Making America Sick Again: How MAGA Is Hurting Healthcare and Science (Half the Answer #70, with Walker Bragman)

Trent and Caitlin reconnect with journalist Walker Bragman to hash out the current state of the NIH and HHS, the ideologies that drive people to promote eugenics and science denial, and the childish nature of fascism.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

Important Context Newsletter

Rebuilding the Public Trust

Walker Bragman's Bluesky Profile

Tracking Measles Cases in the U.S.

Trump's pick for surgeon general grilled over her positions on vaccines

Bhattacharya urges measles vaccination as US activity increases

Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson:** Happy days are in the area. Happy days — generally, we're looking for them. We're hunting them down. Not so easy recently. But well, you know that understanding a question is half the answer, and this, of course, is Half The Answer with your hosts Trent R. Nelson and, of course, Caitlin M. Green. And you know what we both get into — well, I'm a writer and editor and philosopher. Sorry, I do a lot of things, but not as many as does Caitlin. She is a linguist, she's a writer, she's an editor. She is a mom. She is not Ariel. She does have friends in the ocean, but that is for another matter, another time. To be sure — Caitlin, we just have such wonderful company all the time. And you know, the only thing we potentially love more than a first-timer is a recidivist. Who have you brought back on to the program today?

**Caitlin M. Green:** I don't know how we keep doing it, but we keep conning people into coming back after we've wasted their time for an hour and a half in the past, and today is no different. We have Walker Bragman. Walker is a journalist who tracks dark money and attacks on public health. He's a co-founder of the Accountability Journalism Institute. You can read his work on Important Context, which is his website, and of course you can see his words in many, many other places as well. Walker, how are you today? Yeah, right — the answers when we ask that, it's like a human convention. "Hey, how's it going? How are you?" We need to stop, because we never get the answer of "so good, so good." It's not happening.

**Walker Bragman:** You know, I'm all right. The child joy is the best, though. My son is now crawling and wants to get into everything. So it's a constant push-pull of "let me play with that." And yeah —

**Caitlin M. Green:** The best — like, I threw a toddler birthday party this weekend, so I'm still riding high off of all the child joy. My daughter had like three different costume changes during the party. She started out dressed as Ariel, and then somehow she put pajamas on when I didn't even see, and she came out in her pajamas, and she went back in and had a different Ariel dress on. She was really enjoying herself.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, the nostalgia for the days when you could put them on the play mat and then go pick something up off the counter, and when you came back, they'd still be on the play mat. Not anymore. Those days are gone.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, he hates it. We have a playpen for him and he just hates it. He does not like being in that. Whenever you put him down, it's immediate tears.

**Caitlin M. Green:** We had to do that for a long time because we just needed walls around her. She would roll under the furniture all the time. I'd blink and she'd be under a chair and couldn't get out. We need borders. We need to build a wall.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Build that wall. So we did — we did a playpen that was on wheels, and I could drag her around with me so she wouldn't feel mad that I'd abandoned her somewhere. And then also the Circle of Neglect. We've talked about the Circle of Neglect. The Circle of Neglect is the little thing you put them in upright, and their legs go through, and there's toys around — you know, the little table. That's what we always called it — "put her in the Circle of Neglect, I need to chop some vegetables."

**Trent R. Nelson:** Hey, link it. Link will be in the description for our listeners and viewers too. No, we have to come up with our own version, which is called the Circle of Neglect.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, Caitlin, last time we had Walker on, we talked about the worst people — who don't really care if we get very sick or not, it seems, for they continue to take away our means of not getting so sick. And well, they have not stopped in the time since last we spoke with Walker, so we figured we better have him back on. Walker — how is your friend Jay Bhattacharya doing?

**Walker Bragman:** Oh, he's got a new position to add to his CV, and that is CDC acting director. So, yeah.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, you know, in 2024, before Trump had won, I suspected that Jay was going to be the CDC director. That was my thought — like, this guy is primed for that. And then they made him NIH Director, which I was like, well, I guess that kind of makes sense, because of his grudge against the last NIH Director, Francis Collins. The administration seemed to be like, "If you don't like the person who held this position in the past, well, now you can have the position and do whatever." Or, "If you don't like this agency, well, guess what — now you're running it." So it made sense, but now he's CDC director as well.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Because, yeah — I feel like last year we were like, "Why does Marco Rubio have so many jobs?" And now it's Jay Bhattacharya has every job in the world.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Right, in so many ways that tracks with how Trump does business. He's like, "Linda McMahon, staunch advocate of education." This is his deal — "Oh, you don't like something? Let's put you in charge of it." It's a devious and dreadful concept. Let's put the people who have the most malignant ideas in charge of our health, in charge of our education.

