Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Nancy Pelosi says the Supreme Court is an embarrassment to our founders. We have such a great show for you today. The good Liars Jason Salvig stops by to tell us about what he saw on the road that made him predict the Vice President Harris would lose. Then we'll talk to Mother Jones's Anna Merlin about RFK Junior and what we can expect if Trump
actually adds him to his administration. But first the news.
So, Mollie, what are you seeing As we start to get numbers from the election now.
In Arizona, Ruben Diego will in fact win the Senate seat that he has run for against Carry Lake. Thus perhaps now Carry Lake has been defeated in a gubernatorial and Senate race, so we'll see if that stops her, but Ruben will be heading to the Senate. Congratulations, Reuben. Donald Trump has some truths he would like to tell us. He's he is tweeting on x now and he has some thoughts about Democrats and Kamala Harris's debt.
I'm very surprised that the Democrats, who thought a hard and valiant fight in the twenty twenty presidential election. We should also add that seems pretty out of date raising a record amount of money, didn't have lots of money. He's left over now they are being squeezed by vendors
and others. Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we as a party, and for the sake of desperately needed unity, due we have a lot of money left over, and in that our biggest asset is the campaign was earned media and that doesn't cost very much. Make America great again.
I assume he's being ironic here, right.
I think this is trolling.
Okay, just checking. That was my sense, but I wasn't sure.
Yeah, I'm sure that Lara Trump is stepping away from the microphone and the vocal booth she's in singing a song to go pay those bills right now.
Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of trolling. This is Donald Trump trolling. You know, here we go. Donald Trump will get ready for more of this kind of thing. But also I would add this as a person who really does not like to honor and pay his debts, So that does not totally surprise me that he feels that paying a debt is meant to be sort of ironic. The big excitement for Republicans is this leadership race that's happening right now. So Mitch McConnell, who
has really been wildly love him, hate him. Most people who listen to this podcast are the ladder and not the former. But he got Donald Trump three Supreme Court seats, which have radically remade the country in ways that many of us we haven't even seen really how serious it will be. And so Mitch McConn is going to retire from leadership, though he will keep his Senate seat until his next election. There is a hotly contested race to replace him with a lot of Republicans, many of whom
are very ambitious. Tucker Carlson, who is really a GOP kingmaker in a certain way, has endorsed Rick Scott, Florida Senator Rick Scott for GOP Senate leader. He ripped Mitch McConnell. He said, what the hell is going on in the US Senate? Tucker asked on X hours after Donald Trump wins the most cohesive mandate in forty years. Mitch McConnell
in engineers a coup against his agenda. So there are three Republicans flying for the top spot, John Cornin of Texas, Rick Scott of Florida, and John Thune of South Dakota, who is already the minority whip. Tucker Carlson took issue with both Foon and Cornyn. We'll see what happens. This is going to be a real fight to replace.
McConnell I really like the galaxy brain take that some of them are doing that. Jdvans should be both vice president and set a majority leader. That's my favorite of them.
Oh, I haven't seen that, but that's really scary.
So Moley, what are you seeing here in the House?
Though it's still very tight. I think right now Republicans have one two hundred and thirteen seats in the four hundred and thirty five member House. We have Democrats. We got to get to sort of the number. But I think there are a bunch of California seats that are still being counted.
I believe there's ten seats, with six of them looking good for us right now.
Right so six seats looking good for Democrats ten seats, so that'll be four. It's going to be a very tight majority. Democrats have two hundred and three seats, Republicans have two hundred and thirteen seats, to eighteen will get the major. We'll see what happens. There are still a bunch of California seeds and we just have to see what happened.
So Maya, I was feeling good. I wasn't hearing from Jim Jordan for a while, and I had kind of forgot about the little JACKETLI was fella. Now I saw him creeping back onto Dana Bash's show this weekend. What do you see here?
I see that Dana Bash has had Jim Jordan on, and Jim Jordan has said, and I think this is really important that she did this. She said, do you think the twenty twenty election was free and fair? And Jim Jordan responded, I do, I do. And then Bash asked the question, which is a really good point, and why is it different from twenty twenty when Trump lost? Is that the only difference? Bash questioned, and he said, no, there were concerns with twenty twenty in the all Mantain voting.
