Episode 23: RFK Jr.

So 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.

This is going to 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.

Before we get to the gay frogs, I want the gay logs.

I was waiting for the gay frogs.

Yeah, he's a big gay frog truther.

Yeah.

I mean, who isn't?

Who's the mammas?

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Loira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

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.

Or you have?

I have, actually, yeah.

In the Hyanas Portal, I think so, yeah.

There's not much to see on Cape Cod.

And we're like, oh, fuck it.

I'm the Kennedy compound.

There's not much to see as far as I recall.

So today we're going to be talking about the Kennedys black sheep,

their prodigal son, their...

you know, maybe revealing embarrassment.

Who is not the one who drove a lady off 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 am i'm so excited and i should say obviously I will try to assume the role of the inductee and I will hope to be guided through the life life of rfk jr by you i i should admit that i'm i'm not fully

i 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 uh son of the later late better rfk kind of a celebrity seems to have gone the anti-vax route sort of alongside a couple of more sort of comprehensible consumer advocacy kind of movements that went down a rabbit hole.

Is married to Larry David's wife from Kirby 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 Dershwitz.

Well, Adrian, 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 in 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, you know, 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.

From a tweet to the great American novel back to a tweet.

Christ, what an asshole.

So like, you know, 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 like personal tragedy and these like grand historic forces combine in one person's life to like really foreclose the possibility of him ever achieving a like solid grip on reality.

You know, like this guy just had no shot at being sane.

It'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.

It transforms his own sort 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, Adrian?

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.

Right.

And that's really what happened here.

So like, I'm going to start with this quote from this really excellent Rebecca Traister.

profile of RFK from an issue, this cover story in an issue of New York Magazine last year.

And 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 press with his every word.

That he is, tells us much about this country's broken systems as any of his diatribes do.

Ah, interesting.

So as we move forward, like 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-vaxx diatribes and he's lying he like it does i believe consciously deliberately lie in some of these okay i was gonna ask so you this is pretty documented that he knows that this is bad

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 right to me like even if he believes in the forest, he's lying about specific trees.

So, you know, there's one way to see him like 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, you know, he's quite stupid.

He's just, he's not a smart guy.

So we're going to have to like make space for all of these like three different ways of looking at RFK as, you know, a villain, a victim, and a buffoon, because, you know, 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.

You know, he's got this secret knowledge that he's trying to save the world by spreading.

Well, I mean, that's an interesting thing, right?

Like, 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 like bourgeois squabbling.

Yeah.

While at the same time, like, 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.

Okay.

Our ring episode is about to be the shorter episode.

I swear I'm going to go through this fast.

Yes.

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.

Right.

So Tracer in her article refers to his grandfather whose dictum was, there will be no crying in this house.

Joe Kennedy, yeah.

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 like kind of appetite for public service, right?

Like very public-looking guy.

His parents were politicians, but also like he really understood himself as an outsider, right?

And this is going to be like a recurring theme with RFK Jr.

specifically, but also with the Kennedys in general.

And 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.

Right.

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

because they didn't like that there was an Irishman who graduated from Harvard.

It's shit like that.

They had a chip on their shoulder.

Well, and we might say they're 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.

Right.

They have the Kennedy Camp compound at Hyannis Port.

Is it just the four brothers or is there more?

There's four that I know of.

It was a big family.

Joe dies in World War II.

And World War II.

John, also known as Jack, also a world hero.

Robert and Teddy.

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, in like santa 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 uh skirt chaser really kind of almost compulsively misogynistic and then 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 hyannisport and the sort of famous bastard story about Joe Kennedy, R.F.

Kid Jr.'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 levotomized.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So Rosemary Kennedy had enforced intellectual disability because her father didn't like her and so took away 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.

Yeah.

So Joe Kennedy Jr.

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 AG 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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 1968, has what is like generally regarded as a very like morally righteous and kind of electrifying campaign until he is is assassinated also in Los Angeles.

By Sirhan Sirhan in L.A.

