Robert F Kennedy, Jr isn’t backing down. You can’t get away from his voice or his endless content stream. He’s banked on tech world oligarch anti-vax mom, Nicole Shanahan, to nail down the VP slot. His Children’s Health Defense charity is casting doubt on whether polio was even a virus. And he keeps claiming he’s not against vaccines himself, but his messaging around it tells a different story.
It’s been a few months since we’ve checked up on Chaos Kennedy, so it’s high time we did: to look at polling, rhetoric, and charismatic technique.
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The only thing we know for sure is that Kennedy remaining in the race is going to have an impact, and for him, that might just be enough of a reason to stay in.
That might be what the hell he's doing.
♪♪ ♪♪
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I'm Matthew Rebski.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 204.
What the hell is RFK Jr.
doing?
RFK Jr.
is not backing down.
You can't get away from his voice or his endless content stream.
He's banked on tech world oligarch anti-vax mom Nicole Shanahan to nail down the VP slot.
His children's health defense charity is now casting doubt on whether polio was a virus.
It's been a few months since we've checked up on Khaos Kennedy, so it's high time we did
to look at polling, rhetoric, and charismatic techniques.
So the big news since last we covered Kennedy is his VP choice.
By now, listeners will probably all know that it is Nicole Shanahan.
Here's a quick thumbnail on her.
Shanahan is a lawyer.
She's 38, or just a little over half of Kennedy's age.
She was married to, but is now divorced from, Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Wall Street Journal reported that the split was related to a short affair that she had with Elon Musk.
That's a bit gossipy, but it's just so we get a sense of the circles that she has moved in.
While still married to her, Bryn was the major funder of her private foundation, which is called Baye Echo.
The Foundation's focus is on reproductive longevity, which is another way of saying biotech research into helping women get pregnant later in life.
It also positions itself as being about equality and criminal justice.
But shows no real track record in those areas.
Publicly, Shanahan is a staunch opponent of IVF, in vitro fertilization.
She's made public statements to the effects of it being, quote, the biggest lie ever told about women's health, and a for-profit enterprise that essentially overlooks the underlying health of women and environmental factors that impact fertility.
She's also a proponent of natural childbirth, And the plot perhaps predictably thickens because Shanahan has said publicly she spends about 60% of her time at BioEcho working on finding a cure for autism.
But with regard to IVF, is she saying that a main function of this treatment is to like paper over growing reproductive health issues?
Is that the deal?
Yeah, she's saying there are corporate incentives for doctors to push women in the direction of getting IVF because it's such a big moneymaker and in so doing, They overlook all kinds of other treatments, which would probably be more holistic and would look more at the environmental factors that influence fertility.
Right, okay.
Now, related to this, perhaps predictably, Shanahan has said that she herself was rejected as a poor candidate for IVF, which she describes as radicalizing her around women's equality.
She then ended up getting pregnant without IVF and had a daughter who subsequently has turned out to have autism.
She told Newsweek that she wholeheartedly attributes her daughter's condition to environmental toxins.
That's a quote.
So it's perhaps not tough to guess where she lands on childhood vaccines.
In classic anti-vaxxer style, when asked about it since she's become a VP candidate, Shanahan has said, no, no, no, she's not an anti-vaxxer.
Right before repeatedly debunked anti-vax claims about autism and the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines, the distortions of myocarditis vaccine risks relative to COVID infection, etc.
all come tumbling out of her mouth.
She also thinks that cell phone radiation needs to be looked at more closely because it may be contributing to the epidemic of chronic illness, which is a patented Bobby kind of I think a key plot point as well that she brings to Kennedy 24 is that she touts her early adopter usage of AI in her biotech career.
So she said in her VP nominee acceptance speech that AI is the answer to all of Kennedy's just asking questions themes about iatrogenic and environmental diseases.
So she's positioned as the person who can actually work on substantiating his scattershot innuendo.
So I think that's really good for him because he's not very good at it.
And I think it's one of these examples where Kennedy's alternative to corruption in the tech sphere, in this instance, is some idealized form of tech that will perfectly and impersonally replace the agencies that he wants to gut.
So, it's in the same vein of, you know, cryptocurrency will solve financial corruption.
So, Shanahan, I think, has a magic wand as far as Kennedy is concerned.
And also, she has a lot of cash.
It's pretty interesting that you say that, that he would turn to tech, because there's the other part of his message around fitness, which is always like getting back to our ancestral strength.
So there's this real dichotomy between always wanting to look at natural solutions and yet leaning on tech when it suits his message at that time.
Yeah, I agree.
Oh, yeah.
And he's deeply conflicted about tech too, right?
Because his whole thing is that there are all of these drones that are surveilling us at all times, that there's going to be like these nanobots and there's all sorts of ways that, you know, there's a there's a kind of turnkey totalitarianism which relies on big tech, which is also part of what's censoring him.
So Shanahan's conspiracy bingo about vaccines and autism and IVF and cell phones and chronic disease Dovetails quite nicely with Bobby's recent appearance on the totally sober and sane Glenn Beck Show, which I know both you and I watched, Matthew.
And, you know, his peak moment in that appearance saw him recycling his observation that school shootings in America coincide with the availability of SSRI antidepressants.
He kept reiterating, he's just asking questions so people shouldn't, you know, hang them out to dry on this.
He doesn't know for sure.
It could be violent video games.
And he also asserted that the NIH refuses to study what causes school shootings because they might make a big food or big pharma company angry.
It could also be the vaccines, of course.
But one thing that Bobby and Glenn Beck made a point to underline at least two or three times that they're absolutely sure of So, one of the things that happens when he layers these things together is that all of them are plausibly deniable because there's so many.
It could be this, it could be this, it could be that, but sort of wrapped up all together is, okay, so let's Let's pathologize or make vaccines into dangerous interventions.
Let's pathologize autistic people.
Let's say that SSRIs, which are life-saving for many people with mood disorders and do have side effects that everybody studies, of course, let's wrap that up with school shootings.
Like you layer them all together and it creates this kind of like, I don't know, these circles of hell, of pathologized and, you know, sort of unworthy people or people who are going down the wrong path or people who are stupid.
It's really, really, it's just such an ugly thing when he does that.
Yeah.
