There's No Labels... And There's RFK Jr
We’ve been warning about Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson-- a husband and wife team and two of the worst DC swamp creatures— for many years. Thursday it was Rick Wilson’s turn. Wilson is a NeverTrump ex-Republican who worked in Florida GOP politics before helping to found the Lincoln Project. He told his Mark Penn, Nancy Jacobson (although he spelled her name wrong) in a powerful Twitter thread. I’ve cleaned it up a little and put it in paragraph form. Rick Wilson:
If any of you are still bamboozled by Nancy Jacobsen and Mark Penn's No Label’s actual intentions let me hook you up. They claim to be moderate, centrist problem solvers who are running a third party effort to "give Americans more choices."
Nancy is one of DC's most powerful, influential, and connected players— A Swamp Empress. Richer than God. She and Mark Penn are angry, though. Very, very angry. At whom, you ask? Well, Democrats. They were exiled from Clinton world. Obamas, same. They've been on a jihad ever since. Mark has dozens of Fox hits defending and praising Trump.
Their major donors are the EXACT same billionaires funding Ron DeSantis. (Yeah, Nancy hides her donors, but girl, your org leaks because your staff hates you.)
They formed No Labels as a long con, a way to break the Democrats, get rich doing it (and again, they are VERY rich), and punish their imagined enemies. They branded it as "centrist problem solvers" but their plan to run a 3rd party candidate this year was anything but. They're working to put a conservative Dem (Joe Manchin is their number one pony, but Sinema is also in the running if Joe falls off) on the ballot in key states to drain off votes from Biden. Their math, maps, and polling are utter fantasy, an ever-changing target. Matt Bennett at Third Way and Philip Germain at the Lincoln Project have more stats, data, and proof of fundamental mathematical and polling dishonesty than you can imagine. No Labels makes up the polling numbers to fit their narrative.
When challenged how they'd get a candidate to 270, they argued their third party goon could win in... Delaware. And Florida. And Washington State. And Utah. And um... well, you tell me if this is a serious map in your mind:
It's all a fraud. They describe Joe Biden and Donald Trump as "equally unacceptable"... an assertion I'll leave you to assess. The plan all along was to burn down Biden, and they're getting on the ballot in key states to do just that. We know the why but what about the how? Getting on the ballot is hard, and No Labels is fraudulently representing its petitions in many states and changing voter registrations. They're in trouble in Maine and Arizona already, with more to come.
But they'll be on enough close states to drag off a percentage of conservative Dems and elect Trump or— and here's the big reveal— they'll drop out and not run a candidate if the Republican nominee is— wait for it— Ron DeSantis. From Politico this week:
That's right. Centrist, moderate, problem-solver, just trying-to-give-voters-a-choice No Labels gave away the entire game. You know, Ron DeSantis, that noted moderate. You know, Smilin' Ron, the nicest Republican. Why would they say that? The answer is "Dallas" and the answer is "Manhattan."
Nancy has raised something like $70 million dollars (as noted prior) from the EXACT SAME billionaires backing DeSantis. This donor set (including Sugar Daddy Harlan Crow) cares about 3 things; lower taxes at the Mt. Everest end of the income scale, carried-interest deductions, and oil-and-gas subsidies/write-offs. They'll get them from Trump, but DeSantis has marginally better aesthetics. If they have to spend the big money to destroy Biden, they will... and No Labels is designed to be the vehicle for an ocean of dark GOP money dressed up as moderate do-gooderism. They're perfectly fine with Trump if it happens, and if it's DeSantis they think it's in the bag.
I implore DC media types to stop referring to No Labels as "centrist" or "moderate" for they are neither. It's the most cynical ploy in service to Trump and the MAGA GOP one can imagine. The Ian Fleming Rule of Coincidences is always right.
Last week, No Labels heralded former North Carolina Gov Pat McCrory as their new front man. Pat's main advisor and close friend is Chris LaCivita. For you folks playing at home, Chris LaCivita [from Bush’s slimy Swift Boat Veterans operation] is also the lead strategist to another candidate running in 2024. That candidate is Donald Trump. So endeth the lesson.
Endeth from Wilson, not from me— or my sistah Naomi (j/k). I’m still waiting for No Labels to announce that Robert Kennedy Jr— a bizarre, slightly more serious version of Donald Trump Jr— will be the No Labels candidate for president… maybe with Joe Lieberman as chief strategist? On Wednesday, The Guardian published a classic RFK Jr take-down by Naomi Klein, important to read for any Democrats or unaffiliated voters looking for an alternative to Biden. Short version: keep lookin’— RFK Jr is not a lesser evil. Klein warns, though, that he should not be ignored… With the MAGA Media pushing him, many frustrated voters are seeing him as a viable alternative to Biden, or at least a QAnon-aligned alternative to Biden.
