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RFK Jr.: Sophist, Saboteur, Snake Oil Secretary
00:32:23
Historian Daniel Immerwahr eviscerates RFK Jr. as a master of glib misinformation—“profoundly informed,” yet wielding that knowledge in bad faith to undermine truth and public trust. Kennedy is the conductor of an orchestra of error. Also...
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- [00:00]
Daniel Immervar
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Monday, July 21, 2025. From Pete Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca, and as they say, old Donnie Trump seems to have wriggled out of it again. How'd he do it? How do you distract the people who are driven to distraction by the Epstein conspiracy theory? What is it about that cohort of people that was more interested in a truth social post of a girl in a bikini catching a snake or a weird shallow fake of Barack Obama that got their eye off the ball from this society shattering conspiracy we're sitting on top of? Huh? Donald Trump did post all that. He tweeted some stuff about the Washington commanders. If they don't change their name back to the Redskins, he's taking away funding. So I will take a First Amendment stance as I did on the just list today. And I will say for clarity's sake, so you know what we're talking about, the Washington Redskins. But I will also take a better First Amendment stance and say Donald Trump is violating the First Amendment in demanding that a team, a private team, change its name. Look, it's working. He distracted me. He also posted this about a new technology.
- [01:14]
Daniel Immervar
This could be perhaps the greatest revolution.
- [01:17]
Mike Pesca
In financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself. I think that was about the Bedazzler. But most of all, here's the dynamic. Trump gets in trouble, the media writes about the trouble, and boom, all of a sudden, Trump can attack the media. Turns out Trump's acolytes, even those who are sure there was some shady business with Jeffrey Epstein, they do hate the media. More than whatever it is Epstein symbolizes. Pedophilia, the rich getting away with everything. Jews going to say Jews. So until we get out of this trap where the biggest scandal that could fell Trump is somehow covered by the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, I don't think Trump will ever be felled. Plus, he's got chicks catching snakes. And who doesn't want that from their president? On the show today, I will spiel about obscure commissions. Whoa, whoa. I just saw my number spike. That's right. But first, RFK Jr. We haven't talked about him in a couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean he's not doing a lot of things behind the scenes which could get you and possibly your loved ones a little more sick than they otherwise would have gotten. Or to be fair, a lot more sick. One of the smartest people writing about this is a Northwestern professor and a contributor to the New Yorker named Daniel Immervar. I've wanted to speak to him for a long time and in doing so I found out that he pronounces his surname Immervar. I thought it was Immer War, but this is what you learn. You learn so much from the author of RFK junior Anthony Fauci and the Revolt Against Expertise. It's kind of what we were talking about with the Epstein crowd. But now let's just redirect our attention ever so slightly on the RFK junior crowd and Daniel Immervar. Oh my gosh, we all feel buried under non stop meetings. And then you remember, wait, what did we even say? 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Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. I'm getting a lot more into questions with no answers. Sorry this might not be working out for you, but for me it's fascinating. What the best we can hope for are maybe guidelines about how to navigate these questions. Questions like objectivity I talk a lot about on the show. Karl Popper and the paradox of tolerance I've talked about on the show. And here's one when to say that issues are settled, when to shut down skepticism. There is an answer that works for us in society, but that answer is constantly being recalibrated. And you know who embodies this question without an answer more than anyone else in society today? I would say RFK Jr. And you know who is exploring this question better than anyone I've read in a while? It's Daniel Immervar who who is a professor at Northwestern and has been writing for the New Yorker and he's written about this exact issue. Hello Daniel. Welcome to the gist.
- [07:50]
Daniel Immervar
Hi. It's good to be here.
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Mike Pesca
So let's say this Q and on they're crazy. Alex Jones. Sandy Hook Juice boxes cause androgynism. That's crazy. It's crazy because it's wrong. It's incorrect. But then you have RFK Jr. And he did serve a purpose. Before COVID he was embraced by a group of skeptics and I think society either tolerated him or benefited from him. But what changed? What went wrong with our behavior and attitude towards RFK Jr. Maybe his attitude towards us.
- [08:25]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah. So let's start with when it went right. RFK Jr. Was not just tolerated. RFK Jr. Was celebrated.
- [08:35]
Mike Pesca
And.
- [08:35]
Daniel Immervar
And if there's another public figure who he resembled, it's Aaron Brockovich. Because RFK Jr. Was this sort of bullish environmental lawyer who would confront a situation. There'd be reports that a company was releasing mercury into a river, and the company would say, no, it's perfectly safe, and we've got studies to prove it. And RFK would say, I don't believe you.
