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Episode: BONUS: What's New With RFK Jr.?

Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:12:18

Episode Shownotes

Because we live in hell, here is last month's bonus episode about RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign with a new intro about what he could do at HHS. See you next year! Support the show

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
You know, my first thought when I was like looking at the election results, I was like, oh, we're going to have to keep talking about this fucking guy for the next four years. Yeah, you're correct. I was like, I want to make this about me.

00:00:11 Speaker_02
The guy who works from home. I know. The literal luckiest person who's like literally living his dream as a journalist has to talk about obnoxious people.

00:00:22 Speaker_03
I absolutely had a conversation last night with a family friend who was fucking fluoride pilled and I was like, I can't, I can't, I can't do it.

00:00:33 Speaker_02
I can't do it. Well, here we are.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
Listeners, we love you. We miss you. Are you tagging us in? I guess. I mean, are we even tagging for this? I don't know. I don't really know what the approach is.

00:00:44 Speaker_02
I mean, I guess we should just say welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast that will eventually start recommending raw milk and stuff, because otherwise this administration is going to put us in fucking jail.

00:00:53 Speaker_03
The onion bought InfoWars, but we bought the supplement business.

00:00:59 Speaker_01
Get your brain force from us.

00:01:02 Speaker_02
I'm in so many group chats where people keep posting links and I just keep replying with, we live in hell. I don't know what else to say. I don't even click on the links anymore. I'm just like, we live in hell.

00:01:10 Speaker_03
I'm Aubrey Gordon.

00:01:11 Speaker_02
I'm Michael Hobbs. Let's get this over with. Let's get this over with.

00:01:13 Speaker_03
We're here today for reasons that we don't want to be. On November 14th, 2024, Donald Trump officially announced RFK Jr. as his nominee for HHS secretary. We did a follow-up on RFK Jr.

00:01:29 Speaker_03
when we thought he was sort of riding off into the sunset and this was going to be the last time we had to talk to him. It's so painful to think in those terms.

00:01:36 Speaker_02
Sweet Aubrey, sweet Michael.

00:01:37 Speaker_03
We are releasing that bonus episode onto the main feed today. And before we get into that, we're going to talk a little bit about what has happened since RFK Jr. 's nomination and about how folks in the U.S. can impact this nomination.

00:01:55 Speaker_03
So the announcement of RFK Junior's nomination leads to a bunch of really weird politics makes for strange bedfellows sort of moments.

00:02:07 Speaker_04
Oh yeah.

00:02:07 Speaker_03
God. A lot of those feel to me as someone who's been making this show with you for several years now, like, uh, we're getting the band back together. Yeah, I know.

00:02:19 Speaker_03
On November 19th, Michael Pollan tweets a link to a piece from The American Conservative called They're Lying About RFK Jr. Wait, what?

00:02:30 Speaker_02
I didn't even know this.

00:02:31 Speaker_03
Yes, Pollan has since clarified that he's not endorsing RFK Jr., but like...

00:02:38 Speaker_01
Come on, man.

00:02:39 Speaker_03
Regardless of whether or not he feels like that was technically an endorsement, he did tweet out something that ostensibly reads as strong support, right?

00:02:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, or at least like he's being falsely accused of things, which is not the thing to focus on right now. He's also being correctly accused of like promoting anti-vax beliefs. Children have died of measles outbreaks that he has been connected to.

00:03:01 Speaker_02
So like, That's the stuff that people are upset about.

00:03:04 Speaker_03
He's writing so hard right now on, like, RTs do not equal endorsements in his bio or whatever. Or you're just like, come on, man.

00:03:13 Speaker_02
Why is everyone so dumb? Why is everything so dumb all the time?

00:03:16 Speaker_03
Jared Paulus, the Democratic governor of Colorado, tweeted his excitement about RFK Jr. as HHS secretary.

00:03:24 Speaker_02
We live in hell. I'm just going to keep saying it.

00:03:26 Speaker_03
on November 19th, Pete Evans got on telegram to announce that his new cookbook, healthy food for healthy kids is being published by RFK juniors, children's health defense organization.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
This is getting billed as they're writing a book together like their coauthors. That's not quite it. It's being published by an organization that RFK Jr. is the board chair and founder of.

00:03:54 Speaker_02
I'm sure the actual recipes are like, we'd like to feed your children a bowl of the measles virus. Just a large green bowl of goop just entirely consisting of viruses.

00:04:04 Speaker_03
Suspended in pure vitamin A. Yeah. So that's what I wanted to do next is talk through what RFK Jr has specifically said he's going to do in office as HHS secretary, right?

00:04:21 Speaker_03
One of the clearest sort of mission statements that we've gotten from RFK Jr came to us, of course, via Twitter in a tweet on October 25th, 2024, he wrote the following.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
He says, FDA's war on public health is about to end.

00:04:37 Speaker_02
This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by pharma, pharma capitalized.

00:05:00 Speaker_02
If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. One, preserve your records, and two, pack your bags. Well, if they're leaving, Robert, what's the point of preserving their records? Hey, future staff!

00:05:13 Speaker_02
I fucking hate you, but please help me achieve my goals.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
Also, I'm sick and tired of you suppressing sunshine.

00:05:20 Speaker_02
I love that it's just a list of things which are not suppressed. Again, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been extensively studied and the results indicate that they don't work for COVID.

00:05:31 Speaker_02
Vitamins are something your doctor has fucking told you about. Go out and get exercise and get some sunshine. Completely establishment advice from like every public health agency. It's like, this is just things that are not suppressed.

00:05:43 Speaker_02
And then it's mixed in with things like raw milk, where it's like, yeah, it's actually good to like kill bacteria.

00:05:48 Speaker_03
You don't want TB milk? You're not into it? Oh my god. He's also against the suppression of nutraceuticals. Nutraceutical is a fucking marketing term.

00:06:00 Speaker_02
And that's a huge benefit to corporate interests too, that you're basically going to allow companies to market their products. with whatever, like, oh, this will like cure cancer and then they can sell it at fucking Whole Foods or whatever.

00:06:10 Speaker_03
Right. He's not against industry involvement in health care. He's against regulated industry. Exactly. Exactly. He keeps using the language of like, I'm going to stand up to these industries and I'm going to stand up to blah, blah, blah.

00:06:25 Speaker_02
And you're like, no, you're going to open the door for them and show them in. You want it to be even easier to lie to us in America. Like, I don't get enough scam phone calls. You want me to get more.

00:06:34 Speaker_03
I mean, I think this is very similar to what he says and has said about vaccines, right? He keeps saying he just wants the data, but safety data and long-term research are publicly available and have been for a really long time.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
The funniest possible outcome of this would be that he takes charge and he calls a press conference and he's like, you know, we looked into it and Fauci was actually correct.

00:06:56 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:06:56 Speaker_01
I told you I just wanted the information. Now I have the information. Turns out, uh, everyone's trying their hardest and, uh, now we'll move on on that basis.

00:07:05 Speaker_03
So essentially on the vaccine front, there are a couple of things that he can do around vaccines. It's pretty unheard of to revoke the approval of a drug or a, you know, vaccine.

00:07:18 Speaker_03
And that would be exceedingly difficult since so many States have state level mandates for children to be vaccinated. Good, good, good. he can sort of shape the kinds of clinical trials that are required of drug companies. Right.

00:07:32 Speaker_03
He can slow down the review of those trials and the approval processes, right? There's stuff that he can do to just sort of gum up the works.

00:07:41 Speaker_01
Right.

00:07:42 Speaker_03
But in terms of like broad mandates that like no one's getting a vaccine, like that kind of stuff is much, much, much trickier to pull off. And a lot of it doesn't live at the federal level.

00:07:55 Speaker_02
Although a friend of mine is a public high school teacher in Seattle and had his first student with pertussis this year. Which is the P in the DTAP vaccine. But now people are not getting the vaccine, so we're getting whooping cough.

00:08:10 Speaker_02
We're making whooping cough great again.

00:08:11 Speaker_03
He has also said that he wants to defluoridate all U.S. water supplies. This is a future mega episode for us.

00:08:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, I know. You've been working this for months.

00:08:21 Speaker_03
His views on this counter the CDC's own longstanding recommendation, which lauds water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health victories of the 20th century. Yes.

00:08:33 Speaker_03
He could issue recommendations and like suggest to local governments that they should defluoridate, but he doesn't actually have the power to flip a switch. Right. And actually defluoridate water.

