Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein critique Reason TV's "hit piece" on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing that dismissing his regulatory capture claims without debate mirrors flawed libertarian strategies seen in Iraq War debates. They defend RFK Jr.'s skepticism of vaccines, citing pediatrician pressure and accurate statistics on polio cases and autism rates, while refuting the idea that he is merely a "professional contrarian." Ultimately, they contend that ignoring systemic corruption to focus on minor inconsistencies alienates listeners and suggests that true libertarianism requires engaging with substantive arguments rather than attacking the messenger. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Exciting Editing Process00:03:34
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gas Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Back in my studio, Rob back at home for the first time in a while.
Of course, I'm Dave Smith.
He is my life partner, Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, brother?
How are you?
It's nice to be home for one night and then right back on the road tomorrow.
Free Meat Cawk gig in Memphis and then Milwaukee on Saturday in Madison Grove, Wisconsin for a Sunday afternoon day drinkers.
Come hang.
Ooh, you're traveling around quite a bit.
And don't forget, me and you will both be in Cleveland in a couple weeks, I think.
Cleveland hilarities.
Go to comicdave Smith.com to get all our tickets.
I've heard good things about that club.
I've heard wonderful things about that club.
And I heard great things about the Comedy Club of Kansas City where we just were, and they were true.
It was a great club.
So I'm hoping this one will be true as well.
We get good intel more often than not.
That is essentially the theme of this show, Rob, is that our intel is more often good than not.
And of course, RobbyTheFire.com for all of Rob's stuff that he's doing.
Some reporter tour.
Go check all that stuff out.
All right.
Where to start tonight, Rob?
You're filming.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's right.
Last night, I filmed my second comedy special.
It's been a few years since I filmed my first one, and it was a great night.
Genuinely one of the best nights in my career.
A lot of people I loved were there and you.
That's sweet.
That's not, that was unnecessary.
No, but I was very happy that you were in the building.
A lot of people who I loved were there.
It was a great fucking crowd.
Me and Lewis both filmed comedy specials that'll be out.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Now we got to go into the editing process.
I think within the next couple months, they'll be out and up on YouTube and shit like that.
But it was a cool, it was a cool night.
And yeah, I was very happy with how it went.
Dude, I'm excited to see it come out because I felt like you got it.
I mean, everything was popping.
I was really impressed with the production, the look, the aesthetic of the room.
So I think that's going to really boost the road.
I'm looking forward to it.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
I got a lot of great feedback and then a lot of messages today from like, you know, great people who I respect a lot who are like, yo, dude, I've heard nothing but great things.
And people who were there and were like, oh, it was great.
And, you know, it's weird when you record a comedy special.
It's like you kind of, you have all the material and then you do it and then you feel kind of good about it.
And then as soon as it's over, you're like, oh, now I got to do the editing process, which sucks.
Balls.
So that's where I am now.
But I'm excited for all of you guys listening to see it.
I think you're going to enjoy it.
And Lewis's too, man.
Lewis's was so goddamn funny.
So I'm real excited for them to all come out.
Responding to Online Revolt00:15:47
Okay.
So let's get into an episode, shall we?
So there was a, this is what today's episode is going to be.
There was a video from Reason TV.
I would describe it, I think, fairly, as a hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And when I say a hit piece, I don't mean that to immediately discredit it.
I think sometimes, you know, people deserve hit pieces on them, but I think this is fair to categorize this as a hit piece.
And it is getting insanely ratioed.
I don't know how else to describe it.
If you go check out the YouTube video, the comments on it are like just thousands of comments.
of people being like, this is so unfair.
And not just like comments where people are saying this is unfair, but comments where people are trashing them and the comment has thousands of likes, 600, 700 likes.
The post on Twitter has just thousands of comments underneath it.
It's a very kind of interesting moment to me.
And I'm not saying, I think people kind of like at times will go, oh, so what are we supposed to do?
Judge everything by the YouTube comments or the Twitter replies or something like that.
And I'm not saying that, but I do find it interesting when there's one of these pieces that gets so much of a revolt from people online.
And that's not a perfect metric for anything, but it is almost as good a metric as anything.
What's better than that?
What are we supposed to look at?
What's just accepted in the corporate press or something like that?
It's something.
And so I feel like this was just an interesting moment where you're like, okay, what's going on here?
And what does this exactly say?
And why is this evoking such a response from so many people?
And, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about the RFK phenomenon, which I think is a fair word to call it at this point, because I know, you know, we had him on this show.
The show where I interviewed him has gotten something like, I don't know, it's somewhere in the ballpark of like a million downloads.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would, I'll do it with him every day.
It's somewhere around a million downloads for that episode.
We had a couple subsequent shows where we talked about him, different things, the crystal ball thing with him, and it just got like really blew up.
And it just seems like there's a tremendous amount of interest in this guy.
And that doesn't mean anything about him is good or bad, but it does mean that there's something to kind of think about here.
And that in itself makes it kind of interesting.
And when it's Reason Magazine, who for people who don't know, Reason TV, but Reason Magazine is one of the biggest, more kind of establishment, longest lasting or longest running libertarian publications out there.
And they have their YouTube, you know, Reason TV is like the YouTube arm of Reason Magazine used to be like a hard hardcover.
I don't know, whatever, used to be a magazine.
And, you know, we're not really in the age of magazines anymore, but that they still put out a publication and they have YouTube videos and stuff like that.
And so it's just interesting from our perspective as a couple of people who are libertarians who have also been very interested in the RFK campaign to see this kind of moment where So much heat is being generated at what is a libertarian response, maybe not our version of libertarianism, but a libertarian response to RFK.
Right.
The pro-COVID vaccine, pro-mandate, and anti-MECOC libertarian branch of our party.
Right.
I guess what a shocker.
They have a take different than us.
Right.
Yes.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Well, I think one of the things that I find interesting about this is that there are a lot of people, and I think many of the people in the reason camp who don't exactly understand why this is getting the reaction that it is.
And I feel like I do understand why it's getting this reaction.
And that's something I wanted to kind of get into.
And then I want to play the video.
I want to go through it.
I've also, for people who follow me on Twitter, I've been having a little bit of a Twitter exchange with Liz Wolf, who was the woman who made the video or the woman in the video.
And I'm hoping we can, she's going to come on the podcast and we could talk about this.
I'm not sure if we're going to make that work or not yet.
She hasn't given me like a definitive answer, but we'll see if we can make that happen.
I'd be happy to do it.
I'll preface with this.
And then maybe at some point we could like, I'll read you the tweets and we can kind of go over what was said between us.
But I want to go through the video also and kind of respond to some of what's going on here.
But I think that one of the things that's important to understand, and this is something that we've addressed before.
And when you're a libertarian, there's kind of this interesting dynamic where you can apply your libertarian views in many different ways.
You know, it's if you believe in liberty, well, we believe in liberty across the board, but that doesn't mean that you can't, you know, say, talk about one specific issue and focus on what the libertarian take on that issue would be.
But that can also lead you into areas where you miss the big picture.
And I kind of think that's what's going on here.
You know, we've talked a lot about this, where you'd see libertarians, let's say during the height of COVID, whether it was whatever it was, let's say it was during the height of like vaccine mandates during COVID.
And you'd have someone like Ron DeSantis in Florida, and he would have a bill that says it's illegal for private businesses to have their own mandates, whether mask mandates or vaccine mandates or something like that.
And you'd see a lot of libertarians who are writing pieces attacking him and going, hey, you know, this is not a libertarian solution.
And it is authoritarian for you to tell a private business that they can't have whatever rules they want to on their private business on their private property.
And that is technically correct.
It is correct.
From the libertarian perspective, I mean, it's tough to argue against that.
Like, that's just right.
However, at the same time as you have that, you would have libertarians like at the Cato Institute, not Reason, but another kind of similar organization, who would be putting out these pieces like the libertarian case for vaccine mandates.
And that was stupid.
Okay, the argument there was like something along the lines of, well, it's less of an infringement on liberty than mask mandates, which I don't agree with, but this is the argument.
It's less of an infringement on liberty than lockdowns.
It's less of an infringement on liberty than mask mandates.
So the libertarian who supports maximum liberty and minimal, you know, blah, blah, blah, they could they can deal with this.
And that, okay, that's stupid.
That was like a really bad take.
