00:12:53.220Oh, we're going to get into a lot of fucking chilling information today.0.99
00:12:57.960I literally have a line, wow, this is fucking chilling, like three pages from now,0.93
00:13:02.220about a completely different quote. So what's being described here, this is a very human0.87
00:13:06.520tendency. It just so happens that it's a human tendency that is being very well weaponized by
00:13:11.700platforms like Fox. And nobody is immune to this, really. But you and I have talked about this
00:13:17.160before, and I think it probably will deserve its own episode. Since 2013, the World Economic Forum
00:13:23.320has been placing the global threat of massive digital misinformation at the core of other
00:13:30.620technological and geopolitical risks. It is up there with global terrorism, cyber attacks,
00:13:36.920the failure of global governance. All of these things are ranked up there with digital
00:13:41.140misinformation. So these two researchers, Weinberg and Dawson, they basically studied
00:13:45.980these narrative networks and the trigger words on a channel like Fox. And they found that much
00:13:53.100of the narrative relies on betrayal by two key groups. That's like the underpinning idea
00:14:00.380that kind of holds up a lot of these narratives that you see on these types of platforms.
00:14:05.260The first is betrayal by government, and the second is betrayal by elites. So these two ideas,
00:14:12.180betrayal by government, betrayal by elites, they are associated with certain words and concepts
00:14:17.160and visuals. So for talking about the government side, you might hear things about the immigrant
00:14:22.580threat, words like wall, words like illegals, Sharia law. You might hear about forgotten majority, so you'll see visuals of
00:14:30.380coal miners, or they'll talk about poor white people, or there'll be terms like welfare queen
00:14:35.600or reverse racism. This is also the white nationalism wing of the ideology. So alt-right,
00:14:43.620proud boys, stories about Confederate monuments, all meant to kind of trigger that like the
00:14:47.620government has betrayed white people. Then you have the terms and concepts associated with
00:14:52.960betrayal by the elites. This is where a lot of the COVID and like wellness stuff comes in. So
00:14:58.620COVID conspiracy, a.k.a. China flu, Bill Gates, Plandemic, New World Order. You have fake news,
00:15:06.740liberal media, witch hunt, Mueller report, deep state. My throat is tightening.
00:15:12.160Anti-establishment. This one, it just said, it says images, rednecks, white trash, and then just1.00
00:15:19.140Hillary Clinton. And then finally, you have wellness, which nests under betrayal by elites.1.00
00:15:26.640You'll hear phrases like big pharma, drugging kids, anti-vaxxers, the phrase conspiracy of silence, which I had never really heard, but it speaks to this idea of an unspoken consensus that cannot be questioned, which is how they view these ideas about vaccination or modern medicine being kind of like a global elite plot to hurt people or hurt kids.
00:15:49.720So that's how the wellness wing kind of locks into the rest of this puzzle and the role that it plays. I think today we have to start with the predecessors to the Maha Mamas, because I think it explains how we got here. This is the group that I'd consider the proto-Maha Mamas. They're a group called Moms for Liberty. Now, are you familiar with the Moms for Liberty? You actually just returned from a pilgrimage to their homeland.
00:16:14.920I did. Florida did not bar me from entering this year, but we will see next year. I am painfully familiar with Moms for Liberty.
00:16:26.220When I was working at Katie Couric Media, I had to write a few articles about them, and I was just humbled by their stupidity all the way through.0.77
00:16:34.380so i would start i i was covering them while they were trying to do this like comprehensive book ban0.62
00:16:41.240of some of the mildest fiction you've ever heard of in your life and so i had to cover their little
00:16:47.280town hall meetings and it was a bummer to be a part of personally oh good well we're gonna watch
00:16:51.760the recruitment video today so the moms for liberty were like a parents rights group that
00:16:58.060spawned from this widespread perception, or well, as we've covered, it wasn't as widespread as they
00:17:04.360probably thought it was, of COVID mismanagement in 2021. And it seemed to me as I was reading about
00:17:12.500them that they were really galvanized by this perfect storm of factors. So for one thing,
00:17:18.900the pandemic really was hard on parents. Children being out of school for a long time,
00:17:23.860while work either continues as though everything is normal
00:18:18.720instead of being simply taught reading, writing, and arithmetic,
00:18:21.620Their kids were being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit, the two founders wrote in a November 2021 Washington Post op-ed.
00:18:32.120We started with just two chapters here in Florida in our communities, Deskovich said in a June 2021 YouTube video.1.00
00:18:39.900The real power of Moms for Liberty happens in your own backyard, adds Justice.1.00
00:18:44.700The fact that one of their last names is Justice is just fucking chef's kiss.1.00
00:18:48.180Okay. What the founders don't mention is the big assist they've gotten from powerful conservative organizers, starting with a third and much less visible founder of the group, Bridget Ziegler, a member of the Sarasota County School Board, whose husband, Christian Ziegler, is the vice chairman of Florida's Republican Party.0.98
00:19:06.660Of course, of course. Quote, I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic, he told the Washington Post in 2021. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me. Wow, saying the quiet part out loud. Perfect. Okay, this is perfect.
00:19:26.020Yeah. Now we're going to watch the recruiting video, which is a genuinely remarkable historical text. This is just for fun, because we deserve to have a little bit of fun.
00:20:14.980Usually doesn't have their voices heard.
00:20:16.820Throughout this last past year and with the mask mandate, it's caused medical problems for my son.
00:20:22.440He is losing all his hair, his eyelashes, and his eyebrows.
00:20:26.420I took him to every doctor under the sun to rule out all kinds of medical,
00:20:31.220anything that I could google and find that would cause this. And it all boils
00:20:34.460down to stress. I've reached out to my school board numerous times and they
00:20:39.500don't care. They don't care about children that don't fit their mold. So
00:20:44.220that's why I got involved with Moms for Liberty. Everyone feels overwhelmed with
00:20:48.380what's going on in our country these days. It's too big, it's too much. As moms
00:20:52.520we know the most effective way to have an impact on the future of our country1.00
00:20:56.400is to start at home, it's to start with education, it's to start local. We
00:21:00.580launched Moms for Liberty because we saw parents that didn't have a voice in the1.00
00:21:04.580education system. We started with just two chapters here in Florida in our
00:21:08.460communities and within a matter of five months we've grown to over 30 chapters
00:21:12.840in 18 states, 15,000 members, and we have hundreds of chapter applications waiting
00:21:17.820to be processed. The real power of Moms for Liberty happens in your own
00:21:21.720backyard. It's about empowering parents, women and men, mothers and fathers, to be the watchdogs0.99
00:21:27.740of their district, to re-engage in their children's education, to meet during our chapter meetings
00:21:32.720across this country. All right, that's enough. Okay, I have so much to say. I have so much to
00:21:36.840say. Okay, number one, did I hear someone say that this was a group that was historically not
00:21:42.720listened to? Are you telling me that white moms? Yeah, I mean, white women. Famously ignored.
00:21:48.600Um, number two, I just have to note that one of the founders has just a rocking sideswipe bang situation circa 2003.
00:21:55.960Number three, I just want to note that I think that our Diabolical Lies subscriber count is about to surpass the number of members of Moms for Liberty.1.00
00:22:18.600which is wild. A big piece of the Moms for Liberty platform is that public schools in Florida are
00:22:28.420covertly inculcating children with Marxist ideas, like that the workers should own the means of
00:22:35.300production. Just kidding. Not that Marxist idea. I was just about to say. The idea that they're
00:22:41.320worried about is that gender is a spectrum or that, quote, systemic racism exists. So this
00:22:47.680Mother Jones journalist, she attended their conference in Florida as a paid attendee
00:22:52.360and reported on some of the panelists, and this is what she said.
00:22:57.700One of the goals of this curriculum, he said, was to inject messages about systemic racism
00:23:02.900into academics. Quote, they're going to present critical race theory through ruby bridges and
00:23:08.680statistics lessons, he said, referring to the civil rights icon of school desegregation.
00:23:14.380The point is to turn your regular curriculum into a politics curriculum.
00:23:18.580But the critical race theory portion of social-emotional learning wasn't his main concern.
00:23:23.280The most diabolical, hey, part of Schwab's plan, Lindsay said, speaking in a terse staccato, was to sexualize children through lessons on gender fluidity.
00:23:33.620Okay, I'm going to do a little terse staccato.0.97
00:23:35.640When you sexualize children, you destabilize them.
00:23:38.180It is not developmentally appropriate for children to have their fundamental categories, man, woman, boy, girl, complicated.
00:23:47.220So with social-emotional learning, they introduce this complicated topic, and then they tell them how they're supposed to feel about it.
00:23:54.240Children become moldable entities that you can shape into whatever purpose you want, like becoming change agents and activists when they decide that the world that they see and inhabit is fundamentally unfair to them.
00:25:26.360I was like, oh, these are not the same thing.
00:25:28.740But social-emotional learning is not a woke plot.
00:25:31.860It was developed by a guy named Dr. James Comer at Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center in the 1960s, and it basically was something that they found raised students' test scores, reduced disciplinary incidents, and encouraged civic engagement by, like, teaching children how to build relationships with other people.
00:25:53.660So, I'm going to have you read another excerpt from the on-the-ground reporting where they're, like, in a session about the social-emotional learning.
00:26:02.880Okay. But do Moms for Liberty even want to raise civically engaged citizens?0.98
00:26:08.220During the breakout session on social-emotional learning, the presenters seemed to rail against the virtue of altruism.0.63
00:26:18.300Contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities?
00:26:21.500She asked incredulously, referring to one group's description of one of the goals of social-emotional learning.
00:26:27.620When did that become their responsibility?
