Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The RFK Jr. Episodes

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Robert and Cody conclude the story of RFK Jr by talking about how he was directly complicit in the deaths of dozens of children and probably tens of thousands of people across the county.See omnystudi...o.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Oh no, it's a podcast. It's happening to your ears right now. How could this be? Who did this to you? Why is this happening? Where is this happening? It's happening now here in your ears. I'm Robert Evans.
Starting point is 00:00:17 This is Behind the Bastards. Cody Johnston with me in the studio, which is not a literal studio, but a metaphorical studio, a mind palace studio that exists purely in the space between our third eyes. Cody, how are you feeling? I'm feeling great in our shared studio, studio of our hearts. Yes, that's how we met each other.
Starting point is 00:00:39 It was like a Jedi thing, you know, years before we started working at Cracked in our mind studio recording our mind podcast. Wasn't even a website at that point. No, no, there weren't websites. There weren't websites. We still had that meeting. No, we knew each other in the womb, the creative womb. Cody, how are you feeling about RFK as we head into part four?
Starting point is 00:01:01 God, I'm not confident in his ability to come back to a lot of this stuff. You don't think this is gonna turn out good? I don't think so, man. It doesn't bode well. No, boy, there wasn't a lot of fun stuff in part three, but he was still like, you could believe, at least at points, like, well, it seems like
Starting point is 00:01:21 he's doing better than a lot of Kennedy's are. There was an element of tragedy to him that gives you some sympathy All of that's about to get flushed out the toilet Cody. We are now at the part where he kills hundreds of people. Oh I didn't I we did it Joe Did the cold open. It's over. We did the cold open. We're done. Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement
Starting point is 00:01:53 around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games. And then, a deranged zealot, willing to kill for a cause, lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever, rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal.
Starting point is 00:02:26 I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.
Starting point is 00:02:59 In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode. Before escaping into the wilderness Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere join me I'm going down in the cave as I track down clues I'm gonna call the police and have you removed hunting one of the most dangerous fugitives in the world Robert Fisher Do you recognize my voice listen to missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. We're back, we're warmed up.
Starting point is 00:03:31 We're talking about RFK, plunging into the last chapter of the RFK saga. RFK Junior saga. By the very start of the aughts, RFK Junior seemed to finally have started figuring out his life and to have moved into a better place. In public, he was a respected environmental lawyer and assumed Democratic Party stalwart. Oppenheimer's book includes several quotes from members of the family who are like, again,
Starting point is 00:03:57 thank God he didn't get into politics. He might actually be happy now, right? He's got a chance. But behind his image, Bobby was not the man that his fans or the country hoped. In 2010, he started dating actor Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. The problem with this is that he was still married to his wife, Mary Richardson. Now RFK Jr. had up to that point had a tumultuous love life. He had married his first wife, Emily, and had a child with her in 1994.
Starting point is 00:04:27 They broke up later that same year. I assume his rampant cheating was a significant part of that because that is a through line his entire life as a person who is in relationships. He and Emily, yeah, that seems reasonable. So he and Emily break up the same year that they have their first kid, and he immediately gets married again to Mary Richardson.
Starting point is 00:04:48 Now Mary is a successful architect. She is someone who has done very well on her own, but she is also what has been described as a Kennedy super fan, right? She fucking love, right? So that's not great. That's not great. That's not great. She's been obsessed with the family from a young age and she-
Starting point is 00:05:09 No, that's- Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Cody, this story doesn't end well. And she eventually, she made friends with one of Bobby's relatives. That's how she and Bobby meet and they have four kids together after they get hitched. The two are together a long time, almost 20 years, but those are not happy years.
Starting point is 00:05:29 Mary battles anorexia. She had battled anorexia earlier in her life. By the time they get together, she's on this carousel of medications and therapy that are not always good for her mental health. She struggles with depression and Bobby's constant cheating does not help with that. Turns out that does not make your depression better. Who could have guessed, right? She'll go into these spirals that can last days or weeks.
Starting point is 00:05:52 And a lot of this is not known at the time of the writing of books like After Camelot, which cites Bobby's claims about Mary's drinking and her regular violent outbursts. And if you just were to have gotten from the book After Camelot, you would assume, well, you know, this is a bad marriage. And Bobby certainly probably did some things wrong,
Starting point is 00:06:11 but this lady was kind of out of control and aggressive and like, poor guy, what else could he have done, right? There's no living in that situation. That's what it would have seemed like from some of the early reporting on it. Now, more modern reporting, the stuff coming out now, blames Bobby basically for everything that went wrong in this marriage. So it's one of those things where you kind of have two versions of this story and one,
Starting point is 00:06:37 Bobby is mostly a victim. He's a man trapped in an abusive marriage to a woman struggling with substance abuse issues and prone to violence. The other version of the story is that Mary is somebody with some substance abuse issues, but she is also somebody who is constantly discovering her husband cheating on her, sometimes by sexually harassing
Starting point is 00:06:56 and assaulting very young women. And yeah, she hits him sometimes, but she hits him in part because she is finding out about these really terrible, unforgivable things that he's done and she's breaking down, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, which is a different picture than just, well, she's so out of control because she's depressed that Bobby couldn't stand it anymore, right? Bobby's a much more active participant in the modern version of the story.
Starting point is 00:07:22 Yeah, there's a bit, yeah. There are reasons for this. Yeah, for the behavior. Now, to be clear, the couple's children, this is also, I do think some of the modern versions of the story have sought to allied Mary of some of her responsibility. And I don't think that's entirely accurate because the couple's kids testify about her outbursts, which are bad enough that when the divorce process starts in 2010, she's denied unmediated access
Starting point is 00:07:48 to the kids, right? Because she is not in control of herself to an extent that is problematic, right? But all of the times that she allegedly struck Bobby are not just examples of her being abusive, they're violent reactions to some pretty horrific abusive behavior on Bobby's part.
Starting point is 00:08:06 And so you get passages like this and after Camelot, quote, based on a sworn affidavit Bobby filed in Westchester County's New York Supreme Court on September 16th, 2011, he had been victimized by Mary for many years to the extent that physical abuse was involved. He testified that early in his marriage to Mary, the two had a blazing argument over his continued friendship with his first wife, Emily, during which Mary hit me in the face with her fist. She was a trained boxer and I got a shiner. Her engagement ring crushed my tear duct, causing permanent damage.
Starting point is 00:08:35 He testified that she asked him to lie to her family about the cause of his black eye. He also testified to a time in May 2011 when Mary ran over and killed the family's dog in the driveway. She asked the couple's youngest son, Aiden, to call Bobby and give him the news. When he asked the crying child to put his mother on the line, according to Bobby's testimony, Mary demanded that he come to the house and spend the night there in order to help her calm down the children. When he hesitated, she became upset and said that if he didn't recommit to the marriage
Starting point is 00:09:00 and call off the divorce, she would kill herself. Don't kill the family dog. I don't think she meant to. No, it all sounds horrible. But maybe she would did that to try to get Bobby back. Like it's just a bad, it's a bad time, those poor kids. Right? Those poor kids. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:18 Now I mentioned earlier that a lot of writing on the Kennedys is of mixed providence. A lot of it's tabloid level kind of shit. One of these tabloid level things is a book called Ask Not, The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed. That title is just a little, I don't know, exploitative to me.
