BONUS: MAHA's First 90 Days

Tag line us, tack it, tack it.

The podcast with rotting teeth because there's no fluoride in the water anymore.

No, no, no, I got it.

All right, do it.

I got it.

Do it.

Do it.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is banned in the EU, but somehow allowed in the United States.

Well, that's really good, actually.

That also might be true at some point, although the opposite way around.

We might be banned in America, but allowed in the EU.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbes.

If you would like to support the show, you're already doing that.

Thank you so much.

Or are you?

Or are you?

So as part of our effort to both address what is going on in the country, but also not to lose our minds and also not to make like mega bummer episodes for the rest of our lives, we are going to start doing these kind of periodic check-ins on sort of the health grifters in office.

That is the point of this episode.

Officially, it's a bonus episode, but we're going to put it in the main feed because we think that this stuff is important and people should know about it.

We want everyone to be aware of precisely how bleak it is.

Yeah, we want to put our like most bummer episodes free to the public.

It's so like emotionally crushing to exist in the news landscape that we exist in right now.

Yes.

And I think there are ways in which it feels like both really important and oddly sort of refreshing to just go, okay, here are the moving parts.

Here's what's moving forward.

Here's what's not.

Rather than just like the wave of emotions crashing over us all the time.

For this episode, like I just went on the HHS website and pulled every single press release.

And we're going to talk chronologically about like what RFK Jr.

has done with effectively the first two months that he's been in power.

In my sort of end of the research for today, which is like little some profiles of some like public figures who are supporters of Mahasta.

Yeah, Aubrey's are comic relief for this episode.

It's not very comical, and there won't be relief.

But there was one of the people that I looked into had a quote that was like, I'm fully supportive of RFK Jr.'s quest to find the cause of autism.

And the way that they put it was, to really get to the bottom of what's going on there.

Yeah, this is another fucking thing.

As a queer person who lived through the 90s, I absolutely absolutely remember the like quest for the gay gene.

Dude, this gets us into it because the first thing we're going to do is an audio-visual element.

So on February 13th, RFK Jr.

was confirmed.

That's kind of where our story starts, like the minute he takes power.

He deleted all of his previous tweets from before this date.

One of the first things he tweets is like a public statement of like, now that I'm in power, like this is what you can expect from me.

And both of us,

I wanted to do this like privately with you because our brains are broken in exactly the same way, but we'll just do it on the show.

Michael, I just, I would like to dispute that.

Our brains are not broken in exactly the same way.

I watched 10 hours of Montana state legislature floor session yesterday.

I thought you were going to talk about how your brain is broken in the true crime way, which mine is not.

That's also true.

My brain is also broken in the true crime way.

Okay, I'm going to send you this link.

This is RFK Jr.'s little statement.

And we are going to make like little ding sounds every time there's a conspiracy dog whistle.

Can this be our sound for when there's a wait?

What do you what do you have?

No, that's too happy.

That's too happy.

That's too happy.

We need like the X-Files theme to play.

Wait, hang on.

Hang on.

I got another one.

Michael, I have a few of these.

We could do this every time.

Dude, I'm going to put on the rap air horn.

Hang on.

We should remix the two together.

It's going to end up happening because there's gonna be so many of these.

Remixed!

I was about to tell you not to tell anyone I did that, but then I realized I did it into a microphone.

Many, many people.

Okay,

here's this.

Did you get it?

So wait, what are we?

Remind me what we're dinging.

Dog whistles for conspiracy theories.

Okay, ready?

All right, do it.

Hi, I'm Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

on my first day at work here at HHS.

I want to take this this moment to say a few words both to my supporters in the Make America Healthy Again movement, but also to all of the American public.

I could read you a list of statistics proving that Americans suffer far higher levels of chronic disease, obesity, addiction, cancer, infertility, and depression

than ever before in history and more than any other country in the world.

You already know that.

It's pretty obvious that something has gone terribly wrong with our health.

I'm also not going to tell you the reasons for this decline.

Why?

Because neither I nor anyone else can be certain.

See?

But what I will tell you is that we are going to find out and we are going to do something about it.

No one else was trying to do that.

My commitment to you is that we're going to make chronic disease our top priority.

In our first hundred days, we're going to examine every possible contributing factor to the epidemic.

Every factor.

We will leave no stone unturned.

We're going to listen to the experts and to the dissidents.

And the dissidents.

We're going to listen to insiders and to the whistleblowers.

Whistleblowers.

We're going to listen to the doctors and we're going to listen to the moms.

We will examine our food, our medicine, our water, our lifestyles, and our environment.

Everything that goes into American body.

We have to find something we care about more than being right, more than political advantage, and more than financial profit.

Financial profit.

The health of our children is a higher calling for all of us.

And here's another promise.

We're going to usher in a new era of transparency in all of our health agencies.

There's going to be no more hidden conflicts of interest, no more secrecy, no more profiteering on the substances that we're supposed to be regulating.

That's why we're going to deregulate them.

Dude,

I sort of hate this thing because

it makes me realize what a like tinfoil hat person I sound like.

Because if you took the transcript of this and you were like, oh, like a normal politician said this, most of it I'd be like, yeah, fine, like chronic illness is a problem in America.

And like, yeah, we should have government transparency.

I mean, a lot of the stuff he's saying on the surface kind of sounds fine.

But also, when you know the way that he spent his career and when you know the fucking anti-vax talking points, this stuff about like, we're not going to cave in to big pharma, the infertility stuff.

