In this week’s episode, we discuss the JFK assassination, deportations, DOGE, Tesla, anarchists, flu, measles, vaccines, and crunchy Moms. What do we make of the 80,000 pages of JFK files that were released yesterday? Are immigrants who are in the U.S. legally protected by the Constitution? What are they allowed to say, or think? Does anger at Elon Musk and DOGE explain the left going after Teslas? Or maybe it’s not the left at all, but anarchists. What’s up with flu this year, and should you...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 268 if I'm not mistaken.
You know damn well you're not mistaken.
You just asked me.
I just asked you.
This is true.
I've been caught here on camera live.
Yeah, it is, let's just face it, it is the last Dark Horse Podcast of the winter season here in the Northern Hemisphere.
And yesterday it was so clear that spring was here, and today winter is just back.
So I think this year the equinox is on the 20th, you think that.
Be it the 20th or the 21st.
As of the equinox, winter is coming.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
That is the way to view that.
No, it's really not.
It's a terrible way to view it, but it's true.
It is precisely correct.
True, and yet demoralizing and unfortunate.
And that's the case with a lot of true things, actually.
Like, yeah, true, and just why would you frame it that way?
Totally agree.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, here we are.
So today, we're going to talk about, let's see, just a couple of things like JFK, deportations, Doge, Tesla, flu, measles, vaccines, just a few things.
All the things, as the kids like to say.
It's not all the things, though.
Some of the things.
Yeah, see?
Some of the things.
Yeah, we're going to talk about some of the things.
Yeah.
We're not doing a Q&A today, but we did two last week and they're up on Locals and they're great.
You should go check them out.
Join us now on Locals.
Also, what else is true before we get into our sponsors and then get into the main part of the episode?
You dropped an Inside Rail episode yesterday.
I dropped a bomb.
With Laura Delano.
Yeah.
Who actually, yesterday was the publication of her book, Unshrunk, A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.
Laura is a friend of ours.
She went through hell and she has written this book and she and her husband, I think, Cooper, are now running A business to help other people who may find themselves in similar circumstances of effectively having been destroyed by pharmaceuticals and facilitated into the very mental illnesses they've been diagnosed with by the drugs they are given to treat the mental illnesses
that they never had in the first place.
Book's amazing.
She's amazing.
Your conversation with her, I haven't heard yet, but I'm sure it's amazing.
I thought it was great.
And if you really want to trip yourself out, I would actually say start with the Dark Horse conversation.
Just start there and then go read the New York Times profile of her.
That's right.
So on Sunday, no, I don't remember if it was Sunday or Monday, the New York Times had a big profile on her and Cooper, I believe.
It is what it is.
The New York Times does its thing.
You know, great that this story is getting some play, but they do have their bias.
You, I'm sure, I mean, I've seen you guys in conversation before.
I've been in conversation with Laura before.
I'm sure this was a great conversation.
And the book is well worth picking up.
It was getting published yesterday on the 18th.
We are lucky that Laura and Cooper are effectively the head of this.
Movement to escape.
I'm not claiming every single person can escape, but for many people who need to escape these potent substances, there's a booby trap that prevents you from doing it, which is the meds create the symptoms, and then the symptoms get worse if you take the meds away in the wrong way.
Actually, one more thing.
How we come to know Laura?
Actually, is that we wrote about a little bit about her story as we understood it based on a big Atlantic profile, the Atlantic Monthly profile that had come out, you know, some couple of years before we published "Huntergatherer's Guide" in the 21st century in 2021.
And it was an accurate representation of what the Atlantic had portrayed and not wrong in to the degree To any important degree that we were covering it in our book, in which we were talking about the way that sometimes people fall prey to psychiatric evaluations and diagnoses and treatments when the answer lies within themselves.
And Laura had read the book, said, oh my goodness, they read, you know, they...
Know of me and reached out to us and we have since become friends and now we know more about what her actual story is and was and just so thrilled that this this book is out there and go listen to the conversation.
She is an excellent spokesperson for a very difficult So we are lucky that someone who is as articulate and thoughtful as she is, is at the head of this movement.
Anyway, it's a great conversation.
I really enjoyed it.
Uh, participating in it.
I think you'll love listening to it.
Great.
Okay.
So, uh, before we get into that, you know, minor list of topics that we might be discussing today, uh, that I started with, uh, let's do our three ads at the top of the hour.
As always, three sponsors that we have carefully vetted.
If you hear us reading ads here in Dark Horse, uh, you know that we actually do, uh, support these, these businesses and their products or services.
In this case, three products.
Your first.
All right.
Uh, here it is right on the page written.
Yes, I was going to translate into Catalan for you, having just spent some time in Barcelona, where the not that subtle, but occasionally subtle distinctions between Catalan and Spanish were driving me a little bit batty.
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Yes, yes.
Well, English is my second language, so I should be able to get through this.
Remind me what your first is?
Well...
Spoken English is my first.
Written English is my second.
It's my distant second.
Yes.
Yes.
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Speaking of pomegranates...
As I was several paragraphs back.
Yes, exactly.
But that's timeline being...
A product derived from urolithin A, urolithin A being an ingredient that is found most commonly among human foods in pomegranates.
I had not known that the word for pomegranate in Spanish was And Granada, which was one of the cities that we visited for a few days in Spain in our trip in February and March of this year,
was utterly beautiful and had a certain amount of pomegranate symbolism in it, which would have been bewildering had I not recognized that Granada meant pomegranate in advance.
It also means grenade.
That's what I was going to ask you.
Did we hypothesize that or we have concluded that that is in fact...
Oh, I thought I just looked it up and found that it was pomegranate but also grenade.
But you may have a different...
I may be wrong.
Is the term grenade, is this a non-accidental connection in the sense that a grenade is a lobed...
So as I remember it, and I did not re-look this up in advance of our conversation here today...
We did hypothesize that grenades may be called grenades because they were created after pomegranates existed and were enjoyed and appreciated and brought health, presumably, to the people who live where they are plentiful and devoured regularly.
And the grenades have a not even that superficial resemblance to a pomegranate.
If you throw a pomegranate...
It's going to explode, and it's going to make a mess.
It's going to be hard to clean up.
I don't think that's the resemblance, but I like it.
But this also suggests, if I am extrapolating correctly, that grenadine is effectively grenade syrup.
I mean, it's one of the two definitions of the word.
I don't see how I would go for that one.
I don't know.
From now on, on those rare occasions, when somebody mentions grenadine, I'm going to think grenade syrup.
I'm not.
Then now you understand the difference between the two of us.
I think it goes deeper than that.
It starts there, though.
Can we agree on that?
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You got another comment?
No, no, we're there.
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Great.
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All right.
All right.
Well, there is a lot...
Going on.
I will say there's part of me that feels kind of in a holding pattern, trying to figure out where we are with the new status of everything.
But there's been a bunch of interesting movement.
We're going to start with what happened yesterday with the release of a huge new trove of documents that were previously secret relative to the JFK assassination.
So the whole thing unfolded very strangely.
The day before, President Trump had made an announcement to live reporters saying that this huge trove of documents would be released in the afternoon of the following day.
I think a lot of people pointed LLMs at it in order to process it.
It was some 80,000 pages of new information.
So anyway, we were all waiting with bated breath.
Would we find some new revelation about this extremely important wound in the American psyche that came from the assassination of JFK in 1963?
And I think it very quickly became evident that it wasn't in there.
There was a couple of interesting things, but it was like literally a couple of interesting things.
And frankly, if you've been paying attention to the circles in which the evidence has been processed over the course of all these decades, what was in there wasn't really new at all.
We may have new pieces of evidence.
Now, maybe there's something more to be found in there, and a more careful read of the documents will reveal it.
But there was, you know, A lot of new stuff and very little new information.
The couple of interesting things that showed up very quickly...
Jen, you have a couple images.
You have the one of the guy who disappeared from Washington and then soon showed up dead after...
Oh, unfortunately it's unreadable from here.
But here's one document in which...
Someone closely connected to the CIA became very agitated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, said that a small cabal within the CIA had arranged it, and soon thereafter was dead in what was ruled by Okay,
so we have yet one more thing that points toward the CIA.
I've got to say, from my perspective as somebody who has long followed this case, it seems pretty clear to me that the CIA is involved in one way or another.
Who else is involved?
Not clear.
But the idea that somebody, that we have a new piece of evidence pointing to the CIA is not shocking.
And then we have this other Which caused a lot of murmurs where you have the CIA signing off on the release of these materials without redaction except when it comes to the Israeli Intelligence Service.
So explain to me what we're looking at here.
I see highlighted in yellow the words the Israeli Intelligence Service.
And then in the upper left-hand corner, you see that the CIA is signing off on redactions, and it says, except in brackets.
And the brackets here contain the words, the Israeli intelligence.
I don't, I'm missing a sign.
I don't understand if the CIA is saying, do not redact?
No, it's saying, do not redact, except for this.
So do redact the Israeli intelligence service, in which case, why are we seeing it?
Right.
And it's not the only place that it shows up.
What do you mean, right?
I'm asking you.
You've got the exact paradox.
I haven't looked at these files.
Yep.
Any of the 80,000 pages of them.
This page, as you are showing it now, was in the files that were released yesterday.
Yes.
Which is, it's like, it's meta.
It's a view above from the would-be redactors.
Yep.
Okay.
So, and then there are lots of other pages in which Israeli intelligence services are mentioned.
So...
Whatever this document means, it does not appear to have controlled what was released in this trove of documents.
