Today, Dan and Jordan review the sixth episode of Tucker Carlson's very dumb Twitter show. This installment is about how great Robert Kennedy Jr. is, but secretly may be about how one of his writers is taking a creative writing class.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan. | |
| knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| Not knowledgefight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Dan! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jordan. | |
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot is that this weekend was Money in the Bank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Coming to you live from London. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Yeah, they went over to the UK to do Money in the Bank. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Pounds in the... | ||
| I was about to get there. | ||
| I think they still use the word bank. | ||
| But bank is spelled Q-U-E. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So you have the premise of the match, of course. | ||
| There's a briefcase hanging from the ceiling that you have to get a ladder to get up to. | ||
| And then you grab it, and inside is a contract that you can cash in at any time to become the champ. | ||
| It's a great anticipation device. | ||
| What fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A bunch of nonsense. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Anyway, I don't care about either of the matches. | ||
| There was a men's and a women's. | ||
| I don't care about either of them, because in the middle of the event, you hear those familiar sounds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do-do-do-do! | |
| John Cena was there! | ||
| Out of nowhere, John Cena comes running out of the back. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| What a thrill! | ||
| What is he gonna do? | ||
| Fast 10 is over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Peacemaker isn't even started again yet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Because there's a writer's strike going on. | ||
| So yeah, he might as well show up. | ||
| I really got excited. | ||
| Probably more than I should have, or had any reason to be, because I don't even love John Cena that much. | ||
| I was going to say, I don't know you... | ||
| I find him incredibly charming, but whatever. | ||
| So I texted Marty, oh my god, and then I looked at the phone and I'm like, why'd I text him that? | ||
| That's so dumb. | ||
| So anyway, John Cena comes out, does an incredibly pandering, you... | ||
| Crowd here in London, you are the best! | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| The people in the back, they're all worried because you guys yell too much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a hostile environment, but I say you are the best! | |
| You know, very much... | ||
| First of all, I thought he was supposed to be the USA guy. | ||
| Well, what are you going to do? | ||
| The Marine. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Now he's fucking loving the Brits. | ||
| What, is he going to go ape shit on how they still have a monarchy and be like, what are you doing? | ||
| They have an outsized amount of control over your government still. | ||
| You think that they're a basic figure? | ||
| I would have enjoyed it. | ||
| I would have too. | ||
| So he was giving this great speech. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then his whole reason for being there, which was very unclear for minutes while he was out there, was to rile up the crowd by saying, it's time to bring WrestleMania to London! | ||
| Oh, and that was it? | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I started thinking... | ||
| Man, it would be funny if someone came out and their whole entire thing was they didn't want WrestleMania to be in London and then John Cena beats them up. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| Metaphorically, that's perfect. | ||
| It doesn't even take long. | ||
| He treads water for a little bit longer and then this Australian guy comes out. | ||
| No way! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He comes out and he's like, I think we should have WrestleMania in Australia. | |
| And then John Cena beats him up. | ||
| So the very thing that I thought would be hilarious if it happened, happened, and I got a charge out of it. | ||
| That is great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is a feeling of somebody pulling it off correctly. | |
| It went too long, but otherwise delightful. | ||
| Exactly what it was supposed to be. | ||
| Everyone went home happy. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| So what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is I finished Final Fantasy XVI. | ||
| You said that the last time we were recording. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Privately. | ||
| I mean, I understand that, but there's a new game plus, man. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| There's a new game plus. | ||
| I didn't even start the game until I beat the game. | ||
| I retract my statement. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Anyways, fantastic story. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| It is very, very difficult to end things well. | ||
| It's very difficult to end. | ||
| Are there multiple endings? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| There's one. | ||
| There's one ending. | ||
| It culminates... | ||
| I mean, it puts together all the themes of the story. | ||
| It's successful in everything it sets out to do. | ||
| And I think, honestly, what's amazing about it is that they got away with telling one of the most, I mean, dangerous to capitalism stories that there's ever been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn. | |
| I mean, essentially what this is, is imagine... | ||
| I mean, here's the story, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus... | |
| Tries to free the slaves, realizes that it's actually God who has enslaved all of us, and instead of being like, okay, I'm the son of God, they kill God. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Is this actual Jesus or metaphorical Jesus? | ||
| Metaphorical Jesus. | ||
| Okay, because I feel like if it were literal, this would be trouble. | ||
| But again, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| This is so much like a story of a people over-reliant upon one resource and a guy who is saying to everybody, listen. | ||
| It is a bad idea to keep doing this, and regardless of the harm it will cause, we must remove the resource entirely. | ||
| So the point is, he sets up the entirety of the people for a hundred years of extreme misery in order to free them from an evil god who tries to make them over-reliant again on a specific resource. | ||
| So when you say it's hard for it to end well, you don't mean for you as the player, you mean for the story. | ||
| No, no, for the story. | ||
| As a writer, it's difficult to end it. | ||
| For them, it was difficult to wrap things up in a satisfying way, and then they pulled it off. | ||
| Well, I mean, Game of Thrones, obviously, is an easy corollary. | ||
| They fucked it up, and in this story, they mailed it. | ||
| I think it's time for a reassessment. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was going to say, did you even watch it? | |
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| Oh, okay, you did. | ||
| I joined Game of Thrones a bit late. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So I joined maybe in the fourth or fifth season or something like that, and I got up to speed and everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was like, I kind of like these kids, but the rest of this is a little bit... | ||
| Like, I liked Arya's adventures, and I thought Bran was pretty cool. | ||
| Bran's pretty nice. | ||
| Going, hanging out with a tree. | ||
| He's got a tree friend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who doesn't want a tree friend? | ||
| I want a tree friend so bad. | ||
| Yeah, but all the politics and everything kind of was annoying to me. | ||
| It got in the way! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, I want more of the magic stuff, and kind of like, let people just get along and hang out and have fun with tree folk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or something. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I think Martin had a sort of magic should be the shark and Jaws view of Game of Thrones where it's like, it's really there, but it's never quite, it's not like people walking around shooting thunderbolts at other people, that kind of thing, you know? | ||
| Yeah, but there are ice people who are constantly a threat. | ||
| I'm not saying there aren't ice people who are constantly a threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe that last season wasn't as bad as people... | ||
| I think it might have been. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't thought about it since it happened. | ||
| We don't have to reclaim anything. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| There was... | ||
| A few months ago, or a year ago, or whatever there was, there's a whole effort to reclaim Phantom Menace. | ||
| Fuck off! | ||
| That movie sucks! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| How dare you try and reclaim that shit? | ||
| Oh no, we need a critical re-examination. | ||
| We do not! | ||
| Alex is gonna charge in here like the Kool-Aid man and kick your ass. | ||
| Somebody said... | ||
| He's a prequels guy. | ||
| Somebody defended pod racing! | ||
| How dare you! | ||
| Hey, it's pod racing. | ||
| Was it Greg Proops who was defending pod racing? | ||
| I don't think he defended pod racing once. | ||
| I think he apologized but said, I had a great time. | ||
| Made a lot of money. | ||
| I'm Greg Proops. | ||
| I was high the whole time. | ||
| I should not have been in a Star Wars movie. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode to do. | ||
| We're going to be talking some tuck. | ||
| Some tucker. | ||
| Now, here's where things get messy. | ||
| Tuck talk. | ||
| We're going to be talking about episode six of his show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But this is episode three of our series about Tucker. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how do we title it? | ||
| I mean, are they serialized? | ||
| I mean, there's an order of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| In terms of when they come out. | ||
| Right, right, all right. | ||
| So I don't know whether we should call this episode three or episode six. | ||
| Because if we call it episode six, people are going to be like, where's episode three, four, and five? | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| If we call it episode... | ||
| It's actually episode six of Tucker's show. | ||
| That might confuse people. | ||
| All right, let me throw this out at you. | ||
| All right, we call it episode three, Tuck 60. No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'll figure it out. | ||
| I'm not going to get any help from you, clearly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to get jokes that come to you for serious advice. | |
| This is what I get. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I actually... | ||
| You know, having some fun, but I really don't know what to title it. | ||
| Because the first episode of the Tucker thing was about the first episode of his thing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Second episode about the second episode. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, by the time anyone's listening to this, it'll be a dead question. | ||
