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July 27, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:19:08
164: The Two Faces of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.

We’ve been tracking Bobby’s misinformation, contradictions, and cursed networks for three years. And now he’s having his moment, and it’s anyone’s guess how far he’ll run. But why is he so appealing on the presidential stage? Why is he polling at 20%, with his favorability in double digits against Biden?  It’s not just that his endless rhetoric appeals to libertarians on the right and paranoiacs on the left. It’s that he casts a charismatic spell that echoes, exacerbates, and amplifies some of the deepest conflicts in the American psyche—between tradition and rebellion, nostalgia and grievance, idealism and paranoia. Bobby, you see, is never quite who he seems to be. In one moment he’s the prodigal prince of Camelot, seen through a sepia lens. In the next he’s a tortured and braying conspiracy theorist, lit by the blue light of countless screens. Show Notes RFK Jr. says COVID may have been 'ethnically targeted' to spare Jews  A Kennedy and His Mentor Part Ways Over River Group - The New York Times  Robert F Kennedy Jr says he has ‘conversations with dead people’ | Democrats | The Guardian  Transcript for Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388 Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr’s candidacy at our peril | Naomi Klein | The Guardian  Most People Believe In JFK Conspiracy Theories | FiveThirtyEight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
Follow us on all of our social media channels with a lot of our content going up at ConspiratualityPod and Instagram.
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Podcasts if that is your platform of choice.
Thanks for watching.
on June 9th in his pinned campaign promo statement on Instagram.
Every nation has a darker side and the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our hatred and our anger and our bigotry and greed and xenophobia and all of the alchemies of demagoguery.
And here's Bobby six months ago at a COVID contrarian rally in Washington, D.C.
Every capitulation This is a signal to the oppressors to impose new forms of torment or torture or compliance or obedience.
Every time you comply, you get weaker.
The hill that you're going to die on is the hill that you're on right now.
And they're coming for our children.
Conspiratuality 164, the two faces of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.
So Julian and Derek, we're coming in hot from the top here by revisiting the hill that Bobby
either died on or is rector resurrecting from last week when he instantly became the subject of
many dinner table and water cooler conversations all over the country.
Because video from a press dinner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan appeared to show him saying some very weird and inflammatory things about bioweapons, COVID, and race.
Clarifying what he said and how it landed and for whom, plus how he rationalized it, is like a Rosetta Stone for Bobby's conspiratorial affect, the impact it has, and just how unequipped a lot of journalism is for the task of handling it.
Because Bobby is never what he seems to be.
In one moment you see the prodigal prince of Camelot through a sepia lens, And then in the next, you see a tensed and braying conspiracy theorist lit by the blue light of countless screens.
Now, we could run the clip from that dinner, but the audio quality is terrible, and for the sake of clarity, it's better to put his unique voice to the side, and we'll return to that later.
Derek, can you read the transcript of that minute-plus of him holding court at Tony DiNapoli's restaurant?
We've edited out his stutters and false starts, which may be related to the edgelord territory he's getting into and the foggy understanding of the science he seems to be citing.
We need to talk about bioweapons.
I know a lot now about bioweapons because I've been doing a book on it for the past two and a half years.
We've put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes.
The Chinese have done the same thing, in fact.
COVID-19, there's an argument that it is ethnically targeted.
COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately because of the genetic differentials among different races.
COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people.
The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
The Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.
That's what all those labs in the Ukraine did are out there collecting Russian DNA.
They're collecting Chinese DNA so that we can target people by race.
What happens next is crucial.
The New York Post headline for the story written by John Levine says, RFK Jr.
says COVID may have been, quote, ethnically targeted, unquote, to spare Jews.
Note that the only direct quote in the headline is ethnically targeted.
The phrase sparing Jews is a reasonable paraphrase for a scenario of ethnic targeting.
If you have an ethnically targeted bioweapon, it will spare the ethnicities that are not targeted.
But that phrase, sparing Jews, is not in the transcript.
As we'll discuss, Bobby can lawyer the bejesus out of anything, so when he must explain himself against a tsunami of condemnation that he has made anti-semitic and xenophobic allegations, he says he's been misquoted.
Then he pulls the topic of bioweapons apart from COVID to say that the unequal genetic impacts of COVID serve as a proof of concept that an ethnically targeted bioweapon is conceivable.
He's just asking questions, you see, about two totally different issues.
He's not describing what happened, but talking about what could happen, and maybe did.
So there's a formula here.
Invoke a morbid and implausible concept, ethnically targeted bioweapons.
Support that idea with the pseudoscience of race.
Then refer to inconclusive research that discusses potential genetic vulnerabilities to COVID But that fails to disambiguate that data from the social determinants of why, let's say, black people suffered more during the pandemic, i.e.
economic inequality and healthcare barriers.
Now, slam those two concepts together in a way that makes it sound like Chinese people as bioweapon designers and Jews as their financial overlords, I guess, could have benefited from the pandemic.
When you get called out for the anti-Semitic implications of your innocent questions, express outrage because some of your best friends are Jews and there's no bigger supporter of Israel than the Kennedys, don't you know?
Instantly, the discourse around the dinner devolved into, is Bobby personally anti-Semitic or are his remarks anti-Semitic?
Few commentators seem to be worried about the anti-Asian bigotry implied by his comments.
And when it's reduced to that, of course Bobby has a plausible out, because it's the wrong question.
Yeah, the real question is, does Bobby understand that the relentlessly conspiratorial architecture of his thought and worldview and logoria depends on the demonization of a fantasized overlord or outgroup class.
And that's why every conspiracy theory in the culture over the past thousand years tracks towards anti-Semitism.
I mean, he's well-read enough to know this.
He's got enough education.
He reads Camus.
He quotes Archimedes.
So does he care that the structure of his thought and every talking point in his brain bends towards paranoia and demonization in the minds of his populist following?
He really wants to take the individualistic moral high road, though, to say, I'm not like those other people, i.e.
the right-wing, COVID-denying, queue-adjacent groups that helped organize the many rallies he spoke at during the pandemic.
On the other hand, he's just fine using either their tropes or carelessly dog-whistling them, and he's not turning back their support.
He's not like the right wing people, but he's doing a town hall with Sean Hannity on the day that we're recording this.
Someone who he's previously said was leaning toward fascism.
So that's a pretty interesting jump that he's made.
Well, and I suppose the day is appropriate for it because this is our first glimpse, this story that we open with, of Two-Face Bobby, the conspiracy theorist and lover of Israel, a person who can plausibly say he's not anti-Semitic while also dog-whistling a cynical politics of speculation and demonization.
Does he know what he's doing?
Who knows?
I mean, in my view, it may be more dangerous if he doesn't.
If he's simply driven by traumatized narcissism and can therefore compulsively perform as a useful idiot for the disruptor class, a respectable theater of skepticism and saviorship, shielded by his family name, and that he can do it from within the party that could be
as easily red-pilled in 2023 as the GOP was in 2016.
Okay, so let's rewind a bit.
