T his is the story of how David became Goliath and everything just got worse.
I got dumped by my ex-wife in a Gap parking lot, but the longest day of my life remains the Rescue the Republic rally in Washington, D.C., on September 29, 2024. It was a ChatGPT idea of a MAHA/MAGA political revolution, starring RFK Jr. with red-meat only male guru Jordan Peterson in a two-colored suit and accused sexual predator/new Christian Russell Brand offering a prayer “that Satan be cast out in your name, in all his forms, but in particular the bizarre Kafka-esque, Hitler-esque, late-Orwellian form of totalitarianism, bureaucracy in the name of care.”
Everyone insisted it was a non-partisan revival where it was pure happenstance that Donald Trump’s name received the loudest hosannas. Rob Schneider, an out-of-work actor, was the MC and entertained the crowd with his Saturday Night Live Mexican-stereotype character from the 1990s. There was someone called the Food Babe shouting “Let’s talk about Doritos” and then spilling Froot Loops on the stage.
Still, this was serious business. There was a speech by Tulsi Gabbard calling Kamala Harris a warmonger — no way that would come back to bite her in the ass –– and Senator Ron Johnson told me he had a secret plan to rid Donald Trump of his McDonalds addiction.
The rally was organized by Bret Weinstein, a bushy-haired former biology professor turned frequent Tucker Carlson guest. Weinstein said he was risking his very life by organizing the rally and suggested everyone in the crowd was at danger. He opened the event with his theory that independent thought in America was being crushed by Goliath, an unknowable force made up of government officials, academia, the media, and mega-corporations. Yes, the Deep State was a Philistine.
“It is the force that prevents all meaningful change in the biblical story. Goliath is a giant, a man, a large man, but a man all the same in our time,” said Weinstein. “Goliath, like everything else, has scaled way up. The force that wants us to be terrified to exercise our First Amendment rights in our own capital, that’s Goliath.”
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Then Weinstein smiled. The times were changing.
“Now look around you. Do you all see what I see? David has scaled up. We are David, we are mighty, and our time has come.”
That was 18 months ago. David and Goliath changing places turned out to be the worst Parent Trap reboot ever. Let’s see where our heroes stand today.
Let’s quickly dispatch with Weinstein. He recently chatted with Carlson and was in “just asking questions” mode and wondered about Israel’s possible involvement in the murder of Charlie Kirk. He suggested that Bibi Netanyahu giving Trump a gold pager – in honor of Hamas personnel being blown up by Israeli doctored pagers – was not actually a tasteless joke but a veiled, deadly threat. (Weinstein’s strategy is kind of flawless: when one of his theories is disproven, he suggests it was a Goliath misdirection play. “Traps abound,” says Weinstein.)
And Rob Schneider? He is still unemployed and walking back this April 2025 tweet:
NO WAR WITH IRAN! NO WAR WITH IRAN! NO WAR WITH IRAN! https://t.co/ZbsWKs9uwF
— Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 (@RobSchneider) April 7, 2025
Last week, Schneider flip-flopped like a caught salmon on the deck of a fishing boat.
“We must once again recommit ourselves to one Nation under God, indivisible,” he wrote. “Therefore, we must restore the military draft for our Nation’s young people. Each and every American, at eighteen years of age, must serve two years of military service.”
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Surely, Schneider and Weinstein were lightweight outliers, right? Let’s move on to someone with gravitas. Gabbard was introduced by Schneider at the rally as “someone who knows how to wear a white pantsuit.” (She did not laugh.) Gabbard, a reservist, had far weightier things on her mind. She warned of the dangers of the Biden-Harris war machine.
“We sit closer to the brink of nuclear war,” said Gabbard, a former Democratic presidential candidate. “According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, their doomsday clock is set to 90 seconds before midnight. We are one spark away from our demise, directly because of the policies coming from the Harris-Biden administration.”
She continued.
“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for the military industrial complex. A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for nuclear war.”
In January 2025, Trump began his second term with Gabbard as his Director of Intelligence. The doomsday clock now sits at, uh, 85 seconds to midnight.
“How sick of a state are we as a country when our elected leaders celebrate death, war, and destruction and sell it to us, the American people, as an American jobs and economic plan,” Gabbard said at the rally, speaking behind bulletproof glass. “This is Kamala Harris’s opportunity economy, more war, more money for the military industrial complex.”
Checking the numbers, the Biden administration defense budget was $850 billion. Recently, Trump proposed a defense budget of $1.5 trillion. The $650 billion increase is just short of the annual GNP of — I am not making this up — Israel.
The current American and Israeli war on Iran has left Gabbard in a pickle. The Hawaiian once marketed t-shirts reading “No War On Iran” and long argued that presidents lie us into wars. In 2020, Gabbard bashed Trump for taking out Iranian military mastermind, Qasem Soleimani.
“This was very clearly an act of war by this president without any kind of authorization or declaration of war from Congress, clearly violating the Constitution,” said Gabbard on Fox News.
