0:00

My throat is a sore Aubrey. I've been talking for three

0:02

and a half hours. You've been talking a lot? I've been talking

0:04

a lot. I got very animated. I

0:06

got very animated. I like your

0:09

weird ASMR voice. Your

0:11

little Kathleen Turner voice. Just eating some pickles.

0:13

I got very animated.

0:26

Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the

0:28

podcast that's finally wading

0:30

into Nepo baby discourse.

0:33

Oh, with the ultimate Nepo baby.

0:35

A solid two years after

0:37

it's relevant. Which

0:40

is actually pretty short for us. I'm

0:42

Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs. If

0:45

you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com

0:47

slash maintenance phase. You can

0:50

get t-shirts, totes, mugs, all

0:52

kinds of things at TeePublic

0:54

and you can subscribe

0:56

through Apple podcasts and get the

0:58

same audio as our Patreon

1:00

feed. You can totes do that.

1:03

No. How did it take me three

1:04

years to come up with that? That's absurd.

1:07

Today we are talking about a conspiracy

1:09

theorist about whom I actually

1:11

know very little. Okay.

1:14

I was going to ask you about this. I sort of have a broad

1:16

sense of RFK Jr. I

1:19

know that his

1:20

late beloved father

1:22

was Bobby Kennedy. Yes. That

1:25

his uncle was JFK, the president.

1:28

All I sort of generally know is like

1:31

anti-vax question mark. Yeah. It's

1:34

more like anti-vax in Tirabang.

1:35

With like very emphatically

1:38

anti-vax. I

1:41

mean, this is kind of why I wanted to do this. Like

1:44

you, I didn't really know anything

1:46

about this guy. He's essentially

1:48

found a loophole. He has over

1:50

the years been kicked off of Facebook,

1:53

Instagram, Twitter, everywhere because

1:55

of his anti-vax bullshit. He

1:57

really can't get an audience. But then there's this

1:59

thing.

1:59

where if you run for president, everyone

2:02

has to pay attention to you. He's Connor

2:04

Roy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Looking for the con

2:06

heads. Only less likable.

2:10

And yes, I was not expecting to do

2:12

an episode on this man. But then

2:15

due to

2:16

my personality, I listened

2:19

to the entire Joe Rogan episode with

2:21

him, which is fucking three hours long.

2:24

Because he's an anti-vaxxer, it also struck me

2:26

that

2:27

like, we haven't really covered anti-vaxxers.

2:29

Yeah. And it felt like, OK, let's do it.

2:32

I don't find this guy all that interesting, but he's an

2:34

entry point into like, how

2:36

did the anti-vaxx movement get to the

2:38

place where we now have a scion

2:42

of this political dynasty and

2:45

presidential candidate just openly expressing

2:47

anti-vaxx nonsense? Really, given the listeners,

2:50

the hard sell. Not very

2:52

interesting. Yeah, I know. Just I'm going to tell you over

2:54

and over again that this man is boring. You're

2:57

in for the whatever the opposite

2:58

of a treat is. So

3:01

we will be going into more

3:03

of his biography and sort

3:06

of how he intersects with this, the

3:08

rise of the anti-vaxx movement in the

3:11

1990s.

3:12

I want to start, though, by

3:14

just establishing the fact that this

3:17

dude is cuckoo bananas. So

3:20

he thinks that the CIA was involved

3:22

in the assassination of his uncle. He

3:25

thinks that the wrong person was

3:27

convicted of killing his father. He

3:29

says that mass

3:30

shootings are caused

3:33

by like everybody being on antidepressants.

3:35

So he says prior to

3:37

the introduction of Prozac, we

3:39

had almost none of these events. What?

3:41

We also have a lot more mass shootings since like the

3:44

introduction of Blu-ray DVDs

3:46

and like the Toyota Prius. And

3:48

like we have a lot more mass shootings since many

3:51

things happened. Presumably, we also

3:53

have health records for

3:56

mass shooters and some awareness

3:58

of like

3:59

not 100. of them were on Prozac

4:01

at the time? What? In fact, one of the main problems

4:03

is that they weren't medicated for many people. Yeah,

4:05

correct. It just doesn't make any sense. He

4:08

also, he's obviously a lab

4:10

leak guy. Lab

4:12

leak stuff is absolutely your king. That's

4:14

what's happening here. I finally get to talk

4:17

about the lab leak. What's funny

4:19

about the lab leak discourse is that I feel like most

4:21

people do not know what they're actually proposing

4:23

because nobody gives a shit about the actual facts

4:26

of the case. So in RFK Junior's

4:28

book, he says, Anthony

4:31

Fauci partnered with the Pentagon

4:33

to approve taxpayer-funded gain

4:35

of function experiments to breed pandemic

4:38

superbugs in poorly regulated

4:40

labs in Wuhan, China and elsewhere under

4:43

conditions that almost certainly guaranteed

4:45

the escape of weaponized microbes

4:47

like SARS-CoV-2. What

4:49

the fuck are you talking about? And

4:52

it's my favorite shit because he's

4:54

not just saying that like China

4:57

designed a superbug in a lab, which is

4:59

like the far right conspiracy version of it. He's

5:01

saying the US funded China

5:04

to create a super weapon. This

5:07

is just someone who like got

5:09

high and watched the Oppenheimer trailer

5:12

and was like, I know what's really going on. He's

5:16

also, I mean, I don't

5:17

even need to tell you this at this point, but he's an ivermectin

5:19

guy. Of course. He's a hydroxychloroquine

5:22

guy. He's a fucking vitamin D

5:25

truther, which we will get into in great detail.

5:27

This is my favorite. Wait, I don't know what that means to

5:29

be a vitamin D truther. Oh, Aubrey, you're gonna

5:31

learn. You're gonna learn so much.

5:33

Okay, okay, okay. I'm not Googling.

5:35

I'm not Googling. It's gonna be fine. I'm not Googling.

5:38

He also thinks that chemicals in

5:40

the water are the reason for like

5:42

transgender people. Oh my God,

5:44

is this, I don't want them putting it in the water

5:47

and turning the frogs gay? Are we getting into

5:49

Alex Jones territory? It's literally the

5:51

same study. Wow. Is

5:53

a study

5:53

about frogs

5:56

growing ovaries or something? It's

5:58

not clear that it's chemicals. Like obviously

6:01

they've taken this and like really ran

6:03

with it far beyond the facts. Yeah. He

6:05

also wrote a book which for

6:08

the love of fucking God I read

6:10

because it's very short and is mostly

6:12

footnotes but like janky footnotes called.

6:15

Do you know what his book is called? No. As

6:17

soon as I saw it I was like I have to read this for the show.

6:19

It's called The Real Anthony Fauci.

6:23

Bill Gates, Big Pharma in the

6:25

Global War on Democracy and

6:28

Public Health. Oh wow.

6:30

It's like

6:30

foot fucking everything in there man. Based

6:32

on that title I'm guessing he's also a

6:35

like Soros truther

6:37

guy. He weirdly doesn't because I actually

6:39

control F4 Soros in the question did

6:41

you find it? Because I was like here it comes he's

6:43

a Soros guy. Somehow for some

6:45

reason that's where he draws the line. The

6:48

book has blurbs from listen

6:50

to this cursed fucking list

6:52

of public figures. Tucker Carlson, Tony

6:55

Robbins the self-help guy, Alan Dershowitz,

6:58

Joseph Mercola future

7:00

subject of a maintenance phase episode. Yeah

7:02

absolutely no question. Rob Schneider,

7:05

the comedian is now like a super

7:07

duper far right guy and obviously

7:10

Oliver Stone and

7:11

Naomi Wolf. Just like absolute

7:14

cuckoo bird. People who just like have no

7:16

credibility whatsoever in like whatever

7:18

field they're in. Like Rob Schneider is not a well

7:21

respected actor. Sure

7:23

he is. He's making copies.

7:25

Come on. Now

7:28

we're back to our comfort zone 90s references. 30

7:30

year old references. 30 year

7:33

old SNL

7:33

sketches. We need like a lyrics

7:36

genius page for this fucking podcast. All the zoomers

7:38

be like what the fuck is that of reference to? Start

7:41

that wiki. Yeah he also

7:43

okay we need we badly need to do an episode

7:45

on this but he

7:46

also is an HIV truther. Are

7:50

you aware of this? Oh no Michael. Here's

7:53

what I know. I know that there are people who think

7:55

that HIV is a sham.

7:58

And I also know that there are people.

7:59

who think that HIV

8:02

can be cured by a macrobiotic

8:04

diet. And

8:06

I could see either one of those coming into

8:09

play here. This basically was taken

8:11

up by the president of South Africa for many

8:13

years and he wouldn't import antiretrovirals

8:16

into the country, which cost many

8:18

tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives potentially.

8:21

So it's a really, really consequential,

8:24

horrible conspiracy theory.

8:25

But the conspiracy theory is so fucking stupid,

8:27

Aubrey, that it's almost hard to talk about. It's

8:30

basically that HIV doesn't cause

8:32

AIDS. What? It's like someone

8:34

saying the sky is green. Yeah, totally. You're

8:37

just like, no it's not. It also makes me uncomfortable because

8:39

so many of the arguments

8:42

around anti-fatness,

8:45

around wellness stuff, any

8:47

conclusions that allow us to reinforce

8:50

our existing biases, when we're

8:52

asked to prove why those conclusions are true,

8:55

we often go, that's just how it is, right? Totally.

8:58

Because it absolutely doesn't have to be that way. But in this case, I'm like,

9:00

no, that's just how it

9:00

fucking is. God, what? So,

9:03

okay, we are going to watch a clip with his wildest

9:06

conspiracy theory. This is from

9:08

the Joe Rogan podcast.

9:12

Wi-Fi radiation does

9:14

all kinds of bad things, including causing

9:17

cancer. Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi radiation

9:19

causes cancer. Yeah, from your cell phone. I mean, there's cell phone

9:21

tumors. Cell phones. You know, I'm

9:24

representing hundreds of people who have cell

9:26

phone tumors behind the ear. It's

9:28

always on the ear that you favor with your cell phone.

