On October 9, RFK Jr. brought his three-podcast-bros-in-a-trench-coat campaign to Philadelphia. On a dias across from Independence Hall, he announced his anticipated departure from the Democratic party and his new status as an independent candidate. Matthew and Julian profile his conspirituality credentials, his diagonalist politics, and his incoherent positions:
He attacks public health officials, or corporations—it’s all the same. He can pretend to care about health while making fatphobic and ableist comments. He can rail against the capture of federal regulatory agencies while proclaiming himself a staunch free market capitalist. He can pretend to help advance the lives of Black people by telling them that vaccines are a racist plot against them. He can earnestly identify with and fight in court for dispossessed tribes on American soil, while doubling down on morbid power imbalances abroad.
Butcherbox promo: Sign up today at butcherbox.com/CONSPIRITUALITY and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to receive ground beef for life plus $20 off your first order.
Show Notes
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces independent run for president, ending Democratic primary challenge to Biden
164: The Two Faces of Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.
Brief: The New Age Origin Story of RFK Jr’s Campaign
Brief: RFK's Health Propaganda Roundtable
Brief: RFK Jr., The Anti-Vax Candidate
Brief: RFK Jr Flirts with Body Fascism (w/Natalia Petrzela)
Kennedy Condemns Terrorist Attacks Against Israel
Tribal Council | lowerbrulesiouxtribe
Special Report: Stealing Indigenous Voices in Australia (w/Tyson Yunkaporta)
Robert Kennedy’s Indian Commitment
Deep Commitment
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I should add to that tagline, America's first diagonalist presidential candidate.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
And we are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
And we have a book out!
It's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, and it's in print, ebook, and audiobook format.
Please get it if you haven't already.
Please read, listen to it, enjoy it.
Please review it if you feel so moved.
It helps with visibility, etc.
Welcome to a Conspirituality Special Report, RFK Jr.' 's Independence Day.
I'm here to declare myself an independent candidate.
Well, there he is, Bobby, Monday, October 9th at noon, Philadelphia, on a stage opposite Independence Hall.
He's got the skinny tie on, he's wearing the tailored suit, there's a majority white crowd numbering in the thousands, with 100,000 more streaming on Bobby's Twitter stream.
And they are chanting and they're pumped, they've waited for him to quit the Dems for a long time now.
I'm an independent candidate for President of the United States.
That's not all.
I'm here to join you in making a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government.
And we declare independence from Wall Street, from big tech, from big pharma, from big ag,
from the military contractors and their lobbyists.
And we declare independence from the mercenary media that is here to...
To fortify all of the corporate orthodoxies from their advertisers and to urge us to hate our neighbors and to fear our friends.
And we declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions.
And finally, And finally, we declare independence from the two political
parties.
And the corrupt interests that dominate them and the entire rig system of rancor, of rage,
of corruption, of lies that has turned government officials into indentured servants for their
corporate bosses.
So Julian, as always, Bobby sounds sharp, unwavering, insistent, determined.
It's kind of hard to argue with the broad strokes of his populist message until you look a little bit deeper and see how it's put together.
Or, you know, if you realize that anti-vax tycoon Del Bigtree was actually the master of ceremonies for this historic event.
Or, If you go back and listen to a few of our past episodes on how he got here.
So, Julian, we've described RFK Jr.
as the conspirituality candidate.
Why don't we begin with a summary of that?
Yeah, well, and let me just say first that running against rage and rancor is really interesting considering the kinds of rants that RFK is famous for, especially in terms of the stuff we've looked at carefully.
coverage so far has seen RFK Jr. go from being an environmental lawyer who was generally seen
as a hero of the left, although some of his colleagues had some things to say. We later
found out about his style of working with people and how he played fast and loose with the truth.
Nonetheless, he seemed like a heroic figure. He had a good cause that he was in service of,
cleaning up the rivers. But then over time, he became one of the biggest promoters of
anti-vaccine propaganda. This started back in 2004. Like many of our subjects, the pandemic
seems to have made him even more preoccupied with conspiracy theories.
So much so that he wrote a book purporting to expose Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates and what he calls the global war on democracy and public health in his subtitle.
He's perpetuated misinformation about vaccines and autism, which have been thoroughly debunked for many years now.
He's perpetuated the idea that the CDC covered up black and brown kids being more susceptible to vaccine injuries.
He's floated the idea that COVID was engineered to spare the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews, while asserting that the real epidemic Right.
is one of chronic childhood illnesses supposedly created by vaccines and pesticides. I should say
childhood chronic illnesses. So illnesses that appear in children who otherwise would be healthy
and then of course have led to many adults suffering from these conditions that he believes
are created by vaccines and pesticides. Now combining all of this with his full-throated
spirituality which pulls on his Catholic upbringing and his AA redemption arc, he's
become the darling of the conspiritualist demographic with prominent spiritual conspiracy
essayist and self-described COVID dissident Charles Eisenstein becoming his director of
messaging and sitting behind him quite prominently during his testimony before
Congress about big tech censorship which is a key issue for Bobby after the major social
platforms deleted his accounts in response to his constant stream of anti-vax misinformation.
Fellow high-profile conspiritualist content creator Aubrey Marcus has also waxed poetic to Charles about how he understood whilst tripping.
On plant medicine, that Bobby really should be president before he and Charles then riff together about how in some quantum physics, many worlds, super spiritual way, Bobby's candidacy might represent the mending of the timeline that was broken when his father and uncle were assassinated in the 60s.
Either way, it's become clear to us that Kennedy's candidacy in this timeline represents a kind of redemptive opportunity for red-pilled New Agers to finally be able to show that they were in fact the real Democrats all along.
Yeah, that's right.
And the basic emotional template is very clear.
