Pirate Wires - Based and Microchipped: How RFK Took Over Politics | PIRATE WIRES EP#6

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

EPISODE SIX: In this Episode, Mike & River are joined by Liz Wolfe from Reason. Liz has been deep into uncovering everything about Robert F. Kennedy's rise in the 2024 presidential election. We discuss his ascension, media censorship, where he's right about vaccines and where he goes way off the rails, why people are seeking alternative candidates, and if he's a viable candidate for the Democratic Party. Featuring Mike Solana ,River Page, and Liz Wolfe Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://reason.com/video/2023/06/29/rfk-jr-the-reason-interview/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Liz Twitter: https://twitter.com/LizWolfeReason TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Welcome Liz Wolfe To The Show! 2:10 - Liz and Reason's YT Video on RFK - The Backlash Liz Has Faced 10:30 - Rewriting History - 2020 Lockdown Gaslighters 13:45 - RFK's Real Stance On V**cines 18:30 - Claims On Autism, Xanax, Child V**cinations 26:35 - Media Censorship 35:45 - RFK's Actual Political Stances As A Democratic Candidate 41:09 - The Church River Was Raised In 44:25 - Why Is RFK's Anti-Establishment Message Resonating? C*vid Aftermath & Dems Losing Liberals 48:20 - Where RFK Loses The Plot - Conspiracy Sloppiness 53:00 - Immigration 55:55 - Final Thoughts On RFK - Why He's Compelling & Why People Are Seeking Alternatives 57:54 - See You Next Friday! Go Follow Liz and Watch Reason's Video On RFK - Link In Description

Are vaccines microchipped and do they give you cancer? Is RFK our next president? I don't know, maybe. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the Pirate Wires pod. Today I've got Liz Wolfe of Reason Magazine and our very own River Page from Pirate Wires. Thank you guys both for, well, River, you have no choice. Liz, thank you so much for joining us today. Happy to be here. Thanks so much. today. Happy to be here. Thanks so much. So RFK has just kind of like taken over the landscape, I would say, of the sort of anti-establishment, I don't know, media mind space. And I think as you kind of, Liz, sort of summarized in a video that we're about to get into the details of your video that became an explosive topic of conversation on Twitter. It is an eclectic mix of tech luminaries and strangely libertarians and very strangely

anti-establishmentarians. The man is a Kennedy. It's very weird how he got to be the anti-establishment bell of the ball. The big thing, I think the probably most famous thing in unfairly, I would say that he is sort of known for on his Wikipedia page right away is just, he is a vaccine conspiracy theorist. Now, maybe that is a big part of what he does, obviously, but I think it's kind of crazy that that's the one thing that he's known for on Wiki. We'll get into that in a second. but i do want to have a conversation about just how this man has has captured the attention of uh america and uh i want to talk about some of his claims and i really want to talk about the reaction that people like you are receiving liz um for pushing back in spaces that should be amenable to that kind of pushback, given his political beliefs, which are for the most part not in keeping with the anti-establishment folks. So, yeah, let's just get into it.

Liz, you I saw your video is a couple of weeks ago now or was it maybe a week ago? Is that when you sort of it was a week ago, but it feels like it's been an eternity with the amount of hate mail. It's like every day. It's like a new war for you now. Just walk me through. I mean, so like RFK comes on to Reason. He does an interview, and then you follow on with your, just like a breakdown of his positions, what you think. I mean, can you walk us through that so we have a sense of the substance before we get into it? So like many good things at Reason, this all actually started with Matt Welch. He's the one to blame. Many months ago, as RFK was sort of

beginning to gain some traction, weirdly, in the polls, Matt Welch wrote his Strange New Respect piece, which basically was like a classic Welchian media criticism piece chronicling like, why is it that we're seeing Tablet and National Review and a bunch of the Silicon Valley dudes kind of seeming really fond of RFK when from basically 2005 up until like yesterday, he was sort of dismissed as a little bit of a loon. And so Welch was really focused on that sort of like rehabilitation tour and was sort of interrogating like, what's going on here? What's appealing about RFK? You know, obviously, a big part of it has to do with RFK's, you know, ardent opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates,

which is, you know, a prior that we at Reason absolutely share. I mean, Matt Welch was writing, you know, in opposition to that. I was writing in opposition to that. We honestly took a lot of heat from a lot of people on the left and a lot of friends, which is totally fine. That's part of the role that libertarians play in the discourse. And then my video was in the works. I went on Rising, the TV show, and talked about RFK a little bit. And I sort of didn't really understand the beehive I was touching. And that was when the first sort of swarm attacked me of just absolutely rabid RFK fans. And I was like, whoa, that's kind of bizarre, kind of interesting. I didn't know that this inspired

almost a Bernie bro level of intensity. And so I put a video in the works and had been researching RFK's record a little bit. I just wanted something that was fairly that looked at his record, but also looked, OK, you know, he's good on some level to libertarians, but if he were actually the one in the White House, what types of policy would he be making? Obviously, from a foreign policy perspective, he has pretty good anti-war bona fides, so I can understand why libertarians might be sympathetic. But on a domestic policy front, there's a lot not to like. And I was really interested in trying to give an even-handed assessment of all of these different components, not being overly fixated on any one particular thing, not being overly fixated on his vaccine

track record and his writings in the early aughts on that, or being overly fixated on the foreign policy or overly fixated on the domestic. I wanted to just kind of assess it all because that's sort of how we treat presidential candidates. And then his campaign did reach out to Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmuller, my colleagues at Reason. They engaged with him via an interview. Nick runs our interview products. He runs the whole interview podcast. And him and Zach do a live stream every Thursday. And so that seems like the most appropriate format to engage with him.