00:08:47 Speaker_03
What would need to happen is that Congress would have to ban fluoride nationwide or the EPA would have to put fluoride on a dangerous chemicals list. Neither of those are in his control solely.

00:09:01 Speaker_02
But they are in control of the people who run all three branches of government and the EPA.

00:09:04 Speaker_03
He keeps saying, like, on day one, we're going to defluoridate. And it's like, no, you're not. You can't do that.

00:09:09 Speaker_02
It'll be like day three or four. Don't worry, everybody.

00:09:13 Speaker_03
Many of the changes that we've talked about here would require a process called rulemaking. In the U.S., changing federal rules, which are like the guidelines on how to implement the law, requires a lot of public disclosure and public comment.

00:09:30 Speaker_03
So there will be these long, like 30 or 90 day public comment periods that are opportunities to publicly push back, to organize and to arm staff within those agencies with some additional reasons that X, Y, or Z is a bad idea or a great idea or whatever.

00:09:49 Speaker_03
I would argue that is where a ton of stuff is going to happen at HHS. So I think all of us just got to get better at paying attention to federal rulemaking and being prepared to like submit comment on stuff and all of that. Right. Yeah.

00:10:04 Speaker_03
I want to talk a little bit about what happens next, where we go from here.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
I can already lose their minds slowly and just become just a series of vowel sounds.

00:10:11 Speaker_03
You think this, what we've been recording today has been slow? In order to be confirmed as HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. has to be confirmed by the Senate. If you are in the U.S., You actually can impact this process.

00:10:27 Speaker_03
You can call the capital switchboard directly and tell them whether or not you think RFK Jr. should be confirmed. That phone number is 202-224-3121. This is a thing that people tell you to do a lot.

00:10:44 Speaker_03
The reason that they tell you to do it a lot is that it really matters. Yeah. It's easy to get fatalistic about this kind of stuff, but it's important to remember that this is not actually a done deal. Yeah.

00:10:55 Speaker_03
When you call the Capitol switchboard, when you get in touch with your senator, there is a staffer who is literally sitting there with a tally sheet for how many calls they get in favor and how many calls they get opposed.

00:11:09 Speaker_02
Right. And there's also things like, you know, giving money and there's also local things that you can do. I mean, I think,

00:11:14 Speaker_02
I think everybody's really worried that everyone's so fatigued from the previous Trump administration that no one's going to engage. I try not to make predictions as part of my journalism career. I have no idea what's going to happen.

00:11:24 Speaker_02
But I think complacency is one of the ways that authoritarian regimes flourish, is when everybody gets tired. And I also get it if people just really can't fucking do it at this point.

00:11:33 Speaker_02
But if you are somebody with the ability or with the finances or with the time or whatever, it's really important to engage to the extent that you can.

00:11:40 Speaker_03
So that's what's happened since we recorded this bonus episode. Like two weeks ago.

00:11:46 Speaker_01
Will now sound unbearably light-hearted.

00:11:50 Speaker_02
God, I know. Compared to where we are. And also so naive. We're like, maybe we'll never have to talk about this guy again. But it's like, nope. LOL, nope.

00:11:56 Speaker_02
We will have to talk about him for the rest of our lives until we die of measles, which I think is about a 50-50 chance at this point.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where, for Halloween, we're zombies, but we only eat brains worms.

00:12:23 Speaker_02
That had so much potential, Aubrey, and then it just it just didn't land.

00:12:28 Speaker_01
That's me booing myself. Brains worms.

00:12:36 Speaker_03
I'm Aubrey Gordon, here to disappoint you.

00:12:41 Speaker_02
I'm Michael Hobbs here specifically to disappoint you.

00:12:43 Speaker_03
Michael, I feel like I have a broad sense of what we're in for, but I am generally like not. done a deep dive into the RFK Jr. updates. What I'm aware of involves animal carcasses, sexual assault allegations, and a suspended New York Magazine reporter.

00:13:05 Speaker_02
The body count, both animal and human, of this episode is deranged.

00:13:10 Speaker_03
And HHS secretary rumors.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
Every time we talk about him, I'm like, thank God we never have to talk about this fucking guy again. But this is going to be the rest of our lives.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
So content warning, there's some domestic violence stuff, there's some sexual assault stuff, and there's some suicide stuff in this episode. We apologize for the kind of person that RFK Jr. is and associates with.

00:13:30 Speaker_03
Boy, Michael, if there's one thing I've learned in therapy, you've got to stop apologizing for other people's behavior.

00:13:39 Speaker_02
So, okay, we come to you with great reluctance. We did our last RFK Jr. episode on, I checked, August 1st, 2023. Since then, there have been numerous developments in the RFK Jr.

00:13:56 Speaker_02
story, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and we've gotten a million requests to talk about what's been going on with RFK Jr. because he keeps fucking popping up in the news and there's always weird animals involved. There's like an emu thing that I skipped.

00:14:15 Speaker_02
I was like, there's too many fucking animals. We can't do emus.

00:14:18 Speaker_01
There's like a sea creature one too, right?

00:14:20 Speaker_02
There's a bear, a whale, and a worm.

00:14:24 Speaker_03
This simply must be a fever dream.

00:14:27 Speaker_02
So I basically, I went on the New York Times website and I did a search for RFK Jr. and I opened every single story they have published since August 1st, 2023. And I was like, I'm just gonna fucking read all of these and put a timeline together.

00:14:42 Speaker_02
And then I did some like extra research and stuff. And so we're just going to go through it, like basically chronologically, like what has this man been up to? Okay. We have to start with just talking about like his presidential run.

00:14:56 Speaker_02
So this is kind of ongoing, so it's difficult to put it in kind of chronological time. But as of August 1st, 2023, when last we discussed, R.F.K. Jr.

00:15:06 Speaker_02
Basically he's running this presidential campaign but the presidential campaign is weird because he originally was running as a Democrat but then he switches and he's running as an independent like a third party guy.

00:15:18 Speaker_02
What that actually means in practice is that you have to get on the ballot in all 50 states and the process for getting on the ballot is completely different in every single state

00:15:28 Speaker_02
where you have like in some states you have to get like 42,000 signatures on a petition and in some states you need like 10,000 signatures and then you have to file them by this date and then there's a whole weird subplot where his signatures get thrown out.

00:15:41 Speaker_02
I can't even remember which state but they get thrown out because he didn't have the vice president listed on the petition. There's all this weird technical stuff to get on the ballot which honestly is like kind of fucked up.

00:15:53 Speaker_02
Like I think it should be easier but also It's RFK Jr., so I don't know how much I care.

00:15:57 Speaker_03
It is a super complicated process, and usually there's a team of people in every state, and a director of states is a position that is usually part of a presidential campaign.

00:16:08 Speaker_02
Speaking of which, this is exactly what I wanted you to read. So we have our first excerpt is from a really interesting New Yorker article.

00:16:18 Speaker_02
This is the main theme of this episode, and something that I don't think I got across in our episode episodes is, how much of just a piece of shit RFK Jr. is just like as a person.

00:16:29 Speaker_02
So here is a paragraph from this New Yorker article about him staffing up his campaign.

00:16:36 Speaker_03
Kennedy ultimately appointed Nick Branagh, a former national political outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders and the founder of the progressive group the People's Party to run his ballot access operation.

00:16:49 Speaker_03
Two years earlier, Branagh had allegedly tried to force himself onto a female colleague. Holy fuck.

00:16:56 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:16:57 Speaker_03
An accusation that was corroborated by a woman who had walked in on the scene. Branagh has said that the allegation is, quote, false and politically motivated.

00:17:07 Speaker_03
The campaign and its super PAC have spent millions of dollars working with firms associated with a ballot access consultant named Trent Poole. In May, Poole was arrested in New York City for choking and punching a woman.

00:17:21 Speaker_03
A lawyer for Poole called it, quote, a completely unjustified prosecution. So far, Kennedy has got his name on the ballot in about a dozen states.

00:17:31 Speaker_02
This is the kind of person that he surrounds himself with. It's people who seem to have kind of crashed out of more traditional politics and kind of can't get hired.

00:17:41 Speaker_03
There is a kind of person who gets drawn to short-term, large-scale campaigns. It's not every person who works on them, not by a long shot, but it's an environment. It's like a little Petri dish that allows them to thrive. Yeah.

