How does an elite Millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she’s reporting on?
Most of that should stay between Olivia Nuzzi and her therapist. What we do know is that American Canto, Nuzzi’s new book, is a memoir (or maybe novel) made for the conspirituality age, in which raging toxic roided-up hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand—unless you know how fascism accelerates. We scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.
Show Notes
Zyn pouches and American Masculinity
The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media
A Serious Journalism Scandal Hiding Inside a Frivolous Sexual One
The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir
119: We Are Slenderman (w/Kathleen Hale)
The first-person industrial complex: How the harrowing personal essay took over the Internet.
A Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine on her career, covering Trump and access journalism
Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr’s party
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 287.
She did nutsy RFK Jr. coming.
How does an elite millennial politics reporter wind up having phone sex with and giving campaign advice to the 70-year-old emerging fascist she's reporting on?
Most of that has got to stay between Olivia Nutsy and her therapist.
But what we do know is that American Kanto, Nutsie's new book, is a memoir or perhaps a novel made for the conspiratuality age in which raging, toxic, roided up, hypocritical male charisma is always the center of attention.
The domineering ghoul is the pole star of interest and fascination, always moving too fast and chaotically to understand, unless you have some idea of how fascism accelerates.
So today we'll scavenge these pages for clues about Kennedy and how the hell this journalism disaster happened.
But first, Julian's here with a special ad read for Healthy Nicotine.
Spirituality.
So back in January of this year, while sitting in his televised confirmation hearings, RFK Jr. appeared to surreptitiously eject something from his mouth into his hand and then tuck it away in his inside coat pocket, perhaps for later.
I don't know.
Later, he reversed the action with his other hand, seeming to put something into his mouth and then to use his tongue to tuck it up between his cheek and his gum.
Could it be that during the very hearings that led to his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he was fueling himself with nicotine pouches?
Well, the 10,000-word article in The Atlantic that we covered for last week's episode confirmed that Bobby is a frequent user of Zin nicotine pouches.
When asked how he reconciled this along with his frequent visits to tanning booths, given that both are against federal health advisories, he replied, I'm not telling people what they should do or anything that I do.
I'm just saying, get in shape.
Turns out, these little nicotine pouches have increasingly become a symbol of right-leaning masculinity and even fitness culture.
Former big dog at Fox News, Tucker Carlson, has touted them as being a powerful work enhancer and also male enhancer.
But Tucker soured on the Zin brand when he found out that they'd donated to Kamala's presidential campaign, vowing to start his own nicotine pouch brand, which has not happened yet.
The political association here was further amplified when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, requested in 2024 that the FDA look into the potential dangers of this product, which prompted Marjorie Taylor Greene to call for a Zin surrection on Twitter.
And the GOP congressman from North Carolina then dared Schumer to come and try to take the can of Zin he was holding in a picture away from him.
According to the New York Times, Donald Trump then targeted men under 35 in battleground states with ads featuring YouTube superstar and a guy who fights over the hill former fighters, Jake Paul, stoking fears about Democrats restricting access.
But what is Zin anyway?
It's the brand name for nicotine pouches that originate in Sweden, but are manufactured in the U.S. market in Owensburg, Kentucky.
The company was purchased for $16 billion by Philip Morris in 2022, just in time for their 2023 market share to exceed 70%.
The round tins of delight contain 15 to 20 little pouches that contain either three or six milligrams of nicotine, depending on the strength you buy, that's been extracted from tobacco leaves and then combined with food-grade fillers, flavors, and sweeteners.
It just sounds delicious.
While cigarettes contain more nicotine, the pouches contain a more bioavailable form of the addictive drug.
We're going to talk in a little bit about Olivia Nozze's memoir and the fact that she reveals that Kennedy apparently does psychedelics.
And this is in contrast to his saying, I am clean after suffering from a heroin addiction earlier in life.
But this just brings in another layer of what we call drugs.
Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs out there.
It just fascinates me how people can say that they're clean and yet they are apparently addicted to substances.
And the bar always moves according to whatever addictions they have or don't want to identify as substance abuse or as a drug as compared to others.
And it's really, it just fits into this bigger picture of Kennedy just choosing what he wants to, you know, A, consider for himself as part of his own practices and B, the ways that he positions drugs and whether they are good or not for humans.
These are not made by big pharma.
They're purely part of the commerce sector.
So maybe that makes them okay, right?
I find these strange because on one hand, people are obviously using them.
These guys are using them in a public manner.
They're talking about them.
RFK Jr. is like chowing down during his Senate hearings, but they're not actual chewing tobacco.
Like I first thought when you brought this up that they're like, oh, are we talking about the type that you're tucked into your lip?
It's baseball players and are they spitting into cups?
So it's not like ostentatious or overt like that.
It's something that you're doing in secret in public, but there's no real sign of it being a status symbol.
It's a very strange thing.