The world is terrifying, and who would know it better than this survivor of public family traumas?
But Bobby's steadfast faith in God and the program that has saved him from addiction is the answer.
An answer that increases in urgency according to how desperately bad the world is.
So like all Conspirituality Influencers, he glows brighter and sings more sweetly if he and his followers think that they're in hell.
And he has a real gift for aspirational politics that can swing from the poetic to really, I guess, the cringe.
You know, he'll quote Archimedes, give me a sword and a piece of ground and I will move the earth.
He'll quote Camus, although not very accurately.
He'll quote Saint Francis of Assisi, who he wrote a whole book about.
But also, like the day before his speech, he had himself filmed as Rocky with a theme in the background, running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And that, of course, goes along with selfie uploads of doing push-ups and bench sets at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, or swinging on those rings on the beach, Julian, where all the muscle heads come out to flex.
So there can be something hokey and cheeky about it, as well as a little bit sketchy as we We just found out that the anti-Big Pharma candidate is also taking testosterone replacement therapy to keep himself pumped.
But beneath all the swagger, the deeper schtick throws off a constant tension between paranoia and salvation that we saw reach its peak during a pandemic speech in January of 2022 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Now, apologies to everyone who's heard this, like, way too many times, but we cannot emphasize his manipulations enough.
Every capitulation 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 gonna die on is the hill that you're on right now.
And they're coming for our children.
They are coming for our children.
Now, whose children?
The children of Crunchy Moms, who he has won over with decades of anti-vaxx misinformation?
I mean, that would be one category, but it goes a little bit deeper than that and a little bit more twisted.
Now, that event was called Defeat the Mandates, and the theme was the common anti-vax and COVID minimization attitudes that measures like masking or temporary school closures were actually forms of child abuse.
This is also the speech in which he claimed that being monitored by the government during the pandemic meant that you couldn't hide from the authoritarians like Anne Frank did.
So that is all kind of a resume of the conspirituality angle.
And we know that it's politically scrambled and that it attracts a slurry of stakeholders.
Yeah, it's quite a motley coalition.
I mean, obviously you have People who listen to the Joe Rogan Podcast and are interested in hearing long form pontifications and hot takes on every possible issue run through with as much conspiracy sort of speculation as can be included.
These are the biohackers and the people who are the market for all manner of supplements that claim to be able to deliver benefits that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about, right?
Then you have the crunchy granola moms that you've referenced.
They're just asking questions about the crowded childhood vaccine schedule.
And many of Joe Rogan's guests have good answers for them, as well as people who might move in overlapping circles with Gwyneth Paltrow.
But then you also have the super conspiratorial anti-vaxxers who definitely hear his dog whistles about institutional capture and medical corruption.
And then he's drawing lefty populists who like what they hear in his rhetoric about healthcare and the environment and how the Dem elites have abandoned working people.
But then he's also won praise from Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and a list of other hard-right chaos agents who see him as some kind of truth-telling righteous warrior, or so they say.
Yeah, and I want to pick up on something essential here that Naomi Klein has actually been talking about.
Kennedy can be absolutely right about federal agencies responsible for regulating medicine, agriculture, and environmental pollution being captured by industry reps who move into and out of government positions through, like, the lobbyist revolving door.
But when he is right, He's either too radioactive to Democratic funders to be confronted on these issues, or his rightness is freighted with so much bullshit, you know, as in his anti-vax content, that the subject area becomes politically poisoned for Democrats.
So the pattern is, If Bobby talks about Big Pharma, Biden won't.
And that deepens the vacuum of progressive care.
And that vacuum sucks in increasing concentrations of resentment and conspiracism through the construction like, why is no one talking about this issue?
So, in that one clip we were discussing in Slack, Julian, Klein said that RFK Jr.' 's campaign is like a mirror world version of the Bernie campaign.
Except he's not really offering anything.
So I hear it as a lot of empty rhetoric, a lot of populist left posturing.
But really, when you dig a little deeper, where are the policy promises?
where are the proposals in terms of how to really improve the lives of working people and really sort of reform
the broken social safety net in the United States.
And I think Klein is also very astute here in observing that there is this phenomenon
within our cultural discourse, our political discourse these days,
which is that when someone we oppose brings up a topic that has a lot of nuance to it,
that is a legitimate complaint about something that's going on in the world,
it very often becomes the case that we can't say anything about it
because we might appear to be agreeing with them or to be supporting their position.
That's really a problem.
Now, about the particular type of politics that he is creating or invoking or catching the wave of, we just had on as guests Quinn Slobodian and William Callison.
They're a couple of historians and political theorists who have coined the term diagonalism to describe this new thing that is being sort of created and also audience-captured Julian, what's the diagonalism demographic according to what we heard from Silabodian and Callison?
Well, the thing that I think is important to say first is that diagonalism is a really helpful new lens for us in terms of the central phenomenon that we've been discussing.
...around conspirituality and how conspirituality seems to create strange bedfellows, right?
It seems to create this common cause or this intersection of ways of looking at the world in which culturally liberal people tend to start slanting more towards conspiracism that is very right-wing in its valence.
Right.
Take a turn away from the very popular use of something called horseshoe theory, which says the further you go to the left and the right, the more you end up meeting somewhere in the middle in some distorted sort of way.
Well, the opposite ends begin to touch or something like that, right?
And they mimic each other behaviorally.
But that's always been very, very unsatisfying because the people we're talking about were never really far left in their politics.
They didn't have an analysis really of power, for instance.
Yeah, yeah.
And so what we get from Slobodian and Callison Is this analysis that says there's a digitally orchestrated uprising of the entrepreneurial class, the small business owners, the gig workers, as we've often pinged here, who certainly in the U.S.
live without a social safety net and have a sort of ideological sentiment where they want the freedom to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without interference from the government.
