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July 27, 2023 - On Brand

02:38:21

OB #11 - RFK Jr.

Russell Brand adores RFK Jr. and accordingly we must deal with him on Brand's show; let's see what he's all about. Spoiler: it's nothing good. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Wirth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's Show with my co-host Lauren B. Hi, I don't know anything about Russell Brand, but I guess I'm gonna find out today, as the text messages have already warned me.
	Yeah, you're gonna hate every waking second of this show.
	In any case, Lauren, what's your bright spot this week?
	Oh no, oh god.
	We just got done listing all the frustrating things.
	Yeah, this is true.
	We just had a bitching session.
	Now let's focus on the positive.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Actually, I will say, so a lot of the weather around, you know, kind of around the country has been pretty bad.
	And apparently, well, and actually even in Chicago, we've been getting a lot of rain, which is a real bummer for especially homeowners having basement flooding and all that stuff.
	But I guess it's an update on the dim bright spot that the garden is kicking ass and taking names.
	Here, let me grab it.
	For viewers, I'm going to show off all this sage that I just like had to get it because it was just overtaking.
	And it's it's so very green.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	My big green like I have a garden sage.
	The leaves are huge.
	Smells amazing.
	And I actually, we didn't get any tomatoes, any ripe tomatoes last year at all,
	which is the first time that has ever happened as I know it in the Midwest.
	It's a little different up here, but in St. Louis, I'd have like friends call me and be like,
	I can't eat any more of these cherry tomatoes.
	Come over, bring a box, you know?
	And like, usually it's like a weed that you can't stop.
	And this last year, it wasn't like that.
	And that was kind of weird.
	It was weird for my friends at Love Country had gardening issues that were like strange.
	Right?
	Upsetting.
	But this year's better, which is just nice.
	And a lot of times lately I've been like, I'm too tired or too busy.
	I don't want to go water plants and weed.
	And then I look up and I'm like, oh, it's raining.
	Nice.
	Nevermind.
	What's your bright spot?
	Oh, do you know?
	It's tougher.
	It's tougher than it seems.
	It's more that I've honestly still not been doing anything else.
	So my bright spot is finishing the work on this fucking episode that we're about to do, to be perfectly honest.
	It's a sad one, but it means that tomorrow I can chill out a little bit more, maybe remember
	that I have an Xbox, that'd be nice.
	And just do something else for the first time in a little while.
	This has been a lot.
	I don't think it's going to be aggressively long or anything, but it's just been a lot.
	But yeah, I'm glad that that's done.
	Or will be done.
	Anyway, yeah, so that's me.
	Now, we have a show to deal with, but first we should thank some of our new patrons.
	We have lots of new patrons this week, actually, which is very exciting.
	I'm gonna take a calculated pessimistic risk and split them into two, actually, as I don't... I'm not sure there'll be as many in the next seven days, you know, so it'll kind of even out.
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	In the meantime, Pete Tetradude, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
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	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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	Infinitely superior to Dr. Phil, no doubt.
	I was going Mr. Bill.
	Okay.
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	Thank you so much.
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	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you.
	What a fun last name.
	It's great.
	I'm never sure.
	I'm never sure which direction the pronunciation goes and I don't know the difference.
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	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
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	Thank you, Michael.
	And George Kovats, you are now an Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
	Thank you, George.
	Thanks, George.
	And now, to reveal the name of our elevated tier, as we have finally decided.
	And I have the drop for it ready to go.
	Yes!
	Yes.
	We've got a few in the backlog, but I'll do one a week in chronological order.
	So first up, we have Benjamin as heard on the Super Weird podcast.
	You are now the invisible hand.
	Let me tell you that we love you.
	There is a sort of an invisible hand guiding these events.
	You are fundamentally beautiful.
	Not others, you.
	I believe you are fundamentally beautiful.
	I'm right wing.
	Now get me some shit fuck ice cream, you pig dick!
	You big sexy despot baby.
	I'm right wing.
	I only suggest how to think and how to vote.
	Another big subject over here with us right wing fascists.
	How do you feel about past you at this point?
	I don't even recognise that idiot anymore.
	I'm right wing!
	Oh God!
	I just had a poo and a bit of my bum fell out!
	God, it's propaganda.
	Did you guess it?
	Did you guess it?
	I'm right wing!
	Hey, thank you very much, Benjamin.
	Oh dear.
	I've been thinking about, I know that we've even had a whole episode in between it, but I've been thinking about Russell burping in Rainn Wilson's face so much.
	Yeah, you know, I was, I was this close to putting in, into this drop, you know, him eating his cum all day.
	But I, but I was just like, no, I don't want to have to think about that every week.
	Yeah.
	And it's not like it's, yeah, there's, it's, it's not quite worth, you know, yeah, the, the, it doesn't have the punch.
	Really?
	He kind of, what, like, he meanders?
	But I just, I, man, I hope that... I hope Rainn Wilson was at least annoyed.
	And like, I'm not gonna go talk to that guy again.
	I think he was at least a little bit.
	I think so.
	And if he ever knows, we're on his side.
	And we don't ever have to name names if you want to bitch about it.
	We'll reenact in a way that will protect all parties involved.
	But it would just be nice.
	Or maybe just, hey, Rain, homie, nice to know that we saw what he did.
	And we don't like it either.
	Yeah, we witnessed it.
	We witnessed it.
	Yeah, no, I enjoyed putting that job together.
	Finding the video of him saying, Oh, if this is this, then I'm right wing was a blessing.
	I very much enjoyed that because I've got I've got about 10 different clips of him saying, I'm right wing.
	I was like, yes, I think we'll get more before our time is through.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No kidding.
	No kidding.
	Yeah.
	If anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wonder, join the Invisible Hand, sounds like a cult, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
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	Yeah, tell your friends, tell your mom, you know, whoever might listen to it.
	That'd be awesome.
	So let's get into our first clip.
	It's what you've all been waiting for.
	The thing that literally no one has wanted to cover except Lauren, but we all knew we'd have to deal with it eventually.
	Wanted to is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
	Listen.
	I wasn't looking forward to it or anything.
	You asked for it, so here it is.
	Let's let Brand introduce the guest.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
	Thanks for joining me for a very special show.
	I'm being joined by presidential candidate, renowned environmental advocate and lawyer, founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and Children's Health Defence, and, you know, as I've already said, 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, running on some interesting ideas.
	Listen to this before we meet Robert Kennedy.
	Listen to this.
	Bring the troops home, spend money on US infrastructure, Heal the cultural divide rather than using the cultural war to polarise the country.
	Dismantle surveillance.
	Pardon Assange and Snowden.
	Investigate and maybe even disband the CIA.
	And I guess we're going to have a pretty intensive reckoning over events of the last couple of years.
	I'm of course being joined by Robert F Kennedy Jr.
	Thanks for joining us, sir.
	Oh dear.
	Um, here we fucking go.
	So this is the one I've been working on for a couple of weeks and it's taken me this long for several reasons.
	First, I just haven't wanted to deal with it.
	Normally when I'm cutting clips and researching for these episodes, even if it's a slog, there's an underlying feeling of excitement to be able to finally present it to you and the audience, right?
	In this case, zero fucking excitement.
	Every time I had to sit down, it was like the choreiest chore that ever chored.
	Secondly, I got into my own head a little bit in wanting to have a really decisive takedown of this guy because he's such a nightmare and because Brand loves him so much.
	Eventually, I realized that our real job here is dealing with the things he says on this show and Brand's response.
	There are plenty of excellent general takedowns elsewhere if anyone needs them.
	There was a great one in The Guardian just the other day.
	Whereas we today are going to be getting a bit more into the weeds of the things that RFK Jr.
	says.
	There is also a factor of only wanting to cover this guy once.
	This is probably the most obvious take of all time, but giving this man coverage only serves to enhance his credibility by virtue of simply being talked about, which is very much what happened with Trump in 2016.
	The media has a habit of biting whenever someone says crazy shit and stands by it, and that's exactly what's been happening with RFK Jr., in spite of him obviously being a dishonest actor and having barely any chance of ever becoming president.
	Accordingly, we are doing this exactly once, and even if the fucker comes back on the show, I will be refusing to cover it.
	Well, okay, two things.
	One small thing, one big thing.
	I will say that I have not been as insistent, I guess I haven't been as concerned with covering him in the last like couple of weeks because I have seen a ton of coverage.
	I do agree that just media coverage because someone said something crazy, bad.
	Absolutely.
	I agree.
	I don't agree necessarily that our coverage will be adding to that because if someone's going to actually sit down and listen to a debunk of any kind, they're probably a little more, like, measured in their reactions and they're going to consider what you have to say way more than just, you know, I guess, like, Kennedy man bad.
	Yeah, no, and we're not going to be as clickbaity or whatever else, for sure.
	We're not here to garner that kind of attention.
	But in general, it only gives him credence.
	It supports the idea that he's worth talking about.
	I get that.
	I get that.
	It's a fine line to walk because on the one hand you need to address the shit that he says, at least to a certain point, especially when he has a fair amount of popularity and fame is the other fucking problem.
	Yeah.
	Well, right.
	And I would like to, the reason I've been so insistent, I do want to explain myself and I've told you this already, but I want to just have it like, I'm not predicting anything.
	I'm committing what the pit in my stomach that I've had for a long time, I'm going to mitigate to the permanence of the internet for my own peace of mind.
	And maybe some of you have felt the same way.
	That's kind of it.
	So, In 2008, I was 24, Obama had won, and my friend Bill, like, the next day, one of the smartest people I know, and there, you know, there are people in your life that, like, are just such a gift to have intellectually around, like, just kind of people that aren't know-it-alls, they just, you know that you can go to them because they know stuff.
	Yeah.
	And this is a person who's known stuff and has been reliably a source for a long time.
	The day after Obama was elected, we were all really excited because we thought, not that it solved racism, but it was just a nice moment of stepping right, of moving forward.
	And Bill's Okay, this was great, but America is going to react more violently and uglier than you could possibly imagine.
	Whatever the response is to this is worse than what you could think of right now.
	And basically like the rubber band is being pulled one way and it's going to snap back.
	Be prepared.
	And guess what?
	Trump.
	And we're not magic.
	This is not magic.
	It's just there's a smart person who's paying attention to patterns.
	And we learned that representation does matter and leadership Is optics to some degree consequences are real for what our leadership says and does and like telegraphs to the world so other smart cautious people observed Trump is bad but a savvy capable Trump is much worse and we will get blindsided but it is coming I think just because he's on the Democrat quote-unquote Democrat side I think that RFK jr is this person and even if he never makes
	makes it as far as Trump did, then he could still, he's still pushing that Overton window, because 90% of the work is already done with name recognition alone, and you hear him constantly saying, my daddy, my uncle, which is his right.
	We'll be getting into that.
	But it's also deliberate, and you know it's deliberate.
	For sure, for sure, and I promise you we are going to be covering that, but I'm curious to see Whether any of today's clips will change your perspective slightly actually because I I wouldn't pin him as as Trump like in in that respect, but Yeah Like competent Not even necessarily competent I don't even know that competent I think it's just like they're more effective
	And I think that even just his last name, like, branding of Kennedy's time in office is referred to, like, spiritually, socially in the zeitgeist as Camelot.
	I don't, you can't pay for that kind of fucking branding.
	And that scares me.
	And what, what I'm reacting to is when Trump started gaining momentum, I could not believe it.
	And like in a way that like, I couldn't register it as a reality.
	Not that it wasn't, it's just like, it was so unbelievable.
	Like it's, it was just so outlandish.
	And I was told that, I was told, Eight ways from Sunday.
	Oh, poo-poo, this is impossible.
	There's no way he's going to be president.
	Which, like, that's how I felt in my guts, on my inside.
	There's no fucking way!
	We all did.
	It was too outlandish a concept.
	So I'm hedging my bets and at least worrying about it.
	I'd rather overreact now and be wrong.
	I hope so much that that's true because I'm not getting caught In that, like, feeling again.
	I feel like that has been a lot of people's take.
	A lot of people have felt the same way as you.
	I've heard both.
	I've heard both.
	I've heard a healthy mix of, it's like, I've heard a healthy mix of, this guy is a problem, and that it's impossible.
	And I've heard the impossible line before and I just, I want to be wrong, I want to be wrong so bad.
	So the big problem that he has is that he's a moron who is running as a democrat when there is nothing democratic about the fucking guy.
	And I mean that in every sense.
	Oh yeah, oh yeah.
	But also, you know, so he's a dino, right?
	Democrat in name only.
	That's his thing.
	And I mean, if the Democrats were having a primary, if there wasn't a sitting Democratic president, Then I'd be worried.
	But as it is, unless Joe Biden and Kamala Harris die, then I think we're all good in terms of that respect.
	What I am suspecting might happen is a potential Trump RFK ticket.
	Because then they can say, oh no, we're a split ticket, we're unifying the country.
	We're gonna heal the great divide because we're a Republican and a Democrat together.
	Which we know that it doesn't have to be true.
	To be effective branding.
	Whenever Trump was running, I wasn't thinking that our country was so great that there's no way we could elect him.
	I'm going to be real frank.
	Um, because this is absolutely how I felt at the time.
	Um, and I said this, uh, well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
	At the time, I said to my friends, anyone who we would talk about it, like, well, we live in the country that shot George Wallace and that guy sounds like George Wallace.
	I cannot believe that I live in a country that would even put up with that kind of rhetoric out of that person.
	I'm not relying on the best of people.
	I was relying, hoping for the worst of people because A little bit better aim, and that would have worked out great.
	And I'm not like, listen, violence is not cool, and it's not the answer.
	But that was a choice someone already made, and this is the country we live in.
	This is true.
	I overestimated, if anything.
	I'm just shocked that someone could say those things and be that way with so little pushback and so few ramifications.
	Because in a time where our country There was a lot more ugly shit happening, and it was really bad, and at least somebody tried.
	Somebody tried their plan, and I just, I was so shocked that, like, George Wallace is a real bugbear for me, because that's one of those things we don't learn about in school.
	You know, like, unless you have a reason, because whenever I would say that thing to my friends, like, well, I live in the country that shot George Wallace, so there's something.