“It’s not only the combined power of a dynastic family, violent crime and choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy culture that RFK Jr is riding,” she wrote. “He is also tapping into a wellspring of real pain and outrage. These points may be obvious but they bear repeating: a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world— inflamed on every level— that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created. RFK Jr’s campaign speaks directly to this outrage, with its central message about “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.” When he talks about drug companies controlling the national health agencies and polluters controlling environmental regulators, he is persuasive, which is why he was a good lawyer. When he rails against the corporations who made a killing during Covid, profiteering off the pandemic and using it to crush their rivals, he is speaking my language and it’s hard not to nod along. When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there. He also is tapping into rage at the Democratic party itself, which feels to many like a hostage situation. Inside its logic, there seems to be no acceptable way of challenging entrenched power. Not open primaries, not incumbent primaries, not third parties, not getting in and trying to change the system from the inside. All, we have been told since as long as I can remember, will help to elect Republicans. Of course this political straitjacket provokes rebellion, as well as some irrational behavior.”
None of this means Kennedy is running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth”— as he repeatedly claims. What it does mean is that a public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers. RFK Jr now leads the pack.
Myth #1: He would be a climate champion
Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.” He also says that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires”— a green-tinged reboot of the same, all-too familiar conspiracy theories he rode to pandemic stardom, when he opposed virtually every Covid public health measure, from masks to vaccines to closures. Now he is marshaling the same arguments against climate action.
He told Breaking Points: “In my campaign I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like Covid that the Davos groups and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.”
This about-face has earned him friends among the most prominent and dangerous climate-change deniers, including the Republican-aide-turned-disinformation-dealer Marc Morano, who says Kennedy is “undergoing a genuine transformation over his views on the climate agenda.” In podcast interviews, especially with rightwing hosts, RFK Jr now says he would leave energy policy to the market and describes himself as “a radical free marketeer.” It should go without saying that the markets are incapable of decarbonizing our economies in anything like the narrow slice of time left.
Myth #2: He’s not that anti-vax
Since announcing his candidacy, Kennedy has seemed to back off his extreme views about childhood immunizations, which has been the major preoccupation of his organization, Children’s Health Defense, since well before Covid. This is research that has been debunked by countless medical experts and retracted by the publications that once gave him a platform.
Except he can’t help himself. In almost every longform interview with him that I have encountered (and there have been many), he leaps to defend this debunked position, always by citing the same series of figures. “Why is it,” he asked the journalist David Samuels, “that in my generation, I’m 69, the rate of autism is 1 in 10,000, while in my kids’ generation it’s 1 in 34?” He added, “I would argue that a lot of that is from the vaccine schedule, which changed in 1989. But what nobody can argue about is that it has to be an environmental exposure of some kind.” In interview after interview, he comes back to that same point: something changed in 1989, something that acted as a mass poisoning.
This has been left unchallenged in most interviews, so I am going to go into some depth here. Kennedy is right that something changed in the world of autism at the start of the nineties, just completely wrong about what. What changed was the medical definition of autism. The syndrome was first diagnosed by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who published a paper in 1943 about children with “extreme autism” who, though “unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities,” lived in their own worlds, engaged in repetitive motions, became obsessed with objects, often had limited speech, and struggled to perform the basics of self-care. The condition was so extreme that very few met the diagnostic criteria.
Decades later the definition changed, thanks in part to British child psychiatrist Lorna Wing. Realizing that Kanner’s definition left out many children in need of support, she developed the idea that autism was not a fixed set of symptoms, but a spectrum, presenting in a range of different ways depending on the individual, and could include people who are very verbally and physically capable. In the 1990s, autism entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a “spectrum disorder” and many more people suddenly met the criteria, which is a big part of what accounts for the post-1989 spike that Kennedy blames, wrongly, on vaccines.
And that’s not the only thing that changed at the dawn of the nineties. In 1990, the United States passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, a hard-won victory by the disability justice community that led to further legal protections and support for disabled children to have individual education plans, therapies and other supports in public schools. These laws incentivized parents to get their kids tested for autism, since a diagnosis would unlock these supports. This also helps explain the spike.
Still, systemic racism in both health and education meant that it was overwhelmingly white, middle class parents who could hire lawyers to turn legal obligations into realities in the schools— far too many Black and brown kids were still more likely to be treated as troublemakers and met with harsh discipline rather than empathy. Recent advocacy has begun to close the race gap in autism diagnoses, leading to higher rates overall. We are still a long way from closing the diagnostic gender gap, however. If that happens, and rates go up still further, we shouldn’t panic: this is progress.
