Extinction Bursts

Reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Advocacy

Summary:

Recently, Tucker Carlson featured a segment on his show discussing the aftermath of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. Kennedy was given a platform by Rogan and Elon Musk to challenge established beliefs, and this has triggered a strong reaction from censors, authoritarians, and vaccine enthusiasts. These groups are exhibiting what psychologists refer to as an "extinction burst," which is characterized by an escalation in the frequency or intensity of undesired behavior when attempts are made to suppress it. In essence, it's a desperate final effort by those losing control to regain power.

As Kennedy's voice advocating for the First Amendment and principles of Classical Liberalism gains traction, it threatens the authority and influence of figures such as journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vice, as well as prominent vaccine advocate Peter Hotez. Consequently, they are becoming increasingly frustrated, resembling tantrum-throwing toddlers who can no longer exert control through censorship. This pattern is expected to continue, with authoritarians and censors experiencing more frequent extinction bursts as Kennedy's influence grows.

Article:

"Bobby Kennedy is winning."

Video:

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1672014260480901120

Transcript by Whisper AI - Formatted by Chet AI:

Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. There's never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump, of course it must, but go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced.

When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. But as well known as he is, the paper said at the time, Trump is also widely disliked. Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump.

Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the paper declared, announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating COVID-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans' faith in science. Shaking Americans' faith in science. Imagine if you were an ordinary New York Times subscriber reading that over coffee in your pre-war rent-controlled duplex on Columbus Avenue. You'd think Bobby Kennedy had just declared war on the Enlightenment. My fellow Americans, I have come to shake your faith in science. Join me as I drag our nation back to the medieval period. You'd be appalled.

CBS News viewers likely were appalled. In its coverage of Kennedy's announcement, CBS announced the candidate's views as, quote, misleading and dangerous. The L.A. Times called him a threat to democracy. At the offices of National Public Radio in Washington, a full-blown Category 5 hysteria typhoon broke out. NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines and who, in his spare time, provides moral support to crazed extremists who, quote, rally under the banner of what they call liberty or freedom.

People magazine didn't even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him. Kennedy's younger sister, Carrie, the magazine reported solemnly, does not approve of Bobby Jr.'s harmful views. His harmful views! Bobby Kennedy's thoughts alone are evil enough to hurt people.

That's been the tone of the media coverage around Bobby Kennedy Jr. for the past 18 years, since July of 2005. That's the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expanding schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines. The day that story was published, Kennedy's reporting was considered so solid that two outlets ran it simultaneously, Rollingstone and Salon.com. Unfortunately, neither one of them understood what they were up against. The pharma lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory, and both publications swiftly caved. Both pulled the story and then disavowed it, groveling as they did. No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn't the vaccines and maybe it wasn't, then what was it? To this day, there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attack Bobby Kennedy. They've called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account. YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson, setting unspecified misinformation and so on. Kennedy became the most censored famous person in the United States.

At this point, most Americans have heard a lot more about Bobby Kennedy Jr. than they've heard from him. He doesn't get many offers to speak from big platforms. But last week, Joe Rogan gave him one. Here's some of what he said.

Why do five of my seven kids have allergies? And of course, we know why as aluminum adjuvants give you allergies. They're designed to create a hyperimmune response to foreign particles. And the last category is the allergic diseases, peanut allergies, food allergies, eczema, which I never knew anybody with eczema when I was a kid. I knew people with asthma, but it wasn't one in every four black kids like it is today. So, you know, all of those things. Now, we went from 6% of American having chronic disease. By 1986, we're starting to have the vaccines and we get an 11.8% of kids now. So it's doubled.

Why do five of my seven children have allergies? Now, we don't know the answer, of course, but it's an interesting question. In fact, it's an important question that deserves an adult answer, not that you should hold your breath waiting to get one.

Bobby Kennedy asks a lot of questions like that. He notices things. Kennedy pays attention to the world around him. And he wonders why it's changing. He's an outdoorsman, a falconer, and a fly fisherman. He's interested in how nature works. He's curious.

Not so long ago, these qualities were considered essential to the practice of science. All scientific discovery comes from observation, empiricism, patient watching. Without the willingness to put aside your pre-assumptions and assess with honesty the things you see and touch and smell, the changes taking place right in front of your face, you can't do science.

You can't create art either or journalism or theology. You have to be willing to notice the obvious. And when they tell you you're not allowed to notice the obvious, you should be concerned.

Imagine you were on a commercial airline flight. The plane is just leveled out at 37,000 feet. You're closing your eyes for a nap. And suddenly you smell smoke. And it's not your imagination. You can see it. It's starting to fill the cabin. All around you people are hacking and choking. The guy in the next seat has a napkin pressed against his mouth. And he's mumbling what sounds like Psalm 23. Yay, though I walk through the value of the shadow of death.

