Tangle - RFK Jr. is running against Biden.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Starting point is 00:00:19 Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangled Podcast, an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported podcast where we summarize the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day, and then you get a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about Robert F. Kempby Jr., who is running

Starting point is 00:01:05 for president as a Democrat. He's going to join the Democratic primary, he says, if they have one. And his candidacy has probably not been spoken about enough, given how he's polling right now, which we are going to talk about today. Before we jump in, though, as always, we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, the House passed the bipartisan debt limit bill by a 314 to 117 margin last night. The bill now moves to the Senate for approval. Number two, former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce his presidential campaign in Des Moines, Iowa on June 7th. Number three, North Korea had a failed launch of its first military surveillance satellite into space. Number four, federal prosecutors said they've obtained a 2021 audio recording of former President Trump acknowledging he held on to a classified Pentagon document. Number five, a federal appeals court allowed the maker of OxyContin to settle

Starting point is 00:02:10 thousands of legal claims tied to the opioid epidemic while shielding the wealthy owners of Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, from future lawsuits. Earlier this week, President Biden announced that he'll seek the White House for a second term, but that's not stopping some challengers. And the latest entrant comes from political royalty. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced that he'll run against Biden, and he may have some supporters on his side. A new Fox News poll shows some 19% of likely Democratic voters say that they'd like to see RFK Jr. win the nomination. RFK Jr. is one of the biggest voices pushing anti-vaccine rhetoric, regularly distributing misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, which scientific and medical experts overwhelmingly say are safe and effective

Starting point is 00:03:01 based on rigorous scientific studies. But can a Kennedy breakthrough in 2024? Will RFK Jr.'s controversial stances limit his appeal? I've come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. In April, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed paperwork to run for president in 2024 as a Democrat. The 69-year-old is the son of former New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. Kennedy Jr. is a longtime environmental lawyer and activist who has sparked controversy for questioning the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and the safety of other vaccinations. Politically,

Starting point is 00:03:51 he has spent much of his career fighting pollution and pushing to rein in the power of corporations. In 2019, two of his siblings and his niece published a piece in Politico denouncing Kennedy's stance on vaccines. Since entering the race, Kennedy has been described as a long shot, though his polling numbers are unusually strong for a primary challenger to an incumbent president. A recent Fox News poll found 16% of Democratic voters support him, while 8% support Marianne Williamson and 62% support President Biden. Similarly, a CNN poll found 20% of Democratic voters in support of Kennedy. While Kennedy has asked to debate Biden, the Democratic National Committee has

Starting point is 00:04:31 coalesced around the president, announcing it did not plan to hold any debates for the nomination. There has also been speculation that Kennedy may consider an independent run to try to upend Biden's campaign. Kennedy has emphasized his longstanding friendship with President Biden, saying he is running simply because he disagrees with him on the direction of the country. I'm not running a mean-spirited campaign against Joe Biden. I've been friends with Joe Biden for 40 years, he said on the Katz and Cosby radio show. I'm grateful for his service to our country and his family's service to our country, but I just disagree fundamentally with him on where the country is going. I don't want Wall Street running the country. I don't want the

Starting point is 00:05:09 neocons running our foreign policy. I don't like censorship. I think I'm skeptical about war, Kennedy continued, adding that he thinks the U.S. should quote-unquote settle the war between Russia and Ukraine. On his campaign website, Kennedy emphasizes honest government, healing the political divide, championing environmental issues, honest government, healing the political divide, championing environmental issues, supporting government assistance for the impoverished, ending foreign wars, and restoring freedom of speech as his core issues. He has also tried to address the claims that he is anti-vaccine. People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine,

Starting point is 00:05:45 he wrote in a book calling for mercury to be removed from vaccines. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible. Despite the historical failures of primary challengers to incumbents and independent candidates, Kennedy's polling numbers have consistently hovered around 20%, roughly one in five Democratic voters, more than enough to make a mark on the 2024 presidential race. Today, we're going to take a look at how his campaign is being received by the left and the right, and then my take. First up, let's start with what the left is