We're finally going to have a conversation where we listen to the dissidents.

Oh, we're finally going to hear from people outside of like the expert consensus.

It's all conspiracy nonsense.

Well, and if you're not good at making your extremism sound reasonable, then you're not very good at your extremism.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a good way to put it.

So to get into sort of the meat of this, because I think if you're someone who doesn't follow this very closely, this can all sound kind of reasonable.

And like, you know, why are like people like Mike and Aubrey, like, why are they trying to block this guy who like all he wants to look at is chronic illness, right?

But the minute you go like half an inch below the surface, you find, I'm not talking about like conspiracy talking points.

I'm talking about actual misinformation.

I do like that you're like, hey, you might be thinking, I've never listened to this show before.

Why do these people

non-listeners of our show?

These bad faith people.

Hey, people who aren't listening.

So one of his first acts in office was to have what's being known as like the Maha executive order, like the statement of purpose of like, here's what we're going to do as like the Make America Healthy Again movement.

And so we are going to read some excerpts from it.

Section one, Purpose.

American life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries, with pre-COVID-19 United States life expectancy averaging 78.8 years, and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years.

Six in ten Americans have at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases.

An estimated one in five United States adults lives with a mental illness.

In a vacuum, all of these statistics are roughly true.

Then we get to the next paragraph.

These realities become even more painful when contrasted with nations around the globe.

Across 204 countries and territories, the United States had the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021, nearly double the next highest rate.

Further, from 1990 to 2021, the United States experienced an 88% increase in cancer, the largest percentage increase of any country evaluated.

So this is straightforwardly false.

America does not have the highest cancer incidence in the world and we've seen a decrease, a significant decrease in cancer incidence and cancer mortality over the last 30 years, according to the American Cancer Society.

This is not true that like every single thing that he's talking about is getting worse.

The thing that gets left out of the conversation about stuff like this is like actually how much treatment has progressed of all of these things, how much detection has progressed of all of these things.

Yeah, if you look at the sort of league tables published by the World Cancer Research Fund, the country with the highest cancer incidence is not America, it's Australia.

And that's mostly skin cancer.

And part of that is because Australia is like close to the hole in the ozone layer and like is full of white people who are susceptible to skin cancer.

But it's also because Australia has very sophisticated systems for detecting skin cancer early and treating it.

So the fact that Australia has high cancer incidence is in some ways actually good news.

It means that they're catching it early.

And if you look at the year, he's citing 2021 data, but that's kind of a perfect illustration of this concept because in 2020, we had an almost 10% drop in cancer incidents, which is like totally unprecedented.

Like, you never get a fall in cancer that dramatic.

But of course, it's not because cancer fell by 10%.

It's because all the hospitals were closed because of the pandemic.

And then, of course, cancer incidents skyrocketed in 2021 because people were getting screened again.

This is the problem with the whole like muddy way that he's presenting this, that high cancer rates aren't necessarily bad news.

And a drop in cancer incidents isn't good news.

It could be less cancer, but it could also just be less cancer screening.

Yeah, there's a real bizarre sort of arrogance to, well, two things.

One, there's a real bizarre arrogance to assuming that because we don't have answers that are like definitive and sort of set in stone, that that means no one's trying.

Yeah, exactly.

That's a really, really strange.

only I can fix it kind of attitude, right?

And

why does shit keep leaving my brain, Michael?

I love it when you do two things, one, and then you forget your second thing.

I hate it

so much.

This is why, as a person in my 40s, I never say two things, one, because I know I'm going to forget the second one.

That needs to be left behind in my 30s.

Fuck.

I've noticed this when I'm editing too.

They'll be like, the real problem is A, and then I talk and I just never get to B.

I'm like, I'm just going to cut out me saying A.

Our listeners don't need to know how broken our middle-aged brains are, you know?

I'm just going to cut out this part.

Yeah, I mean, there's, it's really strangely arrogant to assume that because we don't have hard and fast answers, that no one's looking.

And it also feels like there is this sort of...

You have no idea where you're going with this.

It's okay, Barbara.

We can just move on.

It was back.

I had it and it was back.

We have so many more excerpts.

You'll get there.

It'll come back.

I know.

I know it will.

I'm so sorry.

Just read this excerpt.

Okay, I'm reading an excerpt.

All right.

I'm sending you a thing about chronic conditions.

This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.

77% of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores.

You're always talking about this.

You're always like, young people aren't qualifying for the military.

And I'm like, Aubrey, we can't do a whole episode about this.

This is actually like one of the big anti-fat talking points in 2000s.

Yeah,

nuts.

We're not going to be able to invade Canada because people are too fat.

I'll be like, oh, yeah.

How are we going to annex Greenland when we're all this fat?

Like, uh-oh, well, that's a sacrifice I have to make.

So be it.

Nobody tell them about fat deadlifters.

90% of the nation's $4.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions.

In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively.

So this is a talking point that he returns to over and over again.

Like, this is what's like crippling the country is that that, like, we're spending all this money on these chronic conditions that can easily be prevented through like lifestyle.

This whole concept is like completely bunk, though, because the definition of a chronic condition is just anything which affects your daily functioning and anything that lasts for more than a year.

And so, this document itself even mentions earlier, roughly 60% of Americans have one chronic condition or another.

So, I have one.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome.

That's something that's been going on for more than a year.

If you have like back pain, one of the other ones mentioned is tooth decay.

Most of this is just people getting diagnosed with things and also people living longer.

So among people over 65, 95% of them have a chronic illness.