For our listeners who have our book and who've, you know, listened to some of our Kennedy material over the years, you'll know that we've done a lot of work on that file.
We've got a chapter on him in the book that tracks his anti-vax journey into the COVID period where he gained a windfall of attention and cash.
I mean, we always knew how important he was from the point of view of his highly organized, paranoid, and lucrative propaganda machine, how he's built upon his environmentalist passions to get where he is, and how now he runs all of it through a Norman Rockwell version of the Kennedy Democrat.
I think the big picture, as we saw it, was that he brought a high level of organizational and legalistic competence to an otherwise DIY health freedom movement.
And now we're watching him parlay that experience, along with captivating rhetoric reminiscent of dead poet society and a thousand newsreels of his patriarchs, into a very disruptive political campaign as the country's first conspirituality candidate.
However, you know, our book chapter was filed seven months ago, seven months actually before he announced his run.
A lot has happened, but here's what we covered in the book.
Yeah, I'll bullet it, Matthew, but I find it interesting that we chose from a list of like 25 influencers and we went back and forth with RFK and we thought he was important enough to include and little did we know he would be the head of Voltron, bringing together so many of the other ones.
With all of the policy roundtables and everything else.
So in the book, we talk about Kennedy having a history of aligning with Black leaders, both in America and worldwide, to push an anti-vax agenda.
He also conflates vaccine mandates with the infamous Tuskegee Tuskegee syphilis study in which medicine was intentionally withheld from Black men, a correlation that actually infuriates Black pro-vaccine activists because the study involved withholding medicine without consent, not requiring that they get vaccines.
We also talk about Kennedy's activism, and he's been implicated in a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 that infected 5,700 people and killed 83.
Kennedy was cited by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the Disinformation Dozen, in which his outsized influence on social media for pushing anti-vax talking points was nearly unmatched, as well as the money he spent promoting those handles.
And this happened to coincide with his nonprofit taking in increasingly large amounts of money.
And finally, we talked about Kennedy using increasingly apocalyptic language in his speeches, saying that fighting against vaccine mandates is akin to, quote, fighting for the salvation of all humanity.
Captain, oh my captain.
You know, two quick things on this, guys.
The Tuskegee syphilis study, the comparison to that is so egregious because he has this whole agenda that we've never done pre-licensing randomized controlled trials for safety on vaccines.
And so if he were to get into power, he would make sure that all of the childhood vaccines were subject to that.
That actually amounts to a kind of childhood Tuskegee that he would be reenacting because you'd have to have a control group of kids who neither the parents nor the kids nor the experimenters knew were not getting the actual vaccine that protects against death and disfigurement and disability and you know horrible illness.
So that and then the other piece is that you flagged the CCDH Derek and he has now in the last couple weeks started smearing the CCDH as being the recipient of dark money and being corrupt and all the rest of it.
These are, the story just keeps, it's like a snowball rolling down a hill very fast.
His growing popularity and the laundering of his record in the churn of naive adulation marks a sea change in the history of conspirituality as we understand it.
While he stares down the pathway to the White House, behind him stand the legions of influencers and their followers who are following him into political legitimacy and agency and social validation.
Yeah, and so at this point, I think we're deeply familiar with the misinformation, his contradictions, his cursed networks, and the media is slowly catching up, but does anyone really understand why he's so appealing on the presidential stage?
Why he's polling at 20% according to some outlets Forbes just reported that he's the only presidential candidate with positive favorability rankings Soaring above the negative numbers of Biden and Trump at 19% in the black I mean, I believe that the key here is not just that his theories appeal to libertarians on the right and idealist paranoiacs on the left, it's that he casts a charismatic spell that echoes but also exacerbates and amplifies some of the deepest conflicts in the American psyche between tradition and rebellion, nostalgia and grievance, idealism and paranoia.
Yeah, it's as if he really does have two faces.
The Dr. Jekyll of blue blood dignity and erudition, and the Mr. Hyde of Alex Jones-level delirium.
And that means that he can scare his followers, but then soothe them.
That he can invoke the progressive legacy of his family name, but then default to free market capitalism boosterism.
He says he's only for vaccine safety, but he implies the COVID vaccine was a Chinese bioweapon.
He's a massive extrovert who also adores St.
Francis of Assisi, who's an ascetic who rejected all worldly concerns and retired to a forest hermitage.
He's St.
Francis if St.
Francis had Instagram, right?
Right, he's a chronic conspiracist in search of ultimate truth and the baddest of all bad scapegoats, but of course he wouldn't dream of offending Jews or anybody else who is marginalized.
So all of us have been turning over these disquieting questions like how is someone so smart and disciplined also so stupid and reckless?
How does someone with such education and access to brilliant people come to think of Charles Eisenstein as some kind of luminary?
How is he so clueless about the antisemitism at the heart of conspiracy theories?
How does he come to believe that every public institution in his country, except for the institution of his own family, is nefariously corrupt?
How does a person emanate such optimism and nihilism at the same time?
In struggling with all of this, what I've come up with so far by extending out our book research, we've done a couple of op-eds, I've consumed dozens of podcast appearances and biographical pieces, and I've learned way more than I thought I would about the chaos of the Kennedy dynasty, including trying to immerse myself in the flawed radiance of Jack and Bobby Sr.
and to lean into what it meant for, like, my parents' generation to watch those assassinations unfold in real time.
So, given all of that, I've come up with this top-line Bobby bio.
His early life is marred, as we know, by harrowing trauma against a backdrop of political intrigue, betrayal, and murder.
He suffers the paradox of royal family privilege and its terrible expectations, but also soothes himself with nature and the naturalistic fallacy in near-constant reverie on the grandeur of his bucolic family homes.
He waxes poetic about his gamekeeping, his falconry, roaming the wilds of Virginia and Cape Cod, tramping around in the forests and streams, watching puddles boil over with tadpoles and catching mudpuppies, and how brilliant the colors of the butterflies were.
And all of these organic things he treasures, he treasured, that he lists off over and over again, that gave him life and purpose and meaning, they are all threatened.
That's his point.
The pastoral monologues always pivot into despair.
Our children will never see these things, and of course he's increasingly right about this.
The issue is whether he has a coherent answer, or whether he is provoking emotion to fuel demagoguery.
His father, as we know, is publicly murdered when he's 14.
He's snatched out of private school that day by the Secret Service and flown across the country to hold his father's hand as he dies.
And for the next 14 years, Bobby numbs the pain with drugs, winding up addicted to heroin.
He owns this.
He calls himself a bundle of appetites, and today he'll joke about having many skeletons in his closet where they belong, as he says.
He's the third of eleven children, and this always rings in my brain as I'm thinking about the sometimes desperate strategies that some children have to use to be seen and heard.
There are these rich accounts of his mother, Ethel, obviously being overwhelmed in the aftermath of the assassination, and Bobby is sent away regularly on trips and raised by a network of family friends and aides.
So, he's someone who from a very early age had to make himself comfortable in endlessly strange situations.
