noise of the MAHA Mamas. But we. Will. Carry. On.
Julian reviews the misinfo docket. Derek runs down the bureaucratic implications. And Matthew speculates on just how perfect someone like RFK Jr would be as the domestic health figurehead of a fascist movement, if, you know, that were ever to be possible.
Show Notes
Some Cancers Rising Amongst Younger people
Increased Lung Cancer from the 1960s to 80s.
Lung Cancer Rates Today
Smoking Suppresses Appetite and Results in Lower BMI for Some
64% of Adults in UK Overweight
65% of Australians Overweight
Diabetes Was 1.8% in the US in 1960
11.6% of US Population Has Diabetes
Risk of Alzheimer’s Doubles Every 5 Years After 65
30% of Smokers are Overweight or Obese
A recent study did NOT show vaccines cause autism, but RFK Jr. keeps pushing the lie.
“A New Academic Publishing Model”: Right-Wing Dark Money Group Launches Fringe Medical Journal
Judge Orders White House to Unblock Funding for NIH, Others
RFK Jr.'s financial disclosures reveal millions in both debt and income as he awaits HHS confirmation
Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy. Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction in
History of fascism, reproductive rights offers lessons for today
Are tyrants good for your health?
When the leader is ill—or addicted to cocaine, meth, steroids, or hormones
Five Pseudosciences That Fueled the Nazis
‘Hitler Was Centre of Our Lives’: Confessions of Nazi Criminals’ Wives | History | Nuremberg. Casus pacis
Theodor Morell: Hitler’s Particularly Odious Physician
Public Health Under the Third Reich
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we 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 Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 244, battle for the onesies.
As of recording this Tuesday, February 11th.
RFK Jr. has not yet been confirmed to the Health and Human Services Secretary position by the Senate.
Now, that might change by the time we publish this on Thursday the 13th, but if we were setting odds on this confirmation, we'd say put your money on Bobby.
His committee vote squeaked out 14 to 13, even after Bernie Sanders got him on an anti-vax bit of baby clothing.
But it was along straight party lines that we don't expect to shift.
Although Fetterman has grumbled that he'd be opposing, it probably won't be enough.
What the fuck?
Bobby Brainworms will be in charge of U.S. public health, most likely, and its influence around the world.
And our years of reporting on him have been defeated by the influencer noise of the Mahamamas, but we will carry on.
It's hard to encapsulate in all seriousness just how bad this is for every human being alive and yet to be born, but we'll try.
Julian's going to review the misinformation docket.
Derek's going to run down the bureaucratic implications, and I'm going to speculate, only speculate because really what do I know, on just how perfect someone like RFK Jr. would be as the domestic health figurehead of a fascist movement, if, you know, that were ever to be possible.
All right, so as we cover RFK Jr. again, we should start by saying that we, and so many others, Have done all of the necessary debunking of his lies and duplicity about vaccines, and it doesn't really seem to matter in terms of the people who are taken in by them.
As well as his role in the deaths of 83 mostly children under five years old in Samoa, etc.
Now, during the hearings, his presumably well-coached strategy when questioned on vaccines was to say he'd be happy to look at any of the studies that lawmakers were referencing about safety and efficacy.
As well as vaccines not being connected to autism, as if these data were some rare species he'd simply never come across.
Despite leading anti-vax activism group Children's Health Defense for eight years, he could claim ignorance on any of their activities because he'd resigned from their board in April of 2023 to begin his presidential run.
And this led to Bernie Sanders in this viral moment that...
People have probably come across trying to pin him down.
You have started a group called the Children's Health Defense.
You're the originator.
Right now, as I understand it, on their website, they are selling what's called onesies.
These are little things, clothing for babies.
One of them is titled, Unfaxed, Unafraid.
Next one, and they're sold for $26 apiece, by the way.
Next one is, No Vax, No Problem.
Now you're coming before this committee and you say you're pro-vaccine.
Just want to ask some questions.
And yet your organization is making money selling a child's product to parents for $26, which casts fundamental doubt on the usefulness of vaccines.
Can you tell us now that you will, now that you are pro-vaccine, that you're going to have your organization take these products off the market?
Senator, I have no power over that organization.
I'm not part of it.
I resigned from the board.
That was just a few months ago.
You founded that.
You certainly have power.
You can make that call.
Are you supportive of this?
I've had nothing to do with leadership.
Are you supportive of these onesies?
I'm supportive of vaccines.
Are you supportive of this clothing, which is militantly anti-vaccine?
I am supportive of vaccines.
I will.
I want good science and I want to protect...
But you will not tell the organization you founded not to continue selling that product.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My inbox actually served up a fundraising email last Friday from Children's Health Defense with the subject line, Thank you, Bernie.
It included the clip that we just heard, plus a message reading that these are no ordinary times and they...
And I'm quoting here, need your support to expose corporate and government agency corruption and hold Big Pharma accountable for its crimes against children.
The childhood vaccine schedule is harming millions of children, and we're ready to take advantage of this moment to broadcast the scientific evidence to a whole new audience.
So please.
Right.
Now, Derek, didn't they also just start marketing the onesies with a new tie-in and poke at Sanders, too?
Yeah, they started that day.
That night, Children's Health Defense published an article that led with the onesie incident.
Mary Holland, the president of Children's Health Defense, was talking about it, laughing about it.
Right.
