Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's a podcast. It's happening to your ears
Speaker 2: right now. How can this be? Who did this to you?
Speaker 2: Why is this happening? Where is this happening. It's happening
Speaker 2: now here in your ears.
Speaker 3: I'm Robert Vins.
Speaker 2: This is behind the Bastards, Cody Johnston with me in
Speaker 2: the studio, which is not a literal studio, but a
Speaker 2: metaphorical studio, a mind palace, studio that exists purely in
Speaker 2: the space between our third eyes. Cody, how are you feeling.
Speaker 3: I'm feeling great in our shared studio, the studio of
Speaker 3: our hearts.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's how we met each other. It was like
Speaker 2: a Jedi thing, you know, years before we started working
Speaker 2: at Cracked in our mind studio recording our mind.
Speaker 3: Wasn't it a website at that point?
Speaker 2: No, No, there weren't websites.
Speaker 3: There weren't websites. We still had that meeting.
Speaker 2: No, we knew each other in the womb, the creative womb. Cody.
Speaker 2: How are you feeling about r fks into Part four?
Speaker 3: God, I'm not confident in his ability.
Speaker 2: You don't think this is going to turn out good?
Speaker 3: I don't think so. Man, it doesn't bode Well.
Speaker 2: No, we boy. There wasn't a lot of fun stuff
Speaker 2: in part three, but there he was still like you
Speaker 2: could believe at least at points like, well, it seems
Speaker 2: like he's doing better than a lot of Kennedy's are.
Speaker 2: There was an element of tragedy to him that gives
Speaker 2: you some sympathy. All of that's about to get flushed
Speaker 2: down the toilet, Cody. We are now at the part
Speaker 2: where he kills hundreds of people.
Speaker 4: Oh, Zah, I didn't We did it, Joe, we did it.
Speaker 1: And you know what else? We just did Robert Open, We.
Speaker 2: Did the Cold Open. We're done, We're back, We're warmed up.
Speaker 2: We're talking about RFK plunging into the last chapter of
Speaker 2: the RFK Saga, Yeah, RFK Junior saga. By the very
Speaker 2: start of the aughts, RFK Junior seemed to finally have
Speaker 2: started figuring out his life and to have moved into
Speaker 2: a better place in public. He was a respected environmental
Speaker 2: lawyer and assumed Democratic Party stalwart. Oppenheimer's book includes several
Speaker 2: quotes from members of the family who are like, again,
Speaker 2: thank god he didn't get into politics. He might actually
Speaker 2: be happy now, right, He's got a chance, but behind
Speaker 2: his image, Bobby was not the man that his fans
Speaker 2: or the country hoped. In twenty ten, he started dating
Speaker 2: actor Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. The problem
Speaker 2: with this is that he was still married to his wife,
Speaker 2: Mary Richardson now RFK Junior head. Up to that point
Speaker 2: had a tumultuous love life. He had married his first wife, Emily,
Speaker 2: and had a child with her in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: They broke up later that same year. I assume his
Speaker 2: rampant cheting was a significant part of that, because that
Speaker 2: is a through line his entire life as a person
Speaker 2: who is in relationships. He and Emily, Yeah, it seems reasonable.
Speaker 2: So he and Emily break up the same year that
Speaker 2: they have their first kid, and he immediately gets married
Speaker 2: again to Mary Richardson. Now, Mary is a successful architect.
Speaker 2: She is someone who has you know, done very well
Speaker 2: on her own. But she is also what has been
Speaker 2: described as a Kennedy super fan. Right, she fucking love right,
Speaker 2: So that's good. That's not great, that's not great. She's
Speaker 2: been obsessed with the family from a young age and
Speaker 2: she no.
Speaker 3: That's yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry, sorry, Cody, this story doesn't end well, and she
Speaker 2: eventually she made friends with one of Bobby's relatives. That's
Speaker 2: how she and Bobby meet, and they have four kids together.
Speaker 2: After they get hitched. The two are together a long time,
Speaker 2: almost twenty years, but those are not happy years. Mary
Speaker 2: battles anarexia. She had battled anarexia earlier in her life.
Speaker 2: By the time they get together, she's on this carousel
Speaker 2: of medications and therapy that are not always good for
Speaker 2: her mental health. She struggles with depression and Bobby's constant
Speaker 2: cheating does not help with that. Turns out that does
Speaker 2: not make your depression better. Who could have guessed right?
Speaker 2: She'll go into these spirals that can last days or weeks,
Speaker 2: And a lot of this is not known at the
Speaker 2: time of the writing of books like After Camelot, which
Speaker 2: cites Bobby's claims about Mary's drinking and her regular violent outbursts.
Speaker 2: And if you just were to have gotten from the
Speaker 2: book After Camelot, you would assume, well, you know, this
Speaker 2: is a bad marriage, and Bobby certainly probably did some
Speaker 2: things wrong, but this lady was kind of out of
Speaker 2: control and aggressive, and like, poor guy, what else could
Speaker 2: he have done? Right? There's no living in that situation.
Speaker 2: That's what it would have seemed like from some of
Speaker 2: the early reporting on it. Now, more modern reporting, the
Speaker 2: stuff coming out now blames Bobby basically for everything that
Speaker 2: went wrong in this marriage. So, you know, it's one
Speaker 2: of those things where you kind of have two versions
Speaker 2: of this story, and one Bobby is mostly a victim.
Speaker 2: He's a man trapped in an abusive marriage to a
Speaker 2: woman struggling with substance abuse issues and prone to violence.
Speaker 2: The other version of the story is that Mary is
Speaker 2: somebody with some substance abuse issues, but she is also
Speaker 2: somebody who is constantly discovering her husband cheating on her,
Speaker 2: sometimes by sexually harassing and assaulting very young women. And yeah,
Speaker 2: she hits him sometimes, but she hits them in part
Speaker 2: because she is finding out about these really terrible, unforgivable
Speaker 2: things that he's done, and she's breaking down right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: which you know is a different picture than just well,
Speaker 2: she's so out of control because she's depressed that Bobby
Speaker 2: couldn't couldn't stand it anymore, Right, Bobby's a much more
Speaker 2: active participant in the modern the others of the story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are reasons for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for the behavior now to be clear, the couple's children.
Speaker 2: This is also you know, I do think some of
Speaker 2: the modern versions of the story have sought to allied
Speaker 2: Mary of some of her responsibility, and I don't think
Speaker 2: that's entirely accurate, because the couple's kids testify about her outbursts,
Speaker 2: which are bad enough that when the divorce process starts
Speaker 2: in twenty ten, she's denied unmediated access to the kids. Right,
Speaker 2: because she is not in control of herself to an extent,
Speaker 2: that is problematic. Right, But all of the times that
Speaker 2: she allegedly struck Bobby are not just examples of her
Speaker 2: being abusive. They're violent reactions to some pretty horrific abusive
Speaker 2: behavior on Bobby's part, And so you get passages like
Speaker 2: this and after Camelot quote based on a sworn affidavit
Speaker 2: Bobby filed in Westchester County's New York Supreme Court on
Speaker 2: September sixteenth, twenty eleven. He had been victimized by Mary
Speaker 2: for many years, to the extent that physical abuse was involved.
Speaker 2: He testified that early in his marriage to Mary, the
Speaker 2: two had a blazing argument over his continued friendship with
Speaker 2: his first wife, Emily, during which Mary hit me in
Speaker 2: the face with her fist. She was a trained boxer,
Speaker 2: and I got a shiner. Her engagement ring crushed my
Speaker 2: tear duct, causing permanent damage. He testified that she asked
Speaker 2: him to lighter her family about the cause of his
Speaker 2: black eye. He also testified to a time in May
Speaker 2: twenty eleven when Mary ran over and killed the family's
Speaker 2: dog in the driveway. She asked the couple's youngest son,
Speaker 2: Aiden to call Bobby and give him the news. When
Speaker 2: he asked the crying child to put his mother on
Speaker 2: the line, according to Bobby's testimony, Mary demanded that he
Speaker 2: come to the house and spend the night there in
Speaker 2: order to help her calm down the children. When he hesitated,
Speaker 2: she became set and said that if he didn't recommit
Speaker 2: to the marriage and call off the divorce, she would
Speaker 2: kill herself.
