BONUS: What's New With RFK Jr.?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, my first thought when I was like looking at the election results, I was like, oh, we're gonna have to keep talking about this fucking guy for the next four years.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're correct.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  I was like, I want to make this about me.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  The guy who works from home.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I know. The literal luckiest person who's like literally living his dream as a journalist has to talk about obnoxious people.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  I absolutely had a conversation last night with a family friend who was fucking fluoride pilled.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  And I was like, I can't, I can't, I can't do it. I can't do it.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Well, here we are. Listeners, we love you, we miss you.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Are you tagging us in? What are we?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  I guess. I mean, are we even tagging for this? I don't know.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I don't really know what the approach is.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  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 this administration is going to put us in fucking jail.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The Onion bought Infowars, but we bought the supplement business. Surprise! Get your brain force from us.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs. Let's get this over with.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Sweet Aubrey, sweet Michael.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  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 US can impact this nomination. So, the announcement of RFK Jr.'s nomination.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Leads to a bunch of really weird politics makes for strange bedfellows sort of moments.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  On November 19th, Michael Pollan tweets a link to a piece from The American Conservative called "They're Lying About RFK Jr."

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Wait, what? I didn't even know this.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Pollan has since clarified that he's not endorsing RFK Jr., but like,

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Come on, man.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  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. So like, that's the stuff that people are upset about.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  He's riding so hard right now on like, RT's do not equal endorsements in his bio or whatever, where you're just like, come on, man.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Why is everyone so dumb? Why is everything so dumb all the time?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, tweeted his excitement about RFK Jr. as HHS secretary.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  We live in hell. I'm just gonna keep saying it.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  On November 19th, Pete Evans got on Telegram to announce that his new cookbook, Healthy Food for Healthy Kids, is being published by RFK Jr.'s Children's Health Defense Organization. This is getting billed as they're writing a book together, like they're co-authors.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  That's not quite it. It's being published by an organization that RFK Jr. is the board chair and founder of.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  I'm sure the actual recipes are like, "Uh, 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.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Suspended in pure vitamin A.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  So that's what I wanted to do next is talk through what RFK Junior has specifically said he's going to do in office as HHS Secretary, right? One of the clearest sort of mission statements that we've gotten from RFK Junior came to us, of course, via Twitter. In a tweet on October 25th, 2024, he wrote the following.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  He says, "FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, collating 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. "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?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Hey, future staff!

• 5:13Speaker 00

  I fucking hate you, but please help me achieve my goals.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Also, I'm sick and tired of you suppressing sunshine.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  I love that it's just a list of things which are not suppressed.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Again, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been extensively studied, and the results indicate that they don't work for COVID. 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, and then it's mixed in with things like raw milk, where it's like, yeah, it's actually good to like kill bacteria.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  You don't want TB milk? You're not into it?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  He's also against the suppression of nutraceuticals. Nutraceutical is a fucking marketing term.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  And that's a huge benefit to corporate interest, 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.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Right. He's not against industry involvement in healthcare. He's against regulated industry.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Right?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  He keeps using the language of like, I'm gonna stand up to these industries and I'm gonna stand up to blah, blah, blah.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  And you're like, no, you're gonna open the door for them and show them in.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  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?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I think this is very similar to what he says and has said about vaccines, right?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  He keeps saying he just wants the data.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  But safety data and long-term research are publicly available and have been for a really long time.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I told you, I just wanted the information. Now I have the information.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Turns out, uh, everyone's trying their hardest and, uh, now we'll move on on that basis.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  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. And that would be exceedingly difficult since so many states have state level mandates for children to be vaccinated.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Good, good, good.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  He can sort of shape the kinds of clinical trials that are required of drug companies.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  And a lot of it doesn't live at the federal level.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Although, uh, a friend of mine is a public high school teacher in Seattle and had his first student with pertussis this year.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Which is the P in the, uh, DTAP vaccine.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  But now people are not getting the vaccine. So we're getting whooping cough. We're, we're making whooping cough great again.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  He has also said that he wants to defluoridate all US water supplies. This is a future mega episode for us.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. You've been working this for months.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  He could issue recommendations.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  But they are in control of the people who run all three branches of government and the EPA.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  He keeps saying like, on day one, we're gonna defluoridate the, and it's like, no, you're not, you can't do that.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  It'll be like day three or four. Don't worry, everybody.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Many of the changes that we've talked about here would require a process called rulemaking. In the US, changing federal rules, which are like the guidelines on how to implement the law, requires a lot of public disclosure and public comment. 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. I would argue that is where a ton of stuff is going to happen at HHS.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  So I, I think all of us just gotta get better at paying attention to federal rulemaking and being prepared to like, submit comment on stuff and all of that, right?