On the other hand, it's not like something that was newly revealing is contained there.
So again, we are left with hints of things that are widely discussed in the circles that think about the JFK assassination and try to make sense of the evidence.
But there is a kind of...
Dawning realization that whatever we were hoping would be in those documents isn't there.
So what I wanted to do was lay out a concern in the form of a hypothesis about what may be going on.
So it is 2025.
We are living in the AI era.
My concern about what's going on is that why, if you have 80,000 people,
Pages of documents that don't actually move the needle with respect to the case in question.
Why weren't they released before, right?
Why were these documents kept secret if they didn't add anything to our ability to comprehend?
And here's the hypothesis.
Hypothesis is you have a problem when you would love to release, let's say, The guilty parties, or those protecting the guilty parties, presumably the actually guilty parties are all dead.
But those protecting whatever the institutional secrets might be do not want to release things that allow the folks who are trying to understand what took place more insight, right?
You want them to be suffering from the fog of war.
So there is a temptation to hold back everything.
So that they can't piece things together because sometimes something that seems innocuous allows you to check something else, and so it creates a kind of an emergent order that those who want to obscure the truth would like to avoid.
Well, now that we are living in the AI era, it is possible to take a giant trove of documents and to have an AI come to understand the interconnection of those documents with the things that have already been released.
So that you can effectively figure out what the combinatorics will be when the public starts processing the information and crowdsourcing solutions.
So my hypothesis is that effectively what we were given was a haystack in which we are searching for a needle that has been removed, maybe with a magnet, right?
The problem with searching for needles in haystacks is that all the haystack Looks like needles.
It's all lines jumbled together.
But if you can find the needle and you can take it out, why not release the hay?
So these documents are themselves redacted or have the redactions been reversed?
This is a great question.
The redactions are not visible, but what I would imagine has happened...
So it looks like there's no redactions, but that doesn't mean there aren't large missing pieces.
Right.
My guess would be if you took some giant trove of documents...
and you removed a tiny select few and then you used AI to figure out what other documents would imply the existence of the missing ones and you removed those documents so that there's nothing within this that tells you something was removed then it becomes possible to deploy this stuff basically leveraging AI to keep the public in To allow the public to become more informed without giving it any more of the information that is actually
salient to the important question.
What happened to JFK?
So, anyway, is this a pressure release?
I think so.
Now, here's the tough part for us out here in the public.
The president said he would release all the documents.
He has released a huge trove of documents.
Has he made a claim as to whether or not these are all?
I believe it was sort of implied, but no, that direct claim has not been made.
I have heard there is more to come, so it may be that the Trump administration is going to release more, and maybe there will be something important within what is later released.
But it is not the case that if these documents are a pressure release, That allow President Trump to say promises made, promises kept.
That he is necessarily party to whatever effort has purged the useful information from what we have just been handed.
So, in fact, you might imagine that whatever is trying to keep these institutional secrets, even now, would like for Trump's base.
To suddenly feel like they've been betrayed because there's no, you know, this is, it's a nothing burger, right?
So I think we, again, as with Bobby Kennedy, as we discussed a couple weeks back, where suddenly there was things put into the world that made it seem like we had been betrayed, and my point was actually this is exactly the moment to support Bobby Kennedy,
that this is designed to break that support because...
He actually is in a position to do something really important.
So we have to act counter to our instincts.
It's not obvious to me that this is Trump betraying us, right?
It's obvious to me, I think, that there's no major revelation in this, which means that whatever is held by the institutions is still being carefully guarded.
And we need to demand it, just as we do with the Epstein files.
We have no idea what role these things are playing in our modern politics, and until we do, we are fighting blind.
Yes, and we know for sure that the swamp does not want to be drained.
The swamp does not want to be drained, right?
The swamp creatures are dependent on it, and they will defend it.
So anyway, the battle remains active, and...
It is up to us and the public to apply the correct pressure so that we actually do find out what happened to the president and who was involved.
President Kennedy.
Yeah, President Kennedy.
Exactly.
I'd like to know what happened to all the presidents.
Absolutely.
But you were talking about Kennedy.
Yeah, well, and as...
Frankly, every president since then.
Every president.
I'd like to know what has actually happened.
What the real story is, yeah.
I would agree.
All right, so that's more or less what I've got.
On the JFK releases, I'll be interested to see if more careful parsing of what is such a huge cache of documents that, you know, maybe there is something interesting in there.
But seems like it's not going to be what we've been waiting for.
That much seems to be clear.
All right.
The next thing I wanted to talk about is the question of deportations.
I will tell you that in my circles there is a lot of concern over the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who is a permanent resident of the United States, recently graduated from Columbia University in New York,
who was detained, was incarcerated, It has now been moved, I believe, to Louisiana, where he is still in detention, under threat of being deported.
And the case is a strange one.
It does not appear yet to be part of a large number of such deportations.
But to me, the case is quite frightening.
We need to discuss it.
It's causing people who are legal residents of the U.S., and there are various statuses of legal residents, but people who are legal residents of the U.S. are suddenly feeling in jeopardy based on whether or not opinions that they hold, things that they express publicly might be used to deport them.
And the first thing I wanted to say...
Oh, go ahead.
Well, so you brought him up last week, right?
This has been going on for over a week at this point.
To me, and I'll let you riff as long as you want here, but to me, the main question it raises is, does the Constitution apply to citizens or is the population to which our Constitution applies a larger population than that?
Excellent question.
Let me...
Point out, actually, Jen, would you put up Melissa Chen's response to my tweet?
If you can show my tweet first, that's great.
And if not, I can resurrect it from memory pretty much.
So I tweeted some days ago in response to this case that...
Too damn small to see.
That the...
Phrase, from the river to the sea, does imply that the state of Israel should cease to exist.
Yet, it is still protected speech, and therefore, threatening people and deporting people for speaking it is a violation of our First Amendment principles, and I further said that I was concerned about any American who didn't see that threat.
Now, Melissa Chen, who is a good friend, somebody I quite respect and a very careful thinker, responded by saying, yes, it is protected speech.
Even death to the Jews, which is far more explicit, is protected, which means you can't get criminally charged for it.
But if you are on a guest pass, the government reserves the right to revoke or remove you as there is no right to residence.
Now, I don't actually completely agree with what she said.
I think her interpretation of the law is simply wrong when she says, which means you can't get criminally charged for it.
It means much more than that.
Because the way the First Amendment reads, Congress shall make no law infringing.
It's not restricted to criminal prosecution.
Congress shall make no law.
You can't be civilly charged either.
Right.
Criminally or civilly.
Right.
We cannot decide what you're allowed to say or think.
And that has been interpreted correctly, very broadly.
Now, she is correct that it does not apply in the same way to people who are not citizens.
But it is not obvious that it doesn't apply at all.
So when you are given one of these statuses, you can be given a travel visa.
That's sort of the lowest level.
You're allowed to come here, but you don't have any.
Right to stay.
You can be given a student visa where you have an extended period of time over which you're allowed to be in the country.
Maybe it's four years while you're attending college or something like that.
Or you can have permanent resident, a green card status, where you're allowed to be here indefinitely.
And as stipulations within those various categories, there is the right to throw you out for So,
right so we don't want people putting us in a bad spot while they're in the country and we reserve the right to throw you out if you do
has a
Basically, what you've just said is borders exist and they have a reason to exist.
They have a reason to exist.
That is not the same thing as saying that the First Amendment does not apply to people who are legally here generally, right?
It's saying...
And I would also point out that the principle of free speech requires us to be extremely careful if we are going to invoke the exotic...
Right to throw you out based on what you say or think.
It has to be a pretty egregious case.
And in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, there is a claim, oft repeated, that he is a Hamas supporter, which would make him a supporter or a rationalizer of terrorism.
But I would point out...
Do you want to show that Jerusalem Post headline that I sent you?
The Jerusalem Post is repeating a reasonably well-documented fact that Benjamin Netanyahu himself has materially supported Hamas.
He has advocated for the material support of Hamas.
Now, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu is not supporting Hamas because he supports their political position.
He has supported them cynically.
But nonetheless, our ally, Israel, is currently Being led by a person who has supported Hamas.
The idea that supporting Hamas is enough of a thought crime that we're going to throw you out.
Oh, I should also point out Mahmoud Khalil is married to an American citizen, which does not grant you automatic citizenship.
But nonetheless, we're talking about breaking up a family.
We are talking about throwing somebody out based on the claim that they have supported Hamas, which We're talking about essentially somebody who is espousing a widely held belief in American society.
I'm not arguing it is a correct belief.
I believe it is a distortion and that the very claims in question are dubious.
The larger point that I wanted to make is...
Let us step back a second.
Heather, you and I grew up in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s.
Yep.
In the 70s and 80s, all educated Los Angelinos knew the following thing.
There were a large number of illegal aliens, most of them from Central America.
All educated Angelenos understood that that population was in violation of the law and yet was playing a key role in the functioning of California.
Migrant labor did much of the agricultural work.
Of California, California being one of the country's main sources of fruit and other fresh produce.
And that migrant labor was partially legal and partially not.
Yes.
And what's more, well, and the way it worked in California was that the illegal immigrants weren't, didn't have the same protections as others.
So they were paid less.
And so...
Therefore, in some cases, they were preferred.
They were preferred, absolutely.
They were preferred by employers because it was cheaper for them.
It was cheaper.
And they also had fewer protections.
They weren't unionized, and therefore, if they got injured, they had no recourse, so paid less, and there were fewer hidden costs.
