#144 It's Even Worse Than That (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 144th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.This week, we discuss the prestigious scientific journal Nature, and its promotion of an anti-scientific perspective on sex and gender. We also discuss the not-so-prestigious journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, and its take on species concepts, and also on the “Trans*-Ness of Blackness.” We discuss the new research that ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 144.
That's right, it's number 144.
Proving that I can count with a periodicity of a week in between.
Who are you?
Who am I?
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein and I know you to be Dr. Heather Hying and this is the Dark Horse Podcast and we are We're raring to go.
Long-time viewers will know that we have moved and we have had to abandon our studio, and we are working on a new studio, but we now live on an island where everything moves slowly, so we're getting there.
Your correspondence has poured in requesting that our new set have even more wood than our last one.
We've done an analysis, and it turns out the only way to do that is to use thicker pieces, because it was pretty much all wood.
Yeah, and that's not going to be visible, is it?
Well, they'll know, I think.
The correspondence is poured in, meaning that we got one letter suggesting more wood on the set.
But I thought it was a good suggestion, at the very least.
You're giving me that look.
I just think everything about the story is fabricated, that's all.
Oh, it's not fabricated.
The idea that you look at correspondence, for instance.
It isn't fabricated, it's grown.
Alright, well that was a low blow, but you know.
No.
Accurate, but low.
All right, so here we are.
It's Dark Horse Livestream 144, and we are streaming from this makeshift situation.
We will have a studio again at some point, but it's going to be a little while.
So for your viewing pleasure, if you're only listening at home and you want more dog, we got dog.
We got dog this time.
We got Madison right here between us, who hopefully does not start snoring.
We sometimes do put her to sleep.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, she just gets exhausted with us.
Okay, so we will be doing a Q&A after this live stream.
Will we not?
We certainly will.
We will.
That question has now been answered.
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Yeah.
No, we appreciate disagreement.
We appreciate honest disagreement, heartfelt disagreement.
The trolls and the, well, The Trolls, also appreciated.
Yeah, and there are some others.
I wouldn't say so.
Yeah, I mean, no one really appreciates that.
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It looks like it was wonderful.
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All right, and I'm up first this week.
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I'm saying Ned offers you a way in.
A chance to visit Ashwagandha without leaving your seat.
Yeah.
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All right.
We didn't say anything at the top of the hour about where we're going today.
Where would you like to start?
Ashwagandha.
Oh, that's later, though.
That's not on screen.
We're not taking the viewers to Ashwagandha, are we?
Well, I don't know.
I haven't seen the place.
It might be worth it.
Helmet cam and all, you know?
Okay.
You want to go now?
No, we should probably do the podcast.
I mean, as long as it's on the schedule.
It is on the schedule.
We've got a number of people already here.
We don't want to disappoint.
You want to?
Everyone's showing up.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you want to start?
Should I start?
I think you should start.
Okay.
I'm a little distracted by all of the four-legged friends showing up.
What is the four-legged friend who's off camera doing now?
Okay, yeah, sure.
Watching TV in the cabinet.
Presumably finding my better computer stand, which has somehow gone missing.
All right.
Let's see.
We, as we have said, apologies.
We'll stop apologizing at some point, but we don't have all the usual bells and whistles, and so I can't show my screen.
So this is going to be a little janky, but Zach, if we're going to start here, I want you to start by showing the screenshot of the top two news items from Nature this week.
So once again, Nature Okay.
Fairfax is now playing with a tennis ball.
Cats don't usually do that.
The one with the two?
Yeah.
So I get weekly emails from Nature, one of the top two science journals in the world, and Nature this week has, and actually if you could possibly put us in some other corner, that's exactly obscuring a thing I want to be able to see, I can't even read it, so I'm going to have to pull it up.
So in the email that I got from Nature this week, we have the top two pieces.
An editorial, How Nature Contributed to Science's Discriminatory Legacy, we want to acknowledge and learn from our history.
And this is, as you might imagine, the kind of thing that everyone is being expected to do now.
I apologize for the fact that our forebearers were not moderns who understood all of the things about bigotry that moderns understand.
And the second piece in Nature this week is in basically their review of this week's most important scientific things that are happening and that Nature itself published, is worldview.
To set transgender policy, look to the evidence.
Policy debates concerning transgender people are embroiled in the culture wars.
Let data and science, not politicians, guide laws.
This written by someone known as Paisley Carraw.
So, this piece... No, not yet.
Definitely not.
I have to find... I'm not totally prepared here... This piece... Oh my god.
The second article, just at Transgender Policy Look to the Evidence, It begins as follows.
In March, the U.S.
state of Utah passed a law barring transgender girls from high school girls' sports.
It defines sex as, quote, the condition of being male or female determined by an individual's genetics and anatomy at birth, and prohibits those of, quote, male sex, end quote, from competing against another school on a girls' team.
And this piece by, again, Paisley Carraw, proceeds to make a number of arguments that claim to be relying on data and science.
And in this piece, there is literally no definition of sex, no purportedly scientific explanation for how humans, unique among all mammals, can supposedly change their sex, patently no understanding of the organizational effects of hormones.
The author, for instance, seems to believe that hormones only work activationally.
And just a brief endocrinological aside here, One way of categorizing the effects of hormones is activational versus organizational, and most hormones have both types of effects.
An activational effect is one which, when exposed to the hormone, the system that can respond to it, and therefore the body in which it lives, the individual in which it lives, responds immediately to the effect of that hormone.
That is activational.
That is, basically, the body is activated by the exposure to the hormone.
Then there are organizational effects, which is to say, early in development, or at other moments in development, as new systems are being laid down during development, exposure to the hormone basically sets things in process, such that once exposed, things are set in process which can never be undone.
And it's these organizational effects of things like sex steroid hormones, especially testosterone, but also of estrogens, which are widely, almost universally, I think, ignored, and certainly ignored by the author of this piece, which gets such a highlight position in Nature this week, when they talk about whether or not you can actually be truly, truly turn into the other sex.
The fact is that if you went through puberty as a male, You cannot undo all of that simply by taking cross-sex hormones or even by taking puberty blockers because many of the organizational effects of testosterone you actually underwent in utero and in early childhood.
So it strikes me here that the reality is even worse than you're portraying it and you hint at it here.
I'm trying not to get out of control.
You cannot have both arguments.
You cannot pretend that the only impacts are activational and thereby say, well, if we change your hormone profile, we've changed you into the other sex.
And also say that it is important that people transition early, right?
That we cannot afford to delay transition because that will have permanent impacts on the people who don't get the treatments early.