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I want to talk a little bit about what happens next, where we go from here.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Mike and Aubrey lose their minds slowly and just become just a series of vowel sounds.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  You think this, what we've been recording today, has been slow?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 10:15Speaker 01

  In order to be confirmed as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. has to be confirmed by the Senate. If you are in the US, you actually can impact this process. You can call the Capitol 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. The reason that they tell you to do- Do it a lot is that it really matters.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  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, right?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  And there's also things like, you know, giving money. And there's also local things that you can do. I mean, I think, I think everybody's really worried that everyone's so fatigued from the previous Trump administration that no one's going to engage.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  I try not to make predictions as part of my journalism career. I have no idea what's going to happen. 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. 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.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  So that's what's happened since we recorded this bonus episode.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Like two weeks ago.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Will now sound unbearably lighthearted.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  God, I know. And also so naive, we're like, maybe we'll never have to talk about this guy again. But it's like, nope.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  LOL, nope.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:14Speaker 01

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

• 12:23Speaker 00

  That had so much potential, Aubrey, and then it just, it just didn't land.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  That's me booing myself.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Brains worms?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I'm Aubrey Gordon, here to disappoint you.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs here specifically to disappoint you.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Michael, I feel like I have a broad sense of what we're in for, but I have generally like not done a deep dive into the RFK Junior updates. What I'm aware of involves animal carcasses,

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  sexual assault allegations.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And a suspended New York Magazine reporter.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  The, the body count, both animal and human of this episode is deranged.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  And HHS secretary rumors.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Every time we talk about him, I'm like, oh, thank God we never have to talk about this fucking guy again. But this is going to be the rest of our lives. 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, uh, that RFK Junior is and associates with.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Boy, Michael, if there's one thing I've learned in therapy, you gotta stop apologizing for other people's behavior.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  So, okay, this, we come to you with, with great reluctance. This, we, we did our last RFK Junior episode on, I checked, August 1st, 2023. And since then, there have been numerous developments in the RFK Junior story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And we've gotten a million, a million, uh, requests to talk about like what's been going on with RFK Junior? Because he keeps fucking popping up in the news. And like, there's always weird animals involved. There's like an emu thing that like I skipped. I was like, there's too many fucking animals. Like, we can't do emus.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  There's like a sea creature one too, right?

• 14:20Speaker 00

  There's a bear, a whale, and a worm.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  This simply must be a fever dream.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  So I basically, I went on the New York Times website and I did a search for RFK Junior. 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. And then I did some like extra research and stuff. And so we're just gonna go through it, like basically chronologically, like what has this man been up to?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  We, we have to start with just talking about like his presidential run. 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 RFK Jr. 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. 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. 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.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  And then there's a whole weird subplot where his signatures get thrown out. 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. Like, I think it should be easier, but also it's RFK Jr., so I don't know how much I care.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  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 the, like a presidential campaign.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Speaking of which, this is what, this is exactly what I wanted you to read. So we have, our first excerpt is from a really interesting New Yorker article. This is like the main theme of this episode and something that I don't think I got across in our like episode episodes is how much of just a piece of shit RFK Jr. is, just like as a person. So here is a paragraph from this New Yorker article about him staffing up his campaign.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Kennedy ultimately appointed Nick Branna, 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. Two years earlier, Branna had allegedly tried to force himself onto a female colleague. Holy fuck.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  An accusation that was corroborated by a woman who had walked in on the scene. Branna has said that the allegation is, quote, "false and politically motivated." 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. 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.

• 17:31Speaker 00

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

• 17:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And those are people who will do anything to get their way.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And to win their thing, right?

