Someone’s got dirt on RFK Jr. MAHA voters went MAGA because Bobby said he was going to end vaccine mandates—their code for ending vaccines, period. No longer would food be dyed and oils be made of seeds. Everyone would get free gym memberships. America’s chronic disease epidemic would end overnight, as he’s repeatedly claimed.
Then Mr Kennedy goes to Washington only to declare that antisemitism is a public health crisis? And to say that the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to prevent measles? How could he say such a thing when, as Mikki Willis recently claimed, this “version” of measles is a bioweapon designed to infect the Mennonite population?
This week we look way too deeply into Candace Owens’s recent episodes about the blackmailing of RFK Jr, a story that quickly spread its tentacles into the microphones of a number of contrarian right-wing podcasters. We’ll give you the lowdown on the story and how, like a children’s game of telephone, it repeatedly got distorted and reframed with every mind it touched.
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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.
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Music
Conspirituality 254, The Great Maha Purity War of 2025.
Someone's got dirt on RFK Jr.
Maha voters went MAGA because Bobby said he was going to end vaccine mandates, their code for ending vaccines, period.
No longer would food be dyed and oils be made of seeds.
Everyone would get free gym memberships.
America's chronic disease epidemic would end overnight, as he's repeatedly claimed.
Then, Mr. Kennedy goes to Washington only to declare that anti-Semitism is a public health crisis.
And to say that the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to prevent measles?
How could he say such a thing when, as Mickey Willis recently claimed, this version of measles is a bioweapon designed to infect the Mennonite population?
This week, we look way too deeply into Candace Owens' recent episodes about the blackmailing of RFK Jr., a story that quickly spread its tentacles into the microphones of a number of contrarian right-wing podcasters.
We'll give you the lowdown on the story and how, like a children's game of telephone, it repeatedly got distorted and reframed with every mind it touched.
Music
On March 28th, former liberal-turned-right-wing pundit Candace Owens wondered aloud who is controlling RFK Jr.
Her hour-long podcast culminates with the theory that Bobby is being blackmailed.
By who?
Who knows?
By the end of that hour, you're not really sure, but that hasn't stopped the right-wing media ecosystem from speculating that it's Israel, or the American deep state, or it's Olivia Nuzzi in cahoots with Jessica Reed Krauss.
It could even be Jeffrey Epstein from Beyond the Grave.
Because apparently there are many Kennedy tapes that span generations, or so I'm told, while I spend way too much time on Twitter.
Before I get into details, I want to give a few broad points which I think are worth understanding to frame what we're going to be discussing today.
So first, everyone talking about this scandal offers some level of Bobby apologetics.
They're all his friends or his fans or both.
And the notion that...
Bobby isn't really going to Maha, make America healthy again.
It never enters their vocabulary.
What does is the sense that powerful forces are compromising Bobby and his agenda, and so each person goes to great lengths to explain away any breach of mission.
So in other words, they're worried, but they're also sympathetic.
This is their guy.
They can't quite believe that he isn't being compromised, as opposed to being just...
A grifting sack of shit from one of America's most dysfunctional families who made their name on pretending to have a moral core.
Yeah, well, we got, I think, 11 clips coming up, so you're going to hear their attitudes toward it, but that's exactly right.
Varying levels of sympathy, too.
Some of them are a little more peeved than others.
Second point.
The self-aggrandizement of each influencer is in abundance.
I don't need to belabor this point right now because you're going to hear their own inflated egos during the clip.
And finally, I want to explore the way a supposed blackmail scandal bounces around right-wing podcasts.
This entire thing was invented whole cloth and then treated seriously by others in Candace Owens' network.
And it becomes, as we mentioned off the top, this sort of cursed game of telephone, with each character changing the meaning and scope of the scandal a little bit more to suit their own particular needs.
I should also note that this isn't the only blackmail scandal that is surrounding Kennedy at the moment.
And we also flagged this briefly, but when he said the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to protect against measles on April 6th, which happens to be the second time that he's made the statement, his Twitter feed was flooded with blackmail accusations.
And this, in my opinion, is why Kennedy can never be taken seriously as a bureaucrat.
He spent decades spreading conspiracy theories, and so when he has to put on the proverbial suit and tie and go into the office, everyone knows he's faking it.
In this case, someone has compromise on him, which is where we're going to end up in the last segment.
And of course, this is ostensibly why we have hearings, vettings, financial disclosures, medical reports on presidential candidates, all of that stuff, right?
Yeah, I mean, that used to be the reason why we had all of that sort of procedure in place when the appearance of some kind of vetting and assessment of qualifications was required, right?
But yeah, this is amazing.
I mean, the moment he references a scientifically accurate fact, that's evidence that it must be blackmail.
Well, I don't know if you guys saw on our Instagram feed last night, I posted that he has canceled all FOIA requests for the FDA, the CDC.
Right. Yeah, so journalists can no longer access what he's doing behind the scenes.
And this is, you know, Mr. Transparency.
So an agency director can cancel a federal I thought that FOIA was sort of a general way in which journalists were able to address the federal government, but an agency director can just sort of like shut that down for his own agency?
Apparently, yeah.
In this administration, apparently that is what is happening.
Sure, sure, whatever.
Cancelled, cancelled.
Yeah, whatever.
So going back to vaccines for a brief moment, Washington Post reported that hours after he tweeted his support of the MMR vaccine, he attended the funeral of the second child who died.
He also championed anti-vax doctor friends who were promoting alternative treatments.
And this text is in the very same tweet in which he's posing for a PR stunt photo with the Mennonite families of the deceased children.
And the father of one of those deceased children later said that he had no idea those photos were going to be used on social media.
Now, those families, however, weren't opposed to the general messaging, though.
Is that right?
Yes, they have come out strongly against vaccines.
I believe it was the other father of one of the deceased children said it was the doctor's fault for not giving their child the right drugs or the right...
You know, treatments at the time.
It wasn't the lack of the vaccination.
So yes, they are still on board.
Right. Okay.
Like I said, that's not the blackmail that we're going to be discussing today.
This one is much more complex, convoluted, and to be frank, it's fucking dumb.
But worth considering how many followers all the people we're going to discuss today have and the influence they have on Kennedy and Maha.
So the story begins with someone we haven't actually covered that much on this podcast, but who's been in my orbit for a while.
Her name is Jessica Reed Krause, and she writes a popular newsletter called House Inhabit.
And as with many COVID contrarians, I mean, actually...
Most of the people we're going to be talking about today kind of follow a similar origin story here.
Krauss' conservative origin story has her as a former super liberal who turned hard right during lockdowns.
