Bonus Sample: Bobby Kennedy Scares You Shitless And Makes You Swoon
Bobby provokes a “disorganized attachment” response in would-be followers.This is the emotional vortex that begins to churn when a charismatic leader draws followers into a vision of the world as irrevocably broken, poisoned, dangerous, full of lies and betrayal. But he doesn’t just scare them. Somehow, he also promises an island of salvation in their sea of doom. This is Bobby’s pattern.
It’s clear that his misinformation on everything from supposed vaccine danger to the supposed totalitarianism of COVID mitigations is not a description of the world so much as a ghoulish parody of it. As the creator of that vision, in which solutions seem so out of reach, he stands alone as the wizard who can repair it.
Show Notes
Joe Rogan's worst misinformation yet, with RFK Jr.—Dr. Dan Wilson
bad_stats Rogan debunk Twitter thread
How Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Distorted Vaccine Science - Scientific American (coverage of the 2005 article)
RFK Jr.'s reign of error: Correcting the record about yet another false claim he just made | CNN Politics—Tapper
Just Another RFK Jr. Lie. I Know, Because It’s About Me. | The Nation—Joan Walsh
My Conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - by Paul Offit
Robert Kennedy Jr. Full, Controversial Speech at "Defeat the Mandates"
Stein, A. 2017. Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems. Routledge. 2017.
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Okay, so I think it's safe to say that much of our mediasphere has a case of Bobby Kennedy overload.
I'm certainly suffering from it.
And I don't think it's surprising for the dashing scion of an American dynasty disrupting the Democratic Party through a podcast offensive.
So far, out in the wild, there's been a fair bit of coverage on a number of things, such as how he navigates his anti-vax history, either by downplaying it or by writing it hard.
There's a discipline track he follows in which he says he'll only bring it up if he's asked, but if that happens, his discipline goes out the window entirely, as it did with Joe Rogan, who gave him almost 40 minutes off the top of his three-hour appearance to recite his entire anti-vax hero story, going right back to the links he began to imagine between mercury in rivers and thimerosal in vaccines.
The coverage is also centered on his case against American interventionism, his plan to withdraw military presence overseas and compete with China as an economic power rather than a policing bully.
And also there's coverage about how he describes federal agency capture and the revolving doors between industries and regulatory bodies.
But when asked how he would face down corruption, he asserts over and over again that he's a staunch free market capitalist.
That somehow, that same corporate competition that poisoned the heartland rivers and corrupted all of the medications can somehow be shepherded to rebuild a more wholesome America.
So, those are the basics of the mainstream coverage so far.
But there's so much to cover with Bobby, and it's hard to keep up.
He's podcasting his ass off.
And just setting aside the content, that fact alone is a good place to start with some Marshall McLuhan-inspired observations about his media and messaging.
In speaking to both Jordan Peterson and Barry Weiss, Bobby suggests that just as his uncle Jack in 1960 realized that he could thrash Richard Nixon in a televised debate, famously Jack appeared relaxed and was willing to wear makeup, Bobby understands that podcasting is the hot medium of the moment.
And in relation to Jack, ironically, podcasting, in his view, makes broadcast television irrelevant, because he's fond of pointing out, for example, that large podcast venues can rack up ten times the audience of even Fox News.
This self-conscious media mastery is part of the background to him challenging Dr. Peter Hotez to a debate on Rogan's show.
He knows he will simply appear stronger, more virile, and impassioned.
He will play better off of Rogan than Hotez will.
They're not going to simply tag-team the bow-tied, tilly-hat wearing scientist with factoids.
They'll tag-team him aesthetically, and with a shared temperament that will increase Bobby's charismatic profile.
Because for him, muscular Catholicism is not just a philosophy, it's an embodied performance.
And as if to underline the point, we're now getting video clips of his shirtless workouts at Gold's gym in Venice, and also claims that he will lead a medication-free health revival by example.
The second point on this McLuhan angle is that the long-form podcast is tailor-made for the kind of gish gallop and entranced hypnotic speechifying that Bobby does so well.
Three hours on Rogan.
Two hours on Aubrey Marcus.
Ninety minutes each on Peterson and Barry Weiss.
And by the time this is published, many more hours will have racked up.
Even when he gets significant pushback on a legitimate news podcast like The Wall Street Journal's Free Expression with Jerry Baker, he gets 38 minutes.
Now, he's not the only one, of course.
Vivek Ramaswamy is podcasting wherever he can, and Marianne Williamson has never turned down a microphone.