And, you know, Matthew, I could imagine sitting in a late 1990s yoga studio lobby having a conversation with the overly loquacious like post-yoga class.
You know, very open person who's just bemoaning the state of the world, right?
And who's just saying, oh, look at these school shootings.
Look at these violent video games.
Look at these unnatural ways of dealing with depression when really you should be like, you know, using mindfulness meditation and, you know, kale smoothies or what have you, right?
It's a very similar, all of those things are woven into this notion of like, there's a There's an unnatural set of factors that are evidence of how we've lost our way, and look, it all nets out in school shootings.
So we need to look at that more closely.
I'm not saying, you know.
So the last thing I should add about Shanahan was that she was both a creative and financial driver of that now infamous Super Bowl ad that the Kennedy campaign ran.
Which reprised elements of former President JFK's 1960s ad and annoyed his family members no end.
Kennedy!
Kennedy!
Kennedy for me!
Kennedy!
Kennedy!
Do you want a man for president who's seasoned through and through?
A man who's old enough to know and young enough to do?
Well, it's up to you!
It's up to you!
It's strictly up to you!
Kennedy!
Yeah, there it is.
So I think reprise is a little bit kind, Julian, and maybe so is annoyed.
So the American Value Super Pack basically stole and repurposed the original animation and jingle released 64 years ago, but then just pasted RFK Jr.'s face over the face of Uncle Jack,
but it also left in one image of Jack and then an image of his sister, Eunice Shriver.
And so the day after the Super Bowl, Kennedy got flamed by his cousin, Bobby Shriver,
over that image, who tweeted that his mom, quote, "'Would be appalled by his deadly healthcare views.
"'Respect for science, vaccines, and healthcare equity "'were in her DNA,' unquote."
So Kennedy apologized to his family on Twitter, saying that the super PAC that produced it
hadn't coordinated with the campaign as per campaign finance rules.
So we're meant to believe that Shanahan, who would have been in talks with Kennedy
at around that time in preparation for the announcement of her role as VP,
didn't discuss the 1960s parody ad with Kennedy at all, prior to its airing on the biggest platform
in the universe.
It just didn't come up in their texts at all.
So, who knows how that worked.
But, I mean, overall, the ad was a really weird choice for the forward-facing Shanahan.
But, I don't know, maybe she's an aesthetic genius.
She's remixing nostalgia with some sort of postmodern flair.
She's downplaying the potentially dystopic aspects of her AI dreams.
But on the other hand, I think she might be just super naive or maybe 38 years young with no real historical sense because the New York Times profile after that ad ran says that the idea for something retro came from a friend and that Shanahan just wasn't too worried about the family.
They might be upset, but some might be thrilled, she speculated.
What a beautiful homage to this wonderful family, unquote.
It's so innocent.
It's lovely.
Yeah.
So, reports say that she funded that endeavor to the tune of between $9 and $12 million, including the cost of running it, in addition to donating $500,000 to the campaign through a super PAC prior to that.
The day after being announced as VP, Shanahan poured in another $2 million towards trying to get the ticket on the ballot in all 50 states.
Now, Shanahan, it turns out, I looked this up, is the richest VP candidate since Nelson Rockefeller was successfully nominated by Gerald Ford as his replacement in 1974 after Nixon resigned.
And we also know that Shanahan was not a favorite among many RFK fans.
And so that brings us to the question about his campaign overall.
And one of the biggest questions is whether RFK will siphon votes from Trump or Biden, because we know he's not going to win.
And this was a hot topic a few weeks ago when Rita Palma, who was hired as a ballot access consultant for the Kennedy campaign, said that Kennedy's presidential run's real focus is helping to re-elect Donald Trump.
Now, Palma was fired shortly after a video leaked of her stating this in front of a crowd, yet the reason for her dismissal is also because she falsely identified herself as the New York State Director for the campaign.
Yeah, they fired her immediately from that ballot access consultancy role, but they also said that she hadn't been speaking at a campaign event.
So, they really wanted a lot of distance from that statement, but I still think it's significant that anyone in his organizing orbit is thinking aloud that way.
Right.
Now, the question of his role in this election is super important, so let's look at a little research.
The Hill Decision Desk HQ found that for the first time, Biden and Trump are tied at 41.3%
with Kennedy pulling in 7.7% of the votes. This figure is based on 130 recent polls,
so it's sort of a meta-analysis in that sense.
Now, where will these voters go?
According to Axios, pollsters asked RFK voters if they'd vote for Trump or Biden if their candidate pulled out of the race.
That turned out in Biden's favor.
So 47% said they'd vote for Trump, 29% for Biden.
Extrapolating from that data, it means that Kennedy remaining in the race is pulling more support from Trump than Biden.
All of this with the caveat that we know how fucked up polls can be and how little to rely on them, but there's still a bellwether and I think we should pay attention.
Right.
And even all that said, it's not that clean of an issue, because at the moment, Kennedy is only on the ballot in Utah and Michigan.
He just added California, so that's three states.
He's completed signature gathering in at least six other states, and one PAC claims it has enough to gain access to three more.
Michigan access is important, though, given that Biden is struggling there due to the state's large Arab-American population.
So if you didn't catch this, in February, 13% of Democratic voters went with uncommitted as a protest vote for Biden's continued support of Israel.
Biden also signed an aid package that sent $26 billion to Israel last week, but to be clear, that was $17 billion going to the Israeli government, which we're sure is going to use it for some sort of defense.
Another $9 billion is earmarked for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, but because of this, many Arab Americans are feeling further betrayed.
So, given all these conditions, plus the Complete shitshow that the media is undergoing right now because of all the college protests.
Kennedy could swing the state toward Trump for sure, and it's one that Biden needs to secure a victory.
Yeah, more than 200,000 Arab Americans in Michigan, the majority historically leaning Democrat.
Biden carried Michigan in 2020 by about 150,000 votes in total.
As I said, we know polls are unreliable, but there's a lot of factors here, and given how tight this race is, we can't be certain what effect Kennedy will have.
We do know even Trump says Kennedy will hurt both candidates, though Trump of course thinks he'll hurt Biden more, because that's how he'll always think about things.
The only thing we know for sure is that Kennedy remaining in the race is going to have an impact, and for him, that might just be enough of a reason to stay in.