And it really seems that perpetual extroversion was one, you know, key strategy.
Now as Bobby tells the story to Lex Friedman, reading Jung and meeting a recovered Muni set him on a 12-step addiction to spirituality pathway.
And I'm just going to note here that 12-step ethos promotes the ideal of the full recovery grounded in spiritual realization.
And that this must be maintained with strength and vigor, moment by moment.
Bobby says he attends a meeting every day, first thing in the morning, while intermittent fasting.
Then he takes the three dogs for a hike up through Mandeville Canyon, then he hits Gold's gym, and then on to the media circuit.
Recovery is at the center of Bobby's personal story, but there have been indications that at times it's been unstable or that he's not always passed the threshold from dry into sober, as they say in 12-step programs.
And what I'm referring to here is that for all of his apparent personal transparency, the thing that he very rarely talks about is the suicide of his second wife, Mary Richardson, who was said by friends to be emotionally bereft over Bobby's compulsive affairs.
Among Richardson's effects was found a confessional diary in which he recorded the exploits of what he called his lust demons, acting out dozens of times per year.
Now I should say there are many reasons why he declines to speak about this at any length and why so far journalists have stayed away from the topic, not the least of which is the potential impact on the children that he had with Mary.
So, there are many elements of personal history that seem to throw him into a tortured messianic mission against something or against everything that has gone terribly wrong.
Against pollution, externally in the environment, and then internally in the body.
It's a mission he prosecutes as though it cannot be altered or abandoned for fear the hero will literally die.
Perhaps like his brother Michael, who OD'd, or the family patriarchs who he believes were also killed by an inside job, the inner poison of the deep state.
In the years before he pivots to his anti-vax crusade, all of these reasonable suspicions about environmental poisons are concentrated like sunlight through a magnifying glass into his experience of taking his anaphylactic toddler to the emergency room 29 times.
He says that something happens during those trips that scares him more deeply than anything else has in his life.
So, you take this backstory of intrigue, oblivion, back-alley heroin dives, alleged philandering, spiritual transformation, and his own stressed-to-the-breaking-point fatherhood.
Give him every elite connection and advantage an heir could have.
Give him legal training.
Give him a mission to save a sacred river.
Let that river become a poignant microcosm of the whole world.
Have him litigate in court for decades.
Have him win.
Identifying with the oppressed.
Train him to think on his feet to find every angle and pathway towards his goal, to memorize every point of order, and to preempt every objection.
Make him argue the most advantageous data points, whether they hang together or not, with the objective of winning.
And I think you wind up, after all of that, with a spiritual street fighter, a kind of bulldog for God.
Yeah, and so with regard to the litigation history and him having been a law professor, there's an interesting sleight of hand I think that happens here with his anti-vaccine arguments.
We use the same word evidence in both science and in litigation, but proving something in a court of law is a different endeavor than showing positive experimental evidence for a scientific hypothesis and then subjecting it to independent replication.
For example, the tearful testimony of a mother, or multiple mothers, fathers, teachers, even pediatricians under oath, persuasively telling a judge or a jury that they're convinced the MMR vaccine caused the child's autism, Remains in scientific terms an anecdote without evidence of causality.
But this is why Kennedy's emotionally driven crusade actually finds a perfect point of reference in what is colloquially called the vaccine court, which uses a particularly generous standard called the preponderance of evidence.
What this means is that without a shred of conclusive causal evidence, as long as you can make a plausible case that seems at least 51% likely, the court will award you the victory.
And the representative of a particularly predatory class of lawyers who know how to work that system will also then get to take their cut.
So what you're saying essentially is that Baha'i is really trained in persuasion as opposed to research.
Yeah, totally, which is why he's confident that he could win any debate with a vaccine scientist hosted by Joe Rogan.
But the government's reasoning behind that very generous standard of evidence that the vaccine court uses is that there's a huge amount of money gathered from the vaccine excise tax, and the court bends over backwards to try to give that money away to help anyone who may have possibly been injured by a vaccine.
Unfortunately, this lets anti-vaxxers play both sides because the payouts seem to give the lie to the scientific claims of safety.
And it means that, yes, as they love to quote, $4 billion have been paid out so far.
But the anti-vaxxers always conveniently leave out that in hindsight, the science has shown that the vast majority of that compensation was actually unwarranted.
But never mind that.
Kennedy can be the crusader exposing big pharma corruption while using impressive legal language and claiming, always, that the science is actually on his side.
It's also important to remember why the vaccine court was created.
And if you don't know, you hinted at it, Julian, but America is an extremely litigious culture.
Many citizens were suing pharmaceutical companies in the 70s and 80s, sometimes justifiably as you said, but often not.
And since vaccines are such a small revenue stream for these companies, I've seen ranges from 1.5 to 4% of annual profits.
The number of manufacturers willing to even create and distribute vaccines dropped precipitously from 20 to 3 in the early 80s, and this was all due to increasing consumer lawsuits.
The government had to put guardrails on so that they'd continue to produce those vaccines and reach out to them directly to ask them to.
I mean, a similar phenomenon is going on with antibiotics right now.
Because they don't make a lot of money, pharma companies are putting less time and money into R&D, and so we have less effective and fewer new antibiotics being produced.
So the real issue here is our for-profit healthcare structure.
But instead of directly addressing that, someone like RFK mixes some truths around the industry writ large with his half and zero truths, and then everyone gets confused instead of focusing on what really matters.
That's exactly right, Derek.
Thanks for bringing that up.
And the thing I want to really underline there, because a lot of people don't realize this or are confused by the propaganda, is that the vaccine court and the excise tax and the crisis that you're describing where vaccine manufacturers wanted to just walk away because it wasn't worth it to them.
That was all organized around a panic that the DTP virus, Diphtheria Tetanus Pertussis Virus, was causing certain kinds of brain injuries.
And it turned out that it actually wasn't.
And so a lot of people whose kids were experiencing a rare form of brain disorder that actually turned out to be more genetic than anything else, were thinking it had to do with the vaccine.
And so all of these court cases were coming.
And it just wasn't worth it to the companies to deal with that.
And so a lot of times the anti-vaxxers will make that about, oh, this is a way that big pharma has sort of indemnified themselves from any accountability.
And it's just not true.
It's the way the government made it possible for thousands and thousands of lives of kids to be saved every year by sidestepping this confusion about the science.
I've got one last note about his real-life skill being in litigation.
And it's for people wondering whether there was some huge personality or tactical shift when Bobby seemed to have jumped the shark from environmental law to misunderstanding vaccines in the early 2000s.
And to show or give some insight into this, we have a few sentences from a New York Times report dated November 5th, 2000.
The title is, A Kennedy and His Mentor Partways Over River Group.
Now, the context is Bobby falling out with a guy named Robert Boyle, who first hired him in 1984, coming straight out of rehab to complete his court-ordered community service work on legal issues on the Hudson Riverkeeper Project, which Boyle headed up.