Right.
You could treat them less like humans and more like things that did work for you.
So, the ferociously gigantic economy of the state of California was...
All of us who were participating in that very vibrant economy were benefiting from the existence of large numbers of people who had migrated illegally from Central America.
Let me just say, I don't have any idea what the ratio was of legal to illegal migrants who were doing so much of the farm work in California for much of the middle.
Late part of the 20th century.
I would not have guessed that it was a majority or even that it was a particularly significant minority, but even if it's 15%, it's still a huge piece of the economy.
Yes, and it also changed over time.
There was a moment at which, I believe, as a cynical political game...
So I did want to say it's not just the farm workers, right?
There were large numbers of illegal aliens in Los Angeles specifically doing all kinds of things, you know, doing...
Candyman, gardening, house keeping, a lot of domestic and landscaping and construction work that were either therefore cheaper for households to employ, or again, employers like, you know...
Right.
So that state of affairs came to an end more or less when, I think it was somehow during the Clinton administration, but I may be off in terms of when it took place, but somebody had hired an illegal alien to do some sort of domestic work.
And it got blown up.
Yeah, it was something like that.
And so the optics were terrible because most of the country wasn't really aware of how comfortable Californians had become with, you know, the fact that a large part of their economy was not straightforward.
So anyway, it began to be policed at some point.
But the larger point, and I would also just add one more thing.
When I was a...
High school student briefly involved in speech and debate.
We did research on various topics, and I can't remember what brought it up, but it turned out there was actually a tremendous amount of evidence, really well studied, that the immigrants, the illegal immigrants from Central America were actually disproportionately hardworking,
aspired to...
Become citizens.
They started businesses.
So the point is, it was understood by everybody involved that there was an aspect that was troubling and there was an aspect that was extremely positive.
But it wasn't a slam dunk in either direction.
So anyway, this is all to say.
My state of mind, I'm a patriotic American.
I am favorable towards anything that makes the country I like a lot of the cultural wisdom that the Latin Americans brought to California.
I'm very favorable to that.
Nonetheless, in this election, I voted for the deportation of illegal aliens.
I did that knowing that lots of people who took advantage of the open border that existed during the Biden administration were looking for We're ready to be hardworking, law-abiding members of society,
and that many of those people would end up getting deported in any case.
I voted for those deportations knowing that there would be injustice built into it because I didn't think that the circumstance that existed during the Biden administration left us any choice.
Having had an open border, having let in all sorts of people who were not intending To be who didn't like America, who could be openly hostile to it, who might be working for foreign powers.
I didn't think we had any choice.
So I voted for the deportation of illegal immigrants, and I take responsibility for the fact that there's no way that that could be clean and surgical.
It's going to involve deporting people that, on balance, we are better off having in the U.S., and I accept my share of responsibility for that.
But I did not vote.
Or deporting people who are legally in the country over things that they say and think.
Even things that they say and think that I think are flat out wrong are flirting with dangerous territory.
But this situation you're talking about is someone who's here illegally.
No.
Mahmoud Khalil?
No.
He's here legally.
Absolutely here legally.
My concern, this is exactly the problem, is that the fact that we have a deportation case surrounding criticism of a foreign government by a legal permanent resident of the U.S. is muddying the waters surrounding the question of deportation of illegal immigrants.
But I mean, I guess when we've talked about it before, off air.
What I thought was muddying the waters was the idea that speech is emerging as the reason for you being targeted at all, regardless of your immigration status.
That there is a rubric that should be being applied.
And even with the 10 minutes of preamble that you just gave as to what the value of it is, Illegal immigrants has been in, for instance, California's economy in the 20th century, in the early 21st century.
Even with that, you, and I believe I as well, although I had not formulated it in my head with this clarity, voted in part for the deportation of illegal immigrants knowing that there would be damage done to people who actually would have brought value to the United States had they been allowed to stay.
But the The measure was, are you here legally or are you here illegally?
That is the only measure that matters.
Even with the understanding that some people who are here legally are people that we might not want to be here, just as some of our citizens are people who are not good people, right?
And some of the people who are here illegally are people who would bring value.
But we have a measure, and it is one of law, and it is, are you here illegally or are you here not illegally?
Are you here illegally or legally?
That is the only thing that should apply.
And so in his case, Khalil's case, here legally or not, the idea that he's being targeted because of what he is saying is, I think, the problem.
That is exactly the problem.
It is a violation of not only a Central American value, but the value on which all the others rest.
Whether or not we have the legal right to...
Central American value?
Oh, no.
Okay.
Foundational, fundamental.
We cannot start inspecting the quality of what people say.
We have to take a very broad, protective brush to how we view speech and thought issues.
And I would just point out.
So the question, so it sounds like it comes down to then.
If you have gotten into the country, if you are in the country legally, the protections that apply to American citizens apply to you.
Now, that That analysis changes if you are here on anything.
But I mean, actually, even green cards have expiration dates, don't they?
Put aside green cards for the moment.
Many of, you know, student visas, a lot of the visas are not permanent.
And so the analysis changes at the point that you might want to extend your visa, at which point does the government have the right to look and see if it actually still considers you someone that is valuable to the country?
Of course it does.
But that is not what is happening here.
Right.
That is not what is happening here.
And I would just point out, you know, I have no patience at all for supporting.
There is a reason I'm hedging here.
The word terrorism is so legally toxic that even though Hamas is clearly a terrorist organization that engages in terrorism, That does not make a person who sees resistance in the Middle East,
even resistance that I think is abhorrent, it doesn't make somebody who sees resistance as positive a supporter of terrorism.
And so you can sort of leapfrog your way there.
But the basic point is, look, we are taking an interpretation of what all right-thinking Do you have the right to question Israel's right to exist?
Now, let me say up front, I want Israel to exist.
I believe it is important for the world that it does exist.
Does that mean that somebody who believes otherwise is engaged in a thought crime enough to throw them out of the country?
No.
And in fact, what does it mean to have the right to exist?
If, as a college professor, if I was to assign a room full of college students, if I was to give them a list of all of the countries that exist on Earth today, and I was to say, spend a week and come up with a justification for the existence,
what allows Poland to exist, right?
What says that it has that right?
I was to say, go through all of these countries and figure out if there are any countries on that list that don't have the right to exist, you know, on a solid foundation, solid logical foundation.
My guess is you would actually have trouble coming up with a justification that any country has the right to exist.
Now, at the same time, I believe the countries that exist have a right to defend themselves, right?
Yeah, so this is the distinction.
And so many of the rights claimed by activists across many domains now are absurd if you can begin to consider them.
And I think your basic question, which sounds maybe like a nothing question, and so we'll get glossed over, is really important to keep coming back to.
Does any country inherently have the right to exist?
What would it mean for it to do so?
And usually where people go is to, you know, well, were the people who are its citizens the first people?
Or were they there before the others who are making the claim?
Right?
And if it's a question of I was here before you and so I have a greater claim to this thing than you do, it's a kind of...
Well, it's a little bit mercenary, but it's simply about territory.
It's simply territoriality, which goes back far earlier than humans, of course.
But there are no First Peoples.
There are no First Peoples left.
We have long since explored all of our landscapes where we are, and the First Peoples of the New World are no longer the First Peoples.
It's obvious with regard to something like the Inca or the Maya who displaced the people who came before, but all of the people who are currently identified as First Peoples are like, "No!"
Earlier peoples than Europeans, yes.
But does that mean that the Cherokee Nation inherently has the right to exist and the United States does not?
I think neither of these arguments make sense.
Right.
And, you know, let's say that we start deciding that the current inhabitants have the right to the nation.
Is the banned Midnight Oil?
Has it justified?
Yeah, you're not going to see that one coming, huh?
Well, Midnight Oil had a song sometime in the late 80s.
You and I were in high school.
And it contained a verse.
And the whole song was about it.
But the verse is something like, Time has come to say fair's fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share.
The time has come.
A fact's a fact.
It belongs to them.
Let's give it back.
Right?
They were advocating that the Aboriginals had a right to Australia.
Now, there's a reason I remember that lyric all these years later.
It's not because you remember all lyrics?
Nope.
That one came back because it was a profoundly powerful thought experiment.
I suppose the answer is, presumably, the Aboriginals do have a right to Australia, and the Europeans who currently control Australia took it from them.
And so you could make the argument it's ill-gotten gains, it should be returned.
On the other hand, the world cannot work that way.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm much more familiar with the history of the New World insofar as we understand it than the history of Australia and New Zealand.
But Australia and New Zealand, maybe.
And perhaps the South Pacific Islands may be the only places where the idea of First Peoples is remotely applicable.
Yeah, remotely applicable.
You know, the Kalahari, the Kung Bushmen have probably the greatest claim of a continuous genetic lineage in the location that they currently exist.
But anyway, the point is these questions get super murky.
And then even the question, okay, the Jewish claim on the land that is now Israel, yes, there's a very strong claim based on a history of presence, but that history of presence isn't primarily European Jews.
So is it a genetic right to be there?
If so, then the current situation doesn't make any sense.
So if it's not a genetic right, is it based on What scripture you believe in?
Well, that's a whole different world, right?
Where we start deciding who has the right to be where based on what they think.
So the point is that I'm not arguing.
Yeah, and who was first?
Puts it all in the realm of historical luck.
And is that actually the world that we prefer?
Historical luck.
Privileging historical luck.
And I think the answer is all of these things.
Marvelous exercises for a college classroom.
You cannot run the world this way.