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Because when you're running a short-term campaign, that's a year or less, which a lot of these,

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  you know, styles of campaigns are, you're not really accountable to a community of people. You're not really accountable to like a lasting board or anything like that.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Right? You have one job and your one job is to win.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And if you win, whatever you did in the course of winning will be sort of forgiven by your side is sort of the understanding.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  In some ways, it's like uniquely bad because it's fucking RFK Jr., so of course it's worse.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  But it's only like 5% worse.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  No, 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. You know what I mean? Whatever you gotta do.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, always be groping.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Break worms are for closers.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  But I mean, this, this leads very well into like the next little chapter of this. So there's two aspects of, of getting on the ballot in all 50 states. 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 like companies that will go and get the 100,000 signatures for you. It's very expensive, but like this is just part of kind 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. So I'm going to send you the first two paragraphs of an article from the New York Times.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  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. The top of the petition was folded underneath itself.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Uh huh. So that the names of the candidates were not visible, Ms. Bernstein said. 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?"

• 20:08Speaker 00

  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?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  This New York Times article is really funny because you can tell how it came about. 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." 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. One guy, these are not New York Times reporters, but one guy says, "Uh, this is a petition to get Biden on the ballot."

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  This is after the primary. He's like, "What?"

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Right, but before Biden dropped out, so it's not that wild a swing as it might have now.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  RFK Jr. says, "We, the, of course, the campaign says, like, denies anything like, oh, we must have hired the wrong third-party contractor. We're very disappointed." RFK Jr. 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." So, the guy who says that there's mercury in the vaccines is very, very concerned about truthfulness.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  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. And I think the thing that I find stunning about RFK Jr. is how unpersuasive he is for an attorney.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Well, keep in mind, Aubrey, he was never really an attorney.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Right, okay, sorry, sorry.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  He was fired in disgrace. Like, 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.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I love that you're like, counterpoint, don't forget, he's bad at it.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  He is fake.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  That is technically his job, but he is bad at it.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Your last shred of good faith that you're bringing in this episode.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I was really holding out hope for RFK Jr.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're like, what a conundrum. It's like, no.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Until this moment.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Just the lifelong failure is also failing at this.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  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. So this is another thing, that you know when you get the ballot, there's the like, "Make Seattle Safer" party.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  They run a candidate every year. And this is, 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.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, Michael.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Do you know about this?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I can't tell you how much I know about and resent.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Wait, you know about this?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  There was one political party that threw real shit fit about automatic voter reg- uh, and that was the independent party.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Aubrey, yes. 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, they endorse Kanye West in the last, in the last election.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  They're bad, guys.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  We don't do this in Washington, but like 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.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  They don't actually want anything to do with this party. So apparently, there's been like 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 and have like come out and a bunch of other, I read a whole article about this, of like other prominent people who are like, I, I accidentally ticked the box, you guys.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Secretaries of state also should have been saying, that can't be the name of your party.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Look, we do this with vanity plates. We should be doing it in political parties, right?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Look, if my friend can't get a vanity plate that says two dykes

• 24:48Speaker 01

  and has to go to court for it.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  She's Dutch. She's just talking about infrastructure, water, infrastructure.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  She specializes in fluid flow engineering. Well, I guess, kind, nevermind.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  It's below sea level.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I feel like you really missed my fluid flow lesbian joke.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Oh, see, I don't know the lesbian jokes. There's no way. Just give the, as a, as a genre of joke on this show, Aubrey, give up.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Fluid is flowing, that's all.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Okay, so that is like the logistics of the campaign. There's also the content of the campaign. 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. 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 explicitly saying that like, oh, I'm, you know, 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. You are going to be David Remnick, who is asking the questions. Do like a NPR podcast voice.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I have a podcast voice, Mike.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, shit, sorry.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  I sometimes forget that we're not just like talking. Okay, yes. Wow, you'd be good on a podcast, Aubrey. Has anyone ever told you that?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  What a voice for a podcast.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  So here is the first excerpt. We're starting with you.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  I don't think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Well, then why did he do the lockdowns?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  What?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Sir!

• 26:54Speaker 00

  I love it. This is like 30 seconds into the interview.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Wow!

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Remember, remember the plandemic lady? How she, how she was just there like, are you an anti-vaxxer? She's like, no, but Fauci's killed millions. Just like zero to 60.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  So, okay, that was excerpt number one.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  I believe in labor unions. That's why I've partnered with Donald J. Trump.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Okay, this one is even longer.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 27:46Speaker 00

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

• 28:22Speaker 01

  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?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  I'm not a cancel culture guy.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Good.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  It is like the number one issue for him.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  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. 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. Being canceled.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nah dude, people are just judging you based on your beliefs and actions. I don't know what to tell you here.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  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. 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."