00:17:57 Speaker_03
And those are people who will do anything to get their way. Oh, interesting. Okay. And to win their thing. Right. Because when you're running a short term campaign, that's a year or less, which a lot of these, you know, styles of campaigns are,

00:18:15 Speaker_03
You're not really accountable to a community of people. You're not really accountable to like a lasting board or anything like that. Right. You have one job and your one job is to win. Right.

00:18:27 Speaker_03
And if you win, whatever you did in the course of winning will be sort of forgiven by your side as sort of the understanding.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
That's a good point.

00:18:35 Speaker_03
In some ways, it's like uniquely bad because it's fucking RFK Jr. So of course it's worse. But it's only like 5% worse. No, it's not 5%. It's more than 5%. But it is just sort of like, it's like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, but of elections.

00:18:51 Speaker_03
You know what I mean? Whatever you got to do.

00:18:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, always be groping. Break rooms are for closers. But I mean, this leads very well into the next little chapter of this. So there's two aspects of getting on the ballot in all 50 states.

00:19:04 Speaker_02
So one of them is you sort of start from scratch in these various states. You have to get x number of signatures, whatever. And so you usually hire a firm to do that. There's companies that will go and get 100,000 signatures for you.

00:19:17 Speaker_02
It's very expensive, but this is just part of running a campaign. So over the course of the campaign, there start to be questions about the kinds of firms that he's hiring and the kinds of tactics that they are using.

00:19:28 Speaker_02
So I'm going to send you the first two paragraphs of an article from the New York Times.

00:19:35 Speaker_03
Amy Bernstein, a traffic court judge in Brooklyn, was heading home from work one night in late April when a young man carrying a clipboard approached her on the subway platform asking if she would sign a petition to help place independents on the ballot in New York.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
The top of the petition was folded underneath itself. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So that the names of the candidates were not visible, Ms. Bernstein said.

00:19:59 Speaker_03
She asked for more details and told the man she was a judge, at which point he yanked the clipboard away and asked, am I going to get in trouble?

00:20:08 Speaker_02
So they're like, do you want to sign this petition? You're like, what's the petition for? And they just like turn and run away.

00:20:12 Speaker_03
Yikes!

00:20:16 Speaker_02
This New York Times article is really funny because you can tell how it came about.

00:20:20 Speaker_02
So after it tells the story of the judge, it says, more than a half dozen New York City residents, including two who are journalists at the New York Times and were approached randomly, have described similar encounters with signature gatherers to Mr. Kennedy.

00:20:35 Speaker_02
So basically like New York Times reporters get these people come up to them and they're like, wait, what the fuck is this? And people won't explain what the petition is actually for.

00:20:44 Speaker_02
One guy, these are not New York Times reporters, but one guy says, this is a petition to get Biden on the ballot. Jesus Christ. This is after the primary. He's like, what? Right. But before Biden dropped out.

00:20:54 Speaker_03
So it's not that wild a swing as it might sound now.

00:20:58 Speaker_02
RFK Jr. says, of course the campaign denies anything, like, oh, we must have hired the wrong third-party contractor, we're very disappointed. RFK Jr.

00:21:06 Speaker_02
says, we take ballot access, voter rights, and truthfulness extremely seriously around here, Mr. Kennedy said. It's the very substance of what motivates us to fight the establishment parties in the first place.

00:21:17 Speaker_02
So, the guy who says that there's mercury in the vaccines is very, very concerned about truthfulness.

00:21:23 Speaker_03
Here's the thing that blows my mind about RFK jr among other things. He is an attorney and like law is figuring out how to color in the lines, right? In a lot of ways. And it's also figuring out how to build like a persuasive argument for something.

00:21:39 Speaker_03
And I think the thing that I find stunning about RFK jr is how unpersuasive he is for an attorney. Well,

00:21:46 Speaker_02
Keep in mind, Aubrey, he was never really an attorney. He was fired in disgrace. He's not a real attorney. And when he was like, quote unquote, an environmental lawyer, he was mostly like a figurehead who was good at getting funding from rich people.

00:22:02 Speaker_03
Love that you're like counterpoint. Don't forget. He's bad at it. He is fake Your last shred of good faith that you I was really holding out hope Lifelong failure is also failing at this.

00:22:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, so one Like, thread of his campaign is this kind of starting from scratch thing where you need to get a bunch of petitions to get on the ballot. Another thread is he's convincing existing political parties to name him as their candidate.

00:22:39 Speaker_02
So, this is another thing that, you know, when you get the ballot, there's the, like, make Seattle safer party. They run a candidate every year.

00:22:46 Speaker_02
And this is like a weird tangent, but I was not aware of the fact that in California specifically, the third largest political party, bigger than the Libertarians, bigger than the Greens, is something called the American Independent Party.

00:23:00 Speaker_03
Oh my god, Michael.

00:23:03 Speaker_02
Do you know about this?

00:23:04 Speaker_03
I can't tell you how much I know about and resent. Well, you know, the independent party. Yes. So listen, one of the campaigns that I worked on, Oregon was one of the very first states to create truly automatic voter registration. Right. Yeah.

00:23:20 Speaker_03
There was one political party that threw a real shit fit. about automatic voter reg. And that was the Independent Party.

00:23:28 Speaker_01
Oh, really?

00:23:29 Speaker_03
Because before it was Republican Democrat Independent. So they were essentially like people were like getting confused and they thought that independent meant unaffiliated and they were accidentally registering with a party.

00:23:39 Speaker_02
Dude, this is exactly the thing in California. So the reason it's the third biggest party is not because people want this to be members of this political party, right? They endorse Kanye West in the last in their last election. They're bad, guys.

00:23:53 Speaker_02
We don't do this in Washington, but in other states, you sort of register as a Democrat or a Republican. People see the choice of you can register as a member of the American Independent Party, and they think that means, oh, I'm an independent voter.

00:24:05 Speaker_02
Yes. They don't actually want anything to do with this party. So apparently, there's been a whole celebrity campaign to get people not to take this box, including the actresses Emma Stone and Demi Moore have both been fooled by this.

00:24:20 Speaker_02
and have come out and a bunch of other, I read a whole article about this, of other prominent people who are like, I accidentally ticked the box, you guys. Yeah, yes.

00:24:32 Speaker_03
Secretaries of State also should have been saying, that can't be the name of your party.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
Look, we do this with vanity plates, we should be doing it with political parties.

00:24:40 Speaker_03
Look, if my friend can't get a vanity plate that says, two dykes,

00:24:48 Speaker_01
And has to go to court for it.

00:24:50 Speaker_02
She's Dutch. She's just talking about Infrastructure water infrastructure.

00:24:55 Speaker_03
She specializes in fluid flow engine.

00:24:57 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:24:58 Speaker_03
Well, I guess kind never mind It's below sea level feel like you really missed my fluid flow lesbian joke.

00:25:04 Speaker_02
Oh, see, I don't know the lesbian jokes. There's no way Just give them as a as a genre of joke on this show Aubrey give up. Fluid is flowing. That's all. Okay, so that is like the logistics of the campaign. There's also the content of the campaign.

00:25:22 Speaker_02
People are so mad we're not talking about the bear and the whale right now, but we're going to talk about the actual political issues at play.

00:25:28 Speaker_02
So, one thing that I think is interesting, like looking over old articles, is that RFK Jr., at the beginning of his campaign, sort of tried to appeal to more left-wing people and, you know, because he's a Kennedy and he ran as a Democrat and stuff, he was

00:25:42 Speaker_02
explicitly saying that like, oh, I'm a Democrat, but I'm like the better kind of Democrat. So we are going to read a relatively long excerpt from a New Yorker interview where I am going to be RFK Jr.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
You are going to be David Remnick, who is asking the questions. Do like a NPR podcast voice.

00:26:01 Speaker_01
I have a podcast voice, Mike. Oh, wait. Shit.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
Sorry. I sometimes forget that we're not just like talking. OK, yes. Wow, you'd be good on a podcast, Aubrey. Has anyone ever told you that? What a voice for a podcast. So here is the first excerpt. We're starting with you.

00:26:19 Speaker_03
You're running as a Democrat for president. And I wonder, who in the Democratic Party do you feel is kindred to you? Obviously not Joe Biden, but AOC or Joe Manchin? Or are you something new entirely? How would you define your ideology?

00:26:35 Speaker_02
I'm something old. I'm a Kennedy Democrat. I believe in labor unions. I believe in a strong, robust middle class. I believe in racial justice and policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.

00:26:46 Speaker_03
I don't think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.

