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The Clip That Said It All
It begins, as so many modern ironies do, with a trailer.
“Is it just me, or are things actually really weird right now in the world of public health?”
“Every day brings another confusing headline or far-fetched claim,” says Chelsea Clinton, her voice pitched somewhere between alarm and reassurance.
“People’s lives are at risk,” she warns, before promising to “sort fact from fiction” alongside “trusted experts.”
The first guest? Dr. Jessica Knurick, a registered dietitian and social media debunker who, we’re told, “myth-busts wellness fads and exposes the real dangers that come when people distrust science and public health institutions.”
Cut to Megyn Kelly’s reaction: laughter mixed with disbelief.
“Oh, excuse me—Dr. Chelsea Clinton!” she quips. “She’s pulling a Jill Biden and insisting we call her ‘Doctor’ now. But this podcast isn’t about her doctorate in international studies—it’s about taking down the MAHA movement.”
“Who in the world is going to listen to this?” Kelly asks. “Who’s saying, ‘I need more Chelsea Clinton in my life’? She’s not a real doctor—she’s the ultimate nepo baby.”
It’s easy to dismiss such mockery as partisan cruelty. Yet beneath the satire, Kelly and her guests stumbled into a truth that even Clinton’s marketing team can’t conceal: this is not a project born of confidence—it’s one born of panic.
The Reactionary Return
Across mainstream coverage—from The Hill to SELF to The Daily Mail—the storyline was identical: That Can’t Be True! will “debunk misinformation” and help the public “sort fact from fiction.”¹ ² ³
But buried in that repetition is the real purpose. As The Daily Mail put it, Clinton’s new podcast “takes aim at the MAHA movement’s ‘weird’ anti-vax, raw milk agenda” and at the health policies of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.⁴
In other words, this isn’t a conversation—it’s a counter-insurgency.
The That Can’t Be True! project is the cultural flank of a political war—an attempt to discredit MAHA’s populist health agenda by reasserting the language of “science” as moral authority.
But that authority is gone.
The Ritual of Reassurance
Clinton opens her show by listing every emblem of societal anxiety: the loss of trust, the fear of “weirdness,” the supposed epidemic of pseudoscience. Yet the performance feels hollow—like a spell cast by someone who no longer believes in its power.
Even her choice of experts amplifies the irony. SELF magazine praised her lineup of “unimpeachable experts,” placing Jessica Knurick, a social-media dietitian with modest academic credentials who believes seed oils are safe and mass water fluoridation campaigns healthy, alongside Dr. Peter Hotez, the celebrity vaccinologist and media regular whose rhetoric has grown increasingly militant.²
Knurick’s record shows small university grants and TikTok myth-busting—not groundbreaking science. But in this ecosystem, data doesn’t matter. Narrative utility does. Her role is to personify the “good scientist”—the mother, the Ph.D., the online myth-buster—who contrasts neatly with MAHA’s unruly, decentralized voices.
But Hotez represents something darker: the evolution of “public health” from persuasion to enforcement. In a 2024 interview, he proposed that governments treat “anti-vaccine aggression” as a national security threat, urging the Biden administration, the WHO, and even NATO to mobilize against dissenters. He told reporters:
“The health sector can’t solve this on its own. We’re going to have to bring in Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, the Justice Department… I met with Dr. Tedros in Geneva and said the World Health Organization can’t solve this alone. We need NATO. This is a security problem… a lethal force. Two hundred thousand Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression.”¹⁰
This, from the man now positioned by Clinton as an “unimpeachable expert.”
The implications are chilling. As GreenMedInfo reported, critics across political lines saw in Hotez’s statement the militarization of public health—a shift from debate to suppression, from medicine to policing.¹⁰ Philosopher Giorgio Agamben once warned that this “biosecurity paradigm” turns citizens’ bodies into instruments of governance, manufacturing compliance under the guise of safety.
The result is not science—it’s a form of psychological warfare. The moment health officials speak the language of counterinsurgency, the healing arts become indistinguishable from statecraft.
And so, when Clinton invokes Hotez as her guiding light of “truth,” she unwittingly reveals the tragedy of the entire enterprise. These are not confident scientists—they are frightened priests of a collapsing orthodoxy, reciting the old liturgy of authority to an audience that has stopped responding.
