Tragic Pharma Magic in the Confirmation of RFK Jr.
Walter Kirn shares his perspective after sitting front row in the confirmation hearing of RFK Jr. Find Walter on X: https://x.com/walterkirn Find Walter at County Highway: https://www.countyhighway.com/ ***** Sponsors: Brain.fm: intense music that boosts productivity. Unlock your brain’s full potential free for 30 days by going to brain.fm/DARKHORSE Dose: Orange shot for your Liver health. Save 30% on your first months subscription at dosedaily.co/darkhorse Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club:...
There was a book that came out a few years ago, and they made it in a movie called Catch Me If You Can.
And it was about a serial con artist who pretended to be a surgeon, airline pilot, and all sorts of things.
But all the things that he pretended to be had one thing in common.
They wore uniforms.
And those uniforms projected a sense of authority that has been earned in your mind over your whole lifetime, right?
It's not the doctor's coat because it's white that causes you to obey the person.
It's because it reminds you of every other doctor's coat you've seen in your life, maybe going back to your childhood, your pediatrician, and all the people on TV. And that thing is able to conduct this, you know, to over-leverage the situation with all this accumulated symbolic force against you just having to make a momentary choice.
So it's really a power differential.
It's why a priest can run into a room and suddenly tell everybody what to do, and they'll listen to him, not the guy who's dressed in a blue polo shirt.
Hey, folks.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the pleasure and honor of sitting this afternoon with my good friend, Walter Kern.
Walter Kern is many things and has a long and storied career that many of you will be well familiar with at the moment.
You tell me if I've got this wrong, Walter, but you are the editor-in-chief of County Highway, America's only newspaper?
Editor-at-large.
Editor at large.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a kind of Kremlin and a logical distinction between that and editor-in-chief.
It means that I'm kind of out in the middle of the country, not at the headquarters.
So it's a partnership with a guy named David Samuels.
We thought of the magazine together.
And he really takes the—I'm like the lead singer, but he's the guy who writes the music, sort of.
Edits on the ground, you know, word by word.
It does a lot of the hard work, and I kind of promote the place, write for it, help advise on the sensibility and so on.
It's an odd division of labor, but for those who don't care about such distinctions, you can just say, you know, editor of County Highway or co-editor, yeah.
Co-editor of County Highway.
Got it.
And you are definitely at large at the moment.
In fact, at the moment, you are in Washington, D.C., which is a fascinating, if terrifying, place in light of the confirmation hearings that are taking place, have, I guess, just concluded, and about which we are awaiting the votes for Bobby Kennedy, for Tulsi Gabbard, for Kash Patel.
And you've been at least in the hearings.
For Bobby Kennedy, were you able to go to any of the Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel hearings?
No, I wasn't.
I've watched them all.
I had a front row seat at the first and biggest and most well-attended Kennedy hearing.
It was the first such proceeding I've ever attended in my whole life.
I've never been inside a Senate hearing room.
I've never seen a confirmation hearing.
Anything like it.
So I came to it virginally intact and was absolutely astonished, blown away, shocked, and everything else that is a synonym for that by what I saw go on that day.
Well, I'm going to ask you about that.
But before we get there, I am watching something that doesn't look like any prior.
Confirmation battle that I can recall, and I'm trying to figure out whether that's just simply that I care and am more closely associated with the parties who are being grilled than usual, and that this is more normal than I think, or if things are as unusual as they seem.
It's unusual.
There were people in line for the first hearing, the Kennedy hearing, at 4 a.m.
The halls were filled.
The overflow viewing rooms were filled.
Everyone I spoke to said this was an unprecedented level of attendance, interest, and intensity.
A parallel might be something like the Clarence Thomas hearings back when, you know, he was being reviewed for the Supreme Court.
But to have three of these in a row, almost equal intensity, I think is unprecedented.
And just the Kennedy hearings alone were something that everyone told me.
Just don't happen that way.
It's almost traditional that some senators don't even show up for these things, the senators themselves.
Often the room is partly empty.
This felt like some very critical, crucial, and historic moment, and everybody who was in there seemed aware of that, whether they wanted him to be, you know, confirmed or not.
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At some level, you and I both know that we are watching an event that is unprecedented, at least in living memory, in the sense that the Trump administration, the second one, is an insurgency that now the second one, is an insurgency that now represents a fair fraction of the electorate, including people who are not traditional MAGA Trump voters.
The Maha movement, the unity movement, this represents a coalition that I think is unprecedented.
And the powers that be, powers that I and I assume you, Would regard as illegitimate that have captured our system must understand at one level or another that the wolves are at the door.
And the theater that is taking place as these senators pretend to be very concerned about the threat to the public health represented by Bobby Kennedy or the threat to national security represented by Tulsi Gabbard.
That that charade is really about interlopers attempting to hold on to illegitimately acquired and wielded power.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, first of all, the question of whether illegitimate forces have taken over...
...versus legitimate ones is moot to me.
These are the powers that have been in control for quite a while, and I'm sure they regard themselves as illegitimate as hell.
And in some tacit way, we've legitimized them over the decades and years by allowing red flags that...
Now, in retrospect, we should never have allowed to pass by.
We have, in a way, allowed them to occupy.
It's like letting squatters move in.
After a point, they become legal.
We haven't done much about it.
For some reason, the situation became recently intolerable, or visible, at least, and then intolerable, because perhaps it wasn't something we could see clearly in the past.
Our media was structured in a way that didn't allow us to cross-reference and all sorts of things.
That would reveal the situation to us.
But now that it has been, and now that we crossed all sorts of lines, bring two Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy, two Democrats who've run for president themselves, of all things, to this triad this week.
And then we have, you know, Kash Patel, who's...
Qualifications are being questioned, but who really is a congressional investigator, a longtime member of our functioning government, but is suddenly being...
Treat it like an interloper.
In other words, you can be a Democratic presidential candidate and a longtime public servant, but you can be treated as some sort of anarchist you ran in off the street if you don't hold the proper values or loyalties or credentials.
But these people have the credentials.
Oh, I 100% agree with you.
I did want to push back maybe just slightly on the idea that these people have become legitimate, or the forces that control these people have become legitimate, and by people, I'm talking about the senators in this case.
Because I can't say where you have been, you'll tell us, but for a couple of decades, I have been Trying to sound the alarm about the overwhelming corruption of our system.
20 years ago, I was deeply committed and vocally so to the idea of campaign finance reform, which I now regard as so overdue as to be an absurd idea.
But at the time, the fact that something had gained control over our legislative branch at the very least and was acting, was effectively selling out the American public routinely to what at the time I think was the highest bidder.
I think it's become more complex now.
But nonetheless, I don't feel like I failed to notice and therefore I have to accept that these people have become legitimized.
But I do see That the public, or at least the part of the public that I'm tuned into by virtue of the murky algorithms that show me whatever they show me, there are a large number of people who are waking up to the fact that our system is effectively wholly corrupted.
And that that does mean that this set of confirmation hearings is special because, and I want to get to this, you today tweeted That this was a magic show.
I was thinking in simpler terms.
The whole city is a magic show, Brett.
Our federal government is a magic show.
I mean, this is just a minor lounge side act to the big one.
And I mean that in the most literal terms.
People aren't who they say they are.
Their loyalties aren't what they pretend to be.
They actually lie about basic things.
You know, we've all been through COVID and the COVID magic show.
They put on uniforms and they wear medals and they use credentials to dazzle you.
They pretend to know things they don't.
They ventriloquize others.
You know, we're used to the falsity of a presidential election, right?
In a presidential election, we know that every moment is managed and overdetermined.
And we know, especially after Kamala Harris, that, you know, you keep the person—and after Joe Biden, frankly—you keep the person in a box, you show them through certain apertures at certain times, you maybe edit.
You know, right now there's a big lawsuit that— CBS is thinking of settling for the deceptive editing of a Harris interview.
It's a $10 billion lawsuit.
I had never quite seen something like that, but that was a kind of magic.
In any case, it's only the status quo on a microcosmic scale that we're seeing in the hearings.
They're not the big grand magic show, but they are a very intense, dramatic microcosm, and you can sort of pick apart the techniques and see them up close in a way that I think is sometimes blurred in the confusion of the big show.
As I hear you talk, I'm increasingly persuaded that Magic Show is at least one of a tiny number of analogies that fits because of the prominence of misdirection in the toolkit of keeping the audience exactly where you know what they will see so that they never see anything that breaks the suspension of disbelief.
But that does raise a question.
So what I was wrestling with was the senators themselves, who I do not believe are the magicians for the most part.
There may be an occasional senator who is conscious enough of their role to be a magician, but I would imagine that an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders is simultaneously, they have been captured by A kind of power that they would once have railed against.
And their capacity to rationalize their position is so complete that they do not understand that they have become villains in a story that they would once have understood.
So I guess the question is, maybe magic shows the right analogy, but are the senators magicians or are they props?
They're liars and actors, and I would call them magicians.
They're fully in control of their performances.
Let me tell you what I saw with just Bernie Sanders.
I was sitting five feet to the left of RFK, in the very front row.
In other words, I was sharing his perspective as closely as you can, visually, in every sensory way, okay?
I could see his heels tapping.
Under the table as he, you know, anxiously awaited his turn to answer ridiculous charges and lies and, you know, sort of tangles of insinuation that I wouldn't have been prepared for at all, and I don't know that he was.
Bernie Sanders.
I watched the guy the whole time because he was a presidential candidate once.
He was the populist left, you know, harbinger of change that never came.
He always seemed to duck out the side door and let the main act go on just at the point where you'd think he might fight.
But, you know, that's just cowardice or something.
But here I got to see him up close.
And I had some respect.
For the guy, residual respect, or at least family members who liked him and colleagues who liked him had convinced me there was something there.
Based on what I saw, which is all I could report, there is nothing there but a complete fabrication of attitudes.
It is Bernie Sanders as the Red Diaper Socialist, starring Bernard Sanders.
Here's the deal.
He came in, and you see one way in which is a magic show is you only get to see on TV, especially.
And remember, this was produced for TV. Because no matter who was in the room, they were dwarfed by the audience outside the room, okay?
I knew that because at certain times I wandered into the shot of the family, the Kennedy family, because I was sitting next to them.
And the person who called the Sherpa, who helps the nominee through the Senate processes, warned me, you know, not to get in that shot.
Well, what Bernie was doing when the shot wasn't on him...
Was not listening at all, okay?
Not even looking at all.
Not even doing anything but talking to whoever was delivering pieces of paper to him from behind his back.
He had no interest in Kennedy.
He had no interest in the themes of the hearing.
When Kennedy had said, oh, we now spent $4 trillion on chronic disease when in my Uncle's Day, JFK, we spent zero.