And then they immediately in a day or two later, put a banner on their website marketing the onesie and you could save like 10% using the code Bernie.
Yeah.
I also want to point out this is coming at the moment when there is another measles outbreak in East Texas.
It's up to 15 people now.
And data recently came out that in 2023, over 10 million people around the world suffered from the measles that year.
About 108,000 people died that year from the measles, the majority of whom were under five years old.
So the fact that this organization is marketing a fucking onesie with an anti-vax slogan on it when actual children who get it are dying just shows you how...
Closed off in their own bubble, these people are, but how dangerous this sort of rhetoric is.
Yeah, and so there's Kennedy on the biggest stage he's ever been on, and plenty of people unfamiliar with his rhetorical style will find much of what he says appealing or even reasonable.
But both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pointed out the hugely problematic financial aspects of Kennedy's anti-vax activism now translating into government.
His star power.
Turned Children's Health Defense into a massive operation.
Their revenue rose from $13,000 in 2014, the year before he joined, and that's, by the way, when it was still called World Mercury Project, to $470,000 the next year once he got involved.
Their opportunistic fundraising during COVID translated into quadrupled revenue from 2020 to their 2022 high of $23.5 million raised for that organization.
And Bobby, as his salary, took over $800,000 as his salary that year.
But you know what, guys?
That's peanuts compared to the estimated $3.8 million he's made from the sales of his bestseller.
The real Anthony Fauci, who, by the way, a couple weeks ago had his security detail relieved of their duties by Trump personally, as well as the combined $10 million he says he made over the last year, this is a financial disclosure, from speaking fees and anti-vax lawsuits along with his children's health defense salary.
It's a lot of money.
I want to turn now to just the initial remarks of Kennedy's opening statement at the first hearing, because that's a microcosm of his ideology.
Like all conspiracism, his case seems to hang together if you don't look too carefully.
And he actually only mentions vaccines in his opening statement to say he's not anti-vax, but pro-safety.
And then, as if winking to his posse, he shouts out the Maha Moms.
He praises farmers.
And then he shares that he's gone down on his knees and prayed to God every day that he could be put in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic.
Just that, just that little ambition.
Kennedy bemoans the high cost of healthcare, but he blames it not on for-profit medicine or exploitive insurance companies or income inequality.
No, no.
It's America's level of unique chronic disease, you see.
Now, never mind the fact that countries like Australia and the UK have very similar rates of chronic disease, but they're still somehow able to have nationalized healthcare systems.
And as he points out, they spend half what we do per capita.
He also promises to scrutinize chemical ingredients in food as if this hasn't been done for a century by the FDA and to create an honest, unbiased gold standard science, that's a direct quote, at HHS. Which is really rich, coming from the guy who touts the efficacy of ivermectin for COVID and who also denies that HIV causes AIDS in his book that demonizes Fauci.
That point you made about the fact that other countries have similar rates and yet offer nationalized healthcare I think is so pertinent.
It reminds me of my years I worked as a world music journalist for about...
I was always fascinated by how little Americans cared about cultures outside of their own.
If something becomes integrated into American society, the general trend is Americans will pick up on it.
But overall, Americans have very little interest in what happens unless it serves to confirm their own agendas or what they're saying right now.
All this data is very searchable.
You can find out that...
A whole range of statistics that are presented by Maha either aren't true or they're just manipulating data, which I'm going to get to more in my section here because now they're being weaponized to do so by scientific journals.
But it all really starts by the fact that as a group, Americans seem so disinterested in what happens outside of our borders.
And that's coupled with the fact that – and our listenership also shows that.
So many people from other cultures pay really close attention to what's happening in America.
And I think that sort of hurdle in understanding data is one of the biggest educational landmarks of why we're in this situation we're in.
Not saying that people wouldn't still gravitate towards these charismatic figures, but come on, it didn't take you that long to find that research.
Yeah, exactly.
Here are the main points then.
I've grabbed a few of Kennedy's pitch.
70% of Americans are overweight.
This is part of what Bobby claims he wants to fix.
It's an epidemic, you see.
Now, that number sounds really bad, but it's only about 5% higher than Canada, Australia, and the UK. And the thing is, these numbers are based on BMI, or Body Mass Index, which we've covered several times as incorrectly skewing very many healthy people who just happen to have athletic muscle mass into overweight or obese.
It's a very blunt instrument.
So there's that.
Number two, diabetes is 10 times more prevalent now than in the 1960s.
So fact check on that.
Diabetes was about 1.8% of the population back then in the 60s.
Now it's about 11.6%.
So if you crunch those numbers, it's more like 6.4 times higher, which is awful, but not 10 times higher.
Are you mathing again, Julian?
I know.
It's not my strong point, but I do know how to work a calculator, which clearly Bobby kind of just does it on the fly.
I just use it to spell boobs.
Because type 2 diabetes is highly correlated with obesity, it's an easy target.
For moralism.
But genetics tells us that having a first-degree relative with type 2 diabetes increases prevalence by two to three times the rest of the population.
So you're two or three times more likely to have it if you have one of those relatives.
And that goes up to having a 70% likelihood of type 2 diabetes if both of your parents have it.
Number three, cancer rates amongst young people have been rising 1% to 2% a year.
Now, this is true, but only for certain cancers.
And scientists don't really fully understand why, because sometimes that's the case with science.
