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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
Buying a car in Carvana was so easy, I was able to finance it through them. I just.
- [00:04]
Matthew Remsky
Whoa, wait.
- [00:05]
Commercial Narrator
You mean finance? Yeah, finance Got pre qualified for a Carvana auto loan, entered my terms and shot from thousands of great car options, all within my budget.
- [00:12]
Matthew Remsky
That's cool.
- [00:13]
Commercial Narrator
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- [00:31]
Julian Walker
Hola mi gente.
- [00:32]
Commercial Narrator
Turn up the Latin flavor with Cafe Bustelo coffee. Choose light, medium, dark and dulce de leche roast. Whatever your vibe, we got you covered. Cafe Bustelo esta aqu?
- [00:57]
Derek Barris
Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spirit spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [01:08]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:10]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:11]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can search for our names there and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality if you you can also just access our bonus episodes every Monday via Apple subscriptions. We are independent media creators and we really appreciate your support.
- [01:44]
Julian Walker
Conspiracy275 it's never the guns Less than two weeks after a shooter unloaded 500 rounds at the CDC in Atlanta, Bobby Kennedy decided to gut that agency's violence prevention research by firing 100 employees. Less than a month later, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of a crowd of 3,000 at a Utah university. Millions saw the graphic clip online, which ignited a propaganda and disinformation culture war. Meanwhile, yet another child shot his classmates at a Denver high school that same day. It's not the guns, though, say the GOP pundits and politicians. It's the violent rhetoric from the left and those hateful transgender antifascists. Ask RFK Jr. And he'll confirm it's not the guns, but all those kids over medicated on dangerous antidepressants. But what are SSRIs anyway? Do hurt people hurt people? And do gun laws have any effect? Guns have always been as American as apple pie. But as with so much of what we cover on this podcast, the Dark Paranoia of Pandemic Conspiracism puts some extra worms in those those already rotten apples. Gun sales hit an all time high during 2020. You remember guys, the good old days of QAnon infected MAGA extremists toting guns outside state houses and schools, doing drag queen story hour and intimidating voters at ballot boxes.
- [03:18]
Derek Barris
Those were the days.
- [03:19]
Julian Walker
Yeah. Anyway, during that year over 21 million guns were sold and that's just going off the data from guns purchased legally. That was a whopping 64% increase from the previous year and it outstripped other spikes like after Obama was elected and after Sandy Hook, which are in second and third place amidst fears in both cases that gun laws would tighten up. We did have that 10 year assault weapons ban which was passed under Clinton from 1994 to 2004. It was never renewed under Bush and then blocked by the Senate when Obama tried to reinstate it. Sadly, the data is actually fairly inconclusive that this ban reduced gun deaths in the US but it is clear that after it expired, increased access to those weapons and more specifically to large capacity magazines does correspond with the trend of mass shootings becoming increasingly more deadly over the last 20 years. The violence Project reports that the use of assault rifles by mass shooters tripled during the 2000s. Large capacity magazines also result in 10 times the number of fatalities on average at each incident. It turns out that alongside Trump's and RFK Jr. S other assaults on the health of our democracy and population, we can also chalk this devastating social ill up to the conspiracy driven paranoia and distrust of institutions that reached fever pitch during COVID And while gun deaths per capita are still significantly higher in Latin American countries and Caribbean islands, some of which are US territories, the US leads high income countries with numbers averaging up to 10 times higher than countries like France, Germany, Canada and Australia. And deaths of children by firearm are up to 80 times higher than those countries. But since the Supreme Court transformed into its conservative supermajority in 2020 and the rubber stamping of so much of Project 2025 after last year's election, gun control laws are only getting more lax. We've seen the return of the bump stock, that terrible modification that allows for continuous firing via the gun's recoil against the trigger finger that it had been banned after the worst mass shooting in US history killed 60 and wounded 413 at a country music festival in Las Vegas over the last decade, the average number of people killed in a single mass shooting event has doubled. We've also seen expanded permissions for handguns with 29 states as of this year allowing permitless concealed carry. That's up from just four in 2013. Those numbers are terrifying when considered in the context of the last study I'll reference here. The Violence Policy center found that states within the US with weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun ownership correlated perfectly with high numbers of gun deaths. The most recent year they had data on that was for 2023. And the three top states for gun deaths were Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. The bottom three were Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. And this paints an almost too predictable picture of American gun politics. So beyond anything else, beyond violent movies and video games, beyond the Internet and social media, beyond hate speech and the supposed decline of Christian family values, the largest single variable in our normalized crisis of gun violence is simply access to guns.
- [06:47]
Matthew Remsky
You know, there's this Buddhist metaphor about the effect of karma, like increasing in weight and intensity over time. And you they use the example of the small banyan seed that grows into forest like single tree clump masses that you can't uproot. And that's what I feel like when it comes to guns and America and the real sort of problem of an intractable issue that it sort of compounds over time. Because honestly, with 300 million guns in the country and political violence rising, the window for amnesties or buybacks or legislative sort of initiatives is closing or closed. I would be arming myself if I lived there at this point. And then with the Kirk murder, that was a hunting rifle that was super common, you know, not the weapon you'd even want to ban from the huge numbers of folks who legitimately hunt.