So, this is disturbing in terms of where exactly Bobby is locating himself politically on January 6th and presidential pardons more broadly.
The first week of April, Kennedy's campaign sent out a mass email, which I will quote from here, courtesy of NBC News.
This is the reality that every American citizen faces, from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange, That's a real spectrum of figures.
sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties,
please help our campaign call out the illiberal actions of our very own government.
That's a real spectrum of figures.
So, like, is there a world in which lumping them together makes sense?
Or, I mean, is it about legitimizing the J6 people as whistleblowers or researchers or something like that?
To me, it's a shining example of this somewhat new concept of diagonalism, which we've talked about a few times, in which the unexpected left-to-right political alliances are formed around conspiratorial and populist pseudo-politics, so the seemingly free-associated List of people, as you flag, Matthew, are all cast as victims.
What they all have in common is that they're victims of an anti-free speech authoritarian elite.
It's why when Bobby went on Bill Maher this past Friday, as Derek will discuss in a bit,
he tried to argue that Biden was a bigger threat to democracy than Trump because he colluded with big tech
to censor anti-vax and COVID misinformation.
So he's opposed to free speech and that's the real threat to democracy.
And you know, Maher keeps trying to push back.
It's just, we'll talk about it in a bit.
And this is how conspiritualists try to posture as freedom fighters.
But the connective tissue is predictably thin, right?
If we look at this Snowden, Edward Snowden leaked highly classified documents
exposing government surveillance programs and he's hiding out in Russia.
Julian Assange, who anyway is Australian, so I'm not sure what American civil liberties he has.
Yeah.
He's hiding out from sexual offense charges in London.
And whatever anyone thinks about the moral valences of their digital espionage, those two guys, they're in a different class than the dudes in MAGA hats who smeared their own shit through the Capitol while baying for the blood of legislators.
And regarding constitutional rights, only 15 of the over 1,265 insurrectionists charged for January 6th are still in pretrial detention.
And of that group, Two are previously convicted murderers.
One is charged with setting off an explosive in that tunnel filled with police officers.
One with firing a weapon on that day.
One with plotting to kill FBI employees involved in his arrest while he was on pretrial release.
So, I'm not really sure what the stripping of constitutional liberties amounts to here.
And then, of course, there's also the language problem of calling those January 6th folks activists.
Well, they're not the social justice type, at least, I suppose.
But I guess it's different from patriots.
He didn't use the word patriots in the email.
I mean, look, I could see calling someone peacefully protesting with a Stop the Steal placard an activist of some kind, misguided to be sure.
But I think you lose that designation when you're indicted in the first violent breaching of the Capitol in 200 years.
The campaign walked back the content of that email, claiming it had been inserted by a now-dismissed marketing contractor, and it did not reflect the views of RFK Jr.
Rather, it had just slipped through the normal approval process, which is interesting.
But Kennedy had actually told Neil Cavuto back in March on Fox News that he would pardon Assange and Snowden if elected.
He then played coy on the rioters in response to Cavuto asking, saying he would not speak about whether or not he'd pardon them until after he wins.
And this was also after the Fox host had used Trump's language about freeing the January 6 hostages, which Bobby did not push back on one bit.
He did, however, take the opportunity to mention Ross Ulbricht as a likely pardon.
Now, in case anyone has forgotten, Ulbricht was given a life sentence for creating and running the dark web marketplace called Silk Road.
Kennedy characterized his sentence as being a way to punish Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
But before it closed down, of Silk Road's products were illegal drugs.
Okay, so is crypto freedom Kennedy's only real hook into supporting Ulbricht, or is
there something else going on there?
I mean, again, with the diagonalism as far as I can tell, because back in May of 2023,
turns out Kennedy gave the keynote address at a conference held by Bitcoin magazine.
And that was actually his first public appearance as a presidential candidate.
He said in that speech that he got interested in Bitcoin because of the Canadian truckers having used it to get around financial restrictions imposed on them by, you guessed it, tyrannical government.
He framed Bitcoin as symbolic of freedom and civil liberties, and he vowed there to look into cases like Ulbricht's as potentially representing a government crackdown on crypto, and that he would consider pardoning him.
So he said that in the same speech.
Now, it turns out, too, that Bobby's VP pick, Shanahan, is now in a committed relationship with someone named Jacob Sturmwasser, who's an advisor at a Bitcoin software company called Lightning Labs.
So there are layers of connection here.
But to go back to the April 4th walkback of that email that compared the January 6th insurrectionists to Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, the very next day, Kennedy came out and made a statement including the following quote.
I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there's little evidence of a true insurrection.
They observe that the protesters carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest peacefully.
Now this, of course, is inaccurate in so many ways, but we can start with the fact that four of those convicted and sentenced insurrectionists were actually carrying guns.
Many others were armed with axes, hockey sticks, pitchforks, stun guns, knives, bats, bear spray, and pepper spray.
but no real weapons, I guess. Right. Then there were the Oath Keepers, just on the other side of
the Virginia border for tactical and legal reasons, gathered on that day in what they called
a quick reaction force with a huge cache of guns and ammo.
Perhaps Bobby needs a reminder about Oath Keeper founder Stuart Rhodes being sentenced to 18
years in prison for seditious conspiracy and evidence tampering.
I mean, Kennedy is right, perhaps, about the lack of overall planning.
I don't think we have any evidence of coordination or communication between the Oathkeeper types and, like, the regular folks who are there to livestream their hijinks to parlor.
Roger Stone is in a fancy hotel talking to both groups, to all groups, I guess, but he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, right?
I mean, Roger Stone is in all the sheds and he's been in all the sheds for quite some time.
He was instrumental in concocting the fake elector scheme here as well, in terms of like Trump's various ways of trying to hold on to power.
And he's in the background as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys coordinate with one another.
I went into detail on all of this in my Swamp Creatures bonus episode about him.
Right.
But look, Stuart Rhodes and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio got the longest sentences so far for January 6th because of the extent of their planning and coordination.
But yeah, you're right.
The lumpenmass of MAGA hooligans were not taking highly strategic marching orders on specifically how to enact a literal coup.
But in that new post-walkback statement that I was just referring to, Kennedy also repeated right-wing talking points about the weaponization of the DOJ, the IRS, the SEC, the FBI against political opponents.
