Rescue the Republic: The 244th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 244th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss excess deaths from 2021 on, and what the insurance industry is recommending that we do (more of the same treatments that got us into this mess!). Related: Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health during Covid, asks why “facing a common enemy” didn’t bring us togeth...
Hey folks, welcome to the 244th Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is still summer.
Yes, it is.
Yes, barely.
Yes, it is barely.
Actually, we are going to finish today with a read of a piece that I wrote last year for County Highway, but is just as relevant this year because it's about the equinox, which is not quite upon us, but is almost upon us.
It is hurtling towards us.
There's very little that can be done to prevent it at this point.
Is it hurtling towards us or are we hurtling towards it?
We are hurtling.
We are all hurtling together.
The Econox hurtling through space with us in a way that... Alright, I'm just going to back out of that whole argument.
But anyway, it's coming.
Not much to be done.
Yeah, so enjoy these last few days of summer.
We're going to talk a little bit today about some of what the press has been putting out there this week, about excess mortality, who scientists endorse for president.
Let's see, how awful, awful everything was back during the pandemic, you remember, right?
And how all the good-hearted people were together.
And we're going to talk a bit about rescuing the Republic and what it means to be in the West and what our priorities are.
Yes, absolutely.
We're going to make a case that you have not heard yet.
Excellent.
All right, so this is going to be our last live stream until after the Rescue the Republic rally in D.C.
on the Mall on September 29th.
We encourage you to join us there.
We'll be back for our next live stream after this on October 2nd, a Wednesday, at which point the summer will be over by then.
Yes, let me just say, Rescue the Republic If you can go, great.
If you can't go, we could use financial help.
So find the link to donate on the jointheresistance.org website.
And anyway, looking forward to seeing many, many people there.
Jordan Peterson is going to be joining us, so the lineup just keeps getting better.
Indeed.
All right.
Join us on Locals.
That's where the watch party is.
We've done a couple of Q&As.
Gosh, which one?
I think this last Q&A that we did on Sunday was particularly good.
And so those are all available indefinitely.
And if you're there in real time, you can engage with the chat, as we do.
So please join us there.
For now, we start, as always, at the top of the hour with our three sponsors.
And then the rest of the episode is ad.
Free.
Three, I was going to say.
Add three.
Add three.
Yeah, take three.
Anison three.
That's all I remember from my childhood.
That's all you remember from your childhood?
I don't want to talk about that.
All right.
Yeah.
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I should try unitasking because I've had rather a lot of difficulty with monotasking.
So maybe unitasking is the solution.
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Yeah, you think your problem is the prefix?
Let's put it this way.
We ought to check that off the list.
No, we don't.
You can go ahead and work on checking that off the list.
Try to do it and not only that.
Do that and only that.
Yeah, I think that is something I should focus on exclusively just to get that one off the list if possible.
It may be that one of your product barriers to productivity is that part of your brain is always looking for the pun.
Yep.
Guilty is charged, and I'm not sure what to do about that part of my brain.
It seems to be wired to everything else, so, you know, I'm loathe to unhook it.
The brain is wired to everything else in the brain.
That part, that module, seems to be wired to everything else, yes.
It does.
Yes, which is particularly annoying in an emergency, as you know better than anyone.
I do.
Yeah.
Actually, no.
In an emergency, it unhooks.
You're right there.
I am right there.
In an actual emergency, you are on it.
Don't want anyone else, and nor should anyone else want anyone else but you in an emergency.
I appreciate you saying that.
Sometimes there are pauses during an emergency during which punning is permissible, and so it is running there in the background.
And you know what else is permissible at that point?
You being punched.
Well, all right.
Point taken.
Punning during an emergency.
Yeah, in fact, once all this clears up, I may write a...
A monograph on incurring an emergency.
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So we haven't seen it yet, but it looks great and it's it like the equinox is hurtling towards us.
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Catching cast iron, enamel cast iron, might be a little dicey, but Caraway has this brand new line of enamel cast iron just dropped today.
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Awesome.
All right.
Um, shall we start?
Heather reading my notes, which he's laughing, which means that in this case, unlike many cases, she can actually read my notes.
Monostatism?
Monotasking.
Oh.
Yeah.
Oh, without the G.
monotascin.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like, fine.
Excellent.
Do, do add that G.
Hey, that looks like a G or nine.
All right.
So let us talk for a moment about this interesting, um, report.
I realize I've, I don't know which thing I, I thought we had an idea about where to start, but I don't know where you're starting.
You start where you, where you want to start.
No, no.
I just don't know which, what you're alluding to.
I was alluding to the insurance.
Oh.
Industry report on, um, all cause mortality over the last several years.
A report that initially seems like a breath of fresh air.
I think I forgot to send it to Jen.
You don't happen to have it, do you?
I have it.
You do?
Yeah, but I did not think this is what we were starting, so I need to reorder some things here.
So, the report reports... the report discusses a... Yeah, I don't... is this... I don't... I guess it is.
Okay, so you can show my screen now.
Here it is.
It's a PDF.
I will link the URL in the show notes.
This is in the magazine, Insurance Business, reporting on the report.
Right, reporting on the report.
Excess mortality may stay high for a decade.
Swiss Re... I don't know how to pronounce that.
It's an insurance company.
Warnes.
Yep.
Now, at first, this sounds like it may be yet one more contribution to us sorting out what took place over the course of the pandemic and what its true effect may have been.
But this is a very odd report.
So I did not go and look at the report.
All I know is what this report on the report says.
Let's read several paragraphs in.
Let's just start at the beginning and read several paragraphs in.
Really?
Yeah.
Four years after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries continue to report elevated all-cause excess mortality rates compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from Swiss Re Institute.
I just want to say again, though, that I think you also have not read the actual report.
So we are relying on the reporting on a report, which is not what I would usually be doing at all.
The report titled, The Future of Excess Mortality After COVID-19, warns that without intervention, excess mortality could remain up to 3% higher than pre-pandemic levels in the United States and 2.5% in the United Kingdom by 2033.
Paul Murray, pictured above, CEO of Life and Health Reinsurance at Swiss Re, highlighted that COVID-19 continues to have a significant impact on mortality rates, In 2023, the United States reported an average of 1,500 weekly COVID-19 deaths, a figure comparable to fatalities from fentanyl or firearms.
So that warrants just a side note right there that a number of the things we want to talk about today point to the active Revisioning of history that is happening right now in the media.
It was, for a while, easy to say and have recognition immediately that death from versus death with COVID was a conflation that was actively happening.
I mean, again, we're not looking at the actual report, so I don't know how it is that they got these numbers, but it was a common error or intentional sleight of hand to claim that people were dying from COVID when actually what they were doing was dying with COVID as effectively a fellow traveler that may or may not have contributed in any way to the death of the person involved.
If this continues, our analysis suggests a potential scenario of elevated excess mortality extending over the next decade, Murray said.
However, he added that excess mortality could return to pre-pandemic levels sooner if COVID-19 is brought under control through vaccination and other health measures.
Long-term improvements in health care access and healthier lifestyle choices are also expected to play a role in reducing mortality rates.
Let me just go to what I thought we were going to just focus on here.
In 2021, excess mortality surged to 23% above the 2019 baseline in the United States, with the United Kingdom experiencing an 11% increase.