- [07:45]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, we're never going to have gun erasure, but I think we can still try to have some forms of gun control. Because yeah, you're right, that bolt action rifle and the handgun used on the same day in Denver don't fit the AR15 typology. They're not the kind of weapon that a lot of that legislation would target. Nonetheless, the strong correlation between stronger gun laws and less gun deaths in certain parts of the country does mean it's not a zero sum game.
- [08:13]
Derek Barris
It kind of surprised me when the right came out a couple weeks ago, even before the Kirk murder, saying that transgender gender individuals should not have access to guns. And I speculated that the NRA wouldn't go for it. And a few days later, the NRA came out and was just like, guns are for everyone. So the the woke NRA now is is promoting them for. For anyone who wants them. I there are still buyback Programs that do exist, Matthew. But okay, you're right, it's not. It's not like it's going to solve the problem. But from what I see every year, different cities. I remember when I lived in New Jersey, Newark would regularly have them. They at capturing hundreds of guns on that day. But you're talking about hundreds of millions that exist in the country.
- [08:58]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And we also know from the photos that have been unearthed from the shooter's social media history and his family social media history that he really lived within a subculture that fetishizes guns, and especially fetishized big guns and militarized guns. So there's a whole tapestry there that.
- [09:18]
Matthew Remsky
He seems to be part of as a semi outsider. For me, what's so confounding about the American shooting crisis is that this absolute overwhelming number of guns meets a culture that I view as intensely contradictory and crazy, making, like in wealth inequality, war policy, a bunch of other areas. As a dual citizen, I've always felt this way. So, like, I cross the border and on one hand I recognize everything, but on the other hand, I know that the underlying logic about what can happen on any given normal day is just different. You cross the border and you're in a different place. And shortly after I was born on an Air Force base in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, my dad was enlisted. He worked as a jet technician. My Canadian mother said, this country is insane and we're getting out of here. Yeah, she had. And it wasn't about the people that she knew. She had friends. She loved my dad's parents in Detroit. But she could not comprehend a country where like half or more of the population at that time could watch body bags on television, come back from Vietnam and still think, yeah, we have to stay the course. And always she would say in the back of her mind was, so many people have guns. And it also didn't help that our neighbor out in the sticks, this is Oswego county, didn't like how much our dog barked. And so he just shot at him from the back porch. That didn't help.
- [10:54]
Julian Walker
Wow. Okay, let's transition to another aspect of this story. Mental health has sadly become. Republicans go to deflection from addressing gun laws, but we know they also vote to defund mental health services services. And they're not exactly therapy friendly in GOP circles, so it's hard to take them seriously. A tiny percentage of people with mental illness are also violent, so we should set aside any ugly stereotyping. Also, there are killers who are not mentally ill. They may have material, moral or ideological motivations behind their actions, even if those are at odds with the dominant society or the regimes of state sanctioned violence they have endured. But here's some research which supports a prescription I want to recommend of combining much stronger gun control with well funded and integrated mental health services. Everything that follows will be cited in the show notes so let's start with criminologist Paul Densley. He co founded the Violence Prevention Project with Gillian Peterson in 2017. It's the largest existing database of mass shootings going back to 1966 and correlating 150 life history variables based on interviews with perpetrators and their families. They identified four recurring early childhood trauma, a crisis point involving suicidality, validation via studying prior shooting by others, and access to firearms. They've also emphasized that shooters often leak their intended actions ahead of time as a kind of unheeded cry for help. In a 2024 interview, Densley discussed the overlaps between lone actor assassins and mass shooters, saying that the research into mass shooters actually gets its start with studying the political assassinations of the 1960s. And in both of these cases, the profile tends to be isolated, alienated men in their 20s who are not involved with a broader political movement but are acting out of personal grievance as a way of externalizing personal issues. This was right after the attempted shooting of Trump that he did the interview, and Densley noted that that shooter's Internet history showed that he may have been equally willing to assassinate Bide, Biden or Trump based on their speaking schedule in proximity to where he lived. Speaking of online radicalization, he said, we often see that hate comes late. Clever turn of phrase. It means that one of the final phases before they act could include latching onto an ideology that identified someone to blame and punish as the target of their performance of violence, which usually also results in their own death and tells us something about where they're at in their lives now. A study published in 2013 by Clark McAuley, Sophia Moskalenko and Benjamin Son in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism actually compared what they refer to as assassins and school attackers. They found that lone wolf terrorists that they'd also studied actually have three characteristics in common with these assassins and school attackers. They plan and perpetrate violence. The great majority do it alone, and a great majority act out of a perceived grievance, not out of any material self interest. So we're sort of clearing up the we're separating them out from other forms of criminality. We could say they identify six mechanisms of radicalization Personal grievance, political grievance, risk and status seeking, slippery slope and unfreezing. And that last one, unfreezing, refers to the loss of the everyday reassurance of relationships and routines. Now I would suggest here, as with vulnerability to cult indoctrination, those who've perhaps moved far from home or had someone close to them die, maybe they've lost a romantic partner or a job or been struck by illness, can be more susceptible to radicalization combined then with a personal sense of having been mistreated or identifying with a political sense of mistreatment of a group that you're in. And then a slippery slope of becoming desensitized to the idea and, or the experience of violence and a drive to regain respect and a sense of being seen through this spectacular violent act can tip them over the edge. They also found that even if they weren't in a violent group, having a relative, a friend, or a romantic partner who was, could also be a factor in how they chose their targets as a way of kind of defending or fighting on behalf of the honor of they loved.
