So I'm now just gonna go and give you kind of rapid fire,
a bunch of the things that RFK believes
and that he has advocated for it in public.
This is gonna be good.
One, that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS.
Sure, sure, why not?
Two, that SSRIs, antidepressant medications,
are responsible for school shootings.
Okay.
Three, that gender dysphoria in teens
is linked to water contaminated with atrazine,
which is a additive that has possibly caused hermaphrodism
in frogs, which is where we get to the gay frogs
in some live studies.
I was waiting for the gay frogs.
Yeah, he's a big gay frog truther.
Yeah, I mean, who isn't?
Whomst among us?
["The
Gay Frogs"]
So Adrian, today I wanted to ask you
if you had ever heard of this kind of obscure family
from Massachusetts, the Kennedys?
I've driven by their compound.
Where you have?
I have actually, yeah, in the hiatus court.
I think so, yeah.
There's not much to see on Cape Cod,
and we're like, oh, fuck it, I'm going to the Kennedy compound.
There's not much to see as far as I recall.
So today we're gonna be talking about
the Kennedys' black sheep, their prodigal son,
their, you know, maybe revealing embarrassment.
And...
Who is not the one who drove a lady off a cliff?
No, he does not seem to have killed anybody,
but he is still the one that they like the least.
He is a conspiracy theorist.
He is a presidential candidate.
He is an anti-vaxxer, a scion of the last great American
dynasty, and the victim of literal brain worms.
Today we're talking about a man by the name of RFK Jr.
I'm so excited.
And I should say, obviously, I will try to assume
the role of the inductee, and I will,
I hope to be guided through the life of RFK Jr. by you.
I should admit that I'm not fully...
I know some stuff about this guy.
He's pretty inescapable.
The family is pretty inescapable.
But I'll try and keep myself as pure as I can.
Well, maybe this would be a good place to start,
because what do you know about RFK Jr.?
Well, I mean, son of the later, late, better RFK,
kind of a celebrity seems to have gone the anti-vaxx route
sort of alongside a couple of more sort of comprehensible
consumer advocacy kind of movements.
And just I went down a rabbit hole.
Is married to Larry David's wife from Caribbean enthusiasm?
Is that right?
Yep, Cheryl Hines.
Which must be awkward, because like,
cannot imagine that Larry David suffers a man like that,
given it's on record what he said about Alan Dershowitz.
Well, Adrienne, you have so much to learn.
This is fantastic.
So as you can tell, like, I know bits and then the stuff
I do not know about RFK Jr.
could stun a pair of oxen on their tracks.
Right.
There is kind of so much to know about RFK Jr.
And I spent a couple of days in this rabbit hole,
like really kind of entranced by this story.
And it is really a great story.
And I sort of went from thinking, basically, like you did,
Adrienne, like who is this asshole?
To being like, oh, my God, this is one of the most operatic
stories of history and family and destiny and madness
and feeling really invested in the saga of RFK Jr.
And then I sort of came out the other end and was like, God,
who is this asshole?
So this is the journey I want to take you along with.
From a tweet to the great American novel back to a tweet.
Just what an asshole.
Yeah.
So like, joking aside, the story of RFK Jr.
really is kind of a tragic one.
So it's a story, as I said, of mental illness,
of how personal tragedy and these like grand historic forces
combine in one person's life to really foreclose
the possibility of him ever achieving
a solid grip on reality.
This guy just had no shot at being sane.
It's also the story of the conditions, the sort of 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.
It 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.
It is also a story about the emerging trend
of American political diagonalism.
Have you heard this phrase, Adrienne, diagonalism?
Yeah, of course.
It's where basically kind of conspiratorial rhetoric
can cut across what we would think of as sort
of intrinsic divides in American politics.
Yeah, it's a kind of usually populist, usually quite
conspiratorial political rhetoric
that can unite the left and the right.
And the thing that diagonalism almost always does
is drag everybody further to the right.
And that's really what happened here.
So I'm going to start with this quote
from this really excellent Rebecca Tracer profile of RFK
from an issue, this cover story in an issue of New York
magazine last year.
She puts him this way, right?
She describes him like, if he were your uncle,
you would likely consider that he is fighting
some serious psychological headwinds.
His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was nine.
He was pulled from school five years later at 14
and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated.
His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way
to Bobby's sister's wedding, JFK Jr., very famous.
I remember this, yep.
One of his brothers died in a skiing accident.
Another died of a drug overdose.
His wife died by suicide.
All this in a family in which his grandfather's dictum
was, there will be no crying in this house.
Oh, yikes.
But if he was your uncle, he would not
be performing surprisingly well in a Democratic presidential
primary and gobbling the attention of the national
grass with his every word.
But he is, tells us much about this country's broken systems
as any of his diatribe do.
Interesting.
So as we move forward, there's one way
to look at RFK Jr. as a villain, right?
Because he's taking up a lot of media attention
with all his anti-vax diatribes and he's lying.
He does, I believe, consciously deliberately lie
in some of these.
OK, I was going to ask.
So this is pretty documented that he
knows that this is bad shit.
Well, it's impossible to establish that kind of state
of mind, but he has so many contradictions and omissions
in his presentation of science that it seems to me,
even if he believes in the forest,
he's lying about specific trees.
So there's one way to see him really as villainous, right?
And then there's another way to see him as a victim, right?
Because he's clearly sick and suffering
and has been through the kinds of high-profile violent loss
that would, I think, drive a lot of people crazy.
And then there's a third way to look at him as a buffoon,
right?
Because he's very obviously being used as a pawn by others.
And he's quite stupid.
He's not a smart guy.
So we're going to have to make space for all of these three
different ways of looking at RFK as a villain, a victim,
and a buffoon, because the guy contains multitudes.
One thing I think is really important to note about him
is that he really thinks of himself
as this degraded outsider.
He thinks of himself as like avenging
other people's low expectations of him
by telling these forbidden but morally urgent truths.
He's got the secret knowledge that he's
trying to save the world by spreading.
Well, I mean, that's an interesting thing, right?
I mean, right down from the Camelot metaphor
about the Kennedys, the Kennedys have often
been treated as kind of an American aristocracy.
And of course, this idea that you can be both the consummate
insider in the sense that your name opens all these doors,
but you're kind of still an outsider.
This is a position or a pose that I think aristocrats tend
to have a much easier time with, right?
Because they're above the fray in a certain way
of bourgeois squabbling while at the same time, right?