• 29:51Speaker 01

  How are you being censored out of the White House?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  "The White House was ordering the social media sites to censor me."

• 29:57Speaker 01

  You're everywhere in the press. You're in what you call mainstream media. You're on Joe Rogan. Who censored you?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  "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."

• 30:14Speaker 01

  What?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Citation, citation needed. I don't think the New Yorker bothered being like, "This is not a real fact."

• 30:23Speaker 00

  I don't think the White House cares. Honestly, 800,000 followers isn't even that many followers.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  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? He's basically mad that like his, 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. 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.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Right? If you start a fight at a bar and the bouncer kicks you out, they're not like censoring you.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  They're like, "You can't fight here."

• 31:16Speaker 00

  And also they're not, they're not following orders from like the mayor.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. That doesn't mean the president told him to do that.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  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, that, that sort of leads us to the next couple of chapters of this. So. Over the course of the campaign, he starts to drift right. 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. 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. But then every once in a while, one of these right wing hosts would be like, oh, and the Democrats are lying about climate change. And then RFK Jr., because he was an environmental guy for so long, he'd be like, oh, actually, climate

• 32:09Speaker 00

  change is real. That one I'm actually, I happen to be with the Democrats on. It was like, he had this one thing.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  What?

• 32:34Speaker 00

  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. 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. 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.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  It's also interesting, because normally, the way that you do things, if you're like, we're gonna appease everyone and therefore do nothing, is usually what that means, right? Is like, you make like a blue ribbon commission.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you just delay, delay, delay.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  That is the number one thing that climate change activists will absolutely not tolerate at this point. It's like, what if we just talk about it some more?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  We also, in March and April, start getting more signs of his like, right wing ideology and like flirting with the right. 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 DC jail, stripped of their constitutional liberties."

• 33:41Speaker 01

  What?

• 33:42Speaker 00

  He then goes on Tim Poole's podcast. To say that he's against this move to like, take down the Confederate statues.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Good lord.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  This is a masterpiece of a paragraph from a New York Times article. It says, "While defending the statues, Mr. Kennedy also said there were, quote, 'heroes in the Confederacy who didn't have slaves, comma. 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."

• 34:11Speaker 01

  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? Like, yeah!

• 34:24Speaker 00

  You know exactly what you're doing. Absolutely.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  It's the best day of your week, if not your year.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  So, okay, but then this is Aubrey bait. So we now get to the Aubrey bait section. As he does more of these fucking podcasts, he keeps bringing up obesity.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Great.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  You know, for all that we bitch about the framing of this issue, it hasn't really been an election issue.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really has not.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  It comes up in like, presidential debates. 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? 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.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus fucking hell.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  It's so boring. It's so boring.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  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. Today, one out of every three kids who walks into his office has juvenile diabetes, and nobody is talking about it.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  No one's talking about it.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  It is costing us $4.3 trillion a year. Three times our defense budget. Okay, so, question.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Not a question, but proceed, proceed, Governor.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  This is fucking garbage and like, it's not fucking true. It's not one of every three kids does not have diabetes?

• 36:01Speaker 00

  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. 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. They're basically saying that like, all heart attacks, all strokes, even because there's kind of downstream effects of diabetes, they're throwing in all this extra stuff and saying that's like, the cost of diabetes. 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

• 36:45Speaker 00

  in three kids has juvenile diabetes. 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. 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.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Oh, are you about to say that the type 1 people need to be blamed as well? We're coming for the type 1 people?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've had it too good for too long.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Sorry, guys. It's time for you to suffer with the rest of us.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  It calls up a series of images, and I think he knows that he's doing that, right?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. He's weaponizing, he's weaponizing all this existing stigma. I mean, he's not going to propose anything that makes anybody healthier, right? What he wants to do is get rid of vaccines.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  He's not actually gonna like improve school lunches or anything, right?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Oh, gross.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  So that was gross. We now get to the more comedic elements of this story. On May, well, actually, this one isn't comedic. Uh, well, we'll get there. So on May 8th, we get an article in the New York Times called RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found A Dead Worm In His Brain: 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. 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

• 38:47Speaker 00

  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, and that can affect your cognitive abilities. What's funny about this is like, it, it makes him look quite bad. But like, he's exaggerating how bad it is. So they, 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. 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.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  So in the New York Times, they say, "It is unlikely that a parasite would eat part of the brain." They also, they also, like, there's different kind of type, 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. In the article, they say, "Unlike tapeworm larvae in the intestines, those in the brain remain relatively small, about a third of an inch." But that sounds really big to me.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  That sounds so big.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  I don't want a third of an inch worm in my fucking brain.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I just absolutely caught a chill.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  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 where I was like, "All right, Robert, I'll give you this one." So it says in the article,

• 40:16Speaker 00

  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."