- [09:00]
Mike Pesca
Here.
- [09:01]
Daniel Immervar
Here's some other studies. I'm suing you. And he just did that over and over and over again. The moment it changed was, from his perspective, not a change. Not in him, but in us, was when he started making the same claims about pharmaceutical companies introducing dangerous chemicals into our bodies via vaccines. That's the moment when, you know, he was kind of doing the same thing he'd always been doing, but that's the moment when he sort of stepped awry.
- [09:25]
Mike Pesca
And for him, this was no different. In fact, the more pushback he got, probably, unless he's totally lying, the more it reminded him of the glory days or the days of a celebrated figure, especially in Democratic Party circles, when he was saying the same things about polluted rivers.
- [09:43]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So. And from his. He's the kind of guy where when you push back, he sees a conspiracy and, you know, he made a reasonable point, which is, you don't trust big agricultural companies, you don't trust pesticide makers. Why do you trust Big Pharma? These are the same companies that gave us the opioid crisis.
- [10:03]
Mike Pesca
So there was a time before COVID where I think that was at least countenanced. He was probably pushed back on more.
- [10:09]
Daniel Immervar
That's right.
- [10:10]
Mike Pesca
But within circles that we would now say are within the Democratic establishment, there was a value to that. And I think it was because. But you tell me he was getting. He was being useful in terms of getting enough of it. Right. That Democratic circles would still have him around as this Cassandra. Useful Cassandra figure.
- [10:32]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah. So in 2006, that's the first moment he takes up vaccine safety. And in 2000, it's not his only issue, and it's not his defining issue at that time. And, you know, it's one of the many things that he's talking about and fulminating against. And in 2008, Obama considers him to head the EPA.
- [10:51]
Mike Pesca
So vaccine safety, then does it take on a different salience in terms of autism? He stays the same and the debate around it changes because of autism, or does he change to match what the maximalist claims of the autism and vaccine skeptics are?
- [11:10]
Daniel Immervar
I think it's reactive. So it's. The chronology is interesting. He writes his article in 2006, and that doesn't, as far as I'm aware, transform his life. Then years later, as the debate about vaccine safety starts to clarify, his article gets retracted. And he, you know, being the kind of guy he is, he takes this as an invitation to double down. So then he writes a book about dangerous vaccines in 2014. And at that moment, he starts to feel all the doors close in his face, doors that had once been open. And given that it's RFK Jr. You know, my version of no one's talking to me is like, you know, my friends don't invite me to parties. His version is the Clintons won't return my phone calls anymore. Oh, my God. And so, and I think at that moment he's like, well, you've already socially sanctioned me. I'm already a pariah. I think I'm right. And then he just becomes a kind of equal opportunity believer in things and really starts to take up any number of discarded causes, no matter how implausible.
- [12:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I will say. And you didn't get into this in your article, but I followed his writing for Rolling Stone where he tried to discredit the results of the 2000 for president.
- [12:23]
Daniel Immervar
That's right.
- [12:23]
Mike Pesca
He's also John Kerry and Ohio.
- [12:25]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah.
- [12:26]
Mike Pesca
And this was, to me, just as factually inaccurate or as, let's just say, as far fetched. I suppose anything could happen. But he, an objective person, for which I suppose there's no such thing, would say he just didn't get there. But it was countenanced within Democratic circles. John F. Kennedy never believed those claims, but. Sorry. John Kerry never believed those claims, but, you know, they kind of supported him or put some wind beneath his wings. So it's interesting he didn't get crosswise with the establishment with those claims, even though they were just as far fetched and maybe not as dangerous because no one took him seriously, but just as far fetched as the autism claim.
- [13:09]
Daniel Immervar
And I think there's a defense of that. I mean, the, the I see what you're hinting at, which is that when he's on your side, no one asks questions. And when he's not, then, you know, he said he's. He gets the old he foe. But a plausible defense of that is that Kennedy, by all accounts, he's not a subtle man. Right. He picks a cause, he lines up the facts. He doesn't really. He kind of pushes aside everything else and then he just goes. And that's not the worst quality if you're an environmental lawyer. And it does kind of help in general, in society to have people who will pick up causes, line up the arguments behind them and say, this is what the argument looks like, whether you find it plausible or not. So, I mean, I think there is an argument for condensing that.