And yes, they say diet and exercise may account for some of it, but so too the cultural phenomenon of people having kids later in life, or not at all, which slightly, it's 4% or lower, increases cancer risk in female reproductive systems.
Then there's also the socioeconomic reality of disparities in access to healthcare, not to mention access to healthy food or the luxury of time to exercise and join a gym, which during his presidential campaign was one of Bobby's prescriptions for how to make America healthy again.
Just give everyone gym memberships.
And it should be pointed out that we can talk about the different measures of what health means, but less than 20% of Americans even have a health...
Now, of course, people work out all sorts of ways.
It isn't restricted to that.
But he's presenting it as if the other 80% are going to be like, oh, what's this?
Now I can go do this thing?
And they're just going to adopt that as a practice.
And having had worked in gyms for decades, it is very hard to get people to change their everyday lives.
And that's just reality.
So you talked about blunt instruments a moment ago.
That's another one.
And it's why this whole Maha movement is a farce.
Yeah, absolutely.
And speaking of gyms, right, we all know that part of the business model is that you sell people on their New Year's resolution.
You sell like three or four times more memberships than your gym can actually logistically handle because you know that people are going to maybe show up a few times and then not come back again, but you've sold them for the whole year.
Yeah, it's actually more than that.
When I worked at Equinox, which the memberships were about $225 to $275 a month, The retention rate was only 50% of people who signed up actually went every month.
And then when you go to the lower tiers like Planet Fitness, it's more like 90% of people who pay $10 a month don't go every month.
So that is the business model.
So again, it's just showing why there's so many holes in the argument that this would actually be effective.
Now, we've probably covered the first minute of Bobby starting to give this gish gallop, right?
Next, he speeds up.
He says neurodevelopmental disorders.
Alzheimer's, mental health diagnoses, and autoimmune conditions are all rising alarmingly.
And I want to take a minute to actually unpack this one because we've not really covered this angle specifically before, and the lumping together is a regular feature of the Make America Healthy Again argument.
One thing these conditions do have in common is the advances made in understanding and correctly detecting them due to progress in medical screening, digital data collection, and more nuanced sensitive diagnostic criteria.
So yes, conditions that your grandparents had never heard of are now seen as more common.
Because of medical science, people are also on average living 10 years longer than they did in the 1960s.
And risk of Alzheimer's doubles every five years after the age of 65. So increased Alzheimer's should be expected.
To some extent, the incidence of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and cancer is more prevalent now because the percentage of the population who are over 65 has doubled since the 1960s, which is the era that Bobby keeps hearkening back to as the baby boomers hit old age.
Today's birth rate, just to get a real clear sense of this, is around 1.6 per woman.
But in the post-war period, it was 4. Do you know, Julian, I haven't actually clued into this yet, that the paranoia that is sort of the undercurrent of the Maha movement is really coming out, perhaps, of some kind of boomer recognition or premonition of their own sort of demographic base, you know, fading.
I haven't made that connection before.
That's kind of extraordinary to think about.
And it starts to explain a lot about how especially the elders in the movement are, you know, really fanatical about taking care of themselves with all kinds of magical things.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, what about exercise?
Available data says that about 24% of Americans exercised regularly in the 1960s.
And today, about the same.
24% meet recommended levels of aerobic exercise plus strength training.
But an impressive 46% get sufficient aerobic exercise alone.
I can't find a stat for that in the 1960s.
They probably weren't thinking about it that way because so much of this has been culturally sort of emergent.
But commercial gyms, yoga studios, cycling apps and jogging clubs may be a more contemporary phenomenon because more of the population got their exercise from physically demanding jobs in the 1960s.
But you know what else was different?
42% of Americans were smokers back then.
And it's a little bit controversial, but smoking has been repeatedly shown to be correlated with lower BMI. A 2015 study showed that only 30% of smokers are overweight or obese.
So that's one way to make America healthy again, I guess.
Today, less than 12% of Americans smoke.
Because of the popularity of smoking, lung cancer rates doubled between 1960 and 1970, and then more than doubled again over the next 10 years.
Today, they once again stand at half the rate we had in the 1980s.
Yeah, but I really miss flying on airplanes when people are allowed to smoke.
Or when I started DJing in the early aughts when bars in New York City allowed smoking and I would leave after a six-hour set and have to detox my clothing for three days.
Yeah, or throw it away.
Playing in bands in the 90s was just like you're basically drenched in smoke.
So look, context matters.
And free-floating statistics of the kind that Kennedy uses in his rhetoric can be really deceptive.
What he does is churn scary factoids together to paint a picture of American decline, and then he asserts without evidence what is causing the crisis and claims that he has the solutions which will make America healthy again.
So as I watch this, as I listen to this, I'm thinking to myself, you know, this has appeal.
Like, who does this appeal to?
And I want to say first that these kind of fallacious arguments are not new.
The entire wellness marketplace has relied on them for decades.
They are arguments that I myself would have made in my 20s to people about the importance of going against the mainstream toxic food and cleaning supplies and all the rest of it.
These things appeal to both our idealism and our distrust.
And this is where the Venn diagram between natural living yoga folks and bro science optimizers trends toward the conspiracism that more and more they've been sharing with MAGA. Kennedy knows this when he shouts out farmers and Maha moms.
And when he says the chronic disease epidemic is not just a medical crisis, it's a spiritual one.