I'm actually really glad they did a recorded interview because it allows our viewers to really get a sense of RFK in his own words. I think so frequently there's a media malpractice going on where people are excerpting what he's saying and then they're adding a lot of editorializing in there. And mine was obviously an intensely critical editorialized piece, but I think that it's important for our readers and viewers to have a full, robust sense of the man. And I'm glad that they got the opportunity to sit through an hour-long interview with him and actually hear him in his own words. I think, for a reason, we've had a few different ways of engaging with this candidate. It's a really weird and interesting candidacy. And I'm honestly looking forward to all the different

ways we're going to keep engaging with him. Well, I mean, first of all, there's an implication that you think he's going to be doing well as the election season progresses. He might. He might not. I do think that the thing that's not going away, regardless of what happens to his candidacy, is there's this whole group of people. There's the L.A. Gwyneth Paltrow-y goop types. There's the people who were never particularly radical on the vaccine questions, but COVID

vaccine mandates, you know, people attempting to coerce them into vaccinating their six year olds kind of radicalized them and made them very suspicious and distrusting of the public health establishment. There were a lot of people who were abandoning the left in droves post COVID. In addition to some of like the old school anti-vaxxers that maybe were really big in the 90s and sort of have continued to persist in those beliefs. So it's not just one type of person that is attracted to RFK. And I don't think that that phenomenon is going away. There's a lot of people who feel underrepresented. You said something a moment ago that really resonates with me and I think is really the case here. He's the candidate who's talking about what happened with COVID. He's the candidate who's talking about what happened with COVID. He's the candidate who is forcing us to, as a nation, have that conversation or maybe

even just allowing us as a nation to have that conversation because a lot of it's been memory hold. So you had coercive vaccination, right? You had people being forced to get a vaccine to keep their job throughout the country. It was a really scary time. There was a huge kind of, I think, authoritarian leap that we now, kind of looking back, are just pretending didn't happen to maybe heal as a nation, to kind of move forward. It's weird that you don't see a lot of that from the right even. It's just, I mean, people are just, they're kind of trying to get past COVID. And RFK is like, no, we need to talk

about the vaccines. We need to talk about the fact that we were forced to take the vaccines. We need to talk about being locked indoors and everything else. And that does appeal to a certain kind of person who just wants to see, I don't want to say revenge, consequences, I guess. They want to see accountability. They want someone to be like, yes, I was responsible for that. And then we can say, you're fired, moving on. And because of that, because he's the only one who's willing to, not even willing, I would say, he's quite enthusiastic about this stuff. He loves talking about it. Because of that, maybe people are willing to overlook a lot of the other stuff or even because of that,

they're radicalized on the other stuff. You know, when someone says something that you really agree with and everybody else is lying to you, you're like, yes, he's got to be right. And then he says, you know, also Xanax causes school shootings. And you're like, oh, I don't know. Maybe like you seem like a trustworthy guy. Yeah, I think that there's something obscenely disrespectful about what Randy Weingarten is doing, for example, or what a bunch of people. So the teachers union had Hancho, the AFT, who basically, for the last few months, has been engaged know, oh, well, we didn't really want to keep schools closed.

We were actually, the teachers union, we were really interested in school reopening. And it's just like, do you think that parents are stupid? Like, you must, right? There's no other explanation for why you would be trying to retcon your record like this. I saw the MSNBC guy, one of the, like, the the big ones talking about how also it's it's very related, how it's Chris, Chris Hayes talking about how there was no violence. Right. There were no everyone. The Republicans want to talk about how the cities were burning and whatnot. And and that just didn't happen.

It was like it was very calm. And, you know, it's all overblown. It's just related in that. It's like those years, I think things are actually much better than they've been in years. But those years, like the 2020, 2020 was insane. I'm never going to forget it for as long as I live. And the fact that you have so many people committed to just straight up gaslighting you now it is maddening it is like yeah go ahead river well what chris hayes actually said was that people on the left were quietly saying that they didn't approve of the riots and i'm like well i was like very much on the left like on the socialist left at the time writing for a like a mark small like marxist magazine and i was one of the people on the left who was actually saying like no these brides are

bad you actually like want to you know appeal to working class people who you say are like your base of support or even like on the far left you're like revolutionary project or whatever um burning down their cities is not the way to do it and i like got doxxed for that like i got just completely maligned like online for all of that and yeah there's a strong just lockstep commitment to rewriting history and the crazy thing is something we write about a lot here at pyrewires is uh in the context of technology that makes it easier than ever to actually rewrite history that's pretty scary you know um the actual sort of the the the internet the artifacts on the internet um are

thinning out we have less evidence you know tweets are deleted uh clips vanish from youtube and it's like the stuff is like sand through your fingertips and all you have is your memory. But it's like, I know what I saw. It's like, I know that hate street was boarded up. I know that people lost their jobs. I know that I was told I was an anti-vaxxer, not because I was suspicious of the vaccine, but because I didn't think people should be forced to get it. That is just, and I think that's the enduring power right now. Not the enduring, That is just, and I think that's the enduring power right now. Not the enduring, but that is, I think, the power of RFK right now, is he's saying, no,

you're right, that happened. Yeah. And the thing that's tough, though, is that RFK is super nonspecific in what he actually wants done about it. And this is one of the big qualms that I have with RFK. You see this even with some of his criticism of the the CIA, which I think is in some cases reasonable. But his response frequently for how to fix the rot within these institutions is like, oh, well, like, you know, put better people in them. And it's like, really, that's it? Like you're saying that the CIA is part of the deep state and that it like killed a bunch of members of your family. Yes. And your response is like,

oh, we need a better CAHR department. Like to me, it seems like, I mean, obviously if he had the right takeaways from some of these things, he would just be a libertarian like us. Right. So, you know, I'll be understanding of the fact that not everybody comes to these same conclusions, but to me, that's not a very satisfying response. And I wish that he had more tangible specifics for how Randy Weingarten ought not to be in power anymore or how public health officials like anthony fauci ought to be punished for ways in which they misled the public oh his daughter-in-law is a cia agent amaryllis and yeah i wrote about her i reviewed her i wrote an article about the cia um and sort of like woke language and American Affairs a couple years back and I actually

