However Much You Hate Journalists, pt.II

A well timed hitpiece to smear RFK Jr. by linking him to me

On Monday, I received an email from a journalist at Politico, one Ariel Wittenberg, asking if I’d like to offer comment for a piece she was writing, with a very short deadline, about RFK Jr. and how his thoughts on environmental pollution and health overlap with mine.

I am looking to get in touch with Raw Egg Nationalist (Charles Cornish-Dale) for an E&E News article I’m working on about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his appeal to rightwing bodybuilders like Raw Egg Nationalist.

The story discusses Cornish-Dale and Kennedy’s joint 2022 appearance in The End of Men, and also some more recent comments Cornish-Dale has made in support of Kennedy’s potential nomination on various podcasts. The article, in particular, focuses on Kennedy and Cornish Dale’s views on atrazine and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals and how they may be impacted testosterone levels.

Do you have any comments for me to add to the story?

Obviously, my spider senses told me, this would be a hitpiece timed to coincide with RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing before the Senate, which is taking place right now, as I type. Don’t ask me how I knew.

Author of the RFK Jr. hitpiece: Ariel Wittenberg

The main strategy of the hitpiece would, of course, be that RFK is dangerous because he shares my views and enables people like me—dangerous right-wing bodybuilders who advocate dangerous things like consuming raw eggs and raw milk and have recondite opinions about the physical appearance of leftists.

Normally, I don’t play along with this kind of bullshit. My views on journalists are those of Soren Kierkegaard, as you’ll know if you follow my Twitter account. Anyway, just this once, I thought I would play along, because there are plenty of things I can say on the topic of RFK Jr.’s appeal and the devastating effects of exposure to endocrine disruptors, and I figured they’d actually be pretty hard to twist. Hell, I might even have some fun at Ms Wittenberg’s expense. So I wrote a thousand words in response to her questions and clicked send.

The hitpiece turned out to be exactly that—a hitpiece, hatchet job, whatever—and Ms Wittenberg did her best to twist my words. I think she failed, frankly. You can see for yourself by comparing what’s she’s written to my full answers to her questions, which I’ve reproduced below. The hitpiece hasn’t gained any traction, and so far RFK hasn’t been asked by any Senators about his putative links to me, so what the hell?

RFK Jr is a lifelong Democrat and environmental attorney, why does he appeal to you and so many of your followers?

How much of your support is because you share aligning views on things like industrial agriculture’s use of endocrine-disrupting chemicals like atrazine versus other policies or concerns you may align on?

RFK Jr. is jacked, tanned, smart and a hit with the ladies. What’s not to like? He embodies the ideals he promotes—many of which we promote as well—and he’s been brave enough to speak the truth to power. He’s spent decades speaking out and fighting against massive corporate concerns most American politicians are happy to bend over for, because he knows the truth and isn’t afraid to say it: that corporate control of the food supply and our growing dependency on Big Pharma have been a disaster for our health. He’s been brave enough to break with his family to support President Trump too.

The fact that he’s a Democrat, for me, is neither here nor there. He’s been for reparations in the past, which I can’t say I think are a good idea, but when he’s right on so many other things, I can agree to disagree with him on handouts.

My article discusses the End of Men Tucker Carlson special, which both you and RFK jr. appeared on. How would you say that show effected your following online?

The End of Men sent my popularity through the roof. I had fairly big account before the documentary—I think it was maybe 80k or 100k followers—and my books were selling well, but things just went crazy afterwards. I’ve been on a steep upward trajectory ever since. It’s been great. And it’s been even better since my identity was revealed.