It's like a way to take a drug that they're all very excited about, but you can't really see them take it, I suppose, right?
Yeah, I'm going to unpack some of those things that you just brought up in.
Okay, Matthew.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So these pouches are designed to be tucked between the gum and the cheek, where moisture then causes the nicotine to be diffused and absorbed by those tender tissues into the user's bloodstream.
And contrary to what I initially imagined, they do not in and of themselves create a foul odor, though over time, the dry mouth, disrupted microbiome, and ensuing tooth decay and gum recession may well contribute to that special flavor of halitosis caused by gum disease.
But hey, as an alternative to smoking, Matthew, at least you don't have to spit all the time like you do with chewing tobacco or use one of those effeminate vape pens, right?
Is part of how I've heard the contrast described.
Journalist Max Reed has done a lot of good work on this.
He coined the term Zinternet to refer to an emerging largely frat boy sports betting online subculture last year.
There are also Zinfluencers who post novelty TikToks showing off fridges full of Zin or thrones built out of Zin cans or the Zin birthday cake, very special made by a woman for her boyfriend.
Some videos that I came across show like 20-year-old guys gobbling an entire tin of 15 pouches at once and then eventually throwing up and trembling with their eyes watering as they describe how much they're buzzing.
So this really is a heightened drug delivery system for nicotine.
There are also Instagram reels and TikToks that tout the effect of nicotine pouches on performance in the gym.
And you see these guys sometimes mega-dosing as many as six pouches at once as a stimulus then to lift heavier.
So they've got all these things like stuck up in their mouth while they're doing bench press, right?
That sounds really bad.
That sounds like a really bad idea.
Does it have an analgesic effect too?
Like, are they going to like stock up on that and then they'll work too hard and get injured?
I mean, I think mostly what it's doing is just giving them a massive stimulus so that they just feel like they can push really hard.
And then the buzz that you get after you lift heavy is even more amplified.
Right.
Okay.
I wonder, I'd have to look into it if that actually has an effect.
There are stimulants that do have an immediate effect I know of and lifters use.
I don't know if nicotine is one of them, but I do know there is a placebo effect that happens with energy pouches because, for example, when I cycle for long distances, I'll have those 100 calorie sugar pouches on me and I'll be taking one every 20, 30 minutes.
And the thing is, as soon as you take it, the flavor gives you a certain stimulus and you feel like you get a jolt of energy.
But in reality, physiologically, it's not going to actually affect you for 10 to 15 minutes.
Yeah.
So you've got research on this.
Yeah, exactly.
It's actually the flavor and the sense that you know it's coming that gives you that burst at that moment.
And I wonder how nicotine stacks up in that sense.
Well, as somebody who's smoked for a number of years, I can imagine that it's very quick.
Like I think there is a lot of placebo going on in the first drag, or it's a lot of sort of, I don't know, like a predictive.
You're expecting this sensation.
And so you'll have it.
But I mean, it's a very powerful physiological response.
And yeah, that's where I think the addiction really locks in.
Yeah.
I mean, Derek, with regard to what you were just saying, too, it reminds me of the trend of dry scooping, right?
Where instead of mixing protein powders, which often have various ingredients, some of which are hyperstimulus, hyperstimulating, there's a trend that was going around for a while of people just dry scooping the powder directly into their mouth right before they work out because they want to just get it in there more quickly.
Oh, it's ridiculous.
I've seen people do it with creatine and I take creatine every day and I drop it in some water and drink it.
But people think that dry scooping has some special effect.
And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
It's just going to make you choke.
So wouldn't you know it, guys?
Joe Rogan uses Zinn, and so does his comedian buddy Shane Gillis.
And so too Daily Wire host Michael Knowles.
Actor Josh Brolman uses it all day and has said that he even has one in his mouth when sleeping.
It's what he used to quit chewing tobacco, actually.
World champion addictive personality Charlie Sheen has used Zin as a healthy alternative to smoking.
Singing the praises of the little pouches, State Freedom Caucus Network Communications Director, and no prizes forgetting that that guessing that that is an ultra-conservative organization, this guy's Greg Price, and he told Semaphore, a man with nicotine, caffeine, protein, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force.
Now, it seems that RFK Jr. may feel the same.
And given the supposed health benefits of nicotine being touted by wellness influencers like COVID conspiracist anti-vax chiropractor Brian Artis and friend of the pod Dave Asprey, I won't be surprised if Zin or something like it emerges as an element of the Maha prescription for optimized immunity, mental focus, and muscle growth.
Well, in terms of immunity and some of the other supposed wellness benefits, Mallory DeMille will be returning in three weeks for the January 1st episode, and Brian Artis will be a main focus of that episode where we unpack the nicotine craze.
Awesome.
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If you listen to this podcast regularly, you know how often we've covered RFK Jr. over the past three plus years.
This includes a sexting scandal he was involved with with Olivia Nootsi, a former New York magazine writer who's nearly 40 years his junior.