**Walker Bragman:** Jay is CDC director now — definitely not somebody we want running the CDC. An economist whose big idea was everybody should just get COVID and then we can get herd immunity and move past the crisis. That didn't work. Everybody got COVID, and then they got it again and again. And a lot of people died. He's now in charge of the CDC. He's an economist — what business does he have running the CDC or NIH, frankly? But this is the Trump administration.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, we love putting people in who have no normal qualifications — the kind of things that 100% of previous inhabitants of that role had. We're just breaking with tradition here. We're trying something bold and new and exciting. We've got Casey Means, whose main qualification is that she has a lot of followers on social media.

**Walker Bragman:** Well, that's probably part of it. Trump is sort of drawn to these people who are telegenic, or they have a lot of followers. That is something he values a lot. And unfortunately, they have this view of expertise that like, "Oh, it doesn't matter that these people have been working their whole lives towards something or studying their whole lives — any idiot could do that." And now we are experiencing what it's like to be run by people without expertise.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yeah, it's one of this movement's most Jacksonian qualities — this absolute disdain and hatred, but it comes from this sense of "every man can do anything." It comes from this utopian idea that any man is just as good as another man. Put a man in a position and give him some time and he'll learn how to do the thing. Because that's the same idea that Andrew Jackson brought in — any person who is in an office for too long starts to reap benefits and have advantages that no one man should have alone, and so anybody could do any of these jobs. They've really zeroed in on that, and it's the same thing that happened 100, 200 years ago. It zeroes in on the desire of regular people to be lifted up, to feel positive about themselves, to feel as though they have the ability to help run the government. But unfortunately —

**Walker Bragman:** That's interesting. I hadn't heard the Jackson comparison before, but that's a good one.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Correct. I think it's dumb as shit, because I certainly am not a temporarily embarrassed CDC director. But it comes from a place of longing. That doesn't really help us, because much like 200 years ago, if you put in people who don't know what they're doing, you get results that showcase that. Walker, what sort of terrible results have you been noticing, other than, of course, the rampant measles outbreak and increase in polio — all of these things that my grandmother hasn't spoken about in literally 70 years?

**Caitlin M. Green:** That's beautiful. Really — we're all just temporarily embarrassed CDC directors.

**Walker Bragman:** I mean, pick one. You've got the FBI run by a Trump loyalist — dysfunctional FBI. You've got untrained federal agents on the street, killing Americans. The entire administration is just the last people you would want in charge running stuff. The NIH under Bhattacharya has been absolutely devastated. I read somewhere that it'll take a generation at least to undo some of this damage. We've really lost the confidence of researchers, not just here but abroad. Why would you come and work in the US right now? It's a disaster — we are losing brain. It's a brain drain, people are going elsewhere. And when you think about American power in the world, that's one aspect of it — our cutting-edge science, the ability to make miracles. This administration does not appreciate that. They've gone after research on the grounds that it's DEI, which is ridiculous, because when you talk about unqualified people getting positions they're not qualified to have — that's the entire administration. The thing that they said was happening is happening, but they're doing it. Every accusation is a confession.

**Walker Bragman:** And their whole thing — it's just ridiculous. Jay's built this sort of mythos around himself as the censored truth-teller of COVID. And I think we talked about this a little bit last time. He was not censored. The man was all over Fox News, all over right-wing media, giving presentations before the Council for National Policy, Brownstone. He was amplified by this right-wing media ecosystem to the point where now he's the NIH Director. That's not censorship — if that is censorship, censor me please. But this is not just rank hypocrisy and shameless lying. It is a deliberate strategy to undermine their opposition and sell this damaging, destructive right-wing agenda. They don't actually care about academic freedom or free speech. What they care about is imposing right-wing ideas on everybody.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Well, I'll say it every time — when somebody starts going off about censorship and loss of academic freedom, and not being allowed to say challenging, difficult truths — when they're asked to give examples of that happening, without fail, they list stuff other people are saying as the problem. Where it's like, that's actually the opposite of the issue. When you're like, "Oh, classicism is overrun with censorship — I went to a conference and people did presentations on queer themes in ancient Greece." It's like, no — that was other people's research. You didn't like that other people were doing research that you thought was gross. It turns out that if you want academic freedom, you have to let them do that stuff.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, I mean, that's pretty succinct. It also feels like there's all this debate about, "Is this person really in their heart a fascist or a eugenicist or whatever?" And it's like, I don't know — I can't read your mind. But if I were a person who thought that certain kinds of children were weak stock that needed to be culled for the future of humanity, I don't think I'd be behaving any different than RFK Jr.

