We explore the strange heir, political candidate, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and swole boy known as Robert F. Kennedy Junior with our friends from the Conspirituality podcast — Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker.
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Music by Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 242 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Conspiratuality RFK Jr.
episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
When you think of modern political dynasties in the United States, a few come to mind.
The Bushes, of course, with their fun roots of wartime Nazi collaboration, CIA connections, and devastating foreign wars built on lies.
The Clintons, perhaps less patrician and generational, but certainly infamous for neoliberal reform, alleged sex crimes, and pied-piping Donald Trump into office.
And then there's the Kennedys, with their goofy, accident-prone hijinks, good looks, and contentious relationship to the intelligence apparatus.
Each of these three have their fair share of failed sons and daughters.
Among them, Jeb Bush, Chelsea Clinton, and of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced former environmental lawyer who announced his presidential candidacy in April of this year.
Although R.F.K.
Jr.
comes from a long line of famous politicians, including his father, one-time U.S.
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated, he has no political experience himself.
Honestly, that might be why he's still alive.
Instead, after decades of practicing law, R.F.K.
Jr.
has embraced wild conspiracy theories, particularly those related to vaccines.
RFK Jr.
is running as a Democrat, but has found surprising support among many right-wing personalities including Mike Flynn, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones, and Roger Stone.
Some of them have even speculated that he could become Trump's 2024 running mate as part of a unity ticket if he loses the Democratic primary.
Recently, his campaign has been making the news for a series of bizarre and cartoonish moments.
A loud spat about climate change between two men at a recent fundraiser escalated into one of them releasing an extended fart as part of his argument.
Around the same time, RFK Jr.
went on a public rant claiming that COVID-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
To help us make sense of the RFK Jr.
campaign and the people who support it, we'll be talking to Derek Barris, Matthew Remsky, and Julian Walker of the Conspiratuality Podcast.
They recently released a great book titled Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
Now, I had the pleasure of reading it in advance, and this was my little blurb.
Intelligent and compassionate, Conspiratoriality is full of insight rooted in direct experience and rigorous analysis.
The authors are deeply familiar with and curious about their subject.
An essential and unique book that captures both the yearning for and devastating effects of Conspiratoriality as a phenomenon and way of life.
Matthew, Julian, Derek, welcome to the podcast!
Thank you guys!
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, really appreciate it.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I'm really glad to have you on here, because I really enjoy the perspective you bring to the topic that we're going to talk about today, which is RFK Jr.' 's campaign, and also generally conspirituality, because I always, I approach these kinds of things from the perspective of like, you know, a skeptic and an outsider, and that perspective, you know, might be sometimes less charitably described as spiritually constipated.
You guys are approaching it a little bit more from an insider perspective, people who have really experience in the world of yoga and health and, and betterment and spirituality and these kinds of things.
And that perspective, I know it makes it makes your analysis a lot more, I guess, intimate and deeper when looking at these topics.
So I would say really enjoy your podcast.
Thanks so much, and yeah, you're not kidding.
We've done the organ cleanses, so we're not constipated.
We are spiritually pure.
Right.
Don't worry, I'm slipping Travis a lot of laxatives, spiritual laxatives, of course.
You've been following RFK Jr.' 's campaign for a little while.
You've actually called him the conspirituality Candidate and for pretty good reason.
But before we go into his his recent antics and his campaign, I was wondering if you could like talk a little bit about the man himself, you know, because it seems as though it's difficult to really understand him and his motivations without his understanding his background, you know, starting from childhood.
Now, besides besides the obvious horror of having his uncle and father killed in these very public, violent and bizarre ways.
So where what are you think are some of the more formative experiences of his Well, I would begin by saying that tied into those horrible spectacles is the very strongly and immediately emerging family lore around the U.S.
intelligence apparatuses being involved.
So there's like a fundamental story building moment in RFK Jr.' 's life.
Which is built upon the proximity of like personal trauma and institutional distrust.
That is something that he deals with in, you know, a lot of understandable acting out ways.
By the time he's 14 years old, he is addicted to a number of drugs, namely heroin, which becomes his sort of primary focus and difficulty for about 14 years.
And during that time, he's also kicked out of three different private schools.
He is known to be like a profligate, you know, womanizer.
He is mixing and mingling in probably very, I don't know, to be very generous about it, I think he's also looking outside of his own family for a kind of social context that will help him make sense of the world.
But then, you know, his legal training becomes complicated by his inability to complete assignments.
You know, he narrowly—I think at one point he misses his bar exam or something like that.
I'm not exactly sure on the timeline.
It's in a number of the things that we've written.
But I think by the time he's 28, 29 years old, he is both out of law school, barely out of law school, but he's also been arrested for heroin possession.
And as part of his sentencing, his community service ends up being attached to, he gets recruited by the River Keepers Association in Upper New York State.
And this rhymes with, it jives with, his history of outdoors enjoyment in these bucolic settings that he grew up with that are kind of this, I don't know, fantasized, now parallel world to the heroin dens that he was also familiar with.
So in every monologue that he gives, he talks about growing up and, you know, tramping through the forest and watching the puddles boil over with the, you know, the tadpoles, and he's catching mud puppies, and he's trained in falconry, and he's going kayaking in Chile or Peru.
And also something about that childhood too is that he becomes of the land in a way, but also of his clan because he's raised by a series of family connections.
Like, his mother had 11 children.
When dad is assassinated, she's pregnant with the 11th.
And understandably, she really is overwhelmed in the aftermath and in her new widowhood.
And the first thing that happens is that the boys get shipped off abroad for a number of months on sort of traveling adventures.
And so, you know, there's so many sort of conditions that produce this personality, I think, that tends towards adventurousness, extroversion, like he can make himself at home amongst anybody.
He's willing to talk to anybody.
And then he's willing to argue, you know, whatever he feels is true or can be won as a point in a legalistic sense.
And this is really the legacy of then 20 years of going on to become a litigator in environmental law.
But back in the early 2000s, even his colleagues in environmental issues were raising the alarm, saying that, hey, this is a guy who will bend the science in order to win a point.
And he's also really prone to throwing people away when they are not politically or business-wise expedient to them.
Now there's a lot more involved with that.
You know, he goes on to watch his toddler go to the emergency room 29 times for allergic reactions.
And that begins his interest in, oh, maybe the environmental poisons that I'm looking at in the world that I'm litigating against, maybe these are also in our
bodies as well. And so the world and his body and the family all sort of meld together into
this sort of testing ground for, you know, whether God is going to win in the end, because
there's a whole Catholic thing in there as well. So but that's that's a good thumbnail, I think.
Yeah. And you didn't touch on yet the recovery stuff, right? So
So there's this whole tension between the entitled heroic sense of destiny that comes from being part of the Camelot establishment, combined with all of this tragedy, all of this paranoia that then comes from the tragedy, the sense that the CIA is in on what happened to his dad and his uncle, and then there's all of the addiction and the acting out, and then the spiritual salvation that comes through 12-Step and through his deep Catholic faith.
That's also quite complicated by his actual behaviors, including his well-reported habit of philandering.
Now, for many people, the only thing they really know about RFK Jr.
is his anti-vaccine stance.
So, Kennedy is the chairman of the Children's Health Defense.
This is an anti-vaccine advocacy group.
Now, they claim that many childhood conditions, such as food allergies and ADD and autism, are all caused by certain chemicals, including those found in vaccines.
Now, this is untrue, but how did RFK Jr.
find the anti-vaccine community and what has his involvement been in it?