00:26:30.540Did you guys think you were sending your kids to school to be their own best selves and learn skills and knowledge to improve their own lives?
00:26:37.680Well, suddenly, they're responsible to co-create the school community in the local community.0.99
00:27:37.420Back when schools were actually segregated.1.00
00:27:41.180I just have to note, Ruby Bridges was, like, in her 70s right now.0.98
00:27:45.340Like, it's worth noting Ruby Bridges is fucking alive.0.83
00:27:48.580Back when school was just about learning to read, write, and do math, she had looked into the local private schools but found the same kind of curriculum there.0.98
00:27:57.300And she didn't want to pay $40,000 a year for her children to learn about, quote, transgender stuff.0.57
00:28:03.700Gazing into the future, she worried a lot about her white son's job prospects.0.93
00:28:09.020In this climate of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, who would hire them?0.86
00:28:28.120I mean, I guess I wanted to start there because I feel like that perfectly captures this idea of,
00:28:35.320no, there is actually hostility to the idea of interconnectedness.
00:28:39.360The idea that your children's decisions and their relationship with other people around them might actually be part of their responsibility, and the fact that they're, like, scoffing at the idea of co-creating a healthy and safe environment, they're like, did you think your kids were being sent to school for that, really lays the foundation well for what happens next.
00:29:03.360Next. And this is the crossover point. This is like the vector that then spreads the virus, so to speak, and how this starts to gain more mainstream appeal.
00:29:12.400They report, quote, online wellness influencers began to visit these groups, like of mothers that were congregating online, in order to mine followers.
00:29:24.120the covid conspiracies the anti-vax ideas that were kind of percolating and becoming standard
00:29:31.300set of grievances for the moms for liberty and the um political coalitions they were building0.96
00:29:37.360with young women that is where the wellness influencers started to proliferate when you say
00:29:45.120proliferate do you think that a lot of these wellness influencers were aware of what they
00:29:49.140were doing? Do you think it was intentional or instinctual or somewhere in between?
00:29:54.540I think they were probably taking advantage of the environment of distrust and the fact that
00:30:00.420it was a bunch of, like, seemingly, quote, open-minded, awake young women.
00:30:07.320Yeah, and if you're a wellness influencer, then you've already been radicalized yourself.
00:30:11.620You're already in that position of skepticism and resistance and thinking that you have to
00:30:18.880provide the information that no one else has. So I guess it's kind of just like you're not
00:30:22.740intentionally trying to mislead people. You are just already misled yourself.
00:30:27.040Yeah. I mean, something that came up over and over again in reporting from this time period was
00:30:31.880the number of young women who described it as a political awakening. That like that was like
00:30:38.020when they became political and like when they became to see conservative social ideology is
00:30:44.220in line with their interests. The idea that there are some people who are awakened by Palestine and
00:30:50.200some people who are just awakened by red dye number six is just really indicative. Red dye0.94
00:30:56.200number three, Caroline. I'm sorry. We'll get there. Number six is just fine.
00:31:02.600So what's most notable to me, too, is their understanding of effective organizing and
00:31:08.120messaging there was one piece that i found that was digging into these weird uh instances where
00:31:15.900white supremacist groups were organizing with the mothers groups and one of their whatsapp chats
00:31:22.280leaked and so it's a screenshot of the whatsapp chat that has the white supremacists and the
00:31:28.300moms groups in it and the protest leader in la says quote we americans need to grow out of our
00:31:35.160tendency to prioritize performative protests and flashy stunts for social media clout
00:31:40.720and instead focus on the systems and institutions responsible for our oppression and how to best
00:31:47.660disrupt them. Now that is chilling. Do you know what I'm realizing right now is that there has
00:31:53.140been so much conversation this election cycle, last election cycle, the one before that, the one
00:31:58.080before that, the one before that, about why white women can never get in line and can never0.99
00:32:03.440collectively work with other demographics. And I'm having this maybe very naive realization as
00:32:10.400a white woman that it's like, oh, no, they know how to organize. White women are very good at0.99
00:32:14.960politically organizing. They're just never going to fucking do it for you.1.00
00:32:19.940So this is fairly common, where you see these talking points seem to kind of effortlessly slip0.98
00:32:26.260between the registers. Where I was reading that, I was like, that is so fucking leftist.0.99
00:32:30.000gotta get over the performative stuff and focus on systems and disrupting institutions that0.99
00:32:35.120oppress us i was like holy fucking shit um hell yeah brother so next we're gonna talk about laura0.98
00:32:41.080trump did you know that laura trump has her own fox news show now no don't they have a bigger0.99
00:32:46.920bench than that why are they recycling through these people my god okay we're gonna watch it
00:32:53.220Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Pause. Can you remind me which Neanderthal is she married to?
00:33:52.460Part of that strength will come with making America healthy again.
00:33:56.480The Maha movement, spearheaded by his HHS secretary, RFK Jr., has grown into a passionate group of health leaders, elite athletes, and eager parents, all motivated to save America from daunting statistics.
00:34:11.340Today, America's overall health is in grievous condition.
00:34:14.800The United States has worse health than any other developed nation.
00:34:17.860We can't be a strong nation unless we're first to healthy people.
00:34:23.240I think there needs to be a focus on all of the proper basics that are needed to improve the overall health and well-being of Americans.
00:34:29.820I have seen firsthand that the medical community is overwhelmed with some of these preventable ailments.
00:34:35.180We've had enough. We want truth. We want transparency.
00:34:38.580And we want to be able to educate people in a way that isn't being funded by big industry.
00:34:44.500America's average life expectancy is currently 78.4 years old.
00:34:50.680That's years behind the U.K. and other nations, and still behind our own pre-pandemic levels.
00:34:56.740We spend more money on health care than any other country, and yet our citizens have never been sicker.
00:35:03.200The CDC says two in five U.S. adults are obese, and an estimated 129 million people in our country have at least one major chronic disease.
00:35:12.780Things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension.
00:35:17.060Clearly, we have serious ground to make up.
00:35:20.060And yet, those on the left are more focused on fear-mongering and attacking RFK rather than working together.
00:35:40.660Okay, first of all, I'm going to press play in a second, but the fact that they have a lower third over Chuck Schumer that says Maha Mission faces leftist critics, this man is, he's, come get your man. This man belongs to you all.
00:35:56.740Yeah, I just like am having a really hard time right now watching all this. It's like, babe, you're so close. You guys are all so, we're so close. We're so close to getting there.
00:36:07.460I okay I know I was like she's basically hitting all of the talking points that normally lead to
00:36:12.140the conclusion and that's why we need universal health care but don't worry that's not where
00:36:15.880she's going here you go to confirm Mr. Kennedy is a vote to make America sicker RFK guarantees
00:36:23.560that all of our kids will go to school with kids that get very sick women will will die because
00:36:28.480doctors will be confused about what their rights are when it comes to health and more importantly
00:36:33.680our children's health at that, shouldn't we all be on the same team, fighting for the same cause?
00:36:40.420Tonight, on my view, we'll talk to those voices who are committed to the Maha mission,
00:36:45.940from what we eat to how we move and even how we think. It's time to take a step back and
00:36:51.980reevaluate. With new health leaders taking the reins, we have the freedom to really examine
00:36:57.740what we've been told. And if it means feeling better, living longer, and getting more years
00:37:02.600with our loved ones, in my view, I think it's worth it. Let's start tonight with biohacking.
00:37:09.520Sounds a little bit sci-fi, but there are some very real advancements being made by those willing
00:37:14.880to push the envelope in tech, biology, and beyond. And one of the biggest names in the field is Gary
00:37:21.320Brecka. We're a lot more sick and diseased and pathological than we really deserve to be. This
00:37:26.860guy will change your life. Some of your favorite actors, some of the most powerful, richest people
00:45:54.140which was later renamed Are You Fit to Marry?
00:45:57.060This was a movie that came out in 1917 to warn against the dangers of sexual promiscuity and, quote, race mixing.
00:46:06.220So this is a paper that kind of, like, breaks down that movie.
00:46:10.020This honestly sounds like something that could be described in the free press six months from now.
00:46:14.400Since American eugenics was supported by known racists and would later be directly cited by the Nazis as inspiration for their, quote, racial science, it's uncomfortable to look deeper into it and realize how much turf it shares with progressivists' real concern for the treatment of the poor and of mothers, some of whom would have been forced to raise severely disabled children.
00:46:35.400Some Americans thought that the best way to eradicate poverty and disease was to eradicate the poor themselves by restricting their right to pass on the human, quote, germplasm to the next generation.
00:46:47.940Eugenics and even euthanasia became, for some, a way to avoid social reforms.
00:46:53.260Nurture vs. Nature lost out to inescapable hereditary destiny.
00:47:03.780So, it says in the upper corner, like a women-only showing today, the most daring exposure ever attempted, are you fit to marry? Plain facts laid bare, it's the truth, the terrible results of unclean living. Mothers, bring your daughters.
00:47:24.060Just a fun little outing, a little matinee.1.00
00:47:26.280I'm imagining it like the free press article that's like the black stork was robbed at the1.00
00:47:33.500Oscars by an aura so yeah obviously unclean living here is in reference to white women0.99
00:47:40.160having sex with non-white men that's what that means but you can kind of get the impression of0.90
00:47:44.100there's a lot of conflation happening here of like cleanliness purity how you should be raising a0.97
00:47:50.840family I got the impression from looking at other advertisements from this time period that0.80
00:47:55.680unclean living functioned like a dog whistle for race mixing, but also literal illness.0.73
00:48:01.600The ideas kind of started to merge. So here is a soap ad from the 1920s,0.69
00:48:10.020if you can just kind of describe what you're looking at.