And can this identify to some extent from the structures
of power that very much they're on the top of, you know?
Yeah, I 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.
Wow, OK.
Our ring episode is about to be the shorter episode.
I swear I'm going to go through this fast.
Yeah, it's nice.
So RFK Jr. is what we think of as kind of the second generation
of the Kennedys.
But he is like the third or the fourth generation of Kennedys
to be born rich.
So Tracer in her article refers to his grandfather,
whose victim was, there will be no crying in this house.
Joe Kennedy.
Joe Kennedy, yeah, who was a banker.
He ran a Hollywood movie studio.
Joe Kennedy got very rich during prohibition.
So kind of the rumor about him is that he was a bootlegger.
Historians seem kind of unclear on whether that was true or not.
And Joe Kennedy was kind of the first Kennedy
who had this kind of appetite for public service, right?
Like very public looking guy.
His parents were politicians.
But also, he really understood himself as an outsider, right?
And this is going to be a recurring theme with RFK Jr.
specifically, but also with the Kennedys in general.
Catholicism for one thing.
They're Catholic.
They're Irish.
They really understand themselves to be outsiders.
And like, perhaps nobody has ever had less of a claim
to that status.
But like Joe Kennedy was a member of the millionaire elite
at a time when that actually was kind of rare for people
of Irish descent, when the Irish had not
been sort of integrated into American whiteness
quite the same way.
Apparently, he got like booed at his Harvard reunion.
Oh, yikes.
Because they didn't like that there was an Irish
and graduated from Harvard.
It's shit like that.
They had a chip on their shoulder.
Well, and we might say they're Bostonians, right?
Like, so this is not a Chicago family,
meaning they were contending with Boston Brahmins, which
like, you know, are very, right?
Like everyone traces their lineage right back to the Mayflower
and shit like that.
So it's like, it's also very much a Bostonian story,
isn't it?
It's Northeast old money.
Yeah.
They have the Kennedy camp compound at Hyannas Port.
Is it just the four brothers or is there more?
There's four that I know.
It was a big family.
Joe Dyes in World War II.
John, also known as Jack, also a war hero.
Robert and Teddy.
Those are the ones I know.
Were there others?
Is there like a failed son who like did nothing?
There's a failed daughter.
Runs like a bong shop and like, and like son of Barbara
or something like that.
If there was, the Kennedy would never allow us to know.
Right.
About that figure.
You know, famously Joe Kennedy was a real son of a bitch,
right?
He was a skirt chaser, really kind of almost compulsively
misogynistic and like sexually voracious.
They had this mother who was just sort of cloistered
and lived this very sheltered life with a lot of Rosaries
in Hyannas Port.
And the sort of famous bastard story about Joe Kennedy,
RFK Junior's grandfather, is that when his daughter Rosemary
started misbehaving as a teenager,
sort of sneaking out to see boys, talking back,
doing kind of standard issue, troubled teenage girl stuff,
Joe Kennedy kidnapped his daughter,
did not tell his wife, Rose, where he had taken this child
and had her lobotomized.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So Rosemary Kennedy had enforced intellectual disability
because her father didn't like her and so took
a weight part of her brain.
And she was institutionalized for the rest of her life
and was sort of this sort of secret Kennedy sister.
Oh my God.
That gives you a little bit of a taste of who Joe Kennedy is.
Yeah.
So as you can imagine, his sons did very psychologically well.
So Joe Kennedy Junior dies in World War II,
leaving Jack, Robert, and Teddy Edward in that birth order.
Jack Kennedy is a World War II hero.
He works in Navy intelligence, goes on to become president.
He serves from 1961 to 1963 when he is assassinated in Dallas.
During that time, he appoints his little brother, RFK,
as his attorney general in a wildly unethical move.
Yeah, I've always wondered about that.
I mean, he seems to have been quite good at the job,
but it's like, yeah, let's not look too closely.
Like today, Jesus, if like Joe was like, here,
I've got this brother.
Yeah, the attorney general is supposed to be
an independent agent because he is supposed to be able to hold.
All the cabinet posts, right?
Like, interior is not so bad.
HUD, not so bad.
Yeah, like the agent needs to be able to investigate
and hold accountable members of the executive branch,
which you really can't do if the president is your big brother.
JFK is assassinated.
This is a national trauma, right?
All your boomer parents know where they were.
When JFK was assassinated, my mother
got sent home from her Catholic elementary school.
So in the minds of Irish Catholics,
the Kennedys also were sort of a symbol of assimilation.
And the Kennedy assassination was a symbol
of sort of how incomplete that assimilation was.
And so there's a lot of symbolism put on the Kennedys.
RFK goes on to become a senator from New York,
runs for president in 1960.
H has a, what is like generally regarded as a very
like morally righteous and kind of electrifying campaign
until he is assassinated also in Los Angeles.
By Sirhan Sirhan in the-
It's in LA, it's in the kitchen of a hotel.
Yeah, Sirhan Sirhan, who is a Palestinian American,
does not seem to have had political motivations
or been part of a conspiracy.
He seems to have been a severely mentally ill man
who had a long standing fixation on RFK
and eventually shot him.
So RFK Jr., who is the third of RFK's 11 children
born in 1954, is 14 at the time.
He gets pulled out of prep school,
flown on the vice president's private plane to California
to his father's bedside.
It's just five years after the assassination
of his uncle, right?
So this guy has had two, his two male role models, right?
His historically important uncle, his savior,
your old father who was supposed to avenge the family.
Both these men are not just killed
when he's very young, but they are murdered.
And so RFK says that before the death of his father,
he had wanted to be a veterinarian.
Apparently he really likes animals
and had a bunch of animals growing up.
And after that, he feels like he is called by history
to a greater destiny, right?
He has sort of has to take on the mantle
and the role that his father would have fulfilled.
And in like really brief terms,
he just wasn't up to it.
It really seems to have psychically burdened him, right?
So he winds up getting kicked out of a slew
of private prep schools.
He gets into drugs quite young.
I believe his first drug arrest for pot possession
is when he's still a teenager.
He sort of fails upwards through high school
and winds up at Harvard.
Like you do if you've donated a ton of money to the school.
But he doesn't really do great.
Yeah, you know, like something that comes up a bunch
when you look at RFK Junior's biography
is that somebody with this much mental illness,
this severe addiction issues,
this great of a divorce from reality,
if it was any other family,
he would have been institutionalized, incarcerated,
definitely left sort of at the fringe of society
to live in like anonymous disgrace, right?