That happened Jordan said, what Pennsylvania had like two point something million mail in ballots come in without any single verification, which was required under the Pennsylvania statute. So there were all kinds of concerns without the twenty twenty vote was carried out. And then Bash says, okay, but there was absolutely no widespread fraud. There was also plenty of mail in voting taking place in Pennsylvania and the rest of
the country in twenty twenty four. So look, Republicans are claiming that the twenty twenty election was stolen because of mail in voting. You'll remember that in twenty twenty we were in a pandemic, and in the pandemic, mail in voting was the way that we did it. Because of the pandemic, a lot of states did mail in voting. It was not fraud. And the fact is these guys are just saying it was fraud because Trump lost, and now they're saying it's honest because Trump won. Jason salviag
is one half of the Good Liars. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Jason, thanks for having me. I apologize. I'm a little under the weather now. I don't know what it was that did it. Maybe it was traveling to uh six different states in seven days. But I'm not feeling great right now, So I apologize for how I sound right now.
Yes, yes, you sound just all.
Thank you appreciate that.
Really you sound terrible. No, you sound good. And also I want you to so this you're coming on the podcast. I'm doing amazing, We're all.
Just everyone's doing great.
Sight Yeah, but I want you to talk about So I saw you a couple of weeks ago, and we had this conversation that I had with a couple of different people where I said she's going to win and you said, nope, she's not going to win. No, And I said, no, she's gonna win, and you said no, I have been talking to people across the country and I don't think she's going to win. And I said, you're wrong, and then you said, no, I think I'm right.
So explain to our listeners and quite frankly, just to me what you saw that made you think that.
Well, Okay, I'm going to talk about a couple of different things for it.
And give us the backstory a little bit about what you do, just for the few people who don't know you.
Sure.
Yeah, So I'm in a group with de Ron Stifle are called the Good Liars, and we've been traveling the country. You know, we've been doing this for over a decade now. We've been going out for elections and recently we've been going to a lot of Trump rallies and going to a lot of swing states and we've interviewed the Trump
supporters there. Maybe you've seen some of our videos online talking to people, sometimes catching the hypocrisies of some of the ways of thinking they're but also like a lot of it was just we were just traveling a lot, and we were going specifically to the swing states and what we saw on the ground just talking to normal people, not just just not people who are going and going to a Trump rally and waiting in line there, and
they were huge, by the way, they were huge. Lots of people are going to them always and just talking to people. People were generally upset with the current administration and did not have a favorable opinion of Biden. And one story like sticks in my mind our travels, and ironically it was in Illinois. It was right after the DNC. We left the DNC, such a big party at atmosphere. Everyone was so excited and we got into a car to ram and I an Uber to go to the
airport and we're talking about the DNC. We're talking about where we're going to film, our plans and all that this stuff. And the uber driver, who was like a woman in her maybe early thirties, I was like, did you guys were you guys at the DNC And we were like yeah, yeah, yeah, And she said, oh, oh cool, I'm voting for Trump. And we were like, oh, interesting, do tell And she had voted for Biden, and she'd voted for Obama twice and abortion was very important to her.
But she did not like the direction of the country, did not like how much things cost, and it was a no brainer for her to vote for Trump. And like that always kind of stuck in the back my mind, being like, Oh, this person who you would think would be just like in the Democrats back pocket for the election, she is going to vote for Trump this time. We'd have a couple conversations with people like that, and they
always were voting for Trump. No one who wasn't in like the Democratic circles really like excited about Harris.
And being on the ground in the Swing States.
What I saw like cause you know, if you just turn on the radio there you're gonna hear ads. You're gonna hear ads. And if you're driving like we would do, driving long distances in the highway, you'd see the billboards. And what I saw was the ad campaign from Harris did not seem very strong to us, just like listening to it on the radio, seeing the TV ads when we're at the hotel, and also like the billboards.
I don't know who was in charge of it.