Speaker 1: So the family dog.
Speaker 2: I don't think she meant to, but maybe maybe she
Speaker 2: try to get Bobby back, like it's just a bad
Speaker 2: it's a bad time. Those poor kids, right, those poor kids. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I mentioned earlier that a lot of writing on the
Speaker 2: Kennedys is of mixed providence. A lot of it's tabloid
Speaker 2: level kind of shit. One of these tabloid level things.
Speaker 2: Is a book called Ask Not the Kennedys and the
Speaker 2: Women They Destroyed That that title is just a little
Speaker 2: I don't know, exploited if to me. This book was
Speaker 2: published before though most of the allegations against RFK came out,
Speaker 2: was before his presidential run and whatever. And the author
Speaker 2: Mariene Callahan claims that the whole horrible story of Mary
Speaker 2: hitting the dog with her car happens right after she
Speaker 2: finds out about yet another affair. Marine writes that she
Speaker 2: was quote so hysterical that she'd run out of the house,
Speaker 2: gotten in her car, backed out of the driveway, and
Speaker 2: accidentally run over and killed Portsie, the family dog. Now,
Speaker 2: some of the pieces of this story were around in
Speaker 2: the after Camelot days. You just had to poke a
Speaker 2: bit at the edges of the stuff in the mainstream reporting.
Speaker 2: And there's even this passage and after Camelot that includes
Speaker 2: a quote from Mary during one of her fights with Bobby.
Speaker 2: He is a demon. He is a demon. He is
Speaker 2: the most evil kind of man in the world. Everything
Speaker 2: he does is evil and a fraud. He's a philanderer,
Speaker 2: an adulterer, a sex addict.
Speaker 3: I mean that seems exactcurate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is a Bobby. This is the Bobby
Speaker 2: that exists while he's doing all this wonderful stuff at Riverkeeper,
Speaker 2: you know, while he's staying sober like this is he's,
Speaker 2: among other.
Speaker 3: Things, Kennedy stuff, Kennedy stuff, right.
Speaker 2: It's Kennedy stuff. And you know his wife was somebody
Speaker 2: who had pre existing mental health issues in this just
Speaker 2: absolutely demolished. Yeah right, Yeah. Callahan claims that Bobby tried
Speaker 2: to get a therapist to diagnose his wife in order
Speaker 2: to like for the court process, right, so that he
Speaker 2: could he would he could basically cut her out of
Speaker 2: having access to the kids. Yeah, and that's you'll hear
Speaker 2: a lot that she had BPD, that she was a
Speaker 2: borderline personality disorder. That maybe where the claims of BPD
Speaker 2: came in. There's allegations that Bobby basically shopped around for
Speaker 2: a doctor. The therapist who spoke to Callahan and said
Speaker 2: that he tried to get them to diagnose his wife
Speaker 2: basically suggests that yeah, this is this is something he
Speaker 2: did for the divorce. He may have basically been bribing
Speaker 2: medical professionals. You know, those are allegations made. I can't
Speaker 2: speak to their veracity. Here's the next part of that story, though,
Speaker 2: as reported in an article recently published in Vanity Fair,
Speaker 2: after Kennedy left her, Richardson proposed that she live in
Speaker 2: the guest house while Kennedy and Hines lived in the
Speaker 2: main house, and that she keep the Kennedy name. He declined,
Speaker 2: and then tried to avoid paying her child support, using
Speaker 2: his brain fog as a medical excuse for alleged financial straits. Richardson,
Speaker 2: her behavior, increasingly erratic, eventually lost custody of the children
Speaker 2: to Kennedy. The Kennedy family, including Kerrie, who had once
Speaker 2: been like a sister to Richardson, began to distance themselves
Speaker 2: from her. On May sixteenth, twenty twelve, Richardson's housekeeper discovered
Speaker 2: Richardson hanging from the rafters in the barn.
Speaker 3: That's awful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's bleak. It's a bleak story.
Speaker 3: That's really bleak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh boy, hard I had to laugh on a
Speaker 2: podcast about Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure what to say.
Speaker 2: That's just devastating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, several series of events, and I said, it's poor kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Mary's family describe RFK Junior's behavior as psychological torture,
Speaker 2: and they even try to do a wrongful death suit. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't know was he intending to hurt her? You know,
Speaker 2: I don't have evidence of that certainly, but his behavior
Speaker 2: is like would inevitably cause harm?
Speaker 3: Right, Well it's not. It doesn't need to be intentional.
Speaker 3: It's just like that's how he's been hit, how he
Speaker 3: is in his life, floating through it. Yeah, treating people
Speaker 3: in this way, and yeah, doing.
Speaker 2: Other people aren't real, YadA YadA, right right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So Bobby and their kids make the decision to have
Speaker 2: Mary buried on Kennedy Land, not the place your family
Speaker 2: had requested it as a burial plot, And eight months later,
Speaker 2: Bobby made the decision to have his ex wife exhumed
Speaker 2: and reburied away from everyone else. Very unclear as to why. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a weird thing and I don't see any good
Speaker 2: explanation for this. The author of After Camelot describes this
Speaker 2: as like a bleak coda to her whole life story.
Speaker 2: You know, Mary had always been a lonely person. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it is right, it is like, yeah, yeah, and he
Speaker 2: just wants to keep her away, even in death, from
Speaker 2: her family, from everyone else.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Was it was she relocated to where she was
Speaker 3: originally requested to be.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no, why what it's unclear? Unclear?
Speaker 3: That's so weird. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The the author of After Camelot is basically like
Speaker 2: Mary had always been lonely, and now he wanted to
Speaker 2: keep her away even further, you know, even in death.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's so cool.
Speaker 3: So he did it for the poetry, like what like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he did it for the poetry, just like Byron,
Speaker 2: Just like uh, just like Byron.
Speaker 3: That's so all right, great, weird weird move Bobby, like
Speaker 3: weird one, what the fuck? Like?
Speaker 2: Yeah. The initial stages of divorce proceedings is the first
Speaker 2: time that we get Bobby Kennedy making any claims about
Speaker 2: having a worm in his brain. And you saw earlier
Speaker 2: right that he's like, well, I can't pay because my
Speaker 2: brain fog. I fucked up the finances because my brain
Speaker 2: doesn't work anymore because a worm made part of it.
Speaker 2: And the fact that this comes out he is repeatedly
Speaker 2: lying to his wife and to this, you know, allegedly
Speaker 2: lying to this divorce court and is actively divorcing her
Speaker 2: has led a number of folks to question if the
Speaker 2: brainworm stuff is true. I think there's enough evidence in
Speaker 2: here that it's plausible that he has a brain but.
Speaker 3: It's unclear what period of time he got because it
Speaker 3: could have been literally any moment of his life. But
Speaker 3: he's definitely.
Speaker 2: He's eating bush meat, which is always it's a situation.
Speaker 3: It's uh, it's it's believable. Yeah, he's placed himself in it.
Speaker 3: It could be, could be, could be, could be.
Speaker 2: But just because the brainworm is likely doesn't mean he's
Speaker 2: always been honest about how he got it. As you
Speaker 2: kind of insinuated. In that twenty twelve deposition, Kennedy said
Speaker 2: that he had suffered from cognitive issues that had reduced
Speaker 2: his earning power. He claimed his doctors initially saw they
Speaker 2: saw a shadow on his brain right, that is the worm,
Speaker 2: but they thought it was like a tumor maybe, And
Speaker 2: he had a planned operation at Duke, but he got
Speaker 2: a He says he got to call it from a
Speaker 2: doctor at the last minute who was like, no, no,
Speaker 2: it's a parasite. But in a YouTube interview the day
Speaker 2: after this story broke into the mainstream, he gave a
Speaker 2: different version of events, where a random Irish doctor encountered
Speaker 2: him and saw his X rays and was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I don't think this merit surgery. We just have to
Speaker 2: wait to see if it gets better. You know, it's
Speaker 2: something else. Anyway, It doesn't matter which version of events
Speaker 2: is true, just that like they're kind of different. He
Speaker 2: can't keep his story straight in public. Maybe because the
Speaker 2: brain worm that ate part of his brain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, the part that remembers where you got the
Speaker 3: brain worm was destroyed by the brain worm.