I doubt Bernie even heard the comment.
Maybe he has a copy of that opening statement, but I doubt he'd read it.
He was completely preoccupied with other things.
Nothing that was going on there.
Oh, but then, when the cameras switched to him, you'd think that he was fixed like an eagle on the whole thing and was just waiting to come in.
No, he was waiting his turn.
To do his act in the same way the guy who tap dances waits behind the fat lady.
And until the fat lady's done, all he's doing is looking at his nails.
And when it's his turn to tap dance, though, he comes in.
And that was what he did.
And he thundered.
He must have a hearing problem because he was twice the volume of anybody else.
And he thundered at the guy.
And it was...
It was astonishing because it was transparently at every turn in the service of pharma interests.
And the idea that this guy had ever fooled anyone as a, you know, man of the people was absolutely shocking to me.
I thought, this guy?
He's not even good at what he does.
He yells.
He interrupts.
He won't listen.
He is, I don't think, in the least aware of the issues at hand.
He's not even acknowledging the fact that Kennedy is there because of an unprecedented concern over these issues that's led to an unprecedented alliance.
And so he pulled his act.
He, you know, he thundered away.
He played Bernie the red diaper justice warrior.
He got his facts wrong.
He didn't care what his facts were.
He accused him of all sorts of things.
And then he retired.
And to me, that's a magic show, because all America saw was that moment of fierce outrage and so on.
They didn't see the indifference before.
They didn't see the inattention.
They didn't see the thoughtlessness.
It was a complete stage play.
And the editing and the framing of it might have made it look sincere, but if you were sitting there...
I mean, it was like watching a stripper who, you know, right before is wearing regular clothes and then quickly whips them off, puts on their bikini costume or is topless, does their dance, and then puts their clothes back on and leaves.
That's how committed he was to this historic moment.
Well, I mean, I guess I'm learning a little something about myself here because I was a Bernie supporter.
And I'm recognizing that there's a pattern in my own support of Bernie Sanders that is common to many of my current beliefs, which is I think I start out from a position of assuming face-valueness,
but I am very sensitive to any Glimpse of the strings, the smoke and mirrors, and I immediately recognize the hallmarks of falseness.
So Bernie Sanders was something to me.
I bought the story of Bernie Sanders, and I know the exact moment at which it cracked, which was when, in 2016, he was...
Defeated in the primaries by Hillary Clinton, the DNC rigged the campaign against Bernie Sanders, which would have been the exact moment for him to break with the Democrats with whom he was caucusing and to declare war on them, which I already knew that the Democrats were thoroughly corrupt at that point.
But he didn't.
He endorsed Hillary Clinton, of all people.
The person who had conspired against him.
And so I haven't believed in Bernie Sanders since that moment.
But I can speak with some authority to what it looks like to a believer because prior to 2016, I thought he was unique in the sense that how the hell do you end up in the U.S. Senate as a socialist?
Only if you're a fake socialist.
Right.
Only if you're Bernie Sanders playing the socialist.
You know, I had beginner's mind, you might say, at this thing.
So others are going to be outraged and want to make this very complex.
But I'm like a child, you know, a smart, educated, and somewhat experienced child who wandered into something.
And I can only, as I say, report what I saw, not what I'm supposed to see or not what I would see if I had context or what now, in retrospect, I realize I should have seen.
And what I saw on the Democratic side of that horseshoe, that horseshoe of interrogators, was a kind of band.
You know how if you cast a band like the Monkees or even the Beatles or whatever, you have the goofy guy.
The good-looking guy.
Then, you know, the intellectual, whatever.
Well, they had that kind of casting on the left.
See, the Republicans on the other side looked like a bunch of bankers and maybe owners of small hardware franchises in the Midwest.
The guy from Kansas, who's actually a doctor, Marshall.
The guy from Montana, Steve Daines, and so on.
The so-called farm state senators all just felt like regular people who were kind of delighted to be reaching across the aisle to have a Kennedy in the room, to be kind of making a common cause with the other side for this great...
For, you know, this great goal, making America healthier, longer-lived, more vital, etc.
They wanted to know about how his policies might affect farming and ranching, and they asked other sensible questions.
Over there on the other side—and this sounds partisan to be this crisp in my delineation, but I assure you it's not.
It's simply what I saw.
On the other side of the horseshoe, you had a pharma law firm.
That was cast in a certain way with a superficial diversity.
There's the Navajo senator speaking for the Navajo people.
He was so inept at what he did that he literally appealed to the audience to stop laughing at him and then to the chair who had to remind people not to respond.
He was hurt.
He's new in the game, okay?
You had Bernie as a socialist.
You had Elizabeth Warren as the prosecutorial lawyer, who was also just absolutely horrendous to be near.
I mean, if she was at a party or any sort of gathering, you would flee to the other side.
She was horrific.
And the intensity that they bring to it, and when they ramp up from zero to ten on cue, And if you've ever been on a movie set like I have and seen your own work filmed and so on, you know what you're watching.
It's acting.
There's no other word for it.
You don't go from, like, talking to somebody over your shoulder and getting a little document put in front of you to full-on, you're going to destroy America in five seconds in any organic way.
That's just what it is.
Now, whether it's acting in the service of something larger, we might.
Debate.
But that's what it is.
I agree.
And then, you know, when you were thinking about this as a magic show, I was thinking about it as a stage play.
And I guess, you know, it's probably a distinction without a difference here.
Because if you can see the actors who are not on stage, who are just off stage, waiting to go on because their moment hasn't arrived yet, it is very much the case of the stripper who, you know...
Puts on her jeans and her baggy shirt before, you know, so she doesn't get cold while she's waiting for her set, right?
So if you can see both contexts, it explains what's going on.
And what's going on is that what takes place on the stage is not real.
It's an absolute construct.
But, you know, the metaphor is inept in this sense.
Magic shows announce themselves as such.
You're here to see illusions.
You're here to be astonished.
You know you're going to be fooled, but you're fooled anyway.
Magic shows that don't announce themselves as such are something else.
I'm telling you that, you know, finally, once revealed, once the shades fall from your eye, you realize it's one.
But it's not...
One, because it doesn't warn you that what you're seeing are illusions.
And in fact, if you catch the illusions, you will be berated for everything from conspiratorial thinking to over cynicism or, you know, not understanding how the process works or, you know, being new here.
But once you see it, you see it, okay?
And you're not allowed to catch them at it.
You're not allowed...
You know, Penn and Teller do a very sophisticated form of magic in which they pretend to tell you how the trick works, and then while they're doing that, they do another trick.
This reminds me of a Vegas show I went to once with my wife, where there were a lot of people in the audience who were pretending to be audience members, but were actually complicit in the show.
And my sweet, lovely wife...
Who I think is a little less jaded than I am, couldn't believe when I said, you know, those are collaborators, Amanda, in the audience.
Those are actors.
Really.
Because there's something about the human mind that resists, almost to the death, the belief that it's being deceived by authority figures.
It's too frightening at some level.
We cut off the response.
And so they have all the cards in their favor in the sense that your willingness to see what they're doing is low.
You want to believe.
You want desperately to believe.
But I sort of walked in out of the cold, unready, with too good a seat.
Maybe if I was further in back.
And one thing I'll tell you about the difference between TV and live performance is this.
On TV, you assume that you're seeing something between a performance and reality.
In other words, it cools everything down, it evens it out, it smooths it out.
But when you're live and you're sitting next to the nominee and somebody's yelling at them, yelling at them, lies, charging them with all sorts of things.
Elizabeth Warren, your dirty game of making money off of suing pharma.
Will you continue that dirty game in office?
And you see the guy's shoes going up and down, and you can feel in some sympathetic mammalian primate way, maybe through pheromones, the stress that's building, and you see that person continue in their berating and harassing and Just absolutely vicious attack.
You go, wow, this is tense.
This is weird.
And it's acting.
Acting out war.
So, to your point about Confederates in the audience and all, there's actually a perfect analogy, I think, which is the magic shows by Darren Brown.
You know the guy?
No.
The funny thing is he portrays himself as almost exactly what he is.
But what you don't understand is that you're the Mark.
Right?
He shows you, as you're describing with Penn and Teller, he shows you the Mark who is being fooled.
But the Mark is a confederate.
You're the Mark at home watching.
Right.
And you don't know it.
And so you see something absolutely stunning happen.
And you just don't understand that it is what it said it is.
It's just the players aren't—they've been swapped, and you're part of it, right?
So, you know, for example, he's done a test of the question of whether or not you could program somebody to be an assassin, as some of us imagine may have happened with Sirhan Sirhan, right?
And so anyway, he takes some person who he's going to rewire, and amazingly enough, Let me tell you about another principle that I think applies here.
What is magic?
I wanted to be a magician as a kid, okay?
And so that's one of the reasons I find this metaphor so fertile, because I remember what magic was like when I first encountered it.
And I got this kit, and the The cards had strings attached to them and pieces of gum on the back, and some had back designs on both sides, and some were double-sided with the two faces, as it were.
And I went through it, and I said, okay, to do this simple illusion, I will have to train 10 hours in front of the mirror.
I'll have to use all this complexity just to pull off, you know, A tiny little piece of leisure domain.
And that's what magic is.
Magic is when you over, how can I put it?
You over-determine the effect.
In other words, you're trying to get something to happen for one minute, but you spend hours doing it.
And that's another sense I got at those hearings, that all that appeared to be spontaneous was not at all spontaneous.
Things that you wouldn't imagine are rehearsed are kind of rehearsed.
Points that you think they came up with in the heat of the moment they had decided in advance were going to be introduced in the fake heat of the moment.
The reason magic works is that the magician has done about 50 times the work to pull off the effect, but you don't know about that.
You don't know there are strings and gums attached, and every moment of it is misdirection.
And that's how I felt there.
I was like, I wouldn't know this from TV, but these people have prepared for this big hearing.
They knew it was going to be of interest.
They knew Bobby Kennedy was a huge draw.
They knew that probably this year they won't be on TV with as many eyes on them as they will right now.
Unless they go on Meet the Press or one of those boring shows, they don't break out into popular consciousness very often.
So they knew this was their chance.
And boy, did they take it.
And it had nothing, nothing to do with the business at hand.
It had nothing.
No, no.
Well, it had one thing to do with it.
It was trying to interrupt the nomination of Robert Kennedy.
Well, and that's really the...
The important part of the story is that these people who, I agree with you, Bernie Sanders, practiced his outburst in the shower that morning several times.
Oh, the bony finger?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, some of it is just the work of a lifetime.
You know, he's got his repertoire.
But then you watch Kennedy, who's not doing magic, who's there in the most earnest mission of his life, the result of daily prayer about the welfare of America's children, trying to not be rattled, drawn in, or become false himself.