9:31

But cancer's not the worst thing. They also,

9:34

you know, it opens up, Wi-Fi

9:36

radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier.

9:40

And so all these toxins that are in your body

9:42

can now go into your brain. How does Wi-Fi

9:44

radiation open up your blood-brain barrier?

9:47

Yeah, now you're going beyond my expertise.

9:52

But what if... I'm going to use

9:54

a number here and you're going to think it's hyperbole. But it's not.

9:57

There are tens of thousands of studies.

10:00

at Joe,

10:00

the horrendous danger

10:02

of Wi-Fi radiation. You

10:05

got Russians know more about Wi-Fi radiation

10:07

than they developed as a weapon, and a lot

10:09

of the really good science came out of Russia. And

10:13

the Russians won't let kids use cell phones

10:15

in kindergarten or in grade school. A

10:18

lot of the schools in Russia don't let cell phones

10:20

in there because of the danger.

10:23

You learn so much in that clip, Aubrey, it's dense with

10:25

information. It's densely packed. I learned

10:27

that there are literally tens of thousands

10:30

of studies on any one

10:33

topic. You also learned that the Russians

10:35

invented Wi-Fi radiation, famously.

10:38

And they don't let kids use cell

10:40

phones in the kindergarten, which apparently

10:42

I guess we're doing in classrooms in the US,

10:44

what? That's why the kids are trans, because of

10:46

the frogs

10:47

and the cell phones. Also CRT.

10:50

My favorite little interaction is when he's like, did you know

10:52

it opens up the blood brain barrier?

10:54

And

10:55

Joe Rogan, famously skeptical

10:58

journalist, Joe Rogan is like, how does it

11:00

open up the blood brain barrier? And he's like, that's

11:02

beyond my expertise. So early

11:05

on when you and I first

11:07

sort of started talking and hanging out, you were talking

11:09

about like the best follow-up question

11:12

you can ask as an interviewer is just

11:14

like, say more about that. Yeah, how

11:16

so? Or like explain. Yeah.

11:19

And that is exactly what Joe Rogan

11:20

did, is just like ask the

11:23

next clarifying question that's sitting

11:25

in front of him and just immediate

11:27

stumper. Sorry, could you say

11:29

a little bit more about that? And then he just immediately

11:32

fucking punts. Yeah, blood brain

11:34

barrier, normal. So then another

11:37

thing that you might notice about this clip is that his voice sounds

11:39

a little bit weird. So in his forties,

11:42

he developed a condition

11:45

called spasmodic

11:46

dysphonia. There is

11:48

a very interesting

11:50

and telling excerpt from

11:52

a very good NBC News article

11:55

about him, which I am going to send

11:57

to you. Travely

12:00

and strained. It's gotten progressively

12:02

worse since the 90s when Kennedy was diagnosed

12:05

with spasmodic dysphonia, a

12:07

rare neurological disorder that causes

12:09

his larynx to tighten uncontrollably

12:12

and his voice to halt and tremor. The

12:15

cause of spasmodic dysphonia isn't

12:17

known. Researchers think it might

12:19

be genetic or a leftover disability

12:22

from a respiratory infection or

12:24

even stress.

12:25

Kennedy though suspects a flu

12:27

vaccine may be to blame. Quote,

12:30

I haven't been able to figure out any other cause,

12:32

he told a podcaster

12:33

in 2021. In

12:36

a follow-up email, Kennedy said he wasn't

12:38

sure of the connection, calling it quote, my

12:40

own speculation. His

12:42

press person sent links to fact sheets

12:45

included in manufacturer packaging

12:47

of more recent flu vaccines that

12:49

list dysphonia among dozens

12:51

of reported quote unquote adverse

12:53

reactions. The

12:56

adverse reactions in those package inserts,

12:58

which are legal, not medical documents,

13:00

are based on unverified observations

13:03

and as they make clear, don't suggest

13:05

the vaccine necessarily caused

13:07

the reaction. Yeah, this

13:09

is like lawyer don't

13:11

get us sued paper that gets put

13:13

in. This is a pattern that we

13:16

will see throughout this episode where it's

13:18

like he makes this wildly overblown

13:20

claim. I got this from the flu

13:22

vaccine. And then someone is

13:24

like, sorry, can you support this at

13:26

all? And he's like, yes, yes, of course. And then he sends a

13:28

bunch of fucking gibberish. And then when

13:30

you press him more, he's like, oh, well, I never really

13:33

said it was vaccine. I'm just speculating. Michael,

13:35

I just looked in the sidebar next

13:38

to this clip that we just watched. My algorithm

13:40

fully thinks I'm Jenny McCarthy, like quote unquote doing

13:42

my own research. No,

13:45

the one that really got me, I was like, whoa,

13:47

is Robert F. Kennedy

13:50

Jr. on club random

13:52

with Bill Maher. Yeah, I know. I watched

13:54

that one too. Oh, God, buddy. Why

13:56

is this happening to me? Although I also learned

13:58

research. this episode that Spotify

14:01

allows you to play podcasts at up to 3.5 X speed.

14:05

Which bless, bless

14:08

Spotify. Fucking YouTube 2 X

14:10

is not fast enough for me. My brain is so

14:12

broken

14:12

by watching these fucking clips. I'm like,

14:15

speed it up, man. Get me to the

14:17

gay frogs. Yeah. So

14:19

this like stipulated this dude

14:21

is a full cuckoo bird. Yeah.

14:23

So thank you. That was the reason for all that. Thank

14:25

you for pulling me back to my notes. This is the whole

14:28

reason for that little section. So there's a couple of

14:30

factors in his life

14:31

that led him to become the conspiracy

14:34

theorist that he is today. The first

14:37

are his personal circumstances,

14:39

like just everything that happened to him growing up. So

14:42

this

14:42

is from a very good Rebecca Traster

14:44

article about him. Oh, I like Rebecca

14:46

Traster. I know, right? She's good. She's good. She says,

14:49

if he were your uncle, you would likely

14:51

consider that he is fighting some serious psychological

14:53

headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated

14:56

when Bobby was nine. He was pulled from

14:58

school at 14 and flown to the deathbed

15:00

of his father. Also assassinated. His

15:02

cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way

15:04

to Bobby's sister's wedding. One brother died

15:07

in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose.

15:09

His wife died by suicide.

15:11

All this in a family in which his grandfather's

15:13

dictum was, there will be no crying

15:15

in this house. When his father

15:18

was killed, his mother was pregnant

15:20

with her 11th child. They

15:22

had always had a tumultuous relationship.

15:24

He talks in his autobiography

15:26

about begging to be sent

15:28

off to boarding school just like to get out

15:30

of the house because they were fighting so much. And

15:33

after RFK senior is killed,

15:36

it seems like his mom just kind of like

15:38

gave up and like foisted

15:39

him off onto the rest

15:42

of the family, onto family friends.

15:45

It's this really interesting upbringing where

15:47

he's kind of like raised by a village. He

15:49

also talks in his autobiography

15:52

about starting drugs very

15:54

young. He is later diagnosed

15:56

with ADHD. So he's kind of

15:58

self-medicating.

15:59

It starts with like weed and alcohol, and then

16:02

it graduates to Coke and

16:05

LSD and eventually heroin.

16:08

He is eventually arrested for

16:10

possession in 1983 in South Dakota. He

16:14

continues to attend AA meetings

16:17

to this day. It's something he talks about like fairly movingly,

16:19

honestly, being in recovery is still

16:21

like a really big part of his life. Addiction

16:23

makes sense as a reasonable coping

16:26

mechanism to deal with all of this. Oh

16:28

yeah. You're losing both of your parents

16:30

in some fashion. Exactly.

16:32

And so the other way that he comes to

16:34

these conspiratorial views, and I think this is actually

16:37

very important,

16:38

is that he starts from

16:40

genuinely being correct. So

16:44

in the 1980s, after he is arrested

16:46

for heroin possession, he has to do 800 hours

16:48

of community service. He is scooped

16:51

up by this guy who works for the Natural

16:53

Resources Defense Council, which is like a legal

16:56

clinic that basically sues

16:57

governments for polluting the environment.

17:00

He starts working at this organization, and eventually it rises

17:03

up through the ranks. He is one of the

17:05

people generally credited with cleaning

17:07

up the Hudson River. This becomes like a big

17:09

deal in his life. He's like a big nature enthusiast.

17:12

He starts doing falconry. Whoa. When

17:14

he's a little kid, it's like such a rich people habit. But

17:16

whatever, it's like a nature thing. He loves being outside,

17:19

fishing, hunting, all this kind of stuff. Sure. Falconry,

17:21

dressage.

17:22

Hunting poor people for sport.

17:26

He's really on the side of justice. He's

17:28

a big climate change guy. The

17:31

earliest interviews you can find

17:33

of him on the internet are him talking about

17:36

the fossil fuel industry and

17:38

how they've captured the EPA. A lot of stuff

17:40

is fucking true. And I think that kind

17:42

of crusader

17:44

personality type, combined

17:46

with all of the other stuff that he's been through, just

17:48

makes him more susceptible to

17:51

this kind of anti-establishment,

17:54

everything is a conspiracy type of thinking.

17:56

That makes sense to me. And also, it sounds

17:59

like this is

17:59

not a story of someone who

18:03

is revealing themselves to

18:05

be a cuckoo bird, right? This isn't like

18:07

a Scooby-Doo villain peeling off their

18:10

mask and being like, ha ha, it was me all along.

18:13

This sounds like a case of genuine,

18:15

like an unstable core sort of issue.

18:18

This is a guy who has not had a steady environment

18:21

and has

18:21

not had relationships that stick around

18:23

regardless and has not, you know what I mean? Like has

18:25

just like had a tough road to hoe.

18:28

And also there's various reports from

18:30

friends, some of which are sort of rumors, so I don't know how

18:32

seriously to take this, but people say

18:34

that he's always been kind

18:35

of insecure about his intellect

18:37

and insecure about being like one of

18:40

the lesser Kennedys, the

18:42

shadow that his father cast is so large. And

18:44

I think he's always been aware of like the

18:46

need to live up to that and

18:49

a little bit insecure about like his ability to

18:51

do so. And I also understand

18:53

why that would give you a little bit of a chip on your

18:55

shoulder when like people are criticizing

18:58

you or saying like, I don't know about the science on that. You're like,

19:00

oh, are you are you saying I'm not good enough? Yeah.