The billboards, it was like they were blue and yellow and well there was a check mark that looks like a cigarette being ashed in an ashtray. The whole visual of all of it was not like super clear, and Trump was like a caveman wrote it. It was like Trump lower inflation, Harris higher, Trump safe, Harris dangerous, And it was very to the point and not like this is gonna sway everyone. You know, I'm just saying, these
are just observations that we had there. And the biggest thing, the biggest thing of all, even if we didn't go to all the swing states, I probably still would have said I think Trump is going to win, just going by the blast two elections and looking at the polls. Because Trump always overperforms his polls, and by like two points, like it happened in twenty sixteen, and it happened in
twenty twenty as well. He overperforms. And if you looked at what people the most, the two most important issues for people, it was always the economy and the border. Like for most people, that was it, not just the people we talked to Trump Trump brobaby, these are poles saying this. And I looked at that, and I looked at how unpopular Biden was, and then I looked at how Harris. You know, she's the administration, and she had not clearly defined herself in the polls. I'm just saying
the polls now my own opinion. She had not clearly defined herself as different, separate, and just a totally different entity than Biden. So you look at that, and where everyone's saying it's a toss up election, I'm looking at it where it's like even in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and maybe she's ahead by a point in Michigan, and I'm saying Trump is ahead in all of those states. That's like
the baseline of it. So watching the election, like from the very beginning the beginning being like one hundred days ago, because it's in this whole election was crazy this year. She was running almost like she was ahead, but in my mind she was always behind. And I know she said, oh, we're the underdog, We're the underdog, but she was not. Like they were not taking big swings that I wish that they had taken to try and win some of these other voters.
And I could get into the like, what the real problem of it? If you want no, no, So I.
Think these are all really important points and interesting about kind of what you saw on the ground. I want you to talk to us about. One of the things I'm struck by is when you look at the swing state numbers, you have a lot of states where Donald Trump does fifty percent, fifty one percent, and then you know, they leave the rest of the ticket blank. They don't vote for the Republican. It's too much work to fill in the bubbles for all the other candidates, so they
just don't vote. And I'm wondering, you've spent years and years and now you will spend more years.
I don't know, I don't know. I can't even think about that right now.
Trump supporters in these at these events. What do you think those sort of the psychology there is when you vote for Trump but you don't vote for Kerry Lake for example.
Okay, I think what you're probably referring to is North Carolina and Arizona.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, but even Michigan right, bad, Right, all the swings, almost all the swings dates except maybe Pennsylvania we don't know yet, voted for Trump and then just left the bottom of the take a blank. And I want you to make sense with that with the people you've interviewed on the trail.
Look, we spent a lot of time in North Carolina, and you know, we focused on Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow, who both of them lost in North Carolina. She was running for superintendent of public education there and she's the one who like tweeted firing squad for Obama on pay per view. And we all know Mark Robinson, like the alleged porn site stuff and all the stuff that was
out there about him. So people had seen that these were not great candidates, and I think Arizona had already kind of made up their mind.
About Carrie Lake.
But I think what people were doing is they were looking at the big issues to them, and they were thinking, I like Trump because I think he's going to be better for the economy, and I think they just voted with the you know, thinking.
Of their their pocketbooks, the thinking of the wallet.
You know.
I think when the candidates were that bad, like they were in North Carolina and there was that much money spent against them, like, I think that is going to translate to people being like, I'm going to vote on the economy for Trump, but not for some of these down ballot people. But in Pennsylvania, I think it's going to be like a Republican's gonna win there, like in
the Senate. So I think it depends on the state and like how bad the candidate is, because I think some of them, like Kerry Lake and Mark Robinson there it's two of the worst candidates in the history of American politics.
Like they are that bad.
And you could throw Michelle Moro in there too, even though it's a you know, a smaller office, but like the baggage they had is terrible. Like I would make the argument that it's not worse than denying the election results and having a mob of your sports store in the Capitol and refused to accept their election results and all the other stuff that Trump did. But that's just not how everyone saw it in the country, which is really obviously disheartening.
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm trying to sort of understand. You've talked to the people, you know these people as much as anyone does, and I'm just trying to understand, like how a Donald Trump not Carrie Lake voter exists because there are thousands, tens of thousands of them.
We talked to numerous people on the road in a bunch of different swing states, and like we would ask him about abortion and like what they thought about Roe v Wade being overturned, And then we heard this multiple times people say, like I didn't know Roe v Wade was overturned and their pro choice.
Or what they didn't know it. They didn't know it. So like they know Trump.
He's this guy, He's the reality show guy who was president who like tells it like it is. They know who that is, so they're going to vote for him and then they could leave everything else blank. That's part of the mentality, is just like not knowing. But I think also the bad candidates has a lot to do with it.