kind of like reviewed her book and yeah I mean she's like an old money sort of gal and it's hard for the course to say stuff which is that it's always been like a culturally liberal organization it's just they hated communists but yeah his son's a culturally liberal organization it's just they hated communists like you know what i mean um but yeah his son's very cia agent or former one so i i i mean i do think like it's interesting that

and kind of cool in a way that he's like yeah the cia killed my uncle and my dad i'm like yeah i i also believe that but um i mean like it's cool that kennedy is saying that but on the other hand it's like okay but then now you're just letting these people into your family like what do you mean i mean where's the what is the truth of uh you know i've there's a lot of it's an information war so i've heard a lot of things that are probably not true about kennedy uh one is that you know it's like he's criticizing vaccines he's gotten himself or that he's, you know, since he's criticized them, he's gotten stuff. I mean, what is, does he live, I mean, does he practice what he preaches? Do either of you have a sense of that? I think that, so my thought, and it's very hard for me to assess this,

but my thought is that RFK on a personal level seems like somebody I would love to hang out with. He does falconry. He lives in a baller house in Los Angeles. He has a bunch of animals. He's a devoted Catholic. Like, I feel like we he's very eloquent. I feel like we would have a lot to talk about. Super interesting guy. the vaccines question, I mean, he talks about one soundbite that he trots out a lot. I believe he said this on All In. He said this on Rogan. You know, his when he was a child getting vaccinated, he only got three or four vaccinations, but his children, you know, they received 72. And so the child and the point that he's making is that, you know, from the 1950s, when he was born up until like the 90s, when his kids were born, you know, the childhood vaccination schedule has just absolutely exploded. My two two thoughts because i did a lot of digging into what the immunization schedule looks like in california and in new york and in places where he has raised his kids and places where he has lived um i'm like i'm not totally sure where he's getting

that 72 number from in fact you would think that somebody who was so suspicious of vaccines so i understand that he initially had a sort of awakening in 2005. So maybe not, you know, totally at the beginning of having kids. But you would think that, you know, if that were the case, you'd be skipping flu shots, seasonal flu shots, which, by the way, no public school mandates that you have those. covid vaccinations for his kids particularly like teenage boys which makes a lot of sense fair enough uh you know i'm i'm not totally sure where he's getting that 72 number from most of the states that i looked at require like 18 19 20 ish doses in order to enter schools and you can get religious exemptions uh if you feel strongly about that he plays there's a sort of trickery with logic thing that he does. And there are two examples I have. One I saw for the first time in your video, it was in the context of the polio vaccine where he said, most of the polio that we receive now we get from vaccines. And that's something that I looked into a while ago because when I first heard it, I was like, whoa, that sounds messed up. Is

that true? And it's like, it is true. But like in context, it's it's it's so it's it's first of all, the numbers are like minuscule because polio is basically eradicated because of the vaccine. Second of all, this is like what he's talking about are people getting polio from other people who have, I think, gone to the bathroom. Right. from other people who have, I think, gone to the bathroom, right? It's like mostly through sewage, who had this one specific kind of polio vaccine that is not even in America. And there are only a few cases. And as you mentioned in the video, they only affect people.

Even this, this like very rare thing, only affects people who haven't been vaccinated for polio. So it's like the Hasidic community and I guess who else was the other one that you mentioned? I mean, it was mainly the Hasidic community, both in Rockland County in upstate New York and in South Williamsburg in the city. And that was an interesting case because so many of these, you know, the more recent little tiny pockets of U.S. polio, like New York health authorities seem to believe that they were contracted via an ultra orthodox to traveling somewhere i believe maybe in israel um and yeah

yeah contracting it through sort of untreated sewage and bringing it back in that way we and we also now i'm thinking about are we i don't think that we're vaccinated for polio at this point right they're not because the yeah we still are we're really we should be are we i don't think that we're vaccinated for polio at this point right they're not because the yeah we still are we're really we should be are we i think that they stopped doing it because we eradicated it my kid is vaccinated for polio i'm like semi okay you're right yes i'm thinking of uh i think it's smallpox maybe they stopped giving us the vaccination for the other point that i would make on this vaccine thing is like, hey, the fact that the immunization schedule exploded from 1950 to like 1990, maybe that's evidence that like our vaccine technology improved, right? Like there were a bunch of things that we just like didn't have access to in the 40s and the 50s, like MMR, Tdap, like these vaccines have really developed

over time. And the fact that we have access to better technology for things that are legitimately pretty serious, like measles outbreaks are not so good. That's a good thing. And I'm totally open to the criticism of like, we have metabolic disorders, we have autoimmune disorders, we need to get to the bottom of this type of thing. I think Dr. Peter Attia does a really good job approaching that. But RFK ain't it. His specific vaccine complaints are just, they're not very precise and he he plays very fast and loose with causation well i think we're just with the polio one for example i mean it's a statistic that he he studies it well enough to understand what he's actually implying versus

what he's actually he what he's implying versus what he's saying like he knows the distinction there he's implying that polio vaccines are causing polio and that's our only source of it but like the the data just says that that the polio vaccine is basically eradicated polio and to not be honest about that one little thing it just really frustrates me and it reminds me of the xanax causes school shooting stuff or the ssri thing causes school shootings and here it's like i so i i made a comment about this when he did a twitter spaces in uh one of my pieces for Pirate Wires and someone from his campaign hit me up and it was like a long, angry email, like just breaking it down. And it's like, how dare you email? And here's the data that says, all of these school shooters have been

on these drugs. And it's like, well, is it possible that all of these school shooters who are mentally ill have had an encounter with a doctor who was like, hey, you're mentally ill. ill have had an encounter with a doctor who was like, hey, you're mentally ill. Maybe we should be on medication for that. And it's just like, that doesn't mean that the medication causes school shooting. It means that the kinds of people who do school shootings are more likely to be in the doctor's office getting drugs for their crazy ass mental illness. Like most people who are on, it's crazy that I have to even say this, but like most people who are prescribed Xanax are not trying to shoot a school up and it's like and it's almost but by even

like by even having to frame it that way it feels it like it like legitimizes the conversation in some way where it's like i think we should look into that i think i think so i disagree with you slightly i think that there are way too many vaccines right now i think a lot of them haven't been studied i am very suspicious about certain things. I don't even want to mention on this podcast right now because we're going to get fucking delisted and banned. I want more data. I want to actually look at it.