By 2023, excess mortality had decreased but remained significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, ranging from 3% to 7% in the U.S.
and 5% to 8% in the U.K., according to Swiss Re Institute's estimates.
And then they talk about what drives excess mortality, mentioning respiratory diseases, significant factors like cardiovascular diseases, cancer, metabolic conditions, you know, the diseases of modernity and of pathogens, and they don't say anything about lifestyle.
So the two things that I wanted to point out before you start riffing here is What they're pointing out here is excess mortality in 2021, the surge.
And as we talked about at the time, and as many good people have talked about, the fact is that, unfortunate for them, what unfolded during COVID provided a perfect natural experiment with regard to, was it the COVID?
Was it the SARS-CoV-2?
Even with the diabolical machinations around died with versus died of, was it SARS-CoV-2 that was killing people and is creating excess mortality, or was it the vaccinations?
We have a perfect natural experiment because in 2020, when there were presumably the highest deaths because COVID did pick off the weakest and oldest first, There were no vaccinations yet.
There were no COVID vaccinations yet.
And in 2021, there were both.
And so what you want to do is compare 2021 to 2020.
And anytime you see numbers being reported from 2021 only, you know that there is either there is error, intentional or not, being done with the numbers there.
And then in light of that, the fact that earlier here, they are saying that what What needs to happen is vaccination, more vaccination, and other health measures.
Okay.
The problem here is multi-layered.
The insurance industry ought to be a place in which the truth on such matters is actively sought irrespective of how awkward it is.
And the reason for that is because any insurance company that falls for bullshit over what is actually shortening the life of its patients is going to lose relative to a unflinching insurance company which simply analyzes the evidence and discovers the real patterns.
In other words, Imagine a medical insurance company that decides to double down pushing mRNA boosters on its patients to control what it sees as a elevated rate of excess mortality that is going to result in yet more elevation of that rate.
So an insurance company that found its way to understanding that in fact these shots are dangerous and they're killing people and that's resulting in a hemorrhage financially for them Would be better off.
So how is it that the insurance industry deludes itself?
And I would argue that this is a variation on a theme that we have seen across industries, which is corporations strangely cannibalizing their own business for some higher objective.
It is almost as if there is a religion to which they belong, which overwhelms their ordinary obsession with the bottom line.
So, that's one thing.
We should expect the insurance industry to be analyzing evidence in a coldly rational way, because to the extent that they fail on that, they will be out-competed by those that do a better job of that.
So the insurance industry would ordinarily be expected to evolve in the direction of cold rationality about evidence.
We know what cold rationality does when it scrutinizes this evidence because Ed Dowd has showed us.
Ed Dowd has looked at this.
He's been looking for years at the evidence of mortality to take one example.
He's also looked at injury and he has discovered these patterns and he sees exactly the distinction that you point to between 2020 and all of the COVID years after that.
2020 being the year in which whatever contribution COVID and our Non-vaccine responses to it are ultimately causal here.
That is isolated from vaccines which were introduced in 2021.
Which, incidentally, and I'm actually not directly familiar with Dowd's work, but I'll bet he includes this in his analysis, but actually, even that comparison will be conservative, because the other thing that we were doing in 2020, there weren't vaccines yet, but what there were, were putting people on ventilators, which we know was accelerating death or causing death.
To the degree that there are excess mortalities in 2020, it certainly isn't attributable to vaccines, but it's not entirely attributable to SARS-CoV-2 either.
It's going to be iatrogenic even then.
Right, okay.
Not entirely.
Iatrogenic.
And there's a whole story to be told there, and I will just put a stem for a future discussion.
One of the things that I believe happened to us during COVID was that we— All of us?
To the U.S., really to the Western world.
was that we had been primed by what we now know to have been at least partially a PSYOP.
We were primed to understand the lethality of COVID different than it actually was.
And if you imagine how this looked in a hospital environment, you had doctors who had been watching people in literal hazmat suits, riding bicycles in China, right?
Bodies stacking up.
You had these people preparing for a disease of a very unusual lethality.
Now this disease was unusual, but it was not unusually lethal.
Can I just jump to share one thing quickly here from this article we want to go back to?
Here, The Atlantic this week published, Why Didn't Facing a Common Enemy Bring Us Together?
It's by Francis Collins.
As I ran the National Institutes of Health, he writes, during the pandemic, I learned that something deep within our culture is wrong.
And he begins, I mean, this is a piece of work, but he begins, can you remember the early months of COVID-19?
We humans are wired somehow to suppress truly horrible memories.
Unless I force myself to go back and look at notes or media reports from that year, I find it hard to remember just how awful it was.
Well, isn't that nice for you?
I find it- Oh!
In many urban settings, hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed with the sick and dying.
Maybe.
ICUs were unable to handle the demand, and the morgues were overflowing.
Again, maybe.
Maybe.
As Director of the National Institutes of Health, it was my job to marshal all possible resources to focus on rapid development of vaccines, drug treatments, and diagnostic Yeah, actually, as director of a functional National Institutes of Health, it would have been your job to make the American public healthier and therefore more robust to an actual virus, right?
And instead, we heard nothing from them in that regard.
That's one thing.
Absolutely a healthy public would have been much less vulnerable to this.
But the other thing is, on all three counts that he named, he says his job was to promote rapid development of vaccines, drug treatments, and diagnostic tests.
By far the best drugs that you could use already existed, and because of what we knew about interaction with other RNA viruses, including SARS-1, it was not like we had to go hunting the entire pharmacopoeia to figure out which drugs were going to work.
Lots of people already had resuspected.
It was revealed quickly.
We knew.
Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
Right.
Now, here's the thing.
I have a story that I'm going to tell about Francis Collins.
I'm not sure if I've told it publicly before, but I will tell it today.
We'll come back to it later in the podcast.
But the drug treatments that we got, the drug treatments he's referring to here were fancy, new, dangerous pharmaceuticals like Paxlovid and Remdesivir.
So these are dangerous drugs because of their mechanisms of action and they did not succeed in controlling anything.
The vaccines in question that he refers to here did not turn out to block transmission or contraction of the disease.
So what was the point of his being focused on these vaccines?
They were incapable of addressing the problem.
Maybe he couldn't know that in advance, right?
Maybe he couldn't know that in advance.
What we appear to have now is honestly a pandemic of the vaccinated, but maybe he couldn't have known that in advance.
Okay, and then the diagnostic tests have never been worth a crap.
So on all three counts, even by his own metric, he fails.
But the thing I was pointing out about China is A, we now know that COVID was circulating long before the propaganda campaign that came out of China that told us about this lethal virus that was going to have bodies stacking up in the halls of hospitals and all of that.
So, I believe that was a PSYOP played on American doctors.
From the point of view of getting American Somehow we did everything to increase the impression of lethality of this disease, right?
We treated people in a way that actually caused them to die.
Ventilators are very destructive, not necessary for COVID.
They were a negative thing, but If you can imagine doctors working themselves into a lather, seeing video that they think is evidence of the severity of a disease, coming to understand that ventilators are going to be the key to preventing it, and then causing a bunch of death by inflicting those ventilators on people who would have gotten better of their own accord, and certainly would have been at much greater advantage if they had been given the drugs that were already understood to be highly likely to work for a disease like this.
In every realm, Francis Collins has nothing to be proud of about his response to this.
