Staring Down Ignoble Lies: The 293rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss RFK Jr. the CDC, autism and trans activism. Kennedy revealed this week that in 2002, the CDC destroyed data that showed that children who got the MMR vaccine before 36 months of age had far higher rates of autism than did those who get the vaccine later in life. An HHS report will soon be released that ties Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism—what does this tell us about past public health advice, safety and risk? How can we all become better at pattern recognition? Florid...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
It is number 293, if memory serves.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, if memory serves, and you are Dr. Heather Hang.
Again, contingent on memory serving.
293 being prime, yet another prime episode.
All right.
I will take your word for it, having not thought to check 293, but I can't think of any factors.
Yeah, you know, we're getting up there where it's harder to come up with them off the top of the head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Quite.
Yeah.
So we did a Q ⁇ A last Wednesday, which is available on locals.
Considered checking that out.
No Q ⁇ A today, but there's Locals Watch Party going on.
Brett's doing Patreon calls with his patrons this weekend.
Lots of cool ways to interact.
If you would like more than what we got going on here, and we're doing this special Sunday edition because we're going to be off for a couple weeks starting in a week and a half or so.
But top of the hour, as always, pay the rent with our three awesome sponsors.
Without further ado, let us do that.
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Oh, oh.
Yep, it probably is spelled differently.
I'll have to take your word for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Right.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
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All right, we're going to talk about some trans stuff today.
But do you want to start with the couple Kennedy-Maha issues arising?
First of all, there was a pretty interesting set of exchanges in Congress this week where Kennedy found himself testifying in the Senate.
And anyway, people may have seen clips.
There's one thing in particular I wanted to highlight.
It is an exchange in which he reveals something about what's taking place inside the CDC.
Jen, do you want to?
I mean, I'll just tell you one example, and I could sit here and give you thousands.
But in 2002, CDC did an internal study of Atlanta and Fulbright County, Georgia children, and looked at children who got the MLR vaccine on time and compared those to kids who got them later.
So in other words, kids who got them before 36 months and kids who got them afterward.
The data from that study showed that black boys who got the vaccine on time had a 260% greater chance of getting an autism diagnosis than children who waited.
The chief scientist on that, Dr. William Thompson, the senior said, vaccine safety science at CDC, was ordered to come into a room with four other co-authors by his boss, Frank DeStefano, who's the head of the immunization safety press, and ordered to destroy that data.
And then they published it without that fact.
So I've actually heard Kennedy mention this before.
It is an extraordinary piece of evidence because for one thing, it's a 262% increase, at least a 262% increase in the chances of an autism diagnosis.
But this is just simply over a delay in receiving the vaccine.
This is not the comparison between kids who got it and kids who didn't.
This is just simply a matter of delaying beyond 36 months versus taking it when it's recommended on the CDC schedule.
And then we are told that inside the CDC, this inconvenient conclusion was purged so that the public was not made aware of it, which, of course, indicates something about the culture inside the CDC.
Can you imagine just for a moment that you discover something like this and your reaction is not, we have to get this information to the public immediately.
We have to alert doctors because for one thing, this isn't even a question at this point of saying that that vaccine shouldn't be administered.
Just simply the awareness that delaying the administration actually prevents a huge number of cases of autism, that is an amazingly potent fact.
And the instinct to bury it is obviously the result of profound corruption.
Yeah.
And all of the usual objections to, for instance, actually doing placebo trials on these vaccines does not apply here.
This is a question of the schedule is wrong because of the timing of the recommendations, not because of the what of the recommendations.
And I'm sure that's the shallow end of the pool.
But in this particular case, what we have is a claim, presumably a credible claim.
No one has come out and said that's absolutely not true, of the burying of data that children are being harmed by being administered vaccines too early, not by being administered vaccines at all, which presumably those claims are going to be made.
They have been made by others.
But that is not even what this is.
It's not what this is, but presumably, you know, this is really, in some sense, a smoking gun.
Why, given that this doesn't even change a recommendation about whether to administer this shot, would you want to bury this data that would help protect huge numbers of kids?
Well, because it establishes at some level that there is a causal link here.
And now, I can't say that the study was well done because obviously we didn't see the methodology that revealed this.
We aren't able to scrutinize the data.
But the idea that anything that hints in this direction has to be disappeared suggests that there is likely something to hide here.
And in fact, there is lots of evidence that, you know, if you're willing to take the reputational hit and you go looking for it, you find that that evidence does exist.
There's, of course, lots of evidence that will be touted by every major mainstream publication that says that actually we've sought a link, haven't found it, blah, blah, blah.
So you're going to be stuck in that same position that you're always in.
Did the COVID vaccines, you know, save millions of people or did they actually harm millions of people and save few, if any?
Yeah.
And I think, you know, one of the themes, one of the through lines through many of the things that we talk about and have lived through ourselves is how the threat of harm to security and reputation manages to enforce a kind of self-censorship where there are no fingerprints on it.
Now, in this case, there are presumably fingerprints somewhere, but the doctor whom you mentioned, whose name I've forgotten, who was the PI on the study or the lead on the study, who got called into a room and told to disappear the data, presumably he did so.
I don't know anything about his story, but if he continued to work in that field, he never said anything about it and he didn't keep looking into those sorts of studies.
Just like you have self-censorship in academia with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, just like you saw self-censorship during COVID from many health practitioners and professionals who could see what kinds of barbaric actions were being taken with regard to treatment of COVID before the vaccines came out and mandates of the vaccines after they came out.
And it was few people, well known at this point to those who are paying attention and many of whom you have talked to here on Dark Horse, who actually stood up and risked everything in their lives to say, actually, you know what?
I'm a doctor or I'm a researcher and I can see what this is doing and it is not acceptable.
But by and large, people looked around them and said, I actually cannot afford to risk my mortgage, risk my family, risk my career, risk whatever it is.
And so I will be quiet.
We see this over and over and over again.
And it then makes it possible for those who have effectively prompted the self-censorship to claim, well, we didn't do it.
We didn't do it.
They just didn't speak up.
Well, so obviously the story unfolds.
Kennedy alludes to the fact that there are many such stories.
But in such a case, lots of us, I would like to think, if I had been inside that organization, if the answer is, well, we can't very well publish this if it points out this connection that we don't want the public thinking about, presumably the answer is, well, then I'm going to talk about it.
And if for some reason you can't, then the answer is, well, I can't be part of an organization that would lie in this way.
So what does that do?
Well, it leaves behind an organization of people who are all willing to lie in these ways.
And I mean, this.
That's selection.
I mean, that is the process of selection.
That is the evolutionary process by which things change.
That is directional selection being brought in from some unseen force.
And then you see institutions change.
You see the military change because those who resisted the mandates are out.
You see medicine change because those who resist the insanity that men can become women and women can become men and COVID vaccines are safe and effective.
Those who resist are out.
Or they are silenced.
So you end up with institutions full of either true believers or cowards.
Yeah, true believers and cowards.
Now, I want to link this back to a principle because I think we can guess what that meeting sounded like.
It did not sound like we have to hide this autism cause from the public.
What it sounded like is sure to have been something like, this is a vaccine that saves a huge number of lives.
To the extent that the public becomes frightened of it, the cost is going to be dead kids.
Therefore, we are going to disappear this data so that the public takes the vaccine and net good is done.
That's what will have been said.
Now, mind you, I don't buy that story at all.
I think it's very unlikely that in a healthy population, this vaccine would be life-saving at that level.
We have an unhealthy population, which introduces a question about whether the best approach is to fix the health of that population or to come at it with a vaccine that has harms that will presumably injure kids who would never have gotten measles, mumps, or rubella.
But the basic point is this.
You can't have a CDC that feels entitled to lie in order to get a health outcome to happen.
We know where that goes.
That is the road to hell.
You don't have a right to lie.
There is no right to lie in the interests of public health.
What you can do is you can show us the sum total of all of the evidence, and you can accept that one of the costs of that is going to be that, yes, some people may not take a, perhaps it's a vaccine that might have saved a life, but this is our right.
Informed consent means we have the right to know what the information is and to evaluate this for ourselves.
Because for one thing, you may be in a population where your risk of measles, mumps, and rubella and your risk of autism are very different.
