[ If recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated
anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy. His
sycophantic treatment of Elon Musk is about as un-populist as a person
can get...]
[[link removed]]

WE IGNORE ROBERT F KENNEDY JR’S CANDIDACY AT OUR PERIL  
[[link removed]]


 

Naomi Klein
June 14, 2023
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ If recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated
anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy. His
sycophantic treatment of Elon Musk is about as un-populist as a person
can get... _

‘Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he
would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis.’,
Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The Guardian


 

When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plan to run for president in
the Democratic party primaries this April, the dominant liberal
strategy towards the once tough environmental lawyer – now spreader
of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories – seemed to be:
ignore him and wait for him to go away. Don’t cover, don’t engage
and don’t debate. Jim Kessler, a leader of the pro-Biden think tank
Third Way, called
[[link removed]] him
a “gadfly and a laughingstock”; Democratic consultant Sawyer
Hackett brushed
[[link removed]] him
off as “a gnat.”

Well, if recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated
anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy.
Kennedy honed his social media skills over years to spread
[[link removed]] his
anti-vaccine message, so he has simply done an end-run around
traditional media and party structures: a “Twitter Spaces”
tete-a-tete with
[[link removed]] Elon
Musk and a string of video streams, several with hundreds of thousands
of views and listens, on every channel from Breaking Points
[[link removed]] on the left to Jordan
Peterson’s podcast
[[link removed]] on the right (that one
quickly broke a million views on YouTube).

He has landed an apparent endorsement
[[link removed]] from
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this week is being feted at a Bay
Area fundraiser
[[link removed]] filled
with heavy hitters. According to a CNN poll
[[link removed]] released
in late May, support for Kennedy was at 20% among respondents who
identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning.

It’s time to abandon wishful thinking and figure out what is going
on. What are the reasons his campaign is resonating with a
consequential slice of US voters? (And voters beyond the US, where he
has a large following?) What pain, silence and rage is he tapping
into? What important truths and realities is he concealing and
eliding? And, given the near impossible odds of him winning the race
which he is currently running in, what is his real end-game?

Let’s start with the reservoirs of Kennedy’s appeal.

THE POWER OF STORY

After the 2016 election, when many Democratic voters were struggling
to make sense of Trump’s seemingly impossible victory, a theory made
the rounds that I first heard from Color of Change president Rashad
Robinson: that the Trump campaign was like a blockbuster movie, full
of special effects and unconcerned with archaic ideas like facts,
while Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a PBS-style documentary film.
In a culture hooked on highly produced drama, of course the
blockbuster won.

There was some truth to that theory. So it’s worth noting that RFK
Jr’s campaign is rooted in something with almost as much popular
appeal: a true crime story. The traumas and mysteries that swirl
around the assassinations of RFK Jr’s uncle, President John F
Kennedy, and his father, Robert F Kennedy, are both American wounds
and American pastimes.

These preoccupations have, of course, been supercharged by the mass
fantasy-making machine known as QAnon. The cult/subculture has a
longstanding obsession with the Kennedy family, one that includes the
earnest belief
[[link removed]] among
many that JFK’s son, John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a plane crash in
1999, is actually still alive and living under an assumed identity,
perhaps even helping to write “Q drops.” Last year, believers got
so carried away that they gathered
[[link removed]] in
Dallas, at the site of JFK’s assassination, sure that his deceased
son was about to finally reappear and announce that he was going to be
Trump’s running mate in the 2024 elections. He didn’t.

RFK Jr benefits from all of that swirling narrative energy merely by
showing up. (It helps that he has begun to openly support the claim
that the CIA was behind the murder of his uncle and father, something
he says he came around to only “five or six years ago.”
[[link removed]] )

TAPPING INTO THE RAGE

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. 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
[[link removed]] about
“the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.” When he
talks about drug companies
[[link removed]] controlling
the national health agencies and polluters
[[link removed]] controlling
environmental regulators, he is persuasive, which is why he was a good
lawyer. When he rails
[[link removed]] against
the corporations who made a killing during Covid, profiteering off the
pandemic and using it to crush their rivals, he is speaking my
[[link removed]] 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.

Liberal analysts refuse to confront their own complicity in this
dynamic. Instead, we have Michael Scherer in the Washington Post
outrageously lumping together
[[link removed]] the
baseless and dangerous conspiracies of the hard right with Bernie
Sanders’s worldview, apparently because Sanders sees a society in
crisis and “points to the ‘ultrarich’” – as if stratospheric
wealth concentration and legalized corruption are mere figments of the
Vermont senator’s imagination.

GIVING VOICE TO ECOLOGICAL GRIEF

As a lifelong outdoorsman and longtime environmental lawyer, RFK Jr
also does something very few politicians in modern life seem capable
of doing: put into words our moment of shattering ecological loss and
grief. “Environmental protection binds us to our own humanity and to
all of creation,” he said
[[link removed]] on Earth Day.
“When we destroy a species, when we destroy a special place, we’re
diminishing our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is,
and what our own potential is as human beings.”

Kennedy is fluent in the language of heartbreak about dead rivers and
devastated fisheries; of asthmatic lungs and increasingly silent
springs. As smoke blots the sun across entire continents, this is not
a skill to dismiss lightly. Who else has it? Not Joe Biden. Not Kamala
Harris. Not even Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders was great on the facts
of the climate crisis when he ran, and full of righteous fury at
fossil fuel companies – but I don’t think I ever heard him speak
with unabashed emotion about extinction. This is another vacuum that
RFK Jr is skillfully filling.