00:26:48 Speaker_02
Well, then why did he do the lockdowns?

00:26:50 Speaker_03
What?

00:26:53 Speaker_02
Sir. I love it. This is like 30 seconds into the interview. Wow. Remember? Remember the plandemic lady? How she was just, they're like, are you an anti-vaxxer? She's like, no, but Fauci's killed millions. Just like zero to 60.

00:27:14 Speaker_02
So okay, that was excerpt number one.

00:27:16 Speaker_03
I believe in labor unions. That's why I've partnered with Donald J. Trump.

00:27:22 Speaker_02
Okay, this one is even longer.

00:27:25 Speaker_03
I'm finding it curious and maybe even disturbing that some of your early admirers include Trumpists like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone.

00:27:35 Speaker_03
Do you welcome that or do you think maybe, just maybe, someone like that is delighted that a strong Democratic opponent will wound Joe Biden and in the long run help Donald Trump?

00:27:46 Speaker_02
I'm trying to unite the country, David. I'm not going to do what you do, which is to pick out people and say that they're evil, they should be canceled or whatever. I'm a Democrat. I know what my values are.

00:27:55 Speaker_02
I've always spoken to Republicans my entire life. During all the years that I was a leader of the environmental movement, dubious, I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News.

00:28:06 Speaker_02
And when Tucker Carlson recently did a special on endocrine disruptors, and he was condemned by the left, I thought that was crazy. I think what we ought to be doing is inviting people into our tent without changing our values.

00:28:17 Speaker_02
I think the kind of tribalism that you're advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it's toxic.

00:28:23 Speaker_03
At what point do you say, with respect, that this is not about tribalism or cancellation or the terms that you're using, but just an insistence on a certain level of decency and principle?

00:28:34 Speaker_03
Somebody like Alex Jones comes forward and he has nice things to say to you. At what point do you say, you know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don't want your support.

00:28:44 Speaker_02
I'm not a cancel culture guy. Good. It's not funny, but it's like, This is the weird ideology of this guy. This thing of cancellation, which no one can quite define, of course, of course, it's like the number one issue for him.

00:29:01 Speaker_03
It's just a really weird, clear sort of front for some like bad political action. And it's a place for people to put their feelings. And I think That's part of what I think is happening here with RFK Jr.

00:29:16 Speaker_03
is he's like, I'm not a cancel culture guy because he, I suspect feels like he has been canceled or is being canceled. Yeah. Now, dude, people are just judging you based on your beliefs and actions. I don't know. What's it telling you here?

00:29:31 Speaker_02
So this actually leads into the final excerpt from this, which is RFK Jr. just like very explicitly talking about his resentment. So here's this. I think I start this one. Yeah.

00:29:43 Speaker_02
He says, this is the first administration in our history that has colluded with the press to censor Americans directly out of the White House, including me by name.

00:29:51 Speaker_03
How are you being censored out of the White House?

00:29:54 Speaker_02
The White House was ordering the social media sites to censor me.

00:29:57 Speaker_03
You're everywhere in the press. You're in what you call mainstream media. You're on Joe Rogan. Who censored you?

00:30:04 Speaker_02
I am, since I declared for president. But before that, I was deplatformed. I was deplatformed completely. 800,000 followers were taken away from me on Instagram at the behest of the White House. What? Citation. Citation needed.

00:30:18 Speaker_02
I don't think the New Yorker bothered being like, this is not a real fact. I don't think the White House cares. Honestly, 800,000 followers isn't even that many followers.

00:30:28 Speaker_03
This could absolutely be like the text of a conversation between like an influencer who got locked out of their account and like she in. God, I don't want a presidential candidate who sounds like that.

00:30:42 Speaker_02
I also think what's so interesting, too, is that, like, it feels very clear to me that this whole thing is driven by resentment, but it's not even, like, fact-based resentment, right?

00:30:50 Speaker_02
He's basically mad that, like, his account got taken away or taken down or whatever for, like, posting deranged anti-vax shit. But that has nothing to do with the White House. Companies have terms of service.

00:31:00 Speaker_02
You can't post, you can't post like ISIS beheadings and shit on social media. They'll block you. And so he's mad at the terms of service of Instagram, ultimately.

00:31:10 Speaker_03
Right. If you start a fight at a bar and the bouncer kicks you out, they're not like censoring you. Exactly. They're like, you can't fight here.

00:31:16 Speaker_02
And also they're not, they're not following orders from like the mayor. Yeah, totally.

00:31:21 Speaker_03
That doesn't mean the president told him to do that.

00:31:24 Speaker_02
Yes. So this is, I mean, this runs through the entire campaign. He's just like a vessel for all this resentment. And it's really, that sort of leads us to the next couple chapters of this. So over the course of the campaign, he starts to drift right.

00:31:40 Speaker_02
I'm not going to go through every single issue, but one of the things that I remember from researching the first couple RFK Jr. episodes was that he maintained like a shred of integrity.

00:31:51 Speaker_02
So, he would go on these like super right-wing podcasts and talk about like Fauci should be locked up and all this like anti-vax garbage.

00:31:57 Speaker_02
But then every once in a while, one of these right-wing hosts would be like, oh, the Democrats are lying about climate change. And then RFK Jr., because he was an environmental guy for so long, he'd be like, actually climate change is real.

00:32:10 Speaker_02
That one I'm actually, I happen to be with the Democrats on.

00:32:13 Speaker_02
It was like he had this one thing but then starting like this summer he appoints a climate denier, like an open climate denier as one of the managers of his campaign and then he starts talking about like, oh he wants to have climate policy he says that makes sense to skeptics and activists alike.

00:32:34 Speaker_02
And then when people ask him about specific climate policies, he can't name a single thing that he would do to rein in fossil fuels.

00:32:42 Speaker_02
So it's like his one issue, the thing that he dedicated his life to, he just completely sold out to like get right-wing votes basically.

00:32:48 Speaker_02
There's something so like, I don't want to say sad because I have no sympathy for this man, but it's just like kind of pathetic.

00:32:53 Speaker_03
It's also interesting because normally the way that you do things, if you're like, we're going to appease everyone and therefore do nothing is usually what happens, right? Is like you make like a blue ribbon commission. Yeah.

00:33:05 Speaker_03
And you delay, delay, delay. That is the number one thing that climate change activists will absolutely. not tolerate at this point.

00:33:14 Speaker_02
It's like, what if we just talk about it some more? We also, in March and April, start getting more signs of his, like, right-wing ideology and, like, flirting with the right.

00:33:25 Speaker_02
In April, he gives an interview where he says, this is the reality that every American citizen faces, from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in Washington, D.C. jail stripped of their constitutional liberties.

00:33:41 Speaker_01
What?

00:33:42 Speaker_02
He then goes on Tim Pool's podcast to say that he's against this move to like take down the Confederate statues. Good lord. This is a masterpiece of a paragraph from a New York Times article. It says, while defending the statues,

00:33:56 Speaker_02
Mr. Kennedy also said there were, quote, heroes in the Confederacy who didn't have slaves, comma.

00:34:03 Speaker_02
Though when he later picked an example of a Confederate whom he idolized, he singled out Robert E. Lee, a prominent general in the rebel army who owned slaves.

00:34:11 Speaker_03
When you're that writer and you get to write that paragraph, I have to imagine that you're like in your office just quietly going like, LeBron James. You know what I mean? You know exactly what you're doing. Absolutely.

00:34:27 Speaker_03
It's the best day of your week, if not your year.

00:34:31 Speaker_02
So, okay, but then this is Aubrey Bate. So we now get to the Aubrey Bate section. As he does more of these fucking podcasts, he keeps bringing up obesity. Great.

00:34:40 Speaker_02
You know, for all that we bitch about the framing of this issue, it hasn't really been an election issue. Yeah, it really has not. This isn't something that comes up in, like, presidential debates.

00:34:47 Speaker_02
And so he makes it kind of like the cornerstone of his campaign. He's always talking about chronic disease, et cetera. And he's like, you shouldn't take medications. You should, like, eat foods. You know, this whole, like, food is medicine thing.

00:34:58 Speaker_02
I mean, that's what he means, right? If you really don't want to get measles, eat blueberries. Like, whatever the fuck he's talking about, right? So this is an excerpt. from, I believe, an interview with Chris Hayes.

00:35:09 Speaker_03
Oh, Jesus fucking hell.

00:35:11 Speaker_02
It's so boring. It's so boring.