And it may be that in your case, you know, trying to fend off one thing at the risk of the other doesn't make any sense at the cost-benefit level.
This is all true.
But of course, one of the things that is downstream of that argument, which is a legitimate, important, critical argument, is, oh, informed consent suggests that if we did work and it comes out in a way that makes us look bad, then the public has a right to know.
What we're going to do is not do the work.
Well, research won't be done.
And so this is a large part of why you have people arguing, you know, every study that's been done says that, you know, vaccines don't cause autism.
Like, let's start like, A, the claim is false.
But B, it is also true that there's been almost no work done in part because of the self-censorship imposed by, you know, moves like this, but also presumably because the granting agencies, especially the NIH, are not going to be funding the work in the first place precisely because it's messy to have to disappear data.
I agree with that.
On the other hand, we are overcomplicating all of it.
An actual marketplace of ideas would also be a marketplace of papers.
And to the extent that there is work not being done because it might reveal things that are embarrassing, the kudos that go to the people who do that work and discover the important thing that actually changes health outcomes in a positive way for some large cohort of people, that ought to be the force that causes all of the gaps in the literature that are really important to understand to get filled in.
But that presumes that the work doesn't cost much money.
Well, it presumes that the, no, it doesn't really, because I agree that anybody with their thumb on the scales at the level of the funding is going to result in the vast bulk of the work reinforcing whatever it is that the public health apparatus wants to hear.
But you can imagine that if there was something really important that you needed to know, like is this CDC recommended protocol actually resulting in a huge amount of the maiming of children who would otherwise have been healthy, that if you can advance a career by discovering the things we need to know most, and we need to know the most because there's a bias in what we study, that that would cause a shift in focus.
The incentive to do that work would be there, even if the funding apparatus were skewed in the other direction.
Well, we're going to need institutions that function, and we don't have them.
I 100% agree with that.
It's not.
It's the funding agencies and the institutions.
And one, having functional one of those might be sufficient to start the ball rolling.
But we have neither.
We have apparently no institution, either old or new, that is willing to actually say, you know what?
This is going to sound like something that you would see on a yard sign.
Like I stand for science.
Like I'm actually, I am, I, this institution, the people we are going to hire are actually going to be engaged in real scientific investigation.
Not big-ass science that requires a lot of grants and so just keeps the lawns mode because of the overhead, but actual science that's hypothetical deductive and is actually seeking to figure out what is true no matter what the answer is.
Because some of the answers aren't going to be beautiful.
And that is just reality.
Right.
That's the nature of progress, right?
The things that aren't beautiful are often the things that you most need to know because somebody's getting hurt who doesn't need to.
So I want to point out what happens.
You and I have just laid out a, we need to have functional institutions.
We need to protect people who come up with conclusions that are not favorable to industry.
All of those things are true.
We live in the opposite world where there's a tremendous amount of control by industry that does allow an institution that should be concerned only with the public's health to reason itself into lying in a way that actually maims members of the public who otherwise would be unharmed.
So we live in the opposite world.
And this next story is going to help us see a connection.
What happens if you allow those who feel that public health is entitled to lie?
What happens if you allow them to govern the policy of these institutions?
So do you want to show us the Wall Street Journal article?
This is a little bit of a funny one because the Wall Street Journal is reporting on something that they say is going to happen that hasn't happened yet.
And the headline of the article is RFK Jr.
HHS to link autism to Tylenol Use in Pregnancy and Folate Deficiencies.
So let's read a few paragraphs here.
There's a picture of Kennedy.
Can you read that?
Sure.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
plans to announce that pregnant women's use of an over-the-counter pain medication is potentially linked to autism in a report that will also suggest a medicine derived from folate can be used to treat symptoms of the developmental disorder in some people, people familiar with the matter set.
The report expected this month from the Department of Health and Human Services is likely to suggest as being among the potential causes of autism low levels of folate, an important vitamin, and Tylenol taken during pregnancy, people familiar with the Matter set.
So badly written article.
And also that last sentence suggests low levels of folate, but high existing levels of Tylenol, like those are in opposite directions.
Not enough folate and too much Tylenol are the risk factors for autism during pregnancy, apparently.
The agency also plans to pinpoint a form of folate known as folinic acid or leukovorin, the people said, as a way to decrease the symptoms of autism, which affected roughly 1 in 31 eight-year-olds in the U.S. in 2022.
But the next one is about Tylenol.
Let's just read one more paragraph.
Tylenol, whose active ingredient is acetaminophen, is a widely used pain reliever, including by pregnant women.
Some previous studies have indicated risks to fetal development, but others have found no association.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it is safe to use in pregnancy, though it recommends that pregnant women consult with their doctors before using it, as with all medicines.
So I'm just seeing this.
And let me say before you comment that my memory of the timeline here is that aspirin, which is the oldest pain reliever that has been used in pill form in the U.S., obviously, you know, opioids are also an ancient form coming from poppies, aspirin from willow bark.
Aspirin has been used for a very long time as a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory, right?
Yep.
And it was discovered in, gosh, I want to say the 70s or 80s to cause something known as Rays syndrome in children when their mothers took it during pregnancy.
And so although Tylenol had been on the market for a long time, it was at that moment, whenever that was, I want to say sometime in the 80s, that women were now advised strongly against taking any aspirin at all during pregnancy or giving it to children under, I don't remember, the age of 12 or something.
And the recommended substitute was Tylenol.
And there's a lot to be said here, as we have said elsewhere on Dark Horse at other times, about the wisdom or really lack thereof of looking to obscure pain with drugs at all, really, under most circumstances, but especially when you have a fetus inside of you.
It's just, you know, it's not wise to be trying to mask pain when you are pregnant.
You should be trying to figure out what the causes of the pain are and get rid of them such that the symptom of the causes of the pain disappears.
Yes.
When you are pregnant, you are whatever series of nested complex systems you ordinarily are, plus another equally complex nested series of complex systems now interacting with a developmental pathway that has all sorts of sensitivities to it.
So, you know, if there's a moment in time to be maximally careful about any sort of intervention that has potentially harmful consequences, pregnancy would be it.
And we know this.
So like, you know, people are going to object, like, oh, how dare you tell women not to, you know, self-medicate?
Like, well, we already know that alcohol during pregnancy is not good for you, that raw cheese during pregnancy poses a risk that being exposed to, you know, cat's poop during pregnancy has a particular risk.
And these aren't things, you know, eating goat cheese at other times is not considered to be a particularly risky exercise, nor is having a few glasses of wine.
But you shouldn't be doing those things during pregnancy.
And you also should not be self-medicating for relatively trivial things during pregnancy.
Well, I guess I wonder.
I would love to see an analysis that actually categorized these risks with the same scheme, right?
How risky is goat cheese?
How risky is Tylenol?
That would be an interesting comparison.
But let me just say, I have an overarching point for this story.
The overarching point, I want to drill down on what women used to be told about Tylenol during pregnancy.
I think the least interesting way to think about this story is, oh, now we know something that we didn't know, right?
That's true.
That's going to happen all the time.
But if you now look back at the advice that women were given, the advice is unforgivable, right?
Women were told, this is the safe way to deal with your pain.
When the point is, if we now know that that's not true, it wasn't safe then either.
Even if the harms weren't known, the point is when you say something safe, you are not saying it was without harm.
You're saying it is without risk.
We learned this during COVID.
You can't have a safe and effective vaccine if you don't know what it does to somebody five years after they take it.
Safe means there's no risk.
When women were told that Tylenol was comparatively safe, that was not true.
We are now going to find that out if this report on what Kennedy is going to release is accurate.
But I also want to connect this because we have, interestingly, over the history of Dark Horse live streams, we have covered aspirin.
We have covered aspirin in the context of the role that it played in the 1918 flu epidemic, in which we all think that a terrible flu virus killed a huge number of people.
The actual story is that there were two things that mean that we are in no danger of such a flu outbreak in 2025.
The two things are, one, most of the people who died from flu in 1918 died from a bacterial secondary infection, a pneumonia, that is now treatable with antibiotics.
And the second thing is aspirin had just been, I think, discovered, but it was just brought into medical use.
It was the new wonder drug, and it was being prescribed to people in doses that we now understand to be lethal.
And this caused healthy young people basically to drown in their fluids, which was incredibly terrifying.