It's like, you know, the libertarian case for stabbing.
Well, it's better than shooting, you know, like that's just ridiculous.
But okay, but so we had a lot of that stuff coming out.
But that aside, say the libertarian case for why DeSantis's bans on private mandates are wrong is actually a fairly strong libertarian argument.
You can argue pretty strongly that on people's private property, they should be able to do what they want to do.
However, the reason why something like that would get a bad response from a lot of people, not just libertarians, but a lot of people, is not because technically it's not correct.
It's because what it's more like, what are you doing here when you're writing this piece, especially if you haven't focused on the bigger issue?
Like if you really care about liberty, are you talking at all about the fact that in all of these other states, there are government enforced mandates in the opposite direction?
Now, if you have and you're railing against Fauci and lockdowns and vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and then you also go, and by the way, I don't think DeSantis needs to go this far.
I think this is wrong.
Then okay.
But there were so many people who would focus all their energy on just the response.
And then you sit there and you go, okay, well, now you're almost like weaponizing libertarianism to be this thing where if there's a huge crackdown on liberty, you're going to respond to the reaction to that crackdown and judge them on whether they have a perfect score or not, rather than focusing on the huge crackdown to liberty.
Daniel McAdams, who is, of course, Ron Paul's co-host on the Liberty Report, he has this rule that is, I think it's, I think he came up with it, where he said the libertarian rule is never do the bidding of the CIA.
Like never.
Now, I don't know that it's a complete law of libertarian physics.
There are exceptions to it.
Like if someone needs to be waterboarded, like just you have to do it.
Yeah, some sometimes.
Well, I say, if someone asks me, do you think Vladimir Putin is a good guy who was justified in invading Ukraine?
I will say no.
No, I don't.
I think he's a bad guy.
And I think invading Ukraine was wrong.
Now, okay, in a sense, that is kind of what the regime would like me to say.
But okay, I don't think you have to take it that far.
I don't think I have to say that Kim Jong-un is a good leader or something like that.
But the point I believe that he's getting at is that it's like this.
It's like, if you're a libertarian in 2002 and in 2002, the war drums are beating for the war in Iraq.
And, you know, George W. Bush is coming out every day and making his case of how Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and how we actually know that he was in bed with Al Qaeda and he was involved in the planning of 9-11.
And he's trying to get these weapons of mass destruction that he really has into the hands of these terrorists that he's really allies with and that they're going to try to detonate a bomb in, you know, Mississippi.
or whatever the fucking propaganda at the time was which, by the way, what i'm saying, is not that far off.
It was something like that.
Um, and let's say you're a libertarian writing in a libertarian publication, and let's say you just constantly are writing pieces about what a brutal dictator Saddam Hussein is and how he violates the natural rights of all of the people who live under his regime and how their regime would be so much better off if Saddam Hussein just wasn't there.
Okay, that is technically true.
That is accurate from a libertarian perspective.
You're not actually wrong.
However, for non-autistic libertarians who might actually be capable of zooming out and looking at the bigger picture, you might ask yourself, what the fuck are you doing right now?
Like, why is this what you're focusing on?
How is it possible that you think this is the most important thing for a libertarian to say right now when you see what's going on?
And it would make people think that you are naive at best and a tool of the regime at worst, if that makes sense.
And I think that's a big part of what's going on here.
I think that's a big part of why people are having such a knee-jerk reaction against this video.
I really do not believe that it is that so many people so sincerely believe that Wi-Fi is causing these negative health externalities.
I don't think that's what's going on here.
I think it's that people see someone fighting against this most corrupt regime, and then they see everyone in the establishment trying to just fucking like discard this guy without being willing to take on his arguments, Without being willing to sit down mano-a mano with him and actually let like let's see what his response to this would be.
There's so much um, there's such a scramble to just not deal with what he has to say and dismiss him that I think this is kind of what's creating this reaction that people are like yo, I don't, I don't like what you're doing here.
I don't like that everyone's just writing a hit piece about this guy or making a video that's a hit piece about this guy, without being willing to sit down and talk to this guy, who's clearly willing to sit down and talk to anyone.
He was on our show.
He's on, he's going on every show.
It is very clear that RFK is not turning down a debate with anyone.
And there's something about that that people just kind of sniff out and go, yeah, this guy believes he's right.
And you do not seem to have the confidence that you can actually go and tangle with him.
So that I think it's almost necessary to say that to start this off so people understand what's going on here.
It's not a, and I see a lot of these people from, at least from, from the, the tweets and responses and stuff like the reason magazine types who don't seem to get this.
Nevin Eyewear Review00:03:42
They don't seem to get this.
That is in the same sense if you were writing a piece about how awful Saddam Hussein is and someone's furious at you.
It's not that they don't agree that Saddam Hussein's awful.
It's just that you're writing this piece about how Saddam Hussein is awful.
And then I'm going, no, dude, this is fucking, you're missing the whole point.
And then their response is, so you think Saddam's great.
So you must be a Saddam Hussein apologist.
And you're like, dude, what the fuck are you actually missing the bigger picture here?
I don't know what the deal with all these vaccines is.
That's how most people feel.
We don't know.
We're questioning everything these days, but we don't know.
But the point is that he's talking about how corrupt this system is.
And for some reason, you can figure that out.
I'm not going to tell you what it is.
But publications like Reason and Cato never seem to have the level of disdain for Anthony Fauci that they have for RFK.
Now, why the fuck is that?
Because don't sit here and tell me that Anthony Fauci hasn't pushed as much misinformation as you could accuse RFK of pushing at worst.
And who had a bigger impact?
Like who really fucking, who's misinform in, whose misinformation affected more people's lives?
Give me that answer.
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You know, I remember the old guard in the Libertarian Party.
So this is when I, before I joined the Libertarian Party, this was like in 2017, around the time I filmed my first comedy special, Libertas, by the way, up on YouTube, available.
You can go watch it.
Life-changing.
Anyway, so in 2017, I remember that there were a bunch of people in the old guard of the LP and a lot of the kind of like establishment libertarian types.
In fact, I remember I did my first interview with Reason Magazine.
Charlottesville Focus00:03:10
at that point.
And one of the big topics that Reason TV, whatever, Nick Gillespie interviewed me when I put that first special out.
And by the way, I like Nick.
He was very nice to me and nice things to say about my first comedy special.
And he was like, nothing against him.
But one of the major topics that he wanted to talk about was the alt-right.
Charlottesville, Christopher Cantwell.
This was like half our interview was talking about that.
And that same year, the Libertarian Party demanded, or the then chair of the Libertarian Party and a few other people involved demanded that we sign a pledge denouncing Nazism and the people who protested at Charlottesville and saying that they had no part in the Libertarian Party.
And at the time, I was more of like a small dog in this world.
I wasn't really like the big, you know, guy.
It was really more about Tom Woods and Jeff Deist and people like that.
I kind of rose up over the years and have been more one of the more prominent members now.
But at the time, they were demanding that they all sign this pledge and they all refused.
Like all the people in my camp refused.
And they were like, yo, this is fucking stupid.
We're not doing this.
And this became a big issue.
And to this day, I get random people like in that world who are like, you're, you're too soft on the alt-right.
You know, to this day, there are people who still say this.
And it's like, it's not that they're wrong, technically, in the same sense that it's not like you're technically wrong if you said Saddam Hussein is an authoritarian.
It's just that I'm going to focus my energy on George W. Bush trying to launch this war in Iraq.
Because I think that's more of actually the issue of the thing we should be against.
Does that make sense?
It's like, yeah, I know, I know.
Like, I have to be concerned about the rise of fascism because 200 people marched in 2017 with some torches and some fucking khaki pants shorts in Charlottesville.
Meanwhile, our government has gone legit fascist since then.
Like, what do you think is a more important thing to focus on?
I would say the latter.
I would say the latter is a slightly more important thing to focus on.
And there's something about when people start focusing on the prior and that's what gets them outraged.
And the latter, they may even say they resist, but it doesn't seem to get them quite as outraged that people just start smelling something on you.
And that's when they start going, nah, dude, you're like, and then, and look, I know you'll get called a lot of things online that you, you're not necessarily, but they'll be like, yo, you're a fed.
Pushback on RFK Interview00:03:44
You're a fed.
I can just smell on you.
