A Coalition of the Wyrd

Professor Bret Weinstein invited me to D.C. a few weeks before the election to cover his Rescue the Republic rally. Bret and his wife, Professor Heather Heying, are old friends. We met years ago in Portland, where I made a documentary about their bizarre ousting from Evergreen State College - a film someone once called “The Crucible if it were set in a modern campus." 

Curious to gauge the country's mood as it approached such a pivotal moment, I accepted the invitation, packed my camera, and set off for our planet’s capital.

"Americans are nervous about rallying in D.C. after the fallout of January 6, so it’s exactly where this needs to be.”

Bret told me in his unapologetically defiant tone. I admired his spirit, but as we strolled past an unbroken chain of Kamala Harris lawn signs and he described funding problems and D.C.’s dizzying red tape, I wondered why he didn’t choose to hold the rally in a swing state. A pro-Trump political PAC would have covered their costs, and a bigger turnout seemed far more likely. But the symbolism of holding it in the nation’s capital was so important to him that he was willing to endure the shitfight.

He explained that the rally’s purpose was to “help the unity movement discover itself”. The unity movement, as Bret sees it, is based on the idea that the American people are artificially divided by their governing class. He believes that the vast majority of U.S. citizens share common ground on the nation’s founding principles. If they could refocus on those shared ideals, they could unite under a collective American identity and chart a more coherent path through the many problems facing the country.

Bret’s first attempt to ignite the unity movement came in 2020 when he proposed the idea of two candidates running for office - one from the centre-right and the other from the centre-left. The two would jointly share the presidency and govern together as a dialectic. The campaign page was banned from Twitter at the height of the platform’s shady censorship practices. It’s hard to say where it could have gone in the absence of back-end tampering, but from what I could gauge, people found the idea novel and interesting but naively optimistic about political realities.

After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Bret dusted off his Unity pitch and adapted it to the 2024 landscape. This time, he suggested that Robert Kennedy Jr. join Trump as vice president so that MAGA could take a less partisan form and adopt RFK’s health mission. The bonus of the 2024 model, according to Bret, was that Bobby would act as "assassination insurance".

The new pitch struck a chord with a large cohort of fence-sitting Democrats who were disillusioned by the DNC but had reservations about voting for Trump. The preview screening of The Coalition of the Wyrd at the top of the post shows what came next.