You had people who had the flu suddenly dead, robust people.
And the answer is actually that was a yatrogenic harm in many cases.
They were given way too much aspirin.
So we've covered aspirin there.
With Tylenol, we've covered the fact that Tylenol is actually an incredibly toxic substance, so toxic that initially it wasn't allowed to be used as a medication.
Ultimately, it broke through and became marketed, but it remains very dangerous, especially in combination with alcohol, which most of the public does not understand is a health risk.
And we've also covered the question of bolic acid, which is being enriched into flour.
We covered the score.
We covered the story where in a bizarre attempt to protect Hispanic women, it was being introduced in tortillas.
And it turns out research you dug up suggests that this is in no way safe and actually quite hazardous.
So it's interesting that we've covered these topics, which seem to be brought together in this story before, and now we're revisiting them.
But again, the overarching point is what do you do when they tell you something is safe, implying that there is no risk, and then they revise that decades later.
And the answer is, how am I to take your advice in the present if I know that you don't have a problem conflating the I don't know of a harm with this is safe, right?
Again, I'll use the example that I use in general.
If I say I drove home drunk last night and there was no incident, was it safe?
Because there was no harm, right?
Well, obviously it wasn't safe.
Nobody would say it's safe.
You know, if I pick up a gun and I put it to my head and press the trigger and it goes click, there was no harm.
Was it safe?
No, ridiculously unsafe.
So we all know this intuitively.
Safe means there's no risk.
When women have been pregnant and told, oh, yeah, don't use aspirin, use Tylenol.
It's safe.
And then the answer is decades later, you find out you were exposing your child to a risk of autism that, you know, if you have any sense about you at all, you wouldn't have done.
So you were lied to.
There's something too here about expectations and advertising and the marketplace where I think, you know, I don't remember at the point that aspirin started, that the Rays syndrome connection to aspirin during pregnancy became known and now Tylenol is being recommended.
Were the other NSAIDs on the market yet?
Like was Advil, ibuprofen?
I think they remain.
I don't know.
I don't remember this.
My sense is the other NSAIDs were not on the market yet.
It was a long time ago that that concern about Rise syndrome, which I also wonder about too.
Fine, fine.
But I think it was close in time, but maybe they weren't on the market yet.
But when you think all humans, but especially I think Americans have this broken psychology where we think we deserve to have a thing if we already have it.
And so if women, if pregnant women have been allowed to take aspirin during pregnancy because no one has discovered that that's a problem, and now there's a discovery that that's a problem, instead of being able to say to the world and to pregnant women in particular,
actually you can't do the thing that we've been telling you it was okay to do before, in especially I think in the United States, but maybe across the world, the market fills that empty niche with, oh, but don't worry, we got something for you.
And so, you know, Tylenol was already on the market.
So it was very easy to say, well, of course, there's this other thing you can do.
And you were taking aspirin, now you can just take Tylenol.
And yes, I'm sure.
And I have not dug up whatever was being actually said to women at the time.
But it should, it needs to be acceptable to say, you know what?
The thing that we told you was safe isn't.
And we don't have an alternative for you.
We just don't.
Maybe we're looking for one.
Maybe there is none.
Maybe we're looking for one and we'll find one.
Maybe we do have this other thing, which we weren't recommending because we have these concerns that we're going to need to dig a little deeper before we start recommending that, but know that that's a possibility.
But maybe actually the thing that you were treating, the problem that you were solving with this intervention, isn't solvable with that kind of intervention.
That is actually a possibility.
And it's something that I think, again, especially Americans just aren't prepared.
Like we're just not grown-ups.
We're not prepared to say, huh, well, I guess I'm going to need to solve the problem another way.
We expect the market to come in and give us stuff to buy to solve our problems for us.
Well, and we've created a situation that is, again, pharma's web dream.
Because the basic point is, if you're going to say, I'm allowed to tell you something is safe because we don't know of a harm.
Well, that is going to create a strong bias in favor of new drugs.
Because it takes time for these harms to emerge, especially if pharma is, you know, hiding the ball.
So the basic point is going to be whatever we're going to admit now was harmful.
Oh, we've got this other one.
It's safe.
What do you mean safe?
I think what you mean is it's new and we don't know what the harms are.
It's going to take some decades, by which point your child may have been turned autistic and you'll be suffering whatever consequences.
Actually, often what they mean is, you know, let's use the aspirin-Tylenol Rays syndrome example.
Well, Tylenol doesn't cause Ray syndrome.
Like, that's it.
That's what you know.
The thing that has just been taken off the market or stopped being recommended because it has a known harm, a singular known harm, which is not trivial, but it is a singular known harm.
Well, we know that this doesn't cause that.
That is insufficient.
That is wildly insufficient because no one before that moment in the 70s or 80s really had ever heard of Ray syndrome.
Like, that wasn't what people were concerned about.
They're concerned about the health of their babies and the health of the mothers.
And, oh, there's one condition which you really don't want to create.
But guess what?
That's not the only risk.
It can't be the only risk.
Well, and given the tendency to lie in order to get drugs or other treatments to the public, right?
A tendency that exists we can now see inside the public health apparatus, inside medical schools.
We see it inside pharma.
Given that tendency, you have to look back at a story.
I'm not saying that aspirin doesn't cause Rise syndrome in kids.
Maybe it does.
But I can equally well imagine a story in which the folks who had their new fancy patented drug didn't want people going to this thing that had been around for a century and using that because it has a known risk profile.
So it could be.
Well, Tylenol had been around for a long time.
Tylenol wasn't brand new on the market.
Well, I agree with you.
I'm not saying there wasn't market drive towards encouraging Tylenol, but it wasn't a brand new, shiny new drug.
Yeah, I agree.
It wasn't that campaign.
But what I want to know is that something that is objective actually studied this question and came to that conclusion, because you could easily imagine it being a marketing gimmick because clearly people behave this way.
But, okay, so if you take the two stories here together, you take this story about Tylenol and autism, and you take the story about, why am I forgetting what the initial story was?
Well, in any case, the upshot of all of these cases is that you can't afford to treat the advice that you're getting from the CDC, from your doctor, from anybody who's downstream of these mainstream narratives, because it can very easily steer you into a very meaningful kind of harm, right?
And that was the first story that you had, Bobby Kennedy testifying before Congress at the CDC, CDC research on the MMR.
Yes, on a link between early administration before 36 months of the MMR vaccine in children in a county in Georgia was correlated with like a 260% increase in autism diagnoses.
Okay.
So you were told the MMR vaccine definitely didn't cause autism, and it turns out that the CDC itself has demonstrated a meaningful link between the timing of it and autism diagnoses.
So you were told something that was simply not true.
And now you need to know a great deal more.
And you were told that Tylenol was safe for pregnant women.
Turns out that's not true either.
A rational person who just simply is engaged in pattern recognition is going to discover when I am told that something is safe, that does not contain information.
The thing that tells me stuff is safe is perfectly capable of looking me in the eye and saying that when there's no truth and it knows it.
Therefore, I have to look across the entire pharmacopia and all of the other treatments that might be delivered by that same system, and I need to throw out every safety claim.
Now that, I'm sure, sounds extreme, but I will tell you, I've been living with that exact conclusion since my graduate work at the end of the 90s, where I discovered that our drug safety testing mechanism was broken in a way that even the mice will lie and tell you that something is safe when in fact it does tissue damage across the body.
So that is the right conclusion for reasons that we can say something about.
There's a mechanism inside the drug safety system that makes toxic things look safe.
And there's a mechanism inside the safety evaluation system that will lie to your face in order to accomplish something that it never tells you about.
So this ought to spook you because it really does mean you're on your own and there are likely to be harms, both known and unknown, that you have no access to in the public that will be buried from your perspective so that you will think, oh, here's a safe drug.
My doctor told me so.
And it will be a lie whether your doctor knows it or not.
Yeah.
I think that sounds incredibly dire.
You're on your own.
But I hear that and feel some hope, actually, that compelling people, convincing people that actually being self-sufficient with regard, having self-sufficiency, not entirely, no human, No human can be totally self-sufficient,
but having self-sufficiency with regard to an ability to assess information that comes in on your own, as opposed to only taking other people's word for things, is perhaps the most important thing that a modern human can be able to do.