So the point is, if it is true, and it is true, that blocking puberty has an important impact than it is because there are organizational effects which you then cannot pretend have been eliminated by some late-in-life treatment.
That's exactly right.
It's purely contradictory.
That's exactly right.
I think that's very important and just to reiterate also the point I made which is that the organizational effects of testosterone do not... the first time that they rear their heads is not in puberty.
Right.
That they begin in utero with basically beginning the process of the formulation of primary sex characteristics and also there's another surge of basically sex differentiation And I think it's toddlerhood, somewhere around like two to three years if I remember correctly, and I didn't go back and look exactly, so I may have that a little bit off.
And then there is a period of time in, you know, after toddlerhood but sort of early childhood through what we would think of as like elementary school and early middle school years, at least As far as schooling goes here in the US, where the sex steroid hormones aren't that active.
But it's not that they haven't already been so, and you cannot undo organizational effects.
Can you mitigate the activational effects of something by taking that something away?
For sure.
You can, in fact, possibly reverse it entirely.
But testosterone, estrogens, and many other hormones as well don't simply have activational effects.
So the argument falls apart.
This in a piece that claims that what it wants us to be doing is, again, to look at the sub-headline.
And you can show us again, Zach.
It's going to be a little while before I ask you to screenshot again.
is that he wants... I think this person... Paisley.
Yeah, Paisley.
I don't honestly know.
Paisley wants data and science, not politicians, to guide laws.
Well, Paisley, I've got bad news for you then, because you can cherry-pick all of the crap articles that you want, and you did so in this piece, and that does not change the fact that sex in animals is binary.
And in mammals, we do not change sex.
And this does not belie the evidence, the existence of intersex people, very occasionally, that's due to developmental anomalies, nor to very, very occasional trans people, who can, in order to get better alignment between their perceived sex and their actual sex, try to do everything they can to live as the sex that they are not.
But they will never be the sex that they are not.
Again, it's somewhat logically worse than this because, as you and I have pointed out many times, transness exists in many cultures.
It is real.
It is extremely rare.
But the fact that it exists, that it is apparently not the product of some sort of modern distortion of the world, means that obviating the activational effects isn't even necessary for trans people to Play their role and live out a transitioned life.
You mean the organizational effects?
Either, frankly, but I guess my point would be we have modern tools, right?
We can supplement your testosterone, for example, should you want that.
It is apparently not necessary to transness, what transness has been, right?
It is a modern opportunity that is apparently not fundamental here, right?
We cannot fully change the organizational effects.
We have some ability to mitigate the activational effect, but none of that is necessary, and certainly surgery even less so.
So, I think the problem is, like all dishonest political movements, Trans activists want the benefit of part of an argument, and they want to ignore the corollaries of it.
That's right.
And this is just simply not how logic works.
It doesn't belong in nature, for one thing.
Yeah, in the journal Nature.
Yeah.
Yeah, and of course, Nature, who presumably wrote the headline, not Paisley, Cara, Right.
is claiming that this is the argument that comes from science when it's exactly the opposite.
The claim is, don't do the politics, do the science, when what the trans activists are doing is the politics, not the science.
They're doing exactly the thing that they are screaming about.
The tone of this paper is not screaming.
I don't mean that Paisley is screaming, but there's certainly a lot of screaming in trans activist land.
And it is almost always claiming that other people are doing the very thing that they are doing.
So, for instance, there's a reference, there's scant references at all, or even scientifically backed claims in this worldview piece.
But one piece that is cited is a piece from 2019 called Gender Identity Non-Discrimination Laws and Public Accommodations, a Review of Evidence Regarding Safety and Privacy in Public Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Changing Rooms.
Well, that sounds impressive, doesn't it?
I'm not going to go into it here.
I made a bunch of snarky notes here about the Critiques of anti-LGBT policies are abounding.
that aren't backed up by even what they show in the paper.
But I will show this little bit of sleazy language since I can't show my screen here.
Quote from this paper from 2019, Hassan Bush et al.
Critiques of anti-LGBT policies are abounding.
Fogg Davis, 2017, for example, argues for the abolishment of using sex as a criterion for separating facilities.
Let me say that again.
Proudly, this paper is saying we are seeing an increase in critique of anti-LGBT policies.
Isn't that great?
What is their go-to example of an anti-LGBT policy?
Using sex as a criterion for separating facilities.
Sorry, no.
And this actually reminds me, and I don't know if we have a whole lot that we know to say about this, but there was a protest that happened in Vermont today by an alliance that identifies as an LGB alliance.
Including people who were at the original Stonewall riots, who have been long-term proponents of gay rights, and increasingly now women's rights and children's rights, who see the tacking on of the T and the Q and the pluses into this originally movement about gay rights as actually not simply taking space, but actually overturning many of the Yep.
of the gains that not just gays made, but also women have made and children as well.
Yep.
And again, I mean, it is a permanent state in this style of argument.
But again, the idea that in one sentence, the differences between the sexes are so important that one must be able to avail themselves of technological interventions to move from one sex to the other.
In the same breath as, and isn't it a crime that we use sex as a delineator for access to facilities?
The point is, either sex is important and therefore it makes sense that we would use it as a criterion for entering certain facilities, or it isn't important, in which case what's all this transitioning business?
What are you transitioning from and to?
Right?
Right.
Yeah, so... Yeah, no, the hypocrisy and incoherence is Skin deep.
Well, it's not even... It's something else.
It is a habitual desire to have part, but not all, of a logical argument.
Right?
It is a surgical separation of a logical argument from some of its logical consequences.
And that is evidence of bad faith.
I mean, it just simply is.
And this is also a corollary.
We have talked about the fact that you own the downsides of your own arguments.
And this is one of these things, which is if you're going to invoke sex in one sentence In order to justify intervention for transitions, you can't then decry its existence in the second.
Right.
It's one or the other.
You cannot.
There are many things we want to talk about today, and what I want to say next could well be understood to be a branch in the rabbit warren that I fell into in looking into this that may not be totally warranted, but I think we're going to go here.
So in Paisley's bio at Nature, It says, Paisley Carraw is a professor of political science and women's and gender studies.
Oh, it's actually changed.
This is interesting.
At Brooklyn College in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He is the author of Sex Is as Sex Does, Governing Transgender Identity.
So, since I first looked at this a few days ago, that bio has changed.
That bio used to proudly display that he is, quote, the founding co-editor of the journal TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly.
So what happens when you go to this journal?
Again, I can't show my screen.
Shortly, I will ask for the second screenshot, but not quite yet.
I will link to this in the show notes.
Maybe we can just slow down the snoring a little bit here.
It's not me, it's her.