- [13:53]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. In argumentation, we maybe say or celebrate. Oh, it's a provocation. They're a provocateur. It's intellectually useful. When it's something like scientific claims and I think factual claims about elections, especially now, in retrospect, it's less of a welcome provocation.
- [14:12]
Daniel Immervar
Um, yes. But anyway, from his perspective, he's just doing the same thing. Then he gets ostracized and then he just. That's when he really starts with everything. That's when the, you know, plumes behind airplanes or chemtrails and et cetera, et cetera.
- [14:27]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. It's so interesting, though. We are social animals and being cast out of the tribe has these enormous effects, and we're seeing these effects. And this was a case where he was cast out because he was saying dangerous things about autism. I think that's fair. Right?
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Daniel Immervar
Yeah. Yeah. I also fully understand the reaction. Right. Because all these claims about autism, the effect of them is to undermine faith in vaccines and then create the other kind of problem, which is measles, et cetera.
- [14:55]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. From your study of him, does he get better at sophistry and glib argumentation when he starts attaching himself to less factual matters?
- [15:06]
Daniel Immervar
I think he. One thing he gets really good at is being careful about the form of that attachment. So all. If you line up all the thing. The worst things that he said, and then you actually look at how he said them, and usually they tend to be from the last four years. He. He says them always with. You know, we could consider the evidence that HIV doesn't cause aids. I mean, he does this kind of distantiation thing, which of course protects him. So he never actually fully endorses them. He's really good at the sort of just asking questions mode.
- [15:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And there are other aspects to it as well. He was in a congressional hearing where they were beating down on him for embracing or endorsing or perhaps wanting to hire at hhs, a discredited non doctor who was sanctioned for practicing medicine without a license. And his counter argument was that, you know, a court found that some sort of justification or rhetorical version of a court found for him and the senators didn't know the whole story. And there was a court, a lower court that did side with a lawsuit, but then a higher court said this guy doesn't even have standing to make the case. So yes, he is not going off. He knows his stuff. And it is a little more dangerous, I would say, if you believe, as the facts show, that a lot of what he's endorsing isn't true. He's not just going off half cocked and hoping he's right. Exactly. Knows what he's saying and he knows the flaws of what he's saying and he knows ways to argue around the flaws in a way that convinces me he's a conscious propagandist, not a true believer. All the way down.
- [16:49]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah, that's right. I mean, again, this kind of goes with his just sort of, you know, point him in a direction and he'll, he'll go. We, I think we often have the misperception that people who doubt climate change get into the vaccines cause autism thing, that these people are uninformed and that they don't know very much. And actually, empirically, that's often incorrect. They may know a lot of things that are not right, but they have a lot of information. And RFK Jr. Is someone who's profoundly informed. And so when he gets in arguments with, for example, senators, he just sounds like he knows more studies than they do. And in fact, he probably does.
- [17:26]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So let's go through some of the claims that he has made while at hhs and I've looked at a bunch of them and it's surprising that he says some things and we have this heuristic that. Huh, RFK Jr. Chemtrails. But he says some things challenging the medical establishment and sometimes he's. I wouldn't say right, but it's a pretty strong case. And one of them is. I don't, I don't even think you get into this in the piece, but I looked into the justification for smearing newborns eyes with erythromycin. Do you know about.
- [17:56]
Daniel Immervar
No. Tell me about this.
- [17:58]
Mike Pesca
So it's done. This is a critique. He's against antibiotics and so is the new Surgeon General appointee. They're very concerned about injecting antibiotics and in medicalizing children. And one of their examples is why do we do this, and I never even thought about it, but I looked into it and we did it because in 1910 it was a decent way to stop gonorrhea. Now there are much better ways and almost no country in Europe does it. So my eyes were open, pun intended, about. Well, that's a decent critique and I've never heard anyone else in the medical establishment saying it. A little bit similar with the fluoride question, which has always been an area of redoubt among every conspiracist, but there's a decent amount of studying to say that maybe we should at least ask questions about fluoride. So it is kind of remarkable that every once in a while he, or maybe even more than once in a while he gets one right.
- [18:49]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah, I mean, I think actually that's an indictment of us, right? Us meaning the reality based community. Because his modality at this point is everything you think is true, I'm going to deny. Everything you deny I'll say is true. And if we're getting things right, that shouldn't be very effective. That should make you a total kook. And I think one of the tragedies of the last couple years is that actually that perverse methodology has given him a lot of ammunition. Right. He ended up saying a lot of things that in retrospect weren't totally wrong or were compelling to a lot of people because we left a lot of room and, and there were a lot of issues that we kind of just, you know, like fluoride. We're just like, absolutely, you know, this is a closed issue. We're not going to talk about it, we're not going to re litigate this. And then Kennedy's like, well, you know, might be time.