In short, Kennedy, by hinting ominously about something nefarious happening in 1989, is committing that most common of analytic errors: confusing correlation with causation. And there is another important factor he consistently neglects to mention. In this same period, more people, both women and men, decided to become parents in their forties. This is relevant because multiple peer-reviewed studies show that children born to older parents are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.
Acknowledging all of this— the change in diagnostic criteria, the disability rights victories, challenges to medical racism, aging parents— would give us a much fuller understanding of rising autism rates. But that is not nearly as dramatic or juicy as blaming vaccines and screaming about government cover ups…
Myth #3: He is anti-war and pro-human rights
Kennedy is most persuasive when opposing US military intervention abroad, or when he is discussing the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine, and calling for a peaceful settlement. But how seriously should we take his pacifism and human rights concerns? One hint rests in the blanket support he offers the Israeli government, one of the top recipients of aid from the US military industrial complex he decries, and a nation consistently unwilling to entertain peace with justice, while escalating tensions with Iran. Have a look at Antony Loewenstein’s latest, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, for an indispensable accounting.
This position alone should cause Kennedy’s supporters to question his supposedly antiwar, anti-surveillance stance. So should his increasingly reactionary position on border controls. Kennedy talks a good game condemning the US for overthrowing democratically elected governments abroad and destabilizing entire regions.
But that raises the question: what does the US owe to the people living in the parts of the world its policies have ravaged? Very little, according to Kennedy. He has taken to warning about the US’s “open border,” and he told Musk he is looking for ways to “seal the border permanently.” He has also cited Israel— with its network of walls and fences imprisoning Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – as a positive example of a country successfully controlling its borders.
Myth #4: He is a populist
When you hear someone railing that “Our democracy is devolving into a kind of corporate plutocracy,” while telling heartwrenching stories about people having their food stamps slashed amid massive corporate bailouts and handouts, it’s easy to assume that this same person plans to do something bold and courageous to address those injustices.
Kennedy says his campaign is one of “broad-based populism.” It isn’t. Progressive populists make tangible economic offers: tax the rich and give poor and working-class people more money and supports; some call for nationalizing key industries to pay for it.
Kennedy is not actually proposing any of this. On Fox, he would not even come out in favor of a wealth tax; he has brushed off universal public health care as not “politically realistic”; and I have heard nothing about raising the minimum wage. Like Trump (and anyone wanting to get elected) he says he would protect Social Security and Medicare. But asked directly about raising taxes and whether Social Security faces bankruptcy, he dodges, claiming that to answer these straightforward policy questions, he would need to “study more”— something he never seems to feel when it comes to loudly claiming he knows more than epidemiologists about infectious diseases and more than neurologists about brain development.
Meanwhile, his sycophantic treatment of Elon Musk is about as un-populist as a person can get, with Kennedy comparing the onetime richest man alive to the heroes of the American Revolution “who died to give us our Constitution.”
In short, RFK Jr may sometimes sound like Bernie Sanders— but he is decidedly not Bernie.
The question is: why? If you are running a longshot candidacy inside the Democratic party against a centrist incumbent, why not give the base what it wants?
One possible explanation is that Kennedy is not actually running to be the presidential candidate for the Democrats. He would certainly not be the first person to use a primary race simply to raise the value of their own, highly monetized personal brand.
We also have to consider the possibility that Kennedy may have a greater ambition, one that requires those carefully worded hedges, and which would explain his backpedaling on gun control (he has floated the idea that mass shootings in US schools are caused by Prozac), and make sense of his recent trip to southern border, seemingly for the sole purpose of dog-whistling that he is on board with the Republican war on migrants.
Perhaps it’s a plan to run as an independent— or a hope for a spot in a Republican administration. Or … “Yeah. Trump-Kennedy. I said it,” Republican operative and Trump ally Roger Stone wrote on Twitter shortly after Kennedy announced his candidacy.
Trump’s former campaign manager and top advisor, Steve Bannon, likes the idea, too. “Bobby Kennedy would be, I think, an excellent choice for President Trump to consider,” he told his podcast audience, adding that when he shared the idea at a function for fellow Trump diehards, it received a standing ovation
Would Trump go for it? He does love men with famous names who look like they are “from central casting ”— and RFK Jr checks both boxes. He probably still needs an actual Republican for a running mate. On the other hand, to get back in the White House, he also needs more secular white women and more non-white voters. And Kennedy’s relentless Covid misinformation campaign made him a hero among white moms who were sure that online classes, masks and vaccines were destroying their kids, as well as among some Black voters, who Children’s Health Defense targeted with scaremongering about vaccines that exploited deep wounds created by medical racism and abuse. Because Trump supported and indeed greenlit the vaccines, this is an area of weakness for him.
As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer— seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy.
