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Aug. 30, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
52:14
WTW56: Jon Ronson's Things Fell Apart Falls Apart

At long last, we're releasing our series on how Jon Ronson both sidesed the truth into oblivion in the 2nd season of Things Fell Apart. The show, just like its host, is engaging and entertaining. The reporting, however, is not good. It is incredibly favorable to the anti-woke brigade, and as a result, is . And it's also just lazy and false in many ways. First up: Dr. Judy Mikovits. Ronson paints her as a one-time serious scientist who got a raw deal and therefore turned conspiratorial and eventually became the subject of the anti-vax propaganda Plandemic. Or... what if she was actually always full of shit? If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!

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Time Text
What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to... Chex Notes.
What's this podcast called?
It's been so long.
No, Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That is Lydia.
I'm Lydia.
It's been a while.
I don't know if you remember my name.
How do we do this?
Which thing do I talk into?
How's it going?
Pretty good.
My head is spinning a little bit because of everything that's been going on over here that we can't wait to tell everybody about.
Oh, you mean the like 10 hours of series we've been trying to get out for two months?
At least.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a lot.
Folks, It's here.
But here's the thing.
It's here.
And here's an even better thing.
I have made so much emotional growth that I'm going to tell you about that instead of doing a painfully long intro where we talk about conceptually what's going on here for like 30 minutes, I'm not doing that.
We actually did that.
And then I was like, no, I got it.
We got to not do it.
Cut to the chase.
Yeah.
We can save that till after because that's fine.
Why not just show folks what's going on first and then afterwards say, uh, We'll break it down a little bit.
But we do need to give enough context for folks.
So this is the beginning of what will be a quite long and very painfully agonizingly researched and fact-checked series.
Still not done to this day.
Yeah, we're still going.
I'm going to be fact-checking this like 10 years from now just to make sure.
And I'll tell you why.
It's because the subject of our investigation this time was not Bill Maher or Ben Shapiro, some Fox News asshole with seven wives, ex-wives rambling about family values.
No, none of that.
It is someone who I would never have thought would be the subject of Where There's Woke.
John Ronson.
John Ronson is an author that I have been a fan of for a really long time.
I went to college with Carrie Poppy, and we've been friends, and she is friends with John Ronson.
At some point, I got into his books because of her.
I don't remember when, but it's been a long time.
At least 10 years, if not more.
And I really loved his books.
I still do, I guess.
The ones you might have heard of are The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was made into a movie.
But there's also The Psychopath Test, I think was maybe his most popular in terms of just the book.
And I've talked about that one a lot of times.
But then also, So You've Been Publicly Shamed was an interesting one.
I think So You've Been Publicly Shamed was at a perfect time and just preceded a lot of the backlash to what people call cancel culture, and what I think you and I would call more consequence culture, I suppose, or consequences.
And it preceded that.
I like it because it wasn't like some right-wing attack on consequences.
It was, I think, a nuanced look at that, especially because a lot of the, or at least some of the cases in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which of course talked about like massive, you know, online kind of public cancellations and stuff like that.
A few of them were mistaken identity.
Oh, right.
And that's like inarguable.
There's no woke argument that's like, well, yeah, but still people, if you have like the same name, then you're also cancelled.
It's inarguable that if we get to the point or if the internet is at the point where people who are misidentified are then like having massive consequences in their lives and publicly shamed, fired, that kind of stuff.
Everyone would agree that's wrong.
So it was a nuanced look at, yes, this is a thing that has bad consequences.
And I never took his book to be any sort of like Anti-left or even really terribly centrist.
I just thought it was kind of an empathetic, compassionate look at this stuff.
And that's kind of how I've always thought of his work.
Until now.
Until Things Fell Apart Season 2.
He has a podcast series called Things Fell Apart.
It's very compelling.
It grabs you.
You know, it's good storytelling.
And I can't remember much about Season 1 other than I listened to it, enjoyed it, whenever that was.
But Season 2 came out this year.
And I started listening to it and very quickly was just shocked by the shoddiness of it.
I mean, there are stories in there where he just lets the anti-woke person talk, doesn't challenge it, and also just endorses it and cosigns their version of the story.
And what really set me off with it was there were times when Not only are there times when I was pretty sure stuff was bullshit before researching it, and spoiler alert, it was bullshit, but also there are times when his own show didn't really even hold up.
Someone would make a claim and then the way they would justify it a minute later in the very episode doesn't actually demonstrate the claim they were making.
I was very worried and I was upset about it because Jon Ronson, specifically because he's someone I like so much, Yeah.
And I couldn't believe it, but like the more we delved into it, the worse it got.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of thing where we looked into it and was like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess.
No, it's like it got worse and worse and worse to the point where we also somehow roped in Dr. Janessa Seymour, whom if you are a Serious Inquiries only listener, you may recognize.
Fantastic guest.
Doctorate in neuroscience and just all-star researcher and amazingly fun person to do podcasts with.
She got involved too, somehow.
Somehow we roped her in.
I don't remember how.
Maybe she'll tell us.