- [15:30]
Matthew Remsky
Unfreezing is such an odd term and I'm wondering how they came up with it because it sounds like the people who aren't provoked to violence are somehow frozen or repressed. Did you get a sense of like, why they were using that term?
- [15:42]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, it is. You're right. It's a technical term that, that they came up with. I'm not sure of the origin of it. Okay, I would use something like unmooring. Right. That they've, they've, they've. They've become disconnected from, from their, their. They call them reassuring routines and relationships. Right.
- [16:00]
Matthew Remsky
I mean, speaking in fre, we could say that the superego unfroze.
- [16:04]
Julian Walker
Right.
- [16:05]
Matthew Remsky
It released its lock upon, you know, the drive, maybe.
- [16:09]
Julian Walker
Who knows what would otherwise have a somewhat normative repressive effect.
- [16:13]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, exactly.
- [16:14]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. So the last study I'll reference here is from 2015. It's by Emily Corner and Paul Gill. It's called false dichotomy, Mental illness and lone actor terrorism. And this paper does an excellent job of summarizing the kind of complex and contentious history of a field which has wildly swung from postulating that all terrorists must be mentally ill to saying that none of them could be mentally ill because they have to be disciplined and precise. And they point out that treating mental illness as a stark dichotomy, like either you are or you aren't in black and white terms, may be a mistake. And also that most of the prior research was on terrorists who acted in a group and not actually on lone actors. And so what they found was that lone actors were 13.5 times more likely to, to have some kind of mental illness than a group actor. And they were 18 times more likely to have a romantic partner or a spouse who was deeply involved with a broader movement. These are all researchers who are looking at the intersections and overlaps between data on terrorism, assassinations and mass shootings. And to me, it indicates that better funded and integrated mental health services and channels of communication between families, schools and law enforcement could play a huge role in, in reducing these types of events by identifying these folks sooner. In the days before the Charlie Kirk killing and the school shooting at Evergreen High school in Colorado, RFK Jr had appeared on Fox News and then again at a Maha press briefing to opine that guns are not really the problem. Rather, antidepressants may be the root cause.
- [17:55]
Matthew Remsky
In fact, when he was a kid, they used to bring guns to school all the time. There was no problem with it. We weren't shooting up the, the hallways.
- [18:03]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. So he has some memory of the golden age in which we all safely just brought guns to school and yeah, didn't shoot one another. So what could it be except the antidepressants. He was commenting at that time on the Annunciation Catholic School church shooting in Minneapolis on August 28, in which two children were killed and 18 were injured, along with three senior citizens also injured. He claimed that when he was a kid, we had gun clubs at school. Here's the exact quote.
- [18:29]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, there it is.
- [18:30]
Julian Walker
Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into school and just shooting people. He also announced that the NIH would be initiating studies to look into a proposed correlation between what he called over medicating our kids and gun violence. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time you're probably fine. That nice person at the table next to you will watch out for your best interest. But what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports? Your online data is not secure. And it doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack someone. A smart 12 year old could do it, but that data is valuable. Hackers can make up to a thousand dollars per person by selling your information on the dark web. But the type of encryption that ExpressVPN uses would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to break into. And this works on all devices.
- [19:37]
Matthew Remsky
It's easy.
- [19:38]
Julian Walker
You just fire up the app, click on one button, and whatever device you're using will now be secure. So I don't know about you, but I've been a victim of identity theft in the past. It is very time consuming, it is very annoying, it is disquieting and traumatizing. And so this is why I use ExpressVPN is especially when I'm doing research for this podcast and I have to be on Rumble and Telegram and clicking all kinds of links and cruising around the Internet into spaces where all manner of bad guys could be hanging out. But thankfully you probably don't have to do that. Nonetheless, it's good to keep your data secure in a variety of situations, so you can do that today by visiting expressvpn.com conspirituality that's E X P R E S s v p n.com to find out how you can get up to four extra months free.
- [20:26]
Matthew Remsky
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- [22:32]
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- [23:01]
Derek Barris
More Speaking of over medication, Julian, I want to look briefly at the history of the antidepressants that Kennedy decries. Now, the man regularly invokes toxicity when referring to pharmaceutical interventions he doesn't like, but it turns out his understanding and championing of certain forms of chemistry is highly selective given his love for methylene blue and of testosterone replacement theory therapy, for example. Yeah, pharmacological therapy for depression began in the 1950s with monoamine oxidase inhibitors or MAOIs, which prevent the breakdown of certain neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and tricyclic antidepressants, or TCAs, which makes mood regulating chemicals like serotonin and norepinephrine more available in the brain. Neither class of drugs was initially used to treat depression, which is quite common in pharmacology. Consider the discovery of phenothiazines in 1883. Ironically, the story of pharmacology begins with one of Kennedy's favorite tinctures, methylene blue. This happened when German scientist Paul Ehrlich was staining cells with phenothiazine, which was a popular textile dye. It made your blue jeans blue, and it was also a breakthrough application that won him a Nobel Prize. Methylene blue is a derivative of phenothiazine. Ehrlich speculated it could treat malaria, but that didn't pan out. His work, however, laid the foundation for future research and led to the development of prometheizine, later used to first treat allergies. Thanks to its Antihistamine properties. Then it became an antipsychotic. When maritime doctors in Tunisia noticed that it had a peculiar side effect. It made soldiers calm and somnolent. So, yes, to use modern wellness influencer speak For a moment, RFK Jr. Is drinking industrial dye stains.