00:35:14 Speaker_03
We're paying more now, Chris, for diabetes than for our defense budget. So when I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime.

00:35:26 Speaker_03
Today, one out of every three kids who walks into his office has juvenile diabetes and nobody is talking about it. It is costing us four point three trillion dollars a year three times our defense budget Okay, so question. Oh No, it's not

00:35:48 Speaker_03
Not a question, but proceed. Proceed, governor. This is fucking garbage and like, it's not fucking true. It's not one of every three kids does not have diabetes.

00:36:01 Speaker_02
This, I mean, honestly, this is like a quasar of misinformation. Basically, every single thing that he says is false here. So We do not spend more on diabetes than our defense budget. The defense budget is around $900 billion a year.

00:36:16 Speaker_02
The actual spending on diabetes according to the American Diabetes Association is about $300 billion a year, so one third of the defense budget. But that is one of those statistics that is like massively inflated.

00:36:26 Speaker_02
They're basically saying that like all heart attacks, all strokes, Because they're kind of downstream effects of diabetes, they're throwing in all this extra stuff and saying that's like the cost of diabetes.

00:36:37 Speaker_02
So we don't really know but even the high-end estimates are one-third of the defense budget. So that's just like not true. He says one in three kids... has juvenile diabetes.

00:36:48 Speaker_02
We talked about this on our zombie statistics episodes that that's one in three people will eventually at some point in their lives be diagnosed with diabetes, which is also not true because the population as a whole, 11% of people have diabetes in America.

00:37:03 Speaker_02
And among kids, it's 0.35%. And most of that is type 1 diabetes. Like type 2 diabetes rates are rising among children? But they're very, very small as an absolute percentage. I feel like people get things like mixed up in their heads.

00:37:19 Speaker_03
And I think the alarm around kids getting type 2 diabetes is based in an outdated understanding of type 2 diabetes. Right. We have this idea that type 1 is the blameless kind and type 2 is the like you fucked up so hard you got diabetes kind.

00:37:34 Speaker_02
Or are you about to say that the type 1 people need to be blamed as well? We'll come in for the type 1 people.

00:37:39 Speaker_01
They've had it too good for too long.

00:37:41 Speaker_02
Sorry, guys. It's time for you to suffer with the rest of us.

00:37:45 Speaker_03
It calls up a series of images, and I think he knows that he's doing that, right?

00:37:50 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah. He's weaponizing all this existing stigma. Yeah. I mean, he's not going to propose anything that makes anybody healthier, right? What he wants to do is get rid of vaccines. He's not actually going to improve school lunches or anything, right?

00:38:03 Speaker_02
Gross! So that was gross. We now get to the more comedic elements of this story. On May... Well, actually this one isn't comedic. Well, we'll get there. So on May 8th, we get an article in the New York Times called, RFK Jr.

00:38:17 Speaker_02
says doctors found a dead worm in his brain, colon, the presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain. So this is exactly what it sounds like.

00:38:30 Speaker_02
They find court filings from 2012 where he says I have a worm in my brain and he says he got it from a trip to South Asia where he ate some contaminated food and then the little worm swam up to his brain and then ate part of his brain and then died and when a little worm dies in your brain it creates like a little calcified little thing kind of like a tumor

00:38:57 Speaker_02
and that can affect your cognitive abilities. What's funny about this is like it makes him look quite bad, but like he's exaggerating how bad it is.

00:39:08 Speaker_02
So they actually investigate and like people getting parasites is relatively common in the world, right? And like there are literal brain worms and this does in fact happen and it can spread through diet.

00:39:20 Speaker_02
So the fact that he got a brain worm is actually not that weird, right? And most people who get parasites never have any symptoms, they live the rest of their lives.

00:39:28 Speaker_02
So in the New York Times they say, it is unlikely that a parasite would eat part of the brain.

00:39:34 Speaker_02
They also, like there's different kind of, you know there's like tapeworms that like sit in your intestine or whatever and they can be like a foot long, it's like so fucking gross to think about.

00:39:43 Speaker_02
In the article they say, unlike tapeworm larvae in the intestines, those in the brain remain relatively small, about a third of an inch. That sounds really big to me. I don't want so I don't want a third of an inch worm in my fucking brain.

00:39:58 Speaker_02
Oh God, I just absolutely caught a chill. Oh, it's so nasty There is one funny element of this that I kind of like this was the one Aspect of the research for this episode was like, all right Robert. I'll give you this one. So it says in the article

00:40:16 Speaker_02
On Wednesday afternoon, hours after this article was published, Mr. Kennedy posted a comment on his Twitter profile. I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Biden and President Trump in a debate. That's actually pretty good.

00:40:32 Speaker_03
Good job, social media manager.

00:40:34 Speaker_02
Okay. But then it's about to get sad. So the actual context of this is this is from a 2012 legal case where he and his wife are divorcing and she's trying to get child support.

00:40:48 Speaker_02
And the reason he's doing this is he's saying, my cognitive faculties were impaired. Therefore, I have lower earning potential. Therefore, she's entitled to less child support.

00:41:00 Speaker_02
The way that this article is framed in the New York Times is as like a political fucking horse race story. They're like, ooh, the candidate has emphasized his fitness for office and he's done pushups on camera, but actually he has a brain worm.

00:41:11 Speaker_02
And he's clearly lying about the extent to which the brain worm has affected his cognition. He also says that he has mercury poisoning, something he hasn't mentioned anywhere else. He's lying so that his wife does not get any

00:41:22 Speaker_02
money and this happens so he he doesn't have to pay any child support as we discussed in our previous episode his wife ends up killing herself jesus hell you know you never want to attribute it to one cause but like this this kind of ruined her life right right it's not helping yeah it's not helping this whole story is like really sad it feels like the more you sort of scratch the surface with this guy the more you're like oh he's less like a comic

00:41:50 Speaker_03
sort of political side character and more just like a standard issue garbage dude who's like trying to avoid paying alimony and is like sexually harassing or sexually assaulting people.

00:42:05 Speaker_03
Allegedly, despite all of the, you know, bear heads and whale carcasses and brain worms of it all. Yeah. He is just like. Yeah. You're fucking your friend's shitty ex-boyfriend.

00:42:18 Speaker_02
Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:19 Speaker_03
Todd's back. Fuck.

00:42:21 Speaker_02
Yeah. No kidding. Oh, he's Dennis from 30 rock. Yeah.

00:42:25 Speaker_03
This feels very classic maintenance phase. Oh, did you come here to laugh about the brain worms? Just kidding. It's real sad.

00:42:32 Speaker_02
I actually, I don't know why I did this, but I actually have a list of late night jokes about the worm.

00:42:36 Speaker_03
Do you want to hear some of them? Oh, sure.

00:42:39 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:42:39 Speaker_02
Do some. Worms jokes. So this is from the Daily Show. I don't know what's worse, that RFK Jr. had a worm that was eating his brain or that his brain is so poisoned that it killed the worm. That's pretty good. That is good.

00:42:51 Speaker_02
Stephen Colbert said, cause of death, starvation, which I kind of like.

00:42:57 Speaker_02
So we then in July get a Vanity Fair, like a big long investigative feature by Vanity Fair where they interview a million people who knew him and this produces a series of like sub scandals. So we're going to talk about two of them.

00:43:10 Speaker_02
The first is, do you remember the dog allegations? The dog eating? No, what? I was going to send you a link but that will spoil it for you. So I'm going to send you a little screenshot. Hang on.

00:43:25 Speaker_02
There's a New York Post headline that says, Unsettling photo appears to show RFK Jr. with barbecued carcass of dog.

00:43:33 Speaker_03
It's a picture of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a person with long hair and their face mostly censored holding like a big sort of rotisserie like spit that has a roasted animal carcass of some kind, like a whole roasted animal of some kind. on it.

00:43:54 Speaker_03
I'm guessing that's not a dog.

00:43:56 Speaker_02
He says this is a photo of him in the Chilean Andes and it's a lamb. And the minute people look into it, they're like, oh yeah, this, it sort of looks weird the way that it's on the spit.

00:44:08 Speaker_02
Like it looks untraditional, but it's like, you can find a million photos on Flickr of people doing this, like a traditional way to cook goat and lamb and various other things. So this is just like a normal thing that they do in Chile.

00:44:20 Speaker_02
But then again, this photo, whatever, the context of it is so much worse. So the reason we know about this is that he texted this to a friend and said, it was like a friend who's like, I'm on my way to Asia, like a completely whatever normal text.