The thing about 90% of our healthcare spending goes to people with chronic conditions is mostly just a function of the fact that the vast majority of healthcare spending is spent on older people.

Older people happen to be sicker, and when you're sicker, you require more money to get care.

And also, older people are the only people who get nationalized healthcare.

Well, that's the thing.

I mean, a lot of people have have numerous conditions.

And like the fact that the healthcare system is spending money on them is an indicator that like people are receiving health care.

Like a healthcare system that only responds to acute issues, like you, you know, you get hit by a car and you like break your shoulder.

That's not a real healthcare system.

A healthcare system is going to focus on longer-term care and it's going to spend money on care.

This is actually evidence against the thing that he's talking about.

It's actually evidence that the entire medical system does in fact care about chronic conditions already it's it's really maddening i mean i think you see a similar thing when you look at the numbers around like diabetes for example age-based prevalence of diabetes yeah yeah goes like through the roof yeah for seniors right yeah there is a bunch of stuff that is to your point all stuff that is like an outgrowth of living as long as we now live right it's really easy to see those as remedial problems that we have somehow brought on ourselves and not actually like in the scheme of things good new problems that are like, oh, people aren't dying at 30 anymore.

Yeah, we're addressing the issues that people actually have.

It doesn't mean that there aren't still issues to address, but it does mean that it doesn't necessarily mean that we've been like fucking it up real hard.

Yeah.

It also definitely doesn't follow that someone acknowledging the prevalence of chronic illnesses is therefore equipped and qualified to find solutions.

Right.

This is the other piece that feels like it's big here is that like when we have this sort of like, ah, this thing is important and uh-oh, we don't know what to do about it yet, there are two things that can sort of swoop in to fill that gap.

One is worldview, right?

And I think RFK Jr.'s worldview is swooping in in a big way.

And the other is marketing.

And like we'll get into this with the influencer side, but like the marketing side is like alive and well, right?

Like a bunch of the influencers who've attached to the Maha stuff have done so, I would argue, because there is such an opportunity to like get boosted to a new level of audience and to get to sell your products.

This is yet another theme that emerged in a lot of the HHS stuff that I read is that he has like the worldview and the orientation of a fucking influencer, not a person of science.

Yep.

Right.

Because a person of science would be familiar enough with statistics not to like lie in the third paragraph of their sort of flagship executive order.

And also this thing of like, you know, we're finally going to study it.

And like, oh, we're going to listen to the whistleblowers and stuff.

This is like what people say on tick tock who like don't actually know anything and aren't familiar with the science like you don't want people like this running things i want to be precise about something which is like the chances are that rfk jr is not personally sitting down and writing this executive order yeah maybe he is probably not i think it's also an issue if he is not able to hire and supervise staff

in such a way that they can actually accurately fact check.

It's an institutional problem.

It is an institutional problem.

And you could absolutely see this guy like just you could imagine this guy sending something back because it's not the numbers that compare with his worldview rather than that it's not accurate numbers, right?

Right.

Even though the vast majority of like chronic conditions in America are among older people, he then switches to chronic childhood conditions because this is yet again like the way that you market your thing of like, we're finally going to take care of children.

I looked this up around 30% of kids have a chronic condition, but things like learning disabilities and ADHD are considered chronic conditions for kids.

So if you look at like the sort of distribution, it's primarily ADHD, learning disabilities, and asthma.

Around 10% of kids have asthma.

More kids getting diagnosed with learning disabilities, I think, is a good thing.

I think if kids need help and they're getting the help that they need, it's now about 8% of kids have a learning disability of some kind or another.

I don't think that's like a crazy high number.

We're not talking about like 96% of kids have a learning disability.

That doesn't indicate like over-diagnosis to me.

And like some kids do have fucking ADHD, and like it's really great that people are also getting diagnosed with asthma early, right?

I also think like it's easy to forget what the cultural dialogue was around ADHD in the 90s and 2000s.

And that was, it's all made up, psychiatrists are pushing these medications on your kids who don't need them.

Yeah.

It's over-diagnosed, and the medications themselves might be the issue.

And I think you can sort of see some of that peeking through here, right, as a core assumption, right?

It also, like, the thing that makes me like so profoundly uncomfortable with so much of his rhetoric is like the assumption is that neurodivergent kids are a problem to be fixed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have to find out the cause of autism so that there are not more autistic kids.

We have to find out the cause of ADHD.

Food dies, question mark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so sort of divorced from the science around those things.

And it is so, it so speaks to the sort of like, both the like panic panic around those issues and also a likely discomfort with people

he's also so obsessed with the statistic that one in 31 kids have autism now experts say that it's more like one in 36 but like that's three percent of kids and like that doesn't sound nuts to me I'm just like yeah around three percent of kids have this thing that is relatively rare but is also a real thing in the population like Is 3% the wrong number?

That seems okay.

It's like claiming to care about these conditions while like pretty overtly increasing the stigma facing people who have those conditions.

And that's the thing that pisses me off.

And also, I just feel like I know a lot of people who are struggling with that stigma part.

Yeah.

And I'm like, this isn't helping.

Okay, final excerpt.

Aubrey, get your slide whistle out.

No.

The ostensible purpose of this executive order is to set up this commission that is going to study, quote unquote, finally study these issues.

And so I'm going to read you a couple excerpts from the sort of purpose of like the commission and like what it's going to do.

And I want you to like use your little slide whistle when you hear like a conspiracy talking point.