**Walker Bragman:** The idea that they sell to people, which I think is very appealing, is that your health is hackable. And with some lifestyle choices or changes, you too can live into the distant future — our tech utopia where billionaires are going to inject you with their super serum or whatever. You'll get your — what are they? The med beds? Yeah. Like, hey, we already have them — in that Matt Damon movie. What is it? *Elysium*. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Med beds are a mere five to ten years away. It's gonna happen. They were a mere five to ten years away five to ten years ago, and they're a mere five to ten years away now.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Oh, but wasn't there an alien movie too where the girl had an alien in her and she excised it in a med bed? *Prometheus.* I know movies. I'm good at movies.

**Caitlin M. Green:** I love that one. To me, it was like — oh, this is what it's like to interact with an AI system. Because she had to trick it into thinking that she had an ectopic pregnancy, because it wasn't like, "Oh, clearly you have an alien organism inside of you, and I'm going to deal with it." She was like, "I need to figure out what setting will get this thing out of me."

**Walker Bragman:** But yeah, it's just this conspiracism that they sell to people that's very appealing. Who doesn't want to live? My family just experienced a loss. It was very sudden, and that's hard. Death is hard, and life is unpredictable, and that is scary. And so we have all of these systems that we build up and put in place to make that less scary, and the right capitalizes on that — especially with this wellness stuff. "Take these supplements. Eat red meat. It's the secret that the doctors have been keeping from you. Eat whole butter sticks on your steak. Take this coffee enema." It's just nonsense. It's junk science. But they sell it to people. I think people feel like it gives them a sense of control when they don't really have that. We could all die tomorrow, or in 50 years. Who knows. But at some point it will happen. You can't hack your health. You can do things that give you better odds — yes, a better diet, exercise, sleep, these are tried and true. But eventually you expire.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right. You just reminded me of a wellness influencer I just saw a clip of, who was like, "I used to be addicted to alcohol, and now I'm addicted to drinking my own pee, and that's much better." And I'm like, that's not better. I mean, I guess compared to alcohol, maybe. But what if neither? What if you did neither?

**Walker Bragman:** There you go. But genetics is such a big part of this, and so I think implicit in the wellness movement, in RFK's world of swapping heroin addiction for wellness — there's an implicit sort of recognition that not everybody is capable, but those people are less valuable and less important because they just have bad genes.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, I mean, you see it so often. That is almost essentially the entire premise of NA and AA — you like to drink, you like to shoot heroin. So what if you just read the Bible instead? Have you considered that? Just replace the heroin with the Scriptures and you'll be in good business. But Walker, we are very sorry about your loss, to be sure. I do not want to live forever. I do not want to hack my health and be 145. I do not want to be turned into a cyborg living too long. I want to die a regular death, however that happens — surprise or not surprised. Because I think — and I know this is an unpopular take in certain corners of the internet — that death, to some degree, gives us another meaning of living. If you could just do everything forever, then some people might come to the conclusion that there's hardly a point in doing anything, because we have so much time.

**Walker Bragman:** Okay, let me push back on that a little bit, because already, none of this matters. Have you heard of the concept of deep time? So hold your arm out like this. Where your palm is, this is where the dinosaurs start. And the very tip of your fingernail on your middle finger — that's humans. That's the age of the earth. It's time on a scale that humans can't even comprehend. So the idea that there is sort of cosmic significance to anything is to me at least a little — so I'm happy. Put me in a cyborg body.

**Trent R. Nelson:** I don't think there's any cosmic significance or meaning to our lives. I'm an absurdist. I have given myself my own meaning, thankfully. But even with that mindset in place — let me take a nap eventually, right? My grandma, she's 94 years old. She has this indomitable spirit to continue living. She survived through World War Two. She survived through getting left by her husband. She has this incredible spirit. But then you talk to another 97-year-old person, and they look at you dead in the eyes and they're like, "I'm tired, man." And you're like — I get that. I get both.