Well, okay, so let's just sort of clear this up.
Does she have any super liberal credentials beyond saying so?
Like, did she make campaign donations, volunteering?
Did she run for office?
I mean...
There's a trend of kind of inventing past commitments and a story of waking up or going into ideological rehab that lends...
More energy to the contrarian persona.
I was so radical, I thought gay marriage was okay, but now I'm super radical because I realized the scourge of wokeness and so on.
So is this legit or no?
It's hard to tell.
She says that she donated to Joe Biden's campaign, for example, in 2020.
So it does seem that she was on the liberal side of things.
How left she was is open for debate.
I don't know enough about her history because her star really rose with House and Habit.
It's not like she was a big player.
So she can make whatever she wants up and say it.
It's when House and Habit becomes its own thing that she really gets to go into the spotlight.
Yeah, I mean, it's a tough one because politically over the course of this podcast, we've mapped out the general trend of people who were kind of politically checked out and even naive, but then they become red-pilled during COVID.
I would imagine she means by super liberal that culturally she did not identify at all as a Republican and she voted for the blue team because of where she lived and how she grew up and having generally sort of socially liberal attitudes.
But as much as we can scoff at the I used to be liberal or I was a super liberal claim.
I think there's a sad story underneath this, that the percentage of the population for whom that...
So in that transition, she started covering her pop culture stories like Britney Spears' conservatorship or the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.
She also offered a lot of mommy blogger content.
And she filmed videos in her wellness-ready kitchen.
And her readership grew quickly as she realized her teenage ambition of being a gossip columnist.
That is what she always wanted to do.
The British paper at the time...
And thanks to that success, the mommy blogger became the bread and butter.
Her husband quit his job to look after their four children once she started bringing in that kind of money.
In February 2024, Semaphore's Max Tanney wrote about how both Trump and Kennedy, who was still then a presidential candidate, were courting Krauss.
One week in January, Jessica Reed Krauss attended Donald Trump's Iowa victory afterparty at the Hotel Fort Des Moines and posed for pictures with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle.
From there, she flew to Hawaii.
To meet Tulsi Gabbard, where the former Democratic congresswoman took her to her favorite smoothie place.
Three days after schmoozing with the Trump inner circle in Iowa, Krauss brought her family on a catamaran to go whale watching and surfing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and famous surfer...
Kelly Slater.
What a whirlwind tour.
I have a dream to be a gossip columnist.
What a time to be alive.
What's your favorite smoothie place, Julian?
I was going to say, that section was perfectly written for Matthew to read.
Yeah, Jesus Christ.
Oh, I know it's Erewhon.
You know, $24 branded smoothies.
Absolutely. I've never even been to Erewhon.
I don't know what the branding looks like.
I don't know what it looks like.
I have no idea what this is.
You guys keep bringing it up.
Can you just remind me?
Is it like a super upscale Whole Foods or something?
Yeah, it's a small boutique, although the chain is growing.
I've gone to the one in Venice.
That was the only one I've ever been in.
The prices are absurd.
Well beyond anything Whole Foods ever was.
And it is nowhere spelled backwards.
I don't want to get it sidetracked, but that comes from the early 70s when it was founded by the hippie owners.
It has gone through evolution.
So let's leave it at that right now.
It wasn't always as douchey as it is now.
So the point is, Krauss has clout, and this clout caught the attention of Candace Owens, who, again, as we mentioned, is also a former liberal.
And she really was.
She tried to make her name in media as a liberal and failed, and then switched and found a lot more success.
Because she realized there was more money to be made by spreading gossip on the right.
And I'm not being hyperbolic here.
Her hour-long podcast on this blackmail scandal was a barrage of she said, she said content.
So let's get into this because I don't know if you guys listen to the clips, but oh boy.
So it begins with Krause's March 22nd article called In Defense of Gossip, which details her annoyance over bro fraternity ego in media.
In it, she says Owens, quote, appears to be floundering.
Megan Kelly and Candace Owens, two of the most prominent women in male-dominated media, are clearly pivoting.
Whether conscious or not, they're shifting toward the one thing that reliably pulls in the most valuable audience in media.
Krauss also criticizes Tucker Carlson and Ian Carroll, who I'll get to in a bit, as he quickly waited on this scandal and he ended up joining his friend Candace on April 3rd for a full episode.
We'll hear part of that a little later.
Now, importantly, Krauss never mentions Kennedy in this article.
That's where Owens comes in.
I'm going to continue to tell this story chronologically, but I want to point out that on March 30th, two days after Owens' video, Krause published another blog called As Conspiracy Brews, where she writes about her original story.
It's been spun into something so convoluted it borders on comical.
Now this I fully agree with, although the whole fucking thing is comical.
So I'll reiterate that this entire affair rises to the level of passing notes in high school.
And yeah, I'm dating myself as a Gen Xer.
But Krause's entire piece is basically...
I find podcasters insufferable, but I'm a gossip writer you should listen to.
And as happens in the right-wing TMZ wannabe space without the access that the TMZ writers have, it's just more grievance politics.
So the first essay that Owens is addressing is Krauss' meditation on feminist media, but it's rooted in gossip columns written for women that drive women's eyeballs and wallets.
Krauss accuses Kelly and Owens of shifting their emphasis to focus on women and gossip, like celebrity scandals and interpersonal drama, to grow their audience.
So, really amazing insights about feminist media.
What does she say about feminist media?
Oh, amazing.
Amazing insights.
I mean, she's basically saying something true, which is that women drive the media economy, but they're undervalued as people, basically.
Then she kind of conflates it with all her hate on broad podcasters who own the attention economy, which is also very true.
She talks a lot about mediocre men rising up to this level of popularity, but keeps pointing out that mothers aren't valued as much.
So these are all true on a surface level, but when you read them together, it's all just a jumble.
Yeah, so grains of truth, but woven together into various kinds of dog whistles.
There's another great purity struggle going on here, too, guys.
I would say the fight card is headlined by this feud between Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire and Megyn Kelly.
And that's about career women supposedly betraying their rightful role in the world by waiting to have kids.
But bubbling underneath that, there's an especially douchey, conservative, Christian debate bro podcaster.
Have you come across this guy, Andrew Wilson?
He sort of sneers while he smokes a cigarette on Piers Morgan these days, and he just slams all of these prominent Republican women in the media as being covert feminists because they're not barefoot in the kitchen making a sandwich.
They can't win, right?
There's got to be rightward pressure always, right?
Julian, it's a little disingenuous.
You're smoking cigarettes every time we record.
Wouldn't that be funny?
If we, like, signed on?