	And they're like, who's George Wallace?
	And I was like, oh no!
	Well, uh...
	Okay, I didn't realize I had to start where I had to start in this conversation because that person, that human being, obviously represents a lot of views.
	But that person being allowed to get as much power and maintain as much power as they did is shameful, is a blight.
	On our country.
	And even the PBS documentary about him that they made in the 90s was like, had a whole apologetic section that just made me scream in my house and throw stuff.
	Like, there's this whole like, you know, and I mean, it was kind of out of the window after Trump, but like, people are still all trying to get along and do some kumbaya.
	And I can't, I can't believe it.
	But yeah, even the worst in people, Didn't really hold up on that one.
	It's just, all bets are off.
	And I do not like how I felt and how we all felt getting blindsided.
	I would like it to not happen again.
	And I, oh my god, I want so hard, more than anything, I want to be wrong.
	I want to be wrong.
	No, I agree.
	I will say people do keep shooting Kennedys in the head, so you know.
	See, you bring my hopes back up again!
	There's a pattern, I'm not going to advocate for it.
	And to be honest, you know, if RFK got shot then he'd be such a martyr.
	He already acts like a martyr and can you imagine in In injury or death, God Almighty, I wouldn't be able to cope.
	And his life was really fucked up.
	Like, I feel terrible for the man.
	I wouldn't be able to cope.
	Like, yeah, the person, what the person has gone through, I'm not, I mean, I feel like if you have acknowledged that amount of trauma and you want to be president, I question that.
	Yeah, there is that.
	I don't know.
	You've been through so much, and it's reasonable that you should feel pretty messed up about it.
	But maybe this isn't the job for you.
	I don't think you're going to feel the same amount of sympathy by the end of this episode.
	That's just my feeling.
	Even about this stuff, I don't think you're going to feel the sympathy, honestly.
	Well, the little kid experience, that's awful.
	Just what he went through before he turned 18 is terrible.
	I don't think you're gonna feel the sympathy, honestly.
	Well, the little kid, like the little kid experience, like that's awful.
	Like just what he went through before he like turned 18 is like terrible, but everything--
	I question whether-- - I don't disagree.
	I just, I--
	Having worked on this for a while, I'm not sure I even have sympathy for him
	before he was 18, to be honest.
	Honestly, honestly, the way he talks about himself at that age.
	It is really outrageous.
	You're right.
	Well, yeah, you're right.
	And I'm also hearing it from people that are sympathetic.
	It's probably the humanity and the sympathy of the person telling the story or writing the story that is speaking to me more so than him.
	If I'm being critical about my own emotional response.
	There's going to be a lot more of him speaking to you and I don't think you're going to like it.
	So we're going to skip the trailer here because it's just RFK saying platitudes over dramatic music and we'll get right into the middle of the interview.
	I say middle because the opening question from Brand was about Kennedy's family members being assassinated.
	And I shit you not, RFK Jr.
	went into a full 15 minute uninterrupted story detailing John F. Kennedy's assassination.
	And of course, he used everyone's first names where possible, only referred to JFK as his uncle, and did all he could throughout to assert his position as part of the political royalty of the United States.
	The idea generally is that Kennedys are worth listening to.
	They're sensible political figures who for the most part stand up for what's right.
	And then we have this fucking lunatic.
	A racist, anti-semitic, equal opportunities conspiracy theorist who shouts anti-vax theories from the rooftops, and I swear it doesn't live on the same plane of reality as the rest of us.
	And also, we have a country that was trying to get away from hereditary monarchy.
	What the fuck are we doing?
	What the actual holy fuck are we doing?
	I would say not very well is what you're doing.
	So this next clip is the opening question from Brand in true rambling style.
	Wow.
	Bobby, how can you say, though, that it's beyond reasonable doubt that it was the CIA, just because he sacked some high-ups, because he was gonna dismantle it, or at least he had an intention to, because he was at odds with the military-industrial complex?
	And if that is true, do you suspect in other high-profile assassinations there's a comparable structure behind it, including, obviously, the assassination of your father?
	And also that if this is, you know, sort of 70 years ago or whatever, how entrenched are those 50, how entrenched are those deep state interests now with the war, with the current conflicts, with comparable motivations?
	And do you not feel that this, when you have access to sort of like this kind of personal information, Do not feel that this is an indefatigable enemy, that this is an unstoppable machine.
	I mean, like, in this country, when, like, Jeremy Corbyn, like, you know, got a little bit of traction, like, the media just shut that dude down.
	I mean, he couldn't get arrested.
	Like, so, like, how can you talk out, speak out openly against these kind of interests, let alone try and mobilize a political movement and stand against them without serious fear of, you know, well, assassination?
	Ah, so this immediately sets the tone for the rest of the interview.
	R.F.K.
	Jr.
	is so dangerous he might be assassinated for speaking out apparently.
	Hardy fucking ha.
	But the first thing which is immediately clear is that Russell is completely enamoured by R.F.K.
	Jr.
	He's been taken in by the prestige of the Kennedy name, by all of R.F.K.
	Jr.' 's views aligning with Russell's, and by the fact that he's running as a Democrat.
	So to Russell's mind, no one can credibly accuse him of being right-wing.
	That thesis falls apart under any amount of examination, which is basically going to be this entire show.
	So buckle up, Russ. We're about to blow your whole "not a right winger" argument to pieces yet again.
	[Russ laughs]
	[Russ
	[Malcolm
	Now, next up we have RFK responding to Brand, who was asking how the notion of the CIA assassinating JFK is beyond a reasonable doubt.
	Small spoiler alert, it isn't.
	Well, let me answer the first question.
	Your first question was, you know, why do I say that the case against the CIA in terms of the assassination of my uncle is beyond a reasonable doubt?
	The answer to that would take us a 10-hour podcast to even summarize, because the amount of information is so voluminous at this point.
	There are more than a million documents.
	Including all the documents that show that Lee Harvey Oswald, that they recently released, you know, which we already knew, but it came as a shock to the United States because the president never reports it.
	Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset.
	You know, Americans didn't know that.
	Certainly the Warren Commission didn't know that, and Dulles made sure that they didn't know it.
	He was recruited when he was at the Atasui Air Force Base in Japan.
	He was a Marine Radar operator!
	I want to say before I forget that if anyone hasn't heard RFK Jr.
	speak before, he's not someone who's smoked eight packs a day for 50 years.
	He has a unique condition called spasmodic dysphonia.
	It's a chronic neurological voice disorder which results in involuntary spasms of the muscle that opens or closes the vocal folds.
	Basically, if his voice sounds like it's strained and he's struggling to speak, it's because it is and he is.
	Despite that, by God, this man can talk, which we will hear plenty of throughout this interview.
	Now, to address what RFK Jr.
	was saying, the evidence... Well, can I just on his voice?
	Jump in, yeah.
	Because I've also heard the argument that, oh, who would elect a person that talks like that, that's quote-unquote unpresidential?
	Well, that's ableist.
	Nah.
	My counter argument, two words, Diane Rehm.
	That is a person that we all have listened to on NPR and she's a national treasurer
	and she has a similar voice pattern.
	And there is a tendency, and I think a similar tendency
	that people don't really think about with Reagan after the assassination attempt is like,
	America will go so far the other way to be wildly protective of certain people
	that have disabilities that they have to deal with.
	To the point where they will make other arguments about the disability.
	They will be so ferocious that it can protect some people even more from criticism because there's this argument that people will be Very protective over and it, to me, it just shows how callous the right wing is and how callous people that support him are because, well, you can, you can be kind and you can be generous to people that sound different than you and are dealing with different issues than you.
	You just usually choose not to, unless it works for you.
	That's when you want to.
	So we need to think about the totality of the problem.
	Joe Biden has a stutter and they shit on him and his way of speaking every day.
	Immediate double standard.
	Very fucking obvious.
	And they're both too old white men.
	Yeah, the controls!
	Like, there's a lot of variables that are controlled in that environment.
	Exactly!
	Yeah, pretty uniform.
	That is something I hear over and over and over, and I think that it could go any way.
	Like, we don't know.
	We don't know, and so any of these, like, instant disregard out of hand elements, I just, I've been thinking about it a lot.
	Yeah, no, no, no.
	It's worth discussion.
	I'm trying to use history to inform my choices, really.
	No, no, no.
	It's worth discussion.
	Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
	To address what RFK Jr.
	was saying, the evidence of the CIA being responsible for the murder of JFK is tied up in Lee Harvey Oswald being recruited by the CIA.
	But He's made a classic slip-up that a better class of conspiracy theorists knows to avoid.
	He's given me specifics.
	According to RFK Jr., Oswald was recruited by the CIA while at a marine base in Japan called Atsugi, not Asui, and this is according to a CIA guy who was stationed there back in 1960.
	The big problem with this theory, which is even highlighted in the memo all of this is based on, is that Lee Harvey Oswald left Atsugi in 1959, and by the October of that year was stationed in Russia, which means the CIA guy purporting all this to be true never met Lee Harvey Oswald and was just making shit up.
	The person who sent the memo of all this included a handwritten asterisk at the bottom of the note which states, I certainly could have missed something, but I reviewed the contents of about 47 volumes of Oswald 201 files, and I saw no indication of CIA having hired Oswald.
	Others, like Dan Neeserher, CIA staff, and Louis Zibel, went through the same 47 volumes several times.
	So, upon close examination, this is bollocks, and it's apparently the best defense RFK Jr.
	has for his assertions that the CIA killed JFK.
	Hmm.
	Right.
	So there we go.
	Nonsense to start.
	Yeah, well, it's, um, yeah.
	I live in a very Cold War focused home, which is funny.
	I know it's a little strange like I'm sitting next to like images that my partner has yeah like I'm looking at at Jack and Jackie right now yeah it's a whole thing it's it's a little wacky.
	So this is all a little bit close to the... Cut all of it!
	Yeah, hitting a little close to home.
	I, um, I'm gonna say there's a lot of wiggity stuff, and we don't, we don't have enough information to make any concrete claims.
	But I've also stood there, like, in Dealey Plaza, Um, a lot of, like, it's rough.
	It's hard.
	It's hard to deal with as a reality, and I think that that is going to work in his favor, that, like, that's going to work in R.L.K.
	Jr.' 's favor, that, um, it was a really upsetting thing to have happen.
	And the country changed forever because of it, and I feel specifically upset that I'm manipulated emotionally by these tactics.
	It makes me mad.
	I don't like it.
	Go on.
	Yep, he's gonna engage in more of that.
	I figured that's why I just wanted to get it out now and then I'll just let it ride!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	In the next clip he mentions about the CIA also killing his father.
	The evidence that the CIA killed my father is much less, is not that well documented, but it's highly circumstantial.
	Yeah, this one is even too much of a conspiracy for RFK to try and justify.
	He asserts that there was a conspiracy, but there are a bunch of them surrounding Bobby Kennedy's assassination, most of which suggest a second shooter, and all of which have been debunked.
	But that doesn't stop conspiracy-minded idiots from asserting that it's still true, and RFK Jr.
	is one of those conspiracy-minded idiots.
	Yeah, there's been as much analysis as humanly possible of this chap's death.
	There is the possibility that the actual assassin was hypnotized and that kind of thing and that he was That he was actually completely unaware of his actions, and that is a very genuine possibility, nay probability, which is interesting.
	And you know, that's from leading psychologists and psychiatrists, etc, have said that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, that's interesting.
	Well, and you know what?
	And the RFK tapes, the series, if, listener, if you want to go check it out, it's really interesting.
	I think that The much less sexy version of these events, when you look back on them, I think that security, not knowing as much as they know now, security being lax, local politicking among police departments, all that kind of stuff.
	There's a lot of just unfortunate circumstances that didn't keep people safe.
	Also had to coalesce around these events.
	And I mean, even just the way, like the car route around Dealey Plaza, that shouldn't have happened.
	Like, it's just like little things that maybe just people fucked up and security fucked up.
	And so conspiracies can get made out of a lot of it.
	And there's a lot of really sad, like sad truths.
	In both stories, I recommend.
	The RFK tape is super interesting, but it's also wildly depressing because it's mostly about how bad and how racist cops are is a big part of it.
	It's a drag.
	It's a drag.
	I'm shocked, I tell you.
	I'm shocked.
	Yeah, right?
	I know.
	That's the hard part to listen to.
	And also just the real pain.
	I think that we can't disregard the real pain that was caused nationally, you know?
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	For sure.
	And there was a lot of that going around at the time.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	So next we get into a bit of fine literature.
	Well, I, you know, I wrote a book about how the pandemic was misused and that it was not, you know, the public health response was not a was not about public health.
	It was about it was a militarized and monetized response was a pretense for clamping down totalitarian controls.
	And the weird thing about the pandemic was this constant involvement by the CIA and by the National Intelligence Agencies and by the military.
	So, RFK Jr.
	has a few books, and you guessed it, in preparation for this episode, I read only his most recent one.
	You did?
	Yeah, The Real Anthony Fauci.
	Hold on!
	Hold on!
	Oh.
	Oh dear.
	What's about to happen?
	I'm holding on.
	SEAN Oh no.
	No no no no no.
	Was that the actual book?
	Is that the book there?
	Do you have a copy of it?
	Fuck me.
	LAURA Boom goes the dynamite, bitch!
	Which is because a friend of ours, their parent, who had never been political- that I think had not been political, had not been particularly involved in political discourse.
	Mm-hmm.
	We went to go visit and hang, and this friend's like, "Yeah, this--
	my parent, who is, like, has never had any political feelings
	that has been expressed to me before, bought this book for me."
	-And Mike was like, "Nope." -Oh, no.
	Oh no!
	And also, enough of a friend that Mike can be like, no, no, you're not, this book is not in your house anymore, we're taking it.
	It's a forensic, it's a forensic anomalous, like, artifact.
	And actually, an off-brand, what can show you, like, the formatting is as crazy as the words.
	It's like, to me, there's something very weird about it.
	Anyway, I want to get into that a little bit because to start with the book is 480 pages split into 12 chapters in an introduction and yet somehow the first chapter is nearly 200 pages.