Nootsie was fired from the magazine after the affair broke for reasons we'll get into as this episode unfolds.
But today we'll dive into her memoir about this affair, which is called American Kanto.
And it was published to very little fanfare and lots of criticism last week.
I didn't call Nutsie a journalist there, even though that is officially her profession, which is what I want to tug on before we get into the book itself.
But Derek, I got to interrupt you to say that her publishers kind of agree with you because here's some of the ad copy for the book.
Quote, despite her profession, Olivia Nootsi has never been interested in breaking news.
American Kanto is not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president.
Instead, it is something more artful and more interesting, a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.
It seeks to reframe our understanding of the history we are living through from the perspective of someone who observed it from within the kaleidoscope and now sees it clearly from the other side.
Artful is one word for it, that's for sure.
Wow.
That's amazing.
In terms of journalism and the sort of guardrails of that profession, Nootsie got emotionally involved with the subject that she was covering and then, according to her ex-fiancé, used her contacts to flag negative press speeding at that subject, Kennedy, so that he could get ahead of it.
So there was a moment, you might remember it like a year over a year ago now, where RFK Jr. is in Roseanne Barr's kitchen and they just are, you know, kicking the shit about Kennedy leaving a dead bear carcass in Central Park as you do.
It was actually Nootsie who told him that the press was coming and she discloses this in her book.
So it makes her ex-fiancé Ryan Liz's claim seem on pretty solid ground.
And in reality, who knows whether or not Roseanne even realized that she was part of a PR move at that moment, because as Nootsi details in her book, and we'll get into this, leveraging others seems to be a pretty common Kennedy trait.
Colby Hall frames this problem really well for Mediaite when he writes, What happens when an industry spends 15 years telling talented young journalists that personal brand is currency, that access is the game, that being a character in the story makes better content, and then acts shocked when someone takes that logic a few degrees too far?
Here's what we don't say out loud.
There's no money in journalism anymore.
No fame, no glamour, no prestige.
But there's lots and lots of money in media, in being a brand, an influencer, a personality.
We stopped paying journalists and started rewarding performers.
Very insightful, very true.
And we face this problem across professions.
It's the same issue that lets wellness influencers shit on medical professionals, then use their leverage to sell junk products.
And given how poor media literacy in America is, it's how we get someone like Jessica Krauss, aka House and Habit, who ironically appears to be the first person Nozi worked with after being fired from New York Magazine.
Well, Krauss calls herself a journalist instead of what she actually is, which is a gossip colonist.
You have Chaya Rajik, who with her Libs of TikTok brand has been trademarked as a news reporter service.
And while Rajik herself denounces the term journalist, she gives the appearance that what she's doing is reporting, which she certainly is not.
Nootsi never went that far, to be fair, but her story tracks along the same lines.
I think in some ways it's more damaging, though, because she was able to build considerable credibility within that branded mode as a legit reporter for huge platforms.
And I mean, I think we really just have to contemplate off the top how devastating this collusion actually is and whether Nootsi has some of that Kennedy blood on her hands.
So according to Ryan Lizza, so you referenced Derek Nootzi's ex, you know, and we have caveats around his information because, of course, he's not having it run through, you know, proper platforms and editorial control and legal and all of that.
But for what it's worth, Nozi provided constant consultancy for the campaign for Kennedy, for Kennedy's presidential run for more than a year.
She gave wardrobe advice, staffing advice, messaging advice, all on top of the catch and kill work, right?
It kind of made me wonder if she was more on the inside than most of his staffers were in terms of influence.
You know, I remember when we were thinking back in the day about how Aubrey Marcus and Charles Eisenstein would have Kennedy's ear and would be really influential.
But I mean, it sounds like Nozi might have been Kennedy's most consistent top-tier handler.
Wardrobe advice.
So she's why he wears jeans when he works out.
It was a particular, I think it was the Senate hearing, perhaps, with regard to like, should the suit be blue or, you know, how narrow should the tie be or something like that.
But yeah, there's also like a lot of, you know, we were phoning late at night and, you know, he was dressing or undressing or whatever.
So there's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of clothes stuff, very sort of personal grooming and branding interest.
I've done a bunch of episodes over the years on media literacy and the history of journalism as a profession.
And I've always argued that pure objective journalism is impossible because everyone has some inherent biases.
But sexting with a source you're covering while feeding him inside information leaps over professional and ethical norms.
There's another great article I'll include in the show notes by Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, and she writes about it.
She notes, An odd thing about the book, one that gives it an aloof, affectless quality, is that Nozi doesn't seem to recognize that her collaboration with Kennedy was a grave professional betrayal.
She blames Liza, whom she refers to as the man I did not marry, for making her private life public as part of a harassment campaign against her, and seems to believe that by firing her, New York was complicit.
The magazine, she writes, has been spooked into participating in what I considered a siege of hyper-domestic terror.
