“Meet the man who built RFK Jr’s kitchen cabinet” goes the title of a recent investigative article in Politico. Yet that man, Jeffrey Tucker, is much more than that. In fact, you can make the case, as Politico does, that Tucker is one of the main driving forces behind MAHA.
We’ve covered Tucker before on this podcast, including two previous interviews with his estranged daughter, Julia—who Matthew will again be talking to in segment 2 today. Derek will then talk to Duke professor Gavin Yamey, who was cited in the article as well. Before that, we return to Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, architect of the Great Barrington Declaration, a romantic faux-libertarian who wants to see the return of childhood smoking and the demise of child labor laws and seat belts, and, as Politico uncovered, a man who had to leave a prominent position at a libertarian think tank due to accusations of sexual misconduct.
Show Notes
Meet the man who built RFK Jr.’s kitchen cabinet
Leaked Brownstone Institute Emails Reveal Support for Child Labor, Underage Smoking
Brief: My Dad Became a MAGA Power Broker (w/Julia Tucker) — Conspirituality
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Conspiratuality 281, Jeffrey Tucker, Maha Dandy.
Meet the man who built RFK Jr.'s kitchen cabinet, goes the title of a recent investigative article in Politico.
Yet that man, Jeffrey Tucker, is much more than that.
In fact, you can make a case, as Politico does, that Tucker is one of the main driving forces behind Maha.
We've covered Tucker before on this podcast, including two previous interviews with his estranged daughter, Julia, who Matthew will again be talking to in segment two today.
Derek will then talk to Duke Professor Gavin Yami, who was cited in the article as well.
Before that, we return to Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, architect of the Great Barrington Declaration, a romantic faux libertarian who wants to see the return of childhood smoking and child label laws being removed and the demise of seatbelts.
And as Politico uncovered, a man who had to leave a prominent position at a libertarian think tank due to accusations of sexual misconduct.
A new in-depth profile published by Politico on October 18th starts like this.
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ends up finding the cause of autism, convincing parents vaccinating their kids is optional, and turning conservatives into advocates of using government to combat chronic disease, he can thank Jeffrey Tucker.
Now, we've talked about Tucker several times on this podcast, but he's still not a widely known figure outside of circles like our own.
So here's a little 411 on him, because as we'll learn, he's actually been a central behind-the-scenes player in how the movement we call conspiratuality has come to infect the most consequential halls of power.
The reason we've mentioned him in the past has to do with his involvement in the Great Barrington Declaration.
That's the flagship libertarian right-wing rejection of COVID mitigation methods going back to 2020.
Tucker pulled together contrarian medical academics, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Koldorf, and Sunitra Gupta, to draft a document that downplayed pandemic risks and advocated for pursuing rapid herd immunity by letting the virus tear through the population unhindered.
Despite those stances being vigorously rejected by every prominent medical association and the general scientific consensus of the time, and despite a very similar approach having calamitous outcomes when actually tried in Sweden for a brief period, these renegades have still failed upward, in some cases finding themselves part of the RFK Jr. wrecking crew now tearing down our medical institutions.
One piece of this politico article that really jumped out at me is that Tucker edited the Great Barrington Declaration.
It's so indicative of how Kennedy and Maha operate as well.
The document was intended to be provocative, so Tucker had the three contrarians that you mentioned, Julian, draft a short text explaining how they'd manage the pandemic.
Then Tucker got his hands on it.
As the article goes, too much I believe and we believe.
I made the text sharper, Tucker said.
And so what you get is, quote, current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
But what the authors apparently originally wrote was something more like, we believe current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
And that's really a big difference because in the original draft, they were actually following scientific convention.
As best they could, as best they could.
As best they could, but they qualified their statements that they were an opinion, not a fact, and definitely not scientific consensus.
The fact that all three went along with Tucker's edits speaks volumes about them personally, but it's also how all of Maha and I'd argue many wellness influencers that ended up in and supporting that coalition before it formed.
It's how they all operate.
They treat opinions as science.
We see Kennedy doing this all the time.
And then Maha's followers just repeat it verbatim without ever even considering doing their own research to see if it's true.
Yeah, I don't think that that is Jeffrey's job.
Like he really is a propaganda DJ.
He's not a scientist.
It's not even clear to me that he cares that much about science.
Like it feels like he's a little unique in this field in the sense that he's really just focused on the media and he doesn't seem to have a central special interest.