Brownstone Institute, baby, to bring the teen smoking back.
Who do you think I am, Matt Brown?
So Owens naturally makes all this about her, even though she's just one of many people that are cited in the piece.
In her defense, Owen has always combined celebrity gossip with politics.
That isn't new for her.
And here's how RFK somehow gets involved.
Apparently, this blog post was edited by Olivia Nutzi, who is the former New York Magazine political correspondent, who supposedly had a sexting affair with Bobby during his presidential run.
According to Owens, the two women are now working together.
And here's where the speculative leaps really emerge, as we're going to hear in the clips after the break.
Okay, so the entire blackmail scandal hinges on the following timeline.
Nootie had a supposed affair with Bobby.
Owens likes Bobby, so she takes him at his word that it was just sexting.
Why? Because vaccines.
I was inclined to believe RFK Jr. at the time because...
I've had a soft spot for him, which I'd like to harden a bit right now because he was the only source when I decided I didn't want to vaccinate my children.
And I'm not going to take that away from him, his Children's Health Defense Fund.
I am not going to be so petty as to pretend that he was literally the only website.
If you wanted to find information about vaccines and learn something different other than what pediatricians were telling you, you really only had RFK Jr.'s charity, Children's Health Defense.
I'm excited about him joining the Trump administration because I have felt that the country has been too Polaroids.
And when it comes to children's health, we shouldn't be left or right.
Like, moms do need to come together on this and take control and say that doctors have gone too far.
You know, there's a pseudo-feminist posturing here that's always so weird because there's a huge chunk of our vaccine researchers and OBGYNs and pediatricians who are women and moms who are primarily focused on the health of women and girls and children.
It seems like one of the things that's going on with this stuff is that if Owens or Barry Weiss or Kelly Brogan manage a feminist thought, it has to be like about 40 years old, right?
It has to be located in some second wave or below movement.
There's this retro feel to it as though June Cleaver was a feminist, you know, and she's saying, those commie doctors have gone too far.
You know, I just want my kids to be safe in our house with the breadwinning dad, right?
Yeah, so polarizing, Matthew, really.
I know.
You need to work on being a little more conciliatory.
And yeah, I agree.
There's nothing really feminist about this.
It's just populist rejection of medical science experts in favor of whatever conspiracy narrative resonates with that contrarian caricature of mother's intuition, right?
I also want to point out that learn something different about vaccines is an understatement, for sure.
From there, Owens goes into how Nootzi didn't grow up in wealth.
She lost her job at New York Magazine thanks to the sexting scandal with a presidential candidate, but somehow she was able to move to Malibu.
How could a non-elite possibly afford such a move?
Did she have savings?
A sugar daddy?
But this next clip is the full proof of the idea that Bobby is being blackmailed or, as Owens is asked, Why does the Maha movement seem like it's been compromised?
Let's listen to the smoking gun.
But the other element of this is super interesting.
Olivia, currently living in Malibu, which means now she doesn't live in a city, which means now she's got to drive a car, is driving a car.
She's driving a foreign car in Malibu.
And her license plates, and I'm not giving you the end of the license plates, but her real true license plates are, and I can show you here, are...
FK66 blank blank.
Hmm. Hmm.
That is some coincidence.
I gotta tell ya.
I gotta tell ya, okay?
Like, I gotta tell ya, it's a weird thing.
Like, it's not every day.
Do you know what's so weird about listening to these clips?
I get the same feeling from Alex Jones.
You can hear the absolute loneliness and isolation of the soundstage, right?
She takes those long beats where she's sort of trying to squeeze this theatricality out of the, you know, big reveal.
And you can hear that the production crew is just kind of like standing around and hoping that she does really well.
And it's just very, very, it's people in small boxes everywhere doing little things in the mirror.
Do you know what I mean?
And then they get broadcast.
It's a very weird feeling.
What you bring up reminds me of...
During the early days of COVID, when everyone was isolated, John Oliver They basically set up his studio, but it was only him in his room.
That's right.
And he kept referencing the exact thing you're talking about, and he was able to use it to be like, we're all in this situation.
Isn't it ridiculous to be in this lonely, isolated space, and I'm trying to do this, but this is what we can do right now, which is the antithesis of what you're talking about because there is self-reflection in what he said, whereas there is no self-reflection in the space that you're sort of highlighting right now.
Yeah, I can almost see and feel I'm lost.
That's a photo that supposedly emerged of this license plate, and it's 6-6-something-something.
It's seven digits.
So that is probably just coincidence because...
Apparently she showed the photo, like someone has it.
So that part is just coincidence, or is it a coincidence?
Right. Oh, so maybe there's a satanic coincidence underneath the initials of the names of the sexting scan.
Everything is connected.
Well, and Gavin Newsom actually printed his vanity plate, but got the numbers wrong and gave him a satanic plate for his car.
Or her car.
Actually, it's her car, right?
It's Malibu, so the fires maybe have something to do with this too.
Yes, I know.
Chief, you know.
I know.
DEI. Well, it's not actually clear whose car it is.
So when, Julian, when you said you're lost, that is really it.
This entire thing we're discussing today, that was the heart of it right there.
That is where all the speculative leaps begin.
The supposed license plate, which Owens believes is part of a honeypot scheme.
She wonders aloud if it's Jessica Reed Krause's car with RFK license plate, and Olivia is driving it.
And all of this made Owens look further into what the hell is going on.
Oh, I can't wait.
So she says, we don't know who's funding this substack assault on her, because obviously a right-wing troll who's making up to $2 million a year pumping out gossip columns needs some sort of extra funding from somewhere.
Owens loses faith in Bobby because of a license plate.
And that makes her investigate him with a more critical eye.
And when she turns up, oh boy, watch out.
And I just want to note, I believe she means malady here.
And I only say that.
I fuck up words all the time, so it's not really a dig at her.
But I'm saying it because when I first heard this, I had to stop and think about it.
So just keep that in mind while you listen.
But he's kind of made anti-Semitism his focus.
This is a tweet from him that he recently sent out.
Anti-Semitism, like racism, is a spiritual and moral, m'lady, that sickened societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history's most deadly plagues.
In recent years of censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture...
Have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence, making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect based on speech, freedom, and open debate.
And then he included a link to the HHS.gov.
So that's weird.
And then he decided that antisemitism is a health crisis.
This is not what we put you in office for.
I don't care.
We need to debate any of this other than this is not what people put you in office for.
We wanted you to go after vaccines.
We wanted you to go after the CDC.
We did not want you to establish antisemitism as a health crisis.
Yeah, maybe you are not taking a dig at her.