I now all of a sudden have test anxiety where I'm like, oh no, am I going to fail?

Just use it the whole time, Aubrey.

Just says like background noise.

Okay, so this is like the purpose like the, uh, of these assessments that it's going to produce.

One, identify and describe childhood chronic disease in America compared to other countries.

Great.

Two, assess the threat that potential overutilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures posed to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanism of disease.

Assess the prevalence and threat posed by prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs.

Identify and report on best practices for preventing childhood health issues, including through proper nutrition and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.

He also has a thing earlier in the document where he talks about electromagnetic radiation.

I do have to say it was very funny to go through that whole thing and just silently, soberly slide whistle.

That's what these updates are going to be from now on.

Just Mike reading and Aubrey with her slide whistle.

A 21 slide whistle salute.

So this is, again, the thing that I will never stop shouting about.

All of these people saying that like, oh, he just wants to like make Americans eat better or whatever have to grapple with the fact that what he is saying is full of fucking misinformation.

This thing of like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are like making kids have autism or whatever has been looked at.

It's not fucking true.

I mean, a lot of this stuff is just like whack job, blogosphere shit.

And I think it plays to this sort of like oddly kind of like Luddite undertone, which is just like, there are new medical treatments.

They must be witchcraft, right?

I don't know why weight loss drugs is on here, too.

That's interesting, because he always talks about obesity.

And then he throws in, he's like, we need to look into the influence of weight loss drugs.

Yeah, no, he's very anti Ozumpic, very anti-everything.

He wants his wellness farms and stuff.

Yeah, I think that's the whole, like, the whole thing is lifestyle.

He thinks that lifestyle can cure every single illness.

Right, which is what you think when you have relatively good health.

Yeah, yeah.

When your health care has always been provided to you.

Yeah.

And when you've been taught that health is a meritocracy and you get out of it what you put into it, which is not true of almost anything in this.

life.

To me, it's like it's it's fundamentally hierarchical.

It's like there's a good way to live and there's a bad way to live.

And And if you're fat, it's because you're living in the bad way.

And if you live in the good way, you won't be fat.

Yeah.

And like, listen, my good bitches, if that is not like extremely conservative, sort of fascist thinking.

Exactly.

Like, I can look at you and know everything I need to know about you.

Like, if someone is willing to dehumanize anyone,

there is a good chance they are willing to dehumanize lots more people than just that group, right?

Speaking of dehumanizing, Aubrey.

No, what a transition.

The other kind of like first hundred days, like my first action in office thing that RFK Jr.

does is he joins the Trump administration's other ongoing witch hunts.

So on February 19th, he puts out guidance saying HHS takes action on President Trump's executive orders defending women and children.

This is the garbage about how like there's only two genders and like we finally, we're finally going to go back to only having two genders.

And I just want to read a quote from RFK Jr.

because I think there's still like a a little bit of residue of like, well, he's a Kennedy and like he ran as a Democrat and like maybe he's not so bad.

So here is a quote from him.

He says, actually, I'll send it to you.

This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government.

The prior administration's policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.

So no point in going into this in any more depth.

We've done like a million podcasts about it, but like this is, of course, a deranged, bigoted moral panic.

But I just want to emphasize that like RFK Jr.

is like a piece of shit on trans rights the same way that every other fucking Republican is a piece of shit on trans rights.

Also people will argue he's not a Republican.

I would argue you accepted a position with the Trump administration.

I don't know whatever Republican than that, right?

Immediately after this, he rescinds a Biden executive order basically saying that like gender-affirming care is fine and attacks on gender-affirming care, banning a form of fucking health care by law.

All of this is illegitimate.

The Biden administration put out this executive order.

HHS rescinds it.

Fuck off, asshole.

He also launches an investigation of Maine for allowing trans kids in sports.

The governor of Maine is a Democrat.

And then now the Trump administration is quite just sort of openly, illegally threatening to revoke all federal funding from the entire state over this.

So this is like an ongoing legal battle.

And then, this is just last week, he announced that there's going to be an online portal run by HHS where, quote, whistleblowers can submit a tip or complaint regarding the chemical and surgical mutilation of children to the HHS Office of Inspector General.

Jesus fucking.

So, this is again just classic fascist shit.

They set up these fucking hotlines.

They had one under the first Trump administration about immigrant crime, right?

What they do is they cast this net super wide.

They get a million reports.

A lot of them are really bad faith.

Like, oh, the school nurse is like doing surgery on kids or whatever.

And more people get caught up in this insane dragnet of like deportations, getting disappeared off the street.

This is very, very like classic authoritarian stuff.

Gender-affirming care for kids is like, you can go to the, you can go to hospital websites and be like, what do you offer?

Like, when are appointments available?

This is not like a clandestine secret thing.

This is like a part of healthcare.

And studies about it are published in peer-reviewed journals.

The idea that we'd have like a whistleblower hotline about it is absurd.

It's like whistleblowers about like knee replacements or something.

It's like a normal part of health care.

The concept of whistleblowing is like the idea that you would blow the whistle on internal operations of a company or institution that is systematically breaking the law.

Right, exactly.

Or committing unethical acts.

Which again, we have no evidence of in gender affirming care.

What we have evidence of is patients who want care seeking out that care and sometimes being denied that care.

Yeah.

Right.

Like if there's a problem here, it has much more to do with denials of care than it has to do with like, it's run amok or whatever.

The other witch hunt that he's joining is the administration's crackdown on quote-unquote anti-Semitism.

Oh, no.