As philosopher Ivan Illich observed decades ago, institutions facing decline resort to “rituals of reassurance”—repeating the gestures of power to maintain the illusion of it. That is what That Can’t Be True! has become: a sacrament of a fading faith, performed before an empty congregation.The Echo Chamber of Experts
Clinton’s press rollout leaned heavily on credentialism. The Hill referred to her as “Dr. Chelsea Clinton,” while Lemonada’s marketing emphasized her degrees from Oxford and Columbia.¹
The message is unmistakable: Trust us, we’re credentialed.
But that formula no longer works. As Kelly’s panel noted, the public doesn’t care how many letters you have after your name if your institutions have been wrong about everything from masks to mental health to myocarditis.⁶
Titles have become props in the theater of expertise—a ritual invocation of lost authority. And when every episode begins with a performative “fact-check,” it’s not truth being served—it’s nostalgia.
The Mirror of Misinformation
Critics on both sides recognize this dynamic. In his acidic review, Benjamin Bartee called That Can’t Be True! “a trifecta of debunked industry talking points in the ironic service of allegedly debunking misinformation.”⁷
His point, however harsh, is valid: the establishment’s new “anti-misinformation” crusade now mirrors the very tactics it condemns. The “myth-busters” are recycling corporate nutrition talking points about seed oils, fluoride, and infant formula—while accusing everyone else of pseudoscience.
This is projection disguised as pedagogy.
And the tragedy is not the hypocrisy—it’s the futility. The louder the experts preach, the less anyone listens.
The Wakefield Response
When Chelsea Clinton appeared earlier this year as a spokesperson for The Big Catch-Up—a global vaccination campaign co-sponsored by the WHO, UNICEF, and the Gates Foundation—Dr. Andrew Wakefield offered a response that now sounds prophetic:
“Who is Chelsea Clinton? I wrote 150 scientific papers on this and related issues, and I don’t remember citing any publication by a Chelsea Clinton at any time.”
“It’s not that people have lost faith in science,” Wakefield continued. “It’s that science has been misapplied by conflicted scientists driven by vanity and the need to sustain their funding base.… There is a complete lack of confidence in the way science has been applied, because they have lied, manipulated, and deceived you.”⁸
Clinton’s lament that “people no longer trust science” is partly true—but the cause isn’t ignorance. It’s memory. People remember what happened.
The Desperation of the Faithful
The most striking quality of That Can’t Be True! isn’t arrogance—it’s desperation.
This is what institutional panic looks like when dressed up as outreach: a former First Daughter, flanked by corporate foundations and PR consultants, begging the public to believe again.
But belief cannot be demanded. It must be earned through truth, humility, and reform—none of which are present here.
What remains is performance: the soothing voice, the ceremonial “fact-check,” the invocation of “trusted experts.” It’s the liturgical language of a fallen church, one that still knows how to recite doctrine but no longer remembers what faith felt like.
Epilogue: The Sound of the End
That Can’t Be True! is not dangerous—it’s mournful. It’s less an instrument of control and more a symptom of decay.
It’s the sound of an empire of experts narrating its own decline, mistaking the echo of its voice for the return of authority.
As the MAHA movement continues to grow—rooted in self-education, biological sovereignty, and open inquiry—this podcast will likely fade like its predecessor In Fact with Chelsea Clinton.
But as a cultural artifact, it deserves to be remembered for what it is:
a performance of desperation masquerading as truth.
Endnotes
The Hill, “Chelsea Clinton Launching Podcast Targeting Public Health Misinformation,” Oct. 2, 2025. Link
Erica Sloan, “Public Health Feels Like a Dumpster Fire. Chelsea Clinton Has a Podcast to Help,” SELF, Oct. 2, 2025. Link
Meg Storm, “ ‘Nepo Baby’ Chelsea Clinton Has a New Anti-MAHA Podcast That No One Wants to Listen To,” MegynKelly.com, Oct. 2, 2025. Link
Phillip Nieto, “Chelsea Clinton Brutally Mocked for Podcast Aimed at MAHA Movement’s ‘Weird’ Anti-Vax, Raw Milk Agenda,” Daily Mail Online, Oct. 2, 2025. Link
SELF, ibid.
The Megyn Kelly Show, Episode 1,162, SiriusXM Triumph, Oct. 2025.
Benjamin Bartee, “New Chelsea Clinton Anti-‘Misinformation’ Podcast vs. MAHA,” Armageddon Prose, Oct. 5, 2025. Link
Andrew Wakefield, remarks via Children’s Health Defense Canada, Oct. 2025.