At some level, all of us humans, part of that one giant lineage, should be interested in whatever rubric minimizes war and genocide.
What we want to effectively do, and it sucks in terms of like, you know, a well-architected explanation for who is entitled to what, it really sucks to say, hey, you know what?
We're just going to kind of freeze things where they are, and we're going to declare all the countries that are have the right to defend themselves.
And we should all want them well defended because as long as the borders don't change, that means less war.
That's not a deep justification for anything.
That's effectively, you know, some bastardization of might makes right.
But Nonetheless, you can't start returning everything to the people who have some claim on some piece of paper that long predates their own actual lives.
So we are stuck with people having all kinds of explanations for what should take place.
He cannot be throwing people who are legally in the country out.
I mean, especially Mahmoud Khalil is married to an American citizen, has permanent resident status.
He believes some things.
There are claims about other things that he believes that are not substantiated.
But this is not a gray area.
Even if what he believes is wrong, and even if somebody involved in terrorism would see it as supportive, it is thought.
Those thoughts and those ideas, we cannot have a civilization that is dependent on threatening people, which is what this is.
We are disincentivizing people to have thoughts, not on the basis that we can persuade them that those thoughts lead to some bad place or that those thoughts are incorrect.
We're just threatening them with messing up their lives.
That's what we're doing.
We're going to mess up your life if you say those things.
And there might be other things that you say that we don't like on the basis of which we'll mess up your life, but you don't know those in advance, do you?
I mean, that's where this goes pretty quickly.
It goes there.
And so, anyway, we didn't vote for this.
I didn't vote for this.
I voted for a certain amount of carnage that was unavoidable, but this isn't that.
And the idea that these things are being allowed to be conflated is dangerous to us all.
We have a problem that is going to involve deportations, and this is going to delegitimize
Yep.
All right.
I have one more.
Thing I wanted to address, something that showed up at least on my radar yesterday, which I found completely jaw-dropping.
We are all aware that there's been a whole lot of firepower directed at Elon Musk over Doge.
There's obviously stuff to be concerned about because Doge has a broad, I don't want to say mandate, but broad license.
To disrupt things that are functioning, and there's going to be a hell of a lot of carnage there, and I am up for it to an extent, but I don't want to see unnecessary carnage, and anyway, there's reason to be hyper-aware of what's going on.
However, there has been a move towards punishing Musk by Jeopardizing his business interests.
Now, on the one hand, you can make an argument that things like boycotts have an important role to play in persuading people to change.
It's an exotic tool, but I'm not arguing that no boycott is ever justified.
But this is...
We're not seeing boycotts, though.
No, we're not seeing boycotts.
We're seeing something else.
People who have Teslas are being targeted.
We've seen vandalism of people's personal Teslas.
We've seen attacks on Teslas in dealerships.
There was a spectacular multi-vehicle arson fire recently at a dealership in the last couple of days.
So basically the point is, Musk is having his business interests Targeted in completely illegal ways for the purpose of punishing him.
I don't know what the thinking is beyond that.
And yesterday what showed up that really shocked me was a website called DogeQuest, which as of this morning was still up.
You will have...
Varying success trying to access it.
Some browsers may block it.
But it's D-O-G-E-Q-U dot S-T.
No E. I don't think so.
Maybe it is.
Here's a screenshot that I took yesterday.
And what you see in this screenshot is a map of North America.
And within the U.S. you see...
Three kinds, no, maybe it's four kinds of icons distributed around the map.
You see Tesla symbols, which are, I think, dealerships.
You see Tesla chargers.
You see cars.
And you see doge dogs.
And when you click on these things, information comes up.
The cars are the cars of private people.
In most cases, they are not identified by name, but I think that's because the information that this site is using doesn't contain names for all of this stuff.
So it varies.
There are some names associated with some of these things.
So if you click on these Doge animals, these are not really Tesla related.
But here you see is that Cash Patel.
Cash Patel has been doxed by this site.
This is the current director of the FBI.
He's indicated by one of the doge dogs or one of the cars?
Yes, one of the doge dogs.
His home residence in Las Vegas is revealed here along with some other contact information.
Man, the stupid left really does like doxing, don't they?
They sure do.
I mean, can you imagine?
I've got to say, the...
Doxing, the current head of the FBI, suggests that whoever the hell did this has balls that are way bigger than their brains.
Yeah, or just no brains at all.
That would count, yeah.
No brains.
But definitely, that is a bizarre move for them to have made.
Very provocative.
But anyway, the site itself, if you click on that little banner at the top, you know, what is DogeQuest?
You find...
Absolutely classic anarchist sort of cheeky rationalization.
It's just an excuse to rampage.
It is simply an excuse to rampage.
If you go to the What is DogeQuest, this is not it, this is a sublink.
What is DogeQuest?
It says, basically, it pretends...
Without the intent to convince anybody.
It pretends, I think, because whoever put this up thinks that they're going to be able to make this argument if they are ever hauled in front of a court.
But it makes the claim that this is a site to facilitate the meeting of Tesla owners in a community, the discovery of Tesla chargers for those who need to charge their vehicles.
Tesla already does that for you.
Of course, Tesla already does that for you.
And so anyway, it's a transparently sarcastic justification.
When it asks itself if they support acts of protest, they use classic anarchist rhetoric and they say we can neither condone nor condemn, right?
So it's no official stance.
But it provides a link to the No Trace Project.
The No Trace Project, when you click through on that link, what you get is a project, and it says, No Trace, No Case, a collection of tools to help anarchists and other rebels.
I can't read that.
Understand the capabilities of their enemies, undermine surveillance efforts, and ultimately act without getting caught.
Act without getting caught.
So let me correct.
Classic stupid left tactics.
No.
Maybe anarchy emerges from the left-ish, as fascism sometimes emerges from the right, but not always, right?
But this is actually the common enemy of absolutely everyone.
Everyone should understand that the anarchists are the enemy of...
Absolutely everyone else who intends to live in civilization.
This reminds me of Portland, when Portland went to hell, and when Biden was apparently elected in 2020, and they went out on the streets either that night or the next day, and gosh, we covered it on Dark Horse.
I don't remember exactly what their language was.
Basically, they were like, we don't care.
We're angry.
We're going to burn shit down regardless.
That was their take then.
From the left, this is, you know, they're taking out electric vehicles, you know, the maker of electric vehicles, which has been something the left has loved forever, and solar panels and power walls.
And, you know, full disclosure here, we have all three of those.
Like, we have these Tesla products, and they're not perfect, but they are doing the job that they are claiming to do, and these have...
There's forever been things that the left was interested in and that the silly right, the uninvestigated right, that thinks that if you talk about the environment, you're a climate change maximalist and therefore you shouldn't be allowed to talk about the environment.
Anyone who wants to put solar panels on their roof is some kind of idiot.
Well, you guys are wrong too.
The solar panels are great.
The power walls are great.
The cars are okay.
And they're great for some things and not great for others.
The idea that you can affect change in what Musk is doing or what Trump is allowing Musk to do or what anyone is allowing Doge to do by going after individuals who have presumably, long before Trump was elected, bought some vehicle is patently insane and everyone recognizes that,
which points to This thing that you just got us to.
These are anarchists.
Anarchists are the enemy of the right and the left.
They are the enemy of all sane people, and they will be the destruction of civilization.
Yeah, this is so far beyond unpatriotic, which they would cop to.
Yes.
This is uncivilized.
This is anti-civilized.
This is somebody deciding that somebody who, you know...
I guess in this case, this is somebody capable of putting together a website.
Which doesn't take much at this point.
Right.
But nonetheless, they put together a website.
So I can't say the thing that I would often say about the rock throwers, which is they've never built anything.
Okay.
You built a website.
There's so many tools now to do it.
You don't have to know much.
I agree.
But nonetheless, I'm just holding myself to a standard.
Fair enough.
Okay.
But one, let's just recognize something.
A website that clearly invites people to take initiative in destroying Tesla cars that are owned by individuals is clearly running a substantial risk that somebody is going to get hurt or killed.
The fire that comes from the batteries of these cars.
Can easily take out a building.
Fires of electric vehicles are not like fires of gas-powered vehicles.
Yes, and I'm not saying...
They become far more explosive.
They're very hard to fight because of the batteries, which are, once they are exposed to oxygen, start fueling the fire.
Anyway, firefighters know those batteries are a problem.
They're very well protected, but vandals are not...
Primarily what they're protected from.
So this person is running the risk of killing people.
Indirectly, but they're running the risk of killing people.
They had to know that.
And yet they're doing it anyway.
And they're doing it for the purpose of taking a wildly successful American company that makes environmentally positive, not just environmentally positive products,
but has actually...
Created the ability to make Environmentally positive products, right?
The whole obstacle and what you allude to with the cars, the biggest obstacle to those cars being a great replacement for a regular car is the fact that, you know, in certain places, the chargers, sometimes because they've been vandalized, are not available and therefore you've got range issues.
Yeah, so let me just fill that in briefly.
When we lived in Portland, which is when we got our Tesla, we of course had a...
Electron spigot put in our garage.
What are those called?
Charger.
Charger.
And in a day of driving around Portland, you're never going to go beyond the range of a Tesla.
And so as long as you have an electron spigot, I prefer that.
I'm going to call it that from now on.
At home, it works great.
And here on the island, it's great.
I did the math at the electric rates back last summer and haven't redone them.
But to drive into town and back from where we live, it's about 20 miles, which could easily cost you $5 in a gas-powered vehicle at the moment.