You know what I'm reminded of?
You remember when Biden was president?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, okay.
So, he gave a speech in the Oval Office on, and I happened to write it down because I actually also wrote it on a sticky note and it's been hanging in our kitchen ever since, so you know what I'm about to say.
Oh, yeah.
On July 24th, he gave a speech in the Oval Office, and I believe he repeated exactly the same line at the Democratic National Convention, although I haven't, I'm not 100% sure of that.
He said, we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
Yeah.
Yes, he did.
He did say that.
He really seems to believe it.
Yeah.
They really seem to believe it.
A whole lot of them.
It's a, I wonder if somebody, you know, this, this is one of these cases where there is, you know, it's like the car company where the people who put together the ads that show you what the car can do have, they don't even have the phone number of the engineers, right?
So it's like two completely different worlds, right?
So somebody in some PR session decided that the public would be really gratified that they would be really encouraged to hear that the democratic party had beaten pharma.
and suggested it and then somehow that's got thrown out but by it made its way to biden it was in the buffer and it just came flowing out everybody was like i wonder what even he thinks he's talking about well no i don't think i don't think they did think that because for one thing they repeated it you know a month later they he said it in his oval office speech july 24th and i i guess that's going to have been the moment when he basically handed over the reins and That's going to have been after the debate.
I didn't go back through the history.
But roughly a month before the Democratic National Convention, he repeated it.
It was an applause line, I think.
We have finally beaten pharma after all these years, and here's Francis Collins, the now-stepped-down head of the National Institutes for Health, talking about how miserable it all was and how hard he worked and how successful he was, and all of his proposed interventions and successes were pharmaceutical in nature.
Like, they all were.
It's therapeutic drugs and vaccines and tests for the virus, which is itself a pharmaceutical product.
Not just pharmaceutical.
They all are.
Radical and experimental.
That's fine, but with regard to this particular point, we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
Really.
Because it looks, from the perspective of people who have been paying attention for the last four years, like you're actually deeper in bed with them, if that makes sense.
It doesn't really make sense.
But, you know, you're not getting out of bed with them anytime soon.
You always have been.
used to be sort of cool for Democrats, the rank and file, like us, were to talk about big pharma and to, you know, hope for a world in which there was more disconnect and there was less reliance.
And that connection is just stronger and stronger and stronger.
And now it's like being shattered from the rooftops at the same time that the line gets said with no irony at all.
We have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah.
Um, Democratic party is tied to the bed by farm.
I mean, I could go farther, but you get the idea.
Yeah.
The image is it's, it's vivid enough.
Right.
Um, okay.
So I wanted to make two other points about this, this madness.
So you've got the insurance industry, or at least a major component of it lying to itself in a way that will harm its bottom line because it is subordinate to some mystical higher authority.
Now there's a subtle aspect of this that I think everybody who hears about, uh, excess deaths needs to consider.
Excess deaths are a well understood phenomenon.
There's a pattern that should be there.
Pattern is, when you have excess deaths, it tends to be followed by the inverse.
And the reason for that is something called the pull forward effect.
You have people who are vulnerable.
They tend to succumb when some new, let's say that some new virus shows up.
It tends to cull those who are most vulnerable to it.
And then it leaves behind a population that wasn't so vulnerable to it, right?
There's just a fact of selection.
So what you expect to see is the vulnerable pulled forward by months or years.
In this case, if you look at the work of John Campbell, it suggests they were pulled forward by months at most.
They tended to be very old and very sick.
The fact that this pattern continues year after year makes this highly anomalous.
And I have recently recorded a podcast with Ed Dowd in which he talks about how many standard deviations away from any sort of normal variation this is, and it is staggering.
The numbers are astronomically off the charts.
So, is it encouraging that the number of excess deaths is, or the rate of excess death is declining?
Probably not.
It's better than it continuing as a plateau or accelerating, but the fact that we're still in elevated territory tells you that something terrible has happened because we're not seeing the pull forward effect.
You will, of course, make this worse if you do what that report suggests, which is attempt to control this, control COVID with these terrible vaccines.
That's not going to work.
It's not even reasonable in principle because they still don't control contraction or transmission of the disease.
So in any case, this is just pure nonsense.
A little bit of logic and a few minutes of analysis tell you that what is being said is not a match for the facts.
And it is likely to compound the damage.
I would also point out that one of the reasons, probably the biggest reason, that the rate of excess deaths, which should be in the negative, we should have fewer than expected deaths.
But the reason that that excess death number is declining at all is that booster uptake is piss poor.
Why is that?
Because people like Francis Collins failed to blanket the world with their message, to knock out the control group.
Right?
It's because a lot of us took a huge hit.
Because Goliath didn't completely win.
Because Goliath didn't completely win.
And for these people to be saying, well, something's off.
It's COVID.
The solution is therefore vaccines.
It's like, can you, Can you even go one sentence without making a glaring error that you either don't know is an error, in which case you're not qualified for your job, or you do know is an error, in which case you're a monster, because you're gonna kill people with that.
Yeah, I think in terms of dealing with the excess mortality, frankly, my sign-off here at Dark Horse would get you a lot farther.
Absolutely.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
And, frankly, the first will put you in good stead with your own mental health, and the second to mental, but especially physical health.
Do that.
Turn off your devices, and you should be there, depending on what your baseline rate of health is.
Let me just share a couple more of what Collins said.
This is, again, Francis Collins.
In the Atlantic this week, the Atlantic which became so obviously so completely captured.
I've frequently talked about how disappointed I am in the Atlantic, which was the Atlantic Monthly, which was near and dear to my heart.
He says, Collins writes, again the former head of the NIH, as a physician and the NIH director at that time, I was totally focused on trying to advance the science of both vaccines and therapeutics.
Yeah, I think maybe you don't know what science means.
Yeah, technology at best.
Yeah.
I believe that history will recognize the development of vaccines in just 11 months as one of humanity's finest health achievements.
But at the same time, the distrust that had been building during 2020 and early 2021 led to a decision by about 50 million Americans to pass up the vaccine.
This is a very clever sentence.
The timing, he points to, Trump conned 50 million Americans into not getting vaccines because that's the era in which Trump was still president right before he was not president yet.
And that's the only reason you could possibly have passed up this amazing new thing that could have protected you from COVID, except oopsie, it doesn't.
The amazing part is they keep blowing their only alibi.
Their only alibi is that they didn't know.
All right.
Right?
That's the only excuse for the incredible errors.
Like stop it now.
Oh my God.
We are sorry.
We really thought it would work.
It didn't.
Right.
If that's what you mean.
Yeah.
My point is if you actually fucked up, then.
You would reverse course at the point that this is undeniable.
There was a point at which this was contentious and we were all trying to figure out what was going on, or at least we little people were.
The big people must have known, and the way you know that they knew, is that now that it's obvious, they still say the same thing.
That sentence implies that these vaccines had the capability of controlling SARS-CoV-2.
There is no way that somebody who was the head of NIH at the time had better information than anybody else, presumably, could still possibly be under that misapprehension.
It's not possible.
Mm-hmm.
And yet, we know that the head of the CDC at the time was getting her information from CNN.
We talked about that at the time, and I would have to go back and find the exact thing.
Walensky, now deposed, that's not the word they used, of course, but Useful Idiot was done being useful, and so they got rid of her.