- [19:34]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And as you point out, the other main character in this one article that I'm talking about is Anthony Fauci, who said, well, who is treated as a religious figure and who said attacks on me are quite frankly attacks on science. And it is an indictment of the. Let's be honest, there was a lot of dogma, which is the opposite of science, but there was a lot of dogma during the pandemic. And RFK took advantage of it or maybe just noticed it and rebutted it. And that opened. Well, to what extent do you think that open things up to his coming through the hole that was created and becoming the cabinet secretary that he is?
- [20:17]
Daniel Immervar
Absolutely. The pandemic was a moment of triumph for him because, I mean, it's a moment he got more attention than he'd had in A long time. It's when he became a. I mean, not viable presidential candidate, but someone who had the power to potentially swing an election or an effect an election. And it's also a moment when he got to be not wrong about a lot of things. He was definitely wrong about a lot of other things. But, you know, when he said that lockdowns are destructive and they're not helping very much when he, you know, ask questions about the lab leak theory, you know, we're not sure he's right about that. It seems the preponderance of evidence is. He's probably not, but like, that gave him a lot of room to work with.
- [20:59]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And so do you think that that is something in retrospect, that we really should blame Foushee and what he represents, which is the medical establishment or. And I know many of my listeners will hear this and say these were good people trying to do the best they could, trying to work as best they could with the evidence available. And if some cynical actor is going to nitpick everything, they got wrong. Or maybe you just said the preponderance of the evidence doesn't even indicate that the lab leak theory is right. Is that just an example of you can't really blame the Fauci's of the world, or do you think. I mean, I know you think we, we can to some extent.
- [21:37]
Daniel Immervar
It's. Well, it's really tricky. I mean, all that stuff about these people being well intentioned who are trying in a hard time, that's totally true. And I mean, would I do any better? Probably not. And I completely lined up.
- [21:47]
Mike Pesca
You're a historian, though.
- [21:48]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah. You know, so. Right. We're allowed to say, in hindsight, this was regrettable, we're allowed to make that move. Right. And it doesn't mean that it's easy to make decisions when they happen, but it just, it is helpful to say after, you know, after the smoke clears, to say, okay, what went right and what didn't go right. And it seems pretty clear to me that the medical authorities interpreted this moment as such an overweening emergency for understandable reasons, that they really sort of closed epistemological ranks and they just, rather than doing the thing that one would want science to do, which is say, here's a hypothesis, let's let it breathe, let's consider the options. Let's always have a sort of team B to sort of poke holes at it, they just said, okay, this is what we're going with. And not only are we going with it really Quickly, which I get. It's an emergency. But anyone who is doubtful about this is in some ways a danger and deserves to be not just criticized, but dismissed, deplatformed. I mean, what is remarkable, and regrettably remarkable is how many people who said things during the pandemic that just seems kind of arguably true, who, who were removed from social media for saying it. It doesn't mean that they weren't heard, but it does suggest that there was a real sense of orthodoxy that we were enforcing and an orthodoxy that far outpaced our certainty.
- [23:09]
Mike Pesca
Also, isn't it the case that when the mantra the science is settled became something that people said and, and pushed into signs in their lawn, a real scientist, a true scientist, someone who understood how science is iterative, should have immediately said this is not a proper message around science. It will hurt us in the long term if this becomes a mantra.
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Daniel Immervar
Yeah, I think at the point where you are formulating your support for science literally as a religious creed in this house, we believe science is real, you've kind of missed the point. But again, like it felt like such an emergency that we all were, sort of, not all of us, but many of us were disposed to feel, okay, let's just get our provisional conclusions, this is the best we can have and let's do this thing. And anyone who is resisting is a vector and is a danger to society. I had all of those feelings too.
- [24:01]
Mike Pesca
Right? Yeah. And I would also say in defense of the fauci's of the world that we're talking about, you and I have been talking about science, but they're dealing, they're public health experts and they're dealing in science, politics, and we live in this polarized world. And if you act without regard to politics, you're gonna get destroyed and your science going to be ignored. So it's really tempting to have this seemingly useful in the short term cudgel of the science is settled. And if you beat back your critics with that, then you're saying to yourself, thank God, now more people will take vaccines. But if you use the cudgel to say the science is settled around school closures, maskings, or some other non pharmaceutical interventions that didn't work, then you really discredit yourself in terms of science. But they're also playing the game of politics. And I don't know, do you have any insight about how you can play the game of politics without being strong, definitive and black and white?