19:02

Not that I'm expressing like a huge

19:05

amount of sympathy with Nepo babies, but like there

19:07

there is the thing of like you're kind of aware

19:10

of the fact that

19:11

you've gotten this push into these

19:14

upper echelons. And I think there's like an insecurity

19:16

that comes along with that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think

19:18

like if you think about sort of like

19:21

what are the life choices for

19:23

someone with like very notable

19:26

or exceptional or well-known parents,

19:29

their options are

19:31

go into that same line of

19:33

work as your parents and get compared to them

19:35

for

19:35

forever. Go into

19:37

a different line of work that's like a little bit

19:39

more normie and have people have

19:42

all their eyes at you doing some

19:44

kind of tourism or not really having

19:46

the same experience as everyone else or what

19:48

have you. So I'm just like, I do actually have

19:51

empathy for that. That seems like a tough position

19:53

to be in. And it makes sense that people would

19:55

act out in weird ways if it

19:57

feels like all of their choices are going to be

19:59

that. heavily judged based on someone

20:02

else's actions. I'm like, I get that. I

20:04

had a thing a couple years ago where my dad

20:06

asked me to make him a mixtape. I

20:09

put a bunch of Amy Winehouse songs on there because

20:11

I thought my dad would like her. And my dad

20:13

was like, this woman has this beautiful voice.

20:15

What's her story? He had never heard of her. I told

20:18

him her struggles with addiction

20:19

and how her life ended and everything else. And

20:23

my dad, who's the kindest guy, he's

20:25

like, Mike, I'm so glad you never

20:27

had any big talents because

20:29

it makes it start hard when

20:32

you're really talented. I'm like, dad, there's probably

20:34

another way you could have said that. I know what you mean.

20:38

Let's workshop the phrasing of that dad.

20:40

Famously talentless, Michael Hops.

20:43

Look, as a member of the mediocre

20:44

white guy community, I am glad

20:47

for my lack of privilege. You were not a tag

20:49

kid? I would assume you were a tag kid. Oh,

20:52

is that like a pro? We didn't have that. Oh, talented

20:54

and gifted.

20:55

Oh, no, I was not. I was and

20:57

am neither. Okay.

21:00

Just ask my dad. When I was reading

21:03

about RFK Jr. and about the

21:05

rise of the anti-vax movement, I was like, okay, we can do a

21:07

whole episode

21:08

just dunking on this guy. And this is what he

21:10

says is wrong. This is what he says is wrong. That's not

21:12

going to be very interesting for us. That's not going to be very interesting for

21:14

other people. And so I want to talk

21:16

about the tactics of conspiracy

21:19

theorists and how to recognize

21:22

conspiracy thinking structurally.

21:26

Ooh. So the first

21:28

thing that conspiracy theorists

21:30

do, and I think it's very important to start

21:33

with this, is that they fucking

21:35

lie. So I'm sending

21:37

you another clip. From now on,

21:40

I'm speeding up the clips slightly

21:42

just because I had to watch so many

21:45

hours of this man. And I feel like

21:47

the least I can do is speed through the

21:49

clips that we have.

21:50

So this is at one and a half speed.

21:54

I think most people don't know what my stance on vaccines. I've never been anti-vaccine.

21:57

Using that pejorative to describe is what I'm saying. way

22:00

of silencing or marginalizing me. Marginalizing.

22:02

Virtually every American would agree with

22:04

my stance on vaccines, which is that vaccines should be tested

22:07

like other medicines. They should be safety tested.

22:10

And unfortunately, the vaccines are not

22:12

safety tested. They're not. There's 72

22:15

vaccine doses now mandated,

22:17

essentially mandated. They're recommended, but they're really mandated.

22:21

American children, none of them, not one, has

22:23

ever been subject to a pre-licensing

22:25

placebo-controlled trial. Yes, they have. No. Yes,

22:28

they have. OK, let me just say something. Dr.

22:31

Fauci and many other people for many years said

22:33

this. Bobby Kennedy, when he says that,

22:35

is wrong. So I met with Dr. Fauci

22:37

in 2016. I agreed to go on

22:39

Trump's Vaccine Safety Commission, and I was with Aaron

22:42

Ceary and Lynn Redwood and

22:44

a number of other people. And we said to him, can you show us

22:46

one test for many vaccine, pre-licensing

22:49

safety tests? And he said,

22:51

I'll send it to you. I can't find one now. He

22:54

never did. So we sued him. We

22:56

sued Aaron Ceary, I sued HHS. And

22:59

after a year of litigation and stonewalling, they

23:01

said that they could not provide a single

23:03

safety study for any vaccine

23:06

that is on the childhood schedule, pre-licensing safety

23:08

study. Oh,

23:09

anybody who wants to read that can go to

23:12

the Children's Health Defense website, and you can read

23:14

HHS's admission that not a

23:16

single one has ever been safety tested

23:18

pre-licensing.

23:20

Boy, oh, boy. I just think we should safety

23:23

test the vaccines. Really amazing

23:25

as we're going through all of this, how much

23:28

the style of talking here

23:30

reminds me of

23:31

watching so much of the Montana State

23:34

Legislature this year. Oh, really? Yeah,

23:36

that's like there was a

23:39

guy who sponsored their drag

23:41

ban, and his whole

23:44

thing was like, just Google it. They're sexualizing

23:46

our children. Just Google it. Yeah, here's a 200-page

23:48

PDF

23:49

that you can read that may or may not confirm

23:52

my views. But we all know you're

23:54

not going to fucking do that. Right. Either

23:56

it does confirm my views,

23:58

and it's from a totally uncrediting. edited source

24:00

slash I just personally wrote it. Or

24:04

it's not going to confirm my views

24:06

and I'm just counting on you not reading it to

24:08

not know that it counters my views. And

24:10

also this thing of like, I talked to Dr. Fauci

24:12

and he never got back to me. Does that actually

24:15

mean anything significantly? Like there's

24:17

probably many people that Fauci talks to and doesn't

24:19

email back. I called Beyonce

24:21

and she never called me back. So if

24:25

you watch a lot of interviews with him, you find that he just plays

24:27

the same tapes over and over again. Like a spiel

24:29

that he goes on almost word for word the same.

24:31

The claim is that the

24:33

vaccines that we have now have not been tested

24:36

against placebos. So I

24:38

started looking into the history of

24:41

the anti-vax movement. And

24:44

what you find is that the minute

24:47

that we had vaccines, we had

24:49

anti-vaxxers. So the

24:51

first

24:52

vaccine for smallpox is

24:55

invented or like they're sort of testing

24:57

out early versions of it in 1721

25:00

and the doctor who's working on this

25:03

in Boston has to stop the work because

25:05

he's getting so many threats. Wow,

25:07

what? We eventually in the 1800s

25:09

get like good vaccines for

25:12

smallpox because this

25:14

guy Edward Jenner has the

25:15

extremely disgusting idea

25:18

of injecting people with pus

25:21

from sores of milkmaids

25:23

that had cowpox. You know,

25:25

it's like this milder form of smallpox, but he's

25:27

like, why are the milkmaids getting smallpox? That's

25:29

weird. It's because they got this cowpox

25:32

thing, which is like not that bad, but also provides

25:34

inoculation. To be fair

25:36

to the early anti-vaxxers, vaccines were fucking disgusting.

25:39

Yeah, I was gonna say content note for pus

25:41

injections, I guess. I know,

25:43

you have no idea. The stuff that I had to read and

25:46

watch for this is so fucking gross. But anyway,

25:48

the first vaccine mandate in

25:50

the United States was in 1853

25:53

and there's a huge anti-vax

25:55

movement. There's a very

25:57

good Behind the Bastards podcast

25:59

on this. There's... a book called Pox about this. And then

26:01

I also read a book called Anti-Vaxxers,

26:04

How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement

26:06

by Jonathan Berman. Terrible title,

26:09

very good book. Oh, good. So

26:11

he talks about the earliest, like the first

26:14

anti-vaxxers in the United States. Actually,

26:18

this is long. Why don't I send it to you? Great.

26:21

Much of the prevalent anti-vaccine sentiment

26:23

of the era was laid out in 1854, when

26:26

John Gibbs published the booklet, Our

26:29

Medical Liberties, or the

26:31

personal rights of the subject as infringed

26:34

by recent and proposed legislation, compromising

26:37

observations on the compulsory vaccination

26:40

act, the medical registration

26:42

and reform bills, and the main laws.

26:45

End of title.

26:47

Gibbs attacked the Vaccination Act of 1853

26:50

on several fronts, complaining that it was

26:52

an intrusion on personal rights, that

26:54

it was written to benefit the medical trade,

26:57

that it treated the populace as too stupid

27:00

to make their own health decisions, that

27:02

it mandated a practice that was not universally

27:04

accepted among physicians, and

27:06

that it had failed in some individual

27:08

cases. I want to point out here,

27:11

the arguments of anti-vaxxers have not

27:14

changed for 170 years. This

27:17

is exactly what we have now, right?

27:20

What about my rights?

27:22

It's benefiting big pharma. People

27:24

should make their own decisions. There's a debate

27:26

within medicine about whether they work. And

27:30

look at this anecdote

27:30

of something bad that happened to somebody

27:32

who got a vaccine. The same shit forever.

27:35

His complaint that vaccination benefited

27:38

the medical trade may have been related to his

27:40

own occupation in hydrotherapy,

27:42

a kind of quack medicine that involved treatment

27:45

by bathing in, drinking, or injecting

27:48

water, and applying

27:50

it to various parts of the body.