Her total lack of introspection, at least on the page, is vaguely uncanny.
You know, I think Goldberg is really good on the dodging responsibility part, and she captures the kind of aloof, affectless quality really well.
But I think the complication is that Nootsi pulls off what she pulls off through a parody of introspection.
Like she's actually trying to do something smart and artful by using poetry, stoical affect, metaphors, archetypes.
And all of it is meant to reflect on her condition in a way that turns her professional life into a psychodrama to be resolved internally or in conversation with the reader who would identify with her.
But there's no attempt to really ethically resolve any of the issues in the form of like, oh, I really fucked up badly here and caused a ton of damage.
Yeah, and hovering behind that psychodrama, it feels to me like in the passages that I've read, there's a kind of mythic quality.
There's a sense that this is all part of some inevitable kind of archetypal set of dynamics that are playing out against the backdrop of America writ large.
Well, she says often in interviews that this book is about America itself.
It's about the reality of America over the last 10 years.
There's a number of places in which through the metaphorical language, the author implies that she herself is kind of like America, taken by storm, baffled by this presence, not knowing what to do, and just completely undone and ruined by the end of it.
So yeah, it's mythic in the sense that she is supposed to be, I think the writer wants to be representative of an entire culture.
And that just doesn't, that's not going to wash, right?
In one of the key nut graphs that describes why she's written the book, she describes this year plus affair with Kennedy as a slip, just to get back to the responsibility part.
And I looked for the most overt expression of responsibility in the book.
And, you know, if you do, you'll find masterpiece passive voice sentences like this, quote, now a monumental fuck-up had collided my private life with the public interest.
This is an incredible sentence because it sounds like she's describing a meteor rudely interrupting her privacy and somehow someone deciding that it should be laid bare.
And this passive voice dominates the entire story.
It's very, very eerie.
I took a few journalism classes.
I worked for my college newspaper back in the mid-90s.
I also worked for the major New Jersey newspapers, four different papers at the time.
But it's been a while since I had actual training that wasn't on the job.
Still, I can't imagine that anyone serious about this industry would be okay with Nozi making the lines so porous, then just diving right through them.
And then, as you just described, basically not taking responsibility for what she had done.
And I also recognize that every profession changes over time, yet I still have a really hard time ascribing the term journalist to anyone who does what Nootsi so casually accomplished.
Yeah, you know, I think it's so interesting and that there are both generational and gendered things at play here.
And I think a lot of what you're describing in terms of, you know, is this journalism speaks to a lot of the changes you're also referencing.
So I think any listener who wants to reflect a little bit on the boundary blurring writing landscape that Nootsi is coming from, she calls it, first of all, method writing, in which there's a kind of full engagement of the personality of the author and whatever's going on.
And it's really worth re-upping that for some millennial women writers, there's been this notion of the trap of something called the first-person industrial complex, a kind of writing mode that exploded online in the early 2010s.
And this was happening as news and lifestyle blogging provided a kind of precarious economic lane around a contracting media industry.
Now, my first understanding of this came about three years ago when I interviewed Kathleen Hale on this podcast about her amazing investigative book, Slender Man, a tragic story of online obsession and mental illness.
So she's covering the 2014 knife violence among 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin, this terrible incident.
But her book marked a return for her to public writing after she was kind of canceled for this piece in which she confessed too much.
She talked about how she had stalked an online critic.
And, you know, she did it in the mode that she was kind of trained or conditioned to do, which is like she's going to spill out all of her emotions and how she felt about it and she's going to be embarrassed and so on.
And the punchline there was that this is exactly what she had been incentivized to do, to be confessional, to break the fourth wall, to bend genres, and to find the memoir angle in any beat that she tackled.
And then there's a writer named Laura Bennett for Slate who coined this term, first-person industrial complex.
And she's writing in 2014.
The rise of the unreported hot take, that much maligned instant spin on the news of the day, has meant that editors are constantly searching for writers with any claim to expertise on a topic to elevate their pieces above the swarm.
First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.
I love that, without paying for reporting.
So this is the world.
And Taylor Lorenz also does a great job of charting this in Extremely Online that Nootsi grows up in, getting her first gig at the age of 18 at the Tri-City News in Asbury Park, where she's a columnist for 50 bucks a month.
And in a 2018 interview, she's really candid about her entire approach to journalism and then eventually the political world.
Becoming a journalist didn't really occur to me until I was performing acts of journalism.
I didn't know any journalists or anyone in the media, but I knew I wanted to write and I liked politics and thought I had a sort of innate understanding of it, but I didn't have any sophisticated ideas about how those interests might converge to form a career path for me.
Okay, so the interviewer in that piece then quoted Nootsi from some other interview in which she said the following.
At least with politics stuff, I feel like there are journalists who write to report and journalists who report to write.
And I'm definitely in the latter camp.