And she started looking at a particular episode involving a lot of kind of medical stuff and science-y stuff that's way better for, you know, an actual medically scientist-y person to look at.
You mean not the person who calls it medical scientist-y stuff?
First of all, how dare you?
Secondly, yes.
And so she's going to be the first several episodes, and this is the thing about bullshit, it takes way more time to unwind it than it does to produce it.
But it's fun.
That was me transitioning to saying, she's in the first four episodes that are debunking the one episode that he did.
It's a four to one ratio for this one.
Well, plus five to one with the extra that we're going to do.
So that's what this series is.
And we're basically going to go through it in order.
We're not covering every episode, but we're covering Several of them, cause they're pretty bad.
There's several of them that are, that are real bad.
And so I figure we might as well go in order if we're going to do a number of them.
So the first one we're doing is episode two.
Episode one, most mysterious deaths was I think a pretty good episode and there was nothing that immediately caused alarm bells.
And while I, I now don't feel like I can for sure say it's a hundred percent all accurate.
I also don't, there was nothing I don't have any.
Reason to believe anything was wrong.
So we kind of let that one be because it seemed like a pretty good episode.
And again, I love Jon Ronson.
So I enjoyed that episode.
And you know, this isn't about taking down someone like we don't like or something.
Right.
But episode two is where it starts to get quite bad.
And that one's called We're Coming After You, Honey.
I want to set it up.
We're going to get to it with Janessa.
She's going to take us through a lot of why this is not good reporting.
And it centers around someone named Judy Mikovits, who even though you'll hear it's kind of a little bit of a reveal in the recording, I think it's important to just tell you now because otherwise we're talking about someone you don't really have context for for like a half hour.
She is someone who eventually was a part of the plandemic bullshit series.
There's now three of those fucking things.
Somehow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That definitely got people killed and is horrible scientific misinformation.
The second one is called indoctrination.
Just so you know.
That is one that I would try to think of as a joke punchline for something and be like, no, I didn't quite get there.
Indoctrination, though.
It's close.
Okay.
Yeah.
And Ronson talks about her story as one of, if not the main reason he wanted to do this series, because in his mind, there must be a reason that this person went from being at one time a real scientist To what she became, which is a purveyor of the worst kind of scientific misinformation.
Yep.
And that's what we're going to look at.
And that's the structure that Ronson has in his mind.
That this person was at one time one thing, and then something happened and she became another thing.
And the thing she became is horrific.
So I think that's the context we need to bring on Janessa and get this ball rolling.
So without further ado, finally, let's hear why this just does not stack up.
Grab waters, hydrate, you're in for a ride.
And Janessa, welcome back to the show.
So good to have you.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, thank you.
Now, remind me, how did we get onto this?
Did I just ask you to do this?
I don't know where I am at any given moment.
Yeah, so, well, kind of what happened was, I'd never heard of the show, but I saw people mentioning specifically the episode about the parent of a Trans child?
That's right.
That people were picking up on a lot of concern.
This is the messaging I picked up was, hey, this sounds like maybe you just right-wing propaganda and it sounds like people, you know, why isn't he challenging this person?
Why are you taking this person at their word?
So I just kind of went like, okay, this is not for me.
I'm not interested.
So was it that because I had talked about a different episode, right?
And then did you just check out the whole series and you heard this first or?
No, no.
So what happened is I just so happened to be listening to an episode of Knowledge Fight.
And I listen to that show all the time, and there happened to be an episode where one of the hosts, Dan, was out, so the other host, Jordan, often interviews other people when that's happening, and he was interviewing John Ronson.
And I was like, oh, you know what?
Maybe this will be the only exposure I decide to have to this show.
Fine.
Let's hear it out.
And they talked about episodes one and two of Things Fell Apart.
Okay.
And I heard some stuff that I was like, that doesn't sound right, just based on my experience working in science.
I was just picking up certain things that, not having listened to the episode, not knowing much about Bronson or the show, I just kind of felt like knowing what I know from having worked as a scientist for years, and also knowing what I know about the law, having just graduated law school, like, there's a whole story about her arrest.
That just seemed like it can't possibly be true.
The thing you're saying, that didn't sound right.
And so there was one thing I decided to, it was just bugging me, and I was like, I'm going to real quick fact check this.
I thought I was maybe going to find an answer that your average journalist wouldn't know how to find because of a secret little thing that your average scientist might know to look for.
And then it turned out the first hit on Google answered the question immediately.
Wow.
That he was saying he didn't have an answer for Jordan's question.
And I was like, oh, no.
And then we started talking and I went and I what I did is like, here's my little journalistic process as not a journalist.
You are now, baby.
Apparently, jeez.
I listened to the episode and I took notes and I just wrote like, OK, I'm not going to stop and look anything up.
What would I think the story was if I didn't look anything up?
We do that a lot on this show, and it's really instructive.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, I'm taking this at face value, and then I just made little notes of, like, yellow flag, red flag, I want to check this.
And then it consumed my life.
I kept doing the, like, I have a job in law school.
I will only be doing this in my free time, which is quite limited.