| Yeah, they'll have already figured it out. | ||
| Anyway, here's the reason we're doing some Tucker. | ||
| Alex was still out of town. | ||
| Doing his remote sort of rented studio vibe thing where he's on the big screen. | ||
| And Roseanne filled in in studio on Friday. | ||
| And it was, you know, her being on was huge and like bizarre. | ||
| And we talked about that when that happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the second time, it's not really all that bizarre anymore. | ||
| The seal has been broken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not like she was talking about anything that was all that interesting. | ||
| I found it to be a dud, and so, waste of time. | ||
| Alex, while he's been in Florida, did a Q&A at the church of Pastor Howard Brown, Robert Howard Brown, whatever his name is, and that was hard to watch. | ||
| A Q&A? | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yep. | ||
| Q&A at the church. | ||
| I mean, who... | ||
| Of all the... | ||
| Listen, I mean, even if you're a fan of Alex, Q&A is a bad idea, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's a performer. | ||
| You know, like, he turns it on. | ||
| You can see him turn it on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And you can see him, like... | ||
| Dodge questions in real time, kind of, but not in any way that I felt like, oh, this is interesting. | ||
| There was one guy who was insisting that Alex debate the JQ with Nick Fuentes, and that... | ||
| You know, there's nothing quite more deserving of a House of God. | ||
| I don't even like saying those two words. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't like saying the two letters next to each other anymore. | |
| Yeah, Alex wasn't thrilled with it either. | ||
| So he started yelling and holy ghosting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He got up, he stood up, and then the audience got on their feet. | |
| It was like, oh god. | ||
| Just such a distraction. | ||
| I have been given a translation of Alex by the Lord! | ||
| It was horrible. | ||
| So then I was like, let's go to the past. | ||
| Because I always love, it's kind of self-care for me when I get to spend time in the past. | ||
| But unfortunately, March 2nd and 3rd were a zero. | ||
| Nothing is happening. | ||
| Alex does not. | ||
| Recant the story about Carrie hanging out with Anton LaVey. | ||
| Why would he? | ||
| This was the only thing that I even found at all. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is from March 2nd. | ||
| This was ridiculous. | ||
| That's why America's degenerating. | ||
| I do have to say this. | ||
| I can hardly go see any film. | ||
| What? | ||
| Open Range or The Passion of the Christ or any of the last few films I've seen. | ||
| Paycheck, I saw that. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Philip K. Dick, a sci-fi writer. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter what movie you go to. | ||
| There will be 5 to 20 frying infants. | ||
| And, I mean, who does that? | ||
| Just a few years ago, people didn't do that. | ||
| We really are degenerating in this country. | ||
| I mean, that's just an example. | ||
| I mean, women look at me like I'm weird when I open doors for them at restaurants or at the shopping mall. | ||
| You know, older women don't, but young ones think you're hitting on them or something. | ||
| Ooh, you're opening a door for me. | ||
| Well, I'm sorry my mama taught me to do that. | ||
| And I'm not even that polite or nice of a person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I've got my own problems. | ||
| I'm pretty aggressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| It's just I sit there in movies, and I can never have suspended disbelief because, you know, mainly the third world populations are here, and then they just think you bring babies to movies. | ||
| I might as well just, you know, move to China or move to, you know, Venezuela or something. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| Yeah, that took a weird turn at the end. | ||
| That was very odd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I mean, you know, in comedy, you know, I've heard plenty of the black people in movie theaters trope type jokes. | ||
| That's not quite what he's doing. | ||
| No, that's the thing. | ||
| That's very strange. | ||
| That's a strange interpretation of it. | ||
| He's complaining about the inability to suspend disbelief to get into a movie because there are babies there, which I would argue that Alex lives in a constant state of suspended disbelief. | ||
| He sees demons everywhere he goes. | ||
| But I thought, like, oh, this is fine. | ||
| This is kind of like a trite point that he's making, and he's saying that society is deteriorating. | ||
| Because babies are movies and I'm annoyed by it. | ||
| But then bringing in third world immigrant populations as like they're the ones who bring babies to movies. | ||
| They're the baby bringers. | ||
| Like I don't even know. | ||
| That's not even a stereotype. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a bigotry that like you could never see coming. | ||
| It was fantastic listening to it. | ||
| But I was like there's nothing else going on here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's no episode for that. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we're going to cover Tucker because of this challenge of content. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so we'll do that. | ||
| But before that, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Yes, that is. | ||
| That's the preamble. | ||
| So first, Ryan and Lena, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, in the fuck you and your horse you rode in on Technocrat sound clip, Alex's babbling translates to I'm the devil. | ||
| I've got to be taken off the air. | ||
| I did all this. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I don't know the fuck you think we're going to be in September. | ||
| Oh wait, we already said we're going to be in Manchester. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to be in Manchester. | ||
| Next, I wonk it to the east. | ||
| I wonk it to the west. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonk it to the policy that I love best. | |
| I'll be wonkin'. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, someone's got to come up with a dark end of the street parody for the wonks. | ||
| You ever made policy in the backseat of a car? | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| Children, I remember one time I made policy in the backseat of a car. | ||
| I don't know how that's somehow more uncomfortable for me than usual. | ||
| That's where people go, the dark end of the street. | ||
| To make policy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some people... | ||
|
unidentified
|
The rich people, they go out on a boat and make policy. | |
| Some people, they go way up in an airplane somewhere and make policy. | ||
| But for those of us who don't have nothing and ain't ever had, never got to have anything, we get ourselves $2 worth of gas. | ||
| A congressional aid pickup line. | ||
| Like, hey, do you want to go make some policy with me? | ||
| Like, that's pathetic. | ||
| Next, you need to close to the toilet lid in porta-potties for them to work properly and not smell. | ||
| Thank you so much, you are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| To get an extra word in there. | ||
| So, also, we got a technocrat in the mix, Jordan, so thank you so much to Zap Razdower and the Razdower Mobile. | ||
| Thank you so much, you are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | |
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| My daddy was a big old man. | ||
| I can see him with some policy in his hands. | ||
| Policy we never had. | ||
| But we do some walking when the times got bad. | ||
| That's your ending bit now. | ||
| You just put policy in songs. | ||
| And Clarence Carter songs. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And then Aaron Carter songs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For just a few policies. | |
| No, slip away doesn't work. | ||
| Yeah, that's fair. | ||
| So, we're going over number six in the line of Tucker monologues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's stretching out a little bit. | ||
| He's doing a little more time. | ||
| This one's about 18 minutes long. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, it's very dumb. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, here we go. | ||
| We'll start, and you'll get the theme right away. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Tucker. | |
| If you've never been a candidate for president, the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you thought that title belonged to Donald Trump, of course it must, but go check the coverage. | ||
| Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. | ||
| When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. | ||
| But as well known as he is, the paper said at the time, Trump is also widely disliked. | ||
| Then they cited a poll to back it up. | ||
| That was the attack on Trump. | ||
| Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. | ||
| Quote, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the paper declared, announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating COVID-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans' faith in science. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Shaking Americans' faith in science. | ||
| Imagine if you were an ordinary New York Times subscriber reading that over coffee in your pre-war rent-controlled duplex on Columbus Avenue. | ||
| What? | ||
| You'd think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the Enlightenment. | ||
| My fellow Americans, I have come to shake your faith in science. | ||
| Join me as I drag our nation back to the medieval period. | ||
| You'd be appalled. | ||
| I imagine those readers already would know who Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is. | ||
| I would assume. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| If you're reading the Times, you probably have an awareness. | ||
| You've created a... | ||
| I'm a very strange fictional human being for 2023. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You know, like, that's not, that can't be that many people anymore. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| No, most of those people. | ||
| Pre-war rent control. | ||
| Yeah, rent control departments. | ||
| Most of the people who had rent control departments died a long time ago, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I don't have a lot of experience with that. | ||
| I think that's evidence of my claim. | ||
| Yeah, perhaps. | ||
| So what do you think about this premise, though, that RFK Jr. is the most hated candidate ever, more than Trump? | ||
| I kind of don't even think that that was an insult in their first... | ||
| No, I don't either. | ||
| I don't think there was an insult there. | ||
| I think that was descriptive. | ||
| I mean, honestly, I think that was a little bit light compared to what he deserved. | ||
| Yeah, certainly could have been a little harsher. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But back to... | ||
| So you would say no? | ||
| No, I would say no. | ||
| I would say that around... | ||
| Not too far into the campaign season, a video was released of Trump saying you should grab him by the pussy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I remember that one. | ||
| That did happen. | ||
| That happened, and I don't know if I've ever hated anybody more than everybody who's like, eh, it's locker room, dog. | ||