Starting point is 00:09:37 This book was published before though, most of the allegations against RFK came out, this was before his presidential run and whatever. And the author, Maureen Callahan, claims that the whole horrible story of Mary hitting the dog with her car happens right after she finds out about yet another affair. Maureen writes that she was quote, so hysterical that she'd run out of the house, gotten in her car, backed out of the driveway, and accidentally run over and killed Portia, the family dog.
Starting point is 00:10:04 Some of the pieces of this story were around in the After Camelot days. You just had to poke a bit at the edges of the stuff in the mainstream reporting. And there's even this passage in After Camelot that includes a quote from Mary during one of her fights with Bobby. "'He is a demon, he is a demon.
Starting point is 00:10:19 "'He is the most evil kind of man in the world. "'Everything he does is evil and a fraud. "'He's a philanderer, an adulterer, a sex addict. I mean, that seems accurate. Yeah. And this is a Bobby. This is the Bobby that exists while he's doing all this wonderful stuff at Riverkeeper, you know, while he's staying sober.
Starting point is 00:10:37 Like this is, he's among other things. It's Kennedy stuff. It's Kennedy stuff. Yeah. It's Kennedy stuff. And, you know and his wife was somebody who had preexisting mental health issues and this just absolutely demolishes her.
Starting point is 00:10:50 Right, yeah. Callahan claims that Bobby tried to get a therapist to diagnose his wife in order to like, for the court process, right? So that he could basically cut her out of having access to the kids. Yeah. And you'll hear a lot that she had BPD, that she was borderline personality disorder. That may be where the claims of BPD came in. There's allegations that Bobby basically shopped around
Starting point is 00:11:15 for a doctor. The therapist who spoke to Callahan and said that he tried to get them to diagnose his wife basically suggests that, yeah, this is something he did for the divorce. He may have basically been bribing medical professionals. Those are allegations made. I can't speak to their veracity. Here's the next part of that story though, as reported in an article recently published in Vanity Fair. After Kennedy left her, Richardson proposed that she live in the guest house while Kennedy
Starting point is 00:11:42 and Hines lived in the main house and that she keep the Kennedy name. He declined and then tried to avoid paying her child support using his brain fog as a medical excuse for alleged financial straits. Richardson, her behavior increasingly erratic, eventually lost custody of the children to Kennedy. The Kennedy family, including Kerry, who had once been like a sister to Richardson, began to distance themselves from her. On May 16th, 2012, Richardson's housekeeper discovered Richardson hanging from the rafters
Starting point is 00:12:07 in the barn. That's awful. Yeah, it's bleak. It's a bleak story. It's really bleak. Yeah. Oh boy. Hard to laugh on a podcast about anything there.
Starting point is 00:12:21 Yeah, I'm not sure what to say. That's just devastating. Yeah. Terrible series of events and like I said, those poor kids. Yeah, Mary's family describe RFK Junior's behavior as psychological torture. And they even try to do a wrongful death suit. Now, I don't know, was he intending to hurt her? I don't have evidence of that certainly, but his behavior is
Starting point is 00:12:47 Like we'd inevitably cause harm right well. It's not doesn't need to be intentional It's just like that's how he's been hit how he is in his life floating through it. Yeah treating people this way and yeah People aren't real yada yada right right yeah Yeah People aren't real, yada yada yada. Right, right. Yeah. So, Bobby and their kids make the decision to have Mary buried on Kennedy land, not the place her family had requested as a burial plot. And eight months later, Bobby made the decision
Starting point is 00:13:20 to have his ex-wife exhumed and reburied away from everyone else. Very unclear as to why. Yeah, it's a weird thing and I don't see any good explanation for this. The author of After Camelot describes this as like a bleak coda to her whole life story. You know, Mary has always been a lonely person. Yeah, it is. Right?
Starting point is 00:13:43 It is. Like, it's... Yeah. Yeah. And he just wants to keep her away, even in death, from her family, from everyone else. Yeah. Was it, was she relocated to where she was originally requested to be? No. No, no, no.
Starting point is 00:13:59 No. Why? What? It's unclear. Unclear. That's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. The author of After Camelot is basically like Mary had always been lonely.
Starting point is 00:14:13 And now he wanted to keep her away even further, you know, even in death. I don't know if that's cool. So he did it for the poetry. Like what? Like, yeah, he did it for the poetry. Just like Byron. Just like, uh, just like Byron. That's so all right. Great. Weird, weird move, Bobby. Like weird one, Bobby. What the fuck? Like, yeah. Now during the initial stages of divorce proceedings, uh, is the first time that we get Bobby Kennedy making any claims about having a worm in his
Starting point is 00:14:43 brain. And you saw earlier, right? That he's like, well, I can't pay, because my brain fog, I fucked up the finances, because my brain doesn't work anymore, because a worm ate part of it. And the fact that this comes out, he is repeatedly lying to his wife and to this, you know, allegedly lying to this divorce court
Starting point is 00:15:00 and is actively divorcing her, has led a number of folks to question if the brain worm stuff is true. I think that there's enough evidence in here that it's plausible that he has a brain was a bull But it's unclear what period of time he got the brainworm because it could have been literally any moment of his life But he's definitely eating bushmeat which is always the situation It's it's it's believable. He's placed himself in a- Yeah, could be. Could be.
Starting point is 00:15:29 Could be. Could be. But just because the brain worm is likely doesn't mean he's always been honest about how he got it as you kind of insinuated. In that 2012 deposition, Kennedy said that he had suffered from cognitive issues that had reduced his earning power. He claimed his doctors initially saw,
Starting point is 00:15:44 they saw a shadow on his brain, right? That is the worm, but they thought it was like a tumor maybe. And he had a planned operation at Duke, but he says he got a call from a doctor at the last minute who was like, no, no, it's a parasite. But in a YouTube interview, the day after the story broke into the mainstream, he gave a different version of events
Starting point is 00:16:02 where a random Irish doctor encountered him and saw his X-rays and was like, no, no, no, I don't think this merits surgery. We just have to wait to see if it gets better. You know, it's something else. Anyway, it doesn't matter which version of events is true, just that like they're kind of different. He can't keep his story straight in public,
Starting point is 00:16:20 maybe because the brain worm that ate part of his brain. Yeah, right. The part that remembers where you got the brain worm was destroyed by the brain worm That's that's the first part that the brain worm if you know anything about brain worms They're going straight for that part. It goes straight for the part of the brain that remembers you have a brain They don't want you to know where you got it. You know, you won't get it again, right, right They want you to keep getting those brain worms. That's how they breathe exactly now It doesn't really matter, you know,
Starting point is 00:16:46 which of these slightly different versions of events is true. What matters is that, yeah, he's not keeping his story straight and public. It's worth noting that in response to widespread mirth about his literal brain worms, Bobby wrote this on Twitter. I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden
Starting point is 00:17:04 in a debate. I feel confident in the result, even with a six worm handicap. One of the better tweets that it sends, honestly. I love seeing that. That's so funny. It was the best thing he could have posted. It's so good. It really is very funny.