And at the electric rates that we were being charged then, which are not cheap on the island, it was costing about $0.62.
And of course, for us, because we also have solar cells on our On our roof, it was actually free.
You can't do the analysis quite that simply.
But when I have tried taking the Tesla off-island to go, say, down to Portland, on the road it works.
And in fact, there are often, this is what you're getting to, Tesla paved the way by building infrastructure such that at many big gas stations and behind like half the targets in the country, target.
Stores in the country now, it seems.
There are banks of Tesla chargers.
And so, yes, it takes longer than filling up on gas.
And yes, you have to be more aware because there's not signage on the freeways like there is for gas stations.
But being on the road on major highways, it's actually quite easy.
Not at low temperatures, as everyone knows.
Not if you're carrying load.
Not in wind conditions.
You know, there are all sorts of limits to what electric vehicles are good at doing.
But when I got to Portland, I found almost every single charger that Tesla thought existed was destroyed.
Did not exist anymore.
And some of that was due to pre-now vandalism by idiot anarchists.
And so it was just that they decay and they aren't maintained.
Whereas the more people who have them, that you have in this case a density-dependent function, where the more people who have electric vehicles and therefore need electron spigots, the more likely you are to be able to find one when you need it.
So, Tesla made it possible for other manufacturers, and in fact...
They gave their patents away for free.
They have made it possible to have viable electric vehicles.
So whatever else you may think of, Musk, that's a huge benefit.
It makes us safer as a country.
It gives us a wider choice for those for whom an electric vehicle is the right vehicle.
It's actually a viable thing to do.
You can get one.
Anyway, the point is, it's no mean feat to have made this possible.
And the cars themselves include a very sophisticated, as long as the chargers are where they say they are,
And it should be most lauded by the...
The left, which has traditionally been the most environmentally aware.
The idea of punishing individuals or spooking them from buying a Tesla because of what the CEO is doing in his off time is despicable behavior.
And in any case, it is...
I believe we are entering a new era where the tools for people to disrupt civilization are now, as you point out, so readily available that we are depending on people to restrain themselves from engaging in this kind of madness until we come up with some sort of a legal framework that makes it difficult to do,
which frankly creates a threat of censorship that we don't want.
So it's a brave new world.
Yes, it is.
Alright, is that it for Doge and Tesla?
Yeah.
For the moment?
Alright, I wanted to talk a little bit about flu and measles and the moms who were concerned about vaccines.
Based on, and this is not my usual approach, but I just happened to read two popular articles this week, one in Scientific American, one in Unheard, both of which I will say.
Scientific American has long been recognized as having failed utterly under its previous, now resigned, editor-in-chief.
And Unheard, I think, is flailing, because almost every piece I read there now feels like it is a giant misstep.
I kind of want to respond to these two pieces and read a bunch of the Unheard article just to share it to see what your reaction is as well.
So here, I am hoping, Jen, that my computer is playing a nice game at the moment and that you can see this.
Can you see this?
Can you see my...
Okay.
You know, we went through this.
After the live stream last week, and we established that this was not a problem with my computer.
All right.
So here, this is published early March this year, Scientific American, why this year's flu season is the worst in more than a decade.
Outpatient flu visits and hospitalizations are higher than at any time in the past 15 years.
So we see...
They say that, and then this actually only has lines from the last several years, since 2018, it looks like.
And they've all got, you know, humps at various places, except 2020 to 2021, which is basically zero, and 2021-2022, which is zero through the main part of the usual flu season, and that has a slight number late in the normal flu season,
April-May.
And of course, what this brings up is, and many people have done this analysis carefully, and I'm just showing a graph, that Scientific American, which is trying to use fear and numbers to get people to go get their flu vaccine,
their own graph raises the question that has been raised by many people before, did flu actually disappear in the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 flu seasons?
Or was some of what was being diagnosed as COVID actually flu?
So what I would like to see, and again, presumably this has been done, although I don't know where to access it, I would like to see the COVID numbers for each of these years, starting in 2020, 2021, overlaying on top of this.
And then I would also like to see the cumulative numbers and see if you add flu plus COVID from beginning in 2018, let's try.
Like in the 2018, 2019, Northern Hemisphere respiratory illness season.
From that year through 2024-2025, insofar as we are coming to the end of that, I want to see a simple three-column set of numbers.
Number of hospitalizations, or deaths, whatever.
Number of hospitalizations attributed to flu, number of hospitalizations attributed to COVID, and total number of hospitalizations.
You know, it has often been noted that many of the diagnoses of COVID, the bad ones, right?
Of COVID was actually death in many cases with COVID, wherein it was discovered as someone was already dying, or I don't know if in the case of COVID it was ever post-mortem.
Oh, they tested positive for COVID, therefore they died of COVID, in part because there are financial incentives in place for hospitals to benefit from such diagnoses.
So, in this article that the Scientific American is...
Using this graph to try to get people afraid and get their flu vaccinations, they say, here it is, kids have been hit especially hard.
As of February 22nd, 98 children, most of them unvaccinated, have died from flu in the U.S. this season.
98 children.
That's actually a fairly high number, right?
And flu does kill.
Flu is not a cold.
Flu does kill.
That, in comparison, if I can have my screen back here so I can get to the next thing that I want to show, in comparison to the fear that is being invoked with regard to measles in Texas.
Here you have a tweet from someone I don't...
I don't know him.
He says he's a physician scientist, MD, PhD, with a couple hundred thousand followers on Twitter.
Says, now a second death associated with the measles outbreak in the U.S. Measles continues to spread in the U.S. This is from actually the same day that the Scientific American article came out, March 6th.
In less than 200 known cases, two deaths.
This most recent one doesn't have many details yet, but I believe its unvaccinated adult didn't seek care.
So, A, compare...
One dead child from measles in the United States to 98 dead children from measles, rather from flu in the U.S. But look at his link and find Lee County resident tests positive for measles after death.
And this has not been updated since March 6, 2025.
I don't see any evidence of any claim that this person actually died of measles.
This person clearly died with measles.
So one of two deaths in the United States that is being used to terrify people into perhaps getting a re-up on their MMR shot or their first MMR shot is just like what was done with COVID.
A case of had the thing as opposed to died of the thing.
In light of the system having been primed with a false story about Bobby Kennedy's responsibility for the Samoan measles deaths.
Right.
So the point is, what you know is that you've got a story that requires measles to be terrifying.
You've got an apparatus That has a known trick, which is we are going to make sure that we come up with those cases by categorizing people who die with things as if they've died of them.
So anyway, it's hard to know what to make of any of this.
Did the guy die of measles or not?
We don't know is the answer, but I certainly don't trust that.
Measles is real.
Measles has killed.
One more time, show my screen here.
This is from a site called Statista.com, rate of measles deaths in the U.S. from 1919 to 2021.
This is 102 years of data per 100,000 population.
You have people in the early part of the 20th century, right around when Spanish flu was happening, with a lot of ups and downs over the years, there were substantial measles deaths.
But boy, did it fall.
By 1940, we were at 0.53 per 100,000 population.
And by 1963, that was at 0.19.
And it's gone down to, you know, 0.0 and 0.01.
But by 1963, right here, it was at 0.19.
And why does 1963 matter?
Well, 1963 was the moment that Mark introduced the first measles vaccine.
So this has been done many ways, many times, but here we have data that I believe to be true about the rate of measles deaths in the U.S. from going back over 100 years, 102 years worth of data,
in which you could see that measles used to be a real concern for people.
And there is now a vaccine that is being...
Pronounced as the thing that you must do to protect yourself from measles.
What was happening in the U.S. before 1963 that caused the rate of measles deaths in the population to go down so much?
We had greater hygiene and we had greater understanding of why hygiene mattered.
And we have vitamin A. We had good diet.
We had...
We had improvements to public health that human beings could take control of for themselves.
It did not require an exogenous thing.
And in fact, the moment at which the exogenous thing, the Merck vaccine, and now the only thing available is the MMR vaccine to Americans, came after the decline of measles deaths had already happened.
What's more, we know way too little when we look at something like this.
And we're trying to figure out how dangerous the disease is.
And we think, oh, there's a certain number of deaths.
But you don't have the information on who the people were who died and what their state of health was.
What you're really seeing is another trick.
The other trick is that people die when the sum total of their threats and compromised systems is too much for them to maintain homeostasis.
And so it is very frequently incorrect.
I always use the example of when somebody who's in their 90s dies of the flu, their death certificate says flu.
That's not what they died of, right?
Flu is not a deadly disease.
It's a serious disease, but it is not a deadly disease on its own.
What you have is somebody who is hovering very close to death who is pushed over the edge by flu.
And yes, they may have lost a year or two or more of life, but...
To think of people, basically our amygdalas are triggered when we think of people being culled from the population at some rate.
But if the point is, oh, well, those people were very sick and then they got measles and it did X, Y, or Z to them, then the answer is, ah, maybe the right remedy is to figure out what's making people very sick and address that rather than to use a vaccine.
That utilizes aluminum, the safety of which is established in a study of four rabbits, for which the data for one of them was lost, making it three rabbits, which is nearly enough rabbits to establish safety in a statistical test.
You can't get significance from it.
And aluminum is a substance which has no known function in the body.
Right.
We have no mechanism for elegantly dealing with it.
The rabbits that were tested showed that it distributed around the body and stuck around in a way that it shouldn't.
So essentially, once you start digging, once you start questioning that somebody's looking out for you and running the obvious test that you would have to run before releasing something into the market and injecting it into children and all of that, once you do that work, you discover actually their claims that injecting aluminum into children is safe are based on Literally nothing,
right?