And that was the battle I saw.
You know, not to, in a way, betray himself and become a character the way they were all characters.
Well, everything is raised to the negative one in this context.
You have Bobby Kennedy, who you and I both know, who is being portrayed as a wild-eyed threat to the health and welfare of Americans, which is the opposite of what he is.
And the status quo being portrayed as the protector of health.
And it is absolutely not that, as we learned so vividly during COVID, but can now see functions across the board.
So you have this body, the Senate, which is supposed to be representing the interests of the public, but it has monetized that role, and it now sells the public out across every issue all the time.
And it is confronting somebody who has burst through the front door And is ready to actually stand up for the health of the public.
It is portraying him as the Grim Reaper.
It's all upside down.
And I guess the point is, it's a magic show or it's a stage play to you and me.
But there's an audience that, and you talked about it a little bit, you said people are too frightened.
To acknowledge the number of Confederates, but there is an audience that cannot conceive of the possibility that it has been duped.
You and I are ready to know that we've been duped.
But one of the reasons it can't is that they frame everything, okay?
You know, there is a famous allusion by David Copperfield.
I'm going to push this metaphor to burn it to the ground.
Because as much as it seems tortured and in some ways awkward, it does yield little bits of...
How does he make the Statue of Liberty disappear?
There's an audience sitting there looking at the Statue of Liberty, and the camera is fixed on their point of view.
It's behind them, on one of their seats, say.
And then the Statue of Liberty disappears.
How does it happen?
Well, it happens because they have to sit in their seats.
The whole bank of seats is on a motor.
It's on a pivot.
And it pivots just slightly over a long amount of time, just incrementally, at which point the Statue of Liberty goes behind a mirror that's reflecting the rest of the harbor.
So the audience moves, and the Statue of Liberty doesn't do anything.
That is the essence of magic, controlling point of view.
That's the first thing you do.
Don't look there, don't look there.
And they usually have a beautiful woman or some attractive person to steer your point of view.
At the old spiritualist shows in the 19th century, when people would get up on stage and pretend to have ectoplasm float through the air, and there would be strange knocks and lights coming from a cabinet, They were always constantly being exposed by some kid who would run to the side and see, you know, who was behind the cabinet and how it was working.
But politics is all about controlling your point of view on the situation such that you can't be that kid.
Once you are that kid the way I was, I didn't think I'd be sitting in the front row.
I didn't think I'd be seeing it from His perspective.
I thought because the press too is in a controlled point of view.
I was sitting up there right with the people.
I could feel the heat.
The spittle was almost able to reach me from Elizabeth Warren's mouth.
And from that point of view, there was no doubt that it was a spiritualist hokum seance.
But in some way, to take the metaphor one level up, the reason that he's a threat to them And the reason they have to take this stance is because besides servicing their clients, whoever they may be, and you could just see a list after the thing, you saw a list of pharma contributions, and it literally accorded with the vehemence of the presentation.
You know, most vehement, Bernie.
Next most vehement, Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, that was a complete revelation.
But the thing was, It was only because I saw it from this point of view that I could feel this way so unequivocally.
And once I had, I was going, I'm going to have a hard time now leaving because I remember when I had girlfriends who thought that psychics were real.
And then once I tell them that psychics aren't real, our relationship has a splinter in it.
And I thought, my relationship with other people is now going to have a splinter in it that I can't, you know.
That I can't heal.
Well, as long as we're burning your analogy to the ground, I would like to participate in that.
Right.
So there's a concept I'm very fond of.
You know what anamorphic art might be?
Well, I'm trying to decode the Latin.
You will know it even if you don't know the term.
So anamorphic art is like...
A chalk drawing on the sidewalk where the sidewalk appears to break away and you could fall into the universe if you stepped too far in one direction or you didn't hop on the bricks that are floating that would allow you to cross the universe.
Have you ever seen these pictures?
Yes.
Okay.
So the thing about those pictures is they look very compelling, but only from one point.
Yes.
From every other point, they look wildly distorted.
Right?
So that's what anamorphic art is.
Now, I'm thinking that what you're telling us is actually that these confirmation hearings are like the inverse of anamorphic art.
There's one person they're not built to fool, and that's the person who is being chastised.
Bobby Kennedy is not going to be fooled by anything that Elizabeth Warren says.
You're absolutely right.
And in fact, the frustration of being Bobby Kennedy is seeing what, from your point of view, is obvious, but you know is not obvious from any other.
Right.
And I will tell you, I have personal experience with this, as you probably do too.
I get all kinds of accusations leveled at me about who I'm working for and what my motivations are and what it has to do with what I failed to acknowledge at first or whatever, right?
Now, I'm in a great position to know it's bullshit because I know how I got.
To, for example, believing that masks might be useful, I could defend it to you to this day.
If COVID had been transmitted on surfaces or by water droplets, then a mask would have had some utility.
Turned out it didn't.
But anyway, the point is, people read into my trajectory all sorts of forces that are shaping what I do and that I'm a limited hangout or something like that.
I'm the only person who can say for sure it's not true, right?
Heather can come pretty damn close to saying for sure it's not true.
But outside of that, everybody else has forced to juggle, you know, various interpretations.
So you can't fool me, but you could fool everybody else to some degree.
And that's what these hearings are.
They're designed to fool everybody but the nominee who has to play along because they don't, you know, Bobby Kennedy can't stand up in the hearing and say, Elizabeth Warren, you're full of shit and you know it.
He can't say that, right?
He has to keep his cool.
So his heel is tapping there on the floor because he's watching this picture developed of him that isn't right.
So anyway, my claim is it's the inverse of an anamorphic confirmation where from every perspective but the nominees, it looks like a proceeding to get to the bottom of something.
And Brett, that's part of the psychological torture of the thing.
In other words, Bobby has the perspective that reveals all.
But he knows that it's privilege to him, and he knows that the lack of it is being exploited by the people around him.
There was a senator there, White House, from Rhode Island, who's a friend of his, who was in his wedding, one of his weddings, who was acting huffing and puffing and angry and didn't ask him any questions, oddly.
He didn't want— For some reason, direct contact.
So he spieled about some medical problems in Rhode Island and some deep bureaucratic esoterica.
But the audience would have no idea that these people are old friends.
Now, imagine from Bobby's point of view, too, when he's accused of things like...
Oh, not properly—you know, being fuzzy about the origins of Lyme disease, okay?
Now, anybody who knows anything about, you know, our recent history of viral infections and so on might have some questions about Lyme disease.
I'm sure that those senators were pretending not to know things constantly.
That they do know.
And he's seeing that.
He probably has even had conversations with a few of them in which they have revealed completely different approaches to things and pretended to be different people.
And then they come out like this.
Certainly, he's met with those people on that stage.
And I'm sure they weren't screaming at him in the hall or in the office, but they're doing it for the camera.
It must be so distracting and frustrating to go, I am at the node of a performance that is absolutely transparent to me and is being sold to everybody else.
You want to stand up.
And I think in the second hearing, he kind of did with Bernie Sanders, because he could have said what he said to Sanders the second day, the first day, which is, you took millions of dollars from pharma.
And the other proof it was a magic show, you know, is that when he pointed back at the magician like that, when he said the unsayable, you're a phony.
You know, you're pretending to have this justice populist approach when, in fact, you're the biggest recipient of that money here.
Bernie practically— Fell apart.
Steam came out of his head.
You could see springs come out of his eyes.
Those were the employees that gave me that money.
That is how unprepared for being challenged he is?
Right.
And in fact, what he did almost speaks exactly to your analogy.
If I recall the exchange correctly, what he did was actually cue on the fact that some people who we can't see, who are off to one side, in a better position to see the magic act, are apparently awakened momentarily.
He tries to usher them back into the fold, and then he says some nonsense.
I think it is the moment at which the curtain is pulled back.
You know, the funny thing about the great American fable, The Wizard of Oz, which I will deem such the great American fable written by this sort of prairie newspaper man who wrote a fantasy series.
About Oz, and then it got turned into a big MGM musical by socialists, basically.
A lot of left-wing writers, a lot of them who had come from Europe in the late 30s.
And it was an obvious allegory about dictatorship, about authoritarianism, and so on.
And who is it that really exposes the wizard in that movie?
People always forget.
I think I know.
It's the dog.
It's the dog.
And why is it the dog?
Because the dog hasn't been conditioned into the sort of obedient, you know, point of view that the rest of them have.
They all look in the right direction.
They're actually surprised.
They look down, oh, that little dog, he ran off.
He didn't keep his seat.
He didn't stay in place.
He wasn't in the awestruck position that humans are when He didn't know.
And I felt like that dog that day.
And that is the secret.
And that's how Bernie acted.
He acted like Toto had just come up and, you know, yapped at him.
And suddenly he was caught.
And I thought, these guys have such confidence in the controlling forces and the stagecraft of this thing.
And for some reason, it was the height of the arrogance on Kennedy's part to say the most He waited a day to even try it.
Even he was intimidated.
They got him to play along in the first day, to a certain extent.
It isn't any knock on him.
The guy is on a mission.
He wants to do what's necessary.
He shows proper fealty or whatever.
Deference.
By the second day, he was worn out.
The Toto in him came out and just pointed and said, you know, hey, wizard, you take the money from the people that you're sitting here railing against.
And he wasn't prepared for it.
No one ever does that.
Well, I love your point about Toto the dog, because for one thing, you know, you can make a lot of arguments about why the dog doesn't.
Behave as the dog is supposed to because the dog isn't a person and doesn't know what it's supposed to be doing.
But there's also just this aspect of, you know, a dog has a different priority of perceptual modes.
And, you know, you might be fooled by what things look like and the dog thinks something doesn't smell right.
Right.
Oh, exactly.
Exactly.
It has a different intention set.
It has different priorities for what gets its attention.
And it has a loyalty.
The point is the dog, even if the dog is just a pet, the dog is bred to be loyal to its people and to reveal things to its people that they might not know about.
If somebody's sneaking up on you, the dog barks.
And here you've got a guy behind a curtain hoodwinking people, and the dog can smell it.
So, I don't know.
I mean, I like your point about...
And like I say, I think Kennedy himself goes, okay, I'm going into a hall of power.
I'm going to...
Play this game to the extent that I should to show respect or to keep order or, you know, or to maintain the deals I might have made with people, you know, because there are negotiations going on all the time about votes and so on.
He maybe doesn't want to embarrass the Republican senators for their support.
He doesn't want to—and he certainly doesn't want to come off as the thing that they've already pre-bunked him as, as it were.
The big conspiracy theory, Bobby Kennedy, who's got an ego and doesn't draw within the lines.
But at a certain point, he just lost patience with playing his part.