Yeah, and they are, you know, naive or deluded enough to either believe that this is available to everyone or they're cruel enough to know that it isn't and they don't give a shit.
Yeah, they're invested in their own sort of heroic myth of how they're going to be these independent entrepreneurs who are the captains of their own destiny.
Right.
The diagonal lines run from culturally liberal, natural living and self-actualizing spiritual identities to a libertarian capitalist ethos that rejects elite experts and scientific consensus, especially around public health, as it turns out.
Yeah, and I think a huge revelation for me coming out of that discussion was that the anti-lockdown protesters are actually uber neoliberals.
Like, their core outrage is directed at kind of milquetoast centrist leaders like Justin Trudeau.
Who isn't really able to do a heck of a lot to direct an appropriately protective COVID policy, given the type of government he runs.
But for the protesters, even the most modest attempts to flatten the curve, for instance, amount to some existential threat to the neoliberal status quo of choose your own adventure.
He's a tyrant.
He's a tyrant because he won't let you choose your own level of illness or how many times you're gonna get COVID or something like that.
So it was quite enlightening for me to think about these protesters, not in the more extreme terms of, you know, perhaps their neo-fascist echoes, but rather as kind of banal shock troops for neoliberal governments who had betrayed them by asking them for the smallest amount of collective consideration.
There's a super important theme of hyper-individualism running throughout all of this material and really animating RFK Jr.' 's independence bid because it doesn't have a root culture.
It is atomized, it's opportunistic, and it can latch onto and appropriate and commodify for its own purposes, like legitimate Liberation discourses, and maybe it has to do just that to cover over its blatant selfishness.
So I wanted to just for a moment to imagine that Lincoln Memorial speech that we just played through different voices.
So what he said was, Every capitulation 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 you're gonna die on is the hill that you're on right now, and they're coming for our children.
So Julian, that could be Malcolm X.
It could be Fred Hampton.
It could be Che Guevara.
And this is what we'll focus on a little bit more.
It could also be spoken by any First Nations activist demanding land back, treaty amendments, or reparations.
Yeah, if there was a there there, right?
If he was talking about actual oppressors and actual forms of oppression.
And so, wouldn't you know it, Bobby was introduced to the stage with remarks and a prayer from Louis Grassrope, a council member from the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
Now, this is all happening on what I think used to be called Columbus Day in your fair country, which is now undergoing a name change to Indigenous Peoples Day.
So, Julian, what did we hear from Grassrope?
The opening to the proceedings going like this really made me wonder about how much support Bobby can really pull from MAGA or even mainstream Republicans.
Because this was a land acknowledgement that went on for several minutes.
Grassrope underlined the importance of apologizing to the ancestors on whose land we stand, and the importance of remembering the suffering of the past, but also of recognizing that the right wing and the left wing really both belong to one bird.
Right.
Getting into Bobby's speech, I mean, this is where he started his remarks, right?
Yeah, and this was really his only moment of actually invoking the Camelot dynasty, and it dovetailed with this very interesting choice to make the announcement on Indigenous Peoples Day.
Bobby told the story about his father spending a full day on a reservation and being brought to tears by the conditions that people were living under there.
A reaction that apparently has lived on in the memory of those people and which apparently prompted the Sioux in South Dakota to help vote Bobby Sr.
to victory almost unanimously amongst their population on the last day that he was alive before being assassinated.
Yeah, it's a really powerful story.
And like all stories from that era, Bobby tells it really well.
And I want to say that that empathy coming from a place of privilege can go a long, long way.
Now to that point.
I want to pause here and recall the remarks of our recent guest, Tyson Yungaporta of the Appalach, North Queensland, who spoke with me about how easy it is for diagonalists to ingratiate themselves to Indigenous folks by showing some basic empathy.
Now, the subject was the October 14th referendum.
Now, that should be the day that this special report is dropping.
On whether the constitution should be amended to provide for an indigenous advisory body to parliament called the Voice to Parliament.
Now, there are some indigenous folks in Australia who have argued that the proposal doesn't go far enough.
But in general, the referendum should win a slam dunk yes vote, except that a coalition of very sketchy actors who run parallel to the RFK jr demographic have basically scuppered the argument with a ton of RFK style jr conspiracy theories like a yes vote will mean that the UN will steal private property and so on or turn all the kids trans with poison vaccines and Tyson was on in part to talk about how tragically these specious arguments had actually found purchase among some indigenous folks
And for a very sneaky reason.
He said during our interview, you know, we're all vulnerable, meaning to redpilling, and as someone who has been quite readily and easily radicalized over a decade ago myself, this is because it's all true.
You know, we've lived through actual conspiracies.
They did and they do take our children.
We're scared every day.
Like, if we have an argument, we're really worried about raising our voices too much because we know someone might call the police and we might never see our kids again.
We're nervous when we go to the hospital because we don't know if our kids are going to be taken away.
We watch Handmaid's Tale.
That was my grandmother's life.
She lived that.
And you know, this was something, it's not something in the past, it's something that's still happening now because there are more Aboriginal children being removed from their families than at the height of any other time in Australia's history right now, at the height of what they call the stolen generations.
So they're like, you know, hashtag save the children.
And you know, we see that and we're like, oh, these people have affinity with us.
I'm not saying that Bobby Sr.
didn't weep or that he didn't have a good heart in this matter.