Right, But they wouldn't be bad. But the thing is, Carrie Lake isn't a bad candidate compared to Donald Trump, right, because they're the same. You know, ultimately she ran as him. But I think that's a really good point about not knowing things. And I'm wondering if you can just let's just drill down on that for a minute. So you're interviewing people and they sort of know Trump, like him, hate him, but know him, and they don't know other
stuff about American politics. Can you have a story to explain this phenomenon.
I talked to a woman in New Hampshire during the Republican primaries this year who was pro choice and said, I really believe that a woman it should be.
Up to the woman to make that decision. I really do believe that.
And I was like, well, how do you feel about Trump appointing the Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade And she's like, I don't know if that's true. I have to do my own research and figure out that that's true. I'm like, no, that is true. That is a fact. Like Trump will not deny that fact. So there's something about, you know, just not being informed.
But like if you just take a step back and you look at this people knew Trump and like if just imagine, like you live and breathe politics, and like now I do. I've questioned my own life choices, but now I do as well. You live and breathe politics. Imagine like taking in about zero point one percent of what you currently ingest from politics.
That is the amount that people are.
Some of these people, like some people are die hard Trump and they, like I've said before, like they get their news from truth social from Trump's posts. But like some people are just like I like Trump. He tells it like it is and he's my guy, and I don't like read the news like January sixth is.
Like, oh yeah, that thing happened. I remember that a little bit. What was that about?
Well, whatever, whatever, And they just go about their lives like Roe v. Wade being overturned was not a big day, like with you. They didn't have a pit like their stomach fallout, you know, and feel sick from it.
They just were like, oh did that happen?
Oh okay.
Just imagine you're getting in that much and you are just worried about I mean, it actually sounds wonderful doesn't it. You just you're just worried about like the sports team playing, or the reality show you're watching, or whatever the hell you're doing, or the TikTok videos.
Yeah, the dream.
They're living the dream, and maybe that's what we're waking up to. This is the American dream is being ill informed.
But that I think is the major thing. It's just like people not not being informed, and where they're getting their news is not necessarily it's not the New York Times, you know, Like some people we talk to are like the I watched mainstream news sometimes, like always turn on Fox News every once in a while, but you can't trust everything they say, and that they're getting it from podcasts.
I know.
I don't know.
It's not because not because of the election, not because of I mean maybe the other side of that. Not because they like settled a lawsuit with dominion. It's for totally different reasons that they don't trust it. So I do think Democrats, like there's so many different ways they lost, and like how the biggest thing to me though, And maybe you don't want to talk about this day maybe
you already talked about this. I mean, you've got to go back to Biden not dropping out sooner and giving a possibility for somebody to define themselves in less than one hundred days, let them have debates. I mean, look, I thought Harris did a great job considering the amount of time she had. But to introduce yourself and to make it seem super organic.
No, it wasn't impossible. It was a herculean task. And what we saw was the down ballot candidates. She saved a lot of Senate and House seats that would have otherwise been lost. But I agree, but you know, there's plenty of blame to go around, and as Democrats, we tend to love to blame. But I'm more just trying to understand what happened before I get prescriptive on what should happen. I also think that one of the things that happened when a party loses an election is that
people use that failure to confirm their own priors. So if you're person who believes that the left has abandoned the base, then you are going to look at the low turnout and say the Left has abandoned the base. And if you are a person who believes that financial indicators are key in an election, you are going to look at that election, but I just sort of want to understand what I missed more than anything.
Well, I think the poll numbers that everyone should have been looking at from the very beginning, and.
Which it's why like I feel like.
I feel strong about the Biden and just his accomplishments getting things passed, which I think were great, the good things that were done. His failure as a president, I think is as a communicator, and he could never articulate his wins and he could never spin his losses.
And that's a larger macro problem of the Democratic Party not being good enough at you know, one of the things Trump does is he spends almost ninety percent of his time communicating right right.
And Biden he couldn't form the thoughts. He couldn't do it in a successful way. He couldn't take up the oxygen when inflation is really affecting people's lives. He was not able to spin it in a way somebody else could have where it's either like go look at this other shiny thing that we're working on here, or that like that we're doing better than Europe and we're actually like coming out of a pandemic without like a terrible recession,
that is like crippling the whole economy. We're actually doing a pretty good job. He could not articulate it. And because of that, his approval ratings were just as bad as Trump. And that's not just Republicans saying that.