And it's possible.
It's actually not all that hard.
You don't need to become expert in everything, right?
You need to become expert in, as Brett said, pattern recognition and honing your intuition and having some enough analytics that you can test your intuition against what else you can find,
such that even though most people are not going to end up doing their own statistical analyses, you can do sort of like back of the envelope, like, I don't even know what the, what, what the like country version of statistical analyses would be, but like you can, you can effectively test your own intuitions over and over and over again and so become good at assessing when people are telling you things that they have no way of possibly knowing that they are true when they're claiming they are true.
Now, I didn't come prepared for this piece of the story, but it's obviously relevant in light of that.
Joe Latipo, Surgeon General of Florida, announced this week, I believe, that Florida is going to end all mandates and requirements.
Everything becomes optional.
They can't require you to take a vaccine to go to school.
That's right.
And I would argue that this is way ahead of the curve because what really you've just discovered in the last two stories here is that any requirement or mandate for a medical treatment or prevention is invalid on its face.
Why?
Because, well, as Robert Malone famously said at the Defeat the Mandates rally, if there is risk, there must be choice.
You now know that any place you are told there is no risk, you cannot trust that.
If there was risk, they wouldn't tell you.
So if they're going to lie to you about whether or not there is risk, then you must assume there is risk to everything.
There is certainly risk to you.
There's a risk that they're lying and not telling you something they know that is materially important to your maintaining your health.
So that means there's no such thing, as far as I can tell, as a valid requirement or mandate.
It couldn't possibly be true.
You effectively have a natural right to govern your own health, and that means refusing anything and everything that you don't want to take.
There's nothing governmentally that they could possibly know that would overwhelm that because they burned that option at the point they decided they had a right to lie because you don't know where they're lying.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington are busy conflating science with ideology.
So this, can you see my screen?
Amazing.
Out of the governor's office, Kotech in the governor of Oregon, we have September 3rd of this month of this year.
Oregon, Washington, California form Western Health Alliance.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek joins governors in California and Washington to help ensure the public has access and credible information for confidence in vaccine safety and efficacy.
This is responsive to Latipo doing what he is doing in Florida.
Joint statement from Governors Newsom, Kotek, and Ferguson.
That's governors of California, Oregon, and Washington.
Our fair state.
Quote, President Donald Trump's mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists and his blatant politicization of the agency is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people.
The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences.
California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.
So this is part of how the magic trick is done.
Yep.
Right.
Is again, again, we're in Orwell land with regard to the use of language.
They have literally swapped the words science and ideology.
They, the governors of the West Coast, are pretending that they are standing for science.
And they are actually referring, they are asking for a CDC like the one that led us through COVID, in which you would have been better off, as we said over and over and over again, doing exactly the opposite of what the CDC said at every single step.
I am not saying that everything that has come out of this administration with regard to public health policy has been clear or correct or entirely unpolitical.
Of course not.
But the idea that what we need is the CDC from four years ago under frickin Wolensky is unbelievable that that is actually being argued as a stand for science.
These are people who don't know what science is, who wouldn't recognize it if it hit them in the head, and who are partly responsible for the disappearance of scientific thinking from the K-12 and higher ed school systems, precisely because they don't know what it is.
The last sentence that you read from there.
This is the statement from the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington.
The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science.
Ideology that will lead to severe health consequences.
California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.
Right.
Now, will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.
They actually mandated.
We will not allow the population of our states to be protected from risk.
Yes.
It is that.
It's like pharma speaking as Big Brother, saying the inverse of the truth.
But it sounds, if you hear it, they're standing, you know, Trump's people are firing all of the good doctors from the CDC to bring in mystics or something, right?
And it's upside-down world.
And, you know, here's the thing.
It would be funny if your health wasn't resting on whether or not you can see through this nonsense.
Yep.
I'm also just as a matter of happenstance, scroll back up to that logo.
Yeah.
This is the state of Oregon.
This is the state of Oregon's logo.
Look at that.
Look when it was founded.
1859.
The year.
The year that everything happened.
It's the year, among other things, that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.
And the idea that the state of Oregon is going to contravene the most basic lesson of a Darwinian worldview, which is that you are a highly complex system that is built for an environment.
And the more you disrupt it, the less healthy you're likely to be.
It's pretty interesting.
So let me just read one more thing from this.
We have statements from public health officers in each of the three states.
And I could read all of them and dissect all of them.
Let's just go with Hathi, the MD, an MD and MBA who is the director of the Oregon Health Authority who said, quote, our communities deserve clear and transparent communication about vaccines, communication grounded in science, not ideology.
Vaccines are among the most powerful tools in modern medicine.
They have indisputably saved millions of lives.
But when guidance about their use becomes inconsistent or politicized, it undermines public trust at precisely the moment we need it most.
That is why Oregon is committed alongside California and Washington to leading with science and delivering evidence-based recommendations that protect health, save lives, and restore confidence in our public health system.
So I find particularly dangerous here the idea that we can't have inconsistent advice coming from public health authorities and that what we need to do is restore confidence.
How about we actually have a functional public health system?
Because if we did, the confidence would follow.
You can't build confidence on a broken system that is actually making people sick.
And you can't have a consistent system and claim that it's based on science because the science you're going to get towards an understanding, there's going to be conflicting information because you're studying a complex system, and that means there's going to be noise.
So the idea that they have decided that what they should be delivering is a consistent message means they're telling you they're going to lie.
That's simply what they are.
They are broadcasting it.
It couldn't possibly be the case.
There's going to be conflicting information pointing in multiple directions until you have a sufficient amount of evidence that the signal overwhelms the noise.
And if they're not comfortable with that, what they're peddling has nothing to do with science.
Well, and what they're saying in part, and you hear this from people, people all over, like at every demographic, rich, poor, old, you know, old, young, all the class race, everything, right?
But what you hear is, well, basically the people can't handle the truth.
People aren't smart enough.
People are too stupid to deal with conflicting evidence and therefore we have to clean it up for them.
We have to put a nice gloss on it, probably better if it looks really pretty.
And then we can feed it to them and they'll take it because it's pretty and it tastes good like sugar.
And it's bullshit, actually.
Like most people, despite what, you know, like, yes, it's easier to grab a bag of chips than it is to, you know, make yourself a steak.
And the steak is going to make you feel better in the end.
It's going to be delicious, but it takes more time and it's also more expensive.
Most people know that as adults.
And, you know, maybe those are bad examples because some people don't like one or the other of those things.
But the fact is that our experience in the classroom for 15 years at Evergreen and longer than that before when we were teaching assistants at the University of Michigan was that people may come in the room thinking that they just want to be told what's on the test and get it over with because they're not really serious about being here and they're trying to get on with the rest of their lives, whatever the hell that might be.
But actually when challenged to think hard about something in a way that will reveal exciting new things about how it is that they might live their lives and who they are as human beings, almost everyone wants that.
Almost everyone actually wants that.
Not all the time, maybe.
You know, there's moments when you just want to, you know, Netflix and chill, whatever.
But almost everyone actually wants the challenge.
And we are being assured by, in this case, the governors of the three West Coast states that you can't handle the truth.
So we're going to protect you from it.
But we're going to wrap it up in something called science and hope that you don't notice that that's not what science is.
All right.
Here's a challenge to the folks doing this.
Okay.
Because they privately believe that they are engaged in a noble lie.
The ones who are aware that what they're saying is not scientifically supported believe they're doing so for a good cause, but you're not.
And here's how you can tell.
Let's say that there was some risk of autism from the MMR vaccine delivered early.
That's what the apparent implication of what Kennedy revealed in the Senate is.
And you felt that you had to not acknowledge that in order to make sure that enough people got that vaccine to do the greater good of protecting people from measles, mumps, and rubella.
Well, then wouldn't you then spot it as your responsibility to take care of the autistic kids that were produced by your lie?
Would that not be primary on your list of things that you had to take care of?
Because you have decided that this cost is a cost that must be paid to do the greater good.
But then it is a public cost.
You're getting your MMR vaccine to protect us at a population level.
Then the autistic kids who are created by that policy are the responsibility of whoever decided to deliver that lie.
And if they were taking that responsibility seriously, they would be interested in questions like folate and its impact on alleviating symptoms of autism.