00:44:36 Speaker_02
And so he texts this friend back and says, like, well, you're going to have to eat a bunch of dogs there because they eat dogs in Asia. And so here's me eating a dog.

00:44:44 Speaker_01
Oh it's just him making a shitty racist joke? It's just like a racist joke that he made. Neat!

00:44:49 Speaker_02
So the other thing that comes out of this Vanity Fair article is the sexual assault allegations. There's a weird thing where there's one paragraph in the article and this gets no play in like secondary media.

00:45:03 Speaker_02
that when he was married to his second wife, he allegedly would send nude photos of the women he was sleeping with to his friends.

00:45:13 Speaker_02
It says, those friends assumed Kennedy himself had taken the pictures, but they didn't know whether the subjects had consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people.

00:45:24 Speaker_03
Weird that a Kennedy would have issues with women.

00:45:28 Speaker_02
I know. So the sexual assault allegations are around a 23-year-old babysitter who lives with Kennedy and his wife in the fall of 1998. There's three incidents of harassment. So in one,

00:45:44 Speaker_02
They're having dinner and he starts like rubbing her leg under the table. She then writes about it in her diary. And then a little while later she comes into her room and he's like in her room and her diary is like on the desk. And she's like, whoa.

00:46:00 Speaker_02
like kind of confused like what is he reading my diary? But we still don't really know what the fuck happened there. But he has his shirt off and he's like can you rub this, I think it's like sunscreen on my back or like lotion on my back.

00:46:12 Speaker_02
And she's like this is just really weird. He was in his 40s at the time.

00:46:15 Speaker_02
And then the third one is she's like in the kitchen doing something, chopping vegetables or whatever and he comes up behind her and just like gropes her and like rubs her like butt like up her body.

00:46:29 Speaker_02
This is somebody who basically was interested in like working with him because she wants to be part of the environmental movement. She's someone who's like really into environmentalism. And after this, she like leaves the environmental movement. Yeah.

00:46:41 Speaker_02
You know, when contacted by Vanity Fair and when the story comes out, he doesn't really say anything about these specific incidents, but he just says like, I've got a lot of skeletons in my closet.

00:46:51 Speaker_03
What a deeply weird fucking way to talk about. Yeah. Having God damn it.

00:46:57 Speaker_02
But then also this woman, the victim, gets a text from him after the story comes out that says, I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.

00:47:13 Speaker_02
I never intended you any harm. And if I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so. If you feel comfortable, I'd like to tell you this by phone and preferably face to face. I recognize that this might not be possible.

00:47:25 Speaker_02
I have no agenda for sending this text other than making the most sincere and earnest amends." And her name is Eliza Cooney. This is from the New York Times. It says, Ms. Cooney did not respond to his outreach and did not welcome it, she told the Times.

00:47:39 Speaker_02
Sending a text at 12.33 a.m. is not considering his actions affect on someone else, me, she said. At that time on 4th of July weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to him.

00:47:50 Speaker_02
He claims to have no memory of not one, not two, but three examples of his predatory behavior. He expects a societal pass and forgiveness for saying that he's no church boy. I have paid the cost for his sexual misconduct for decades. Correct!

00:48:04 Speaker_02
So like, fuck yes, Eliza Cooney. Correct! was just like, I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I have no interest in talking to you about this.

00:48:13 Speaker_03
It's been a while since I felt such an immediate strong allegiance to someone.

00:48:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. I'm like, hell yeah, spell it out, Eliza. Absolutely. We then enter August, which is a very packed month for RFK Jr. So on August 4th, 2024, we get the story of the bear. Are you familiar with this?

00:48:34 Speaker_03
Uh, Jeremy Allen White? What? We're not doing Yes, Chef.

00:48:38 Speaker_02
How dare you think that I would get a TV reference?

00:48:40 Speaker_03
I know you only get video game references. Exactly. And I only get TV references and never the twain shall meet.

00:48:47 Speaker_02
Give it to me in Tekken 3, then I would get the bear reference.

00:48:50 Speaker_03
You're he's oh, this is he took it home and he was like you're allowed to take it home for meat Aubrey I've read so much about whether or not you're actually allowed to take it home for me.

00:48:59 Speaker_02
I Really hate that. I know so much about like Department of Fish and Wildlife protocol in New York State now, so we are going to watch his telling of this this is

00:49:12 Speaker_02
In preemptive response to the New Yorker, which is writing a long feature profile on RFK Jr. They're doing the same thing. They're sniffing around his life. They're interviewing a bunch of people who knew him.

00:49:24 Speaker_02
The fact checker contacts him right before the story is set to publish and is like, we're going to say this thing about the bear. So to get ahead of it, RFK Jr. posts a video of him telling the full story. So I'm going to send you a link to a tweet.

00:49:40 Speaker_03
Wow. Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, at New Yorker.

00:49:45 Speaker_02
So, the text of this tweet makes no fucking sense. We're gonna watch a brief part of this, and then we're gonna pause, and we're gonna talk about fish and wildlife regulations. So... I know, I hate this. I hate this.

00:50:00 Speaker_03
That's what's making me laugh.

00:50:04 Speaker_02
Okay, you ready? So dumb. Okay.

00:50:08 Speaker_00
I was taking a group of people, up in Goshen, New York, up in Hudson Valley. And I was supposed to meet them there at like maybe eight or nine. I was driving up maybe, you know, really early, like seven.

00:50:22 Speaker_00
And that woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear.

00:50:30 Speaker_00
So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and it was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator and you can do that in New York State.

00:50:45 Speaker_00
You can get a bear tag for

00:50:51 Speaker_03
I have to say, I love the cutaways to the face of the person he's telling the story to.

00:50:57 Speaker_02
Do you know who that is? Who is it? It's Roseanne Barr. What? Isn't that so weird? She's like a deranged right winger now. We went to her Twitter profile. It's dark.

00:51:06 Speaker_03
I mean, like I knew she was deranged. I stopped paying attention to her, but I just wasn't accustomed to her current like blonde ringlets thing. And like, this is just all

00:51:18 Speaker_02
Surprising and even her who like appears to be a friend of his or something like a sympathetic listener She has this look on her face of like what the fuck is this totally she's doing a full Jim Halpert So this is the story that he tells.

00:51:35 Speaker_02
He's driving around New York State. The person in front of him hits a bear, not him, and then it is legal to pick up roadkill and like eat and use roadkill as long as you notify the authorities. There's a lot of like weird fact checking of this.

00:51:54 Speaker_02
A lot of people say that this is false, but it appears to be that this is true. You just have to notify the authorities.

00:52:01 Speaker_02
It's not, he says like you can get a tag for the bear and there's this weird thing where it's like, there's something like local papers, like a hunting license does not apply to roadkill.

00:52:12 Speaker_02
But if you have roadkill and you want to eat it, you can call the fish and wildlife people and they can approve of you eating the roadkill. This whole thing seems very weird to me.

00:52:23 Speaker_02
But apparently, a lot of fish and wildlife departments around the country kind of want people to eat roadkill. People find it really disgusting.

00:52:29 Speaker_02
But it's like, these animals are just going to sit there and rot on the side of the road if somebody doesn't take them.

00:52:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally. This is like a wastefulness thing. And like every government department is understaffed. And they're like, hey, could you do that for us? That'd be great.

00:52:42 Speaker_02
It's a little bit of a moot point, because he didn't notify the authorities, as far as we know. So it's sort of like, he's like, well, it's OK to do this, as long as you notify the authorities, which I did not do.

00:52:51 Speaker_02
But we'll just go ahead and watch the rest of the clip together.

00:52:56 Speaker_00
And so then we went hawking and I had the bear in my car. And then we had a really good day and we went late. We were catching a lot of game and the people really loved it.

00:53:08 Speaker_00
So we stayed late and instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city because there was a dinner at Peter Lugar's Steakhouse. And at the end of the dinner, it went late and I realized I couldn't go home.

00:53:23 Speaker_00
I had to go to the airport. And the bear was in my car and I didn't want to leave the bear in the car. You know, at that time, this was a little bit of the redneck in me. There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York.

00:53:37 Speaker_00
They had just put in the bike lanes and saw people, a couple of people got killed and it was every day and people had gotten badly injured. I wasn't drinking, of course, but people

00:53:53 Speaker_00
And I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of. I said, let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike. It'll be fun and funny for people.