So clearly the airplane is on fire. But almost unbelievably, no one has said a word about it. Not a single person is acknowledging this is happening. Everyone is silent. So in panic, you yell for the flight attendant. There's smoke in the cabin, you say, as if she hasn't noticed. But she stares at you with hard eyes. Shut up, racist, she replies. That's a dangerous Russian conspiracy theory. Stop spreading misinformation or all called TSA and have you arrested when we land.

That sounds like a fever dream. But it's also pretty close to the experience of living in the United States at the moment. All around you, things seem to be fraying and getting worse. Your gut tells you there's something very bad going on and all the evidence suggests that there is. But the people in charge won't acknowledge that. Everything's fine. They scream, stop noticing.

But wait, I don't remember this many kids having allergies or asthma or eczema or autism or for that matter, body dysmorphia. And why so many suicides? What's going on here? Shut up, stop asking questions. That's their answer. But Bobby Kennedy won't stop asking and that's why they hate him.

As Kennedy spoke on The Rogan Show, a reporter for vice.com called Anna Merlin was watching. Merlin was so enraged by what she saw that she dashed off an article attacking Joe Rogan's employer for allowing the conversation to take place. Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation, read the headline. The piece never even described much of what Bobby Kennedy had actually said. Merlin dismissed the entire interview as, quote, a detailed survey of Kennedy's most dangerously incorrect views, a far too extensive list to outline in full. In other words, we here at Vice don't have time to describe all of Bobby Kennedy's lies, but trust us, they were lies.

Then Merlin called Spotify to see if she could get the episode censored. Much to her profound frustration, Spotify refused to censor the episode and kept the interview on its website. So she spent the next several days ranting about all this on Twitter. People were listening to the wrong things and Anna Merlin was mad about it.

So was Peter Hotez. Hotez is a pediatrician from Texas who became moderately famous on MSNBC during the COVID lockdowns as a Biden shill and a vaccine promoter. Hotez read Anna Merlin's piece and then huffily retweeted it. Effectively, why is Bobby Kennedy allowed to talk in public? And that gave Joe Rogan an idea. Why not have Peter Hotez debate Bobby Kennedy on his show? You claim he's wrong. Why don't you explain why he's wrong? That seemed fair. But Hotez wouldn't bite. So Rogan offered to give a hundred grand to Hotez's favorite charity if he agreed to come on. Soon others made their own pledges and the pot swelled to over a million dollars.

But still, Peter Hotez wouldn't come. Instead, he scampered back to MSNBC, where one of the channel's oilier hosts assured him he was doing the right thing by dodging the debate. Arguing with Bobby Kennedy is morally equivalent to debating a Holocaust denier, the host said. No decent person would do that. And of course, Hotez agreed. Quote, 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they believed the anti-vaccine disinformation and refused to take a COVID shot. So really, talking to Bobby Kennedy would be a lot like a betting murder. And Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, was not going to do that.

But wait a second, you ask yourself. Let's think about those numbers.

200,000 people died because of vaccine disinformation from Bobby Kennedy and people like him? Hmm. How do we know that? Is that really science? No. It's not science. Because we don't know that. We can't know that. There is no way to know that.

Peter Hotez's claim is a political attack posing as science, and he specializes in those. Here he is on television during the so-called pandemic. It's all about mass compliance. That's going to be absolutely critical. Because if you don't have mass, remember, this virus aerosolizes. So even six feet is not enough. It can go 17, 18 feet, several meters.

What you really have to do is have vaccine mandates in the schools. We should have a rule that anyone who walks into a school over the age of 12 has to be vaccinated. This is the nature of the anti-vaccine movement in this country. It's somehow married now to far-right-wing extremism and white nationalist group.

Anyone who's unvaccinated and has been lucky enough to escape COVID, your luck is about to run out. And I call it anti-science aggression coming from Senator Rand Paul, Senator Johnson, members of the House of Representatives. In addition to those two senators, are killers. It's all about mass compliance. We must have vaccine mandates for children. Take the vaccine or you will die. Anyone who disagrees with me is a white nationalist and probably an agent of Putin. Do we say probably? Let's revise that. Certainly an agent of Putin.

Again, here is Dr. Peter Hotez. We're starting to see now those same anti-vaccine messages that are coming out of the U.S. And now we're finding it in Africa and Latin America. And remember, the other reason we're seeing this is the Putin government has, this has been reported by U.S. and British intelligence, has been piling on with this whole systematic program of what's being called weaponized health communications, trying to destabilize democracies with anti-vaccine, anti-science messages and targeting.