	Predictably the book is a litany of conspiracy theories thrown together in near stream of consciousness fashion Peppered liberally with misinformation, spin and outright lies.
	On top of accusing Fauci of committing a coup d'etat, comparing Covid restrictions to Nazi Germany and promoting ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, RFK also gets into some AIDS denialism, spending a hundred pages quoting shitheads who say HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
	The book sold a million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 17 weeks.
	Endorsements at the beginning of the book come from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Tony Robbins, Alan Dershowitz, Joseph McCullough, Mike Adams the health ranger, Randy Jackson... It's over for humanity!
	It's over for humanity.
	Randy Jackson, musician, Oliver Stone, the Academy Award winning director, and of course, Rob Schneider.
	RFK actually brings up a number of things he writes about in the book during this interview, so I'll get to them when they come up, but suffice to say, it's complete, unadulterated bullshit from start to finish.
	It's like a book-long Facebook rant.
	It's bizarre.
	It's crazy.
	If anyone wants a concise takedown of the medical claims made in the book, by the way, I highly recommend Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson.
	He's a microbiologist who did a seven-part takedown of the real Anthony Fauci.
	Yeah, it's really great stuff.
	So, next we have the first of RFK's claims from the book.
	When Operation Warp Speed made its presentation to FDA, to the committee, they call it VRBPAC committee at FDA, Birkbeck asked for the organizational charts which were classified up to that time and when Warp Speed turned over the organizational charts, they shocked everybody because the top organization that had managed Warp Speed was not HHS, which is a public health agency.
	It wasn't CDC or NIH or FDA.
	It was the NSA, a spy agency.
	So that was the top That was the top agency, the lead agency on Operation Warp Speed and the pandemic, was the NSA, and the second agency was the Pentagon.
	Sounds scary, right?
	The NSA was the top agency in charge of Operation Warp Speed, the operation to facilitate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines?
	There's not much to say about this one, other than... No, there weren't.
	So the NSA are indeed on the organizational chart which was never classified by the way so the idea of it being a bombshell is nonsense and on its face you do wonder why the NSA would have involvement in a project like this until you consider the way vaccines are created.
	Most people when they think of vaccines being made in a lab imagine someone in a white coat mixing drops from vials of weird colored liquids until Eureka!
	They somehow get the formula right.
	In reality, vaccines are created with computers, which can be hacked and tampered with.
	So the NSA were involved in a cyber security capacity to ensure that months of work wasn't thrown down the drain in case of some malicious actor.
	Who could that ever be?
	Who could possibly be motivated to interfere with vaccine production?
	No one, right?
	No one at all, and no one interferes with elections or anything else.
	Yeah, and if you look at the actual organizational chart, like the NSA section, they have their own kind of little siloed off bit because it's not really related to anything else.
	It's just slightly near the top of the chart, it's just where it happens to have been put, but it's just on its own.
	Anyway, let's get a little bit into the vaccine misinformation.
	And when you start looking at, you know, as it turns out, you know, the vaccines were developed not by Moderna and Pfizer.
	They were developed by NIH.
	They're their own.
	The patents are on 50% by NIH.
	Nor were they manufactured by Pfizer or by Moderna.
	They were manufactured by military contractors.
	And basically Pfizer and Moderna were paid So this is just horse shit.
	vaccines as if they came from the pharmaceutical industry.
	But you know, that's not what they were doing. They were coming from, you know, this was a
	military project from the beginning.
	So this is just horse shit. NIH do own part of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
	as NIH helped develop the underlying spike protein the vaccine was based on. And so some
	of the profits should be going to NIH, which is publicly owned, by the way. So yeah, that
	only benefits the country.
	But Pfizer has nothing to do with it, and the idea that Moderna are just slapping their name on something the NIH has made is complete nonsense.
	And even worse, he says at the end there that the vaccines were made and manufactured by the US military, which is complete bullshit.
	There is no evidence, there's no anything to substantiate what he just said.
	He's just saying things.
	Yeah, I feel like we're going to be hearing a lot of claims like, big if true.
	If true, yeah, I'd be shocked.
	But it's a lie.
	You're lying.
	The worst thing is the tendency for him to not even spin something, to not even produce something.
	Because Russell, when he's bullshitting, he will always have some kind of document to back him up, even if it's complete bullshit made up by nefarious actors.
	He will have something.
	Rfkjr doesn't have that with most of the stuff.
	He's just saying shit.
	That's it.
	Which, yeah, it was incredibly frustrating to have to research because I'm there looking in all fucking corners of the internet to try and figure out where he's gotten this information.
	And there just isn't anywhere.
	It's just, I don't know whether it's his own head, what's going on, but he just, he has no evidence for most of the things that he says.
	Yeah, well what he, the claims that he's making that are completely, you know, like in clips I'm seeing bounce around on social media, are straight up Alex Jones talking points.
	They sound nicer, but it's just repackaged InfoWars He's got a few of those.
	He's got a few of those.
	Too close for comfort.
	Yeah, not too many of them come up in this, I don't think.
	Though... They're out there on socials and y'all can find them!
	It's Alex Jones shit!
	This next one has a tie-in because it's not directly Alex Jones shit, but it's definitely parallel.
	So we're getting into pandemic preparedness simulations.
	One of the things I detail in my book is these simulations that I uncovered, about 20 different simulations, coronavirus and pandemic simulations, that started in 2001, the first one, right before the anthrax attacks.
	And then every year the CIA was doing these, and the CIA was sponsoring them all.
	So, RFK Jr.
	didn't uncover jack shit because nothing was hidden.
	What he's referring to is the pandemic preparedness program started by George W. Bush in 2005, not 2001.
	He, by the way, gets a lot of little details like that wrong in this and it's, yeah.
	But yeah, that was then continued by Obama until Trump decided to nix the whole program which left the U.S.
	woefully under-prepared for a pandemic.
	I can see you vigorously nodding your head, Lauren.
	Part of this program, naturally, is simulations of what would happen in the event of a pandemic of some kind, sort of role-playing events to try and assess how best to respond and address the concerns we would likely face in a pandemic, while highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the current system.
	Oh, and the CIA was never funding any of them.
	No.
	He's about to go into discussing a pandemic preparedness role-playing event from October 2019, which as mentioned had little to do with the US government as Trump got rid of the pandemic preparedness program.
	This event was instead sponsored and put together by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
	But yeah, we're going to touch on that and then depart and then come back to it.
	But next up, we learn that RFK pronounces people's names weirdly.
	And they were the last one was event 201, which was in October of 2019.
	And the participants in there are Avril Haines, who was the former deputy director of the CIA, who has been managing cover ups her entire life.
	She did the Guantanamo Bay and, you know, the I'm the Senate and it's and she's right.
	She is now the director that DNI Director of National Intelligence, which makes her basically the highest ranking officer at the NSA, which managed the pandemic.
	So you have a spy who is convening these pandemic simulations.
	The woman he's talking about is Dr. Avril Haines, not Avril, I've never ever heard it pronounced.
	You don't say Avril Lavigne, do you?
	No.
	Dr. Avril Haines, who is currently serving as the first female director of national intelligence in the Biden administration.
	She served the Obama administration in the State Department as the Assistant Legal Advisor for Treaty Affairs from 2008 to 2010, when she was appointed to serve in the office of the White House Counsel as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House.
	Then, in 2013, Haynes was selected as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
	Quite the promotion.
	From there, she was responsible for obfuscating a report about the CIA torturing people and was also the main go-person when it came to the legality of drone strikes acted upon by the Obama administration.
	Basically, this lady has no doubt done some shady shit in her time, just none of the things that RFK levels at her.
	After Trump got in, she worked in the private sector and at a couple of universities, which she was still doing at the time of this pandemic preparedness event called Event 201.
	She later would join Biden's campaign team and become the Director of National Intelligence, but at the time of Event 201, she had nothing to do with the government at all.
	So next, yeah, yeah, no, no, there's nothing.
	He's just, he's saying things and that's that.
	Next we learn how RFK would have responded to the pandemic.
	Oh my God.
	And in each of these simulations going back 20 years, they're not simulating a public health response.
	They're not doing the kind of things, how do we stockpile vitamin D?
	How do we get people outdoors losing weight, you know, doing exercise?
	So that's nothing short of fucking worrying.
	Oh, there's a deadly virus surging through the nation.
	Let's all get some exercise.
	Let's go on a diet.
	Cool.
	Make sure we have enough vitamin D. Cool plan.
	Jesus.
	Thank Christ the odds of this man becoming president are intensely small.
	God, yeah, that tickled me.
	In the next clip, he suggests doing something that already happened.
	How do we develop an information grid to all the 15 million doctors, frontline physicians all over the world?
	We're going to be encountering this disease so that we can get their information about what they're doing that works and what doesn't work, and put together a model of, you know, okay, here are the drugs, the repurposed drugs that work, here are the treatments that work.
	None of that happened.
	We had an incredible opportunity for managing pandemic in a way that was intelligent and sensitive and devastating to the disease.
	But we didn't do any of those things.
	It was all about how you use the pandemic to clamp down censorship.
	How do you use it to enforce lockdowns?
	So according to RFK, none of the medical or scientific community around the world communicated with each other as to what treatments would or wouldn't work in regards to COVID-19, which is absolute nonsense.
	Our state systems, our separate state health systems, are certainly less efficient than if we had a national health service And we provided medical care as part of the services that you get, just like fixing the fucking roads to your citizens.
	Yeah, there are better ways to do it.
	Jumping jacks is not the answer.
	Yeah, and acting like no one communicated with each other as to what was working and what wasn't.
	I mean, shut the... That was completely stupid.
	There wasn't enough communication, and people had to find that out the hard way.
	The thing is what he's actually whinging about here is that is no one listening to spurious shitheads in lab coats saying that COVID was just the flu and no one glomming on to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine like he would have wanted or at least no one in any kind of position of relative power.
	Yeah, that's what he's actually whining about.
	When he says repurposed drugs, that's what he's talking about.
	Next up, according to RFK, lockdowns makes COVID worse, apparently.
	By the way, the lockdowns, every pandemic preparedness document
	that had been adopted by the major public health agencies, whether it was CDC, WHO, the European Health Agency,
	the National Health Services of Britain, all of them said you don't do lockdowns.
	You quarantine the sick.
	You protect the vulnerable and you let everybody else go back to work because the lockdowns actually amplify the impacts of the disease.
	If you isolate people, it makes them more vulnerable.
	It breaks down their immune system.
	And if you lock them in a door, it's going to spread the respiratory virus.
	Yeah, so there are only so many clips where I can just be like, no, you're wrong.
	But yeah, so if you stay inside, your immune system breaks down.
	The man's clearly never heard of anime weebs or otakus or gamers who pretty much never leave the house.
	If what he's saying were true, all these people would be dead because their immune system would have broken down and they'd have faded into oblivion.
	This is stupid on an out-of-touch-grandpa sort of level, and the idea that the medical community at large advised against lockdowns is just a complete lie.
	Also, the fact that, like, lockdowns never happened here for real.
	There were rollbacks.
	There's that.
	Never was there a lockdown.
	Also, the height of mask wearing.
	No, not at all.
	The height of mask wearing.
	In my town, where I live, I saw it more than anywhere else we traveled, and there's still, everyone could have a mask on, and at least Hmm.
	At least one motherfucker had their nose out or three.
	Oh, yeah.
	So this whole like blaming that's hmm.
	This is also the classic Republican bullshit where they're like, well, we did the thing and it didn't work.
	No.
	You started from minute one to sabotage the thing, and undermine the thing, and unfund the thing, and fuck everything up, and so you can complain that it didn't work, but you never tried.
	That South Park bit of, like, oh, you're wearing your chin diaper, you know?
	Because that's what it was to these people!
	It's a chin diaper!
	He was even almost contradicting, like I saw it, he was, he was like, if I say this the exact way it's going to contradict what I just said, like there were sentences next to each other that didn't work.
	And he was like hedging, you could see it, he was hedging a little like to select what he was saying, even though it's...
	Mimics the noise Yeah, um... Mimics the noise
	Mimics the noise I hate it. That's, that's, that's been the noise I've been
	making for two weeks. Um...
	So let's get back to that Event 201 thing.
	And so all things they were doing, that they were drilling, were about clamping down totalitarian controls.
	And if you look at that Event 201, which is still on YouTube, you can still look it up and go to the fourth seminar that day, it's broken into four parts.
	He's made that classic mistake again.
	Too specific, Bobby.
	Too specific.
	Because he's right, it is still on YouTube, and I watched the whole thing.
	Let's get into who was in attendance.
	And remember, the people who are here, who are they?
	Evel Haynes, the CIA, now DNI, Director of National Intelligence, who was the CIA Deputy Director.
	Former Bill Gates, you know, a lot of Tony Fauci's people, the pharmaceutical industries, the big media, Bloomberg, etc., all the social media companies.
	And then somebody odd, who's George Gao, who's the director of the Chinese CDC.
	So there was no one there from any social media company, nor were there any of Fauci's people.
	Bill Gates wasn't there, nor was Michael Bloomberg or anyone from Bloomberg Media.
	George Gao, which is how you actually pronounce it, was there, and he served as director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention from August 2017 to July 2022.
	RFK Jr.
	seems to think it's weird that the head CDC guy from China would be there when the Gates Foundation and the WEF both clearly have global perspectives and an acute awareness that China, being one of the most populous countries in the world, would have a lot to deal with.
	Not only that, but the role play they were running specifically dealt with the coronavirus and China have had severe SARS outbreaks in the recent past.
	Yeah.
	Not inviting China to take part in this would have bordered on negligent.
	I will also point out- Heaven for fucking Finn that you ask the people that know the most advice.
	Yeah, ask the people who are going to be affected, almost certainly.
	Yeah, I will also point out that Levan Thiru of the Monetary Authority of Singapore was also in attendance, but RFK doesn't bat an eyelid at that one.
	For anyone wondering, the others present were mostly high-level private industry folks, such as the Vice President of Global Health at Johnson & Johnson, the Global COO of Edelman, a comms company, and a Senior Director for Lufthansa Airlines.
	There was also one of the Deputy Directors from the CDC.