Well, one angle on it, as Matthew mentioned, is that he has this young son who goes into anaphylactic shock multiple times, has to be rushed to emergency.
He gets convinced this has to do with a peanut allergy.
He writes the foreword to a book about how peanut energies are caused by vaccines.
And then there is a fateful moment, I don't have the exact year in front of me, where he has a woman come to his doorstep And on his porch, sort of in like Cape Cod, somewhere around there, presents him with a huge stack of documents that show undeniably that vaccines are causing autism amongst other terrible side effects, especially in children.
And, you know, from there, he keeps ramping up until he gets to the narrative he has now, which is that there's an epidemic of chronic disease that has just exponentially exploded over the last several decades.
And it's all because of Various chemicals in the water and in the soil and because of ingredients in vaccines.
Now, I mean, it seems pretty obvious that he is anti-vaccine, but he very confusingly, he's called himself pro-vaccine.
So this is a direct quote from him.
I am pro-vaccine.
I had all six of my children vaccinated.
I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health.
But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible.
So why does he do this?
It's my understanding that he frequently contradicts comments that he has previously made.
I mean, is he just talking out of both sides of his mouth?
Why the posturing as pro-vaccine despite his clear stance on it before?
One key to me to understanding everything that he does is that he always says that he's a trial lawyer.
And as Matthew pointed out earlier, he's always in it to win an argument.
So I've previously done an experiment where I've transcribed Russell Brand and then broke down sentence by sentence what he's saying because he uses a rhetorical technique that's called gishgallop.
Which you overwhelm the person or the crowd you're speaking to with so much information at once that they just can't make sense of it.
So by the time you refute one point, they have 10 more that they've introduced, and he's very good at that.
So with the vaccine topic specifically, he covers his trail very well in the sense that he always has media moments where he points to to say, oh, I'm pro-vaccine.
I just want them tested more rigorously.
And I think if you were to actually take what he says and apply them to actual policy positions and how they would actually play out in our society, you would not see a clear path between what he says and how they're actually implemented.
So, for example, your example there of testing vaccines, he's calling for placebo tests on vaccines that have already been approved by the FDA.
They're just being updated.
This would actually put the lives of a lot of people at risk because those vaccines are already efficacious.
But he's doing this to say, no, I'm actually for the science.
There's just problems.
But the problem is in his actual argument, there is no logic that actually connects all of the dots.
And you see this constantly with him.
So his his whole MO is that he'll point to that as being pro-vaccine, but you can find many other moments where he is actually against all vaccines and he will always run circles around the people he's talking to to try to make a point that actually isn't sellable down the line if you were to follow through to legislation.
I guess this is almost kind of like a sort of ingenious like internet like disinfo Hansel and Gretel like you leave a trail of breadcrumbs that cosign like every opinion from either side so that anytime you get challenged on anything you can You have, you know, 10 different things to point to, to be like, oh, well, I said that, you know, I said that here.
And then somebody said, wait, wait a minute, you said you were pro-vaccine here.
He's like, yes, but I also said over here that they were, that it was, that COVID was bred in a lab.
And it's like, I don't know, I guess that's kind of a genius way to sort of approach our current information, sort of dissemination techniques.
You get plausible deniability with that much gishgallop kind of like just You know, it's a very lawyerly thing to do, just to hammer that again, which is, you know, that the epistemology of his argument is made in the performative moment of making the point.
about this QAnon thing, but I want to save the children. I mean, those pedophiles are
terrible, right?
Yeah. You know, it's a very lawyerly thing to do, just to hammer that again, which is,
you know, that the epistemology of his argument is made in the performative moment of making
the point. This is why he wants to say, "Let's get Peter Hotez onto Joe Rogan and I'll kick
his ass in my Wranglers."
Because what he wants to do is win at trial.
And that has nothing to do with peer-reviewed research.
It has nothing to do with coming to some kind of consensus within a research community.
It's really a single, solitary, heroic, charismatic act.
Of, I have stood up for the children and the truth, and this mother sitting in the front row, and I have done that, and I am the only one to do it.
And if you want to let me do it some more, because otherwise, they're coming for your children.
They're coming for your children.
Yeah.
And again, this is, if anyone who has been following anti-vax rhetoric and argument style and propaganda, you know, for the last 20-30 years knows that they all say, No, no, I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
Never.
No, I just have these concerns.
I'm just asking questions.
I just feel like, you know, they've never done randomized pre-licensing control trials, whatever the correct jargon is, on childhood vaccines.
Never mind the fact that they've all been tested.
They've been shown to be safe.
The links to autism have turned out to not be true.
Just about all of the major payouts that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has delivered have turned out, with hindsight, scientifically, not to have been the result of vaccine injury.
Never mind that.
I would be more sympathetic with Bobby Kennedy as a person and as an argumentarian of his point of view if he were less odious about the people that he's trying to quote-unquote save, right?
Like, if his argument is that the pharmaceutical industry is rife with Perverse incentives that, you know, things that diseases that should be tested for aren't being tested for or, you know, whatever the good anti-capitalism in, you know, the pharmaceutical industry argument would be, which I think he sort of points to and gestures at all the time.
If that's where he was coming from, I have some sympathy with that, right?
But what he does with regard to the so-called victims of vaccines is so disgusting and it's so ableist.
He is constantly going on about autistic children as being part of some kind of general moral and physical decline in the American body politic that, you know, the way he speaks about autistic children is really a throwback to his uncle, you know, during the presidential fitness campaign talking about the tragedy of chubby children.
There's nothing more embarrassing.
There's nothing like that.
There's nothing, yeah, nothing more embarrassing than the chubby child watching other children play basketball.
And so his empathy is like, it's got this knife in it, which I fucking hate.
I hate the fact that I don't understand different types of children.
Like basically that's what he's saying over and over again.
And I think it's a Very important point for people on the progressive left who are taken in by his sort of justice warrior stance.
His empathy is very, very strange, actually.
It has a lot more to do with perfecting people's bodies than it does with, you know, accepting the conditions that we have and trying to improve them.
You know, he just doesn't speak to that.
And he goes one step further than that too, right, Matthew?
He doesn't just sort of turn autistic kids into monsters with his language, but he also has said things like, I can tell the kids that have been vaccinated from the kids that haven't been vaccinated because the light has gone out of their eyes and they're kind of slack-jawed if they've received the vaccine.
Incredible!
Like, he literally says, and nobody will stop him to say, okay, we're gonna line up some kids who are vaccinated and put across the room the kids that are unvaccinated, or mix them up together in a line together, and you pick them out, buddy.
Like, nobody stops him to say, he says these very basic, horrible things that are obviously simple projections of his own self-hatred.
I mean, I don't put that in our stuff, like that's some psychoanalyzing, but like, it just seems so obvious to me.
Yeah, this is a very conflicted dude who treated his own body like, you know, a pincushion.
And he was like, very, very distressed.
And it has a very natural, and I would say, like, understandable sense of fear and anxiety about bodily pollution that comes from a number of different places.
And that just gets spewed out into the electorate during this cycle.
It is very clear to me, though, like with your description of the vaccinated by RFK Jr., that I am doing a podcast with two extremely vaccinated individuals because they are pretty slack-jawed, glassy-eyed.
I'm only glassy-eyed because I feel so much emotion.
See, I think the light went into my eyes after I took the vaccine.
So true.
RFK Jr.' 's campaign is pretty consistently polled in the low double digits, which is, you know, actually pretty good considering that is, you know, his fringe views and lack of political experience.
