00:00:00.000So I'm now just going to go and give you kind of rapid fire a bunch of the things that RFK believes and that he has advocated for in public.
00:03:52.280the story of RFK Jr. really is kind of a tragic one.
00:03:55.540So it's a story, as I said, of mental illness, of how personal tragedy and these grand historic forces combine in one person's life to really foreclose the possibility of him ever achieving solid grip on reality.
00:04:10.920You know, like this guy just had no shot at being sane.
00:04:14.100It's also the story of the conditions, the sort of like media and political conditions that make his mental illness seem charismatic and even enlightened and, dare I say, maybe a little bit contagious to other people.
00:04:27.260It transforms his own sort of inability to understand what's real and what's not from his personal problem into a reflection of an engine for these various other social pathologies.
00:04:41.620It is also a story about the emerging trend of American political diagonalism.
00:04:46.160Have you heard this phrase, Adrian, diagonalism?
00:04:49.080It's where basically kind of conspiratorial rhetoric can cut across what we would think of as sort of intrinsic divides in American politics.
00:04:59.000Yeah, it's a kind of usually populist, usually quite conspiratorial political rhetoric that can unite the left and the right.
00:05:08.560And the thing that diagonalism almost always does is drag everybody further to the right.
00:06:03.100But if he was your uncle, he would not be performing surprisingly well in a Democratic presidential primary and gobbling the attention of the national press with his every word.
00:06:13.980That he is tells us much about this country's broken systems as any of his diatribes do.
00:08:32.300I mean, this might be a good moment to pivot to biography and give listeners who might not be totally aware a rundown of just like who the Kennedys are.
00:08:46.400So, RFK Jr. is what we think of as kind of the second generation of the Kennedys, but she is like the third or the fourth generation of Kennedys to be born rich.
00:18:02.840But he can't actually practice law.1.00
00:18:04.540He later eventually passes the bar and does practice law.
00:18:06.960But, you know, this is kind of a moment where he winds up sort of spiraling kind of downward, right?
00:18:14.540So he's got a lot of problems with drugs.
00:18:17.380His addiction issues are starting to catch up to him.
00:18:20.100At some point, he's on a plane to rehab and flight attendants find him sick, seems like maybe semi-conscious, in the plane bathroom and they discover heroin in his possession.
00:19:08.180And I think when you look at actual addicts, what often happens is that they are people
00:19:12.840who have endured an unendurable loss, right?
00:19:16.660They're often people who are, you know, to use a buzzword, just like traumatized up the wazoo.
00:19:21.520They have often experienced a lot of violence and deprivation in their lives.
00:19:27.380And what they are doing is they're self-medicating, right?
00:19:30.080They cannot tolerate this world as it is with its kind of like drab brutality, you know, these like violent deprivations and disappointments and these like really paltry consolations in the sober world.
00:19:43.180And so they escape into this different world.
00:19:46.360they create a different world through intoxication and through drugs. And sometimes when people stop
00:19:52.540taking drugs and they stop drinking, they still retain that desire to create a different world,
00:19:59.600right? They still want to escape this world and enter into another one. So one way to do that is
00:20:04.920kind of escaping is through substances, but another way to do it is through fantasy.
00:23:52.220he starts working as an environmental lawyer,
00:23:54.640Part of his sort of criminal punishment is to do community service.
00:23:58.580And through his community service, he winds up working for a environmental group and discovers this like kind of passion for environmentalism, for environmental law.
00:25:00.020That like, I do feel that if there's any place in US law where a conspiracy theory and being
00:25:08.200just a legal representative is identical, it's environmental law, right?
00:25:11.140It's like, you wouldn't just pour uranium into this river, right?
00:25:14.860And it's like, turns out they were absolutely just dumping uranium into the river, right?
00:25:19.340Like every insane theory you could concoct when it comes to environmental stuff in the United States, like is happening or was happening pretty routinely.
00:25:40.720And a family that was in, you know, full historical fairness to the Kennedys orchestrating some conspiracies.
00:25:46.880Like, what do you call what JFK was doing in Cuba, if not a conspiracy, right?
00:25:52.680But he does not really seem to have that great a taste for this kind of thinking until at least when he's an environmental lawyer.
00:26:00.580And he becomes like really aware of the corruption of federal agencies and of the sort of malign influence of these big corporate interests that are keeping environmental regulation from having its like desired effect.