You're a fucking plant and you're working for the other side.
I think all of that, if you understand the point that I'm making here, you're going to understand a lot more why this video is getting ratioed from, I mean, something from the gods.
I don't know.
Any thoughts on any of that, Rob?
So basically, you're saying they cut down people's ability to shine a light on important issues by using these little weasel tricks of going like, hey, we support white nationalism, which we obviously don't.
Yeah.
With that said, just for technical accuracy, I guess in this case, Reason did have a conversation with him.
Well, I think I and to be honest, I think that hurts them more because what happened is, and look, to be fair, this is Liz Wolf who put out this video.
She wasn't on the call.
It was Nick and Zach who were on the interview with RFK Jr.
But Reason, nonetheless, they're a publication or whatever, an organization.
And so they have a week or so, a week or two weeks before this video comes out.
They have an interview with RFK and they talk to him.
And I'll tell you, they gave him some pushback.
I thought RFK did a decent job at some of the difficult questions they asked.
I thought there were some that he could have done better.
And I wasn't completely happy with some of his responses.
But overall, as an interview, I thought he did pretty good.
And then like a week later, they just launched this hit piece with all these things, most of which was not brought up in the interview.
And also within the context of what's going on, obviously, as we all know, has been probably one of the biggest political stories in the nation, is that all the experts are saying they're unwilling to debate this guy.
And now he's just debating journalists who don't know anything about what he's talking about.
And so it's just this very weird dynamic when you know that as an organization, Reason should know that, look, at this point right now, the big story is that none of these experts are willing to debate him.
And by the way, they're not just not willing to debate him.
They're not willing to debate McCullough or fucking any of the other experts who dissent from them.
None of them will do that.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Who's willing to go?
Who's willing to go debate any of the experts who have dissented from the COVID regime?
Who said lockdowns were wrong, mandates were wrong, the vaccine is not what they sold it to be.
Who's willing to go have that debate?
Because there's plenty of experts who disagree with all of that stuff.
Okay.
So now it becomes this thing where, like, you know, one of the biggest stories was this Hotez guy refusing to go debate RFK on the biggest show in the world.
Okay.
He wouldn't do that.
You have him.
He's willing to come on the Reason podcast and talk to Zach and Nick.
Okay.
They give him some pushback.
He has his responses.
And then you're going to like a week later come out with this hit piece with all these things that you didn't ask him at the time.
And then all these things that kind of seem to ignore what he said to the pushback or at least like not take it into account.
Vaccine Debate Integrity00:15:01
It's just not, it's not a good move.
It's not a good move for reason.
And they're, they're paying the price now.
It reminds me of the crystal ball thing, where there's something kind of interesting about this moment where you don't just see like, you know, me and you have done shows before where we rustled some feathers from our audience members.
And that's okay.
That's good to do sometimes.
But this is more like a revolt, you know?
Like, you're like, geez, man, you're in this space.
where these people are your listeners and they are telling you on every level.
They are furious at what you're doing.
Now, on one hand, I would say it's good if you can do that sometimes.
That does show some integrity, at least theoretically.
Like, it's good.
There's been times before where I've taken positions that I knew were, it was going to bother the people listening.
And I believed it enough that I was like, you know what?
I got to do this.
And I'll make the calculation overall that, you know what, having integrity is more important than not having integrity.
And I don't want to do this if I'm not telling you the truth as I see it.
And we'll see what happens.
There's a few examples that pop up to me, but I remember during 2020, I was really vocally critical of the Black Lives Matter riots because I don't really tolerate just destroying people's property and assaulting people and murdering people.
And this was happening all across the country.
And I don't really care how you feel about police brutality.
You have no right to go around assaulting people and vandalizing their property.
And so I was a lot of people who were opposed to, agreed with me on that were getting on board.
And then when that Chauvin guy got convicted, I remember like tweeting and podcasting about how great I thought it was that he got convicted for murder.
And I got a lot of people responding to me and they're like, oh, so you're selling out now, Dave.
Oh, so you're like, you're, you agree with CNN.
And I'm like, sure.
If they agree with this, then sure, I agree with them.
Like, I don't know who you think I am that just because I'm against fucking rioting, that I don't think that this fucking pig who fucking kneeled on some guy's neck who was handcuffed on the ground shouldn't fucking, I don't give a shit.
Fuck that guy.
If he found some guy with an unregistered gun, he would have no hesitation to throw him in handcuffs and throw him in a cage for fucking a decade or whatever the fuck the sentence is.
So fuck him.
I don't care, you know?
And I'm happy to, I'll go to war on that point with anyone who wants to argue about it with me.
Fine.
And there's been lots of examples like that.
I, you know, I, I, um, I, I, I don't know.
There's lots of examples of that where I remember being on Tim Poole's show and almost every time I go on Tim Poole's show, I get nothing but a great response.
But there was one time I went on where I just shit on Trump and then Tim was kind of arguing with me and the whole episode turned into me just shitting on Trump.
And I got a lot of heat.
I got a lot of bad responses from that episode.
But it was like, eh, I don't know.
I believe in this.
And so I'm going to, so I'm not saying that like you should never do something that will piss off your own audience.
But if you do piss off your own audience to such an extent, I think it's reasonable to say Maybe if you have some humility, listen.
Listen to what they're saying.
And like, really think through whether or not there's something here that you're missing or there's something here that they are responding to that's legitimate.
That's all I'm saying.
It doesn't prove anything that your audience is furious at you.
But man, their audience is furious at them.
All right.
Let's jump into the video a little bit and I think maybe touch on some things.
By the way, one more thing before we get into this.
I'll also make the point that Rob, you, I believe, just did an episode where you were like pretty, pretty heavily critical of RFK and saying that he's playing some unfair games in his in the positions that he's taking on vaccines.
Is that correct?
Yeah, go check it out.
It's two episodes back.
Starts with Bobby the Bank.
It's about 25 minutes in.
And to give you the very short criticism, I've watched him in five different locations now, and I can't tell you what his opinion is.
And from kind of being decent with watching debate tricks and knowing the way people present information, it seems like he purposely doesn't want to give a clear opinion on what specifically his opinion is, because I don't think he wants to be pinned down on the topic.
And that includes things like just the short version of it is it includes things like it's not my signature issue.
But you're talking quite a bit about regulatory capture.
And so if this is a version of regulatory capture that the vaccine companies have taken over and put out these products, so it sounds like you would be initiating a changeless product or he likes to go, I love vaccines.
Well, it sounds to me like you want to get rid of 99% of them or I don't know what two out of 70 is, but it sounds like you're trying to get rid of most of them.
99, but close enough.
Right.
So it doesn't sound like, so that's not really technically accurate.
I mean, it might be technically accurate that he loves vaccine technology, but only if it's been double placebo.
But that's not a very honest way of presenting the fact that you would like to get most of the vaccines off of the market.
And so a little, oh, tell me what my opinion is and where I got it wrong.
Now, the news kind of presents the information in a way that allows him to take that approach, but that also doesn't allow me to really get a full understanding of what his opinion is.
And then just the last trick, because this one I would say is the most important, is that the entire conversation needs, by the way, I'm not pro vaccines.
I don't know enough about it.
But the way that I would want to evaluate that information is the risk versus reward.
So is it overwhelmingly positive or is it overwhelmingly bad?
If there's select vaccines that have, you know, problems, guess what?
Every time someone gets into a car, they're at risk for, you know, for a car accident.
Guess what?
I think that overwhelmingly we should use carbon and continue to grow our economy.
Does that mean that there's no effect on the environment?
Of course there is.
Can you tell me scattered stories of corporations that have gone too far with pollution and the negative effects that it's had on kids?
Yes.
Does that mean that we should shut down, become Amish and not have any technology or economic growth?
That's not my perspective.
Do I think because of the car accidents on the road, no one should be able to drive a car to work?
No.
And that's the wrong way to look at information.
So just thus far, the more honest approach would be, hey, most vaccines have not been double blind placebo tested.
Here's why we need that in order to have a safety profile.
And I actually think if you look at the numbers, they're more dangerous than they are helpful.
He hasn't, from every debate that I've watched, which is now six or seven or four or five podcasts, that's not the conversation.
Well, look, okay, so I agree with you on that, that the question has to be kind of like, what is the risk versus reward?
It can't just be narrowed down to like, well, here are the negatives.