00:48:13.060I would love for someone who understands this time period more than I do to explain, like,
00:48:17.640the significance of this happening during the Roaring Twenties. That's kind of interesting to
00:48:22.080me yeah okay this ad says it's a headline that says the finest thing in the world a happy healthy
00:48:27.800family and there's like this little portrait of just the happiest trad wife you've ever seen
00:48:34.200with her kind of hitler looking husband holding a baby0.90
00:48:37.940hella fewer vibes and then we have two kids at the table we got a cherubic looking baby0.85
00:48:47.980held by mom, and it's an ad for soap. Yeah, so four children total. It's a soap ad. They're
00:48:53.860standing around a kitchen table, and then this is what the ad says. I simply cannot find the words
00:48:59.920to express the emotions aroused by this lovely picture. The original painting is before me as I
00:49:06.000write. I wish I could hang it in every American home. I'm trying to do like a transatlantic accent,
00:49:11.040but I don't think I'm succeeding. So I'm going to be intensely practical instead. It was meant
00:49:15.920that everyone should be well. Sickness is unnatural and to a large degree preventable.
00:49:21.220Wow. I think all the great doctors and health commissioners would approve the following statement.
00:49:25.540There would be little sickness in a perfectly clean world. Only healthy skin is beautiful.
00:49:31.540Jesus. And more than that, our skins have been softer and finer textured. The little ones have
00:49:37.580not developed ugly rashes or pimples. And our own mirrors reveal that lovely underglow, which is the
00:49:43.800secret of a radiant complexion i know life buoy to be as fine and pure as any soap sold at any
00:49:50.760price i firmly believe that it is the surest everyday protection that any family can have
00:49:55.760against the danger in dirt it agrees with your skin signed the health doctor who was assuredly
00:50:03.380not a woman for the record gary brecca who also sold supplements out of her basement um yeah so
00:50:12.320again echoes of this relationship between like clean living what's natural and these like white
00:50:17.460nationalist ideas from a hundred years ago so there is an amazing piece from the baffler on
00:50:24.580ballerina farm from a couple of years ago that i actually had not read until i was getting ready
00:50:30.700for this episode but it left a different taste in my mouth after like looking back at the type
00:50:36.800of language that was being used in those types of ads.
00:50:42.140So I'm going to share it with you if you can read it for us.
00:54:28.440Which kids are meant to benefit from this? Whose kids have the largest problem in their life be like whether their milk is pasteurized or not? Which kids are we really talking about here?
00:54:39.000I just want to add something, too. The other thing I was thinking about is there's such a don't tread on me vibe, but it's like no one is actually treading on you. The Nealmans have—their kids aren't vaccinated. They don't go to school. They're homeschooled.
00:54:55.320I'll say allegedly, but she has numerous family members who tout anti-vax shit. I would stake my life on the assertion, the hypothesis, whatever I have to say to not get sued, that those children are not vaccinated, at least—0.98
00:55:09.000allegedly. Maybe they, I don't, we'll have to look into what vaccines you need to enter Ireland.
00:55:13.940But that's the thing that's frustrating is, okay, you don't want to go to public school.
00:55:18.660You don't want to vaccinate your kids. You don't want them to eat like to the, all these health
00:55:21.900mamas, then go homeschool your kids. There is a certain thing of like, yeah, you won't be able
00:55:26.780to partake in certain things that require community engagement. But if you give so little
00:55:33.080of a fuck about community engagement, then surely you won't be upset about not going to college or0.99
00:55:39.220going to fucking Six Flags or going to Disney World. You know what I mean? Then go do all that1.00
00:55:43.320shit on your own if you don't want to be in a community. Go. Just go. So one of the books that1.00
00:55:48.840I read for this episode was called The Wellness Trap by Christy Harrison. And something that she
00:55:55.040talks about is that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a social determinants of
00:56:01.500health framework. I should probably archive that page because RFK is probably going to take it
00:56:06.040down. It basically breaks down which elements of someone's life have the largest impact on their
00:56:13.380health outcomes. And it breaks it down into five categories. The first is economic stability. So
00:56:19.340income. The second is education, access, and quality. That is broadly tied to like job
00:56:26.100opportunity. The third is healthcare access and quality of the healthcare that you have access to.
00:56:32.340The fourth is neighborhood and built environment. So do you have safe housing? Do you have reliable
00:56:39.280transportation? Do you live in a safe neighborhood? What type of air pollution are you exposed to on
00:56:44.400a daily basis? And yes, do you have access to nutritious foods and opportunities for physical
00:56:50.220movement? And then the fifth is social and community context, which basically boils down to
00:56:55.980Do you regularly face racism, discrimination, violence, hostility?
00:57:02.360And do you have family and social support or not?
00:57:05.920Now, the county health rankings and roadmaps model of health says that when you look at those five things,
00:57:13.180about 70% of your health outcomes are determinable by the economic, educational, healthcare access, neighborhood context, social factors.
00:57:21.840Like, the stuff that's basically not food or diet-related.
00:57:26.520And the remaining 30% are attributable to tobacco use, diet and exercise, alcohol and drug use, and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.
00:57:36.820So, in other words, like, what you could reasonably classify as someone's behavior or, like, choices, personal—things that are within your, like, personal control.
00:57:44.520With your diet being just one factor out of the four in that 30%.
00:57:50.060it sort of renders an obsession with food quality at the margins as like missing the forest for the
00:57:58.820trees. Something that I'm also thinking about is I've talked about this before in this podcast.
00:58:02.940The food deserts in this country are insane. I have driven through towns where there is no
00:58:10.560grocery store and just a subway and a McDonald's. So it's like the idea that there are women whose0.98
00:58:15.280entire crusade is over like a seed oil and not about getting a grocery store in every per capita0.81
00:58:23.220population. That does not exist right now. Yeah. Broadly, the emphasis is on this very like
00:58:29.640individual choice paradigm of liberalism. You should be able to make an individual choice to
00:58:35.120vaccinate or not vaccinate. And then that's positioned as being like somehow separate and
00:58:39.200siloed from anyone else's individual choice. Obviously, that's not how public health works,
00:58:44.420but this is what Naomi Klein says.0.96
00:59:12.380It's much the same on Bannon's War Room or Alex Jones's InfoWars, with their many supplements, survivalist supplies, freedom fests, precious metal offers, colloidal silver toothpaste, and weapons training.
00:59:25.620And let us not forget Tucker Carlson's 2022 documentary in which he recommended that men regularly tan their testicles with a special infrared light in order to increase testosterone levels in preparation for the, quote, hard times ahead.
01:00:14.280Fixing the free market, correcting corruption, addressing corruption is not an attack on the free market.
01:00:20.520It is an imperative for the free market.
01:00:22.900When I was a lobbyist 15 years ago, we used to go and pay conservative think tanks to say that it was nanny state to take soda off of food stamps.
01:00:31.640But the soda companies are lobbying tens of millions of dollars to get the soda on food stamps.
01:00:35.120So actually saying, should the government be funding diabetes water to addict kids to and then give them diabetes to where Medicaid right now for lower income kids is more expensive than the entire defense intelligence budget and growing two times faster?
01:00:47.800Is that saying conservative policy? No, it's not.
01:00:50.640Actually, it's an imperative for the free market to say we're not going to poison our children with supplemental nutrition programs.
01:00:58.420When we talk about the biggest elephant in the room, which is our $4.5 trillion healthcare budget, that is dictated by the American Medical Association, which is by definition a pharmaceutical lobbying group that has the judgment to have no age limit right now for gender transition surgery.
01:01:13.580That is the group that we have outsourced 20% of the U.S. economy to.
01:01:19.020Whenever anyone in this room goes to a doctor, they are subject to the American Medical Association algorithms, which underpin Medicare and Medicaid through totally administratively decision, like we've just thrown it off to them, and then all private insurance.
01:01:31.120So what Bobby and Trump are saying is it's actually imperative.
01:04:18.040But like, the crazy thing is that a big reason why Americans do not get more than like 15 minutes with a doctor is because of private health insurance.
01:04:28.960That's the legitimate explanation for what he is describing there.
01:04:33.240No, no interest in addressing that at all.
01:04:36.240If we're talking about these bigger factors of public health, okay, you know what else
01:05:25.520Yeah, I mean, at this point, the main theme that I think I've picked up on is just complete mistrust for modern medicine. I think they're actually pretty entrenched in the fact that they don't really speak positively about any medical intervention, even antibiotics. They trash those, too. And it's like, oh, you mean the reason that the population—
01:06:06.100I spent about 10 days reading stuff for this episode from the last 10, 15, 20 years about wellness circles going off the deep end.1.00
01:06:14.720And I shit you not, pretty much every single source from this time frame that talked about vaccine misinformation mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr. specifically.
01:06:27.400Like, it would be, like, prominent anti-vaccine misinformation proponents, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.0.99
01:06:32.360And I was just like, what the fuck is going on?0.99
01:06:51.780Make America healthy again, which they were announcing that they were removing bacon and sriracha from their menus.
01:06:57.060But it became a really central talking point for the campaign at a joint Donald Trump-RFK Jr. rally in Glendale, Arizona, after RFK suspended his run for president, when RFK asked the crowd, don't you want a safe environment for your children?0.99
01:07:17.040All the people in the rally are like, motherfucking guns.0.99
01:09:18.760But again, this is pent up frustration about the fact that our kids are suffering more than ever. 38% of preteens, the ages between 12 and 18, are going to be pre-diabetic. That's unacceptable.