00:26:20.220Right. So like you're right, like there are conspiracies in the world and they tend to be these kind of benign conspiracies of like corporate greed.
00:26:26.620right yeah yeah so that kind of is the seed of his conspiracism he is a mentally unwill man
00:26:33.160already prone to fantasizing with this huge background of trauma and now he's working
00:26:40.960in this righteous field in which he cannot do the right thing because of these malign forces
00:26:46.200right and then in 1994 his son is born he's in his second marriage he has children already
00:26:52.180But his son, Connor, who's born in 1994, Connor Kennedy develops in his early childhood severe, alarming, life-threatening allergies, apparently like largely it's peanuts.
00:27:07.680And RFK Jr. and his then wife have to take their little infant, innocent, precious, beloved son to the ER something like 30 times in his first three years of life.
00:27:18.640So this kid's very precarious in his health.
00:27:22.180And RFK seems to have started to wonder, as I think somebody in his position maybe is
00:27:30.200understandable that they would wonder, if environmental pollutants could have caused
00:28:05.580And has now come back. So, you know, Conor is busy in his own right, doing his own weird shit following the proud tradition of his father.0.98
00:28:12.900But Conor turned out fine, in case you were wondering.0.97
00:28:15.760But like now, RFK Jr. is thinking not just about environmental toxins and the forces that have generated them, but he's thinking about maybe, you know, are these hurting our kids?
00:30:12.220It creates this massive drop off in vaccinations in the UK that is then, of course, followed by a measles outbreak.
00:30:19.580This is pretty thoroughly debunked pretty quickly, especially in the British press.
00:30:25.560By 2004, it has been pretty thoroughly disproven in public.
00:30:31.720Andrew Wakefield, the scientist behind it, loses his medical license in 2010.
00:30:35.400Yeah. And I mean, I was I was around for a lot of these discussions.
00:30:39.360And I mean, obviously, I don't keep close tabs on anti-vax world, but in some way, it was the very swiftness with which the Wakefield study was sort of dispatched.0.99
00:30:50.780That in some way, it kind of seemed to reconfirm anti-vax sentiment, right?0.99
00:30:54.120That people were like, oh, there's a hidden knowledge here that they don't want us to have.
00:30:58.360It's like, no, it was just like an unbelievably shoddy study that didn't show what it purported to show.
00:31:02.940But in some way, the very swiftness with which sort of that window got slammed shut by the medical establishment sort of seemed to activate the kind of anti-authoritarian tendencies for certain, especially, I guess, sort of more left-trending anti-vax parents, right?
00:31:22.680Yeah. You know, we think about anti-vax sentiment as something that's happening among white women in the U.S. in our time. But I think it's interesting to think about like the conspiracy masculinity that RFK sort of steps into where he gets to be a savior of the innocent because of his privileged position, because of his access to all these power brokers and to the secret information.
00:31:47.640Right. It's like, you know, it's a it's a frequently like sort of feminized conspiracy theory. But I think the leadership position he took up in it is a very masculine one.
00:32:00.540Yeah. And I mean, like the idea that like they're poisoning our children, right? Like we yet have to do our episode on precious bodily fluids. But the idea that like that they're trying to inject something into us from fluoride to whatever, right? Like to the COVID vaccine, like that's doing something to gender expression or to gender and how it's lived in society, right? Like they're turning the frogs gay kind of thing.
00:32:23.720We'll get to the gay frogs. Don't worry about it.1.00
00:32:25.640Oh, yeah, no, no, I know. I fully expect that that's the destination here. But right. So like in some way, it's not just gender anxieties, even though I think that you're right that my image of like a anti-vax activist is a mom on some level. But like the concern often enough is not about gender itself, it's about masculinity specifically.
00:32:44.940Yeah. And the specter of autism in particular, which is sort of like eugenic antagonism towards the autistic. It's often about a concern of around boys and around boys sort of failing to mature into this like virile, outgoing, assertive, masculine creature, right? There's gender anxiety in even the like eugenic reoccupation with autism as a disease.
00:33:11.440Yeah, this is something my former colleague, Edith Sheffer, wrote a whole book about Asperger's Children, I think it's called, yeah.
00:34:29.480So the kind of gist of this claim is that for a while, vaccines were made with a disinfectant in the vials to keep them from getting contaminated.