So according to British and U.S. intelligence, anyone who disagrees with Dr. Peter Hotez is a disloyal American working to destabilize our democracy on behalf of Vladimir Putin.

Now, by comparison, never in his life has Bobby Kennedy Jr. said anything half that demented. But keep in mind, Peter Hotez claims to have a valid medical license. He is allowed to treat patients.

After a while, even MSNBC viewers were going to have some questions about a guy who talks like that, and apparently some of them did. As the lockdowns were on, the population started to notice that many of the core claims the TV doctors were making were untrue. You'd only need one shot. If you got the shot, you would never get sick. You would never pass the virus to others and so on. They said these things, as you know, again and again. Ultimately, they were proven wrong. But they never admitted it. They just attacked the people who noticed.

Here's Dr. Peter Hotez calling for the Biden administration to arrest anyone who questions the COVID vaccine. The Biden administration has to realize that that anti-science is a killer, disinformation. It's not even just disinformation. This is an anti-science empire right now, and we need Homeland Security. We need the Justice Department. We've really got to figure this out, and the Health and Human Services will not be able to figure this out on their own. It's not a medical problem. It's a law enforcement problem. They've doubted me. Arrest them.

It's a horrifying outburst, if you think about it. If you were on tape saying something like that, you would be deeply ashamed. But Peter Hotez is not ashamed. He's become even more grandiose. Hotez has written a self-congratulatory new book called The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, a scientist's warning, as if you were a scientist.

Here's how Hotez describes himself in the book's promotional literature. Quote, "During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist in his famous bowtie, appearing daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR, and BBC, and others, Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a non-profit COVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic and was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work. He also became one of the main targets of anti-science rhetoric that gained traction through conservative news media." End quote, though we could go on.

So here you have a renowned scientist, selfless, trusted, going without sleep, self-denying, persecuted by extremists for daring to tell the truth, the Albert Schweitzer of cable news, that's Dr. Peter J. Hotez.

The fact that a partisan buffoon like Peter Hotez can describe himself this way with a straight face and the backing of a publisher makes you despair for the country's future. But don't despair. There is hope. Hotez will never debate Bobby Kennedy Jr., but it doesn't matter. Kennedy has already won. He's more honest than Dr. Peter Hotez, and that's obvious to anyone who's paying attention.

A new economist poll shows that Kennedy is more popular and far less hated than either major party frontrunner. After almost 20 years of being silenced, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is being heard, and why wouldn't he be? Kennedy's theories about vaccines may be right, they may be partially right, they could be even utterly wrong. No one's proved it either way. But what we can say with certainty is that America's medical establishment has beclowned itself for all time. Its official positions on vaccines, psychiatric drugs, puberty blockers, reassignment surgeries, a long list of other politically-professional priorities have no connection whatsoever to legitimate science. It's all effectively witchcraft.

At the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago last week, for example, delegates issued a statement attacking the body mass index as a tool of, quote, racist exclusion, which has caused historical harm. Next year they will denounce thermometers and stethoscopes. They're insane. Compared to them, Bobby Kennedy is a mainstream figure, and people understand that. That's why he's winning. And you know he's winning by how his critics are doing.

So just four years ago, Anna Merlin was regarded as an important expert on conspiracy theories and misinformation. She'd written a book on the topic. Here she is talking about it. "I've always thought that in the case of conspiracy peddlers, it's not necessarily a super profitable enterprise to ask whether they really believe it or not because I don't know what's in their hearts. I don't know what's in their minds. All I know is what they spend their time doing, which is promoting conspiracy theories. In the case of ordinary people, conspiracy consumers, and most Americans are, to some degree, consumers of conspiracy theories, all the studies that we have show that like one in three Americans believe in some conspiracy theory to some extent. For the people in the very sort of deep end of the conspiracy pool, people who are consuming a lot of conspiracy content, I think it's really important to look at the way it helps them make sense of the world and make sense of our political moment and make sense of a lot of times like what's happening in their own lives."

All the studies that we have show that like one in three Americans believe in some conspiracy theory. You'll notice the upspeak, the rising inflection at the end of the sentence. That's a familiar tick in Brooklyn. It's designed to turn a declarative sentence into a question and thereby belittle the listener. Do you follow me? Is this too complicated for you?

So the lady in the nosering wants you to know she's smart, but she's not. When Merlin recorded that interview, Vice, where she now works, was valued at more than $5 billion. Genius investors like James Murdock were showering the company with money. Everyone wanted in on the future of media, which was uptalkers like Anna Merlin lecturing you about racism and misinformation. But that has changed. Last month, Vice filed for bankruptcy. Anna Merlin is still on Twitter screeching about how her critics are transphobic, but nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear from Anna Merlin anymore. The gatekeepers are transparently ridiculous. Everyone can see that. People have started to notice.