And he vowed to appoint a special counsel, if elected, to look into any potential abuses of the justice system in prosecuting the insurrectionists.
Saying he opposes Trump And everything he stands for, Bobby nonetheless added that he is disturbed by the weaponization of government against him.
So I guess we can, we can imagine who might also be on his potential pardon list if he was to sit in the Oval Office.
Now to round out this whole saga of the email and the walk back and the statement, four days later on April 9th, Kennedy was on Chris Cuomo's Newsnight TV show saying that he was mistaken.
in creating a false impression that he does not share in the general consensus that January 6th was, and I quote, a traumatic day in our nation's history, that there were police who were beaten, who were assaulted, that there were congressional members who were threatened, that there were people who were intending to obstruct a peaceful transfer of power in this country, and that's not okay.
Kennedy said, it's not okay even if you believe the election was stolen.
When pressed in that appearance on how he would characterize the events of that day, he said, it was a protest that turned into a riot.
I think there were people there who wanted an insurrection, but I don't know what your definition of an insurrection is.
Yeah, he's blowing in the wind, right?
And lots of walkbacks.
He didn't mean that thing about COVID being engineered to spare the Chinese and the Ashkenazi Jews, I guess, right?
Of course not.
His ballot access person didn't mean he was out to spoil Biden's run.
Never heard of that person.
He didn't mean to piss off his family with a very weird Super Bowl ad,
and he definitely didn't mean to imply that J6ers were simply exercising free speech.
♪ Kennedy was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher last
Friday, and there's a few moments worth discussing
to put where Kennedy is in the context of the campaign.
So first off, Maher asked him why he was running for president after stating his dismay about where his party went.
He said that on the surface, Biden and Trump appear very different, but then he went here.
But the actual issues that they're talking about, they differ with each other, is actually a really narrow Overton window.
It's, you know, it's mainly cultural issues, it's abortion, it's guns, it's the border, it's transgender.
And it's not democracy also?
I mean, I've heard you, let me quote you, you say, I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy.
You've also said the greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns.
But Trump did much more than just question election returns, did he not?
Is he not responsible for actually scheming to overturn that election?
And isn't that a fundamental difference?
Yeah, but are you going to try to put me in a position to defend Donald Trump?
No, I'm just trying to say... I'm saying... No, what I'm trying to do is...
I'm trying to help you run for president.
That's what I'm trying to do.
So first off, Kennedy depicts himself as a medical freedom guy who really cares about health.
That's how he built his public profile as an environmental lawyer.
That's how his star has risen in the anti-vaccine.
Yet he says there's a narrow Overton window between Biden and Trump in that they mostly
squabble about culture war issues like abortions and guns.
And here's the thing, women's healthcare and guns are two of the most important topics when it comes to public health.
And so by pushing them off into the culture war, Kennedy is demeaning both of these topics as if they're a sideshow to the real issues which, he later states, are freedom of speech and medical freedom.
I think what this is really telling me is that I think we all have to be more careful about using the phrase culture war because it's becoming a kind of throwaway, cynical categorization.
Like, it's the site of inconsequential issues that can, you know, be too easily manipulated by bad faith political actors.
It's like what's become of the term online, as if online life is inconsequential.
I mean, five years ago, Culture War referred to the effectiveness of identity politics, or whether DEI trainings were useful or cringe, or whether Milo Yiannopoulos should be kicked off of college campuses.
Like, reproductive rights just, they aren't in that category, and January 6th isn't either, or encampments on campuses.
I felt in watching this that Kennedy really knew that he had an open ear for this blending of categories because Marr leans into it as well.
He's opening the show with really bad dad jokes about how the Columbia students will leave their tents only when their cell phones die, so it's no big deal, but they should hold on to the tents for later after they don't graduate.
And the message is that protesting what a growing global consensus is calling a genocide is like a social justice warrior sideshow.
It's not serious.
So you don't even need to send in the cops.
They're snowflakes and they'll melt themselves, right?
And the interesting thing about this show, we're going to go on and cover more of Kennedy here, Derek, but I think he benefited by being the not most melted guest on Marr that night because there's some guy named Scott Galloway.
I've never heard of him.
Apparently he's a New York University money prof. He made our candidate look sane by saying that students were rebelling about fake things they didn't understand because they're not having enough sex.
And then this incomprehensible statement, quote, it's easy to poke fun at these kids, but history has a way of repeating itself.
And this is how it starts in 30s Germany, a progressive community, a thriving gay community, excellent academic institutions.
And how it started was it was was fashionable to wear a brown shirt and mock students at
the University of Vienna.
And I don't know what he's saying.
Like, is he saying brown shirts were a gay trend in 1930s Vienna, but that the color
turned the gay people mean or something?
Or that Jewish voices for peace, which is like very progressive and super queer friendly,
are like the brown shirts?
Something gets lost there.
I don't know who Galloway is, but I think Kennedy really needs to rise to his challenge and, you know, blame the encampments on GMOs in the university cafeteria food or something like that.
Like, Monsanto soybeans are causing chronic diabetic protesting.
Calloway has a podcast with Kara Swisher focused on tech and I definitely don't agree with him a lot.
He's been lately trying to fill the masculinity space, meaning like how to instruct young men.
But I wouldn't write off everything he says because the same week he was on Morning Joe talking about a very complicated topic, but the fact that why are students protesting now when they didn't When they didn't protest against Syria and the murder of 100,000 Muslims, why are they not out against the Uyghurs?
So, you know, I wouldn't write him off as a goober, but I would say that I definitely don't agree, and he does track right overall with some of his politics, and sometimes he sort of shorthands himself with the comments like you suggest here, which doesn't actually reflect the totality of his thinking.
Again, not trying to defend him, but I actually do think he does try to play centrist a bit, and he does bring up good points.
Sounds like he was a bit of a loose cannon.
I didn't watch that part of the Marr episode, but in looking at that quote, Matthew, it does sound like he's saying it's easy to poke fun at these kids, but that they may actually be... He's saying that it became fashionable to wear a brown shirt and mock students at the University of Vienna, which is how the Nazi movement kind of got off the ground.
He's saying it's easy to poke fun at these kids, but...