So from the jump in her career, the campaign trail is her wheelhouse, specifically being young and female on the campaign trail.
And the writing that opened the door for her at Daily Beast was a memoir of her time working for Anthony Weiner's 2013 New York City Mayoral campaign.
That piece, contracted by NSWF Corp, doesn't seem to exist even on way back now, but the key scuttlebutt reportedly was that Weiner called Nootsi his Monica.
Now, she goes on to climb the prestige and income and access ladder to ultimately get assigned to Trump and then finally Kennedy.
So working with and or reporting on older men, seeking power, attention, and validation has always been her personal interest.
And this has been accelerated by this market hungry for personal flair, especially if there are sexualized undertones in the content.
And so that brings us to how American Kanto gives us some insight on how she's considered her job throughout this time.
My job was to bear witness to the processes of American presidential politics, to travel the country and attempt to understand those who sought or wielded or influenced executive power.
I'd never been interested in politics exactly.
I was interested in characters.
And as it happened, there were lots of them in politics.
And like all great characters, they wanted something, would do whatever they had to in order to get it.
And often they were delusional.
But often enough, to encourage delusion, delusions manifested in America.
Almost as soon as I entered the profession, I was assigned to cover the dominant force, the president, the greatest character of all.
I came to see him as the mirror through which the country was reflected back at itself.
Very, very mindful, very demure, bearing witness.
Very passive.
Very passive.
And if you're not interested in politics, and which I think that's the most extraordinary line, actually.
I was interested in characters.
But if you're not interested in politics, you know, and to me, this might include feminism, the economy, the social safety net, public health, the Middle East.
Who knows?
If power is more interesting to you for its psychology and the narratives it creates, you might just fall in love with a fascist.
Also, I think there's a lot more chance that you'll become part of the story that you're writing.
And if your attention has been influenced by the first-person industrial complex and the worst parts of postmodern self-reflexivity, you might become mesmerized by Trump as a mirror or a blank canvas instead of the figurehead of a movement that will be murdering sailors in the Caribbean and launching pogroms against Somalis in Minnesota, not to mention canceling vaccines, which Nozi must have known was coming.
So in our third segment, we'll dig into the personal stuff Nootsi reveals about Kennedy with caveats because ethics, you know, fuck-ups really damage credibility.
But let me just pick out a key quote from American Kanto that shows just how Nootsi views the downstream effects of her own boundary blurring career.
And I think it'll give you all an indication of how tortured her prose has to be to make something out of it.
Certain dramas you can count on.
Empires fall at last, heroes fail at first.
And here I mean to tell you that character is not what you are in the end.
Character is the thing you cannot outrun or outgun that spars with fate all along.
I refer now to my own witness and witnessed.
When I slipped, I was swallowed whole straight through the plot, under the blade of the devices and out the other side.
I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think.
I mean to tell you that before I was consumed by it, I couldn't have told you what it was.
The flag winked beside lanes that bent to borders, that faded to barriers, that fell to the lines I crossed.
I'm talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the politician.
I'm talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president.
I cannot talk about one without the other.
When I open my eyes, I see still the blurs of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white.
I mean to tell you now as best I can.
So she's completely elided with the flag, right?
She sees the flag everywhere, by the way.
That's throughout the book.
And by the way, the politician is Nootsi's pseudonym for Kennedy, which is really weird because she outs Kennedy in the first paragraph of the book anyway by referencing Kennedy saying that their affair was no big deal because obviously Jackie Bouvier married JFK after she interviewed him.
And so she says to him over the phone, she's standing on the Met, stairs and she says, well, I'm not Jackie and you're not JFK.
And then she goes on with this like pseudonym, which then becomes a kind of weird joke.
But I also think it low-key normalizes Kennedy, who is not some sort of representative politician.
And throughout the book, Nootsi also uses other pseudonyms.
There's the bodyguard, the representative, the personality, the MAGA general, the failed candidate, the war hero.
The affect is always allegory or myth, and it's right there in the title, the canto reference to Dante.
The archetypes help her to gloss over actionable information, but they also let her retain the voice of a kind of muse of politics.
Does she reference what level of hell sexting with RFK Jr. is?
No, no, but there's always this sense that she's kind of at the bottom of something.
And this happens through the metaphors around falconry, which we'll get to at the end, right?
So there's always this image of freedom that's flying up out into the sky, but must always return, or that is leashed somehow to the earth or the falconer.
But Julian, you just read the nut graph basically for why she wrote this book.
And what stands out as you referenced, Derek, is the passivity of the voice, how everything has happened to her.
She was swallowed.
She was consumed.
There's an ostensible confession for her shortcomings, but she does not present herself as a political actor.
And I think one painful liability of this first-person industrial complex is to produce writers without training, maybe without ideology or the political will to see people outside of the bounds of personality.
So why wouldn't you focus on your own personality at the same time in whatever you were doing?