| But the media didn't even really go too hard on that. | ||
| Which is, again, amazing. | ||
| Because we're not talking about the most hated politician. | ||
| We're talking about the media treating them the hardest. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I think that Trump, for everything that was insulting that was said about him in the press, he was not treated as harshly as he should have been. | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely not. | ||
| Nor is Robert Kennedy Jr. | ||
| But I would say that neither of them probably get the title. | ||
| I mean, what about, like, Ross Perot? | ||
| He was given a pretty shit hand. | ||
| There is definitely that. | ||
| Or Ralph Nader? | ||
| He got beat up pretty good. | ||
| No, any closeted gay politician ever. | ||
| David Duke? | ||
| David Duke? | ||
| I don't think he got that much of it. | ||
| Richard Spencer was treated very, very nicely. | ||
| I think they treated David Duke fairly fair. | ||
| But Richard Spencer didn't run for president. | ||
| No. | ||
| David Duke ran for president. | ||
| And he almost won. | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| But I'm saying that there are other people who the media was... | ||
| Lyndon LaRouche? | ||
| Oh, LaRouche got it bad. | ||
| He was not treated nicely by the press? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| LaRouche made it to the news radio joke room. | ||
| Pat Robertson also ran for president? | ||
| No, he was given a lot more. | ||
| He was given a TV show, for fuck's sakes. | ||
| Did he give himself that TV show? | ||
| Oh, that's fair. | ||
| So anyway, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is obviously the premise of this piece, because, you know... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Tucker is very invested in the Democratic primary. | ||
| Yeah, I'm really... | ||
| Very concerned about who the Democrats pick. | ||
| I think this is... | ||
| I think what I feel like is starting to come to my theoretical understanding of this is that they're trying to push... | ||
| RFK Jr. for the primary in the same way that some people tried to push Trump for the primary as like, hey, listen, crazy is crazy, man. | ||
| If we get it in there, we're going to change the window, if you will. | ||
| And somewhat also the last time around with Tulsi, you had all of the people who were the sort of right-wing folks saying that like, oh, get Tulsi in there. | ||
| That's going to be... | ||
| She was the... | ||
| Favorite Democratic primary candidate of the right. | ||
| And now RFK is basically that. | ||
| But way worse in many ways. | ||
| If I was the Democrat who was looking around at my rally and being like, yeah, we can do it! | ||
| And there's a bunch of Nazis, I'd be like, maybe I shouldn't run for president. | ||
| If I were in a debate with Robert Kennedy, if he gets to that stage, I would not even address him. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Anyway, the media's mean. | ||
| Probably not as mean as I'm going to be, but they're mean. | ||
| The L.A. Times called him a threat to democracy. | ||
| At the offices of National Public Radio in Washington, a full-blown Category 5 hysteria typhoon broke out. | ||
| NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. | ||
| NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who, in his spare time, Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, the story was about how his relatives hate him and not about his... | ||
| True. | ||
| And all the stuff that he was saying that NPR said is true. | ||
| He's just saying it in a derisive tone. | ||
| It doesn't make it any less fair. | ||
| Oh, you go to the store on Wednesdays! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why'd you say it like that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Also, a Category 5 hysteria typhoon is great. | ||
| Someone's taken a creative writing class, and that's a person who's hired by Tucker. | ||
| I think it's a real evocative imagery. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah, if we were workshopping, I'd be like, well done. | ||
| I think I appreciate that because they've lived in an alternate reality so much that it's controlled by their own perceptions and projections, right? | ||
| If you're a Tucker listener listening to this, Then you think, yeah, Tucker is saying that NPR savaged him because we think that media networks savage people because we watch Tucker, right? | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| NPR hasn't savaged anyone in their entire existence. | ||
| They go, I really don't appreciate his policy positions, but I think we can respect each other's differences. | ||
| While we can't come to a compromise, I think it's still possible for us to say goodbye as equals. | ||
| So thank you very much, Robert Kennedy. | ||
| What do you think the Fox equivalent of Lake Wobegon would be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you think the Fox equivalent of Lake Wobegon would be? | |
| If they had a Garrison Keillor type who was just telling old quaint stories about an angry, angry fucking town. | ||
| Who just chased off outsiders. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, isn't that the inverse of Tucker saying an innocuous thing with a very derisive tone of Garrison Keillor being like, and he went to the goddamn store on Wednesdays! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, RFK is views. | ||
| You know, people say they're bad. | ||
| I think they're great. | ||
| Kennedy's younger sister Carrie, the magazine reported solemnly, does not approve of Bobby Jr.'s harmful views. | ||
| His harmful views! | ||
| Bobby Kennedy's thoughts alone are evil enough to hurt people. | ||
| That's been the tone of the media coverage around Bobby Kennedy Jr. for the past 18 years. | ||
| Obviously, Tucker is saying that RFK's ideas are evil enough to hurt people as a way of mocking the very notion that such a thing is possible, but that's really dumb. | ||
| When someone's pushing a false ideology that leads people to make misinformed and dangerous choices as it relates to their healthcare and the healthcare of, say, their children, those ideas are capable of hurting people. | ||
| And Tucker knows that. | ||
| There is stupid and, like... | ||
| Tucker's not that stupid. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This is one of the things that somebody says that I really think has to be, like, you and I both know what's going on, and my response to that is, all right, and then we stop. | ||
| Like, I can't... | ||
| If you're not going to acknowledge what you just did, there's no point in us continuing to talk, you know? | ||
| Sure, and that's probably why, you know, we don't want to talk to Tucker. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But we can talk about him. | ||
| That's why NPR didn't savage him. | ||
| Wait till, um... | ||
| They do... | ||
| Fuck, I can't remember. | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| Isn't that a show on NPR? | ||
| NPR Saturday mornings? | ||
| Michael Feldman? | ||
| I've never listened to NPR. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| You didn't listen to Prairie Home Companion? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Wait, was that on NPR? | ||
| Yeah, that was when I was a kid. | ||
| You didn't listen to Celtic Connections? | ||
| No, I didn't listen to that either. | ||
| You didn't listen to Hearts of Space? | ||
| Not once. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I've never been like, let's put on NPR. | ||
| What about... | ||
| All things considered. | ||
| You've already unanswered your question. | ||
| Just the news. | ||
| All things considered. | ||
| I've never actively listened to NPR. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Every day it was on in my household. | ||
| My parents listening to that damn NPR. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's nuts. | |
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never listened to that Irish music. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Celtic Connections. | ||
| Obviously it's better. | ||
| But. | ||
| I feel like that is just as much an annoyance as if somebody has Fox News on all day, every day. | ||
| Well, yeah, I guess it wasn't all day, but it was like, you know, there were things on the weekends when people were home that, like, they listened to regularly. | ||
| So there was, like, Saturday mornings, maybe it was Sunday mornings, I can't remember the day exactly, but in the mornings there was What Do You Know with Michael Feldman. | ||
| There was a fun quiz-type game show thing. | ||
| And then there was Prairie Home Companion. | ||
| And then in the evening, there was Celtic Connections and Hearts of Space. | ||
| And then every day when they'd be cooking dinner, they'd have All Things Considered on. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| But I think the reason that it's less toxic, maybe, than Fox News is that some of it is entertainment. | ||
| You know, obviously Garrison Keillor's a weirdo creep. | ||
| We didn't know that at the time. | ||
| Nobody did. | ||
| I mean, he's on the radio. | ||
| At the time, he's a just folksy storyteller. | ||
| And, you know, there's that. | ||
| And then, like, Hearts of Space and Celtic Connections, just music. | ||
| You know, it's not even, like, it's not even someone yelling their political ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, I wish Fox News had an hour just of Celtic music. | |
| Yeah, and then another hour of weirdo space techno. | ||
| Yeah, at a certain point it just becomes MTV in the 90s, just playing music videos. | ||
| I would love... | ||
| I really... | ||
| Okay, now I would love curated by Tucker, but it has to follow the format of... | ||
| Sundays on NPR. | ||
| Furious Hearts of Space. | ||
| Well, actually, I mean, like, Hearts of Space was a show that it would explore themes. | ||
| And so there'd be, like, anger. | ||
| Or, like, heartbreak. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| And then the music would explore that. | ||
| I feel like Fox News would play a lot of Wagner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it would just be like, boop, boop, bwee. | |
| But that bwee was like a comet going through space. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I'm going to have to go with Goddard Amarung being on repeat. | ||
| Anyway, clearly don't want to talk about Robert Kennedy. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| But we must. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So anyway, the media has hated him for a really long time. | ||
| And rightfully so. | ||
| That's been the tone of the media coverage around Bobby Kennedy Jr. for the past 18 years, since July of 2005. | ||
| That's the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expanding schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines. | ||
| The day that story was published, Kennedy's reporting was considered so solid... | ||
| Sorry, what? | ||
| Reporting? | ||
| Unfortunately, neither one of them understood what they were up against. | ||
| The pharma lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory, and both publications swiftly caved. | ||
| Both pulled the story and then disavowed it, groveling as they did. | ||
| No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. | ||
| If it wasn't the vaccines, and maybe it wasn't, then what was it? | ||
| To this day, there has not been a convincing explanation. | ||
| Instead, reporters just attack Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| Tucker sure is having a lot of fun with details here. | ||
| Yeah, I was gonna say. | ||