Believe me, I know.
Wakeful snoring is not in your skill set.
No, I'm working on it.
You don't need to, we're good.
Transgender Studies Quarterly is Described as, here's just the first sentence in About the Journal.
Okay, so what do they publish?
Okay, so what do they publish? so what do they publish?
Well, one of their first pieces that they published in their very first issue is titled Trans Species, and it has the following quote.
Not yet.
More recently, Ernst Mayr's well-known 1942 biological definition of species as, quote, actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups, end quote, while contested helped solidify heterosexuality's starring role in species debates.
There are a lot of species concepts out there.
For those of us who have actually thought carefully about what a species is and isn't, and whether or not it is a necessary conceit or an actual thing, and reasonable people can disagree about the answers to these questions, and for those of us who have actually also considered many species concepts, including which ones work best for extinct species versus extinct species, asexual species versus sexually reproducing species, plants versus animals, all the things, okay?
Yes, Ernst Mayr, who...
In 1942, proposed what is the most commonly known and most commonly used species concept for those trying to figure out what species are in extant animal land, is about actually potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated.
has nothing to do with solidifying heterosexuality's starring role in species debates, because what it is is actually trying to get to a definition that is scientifically useful so that we can do phylogenetic analysis and understand who is more closely related to whom.
This movement of Yeah, I know, you're about to boil over here.
I'm going to sound like a teenage girl here, but I can't even.
I can't fucking even at this point.
And I haven't even gotten to the next one yet.
It's even worse than that.
This is the theme for today!
It's even worse than that.
Okay, the idea that what is being centered is heterosexuality in species definitions.
No, heterosexuality is central to reproduction.
That's what happened here, right?
The idea that there are species.
It doesn't matter where you fall out on trans activism, you don't have species without reproduction, which does require a certain amount of heterosexuality.
Some species are asexual, okay?
Some species are asexual, and some fungus have many, many mating types, etc., etc., etc.
Within animals.
Yes.
Within animals, which is to say for at least the last 500 million years, which is actually smaller than animals, within vertebrates, so probably for one to two billion years, we have been, we are put in a lineage that has binary sexes and reproduce by putting one of each together.
Okay.
With invertebrates, we can say for sure that that is uninterrupted in our lineage.
That there has never been a moment in our lineage since we've been vertebrates that we, our lineage, has opted for asexuality and then gone back.
Or more than two.
Never more than two in our lineage.
Nope.
Didn't happen.
Not a possibility.
Sorry.
I don't care if you think you're a fungus.
You're not.
Um, yeah.
So, all right.
This journal The Transgender Studies Quarterly, yes.
The Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Of which Paisley Carraw, who has a starring role in the journal Nature this week, is a founding co-editor.
Yes.
So this is a classic case of what years ago I called idea laundering.
Where you want to take an idea that is nonsense and you want to give it the veneer of legitimacy that comes from putting it through the trappings of scientific publication.
So there's obviously no standard of logic here.
These are just simply assertions that aren't true and don't make sense that are being dressed up as if they have been through some sober process of evaluation, which they haven't, clearly.
And what's worse, okay, it's one thing when that happens in trans... Gender Studies Quarterly, TSQ.
Transgender Studies Quarterly.
But this is the exact moment at which this goes from the fringe nonsense journal to the premier science journal nature.
Right.
And not only that.
It's worse than that, too, because the email that you received that gave you a little tour of important things taking place in nature this week... The email from nature, yes.
The email from nature juxtaposes it with an apology for having contributed in the past to illogical... Racist ramblings of people who should have known better, at least if they had been modern.
Right.
Undoubtedly, there is a lot of that in nature's history.
That is a fact, an embarrassing fact of science, and the fact that science is a self-correcting process is the only thing that rescues it.
And certainly we shouldn't be pretending it's not.
Right, but the point is to say we are really sorry for screwing up the science and allowing people's prejudices to fly under a scientific banner in our journal.
And then the next headline is that exactly.
And it's not as if this is victimless, right?
This is obviously trampling the rights of, as you point out, gay people and women.
Yes.
So.
And now children because children are being mutilated.
Permanently mutilated.
Right.
So the point is, what may be the low watermark in the last 7,500 years for the journal Nature with respect to its contributing to the discrimination against innocent people, it is simultaneously doing that and apologizing it
Apologizing for it in the past needlessly because we all understand that it has taken place and that, you know, history of science includes an awful lot of bad science and prejudice.
It's like nature is going like, we are so good at seeing what everyone has already pointed out.
And we are really bad at seeing what a lot of people are pointing out, but the ideologues won't let us say.
And to have those two things in counterpoint with one another in one of the world's two premier science journals tells us that science is in deep trouble.
Yes.
Deep trouble.
Look, this is a game of capture.
And something Nakedly Political has idea laundered in fringe journals and it has now captured a premier journal and in some sense apologizing for the past wrongs of that journal at the same time that it is championing new wrongs is the story, right?
Nature is captured and frankly we've been warning about this.
Do you remember the Shut down stem campaign.
Oh, yes.
Well, they've shut down stem that was right after George Floyd died and many of the cities in the Western world had gone into Protests that had gone violent that had become riots, right?
Yeah, so Clearly the thing that you need to do at that moment is shut down stem shut down stem and you know I don't think people understand, in general, how dependent they are on a yes, admittedly flawed, but functional scientific apparatus, functional governance apparatus, functional public health system.
And when these things get captured, Yes, it's all very fascinating, but worse than that, it's extremely dangerous, right?
How, for example, were there to be a global pandemic, would we navigate it if our science journals had been captured by trans activists?
Right?
That's where we are.
And that's, so I got one more thing on TSQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, but that's where we go next, in fact, a little bit.
I didn't read any complete articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly.
I couldn't do it.
But I did read a number of abstracts, and I skimmed a number of pieces.
I can't say I learned anything.
But here's another article that I ran into.
I'm going to have Zach put the abstract up on the screen.
It's called a research article.
Not quite yet.
It's called a research article.
It's from May 2017.
Every time the word trans is used it has an asterisk after it, but for ease of reading I'm going to elide the asterisk.
I don't know what that's supposed to signify.
The title of this piece is called, the title of this piece is, The Transness of Blackness, The Blackness of Transness.
And it's by someone named Marquis Bay, or maybe it's Marquis Bay, I don't have any idea.
Now you can put up the abstract and I will read it.
Can I point out something?
Yes.
They even put the asterisk in the middle of transness.
Oh yes.
Because that doesn't get its own.
Yes, trans, trans asterisk dashness.
Maybe it implies sacredness.