I think he knows it when he remixes the fascist undertones of Make America Great Again into Make America Healthy Again, because again, always idealizes a lost golden era when the natural order was still intact before it became...
Probably never existed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Before it somehow got polluted, right?
That's the idealism, if we can use that term.
But to explain how we've supposedly fallen from grace...
Requires a blanket mistrust of medical science, government agencies, public health messaging, and doctors.
They're lying to you, says the anti-vax pseudoscience peddler.
The lack of evidence for their critiques and their cures?
Well, that has to be a conspiracy.
Who needs evidence when common-sense intuitions and 1960s photos of healthy-looking people at the beach seems to tell the whole story?
Who can blame a busy mom who follows holistic influencers and just wants to keep her kids healthy from resonating with the messaging of Maha, which for some reason CNN at times is happy to launder.
So too the fit and productive dad who tracks his macros, drinks his greens, and takes advice from Huberman and Atiyah.
Yeah, I never know about that, like how much time is being spent in the man cave instead of like with the damn kids.
But a self-responsible libertarian diet and lifestyle are not magic bullets against genetics, aging, and death.
And they're no substitute for vaccination for cancer screenings, for getting the best medical care possible when necessary, even if the current science is imperfect.
So lastly, to your point, Derek, when exactly was this golden age of perfect health that we're going to return to once again?
Like, 200 years ago?
Life expectancy was between 30 and 40, and infant mortality was 25%.
Guys, the three of us are around 50. Just 100 years ago, we'd all on average be getting ready to die pretty soon here.
At least one of us would be gone already.
Early childhood death 100 years ago?
Terrible.
Over the last 50 years, vaccines are estimated to have reduced infant mortality globally by 40%.
The truth is...
That in Western countries, we've actually been living through as close to a golden age of health that has ever existed.
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All right, so since this is essentially a speculative episode, given that RFK Jr. isn't installed yet as Secretary of Health and Human Services, I'm going to focus on one real potential issue that we're facing.
Kind of trace out how it's going to happen.
Last week, epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs, great follow, she posted her predictions of what happens when RFK Jr. is confirmed on her Blue Sky handle.
By 2026, he will fake or manipulate data to allegedly show that vaccines cause autism or something else.
2026 as well.
Vaccination rates will continue to plummet.
2027 to 28, outbreaks of VPDs, vaccine-preventable diseases, will increase and infants and children will die.
By 2028, some states won't require vaccines for school attendance at all.
Idaho is already close with their joke of an exception form.
They will blame scientists and healthcare workers for mistrust in vaccines, and the damage will continue.
So what's the roadmap here?
So later in the thread, Jacobs notes that most of the damage from what's about to happen won't be felt until the next administration is installed in 2029. Of course, if there is a next one, given Trump's not-so-secret musings about running for a third term or just staying in power.
I don't know if you guys caught it.
He was interviewed on Fox the other day, and they said, do you think J.D. Vance will be ready in 2020?
And Trump's like, no.
No.
Right.
So Jacobs makes an important point.
Public health isn't about immediate results, and the damage that his leadership is likely to do will have a very long tail.
Okay, I'm going to unpack this one part, faking or manipulating data.
As we've kind of established, Julian, you already did, Maha is a ripoff of MAGA. It pulls from the same playbook.
Let's give an example.
There's been a sentiment that no one has been looking into chronic diseases among Maha Acolytes who believe that RFK Jr. is the first person to ever think that shit up.
This tracks with, look at what Elon Musk is doing with agency budgets, right?
I see on Twitter all the time this notion that no one knows where all this money is really going when the very definition of a bureaucracy is accounting.
Both of the situations are really about marketing, not reality.
And we see just how effective conservative media and right-wing social media propaganda has been.
The NIH spends tens of billions of dollars every year researching chronic diseases already, but you're not going to hear about that from Maha.
Because it's the unclefication of the public.
It's like the person just saying, oh, I don't know where that money is going.
Nobody knows.
Nobody must know because you don't.
You wouldn't know unless you were a specialist, unless you were actually looking at it directly.
It's all corrupt.
It must all be corrupt.
It's incredible.
And amazingly, Musk and Doge is pulling all of the data which says where it's all going.
So if no one knows, how is he going to magically figure it out when it's all already there?
So all of this is checkable, which is always the point, but you have to know where to look.
And right-wing media has for generations manipulated stories, right?
For example, I just said Doge.
The right calls that an agency, but it is not an agency.
It works to give Musk and his team an air of legitimacy as they ransack all of our data.
And this same sort of legitimacy is essential to Maha.
Here's one way that's going to work.
Recently, a number of people sent me a study, in quotes, showing how vaccines cause autism.
It was published in the very legitimate-sounding journal Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law.
Here's the issue.
It's not a journal.
It's a blog page.
And it was founded by a team that has all connections with children's health defense.
The study itself is riddled with errors, including the fact that it's an observational study.
It's based entirely on Medicare billing.
And I wish I was kidding with this next one.
The study does not even reference whether or not the people in the study were vaccinated, which is the entire supposed premise of it.
I'm not in debunking mode right now, so I'll link to an article by Dr. Andrea Love, and she worked with a guest epidemiologist on this.
It breaks down all of the problems with the study.
If this study rings a bell, it's because it's the same one that RFK Jr. referenced in his confirmation hearings.