- [25:17]
Matthew Remsky
You know, these stories are so extraordinary, and I think they present this narrative split that is hard for a lot of people to process because there's this, like, serendipitous discovery pathway involved in, you know, discovering that textile dyes have a particular effect that, you know, happens to be calming or something like that. And, you know, the. The feeling is, whoa, we found out that this thing works totally by chance. Isn't it amazing how we put stuff together and learn against all odds? We learn about brain chemistry in textile mills. And then on the other hand, I think that stories like this offer the narrative pathway of. So you're telling us that this evil industrial world, like the satanic mills of Blake, gives us miracle substances. And in that sort of division, the context gets conflated with the discovery. And I think it's easy to see how the aggrieved or the conspiratorial mind can say, oh, isn't this a sly way of telling people that the textile mill is good and healthy? Or it makes good things or that it, you know, it benefits us in some way. You know, and I think we all face the same contradiction over things like military tech that gets personalized into the, you know, personal computer space and things like that.
- [26:43]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, with the. With the mill, it's like you're telling us that the very project of industrialization that so separated us from nature and from living in the soil and turned us into these exploited workers under conditions that were deeply toxic, somehow out of all of that comes something that can be wholesome and good for your mental health.
- [27:07]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, that chilled us out. I mean, it's like I can imagine Musk sponsoring a study showing that kids exposed to cobalt, you know, or whatever, in the minds of. Of Democratic Republic of Congo, like, lowers cancer rates while they're, you know, getting minerals for electric batteries. And so more kids should be sent down to the mines or something like that. You can see it happening, right?
- [27:29]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [27:29]
Derek Barris
One of the reasons, I believe, is because. And you probably heard me stumble over a couple words, is because they're all multisyllabic. So people. And this was shown when Kennedy walked around in Washington being like, pronounce this, and senators couldn't pronounce the words. And then you would have actual researchers say, oh, that's. That's salt. But because we use Latin derived terms that have many syllables for really, for coding reasons, for them to understand. For researchers to better understand the. The lineage of where they come from and how they interact. Well, because that spills over into the mainstream, people are like seven syllables. No way. That can't be good for you. And as basic as it sounds, I think that really makes an impact. Impact.
- [28:14]
Matthew Remsky
The coding is about categorization and etymology, right?
- [28:17]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [28:18]
Derek Barris
Yes.
- [28:18]
Matthew Remsky
Okay.
- [28:19]
Derek Barris
Yeah. But like you keep hearing me say thiazine, so we can trace different forms of that back to Ehrlich.
- [28:26]
Matthew Remsky
Right?
- [28:26]
Derek Barris
Right. And so 70 years later, we're discovering these chemicals for depression use. But it's based off of his research. And you can tell that because you see thiazine at the end.
- [28:37]
Matthew Remsky
Right. Okay.
- [28:38]
Derek Barris
It is a lot to process and understand, but it's important because basically all drugs are derivatives of previous chemical experimen. So many discoveries are made when researchers are looking for something else. How about lsd? Because it was originally used as a stimulant for circulatory and respiratory aid. Speaking of depression, maois were discovered during tuberculosis treatments where patients displayed unusual, unusual mood elevations. TCAs were found to improve depressive symptoms during schizophrenia trials. These discoveries prompted the first biological psychiatric theories, which suggested that depression was linked to deficits in key neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and serotonin. While both were somewhat effective, they caused serious side effects like heart problems and seizures. So researchers kept looking. I should note that all of this is occurring during the tranquilizer revolution. It's really important for this story. This is also a class of drugs that were developed from Ehrlich's research. Psychiatrists began using one of them, Thorazine, in therapy in 1952 because of its targeted effect, which, as you flagged earlier, Matthew, it chilled people. The out side effects were rampant, though. In 1955, meprobamate was brought to the market. This was discovered when researchers were developing a penicillin preservative, and they noticed it calm rats down without knocking them out. That was the targeted effect. It was later christened Mill Town in honor of a sleepy suburb next to Johnson and Johnson's World corporate headquarters in New Brunswick. And it became the world's first blockbuster drug, with over a billion pills produced in 1957. Now, ironically, I grew up in Milltown, and my college, Rutgers, is next to JJ's headquarters. I also worked in the emergency room of Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson and Johnson University Hospital. So Pharmacology is sort of baked into my existence.