He got up out of his seat.
I refuse to have my point of view confined by the angles that you have laid out for me.
And I'm just going to point, and I'm going to speak the obvious.
I think he won at that point.
As far as the hearings are any sort of a debate or a contest or a battle of wills, he won.
He was winning the whole time, though.
The funny thing was, Brett, if you were in the room the first day, there was no anti-Kennedy contingent there of any size or volume.
He was there with his supporters.
He was there with his supporters.
Those who have spent any time at all delving know that Bobby Kennedy is actually earnestly trying to improve their health and the health of their children, and that the forces opposing him are interested in maintaining their capacity to prevent that from happening.
So that was also not visible.
You might have imagined if you were watching a television that there were, you know, both factions represented, but of course it doesn't make any sense.
And I would point out that one thing, at the point that Bobby changed modes and went after Sanders, I noticed conspicuously that he called him Bernie.
And I think the point is there's really two Congresses.
There's the Congress of Senator this and Representative that.
And there's the Congress of the few names you know.
You know, the Elizabeth Warrens, the Bernie Sanders, the Thomas Massies, Ron Johnson, AOC. These people have stepped into a different realm where their power comes more directly from the people.
And Bobby also, it's interesting that Bobby is Bobby to us, right?
He's RFK, but he's Bobby.
The point is he has a direct relationship with the public, and he was calling out Bernie's direct relationship with the public and pointing out that Bernie is falling down on his direct obligation to the public in taking money from the people poisoning them.
Well, Brett, the audience might overestimate my familiarity with him or my friendship.
I've spoken to him once on the phone, okay?
I've never spoken to him face-to-face at the points where I could have security whisked him away at a couple of events.
So I really don't know him all that well.
I am sympathetic to his cause and so much so that I spoke at your event.
On his behalf.
But lest anyone think I was there full of confirmation bias because my best friend or good friend or even friend was being grilled, that's not the case.
He's a guy I've spoken to once for an hour-long phone call.
That's interesting.
I didn't know that.
I assumed you knew him better.
I wouldn't have imagined that it would color your view.
You know, I know you too well.
But others might.
And I'm here to tell them that that wasn't what was going on.
So I want to return to a different element of the question.
And forgive me, I've lost your full framing of it.
But you were talking about the fear that causes the public, or some large fraction of it, not to fully comprehend the degree to which they've been had.
And I wanted to explore it a little bit mechanistically.
Sure.
So I've long thought that there was a lot to be said about Stockholm Syndrome and that Stockholm Syndrome has an obvious, to me, evolutionary explanation.
The explanation being that if somebody has complete control over your fate, if you've been taken hostage by people who have A situation quite common in the early and largest part of human history, I would say.
Something you could probably count on happening in your own lifetime.
Right.
It was not uncommon.
It's something that natural selection will have had plenty of opportunity to work on your response to.
But my point is, if you find yourself in that situation, actually, probably the best thing you can do is try to understand the predicament that put your captors in their position, whether it's rational or not, right?
If you can convince your captors that you actually understand what's motivating them and you sympathize, they might feed you.
They might let you live.
View you as a human being rather than a simple pawn, right?
A chip to be traded.
And so anyway, the basic argument is Stockholm Syndrome is surprising the first time you hear about it, but it actually makes sense from the point of view of your well-being once you've been taken hostage.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Right.
So my point is going to be that the public finds itself most of the time Prior to this election, the public is basically in a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with government, which is, to the extent that you recognize that your entire government has been captured by forces that are hostile to your well-being, it doesn't tell you what to do about it.
In fact, there probably isn't anything to do about it in your average year.
And I speak as somebody who's been trying to do something about it for decades.
There is nothing to do.
The only thing you can do is make your antipathy obvious to your very powerful enemies.
Right.
So, I would argue that part of what keeps people from recognizing the full extent to which they are being deceived is that knowing isn't helpful.
And not knowing...
Playing along with the deception allows you to actually negotiate within the parameters, get a little bit, you know, greater ration here, or, you know, a little bit more immunity to the terror there.
So it's a reasonable, I don't like it, but it's a reasonable thing to do.
And the problem, though, is I don't think the public who may be persuaded to continue to humor the theater of the Senate.
In this case, I don't think the public understands that this is the moment at which you should turn on the terrible people who've been parasitizing you, because this is the moment at which they are actually back on their heels.
And to the extent that you recognize that this is theater or magic or whatever the appropriate analogy is, this is the moment in which there's a tremendous amount to be done.
In other words, an uprising on behalf of Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel at this moment could turn the tide.
It could put the fear of God into the people, into the senators who would otherwise vote against them so that they would elect not to.
The game theory says this is the moment at which it makes sense to be aware of the full extent to which you're being fooled.
And I don't think people get that.
They're just sort of habitually used to pretending that the theater is real.
This is a subject that fascinates me almost more than any other, and I ponder it over and over.
Why do people participate in their own exploitation at the level they do, even after it's manifest or should be to them?
And I've approached it from all kinds of angles, and here's where I am today in the evolution of my own thought.
I think there's a voluntary aspect to what you might call mass formation psychosis.
I've studied hypnosis.
Hypnosis is largely voluntary on the part of the subject.
The idea that a trance is a moment in which your volition is violated and your will is overcome and you become a kind of automaton in the hands of a greater power is actually not believed by hypnotists.
One way I know this is that I bought out a dead hypnotist library, hundreds of books, and I was able to see his underlinings and his notations and the books that were most thumbed through.
And what I learned is that hypnosis is nothing more than our response to authority intensified.
Here's one of the ways they've proved that.
Okay.
Men cannot be hypnotized very easily by women.
White people cannot be hypnotized very easily by black people.
People who believe themselves to be of higher social rank cannot be hypnotized by people of lower social rank.
In other words, hypnosis is a contract.
To act as though I am your submissive in return for whatever comes from that.
And hypnosis in the 19th century was portrayed often as a form of almost mind rape.
It was an aristocratic, good-looking man with a mustache going like this over a young, innocent woman.
That represented it as magnetism, as eroticism or something.
But in fact, it's much closer to what you said.
It's a rather reasonable, economically rational, biologically rational decision to obey and play along.
But I always believe that when you're playing along, there's a part of you Which has also got to be active for survival.
That is, constantly scanning for the prison door got left open.
Or tonight, the guards are snoring.
Whenever.
You know, when you cross the Delaware, okay?
And this is the crossing the Delaware moment.
And I think that a lot of people are sensitive to the fact that this is our leverage point.
This is where we break through.
This is where we're at maximum strength.
Or also, this is the point where if we lose, we lose everything, so we may as well.
And so there's a rational actor always inside the supposedly hypnotized, enchanted target.
But you've got to let him out because you don't do it that often.
You can only do it once or twice.
And it might seem that All the times when it wasn't worth it have created a habit of not unleashing it.
But if you miss it, you miss everything.
That's beautiful.
You've absolutely made my week.
You've told me things I didn't know here.
They comport with the things I do know, including personally.
As far as I know, I'm not hypnotizable.
Me neither.
It does not surprise me one bit.
And, Brett, I think that in some ways people have talked about speciation or all the different ways we've sort of diverged into different groups that are almost cognitive tribes or emotional tribes or temperamental tribes.
And the unhypnotizable, for whatever reason, whether it's genetic or our upbringing or some combination of traits, have found themselves in a frustrated minority.
Because it's not just that they can't be fooled, it's that they have a self-possession and a confidence in their own powers, perhaps, in their own will, in their own resourcefulness, or in their own soul, that won't allow them to give it up.
They value their identity too strongly to merge it with An inferior force or even a superior one in the same way that others are willing to.
A hundred percent.
So my experience is I've polarized every institution I've ever been a part of.
Which I find funny because I think I'm...
Generally participating in these institutions because I believe in their mission and I want to help.
But it's amazing how polarizing that is.
You know, what happened to me at Evergreen shows this exactly.
I met up against a superior force and I just wasn't going to say the things that they wanted to intimidate me into saying.
And it changed everything about my life and our family's life.
You know how to piss off an institution?
Take it at its word.
That's so right.
And I've done that over and over.
I've gone into Time Magazine, and I was working there, and I said one time, in my innocent way, because I was committed to the idea of journalism and sort of popular journalism for all America, which is what Time Magazine used to do, and I said, why, when we only have 52 covers a year, do we often have the exact same story as Newsweek, even when it's not the lead story of the week?
In other words, why would we, who are supposedly competing with Newsweek, do a story on some tertiary issue, and they're doing it the same time?
Are we in cahoots in some way that I don't know?
Or are we really journalists, you know, going our own way?
Well, how long did I last at Time magazine.
Unfortunately, I You know, they kind of fell apart before I got kicked out.
But in almost every job and every institutional role I've played, I've come to it idealistically.
I've looked at its principles, its constitution, so to speak, and I've decided if I can sign off on that, I'm going to go all the way with it.
And then I start noticing people, but, but, but, but, but.
Falling by the wayside and saying, you know, you got to go along to get along and things.
And by the end, I'm out of my butt.
I've maybe got a few friends and I've wrecked everything.
So I want to go back slightly on what I said.
There's one institution I haven't yet polarized.
It's the Brownstone Institute, which I take to be the result of the fact.
That it is composed of all of the people who polarize every institution that they have been a part of.
So I'm hoping it doesn't disappoint me in this regard.
But I also wanted to take your point about hypnotism and project it onto what we know about the Milgram experiment.
I get it mixed up with the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Every time I hear it, I need it to be outlined again for me.
Well, let's say that there are three, actually.
The Milgram Experiment is the one in which Stanley Milgram set up a bunch of different scenarios in which the actual subject of the experiment is instructed to give...
Electric shocks of increasing voltage to another confederate of the experiment who he thinks is a subject of the experiment, ostensibly in the context of training the mind to remember things.
I remember it now.
And so anyway, it becomes obvious to the actual subject of the experiment that they are in danger of doing harm and maybe even killing the person that they are being forced to shock.
And the experimenter tells them that they have no choice.
They have to continue with the experiment.
The punchline of the story is that something like 10% of people do not go along with the experimenter.
90% do go along with the experimenter who tells them that they have no choice but to shock this other person, maybe to death.
Many of them are uncomfortable with the fact that they have to do this, but they cannot seem to escape in their own mind the authority of this person wearing a lab coat telling them they have no choice but to continue with the experiment.
I know myself to be one of the 10% who would stand up and tell the experimenter to go fuck himself.
No question about it.
But if you put the lens that you have just given us with respect to hypnotism on this, if most people are intimidated by the person who appears to have the scientific credential, the doctor or the scientist in the lab coat telling them you have no choice,
Then they will effectively be in this hypnotized state or whatever the actual state is where they accept what they're being told because they literally don't know how to override the power differential.