And further, many of those who support his campaign do so with a lot of passion.
Like, they don't just believe that he's, you know, a candidate who has some, you know, swell ideas about how to run the country.
There's this element of spiritual saviorhood to some of his most enthusiastic
supporters. I mean, what do you think exactly is the, who exactly are the core supporters of R.F.K. Jr. in his
campaign, and what do you think explains their unusual degree of enthusiasm?
Well, I think there's a few different elements, right?
One is obviously name recognition.
You have that whole kind of mythology that you can tap into and get people excited about.
I see RFK Jr.
as sort of like a Trumpian figure from the quote-unquote left, right?
Like a Democratic Party Trumpian figure in that he's tapping into populism, he's tapping into cultural personality.
And then there's another thing that's going on here too.
So populism, what I mean is the sense that like an outsider Outsider, right, from the truest blue blood family in the history of the country.
But someone who's not been in government, someone who has bold ideas, someone who's going to come in and drain the swamp, clean up shop, force the placebo-controlled trials that'll actually be like another Tuskegee, even though that's what he likes to reference to support his arguments.
Someone who's going to bring bold change, who's going to prosecute Fauci, which is what his current book that has been, you know, Selling so well while he's been trying to run this campaign for the Democratic nomination.
So you've got all of that.
But I think you also have an interesting phenomenon which ties into our work, which is that there is a group of new age, spiritual, natural living.
I don't want to take vaccines because I believe in, you know, homeopathy or what have you.
there is that kind of element who went further and further down the rabbit hole during COVID,
who gradually became Trump supporters, who gradually came to believe that the storm was
coming but it was going to be a great awakening into light and love and entering fifth dimensional
reality as the universe expands to a new level. That group of people got to the point where
they were saying, "Fine, call me a conspiracy theorist.
Fine, say that I'm right wing. I'm actually still on the left, but all you people have gone
crazy with all your woke bullshit and now you've got the boot of the Biden administration on
your neck and you're accepting vaccine mandates and you've got your little pussy mask on and yeah,
you can call me whatever Those people, I think, are now having a moment of redemption.
To whatever extent they were on that particular rebellious, libertarian, kind of right-trending, New Age side of the graph, they're having this moment of redemption where they get to go, wow, I've been a Kennedy Democrat all along.
Finally, here's a candidate who represents my views, and he's in the Democratic Party, and I think he's just great.
And look, he's going to mend the timeline in some mystical way and take us back to our golden age.
What Kennedy has done that I think is exceptionally smart and dangerous is he's been able to pick off so many niche crowds and speak to them in very broad ways that doesn't have to actually represent truth in any capacity.
So he had a health care policy roundtable where he discussed What his healthcare policy people would be, and that was Joe Mercola, Sayerji, Mickey Willis, Sherry Tenpenny, all people that we've covered for years, and many of them are in our book.
He has appeared at Bitcoin conferences, so he wants to regulate financial industry, but he wants to deregulate crypto, even though it's not regulated right now, but he wants it to continue to be what it is, but more widely used.
He, this past week, had a regenerative agriculture meeting with some of the top people in that space, and there is a strong crossover between regenerative agriculture and anti-vax, as well as, not as much, but in fringe circles, white nationalism.
And of course, he's been accused of white nationalistic or anti-semitic remarks, which have been rebuffed.
He has also spoken with Silicon Valley, and he's kind of gotten into that road through taking off his shirt.
at Gold's Gym and being filmed there.
So he's kind of taken all these niche communities and if you look at them isolated they all have influence but then if you put them together you realize that he has taken a set sets of people who have distrust in institutions but actually have lobbying power in their own communities and he's bringing them all in under this general umbrella and then doing the sleight of hand which Julian just Alex mentioned, which is saying, no, I'm the original Democrat.
I come from the family that kind of put a stake in civil rights democracy and what it's about.
And I'm bringing us back to that when he's actually, policy-wise, not doing that at all.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny that outside of his, like, kind of obsessive topics, right?
I'd say, honestly, from the list you gave, it sounds like his base is just all the most annoying people on earth.
But I think that, like, when he does kind of actually have to tackle, like, broader policy messaging, He is so boilerplate.
He is so status quo, which is very similar to Trump.
He presents as an outsider, but then he doesn't really have that many new ideas.
And often I think the right likes him because he's not somebody who has any genuinely left-wing messages.
He's not talking about unions.
He's not talking about the moneyed class at all.
He just reads to me as the perfect candidate for our time, right?
Just girl. He did also just have a movie premiere in Los Angeles earlier this week a 19 minute documentary on
Immigration where he went to the border and I was talking to a friend of mine
Who's a reporter at the LA Times and she went to it because she wanted to kind of see the crowd that was there
And her take on it was that the crowd was predominantly older almost all white
But she had a sense that they were there more for the anti-vax stuff, but it does I asked her
I was like, you know just in your own opinion Did it lean into Fox News territory with immigration issues
and she goes I don't know if it was Fox News But it was definitely anti Biden and putting the onus of
the immigration problem on Biden in a strong way Which would then appeal to the Fox News crowd
I want to pick up on something that Julian said with regard to how the yoga, wellness, New Age crowd that got red-pilled during COVID can seek out a kind of redemptive identity through identifying with, you know, the so-called Kennedy Democrat.
Like Christiane Northrup is in his campaign launch speech saying the only person that can bring this country together would be a Kennedy from the Kennedy Democrats.
And, you know, this is the QAnon grandma who basically is also fantasizing about retribution against vaccinating doctors.
But, you know, this nostalgia that is so rife within these reconstructed spiritualities that draw on, you know, ideas of ancient India, or a kind of plastic shamanism, or universalist religious ideas, that that nostalgia finds a kind of historical reality in tying itself to the way in which Kennedy describes his own lineage, right?
And so this is so well exemplified by the director of messaging for the Kennedy campaign, a guy named Charles Eisenstein, who we've covered at length.
He's a New Age writer, like very famous on the sort of workshop circuit.
And, you know, he'll literally say that voting for Kennedy is a way for, you know, the collective to repair the timeline that was broken in 1964 with the assassination.
But then he'll sort of bring sort of quantum physics ideas into it as well, saying that, you know, it's also a parallel reality that continued on.
Everything was going great back then.
You know, the civil rights movement was solving all problems.
Women were gaining, you know, all of the rights that they needed.
There was no pollution or corruption.
Nobody would have believed, says Kennedy, that in my day that the government lied to them, which is like completely bizarre.
Yeah, and like everyone on the left, we know that everything that happened after 1964 is what has ruined America.
Yeah, but it's incredible to watch these people who we have criticized as being depoliticized and ahistorical.
Like, I think that one of the reasons that conspirituality and QAnon really ripped through the yoga and wellness worlds so viciously in 2020 was that there was no kind of political education or ballast to resist it.
We're really talking about a neoliberal, deracinated middle class or falling out of the middle class through gig work population that had no political analysis on board.
They couldn't recognize the fascism coming onto their Facebook feeds.
They didn't know what it was.
It was just interesting to them.
And we don't think that that was by design, but we go back through, like, Yoga Journal, the last 40 years of this trade magazine, to figure out whether or not there was ever a single political article published.
And it turns out there wasn't, really.
Like, and we grew up, the three of us, we grew up in these yoga communities that basically encouraged us to view politics as being this low-vibration distraction from our enlightened activity.
And so, you know, like, we all had this experience, Julian.