Now, there's a long, convoluted story about Boyle, who's an older school outdoorsman, conservationist, and how he came to hate Bobby's guts for various reasons, including they just came from different worlds.
But Bobby at one point had this money scheme that he wanted to promote where he was going to fund the cleanup of the Hudson by creating a boutique bottled water brand.
So, the New York Times covered the dispute and then reached out to other Riverkeeper stakeholders for character comment.
And so, here are some key sentences.
Though Mr. Kennedy draws praise from many in the environmental community, some of his opponents said he could be too aggressive and even reckless at times.
Quote, I think he separates himself from good science at times in order to aggressively pursue an issue and win, said George Rodenhausen, who worked as legal counsel to Putnam County during the negotiations on the Watershed Memorandum of Agreement.
Quote, he had a nasty tendency to deride or insult anybody he thought was not on his side, recalled Jim Gordon, a former Putnam County legislator who worked with Mr. Rodenhausen as the county's negotiator.
So typical lawyer stuff, but also an observation about his history of motivated scientific literacy.
Going back over decades.
So the punchline when it comes to his misinformation habit is that he's probably been this way for a very long time.
♪ ♪
Amidst all this complexity, the simplest thing that I think we can say about Bobby,
specifically about why he's crushing the podcast world, is that he is logoreek.
Like other heroes and gurus of the heterodox world, he cannot shut up.
He loves to talk.
But I don't think we can talk about his talking without discussing his wounded voice.
Yeah, it's something I want to flag here because I've seen a bunch of social media comments poking fun at his voice and I always jump in to try to deflate that.
You know, a lot of our listeners talk about ableism a lot and I think it's an important issue to bring up.
So he has spasmodic dysphonia or laryngeal dystonia, as it's also known, which is a neurological disorder that affects voice and speech and gets worse over time.
Basically, it causes someone's voice to spasm.
And while there are no known causes, it is possibly triggered by an upper respiratory infection.
It can also occur due to overuse or even a larynx injury.
Sometimes, interestingly, Botox, injected directly into the larynx, Can help reduce the severity of the symptoms, but there is no known cure at this time.
Kennedy himself has at times suggested that he may have been inflicted with this condition due to a flu vaccine that he received, I think in the 90s.
He's given no proof and he hedges on his conviction on that idea, but he still mentions it.
And the fact that he repeatedly brings it up definitely gives me pause and I think it should give other people pause as well.
So he has a disability and I think that this is an interesting test case for his followers because what we've seen is that podcast bros and broadcast journalists alike give him a lot of space As he at times struggles to speak, which is great, except for what he says.
It's almost as if they are suddenly hip to disability politics and they're very respectfully carving out accommodation for him.
But lest anyone thinks that he's willing to become a disability advocate, his standard attitude is not, well, this is what happened and this is what I'm working with.
I deserve to be heard like everyone else.
This is typically what he says.
It, you know, it makes it, I think it makes it problematical for people to listen to me.
I cannot listen to myself on TV.
I will never listen to this broadcast, and I won't listen to any, so I feel sorry for you guys having to listen to me.
So that's him speaking with Elizabeth Vargas in a News Nation town hall event.
And I just find it to be a really retrograde attitude.
Yes, it's self-deprecating, but there's also this sort of hint of his Uncle Jack wringing his hands in embarrassment over chubby kids who need more gym time.
This flavor of, I know this is disgusting to you all, But, you know, it also occurred to me the other day, if he's not listening to himself on tape, guys, does this explain like his part of his amazing ability to consistently deny what he says?
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of people use tape to improve their performance and to actually have an objective sense of like, hey, dude, this is what you did.
This is what you said.
Let's do better next time.
There's a couple of connections here.
I think As you said, interviewers do give thoughtful deference to not interrupting him as a kind of reflexive, empathic response to what is a disability.
But this enables his anti-vax, Gish Gallop style.
But I want to say here too, this is speculative, that his style may have A secondary purpose.
He has shared that the longer he talks during the day, sort of contrary to what you might imagine, the stronger his voice gets.
Because his dystonia is actually a nervous system condition.
It's not a problem of the vocal cords themselves.
It's a nervous system condition that over-tenses those vocal cords.
He's clarified in interviews that the longer he talks, The more the distortion he finds too awful to listen to himself actually gets better.
Yeah, so it must feel really good, like really liberating to just keep going, to get more insistent, to, you know, lengthen out those vowels and phrases and preempt every interruption with, you know, his stock phrases.
And let me just say this.
Totally.
And that makes me think that perhaps each time he has a microphone in front of him, the slacker, the former heroin addict, the guilty and sexually unfaithful Catholic son gets to enter a kind of ritual of redemption in which the more he lets that tangential stream of consciousness trance state take him over, the more the distorted evidence and misinterpreted half-truths flow freely over those vocal cords, the more he feels, And perhaps hears himself in fuller voice as the rightful heir to the Kennedy dynasty and the American Holy Land.
We've got the press dinner Rosetta Stone.
We've got a thumbnail biography.
Now we can turn to two main questions that we can puzzle through.
So first of all, is RFK Jr.
a conspiritualist?
And if so, does this make his behavior predictable?
Second, how is he hooking and reeling in and expanding the conspirituality demographic?
Number one, Is RFK Jr.
a conspiritualist?
If we go back to first principles here to make sure that this online religion as we framed it really applies to RFK Jr., it's a good thing to do because it wouldn't be cool to just be padding our resumes here.
So here's a definition.
Conspiratuality is a mainly online social movement where conspiracy theories and spirituality, especially the New Age type, get scrambled together in a volatile mix of cults, pseudoscience, and right-wing extremism.
People wrapped up in it are convinced that terrible things are happening in the world, perpetrated by evil elites, and that becoming aware of this corruption is part of a spiritual awakening that will heal the world.
They want to accelerate that process through tuning into their hearts, taking supplements,
refusing vaccines, and listening to channelers. It tracks to the right politically because it
believes that all human institutions, government, education, medicine, journalism, are blocking
spiritual sovereignty. And Bobby hits a lot of these marks in a very personal way.
We can take it step by step on the volatile mix part and start with conspiracy theories.
And of course, there's the old saw that a conspiracy theory begins with a mixture of truth and paranoia.
And Bobby seems to embody that mixture and he spends his life straddling and blurring the plausible and implausible.
So, with regard to the plausible conspiracy theories, yes, Lee Harvey Oswald may not have acted alone.
Less plausible?
Nor did Sirhan Sirhan act alone, the Palestinian assassin of Bobby's father, who actually confessed to the murder, but Bobby doesn't quite buy it.
And then, of course, there's the harmful ones.
Vaccines cause autism.
Bill Gates wants to track you personally with his vaccine microchips.
Drug companies are covering up the correlation between SSRI usage and mass shootings.
And, well, I guess UFOs are real, after all, and part of everything else the government is hiding from you.
Okay, so what about the spirituality part?
Well, it is a huge motivator.
It's part of every in-depth interview that he does.