**Caitlin M. Green:** My dad's gonna hate this part. I'm gonna get talked to about this segment of the podcast. The next time I go lift weights with my dad, he's gonna tell me how annoyed he is that we're denying the cosmic beauty of the universe.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah. He's gonna laugh, but — no, but if I could have thrown my grandma into a med bed and made her live forever, I would have done it. She's the best grandma in the world. But she would have probably been mad at me.

**Walker Bragman:** I think there is an argument that death is sort of necessary. The idea of a Musk living into eternity is terrifying. But these sorts of promises of longevity are very appealing.

**Trent R. Nelson:** We'd all do that for somebody. That's the thing — we would all put somebody in the med bed. And other people would put us in the med bed. Because love.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right? Well, we have a lot of art to help us deal with this kind of question. This is part of the story of why we have vampire stories — about what happens when you don't decay and you don't move on. I don't know if you guys read *Tuck Everlasting* as children, but it's the story of a family who has on their property a sort of fountain of youth — a spring of eternal life. If you take a drink from it, you stop aging from there. And a little girl meets them and learns about it, falls in love with the boy in that family, and they offer her, "Will you take a drink of the water and be with us and stop aging?" And spoiler alert, everybody — at the end, Winnie says no. She continues to age as they stay still. And I as a kid was like, "Winnie, you dumbass. What are you doing? You could have been immortal."

**Walker Bragman:** Didn't they make a movie out of that? I think they did, right?

**Caitlin M. Green:** They did. It had Alexis Bledel as Winnie. I don't know — my little bisexual heart was only interested in knowing about Alexis Bledel, okay? That really should have been my first clue that I was bisexual — that I have no memory of who the male lead was. Those piercing blue eyes. It is some gentleman named Jonathan Jackson. I don't know who that is, but he always has his hair too long. William Hurt was the dad and Sissy Spacek was the mom. So it was a big deal. Victor Garber was Winnie's dad. Amazing.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, Walker, this actually moves us towards something that I think about often. I suspect in this movement there also seems to be this mythological conception that at some point throughout the ages, people just walked into the field with cholera and ate grass seeds and then were fine. And that at some point the big bad capitalists ruined that, because they couldn't just sell grass seed to people, so they had to turn it into a pill that also kills your kidneys. What is that about? Because I hear it often, and I say to the people who bring it up — listen, man, you used to die from whooping cough. You used to die from the common cold. Life was not easy.

**Walker Bragman:** No. It's utopian. It's a utopian revisionist past of hunter-gatherers living into their hundreds. It's nonsense, but this is what they sell people.

**Caitlin M. Green:** My favorite expression of that is, "Don't take that Pfizer vaccine — take your ivermectin, which you can purchase from the good people at Pfizer." Big Pharma is really trying to get you, so make sure you don't give them your money by buying the vaccine from them — just buy the horse paste. It also all smacks of gender, does it not? It is very much like, the manly way to live is the hunter-gatherer way, the caveman way. Needles go in you, and that's kind of, if you think about it — like, gay and female. So we shouldn't do that. Just smear paste on ourselves like the good caveman did. "I'm not letting some doctor penetrate me."

**Trent R. Nelson:** Fellas — is it gay to get vaccines? That's where we're at.

**Walker Bragman:** Well, yeah — "My immune system is strong. I am strong. And so I will gladly get polio." Okay.

**Trent R. Nelson:** We can read it in Plato — this idea that we should not be doctoring our illnesses, that we should let the strong overcome the illness and continue on with their labor, and if they die, then that is simply a matter of culling a herd, eliminating the weakness. But there is a great deal of cruelty in such an idea, is there not, Walker?

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, it's eugenics. It's social Darwinism. Humans don't operate like that. Some of these lives that we're losing — they're people, they're human beings. I think about — remember when Herman Cain died from COVID? He had gone to the basketball game or whatever with Trump, got COVID, and then died. This guy was your friend.

**Walker Bragman:** People aren't people — real human beings don't work like that. They grieve, they appreciate. When I talk to somebody, I'm not evaluating their genes for how much I should invest in the relationship. "What's your family medical history?" People don't operate like that. So much of this feels unnatural, despite their insistence on "oh, we're going back to the natural lifestyle and natural roots, real food" — all that shit. They don't operate that way.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right, but the strong caring for the weak has been part of humanity's natural behavior forever. Why would we abandon that?