They would be interested in all of the discoveries about the microbiome and the many parents who have discovered by ignoring the wisdom of the public health apparatus that actually they can have significant positive effects on their autistic kids by altering those microbiomes.
So you would be obsessed with those things because it would reduce the cost that you have decided that we all have to pay.
And yet you're not interested in doing those things, are you?
So you're not a noble liar.
You're just a liar.
That's what you are.
It's analogous to how veterans of the Vietnam War were treated.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
We tell you some beautiful story to get you to sign up.
You then come back with horrifying PTSD, and we don't understand that that's our responsibility.
We put you there.
You did your job from the perspective of the public.
The public now has a responsibility to you.
I mean, veterans in general, I think we often treat badly as a society, not everyone.
But I think what happened in Vietnam was a particularly egregious and obvious example.
It was, but as you point out, it's by far not the only one.
I mean, you know, Gulf War syndrome and every other one of these things.
We fail to take on the natural responsibility of the choices that we make.
Yeah.
And, you know, okay, so Vietnam War was a mistake.
Sending people there was a mistake.
They went there.
It's not the fault of the people who went.
It's not the fault of the people who went.
Oh, should we talk about something more uplifting?
Like how men who cosplay as women are allowed to do whatever they want, apparently.
And all the rest of us are just supposed to sit back and take it.
Yep.
We're supposed to applaud.
Yeah.
Well, that too.
And if and if we don't, maybe we're going to get punched.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So, and I mentioned this at the end of the last episode, but here we have, I'm just, I'm going to read a little bit from Andrew Doyle's piece in Unheard on the shameful arrest of Graham Linehan.
Free speech in Britain is on life support.
So Andrew Doyle and Graham Linehan are both comedy writers.
They're both more than that, and they know each other both, I think, socially and professionally.
So Doyle begins in this piece from September 3rd.
Many will remember celebrity outlaw Ronnie Biggs.
And again, these are Brits.
And so those in America may not remember these stories, but many will remember celebrity outlaw Ronnie Biggs landing at Gatwick Airport in May 2001 and being immediately arrested.
Having participated in the great train robbery of 1963, in which £2.6 million was stolen and the driver badly beaten, he subsequently escaped prison and lived for decades as an international fugitive.
Most would agree that this arrest, however dramatic, was more than justified.
But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted.
Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind.
His crime?
Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offense.
As for those tweets, on the 19th of April, he posted an image of a trans activist protest in London along with the caption, a photo you could smell.
When challenged by a user for the unnecessary comment, he replied, I hate them.
Misogists and homophobes.
Fuck them.
The third was posted on 20th of April, and in it, Graham wrote, quote, if a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent abusive act.
Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
End quote.
So a little bit more from the same article, not contiguous.
As the lawyer Sarah Fillimore pointed out, there was nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle men encroaching on their personal space.
If you want to arrest my dad for this, she writes, he's in a jar on the dresser.
For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution, one with multiple ringmasters.
He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018 when he was given a verbal warning for deadnaming and misgendering trans activist Stephanie Hayden.
A little bit more.
And so we're going to come back to the trans thing, but Doyle, deftly, as he so often does, has us, discusses the larger societal implications, specifically in Great Britain, of what is happening here.
But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years.
We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink, citizens imprisoned for posting memes, prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes, teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes.
Freedom of information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of, quote, non-crime hate incidents, mostly without being informed.
Parliament should further abolish all hate speech legislation.
He is now making policy requests of his government.
Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of hate, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech.
Section 8 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws, quote, threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior, if it is intended, quote, to stir up racial hatred, end quote.
Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of racism is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.
Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 prescribe the sending of material that is deemed, quote, grossly offensive, a hopelessly subjective notion.
The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause, quote, annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety, end quote.
If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens.
Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.
It's an unbelievable story.
It is.
Especially in the context of what else is going on in Britain.
So you simultaneously have the state protecting grooming gangs and pretending that it is doing such a good job of protecting the public that it is entitled to police speech.
It's absurd.
Effectively, it has surrendered with respect to protecting the public, and the public speaking about who might be threatening is no longer tolerated.
And it's hard to imagine that that's actually an accident.
That is so, it is such a fundamental threat to the ability of a cosmopolitan nation to function that, well, you know, as our good friend Dave says, once is a mistake, twice as a coincidence, three times as enemy action.
How many places do you have to see the fundamental pillars of Western civilization under simultaneous attack before you decide actually somebody's attacking this civilization because they don't like it, that they actually want to see it fall?
And, you know, shame on the British police for participating.
That's right.
And before people get upset at how mean Linehan must have been and at critiquing those who are merely suffering from gender dysphoria, let me share this thread of some of what is happening online.
Because all of his supposed crimes, which were not crimes, happened online on Twitter on X.
And so this also is on X. Here's a thread.
Here we have a picture of a guy who's pretending to be a woman with a presumably pseudo-bloody shirt on that says, I punch turfs.
Turf, of course, being the acronym standing for trans exclusionary radical feminists.
You have a picture.
I mean, it's just absurd.
This picture of, I don't even know how to describe this person.
He's in a pride speedo, topless with a rainbow scarf and a rainbow tail and a clown hat, clown hair.
And he says, pride, motherfuckers, punch a turf in the neck.
Okay.
What is a turf, you ask?
It's anyone who excludes men from their definition of women and vice versa.
There's so many of these posts.
This person making this thread, Jennifer, has made a collage here.
Trans rights are human rights.
Punch a Nazi, fuck fascism, throat chop a turf, curb stomp, trust scum, true scum, make racists scared again.
Why are we not physically beating the shit out of bigots?
See a turf, punch a turf.
Blue sky in general seems so averse to violence.
Punch a turf in the face.
Punch a turf for trans rights today.
Punch a Nazi, kick a turf, etc.
It goes on and on and on and on.
So what did Lineihan do that got five police to show up as he landed at Heathrow?
He has now moved to Arizona.
So he's going back to Heathrow.
And as he lands, he's met at the airport by five cops.
What did he say?
He said, again, from the article, the Doyle article that I was just reading from, something to the effect of, look, if there's a dude in the women's room and you can't get him to leave, it's possible that you're going to have to defend yourself.
And one option is to kick him in the balls.
And he apparently then explained partially what he was talking about is given the average difference in size between men and women, that that is going to be the place that a woman defending herself against a cosplaying man in the dressing room is likely to be able to get to.
But he's also pointing out that these people who are pretending to be women have testicles, which demonstrates that they're not women.
It's just the entire thing is a farce.
And so he says that in the abstract and is met by five policemen at Heathrow.
And these people are literally saying what you should do is throat chop, punch, kick all of these actual invitations to violence.
Anyone who is a turf, and again, that's, you know, that's me.
That's a lot of women and some number of men who say, you know what?
You're not a woman just because you say you are.
That's not what a woman is.
So to make this a little bit clearer, he is suggesting a hypothetical scenario in which a man is in a woman's space, which is threatening.
Yes.
These folks are suggesting violence based on a person's belief.
And what's more, hitting somebody in the nuts is not a lethal act.
Punching somebody in the throat, there is a reason that they are saying throat, right?
They are talking about collapsing your airway.
It is supposed to be a dangerous kind of violence that they're advocating.
And I would be absolutely shocked if anybody has been arrested at Heathrow for saying punch a turf in the neck.
You've got lots of people saying it online.
Presumably some of them have traveled to Britain.
Has anybody been arrested?
Why is Linehan saying punch a theoretical person who is in the process of being in a space they're not allowed to be in, a protected female space?
Why is that abstraction worthy of an arrest?
And these people advocating attacking people in a dangerous fashion for ideology, for an ideological difference, why is that not a much greater risk and therefore resulting in arrests of its own?
It obviously is.
So just one more here.
This from the same thread.
This phrase, fix your heart or die, transfer, has become, has become increasingly common.
And here's just another evident piece example of this.
This man in some kind of get up, fix your heart or die.
And is your guillotine greased yet?
These are not, there's no one who is being addressed specifically here, but they are taking a class of people who say, I actually believe in reality and saying, we're out to get you.
You're going to change what you believe.
You're going to shut up.
You're going to change what you believe or you should die.
And it's beyond implicit.