But before we get into it, I want to issue a caveat because we aren't diagnosing this guy's internal life or speaking to his intentionality.
We're really just looking at his own statements.
We're analyzing the psychosocial textures of the Bobby world and we're doing it because it's not enough to show that his statements are false.
I really believe we have to understand why people love his endless speech, the affect, the mood and tone.
He has to be debunked.
There's a lot of people out there doing that.
But we're also seeing that the debunk rhythm is the same as his Gish Gallop rhythm.
And he's just like breakdancing to it.
So yes, he says beguiling conspiratorial things, but people also just love him.
And that's about way more than ideas.
Now, with regard to spirituality, we typically focus on the New Age sector of that world.
And Bobby does have strong social and parasocial links in that space.
And that's underlined by hiring Charles Eisenstein as his communications guru.
And we found out just this past week how important that position is because, you know, Charles is sitting there behind him during the congressional hearing as an advisor right next to Dennis Kucinich.
Bobby also grounds his ideas in two other streams of faith—his natal, muscular Catholicism and 12-step spirituality.
Now, as for his Catholic faith, he claims in many places that he attends Mass daily.
Now, I have doubts about whether this is happening or possible when he's on the campaign trail, given what else he said about his daily schedule, but he did tell Lex Friedman the following.
I was raised in a very deeply religious setting, so we went to church in the summer, oftentimes twice a day.
Morning Mass, and we definitely went every Sunday.
And we prayed in the morning, and we prayed before and after every meal, we prayed at night, we sent a rosary, sometimes three rosaries a night, and my father read us the Bible.
Whenever he was home, We'd all get in the bed, and he'd read us the Bible stories.
And I went to Catholic schools.
I went to Jesuit schools.
I went to the nuns.
And I went to a Quaker school at one point.
These images are just straight out of 1950s children's Catholic catechism books.
Like, I can see the line drawings and the yellowed pages.
But, like, reading between the lines, I'm also noting the whenever-he-was-home bit about his dad because Bobby Sr.
was obviously perpetually on the road.
As an ex-Catholic, I can tell you that what this picture means is that church and home for this man at some point early in his life became interchangeable.
And for families like that, you always feel like you're walking around in sacred space.
Now, Bobby even implied in one interview that he speaks to his dead father while in prayer.
Of course, then he had to clarify that he wasn't getting policy advice from him.
And then in 2021, Derek referenced this, we put it into our book, just after losing his Instagram account, he stood at the podium of an evangelical church in California And he said that the coming political battle, the event was about vaccines in particular, but he said that the coming political battle was apocalyptic and that he was willing to die with his boots on.
I would say that more even than his Catholicism, I don't know if it's more important, but an extremely important spiritual thread is his relationship to 12-step spirituality.
Now, Bobby says he's been attending meetings for 40 years since entering recovery, and he's also said that during COVID he went to nine meetings a week, and I'm assuming many of those are on Zoom, and it's a lot.
I know people who go every day, nine meetings a week I think is a lot.
That might indicate a period of elevated need or service opportunities and sponsoring others during lockdown or difficult times.
But the main thing that I want to point out here that speaks to the two faces of this man's life is the proximity between an intense spiritual program of self-responsibility and a surging escalation in anti-vax propaganda output and monetization.
So what does it feel like to be posting and then 12-stepping from the same computer?
Kennedy also uses addiction and its metaphors in super evocative and very personal ways.
America and the world more generally is often framed through addiction in his rhetoric.
It's relentlessly and hopelessly polluted and it all has to be purified.
And he applies that poetry sometimes in really compelling ways.
Like the best line I've heard him deliver, you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to it, is that when it comes to foreign policy, listen to this,
the US has been acting like an alcoholic behind on his mortgage,
using milk money to buy rounds of drinks for strangers at the bar,
thinking that they will be friends forever.
Wow.
Yeah, like, it's super effective, very reductive, but it really hits hard.
Like, this is a central theme of his discourse.
And 12-step programs aren't conspiritualist per se, but I can see how they intersect with some main themes that we're very familiar with.
Reaching out from the pit of the addict's hell to receive the guidance of a higher power you surrender to.
I can see how a few more twists can make 12-step literature almost parallel to conspiracy theorizing, because the causes of addiction are vast and existential, and they create an apophenic array of downstream effects that impact every aspect of life.
And likewise with vaccines, you know, the DTaP vaccine prevents pertussis, but in Bobby's world, it might also cause cancer.
So the bottom line is that the only way to overcome the obstacles of impurity is by going through a full immersion in a spiritual program that grants a kind of certainty over what works.
But only if you do it all the time.
Right.
In fact, in his News Nation town hall appearance, he invoked that higher power principle, saying that he believes help never comes from the material world, from a substance, or from a medication.
It comes from within.
In Bobby's case, God is within, aiding all decisions, but it's only because he maintains a constant posture of surrender, as he says in the last part of the two hours he spends with podcaster Lex Friedman.
I just started pretending there was a God watching me all the time and kind of Life was a series of tests and each there was a bunch of moral decisions that I had to make every day and each one you know these were all just little things that I did but each one now for me at a moral dimension like when I
Do I spend an extra 10 minutes with my handle and thoughts, or do I jump right out of bed?
Do I make my most important decision of the day?
Do I hang up the towels?
When I go into the closet and pull out my blue jeans and a bunch of those wire hangers fall on the ground, do I shut the door and say, I'm too important to do that?
That's somebody else's job.
Or not.
And so do I put the water in the ice tray before I put it in the freezer?
Do I put the shopping cart back in the, you know, place that it's supposed to go in the parking lot of the Safeway?
And if I make a whole bunch of those choices right, that I maintain myself in a posture of surrender, which keeps me open to the power of, to my higher power.
Why didn't he just ask Jordan Peterson these questions?
He would have just told him, make your bed every day.
Would have been simpler.
Yeah, it may have helped.
You know, I'm struck by the desperate anxiety of that description of all of these tiny little decisions in which he's trying to be in alignment with some Moral adjudicator.
And nowhere in any of that did he talk about any of the big stuff.
I'll also add we, you know, we had a lot of different sections going in this episode and we had to trim a bunch, but one of them was talking about the relationship that, in language like that, that reminds me of what orthorexia is.
And that, if you don't know, is something I suffered from 15 years.
It's an eating disorder where you consistently take out Different foods because you're looking for the healthiest or purest diet.
And when I was listening to that, it actually triggered back to when I first moved up to New York City and I was suffering the worst effects of it because you start looking at labels and you start questioning, this has this many grams of protein versus fat, this has this, and then you actually get paralyzed.
And for me, and from what other people I've read with this condition, is you end up not even eating Yeah, exactly.
And that's a hell to be living in.
It reminds me of a friend who got really into muscle testing as a way of deciding which foods to buy in the supermarket and she would spend hours, hours muscle testing everything with her fingers in the supermarket before she could The last part of our definition is that the prior impulses of conspiracy theorizing and religious devotion that we referred to, they get scrambled together in a toxic mix of cults, pseudoscience, and right-wing extremism.