Derek, we've all talked about it.
And so there was this reality principle that was missing.
And to see Charles Eisenstein suddenly say, oh, all of this sort of dream work that I've been doing at Esalen and, you know, on the workshop circuit for all this time, now I can find a real home.
Now I can be in the history books.
Now I can put on a suit.
Now I can be a real person.
I can grow up.
So there's also like a maturation opportunity here for a lot of these people.
These wild ideas that you've told me are just me having my head in the clouds.
Now I'm sitting behind Bobby Kennedy in a suit.
In Congress!
In Congress.
So how do you like me now?
And yeah, Eisenstein is very much, as the advisor, as the Director of Communications, he's in that non-dual, the way out of political conflict is into some kind of unifying principle where we transcend.
And in that conversation he has with Aubrey Marcus about mending the timeline, He also says that the Bobby Kennedy that will show up, the version in the multiple universes of Bobby Kennedy that will show up, who can win, is the one that will come from us focusing our attention on him in the right way so that we manifest the correct version.
His head is so far up his ass on all of this kind of stuff.
And let me just also say, too, in relation to what Julian was commenting with regard to Kennedy's policies.
Okay, so we just heard about him making a little documentary about the border, and he's following Mickey Willis's playbook and doing a 15-minute video and calling it a documentary, right, and having a grand premiere.
So he's got Fox-trending immigration policies.
His ideas about the environment and about health insurance are that the market will solve these things.
Yeah, it's very non-dual the way Bobby Kennedy Jr.
approaches the question of Israel and Palestinian rights.
Yeah, there's actually only one state.
It's called Israel.
There's no duality there.
Yeah, exactly.
If we could just all see that together.
I wonder what's going to happen if RFK Jr.
continues to sort of rise in popularity, or at the very least visibility, which who knows, maybe the two are interchangeable at this point.
You know, for years and years and years, you've had QAnon followers talking about the return of JFK Jr.
And I'm wondering if at any point somebody's going to try to bake that, you know, that, well, we decoded something wrong.
It's actually RFK Jr.
that's going to come back and provide the Great Awakening.
We consulted the Gematria thing, and we realized... Yeah, they rolled the dice wrong.
They did a couple miscalculations.
The J key on the keyboard wasn't working, or the R key wasn't working on the keyboard, so they had to use the J instead.
That's so depressing.
It's like, yeah, we have a JFK Jr.
at home, and you come home and it's RFK Jr.
No, you can't get it.
We've got our very own JFK Jr.
at home.
You can play with that.
Since you've now stated that, it's going to become a reality.
So you've just given us more content to have to watch out for and cover.
Yeah, according to Eisenstein, that's it, right?
We're speaking that into being.
And you know, by the way, we talked to Jake and Travis the other day, and we asked this question about when did you believe that this was going to become a thing, that QAnon was going to be a real influence in the world?
And, you know, your answer, part of it was, well, behind the scenes, we were talking about how we believe we have a feeling it's gonna be big, and we can see it sort of leaking out over into mainstream social media from the depths of the internet.
And I feel like we're kind of in the same situation with this story, that it's very difficult to assess his support, how he's going to do, how much the DNC is going to thwart him.
And I just have this feeling that it's going to be more surprising and in a worse way than a lot of people expect.
And it's hard, right, because I don't want to be an alarmist about this guy, but I do think he's extremely good at what he does, and he's very compelling, and people do go nuts over him.
And I can't see his followers actually letting him bow out because the DNC cuts him off at the knees.
Like, I can see people really pressing him to go independent at a certain point.
The roots of conspirituality started in 2012 when Julian and myself and three other people in Los Angeles started a website called Yoga Brains, which was talking about political disengagement in the yoga communities.
And Matthew was a contributor, so that's how we all know each other.
And we had an audience of pretty much ourselves, because people in the yoga community are like, why are you talking about politics?
We're above that.
We've transcended it.
It took a pandemic for these topics to become something that people paid attention to.
And because we have done years of this sort of work without an audience, by the time it was ready, we were kind of in place.
And that's just timing, and that is what it is.
But I agree with Matthew that he is going to, by picking off all of these fringe communities, at the very least, he's continuing to sow distrust in institutions.
Some of it very warranted.
And that's that's the thing.
Like, do we trust the government or agricultural conglomerates or pharmaceutical companies?
No, but we also don't distrust them in the ways that someone like RFK is telling us to distrust them.
There's a different level.
But if you don't have that discernment, it's going to be hard to wade through all of that.
Yeah, you know, I mean, some of the more concerning things I've heard from RFK Jr.
concerns his really bizarre sort of desire to prosecute, like, medical researchers and doctors.
He often talks about this, you know, this fantasy or, like, policy proposal, essentially.
of finding some way to punish and blackball and exile and ruin all of these researchers,
which he believes have unfairly, you know, I guess, elevated medical practices, which
he believes are not effective or actively harmful.
I mean, and it's very, very bizarre for me, because he comes from a crowd who, you
know, who are supposedly anxious about, you know, government overreach and the government
deciding what is truth and what is falsehood.
But, you know, we saw this, we saw this in the Twitter files, but on these medical issues,
at least, he seems to be very open and excited about the possibility of actively harming
people who simply have published research that he doesn't agree with.
And what better leader than a guy in the Kennedy family whose uncle and father were assassinated?
I mean, here's somebody who's real life, you know, not in a made-up story, you know, is at the root, you know, at the center of what spawned I mean, he is the perfect character, in a way, to be at the center of this story that seems to be emerging over the last couple years within conspiracy communities, which is that the nature of what the true America could be, this Great Awakening, has been silenced by a deep state, and here is the young boy at the center of it.
If you were writing a movie, this would be the main character, and I wonder how much RFK Jr.
is aware of his power in that regard.
Hilariously, he's 0% a threat to the actual moneyed interests and the, you know, kind of military-industrial complex, so in a way, he's actually a perfect product.
They'd much rather him than a Bernie who might actually touch some of these kind of institutions that have been, you know, controlling and hoarding power.
You know, I don't know if I can find the quote just offhand really quickly, but as to his awareness of his position, it's pretty on the nose.
He opens one of his memoirs with a statement about how, I'm just paraphrasing here, I always knew that within my family, we were in a great struggle for the soul of the country and that all of our actions were extremely important and that we were part of a war for righteousness.
He's very open about that and about his own position.
His constant pinging of, my father gave me this, my uncle stood for that, usually he's laundering many of the details with these memories.
It's very much cinematic that way.
Yeah, I was gonna say, it's like the beginning of Goodfellas.
It's like, for the day I was young, I knew I wanted to be a gangster, you know?
It's like, it's the opening of The Sopranos voiceover.
I mean, it has that sort of cinematic sort of feel, and as we know, like, that resonates really, really well with the conspiracy community, who, you know, the Q poster directly was telling them that they are watching a movie.
Derek, could you talk a little bit about RFK's policy proposals, essentially going after doctors and researchers?
What you had said, it's even worse than that, because what he said during the Healthcare Policy Roundtable was he wants to blacklist researchers and scientists who have had clinical trials that the FDA used to approve drugs.
Oh, God.
That's the most cynical thing that I can imagine.
He wants to go back and look at FDA approved drugs, pick out the ones that he doesn't like, and then blacklist them.
He also wants to blacklist the journals that publish the data and the research that was used for those drugs.
And during that, he also said that he wants to take all funding from the US government and the NIH out of virology research and put it into chronic disease research.