Speaker 2: That's that's the first part that the brain worm. If
Speaker 2: you know, straight for that part, it goes straight for
Speaker 2: the part of the brain that remembers you have a brain.
Speaker 3: They don't want they don't want you to know where
Speaker 3: you got it.
Speaker 2: And then you won't get it again, right, right, They
Speaker 2: want you to keep getting those brain worms. That's how
Speaker 2: they breathe exactly. Now, it doesn't really matter, you know,
Speaker 2: which of these slightly different versions of events is true.
Speaker 2: What matters is that, Yeah, he's not keeping his story
Speaker 2: straight in public. It's worth noting that, in response to
Speaker 2: widespread mirth about his literal brainworms, Bobby wrote this on Twitter.
Speaker 2: I offer to eat five for brainworms and still beat
Speaker 2: President Trump and President Biden in a debate. I feel
Speaker 2: confident in the result even with a six worm handicap.
Speaker 3: One of the better tweets honestly that I love seeing that.
Speaker 2: That's so funny.
Speaker 3: It was the best thing he could post it.
Speaker 2: But it really is very funny.
Speaker 3: It's so good and true, like not on like being
Speaker 3: correct about the issues, but in his ability to like communicate.
Speaker 3: I think I think you can kind of nail his
Speaker 3: confidence there.
Speaker 1: What's extra funny, Robert, is you were writing this while
Speaker 1: we were sitting in the RNC convention.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't disagree. I didn't disagree.
Speaker 3: Now it's so good.
Speaker 2: I know that. Up to this point, most of the
Speaker 2: bastardry in Bobby's life has been confined to his personal life,
Speaker 2: with the notable exception of intervening in the Escape murder trial.
Speaker 2: But in the early aughts, starting a few years before
Speaker 2: Mary's death, Bobby began to get increasingly involved with the
Speaker 2: movement that would lead him to causing the greatest amount
Speaker 2: of harm so far that he has caused to the world.
Speaker 2: The genesis of the problem started with his work at
Speaker 2: water Keeper. This is a different environmental nonprofit from river Keeper,
Speaker 2: one that focuses on drinking water and fighting back against
Speaker 2: corporate pollution of water sources. Some of the cases Bobby
Speaker 2: was involved and were focused on mercury levels and migratory fish,
Speaker 2: and this led to him studying and reading about the
Speaker 2: health consequences of exposure to various chemicals, including mercury. Now,
Speaker 2: you don't want to get exposed to mercury. That's not
Speaker 2: great for you. I don't know. I know that you're
Speaker 2: you're a big mercury guy, but I worry about you.
Speaker 2: And it's it's not it's not good for you. It's
Speaker 2: less of an health tonic than you might think.
Speaker 3: It's not good for other people, and I don't recommend
Speaker 3: it to other people. But I no problem so far.
Speaker 3: All right, Well I'm and fine, it's my speak is good.
Speaker 3: So don't whatever you said that I remember, all right.
Speaker 2: Why don't Why don't you murk out and our listeners
Speaker 2: and also take the capitalist equivalent of mercury, which is mercury,
Speaker 2: but it's also the products and service sports podcast. It's
Speaker 2: just it is just mercury. We're back. God. I love mercury.
Speaker 2: I like the way it moves like that. I do
Speaker 2: too taste. Yeah, somebody doesn't like mercury and he doesn't
Speaker 2: like mercury in part because he thinks it's in vaccines,
Speaker 2: and he thinks that like there's like trace different kinds
Speaker 2: of chemicals and vaccines, but like in levels that are
Speaker 2: not going to be a health threat. You know. It's
Speaker 2: like you shouldn't have too much energy, but it's in
Speaker 2: your oxygen.
Speaker 3: You'll be okay in the area. Yeah. Yeah, I assume
Speaker 3: they would go like, oh, that's too much mercury. We
Speaker 3: shouldn't pump people full of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they're aware this is not really a problem,
Speaker 2: but Bobby becomes convinced that he is that it is.
Speaker 2: And Bobby is not a doctor. Again, he is a lawyer.
Speaker 2: And it's not surprising that years of focusing on chemical
Speaker 2: exposure and waterways might have transferred over to other things.
Speaker 2: Because while he is kind of obsessively fighting and reading
Speaker 2: about all of this mercury poisoning, he and Mary have
Speaker 2: their first son, Connor, and Connor has a soy and
Speaker 2: peanut allergy. These are serious allergies, and you know, RFK Junior,
Speaker 2: given all of the family members that have died, is
Speaker 2: a man who was primed to be extra upset about
Speaker 2: this and perhaps unreasonably obsessed with why it had happened.
Speaker 2: So he dedicates himself to figuring out a reason why,
Speaker 2: and he lands on mercury exposure as the cause of
Speaker 2: Connor's allergies. Right, that this is because he's obsessively reading
Speaker 2: about and fighting with corporations about mercury exposure and waterways,
Speaker 2: his son gets an allergy. And there is a belief
Speaker 2: among certain weird health anti vax types that mercury exposure
Speaker 2: in vaccines causes allergies in children. Right, this is a
Speaker 2: this has existed for more than twenty years now, this
Speaker 2: belief that like these trace chemicals in vaccines are causing
Speaker 2: our kids to get develop weird allergies. Because it can't
Speaker 2: my son who has this potentially life threatening allergy. That
Speaker 2: scares me. It can't just be because some kids have allergies.
Speaker 2: There has to be a reason, right, There has to
Speaker 2: be something I can crusade against.
Speaker 3: The right I was gonna say, like, this needs to
Speaker 3: be some like entity that I can actually go after,
Speaker 3: Like it can't just be like, oh that happens. No,
Speaker 3: I have a focus, I have a target. I can
Speaker 3: use the power of the Kennedys to destroy that target.
Speaker 2: Now I want to make it clear that this is
Speaker 2: vigorously disproved nonsense. I found a twenty twenty three study
Speaker 2: published by the Japan Environment Children's Study Group. They collected
Speaker 2: and explored data for more than ninety four thousand mother
Speaker 2: infant pairs and looked at how prenatal metallic element exposure
Speaker 2: might correlate to food allergies. To make a long story short,
Speaker 2: that concluded, quote, no association was found between prenatal mercury
Speaker 2: or manganese exposure and the risk of allergic diseases. Right,
Speaker 2: that's a very large study. It's not the only thing
Speaker 2: you can find on the subject. But there is no
Speaker 2: evidence that this is a thing at all, and in fact,
Speaker 2: pretty strong evidence that it's not. But Bobby believes in it. Right,
Speaker 2: And one of our sources on how kind of obsessed
Speaker 2: he is with mercury poisoning during the kind of early
Speaker 2: to mid auts is Cooney, that babysitter he harassed who
Speaker 2: told Vanity Fair that he told her Connor's allergies were
Speaker 2: likely because of vaccines he'd received that had mercury in them.
Speaker 2: And you know, Kennedy has claimed later in other writings
Speaker 2: that right around the same time he starts meeting with
Speaker 2: groups of mothers who start handing him research about like
Speaker 2: mercury in the MMR vaccine and how it's causing autism, right,
Speaker 2: the original Facebook group, Yeah, the originals, like a mom
Speaker 2: handing you a sheef of paper she printed out. You know,
Speaker 2: he becomes acquainted with Andrew Wakefield and Wakefield's absolutely disgraced
Speaker 2: study that was published in like nineteen ninety eight. But
Speaker 2: you know, obviously the fact that this is all nonsense
Speaker 2: and that Wakefield is completely disgraced eventually from it doesn't
Speaker 2: stop him from becoming you know, famous among a whole
Speaker 2: host of Hollywood weirdos like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey,
Speaker 2: and obviously Bobby Kennedy is right there in the center
Speaker 2: of it. This is the kind of cause that Bobby
Speaker 2: like loves to drag himself towards. You know, he's he's
Speaker 2: a Kennedy, so he's not the little guy, but he
Speaker 2: gets to be the little guy when he's fighting these
Speaker 2: big corporate polls or when he's dealing with you know,
Speaker 2: this vaccine conspiracy that's getting mercury into kids, right he
Speaker 2: and because he's you know, the Kennedy that he is,
Speaker 2: he always has access to the news media even when
Speaker 2: he shouldn't. He's friends with the publisher of Rolling Stone
Speaker 2: at the time, Jan Winner, and he gets a Winner
Speaker 2: to agree along with the editors of Salon to let
Speaker 2: him co publish a story to copholish the story he
Speaker 2: wrote about vaccines, which is basically him repeating Wakefield's research.