The thing that I think the, I don't know what the, you know, the mainstream, for lack of better term, they allow him to get away with this because they, they don't, what you would want to see, and this is why I think so much, so many of us want to see a debate about these issues, is that what you would want to see is them start an interview like, hey,
so what exactly is your position on vaccines?
What exactly is your position on the MMR vaccine?
What exactly is your position on the COVID vaccine?
And I think the Rogan podcast was probably the best one where he was just kind of asking questions like that.
But what happens with a lot of these interviews is the crystal ball thing where they'll go, well, listen, you are pushing discredited, false, you know, bullshit about the vaccines.
And then that allows him to go, well, what am I wrong about?
What's false?
You tell me what's false in my position.
And then he comes off being like the guy who's like, yeah, okay, that's a reasonable response to that question.
But to your point, it does seem like sometimes he is kind of, he's, he's saying, look, I just think they should be tested more.
Or I just think this.
I have nothing against vaccine.
And then sometimes it seems like he's saying, you know, no, I believe that these are a contributing factor to autism and to all of these chronic illnesses.
And, but it, it, even if they are a contributing factor to those things, which is, is debatable, but you'd still want to go, okay, but then what's the benefit?
What's the benefit versus what the cost is?
Because that's the only way you actually make, because there's no, like, to your point, there's no question cars are a contributing factor to automobile accidents.
They're the majority.
It might be a significant factor for death in the United States of America.
Right.
We tolerate it.
But you'd also say, yes, but they also create like all of this opportunity for economic growth and freedom and all of these things.
Okay.
So I think all of that's fair.
But I just almost want to make it clear that me and you are not coming from this position like we really have a dog in this fight.
I'm not coming at this from a position of like, I'm anti-vax and I want the thing to be that these vaccines cause all these problems.
I don't know.
I do not know.
And we can get into this a little bit more.
Let's let's jump into this.
I just wish I got the HPV vaccine earlier.
That's all I wish for my life.
You really should have.
Okay, let's jump into this video and start off here.
The nonprofit Children's Health Defense, which warns of the possible dangers posed by vaccines, used to receive a modest 119,000 monthly visits to its website.
When COVID happened, public skepticism of the medical establishment exploded and the site's web traffic went wild, peaking at 5 million monthly visits.
So who's behind this group that warns of the dangers of electromagnetic radiation and the global cabal attempting to ban meat?
The group's chairman, chief legal counsel, and highest compensated officer is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was moved out of the fringe after lunch.
It's just the starting point on this is looking at it as a negative that it exploded during, well, how overwhelmingly right and wrong.
Like, I don't know.
By the way, his website seemed out there enough during COVID that when I was doing all of my COVID research and I ended up on his website, I didn't read it because it seemed so out there that that was not a place that I was sourcing materials from.
So I don't know what was there.
And I'm also not saying that it was wrong.
I'm just telling you that when I was doing a lot of COVID research and they had similar things over there, I was not reading that website and I would not take that as my, as my place for source material.
It's just so, yes, it's the starting point is so unfair because what she's doing.
But she's pointing to a good.
She's literally pointing to a good.
Yes, there's problems with actually this whole racket of we're going to be eating bugs.
Look at what they just tried to do with the nitrogen and like the, you know, they are trying to take maneuvers towards the food supply.
They were very wrong about COVID.
And he was educating people to the fact that the vaccine regimen that they put out was terrible.
Everything she's mentioned thus far is an overwhelmingly positive thing in his favor.
Yeah, but it's they're all she's presenting it.
At least it seems to be implied that this should somehow cloud how like how you look at him that he is benefiting from this group.
Like it's it's as if you know, if I had a website that was about how the U.S. government lies us into war.
And then, you know, as soon as we invaded Iraq, my website went from 100,000 views a day to 5 million views a day.
And who was the big beneficiary of that?
Well, it was me.
And therefore, you shouldn't look at me the same way.
Like, what does that mean?
Right.
Truth is valuable.
If I'm in the game of giving out information and all of a sudden my information is highly popular, that's not proof of the fact that it's wrong or bad.
Yeah.
If I'm in the game of saying you should be skeptical of the medical establishment and then the medical establishment gets it wrong in the most profound way ever and my website like blows up from that, that doesn't prove anything, man.
And like, look, you know, I've talked about this before, but maybe I don't know if I like quite hit home with this as much.
But you know, Rob, as I've told you several times on this show, and I think we've talked about this privately too, but I had a crazy experience that was a life-changing experience for me that I will never look at, not even the medical establishment.
I mean, I will never look at doctors the same way as when I had a pediatrician that I had to leave.
It was my family pediatrician, which by the way, I was not in a shitty place when this was my pediatrician.
I was not fucking making $20,000 a year and I was going to the Medicaid fucking doctor.
I was doing quite well.
And I was going to a person who was like a very well-respected fucking pediatrician in the area where I was living at the time.
And he was arguing with me in 2022 that I should get my, at the time, I believe my boy was seven months old, something like that, between seven and nine months old, somewhere like in that range.
The most at risk for COVID.
Yes.
Right.
And he was they had just approved the vaccine for six month olds and above.
And he was trying to get me to give him the vaccine.
We're keeping this baby at home with me and my wife who both have COVID, but he could infect other people.
So I mean, the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, but you better get him vaccinated.
Three Hour Podcast Idea00:05:17
I try to, for people listening who don't have kids, it's hard to like explain.
But like imagine you had like a little, a little bundle that represents everything in your life that you care about.
Everything.
You know, your professional life and your the home that you live in.
Like if something happens to this, you know, imagine you lose your health, you lose your home, you lose your girlfriend, your boyfriend, husband, wife, whatever.
You lose your job, you get stabbed in the eyes a million times.
You get just everything.
Your mother dies, your father dies, your grandma gets tortured to death.
Like everything bad happens if something bad happens to this little package.
That's kind of how you feel when you have.
A kid like that, your entire existence, you would.
You would die to make sure this thing is okay.
And so I got this little baby and and this doctor is trying to argue with me not that, not also he's arguing with me that me and my wife and my at the time Three-year-old daughter and my eight month old I can't remember exactly how old he was, but around that should all get the Covet vaccine.
And this is this is Post Delta Wave.
You know, this is Omicron, was in South Africa and hadn't made it to America yet, and I have now.
I have not done a deep dive on all of these other uh vaccines.
Maybe I should.
There's a lot of things i've done deep dives on that i'd feel very comfortable to talk to you about.
If you want to talk about the history of uh, the you know, the Post-soviet history of um?
U.s.
Russian tensions, the history of the Ukrainian Russian conflict, I?
I i'd do a three hour podcast with you tomorrow on that and be very comfortable to talk about that.
If you want to talk about the monetary history in America over the last hundred years, i'd do a three hour podcast.
The history of the war in Syria or Somalia or Yemen or Iraq.
Um, you know, there's lots of things that i'd be like, literally with no preparation, i'll do a three hour podcast with you on and talk about all of this.
I don't feel that way about the Mmr vaccine.
I I don't feel that way about a lot of this other stuff.
I I couldn't do that about, like wi-fi and the you know chemicals in the water and all this other shit.
I just I, I don't know that stuff as well as I know other things.
But I did dive into the Covid vaccine because we, you know it was a pretty big issue and me and you were doing a show three times a week and we, you know, this was the biggest thing for a while.
So I knew a lot about that.
I was ready to talk about that and to be in this situation where this fucking doctor is giving you advice about your world.
Who is this little baby?
Who is, by the way, my son has a very serious congenital heart defect, who had open heart surgery at three days old and he's telling you, shoot him up with this stuff.
What are you doing?
And then we're having a debate and i'm wrecking him like, objectively speaking, he's getting it all wrong because he doesn't know half the shit that I know.
It was eye-opening and not in a sense where I always would have known that big pharma was corrupt.
I always would have known that any like the CDC was corrupt.
But it was shocking to me that your family doctor could be, I don't know if he was corrupt.
I don't know if he was getting some type of money for this, or if it was just the fact that he was just following what the fucking organization said.
And he was just taking that as gospel and just telling me that.
But you're like, wow, you would really expect when your family doctor tells you, hey, you got this baby boy who's had open heart surgery, you know, that like, if I'm telling you to inject something that is, you know, associated with risks to heart conditions, I've done my research and I know what's going on.