00:34:41.980And this disinfectant contained, among other things, like trace amounts of mercury.
00:34:47.500And so RFK believed that childhood diseases were being caused by mercury exposure after vaccination.
00:35:59.980What actually happened is that the CDC had a meeting where they were anticipating this conspiracy theory happening, right?
00:36:08.700And so they had decided to remove the mercury disinfectant, even though there was no evidence that it was dangerous, in anticipation of anti-vaxxers finding out about it and deciding that it was dangerous and concocting a conspiracy theory.
00:36:21.780So the thing that he says causes autism is no longer in the vaccines and yet autism rates are still going.
00:36:28.240I mean, whatever. Why am I debating this? This is ridiculous.
00:36:30.720This is also something where like several European countries had removed this disinfectant from their vaccine supply long before and their autism rates hadn't changed at all.
00:36:39.160So you could also like have a control group, right?
00:36:43.400This is a meeting about how they're removing it out of an absolute abundance of caution and how they want to present the notification of this removal of the mercury disinfectant so that it doesn't feed conspiracy theory.
00:36:57.140But then the whole attempt to roll this out in sort of a healthy, helpful way that's not going to create more vaccine hesitancy, in fact, is taken up by the vaccine skeptical community and pitched as a conspiracy against American children.
00:37:13.400It's also the thing where basically FOIA can sort of operate the exact opposite way,
00:37:18.780which is intended, where like you're watching a government body do its work.
00:37:24.320But because you can see the messy business of how that is done,
00:41:11.260But this is not the only conspiracy theory he starts trumpeting.
00:41:16.320So sometime in the early 2000s or the mid-2000s, his friend Larry David introduces him to what becomes his next big advocacy for conspiracy theorizing, which is his notion that the Republican Party stole the 2004 election.
00:41:37.140Okay. So just backing up for a second, him and Cheryl Hines getting together, isn't Larry David joined?
00:41:43.800Yes, Larry David introduced RFK Jr. to Cheryl Hines, the woman who would become his third wife.
00:41:53.180And that actually brings us nicely to the end of his second marriage.
00:41:56.440Because around 2010, Kennedy files for divorce from his second wife
00:42:03.260and initiates a prolonged, ugly public custody battle over their children.
00:42:09.960As part of those proceedings, a diary that RFK kept during the time of his marriage shows him keeping tallies of women who he had had sex with while he was married to his other woman.
00:47:26.020So, like, when you look at these big data sets, there does seem to be some correlation between vaccination and other diagnoses in children, right?
00:47:38.780Children who are vaccinated are a little more likely to be autistic or to have ADHD or to have other health issues.
00:47:48.400And that is because they are going to the doctor and they are being diagnosed.
00:47:54.800The kids who aren't being vaccinated are kids who aren't seeing a doctor ever and hence aren't being given.
00:47:59.680I was biting my tongue to not have to say that.
00:50:26.760He does seem to believe that it happens.0.67
00:50:28.120I think his quote was something like, at least when Hitler came for you, you could hide like Anne Frank and you can't do that with a vaccine mandate.0.96
00:50:39.940I mean, this is like, so this is someone who's almost indiscriminate in terms of his, he just grabs everything from the buffet.
00:50:47.400Yeah, basically anything that has been floating around as a physically health-related, but like right-wing conspiracy theory on the internet and the right-wing internet over like the past 20 years, he has been an advocate for at some point.
00:51:41.220A lot of people spend a lot of time tweeting during the quarantine, but his Twitter really became this like sort of engine of parasocial attachment to RFK Jr. for some of the quarantined anti-vax set.
00:51:56.620So on his Twitter, he posts a lot of front-facing videos and videos of himself, like especially performing feats of strength.
00:52:05.220So he'll like lift weights, he goes skiing, stuff like that.
00:54:04.280You know, I don't think RK could win in a fight.
00:54:06.120But, you know, he gets kicked off of these Facebook and Instagram platforms and he claims that he's being censored, right, by the evil shadowy powers that be.
00:54:18.300He actually sues and says that the White House has pressured Facebook to deplatform him.
00:54:25.420We know that actually the White House did sort of encourage tech platforms during this era to like maybe not amplify vaccines information quite as much as they were doing.
00:54:34.040And, you know, R.K. in his lawsuit has posed this as a free speech issue.