This is not really a dig either, but I will say her unfamiliarity with words longer than two syllables does say a lot, perhaps, about her general reading habits.
She is speeding up to Ben Shapiro levels of patter, though, at the end as well.
Yeah, it's pretty anxious.
In her rants, Owens and the many people who follow her cite...
She's referencing the Hasidic Rabbi Shmuley Bodiach, who is the author of 31 books, including Kosher Jesus and Kosher Sex.
And he's the former host of the reality TV show, Shalom in the Home.
Are you sure he's not AI?
This is too good.
No, it is.
No, he's serious, man.
Being in the spotlight for decades, he regularly courts controversy.
But this one's specific to Owens as Shmuley got into a public feud with her in March 2024 due to her support of Palestine.
Shmuley dressed up as a Candace Owens Jew, which he posted on Twitter, and she claimed he has a deep hatred for blacks, Muslims, and Christians.
Yeah, he goes way over the top.
I mean, they've yelled at each other about this on Piers Morgan's show, which is really the place where you go to do that, and it's wildly effective.
Clickbait. The YouTube video of that argument has 4.3 million views.
Since Bobby has been standing alongside Shmuley since at least July of 2023, this relationship, along with Bobby's recent tweet, all became part of Owens' corkboard.
On a serious note, with this friendship, Bobby, I think, has to own supporting one of the most, I think, fascist Zionist influencers in the U.S. You can find his views on Israel anywhere.
Along with his zeal for blaming every victim of the IDF on Hamas.
But I think more pressing for the moment, and I think for Bobby's own blathering on about free speech, is his support for, Bodhiak's support for the rendition of people like Mahmoud Khalil.
The Columbia anti-genocide protest leader.
There's a nice quote I found here from a shmooly appearance on Pierce Morgan.
Quote, deport him now because he's not promoting free speech.
He's promoting incitement of violence.
Hate speech is actually outlawed in the United States.
I love the First Amendment, but you cannot incite violence for people to be attacked.
And people can debate the morality of Khalil's rhetoric, but he has not been charged with any crime.
And, you know, this is one of these arrests that has set the precedent for black fanning legal residents without charges and, you know, rendering them to El Salvador or wherever.
And Bobby is now tied to that at the hip.
It harkens back to the FOIA request thing.
It's free speech and censorship as long as you're not arguing against what I'm saying, basically.
To be clear, Bobby, as you flagged, has long supported Israel, so any sort of grievances or debate is totally fair game, but let's recap the story up to now.
Owens strikes back at criticism from Jessica Reed Krauss, a.k.a.
House Inhabit.
She supposedly discovered a working relationship between Krauss and Olivia Knutzi.
She found out that Knutzi was driving a car with a license plate that starts with the letters RFK and it's supposedly owned by Krauss.
Bobby is calling anti-Semitism a public health crisis in his position as Secretary of HHS.
He must be being blackmailed.
If you were wondering whether JFK would find his way into this, congratulations!
Here's where Owens brings it all together.
I just know where there's smoke, there's fire.
And it seems to me that she, her odd protection of RFK Jr., her wanting to stay in the background as she edits pieces attacking certain people, and all of them kind of happen to be people that say anything about Israel.
After I looked through all the JFK stuff, it ain't making me feel like, it's just not making me feel like this couldn't be, I don't know, I guess the best way to say it is like the last leg of the Zionist attack on influencers who they don't have influence over,
who just tell the public the truth and are willing to discuss the topics as they are.
Just don't care what you're going to call us anymore because you've called us everything.
Which is why you're now working on conspiratorial pieces and trying to make them look real.
Yeah, they're working on conspiratorial pieces.
So if this is where the story ended...
I wouldn't even have floated the idea of doing this episode.
It would have been yet another RFK Jr. soap opera that is worth forgetting.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that I'm really noticing here as we listen to these clips in order, Derek, and thank you for doing the work gathering them and piecing together this incoherent theory that she has going on, is that she's on the same arc.
As Alex Jones and Brett Weinstein and Russell Brand, where over time, the more you talk about conspiracies, the more you become Right
-wing. Influencers Never Let a Good Conspiracy Die.
And in the following days, the story bounced around that ecosystem to millions of people, including who we're going to look at now, Ian Carroll, and as you just referenced, Alex Jones and Brett Weinstein, because they're both part of this.
I keep referencing telephone.
It is that.
And it didn't take very long.
Ian Carroll, who was also called out by Krause in the original blog post, opens with a similar tone.
Bobby is in charge of public health to get rid of vaccines, but then, plot twist, the big pharma deep state is actually keeping Bobby in check with a sex tape.
Now, if you're not familiar with Ian Carroll, congratulations.
I applaud you.
And secondly...
I'm sorry you're now going to meet him.
This dude is purely the product of right-wing conspiratorial fervor.
Although like Krauss and like Owens, he too claims that he was on the left until COVID radicalized him.
Talking shit about conspiracy theories is literally his thing.
That is it.
And he's also spun off a t-shirt company to share the messages and monetize it of his conspiracies.
Now, like many on Twitter, the algorithm favored his just-asking-questions approach about COVID alongside his long tirades about Jeffrey Epstein and Pizzagate and the Podesta emails.
And then a March 2025 appearance on Joe Rogan sent his numbers into the stratosphere.
Two things about this guy.
I didn't know much about him until you flagged him, Derek.
But first of all, he looks like the guy who does the jokes on TikTok about...
Being a customer service representative where, you know, a customer comes and the guy's working at Ikea and he says, you know, how dare you, you know, ask me for, you know, service or like, do you think I want to be working here?
He has this kind of like smarmy, it's like he's playing a comedian and he's not.
And I just, like my whole body just sort of...
It prickles up when I see him or hear his voice.
It's so smarmy and self-assured, and I just don't know who can't...
Get a bad feeling from what is coming off of the screen.
It makes sense that he would show up on Joe Rogan's radar because he's someone who pretends to be a comedian but is not at all funny.
I guess, yeah.
I don't know if you caught up, but a couple months ago after the wildfires, that was the first time I covered him on our Instagram feed.
I made a video about his insane takes about Altadena fires at the time.
So we have touched upon him before.
This is the first time we're looking at his podcast.
But it's like he does this.
Walk and talk thing all the time where he knows exactly what's happening in the world.
And I just don't know how long that's going to last, you know, with regard to really grabbing clicks.
Like, how long can it possibly be that people go, hmm, that guy sounds like he really knows what's going on.
I have no idea who he is or where he comes from.
But yeah, I'm going to listen to more.
How long can that last?
I don't know.
Have you ever met people before?