I think it also means that the country itself, which she says in her author's note she's writing for, because love of country is everything, becomes the abstract backdrop for the psychodrama of its loudest influencers.
And that's why I think she was actually a perfect fit, a match made in heaven for Kennedy, because personal mythology is what this fashion leaning dude lives for.
Like she took him seriously and she made him feel like he was deep.
It's so interesting, Matthew, because I'm hearing this contradiction, right?
Between like the first-person industrial complex of making everything sort of like a journal entry.
Yeah.
And then on the other hand, this device, which is not really about anonymity.
It's about invoking some archetypal sense of these are perennial characters that are part of just the fabric of humanity and the cosmos and America, right?
And it seems to me that somewhere between those two things would be substance and introspection and self-reflection, right?
I think there is.
I just think it drives in one particular direction, which is for her to try to figure out without really indicting herself too much why this felt so volatile, why it felt so fateful, why she was drawn in.
But there's no real answer to that introspection.
Before we continue discussing Nootzi's circular trip down through the inferno, we should note that RFK Jr.'s wife, Cheryl Hines, happened to publish her own memoir in November.
It's called Unscripted, and her husband plays a minor role.
And when his name is invoked, Heinz paints him as a caring, kind man who is ultimately misunderstood by the media, by Americans, and by the medical establishment, because his only goal is really actually to make everyone healthier.
There's a stunning amount of omissions in her text, and she doesn't even mention the infamous 2021 party at the Kennedy household in which Heinz required everyone to be vaccinated before attending, which is in stark contrast to her husband's anti-vax activism.
In fact, at the time, she said Kennedy is not always the boss at my own house.
That bold statement withers in the text of Unscripted as Heinz both sides the COVID vaccine situation, writing.
Soon, the idea of a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the disease was introduced.
It ignited acrimonious debates between doctors, scientists, activists, families, and friends.
Some people were counting down the days until they could receive the vaccine, while others wanted more information before they had to get it.
Bobby emerged as a leader among the people who wanted proof that it was safe and effective.
I'm sure most of us can recall the fever pitch of the vaccine debate.
People on both sides were loud and highly emotional.
I've seen Cheryl do this in interviews with like Tucker Carlson, for example, too.
It's just a purely stunning rewriting of history, framing it as if doctors were really debating the efficacy of the vaccine, which is not what happened after numerous clinical trials.
Heinz mentions vaccines on eight pages in the book, and each time it's part of a supposed rigorous debate that's happening across America and not the culmination of decades of anti-vax propaganda finding a target in the COVID vaccines.
Perhaps more shockingly, vaccines don't make a single appearance in American Kanto.
Yeah, I searched and searched.
I was like, come on.
Yeah, I don't know how you can write an entire book about Kennedy and fail to mention the single thing he's obsessed with, besides maybe infidelity, because Nootsie just steers clear of the topic.
It seems like she missed the golden opportunity to construct some kind of metaphor about how she hadn't been inoculated against the virus that is shaking.
She did.
She missed.
Damn, Julian.
She totally missed.
Maybe you can ghost write her next book.
Now, whereas Heinz seems to simply accept her husband as a freedom fighter and move on, Nootsi's text is riddled with contradictions about the man.
It's a sign that she seems to ultimately see as a strength, though these paradoxes aren't like some Zen pair of opposites that fit together like a glove in hand.
They rather reveal a confused series of events.
So when Nozi writes about Kennedy leaving the Democrats and the independents behind to become a Republican, which I would think would be pretty fucking stressful if you have a moral center, she positions Kennedy as a brave warrior whose true mission transcends simple partisan politics.
The politician was not delusional about the realities of his political present or political future.
His experience in the current campaign had confirmed for him that the American system would not allow for a presidential candidate to succeed with a third party.
Of 2028, he said, I'd have to do it as a Republican.
He was also clear-eyed about the president himself.
I always thought of him as a novel, hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth, he told me.
As someone whose job was to bear witness to the president and explain what I had seen to others, and who had devoted many thousands of words over many years to doing so, this concise description struck me as about perfect.
As a writer, I was almost jealous, and I loved that.
What a self-reveal.
Hundreds of lies do not in any known universe add up to a big truth.
Yet, I suppose if your M.O. is lying all the time, you'd like to believe that the compass is pointed to an honest North Star.
Well, he is, to be fair, referencing a novel.
And what his line reminds me of is how Michael Andace writes about changing facts in his portrayal of Buddy Bolden, the jazz legend, in the novel Coming Through Slaughter.
So he writes something like, you know, some facts here have been changed to suit the truth of fiction.
And I think the larger truth of Trump is, you know, I think if you asked him that Kennedy would say it's his reflection of popular resentment and the desire to feel nationally confident.
And I think Nootzi loves the line because she spent years tracking the unreality of Trump's language and promises and commitments.
And the line sums up why it all works anyway as fiction.
But she could have just used the word fascism.