27:59

Uneffective means of preventing smallpox

28:02

infection. I bet so We

28:05

have someone who is making these like high

28:07

level philosophical objections

28:10

to Vaccines like oh isn't it about

28:12

my personal liberties when it turns out they're just

28:14

a fucking grifter who wants to sell you some bullshit

28:17

and like That totally that's the actual heart of their complaint

28:19

last time we're gonna

28:20

see this in the anti-vax story I just wanted to put it here because

28:22

it's the only time this has ever happened Yes, totally it never

28:24

will happen again. Got it check And so what we have

28:26

over the course of the next hundred years as more vaccines

28:29

develop is This this cycle

28:31

emerges where there's compulsory

28:33

vaccination a ton of people get vaccinated The

28:36

disease

28:36

disappears and then after

28:39

it disappears for a while people kind of forget how bad

28:41

it was Then you get the rise

28:43

of these anti-vax orgs like it's about my rights

28:45

blah blah blah Vaccination rates fall

28:48

and then an outbreak happens. It's like oh fuck we

28:50

have smallpox again. Look how terrible This is my god.

28:52

We forgot how bad it is. Then you

28:55

get people getting vaccinated again Mm-hmm.

28:57

This is the cycle that we're in now

28:59

like just to spoil the ending like this is what we're

29:01

saying now with measles Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

29:03

So this cycle continues until

29:06

the emergence of polio in

29:08

the early 1900s Polio

29:11

is a poop spreading disease

29:13

is one of the poop diseases. Oh congratulations

29:15

I know I have to look into poop again You keep

29:18

picking topics that lead

29:20

you back thought it was airborne But it

29:22

turns out it's poop and I to read about poop forever Polio

29:25

another thing that is kind of in memory hold about

29:27

polio Is that like the

29:29

vaccine rollout for polio was a huge

29:31

fucking disaster really? So in

29:34

the 1940s and 1950s, there's a bunch of outbreaks of

29:36

polio. We had 58,000 cases in 1955 in

29:41

the early 1950s. They start testing a polio

29:44

vaccine So the way

29:46

the vaccines work is they have virus material

29:49

and then they blast the virus

29:51

with Formaldehyde which kills

29:53

the virus so it's not live virus

29:55

anymore, but it is still like virus material

29:58

and basically your body So

30:01

that next time it knocks on the door, your

30:04

immune system is like, I know you fuck off. Yeah.

30:06

Right. But what happens in 1955,

30:09

as they're rolling out, this mass

30:11

polio vaccination is one

30:13

of the batches they forgot to add

30:15

formaldehyde. What? So a hundred

30:18

thousand batches of vaccine

30:20

were just straight up like injecting

30:23

kids with polio. God. So then this

30:25

just becomes proof positive

30:26

for anti-vax

30:28

people. Right. That was like you were right

30:31

all along. Exactly. Right. There's

30:33

also I mean, not to give the anti-vax

30:35

people very much credit, but also people just

30:37

in general are kind of weirded

30:39

out by vaccines. I think because you're

30:42

sticking a needle sometimes

30:44

in an infant. I think a lot of people are scared

30:46

of needles in a way that they don't necessarily realize

30:48

or admit to. And most

30:50

people don't know how vaccines work. Right. It's like this weird

30:53

clear liquid that's magical. And

30:55

you inject it in me and like, maybe I feel kind of crappy

30:57

for like a day, but then I'm immune

30:59

to this disease that like maybe I haven't

31:01

even really heard of. Right. Like Rubella. I

31:04

guess I can't get Rubella now. What the fuck? I don't

31:06

know what that is, but okay. There's a huge amount of trust

31:08

in the medical system that is required for these things.

31:11

And I sort of get on a gut level

31:13

why people just think it's sort of weird. Well, also

31:15

like even if you sort of know what you're up

31:17

against, it's still injecting

31:20

yourself with something you're trying

31:22

not to get. Exactly. It freaks people out. And I

31:24

think that's just like a little bit of a mind fuck. So

31:26

this incident in 1955 was

31:28

like a huge deal. Yeah. Horror

31:31

show. There's lawsuits. There's

31:33

again another wave of

31:36

organized anti-vaccine

31:38

sentiment. Right. So in 1973,

31:40

we get the foundation of the association

31:44

of parents of vaccine damaged

31:46

children. And so to return

31:48

to the R.K.

31:49

Jr. clip that we just watched. Yes. He

31:51

says that vaccines are not

31:53

tested on placebos. This is

31:56

again a fucking lie.

31:58

I googled.

31:59

measles vaccine placebo and

32:02

found many studies. There's

32:04

one in 1963 where they test the measles vaccine

32:06

against three different kinds of placebo.

32:09

There's one in 1986, this is actually pretty

32:11

cool, where they tested the measles vaccine on

32:14

identical twins.

32:14

Oh, whoa. The one that placebo one didn't,

32:17

all of the COVID vaccines were tested against placebo.

32:20

Rotavirus tested against placebo for years.

32:22

It was like 70,000 people. It was like a bunch of different

32:24

countries, four years. The fucking

32:27

polio vaccine was tested against saline

32:29

in 1952. Yeah. When

32:31

RFK Jr.

32:32

says that none of the vaccines have been

32:34

tested against placebos, what he means

32:36

is that none of the current brand

32:38

name vaccines have been tested against

32:41

placebos. So over the years,

32:44

the pharmaceutical companies will update the

32:46

vaccines for various reasons, for like technical

32:48

reasons or like this one preserves longer,

32:50

it's easier to ship or whatever. There's various

32:52

reasons that they change the formulation of

32:54

the vaccine.

32:55

And when they do that, they test

32:57

the new vaccines against the old

33:00

vaccines. If you're making some technical

33:02

tweak to like the measles vaccine, it

33:04

doesn't make sense to test it

33:07

against a placebo.

33:07

First of all, because what

33:09

you want to know is whether it's as effective

33:12

as the older formulation, right? Secondly,

33:15

it's really unethical to give people

33:17

placebo vaccines because they might

33:19

get fucking measles. But Michael, he didn't

33:21

return his call smoking gun. I

33:23

know.

33:24

Good Lord.

33:26

So are you ready for our next clip? Yes,

33:29

let's clip it up. Our next category of information. Clip,

33:31

clip, snip, snip. The next

33:34

thing

33:35

that conspiracy theorists do is

33:38

they deliberately remove context.

33:41

Okay. So this is another

33:43

clip from RFK Junior's

33:46

appearance on Joe Rogan. A pass

33:48

the Vaccine Act in 1986 and the Vaccine

33:50

Act gave

33:52

immunity from liability to all vaccine companies.

33:55

If you, for any injury, for negligence,

33:57

no matter how negligent you are, no matter how reckless

33:59

you're gone.

33:59

no matter how toxic the agreement, how shoddily

34:02

tested or manufactured the product,

34:04

no matter how grievous your entry, you, your

34:06

vaccine company, you cannot be sued. This

34:08

was a huge gift for this industry because the biggest

34:11

cause for every medical product

34:13

is downstream liabilities. And

34:16

all of a sudden, those have disappeared. So you're

34:18

not only taking away that cost, but you're

34:20

also incentivizing the production of many new vaccines.

34:23

You're removing the incentive to make them safe because

34:26

no matter how dangerous they are, they don't care because

34:28

they can't be sued.

34:31

I

34:31

can't fathom that this is in any way

34:33

accurate. Well, you don't think it's true that no

34:35

one cares. We're just injecting just pure mercury

34:38

into children. You can't file a lawsuit. You don't

34:40

think that's true, Aubrey?

34:41

Look, that's not coming

34:44

from a place of I

34:46

have a great deal of faith in institutional

34:49

public health systems. Whatever. That's

34:52

coming from a place of we're in a country

34:54

where anyone can sue anyone for

34:56

anything. I do not believe

34:59

that there would be this kind of blanket immunity

35:01

for an entire like industry

35:04

that seems wackadoo. Can't believe you're spoiling

35:06

the next six minutes. Oh no, Michael,

35:08

I'm so sorry. I'm fired. She's

35:12

turned the pink slip on herself. So

35:16

we are fast forwarding slightly to 1982.

35:20

There's new vaccines being introduced and

35:22

we have this uptake of them

35:25

and then people get nervous and then it

35:27

goes down and then we get an outbreak. So in

35:29

the 1970s and 1980s, there's a couple of outbreaks

35:31

of pertussis, which is whooping cough. So

35:34

in the midst of this kind of vaccination

35:36

and outbreak cycle, in 1982, we get a TV

35:39

news

35:40

special

35:44

called DPT vaccine

35:47

roulette. Oh no.

35:49

We are going to watch the first two

35:52

minutes. So this was originally broadcast

35:54

on a affiliate in Washington

35:57

DC, but it becomes a big

35:59

deal nationally.

36:01

It's a fact of life. All children must

36:03

get four DPT shots to go to school.

36:06

Shots we are told will keep our children healthy.

36:09

Shots we are told will protect every child

36:11

from a dread disease, pertussis, it's

36:13

whooping cough. But the DPT shot

36:15

can also damage to a devastating degree.

36:26

It's probably the poorest and the most dangerous

36:29

vaccine that we now have.

36:31

Whoa, crips.

36:34

It's so bad, right? Yeah, so the images

36:36

are of, like, disabled kids. And

36:38

it's horrible, like, heart effect, like, horror movie sound.

36:41

Yeah. Above, like, kids with Down Syndrome. Grotesque.

36:44

Yeah, really grotesque. Like, absolutely fucking reprehensible.

36:47

So most of the special is anecdotes

36:50

of parents who are like,

36:51

Lucy was fine, and then we

36:53

took her to get her DPT shot, and then

36:55

immediately she had all of these developmental delays.

36:57

It's basically anecdote after anecdote after anecdote. The

37:00

HHS, sort of the,

37:02

what she calls the medical establishment, is not really given

37:05

any ability to respond.

37:07

It's just like, HHS said that there was no evidence

37:09

of this or something, but it's like, it doesn't really dwell

37:12

on it. And then anyone who tries to say that

37:14

there's no evidence that the vaccines actually do this,

37:16

it's like,

37:16

you know, someone in, like, a lab coat sort

37:19

of sitting at a desk, and like, there isn't really a

37:21

visual associated with it. Yeah. Whereas

37:23

just the visual of, like, as we saw in

37:25

that clip, it's like a baby being injected

37:28

and immediately crying.