Okay, here's the other thing about this guy, but a lot of people are doing this.
I hate the fact that the Epstein case is actually lying right there in front of us like a steaming turd that no one can clean up because it gives guys like this.
You know, this really solid hook into the meat of real abject corruption and deception.
They know how to fantasize about it and how to monetize those fantasies, but they would have no idea how to actually investigate it or address it, because if they did, it would probably collapse their black and white worlds.
In fact, they don't want to solve those particular black holes, right?
No, they have to keep it in self-focus because Daddy Trump is such a big part of the story, in fact.
Yeah, it is that blurring of...
I don't know.
Long-time listeners might remember that early in COVID, I did a weekly, was that Clubhouse or Treehouse?
Clubhouse. And the week after we covered Brett Weinstein going on to Bill Maher talking about vaccines, Eric Weinstein came into our Clubhouse.
He blessed us.
That was our biggest moment.
And one of the first things he did was start talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
And it immediately...
There's a psychological component that happens where it's just like, yeah, the Epstein thing is fucked up in a lot of ways and it immediately switches the ground to make it seem like they're more legitimate.
And the influencers are really good at doing that.
Ian Carroll publishes a nine-minute video on Twitter on March 30th where he details exactly why the Bobby Blackmail story is ultimately a nothing burger.
And we'll see.
How Matthew here reacts to the shmarminess.
In talking about the blackmail angle, we are showing Bobby that we don't care.
We don't care about his sexual infidelities.
There is no evidence that I have seen that anyone has talked about in any of the circles that it has to do with kids or any of the actual, like, illegal style of sexual blackmail.
We just want Bobby to save our country, and that's what he's here to do.
Blackmail only has power if it's a secret, and it stays in the dark, and it's used as leverage.
So here's a speedrun of what I personally think is going on right now.
I have spoken to many people involved in the campaign, from the Maha Moms from before the campaign, people that have been around Bobby for a decade and more, that have had serious concerns about this kind of stuff for a long time, but have been afraid to speak about it because they don't want to damage Bobby's reputation or the campaign.
Many of these people have been pushed out despite great contributions.
Many of them have decided to leave because they just couldn't handle this environment that this kind of control seems to be creating.
And the most awkward part is that everyone has different theories about who is controlled within Bobby's camp, who is controlling him, who is an op, and who is not.
And it's all just allegations without smoking guns at this point.
Why does he sound like he's in a cooling truck?
He's talking directly into his phone and if his hand's over, whatever.
He's not someone who uses professional equipment to do this.
Right. Yeah, he's just giving you the raw feed of his brilliant insights.
But this is where the moral hypocrisy makes for powerful pragmatic solidarity amongst people on the right.
I mean, you don't really see this on the left.
the things they'd
And then in terms of the game of telephone that you referenced, Derek, yeah, here we go.
Now finding a moral relativist solution that somehow neutralizes the blackmail so Bobby can get on with his open anti-vax crusading.
As I mentioned...
They all bring themselves into the story, and that's how we leap from Owens' corkboard to Carol's misogyny, as long as it's not kids or anything.
Because infidelity is just fucking fine.
Nothing to see from someone who oversees the entire public health apparatus in America.
Yeah. I mean, he's, you know, Bobby is an admitted sex assaulter who talks openly in a kind of like strategic transparency mode about how many skeletons he has in his closet.
If they were all released, he would be president and they could vote and whatever.
You know, beyond what we know of the dozens and dozens of affairs while married to Mary Richardson, who died of disparate.
We've also got his own...
Like, sister talking about his consistently chaotic and aggressive behavior as a teen and young man.
And I think sex is actually a distraction here because it's really about whether this is a guy who uses people.
That's what it's about.
Yeah, but let me tell you, if Bill Clinton lied about a blowjob, what else is he not telling us the truth about in terms of geopolitics and the nuclear football?
Well, from sex, we next get to Alex Jones, who we'll cover after the break.
Alex Jones is on a hike while he was watching the Candace Owen and Ian Carroll videos because you know how awesome the people who just blare their phones out while you're in the woods are in general.
So he decides he needs to stop right there and jump in.
And so he opens by saying how much he likes and respects...
Candace and Ian.
He then says he thinks the whole Israel thing isn't the most important thing in the world.
He calls Shmueli a demon, and he reminds everyone that RFK Jr. has always been a fan of Israel, so again, no smoking gun here either.
Then he lands in the clip I'm about to play because, of course, he does.
What I'm into is policy and real results.
The fruits of the tree, as Christ said, I'm a Christian.
So, I'm going to say it for now.
The kidneys are famous for their zest.
I got my own zest.
And I've never been, you know, somebody that sits there and lies and says that I haven't, you know, enjoyed some females in my time, though I'm married and all the rest of it.
I'm a good guy.
Currently. The point is, is that, I don't mean, King David had his best friend killed because he was lusting after his wife, and then he repented to God over it, and God said, your man from my own heart, because you really...
He really was upset about what he did and turned it around.
So, if you look at RFK Jr., I don't care if his wife's okay with it, if he's been with 20 checks, okay?
In the last couple years, okay?
As long as it's consensual.
I don't care.
I'm not saying it's morally the best thing.
I personally have not done stuff like that, but when I was younger and stuff, I was wild.
But I understand the mindset.
And if you think the Kennedys, who are famous for their prowess and for their drive, what you also see in life.
In other aspects, if you think that's the reason to have some big scandal, even if it's true, and to do all of this and then let them continue with the poison shots and the GMO and all the additives and stuff.
It's bullshit.
So he really wants to make a distinction between the zest power and drive of, you know, the Kennedy men who are willing to, you know, have dozens of affairs and somebody like him.
He has his own zest power drive, but he's a good guy and, you know, he's never going to do anything like that.
It's not his cup of tea, right?
But yeah, I don't know what the, like, there seems to be this weird false division between people who sort of appreciate this and people who do it.
But the overall implication is that, you know, fucking anyone you can is just the side effect of your power and productivity.
That's what you're going to get with the great man theory of history.
Exactly. If you want an alpha male, well, the guy who's going to get shit done and be a real cowboy is probably going to be...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there is some historical precedent here, you know, Kissinger's famous observation that...
The power is the greatest aphrodisiac.
But it is classic patriarchal rationalization.
And they, of course, would have piously decried it in the case of someone like Bill Clinton.
Well, you guys know my hatred for Alex Jones as a human being.
So let's move on from him.
And Brett Weinstein doesn't touch the sex angle, thankfully.
He laser focuses on the notion that Bobby is being blackmailed.
And what evidence does he have?