- [30:49]
Matthew Remsky
One other thing that as I'm listening to you, Derek, I'm cluing into about how difficult it is for the Maha mind to accept this type of, you know, scientific progress is that the whole idea of the targeted effect seems to be just sort of categorically different from how we understand, you know, the things in the world that we relate to, to have holistic effects upon us. It's like, you know, you know, if you have a certain type of vegetable, it'll have a range of nutrients, and yet when you apply one of these chemicals to a particular symptom, it will, might have a targeted effect in one place, but then it will have a bunch of side effects that you weren't expecting. And I think that's, that's difficult for people to process. There's this. No, I don't know, there's something about. They seem to be two different languages. It's like this, this broken down, very specific language of chemistry is trying to interact with, you know, being and existence and something that feels to people to be networked and systemic and holistic.
- [32:00]
Derek Barris
They all want to be shamans, or a lot of them do.
- [32:02]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [32:03]
Derek Barris
And this idea that you could just travel somewhere and fix somebody whole cloth is very seductive to a mind that, that doesn't really understand how the scientific process works.
- [32:13]
Julian Walker
And yet at the same time, if you drink ayahuasca or you eat the peyote cactus, a lot of times when you have mushrooms, there's the targeted effect of the mind expansion and whatever psycho spiritual healing you might experience. But you also tend to throw up a whole bunch because there's a bunch of stuff in there that's toxic to your body.
- [32:30]
Matthew Remsky
Yes, but that's not a side effect. That's detoxing, that's purging. Right. So the side. Okay, so the side effect is something that we, we accept, I suppose, in the holistic world.
- [32:38]
Julian Walker
But you can get, you can get pharmacologically extracted active ingredients from all of those plants and have none of the side effects and all the benefits.
- [32:48]
Derek Barris
But that's not natural because, for example, in ayahuasca, the combination of the natural ingredients is still chemical based. So it's only certain chemicals in there that are having the effect that it's having. And yes, the, the side effects do exist. I never threw up in ayahuasca, but the next day when I had to, it was not pretty every time. So it does something to your digestion that, that you can't process. Regardless, and you're going to most likely have some sort of effect from so Milltown again, where I grew up, the drug, it was a huge hit in 1956. One in 20Americans were using was huge in the mainstream. Comedian Merton Berle promoted it on his show, he Cool Miltown. Salvador Dali was paid to create an exhibit that captured the feeling of being on this tranquilizer. As with many early drugs, though, side effects started to take off the more people use them. And within a few years it was rescheduled. It was eventually taken off the market. But tranquilizers open the door for antidepressants. In the 60s, experiments revealed that serotonin plays a vital role in mood regulation, inspiring interest in serotonin reuptake as a therapeutic target. Scientists believe that increasing serotonin in certain brain regions could relieve symptoms of depression. This is known as the serotonin hypothesis, and it is completely contested. It was contested in the early 70s, it's still contested today. But it caused drug developers to focus on this neurotransmitter pathway. And so SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, became the first class of antidepressants designed with this particular strategy in mind. Chemists began searching for molecules that could modulate the serotonin transporter without negatively impacting norepinephrine or dopamine. Again, this research originated from modifications to phenothiazines. The first SSRI, zine, was withdrawn in 1983 due to rare cases of Guillain Barre syndrome syndrome. Then you get Fluoxetine, or Prozac. This was developed at Eli Lilly, and it was approved by the FDA in 1987. Known as a miracle drug, it has helped millions of people and was initially thought to have fewer adverse effects. And so SSRIs quickly became the standard for depression treatment. And didn't just treat depression, but also anxiety disorders, ocd, ptsd, and panic disorder. And yes, they definitely have side effects. You have gastrointestinal disturbances, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, irritability, and in rare cases, increased suicidality, particularly in adolescence. This created a growing amount of public distrust, which led to more people questioning the chemical basis for depression. If Miltown was requested by name, which was really happening a lot in the 50s, so was Proac. Due to the flood of advertising on television and in magazine magazines. Peter Kramer wrote a bestseller in 1993 called Listening to Prozac. And he introduced the idea of cosmetic psychopharmacology. And this is the notion that you can feel better than well, which, as we Know is pretty common in wellness influencer speak and biohacking spaces. Now optimization comes straight line right from there. You have the tech people in the early 80s who are playing with all sorts of pharmacology and you have have this basically it's in the water, it's in the air. The idea that you can optimize in particular targeted ways. Prozac was also being called out for suicidal ideation at the time. However, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights petitioned the FDA for its withdrawal. A high profile FDA review found no causal link between Prozac and suicide or violence, but anecdotes from some patients and Doctors continued. Still, SSRIs remain first line therapy for depression and anxiety disorders. While research continues on creating better therapeutics that treat a wide variety of people, don't have as many side effects, and fit into our evolving understanding of mood disorders. We should just know it's really no different than what is happening with autism. There are better diagnostic criteria, we have a better understanding of how different individuals react. And so we are, are trying to create better therapeutics for it. There's benzodiazepines which were introduced in 1960 and many people take Xanax today. That's what I was prescribed when I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. And for a short period it was quite useful for me. Should also note that a lot of these drugs are only recommended for short periods. So a lot of the systemic effects that happen over time are probably because there's really no recommended tapering processes for people who want to get off them. And that is a real issue. You also have the first SNRI or serotonin or epinephrine reuptake inhibitor, which hit the market in 93. And more recently you have interventions like ketamine that have come onto the market. Kramer's better than well thesis triggered ethical debates over medical enhancement versus treatment. And I feel like Kennedy has tapped into this lineage of criticism. We know that SSRIs like Prozac have helped millions of people deal with mood disorders. And we know there are side effects in some people. Research consistently shows that interventions like talk therapy in conjunction with pharmaceuticals work better than pharmaceuticals alone. Yet in America, that's cost prohibitive to many people who can only for afford a prescription. And you hear that kind of nuance come from Kennedy, who has repeatedly opposed socialized medicine. Yet as with many things that he says, there's a grain of truth, all chemicals have side effects. But as is his nature, his myopic focus on antidepressants, which have helped many people with crippling depression or anxiety navigate their lives. It obscures more than it reveals. Could their use have aided in some shootings? It is certainly possible. But to suggest that they're a root cause of gun violence is a convenient way to avoid conversations about gun control or as I just mentioned, socialized medicine. Two factors that certainly affect gun violence more than pharmaceuticals.