And that's a communication problem, and we kept seeing that throughout the election. The problem he had communicating.
Yeah, the only news thing he had that broke through was he put on a Trump hat and he called trump'spports garbage. Those are the two things that broke through besides dropping out of the race.
That he did.
That's not a good thing. Now, is that sway the election? No?
I think that like you're playing like I said, those the polls are two percent off, and it turned out to be true that you're playing behind. That puts you more behind. So if there was a primary or something, I feel like things could be different, you could define yourself in a different way.
But again that's Monday morning quarterback.
The real lesson here, in my mind, is that Trump is a uniquely good politician, good at politics in a way that other Republicans are not, and most Democrats are not. Right like I mean the end, Perhaps it's because he was a celebrity for twenty years. I mean, there are any number of theories of the case. But like the people you talk to, they're not necessarily committed Republicans as much as they're committed Trump is.
We talked to lots of people who voted for Obama twice who are Trump supporters now, Like that's very common, and that's very common.
So this is not ideological at all.
Yeah, it's a little bit of the personality.
But I think it's also like I think there's a it's anti establishment, and the Democrats did not run as anti establishment. They were saying we got Dick Cheney as an endorsement, thinking that that sways the suburban vote, when that is just it. Maybe in two thousand and eight or something, maybe there was a time that that would be helpful. And I don't think that's like the straw
that broke the Campbell's back. I'm just saying it doesn't sound like it's even though the policies help the working person, the messaging is never that. And even if it's the mess not the messaging, it's the visual of who you see out there for campaigning with the people. So I think there was a failure with that and it was playing it safe in a race when you're down was a mistake too, but also your delta really bad hand because Biden didn't get out of there sooner.
Thank you. Jason Anna Merlin is a reporter and Mother Jones and the author of Republican Lies, American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power. Welcome to Fast Politics. You've been here before, Anna.
I don't think so.
All right, well, I feel like you've been here before in my night Goldfish Brain. So you you have this piece you write for Mother Jones, and you have his piece about RFK Junior is going to be a member of Trump's presidency. Let's talk about RFK Junior.
Sure we should note though that as we're talking, we don't actually know if he's going to be part of Trump's cabinet. They've been very nonspecific about it, so who knows.
Though Trump has sort of made a lot of overtures towards him.
Yes, definitely has is unclear in what role he will actually serve in the Trump administration, but he's definitely a part of his transition team and has been a pretty big face of the last days of the Trump campaign.
Right give us a sort of sense of what he is, sort of what he's talking about.
Robert F.
Kennedy Junior, obviously is an environmental attorney turned anti vaccine activist. He's been an anti vaccine activist for quite a long time at this point and ever since he suspended his independent residential run.
Can I just pause you for a second. Why did he take this?
Like?
Did he have a child with a lot of times people become anti vacs because they have a child with autism or something to that effect.
The story that mister Kennedy has told is that he started looking into the connection between vaccines and autism, which there is no connection that has been debunked many times over. But he became.
Curious about this issue because a mother of a child with autism begged him to get involved and look into whether vaccines were causing it. So this is his kind of self stated origin story. So in two thousand and five, he published a piece that ran in both Rolling Stone and Salon called Deadly Immunity, making a bunch of false claims about vaccines and their connection to disease. It was eventually retracted by Rolling Stone after a series of errors.
But yeah, his claim is that it came out of parents asking him to get involved.
Okay, so all right, sure, so talk to me about this piece.
Right.
So Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign a while ago and endorse President Trump. Started using this slogan a make America Healthy Again, which is meant to kind of illustrate the polices where Trump and Kennedy's agendas overlap, and is meant to be a promise about what mister Kennedy will do under a second Trump administration. But the reality is that a lot of what they are talking about is rooting out supposed corruption in public health agencies by essentially
dismantling them. Kennedy, as part of his anti vaccine activism for a long time, has implied not just some kind of connection between big pharma and public health agencies, but also a sinister level of collusion hiding all these things that he believes are happening behind closed doors where public health is concerned. Project twenty twenty five has called for, for instance, breaking up the sea into two smaller agencies.
So what both of these guys agree on and what they are proceeding together with is this idea that public health agencies, as they exist right now in the United States shouldn't and that scientists, for instance, should be investigated. He's made a lot of promises about, you know, quote unquote cleaning up medical journals, which are of course not under the offices of the federal government.
