Who's Worse, RFK Jr Or Meatball Ron?
Liz Cheney isn’t going to run for president because she thinks it would probably hurt Biden more than Trump and because she hopes that all anti-Trump voters will be on the same page. If there was a Republican who could take votes away from Trump, the DNC would probably be persuading them to run. But there isn’t a plausible figure. On the Democratic side, there probably are. I’m sure I’d vote for Cornel West before I’d vote for Biden, though, living in deep blue California that’s an easy and inconsequential call for me. Yesterday, Eric Levitz wrote that the case for my candidate’s economic and social justice-advancing campaign is extremely weak and quixotic and “will disproportionately siphon votes from the Democratic nominee, thereby marginally increasing the odds of a second Trump presidency.” I’m betting that if the “Democratic nominee” wasn’t Joe Biden no one would be worrying about West siphoning off votes. “One recent poll of a hypothetical 2024 race,” shuddered Levitz, “found West drawing 4 percent support nationally, erasing Joe Biden’s advantage over Donald Trump in the process.” His interest is “in supporting America’s only politically viable coalition against right-wing rule.” Most of my friends will be in the same camp.
Levitz decided to deconstruct Lily Sánchez’s recent pro-Cornel West piece in Current Affairs, having decided her arguments about the worthlessness of the corrupt and anti-progressive Democratic Party “range from delusional to dubious” and his presentation of them are. Her own presentation sound a lot better. I never knew Levitz was such a Biden asskisser. I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. He’s very nervous that the Democraps’ leftwing critics will think they don’t “have a better chance of advancing their political ideals by fighting for power within blue America” and instead defect to a third party. In the end he dismisses all anti-Biden Democrats as liars.
There’s probably a greater danger to Biden on the right though than on the left: crackpot Robert F Kennedy, Jr., whose campaign is basically a Steve Bannon/Fox News construct to lure Democratic voters unhappy with Biden but unwilling to vote for Trump, to vote for… not-Biden.
You may have seen the Axios report yesterday that a small but growing number of wealthy campaign donors in banking, venture capital, hedge funds and tech are supporting both Meatball and RFK, Jr. Peter Thiel-adjacent David Sacks (who once asked— in writing— “why is all blame placed on the man?” in cases of date rape) hosted fundraisers for both DeSantis, who he gave $50K and RFK, Jr, who he gave $10K. He’s supporting them because he’s pro-liberty (against public health restricts and apparently pro-book bans and anti-LGBTQ). Ex-Dem Omeed Malik gave DeSantis $120,000 and $6,600 to RFK, Jr. One of his partners, Joe Voboril, said he considers himself an "orphaned Democrat" and gave $25K to DeSantis and $6,600 to Jr. “Malik and Voboril said they are attracted to the two candidates for their willingness to go against mainstream thought consensus.” And— you guessed it— Elon Musk is also interested in both horrible candidates, because they’re both pro-Kremlin. Axios concludes that “The donors backing both DeSantis and Kennedy are ‘kind of like the super-rich Joe Rogan crowd.’”
There has been a lot of ink devoted to proving what a turd RFK, Jr is. As a young teenager, I once worked for his father for a summer. So, although I agree that Jr. is a turd, I decided to read David Remnick’s recent q&a with him for the New Yorker. In way of intro, Remnick noted that “ he is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism. There are many. To prepare for the conversation, I listened to some of Kennedy’s podcast sessions with the likes of Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand and Joe Rogan. I watched his marathon announcement speech and tuned in to all the hosannas he was getting from a peculiar amen corner that includes Steve Bannon, Jack Dorsey, and Tucker Carlson. In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy accuses Fauci, who was then the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, of helping to carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” (The book has blurbs from Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, and Oliver Stone.) Kennedy’s habits of mind are MAGA-adjacent, but his manner differs from that of his Republican doppelgänger. Donald Trump is a bully— rude, swaggering, out to flatten his questioner under an avalanche of lies and volume. Kennedy is not rude. Rather, he is serenely convinced of his virtue and his interlocutor’s pitiful susceptibility to conventional wisdom.