| The piece that Kennedy wrote in 2005 was titled Deadly Immunity, and it was making the argument that thimerosal and vaccines were responsible for the rise in cases of autism. | ||
| Salon didn't cave to big pharma pressure. | ||
| They were bombarded with corrections and had to add five different major corrections to the story in the immediate days after publishing that an editor said, quote, went far in undermining Kennedy's expose. | ||
| The media didn't hate Kennedy for this article. | ||
| If he's even hated at all, it's because of all the shit he says that's long debunked. | ||
| He just continues spreading the same bullshit, pretending that no one has provided any reason that he's wrong. | ||
| And when that doesn't work, he just moves goalposts. | ||
| If he'd published that article, then seen the corrections and said, oops, my bad, then no one would be mad at him. | ||
| It might lead to a reconsidering of his credibility and his ability to investigate things, but he would show a measure of goodwill. | ||
| And people would be like, eh, whatever it happens. | ||
| Instead, he's just doubled down and led tons of people down a really dangerous road. | ||
| And guess what, ding-dong? | ||
| People not having an easy answer for the question of autism diagnoses doesn't mean that Kennedy just might be right. | ||
| Because that's the game that Tucker's trying to play, insinuating that because no one's fully solved this issue, that leaves some room that Kennedy could be right. | ||
| He has given an explanation. | ||
| And guess what else, ding-dong? | ||
| One is greater awareness in the wider population of the autism spectrum with a greater likelihood that parents, you know, will seek out appropriate care, and that'll likely come with a diagnosis. | ||
| There's also, you know, some screening that people do in well-child visits now that wasn't routine before but has become more now. | ||
| There's also a number of other ideas like genetic predispositions, but the vaccine link has been investigated and found to be bullshit. | ||
| And yet Kennedy pushes the same shit that he pushed years ago. | ||
| And that's why people hate him. | ||
| And Tucker fucking understands this. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| He's playing a weird game where maybe he's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I agree with everything that you said. | ||
| And I think that those are good concerns. | ||
| But my biggest issue is whoever gives him adjectives should be fired and in trouble. | ||
| Tucker? | ||
| Yeah, these are a little overwrought. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Look, they fucking groveled at the face. | ||
| When you're in a creative writing class, it's a process. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| This is a high school student. | ||
| They're in the middle of the semester. | ||
| Trying to, like, zhuzh it up a little bit. | ||
| Right, they haven't reeled it in yet. | ||
| Because they don't have anything good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But look, you see little signs that there's progress. | ||
| It's like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Calm it down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm tired. | ||
| So if you're wondering why this is happening, it probably is because Robert Kennedy was on Rogan. | ||
| Oh, for fuck's sake. | ||
| So Tucker's going to play a clip of that. | ||
| At this point, most Americans have heard a lot more about Bobby Kennedy Jr. than they've heard from him. | ||
| Bobby! | ||
| He doesn't get any offers to speak from big platforms. | ||
| But last week, Joe Rogan gave him one. | ||
| Here's some of what he said. | ||
| Why do five of my seven kids have allergies? | ||
| And, of course, we know why. | ||
| Because aluminum adjuvants give you allergies. | ||
| They're designed to create a hyperimmune response to foreign particles. | ||
| What? | ||
| And the last category is the allergic diseases, peanut allergies, food allergies, eczema, which I never knew anybody with eczema when I was a kid. | ||
| I never, asthma, I knew people with asthma, but it wasn't one in every four black kids like it is today. | ||
| So, you know, all of those things. | ||
| Now, we went from 6% of Americans having chronic disease. | ||
| By 1986, we're starting to have the vaccines, and we got 11.8% of kids now, so it's doubled. | ||
| Why do five of my seven children have allergies? | ||
| Now, we don't know the answer, of course, but it's an interesting question. | ||
| In fact, it's an important question that deserves an adult answer, not that you should hold your breath waiting to get one. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy asks a lot of questions like that. | ||
| He notices things. | ||
| Kennedy pays attention to the world around him and he wonders why it's changing. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy is not wondering why his kids have allergies. | ||
| He asked that as a rhetorical question, then gave his answer. | ||
| Tucker is acting like this guy is just out here noticing things and playing the role of an observational comic, pointing out things that seem weird. | ||
| Kennedy is not doing that. | ||
| he's using his children's allergies to push his anti-vex worldview. | ||
| There are a lot of theories about the rising number of people with allergies, but there isn't a full consensus on the matter. | ||
| One of the most popular theories has to do with children being exposed to less microorganisms early in life than they were in the past, but there's another co-founding factor that's difficult to deal with, and that is that way more people think they're allergic to things than actually are allergic. | ||
| According to a paper published in 2018 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Quote, currently the majority of available data is based on self-reporting, which generally overestimates food allergy prevalence by a factor of three to four. | ||
| Oof. | ||
| People aren't reliable reporters of whether or not they're allergic to something or really just don't like it, or maybe they got sick from it once and decided it was an allergy. | ||
| I've been guilty of that even myself. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I thought I was allergic to avocados. | ||
| I think it was just because I got sick eating some bad guacamole when I was younger and I made a bad data set there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Based on everything else I know about Robert Kennedy Jr., I'm going to have some healthy skepticism about whether or not five of his children actually do have allergies. | ||
| Maybe they do. | ||
| Maybe they don't. | ||
| But the thing to note about this that is really important about the way Tucker's playing this game is he's acting like he's just asking questions when, in fact, Robert Kennedy is making very emphatic statements. | ||
| This is not questions. | ||
| Well, but that's the trick there, is because he's asking rhetorical questions, if you leave off that he gives answers at the end of it, then you give the viewer the idea of this person being an open-minded truth seeker, and then when you go listen to it, you come back and you say, oh, this open-minded truth seeker has found an answer. | ||
| Not just is asking questions anymore. | ||
| And because I know he's an open-minded truth seeker, I can trust him. | ||
| Yeah, it's dumb. | ||
| Is that what he sounds like all the time? | ||
| I've never heard him speak before. | ||
| Yeah, I regret not knowing the specifics, but he had some health condition that led to... | ||
| I apologize that I don't know the exact details. | ||
| But he had some health thing a number of years ago. | ||
| And so he has a throat. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, then he won't be president, so I'm not worried. | ||
| He sounds like that all the time. | ||
| People are shallow, but maybe not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it's disqualifying, necessarily. | ||
| His ideas are disqualifying. | ||
| Oh, I think his ideas are disqualifying, but I think that the reasons... | ||
| So, look, he says, Robert Kennedy, Bobby is really observant. | ||
| He sees things. | ||
| He notices things. | ||
| He's a falconer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy asks a lot of questions like that. | ||
| He notices things. | ||
| Kennedy pays attention to the world around him. | ||
| It's a bird! | ||
| And he wonders why it's changing. | ||
| He's an outdoorsman, a falconer, and a fly fisherman. | ||
| He's interested in how nature works. | ||
| He's curious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Not so long ago, these qualities were considered essential to the practice of science. | ||
| All scientific discovery comes from observation, empiricism, patient watching. | ||
| Without the willingness to put aside your pre-assumptions and assess with honesty the things you see and touch and smell, the changes taking place right in front of your face, you can't do science. | ||
| You can't create art either, or journalism, or theology. | ||
| You have to be willing to notice the obvious. | ||
| And when they tell you you're not allowed to notice the obvious, you should be concerned. | ||
| Imagine you're on a commercial airline flight. | ||
| The plane is just leveled out at 37,000 feet. | ||
| You're closing your eyes for a nap. | ||
| And suddenly you smell smoke. | ||
| And it's not your imagination. | ||
| You can see it. | ||
| It's starting to fill the cabin. | ||
| All around you, people are hacking and choking. | ||
| The guy in the next seat has a napkin pressed against his mouth. | ||
| And he's mumbling what sounds like Psalm 23. What? | ||
| He walks from the valley of the shadow of death. | ||
| So clearly, the airplane is on fire. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But almost unbelievably, no one has said a word about it. | ||
| Not this single person is acknowledging this is happening. | ||
| Everyone is silent. | ||
| So in panic, you yell for the flight attendant. | ||
| There's smoke in the cabin, you say as if she hasn't noticed. | ||
| But she stares at you with hard eyes. | ||
| Shut up, racist, she replies. | ||
| That's a dangerous Russian conspiracy theory. | ||
| Stop spreading misinformation. | ||
| We're all called TSA and have you arrested when we land. | ||
| That sounds like a fever dream. | ||
| But it's also pretty close to the experience of living in the United States at the moment. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| That doesn't sound at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a genuinely funny story. | |
| Look, Kennedy, he can be as stoic an observer as he wants, but he's not a scientist. | ||
| No amount of hiking and playing with falcons is going to change that, but I don't really care. | ||
| I want to talk about Tucker's metaphor, because I think there's something slightly off about it. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| In the context of talking about Robert Kennedy, the points of comparison are pretty obvious. | ||
| The people coughing and the smoke in the cabin are things like more people having allergies, or there are more autism diagnoses than there used to be. | ||
| Kennedy is seeing those things and pointing them out, and people are yelling him down as a... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| He says that vaccines are doing all the things like causing allergies and autism, so in the plain metaphor, what he'd actually be doing is yelling at the flight attendant about what he's decided is causing the smoke in the cabin, but he'd also be wrong. | ||
| Maybe Kennedy would be telling the flight attendant that the way landing gear are installed create fires, but in reality it was just someone vaping in the bathroom. | ||