- [39:34]
Matthew Remsky
You know, for me, one standout sentence from you, Derek, here is better. The better than well thesis triggers an ethical debate over medical enhancement versus treatment. And I feel like RFK Jr. Is tapped into this lineage of criticism. So 100% agree that this is kind of a wedge point or irritant for the Maha sensibility because the notion of harm reduction violates the wish for the miraculous cure. And the idea that some people might actually need non self generated, but also not divine help really messes with her sense of meritocracy and spiritual alignment.
- [40:11]
Julian Walker
Yeah, so this, this whole tension between whether something is natural or not is very much at the forefront with. But I want to also reply, Derek, to where you're saying that. Could it have, could SSRIs have contributed to some shootings? Yes, the data shows that about 1% of. Of these kinds of shooters have ever been on antidepressants. And I think that the population size, it's something like 11%.
- [40:35]
Derek Barris
And that's the thing about these conversations, because if I were to say it's never affected anyone, then you'd have critics saying, no, we, we can show you that it has or they've been on it. And I think that is always important to just like vaccine side, they, they affect such a minute part of the population. And yet if you were to deny that there are any, you would get so much pushback. And but in the broader scope of public health, it is such a non or such a small number, almost insignificant. And yet you have to recognize it. And this is always the tension between like the wellness influencers and actual researchers. That is, they will acknowledge that there are rare cases of it, and you have to acknowledge it. But they're not speaking determinist in that sense. And wellness influencers love to speak deterministically.
- [41:24]
Matthew Remsky
Well, you have to acknowledge it because you want to, we want to find the cause for that. You want to try to mitigate the actual problem. So I mean, one of the core reasons that Maha is a fascist movement with a religious psychic structure is because the Maha person, I don't think, is able to abide the fact that some people just go through unsolvable material Challenges that have nothing to do with willpower or beliefs. They are facts of luck or nature. So the irony is that, you know, Bobby looks out in the world and sees autism, which, you know, where there are estimates, you know, currently that up to 20% of the human population is neurodiverse in one sense or another or one in five people. So it's obviously a natural variation and he has to find a pathology for it. Like God would not have intended for some people to be autistic or else my God is cruel and unfair. But actually maybe your God is a God of diversity, you know, and you can learn about that instead of deciding what a child must be based on your own biases and anxieties. And another thing I want to note about Maha eugenics is that it's different from Nazi eugenics. Aside from, you know, not being at the let's just murder you now stage. Unless you're Brian Kilmeade on Fox who just blurted out that unhoused people should be euthanized. But the Nazis didn't have to manage the contradiction of playing God and deciding what humans must exactly be because for the most part, they didn't care about God, they didn't believe in God. But Maha Christians have something more difficult to negotiate internally. They have to independently decide what God wants humans to be while also pretending to remain humble servants of God. It's really shameful. Yeah.
- [43:19]
Julian Walker
And last thing here I started off saying that Republicans tried to deflect from any kind of gun legislation to mental health. If they really cared about mental health when it comes to this particular topic, they would actually be advocating for finding the best solution that would incorporate some kind of therapy and probably some kind of pharmaceutical treatment for people who might be at danger of enacting some kind of murder suicide. The way that a lot of of these young kids end up doing.
- [43:58]
Matthew Remsky
Bundle and safe.
- [43:59]
Julian Walker
With Expedia you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row we were made to quietly save you. More Expedia made to travel savings vary.
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Matthew Remsky
And subject to availability.
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Julian Walker
Flight inclusive packages are at all protected.
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Matthew Remsky
Earn skills weeks, not yours. Visit phoenix.edu it's back to school season.
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Julian Walker
Put me in just one Clorox wipe on a team we can take on. Crayon smudges, sticky fingerprints on every surface, sneezes on the door handle, juice box explosion by the sink, snack crumbs. And don't even get me started on the bathroom passes.
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Julian Walker
Think about it. Bathroom passes clean.