37:30

That's what sticks with you from this. This

37:32

is big Apple morphing into

37:34

a skull and crossbones territory.

37:37

It really is. This, like, early

37:39

80s special report news magazine

37:42

kind of stuff was really working

37:44

over time on that front. And of course, later

37:47

on, like, far after there's any real

37:49

ability to do anything about it, people look

37:51

into the

37:52

details of this documentary and they find that a lot of

37:54

the numbers were wrong. A lot of the

37:56

researchers whose work was cited in this

37:59

report are like, that's not. what our study says. Yeah,

38:01

it's anecdotal and it's all correlation, right?

38:04

Yeah, I mean, the primary

38:06

structural problem with vaccines

38:09

is the scale. You have millions

38:12

of children every year being injected

38:14

with vaccines. Yeah. You know, something that happens in one

38:16

out of 10,000 kids

38:19

is going to happen a couple thousand times because

38:21

so many kids are getting the vaccines. Yeah, totally.

38:23

And the vaccine schedule,

38:25

there's quite a few vaccines, even in 1982 that

38:27

kids had to get. And these are also the time

38:30

of development, sort of between six months and 18 months

38:33

when disabilities start to appear in kids, right?

38:35

You start to notice speech delays, you start to notice vision

38:37

impairments, hearing impairments. And so, given

38:40

the number of shots that kids are getting and

38:42

given the way that

38:43

humans form patterns, we look

38:45

for patterns in our brains without really realizing that's

38:48

what we're doing, of course, you're going

38:50

to sort of put these two things together

38:52

and be like, oh my God, her hearing issues

38:54

started the week after she got the vaccine. It feels

38:57

a little bit like my phone is listening

38:59

to me crowd. Like when people

39:01

are like, I was just talking to my friend about this

39:03

and then I got an ad for it on my phone. And I'm like, did

39:05

you Google it though? Dude, I used

39:07

to think

39:07

that I had ESP because

39:09

I could very reliably predict which song

39:12

was going to come on on shuffle. I

39:14

thought I had the gift. It's like of the 12

39:17

tracks on this scene. Which

39:19

one's coming next? That's amazing. So

39:22

another very good book that I read for

39:24

this is The Panic Virus by

39:26

Seth Mnookin. He talks about

39:28

how just this

39:31

documentary results in like another

39:34

increase in the size of the organized

39:37

anti-vax movement. A bunch of parents

39:40

start getting together in these organized groups. They

39:42

start doing newsletters and much more sort of political

39:45

lobbying and eventually

39:47

they get together a

39:48

bunch of lawsuits. So in 1978,

39:51

there were two lawsuits

39:53

against vaccine manufacturers. In 1986,

39:56

four years after this documentary, there were 250 lawsuits.

39:58

And they

40:00

were totaling 3 billion in damages.

40:03

And some of these cases won. Vaccines

40:06

are not particularly profitable, right? They're mostly being

40:08

bought in very large quantities by municipal

40:10

governments and stuff. The drug makers

40:12

are basically like, this is not

40:14

worth it for us. What starts

40:16

happening in the 1980s is

40:18

the number of companies that make

40:21

vaccines goes from over 20 to

40:23

less than four,

40:24

because they're like, we can't afford the litigation.

40:28

So in 1986, Congress

40:30

passes a law

40:33

with a name that will like ring in the

40:35

fucking ears of the anti-vax,

40:37

the anti-vax people love the fucking name of this law.

40:40

It's called the National Childhood Vaccine

40:43

Injury Act. Okay. Which

40:45

makes it sound like, oh, kids are being injured

40:48

by vaccines. Yeah, absolutely. And

40:50

the minute you talk about this, they'll be like, well, then why is it called

40:52

the Injury Act then? Oh, God. And

40:55

so what this does is it sets up this compensation

40:57

scheme

40:58

that RFK Jr. mentioned obliquely

41:00

in his clip.

41:01

There is actually a mechanism now

41:03

that if you believe your child is harmed

41:05

by a vaccine, you can take your case

41:08

to this compensation scheme. It will be heard by

41:10

a sort of panel of judges and

41:13

it may or may not pay out awards. So

41:15

this does actually happen. In

41:17

the same way that like, did you get side

41:19

effects from the COVID vaccine? Not really. Like

41:22

my arm kind of ached? How about you? I mean, I have

41:24

had a bunch of them by now, but like in general,

41:26

I had like one or two days of feeling flu-y. But

41:29

again, with the scale, it's like

41:31

there are side effects of vaccines,

41:33

right? And if you think about, you know, this is being given to tens

41:35

of millions of people, in the bell

41:38

curve of side effects of vaccines,

41:40

some people really are going to be at like the far

41:42

tail end. So like there are cases of kids fainting

41:45

after they get vaccines, kids vomit after

41:47

they get vaccines. Like vaccines have side

41:49

effects and like risks. They're very small and they're

41:52

extremely small compared to the risk of not getting vaccinated,

41:54

i.e. getting measles or whatever else. But

41:57

like people really do have side

41:58

effects. So, when RFK

42:01

Jr. says that there is

42:03

this compensation scheme that protects

42:06

Big Pharma from some liability

42:08

for vaccines, he is telling the truth.

42:11

However, he is also leaving

42:13

out three critical pieces

42:15

of context. First of all, he's ignoring

42:17

all of the history that we just went over.

42:20

The precipitating incident of

42:22

this injury act was that there was

42:24

only one

42:25

producer of the pertussis vaccine

42:27

left. And it's easy to forget this now,

42:30

but before we had a vaccine against whooping cough,

42:32

it killed 9,000 kids a year. So

42:35

Congress was looking at a context

42:38

in which the options were either

42:40

have no pertussis vaccine

42:42

or set up this injury compensation

42:44

scheme. The second piece of

42:46

context that he's leaving out is that these kinds of injury

42:48

compensation schemes are really standard

42:51

throughout the developed world. Vaccines

42:53

aren't like running shoes or something where if you

42:55

buy it and it sucks or it harms you,

42:57

you sue the manufacturer. Vaccines

43:00

are mandated by federal and state

43:02

governments. So around the world,

43:05

what governments have done

43:06

is basically said, look, we are making

43:08

kids take this, so it makes sense

43:10

that we would take on the liability.

43:13

And the third, and by far the

43:15

most important piece of context that he's leaving out, is

43:17

that this injury compensation scheme,

43:20

which we've now had for a couple decades, has

43:22

lower standards than

43:25

legal standards. This actually makes it

43:27

easier for parents to get compensation

43:29

when their kids are harmed by vaccines in these

43:32

rare cases.

43:33

People have in fact gone to this compensation

43:35

scheme and gotten payouts for

43:38

harms of vaccines that are basically biologically

43:41

implausible. Scientists look at this and they're

43:42

like, there's really no way that a vaccine could

43:44

have done this, but we can't really prove

43:47

that a vaccine didn't cause this disability

43:50

or this harm, and so we're going to

43:52

pay this person out. That's something that would

43:54

never happen if these parents

43:56

were forced to come together as

43:59

a group, file a vaccine.

43:59

a class action lawsuit, go through this whole

44:02

years-long process, finally get into

44:04

war, there's then an appeal, etc., etc. This

44:07

is actually a better process if

44:09

you believe that your children were

44:11

harmed by vaccines. Man, I'm

44:13

hearing you say all of this and I'm also staring

44:16

at this screen of YouTube.

44:19

And the very first

44:21

comment is, I am by no means

44:23

a scientist, but the second I saw they didn't

44:25

have any liability, I knew I wouldn't

44:27

be taking it. There you go. 1,000 likes.

44:30

Yeah. This whole episode

44:33

is just an exercise in how much longer it takes

44:35

to debunk this bullshit than it does to say it.

44:37

Even this, his interview

44:40

with Joe Rogan was three hours long. We're

44:42

going to do a fucking two-part episode. We've

44:44

already been recording for two and a half hours. We will get

44:46

to like 5% of

44:48

the bullshit that he's been on. Oh my God. Oh

44:51

my God. Just to flood the

44:53

fire hose of nonsense.

44:56

At a certain point, you just need

44:58

to be like, this is not a person who is connected

45:00

with reality and like everything that

45:02

he says, you should assume that it is false. Unless

45:04

somebody else, like somebody credible, somebody with a podcast

45:07

says that it is true. Somebody with the podcast,

45:09

you know. Look at a podcast. That credibility

45:11

factory that is having a USB

45:14

mic. All right. We have one more

45:16

section. The third

45:19

thing that conspiracy theorists

45:21

do, they are obsessed with

45:24

being silenced by these scientific

45:26

establishments. Oh my God. So

45:28

the image that just popped into my mind

45:30

when you said that

45:32

was Marjorie

45:35

Taylor Greene speaking on the floor

45:37

of Congress with a mask

45:40

on that said censored. Oh yeah.

45:42

Jesus Christ. You're a sitting Congress

45:45

person speaking in Congress.

45:47

Who's censoring you? Thank you and

45:49

fuck you for bringing that back into my brain. Sorry.

45:52

You're welcome. Actually, this clip

45:55

does not deal with Marjorie

45:57

Taylor Greene. This deals with Nicki Minaj.

46:00

Oh no, it's about her cousin's testicles.

46:03

We're mostly reading this because I think it's funny,

46:05

but I'm gonna bring it back to the theme, don't

46:07

worry. So this is from his

46:10

Anthony Fauci book. By September of 2021, Dr.

46:13

Fauci's power to muzzle his

46:16

critics had achieved a mastery over

46:18

free expression unprecedented

46:20

in human history. Unprecedented.

46:22

That month, with a single phrase, Dr.

46:25

Fauci silenced pop icon

46:27

Nicki Minaj after she questioned

46:29

whether COVID vaccines might be causing

46:31

problems involving testicular

46:33

swelling.

46:34

When CNN's Jake

46:36

Tapper asked him about Minaj's claim,

46:39

Dr. Fauci simply declared, the

46:41

answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no.