We'll actually link to a good summary of the impacts of his visit from the Journal of American Indian Higher Education, but what Yunkuporta is pointing to is the impact of rhetorical attunement regardless of the
follow through or the politics that that attunement conceals. So in Australia, for instance,
the queue adjacent anti-lockdown sovereignty people are on one hand professing cultural
solidarity with Aboriginal peoples, but on the other hand, they're pressing to enact a series
of libertarian policies that have nothing to do with redressing the history of
colonialism. And just a little funny side note, Yunkaporta told me that he's getting all kinds of
emails from, you know, folks and colleagues in the US asking him when he's going to put
his shoulder behind RFK Jr.'s campaign. So the question is...
You know, will Bobby do poorly on the Aboriginal or Indigenous rights file?
He does have a legitimate record in environmental law suing corporations for polluting Indigenous lands.
And on his website platform, he's got some verbiage that I think would make Jordan Peterson swear and weep.
Julian, do you want to read that?
Under a Kennedy administration, historic wrongs done to Native Americans will be addressed and made right.
This spirit, as well as the letter of treaties, must be honored as the highest law of the land, documents made between sovereign nations.
Cultural renewal will be supported and religious practices and sacred sites will be defended.
Tribal sovereignty and the right of self-determination will be respected.
The need for a restoration of illegally taken lands and resources, reparations for broken treaties, protection and enhancement of natural resources in Indian country will be elevated to matters of national interest and examination.
Tribes will have a friend and ally in the White House.
The magic words are in there.
Reparations, protection and enhancement of natural resources.
It's really good.
However, what is Bobby Jr.' 's actual track record when it comes to using the language of sovereignty to support marginalized people?
You did a lot of work on how he used his family's civil rights legacy to help promote anti-vax conspiracy theories in the black community.
So what's the summary on that?
Yeah, so there's multiple intersecting stories here.
The short version is that he has forged alliances with Black Lives Matter leaders.
He's worked with Nation of Islam leaders.
He has gotten on side with the black candidate for Congress.
And in each of these cases, he's brought conspiracy theories about vaccines, perpetuating what he calls in a propaganda film that he made medical apartheid.
Right.
As I mentioned before, he's repeated the false claim that the CDC covered up dangerous vaccine side effects for black and brown kids.
And this has played a role in deadly measles outbreaks amongst minority communities at home and also in Samoa, where he and fellow anti-vax titan Andrew Wakefield have gained influence and So that's part of his unity platform, I suppose.
Yeah, this is an excellent example of how he is helping to support minority groups and redressing the imbalances of the past.
With all of that said, his platform statements on racial healing still sound, I mean, they always do, pretty good.
He makes points on prison and police reform, minimum wage plans, and also 3% mortgages for qualifying families.
So in some ways he really does echo the new frontier politics of his uncle.
But I want to now test Bobby's commitment to the marginalized in another context that is tragically cracking the world open at this moment.
Here's Bobby's press release on the current war between Israel and the Palestinians.
This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state's right to self-defense.
We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself now.
As President, I'll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind.
I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need.
However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens.
Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering resolute and practical action.
America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense.
All right, so here's our pro-peace.
Let's end the polarization.
Let's end the forever wars candidate.
And he's unable to even name the peoples involved in conflict.
He can't even type out the word Palestine or Palestinians as he commits to providing one side with whatever it needs.
Now, how do American First Nations land back activists feel about that, I wonder?
How do the Standing Rock protesters feel about that?
There's another piece to this though, which is that many people noted that in his independent run announcement, he didn't mention Israel at all.
But that was only for those of us on the live stream.
If you were live, You would have heard before the cameras rolled that he had Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is a celebrity Orthodox rabbi, super high strung pro-Israel activist and huge Netanyahu supporter, speak about the war and call for a moment of silence for victims in Israel.
So there's a report from CNN.
When asked by CNN following the event about Kennedy not mentioning Israel and Hamas in his remarks, Boteach dismissed the oversight and said his involvement in the event spoke loudly about Kennedy's stance toward Israel.
Quoting, I think that was very brave of him and showed tremendous solidarity that he asked a rabbi who's his close friend, you know, he moved away from the political figures who could have introduced him and endorsed him.
The fact that I'm the one that introduced him, I think, said it all.
But if they didn't livestream that bit, Julian, who did it say it all to, really?
It's just very stinky, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, essentially, it's saying to the inner circle who happened to be present.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At that announcement in the flesh, hey, here's where we stand on this.
But then it's also leaving that out very strategically from the many hundreds of thousands more or
millions more that will see the live stream and the stuff that will be broadcast on television.
There could be a cynical concealment there.
But the thing that stands out to me is the incoherence, especially around these issues
of geopolitical power balance and colonialism and settler consciousness.
And I think we come back here to diagonalism because there really isn't any coherent analysis or grasp on any moral center of political action in any of this.
It's not about consistency.
He can attack public health officials.
He can attack corporations.
It's all the same.
He can pretend to care about health care while making fatphobic and ableist comments.
He can rail against the capture of federal regulatory agencies while proclaiming himself a staunch free market capitalist.
He can pretend to help advance the lives of black people by telling them that vaccines are a racist plot against them.
He can earnestly identify with and fight in court for dispossessed tribes on American soil while doubling down on these morbid power imbalances abroad.
So, like, what holds it all together, Julian?
It's not a coherent philosophy.
It's like Bobby Kennedy Jr.
I mean, he's like three podcast bros in a trench coat.
That's a good description.
Yeah, I mean, just reflecting on this opposition he has to supporting Ukraine and how he frames that as being part of this American investment in forever wars that he is opposed to.
And then this statement about what's happening in Israel and the war against Hamas.
There's something there in both cases that is so radically at odds with this message about Indigenous Peoples' Day and everything he wants to do for, you know, essentially the people who were colonized.
Because in both cases, even though these are all very complex issues, in both cases he is not on the side of the people who were saying, our land has been invaded.
He does seem like three podcast bros in a trench coat.