But Bobby is definitely leading the pod race, racking up a content output that is larger by orders of magnitude when compared with Trump, Pence, or DeSantis, and certainly Joe Biden.
And there's been responses so far from those who understand the flaws in his arguments.
Almost as fast as Bobby can publish, the debunking flows into the breach.
So here's just a few examples.
At the end of the podcast, Dr. Dan Wilson of Debunk the Funk calmly and methodically picked apart Bobby's spurious claims about vaccine testing and safety, the various types of mercury, the causes of autism, the effectiveness of ivermectin and vitamin D, and whether cell phones emit the type of radiation that degrades cells and causes cancer.
They don't.
There are other debunking pieces as well.
There's a really good one from Bad Stats, the Twitter account, and I'll put that in the notes too.
But then there's also two big pieces about Bobby's version of events surrounding his 2005 article in Rolling Stone and Salon called Deadly Immunity, which helped popularize the false connection between vaccines and autism.
In a piece for The Nation called Just Another RFK Jr.
Lie, I Know Because It's About Me, editor Joan Walsh writes, I edited Kennedy's error-ridden piece on a vaccine-autism link, which Salon later retracted.
We caved to the truth, not Big Pharma.
And in the piece, Walsh recounts how, after issuing the five major corrections to the article, they just had to pull it.
And she describes it as a low point in her career.
Then, in a CNN article called RFK Jr.' 's Reign of Error, correcting the record about yet another false claim he just made, Jake Tapper fact-checked Bobby's claim that they'd worked together for months on a TV documentary tied to the Rolling Stones salon article.
Bobby claimed that Tapper had admitted that corporate had killed the TV spot.
But according to Tapper and all of the receipts he brought, none of that was true.
They did one remote interview for a two-minute segment, and that wasn't pulled at all.
But it ran in June of that year with Tapper citing experts who contradicted Bobby's findings.
And then finally, Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, responded to what he characterized as outright lies that Bobby told Joe Rogan regarding a phone call they had in 2003 about thimerosal.
There's a reported pattern of falsehoods here, and not just about science, but more troublingly about personal interactions.
And that's my focus, because scientific misinformation and relationship toxicity are related in this case, but they're also different, and I think the latter deserves more attention.
And I will say that all of the pushback is crucial, because a presidential candidate can't be allowed to lie, and consensus reality is increasingly fragile, and it has to be expressed to remain accessible.
One of our supporters, Dr. Jonathan Steyer, who's a clinical psychologist in Calgary, posted about our book on Instagram, and he showed the cover next to, like, a favorite coffee mug that said, And I love that mug.
And it's not like science exists or operates outside of this realm of discourse, personalities, aesthetics, and relationships.
We can't point to it as though it expresses its own authority outside of the frameworks of social power and trust.
And that's why Steya and so many others have to keep walking the walk.
And it's also why they will be called pharmashills or gaslighters as they attempt to engage the facts on the ground.
And this is part of why I don't think it's enough to debunk Bobby's melted grasp on reality.
We have to understand what he's doing in relational terms that makes his views so compelling.
Career contrarian Barry Weiss set out to answer a version of these questions in her 90-minute interview with Bobby in his L.A.
home.
In her preamble, she explicitly said that she wasn't going to interrogate his views on vaccines and autism, for example, because her focus was going to be on why he was connecting with rising percentages of Democratic primary voters.
Of course, in the process, she gave him carte blanche to continue to lie about the facts.
But she was able to elicit a transparent statement from him about how he understands his own appeal.
She asked him about the dangers of populism, how populism seeks a scapegoat, how it reduces political tensions to very simplistic terms.
And he agreed with her and suggested that his family had unlocked that problem, that his uncle and especially his father had formed populist coalitions across class and racial chasms, but that in 1972, the segregationist George Wallace had somehow seized the votes left up for grabs in the wake of his father's assassination.
So there are echoes here of disillusioned Bernie voters casting their lot in with Trump.
Weiss asked him to interpret that strange turn, and his answer leads us into the heart of his technique.
So what do you take from that?
Well, I took from that that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side, and that the easiest thing for a populist leader to do is to appeal to our darker angels, our anger, our hatred, our fear, our bigotry, our xenophobia, anti-immigration, misogyny, etc.
So, there's strong progressive coding in there, relating anger, hatred, and fear to xenophobia and misogyny, but he's very familiar with directing anger, hatred, and fear in other ways, as we'll see.
He went on to explain that Wallace and similar figures used the alchemy of populism to exploit disillusionment and cynicism, but that his family's legacy was to use it to invoke idealism.