46:44

As usual, he cited no study

46:46

to support this assertion. Where's the

46:48

study showing it doesn't expand balls? Unlike

46:51

RFK Jr. who

46:53

cites literally tens of thousands

46:55

of studies. I

46:58

also love that he's saying that Dr. Fauci is like silencing

47:01

her when all that happened was he went on CNN

47:03

and they're like, is she right? He's like, nah. I also

47:05

really enjoy him referring to her as

47:07

pop icon Nicki Minaj because

47:10

I am certain that he had not heard of her.

47:12

Nicki Minaj. Based

47:14

on Dr. Fauci's word alone, Twitter

47:17

immediately evicted Minaj from

47:19

its platform, censoring her

47:21

communication with her 22 million

47:23

followers. Obama's obedient

47:26

attack dogs, CNN, CBS

47:28

and NBC, rushed onto

47:30

the dog pile to defame and discredit

47:33

the rapper and to assure the public

47:35

that Minaj was wrong.

47:37

Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken!

47:40

Also, do you want to read the actual tweet,

47:43

Aubrey? Sure. This

47:45

is the Nicki Minaj tweet that

47:47

Dr. Fauci so cruelly silenced.

47:50

My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine

47:52

because his friend got it and became impotent.

47:55

His testicles became swollen. His

47:57

friend was weeks away from getting married.

48:00

now the girl called off the wedding. So

48:02

just pray on it and make sure you're comfortable with

48:05

your decision, not bullied. Think about

48:07

your testicles. There was a lot made of this

48:09

at the time, like Nicki Minaj's

48:11

cousin's friend was like the, like

48:13

sort of full title

48:16

of this whole thing. And like,

48:18

she's sort of gesturing

48:20

at something, which is not great. I don't

48:22

love the gesturing that she's doing here,

48:24

but she's not saying, these

48:27

vaccines are unsafe, I have the proof. Right.

48:30

Right. But this is also the thing that anti-vaxxers

48:32

always do, where like they keep this distance,

48:34

right? Where they can say something and then immediately be

48:36

like, Oh, I never said that. I never said nobody should get

48:38

the vaccine. I merely said that

48:41

like it's harming millions of children. Yeah. I

48:43

never said you shouldn't get it. So

48:46

for this, I spoke to a friend of the show,

48:48

Eric Garcia, and read his book,

48:50

We're Not Broken, which was really good. Yay, Eric.

48:53

And he went on me and Sarah's podcast to describe

48:55

sort of the genesis of the

48:57

modern

48:58

anti-vaxx movement, which is what we're going to cover now. This is like

49:00

when me and you started hearing about the anti-vaxx movement,

49:02

it's like, what's about to happen? I'm not going

49:05

to go through like every minute detail because

49:07

this has been covered like pretty extensively

49:09

elsewhere. But one

49:11

thing that I do think

49:12

is really interesting to note, and I noticed in

49:15

the reading for this, is that a

49:17

word that has not come up in any

49:19

of the anti-vaxx movements so far throughout

49:22

the seventies and eighties is autism. Oh,

49:24

interesting. This specific link

49:27

between the MMR vaccine and

49:29

autism has not been made yet. This

49:31

is something that is totally constructed in the 1990s. Which

49:33

is wild because that is

49:35

the leading claim at this

49:37

point, right? At this point, yes. Like if you asked me to

49:40

characterize like, what

49:42

are the values of anti-vaxx

49:44

movements in the US? I'd be

49:46

like, well, they don't want there to be any autistic people. Step

49:49

one. So most of this I'm getting from Brian Deere's

49:51

book, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, but

49:53

I'm also pulling from Neurotribes

49:55

by Steve Silberman and Paul Offit's book, Autism's

49:58

False Prophets. I really started

50:00

understanding this chapter of the

50:02

story once I learned that there had been all

50:05

of these waves of organized

50:07

anti-vax movements. So, as

50:10

the attention on this DPT documentary

50:13

wanes, in the UK,

50:16

there's a couple of scandals

50:18

related to vaccines. So,

50:21

there was some sort of contamination thing

50:24

where the mumps vaccine

50:26

in 1992 ended up causing some

50:29

cases of mumps. Ugh. Relatively

50:32

small outbreak, but the right-wing

50:34

tabloids, which you know I love in Britain,

50:36

just very responsible institutions. Daily

50:39

mail hive. Yeah, exactly. That's us.

50:42

Yeah. So, we're

50:43

whipping up a panic about all

50:45

of the vaccines that kids are taking.

50:48

So, famously one of the stories

50:50

has the headline, why another needle, mommy?

50:54

Sort of seen as big government, government overreach,

50:56

whatever. So, there's a whole big sort

50:58

of swirling panic about

51:01

vaccines in the 1990s in the UK. And

51:03

there's this woman named Jackie

51:05

Fletcher who starts showing up in the tabloids

51:08

giving interviews. She has a son who

51:10

she says was like totally normal. He's one year old. He

51:13

then gets the MMR

51:14

shot and almost immediately

51:17

starts having seizures. She then starts gathering

51:19

up other mothers, other people around her. This then becomes

51:21

like an organized political movement. She

51:24

and another mother of a kid who blames her

51:27

kids' developmental delays on vaccines, they

51:29

start placing ads in the newspaper to

51:31

be like, are you a parent who blames

51:34

your kids' condition on the vaccines? Come and find us. In 1992,

51:38

they found something called Justice Awareness

51:40

and Basic

51:41

Support, which is JABS

51:43

for short. Pretty good. Good

51:45

work. It's actually pretty good work. I

51:47

like that. And they start working

51:49

on a legal case. So, the

51:52

standards are very different in the UK. It's much

51:54

harder to sue companies,

51:56

but they are convinced that this technological

51:59

product produced by a pharmaceutical manufacturer

52:02

harmed their children. So they are very

52:04

enthusiastic about getting together a legal case

52:06

and doing some sort of the equivalent of a class action

52:08

suit against one of these vaccine manufacturers.

52:11

In 1995, they hire a lawyer named Richard Barr,

52:16

who is going to organize this. There's

52:18

like a lot of technical criteria he's

52:20

going to sue under this like weird EU law.

52:23

And he has to meet all of these

52:24

criteria for actually

52:26

getting the case to go forward. The

52:29

problem that he has is that there's no actual proof

52:31

of this. Like he has to gin up some actual

52:33

evidence that these people were harmed from the vaccines

52:36

rather than just like, oh, they say that they

52:37

were harmed by the vaccines. Right. So he

52:40

finds a researcher named Andrew

52:42

Wakefield. Oh, I

52:44

know this name. So Andrew Wakefield

52:47

is originally like a bowel

52:49

surgeon.

52:50

He's sort of described as a doctor, which makes

52:52

you think that he's like a research scientist, but he's like

52:55

a doctor doctor. And he

52:57

in the eighties becomes

52:59

very interested in Crohn's disease,

53:03

which is this autoimmune disorder that causes all

53:05

kinds of stomach problems. And he like

53:07

really wants to understand like, why do I have so

53:09

many more patients with Crohn's disease these days? In

53:12

the early 1990s, he

53:14

says that he has this like Eureka moment.

53:16

He's in the library. He's reading

53:19

all these old books. He finds that

53:22

measles, the measles virus can

53:24

cause in rare cases ulcers

53:28

in people's stomach and bowels, like in their digestive

53:30

system, measles can cause this. And

53:32

so he then becomes convinced that

53:35

the measles vaccine, exactly.

53:38

So he is like, well, where are kids getting exposed

53:40

to the measles virus at this point?

53:42

Aha, it's in the vaccines. Yep.

53:44

In 1983, he publishes a

53:47

very janky study, quote unquote, proving

53:49

this link, which is published,

53:52

but then like almost immediately people start looking at

53:54

it and they're like, this is just wrong. Like this just

53:56

isn't, this would be a really big deal if this was

53:58

true. Right. And they look into it and

53:59

This is just janky as fuck. But

54:02

even though the study is not seen as particularly credible

54:04

by researchers, he starts becoming a media

54:07

darling. So he starts showing up in these

54:09

right-wing scare stories about not

54:11

another needle mummy, and they'll interview

54:14

this guy who's sort of like, I'm within the medical establishment,

54:16

but I'm pushing back. He has this great

54:18

forbidden knowledge kind of story about

54:20

himself. So he becomes a media figure.

54:23

In 1995, this lawyer for

54:25

the moms

54:26

finds him in one of these articles

54:28

and is like, aha, this guy

54:31

might be my ticket to ginning

54:34

up some proof for the fact that

54:36

vaccines are causing developmental

54:38

delays. So Richard

54:41

Barr hires Andrew Wakefield.

54:43

He will eventually be paid, adjusted

54:45

for inflation, more than $1 million over

54:47

the course of the next decade. They then

54:49

start putting out calls to parents

54:52

so you can actually go back and see in the

54:54

newsletter for this jabs organization.

54:57

Richard Barr is like, hey, if you think

55:00

your kid has been harmed by the vaccine, get in touch

55:02

with this Andrew Wakefield guy. He's putting together a study.

55:05

So in 1998, he publishes his study. I'm

55:08

going to send you the title because it is

55:10

a nightmare and I want to hear you try to pronounce it.

55:13

No. You get one try. Are

55:15

you going to go like, eh, assuming I get something wrong? Well,

55:17

I don't know either. So your guess is as good as

55:20

mine. All right. I'm taking

55:22

it slow. Right. So it's called lymphoid

55:24

nodular hyperplasia, non-specific

55:28

colitis and pervasive

55:30

developmental disorder

55:31

in children. Pure clickbait. Yeah.

55:34

He's like, wow. Yeah. When I see non-specific

55:37

colitis, I got a click. They started

55:39

on ileal. Oh yeah. Give it to

55:41

me. What

55:43

this study purports to be is

55:46

like we're at a hospital in London and

55:48

over the course of the last couple of months, we've had 12 kids

55:51

come in

55:52

with autism. Eight of them

55:54

got autism very rapidly almost

55:57

immediately after receiving the MMR vaccine.