I want to have real conversations about it and things like Xanax and all the sort of mental illness drugs, that whole entire like pantheon of them, including things like Adderall. Like I'm suspicious of this stuff, but I don't like the distortion of logic here. It really bothers me and it makes me not trust anything else he has to say. Oh, totally. I mean, if you've seen me on like, like if I'm this violent on Xanax, consider me without Xanax, right? Like, like there's also that component to it, which is like, do we actually want to

make sure that these mentally ill people are taken off of their drugs that arguably help them i don't know is that a better alternative river yeah well he has like this cosmology that makes his opposition to the pharmaceutical industry which i do think is corrupt and fucked up and has a lot of issues um but he it he turns it into almost an ideology it's like uh to where like pharma is to blame for like basically all social ills it's like blaming capitalism or white supremacy or big government or whatever it's like the same thing where it's this one institution that's causing everything i mean even his own like uh dysphonia like his voice being kind of messed up he blames that on the vaccine.

It's like, dude, you're on heroin for like 20 years. You know what I mean? There was like plenty of I don't know if Fred knew it there. A friend of mine, I swear, she's like, that's not a vaccine. That's, he was smoking crack. Like that is just 100%. Like she's convinced. Yeah, I mean,

there's like, it's also he had a family member who had the same thing so it could also be genetic it's like there's like so and it's a really rare disease so it's like if you had like i think it was his aunt who had it it was like if you had a family member who had this really weird rare disease why would that not be the first thing or all the drugs you did instead of like the vaccine that almost everybody in America got. It's such a strange thing. This is something I was thinking about when I was delving into the autism rates claim made by RFK. And I think it's actually really interesting. We know for a fact,

and the economist Emily Oster has written on this, I believe that Down syndrome rates have increased as age of first child has, as like maternal age at which you have your first child has increased so you know i was 26 when i had my son okay my odds of having a child with down syndrome at age 26 are extremely low my odds at age 46 are a lot higher um and and that's just like as we see you know i'm not saying that this is a that there's a case to be made for, you know, regulating this away or trying to use any sort of like pro or anti-needless policy to rejigger any of these things or to do any sort of social engineering. But like we observe this happening that the age at which people start having kids is just, you know, getting like higher over time. And we know for a fact that this is a component that is, you know, at play with increasing down syndrome rates.

And there's also some evidence to indicate that it is a part of the puzzle in why we're seeing increased rates in autism over time. I think that this absolutely deserves further study, but it's odd for RFK to just neglect to mention these things that are like, actually, these aren't alternative science world facts. These are things that people generally agree on. There are also a lot of people who are being diagnosed with autism where that i've met they're like i'm autistic and i'm like if you're autistic then i'm fucking autistic because we're all at the same level here um also we're libertarians right it's a total benefit to us

right my my mom ran a school for autism so i I spent my summers there. My dad worked there. My sister worked in autism. Like I, I know what, I know what classically presenting autism is. And it's like, you can't function. And it is a part of your family forever. Now, like you got to take care of this person to some extent, even the highest functioning people in the sort of classically presenting world. We had, there was one student, my mom was really excited about, like he got a job at a post office and couldn't hold it down. And that's the top student, right? We're talking about people who are nonverbal at times. It's like hard to potty train people. And this is a totally separate subject, but it does really frustrate me when I see people using autism as like an identity signifier on Twitter and having like a coherent conversation

about it from their job that they're holding down. and having like a coherent conversation about it from their job that they're holding down. It's like, call it, it has to be, you need to call it something else. It's like, it just like make up some new term and be that thing. Like, that's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about autism. I'm talking about those kids that I grew up around. Um, and I'm talking about their family really, who they have to take care of. It's hard to be the sibling or the obviously the mother and father a lot of these marriages struggle uh when you have a kid who needs so much and um and i do just a lot of them do have similar stories about their kid

functioning in a way that is totally typical typical until they develop a sickness following a shot. I'm not saying it is what happened, but I'm saying you can only hear that story so many times every single year, every single generation before I think you look at it. I understand where the questions are coming from. I understand it. You do see it again and again. A parallel that I think is so much, it's obviously so much less serious, but is the way that women's periods, their menstruation was talked about post-COVID shots, where we saw pretty widespread reports. And at first, this was just circulated in group chats and via Reddit forums of women saying, hey, look, I've been regular for my entire adult life. And then I got this mRNA vaccine and I just haven't had a period

in five months. And maybe they were using the rhythm method or whatever to track like, you know, your menstruation data is useful to you. And there's a little bit of this jarring sense of like, well, wait a second, I got that vaccine. And then now I've seen this unprecedented disruption. And for a long time, the mainstream media really discredited this and hand waved it away. And now there's been some more evidence that's come out. And I think New York Times has done a decent job of reporting on this that basically says, no, this wasn't in people's heads. This was a real side effect. And we're not totally sure why it happens. But it's that type of thing where like, I think both you and i are on the same page where it's like these areas just deserve more study when there's like mysterious things happening in the wild and people are concerned and their bodies

and their health are affected by it it's very very human and natural to want answers yeah let's talk about the censorship i think it's a really interesting i think it's a really important point um because there is here we are having a conversation that i think it's a really important point um because there is here we are having a conversation that i think is like fairly critical of rfk and that's possible like we can sit here and listen to his claims and and judge them um but what happens when he's censored you know when a podcast is removed uh when uh he's banned from a platform or whatever else it is, I mean, it validates his entire worldview, right? It validates, it's like the man is trying to keep the truth from you. And it's just like, all that does is make me want to look at it, right? All