Like we often talk about charismatics in this zone as being galaxy brained or they can be hobbled by this halo effect that convinces them that some legit knowledge in one area is transitive to others.
I don't know with Tucker what that legitimate knowledge is.
I know he knows a lot about church music, but I don't think there's any money in that.
I think what's clear from his massive output is that he's a compulsive writer.
And so I'm not surprised that he takes this kind of like writerly and editorial approach to this pathway to power.
But the writing content has really been hit and miss.
And in my first conversation with Jeffrey's daughter, Julia, back in December, which we'll link to, she pinged the Great Barrington Declaration as the kind of lucky strike in this stream of endless commentary.
Like he's always rolling the dice and then finally came up with sixes.
This is a guy who's floated from one fringy right-wing obsession to another.
The constant in terms of content is libertarianism, probably even more than religious ideas.
But he's got 10 books, countless articles.
The method really is all about flooding the zone and seeing what sticks.
And I've gone in and out of hypergraphia in my life, so I can identify with some of this, but I never got to the point of like putting out a blog post every day or covering the walls of my bedroom in tiny print.
But I'm, you know, one thing I can say about compulsive writing is that it is either about like purging things you can't keep inside or organizing things so that you can understand them or needing to create a fortress of words around you to bolster your sense of self.
But what it never is about is learning, I don't think.
Well, the now 61-year-old libertarian activist is an eccentric with some very weird ideas, as we've already flagged.
He's fond of bow ties that are often ostentatiously prominent and colorful, and he pairs these with white dress shirts and darker colored tailored formal suits, sometimes three-piece, sometimes double-breasted.
So he is a dandy.
Jeffrey Tucker sometimes also wears a cape.
He looks to me, and this is a bit of a stretch, but that's what popped into my head, like he could be auditioning for the role of the banker in a stage play based on the Monopoly board game.
Like a top hat and a monocle would not be out of place on this guy.
But all of that aside, Tucker's cosplay as a tycoon of the past fits with these weird ideas I mentioned.
And we already said this in the intro, as this hardcore libertarian, he's argued, and this is in leaked emails, in favor of ditching both child labor laws and age limits for smoking cigarettes.
I don't know why you're laughing.
You're wearing a cape right now, Jillian.
That's why we do my videos.
I'm a hero.
I'm a hero.
Well, speaking of those, what Tucker actually wants, Walker Bragman over at Important Context covered those topics from leaked emails he got a hold of back in May 2023.
I've also included them in the show notes, Walker's writing.
In it, Tucker writes that the 1936 child labor law is, quote, cruel and robs kids of a good life.
He goes on to discuss how he got around that law when he was 12 so he could tune church organs, speaking of church music, Matthew.
Yet somehow he claims that this legislation condemns kids to a life of desk sitting.
Yeah, I mean, these are the fantasies and idealizations of someone who believes that everyone is self-made or should be.
And then the earlier you start, the better.
I don't know if you guys know anything about like church organs, but you kind of have to be very small to get into the chamber where all of the pipes actually are.
And so it has traditionally been something that kids in organ building guilds have helped out with.
And I'm sure he's like steeped in that kind of history.
And that was like some sort of golden age when you didn't really have to go to school, but you did this trade that was also sort of supporting the moral architecture of the universe.
Yeah, it's making me wonder if you needed on your CV to have also been a chimney sweep in order to become an organ tuner, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's that feeling of you can go get them, right?
Like, and I think this shows up in the fact that, you know, he was a homeschooler.
And, you know, Julia talked in that first interview about this independence bias, specifically in relation to homeschooling.
You know, you make people, kids learn and earn on their own.
But, you know, the irony is that homeschooling also takes a lot of time and supervision.
It's like, you know, you can think about your kid going to the organ loft and, you know, I don't know, cleaning the pipes or whatever, but you also have to show them how to do it.
And you probably have to supervise them.
It takes a lot of time.
And Jeffrey, because he's always writing articles, didn't have a lot of time.
And that meant that Julia would often just get dumped at the public library with a brown bag lunch.
And it turned out that this is what turned her against his trad cast libertarian bullshit because she actually read a lot of books.
It's like there's an Achilles heel in the libertarianism thing, which is, you know, if you don't have time to supervise your kids and you really think that they're just going to go get it on their own, you know, what they go out and get might not be something that you like.
There's one more link that I want to make here with Tucker because he is perfect for Project 2025.