Speaker 2: So he gets he gets Rolling Stone and Salon to
Speaker 2: dual publish an article written by him in twenty eleven
Speaker 2: about how vaccines cause autism. Uh, and they you know,
Speaker 2: they have since retracted the paper because of fucking course,
Speaker 2: But the fact that it gets out there at all,
Speaker 2: it's evidence that just by being a Kennedy he gets
Speaker 2: to like skip the line, right he is. He's not
Speaker 2: just a guy who gets He often gets portrayed as
Speaker 2: just another anti vaxer who got wrapped up in this.
Speaker 2: No no, no, he is how anti vax he's part
Speaker 2: a big part of how it breaks containment.
Speaker 3: The name he uses to because it would have had
Speaker 3: like some editors going through it, yeah, with like rigorous
Speaker 3: like actually like looking at like fact checking and stuff
Speaker 3: and like.
Speaker 2: Well, this is who the fuck is this guy?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, we're not going to publish this, but it's Kennedy,
Speaker 3: so you just publish that. Sure.
Speaker 2: One thing I find myself explaining to a lot of
Speaker 2: liberals in the modern era is how they'll hear about
Speaker 2: like organic food hippies or like crystal healing types who
Speaker 2: have gone hard maga and be like, well, those guys
Speaker 2: are like left weirdos, right, Like those guys are weirdos
Speaker 2: who are on our side of things, right, That's how
Speaker 2: it's always been, And Kennedy is a big Bobby Kennedy
Speaker 2: is pulls them out of the left. He is a
Speaker 2: big part of that, right because there's so much gravity
Speaker 2: to the Kennedy name. As he comes sailing over that
Speaker 2: political divideline in our society, he pulls a huge chunk
Speaker 2: of like the weird left with him because he's still
Speaker 2: this guy who celebrated in progressive circles for his work
Speaker 2: and environmental law. So when he takes gets to anti vacshit,
Speaker 2: it has a big impact.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He also like it's sort of grants like validity
Speaker 3: to it. Yeah, even if you weren't like doing all
Speaker 3: this publishing stuff and like actually like getting the bad
Speaker 3: information out there, he's still just sort of saying like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I believe this and I'm mc kennedy, therefore you can
Speaker 3: and like it's sort of like give these people that
Speaker 3: can have these sort of contradictory positions and like have
Speaker 3: you know. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's it's a
Speaker 3: real phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a it's real, and it's cool and it's good. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Bobby is an important part of the journey of
Speaker 2: a chunk of you know, fringe kind of WU culture
Speaker 2: over to the right because the myth of the Kennedy
Speaker 2: family is a huge deal for everyone in society. Right,
Speaker 2: there's a guy, to go back to the Trump shooting
Speaker 2: in the when he gets shot, there's a dude standing
Speaker 2: directly behind him that thousands of QAnon believers think is
Speaker 2: literally John F. Kennedy Junior in disguise because JFK Junior
Speaker 2: s didn't die in the plane crash. He's hiding. He's
Speaker 2: waiting to Corain King or some shit. Yeah, and that guy,
Speaker 2: that fake Kennedy is standing directly behind Trump when he
Speaker 2: gets shot at because why not, why not? We're just
Speaker 2: doing mad.
Speaker 3: Libs and wild like nothing is real.
Speaker 2: Nothing is real. Now, the fact that Bobby became a
Speaker 2: vocal advocate for anti vax shit has a big impact
Speaker 2: and it helps impart a gravitas and credibility to this crowd.
Speaker 2: The particular brand of scum who have crusted to the
Speaker 2: rim of the anti VAXX movement tend to have precisely
Speaker 2: one skill, which is an instinctive knowledge of branding. Once
Speaker 2: they see there's a Kennedy in the mix, there is
Speaker 2: a feeding frenzy over who gets to be his friend? Right, Like,
Speaker 2: this guy could take us everywhere.
Speaker 3: We want to go.
Speaker 2: Like like, let's see who can win in a scrum
Speaker 2: to actually get to like be his best buddy. And
Speaker 2: the winner here is Dell big Tree. Great name for
Speaker 2: a weirdo vaccine conspiracy theorist. Dell is a former TV
Speaker 2: producer who has in recent years become a regular guest
Speaker 2: on the Alex Jones Show. I mostly encountered Dell before
Speaker 2: this through the podcast Knowledge Fight, which chronicles Jones. Dell
Speaker 2: is also the CEO of the Informed Consent Action Network.
Speaker 2: And if you know now that we know something about
Speaker 2: Bobby Kennedy, there's no he should If he's involved with
Speaker 2: an organization, it absolutely shouldn't be The Informed Consent Action
Speaker 2: Network he's not great on informed consent.
Speaker 3: Maybe he can take a seminar, Yeah, like he should
Speaker 3: take learn something from them. But maybe he shouldn't be
Speaker 3: heavily involved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he shouldn't be helping to run things. Dell produced
Speaker 2: the documentary Vaxed. Dell has no relevant medical training. He
Speaker 2: has absolutely no reason to be talking about any of
Speaker 2: this stuff. But he did once produce a TV show
Speaker 2: called The Doctors, And that really is all it takes.
Speaker 2: With the chuck of the country, all it takes.
Speaker 3: God, we're so cooked, We're so doomed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we we we they were a little doomed. We
Speaker 2: might be a little doomed.
Speaker 3: But it's maybe it'll be fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it'll be okay. Maybe we're all getting out.
Speaker 2: Maybe we're gonna shake all this off like a fever,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, A man can dream, a man can hope.
Speaker 2: As I stated earlier, Dell hads an instinctive understanding of
Speaker 2: pr and how to do the slow work of ideological capture.
Speaker 2: He focused on doing rallies and outreach to communities that
Speaker 2: were primed for an anti vaccine message. Hasidic Jewish synagogues
Speaker 2: were a particular favorite of his. Kennedy gave him inroads
Speaker 2: into an even larger community, Americans who still thought back
Speaker 2: mournfully to the what could have been of Camelot. Big
Speaker 2: Tree connected Kennedy to Wakefield, and the three did numerous
Speaker 2: appearances together. RFK Junior starts writing anti VAXX books with
Speaker 2: titles like vax unvaxed, Let the Science Speak. And I
Speaker 2: don't know how much of these he's actually writing. Again.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like that thing with his thesis. Is
Speaker 2: he just he puts out so many books. He's like
Speaker 2: more than one a year. Sometimes I kind of think
Speaker 2: he's just paying people to write books for him. And
Speaker 2: he's like, it doesn't matter, matters. Is that the Kennedy
Speaker 2: names on it, you know, and I agree with the message?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Or the worms working overtime.
Speaker 2: Or that worm, that poor worm. Just I'm really starting
Speaker 2: to feel sorry.
Speaker 3: For the word sleepless nights for that worm just hunched
Speaker 3: over the brain.
Speaker 2: The typewriter just chain smoking cigarettes out in the mountainous
Speaker 2: Corpus colosum.
Speaker 3: Well that's where the brain flog came from. Cigarettes and
Speaker 3: the star.
Speaker 2: Oh fuck. By this point, RFK Junior is firmly flirting
Speaker 2: with the fringes, but this stuff had also not been
Speaker 2: politicized like it is today. Every mainstream political figure was
Speaker 2: against the anti vax weirdos, right. George W. Bush was
Speaker 2: not a big anti vax guy, right. And so during
Speaker 2: that kind of period, it's not super obvious which political
Speaker 2: party you would want to be on. If you're this
Speaker 2: kind of weirdo, right, you're certainly not necessarily gravitating towards
Speaker 2: the Republican Party. Right up to the early two thousands,
Speaker 2: RFK Junior still hung out with Bill Clinton on occasion
Speaker 2: and counted himself a member of the liberal elite. Vanity
Speaker 2: Fair traces the moment when this changed to twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: quote Kennedy married Hines in a wedding attended by a
Speaker 2: glittering array of friends, including Larry David and Julia Luis Dreyfuss,
Speaker 2: and moved to Los Angeles. The move marked a reinvention
Speaker 2: of sorts, distancing Kennedy from his East Coast network and
Speaker 2: perhaps removing some of the built in guard rails that
Speaker 2: had tempered his worst impulses. In addition to consulting for
Speaker 2: companies seeking his environmental Seal of Approval, he chaired the
Speaker 2: five oh one C three nonprofit Children's Health Defense, which
Speaker 2: began in two thousand and seven under the name World
Speaker 2: Mercury Project and inveighed against vaccines and fluorite in the water.