Well, so that suggests I think that the hypnotizer or the hypnotist is more powerful than they are.
When you put on a code, okay.
I'm a student of con artists and con artistry and charlatanism.
And there was a book that came out a few years ago, and they made it in a movie called Catch Me If You Can.
And it was about a serial con artist who pretended to be a surgeon, airline pilot, and all sorts of things.
But all the things that he pretended to be had one thing in common.
They wore uniforms.
And those uniforms projected a sense of authority that has been earned in your mind over your whole lifetime, right?
So it's not the doctors.
It's not a coat because it's white that causes you to obey the person.
It's because it reminds you of every other doctor's coat you've seen in your life, maybe going back to your childhood, your pediatrician, and all the people on TV. And that thing is able to conduct this, you know, to over leverage the situation with all this accumulated symbolic force against you just having to make a momentary choice.
So it's really a power differential.
It's why a priest can run into a room and suddenly tell everybody what to do, and they'll listen to him, not the guy who's dressed in, you know, a blue polo shirt.
Because he's bringing with him, and that's what symbols do, you know, they store and they hold authority, and it's what uniforms do.
You know, that's why, how do you know if somebody's a dictator?
They have the most medals.
You know, and they have the epaulettes, and they're overkilling with the uniform.
So my story about the Milgram experiment is really that the power is not mental in the sense that, like, there's some kind of magnetism or situation going on in the room.
It's exploiting your entire history with doctors, scientists.
All of the prestige of that is being brought to bear On little you, because I'm telling you again that I think the essence of magic is asymmetry.
You're just there right here for an hour, but they've been practicing the trick for 100 hours.
You're just here, little you, to do an experiment to help out that day, but they are wearing the very authority of science.
Well, I agree.
Unfortunately, I think given how much we should be discussing about what you've seen in Washington becoming a bit personal, but...
Who cares?
Yeah.
Somehow, and I'm convinced it's developmental.
I'm actually convinced it's downstream of my so-called learning disability.
But my learning disability just altered my relationship to authoritative texts and...
So let me describe it this way.
In theory, I'm a dyslexic.
I don't really believe in the category.
I don't think it's a disorder in the way that it's portrayed.
But nonetheless, whatever it is, I'm dyslexic.
And that means that my relationship, even to what's on the written page, is uncertain.
You know, as a kid reading, I would have to analyze.
The content that I was reading.
And when I read something that didn't make any sense, I had to go back and reread it to make sure I had gotten it right.
Because one of the reasons that things don't make sense is that I had misread them.
But the other reason that things didn't make sense was that they didn't make sense.
And so I got very good at spotting illogic, right?
Because I had to distinguish that between having just misinterpreted the letters on the page.
So anyway...
I don't take the texts as authoritative because I more or less habitually am constantly testing them to see when they say stuff that can't be true.
Same thing with the person in the front of the room.
I don't care that they have a PhD.
Frankly, I don't care that they have a Nobel Prize.
I am always listening to hear when they make an error or a leap that isn't justified because frankly...
For somebody like me, that's where all the profit is, discovering what other people don't know, right?
That's where you can discover something new, right?
Or correct something that's been broken.
And so I think those two things are the same.
I think there's a sense in which if you get enough reward for spotting the magic trick and how it's done, or spotting the...
Overclaim or the reliance on authority that is not justified by that authority being accurate or insightful, then this is all just the same stuff.
And frankly, it's why, and I assume that you'll have a different explanation for how you ended up in this sort of unhypnotizable category, but that if you are that sort of person, A, there are contexts in which you're probably not very functional.
As a part of a military regiment where rank is assigned and warned on the shoulders, you might be questioning things that you're not even allowed to question.
On the other hand, in a moment where stuff is just broken and stupid and wrong, you're like a kid in a candy store.
You just don't know where even to focus.
There are so many things to point out that don't make any sense that you could do it all day every day and never run out of subject matter.
Anyway, I do think that this is one of those moments where things have gotten so—the narrative, our own narrative about who we are and what we do as a nation is so wrong that this is the moment for the unhypnotizable to help bring others along.
And, you know, one of the things that makes you unhypnotizable is when you know more about a subject than an authority figure.
Which is often not hard.
Which is often not hard, okay?
And I was sitting there with this Senate committee with all its august eagles and high-podium judgmental seating and so on and all the trappings of authority and prestige, and they were saying things that were just ridiculous.
One guy acted like it was heresy to say that the COVID virus had been engineered.
And the minute you heard these things, you were like, now I realize not only are they faking it, but they're not able, if they weren't faking it, they're not able to have...
An intelligent conversation anyway.
You know, sometimes we want to grant them fakery because the alternative is stupidity.
But the reason I think we resist, you know, breaking out of the frame or calling it as it is or whatever, breaking the trance, is the reason our complicity is so deep and so habitual is that we've got an investment in these institutions.
And there's another concept called cognitive dissonance.
You know, it came about from two sociologists who embedded themselves in a doomsday cult in Chicago.
And they made a hypothesis that when the world did not end when the charismatic leaders said it would, people would not desert the cult because they had given their entire lives and sometimes all their money and rearranged where they lived.
To follow this cult.
And so rather than suddenly go, oh, damn, I'm getting out of here.
This guy's wrong.
He says he knows when the end of the world is.
The sociologists predicted that they would protect their accumulated investment and defend him and listen to any rationalization, any excuse.
And in fact, they would double down on their loyalty to the cult lest...
The terror of having wasted their lives on this guy descend on them.
And I think that's what holds us back some days.
You go, because no matter who you are in America, unless you're just an absolute, you know, you were born Mark Twain or something.
You made an investment in the U.S. Senate.
You made an investment in that Capitol Dome and the notion of democracy and senatorial dignity and doctors and lawyers and da-da-da.
And you're going to have to give it up just because you saw something.
And it's going to make you wonder about why you completed your college degree.
When you had something else interesting to do.
Why in the past you have bowed to this authority, made yourself a part of this system, sought the credentials, taken the tests, because once it falls, you're going to have to revisit all those decisions, and you might not want to.
And for me, it's easy.
Yeah, I got fooled.
I forgive myself.
Yeah, I agree.
And actually, it leads me to another one of these.
Very personal thoughts.
But I think we live in a landscape where, I don't know about you, but I run into a lot of people who hold me to a standard that I regard as not only impossible, but stupid.
A standard of, you know, were you right about everything during COVID from the get-go?
No, I was not right about everything about COVID from the get-go.
I did get smarter.
Very rapidly.
I learned an incredible amount.
But no, I got stuff wrong from the beginning.
And to me, that doesn't strike me as an indictment of anything.
In fact, my feeling is that's the whole game, is can you figure out what you misunderstand and fix it?
And the only way, in the case of COVID, that you could get everything right from the get-go was that you were just so cynical that you didn't buy anything.
And while in the case of COVID, that may have worked because, frankly, everything we were told about COVID turned out to be garbage pretty much.
It's not evidence that you're smart.
It's evidence that you're cynical.
And so, yes, I accept that some cynics may have beaten me to a proper analysis of COVID. But it's not like they've demonstrated the capacity to think their way out of some other puzzle.
So anyway, I don't view it as a particularly powerful position.
It is a manipulative, nonsensical...
That someone can't be right now because they were wrong in the past.
If that were true, then every artist who wrote a bad poem at 17 would be held to that rather than the masterpiece they wrote at 40. Oh, Einstein, I see it took you a while to get to the general theory of relativity.
What were you thinking before then?
How did you think things work?
Well, mistakenly, obviously, you know, what we're not allowed to grow anymore.
The thing that I kept thinking at the Bobby Kennedy hearing was, don't ever write your thoughts down.
This guy has written book after book, exploring all sorts of You know, from environmental situations to medical situations.
And he's explored them kind of from the point of view of what used to be in England, let's say, back when, the enlightened amateur, which was all there was back when.
You know, as a lawyer and as a logical thinker and a good researcher and somebody with good values, he would go into various areas and satisfy his curiosity and try to state the truth about them.
We've done this year after year, decade after decade.
But he mistakenly created a record as far as getting confirmed in the Senate.
He should have probably just, if there had been ChatGPT, consulted the conventional wisdom at every turn.
Whatever mistake he's ever made, whatever statement he might have come out with that was more colorful than another, whatever flat error.
Or overstatement he might have made, besides just taking things out of context, was used against him.
It's almost as though you're charged as an adult with having been a child once.
I remember when you couldn't tie your shoes.
You know, what reason do you think you can run a giant department of the United States government?
It was that kind of an absurd reduction of his past that he was made to answer for.
And I thought, these people don't even have pasts.
I don't even know where Mastro Cortez—I spend most of my time in the winter in Nevada—came from.
Like, out of nowhere, she's a senator from Nevada.
It's all very easy for people who have, like, indefatigably and relentlessly pursued anonymity and unaccountability in their lives to come up against somebody who's put words on paper his whole life.
Well, actually, I mean, your point about you're not allowed to grow, that that's taken—any evidence that you have grown in your perspective is taken as evidence as an indictment is fascinating because It actually suggests that the cynics who are wielding evidence that your position has evolved against you are actually closely aligned analytically with those who were peddling what they called settled science
during COVID, right?
Because the idea of settled science, I mean, A, that concept doesn't really exist in science.
There's nothing that is beyond question in science, inherently.
We don't prove things.
We disprove things.
And so the idea that there is settled science and we don't question it, actually, that is the death knell to science.
Once you decide that there are things that, you know, once you've got a consensus in science, then anybody who questions it is a crank.
Well, then you've just taken every person who has radically advanced the cause of science and put them in the permanent crank category where they can't escape, right?
Because every great idea starts as a minority of one, right?
It's never the consensus.
It is the heterodox view.
And most of the stuff that starts as a minority of one never escapes that category.
Most of it's wrong.
But if you take the whole category and throw it out, you literally can't have scientific progress.
So I think...
Settled science used to be called dogma.
Settled science is the thing that science arose to challenge.
Settled science was my dad said because his dad said...
I'm doing it because the priest said, because his priest said, and I'm doing it because it has this chain of title that goes back to some ultimate authority.
And in fact, I don't even want to test the proposition that, you know, the earth...
Isn't the center of the universe?
Because if I do, it puts me at odds with people.
And who's going to back me?
Man, there's nothing lonelier than the scientist who's discovered that his whole university is wrong about something.
What's he supposed to do?
And there have been people in that position.
You know, recently under COVID, there were a lot of people who were...
Able to look around at their medical school or whatever, their biology department and say, I am surrounded by people who either don't know or are going along for reasons of, you know, social and power preservation.
What do I do?