56:00

So six days after receiving the

56:03

MMR vaccine, they all get both

56:05

this like tummy trouble, which they're

56:08

calling non-specific colitis, but like basically

56:10

constipation and all kinds of like

56:12

BAMU stuff basically. And

56:15

they have very rapid disintegration

56:18

of like developmental markers. Like they become

56:20

nonverbal, they have like twitches,

56:23

all kinds of like symptoms of like

56:25

something much greater, almost immediately. They

56:28

run all kinds of tests on the kids and

56:30

show that there's like ulcers and stuff. There's all kinds of like

56:32

technical like bowel stuff. Most

56:35

of the paper is like totally unreadable because it's all this

56:37

like super technical shit. The paper

56:39

basically puts forward this theory that

56:42

there's something in the vaccines

56:46

that is like swamping the brain and

56:48

crossing the blood-brain barrier

56:50

and is causing some sort of like bowel disintegration.

56:52

And then the bowel disintegration

56:55

is somehow causing autism.

56:57

People point out later

56:59

that this is very important for the paper

57:01

to include this because to get legal

57:03

compensation under the UK

57:06

and EU product liability laws,

57:08

you have to show that the product caused a

57:11

unique condition. And

57:13

you have to show that it was rapid onset.

57:15

You can't just be like, my kid got a vaccine and like

57:18

a year later he started having headaches. And

57:20

so low and behold, this guy

57:22

who was hired by a lawyer to give

57:25

ammunition to a class action lawsuit

57:28

produces perfect

57:29

evidence of something that matches the legal

57:32

standard for liability. Interesting

57:34

stuff. What a coincidence. Shocking.

57:36

So when this paper

57:39

is published, the paper is published in the Lancet, which

57:41

is like one of the most prestigious medical

57:43

journals in the UK. The Royal Free

57:47

Hospital, which is where he works at the time holds

57:49

a press conference where Andrew

57:51

Wakefield sort of announces this to the press.

57:53

He immediately goes off script. So

57:56

of course, reporters are going to be like, well, what

57:58

does this mean about like getting a vaccine? He's like, says,

58:01

I cannot support the continued use

58:03

of the three vaccines given together. We

58:05

need to know what the role of gut inflammation

58:08

is in autism. His like boss

58:10

is like, Oh, that's not justified at all. This

58:12

is like a super preliminary report.

58:14

But of course, that clip doesn't make it on the news, right?

58:16

What makes it on news is, oh my god, there's

58:18

these kids that immediately came down with autism after getting

58:20

the vaccine and the researchers like, oh, we should think about

58:22

like changing the vaccine schedule. As you're talking

58:25

about this, I'm just thinking about like,

58:27

how much of a theme it is

58:29

on the show for the place

58:31

where it was possible to make things go differently

58:34

was the point between researchers and media,

58:36

right? Yeah, that like, that is

58:39

really the point at which folks

58:41

are getting, you know, rocket fuel

58:43

for their weird and baseless claims,

58:46

or they're being checked in a way that makes them

58:48

uncomfortable and forces them

58:50

to like sit with it a little bit, right? Like

58:53

it just feels like,

58:54

had there been the same kind

58:57

of journalistic energy channeled towards

58:59

what's going on with Wakefield and all of this, as

59:02

it was happening, as

59:04

there was devoted to the

59:07

like DPT vaccine story,

59:09

right? That we would have a really, really

59:12

different story of this movement happening.

59:14

Right. And it's also it's so predictable.

59:16

Again, the UK has been in a constant right

59:18

wing panic about vaccines for nearly a decade

59:21

at this point. Yeah, we know that these movements exist.

59:24

We know that this narrative is out there. They

59:26

publish the article. They also publish a critique

59:28

of the article in the same issue that is like,

59:30

look, this is just 12 cases. We don't really

59:32

know anything. It's super duper preliminary. But

59:35

it's like,

59:36

you didn't think to just not publish it, or

59:38

like wait and fucking stress test it at

59:40

all. Like, you just be like, oh, well, we're just gonna

59:43

print both perspectives with no

59:45

acknowledgement that you know which perspective

59:47

is going to end up in the fucking tabloids. Right? Well,

59:49

that's the other sort of like point of

59:51

intervention that we come up against all the

59:54

time is this sort of like deep

59:57

desire for science

59:59

to be apolitical or to exist in

1:00:01

an apolitical landscape, which it absolutely

1:00:04

never does. We're talking about the safety of people's kids.

1:00:07

Even people don't care about this stuff. People are going to err

1:00:09

on the side of caution with this stuff, right?

1:00:12

Especially when it comes down to my

1:00:14

kid is about to be harmed in this extremely proximate

1:00:16

way by getting a vaccine versus if my kid

1:00:18

doesn't get vaccines, they might get rubella, which

1:00:21

I've never heard of, or like pertussis, which

1:00:23

doesn't feel

1:00:24

real to people. I was actually looking at

1:00:26

statistics of various countries and vaccination

1:00:28

rates over time. You can see a fucking

1:00:30

dip in 1998. It's wild in the

1:00:33

UK. It's like craters.

1:00:36

And then of course, there's a bunch of outbreaks

1:00:38

of various things. And there's all kinds of other media

1:00:40

stuff. And then the vaccination

1:00:42

rate goes up. But it's

1:00:43

like even zooming out to the century

1:00:46

level of like, okay, what were the vaccinations? Right.

1:00:48

You're like, hey, what's that divot in the... Yeah.

1:00:51

You can see the fucking Wakefield divot. It's fucking

1:00:53

wild. And of course, this was going to fucking

1:00:55

happen. And what drives me absolutely

1:00:57

nuts is that in

1:01:00

this evisceration

1:01:01

of the paper that runs alongside

1:01:03

the paper, people do point out that

1:01:06

this is only based on 12 kids at one hospital.

1:01:09

This is based exclusively on the memories

1:01:11

of the parents, right? So it's not medical records.

1:01:14

And also, what I still feel like

1:01:16

has not really been conveyed to

1:01:18

the British public at the time or even fucking now

1:01:21

is that if kids were

1:01:23

coming down with

1:01:25

very severe digestive

1:01:27

issues and autism within

1:01:30

a fucking week of getting the vaccine,

1:01:33

we would know different countries

1:01:35

have very different vaccination rates and

1:01:38

different parts of different countries. Some Indian

1:01:40

states have much higher vaccination rates than

1:01:42

other Indian states. Do you know how fucking easy

1:01:45

it would be to look at this and be like, oh, okay,

1:01:47

this part of India has like really high rates

1:01:49

of bowel

1:01:50

problems of kids. This part has much

1:01:52

lower. Oh, weird. It matches up perfectly with the vaccines.

1:01:55

In the years after this, people

1:01:58

go back. There's a study that... actually finds every

1:02:01

single kid diagnosed with autism

1:02:03

in a particular region of the

1:02:05

UK, no link between

1:02:08

symptoms of autism and vaccination. There

1:02:10

are huge country studies of

1:02:13

like, okay, the vaccination

1:02:15

rate, vaccinations became mandatory in

1:02:17

this year. So the vaccination rate

1:02:20

went from 15% to 99%. Did we see

1:02:22

any increase in bowel stuff? Did we see any

1:02:25

significant explosion in autism rates?

1:02:27

No, like people have looked for this for

1:02:29

years and have found nothing.

1:02:32

Can I ask about that? So on the,

1:02:35

the scientific establishment wants to silence

1:02:37

me on the, nobody cares about the welfare

1:02:39

of

1:02:40

white wealthy children. Does RFK

1:02:42

jr. Or does

1:02:44

the anti-vax movement writ large

1:02:47

offering motivation for that? Oh,

1:02:49

uh, big pharma. Oh, just straight up

1:02:51

like they're getting payoffs or whatever in the pocket of big

1:02:53

pharma, which I actually, again,

1:02:55

the, the, the best rebuttal

1:02:58

to any conspiracy theory is to ask yourself

1:03:00

like how many people would have to be in on the

1:03:02

conspiracy for this to work. And

1:03:05

so even if you want to say, okay, America,

1:03:07

America is lost. America has totally fallen

1:03:09

to

1:03:09

like big pharma or whatever, right? There

1:03:12

are vaccination programs worldwide. Why

1:03:14

would thousands of researchers in Pakistan

1:03:17

be willing to lie about the symptoms

1:03:19

of vaccines so that American companies

1:03:22

can get rich? If vaccines

1:03:24

are obviously harmful,

1:03:26

we're talking about a conspiracy that involves easily

1:03:29

a hundred thousand researchers and like

1:03:31

all of these, like the public health ministry

1:03:33

of like Bangladesh has to be in on it. Why

1:03:35

the fuck would they care what big pharma does? Like

1:03:38

it doesn't make any sense the minute you get into

1:03:40

like the specifics of how like the

1:03:42

global vaccination distribution

1:03:44

system works. Yeah. This, that was my Rogan

1:03:47

question. Say more about that. Why? Why

1:03:49

would they do that? What do you mean? So, okay.

1:03:52

There's all kinds of problems

1:03:53

with the paper itself. It basically

1:03:56

never should have been published. Six

1:03:58

years later in 2004, A journalist

1:04:00

named Brian Deer, who wrote a very good book

1:04:02

about this entire thing, starts looking

1:04:05

into the background of this

1:04:07

study. Nobody knows any of this

1:04:09

stuff at the time about like the

1:04:11

parents are specifically being recruited because they're

1:04:13

already anti-vaxxers, right? Nobody

1:04:16

knows about the funding. He starts looking into it and

1:04:18

he finds all of it.

1:04:19

He eventually tracks down

1:04:22

the parents of all 12 of

1:04:24

the kids who participate in the study

1:04:27

and he reads them the description, okay? There's

1:04:29

like patient 11, like, okay, your child is patient 11.

1:04:32

These are his symptoms. This is when he got vaccinated. And

1:04:34

over and over again, the parents are like, that's not true. He

1:04:37

finds out a huge number of the kids

1:04:40

had symptoms of autism before

1:04:43

they got vaccinated. Other kids

1:04:46

had symptoms of autism like

1:04:48

eight months after they were vaccinated.

1:04:52

This whole thing of like, you know, a case

1:04:54

study, right? 12 random kids happened

1:04:56

to have come into our clinic over the last couple of months

1:04:58

and they all have these same symptoms. That's not true.