And then it turns out, I don't know what mentally healthy people do with their free time, like sleep, I guess.
Podcasts.
I think they do podcasts.
Yeah, presumably.
I just did this.
I just kept Googling.
I was losing my mind.
I'm so glad we're going to get to talk about this so that all my friends and my partner and my family don't have to listen to me yell.
I'm losing my mind.
I'm losing my mind.
Oh my God.
So you fit right in here because I'm reminded a lot of the thing that consumed my life on the fucking Michael Powell- James Webb.
James Webb, where I kept having to be like, okay, just listening to that, what would you think?
What would you think?
Just listening to that.
And then it was like completely wrong.
Lydia would just reasonably be like, oh, it sounds like this.
And it's like, no!
Total lie.
So with that as the kind of teaser, I think we're going to be talking about this for likely a number of episodes.
Why don't we get started?
All right.
So let me, I guess we'll do exactly what I was saying I did to myself, really.
Here's what I think you would have heard if you listened to this.
And you know, I guess if people want to get the full experience, you can go listen to episode two.
Season two, episode two of Things Fell Apart.
It is We're Coming After You, Honey.
What you're gonna get in this story, Judy Mikevitz, she has a PhD in biochemistry.
She gives up her whole career as a biochemist who studied cancer and HIV.
She's a virologist by her, you know, experience.
Gives it all up, moves to California for love, and then in 2006 meets someone in a bar.
There's a funny little chain here of like an accountant for a wealthy person with a sick child who knows a wealthy couple who have a daughter sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, which I will inevitably start calling CFS because they start doing it too.
Sure.
And there's this story where, like, she is working in the yacht club as a bartender.
Relatable.
Yeah, sure, right?
Like, how many of us with a PhD haven't quit our job and fantasized about being a bartender?
I am not kidding how many people do, you know.
Relatable, for sure.
She is talking about, as she says, curing cancer and curing AIDS and, you know, all kinds of interests she has.
And this person mentions to her, yeah, there's this very wealthy couple who have this daughter with chronic fatigue, you should meet them.
So she agrees to meet them, she flies out to Reno, they become friends, yadda yadda, she becomes the director of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, the Whittemores being that wealthy couple.
This sounds like something from Lost.
Doesn't it, though?
Whittemore, whatever, yeah, they go to an island and they, yeah.
Oh, you don't know how right you are.
So she discovers in this research She's looking at these CFS patients and she discovers XMRV, which is a mouse virus, and it's in the blood samples of 67% of the CFS patients.
Interesting.
And it's also in 3% of healthy controls.
Which gets everybody up in arms of like, oh my god, is there a virus in the blood supply?
And it's actually super concerning.
Sorry, blood supply?
Like for transfusions or something?
Yes.
Oh, okay, gotcha.
This whole thing comes out, the paper's published in 2009, and This is like the next potential, like, AIDS panic.
Oh, I see.
Like, AIDS hepatitis.
Sure.
Like, oh my god.
That sounds scary.
Something's in the blood.
Yeah.
It's giving some people CFS and then other people might be, like, just carriers.
Oh god, oh god.
And then nobody can replicate the study.
Interesting.
Now, I just want to make sure, so she wasn't at like a university or whatever.
She was just like funded by some rich villain from Lost.
Is that what it is?
Pretty much.
Well, that's what we're hearing so far in this story.
What was her actual like qualifications?
She has a PhD in biochemistry and she has worked as a virologist.
So like she is qualified to be looking at this for sure.
Evidence starts coming out.
Why can't we replicate this?
There's some evidence it's an accidental contaminant.
These patients don't actually have this virus.
Maybe nobody has this virus.
Wow.
It's a lab contamination.
And that happens, right?
I mean... It does.
It does.
Yes.
So this is going on.
Oh my god, what is it?
Is it false data?
Is it a contamination?
What do we do?
What do we do?
Everybody's trying to study the blood supply just in case.
It's a whole thing.
It's blowing up.
This is like science famous, which means nobody else knew any of this was going on.
But scientists are freaking out.
And then as it's getting questioned more and more and more, she won't turn over the cell lines.
Very interesting.
And then she gets fired.
She gets fired even by the billionaire eccentric.
Yes, they fire her.
And then her research assistant, Max, retrieves her notebooks for her from the lab after she's been fired.
And suddenly, Judy is arrested.
She is civilly sued for stealing her own notebooks.
How terrible.
How unimaginable.
Okay, sure.
And the charges do eventually get dropped because Harvey Whittemore, the husband in this couple, he gets into some legal troubles of his own.
Like many rich people, he is eventually accused of embezzlement and campaign finance violations.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
And so the way that it is finally capped off in the podcast, Judy is feeling really persecuted.
You know, there was this accidental contamination and everybody dogpiles.
Oh, she admit that or?
Does she admit that it was a conhamination or no?
Pin in that.
Yes, let's just put a pin in that.
Let's put it that way.
What does the show say her feeling about it?
The show says that she is getting defensive.
She feels persecuted.