So there's a lot going on here.
Wait, can I ask you a question as a baffling aside. Sure you've written about him a bunch. Is he not smart?
Oh?
I don't know. I wouldn't. I wouldn't be comfortable saying whether anybody is smart or not smart?
Right. What do you think drives some of this? So?
I think that he specifically has always proceeded under the kind of assumption that every kind of like public health agency is corrupt and that it has to be like rooted out. This is a claim that he makes not just about vaccines, but about things like you know, five G technology, GMOs, and so I think if you proceed with kind of like an overwhelming sense of everything being deeply corrupt, then you tend to kind of make sweeping statements like this.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that answers your question.
I think what you're saying, which is important, is that it's paranoia on some level, or it's being convinced that these people are not on the level.
Yeah, that is definitely a claim that he's made for a long time, sometimes in more extreme forms than he is right now, for instance, when he's speaking to sort of like friendlier anti vaccine audiences. But yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of important to.
Point out here that there is a pretty high degree of distrust and paranoia in against the medical establishment in the United States. Like, you know, conspiracy theories about the medical establishment are incredibly common.
And especially after COVID.
Sure, especially after COVID, people feel disaffected by the medical system. They feel like it is not there for them. And so his kind of line about rooting out supposed corruption in those agencies probably finds more of a receptive audience than it would have before COVID.
Yes, for sure. And I think that's a really important point because I think that that's absolutely one hundred percent true anyway, So continue.
So, Yeah, the MAHA agenda is basically about all of these ways that they are going to dismantle these agencies investigate, Yeah, the editors of medical journals. But you know, in the midst of all of this, as I said, we don't actually know where exactly Kennedy fits into a Trump administration. They've been pretty vague about it. But the thing that both Trump and Kennedy have said over and over is that Kennedy is going to be responsible for curing what
they both call the chronic disease epidemic. Kennedy also told a group of MAHA supporters that Trump quote promised me control of the public health agencies, including AHHS, the CDC, FDA, NHUSDA, and a few others.
So that is the claim that he's made.
It seems like a lot.
It seems like a lot.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense, though I guess it doesn't have to. But the one other thing we should have known here is that in twenty seventeen, Kennedy claimed that Trump had asked him to be on a vaccine safety commission looking into, you know, whether anything about the vaccine kind of administration system needs to be overhauled or whether vaccines are unsafe, which is of course a belief that he has, and that didn't happen, right Like the Vaccine Safety Commission didn't happen.
Kennedy did not play any role in the first Trump administration.
So there is a little bit of a question here about whether or not this is like a promise that will be appalled.
That sounds like it makes a lot of sense, as much as any of this makes sense, which is not a lot.
Yeah, it's the same as like Elon Musk, Right, you know, we don't actually know to what extent any of these guys are going to be involved in the Trumpet administration in an ongoing way, because what we know from a previous Trump administration is that it had really high turnover, a lot of people had the same jobs for a very short period of time.
So we'll see, yes, exactly. So anyway, continue on with this story. Yeah.
So one of the things that Kennedy has said about the supposed like Maha agenda is that he's going to end what he's called the FDA's war on public health. But then when he lists things that he considers to be tenets of public health, a lot of them are pseudoscience.
So he tweeted this includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ibermectin, hydroxychloroquin vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health.
And can't be patented by pharma.
He also added, if you work for the FDA and or part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. One preserve your records and two pack your bags. So it would take us too long to get into each of those things individually.
Hit sunlight. Let's start with sunlight.
So, I mean, I don't know if you remember, but this was a pretty widespread claim during the start of COVID, is that sunlight was if.
You bring it into the body, Yes.
Yeah, a literal disinfectant and maybe that would cure COVID, which it turned out it didn't. Hyperbaric therapies I have to assume there he means hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which are a debunked and very dangerous fake treatment for autism. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers are used for deep sea divers who are suffering from the bends. That's their actual use. There has been at least one death from a family who is using a hyperbaric chamber to treat their suns autism.
Same with kylating compounds kulation.
Again as the practice of drawing heavy metals out of the body. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff in here that suggests again again raw milk.
Raw milk seems to be like a real maga thing, right.
Yeah, I mean I think it. It connects a few different things, right.