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, empathy is an evolved trait that is beneficial for our survival. These people don't care about science. They never really have. It's just this warped, unnatural view. And I think that's the right in general — you have the INCEL groyper types who also have this view of masculinity that's just weird and alienating and not like people you'd want to be around. I'm sorry, Andrew Tate — who wants to be? Or Nick Fuentes — that guy's not getting invited to any parties.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, everything about it reads weird. RFK — "I went and took a bath in that toxic stream and I came out fine." Dude, you submerged in sewage waste. It's just — at some point somebody's got to say this shit isn't normal.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right, and they didn't miss a beat. And then also, after Herman Cain died, didn't his account tweet COVID denial?

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right, how old were your grandparents when they died?

**Trent R. Nelson:** But it will happen. It will happen because it always does eventually. Everyone is going along with the McCarthyite scare, with the red-baiting, with the insanity, and then all of a sudden — the famous "Have you no shame, sir? Have you no honor?" And we long for that moment today. We long for that "Have you no honor" moment where everyone's like, "Oh, wait a minute, I do have honor. What the hell is going on here?" But we are 10 years into this mess, with the nominee process from 2015 all the way up to here, and there is a prevarication amongst so many people. I suspect it is the prevarication of investing so much into something that — to say that you were long-conned on fascism, when your kids and your sister and your father were telling you about fascism your whole life? That's embarrassing as shit. I feel like you're not going to get people coming out of the woodwork just being like, "Hey, turns out I was lied to and wrong three times in a row." Where do you fall on that?

**Walker Bragman:** I think the real appeal of this is that Trump tells people you can be your worst self, and that's actually desirable. And feeling bad is actually bad — that's the impulse. You don't have to try to be a better person, because actually you're perfect the way you are. And RFK is like, "Also, your health is hackable. Don't improve — just take supplements or eat this fad diet." It's just selling people bullshit. But it's appealing bullshit, so people want to believe it, and they don't necessarily recognize the parallels to fascism.

**Walker Bragman:** We have a frontier mentality — manifest destiny, we tamed the land, and we can do it again. And it's just nonsense. We live in a modern world and it's unpredictable. Sometimes you can do everything right and still get sick, and you're just one illness away from disability. That's scary. But you live, you appreciate the day-to-day, you try to enjoy the time that you have. That's it. They're not going to save you.

**Trent R. Nelson:** And if we didn't do it with technology in the 21st century, we'd have done it in the 15th century. We'd have done it 3,000 years ago, because that's what we do. We look around and we see fireflies and we're like, "Ah, yes, the spirits of my dead ancestors." And in those ways, there is a sort of beauty in it. But in med bed conspiracy theories, there's a certain psychosis about it — take a deep breath, this doesn't exist. Live your life. Be happy now and love now, instead of worrying about keeping it going for an endless period of time.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, it is funny that you bring that up, because that feeling of "oh my god, death is inevitable" — it fuels these conspiratorial ideas about med beds. But it also feels like that's what's behind these ads that are like, "You can call your AI grandma in a video chat and she'll read a story to your kid." It's the same thing — "I can't cope with the idea of death, so I'm gonna believe whatever you tell me about how I can get around it."

**Walker Bragman:** My friend calls it a perpetual adolescence. Because if you're not dealing with the finality and randomness of life, you're not really growing. And there's plenty out there to prevent you from doing that. Look — maybe I'm getting a little bit up on my atheist high horse here, but organized religion has been very appealing and shares some of the same qualities with the wellness stuff.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yep, right — the idea that you can access the things that are kind of beyond the veil.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, there is something to that. Linking the conspiracies with a certain constituency of people who believe in religion in a certain way — I talk about it often. I think it's actually very telling, because those people often have issues with things like science and history. And we ask ourselves, why? It's because the things that they believe in are capable of being static over long periods of time. They're capable of being unchanging monoliths. "We could always eat red meat and lick tallow from the bones of dead animals, and that would always help, and they've been doing that for thousands of years." And the foibles of religion — "This is eternal law. This is unchanging." They hate science because the scientists will come out and be like, "We figured out this new thing," and then come out later and be like, "Turns out we were slightly wrong about that, and we've revised our discovery — good job us." And history has the same thing — we're constantly rediscovering that something we thought is only half true. For the people who understand these concepts, it's pleasurable, almost — because it's progress each and every day. But for people opposed to these disciplines, it is infuriating. It's almost like, "What do you mean? You're so smart but you're always wrong? How is that possible? And then you're right, but your right is probably also going to be wrong one day."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah. But then they can make up whatever and be like, "Oh, this is a very ancient idea, actually." And it's like, no — someone made it up in 1975. I don't know why we're pretending that it's ancient wisdom.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yes. Much of what we know — for many peoples, it becomes like the talisman that they're given by their grandmother. It becomes the heirloom passed down from generation to generation. And so to deny Lutheranism, to deny X, Y, or Z — it's almost to deny our family, to deny our lineage, to deny ourselves. And I think for a lot of people, that is psychologically difficult, if not impossible.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, right. It's like a fix. It's the feeling of pursuing a fix as opposed to living your life in a healthy way. I mean, who among us has not allowed a moose carcass to liquefy in the back of our car? It's just one of those things that happens to you — in the pursuit of health.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, it's and I think it really is like an addiction in a certain way. Kennedy is low-hanging fruit, but the man was a fiending heroin addict who swapped one addiction for another. And where you get a little bit of that flavor is Olivia Nuzzi's book excerpt — she's like, "He desired — desiring — he wanted to — he desired me, desiring him, desiring desire." He would eat the world if he could. That's what you're describing — addiction. My uncle was an addict, and he had the same kind of almost pathological need for whatever it was he was into. A lot of this wellness stuff is super unhealthy and conspiratorial, but also reminds me of a drug addiction.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Auntie's kids — that's what really kills me.