Speaker 2: So he moves to Hollywood, and that's kind of what
Speaker 2: cuts cuts the tethers to reality for this guy. Obviously,
Speaker 2: some of this is Larry David's fault. I think none
Speaker 2: of us is surprised of that. You know, whenever anything
Speaker 2: evil happens in the world, I assume Larry David's got
Speaker 2: some involvement, and it is somewhere up in there. Isn't
Speaker 2: somebody offered, Yeah, Larry David and Darfur. There's an episode
Speaker 2: of Curve on that. Probably not Probably shouldn't do that anyway.
Speaker 2: The World Mercury Project had been founded in two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven and today under the name Children's Health Defense.
Speaker 2: Bobby presides as chairman over a fifteen million dollar a
Speaker 2: year organization. They particularly target new parents and minority communities.
Speaker 2: During the start of the COVID nineteen pandemic, they launched
Speaker 2: a media campaign to argue that COVID was not, in
Speaker 2: fact very dangerous and people should avoid the vaccine at
Speaker 2: all costs. They are particularly pushing this in black communities.
Speaker 2: The PCHD targets Black Americans with propaganda, comparing the COVID
Speaker 2: vaccine to the Tuskegee syphilis study. Basically, Bobby's like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know how you don't trust the government because it's
Speaker 2: fucked you around. Why would you take this vaccine? Just
Speaker 2: kind of raw dog COVID. It'll be fine. It's better
Speaker 2: than letting the government experiment on you. It's not just
Speaker 2: you know, Bobby's shit that feeds into this. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of socioeconomic stuff. So it's hard to say how
Speaker 2: much of this is Bobby's doing, how much of vaccine
Speaker 2: hesitancy in the United States is Bobby doing? But the
Speaker 2: CCHD is like people who have gone in and looked
Speaker 2: at social media will note that propaganda spread by the
Speaker 2: HD is some of the whitest spreading anti vaccine, and
Speaker 2: like anti COVID nineteen sane reasonable prevention statistics propaganda that
Speaker 2: goes out on the Internet, it spreads incredibly widely. Right,
Speaker 2: So you can't really say, here's how many people Bobby
Speaker 2: killed by doing this, but I would argue that by
Speaker 2: any reasonable stretch of the imagination, he beats Ted's chap equitic.
Speaker 3: Count, right right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, drug driving maybe the least dangerous thing that
Speaker 2: Kennedy's to get involved in.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Analysis by NBC News claims that the HD is
Speaker 2: one of the top three sources of fake news about
Speaker 2: the coronavirus vaccine on the entire internet. So yeah, I mean, basically,
Speaker 2: by any argument, there's a body count. RFK has very significant.
Speaker 3: There's some sort of negative health count regardless like hurt people, yeah,
Speaker 3: or prevented and prevented them from, yeah.
Speaker 2: Prevented them from not getting hurt from like seeking you know,
Speaker 2: basic reasonable ill for their situation.
Speaker 3: And telling them apparently that COVID's fine and you should
Speaker 3: feel fine getting it, which again, the community did get disproportionately.
Speaker 3: Maybe that is bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if we want to talk about like the
Speaker 2: greatest harm that he or the clearest harm that he's done,
Speaker 2: the easiest body count we can draw to him, that's
Speaker 2: going to bring us to twenty eighteen and the Samoan Islands.
Speaker 2: Have you heard this story, Cody, I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, this is bad. This is a real bad one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't think I have I don't know, do
Speaker 3: I want to.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, oh boy, Cody. In twenty eighteen, two children
Speaker 2: in the Samoan Islands died after catastrophic reactions to the
Speaker 2: MMR vaccine. Now that is how it was spun initially, right.
Speaker 2: The reality is that two nurses fucked up horribly in
Speaker 2: administering the vaccines and dosed both children with massive quantities
Speaker 2: of expired muscle relaxers. Now, oh, this is a terrible thing. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's evidence that there's issues with those nurses, that there's
Speaker 2: probably issues with the facilities. Right, this happens, that a
Speaker 2: lot does need to change, Right, Like, you don't just
Speaker 2: let you know, just go like, well, sometimes shit happens, Right,
Speaker 2: this is evidence of serious breakdowns and right, how this
Speaker 2: process ought to work. Yeah, But RFK Junior takes it
Speaker 2: is like, this is proof that the vaccines that I
Speaker 2: blame for my son's allergies are a threat to life
Speaker 2: and limb. Right. So he throws himself and his organization
Speaker 2: all of their resources into spreading anti vaccine propaganda just
Speaker 2: in Samoa. Right, And because he's a Kennedy and because
Speaker 2: he's got a shitload of money to spend on this
Speaker 2: ad campaign, people listened. The Samoan Prime Minister was not
Speaker 2: used to dealing with social media campaigns at this scale
Speaker 2: and sophistication. The rapid outcry cultivated by rfk's organization caused
Speaker 2: him to announce a halt to the administration of the
Speaker 2: MMR vaccine across Samoa. Because of this campaign, he launches
Speaker 2: the Samoan government stops rolling out the MMR vaccine, right.
Speaker 2: They put a pause on it basically in June of Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is going to have a pretty catastrophic result.
Speaker 2: In June of twenty nineteen, Kennedy and his new wife,
Speaker 2: Cheryl Hines flew to Samoa for a press blitz and
Speaker 2: a private meeting with the Prime Minister. Now, this is
Speaker 2: a great time for Bobby, But while he schmoozed measles
Speaker 2: was starting to percolate throughout the community, infecting huge numbers
Speaker 2: of now unvaccinated little kids. In months, there was an epidemic,
Speaker 2: infecting nearly six thousand people and leading to eighty three deaths.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of those deaths are extremely young children.
Speaker 2: These are eighty three deaths that we can tie directly
Speaker 2: to Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 3: They halted vaccines generally, well, no, the MMR vaccine, Okay, okay, Okay.
Speaker 2: Which is measles, momps and rebelt.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: Robert Ofitt, a member of the FDA Advisory Committee who
Speaker 2: analyzed the epidemic, later concluded, Robert F. Kennedy Junior had
Speaker 2: everything to do with that, And it shows you how
Speaker 2: disinformation can kill, so that.
Speaker 3: He kills people killed, all the reasons. He's like, literally
Speaker 3: the reason that those kids are dead. That's so fucked up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he gave those kids measles, he got.
Speaker 2: Them, he m. Bobby, Yeah, what do you even say
Speaker 2: at a certain point, Bobby, Bobby said, Bobby.
Speaker 3: Like, you didn't? Why did you? Does he care this happens?
Speaker 3: Is he like does he know understand? Does he understand
Speaker 3: that this happened? Knows?
Speaker 1: And he doesn't think it's his fault in this life?
Speaker 2: That Cody, we're getting to that, but first let's get
Speaker 2: to some ads. Then we'll come back. Okay, Okay, we're back. Wow,
Speaker 2: And you know what, I after listening to those ads,
Speaker 2: my opinion is completely different, Cody. Let's let's get the
Speaker 2: the MMR vaccines sucked out of our bodies.
Speaker 3: No, I think we have to.
Speaker 2: I'm back on board. Thank you, Thank you rfkju.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say, no.
Speaker 2: Sophie, what's what we're doing. I got a vacuum rigged
Speaker 2: up on reverse.
Speaker 3: I don't want allergies.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I'm gonna cut my arm, suck out the blood,
Speaker 2: filter out the MMR, and squirt it right back in.
Speaker 3: Sophie, don't make me put rotting meat in your.
Speaker 1: Fridgebody as somebody with a ship ton of allergies.