Starting point is 00:17:21 It's so good and true. Like not on like being correct about the issues but in his ability to like communicate. I think he kind of nailed his confidence there. What's extra funny, Robert, is you were writing this script while we were sitting in the RNC convention. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:42 And just. I didn't disagree. I didn't disagree. Now. It's so't. I didn't disagree. I didn't disagree. Now. It's so good. I know that up to this point, most of the bastardry in Bobby's life has been confined to his personal life, with the notable exception of intervening
Starting point is 00:17:54 in the Skakel murder trial. But in the early aughts, starting a few years before Mary's death, Bobby began to get increasingly involved with the movement that would lead him to causing the greatest amount of harm so far that he has caused to the world. The genesis of the problem started with his work at Waterkeeper.
Starting point is 00:18:10 This is a different environmental nonprofit from Riverkeeper, one that focuses on drinking water and fighting back against corporate pollution of water sources. Some of the cases Bobby was involved in were focused on mercury levels and migratory fish. And this led to him studying and reading about the health consequences of exposure to various chemicals including mercury. Now, you don't want to get exposed to mercury. That's not great for you, Jody. It's true.
Starting point is 00:18:36 I don't know. I know that you're a big mercury guy, but I worry about you and it's not good for you. It's less of a health tonic than you might think. It's not good for other people and I don't recommend it to other people, but no problem so far. All right, well. I'm working fine. My speak is good, so don't whatever you said
Starting point is 00:18:58 that I remember, all right? Why don't you murk out and our listeners can also take the capitalist equivalent of Mercury, which is Mercury, but it's also the products and services that support this podcast. It is just Mercury. It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. A backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks.
Starting point is 00:19:31 Two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story. One that I've become entangled with. I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces,
Starting point is 00:19:48 forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism.
Starting point is 00:20:10 Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. One on one, let's see. In 2001, police say I killed my family.
Starting point is 00:20:29 First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary.
Starting point is 00:20:43 And my dog flew. All I could think of is in the sniper me out of some tree, but not me police believe He is alive and hiding somewhere for two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation I'm going down in the cave tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere Keep asking me this I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, a hunt, a family annihilation today, and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
Starting point is 00:21:20 Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals,
Starting point is 00:21:55 the love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's gonna cry
Starting point is 00:22:18 when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. God, I love mercury. I like the way it moves like that. I do too. The way it tastes, yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:39 It's incredible. Bobby doesn't like mercury, and he doesn't like mercury in part because he thinks it's in vaccines And he thinks that like and there's like trace different kinds of chemicals and vaccines But like in levels that are not going to be a health threat, you know It's like you shouldn't have much nitrogen, but it's in your oxygen. You'll be okay in the air Yeah, yeah, I assume they would go like oh, well, that's too much mercury. We shouldn't pump people full the air. Yeah. Yeah. I assume they would go like, oh, well, that's too much mercury.
Starting point is 00:23:05 We shouldn't pump people full of that. Yeah. Yeah. They're aware this is not really a problem, but Bobby becomes convinced that it is. And Bobby is not a doctor. Again, he is a lawyer. And it's not surprising that years of focusing on chemical exposure and waterways might have transferred over to other things.
Starting point is 00:23:24 Because while he is kind of obsessively fighting and reading about all of this mercury poisoning, he and Mary have their first son, Connor. And Connor has a soy and peanut allergy. These are serious allergies. And, you know, RFK Jr, given all of the family members that have died, is a man who was primed to be extra upset about this and perhaps unreasonably
Starting point is 00:23:46 obsessed with why it had happened. So he dedicates himself to figuring out a reason why and he lands on mercury exposure as the cause of Connor's allergies. This is because he's obsessively reading about and fighting with corporations about mercury exposure and waterways. His son gets an allergy and there is a belief among certain weird health anti-vax types that mercury exposure in vaccines
Starting point is 00:24:15 causes allergies in children, right? This has existed for more than 20 years now, this belief that like these trace chemicals in vaccines are causing our kids to develop weird allergies. Because it can't, my son who has this potentially life-threatening allergy that scares me, it can't just be because some kids have allergies. There has to be a reason.
Starting point is 00:24:37 There has to be something I can crusade against. Right, I was gonna say, it needs to be some entity that I can actually go after. It can't just be like, oh, that happens. It's gotta be, no, I have a focus, I have a target and I can use the power of the Kennedys to destroy that target. Now, I wanna make it clear
Starting point is 00:24:55 that this is vigorously disproved nonsense. I found a 2023 study published by the Japan Environment Children's Study Group. They collected and explored data from more than 94,000 mother-infant pairs and looked at how prenatal metallic element exposure might correlate to food allergies. To make a long story short, they concluded, quote,
Starting point is 00:25:17 "'No association was found between prenatal mercury or manganese exposure and the risk of allergic diseases.'" Right? That's a very large study. It's not the only thing you can find on the subject, but there is no evidence that this is a thing at all. And in fact, pretty strong evidence that it's not, but Bobby believes in it, right?
Starting point is 00:25:35 And one of our sources on how kind of obsessed he is with mercury poisoning during the kind of early to mid aughts is Cooney, that babysitter he harassed, who told Vanity Fair that he told her Connor's allergies were likely because of vaccines he'd received that had mercury in them. And, you know, Kennedy has claimed later in other writings that right around the same time,
Starting point is 00:25:58 he starts meeting with groups of mothers who start handing him research about like mercury in the MMR vaccine and how it's causing autism, right? The original Facebook group. Yeah, the original, just like a mom handing you a sheaf of paper she printed out. He becomes acquainted with Andrew Wakefield
Starting point is 00:26:14 and Wakefield's absolutely disgraced study that was published in like 1998. But obviously the fact that this is all nonsense and that Wakefield is completely disgraced eventually from it doesn't stop him from becoming famous among a whole host of Hollywood weirdos like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. And obviously Bobby Kennedy is right there
Starting point is 00:26:36 in the center of it. This is the kind of cause that Bobby like loves to drag himself towards. He's a Kennedy, so he's not the little guy, but he gets to be the little guy when he's fighting these big corporate polluters or when he's dealing with, you know, this vaccine conspiracy that's getting mercury into kids,
Starting point is 00:26:54 right? And because he's, you know, the Kennedy that he is, he always has access to the news media, even when he shouldn't, he's friends with the publisher of Rolling Stone at the time, Jan Winner. And he gets Winner to agree along with the editors of Salon to let him co-publish a story he wrote
Starting point is 00:27:15 about vaccines, which is basically him repeating Wakefield's research. So he gets Rolling Stone and Salon to dual publish an article written by him in 2011 about how vaccines cause autism. And they have since retracted the paper because of fucking course. But the fact that it gets out there at all,
Starting point is 00:27:33 it's evidence that just by being a Kennedy, he gets to like skip the line, right? He's not just a guy who gets, he often gets portrayed as just another anti-vaxxer who got wrapped up in this. No, no, no. He is how anti-vaxxer who got wrapped up in this. No, no, no. He is how anti-vax, he's part, a big part of how it breaks containment.