- [25:04]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah. So let's talk about that. I mean, the scientists arguably were doing their job which is they were coming to the best conclusions that they could under pressure. The politicians were not doing their job because essentially what happened during the pandemic is that we politically abdicated to scientists, and not just to scientists in general, asking questions about what would support public health and public flourishing. Scientists who were tasked with answering the question, what would minimize deaths from COVID And now we know that putting an absolute value on minimizing deaths from COVID and not worrying about other adverse health outcomes, other adverse economic outcomes, other adverse political outcomes. I mean, the pandemic quite obviously got Trump elected, and that was a really bad thing for the country. It turns out that just like deciding that all public policy will be answered by the question, what will minimize deaths from this particular disease, while understandable, was really destructive in hindsight.
- [25:57]
Mike Pesca
Wait, what do you mean the pandemic got Trump elected?
- [25:59]
Daniel Immervar
Oh, all of the things. Okay, so first of all, all of the frustration with the pandemic.
- [26:06]
Mike Pesca
Oh, got elected. Got him elected in 2020.
- [26:08]
Daniel Immervar
I'm sorry. Yes, of course.
- [26:09]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think it got him unelected in 2020.
- [26:13]
Daniel Immervar
Arguably that, too.
- [26:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's very hard then for a politician to maybe say the right thing, which is. We're going to go with masks. There's not great evidence, but we think it could work. I mean, that politician would get destroyed.
- [26:27]
Daniel Immervar
It's hard.
- [26:27]
Mike Pesca
That's. That was the answer. That was the truth.
- [26:29]
Daniel Immervar
Yeah.
- [26:30]
Mike Pesca
Then again. And there are some politicians who said, hey, look, I don't think the minimization of deaths is our only consideration. Ron DeSantis said that Ron DeSantis constructed his policies. Maybe there were some other considerations, but that was basically in a sentence, what Ron DeSantis was thinking about his policies, and he became the kind of anathema to the American left. And. And that probably wound up polarizing him. I don't see any way in the politics of America to kind of have navigated this successfully politically without being overly reductive scientifically.
- [27:06]
Daniel Immervar
Okay. And that's fine. And if that's the case, and I don't disagree with you, then in some ways that's also on us, the voters. Right. That we can't possibly tolerate a politician who could say, this is a complicated issue, there are warring values at stake. We're going to take them all seriously. We're going to listen to the scientists, and they're going to tell us about the things that they know. We're also going to listen to economists. We're also going to listen to education experts. And frankly, we're also going to talk to a lot of people who are suffering through this and figure out where the greatest pressures are. We're going to think about things like domestic violence. We're going to think about things like social isolation. We're going to think about things like suicide that might come out of this. That's hard.
- [27:42]
Mike Pesca
I could play Trump. I could play clips of Trump saying that exact thing.
- [27:45]
Daniel Immervar
Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, you mentioned DeSantis.
- [27:48]
Mike Pesca
He talks about suicide. He talks about suicide rates. They were dismissed as, I mean, he's a politician, too. We know he's probably grabbing for the arguments that best help him sometimes. He was making, perhaps through improper motivation, the arguments that in retrospect, wound up being right.
- [28:03]
Daniel Immervar
Okay, but let's also say the other thing. DeSantis and Trump were at the same time minimizing the danger of COVID And they did something incredibly dangerous, too, which is they delegitimize the vaccine. The vaccine worked. So it's very, I think it's important retrospectively for you and I to explore ways in which the right had pad points that were that were right and they were arguable. But it is also really important to say that in the course of making those, the right got something huge wrong, which is the efficacy of the vaccines.