So on February 5th, the HHS announces that it's initiating investigations of four medical schools for anti-Semitic incidents at their commencement addresses.

And I was like, I haven't heard of this.

Like, were people throwing things?

Like, was...

No, someone fucking wore a Palestine flag pin or some shit.

Aubrey,

it's gonna be nothing.

I'm sending you the link.

I'm sending you the link.

I'm sending you the link.

So I googled this.

I was like, commencement medical schools, like it's a very specific thing, right?

And the HHS press release doesn't name the schools or like what happened.

So I was like, where are they even getting this?

This goes to one article called Medical Schools 2024 Commencements and Anti-Semitism colon addressing unprofessional behavior.

This is like this random academic article.

Scroll down, Aubrey, to figure one.

It's in like a different color than the rest of the text.

It's images of different scarves that people are wearing with their graduation robes.

Some of them are wearing kefias.

Some of them are wearing Palestinian flag scarves.

That's it.

It's not anti-Semitic remotely to do that.

Like these are not anti-Semitic incidents at commencement addresses.

Like they're just.

And it's so fucking frustrating because anti-Semitism is a super real thing and it's wild to watch this administration just appropriate it as a way of quashing political speech.

Oh, also, you can scroll down to figure two if you want, which is like right down there.

I don't want, but I will.

And these are like anti-Semitic slogans that the students were holding, allegedly.

One of them says, stop bombing hospitals.

It's not like this is like misinformation or something.

Like this group is being falsely accused of something like, this is happening.

So to say that this is a fucking anti-Semitic slur and that somehow this this kid, which like I think is relatively brave for putting this on at their fucking commencement, this person is the problem rather than the bombing of fucking hospitals.

There's another one that is someone crossing the stage to presumably accept their degree and unfolding a banner that says end genocide, apartheid, Zionism, and something, something, something that I can't read and then free Palestine.

It says end your complicity.

End your complicity, free Palestine.

The core problem is the idea that we need some sort of exotic explanation for why young people would be offended at like entire cities being raised to the ground and like children starving.

Why doctors would not want

hospitals to be bombed?

I don't need an alternate explanation for this.

Like, wow, why are people doing this like totally irresponsible thing?

It's like, no, I think very straightforwardly, people are offended by images of children starving.

The idea that we're like casting around for like, what are their real motivations is fucking insane.

So anyway, this article, as far as I can tell, is like the only place previous to this HHS press release where this like anti-Semitic incidents at commencement addresses like thing was put forward.

So, like, we don't know what the consequences on these schools will be, but like, this is like a, this is becoming a real thing that people with power are wielding.

Yeah, and when you line that up with trying to rescind the tax statuses of universities,

trying to sort of pull grants and funding, like, there's just like so much very clearly politicized manipulation happening here.

So, there's also one, we won't get as into it, but there's also one about DEI.

There's a deranged article in the Washington Free Beacon about UCLA medical school.

They're giving in to woke DEI and that they don't have as many white students anymore, something, something.

Finally, someone's looking out for white medical students.

I'll finally have a white doctor in my life.

The article itself has statistics indicating that this has not happened.

It says that they've appointed this mega DEI president of UCLA Medical School, and it has statistics.

Basically, there's there's the same number of white people from 2020 to 2024, but there are now fewer Asian people and more Hispanics.

So like that has shifted.

But like the idea that like there's no merit-based admissions, like this is just like classic right-wing moral panic garbage.

But of course, HHS is now joining this and is like investigating UCLA.

So again, we see this pipeline from like bad faith, right-wing, tabloid nonsense into like actual government policy.

God damn it.

Okay, now that you're all pissed pissed off, let's talk about influencers.

Let's talk about influencers.

It's not going to get better.

Well, I'm excited, though, anyway.

Do you want to know why it's not going to know who our first influencer is?

Katy Perry in Space.

Jillian Michaels.

Oh, yeah.

We talk about off the show like pretty frequently, but we finally get to talk about her on the show.

Everybody wants a mean lesbian, but then she shows up.

It's all fun and games if she's on white lotus, but in real life.

So, Michael, while you were looking into the sort of official Maha agenda thus far, I was looking into some of the public figures that have lined up behind RFK Jr.

in particular.

And one of his biggest champions is Queen Gremlin herself, Jillian Michaels.

Friend of the show.

Enemy of the show.

Jillian Michaels.

For folks who are unfamiliar, Jillian Michaels was the trainer on the biggest loser.

Mike, are there any particular memories that you have of you did our biggest loser episode?

All I remember is her like lying down so she could yell at someone like closer to their face when they were like doing push-ups.

That's the image that has burned into my mind of like, it's not enough for me to be shitty to you from like three feet away.

I need to be like six inches away.

I will say, as someone who recently re-watched some biggest loser episodes, I thought she was awful.

And then I went back and watched those episodes and I was like, oh, my brain has been going easy on Jillian.

Oh, really?

She's so much worse when you go back and re-watch those old episodes than you can even like imagine.

One of the big ones, and we talked about this on our episode, was her shouting at a fat person on the biggest loser who was on a treadmill and was saying, like, was like wheezing and saying, I can't actually do this.

I need to take a break.

Jillian Michael screaming at them at the top of her lungs.

The only way you're getting off that treadmill is in a body bag.

Nice.

It's just a thing that you say to people, just as an adult.

A thing that you say to other adults.

Well, it's motivating, Michael.

And you say it because you care.

I'm actually like a really good person for being like a huge piece of shit to you.