Starting point is 00:27:48 The Kennedy name he uses to monitor this shit in the mainstream. Yeah, because it would have had like some editor going through it, yeah, with like rigorous like actual like looking at like fact checking and stuff. I mean like, well this is not- Who the fuck is this guy, right? Yeah, we're not going to publish this, but it's Kennedy, so you just, yeah, we'll publish that, sure. One thing I find myself explaining to a lot of liberals in the modern era is how they'll
Starting point is 00:28:08 hear about like organic food hippies or like crystal healing types who have gone hard MAGA and be like, well, but those guys are like left weirdos, right? Like those guys are weirdos who are on our side of things, right? That's how it's always been. And Kennedy is a big, Bobby Kennedy is, pulls them out of the left. He is a big part of that, right? Because there's so much gravity to the Kennedy name as he comes sailing over that political divide line in our society, he pulls a huge chunk of like the weird left with him because
Starting point is 00:28:39 he's still this guy who celebrated in progressive circles for his work in environmental law. So when he takes, gets to anti-vac shit, it has a big impact. Yeah, he also sort of grants validity to it. Even if he weren't doing all his publishing stuff and actually getting the bad information out there, he's still just sort of saying, yeah, I believe this and I'm McKennedy, therefore you can, and like, sort of like, can these people, they can have these sort of contradictory positions and like, have, you know, yeah, I don't know, it's a real phenomenon. Yeah, it's real and it's cool and it's good.
Starting point is 00:29:16 Yes, yeah, it's all that. Yeah, Bobby is an important part of the journey of a chunk of, you know, fringe kind of woo culture over to the right. Because the myth of the Kennedy family is a huge deal for everyone in society, right? There's a guy to go back to the Trump shooting. In the, when he got shot, there's a dude standing directly behind him
Starting point is 00:29:39 that thousands of QAnon believers think is literally John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise because JFK Jr. didn't die in the plane crash. He's hiding, he's waiting to coronate. I don't know if the new American king or some shit. Yeah, and that guy, that fake Kennedy is standing directly behind Trump when he gets shot at. Because why not, why not?
Starting point is 00:29:58 We're just doing mad libs in America today. I know, it's wild. Like nothing is real. Nothing is real. Now the fact that Bobby became a vocal advocate for anti-vax shit has a big impact and it helps impart a gravitas and credibility to this crowd. The particular brand of scum who have crusted to the rim of the anti-vax movement tend to have precisely one skill, which is an instinctive knowledge of branding. Once they see there's a Kennedy in the mix, there is a feeding frenzy over who gets to be his friend.
Starting point is 00:30:26 Right? Like this guy could take us everywhere we wanna go. Like, let's see who can win in a scrum to actually get to like be his best buddy. And the winner here is Dell Big Tree. Great name for a weirdo vaccine conspiracy theorist. Dell is a former TV producer who has in recent years become a regular guest on the Alex Jones show.
Starting point is 00:30:50 I mostly encountered Dell before this through the podcast Knowledge Fight, which chronicles Jones. Dell is also the CEO of the Informed Consent Action Network. And if you know, now that we know something about Bobby Kennedy, there's no, if he's involved with an organization, it absolutely shouldn't be the informed consent action network. He's not great on informed consent.
Starting point is 00:31:11 Maybe he can like take a seminar. Yeah, he should take a class on informed consent. He can learn something from them, but maybe he shouldn't be heavily involved. Yeah, he shouldn't be helping to run things. Dell produced the documentary Vaxxxed Dell has no relevant medical training He has absolutely no reason to be talking about any of this stuff But he did once produce a TV show called the doctors and that really is all it takes with a chunk of the country All it takes God
Starting point is 00:31:39 We're so cooked we're so doomed. Yeah, we, we, we, we, we're a little doomed. We might be a little doomed. Um, but it, it, it's, it maybe it'll be okay, Cody. Maybe less, we'll see. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. Maybe it'll be okay. Maybe we're all getting up. Maybe we're going to shake all this off like a fever, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:56 Yeah. A man can dream. A man can hope. As I stated earlier, uh, Del has a, an instinctive understanding of PR and how to do the slow work of ideological capture. He focused on doing rallies and outreach to communities that were primed for an anti-vaccine message. Hasidic Jewish synagogues were a particular favorite of his. Kennedy gave him inroads into an even larger community, Americans who still thought back
Starting point is 00:32:20 mournfully to the what could have been of Camelot. Big Tree connected Kennedy to Wakefield and the three did numerous appearances together. RFK Jr. starts writing anti-vax books with titles like Vax Unvax, Let the Science Speak. And I don't know how much of these he's actually writing. Again, it's kind of like that thing with his thesis is he just, because he puts out so many books. He's like more than one a year sometimes. I kind of think he's just paying people to write books for him. And he's like, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the Kennedy name's on it, you know?
Starting point is 00:32:51 And I agree with the message. Yeah. Or the worm's working overtime. Or yeah, that worm, that poor worm. I'm really starting to feel sorry for the worm. Lots of sleepless nights for that worm, just hunched over over the brain while RFK is hunched over the typewriter. Just chain-smoking cigarettes, putting them out in his corpus callosum.
Starting point is 00:33:12 Well, that's where the brain fog came from, from the worms smoking cigarettes in his skull. That's where he had to smoke the cigarettes. Right? Oh, fuck. Now, by this point, RFK Jr. is firmly flirting with the fringes, but this stuff had also not been politicized like it is today.
Starting point is 00:33:27 Every mainstream political figure was against the anti-vax weirdos, right? George W. Bush was not a big anti-vax guy, right? And so during that kind of period, it's not super obvious which political party you would wanna be on if you're this kind of weirdo, right? You're certainly not necessarily gravitating kind of weirdo, right? You're certainly not necessarily gravitating towards the Republican Party, right?