You know, actually, maybe we should remember that it's important to have students protesting for democratic freedoms.
Okay, well, the rest, I mean, he's there to, like, demean the encampment protests.
Like, that's his, he's not saying we should take them seriously.
He's saying that, and I don't know who's mocking who here in his statement.
I mean, it's quite confusing.
Oh no, he is saying to take them seriously.
He very much says take the students seriously.
The thing, though, is he says take them seriously and then send the cops in and then to expel them from school, which is happening at Columbia.
And the problem overall with this is that you have very real issues like taking over a building in Columbia.
Last night here in Portland, 50 students took over Portland State University Library, and not only did they break in and break the glass, but they completely trashed the stacks of books.
They've sprayed graffiti everywhere.
And so we're in this really volatile moment where you have... I support protests on college.
I'm really upset that the media has come out and saying, basically, don't protest at all, because that's bullshit.
But in some campuses, you have Protest, which the professors are joining the students, and that's a good example of democracy.
And in some of them, you have students who are actually defacing property.
And what happens with someone like Galloway is they look at those and think they exemplify all of the protests, and then they make those sorts of statements that you see on Marr.
And that really sucks because it doesn't reflect the totality of the protest movement.
And that's what happens in this media environment.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, and also when I look back at that quote, I feel like he is he's describing the U.S.
as being like the 30s in Germany.
And how in the 30s in Germany you had this progressive community, a thriving gay community, excellent academic institutions.
I think he's sort of playing both sides here a little bit where he's saying some things that are critical of the students, but he's also saying, hey, let's not be too quick to mock them because that's how things went down in Nazi Germany.
I don't think he's saying that the students are edging us towards Nazi Germany.
I think he's saying mocking students as a brown-shirted fascist is part of what leads us to Nazi Germany.
So maybe we have a difference of opinion on the interpretation.
Yeah, maybe we should ask him.
Well, another one.
I mean, Marr, as I've said before, I used to listen to a lot.
And Kennedy brought me back to watching his show, which I don't enjoy anymore, unfortunately, because he's gone a little off the rails to me, mostly around the medical stuff.
But I'm glad he pushed back on Kennedy about democracy being on the ballot.
And he brings up great points.
But then he moves from journalist role to booster.
By saying in that first clip, I'm trying to help you run for president, which works in Kennedy's favor because then he pivots to the free speech issue and then casts himself as a victim of the Biden administration and Maher never presses him on that point, so that gets lost.
Kennedy claims to have been censored hundreds of times by the Biden administration and states it was due to COVID criticism.
But what he never says, and what he never could say, is that he's been spreading medical misinformation around COVID and vaccines.
We know he's not just asking questions, and we've extensively covered Kennedy's anti-vax propaganda in the past.
But before we get to more of what he spread on Mars Show, this piece during the free speech section stood out that I want to clip.
So he says that he doesn't think that Biden is going to dismantle the republic, which I guess is a good thing.
But then he starts a narrative around the censorship he is supposedly at the receiving end of.
Once you cede a power like that to a government, it will never Give it back.
And it will always ultimately abuse it to the maximum extent possible.
So, you know, today they're letting pharmaceutical companies censor doctors and scientists who differ with the official orthodoxies on COVID.
But I've been around long enough to know that once the big tech firms know that they can get away with that, the oil companies will be back next in line to censor their critics.
The coal companies, the chemical companies, the processed food industry, everybody else is gonna get in line.
Once we say that's okay, we've let a genie out of the bottle.
And that happened during the Biden administration.
That opening bit, I think, on Slippery Slopes is crucial to his technique.
And I'm gonna talk about how he does that with spirituality in a bit.
But I think he's really good at this plausible framing abstraction because he's not wrong about, you know, once a government gets away with X, that
right will never return.
But he doesn't apply it to the most obvious modern instantiation, which is like austerity
and the gutting of the welfare state.
Because the real slippery slope that Kennedy's libertarianism and his anti-vax fundraising
actually benefits from is the relentless erosion of social welfare.
So austerity and medical services, declines in union rights, food stamps, housing support, cutbacks in social services and libraries, urban planning and transit.
The real slippery slope, I think, is people having their expectations of care and cooperation and being able to know things clearly, lowered bit by bit, which forces them into his territory of do your own research and gain your medical sovereignty.
So in other jags, he'll rattle off all of the government agencies he's simply gonna cancel and then rebuild.
So the CDC, the NIH, the FDA.
These are agencies that took decades to build, but only, you know, it would take an executive order to destroy.
And that is a real slippery slope because those things don't get rebuilt if they get damaged.
And it's really dangerous that basically two of the three candidates now will do that.
If Trump does follow Project 2025, those same agencies will be gutted and destroyed.
Now, just last week, Trump came out and said that he was kind of pissed that Heritage is trying to strong-arm their way into choosing his administration if he wins.
So maybe that's a good sign in all of this terror right now, but the fact that so much emphasis on Deconstructing and basically obliterating these agencies is really, really dangerous.
And when you listen to Kennedy, you know, anti-vax doctors are being censored.
That's his statement.
When the overwhelming majority of evidence supports COVID vaccines.
Now, again, to his credit, Marr does end up defending vaccines.
But did you notice that he started with pharmaceutical companies and without pausing, pivoted to big tech, getting away with it, then runs down all the scary bigs, oil, coal, chemical, processed food.
It's like a slow Gish Gallop, not like the busyness of Russell Brand, but he has this measured cadence about it.
And throw out all the scary industries, which really do have problems as we know, but let me put them all into one box under the banner, Biden will do this.
Also, the genie-out-of-the-bottle metaphor is a bit weird.
I mean, pharmaceutical and oil companies don't need wishes.
They have lobbyists.
Yeah, and think tanks and all of these people, you know, speaking for them on Capitol Hill.
Come on.
I think he needs metaphors like that to indicate, like, uncontrollable evil without sounding too QAnon.
I also want to point out the hypocrisy of Kennedy coming out as a free speech warrior, saying it's the amendment all the others depend on, and stating that these anti-vax doctors are being censored when he said what I'm about to play last June during his health freedom roundtable, which featured Joe Mercola and Sherry Tampeni and Mickey Willis and Sayer G. So for context, Kennedy mentions what he wants to do to scientists who sat on two governmental committees.