00:54:38.560Well, I mean, this is something I, in rewriting my book for the American edition, like, it really struck me how, like, part of why stories about cancel culture and free speech, part of why they happen, why these stories happen is because people who are used to a really big platform sort of feel that they're not giving the platform their owed.
00:55:57.080And look, COVID was A, really terrifying and confusing for a lot of people, and it was also legitimately mismanaged.
00:56:04.800I'm going to read again just briefly from the RFK profile by Rebecca Tracer, where she's talking about this period of his life.
00:56:13.160Being shunned in any way for ideas that, when it comes to vaccines, are not just about individual choice, but about our collective responsibility is perhaps anathema to people raised to assume their voices would be heard and understood as legitimate.
00:56:26.060it. Public health directives during COVID were crude and sometimes wrong. Messaging on masking
00:56:32.120changed repeatedly. Masking outdoors now seems silly. The school closures lasted longer than
00:56:36.840they should have. But the objections made by people like Kennedy were not rooted in special
00:56:41.360advanced scientific knowledge. Rather, they stem from the fury of normally powerful people
00:56:46.620affronted by the argument that their individual impulses put them on the wrong side of a moral
00:56:52.800question of communal engagement and compassion. It is a dynamic many manage to reframe as their
00:56:59.620willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep.
00:57:05.460And it's a type of environment in which men born with immense wealth and power,0.57
00:57:10.060the kind who casually mentioned that governors have called and offered them sentencing so they
00:57:13.760have turned down. This is something RFK claimed in the interview with her. The governor in question
00:57:18.740says it's not true, can recast themselves as martyred heroes. So in 2021, he publishes a book,
00:57:26.620The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,
00:57:32.360which in turn has launched him into his 2024 presidential run. He is now polling in some
00:57:37.500national polls as high as 20%. Is that true? Yeah, he seems to have gone down more recently,
00:57:43.100But he is on the ballot in a couple of states that are real significant, specifically Michigan, which Biden really needs to win and which he's already at risk of losing because of how deeply Biden has alienated Arab American and Muslim American voters who are a big voting bloc in Michigan.
00:58:03.100So, you know, he's on the ballot and he might actually be like a Jill Stein style spoiler.
00:58:09.660It might be worth mentioning his running mate.
00:58:19.160Well, I'm not shocked because this is, I mean, you know, the tracer description, which is as always spot on, right, describes 95% of Silicon Valley billionaires, right?
00:58:29.040Like this idea that they are never more outraged than when what they take to be their outsized claim on our attention and deference is threatened in the least.
00:58:44.200And like RFK Jr., they have this weird kind of humiliation ritual going, I feel like, where these people are rich as hell and don't have to hear from us plebs ever.1.00
00:58:54.020But then they all start Twitter accounts and post incredibly stupid shit.1.00
00:58:57.580And then like people point out that like it's stupid shit.1.00
00:59:01.060And then they're like, cancer culture is real, right?1.00
00:59:48.880She legitimately did grow up very poor.0.82
00:59:51.960Like her mother was an immigrant, single mother, immigrant on welfare.0.99
00:59:55.980I was going to say, wait, Shanahan Kennedy? This is the first all-Irish ticket?0.80
01:00:00.860Her mother was an immigrant from China, and her father was a white American who I think took off pretty early.0.82
01:00:10.060But she came really from nothing and worked her way up to being a lawyer in Silicon Valley.
01:00:17.360And she made quite a bit of money by getting married.
01:00:20.820She married a gentleman named Sergey Brin, who is the co-founder of Google.
01:00:24.880They had a daughter who is, I think, currently like four years old and is autistic, which Nicole believes may have been caused by environmental factors, among them vaccines.
01:00:38.020Nicole is a pro-natalist, but also a natural childbirth enthusiast.
01:00:45.800So she actually opposes IVF and medication, pain medication during childbirth and has a big sort of fund devoted to like research and libbing.1.00
01:03:27.920I mean, they called their own reign, like literally Kamala, right?
01:03:33.180Righteous, pure, you know, noble, aristocratic.1.00
01:03:38.220And then what you actually have is this kind of blubbering idiot.0.99
01:03:43.080We didn't even get to the fact that he literally has brain worms and he has had worms in his brain at least since 2010, according to court depositions.1.00