1:05:01

These kids were brought in to the clinic.

1:05:03

Specifically, one kid was flown there from the

1:05:05

Bay Area of the United States. What?

1:05:08

A lot of these kids have

1:05:09

conditions that make it very difficult

1:05:11

for them to be taken out of like comfortable

1:05:14

environments. It's like really stressful on these

1:05:16

kids to travel, right? Much

1:05:18

less go into a clinic where a bunch

1:05:20

of tests are going to be done on them. So

1:05:23

this is super

1:05:24

fucked up, but like the kids are given spinal taps,

1:05:26

which are like very painful. A lot

1:05:28

of the kids have to be held down

1:05:30

by like three people to get just to draw

1:05:32

blood. There's never an ethics

1:05:34

board that looks at this. There's

1:05:36

eventually a trial there. It's like a medical

1:05:39

licensing board trial. It's the longest trial

1:05:41

of this nature of its type in the UK ever

1:05:43

goes on for more than two years, I believe.

1:05:46

And eventually Wakefield is

1:05:47

stripped of his medical license. Oh,

1:05:50

wow. The reason why I wanted

1:05:52

to talk about this thing of like the scientific

1:05:54

establishment is trying to silence me is

1:05:56

that the story of Andrew Wakefield

1:05:59

is not. a story of the scientific establishment

1:06:02

being too mean to somebody, this is a story of the scientific

1:06:04

establishment being too nice. Yeah, totally.

1:06:07

One of the things that Brian Deere mentions numerous

1:06:09

times in his book is how long it took

1:06:11

him to get other scientists

1:06:14

to admit

1:06:15

that Wakefield was acting in bad faith. And

1:06:17

this was a fraudulent paper. Everybody was like, no, no, no,

1:06:20

no, no, no. He really believes this. He's doing

1:06:22

his best. He may have just like kind of stepped

1:06:24

over the line in a couple places. And

1:06:26

Deere's like, dude, he's lying to you about

1:06:28

his finances. He's lying

1:06:31

about the basic chronology of these

1:06:33

kids. He's lying about where they're based.

1:06:36

It takes 12 years for

1:06:38

the Lancet to retract this paper. What?

1:06:41

Brian Deere figures out all this funding, all this

1:06:43

recruitment of the parents and shit in 2004. They

1:06:47

don't retract the paper until 2010. Oh

1:06:50

my God. Also keep in mind, not

1:06:52

only was this extremely jank balls paper

1:06:54

published in the first place, but it

1:06:56

was published with a fucking press conference by his

1:06:59

employer. The scientific establishment

1:07:01

was coddling this fucking guy and

1:07:04

was like accepting just on

1:07:06

its face shoddy work. I mean, it was a shoddy

1:07:08

paper to begin with. Yeah, good Lord.

1:07:10

What we see in the story over and over again is

1:07:12

the scientific establishment not being

1:07:15

mean enough to anti-vaxxers

1:07:18

and fucking taking them at their word and taking them

1:07:20

in good faith over and over again, even long

1:07:23

after

1:07:24

they have ceased deserving any

1:07:26

assumption of good faith. Yeah. I

1:07:29

mean, we've gotten a number of emails

1:07:31

as a podcast from researchers

1:07:33

and from, you know, professors

1:07:36

and folks who've sort of served as the

1:07:38

peer research,

1:07:39

peer review part of the research

1:07:41

world who have spoken very

1:07:44

articulately and passionately about

1:07:47

how deeply flawed the peer

1:07:49

review

1:07:49

system is currently, right? That it's

1:07:51

like sort of on a volunteer basis.

1:07:54

And there's a lot of bias that comes

1:07:56

into play in reviewing different people's

1:07:59

work. in different subjects of work, right?

1:08:02

It makes sense to me that

1:08:04

a system that has that many things sort

1:08:06

of fall through the cracks, including like

1:08:09

findings that strain credulity

1:08:12

and don't really even pass the sniff test,

1:08:14

right? Like it makes sense to

1:08:16

me that like, you know, to hold

1:08:18

folks to account would require

1:08:20

a great deal of time

1:08:23

and energy and effort and like people power

1:08:26

that I'm guessing these journals just

1:08:28

don't have. Yeah, I actually, one

1:08:30

of the reasons I wanted

1:08:31

to do this episode is

1:08:34

the anti-vax story is

1:08:36

a story where like science gets

1:08:38

to be the good guy. Despite

1:08:41

like the rest of the episodes of the show, I'm actually

1:08:43

like a huge believer in science and

1:08:46

a huge believer in like the mission of public health.

1:08:48

I think that this is something government has to

1:08:50

do. This is something that we do together. I

1:08:51

think it's extremely important. One

1:08:54

of the main blind spots

1:08:56

in science that we saw back then and we still

1:08:59

see now is they want science

1:09:02

not to be released into

1:09:04

a political and social context, right?

1:09:07

It's something you hear all the time. Climate change shouldn't be a political

1:09:09

issue. Totally agree. I'd love it if

1:09:11

it wasn't, but it is. Yeah, I

1:09:13

mean, it's such a tough one because

1:09:15

it is like there's one

1:09:17

side that's grounded in science and there's one side

1:09:20

that's like

1:09:21

sort of spouting nonsense. And I would argue

1:09:23

it's even bigger than that, right?

1:09:25

Which is like there are claims

1:09:28

that are based in sort of

1:09:29

scientific observance, right?

1:09:32

And on the other side, there is like profound

1:09:35

anxiety. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.

1:09:37

So it's not even someone's making good

1:09:39

points and someone's making bad points. It's

1:09:41

someone's having a conversation about information

1:09:44

and someone else is having a conversation about feelings.

1:09:46

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So we're just like

1:09:48

not ever gonna meet if

1:09:51

that remains the case. I want

1:09:53

to end by circling back to RFK Jr.

1:09:56

So it's

1:09:59

now 19. In 1998, things

1:10:01

are starting to happen in the UK. There's this

1:10:04

huge wave of both sides' media.

1:10:06

It's like, well, there's a debate about whether the vaccines

1:10:08

cause autism,

1:10:09

which they're never really meaningfully was, but

1:10:11

this is the message that people are getting. This

1:10:14

also is a key moment in the radicalization

1:10:17

of RFK Jr. So we've talked

1:10:20

about some of the

1:10:21

factors, kind of the larger biographical

1:10:23

factors that made him susceptible

1:10:25

to conspiracy theories.

1:10:27

In the early 1990s, he

1:10:30

has a kid who has

1:10:32

severe allergies, and

1:10:35

this ends up being a major

1:10:37

component of his radicalization. So

1:10:39

I am going to send you an excerpt

1:10:42

from the foreword

1:10:44

to a book called The Peanut Allergy Epidemic,

1:10:47

which is like this really weird crank conspiracy

1:10:49

book, but they ask RFK

1:10:51

Jr. to write the foreword to it in

1:10:54

the second edition or something, and I'm going to send

1:10:56

this to you.

1:11:17

In

1:11:26

my own research, I learned that a host

1:11:28

of other childhood epidemics, autism,

1:11:31

ADD, ADHD, SIDS,

1:11:34

OCD, ASD, narcolepsy,

1:11:37

sleep and seizure disorders, neurodevelopmental

1:11:39

delays, autoimmune diseases, and ticks

1:11:42

all began rising in the early 1990s. Coincidentally,

1:11:47

this is the time period during

1:11:49

which the CDC dramatically expanded

1:11:51

the vaccine schedule, raising

1:11:53

children's exposure to mercury, aluminum,

1:11:56

and other toxic

1:11:56

vaccine ingredients. K.

1:12:00

Jr. is one of these parents

1:12:02

who's radicalized by the

1:12:05

experience of having kids with various

1:12:07

medical stuff, and he

1:12:10

somehow finds this link to vaccines

1:12:13

and becomes radicalized. Like,

1:12:15

this is this is where it comes from. This

1:12:17

is his radioactive spider. Yeah, he doesn't talk

1:12:19

about it that much, which is weird now.

1:12:22

It makes sense, right, as a source

1:12:24

code for folks like level of feelings

1:12:27

and depth of feelings on this issue,

1:12:29

right? Like, it would make sense that

1:12:31

one of the only places that that would come from

1:12:34

is your kids and how you feel about your

1:12:36

kids, right? Like, that is the

1:12:38

time and the place that people will go to

1:12:40

lengths that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise

1:12:42

go to.

1:12:42

And he's also doing the thing that we see

1:12:45

in all forms of health grifting,

1:12:47

where he's just throwing the kitchen sink

1:12:49

at it. He's like, oh, the vaccines cause

1:12:51

autism, but also ADHD and SIDS

1:12:54

and OCD and narcolepsy.

1:12:56

Yeah, this is something I've seen him do in

1:12:58

like a million interviews, where

1:13:00

he just lists off a bunch of conditions

1:13:03

that have like no biological mechanism

1:13:06

similar to each other, right?

1:13:08

It would be really weird if the same

1:13:11

thing was causing ADHD

1:13:14

and sudden infant death, right? And

1:13:16

then, as you saw a little bit of in

1:13:18

that clip that we watched, people try to push

1:13:21

back. They're just like, no, it's not. Yeah. This

1:13:23

is like the, if

1:13:24

you've had conversations with conspiracy theorists,

1:13:26

this is every conversation where you're like, yeah,

1:13:29

how do you know that? And they're like, well, I just think

1:13:31

you should be able to say it. This is the

1:13:33

voice of experience chiming in here when

1:13:35

you were like, if you've ever talked to a conspiracy theorist,

1:13:37

oh yeah.

1:13:38

And then just like dropped into

1:13:40

some deep real stuff.

1:13:43

I am subtweeting

1:13:44

some very specific people,

1:13:46

yes, entire episode. And

1:13:49

in some ways with this entire show. Glad

1:13:51

that you've called me out for that. Yeah, you're welcome.

1:13:53

You're calling me in. I mean, listen, our

1:13:56

whole show is just a series

1:13:58

of sub tweets.

1:13:59

than anyone becomes a journalist.

1:14:30

You