It's in the kitchen of a hotel.

Yes, 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 hero 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 liked 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 sort of has to take on the mantle and the role that his father would have fulfilled.

And in like really brief terms, like 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 R.F.

K.

Jr.'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 have seen, 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.

It was not, he's not a fail son, but the drug-addicted fail 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.

You know, 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, 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 you know, some kind of attention other than Harvard Yard might have helped.

Yeah, you know, 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?

Yeah.

so he goes to law school i believe at the university of virginia pretty good law school yeah and then as soon as he graduates he is appointed to be an ada usa in new york city wow very cushy job assist 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 months later, he has to quit because he failed the bar.

Oh, shit.

He can't actually practice law.

He later eventually passes the bar and does practice law.

But, you know, 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 this 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 Jr.

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 traumatized 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 is through 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 descent into conspiracism.

Another thing to think about in terms of RFK's experience as an addict, and he talks a lot about being in 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 like sort of become a media figure in his own right.

He's done really well in the manosphere and in these sort of like 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 like messianic style secret knowledge, but this kind of almost preacherly compassionate 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.

Yeah.

He's compelling, but he never has a good time.

Right.

He's never funny.

He's never self-ironic.

There's a drivenness and a kind of almost hunted quality to or haunted quality to him.

And that's something that clearly was behind Peterson's connection with the manosphere and with especially young men and the podcast format, we might add, as well.

And they both also have like very broken, gravelly voices for which, I know he has a medical reason for that.

So I don't want to, to, 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, I don't want to make light of that.

The point is he's compelling even though there's a certain labor in speaking, right?

It's not the kind of podcasting that I aspire to, where frankly, it all feels a little, you know, feels off the cuff, feels kind of excited and inviting people to kind of go along.

His mode, like Peterson's, feels like when 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.

Right.

And again, I don't mean to mock that.

It's to say there's a passion there in the sense of a, not, not, not just passion as an excitement, but there, you know, 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 you know, when he talks, you listen to him on these podcasts.

He did a three-hour Joe Rogan interview that I listened to.

I did listen to it at like 2x speed, but I'm so sorry.

And then he did Jordan Peterson.

He did a bunch of these, like Manosphere podcasts.

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 aspect, right?

And that's like kind of the magic that he has.

But we're off of his biographical track.

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 an environmental group and discovers this like kind of passion for environmentalism, 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.

Whoa.

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 like competition of like, who's brave enough to swim in the Hudson River and like, 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, and I mean, that's the other, there's another little bit of foreshadowing here, right?

That like, I do feel that if there's any place in U.S.

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.

You know, it's interesting because he comes from a family about which so many conspiracy theories have been spun.

Right.

And a family that was in, you know, full historical fairness to the Kennedys orchestrating some conspiracies.

Like what do you call what JFK was doing in Cuba, if not a conspiracy?

Yeah.

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, like 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 his conspiracism.

He is a mentally unwill 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 Taytay 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

and has now come back.

So, you know, 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, you know, 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 2000s, 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 recruited to like sort of the anti-vax world, there has been a big splash of anti-vaccine publicity because of a study conducted in the UK in 1998 by a guy named Andrew Rakefield.

Adrian, do you know a book about this?

Oh, yeah.

So it's been like retracted more often than any study in the history of ever.

It does not show what 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.

Yeah.

And I mean,

I was around for a lot of these discussions.

And I mean, obviously, I don't keep closed 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 kind of seemed to reconfirm anti-vax sentiment, right?

That people were like, oh, there is a hidden knowledge here that they don't want us to have.

It's like, no, it was just like an unbelievably shoddy study that didn't show what it purported to show.

But 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?

Like the Marin moms, if you will.

Yeah.

And, 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 this secret information.

Right.

It's like, you know, it's a, 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.

Yeah.

And I mean, like the idea that like

they're poisoning our children, right?

Like we, 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.

But we'll get to the gay frogs.

Don't worry about it.