And he does this because he's using an argument that most people who died of COVID had a chronic disease or multiple chronic diseases.
And so the root of the problem is not actually the virus itself, as if no one who just got it could be afflicted by it, but you had to have had a chronic disease.
And that plays into the ableism that Matthew said earlier, but it's a very popular message with the crowd that he's speaking to, which is very much the demographic that we swam in for so long in the quote-unquote wellness industry.
Yeah, that if you were healthy and fit and eating a good diet, then you didn't have to worry about COVID and so you didn't have to get vaccinated because the vaccines actually might be really dangerous and they're lying to you about that, right?
And there's also there's another piece here, which Lee McIntyre talked about on our show as one of the aspects of science denialism, which is having these completely unreasonable standards of perfection that you demand from science.
Otherwise, you throw it all out.
It's very black and white thinking, right?
And so it's almost like he has this Impossible fantasy perfection of what he thinks real scientific research should be.
And so the people who are involved in doing the research to try and therefore have relationships with the FDA in order to get drugs approved and to show that they're safe, they're somehow still impure, corrupt.
This is evidence that they're involved in something nefarious.
And it's like, no, that's just how the system works.
And in fact, it works really fucking well.
And in fact, you should go to some countries that don't have the kind of
infrastructure that we have and see how terribly people do without these kinds of governing bodies
and these kinds of research methodologies. Yeah, I mean it is really bizarre,
especially since, you know, the most famous study that supposedly showed a link between vaccines and autism
was done by Andrew Wakefield and It was a fraudulent, later retracted, and of course he faced professional consequences for, like, you know, falsifying that study.
But I think it would still be horrifying if, like, you know, the government went after him.
For some reason, but they still have this especially weird because a lot of these people are really into like, you know The Twitter files for example, and they have anxiety which you know, of course I think is reasonable about the idea of government having too much sway over You know the public conversation and you know having too much say over what is true was false but like in the Twitter files it was like You know, an FBI agent sending an email to their contact at Twitter over some content that may have violated their terms of service.
And here they're talking about the government essentially declaring some research as worthless and wrong and incorrect and then, you know, ruining the lives of the people who engage in it.
Which is far more authoritarian.
Really horrifying stuff.
Yeah, so he's a free speech absolutist and martyr and he's being censored and it's terrible and big government has all this overreach and big tech is interfering in our constitutional rights.
But I have this idea that I want to run by you about how we're going to punish all of these medical researchers.
Yeah, there's something very, like, prosecutor-like about this, too, where it's like, well, what evidence is admissible?
We want to make sure that this evidence that doesn't help my case is not admissible.
Is it evidence?
Yes.
Is it even possibly true?
Yes.
But it contradicts my argument, so we're just going to, you know, kind of use the motions of the court to, like, try to get it thrown out.
Yeah, debate club science and political rhetoric.
In terms of not bringing in evidence, one thing that people don't know or they forget, because you never hear it anymore, is that at the time after Andrew Wakefield published his research, which was eventually retracted from The Lancet, he had taken out two patents on vaccines that he wanted to be used.
So he was saying, don't take these vaccines at the same time that he was filing for patents for his own vaccines.
So the grift was baked into the very structure of the study, which was horrible from a clinical perspective.
Brian Deer has written extensively about that and was sued by Wakefield for being a reporter.
But that I never hear that argument from the anti-vaxxers because they probably don't even aware of that, but he is a grifter through and through, and Wakefield is still out there and is still a martyr to this community.
Yeah, so he's trying to corner the market on the measles vaccine by doing this fudge study, and he even admits to that eventually, I believe, as part of the proceedings.
And that's not a conspiracy theory that you're ever going to hear anti-vaxxers talk about.
I mean, that's why we're saying Tucker Carlson's wrong, or don't listen to Joe Rogan, because we want to be the only media company.
Right.
I want to talk a little bit about the media strategy for the RFK Jr.
campaign, because it seems to be mostly podcast-based.
Now, his most famous interview was on Joe Rogan, and like, clips of that went viral and led to Lots of controversy.
But he has also done podcast interviews on shows like Lex Friedman, Stay Free with Russell Brand, Honestly with Barry Weiss, Jim Brewer's podcast, which I learned is called Brewerverse, and there's a lot more.
So, I mean, it's, you know, on one level, this makes sense.
I think, like, podcast listeners, they're famously the most attractive, talented, intelligent of all media consumers.
Absolutely.
Well, it depends the podcast, honestly.
Right, but still kind of an unusual strategy because it's mostly sort of alternative and independent media.
So like, why is he focused on like getting his message out through podcasts so much?
Okay, a number of things here.
First of all, he's transparent about the legacy of his family in pioneering political rhetoric through new media.
So he'll reference, you know, my uncle understood that television was going to allow him to get his message out and You know, kick Richard Nixon's ass so he wouldn't put on makeup and he looked like he was sweaty and, you know, he was going to faint during those famous debates.
But then it's very, very natural the way that he's already networked
within the health and wellness world that he would move into be familiar
with the long form podcast scene where really they're about good conversations.
He gets softball questions, there's never any pushback.
He's not going to be interviewed by journalists.
So it gets a little bit spicy when he does get called out by people like Crystal Ball
and he's not in the podcast space.
But I think it really suits him to go long, to storytell, to mesmerize.
And then we just want to note something about his voice.
He has a vocal injury called, what is it called?
Spasmodic dysphonia.
Yeah, and it's unclear what the cause is.
He has said that his voice declined from his 40s onward, that he didn't know what the condition was until somebody pointed it out to him.
He said that it's possibly from a flu vaccine injury, but then he's walked that statement back in other places.
And then he'll make a joke about how, you know, this is kind of what, or it symbolizes how my speech has been restricted over the last 18 years.
Which, by the way, started from 2005 when he basically published an article in the Rolling Stone that had to be retracted.
Very famous sort of spectacle over that.
But he has said that his voice feels stronger the more he talks.
And it's like, you can kind of feel it happen.
When he gets on a roll, he rises up into his full persona.
He is not one for soundbites.
He's not one for being disciplined and staying on script.
I mean, he does have set pieces that he'll repeat over and over again.
But Julie and I have talked about this at length, especially in relation to how charismatics generally speak.
It's not just the gishgallop.
It's also a kind of form of self-entrancement, we believe, where the storytelling is so powerful, it is so emotive.
He never really breaks into tears.
I mean, his grandfather famously said, even in the midst of all of the family tragedy, you know, there will be no tears in this family.
So he's never like, you know, weeping in that sense.
But there's an emotional sort of grandeur that builds and builds and builds through each of his monologues that I think is extremely captivating from a media perspective.
And he doesn't like to be interrupted, that's for sure.
Same with, you know, Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, basically everybody that we can think of who is male in the sort of podcasting, you know, extroverted vocalizing world, they have this trait, right?
Non-stop speech that grows in intensity over time.
Yeah, and I have this hunch that while he's talking, he hates the sound of his disability.
Yeah, he says that quite often.
Like, lest you think he's a disability activist guy, he says, you know, my voice sounds terrible, and I really feel sorry for you for having to listen to it.
Yeah, I can never listen to my own voice.
I'm really sorry that you have to hear it.
I know it sounds terrible, but don't worry.
The longer I speak, the better it gets because it's a nervous system condition, not a vocal cord condition.
And I have this hunch that the longer he talks, the better it feels, the more his nervous system kind of figures out how to fire correctly, the more he starts to find himself feeling like the chosen son, like the one who is arising to his proper place in the world.