	So RFK is lying about who's there all while saying isn't that weird about George Gow, which is
	fantastically stupid Okay, all right, okay, yeah, um, so speaking of stupid, uh,
	the next thing RFK says is drastically dumb
	So this is in October.
	Of 2019.
	Nobody knows about coronavirus there, and yet they're drilling a coronavirus epidemic, a world global coronavirus epidemic.
	Nobody's going to ever hear the word coronavirus.
	The Chinese first acknowledged it on January 1st, so three months later.
	But we now know coronavirus was already circulating in Wuhan, and the Chinese knew about it at least by September 19th, so that's a month before that pandemic simulation.
	George Gao is the Chinese head of the CDC and the Chinese expert on coronavirus, so clearly he must have known.
	So according to RFK here, no one knew of the existence of coronaviruses at all before COVID-19, and so the fact that they gameplanned a coronavirus pandemic at Event 201 is a smoking gun!
	Complete nonsense.
	I'm going to read directly from the NIH website here.
	Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that usually cause mild to moderate upper respiratory tract illnesses in humans.
	However, three coronaviruses have caused more serious and fatal disease in people.
	SARS coronavirus, SARS-CoV, which emerged in November 2002 and causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.
	MERS coronavirus, MERS-CoV, which emerged in 2012 and causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, MERS.
	And SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in 2019 and causes Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-19.
	The earliest reports of a coronavirus infection happened in North America in the 1920s.
	What RFK is getting into at the end there is him saying that George Gao knew about COVID-19 a month before coming to Event 201, which is just completely untrue.
	The first patient of COVID-19 was most likely in December 2019.
	Though, one Chinese outlet believes it was November 2019, both based off of different retrospective analyses.
	Both are, either way, after October 2019, when this event 201 happened, and there's just no way that COVID-19 was already confirmed in September of 2019.
	And I have said the word 19 too many times!
	I'm done with it.
	Right.
	Just complete bollocks from start to finish.
	So, in the next clip, yet again, he just flat out makes shit up.
	On September 19th, a month before that simulation, the Chinese military kicked down the door of Wuhan lab.
	Went in and took all of the genomic sequences off of the public-facing websites and started destroying all the links between the lab and the virus and put a military general away in charge of the lab.
	So they clearly knew that it had come from the lab and that it was already circulating.
	And it circulated out, we know, down the subway line.
	The subway line that leads to the airport from the lab to the airport.
	That's just crazy.
	Yeah, so General Chen Wei did take over at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but not in September 2019.
	It was January 2020 that she took over.
	So that was his claim?
	That that all happened in September before this?
	In September before this thing happened.
	Not Agenda 21?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Before Event 201, a month before allegedly the Chinese military kicked down the doors of the Wuhan lab and destroyed everything and took things off the website, none of this ever happened.
	But yeah, General Chen Wei is also an epidemiologist and virologist specializing in biodefense and was instrumental in developing the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, Convidecia.
	So, all this stuff about the military kicking down the door of the Wuhan lab is just completely unsubstantiated bollocks.
	That was a cute, weird story.
	There is nothing to it.
	At all.
	Oh my god, it sucks.
	This is so stupid.
	It is, and yet in the next clip we develop the theory a little bit further.
	So they knew it up in October and they had this simulation in New York and people there, some of those people must have known it was already circulating.
	And what are they talking about?
	The fourth simulation that day.
	And you can go up on YouTube right now and look this up.
	They talk about how do we stop people from saying that this came from a lab leak?
	And the people who are leading that discussion are the CIA Director Avril Haines, Deputy Director, and George Gayle from the Chinese CDC.
	And Avril Haines says, essentially she's saying, George Gayle is saying, we gotta censor the social media.
	We gotta stop them from saying it's a lab leak.
	Anybody who says that needs to be deplatformed.
	This is six months before all this started happening.
	And then Avril Haines says, Not only do we have to censor, but we need to flood the zone with authoritative voices who dismiss the idea that this was a lab leak.
	Let's make him up!
	Let's make him up!
	Well, he needs to stop saying this, because he said I could go look this up, so I did, and rather than explaining what was said by who and when, I'd rather just play the clip so you can all get an idea of what actually happened at this Event 201.
	I'm going to play the specific clip that RFK was referring to where he's saying that George Gao and Averill Haynes, not Averill Haynes, are all about quashing any ideas that the hypothetical coronavirus is a lab leak and that they're all about censorship.
	To preface the clip, George Gao is reading off some data that he's been given about the state of China in this role play of a pandemic.
	So it's all hypothetical, but that's what he's discussing to start.
	Yeah, let's go.
	You know, by now, you know, we have more cases in China and also death cases reported.
	And also my staff told me that before there's misinformation and there are some believe,
	people believe, you know, this is a man-made, some pharmaceutical company made the virus.
	So there are some violations and even, you know, death is because of this misinformation.
	As a, you know, from like a citizen, and I don't know whether Steve agree with me, when you are doing the field work and you like to do some so-called TOT, training of trainers, so we really need to to train the health workers,
	you try to have care workers, their access to the patients, to the public.
	So make sure they got the right information.
	So not necessarily, you know, sometimes the health care workers, they know something,
	but if they are not well trained, they might give the wrong information,
	but also they might say something.
	You don't say. - Oh, I don't know.
	I don't know, that could hurt.
	So when I remember, that's such a situation remind me.
	When I was in Sierra Leone, and I was interviewed by radio, the national radio,
	I was asked by one of the audience to say, "Okay, we believe Ebola was man-made.
	"It's transported from."
	I very much agree with that.
	So, I mean, I think I agree with a lot of what's been said.
	the TOT, so make sure the healthcare workers have the right information.
	Okay, thank you.
	Avril?
	I very much agree with that.
	So, I mean, I think I agree with a lot of what's been said.
	I just add to it maybe by saying that I think one of the things we want to do is work with
	telecommunication companies to actually ensure that everybody has access to the kind of communications
	that we're interested in providing because that's going to be critical for dealing with,
	you know, obviously the explosion of the disease.
	And--
	And then another issue I suppose is just through that, if you have a trusted source, I believe in the idea that we shouldn't be trying to Control communication but rather flood the zone in a sense with a trusted source that then is influential community leaders as well as health workers as Brad noted and others on these issues in order to try to amplify the message that's coming through and I think Tim's absolutely right I certainly seen the value of communicating constantly on these issues so as to continue to to deal with you know sort of the vacuum that can be created in this circumstance but then also with the comments made about
	The fact that for all of the disinformation that will be put out, it's going to be important to actually have a response to those questions and to those concerns, as Stephen said.
	And I understand from staff that actually there are also intelligence sources identifying multiple foreign disinformation campaigns and so on.
	But it's all a part of a larger piece, which is to say that every time there is something that comes out that is, in fact, false information that is starting to actually hamper our ability to address the pandemic, then we need to be able to respond quickly to it.
	So, George Gao, to start with there, is saying we need to train healthcare workers properly to ensure they can combat misinformation on a ground level.
	And not contribute to misinformation equally.
	He then tells a story about someone telling him they thought Ebola was man-made.
	Avril Haines then comes in to make her specific points.
	What she says very clearly is that no one should be censored, disinformation shouldn't be taken down, and an effort should instead be made to flood the zone, so to speak, with verifiably correct information.
	That flood the zone thing is a phrase that someone else uses earlier on in the same session, so she's just borrowing their terminology to say that she agrees.
	She says specifically, we shouldn't be trying to control communication.
	So RFK is just flat out making shit up here.
	His interpretation of what we've just seen is completely off the rails.
	I don't think he watched this.
	I really don't.
	I think he heard someone else made up it.
	I think he probably heard somebody else make an assessment because you can't, like, you gotta really stretch.
	What's really disheartening... I would love to know his media diet, that's for sure.
	Yeah, is it just four QAnon guys?
	Who?
	Right?
	It's just 4chan.
	It's just a wall of green text.
	That's all that he's into.
	And the wall that he faces when he's on the toilet?
	That's where he gets his best ideas?
	Like, truly, truly.
	Because he makes shit up.
	It lives in a fucking dream world.
	Truly, like it hurts my feelings to hear these actual clips from real people that are trying very hard.
	One, because you can see them try to fix these problems in good faith and in real time and could have actually done something and then just to think and feel.
	Doing a decent job.
	Yeah, like trying their damnedest to do this in an unsexy way and then And then the second half of that that I cannot help but think about is what they went through.
	After like watching all this bullshit unfold and just being powerless to stop it.
	Even though they're like, oh, we tried all this stuff.
	We tried everything we possibly could.
	You motherfuckers ruined everything and you're not taking us seriously.
	We're trying so hard.
	And yeah, private industry maybe shouldn't be trusted with this.
	Like there should be more systems in place.
	Not less.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree.
	I completely agree.
	The transparency is almost like, it's just another like kick in the teeth that like, yeah, if we all just watch C-SPAN, you know, like.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, no, no.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	You know, because I mean, Dr. Avril Haines here, you know, as I mentioned, definitely done some shady shit.
	But, you know, she's trying her hardest here.
	And I watched the whole fucking thing and she made some good points.
	Yeah, she predicted a good number of problems that were going to occur, to be honest.
	Right!
	Use your energy to go after the non-shady shit!
	Like that's the thing is like there are so many Jenga blocks that fall that have no like
	that don't seem part of this subject but are in fact tangentially connected.
	That's when you think I mean that's like what climate change is happening is like oh wow
	all of these elements together creating a much worse situation than we could have ever
	possibly imagined.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.
	And there's also the factor of, you know, you're making shit up about these people when there are actual things that you could be addressing.
	That's exactly what I'm saying.
	Actual fucking problems.
	Well, I don't know if we get to it in this episode, but PBS did a really great, like, special on Frontline about, like, there was information control and there was censorship in China, but not how they're describing it.
	It was not great, but it was happening in the initial onset with doctors and with hospitals, not labs, not the military.
	That's actual vetted reporting that's already been done.
	PBS did it!
	They did a great job!
	Believe it or not, the MSM, the mainstream media, actually, you know, have an interest in this stuff, and reporting it correctly.
	But, yeah.
	So, the next clip is just another outright lie.
	And I detail all of these in my book, and every one of them the CIA wrote the script for.
	So, no, they didn't.
	He's saying the CIA wrote the script for every single pandemic preparedness event.
	No, they didn't!
	There we go, nice and simple.
	That event 201, for instance, was put together by the staff at Johns Hopkins.
	So, there.
	Done.
	Even, like, bitch about the CIA, like... Bitch about all their CIA shit!
	Yeah, there's actual CIA problems.
	There's actual CIA problems.
	Then, everyone else that has a real complaint against the CIA, their point of view, their information is devalued because of your stupid ass.
	That's crazy.
	Maybe address the torture thing that I mentioned before, because that's an actual problem.
	I know shit.
	I know shit.
	And also, not your stupid shit.
	I'm not mad at you.
	I'm mad at the director.
	No, no, no.
	I know what you're saying.
	Don't worry.
	Don't worry.
	It's fine.
	I get it.
	So, NextRFK says that Gain of Function Research in Wuhan was being funded by the United States.
	We're partying. Let's roll. Let's do it.
	It says the gain of function research in Wuhan was being funded by the United States.
	So Fauci was funding, Fauci funded about 26 million dollars.
	The CIA was the biggest funder through USAID, about 64 million.
	And then the Pentagon was the second biggest.
	So it wasn't just Fauci, it was the whole US intelligence military apparatus that was basically handing over cutting-edge military technology, bioweapons technology, to these Chinese scientists who were messing with it.
	Okay, so we addressed this before in our WHO episode, but gain-of-function research wasn't being undertaken at Wuhan, bioweapons weren't being made, and then he says that USAID is actually the CIA somehow?
	Like what, they own it or something?
	It's completely made up.
	There are a legion of conspiracy theories around USAID, but none of them have ever proven fruitful.
	As for Fauci funding things, the NIH were funding research in Wuhan.
	Sure, not gain-of-function research, but research.
	And Fauci was director of one of 27 different centers making up the National Institutes of Health, with an advisory role as well.
	He had no legislative powers and couldn't just dictate funding for the entire NIH.
	The way the RFK acts is like Fauci was some kind of god-king that could just dictate what the entire country was doing and that's definitely the perspective he comes out with in his book.
	What he really was, was a punching bag mascot that assholes like this could latch on to and call him Tony.
	Somebody said, I heard that on a podcast, was like, yeah, you know, this person has a problem when they say Tony Fauci.
	That's a red flag.
	Immediate red flag.
	I absolutely agree.
	And what Fauci actually was, was a decent man trying to do a good job and save some lives.
	That's all I see when I look at the guy.
	I feel so bad for him, honestly.
	Me too!
	He seems like a nice chap.
	Also, if you're going to come for somebody that was, like, trying to deal with AIDS when AIDS started, and was still around and still worked really hard... This is it.
	This is it.
	That makes me mad.
	We'll get into Fauci's qualifications in a minute.
	But yeah, it is absurd, the problems that people have with him.
	So, finally, RFK stops talking and Russ is able to get a word in because... Oh wait, that was all... All in the same fucking stretch!
	No, I'm not kidding!
	No, this is all one thing!
	Most of that was tied together as well.
	Most of that was all one continuous thing.
	If you put the clips back together, it'll all make sense.
	Oh, it'd be great if we cut back to Russell and he's eating a sandwich, pulling an Alex.
	No, no, no.
	Yeah, yeah, keep talking.
	That was great stuff.
	Keep talking.
	I need to finish my yogi.
	I think the last thing that Russell is going to do is ignore this man.
	Let's see what Russell has to say.
	All of these kind of things that I suppose now seem like the sort of worker day layman's conspiracy theories are left in the dust when you say that this is something that the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex have been involved in since the get-go, that companies like Pfizer and Moderna merely facilitated the distribution and branding, that this has always been A global operation that was designed to introduce draconian measures that would otherwise not have been introduced.
	Entirely on board.
	No questions, no follow-ups, taking literally everything at face value, and Russell is enamoured by this guy.
	Oh, your conspiracy theories make the rest of them look like work-a-day conspiracy theories.
	I love your conspiracy, Daddy.