In what I would argue is the least surprising turn in human history, Jillian Michaels is now a regular on Fox News.

She is also on News Nation.

She recently wrote an op-ed for the Daily Mail about how being trans is the result of social contagion and because people are just doing it because it's quote unquote fashionable.

You're not even an athlete, Jillian.

You just like work out.

You're just like good at working out.

She also has a podcast called Keeping It Real.

What?

It's not even like a pun.

It's not like biggest losing my mind.

If you go to Apple Podcasts right now and you pull up her podcast, there will be three recent guests just on the same screen without even like load more.

Those guests include Candace Owens, Bill O'Reilly, and Alan Dershowitz.

So she's in.

She's not like one of the reasonable ones.

She's like a full-on psycho.

She's in.

She just sort of started popping up on these shows like five to ten years ago.

Part of it is she had this program called Healthy Wager.

She still runs it.

That is the idea is you place a bet against yourself.

Oh, we've already talked about these.

These are such garbage.

Yeah.

And throughout all of this, I think this is really interesting.

This came up with a couple of the sort of like lady influencers that I looked into for this.

They're continuing to be platformed by like entertainment news and women's media.

So like e-news keeps giving a platform to Jillian Michaels.

It's too e-news

wither fashion police.

It's really notable to me how many of the folks that I started to sort of look into on this Maha End started out with some level of weight loss content.

Right.

and i wanted to just lift up that like people who have strident anti-fat views people who devote their time to making sure that other people look a way that is acceptable to them right are people who also buy into healthism and ableism in a really big way right it's very similar to this all this garbage about like sort of anti-trans stuff, but also just like, I had a purple-haired barista at Starbucks, and somehow that's like an imposition on my rights it's just like a hatred of difference i think you're right about like a core discomfort with difference and a core disdain for difference i think the thing

two things one the direction

what's the second thought leave all of the second thought you said one where's two

no the thing i was gonna say about julian michaels is that like the sort of core complaint that she has about a number of things, she is also very skeptical of Ozempic.

She is also very skeptical of weight loss surgery on the biggest loser.

She refers to it as, and I quote, taking the easy way out, which like I would encourage you to

just

pilot that, just see how that goes over with anyone who has had or performed weight loss surgery.

Also, just leave people alone.

The core assumption there is that if fat people don't want to be treated badly, they should just not be fat.

Yeah.

But also, don't be fat in the ways that I want you to not be fat, right?

Which totally erases Jillian Michael's own behavior from that equation, right?

It totally absolves anyone who is treating fat people like shit of having to think about their own behavior.

And it's the kind of thinking that shows up in a lot of conservative politics, right?

Yeah.

It's the, if that person didn't want to be sexually assaulted, they should have dressed differently or they shouldn't have been there, right?

Like, it is all of this sort of thinking that is like, there are no aggressors, there are only foolish people who make themselves prey.

Right.

That is the canary in the coal mine for a lot of people that their politics might not be as like rock solid and they might not be as deeply empathetic

as they might want you to think.

Although, Jillian Michaels, in fairness, never wanted anyone to think she was deeply empathetic.

That was never the message.

She's mean as hell, but now she's just mean as hell in a specific way.

So that one's just like a little like, where are they now?

And the answer is they've gone from yelling at fat fat people to yelling about trans people and immigrants on Fox News.

My next little section of like RFK Jr.

stuff is like the sort of decent things that he's done or like borderline decent things.

So maybe this will lift us back up.

Maybe this will lift our spirits.

We're talking about pharma ads?

No, we are talking about the measles outbreak.

This is moving very fast.

It's now in many states.

There are two deaths so far.

On March 3rd, the HHS releases a press release called Measles Outbreak is a Call for Action to All of Us.

And this is written, sort of officially written by RFK Jr.

The sub-headline is: MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.

Genuinely kind of stunning coming out of an administration run by this guy.

I was happy to see this.

Like, there were various things going on in social media of like, RFK Jr.

defends measles vaccine.

And I'm like, okay, great.

Like, lowest imagin bar.

He cleared it.

I'm happy about that.

However, if you read the full public statement,

it also says some slightly more out-of-pocket things.

So, here is a paragraph from later in the market.

Shocking.

It is also our responsibility to provide up-to-date guidance on available therapeutic medications.

While there is no approved antiviral for those who may be infected, CDC has recently updated their recommendation supporting administration of vitamin A under the supervision of a physician for those with mild, moderate, and severe infection.

Studies have found that vitamin A can dramatically reduce measles' mortality.

Boy, oh fucking boy.

So out of one side of his mouth, he's like, get the vaccine.

And then out of the other, he's like, well, but also you need vitamin A because vitamin A is like a miracle.

Take it from a guy who had an eating disorder.

Vitamin A is in fucking everything.

There is some data that vitamin A can kind of like in an inchoate way help strengthen your immune system when you have measles.

Like it can help you recover a little bit more quickly, although it's not like necessary in any way.

It's like, yeah, this might help.

But also, people are now taking it as a prophylactic because they think that it will prevent measles.

And there's no fucking evidence of this.

And taking vitamin A in large doses regularly is really bad for you.

So parents in Texas are giving their kids vitamin A regularly, and kids are coming into the hospital fucking sick.

Michael, this is the reason that Pete Evans' kids' cookbook got pulled from the shelves for vitamin A.

It's because there were recipes with mega doses of vitamin A that were designed for like toddlers and infants.

Dude, that's why we all don't have a copy of Bubba Yum Yum by Pete Evans.