Speaker 3: Give me that vaccine from experience.
Speaker 2: So that Samoan epidemic was so devastating that the Prime
Speaker 2: Minister reversed core declarity state of emergency and put a
Speaker 2: vaccine mandate in place. Good people started getting vaccinated again.
Speaker 2: The measles epidemic ended. While any reasonably humble and aware
Speaker 2: person would have recognized at this point, oh, I have
Speaker 2: fucked up in an unforgivable way, right, Obviously my actions
Speaker 2: caused this, and obviously as soon as they stopped listening
Speaker 2: to me, it got better. Welp, I fucked up, right,
Speaker 2: But duh, yeah, yeah, that's not what happens. Because Cody
Speaker 2: being a Kennedy I means you only have to listen
Speaker 2: to reality when it sends a bullet your way, right
Speaker 2: like that is that is the essence of this family, and.
Speaker 3: So not the lesson to learn. Man, so many better
Speaker 3: lessons from all.
Speaker 2: This, Yeah, quite a few of them. RFK Junior ignored
Speaker 2: the fact that he had gotten his way, children had died,
Speaker 2: and his whole ideology of vaccine hesitancy had been shredded.
Speaker 2: When confronted by a filmmaker for an upcoming documentary, Bobby
Speaker 2: refused to even acknowledge what he'd done. I had nothing
Speaker 2: to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never
Speaker 2: told anybody not to vaccinate.
Speaker 3: What how can he do that?
Speaker 1: Like, like I said, you just told.
Speaker 2: Him the vaccine was dangerous and whipped them up into
Speaker 2: a frenzy.
Speaker 1: Were allowing a man not taking responsibility for his own actions.
Speaker 3: Oh my what Yeah, it's can't do that. You can't
Speaker 3: say that, I mean, you can't like the worm. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I didn't tell them how to take it. I just
Speaker 3: said if they did, they die exactly.
Speaker 2: I just told him it was going to kill their kids.
Speaker 2: You know, not my fault that they acted based on that.
Speaker 3: Now with this campaign with a fucking like organization that like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Your multi million dollar propaganda.
Speaker 1: Are Bobby Robert, It's just so interesting that the like
Speaker 1: selective choice. He has to understand what his last name
Speaker 1: means to people, like the fact that he Kennedy saying
Speaker 1: to people, don't do a thing, Like he forgets the
Speaker 1: weight of that. He forgets that, like people take that
Speaker 1: name seriously and he's like, what me who people did?
Speaker 1: Couldn't have been what?
Speaker 3: But he totally knows because he uses it all the time.
Speaker 2: But he's investedt using Yeah, selective choice. I mean, look,
Speaker 2: as a man, we're all good at that, right, Like
Speaker 2: that's that's really the superpower of our Wow, Sophie. I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't disagree, but you shouldn't say it on the air.
Speaker 3: You can't just say that.
Speaker 1: I selectively say it. Not all of your cash, except
Speaker 1: all of your it's too bad.
Speaker 2: So if he twitter already heard you say the first thing, they.
Speaker 3: Are they are angry, they're not happy.
Speaker 1: They're going to lose their mind, really tired of listening
Speaker 1: to men lie.
Speaker 2: But it's so easy, and I know, easy to get
Speaker 2: away with. You should see what I'm doing in Samoa
Speaker 2: Jesus boy.
Speaker 1: But at least you tell me the truth about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah I did.
Speaker 3: That's that's good.
Speaker 2: At least so In subsequent conversations, Kennedy would suggest that
Speaker 2: the measles epidemic had in fact been caused by the vaccines.
Speaker 2: We also claimed that allowing dozens of people to die
Speaker 2: by inciting vaccine hesitancy was an experiment quote to measure
Speaker 2: health outcomes following the national the natural experiment created by
Speaker 2: the national respite from vaccines. And if that's the case,
Speaker 2: I'd say we learned what happens when you have a
Speaker 2: natural respite from vaccine. Yeah, that's.
Speaker 3: Experiment. You need to get in the lab again, Bobby,
Speaker 3: the lab being like fucking the world, Like, I.
Speaker 2: Think we might need to do another experiment. No, I'm
Speaker 2: not going to make a Kennedy assassination reference, but you
Speaker 2: know what I was gonna say.
Speaker 3: But there's like the implication, was there, Yeah, Robert, Bobby.
Speaker 2: It's always Bobby's So.
Speaker 3: That's infuriating. We will, that's like, just do it and
Speaker 3: if anything like because he said he didn't do it,
Speaker 3: he didn't do it, and didn't even do it, do
Speaker 3: it that and then he's like, well, yeah, I did it.
Speaker 3: It was experiment and it fucking ruled.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 3: What are these two thoughts you have?
Speaker 2: Like you is wrong with you?
Speaker 3: What's fucking wrong with you?
Speaker 2: He's such a piece of ship. Now, you know. Again,
Speaker 2: in an ethical society, I think the way you would
Speaker 2: deal with this guy would involve a catapult and the sea.
Speaker 2: I think you would catapult him into the sea, right,
Speaker 2: I think we should catapult more people into the sea.
Speaker 3: A large lake.
Speaker 2: Yeah sure, maybe one of the Great.
Speaker 3: Lakes, really really big lake.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, we've got we've got some big legs.
Speaker 2: We have options for bodies of water to catapult people into.
Speaker 2: But in our society, that's not how we punish this
Speaker 2: sort of thing. Instead, Kennedy was feted by some of
Speaker 2: the wealthiest and most influential celebrities around. He got to
Speaker 2: guest on the Joe Rogan podcast, and he published six
Speaker 2: books of vaccine disinformation and donations to his charity doubled. Yeah. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 2: I just don't. I don't think you're able to write
Speaker 2: all those You.
Speaker 3: Don't think you're doing that, man, Just do too, Like
Speaker 3: that's plausible, And held.
Speaker 2: An outline and had a ghost writer come in.
Speaker 3: They wrote the titles for these books.
Speaker 2: Yeah maybe God, And they're not good.
Speaker 3: Titles, of course they're not.
Speaker 2: Now, Kennedy has also made repeated statements that he believes
Speaker 2: in a link between vaccines and autism. I should not
Speaker 2: need to explain that this is whoy. The reason why
Speaker 2: autism rates seem to have skyrocketed is that it wasn't
Speaker 2: the thing that we diagnosed or recognized for a very
Speaker 2: long time. So when you start to realize that it
Speaker 2: is one thing, it will look like there's a surge
Speaker 2: in it. That's not what's happened. Right, Yeah, oftentimes kids.
Speaker 2: You know that we now know our children who have autism,
Speaker 2: you would diagnose them look like one of a dozen
Speaker 2: other things.
Speaker 3: Right, pattern recognizing, categorizing species. We like categorizing things and
Speaker 3: then recognizing pat.
Speaker 2: We like that, but we do not like critical rational thought.
Speaker 2: Not our favorite thing. No, Yeah, or are K Junior
Speaker 2: has stated that increase in autism rates is a literal holocaust.
Speaker 2: Now you might notice there's some stuff that's messed up
Speaker 2: about that because the Holocaust killed people and children with
Speaker 2: autism are alive.
Speaker 3: That's a good point. Thank you for bring that up.
Speaker 3: Children are doing fine. Yes, they're not dead. They're living
Speaker 3: full and happy lives. I what a fucking weird thing
Speaker 3: to say, What a weird thing?
Speaker 2: It's especially weird because he can't keep to one side
Speaker 2: of the Holocaust comparisons, because he is also compared being
Speaker 2: a wealthy anti vaxer who gets to go on the
Speaker 2: most influential media programs in the world, as being like
Speaker 2: Anne Frank.
Speaker 3: He's a victim of the Hall And I know what
Speaker 3: you want to say.
Speaker 2: Stuck in the attic of Joe Rogan's fucking podcast.
Speaker 3: Like fucking like attic is fucking above a studio and
Speaker 3: like below.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, what if and Frank had been one of
Speaker 2: the most influential media personalities of her.
Speaker 3: Day, I gotta go on this billion dollar podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And also what if no one had ever tried
Speaker 2: to hurt her?
Speaker 3: Also, I don't know, have you heard, but I'm a Kennedy.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and she had half a billion dollars. Other
Speaker 2: than that, great comparison.