She wants these notebooks because she's really worried someone's going to tamper with her data and so she just, you know, tried to get her own personal notebooks and then it all blows up and the Whittemores get her arrested and she feels Right off the bat, if you are employed, usually the stuff, your work product doesn't belong to you.
Like you don't get to just take everything you... Yeah.
Unless it's specifically like your contract allows it or something.
Like I think pretty standard, you're not allowed to just... Yeah, it belongs to your employer.
Yeah.
When I worked for the state, if I just took all the kind of the programs I wrote to help people be able to do stuff faster, if I was like, all right, I'm leaving.
Give me all that.
I'm taking it.
It's like, no, you can't just take it.
Like, what are you talking about?
Yeah.
This was my first tip-off.
And I was like, oh, this person doesn't know how science works, because any scientist would tell you your grants don't belong to you, your data does not belong to you.
It feels so like it's yours, but it isn't.
Your grants, if you move universities, your grant stays at your university.
You usually can't take it with you.
Which is arguably, you know, very frustrating for people.
You put all this effort and your university, who made you get this grant because they won't finance your research, is gonna get to keep it?
Like, yeah, it sucks.
I'm not saying it doesn't.
But this is even less bad than that, which is like, literally, the stuff that this place has paid her to do, it's like, well, no, that would belong to us, I would think.
We hired you to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah, so this was my first tip-off that I was like, that sounds a little biased in her favor to portray this as, like, her own notebooks and she was arrested.
And I was like, that's not usually... I mean, I know our cops are not exactly the most on it, but even that seems a little extreme.
Right.
And like you say, it's a tip-off.
Like, we deal with a lot of these stories where it's like, I'm not saying there's no circumstances in the world where that wouldn't be bad.
Like, yeah, you could come up with plenty of scenarios, but it's one of those tip-offs.
We see this a lot where it's like, That doesn't quite sound right.
Like maybe we'll research into it and we'll be like, oh no, it was like her personal notebooks and it had pictures of her kids and that's all it was.
And it's like, yeah, well, okay, nevermind.
You know, but it's like, it's a little fishy, a little fishy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So basically it all caps off with like, yeah, she took these because she was worried.
She's getting paranoid.
She feels You know, persecuted by the science community, and then she feels persecuted by the police and the DA because she got arrested for this, and she's being civilly sued for this.
She drifts out of view.
She goes underground.
Eight years later, re-emerges.
Judy Michovitz is the subject of Plandemic in 2020.
Oh, right.
That's right.
And it's important, I should have noted this, like the whole point of season two was that, oh, there are these culture war issues, culture war little firestorms.
In principle, it's a really fascinating podcast.
Like, oh, John Ronson has researched and gone back in the chain of causation and like, oh, this person here who, you know, you would think this is unrelated, like somebody, you know, yacht bartender or whatever the hell.
And like, then fast forward and now, and usually then he links it to something you've probably heard of, which is Plandemic.
Totally fascinating, interesting thing to do for a podcast.
Love it.
Nothing, nothing wrong with that.
Um, but.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, and actually on the interview on Knowledge Fight, he said Judy's story was why he wanted to make the second season.
Like that was the jumping off.
He heard about Plandemic and was like, how did a virologist, not just like a smart person, an educated person, Because, you know, there is.
If you want to play the clip, it's at about 32.57.
This is actually where he'll tie it all together and give us, like, our theme that I think is important.
And that's the story of Judy Mykovitz.
What began with a chance encounter in a yacht club ended with the first great anti-vax conspiracy theory, a new battlefront in the culture wars.
It's a story that, I think, touches on a great mystery of our times.
What happens to send smart people tumbling down rabbit holes?
It's such a mystery that experts in radicalisation say that for people like Judy, ideology can be so mixed up with personal grievance, it can be difficult to know the driving motives.
So I think that's, to me, the theme that we're going for here.
What happens to send smart people down rabbit holes?
I do want to challenge the general idea of, like, oh, that smart people can't believe a dumb thing, or, like, educated people can't believe an uneducated thing.
Like, if anything, believing that makes you, I think, more susceptible to this stuff because you're not immune.
Nobody's immune.
You have to be a critical thinker all the time, right?
Yeah.
But I'll totally grant like, okay, if he was interested in the question of that very thing, like, oh, how could it be?
Because I'll certainly grant that, like, basically everyone's intuition is like, no, how could a smart person fall for this?
And if that's what he's looking to investigate, nothing wrong with that.
That's like a similar thing when you talk about how smart people end up getting involved in cults, right?
Like perfectly normal, reasonable people.
How did you get there?
What happened?
And right away, I think people might be thinking, OK, but it sounds like she's a villain in this story.
So does that kind of explain what might be going on here?
I think.
That Ronson is really trying to humanize her, which I'm not opposed to.
Like, certainly not.
We're trying to figure out, you know, at the end, I guess it's not difficult to say a villain.
I mean, to put out Plandemic, if people aren't aware, is a documentary Documentary, I don't even want to say that.
Yes, that claims COVID is made in a lab.
COVID is a conspiracy by the government to make you take vaccines and vaccines are bad and masks actually activate the virus and make you more likely to get it.