The essay thinks radically differently about the concepts of black and trans.
Trans and black thus denote poetic, paraontological forces that are only tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender.
That is to say, they are differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology.
Manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, Black and trans, though pointed at by bodies that identify as Black or trans, precede and provide the foundational condition for those fugitive, identificatory demarcations.
The author seeks to demonstrate the ways in which trans is black and black is trans.
In what ways and to what extent is there a blackness present within transness and vice versa?
What is the effect of these analytics?
This essay hopes to address these questions, but also leave them suspended in black trans liminality.
It's good.
It's good.
And it's like a dare.
It's so good.
They're daring you to point out that that is not...
It doesn't actually even mean anything.
It is, at best, bad poetry.
It's Fogon poetry, in fact.
It's Fogon poetry.
I know.
It makes me want to jump out of an airlock when I read this.
My favorite sentence, I think, in this is, Trans and Black are differently inflected names for an unoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology.
Well, I actually kind of agree with that.
I don't think it means anything, but I agree with its meaninglessness.
Oh my god.
So, the co-founding editor of this journal, of the journal in which this was published, and no, the co-founding editor of a journal is not responsible for everything that is published in it, whereas that line about the biological species concept was in the opening volume, the opening issue, so I do think that Paisley Currah can be held responsible for that.
Maybe he can't be responsible for this, but frankly, I would hold Paisley Currah responsible for the whole thing, because for what reason, nature, did you give this person with negative scientific credibility a giant platform in your esteemed, but not for very much longer, publication?
Alright, I am going to take up the contrary position here.
Okay.
All of the shame here belongs to nature.
I don't know what Paisley-Curah is, I don't know what Paisley-Curah is up to, but the entire purpose of a scientific journal is to figure out what is scientific and meritorious enough to broadcast, right?
To the extent that some person outside of that world wondered... I mean, effectively, this is the Sokal hoax.
Yeah, you can't blame Paisley for trying.
You can't blame Paisley for trying to gain access to one of the premier science journals on Earth.
And the fact is, Paisley, he, I guess, has done us a service by Revealing that that journal is non-compos mentis, right?
That is a legitimate service.
Not the service that Paisley was hoping to do, but okay.
I don't know.
Maybe Paisley's going to reveal Paisley's self to be a hoaxer who wanted to prove that the journal Nature had fallen apart.
But the point is, I don't think you can blame Paisley for this.
I think you blame Nature No, I also put the blame on the academics like Paisley who have been driving academia into the sea for many decades now.
And, you know, the fact that the bio reveals this person... I can't remember where I had it.
As a professor of political science and women's and gender studies, and has just written, Sex is as Sex Does, Governing Transgender Identity.
This person is a political activist masquerading as a scholar, and now masquerading as someone who knows something about science.
And I absolutely 100% blame Paisley Carraw, but as for why we are being exposed to Paisley Carraw's ideas, this could have been beneath the radar for longer if nature hadn't decided to widely publicize this insane anti-scientific rhetoric that is masquerading as science.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I do think this is actually an interesting question.
You have universities that will not defend their faculty against activists who are actively anti-science.
Yeah, there's something out of University of Maine this week, I think?
Some professor insists that there are two sexes, and one person in the class went along with it, and everyone else had a fit and is now demanding that the professor resign, apologize, etc.
And there's some choice quote from someone saying that this is terrible, and she's traumatized, and oh, by the way, she wants to be a high school science teacher, I think.
I think I have that right.
I think where I come out on this is you have to have standards to run an institution.
If your institution surrenders its standards, you know, it's a little bit like leaving the yogurt Open on the counter for a week, right?
I don't think it's the funniest.
That's what's happened to the universities.
That's what's happened to the universities.
They have become rotten because they have not refrigerated the perishables.
Paisley Cara is not akin to a fungus here, because the fungus pre-exists the leaving the yogurt open on the counter and is looking for the niche.
But the niche already does exist, it just may not exist in that abundance.
But this leaving the yogurt open on the counter thing with universities has helped create the Paisley Caras of the world.
Of course.
So it's not I don't think quite an apt analogy.
I think actually the analogy works very well, because of course the yogurt that you left out on the counter, Heather, that's spoiled, created fungus, which put out spores, which made the next yogurt spoil.
Wait, did you just say the yogurt created fungus?
Well, the yogurt provides a resource on which the fungus grows, which makes the presence of fungal spores that much more common, which is very much like the universities.
But the fungus separately exists.
And I would argue, you know, there's a reason that while trans people have existed in tiny numbers in some cultures across time, there was a reason that we now see this thing and people, you know, cosplaying as the opposite sex and Making just a mess of so much of science and law and university and such.
And it is not because they existed all the time and they were just looking for the right niche.
That niche, that university niche, helped to create them.
I agree.
But, and you know, of course, we're not really talking about trans people.
We're talking about trans activists who have taken over the universities.
And the point is, yes, there's something a little bit different than the biological case in the sense that the fungi that attack the yogurt are very long-standing in some sense, but there's nothing unique about the idea that the yogurt provides a different environment than whatever it is the fungus rode into the house on, and that it will adapt to the fungus.
If you keep leaving yogurt out, it will become very well adapted to gaining access and exploiting yogurt.
And that is what happened to the university.
The university did not guard itself against terrible, anti-scientific, anti-enlightenment ideas.
Those ideas flourished and experimented there, and they have now proliferated out into society where they're looking for all kinds of things beyond yogurt that they can spoil.
I mean, I just think it's almost, it's almost, it's a perfect analogy, in my opinion.
And the point really is, just as I don't blame a mosquito for sucking my blood, right?
I might blame somebody for leaving the door open, if that's how it got into the house or something.
But I don't blame the mosquito.
The mosquito is simply doing what mosquitoes do.
People gaming systems is what people do.
And it is the obligation of the people who are stewarding those systems to protect them from this nonsense.
Yes, but unlike a mosquito which cannot receive education and be taught to eat something else... How do you know?
A human being who truly believes that they are preaching science when they are preaching anti-science and actually doing damage to not just a lot of people, but a lot of functional systems, is at base a human being who can unlearn the garbage that was facilitated by the university system.
Okay, I agree with you.
I'm not, look, my expectation is this person who has gamed this system, probably their intent on, they are at least deaf to the damage that is done by what they're up to, right?
They're putting us all in danger by doing this.
But I guess what I'm really getting at is, If you have a government, you should absolutely expect people to try to corrupt it.
To the extent that you just assume that away and you leave it vulnerable to corruption, it will be corrupted.
And I don't necessarily expect the people buying influence Uh, to, you know, rein themselves in.