01:11:29.480There's poisonous ingredients in this food. American kids are fat. These are extremely1.00
01:11:37.680hyperbolic statements, and I just want to call this out on the pre-diabetic thing because this
01:11:43.540is another factoid that gets thrown out there a lot in this world. Pre-diabetes is a label that
01:11:49.760began being used in the United States in 2002. It was introduced by the American Diabetes
01:11:54.960Association, the World Health Organization does not recognize it as a legitimate health marker
01:12:01.280because they think it lacks predictive scientific value. It's basically this question of like,
01:12:05.520well, how pre is pre? Where's the cutoff line? It's kind of arbitrary. And according to the CDC,
01:12:12.320the rate of prediabetes conditions that turn into diabetes is less than like 2% per year.
01:12:18.200All that to say, I just found that little diatribe to be very useful for where we're going next and kind of very telling about what it is they're actually concerned with and, like, what they're pointing to as the problems.
01:12:36.700So this is also from the reporting in New York Magazine.
01:12:42.060Thank God we're getting a break from Barry.
01:12:43.680Okay. The movement's unorthodox wellness agenda, articulated on message boards and podcasts, holds that the nation has been made sick by everything from vaccines to pesticides to food dyes to seed oils to processed foods to microplastics, all of it fueled by corporate regulatory capture.
01:13:03.360It proposes to remedy the sickness via the adoption of wholesome school lunches, raw dairy, unfluoridated water, regenerated soil, plain old vigorous exercise, and other holistic fixes, some of which circumvent the guidance of the medical establishment.0.90
01:13:18.040You know that these people fucking hated when Michelle Obama tried to make kids' school lunches healthier.0.99
01:13:23.080You know that they fucking hated that.0.99
01:15:53.480Whoever's protein powder it is, they're paying him to say it.
01:15:56.140You might have remembered, like, in Laura Trump's show, she's like, the left is just fear-mongering.
01:16:01.120Meanwhile, the Turning Point USA influencers on Instagram are like, this is full of estrogen, and this is bad for your microbiome.
01:16:08.000Like there is so much health fear mongering that like everything around you is going to
01:16:14.340damage or hurt you if you are not hyper vigilant and that like you need to be using supplements
01:16:20.680that are accounting for all of these dangerous and nefarious changes that again, like you
01:16:27.600kind of get this idea in the protein powder out of it's going to make you more feminine
01:16:31.260if you're using the wrong kind of protein powder.1.00
01:16:34.240There's one that's going to introduce too much estrogen to your body.
01:16:37.480Which is the worst case scenario for the American male. Yeah. And I would also say that I do understand how scientific words can sound so smart. To quote you, like, this probably goes so fucking hard if you're stupid. I can totally see how it would be like, oh, I don't want the glucomyosophate in my relacifactors. I don't know. Like, whatever. I'm not a doctor. I guess I'll just listen to this fucking lug nut in his sunroom.
01:17:04.840Did you notice the anti-vax thing in the beginning?0.99
01:17:18.880Okay, so Naomi Klein kind of talks about this, this like rhetorical pattern that you'll see to call something out about modern medicine, suggest that it's a scam, and then sell you something else to fix that.
01:17:33.120These statements sum up a pervasive logic in the more entrepreneurial parts of the wellness sector.
01:17:38.700Doctors and drug companies want you to be sick so that they can sell you Band-Aids,
01:17:42.460while fitness and wellness professionals want you to be well,
01:17:45.680but first you have to buy whatever they are selling instead.
01:17:48.640The larger and more profitable the wellness industry grows,
01:17:52.040the fiercer this competitive perspective becomes,
01:17:55.160to the point where even going to the doctor or getting a prescription filled
01:18:01.000Clear evidence that you did not juice or train hard enough.
01:18:04.240Lining up with all of those regular, i.e. toxic, unfit people to get injected with something that requires no special knowledge or virtue to access,
01:18:12.920and, most suspicious of all in a market system, doesn't cost any money, can be enough to cause a full-blown identity crisis.
01:18:19.660Wow, that's so interesting. That's really good.
01:18:24.400Right. Yeah, and wellness globally is a humongous industry.
01:18:29.700So there's this group called the Global Wellness Institute, and they claim that wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry globally as of 2023.
01:18:43.380They write, quote, it has grown rapidly in the aftermath of the pandemic.0.90
01:18:47.760I would also imagine that when you get inculcated into this world and you assume that, frankly, that health is an elite thing, the idea of poor people getting access to health is, well, what gives you the fucking right?
01:19:01.720I'm really interested in the idea of a vaccine being like, yeah, they're going to claim that it's not working, but I wonder if there's also this subconscious thing of, well, why do you get to do that?
01:19:13.700You shouldn't get your health for free.
01:19:15.060Yeah, or I'm like, I'm working so hard to be healthy in these other ways.
01:19:19.500I deserve to be healthy and you're taking the shortcut.
01:19:23.160I actually didn't notice it until this third rewatch that we just did.
01:19:26.600But the fact that Barry described activities like drinking Coke as low status, I was like, oh, that's actually really interesting to call that out.
01:19:35.020I know that people associate weight with status, but I, like, anecdotally do not find the soda thing to be true.0.80
01:19:42.580I feel like I know a lot of hella rich people who drink a fuck ton of soda.
01:19:47.720In that $6.3 trillion estimate, they are including a number of, like, sub-industries.
01:19:53.920I would say we should probably shave off about a trillion to cut out the beauty and personal care because I actually don't really consider that part of this, the physical activity, the wellness, tourism, weight loss, wellness, real estate, thermal and mineral springs, like things that are like more explicitly positioning themselves as being stand-ins for modern medicine or like actually engaging with medication.
01:20:19.300But even then, we're talking about $5 trillion globally, which is substantial.
01:21:10.980Compare this hands-off approach with the strict rules and regulations for drugs, Skerritt writes.
01:21:15.400No drug can be sold until the FDA has clear proof that it is safe and effective, and every FDA-approved drug must be made to strict specifications.
01:21:24.580One can imagine that some pharmaceutical drug makers might fume over this situation.
01:21:29.640After all, while they take on the serious and costly work of running intensive drug trials and conducting post-market surveillance,
01:21:37.080dietary supplement makers can just grind up a few plants, put them in a bottle, and then forego responsibility.
01:21:42.360Except for one thing. The reality is that even though the regulations on pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals are as different as night and day, the companies creating them are not sick, sick, sick.
01:21:54.940Increasingly, Big Pharma and Big Herba, that's hilarious, are indistinguishable, claims Paramore.
01:22:00.960The very same mega-companies with gigantic chemical labs that make drugs are cooking up vitamin and herbal supplements labeled with sunny terms like natural and wholesome.
01:22:10.560Pfizer, Unilever, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, they need to work on their name, and other
01:22:15.780big pharmaceutical firms make or sell supplements.
01:22:19.140While she does acknowledge there are a few small companies still in the mix, Paramore
01:22:23.440says they represent a small fraction of the total sales in the $39 billion a year supplement
01:29:15.160And when you look at nutrition labels and you look at ingredient labels
01:29:18.960and you see all of those chemical names,
01:29:21.660they're not there for a nutritional purpose.
01:29:23.940And this is one of the most fundamental things the human, you know, every human should know is that if you don't recognize an ingredient and you don't see it as something you would find in nature, it's not there to improve nutrition.
01:29:36.680It's there to improve the bottom line of the food industry.
01:29:39.460When you opt out of that science experiment, you start to realize a level of health that you never thought was possible.
01:29:45.020And you start to get off all the pharmaceuticals.
01:34:23.920indisputable fact that you can find yourself by looking at VAERS. So, honestly, I don't want to
01:34:31.620hear it. Okay. She posted this two weeks ago, okay, when Akita just died from measles. So,
01:34:38.400Caroline, are you familiar with this VAERS database? No, I'm not. So, it is everywhere
01:34:43.820in this content. They're constantly referencing this database. It stands for Vaccine Adverse
01:34:49.300event reporting system on the CDC website. Anyone can submit anything. If you scroll through the
01:34:56.040thousands of reports, you will see everything from gunshot wounds to imprisonment being reported as
01:35:02.800vaccine side effects. There's not like a legitimation process that you go through. You can
01:35:07.940just claim anything. It's self-reported. Yes, it was intended to be an early warning system
01:35:13.700for potentially unforeseen problems with approved vaccines that might be worth investigating.
01:35:19.300because when you give tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people a drug,
01:35:25.880there will be adverse effects for some tiny portion of them.
01:35:29.480Like, in medicine, anything that has the potential to do good also has the potential to do harm.
01:35:36.760In 1997, it helped doctors adjust the vaccination schedule for the polio vaccine
01:35:42.240because there were between 8 and 10 cases per year of vaccine-induced paralysis.
01:35:48.240Now, globally, we're talking like eight to 10 cases per year out of 400 million vaccinations.
01:35:55.320Teeny, teeny, tiny, but like it's a way for them to make sure that they're not missing something once the sample size gets big enough and then they can adjust accordingly.
01:36:03.840So here's Jillian Michaels bringing up the measles vaccine at this free press panel.
01:36:10.040And again, credit to Barry where it's due.1.00
01:36:12.400she is explaining the definition of public health to these fucking quacks which is kind of delightful1.00
01:36:17.720um here's barry weiss explaining how vaccines work to jillian michaels0.99
01:36:22.320i guess the difference jillian between vaccines and your decision to eat fruit loops is vaccines
01:36:30.120let's say against one we would all agree is essential polio but hold on but the difference
01:36:36.760is it relies on herd immunity it relies on us making a collective choice in a way that few
01:36:43.580other public health issues do that's why it's such a different case by case you can't just
01:36:50.380lump all vaccines into one thing you can't do no i'm just making a categorical difference of why
01:36:56.040i don't think it's a red herring to talk about because well okay well to say okay so to say
01:37:01.540kennedy was responsible for samoa no he wasn't what ended up happening in 2018 is that two kids
01:37:06.240died from an MMR vaccine that was improperly prepared. And that's exactly the kind of stuff
01:37:11.820he's advocating to prevent forever. He was out there in 2019. He had no direct connection to
01:37:17.960that incident whatsoever, and yet was smeared with it. And let's be very clear. Bobby, very
01:37:23.240let's Bobby Kennedy is not responsible for the lack of faith of our public health authorities.