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- [44:59]
Matthew Remsky
You know, I said several episodes back that I've spent way too many months of my life trying to make sense of the cognitive train wreck that is RFK Jr. But when I step back and I really try to think about how he's leapt from a lifetime experience of catastrophic gun violence in his own family with clear political and material causes to being convinced that gun violence in schools is somehow not related to politics or policy, but rather caused by medications that like 3.6% of school age kids take to reduce anxiety or lift depression or to manage the social stress of being neurodivergent. I enter some new layer of like mystifying hell because this is a guy who sees most things in terms of geopolitical or tycoon capitalist intrigue. But then when it comes to mass shootings in schools, he turns to conspiracy theories focused on pharmaceutical corruption. I mean, maybe that's the connection. Maybe it's also easier to imagine, and not totally untrue, that the intent of a corrupt elite is to amass wealth no matter who pays the cost. I mean, he should know. He's been around elites all of his life. But his fictional answer comes at the expense of digging into how and why why a kid might be influenced by all of the factors that you were talking about, Julian. By, you know, ideology, by white supremacy, by anti Semitism, or by the incoherent attention seeking, hilarity and violence of shitposting, which we're all slowly learning about as more becomes known and many things are unclear about Tyler Robinson. There are no conclusive causal links between mental illness and mass shootings. But there's still a lot of debate on the problem because of the noise of self reporting and the problem of poor access to mental health care, especially in decades past. I looked at the Columbia University's mass murder database, which covers 1700 plus incidents between 1900 and 2019 and shows that only about 5% of mass shooters have severe mental illnesses like psychosis. About 25% are associated with non psychotic psychiatric conditions like depression. So according to that data set, at least the majority of mass shooters including school age offenders do not have diagnosed mental illnesses. And again, some critics say that this all might be be lowballing things because of self reporting and poor access to mental health care and diagnoses in days gone by, but I haven't found significant rebuttals of those general findings. And then for our present time, this data set shows that only about 4% of mass shooters over the past several decades had taken antidepressants, including SSRIs at some point in their lives. That means not necessarily at the time of their crimes, and that's way lower than the baseline rates of antidepressant use in the general population. So 4% of US school children are prescribed SSRIs. And this data set has 4% of mass shooters of all ages over past decades on SSRIs. So by orders of magnitude there are more kids using SSRIs than kids using SSRIs and doing mass shootings. And my layperson's question is, is, isn't it just as likely that SSRI use is having a positive and preventative effect against violence in schools? Just like say, hmm, vaccines are having a positive and preventative effect on preventable infections.
- [48:59]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and thank you for that Matthew, because I was remembering incorrectly I said 1% earlier, but I'm remembering the exact sentences that you got that from from my own reading too. Yeah, 4%.
- [49:09]
Matthew Remsky
So if we take medication and you know, the confusing material around mental health diagn out of the mass shooter focus, then we have life stressors that can become acute relationship problems, economic stress, social isolation, and volatile Internet cultures that remix and co opt every piece of agit prop from every political direction to create a flood of shitposting that at a certain point becomes real. So as the picture emerges of Tyler Robinson, we get some indications in that direction. GOP family, terminally online kid. You know, I wonder if that's with little supervision, perhaps swept up by groiper bloodlust against Charlie Kirk and Turning Point for not being black pilled enough and then etching his shell casings into artifacts of 4chan alienation it seems.
- [50:07]
Julian Walker
Which also also goes along with some of the research I mentioned earlier about perhaps studying and perhaps emulating other shooters.
- [50:13]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, exactly, because this is a feature of a number of shooters recently going back to Christchurch. There are really not many people who understand that culture, particularly because it designs itself to be impenetrable via irony. None of those people who understand this culture are in Congress and few of them work for major media platforms, especially since the attacks on disinformation journalism following Trump's second victory. You really have to be embedded in these cultures to understand them. And I don't see a lot of incentive for people to learn about them either because like, shitpost assassinations don't serve established narratives. And I just want to flag that way back, I think almost in our first year, we did an interview with a friend of the pod, Dale Barron, who really broke ground on all of that culture in his 2019 book It Came From Something Awful. I'd also suggest viewing somebody named Cy Cantarell's eight minute breakdown of black pill accelerationism. That'll be in the show notes.
- [51:16]
Derek Barris
I saw someone comment that we're still trying to teach boomers what a message board is and you're expecting them to understand grapers now.