And you should really go to the beach because microbes in the sand will cure COVID and It's nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
But big not-the-beach doesn't want you to know that.
Yes.
Big skiing!
Yes, they were clearly trying to shut down the cotton candy industry.
So, this person who, I mean, putting out Planned Pandemic, if it convinced one person not to get vaccinated, it easily could have gotten people killed.
Like, it's not a joke that she did this.
Oh, it absolutely got a lot of people killed.
Yeah, undeniably.
It got taken down.
Like, it was that bad that they took it down from YouTube, right?
They didn't even let you... Yeah, they actually talked about, the guys on Godawful Movies covered it, and they said when they tried to share it so that they could watch it to critique it, by sharing it through Facebook Messenger, it got, like, deleted off their Messenger.
Wow.
Facebook, who notoriously will not take down anything, took this down with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
Everybody was like, this is getting people killed.
So Judy is not a sympathetic character in the year 2020.
The idea seems to be that Judy is sympathetic in the year 2009 when this paper comes out.
And what happened to her.
And very specifically, he attributes it to her unnecessarily cruel arrest.
That's the exact words.
And that's him in narrator voice saying that.
Yes.
I'm sure she would also characterize it that way.
Of course.
Who has been arrested who says, yeah, fair.
Right.
And this is, I don't know if it's worth getting into.
I will just signpost this because my episode that I did on this, the one that I researched, it's going to be a fine line to just kind of signpost this.
I think he or his defenders, Ronsons, would be able to say, well, storytelling, you know, he likes to just listen to stories and whatever.
But it's very weird that always the really awful conspiracy theorists, conservative or worse, Yeah.
person is presented as, at a certain point in time, their story is actually just factual.
Rather than say, "How did this upstanding scientist go from that to this?" It's a little bit different.
You're like, "Actually, if you look at the facts, how did this total asshole who's always been a conspiracy theorist turn into a conspiracy theorist?" That's important.
You shouldn't leave that out.
I still don't know your story, but for mine, it doesn't work to always just take someone's story.
There's times he chooses to fact check And there's times he chooses to tie up some ends or at least present the other view, and there's times he definitely doesn't.
Right, yeah.
So the fundamental problem when you have someone like Judy, who in Plandemic, she makes claims, not just these false factual scientific claims, she makes false autobiographical claims.
She claims, for example, that She worked in Frank Ricetti's lab at the National Institutes of Health, and they were the first to discover HIV-1, and Dr. Fauci showed up and took that and stopped them from publishing it because his friend was going to be the first to discover HIV, dammit, not them.
Oh, that sounds real.
At the time HIV was first discovered, she did not yet work in Dr. Ricetti's lab.
So it is physically impossible for this to, for it to even be true.
She would have to at least be working in Dr. Rossetti's lab for this to be remotely plausible.
She is not a reliable narrator of her own story.
To clarify though, that's from Plandemic, right?
And that's not something that Ronson co-signed or anything, just making clear.
No, no, no.
Yeah, of course not.
But the point being, if you know about Plandemic, and we will later find out in the Knowledge Byte interview, he does know all about it.
He knows about that claim.
He knows, or should know, she is an unreliable narrator.
Yeah.
You cannot trust her to tell her own story accurately.
She will tell you that she was at one point hired to engineer the Ebola virus to be better at attacking people.
Oh my god.
This woman makes stuff up, okay?
You can't trust that the words coming out of... I don't know if she believes what she's saying or not, Yeah, either she believes it and she's delusional, or she doesn't believe it and she's a pathological liar.
There's no good option there.
Yeah, but the responsible thing to do there, even if he is interested in the storytelling perspective and letting her tell her own story, you have to couple that with truth.
Otherwise, you are just starting to misinform a whole lot of people and never provide any buttress.
Yeah, if you're picking an arbitrary moment in time to decide, well, this is where she actually was still reliable, but she wasn't, why would you pick that moment in time?
Why wouldn't her lies from early in her life just be another extension of her lying that is now currently happening?
To frame it this way, it's misleading.
Oh, you have perfectly hit where I want to go.
Because that was my very first question was, okay, if the story is she was a rational, reasonable person, then there was this unnecessarily cruel arrest and jailing.
She felt the world had turned against her.
This is a quote from Ronson narrating.
And then he says she was turning, looking for a new community.
What this tells us is, If it was the jailing, the arrest, the world turning against her, now she's looking for a new community, okay, that means she wasn't like this once upon a time, and now that's the moment, right?
We were trying to study this question, how does a smart person fall down a rabbit hole, and we have answered our question.
It's getting arrested for something ridiculous.
It's feeling like everyone's trying to debunk my paper and I didn't even do anything wrong.
So the question is, was Judy once upon a time a rational, reasonable person and then she got arrested?
No!
No, no, no!
And I'm about to tell you all the reasons we know that's not true.
So this paper was published in 2009.
It will get retracted in 2011.
And she begins expressing extreme resistance and conspiratorial thinking about the people debunking her paper from the very beginning.
Like, the absolute second people are saying, hmm, I'm not so sure, she is saying this is a government conspiracy to cover up the cure for CFS.