Starting point is 00:33:49 Up to the early 2000s, RFK Jr. still hung out with Bill Clinton on occasion and counted himself a member of the liberal elite. Vanity Fair traces the moment when this changed to 2014. Quote, Kennedy married Hines in a wedding attended by a glittering array of friends, including Larry David and Julia Louis Dreyfus, and moved to Los Angeles. The move marked a reinvention of sorts, distancing Kennedy from his East Coast network and perhaps removing some of the built-in guard rails that had tempered his worst impulses. In addition to consulting for companies seeking his environmental seal of approval, he chaired
Starting point is 00:34:20 the 501C3 nonprofit Children's Health Defense, which began in 2007 under the name World Mercury Project and invade against vaccines and fluoride in the water. So he moves to Hollywood and that's kind of what cuts the tethers to reality for this guy. Obviously some of this is Larry David's fault. I think none of us is surprised of that. You know, whenever anything evil happens in the world,
Starting point is 00:34:45 I assume Larry David's got some involvement in it. Yeah, he's somewhere up in there. He's pissing somebody off or. Yeah, Larry David and Darfur. There's an episode of Curb on that. Probably not, probably shouldn't do that. Anyway, the World Mercury Project had been founded in 2007 and today under the name Children's Health Defense,
Starting point is 00:35:07 Bobby presides as chairman over a $15 million a year organization. They particularly target new parents and minority communities. During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, they launched a media campaign to argue that COVID was not, in fact, very dangerous and people should avoid the vaccine at all costs.
Starting point is 00:35:25 They are particularly pushing this in black communities. The CHD targets black Americans with propaganda, comparing the COVID vaccine to the Tuskegee syphilis study. Basically, Bobby's like, hey, you know how you don't trust the government because it's fucked you around? Why would you take this vaccine? Just kind of raw dog COVID, it'll be fine.
Starting point is 00:35:45 It's better than letting the government experiment on you. It's not just, you know, Bobby's shit that feeds into this. There's a lot of socioeconomic stuff. So it's hard to say how much of this is Bobby's doing, how much of vaccine hesitancy in the United States is Bobby's doing. But the CHD is like, people who have gone in and looked at social media will note that propaganda
Starting point is 00:36:06 spread by the CHD is some of the whitest spreading anti-vaccine and like anti-COVID-19 sane reasonable prevention statistics, propaganda that goes out on the internet. It spreads incredibly widely, right? So you can't really say, here's how many people Bobby killed by doing this But I would argue that by any reasonable stretch of the imagination he beats Ted's chapiquitic count, right? Yeah, yeah drug driving maybe the least dangerous thing maybe the Kennedy's to get involved in yeah. Yeah
Starting point is 00:36:39 Analysis by NBC News claims that the CHD is one of the top three sources of fake news about the coronavirus vaccine on the entire internet. So yeah, I mean, basically by any argument, there's a body count RFK has that's very significant. Yeah. There's some sort of negative health count, regardless, like he's hurt people. Yeah. Or prevented them from, yeah. Prevented them from not getting hurt
Starting point is 00:37:05 from like seeking, you know, basic reasonable help for their situation. And telling them apparently that COVID's fine and you should feel fine getting it, which again, the community did get disproportionately, maybe that is bad. Yeah, and if we wanna talk about like the greatest harm that, or the clearest harm that he's done the easiest body count
Starting point is 00:37:27 We can draw to him. That's going to bring us to 2018 and the Samoan Islands. Have you heard this story Cody? I don't think so. Oh boy. This is bad This is a real bad one. Yeah, I don't think I have I don't know. Okay, do I want to use? Oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy Cody. In 2018, two children in the Samoan Islands died after catastrophic reactions to the MMR vaccine. Now that is how it was spun initially, right? The reality is that two nurses fucked up horribly
Starting point is 00:37:57 in administering the vaccines and dosed both children with massive quantities of expired muscle relaxers. Now, this is a terrible thing, right? Yeah. It's evidence that there's issues with those nurses, that there's probably issues with the facilities, right? This happens and a lot does need to change, right? Like you don't just let, you don't just go like,
Starting point is 00:38:16 well, sometimes shit happens, right? This is evidence of serious breakdowns in how this process ought to work. But RFK Junior takes it as like, this is proof that the vaccines that I blamed for my son's allergies are a threat to life and limb, right? So he throws himself and his organization,
Starting point is 00:38:34 all of their resources, into spreading anti-vaccine propaganda just in Samoa, right? And because he's a Kennedy, and because he's got a shitload of money to spend on this ad campaign, people listened. The Samoan Prime Minister was not used to dealing with social media campaigns at this scale and sophistication.
Starting point is 00:38:52 The rapid outcry cultivated by RFK's organization caused him to announce a halt to the administration of the MMR vaccine across Samoa. Because of this campaign he launches, the Samoan government stops rolling out the MMR vaccine, right? They put a pause on it basically. Yeah. Yeah. And this is going to have a pretty catastrophic result. In June of 2019, Kennedy and his new
Starting point is 00:39:18 wife Cheryl Hines flew to Samoa for a press blitz and a private meeting with the prime minister. Now this is a great time for Bobby, but while he schmoozed, measles was starting to percolate throughout the community, infecting huge numbers of now unvaccinated little kids. In months, there was an epidemic, infecting nearly 6,000 people and leading to 83 deaths. The vast majority of those deaths are extremely young children. These are 83 deaths that we can tie directly to Bobby Kennedy. Do they halt? Wait, they halted vaccines generally? Well, no, the MMR vaccine.
Starting point is 00:39:51 Okay, okay, okay. Which is measles, mumps, and rubella. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. Robert Ofit, a member of the FDA advisory committee who analyzed the epidemic later, concluded, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do do with that and it shows you how disinformation can kill So that's bad people who kill those kids
Starting point is 00:40:09 He's like literally the reason that those kids are dead. That's yeah, so fucked up. Yeah, he gave those kids measles. Mm-hmm He sure did got you got them Bobby Yeah, what do you even say at a certain point? Bobby. Bobby. Bobby, like, you didn't... Why did you... Does he care? Did this happen? Does he like... Does he know? Does he understand that this happens?
Starting point is 00:40:46 He doesn't think it's his fault in the slightest That Cody we're getting to that but first let's get some ads then we'll come back. Okay It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, a backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story, it's a human story, one that I've become entangled with.
Starting point is 00:41:23 I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out. The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death. Their once ordinary lives, and mine, changed forever. It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom. And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat. Far right, homegrown, religious terrorism.
Starting point is 00:41:52 Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.
Starting point is 00:42:19 Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals, the love that was so real for me was always just a game for him, to betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where
Starting point is 00:42:46 he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.
Starting point is 00:43:14 In 2001, Police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down.
Starting point is 00:43:28 They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is getting the sniper me out of some tree. But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything.
Starting point is 00:43:41 I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in a cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fischer.
Starting point is 00:43:52 One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house. The Hunt. Family annihilation. Today. And a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday
Starting point is 00:44:03 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. We're back, wow. And you know what? I, after listening to those ads, my opinion is completely different. Cody, let's get the MMR vaccine sucked out of our bodies. No.
Starting point is 00:44:25 I think we have to. I'm back on board. Thank you. Thank you, RFK Junior Charity. I'm gonna say no. Nope. Sophie, what's what we're doing? I got a vacuum rigged up on reverse.