I think he, one of the things that really struck me about this speech was how careful it was, because at times he can go full mask off with a very vengeful streak that promises, for example, to punish Fauci.
That's what his whole book is about.
Yeah.
And others in the public health and pharmaceutical establishment.
He wants to punish scientific journals who he believes have suppressed the truth.
Uh, of his conspiracy claims.
And I think what holds it together is exactly that contrarian, old media, paranoid conspiracism
and contrarianism that rejects standards of evidence and expertise in favor of vibes and
political posture.
I want to center in on the vibes because the way I'm starting to think about it is that
diagonalism is a contrarian protest against the expectation of political coherence.
Slobodian and Kallsen really help with that when they tie the movement closely to the techpreneur startup grindset that preaches move fast and break things.
Because here, the pleasure of the politics is not located in the work of building coalitions or really investing in ground-level policymaking.
The pleasure is similar to the self-help workshop epiphany.
Like, you get to say, these systems of control have all been lying to us.
I've been blind to all of this all this time.
It doesn't have to be this way.
So, it rebels against the conventional.
It's very adolescent in a way.
It's looking for some kind of magic, a transcendent third way above and beyond what it pretends to be, the illusory polarity of left and right.
And I think that's why it's so easy for this demographic to welcome or nurture spiritual elements.
And here, I want to digress a bit for a moment to name something in the New Age workshop, California ideology, diagonalism, culture, that I don't think we've discussed, but it's been in the water all along.
And I think, you know, I'll call it something like deconstruction ecstasy syndrome.
Here's what I mean.
When a person enters the wellness world and then stays, and it becomes part of their identity, maybe to the extent that they professionalize, they add a modality or two to their gig work portfolio, That happened because they were hooked.
They had an epiphany.
And anecdotally, I would just say that the nature of that epiphany for many people is a kind of via negativa, like that old mystical term for the feeling of emptiness and clarity of things falling away.
In Indian systems, the term is nirguna or without qualities.
It's a sudden stillness or relaxation that is proximal to some questioning or release of
psychosocial conditioning. So it's this feeling of, I don't have to be tense in that way anymore,
or that's not important, or I can let that thing go, or I don't have to keep up appearances in
that way. So there's this feeling of quick, sweet relief, a placid resolution that just makes your
whole body hum, and it can be quietly exhilarating, and it can even for some people relieve physical
pain. So you're familiar with this moment, right Julian? Oh yeah.
Oh yeah, this is the big weekend workshop.
Whether it's the yoga retreat or the ayahuasca kind of adventure into the Amazon jungle, whether it's being in the hotel ballroom for Est or Lifespring or any of those kinds of events, it's the group experience where there's a kind of shared revelatory Hysteria, actually, is the word I want to use.
That sweeps through in which people are suddenly realizing, oh, this is actually the truth.
And all of this other stuff was an illusion, whether the illusion is that you are in any way victimized by the world.
Or that trauma can really impact the deepest core of your non-dual self, or that politics matter, or that the story you've been telling yourself about money actually has to be, you know, has to predict your future.
Like, it's that thing of like, we've all been orchestrated into a kind of shared state of consciousness in which actually radical new beliefs about the nature of reality and who we are have dawned as being ontologically undeniable.
I think this sensation was a doorway into both of my high demand groups that I was a part of.
Like, with Buddhism, the group leader simply said something like, you're going to die.
And nothing matters but trying to understand what that means.
And suddenly, in that moment, in the meditation hall, every petty concern in my life fell away.
I actually had tunnel vision on his face.
Now, of course, along with every petty concern in my life falling away, so did the real world of people and politics and collective suffering.
But that's actually part of the bargain that comes along with the territory.
And then later, I opened up A Course in Miracles, and I read the first lesson.
Which says, nothing I see means anything.
And I felt the same kind of lighthearted relief.
Oh yeah, I've totally been there.
Just reading that passage and you're like looking around, like follow the exercise, look around the room, observe that nothing, the chair only means whatever meaning you have imbued it with and have been conditioned to perceive it as.
Just can you see it now as simply being something else?
Yeah, the immediate power of that particular text really makes me wonder whether what people suspect about William Thetford, who is Helen Schuchman's transcriber for A Course in Miracles, whether he really was involved in MKUltra, because there's almost something hallucinogenic about that first lesson and its passage.
It details, you know, you're looking at the door, the window, and the chair, and I remember looking at the door and the window and the chair and saying, nothing I see means anything.
and the edges of those objects starting to glow in some strange way.
Mm-hmm. And what is that besides nothing is as it seems?
Exactly.
There's your hinge point into red pill.
I have awakened now to a deeper, you know, political and, I don't know what,
They're all deconstructive.
of the true nature of reality that was hidden from me prior to this.
And so you go through like the first hundred lessons, and they're all like that.
They're all deconstructive.
That's where their pleasure is.
You're pulling allegedly unnecessary tensions apart so that they're not holding you together anymore.
And in the group that I was in, we used to dance ecstatically, inspired by meditations like that every morning.
And then the joke was, as we were all coming down from that after lunch and we had to go do our shit service jobs, you know, we said, oh man, I can't function in this insane world.
I'm completely blasted by the light.
But then what, Julian?
Like when you do enough yoga stretches or you shit your guts out with some cleanse or you repeat the mantra a hundred thousand times and your brain goes like radiant and blank, like what happens?
What are you supposed to do with all that pleasure and relaxation?
It's a fascinating thing, right?
Because we're talking about altered states of consciousness.
And we're talking about how repeatedly getting high, repeatedly getting your basic epistemic framework destabilized by these ideas and these practices creates a nascent sense of self that We're sort of trying to hold on to because it's the enlightened self.
It's the self who now knows what was not known before.
It's the self who is now free from the roots of the illusory neuroses that had run the show before.