And this guy objectively didn't.
Like I would talk to him about these things and he didn't know half of what I knew.
And this isn't like my opinion is that I was right and he was wrong.
I'm saying that no one could even argue today that I was right and he was wrong.
At the time, the guy was arguing that if you got the fucking initial double booster, that's what he was talking about, the initial vaccine that you couldn't catch or transmit the Omicron.
That's what he was arguing with me.
No one can defend that today.
And I knew he was wrong and he thought he was right.
So I'm just saying, why would a website like this explode during those times?
Local Gun Shop Sponsor00:02:08
I don't care if RFK was benefiting from that.
And then by the way, also RFK probably, you know, if he benefited from this website exploding, imagine the fact that RFK is a Kennedy.
He's been a Kennedy his whole life.
How many years was he an anti-vaxxer that it just hurt him?
You know what I mean?
And then you're telling me when the biggest, most important vaccine rollout mandate propaganda campaign came up, he benefited from that?
It doesn't prove anything.
Like it doesn't at all.
You get the point I'm making, right?
Yes.
That it's like to try to hit him with that as a knock is nonsense.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing because we're, whoo, we're going a lot longer than I thought before we played a lot of this video.
Establishment Corruption Claims00:07:08
Let's keep going.
RFK Jr. is not worthy of the rehabilitation tour he's been getting from pundits, podcasters, and tech luminaries.
He's built a career as a professional contrarian.
He pushes tablet quality reporting and he wildly extrapolates from little grains of truth.
He frequently implies that the establishment is corrupt at best, evil at worst, and he winks at the existence of puppet masters pulling the strings of major institutions.
Paularization.
Pause it.
Pause it.
Rob, what do you...
Look, I don't even know what to say to that.
As libertarians, we are supposed to have total faith in our institutions.
Isn't that too important?
I mean, forget even as libertarians.
Like, even forget that we're libertarians.
But yes, I think, I almost think she's just describing libertarianism, but she's saying it again.
She's just saying it in this tone as if there's something about that that's anything other than objectively factual.
He, he, the quote, he, um, he frequently implies that the establishment is corrupt at best, evil at worst.
That's, that is the moderate position, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, I'm not even talking about libertarians.
What honest left-winger or honest right-winger could even debate that the establishment is at best corrupt and at worst evil?
How could you possibly even argue that?
I'll take this a step further.
I will debate anyone who wants to argue that that is not a factual reality, that the establishment is corrupt at best and evil at worst.
What are we talking about?
Name the policy and I'll tell you how the best case scenario is that they're corrupt.
And in fact, I'll go a step further.
I'll take that they're evil.
You know, like, what do you mean?
What even is the line there?
What is the other option?
Thus far, her criticism of RFK Jr. is, can you believe that there's a person who's popular for questioning the COVID regime and pointing out the government might be corrupt?
What kind of mainstream bullshit is this?
This is like straight out of...
Yeah, this is straight up like Merrick Garland.
How dare we can't answer this?
Because that would be questioning the very institution of the Justice Department.
Yeah.
And there is something like...
Look, there's always been a split in the libertarian world between the kind of reason Kato camp and more of the like Mises Ron Paul camp.
And I think a big part of it is this.
And this is what we often describe as the blue-pilled libertarians.
And I know they don't like that description.
And okay, we don't like a lot of the descriptions they would give to us.
But I think part of the reason why they don't like it is because they don't understand what we mean by it.
But there is, there are people who I love who I think are really great.
Like I think John Stossel is really great.
I think he's the absolute best blue-pilled libertarian.
But he's still blue-pilled because he'll have this thing.
And he used to have this thing on his show constantly where the whole take, he would nail everything.
But then his final Distillation of what is really going on here would be like, look, these government bureaucrats are a bunch of jokers.
Like, that's, that's kind of what he takes away.
He goes, look, man, these guys think they're helping people, but they're really hurting people.
What a bunch of clowns.
And, and there was always something about our camp was like, no, they're not clowns.
What are you, retarded?
They're not clowns.
They know exactly what they're doing.
And it's like, and this is such a strange dynamic to see people struggle with this.
Where it's like, I remember Robert Murphy gave a speech that I was at years ago.
One of the first times I ever saw him talk live.
This is well before he knew who I was or I was anybody.
I was just there.
Like I bought a ticket to see him speak.
And he was talking about how there's these, you know, there's these people who be like, oh, what a bunch of jokers in the government.
I mean, they subsidize tobacco and they tax tobacco.
How stupid are they?
And then he was like, no, they're not stupid.
Like they subsidize tobacco and then they get huge campaign contributions from the tobacco industry and then they tax tobacco and they get revenue from that and they win over votes for, you know, presenting themselves as the people who care about your health.
Like they're not stupid.
You're stupid.
You're stupid for thinking they're jokers for doing this.
And that's kind of the, that's kind of the split in a way in this libertarian world, where there's these people who are like, you know, what a bunch of clowns.
And then there's the people on our side who are like, what a bunch of blood-soaked monsters.
That's a different thing.
A blood-soaked monster is a different thing than a clown.
And I don't think it's unreasonable to call them that.
And so then her, what was her next line?
That she says he frequently implies that the establishment is corrupt at best, evil at worst.
And he winks at the existence of puppet masters pulling the strings of major institutions.
Imagine still thinking that that's crazy.
That maybe there are some people involved in like pulling the strings of how this is operating.
I guess that's crazy still to some people these days.
You know, it's like when you say something and people, if you believe it or not, there are still some people who will call you a conspiracy theorist and think that that's an insult and think that they've they've proven that you're wrong by, oh, what are you a conspiracy?
What are you, a conspiracy theorist?
Like, and you're like, what?
Autism Rate Arguments00:15:13
Look, obviously not every conspiracy is, you know, that people believe in is correct.
But are you actually arguing that elites don't conspire?
Is that your position?
That there are no powerful people who conspire to achieve a desired outcome?
Okay.
How many examples do you need where it's so clear that that's exactly what happened?
And especially after the last three years, it just seems mind-boggling that anyone could not, that anyone could still use that as an insult.
And this is what's so bizarre about Reason Magazine, where you're like, you go like, look, who are you?
And who are you talking to?
That you think this opening of the video would be at all compelling.
Hey, this guy who's a skeptic of the system, his website blew up in 2020.
And he seems to think the whole system is corrupt.
So like, what's up with that?
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
All right, let's keep playing a little bit.
Children's health defense gives opponents of vaccine mandates and government overreach a bad name by lumping us together with anti-vaxxers.
That's why most of the polio today, 70% of the polio today is vaccine polio that came from the vaccines.
By the way, 80% of the polio cases on earth today, according to the WHO, are vaccines in polio.
That means people got it from vaccinated people.
In 2022, Children's Health Defense made the same point in a piece headlined, Polio, why vaccines are to blame for rising number of cases.
It claimed that cases have been on the rise globally since 2016, and the resurgence is related to the use of vaccines.
Actually, global polio cases fell by 99% between 1988 and 2022, and were extremely close to eradication thanks to vaccines.
What Kennedy said is technically true, but misleading.
He is referring to polio spread through untreated sewage by a form of the vaccine that uses high virus.
Not only has that version of the vaccine been retired, but it can only cause an outbreak in unvaccinated communities, such as some Hasidic neighborhoods of New York City and outlying areas.
For the last 18 years, Kennedy has been a leading figure in the anti-vax movement.
All right, so let's pause it right there.
So if you're following closely what she said, not only did she not refute his point, she conceded that he's right.
She said he's right, but it's misleading because where these spreads actually come from, you know, where they actually like kind of take off is these unvaccinated communities.
So he said there's been this rise since 2016.
Then she goes, yeah, but way before 2016, it was falling.
And even though he's technically right, the real problem is the unvaccinated.
Okay.
She might be right about that.
Let me just make this clear.
I don't have a strong opinion about that.
That would be a great question to pose to RFK.
I would love to see someone pose that question to him and see what his response is.
Maybe he's got this all wrong.
I'm not against that.
It's just, I kind of wonder, you know, like I said to you, Rob, there's all these topics that I'm like, I'd fucking go debate anyone.
I have a lot of topics that I'm like, I'd debate someone right now.