Starting point is 00:44:35 I don't want allergies. Yeah. No. Gonna cut my arm, suck out the blood, filter out the MMR and squirt it right back in. Sophie, don't make me put rotting meat in your fridge. As somebody with a shit ton of allergies, give me that vaccine.
Starting point is 00:44:52 Fair enough, okay. Speaking from experience already. So that Samoan epidemic was so devastating that the prime minister reversed course, declared a state emergency, and put a vaccine mandate in place. Once people started getting vaccinated again, the measles epidemic ended.
Starting point is 00:45:10 Now any reasonably humble and aware person would have recognized at this point, oh, I have fucked up in an unforgivable way, right? Obviously my actions caused this. And obviously as soon as they stopped listening to me, it got better. Well, I fucked up, right? You fucked up.
Starting point is 00:45:27 Yeah, yeah. That's not what happens because Cody, being a Kennedy, means you only have to listen to reality when it sends a bullet your way, right? Like that is the essence of this family. And so- Not the lesson to learn, man. God, so many better lessons from all this.
Starting point is 00:45:44 Yeah, quite a few of them. RFK Jr. ignored the fact that he had gotten his way. Children had died and his whole ideology of vaccine hesitancy had been shredded. When confronted by a filmmaker for an upcoming documentary, Bobby refused to even acknowledge what he'd done. I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate.
Starting point is 00:46:03 What? How could he do that? I guess that's true. Like I said, he's- No, no. You just told him the vaccine was dangerous and whipped them up into a frenzy. I knew he was- We're not saying, we're not allowing-
Starting point is 00:46:16 A man not taking responsibility for his own actions? Oh my, what? Yeah, it's pretty funny. Bobby, you can't do that, you can't do that. You can't say that. I mean, you can, obviously. He's like, it was the worm! Yeah.
Starting point is 00:46:31 I didn't tell them not to take it. I just said if they did, they'd die. Yeah. What? Exactly, I just told them it was gonna kill their kids. You know, not my fault that they acted based on that. Now, in subsequent- With a campaign, with a fucking organization organization that like yeah
Starting point is 00:46:46 Your multi-million dollar propaganda are Bobby Robert It's just so interesting that the like selective choice he has to understand what his last name means to People like the fact that he a Kennedy saying to people don't do a thing like he forgets the weight of that He gets forgets that like people take that name seriously and he's like what me who people dead couldn't have been What but he totally knows he uses all the time He's best at using yeah choice, yeah, I Mean look as a man. We're all good at that, right? Like that's really the superpower of our,
Starting point is 00:47:25 oh wow, Sophie. I mean, I don't disagree, but you shouldn't say it on the air. You can't just say that. I selectively say it, not all of you are trash, except all of you are trash. Too bad, Sophie, Twitter already heard you say the first thing and they are angry.
Starting point is 00:47:42 They're not happy. They're gonna lose their minds. They're really tired of listening to men lie. Really tired of it. But it's so easy. And easy to get away with. Easy to get away with. You should see what I'm doing in Samoa.
Starting point is 00:47:58 Jesus, woo boy. Yeah, but at least you told me the truth about that. Yeah, I did, I did, I did. That's good, at least. So in subsequent conversations, Kennedy would suggest that the measles epidemic had in fact been caused by the vaccines. He also claimed that allowing dozens of people to die
Starting point is 00:48:17 by inciting vaccine hesitancy was an experiment, to measure health outcomes following the natural experiment created by the national respite from vaccines And if that's the case, I'd say we learned what happens when you have a natural respite from vaccines. Yeah, that's Baby's guy fucking experiment you need to get in the lab again Bobby the lab being like a fucking world Like I think we might need to do another experiment No, I'm not gonna make a Kennedy assassination reference, but you know what I was gonna say, right? But there's, like the implication was there.
Starting point is 00:48:47 Yeah. Robert. Bobby. It's always Bobby's. So. God. That's infuriating. We don't have to dwell on this. Oh, it's the worst. That's so fucking stupid. It's the worst.
Starting point is 00:48:59 Like, it's just like, why didn't you do it? And if anything, like, cause he said he didn't do it. He didn't do it. He didn't do it. He didn't do it, do with it. And then he's like, well, yeah, I did it. It was an experiment and it fucking ruled. Like, it was great. What are these two thoughts you have?
Starting point is 00:49:13 Like, what is wrong with you? What is fucking wrong with you? He's such a piece of shit. Now, you know, again, in an ethical society, I think the way you would deal with this guy would involve a catapult in the sea. I think you would catapult him into the sea, right? I think we should catapult more people into the sea.
Starting point is 00:49:30 A large lake. Yeah, sure, maybe one of the great lakes. Really, really big lake. Yeah, yeah, we've got some big lakes. We have options for bodies of water to catapult people into. But in our society, that's not how we punish this sort of thing.
Starting point is 00:49:42 Instead, Kennedy was feted by some of the wealthiest and most influential celebrities around. He got to guest on the Joe Rogan podcast and he published six books of vaccine disinformation and donations to his charity doubled. Yeah, yes. That's too many books. That's an unbelievable amount of books, man.
Starting point is 00:50:01 I'm just sorry, I just don't, I don't think you're able to write all those books. I don't think you're able to write all those books. I don't think you're doing that, man. Just do two. That's plausible. Maybe you wrote an outline and had a ghostwriter come in there. He wrote the titles for these books.
Starting point is 00:50:13 Yeah, maybe he got in. They're not good titles. Of course they're not. Now Kennedy has also made repeated statements that he believes in a link between vaccines and autism. I should not need to explain that this is hooey. The reason why autism rates seem to have skyrocketed is that it wasn't a thing that we diagnosed
Starting point is 00:50:29 or recognized for a very long time. So when you start to realize that it is one thing, it will look like there's a surge in it. That's not what's happened, right? Seeing it. Yeah, oftentimes kids that we now know are children who have autism, you would diagnose them with like one of a dozen other things, right?
Starting point is 00:50:47 So we'd be- We're pattern recognizing categorizing species. We like categorizing things and then recognizing patterns. We like that, but we do not like critical rational thought. Not our favorite thing. No. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:59 Or accountability. RFK Jr. has stated that increase in autism rates is a literal holocaust Now you might notice there's some stuff that's messed up about that because the Holocaust killed people and children with autism are alive That's a good point. Thank you for bringing that up Children are doing fine. Yes They're not dead. They're living full and happy lives. What a fucking weird thing to say.
Starting point is 00:51:30 What a weird thing to say. It's especially weird because he can't keep to one side of the Holocaust comparisons because he is also compared being a wealthy anti-vaxxer who gets to go on the most influential media programs in the world as being like Anne Frank. He's a victim of the whole, and yeah. I knew what you were gonna say.