This meant Gabbard’s motherboard had to be completely rewired before her congressional testimony two weeks ago. Describing Trump’s unilateral action, she chirped, “As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat … and whether to take action … President Trump concluded that… Iran posed an imminent threat, and he took action based on that conclusion.”
Trump World was spinning so fast that Gabbard was making about-faces in real time. Gabbard’s written statement to Congress suggested Iran’s nuclear capabilities were nonexistent after Trump’s June 2025 attacks on their facilities. Gabbard wrote the following:
Tulsi Gabbard speaks during the “Rescue the Republic” rally on the National Mall near the Washington Monument, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024 in Washington, D.C. Al Drago “As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. … The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.”
But Gabbard zigged instead of zagging in her actual remarks. Notice the not-subtle tweak.
“Iran is trying to recover from the severe damage caused by Operation Midnight Hammer.”
No more obliteration and now Iran is recovering.
The comedy is that Gabbard has sold out her beliefs while, by all accounts, being frozen out of Trump policymaking. This tends to happen if your resume includes unsanctioned visits with Syrian mass murderer Bashard al-Assad. Meanwhile, Joe Kent, Gabbard’s wingnut deputy, resigned from the Trump administration. Kent, a two-time congressional loser, twisted the knife by making the formerly Gabbardian point that Iran poses no immediate threat to the United States.
Aloha.
RFK JR. SPOKE EARLIER than I expected at the Rescue the Republic rally. Maybe it was because a few hours later Kennedy and Russell Brand had an appointment at the Capitol Hill office of Gavin de Becker, security consultant to Jeff Bezos and other stars. Did they talk of the recent disclosure of Kennedy’s alleged affair with journalist Olivia Nuzzi or the illegal moving of a bear carcass? Nobody knew.
Kennedy’s speech was the usual litany of anti-vax nonsense and persecution as campaign strategy. He proclaimed that the Covid pandemic was merely an excuse for corporate thievery.
“They shifted money upward. They strengthened Big Tech institutions like Amazon and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Google, and they weakened Main Street and small business and the American worker,” said RFK. “And they shifted $4.3 trillion from the American middle class to this new oligarchy of billionaires.” (The $4.3 trillion figure was actually the total amount of federal aid given to all individuals and businesses so they could survive the pandemic).
Kennedy was the most covered independent presidential candidate in American history and spoke insanely loudly that afternoon from the Washington Mall. Still, he insisted that his message was being stifled. He ended with a promise that the only one who could save America’s health, freedom, and reputation was Donald Trump.
“Do you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again, and who’s going to make America free again, and is going to make America once again the greatest nation and the moral authority around the globe?” asked Kennedy. “You need to go to the polls and get your friends there and get Donald Trump and me into Washington, D.C.”
(Trump was campaigning that day in Pennsylvania and suggested crime could be ended with “one rough hour” of “violent” police action across America).
Eighteen months later, America is in a dire place. We are waging a war against Iran, six months after Trump said previous air raids had left Iran’s nuclear capabilities “obliterated.” After Trump’s threats to invade Canada, Cuba, and/or Greenland, our allies have told us, diplomatically, to fuck off. Domestically, ICE agents are bashing heads on American streets. I thought of something RFK Jr. said that day that got little attention. Kennedy argued that governmental overkill during the Covid crisis was a violation of our constitutional rights.
“They then went after the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unwarranted searches and seizures, with all these track and trace requirements. … To take an airplane, we had to show our private medical records. They waived HIPAA. They made us disclose our private medical records, to virtually anybody who asked. They turned us into a tyranny.”
Fast forward to this winter. I’m watching ICE pull over and interrogate residents of Shakopee, Minnesota, who happen to have dark skin. Thirty minutes away in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti and Renee Good are killed while legally protesting ICE’s repeated violation of their fellow Americans’ constitutional rights. The Fourth Amendment that RFK Jr. railed about? That’s just something our kids will read about in history books.
But that’s just the vinegar, here’s the arsenic. In January 2025 Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor, held Kennedy’s confirmation in his hands. A “no” vote from a Republican physician might be enough to sink the nomination of the testosterone flavored, toffee colored Kennedy.
Cassidy was no hero. The fact than an actual doctor was considering confirming RFK Jr. – a man with no health care experience who once said Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” – was unfathomable, unless you realized Cassidy was hoping to get re-elected in 2026. He was willing to give RFK Jr. the benefit of the doubt in order to avoid the wrath of Trump and MAHA moms fueled on unpasteurized whole milk. He publicly mused on C-SPAN about RFK Jr.’s capacity to show growth.
“Does a 70-year-old man, a 71-year-old man who spent decades criticizing vaccines and is financially vested in finding fault with vaccines, can he change his attitudes and approach now that he’ll have the most important position influencing vaccine policy in the United States?” asked Cassidy. “Will you continue what you have been, or will you overturn a new leaf?”
In the end, Cassidy voted for Kennedy and he was confirmed 52-48.