And that's not true with RFK.
He sort of keeps failing up for a while.
I do wonder if that's just about the Kennedys.
I mean, I used to live in New England
and I know you're a New Englander as well.
I feel like there's a whole system to shuffle the,
well, I mean, I guess RFK really was just not doing very well.
He's not a failed son, but drug addicted failed sons
of wealthy families from one place to the other
to minimize accountability as much as humanly possible, right?
Like there's a whole totem pole of prep schools.
You can sort of slide down.
If you get kicked out of one for cocaine abuse,
you go to the next one, right?
So in some way, like he's kind of representative
of a whole segment of American society
where failure just is kind of like a thing
that happens to other people.
You will be bounced along,
even if you probably would be helped
if you got a different kind of attention.
I mean, I don't think he would have done,
I mean, obviously I'm not saying jail.
I don't wish that on anyone,
but some kind of attention other than Harvard Yard
might have helped.
Yeah, he does sort of wind up in,
maybe because he feels called to by his family
and by history.
He winds up in these positions
that he can't really live up to, right?
So he goes to law school,
I believe at the University of Virginia,
pretty good law school.
And then as soon as he graduates,
he is appointed to be an ADA USA in New York City.
Very cushy job, assistant district attorney
for the United States is a kind of job
from which people like then run for Congress, right?
It's a fancy job in its own right.
And it's also the job that is a trampoline
for a lot of people's political careers
or very ambitious careers.
And he gets that job and a couple of months later,
he has to quit because he failed the bar.
Oh, shit.
But he can't actually practice law.
He later eventually passes the bar and does practice law.
But this is kind of a moment where he winds up
sort of spiraling kind of downward, right?
So he's got a lot of problems with drugs,
his addiction issues are starting to catch up to him
at 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.
So that's another arrest.
And I think it might be actually useful
to make a note here about the psychology
of addiction and recovery, right?
So like, first of all,
some of my best friends are drug addicts, right?
Like nothing I say here is meant to disparage
the good character of drug addicts
by comparing them to RFK Junior.
But I think the experience of addiction
is like one useful lens to look at RFK through
because like we tend to think of addicts and alcoholics
as people who like kind of want too much of something
and can't stop themselves from ingesting, indulging,
taking on more, right?
And I think when you look at actual addicts,
what often happens is that they are people
who have endured an unendurable loss, right?
They're often people who are, you know,
to use a buzzword just like traumatize up the wazoo.
They have often experienced a lot of violence
and deprivation in their lives.
And what they are doing is they're self-medicating, right?
They 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.
And so they escape into this different world.
They create a different world
through intoxication and through drugs.
And sometimes when people stop taking drugs
and they stop drinking, they still retain that desire
to create a different world, right?
They still want to escape this world
and enter into another one.
So one way to do that is kind of escaping us
for substances, but another way to do it is through fantasy.
Right.
And so I kind of want us to think about this
psychological profile of the addict
as we like move forward into like RFK's
dissension to conspiracism.
Another thing to think about in terms of RFK's experience
as an addict, and he talks a lot about being
a 12-step recovery.
And 12-step groups are this kind of rare space
in which non-related men talk to one another
about emotional life and feelings, right?
And RFK is actually really good at doing this.
He is kind of an intoxicating speaker.
He's absolutely bonkers insane, right?
But he is really, really appealing to young men
as he's sort of become a media figure in his own right.
He's done really well in the mannosphere
and in these sort of male-oriented media spaces,
especially podcasts.
Like not to indict ourselves too much,
but this guy is like such a podcaster.
And it's clear that part of what his audience
are going to him for is not just this messiatic style
of secret knowledge, but this kind of almost
pre-truly compassion and emotionalism
that he can take on.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it this way,
but it feels to me that his podcast personality,
and I've heard a couple of clips over the last couple of months,
is very Jordan Peterson-esque.
Like you're watching him suffer, and you're
invited to suffer along.
He's compelling, but he never has a good time.
He's never funny.
He's never self-ironic.
There's a drivenness and a kind of almost hunted quality
to him.
And that's something that clearly was behind Peterson's
connection with the mannosphere, and with especially
young men, and the podcast format we might add as well.
And they both also have broken, gravelly voices for which,
I know he has a medical reason for that,
so I don't want to mock that.
He has a, it's called spastic dystonia, I believe.
He believes that he got it from a flu vaccine,
but it is a medical condition.
Yeah, so I don't want to make light of that.
The point is, he's compelling even though there's
a certain labor in speaking.
There's not the kind of podcasting
that I aspire to where frankly it all feels a little,
feels off the cuff, feels kind of excited,
and inviting people to kind of go along.
His mode, like Peterson's, feels like one,
you're invited to suffer along, and to kind of empathize
with the difficulty that this man clearly has,
making himself understood and expressing himself.
And again, I don't mean to mock that.
It's to say there's a passion there in the sense of a,
not just passion as in excitement,
but as the passion of the Christ.
He's suffering for us, and we're invited to either
mock that or to identify with that struggle.
Right, and when he talks, you listen to him on these podcasts,
he did a three hour Joe Rogan interview that I listened to.
Of course.
I did listen to it like to X-speed, but.
I'm so sorry.
And then he did Jordan Peterson, he did a bunch of these,
like Manusphere podcast, and he does speak, you're right,
it's laborious, it's not fluent.
He always sounds like he's got a terrible cough,
or like maybe he's had a stroke, it's effortful,
but it's also quite fast.
Yeah, yeah.
He talks very fast, and he pulls in a lot of references
to make this kind of cloud of associative ideas
that never really quite hang together,
but they are sort of glued together in his performance
by his personal charisma, by his aspects.
And that's kind of the magic that he has.
But we're off of his biographical tracks,
so let's go back a little bit.
So after he gets sober, he starts working
as an environmental lawyer.
Part of his sort of criminal punishment
is to do community service, and through his community service,
he winds up working for a environmental group
and discovers this kind of passion for environmental,
for environmental law.
And he does that for a long time,
and everybody agrees that as an environmental lawyer,
RFK Jr. is competent, useful, like impassioned.
He seems to have been pretty good at this
in a way that you might not anticipate.
So he is actually almost solely held in esteem
as the guy who got the Hudson River cleaned up.
Oh, yeah.
That's a plus.
I went to school.
I thought that was Lenny Briscoe.
I went to school in upstate New York
and the campus of the college that I went to
was right on the Hudson.
