This is a preview of The Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. Please go to our Patreon to gain access to the regular Weekender episodes on Fridays.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman point out that there might be a realization in the Trump administration that they are failing at their jobs writ large. RFK Jr. continues to attack autism as a subtext to eliminating vaccines, while Pam Bondi establishes an committee to root out anti-Christian policies in the government while Thomas Friedman proposes a way forward for Democrats that's astoundingly bad.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCray Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. It's next time I'm here with my good friend, my co-host, Nick Housman.
Nick, how you doing, bud?
How's the weekend looking?
You know, I don't know.
I haven't even thought about it, but, you know, I guess I should since this is called the Weekender.
But does anybody look ahead and plan for weekend events now?
I live for the weekend.
Oh.
That's when I thrive, my friend.
And by thrive, I mean that's when I just sort of sit and look out a window and go, Yeah.
Okay, so you don't necessarily have to have anything planned days in advance locked in.
I don't think you do.
You can.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That must be nice.
I have friends who, you know, you have to book six months out to get a plan with them.
Well, I mean, that's living in L.A., my friend.
Yeah, I guess so.
That's how that is.
We have an absolutely packed show.
Tons of stuff to talk about, as always, because this administration never leaves us wanting for things that we have to analyze and talk about.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash moncraigpodcast to hear the entirety of The Weekender.
Also, by the way, we have had just an absolute influx of people who are supporting us and helping us grow, and we are so, so grateful.
Join everybody.
You'll get access to The Weekender, access to the Discord, live events, special things, all of that good stuff, and it keeps us editorially independent, keeps us growing.
patreon.com slash moncraigpodcast.
Nick, we start today, unfortunately, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.
And the story that we're about to talk about, the good news is that the public outrage against it has already stopped this plan in its tracks, and we're also going to talk about the hope that's there and the opportunities that are there, particularly at this moment.
But over the past week or so, there's been a disturbing trend.
And we're getting ready to listen to a statement that made the rounds.
And here, RFK Jr. discusses his thoughts on what he sees as a public health crisis in terms of autism.
And, yeah, let's listen to this thing.
This is an individual tragedy as well.
Autism destroys families.
More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are children.
These are children who should not be suffering like this.
These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they're two years old.
And these are kids who will never pay taxes.
They'll never hold a job.
They'll never play baseball.
They'll never write a poem.
They'll never go out on a date.
Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.
And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children.
So first things first, Nick, before we get into this and the policy or the attempted policy that followed it as a person with autism, I think I speak for everybody with autism.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
And fuck you for taking people's struggles and turning it into such a thing as this.
I think that this speaks to a lack of basic humanity within RFK Jr. and within the Trump administration.
We saw for a moment that he was planning on doing a study on autism, which he has tons of conspiracy theories about.
And in doing that was talking about putting together a registry of people who have been diagnosed with autism.
Luckily, public outrage has scuttled that.
We'll talk more about that in just a second.
But Nick, I think that this statement by him and the actions by him, I think it reveals something much, much more disturbing about the people who are involved in the Trump administration and the road that we're going down in general.
For what it's worth to flesh it out, he then tried to say that he was only referring to, I think that term was severely autistic people, some version of a description like that.
But here's an insight into who he is, how he thinks.
Is he constantly likes to say, there's nobody my age that has full-blown autism, I think, whatever.
And it's just kind of laughable.
I deal with this on the basketball side when people try and do this sort of anecdotal thing, you know, about how, well, I've never met anybody, ergo, there isn't anything that ever existed like that.
And the fact that he doesn't understand science, and the fact that he is going to do this study, right, and they promise to have the study done by...
Wait for it.
September.
Oh, cool.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
They're going to do the complete and utter, you know, the fullest, most diagnostic investigation of autism and its causes.
In five months.
And they're going to have absolute results they need to definitively prove as if they didn't already have an outcome they think that's going to happen already, right?
This is like, these are people who are, the brain worm, this is brains, worms eating brains, and there's nothing left in there.
And I will also say this, the way he speaks, and I know he's got a medical issue that makes him speak that way, Trump will fire him at some point because he will not be able to stand hearing him when he talks on Fox News.
Well, you know, on that note, man, unfortunately, I've been spending way too much time watching all these interviews with these absolute assholes.
And like watching Linda McMahon, and we've talked about her in the past, the current Secretary of Education.
These people are in there for a very specific purpose, and they will serve that purpose, and then they will go away.
So, for instance, talking about autism in this way is about going after vaccines, because that's the conspiracy theory that RFK represents and the Trump administration
It's taking away things that have saved lives, unbelievable untold amounts of lives for a reason that is not scientifically sound.
And what also comes with that is a dehumanization.
Is what we're talking about here.
You know, and we've heard this from, you know, they've already tried to basically disappear trans people.
They have basically tried to remove, and like you said, this idea that we've never seen autism before.
No, we finally understand it.
You know, and like all of us have come across people before autism became more commonly understood.
People who were autistic, we didn't understand them.
