Bret Weinstein criticizes HIV AIDS on Rogan; The usual suspects melt down

A crack in the wall?

Bret Weinstein was on The Joe Rogan Experience this week for a whopping three hour long show, and X has been aflutter because at about the 1:20 mark of the podcast, Weinstein admitted that he found the “alternative theory” that HIV does not cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” As you may recall, I recently covered Dr. Weinstein’s interview with Tucker Carlson, and at the time I expressed concern that he wasn’t “getting it” (or wasn’t “going there”) with HIV. So you can imagine I am very encouraged by this recent development. You can find the Spotify version of the podcast at the following link:

Joe Rogan Experience #2101 - Bret Weinstein

Not only were there a bunch of panicked tweets, a few of which I’ll link below, there was also a piece that appeared in Vice with the predictable mocking tone. I won’t bother to summarize it, because it says exactly what you’d expect it to in the predictable hand-wringing yet condescending tone; you can read it here if you’re interested:

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein Promote AIDS Denialism to an Audience of Millions

I love the subtitle, which says everything you need to know: “Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.” Note the strategic use of words like “discredited” (where?), and the panicked tone—“alarming and infuriating public health experts”!

There is one final paragraph that I will include in full because it makes my heart soar. Take that, mainstream media!

Rogan will have an opportunity to continue doing whatever he wants, and on even more platforms than before, for many years to come; Spotify recently announced that it had signed a new multi-platform deal with Rogan, reportedly worth around $250 million. 

Before I move on to the tweets, I will point out a couple things and one is that Weinstein’s publicly mentioning this on Rogan is significant. For one thing, he mentions right away that it was Kennedy’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that led him to begin to question HIV AIDS. We have discussed here more than once the curious fact that the skeptics that have lauded the Kennedy book have all neglected to mention his criticism of HIV AIDS, which takes up a significant portion of the volume. I commend Dr. Weinstein for breaking this silence. He also points out the significance to Covid, which many Covid critics have either not noticed or chosen not to mention.

Okay, here are some tweets. I won’t include too many but I’ll link to their pages so you can view the threads if you want.

The first is the tweet that alerted me to the interview; if you click the link there is also video of a portion of the interview in which they discuss HIV AIDS.

Nice of Bret to use his appearance in front of millions of listeners on Rogan today to talk about how he is now an HIV/AIDS denialist. He finds the evidence that AIDS is not caused by HIV but by the gay lifestyle to be "surprisingly compelling." (@Bad_stats)

And here are some predictable reactions; I can’t link to too many because some people have blocked me (I rarely tweet).

It appears @BretWeinstein has embraced the conspiracy theory that "poppers" and not HIV are the cause of AIDS. He claims the alternate theory is not laughable - it is. I'm a gay physician who works with HIV patients, Bret, and I have questions for you: (Jonathan Laxton, MD, @dr_jon_l)

Crank magnetism. Once you go down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience, quackery, and conspiracy theories in one area (e.g., #COVID19), it is nearly inevitable that you will embrace fractal wrongness in the form of multiple kinds of pseudoscience (e.g., antivax, AIDS denial, etc.) (David Gorski, MD PhD, @gorskon)

Dear @BretWeinstein @joerogan @RobertKennedyJr In 1995 Skeptic investigated the claim that HIV is not causally connected to AIDS. We examined Peter Duesberg, Kary Mullis, Robert Root-Bernstein, et al. They are all wrong (as is RFKJ) & we show why here: https://skeptic.com/reading_room/The-Aids-Heresies-Skeptic-3-2.pdf (Michael Shermer)

That’s probably all you need to read to get a sense of what’s been happening. I don’t know where this is going to go, but I am extremely grateful to Dr. Weinstein for daring to approach the third rail. It will be very interesting to see how things unfold in the next months and weeks.

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If you’re a new reader and would like some background as to my views on HIV AIDS, including the “existence” question, please refer to this post and the links contained therein.