Their whole deregulation frenzy is a long time Republican response, almost a century now, that is trying to overturn New Deal policies.
So Tucker's role makes perfect sense because the law that he's referencing specifically that I brought up a moment ago is called the Public Contracts Act of 1936.
It is a New Deal policy.
And the MAGA administration just wants to decimate all of them.
Now, ironically, this particular law only targeted federal contractors, not private companies.
Those would come later, but give it up to Jeffrey for attacking the root cause of the plague of pre-teen unemployment.
It all goes back to the Public Contracts Act of 1936 when kids started to get soft and we lost our hardcore capitalism.
Fuck, man.
So overlapping with his great Barrington Declaration, Dark Advocacy, on behalf of the American Institute for Economic Research, Tucker also founded something called the Brownstone Institute, where he then gave prominent roles to Bhattacharia and Koldorf, while Gupta, the third in that group of renegade academics, is a major contributor of pseudoscientific articles.
And all of this, as it turns out, caught the eye of the surging Bobby Kennedy, who promised that he would appoint renegade doctors like these, he called them, if given the chance.
And he has been given the chance.
Tucker has also since been a facilitator of right-wingers finding their way into Kennedy's Maha movement and the emergence of mainstreamed anti-vaccine sentiment as a shared value, kind of gluing those groups together.
Many key figures in RFK Jr.'s orbit as the head of HHS, like Robert Malone and Vinay Prasad, have been contributing contrarian experts for Brownstone.
Their articles sit aside those from none other than old conspiratuality favorite and one-time Kennedy campaign head of communications, Charles Eisenstein.
For his part, Tucker also contributes a weekly column to that bastion of Falun Gong cult conspiracy journalism called the Epoch Times.
Now, his 2020 transition from AIER to Brownstone also turns out to be linked to a string of sexual harassment accusations from his previous job.
The Politico piece we've mentioned also revealed these allegations for the first time.
And one of two lawsuits that AIER settled out of court involved claims that he'd pressured female employees to drink and model fur coats, all while parading around in boxer shorts and trying to drag women into his bedroom.
This also fit with a reported pattern from previous colleagues of inappropriate touching and bragging about his sexual exploits with women in the office.
According to Politico, over the last five years, Brownstone has published an astonishing 3,500 articles and 20 books.
Now, over half of those articles question COVID policy or the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
They also launched an initiative that analyzed the government's COVID response and then urged Congress to investigate supposed wrongdoing during the pandemic.
They now have over 17,000 donors and an annual revenue of $2.75 million.
This past September, Brownstone was involved in a retreat in the shadow of Washington's Blue Ridge Mountains that brought Maha proponents together with Children's Health Defense, that's Kennedy's former organization, and the Heritage Foundation, some kind of unholy trinity there.
It was held at the farm of Christian environmentalist Joel Salatin, who that excellent Politico article positions as emblematic of the burgeoning crossover between conservative libertarians and ostensibly left-leaning environmental populists.
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So it's very rare that we get an insider's view into the lives of the figures that we cover.
Julia Tucker was my guest back in December for an episode we called My Dad Became a MAGA Powerbroker, and we'll link to that in the show notes, as I said.
And in that conversation, we went into detail on Jeffrey's life arc, his contradictions, how they bonded over liturgical music.
Julia is now a professional organist, and also how they fell out over a long period of time over politics and just basic values.
So after the politico piece dropped, I reached out to catch up.
Julia Tucker, welcome back to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you, Matthew.
It's great to be here again.
Okay, so Politico did a deep dive on your dad, Jeffrey, and his rise through the MAGA Maha ranks.
Now, you've been watching this unfold your entire life.
How does it feel to have a publication make it all visible and bulletproof?
I have to say it feels really good.
I know that that is probably, you know, kind of a weird thing because he's my dad.
But, you know, when you have been carrying around this, you know, sort of secret or truth or something that you know about someone, to have somebody else from the outside come in and fact check it, publish it, and send that kind of truth out into the world, it really feels like a burden lifted, I have to say.
Yeah, you know, I think we're implicitly taught that so much of our family stuff is just normal.
Like it's the way things are.
And if you suspect something is off, you must be the one who's delusional or ungrateful or something like that.
Are you now a little bit less of the black sheep, I guess?
I think the verdict is a little bit still out on that.
You know, there's been a variety of family responses to the Politico article.
