Bret Weinstein Sure Has A Lot Of Theories

It’s frustrating to watch the worst sort of conspiracy theorist become a thought leader by scaring and misleading people

I’ve written before about the perils of making anti-wokeness (or whatever we’re calling it) the center of your political belief system. Bret Weinstein is a really good, really dark example.

Many of you are probably familiar with the incident that launched Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, toward stardom. The basics are on Weinstein’s Wikipedia page, and the two of them were, in fact, treated quite unfairly during one of the more insane American college campus blowups you’ll read about. They didn’t deserve what happened to them, and the administrators who capitulated to that madness should feel shame over it.

But at a certain point, regardless of what happened to him, Bret Weinstein is responsible for his own behavior. Specifically, he’s responsible for the claims he makes on his ever-growing platforms, whether to his million-plus Twitter subscribers, the large audience he and his wife have built around their podcast The Dark Horse (around 450,000 YouTube subscribers), or to the audiences of the countless big-time podcasts he appears on.

Recently, he was on both Joe Rogan and Alex Jones’ shows. No decent person should go on Alex Jones’ show unless they are toting a thick dossier that will allow them to argue with Alex Jones about all the stuff he’s lied about, and even then it’s probably a bad idea. Jones is an absolute blight on our media landscape — a liar and a fraud who preys on addled people. The fact that Weinstein would choose to go on Alex Jones’ show is, on its own, a red flag.

On Rogan’s show, Weinstein posited a terrifying conspiracy theory: Kary Mullis had been murdered. Mullis was a scientific pioneer who shared a Nobel Prize because he “invented the process known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which a small amount of DNA can be copied in large quantities over a short period of time.” 

Here’s the exchange in question:

Weinstein: Kary Mullis was the inventor of PCR technology who died tragically, and some would say strangely, at the very beginning of the Covid crisis.

Rogan: Why strangely? Just because of the timing?

Weinstein: You ever seen this piece of video where he talks about Anthony Fauci? Let’s put it this way: Kary Mullis was an outspoken, vigorous, highly intelligent person who was not corralled by fashion.

It’s worth noting that Mullis became a peddler of fringe beliefs himself, on matters both large (claiming HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and humans aren’t causing global warming) and small (“In his autobiography, he endorsed several other strange ideas, saying that he once encountered a fluorescent raccoon that spoke to him [addressing him as ‘doctor’] and suggesting that the raccoon might have been an alien.” Mullis did not like Anthony Fauci, and there is, in fact, a video of him criticizing Fauci that Rogan and Weinstein subsequently watch. A bit later Weinstein allows that he doesn’t know how Mullis died but describes it as “some spontaneous thing.”

So, in summary: Kary Mullis “died tragically, and some would say strangely, at the very beginning of the Covid crisis” as a result of “some spontaneous thing,” and he had beef with Fauci. Let’s put one and one together here: Weinstein is obviously, obviously implying a connection between Mullis’s death, his criticism of Fauci, and Covid policies.

Except, as I believe Richard Hanania was the first to point out, Mullis “was 74 years old and died of pneumonia in August 2019,” well before the Jewish lizardmen who control everything loosed the pandemic on the world (sorry, sorry).

Then Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, subsequently posted this:

Dear @bretweinstein

On @JoeRogan you suggested that there was something mysterious about Kary Mullis’s death, and that since he was critical of Anthony Fauci you hinted that perhaps there was something nefarious about his death.

I knew Kary, and I am still in touch with his wife Nancy, so I asked her if she thought there was anything mysterious or nefarious about Kary’s death. Here is what she told me:

“Kary had many years of heart issues; it was in his family history, and on his 60th birthday he had a six-way bypass. One thing led to another, and his heart gave out. He also got pneumonia and that was so hard on him.”

She added that such suggestions are “conspiratorial BS” that she has encountered before and “hates.”

Bret, I have long respected you and appreciated our friendship, so please accept this in that light:

Before floating such conspiracy theories as “hypotheses” or “just asking questions” to tens of millions of people, please be more responsible and at least fact-check such fantasies before people inculcate them as facts.

I’ve subsequently tagged Weinstein on Twitter a few times and contacted him via Twitter direct message, simply asking him to explain exactly what he was getting at in the Rogan interview and what his evidence was. 

After all, this is a spectacular claim: Weinstein is suggesting that a man whose death does not appear to have been at all medically suspicious, and whose own wife doesn’t see it as such, came about because he criticized a prominent public health official. 

This seems like the sort of theory you shouldn’t float unless you know something. Does Weinstein know something? He won’t say. As far as I can tell he has completely clammed up since floating this claim. Shouldn’t he simply clarify, one way or the other, what he knows and what he was positing? After all, to those of us with no particular knowledge of any of this, it certainly appears as though Weinstein bungled both the timing and the circumstances of Mullis’s death.

This is a common tactic for people who profit off of conspiracy theories: they make extremely inflammatory insinuations, but they keep things just vague enough to allow themselves some plausible deniability. This allows them to seem — at least to credulous readers or listeners — like they’re in possession of forbidden knowledge of the utmost importance, but without ever having to prove what they’re claiming, which is convenient since they can’t prove it, what with it not being true. 