And despite him saying he's no longer involved with children's health defense, he certainly seems to continue to read their website because they posted an article with the headline, jaw-dropping study finds vaccinated children have 170% higher risk of autism based on that flawed study and then not actually a journal that their contributors run.
Then it gets pumped through right-wing social media and right-wing media, and none of that actually matters.
Now, the Children's Health Defense Journal isn't the only one.
Walker Bragman has been doing fantastic work, and I believe he just became a father, so congratulations.
He reported last week in his blog, Important Context, the anti-vax organization, Brownstone Institute, has what it calls a journal on its website.
And then he also talked about another one, which is the Real Clear Foundation.
who run RealClearPolitics and RealClearScience.
They've tracked far-right and libertarian over recent years, and they've launched their own journal that's being run by a rogues gallery of anti-vaxxers and COVID contrarians.
So you've got Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Koldorf, who served as the scientific director of Brownstone in 2022. You have another co-author, Jay Bhattacharya, who's been tapped by Trump to run the NIH. You have Marty Macri, who is set to run the FDA. Now, Macri...
We've pointed out before.
He was behind a study that claimed medical errors are the third leading cause of a death in America, and that has been showed to be false, but it's been repeated endlessly, for example, during the Maha Congressional Show trial last fall.
All of these figures I just mentioned are friends with RFK Jr., and given all of their history of manipulating data...
We should be very concerned about the integrity of these scientific journals and how they're going to be weaponized.
So everything is already in place for Elizabeth Jacobs' prophecy.
For years, low-quality pay-to-play journals have allowed such manipulation to occur, so this isn't new.
The difference is Naha now has their own journals at their disposal, so doing what they want with the data is not going to be hard.
Now, imagine this sort of wholesale manipulation across all health agencies.
So I've mentioned a few of the figures.
We also have Surgeon General nominee Janet Neshawait, and you have the CMS Administrator nominee, Dr. Oz, both of whom sell supplements.
Oh my God.
None of these nominees that I've mentioned are qualified to run these agencies that they're being installed at, but each one stands to personally profit from decisions that could be made by the agency.
I have a question, Derek, which is, there's an awful lot of effort that is being put into creating these kind of fake journals, almost like shell companies, to make it seem like there's some science going on.
How long are they going to put up with the necessity, the facade of having to do that?
It would seem that after a while, nobody's really going to care and the actual real scientists who have had their funding cut off are going to have to find other jobs and do their own subsistence farming or whatever.
I wonder how long the fake journal racket is going to keep up or will it only be an instrument for selling their own supplements?
My guess is that it's going to increase because...
Look at what you just laid out.
The funding is being cut off.
Those researchers and scientists, the credible ones, are already looking for other jobs.
They're being forced into private industry because that's where the money is in biotech.
They're going to be working for companies who want very specific results on products and pharmaceuticals that they can monetize.
Then on the public level, on the governance level, you have the people running it who are involved with these fake journals.
I think it's going to run for a long time.
Yeah, and the fake journals have been going on for a long time.
This is not a new phenomenon.
And they're typically outgrowths of specific little think tanks and organizations that have a very specific agenda.
And so, yeah, they're well-funded.
The funding is going away for the legit stuff.
Yeah, I guess the paradox here is that they're useful to the extent that they have to fool people.
You know, the pseudo-journal has to fool somebody, and at a certain point, there isn't going to be anybody left to be fooled.
Well, yeah, I think you're right, but also the scientists and researchers involved in those journals, they're...
They're sincere.
They believe they're doing legitimate work trying to show their alternative hypotheses about how science and diagnosis and prescription should work.
Yeah, I mean, I guess my confusion is based on a kind of cynicism that they're grifting, and that's not necessarily true.
It's a blend.
I think it's a blend, but that's me speculating.
And I want to point out, Julian, that pseudo-journals have existed for a while.
One discipline that they've existed for a while, or acupuncture, for example.
But this specific one is really an outgrowth of COVID. So I said pay-to-play journals.
Those are people who are just trying to make money so they don't give a shit what the content is.
They're going to publish anything.
That's been weaponized for a long time.
But these three that I'm mentioning are all new and this really seems to be an outgrowth of the COVID contrarian market.
So I mentioned all of the people who stand to profit.
Of course, RFK Jr. is in that bucket if he so chooses as part of the vetting process for his role.
He had to submit his financial disclosures to Congress.
You already brought up he made $10 million last year for a range of anti-vax activity.
He also disclosed that his presidential campaign is still $1.5 million in debt.
That he did on his email list, which I'm on.
And it also came out that he's $1.2 million in credit card debt.
Or, I should be specific, his credit card debt has ranged between $610,000 and $1.2 million over the last couple years.
So, overall, we should be very concerned about people who can't handle their own finances being put into positions where they'll be able to profit.
Derek, the rich are not like you and I. They are not like you and I. I mean, seriously, though, this is not somebody who has ever had to pay anything probably back.
This is not somebody who's had to have any kind of reality basis within a financial world, if you think about the network of trust funds and inheritances and just how much money floats around this whole set.
Yeah, it must be very, very disconcerting, actually, to now be in a position of some kind of responsibility where you have to keep track of things, but maybe he won't.
Yeah, and to your point, he's motivated to enrich himself.
To get out of that debt.
Right.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
I've been out of credit card debt for 15 years.