Never!
That's not how it works.
You leave yogurt on the counter, it's going to spoil.
You leave your government open to being corrupted, it will be bought and purchased by people who, you know, see the opportunity early.
Right?
If you have a university that is supposed to be studying truth and you leave it open to threats from powerful political groups, they will take over the truth apparatus.
You have a journal that is supposed to limit itself to only high-quality ideas in circulation and, you know, you haven't provided a mechanism whereby it will turn down political fads, then it will be taken over by political fads.
I guess the point is, these are entities filling niches.
And I think the point is, the game is always won or lost based on whether or not you left the niche open.
If the niche is left open, expect it to be inhabited.
It may be inhabited by this person or that person.
It may be inhabited by this fungus or that fungus.
But the real story is, you left the niche open, not something inhabited that niche.
I think they're both a story.
How do we change this and how do we create systems that ensure that they don't get gamed?
What you're talking about is the only place to focus.
We don't focus on the perpetrators, the people who are making Bank, whatever that might mean, on gaming the current system.
That doesn't mean that they don't have agency and don't have consciousness and couldn't actually be better human beings if they were trying.
Yeah, okay.
I think we've now arrived at it.
The real point is there's only one game in town from the point of view of preventing this sort of thing.
However, it doesn't relieve anyone of responsibility for being bad and externalizing harm on others or exploiting.
Illegitimate niches.
Yeah.
Okay, I got a couple more things.
Let me do one of them, and then maybe you go, and then we'll see if we have time for my final thing.
This week, the Washington... so I don't have any screenshots for you on this one, unfortunately, Zach.
I will link to everything here, but I can't show you.
This week the Washington Post published an article headlined, Women said coronavirus shots affect periods.
New study shows they're right.
Sub-headline, a coronavirus vaccination can change the timing of when you get your period.
According to research, for most people the effect was temporary.
My first reaction to this was, and I apologize, some of you don't like it when I swear and some of you like it a lot when I swear, but you don't fucking say WAPO.
Like, yes.
We know.
And yes, there are a lot of us who were yelled at and told that we were anti-vaxxers and far worse for suggesting that people were actually experiencing real effects from an experimental treatment.
So, yeah.
Good on ya!
You're a little bit late.
You're actually a lot bit late.
So there's a news release on the study from NIH, which goes into a little bit more detail, and then of course there's the original research, which I'm going to read you a few things from.
It's an Edelman et al.
paper in BMJ Medicine called Association Between Menstrual Cycle Length and COVID-19 Vaccination, Global Retrospective Cohort Study of Prospectively Collected Data.
So I guess let's do it this way.
No, I need a pen.
This one doesn't work.
Yeah, let's do it this way.
I'm going to read you a couple paragraphs from the WAPO piece, the Washington Post piece.
Alison Edelman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health and Science University, based in our former hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Allison Edelman, who led the study, said that for most people the effects were temporary, lasting for one cycle before returning to normal.
She said there were no indications that the period side effects had any impact on fertility.
Now we can give people information about possibly what to expect with menstrual cycles, Edelman said.
So I hope that's overall really reassuring to individuals.
Well, no, actually it's not.
And here's part of why.
The study, this is literally from the abstract of the study, analyzed data on, quote, at least three consecutive cycles before vaccination and at least one cycle after.
One.
One cycle after vaccination.
And they looked at a lot of people, you know, they studied a lot of women.
Sorry, it was all women.
But The idea that you can tell anything about long-term effects or impact on fertility on the basis of a study that looked at at least, but actually usually exactly, three cycles before and one cycle after vaccination On what basis is she making these claims?
And those claims that she's making as the lead author on this study are now going to be the ones that are repeated and now going to be the basis for the, you know, PolitiFact and the fact-checker organizations who come after people like us who say, actually, no, that research can't say anything about long-term effects or effects on fertility.
It simply can't.
Did you read the study?
And the fact is that the fact-checkers at these places, art scientists, they have no ability and apparently interest in actually reading the research in which they're supposedly fact-checking.
And here we have the lead author on the paper making egregiously misleading and frankly just flat-out wrong statements to Washington Post, which of course is going to be the thing that people see.
That quote, the idea that upon discovering that indeed these effects that many of us have talked about are real, that the proper response to that is for people to be reassured Rather than for the safety apparatus to become alarmed and say, well, all right, given that these effects are real and they shouldn't be happening because these things aren't supposed to be showing up in your reproductive apparatus at all.
Right?
That there's any signal at all here is a story.
Right.
It is a story, and the right response is, how does that change the cost-benefit analysis for any individual who might be taking these things?
The answer is not, oh, well in our study it turned out to be short-term, because that's all we studied, right?
And therefore people should be reassured.
I hope this will cause people to be reassured.
Do you?
What are you?
Are you a scientist?
Or are you, in fact, someone who's just trying to change people's minds?
Right.
The point is, this is the sound of the scientific apparatus being used to rationalize irrational and dangerous behavior.
Right?
You've got a safety signal here, and the response is, The safety signal is no worse than could be found in our short-term study.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There is no long-term aspect of the study published here, and so the point is they're saying, well, there's no evidence of a long-term effect.
Well, it wasn't a long-term study.
Here we have, actually in the paper, conclusions.
Conclusions as written into the abstract.
"COVID-19 vaccination is associated with a small and likely to be temporary change in menstrual cycle length but no change in menses length." "Likely to be on the basis of nothing in the paper." That has no place in this paper at all, in the abstract, in the conclusions, anywhere.
Where did that likely to be come from?
Because they want it to be.
That is hope.
Pretending to be science.
And that hope then lives in apparently the lead author's head, sufficient that she says to the Washington Post when they come to her, she repeats the hope as if it is the science.
Guess what?
Hope isn't the same as science.
This is not how science works.
So either this is a case of pharmaceutical idea laundering, right?
Where they take a pharmaceutical talking point and they launder it through a scientific process so that it appears to be scientific in some way.
Or this person actually believes they've engaged in science themselves and it is a case of some kind of brain laundering.
Right?
That their mind... I don't see any reason.
The paper, the research that was done...
If you ignore the editorializing in the text of the paper itself, and certainly the editorializing that is happening extra paper, like outside of the paper, the actual design of the experiment seems to be fine.
The science, insofar as it said something narrow and true, seems fine.
So I don't think we want to say, oh, was she even doing science?
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't agree with that because it'd be one thing if the people who did the study had done the study legitimately and then someone else scientific was commenting on it with this sort of absurd conclusion.
But if it's in the paper itself, right, then the point is the paper is a scientific process.