And I think this creates a lot of tension, a lot of sense of, you know, like then whenever anything else creeps in, that's your ego.
That's your unenlightened self.
And so then what do you do?
But it's just the world!
It's just stuff to do!
It's just your neighborhood.
Yeah, it's just what exists outside of that shared group, you know, deranged state, which might in equal parts be filled with ecstasy and terror.
And what are you supposed to do with all of it?
Well, you're supposed to become more committed to the group.
You're supposed to sign up for the next training.
Yeah.
You're supposed to go out and proselytize and recruit others, because what else are you going to fucking do with it?
Yeah, well, because there's no plan.
There's no substitute vision that really makes sense that's gonna slide into the vacuum left by the deconstruction.
It's a shiny, bright kind of nihilism.
That's why on the extreme end of this, Teal Swan has nothing ultimately to offer her followers other than to say things like, suicide is a reset button.
But the thing is, when you don't have a substitute vision, you can only double down on the first part.
When you don't have a substitute vision.
And that first part is the ecstasy of deconstruction.
And that doubling down will intensify when the real world comes calling.
Because the internal epiphany might grant a greater capacity for relaxation and equanimity, but that doesn't change anything because the world is still there.
Capitalism is still rampaging.
Your family is still suffering in some way.
Your friend is still an alcoholic.
All of the intractable problems remain.
But you found a pill and you have to keep taking it for the spell to continue.
And that's why the sales pitch of wellness and yoga never ends.
Because the effects have to keep the world at bay.
They have no choice but to advise you to deepen your practice, which basically means stay in that moment of deconstructed relaxation and subtle ecstasy.
That's where your life really exists.
And this is why In my opinion, yoga and wellness people are so lousy at politics and activism.
It's not just that the demographic has been systematically depoliticized by neoliberal discourse and leaders who pretend that politics is some sort of shabby enterprise unworthy of your holy being.
It's also because the culture is stunted by this partial theory of change.
So the real drug is the moment of deconstruction, and it's too pleasurable to abandon or even pause for a while to think carefully about what kind of world you might actually build.
So my rant here is all to say that for the new age biohacking wellness tech bro crowd, Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is offering the same kind of epiphanic trance that they're already familiar with.
Abandon your conditioning.
Leave your old models behind.
The world of institutions is a rotten husk.
You don't need to believe in it anymore.
But this is only one half of a theory of change.
And when we get to the nuts and bolts of what he actually wants, it's really more of the same.
Which is down to, like, free market capitalism will solve the environmental crisis.
But his followers, I don't think, are primed to hear that part of it because they are really enamored with the deconstructive ecstasy.
Yeah, and this goes back to your conversation with Tyson as well, right?
Which is that he, at one point actually, we were talking behind the scenes with him and he said that he was sort of almost forced non-consensually into being a galaxy brain.
That when you go on all of these There is an expectation that you're going to opine for extended periods of time about all manner of subjects that you really don't know anything about.
But the reason why you are qualified and the reason why it's interesting to talk to you about this is because this deconstructive ecstasy has gotten you in touch with some sort of first principle.
that you are now uniquely positioned within this community of the adequate to use from
which to extrapolate about everything in the world without really knowing anything about
what you're talking about, right?
Okay, so this is perfect because I think it brings us back around to Charles Eisenstein.
Jr.' 's Director of Messaging.
Now, in this speech on First Listen, Julian, you said you didn't hear strong echoes of Eisenstein in the text.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And when I said that, specifically what I meant is it doesn't sound like he wrote it.
I'm not hearing his turns of phrase and I'm not hearing his, like, strange, you know, tangential reasoning.
I really have to say overall, I think it was a quite good candidacy announcement speech.
He hit the notes he would have expected.
I imagine he got someone who really knows what they're doing to help him with the speech.
The country is ready for an historic change.
People want the bitter and divisive polarization to end.
He, I suppose, is uniquely situated to do this because he's independent of both the Democrats and the Republicans, and they're corporate overlords and lobbying pimps.
Fair enough.
He also hits some very reasonable and refreshing notes, I think, for many who might be receptive about crushing debt and low wages, how most Americans agree we should have health care and take care of our veterans and the environment, and how 80% of the population can't afford what is sort of framed as a middle-class lifestyle.
Yeah.
In this speech, he never indulged his usually overtly conspiratorial tangents, but I could still hear the
underpinnings there in how he extended the critique of, say, government lobbyists, which yes, I'm cheering you on,
Bobby, and dark money groups, absolutely, and corporate political power, then to the wild and vague generalizations
about all government agencies being corrupted and the quote-unquote mercenary media being too beholden to its
advertisers to tell us the truth, and in fact, profiting from making us hate one another. You know, the elites
want us at each other's throats because it then makes us easier to control. But I still didn't hear a lot of Charles
Eisenstein, although you pointed out to me afterwards a very astute observation about a conceit that he lifted
directly from him, yeah?
I certainly did, but we can warm up to it because this overriding theme of the meaninglessness of right and left discourse, we can unpack by looking at this long riff that comes about three quarters of the way through the speech.
As I said, it's a long passage, so we can pause it and comment as we go.
I want to share with you a hopeful sign.
I'm proud to say that my supporters include both pro-lifers and pro-choicers.
They include climate activists and climate skeptics.
They include vaccinated and unvaccinated.
They include people who for years have been on both sides of the culture war.
Because more and more Americans are beginning to understand that for the good of our country, one cannot insist on getting one's way on every issue.
They understand that people can disagree and still respect each other.
You can be pro-choice.
Thank you.
And not think that pro-lifers are women hating zealots.
You can support the Second Amendment and not think that gun control advocates are totalitarians who hate freedom.
This is what I mean from independence.