	It's pretty horrifying to see.
	I don't want to do it anymore.
	Honestly, that's how I felt the entire time doing this.
	I'd feel, I would feel guilty.
	And I went through two, Zarafkay came on the show twice.
	I went through both of them.
	Um, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I, I, mm, mm.
	Um, right.
	Fuck me.
	Fuck me.
	Um.
	Let's all hop on the struggle bus and just keep rolling down the street with this one.
	You might, you might detect that I'm just, I'm just fucking, I'm done.
	I'm done with this guy.
	I'm sorry, buddy.
	Well, you will be.
	Let's do it.
	Let's do it.
	We'll do it.
	Honestly, I think I hate this guy more than any other of Bran's guests that we've covered so far.
	I hate him more than DeSantis, I hate him more than any of them.
	I think he is the worst.
	I don't know whether that's just my personal fucking feelings, because DeSantis, you know, he's done actual horrible shit with actual horrible consequences, whereas RFK just says horrible shit with horrible consequences.
	No, but he's got a body count, because...
	He does, and we will get to that.
	He's got a body count, and it's worse than we think.
	I know that for sure.
	He does.
	He does.
	I've had to learn about it too.
	Absolutely.
	But yeah, I fucking hate this guy.
	I don't like that feeling.
	Anyway, next we- Well, sometimes your instincts about a person being bad is what protects us, you know?
	No, that's very true.
	That's very true.
	Next, we get a brief book review and Russell gushes a little bit.
	And saying something like this, is that if you cannot prove that, isn't it going to discredit the necessary, and I know you've written a massive and very successful book on it, but that book, that's hard going, that book, Robert.
	I mean, Jesus Christ, it's hard enough to read it, let alone bloody write the thing.
	Like, like, like, like, how, like, because I feel like that you are exactly what's necessary, and I feel like mad, crazy shit can happen in politics, because Trump, you know, like, and I feel like that what you need is an anti-establishment figure, and yet, from your history, you know, you know where the wires are for the Khrushchev batphone, like, the Kossak dancing spy in the front room.
	Your personal history is so sort of, like, like this, like, absurd American version of the crown, It's like so incredible to hear.
	No it's not!
	I actually feel that you are what is required.
	But like that is so hardcore and extreme.
	I know our Rumble audience, this lot, they'll bloody well love it.
	They'll be well into it.
	They've been dragging me along out of the mainstream.
	I could have been in movies till about six weeks ago, but this lot got me in all sorts of crap, right?
	So, like, what I feel like is, are these the ideas and issues and the framing that you're going to be going into, like, president- not presidential debates, we know Joe Biden won't have them, but, like, going into this campaign with, and what kind of onslaught are you gonna get from, like, you know, from the corralled forces of the establishment?
	and then after this we'll move on to the war in Ukraine.
	What are you going to do? God knows where you're going to go with that.
	Yeah, we're the corralled forces of the...
	So we've seen people that Russell is a fan of before, but this is a whole other level.
	Talking him up as an American version of the Crown, he's incredible, he's what's required, he's hardcore and extreme.
	But this is what people are going to think.
	This is the branding.
	Like, this is... Brand is showing branding.
	This is what we need to expect.
	This is what people are going to think.
	And it is absurd.
	And that doesn't mean... The absurdity does not affect... Absurdity does not impact efficacy.
	Because yeah, they're conjuring this idea of this little boy standing next to his...
	You know, the leaders of the free world that we all pine for, which is also not the case.
	Like it's just not like that's also just not like tragedy struck.
	Absolutely.
	But this dude was okay.
	All right.
	I'm getting ahead.
	I know.
	It's okay.
	It's incredibly frustrating to watch because most of us have this kind of thing in the back of our heads that makes us go, you know what?
	I don't want to lie.
	Or at the very least, I want to be able to back up something that I'm saying at least a little bit.
	I want to at least be able to pretend that I'm saying something, you know, like Russell does.
	You know, to be able to at least pretend so that if someone calls me out, I can say, aha, but this document... Yeah, and we're a bunch of fucking suckers.
	Yeah, but he just doesn't do any of that.
	There's a genuine kind of psychopathy to his lying.
	It's terrifying.
	So... Let's roll.
	We're going.
	Next, Russell wants to get into some Ukraine nonsense, but RFK instead wants to chat... It'll happen, but first RFK wants to chat about how COVID-19 was a bioweapon.
	We're gonna skip a little alternate history lesson of his in which he says there were former German and Japanese scientists from World War II living under the Pentagon and get to the- Fuck!
	I know.
	There are so many things- Can I flush my computer on the toilet?
	I'll find out.
	So many things that I was just watching and I was like, that's just so obviously not true.
	That's just so obvious.
	What in the holy- I looked it up, just to be sure, but I was... And that's the thing!
	That's the thing that's been so frustrating, even if it's obviously fucking false!
	I've had to look it up anyway, and... Did you think, like, an article from Soldier of Fortune magazine that was actually an ad in 1987?
	That is...
	No, no, no.
	A lot of UFO stuff started coming up.
	But a lot of other conspiracy theories.
	Don't give them that fun.
	No, no, no.
	That's fun.
	No, no, no.
	Oh, no.
	Well, I've mentioned this to you, I think, off air in general, but Russell is super into the UFO shit.
	You know what?
	That'd be way more fun.
	And honestly, we could all speak to it.
	A lot better.
	That might come next week.
	I don't know.
	We need a palate cleanser.
	A little Project Camelot as opposed to...
	The thing is, I don't care about UFO stuff at all.
	I believe that intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe because it would be incredibly arrogant to believe that we are the only sentient fucking things in existence.
	But I don't think any of them have come here, and that's what all of the UFO stuff at the moment is getting into.
	It's all made up bullshit and I don't care about any of it, but Russell is engaging with it at least once a week on his show.
	Really?
	At least once a week.
	Yeah, no, he spends like a full hour a week on this shit.
	As folklore, I think it's fascinating and really fun.
	And I think the human experience is really interesting.
	I've also like... From a detached perspective, it's hilarious.
	Well, yeah, I mean, it can be sad.
	Like, you know, Travis Walton, there's something fucked his life up.
	Like, there are really sad stories and we should support people that are going through something more than we have.
	The worrying tendency of UFO conspiracy theorists to always seem to lead back to anti-Semitism or racism.
	There's also that.
	So I don't know.
	Maybe next week at some point we'll probably have to deal with it just because it's such a regular feature of his show at this point that I feel like it would be dishonest not to cover it.
	But we'll see.
	I think next week, either way, after this chuckle fuck and DeSantis, like, we need a bit of a palate cleanser.
	So I'll see what I can conjure up.
	Oh, that'd be fun.
	That'd be fun!
	But yeah, it's not something that's like, yeah, it can get really not fun really fast.
	So I'm even cautioning you.
	No, no, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I'm fully aware, and I'm not going to enjoy it that much anyway is the concern, but we'll see.
	Well, but also don't stress yourself out about it at all.
	I'll have a look.
	I'll have a look.
	Anyway, yeah, so yeah, there aren't German and Japanese scientists from World War II living under the Pentagon, in case that wasn't obvious to anyone.
	And let's get to the meat of RFK's actual point that he gets to after that bit.
	9-11 happens.
	And 9-11, the neocons ring off of the shelf.
	The Patriot Act, which basically is the beginning of the surveillance state in our country.
	Nobody reads it.
	The only congressman to read it was my campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich.
	What?
	And he was in Congress at that time, and he told me not one copy was available to any congressman.
	The 350 Act that suddenly appeared the day after 9-11.
	And that dismantles basically the United States Constitution.
	Interestingly, that act, which nobody read, had a provision in it that revokes effectively the Geneva Convention and the Nixon's bioweapons charter.
	Oh yeah, no congress people whatsoever read the Patriot Act before voting for it.
	Sure thing, buddy.
	So he's saying the Patriot Act had a provision that effectively revoked the Geneva Conventions and what he's calling the Nixon Bioweapons Charter No such charter exists.
	Nixon gave a speech once decrying bioweapons, and he was the one to sign the UN Biological Weapons Convention of 1971.
	So maybe that's what RFK is all about?
	In any case, the Patriot Act does no such thing.
	There are Legitimate problems with it, but this absolutely isn't one of them.
	The act makes no mention of bioweapons, Geneva, the UN, Nixon, any of it.
	The closest thing, and I had to read this fucking thing, the closest thing I could find was discussing bioterrorism and the things the US needs to do to counter it, mostly vaccines and shit, which does not include creating bioweapons in even an implied capacity.
	So just complete nonsense yet again.
	So also all these claims about... I don't know if we're going to talk more about bioweapons, like the whole weaponized... A little bit, yeah.
	A little?
	Okay, all right.
	I'll save it.
	That's a fucking thing.
	That's also a fucking thing.
	It's all a fucking thing with this guy.
	I know!
	It's a thing and a thing and a thing!
	It's a nesting doll of things!
	It's a Russian nesting doll of conspiracy bullshit.
	Yeah, like, oh, this is a fucking thing, TM?
	Like, as in, oh, a fucking thing?
	And a fucking thing.
	Jesus Christ.
	And all of this makes the next thing he says even stupider.
	Oh, all of the, you know, so it basically relaunched the bioweapons arms race.
	There were two guys who were blocking it, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle.
	A week later, they're stopping it.
	They're not going to let it pass.
	A week later, they get envelopes filled with anthrax in their offices.
	Congress is shut down.
	They're shut up.
	And while Congress is shut down, the Patriot Act gets passed.
	What?
	What?
	So apparently there was a bioweapons arms race that we were all none the wiser about.
	As for his thing about Congress getting shut down and that's when the Patriot Act was passed?
	Complete bullshit.
	Congress enacted the Patriot Act by overwhelming bipartisan margins and was passed 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate.
	So, the idea that Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were single-handedly preventing the Patriot Act from passing is absolutely untrue.
	Especially when you consider that Tom Daschle was the majority leader at the time who sought unanimous consent to pass the proposal without debate or amendment.
	As for Leahy, he agitated for some amendments to the Patriot Act, got his way, and voted for it.
	Hmm.
	Complete horseshit.
	We have heard conspiracy theories use this trope of the government shut down.
	No one was there, but they passed it.
	We've heard this over and over.
	Yeah, there were three people, was it?
	About the creation of the Fed, wasn't it?
	The Federal Reserve.
	Yeah.
	And I heard that shit all the fuck over the place, like when it was all buzzing about around, you know, whenever Ron Paul was running.
	So this is the same repackaged conspiracy theory, but he's just kind of tacked it on there.
	Yeah!
	Goofy-ass pieces!
	Just a fun little reference for the seasoned conspiracy theorist, I think, almost.
	Yeah, and there's like Jade Helm shit in here, like it's all the same shit all over again.
	So, next up, RFK almost gets one right.
	And the Patriot Act relaunched the arms race.
	So the military begins, and by the way, that anthrax, which was also used as the excuse for going into Iraq and invading Iraq because Saddam Hussein did it, you know, we were told.
	It turns out after a two-year investigation, the FBI came back and said that anthrax was Ames anthrax, highly sophisticated.
	There's only one place in the world it could have come from, Fort Detrick, which is the CIA Pentagon lab.
	So the anthrax sent in those letters was derived from the same bacterial strain known as the Ames strain.
	It's a common strain, isolated from a cow in Texas in 1981.
	It was first researched at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, but then subsequently was distributed to 16 bioresearch labs in the U.S.
	as well as three international locations, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
	The FBI never actually caught who sent those letters, but they were fairly sure it was a guy called Bruce Ivins who did actually work at the lab in Fort Detrick.
	So I'm gonna give RFK Jr.
	half a point for this one.
	And that's as much as he gets for this entire episode.
	Just for the reference.
	But yeah.
	I think he accidentally got that one kind of right-ish.
	Almost.
	Well, but it's still manipulating.
	Oh yeah, but it's still, yeah, it's not right in the way he says it is, is the thing.
	And you know, there was concern about anthrax in Iraq.
	But that's why?
	The anthrax letters are why?
	No.
	Apparently, yeah.
	That's not true.
	Yeah, sure buddy.
	That's not.
	That didn't, no.
	Lies.
	So, next we've got another really stupid thing that he says.
	Oh, at that point, the Pentagon began pumping a lot of money into bioweapons, about $2 billion a year, but they don't want to do it because they don't know if the Patriot Act is actually legal.
	The Patriot Act, what it says is, We're not revoking the Geneva Convention, we're not invoking the Bioweapons Charter, and we're making a law that any federal official that violates those two bills cannot be prosecuted.
	So the treaties are still in place, but they give an exemption to all federal officials.
	What?
	So apparently any federal officials can just wander around breaking the bioweapons and Geneva Conventions according to this man.
	It's profoundly stupid.
	I'm not even going to bother saying this is wrong because it's so obviously bullshit it doesn't even warrant a response.
	Next up, what do you suppose the consequences of violating the Geneva Conventions are?
	And it is perfectly fine to not know the answer to this by the way.
	Trial in the Hague.
	Interesting.
	I hear idiots say court-martialing a lot.
	Okay, okay.
	Of like the country leader.
	Sanctions!
	Let's hear what RFK thinks it is and then I'll get to the truth.
	The Pentagon's not sure that that's legal.
	And by the way, if you violate those provisions of Geneva, it's a death penalty.
	You get hanged.
	But they were worried about doing it.
	So they, instead of putting it in-house at the Pentagon, they put it all at NIH in Tony Fauci's shop.
	They give him a 68% raise, which is why he became the highest paid federal official in history.
	Right, so there is no punishment for breaking the Geneva Conventions.
	The conventions are not laws, they are conventions.
	Standards of conduct which are observed by mutual agreement among nations.
	The concept of getting the death penalty for breaking them is utter fantasy, let alone by hanging for fuck's sake.
	Anyway, now he's mute.
	Yeah, conventions are just like, well, we've all agreed to this, so then if you want to We've all agreed to this, and so if anyone then breaks it, then the rest of the international community can say, oy, you've fucked up this agreement, this thing of trust.
	And potentially take further steps, right?
	Yeah, and we might all then later take you to The Hague, possibly, which, yeah, I was going to say, historically that's not the way this has gone.
