RFK Jr. Is Great At Making Conspiracy Sound Like Common Sense
And that's the scariest thing about him.
On Wednesday night, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did a town hall with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas in which he interspersed a bunch of wacky conspiracy theories with a lot of things a lot of people really want to hear — and in a way that, if they don't know a whole lot about the issue, can sound a whole lot like "common sense." He plays into areas where there is already a high level of distrust and tells people it's even worse than they think, which is just what many of them have suspected all along. He provides simple solutions that are easier to swallow, and much more satisfying, than effective solutions.
'I'm Proud Trump Likes Me'
The big headline from the town hall is that RFK said he was "proud" that Donald Trump likes him, because of how he wants to bring people together. This is, I can say right now, going to reel in a lot of support for him on the Right, largely from people who just want to be told "You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you."
He then told a story about how after his dad, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles, he went on a trip to bring his body back to the East Coast and there were lots of people from a whole cross section of the United States, people in urban areas, people in rural areas, coming to pay their respects to him at every stop. Four years later though, he says, those people didn't want George McGovern, who was more aligned with his father, they wanted George Wallace.
Oh gee, wonder why that happened?
He tried to present this as his father just having an amazing gift for speaking to populist concerns — and sure, to a degree that was true, but also there were just a few other things going on in 1968 and the years after that led to those voters shifting to the Right. Like the entire civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.
I will be the first to criticize a lot of the Democratic Party for having a bit of a classism problem, but this is quite the stretch.
Nevertheless, it's the story a lot of people want to hear. They're a lot more comfortable with "Oh, Democrats just stopped caring about rural folks" than they are with "those motherfuckers were pretty fucking racist, and voted accordingly."
Gun Violence and Mass Shootings
He started right out with "I don't want to take people's guns away" — explaining, in a way more directed towards gun owners than those who think that perhaps it might be good to regulate guns that can kill dozens of people in seconds, that there are a lot of people in this country whose whole identity is wrapped up in guns and gun ownership. And that the threat of taking their guns away from them seems like taking their identities away from them. The poor dears.
Kennedy, whose father and uncle were both very famously assassinated by people with guns, remarked that things just didn't used to be this way and that it just can't have anything to do with the guns because we've always had the guns. The thing is, things have always been this way, just in different ways. It's just that, instead of mass shooters, we had a lot of serial killers. And before that, we had a lot more organized crime, we had a lot more assassinations, we had more bank robberies. In 1934, the government started regulating machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and other types of weapons known to be used by gangsters, because they were using them to kill lots of people at once. There has just never been some halcyon time in the US — post-muskets, we mean —in which guns were not a serious problem.
But RFK Jr. thinks the real problem just might be video games and antidepressants.
This is a very appealing answer. I don't think it's true, but it's certainly what a lot of people want to hear and a thing that even many who think there should be gun control can see as being "reasonable." Except, I suppose, for those of us who actually play video games or are on antidepressants. There is a perception among many who are not on antidepressants that "everyone" is on them and that doctors are doping up all of the children in order to boost pharma sales. In reality, it's about 11 percent of us. About 8.4 percent of Americans have had a major depressive episode (which is not going to be all people who suffer from depression), so the numbers are not entirely out of line.
Also, in reality, studies have shown that mass shooters with diagnosed psychiatric illnesses have, in fact, been unmedicated and untreated.
Iceland has the highest rate of antidepressant use, at 15 percent. They also have a high rate of gun ownership. They also haven't had a gun-related murder since 2007. Perhaps this is because, on top of all of that, the process of being able to own a gun is highly regulated . People have to be seen by a doctor, they have to have a talk with the chief of police, submit to a background check, sit through a four-hour lecture, pass a test, and go to a day-long training.
The Philippines has the highest rate of video game use in the world, a high rate of gun ownership and a low rate of mass shootings. There are lots of countries, actually, with a much higher rate of gaming than the United States, none of which have a mass shooting problem. This is not surprising given that 73 percent of mass shootings happen here.
They're Using The Vaccines To Silence Me!
One of the strongest criticisms of RFK has been the fact that he is an anti-vaxxer, a characterization he disputes. He claims that he is in favor of vaccines, he just doesn't believe they have been safety tested enough.
“I think most people don’t know what my stance on vaccines — I’ve never been anti-vaccine. And I’ve said that hundreds and hundreds of times, but it doesn’t matter, because that is a way of silencing me using that pejorative to describe me is a way of silencing or marginalizing me. And my position on vaccines, I think is I think virtually every American would agree with my stance on vaccines, which is that vaccine should be tested like other medicines, they should be safety tested,” he said. “And unfortunately, vaccines are not safety tested. They’re not. There’s of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated, essentially mandated, they recommended but they’re really mandated, for American children, none of them one has ever been subjected to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial.”
Literally none of this is true. Vaccines are absolutely safety tested. Thankfully there was a lot of pushback on his nonsense here, but Kennedy purposely avoided specifically saying that he believes vaccines cause autism, which he does. HE, in fact, avoided specifically saying "I believe this vaccine causes this specific problem." Instead, he relied on vague "I just don't think they're testing them enough!" rhetoric meant to make people go "Oh, well ... maybe?" because obviously we all think everything we put in our bodies should be tested for safety.
Maybe The 5G Towers Are Doing Something?
RFK also offered the audience a watered down version of his ridiculous theories about 5G, suggesting that they could cause harm from radiation and just shouldn't be near schools. They don't and that's ridiculous, but it sounds more reasonable than "COVID-19 was an evil plot to install 5G everywhere so the government can control and enslave you."
— (@)
No, He Didn't Get To His AIDS Nonsense ... Or A Lot Of His Other Nonsense
Kennedy failed to mention that he believes poppers, not HIV, causes AIDS.
Or that he believes chemicals in the water supply are turning the kids trans!
What he did get to is that he thinks we should pull out of all of our armed conflicts and that we need to do more about the opioid epidemic, but that we should also legalize marijuana and some hallucinogens. These are things that, probably, a majority of Americans agree with at this point. He said that he supports the right to have an abortion but also thinks that every abortion is a "tragedy." He said he won't agree to support the Democratic nominee and will instead wait and see to see if he agrees with what the nominee is going to do. He clearly wanted to appear as mainstream as possible, while still holding onto a few outsider-ish positions that make him appealing to voters who want something different — which, let's be real, is a lot of voters in one way or another.
I don't know that he actually poses any kind of threat to Joe Biden, because it actually seems like he'd be more likely to win the Republican primary than the Democratic one, but we should definitely worry about his ability to make absurd conspiracy theories seem entirely reasonable.
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I've stopped submitting articles to The Lancet.