In the episode, How to Free RFK Jr. of his Dark Horse podcast, he cites a March 2024 tweet by Kennedy.
Now, like Owens, Brett points out that Kennedy is tweeting in his official capacity as secretary, not his personal account, which he believes he should be free to do, meaning his personal account...
Totally fine.
But when you're representing the US government, you have to be a little more measured and professional.
So here's the tweet.
Instead of inspiring universal condemnation, the October 7 Holocaust triggered a global wave of anti-Semitism.
Ivy League campuses became a greenhouse for poison.
President Trump has ordered his cabinet to use every constitutional tool to uproot this divisive weed.
I'm glad Columbia has agreed to this first step and will begin to restore itself as a garden of tolerance, reason, compassion,
So here's what Brett says about this situation.
Bobby Kennedy is my friend.
I don't want to have to say this.
But this feels like a hostage video.
This feels like somebody who has no choice but to say the things that he is saying from the podium at which he is saying them because of some force that we cannot see.
And the idea not only of making antisemitism the focus of this new health and human services era,
But to call October 7th a Holocaust, obviously, is the most charged of terminology.
Right, because Bobby isn't known for being hyperbolic.
Brett goes on to claim few people really think deeply about why anti-Semitism is unique among other forms of racism, but thankfully for Dark Horse listeners, Brett has thought about it, and he's realized what it is.
He says that antisemitism is special because Jews have lived among other populations as a diaspora.
Okay. Yeah, that's it.
I was doing the Candace Owens pause for a second there.
Yeah, that's it.
Is that the evolutionary perspective that he's offering?
It's the global universal understanding of truth, which the Weinsteins are uniquely qualified to speak about.
That is his grand revelation.
Because telomeres.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah, the telomeres are part of the diaspora.
He ultimately lands here about the supposed blackmail.
I don't know what's going on.
I will say that I believe Bobby Kennedy's commitment to defend Jews and to advocate for Israel is longstanding and it is genuine.
I don't think that that is in and of itself the problem here.
But the fact that he is...
This is the moment at which we should address the myriad of problems that Bobby Kennedy is, in many ways, uniquely encyclopedic about,
suggests that something else has different priorities and that Bobby is experiencing some kind of pressure that he is not.
I just need to say, because we've done a lot of aesthetic commentary, or I have anyway, a lot of aesthetic commentary, the basso profundo of his voice...
I think has got to be about 80% of his longevity in this space.
Like, his rhythm and his ability to sound like he is a sage, no matter what he's saying.
And I think that Heather, his partner, is always sort of like affirming and letting him take those long beats.
I think that's a huge part of the story.
Like, I don't think he would get anywhere if he didn't, you know, just sort of rumble through our bodies like that.
Yeah, I agree, because how else can someone frame Bobby's brain as uniquely encyclopedic and get away with it?
I think he means uniquely able to do free associative gish gallops, uniquely verbose while scientifically uninformed.
But, I mean, this is all about a tweet, right?
This is the amazing thing, is that these people can spin so much content out of something as sort of...
Well, the philandering angle was brought in by Ian.
Right. I mean, Owens mentioned it as part of what happened, but he didn't make that the focus.
Ian and Alex then make it the focus, and Brett goes back to being more honest or true about what Owens was doing.
I don't know what's going on, right?
I don't know what it is, but there's something.
Okay, I'm just going to spitball this, but I think I have a psychological theory for what's happening with the various influencers, is that however the Owens or Carol or Weinstein are actually identified with Bobby, however they feel themselves being attacked through his discrediting,
that's what they're going to focus on, right?
So with Owens, it's going to be about the vaccine issue.
With Carol...
I mean, it's going to be about whether he's accused of...
Yeah, and to your point, Brett loves to be the galaxy brain former professor who was censored,
and so that's what he's going to focus on.
Bobby is uniquely qualified to...
Right, exactly!
Just like I'm uniquely qualified.
I've been cheated out of a Nobel Prize.
I can see that Bobby is a genius.
Yeah, and I can see that Bobby's about to be cheated out of his rightful place in the firmament of healthcare reformers.
Okay, so what are the possible implications, though, beyond the fact that Bobby has always been a Zionist?
Are they saying that Mossad has something on him, that the ADL or AIPAC are threatening him?
It doesn't make any sense, because...
He's already the secretary.
If the brain worm and admitting to assault and lying about vaccines hasn't done him by now, what would he be afraid of?
Who could be blackmailing him?
Why would he care about any pressure?
We probably need another tweet for us to understand how Brett's friend, Brett's friend, Bobby.
You know, has always supported Israel very sincerely, but somehow this bizarre turn has now happened because the tweet shows that he's turned away from the things he really should be focusing on.
Right, okay.
It makes me wonder your question, Matthew.
You know, now that the dog has caught the car, these people are now in power.
Yeah. So they continually need to still be the aggrieved.
I mean, that's Trump 1.0, and now it's even more now that his rogues gallery is all with him in charge.
They still need to be perceived as the people.
victims of the deep state, not the deep state itself.
Look, guys, here ends our story.
Right, yeah.
Until April 2nd, when Brett invites Charles Eisenstein on the podcast, which he titled Staring Down Blackmail, Talking RFK Jr. with Charles Eisenstein.
Now, Eisenstein, of course, appeared for two episodes on our podcast in the very early days to discuss his COVID mythologizing essay, The Coronation.
You did those episodes with him, Matthew, and
To his credit, he's one of the few people we've criticized who's engaged with us, though I don't think he would come on any longer.
Eisenstein scored a position in the Kennedy campaign as the director of communications, and he was always troubled by Bobby's position on Israel, something he ended up writing numerous long and winding essays about.
But he does personally know the man, at least a bit, and he reached out to Brett after the episode we just clipped from to express his concerns.
Now, Brett leads with the idea that Bobby's being blackmailed and that's stopping him from doing the amazing work that Maha is said to do.
Now, Charles believes that he is Maha-ing, and then the conversation goes in many directions.
Both agree that Bobby didn't go to Epstein Island, so we do get a little bit of crossover there.
There's some level of compromise behind the scenes.
Brett believes whoever it is has substantial influence on our politics.
And then Charles says that he's certain that Bobby isn't a pedophile, but he knows what party has what information on who.
So even just quoting Charles gets me tongue-tied sometimes.
So here's one of the more concise clips about the supposed blackmail, and I apologize for the length.
But Charles isn't exactly known for getting to a point quickly or coherently.
Well, I think that he is addressing issues of health.
And partly, on one level, this is all a huge distraction and just another way for people to trip him up and divert his attention onto other matters.
But there's something deeper here as well.