You know, it has been a long family process to kind of face this about Jeff and having somebody come from the outside to verify that, I do really think helps in that process.
Well, we'll walk through some of the article's details, but maybe it's best to start with your 30,000-foot framing.
If you were limited to naming three influences over your dad's political life or the beliefs that he runs on, what would those be?
I would say that libertarianism has been, you know, a huge influence in his life.
That's something he encountered, I think, in his early 20s.
Traditionalist Catholicism has also been a huge influence.
I think he encountered that also in his early 20s.
I think those are sort of simultaneous beliefs that emerged.
But he also has this, he's always had this nostalgia for times and places that I don't think ever existed.
And certainly if they did, they predate him.
And that nostalgia kind of just pervades a lot of his worldview.
Well, we see it, I think, in the clothes, and we'll get to it in a moment, and in sort of a fetishization around smoking.
But is it also fair to say that his most acute contradiction is wanting to be a trad calf libertarian, like to combine those two things at the same time?
Like, how does that shake out?
Yeah, that's an odd mix for sure.
I would say at this point, you know, he's kind of a failed libertarian.
You know, once you go MAGA Maha, it's kind of hard to say that you're pro-free trade, anti-big government, pro-individual liberty anymore.
And from what I understand, actually, he's sort of been rejected by a lot of the leaders in the libertarian movement at this point.
But also, as the Politico article shows, he's definitely a failed traditionalist Catholic at this point as well.
But I think he picked up on the sort of anti-establishment threads of both of those movements.
And I think he really emotionally resonated with them.
They just, they hit a chord inside him very deeply.
But of course, now in the ultimate contradiction, anti-establishment Jeffrey Tucker has become, you know, squarely in the pocket of the establishment.
Well, will that be satisfying for him, do you think?
Or will he at some point have to rise up and strike out against the tyranny of RFK Jr.?
I have really wondered about that.
You know, because that is such, I mean, for the first time in his life, he is within the mainstream political establishment.
I think that, you know, he's 61.
I think he's getting older.
And I do think there is something to be said that your taste for radicalism can kind of wane as you get a little bit older.
So from my perspective, I don't see him striking back out against Magamaha anytime soon.
I think it feels very comfortable for him at this point.
Okay, well, I've got a quick Catholic contradiction question for you.
Will he be in favor of Pope Leo disbanding Opus Day?
Because obviously Opus Day is a highly restrictive and deep state cult.
Or will he view Leo as yet another tyrant like Francis, do you think?
I think he'll definitely view Leo as yet another tyrant for sure.
Yeah, I don't think he's going to be pretty happy about Pope Leo.
So we were texting after this came out and you highlighted your favorite paragraphs.
Tucker welcomed Politico into his apartment in West Hartford, Connecticut last month.
A portrait of King Charles III when he was a prince hangs beside the entrance door to the one bedroom unit furnished with antiques.
Tucker dresses like a king out of uniform.
He wears a sharply pressed blue pinstripe suit, cufflinks and a bow tie.
The rubber bracelet on his arm that says, I won't be locked down again is the only accoutrement that doesn't match the ensemble.
So did the writers capture him there and how so?
I think they absolutely did.
I mean, that was my favorite line of the entire article.
I think I actually like chortled when I read it for the first time.
You know, I haven't seen Jeff in a couple of years, so I haven't kept up with his taste in home decor.
I will say the King Charles portrait is definitely a recent addition.
It was not in my childhood home, but it just completely tracks that he would end up simping for the British monarchy.
You know, I know we've talked about his unusual taste in fashion, including capes.
He has a very sort of distinctive pseudo-British accent, which is a complete affectation.
He's from West Texas.
But, you know, the suit, the bow tie, the cufflinks, it all just plays into this image.
I think if he ever does meet King Charles, he's ready.
Well, if you can refresh my memory here, maybe I didn't quite ask this last time.
Is this affectation compensating for something in terms of like class or culture or ideas of culture?
Like, did he grow up on the wrong side of the tracks?
I think, you know, West Texas is a pretty, you know, especially he's from Lubbock, especially when he was growing up.
That was a pretty rural, isolated area.
And then as a young man, he was living in Washington, D.C. And I think trying to rub shoulders with the kind of Ron Paul, You know, libertarian or conservative-leaning Republican crowd.
And I think that's a little bit tough to do if you have the mannerisms of a guy from West Texas.
So he needed a costume change and just kind of an affect change.