it does is make me want to believe it because it's so infuriating that someone is telling me that I am not smart enough or capable enough to assess the data on my own or make a judgment call on my own. What do you guys both make of just the role that censorship has played in making him bigger and maybe in general, right? The role that censorship has played in making celebrities out of certain kinds of people online. censorship has played in making celebrities out of certain kinds of people online. I feel like the more you get canceled, like canceling is, if you are like a certain degree of like intelligence or whatever, like you can just make a cancellation work to your effect. Like you can use it to raise your profile, you can use it for whatever not just cancellation but also censorship and when it comes to rfk i mean the vaccine stuff i think is some of what he's been censored over but i also think that

they're people now because all of that's sort of over i think a lot of people are uh more just injuring him over maybe some of his thoughts over like ukraine and stuff like that which are they have have they been going after the war stuff uh he's been criticized for it i've seen um because he i mean he said which is i i believe is true and i agree with um which is that you know we basically encircled russia which we said we would not do after collapse of the soviet union and that in some ways we sort of created this situation um but how can we not do that the entire free world is it's like rush over this is like a whole other conversation i just don't i i really so this is the thing this is how it happens so like i find that kind of thing what you just said the rfk position if that's a correct

assessment i find it like it's just so frustrating i'm like why are you blaming us for this i'm not saying that we should go to war with uh with russia i don't think that we should but the idea that there is any blame at all for invading another country other than the people who fucking did it is just crazy to me. And so then that rage that I'm having now is like, that's what's fueling the censorship. It's not like it's too dangerous to hear that opinion. It's like, I just don't like it. And if I have power, if I have too much power, I can act on that impulse. And that is a really dangerous situation. That's the situation we've been in for the last few years. I think we're kind of coming out of it, but I don't know, Liz or River, I mean, if you want to just beat the, let's get into the Ukraine thing, Liz, or if you have a comment on the censorship

stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think it's totally, it gives more fuel to his fire, right? I mean, we see this over and over again. The comparison I keep drawing is Alex Jones. I went to Alex Jones's movie premiere in Austin, Alex's War. I keep drawing is Alex Jones. I went to Alex Jones's movie premiere in Austin, Alex's War. Glenn Greenwald interviewed Alex Jones. I walked away feeling like this was not in any way compelling. I walked away knowing way more about Alex Jones, but not finding myself believing the things he was espousing. And I'm so grateful that I was able to attend that type of thing, that I live in America where I can go to just this oddball, weird movie premiere with all these alt-right celebrities and kind of understand their worldview a little bit more. It was absolutely wild, a really interesting experience.

But it's stunning to me that Alex Jones continuously gets deplatformed, that all of these big tech companies are sort of conspiring. that all of these big tech companies are sort of conspiring. And again, it's like the cartoonish nature of the platforming. How much did he owe in damages for saying that the people were contractors? It was some extraordinary amount of money. They tried to take the man's cat. Did you see that video?

The FBI was like, how much is your cat worth? And he's like holding him and he's like, it was like a $2,000 cat, but we love her. But I think it was like literally something crazy like a two thousand dollar cat but we love her but i think it was like literally something crazy like a billion dollars or a 1.4 billion dollars like that's crazy he doesn't have who the has a 1.4 billion dollars like you are just straight up like how can we that's not even you don't even care about alex jones at. That's a sign to everybody else. It's like, don't you fucking dare say something that we don't like.

We will destroy your entire life, your kids' lives. We're going to take your cat. Like, you will never recover from this. Fox News was ordered to pay less in the Dominion suit, right? Like, that's an insane amount of money. Fox News was ordered to pay less, and they still had to fire a bunch of people in order to make that happen, right? Yeah. I mean, it's stunning to me. But you just basically make it so that alex jones is cooler as a result

right you make it so that he has more um of a sense of martyrdom and a sense of being spurned by the establishment and i fear that it's the exact same type of thing that's happening with rfk jr in no world is this man's ideas so dangerous that he you know should not be able to uh say them or or rather we should look at the real world effect, because I think actually children's health defense has sowed an awful lot of vaccine skepticism, which has I think you could make the argument that it has resulted in some more vaccine refusal in the United States and little pockets of like measles outbreaks, which leads to bad consequences. Right. So I think you can make that case, but still we have to consider, okay, the people who might be inclined to

be skeptical of vaccines, if we just push children's health defense and RFK Jr. deeper underground, do those people's feelings suddenly go away or did they just find other ways of seeking out those resources and that information i think this is something libertarians really want to believe they want to believe that if if you if you censor people it it makes it so the stuff come comes out like information can't be stopped but like the reality is you actually can censor it's we china is right there right it's like they've succeeded. We see there, it's like a technological censorship hellscape. And not only that, but they're so censorious just due to sort of the nature of capitalism and the free market is free ish market. the chinese market you have chinese you have disney films changing in uh in keeping with the ethos of communist china uh so i think it's like censorship is possible and that's what scares me it scares me that they're getting it's like it's not working for alex jones right now we're in the age of the internet things are pretty wild still uh i think that there's it's like if this doesn't

work they're just they're going to come in harder and they will succeed and we've already seen the kinds of things they think about throughout covet right it's like there is there are all of these moments where they really failed and uh and and the set i i guess my my concern is just like the censorship will work and we will be worse for it i think that's a fair critique and i think libertarians of of you know operating in good faith can disagree on this one for sure and I should just say I'm not a libertarian like at all I'm like I think we should like completely

nationalize the healthcare sector and the energy sector and like yeah I may disagree about this all the time but I will say I don't think that RK is dangerous I don't think that Alex Jones is dangerous. I can kind of see a similarity between the two.

I find them both compelling, but for different reasons. I mean, RFK, if you just take his positions on paper, with the exception of foreign policy, in which the Democratic Party has become very hawkish, his positions are really not that much different than like a pretty run-of-the-mill democratic candidate um alex shows on the other hand he believes like a lot of kind of crazy stuff but i view them as like a showman like i grew up like in east texas like in a church. And like, I see talks like a,

like an old school, like evangelical preacher. Like he has this way of like inflecting. And I don't, I don't know. Like there's like something, I think he's one of the greatest broadcasters ever. Like, I just,

I think he's like a brilliant entertainer. I think that he deserves credit for like bringing things to the public consciousness, which are true and which it sounds like conspiracies, but aren but aren't like i mean who else like in you know um the early odds was like talking about like the northwoods project or um and tail trying all that working on bohemian grove which was really interesting like that was sort of his breakout moment, right? Right, yeah. Because I saw maybe Liz sort of disagreeing with the standard Democrat positions of RFK. Lay him out.