That's always bothered me.
You know, it's no secret that I was vehemently opposed to his, what I would consider very extreme Zionist views during the campaign.
whole polarization around the Palestine issue and in many quarters, the
Collapse of something really complex into a good versus evil narrative, that is at the root of the same problem that we're looking at in terms of public health and the political transformation that we are all excited by in the Maha movement,
for example.
Isn't about merely shifting the identity of the bad guy, but it's a fundamental paradigm shift.
It's a different way of looking at the world.
And that is why, I mean, aside from the fact that, you know, innocent men, women, and children are dying, I mean, that's why it's so disturbing and so seemingly incongruous with everything else that he stands for.
And so that's why I think, why there's speculation.
Okay, because we're not the only ones who have noticed this incongruity.
So I think that's why there's speculation of like, okay, what's going on here?
I feel like Charles has to do this kind of like judo on his own argument where, like, he quit Bobby's campaign over Bobby's Zionism, but then he has to sort of...
Would impugn the assumed polarization that something like that or a move like that or a stance like that would have?
Would exemplify.
Yeah, it's like he had to take a stand and now he has to walk it back because now he's playing into the story of separation himself.
But he hates Bobby's Zionist hawkishness.
And so why would Bobby's focus in a tweet on Israel be surprising?
So it's just like he's such a storyteller that he begins with this obvious explanation for why Bobby is Zionism posting, and then he has to make up a story about why it's somehow more complicated.
Yeah, and they hate postmodernism.
Two, then he collapses the good versus bad supposed dualism and geopolitics that we have to transcend through the new paradigm.
He makes that into being the same as science versus pseudoscience in medicine.
It's just classic Charles Eisenstein.
Just like you said, Matthew, each of them is going to see it through their prism.
Each of them is going to write themselves into the story.
The more beautiful world we know is possible can only happen when we get to the point where we...
Transcend these dualisms.
And for the love of God, Charles or Brett or Heather or whoever's in charge, please edit out the phlegm or pay someone else to do it.
No one needs to hear that.
There's an AI for phlegm.
I could have edited it out, but I just wanted to give listeners the full experience.
Yes, absolutely.
So they had to know what I had to endure for two hours.
So you can listen all two hours of this conversation.
Go for it.
It's one of those rare instances where two bloated, verbose speakers are doing the weave between each other's conspiracy theories.
They spend a lot of time discussing Israel, Gaza, and anti-Semitism.
I just want to play one more clip that highlights just how highly Charles thinks of himself as a so-called public philosopher.
At some point I kind of cracked the code for how Compromont actually works.
It's not so explicit as, you know, you're a public official and someone comes to you in a trench coat and says, hey, look at these videos.
You wouldn't want these to get out there, so you better do as we say.
No one wants to feel that they're being blackmailed.
So what happens is there's this kind of this...
This latent knowledge among a large swath of the power elite that these kind of things are out there and that certain parties have that information.
And the best way to make sure that that isn't a problem for you is to adopt the beliefs that make it unnecessary for you to be blackmailed in the first place.
and so it's a little bit of the Stockholm Syndrome where you start to sympathize with
It's insulating.
Charlie has cracked the code.
It's much more subtle and nuanced than everyone thinks, guys.
It's actually not that they've got dirt on you at all.
It's that you're conforming intuitively to the beliefs and public statements that don't require any defense against blackmail, right?
Yeah, everything's just floating in the miasma.
And so people sort of, they don't have to respond to direct threats or to blackmailing statements.
They'll just sort of move as the winds blow them.
It's pretty tragic because I think the essay that Charles could honestly write now is one sentence long.
Something like, in a fit of personal grandiosity.
I took the flattering bait on a presidential candidate who turned out to be an insane grifter, and he paid me tens of thousands per month.
You know, we live and learn.
Thanks, bye.
Well, remember, off the top, I mentioned that everyone just brings their own ego into it, and I'm always stunned.
By how often people present very simple ideas as if they're revelations.
I mean, this is actually what Maha is all about.
Saying things like, sunshine and exercise and good food will make you healthy.
And then they present it as if no one's ever fucking thought of that before.
And in their own ecosystems, they get to do that sort of thing.
I want to play one more clip from Candice Owens.
Listeners, if you're still with us, congratulations.
I promise it's the last one.
And say what you will about her, and I've said a lot, but she never lets a viral moment go to waste.
Her interview with her friend Ian Carroll dropped on April 3rd, and it's gotten a million one views so far, 1.1 million.
The first 10 minutes are the same, I know this person but can't talk about it, and then she said bullshit that you're likely already numb to.
Carroll launches early into how many Maha and MAGA and children's health defense workers he's
Now, not to be outdone by Eisenstein,
Ian Carroll breaks down what the black male really is.
A friend who's got your back when you do some stupid shit until they need a favor and then you better comply.
It's a low-key realization that, huh, they do have that Epstein tape.
I guess I gotta listen to this person.
Then he states why this has to be the case because Bobby would never allow himself to just be straight-up blackmailed.
I think that Bobby does have a strong soul and he does have that Kennedy And so I doubt he would be able to be blackmailed in an overt, like, do this or else way.
Or at least not at first.
But at first, maybe the blackmail is small.
Maybe it's just simple things.
And you never know what kind of leverages people get over politicians.
And eventually you wind up with Rabbi Schmule hanging out with you and declaring anti-Semitism the greatest health crisis.
In America today, or whatever it is.
Well, he has good breeding, clearly, from his Kennedy stock, and he's spiritually sound.
He has a good soul.
But the corruption of peer pressure will get you every time.
I mean, as we move towards our closing discussion here, I want to point out for any of the listeners who don't follow this stuff the way we do, that...
Candace Owens was a prominent figure on Ben Shapiro's huge, ultra-conservative Daily Wire platform until March of last year, 2024, when she had a very public falling out with Ben Shapiro, notably over his blanket support of Israel.
And she rightly criticizes some of Israel's actions in Gaza, and then...
True to form, she then ends up mixing in plenty of actual anti-Semitism, flirting with Holocaust denial, revisionist history on Hitler, defending Kanye West, etc.
Well, I'm glad we got here, because forcing this conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism from the right is such a mindfuck.
It happens from the left as well.
I think the premise might be that it's religious Zionists in particular who are running the imperial project, and so criticizing those Jews as Jews is fine, but colonial Zionism itself wasn't historically a religious project.
There you go again with your facts, Matthew.
I think it's way too sophisticated.
As with the word feminism earlier in this conversation, your reference to Zionism is rooted in history and academic definitions, and these folks know very little about any of that.