It's more than being independent of two existing parties.
It's also independence from tribal thinking.
Let's pause there.
So it's having no position on the most polarizing issues of our day.
It's wonderful, I suppose, if you can say that my campaign has attracted both pro-choice people and pro-life people.
But what will that mean?
Well, they're getting along, you see.
They're getting along in other ways?
Exactly, like what?
Because most of them have also refused the vaccines?
Like, what are the Venn diagrams there?
I don't really know.
Well, the center of the Venn diagram is the charismatic faux populist leader, right?
All right, so we don't know how the pro-choice and pro-life followers are actually going to help him form policy.
Yeah, there's no hunch on how we're gonna reconcile abortion rights, Second Amendment issues, climate science.
It's like, yeah, it's know-nothing populism.
If you said, my campaign has attracted climate activists and climate skeptics, How will the climate skeptics influence your policy?
Like, what is he actually saying there?
The thing is that I think this can sound good to people, and it's gibberish, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's nonsensical.
And speaking of nonsensical, I'm realizing that Through this conversation, we've invoked Charles Eisenstein a couple times and we're focusing on him a little bit here.
Do you want to just say a couple sentences about who he is for anyone who might have never heard of him?
Yeah, I mean, you can search through our podcast feed, the archive for our episodes where we talk about him directly, but he is a long lauded New Age commentator who's written several very popular books that are, I would say, approaching a kind of intellectual Integrity but generally the sourcing is pretty bad and you know they're very galaxy brained in the sense that you know one of them is trying to sort of reinvent economics from the ground up.
First principles.
Yeah first principles and then another one is a full commentary on the entire environmental movement and what everybody should be thinking about and what everybody has to do like He really wants to be able to say the smartest thing about everything, no matter what it is.
And I think that came to the fore during COVID, when nine days after the pandemic was actually declared by the WHO, he wrote an essay called A Coronation for All, which was a play on words, of course, using the corona out of coronavirus.
And this essay was 9,000 words long.
He's not an epidemiologist.
He's not a virologist.
It also repurposed a lot of ideas from previous essays about other pandemics that fizzled really quickly.
So he was, he had this in waiting for a while.
Well, yeah, and the thing was, is that it was an incredibly distracting, very self-centered, Kind of overly emotional plea for people to kind of accept their place within the natural order of things and not resist the virus in the same way that they resist each other.
To not allow the virus to become a divisive phenomenon in the world, because actually, that's what the devils of human consciousness actually want.
And that if we can all awaken to our higher selves, we'll realize that the virus itself is probably not as dangerous as we think.
Well, and also that the wise path is to continue gathering together and celebrating love and life and beauty and accept the fact that more people might die during this period than might otherwise die, but that's really okay.
And so this essay got him massive exposure.
Yeah, Jack Dorsey tweets it out.
It shows up in Ivanka Trump's commencement speech to, I don't know, some college in Kentucky or something like that.
Incredible play.
Millions and millions of views.
And it really shot him to the top of the COVID contrarian intelligentsia.
And I don't know if Bobby Kennedy Jr.
was aware of his writing before that, but it certainly put him in the position to sort of be the poet-in-residence for, you know, the House of Kennedy.
So that's a little bit of background, but you can look through our archive for that.
Okay, so let's listen to what Bobby has to say about left and right being meaningless.
It's freedom from the reflex of having to take sides.
Instead of asking people, which side are you on, I'm going to ask people, what do you care about?
As if that doesn't define which side you're on.
Yeah, I mean, it would be nice if he had taken his own advice there on his Israel statement, eh?
What do your children need?
What is it like to be you?
What do you love?
Because our country is never going to heal if the formula, the only formula, is for one half of the population to vanquish the other half in a pitch battle.
I'm happy to say that the old political alignments are dissolving.
right and left.
The right and the left have been kind of all mixed up anyhow.
Wow.
It used to be the Democratic Party opposed censorship.
It was the Democratic Party that wanted to rein in the military and the CIA.
It was the Democratic Party that fought corporate influence.
Remember when Wall Street and big corporations all supported the Republicans?
Well, who is the liberal now?
And who's the conservative?
Who is the left?
Who is the right?
These labels make less and less sense.
And out of habit, we still group ourselves around the empty husks of those old alignments and threadbare ideologies.
But now that habit is breaking down.
That's why half the electorate no longer identifies with any political party.
And...
And 63% of Americans want an independent to run for president.
Of course, the outer structures of the party still dominate the political landscape.
But they're hollowed out from within, like a building full of termites.
What kind of new political structures might emerge from those ruins?
What is politics going to look like when it's no longer us versus them?
American democracy should be more than just picking between two candidates anointed by shadowy institutions.
Big oil funds the Republicans.
Big tech funds the Democrats.
Big pharma and the military contractors make sure to give to both.
Instead of two parties, we have this kind of uniparty, a two-headed monster that's constantly bickering with itself as it leads us all over a cliff.
Yeah, I mean, his analysis of the two-party death struggle is not wrong.
But what's his actual remedy?
Yeah, there isn't one.
We're not talking about a synthesis.
Like, there might be an interesting synthesis.
We're not talking about campaign finance reform?
Did you hear him say anything about that?
We're not talking about exposing dark money and some sort of legislative plan for eliminating the influence of dark money and of super PACs?
Like, where's the meat?
There's another riff in the speech about how he's not beholden to any of the same interests that the two parties are beholden to.
And I'm assuming he's suggesting that just because the lobbying infrastructure of Washington is set up to deal with the two-party system and not with him.
But of course, he's going to have to find his own funding as well.
And he's going to have to work with Yeah, I mean, that's always the promise of an outsider is they're always going to be able to say, well, I'm not I'm not already entrenched within this system that is so hopelessly riven with all of this lobbying influence, which and that's absolutely true.