So he, I mean, if you've ever heard him speak, it is extremely distinctive.
And in fact, the reporter from Politico, one of her first questions for me was, where is he from?
I can't remember his accent.
But, you know, it's a funny thing when you're family, you end up just kind of picking up on each other's little weirdsies and you just know each other really well.
And do you remember those Live Strong rubber bands that came out in the early 2000s?
Right.
I remember.
Yeah, I Jeff just thought those were the fucking coolest things.
Like he loved those things.
I don't know why.
But when he was doing like branding and merch for previous institutions he worked for, he was always like, we got to get the rubber bracelets.
We got to get the rubber branded bracelets.
And obviously they still have a hold on him.
He was the rubber bracelet guy.
Yeah, he was so into them.
He'd wear a couple of them at a time.
And he's always worn them with suits.
Odd fixation hasn't gone away.
So your dad isn't super well known, or he hasn't been, at least not yet, as a maha wheeler and dealer.
So Politico has done a good job of clarifying his arc, his rise to power, and especially nailing down his participation in the production of a Great Barrington Declaration.
But they also investigated several allegations of sexual harassment against him.
Had you known about these allegations before, and did they surprise you?
Yes, I did know about the allegations.
The specifics have been on my radar since he left the American Institute of Economic Research in 2021.
And I had my own suspicions about his behavior for years before that.
As far as whether or not they surprised me, I mean, no one wants to find that out about their dad.
I think most women have met probably hundreds of men like that.
And as a defense mechanism, you get really good at sniffing that out pretty quickly.
But it's very difficult to reconcile that oh-so-familiar trope of that sexually very predatory man with a father figure that you admired and looked up to as a child.
But I also, I mean, I saw with my own eyes his deeply problematic behaviors and ideas concerning women.
So in that sense, the sexual harassment allegations didn't really surprise me.
And not at all to make light of the allegations, but the way they're described seems to come out of the 1950s, right?
Lots of drinking.
He's asking employees to dress up in furs.
He's trying to pull one towards a bedroom while wearing only boxers.
And then he calls his accusers tramps, like it's some sort of Broadway musical 1955 or something.
Like you have to be a misogynist to harass women, which I think you're pointing to.
But it really sounds like this misogyny comes straight out of the past.
And is that reflective of the nostalgia you mentioned at the top?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's like he wants to live.
He has a nostalgia for a time where he feels like he was a man who could have done what he wanted.
And he tried to create that in his workplace.
And that was the, when the allegations first came out, you know, and they were later followed by court documents that I found and, you know, sent to family members.
And they're so Jeff-like.
Like the behaviors described, you couldn't make it up.
They just, they completely track with his sort of unique way of relating to women and unique way of relating to the world.
And in that sense, I mean, from my perspective, Like they absolutely were true.
I believe them from the moment I saw them.
You couldn't write something that fit his character so perfectly.
Although, you know, maybe writers for Mad Men would sort of study him as kind of like a side character, not the person who was coolest in that environment, but the person who sort of had aspirations to be as virile or as, you know, sort of powerful as somebody like Dawn.
Yeah, I think maybe Jeff watched Mad Men and sort of took the wrong message away from it.
Thought it was cool, right?
Thought it was cool.
Yeah.
Here's an emotional intelligence question that you might have insight into.
Like we're almost six years out from the Great Barrington Declaration.
At this point for me, it is axiomatic to think of all of the influencers who pushed pseudoscience, who eroded confidence in medical expertise and fed into the larger fascist project of soft eugenics.
I think of these people as having blood on their hands.
Do you think this ever crosses Jeffrey's mind?
I don't.
I don't think it crosses his mind, not in the slightest.
I wish that weren't the case.
I think for Jeff and other people like him who have peddled in this pseudoscience, I think to do that, you have to completely sever your conscience from your psyche.
If they thought about it even a little bit, it would destroy them.
So you have to cut that part of yourself off.
Okay, so that's a very clear answer.
Where does his empathy or sense of responsibility show itself if it does?
Well, I know he has a dog.
Okay.
So I hope he feels empathy and responsibility for the dog.
But I think if you sat down and asked him, Jeff, like, who are you helping?
What is all of this?
What is the Brownstone Institute?
You know, what is it all about?
Who are you doing this for?
I think he would say something like, you know, I'm doing it for all of the people who were depressed and isolated during the pandemic because of the lockdowns.