| Then Kennedy would start a lifelong, highly funded campaign to get rid of landing gear on planes, and then he'd marry Cheryl Hines. | ||
| My point is that this metaphor is dumb. | ||
| Tucker is trying to play fast and loose about what Kennedy does. | ||
| He doesn't observe the world and ask questions. | ||
| He has a dogmatic answer to those questions already in place. | ||
| And whatever observations he does have are merely meant to prop up the already determined conclusion that he's based his life on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is Cheryl Hines on the plane in this metaphor, though? | ||
| She's the one on the wing. | ||
| Tucker didn't make that clear, and I feel like that's a huge detail for me. | ||
| It depends on... | ||
| That changes everything, because then I want the plane to... | ||
| I mean, I've got nothing there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| It's dumb, because I get the point that he's trying to make, but there is such a refusal to accept that this is not just a person who's pointing things out and observing things. | ||
| That's the entire shell game he's playing, and it's ridiculous to anybody who has any familiarity with the people involved, the history of this. | ||
| No, I think what I find so fascinating about that is that from the writing of that, I do feel like all I would need to do to make a solid bit about that is be like, oh, Tucker is saying things like, and then say that word for word, and people will laugh at it at the beats. | ||
| If you just change the inflection points and you calm the beats and the timing down, that's a bit. | ||
| But let me ask you this. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| From a creative writing perspective, pretty good. | ||
| No, that's why it's a bit, is because it's overwritten. | ||
| It's way too dramatic. | ||
| But the high school staffer is getting better. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| I will say that there is a full narrative conclusion there. | ||
| There is a problem that the entirety of the piece is uneven. | ||
| Internally and just taken as a whole. | ||
| Yeah, there's a little bit of a problem there. | ||
| So look, man, there's something going on, but no one admits it, much like the plane with the smoke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All around you, things seem to be fraying and getting worse. | ||
| Your gut tells you there's something very bad going on, and all the evidence suggests that there is. | ||
| But the people in charge won't acknowledge that. | ||
| Everything's fine, they scream. | ||
| Stop noticing! | ||
| But wait! | ||
| I don't remember this many kids having allergies or asthma or eczema or autism or, for that matter, body dysmorphia. | ||
| And why so many suicides? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| Stop asking questions! | ||
| That's their answer. | ||
| But Bobby Kennedy won't stop asking, and that's why they hate him. | ||
| So, all the things that Tucker brought up there as pieces of evidence that there's something really bad going on are things that serious people study, and questions are asked about them all the time. | ||
| The people are not being like, don't look at this! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no! | |
| I mean, the idea that someone in America is saying things are fine is un-American. | ||
| Since this country was born, everyone bitches about everything. | ||
| It's honestly a bizarre idea. | ||
| To say, like, all of this stuff, the people in charge, by the way, who are the people in charge? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Very unspecific. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| They're just like, oh no, everything is fine. | ||
| This is all, everything is good. | ||
| No questions. | ||
| Countless pages of media have been written on these topics. | ||
| And for Tucker to pretend otherwise is honestly embarrassing. | ||
| And again, no one hates Kennedy for asking questions. | ||
| They hate him because he won't stop making the same debunked arguments he's been making for years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I genuinely believe this. | ||
| And I think this is kind of funny in light of Tucker's comments. | ||
| It's like, if we had a full-on tech recording of every single American's day on the day he recorded this, I guarantee before 8 p.m., every human being would have been like, this is not fine about something. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Every single one of us. | ||
| But... | ||
| What about the people in charge who are not specified and we don't know who they are? | ||
| See, those are the people that we have documented video of saying this isn't fine on that day. | ||
| Beg to differ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair enough. | |
| I just heard a very reputable source named Tucker tell me that they don't. | ||
| People are screaming, things are fine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So, Robert Kennedy was on Rogan, but then someone at Vice wrote an article about him being on Rogan. | ||
| As Kennedy spoke on The Rogan Show, a reporter for Vice.com called Anna Merlin was watching. | ||
| Hi, Anna! | ||
| Merlin was so enraged by what she saw that she dashed off an article attacking Joe Rogan's employer for allowing the conversation to take place. | ||
| Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation, read the headline. | ||
| The piece never even described much of what Bobby Kennedy had actually said. | ||
| Merlin dismissed the entire interview as "a detailed survey of Kennedy's most dangerously incorrect views, a far too extensive list to outline in full." In other words, we here at Vice don't have time to describe all of Bobby Kennedy's lies, but trust us. | ||
| They were lies. | ||
| Look at that delivery. | ||
| Yeah, that was probably his worst delivery so far. | ||
| That was Tucker getting fancy. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| It was cute. | ||
| That's troublesome. | ||
| So he's also just lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anna's article is pretty specific about the claims that Kennedy made on Rogan and which ones are bullshit. | ||
| Tucker took that line that said it was too long of a list to outline in full and then he just lied to the audience that that was the extent of the discussion. | ||
| In fact, the next paragraph starts, quote, they included innumerable talking points that have already been debunked. | ||
| At one point, for instance, Kennedy falsely suggested that vaccines cause autism, which has been repeatedly and roundly disproven, with Rogan interjecting supportively. | ||
| Kennedy also trotted out one of his favorite talking points, that vaccines contain a dangerous form of mercury, something he says a lot. | ||
| As ever, he conflated ethyl mercury, which is not considered hazardous to human health, and methyl mercury, which is considered dangerous in even small doses. | ||
| Both of these points are backed up with links to supporting research in Anna's article. | ||
| Anna goes on to point out that Kennedy also said that Wi-Fi, quote, straight up lying about this article because he knows the audience isn't going to check and he doesn't care. | ||
| The image that Vice is just posting essentially empty attack articles is what the audience wants to hear. | ||
| So that's the image that Tucker paints for them to make sure that they don't... | ||
| Consider any criticism of Robert Kennedy for some reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And, you know, it would be ironic if he were unaware of it, but... | ||
| And appropriately, his last line is, they're just saying things and then asking you to trust them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In essentially the exact thing of his crime being done to people. | ||
| And then he does a fancy voiceover it. | ||
| So, fuck off. | ||
| But then he also, in the next clip, he's going to say more about the article from later in the article. | ||
| So he would have had to read the beginning and then skip to the end in order to not get the part where Anna went over the specifics. | ||
| it's not ironic because he's appropriately lying about it yes it's a fucking malicious liar yeah yeah and then god damn it I'm sorry about this but we're about to get back into Peter Hotez no Then Merlin called Spotify to see if she could get the episode censored. | ||
| Much to her profound frustration, Spotify refused to censor the episode and kept the interview on its website. | ||
| So she spent the next several days ranting about all of this on Twitter. | ||
| People were listening to the wrong things and Anna Merlin was mad about it. | ||
| So is Peter Hotez. | ||
| Hotez is a pediatrician from Texas who became moderately famous on MSNBC during the COVID lockdowns as a Biden shill and a vaccine promoter. | ||
| Hotez read Anna Merlin's piece and then huffily retweeted it. | ||
| Effectively, why is Bobby Kennedy allowed to talk in public? | ||
| And that gave Joe Rogan an idea. | ||
| Why not have Peter Hotez debate Bobby Kennedy on his show? | ||
| You claim he's wrong. | ||
| Why don't you explain why he's wrong? | ||
| That seemed fair. | ||
| Yeah, but your question is, why not? | ||
| Why is the rebuttal? | ||
| Why do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| That's simple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's really uncomplicated. | ||
| Yeah, so now we're getting into the Peter Hotez of it all. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I mean, it's just the derisive tone towards moderately famous when it's like... | ||
| The guy didn't want to be any of this! | ||
| You should have not had a pandemic, assholes! | ||
| I didn't like to start a TV show! | ||
| Later, Tucker does call it a so-called pandemic, so there may not have been one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Motherfucker! | |
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| He didn't start a podcast. | ||
| He didn't go out. | ||
| He wasn't on the open mic circuit, and then he got his big break at JFL, and then he finally... | ||
| But he never made it to the big times. | ||
| He's just a fucking doctor! | ||
| That's where you're wrong. | ||
| Okay, never mind. | ||
| He did make JFL New Faces Pediatrics unsigned. | ||
| I would watch that show. | ||
| Just children's doctors who have no agent? | ||
| All pandemic with no agent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be good. | |
| That would be a good show. | ||
| Oh, we could write their bets. | ||
| So anyway, Peter Hotez went on MSNBC instead of talking to Rogan because he's a coward. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| But Hotez wouldn't bite. | ||
| So Rogan offered to give a hundred grand to Hotez's favorite charity if he agreed to come on. | ||
| Soon others made their own pledges and the pot swelled to over a million dollars. | ||
| But still, Peter Hotez wouldn't come. | ||
| Instead, he scampered back to MSNBC, where one of the channel's oilier hosts assured him he was doing the right thing by dodging the debate. | ||
| Arguing with Bobby Kennedy is morally equivalent to debating a Holocaust denier, the host said. | ||
| No decent person would do that. | ||
| And of course, Hotez agreed. | ||
| 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they believed the anti-vaccine disinformation and refused to take a COVID shot. | ||
| So really, talking to Bobby Kennedy would be a lot like abetting murder. | ||
| And Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, was not going to do that. | ||
| But wait a second, you ask yourself. | ||
| Let's think about those numbers. | ||