00:54:04 Speaker_00
So everybody thought, that's a great idea. So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. The next day, And I turned on the TV, and there was like a mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 cop cars.

00:54:29 Speaker_03
Once again, bless this editor for the cutaways to Roseanne's face. Like when your judgment is being questioned in real time by Roseanne Barr?

00:54:45 Speaker_02
Also, it's so funny to me that he tweets this with looking forward to seeing how you spin this one. It's like, this is a deranged weird story. There's no spin required.

00:54:56 Speaker_03
It's also like, A couple of things. There's a point at which he says something about like, I guess that's a little redneck in me. And I'm like, you're a Kennedy. It's so weird.

00:55:06 Speaker_03
It's such a weird, like caricature of a rich villain thing to be like, it'll be so funny to dump this bear carcass in Central Park.

00:55:16 Speaker_02
Why would someone think it's funny to find a dead bear? He's like, Oh, they might get a kick out of it. What?

00:55:22 Speaker_03
Right. And the other thing that he doesn't appear to be clocking here is he's like, Oh my God, it was on the news. A, that's a wild ass thing, of course the cops were called.

00:55:32 Speaker_03
And B, if it wasn't on the news for there being a dead bear in Central Park from question mark, question mark origins, there would be eventually a story on the news that was like, a Kennedy put a dead bear in Central Park.

00:55:47 Speaker_03
Dude, this was always going to be news.

00:55:50 Speaker_02
Also, Aubrey, I am incandescent. that you have not mentioned his slander of bicyclists. This is what jumped out to me about it. He's like, I'm going to make it seem like a cyclist killed the bear. Yeah. A, that wouldn't even really happen.

00:56:06 Speaker_02
You'd have to, you'd have to be a really fast biker to kill a fucking bear. Yeah. And secondly, why the fuck would you frame a cyclist God's chosen creatures?

00:56:16 Speaker_03
That is another weird underscore of his like unrelatable rich dude shit where he's like, These cyclists are always burping back. That is such a weird, shitty guy who's been driving a giant and expensive car for a very long time.

00:56:34 Speaker_02
One thing I did actually find kind of cathartic about this is that I went back to the original coverage of this, like the AP stories and New York Times stories that were published in 2014, when they found a bear in Central Park.

00:56:45 Speaker_02
And the reason it was a big deal is because there are no fucking bears in New York. There's no bears in the zoo in New York. So it's like, how the fuck did a bear get into Central Park? So like, of course it was a news story.

00:56:56 Speaker_02
They do an investigation and immediately clock it. They're like, oh, somebody hit this with their car elsewhere and drove it here for some reason. Oh, God. Nobody falls for this fucking stupid prank. This is from the AP story in 2014.

00:57:07 Speaker_02
It says, the initial details of the case were clear. A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle.

00:57:19 Speaker_02
There's a bicycle on top of this bear for some reason. This is from the New York Times article. So he seems to have just like put this bear in Central Park and just like thrown a bicycle on top of it To act like I like I'm a cyclist.

00:57:59 Speaker_02
I'm biking through Central Park.

00:58:01 Speaker_03
I hit and kill a bear and I leave my bike This plan has all the sophistication of those like the like Chick-fil-a billboards that are just cows holding signs that say like, eat more chicken. He's just very bad at framing people.

00:58:21 Speaker_03
Oh my God, Mike, when do we get the ripped from the headlines law and order episode?

00:58:27 Speaker_03
One tiny thing about this video that I would not have clocked except that this video shows up in my thread with you right next to the picture of the quote unquote eating a dog. Oh yeah.

00:58:40 Speaker_03
Is that this whole video is filmed while he's sitting in front of a giant hotel pan of beef ribs?

00:58:46 Speaker_01
No, I know.

00:58:46 Speaker_02
It's like these giant ribs, like huge, like Flintstones meat.

00:58:49 Speaker_01
I get it. You like meat.

00:58:52 Speaker_02
So that. Story comes out August 4th. There's all this discourse about the bear. Starting in July and through August, we start to get stories of how his campaign is running out of money, basically.

00:59:05 Speaker_02
There's also this thing in Arizona where they can't get enough signatures for the ballot. They're supposed to have 42,000. They can only get 9,000.

00:59:16 Speaker_02
And then out of nowhere this like kind of sketchy pack delivers 110,000 signatures to the Secretary of State. And you're not supposed to coordinate.

00:59:25 Speaker_02
This is the whole Citizens United garbage thing where it's like you can't give money to candidates but you can give money to super PACs. But the super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns which we all know they fucking do all the time.

00:59:35 Speaker_02
according to election law, may count as an in-kind donation to the campaign, because this PAC was basically doing work for the campaign, and that may count as coordination, so this may be illegal.

00:59:48 Speaker_02
So even before RFK drops out, he drops off the ballot in Arizona. because there's all these like legal questions and like legal challenges. And he's like, oh, this looks really bad. So he's already off the ballot in Arizona.

00:59:59 Speaker_02
In mid-August, we start to get reports that he's speaking to the Harris and the Trump campaign. It seems like he tried to get a bunch of meetings with Harris of like, what are you going to give me if I drop out?

01:00:10 Speaker_02
And the Harris campaign was just not interested. Speaks highly of them. Good job.

01:00:15 Speaker_02
And then the weirdest fucking cameo in this is that we start getting these sort of like anonymous source quotes about him in like detailed weeks long talks with Donald Trump's campaign brokered by Tucker Carlson.

01:00:31 Speaker_02
Oh, he then on August 23rd, he announces that he's dropping out. Annoyingly, he's still in the fucking media, so he's still around. So on September 16th, we get the story of the whale.

01:00:45 Speaker_02
The whole thing is basically, it's a clip from like an old obscure documentary where his daughter is talking about they're in some fucking house in Long Island or Martha's Vineyard or some bullshit. And a whale washes up on the beach, a dead whale.

01:00:59 Speaker_02
And R.F.K. Jr. sees this and immediately runs to the garage, grabs a chainsaw, runs down to the beach and chops its head off.

01:01:08 Speaker_02
And then like drives it back to his other house and like I guess like mounts it on the wall or does – I don't know what the fuck he does with it but he does that. This is also illegal. So Noah is investigating this.

01:01:19 Speaker_02
who knows whatever he might have like pay a fine or something and then the final chapter of this which i really should not have spent this much time on it is The Ballad of Robert and Olivia.

01:01:34 Speaker_03
Oh, this one makes me sad. This one's just a huge bummer. It's such a bummer.

01:01:39 Speaker_02
We're not going to go super into this one. This is the only story I've ever looked into for this, like for any podcast that I'm like, I want to know less about this. I think everyone should know less about this.

01:01:50 Speaker_03
It's just so weird. I started to read about it and then I was like, I don't. Feel good knowing these things.

01:01:59 Speaker_02
Anyway, we're both we're both deep into this.

01:02:01 Speaker_02
So we're we're previewing it but this is the story of a Political reporter for New York magazine named Olivia Knutzy who's sort of like a rising star on the political scene She's one of these like 30 under 30 people.

01:02:14 Speaker_03
I don't know how these people get on these fucking lists boy Spoken like somebody who wasn't on a list.

01:02:19 Speaker_01
There's no There's no 40 over 40

01:02:23 Speaker_02
People who are somehow keeping it together despite their back hurting.

01:02:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, where's the anemic 40 year old gay man?

01:02:29 Speaker_02
I feel like I would at least be like number seven on that list. Okay, so she works for New York Magazine in October of 2023. She flies out to California to meet with RFK Jr. They go on a hike. We're not going to go too far into this.

01:02:46 Speaker_02
I'm actually – I went down like a deep rabbit hole of her work and I think me and Peter are going to do a bonus episode about just sort of this type of journalism that is all based on access. Like she flies all the way to California.

01:02:59 Speaker_02
She spends the day with RFK Jr. She goes hiking with him and yields no useful insight. It's like he strode up the trail strongly. He said, ooh, there's a bird in the distance or whatever. And you're like, yeah, he likes birds. Yeah.

01:03:15 Speaker_02
Like going hiking with him is so that you can brag that like, oh, I went hiking with RFK Jr. It's not about getting any actual useful information. Like this whole form of journalism is like a self aggrandizement. Like he's written numerous books.

01:03:28 Speaker_02
You can read his fucking books if you want to know what he believes.