Yeah, the entire academy indicted itself.
And so basically, you know, the odd thing is really that Most universities didn't have a single person stand up and say, actually, I don't know why, but all my colleagues have got this wrong.
Every university should have had multiple people saying that, and it didn't happen.
But for all kinds of reasons, a bunch of people left largely Europe.
And now parts of Asia and other parts of the world, Africa in larger and larger numbers, to come to America.
And they did so at a point in intellectual history where settled things didn't quite have the prestige they had.
They usually came from countries, and maybe still do, where a church or a tradition or, you know, whatever, a patriarchy or matriarchy still rules on things.
But in America, we basically came about Simultaneous with what we call the enlightenment.
So, you know, we were able to build Washington Our capital city, where I'm sitting right now, and it looks like a frickin' architectural experiment.
Long, straight lines with pinnacles that line up.
Who knows the suns?
It might be a sundial for all of you.
That's one of the spooky characters, characteristics of the place.
But it's an Enlightenment place, and the conspiracy theories say it's Masonic.
Whatever.
It has been designed.
It's a rational place.
It doesn't resemble other places.
It celebrates the mind over tradition, as it were.
It subordinates tradition to experiment, to growth, to freedom, and so on.
America, culturally, used to celebrate and glorify The cowboy, the genius, the Jimmy Stewart character in a Frank Capra movie who goes to Washington and says, wait, all these people are doing it for the money?
I just want to help the boys of America, you know, in that plot.
We used to celebrate those characters because those characters are, in a sense, scientists, because they are willing to depart a consensus based on evidence that they refuse to pretend isn't there.
They refuse to pretend that politics helps people when it's actually hurting people.
They refuse to pretend that science describes a situation when the experiment can't be reproduced.
That used to be our default setting.
What the hell happened, man?
How did they beat that out of us?
Yeah, what the hell happened?
And, I mean, the problem is that the lessons that are most relevant now...
Are just slightly too old for us to map them correctly, right?
Because what is taking place here, I've heard people call vaccines the religion that has overtaken the Senate.
I called them the other—I said—I literally said that on Twitter.
I said, who would have guessed that the American religion would be vaccination and vaccines?
All right.
Well, I don't mean—I love that point.
I want to kind of correct it for one thing based on my own schema.
Right.
Which is that I would argue that a religion— Is a cult that has been refined and has stood the test of time, that has been refined by evolution.
And therefore, we have lots of cults which are more harmful to the people who believe in them than beneficial.
And only occasionally does something evolve into a religion that is more beneficial to the people who believe it than harmful.
So anyway, my point would be, this vaccine stuff, it's a cult.
It's not a religion.
And the irony of it...
Yeah, I definitely see that to you.
Definitely, you're right.
But the irony of it is that you're watching, you know, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and the rest going after Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy's knowledge on this topic is encyclopedic.
I know that because I've spent hours talking to him about it.
I've learned many things from him that I did not know that turn out to absolutely revolutionize my view of what these things are.
Most of these people who are Raising their voices and pretending that Bobby Kennedy is some threat to health don't know what an adjuvant is or what effect it might have.
We just had a psychic moment.
Because I was sitting so close behind him, and because I'm the kind of guy that everybody can see I am, watching me gesture and lean back and forward, I wanted to go up in his ear and say, ask them what an adjuvant is.
Yeah.
If they love vaccines so much, ask them how they work.
Say, what is a vaccine?
I'm not sure that we're talking about the same thing.
What's a vaccine to you?
At one point, he was challenged on the notion that he had once said the COVID vaccine has been the most dangerous or harmful vaccine in history in terms of side effects.
He was challenged on that.
Well, he said, well, I can only say what has been reported through the VAERS system.
And the minute he said that, they said, that's not what I was asking.
That's exactly what they asked, whether they knew it or not.
Right.
But it was mostly incantatory.
That's another thing about magic.
Magic just, you know, uses magic words.
And vaccine has become a magic word.
And anti-vax has become a magic word.
And they were going, anti-vax, anti-vax, anti-vax, as though just by sheer weight of negativity and bad vibes, they could put him down.
Just call him the name enough that he'll be tarred with it forever.
And I was like, well, that's like calling somebody anti-vax.
I don't know, anti-candy or something.
Because they don't like certain kinds of candy.
Or they think sugar's bad for you.
But there was no intelligent discussion of the matter.
None.
They just wanted their incantations.
They just wanted to berate and push this authority that they have for reasons that are really confusing once you see them in person.
You go, how does Bernie Sanders win an election?
How does Elizabeth Warren do it?
You know, why would you want to even be around that person or see them on TV? It's actually mysterious to me.
And some of the non-entity senators, you have no idea how they got there.
Through what machine were they placed in that role?
Well, I remember thinking that when, what was his name?
George Bush Sr.'s VP. Why am I blanking on his name?
Quayle?
Dan Quayle?
Yeah, Dan Quayle.
When Dan Quayle suddenly showed up on all of our radar and was like, what was this guy doing in the Senate?
You know?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
How could he have gotten there?
But as I also say, over on the right side of that horseshoe, there was Senator Ron Johnson, okay?
And I have met him before, only once, and was able to listen to him and give a talk.
Hear him in conversation.
And he was listening the whole time to Kennedy.
He wasn't taking notes or doing any of the theater of paying attention.
He didn't have anybody telling him what to do.
He wasn't turning to an aide.
He was listening the whole time.
And then he had some very probing, very, I think, pertinent and legible questions.
For the person.
And I thought, okay, that guy is the standard.
He's the control.
That's what a senator would do.
They'd listen.
They'd think about the principles and the stakes.
They would address themselves to the matter in a serious way.
And then they would let it be answered and listened and not interrupt.
Okay, that should be the norm.
But it isn't.
That was the exception.
That's what the founders envisioned.
As what legislators should be.
They should be citizens who go there to represent our interests and employ their special powers to call people to testify, have a staff to help them integrate information.
And, you know, that really is who Ron Johnson is.
And so, anyway, the idea that there are a couple of these exceptions, but the others, you know, they really are the money changers.
Bernie Sanders turns out to be a pharma money changer.
And the whole story is just on its head.
And the thing, I probably already said it here, but there's something to me that is absolutely maddening about watching Yes, I get it.
These senators, they have a problem, which is that they need to get reelected, and we have a corrupt system that requires them to come up with enough money to get reelected.
I understand how it works.
But at the end of the day, Bernie Sanders is actually willing to continue to put children in harm's way in order to protect his position as a senator.
These are children.
Yes, he is.
And I would expect...
Anybody with even a little bit of integrity to understand that, yeah, it may be that you can't do the job correctly.
You can't keep your seat as a senator and put children first.
But I would expect any reasonable, decent person to decide that in that circumstance, you have to go with protecting kids, come hell or high water.
And it's amazing how rare that characteristic is.
Brett, at the hearings, I heard the term or the name, the title, Children's Defense Fund?
What?
Health Defense Fund?
Yeah.
Used as though it were suspicious and dubious.
You run something called the...
It was Bernie who said it.
He did it when he put up the onesies placard.
He said something called the Children's Health Defense Fund.
And you're advertising on your website.
And, you know, Kennedy had to demur and say, I don't run it anymore.
I'm not associated with it.
I don't have an active role there.
I don't decide what products they sell.
But Bernie used it, though it was the most dubious name for a thing.
And I thought, Bernie, you know, it's not just—how can you project all your cynicism onto him?
Maybe that's how they do it.
Through what psychic trick are they able to countenance and rationalize their own lack of care for children's health?
That's the question.
And it is a bit of a mystery, but I got closer—I think I got closer to solving it than I used to.
I guess I used to think that if someone was a socialist or something, socialism takes the afterlife and it puts it here on Earth.
It says, I won't expect to go to heaven after I die.
We'll all go to heaven sometime in the future once we've built utopia, once we've built this just society.
And I thought, they can rationalize anything on the way to that.
War, year zero, genocide-style Pol Pot.
You know, wipe out your rural population so that you can liberate the farmland for the new...
Anyway, I thought that maybe was it.
But I don't think it's that anymore.
I don't think Bernie the Socialist or, you know, Elizabeth Warren, the puritanical sort of congregationalist New England scold against power, you know, she's kind of like an abolitionist.
That's kind of the...
Role she's playing in terms of historical symbolism.
I don't think they're doing it because their ideas give them ends justify the means excuse.
I think they're doing it because they enjoy it.
I think they're doing it for reasons that we all do the things we do.
You and I like talking, thinking, conversing, testing our ideas.
Other people like watching baseball games, so they get jobs as baseball commentators or coaches.
They're up there because they like it.
Maybe they don't spend all their time in hearings, but there's something about being a senator that they like and what part of it.
And they like it so much that they're willing to lie.
They're willing to take money.
They're willing to ignore the consequences of their decisions in order to have that.
Whether it's that pleasure, that reward, what is the reward?
Well, I don't understand abnormal psychology as well as I should have, but their psychologies, I think, are abnormal and they're gaining some satisfaction, some nourishment for their particular psychological, emotional mechanisms that we can't see.
That is more important to them than reality.
Well, and more important to them than protecting kids.
And, I mean, I think this goes exactly to your point about abnormal psychology.
Because I would think that that's the line that would be impossible for anyone remotely normal to rationalize across.
And yet, here you go.
As you point out, children's health defense is being used as some sort of self-evident slander, which is preposterous.
And in fact, even the onesies themselves, I look at those onesies and I think, well, onesies aren't my thing, but those onesies are supportive of informed consent and freedom of speech, which are both principles that I hold in the highest regard.
The idea that these onesies are suspect is strange to me.
That the organization Children's Health Defense is inherently suspect is strange.
And, you know, if you do know where to stand to watch this magic trick being done, it does make the broken characters who are playing their absurd role, it makes them look demonic.
Okay.
I think I have a clue.
And I saw this in every one of those senators, in every one that hectored him, whether they were doing it cynically or performatively or whatever, they all lacked humor.
They all lacked a sense of humor.
And the reason that Bernie could launch that ridiculous sentence Tell me again, do you support these onesies?
It's because there's something wrong in his head.
He can't get a frame outside of himself and his own beliefs and thoughts and systems.
He has no sense of irony.
He doesn't know that onesies is an inherently funny word.
You probably shouldn't say it in the Senate, except in the joke.
It's a punchline word.
Yeah, it's a punchline word.
And you probably shouldn't put up actual photos of children's underwear, basically, behind you as a backdrop for your inquisition.
Larger than life.
This is a tin ear on an almost spiritual level.
It suggests a deformity, actually.
A deformity meaning, I can't...
I can't even plausibly get outside of myself.
I can't get outside myself long enough to watch my own act.