| 200,000 people died because of vaccine disinformation from Bobby Kennedy and people like him? | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| Is that really science? | ||
| It's not science. | ||
| Because we don't know that. | ||
| We can't know that. | ||
| There is no way to know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, wait, wait. | |
| Peter Hotez's claim is a political attack. | ||
| He's a specialist! | ||
| Is he literally trying to break people's faith in science? | ||
| It seems like it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can probably bicker about the exact number, but you'd have a really difficult time refuting that there was a large number of excess deaths caused by vaccine refusal. | ||
| Just to start, in November 2022, Yale School of Public Health released a study that looked at excess death numbers across partisan lines. | ||
| The authors found that the excess death rate was 1.6%. | ||
| 10.4 for Republicans specifically after the vaccine was released. | ||
| They said, quote, the gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available. | ||
| Other research has done that's tried to disambiguate these variables and look at vaccine refusal and health outcomes, and it doesn't look great for people who are telling people not to get vaccinated. | ||
| In all likelihood, 200,000 is a pretty fair estimate of the deaths caused by anti-vax profiteering during the pandemic, and Tucker is most likely just really upset about that because those people's blood is on his hands, too, and he knows it. | ||
| But also, like, he can always hide behind the impossibility of drawing straight lines between, like, why exactly did someone not get vaccinated? | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| You can look at the numbers. | ||
| You can look at differences in excess death rates and vaccination rates. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's pretty clear that the spirit of what Peter Hotez is saying is accurate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but that's kind of the problem, is that if we're so obsessed with only dealing with straight lines, then, boy, there are so many ways to get to a different point that aren't a straight line. | ||
| So if the problem is the point we get to, then you have to deal with where we start and not the line. | ||
| And if we're adhering to this rigid a standard for proving things, there's a whole lot that's already been said by Tucker in this episode that's going to fall the fuck apart. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I would say that that A to B relationship is messy to... | ||
| Delineate with a straight line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And you could probably argue about the precise number. | ||
| And that's fair enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But for him to be making a mockery of this and saying it's a political point that has nothing to do with science and all this is ludicrous. | ||
| And Tucker, he knows well enough. | ||
| He knows well enough. | ||
| His job is to force people to be so angry and... | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| There's actually a really great example of that later on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Big Pharma cabal that's trying to attack Robert Kennedy because he's a threat to it. | ||
| And meanwhile, Tucker's spending all his time demonizing Peter Hotez, who tried to make a patent-free vaccine for coronavirus, which is a giant attack against Big Pharma. | ||
| I mean, it's absurd. | ||
| It's forest for the trees, definitionally. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I mean, just the idea, the idea that you can give a fuck about the number. | ||
| That's bananas to me. | ||
| 200,000 is an unconscionable number. | ||
| Do you know what else is an unconscionable number of people to die because of lies that get other people made? | ||
| One! | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I'll go with you on one. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So why are we fucking talking about this at all? | ||
| Because Tucker wants to create an argument out of something that is inarguable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he wants to just shit on Peter Hotez. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's fair. | ||
| Here he is on television during the so-called pandemic. | ||
| It's all about mask compliance. | ||
| That's going to be absolutely critical. | ||
| Because if you don't have masks, remember, this virus aerosolizes. | ||
| So even six feet is not enough. | ||
| It can go 17, 18 feet, several meters. | ||
| What you really have to do is have vaccine mandates in the schools. | ||
| We should have a rule that anyone who walks into a school over the age of 12 has to be vaccinated. | ||
| This is the nature of the anti-vaccine movement in this country. | ||
| It's somehow married now to far right wing extremism and white nationalist group. | ||
| Anyone who's unvaccinated and has been lucky enough to escape COVID, your luck is about to run out. | ||
| I call it anti-science aggression coming from Senator Rand Paul, Senator Johnson, members of the House of Representatives, in addition to those two senators, are a killer. | ||
| It's all about mask compliance. | ||
| We must have vaccine mandates for children. | ||
| Take the vaccine or you will die. | ||
| Anyone who disagrees with me is a white nationalist and a killer and probably an agent of Putin. | ||
| Do we say probably? | ||
| Let's revise that. | ||
| Certainly an agent of Putin. | ||
| Again, here is Dr. Peter Hotez. | ||
| We're starting to see now those same anti-vaccine messages that's coming out of the U.S., and now we're finding it in Africa and Latin America. | ||
| And remember, the other reason we're seeing this is the Putin government has, and this has been reported by U.S. and British intelligence, has been piling on with this whole systematic program of what's being called weaponized health communications, trying to destabilize democracies with anti-vaccine, anti-science messages and targeting. | ||
| So according to British and U.S. intelligence, anyone who disagrees with Dr. Peter Hotez is a disloyal American working to destabilize our democracy. | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| On behalf of Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Yeah, it all makes sense. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Like that so-called pandemic in there. | ||
| That was a super good touch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Hotez's points were... | ||
| Totally fair, and Tucker is misrepresenting what he said in order to pivot the argument into safer waters. | ||
| Hotez didn't say that if you were anti-vax, then you're a white nationalist or whatever. | ||
| He just made a very accurate point that opposition to vaccines became involved with white nationalist groups during the pandemic. | ||
| It's a fertile recruitment pool that extremist groups use to grow their ranks, and they associated intentionally. | ||
| Hotez also didn't say that if you're anti-vax, or even if you're spreading anti-vax messages, you work for Putin. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| These are interpretations you might make if you had a difficult time with reading comprehension. | ||
| But that isn't the case for Tucker and his staff. | ||
| They're just liars who are hiding behind poor comprehension as a way of sort of passing off their lies. | ||
| I mean, on the other hand, one of his writers did give him the word huffily. | ||
| Huff. | ||
| Which, I mean, that's just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huff, huff, huff, huff, huff, huff. | |
| That suggests a poor reading level. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a bad sounding word. | |
| It has a bad rhythm. | ||
| So Hotez thinks that if you're anti-vex, you're a white nationalist, you work for Putin, and also everyone who criticizes him should be arrested. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair. | |
| Now, by comparison, never in his life has Bobby Kennedy Jr. said anything half that demented. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Keep in mind Peter Hoshua. | |
| What? | ||
| Claims. | ||
| patients. | ||
| After a while, even MSNBC viewers were going to have some questions about a guy who talks like that, and apparently some of them did. | ||
| As the lockdowns wore on, the population started to notice that many of the core claims the TV doctors were making were untrue. | ||
| You'd only need one shot. | ||
| If you got the shot, you would never get sick. | ||
| You would never pass the virus to others, and so on. | ||
| They said these things, as you know, again and again. | ||
| Ultimately, they were proven wrong, but they never admitted it. | ||
| They just attacked the people who noticed. | ||
| Here's Dr. Peter Hotez calling for the Biden administration to arrest anyone who questions the COVID vaccine. | ||
| The Biden administration has to realize that That anti-science is a killer. | ||
| Disinformation. | ||
| It's not even just disinformation. | ||
| This is an anti-science empire right now. | ||
| And we need Homeland Security. | ||
| We need the Justice Department. | ||
| We've really got to figure this out. | ||
| And Health and Human Services will not be able to figure this out on their own. | ||
| It's not a medical problem. | ||
| It's a law enforcement problem. | ||
| They've doubted me! | ||
| Arrest them! | ||
| It's a horrifying outburst if you think about it. | ||
| If you were on tape saying something like that, you would be deeply ashamed. | ||
| But Peter Hotez is not ashamed. | ||
| He's become even more grandiose. | ||
| He's emboldened. | ||
| I am so Speechlessly angry about this. | ||
| Yeah, and if you watch the larger context of that clip that he played, they're talking about how you could save more lives now. | ||
| You could still save lives. | ||
| And, like, people are dying because of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Still. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, I don't think... | ||
| I would hear that clip and I would have follow-up questions about exactly what the roles of the, like, Department of Justice would be, you know. | ||
| But I don't hear that as arrest people who disagree with me. | ||
| I would hear that as sue people and send cease and desist letters to people who are making money off... | ||
| Don't do nothing. | ||
| Your job is to do something to save people's lives and you're doing nothing about it. | ||
| So do a different thing. | ||
| Yeah, not necessarily like arrest Tucker. | ||
| I mean, I don't want you to arrest people. | ||
| I want you to do a thing. | ||
| Because arresting people wouldn't do any good either. | ||
| Yeah, it would just create heroics or martyrs out of those arrested. | ||
| Yeah, no, I find it unacceptable on a human level for Tucker to say that it was other people providing a shit time. | ||
| It was doctors who were providing misinformation during the pandemic. | ||
| That really is unacceptable shit. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| You know, it's always going to be easy when you have an evolving public health situation and a novel virus that you are able to create a vaccine for in, you know, such a brief window. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That there's going to be times where you're wrong about something. | ||
| You're not providing misinformation. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| And then because you're wrong... | ||
| You're wrong for all the right reasons. | ||
| And then you correct it! | ||
| And also, maybe you were right at the time. | ||
| And then there's another variant, you know? | ||