	Right, well, so what is ringing in my ears, and I don't, like, I'm about to say something that might be very stupid, I don't know, because I found out as soon as we started recording this podcast, I have found out so many things that I thought were true are not.
	And, but I have heard, you know, the thing is, is like, in a conversation with me and you that wasn't being
	recorded, I'd be like, "Oh yeah, this thing, I'm going to hedge like crazy because it is my
	understanding that the Bush, from my adulthood, Bush made it more difficult for American
	leaders to be prosecuted internationally for war crimes."
	Oh!
	I don't know.
	That's what I understand.
	I don't know is my answer to that.
	I have no idea.
	The fact that I'm saying it at this point, it's probably wrong.
	And it sounds like a sinister thing that that club, the Cheney Rove party, would do.
	Don't get me wrong, yeah, it does sound like something they would do.
	But it wasn't the Patriot Act.
	Also, I don't know how that would work because, you know, ultimately it's not up to them what the rest of the world decides.
	You know what I mean?
	As to making it harder to process.
	If the rest of the world goes, fucking no, you're coming to The Hague and we're going to deal with you, then you don't really have that much of a choice.
	Well, then why didn't that happen?
	It might just be us searching for a reason why all these war criminals get to paint and be cute now.
	Why isn't Tony Blair in prison?
	Why isn't Vladimir Putin in prison?
	There are a lot of world leaders that should be in prison.
	Anyway, now RFK has weaved this whole narrative into Fauci's universe, saying that the CIA gave NIH bioweapons research to do and Fauci was in charge of it.
	Interestingly, Fauci did get a 68% pay rise across three years back in 2004, which took his salary up to $335,000 a year.
	$335,000 a year.
	His final salary before quitting in 2022 was $480,654.
	So he was indeed the highest paid federal official in history.
	That much is true.
	Whenever this is brought up, though, there seems to be very little discussion as to why he was the highest paid federal official in US history.
	Anthony Fauci is probably one of the highest qualified immunologists in the world, and he served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, so 38 years in the job.
	He was at the forefront of trying to tackle the AIDS epidemic and he
	personally made some serious medical breakthroughs with both rheumatism and
	cancer. The salary this man would have been able to earn in the private sector
	is unimaginable. He could have been a CEO of a pharmaceutical company by this
	stage in his life earning millions every year but he chose to stick with public
	service.
	As for why he got that significant a pay rise in that short a space of time, I'm going to read part of a letter from Dr. Raynard Kingston sent in 2004.
	More recently, Dr. Fauci has been a key figure in the White House and Department's response to bioterrorism.
	His contributions to this effort have been outstanding and include the development of the departmental strategy to augment smallpox vaccine supplies and the development of a plan to develop a new anthrax vaccine.
	He serves as an expert consultant to the White House, the Secretary of DHHS, congressional staff, and a number of HHS groups on the development of biodefense-related research and public health priorities.
	He is leading the development of a series of research initiatives, has coordinated fast-track initiatives for academia and industry participation in biodefense-related research, ...and is responsible for the development of future intermediate and long-range research plans and policies for a sustained and committed biomedical research response to bioterrorism threats.
	During financial year 2004, under Dr. Fauci's leadership, NIAID had significantly expanded, intensified, and accelerated its research programs in biodefense."
	All pretty self-explanatory, that post-911 and post-anthrax letters sent to senators, biodefense might be an immediate concern, and Fauci was the person to deal with it.
	Combine that with Bush's new pandemic preparedness efforts, which Fauci was pivotal in, and it explains quite a bit.
	Because that all happened at the same time.
	And needless to say, the man wasn't getting paid off to make bioweapons, and you'd have to be a complete fucking moron to think so.
	Yeah, well, we're so... It's so foreign to hear someone getting paid what they're worth.
	Yeah, right.
	Well, this is it.
	And most federal salaries are capped at, I think it's $175,000, I think.
	But there are exceptions, particularly for medical roles, because they're so fucking necessary.
	Yeah, and the pay disparity is so huge in the private sector.
	The private sector, yeah, will pay an absolute fortune.
	So, you know, you've got to compete if you want the good people.
	Yeah, so, wrong problem!
	Like, again, wrong problem.
	Yeah, I don't think this is an issue.
	Yeah, anyway, next he gets into something we've already covered again.
	He was making more, $450,000 a year, the president only makes $400,000, but it's because of that military salary he got, the 68% raise in military, so he had to do bioweapons development.
	That's why he was going to do it and gain a fortune.
	And then in 2014, three of the bugs escaped from labs in the United States and everybody finds out about it.
	Congress has 300 scientists write letters to Obama saying sign a letter to Obama saying you got to shut down Tony Fauci.
	He's going to create an epidemic.
	Obama shuts down all of Fauci's projects, orders them closed, has a moratorium, but Fauci doesn't shut them down.
	He continues doing them, and then he starts shipping everything over to Wuhan.
	Like he's some fucking, like, rogue actor, like, ha ha ha, I'm gonna do it anyway!
	Supervillain Fauci.
	And the bugs escape the lab, like the Keystone Cops?
	Um, yeah.
	Whackity schmackity doo!
	That's crazy.
	So again, we discussed this in our WHO episode, Gain of Function Research, right?
	A moratorium was put on gain-of-function research back in 2014, that is true.
	As for why, it's not bioweapons or bugs escaped labs.
	It's that there was a gross mishandling of serious agents like anthrax in various labs across the US.
	And if you remember, that chicken was injected with the wrong strain of influenza, etc, etc.
	It was nothing to do with bioweapons, nothing to do with gain-of-function research, and nothing to do with Fauci.
	So do we have more bioweapon talk?
	Because here's the thing about bio, like the cutting edge, I do, maybe I should have mentioned this earlier because I want people to hear this.
	Anytime that there is there, anytime people like RFK Jr.
	are invoking Advanced, dangerous, bioweapon technology.
	It is a boogeyman.
	For the most part, like, yeah, diseases are a problem.
	And we all go through it because we're all human beings.
	So we all get sick and things go badly.
	And so we can think it's easy to rile up fear from a bio weapon because it's invisible,
	like because of all the pernicious reasons why that's a scary prospect.
	But in reality, it's very difficult to use a pathogen as a bio weapon.
	And they actually talk about it in, so "Behind the Bastards" just did a series
	on basically like the danger of whipping folks into a froth through internet conspiracies.
	And one of the issues is that.
	The idea that there's a bioweapon around every corner and every government is making them and using them is ahistorical and it's also just like it's not that easy to do.
	No!
	They're using like James Bond toys As real technology, and that's just not how things work.
	It is not.
	Yeah, no, it's it's it's all based on fucking movies, isn't it?
	Right.
	It always will be.
	And so what he's talking about is Q making a neat little pen that you can that is a bio weapon.
	And that's like that's bugs escaping a lab.
	James Bond Q, not QAnon Q. Oh, yeah, right.
	I mean, either from him, either.
	I don't know.
	But yeah, you're right.
	James Bond Q. Yeah, yes.
	James Bond Q. Yeah, but like cutting edge biotechnology, most of this stuff that is so pervasive in this fear mongering is impossible.
	It's literally impossible.
	And like, yeah, all kinds of horrible tests were like, you know, like, CIA, FBI, like they were doing all kinds of crazy experiments and shit in America!
	There's stuff that happened in my hometown in St.
	Louis that were like fucked up and it's like really bad stuff but those tests proved how difficult it is to control and how difficult it is to use it by a weapon and they found that there were problems and they're like, well we can't really do this anymore because this is a little out of control and Like, yeah, poor people have been used as guinea pigs, mostly people of color in this country.
	Yes, sure, we're talking about two different things, but they're invoking images that are purely for fear-mongering and have nothing to do with reality, or very little to do with reality.
	Oh yeah, none of this is based in reality at all.
	This is a complete, complete aside, but I haven't really paid that much attention to the shelves behind RFK Jr.
	Now, for listeners, you can't see that much.
	Crosses and books?
	Ducks?
	There are nine ducks, right?
	And only six crucifixes.
	Which says to me, he worships ducks more than he does Jesus.
	That's what I'm taking away from this.
	He's got nine wooden carved ducks and then six crucifixes that I can see.
	I'm betting there's more ducks behind.
	I think there's a shrunken head.
	There's a shrunken head.
	There's a shark as well.
	He's all kinds of shit.
	I would love to be able to see some of the titles of the books on this.
	I can see one big one that just says Jesus.
	I think you're wishfully thinking and trying to distract yourself is what you're doing.
	I just, I don't know, it's just weird.
	It's weird for a presidential, I mean, compare this to fucking DeSantis, you know, who had, you know, like a statesman-like background, he had a fucking flag somewhere, he had a proper microphone, a decent camera as well, like his production values for his little interview were pretty decent, whereas this, this is just grandpa on Zoom, this is what this is.
	He's a governor, so the state of Florida probably paid for it.
	Most likely, but RFK's fucking loaded, so he could definitely afford it.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Oh good, thanks for reminding me.
	At least he's stinking fucking rich.
	At least he's super rich, yeah.
	Cool.
	Yeah, and he's a fucking lawyer as well, so you know, it's not like he's...
	Well, that's actually a point that was really good, and maybe this comes up too, but the fact that he's a lawyer means it's his job to learn how to argue.
	It doesn't mean that it's his job to be right in his heart on the inside.
	It means he's good at arguing.
	That's the job.
	I don't even think he's good at that.
	I think he just says things and no one pushes back.
	The problem is this is the kind of man that you couldn't have a debate with because none of his ideas or the things he says are based in reality.
	So how are you supposed to debate that?
	And he's good at throwing out a bunch of stuff that separately needs to be debunked because he can confidently deliver a lie.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	For each of these clips, I've got three or four fucking things.
	And you know, if I was Joe Biden, I wouldn't fucking debate him either.
	What would be the point of that?
	Yeah.
	No, that's absolutely right.
	You're absolutely right.
	It would be an exercise in slapping yourself in the face with a wet fish.
	And that's basically the whole affair.
	Which I've expressed my opposition to that particular instance already.
	You know how I feel.
	It's not great.
	Yeah.
	I'm enjoying it.
	Right.
	But also, like, you're platforming.
	That is, like, Joe Biden would be platforming InfoWars ideas, because that's a lot of what the shit that he's saying.
	So like, no, he should- Yes, yes.
	Joe Biden should not- A lot of it comes back to some very dangerous underlying rhetoric.
	Let's put it that way.
	Yeah, because I mean, you know, if you really start going back to it, you know, the whole fucking idea of, you know, vaccine, being anti-vax, etc.
	circles back to, you know, poison the well kind of shit, you know.
	And veiled anti-semitism, so... Anyway, yeah, he's talked for a little bit more, for quite a bit more.
	Again, all of those were connected clips and I did cut a little bit out the front because it was just that stupid history lesson about people living under the Pentagon.
	But so, it's time for Russell to come back, so let's just have a look at his fawning response to all of this bullshit.
	Bloody hell, Robert.
	Right, to see this of the intricate relationships between these varying complex ideas outlaid in this mad anecdotal way, this fireside chat with an uncle who explains that there is just entrenched corruption everywhere you look, is a real delight, but also quite bloody terrifying as a matter of fact.
	Yeah, it would be quite terrifying, Russell, if any of it was true.
	If true!
	As it is, I don't think he's said a single whole truth at all, but Russell is eating it up with a fucking spoon.
	He loves this.
	So next, Brand finally asks his Ukraine question proper.
	Bobby, I want to ask you this.
	How are we to take seriously the claim that the war between Ukraine and Russia elicits the involvement of America only from a humanitarian perspective when it is so costly and humanitarianism so seldom seems like the motivation for war?
	There's $100 billion.
	I don't know if I'm telling you any facts.
	You're about to hit me on the head with 10,000 of them.
	I have a bedroom somewhere!
	So Bobby, tell me what's going on with this war?
	Is it a proxy war?
	Are we pushing Russia and China into a closer alliance?
	How are you bloody well going to undo this?
	After this question, the war one, we're going to go through these pledges and then we're going to talk about what's going to happen if You know, if this stuff gets properly off the ground, and I know you've got 20% in the polls.
	So firstly, yeah, is it a humanitarian war?
	What's going on with the expenditure?
	How do you end these wars?
	What's going to be the impact of the escalating tensions between the US and Russia?
	And of course, the agitation of China through the semiconductor Taiwan gear.
	Fair.
	Fair.
	Marilyn Monroe giving RFK's information from out of a bedroom somewhere would make about as much sense as
	anything else he said today, so sure Yeah, right. I do feel like Russell's getting his timelines
	a bit fucking crossed there because bit of an age gap But anyway
	This is it So long question there, rambly in true brand form, bit of a bramble, so let's see how RFK answers.
	Zelensky runs in joining up, we helped overthrow the democratically elected government of the Ukraine in 2014.
	And install a very ultra-nationalist, and that is a polite way of describing them, ultra-nationalist government there that's extremely anti-Russian.
	That prompts the Russians to go in and invade Crimea because they're terrified that now that we have our own government in place there, we're going to put the navel of our U.S.
	Navy fleet In a warm water port that they've had for, I think, 370 years.
	It's their only warm water port.
	It's their way of having a military presence on the Black Sea.
	They're terrified we're going to go in there, so they invade Crimea.
	Okay, so he fully believes that Ukraine is Russian territory.
	So yeah, the Russians invaded and annexed Crimea because they were scared apparently.
	The whole bit about the US instigating a coup in Ukraine is complete Russian propaganda.
	As for the idea of the Ukraine government hating Russia, I wonder why?
	Yeah.
	Whatever could have caused such a thing?
	How fucking stupid.
	To go back to Russia being scared about the whole warm water port in Crimea thing, it's literal Russian propaganda that he's regurgitating.
	There's no facts to it, no basis, no nothing.
	The US Navy was never going to sit in port in Ukraine.
	It's just completely ludicrous.
	I have a firm belief that this man is as much of a Russian asset as Trump is, by the way.
	So, next!
	Another bald-faced lie!
	The new Russian government comes in and enacts all of these oppressive laws against the ethnic Russian majority in eastern Ukraine.