If you said right after this show that I'm completely unprepared for, you got to go debate the war in Ukraine or the Federal Reserve or the war on drugs or the, you know, I name a lot of things.
Go do a debate right now, completely unprepped, just what you know.
I'd be ready to go.
I'm not ready to have this debate, you know?
I wonder if Liz Wolf really is.
Like, have you actually done the fucking research on this?
Would you be ready to go debate RFK Jr. on this right now?
It's an honest question.
Maybe she is.
Maybe she's really done her shit, but it kind of seems like you're just reading a script and you're not really.
But maybe I'm wrong about that.
But still, even there, you're going, she's conceding that what he said is right, but she has a different explanation for it.
A great thing that you should bring up to him and let me see what his response is.
Is that reasonable?
Yeah, it's funny with the, I hate science.
I hate stats.
I don't have a good feel for any of it.
And I got the COVID stuff remarkably right because you did.
Sometimes when people are lying to me, and especially when they're trying to infringe on my freedom, you light a little fire in my ass where I'm like, hey, go fuck yourself.
I'm going to go do the research out of spite.
And I did the research out of spite.
And now, you know, it's funny because like two years ago, I didn't mind what the fuck I said because I had no track record of being right.
What do I care?
Now I feel like it's two years later.
I did all the homework on that.
I was overwhelmingly right.
And I have no interest in commenting on this because I haven't done my homework and I don't want to undo two years of my rightness with gut reactions on this, which I'm not as up on.
But with that said, I'm like, this is just gut reaction on this polio stat.
That kind of sounds like an argument to me of the vaccine's working well.
If the only cases are coming from the actual vaccine now, that must be because of a drastic reduction in polio.
90% of cases doesn't tell you anything.
That's a percentage of cases.
If 100 years ago, there were a million cases and now there's three cases.
Well, what happened that we went from a million to three?
The fact that three of them is because science is fucking up and putting them in the vaccines and giving it to three people.
Does that mean that we'd rather have a million cases?
Of course not.
Well, no, I agree with you, but I also, the people, look, the argument is, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the argument is from these people that polio was already coming way down before the vaccine.
Was it was there was natural immunity and then the vaccine came around.
And this happens a lot, by the way, that libertarians, even the fucking John Stossel Reason magazine types would point out that they'll say the government will sometimes make these arguments like, look, once OSHA was created, workplace deaths went way down.
But then other free market types would come out and point out like, wait, like expand that graph.
Because before OSHA was created, workplace deaths were coming way down.
And so then OSHA got there and they were, this was a John Stossel, John Stossel's old line was that government jumps in front of a parade and then claims they're leading the parade.
And so that's their argument.
I don't know, but there does seem to be an argument here.
And this is why so many of us are saying, have the fucking debate with this guy.
You just had him on your platform.
I don't know, but I'd like to hear you present this case to him and then him respond and let me judge who has a more sound case about this.
And then the thing that she kind of admits there already is that, oh, the virus used to be like this, but then they stopped.
And you're like, oh, okay.
So was it bad then?
This comes up again in this video.
So I want to get.
I think we can all agree those dirty Jews that stop drinking sewage.
I mean, that's not his takeaway.
What are these people in Brooklyn doing around dirty polio sewage?
Clearly, we agree with Reason Magazine that these Jews must be stopped.
That is, obviously, we're all coming from that.
We're ending on the same place.
Are these vaccine manufacturers that it sounds like I'm defending putting out polio sewage in New York City?
It's pretty incredible.
All right, let's keep playing the video a little bit.
My principal objective is that vaccines and the childhood vaccines are immune from pre-licensing safety testing.
Pharmaceutical drugs are now the third biggest killer in America after heart attacks and cancer.
No, I do not intend to make it easier to get drugs from our kid.
This is a rhetorical ploy to make his vaccine fear-mongering sound reasonable.
The Food and Drug Administration is, if anything, overly cautious with vaccine testing.
Bringing a vaccine to market generally takes 10 to 15 years and costs several billion dollars.
When I was a kid, I got three vaccines.
All right, let's pause for a second.
I don't have much to say about any of that, but this is another libertarian thing where you go like, okay, obviously we all agree there shouldn't be this government body that decides this.
But if your case is going to just be like, he's saying, oh, they're way too easy.
And you go, obviously, they're way too harsh.
And it takes way too long.
I mean, it takes like 15 years.
You're like, well, there was a pretty big one that didn't take 15 years, right?
So maybe that's what a lot of people are responding to.
If it takes 15 years, you're saying none of them should take 15 years.
How do you know?
This is kind of the essence of the libertarian point, which is that the government is going to get these things wrong one way or the other.
But it's not that it's always going to be one way.
It's not that if the government sets a price for something, it's always going to be too high or always going to be too low.
It's just it won't be accurate.
But you're telling me that you know for a fact, what, that 15 years is too high?
Well, maybe a few months was too low for the COVID vaccine, which really is the most fucking important vaccine of my lifetime.
Because it's the only one that I ever wasn't allowed in a restaurant in New York City because I didn't get.
So maybe that, okay.
So maybe it's not 15 years.
What's the fucking correct number?
Well, I don't know and you don't know.
And only the market can really decide like the best approximation.
And even the market doesn't know, but it would be better than what a government like fiat dictate would be.
But okay, so is it two years?
Is it five years?
Is it five minutes?
My guess is it's more than five minutes, right?
So, okay, well, we just went through this one that was way less than 15 years and billions of dollars.
And why the fuck should they be excluded from liability?
Like those are some pretty libertarian questions to ask.
And Robert F. Kennedy seems to be asking them.
I agree with the liability point.
I mean, even if vaccines were, let's just say, overwhelmingly good, there's zero reason to shield from liability because you can just price it in.
I mean, if anyone is being harmed by the vaccine, if you have a kid that has autism, I mean, what's the cost of care?
I mean, this is not, this is a better way of looking at it.
It might sound a little bit non-humanitarian, but it's a reverse insurance policy.
No, no, no.
It's not.
But just to be clear, it's not non-humanitarian because you're going like what you're saying is for just to make up numbers.
What you're saying is that if five kids would die, but now those five kids won't die, but one kid will have autism.
Just hypothetically, I'm not saying this is true.
I'm not even saying the vaccine leads to autism or that they save lives.
Just hypothetically, if five kids would die, but one kid would get autism, it is reasonable to accept that trade-off, you know?
But at the same time, I think your point is that, okay, so then we have a little bit of a cost-benefit analysis and we can work out what the pricing in there should be.
This may sound like a- But the point is, you could, let's just say you're giving 10 million people a vaccine.
So charge one more dollar and give $10 million to the family that now has a kid with autism.
The idea that the company should be like, it doesn't even make sense.
It is the most autistic take on autism in the history of the world.
But it's not like you're not being shitty.
I know that'll come off shitty to some people, but there's lots of like cost-benefit analysis like that that people have to make that, you know, where there will be a severe downside, but also the upside is so great that you kind of have to deal with that.
And then, and so anyway, I just want to make that point that you're not, you're not just being like, I don't care if someone has autism, we'll pay them off.
You're saying like, look, this also might save babies' lives.
So let, you know, saying that the shielding from liability doesn't make sense because you're literally just creating more harm for the person that was injured because you could actually very easily price into the product like the cost of harm to actually give that back to people.
Like in other words, like you should have your own decision about whether or not you're going to take a vaccine.
And if we know that there's a specific amount of people that are injured, but it's still overwhelmingly good, there's zero reason to not be compensating the people that are harmed, especially if it's 100% society to get it.
Okay.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
When I was a kid, I got three vaccines.
My children got 72 doses of 16 vaccines.
RFK is playing fast and loose with the numbers.
About 30 doses are on the childhood immunization schedule, with fewer required to attend most states' public schools.
The reason he didn't get vaccines is to prevent measles and moms.
It's just funny how scary even those images she's pulling up of how much shit you have to get where she goes, look, this is no big deal.
And then they're circling stuff that just looks like way too much.
Yeah, she's also not arguing with what he said.
He said, my kids got this many.
And she's going, well, he's playing fast and loose because this is what's required.
But that's not which is different than that's not what he said.
He's saying what they got.
So it's just very kind of lame, shady tactics.
But all right, let's keep playing.
When he was a kid, is that they didn't yet exist, which is a shame because they've mostly eradicated them.