And it used to be this competition of who's brave enough
to swim in the Hudson River and will you come out with gills?
But it was actually decently clean.
It was decently clean because of work that RFK Jr. did.
And I mean, I should say, I mean, that's the other,
there's another little bit of foreshadowing here, right?
That I do feel that if there's any place
in US law where a conspiracy theory
and being just a legal representative
is identical, it's environmental law, right?
It's like, you wouldn't just pour uranium
into this river, right?
And it's like, turns out they were absolutely
just dumping uranium into the river, right?
Like every insane theory you could concoct
when it comes to environmental stuff in the United States,
like is happening or was happening pretty routinely.
Yeah.
So this is actually kind of where he seems to have gotten
his first taste for conspiracism.
It's interesting because he comes from a family
about which so many conspiracy theories have been spun.
And a family that was in full historical fairness
to the Kennedys orchestrating some conspiracies.
Like what do you call what JFK was doing in Cuba,
if not a conspiracy, right?
But 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
and 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, right?
So like you're right,
there are conspiracies in the world
and they tend to be these kind of benign conspiracies
of like corporate greed, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So that kind of is the seed of his conspiracism.
He is a mentally unwell man,
already prone to fantasizing
with this huge background of trauma.
And now he's working in this righteous field
in which he cannot do the right thing
because of these malign forces, right?
And then in 1994, his son is born.
He's in his second marriage.
He has children already.
But 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.
Oh no, yeah, that's a tough one.
And 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.
So this kid's very precarious in his health.
And RFK seems to have started to wonder
as I think somebody in his position
maybe is understandable that they would wonder
if environmental pollutants
could have caused his son's allergies.
By the way, side note about this kid,
he seems to have recovered.
He grew up to be weird on his own terms.
Connor Kennedy briefly dated Taylor Swift,
friend of the show, in 2012.
Oh yeah, just found a picture of Tay-Tay
and yeah, Connor Kennedy.
More recently, Connor says that he traveled to Ukraine
after the Russian invasion in 2022
to volunteer with a Ukrainian militia there.
Oh wow.
And has now come back.
So Connor is busy in his own right,
doing his own weird shit
following the proud tradition of his father,
but Connor turned out fine in case you were wondering.
Good, good.
But like now RFK Jr. is thinking
not just about environmental toxins
and the forces that have generated them,
but he's thinking about maybe,
are these hurting our kids?
Right.
And that is when stuff starts to get really weird.
So during this whole time,
RFK is a public figure.
He's very much trading on his family name.
He's trying to advocate for causes he believes in,
mostly environmental, in the public sphere.
He's traveling all across the country.
And sometime in the early 2000s,
it's not exactly clear when this happened,
but sometimes in the early 2000,
he is approached by a group of anti-vax mothers
who recruit him to the cause of vaccine skepticism.
And he becomes one of the most prominent
anti-vax conspiracy theorists in the US.
This is an era when vaccine skepticism is on the rise.
So like conspiracy theories and skepticisms of vaccines
are as old as vaccines are, right?
This is a technology that has always provoked
a lot of fear and resistance
from sections of the general public.
But at the time that RFK is recruited
to like sort of the anti-vax world,
there has been a big splash of anti-vaxing publicity
because of a study conducted in the UK in 1998
by a guy named Andrew Wakefield.
Andrew, do you know about this?
Oh yeah.
So it's been like retracted more often
than any study in the history of ever.
It does not show, but it purports to show.
And I think he lost his license.
Yes, he lost his medical license in 2010.
The study purporting to show that 12 British children
were made autistic because of exposure
to the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine
is a big blockbuster study.
It gets covered up the wazoo.
It creates this massive drop off in vaccinations in the UK
that is then of course followed by a measles outbreak.
This is pretty thoroughly debunked pretty quickly,
especially in the British press by 2004.
It has been pretty thoroughly disproven in public.
Andrew Wakefield, the scientist behind it,
loses his medical license in 2010.
And I mean, I was around for a lot of these discussions.
And 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.
I was like, this is bullshit.
That in some way, it kind of seemed to reconfirm anti-vax
sentiment, that people would go, oh,
there is a hidden knowledge here that they don't want us to have.
I was like, no, it was just an unbelievably shoddy study that
didn't show what it purported to show.
But in some way, the very swiftness
with which that window got slammed shut
by the medical establishment seemed
to activate the kind of anti-authoritarian tendencies
for certain, especially I guess, sort of more
left trending anti-vax parents.
Like the Marin moms, if you will.
Yeah.
We think about anti-vax sentiment
as something that's happening among white women in the US
in our time.
But I think it's interesting to think about 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.
It's like it's a frequently sort of feminized conspiracy theory.
But I think the leadership position he took up in it
is a very masculine one.
Yeah.
And I mean, the idea that they're poisoning our children,
we yet have to do our episode on precious bodily fluids.
But the idea that they're trying to inject something into us
from fluoride to whatever, to the COVID vaccine,
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.
But we'll get to the gay frogs.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
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
is about masculinity specifically.
Yeah.
And the specter of autism in particular,
which in it's 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 eugenic reoccupation
of autism as a disease.
Yeah.
The same thing my former colleague,
Steve Sheffer wrote a whole book about Asperger's children.
I think it's called.
Yeah.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
For our listeners who are waiting on bated breath,
vaccines don't cause autism.
They don't cause any other things that RFK Jr.
attributes them to cause, such as ADHD, allergies,
verbal, and physical ticks.
But he does write a big investigative piece,
what's billed as an investigative piece,
as published in 2005, and it is published on the homepage
of salon.com.
Oh, oh, oh.
And also in the print edition.
That was a wilder place in 2005, I feel, I guess.
But it was also published in the print edition of Rolling
Stone.
Oh, wow.
RFK Jr. is very close friends with Yann Wenner,
the co-founder and then editor-in-chief of Rolling
Stone.
Also a kind of scumbaggy guy who we should probably
do an episode on now that I think of him.
With interesting gender politics.
Interesting gender politics.
So Salon and Rolling Stone published what they billed
as a joint investigation from RFK,
in which he claims to have blockbuster inside information
that was so hidden that he had to get a FOIA for it,
that the CDC has been covering up the danger of vaccines
to children.
So 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.
And this disinfectant contained, among other things,
like trace amounts of mercury.
And so RFK believed that childhood diseases
were being caused by mercury exposure after vaccination.
OK.
That's not what happens.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things.