"The experience of interviewing him and listening to his previous interviews, I found, was like settling in for a long train ride with a seemingly amiable stranger in the next seat. You ask a straightforward question and, an hour later, as you race by Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, he is still going on about the fraud of COVID vaccines and how he was unfairly ‘deplatformed’ for spouting conspiracy theories. By the time you’ve pulled into Wilmington, he might be talking about how drugs known as poppers helped cause the aids epidemic, or how ‘toxic chemicals’ might contribute to ‘sexual dysphoria’ in children. As you head south, he is talking about being ‘censored’ by Instagram, the FBI, and the Biden White House. New technologies like 5G towers and digital currencies are totalitarian instruments that could ‘control our behavior.’ Wi-Fi causes ‘leaky brain.’ After a while, you begin to wonder why you bought a ticket. But it’s too late. You’re pinned into the window seat…
“Among the obvious parallels between Kennedy and Trump is their disdain for ‘élites,’ their suspicion of, in Trump’s words, the ‘deep state,’ and their belief that traditional media and ‘cancel culture’ threaten to silence them. With Kennedy, this is particularly curious. The Kennedys are the embodiment of dynastic power. Tens of thousands of books have been written about the family. It is impossible to imagine both the tragedy and the privilege Kennedy experienced as a child and adolescent. His uncle was murdered when he was nine. His father was murdered when he was fourteen. As a young man, he was kicked out of prep schools, got arrested for marijuana possession, was addicted to heroin, and still managed to graduate from Harvard. He now works as a lawyer, and his income last year was $7.8 million.”
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— A.O.C.? Or Joe Manchin? Or are you something new entirely? How would you define your ideology?
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, in policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.
I don’t think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.
Well, then, why did he do the lockdowns? Lockdowns robbed four trillion [dollars] from the middle class and the poor in this country and transferred it to the super rich. We created five hundred new billionaires—a billionaire a day, every day. [Fact-checking Kennedy’s assertions is like chasing rabbits. This is a good example. The four-trillion dollar figure was likely an estimate for the price of the federal bailout. Many of the five hundred billionaires he seems to refer to rose up in other countries, especially China.]
Do you think he did lockdowns, or politicians did lockdowns, in order to enrich billionaires? That was the goal?
I think that, if they cared about the middle class in this country, they wouldn’t have done it. They wouldn’t have shut down 3.3 million businesses without due process, without just compensation.
Did they make mistakes, or were they carrying out some kind of perfidious plot?
No, I think that they made mistakes, which disqualifies them from continuing to do that job.
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. 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?
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 cancelled, or whatever. I’m a Democrat. I know what my values are. I’ve always spoken to Republicans my entire life. During all the years that I was a leader of the environmental movement, I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News. 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. I don’t change my values. I have the same values that my father had, that my uncle had, and that I have harbored and fought for since I was a kid. But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to speak to people who don’t share those values. I think the kind of tribalism that you’re advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it’s toxic. It’s created a polarization, a division, in this country that is more dangerous than at any time since the American Civil War.
Isn’t there a difference between disagreement and…
What you’re trying to get me to do now is to lash out against other Americans. And what I’m saying is: I don’t agree with what those people represent in many parts of their lives. I don’t agree with it, and I don’t like it. But I’m still going to talk to them. I’m not going to cancel them. I’m going to invite them into my tent. If I can get them to support a vision of the idealistic America that I believe in— the same America that my father and my uncle believed in: an America without censorship; an America that fights for our Constitution; an America that is a moral authority around the world, that projects economic power around the globe rather than military violence— if I can get people to support that, I don’t care if they’re Republican or independent, or what they are. These are democratic values.
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? 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”?
I’m not a cancel-culture guy.
That’s not cancel culture. That’s a principled insistence that he’s a bridge too far.
If you’re just saying you’re going to dismiss certain people because this human being is so irredeemable that I am going to exclude him or her from any future activity on the planet— I just don’t think that’s consistent with my spiritual beliefs. It’s not consistent with my political philosophy. I believe that we should invite our enemies into the tent with us to the extent that they want to break bread with us, that they may want to endorse some of the values that we hold dear…
That’s less than half. If you want to read the rest, here. To me it just confirmed my belief that he's a nasty crackpot with a lot of grievances and a cracing for vengeance. This is insane (especially Florida, Oregon, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, the Carolinas, Vermont, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, DC, the Dakotas and Montana):