I'm not going to, I don't, it's beyond implicit, the threats here.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, there's something that is just confusing of the mind here.
If you had a bunch of guys talking about guillotining folks, everybody would understand that there was something to discuss.
When those guys pretend to be gals and they say guillotine, somehow it confuses the mind.
And it's not like, oh, hey, there's a bunch of guys talking about guillotines.
That's worrisome.
You know, they're coming from a particular ideology that sounds, you know, very French Revolution-like, frankly.
Yeah.
No, and I think There are a lot of women who are very confused still, but I think a lot more women than men are seeing this for what it is because even if we've never walked into a bathroom and found a guy there,
which many of us have at this point, depending on where we live, we have walked down the street and seen the swagger of someone who is clearly a man, but because of the way he is dressed, he is clearly trying to present as a woman.
And not all of them, but this is a mental disorder.
And the crazy eyes, the brandishing, the way that they are presenting in the world.
I saw many of these men last week in Portland.
And when I see a man looking like that, not in a dress, I cross to the other side of the street.
And when I see a man like that in a dress, I do that.
And I also recognize that because he is wearing a dress, I am going to be considered the bigot.
This is ancient.
Women protect themselves from crazy men.
But if crazy men dress up in dresses, somehow a bunch of people are confused.
And I don't actually care at this point how many of them really believe their lies.
I don't think it's most of them.
I don't think it was ever most of them.
It's autogonophilia.
They get off on being perceived as something, which of course most people don't even perceive them as, but whatever.
But even if some small percentage of the people walking around like this do believe that they're actually women, it is our right as women and societies, society has already long since agreed that women get to have spaces for women only and get to be protected from the threats of men on the basis of men being more likely to be able to do us harm
because of the differences between the sexes.
This is a mass delusion that I'm actually just shocked that it's gone on as long as it has.
We keep on having wins.
Like we keep on having both in the United States and Great Britain wins that say, actually, you know what?
It's not true.
And the transing of children is bad.
And all of this, it turns out we were wrong.
And these people just get more and more adamant.
And frankly, the threats online at least get more and more violent.
Oh, yeah.
And meanwhile, they're going to arrest Linehan at Heathrow?
Unbelievable.
Well, think about it this way.
The state, I've now forgotten where this quote originates, but the state effectively has a monopoly on violence.
That is why the police can show up at Heathrow and say you're under arrest and you can't tell them to fuck off.
Okay.
Because ultimately, if you do that, they have the right to forcibly take you into custody.
Monopoly on violence.
Here you have the state with its monopoly on violence acting on behalf of men pretending to be women.
Now, if you think, oh, well, nobody's pretending to be women, this is always the result of profound gender dysphoria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, no.
As soon as you've got the state willing to beat people up on your behalf, you don't think that's going to accumulate some psychopaths?
Do you not believe that psychopaths exist?
Because if they do, hey, if you're a psychopath and it's like, wait a second, all I got to do is to pretend to be a woman and then the state will beat people up on my behalf, that sounds like fun, right?
You're going to accumulate some of these people.
So let's just own up to that fact.
Some fraction, and it appears to be a large fraction at this point, of the people using this particular trope are doing so because civilization is dumb enough to play along.
That's where we are.
Yes.
And, you know, this next Twitter thread is actually so extreme that I feel like some of them may be punking us.
I hope.
Like, I hope.
So this from the Twitter account, Hazel Alpeyard, retweeting someone else, to any trans women who are really attractive, how did you do it?
And I was going to say you will want to see this as opposed to just listen, but maybe you don't actually, because some of these pictures, here we have a guy, an obvious guy, confidence.
I felt beautiful just dressing how I finally wanted to, not where I want to be quite yet, but I can feel it.
And there's a way in which you're like, yeah, you know what?
Confidence does go a long way.
Acknowledge that you're a dude and be confident out there.
And none of this is going to come down on you.
But this guy thinks he's a woman, really?
Well, there's something weird about confidence.
Yes, given whatever you are, confidence tends to make that more attractive.
But if what you're confident in is something that you aren't.
Yeah.
Right.
Confidence in your delusions is not attractive.
Right.
If I am confident that I'm a jerboa, that's off-putting and weird, right?
Which is a cute little mammal.
but the point is you're a cute bigger mammal Thank you.
But the point is, confidence assumes that the thing you are confident in is real.
If the thing that you are confident in is a fiction, then it isn't, it's a whole different characteristic.
It's a delusion.
And it's like, amplify your delusion.
That's the way to be attractive.
And it's like, you know, how many layers is your delusion?
Right.
And I'm not going to show a whole lot of these, but I don't know.
I was an ugly guy.
This next person says.
I transitioned and people started calling me gorgeous.
Eventually I started believing them.
You know, this guy's not gorgeous.
And people will tell you things in your delusion in order to not confront you.
This is part of what is happening, right?
This is someone with pierced lips and green hair and a lot of makeup on the answer to triggering uncanny valley circuits intentionally.
Sure.
And the question is, to any trans women who are really attractive, how did you do it?
And this person says, genetics, exercise, makeup skills, and confidence.
And there are a number of people we'll see here who answer genetics, which is particularly remarkable given that, you know, being XX or XY, it's not what defines you as male or female.
But in mammals, it is what determines whether or not you are male or female.
And there are chromosomal abnormalities.
We don't have to go there again.
But the idea that men who are pretending to be women and are not beautiful, but are answering the question to trans women who are really beautiful, how do you do it?
The answer that's coming up is genetics.
They are referring to presumably like my, you know, my facial structure is so beautiful.
You know, was she born with it?
Or is it Maybelline?
Well, the chromosomes don't matter.
That part of the genetics doesn't matter.
But the facial structure, yeah, definitely not Maybelline, except it's also Maybelline because makeup skills.
But again, I wish I knew why I'm hot now, says this person.
I think it has to do with the fact that I'm an authentic person.
Except not, of course, because here's a dude in a dress.
And also genetics and not being poor, unfortunately, which I know is hard to control.
That's actually a real point, right?
Like it's harder to look amazing if you're poor.
Nothing else in what has been said here is accurate.
Genetics, again, surgery.
Presumably like facial feminization surgery.
I don't know, maybe a boob job.
Confidence and style.
Oh, and the blood of virgins, of course.
I mean, clearly joking, but it's hard to take a joke from these people.
Right.
That's the problem is what exactly constitutes a joke.
Yeah.
One more.
Genetics is the answer.
Exercise, hygiene, being ultimately myself, confidence and sense of style, I suppose.
LOL.
Some of these people are dressed like Satan worshipers.
None of them pass as women, with the possible exception of that uncanny valley guy with the green hair.
But that's just because it sort of looks like it came out of anime.
But this is the evidence of the mental illness of the people who women are seeing on the streets, who are running into in bathrooms, who, if they are unfortunate enough to need a domestic abuse shelter or to be in prison, are running into in these supposedly single sex spaces.
It is...
It is men who are delusional enough to think that they can become women and that genetics matters when it comes to how their faces look, but not when it comes to what sex they are.
Like there are just so many layers of inconsistent, fractured thinking that are totally apparent in this thread and everywhere.
This is not, this has not been particularly cherry-picked.
I mean, this is obviously at some level, any thread is.
But this is what the face of trans activism looks like.
This is what Linehan is reacting to.
And unfortunately, the police are reacting to him instead of society reacting to the very confused, sometimes aggressively violent men who are being allowed to threaten women and get away with it.
So I also think there's something interesting to the fact that, you know, the degree to which trans people pass is highly variable, obviously.
Sure.
And the two examples that come to mind of people who do a good job of approximating the other sex, actually, the three.
Blair White, Buck Angel, and Joe, whose last name I'm blanking on, the helicopter pilot that I interviewed.
None of these people are delusional with respect to whether or not they've switched sex.
Interestingly, they are accepting of the fact that they have gone through some process, but it doesn't change their sex.
And that is in stark contrast to these people who are delusional at multiple different levels.
You know, they believe that they have changed sex and they believe that they are beyond passing.
And, you know, I mean, if they really believe that, it's sad.
But anyway, there is something interesting in that observation.
I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
But as I've said before, I think it's really important that folks who are struggling with profound gender dysphoria and have transitioned in one sense or another, but who are not part of this activist madness that is attempting to turn civilization upside down, that you reveal yourselves and let us know that you're not signed up for that because those people aren't on your side.