Like if something contains something,
you always have to wonder about quantities, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm not going to shoot my mouth off and try
and be a medical doctor here.
But I do think it's always very noticeable when you're told
that something contains something.
There was that famous claim a few years ago,
like LaCroix contains rat poisons.
It appears to contain a tiny bit of a compound that also occurs
in rat poisons.
I feel like the images of someone dumping
industrial quantities of the substance into your vaccine
is different from, yeah, there's like,
there might even be a trace amount of something in there.
I mean, doesn't like every tuna eat contain some mercury?
Actually, RFK believes that he himself
is a victim of mercury poisoning because of the large amounts
of canned tuna that he was eating for stretches
of his adult life.
But he publishes this salacious claim, right?
And what it gets read as, and this is not the facts,
what it gets read as is your children are being
injected with mercury.
It's making them sick.
The CDC is covering it up.
What actually happened is that the CDC had a meeting where
they were anticipating this conspiracy theory happening.
And so they had decided to remove the mercury disinfectant,
even though there was no evidence that it was dangerous.
He had anticipation of anti-vaxxers finding out about it
and deciding that it was dangerous and concocting
a conspiracy theory.
So the thing that he says causes autism
is no longer in the vaccines.
And yet autism rates are still going.
I mean, whatever.
Why am I debating this?
This is ridiculous.
Right.
This is also something where several European countries
had removed the disinfectant from their vaccine supply
long before.
And their autism rates hadn't changed at all.
So you could also have a control group, right?
Yeah.
And also, it's already removed.
This 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.
But 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.
It's also the thing where basically FOIA
can sort of operate the exact opposite way, which
is intended where you're watching a government body do
its work, but because you can see the messy business of how
that is done, it fuels more conspiracy theories.
And instead, you get the opposite.
These are people who are existing and operating
in reality and are like, oh, shit,
is this really worth it?
We don't think it's dangerous, but let's not stoke this.
And then that very operation is the sign that something
is secret hidden from you.
Right.
And that anything kind of secretive or happened in quote
unquote behind closed doors is necessarily nefarious.
This wasn't even really concealed.
RFK Jr. filed a FOIA request, something every reporter does.
Everyone can do.
A couple times a day.
Anybody can do it.
I filed a FOIA request.
I am not a particularly smart person.
It's not hard.
And he received the documents that he requested,
and they showed nothing.
They showed nothing nefarious.
And this is where I think RFK counts as a liar,
because his salon article emits vast chunks of context.
It emits big chunks of quotes to try and make this seem much
more nefarious than it is.
So you mentioned Jan Wenner, but was this
the Joan Walsh period of salon?
Like, who greenleaves this fucking thing?
Yeah.
So this is the other thing, is that this article gets debunked
quite quickly.
It has a lot of serious factual errors.
Salon and Rolling Stone eventually retracted a few years
later in 2011.
But in the meantime, it does go about as viral as anything
can go in 2005, which raises the question,
as you said, of who published, who edited this thing?
And Joan Walsh was indeed the editor of Salon of the time,
or an editor of Salon at the time.
She's now at the nation.
And she wrote this past summer an account
of the publication of this article,
in which she says, look, this guy got away with things
we would not have allowed other writers to get away with,
because his last name was Kennedy,
because he has known people like John Wenner his whole life,
because people working in the media
have looked up to his dad their whole lives
and have had a reverence for the sort of romantic past
and image of sort of liberal righteousness associated
with this name.
They let him publish some horseshit that
had a really devastating public health impact.
Yeah, I mean, and this is such a common thing, right,
that you get these sort of celebrity,
and especially this is especially when you take positions
kind of right of the mainstream normally, right?
You're like, oh, I was censored, but because I'm such
a powerful person, I was able to get this information out.
And in fact, it's like, no, it's because everyone's
terribly afraid of being seen as coming down too hard
in that kind of opinion, right?
If you were just to say something bog standard,
like, you know, let's eliminate three strikes
or something like that, like they will come down
on you much harder, right?
Like, some way the kind of thing kind of contains
its own refutation, but it's a very, very common
kind of discursive trope, and it drives me,
frankly, a little insane.
Yeah, this is like his claim or his conception
of himself as an outsider, right?
He's like, look how dangerous I'm being.
It's like, what's actually happening is these institutions
are bending over backwards to accommodate you
because of how thoroughly you are, in fact, an insider
and how much entitlement to public platforming
and attention we all consider you to have.
So this is his like real initiation or like coming out story
as an anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist, right?
And after this 2005 article, he sort of broadens
his horizons, becomes, you know, he remains sort of
at his core, an anti-vaxxer, that's clearly
where his passion is, but this is not the only
conspiracy theory he starts trumpeting.
So sometime in the early 2000s or the mid 2000s,
his friend Larry David introduces him
to what becomes his next big like advocacy
for conspiracy theorizing, which is his notion
that the Republican Party stole the 2004 election.
Okay, so just backing up for a second.
Him and Cheryl Hines getting together,
is a Larry David joint?
Yes, Larry David introduced R.F.K. Jr. to Cheryl Hines,
the woman who would become his third wife.
Pretty, pretty, pretty weird.
Pretty weird, and that actually brings us nicely
to the end of his second marriage because around 2010,
Kennedy files for divorce from his second wife
and initiates a prolonged, ugly, public custody battle
over their children.
As part of those proceedings, a diary that R.F.K. kept
during the time of his marriage shows him
keeping tallies of women who he had had sex with
while he was married to this other woman.
Such a beginner mistake, it's a weird thing
to do on your second marriage.
Yeah, he writes all these women down
and then he ranks their sexual performance.
He recounts in that diary,
sleeping with 37 women just in the year 2001,
which I think is a nice callback
to this anxious Kennedy masculinity insecurity.
Yeah, I was gonna say,
like there's the satiriasis run strong
among the men in that family, right?
Like, I mean-
Yeah, his grandfather, Joe Kennedy, was famous.
This is Philanderer, so work has two uncles,
J.F.K. and Ted Kennedy.
This actually doesn't seem to have been something
that his father, R.F.K., was as in due.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, he had 11 children.
I mean, I feel like you guys just tapped out.
R.F.K. was the choir boy,
but R.F.K. Jr seems to have taken on
this anxious sexual acquisitiveness.
He's like, you know, 37-
J.F.K. Jr was kind of a Playboy too, right?
Like famously.
I don't know as much about J.F.K. Jr.
I just know the outfits.
I see a lot of picture of the beautiful, like J.Crew.