Speaker 3: And like just sexually harassing everybody he meets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of reasons not to compare him.
Speaker 3: A lot of reasons Frank. Also a lot of reasons
Speaker 3: not to say that kids with autism are like victims
Speaker 3: of the Holocaust.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Ah, it's great.
Speaker 3: He's like I never you know, like from the beginning obviously,
Speaker 3: but like, man, he really ramped it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, he does. He does. By the end here,
Speaker 2: we're fully of like world class piece of shit terrator. Now.
Speaker 2: Bobby and his organizations also did a lot to spread
Speaker 2: conspiracy theories that COVID is somehow ethnically targeted against people
Speaker 2: who are not Jewish or Chinese, a thing that is
Speaker 2: not possible. All this disinformation caused him to suffer my
Speaker 2: old consequences during that brief shining period in the early pandemic,
Speaker 2: when some social media sites occasionally punished people for trying
Speaker 2: to spread vaccine hesitancy. Right Meta banned his Instagram account
Speaker 2: once the COVID pandemic took off, and Kennedy sued the
Speaker 2: Biden administration for this, blaming them based on absolutely nothing whatsoever,
Speaker 2: for pressuring Zuckerberg.
Speaker 3: Oh you need to get Matt Tybee on the case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe Joe Biden got me banned from Instagram.
Speaker 3: The Instagram files, Mark, we got a good I don't
Speaker 3: know if.
Speaker 1: Zuck can be fucked like that.
Speaker 2: No, he like, he's certainly not going like it's just.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I just sat with that statement.
Speaker 3: I'm reacting to everything. It's a collective face, it's a ah,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't get pocked like that, though, You're right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Man, Go call Joe Biden. You're a Kennedy. Like,
Speaker 3: go ask Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: You're a Kennedy. Yeah. With that patented Kennedy magic, Bobby
Speaker 2: turned getting banned into a cause worthy of breaking his
Speaker 2: lifelong absence from personal involvement in electoral politics, and he
Speaker 2: turned it into the core of his presidential campaign. Vanity
Speaker 2: Fair quotes a relative of saying social media was his stash.
Speaker 2: In banning his account put him into withdrawal. If so,
Speaker 2: we might see his present campaign as a relapse. Bobby
Speaker 2: Kennedy is now shooting up the heroine of political prominence.
Speaker 2: Multiple sources have noted that he remains obsessed with the
Speaker 2: loss of eight hundred thousand followers, for which he blames
Speaker 2: Joe Biden. I found one New Yorker interview where the
Speaker 2: journalist pointed out, Hey, you're like one of the most
Speaker 2: vocal and heard men on planet Earth, with access to
Speaker 2: like the Joe Rogan Show and everything. How how do
Speaker 2: you claim that you're persecuted? And he responded, I am
Speaker 2: since I declared for president, but before that I was deplatformed.
Speaker 2: I was deplatformed completely from eight hundred thousand followers were
Speaker 2: taken for me on Instagram at the behest of the
Speaker 2: White House again house. No, there's a thing that happens,
Speaker 2: can happen with addicts when after an extended period of sobriety,
Speaker 2: a damn breaks, and with Bobby, the damn breaking let
Speaker 2: out a flood of narcissism. Right, he doesn't fall back
Speaker 2: into drugs as far as we know, but he's treating
Speaker 2: fame and social media that way right up to.
Speaker 3: His arm, right totally. Yeah, I don't want, you know,
Speaker 3: don't need to go on a tangent, but like I
Speaker 3: feel like Russell Brand still a lot with that exact
Speaker 3: thing of like, yep, you replace it with conspiracies or
Speaker 3: right now it's catholicism, but you know you need to
Speaker 3: fill that space. Yeah, And there are a lot of
Speaker 3: unhealthy options out there that are that exists in order
Speaker 3: to keep you there, right, I mean to make it.
Speaker 2: Right, that are made to be addicted.
Speaker 3: They're designed for that exact thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So one of the
Speaker 2: things that Bobby can't accept that I think plays into
Speaker 2: all this is that he is now an old man.
Speaker 2: You know, he hasn't aged, didn't I would say prior
Speaker 2: to this, you wouldn't say he'd aged terribly. But he's
Speaker 2: an old man, right and when he you know, so
Speaker 2: he starts, he starts shooting up steroids. Basically right when
Speaker 2: he comes out to announce his presidential campaign in April
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three, people who had known him for
Speaker 2: years were shocked by how he looked. He's all puffy
Speaker 2: and bloated with steroids. He says that he's on organic testosterone, which, like,
Speaker 2: you're just on gear, man, You're just on gear. I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if the gear is organic. My meth amphetamines.
Speaker 3: Organic, all natural.
Speaker 2: It's not. It's just you're on test brother, Like, and
Speaker 2: I'm sure you're on other shit, but like, come on.
Speaker 2: One close family friend described him as unrecognizable now Bobby's
Speaker 2: presidential campaign, whar's the drag of an independent grassroots effort,
Speaker 2: but there's funding behind it from some of the most
Speaker 2: powerful and wealthy people in this country. His VP pick
Speaker 2: is Nicole Shanahan, who you may not know much about,
Speaker 2: but she is the ex wife of Sergey Brinn and
Speaker 2: got the job because she has ex wife of Sergei
Speaker 2: bren money that she can throw into the campaign. Vanity
Speaker 2: Fair explains that additional funding came from quote Timothy Mellon,
Speaker 2: an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who has given
Speaker 2: thirty million dollars the super Pack supporting Kennedy while also
Speaker 2: giving fifty million to Donald Trump's campaign, an alignment of
Speaker 2: interests that critics suspect the strategic financing Kennedy's campaign to
Speaker 2: draw votes from Joe Biden and therefore boost Trump. His
Speaker 2: campaign manager is his own daughter in law, Amaryllis Fox,
Speaker 2: a former CIA agent and wife of Bobby the Third,
Speaker 2: himself an actor and screenwriter who once ran a website
Speaker 2: dedicated to fact checking political statements. The two meditt burning
Speaker 2: Man is just the most incredible group of people.
Speaker 3: H to see that. I got to sentence this stone add.
Speaker 2: No, of course not. In the immediate wake of the
Speaker 2: assassination attempt, Trump, who back in May had called Bobby
Speaker 2: a wasted protest vote, started calling for him to receive
Speaker 2: Secret Service protection. Now to be Frank, I don't disagree
Speaker 2: with this. I think another dead Kennedy would not improve
Speaker 2: the sanity of our domestic political situation. Yeah, But the
Speaker 2: aftermath of that led Trump to reach out to RFK
Speaker 2: Junior personally. The two had a phone call, which Kennedy
Speaker 2: filmed himself taking for reasons that are somewhat unclear, but
Speaker 2: very likely related to the brain worm.
Speaker 3: I mean it's usually that right, like Yeah.
Speaker 2: An article by the AP describes the scene. The video
Speaker 2: shows Kennedy listening on a speaker phone as Trump shares
Speaker 2: disproven claims about childhood vaccines, an issue that has helped
Speaker 2: Kennedy amass a loyal following. Trump also appears to pitch
Speaker 2: Kennedy on endorsing his campaign. I would love you to
Speaker 2: do so, Trump tells Kennedy, and I think it will
Speaker 2: be so good for you and so big for you,
Speaker 2: and we're going to win. Kennedy leaked the video of
Speaker 2: this call again for unclear reasons. I'm not sure why
Speaker 2: it got out. Subsequent reporting has provided us with more details.
Speaker 2: In a shock to those who saw our FK Junior's
Speaker 2: campaign as a Trump op, the calls apparently featured Bobby
Speaker 2: begging for a quid pro quote job in exchange for
Speaker 2: endorsing Trump, and doing so to such a blatant extent
Speaker 2: that it worried Trump's staffers. Right, they were probably okay
Speaker 2: with actually giving him something, but the way he mentioned it,
Speaker 2: they were like, well, shit, if he's recording this or something,
Speaker 2: we could be in a lot of trouble.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which, you know, it's probably why he was recording it.
Speaker 3: I guess maybe maybe.