Pause.
Yeah, that was his point, that they didn't yet exist.
When I was a kid, I only got this many vaccines.
He was never saying, oh, there were all these ones, but I only got these three.
He was saying, yeah, that's what we got when I was a kid.
Again, just like not actually, she's trying, she's doing these tactics to make him sound like he misrepresented things, but that wasn't what he did.
Single Culprit Fallacy00:04:14
Whatever.
Let's keep playing.
Those serious diseases in the U.S. beginning in 1989.
We experienced a chronic disease epidemic in this country.
It is unlike anything in history.
I mean, neurological disease that I never saw when I was a kid.
ADD, ADHD, speech away, language late ticks, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy, all of these suddenly appeared.
Autism rates went from one in 10,000 to 1 in every 34.
Peanut allergies suddenly appeared.
Food allergies, eczema suddenly appeared, anaphylaxis, and asthma, you know, which had been around, but it exploded.
He's correct that food allergy, asthma, and childhood obesity rates are increasing, but there's no evidence it's caused by vaccines.
RFK is once again flubbing the particulars in order to pin blame on a single culprit.
Kennedy frequently causes spoilers for call.
So look, if RFK is making the point that autism rates, let's say, went from one in one, one in 10,000 to 1 in 34.
I mean, look, if you know, about 50% of kids with people with autism never develop language.
It's about half of them.
They never develop language.
They don't speak.
So this is not something that can be explained by, You know, they didn't use to diagnose it or something.
Are autism really that high?
One in 34 babies.
Yeah, yeah.
So that means one in 68, according to what you just said.
One in 68 never developed language.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's pretty insane.
The only reason that sounds, I know that this is anecdotal, but the reason that that sounds off to me is that nearly everyone in my peer group has a kid.
I don't know a single one that has an autistic kid.
And like usually.
I know several.
It could be.
It's just like usually they say like on death rates, it's like once that you go, I think like above seven in 100,000 or something, that means that you'll know someone directly affected.
And so it's somewhat like a decent marker for.
Well, I'm just saying I know, I know several people affected.
So it's...
Your friends had more vaccines than mine.
Yeah, maybe that's the answer.
So there you go.
But I'm telling you, I can account for you, for you.
Or maybe kids need to get more circumcisions.
That's why it snaps the babies out.
But so for her to say that he's he, what was her exact comment?
That he's being disingenuous or something because he's like conflating what this issue.
To not bring up this issue is insane.
And to not say that like, yes, okay, these rates have spiked.
And what she says there, and I'll tell you this again, as someone who says, I've not done a deep dive enough on all of these issues.
I don't know what the answer is to all of this stuff.
And I am quite open to the possibility that vaccines have nothing to do with any of this.
I'm much more open to the idea that vaccines have benefits that far outweigh these issues, even if maybe they do contribute to them.
But I know enough about this to call bullshit when I see it.
And I've listened to RFK in probably at this point, at least like 15 long form interviews, including one I did myself with him.
But I've listened to him in at least like 15 to 20 long form interviews.
And he says over and over again that he does not blame one culprit, that he says there's multiple culprits for these problems and the vaccines are just one of them.
So for her to say that he tries to bring this back to one single culprit, which is the vaccines, is flat out a lie.
BetterHelp Mental Health Aid00:02:16
It is a flat out misrepresentation of what he's saying.
He's made this clear over and over again.
Now, he may be wrong about everything he's saying, but she is absolutely wrong to say that he blames this all on one single culprit, which is the vaccines.
He has said over and over and over again that there are many culprits and the vaccines are just one of them.
So that's just like a factual statement that she is misrepresenting what he said.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's keep playing the video.
Kennedy frequently mistakes correlation for causation, gets the numbers totally wrong and portrays complex trends as simpler than they really are, which he's all right, pause it, right there.
Pause it.
Pause it.
Pause it and don't pull the video down.
Pause it.
She says he uh says complex.
He tries to say that complex trends are simpler than the they really are.
And he they pull up this tweet where he says that this is what.
Joe Rogan Tweet Analysis00:05:02
I don't know why this tweet is playing in the background here, but he says, recently revealed emails show the CDC was lying, their underline was lying when they said the vaccine stop infection, it wasn't that the signs changed.
They knew and they lied.
And this is the tweet they pull up to show that he fucking is.
Oh, he's like really taking some things and trying to make them more simplistic than they really are, as if that's wrong.
What are you doing reason?
This is the battle you're fighting.
You're saying that when someone says the CDC was lying, when they said they knew the vaccines could stop infection, it wasn't that the signs changed.
It's that they they, they were lying.
Dude rob, you know me and you could do a devastating case to prove like if this was a court of law, we could prove that that statement is correct.
They came out and swore up and down that they knew the.
The entire mandate regime and covet, excuse me, the entire vaccine mandate and vaccine passport regime was predicated on the idea that they, they were promising you that you couldn't get someone else sick if you got the vaccine, and they never had any studies to back that up, none.
Look, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast and I I was involved in a segment.
Now, it wasn't because of me, it was because of Joe Rogan, but i'm just saying I was the guy sitting there with him when he said that he wouldn't advise young, healthy people to get the vaccine.
He would advise them to just be really healthy, to work out, get a lot of vitamin d blah blah, blah.
But he wouldn't say oh, go get the vaccine for young, healthy people.
And I remember Anthony Fauci responding to the segment that I was a part of.
It was a very surreal moment.
Joe Biden commented on it.
Everyone in the news, fucking every important person in the media, commented on it.
And you know what?
What Anthony Fauci said?
Okay, not the CDC, but close enough.
What Anthony Fauci said was what Joe Rogan doesn't understand is that it's not just about you.
You take it to protect other people because if you get the shot, then you can't transmit the virus to other people.
And they had zero scientific evidence to back that up Zero.
The head of Pfizer was going on, all these quotes about how he was saying, you can't, you have to get the vaccine so you don't get other people sick.
And the CDC went along with it the whole time.
In fact, this bitch that's on the screen right now, fucking the head of the CDC, recently admitted that they don't even have data on this stuff.
They don't even know.
What was the older, do you remember her name, Rob?
I always blank on her name, goddammit.
But the older chick who was on the COVID task force, who like said, yes.
And she said that she was like, look, I knew we were overplaying our hand when we said that it would prevent transmission.
There was never any studies about transmission.
So come on.
The whole goddamn regime was propped up on this will stop transmission.
And they all knew that there was no evidence that it would stop transmission.
So don't tell me that this, why the fuck is this screenshot up on your goddamn program, Reason?
It's embarrassing.
Not just for fucking Liz that she would put this up, but for everyone at Reason Magazine that they would allow this screenshot to be up on their video.
It's fucking humiliating.
God damn it.
That you would let this be up.
Come on.
Now you tell me, Rob, you've been more or less a critic of fucking of RFK Jr. over the last few weeks, but come on, dude, that they would put this up as that this is some own on him, this tweet.
Talk to me, Rob.
I don't know.
No, I agree 100%.
They're not doing a good job of proving their case here.
All right.
All right, let's keep playing.
Last year, he produced the documentary, Infertility, A Diabolical Agenda.
It was directed by Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who wrote a 1998 article in The Lancet presenting evidence that vaccines cause autism.
As for the film that Kennedy and Wakefield collaborated on, it recycles long debunked myths from the 90s that tetanus vaccines administered in Kenya were deliberately laced with a hormone blocker that caused infertility.
Government Scheme Effectiveness00:14:14
This, they say, is part of the World Health Organization's depopulation plot.
But the Catholic bishops who were the source for that claim never presented conclusive evidence.
Libertarians who understand the incompetence of government entities should be more skeptical that the World Health Organization would be so effective at carrying out its nefarious scheme.
He used his famous last name to add the veneer of respectability.
All right, let's pause.
Circular backwards.
So she says there, and we can end on this, but she says there that libertarians who understand the incompetence of government entities should be more skeptical that the World Health Organization would be so effective at carrying out such a nefarious scheme.
I want to really focus on that statement as we wrap up here.
That somehow libertarians, that this is a real distinction between our camp of libertarians and the Reason Cato camp of libertarians.
We should be skeptical, Rob, that government should ever be, they're so ineffective.
How could we ever believe that they could carry out such a nefarious scheme?
Where exactly is that deduced from libertarian principles?