Oh, 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.

Yeah.

And the specter of autism in particular,

in its sort of like eugenic antagonism towards the autistic, it's often about a concern of around boys and around boys sort of failing to to mature into this like virile, outgoing, assertive, masculine creature, right?

There's gender anxiety in even the like eugenic preoccupation with autism as a disease.

Yeah, this is something my former colleague Eve Scheffer wrote: a whole book about

Asperger's children, I think it's called.

Yeah, oh, cool.

Yeah, uh, for our listeners who are waiting on bated breath, vaccines don't cause autism, they don't cause any of the 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 built as an investigative piece.

It's 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 like.

Yes.

But it was also published in the print edition of Rolling Stone.

Oh, wow.

RFK Jr.

is very close friends with Jan 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.

Yeah, and with interesting gender politics.

Interesting gender politics.

So Salon and Rolling Stone published what they bill 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.

Right.

So the like 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.

Okay.

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, you know, 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, right?

Like there was that famous claim a few years ago, like La Croix contains like rat poison.

It's like it appears to contain a tiny bit of a compound that also occurs in rat poison.

Like, I feel like the images of someone dumping.

industrial great quantities of the substance into your vaccine like that's different from like yeah there's like there might even be a a trace amount of something in there.

I mean, doesn't like every tuna I 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, you know, 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.

Right.

It's making them sick.

The CDC is covering it up.

Right.

What actually happened is that the CDC had a meeting where they were anticipating, 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, in 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.

This 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.

So you could also like have a control group, right?

Yep.

And also it's already removed, right?

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 this thing where basically FOIA can sort of operate the exact opposite way, which is intended, where like 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 like, who are existing and operating in reality and are like, oh, shit, like, is this really worth it?

We don't think it's dangerous, but let's not stoke this.

And then that very operation sort of is a sign that something's secret hidden from you.

Right.

And, you know, that anything kind of secretive or happening, quote unquote, behind closed doors is necessarily nefarious, right?

Like this wasn't even really concealed.

Like 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 like, 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 omits vast chunks of context.

It oits big chunks of quotes to try and make this seem much more nefarious than it is.

So you mentioned John Wenner, but like, was this the Joan Walsh period of Salon?

Like, who, who, who green leads this fucking thing?

Yeah.

So this is the other thing is that this article gets debunked quite quickly.

It has a lot of like serious factual errors.

Salon and Rolling Stone eventually retract it a few years later in 2011.

But in the meantime, it does go about as viral as anything can go in 2005.

Sure.

Right.

Which raises the question, as you you said, of who published, who edited this thing?

And Joan Walsh was indeed the editor of Salon at 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.

Oh, cool.

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.

Yeah.

Right.

Because he has known people like John Winter his whole life, because people working in the media have looked up to his dad their whole lives and have had the 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 like 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 on 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 that 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.

Um,

okay.

So just backing up for a second, him and Cheryl Hines getting together.

Is it Larry David joined?

Yes, Larry David introduced RFK 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 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.

It's 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 yeah i was gonna say like there the satiriasis runs strong among the men in that family right like yeah his grandfather joe kennedy was famous as a philanderer so were his two uncles jfk and ted kennedy this actually doesn't seem to have been something that his father, RFK, was as into.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, he had 11 children.

I mean, I feel like you're just tapped out.

RFK was the choir boy, but RFK Jr.

seems to have taken on this like anxious sexual acquisitiveness.

He's like, you know, 37.

JFK Jr.

was kind of a, was kind of a playboy too, right?

Like famously.

I don't know as much about JFK Jr.

I just know the outfits.

I see a lot of picture of the beautiful like J.

Crew.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that was his, that was sort of his vibe, I thought.

Maybe who, I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to suggest anything, but you 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 Wills' book, The Kennedy Imprisonment, which I think over really.

Gary Wills wrote it, but the Gary Wills wrote it.

Gary Wills wrote a really good book about the Kennedys.

It deals a lot with the psychology of the Kennedy masculinity.