It's not even a study in which four rabbits showed no harm.
That study never happened, right?
We got a study of four rabbits, which isn't capable of showing harm.
So it was set up to fail and it demonstrated harm anyway.
So what the hell are we doing?
Like the system couldn't be more absurd if Monty Python had written it up in a sketch.
So unfortunately, that's a good setup for me sharing part or all of this unheard article.
So let's just go there.
Crunchy moms aren't scared of measles.
They have become a potent political force, reads the headline.
So this came out March 17th, two days ago.
I had measles when I was a kid, reminisced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a 2021 podcast interview.
I had 11 brothers and sisters.
We all got measles.
It was a great week.
We stayed at home.
We watched Sea Hunt.
I don't know what Sea Hunt is.
I think I remember it.
It's before our time.
The now health secretary concluded, the treatment for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A. You can't patent those.
He's not wrong.
It seems as if nothing will change his mind.
The current outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico, which now counts 250 cases and two deaths, asterisk.
I'm just going to make comments on this.
Remember the two deaths, at least one of which has not even been attributed to the measles which the person was found to have had after he died.
One of a child and one of an adult has been Kennedy's first test in his new role.
So far, he has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents.
While he's acknowledged that the measles vaccine does prevent transmission of the disease, he has not urged people to get it.
Instead, he's enthused about the effectiveness of vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments, as he should.
It just so happens that vitamin A and cod liver oil is the measles treatment of choice of the so-called crunchy moms, who are widely credited with powering Kennedy's ascent.
The crunchy moms are reacting online to the measles outbreak with defiance.
They generally believe that measles is no more serious than the chickenpox, and even that it's beneficial to catch it.
They refuse to be cowed by what they see as an agenda-driven media circus.
An agenda-driven media circus.
Yep.
That sounds right.
I've been to that.
Not that fun.
Stuck in that circus.
Can't leave.
Measles outbreak headlines.
Equals paid advertising, wrote influencer Bracey Dutton on Instagram last month.
The real headline?
Your immune system was designed to handle life.
Fear is the real virus.
Sunshine, movement, and real food are the cure.
Other than fear is the real virus, I agree with what she says here.
The crunchy mom's fervor on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump's Make America Healthy Again Maha movement.
That wasn't Trump's movement.
That was Kennedy's movement.
They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood, what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use, a key political issue.
I'm sorry, that wasn't the moms who did that.
That was the collaboration between the corporations and the government, mostly as being led by the Democrats, who we just voted out of office, who allowed the...
food that our children are eating, the medical care they receive, and the products they're using to be completely destroyed by corporate interests.
And their COVID-era-fueled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the right.
It's because the left has lost its mind.
If you're a mother on Instagram, it's almost impossible to avoid this crunchy content.
Crunchy.
Yeah.
Granola eating, crunchy, right-wing moms.
I became aware of the moms even before I had my son early last year.
The algorithm, having picked up on the fact that I was pregnant, funneled them into my Instagram feed.
They were having wild pregnancies with no prenatal care at all, and even free birthing at home with no medical professionals present.
When their babies arrived, their conflict with the medical system intensified.
There would be no pokes or cupcakes, code for vaccines, used online to avoid social media filters.
Checkups at the pediatrician were best avoided completely.
Okay, so let me put everything that I just read aside for a moment.
Childbirth is risky in modernity.
I am not advocating for having no one with medical experience present at a birth, if you have a choice.
The rest of this paragraph, though, I think, is entirely batshit crazy.
Remember, she is mocking the moms who she is calling crunchy moms, whom she was being fed when she was pregnant and after the birth of her son.
Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket.
Milk pasteurization was unnecessary, even harmful.
Homeschooling was a must.
Every detail of home life and child rearing was a battleground, under threat by nefarious forces.
Yep.
Yeah, every word.
Every word, right?
The personal is political was the slogan of left-wing feminists in the 70s, but today it has no better inheritance than the Maha Moms, because it's the same people.
Because the names of the political groups have changed, but it's the same people who were crunchy, granola-eating, homeschool-thinking, real-food-giving, letting their children run outside barefoot at all hours in the 70s.
It's the same ideas that are causing them to do that now.
Just because you say, oh, well, they voted for Trump, therefore they have totally different politics.
No, it's you who has changed.
If you think you're on the left and you think all of this is crazy that these mothers are saying, the problem isn't with them.
In the last few decades, the right has successfully claimed ownership of the politics of motherhood and neatly merged them with the COVID era's upswing in hostility to medicine and expertise.
It has made space for a politics centered on motherhood as an identity and on the granular concerns of moms.
The left, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach, ignoring the deeply political nature of homemaking altogether.
Vice President J.D. Vance's remark acquitting Democrats with childless cat ladies may have been unfair, or not, but it reflects a real sentiment that has provoked the rightward swing of the crunchy moms.
On paper, during the last election, the Democrats were the pro-woman party, with a female candidate and pro-choice policy.
No.
The Democrats were not the pro-woman party.
I explained a lot of why in the piece that I wrote on natural selections, why I'm voting for Trump, but no way was that candidate or any of its policies, any of the Democrats' policies pro-woman, despite what you were told.
But preoccupied by the girl boss ethos, oh my god, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family.
So girl boss, which is...
A depraved, disgusting throwback to like, I mean, it's like the same people who embrace girlboss as if that's empowering women embrace trans as an empowerment of something inside of you.
It's the same mistake and it's backwards and wrong.
Preoccupied by the girlboss ethos, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family.
As a result, the kind of mothers who once may have gravitated to the granola left have now completed a hard right turn.
Wait, wait, wait.
I just want to pause on the irony of, I mean, I love this portrayal.
It's genius.
The Democrats were so focused on the girl boss, what was it?
Aesthetic?
Girl boss ethos, yeah.
Yeah, the girl boss ethos.
As if, I mean, this is brilliant, right?
Why did they lose motherhood?
Because they were so focused on accomplishment in the workplace in which girl boss, like girl is not what accomplishes things in the world.
Accomplishment in the workforce, as in brat summer.
That's what girl boss means.
And then you touch them and critique them, say you could be doing better, and they disappear under tears.
Frickin' faces melt because they weren't what they appeared in the first place.
None of it's real.
How preposterous is it that Kamala Harris was supposed to be the icon of this, you know, getting shit done in the workplace?
Like, we couldn't find any real accomplishments to even scrutinize.
There's nothing there.
You had an empty suit.
Right.
Yep.
Oh, man.
Yep.
That's right.
So you see why I wanted to share this?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
This mass desertion wasn't inevitable, this unheard article continues.
The left used to concern itself more with the domestic realm.
Take the Wages for Housework campaign, began in the 70s, which sought equal recognition for women's work in the home.
Then there was Alex Kate Schulman's Marriage Agreement essay from 1970, which delineated the arrangement she and her husband made to split housework equally, and which included as its first principle, we reject the notion of the work which brings in more money is the more valuable.
I have not gone and looked at that essay.
Maybe it's great.
Maybe it's crap.
I could see from that description it could be either.
As we have written about in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, as I have written about separately, division of labor makes sense.
Division of labor does not inherently mean that one person gets stuck with all the crap work and one person gets to do all the amazing, wonderful work.
It doesn't mean that.
It means that actually you both will have more time to do the work that you want to do in the world if you actually specialize a little bit and do some tasks and have those be the tasks that you know that you're responsible for doing.
The two-income trap argued that the decline of stay-at-home motherhood had had a deleterious effect on American families.
But the overall tendency of mainstream feminism today has been to portray homemaking and care work as a kind of prison, Betty Friedan's problem that has no name, and urge women to succeed in the workforce just as a man would.
This tendency, culminating in the frenetic, lean-in-style corporate feminism of the 2010s, is what the crunchy moms are reacting to.
No, they're not.
I mean, some of them are, to some degree, because it was stupid and wrong and wasn't what it claimed to be.
But what the crunchy moms are reacting to, again, is the evil relationship between The corporations and the government that again made the food, the medicine, and all the products that you might have your children engage with toxic and dangerous.
That's what the Crunchy Moms are responding to.
Not just the lean-in feminism, lean-in style corporate feminism of the 2010s.
Yes, that was also naive and stagnant and responded to a static idea of the problems that women were facing in the workforce, but that's not the main thing that Crunchy Mommas are responding to.
No, they're actually responding as mothers who love their children and are actually going to go into full mama bear against the forces arrayed against them.
Go ahead.
I wanted to point out.
Nowhere on the list of threats to children, which are frankly animating the so-called crunchy moms, is PepsiCo.
Right.
That's why I keep on invoking the corporate government alliance.
But the point is, if you, you know, let's grow up.
And Kennedy is going after.
Right.
PepsiCo.
He's going after PepsiCo.
And I don't mean to single them out.
They're hardly alone.
But, you know, the fact is, children, after they are one year old, should be healthy in general and should not die of anything.
They shouldn't become vulnerable to anything that kills until long after they have matured.
The fact that we have children that are vulnerable to things that are actually circulating owes to their ill health, which owes to PepsiCo as much as anything else, right?
The sugary drinks, the seed oil-laden chips, the whole thing is setting children up.
You have to ask yourself, if you had the analysis in which you understood what all of the contributing factors were for every child who dies in the U.S., right?
Whether it's automobile accidents or poisonous food or vaccine adjuvants or whatever it would be.
If you had the matrix in which you could see all of the contributing factors.