Yeah.
No, that was his vibe, I thought.
I mean, I'm not gonna suggest anything,
but he did not look at him and go like,
that's a man that doesn't fuck.
Yeah, yeah, the sort of like sexual swagger.
Yeah.
You know, your enemy did a wonderful podcast
on the Kennedys that introduced me to Gary Will's book,
The Kennedy Imprisonment,
which I think all our readers-
Oh, Gary Will wrote about the Gary Will's wrote about the Will.
Gary Will's wrote a really good book about the Kennedys.
He does a lot with the psychology
of the Kennedy masculinity.
And his theory is like, you know, these guys,
unlike the sort of stereotype
of mid-century Irish Americans,
these were not like big physically intimidating,
fighting Irish guys.
The Kennedy men are kind of scrawny.
Yeah, they're hot soy boys.
Yeah, they can't win a fight, right?
And Joe Kennedy compensates for-
Well, except the World War, I guess.
The Kennedy men compensate for what they feel
is their insufficiently masculine physical prowess
with just like insanely insecure sexual acquisitiveness.
Masculinity is something you have to prove, right?
Feminity is something that like you get relegated to.
Masculinity is something you have to maintain.
And the way the Kennedy men maintain their masculinity
is by having sexualism with many women as possible.
That sort of comes up in that book,
is that Halberstam, the best and the brightest,
sort of about the transition
from the Kennedy administration
to the Johnson administration that, you know,
Johnson was, had this like, right,
famous, a huge guy,
kind of had his dick out half the time, right?
Like as a totally different model of masculinity
and that like the Kennedy boys just really chafed against that.
And he, against them, that sort of comes through there,
that there's also these dueling styles of masculinity there,
because Johnson infamously is just like,
is I think sexually not that, it's not acquisitive.
He's just like, it's just like out there, right?
Like, right, like would sort of have people
watching urinate and stuff like that.
Weird shit.
We should do a LBJ episode,
because he's a weird guy.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
But RFK Jr. has sort of inherited this like anxious,
got to fuck a lot, got to prove I'm a man.
And then keep a diary about it, which like,
And then he keeps a diary about it.
So this all comes out in his very messy second divorce.
Skill issue.
In the process, this is going to get dark.
And this is a little bit of a content warning,
but his second wife, in the process of their divorce,
Mary Kathleen Richardson commits suicide in 2012.
She hangs herself in an outbuilding
of one of their estates.
Oh no.
But he quickly gets married again.
He gets married to Cheryl Hines, who Larry David
plays opposite on curvy or enthusiasm and the actor.
He gets married and divorced from
in different seasons of curvy enthusiasm.
Yes, and Larry David introduced them
and they get married in 2014.
Also in 2014, he publishes another book on vaccines.
Once again, talking about that mercury-based
disinfectant additive is a book called
Samarasal, Let the Science Speak,
that blames vaccines for speech and facial tics.
He eliminates autism from this book
because he says it's too controversial.
He says, you know, these vaccines with Samarasal in them,
they cause speech and facial tics, they cause allergies,
they call ADHD, they cause all these other
childhood health issues.
And he points to the cause as-
That's less controversial.
Yeah, it's not true.
It's not true.
And also, he published this book in 2014
and Samarasal has not been included in vaccines since 1993.
Oh, my God.
Also, I mean, can we talk about the fact?
I mean, not the point here, but like,
is this just post-hoc ergo-proptor hoc, the book, right?
Like, what's the causal connection between
these substances and all these things?
Like, is it just that those are rising?
These are all things that go up, right?
Line go up, I guess, famously.
The more kids diagnosed with ADHD
than they were 20 years ago, that's true.
And then you're connecting it to like,
your particular pet issue, like, I mean, like,
what's wrong with microplastics?
That's also, I see.
So like, when you look at these big data sets,
there does seem to be some correlation
between vaccination and other diagnoses in children, right?
Children who are vaccinated are a little more likely
to be autistic or to have ADHD
or to have other health issues.
And that is because they are going to the doctor
and they are being diagnosed.
The kids who aren't being vaccinated
are kids who aren't seeing a doctor ever.
And hence aren't being given.
Was biting my tongue to not have to say that, exactly.
And hence aren't being given these diagnoses, right?
So it's a correlation that he mistakes for a causation.
Class of conservative thought mistake.
And it's one that has been debunked pretty thoroughly,
but he does go on like all of these network morning shows,
talking about his book that makes no fucking sense.
So, you know, this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg
with RFK.
So I'm now just gonna go and give you kind of rapid fire,
a bunch of the things that RFK believes
and that he has advocated for it in public.
This is gonna be good.
One, that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS.
Sure, sure why not?
Two, that SSRIs, anti-depressant medications,
are responsible for school shootings.
Okay.
Three, that gender dysphoria in teens
is linked to water contaminated with atrazine,
which is a additive that has possibly caused
from aphrodism in frogs.
The frogs.
So we get to the gay frogs.
I want the gay frogs.
I was waiting for the gay frogs.
Yeah, he's a big gay frog, truth or dare.
Yeah, I mean, who isn't?
Whom's the mongers?
Four, that the CIA orchestrated the assassinations
of his father, RFK and his uncle.
I was wondering about that, okay.
Yes, he does not believe that Sir Hans Sirhan,
the man who is still currently in prison
for the death of his father, committed that murder.
Kennedy has advocated for Sir Hans release,
much to the chagrin of his siblings.
Five, that his cousin, Michael Skakel,
who served over a decade in prison
for the Greenwich Connecticut murder of Martha Moxley
is innocent of that murder
and that the real murderers were two local black young men.
Oh, lovely.
Five, that 5G Wi-Fi is being used to poison
and surveil people, causing, among other things,
a condition that RFK refers to as leaky brain.
It's the silent killer.
Seven, that the COVID-19 virus was A, engineered in a lab,
and B, that it was engineered to be less fatal
to Chinese and Oskanasi Jewish people.
Oh, wow, I love that we get to the antisemitism
at the very end there.
He's like, oh, and by the way.
It never fails, and A,
to that COVID vaccines are worse than the Holocaust.
Oh, okay.
Which he does believe happens,
so at least there's that.
He does seem to believe that it happened.
I 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.
Except people did, like a lot.
Yeah, wow, I mean, this is someone
who's almost indiscriminate.
Yeah.
In terms of his, he just grabs everything from the buffet.