We've spoken enough about the pseudoscience.
A lot of people are doing that.
So let's go to the question, is Bobby running a cult or is he in one?
And I have to say, this is just not clear, but we can say a few things about the charisma and the dynamics.
So first of all, deception is the lifeblood of all cultic organizations.
And we have to put that on the table for someone not only accused of decades of misinformation, but someone who's been told about it constantly.
Someone who, it seems, never walks anything back.
Sometimes the deception is blatant.
So here he is testifying before Congress.
I have never been anti-vax.
I have never told the public avoid vaccination.
The only thing I've asked for And my views are constantly misrepresented.
I have never been an anti-vax.
So here he is in a 2021 podcast appearance as captured and posted by Brandy Zdrozny.
Our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody.
You're walking down the street, and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don't want to do.
I'm not a busybody.
I see somebody on a hiking trail with a carrying a little baby and I say that I'm better and I get him vaccinated.
And he heard that from me.
If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won't do it.
You know, maybe, maybe he will save that child.
And before we were all quiet because we didn't want to get along with our families.
We just take endless flack.
if you talk about this issue to people, you're scared you're going to get marginalized in your
community, that people are going to call you crazy or whatever, but now's the time, come out of the
closet. I can't say this for sure with Kennedy because I don't know him enough, but I have had
a number of friends throughout my life, or people that I've met, I wouldn't say close friends,
who assigned a certain spiritual component to paradoxes.
Right.
That they could somehow navigate the space between them.
And that was a mark of their spiritual prowess.
And that is exactly when I hear things like that or the clips you played earlier.
That is exactly what I hear.
Those moments with these people being like, well, that's just life.
That's the yin yang.
And I'm between those.
I've completed the circle.
One question I came up with while listening to Lex Friedman is whether or not Bobby's relationship to the truth is mitigated by religious faith.
In conversation with Friedman, he describes how he used Carl Jung to become an even stronger believer in God.
And Bobby said that Jung's formula for life that he appreciated most was to fake it till you make it.
All right, so what about his interpersonal behaviors?
We don't know how he treats his circle of obviously adoring supporters.
We actually know a lot more about Marianne Williamson in that department.
Yeah, arguably, there is a cult of personality propping up the Kennedy brand in the sense that the myth of exceptionalism must be maintained at all costs, and that will happen through its towering father figures who, because they were murdered, they left behind a charisma that must be kept blazing if it is also routinized.
If we entertain the possibility that a cult bears some relationship to an intense family dynamic that you can't imagine yourself independent from, well, Certainly what we're seeing so far on the campaign trail is the extended growth of a family-based cult of personality that began years ago after he cleaned up and started hitting the lecture circuit to talk about environmental renewal.
And if we're talking about far-right extremism, Well, let's look at who's flocking to him.
Alex Jones, Steve Bannon.
The only reason he hasn't been on Bannon's podcast, he says, is that his wife Cheryl Hines wouldn't tolerate it.
Then there's Roger Stone, and of course, Jordan Peterson.
Okay, so last relevant part of our conspirituality definition.
Becoming aware of this corruption is part of a spiritual awakening that will heal the world.
They want to accelerate that process through tuning into their hearts, taking supplements, refusing vaccines, and listening to Chandler's.
Yeah, check, check.
Chandler's.
It tracks to the right politically because it believes that all human institutions, government, education, medicine, journalism, block true spiritual sovereignty.
Yeah, so I think Slam-dunk to say that Bobby is the conspirituality candidate, but how is he hooking the conspirituality crowd?
What's happened here today is that you have lifelong Republicans, lifelong Independents, lifelong Democrats.
It's time that we ended this schism.
The people standing here today do not identify with any political party.
We identify with unity, with health, with freedom.
That's what's important about today.
That's Christiane Northrup speaking at Bobby's campaign announcement event in Boston.
And I think we have to give it to Grandma Q here.
She's totally right.
But how is Bobby appealing to both right and left?
Like, how is he fulfilling Northrup's wishes here?
What do you guys think?
My first response is something I thought about in terms of what draws people into conspirituality.
And he speaks to individualism and individual Responsibility exceptionally well, right?
Because Joe Biden is constantly talking about people working together and going across the aisle and bringing in everyone from bipartisan efforts.
So my sense is that a lot of people aren't actually interested in that, at least not in the domains in which Kennedy plays, and especially not on social media, which isn't set up for that.
Kennedy plays up the sovereignty angle really well, even if it falls flat.
With his free market ideologies.
So, for example, Kennedy has repeatedly stated that a true free market is the ideal venue for solving climate change, by which he means competing technology companies with little to no regulations will create innovative solutions.
And if that sounds a bit like Reaganomics, that's because it's all it is.
It's this sort of pie-in-the-sky idealism of trickle-down climate solutions as if companies left to their own devices will self-correct for the good of humanity and save us all.
It was bullshit in the 80s, and it's bullshit now.
We have plenty of data to show that.
But I feel like it's a convenient way of punting having to actually do anything about it if you were actually elected to office.
Because corporations are not going to solve climate change without regulations, and Kennedy is not going to regulate them, so he can wax poetic about the mythical true free market while avoiding the actual market that we play in.
And that is That's where his rhetoric really serves and crosses the left and right, is that people feel like they are empowered to make their own solutions, do their own farming, support their own companies, and that they'll be able to solve these problems on their own.
But what Kennedy always overlooks is the fact that people, and especially companies, are going to look out for their own interests first and foremost.
And it's this really weird situation that we have where we have to work together on
solutions, but by Kennedy saying freedom, which is very vague motion and it's very much a
part of his free market gambit, it plays very well with people that fall for slogans easily.
I think George Carlin said it best when he half-joked, I leave symbols for the symbol-minded.
You can certainly apply that to many politicians for sure, but Kennedy is certainly a much
among those politicians and the fact that people think that he's an outsider to the
system is really confounding to me.
Yeah.
I want to say here that this individualism that you're describing, Derek, really has
a populist aura.
There's this style of political populism that I think has emerged in the last 10 or 12 years around the world and certainly in the US.
I see it as a kind of backlash against the progressive victory lap that I think a lot of us were taking when Obama got into office, right?
That the arc of the moral universe and the civil rights struggle and the end of apartheid and the end of the USSR and the first black president all meant that we had just crossed this threshold beyond which we could not turn backwards.
In terms of progressive politics.
And so there was this related sense that global human rights and equality should deprioritize national identities and traditional values.
And so nationalism and not being ashamed of the conservative traditions and identities that make us proud is part of that populist backlash, as well as the pushback against educated elites.
And all of their, you know, weird Marxist influenced ideas and career politicians who are insiders and are corrupt.
But there's something else going on here too, because the neoliberal aspects of the ruling class actually have fucked over working people with their parade of noble, environmentally, politically woke ideas, while at the same time, you know, being Unapologetically capitalist.
Populist leaders and influencers exploit the suffering of working people during quarantine.