01:03:30 Speaker_03
It seems like the like. Allure is the like, she knows everybody. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. That's the selling point rather than the like, Oh, there's an insight here that I find useful or there's analysis here.

01:03:42 Speaker_03
There's context or there's history or there's anything. No, no. It's just like, can you believe she has so-and-so's cell phone number?

01:03:50 Speaker_02
She has this person on speed dial. I don't think speed dial exists anymore. I'm gonna star six nine So this we're just gonna go quickly through this I hate this shit apparently they start after the story comes out He is unhappy with it.

01:04:05 Speaker_02
He later characterizes it as a hit piece, which it is not It's way too nice to him. And then they start like dealing with stuff over text. This text becomes flirtatious This becomes apparently like a sexting thing.

01:04:19 Speaker_02
They then have like FaceTime sex or whatever and It's also a really weird story in that neither one of the participants in this affair are like really talking about it.

01:04:32 Speaker_02
So all of the quotes are from like friends of theirs, like anonymous quotes from friends of theirs, like talking to the New York Post and shit.

01:04:39 Speaker_02
But then, of course, these are biased actors because they're only getting a depiction of the relationship from the people involved, right? So all of his friends are like, she threw herself at him. He had to block her.

01:04:50 Speaker_02
It's like she couldn't stop texting.

01:04:52 Speaker_03
It definitely wasn't this serial sexual abuse.

01:04:56 Speaker_02
Exactly, who's had like numerous affairs, right? Allegedly, yes. Yeah, and like maybe that is true, but also he's not a remotely reliable narrator, nor are his friends remotely reliable.

01:05:05 Speaker_02
There's one of his friends, who's like another like anti-vax weirdo, says, this had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn. Wow. Which is not a real thing.

01:05:16 Speaker_03
There's also something about this that just sort of sucks from a like media representation of lady journalists thing. I know.

01:05:24 Speaker_03
Which is like part of the reason there was like an undercurrent of the freak out about spotlight being such a great movie that was lady journalists who were excited that it was a story about a lady journalist who didn't get the story by sleeping with a source.

01:05:40 Speaker_02
whenever people are yelling and making fun of a woman on the internet there's always an under threat of misogyny to it that just like makes me uncomfortable and like a weird sex shaming element to it and like even if she deserves a lot of criticism whenever it's a woman like the criticism just goes to 11 really quickly.

01:05:57 Speaker_03
Yeah, and it goes to a place that it's like, it goes from deserved critique to totally undeserved and personal, like in the blink of an eye.

01:06:07 Speaker_02
I also, when I first heard about this, I didn't like look too much into the details. And I just thought like, well, obviously they had some like tryst, but like they never actually met. Yeah. It was all virtual, right? Yeah.

01:06:16 Speaker_02
It's, it's all just like phone stuff. She was engaged at the time, he was married, her engagement has now been broken off, and they're filing restraining orders against each other in court, and it's all fucking weird.

01:06:29 Speaker_02
She is accusing her fiancé of leaking the story. We still don't know who went to the media with this story. It's sort of weird that we know this, right? It could have just been an employment issue with New York Magazine, which has now put her on leave.

01:06:42 Speaker_02
But the fact that we know about this, and also the fact that her boss found out about it, somebody had to tell him, right? So we don't really know who that person is. She says it's her fiancé, her fiancé says that it's not him.

01:06:52 Speaker_02
It's a whole big, ugly, dumb thing.

01:06:54 Speaker_03
That's another one of those things where I'm like, I don't feel like I should know this about your relationship.

01:07:00 Speaker_02
The court filing, I was like trying to get the PDFs of the court filings between her and her fiance. And then I was like, what is my life? What am I, what am I doing?

01:07:08 Speaker_03
I don't want to know this shit. 100%.

01:07:13 Speaker_02
I think this is someone who exercises unbelievably poor judgment. I think whatever happens between her and her fiancé really isn't any of my business. And whatever happens between RFK Jr. and his wife, also none of my business.

01:07:23 Speaker_02
He's also a piece of shit due to what he does in public. For real.

01:07:27 Speaker_02
There's a really fucked up article in the New York Post during like when his diary is coming out and when this whole like really ugly divorce case is going on that says like he basically has the phone habits of like a middle-aged gay man.

01:07:43 Speaker_02
It says that he has 43 women, like mistresses or whatever, saved in his phone.

01:07:49 Speaker_02
It says in the post, at the time, it appeared Kennedy had a woman in almost every city, including at least five in Toronto, one in Paris, others in Palm Beach and Pensacola, Alaska, Aspen, Colorado, Miami, Montreal, and Cleveland.

01:08:03 Speaker_02
One of the women had the note airplane.

01:08:05 Speaker_02
after her name, while another was denoted with farm and a third with teacher, yet another was only cryptically referred to as Z. And apparently he saved them all under the letter G for Goomar, which is remember in The Sopranos, that means like you're like girl on the side, Goomar, right?

01:08:26 Speaker_02
Don't make me do that again.

01:08:28 Speaker_01
I think maybe you should cut it out.

01:08:29 Speaker_02
I should probably maybe cut that.

01:08:30 Speaker_01
That was bad.

01:08:31 Speaker_02
That was quite bad.

01:08:34 Speaker_01
Or leave it in along with us talking about it being miserable.

01:08:39 Speaker_02
But also it's like there's something darkly funny about the fact that he just has like Susan Airplane in his phone. It's like everyone I know does this. They're like Steve, lawyer. Todd, Seattle.

01:08:53 Speaker_02
Because everyone's on the apps now and it's like it's not specific enough to be like Jessica Hinge. There's like three Jessica Hinges. Like, I was looking through my phone the other day deleting people and I have David Bicep.

01:09:06 Speaker_02
I don't know what that means.

01:09:09 Speaker_03
Yes, you do. I don't know who any of these people are. Weirdly, RFK Jr. 's ringtone was just The Rambler, that song from the 60s. I'm the type of guy who likes to roam around.

01:09:22 Speaker_02
No, that's The Wanderer. I love that song.

01:09:24 Speaker_03
Oh, The Wanderer. Excuse me. Excuse me.

01:09:26 Speaker_02
It's the original, I've got hoes in different area codes.

01:09:29 Speaker_03
Yes, absolutely.

01:09:30 Speaker_02
I want to end with a really good quote. This Vanity Fair article is actually quite good. Just like about him. I think for the love of God, I hope this is the last time we have to talk about this person. This is a good conclusion. So here's this.

01:09:44 Speaker_03
Kennedy's personal history is not dissimilar to Trump's, a bottomless well of scandal that, over time, has immunized people against its real-world consequences.

01:09:55 Speaker_03
The Kennedy name, the fantasy and celebrity of it, is its own shield, blinding people to the fine details of Kennedy's actual beliefs, and thereby making him an appealing and easy vessel for discontent with Biden and Trump.

01:10:10 Speaker_03
Quote, like all the rest of us, Bobby grew up feeling that being a Kennedy, you could do virtually anything you wanted.

01:10:17 Speaker_03
Kennedy's cousin, Chris Lawford told the authors of the Kennedy's and American drama quote, it was good because you got away with things other people wouldn't dream of. It was bad because it destroyed your sense of what was worth doing.

01:10:33 Speaker_03
Bears in Central Park! Two dinaires!

01:10:35 Speaker_01
Bears in Central Park! Whale heads everywhere! Whale heads! Whale heads!

01:10:40 Speaker_02
If you think about Kennedy, I mean, we kind of already talked about how he's essentially this, like, fairly mediocre dude who has, like, failed upwards into these prestigious institutions his entire life.

01:10:49 Speaker_03
It's a real classic fail son.

01:10:52 Speaker_02
It's a huge fail something, right? Spoiled kid eventually makes good because he has 85 layers of safety nets below him, right? But then you look at what he leaves behind, right? You've got this babysitter who left the environmental NGO.

01:11:04 Speaker_02
You've got his wife who killed herself. You've got this outbreak of measles in Samoa that we barely even got to talk about where 83 fucking people died, partly because RFK Jr. promoted a bunch of anti-vax garbage. It's like you've got this wake.

01:11:17 Speaker_02
of damage behind him, and yet he himself has only become wealthier, more prominent, and it just, like, sucks. We need to not have so many fucking mediocre-ass people in American life who just never leave.

01:11:30 Speaker_03
You can't see it, but I'm Roseanne Bar-grimacing at the camera.

01:11:35 Speaker_02
You have a giant plate of ribs in front of you.