Yeah, basically anything that has been floating around
as a physically health-related,
but like right-wing conspiracy theory on the internet,
on the right-wing internet over like the past 20 years,
he has been an advocate for at some point.
Right, right.
So as you can imagine,
this is a guy who dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic
in like totally normal.
Oh yeah.
And healthy ways.
Yeah, massively mature, I'm sure.
So like as we covered,
RK has been riding the anti-vax train
for a long time before 2020,
but the COVID-19 pandemic created this,
once again, a resurgence in anti-vax sentiment.
And this really revived his fame in a new way
and it brought him an influx of new attention,
new fans, new visibility.
So his podcast really took off
and so did his Twitter and on his Twitter account.
So did mine, so I can't hate the hustle, yeah.
A 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 Junior
for some of the quarantine, the anti-vax set.
So on his Twitter, he posts a lot of front-facing videos
and videos of himself,
like especially performing feats of strength.
So he'll like lift weights.
He goes skiing, stuff like that.
And he talks a lot in these videos
that he posts on Twitter in his very distinctive voice.
And so like maybe most importantly
in the COVID era, RFK Junior became a fixture
on sort of like casually reactionary,
like men's entertainment, right?
So a lot of the talk interview podcasts
in which men talk to other men about how to be men
and how being men is so great.
This is where he really found his niche.
So Russell Brandt, the allegedly sexually abusive
British comedian, he went on his show.
Lex Fridman, who is this like, I guess,
Russian born former military guy, he went on his show.
He goes on Bill Maher a bunch.
Of course.
Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck.
Wow.
Jordan Peterson.
And probably most importantly, Joe Rogan,
who's sort of like the king of this little shit mountain.
God, why didn't you just give all these people COVID?
That would have been so funny.
And he gains a ton of attention,
especially from young men, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So in this era, he's spreading a ton of COVID misinformation.
He's got lab leak, anti-vax.
He's a big proponent of ivermectin,
that horse drug that people were taking.
The dewormer.
The pandemic, like you name it.
And specifically.
Parts one, two and three.
Yeah.
And specifically, he starts targeting Anthony Fauci.
Right.
Who must have been on his radar before, right?
Like.
He was a public health official,
who was sort of the center of a lot of COVID conspiracy
theorizing in this time.
So he gets kicked off of Facebook and Instagram
during this era.
He has since been restored.
He is your uncle.
He's basically your uncle.
He is.
I mean, my uncle.
Everyone's uncle.
No, not your specifically, but like everyone's uncle.
My uncle could win in a fight.
You know, I don't think I would win in a fight.
But, 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.
He actually sues and says that the White House
has pressured Facebook to de-platform him.
We 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.
And, you know, RFK and his lawsuit
has posed this as a free speech issue.
Well, 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.
The reason they catch on though is because
people do seem to have these experiences of like,
oh, I'm not getting to say the thing I want to say.
And it was very noticeable as I was traveling
with my book in German, the 2022 one on cancel culture.
And a lot of people were like, well, what happened to me
and my Facebook group or in the WhatsApps, you know,
when I posted just this totally innocent stuff
about Italian doctors finding this and that
in the COVID vaccine and my kids came down on me
like a ton of breaks.
Like people had a lot of experiences of like
feeling like they couldn't say stuff, right?
And like, it's not shocking that that's how
he and this audience found each other, right?
Like, because it's both.
It's both him not getting the kind of attention
and imputation of expertise that he's used to
and it's people, very everyday people having experiences
that aren't really censorship but can feel like it, right?
Or it's like, shut up, uncle.
I'm like, get you, get you a damn shot
or you can't see a kid, right?
And look, COVID was a really terrifying and confusing
for a lot of people and it was also legitimately mismanaged.
I'm gonna read again just briefly from the RFK profile
by Rebecca Tracer where she's talking about
this period of his life.
Being 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.
Public health directives during COVID were crude
and sometimes wrong.
Messaging on masking changed repeatedly.
Masking outdoors now seems silly.
The school closures lasted longer than they should have
but the objections made by people like Kennedy
were not rooted in special advanced scientific knowledge.
Rather, they stem from the fury of normally powerful people
affronted by the argument that their individual impulses
put them on the wrong side of a moral question
of communal engagement and compassion.
It is a dynamic many managed to reframe
as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge
to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep.
And this is a type of environment
in which men born with immense wealth and power,
the kind who casually mentioned the governors have called
and offered them sentencing so they have turned down.
This is something RFK claimed in the interview with her.
Oh, wow.
The governor in question says it's not true.
Can recast themselves as martyred heroes.
So in 2021, he publishes a book, the real Anthony Fauci,
Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy
and Public Health, which in turn has launched him
into his 2024 presidential run.
He is now polling in some national polls as high as 20%.
Is that true?
Yeah, he seems to have gone down more recently,
but 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 big voting block in Michigan.
So he's on the ballot and he might actually
be like a Jill Stein style spoiler.
It might be worse mentioning his running mate.
Oh, he has a running mate.
Who is a Silicon Valley person.
Well, I'm not shocked because the Tracer description, which
is as always spot on, describes 95% of Silicon
Valley billionaires.
Like I said, they are never more outraged
than what they take to be their outsized claim on our attention
and deference is threatened in the least.
They do not handle this very well.
And 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.
But then they all start Twitter accounts
and post incredibly stupid shit.
And then people point out that it's stupid shit.
And then the cataculture is real.
It's so fascinating.
This doubleness of on the one hand,
no, you do have an outsized platform.
You could probably use it for anything.
But any kind of back talk, any kind of clap back
will send you into a fucking tailspin.
And I'm not shocked that he found some sympathicos
among the well-heeled of Paul Altmanlow Park.
Yeah.
She is his vice presidential running mate.
She's also the primary funder of his campaign now.
Shocker.
Her name is Nicole Shanahan.
Do you know this person at all?
Yeah.
Yeah, I looked her up when this was announced.
But I've forgotten everything I learned about her then.
She, Nicole Shanahan is a tech lawyer.
She legitimately did grow up very poor.
Like her mother was an immigrant, single mother,
immigrant on welfare.
I was going to say, when Shanahan Kennedy,
this is the first all Irish ticket.
Her mother was an immigrant from China.
And her father was a white American who, I think,
took off pretty early.
But she came really from nothing
and worked her way up to being a lawyer in Silicon Valley.
And she made quite a bit of money by getting married.
She married a gentleman named Sergey Brin, who
is the co-founder of Google.
Oh, yeah.