I know that he's a Green New Deal guy. I know that he's a tax the rich guy. I know that he's anti-war. And I know that he thinks Xanax causes school shootings. These are roughly the things that I know about RFKfk i mean so a few other policy positions he is a little bit of a flip-flopper on guns um i think he keeps trying to sort of realize that like a lot of his base at present is conservative libertarian-ish and so he keeps trying to sort of like you actually look at his sound bites from a few years back and then you look at the ones today and, and he's very flip-floppy on that.

You look at one thing that I think the left is very divided on right now, and I'm very curious as to which way we're going to go, whether we're going to go and emulate France or emulate Germany. The nuclear question, I think RFK is a really ardent anti-nuclear voice and was actually one of his crowning achievements in his environmental career was being a huge oppositional force to the Indian point power plant in New York right like this is not a side note I think if we're actually going to look at his off we need on that either he's he's got he's gone in he's gone in deeper and harder and what it was like some he has some weird it's like he doesn't want the people in charge of it to be in charge of it or something it was like it was like it seems like it's a it's a it's an issue with the people running nuclear more than it is about the science is that correct it's not even clear to me he's pretty in my view inconsistent um on this uh he also casts a lot of

doubt on like the safety of of nuclear um waste disposal methods and stuff like that which by the way i love that there's been this trend in the last few years of like objectively beautiful ladies who are like nuclear influencers now like i know miss america isabel obviously and then miss america and then i know there's some other uh like pregnant nuclear influencer gal who is specifically like posing with nuclear waste while she's three months pregnant or three in her third trimester. Nine months pregnant. Huh? Yeah, I'm working on a piece with both of them right now.

Oh, perfect. Amazing. But it's absolutely fascinating that this has become like it's like hot girl nuclear summer. I love this. It should be. Precisely the type of thing we need. Yeah. But no, I mean, I think you can also

look at like RFK. So like an area where I actually very much agree with him, but I know he's gotten a lot of heat from the left is his support for crypto. And he spoke at the Bitcoin Miami conference, my colleagues, Zach Weissmuller and I produced a documentary where we incorporated some of his comments, you know, relatively positively. But the fact that he's come out to such a force in favor of the Bitcoin community, especially as they're increasingly facing all kinds of SEC crackdowns is interesting, especially because a lot of environmentalists really depart from RFK on this one. They look at the environmental cost of crypto mining and I think wrongly see it as a huge environmental

threat. But that's sort of something that I think he's going to need to contend with at some point. as a huge environmental threat but that's sort of something that i think he's going to need to contend with at some point right um but his positions on like domestic social policy are basically mainline democrat not too far to the left not too far i mean probably actually to the left of biden a little bit because you know biden wanted to uh you know like perform like social security and medicare he does that um he i think once he's been talking about like expanding like food stamps or something like that um so yeah he's a pretty he's in sort of like the social democratic tradition of his dad and lbj and sort of that era of the democratic party do you think and he's doing the classic kennedy dance that we've seen so

many times before of like i'm not like other catholics like i'm a little pro-choicey but not too pro-choicey which might be just right for the moment i don't know it's crazy the funniest thing about that i remember when uh i believe it was john kerry uh was trying to be like a pro-choice catholic and um the church was like you can't come to you can't take communion anymore yeah like straight up they were like like that's you don't mess you don't mess with the catholic church on this stuff and it's people want to think that the catholic church i think is this hardcore right-wing thing and it's actually just really weird right it's like a weird combination of things that don't map to american politics pro-choice is uh a no that's

like a hard no that's like one of the it's like not one of the few but it's like one of the main hard no's from the catholic church but it's also like they're like pro-immigration um like open borders ask especially for the welfare countries like the america i'm pretty sure that if you were to ask them about like just straight up the pope like asking right like welfare policies i think it's like very high like lots of it just give the money away i mean he's christian at the end of the day this is like how could you be a jesus guy and you're like but don't tax the rich like i just i mean the church i grew up in like they thought that catholics were degenerates because they drank in church right well you were from the deep south right like it's like a

southern like protestant i mean these are people who still probably believe catholics shouldn't be running for president no my grandma uh or my great-grandma she's never voted for a republican um because she is sort of like the old like dixie crowd like mindset i guess or something i don't know but like she voted she voted for um for jfk i think she said she didn't she didn't care for him being a catholic but she voted for him anyway because she went over a postcard what were you saying liz oh i was just asking for more details about the church you were raised in oh uh missionary bapt Church. So it's like a sort of congregationalist offshoot separated from the Southern Baptist Convention

because they thought that the Southern Baptists had gotten too liberal. Oh, yeah. So they're like more conservative than the Southern Baptists in every respect, except for that,

like during Jim Crow, like there were black missionary churches and white churches so like there was more integrated racially but in in every other respect very conservative like my mom wasn't allowed to go to prom she still got pregnant at 16 with me so her dad was a preacher so you know i don't know how successful it is but was there any speaking in tongues or no that was strictly banned it's very kind of like uh austere a little bit like that that scene is like performative and um just not how do you ban it though right doesn't it just happen doesn't it just come out of you no i mean they they

there's a controversy it was before i was born my mom told me about it in the 90s where that had become like a thing that some people wanted to do and they were like expelled from the church uh because they were like no you can't do that here uh you just kind of said you're pew and you like sing the hymns and people play banjo and then yeah you know what and then there's a witch burning out back yeah i have cousins who are uh like pentecostals though and like they they didn't do snake handling at their church, but they would go to like revivals with the snake handling and stuff. Wow. Yeah. I like accidentally have discovered that Pentecostals are absolutely dope just to hang with,