And that is then positioned, you know, with some good, some understandable underpinning as an abuse of power.
By elites who don't actually care about the common man.
And so why would they tell us the truth about any number of interlocking paranoid conspiracy theories like the lab leak, vaccine depopulation, the science on masks, which is shown to be wanting.
With regard to populism, as this episode was in preparation, Naomi Klein published a must-read Guardian piece that Cline covers four myths that swirl around Bobby in the Democrat and Independent imaginations, and she includes populism in that mix of myths.
We'll link to it.
Cline also shows that the populism is certainly not progressive.
There's no talk of taxing excess wealth or nationalizing resources.
And he just sort of gives up and states openly that Medicare for all is just not feasible.
In the inevitable follow-ups to this episode, we're going to look at the specific ways in
which Bobby hooks players like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and others.
But for now, we'll examine his real all-purpose tool, his shiny Leatherman in his Wrangler's pocket, and that's nostalgia.
Studying his endless invocation of nostalgia really illuminates Bobby's two faces, because the dark side of nostalgia is grievance.
Kennedy embodies a nobler, simpler America for his supporters.
He comes from a Camelot before everything changed.
In the young lives of white boomers and the babyhoods of Gen Xers, before the terrible assassinations of Jack and Bobby Sr., When Kennedy speaks on these podcasts, he tells Peterson that this is the medium of the 2024 election.
Given that neither Biden nor Trump are yet talking about debating their opponents, you can hear him and his hosts fantasize themselves into that nostalgic world.
And I've listened to hours of this stuff now.
And when I close my eyes, I get like a diorama of old timey Manly influences like sepia scenes that make me think of John Muir and the great outdoors but also a dash of Richard Linklater's rotoscoped world in Apollo 10 and a half where the boy fantasizes about being the first child to land on the moon and in the process he contemplates the promise of cosmic travel and a Star Trek like future.
He's really good at generating that heroic and tragic Kennedy mythos.
But when it comes to solutions and plans, there's a lot of hand-waving and none of the pragmatism of Uncle Jack and Father Ted.
As an example, as part of what he frames as an anti-imperialist stance, Kennedy opposes NATO-backed support of Ukraine in the war with Russia.
But when asked what he would actually do, he says, on day one of my administration, I'll stop the killing.
I'll settle the war.
And then he implies that Putin is acting in good faith and America is actually to blame for prolonging the conflicts.
Similarly, after painting an absolutely hopeless picture of U.S.
medical, drug, and agricultural industries regulated by federal agencies he describes as financially and ideologically captured by the companies they're supposed to rein in, and he's not wrong about that, He's asked, so how would you study vaccine effectiveness?
And he basically says, well, I would get researchers to really, really study vaccines when that's actually been happening for decades.
But as I said, his bread and butter is nostalgia.
He evokes a world before climate change, environmental pollution, before the Internet, but not as we'll see the world before free market capitalism.
Now, people like Marianne Williamson also play the nostalgia song, but she subs in Social Democrat for Kennedy Democrat with her endless quotes of Lincoln, FDR, and Martin Luther King Jr.
And everyone plays the nostalgia card to a certain extent.
That's what MAGA means.
It's an appeal to the heroes and presumed values of more moral times.
But Bobby is better at it than most because he was there.
He was on TV.
He was a pallbearer at his dad's funeral.
He can masterfully recite the Kennedy script on geopolitical history.
He can place himself almost Forrest Gump-like in its most historic tableau, and he name-drops all the way.
And so the overall effect in listening to him is this feeling that one is entering a complete world, a full mythos.
But as one of our good listeners on Instagram pointed out, the inverse of nostalgia is grievance.
And with this crowd, that shadow is always close to the surface.
Eisenstein and Northrup have both fantasized aloud about avenging themselves on members of the cabal.
Peterson, the most nostalgic rageaholic on the internet, harasses random fat swimsuit models on Twitter, thinks trans people are mentally ill, and has dedicated his life to avenging University of Toronto administrators who suggested he might benefit from a little DEI training.
Each of these people has written grievance to contrarian fame, but often there's a glass ceiling that separates outraged merchants from the levers of power.
But Bobby smashes that glass ceiling, offering a new hope.
He can bring these folks back into the mainstream fold.
And have that in itself be an event of spiritual importance.
And so a key phrase in the campaign brought to us by Charles Eisenstein is Heal the Divide, which has non-dual overtones.
Yeah, this is what, Derek, you were touching on earlier too.
I call it know-nothing non-dualism in that it turns quite sophisticated Vedantic philosophy into this weird fundamentalist New Age rejection of both facts And values.
Eisenstein is the flag bearer for this right-trending posture of transcending icky political discourse via idealized intuition, which of course then leads him to say really odd things about the cabal and about vengeance or like learning how to transcend vengeance even though it's justified.
Right.
As 2020 rolled into 2021, this evolved into a defiant stance that said, fine, Call me a conspiracy theorist or a right-winger.
I won't let you try to censor me.
We heard this from a lot of the people we cover.
But now, Bobby represents a shot at redemption.
Conspiritualists can say they've really been Kennedy Democrats all along, and now they finally have a candidate that represents their worldview.
And that's why it's hard to think of a more ideal candidate for the post-COVID influencer.
Bobby gives gravitas, pseudo-historical validation, and a veneer of compassionate progressivism to Northrop, Brand, Peterson, Musk.
As a purported anti-imperialist, he can pull in leftists appalled by continued American interventionism from the Middle East to Ukraine.
And as a conspiracy theory reductionist, he can offer whole clips of silver bullets.
Now, COVID, as we know, exploded the conspiracy theory world and general levels of institutional distrust, exploiting deep grievances with neoliberal hypocrisy.
It uprooted people politically and epistemologically, and Bobby was there with his name and alt-health infrastructure to snag them up, to gather them, gather up the red-pilled who also want to weave themselves back into the mainstream political fabric.
You know, people who want to view themselves as progressive while also holding on to their fuck-the-facts attitudes.
Yeah, and I'll just add this piece here to what we were talking about before with regard to populism and conspiracy theories.
Right-wing populism especially always offers oversimplified solutions and finds scapegoats in order to try to resolve the complexities of the world.
And that's why Right-wing populists coming to power is always a nightmare because they don't know shit about the world, about politics, about how governments are run.
Part of the perfect storm we've been in since 2016 is that the dynamics of social media and digital conspiracy propaganda fan the flames of that political populism.
This lowest common denominator discourse that elites are all corrupt, experts and institutions have been captured, only influencers Citizen journalists, maverick politicians and awakened truth seekers, some of whom of course are raking in all of that clickbait money, can actually be trusted to usher in a revolution for the fearless everyman who's mad as hell and won't take it anymore.
But it's not just nostalgia, it's also spiritualized nostalgia.
Eisenstein's construction of The Promise of Bobby really illuminates the core appeal of this candidate.
Here is Charles.
In the 50s, if you were a typical, you know, white middle-class person, it was very easy to believe.