One was VRBPAC, which is the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and ACIP, which is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
There's millions and millions of just really cool things that we're going to be able to do, including You know, blackballing the scientists who, you know, worked on ACIP and approved a lot of these, you know, these interventions that should not have been brought on without using evidence-based medicine.
If you're sitting on those committees, on VRBAC and ACIP, and you're allowing medications through the gate, you have a responsibility.
You have a responsibility to protect American health.
If you are not living up to that responsibility, you should be forbidden from serving on any federal medical commission ever again, lifetime ban.
And you should be at least penalized for a long period of time against, I'm saying at least eight years.
I'm from receiving any federal grant for any purpose.
So there's Mr. Freedom of Speech threatening to blackball scientists, researchers, and public health officials on these committees who are all some of the leading experts on vaccinology and public health because they allowed the COVID vaccines to be administered without being properly tested, which we know is bullshit because they were all properly tested.
And this makes what's coming next all the more troubling because Maher gets into COVID, and Maher does express his disdain for people wearing masks outside and agreed with Kennedy that he's against vaccine mandates, but then Maher brings up Kennedy speaking on Lex Friedman's podcast saying there's no safe and effective vaccines, and this is how Kennedy responds.
I made that statement on Lex Reitman podcast.
Yes.
And it was an answer to a question that Lex had asked me about, are there any vaccines?
And if you go back and look at this, because that statement has been misused.
I would never say that.
What I said was, he asked me, are there any vaccines that are safe and effective?
And I said, it appears like some of the live virus vaccines appear to be both safe and effective.
And then I said, there's no vaccines that are safe and effective, and I was going to continue that sentence if you ask for the product to be measured against other medical products with placebo-controlled double-blind studies.
Lex interrupted me before I said anything.
All right, then there's the explanation.
Way to let him off the hook, Bill.
So, did you notice he says it appears like some of the live virus vaccines are safe and effective?
That means he's saying inactivated vaccines are not safe and effective, and these are vaccines for polio, which I guess, as you flagged earlier, is not a virus, whooping cough, rabies, hepatitis A, typhoid, cholera, plague, and the flu.
We know all of these vaccines are safe and effective with the caveat that the flu vaccine's efficacy varies from year to year.
We also know that mRNA vaccines are also safe and effective, so even right here he's spreading misinformation with that omission and Mar does not press him on any of that.
And the thing is, the live virus vaccine reference is going back decades, and we don't use them anymore because those are the ones that actually do have a history of from time to time ending up causing really, really bad side effects, especially the polio one.
And then he's just trotting out his talking points.
Which is this randomized control of placebo double-blind trials that have never been tested, blah, blah, blah, which ignores the entire history of vaccine science, everything that, the interlocking web of evidence that builds from vaccine to vaccine as we have enacted probably the most spectacularly successful advance in medical history.
He just ignores all of it and uses this stupid talking point of, well, we've never taken a group of kids and let them, you know, Have whooping cough and die and see how they do on placebo next to this group who are on the vaccine that has, you know, essentially saved millions of lives.
Okay, where I'd like to end with this last segment is with a zoom out to focus on the Kennedy Spiritual Horizon and take a look at a particular charismatic technique that I believe he's not unique at deploying, but I think he's really good at.
And, you know, I've looked at a lot of tape through this lens, And so I'm going to unpack two aspects that I've touched on a little bit before, but they appear to me sharper now and a little bit more melded together.
So first of all, Kennedy constructs for his followers a contradictory spirituality that's rooted in tradition, but it's also freed by self-direction.
And ultimately, it's so vague that it can be used to emotionally authenticate any position that he takes because it's about him.
Secondly, he slips into his spirituality mode consistently in his appearances.
And that creates a kind of charismatic rhythm that locks listeners in.
I think it's hypnotic.
I think it love bombs.
I think it tazes the listener with the sparks of God.
Okay, so first, about the contradictions of his spirituality.
Here he is talking to Jordan Peterson.
Now, this is seven months ago, but it's the best sort of encapsulation of his various positions.
So we'll take it here in four chunks.
Have you stepped outside of the 12-step ethos into a more classic domain of spirituality?
And how do you relate that to the political?
Yeah, I mean, I came from, you know, a really firm sort of, you know, base of, you know, Catholic schools, Catholic piety.
I mean, my family went to church twice a day during the summertime, every day.
We went, we said the rosary every night on our knees, you know, we said prayers at every at every meal before and after.
So there was a consciousness of, you know, of a kind of present and intervening God
in our, throughout our lives, my life.
So I had kind of a basis in that kind of orthodoxy.
I just wanna underline that this message is perfect, at least where it starts out for the seekers
who are drawn to him, because unlike a lot of people younger than him,
He's had this orthodox, as he describes, and very structured religious life to start out with.
Now, of course, this is in his telling, because what we're not hearing here is that he's the third of 11 children, and before the assassination, his dad is constantly on the road.
So we're not talking about a quiet and contemplative house, but a ton of traffic control that breaks out into football games on the lawn, sort of randomly.
But nonetheless, the story that he tells is mass twice per day.
Okay, and I'm still not sure I buy that because that's like monastic level attendance.
And then the rosary every night.
So, he has this discipline foundation.
Very good start for all of the optimizers out there who really want to get on a schedule.
But he's also a rugged individualist, right?
So, he goes through then a period of disillusionment and wandering.
And of course, we can say sin.
When you're an addict, you're living against conscience, and when you do that, you're pushing God out of your life.
So, you know, God became really a distant concept to me during the years that I was That I was an addict, an active addict, and if you had asked me, I guess, at that time, do I believe in God, I'd say yeah, but I had no sense of any kind of spiritual experience or authentic religious experience happening in my life.
So, there's the prodigal turnaround that comes next.
He becomes a sponge for every kind of spiritual ideal.
If you ask me where I am on organized religion today, I'm like a sponge.
I take whatever I can out of any.
I read a lot.
I read about other religions, and I'm like a sponge.
I take the wisdom out of each thing, out of each source, and try to integrate the things that I find useful into my
own cosmology.
I'm the least doctrinaire person, and I think orthodoxies are dangerous wherever they are.