How ridiculous is it that we are talking about, you know, two deaths from measles?
How many deaths of children are attributable in large measure to food that they got from a major corporation that has, you know, brightly colored things on every shelf of your supermarket?
Sprinkles.
Right.
We tend to think two deaths of children is a tragedy.
One.
There's one death of a child from measles.
Maybe.
It is a tragedy.
But the point is, lots of kids die who shouldn't be.
And they're being set up by a system that makes them unhealthy, which is, of course, exactly why we're getting pushback on measles.
And hence Kennedy's focus, stated focus, on chronic disease more than the focus has been and less focus on infectious disease because children are dying of chronic disease.
Americans are unhealthy because of...
Chronic disease.
American life expectancy is going down.
Children are miserable and unhappy, and all of that is a chronic disease situation, not due to infectious disease.
I also believe we should each have in our minds a threshold number.
We're being told to jump at the death of a single child for measles.
Is the death of a single child indicative of something that we should be taking action on?
Or is taking action when a single death has occurred going to result in a system that kills more people because it's always jumping to act when in fact you can't address every single outlier, right?
So if one child dying from measles is reason for us to be writing articles and jumping to attention, then why have we not been leaping to attention at the huge number of years of productive life that...
Americans are being robbed of by all of these corporations and their garbage food.
Well, I mean, you know the answer to that.
Of course I do.
And we write about it, again, in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
And it's like, and I think this is actually the example that we use in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, taking it out of medical space.
And putting it into acute physical risk space, which parents are also wildly protecting their children from, such that they become 18-year-olds, and they're children in all but body because they have never been exposed to anything that forced them to actually make decisions and figure out risk on their own.
And so a school that takes a group of 15-year-olds on a class trip, and one of them...
Slips on a steep trail and falls off a cliff and dies, is forever burdened with that tragedy, that memory, that knowledge, that that is where that happened, and that they were in some way responsible.
Most schools, many schools that have that happen to them, will respond by saying, okay, no more.
No more trips.
We don't do that anymore.
And so what you have then are children coming of age where they've never been able to explore.
And there will be more children who become adults and who later make decisions based on no experience whatsoever that end up getting them killed.
They will live less interesting lives and they are more likely to die because they weren't Enabled to experience risk when they were young.
Does being an advocate for having children take risks of all sorts?
Physical, psychological, metaphorical, all of them.
Put me at risk of having someone make a decision that will end in tragedy?
Yes.
But what we can't do, because we cannot measure it, Is know for sure how many more orders of magnitude children are dying or are leading as adults unfulfilled and uninteresting lives because they were never able to take risks in the first place.
So, you know, why aren't we doing it?
Why aren't we holding PepsiCo accountable?
Because how would you?
How would you know to what...
What piece of the ill health of a 25-year-old is attributable to the fact that they had a liter of Pepsi every week of their life for 10 years when they were growing up?
How do you put that into a spreadsheet?
Yeah, you don't, but I think we have to start exerting some discipline.
First of all, we all know whether we ever explicitly have the thought.
We all understand what you're saying about The net benefit of something risky in which a certain number of people die.
Right?
We all make this decision with respect to driving.
Yes.
Right?
We could eliminate a huge number of deaths, frankly, by not driving anymore.
But the point is we all take a small risk in order to avail ourselves of the convenience and some of us get unlucky.
That's just simply the way life works.
But here's the other thing.
Freddie.
The lead at Unheard is a friend of mine.
So I say this with love in my heart.
But at some level, the way to address this is to deal with Unheard's failing here.
Unheard has published, frankly, a hyperventilating article panicking people over one very minor danger.
I do want to finish the article.
With an incomplete analysis.
While failing, as far as I know, to deal with all of the things that are more threatening.
That's kind of my point about the PepsiCo comparison.
What fraction of the harm comes from known corporations distributing products that are household names, etc.
But what are all the things that are actually more threatening to children than measles?
Let's take, for example, hey, I don't want to hear your bullshit about measles.
Unless you have also tried to raise the alarm about suicidality coming from psychiatric medicines, right?
How many kids do we lose because they're on psychiatric meds for which we know that a side effect is suicidality?
We're losing huge numbers of kids.
That is a tragedy.
Those kids, they don't have informed consent.
Their parents don't have the information to consent properly on their behalf.
They're taking drugs that result directly in this consequence.
And the point is, if you're concerned about the death of children who shouldn't be dying, you should be concerned of suicidality from people on psychiatric meds way before you get to measles, just based on the simple numbers.
So if unheard, And, frankly, even if you want to stick to infectious disease, you should be 98 times as concerned about flu this year than you are about measles.
If you're just doing the simple dumbass rubric that way, honestly, flu has killed 97 more children than measles has this year.
Right.
In the U.S. So, yeah, and I think that is a, you know...
There are nuances, but in general, the question is how scared should you be of that thing is something you can roughly say statistically, and maybe we should discount the ones, even if they kill a lot, that we can't do anything about.
But the fact is, yeah, we should be roughly in proportion to the actual harm to people, be concerned about these things, and promoting ones that are very low risk to, you know, top of mind is obviously a scare tactic.
And, you know, and it's obviously political in this case.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, let me just finish this article.
Yeah.
The mahal moms on social media often allude to their disillusionment with feminism.
I wish the mainstream feminism would also include mothers in their advocacy instead of contributing to the anti-motherhood children culture, further promoting the undervaluing of women's domestic labor and refusing to acknowledge that the well-being of our children lays the groundwork for the future of society.
Read an Instagram video by user Radical Garden earlier this year.
But if feminism is considered one dragon to slay, Big Pharma is another.
Twenty years ago, the word crunchy evoked NPR-listening New England or West Coast liberals who shop at health food stores and did yoga.
Today, it calls to mind right-wing homesteaders who eschew vaccines.
The same people.
The only thing that's changed is that you're calling them right.
That's exactly right.
In a typical crunchy mom reel last week, the account empowered.mama.nest wrote, They lied about thalidomide.
They lied about DDT.
They lied about tobacco.
They lied about asbestos.
They lied about mercury.
They lied about opioids.
They lied about COVID.
They're lying about vaccines, too.
You know who doesn't have the incentive to lie?
Mothers.
She's not wrong.
COVID and the authorities'heavy-handed vaccine implementation has much to do with this shift, drawing the battle lines definitively between left and right on vaccines and driving any skeptics into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement.
But a deep distrust of Big Pharma was simmering well before then, and again, it was moms at the forefront.
Kennedy has said that moms of autistic children who attributed their child's condition to vaccines inspired his initial interest in the vaccine issue, which has formed the cornerstone of his career.
No, it...
I'll just read.
I won't just read about it.
We have met some of these moms who are loving mothers who are very smart, highly educated, and who have learned the research behind their initial observation that a normally developing child after getting a shot,
often an MMR, stopped developing normally and in fact regressed.
There are many, many, many of these stories.
And yes, Kennedy has said that at some point after being approached by mothers who had experienced this over and over and over again at events, he finally started paying attention.
And it has been something that once you see, you cannot unsee.
That doesn't mean it's a cornerstone of his career.
But once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
And frankly, imagining that you should want to is depraved.
His running mate in 2024, Nicole Shanahan, is a self-described autism mom who believes her daughter's autism stems from vaccines.
These two issues intersect in the online aesthetics of this movement.
Crunchy mom content ranges from the gauzy and trad wife inflected, women in prairie dresses needing sourdough, to the militant, often by the same accounts.
One minute you're looking at someone's video about co-sleeping.
Oh, how insane.
And the next you're watching a woman drinking out of a jug of raw milk and talking about chemtrails.
The crunchy moms seem to have it all figured out.
For every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer.
That's not true, and they wouldn't say it either.
These are mothers who are trying to figure things out and do the best for their children.
It's easy to see why so many women have sought refuge among them amid motherhood's flurry of anxiety and decision-making.
And so far, I think we're almost there, and so far their tactics seem to be working.
The Food and Drug Administration, the Crunchy Mom's nemesis, lost hundreds of workers during the Elon Musk-led Doge purge.
The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy's purview, announced it was cutting research grants relating to vaccine hesitancy.
The Centers for Disease Control, another organization in the Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly going to perform a large-scale study investigating whether there is a link between vaccines and autism, a notion that has already been studied extensively and is not supported by evidence.
Wrong.
Victory goes to the crunchy moms, but they may find that it's a pyrrhic one.
They want nasty ingredients and dyes out of the food supply.
They want clean water and soil, and they want sterner oversight of pharmaceuticals, but they support an administration that's dismantling the federal agencies that oversee these areas.
This is, remember, the FDA, the CDC, and the...
What was the third one?
Oh, the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC is what this author is claiming.
These crunchy moms really need to just get behind and back whatever it is they want to do because they are, after all, in charge of doing the very things that the crunchy moms want, which is, you know, to keep their children alive and healthy.
And it's exactly those agencies that have overseen the destruction of American childhood.
So this argument is incoherent and, like, it couldn't be less coherent.
And if they hope that the Trump administration will remain steadfast against big business to defend their children's health, they may find themselves disappointed.
Kennedy's latest move was to endorse the fast food burger and milkshakes chain Steak and Shake because it has stopped using seed oils.
It's a really important step.
This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms, but so far they've shown no interest in speaking to them on their terms, or in general addressing large swaths of Americans who have lost trust in the medical establishment.
These women are trying to protect their children, and they think they're doing so, even those who don't vaccinate for measles.
As long as trust the science is the only answer to a worried mom who has questions about the vaccine schedule, those moms will gravitate towards the side that embraces them, whether it ultimately benefits them or not.