| Like, that can happen. | ||
| And you're always going to be able to make mileage out of misrepresenting things that doctors and such said earlier. | ||
| And then also there were some people who were maybe a little capricious with their messaging. | ||
| But that wasn't the lion's share of the folks who were in support of the vaccine. | ||
| I just, I mean, it's just so, you know... | ||
| The feelings that the pandemic arose. | ||
| So-called pandemic. | ||
| See, you know what, do you know what I mean of like, this is something that I do not feel was reckoned with. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| The pandemic was not reckoned with. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And it still hasn't been. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And until it is, we're guaranteed for chaos. | ||
| We don't do that here. | ||
| See, that's... | ||
| Our country doesn't reckon with stuff. | ||
| We need to reckon with things. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| There's so many things that need a reckoning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if we don't reckon with them, we will be reckoned with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not going to be good for us. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It never is. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And we don't learn. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So someone who does learn is Peter Hotez. | ||
| He learns to be emboldened. | ||
| By getting away with it all in plain view. | ||
| Oh, these emboldened doctors. | ||
| And so Tucker, in order to take him down a peg, decides to read his bio. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But Peter Hotez is not ashamed. | ||
| He's become even more grandiose. | ||
| Hotez has written a self-congratulatory new book called The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science. | ||
| A scientist warning, as if he were a scientist. | ||
| Here's how Hotez describes himself in the book's promotional literature. | ||
| During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist in his famous bowtie, appearing daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR and BBC and others, Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a non-profit COVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. | ||
| During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic. | ||
| And was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work. | ||
| He also became one of the main targets of anti-science rhetoric that gained traction through conservative news media. | ||
| End quote. | ||
| Though we could go on. | ||
| So here you have a renowned scientist, selfless, trusted, going without sleep, self-denying, persecuted by extremists for daring to tell the truth, the Albert Schweitzer of cable news. | ||
| That's Dr. Peter J. Hotez. | ||
| The fact that a partisan buffoon like Peter Hotez can describe himself this way with a straight face and the backing of a publisher makes you despair for the country's future. | ||
| But don't despair. | ||
| There is hope. | ||
| There's hope, Jordan. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Brass balls for Tucker to joke about Hotez's bow tie. | ||
| I am beyond... | ||
| Yeah, also, Tucker really slipped over something there that him and his ding-dong friends all ignore, and that is that Hotez is... | ||
| I would say his primary claim to fame at this point is the work towards creating the non-profit COVID-19 vaccination, which kind of makes him legit an opponent of Big Pharma in a way that Tucker could never even pretend to be. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I mean, the greatest thing you can do to Big Pharma is threaten them economically. | ||
| In service of providing something for people. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That's what Hotez and his team were nominated for a Nobel Prize for, making a patent-free COVID vaccine, which could help people in the developing world. | ||
| Millions of doses have been administered in poor areas of India and Yeah, I just don't. | ||
| I just don't. | ||
| And, like, we can play the same game if Tucker wants, where I go find one of his bios from his books and I read it in a snarky voice, but where does that get us? | ||
| No, it doesn't get us anywhere, and it is... | ||
| I mean, it's so fucking annoying because he's correctly grasping a serious issue and distracting from it, and then giving power to the people who are causing it. | ||
| What? | ||
| Lay it out. | ||
| I mean, like, the reason that you're willing to go along with... | ||
| Tucker's dumb shit is because Big Pharma is fucked up. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| You cannot deny that. | ||
| They're fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I don't know if that's why you go along with Tucker's stuff. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But the reckoning never came for the Sackler family. | ||
| You know, like all of these things are there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, there is a problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you come to it with like, oh, this person who gave people millions of doses of a vaccine that they don't have to pay for is evil and a murderer. | ||
| And that's why we need Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the guy who is almost directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, to become our leader. | ||
| Arguably, like, so, you know, with Peter Hotez, with his, you know... | ||
| He is providing something for people. | ||
| It benefits their health at the expense of big pharma. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're not able to charge for it and what have you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| if you really look at it if you're a cynical evil big pharma person You're probably thrilled with Robert Kennedy. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Like, he's advising people not to get vaccinated, which will create more health conditions that they have to deal with with medicine later and throughout their lives, perhaps. | ||
| And so, like, it's actually the reverse. | ||
| Like, Hotez is doing something that helps people at the expense of Big Pharma. | ||
| Kennedy is doing something at the expense of people that helps Big Pharma. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's what Tucker's avoiding. | ||
| All... | ||
| Medicine should be non-profit. | ||
| Well, he doesn't touch on that, surprisingly. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But Peter Hotez is a coward, because he won't debate Robert Kennedy. | ||
| But there's still hope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there? | |
| But don't despair. | ||
| There is hope. | ||
| Hotez will never debate Bobby Kennedy Jr., but it doesn't matter. | ||
| Kennedy has already won. | ||
| He's more honest than Dr. Peter Hotez, and that's obvious to anyone who's paying attention. | ||
| A New Economist poll shows that Kennedy is more popular and far less hated than either major party front runner. | ||
| After almost 20 years of being silenced, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is He was on rote. | ||
| No one's proved it. | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| But what we can say with certainty is that America's medical establishment has beclowned itself for all time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Beclowned. | ||
| What? | ||
| What fucking asshole wrote this shit? | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| Creative writing class. | ||
| God, my red pen would tear this person apart. | ||
| Beclowned. | ||
| So that's a really weird formulation on Tucker's part. | ||
| Basically, he's saying that the audience shouldn't despair because Kennedy may be totally wrong in misleading hundreds of thousands of people towards risking their lives for no reason. | ||
| But a recent poll said he was popular. | ||
| And Peter Oates beclowned himself. | ||
| Biden, Trump, and Kennedy have pretty similar favorability numbers in that poll that he's talking about, although Kennedy does come out ahead a bit in net favorability because he has a higher number of people who answer don't know about him. | ||
| They don't have an opinion. | ||
| Biden and Trump are well-known quantities at this point. | ||
| They have much heavier unfavorabilities built in because of that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Also, in that poll that Tucker's, he's not mentioning this, but they have a question, if the GOP primary... | ||
| Trump would fucking cook everyone. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| He destroys DeSantis. | ||
| I think it was like 51% for him and then 20-something. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| That poll didn't have voting metrics for a hypothetical Democratic primary, but the most recent poll that's available has Biden at 64% and Kennedy at 17%. | ||
| And that was a Fox News poll. | ||
| So, not Biden-favorable territory. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But clowned. | ||
| That's insulting the noble profession of clowning, of which I count myself a member. | ||
| I will say that I don't know the word. | ||
| But I typed it into my word processor, and I do not have a red line under it. | ||
| No, it's a real word. | ||
| It's a real word. | ||
| That's not the problem here. | ||
| The problem is not that words aren't or are real. | ||
| It sometimes is. | ||
| In this case, it's not. | ||
| There are so many unreal words that are so much better than beclowned. | ||
| It's certainly attention-grabbing, though. | ||
| So anyway, medicine is witchcraft now. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But what we can say with certainty is that America's medical establishment has beclowned itself for all time. | ||
| Its official positions on vaccines, psychiatric drugs, puberty blockers, reassignment surgeries, a long list of other politically fashionable priorities have no connection whatsoever to legitimate science. | ||
| It's all effectively witchcraft. | ||
| At the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago last week, for example, They're insane. | ||
| So the importance or significance of BMI, or body mass index, has always been kind of shaky. | ||
| The idea of putting one number on body mass is a bit simplistic, and the medical community has known about that for a long time. | ||
| It's a foundation for a measurement that could be important, but it needs a lot of work to account for various things like fat distribution, age, and ethnicity. | ||
| The reason that it was called a tool of racist exclusion is explained this way in an article from the Washington Post from over two years ago. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| ideal right right right it's not a universally applicable number but most experts recognize the BMI idea is a jumping-off point for a measurement that could be more meaningful but it just hasn't been developed yet whatever that more meaningful metric is this isn't an instance of the medical community being insane unless you're a white identity zealot like Tucker who thinks that everything about the world should use white people as the default and and the ideal. | ||
| Then the idea of reconsidering that legacy might seem insane, like it does to Tucker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I find fascinating. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, Tucker lives in a world where witchcraft is real. | ||
| I think that might have been a flourish for him. | ||
| But this is what I'm saying here, right? | ||
| Alex lives in a world where witchcraft is real. | ||