If she does, though, I think it kind of contradicts another impulse in the book, which is it seems that the author really wants to avoid being direct about the implication that she helped Kennedy become a key part of a fascist movement.
So I think it's great that Kennedy hands her away to kind of like soften and, you know, I don't know, artistically modify that description.
I think it took a few years of doing the podcast until Matthew and I realized we're both huge Honda fans and I've read all of his works.
Fantastic writer.
Let's go back to a not as fantastic writer, though, because in the same text, Kennedy is presented as handling himself skillfully under such crisis.
But then it turns out maybe he's not that skillful.
I was learning that the politician was not good in a crisis.
He did not handle stress well.
He alternated between his usual gentleness and a frantic and accusatory posture.
He was furious, for instance, that when confronted with evidence of our relationship, I had not said that it was a deep fake.
I was learning too, and at just about the worst possible moment to learn such a thing, that the politician, despite being a subject of media interest for his entire life, did not know much about how the media worked.
I think what's good to consider here is that it looks like they were in contact pretty constantly for about a year.
So this is phone calls while traveling, hotel rooms, lots of late-at-night stuff.
She says that he's saying these obsessive things about her constantly while also seeking her advice and counsel.
So, you know, she says learning Kennedy was not good in a crisis, it carries the context of him turning to her compulsively for information, validation, protection from, you know, media enemies, but also distraction, of course.
And unsurprisingly, this begins to slide over into toxic and obsessive relationship territory.
She quotes him as saying at one point, quote, I want to talk to you more than I want to do anything else, more than I want to do the things I'm supposed to do.
You push me over the edge.
You push me.
Sorry, you push me over the edge is what he says.
And then she comments on that by saying, you push me.
He was beyond the edge.
And for that, I was responsible, which is very not good stuff.
And sadly, this also brings us to questions about Kennedy's sobriety.
Here are some key passages.
The politician was hyper-interested in whether I did drugs or took pharmaceuticals or drank alcohol.
He loved to discuss drugs, psychedelic trips, all manner of related mind-altered esoterica.
The politician still does some psychedelics for fun.
He said, he described how he waited until his wife was not home to go outside and smoke DMT, just as he waited until she was not home to call, or else he would call while locked in the bathroom.
The bag of toiletries he traveled with was full of so many prescription pill bottles, it seemed to barely zip closed.
And the sight of it worried me, though I never asked, or because of that, I never asked, what they were all for.
I'd heard he used another drug, and there were rumors it sometimes interfered with his ability to perform the work of campaigning for office.
When I raised the subject, he denied it.
If he was willing to tell me about the drugs he did consume, like DMT, it did not make sense that he would lie to me about others.
His sobriety was a central part of his self-mythologization.
Because of that, I did not question his definition of sober.
Yeah, you know, by the way, Nootsi has maintained that the relationship was not in person.
They did meet for her to do the profile.
But I don't know, like, do you really pick up on the fact that a toiletry bag is not going to zip closed if you're on FaceTime?
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on this one.
You can easily spy an overstuffed bag and I don't know, maybe she's using some poetic license.
Like in the background of the shot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like the fucking Cheryl Heinz ad for her skincare or whatever, where Kennedy's showering behind her as she's talking.
Oh, right.
You know, so it's definitely possible, but I do want to make two quick points.
First off, again, it's just, it's something we'll have to grapple with.
What is a drug and what is not?
Because psychedelics are physiologically not addictive.
Although people can, I would think, get addicted to the feeling of chasing what they experience on them.
So that way you have to weigh that out.
We have nicotine, you know, and so it's just when someone says they're sober now, usually they mean they do not take any substances.
Some people go as hardcore as saying, I don't even do caffeine.
Now, Kennedy is obviously not in that camp.
And if he's sober off heroin, that's wonderful.
But to say you're sober and then you're doing a range of other substances, I think is a little disingenuous.
And again, to me, it just goes back to sort of pick and choose over which substances he wants to take and which ones, you know, he does not.
Testosterone replacement therapy comes to mind as well.
And Kennedy is repeatedly pissed off his base by, for example, continuing to approve vaccines and FDA drugs.
We've always wondered how real his activism is in this sense, given that all of his children are vaccinated.
If he needs prescription pills, that's totally fine.
Aging humans generally do.
If you're in your 70s, you're probably on something.
Just don't make it your identity to shit on pharma at every turn, but then you actually use pharma when it's needed and convenient for you.
One contradiction that I think it would be great to hear more from an expert is, you know, if he is still engaging in a number of, you know, substance adventures, but he's also going to meetings every day, AA meetings or narcotics anonymous meetings or whatever type of meeting he goes to and he's sponsoring people and he's traveling from place to place.
Like he says that he goes to a meeting every day.
What I've heard from people in the AA community is that you don't, it's anonymous.
You don't tell people that that's what you do, right?
Like that's not, it's not, that's actually, he's breaking a rule there culturally.