And his theory is like, you know, these actors, these guys,

unlike the sort of stereotype of mid-century Irish Americans, these were were not like big physically intimidating, fighting Irish guys.

The Kennedy men are kind of scrawny.

Yeah, they're hot soy boys.

Yeah, they like, they can't win a fight, right?

And Joe Kennedy compensates for except the World War, I guess.

The Kennedys compensate, 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?

Femininity is something that like you get relegated to.

Masculinity is something you have to maintain.

And the way that Kennedy men maintain their masculinity is by having sex with as 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, I mean, famously huge guy, kind of had his dick out half the time, right?

Like as a, as a totally different model of masculinity, and that like the Kennedy boys just really chafed against that, and he against them.

That 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, is not acquisitive.

He's just like, he's just like out there, right?

Like, like, right, like would sort of have people watch him urinate and stuff like that.

Weird, weird shit.

We should do a LBJ episode because he's a, he's a weird guy.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But RFK Jr.

has sort of inherited

this like anxious, gotta fuck a lot, gotta prove I'm a man.

And then keep a diary about it.

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 gonna get dark and this is a little bit of a content warning but his second wife in the process of their divorce married 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 curvier enthusiasm and the actor married and divorced from and on 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.

It's a book called Samarisol, Let the Science Speak, that blames vaccines for speech and facial ticks.

eliminates autism from this book because he says it's too controversial.

He says, you know, these vaccines with the merisol 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.

Yeah.

It's not true.

And also, he published this book in 2014.

And themerisol 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 prop to hoc the book, right?

Like, what's the, 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.

There are more kids diagnosed with ADHD than there 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 rising.

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.

Right.

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 it's 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 right 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 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 possibly caused hermaphrodism in frogs.

Before we get to the gay frogs, I want the game live.

I was waiting for the gay frogs.

Yeah, he's a big gay frog truther.

Yeah.

I mean, who isn't?

Who'mstamung us?

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 Sirhan Sirhan, the man who is still currently in prison for the death of his father, committed that murder.

Kennedy has advocated for Sirhan's release, much to the chagrin of his siblings five that his cousin michael scakels yes 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 ashkenazi jewish people oh wow i love that we get to the anti-semitism at the very end there and he's like oh and by the way it never fails uh and eight that coveted vaccines are worse than the holocaust oh okay which he does believe happened so at least he does seem to believe that it happened yeah 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 like, so this is someone who's almost indiscriminate.

Yeah.

In terms of his, his, he just grabs everything from the buffet.

Yeah.

Basically anything that has been floating around as a specifically 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.

Right, right.

So as you can imagine, this is a guy who dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic in like totally normal

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.

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 Jr.

for some of the quarantined 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, you know, very distinctive voice.

And so like maybe most importantly, in the COVID era, RFK Jr.

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 Brand, the allegedly sexually abusive British comedian, he went on his show.

Lex Friedman, 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 like little shit mountain.

God, why didn't he 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 mine, not yours specifically, but like everyone's uncle.

My uncle could win in a fight.

You know, I don't think RK could 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 deplatform him.

And we know that actually the White House did sort of encourage tech platforms during this era to like maybe not amplify vaccine disinformation quite as much as they were doing.

And, you know, RFK in his lawsuit has posed this as a free speech issue.

Well, I mean, this is, this is something I, 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 sort of 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 is very, it was very noticeable as I was traveling with my book in German, the 2022 one on cancer culture.

And a lot of people were like, well, what happened to me in my Facebook group or in the 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 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, 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?

Where it's like, shut up, uncle.

I'm like, yeah, get you, get your damn shot, or you can't see your kid, right?

And look, COVID was A, really terrifying and confusing for a lot of people.

And it was also legitimately mismanaged.

I'm going to read again.

Right.

Yeah.

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 stemmed 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 manage to reframe as their willingness to stand in patriotic challenge to weak-minded, compliant, vaccinated sheep.

And it's 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 senate seats that 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.