It took me a while to dig out of that hole, and I work really hard to stay out of it.
And I know that my wife and I were one financial medical emergency to happen.
I could fall right back in at any time.
And that's really a precarious place to be, and it fucking sucks.
So how do you go a million dollars in credit card debt?
I don't fucking know.
By not caring.
By not giving shit.
You don't care.
You don't expect to pay it back.
Like, what kind of accountability exists within this particular class of people?
When does anybody have to be responsible for anything?
So if he so chooses, Kennedy will be able to monetize, for example, his trademark around Maha, which in the most ironic of twists includes his ability to market vaccines.
That is a very specific thing you have to write into an LLC. He'll also be able to monetize if he wants supplements, vitamins, essential oils, and cryptocurrency because they were all part of that LLC. Now, he did transfer ownership of it to Dell Bigtree in December.
Damn!
Dell.
Big old Dell.
I kind of feel just like he says, I'm not involved with children's health defense anymore.
I kind of feel like this is it since Maha is his fucking term.
No, no, no.
Him and Dell have great boundaries.
They're a great, huge firewall between him and Dell and BigTree.
I just want to flag how holistic this is that he's got this Maha thing trademarked so that he can sell probably the good vaccines that synergize really well with the supplements and the essential oils that you can use as a cryptocurrency token.
You're not joking.
They'll figure it out later, but they own it now.
Chakra vaccines.
Different colors in the syringes.
I just saw stuff about this this morning.
Maybe it's been floating around for a while.
That part of what Elon is gutting right now is the consumer protection.
Right.
And that this relates directly to some of Elon's plans in terms of person-to-person payment tech stuff that he's developing.
And to me, this probably fits right in with that.
And they're already working on an executive order.
It might have even passed by now where the cap that they put on credit card – sorry, overdraft fees and stuff, they're getting rid of that.
And credit card interest rates, they're getting rid of that because they're so fucking people-friendly.
So all of this is why Maha perfectly mirrors MAGA. It appears to be a power and profit grab all the way down the line.
To close up, at the time of recording, a federal judge has told the administration to resume NIH payments, yet there have been some reports that payments have not resumed.
I have not seen RFK Jr. or any Maha person criticize this fact.
In fact, Bobby sent out his own fundraising emails to pay off his campaign debt while cheerleading this freeze because bad bureaucracies was how he framed it.
Now, I discussed what these freezes mean in depth during last week's episode, so I'm not going to revisit here, but I'm going to keep asking the same fucking question.
How does any of this make America healthy again or at all? - Learning English is hard.
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Rounding up, I kind of want to bring a level of analysis that takes it as a given that RFK Jr. is not sitting in that chair as a good-faith actor in the public health realm.
How dare you?
Committed to facts and evidence.
Yeah, I know.
I'm going to speculate here that he's actually there.
Now, this is whether he knows it or not, because his life path and his psychology have actually set him up to play an effective role in the domestic affairs of what appears to be an emergent fascist regime.
And just so we're all on the same page, we throw this word around a lot.
I'm starting to default to this incredibly compressed and crystalline definition from Robert Paxton, the anatomy of fascism.
Just for reference, he describes fascism in his 2004 book as, quote, a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass based party of committed nationalist energy and purity, in which a mass based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with Like every phrase here is perfect.
Abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
So. So...
Are we there?
We've got unitary executive theory on the go, staff purges, oligarchic leadership, blatant and constant lying and confirmation hearings, and intimidated media, executive orders, Guantanamo reopening, pardoning and deputizing fascist street gangs.
In my view, all of this tracks pretty much with the history we now have of how fascist regimes seize power, not through revolution, but through the failure of cowardly and self-contradictory liberal institutions, and also bloodlessly through technical coups, as we have with Trotsky in 1917. and also bloodlessly through technical coups, as we have with But what do you guys think?
Is this an okay place to start?
Yeah, absolutely.
And as Paxton also points out, they typically come to power through almost like a Trojan horse kind of phenomenon with conservative parties or legitimate right-wing parties that they take over from the inside.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely right.
And I think every day we inch a little bit closer.
Ignoring the courts, I think, is going to be a major line that gets crossed.
And for me, there's a certain level of state violence directed internally that will be the...
I'm also going to point out that we've been talking about the unitary executive theory for a while.
And Matthew and I, you and I had a discussion offline about expertise and sometimes how that can blind you to the reality of what's happening.
I think that's important here because as much as I champion experts and I think it's important, you can be too boxed in by what these frameworks offer.
And so, for example, a poli-sci...
Political history, sorry, Professor kind of rebutted something I was saying on social media about, well, this is what the courts are for.
And I'm like, yes, ideally, but as has been pointed out, the courts do not have the ability to physically enforce anything that they're putting forward.
That falls under the Department of Justice, which now falls under Pete Hegset.
So you're in a situation, we are in unprecedented territory, and every morning as I listen to the news, I hear them inching closer to being like, wow, this could really be a problem.
And it's like, when are you going to realize?
They will probably not get everything through, but they're going to get a lot, and they are already showing signs of ignoring the orders, and that is only going to get worse.
And one of the things that really jumped out at me, which I think flew under the radar for a lot of people, is the...
The revoking of the executive order, I believe it was, that had to do with it being illegal to work at certain levels of government while also operating as a foreign agent.
This is the exact thing that Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort were charged with.