| In their world. | ||
| If you call doctors witchcraft, I feel like that means they are effective at doing what they are asked to do, right? | ||
| They have power. | ||
| They have the ability to heal through witchcraft. | ||
| I... | ||
| Don't think that's the conclusion he wants to lead you towards. | ||
| I understand that, but if I am listening to this, I'm thinking, oh shit, witches can save me. | ||
| I think it was meant as just strictly a pejorative thing. | ||
| Sure, sure, but I feel like we need to re-examine whether or not witches are real, because Tucker is clearly considering them. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| Hopefully in episode 8 or whatever of his show we'll get to the bottom of whether or not there are witches. | ||
| I hope he does a witch episode. | ||
| I want to do that. | ||
| Please, Tucker. | ||
| Do a witch episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please. | |
| So compared to these witches who are talking about BMI being racist, they're all on another planet. | ||
| Compared to them, Robert Kennedy's sane, man. | ||
| Next year they will denounce thermometers and stethoscopes. | ||
| They're insane. | ||
| Compared to them, Bobby Kennedy is a mainstream figure. | ||
| And people understand that. | ||
| That's why he's winning. | ||
| And you know he's winning by how his critics are doing. | ||
| So just four years ago, Anna Merlin was regarded as an important expert on conspiracy theories and misinformation. | ||
| She'd written a book on the topic. | ||
| Here she is talking about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've always thought that in the case of conspiracy peddlers, it's not necessarily a super profitable enterprise to ask whether they really believe it or not, because I don't know what's in their hearts. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| What's in their minds, all I know is what they spend their time doing, which is promoting conspiracy theories. | ||
| In the case of ordinary people, conspiracy consumers, and most Americans are to some degree consumers of conspiracy theories. | ||
| All the studies that we have show that like one in three Americans believe. | ||
| In some conspiracy theory to some extent. | ||
| For the people in the very sort of deep end of the conspiracy pool, people who are consuming a lot of conspiracy content, I think it's really important to look at the way it helps them make sense of the world and make sense of our political moment and make sense of a lot of times like what's happening in their own lives. | ||
| All the studies that we have show that like one in three Americans believe in some conspiracy theory. | ||
| That's a familiar tick in Brooklyn. | ||
| It's a familiar tick for you. | ||
| It's designed to turn a declarative sentence into a question and thereby belittle the listener. | ||
| Do you follow me? | ||
| Is this too complicated for you? | ||
| So the lady in the nose ring wants you to know she's smart. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| What the f- Fuck! | ||
| I feel like listening to Anna speak was far less condescending than listening to Tucker's bizarre vocal flourishes. | ||
| Amazing! | ||
| I don't know what's going on. | ||
| She sounded like a completely normal person to me. | ||
| I don't know what the point of this is, to be totally honest. | ||
| It feels unnecessarily mean, and the larger point of the segment legitimately makes no sense. | ||
| None. | ||
| Is Tucker trying to say that compared to a medical establishment that he defines as insane and beclowned, Robert Kennedy is not quite so insane or beclowned? | ||
| Like, I'm not sure that's a great point. | ||
| Are you saying, like, look at where his critics are? | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Listen, doctors are witches, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might be completely wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| But that one poll said he has more favorability. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Than Biden or Trump. | ||
| Then we've gotten to the bottom of it. | ||
| He won the popularity contest in this one economist poll. | ||
| I feel like Tucker is trying to create the platonic ideal of gaslighting. | ||
| Like, he is literally... | ||
| Embodying the concept of aggressively existing in one reality and trying to force a false reality on whoever is around him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's absurd. | ||
| Maybe that's the mission statement of his Twitter show. | ||
| That could be. | ||
| That could... | ||
| I mean, somebody who's eventually going to have to create the platonic ideal of gaslighting. | ||
| That's just simply... | ||
| Once something exists, a human must create it. | ||
| Well, now that you've spoken into existence... | ||
| Episode 9 of the show. | ||
| After the witchcraft episode is going to be. | ||
| We gotta do the witchcraft first. | ||
| So here's the dismount. | ||
| Legitimately, I think his final argument is that Robert F. Kennedy is pretty cool because Anna Merlin's dumb because Vice is going bankrupt. | ||
| I think that's the point he's making. | ||
| So the lady in the nose ring wants you to know she's smart. | ||
| But she's not. | ||
| When Merlin recorded that interview, Vice, where she now works, was valued at more than $5 billion. | ||
| Genius investors like James Murdoch were showering the company with money. | ||
| Everyone wanted in on the future of media, which was uptalkers like Anna Merlin lecturing you about racism and misinformation. | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| But that has changed. | ||
| Last month, Vice filed for bankruptcy. | ||
| Anna Merlin is still on Twitter screeching about how her critics are transphobic, but nobody cares. | ||
| What? | ||
| Nobody wants to hear from Anna Merlin anymore. | ||
| The gatekeepers are transparently ridiculous. | ||
| Everyone can see that. | ||
| People have started to notice. | ||
| And that's the end. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know what's happening. | |
| I mean... | ||
| This show is so dumb! | ||
| I honestly... | ||
| I think... | ||
| I'm sure Anna's overjoyed. | ||
| I feel like that's pretty funny. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's pretty funny. | ||
| Yeah, I did not reach out for comment. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| I mean, this ending is a little incoherent. | ||
| Oh? | ||
| Because Anna's reputation is still quite good, even if Vice goes bankrupt. | ||
| It really is not... | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| She got sued, and that's why they're bankrupt, much like Tucker with Fox News. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They didn't go bankrupt. | ||
| He's still... | ||
| Did Anna lose Vice $800 million? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| Well, then I think we're probably okay. | ||
| But also, like, I don't know what the bankruptcy has to do with, like, whether or not... | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy is cool. | ||
| Well, as everybody knows... | ||
| She was criticizing him being on Rogan. | ||
| The connective tissue is thin. | ||
| And then also, if going bankrupt somehow has anything to do with your intellectual credibility, what about Alex? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Infowars, they both are bankrupt. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, see, so... | ||
| What happens, and I think a lot of people know this now, right, is that the writers control the finances of most media companies. | ||
| They really want the input of the people who make their content, right? | ||
| That's definitely not like... | ||
| I don't know, groups of rich hedge fund investors who saddle the company with all the debt that they use to buy the company, and then they declare bankruptcy and sell it for parts because they've actually, and they make money coming and going. | ||
| I'm honestly shocked that he didn't somehow tie this into Gavin McGinnis and the Proud Boys. | ||
| I was kind of feeling like Gavin McGinnis should have showed up! | ||
| Yeah, that seems like fertile... | ||
| Ground for him to get into? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the way to do it. | ||
| See, yeah, I mean, look, I don't know what we... | ||
| I don't know what the point is here. | ||
| I mean, obviously this is just meant to be a defense piece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But, like, it doesn't at all deal with any of the criticisms that are really being levied against him. | ||
| No. | ||
| And it seems to mostly be like, I don't like Hotez! | ||
| Anna Merlin sucks! | ||
| And I don't really think that that's... | ||
| Powerful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, it is a little bit like listening to... | ||
| Well, no, it's not a little bit like listening to a high school kid. | ||
| This is listening to an annoying freshman high school kid who comes to school in a suit, and you're in the same English class, and he won't shut the fuck up about Lord of the Flies for some reason. | ||
| And you're like, when we get to catch her in the rye, I'm gonna kill myself. | ||
| You're describing his head writer. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Apparently, yeah. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Oh, Category 5 Typhoon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, boy. | |
| What was it? | ||
| Hysterics? | ||
| Yeah, Hysteria Typhoon. | ||
| Good stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, look, I continue to be bewildered by this show. | ||
| As somebody who's used to, somebody who has no point at all, but it's forgivable that he has no point because he's just rambling. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| It's very jarring to listen to this and see, like, I think I get what your point is supposed to be. | ||
| It's flawed. | ||
| The premises, upon examination, fall apart, and it becomes entirely unclear what you're trying to say. | ||
| I get the anger behind it, but, like, there has to be a second... | ||
| Like, pass at this. | ||
| Like, you wrote this. | ||
| You need to edit it. | ||
| Edit it, please. | ||
| You need to do a better job of making this argument stand up to scrutiny, because it's silly. | ||
| Alex doesn't try. | ||
| He doesn't have a teleprompter. | ||
| He's just talking shit. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| This is unpolished garbage. | ||
| It is a bit like... | ||
| So Alex is like a rollercoaster that is poorly made, and it might... | ||
| Fall apart at any second. | ||
| It's like that New Jersey park. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The danger park or whatever. | ||
| Action park. | ||
| Where people die. | ||
| But Tucker is like the hall of warped mirrors, you know? | ||
| You walk in there and you're like, none of this looks like this and I can't escape. | ||
| This is horrific. | ||
| Yeah, I... | ||
| That metaphor is as good as anything his writers are going to come up with. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| So, Jordan, we'll be back for another episode in the near future. | ||
| Hopefully Alex will be back in studio. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep, we're all on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Yep, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo, I'm Leo, I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| Your time is up. | ||
| My time is now. | ||
| London! | ||
| WrestleMania! | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
|
unidentified
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What about Australia, mate? | |
| And now here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |