BONUS: MAHA's First 90 Days

Summary

Maintenance Phase Podcast Summary

Episode: BONUS: MAHA's First 90 Days
Hosts: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Release Date: May 1, 2025
Podcast Description: Debunking the junk science behind health fads, wellness scams, and nonsensical nutrition advice.

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Introduction

In this bonus episode of Maintenance Phase, hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes delve into the first 90 days of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s (RFK Jr.) tenure as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The episode critically examines RFK Jr.'s policies, actions, and the broader implications for public health and governance.

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RFK Jr.'s Appointment and Initial Actions

Timestamp: 04:00 - 07:00

Aubrey and Michael kick off the discussion by highlighting RFK Jr.'s sudden rise to power and his initial communications upon taking office. Shortly after his confirmation on February 13, RFK Jr. deleted all previous tweets and made a public statement outlining his vision.

Notable Quote:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "We're going to examine every possible contributing factor to the epidemic. We're going to listen to the experts and to the dissidents." (04:23)

The hosts express skepticism, noting that while RFK Jr.'s rhetoric sounds promising on the surface—addressing chronic diseases and promoting transparency—it quickly veers into conspiracy-laden and misinformation-filled territories.

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Chronic Disease Agenda

Timestamp: 07:00 - 15:05

RFK Jr.'s executive order, known as the "Maha Executive Order," is scrutinized for its claims and underlying assumptions about America's health crisis.

Key Points:

• Misrepresented Statistics: RFK Jr. asserts that the U.S. has the highest cancer incidence rate, a claim Aubrey and Michael debunk by referencing data from the World Cancer Research Fund.

  Notable Quote:

  RFK Jr.: "Across 204 countries and territories, the United States had the highest age standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021." (08:31)

• Dismissal of Medical Progress: The hosts argue that RFK Jr. overlooks advancements in cancer treatment and detection, misrepresenting fluctuations in cancer statistics as indicators of worsening conditions rather than improvements in medical care.

• Overgeneralization of Chronic Conditions: RFK Jr.'s broad definition of chronic diseases is criticized as misleading, encompassing a wide range of conditions that naturally increase with age.

Notable Quote:

Aubrey Gordon: "It's really strange to assume that because we don't have hard and fast answers that no one's looking." (10:34)

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Influencer Involvement and Healthism

Timestamp: 31:02 - 37:34

The episode shifts focus to the involvement of public figures and influencers supporting RFK Jr.'s agenda, particularly Jillian Michaels.

Key Points:

• Jillian Michaels' Transformation: From a fitness trainer known for her role on The Biggest Loser, Michaels has transitioned to a vocal supporter of RFK Jr., endorsing controversial views on trans issues and weight loss.

  Notable Quote:

  Aubrey Gordon: "It's very similar to the 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." (35:21)

• Promotion of Ableism and Healthism: The hosts highlight how influencers involved in the movement propagate ableist attitudes, framing health solely as a matter of personal responsibility and stigmatizing those with chronic conditions.

• Dehumanizing Rhetoric: Aubrey and Michael critique the narrative that blames individuals for their health issues, arguing it erodes empathy and fosters a hostile environment for vulnerable populations.

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RFK Jr.'s Policies on Gender and Education

Timestamp: 22:00 - 30:57

RFK Jr.'s stance on gender identity and educational policies is examined, revealing a pattern of regressive and discriminatory actions.

Key Points:

• Reinstating Binary Gender Policies: RFK Jr. aligns with the Trump administration's efforts to enforce traditional gender norms, rescinding previous executive orders that supported gender-affirming care.

  Notable Quote:

  RFK Jr.: "This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government." (23:40)

• Anti-Trans Legislation: Initiatives to ban gender-affirming care for minors and investigations into policies allowing trans participation in sports are highlighted as actions that marginalize and harm the transgender community.

• Suppression of Academic Freedom: RFK Jr.'s administration targets academic institutions for perceived anti-Semitic incidents and undermines Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, further politicizing education.

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Measles Outbreak Response

Timestamp: 37:44 - 42:22

In a seemingly contradictory move, RFK Jr. addresses a measles outbreak, advocating for vaccination while simultaneously promoting unverified treatments.

Key Points:

• Promotion of Vaccines Contradicted with Misinformation: Although the administration emphasizes the importance of the MMR vaccine, it simultaneously advocates for vitamin A as a treatment, leading to confusion and potential health risks.

  Notable Quote:

  RFK Jr.: "While there is no approved antiviral for those who may be infected, CDC has recently updated their recommendations supporting administration of vitamin A under the supervision of a physician." (38:32)

• Misrepresentation of Historical Data: RFK Jr. claims that improved sanitation and nutrition alone nearly eradicated measles deaths by 1960, downplaying the critical role of vaccination.

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Food Policy and SNAP Reforms

Timestamp: 43:32 - 52:12

The hosts critique RFK Jr.'s efforts to reform food policies, particularly targeting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Key Points:

• Restriction of Food Stamp Eligibility: Initiatives to ban ultra-processed foods, candy, and soda from SNAP purchases are presented as attempts to "improve" public health but are argued to disproportionately affect low-income families.

  Notable Quote:

  Aubrey Gordon: "It's just an attempt to make food stamps inaccessible to as many people as possible." (48:07)

• Loophole Closures: RFK Jr. aims to tighten FDA regulations by eliminating the self-certification process for food additives deemed "generally recognized as safe," a move seen as bureaucratic overreach influenced by conspiracy theories.

• Economic Impacts: The restrictive food policies are criticized for imposing unrealistic standards on marginalized communities, ignoring socioeconomic factors that influence dietary choices.

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: 52:12 - End

Aubrey and Michael wrap up the episode by expressing deep frustration and concern over RFK Jr.'s administration, characterizing it as a step backward for public health and social justice.

Key Points:

• Authoritarian Tendencies: The hosts liken RFK Jr.'s approach to classic authoritarian strategies, such as orchestrating witch hunts and undermining institutional integrity.

• Erosion of Trust in Public Health Institutions: RFK Jr.'s policies and rhetoric are portrayed as damaging to the credibility and effectiveness of HHS, exacerbating public health challenges.

• Call for Vigilance: Aubrey and Michael emphasize the importance of resisting misinformation and holding public officials accountable to ensure evidence-based policies prevail.

Notable Quote:

Michael Hobbs: "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 [process like this]."* (45:00)

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Key Takeaways

• RFK Jr.'s leadership at HHS is heavily critiqued for promoting misinformation and regressive policies under the guise of public health reform.

• The involvement of influencers like Jillian Michaels serves to propagate harmful narratives that stigmatize vulnerable populations and undermine scientific consensus.

• Current policies targeting SNAP and food regulations are argued to be punitive and misguided, neglecting the socioeconomic realities of low-income individuals.

• Overall, the episode serves as a stern warning against the infiltration of conspiracy-driven agendas into critical public health institutions.

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This summary captures the primary discussions and critiques presented by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes in their examination of RFK Jr.'s first 90 days at HHS, highlighting the perceived dangers of his approach to public health and governance.

Transcript

[Aubrey Gordon]

Foreign.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, no, no. I got it.

[Michael Hobbs]

The podcast. All right, do it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I got it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Do it, do it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

That's really good. Actually. That also might be true at some point, although the opposite. We might be banned in America but allowed in the eu.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm Michael Hobbs.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If you would like to support the show. You're already doing that. Thank you so much.

[Michael Hobbs]

Or are you?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Or are you?

[Michael Hobbs]

So as part of our effort to both address, like, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

We want to put our most bummer episodes free to the public.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And I think there are ways in which it feels 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

For this episode, I just went on the HHS website and pulled every single press release and we're gonna talk chronologically about what RFK Jr. Has done with effectively the first two months that he's been in power.

[Aubrey Gordon]

In my sort of end of the research for today, which is some profiles of some who are supporters of Maha stuff.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, this is another fucking thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude. This gets into it because the first Thing we're going to do is an audiovisual element. So on February 13, 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 thing 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's also true. My brain is also broken in the true crime way.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, I'm gonna send you this Link. This is RFK Jr. S little statement, and we are gonna make, like, little ding sounds every time there's a conspiracy dog whistle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Can this be our sound for when there's a.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, what do you. What do you have? No, that's too happy. That's too happy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's too happy.

[Michael Hobbs]

We need, like, the X Files theme to play.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on. I got another one. I got another one. Michael, I have a few of these. We could do this every time.

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, I'm gonna put on the rap air horn. Hang on.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We should remix the two together.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

A microphone, and you many, many people. Okay, here's this. Did you get it?

[Aubrey Gordon]

So, wait, what are we. Remind me what we're dinging dog whistles for.

[Michael Hobbs]

Conspiracy theories.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay, ready?

[Michael Hobbs]

All right, do it.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. On my first day at work here at HHS, I want to take this moment to say a few words both to my supporters of 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Infertility.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

And 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. Not going to tell you the reasons for this decline. Why? Because neither I nor anyone else could be certain. See, but what I will tell you is that we are going to find out and we're going to do something about it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No one else was trying to.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Every factor.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

We will leave no stone unturned. We're going to listen to the experts and to the dissidents.

[Michael Hobbs]

And the dissidents.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Whistleblowers, whistleblowers.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

We're gonna listen to the doctors and we're gonna listen to the moms. We will examine our food, our medicine, our water, our lifestyles and our environment. Everything that goes into Americans bodies. We have to find something we care about more than being right, more than political advantage, and more than financial profit.

[Michael Hobbs]

Financial profit.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, I sort of hate this thing because it makes, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Why do these people. Yeah, what's going on?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Non listeners of our show, these bad faith people. Hey, people who aren't listening.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 ten have two or more chronic diseases. An estimated one in five United States adults lives with a mental illness in a vacuum.

[Michael Hobbs]

All of these statistics are roughly true. Then we get to the next paragraph.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's a really, really strange, only I can fix it kind of attitude. Right. And why does shit keep leaving my brain? Michael?

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

I fucking hate. I hate it so much.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

Forget the second one that needs to be left behind. In my 30s, I've.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 gonna cut out me saying A.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Our listeners don't need to know how broken our middle aged brains are.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, I'm just gonna cut out this part.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

You have no idea where you're going with this. It's okay, Aubrey. We can just move on.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It was back. I had it and it was back.

[Michael Hobbs]

We have so many more excerpts. You'll get there. It'll come back.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I know. I know it will. I'm here.

[Michael Hobbs]

Just read this excerpt.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay. I'm reading an excerpt.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm sending you a thing about chronic conditions.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, nuts. We're not going to be able to invade Canada because people are too fat. I'll be like, okay, annex Greenland when.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We'Re all this fat.

[Michael Hobbs]

Like, oh, well, that's a sacrifice I have to make. So be it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Nobody tell them about fat deadlifters. Ninety percent 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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, 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 that's 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Well, that's the thing. I mean, a lot of people 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 know, you get hit by a car and you, like, break Your shoulder. That's not a real health care system. A health care system is going to, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 goes like through the roof for seniors. Right. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 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 RFD 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 al 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 gonna study it and like, oh, we're gonna listen to the whistleblowers and stuff. This is like what people say on TikTok who like don't actually know anything and aren't familiar with the science. Like, you don't want people like this running things.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Maybe he is probably not. I think it's also an issue is not able to hire and supervise in such a way that they can actually accurately fact check.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's an institutional problem.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We have to find out the cause of autism so that there are not more autistic kids. But to find out the cause of adhd. Food dies. Question mark.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 around those issues and also a likely discomfort with people.

[Michael Hobbs]

He's also so obsessed with the statistic that 1 in 31 kids have autism. Now, experts say that it's more like 1 in 36, but, like, that's 3% of kids. And, like, that doesn't sound nuts to me. I'm just like, yeah, around 3% of kids have this. This thing that is relatively rare but is also a real thing in the population. Like, is 3% the wrong number? That seems okay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, final excerpt. Aubrey, get your slide whistle out. 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 gonna 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Just use it the whole time, Aubrey. Just as, like, background noise. Okay, so this is, like, the purpose, like, the. Of these assessments that it's gonna produce. One, identify and describe childhood chronic disease in America compared to other countries.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Great.

[Michael Hobbs]

Two, the 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

That's what these updates are gonna be from now on. Just Mike reading and Aubrey with her slide whistle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

A 21 slide whistle. Salute.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 make Americans eat Better or whatever. 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Too.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. No, he's very anti Ozempic. Very anti everything. He wants his wellness farms instead.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. I think that's the whole, like, the whole thing is lifestyle. He thinks that lifestyle can cure every single illness.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right. Which is what you think when you have relatively good health.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

When your health care has always been provided to you.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Speaking of dehumanizing, Aubrey, 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 19, 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 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Also, people will argue he's not a Republican. I would argue you accepted a position with the Trump administration, I don't know, like, whatever, Republican than that, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Fuck off, asshole.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus fucking.

[Michael Hobbs]

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, all 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, this is very, very like classic authoritarian stuff. Gender affirming care for kids is like, 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 healthcare.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Right, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Or committing unethical acts, which, again, we.

[Michael Hobbs]

Have no evidence of in gender affirming care.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

The other witch hunt that he's joining is the administration's crackdown on, quote, unquote, antisemitism.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, no.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No. Someone fucking wore a Palestine flag pin or some shit. Aubrey, it's gonna be nothing.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 happens. I was like, where are they even getting this? This goes to one article called medical schools 2024 commencements and antisemitism 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's images of different scarves that people are wearing with their graduation robes. Some of them are wearing keffiyas, Some of them are wearing Palestinian flag scarves. That's it.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's not anti Semitic remotely to do that. Like, these are not anti Semitic incidents at commencement addresses. Like, they're just not.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't want, but I will.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

Allegedly, one of them says, stop bombing hospitals.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 how 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

It says, end your complicity.

[Aubrey Gordon]

End your complicity. The city, Free Palestine.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 razed to the ground and like children starving, why.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Doctors would not want hospitals to be bombed.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. And when you line that up with trying to rescind the tax statuses of universities, trying to sort of of poll grants and funding, like there's just so much very clearly politicized manipulation happening here.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 like they don't have as many white students anymore or something, something, finally.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Someone'S looking out for white medical students.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 the same number of white people from 2020 to 2024, but there are now fewer Asian people and more Hispanics. So that has shifted. But the idea that there's no merit based admissions, this is just classic right wing moral panic garbage. But of course HHS is now joining this and is is like investigating ucla. So again we See this pipeline from, like, bad faith, right wing tabloid nonsense into, like, actual government policy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

God damn it.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's not gonna get better.

[Michael Hobbs]

Well, I'm excited though, anyway.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you wanna know why it's not gonna. Do you wanna know who our first influencer is?

[Michael Hobbs]

Katy Perry in space.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jillian Michaels.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

It's all fun and games when she's on White Lotus, but in real life.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Jillian Michaels.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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?

[Michael Hobbs]

All I remember is her lying down so she could yell at someone closer to their face when they were 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 3ft away. I need to be like 6 inches away.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I will say, as someone who recently rewatched 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, really?

[Aubrey Gordon]

She's so much worse when you go back and rewatch 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. 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 Michaels screaming at them at the top of her lungs. The only way you're getting off that treadmill is in a body bag.

[Michael Hobbs]

Nice. It's just a thing that you say to people just as an adult. A thing that you say to other adults.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Well, it's motivating, Michael. And you say it because you care.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

You're not even an athlete, Jillian. You just like work out. You're just like good at working out.

[Aubrey Gordon]

She also has a podcast called Keepin It Real. What?

[Michael Hobbs]

It's not even like a pun. It's not like Biggest Losing My Mind.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

So she's in. She's not like one of the reasonable ones. She's like a full on psycho. She's in.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, we've already talked about these. These are such garbage. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 Michael.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's 2E News.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 that other people look a way that is acceptable to them are people who also buy into healthism and ableism in a really big way. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I think you're right about like a core discomfort with difference and a core disdain for difference. I think the thing.

[Michael Hobbs]

Two things. One, the direction, two things. What's the second thought?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Leave all of the second thought.

[Michael Hobbs]

You said one. Where's two?

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, the thing I was going to 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Also, just leave people alone.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The core assumption there is that if fat people don't want to be treated badly, they should just not be fat, but also don't be fat in the ways that I want you to not be fat. Right. Which totally erases Jillian Michaels 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 kind of thinking that shows up in a lot of conservative politics. Right. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

So that one's just like a little like, where are they now? And the answer is they've gone from yelling at fat people to yelling about trans people and immigrants on Fox News.

[Michael Hobbs]

My next little section of like, RFK Jr. Stuff is like, the sort of decent things that he's done are like borderline decent things. So maybe this will lift us back up. Maybe this will lift our spirits.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We talking about pharma ads?

[Michael Hobbs]

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 3, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

I was happy to see this. Like, there were various things going on in social media of like, RFK junior Defends Measles Vaccine. And I'm like, okay, great. Like, lowest imagile bar. He cleared it I'm happy about that. However, if you read the full public statement, he also says some slightly more out of pocket things. So here is a paragraph from later in the press release.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 recommendations 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

So out of one side of his mouth he's like, get the vaccine. And then out of the other he's like, but also you need vitamin A because like vitamin C, vitamin A's, that's like miracle.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Take it from a guy who had an eating disorder. Vitamin A is in fucking everything.

[Michael Hobbs]

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, eh, 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 take, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Michael, this is the reason that Pete Evans kids cookbook got pulled from the shelves for vitamin A was because there were recipes with mega doses of vitamin A that were designed for like toddlers and INS infants. Dude, that's why we all don't have a copy of Bubba Yum Yum by Pete Evans.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also this, the following paragraph.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 death. Good nutrition remains a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses. Vitamins A, C and D and foods rich in vitamins B12, C and E should be part of a balanced diet.

[Michael Hobbs]

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?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes, absolutely. Like was, they died. They had Covid when they died. But that doesn't mean that's why they died.

[Michael Hobbs]

And it's like, yeah, oh, if you die in a car accident, but you're Covid. It's listed as a 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. It's maddening also, like, do you want to look at life expectancies before 1960, my guy?

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are you kidding me?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I had to go get it, like, a couple months ago. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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. Right. Like, and he was just like. So I just sort of, like, went along with that and whatever else.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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 gonna yell at you for how late you are. I'm gonna be happy that you're here. So, like, good for your friend. Good for my parents. 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 junior initiatives. So at hhs, he's also done a lot of stuff about food attitudes. So on March 10, 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 safe. I don't know if you remember this from our Daily Harvest episode.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, grass.

[Michael Hobbs]

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, we'll 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 check. 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 effort 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 had more than 750 chemicals enter the US food supply and only 10 of them have gone through the process of like being tested as 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 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

Absolutely.

[Michael Hobbs]

So like, again, 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.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I 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 such a completely off his rocker.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, he was like, it's real and it's not just Soros or whatever. And I was like, oh, God help us.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's literally Elon Musk though.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We gotta do something about antisemitism. While I blame a high profile Jewish person for being the deep state, the.

[Michael Hobbs]

Last thing we're gonna 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 tools 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 that is, like, harming us is sort of plausible to me. But also that's like, we need to actually look at research. There's, like, also a fear mongering component of this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. It's just an attempt to. 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.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's sort of the hostile architecture approach to, like, public support programs. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

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. Soda. 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, like, soda. There's some issues with, like, 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There is almost no food that you could argue is entirely unprocessed. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

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's 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.

[Aubrey Gordon]

In most states, tampons and pads are not covered by food stamps. Where you're just like, great. Cool.

[Michael Hobbs]

Is like a single mom with three kids supposed to go to the grocery store and get raw broccoli and then make nice roasted broccoli with olive oil for her kids. Well, A, she doesn't have the time. B, broccoli's expensive as fuck.

[Aubrey Gordon]

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.

[Michael Hobbs]

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

[Aubrey Gordon]

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

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. So that is our bleak RFK junior Update.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Calgon. Take me away. Send me to the wellness farm.

[Michael Hobbs]

No one is still with us, Aubrey. Nobody. Everyone. Dude, after. Like, this is too much.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is a death march. I hate it.

[Michael Hobbs]

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. Time for the second thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Next time on 40 year old woman's Brain.