She's saying this as early as, like, early 2011, and the paper won't be retracted until December 2011.
Yikes.
And way before the arrest.
She was also expressing anti-vaccine beliefs way before the arrest.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Before she was arrested, before she was fired, before the paper was retracted, she was making claims that this XMRV virus she had discovered, well, not that she had discovered, but she had discovered in CFS, was also linked to autism, to cancer, to MS.
Okay, yeah.
She was saying that the link between XMRV and autism, which to be clear there is no evidence for this, That that link might explain the link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
Which again, there is not one.
Just to make sure.
Everybody knows.
In case we gotta repeat it.
Boy, that just took me down a weird brain.
It's like dividing by zero.
Well, can one imaginary thing explain another imaginary thing?
I don't know.
They're both imaginary.
So I guess yes.
Like you could say, well, dwarves living here explains elves living there.
I guess.
Why not?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, they're all imaginary.
There's nothing.
Yeah.
No sense in which that's true.
So right off the bat we have this narrative that it was the arrest and the paper retraction that's what sent her down a rabbit hole.
She was making claims about autism and the MMR vaccine before any of that happened.
Wow.
This was conspiratorial thinking on a level that in 2011 to talk about autism and MMR... No kidding?
Yeah.
This is not 1990 when that paper just came out and people were questioning the paper.
This has been debunked 20 years ago.
We're done with this theory, this non-theory.
Yeah, it's like saying, man, you know what caused Andrew Wakefield?
That's the name of the guy who did the thing, right?
Yes, correct.
You know what caused Andrew Wakefield?
He got his house broken into.
And he already believed that vaccines caused autism.
You're like, that's okay.
I don't think the house thing matters.
That's not the origin story.
Yeah, it's not.
Yeah, I think he already seems to have believed that.
It's just not.
Judy believes the arrest was a conspiracy because she was already conspiratorial in her thinking.
Something that's also interesting, the more I dug, good lord, I had to stop myself.
If anyone would like to dig more into everyone around Judy, Lombardi, one of her co-authors, the first author on the paper who also worked at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, In 2009, was presenting on this XMRV and autism link, which again, there is no evidence of, her PhD advisor, Rusetti, at the National Cancer Institute.
There were either people saying, Gosh, Judy just ruined his reputation.
Or, isn't it interesting how quiet he is?
Or, isn't it reasonable how quiet he is?
He doesn't want to be linked to this person.
Or, I saw people saying he's kind of a quack too.
Well, I don't know what he used to be like, but what I can tell you is that in 2021, after Plandemic came out, he wrote a book with Judy.
about anti-vaccine and conspiracy movements within science.
It's interesting to me that her PhD advisor, who worked at the National Cancer Institute until 2013, after Judy put Plandemic out, you should know she's nuts, he wrote a book with her.
I could pull the title of it real quick.
Boy, maybe he got arrested, too.
And with another anti-vaxxer, though.
That's what I'm wondering is, like, maybe, just maybe, the reason Judy got so far into her scientific career as an anti-vaxxer, instead of somebody going, you can't be a virologist anti-vaxxer, what if her PhD advisor was, too?
Yeah, happened to be another anti-vaxxer.
Unless he just wasn't until the year 2021, maybe.
When he was arrested.
In a way, that was unfair.
Yeah!
So, like, you've got this co-author Lombardi, who is talking about XMRV and autism, which there is no evidence of.
You've got her PhD advisor, who I heard little inklings, and he was very, very quiet during this whole thing, and then after Plandemic comes out, he's writing an anti-vax book with Judy.
After Plandemic, wow.
After Plandemic, he wrote a book, and retired from the National Cancer Institute, and then wrote a book with her.
I know, something's not right there.
And then it turns out maybe the Whittemores are also a little bit anti-vaccine?
Jeez.
Yeah, so it turns out, so the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, there's Annette Whittemore and Harvey Whittemore.
They are the parents of Andrea Whittemore-Goad, who's 31 at the time the paper is published, and she is the daughter with CFS.
If you go read, I can provide the source, but it's a source where Annette is talking about the founding of the Whittemore Peterson Institute.
She mentions, among other things, her daughter's condition was showing, quote, modest improvement until she decided to enroll at the University of Nevada, Reno.
The admissions policy required the MMR vaccine prior to starting classes.
Within five days, Andrea had a severe relapse and never regained her previous health.
So if your kid is going to university and now needs the MMR, that means you didn't get it as a kid.
So if you date back their 31-year-old in 2009, that means right around 1980 is when she should have gotten her first MMR.
They've been anti-vax for like three decades when this paper came out.
Before it was cool.
Yeah, that's, wow.
Before it was cool, before Wakefield.
Unless, you know, if there was some medical reason, well then she would still have some medical reason.
Yeah, you'd be able to opt out of it in college, right?
Right.
And they say her CFS didn't start until she was 11, which is well after you would have gotten your first MMR.
There's no real explanation for this.
And then even if you set all that aside, at the end of the day, this person says within five days of vaccination, she had a relapse and never regained her previous level of health.