I'm doing it for, you know, the people who died of COVID because they couldn't get access to ivermectin.
You know, the kids whose learning outcomes were affected by virtual school.
But these are larger than life caricatures that really would break down, you know, if he went out there and actually talked to some folks.
Well, he's not a journalist that way, is he?
No, not at all.
And I think that, you know, you can't discount the isolation factor here.
I know that he is very isolated.
And to be honest, I suspect that a lot of the figures that you've talked about on the pod are.
Social isolation does seem to be one of those kind of primary ingredients in the conspiratualist recipe.
I think it's definitely that way for Jeff.
Now, not everybody's dad will rise to the upper echelons of a fascist state, but there are plenty of dads who skid right words into ultra conservatism and even fascism.
So I wanted to end by asking that if you could give advice from where you are now to your 14-year-old self about how to know what's happening in a situation like this and how to keep sane while it happens, what would you say?
I would say to my 14-year-old self and any 14-year-old in that situation, to trust your own moral compass and sense of right and wrong.
Children and young adults naturally defer to the emotional authority of the adults around them.
But by 14, you also have a conscience that can speak to you.
And when the political anger seems out of proportion or the grievance mongering seems to not quite make sense, you can trust your gut feeling on that.
And as for how to stay sane, I, you know, study, read, learn as much as you can.
I am a huge believer that knowledge is power, particularly in situations where you may be receiving a version of the world that is filtered through one ideology.
And seek out mentors and adults other than your parent who you can trust to speak wisdom into your life.
I feel like I was extraordinarily lucky to have several of those at some key moments.
But lastly, if it is at all possible without doing great harm to yourself, stay close to your weird dad, particularly as you navigate that transition from young adulthood into adulthood.
That was not possible for me and Jeff, but I wish it was.
The more isolated these individuals become, the sicker they'll get.
And I really am a huge believer that community, or even more plainly, love, is it's the only antidote that I know of.
Julia, that's a wonderful place to end.
Thank you for being our guest so many times.
Not the most comfortable subject, but I really appreciate your insights.
Thanks so much, Matthew.
It's always great to chat.
The next time I'm on here, we have to talk about church music, not Jeff.
Yes, absolutely.
Awesome.
Well, thanks so much.
I was really happy to see Gavin Yamy's name pop up in that political article.
We've communicated on Blue Sky and social media for years now.
He is also a huge world music fan, so we often trade music that's going on.
But he has quite a career and is the perfect person to talk about what someone like Jeffrey Tucker represents in the larger scope of public health.
So Gavin is the director of the Center for Policy Impact and Global Health based in Duke Global Health Institute.
He's a professor at the Institute as well, as well as in the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy.
He trained in clinical medicine at Oxford University and University College London.
He also trained in medical journalism and editing at the BMJ and Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He's worked with the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Kaiser on public health programs across the world, including on-the-ground work in Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya.
And he's currently a Time magazine columnist where he writes about issues in public health and policy.
Gavin, in the Politico article, you said, quote, MAGA meets Maha, meets libertarianism, meets the Great Barrington Declaration, meets the Brownstone Institute.
This interconnected movement has now adopted animus towards vaccination almost at its core.
And that's not something one used to see on the right, end quote.
Now, we saw something similar in the 60s with, for example, the Birchers teaming up with the hippies and their disdain for fluoride.
But this current moment and this current movement feels like it's on steroids or maybe testosterone replacement therapy.
Why do you think that is?
Well, I think, you know, there's a lot to unpack in that quote, Eric, I think.
Yes.
There's the fact that these movements are now so deeply intertwined.
I think that's quite a dangerous moment that we find ourselves in.
And there's the fact that, as I said in that quote, animus towards vaccination is almost what is defining this stew, this kind of interconnected toxic stew.
I would argue it's toxic.
I'd argue it's extraordinarily dangerous.
And I think the public health impacts are already being seen.
I think one thing to say is that if you look at kind of Trump 1.0, this level of anti-vaccine, animus, certainly anti-vax activism wasn't as powerful as it is now.
What's happened is that Donald Trump in Trump 2.0 has clearly put together a group of leaders for the health agencies who, during the pandemic, were already kind of espousing views that were pretty far outside the mainstream.
In the case of RFK Jr., they had had decades of anti-vaccine activism.
I mean, I would argue that RFK Jr. is one of the world's most extreme and most dangerous anti-vax activists and conspiracy theorists.