Yeah.

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 goals 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 significance, 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.

So, you know, he's on the ballot and he might actually be like a Jill Stein style spoiler.

It might be worth mentioning his running mate.

Oh, he has a running mate.

Who is a Silicon Valley person?

Well, 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?

Like this idea that they are never more outraged than when when what they take to be their outsized claim on our attention and deference is threatened in the least like they're just like they they do not handle this very well and 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 plebes ever, but then they all start Twitter accounts and post incredibly stupid shit.

And then like people point out that like it's stupid shit.

And then they're like, cancer culture is real.

Right.

Like it's, it's so fascinating.

Like this doubleness of on the one hand, like, like, no, you do have an outsized platform.

You could probably use it for anything.

But like any kind of back talk, any kind of clapback will send you into a fucking tailspin.

Right.

And that, like, I'm not shocked that he like found some sympaticos among the well-heeled of Palo Alto and Menlo 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.

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,

Shanahan Kennedy.

This is the first all-Irish kick.

Her mother was an immigrant from China, and her father was a like 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 Sergei Brin, who is the co-founder of Google.

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 them vaccines.

Nicole is a pro-natalist, but also a natural childbirth enthusiast.

So she actually opposes IVF and medication, pain medication during childbirth and has a big sort of fund devoted to like research and libying.

To deny women care.

Right.

And she recently got divorced from Sergey Bryn, according to the Wall Street Journal, because she cheated on him with Elon Musk.

I mean, the word shit sandwich gets thrown around a lot, but Jesus fucking Christ.

So, you know, she's got, 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 money.

And she's decided to spend it.

on RFK.

So now, you know, 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, you know, years ago for a piece, I went to the, do you know where the Rosewood is in Palo Alto on Sand 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, you know, people to have affairs with, at least the, the scuttlebutt.

Like, it sucks when that invades your your national politics.

That was a weird fucking scene.

I went a couple of times for this piece and like, it was a weird fucking scene.

And little did I know that like it might cost Joe Biden Michigan in 2024.

Yep.

These people really should be insulated.

from the dangers of their own minds, right?

Live in that compound, man.

But they have so much money that they have to make it our problem.

And I sort of want to like end maybe on this note about Kennedy's Super Bowl ad.

It was Shanahan's idea.

It was her funding, you know, but RFK Jr.

put out this ad at the 2024 Super Bowl that was frame for frame,

a rerun of a JFK campaign ad.

Ah, 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.

No, but I fucked it up.

It's like, yeah, I did put one, it's too many Kennedys.

But then people just talk, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy.

It's a very, it's very old-timey.

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 like, fair play, you know, Don Draper or whoever came up with this monstrosity in 1960s.

But, you know, he's just, he's so transparently trading off of the nostalgia

for this like.

imagined noble past, you know, which the Kennedys were also doing.

I mean, they called their own reign, like literally Camela, right?

Right.

Righteous, pure,

you know, 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 park my car in yon

parking lot, can I ask you a question?

Do you have brain worms?

Fuck it.

We gotta settle.

Yeah, um, 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 the thing.

Like, I mean, there are amoebas and kinds of things that you can pick up at that, that do burrow in your brain.

It's not, it's in some ways, no joking matter.

And someone goes to 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 like doctors speculating in the New York Times, like, okay, 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.

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 like cocoon around it, and that can cause inflammation.

Jesus.

So, you know, he's like, he's deeply unwell, right?

This is 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, you know, like his attempts to insulate himself from psychic pain have clearly just made him.

really debilitated right um 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 Jr.

Thank you for coming along on this journey with me, Adrian.

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 brain worm 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, you know, 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 accident that this is a Kennedy and a 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, like, got an earful just because he like supported Donald Trump, right?

Which like a lot of the country did.

And like, 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 Kennedys.

But I hope you guys will join us next time on your favorite podcast, Invent with the Right.

See you then.

In Bed with the Right, would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Her producer is Katie Lau.