Yeah, you know, podcasting as a medium, I think is also an interesting choice because, at least audio podcasts, because it takes away from his biggest asset, I think, or one of the assets he has on his campaign, which is how swole he is.
Yeah, he's also got those those 60 suits that are very fitted with a skinny tie.
Yeah, very stylish.
It's really interesting, actually, I mean, like how much physical fitness plays into his messaging, perhaps more on a subliminal level.
But, you know, we saw that video of him looking very pumped doing incline barbell presses.
Now, we've had, you know, fit presidents before.
Gerald Ford, champion college linebacker.
Teddy Roosevelt loved many sports, trained in multiple martial arts.
But in recent decades, it doesn't seem like presidents are training enough for maximum muscle growth, you know?
Obama had a three-pointer, so don't...
Yeah, you know, he was perhaps our last fit president, I gotta say.
Our current one, I'd be impressed if he can do two push-ups.
Our last one apparently had a belief that the human body was like a battery that ran out of energy and therefore you shouldn't exercise too much.
He also claimed to be the best baseball player of his generation, right?
Right.
Yeah, I'm just curious.
I want to ask you, I guess, what role does physical fitness have in his messaging in his campaign?
Well, I'll start with the image itself.
He goes to the mecca of bodybuilding in America, Gold's Gym, takes off his shirt, he admits he's on testosterone replacement therapy, the big anti-pharma guy is on that, and he does what he does in his drop set.
He gets mad when people say how little weight he's putting up, but that's a separate story because he doesn't like, you know, criticism.
But that is very much geared toward a certain Silicon Valley bro science, neurohacking community that when he posted that video, go through the comments and you'll see them all.
It's about time we had a strong man.
And I don't like the one, it's not a one-to-one with Putin on the horse, but you can't deny that that image has the same affect.
to people who see a guy who's strong and men who like that will be drawn into that.
And then his most recent video, he's at the Santa Monica Rings, which if you know Los Angeles,
that is also, that's where the original Muscle Beach was, but that is also where all the yogis go.
There's the lawn right over there.
That's where everyone works out.
And he watches a guy in the rings and then he's like, I can't do that.
And then he does a few of the rings and Cheryl's laughing.
And he's really trying to play this.
Oh, I'm just a guy at the beach.
Every man.
But also look how strong I am.
So from an image perspective, he has that affect down.
But I'm sure Matthew has more thoughts on like the overall messaging of that.
Well, from the outset within our own study of yoga and wellness, we've been pretty captivated by this idea of body fascism, the way in which, you know, the ideals of physical culture coming out of the early 20th century European movements and then sort of translated into the modern Indian yoga movement and then back again in the 50s and 60s in the form of global yoga.
That really it is a core driver of neoliberal politics over time, in the sense that the body becomes the site of the resolution of all political and social issues, and it's a highly individualistic perspective, it's very anxious because it really doesn't
want to depend on the social projects of public health or, you know, social endeavors
like vaccination. Like the reason that one of the reasons that this crowd is very, very
skeptical about the notion of a collective health effort is that there just isn't any
history behind it. There's been such a long story being told about how you are responsible
for your health and well-being, and you alone.
Because it's like it's this collective, unified, we are all one kind of notion, but we're all one in our sovereign, separate integrity of finding individual self-actualization and enlightenment, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, what I see when I see the the furor over Bobby Kennedy's Gold's Gym videos is this celebration of, yeah, now we are going to show that the American body politic really is self-selecting towards success.
Like, that's what we want and that's what will represent success.
Not, you know, social programs, not, you know, closing the inequality gap, not talking about Medicare for All.
It's going to be about personal willpower, you know, the expression of your, you know, muscular religiosity, and then basically everything that you talk about with Annie Kelly on Man Clan, Julian.
Yeah, I mean, I think that people, we need to hearken back to the people who went and won World War I and World War II.
They had all downloaded the Peloton app and had done it for themselves.
They'd done self-improvement and then together they were able to defeat the Nazi threat.
Yeah, and to bring it back around to what we were talking about earlier too, I think, Matthew, what you're describing is also, it's very aspirational, right?
It's very much part, it's an expression of influencer culture, it's an expression of like, I'm just this guy who happens to be 70 years old who's hanging out at the beach and I'm going to I'm going to go on the rings and my wife, who just happens to be from one of the most popular TV shows of the last 20 years, is going to just be watching and laughing.
And it's like, this is what it is to be a successful man on testosterone replacement therapy who thinks Big Pharma is the most evil thing in the world.
So there's that piece, but I think to what Travis was asking earlier, too, there's also the sense of like, I'm being censored by the mainstream media, but I can go on all of these podcasts, and a lot of these podcasts not only are contrarian and politically reactionary and conspiratorial, because that gets clicks, and there's always something interesting to talk about in that controversial, polarizing realm.
But they're also willing to have him on and say, we are the ones who are brave enough to have these forbidden conversations.
And so it's a perfect medium for him that way.
I also just want to point out that there's an immense amount of anxiety that is hovering underneath the surface of the wellness, you know, performance and spectacle.
It's really self-driven, it is self-reliant, and then it is self-responsible.
Because if you get sick, you must have done something wrong.
And that anxiety, I believe, accounts for some of the misanthropy and the ableism and the aggression that strangely comes out of this world and points itself at political enemies, and it makes the yoga and wellness worlds vulnerable to the kind of cruelty of fascism.
Where, you know, what's at the heart of fascist politics is the quest for power.
So there's this strange cultural, I don't know, confusion where we assume that doing your stretches and doing deep breathing and doing green smoothies or something like that is going to bring you into a more holistic awareness of your connection with everybody else.
And yet there's also this other messaging underneath that has nothing to do with the project of society.
It's really about the project of the self.
It's the secret.
Yeah, right.
It's the secret.
You're gonna do all these things and think all these things and make these vision boards and then you'll be powerful and wealthy and hot.
Yeah, I love to do affirmations in the morning.
I will take my testosterone shot.
I gotta wonder, I mean, you talked about, you know, that he's married to, you know, one of the most recognizable television stars, you know, over the last decade.
I wonder what it's like for her, because from my experience in Hollywood, everybody is pretty much some variation of neoliberal, and, you know, being connected or married to a guy who's talking about how, you know, COVID was programmed to miss, you know, the Ashkenazi Jews, and you know the stuff that he said about vaccines.
I imagine that puts her in a fairly uncomfortable social situation.
And I was wondering if any of that has sort of come up.
I don't know if that's really the case.
Like, if you look back, Barbara Bush was a voting Democrat.
If you look back, the Kennedy that's married to, or was married, I suppose, to Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Democrat.
Maria Shriver, yeah.
Maria Shriver, yeah.
It's almost like there's not that much difference between them.
Yeah, there's also there's also a little bit of a hidden secret, I think, in the upper echelons of Hollywood, where you say these things that are progressive, but then behind closed doors, you're voting for Trump and you're donating to his campaign and stuff.
So I also, you know, hold out the possibility that this has no effect whatsoever and that they're all you know, that everybody behind closed doors is is At least, you know, at this point, they've probably chosen a circle of friends who, you know, are all kind of in various levels of agreement on this kind of stuff.
Yeah, so you're going to have all of this posturing and virtue signaling around inclusion and being politically progressive within Hollywood.
And then if you look at what's happening with the strike right now, and the numbers that are coming out about the disparities in pay, it's like, oh, okay, great.
Yeah, you're really for the little guy.