which is funny because like I like to drink and do all kinds of normal things, but like there's a certain Pentecostal secret spiciness that comes out. So I'm very proud. They're the ones that have boring churches though right isn't like everything white and plain and who's that the fifth day adventists i came up in the catholic church and my sense of aesthetics is just i believe the best it's like we're talking about magic incense giant stone statues cathedral ceiling stained glass like you walk into a catholic church and you're like oh yeah god definitely exists um i love that shit and i'll just never forgive the protestants for their bad art they came out of like the black church tradition

so it's actually like you go if you even if you go to a mostly white pentecostal church it feels like you're in like a black church because people are like singing and dancing and like literally running like around and like falling out and like it's very like theatrical and dramatic um it's actually it's actually like growing up in the type of church I did it was actually kind of fun to like occasionally like go to church with my cousins because it's like a little bit of adrenaline in there because you didn't know what was going to happen oh yeah go ahead oh I was just going to say i go to a catholic church in like nolita soho area and so it's like all the good aesthetics of catholicism coupled with all the good aesthetics

of like soho and so it's just like it's a lot it's like not not what you would uh typically expect for the churchy population and i try to bring my fashion a game every sunday um i want to i want to wrap with uh for me just like the enduring question of rfk which is not him or his policies or even why he's resonating broadly which i do think is uh i do think is the vax it's like the covet and the vaccine thing just just a willing being willing to have this conversation um i think a lot of people feel like they shouldn't have taken the vaccine. A lot of men, I think specifically, a lot of parents who have young boys, things like that. I think it's just like, why did we do this? Why didn't we just give it to obese people and the elderly? And why were we forced to do it? Why did we lose our jobs for doing it? Why were we locked

inside for so long? What happened with the schools randy like we've got to do something about these teachers unions and he's speaking to that but that's like a general thing why is he so popular among the anti-establishment right it seems crazy to me he's an he's a kennedy like i don't understand i don't understand how this happened i when i was getting into rfk's uh vaccine stuff i was reading his book the real anthony falchi i like that he's in like memetic conflict with another white ethnic like i feel like that's very like old school northeastern sort of vibe uh yes it's like irish versus italian it's like this is the northeast man this is what happens up there they marry each other and they fuck each other yeah um but so he's he got into um the vaccine stuff i found sort of like okay so it's like uh the flu vaccine has like

the amount of mercury as like a can of tuna and like this is what's causing autism whatever i that to me i was just like i'm not sold but it really got interesting when I got into chapter five of the real Anthony Fauci which is titled the HIV heresies uh which opens uh with a quote about the circle of delusion by uh Khalil Gibran which but um it's I he starts with uh I hesitate to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy of HIV as a sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable, even dangerous heresy among our three medical cartels and its allies. disease than western AIDS whereas western AIDS and western whereas AIDS in western countries continue to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexuals with women reporting only 19 percent of U.S. and European AIDS cases in Africa 59 percent of AIDS cases are women 85 percent of cases occurring in heterosexuals the remaining 15 percent children no one has explained how a

disease largely confined to male homosexuals in the west is a female heterosexual disease in africa and i'm like i can explain that and i'm just like a regular i'm not even a doctor like i listen bobby if you're listening if you think that the black guys are dealing in atlanta you should see them in zimbabwe you know what i mean like there's not there's the most african guys are closeted they're like married to women and more importantly the central african republic or whatever like in the 70s did not have what new york and san francisco had in the 70s which is giant neighborhoods of nothing but gay guys going and like having orgies like bathhouses and stuff like this that's not happening in boba de issue that's still happening oh my goodness my husband went to so he's a straight man uh to clarify went to the uh male only hour at the sauna that he goes to

in manhattan on his lunch break big mistake oh my god he said it was just like every fluids everywhere the boys be cruising yeah maybe it's the same it's like when you hear these stories you're just like come on guys like we've got to like have jobs and shit out here like just like lock it down he does this great thing everywhere where it's like he he does so much cover your ass type hedging right like he is the king of that the master of that we even saw this with his sort of kind of anti-semitic a little funky comments at that upper east side dinner party uh over this past weekend that the new york post was writing about but talking about how you know like the chinese and the ashkenazi jews were spared uh from covid and it's like uh tell that to like china and israel's death tolls like what are you talking about the actual study that he was

was talking about you know doesn't really say the thing that he claims uh that you know covid was something that attacked that was ethnically targeted but he distanced himself from it by saying some people say there's a theory out there yeah yeah i mean that's crazy i i don't think that it was anti-semitic because i think he also listed like the amish and like sinish people or something like it was like i and he's also like a uncritical like supporter of israel in a way that i actually disagree with in a lot of ways but he's he's i i don't think that he's an anti-semitic i think that was like kind of a hit job but i do think that he's an anti semi. And I think that was like kind of a hit job. But I do think that he's crazy for thinking that COVID is like an ethically targeted. Well, here's the thing.

Yeah. He's saying that it's a it's like he sees conspiracies everywhere because of his family trauma, I believe, is the root of all of this. And so he's the most normal Kennedy, because it's like my family died under similar circumstances i think i probably oh yeah my mom on fox news every night talking about the crazy shit our government did to me but the thing about the ethnic bioweapon thing is like it frustrates me because people hear that and they're like obviously it's i not obviously and i want to you know maybe we'll have some guy on here a virologist and we can talk about the complexities of whether or not COVID was a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese government who knows but it is possible to do that actually and and it's like or let's just say it is

conceivable that something like that can happen and what we definitely know is possible is it's possible to create new viruses and I think that like we are living in a time now where we should be talking about that. Like the craziest thing about COVID to me is that we aren't having a serious conversation about gain of function research and whether or not we should be doing it at all. And like, what's going on in all of these labs? Like that was the real frustration with not being able to talk about lab leak, but not because it's like, I just want to talk about something I'm not supposed to talk about. It's like, I want to make sure this doesn't happen again. And how do you make sure this doesn't happen again if you're

not interrogating what happened in the first place? And it seems like there's a lot of evidence on the lab leak side. I don't think it's 100%, but I think there's a lot of evidence there. And I know there's a risk there. There's a there's a lot of evidence there. And I know there's a risk there. There's a risk in things like gain of function. And I know that engineering is getting better and better and better. And so we should be having conversations about our future in pandemics. And he kind of poisons the well in a way. By not having the conversation in a responsible way, he poisons the well. And then by censoring him for it, it's like it makes it impossible for us to have these conversations.