There's also this, the following paragraph.

Tens of thousands died with or of measles annually in 19th century America.

By 1960, before the vaccine's introduction, improvements in sanitation and nutrition had eliminated 98% of measles deaths.

Good nutrition remains a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.

Vitamins A, C, and D and foods rich in vitamins B, 12, C, and E should be part of a balanced diet.

Notice the conspiracy language here.

Tens of thousands died with or of measles annually.

People did not die with measles.

That's like a COVID conspiracy myth, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Like,

they had COVID when they died, but that doesn't mean that's why they died.

And it's like, yeah, oh, if you die in a car accident, but you have COVID, it's listed as a COVID COVID death, which wasn't fucking true.

But this goes around conspiracy circles, and it's especially ridiculous with measles because most people who died of measles were fucking little tiny kids.

So just straight up misinformation.

And this whole thing of like, well, by 1960, we basically didn't even like need the vaccine because like sanitation and nutrition got like so much better.

Like he's implying that like the vaccine didn't matter because everything the vaccine achieved, we achieved with lifestyle beforehand, which is not true.

So it's like even when he clears the lowest imaginable bar, he still throws in conspiracy garbage and fucking vaccine hesitancy talking points.

Yeah, it's maddening.

Also, like, do you want to look at life expectancies before 1960, my God?

Yeah, for little tiny kids.

There's another, like, we now have outbreaks of whooping cough, too.

And, like, whooping cough used to kill like hundreds of kids a year.

And it's coming back.

It's like really dangerous stuff because people are refusing to get.

vaccinated.

I had to go, I had to go update mine because my parents didn't vaccinate me because they saw that documentary.

Are you kidding me?

Yeah, I had to go get it like a couple months ago yeah I had a friend who like admitted to me recently that he did not have his kids vaccinated until like I think they were teens or whatever and he was just like yeah man I was just in sort of like crunchy lefty spaces where people are like that's what the government wants you to do or whatever right like and he was just like so I just sort of like went along with that and whatever else yeah it's just really wild I think especially on the Maha stuff to just think about how many people I know who are like well they are poisoning our food.

Right, right.

Like the number of people I know who talk about endocrine disruptors without actually having any sense of like what that means or how it would function.

Yeah.

And I think it's just been really striking to me how much the people who think they are least vulnerable to this stuff are actually most vulnerable.

I think that's my point here.

Also like full amnesty for anybody who was like previously an anti-vaxxer or whatever.

Like if you come to the party late,

I'm not going to yell at you for how late you are.

I'm going to be happy that you're here.

So like good for your friend, good for my parents.

Like, it's, it's much better to sort of destigmatize people who change their minds on this stuff and be like, well, that's great.

You got vaccinated.

I think that's good.

However, people get there.

Yeah.

But this sort of stuff actually leads to like the next little string of RFK Jr.

initiatives.

So at HHS, he's also done a lot of stuff about food additives.

So on March 10th, he announces that the FDA is going to close the loophole by which food companies can assess that their own ingredients are generally regarded as as safe.

I don't know if you remember this from our daily harvest episode.

Yeah, grass.

The grass stuff.

So the idea is that in 1958, Eisenhower passed a law that basically established the modern food system and said that like every chemical that goes into food has to be tested and has to be safe.

However, because there was already an existing food supply, you had to have like a little exception for existing ingredients.

So like the one they always use is olive oil.

Lots of foods had olive oil and you can't just like, well, take all the olive oil out of the food and like we'll test it and make sure that it's safe.

You can say like, well, it's generally regarded as safe, or like baking soda.

So, this makes sense in its inception.

Since this time, there's now a process where food companies can self-certify that their ingredients are generally regarded as safe.

And this isn't necessarily checked.

There's kind of two different ways of doing this.

And one of the ways of doing it is like you have to submit an affidavit of research, and then the FDA can be like, okay, we're not going to contest this.

And then it goes forward.

But there's also a way that you just like notify the FDA, and the FDA is like, okay.

Since the 1950s, we've we've had more than 750 chemicals enter the U.S.

food supply and only 10 of them have gone through the process of like being tested by chemicals.

So like this is an actual thing and like left-wing think tanks have like also written reports about this.

We talked about it in the Daily Harvest episode.

It's like a real genuine problem.

This loophole in the FDA, like this is worth closing.

However, this also is like one of the sub, sub, sub bad reasons why you shouldn't have like conspiracists running things is because I don't fucking trust RFK Jr.

to like run this process.

If we leave it to him, then fucking measles is going to end up on the grass.

Exactly.

Just like a vial of measles and like your lucky charms.

Absolutely.

So like again, it's like there are people who are like, well, I think we should give him credit for doing this.

And like, maybe, but we haven't seen the outcome of this.

And I do not trust a person who has no fealty to like basic facts and who has a bunch of conspiratorial beliefs to run a fucking process like this.

I don't think the outcome of this is going to be positive.

Right.

It requires like a level of, if I'm thinking about like redesigning a system like this, right?

From a policy standpoint, this would require years and years of public engagement, years and years of buy-in building.

Exactly.

Such high levels of transparency that would be really difficult for someone who has never held office before.

It also requires not firing thousands of people, tens of thousands of people from fucking HHS, which is one of the other first things that he's done.

They've gone from 82,000 employees to 62,000 employees.

And just this morning, I saw that the NIH put out another report showing even more fucking cuts.

So again, any serious effort to make Americans healthier and to like address chronic illness would not have mass fucking firings.