You know, libertarian principles, no matter what camp you're in, it might be that you believe in the non-aggression principle or you believe in natural rights, or you believe in both, or you just believe in like kind of maximum liberty or something like that.
But you have to think government is so ineffective that they couldn't carry out nefarious schemes.
That to me doesn't seem like libertarianism.
That to me seems just to live in a world completely divorced from reality.
Like, what the fuck do you even mean that the government can't carry out nefarious schemes?
Let me state this again.
Libertarians who understand the incompetence of government entities should be more skeptical that the World Health Organization would be so effective at carrying out such a nefarious scheme.
So this is a thing that you get from these type of libertarians a lot, that government is so ineffective.
And, okay, fair enough.
There are some areas that government is very ineffective at, right?
Like, at least they're ineffective at their stated goals.
Like, government might try to build a road and it'll cost you way more than the road would otherwise cost you.
And it'll take way longer than it would otherwise take you.
Government might say we want to deliver really great health care for the people and they might be really ineffective at delivering that healthcare, right?
You know?
But does that mean like you only believe that they're ineffective if you take for granted that their goals are their stated intentions?
Does that make sense?
So if their goal is what they tell you their goal is, then yes, I would kind of grant that they're ineffective.
But are governments in general ineffective?
Okay, let me ask you this, Rob.
How effective was Adolf Hitler at slaughtering Jews?
He did a pretty good job.
Put up decent numbers.
Yeah, I mean, I think pretty effective.
How effective has our government been at this?
Last couple of years.
Ever since they invented it.
How efficient has our government been?
Turning kids trans or do you answer that?
Okay, let me get this off.
Sorry.
But like, how effective, how efficient has our government been at making Lockheed Martin filthy fucking rich?
They've done a pretty good job, right?
Like, pretty good.
Like, it just depends on what you think their goal is.
And if you're sitting here and saying, oh, you really think, okay, so libertarians who know that, look, we know that there are issues with government providing common goods.
We know that there are issues in the pricing system and with all these things that like, yes, if there were good people in government who really wanted to provide, you know, baskets of wheat to every working American, we know that would be a very inefficient system.
Okay, fine.
I get that.
But to extrapolate from that, that come on, libertarians, do you really think there's nefarious actors at the absolute top who could efficiently get government to move in some type of conspiratorial way to do some evil thing is insane.
How many examples do you need?
There's so many and we're way over time.
I didn't think we were going to go this long as an episode.
But like, imagine this.
Imagine if I were to say to you, you go, I'm really concerned that a few elite people at the top of the American government, we're going to call them the neoconservatives.
And they have this project for a new American century.
And they're going to convince people that we have to just fucking decimate Iraq for bullshit reasons, you know?
And this is going to make all of their friend, all of their friends rich.
And this is going to just, it'll probably end in a million dead Iraqis and multiple millions displaced.
And they're going to do it.
They're going to be super effective and efficient at this.
And you responded to me and you went, Dave, I'm a libertarian.
I know how inefficient government is.
And I know that there could never be like some cabal at the top of it who conspire together to make this happen.
You know, what would you even say to that?
At this point, even if theoretically you thought that was true, wouldn't you just in practical terms go, oh, well, we've seen this happen over and over and over again.
Over and over and over again.
Of course.
Of course we know that government is tremendously efficient at making privately connected interests rich and slaughtering people and destroying.
They are the most efficient and effective organization in the history of the world at doing that, man.
And I don't know where you have to be that you would that you would even think that makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
I don't get it.
So by the way, I'm doing a little digging over here and it seems like the autism rate exploded like in the 2000s basically because he said 1988, which looks like the wrong benchmark because there was an increase from like one or two in the 70s and then like it really starts taking off in the 2000s.
So I think if it was anything, it's probably Y2K.
I think that's really the only explanation.
There you go.
It didn't shut the computers off, but it did.
It had another side effect.
On a more serious note, I guess it didn't really quite settle in with me what one in 34 is.
That's basically a spin of a roulette wheel that your child is going to have autism.
And it's a little bit shocking.
I would think at that level, we would be running studies to really solve.
That sounds like something you would really want to solve for.
Even if it's not, even if it has nothing to do with the vaccine, which I am completely open to the idea.
There is nothing.
There seems to be very little.
And this is one of the things that's interesting about RFK.
And we got to wrap on this, but one of the things that seems to be interesting is that he's bringing up the fact that America leads the world in chronic illness.
He's bringing up the explosion in autism, in allergies, in Tourette syndrome, and all of these things.
And it does seem.
And again, we talked about there's the areas that we've dived into that we really know.
These are areas that I haven't dived into and I don't really know.
But it's very interesting that he's bringing these up and no one else seems in the political conversation, at least, no one else seems to be really bringing these things up.
On the note of one in 32, that's already substantial where I would think like you'd really want to solve for that.
I haven't done much digging, but I would think you could take groups of any thousand people and decide we're not giving them blank vaccine.
And if they didn't live in a concentrated area, they're probably not at risk for like if you took any random thousand kid across the country and give them whatever vaccine, whatever, I don't know, take take one mum's whooping cough.
I don't know what the fuck, you polio.
I don't know if you're the one person in Nebraska without the polio vaccine.
What are the chances that you're coming across polio?
I would think you could probably do baskets of like, you know, because he was saying like they haven't done the double blind.
I would think maybe a thousand people is not enough to know, but it's like, I would think you could start kind of taking almost all the shit that we do, start giving baskets of people, like not introducing them to that thing and seeing if you could unwind what the fuck.
Or maybe they purposely want it that way.
So the only guy giving them some chemical that everyone's getting autism, you'll never bust it, you know?
Maybe.
There's so many variables.
Like I was reading an article in the Washington Post yesterday that they found out like tap water, like 50% of tap water tested has like forever chemicals in it.
Like you look at whatever the fuck they're putting in our food, how fat people are.
Well, that's one of the interesting things that RFK is talking about that no one else seems to be is that he's like, look, these are the chemicals in the water.
These are the chemicals in the air.
These are the chemicals in the vaccine.
Why are we doing that?
You know, even in this video, Liz brings up how she's like, well, you know, he blames these chemicals and the vaccines, but they stopped using those chemicals.
And you're like, okay.
But so you're telling me at one point they were using them and then they stopped.
Like, oh, okay.
Now the kids are more autistic.
So maybe we got to put those chemicals back in.
Yeah, really.
But okay, so maybe none of this has anything to do with anything.
But even through your admission, you're going, they were putting some fucked up shit in there at one point.
It's just, why the fuck are we making this allergic?
We're making this allergic to talk about.
Nothing should be allergic to talk about.
And if, and if he's got it wrong, then the answer, and if, and if Liz, the way she's promoting herself on this video right now is, you get, you get what I'm saying?
The energy she has on this video right now is like, look, here's why he's wrong about all of this shit.
And I'm the one.
Look, Rob, in the same sense, would me or you do a video like this?
No.
And you know why?
Because we've both said we haven't done a deep dive into this.
Would I do a video like this about the war in Ukraine?
Absolutely I would.
Absolutely I would.
Would I do a war, a video like this about the Federal Reserve or the war on drugs or the fucking NSA or the CIA or any of the shit that I've been talking about for years?
Trump, Russia gate, anything like that.
Would I do a video like this?
Yes, I would.
And if someone wanted to fucking debate me on that, everybody listening to this knows I'd debate them and I'd fucking take them to school, right?
I would do that.
So like Liz is doing this video on this.
So you go, okay.
So are you actually ready to take this guy to school?
Or are you just doing this video?
And then like, if you actually sat down with this guy, you'd get fucked up.
I don't know.
Maybe she'd win.
I'd love to see that.
Go do it.
It's what all of us have been saying.
Go do it.
Someone take this guy on.
Because Nick and Zach didn't do a good enough job.
They asked him questions and he had, you know, he didn't have perfect answers on everything, but he came out of there unscathed.
So that's what we need.
One of you to actually like take him on.
And I feel like it's easy to sit down and do a video like this, but half the shit that she put out there is like, yo, this is weak.
This is weak.
Like just trying to make him look bad for his website blowing up when the government was fucking everything up or trying, you know, all the shit we've been tearing apart this episode.
So come on, do a little bit better.
If you want to actually take this guy on, take him on.