By Steve BermanThe country once dodged a bullet. This time it might hit its target.
It’s January 11, 2017, and then-President-elect Trump’s transition team—a disorganized three ring circus led by clowns—found Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. too much of a crank to seriously consider as leader of a panel on vaccine safety. RFK Jr. is of course the son of the assassinated attorney general and presidential candidate, and the nephew of JFK himself. And for years, he had been on the bleating edge of the herd of sheep known for wooly resistance to all vaccines.
Since 2005, Kennedy had pushed the thoroughly disproven claim that the preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines causes autism. He represented Massachusetts as a Democrat in Congress, and in April, he announced his candidacy for the presidential race in 2024, opposing President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. Yes, it’s a longshot. But Kennedy’s status as practical royalty in his party, plus his own anti-vaxxer views on COVID-19 have brought him a lot more attention than your normal run-of-the-mill conspiracy nutjob.
The attention attracted, bien sûr, Joe Rogan, whose podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, is one shy of 2,000 episodes. Episode 1,999 featured RFK, Jr. spreading his paranoid fantasies. This isn’t the first time Rogan has entertained COVID anti-vaxx conspiracies to his 14.9 million subscribers.
In 2022, a letter signed by a group of medical professionals asked Spotify to remove a podcast for “potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by” what they called “fake information about vaccines.” Rocker Neil Young and other artists joined in, pulling their music from the platform. The company responded by disclosing the full value of their 2020 deal to retain Rogan: $200 million. So we all now know what the truth is worth: a lot less the lies.
Rogan plies the waters of conspiracies like a yacht captain island hopping the south Caribbean for clients ranging from drug lords to rich Youtube influencers. The more sensational, the more risky, the better for him. Because its all about the money, damn the lives.
In my mind, RFK Jr.’s sins are more forgivable than Rogan’s. Since 2005, RFK Jr. has firmly believed that there’s a vast international conspiracy, a medical illuminati, bent on pushing vaccines on an unsuspecting public as a means for global control. He really believes it. The 2000 “Simpsonwood” WHO meeting outside Atlanta RFJ Jr. claimed as proof, and he mangled the meeting’s 286-page transcript to construct his theory.
(As an aside, I literally laughed out loud when I read that Kennedy believed Simpsonwood was chosen because it was “nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy.” The site was a United Methodist Church-owned campground and conference center. My wife and I have stayed there to attend various conferences over the years, and I pass within a half mile of the site twice a day on my commute. In 2015 it was sold to Gwinnett County and turned into a riverfront recreation area. It was chosen in 2000 because every hotel room within 50 miles of Atlanta was booked.)
Listen to me here: there’s plenty of evidence that the public health community and its leaders like Dr. Anthony Fauci relied, and continue to rely, on manipulative and controlling tactics, political intrigue, controlling “science writer” publications, and the firm belief that no matter what anyone else says, they are right and everyone else is stupid. That community includes an unhealthy iron triangle between research institutions, drug manufacturers, and government public health officials. It’s well-lubricated by government grant money, patent speculators, tenured university researchers, VC-funded labs, big pharma, and their media remora.
Investigative journalists like Paul D. Thacker have documented this collusion and its own disinformation operation. There is every reason to be skeptical of universal pronouncements where minority opinions are treated like heresy and their authors are excommunicated as heretics. However, there is every reason to believe that the actual researchers who are trying to prevent deadly diseases, find cures for killers like Alzheimers, and protect children from preventable outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and—yes— adults from COVID-19, have professional ethics and good intentions in their corner.
It’s possible to believe as true, at the same time, that the Chinese government is lying its red-flagged commie head off about the true origins of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and also that the three major vaccines produced to counter it were done due to decades of solid, peer-reviewed research and given the best safety processes available while prioritizing getting the vaccines into the population as quickly as possible. Some problems are hard, and the experts need to be trusted over crankshaft lawyers like Kennedy, or blurt-spewing grifter ex-Presidents like the one in the White House during Operation Warp Speed.
Such distinctions as expertise on the actual subject-matter, years spent doing real public health work versus lawyering through desperate claims of parents looking for a scapegoat for their kids’ autism, are lost on Joe Rogan. I can forgive RFK Jr. because his crackpottery is based in his own paranoia and abandonment of reason.
I can’t forgive Joe Rogan, because he is actively proctoring the wide release of disinformation, “old-school antivax claims,” while following that up by trolling actual medical experts into “debating” Kennedy on his podcast. Rogan tweeted to Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine:
Peter, if you claim what RFKjr is saying is “misinformation” I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.
Professor Hotez has suffered the weight of ten thousand Twitter cranks, along with sniping from Elon Musk, Twitter’s proprietor and troll-in-chief, for his debunking of Rogan’s guest. Just to put this in perspective: Hotez makes $205,908, and has a net worth of around $4 million. As cliff-climber Alex Honnold (“Free Solo”) told a student who questioned him on how much money he has, Hotez is about as rich as a moderately successful dentist. Rogan got $200 million in 2020 from Spotify to talk into a tin-can, and Musk is the world’s richest man.
Hotez said that his Houston home was “stalked…by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate” Kennedy, within 24 hours of the tweet storm. This kind of real-world bullying of a scientist and academic subject-matter expert by two uber-rich trolls is unconscionable and execrable behavior.
There’s no reason a person like Dr. Hotez or any other serious researcher into virology should appear on Rogan’s clown show with a buffoon like Kennedy, with Rogan himself acting as the “moderator.” It would be a waste of time for someone like that to sacrifice his own dignity to suffer such fools. Worse, it would be almost criminal for the fools to profit from it. Even for $100,000.
I can forgive RFK Jr. I think he is suffering from some form of mental illness that does not permit him to accept facts outside his conpiracy-laden fantasy. The fact that he’s a Kennedy, and his own family has distanced themselves from his foolishness, and that he’s a candidate for president, should bring greater scrutiny on his benighted ideals. Instead, Rogan has chosen to double down on them, and promote the maniacal rantings of a man who couldn’t be convinced if the truth was tattooed on his face. Rogan has done so by engaging in a stalking campaign against an actual respected expert.
A pox on Rogan for his moral degeneracy.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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