One is government regulation because there are a lot of places where you can't legally sell raw milk. The second is this idea that anything quote unquote natural is better, you know, that pasteurization does something bad, which it doesn't. And the third is sort of a belief in I guess food born illness not existing.
I mean, we have.
Really good data about what raw milk does or can do, and it's not great.
I mean, it's like there are so many problems in this world that it seems hard to imagine that you need to get involved in unpasteurized milk. But I guess you do.
Right.
It's been a really big thing lately with sort of wellness influencers online, as I'm sure you've seen, any of whom were also pretty enthusiastic Kennedy supporters. I think it's kind of symbolic of a bigger set of approaches towards towards health and sort of an individualized view of health as opposed to a kind of public or systemic view of health.
Right, Yeah, I think that's right, So continue on this road.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the big thing here that Kennedy has talked about a lot is that there is a chronic disease crisis that poses like an existential threat to the country, which, like, I don't think anybody would dispute that Americans suffer from some chronic diseases at higher rates. That is a thing, you know what I mean when we're talking about stuff
like cancer, diabetes, asthma. But there doesn't tend to be And I spoke to an immunologist and public health expert about this named doctor Andrea Love, who talked about this a lot, which is essentially that there doesn't tend to be a discussion of like we have chronic diseases like asthma that affect kids because of air quality, we should focus on cleaning up air quality instead, it tends to be about kind of individual approaches and cures, like you know,
future kids around milk. And so there's an interesting thing that's going on here where fundamentally what Kennedy is talking about here and what Trump has thrown his support behind is an atmosphere of less oversight, less regulation, less regulation of food, of medicines, of supplements, and so to a lot of public health experts that I've spoken to, it doesn't really seem like a environment that would actually make Americans healthier, but it would certainly let people sell stuff
and market stuff that they can't right now.
Right, And that makes a lot of sense, right, because that is sort of the thought of Trump world, right, selling things that might not necessarily be good for people, right.
Yeah. And also just a belief in deregulation.
I mean, this is something that we see in Trump World and also on the rite more generally, this belief that government agencies are too big, that they exercise too much control, but in the case of things like food safety.
They actually don't because we haven't had a food regulation change in a long time anyway. Sorry, I actually know about tho.
Yeah, I mean it's sort of interesting, right because also most Americans in our lifetime, pretty much everybody who's alive today, does not remember a time before we had food regulations.
You know, we don't remember a time when you might be fed a patent medicine concoction that was made entirely of cocaine and laudanum that would kill your baby, Like we don't actually have a living memory of those things, which can be super persuasive for some folks who feel just sort of ambiently like something's wrong in our health system and are attracted to mister Kennedy's kind of proposals of how to fix it.
Yeah, is there any bright spot here?
Well, I guess it depends on who you are, right, I'm sure some people are. I wrote another piece this week about mister Kennedy's anti vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense, which used to be called the World Mercury Project back when he was claiming that a form of mercury in vaccines was making kids sick, and then he switched to a different set of claims and changed the name. Those people are really excited, obviously they see this there a
big moment for them and their movement. I think for the rest of us, it is helpful and useful to know what these folks are proposing and what their vision is for how public health should look in the United States.
This would be a.
Great time to have a conversation with your doctor. If you have a trusted healthcare provider and make sure if you personally are somebody who gets vaccinated, that you were up on your shots and things like your tetanis booster, which is good practice always right but especially especially right now.
I don't know.
I think that in this area is with so many other things about the impending Trump administration, it's great to have information. It's great to just know what is going on and what the proposals are, and people can choose how to respond to them in their own lives in kind of productive ways as opposed to just feeling a sense of doom.
If that's how you feel.
Yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you so much, Anna, thanks for having me.
All Moon Jesse Cannon I joined fast. When I think of the things that are most distressing about Trump's when there's many, but I continually get very depressed about this very subject. What are you seeing here?
Donald Trump said he's going to leave the Paris Climate Accord. His transition team is preparing executive orders and proclamations on shrinking the size of some national monuments to allow more drilling and mining. The New York Times said on Friday, Trump is expected to end the pause on permitting new liquefied natural gas exports to big markets in Asia and Europe provoke the waiver that allows California and other states
to have tighter pollution standards. This is going to be really, really depressing and really sad to watch, and this is where it's going to go, and there's really.
Nothing we can do, especially when it's eighty and November in New York.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.