01:37:28.300The public health authorities are responsible for that. Oh, clap, clap, clap, clap. Yes,
01:37:33.080oh my god you really ate babe holy shit i'm speechless didn't you love when they all start0.99
01:37:39.860talking over each other and they're like well you gotta go case by case you have to go case by case0.98
01:37:44.760i'm sure that you you know me well enough by now to know that throughout this whole conversation i
01:37:50.100am i am just like swallowing a huge urge to rant for the rest of my life about how
01:37:56.200media is responsible for all of this and i'm just like watching these three0.99
01:38:00.780fucking ignoramuses on a massive platform and just being like yeah they're wrong but also0.99
01:38:09.080who cares if they're wrong why do these people have a platform most people are wrong about0.99
01:38:15.760most stuff how did we end up here except for us except for us but like genuinely because that's
01:38:21.980where you always get people have always believed conspiracy theories there have always been people
01:38:26.980who believe things with no substantive evidence and you can't eradicate that from the human
01:38:33.020population. I think that that like goes in line with innovation and like human curiosity is humans
01:38:38.360just designed to believe random bullshit. But what we do have now that we have never had before are
01:38:43.060these fucking platforms that allow these people to position themselves as experts. And I'm like,0.98
01:38:48.720who gives a fuck what Vani Hari thinks about vaccines? You are not a public health expert.0.99
01:38:55.340these people are like not credible officials. They don't know anything. Why are they there?
01:39:02.000Why is she talking to them? You would think there would be like one medical professional0.86
01:39:07.160on the stage who could be like, well, actually. Just one, but apparently.
01:39:12.660Can we talk to somebody who went to fucking medical school?0.99
01:39:15.460The free press does not like doctors. So we've kind of like been dancing around0.99
01:39:19.620the measles thing a little bit. We've talked about the crunchy mom influencer who's like,
01:39:24.360check VAERS. People are dying of the MMR vaccine. Jillian Michaels is repeating on stage,
01:39:29.460well, those kids died because of an improperly prepared vaccine. So in Congo, where vaccination
01:39:37.760rates against measles are around 52 percent because vaccination is so challenging to access
01:39:43.420there. These vaccines have to be refrigerated. The transportation is very difficult. There were
01:39:49.460more than 311,000 reported cases of measles there in 2023. Wow. 6,000 kids died, often within days
01:39:59.840of getting sick. Oh my God. So this is from some New York Times reporting on what's happening in
01:40:08.120Congo. They write, quote, measles causes immune amnesia, wiping out immunity to other infections
01:45:48.180That's what conspiracy theorists think.
01:45:51.420Dude, why? Why? Why does she get a CNN segment?
01:45:55.400why okay two things that she is really stuck on and again yeah cnn segment this is not some like
01:46:02.260fringe media outlet these people are being platformed in the mainstream media yeah
01:46:07.280gmos in the food supply this has got to be it and the claim that vaccines are weakening immune
01:46:12.080systems callie means echoes this claim on stage with barry and to her credit again she does push
01:46:19.280back on him um so before we kind of like get into what these claims mean and like what they tell us0.60
01:46:25.520let's watch callie on stage observe another nonsensical tirade i think people start to
01:46:34.800look at things a little bit more skeptically is around the issue of vaccines and around the issue
01:46:40.880of skepticism around vaccines because if you just look again common sense of the numbers we live in
01:46:47.020we live in a country where there's no polio we live in a country where there's no measles and
01:46:51.040these innovations have been essential life-saving especially for children square for me like contend
01:46:58.160with that issue for me i'm sure that you've gotten this question many times before i mean it's 72
01:47:02.700interventions for a kid right so so there's there's 12 different things so what bobby could
01:47:08.800be saying if you ask the country you know do you support vaccines majority would probably say yes
01:47:13.540those polls. If you ask the country, should criminal enterprises be continually subjected
01:47:17.460to science to make sure they're calling the truth when there's an incentive for them to get their
01:47:21.740products on a schedule to be mandated for every single American and we should continue to subject
01:47:25.200those pharmaceutical products to science and continue to study them and continue to have
01:47:28.720transparency in them, 90% of people would say yes. If you actually decipher what Bobby Kennedy has
01:47:32.560said about vaccines, as it's just a demonstrable statement, he is saying that they should be
01:47:35.720subjected to science. He is saying pharmaceutical products should be subjected to science.
01:47:39.560President Trump has declared his intention to investigate why kids are getting sick.
01:47:43.540As we're all talking about, and so what Casey talks about so eloquently, there's a multifactorial pillars of why we're getting sick, we think.
01:47:54.460And absolutely, it's overprescription to pharmaceuticals.
01:47:57.340It's the fact that we're on 4.6 billion prescriptions a year.
01:48:00.600And it might be the fact, even taking what you just said, the fact that we've dramatically increased.
01:48:05.960And there's a massive incentive for criminal enterprises, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, to get more and more and more vaccines on the schedule.
01:48:12.200You cannot watch an NFL game without seeing ad after ad after ad.
01:49:38.260Exactly. I mean, the keto diets in Denmark.
01:49:42.420Okay. And then secondly, his point about the over-prescription of pharmaceuticals.
01:49:47.560This is what he's pointing to, right, as the major factor in American illnesses.
01:49:52.120But remember, it is a lack of access to medical care, a lack of access to medicine that is associated with worse health outcomes.
01:49:59.560Not too much modern medicine. That's not what the data says.
01:50:02.220So, the idea that permeates all of this, from vanihari to calumines to zen honeycut, is that a healthy diet and lifestyle circumvent the need for medical care and medicine.
01:50:16.180So, I don't want to spend too much more time on vaccines because I think the science is so settled there that even appearing to debate it lends credence to the idea that there is still something up for debate.
01:50:26.260But I do want to talk about GMOs, because GMOs are actually similar to vaccines in the sense that the science is settled about their safety. There is no scientific debate about this, but you would not know it by the way that they are discussed. So please read this from the Genetic Literacy Project.
01:50:46.860Every major international science body in the world has reviewed multiple independent studies, in some cases numbering in the hundreds, in coming to the consensus conclusion that GMO crops are as safe or safer than conventional or organic foods.
01:51:02.320Still, the claim that GMOs are, quote, understudied has become a staple of anti-GMO critics, especially activist journalists.
01:51:09.980In response to what they believed was an information gap, a team of Italian scientists cataloged and analyzed 1,783 studies about the safety and environmental impacts of GMO's foods, a staggering number.
01:51:26.020The researchers couldn't find a single credible example demonstrating that genetically modified foods pose any harm to humans or animals.
01:51:33.620The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of genetically engineered crops, the scientists concluded.
01:51:43.380Okay. No scientific debate about the safety of genetically modified food.
01:51:47.520But that's not Honeycutt's independent scientists, wherever her .gov creed backslash website that she goes to.
01:51:55.340The crazy thing about this, too, is that GMOs are scientifically constructed often to require less water and fewer pesticides.
01:52:03.620So they allow us to feed our population, like, more reliably.
01:52:08.840They can also be used to reduce food waste.
01:52:12.740Let's talk to Jillian Michaels again and see what she thinks we should ban.
01:52:17.240With that said, what would be banned?0.97
01:52:20.420Well, let's look at the argument that Vonnie has put front and center with regard to sugar cereal.
01:52:25.740What if it was just sugar and not high fructose corn syrup from genetically engineered crops that are sprayed with a million different chemicals?
01:52:33.620What if she could just do that for you with your Froot Loops to make it that much easier for the average American not to have to worry about their toxic load?
01:52:43.120That's the kind of stuff that people, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Bonnie is trying to facilitate.
01:52:48.000So it's not about taking your cereal away.
01:52:49.780It's about making it significantly less poisonous.
01:52:55.580The point is like, she's, she's sitting up there being like, yeah, the genetically engineered crops sprayed with a million different. I'm like, even at like the, at like the broadest level. Think about this. Like I did what, 10 days of research on this. This is your entire fucking beat, Jillian Michaels. You are on stage in DC talking your book. Shouldn't you know that genetically modified crops require fewer pesticides? I feel like I'm going fucking crazy.0.99
01:53:23.320Okay, I have a question. What do they think that Bobby is going to do?
01:53:30.600That is a great question. Something that does, I think, raise some alarms about this non-GMO0.91
01:53:38.200craze or this GMOs are toxic craze is the labeling in this space. There is a non-GMO project label
01:53:46.620that is used now, which is actually kind of a misnomer because the foods that this gets put
01:53:52.720on can still technically be genetically modified, but just less so? I don't know. But the foods are
01:53:58.820almost always more expensive. Non-GMO marketed foods cost an average of 73% more as of 2015.
01:54:07.320Wow. When I get the grapes that are the size of my fist, is that a GMO grape?
01:54:12.160Oh, Caroline, there is not a single apple, banana, stalk of broccoli, or ear of corn in existence
01:54:18.580today that is not genetically modified. This might be slightly hyperbolic. It's like 90%
01:54:23.560of the food supply is genetically modified. Again, because it makes food more resistant to
01:54:29.520pests. You don't have to use as many pesticides. It makes it last longer. This is like a good
01:54:35.360thing. Also, I just want to remind everyone, we have destroyed so much farmland with bad
01:54:43.060farming practices over the years. Might I remind everyone of the Dust Bowl? You'll take the food
01:56:09.980I spent as little time on Zen Honeycutt as I could.0.99
01:56:12.340I was like, got it, CNN segment, moving on.