Manafort did jail time.
Flynn was pardoned or commuted or whatever the hell they did so that both of those guys ended up getting off.
Now that's not even illegal.
So it extends in so many different directions, the fact that you've legalized this particular form of grift and being this vulnerable to the influence of malign countries like Russia.
It's incredible.
The thing that you're saying about expertise potentially being blindering, Derek, comes up when I see somebody like...
Maybe you guys know Corey Robin, who's the really smart historian of American conservatism.
He's not an expert in fascism, but he's on Facebook, in my opinion, putting his foot in it by saying that MAGA can't really be fascist because they're too stupid.
They're too incompetent.
As if Hitler or Mussolini were geniuses to do what they did, not pathological overreachers who burned everything around them, including themselves.
Competence is not part of the definition of fascism.
They are extremely wasteful, unbalanced, generally unhinged people, and they win despite themselves.
But I think that often what we're seeing in this almost a resistance to just name what's in front of us is that the argument from incompetence...
Can be a way for certain folks to save face and prop up this fiction, I would say, of American exceptionalism, like this could never happen here.
We're not a shithole country.
We still have protections.
We still have courts.
All of those things are moderately true, but you can feel the defensiveness.
No, no, no, it's not happening.
It's not yet.
No, no, we still have our power.
That sort of thing.
It's a very, very strange time.
It could never happen here because our population is too stupid.
That's an interesting...
Well, no.
I think Robin is saying the inner circle is too incompetent, which, yeah, that's not a factor.
They don't have to be competent.
They just have to be volatile.
But I'm thinking about Kennedy in these terms because the entire...
Inward-facing apparatus of Trump's cabinet at this point is about purging internal threats of disease and perversion.
Like, this is a very strong theme in Project 2025. The enemy within is wokeism.
It's the trans agenda.
It's queerness in the military.
It's the pseudo-religion of climate activism.
And, you know, to a large extent, that is the rhetoric that Musk, through Doge, is using to do his, you know, alleged...
And then we have, like, Kash Patel on the verge of being confirmed as, you know, FBI head who's going to purge the FBI and apparently has already started of its cabal and its elites, which of course are responsible for investigating the deep state itself.
And so it's very clear.
To me, that if we are talking about an emergent fascist regime, that RFK Jr. fits like, you know, hand in glove within the realm of this inner purification theme rooted in the return to nature and atavistic beliefs.
Like, make America great again and make America healthy again.
I mean, you both are referencing this kind of romantic appeal to an unknown past.
But the imagery is so potent.
It's powerful.
And Kennedy embodies it, even in his dress, right?
Like, you can actually see him.
I'm imagining Norman Rockwell painting his whole family, you know, and sticking it on the wall on the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport.
of playing football with his brothers and cousins on the great manor lawn in this time when, you know, chronic disease didn't exist and everything else that you guys have already covered.
So, you know, it's like so many things fit together with him to create this kind of perfect internal disciplinarian force.
And I think that two related takeaways that I have when I look back through, you know, my understanding of fascist history is that we know that fascist healthism hides things.
So, a couple of points here.
We have no idea what cocktail of shit is keeping Trump walking.
We have no idea how much Brian Johnson type BS Kennedy himself is doing beyond HRT. But he also looks, there was a viral video about him taking a shitload of methylene blue.
I think you know something about that, Derek.
It fascinates me.
I looked into methylene blue for research in my book on psychedelic therapy.
And it's considered the first fully synthetic drug ever used in medicine dating back to 18 years.
So to see Mr. Naturalist Bobby drop it into his cup is pretty mind-numbing.
No, no, no, man.
That's the OG all-natural synthetic stuff.
It's totally fine.
It was invented before EMFs, critical race theory, and Smurfs, and all of that.
It's the color of the sky.
Be careful there.
Colloidal silver is the Smurf medicine.
That's what turns you blue.
Methyl and blue is something else.
But it actually used to be used to dye textiles in factories, and later it was used to stain pathogens.
Is it for his genes now?
Is that what he's doing?
If you take it in your mouth, does it come out in your genes?
As above, so below.
As inside, outside.
It's all one here, Matthew.
It was first used to treat malaria in 1891, and it does, to be fair, have legitimate uses.
For example, you can treat tropical fish for fungal infections with methylene blue.
What about worms in your brain?
Will they treat the worms in your brain for their infections?
It is actually used to treat the freshness of milk.
That is true.
So maybe Bobby was just chasing his raw milk smoothie with the methylene blue.
We didn't see the whole video.
We're not being privy to everything here.
Science.
It somehow made its way into wellness lore where it's supposed to be a mitochondrial optimizer.
It also is purported to help improve cognitive function.
None of these have been shown to be true.
But we do have some science on what using it for fitness could lead to.
You can overdose on it because it is toxic, depending on dose size.
It can also cause circulatory and respiratory issues.
And this is an interesting one because Bobby rails against SSRIs and mental health interventions, pharmaceutical interventions.
If you are taking an SSRI and you take methylene blue...
It could result in serotonin toxicity, and it could even cause anaphylactic shock.
Sounds like it's a preventative for school shootings then.
Oh.
Right?
3D chess.
We need to get you a contract with Maha, Julian.
And he's taking a lot of it, because that was like a three-inch dropper full.
I don't know what the dosages are supposed to be, but it was a lot, and that water was blue.