Yeah, it's like, listen, we've got some differences, but at least we can agree free market capitalism is awesome.
And those are the two sides.
We can still agree about that.
There was a moment before the presidency during the pandemic where they had a gathering at their house and it came out that Sheryl Hines required everyone to be vaccinated.
So that put RFK, you know, there was some press around it when that happened.
So when he announced, I was very interested to see how on board she was going to be, but she has fully been on board.
And in fact, just today she posted a photo with her and Woody Harrelson and Woody's wearing an RFK hat.
So she's drawing people from her circle into the mix, it seems as well.
And the other key moment, of course, is after he does the Anne Frank gaffe on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
She tweeted at him and about him to anyone who was listening that this was really not okay and he needed to apologize.
Actors, not trustworthy, and it seems like maybe even shallow, maybe just about appearances and not some deeper sense of politics.
Breaking news!
Also, I'm very sad she's not with Larry David anymore.
You know, I want to say something about how he manages the obvious acrimony around him.
I don't know that much about, you know, how Sheryl Hines has to organize her own life around this.
But he regularly speaks about and acknowledges, but I would say it's a form of strategic transparency.
He acknowledges that his family opposes his candidacy, that they disagree with him strongly about a number of issues.
He doesn't go into detail.
They go into detail.
They say, this is exactly what he's wrong about in terms of public health and vaccines.
We don't want him to be running.
But like, I think one of the things that he's brilliant at is fostering the illusion of civility when necessary.
So he'll say, we have to be able to disagree civilly with each other.
We have to be able to, of course, you know, within families, you know, he'll joke sarcastically.
He'll say, of course, no other family but mine has disagreements.
Ha ha ha.
And then everybody laughs.
Like, of course, our own families are always arguing about everything.
And so he minimizes the conflict there, but he also makes this appeal constantly to, we should be treating each other with respect.
And then he will flip it and he will go into retribution mode.
He will stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and talk about the hill that he's going to die on.
He'll talk about, they're coming for your children.
He flips back and forth between, I would say, paying lip service to a kind of, Unity theme and then speaking in fire and brimstone terms about political retribution.
And that's very disorienting.
And I think what we've seen from many cult leaders, I'm not saying that he's a cult leader, but there's a parallel here with charismatics who do two things at the same time in close proximity.
They appeal to people's higher sort of sense.
They talk about unity.
They talk about kindness and love.
And then in the next sentence, they scare the shit out of them.
And that's a very disorienting thing to be the audience member of.
And some theorists, you know, talk about how that can contribute to a feeling of what's called disorganized attachment or actually trauma bonding with this person who you don't know whether they're caring for you or terrorizing you.
But you're going to bet that they're caring for you because they've got all of your attention.
The other way around is even more effective, right?
I'm going to scare the hell out of you and then I'm going to tell you I am the one.
I love you.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the unvaccinated and the vaccinated will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Slap George with a shiny eye to like.
Right.
But what's more relatable than that?
I mean, especially in this day and age, to have a candidate who gets up there and says, hey, I argue with my family around the dinner table about politics the time. You know, I think millions of people are going to
look at that and whether or not they actually care about the policy or
believe in the policy, what they do believe in is the experience. And so much of
politics nowadays is so experiential as opposed to really having to wade through
policy and put the time in to read somebody's website, read everything that they're,
you know, promising to do or what they care about, but to be able to
identify and say like, "Oh man, well I love that idea because if this guy gets
into office, you know, he's gonna have people that he loves and he cares about around
him pushing back or agreeing, you know, with some of the things that he says
and that's just like my family and that's, you know, that's what I want."
I want a mirror of my dinner table conversations permeating throughout the highest levels of government because that feels real to me and it closes the gap that everybody, I think, at this point can acknowledge between politicians and your average American voter.
Sure, and I mean, it can actually be useful sometimes for people who are dealing with red-pilled people and their family, but it's only on a personal level, you know?
It's not gonna, like, help the general trajectory of the country.
It's gonna help you maybe have some better conversations.
With your mom that you feel is like so far away from you.
So, you know, I mean, I think that all of us, this whole conversation speaks to just how twisted politics as a concept has become.
You know, I remember speaking to someone recently who was like, Oh, you're on the left.
So you're like LGBTQIA plus and like, we don't have any idea what politics are anymore.
It's all just, are we able to have conversations?
What is our identity?
There's the culture war has completely subsumed Any conversation about the structures of power, you know?
So now it's really just what side do you take on this?
And I think even vaccines, the reason why at the end of the day someone like Sheryl Hines can still be like, yeah, everyone should be vaccinated for this party is because you don't have to be coherent.
It's just two sides of an argument.
And if he is a prosecutor, then it's a trial about nothing with no charges and no jury.
I was, I was talking, I was talking to a good, good buddy of mine, uh, the other day, and he was telling me that a friend of his was, you know, kind of lamenting the fact that he was going to cancel his, his Disney season pass because he doesn't agree with their politics.
And it's like, well, dude, Disney doesn't give a fu- you know, like Disney has basically, essentially just said it's, it's okay to be gay.
You know, and they don't give a fuck if you cancel your season pass.
These systems of power and the large corporations and the brands, they are unaffected largely by your sort of position within the culture war and deciding how you want to use your dollar.
Even this, and this guy loves Disney, you know, he's giving up something that brings him a lot of joy.
And so, I don't know, yeah, I feel like, Julian, you're really sort of onto something in this idea that this sort of aspects and focus on the culture war completely hamstringing any real conversation about government and reaches of power is, I don't know, I mean, it feels a little bit by design.
It's very convenient, at the very least, that the argument is, what side of the product are we?
It's all just consumer revolt stuff, right?
And what Disney's saying is not, it's okay to be gay.
It's okay to be gay and subscribe to Disney+.
Well, and are you drinking Bud Light or are you blowing it up in your backyard with a bazooka?
Yeah.
And it also could just be the market dictating that when you have these sort of cultural disagreements, you know, at the heart of who's buying what, that's probably good for business because for everybody that's burning their Bud Light cans, you know, or shooting them out of, you know, a mortar tube, there's going to be another group of people that goes, hey, I love Bud Light.
I love Bud Light now because it's making my political enemy pissed off.
And that's what I like to see.
That should be their next ad.
It's like some red-pilled guy shooting it out of a mortar tube, and then his neighbor is having a barbecue and catches it mid-air.
Oh, that's so good.
No, stop, stop.
We're all together.
We edit this out.
We can't give them any, any ideas.
But nothing sums this, this part of this conversation up better than that is, yeah, some, some pilled guy shooting it out of a mortar.
It goes over, it goes over the fence yard and the liberal neighbor You know, catches it with his hand, pops the top open, drinks it, and it's like, ah!
You know, somebody else's misery and anger is your joy.
Yeah.
And so much of that, especially online, you know, which seems to be where many of these fights sort of play out, is just, we're consumed by this.
And that's why I think that RFK Jr., to bring it kind of back around to that, is the perfect candidate because he's a culture war candidate.
He's someone who places aesthetics before any kind of, like, tangible, uh, underlying structure.
He has zero left-wing analysis.
He's not even, like, you know, full-hearted in his support of, like, the right-wing stuff people accuse him of.
He is, like, the kind of, like, half-assed, Phantom of like the kind of death of political possibilities.
It's perfect.
And he's got good lore baked in.
I mean, imagine him quoting his uncle, quoting his father.
Imagine, you know, political rallies playing, you know, cinematic clips of John F. Kennedy making speeches.