I am so consumed by whatever it is, my importance or my needs or my sense of righteousness.
And I can't—you look at one of those senators that day on that left side who said anything that was funny, and I'll give you ten bucks.
You can write me.
There wasn't any.
I think you're exactly right about this.
And I think that actually the lack of humor is a telltale sign of a kind of mental deformity.
We see it in woke culture.
Woke culture is absolutely devoid of a capacity for humor.
And I think it means exactly what you're suggesting.
I also think that there's just an evolutionary basis for this.
And I will tell you that evolutionarily, humor is something that is not well understood.
I've done a lot of thinking about what it is.
And one of the things that is true about it is that it is highly effective at discovering who is a faker.
And I want you to just put yourself in the mindset of, you know, you're in a crowd and somebody funny, whether it's a comedian on the stage or it's just somebody with a commanding presence and an ability to engage in humor, is talking to the crowd and they say something and one of two things happens.
Either they say something and the crowd erupts in laughter, but you don't know what's funny and you suddenly feel exposed.
Because you're not laughing and everybody else is, right?
Or they say something and you think it's funny and you laugh, but they haven't gotten to the funny part yet.
Equally, this exposes you as not really one of us.
And even to the fact that humor involves this odd fact of timing, right?
Comedy timing.
Why does the particular delivery of a joke have a very different effect if you fail to get the timing right?
And to me, it's like there's a trigger.
And if you are one of us, there is a certain count before you get to the whiplash of the punchline.
And you will arrive at exactly the right moment so that the whole room is in resonance, right, laughing at the same moment.
But if you screw up the delivery, then the point is you break the rhythm of it, and so people arrive haphazardly at the recognition of what's funny, and it just doesn't function that way.
Anyway, the point is all of that only works if you have, in a sense, a shared consciousness, right?
If you've been raised on the same stuff in the same context so that Your mind, yeah, you have an individual mind, but that mind is also part of a collective mind that knows what's funny and knows what isn't funny.
And so anyway, point being, your senators who lack a sense of humor are pretending to be us, but they have no sense.
Exactly, exactly.
Here's another moment of humor from the hearings.
Elizabeth Warren or something, I think it was her, said, Go to work on behalf of pharma.
And he said, I don't think they want me.
And everybody laughed because in this case, the humor was the truth.
The truth in a setting in which you don't expect to hear the truth.
The obvious truth spoken in a way that embarrasses authority.
You know, nothing can get you killed faster in a dictatorship, being the one person to laugh when the dictator goes by, right?
So there is a social price to laughing out of turn.
America, one of the great hypnosis of America, you know, lies above government and everything else at the level of culture and soul, took a turn when they...
When they embedded fake laugh tracks in our TV shows, okay?
Which were merely...
The laughter signaled, this is America laughing.
This is the consensus laugh.
In other words...
If there's settled science, there could be settled humor.
We came up with this idea of consensus comedy in America.
And when you watch the late-night shows like Colbert now, they are actually just training sessions in what you should laugh at.
If you're a member of the class of people who buys the kind of products that The Colbert Show advertises and, you know...
Likes people who wear glasses as your hosts and thinks of yourself as somewhat upscale.
We're going to tell you every night what to laugh at.
Yeah, it absolutely is a programming device rather than a comedy that is consistent with your programming.
And I must tell you, I have long regarded the laugh track as one of the great evils.
The idea of manipulating a person sitting alone into feeling that they are in a room of people laughing is a shocking betrayal.
And the funny thing is there was sort of an intermediate step because it used to be that sitcoms were recorded in front of an audience who did laugh.
And then I think Laugh Track started as an augmentation.
It was added to the organic laughter of the audience.
And then it replaced the audience entirely.
And the point is, you're actually dealing with a sacred neurological architecture, right?
Your mind's ability to conclude what is and isn't funny is the most personal thing.
And to have some corporation decide...
In fact, there was a sitcom I never saw called ALF. Alien life form.
I never saw it either, but I know of it, yeah.
Okay, so the writers were famously coked up.
And one of them, after I think Alf was off the air, talked about what the writer's room was like.
And he described that they had a thing that they would do.
You know, it was a half an hour show.
There were a certain number of jokes that had to be delivered regularly.
And sometimes they just didn't have a joke.
And so they would deliver something they called a humor-like substance.
Which took the form of a joke.
And then the laugh track would be added and it would function like a joke, but it just hadn't been funny.
And so anyway, I have been ranting about, I mean, I used to lecture on the evil of laugh track when I would talk about the evolution of humor because of exactly this issue.
So it's fascinating.
But the other thing that was interesting about the hearing was Bobby got tons of laughs.
Because at certain points, he would say something like, I don't think they want to employ me, an obvious truth, and it would undercut the stupidity of the question.
Are you really suggesting after thundering at me for being the greatest enemy of pharma that also I might be in their pocket?
But every time, every laugh at that thing was on his behalf.
They don't like it because they don't control it.
And again, it's a magic show because the audience is complicit.
You sit in your seat, you watch from your point of view, you don't get up and look behind the stage or come early and watch them putting together the apparatus.
You play your part as a good audience member at a magic show.
But at certain points in this Senate hearing, people actually had spontaneous Voluble reactions.
The Senators don't like that.
They don't like price discovery of the value of their points.
They don't want any feedback mechanism that rates their intelligence with mood or tone.
That was very strange.
And when the chair was asked to admonish the audience for tittering over the ineptitude of one senator's presentation, it was like, you know, there will be no laughter, there will be no clapping, there will be no audience response.
It undercuts our control of this thing.
Redounds always to his benefit because he has become, by the end of the hearing, the avatar of everybody behind him.
You could come in there with almost any political persuasion, but if you didn't know the language, you knew who the hero in the room was.
It was like the lottery.
We all read it as a kid.
They all picked up their stone and they threw it at him.
When we read the lottery, we fantasize that We see the injustice.
We would never be a member of that crowd.
We don't want to be one of these stupid New Englanders trying to make the crops grow by stoning to death somebody whose name was drawn at random.
So how do we end up being that person as adults often?
Or how do we end up tolerating it when we see it?
Well, hold on.
I didn't know that the audience had been advised not to laugh.
They were toward the end.
Absolutely offended as a human being on their behalf because they have an absolute right to laugh there.
I consider it an extension of...
They didn't call it laughter.
They just said, you know, don't, I don't know, have any outbursts or something.
Don't have any involuntary normal human reactions.
We will control your faces, throats, and, you know, lungs at this place.
But it's the inverse of laugh track.
The suppression of organic laughter.
I get exactly why they had to do it, because the fact is, laughter, organic laughter, has the power to indicate where the power in the room is.
Yes.
In other words, the same way that a CEO who's not very funny can reliably get laughs from his subordinates, right?
That's one kind of power.
And then there's the kind of power that comes from the subordinate who is so clever that they see through the artifice, right?
And that's a very dangerous kind of power.
And so the idea that Bobby Kennedy in that room is able to get organic laughter, but the senators wouldn't have the first clue how to go about it, that tells you— And they don't—not only do they not know how to get laughter, They don't know how to stop people from laughing at them.
Right, exactly.
Do you support these onesies?
So, I guess the thing is...
And thank God we live in a country where people still do laugh at Senate hearings.
Hell yeah.
With some of the most important and, you know, self-important and humorless and grave and screaming.
Powerful people who control all these resources only feed away, and probably cameras in the room, but we're still not so completely demoralized that we can't laugh at these folks.
That is the good news.
We have, in my opinion, an obligation to ridicule the ridiculous.
And these people are ridiculous, and they have been for decades.
And the fact that it's suddenly visible to such a large number of people is a very welcome development.
Yes.
Now, they still have the power.
I think they have the power to reject these nominees.
I hope they understand that if they do that, that will be their undoing.
And I really feel that at this moment, that the people understand whatever else may be true, even if they don't know that Bobby Kennedy knows what he's talking about, which he does.
But even if they don't know that, they know that he's on their side.
They can tell.
Right?
He's not faking.
Framing him as a profiteering, ambulance-chasing lawyer didn't work at all.
Doesn't work, especially if you know the story of what happened to him and how he ended up in this element that has been described as anti-vax.
He did not want to go.
He was a popular A warrior on behalf of the public, cleaning up rivers, taking the mercury out of fish.
That was a marvelous position relative to what happened to him, and he did not want to go up against vaccines.
And he had no ability to say no.
He was confronted literally by a mother of an injured child who had the receipts.
And she said, you have to look at this.
And he did.
It changed his life very much for the worse, I would say.
And it resulted in him going on this journey from which he's finally returned and is now being faced with this ridiculous grilling in the Senate.
But he is battling on behalf of the people on the basis of what he believes to be true.
Many of the things he believes to be true are hard to swallow.
But if you chase it down, you discover all kinds of things.
I remember, you know, I learned what an adjuvant was after COVID had began.
I believe I probably learned it from Bobby.
And at the point that I came to understand what an adjuvant was, as a biologist, how could that possibly be safe?
You're gonna...
Hyperactivate the immune system in a nonspecific way in order to get it to respond to your feeble vaccines, and you think it's not going to react to a bunch of other stuff in your environment, stuff in your gut?
How?
Just name a mechanism by which this nonspecific poison that activates your immune system would not result in a bunch of other pathologies, including autoimmunity.
How could it happen?
Once you know that, it's like...
Look, you're depending on the failure of the public's biological education in order for them to continue to believe that this technology might make sense to inject into babies.
That's what you're depending on.
You know, it's interesting when you talk about the mechanism of vaccines.
There is an analogous mechanism in programming people psychologically.
It's called trauma-based programming.
Substitute for the adjuvant, a trauma, which sort of gets the juices flowing, which activates the body, which sort of creates a vulnerability for the antigen, which is the message.
Now, in America, COVID was a vast trauma, and they used it to...
Repeat these incantations, science, vaccination, trust, World Health Organization, Dr. Fauci.
While America was opened up by this adjuvant, which was the fear, anxiety, the toxicity of this horrible prospect of people dying and being socially isolated, they shoved all this down our throat and put it right deep into our brain.
In the same way that some vaccines might get purchased inside us.
You in that room had no idea that COVID had ever happened.
The only reminder that the whole COVID drama had happened was that the COVID vaccine, the greatest thing that had ever happened to earth, you know, was being questioned by the vile Bobby Kennedy.
Other than that, The utter failure of all the institutions and the companies and the interests that these people represented was not even alluded to.
And yet it was the whole reason there's a Bobby Kennedy in front of them.
In other words, the failure of your system, your companies, your pharma, you know, Pfizer, Moderna, the Senate that put other people in charge last time resulted in This mass event, this pandemic.
And they're acting as though they've never heard of the damn thing.
And it was all roaring success.