Speaker 2: Now our FK Junior wanted to secure himself a post
Speaker 2: overseeing health and safety in the next Trump administration. Discussions
Speaker 2: between the two during this recorded call included possible jobs
Speaker 2: he could get at the Cambinet level because that doesn't
Speaker 2: require Senate confirmation, and this would have been an exchange
Speaker 2: for Kennedy dropping out and endorsing Trump. Further information has
Speaker 2: since come out that provides, I think a concrete idea
Speaker 2: of what Bobby would seek to do if given a
Speaker 2: position of power in a presidential adm minute, and unfortunately,
Speaker 2: it's something that gels all too well with some of
Speaker 2: the plans members of the fascist right have already put forward.
Speaker 2: In a virtual Latino town hall last week, Kennedy floated
Speaker 2: the idea of wellness farms, which is these are basically
Speaker 2: American gulags, right. He wants you to be able to
Speaker 2: send drug addicts and people who are on antidepressants for
Speaker 2: years of mandatory work therapy. Right, not just people who
Speaker 2: are like convicted of drug possession, but people who are
Speaker 2: on eighth D meds. He describes the goal of these
Speaker 2: facilities as to reparent people. And of course, since Kennedy
Speaker 2: believes cell phone radiation is poisonous, people in turned in
Speaker 2: these camps would not have access to the Internet or
Speaker 2: any way to communicate to the outside world. So that's cool,
Speaker 2: good Nabel.
Speaker 3: It's so I mean, he's not the only one. This
Speaker 3: is so blatant and weird and like it's just so funny.
Speaker 3: So many people on the right just trying to like
Speaker 3: portray themselves as like, you know, we're like the Party
Speaker 3: of Freedom, and then half their ideas are like, well,
Speaker 3: put people in camps obviously to work, but also people
Speaker 3: they can't vote, sure, like we we should only have
Speaker 3: like the head of the household vote or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: Where it's just like so anti the thing they are
Speaker 3: desperately trying to pretend that they are. I don't know
Speaker 3: if it's going to work for that long. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: If I don't know either. It seems like very suddenly
Speaker 2: it may have stopped working as well. I guess we'll
Speaker 2: see how long this vibe shift lasts, but we'll see.
Speaker 3: I think it, like so so many things coalesced at
Speaker 3: the same time, but like Biden just kind of fading
Speaker 3: into the background really opened things up. I think for
Speaker 3: people to realize, like, oh, look at these freaks and
Speaker 3: look at the flawed but mostly normal people. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: really really up that contrast, because when you contrast the
Speaker 3: freaks with like this old goat, it's like, what can
Speaker 3: you say. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see
Speaker 3: if it lasts.
Speaker 2: We'll see if it lasts, you know. I do think
Speaker 2: it's interesting. I'm kind of compelled by what we've seen,
Speaker 2: like because it seems like there's some evidence that people
Speaker 2: within Trump world, or people backing him, if not the
Speaker 2: campaign itself, wanted to push and support Bobby because they
Speaker 2: thought he could take enough votes away to hurt Biden.
Speaker 2: And it kind of seems like a lot of the
Speaker 2: evidence suggests he takes more votes from Trump, and I'm
Speaker 2: kind of under I'm wondering if what we've saw what
Speaker 2: we saw from Trump offering him this job as like
Speaker 2: a result of kind of panic over that. We we
Speaker 2: we set that we thought we had control of this guy,
Speaker 2: and specifically we thought we had control of how he
Speaker 2: was going to like play in the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's gonna he's running as a Democrat that he's
Speaker 3: independence so he's going to take some Democrats, but like
Speaker 3: the Democratic Party generally, and the electorate kind of rejected
Speaker 3: him generally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, not work. He's yeah, he's kind of
Speaker 2: gone rogue. So I don't know, maybe we'll see how
Speaker 2: that works.
Speaker 3: We'll see. It is funny how like they they keep
Speaker 3: doing that, like they keep sort of like realizing like,
Speaker 3: oh wait, we miscalculated all this, Like from like honestly
Speaker 3: from the day after we recorded Part one and two,
Speaker 3: from like that moment on, it's just been like they
Speaker 3: don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to
Speaker 3: react to anything that happens, they don't know the messaging
Speaker 3: they need to go forward with any event, and it
Speaker 3: just seems like a like a two to three week
Speaker 3: long just sort of like crumbling this, you know, house
Speaker 3: of what's flimsier than cards, it's the house of posted toilet.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they thought that they crammed the whole, right, is
Speaker 2: this coalition of all of the weird, the like the
Speaker 2: bad weird in this country. And they crammed it into
Speaker 2: a tiny sack, and you know, it felt like it
Speaker 2: had enough weight to it that they could swing it
Speaker 2: and do some damage. But as soon as the sack
Speaker 2: breaks open, like now now there's just nutso ship everywhere,
Speaker 2: and people it's every at the guy who was swinging
Speaker 2: the sack, and there's an element of.
Speaker 3: Like, oh, they're just they're just swinging the sack at
Speaker 3: like this old guy who like, understand I don't.
Speaker 2: Really like him. This isn't my problem, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but no, that guy's gone. Now it's just
Speaker 3: like quld swinging your sack around this get what are
Speaker 3: you doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, that's wrong with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I should note before we leave, the entire Kennedy family
Speaker 2: basically has disavowed Bobby, all of his siblings that are
Speaker 2: left alive. Everybody has been like and he got he
Speaker 2: got pushed out of River Keeper to his involvement with
Speaker 2: these charities because they were like, you can't one day
Speaker 2: come on and be like climate change is real, we
Speaker 2: have to deal with it, and then the next day
Speaker 2: be like vaccines aren't real, right, Like you're you're you're
Speaker 2: hurting the cause at this point by being tied to
Speaker 2: this ship.
Speaker 3: So I mean, does he even say that climate change
Speaker 3: is real anymore?
Speaker 2: I don't know if you said it lately, because he's
Speaker 2: like talked about it in the past Al Gore did
Speaker 2: the four book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it just seems like it's something he would, you know,
Speaker 3: like there's that group of people who've like kind of
Speaker 3: uh gravitated towards like, well it's not it's either like
Speaker 3: it it is real, but it's not a big deal,
Speaker 3: or like it was a big deal but we kind
Speaker 3: of fixed it so we don't need to do anything
Speaker 3: about it anymore. Yeah, curious about that camp, but me too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Cody, that's the Showdy.
Speaker 3: You did it?
Speaker 2: How you doing.
Speaker 3: Now? I'm great? Thanks so much for the show, toy
Speaker 3: and the knowledge of Uh, I learned too much about
Speaker 3: this guy.
Speaker 2: We all know too much about this guy.
Speaker 1: Now, no career you're interested in getting a pet hawk.
Speaker 1: I just feel like.
Speaker 3: A little bit like, thank you so much. I think
Speaker 3: that my talk and Kat would not enjoy that. I
Speaker 3: would love it if Bobby just started carrying the Hawk
Speaker 3: around like a hawk and become a hawk guy like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: at least then, yeah, there's something fun about it instead
Speaker 3: of just like, well, it's kind of killing people and
Speaker 3: lying about it, except for all of the killing getting
Speaker 3: babysitters to oil them up.
Speaker 4: God ah god, well but only her, he only ever
Speaker 4: did to her. So yeah, yeah, anyway, Well.
Speaker 3: We're anyway, thanks for having me. Check me out online,
Speaker 3: Doctor Jacody. On social media. I've got a podcast called
Speaker 3: even More News and a web YouTube show called Some
Speaker 3: More News. It's every Wednesday usually. We just did an
Speaker 3: episode about Tim Poole. We got some Jordan Peterson climate
Speaker 3: change stuff coming up. I don't know when this is
Speaker 3: gonna come out. I have a band called the Hot Shapes.
Speaker 3: We're on bandcamp and SoundCloud. Check it out and listen
Speaker 3: to stuff.
Speaker 1: Check out a cool Zone Media's newest show, hosted by
Speaker 1: Molly Conger called Weird Little Guys. On the day of
Speaker 1: this episode is release. Episode zero and episode one are
Speaker 1: out now, Robert anything else, No.
Speaker 2: I'm done, I'm tired. I'm gonna go nap.
Speaker 3: Goodbye. Yeah, me too. Hi.
Speaker 5: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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