Even if you were a black person in the 60s, you know, we're fixing it.
Civil rights, you know, and environmentalism, and we're on the right track.
There was an incredible Optimism at that time that was betrayed.
And we took a different path.
What kills me about Eisenstein soothing himself in the shadow of Kennedy's charisma is that it forces him to negate his own anemic critique of capitalism.
Like, he's talking about a shared feeling of promise in the 1950s, but that came from the runaway free market capitalist expansion and the same mythology of progress he spent his career criticizing.
Yeah, I mean, I just hear him in real time.
I imagine him being like, I better had a caveat about black people.
If you were just a basic, like normal white person back in the 50s or even a black person.
In the 60s.
You had to wait a little bit longer, but it was still all going up.
Right.
Does he really think all this?
I mean, seriously, has he ever watched a James Baldwin video?
It's incredible, Derek.
Like, no, he's basically sighing wistfully over Leave it to Beaver or Mad Men.
Right.
Like in like in the early 50s.
Polio is ravaging kids, there are ground wars over the Vax campaigns, then those same children are hiding under their desks during nuclear drills while they know that hiding was useless, and the CIA is embarking on a decades-long campaign of foreign coups.
And, like, what environmentalism in the 50s and 60s are we really talking about here?
Let's get Charles some James Baldwin books and videos.
Let's get him some Philip Roth novels.
Yeah.
And then let's get him, who wrote The Silent Spring, Rachel Carson.
Let's get him Rachel Carson.
And then maybe that'll help fill out some of his education of the missing decade.
Yeah, because he's basically saying that the Freedom Riders knew things were going in the right direction when they faced police dogs and got their heads cracked by redneck cops in 61.
And ironically, that that is happening as JFK himself is more reluctant or shows himself to be more reluctant than Johnson would be in getting civil rights legislation passed.
Here he is again.
It's incredible what he says.
That was a timeline.
That was alive in the 60s.
Some of you can remember it.
The optimism, the can-do spirit.
And I can tell you the date that we entered a different timeline.
November 22, 1963.
Everybody who was alive then remembers where they were on that date.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
And on some level, people felt the timeline shift.
We can even feel it now.
And that new timeline was cemented into place over the next five years with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.
You know, Charles talks about all of this as if he's the guy in that science fiction movie who's been able to travel back in time.
He was actually there for all of that, and he's seen how the multiple universes have sort of gone off in these different tangents.
I also want to point out, and I've pointed this out before, a third of Americans in the mid-60s were on tranquilizers, often for things like getting the nerves.
The amount of Americans who are on psychedelics is relatively small, but it had an outsized impact on the cultural media perception of what was going on, when in reality, most people were actually numbing themselves or trying to escape the tensions and the aggressiveness of the burgeoning neoliberal
capitalism that was coming up at that time.
So he is just playing on the tropes of a very small piece of Americana
that didn't reflect what was actually happening in the culture at that moment.
Basically transmitted by Walt Disney.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But to return to, so he makes a big deal out of, you know, the moment of the assassination creates a cleft in the space-time continuum where the non-Kennedy assassination America continues on and is able to provide us with goodness.
And that's still there.
We can bridge that gap.
I talked about that in the brief that I just published.
But the focus on the assassination and the singularity of it is a theme that also really serves the charismatic set because it's all about the great man theory of history, the singular person around whom all events gravitate.
in Eisenstein's telling, like JFK and these other heroes, and credit here for mentioning Malcolm,
although he's probably ticking some boxes as you were suggesting, Julian. They were at the
center of the moral universe and when JFK gets blown apart in that limo, everything fragments.
And Charles is like our age, right?
A little bit older, maybe a few years older.
67 I think he's born.
Okay.
So he, he has, he has marvelous insight and nostalgia for the time that, that he never saw.
Right.
So it's, it's already, it's already this very sort of weirdly one step removed authority that he holds.
The great man theory creates a vacuum because when a great man falls, the next person has to step into the breach to replace him.
And of course, that's going to be Bobby Jr.
Let's listen to Charles a little bit more.
And since then, and you know, the JFK assassination especially was such an obvious conspiracy And the official story was so obviously absurd that it was actually, it was almost on purpose that it was that absurd because it offered us a choice.
Will you believe a blatant lie?
And collectively we said, yes.
That lie has been like, you know, if you inhale a speck of plutonium, it just generates cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer.
That's been like that.
It's been like this, this, Wow.
It was almost as if it was on purpose.
poison inside the body politic ever since.
Because once you accept that lie, you start to accept all the other lies that are required
to maintain it.
And the result is that we live in a matrix of lies right now, where we take it for granted.
Being lied to, we take it for granted.
Wow.
It was almost as if it was on purpose.
And then collectively we said yes.
Well, obviously we didn't.
In 2017, FiveThirtyEight polled over 5,000 Americans and found that a third of them did not believe that a lone gunman killed the president.
Well, this is sort of, it rhymes with how Eisenstein's vision of the world is incredibly cynical, always with a touch of misanthropy.
He is always kind of implying that people are very stupid when they're dealing with complexity and disappointment.
The rhetoric leans in its broad stereotypes about how the majority just accepts cruelty and absurdity with no misgivings.
There's an Old Testament prophet tone to it, like, woe to you, O people of Israel, you've lost your way.
Yeah.
I think that being a New Age visionary really depends on projecting out a uniformly corrupt and unimaginative dominant culture.
Yeah, it's a bully pulpit style.
I am the one who has had this special awakened insight that's sort of been bestowed upon me, and I can see how all the rest of you are just deluded, and I'm going to tell you without, like, much citation.
He's proposing here that somehow there was no propaganda during the Camelot years.
He's proposing that back then, journalism was totally functional, that researchers couldn't be bought, that politicians never lied.
Like, that's how he has to construct this world in order to make sense of his new job.
And then he finishes here.
The lost timeline that was truncated in 1963 actually isn't lost.
This is why I've gotten involved in the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That's his announcement, actually.
So, as we come to the end here, we've got an image to finish up with.
As we mentioned earlier, Kennedy just appeared in Congress before a Republican-led circus hearing on government censorship.
And of course, he used it as a campaign event with a report coming in that something like $5 million were raised by the campaign while the event streamed.
And during that campaign, he rolled out his typical BS.
But imagine our giddiness to see Charles Eisenstein sitting behind him beside campaign director Kucinich.
Yeah, and that seat, that position right behind him framing Kennedy while he's in front of that almost like perfectly constructed campaign event is incredible.
It indicates top advisor status, like these are very important people flanking him.
And then Bobby opens by saying he's going to put aside his written statements to improvise a response to ranking member representative Stacey Plaskett's blistering attack, She's My New Hero, on the fact that the committee is platforming Bobby at all.
So Bobby pushes aside this pile of written papers, typescript papers, and then he launches into his standard, we need peace and healing riff.
And behind him, you can see Eisenstein closing his eyes as if in meditation and smiling that new age Mona Lisa smile.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us next week.
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