There is no evidence that CFS has anything to do with vaccination.
This is an anti-vax talking point.
These people are at least vaccine-hesitant, people might call them.
So she's surrounded by other anti-vax people before the arrest, before the retraction, possibly before publication.
The whole narrative is not correct.
So that's our first big piece here.
We're not even close to done.
That's our first one, and there's more.
Yeah, already the framing of the story should be how a group of anti-vax assholes astroturfed Symantro, you know?
You can't just buy into their narrative.
It's fine if you want to reference what their narrative is, that's fine.
Tell us what she thinks happened, but come on, this is bad.
Dude, that was my whole, I had to stop myself because it was like the real reporting I want is I want to know what Rossetti was up to because he worked at the National Institutes of Health for decades and if he was anti-vax that whole time... Jeez.
Yeah, what projects was he involved with?
Yes!
That's the conspiracy.
Yes!
Yes!
Yeah, it could be like, uncovers a lot of hidden anti-vaxx people through history.
Like, that is the story.
That would have been an amazing story.
Now, for all I know...
Maybe it turns out Rusetti was totally normal and then he watched Plandemic and was convinced.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's an awful coincidence that she's just had so many anti-vax adjacent anti-vax seeming people around her.
What we know for certain is she made anti-vax and conspiratorial statements about the government and CFS way before any of this went down.
The narrative is incorrect.
Yeah.
I've got a little fun piece about the narrative of the meeting in the Yacht Club.
It's among the least consequential, but it is also among the silliest.
Okay.
I love sillies.
So you're going to hear a little bit of Ronson narrating, a little bit of Judy talking about how she met the Whittemore.
So we're way back in the start of this thing.
Yes.
Given Judy's background and expertise in science, while she tended bars, she chatted to the customers about viruses a lot.
And given her credentials, people listened.
Oh yes, I absolutely talked about not just viruses but curing cancer, curing AIDS.
Yeah, everybody knew who I was.
And something happened one day at the Yacht Club.
You were making drinks and a couple of people came in and this chance encounter, just this chance conversation really changed your life.
Ah yes.
At the yacht club, Judy had got chatting to an accountant for a very rich woman with a very sick daughter.
The woman was friends with another very wealthy couple who also had a very sick daughter.
They had a similar age daughter who was bedridden, very, very ill.
Simply two very wealthy women with a passion to heal their children.
The wealthy couple were called Annette and Harvey Whittemore.
Harvey was a lawyer for Nevada's gaming industry, and their daughter was sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS.
They were feeling fobbed off by the medical establishment, who were labelling the condition Yuppie Flu.
But Annette Whittemore was convinced that what her daughter had was an infection.
Judy had never heard of chronic fatigue syndrome, but she had a passion for science and 20 years experience at the National Cancer Institute, where she'd worked on treatments for HIV.
And so she agreed to meet the Whittemores.
She flew to Reno and they became friends.
Okay, so I guess the narrative you would probably get from there.
I guess maybe you tell me, like, how do you think they met?
How do you think this all happened?
She was tending bar.
Sure, sure.
Making some delicious cocktails, maybe.
Who knows?
He was a skater boy.
And then was Ronson saying that it wasn't the Whittemores that came to the bar?
It was like the accountant of the Whittemores?
It sounded like it was a double daughter with a wife.
This person had a daughter who knew this person who had a daughter or something.
So he says in the podcast, it's the accountant of a wealthy person with a sick daughter, and that wealthy person knew a wealthy couple who also had a sick daughter.
So there's like four degrees of separation, right?
And there's this encounter in the bar.
Here's our one-sentence description of the podcast, like if you were to just pick the episode up in your podcatcher.
How a chance encounter in a yacht club in the early 2000s between a bartender and a very wealthy couple with a daughter sick with a mystery disease ended with the creation of the first great COVID conspiracy theory.
Yeah, so from that I would be thinking that the wealthy couple are the ones getting served at this bar.
Not that.
So what if I told you this wasn't in the early 2000s, it wasn't a chance encounter, it didn't happen in a yacht club, and it wasn't the wealthy couple that she met in that bar?
I'd say, are you sure you didn't just look up a different story, is what I would ask.
Yeah, let me tell you what probably really happened.
I'm gonna put a big allegedly on everything because Judy is such an unreliable narrator.
There is one source I can find, it's in the New York Times article about the first publication of this paper when everybody was very excited that we maybe had the cause of CFS nailed down.
They do say that Judy met someone in a bar and that that person mentioned the Whittemores.
That's it.
Okay.
The part that is Verifiable multiple sources reiterate this, including Annette Whittemore.
So many, so many sources will repeat that this is what happened.
So the HHV-6 Foundation, HHV-6 is Human Herpes Virus 6.
It's a strain.
It's a foundation co-founded by Annette Whittemore.
She claims, I don't know if this is true, That the Foundation believes HHV-6 is the sole cause of CFS.
I don't know why she's then studying this other, but whatever.
So she founds this organization that is investigating maybe a fringe idea about CFS.
Judy was hired as a consultant for the organization part-time while she worked at the National Cancer Institute.