Starting point is 00:51:50 Stuck in the attic of Joe Rogan's fucking podcast. Like, it's fucking like, this attic is fucking above a studio and like below. Yeah. Yeah, what if Anne Frank had been one of the most influential media personalities of her day? I gotta go on this billion dollar podcast. Yeah, and also what if no one had ever tried to hurt her? Also, I don't know if you heard but I'm a Kennedy. Yeah. Yeah, and she had a half a billion dollars
Starting point is 00:52:20 Other than that great comparison and like Just sexually harassing everybody that he meets. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons not to compare himself to Anne Frank. There's a lot of reasons not to compare himself to Anne Frank. Also, a lot of reasons not to say that kids with autism are like victims of the Holocaust. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:40 Ah, I don't like him. It's great. He's, yeah. Like I never, you know, like from the beginning, obviously, but like, man, you really ramped it up. Yeah, no, he does, he does. By the end here, we're fully in like world-class piece of shit territory. Now, Bobby and his organizations also did a lot
Starting point is 00:52:57 to spread conspiracy theories that COVID is somehow ethnically targeted against people who are not Jewish or Chinese, A thing that is not possible. All this disinformation caused him to suffer mild consequences during that brief shining period in the early pandemic when some social media sites occasionally punished people for trying to spread vaccine hesitancy, right? Metta banned his Instagram account once the COVID pandemic took off and Kennedy sued the Biden administration for this, blaming them based on absolutely nothing whatsoever for pressuring Zuckerberg.
Starting point is 00:53:31 Oh, you need to get Matt Taibbi on the case. Yeah. Joe Biden got me banned from Instagram. The Instagram files. I don't know if Zuck can be fucked like that. No, he can't like, he's certainly not going like, it just, none of it makes sense. I'm sorry, I upset Cody with that statement. I'm so sorry Cody.
Starting point is 00:53:55 I'm reacting to everything. It's a collective face. You wouldn't get kicked like that though, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. Go call Joe Biden. You're a Kennedy.
Starting point is 00:54:11 Go ask him. Go call Joe Biden. You're a Kennedy. Yeah. With that patented Kennedy magic, Bobby turned getting banned into a cause worthy of breaking his lifelong absence from personal involvement in electoral politics, and he turned it into the core of his presidential campaign. Vanity Fair quotes a relative as saying social media was his stash, and banning his account
Starting point is 00:54:31 put him into withdrawal. If so, we might see his present campaign as a relapse. Bobby Kennedy is now shooting up the heroin of political prominence. Multiple sources have noted that he remains obsessed with the loss of 800,000 followers, for which he blames Joe Biden. I found one New Yorker interview where the journalist pointed out, hey, you're like one of the most vocal and heard men on planet earth with access to like the Joe Rogan show and everything. How do you claim that you're persecuted? And he responded, I am since I declared for president, but before that I was deplatformed.
Starting point is 00:55:06 I was deplatformed completely from 800,000 followers were taken from me on Instagram at the behest of the White House. Again. The White House is a claim. No. There's a thing that happens, can happen with addicts when after an extended period of sobriety, a dam breaks.
Starting point is 00:55:24 And with Bobby, the dam breaking let out a flood of Narcissism right he doesn't fall back into drugs as far as we know But he he's he's treating fame and social media that way right this is place up to his arm right totally Yeah, I don't you know don't even go on a tangent, but like I feel like Russell Brand Still a lot with that exact thing of like yeah like you replace it with conspiracies or Lynn right now. It's Catholicism But you know you need to fill that space Yeah, and there are a lot of unhealthy options out there that are that exists in order to keep you there Right and to make it right that are made to be addictive. They're designed for that exact thing.
Starting point is 00:56:06 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the things that Bobby can't accept that I think plays into all this is that he is now an old man. He hasn't aged, I would say prior to this, you wouldn't say he'd aged terribly, but he's an old man, right? Sure.
Starting point is 00:56:24 And when he, so he starts shooting up steroids, basically, right? When he comes out to announce his presidential campaign in April of 2023, people who had known him for years were shocked by how he looked. He's all puffy and bloated with steroids. He says that he's on organic testosterone, which like, you're just on gear, man.
Starting point is 00:56:41 You're just on gear. I'm sorry. It doesn't matter if the gear is organic. My methamphetamine's organic. It comes from a plant. It's like all natural. It's not, it's just, you're on test, brother. Like, and I'm sure you're on other shit, but like, come on.
Starting point is 00:56:57 One close family friend described him as unrecognizable now. Bobby's presidential campaign wears the drag of an independent grassroots effort, but there's funding behind it from some of the most powerful and wealthy people in this country. His VP pick is Nicole Shanahan, who you may not know much about, but she is the ex-wife of Sergey Brin
Starting point is 00:57:15 and got the job because she has ex-wife of Sergey Brin money that she can throw into the campaign. Vanity Fair explains that additional funding came from, quote, Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who has given $30 million to the super PAC supporting Kennedy while also giving 50 million to Donald Trump's campaign, an alignment of interests that critics suspect is strategic, financing Kennedy's campaign to draw votes from Joe Biden and therefore boost Trump.
Starting point is 00:57:40 His campaign manager is his own daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox, a former CIA agent and wife of Bobby the Third, himself an actor and screenwriter who once ran a website dedicated to fact-checking political statements. The two-minute Burning Man. It's just the most incredible group of people. Gosh, to see, the sentences don't end. Wow. Yeah, no, of course not.
Starting point is 00:58:03 In the immediate wake of the assassination attempt, Trump, who back in May had called Bobby a wasted protest vote, started calling for him to receive Secret Service protection. Now to be frank, I don't disagree with this. I think another dead Kennedy would not improve the sanity of our domestic political situation. But the aftermath of that led Trump to reach out to RFK Jr. personally. The two had a phone call, which Kennedy filmed himself taking for reasons that are somewhat unclear but very likely related to the brain worm. I mean, it's usually that, right?
Starting point is 00:58:35 Yeah. An article by the AP describes the scene. The video shows Kennedy listening on a speakerphone as Trump shares disproven claims about childhood vaccines, an issue that has helped Kennedy amass a loyal following. Trump also appears to pitch Kennedy on endorsing his campaign. I would love you to do so, Trump tells Kennedy, and I think it will be so good for you and so big for you, and we're going to win. Kennedy leaked the video of this call, again, for unclear reasons.
Starting point is 00:59:00 I'm not sure why it got out. Subsequent reporting has provided us with more details. In a shock to those who saw RFK Junior's campaign as a Trump op, the calls apparently featured Bobby begging for a quid pro quo job in exchange for endorsing Trump. And doing so to such a blatant extent that it worried Trump staffers, right? They were probably okay with actually giving him something, but the way he mentioned it, they were like, well, shit, if he's recording this or something, we could be in a lot of trouble.