Those people are actually going to make life worse for all of us and it's not theirs to do and they're doing it in your name.
I mean, they're effectively, you know, using you as a Trojan horse in order to engage in literal violence in some cases.
So yeah, I mean, as you know, and as long time listeners will know, my position on the issue has changed fairly substantially.
And I'm not sure.
Five years ago, I was using the term true trans without hesitation.
And I don't, I don't think I would now.
Even though I still know some people whom I would engage with as the sex they are trying to present to the world as.
Not many.
I know of, and I know a very few people for whom that really does seem to be the way that they are best able to live their lives due to trauma and damage that they had nothing to do with, but that happened to them.
That presumably has happened throughout human history, but at exceedingly low rate.
So what we have now is a combination of social contagion, of auto gynophilia, of munchausen by proxy in the case of moms transing their kids, and a number of other things.
And I don't even exactly know what to do with this last story that I want to talk about a little bit because it's just got so, so much of the modern condition in it without being like clear in any way.
So I guess you can show my screen.
And I'm showing this from the web because my PDF version doesn't show the pictures.
And so I don't have anything highlighted.
I'm just going to kind of scroll through and see if I see things that I want to share.
But this is from New York Magazine, their fashion section called The Cut, and published September 2nd, 2025, a piece written by someone named Brock Colyar, who we don't learn until the very end of the article identifies as a non-binary person themselves.
I don't know what sex they actually are.
It shouldn't matter what sex the writer is, but the fact that at the very end we hear that they're an NB, a non-binary person, calls into question any of the analytics that they possibly could do about Vivian Wilson.
Vivian Wilson, who is Elon Musk's oldest living child.
Vivian Wilson's nearly normal life, the headline reads, her father is the richest man alive with an anti-trans vendetta.
She's still figuring out what she wants to do.
Vivian Wilson, of course, is male, is a young man, 21 now, but has presented to the world as female and is now being embraced first earlier this year here in Teen Vogue.
Sorry about the scrolling, but Teen Vogue profiled this person and now we have it, the New York magazine.
So Any young person who is suddenly getting a lot of attention for being what they are presenting as is going to have a very hard time undoing that presentation.
And I don't want to judge this young man too harshly, because at 21, there is a lot to learn.
And it's going to be very hard to undo this.
But make this a little bit bigger.
It begins.
How the fuck do you eat these?
asks Vivian Wilson, staring skeptically at the oysters on the dinner table in front of us.
Oh my god, they smell like the ocean.
It was her idea to order them.
She couldn't remember whether she even liked oysters.
So instead of getting a full dozen, she asked the waiter for two, one for each of us.
I feel so fancy ordering appetizers.
I haven't had fancy food in forever, she tells me when the two lonely bivalves arrive on ice.
I don't even know if this is fancy.
It's not really.
We're sitting on the sidewalk patio of an unremarkable seafood joint on Ventura in the valley, and honestly, the oysters don't look entirely fresh.
Wilson takes a second to psych herself up.
I love seafood.
I love seafood.
I love seafood, she mutters before finally committing to it.
She grimaces and promptly washes it down with a sip of her piña colada.
Oh, girl, this is so strong, girl, she says, sliding the cocktail across the table.
Have a sip, girl.
So that just sounds like a not very interesting person who is delusional about what sex he is.
Finally, Wilson is starting to show some spirit.
When I picked her up at her house an hour earlier, she barely made eye contact or spoke above a whisper.
She blamed her state on staying up till well past 5 a.m. that morning, getting stoned and watching the hunger games.
I can be a bit closed off, she tells me.
I have a lower social battery than most people.
As she gradually opens up over dinner, I learned that in addition to staying up too late too often, she subsists on takeout, mostly cheap sushi.
She doesn't call her mom enough.
She loves video games and K-pop and drag race, and she has ADHD, meaning she struggles to sit still or pay attention.
When a particularly noisy car drives by, she starts screaming at it.
You want attention?
Just go on social media like everyone else.
She tells me, I feel like I'm an adult, but I also feel like other people don't feel like I'm an adult, which is annoying.
I can't help but remind her several times that she's only 21 years old.
So this person is not acting like an adult.
This person is acting like someone who is addicted to diagnosis and to quick answers, quick solutions to the problems of being a human being, and especially of being a human being in the 21st century.
And the idea that before New York Magazine came out to profile him, he stayed up until 5 a.m. watching shows and getting stoned does not show any evidence of maturity or wisdom.
And, you know, most 21-year-olds don't have maturity or wisdom.
But the only reason we know about this human being is because he's the eldest living son of Elon Musk and the one who is presenting as a woman.
Well, the three pictures that you've shown so far.
And there's more.
You know, it's disturbing.
This person does not look happy.
And, you know, they're being profiled.
There's another one.
Yep.
They're being profiled, and you would expect that they, you know, to the extent that they're being championed, that they would want to present something that indicated that they, you know, were glad for where they've ended up.
And instead, it leaves the impression of, you know, a young person who is unfortunately searching in a very public way for some radical shift in life that will make it satisfying.
And at some level, you know, this is what adolescence, which in days of old, you couldn't afford to still be in the throes of this adolescence at 21, but adolescence is about searching for meaning.
And I've talked about this before, that we have replaced the search for meaning with a search for identity, which is a much more narcissistic, inward-facing thing, which has much less likelihood of actually bringing you a sense of well-being and actually being able to do anything real in the world, but that's where we are.
But this person is in part being forced to, and in part choosing to go down this road of doing so publicly.
And it's a problem that all famous children and young adults face, of course.
But it would be so much better for this human being, regardless of what he thinks of his father, and apparently they have no relationship and they don't speak to one another, to do as much as possible out of public view and figure things out.
A little bit more from this article.
She came out as trans at 16.
I had really, really, really, really, I can't emphasize how many reallys are in the statement, really fucking bad gender dysphoria, she tells me.
She went by Jenna at first and later landed on Vivian, the name of a character in one of her favorite online first-person shooter games, Paladins.
By the time she turned 18 in 2022, her relationship with Musk had soured.
In her petition for her name and gender change, she wrote to the judge, I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape, or form.
Okay, it goes on.
More photographs.
More of these fashion photographs.
So this is a 21-year-old man with very long straight hair.
He's tall.
He's thin.
And tall and thin is what high-fashion clothes are made for.
And so some of these photographs are compelling in the way that high-fashion photographs can be compelling, not because he actually looks particularly like a woman.
My computer has failed again.
So here's, let me find this picture.
This is like the worst of trying to be schoolgirl and it's sexualized and he's not a schoolgirl.
He's neither in K-12 school nor a girl here.
Here we go.
The back and forth between Wilson and Musk drew more attention than Wilson expected, especially from her father's army of extremely online right-wing trolls.
A lot of people have tried to spin things I say into things they don't mean, she says.
Okay.
Now I think I missed.
There's a section in here that talks about, maybe we'll run into it, that talks about this human being.
Here's another picture while I'm talking about it.
Oh, actually, here it is.
So successfully distancing herself from her father's reputation, Wilson has learned means it's time to get serious about what exactly she wants to do with her own career.
While she was duking it out with him on the internet, she was at school in Quebec, a choice she made in part to brush up on her French and also because she dreamed as a kid of becoming a translator.
She also has Canadian citizenship through her mother.
One of the few times she becomes truly animated during our conversation, other than when talking about her favorite movie, the animated Netflix musical K-pop Demon Hunters, which, and this is a 21-year-old with a favorite movie that I looked it up just came out a couple months ago.
So everything here is so sort of like dissociated and frantic and fragile and temporary and broken and sad.
And if you could only just do all of the searching not in the public eye, you would actually have a chance.
But okay.
One of the few times she becomes truly animated during our conversation, other than when talking about her favorite movie, the animated Netflix musical K-pop Demon Hunters, is when we get to talking about all of the languages she learned growing up, including Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.
Getting noticeably better at a language is probably the most satisfying thing I've ever done, and I want to keep doing that, she tells me, tearing up.
Being able to speak to someone who doesn't speak English is very, very fucking cool.
Now, who knows if she actually speaks all those languages?