01:56:15.760The sole purpose of these labels is marketing a more expensive product
01:56:19.900that has no evidence of being healthier.
01:56:22.420But getting that label does require FDA oversight and regulation to enforce,
01:56:27.820which means that the FDA is currently bogged down
01:56:31.260regulating something that is ultimately meaningless.
01:56:34.980There are studies, like the pesticides thing,
01:56:36.900like let's touch on that because that also came up a lot.
01:56:39.020Again, in many ways, like in these kind of rants that they're going on, it's they're kind of like conflating GMOs and pests.
01:56:44.660It's like these are not the same thing.
01:56:45.760But there are studies that looked at occupational exposure to pesticides.
01:56:50.700So people working with pesticides as part of their jobs rather than a consumer who was going to eat a pack of washed raspberries every week.
01:56:58.760And they suggested like, yeah, you should monitor fertility in populations that work with commercial pesticides as a matter of their job.
01:57:35.380None of these people are Irish is all I have to say.1.00
01:57:39.020You have to be so fucking myopic to not like vaccines or food. You have to be so uncurious to think that people were better off with earlier food systems and no vaccines.1.00
01:58:01.240Like that that is also that's the trad wife fantasy. We have this fantasy where like everyone had a farm and everyone had drank raw milk and everyone had fresh eggs and everyone ate fresh vegetables. Everyone ate kids. That is not what happened. What happened was three of them died. Right. What happened where there were a few farms in each huge community and you were lucky if you had two food groups.
01:58:38.240I wish someone would write a novel about what would happen if one of these trad wives had to, I don't know, go back in time and experience this life for themselves.1.00
01:58:51.640Okay, so this is from a paper that studies the impact of non-GMO marketing on costs.0.99
01:58:58.520So as I've already told you, foods that are apparently non-GMO cost 73% more.
01:59:03.740But what has the impact of technological improvements in the food supply been over time?
01:59:10.880Technological improvements have increased the overall quality and variety of the U.S. food supply while, at the same time, lowering overall food costs.
01:59:19.060The share of disposable personal income spent on food at home fell from 21.2% in 1930 to 5.7% in 2012.
01:59:28.280There you go. Less than 100 years ago, people spent one in every $5 they earned on food. So it was 5.7% in 2012. As of 2023, it was 11.2% after the recent inflationary spike, but it's still about half as much. And the food is higher quality.
01:59:47.440The point is, it's totally fair to say more research should be done about the effects of, like, all sorts of elements of modern life on the human body.
01:59:56.120That is exactly what scientists are already constantly doing.0.69
02:00:01.300But to claim with certainty that our food system is toxic or poisonous is, like, honestly just ridiculous.0.58
02:00:10.280But that's not to say there's nothing wrong with it, right?
02:00:12.580There are often contrasts. I think we heard a Vani clip where she's talking about like food in the EU, food in America, whatever. Formulations are different. I think much of this framing in these conversations focuses on American corporations exploiting people. And that's actually sort of true, but I think they are suspicious of the wrong things.
02:00:34.980Are you familiar with Monsanto, Caroline?
02:00:38.880Okay, they're like a big food, like, farming giant.
02:00:43.160Monsanto's farming practices have basically made seed replanting illegal.
02:00:48.220So farmers have to keep buying more of the Monsanto seeds.
02:00:52.800Now, the way that they've done this is because the seeds are genetically modified,
02:00:57.060they claim the seeds are their intellectual property.
02:01:00.180You can't replant their seeds and sell their food without paying them a royalty.
02:01:04.980so this means that like one of the most legitimate systemic issues with our food system
02:01:10.100is not about toxicity or poison it's about private ownership and so in 2013 one farmer
02:01:19.000took monsanto all the way to the supreme court to fight this and the court ruled in favor of
02:01:23.140monsanto and like upheld the patent on the genetically modified food and basically said
02:01:27.900yeah like you if you're gonna sell their product you have to pay royalty all that to say it's not
02:01:31.780perfect. There's absolutely room for reform, but the things that actually need reform are not at
02:01:37.820all the things that we are, like, really talking about. Can I pose a theory? Sure. Okay, here's my
02:01:44.400theory, and you can tell me at the end if we're close or not. Okay. I am thinking about a lot of
02:01:48.980the work that we've done on this podcast, actually a lot of the work that you have spearheaded in
02:01:52.120talking about the women of the new right and also in our episode about, like, the men are not all
02:01:58.540right and how the whole structure that we have is that if you're a man who doesn't get access to the
02:02:03.680most power then you do at least get access to power over a woman and if you're a woman in the
02:02:07.680right then you have to find a way to like carve out a space in which you are either decorative or1.00
02:02:12.860not i am feeling like these women are just spewing bullshit but they are doing so in an arena where1.00
02:02:22.060they can stake claim because the men don't care about it because it is coded as feminine. And so1.00
02:02:28.340it's this way for them to get some level of power and legitimacy. And now that they have like a
02:02:34.560voting block, they matter to good old Bobby and Donald Trump. But they're also in a space where
02:02:39.980it's probably not going to be overrun by men, whereas someone like Nancy Mace is constantly1.00
02:02:45.660getting her little face smashed because she's in the men's space. But food and wellness and
02:02:50.700taking care of your children is a woman's space. And so these women can all proliferate there1.00
02:02:55.280because that's where they're meant to be. And they're tolerated there because, to your point,0.99
02:03:01.140it's their sphere of influence. And also, it is really good for the Republican Party if they can
02:03:07.560superficially gesture at, like, changes that would be made. But as we'll see shortly, nothing that's
02:03:13.060actually going to impact anything. Yeah. Anyways, that's what I'm thinking. Continue.
02:03:16.480So we've just been talking about areas where the science is settled, but we're still asking questions as though we don't have evidence. So now what I want to do is call our attention to areas where the science isn't settled, but we are discussing things with certainty anyway. So, Caroline, do you know who Marty Macquarie is?
02:03:38.960He is a doctor who has just been nominated by Trump to lead the FDA.
02:03:45.060So at least we're like putting an actual doctor in charge of something.
02:03:47.760He actually wrote a book about the U.S. health care system that I read a couple years ago called The Price We Pay that I thought was pretty good.
02:03:54.580We're going to watch a couple clips of him being interviewed by another doctor.
02:04:00.740You're touching on a very important topic, and that is what's the right balance?
02:04:13.240Childbirth is a good example. We sort of swung as a profession to the over-medicalization of ordinary life, and then people are swinging back to delivering babies in the woods with nobody, and that's dangerous.
02:04:25.460So there's a balance with all of this. And with school lunch programs, if you think about the big food, big ag in their lobbies, you might think, these are evil companies.
02:04:35.920trying to poison us. But I actually see the best in people. We have good people that went into
02:04:42.500those industries. And those industries after World War II were asked to address food insecurity,
02:04:47.220to maximize food production and address hunger. And they did that. And an unintended consequence
02:04:54.260of all the GMO and pesticides and added food ingredients that the food scientists engineered
02:05:02.760to be addictive. So a kid finishes eating the school lunch, and they're kind of full, but it's
02:05:09.540kind of queasy full. They don't really feel full. And so their hunger level is designed to increase
02:05:15.900with the food additives. And so they want to keep eating. And we never saw this before. We don't see
02:05:20.700it with any other species in the animal kingdom. You didn't see it before just the current
02:05:25.220generation. Try overeating broccoli. It's like impossible. And so we've got to look and say,
02:05:31.840what are some common sense things we can do? California just banned seven food chemicals
02:05:37.140that have been implicated in attention deficit disorder, hormonal disruption,
02:05:42.380genetic mutations. And so there are some things we need to do. And a lot of it's just educating
02:05:47.720people. You don't need a lot of these food ingredients. Okay. So that doesn't sound
02:05:53.180overly inflammatory. He's not claiming there's a cabal of elites trying to poison everybody.
02:05:59.640He's conceding that, like, oh, well, the people who work in food science are well-intentioned.
02:06:04.260They've just—the pendulum has just swung too far, right?
02:06:07.260But he's still talking about GMOs and pesticides without making any real claims about what those things supposedly do.
02:06:17.620Also, there's a big difference between a bag of chips and GMOs, the correlation he's making.
02:06:22.880He's talking about, like, GMOs, and then he's referencing something which is real, which is, like, these chips that are designed to make you eat more.
02:06:30.160Like, that is, it's such a quick jump, and I feel like I have gone down that rabbit hole before of thinking that all these things, and then they use the one example of something that is very processed, that probably should be regulated, or that people should have a better understanding of.
02:06:44.040But then you use that as a reference point for everything else.
02:06:48.000I'm sure this Johns Hopkins doctor knows you can't not have pesticides in a food system.
02:06:55.540Like, that's not something that, and to the extent that you can, it's because you've genetically modified crops do not need to be sprayed with them.
02:07:01.860So anyway, we're going to watch a little bit more now.
02:07:04.400It may be the cumulative burden of all of these things going down our GI system that's increasing inflammation.
02:07:12.780When chemicals go down the GI tract, things that do not appear in nature, like vegetable oil and
02:07:20.580seed oil derivatives, these are chemicals. They sound healthy, but they're not. Microplastics,
02:07:26.060toxins, arsenic, ultra-processed foods, it may be the cumulative burden of all those things that is
02:07:32.080causing some of this. So we want to give people good guidance. And so here's something that I
02:07:37.080think is a good way to think of it for people who are listening. You want to think about your gut
02:07:40.840health. It may not be, say, the GMO food itself. Again, literally the entire food supply is GMO,
02:07:47.380like everything. That is that toxic and poison. But why are these foods genetically modified in
02:07:54.100the first place? Well, they found out after using Agent Orange in the war that it kills a lot of
02:08:00.380stuff, including insects. And so they started using it as a pesticide to get rid of the insects
02:08:05.960in crops, and they found it kills the crops and the pesticides. So then they thought,
02:08:11.100let's genetically modify the crops to be Roundup ready so it can handle the pesticides.
02:08:17.360And then we eat these foods coated with all these pesticides. The average strawberry has
02:08:21.620been sprayed over a dozen times with 7.8 different pesticides. One sample of school lunches in the
02:08:28.060DC area found that a school lunch has up to 38 detectable pesticides. It's showing up in the
02:08:35.220urine now when tested in children shows up in the umbilical cord of moms so these pesticides
02:08:41.760have been added but the gi tract is not roundup ready humans are not roundup ready so what may
02:08:48.860be happening is the pesticide itself may not be poisoning you it may be altering the microbiome
02:08:55.520the lining of the gi tract of millions of different bacteria that normally live in a balance
02:09:00.760But when you throw all this stuff down, it's changing that balance and you get overgrowth of certain bacteria.
02:09:09.460And we know those bacteria are involved in digestion.
02:11:06.660And I'm drawing a conclusion that it must be our food system. Nay, it must be the gut microbiome.
02:11:17.720Can I also just ring my fucking bell, which is, how long have we been testing for these things? How long have we been measuring infertility in women?0.99
02:11:26.360Oh, I'm sorry. Is infertility skyrocketing according to what? Your 30 fucking years of
02:11:34.680self-reported data? Like, shut the fuck up. Oh, we're going to get there. We're going to1.00
02:11:41.740fucking get there, Caroline. A lot of what you'll find if you watch enough of these interviews is0.98
02:11:47.160just correlation being conflated with causation over and over again. I will echo the fact that
02:11:52.720we don't know. That's kind of the bottom line. But the world became a radically different place
02:12:00.040over the period that he is talking about. The invention of the fucking smartphone,0.99
02:12:04.520social media as a category. There are so many elements of life today that are different than0.99
02:12:09.800they were even just 20 years ago. Greenhouse gosses. To be so confident. Greenhouse gosses.
02:12:18.360to be so confident that, well, these elements have changed or like, well, chemicals are a thing.
02:12:26.420And so like, it must be what ultra processed foods are doing to our gut microbiomes. It's like,
02:12:32.040brother, you're going to have to cite some evidence. The other thing that I wanted to call
02:12:35.880out is based on what we know about what influences health outcomes. Another thing that feels like a
02:12:43.320pretty fucking massive elephant in the room in this conversation is income inequality.
02:12:50.460Do you know what else characterizes the time periods you're talking about?0.96
02:12:54.780Widespread work requirements for welfare, stagnant low and middle income pay, the costs
02:13:02.600of health care, housing, and education, what we know are the three biggest factors in health
02:13:10.540outcomes rising faster than inflation. None of these people are even remotely interested
02:13:17.580in discussing one of the things that we know for certain impacts health, which is poverty.
02:13:26.000Over any 10-year span, 40% of Americans will spend at least one year under the poverty line.
02:13:32.92040 percent. Do we not think that the stress of housing and food insecurity might play a role here
02:13:41.120that is more meaningful than microplastics? Or even just being like, make healthy food
02:13:48.700cheaper. I think what it is is Americans are time poor. Yeah. They're spread so thin that like,
02:13:55.500they don't have the time and energy to prepare fresh food. That's a great distinction. We don't
02:14:01.200even have paid sick days in America, let alone universal healthcare. People routinely go to work
02:14:05.680sick because you can still be fired for getting sick and missing work in this country. They are
02:14:10.640obsessed with talking about the health of children, but they never mention the fact that the largest
02:14:15.900group of poor people in America are kids. It is not that there are pesticides on the strawberries
02:14:22.720or like these parents are not buying adequately organic food. It's that for that group, their
02:14:30.160single mom probably works multiple part-time jobs. They live in a food desert and they will
02:14:35.000probably experience at least one destabilizing eviction by age 15. They're probably under a
02:14:40.360chronic state of stress. And I'm sorry, Vani Hari, but food dye is not in the top 100 issues
02:14:46.820facing the majority of children in America. Right. The seed oil conversation is such a
02:14:53.140fucking racket. Dude, can't be bothered. We're what, two and a half hours in? I'm like, yeah,1.00
02:14:58.660Yeah, we'll skip seed oils. We'll skip that one.
02:15:02.120The other thing is, like, microplastics keep coming up.
02:15:04.480I will say I actually think this is a legitimate health and environmental concern
02:15:09.440and, like, has been for a long time, the fact that there is just so much plastic on Earth
02:15:23.900The fact that I am the type of person who actively worries about microplastics kind of reveals the underlying point that I'm trying to make, which is this is largely the health concern that you have if you have no other real problems.0.99
02:15:37.780That's not to say it's not a real issue that globally we should concern ourselves with, and researchers are working on this, but we are lacking such basic, basic protection for tens of millions of people in this country, and addressing those things would do substantially more to improve health than these little tweaks at the margins that are maybe sort of supported by science, maybe, but we don't really know.
02:16:03.060Well, and I'm sure we're going to get into this, but also when I'm watching all these interviews, it is not immediately clear to me that they have any actions that they want to take. Like, it really feels like a speaking tour of just beyond selling their own supplements. I have a very hard time hearing what any, like, even this guy being like, well, education. I'm like, is that your best answer? Education? In what way? How are you going to disperse it through the public school system? Aren't we currently taking a crowbar to the Department of Education?
02:16:41.680So we're going to spend a little bit of time digging into that one comment he made about infertility skyrocketing.0.98
02:16:48.280Because what you'll find if you spend a lot of time watching shit from, like, wellness influencers is this claim.0.99
02:16:54.580People are becoming infertile because of the poison, the toxic, whatever.0.98
02:16:57.960Another thing that you might recall from the early pandemic era was confusion and misinformation about the COVID vaccine putting women at risk of infertility.
02:17:07.360Yeah. Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories about vaccines are key drivers of vaccine hesitancy.
02:17:15.780A repeated false claim about COVID-19 vaccines is that the vaccines cause female infertility.
02:17:21.060Dating back decades, various conspiracy theories have linked vaccination programs with infertility, and thus harmed vaccination programs in Africa, Asia, and Central America, particularly against polio and tetanus.
02:17:34.740After distribution of COVID-19 vaccines began in December 2020, almost immediately there arose conspiracy theories claiming that these vaccines cause menstrual irregularities, miscarriages, and infertility, promoted by noted anti-vaccine activists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Andrew Wakefield, among others.
02:18:02.120A 2021 study found that between June and July 2021, 41% of people surveyed believed that COVID-19 vaccines could negatively impact reproductive health or fertility.0.99
02:18:14.480That is how widespread that claim had become.
02:18:18.640There is not only no evidence of this, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, okay?
02:18:25.000Here's what was interesting about their findings.
02:18:29.180We identified that urban residents, married individuals, those born outside the U.S., those with health insurance, and people with higher education and income greater than $100,000 felt that the vaccine would affect fertility more than their counterparts did. Wait, what?
02:18:46.740That is very unusual for, like, higher income, more educated people.
02:18:52.700That's so weird. I wouldn't be surprised at all if black and brown communities were very skeptical of the vaccine, given like the type of medical experimentation that was done on them.
02:19:03.320But the idea of some rich fucking Debbie with her kids in private school being like, they're after me with the vaccine. I'm like, are they? I don't know.0.99
02:19:10.820So that begs the question, Caro, is infertility on the rise? Is it skyrocketing?
02:19:17.620according to the cdc infertility in women is defined as a lack of pregnancy in the 12 months
02:19:28.280before the survey despite having unprotected vaginal intercourse in each of those months
02:19:34.620with the same husband or cohabiting partner so is this on the rise or not i'm thinking that
02:19:41.020it is something to do with either like self-reported data or maybe that they're just
02:19:45.960reporting children not being born and they're assuming that women would be infertile if not1.00
02:19:51.280to want children the only reason women wouldn't want to have children would be if they're fucking0.99
02:19:55.940infertile am i correct correct they're basically looking at the birth rate and they're being like1.00
02:20:01.500go fuck yourselves okay so that's that's what's happening you have people looking at birth1.00
02:20:06.140and then deducing that because people are having fewer children now that it's because women are1.00
02:20:12.640less fertile. But... That's incredible. People are, A, choosing to have fewer children. We know
02:20:19.080this. People are also just waiting longer to have children. And one of the most predictive elements
02:20:26.720of how hard it's going to be for you to get pregnant is how old you are. Like, are you 19
02:20:32.260or are you 39, right, when you're trying to have your first kid? It makes a fucking difference.1.00
02:20:36.800So the CDC study conducted 21,000 interviews between 2015 and 2019 to determine whether infertility was actually on the rise, and they found it was not.0.98
02:20:49.060Quote, both infertility and impaired fecundity, which is basically like difficulty getting pregnant, were associated with age for women after adjusting for other factors.
02:20:59.860They have been measuring this since 1973, and they found that difficulty getting or carrying a pregnancy to term has remained relatively stable, with no significant increase in prevalence from 1973 until now.
02:21:13.540I'm just imagining, like, fuck the CDC, some independent scientist interviewing all these women and being like, why don't you have kids yet? And one woman being like, well, you know, I was just really passionate about it. He's like, infertile. And then he goes up to the next one. And he's like, why don't you have kids yet?0.59
02:21:28.060And she's like, well, I have one, but I don't want any more.0.97
02:22:24.920So unlike the pharmaceutical industry, we know the supplement industry is pretty unregulated by comparison.
02:22:30.920But that lack of research does not stop supplement companies from making claims they can't support.
02:22:36.680In 2019, a health and science watchdog group petitioned federal regulators to take enforcement action
02:22:43.640against 27 supplement manufacturers who were selling products marketed as helping women
02:22:49.360detox so they could become pregnant or boost fertility, but for which there is no scientific
02:22:54.880evidence of efficacy. I'm going to have you read a quick little blurb.
02:23:01.020It's like the EV birth control detox. Okay. Dietary supplements can be legally sold without
02:23:07.640proof of safety or efficacy under the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act.
02:23:13.120I would love to know the story behind that act. But the law allows manufacturers to make only
02:23:17.960general health claims, such as that a supplement, quote, boosts energy or improves well-being.
02:23:23.660They are prohibited from claiming a product helps a specific medical condition unless they submit
02:23:29.140results from clinical trials showing such a benefit. None of the fertility supplement makers
02:23:33.840have done so. Of course. Of course. So there was one case in which the supplement maker did
02:23:39.460cite a clinical trial. They sold eight different fertility supplements. And the clinical trial
02:23:46.700that they cited claimed that 12 of the 16 formerly infertile women who took the active ingredient
02:23:54.540that was in their product conceived after taking that active ingredient. That sounds pretty good,
02:24:00.620right? It's a compound in folic acid. But the trial was from 1942, and it studied men.
02:24:08.120what not women it was like men were taking the active ingredient so like oh my god there's just0.98
02:24:14.400a lot of bullshit in this space and like there's like very little regulatory oversight which is a0.95
02:24:20.620problem but when it comes to risks legitimate risks of increased infertility we should probably0.98
02:24:26.700talk about who is actually at risk so per johns hopkins aka the institution that employs
02:24:31.800Marty Macri, who is very concerned about infertility skyrocketing.
02:24:39.160During recent decades, the rate of infertility among women in the United States has remained
02:24:44.120largely the same, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Their new analysis of
02:24:49.240data, collected from 1995 and 2019 and published June 14th in the journal Fertility and Sterility,0.97
02:24:56.260found that infertility is more common among women who are older, who are non-Hispanic Black,
02:25:01.040and who have less income or education and women without access to sexual and reproductive health
02:25:05.900services. Interesting. So you mean to tell me that it's a lack of income, education and access
02:25:12.720to medical care that's associated with infertility? Oh my God, these people. But are you sure it's not
02:25:19.220the Froot Loops? Are we like really sure it's not the cereal? I appreciate Vani Hari's little
02:25:27.160story of going to the library and reading books and, like, fuck Google. But sometimes with this0.99
02:25:33.180project, I'm like, wow, we did all this research in, like, two weeks, and it's a big bummer that
02:25:38.960these people have careers on this and just totally bypass this information. I don't want to diminish
02:25:46.000the work that we do, and I'm proud of the work that we do, but this is not rocket science. This
02:25:51.500This is information that can be found.0.76
02:25:54.260It is on the first page of Google when you look up, like, are women infertile now?0.99
02:26:00.600I say that not because these grifters are ever going to change their grift, but so that people can understand just how grifty they are.0.98
02:26:08.220This is not something that's hard to figure out.
02:26:11.900This is like willful misunderstanding of all this information.
02:26:15.680Part of what I really want to get across today is that a lot of this stuff is just very complicated.
02:26:20.500And there's a lot of confidence with which these assertions by the potential new leader of the FDA are, like, making these claims on podcasts that get millions of views about infertility skyrocketing.
02:26:34.040The confidence with which these things are stated and then, like, in the same sentence related to, like, pesticides on strawberries and, like, school lunches, it just creates this real environment of fear and distrust.
02:26:49.160But a lot of these things are being actively studied, and in some cases, they don't really know yet. For example, environmental toxins. It's not a stretch to think exposure to pollution would impact human fertility, but the research that does exist, like there's a study that I found that tried to look at the outcomes of IVF for a thousand cycles that was focused on air pollution and air quality.
02:27:16.420And they found, quote, particulate matter is a common air pollutant produced by diesel-powered vehicles, power plants, and other industrial facilities, as well as wildfire smoke.
02:27:29.920And the EPA this year lowered the threshold at which it takes action to reduce levels because research has shown the substance more toxic than previously thought.
02:27:40.020So, like, these agencies are actively studying these things and trying to figure out what levels are safe and what aren't.
02:27:48.140But what was so fascinating about this study is that the results themselves were kind of conflicted.
02:27:54.100It found that environmental pollution, this particulate matter and organic carbon, negatively impacted fertility outcomes during IVF procedures.
02:28:02.380But some pollutants, like nitrogen dioxide, actually seemed to have a positive association with fertilization and usable embryos.
02:28:12.040There were some air pollutants that actually led to higher rates of fertilization.
02:28:16.940The point is, more research is being done because we don't understand why some pollution is quote-unquote good and other is having a bad impact.
02:28:24.620But every time we talk about these things, it's being discussed with so much certainty that you would never know that, like, the body of data is still open to so much inconclusivity, basically.
02:28:37.240Well, and the really brilliant self-reinforcing mechanism of these conspiracy theories is that you get reinforced to the idea that things are simple.
02:28:48.700We need to go back to common sense, non-scary words, simple food lists.
02:28:53.180And so if you read something like that, that says, oh, well, we don't know, or that gives conflicting information, I can see someone almost having a gotcha of like, oh, see, like they have conflicting information or like, oh, they're trying to obscure information because it's so confusing. And it's like, no, that's what things look like when you're learning about them. That's actually how scientists function.
02:29:15.000And I'm actually going to pull it back to climate change again because I think that we are a generation and the generation, I guess, below and above us have both moved through this time period where we have so thoroughly fucked our environment that we are now living through a kind of bizarre scientific phenomenon in which virtually 100% of scientists are in agreement.
02:29:33.940And that's actually not like common. That's not necessarily like indicative that science is happening correctly. It just means that we have taken so long that scientists started to raise the alarm in like the 50s and 60s and 70s. And so now we are reading these data and it's on the news, it's on CNN that it's 100% of scientists.
02:29:54.240And I think that that contributes to this misunderstanding of how science functions, where it's like, no, that should be a sign that we have thoroughly screwed the pooch.
02:30:03.220We should be much more comfortable with the idea of conflicting information in science, because that means that we are still learning about something.
02:30:10.520Yeah. Okay. So, Carol, let's talk about what RFK Jr. is actually supposedly going to do to address all of these wide-ranging concerns.
02:30:23.680We've talked about regulatory capture, areas that are not adequately regulated.
02:30:28.980We've talked about supposedly the need for more research to be done, right?
02:35:12.000both administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, provides access to food
02:35:18.660for people living under federal poverty limits, and only certain foods are eligible for purchase
02:35:24.600using WIC and SNAP. They're expecting to be a coordinated effort between the USDA and the FDA
02:35:30.020that would limit the money that can be spent on, like, ultra-processed foods. Like, they're going
02:35:35.300to try to take that stuff off of the SNAP and WIC eligibility. Right. As one does. So I have to tell
02:35:41.820you, this really bothers me. It's basically saying the answer is policing what poor people eat.
02:35:46.740Poor people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves. We will help them by obstructing their access to any food that we deem ultra-processed. A lot of the reason that that food is, like, popular is because it's very calorically dense. Like, you can get a lot of calories for less money, and it's very fast. It's quick.0.97
02:36:08.340Like, one of the things that the population on SNAP and WIC lack a lot of times is time because they're spread thin effectively.0.99
02:36:18.720I feel like this administration is so focused on punishing and, like, the stick rather than the carrot that I have to imagine that it would be like, anyone who ends up using this is going to get their benefits rescinded.0.98
02:36:33.000it's hard for me to imagine that this would ever be effectively carried out like well no one can1.00
02:36:38.640buy lay's chips anymore and it's much easier for me to imagine that a bunch of these maha mommies1.00
02:36:44.440would go to congress and be like we're wasting money on snap it's not helping people be healthy1.00
02:36:49.460and then they just fucking cut the program altogether it just indicates that like there's0.58
02:36:53.500a real interest in again policing behavior totally it's not like they're gonna go to lay's0.96
02:36:58.680and be like, you have to change the formula.
02:39:39.020I think that it'll be interesting to see how this coincides with all of the, like, deregulation that they're indicating they would like to do.
02:39:50.660They want to create a single food safety agency, basically consolidating the FDA and FSIS inspectors, which is like another, I think, a branch of the USDA.
02:40:02.040Kind of a win that they do want a government agency.
02:40:27.020Currently, the FDA does not enforce laws of interstate commerce in raw milk, but states vary in their treatment of it.
02:40:34.500And so this is just saying that they think it's unlikely that the FDA would issue regulations allowing for interstate commerce and raw milk, but it is something that Kennedy has indicated he will pursue, even when they're pointing to things that could be helpful or at the very least not actively harmful.
02:40:52.460they are constantly talking about kids being hurt by these systems but uh none of what they want to
02:40:58.760do is going to improve anything in a meaningful way for the groups who are actually hurt by the
02:41:03.480failures of the systems that they're talking about it's so funny because the fringe proximity i have
02:41:09.420to this movement i do see it pretty regularly i feel like we all know someone at this point0.97
02:41:15.740who's into this shit and the adoration for kennedy is what like they think he's gonna0.98
02:41:23.280fucking save the world and it's so funny that his plan is like i don't know taking on a few additives0.99
02:41:30.320and like mashing two agencies together i'm like yeah okay so he's not stopping pharmaceutical0.98
02:41:35.200companies he is certainly not delivering living produce to everyone we aren't going back in time