I think that that's the absolutely appropriate take. His sloppiness is so threatening in my view because it undermines important conversations. And frankly, his comfort playing fast and loose with the facts related to a lot of the scientific objections he watches. I'm really worried that that will make it so that people take like, I don't know, like B'nai Prasad or other really interesting, even handed sort of COVID lockdown skeptics who have a pretty solid understanding of the science. I'm worried that they just won't be taken as seriously because RFK, I think, is just, you know, associates those of us who are objectors to a lot of the things that the public health establishment does. This associates us with like kind of loony anti-vaxxers and

conspiracy theorists, when in reality, I don't think that that's exactly where we ought to be going with this. You're totally right. Like gain-of-function research and especially the actual practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. ProPublica had an excellent investigation on this, and I think more and more journalists need to be looking into this. But it's something where there should have been a gazillion people blowing the whistle on the fact that gain-of-function research was happening at a lab in China, in Wuhan, with such horrible safety practices that really fool in the face of the accepted understanding of how these labs ought to be operating. I mean, this was a ticking time bomb in many ways.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, this is what happens when you only have one candidate willing to talk about stuff. I mean, this is like Donald Trump, right? Well, the one candidate, the one thing he would talk about that no one else would talk about, well, probably there were a lot of things, but the thing that mattered was immigration. He was the only person who was like, Well, probably there were a lot of things, but the thing that mattered was immigration. He was the only person who was like, hey, this is messed up. And I know you probably disagree, Liz, but most Americans at that time, that was a story that resonated. That was a position that mattered.

And it's like you had someone who was pretty irresponsible in a lot of ways, being the only person willing to talk about a topic. And what does that do it means that you have you end up having a really unhealthy version of that conversation um and two sides walk away one thinking uh the conversation is not allowed to be had and so i hate the government and the other side walking away thinking oh there's nothing valid whatsoever to be said about this thing um and the truth is unfortunately somewhere i don't even know if it's the middle it's somewhere sort of like out in outer space like nowhere near the conversation

that we're having have you noticed that rfk is totally silent on immigration have not what is the what is the thinking there well you went he went to the border, didn't he? Yeah, but he hasn't really talked about it very much in any of the appearances that I've seen. I don't know. I've come through a lot of hours of Rogan, of his all-in appearance, of a bunch of his podcast appearances and all kinds of places. And it's odd to me. This is just an area where he's a little bit on the quieter side. Maybe he's just serious about winning the election and he thinks he has a chance of taking down Biden because Biden, I mean, I don't know, is he going to be primary to the last minute by Mr. Gavin Newsom? And then suddenly there are Democrats in the running and he's the only one who's been

working at it. He doesn't want to kneecap himself. There are a lot of Democrats who are angry about COVID stuff. Maybe he has a chance. Well, I saw a video of him at the border, and he was just like... He was saying, like, this can't continue or whatever, and he was talking about how it's people from all over the world. He's like, there's people from Tajikistan here.

Like, whatever. And so he's going on and on about how terrible it is but i don't think he really offered a a solution exactly how he's going to i actually know i take that back i did hear him say something and i can't remember where i heard it i thought he wants to do something along the lines of what he says israel's done where they have like sensors not a wall exactly but like sensors set up across the border where they i guess detect people when they're walking through which i'm not sure we've already got some helps yeah we already had a bit of that here um i mean this is like in akazia akazia also

went to the border and it doesn't mean that you care about immigration it's like you care about a photo op and whatever uh what are your policies what are anyone's policies an iconic photo set by the way yeah we'll never forget that's a whole other conversation i think it's like last thoughts at this point um i'm gonna give it to the both of you guys anything on the anti-establishment stuff or anything else at all last thoughts on an rfk yeah i think he is so incredibly compelling to a certain segment of people because people are seeking alternatives. I mean, the political duopoly has failed us. There are so many people increasingly identifying

neither as Republicans nor as Democrats. The story, I mean, the fact that it's a trope now of the left left me behind. I'm like, I used to be a liberal, but now, I mean, they're a little crazy on the wokeness thing. This is like such a common tale. You walk around any big city and you can find them all over the place. I mean, to me, this shows the Democratic Party has really left a lot of its base. And then you look at the Republicans and just how it'll be really interesting as we sort of have this Trump DeSantis showdown and then a whole bunch of people who kind of don't like that at all. We have, I think, increasing populist sentiment on both left and right, which will be really interesting to see how that plays out. I think RFK is tapping into something real, which is the sense of the public health authorities,

the Biden administration, the teachers unions never atoned for the ways in which they deprived us of our freedoms for more than two years. And in many cases, it's not just that they never gave us an apology and never suffered any consequences for the things they did. It's also that now they're lying about the records and pretending like, no, that didn't happen. And if it did happen, it was no big deal. And don't worry about it. Don't worry your pretty little head. And understandably, you know, some number of the 300 plus million Americans get really, really pissed off when that's the way you talk down to them and when that's the way you treat them. So I think the sentiment RFK is tapping into is super understandable. I think there is a lot to like, but I think we fundamentally have to be very

careful. We ought to platform as many people as possible and allow, I'm a free speech maximalist, allow endless speech all over the internet and in person, but we ought to be pretty judicious with who we actually listen to and who we believe. And I don't think we should believe a lot of the things that RFK is saying. All right. Thank you, Liz, for joining us today. And I'll probably drag you back on here in the months to come. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to read your work, River. Oh, thank you. And I really liked your piece on RFK too.

You have a lot of juicy dirt that it seems like you've been excavating and I just kind of love the intensity. I'm really excited. Thank you.