	80% of the people in the Donbas are ethnic Russians, and they were able to have their own language, and they felt part of the Ukraine, but suddenly there's all these laws being passed saying, you know, that language is no longer any good, you have to speak Ukrainian, and treated essentially as red-headed stepchildren.
	And they start doing protests, and the government then reacts violently, and you basically have a civil war in which 14,000 ethnic Russians are killed.
	Anytime I feel bad about being incoherent, you play me this clip.
	How about that?
	So, there were 14,000 total deaths in the first Russo-Ukrainian War.
	How did you sort this one out?
	I'm just impressed at this point.
	That was... I spent so long listening to this guy that I... You learned it?
	I understand what he's trying to say.
	Respect.
	I appreciate you, friend.
	Man, oh man.
	Thank you.
	See you then.
	This is the most I have seen you rub your eyes!
	Yeah, no.
	It's not because I'm tired.
	He's saying that Russia annexing fucking Crimea and all that, he's saying that was a civil war.
	That was a civil war caused by Ukraine basically clamping down on ethnic Russians in the region and not being Ukrainian enough.
	Yeah, there were 14,000 total deaths in the first Russo-Ukrainian war, so that's on both sides, which was prompted by the annexation of Crimea by Russia.
	That's what he's talking about here.
	The laws against the ethnic Russian community, as RFK puts it, is also complete shit.
	There were pro-Ukrainian laws put into place to re-establish sovereignty and the sanctity of the Ukrainian language and establish that as the official language of Ukraine, which to me makes sense.
	But it's not fair to say that these were oppressing ethnic Russians.
	This, in fact, just ties into more current-day propaganda from Russia saying that Russian speakers were getting murdered in Ukraine.
	It all just ties back into itself.
	Next, RFK talks himself up in a very stupid and transparent way.
	Put yourself in our position.
	You know, I was here in 1962 when the Russians put nuclear missile sites in Cuba.
	And we were ready to invade, even though we didn't even know they had that, that they were armed at that point.
	And if they had also, you know, if Mexico did that, we'd be in there in a second.
	If Mexico started killing American expatriates, you know, 14,000 of them, we'd invade in a second.
	So we have a Monroe Doctrine that we've been forced for hundreds of years that says, Nobody can put any, no other major power can put any military equipment in our hemisphere.
	Meanwhile, we've never been invaded.
	The Russians have been invaded three times through Ukraine.
	The last time they were invaded during World War II, they were invaded through the Ukraine.
	One out of every seven Russians was killed, 13% of the population.
	I don't think he understands what a hemisphere is.
	I was here in 1962.
	I mean, that's true in that he was alive at that time and his uncle was the president, but he was eight years old.
	I was here in 1962.
	You were playing with toy cars, you bloviating prick.
	I want to take this opportunity to point out that we have literally no reason whatsoever to believe that RFK Jr.
	knows anything about anything, least of all foreign policy, military history, or politics.
	He's never once held any kind of elected office, he's never been in the military, and he's never so much as represented his country in a fucking spelling bee.
	Yep.
	If he was talking about law or the environment, I might listen, as he's actually spent good
	chunks of his life doing those things, but on these subjects the man is as knowledgeable
	as a fortune cookie and even less fucking accurate.
	Like, to me, because I've tried to educate myself on what the good would be, and it's so, it just pales.
	Yeah, no, no, no, no, absolutely.
	I would possibly listen to some of it.
	A lot of the good, quote, good shit that he's done was a long time ago by now as well.
	And who knows where the fuck his mind has gone on subjects of the law or the environment in that time.
	Now, with all that said, I'm about done with this fucking guy.
	I'm genuinely done.
	And I cannot stand to tolerate this bullshit for even a second longer because it's just the same exercise of him saying something and me saying, that's not true.
	And that's it.
	There's not even any fucking interesting source that he's gone for.
	He's just making shit up.
	And there is only so much of that I am willing to tolerate.
	I've got a couple of final clips but other than that I'm just fucking done.
	So the next clip is how they sign off this first interview.
	There's a war where Ukraine has been made a victim not just by Russia but by the United States government.
	I don't think you're gonna hear that kind of conversation, those kind of ideas, that kind of transparency on the mainstream media or from a mainstream politician.
	Robert, we will be supporting you and discussing you for as long as your campaign continues and I pray that it ends in success for you and for the people of America and for the world.
	Thank you so much for joining us today.
	Russell, thanks so much for having us and for being so outspoken, truth-teller on these issues for the last three years.
	You've been a little oasis in a desert of disinformation, so thank you.
	Sure, buddy.
	Sure.
	It's story time today!
	Just complete gross brown nosing from both sides there.
	The last three years, huh?
	Yeah, right.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	He's saying, I think since 2020 was all he was meaning, so since the vaccine shit started coming out.
	I think it was before that.
	Anyway.
	Oh, sure, sure, sure.
	I'm just interested in that moment of truth.
	Why else would he say it?
	You know what I mean?
	He has no incentive to lie.
	Yeah, not about that anyway.
	I've got a couple more clips.
	The next one is from the second time RFK Jr.
	came on Russell's show.
	He came on with his wife Cheryl Hines, who was previously in Curb Your Enthusiasm, in an effort to soften his image and broaden his appeal.
	Thankfully, she then left in order to let the men talk.
	Fabulously 50s of it.
	At which stage, Brand and RFK chatted genuine shit that's as factually accurate as what we've dealt with today.
	And accordingly, I've not really bothered cutting many clips from that other than this last one to illustrate that Brand has actually been fundraising for RFK's campaign.
	If your campaign is going to be funded solely by my pull-ups, you might find that you're a bit short.
	But in order to donate to me and Bobby's pull-up challenge, you can go to kennedy24.com forward slash pull-up to make your donation.
	And indeed, if I do end up losing, I will be very happy, honoured even, to join you Is Russell just naked under that kimono?
	A little bit, yeah.
	access once more to your thoughts. Thanks for introducing us to Cheryl. Thank you for
	your bravery, mate, and I look forward to supporting you further. Thank you.
	Thank you very much, Russell.
	Cheers, mate. You're a good man. Thank you, sir.
	Is Russell just naked under that kimono?
	A little bit, yeah.
	He said he wore it.
	Yeah, no, he is.
	There is a point just prior to this where he takes the kimono off to show how weak his body is in comparison to RFK and how he's going to get absolutely trounced in this pull-up competition that they've That they're doing.
	So yeah, a pull-up competition was announced between them and yeah, not much to say about that really.
	It's raising money for RFK Jr.' 's campaign.
	Fantastic.
	And he even wants to join RFK on the campaign trail, should there ever be one.
	Daddy does.
	After the whole Ed Miliband thing we covered in our Don't Vote episode, Russell had said he'd never endorse a political candidate again, but I'd say this is about as close as it could possibly get to doing so without explicitly saying, vote for RFK Jr.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, and I think that's what is alarming to me is, that's what, and I do think that Russell's taking a bit of a scattershot approach, obviously, because Marianne Williams has also been on a show that I know of, and he's trying to He's not, he's not kind of had the same level of enthusiasm for any of the rest of them.
	For Marianne Williamson or Cornel West.
	Cornel West, yeah.
	Or DeSantis, you know, I mean, he's still, I don't know, he did like DeSantis to be fair, but not to the degree that we've seen here.
	But then I wonder whether RFK is becoming, at this point, too much of a toxic commodity.
	We'll see.
	Um, but, uh, well, yeah, but that's what bothers me and alarms me is like, it seems like a gamble he's willing to take because what we saw in 26 to 2015 was like Alex Jones.
	I'm above the left-right paradigm, hitching his wagon to Trump as an opportunity.
	And honestly, as a business decision, makes perfect sense.
	And obviously there's no care or compassion in these choices these people are making.
	It did short term, I question whether it did long term.
	Oh, absolutely, I agree.
	But that's what I'm saying is like a propagandist's business decisions, I think inherently are not long-term.
	Yeah, true.
	True, true, true.
	But the amount of damage they can do in a short-term period while making a lot of money is obviously something we don't address and don't talk enough about or warn against in a way that we should.
	As a society, yeah.
	Yeah, as a society, yeah.
	Obviously, you and I are very invested.
	We do.
	We do quite a lot.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Ask all the shit that has not gotten done around my house.
	Yes, I spend a lot more time on this.
	But like, that's what I'm saying.
	It's like, that's, it's the confluence that makes me, that multiplies my unease.
	Yeah, no, I agree.
	I agree.
	I, yeah, I think the good thing about him hitching his wagon to RFK is that, yes, the things that RFK says are dangerous and there is a body, like there is blood on this man's hands.
	But he's never going to be President.
	I don't care who comes for me.
	This man is never, ever going to be President of the United States.
	Not for a fucking second.
	Whereas DeSantis has a shot.
	He at least has a shot.
	It's a slim fucking shot, but it's there.
	So anyway, we have one final clip from here.
	And it was just a small tidbit that I found a little bit worrying.
	I think you'll agree that there's a great deal to unpack and appreciate in that complex conversation with RFK.
	If you're a member of our Locals community, you can hear the whole interview, including some exclusive revelations that I simply have to keep under veiled just for you.
	Just click the red button below to hear even more from the brilliant RFK Jr.
	So clearly RFK rambled on for a bit longer than we were made aware of in the edited version and I'm deadly curious what in the fuck could possibly be more ridiculous or explosive than the things he's already said.
	But apparently there is Locals exclusive content from RFK Jr.
	So it's either completely banal or overt racism or anti-semitism and Or the AIDS thing.
	Or the AIDS thing.
	And it's impossible to know which without giving Russell money, which I refuse to do.
	So yeah, that's there.
	It's not worth your stress.
	And he says all this stuff in other avenues.
	That's also something that was...
	No, yeah.
	Well, the mention of someone, you know, I've been taking in a lot of content to try to be armed, right, in this, against this RFK business.
	And one of the things that he, like, he had been banned for disinformation from all these platforms.
	But figured out how to get around that system by being a presidential candidate.
	And he doesn't have to have his own podcast, he doesn't have to make his own content if he is a guest on other podcasts and other shows.
	I think he does have a podcast.
	I think he does have a podcast.
	But that is what can be banned from platforms.
	Well, he's now on Rumble.
	He's now got his own Rumble channel.
	I don't know if you knew that.
	He's joined that bandwagon.
	It's supposed to be a big fucking deal that he's got his own Rumble channel.
	Who gives a shit?
	He was de-platformed and has since been...
	He's pre-platformed because of a presidential candidate.
	I don't know his subscriber count.
	That reminds me, I keep forgetting to fucking tell the audience, by the way.
	Audience, on a completely separate note, since we started this podcast, Russell Brand's Rumble following has grown by 20%.
	20% since we started this podcast, and it's only been a couple of months.
	Yeah.
	20%.
	We've been at this for a minute and a half.
	It is a worrying fucking trajectory.
	Yeah.
	And I'm going to look up in a second how many followers RFK Jr.
	has actually because I'm curious.
	I bet it's not as many as Russell.
	This is really upsetting.
	And also he's overtaken Steven Crowder now in terms of number of followers on Rumble.
	So there we go.
	Officially bigger than Crowder.
	But also fair.
	Also fair, Steven Crowder's fucking the worst.
	No, actually, actually, actually, you know what?
	Tim Poole is the worst.
	Steven Crowder is just slightly above the worst.
	Yeah, but they're bumps on a log.
	I mean, compared to what Russell can deliver.
	Yeah, right.
	Yeah, no, 100%.
	100%.
	Finally, What more did we want to say about RFK Jr.
	while we have the chance?
	Because there's plenty that I haven't covered.
	So his Children's Defense Fund, which is anti-vax for kids.
	His assertions that COVID-19 was a race-specific bioweapon that favored Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese.
	Oh my god!
	Creepy!
	His telling a Samoan population not to get vaccinated, leading to the deaths of 84 children.
	Yeah, it's all completely fucked.
	When I say he's got blood on his hands, I fucking mean it.
	And AIDS disinformation that has just been rampant.
	And I've heard the seeds that he planted of disinformation popping up in other places.
	That's the thing.
	It doesn't take much if you have bad actors That are invested in pushing their own narratives because it's just so much harder to put that toothpaste back in the tube.
	I mean, just look at Andrew Wakefield.
	And then people that could do something didn't take it as seriously as they should have.
	And yeah, the blood is on all of their hands.
	I think it's easy to I don't know.
	I don't... This isn't about a roast.
	You know, this isn't... Yeah.
	This isn't about a roast.
	This isn't about gotcha.
	This is, like, really serious.
	People are harmed.
	And even just with the Russian disinfo.
	Something that, like... I posted in my own Instagram story.
	And it's just, like... It's another thing.
	It's another drop in this really awful bucket.
	But, like... Don't...
	No, no.
	demonize an entire country like Russia or whatever, right?
	It's not fair to assign that kind of blame to all the people in the country. That's not
	fair. But understanding the way that Russian media works, understanding the incentives that
	are offered that can, I mean, the idea of "Russian asset" is, there's so many different
	ways that someone could be that. But reminding folks that the Russian government just
	passed laws that are the most strict.
	Pass laws against trans people that are some of the strictest in the world.
	More laws against trans people.
	Exactly, more.
	And that's the thing.
	There's a lot of folks that can come out of the woodwork and defend Russia and be stoked on Russia.
	And what gets lost is their pernicious persecution of LGBTQ people.
	And that, to me, is what I look for in a government to trust, in trusting a government.
	That's one of those things that you have to keep your human rights ear open.
	Always.
	Yeah, no, no, for sure.
	It's fair towards Russia.
	It's like it's a totalitarian dictatorship.
	There's there's there's no questioning.
	There's no questioning that.
	And you can't lay everything.
	There's an important distinction between Russia, the Russian government and the Russian people.
	And I have friends who are Russian.
	You know, I have friends who have fucking left Russia because, you know, especially queer friends.
	Right.
	Because they have to leave.
	Because they would be killed if they were still in Russia.
	I know that with absolute certainty.
	And things are bad here, but they're not that.
	And I'd like to never get to that point, thank you.
	That's the hope.
	So I've just brought up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's Rumble channel.