The scientific method may be narrowly applied to the experiment that was done, but the extrapolating only so far as the evidence allows you to Right, but I didn't say this paper is a good example of scientific research.
I said, I think that from what I can see, the actual research that was done, although it is not accurately portrayed in this paper, was potentially good.
That is what I said.
Well, I don't see it that way because Because the degree of extrapolation is inherent to the scientific process, and so if that part is badly done... So that leaves you suspect as to what else happened that isn't visible in what we can see?
No, I would just say, first of all, if you were to go back through every Terrible, wrong paper, and say, well, the work itself, was this a valid experiment?
You would find many valid experiments that just didn't establish the thing that the paper claimed they had established.
So, I'm saying, to the extent that you have presented a piece of work, and the piece of work is Here's the data we collected, and here's what it implies based on the fact that we had or did not have a pre-existing hypothesis, and these are the things that showed up, etc.
Right?
The point is, you either did that job right or you didn't.
And to the extent that you ran an experiment that might be valid embedded in some paper, but not the paper you wrote, that's a pretty thin defense.
Okay.
One more thing on this.
Sure.
Back to the Washington Post piece.
Later in the same article, I'll just read these two short paragraphs.
Other research has suggested that the vaccines, again it's the COVID vaccines, have a variety of effects on periods.
A survey published last fall collected information about periods and vaccines from 160,000 people, including transgender and post-menopausal people, and found that thousands reported heavier bleeding than usual or breakthrough bleeding.
While these observations aren't necessarily medically alarming, Catherine Lee, an assistant professor at Tulane University who led the survey, said the information is important to help trans men plan for additional support if menstruating causes gender dysphoria, and also to help people make decisions about stocking up on tampons and pads.
So the first mainstream media acknowledgement that all those women who were saying that their periods were affected by the COVID vaccines and who are now worried about fertility issues and such, and frankly no one has done anything to allay those concerns, the first mainstream media article to talk about this at all, somehow manages to talk about trans men?
What is going on here?
How are we constantly coming back to a fringe activist population when there is actually half of the world who is at risk from these experimental treatments and here we are being concerned about gender dysphoria and trans men?
What is going on?
It's worse than that because It's got to be the title of this episode.
It's worse than that.
They have created the entire problem.
If you simply didn't fuck up the definition of women, then those women who happen to be trans men would be covered by this without having to specifically say anything, right?
The point is, There is something called a woman, right?
It has a biological definition that isn't difficult.
It allows you to extrapolate from a paper without a problem, and the only reason that there is any argument for breaking out trans men as victims of this is that you scuttled that definition for your own political purposes.
It's frankly insane.
And maybe that's the point.
It's more sophisticated.
It's insane, and this is more, again, of... There are a lot of sex-specific effects of COVID and the vaccines.
Right?
We know this.
The myo- and pericarditis that has been finally begun to be acknowledged that is more of a risk for young people is specifically more of a risk for young men, for adolescent boys and young men.
And early on we were hearing, and I actually just haven't seen the stats recently, but I assume it's still true that all else being equal, COVID is more likely to go bad for you if you're male than if you're female, controlling for all of the other demographic truths about yourself.
And so here we have one of the places, and of course there are all those insane papers, insane articles early on about how even though men were dying more, COVID was harder on women.
I do remember that.
Wow, you're really, really working hard there.
Well, dying is only hard on you at first.
At the point you've done it, it becomes, it's all downhill.
Yeah, now they're lazy again, right?
Those men not doing their work, not doing their fair share of cleanup after they die.
But now we have fertility effects, and you know, I don't know, there may be fertility effects for men too.
I haven't, we haven't been hearing about those so much.
But there have been lots, there has been lots of talk about menstrual effects, which of course has the potential to be a fertility effect in women.
And here we have some research that may or may not actually be, you know, bold enough to have actually seen this.
And the Washington Post can't even Talk about women for one article.
It has to go into trans activism, sophistry, ideology.
We're not allowed to just talk about fertility effects for women.
Even though that would fully include trans men.
You didn't need to do a damn thing.
They were fully included in that discussion if you just simply didn't do a thing.
But no.
It has to be the focus.
It has to be the focus.
All right.
Maybe I should take a break.
All right.
You calm down a little bit.
Yeah.
I noticed this week that apparently, and I admit I don't know exactly who's eligible yet, but amongst people who are eligible for these new bivalent boosters The Pfizer's new, yep.
Yeah, uptake has been extremely low.
And my feeling is, you know, whether you love Pfizer or hate Pfizer, I think we can all agree that no one has done more to help COVID than the people at Pfizer.
So I wanted to return the favor and suggest that actually what they've got is a marketing problem.
I'm not looking, I'm not going to charge them for this service, but I thought I would give them a little advice on how to redirect their marketing campaign for these bivalent boosters so that they would get more uptake.
Awesome, so you're going into marketing.
You're going to pro bono marketing.
It's not the career move I was expecting.
They're not seeing the big picture.
They're Nazi-ing the big picture.
That's how I heard that.
Nazi-ing?
No.
That was an unintentional, if poignant, pun.
But in any case, my thought was this.
So far, they have marketed these So-called vaccines on the basis that it has some yes waving your arms and obscuring lots of facts about Transmission and contraction of the disease which it doesn't really prevent all that but they've sold them on the basis that something something something Positive for your health or something along that lines.
Oh and save grandma and be a good citizen Yeah, all those sorts of things and it's not working.
So I think they've just got it wrong, and what they should be doing in light of the, let's say, unprecedented safety signal that has shown up in the VAERS system and the military database, they should be marketing these things as inoculations for daredevils and thrill seekers, right?
I just think it would be more successful, right?
A, it's more honest, right?
You know, the question is kind of a gamble, and that if they were upfront about that, it might be that people, you know, started lining up for these things.
And I wanted to suggest... Hang on tight!
We're gonna take you on a ride!
Yeah, that's a little wordy.
It's a little... I was thinking something more like, let us hold your beer.
Oh!
Right?
Right?
Or... How about this one?
What are ya, chicken?
And you could even, with that one, you could have noises, right?
Sort of goading people into demonstrating their bravado.
You know, make a page out of Red Bull's playbook.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Right?
Also, it occurred to me that, you know, they could just go straight at it.
Schmyocarditis, right?
The daredevil just scoffs at my myocarditis.
They don't fear it.
Yeah, I don't think that one works as well, because that sounds like you don't believe it exists, rather than, I'm not afraid of a little myocarditis.
No, I think properly used, myocarditis suggests you think it's unimportant, whether you think it's not for real, right?
So, anyway.
What do you think?
A daredevil ad campaign for thrill-seekers in the game?