They 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
the vaccines.
Nicole is a pro natalist, but also a natural childbirth
insidious.
So she actually opposes IVF and medication, pain medication
during childbirth and has a big sort of fund devoted
to research and lobbying.
To deny women care.
Right.
And she recently got divorced from Sergey Brin,
according to The Wall Street Journal,
because she did on him with Elon Musk.
I mean, the word shit sandwich was thrown around a lot,
but Jesus fucking Christ.
So she's got her divorce money.
She's got her lawyer money, and then she's got divorcing
one of the richest men in the world's money.
And she's decided to spend it on RFK.
So now we've got the specter of Silicon Valley funding
fueling all this conspiracy theorizing.
The way their algorithms fuel it into our faces on YouTube
and Twitter, et cetera.
Now also, they're funding it onto our ballots.
Wow.
I mean, years ago for a piece, I went to the,
do you know where the Rosewood is in Palo Alto on San
Hill Road?
I think I do, yeah.
Yeah.
That's famous for its cougar night,
where sort of like the wives of Silicon Valley grandees
kind of go on the hunt for people who have affairs with,
at least the Scuttle.
But it sucks when that invades your national politics.
That was a weird fucking scene.
I went a couple of times for this piece,
and it was a weird fucking scene.
And little did I know that it might cost Joe Biden,
Michigan in 2024.
Yeah.
These people really should be insulated
from the dangers of their own minds, right?
Living that compound, man.
But they have so much money that they
have to make it our problem.
And I sort of want to end maybe on this note about Kennedy's
Super Bowl ad.
It was Shanahan's idea.
It was her funding.
But RFK Jr. put out this ad at the 2024 Super Bowl
that was frame for frame a rerun of a JFK campaign ad.
The one?
Yeah.
Could you know the tune, the jingle, the animation?
For Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy,
Kennedy for you, something like that.
Yeah.
You have a beautiful voice, Adrian.
Thank you.
No, but I fucked it up.
It's like, yeah, I did put too many Kennedy's.
But then people just thought, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy.
It's a very old-timey.
It's very subtle.
It's very subtle in what it's doing.
I heard this 30 years ago, I think.
Like, and it's still in my brain.
So fair play.
Don Draper, whoever came up with this monstrosity in 1960.
But he's so transparently trading off of the nostalgia
for this imagined noble past, which the Kennedys were also
doing.
They called their own reign literally Camila, right?
Right.
Righteous, pure, noble, aristocratic.
And then what you actually have is this kind
of blubbering idiot.
We 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.
How did this come up?
Well, you see, Your Honor, when I parked my car
in the on parking lot, can I ask you a question?
Do you have brain worms?
Fuck it.
Good.
I mean, we're cooked.
We got to settle.
Yeah.
When he was divorcing his second wife,
he was trying to argue that he didn't have a lot of earning
power, in part because a worm had eaten part of his brain.
It's kind of unclear how the worm got there.
It does seem to actually be a real worm.
Yeah, this is a thing.
Like, I mean, there are amoebas and kinds of things
that you can pick up that do burrow in your brain.
It's not.
In some ways, no joking matter.
And someone goes through a lot of tropical locales
to do exciting things.
I could imagine he's got a higher than average chance
of picking one of these bad boys up.
Yeah, because he travels a lot.
They've got doctors speculating in the New York Times,
like, OK, he may have eaten some contaminated pork.
That's one way it can happen.
But he does literally have a worm, a now dead worm.
It's still there.
I thought you can get rid of these things.
No, I mean, what happens is they die in your brain.
And then the cells form sort of like a calcified little cocoon
around it.
And that can cause inflammation.
Jesus.
So he's deeply unwell, right?
There's a guy who has been in flight
from his traumatic past and from the horror of his world,
his whole life, and has now become so deeply divorced
from reality and really hurt by this flight,
like his attempts to insulate himself from psychic pain
have clearly just made him really debilitated, right?
And in a way, he's like Hamlet, but he's stupid Hamlet.
He's also like the stupidest person alive.
So that is my spiel on RFK Junior.
Thank you for coming along on this journey with me, Adrienne.
I feel like I've really taken you on a ride.
Yeah, I feel like I ate some bad pork.
And now I've got a mummified brainworm myself.
Well, thank you for walking me through this.
I had not seen the Super Bowl ad because I didn't watch
the Super Bowl, forgot.
And it's interesting, right?
Like the way that like the past isn't dead,
it's not even past.
Like this, we're still kind of shadow boxing
with these demons from over 70 years ago, right?
Like it's really quite remarkable.
But on the other hand, I do think it's a weird and idiosyncratic
story, but like the way that the rich have been
able to inoculate themselves against, you know,
pun very much intended against any kind of accountability,
right?
Like it's just so remarkable here, right?
Like, and there's not, it's not an accent that this is a Kennedy
in the Silicon Valley billionaire sharing top billing
of our story in some way, even though I guess she entered
the story pretty late.
But like it's just this thing where like, you know,
what would it take for these people to ever face accountability?
It's like it's not even possible to imagine, right?
Like what it would take for one of our elites to sort of have
to explain what they fucking meant or like whether or not
it was good that they probably got people killed by giving
garbage health advice or whatever, right?
Like apparently, you know, not to get on my soapbox here,
but like as I read in your wonderful article from this
morning, apparently Supreme Court justices that fly upside
down American flags outside of their houses are not actually
responsible for flying upside down American flags outside of
their houses. Like we've created a zone of impunity around
certain elites around certain groups and Silicon Valley,
the Kennedys, and you know, the upper echelons of the
Republican Party are sort of probably the most noticeable of
these, where it's just like, it's not even conceivable what
failure would look like, what accountability would look like,
what becoming impossible would look like, right?
I mean, like, you know, the man's probably hobnobbing with
Larry David as we speak, which sounds lovely, right?
Like, poor Alan Dershowitz got a year full just because he
like supported Donald Trump, right?
It was like a lot of the country did.
And like, Larry David will still hang out with this dude.
Like it's just, I don't know, I give up.
In short, I give up.
You made the mistake of not being born to Robert F. Kennedy.
That was your first mistake.
And now you don't get to hang out with Larry David.
Yeah, that's my tragedy.
All right, well, we're all going to have to go grieve.
Our inability to be consequence-free candidates.
But I hope you guys will join us next time on your favorite
podcast, In Bed Was Alright.
See you then.
In Bed With A Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.
Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.
Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.
Our producer is Katie Lau.