It would have a huge increase in the capacity of the government to do stuff like this.

And then the people who stay get to stick around for like staff meetings where he's thrown around the R word apparently.

Yeah, you know, and then just like, Jesus God.

He also, in that same speech, said that like the deep state is real and shit.

He's also like a movie off his rocker.

Yeah.

He was like, it's real and it's not just Soros or whatever.

And I was like, oh, God, help us.

It's literally Elon Musk, though.

We got to do something about anti-Semitism while I blame a high-profile Jewish person for being the deep state.

The last thing we're going to talk about is he has in late March, until now, effectively embarked upon the Maha tour.

where he is like visiting different states.

And in the HHS announcement, it says, Senator Kennedy will celebrate new state laws that ban ultra-processed foods and dyes in public schools, restrict snap purchases of candy and soda, and ban the addition of fluoride to public drinking water.

So he's basically celebrating these like right-wing efforts to do like right-wing food shit.

The thing, again, removing dyes from school lunches, this is legislation that was just passed in West Virginia.

It's sort of an empirical question how big of a deal this is.

The idea that like there's a chemical additive that is like harming us is sort of plausible to me, but also that's like we need to actually look at research.

I don't, there's like also a fear-mongering component of this.

The thing to know about the food dyes stuff is that when you ask people like what's the issue, they will tell you it's hyperactivity in kids.

What they won't tell you is that the core question that most frequently gets researched is,

do food dyes exacerbate existing symptoms in kids who already have ADHD?

But because we're all playing playing one giant game of telephone about this shit, that has turned into it causes ADHD, right?

So it's leaning really hard into like straight up proud ableism.

The really bad one is this stealth effort that is happening in numerous states now to ban soda and quote-unquote candy from food stamps.

Have you heard about this, this like nationwide effort to take soda off of food stamps?

Yeah, it's just an attempt to make food stamps inaccessible to as many people as possible and to make them as confusing as possible and to make them as unappealing as possible.

Right.

It's sort of the hostile architecture approach to like public support programs, right?

Of course, it's also perfect for them because they can say, like, oh, well, soda is very bad for you and we care about the health of Americans and we're just trying to improve the health of Americans, right?

But of course, what this amounts to is just a further restriction on food stamps.

So 15 states have proposed bills to do this.

And actually, when he was running for president, RFK Jr.

published a editorial in the Wall Street Journal that said that he wants to exempt not only soda, but also quote, processed foods from food stamps, which is like significantly worse because soda, there's some issues with how to define soda, but like processed foods is just like no one knows what the fuck.

Like everybody has a completely different definition.

And so exempting quote-unquote processed foods could be a small category or could be like a massive category.

There is almost no food that you could argue is entirely unprofitable.

Exactly.

There's also the question of like, why is this happening all of a sudden, right?

If 15 states are doing something at the same time, that means that there's a push from like an outside actor.

So this entire wave is being pushed by a think tank called Foundation for Government Accountability, which is very open about the fact that it wants to basically gut every form of welfare.

So Biden expanded food stamps like quite significantly during the pandemic.

This organization has published op-eds arguing to roll that back.

The FDA also uses a specific like basket of goods when they're calculating food stamp amounts.

It's based on like the prices of various foods.

And there's like different ways you can do that.

There's like the thrifty bucket.

There's like the enough nutrition bucket.

There's like too much nutrition bucket.

There's like different ways of doing this.

And this organization has pushed for an even lower threshold to be used.

Like people should be eating even shittier and cheaper food than they are now.

So this is an organization that wants to cut food stamps.

That's not like a he said, she said thing.

All of these are designed as entry points into a larger sort of like set of movement values and like policy objectives.

And I think we get so far into like wanting to give everything a fair shake and wanting to both sides everything that we

turn off our critical brains and just allow ourselves to get guided by some of this stuff.

Luckily, I don't think this would make that much of a difference, honestly.

I mean, people are not spending that much of their income on sodas anyway, because soda is super cheap.

But on the other hand, why the fuck are we even doing this?

Like, there shouldn't be food stamps.

There should just be money that you get.

Like, the whole idea that like there's like right now, food stamps, like you can't buy hot food with food stamps.

You can't buy like paper towels and stuff with food stamps.

In most states, tampons and pads are not covered by food stamps.

Where you're just like, great, cool.

Is like a single mom with three kids supposed to go to the grocery store and get like raw broccoli and then like make nice roasted broccoli with olive oil for her kids.

Well, A, she doesn't have the time.

B, broccoli is expensive as fuck.

Right.

Like even if you agreed to the premise that like actually lifestyle is at the root of every everything, he also doesn't want to do the things that would make those lifestyle choices possible.

Yeah, it's just, it's, it's a, it's a thing that you say so you can get your weird conspiratorial anti-vax garbage into polite society.

It's not something he actually has any interest in doing.

If you look at the history of this man's life, like what has he spent the last three decades doing?

You find no evidence of doing anything for low-income people or doing anything about chronic disease.

You find a bunch of anti-fax garbage.

Right, and a bunch of rhetoric that like actively makes life harder for people who have chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, neurodivergence, all of that kind of stuff.

Yes.

So that is our bleak RFK Jr.

update.

Calgon, take me away.

Send me to the wellness farm.

No one is still with us, Aubrey.

Nobody.

Everyone too death.

They're like, this is too much.

This is a death march.

I hate it.

i want you to say two things one and then say something and then the episode ends and it's a cliffhanger and people have to tune in next time for the second thing next time on

40 year old woman's brain