- [51:23]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, and, and really it, it should be people like Cantarell who, who are just sitting at the desk at Washington Post. Right. I want to say that at the center of these overlapping panics over, over medications and helicopter parenting and then real radicalization threats via online shitposting is the specter of the young depressed or anxious or immiserated man or boy. Like who is he? What shall we do with him? What is behind his eyes in that terrifying mugshot after the massacre? Is he evil? Is he a political enemy? Is he poisoned by vaccines or SSRIs? Is he under the spell of Andrew Tate or wokeness or trans ideology? So for me, the mystery menacing boy is kind of like a focal point, a talisman or an idol of our anxiety when something seems to make him understandable or approachable. The culture's really gratified. So 15 year old Owen Cooper, I don't know if you guys saw this, just won the Emmy for his excellent performance in adolescence, which we covered. And Cooper is particularly valuable as an actor because he can play this inscrutable kid, but then be interviewed as the normal kid you recognize and relate to. So he performs this role of black pill whisperer or shaman. He's safe because he was only playing that role. But speaking as the parent of two boys who share that age and demographic with kids who wind up in mugshots, it's pretty clear to me that punditry speculation on what's wrong with our boys is typically based on a failure of nuance and a failure of on the ground engagement with their lives. And the paradox is, is that some of the biggest media properties out there about struggling boys are these kind of statistics based galaxy brain takes in which no really solid in real life boy in trouble gets interviewed Like Richard Reeves's book, he talks about interviewing one kid. I know he goes on to do other interviews later, but his main book of Boys and Men is not based upon fieldwork. Jonathan Haidt and Scott Galloway are no doubt concerned about the mysterious boy they can't understand or reach. But the only real tweens and teens they engage with seem to be their own right. And although Galloway talks about mentoring the sons of his friends, that's a really narrow demographic. So what I see in these discussions is, is two layers of abstraction that have different political valences. There's demonizing on one side and then there's hand wringing on the other. And the demonizing abstraction seeks to blame political enemies for the kid's condition and make the kid into the debased acolyte of the other. And that's what we get with the insane early projections onto Tyler Robinson from Nancy Mace and legions of MAGA flying monkeys before anyone even knows his name. My favorite Twitter joke was, he's trans. Nope. The bullets are trans. Nope. His girlfriend is trans. Oh, maybe. And then we have Stephen Miller tweeting in the hours after Kirk's death, addressing both his killer and anyone who didn't respond to the news in the way he wanted them to. Julian, do you want to read that?
- [55:03]
Julian Walker
There's an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted, and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.
- [55:19]
Matthew Remsky
So that framing isn't going to fly very far outside of maga. But there's another option, which is hand wringing, which I see coming more from and appealing more to the center. And hand wringing has this horizontal quality because it's often about parents, low key, attacking each other across class and party lines over things like disability discipline, screen time, the appropriateness of gaming or social media. And, you know, it really kind of stinks. Like the tensions on the soccer field sideline or in the stands at hockey. And it rides on the performative parenting that gets monetized on Instagram. And to me, there's often this abdication of class solidarity amongst parents. Like it's hard enough living in often isolated nuclear units, but then with competitive parenting, parenting, people get to express contempt over how their neighbors are fucking up. Like, I would never feed my kids Froot Loops. That's not just a personal affirmation or commitment. It's also a dig at the mom down the street who has Froot Loops poisoning her home and it's just a really cheap and maudlin way to score social points. But I think that's where I see Bobby really making his mark with his lies about SSRIs, because within the general penalty panic about whether we are good enough parents that we shouldn't need to offer our kids medication, there's this feeling that medication is a sign of parental failure. Whether we're good enough parents that we should remember how well things went in the 1970s and the 1980s when we didn't have all of this stuff, whether we're better than that, even though we now are aware of how toxic food dyes and Fruit Loops are and so on.
- [57:07]
Julian Walker
Allegedly.
- [57:08]
Matthew Remsky
Allegedly Trumpism mobilizes both streams. So Miller can attack boys as brainwashed radical leftists and MAHA can make boys the victims of progressive mollycoddling and that takes chemical form in vaccines and SSRIs. But the latter can be a bridge to the centrists who might not associate with MAGA at all, who make this same type of argument about self responsibility. The MAHA version relies on chemical purity like you're a bad parent if you resort to these toxic drugs, but the centrist version relies on parenting perfectionism. You're a bad parent if you coddle or accommodate or pander. Currently I'm reading an advanced reading copy of Scott Galloway's notes on Being a Man and there's a lot of parts of it that are really compelling. And you know, I'll have more to say about it later. But his general answer to the alleged suffering of boys and men as a class is most broadly competitive. Bootstraps, tips and tricks. So here's a sample of how he presents that sort of horizontal attack on other parents.
- [58:15]
Julian Walker
Julian Some boys never make the transition to creating surplus value. Concierge, bulldozer and helicopter parents contribute to more self indulgent young men than almost any other factor. The eighth winningest kid lines up to receive a trophy. The phony feel good school ecosystem with its lack of emphasis emphasis on fitness. That version of masculinity is actively bad for young men. It tells them nothing is their fault and that they're responsible for the successes but not their failures that they can sit passively by and still be winning. They get to marinate in negative surplus value their whole lives while believing they're still being good citizens.
- [58:54]
Matthew Remsky
So all right, would you be surprised to know there isn't a single citation for any of the stereotypes types? Or that his book says nothing about which boys might need what type of care and support. I mean, Galloway is too smart to have any opinions on SSRIs, and he does do an okay job in connecting the suffering of boys to the immiseration of wealth inequality. But I do think he's a good example of the core axiom that this panic about boys and men relies on, from the demonizing to the hand wringing. An axiom that Bobby exercises every day, which is that you find anything you can to point at that does not involve changing the basic conditions of competition and inequality that young men and all of us struggle with. So what the maha to centrists share I think is a conspicuous silence on material support, universal healthcare, free education, college debt cancellation, maybe even a public works employment guarantee. Who knows? I think it's easier to catastrophize about boys needing Prozac and blaming parents if they use it than it is to imagine building a better world for them.
- [60:31]
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