He's got the lore baked in.
You show up with a certain feeling about his family.
I agree with that old guy who made a very long fart at his fundraiser.
that's going to do some heavy lifting, you know, as we, you know, get closer and closer to the 2024
election. I agree with that old guy who made a very long fart at his fundraiser. Like, that's
kind of how I feel about the whole thing. Yeah, I wanted to say too that this, what you're saying
about the culture war, I think a lot of it is by design, a lot of it is opportunistic.
And it's, it's creating this bizarre distortion in which all of the accusations of authoritarianism and of wanting to lead us away from democracy are deflected continuously back onto the woke left.
When it's all of these people who, whether they're claiming to be enlightened centrists, or they're obvious right-wing propagandists like the Daily Wire folks, or they're some of the people that we cover who are in the RFK camp, they're all basically convinced that we're on this very dangerous track.
They just have a completely wrongheaded analysis of what that track is and why it's happening and, you know, where it's headed.
One last thing I want to ask you about RFK Jr.' 's campaign is how far
Do you think he's willing to take this?
Because really, at the end of the day, he's a nominally Democratic candidate challenging the Democratic incumbent, so the odds of him having any real success this election cycle are really, really remote.
So, I mean, do you think his strategy is to maybe go independent?
Is he going to try and, you know, probably maybe make a deal, get concessions from the Democratic Party?
I mean, what exactly is his perhaps more realistic goal with this campaign?
The way some of his key supporters within the demographic that we cover talk about him, he is a once-in-a-lifetime, salvific character who should not be bound by the logistics or the pedantry of party politics.
his message and what he can potentially embody for the country is so important, so crucial,
that I think it'd be very hard for me to imagine that bunch of his supporters. Now, the money is
another thing, I suppose, but he's got a core of support that I think would push him towards
trying to win at any means necessary. And if that meant going independent, I think that's
what it would mean. But not being a political analyst, I don't know what the logistical
challenges are of that, so I have a little bit of a blank spot there. I do think that if he doesn't
go very far, if he eventually fails this time around, he is very well set up to be on the stage
for the next round.
I don't think he's going to go anywhere.
He's working out.
Before we let you go, fellas, I thought I'd ask about your book, Conspiratoriality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat.
So could you tell us a little bit about this word, conspiratoriality, and what the book is about and why people should check it out?
So, uh, conspirituality is a portmanteau of the words conspiracy and spirituality, and we first came across it, it's been around for a while, we came across it in a paper from 2011 by Charlotte Ward and David Foas, and they were essentially describing at that time, back in 2011, what they were observing as this phenomenon of a strange kind of marriage between darker, more paranoid, more typically male-coded conspiratorial thinking, online with light and love.
Everything happens for a reason.
It's all unfolding perfectly, kind of new age, typically female coded ideas and beliefs that were also circulating online and how they were intersecting in interesting ways.
And then, Derek, I think you came across the Jules Evans paper, yeah?
Yeah, Jules Evans is a philosopher in the UK, and he wrote a write-up about the paper.
So that was sort of the pipeline.
Jules introduced it, and then that's how we got a hold of it.
I think that one of the key sort of, I don't know, lenses for understanding the phenomenon as a whole is that Ward and Voas in their paper used the work of the political scientist Michael Barkun who describes the architecture of conspiratorial thinking as being rooted in the paranoid sense that everything is connected, everything happens for a reason, and nothing is as it seems.
And what Ward and Voas did is they realized that those three statements actually, if they are uncurdled, if they are presented in a positive light, they are actually Consonant with, you know, very aspirational goals that, well, if things are not as they seem, then perhaps a hidden divine potential can be excavated from this moment.
If everything is connected, maybe I'm not as alienated as I thought I was.
And if everything happens for a reason, then my actions and my life are not meaningless.
And I think that what we saw in the demographic that we studied is people who were steeped in the aspirational version of this trifecta, who said, you know, who held these very, I think, helpful beliefs in terms of their personal lives, Who then also began to see some kind of shadow version of them play out in their political milieu.
And so that kind of intersection of three principles, on one side they are aspirational and on the other side they are paranoid, that's the kind of chiaroscuro that I think we've been looking at.
We start the book, the first section, we look at the history of conspirituality, sort of the 19th century setting of the stage.
Matthew mentioned body fascism earlier, and the ways that the quote unquote wellness community came into America.
So we look at a lot of different 19th and 20th century historical forces to set the stage.
So in the second part, we chose 10 influencers in the, you know, wellness yoga space that were very prominent during COVID as Boosters of this kind of audience-captured fervor for lacing their material, their wellness content, with conspiratorial, you know, BS.
And we, you know, we had to make tough choices about who to include.
It's pretty diverse.
There are some sort of cult leader figures.
There are bro scientists.
There's Mickey Willis makes an appearance.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So we had a preparatory, you know, but this thing is that chapter was written like eight months before his presidential campaign was announced.
And so we've had to do a lot of updating, but we had a good backbone there.
And then we finished up with stories from listeners about how conspirituality has impacted their lives, especially, you know, people who were, you know, my husband was diagnosed with cancer and got involved with the teachings of Joe Dispenza and almost stopped his chemotherapy and You know, how did that play out?
So we tried to do some ground level, like, impacts on how this blending of, you know, spirituality and pseudoscience and kind of paranoia about the world impacts people's daily lives.
Yeah, I want to say too that, you know, we embarked on the podcast project and then eventually on the book because we were seeing our own social media feeds get taken over by conspiratorial content, Q-adjacent content, COVID denialism, it's being caused by 5G, and then like the new age versions of all of that that kept proliferating as time went on.
And our feeds, of course, it was a lot of yoga people, a lot of life coaches, a lot of You know, healers and people who had some sort of a spiritual business, some spiritual entrepreneurs who then were being affected by COVID because they couldn't work and they couldn't make money and they're very angry about that.
So in the middle section of the book, we're really trying to understand what happened during the pandemic to this community and who were the main figures who were either boosting these ideas or like riding to fame on these ideas and making a lot of money from it and proliferating a lot of disinformation.
And then we went in the first section, how is this possible?
What's the history?
What are the ideas?
What are the beliefs?
How did we get to this point where this community could be vulnerable to this?
Because the question we've gotten the most from journalists is, I thought, like, the yoga and wellness crew were going to be primarily liberal.
These are open-minded people who are into the spirituality from other cultures.
These don't seem like textbook conservatives.
How did they get involved with stuff like QAnon, for God's sake?
So, like, okay, how did that happen in the first section?
And then in the third section, we're trying to end on a positive note and talk about what's beyond conspirituality.
How do people get out of this?
What are some stories of people who've come around on the other side or who've had some kind of healing experience with their family members or close friends, for example, and become sane again?
Yeah, it's great stuff.
I really recommend the book, and I think you interweave your own personal experiences and stories into it in a really cool and, I don't know, compassionate, incredible way.
So we'll put the link in the episode description if you are interested.
Where can people check out your podcast?
And is there anything else you'd like to plug?
Conspirituality.net is our website, but we're on all podcast providers.
ConspiratualityPod on Instagram, if you do that.
And then the book, yeah, wherever you get books, you know, go to an independent shop if you can.
Yeah, if you go to the Instagram, there's that famous photo of you three at the Gold's Gym with no shirt on, right?
Exactly, right.
Yeah, and then if we pop over to yours, you're at the HealthNuts workshop in Arizona doing some ball slapping.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, gentlemen.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys.
A real pleasure.
Thanks, guys.
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