	He's got 57.7 thousand followers.
	That's it.
	That's his little, that's his little Rumble thing.
	Russell on the other hand... One's too many though!
	I don't like, I don't think any of them... No, I agree.
	Russell on the other hand on Rumble has 1.33 million at this point.
	0.33 million at this point.
	So, that's encouraging.
	And you know, six and a half million on YouTube who at least will see the first 15 minutes of unselected clips.
	The number is a little hard to wrap your head around.
	I think the growth of 20% in such a short time.
	That makes me uneasy.
	I don't like that.
	That is a frightening trajectory.
	Yeah, that's really bad.
	It's intimidating, honestly.
	Feels very like, we've got our little rock in the sling and we're just trying!
	Yeah, yeah, just kind of hoping, I don't know, some part of his heel crumbles away or something, I don't know.
	Yeah, I can't think of anything else necessarily to say.
	I mean, I think that we just, we don't have the luxury of ignoring any of this stuff.
	And that sucks.
	And it feels bad.
	I think it needs addressing and then I think everyone needs to just fucking stop talking about this man.
	Because he's gonna say this crazy shit like the fucking race-specific bioweapon thing, you know, that's designed to let Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese live and everyone else die.
	You know, it's insane shit that he's gonna say.
	It's a weird combination, that one.
	Yeah!
	Right?
	Like the Chinese and the Ashkenazi Jews were working together.
	That's an interesting partnership.
	Or, like, why would they engineer it that way?
	And I just...
	And how?
	How would you get it?
	Who they, which they, and then how would they do that?
	Because it's not possible.
	Race-specific bioweapons don't exist.
	Period.
	They tried it.
	That's part of it.
	There was all kinds of efforts to make crazy bioweapons and a lot of them didn't work.
	That's why we went robot dogs!
	That's why we went robot dogs!
	Do you think the Nazis wouldn't have appreciated a bioweapon that would just kill all the Jews?
	No shit!
	Because that was kind of what they were aiming at!
	Yeah, they thought it was way more pain in the ass than they thought.
	Right, and I just...
	Somebody said I sound like Roger Rabbit when I'm really upset.
	And some folks may take that as some negative.
	That's maybe one of the best things I've ever heard, and to that I say Keep listening and I appreciate you.
	You know what?
	Roger Rabbit's gonna come out when I ain't got nothing.
	I'm frustrated.
	That's this whole guy's thing.
	A lot of us are.
	And it is incredibly frustrating to just have someone just stand there and outright lie for hours.
	And without any basis to the things that he's saying at all.
	It's remarkable.
	Rich white guys confidently lie a lot.
	Sounds like a problem.
	I know, but at least some of them base it in something.
	Some of them are entertaining.
	God, they at least try to pretend that it's real.
	I feel better knowing that we did this.
	Yeah.
	And also, the coverage I've seen is very heartening.
	And while some of it is like, oh, it's impossible, it's not that I don't feel like it's impossible for him to be president.
	Yes.
	I've thought that already.
	And I can't allow myself to think that again.
	I understand why.
	I understand why.
	But there is just no way.
	There is just no way.
	Especially while this man's running as a Democrat.
	Not a fucking chance in hell.
	Not a chance in hell.
	But you never know, like you just never... Even if he switched teams, he'd have Trump to go up against, he'd have DeSantis to go up against, and even DeSantis comes across more fucking sane than this guy.
	Yeah, I just, I can't ever...
	I can't underestimate the depravity.
	That's kind of where I'm coming from.
	Yeah, I get that.
	Once bitten, twice shy.
	You don't have the luxury of feeling sure about anything anymore.
	Yes, that's true.
	Because of what happened in 2016.
	I'm touching my nose right now.
	I think you nailed it on that one.
	And because of the apathy around Joe Biden as well.
	It's that fucking trope of nobody voted for Biden, they voted for Biden, didn't they?
	Voted against Trump.
	Exactly.
	And there is an element of that.
	Bring it back to running, man.
	Both those governors just fighting each other.
	I think if I had my druthers, if your family was already president, bye.
	Because we shouldn't have a generational monarchy.
	That's kind of what this country was about.
	And Game show hosts don't get to be president.
	I just think that enough people recognizing your name on a ballot is not, I just don't believe that of the hundred best people in America as the best people for president.
	I know.
	I know.
	And I'd like to at least bring attention to the reality of like, first of all, what makes, what would make you a good president is not wanting to do it.
	So we're already screwed.
	Yeah, the world needs just a thousand Marcus Aureliuses.
	That's what the world kind of needs.
	Just maybe less war-focused.
	I was like, I don't know that I'd even sign off on that!
	Late stage Marcus Aurelius, you know, like just before he died.
	That kind of, you know, that kind of view.
	Yeah, but all the kings do that.
	Regretful.
	All the kings live their whole lives and then they tell their grandsons, like, don't love war like I did.
	And none of them fucking listen.
	So obviously that's not effective.
	We just need to actually, like, it's just being on TV or being in movies doesn't make you the best for I mean, do you know what?
	You bring up the running man, I feel like maybe that should be the system.
	Just a fucking... A gauntlet of some kind?
	Yeah, yeah!
	Fight and die and whoever wins leaves the country.
	Do you know what?
	It'd at least be more entertaining.
	I don't think RFK Jr., you know, he's pretty buff, but I don't think he'd last that long.
	He's quite old, you know?
	Biden definitely wouldn't go through it.
	Trump would be dead within half a second.
	You'd definitely get some younger candidates, that's for sure.
	I'm kind of sick of old white men at this point.
	I do think that we've identified essentially the issue, which is merit has nothing to do with it, which is a problem.
	And at this stage, I'd happily have Schwarzenegger above all of them.
	Just throwing that out there.
	Jesse Ventura would be my pick.
	Out of the two of them, really?
	Yeah!
	Interesting.
	Okay, that's curious.
	We'll talk about it.
	That's another horse for another season.
	That's an off-brand subject.
	We're getting into that in a minute.
	Schwarzenegger in recent years has been fucking right on, I think.
	In the last five or six years.
	Jesse the mighty Ventura is my man.
	Listen, of that very limited group, I need to be crystal clear.
	It's a small group.
	If we're taking 80s action stars, out of a lot of them, I wouldn't put Stallone up there.
	I don't think he's got there.
	No.
	No.
	No, no, no.
	Van Damme's out.
	Bruce Willis.
	He's had nice moments.
	You know what?
	We are in fraught fucking territory and I'm gonna be frank with you.
	I don't know.
	This game is not fun anymore.
	I'm quite enjoying the fantasy to be honest.
	But Bruce Willis wouldn't be able to do it for health reasons at this point.
	God love him.
	Bless him.
	I know.
	Well right.
	It's very sad.
	Who else?
	I keep thinking of like... Dolph Lundgren?
	Not bad.
	He's smart.
	He's capable.
	Maybe.
	I don't like this game.
	I kind of feel like it's a little Russian roulette-y to me.
	I don't like it.
	I'm going to find out so many terrible things really soon.
	No, the actual Russian roulette is the Republican side of it.
	Their whole candidacy is Russian roulette.
	Literally and figuratively.
	But also, the point is, the point I'm trying to make, movie and TV stars shouldn't be in office.
	I mean, like, listen.
	Honestly, Dolph Lundgren is a great example.
	I don't remember what degree he has.
	Biochemist?
	No.
	Oh my god.
	Anyway, yeah.
	He's a smart expert.
	Yeah, he's an educated academic person.
	Aside from that... One important take.
	You say all you want.
	I'm not digging a hole for myself anymore.
	I'm gonna, because the one thing that I think will happen, and I think he'll fucking win when he does it, is there is eventually going to be a Dwayne The Rock Johnson political campaign to be president.
	And I think the second he runs, he's fucking won.
	Oh, if he does he will, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, he will absolutely.
	If there was one person that was going to unify the country, probably that guy.
	Weirdly!
	Do you know about his politics, though?
	Uh, previously Republican.
	He's been pretty quiet in recent years.
	Yeah, why do you think that is?
	Yeah, that's it.
	That's it.
	But I mean, in terms of his campaign, he would unify the country.
	In terms of the vote, I think everyone would be like, because everyone fucking loves the guy.
	I love him.
	I used to watch wrestling back in the Attitude era.
	People's Elbow, baby.
	Him and Stone Cold Steve Austin beating the piss out of each other was one of my favorite parts of my childhood.
	And then you've seen him develop into bloody A-list actor and whatever else.
	One of the most profitable people in Hollywood.
	As an actor?
	Killin' it.
	Doing great, baby.
	Yeah.
	Not even that good an actor.
	Not even that good an actor, but you know what?
	He's entertaining.
	He's entertaining.
	Yeah.
	And fantastic in Jumanji as well.
	That was a great movie.
	Was not expecting that to be enjoyable, but he was great.
	Politics.
	Politics should be fucking boring.
	You're a public servant.
	You should be a skilled negotiator to get along with other people and organize and represent.
	I think he can do that.
	I don't know how... The thing is, right, the thing I will say about The Rock is... Are we going to have our first fight?
	No!
	In front of the listeners?
	Maybe.
	Are you trying to make a movie star?
	No, I'm not.
	I'm not.
	But the thing I will say is that if he went up for the job, I could at least trust that he would take it seriously, which I could not say for Donald Trump.
	I don't think that's...
	I think he would.
	I think he would.
	That's my personal opinion.
	But based on all of the shit that I've seen him say and do over the years, I think he would at least want to do a good job.
	Because there is, in earnest, somewhere inside him, a good person with a kind heart.
	I think he would genuinely want to do his best by the American people.
	That's my perspective.
	That's my perspective.
	When he was speaking at Republican political events.
	As the character The Rock, As the character The Rock,
	is worth pointing out, and this was nearly 30 years ago.
	Well, So.
	Or at least 20 years ago.
	It might have been early 2000.
	Well, I just, I think that taking it seriously is like, is subjective.
	I don't know.
	I did just have like a fun thought experiment in my mind where like Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a person of color.
	And so yeah, unifying the country behind, like, that'd be a real pickle for racists in America.
	I might be back on board for this reason.
	It would be fascinating to watch from that perspective.
	You know, because all of them will have watched and enjoyed his movies as well, no doubt.
	Or will have loved his wrestling career or, you know, it's, yeah, it would be really interesting.
	I think it'll happen.
	I think it'll happen.
	At some point in the next 20 years, that man is gonna be president.
	I think he's too smart.
	I wouldn't credit him with that.
	I don't think he's dumb, but... I think any man who's a person of color watching what happened to Barack Obama would be that the whatever notion that would override oh no that's i'm not doing that you in danger girl i'm not doing that but it would be an interesting predicament for a section of americans yeah i can't wait to see i can't wait to see it because i think it's going to happen uh but i but but also like
	Don't forget, in order to get to the kind of position that Dwayne Johnson is in, you have to have a lot of things, but an ego is one of them.
	And you have to think a lot of yourself.
	You have to think a lot of yourself to be able to believe that you can achieve the things that he's done.
	Was it?
	you know, and I think that that could override the thing of, you know, oh, this is what Obama
	went through. Also, it was a different time. It was a very 2008 to, you know, and 2012.
	They were we. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
	We were discussing this about a separate subject, but the world has changed a lot in the last 10 years.
	A lot in the last 10 years.
	Well, I feel like the racism part has actually gotten a lot more overt and ugly, which is what would give me awe.
	That's one of the ways it's changed.
	That's one of the ways it's changed.
	But also there are more Fast and Furious movies, I guess.
	More Fast and Furious movies, more The Rock movies in general.
	Right.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Right.
	Well, that.
	I wasn't on board, you brought me back.
	With, like, the threat posed at racists that I can get on board with.
	I'm mostly just talking shit, but I would love to see it.
	I really would love to see it.
	I really would.
	Because any amount of fun would be nice, because this is all miserable.
	Yeah, well, and do you know what?
	It would be fucking fascinating to see.
	Yeah um anyway right we should we should go go off brand at this point um because we're already halfway there we can tell um yeah so uh if anyone wants to uh support us and what we do become an awakening wonder or or uh or join the invisible hand um then uh head over to patreon.com I came up with that one I'm very proud of myself Yes, yes, that was Lauren's call and I think it's an excellent one.
	I love that it sounds like a cult as well, you know, joining the invisible hand.
	It's very Illuminati.
	It's great, I love it.
	That is going to make a fantastic t-shirt at some point.
	Oh yeah, no, I thought about that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And if you want to find us on social media, we are in most places at the On Brand Pod, definitely on Instagram that way, etc, etc, TikTok.
	TikTok, we're on TikTok.
	And Blue Sky and Twitter and yeah and we have a subreddit also.
	Oh it's not Twitter anymore it's X because it's now a porn site apparently.
	If you want to send us an email it's theonbrandpod at Gmail.
	Well, did you see that thing of all the tabs next to each other and only one of them wasn't porn?
	They all just had an X on the thing.
	And Meta own the rights to X being in social media.
	It's hilarious.
	Yeah, send us an email.
	Theonbrownpod at gmail.com.
	Say hi!
	I've got a couple of emails I know I need to respond to.
	One from Wes.
	I will get to you as soon as I can, my friend.
	Or leave a voice message on Spotify, where you can also watch video.
	The link, I think, should be in the episode description in general, in most places, I think.
	Oh yeah, just record something and just send it to us.
	That's perfectly fine.
	And our personal socials.
	I'm at Al Worth Official, and Lauren is at made.buy.lauren.be.
	Yeah, tell your friends, tell your mom, tell your grandma, you know, whoever you think would enjoy this.
	Or people who you don't think would enjoy this.
	Send it to them maliciously and see what they say.
	I'm perfectly fine with that as well.
	Yeah, it takes all kinds, hey.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	And in the meantime, we will see you next week, probably with a palate cleanser of some kind, because after this last week, fucking hell.
	Thank you, buddy.
	You did it.
	We did it.
	As long as nothing pressing comes up, which you just never know with this guy, then hopefully it'll be something a little bit lighter, but we'll see.
	In the meantime, we are going to go to off-brand, but we will see you all next week.
	Thank you.
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	Bye bye bye.

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