And it makes me wonder whether he is as welcomed at those meetings as, you know, he says he is when, because there is one comment he makes about how, you know, when I walked in, they thought that, you know, these guys thought that, you know, I was, I was their enemy or something like that.
And then, you know, by the time the meeting was over, we were all best friends or something like that.
But he's, he's, he's engaging in this culture and he's not really aligning with some of its core principles, it would seem.
And I just want to know like how that's working out and what AA people feel about that.
Just yesterday there was a press event in a fucking airport Washington Dc's main airport where Paul Saladino brings a pull-up bar that Sean Duffy and Kennedy are using to say hey, we should have gyms in airports.
Now what i'm saying is he does not mind being performative at every turn.
Yeah, so it kind of doesn't surprise me that he would just talk about being in these meetings, because that is his mo.
He is a performative dude.
Now, ironically or not ironically at all actually, this is the same day that, you know, Trump ended a Biden Era Era policy where airlines have to refund you if they're over a certain amount of time late on their flights, and that is now a consumer protection that is gone.
So Kennedy I?
That makes me wonder.
He is performing his pull-ups his half-ass pull-ups, to be clear in this context yet he's really running cover for the Trump administration, so people focus on that instead of the policy being changed.
So there's nothing to me that Kennedy will not perform at.
You mentioned deep fakes a moment ago and there was something very interesting in that to me because I don't know if you guys remember, a few months ago Trump was sharing deep fakes of himself on true social and some commenters actually wondered if he thought he actually did those things, like if that was actually video of him.
So it's stunning to think that Kennedy might also fall for the same trap, if not exactly the same, something radically close to it.
Now finally, I have one more passage or you know, this is a recurring passage throughout the book, but I have to wonder why Nozzie included the story about the raven.
Kennedy's love of falconry is well known, but it's not limited to that bird.
He's posted a bunch of videos about the various birds that he trains.
But this particular framing makes me wonder if Nozi actually realized she was being played the entire time.
The politician was working on a raven.
How do you work on a raven, I asked.
Every morning he said he would step outside and throw a treat into the air, and every week the raven would fly, less skeptical.
The raven gets closer as she gains more trust in me and confidence in our relationship.
He told me it worked this way according to his plan.
I want her to eat from my hand.
I want to hear her croak.
I want to see her cock her head and hold her gaze and admire her glistening feathers at close range.
He said I can't tell her my intentions.
I'm not sure how introspective Nozzie is.
I know she's going for prose here, I know, but there's the passive voice aspect.
She, directly after this point, talks about Kennedy always naming his ravens after Poe, and then she tells a story about meeting with then governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who shrugged away a dead bird in front of a radio station.
Then she pivots to Trump's hatred of wind turbines that kill millions of birds each year.
I I don't think that's why Trump hates them, but she Kind of brings that into the mix, to use another bird metaphor.
So the potential for an app metaphor, but it just completely disappears in this metaphoric jumble that resolves with Kennedy, of course, being shirtless in nature.
I told him about my dream of solitude in the woods, shirtless as he often was.
He showed me Charlie and Lenore over his shoulder.
Can I bring them? He asked.
I smiled.
He knew by solitude I meant with him.
So as far as introspection goes, I think she is indicating that she has understood what has happened because I think the raven is her.
I think the raven is the author.
It's an extended metaphor throughout the text.
And another one, as I was saying, is the American flag, which flutters at every promising but also ominous juncture.
And then it also becomes rallyware for the MAGA faithful.
There's a third common metaphor, which is the classic westward journey to the edge of the world, to the edge of California, the void afterwards that you gaze into where heroes and anti-heroes are always contemplating the end of the American project.
Now, with the Raven, I think the author casts herself as free, but also bound, an instinctual hunter and watcher who soars above the battleground for brief moments, but she's also trained by and beholden to the falconer.
And I think it's an attempt to describe grooming in a way that preserves a sense of possible dignity and freedom because she really wound up tied to this guy on a lead, as it were.
And then she closes the book with a more ominous and kind of locked down variation on this because she watches a boy fly a drone over the California bluffs, which are still smoking from the wildfires.
So in other words, Kennedy controls birds of prey, but the boys these days, they pilot these lifeless drones.
The thing that haunts me the most about the raven metaphor and why Nootsi settles on it is this, though.
Falconry is this like ancient near-mystical art form that depends on, you know, this incredibly intuitive connection between the human and the animal.
And that's a connection that's built on trust and protection and, you know, food and closeness.
But you'll read through this book and you will find nothing in Nootsi's account where she's describing getting anything from Kennedy for her loyalty beyond like an occasional patronizing pat on the head about how good her writing is.
But then when the news breaks of their affair, he actually turns around and he does what he would never do to an animal.
He defames her as a stalker who's used her looks to manipulate him while he privately tells her, I need you to take a bullet for me, which has a really dark historical echo, of course.