• 40:31Speaker 00

  That's actually pretty good.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Good job, social media manager.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  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's, him and his wife are divorcing, and she's trying to get child support. 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."

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  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." 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 money. And this happened, so he, he doesn't have to pay any child support. As we discussed in our previous episode, his wife ends up killing herself.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Jesus, hell.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  You know, you never want to attribute it to one cause, but like, this, this kind of ruined her life, right?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Right, it's not helping.

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  It's not helping.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  This whole story is like, really sad.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  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 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 allegedly, despite all of the, you know, bearheads and whale carcasses and brain worms of it all."

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  He is just like, "Yeah, you're fucking, your friend's shitty ex-boyfriend."

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  "Oh, Todd's back? Fuck that guy."

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, no kidding. He's Dennis from 30 Rock. Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 01

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

• 42:31Speaker 00

  I actually, I don't know why I did this, but I actually have a list of late night jokes about the worm. Do you want to hear some of them?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Let's do some worms jokes.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  So this is from the Daily Show. I don't know what's worse, that RFK Junior had a worm that was eating his brain, or that his brain is so poisoned that it killed the worm. That's pretty good.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  That is good.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Stephen Colbert said, cause of death, starvation, which I kind of like.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  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. The first is, do you remember the dog allegations? The dog eating?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  No, what?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  And send you, I was going to send you a link, but that will spoil it for you. So I'm going to send you a screenshot. Hang on. There's a New York Post headline that says, unsettling photo appears to show RFK Junior with barbecued carcass of dog.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  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 whole roasted animal of some kind on it. I'm guessing that's not a dog.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  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. 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. 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. And so he texts this friend back and says, like, well, you're gonna have to eat a bunch of dogs there

• 44:41Speaker 00

  because they eat dogs in Asia, and so here's me eating a dog.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it's just him making a shitty racist joke?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  It's just like a racist joke that he made.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Neat.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  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."

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Weird that a Kennedy would have issues with women.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  I know.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Ha!

• 45:30Speaker 00

  So this, 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, there's three incidents of harassment. So in one, 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, like kinda 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. And she's like, this is just really weird.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  He was in his 40s at the time. 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.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  What a deeply weird fucking way to talk about.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Having, yeah, god damn it.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  But then also, this, 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. 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. 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. "Sending a text at

• 47:40Speaker 00

  12:33 a.m. is not considering his actions' effect 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. He claims to have no memory of not one, not two, but three examples of his predatory behavior. He expects a societal path and forgiveness for saying that he's no church boy. I have paid the cost for his sexual misconduct for decades."

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Correct!

• 48:04Speaker 00

  So like, fuck yes, Eliza Cooney.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Correct!

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Was just like, I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I have no interest in talking to you about this.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Boy, I, it's been a while since I've felt such an immediate, strong allegiance to someone.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  I was like, yeah, exactly. I'm like, hell yeah, spell it out, Eliza.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  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?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Uh, Jeremy Allen White?

• 48:35Speaker 00

  What?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  We're not doing Yes, Chef?

• 48:38Speaker 00

  How dare you think that I would get- A TV reference.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  I know you only get video game references.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  And I only get TV references and never the twain shall meet.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Give it to me in Tekken 3, then I would get the bear reference.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  You're, he's, oh, this is, he took it home and he was like, you're allowed to take it home for meat.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Aubrey, I've read so much about whether or not you're actually allowed to take it home for meat. 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 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. 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.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Wow. Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one at New Yorker.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  So the text of this tweet makes no fucking sense. We're going to watch a brief part of this and then we're going to pause and we're going to talk about fish and wildlife regulations. So I know, I hate this.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  That's what's making me laugh.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Okay, you ready? So dumb. Okay.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  I was taking a group of people, okay, up in Goshen, New York, up in the 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. And that woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear. 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 and put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  I have to say, I love the cutaways to the face of the person he's telling the story to.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Do you know who that is?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Who is it?