Given the undeniable strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate,
we should expect him to continue to build momentum, and continue to
find new audiences. Ignoring him is not an option. What is needed
instead is a serious engagement with the myths that underlie the
Kennedy performance and that are key to his progressive appeal.

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]: “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
[[link removed]], who says
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] by the
publications that once gave him a platform.

Kennedy didn’t mention
[[link removed]] vaccines
in his two-hour-long campaign kick-off speech, and he told
[[link removed]] The
Wall Street Journal: “I’m not leading with the issue because
it’s not a primary issue of concern to most Americans.” More than
that: for many voters, his views are a major liability.

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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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 
[[link removed]]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
[[link removed]].
This is relevant because multiple peer-reviewed studies show
[[link removed]] 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.

Kennedy’s decades-long anti-vax crusade has had serious impacts on
autistic people by reducing them to mere pawns and data points in
these information wars. Back in 2015, Kennedy caught flak for saying
[[link removed]],
of childhood vaccines, “They get the shot, that night they have a
fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their
brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our
country.”

He apologized for the Holocaust reference, but that only scratches the
surface. Autistic people’s brains are not “gone,” they are
different, often in beautiful and interesting ways. And during the
real, non-rhetorical Holocaust, the Nazis in Germany and Austria
murdered disabled children, many of them autistic, for precisely those
differences. At Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic alone, almost 800
disabled children 
[[link removed]]were
murdered, and research on their remains continued well into the 1980s.
Meanwhile Hitler opposed
[[link removed]] vaccination
in the territories Germany seized because he was just fine with
non-Aryans dying, the better to seize their land.

Leaving out the most relevant facts in any given argument has sadly
become an RFK Jr trademark. In speeches and interviews, for instance,
he cites
[[link removed]] Sweden’s
supposedly stunning success at combating Covid, without introducing
lockdowns, as proof that lockdowns and closures were never needed in
the US – even as US hospitals and morgues were so overcapacity
that refrigerated trucks
[[link removed]] were
filling up with bodies.

He fails to mention Sweden’s far greater social welfare protections
(generous
[[link removed]] paid
sick leave, universal healthcare, better funded public
hospitals, smaller [[link removed]] class
sizes…), which helped to control the virus, nor does he mention the
relative health of Sweden’s population compared to the US. Most
critically, he fails to share the fact
[[link removed]] that
Norway, Finland and Denmark, which all took Covid more seriously in
those early months marked by lockdowns, had significantly lower death
rates than Sweden, proving the exact opposite
[[link removed]] of
the point he is trying to make. Yes, the death rates
eventually leveled out
[[link removed]] between
the Scandinavian nations, but that had less to do with lockdowns than
with very high vaccination rates – the very shots Kennedy has
claimed are killing people in droves.

We should be honest about the ways kids were impacted by school
closures, and be transparent about vaccine risks, rather than
dismissing all reports as conspiracy. We should also stay open to the
possibility that environmental factors might be contributing to some
forms of autism and other neurological conditions. We should insist on
honest independent research and reporting about all of it.

But we should also be clear: actively spreading terror on the scale
that RFK Jr has done for two decades is itself a public health crisis.
The vaccine-autism myth stigmatizes people who are neuro-atypical,
presenting them as tragic, and distracts from the urgent need to fight
for greater accessibility and lifelong supports. It also discourages
vaccination, which is already leading to a resurgence of diseases we
thought we had defeated, from measles
[[link removed]] to diphtheria
[[link removed]].

Kennedy complains that he used to be so marginalized for his
conspiratorial views that speaking felt
[[link removed]] “like
talking into a fucking tin can.” Well, thanks to his primary run,
his tin can has been replaced with a global megaphone and millions
more people are hearing his bogus theories. We will feel the
ramifications of that for decades to come.
 

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
[[link removed]] he offers
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] with
Iran. Have a look at Antony Loewenstein’s latest
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]] about
the US’s “open border,” and he told
[[link removed]] Musk
he is looking for ways to “seal the border permanently.” He has
also cited [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] even come out in favor
of a wealth tax; he has brushed off 
[[link removed]]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 [[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] the
idea that mass shootings in US schools are caused by Prozac), and make
sense of his recent trip
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] his
podcast audience, adding that when he shared the idea at a function
for fellow Trump diehards, it received a standing ovation

After first seeming to leave the door open (“I would probably never
end up there,” he said
[[link removed]] on Breaking Points),
Kennedy now claims
[[link removed]] there
are “NO CIRCUMSTANCES” under which he would join a Trump ticket.
Of course, given his tumultuous relationship to the truth, nothing can
be ruled out.

Would Trump go for it? He does love men with famous names who look
like they are “from central casting 
[[link removed]]”
– 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
[[link removed]] 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.

_[NAOMI KLEIN is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She
is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for
Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is publishing in
September.]_

_Maggie O’Donnell and Kendra Jewell provided research assistance._

_From Elon Musk to Rupert Murdoch, a small number of billionaire
owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches
the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is
different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider.
Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not
profit motives._

_And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency,
born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence
in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we
know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism
and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the
climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as
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perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular
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[[link removed]]_

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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]

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