I don't know that you should have done that pro bono.
I mean, I think this is the way to go.
Before your next adventure, do a pre-adventure.
Do a pre-adventure, yeah.
All right, well, that was more or less the idea.
That's it.
That's it.
I like it.
That's great.
That's great.
Okay.
Let's see.
I find myself a little bit thrown by not being able to show my screen.
Here we go.
Okay, one more story.
Phil Harper, who's awesome, you've met him.
I have met him.
He's got a substack, The Digger, which I highly recommend I will put in the show notes.
He pointed to a talk, but somehow I can't now find the talk, so I'm going to just point to his substack generally.
So just hat tip to Phil Harper here, because I wouldn't have known about this talk but for him.
Unless I dreamt the whole thing, in which case I don't know how I come into finding this talk.
But there's a talk given at Oxford in March 2022 in which a Dr. Dame June Rain, who is speaking on behalf of the regulatory agency in Great Britain known as the MHRA, that's the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the tagline for which is Regulating Medicines and Medical Devices.
So this basically, if you're American, this sounds like the FDA, the analog to the FDA.
She gives a talk about the MHRA, about the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which remarkably she calls, from watchdog to enabler, regulation in COVID and after.
So I've got five screenshots from the talk.
I'll link to the talk in the show notes as well.
Associated with this screenshot, with her introducing her talk here, she says, I'm going to talk about how the COVID pandemic has catalyzed the transformation of a regulator from a watchdog to an enabler.
And I was telling you about this, Brett, but you were like, enabler of what?
of Pfizer, of the pharmaceutical companies.
She's mostly talking about the Pfizer shots in this talk, but she also goes into talking about AstraZeneca a little bit, but almost entirely she is talking about being proud to have moved a regulatory agency from understanding its role as that of watchdog To that of being an enabler of the developers of the treatments that are being brought to them in this case, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It's a classic case of saying the quiet part out loud.
It's unbelievable.
It's a jaw-dropping admission.
I recommend this.
It's, you know, it's 25 minutes or so, and you can skim parts of it.
It's, you know, sort of standard academic conference-y stuff.
The next, and just a few screenshots here.
Next screenshot, Zach.
Here we have on the screen a couple of little speech bubbles, and What she says associated with this is, so I was dashing into number 10 for a meeting in the cabinet office, right?
So she's, you know, she's important enough to be, that's number 10 Downing Street, of course.
That's like saying, so I was dashing into the White House for a meeting at the cabinet office, if she was American.
And in that meeting, in that meeting at number 10 in the cabinet office, she is asked, as it shows on screen, by someone, I didn't catch the name, will the MHRA stop us from killing people?
And she immediately responded, no, the MHRA will help you keep people alive.
And this is how she understands her role changing as a person who's helping lead a regulatory agency through an emergency, is no, I'm not going to put the brakes on.
I'm going to speed things up.
So again, proud enough of this to have it on screen.
Okay, next screenshot.
This is not all that informative.
This has the tagline for MHRA, but what accompanies her saying this, what accompanies her showing these agencies that are collaborating now under her watchful guidance is, quote, we collaborated across these boundaries as never before.
And she does say she knows we need to remain independent.
That's really important.
But then she says enthusiastically that, quote, we tore up the rulebook.
During COVID, we, the regulatory agency of Great Britain, tore up the rulebook.
Okay, next screenshot.
So this shows the MHRA having facilitated, having allowed pharma to change the timing of clinical trials, whereas it used to be phase 1, phase 2, phase 3.
Phase 1 had to actually be done before you went into phase 2, and phase 2 had to be done before you went into phase 3.
She is proud of the fact that during COVID, under MHRA, they changed the guidelines so that now pharmaceutical companies could modify the timing of the clinical trial such that you could have the phases overlapping one another.
And she says, quote, of the vaccines which had begun to be manufactured well before even the first phase was done, first phase of the clinical trial was done, quote, large-scale manufacture was prepared at risk.
We did not know if any of these vaccines would be effective, end quote.
But surely, surely everyone, even this audience, this small audience where she's giving this talk at Oxford in March of 2022, can see that at the point that the government has purchased in advance the large-scale manufacture of a whole bunch of vaccines, and they don't actually have the safety data yet, that it's going to be that much harder to say, actually no, all of those have to go into the trash.
I hate to say it, It's worse than that.
It is.
Because if you listen to this knowing what has taken place during this process, right?
If you know what we know now about what took place in the drug trials, for example.
There was never any risk that these vaccines were not going to be safe and effective.
Right?
In which case, why not do this?
Right?
Like, why not just overlap phase one, phase two, phase three?
That's just the thing.
This is pro forma.
The idea is what we now have is a safety system incapable of recognizing a safety signal that is really just a laundering, a safety and effectiveness laundering apparatus for, that is, effectively a branch of pharma.
And if that sounds hyperbolic, I know in the US that a tremendous percentage of the money that flows through the regulatory apparatus is actually pharma money, right?
That the system has been built to fail, where the controls have been handed to pharma, the financial controls, the power of the purse, effectively.
And what this sounds like to me, If you're pharma, then you ought to live in fear that the regulatory apparatus is going to be uncompelled that your product is safe and or effective.
That's what they're there for.
And really, if you're pharma, you ought not live in fear because you ought to know the regulatory apparatus is there and therefore you ought to do your damn job and produce a safe and effective product to begin with.
Right, but of course the fiduciary responsibility of the corporation is clear and the fact is it was very expedient from the point of view of taking care of their shareholders to capture the apparatus so there was never any risk, right?
At a business level that makes sense.
It's criminal, but at a business level it makes sense and so if you were to do that, There is a governmental regulatory apparatus.
Its purpose is to prevent dangerous and or ineffective treatments from making it to market.
Pharma can't tolerate that because Business is difficult.
So it captures that apparatus.
The zombies inside of that apparatus still exist.
They still have to give speeches about their role in the process.
They have to occasionally wag their finger at pharma in order that they still look like a regulatory apparatus.
But basically what will they sound like to themselves?
They will sound like they think it is clever that they tore up the rule book.
Right?
They will be proud of the fact that their watchdog role has been transformed into enabler, which surely is not the term she was looking for.
Facilitator would have been... It's literally in the title of the talk.
Right.
So the point is, to the extent that people talk behind closed doors and they say things that they wouldn't and shouldn't in public, This is one of these cases where enabler sounds like internal language.
It sounds like, frankly, formal language, right?
Right.
Actually, we're going to get the regulatory apparatus to function as an enabler of this process.
Well, maybe she's the Rochelle Walensky of Britain.
That is exactly what I'm getting.