These sorts of conspiracy entrepreneurs, if they are talented at what they do — and clearly Bret Weinstein is — will always have a ready audience of credulous, disillusioned, addled (there’s that word again) types, especially in 2024: trust in authority seems to have plummeted as a result of social media misinformation, real missteps on the part of the authorities themselves, and all the other causes of the epistemic fracturing we appear to be experiencing.

There’s nothing wrong with being skeptical of authority and trying to explain to people what’s really going on when authority stumbles. That’s part of what I do on this newsletter, and I hope it’s helpful. But it’s morally wrong to stoke people’s worst impulses by chumming the waters with the darkest sorts of conspiratorial garbage.

I reached out to Chris Kavanagh, cohost of the invaluable Decoding the Gurus podcast and someone who is (God bless/save him) much more familiar with Weinstein’s oeuvre, to ask if this sort of “I’m not necessarily saying, but I am hypothesizing” style was Weinstein’s normal MO.

I almost wish I hadn’t. Kavanagh wrote back:

Examples of Bret’s prior conspiracy hypotheses include:

—That the Israeli defense force being unprepared for the Oct 7th attack demonstrated it was being controlled by Goliath with the goal being to sow discord amongst Covid contrarians (anti-vaxxers).

—That the connections not working well on his recording equipment during the pandemic could be a sign of targeted outside interference to try and prevent him from revealing the truth about the pandemic/ivermectin. (He put tinfoil hats on the cameras.)

—That the Chinese one-child policy is a lineage adaptation to generate a conquering army of males that can be sent to the U.S. and become a fifth column in the military, replacing the independent-minded and principled soldiers who lost their jobs for refusing to get vaccines.

—That Bret’s pioneering work on telomeres was stolen by a Nobel Prize laureate who prevented him from being published and then stole his insights uncredited. Incidentally, this work also means that all drugs in the U.S. are unsafe. [links added by me after I asked Kavanagh for them.]

The China one nicely demonstrates the level of thinking on display here. Weinstein himself recently traveled to the Darién Gap, the very dangerous dense stretch of jungle in Colombia and Panama traversed by migrants attempting to get to the United States, to. . . well, to gather fodder for his deranged conspiracy theories, I guess.

Then he went on GB News to discuss his travels. If you watch the clip, you’ll see Weinstein explain that something he noticed about Chinese sex ratios and that nation’s one-child policy. . .  

. . . is curious, and it made me wonder if there is an evolutionary adaptation at a higher level in which populations sometimes produce a surplus of males in preparation for war. So it is only a hypothesis, but in seeing a migration of military-age males flowing from China through the Darién Gap into Central America and up to the United States, I have to wonder if this might not be a military force waiting for orders that is being deployed covertly in the midst of a migration that makes it hard for us to recognize it.

He’s just curious! In this view, the Chinese government, probably one of the top five most technologically and tactically sophisticated human organizations in human history, decided to plant the seeds of military action by. . . flying a paltry (by military standards) number of young Chinese men to Colombia and having them engage in an extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive foot-trip northward, blending in with migrants, to get to the U.S. and do. . . something? For reasons unknown, in this theory, the Chinese government chose this approach rather than, like, taking advantage of the thousands of weekly flights between the two countries. 

Weinstein also raised the alarm about these migrants on Tucker Carlson’s show, leading Carlson to tweet: “Bret Weinstein traveled to the Darien Gap to understand who's behind the invasion of our country. His conclusion: ‘it's not a friendly migration.’” Thank goodness we have Bret Weinstein to help us separate friendly from unfriendly migrations. 

If we’re talking hypotheses, here’s another one: if, in fact, the subset of Chinese migrants traveling this route are mostly military-age men, that’s because. . . that’s exactly who is most likely to make a dangerous trip to the States? Add up the subset of unmarried men simply looking for better economic prospects with the subset of married men with kids hoping to send money back to support their families in China, exclude men who are too infirm to make such a trip in the first place, and there you go! You’re left with “military-age” men. In China, as in most of the world, surely women are more likely to stay home and look after the kids in this sort of difficult situation.

In the Tucker Carlson segment, Carlson wonders aloud why The New York Times hasn’t dispatched someone to the Darién Gap — why it fell to Bret Weinstein to do this important investigative work. But of course the Times has covered this story at length — see here for examples — and in fact just last week there was an episode of The Daily on the very subject of Chinese migrants traversing the route.  

The Daily episode includes an in-depth interview with one Chinese migrant who ended up in the States, seeking asylum. He says he made the trip because his livelihood was ruined by the Chinese government’s corruption, and other parts of the episode provide further context for this increased pace of migration — still small in terms of raw numbers — from the world’s second-largest economy to its first-largest economy. It’s an interesting and unusual event, but explaining it certainly doesn’t require the invocation of any conspiracy theory, at least as far as competent journalists and other observers are concerned. That said, the Times reporter doesn’t once ask the migrant she interviews whether he’s really part of an evil top-secret Chinese sleeper cell, so how can we know Weinstein isn’t correct? What is the Times hiding??????(!!!!!!!!!!)(????????)

Bret Weinstein is profiting significantly off of people’s worst fears, and he’s doing so in a lazy, pseudointellectual, morally bankrupt manner. He should stop. Or, if he’s not going to stop, he should at least be willing to explain exactly what he means when he floats one of his many hypotheses.

---

Questions? Comments? Deranged conspiracy theories? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The image is a screenshot of Charlie breaking the Pepe Silvia conspiracy wiiiiiiide open.