A lot of times people make those claims that they don't actually speak the languages, but I'm ready, I'm prepared to, given how that is written and how some of the other stuff is written about this person's long-standing interest in speaking other languages, I'm ready to give them the benefit of the doubt in this regard.
And that's amazing.
That's a real set of skills, and that's a real interest that is worthy of focus and dedicated hard work such that you could actually do something valid and amazing in the world.
And yet, we learn later on in this piece that, you know, he's thinking of becoming a model or an influencer.
Because that's where the money's going to come from, and that's where the attention is coming from, and it's an addiction all the way down.
So here, another picture in the couture.
All of them with the same blank expression.
The same blank expression.
And I just want to finish with the final little anecdote in the story.
After dinner, Wilson is ready to head back home to watch her favorite new Netflix series, Alice in Borderland, an animated sci-fi show about a gleamer in Tokyo.
So again, though, the constant, like, what do you do with your time?
Well, I get stoned and I watch screens.
We decide to stop by a liquor store to pick up some booze first.
Let's get some cheap wine, she says.
Cheap wine is one of God's greatest creations.
She can't taste the difference, she tells me, between red wine and white wine, or shitty wine, expensive wine, so she settles on a $9 bottle of Cabernet called Santa Carolina Reserve.
Carolina Reserve.
The burly guy at the cash register, wearing a Dodger's cap, seems to recognize her.
You look familiar, he says.
Wilson clams up.
Uh, maybe.
I don't know.
We're barely out the door before he chases us down.
You're not Elon's daughter, are you?
He asks.
She hesitates and looks off in the opposite direction as if she'd take off, running across the street if there weren't so much traffic.
Uh, no, sorry, I get mixed up for her a lot.
He calls her bluff.
I was gonna say she's my favorite person, he tells her, before sending us away with two free shots of tequila.
To shake it off and save money on an Uber, one more picture here.
To shake it off and save money on an Uber, we decide to walk the two miles back to her house.
I'm not very good at being famous.
It's a skill, she tells me, reflecting on the encounter.
I fought so hard for so long to be viewed as a regular person.
There was a moment literally right before I became famous where no one knew who I was.
It was amazing.
Everyone treated me as a regular person.
I kind of missed that.
But I also like being famous.
She says so half-heartedly.
Does she really?
I ask.
I guess I'm kind of indifferent to it, but I like the fact that it makes me money.
After being tumbled through the right-wing media machine, she's working on building back her confidence.
I think about the support I get more than the hate, and it kind of outweighs it, she says.
I get a lot of hate posts about me, but what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?
I don't really have a choice other than to build a bridge and get over it.
One positive takeaway of the past year, she says, is an, quote, improved faith in people.
I thought people would hate me immediately.
It's been a year, and seemingly people don't hate me.
The walk to her house is dark along a busy street and by a couple of fairly creepy underpasses.
At one intersection, a driver waiting at the light spots us, then launches into a profane, transphobic tirade.
For the first time this evening, Wilson gets mad.
Shut the fuck up, girl, go to Texas.
Get your bitch ass back to Texas, she screams as he drives off, starting to chase after him.
I wish he'd come back so I could yell at him some more.
Like, fuck that bitch.
It's unpleasant, and we'll be needing a cigarette.
Wilson left her marlbars at home, but luckily I have plenty on hand.
When she notices my lighter, which has a photograph of Stevie Nix on it, she laughs at me, calling me a stereotype of an Enby.
I ask what the most stereotypical thing about her is, and the question isn't fully out of my mouth before she shoots back an answer.
Daddy issues.
Wow.
I'm just overwhelmed with sadness here.
Yeah.
And I came across this story in the same week as thinking about Linehan being arrested and these misogynistic, violent, cos-playing men on the internet actually putting women at risk across a number of different domains.
I thought I'd have this reaction to this human being with the same kind of anger, disgust even.
But I just feel sad.
Like I cannot, actually cannot grasp how much we have destroyed, how many people we are destroying with our confusions.
And in this case, some of those confusions probably came from the natal home, right?
There's just confusion about, there's like tech bro confusion about how much we can how much we can create just by applying enough force of will and money to a problem and conflation of complex with complicated systems and imagining that if what you feel like is uncomfortable in your skin one of the possibilities might be that you're not the sex that you are that's never been true it's not true we are encouraging people in
just sad myth that then some of them go on to utterly destroy themselves and there will be no coming back.
Well, I'm also, maybe I'm connecting threads that shouldn't be connected, but there's something, I don't know what Elon is doing, fathering children the way he's fathering them.
Yeah.
But there is a way that children are supposed to be produced and raised and it involves committed pairs of parents investing in those kids, steering them in the right direction as they go wrong.
And he was actually married to Vivian's mother and she had a son who died crib death.
Which Elon has talked about.
And then through IVF had twins and triplets, all boys.
So there's five children by this one mother.
And then he divorced her and got engaged within six weeks.
So this, this, this child was sired and raised for the first couple of years within the confines of a committed relationship.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Of course, the kid is the product of a broken home and a, you know, spectacularly broken home in some sense.
And who knows what effect that has.
I would also point out, if I'm doing the math correctly, the article is new.
The article is new.
So that puts her coming out in 2020?
Well, you know, I've actually, one place it said 2020, another place it said 2022.
So I'm not.
No, I think there were two different dates.
And it said that she came out in 2020, if I did the math right.
But anyway, COVID era.
Yeah.
Which is a very interesting moment.
You know, you had a young person who, no matter what else was true, was going to have the normal developmental pathway interrupted by all things COVID.
And who knows what kind of dysfunction this produces.
Maybe she had issues going into it, but it's not going to have helped, right?
And the lesson across all the stories we've talked about today and so many of the other ones we've focused on is, I mean, I hate to put it in this cliched terminology, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it is a pretty good rule of thumb in a complicated system.
In a complex system, it's essential.
The likelihood of improving something in a system you cannot fathom is very, very low.
And so what we've done is just, you know, you've got a Jenga Tower and you've taken out a huge number of the things that allow it to stand.
And it's no wonder that the kids are as screwed up as they are, right?
This has only gotten worse as we've gotten farther and farther from anything that looks like a recognizable environment that has produced healthy children.
And, you know, it is actually our moral obligation to kids before anything else to provide them in an environment in which they can develop normally, right?
That is, that's the prerequisite to a proper life.
And we're not even delivering that.
And it's, it's a tragedy.
It is.
It is.
Yeah, we have we've messed a lot of things up.
And I hope it's not too late to get sufficient numbers of them back on track that we can actually move forward as a society whole and with sufficient numbers of intact young people that they can begin rebuilding what seems to have been stalled for many years now.
Yeah.
I hope so.
I'm concerned that AI is the accelerant that gets poured on all of these runaway processes.
And that's something we should be thinking about quite deliberately.
Indeed.
Well, we will be back in four short days.
We'll be back on Wednesday at our usual time.
Four increasingly short days.
Four increasingly short photo periods for those of you in the northern hemisphere.
Exactly.
Yes.
And I mean, really, who that matters isn't in the northern hemisphere.
That was a terrible joke.
I can't believe I said it out loud.
But anyway, if you're in the southern hemisphere, that was not intended to be personal.
Well, and I intended to be fun.
Yeah.
And I mean, like, my sort of correction rejoinder seems like this semantic silliness.
And yet I'm always thrown by this.
Day means two very different things, right?
Like a day is a set amount of time that does not vary across the year.
Well, it does a little bit, but not right.
Like, but it's, you know, it's 24 hours, give or take.
But usually when we say something like that, oh, the days are getting shorter.
We don't imagine that a full, you know, spin on its axis is getting any shorter, particularly after the equinox or as the equinox approaches, or actually after the solstice.
What we mean is the photo period is decreasing.
Yep.
So day and day mean very different things and they're used in the same context.
Right, you've got to listen very carefully to the intonation of the word.
Well, and it's spelled differently.
Yes, of course.
No, it's well done.
Thank you.
Yes.
All right.
So we'll be back on Wednesday at our usual time.
And until we see you then, check out Brett's Patreon tomorrow and check out our locals.
Evolution Patreon tomorrow.
Evolution Patreon tomorrow.
Beautiful.
And the Q ⁇ A that we did last week is up on locals.
And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