My article is focusing in particular on claims RFK jr has made regarding atrazine exposure creating “gender confusion” among America’s youth. He often references a 2010 study from the University of California Berkeley about genetically male tadpoles that were exposed to atrazine and developed into female frogs with ovaries. I spoke to the author of that study who said that it cannot be used to extrapolate atrazine’s effects on people. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I think Dr Hayes is being disingenuous here, frankly. I expect he wants to avoid controversy, especially association with the Alex Jones “gay frogs” meme. Perhaps if you went back and looked at the coverage of the clawed frog studies from when they were first released—c.2010 there was coverage in Nat Geo, Science and other mainstream publications—you’d note that Dr Hayes had no qualms about suggesting clear implications for human health then. What’s changed is the political context, and of course the “conspiracy theory” tag that’s been attached to any suggestion chemicals in the food, water and environment might be having serious negative effects on our health.

Hayes is right in the sense that you can’t recreate his experiments with clawed frogs, using human subjects. No, you can’t bathe humans in atrazine from conception under controlled laboratory conditions and see what happens to them. And frogs aren’t humans, so there’s no “direct line” from his studies to humans. But the similarities between frogs and humans are close enough that we should naturally be asking questions about whether the same effects happen in humans. The evidence of other atrazine studies, and of hundreds if not thousands of studies of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, show clear associations between observed effects in animal studies—reduced testosterone, reproductive abnormalities, metabolic disturbances, cancer, and so on—and similar effects in humans. We’re talking about a whole class of chemicals whose mechanisms of action (e.g. activating estrogen receptors, triggering chronic stress pathways) and effects are established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even if atrazine only turned out to be an endocrine-disruptor for amphibians—which is unlikely—well, what about glyphosate, what about chlorpyrifos, what about 2,4-D and paraquat, what about phthalates and BPA and PFAS? We need to see the wood for the trees here. It’s not just about one chemical.

I’ve talked to trans activists, environmental advocates, and people who track far-right groups online who say that while use of industrial chemicals is concerning, erroneously crediting herbicide use for transgender people is hateful and helps drum-up support for anti-LGBTQ policies. Do you have any comment on that?

Nobody is saying that herbicide use is somehow “responsible” for transgenderism. Transgenderism is a complex phenomenon. It’s multifactorial: exposure to endocrine disruptors is one possible cause among many.

For starters, I think transgender people, in a variety of different forms, have existed throughout history. The anthropological and historical record shows this. Among the nomadic Scythians, for example, there was an entire class of “effiminates” or andrieis. The Greek historian Pseudo-Hippocrates credited the moist, damp environment of the Pontic-Caspian and the Scythian lifestyle—including the tight trousers they wore—for the existence of this third sex. Ethnographic accounts from Africa, the Americas and Asia suggest similar groups existed in those places at various different times. Transgenderism isn’t new.

When it comes to the explosion of gender dysphoria we’ve seen in recent decades, there are studies that show, for example, a very clear element of “social contagion” in the spread of the condition: social-media use and having friends who already identify themselves as transgender are key factors in explaining the occurrence of gender dysphoria (see this study). The rise of mental illness more broadly is also a factor. This study found that nearly 63 percent of sampled patients requesting gender reassignment had “at least one psychiatric comorbidity.” A third of patients suffered depression, 20.5 percent suffered a specific phobia, and 15.7 percent suffered from adjustment disorder.

I generally advocate for compassion for transgender people (see this essay, for example), but I don’t believe that compassion and indulgence are synonyms. If we want to help transgender people, we need to understand the truth about their condition. And the truth is that the stunning rise in gender dysphoria and transgenderism is not an “innocent” phenomenon—it’s not the case that all these people, who were always there, are just coming out of the woodwork now that we’ve decided to be a nicer, more tolerant society.

And there is a strong prima facie case—on the basis of what we know about endocrine disruptors, about how sexual development works, and about how and when humans are exposed to endocrine disruptors—to believe exposure to endocrine disruptors may be responsible for reproductive and developmental abnormalities that lead to gender dysphoria and transgenderism.

There was recently a study, the first to my knowledge, which showed a direct link between exposure to an endocrine-disrupting chemical and transgenderism. Young boys exposed to the chemical diethylstilbestrol (DES) in utero had a 100-fold increased risk of becoming male-to-female transgender in adulthood.

This isn’t about hate. This is about facts. And as my mentor Ben Shapiro famously said, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”