• 50:58Speaker 00

  It's Roseanne Barr.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  What?

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Isn't this so weird? She's like a deranged right winger. Now I went to her Twitter profile. It's dark.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  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?

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And like, this is just all surprising.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  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?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Totally. She's doing a full Jim Halpert at the camera.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  So, this is the story that he tells. 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. 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. 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 some like, local paper, it's like, a hunting license does not apply to roadkill. But if you have roadkill and you want to eat it, you can call the fish and wildlife people,

• 52:18Speaker 00

  and they can like, approve of you eating the roadkill. This whole thing seems very weird to me. But apparently, a lot of fish and wildlife departments around the country kind of want people to eat roadkill. Like, people find it really disgusting, but it's like, these animals are just gonna sit there and rot on the side of the road if somebody doesn't take them.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  It's a little bit of a moot point, because he didn't notify the authorities, as far as we know.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  So it's sort of like, he's, he's like, oh, it's okay to do this, as long as you notify the authorities, which I did not do.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  But we'll just go ahead and watch the rest of the clip together.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  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. So we stayed late and instead of going back to my home in Rochester, I had to go right to the city because there was a dinner at Peter Luger's Steakhouse. And at the end of the dinner, it went late and I realized I couldn't go home. 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 the little bit of the redneck in me. There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and saw people, a couple of people killed.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  And it was every day and people had gotten badly injured. I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea. And I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of it. 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'd be fun, funny for people. 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, it was like, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  And I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 odd cars.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Once again, bless this editor for the cutaways to Roseanne's face.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  I know.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Like when your judgment is being questioned in real time by Roseanne Barr?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  I know. 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.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  It's so weird.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  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."

• 55:16Speaker 00

  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?"

• 55:22Speaker 01

  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. 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." Dude, this was always going to be news.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  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 gonna make it seem like a cyclist killed the bear."

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  A, that wouldn't even really happen. You'd have to, you'd have to be a really fast biker to kill a fucking bear.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  And secondly, why the fuck would you frame a cyclist? God's chosen creatures.

• 56:16Speaker 01

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

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Driver brain. Take. 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, they found a bear in Central Park. 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. 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."

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Nobody faults for this fucking stupid prank. This is from the AP story in 2014. 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. There's a bicycle on top of this bear for some reason? This is from the New York Times article. Florence Slatkin, who lives near the park, said that she and a friend were leaving when her friend's terrier spotted something near a bicycle lying on the ground. "At first, we thought it was a bag of clothes or maybe a dead dog," she told the Associated Press. "But then, as they got closer, they realized it was a very small bear with its mouth wide open and scratches on the side. The cub's head was on top of a back bicycle wheel," Slatkin said. "It was terrible, and it was the strangest thing," she added.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  "Why was the bike there?"

• 57:51Speaker 00

  So it 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'm a cyclist, I'm biking through Central Park, I hit and kill a bear.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  And I leave my bike.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  This plan has all the sophistication of those like the Chick-fil-A billboards that are just cows holding signs that say like, eat more chicken.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  He's just very bad at framing people. Oh, my God, Mike, when do we get the ripped from the headlines Law and Order episode?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 01

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

• 58:46Speaker 00

  No, I know, it's like these giant ribs, like huge, like Flintstones meat.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  I get it, you like meat.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  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. There's also this thing in Arizona where they get, like, they can't get enough signatures for the ballot. They're supposed to have 42,000, they can only get 9,000. And then out of nowhere, this like kind of sketchy PAC delivers 110,000 signatures to the Secretary of State, and you're not supposed to coordinate. This is the whole Citizens United garbage thing. 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.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  And this, 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. 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. 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 gonna give me if I drop out? And the Harris campaign was just not interested.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Speaks highly of them. Good job.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  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. 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. And RFK Jr. sees this and immediately runs to the garage, grabs a chainsaw, runs down to the beach and chops its head off. 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.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  This is also illegal, so Noah is investigating this. 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.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, this one makes me sad.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  This one's just a huge bummer.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  It's such a bummer.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  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. This is just so weird.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  I started to read about it and then I was like, I don't feel good knowing these things.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Anyway, we're both, we're both deep into this, so we're, we're previewing it. But this is the story of a political reporter for New York Magazine named Olivia Nutzi, who's sort of like a rising star on the political scene. She's one of these like 30 under 30 people. I don't know how these people get on these fucking lists.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Boy, spoken like somebody who wasn't on a list.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  There's no.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  There's no 40 over 40. People who are somehow keeping it together despite their back hurting.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where's the anemic 40 year old gay man?