Friends, you will be shocked to learn that RFK Jr. did not turn over a new leaf but remained a particularly stubborn and toxic weed.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during the “Rescue the Republic” rally on the National Mall near the Washington Monument, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024 in Washington, D.C. Al Drago Kennedy pledged to the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he would not change long-established vaccine schedules. A month after his confirmation, Kennedy changed the vaccine schedule. He ran the HHS on a diet of public pushups and chaos, firing two Trump veteran staffers early in his tenure. Last June, he canned all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) who oversaw vaccine policy. Kennedy declared the 17 were toadies of Big Pharma and replaced them with, well, 17 questionably credentialed toadies of the anti-vax movement. They were led by fellow Rescue the Republic speaker Doctor Robert Malone, who simultaneously claims to have discovered the mRNA strand that led to the Covid vaccine and that the actual vaccine generated a toxic spike protein that could shut down organs. (Neither was true).
Two months later, Kennedy fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she told Kennedy she would not approve his proposed vaccine restrictions without scientific review. (Monarez also testified that Kennedy made no call of concern or condolences after a gunman fired 180 shots at CDC headquarters and killed a responding police officer).
Kennedy’s silencing of Monarez reminded me of something he said at Rescue the Republic about the Covid response.
“We don’t want to give the government power to censor other people’s misinformation while it perpetrates its own, do we?”
I guess we do!
Last September, RFK Jr. appeared again before Cassidy and the Senate. The senator, realizing he had been played at Kennedy’s confirmation, had grown tired of RFK’s charade. In 2025, the country entered a terrifying measles outbreak that is still ongoing. Kennedy published an op-ed on Fox News where he declared the measles vaccine worthwhile, but then he added: “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”
Exasperated, Cassidy laid a trap for Kennedy. Cassidy mentioned that President Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for overseeing Operation Warp Speed, the governmental program that developed a Covid vaccine that, according to Cassidy, saved millions of lives.
RFK Jr. agreed.
“Senator, absolutely.”
Cassidy grimaced a bit.
“But you just told Senator [Michael] Bennett that the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid. That was a statement. … You also said as lead attorney for the Children’s Health Defense, you engaged in multiple lawsuits attempting to restrict access to the Covid vaccine. … It also surprises me because you’ve canceled, or HHS did, under your direction, $500 million in contracts using the mRNA vaccine platform that was critical, Operation Warp Speed — again, an accomplishment that I think President Trump should get a Nobel Prize for — you canceled $500 million in contracts.”
Kennedy’s face turned the color of a toasted cigarette. He said Cassidy’s interpretation of his remarks to Bennett was incorrect. He then offered some weak sauce on Trump and Operation Warp Speed.
“He also brought in therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and protocols for treatments and all,” said Kennedy. “And there were no mandates.”
Cassidy cut him off and noted that some of his new ACIP appointees were serving as paid witnesses for individuals suing drug companies over vaccine issues.
“If we put people who are paid witnesses for people suing vaccines, that actually seems like a conflict of interest. Do you agree with that?
Kennedy was defiant.
“No, I don’t. It may be a bias, and that bias, if disclosed, is okay.”
Cassidy was out of patience. He noted that the chaos and conflicting statements being issued by the HHS had left doctors and patients unclear of who was eligible for Covid shots and who needed a prescription for the vaccine. He looked back at Kennedy.
“I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccines.”
Cassidy yielded his time before RFK Jr. could respond.
Last month, the RFK-appointed ACIP panel was declared illegal by a federal judge. The judge noted “only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines” and that the group failed the legal standard for a balanced committee. The panel’s policy decisions of the past year were voided. American vaccine policy now drifts and the CDC still has no permanent director six months after Monarez’s resignation. The country doesn’t have a Surgeon General either as Kennedy ally and fellow health weirdo Casey Means lacks the 50 votes needed for confirmation. Her appointment remains in political limbo. A recent Politico poll found that 52 percent of Trump voters didn’t think the administration was making America healthy again.
To be sure, RFK Jr. has had his achievements during his HHS tenure. He laid off over 10,000 HHS staffers. He dropped a video where he did a cold plunge with Kid Rock in his blue jeans. Nuzzi released American Canto, an indecipherable memoir that included oblique references to an affair she had with Kennedy after profiling him for New York magazine. In a particularly moving passage, Nuzzi worried about Kennedy’s brain being invaded by a worm.
“I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. … He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. ‘Baby, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s not a worm.’”
I can’t help but think how different the world would be if it was a worm.
But let’s go back to the opening proclamation of Rescue the Republic, the one about how MAHA David was about to become MAGA Goliath. I didn’t think about it at the time, but recently, I wondered how the transformation went back in the Old Testament.
Not great, it turns out.
David becomes king, wins a battle and executes prisoners. His domestic policies displease God who sends a plague that kills 70,000 Israelites. David takes a mistress, impregnates the mistress, and sends the woman’s husband to certain death in battle. Their love child dies. David’s eldest son rapes his daughter. Another son kills that son for his sex crimes. That son rebels against David and is eventually murdered by his dad’s top general.
His kingdom is neither great again nor particularly healthy.
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Someone should get RFK Jr. a copy of the Trump Bible. Tell him to flip to Two Samuels, as the president might say.
It is never too late to be rescued.