I think when you say Zionism, they just hear Israel has a right to exist, Jews have a right to have a home, and if you oppose that, obviously you're an anti-Semite.
But with regard to that history as well, I mean, there is kind of a blurry line there between religious and cultural.
Whatever the Zionist, socialist, atheist, philosophical bent may have been, say, in the late 19th century, establishing a Jewish ethnostate in the land of the Old Testament is almost impossible to disentangle from religion, don't you think?
So back to Candace.
Since leaving the Daily Wire, she's gone independent.
She came out of the gate with a hard turn toward tabloid Alex Jones-style conspiracism, as we've been hearing.
For example, she said she would stake her entire career on French president's wife, Brigitte Macron, secretly being a man.
Yeah, well, how would that...
Change the world in any way?
Like, who even cares?
It's so nuts.
It would make no difference whatsoever, but for people like Candace, and as we know, like Alex Jones before her, whose footsteps she's kind of walking in, this kind of elaborate deception evokes ominous Illuminati, reptilian shapeshifter, satanic cabal vibes.
It's the subversion of all that is trad holy.
And so, of course, she's done an eight-video investigative series of videos on this topic because of how this ecosystem works.
She's also spent six months making Kamala Harris the lead story of over 19 videos in a series called The Kamala Chronicles.
And these allege that the former VP's family was involved in Freemasonry and that they lied about being Black.
And in between all of this, she's found time to interview moon landing denialist Bart Sibrell.
And then stoke all of this Bobby Blackmail stuff.
So it seems like going way over the top now with these sensationalist claims is her strategy for staying relevant and courting an even more conspiracist audience than she did with The Daily Wire.
And the punchline is, it's working.
She has a bigger audience than she had when she was with that outfit.
You know, Derek, you've always pointed out how superior right wing organizing has been in the U.S. over the past 40 years that, you know, these are folks who are willing to make coalitions across Christian denominations.
They have competing visions of capitalism.
They will compromise on social or fiscal principles when it's expedient, like we see this with school vouchers, for example.
They'll sacrifice their outlier or fringe values when it will help consolidate their electoral power.
And in contrast, the center and the left of the country has struggled to build any popular front against rising fascism because it has to debate difficult structural and identitarian issues.
But I think this episode is interesting because with the Bobby Wars, we can start to see cracks in the coalition in a pattern that's kind of reminiscent of what we see on the left side of the ledger, like a paranoia over there always being something hidden.
Always being something ready to betray the cause.
I did a piece a while back on how the feminist philosopher Eve Sedgwick tagged this tendency towards distrust as the style of paranoid reading, which kind of sums up Candace Owens' entire style from the top of the episode.
If you can predict how Kennedy is being paid by Mossad to focus on Israel instead of mRNA vaccines or whatever, you can protect yourself against disappointment.
So it's not only that conspiratorialism and controversialism
Contrarianism is competitive and that you always have to up the ante.
It's that if you abandon that particular mindset, you lose a real psychological defense that you might have been relying on for a very long time.
And I think that's even more disorienting if your guy is closer to power.
Yeah, and just as there's no honor among thieves, the same post-truth...
Broken cognitive style of paranoid conspiracism and demonizing of enemies very easily leads to eventual suspicion of your own circle.
So the purity tests and the infighting are inevitable, right?
I know this story.
I know the clips are a couple weeks old.
It hasn't completely died down.
House and Habit just on the 18th published an article called If For Nothing Else.
It was written by someone named Aaron Everett, who I didn't look into.
I guess he's a contributor there.
It's a very, very verbose and long piece about the Roman Emperor and comparing it to the American Empire and whatever problems Maha and Bobby has.
At least Bobby's out there talking about things, like I said, that medicine has known for generations.
Jillian Michaels, who is newer to the Maha contrarian space, but she was at the Maha congressional hearing with Ron Johnson.
A few months ago, and she started a podcast eight months ago and has platformed Bill O'Reilly and Heather Hang, Matt Walsh, Tony Robbins, Dave Rubin, and recently Candace Owens.
So Owens came on to discuss the blackmail issue, but Candace immediately pivoted.
She actually didn't even say Kennedy's name during the entire thing.
She immediately wanted to talk about her personal grievances, so I didn't clip it.
But I'm sure as Kennedy continues to not toe the purity lines that you just referenced, Julian, that his fan base expects, Owens and others will reemerge with more license plates and old tweets to discuss the nefarious puppet masters pulling his strings.
And meanwhile, the gutting of public health continues under Bobby's purview.
His promises of stopping chronic disease has turned into this myopic focus on autism, as I know you're going to mention when we close, Matthew.
And I want to point out one last example of the hypocrisy of Maha here, which deserves way more oxygen than the conspiratorial blackmailing that makes for great content in the right-wing podcast space.
Kevin Hall recently retired from the NIH.
Now, for 21 years, The nutrition and metabolism scientist has studied how diet affects health.
He was behind the 2019 study that linked ultra-processed foods to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity.
This is the very study that Maha activists have weaponized to sell supplements.
Oh, so he's their guy.
Yeah, his study has laid the groundwork for a lot of what they rail against.
Now, why is he leaving?
Because Hall says that censorship is rampant under Kennedy's watch.
So he's continued to do good work, and his recent findings about addictions and ultra-processed foods didn't match Kennedy's predetermined stance on the topic.
And so he was apparently going to squash the research.
Rather than fighting an impossible battle, Hall decided to retire.
And this is a real loss for people who actually care about public health, and I'm not really sure who it's a win for.
It's a win for Bobby's worldview, right?
For his general sort of, I don't know, imaginarium of what the world is like, which is just sort of dangerous.
Dire and always threatening.
He had this recent bile dump about ending the autism epidemic.
And that's opened a new front in the Maha Purity Wars.
I'm sure we're going to do a lot more on this in the weeks to come and months to come.
It's been pretty interesting to watch him say exactly what he's been saying about autistic people for 15 years or more.
All of them are dysfunctional people who don't pay taxes.
These are kids who don't play baseball or they don't kiss the girls.
They're ruining their family's lives.
And all kinds of incredibly fucking insulting and incorrect stuff.
But now he's saying this stuff on a much less bubble-filtered stage.
So I watched my own autism socials blow up last week in Disgust, and that's a really good thing.
But it also kind of showed me that Bobby faces real liabilities when he gets to a truly international stage, and he's not really buffered by anybody.
And I'm wondering whether there's a ton of maha mamas out there who have gushed over him for years because he seemed to care about their autistic children, and whether they're going to stand for his hate speech forever because, you know, they didn't support his candidacy so that he could call their kids useless eaters,