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  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. I'm actually, I, 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 the, this type of journalism that is all based on access. Like she flies all the way to California. 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.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Like going hiking with him is so that you can brag that like, oh, I went hiking RFK Junior. 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. You can read his fucking books if you want to know what he believes.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  It seems like the like allure is the like she knows everybody.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, totally.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Like that's the selling point rather than the like, oh, there's an insight here that I find useful. Or there's analysis here, there's context.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Nothing.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, she has this person on speed dial.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  I don't think speed dial exists anymore.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  I'm gonna star six nine.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  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. 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 the stuff over text. This text becomes flirtatious. This becomes apparently like a sexting thing. They then have like FaceTime sex or whatever. And there's, it's also a really weird story in that neither one of the participants in this affair are like really talking about it. 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.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  She couldn't stop texting.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  It definitely wasn't this serial sexual abuse.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Exactly. Who's had like numerous affairs, right?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Allegedly, yes.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  And like, maybe that is true, but also he's not a remotely reliable narrator, nor are his friends remotely reliable. There's one of his friends, who's like another like anti-vaxx weirdo, says, this had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Which is not a real thing.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  There's also something about this that just sort of sucks from a like media representation of lady journalists thing.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Which is like. Like, part of the reason there was like, an undercurrent of the freakout 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.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  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 shamy element to it. And like, even if she deserves a lot of criticism, whenever it's a woman, it like, the criticism just goes to 11 really quickly.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it goes to a place that it's like, it goes from deserved critique to totally undeserved and personal.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Sounds like weird shit.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  In the blink of an eye.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was all virtual, right?

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's all just like, phone stuff.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  She was engaged at the time, he was married. The, her engagement has now been broken off. And they're filing restraining orders against each other in court.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  And it's all fucking weird. She is accusing her fiance 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. But like, 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 fiance. Her fiance says that it's not him. It's a whole big, ugly, dumb thing.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, absolutely. 100%.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  I think that someone who exercised unbelievably poor judgment. I think, whatever happens between her and her fiance really isn't any of my business. And whatever happens between RFK Junior and his wife, also none of my business. He's also a piece of shit due to what he does in public.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  For real.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  There's a really fucked up article of 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. So it says that he has 43 like women, like mistresses or whatever, saved in his phone. 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. One of the women had the note airplane after her name, while another was denoted with farm and a third with teacher. Yet another was only

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  cryptically referred to as Z." And apparently he saved them all under the letter G for Gumar, which is remember in The Sopranos, that means like your, your like girl on the side, Gumar, right? Don't make me do that again.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  I think maybe you should.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  I've probably maybe cut that. That was bad. That was quite bad. That was my, that was my Tony Soprano.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Along with us talking about it.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  It's like miserable. 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.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  They're like Steve lawyer.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Todd, Seattle.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Cause 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. I don't know what that means.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yes, you do.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  I don't know who any of these people are.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Weirdly, RFK Junior's ringtone was just The Rambler, that song from the 60s. "I'm the type of guy who likes to roam around."

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  No, that's The Wanderer. I love that song.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Oh, The Wanderer. Excuse me.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  It's the original, "I've got hoes in different area codes."

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  I, I want to end with a really good quote. This, 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.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  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. 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. Quote, "Like all the rest of us, Bobby grew up feeling that being a Kennedy, you could do virtually anything you wanted." Kennedy's cousin, Chris Lawford, told the authors of "The Kennedys: An American Drama." Quote, "It was good because you got away with things other people wouldn't dream of.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  It was bad because it destroyed your sense of what was worth doing." Bears in Central Park.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Dude, I know!

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Bears in Central Park!

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Whale heads everywhere!

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Whale heads, whale heads!

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  It's a real classic fail-sun scenario.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  True fail-sun thing, right? Spoiled kid, eventually makes good because he has this 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, 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 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.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  You can't see it, but I'm Roseanne Barr grimacing at the Kennedy Center.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  You have a giant plate of ribs in front of you. (laughing)