I hate to say it, but who wrote this article?
Rosie Gray.
Rosie Gray.
This article is sophistry in the following sense.
But she doesn't think it is.
I don't think...
I think she's writing truth.
I'm agnostic.
I will not be surprised to find out that there is some incentive that has been created, and I would not be...
Surprised to find out she's a true believer.
But what this obviously is, is a person taking various information that we have available to us, which is highly conflicted for reasons we have covered extensively here on Dark Horse, and saying,
well, if I had to make the case that the Crunchy Moms, first of all, if I had to make the case that those who are now on high alert, About the dangers of all the products of pharma.
If I had to make the case that those people were putting their own children in jeopardy, how would I do it?
Right?
And this article uses the manipulative tactic of calling them crunchy.
It uses the tone.
Frankly, it borrows from a conversation from 1985 that I remember well.
About the people who were, it seemed at the time, rejecting scientific insight in favor of mysticism and gut instinct,
right?
The idea that modernity was somehow bad and that they were better off doing whatever the alternative, the natural alternative was.
And let's put it this way.
Those people, they're on an amazing winning streak.
The number of places where modernity was doing something dangerous and harmful that we didn't detect for decades is huge.
You and I have spent so many hours covering it here.
It's riddled throughout our book.
They were right.
They weren't right in every instance, presumably, but their general instinct that if you go into the supermarket and you buy the stuff that the FDA says is safe and you go to the doctor and you take the stuff that the CDC says you should take, that you're going to end up doing yourself more harm than good,
that instinct was correct.
And frankly, we need things like unheard.
To recognize its responsibility to not allow decent people who are trying to do right by their families in a completely poisoned and clouded information environment, they must not be caricatured.
And the fact is, you and I have watched the so-called anti-vaxxers be caricatured over the course of decades, and now we have met many of the people at the head of that movement.
And I, some years ago, tweeted, You know, scratch an anti-vaxxer and what you'll find is the parent of an injured child, right?
This is in general what most of these people are.
Put yourself in their shoes.
It's not difficult, right?
Imagine.
Let's say that it's not true.
Let's say that there is some other mysterious thing that none of us have ever figured out.
That is causing children to suddenly regress and lose developmental skills that they had already attained, lose their capacity to interact in an emotive way.
Let's suppose there's something else.
It's not vaccines.
And for some dumb reason...
It always happens after going to the doctor.
It always happens after going to the doctor.
Or 50% of the time, it happens after going to the doctor.
And those mothers are connecting two and two and they don't deserve to be connected.
Whatever it is, just put yourself in their shoes.
You can't be compassionate that somebody who's watched their child regress suddenly is trying to figure out what it is, and they've been given evidence that they can't ignore, that it's connected to their visit to the doctor?
Like, what human can't empathize with that?
How could you miss it?
But I think part of, and I don't know this author at all, but she says that she had a child last year.
And we weren't fearful new parents, but we were evolutionary biologists.
And I think most new parents and parents in general in the U.S. for some decades at this point have lived in a state of fear because there are so many conflicting sources of expertise that are coming at them.
And they really have...
It's kind of like they have to pick a lane and stay in it unless they can develop and, you know...
This is always going to be my bias, and I think it's the right one, unless they can develop two sets of tools.
Scientific tools enough so that they can assess for themselves the claims that are being made, as opposed to simply trusting the guy wearing the lab coat.
And evolutionary tools such that they can make sense of what does and does not make sense in the landscape.
And those are not...
Overlapping sets, although the evolutionary tools are, of course, scientific ones as well.
And so if you trust experts, if you love your child, which every parent does almost, and you are being told by some of those experts that if you don't do what they say,
you are putting your child at risk, it may seem like you are doing yourself, And the world, and indeed those very parents, a favor by making them feel bad for questioning the experts who say that they have your health's child in their hands,
their child's health in your hands.
Well, I agree, but, you know, you and I have now traveled this road having believed that the basic science had been done to establish these things, you know.
As I keep saying, I never thought vaccines were perfectly safe, but I thought they were safe enough.
And I'm now embarrassed that I assumed what I think any reasonable person would assume, which is they couldn't possibly have released this onto the market without a placebo-controlled test that showed that these things were not doing damage to large fractions of the people who take them.
Oh, but they did.
Yeah, oh, but they did.
And then they mandated them on the childhood vaccines.
So it used to be, back in the day when the left wasn't batshit crazy, that the left admired Europe over the precautionary principle.
I find evidence of that in my lectures.
Absolutely.
The precautionary principle, hard to operationalize.
You know, it's not a law.
It's a principle.
But the point is, At what point did you forget that the precautionary principle applies when you intervene in a complex system?
You have a child and you have a doctor.
And the doctor is saying, we must inject your child with this thing.
Oh, what's in it?
Oh, it's an antigen that's going to alert your immune system to a disease your child hasn't seen.
Is that anything else?
Well, there's an adjuvant.
Oh, what's that?
Well, in this case, it's a metal.
What's it do?
Oh, it hyperactivates your immune system.
In a specific way?
No.
Has it been tested to see whether it's safe?
Oh, in humans?
No.
Has it been tested in anything else?
Rabbits?
Was it safe?
No.
I mean, like, how dumb does this have to get before you're like, wait a minute, doctor, you're putting my child in danger.
Wait, and the point of the metal that hasn't been tested for its safety in humans and has been tested in animals and it's not safe, the point of the metal...
Is to aggravate the immune system.
Right.
That is the point.
And so then we have a whole several generations at this point with aggravated immune systems.
Everyone's got allergies and autoimmune diseases.
And has that have nothing to do with the fact that we've been ingesting people with heavy metals?
Injecting people with heavy metals?
No, certainly not.
It couldn't because they wouldn't let that happen, would they?
Well, I think they would.
I think they would.
The story is just too dumb.
And here's a little exercise for you.
Pharma is a big industry.
It obviously has an interest in people taking its products, even in cases where maybe those products aren't in their interest to take.
Let's just recognize that it has that financial interest.
Of course it does.
It also has a huge amount of money to spend on persuading.
People and their doctors to take things that they probably shouldn't take.
So it's bound to have some impact on how many things people are taking and for what?
Now, in your mind, how big do you think that impact is?
And what happens if you take the public discussion that we're having, articles like this one from UnHerd, and you subtract?
You say, well, actually, the enthusiasm that people have for vaccines is certainly justified based on the scientific evidence that these things are to the net benefit of the people taking them.
But maybe they're not as good as we think.
Do you think that's a 1% bias?
Do you think it's 5% of why we think they're good?
Is it 75%, 95%?
The answer is you don't know.
And in such an environment, you ought to move very carefully, especially when the thing in question is, am I going to allow somebody to take a syringe?
The contents of which I am not in a position to assess and inject it into my child, the consequences of which I will not be able to assess.
And if there are consequences, I'm going to walk right back there into the doctor and I'm going to say, what's happened to my child?
This is the result of that thing you injected and the doctor's going to say, no, it isn't.
That's all.
He's just going to say, no, it isn't.
And you're going to say, yes, it is.
And I'm going to go to my lawyer.
Doesn't matter.
Manufacturer has liability protection.
So in that system, You ought to be a crunchy mom.
You ought to be a crunchy mom.
And what the author of the article says, that the so-called liberals, the only thing in their arsenal is follow the science.
There's two problems with that phrase.
Science isn't something that you follow.
Science is something that you can assess and agree with and move based on what it has found.
So maybe loosely we can say that might be following.
You can't come close to following science that hasn't actually been done.
Like, the vaccine safety testing has not been done, so there is no science to be followed here.
Yeah.
To be clear, for those who may have just joined Dark Horse for the first time, what does it mean that the science wasn't done?
It means that when they test these things, they test them against an injection that contains the adjuvant.
So if the adjuvant is doing harm, the harm shows up in both the treatment and the control, which means we don't know how much harm it does.
Period.
The end.
Why would you do that?
You would do that to obscure the harm done by the adjuvant.
It's that simple.
So, you know, forget it.
We're speaking as scientists, but we're also just speaking as parents.
If we had it to do over and we knew which questions to ask, there is no way we would have signed up for those injections just on the basis that it isn't safe to inject your kid with a mystery substance, right?
It's a mystery substance because it hasn't been tested against the control.
You know, we were thinking that we might get re-monetized by YouTube at some point.
Those are good times.
Yeah.
They demonetized us, for those of you who have never known or forgotten, back in the summer of 2021, because we were talking about, ooh, you know, COVID vaccine safety and ivermectin.
And it seems like times have changed.
They've taken a lot of money and just kept it for themselves.
It should have been ours.
But probably this conversation makes it difficult to open that conversation back up again.
I don't know.
Maybe they're going to have a come-to-Jesus moment and realize we're not the enemy.
It depends on who they are.
Like, we're the enemy of some people, but we're not the enemy of humans.
We're not the enemy of humanity.
We're not the enemy of, you know, children and health and, you know, all of the amazing things that humans can be.
But we are the enemy of some of the forces aligned in the universe right now.
Yep.
Indeed.
All right.
We'll be back again next week at the same time.
Please do consider joining us on Locals, where we've got our Q&As up and other great content.
And do check out, what did the title of the episode with Laura Delano end up being?
It is Prescription for Insanity.
Prescription for Insanity.
Excellent.
So check that out.
That dropped on the Inside Rail part of Dark Horse yesterday with Brett and Laura Delano.
And until we see you next time.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