The sort of the cabinet that Trump created on the health side, and then the group of mostly men, not entirely, but the group of mostly male MDs and PhDs that RFK Jr. has surrounded himself with and who are doing his bidding, I think, very much so and very willingly.
So they were already espousing views that were highly problematic and highly dangerous.
You've got the MAGA who brought Maha on board, which I think has been quite a big part of the authoritarianism.
I think the health authoritarianism that RFK Jr. is leading is really worrying.
And then Maha brought on board these other folks who were already espousing some pretty unusual ideas.
If you look at, for example, the two authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kuldoff, one of whom is now NIH director and one of whom is chairing the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
You know, they had been recruited by Jeffrey Tucker, who was the central figure in the politico article that you mentioned and whose daughter I know you've had on your show before.
And he himself has a highly problematic right-wing, libertarian, pro-tobacco, pro-child labor, anti-vaccine, anti-public health history.
And, you know, he's the one, he's the intellectual architect of the Great Barrington Declaration who brought Buttacharia and Kuldoff together and who is now seen as a key actor in the MAGA Maha world.
So this interconnection of deeply problematic movements and peoples who are espousing, I believe, terribly damaging and dangerous anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-public health views.
It's a terrible moment we're in.
One thing that came out in the political article is that Tucker seems to have hypergraphia.
He just writes thousands of words of text.
He's been doing it for a long time with little success.
And yet, the Great Barrington Declaration kind of marks his entry onto the national and global stage.
What do you believe were the driving incentives behind that document?
If you look at Tucker's history and if you look at Tucker's background, you can see that he has called himself an anarcho-capitalist.
can see that he has a long history of trying to empower the powerful, particularly big business, and disempower the disadvantaged.
If you look at the Great Barrington Declaration, where it came out of, you know, he at the time was at the AIER, American Institute of Economic Research, very kind of pro-business, kind of libertarian, right-wing group.
If you look at his kind of version of libertarianism, which was really you know, not wanting the powerful to have any kinds of restrictions, regulations, you know, his opposition to kind of seatbelts, his belief that kids should be able to smoke, kids should be able to work.
You know, I don't think you can divorce the Great Barrington Declaration from that history.
There are some who viewed the Great Barrington Declaration as the product of sort of an independent scientific process where scientists just happened to get together and sort of write this piece.
That isn't how it went down.
This was generated by Tucker.
He says he wrote parts of it.
He certainly sponsored it, marketed it, created a think tank, the Brownstone Institute, around it.
There's, you know, documented kind of linkages between these actors and kind of right-wing dark money interests, corporate interests.
No surprise that kind of corporate interests of big business and conservatives and Republicans, some of whom already were suspicious of public health measures, embraced it because it sort of seemed to offer kind of freedom to sort of big business and corporations to kind of do what they wanted.
One of the sleights of hand that Maha regularly does is Kennedy and the influencers, they'll say things like, no one has ever looked into this before.
And the political article tugs at this when they talk about Tucker editing the document to remove qualifiers that scientists use, like we think, and he turned opinions into declaratives.
They're not actually ever sharing gold standard science.
Now, you've published over 250 articles in peer-reviewed publications.
You know the process of medical journalism inside and out, given that's one of your specialties.
What is Kennedy doing when he does this?
And why do you think him and Maha is finding success?
So let me just say something somewhat tangential, but I think related and I think really important.
And that is just to go back to Tucker for a minute.
My interest in the Great Barrington Declaration and Jeffrey Tucker, the man behind the GBD, partly arose because I was kind of seeing what he was writing and I was seeing what he was saying on television.
And then I also happened to chance upon a webinar.
I'm not entirely sure how I did so, but I chanced upon a webinar that he gave to a number of folks, a number of constituents in Uganda.
In addition to all the usual things that he was saying about public health measures not being necessary and what have you, he started espousing some really extreme anti-vaccine sentiment.
And he said that COVID vaccines have never been proven to be effective or safe.
And he was saying this at a time where the exact opposite was true, right?
At a time when the efficacy and safety of COVID vaccines had been documented in peer-reviewed journals and it was established science with all the usual caveats.
Yes, of course there are side effects as there are for every vaccine.
And of course they're not 100% effective.
But to make a statement like that I found absolutely enraging and I was finding it very difficult at that time to understand why some people were in love with Tucker, in love with his declaration, some people even kind of signing his declaration.