Starting point is 00:59:29 Yeah. Which, you know, probably why he was recording it, I guess. Maybe. Maybe. Now, RFK Jr. wanted to secure himself a post overseeing health and safety in the next Trump administration. Discussions between the two during this recorded call included possible jobs he could get at the cabinet level, because that doesn't require Senate confirmation,
Starting point is 00:59:49 and this would have been in exchange for Kennedy dropping out and endorsing Trump. Further information has since come out that provides, I think, a concrete idea of what Bobby would seek to do if given a position of power in a presidential administration. Unfortunately, it's something that gels all too well with some of the plans members of the fascist right have already put forward. In a virtual Latino town hall last week, Kennedy floated the idea of wellness farms,
Starting point is 01:00:14 which is, these are basically American gulags, right? He wants you to be able to send drug addicts and people who are on antidepressants for years of mandatory work therapy, right? Not just people who are like convicted of drug possession, but people who are on ADHD meds. He describes the goal of these facilities as to reparent people. And of course, since Kennedy believes cell phone radiation is poisonous, people interned
Starting point is 01:00:37 in these camps would not have access to the internet or any way to communicate to the outside world. So that's cool. Good and evil. I mean, he's not the only one. This is so blatant and weird. And like, it's just so funny, so many people on the right just trying to like,
Starting point is 01:01:01 portray themselves as like, you know, we're like the party of freedom. And then half their ideas are like, well, put people in camps obviously to work, but also, yeah, we're camp. They can't leave. Sure. Yeah. Like we we should only have like the head of the household vote or whatever it is, where it's just like so anti the thing they are desperately trying to pretend that they are. I don't know if it's going to work for that long. Yeah. I don't know if it's going to last. I don't know either. It seems like very suddenly it may have stopped working as well.
Starting point is 01:01:33 I guess we'll see how long this vibe shift lasts. But we'll see. I think it like so so many things coalesce at the same time. But like Biden just kind of fading into the background really opened things up, I think. People to realize like, oh, look at these freaks and look at the flawed, but mostly normal people. Yeah. And really, really up that contrast. Because when you contrast the freaks with like this old goat, it's like,
Starting point is 01:02:04 what can you say? I don't know. Um, yeah, we'll see. We'll see if it lasts. We'll see if it lasts. You know, I do think it's interesting. I'm kind of compelled by what we've seen, like, because it seems like there's some evidence
Starting point is 01:02:20 that people within Trump world or people backing him, if not the campaign itself, wanted to push and support Bobby because they thought he could take enough votes away to hurt Biden. And it kind of seems like a lot of the evidence suggests he takes more votes from Trump. And I'm kind of- 100%, yeah. I'm wondering if what we saw from Trump
Starting point is 01:02:37 offering him this job is like a result of kind of panic over that. We thought we had control of this guy. And specifically, we thought we had control of this guy. And specifically we thought we had control of how he was going to like play in the world. Yeah, he's running as a Democrat, then he's independent. So he's gonna take some Democrats, but like the Democratic party generally
Starting point is 01:02:56 and the electorate kind of rejected him generally. So this is not gonna work. Yeah, he's kind of gone rogue. So I don't know, maybe we'll see how that works. We'll see. It is funny how they keep doing that. They keep sort of realizing like, oh wait, we miscalculated all this.
Starting point is 01:03:16 Honestly, from the day after we recorded part one and two, from that moment on, it's just been like, they don't know what they're doing They don't know how to react to anything that happens. They don't know the messaging they need to go forward with any event And it just seems like like a two to three week long just sort of like crumbling Yeah, this you know house of but what's flimsy rhythm cards? How supposed to toilet paper? I don't know yeah you know, house of, what's, flimsier than cards. It's a little house of post-it notes, I guess. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:03:48 Yeah. They thought, they crammed the whole right, is this coalition of all of the weird, like the bad weird in this country. And they crammed it into a tiny sack and, you know, felt like it had enough weight to it that they could swing it and do some damage. But as soon as the sack breaks open,
Starting point is 01:04:04 like now there's just nutso shit everywhere and yeah It's everywhere the guy who was swinging the sack Like oh, they're just they're just swinging the sack at like this yeah old guy who like I can't understand This isn't my problem right yeah, yeah, but no that guy's gone now. It's like quit swinging your sack around Why are you doing this? Out of here, what are you doing? Yeah? Yeah, that's a long with you Yeah, I should note before we leave the entire Kennedy family basically has disavowed Bobby all of his siblings that are left alive Everybody's been like and he got he got pushed out of River keeper to his his involvement with these charities, because they were like,
Starting point is 01:04:45 you can't one day come on and be like, climate change is real, we have to deal with it. And then the next day be like, vaccines aren't real, right? Like you're hurting the cause at this point by being tied to this shit. So- I mean, does he even say that
Starting point is 01:05:01 climate change is real anymore? I don't know if he said it lately. I mean, he certainly talked say that climate change is real anymore? I don't know if he said it lately. I certainly talked about it in the past. Al Gore did the foreword book. Yeah, it just seems like it's something he would, you know, like there's that group of people who've like kind of gravitated towards like, well, it's not. It's either like it it is real, but it's not a big deal or like it was a big deal, but we kind of fixed it. So we don't need to do anything about it anymore.
Starting point is 01:05:26 Yeah. Curious about that camp but. Me too. Yeah. Well Cody, that's the showdy. We did it. How you doing? I'm great, thanks so much for the showdy
Starting point is 01:05:43 and the knowledge of So I learned too much about this guy We all know too much about this guy now Now you're interested in getting a pet hawk. I just feel like a little bit you can I feel like thank you so much I think that my dog and cat would not enjoy that. Fair, fair. I would love it if Bobby just started carrying the hawk around. Yeah!
Starting point is 01:06:11 Like getting the hawk and become a hawk guy. Why is he not doing that? Yeah. At least then there's something fun about it. Instead of just like, well, he's kind of killing people and lying about it. Except for all of the killing people. Getting his babysitters to oil him up, God. Oh, God. Well.
Starting point is 01:06:33 But only her, he only limited to her, so. What a piece of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Well, we're done. Anyway. Any plug-ables, Cody? Thanks thanks for having me check me out online. I'm dr. DeCote on with social media
Starting point is 01:06:49 I've got a podcast called even more news and a web YouTube show called some more news. It's every Wednesday Usually we just did an episode about Tim pool We got some Jordan Peterson climate change stuff coming up. I don't know when this is coming. Can I come out? I have a band called The Hot Shapes. We're on Bandcamp at SoundCloud. Check it out. Listen to stuff.
Starting point is 01:07:13 Check out Coolzone Media's newest show hosted by Molly Conger called Weird Little Guys. On the day this episode is released, Episode Zero and Episode One are out now. Robert, anything else? No! I'm done. I'm tired.
Starting point is 01:07:27 I'm going to go nap. Goodbye. Yeah, me too. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 01:07:53 Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the Centennial Olympic Games. And then, a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others forever. Rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal.
Starting point is 01:08:25 I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona.
Starting point is 01:08:56 And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, Police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode. before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me,
Starting point is 01:09:12 I'm going down in the cave. as I track down clues. I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting, One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Starting point is 01:09:25 wherever you get your favorite shows.

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