It's it's scandalous how American democracy is completely owned by these corporate interests.
For the Charles Eisenstein figure prints that we were looking for, here I've pulled this up out of, actually this is Eisenstein's own announcement of his new job with the campaign.
He writes, For the last 20 years, I've worked mostly in the counterculture, contributing as best I could to the transformation of our civilization's defining myths.
The story of separation, the paradigm of progress through control, nature as other and so forth.
I would often say change starts from the inside.
Here it is.
The ideological core hollows out, leaving the superficial structures intact, like a termite-infested house that collapses when the moment comes at a mere touch.
And I think that phrase, at a mere touch, also gestures at the fact that at the center of Eisenstein's messaging for Bobby's campaign, there's the notion of the miraculous.
And actually, at the end of this speech, Bobby compares himself to Moses, who is, you know, coming to the ridge, looking out onto the horizon of the Holy Land, or the Promised Land, and realizing that he might not make it himself.
He also sort of elides himself into MLK Jr.
There's this notion that it really doesn't take much once everything is so fragile for, you know, the light to stream in.
You know, there's this perennial question about how a third party could break the deadlock and bring in some fresh perspectives, how it could actually mean that a lot of people feel like they finally have more of a choice than just voting for the lesser of two evils who are both entrenched in this corrupt system that we've been describing, and I really sympathize with that.
But the thing is, elections are really won and lost in America by incredibly small margins.
So between the electoral college, which I totally think we should do away with, and the gerrymandering and the voter suppression tactics of the GOP, all of which is carefully orchestrated to cover over the fact that they can't win majorities in the ways that would give them the kind of power that they have now if we had representational democracy, we all know that this just ends up coming down to a few swing states.
What is a swing state, really?
Well, it's a state in which a sliver of independents, moderates, and more often not particularly politically engaged voters have the power to shift the electoral college votes in that state one way or the other.
Besides this few thousand people here or there, most of the voting population is locked into how they're going to vote before any of the hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised, let alone spent on the extravagant campaigns and TV ads.
In 2016, it looked like a genius because despite every analyst and polling expert predicting Trump as having only a very slim outside chance of defeating Hillary, Bannon's strategy did it by flipping two-time Obama voters through the Rust Belt.
And the story goes that these mostly blue-collar workers felt economically abandoned by the Dems and were susceptible to this faux populist message that blamed the coastal elites and their obsession with identity politics.
Yeah, that checks out.
Obama has even sort of acknowledged as much and been regretful about this, especially
about abandoning that particular sector of the population of the country.
For people who get excited about third party candidates, the general claim is often that
the two main parties are indistinguishable because they're just the servants of corporations
and lobbyists.
But here's the thing, Bannon's big promise at CPAC was that the main priority of Trump's
tenure would be the dismantling of the administrative state.
That's a direct quote from him and it's something that's been said often.
This essentially means a hard push for deregulation by gutting federal agencies in charge of education, environmental protection, health and human services, labor protections, housing, basically anything that serves the welfare of the population.
Or tries to put guardrails on how big business pollutes, exploits, or cheats the country.
If Bobby actually is serious about this problem of regulatory control, I think he absolutely is, that that's genuine.
He's proposing a counter-argument to Bannon.
Not that the federal agencies should be gutted, but that they should be reformed altogether.
And that is just occurring to me seems like an incredibly tall order.
His position is much more from that particular angle where he wants to reform all of these organizations.
He wants to punish all these people who have contributed towards the kind of corruption that allowed someone like Anthony Fauci to have his authoritarian way.
With America.
What did Trump do?
Trump was coming more from being beholden to the Republican kind of anti-government ethos in which he just said, I'm going to appoint people to be heads of these agencies who are completely opposed to anything the agency might be doing that is of service to the country or that is limiting the profits of big corporations.
Not only that, so these are things Trump actually did during his presidency.
He interfered with how those agencies were operating, specifically to try to dismantle them a la Bannon's promise at CPAC.
Not only did he do that, he also abandoned multiple international treaties.
Trade deals, climate agreements, he destabilized Europe with his art of the deal posturing and the appointments he made with regard to how things were handled with NATO and the EU.
This undeniably strengthened Putin and his expansionist aggression, which gets us where we are now.
I mean, regardless of any other policy disagreements we may have had with Hillary Clinton, I'm confident in saying that none of those material steps would have been taken under her presidency.
And this, to me, really gives the lie to, I think, an often lazy and emotional claim that it doesn't really matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
It matters more than ever right now.
As we'll discuss in future episodes, a potential return of Trump or someone like him who would be willing to enact what the Heritage Foundation has outlined in a 920-page document that they collaborated with a lot of other think tanks on this, called Project 2025, will only take us further down exactly this road of dismantling the administrative state and also We'll seek to weaken any checks and balances on absolute presidential power.
Some of that is also the stacking of the courts that Trump has already been able to get a good headway on.
I think at best we can say that Bobby is correct in the abstract.
Zoomed out to 30,000 feet as he views the political deadlock.
Sure.
But as Naomi Klein says, the conspiracy theorist gets the feelings right, the big things right.
And the facts and the details wrong.
Who do you think it's going to continue to fool, Julian?
Who is he going to pull more votes from?
I mean, I think it's this ragtag coalition that we've described so far.
My sense right now is that his run is dangerous to the Democrats in that it does have this populist left-leaning tone, even though he, you know, people like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon are going to say that he's a man of the people.
Some of the policies that he is gesturing towards, however superficially, are a turnoff for the disillusioned right-leaning voters.
I can't imagine any anti-woke patriots watching that lengthy land acknowledgment at the beginning of his announcement and thinking that RFK is their guy.