Okay, so...
We also know historically that fascist medicine is about appearances.
While they advocate for the naturalist fallacy in terms of the public audience, the inner circle is always hiding its actual health data.
And it always has access to extreme or quack substances, and it's always using them not only to treat real ailments, but to pursue mystical or superhuman powers.
So Dr. Theodor Morrell is the sort of key figure here.
He was Hitler's personal physician.
One of his top responsibilities was to load him up with methamphetamine-laced drugs, which he often labeled as vitamins or harmless stimulants.
He kept detailed records of his treatments.
But he also concealed the full extent of Hitler's declining health, including symptoms consistent with Parkinson's disease and other ailments.
Now, the same thing happens with Mussolini, although we have less documentation.
But Il Duce had syphilis, he was a big cocaine user, and he had chronic explosive D. And very few people knew the extent of his ailments.
Now, I can't make this case without noting that Biden's inner circle also concealed its decline.
So I think this just happens with leaders in general.
But there's some notable fascist distinctions here that I'm going to go farther with.
You just mentioned the extreme quack substances compared to actual health data.
And I want to point out something that has been big on the Maha circuit, which is saying in Europe, you can only use 400 food ingredients.
In America, it's over 10,000.
Why is that?
It's such a perfect test case for the manipulation of data because what they do is they're taking a number that over 10,000 number and they're including things like packaging.
So they're including a broader category of what is involved in the entire supply chain of food, whereas in Europe, they're only taking a number of specific food ingredients, but they're putting them side by side to say, look at how much more shit we have in our food when you're talking about boxes and plastic wrapping and shit like that.
So it is a constant.
how they take data and just warp it.
And then the people who follow them just take it wholesale.
Well, and it serves that everything has been corrupted with added things that don't belong there, right?
Like everything is polluted, right?
Okay.
So the next main point is that we know from history, and this is very far away from concealing Biden's cognitive decline and whatever.
We know from history that fascist healthism is always hypocritical and always projective.
So So Hitler reached a peak in health contradiction when he began to develop symptoms of Parkinson's disease, degenerative nervous disorder that causes tremors and a shuffling gait, as you know.
Which is helped by methamphetamine, by the way.
Right.
Well, and Dr. Murrell knows that.
He relied on his doctor and inner circle to hide this from the public.
However, just years before, the genetic health court that carried out his eugenics program had specifically singled out people with Parkinson's to be murdered because they were defective.
The Reich ultimately murdered 300,000 disabled people.
Mussolini had chronic bowel complaints, but he would order his black shirts to force political opponents to swallow castor oil up to a liter at a time as a form of torture.
In terms of sexual...
Purity and pollution, Hitler's entire inner circle were philanderers.
Mussolini had sex with or raped thousands of women by his own account.
He kept extensive notebooks.
Sound familiar?
On one hand, this is just misogyny and patriarchy.
No politics are needed.
I mean, Fidel Castro does the same thing.
But with the fascists, there's an additional drive to cover up and to displace.
Let's fret about the queer agenda, the trans agenda.
Let's be the arbiters of sexual and gender morality.
Let's make everyone else's lives sexually sick.
Let's say AIDS is not caused by HIV, but actually the moral failures of gay men.
So from where I stand, the insistence of righteousness and purity seems to be intensified by the magnitude of the lie.
And I would say that the worse the claims get, the allegations get against people like Trump, Hegseth, Gates, Musk, and Kennedy, I think the more aggressive they will be about the spectacle of righteousness and punishing alleged perverts.
Yeah, I want to add here too, that's all very, very interesting and very on point, Matthew, that when I see Kennedy rising to this position of power, most likely, I think of Trofim Lysenko.
I think of, in the Soviet era, how this man for almost 20 years was in charge of farming.
He used completely discredited genetic pseudoscience.
And it resulted in the deaths of at least 40 million people across the Soviet Union and China as a result of getting into a position where a completely false, calamitous take on the science of food production was taken as the party line.
And anyone who objected to him was thrown in jail.
Scientists, agriculturalists.
You know, wasted away in jail.
Is there a silver lining?
Historians pretty much agree that even without decisive military pressure, the Nazis probably could not have maintained power for long because for the most part, fascist regimes are high on heat and pain and they're low on fuel and sustainability.
They are unstable.
They are overly dependent on single charismatic leaders who inevitably buckle under pressure and fend off succession planning.
I mean, Trump's saying, no, Vance isn't going to be ready.
It's pretty funny there.
You know, it's like, come on, dude.
Are you going to make it through this term?
Their populist promises, which are standard throughout campaigning, at least to the point where they take over power, they just can't be kept by the oligarchic management because there's a disconnect there.
The oligarchs don't give a shit in the end.
And then the contradictions between the performance of national health and the reality of conditions become intolerable.
And then the contradictions between the spectacle of personal leader health and the reality of their pathologies become just impossible to conceal.
We don't know exactly when this confirmation will happen.
I think there's a whisker's chance that he misses it, but it's likely by the time we meet next week, guys, that he's going to be our secretary.
And, you know, he's attained this power, but...
We know that from the reporting on his abandoned presidential campaign that he's a chaotic mess as an administrator.
The $1.2 million in credit card debt aside, it seems like it's very difficult to get things done or for people to have coherent information inside that campaign.
So he got to the position by the skin of his teeth, which will soon be turning blue.