**Walker Bragman:** I mean, this guy let whale juice from a dead whale dribble onto his kid. He brought his grandkids to the sewage stream. What are you doing, man? There's something wrong there — not just like, "Oh, that's fucked up," but like, oh, there's something wrong up here.

**Caitlin M. Green:** So, like, I wasn't following these people before they became a huge part of our government. But what I was following was the heterodox, anti-woke academic sphere, and I was thinking about the same tendency. Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein, who were academics, and then they got "canceled" — campus cancel culture. And then they had the Dark Horse podcast. And on it, they took ivermectin because they were COVID conspiracy people. And then they also gave it to their teenage son, and that was when I was like, fuck you — that kid is under your care. You're responsible for his health, and you're doing a political stunt using him like that. That kind of thing deserves to be shunned. Putting your grandkids in the toxic sludge — that is medical abuse, that's physical abuse. You can't do that.

**Walker Bragman:** It's abuse. If one of my son's grandparents did that, they would never see him again. Ever. I don't care what their position was — never. And the sort of flippancy with which Bhattacharya or Kulldorff will spew vaccine misinformation, or fear-monger about a life-saving vaccine — man, fuck you. They're saving lives, and you're making that harder. There's a non-zero percent chance that somebody is going to listen to you and die. Is your career, is the attention really worth it? And I think for a lot of people the answer is yes. And fuck those people.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right, and that kind of failure to act like a human person is disqualifying. And this is when I get on my linguistics high horse, and I start yelling about the people who think that it's really cool and edgy to say things like "words are not violence." I get it — saying something rude is not inherently violent. But that is never what people are saying. "Your words can be violence" — it's when you have the power to cause somebody to do something that kills them, or when you have the power to order somebody to kill somebody else. Your words actually are violence. That's called linguistic performativity. That's when you do a performative speech act that causes something to happen where people die. Words can be violence. "I hereby sentence you to death" — that's violence. Signing a warrant to cart somebody off to a camp where everybody's got deadly diseases and is being fed moldy food — that's violence.

**Walker Bragman:** Well, Charles Manson never killed anybody. All he did — no, exactly.

**Caitlin M. Green:** But also, have we considered that putting up flyers telling everybody that Jay Bhattacharya's policy advice led to people getting sick and dying — that's also violence? When he has to see them? He wants us to know that that was actually a death threat and we need to take it seriously.

**Walker Bragman:** Canceling an experimental cancer trial midway through — that's happening. These are not serious people, to borrow from *Succession*.

**Caitlin M. Green:** They're not — and it's a solipsism: if it happens to me, then it's real and it's important. If it happens to somebody else, then it's fake and stupid.

**Walker Bragman:** Marjorie Taylor Greene with "my life is now under threat, all these sexist fans of the president are coming after me and threatening me." So now you appreciate what — oh, that's awful. I mean, it is awful. But you couldn't have said it was awful before?