She says in some interview that she was so surprised to hear, I don't even remember what it was she was talking about around the vaccines, so surprised to learn this really important thing that she should have been at the forefront of, From watching CNN and she says it sort of glibly and laughing like, oh my God, wasn't that amazing?
So, you know, I, I don't think Collins, I don't think Collins was a useful idiot in the same way.
I don't think he was in on it.
De facto in on it, or the same thing that happened to the insurance companies has happened to him.
He has a religious devotion to something that allows him to, to lie to the faithful.
And that's what he's doing now as to what the fuck happened to the Atlantic.
How is The Atlantic publishing that and not going back to Collins and saying, what exactly do you mean by that?
Where is the evidence that this controls contraction and transmission of this disease and therefore that the 50 million people who opted not to get it are somehow involved in the story of why it's still doing damage?
How did The Atlantic miss that?
Remember that The Atlantic's reporting on COVID during COVID.
was almost if not entirely done by three relatively young female journalists.
I've forgotten all of their names at this point, although I read pieces of pieces from all of them during the debacle.
And none of these people had any scientific ability at all.
They also didn't have scientific backgrounds, they also didn't have degrees, but I don't care about that.
What they didn't have was an ability to think scientifically.
They just had a couple of people they went to as their experts, and they believed anything that was told to them.
It was clear they had a couple of people they just kept going back to.
And, or, they had a conclusion in the beginning that they pushed on people over and over and over again, and the only way to do that successfully, given that the evidence mounted weakly that this wasn't killing people to the degree that we were being told, the vaccines were neither safe nor effective, The tests were crap.
The therapeutic drugs that they generated for these were awful.
The pre-existing drugs that you could use off-label were effective.
None of that was ever reported in The Atlantic, so it looked like, although I have no way of knowing, there was a conclusion in the beginning that was pushed and pushed and pushed.
In concert with what was happening on MSNBC and CNN and The New York Times and WAPO and NPR, it all started to just feel like, The truth.
Feels like the truth must be the truth.
Except, sorry, that's not the way truth works.
All right.
I want to tell my Collins story.
This is a story that Collins should be profoundly embarrassed by.
And there's also a little embarrassment for me.
So anyway, I will point both of those out.
After the pandemic had mostly faded, and that's not to say anything about the medical reality of COVID, that's just to say that people's focus had begun to move on, I was approached by a friend who was also in contact with Francis Collins.
And that friend wanted me and Francis Collins to sit down for a discussion in which we tried to resolve our differences.
Now, I was not terribly favorable to the idea of resolving our differences, but I was interested in comparing the coherence of our two narratives.
I was interested in having that discussion so that people could see what the head of The NIH had been up to and what it meant relative to what I believe was an accurate, if noisy, understanding of COVID and its consequences.
I tentatively said yes, I would be willing to participate in this, and Francis Collins sent back a message, the upshot of which was he would be interested in having the discussion, but only under the condition that he would be able to kill off any mention that a discussion had even happened If the result of the discussion was not to his liking.
Yes, he was going to grant me the same right, but I wanted the discussion to happen, maybe even live, so that people could hear it.
He wanted the right to see how it went and then decide to actually prevent me from speaking about the fact that we had spoken about it if I was to embarrass him.
Now this made me very angry.
This is somebody whose job had been to protect the American public from serious hazards.
Somebody who had fallen down on the job.
Somebody who wanted to talk down to me about what it is that he thought he knew that I needed to know.
And was not willing to take the risk that he might learn something.
In other words, this was a read-only phenomenon where there was going to be no ability to alert him if indeed he did not know some of the things that he needed to know about ivermectin, about the vaccines, about COVID itself and its origins.
Who knows what the man doesn't know?
He lives in whatever bubble he lives in.
Sure.
So in any case, I was As an American, as a father, as a husband, I was angry at the very suggestion that he wanted the right to kill off mention of the discussion.
And I wrote a very pointed letter back.
And I said, effectively, that I thought that was a dereliction of duty on his part and that he had an obligation to have the discussion and, you know, let the chips fall where they may.
And I showed that letter to various people, including the friend who had tried to set up this discussion and People told me that it was too aggressive and was likely to cause Collins not to want to engage in the debate, which I must say at the time, I didn't really care.
If he didn't want an honest debate, I wanted him to have to answer for the fact that he wanted these special privileges rather than to just simply talk to a citizen with whom he disagreed and had some interest in a discussion.
So anyway, I did not follow up because I didn't want to soften the letter and somehow I think I probably should have overridden the instinct of my friends to try to keep a discussion going because I didn't see the point.
I thought, let me lay it on the line and if he doesn't like it, I'll make the letter public.
So, I'm embarrassed for not having followed through.
He should be embarrassed for needing, um, you know, floaties to get in the pool to talk about something that was squarely at the center of his obligation to the American public.
Yes.
Not about Francis Collins, but one more piece.
Here is the media engaging in cringeworthy either revisionist history or claims about what will happen in the future.
Here we have Scientific American.
Which is not a scientific journal, right?
This is a lay magazine.
This is a magazine that curates and writes for the lay public on scientific topics.
It was certainly in my home growing up.
It was in your home growing up.
But it doesn't report on original research.
but Scientific American was the main place where people who weren't already educated in the jargon and methods of a particular scientific field could reliably get sort of the lay of the land every month.
Scientific American has long since jumped the shark in this regard.
They've long since revealed that they don't know what science is.
You know, they think men can become women, for instance.
They don't know how to define either term.
But here we go.
Also yesterday, I guess today's the 17th, right?
So September 16th, an opinion piece in Scientific American vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health and the environment.
Kamala Harris has plans to improve health, boost the economy and mitigate climate change.
Donald Trump has threats and a dangerous record.
This is the Editorial Scientific American.
Let me just read a couple of bits on health.
I mean, the entire article is insane, but here we go.
Healthcare.
Scores of studies have shown that people with insurance stay healthier and live longer because they can afford to see doctors for preventative and acute care.
I did not click through, nor do I think they've actually cited scores of studies here.
I don't know what the studies they're claiming exist, but I predict that no, especially now, those with insurance aren't inherently healthier, because what you get with insurance is not just the bad medicine that the allopathic system is delivering almost entirely, not entirely, but almost entirely, But you also get the headache of dealing with insurance.
Wait, one extra point.
I don't know whether their evaluation or the evaluation that they're citing is credible.
But the other thing is, if you were to do a proper evaluation, you'd find that there are people who are falling off the bottom of the ladder who don't have insurance, don't have a roof over their heads, have serious drug addictions.
The result, no matter what the actual result means, if you were to analyze that, it's not that insurance is causal of health.
Right.
Almost everyone with W-2 salary has health insurance.
If you are salaried, you very often have health insurance.
If you are salaried, you are at least keeping it together well enough that you are able to hold down a job.
That is right away going to be a difference in health than those people who don't have insurance because they can't hold a job and have no ability ability to get insurance, as opposed to those of us like us who have recently finally decided, you know, the health insurance industry is a scam.
And we're using, as listeners will know, we're using CrowdHealth now, which, yes, is a sponsor.
But we started using them before they became a sponsor.
Yes, I would point out that unlike the Biden administration, we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
I don't know if we're talking about pharma here, but insurance anyway.
Well, I don't know, I think we've beaten them both.