- [28:32]
Mike Pesca
And guess what, we've got 20 more minutes for you because Daniel Immerhar is himself an expert. But by you, I mean those who support us in the best way you can by subscribing to Peska plus, where you get bonus content, you get ad free content. There's also just an ad free version. It is at subscribe Mike pesca.com thank you for supporting the gist there. And now the spiel. You may have heard that Donald Trump is going tete a tet with the tet of the Federal Reserve. Jerome Powell, you may not have heard that one angle Trump is pursuing is trying to establish that Powell exercised poor oversight in the renovation of the Fed's D.C. headquarters. This would, the theory goes, allow Trump to fire Powell for cause. But if you did hear about that gambit to fell Powell not for exceeding preferred interest rates, but for allowing contractors to exceed their estimates. You probably heard this next bit, that Trump has replaced the members of the board that oversees Powell in his site manager capacity. And that board is called the National Planning Commission. Only it's never just called the National Planning Commission. Politico calls it a, quote, obscure architecture board. The New York Times refers to it as, quote, a Little known planning board under scrutiny. Meanwhile, Axios makes the case that it like a microchip or the leaf cutter anti is small but potent. The powerful D.C. planning Commission. That's Axios. His words. But so is this. An obscure D.C. architecture commission. Let's be honest, only a few commissions are household names. You had the Warren Commission and the Kerner Commission and the 911 Commission. They grabbed headlines and lodged in the imaginations, but they were one offs and they were designed to address a concern already occupying the public. But there are many, many, many, many other commissions, most of which we only hear about if something goes wrong or if an appointee is thrown out unceremoniously. So just as the National Capital Planning Commission's new Republican members, who are all Trump loyalists, replaced the thrown out three Biden appointees, so too did Joe Biden throw out three Republican appointees and replace them with his own people. On the U.S. commission of Fine Arts, the headline in the Washington Post for this was, Biden Removes four White Men from Commission of Fine Arts. And the story did not disapprove of that. By the way, the Wall Street Journal cried foul. They didn't like the partisanship going on. But they also contextualized the misdeed by criticizing Biden for, quote, decapitating an obscure fine arts commission. All right, here's the question. What's not an obscure commission? It's certainly not the Northern Border and Regional Commission or the U.S. commission on International Religious Freedom. U.S. curve, the hour and Wage Division, which is sometimes called the Division of Hours and Wages when they're feeling a little saucy. You got the Office on Violence Against Women, which I would recommend a rebrand to the Office Against Violence on Women. You could still keep the official initials ovw, which is just Office violence. Women. That's weird. You got the Defense Commissary Agency. Der. Commissar. No. They literally provide a worldwide network of commissaries that sell groceries and household appliances at low cost to members of the armed services. You have the US Trustee Program, I trust. You have the Bureau of Reclamation, a provider of wholesale water and hydroelectric power in the U.S. i got to say, their logo looks a bit like the FC Vancouver team. The white caps look out for that one. You got the Railroad Retirement Board, which I just assume was a card in the community chest portion of Monopoly. You got the Japan US Friendship Commission, which is nice. They give grants to stimulate friendship between those countries. Without it will we not be friends? You're saying the Japanese would be less polite to us. You know there's no Canada U.S. friendship Commission. We're pretty friendly. No Thailand U.S. friendship Commission. We're doing okay. Then you got these the abilityone Commission creates job opportunities for people who are blind or have other significant disabilities. Not to be confused with the Access Board, an independent federal agency devoted for accessibility for people with disabilities. Not to be confused with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Not to be confused with the Administration for Community Living, which supports the needs of aging and disability populations. And also, as a joint meeting with another council, the Advisory Council to Support Grandparents Raising Grandchildren. Overall, there are 392 federal agencies. But, you know, going through the list was and because I was obviously looking for the hilarious ones, I was struck by how many I recognized. Huh? Oh yeah, those guys. We'd be worse off without them. I assume they mostly do good things. Obscure things, sure. But good things. When obscure is used as a synonym for not important, it sometimes rankles me. All these dam and energy and security commissions and boards and committees. Just because we don't know what they're doing behind the scenes doesn't mean that they're not doing good or necessary. I mean, this is the pitfall of DOGE to assume that obscure was unnecessary. It's like the guy who goes busily deleting all the big files on his laptop windows server.exe that can't be a thing. So even if hard to name or easy to monkey with politically, this vast array of commissions had me in awe, a little bit marveling at all the people in all the jobs who do important things. I read through some of the bios again, searching for hilarity, coming across just bland competence. Which is fine. They're not fun, but they seem to be qualified. They have good experience, they went to fine schools, and they almost uniformly have pictures taken in poorly lit backgrounds. But that's okay because they're in commissary procurement or grandparent reallocation. They're not in it for the fine arts. And if they were Biden, then Trump, then the next guy would be firing them, leading to a one day story marking outrage and then returning to obscurity. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astra Green is our social media director. The production coordinator is Ashley Khan. Michelle Pesca is all there as our head of commissions on commissions, Peru G Peru Duparu. And thanks for listening.
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