And Bobby somehow threatens that, you know, that series of ringing successes.
My God, he's there because of a crisis, dudes.
And only a crisis would cause somebody like Donald Trump to bring him in.
I remember when the conventional wisdom was Donald Trump cannot share the stage with anyone.
And I'd say, well, I think Kennedy's coming on board.
And he'd say, oh, that'll never happen because he doesn't play second fiddle.
He doesn't like other celebrities.
Well, that wasn't true, first of all, because they don't tell the truth about Donald Trump's character or personality.
But insofar as it is difficult for him, he...
Allowed this guy to share the spotlight with him because he saw it was a crisis.
But they're all acting innocent of the very reason that there's a Bobby Kennedy sitting there.
It's stupefying.
It was asking me to live in a world that, not just of nonsense, but of total unreality.
Because the whole narrative that had brought us there was...
When unrecognized, unacknowledged.
Well, I have some...
I have a thought about what's going on.
There was a kind of speciation event that was triggered by COVID. It was triggered by COVID plus a...
Internet that was sufficiently developed that lots of people who didn't know each other could find each other and begin to sort out what was taking place.
It was then at the liberation of Twitter by Musk, it was invigorated in the ability to basically crowdsource a sophisticated perspective on reality.
Broke a lot of people free from the Matrix.
However, there are a minority who are still subject to the Matrix for whatever reason.
And it's too many voters to surrender the pretense.
So the point is, what we're watching is theater that...
Couldn't possibly work on anybody who was paying attention during COVID. Right.
But if you bought the official narrative during COVID and for whatever reason you've dodged reality long enough that you still think it was more or less true, then they're playing to you because they can't afford to lose you.
So it's very strange and disorienting for those of us who have, you know, long been discussing the...
Phenomenon of the mRNA vaccines, the lab leak, the suppressed drugs that actually do treat and prevent COVID. If that's what you've been steeped in, then you can't imagine what's going through the mind of Elizabeth Warren.
How could she possibly be in the dark?
On the other hand, what she's saying isn't for you.
It won't persuade you.
And so she's speaking to people who are still subject to a narrative that for you and me broke many years ago.
Right.
Maybe maybe there's such a.
Pressure of forward motion in our media and in our communications now that the past simply doesn't exist for these people.
They only care about what happens next week.
They only care about the next six months.
And people are willing to sign this contract of having no memory, this kind of willing amnesia.
Oh, the past is the past.
I found it enraging and...
Troubling.
How willing people are to write off the whole COVID problem.
Oh, wait.
You mean the ongoing illnesses that might be caused by all sorts of things?
The funerals that never happened?
The families that broke up?
Businesses that failed?
You're willing to call it a day in the name of what?
They talk about justice on the left, but they don't like it very much, because justice involves avenging the past, or at least correcting it or rebalancing it.
But they are just on to another thing.
The most horrible and, for me, memorable moment of this whole weekend—or week—did not occur in the hearing rooms, but afterwards, when a senator from Hawaii came out and accused Bobby, literally.
Accused RFK of wanting to run the Tuskegee experiment on the entire country.
He said millions will die.
Millions will die.
He wants to, quote, observe the disease process in the entire American population.
And at that point, it went from being a magic show to, I mean, I guess if you're absolutely innocent, it could still work on you.
To being some sort of challenge to live in a fantasy.
Because if you knew word one about the thing, it was such a horrendous slander that it could not go unchallenged.
But it largely did.
Yeah, it's the worst conceivable slander.
Yeah, I can't think of a worse one.
I did want to add something to your point about COVID, which I, of course, agree wholeheartedly.
The harms of COVID are still largely unaccounted for.
And accumulating.
Right, accumulating.
I mean, the fact that we have excess mortality.
That appears to be the result of the mRNA vaccines and that it is not, there's a normal process by which if the vaccine was toxic and it killed off vulnerable people, we should see a decrease below expected mortality rates and we still don't see it.
We still have elevated excess mortality.
So something is very wrong.
Interesting.
The harms are not over.
That said, I don't think that that's even what you listed was the medical harms, the failed businesses, the harm done to families, the funerals that were unattended, all of that stuff.
That's a huge quantity of harm.
But we also have the strange fact that COVID revealed the massive dysfunction of all of our institutions.
Yes.
It all failed.
The press failed.
The university system failed.
Government failed.
The tech sector failed.
It all revealed itself.
And so odd to sit in a room where they're pretending they all succeeded, that it was their finest hour.
Well, I may have mentioned this to you before, but one of my favorite books is Catch-22.
Mine too.
Love it.
A scene where the pilots, terrified of some deadly mission they've been given, dump their payload at sea harmlessly because they're afraid to fly over this target from which they fear they will not return.
And the brass, instead of punishing them for this, decides that it has no choice but to give them medals in order to disguise the fact that it's happened.
Yes.
And this idea of congratulating, the system congratulating itself over COVID, it's like...
But that's what you saw in that room.
That was the operating assumption.
That was the implicit basis for their right to question Kennedy.
They had championed a great vaccine.
They had done all the closures and hard things that it took.
They didn't explicitly plack themselves on the back, but it was...
You know, the basis for their throne-like bearing.
These are the people that brought us through COVID against the person who would threaten the system that brought us through COVID. It was Catch-22.
And what's Catch-22 finally about?
Well, to me, I've thought about the book way too much.
It's not just about inversion and funny jokes and logic traps, you know, and double binds.
And this is revealed in its ending.
The brass say to you, Sarian, listen, man, we'll send you home.
He's been trying to get home the whole book, pretending he's crazy, pretending he's sick, doing all these things.
And they say, we'll send you home.
But you've got to do one thing.
Oh, I remember.
Tell us you like us.
Yep.
And that really, you felt, was the thing they were doing.
To Bobby.
They knew that there was one line he couldn't cross.
He could show undue respect.
He could listen to their dumbass arguments.
He could not, you know, call them out and make fools of themselves for their scientific illiteracy.
But there was one thing he couldn't do.
Pretend he liked it.
Yeah.
And he didn't.
And he didn't.
So if he goes down, he goes down.
But he did not betray himself.
He didn't.
Kiss the ring.
He wasn't Winston Smith at the end of 1984 who goes, I love Big Brother.
And he wasn't Usarian.
I mean, he was Usarian.
He refused to say, I like this.
He stood up to find.
He went back for it again.
Boy, they don't like it.
You get the feeling almost that they would approve him if he did it.
Yep, it would provide them.
So I think the problem is that they're stuck with an inability to reject him.
And live to tell the tale.
And he refused to provide them the cover that would have allowed them to acquiesce and pretend, you know, that they had done their jobs or something.
The strange thing about this, Brett, is I've heard a lot of inside gossip about whether the nomination will succeed.
I've heard a lot of senators described as wobbly, even though they might not seem to be.
But I can only think about it in a larger sense as, you know, a challenge to this authority.
And will it show its power by rejecting him, or will it Pull back like an animal usually does when it's fighting a foe that it didn't expect would be its equal but won't give up.
And I say the animal behavior filters tells me they'll approve him.
I think so too.
Because they'll destroy him some other time.
Yep.
They'll figure out...
What his weakness is.
But right now, they can't quite handicap the results of this conflict.
And they'll get back to it.
I think they're going to kick the can down the road.
We'll destroy RFK some other way.
This way didn't work quite the way we hoped.
Well, unfortunately, I think that is exactly what I would predict as well, is that they will never surrender, but they will withdraw and live to fight another day.
It's like a cat.
I've seen a cat fight a snake.
Sometimes you just withdraw a little, and you wait for it to get a little more tired, and then you go in.
Yep.
Well, I mean, they are facing an existential threat to a system of illegitimate power.
And I expect them to try every trick in the book.
But I don't think, I just don't think that they made it possible to reject him in this case.
And I hope, frankly, that they also find it impossible to reject Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel.
And I agree.
And the reason that this is a triad or a trinity to us, in a sense, that we're perceiving it as that, is not just because the hearings are near each other, but because these are three people who will stand over institutions, each of which played a huge role in what I will call the scam, the deadly scam of certainly the recent past.
But also the longer-term past.
We have law enforcement, intelligence, and medical authority.
And those are the three portals into the darkness that we've seen.
I'll mix metaphors until I can drink Metator smoothies, but they are linked because authority failed at all these levels.
And it tried to, not just failed, it tried to run an actual scam on us.
Magic is different than just lying.
Lying is just saying that, asserting that something that isn't true is true.
Magic is the mounting of a whole illusion.
The attempt to get you to agree on something, not just, you know, no, that never happened, but I'll create the feeling of something happening that isn't happening, or...
I'll disguise something that is happening with something else.
And the illusion of COVID success, Dr. Fauci, you know, CNN reports, whatever.
The illusions that they have patiently asked us to buy into, the personalities that were created, the commentators, they've all pretty much come down.
And I don't think they have much To fight with right now.
And I don't think they want an outright fight, because there are people behind those TV cameras who are watching, and I think they have a sense of them.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
I'm ever more fond of your point about magic here.
I hate to do this.
Unfortunately, I have to go, but I hope you'll return many times.
Anytime, anytime, Brett.
Great.
Really, anytime I do have time.
I've been unusually busy.
I don't know if you asked me on the air to keep my phone on in case something happened.
Yes.
There's been another plane crash.
No.
In Philadelphia, not far here from Washington.
No.
Yeah.
Fiery plane crash into buildings in the city.
Not a commercial airliner, but a small plane.
Wow.
The adjuvant.
I guess.
Geez.
Wow, that's a heck of a note to end on.
Well, Walter, I'm going to go check on that quickly before my next engagement.
But thank you very much for joining me on Dark Horse.
I know you will come back, and we'll have plenty to discuss.
Good luck on your mission, and I hope we see some confirmations maybe this weekend.
I really do.
Despite all the jaded and sort of bitter tones that I might have vented at points, I'm pretty hopeful because I don't see an America that's completely whipped.
I actually see one that is standing up and willing to pull back the curtain and willing to deal with the disappointment and the challenge and the opportunity that lies with I agree with you.
I think we're actually back, and we've got to carry through with our mission here, but I'm amazed at how well we're doing, and I'm also uncharacteristically hopeful.
Where should people find you?
County Highway, America's Only Newspaper.
They can find me at County Highway, America's Only Newspaper.
I'm a novelist who's written many books.
You'll find seven or eight of them on Amazon.
You can go watch the movie Up in the Air, which is based on one of my novels, or the movie Thumbsucker.
I'm all over the place, but I shoot my mouth off most often on Twitter.
And what's your handle?
Walter Kern, K-I-R-N, not E. And I make a lot of friends there, and I really try to interact with people.
So if you want to get to know me and want me to know you, meet me there.