And then, here's further evidence that Scientific American presents as to why a Harris-Waltz administration will be better for your health than a Trump-Vance administration.
And the Biden-Harris administration succeeded in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which caps the costs of several expensive drugs, including insulin, for Medicare enrollees.
Harris' vice presidential pick, Tim Waltz, signed into law a prohibition against excessive price hikes on generic drugs as governor of Minnesota.
Both of these are about the price of drugs which most Americans shouldn't have to be on in the first place.
There is nothing in anything the Democrats have done for years now that actually seeks to address the underlying cause of the fact that Americans are woefully unhealthy.
Obese, sick, unhealthy across the board, and they are championing Slightly lower cost, and it was actually that, I believe, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the basis for which Biden made that extraordinary claim, we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.
No, what you have done is slightly cut into their profits in one way, while being tethered to the bed by a BDSM leash.
Putting stuff into their pockets, which is taxpayer money, in all these other ways.
That's not beating pharma.
Yeah.
It's beating the taxpayers.
You have finally beaten the taxpayers after all these years.
Well, let's just... The party, the blue team, has become captive of pharma.
And it is obvious, once you think about it, that pharma is healthy when people are sick.
So it is not surprising that we have a health epidemic and that this party is acting in ways that it can claim are health-augmenting while are actually health-degrading, which is, of course, the entire reason that in, you know, a matter of a day, the idea of Make America Healthy Again caught on like wildfire.
Everybody knows we have a problem and everybody knows it has causes and it can't be that goddamn hard to figure out what they are.
That's what scientific tools do.
You figure out this causes that by running experiments.
You figure it out and then you eliminate the cause of harm from the environment of your children.
You know, it's not going to happen right away, but we can start right away.
We can figure out what those problems are.
Reduce the degree to which they impact kids.
Start figuring out how to rescue people from the chronic conditions that they have.
This is such the obvious place for us to be investing our resources and our attention.
Because, I mean, you know, what are you if you're a country of unhealthy people who's constantly being fed to this predatory industry by, you know, one of two parties that you are allowed to choose from?
One more thing from this Scientific American endorsement of Harris, which I think on Twitter they loudly proclaimed, this is only the second time we've endorsed a candidate for president.
Like, yeah, and the last time was four years ago when you endorsed Biden.
So this isn't a sea change for you people.
This is what you now do.
This is two times in sequence, and yes, two times does not yet make a statistically definable trend, but It's clear whose team you are on, and science isn't supposed to have teams.
Science doesn't have teams, and the fact that you're on a team is further evidence that you're not interested in doing or reporting on science.
So, here, the COVID pandemic has been the greatest test of the American healthcare system in modern history.
Well, that's true.
Okay.
Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests.
True.
COVID vaccines are neither safe nor effective.
The free mail-order COVID tests are ineffective and worthless.
I don't know that they're unsafe, but who knows?
Wastewater surveillance for viruses has improved, allowing public health officials to respond more quickly when levels are high.
Do we have evidence that wastewater surveillance for viruses is tied to any actual other health outcome?
I don't know that.
I don't know that at all.
But you can measure it, therefore it's good.
Bird flu now poses a new threat.
Yeah, sure it does.
Highlighting the importance of the Biden-Harris administration's Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response policy.
A vote for Harris is a vote for your health.
Unbelievable.
It is.
I was looking for a response that I thought was particularly cogent, and I can't remember who it was.
It was either, maybe it was Marc Andreessen or Walter Cairn, I can't remember.
But the response was effectively this.
And I think this applies equally well to The Atlantic.
That people spend decades, they can spend centuries, building something up.
And these mind-numbingly foolish activists get into these systems and think nothing of destroying all of that work in order to get a momentary gain towards some little objective that they see as important in the present.
And what we have now... Chesterton's fence all over again.
It's not even Chesterton's fence because it's actively hostile to the problem that the institution exists for.
Well, not as you just laid it out.
I think it often is actively hostile.
But as you just laid it out, I don't care a whit for history.
And actually, I want to read a little bit from Kundera here.
And it's speaking exactly to this.
It doesn't have to be actively hostile so long as it pays no heed to the history on which, you know, to the foundation on which you are now standing.
Yeah, in fact.
If you are hostile to that foundation, that's one thing.
If you actually are just not paying any attention and you're just like, but I want that.
I like candy.
I want candy.
Well, that actually candy is the perfect exemplar of this because, you know, wisdom, I have said, is almost synonymous with delayed gratification.
That it is about your ability to project forward, the ability to do something hard now because the reward much later is great.
You know, the farther out you can wait for a reward, even indefinitely long, right?
The ability to do things now that will benefit people two generations from now is extremely wise in a way that's hard to defend.
To people.
But the inverse of that is like this instantaneous census of what the right thing is.
Yes.
Right?
And the point is, well, what is the use of Scientific American?
Oh, it's to shift the presidential election in direction of Kamala Harris.
That's what we Scientific Americans do.
Right.
And the point is, no, Scientific American has a purpose.
It has now stepped out of that purpose into a realm that it needs to say nothing.
It does not have to weigh into the presidential race at all, and it shouldn't because it compromises its credibility, even though, hey, I'm working overtime trying to get this race to go in the direction that I think we have a future.
But it doesn't mean I want Scientific American or the Journal Science or, you know, any such entity that is supposed to be about truth seeking in an objective, factual sense.
You're not claiming that you're doing that Right.
Now, I may be motivated.
You are a scientist.
Yes, and I use scientific tools.
And you come to your conclusions through scientific means, but you are not claiming that that is the doing of science.
And, you know, publications change as parties change, right?
Yeah.
But if it's going to keep the name it has and, you know, the masthead it has and all of this, and it at least strongly implies, and really I feel like it is explicitly Assumable by the readers of Scientific American that it remains the kind of magazine that it was, but it patently hasn't.
Yeah, and in fact, in the case of The Atlantic, I think it should change its name to The North Atlantic, and it should have the same cover every month, and it should be a giant frickin' iceberg until they wake the hell up.
All right.
So, you wanted to talk about a new argument, and in keeping with that, I have a little bit from Kundra, and I don't know when that will fit in, but perhaps you want to change gears, and if you would rather I start, then I can start with you.
Yeah, why don't we do that?
You want to start?
Okay.
So, Milan, Kundra.
Apologies.
Even though, what, 11 months ago or so, we had the great pleasure of being in Prague in the Czech Republic for, gosh, I think a little over a week, I remain not really able to pronounce Czech names.
I was lucky to study Milan Kundera my very first quarter in college.
I think I've mentioned that before.
I had a class on Kundera and Solzhenitsyn, which was mind-blowing.
But for those who don't know, Kundra was an extraordinary writer, thinker, and political dissident.
He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and, due to his political dissidence, felt compelled to go into exile in France in 1975.
Four years after that, he had his citizenship in Czechoslovakia revoked, so he was stateless.
He had no citizenship anywhere in the world for a couple of years until he attained French citizenship a couple years later in 1981.
It's interesting to consider what it would be like to be without a state, right?
Like to have no citizenship, which was the case for him between 1979 and 1981.
He had his books banned in his homeland in 1989 when the Velvet Revolution was brewing.
And then many, many years later, in 2019, he was awarded Czech citizenship in the not-that-new-by-then Czech Republic.
And he only died last year.