I think whether they're religious or secular, orthodoxies are often hateful and sometimes
lethal, and being doctrinaire is kind of the enemy of civility and community ultimately.
So here's what's absolutely crucial about Kennedy, I think, which is that he never gets specific about the sponged beliefs or values that he's taken in.
Like, he's not going to tell you.
How religion impacts his views on science or medicine or gender or cultural issues because he's gone beyond orthodoxies.
And that's also great for the manosphere set he has such a pull on because these are guys who are not generally interested in vows or rules or canon law or making sure you go to confession before going to mass or really thinking hard about using birth control Or, in Russell Brand's case, he just got baptized over the weekend, feeling remorse and repentance about a career of alleged sexual assault.
You know, and good for them.
I mean, why should they obey stodgy rules when all they really want is the feeling of justification and authority?
So I think it's really good for Kennedy that he's moved beyond orthodoxies, because as a more traditional Catholic, he himself ran up against painful contradictions.
Now, I've touched on this before.
In 2005, he published a children's book about St.
Francis of Assisi, which opens with a description of how he would kneel beside his wife at the children's bed every night to recite the prayer of St.
Francis.
But we know via reporting that in the years he was kneeling beside Mary, he was also recording his adultery body count in journals.
So there's a 2001 diary in which he confessed to 37 affairs all over North America as he's on the road campaigning for clean water.
Kennedy has never refuted this reporting, which came out two years after Richardson died by suicide, reportedly distraught over his infidelity.
So however he's living now, Kennedy doesn't have the pressure of a pious Catholic facade to maintain, and I think that's also perfect for the Lex Freedmans and whoever else is interviewing him, because who doesn't have youthful stories?
But the question is, what has replaced the orthodoxy?
And after engaging with hundreds of hours of video, audio, written content, it seems to me that his spiritual jargon rotates around two ideas—surrender and centeredness.
So, surrender comes up when he's talking about his 12-step theology, but here he is telling Peterson about centeredness.
Now, how does the spirituality that you've been pursuing, that's helped you stay on the straight and narrow, let's say, on the behavioral path, how does that inform your political enterprise?
Well, I mean, my spiritual discipline keeps me centered, which is, I think, where I need to be, you know, where I don't.
I feel like, you know, God's in charge, he has a plan, and if he's not, and if the world appears to be the way it is, and just that, then we're all screwed anyway.
So I have to live as if God has a plan, and my challenge is to put my most deeply held values first, and my relationship with my higher power and belief system has to be the most important thing in my life.
And that, you know, everything I do has to come ultimately out of a spiritual place.
And that, you know, and when I'm spiritually centered, you know, I'm much more powerful, much more able to affect the world.
The Earth, the world around me, the material part of the world.
Abraham Lincoln said something to the effect that if he had six hours to cut down a mighty oak tree, that he'd spend five of the hours sharpening the axe.
And I think that is true, that if you're spiritually centered, you can wield a power that things become kind of effortless, that monumental tasks occasionally become effortless.
He's centered in spirituality.
It has many reference points.
It's got lots of, lots of word salad.
There's lots, there's bitter greens in there.
There's, there's, there's lettuce.
There's, there's a few different dressings.
It's yeah.
When pressed on details, this is what comes out, right?
But there's nothing doctrinaire in it, and that's great.
And the universalism is vague, which also means it's unknowable and unaccountable.
It's solipsistic.
He knows he's in it when he's in it, and that's all you need to know.
And these vague properties become a crucial reference point for his credibility.
Okay, so that, I think, is a pretty good encapsulation of the content of Kennedy's spiritual aura and how he talks about it.
But equally important is the form in which it's deployed.
And to get into this, I'm going to refer to our episode from last week with Neil Brennan in which we were talking about his recent episode with Joe Rogan.
And I commented last week that what really struck me about Brennan on Rogan was this double register of their conversation.
Because they spent two hours wandering through a kind of newsy, op-ed style, smorgasbord of issues, but then they slipped into a concluding half hour of intimate friendship and sharing, prompted by Rogan saying that he suffers from anxiety in the evenings when he's high.
And then Neil is able to share about his own journey and suddenly everything gets a little bit more rich, at least for me.
And I could feel the friendliness and the receptivity between them.
The prickliness was gone.
The grievance was gone.
The fragility is gone.
They're not calling on Jamie to look up basic facts about whether fluoride is poisoning us all because they are talking to each other about deeper issues.
And so I started thinking that there's a contrast there that seems to characterize prominent male podcasting spaces with Joe Rogan experience at the absolute pinnacle, setting the tone and expectations.
It's a rhythm of politics and opinionating set against deeper moments of connection and bonding.
There's a moment in which the parasocial warmth balances out and maybe erases the more paranoid world.
It's a time-stopping moment.
And with Rogan and Brennan, I think you can feel it because the connection is historical and personal and it's compelling.
But Kennedy rides this wave too.
I would say in a more instrumental, maybe cynical way.
He's not using friendship in the way that we see on that episode with Rogan and Brennan.
Even though he's known people like Marr for years, he's using spirituality to create these kind of laundering, radiant pauses.
There's this endless stream of content, and he makes regular interventions that open a more intimate space, and into that space he injects the content or persona of spiritual centering that's all very vague, it's all very universalist, and it functions like a gentle spiritual tasing on the interviewer.
Like, you know, things just stop.
And with some interviewers, the spiritual tasing happens more easily.
So with Lex, that was the whole ballgame.
That's all he was there for.
Jocko Willink, the former Navy SEAL guy who's a podcaster, he sticks more to his question script.
But in hour two of, my God, a three-hour episode, there are these rhapsodies that interject themselves from Kennedy.
And I've got this clip coming up, and it's taken from a longer excerpt in which Kennedy really blends every New Age and Orientalist cliche in with some, like, Old Testament athletic greens.
And we'll pick it up in a moment where even Jocko is trying to move things along, but Kennedy feels compelled to tase him again with yet another metaphor.
You know, if you can stay in that high vibration, just good things happen.
So, you get sober, and then you kind of- Let me give you another metaphor, just one thing that just occurred to me.
When I was a kid, sometimes I'd pick a flower, like a rose that was still in the bud, and then try to unfold it.