We had no idea.
In the same way, they're like, there are more gay and trans people.
No, they've always been around.
It is a basic constant of humanity and existence.
But what this is about...
It's about creating crises that can then have other actions around them.
I'm sure that some of the other people who are listening to this, the moment that they heard about a registry of people who have been diagnosed with autism, Nick, all I could think about was the phrase, unworthy of life.
And for people who aren't familiar with that phrase, unworthy of life is what drove the Nazis and their eugenics program, and the eugenics program within the United States of America, because we need historical context.
So what's happening in this country?
We have cascading crises in which funds are being pulled, in which the economy is being demolished, in which there's not going to be enough money to go around, especially because you need to give money to billionaires.
And all of a sudden, you start looking around, and much like other eugenicists of the past, epileptics, depressed people, gay and trans people, disabled people, their humanity is brought into question, and they are seen as unworthy of life.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the ideology and the reasoning behind this is exactly mirrored with past authoritarian, fascistic, and Nazi regimes and that we're also seeing concentration camps.
We're also seeing forced labor that is being normalized in all these different ways.
This thing right here is the exact same thing that we have seen before.
It just has a different coat of paint.
That's all.
Period.
The only problem I have with that statement is that it's not just that they're looking for a way to set up a pretext to get rid of vaccines.
They believe this.
I believe that there is a cause and that it's probably, sorry, in his words, it must be from these vaccines, even though we've already had, because he always will say, double blind, they don't have these double blind tests when they are, you know, when they're looking at the autism stuff and the vaccines.
And they have, they've done all of these things in a very rigorous way, because it is bad for business, right?
If you're big pharma and you create a vaccine that's causing all these issues, And you're not going to...
I mean, listen, I guess we've seen plenty of times where they buried stuff when they're killing people.
But all I can tell you is that when you do see these studies, and they're across the world, and there's a whole bunch of them, it's at least compelling to me in the science that they haven't been able to form any connection between these things.
And the idea that they wouldn't look at, okay, people are having children later in life, right?
Now, there's an interesting connection between older mothers and autism, okay, but not...
And then the idea that they're also trying to rewrite the whole COVID thing.
Did you happen to notice that, that they were changing the website?
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, you have to change everything.
You have to take control of reality and history and shift it in the way that you want it to be.
So it's a vacillating thing where, yes, they definitely want to get rid of the vaccines, and this is another backdoor way to do it, but I have no doubt there are zealots, and that was the whole reason behind clearing out the government and finding, you know, whoever out there that would be willing to do these things is because they are believers,
right?
That's what's so weird, and I think you talked about this before, is they attract each other, right?
People like this and this kind of mindset and these personalities kind of find each other and they have a bond in a way once you realize through that dance of talking and, you know, a little bit as you introduce yourselves, you figure out, oh, okay, and then they can destroy the government.
No, and they come to tell themselves a common story.
And, you know, this is related to another disturbing fact, which is that the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for LGBTQ youth is being absolutely destroyed, which gets thousands of calls.
Every single day.
And we live in a culture in which, you know, gay and trans people and people of all those tribes are absolutely harassed and marginalized, and they are much more at risk for ending their lives.
And when it comes to this, Nick, that story that they're telling is that all these things are aberrations, that they're part of the so-called woke mind virus.
And if all of those people...
Or if all of those people are killed or, you know, pushed to the margins of society and made to hide, that the problem will go away.
And the problem is that they don't want to have a pluralistic, tolerant society.
And so they see this and in their own, quote unquote, mind virus, which is enforced by what you were just talking about, which is them talking to one another.
And so, first of all, with science, it's the exact opposite of the scientific method.
It's them having a belief about what's happening and then rigging everything around that in order to prove what they go ahead and they think and what their prejudices are.
And that's how it's always worked.
Is that they want to go ahead and say, hey, we didn't have gay and trans people back then.
Like, we didn't have autistic people back then either.
If we get rid of the things that make us understand them, and if we make those people shrink themselves and disappear themselves, all of a sudden the problem goes away, and it's the story that they share and they reinforce with one another.
And the next level of that is that because they're trying to run the government like a business and they're trying to slash and cut expenditures, this is another reason why the Department of Education is being dismantled.
It's because they're the ones who provide all the support for kids with autism in schools.
And it's actually a really good system.
I am well-versed in it right now, and it's a way that there's a lot of support in monetarily and also with teaching support as well for a lot of kids.
And it's mandated by the government.
It's funded by the Department of Education.
And without that, who knows how it's not going to be centralized anymore.
It would be a lot harder to get those kind of services.
And they can patch it together.
But I've got to tell you, that's a success story right there with what it was able to do since the inception of it.
So, again, this is the reason why we can't approach the government like they're trying to do.
And guess what?
They're realizing that as well, right?
They're suddenly having to walk back almost everything they try and do and everything they have to cut, they have to reinstate within a week.
You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and subscribe for lots more additional content, including a Discord server and live shows.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