Wow, I did not realize that.
I did not realize that either.
So this reading is from this, the book here is called A Kidnapped West, The Tragedy of Central Europe, but it's got a couple of his pieces in it.
And I'm actually going to read from a different address that he made in 1967 to the Czech Writers Congress.
Just a couple of pages here.
Let's see.
Who is a vandal?
It is absolutely not the illiterate peasant who in a fit of fury sets fire to the rich landowner's mansion.
The vandals I myself run into are all of them educated, pleased with themselves, socially well-situated, and not especially resentful toward anyone.
The Vandal, rather, is that prideful, narrow mind, pleased with itself and ever ready to claim its rights.
That proud, narrow-minded fellow believes that the power to fit the world to his own image is among his inalienable rights and, since the world is largely made up of matters beyond his capacities, he adapts the world to his image by destroying it.
Thus, an adolescent knocks the head off some statue in a park because the statue infuriatingly seems a better human than he.
And since any act of self-affirmation brings man satisfaction, he does it with delight.
Men who live only their own contextless present, who know nothing of the historical continuity around it, and who lack culture, can transform their nation into a desert with no history, no memory, no echoes, and untouched by beauty.
Vandalism in our time comes not only in forms condemned by the law.
When a committee of citizens or bureaucrats managing a project decrees that some statue or chateau or church or age-old linden tree is useless and must be eliminated, that is just another form of vandalism.
There is no great difference between legal and illegal destruction, just as there is none between destruction and prohibition.
A Member of Parliament recently demanded in the name of 21 deputies the banning of two major Czech films.
Both difficult.
Unabashed, he attacked the two films readily admitting, his exact words, that he hadn't understood them.
The illogic of his complaint only seems obvious.
The worst crime he charged the two cinematic works is just that.
By surpassing their judges' capacities, the works had offended them.
In a letter to Helvetius, I think, Voltaire wrote this magnificent line.
I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it.
Here you have the articulation of the basic ethical principle of our modern culture.
He who regresses into history before the birth of that one principle thereby abandons the Enlightenment and returns to the Middle Ages.
Any repression of an opinion, even the brutal repression of wrong opinions, essentially goes against the truth, that truth that is found only by setting free and equal opinions one against the other.
That's Kundra in 1967 when he was still in Czechoslovakia.
Would hardly be a better match for what we just discussed.
Right.
The vandals who have taken the Atlantic, Scientific American, all of the institutions that were constructed for a purpose and have now been inverted.
And it's so true that those capturing the Atlantic and ruining it is not illegal.
It's not.
It's not illegal.
And it wasn't done by But his point is, even when it is.
So capturing the Atlantic is not illegal.
Capturing the NIH isn't illegal either.
Capturing the CDC isn't illegal.
It's vandalism all.
It's vandalism, and we should all be actually outraged.
Because what's the final line that I read?
It's not the final line of the piece, but just once more, truth is found only by setting free and equal opinions, one against the other.
There it is.
Yeah, and his point, too, is actually the perfect segue to the next piece, because his point is really that the free speech, effectively, free exchange of ideas, is the one and only stopgap that Keeps this from being a dark age.
Exactly.
That is the one and only thing.
And we are now staring at the destruction of our First Amendment here in the U.S.
It is being chipped away at constantly.
And the Biden-Harris administration has made it clear that they want greater restrictions in the place where speech matters most.
So it is under threat, right?
If Kundera is right, and I believe he is, his argument is very sound.
Then what is at stake is whether or not we are to go forward based on enlightenment principles or whether we are to go backwards into a dark age.
And then I don't know what the plan is, right?
Because basically the only thing that works is...
Talking about what the antagonists of freedom are up to and outing them and making it plain how we know what they're doing and what the implications are for your health or your longevity, etc.
So, you know, in effect, this is it, right?
The case is right before you.
So what I wanted to do is I have, of course, in the process of working on Rescue the Republic, been confronted with many, many arguments and questions, and there are themes among them.
And I want to just address a couple of them and say some things that thus far I don't think have been said anywhere.
In effect, I want to make the case that this is worth doing in spite of the risks.
So let me talk a little bit about the risks.
I hear several things from people.
They say, don't you know about January 6th?
Aren't you afraid they're going to do that to your event?
Well of course I'm concerned that they might try, though frankly I think it would be Unlikely to work.
Our slate of speakers is so excellent and so articulate that I think any such thing would be laughable.
But it doesn't mean that somebody might not try to create something.
And we have bent over backwards to look at our language to make sure that even a cynical person would have great difficulty portraying this as an incitement to violence or something like that.
In fact, this is The inverse.
Speech is the alternative to violence.
Is that a threat?
No, that's not a threat.
That is an argument that the founders have laid out.
We are attempting to use speech because what will happen if speech doesn't work is violence will break out, having nothing to do with us.
That's what's going to happen.
So we are trying to prevent violence.
If violence is something you don't want, then listen up.
So yes, somebody might try something.
I will say that if we look back at the examples that we have from recent history, the attempts to misportray a movement like this or a gathering like this are quite transparent.
And if you see somebody who is inciting lawlessness or violence or displaying symbols that are understood to be horrifying.
It's probably a fed.
You should probably thank them for their service, videotape them, and move on.
Glad you liked that one.
Now, we should not have to be ultra careful about, for example, in the poster that we put out with various modern characters, many of whom will be at the rally on what is obviously an allusion to Washington's boat crossing the Delaware.
We deliberately did not allow muskets to be there because we didn't want to be misinterpreted.
And we should not have to bend over backwards in that way.
It would be a perfectly legitimate artistic allusion if there had been muskets.
But no, we're being very, very careful.
More so than we should have to be.
So, yeah, there's the danger of it being misportrayed.
But the other thing is...
We actually have some obligation to hold this event in the Capitol because what has really happened?
The fact that people have concerns about something like, you know, a federal misportrayal of the event in some ugly way.
Is evidence that, however it happened, the American people are no longer welcome in their own capital.
That can't be.
Right?
We have to show that we are not afraid to show up in our capital and to speak clearly and directly.
We have a right.
In fact, it is enumerated in the First Amendment.
Not only the right to peaceably assemble, but for what purposes it's spelled out in that amendment.
Seek redress of grievances.
Maybe I missed it.
What is the evidence that we wouldn't be able to be there?
The fact that people are concerned about showing up on the Capitol Mall in order to have a perfectly reasonable, peaceful gathering of a coalition that is patriotic.
I guess I take that not as space-based, but as indicative of the moment in time in which we have all arrived.
Maybe.
The rally will be larger because of where it is and will be more historically significant because of where it is, but I think any such gathering is a threat to Goliath.
Right.
But but I guess my point is people would be less concerned if it was somewhere else.
But because they would be less concerned if it was somewhere else, that's evidence that, hey, there's some force that exists in our capital that must not exist in our capital.
This is our goddamn capital.
Right.
We are entitled to go there and speak in angry voices if we must, because the founders said so.
They said so.
And they were right.
And Kundra reflects the degree to which they were right.
Okay.
So the second part of what I want to do is I want to describe in what way it is useful for us to gather in Washington for Rescue the Republic
and in what way it is useful for people to make what for many will admittedly be a substantial effort in order to get themselves there or to otherwise support those who do.
And my point here would be Um, there are really two reasons.
I've talked about one of them before, which is there is a group of, um, citizens eligible to vote who are not in any way tuned out of our governance structure and politics.
What they are is disaffected.
They are disgusted and they are not participating and they have not participated.
Sometimes some of them do, but in general, there's this large collection of Americans that do not vote, not because they're not paying attention, but because they believe it is either pointless or that they can't stand being suckered again and again.
I totally get it.
I've never been a non-voter, but I've certainly voted for people that I knew weren't gonna win, and in fact, in presidential elections, that's almost all I've done for decades.
So.
The point here is that group is so large that they can swing any election they want.
And if they were to come to understand, as I think you and I have come to understand, that this election is a make or break election.
Why is it make or break?
Because the First Amendment is at stake and that's the only tool that we have to bootstrap our way out of the problems that threaten Are basically the threat in Western civilization.
So that vast group can swing the election if they want, but they've got to come off the bench.
And that means that we have to make the case to them that now is the moment to come off the bench.
So the first reason that this gathering in Washington is so significant is because it will make the point to people who are still on the fence about whether or not this election means anything that should motivate them to do anything different than they have been doing.
Seeing a large number of people and the impassioned speakers, seeing that this thing actually not only exists as an abstraction online with people talking on podcasts, but actually represents physical people who are putting aside ideological differences and gathering in one space.
And I'm telling you, that's going to feel good.
Shoulder to shoulder with people that you 10 years ago would have thought you had nothing in common with and yet actually you see the same existential threat and you're willing to take the risk of acknowledging that you see it and fighting it together.
That is going to feel marvelous and I'm hoping that that will be profoundly motivating to that vast group of people who can win this election almost on their own just by simply coming off the bench and letting themselves be counted.
I think to that end, having stories emerge from the crowd who gather, just short stories of, honestly, as much as I hate the concept at this point, of identity, that reveal how many different places and demographics and situations the people who have gathered are coming from.
You know, shoulder-to-shoulder with, you know, liberals and conservatives, old, young, black, white, woman, man, you know, obviously, but, you know, all of it, and especially across the belief systems, you know, atheist, devout, you know, blue, historically blue, historically red, you know, former never Trumpers to, you know, been with Trump all along, you know,
excited about obama started to you know cringe later and uh you know or you know could see it with clinton one which is not what we call him but i'm gonna start calling him that it sounds like his board name well you know bush one bush two yeah yeah clinton one yeah yeah anyway um i i feel like those stories um very brief stories juxtaposed because Kind of like, actually, I'm reminded I'm going to look it up when you're talking next.
I've briefly forgotten the name of the amazing photographer who shared many of his photographs with me that I posted on my natural selections.
During the truckers convoy, in which he photographed just beautiful Canadians who had come out in support of the truckers convoy, each of whom looked like no one else and like no other, and they put the lie to Trudeau's line about this being a bunch of Nazi fascists, right?
Yeah and actually I spoke to Jordan Peterson yesterday a little bit about this and one of the things he said really struck me which was he said this is the kind of gathering you will want to be able to tell your grandchildren you were at and I think it's for exactly that reason because something will change and having been present for that will be something to be proud of and to be able to tell people who weren't there personally what that was like.
And I will just say as a final rejoinder to your point here, You and I have had the fortunate experience since 2017 of being welcomed into company that would not have fit our, I hesitate to say demographics, but we have been welcomed by conservatives, by devout but we have been welcomed by conservatives, by devout religious folks, by all sorts of people.
And it has been extremely gratifying to just simply recognize the humanity of people who believe very different things and to understand that, yeah, that's something.
But, you know, compared to what we share in terms of our interests in the future, you know, a safe, healthy environment for our children, right?
Like that cuts across every ideological difference there could be.
While you keep talking, actually, Jen, if you would show my screen, I found this post that I made with some of Dan Aponte's photographs.
And here's one, but I did a little preamble first.
But this is Dan Aponte.
He's linked.
This is at Dantra Selections.
This is Portraits that he took in Ottawa.
Remember, it was like, it was deadly cold there.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
In Ottawa.
Yeah, the bouncy castle nearly shattered.
On February 5th, 2022.
So, and he has many, many more.
These are just the ones that I wanted to publish.
But if, you know, if you want to provide a background while I just scroll through this, this is just some of the many people who showed up in absurdly cold weather to the capital of Canada to support the truckers.
And their own freedom, which was being taken away from them by Trudeau in the name of freedom.
Trudeau's freedom is not freedom, just as Biden and Harris's freedom is not freedom.
It was, as many of you will remember, tremendously heartening to know that somebody was succeeding in gathering somewhere and making the correct point.
And no matter how they were being portrayed, first of all, nobody bought it, right?
Everybody understood that the truckers were standing up for basic freedoms that we all should value.
And, you know, yeah, it was it was a powerful moment.
And I think this one is going to be as well.
Which brings me to the final point about it.
All right.
There's a second reason.
In addition to just making the point to the vast collection of voters who sit on the sidelines for understandable reasons that this is the moment to come off the bench.
Well, the next reason is related.
Which is, what is it that will motivate the vast group of disaffected voters to show up enough to overwhelm any capacity to cheat that might exist?
One of the things is knowing that this isn't them showing up to support a candidate that, you know, they've already long since formulated their opinion of.
This is actually their ability to demonstrate that they do exist in large numbers, and therefore they are a constituency whose concerns ought to be front and center for the candidate who is trying to win above that cheat margin.
So what I'm getting at is, on the one hand, demonstrating to people that there are many of us and that we are going to show up in force and we are going to do everything in our power to protect the Constitution, to protect the eight pillars that we have outlined, but also to make to protect the eight pillars that we have outlined, but also to make those eight pillars become a focal point in order to
We want to push the system in the direction of protecting that which matters and making those things central to the election is the way to make that happen.
I think that's a very powerful argument for showing up.
And if you can't show up, you can support us in other ways.
And I would just say, we do need funds.
You can donate at, you can find the link to donate at jointheresistance.org.
And the other thing you can do is spread the word.
Figure out what you want to post.
Don't just post the hashtag.
Post something that means something to you.
Post a statement about why this is important to you.
Say that you're going.
Say that you'd love to go, but you can't.
Or say, here's something that I think fits the theme, but post it somewhere.
Post it to other social media sites than X.
Make it visible so that people really understand how much effort is going into this, how much momentum it has, and they will show up in force and that greatly increases the chances that come November there will be reasons for hope.
Let us find reasons for hope.
Okay, one last thing, literally on a very different topic, but metaphorically I think not so far.
I want to share the piece that I posted just this morning on Natural Selections.
It's a piece I wrote for County Highway a year ago, and you can show my screen here.
It's a piece I wrote for County Highway a year ago, and County Highway, if you're not aware of it, is an amazing publication.
I encourage you, I've got links here.
It's America's only newspaper, am I right?
It's America's only newspaper, yes.
And you can pick it up in an independent bookstore or feed store or music store near you, or you can go sight unseen and subscribe online.
It doesn't exist online, it's an actual newspaper that comes, and you can Drink it with anything from coffee to bourbon on your porch, but as I say in here, you have to supply your own porch.
You could read it while drinking coffee or bourbon on your porch, but you have to supply your own porch bourbon and coffee, because it doesn't come with any of those.
Yet.
Ever.
Okay.
The Equinox.
The feathered snake god slides down an ancient stone temple.
Like all of the best gods, Kukulkan is not visible most of the time.
His head, a gaping maw of serpent badassery, is fixed in place at the base of his temple in southern Mexico, but most days his body is absent.
Twice a year, a one-two punch of astronomical reality and Mayan insight come together, creating the massive, undulating body of a serpent out of shadow and stone.
At the solstices, we are at astronomical extremes, the position of the Earth such that half of the planet is tilted most directly towards the sun, the other half away.
On the northern summer solstice, we Americans enjoy a day with an abundance of sunlight.
Six months later, halfway around our orbit and tilted the opposite direction from the sun, we have our darkest day.
Following that darkest day gets colder and colder, even as the days inch longer nearly imperceptibly for a good long time.
When I lived in Michigan in my 20s and decamped to Madagascar over several winters to study the sex lives of poison frogs, I was asked once by a Malagasy man if I was there to make money.
He just wasn't buying the whole scientific research-for-the-sake-of-human-knowledge thing.
No, I told him.
I'm chasing the light.
The farther from the equator you are, the more extreme are your solstices.
If you are in Anchorage in December, it can be difficult to relate to someone in the Everglades.
At the solstices, we have the least in common with one another, astronomically speaking.
On the equinox, though, just for a moment, things even out, and the snake god shows himself.
Equinoxes are the great astronomical equalizers.
Halfway between the solstices, the Earth's tilt is neither towards nor away from the Sun.
All of us, regardless of where we are on our shared planet, experience similar lengths of day and night.
It is not quite true to say that day and night are equal on the equinox, however, for reasons both trivial and profound.
With the help of an atmosphere, you see, light spreads into darkness, but darkness does not spread into light.
Stand outside at dusk.
Keep your eyes wide open as they adjust to the failing light and steer clear of electric light.
The crisp edges of trees, people, the horizon, they all begin to soften before disappearing entirely.
Movements at the edges of your visual field feel more ominous, and at some point you lose color, the world sliding into grayscale.
Can you mark that moment as it happens?
I cannot.
Close your eyes and listen.
This transition, this crepuscular time between day and night, is an opportunity for creatures who specialize on neither extreme.
Their calls may hang in the cooling air.
If you open your eyes, you may find that someone is very near you.
Someone who walks with such care that he is soundless.
A fox, perhaps.
Someone who was always very much aware of you, even while you were unaware of him.
Inhale deeply.
Smell the landscape if you can.
Take in smells that change not just with the seasons, but with the time of day.
Night-blooming flowers are a sensual pleasure, providing a surprise richness in the air when there is nothing left to see.
The earth, too, smells different as it cools and the air stills.
Even your ability to smell has its own rhythm, its own circadian capacity that ebbs and flows.
Be barefoot on the earth.
Some will invoke gods or other mysteries to explain the virtues of grounding.
I prefer the language of electromagnetic fields and our evolutionary history inextricably tied to this, our one and only planet, to understand why being in literal touch with the ground is good for you.
Either way, the conclusion is the same.
Be barefoot on the earth and remind yourself that you are home.
Be you in Anchorage or the Everglades, the equinox is now upon us.
In a few days.
And we all have the same amount of daylight in which to get on with our lives.
It's been one hell of a summer, and now perhaps things can calm down a bit.
We can find our equanimity again.
Nikki McClure lives on the southern edge of the Salish Sea, and when she is not making art, she picks berries, watches birds, and sails.
She is an exquisite artist, as well as my friend, and her medium is paper, from which she cuts intricate images from single sheets with an X-Acto knife.
For many years, one of her creations has been wall calendars, each month with one image and one word.
This month, September's word is manifest.
Consider the last ten years of her Septembers, marking the autumnal equinoxes of a prior decade.
School.
Liberate and try.
Test and defend.
Linger.
Need.
Subvert.
Chance.
Barter and foster.
The equinox is an astronomical reality, but our months are not.
If aliens were to actually land here, they would already know the length of our day and our year.
Or at the very least, they would know how to calculate those without difficulty.
A week, though, is a total human construct.
Months come closer to describing something outside of us.
They are not that far off from the moon cycle, while definitely not being the same.
Said aliens would understand the desire for a unit of time between a day and a year, but they could not begin to guess the particulars from our astronomical position in the universe.
They would have no way of knowing.
Similarly, the other organisms with which we share our planet have circadian rhythms and annual ones, but they do not experience weeks.
Hummingbirds do not have Mondays.
Gorillas have no weekends.
But days without distinction from one another are a terrestrial universal, as are years.
All human cultures have understood days, too.
They are easily measured.
All human cultures have no doubt recognized years as well, as summer always gives way to autumn before winter, spring, and summer again on endless repeat.
But years are far more difficult than days to calculate with precision.
The Maya had a calendar that came very close, in which units of time included days, of course, but also 20-day units, the winal, and in turn 18 winals, the tun.
The tun is thus 360 days long, very close to the length of an actual year.
And the Maya played out the math further yet.
20 tuns is a katun, and 20 katuns is a baktun.
A baktun is 144,000 days long, almost 400 years.
Any people who measure such grand lengths of time must be forward-thinking themselves.
Indeed, the Maya were one of the world's great civilizations, with an enlightenment of their own long before the one in Europe.
They had writing and roads, art and architecture, governance and gods.
Some of them farmed, while others designed reservoirs to mitigate against drought.
They had the concept of zero, and they had astronomy.
One of the greatest city-states of the Maya was Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula, the central temple of which houses Kukulkan, the rarely but predictably visible snake god.
The sun, when it hits the stairs of the temple at Chichen Itza just right, creates the humps and bumps of an enormous snake cascading down the temple wall.
The feathered serpent god is revealed only at equinox.
As the days continue to get shorter, and darkness encroaches, remember that darkness does not flow into light.
Again, winter is coming, but light spreads into darkness, not the other way around.
Unless you live either in the era of big science, as we do, or in the time and space where local astronomers have done the heavy lifting for you and created a physical calendar out of sunlight and stone, you would be hard-pressed to know precisely when the equinox is.
But still, you can feel it at a less precise level.
There is a quickening, isn't there?
A change in the air.
Test and defend.
Linger and subvert.
Manifest.
The Lengua days of summer are loosening their grip.
Now, finally, you can get some things done.
I think we should go to D.C.
and get some things done.
Let's get some things done.
It's marvelously written, by the way.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So again, that was published in County Highway.
If you don't know it, you should find it.
Yeah, like that.
Anything else to say?
No.
All right.
Exciting times.
Exciting times.
May we all come out with more with more possibility.
Yeah.
Okay, so we are off until October 2nd.
We'll be back in I guess that's 15 days from now.
Much will happen between now and then.
You can find the Q&As that we just did and lots of other stuff as well on Locals.
Please join us there.
There will be at least one Dark Horse Inside Rail dropping between now and then.
And you can go to darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, to find our schedule, links to our store.
We've got a lot of great merchandise.
And a reminder about our sponsors this week, which are Brain.fm, Carraway, and Seed.
We are supported by you.
We appreciate you, our audience.
We've already heard from some people in our locals, actually, that they'll be coming to DC, so there'll be other Dark Horse people there.
We appreciate you liking, sharing, subscribing, all of that.
Let's rescue the Republic, and until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