**Trent R. Nelson:** One of my least favorite parts of the early COVID pandemic was hearing from people who were like, "This is all bullshit. This is all to keep us inside, to kill the economy, to stop Trump, to kill his presidency." And then one of their relatives passes away, one of their friends passes away, and all of a sudden it is now a very serious thing we should be taking very seriously. And I hate that so much, because while you were denying all of it, other people were dying and you didn't care about them. And that is what we spoke about earlier, Walker — they want us to think of empathy as something horrifying, as something bad. While in fact, this is one of the most beautiful adaptations that we have — to be able to look around and say, "I'm not so different from that person. Look at their suffering — that feels like my suffering as well."

**Walker Bragman:** It's also the adaptation that has allowed us to extend human life. This is how modern science develops. This is the basis of medicine — taking out all the Nazi medicine we learned from, you know — but this is how humans have survived: we cooperate with each other because we realize there is a benefit to doing that. We work together to solve problems. Let's be real — I'm a journalist, I'm not going to cure cancer. If I get cancer, I will not be able to solve it myself. And frankly, I'm not gonna grow my own food either. That's a full-time thing. This is society.

**Caitlin M. Green:** That's right. Even people who are growing their own food — they're not growing a full balanced diet. They still need to go elsewhere for the things that they are not producing.

**Caitlin M. Green:** You're welcome, world. Electricity.

**Trent R. Nelson:** I know. This is part of having developed as a society in such a way that we do not recognize that it is only thanks to the collectivity of farming, of all of the utilities of life, that we're able to be writers, or podcasters, or journalists, or do any of these things. It's only thanks to the great bounty of human collectivity that we're able to become entertainers or movie stars or anything we'd like to be. And that's taken for granted. When people say they want to go off the grid, they almost never actually mean they want to go back to a time where you had to do everything manually. They want to take all of the bounty and boons that we've created as a civilization out to the middle of nowhere so they don't have to talk to anybody. It's so disconnected from reality.

**Walker Bragman:** But there's also this sense of resentment from people who do the rural lifestyle — "This is what's meaningful to me. This is the work that I do. And these entertainers aren't really working because they're not doing this." I get that. But when that resentment turns into less savory resentment, or finds its way and maps onto this or that minority group — that's when it gets really, really bleak.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right. And also it's always just one way. You can never say a bad thing about rural life and people who live in rural areas, but they get to shit on cities all day and talk about how degenerate we are and how dirty and how gross and how woke.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, but that's another right-wing appeal right there — "Hey, these city folks can't go off the grid, but you can." But like, that's who's buying your stuff. That's who's sustaining your lifestyle. Society is good actually. It's helpful and beneficial.

**Caitlin M. Green:** But again — rural residents are boys and city residents are girls, okay? And so that's why we don't like the city residents. And that's why "real America" is the rural kind, even though the majority of Americans live in cities.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, what you're saying is certainly accurate, Walker. I feel as though we lose sometimes in this back-and-forth between rural and urban communities — as Caitlin alluded to — mutual coordination. We buy from you. We come to visit your places. You send your children to the cities to get education. That mutual coordination is something that we can find meaning in.

**Walker Bragman:** Right — we would be a lot better off if people stopped being so freaking judgy. Mind your own fucking business. And at the same time, acknowledge that billionaires are destroying everything for everybody. But it's the weirdness of the conservative movement — it's always had its conspiratorial elements. You've had the John Birchers, and now they're the mainstream of the GOP. But that weirdness is alienating. You are alienating yourself from culture. You don't have to be mad about everything, but you are mad about everything, and if you weren't, you'd be less ostracized. And I think Trump has had a very negative impact on certain folks because he's encouraged them to be even more weird and reclusive — retreat into that right-wing ecosystem, retreat into the conspiracism. And that's done real damage to our society. Because I don't know how you're supposed to have a country with people who don't believe in having a country.

**Caitlin M. Green:** We're gonna have to work our way around to some hope at some point — that's our finishing move always.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Of course — primary season has begun. We have real power, real volition, real ambition. The numbers aren't looking good for Republicans in Texas — some of the districts they gerrymandered are literally getting higher Democrat turnout at this point. So there's hope on the horizon. Do you think we're gonna be able to turn the screws on any of these medical loonies, Walker? If we get —

**Caitlin M. Green:** Do you think Casey Means is going to get confirmed? What do you think is going to happen with that?

**Walker Bragman:** I hope not, probably, but that's my — I say that without any inside knowledge here. But my sense is that they confirmed RFK, they confirmed Bhattacharya, they confirmed Makary — they're going to confirm Casey Means. She might be more extreme.