And it never looks right, you know, and a lot of times you have to just learn to be still.
You do your job, which is watering the flower, but otherwise you leave it alone.
And you know, I remember when I got out of the rehab, I read a line from Isaiah that said, be still and know that I am God.
To be still is so much because my life before was, including drugs, it's about feeling discomfort and then having to fix it somehow.
And, you know, growing up is about learning to live with this discomfort and just experience it like dark clouds on the horizon that it's going to come through and that you just have to experience it and let it keep flowing and there's nothing to do about it, you know, and learning that, learning to be still.
Learning to be indifferent to pain, learning to be indifferent to pleasure, to desire, those should be ultimately the ambition of an enlightened, you know, of a spiritual enlightenment.
So, Matthew, when you talk about these two rhythms, right, these sort of superimposed styles that he maybe flips in and out of, and you compare them to, you know, other moments within the bro-sphere, right, where you have You have all of this kind of lively culture war, for want of a better term, like back and forth that happens on these shows by people who are largely unqualified to talk about these things and have hot takes.
And then you have these moments of like intimate, vulnerable bonding that happen.
And then with Kennedy, you're talking about a different kind of rhythm, right?
Where the place that he slips into is this kind of oratory.
It's this kind of hypnotic, spiritual kind of sermonizing.
And to me, I think this is really interesting.
And to me, it reminds me of a lot of the work that you did about Zach.
Yeah.
Where Zach Bush goes into that mode and where essentially what you're dealing with here is a kind of celebrity guest who, especially with someone like Lex Friedman, it seems less so with Jocko Willink, right?
But with someone like Lex Friedman, they're almost waiting for that moment when the guest who has the special gift is going to launch into one of those magical moments where they just, you know, deliver.
Yeah, I'm gonna talk exactly about that because waiting for that moment, I think, is part of the entire structure.
But in general, I would say that there's a ratio to these two registers.
Like, after listening to dozens and dozens of hours, my guess is that for every ten minutes of, like, hard-edged, inflammatory, often conspiracy theory-laden content, there's gonna be one minute In which all of that falls away and the energy shifts and it feels like the subject isn't politics at all and I think that the 10 minutes don't work without the one minute.
That's my point.
If we go back to Ward and Voss in 2011, they say that conspirituality allows adherents to check their political cynicism with spiritual hope.
And so I've been thinking about this ratio of the hard to the soft in Kennedy, of the cynical to the hopeful, and I think that there's two more things that sharpen it up and make it super effective.
in order for whatever part of the brain registers conspirituality to really light up and start
driving the car.
And so I've been thinking about this ratio of the hard to the soft in Kennedy, of the
cynical to the hopeful, and I think that there's two more things that sharpen it up and make
it super effective.
And one of those things is the variable rate.
So in terms of behavioral response, anybody who interviews Bobby now in the podcast space
is going to be aware.
or...
Maybe some are more conscious of it, maybe some are less, but there's going to be an awareness that he has this capacity to break into rhapsody, whether he plans it out or not.
And my guess is that it's going to be effective for elevating the content to the extent that the interviewer and the listener just don't know when it's coming.
So what the behaviorist B.F.
Skinner learns in all of those pigeon-in-a-box experiments is that if you create a variable rate for the treat, for the birds, the behavior will intensify rather than extinguish.
And so I think that's one factor.
Yeah, and I believe the term for that is intermittent reinforcement, right?
Yeah, right.
You pull the lever, you pull the lever, you pull the lever, you don't get the thing you're wanting, you never know when you're gonna pull the lever and then the magic is gonna happen.
Yeah, and that's how you wind up with three-hour podcasts, right?
So another factor is that the difference between Bobby's political register and his spiritual register seems to be parallel to a difference between the public persona and his private life.
Like, it's reminiscent of a common social media trope where people create content that is more transparent or authentic or just more honest about the fact that a platform like Instagram is very performative.
So it's like, you know, fashion influencers or life coaches, every once in a while, they'll show up in street clothes or without makeup or having just rolled out of bed and they'll say, I'm just gonna get real here for a moment.
This is me without any adornment.
This is the raw me.
And of course, that ends up just sort of becoming performative as well to the point where you wind up with a private self and a public self that both can be monetized.
So it's like, you know, double money.
But what I hear in Bobby's capacity to flit between the political and the intimate Is just that.
Like, the mask comes off, the venal politics falls away, time stops.
The interviewer never really has a response.
Like, Lex's mouth just drops open.
Something is being unveiled.
He's unraptured because he's seen Kennedy in his pure form and he can hand that over to his audience.
You can almost hear him, like, very quietly orgasm.
So, we're talking about how men talk to men.
This is the last piece.
And I think there's something really attractive about these moments of bonding through the spiritual sermon.
I think it's a bonding that does a lot of work because it makes the political messaging seem safer, more friendly.
I think it makes it seem like Kennedy isn't actually talking about autistic people as useless and deranged.
It makes it sound like Kennedy is not really talking about fluoxetine as the potential driver of mass shootings with zero evidence whatsoever.
I think it makes him sound like he's not talking about Tony Fauci as somebody who's trying to kill people.
These are moments of spiritual openness or seeming openness that make the rest of the messaging safer.
He can say whatever he wants because he's centered.
And so my guess is that these moments give these men, but then parasocially, the men that are listening in, the opportunity to bond in ways that don't feel as empty or as venal or as cruel as the moments they share through the messaging of medical libertarianism or mocking the woke.
I think men are often looking for something deeper than the LOLs and the resentments.
And so maybe the moment when you realize that if Joe Rogan can be anxious, maybe you can be too.
Or the moment when you hear Kennedy say that every day he has to surrender to God, you might think, oh, I know what he means by that.
Maybe I should do that too.
And then suddenly, all of the libertarianism and its cruelty, all of the unhinged alienation from the project of community and civics, all the over-the-top exaggerations about evil doctors, it all recedes into the background.
Because you're centered, right?
And that's all that really matters.
So I just don't think, this is my final word for now anyway, I don't think he could get as far as he's gotten without this kind of sermon hypnosis technique, this spiritual tasing.
And I think we should look out for how well it continues to play as we look past the current train wreck into 2028, because I don't think he's gonna win this time around, of course, but he's also not gonna stop, right?
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