RFK Jr. does this a lot, right?
He makes these statements that are literally the opposite of what the scientific facts show, or he'll just make things up that might to a lay person sound vaguely credible.
I mean, during that catastrophic press event with Trump and RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya, Martin McCari and others on autism, which I happen to think was the probably most damaging press event of its kind that I've ever seen.
And I've watched a lot of these.
I can't think of anything more anti-scientific and more damaging.
RFK Jr. said the odd sort of thing that you might listen to and go, oh, that's interesting.
And that might provoke sort of interest in people.
I think at one point he started saying, oh, there's no autism in Cuba and there's no Tylenol available in Cuba.
But both of those things, by the way, factually untrue.
But if you were listening to that, you might go, oh, wow.
Huh, that's really interesting.
In places where nobody's taking Tylenol in pregnancy because it's not available, there's no autism.
Maybe the guy's onto something.
One thing I've noticed is that once it enters the Maha sphere, I'm working on a piece right now about the Flexner report because Callie Means and RFK Jr. have both said so many factually inaccurate things about Abraham Flexner and what that report was.
And then I will see a flood of wellness influencers just repeat it without actually ever looking into it.
And it's pretty ironic to me because this is the do your own research crowd and they are immune to fact checking.
Oh yeah.
And something similar happened recently, which I saw Angie Russ Newson has written about.
She is a remarkable virologist.
Full disclosure, I have worked with her before.
Full disclosure, her and I gave pro bono advice in a legal case against the Great Parrot Declaration, which the GBD side lost.
She wrote a piece recently about Kennedy's other bizarre statement on sperm counts of adolescent boys.
She tweeted something out about it and then RFK Jr. actually ended up replying in her mentions with a paper.
The preprint.
Yeah, a systematic review, I think it was.
So some people might go, oh my God, RFK Jr. is actually showing the science behind his statement.
And then she wrote a piece to dissect what he'd sent out.
And the paper does not show that at all.
So, you know, that's, I think, highly indicative of what's going on.
A game that I've played before is going to the Children's Health Defense website, reading the studies that they post as proof, and finding that it almost never matches up to what they're saying.
Never matches up.
So, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So, last question, probably the hardest, and I know we're thinking big picture here, but you've spent your career working in public health.
You've been on the ground all over the world, like thinking seriously about this.
I don't know if you've ever noticed anything that any precedence, like what's going on in America today, but how do we restore trust in public health?
Oh, we end on the easiest question.
I said the best for last, Gavin.
It's easy right now to be somewhat despondent given the folks who are running public health in America.
If you look at the folks who RFK Jr. and Trump has put in charge of the health agencies, and I believe that they are sadly, very successfully dismantling public health and health research in the US, including vaccination systems no doubt.
I think RFK Jr. is being wildly successful in his anti-vaccination crusade tragically.
And I do think it's going to take time to restore that.
Obviously we are going to need new political leadership.
I think that is, there's no doubt about that.
I would like to see, and I don't think everybody agrees with me, but I would like to see the leadership of scientific organizations, of physician organizations, particularly the sort of elite physician organizations, being more vocal than they are now.
I know that some of them have taken the view that they need to kind of keep on Trump's good side and keep on the good side of the physicians who Trump has surrounded himself by, or else they'll get on the receiving end of retaliation.
They'll be on the receiving end of retaliation and they need to keep those channels open.
I personally don't ascribe to that view.
Right now, the Trump administration is kidnapping people, including children, and putting them in conditions akin to concentration camps.
Many of those people have disappeared.
They are zip-tying kids.
They are absolutely destroying the US healthcare system.
They are throwing people off Medicare.
They are making it much harder for people to get health coverage.
They are rolling back environmental and other health regulations over and over.
The steps that they are taking are so anathema to health and well-being that I would like to see the powerful health and science organizations take a different stance.
I saw a piece recently, an interview with the president of the American Medical Association saying it's really important to sort of maintain good relationships with Trump.
That's a view that I don't share.
We're going to need new leaders and different leaders.
And I think that right now we all have, and I know that Conspiratority Podcast is doing this and is doing a really wonderful job of that.
I think we need to continue to highlight the powerful forces, the networks, the institutional networks behind what's happening.
This is an authoritarian takeover of the US, including authoritarianism affecting health and public health.
And I think we need to continue to kind of highlight what's going on, expose what's going on, show that it is against what science is showing.