**Walker Bragman:** Her take on COVID was that it was a "Darwinian moment" for the country. Literally — a "Darwinian moment." That's what she said. And that's the entire ethos of the movement, right there — social Darwinism just out in the open. Some people are going to die. The people who die — well, it's okay.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, it's a really fun kind of mental gymnastics that we do where we don't believe in evolution, but we do believe in eugenics somehow. We didn't evolve from monkeys, but we're gonna strengthen our gene pool — so we should allow those people to die.

**Walker Bragman:** So I think she'll probably be in. But if she's not, I'm — look, I'm hopeful. Sign the petitions. Call your senators. But we are living under a Republican trifecta right now, and they don't believe in expertise or qualifications. They don't believe in science. Hopeful about the primaries.

**Walker Bragman:** I'll tell you, though — if they put Jeffries and Schumer back in charge, it's not a good sign. Let's hope that enough people who are pissed off at the Democratic leadership win their primaries, and we get a party that actually is willing to fight.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right, so the primaries — we're being hopeful about the primaries. We know that it's something to be hopeful about because Trump is freaking out.

**Trent R. Nelson:** If you could only have one replaced, Walker — who are you choosing?

**Walker Bragman:** Oh, if I could only replace Schumer or Jeffries — is there a third option? Can I lobotomize myself instead? I mean, probably Schumer. Because — yeah, no, that's terrible. That's one of the worst "would you rathers" I've ever heard.

**Caitlin M. Green:** That's like — you get in an elevator with Jeffries and Schumer and you have one pink slip. Who do you use it on?

**Walker Bragman:** They're both from New York. How does New York produce this? When I think New York, I think "walk — fuck you." Where is that attitude? I want 8:30 AM rush-hour coffee-enema energy. That's what I want from our leaders. Instead, we get pictures of Jeffries with a baseball bat, or Schumer being like, "I'm mad as hell" —

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, like — okay, I'm mad as hell, but I am gonna take it anymore. Come on.

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, we are gonna take it. Yes, we are gonna take it.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Again, in the Editors' Chat last month, Adam agreed, and as did I — Schumer. And that's not to say that I like Hakeem Jeffries very much, but Schumer has just been in this position for so long. As the head of the Senate Democrats, you cannot have your head senator be as non-militant against these fascists as he has been. Jeffries has shown signs at times, although he has been very displeasing to me as well. Schumer is just full of strongly worded letters, and you just can't get over it.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, and he's just more frequently in a position where he could do something more than what he's doing. So that would be more useful, I think.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Walker Bragman, you are the best — despite battling all of life. We've got unfortunate passings, we've got fascism, we've got out-of-control medicos who are not medicals — they are economists. It's not great. But we appreciate you so much. Will you let our listeners and viewers know where they can find you, where they can read all your stuff, give you money, comment on your writings?

**Walker Bragman:** Sure — you can go to accountabilityjournalism.org and make a donation to our nonprofit. We just brought on a new board member, Billie Jean Sweeney, who is a fantastic journalist. You can go to importantcontext.news, subscribe. We do enterprise reporting, investigative reporting on bad actors in our government. And I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things — I'm not there yet, but I will be. It just takes time.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, that's right. It turns out we have to be grown-ups about it, and it sucks, but we do. And that's how our public health system should work too. Please be grown-ups.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yeah, and everybody — it takes time differently for everybody. We have to be patient with ourselves. We have to show that same empathy towards our own emotions and feelings as we do towards others.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Is it gonna be like *Futurama*, where they just screw your head onto a body?

**Walker Bragman:** Yeah, yes, exactly. But in the event of robot bodies, I'm all in. I'm down. I just — I'm not willing to funnel more money upward to Sam Altman or whatever.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, the Nixon robot. That's fine with me. Whatever — either that or the Lucy Liu sex bot. If I can get that one, I'll do that one.

**Caitlin M. Green:** But yeah, I don't want a robot body if I have to feed more orphans into the orphan grinder to get it. I'm not interested anymore. Thank you.

**Walker Bragman:** Although, I would be down to send Elon's robot body into space, you know — deep space. Yes, you can have forever, but —

**Caitlin M. Green:** Oh, yeah — that's just separately a goal of mine: to send him into space forever. Have so much fun on Mars. No, we're not gonna come visit you. You just stay there.

**Trent R. Nelson:** I have never once wished for anybody to be Major Tom other than him. But there we are. You come to a first every time, if you get lucky enough.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Thank you for coming. We will see you later. And as we all know, understanding a question is half the answer. And this is Half The Answer. We love you. Bye — see you next time.