And then in May of 2006, so not the early 2000s, she goes to an HHB-6 Foundation conference in Barcelona.
And that is where Judy goes to a presentation by Daniel Peterson of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, where he is speaking about A particular cancer that is associated with CFS.
Pin in that, I guess.
This is exhausting.
Everybody's out of their mind in this.
I know, I get so bored with these things because they all go in my mind as, all right, someone thinks not the real cause of something is the cause of something.
Yeah, probably.
Another person thinks something is caused by something it's not.
Got it.
All right.
Yeah, so Peterson of Whittemore Peterson is presenting on HHV-6 and atypic cancer and maybe CFS and Judy stands up and asks a question and this gets the attention of the Whittemores.
That is how they met.
Huh.
She worked part-time for a foundation that Annette Whittemore co-founded.
She went to a conference for that foundation, which makes sense because she works for the foundation.
She watches a presentation by Peterson of Whittemore Peterson, stands up to ask a question, and Annette goes, huh, what an interesting person.
There's no way that the timing- Let me return you!
No!
She met an accountant who knew a guy who knew a guy in a bar.
She agreed to meet the Whittemores and flew to Reno, where they became friends.
Yeah.
That is true.
However, the only thing is, like, I don't understand what the purpose of that lie would be.
So, like, are we missing something?
All I can think... I tried so hard to make that timeline line up, and I can't.
Nothing about it lines up to say that she agreed to meet the Whittemores, she flew to Reno, and they became friends.
That's not what happened.
It just isn't.
It's not a chance encounter.
I think what it is, is it's a fun story.
It's exciting.
A chance encounter.
She quit her science career, which also, no, she didn't.
She didn't move to California for love and quit her job.
She moved to California to work at a cancer drug company that ended up failing.
And then got a part-time job at the Whittemores, or maybe got a part-time job at the Whittemores before it failed, or maybe got a part-time job at the Whittemores... When was the Yacht Club?
When the hell's any of that?
I don't know!
Because she's such an unreliable narrator.
There are 15 narrations of what Judy was up to at one time.
But what we definitely know, because it's reported by other people and more documentable because it's coming from other sources, is she went to this foundation conference.
She worked there part-time already.
She was going there, if anything, if she got tipped off by this accountant in the bar, then she went there on purpose to try to meet them because Annette already believed a virus caused CFS and Judy already believed a virus caused CFS and now we're going to go prove that a virus causes CFS.
Right.
And that is a really important thing that we're missing is that these two people came in with a preconceived notion and are trying to pursue this research direction And in the meanwhile, we've got... But isn't it such a fun story?
If she was working as a bartender, which she quit her science job for love, and then she just gets... It's more of a movie.
She dragged back into it because of a chance encounter.
She's just talking about AIDS and HIV at the bar for no real reason.
Just cause.
Like, if a bartender started being like, you want to know about the cure for AIDS, I'm leaving.
I'm out of here!
Fear those people.
You know they have a cure for whatever locked in and whatever because the only other thing I can think of is is it part and I really don't know but is it part of like some sort of astroturfing attempt of rather than yeah there's a group of us assholes who are trying to make Anti-vax a thing and we've had this, you know, organization that was anti-vax and we were organized in this way.
It's more like, no, there's so many of us we meet in the wild and it's a natural organic event or something.
That's the only other thing I can think of.
I think it also maybe makes you more sympathetic, right?
Like if the way that you're setting up the story is, you know, I changed my life.
We became friends, you know, and then my friends turned on me rather than my employer.
you know, had issues with how I was conducting science.
I think like that is more sympathetic, right?
Because then it's a friendship that's broken as a result of this too.
Well, that's weird.
Yeah, it was.
I know it's like it's nitpicking.
It's silly, but it's also just like wildly incorrect and not backed up properly.
by anything as far as I can tell.
And it is, I think, again, when you have this person who you know has lied and lied and lied and is an unreliable narrator, I don't know, wouldn't it be fun to fact check her story and be like, Judy, what about this thing that everybody else is saying?
And as you say, you bring up the description of the episode.
Like, it's just, I don't know how much rides on this.
Sure, this one thing that, like, whether the chance encounter or whatever, but if you've branded your whole episode as that, a chance encounter at a thing, that's pretty important.
Like, I don't think there's room to say, oh, well, yeah, she believes it happened that way, but, you know, whatever, it probably didn't happen.
No, I mean, you, the narrator god voice, is saying this happened.
Like, you can't just do that.
Right.
Oh, if he ended that with, or did it?
Yeah.
I'd have been like, whoa.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're going to end part one there.
That was mainly about some of the weird biographical inconsistencies.
You all know about Judy now.
Yeah.
You're welcome.
But next time on Where There's Woke, my favorite part, because Janessa takes us through this crazy thing that happened with this virus and the results that were not right and a lot of the science of that.
And it is a wild story.
I cannot wait for you to hear the next episode.
Part two of this Ronson episode two.
God, it's so crazy.
It's crazy to do this many things, but you have to.
It's so much.
So we'll see you then for part two.
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