Let's put it this way.
What Pharma did is despicable, but it makes sense, right?
What these people do is despicable, but it makes sense, right?
These are careers that are being made.
How is your career being made?
Is it being made by being a good watchdog?
No, that'll get you tossed out on your ear, right?
It's being made by transitioning your role from watchdog to enabler, right?
That's how you rise.
And so the point is, we are hearing This weird mixture of the internal dialogue and the public presentation of, you know, the victory lap.
And it's like, well, A, what are you taking a victory lap about?
It's not like you distributed a product that worked.
Right.
It didn't.
And what's more, it was hugely dangerous.
So why, you know, why are you championing the change in the process that you shepherded?
But nonetheless, we get to hear it and it does sound like, um, It sounds like what you would imagine a captured regulatory industry apparatus is like on the inside.
Yeah.
Right?
As it rationalizes to itself its failure.
Totally.
And actually the last screenshot, which isn't a giant deal, but I'll show it, Zach, proudly discusses the agency's regulatory flexibilities.
And, you know, that like enabler strikes me as a word that they really ought had and not publicized.
They are, as you say, saying the quiet part out loud here.
And yet, you know, as easy as they're making it, for those of us who are paying attention, still, still we are the ones who are considered to be purveyors of mis-dis-mel and all the other bad types of information.
Yes, which of course have been declared terrorism.
Yes, I don't know if they have them in Great Britain or not.
Well, I mean, Great Britain is one of the Five Eyes.
No doubt terrorism here is terrorism there.
That's probably true.
Yeah, so that happened back in March 2022, and it's shocking, frankly.
I'm no less shocked than if Than if the FDA, I don't even know who the lead on the FDA is, but some equivalent person at the FDA to this woman at the FDA's analog in Great Britain, had said these things.
We are proudly moving.
We're excited.
We're excited to have thrown away the rule book.
To have moved from watchdog capacity to enabler.
To be engaging in regulatory flexibilities.
And anyone is confused as to the lack of oversight and the fact that we don't actually... Lots and lots of people, ever more every day, are saying, I don't actually trust you guys to make decisions on my behalf.
No.
No.
Not you.
Not now.
Yeah.
One of the truly evil aspects of this is that many of us were calling attention to the evidence of what was going on as it happened.
And the evidence was of course less than it is now.
Right.
But that was a very risky thing to do.
Right.
And we can now see that, you know, what should be a Alarm bell going off at the acknowledgement that in fact there are reproductive consequences to these products and that that ought to cause a rethink.
Probably temporary.
Probably temporary, right, but the point is what you can see for sure now with the amount of evidence that is currently available even just to the general public, what you can see is that the system is completely indifferent to the risk it's putting citizens at.
Completely indifferent.
It is not changing its tune about whether or not you should be inoculated with this stuff based on the alarming evidence of the safety signal, based on the evidence of the ineffectiveness of the shots at preventing you from contracting or transmitting the disease.
It has yet to do any attempt at risk stratification analysis.
No evidence of risk stratification, which tells you right there that this process has nothing to do with health because the cost-benefit analysis is obviously risk stratified.
Which is just to say, again, like risk stratification by age, and this is something we've talked about before and many, many doctors have as well, we have known from the beginning that this virus is much more likely to bring you to your knees the older you are.
Also, the more comorbidities, but the risk stratification by age, means that, given that the virus is very unlikely to do you harm if you are a healthy young person, and also, separately, the vaccines seem to be more likely to do you harm the younger you are, Risk stratification analysis would suggest that there should be different guidelines for, at the very least, different guidelines for whether or not you're expected to take this thing.
Steeply different.
Steeply different, and yet, what, most of the elite universities in the United States are now requiring not just vaccines but boosters for their students, for their presumably young, healthy student populations?
Are you trying to kill them?
What is going on?
Right, it's insane.
You should have, let's put it this way, the Date.
If there is an argument for these so-called vaccines at all, there should be an age at which the cost-benefit analysis flips enough in their favor that we recommend it.
And that age should be in motion with the more evidence that we have.
And the fact that that age doesn't exist at all, we're just like, oh, they're good.
Get them.
Right?
Six months old?
Get them.
Pregnant?
Get it.
Right.
That is a Manufacturer's view of a product.
Is this product for you?
Definitely.
Yes.
Right?
There is no... It's not a question, well, who are you?
Let's figure out whether this product is for you.
You can see that.
Are you human?
We got a thing for you.
As long as you can see that that is what's going on, that the thing is not interested in who you are, even though The evidence suggests that that should be the primary question in deciding whether or not to recommend it, and that it isn't just the manufacturers who are so indifferent to your well-being.
It's the thing that is supposed to be protecting you.
Once you've seen that, then the real question is, well, was that true from the start?
What about all that shit you told me that turned out it wasn't right?
Did you know it wasn't right?
Right.
Right?
That's really the question.
I do hope we ultimately, I doubt we will ever get a full reckoning, but we have to try because to the extent that the system That allowed this to happen is completely captured, and we are dependent on its functioning not just this time, but next time.
It won't be better next time unless we figure out what got into it.
That's right.
Now, one of the recurring themes in that video that I showed you screenshots of from Oxford in March of 2022 is the rejoicing that during the next pandemic, and there will be a next one, she proclaims, and it's true.
They've already got all these changes in place, so it'll be easier next time.
Easier?
It'll be easier next time to be the enabler, and no worries about them being a watchdog.
I inhaled some dust.
I think it might be time for us to get off.
Alright.
Oh, dammit.
You do have water over there.
It's not helping.
I was drinking it.
Alright.
Well?
Oh my god.
You all right?
Yeah.
You should talk.
I'm trying to figure out how to address the conclusion of the podcast.
Okay.
You're back.
Okay.
You're back.
Hi.
All right.
Oh, dust.
It's still there.
Okay, let's finish this up.
Yep.
And we will be back for Q&A in Whenever I stop coughing.
Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
That's right.
All right.
You can ask questions at DarkHorseSubmissions.com.
You can email logistical questions to DarkHorseModerator at gmail.com.
If this happens again, I'm just going to start singing.
Please do.
Something.
Don't just look at me while we're stuck to one camera here.
Oh my god.
Okay, so join our Patreons.
Brett, you have another conversation tomorrow, right?
Yes, I do.
For one of your Patreon groups.
Those are always good.
If you want to read a little bit more about objection to vaccine mandates and why they are out of control, go to my sub stack, Natural Selections.
That's what I wrote about this week.
And we'll be talking about that more on Dark Horse soon as well, I think.
And until next time, we'll be back here same time next week.
Until then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