Starting point is 00:06:39 saying. The left is mostly distrustful of Kennedy's populist appeal, comparing him most closely to Trump. Most are labeling him a crackpot, saying his anti-vaccine theories and radical brand of environmentalism are too dangerous and too far out on the fringe. Others say he's the distrustful anti-authoritarian we need to get the country back on track. In the Washington Post, Matt Bayh called Kennedy's campaign pure Trump. In the Washington Post, Matt Bayh called Kennedy's campaign pure Trump. It doesn't surprise me at all that a Trumpian candidate would emerge inside the Democratic Party. Someone trying to run for president with the same cynical mix of star power and misinformation, Bayh said. Kennedy might not align with Trump on policy, but he has the same dark

Starting point is 00:07:18 strand of populism mixed with self-grander and self-created reality. Like Trump, Kennedy does not have a day of actual governing experience, but loads of celebrity. Kennedy seeks to channel a destructive distrust in the electorate, Bayh wrote. In a Trumpian monologue at his campaign launch, Kennedy sketched the bleak tableau of a government wholly owned and controlled by corporations of nefarious powers in both parties hell-bent on enslaving people with bureaucratic mandates. His family has criticized his anti-vaccine stances, showing the distance between JFK's liberalism and RFK Jr.'s Trumpian theme of trashing government and science while stoking fear and resentment. In the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis said Kennedy Jr. was always a crackpot,

Starting point is 00:08:00 he just switched political tribes. Though he lacks anything close to his father's resume, he has spent decades as an influential conscience of the left, promoting the worst kind of left-wing environmentalism, Lewis said. Most recently, this involved helping convince his former brother-in-law, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, to shut down a nuclear plant, which predictably led to New York State burning more carbon. Arguably even more damaging than this environmentalism that has led to more fossil fuel burning is that he's promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. In a 2005 interview with Jon Stewart, he spewed his anti-science rhetoric on vaccines, which Stewart said he quote-unquote appreciated, Lewis wrote. Since COVID-19, former Trump advisor

Starting point is 00:08:41 Steve Bannon has embraced him and encouraged him to challenge Biden. This is to say that while RFK Jr. may be an imbecile with no real qualifications, both sides of the American political spectrum have embraced him at different points when he told them what they wanted to hear. In counterpunch, Anish Shivani suggested the left should give RFK Jr. a chance. If Joe Biden was hoping to sail through to renomination despite abysmal approval ratings, that's not going to happen anymore, even if all the potential establishment candidates have backed out, Schiavone said. Kennedy is picking up the baton of protest against extreme corporate power allied with state tyranny. To these, he is adding a unique poetic calibration of his own, which comes from his unmatched personal experience as the nephew and son of a slain president and a possible future president,

Starting point is 00:09:29 respectively. To the extent that liberals have bought into the compulsions of the national security state in recent years with unquestioning obedience because populist nationalism on the right is presented as an existential threat by the organs of the same national security state, liberals in fact create the conditions for resistance to empire, mostly on the right, that takes distorted form, Shivani said. RFK Jr.'s is the voice of rationality that we badly need, able to connect the immediate anguish to the larger factors that set us up to accept our assaulted state and do nothing about it. And he's able to communicate all the ways we are poisoning

Starting point is 00:10:05 ourselves and all life on earth and how we might return to health. All right, that is it for the leftist thing, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right is divided on Kennedy, with some supporting his anti-establishment tack and others wondering why the right is backing him. Some say his candidacy is a reckoning for the Democratic Party. Others criticize the right for embracing the authoritarian Democrat, who is a paranoid crank. In the free press, Peter Svodnik called Kennedy the Democratic Party's reckoning. The most recent CNN poll shows Kennedy winning one in five voters, Sivodnik said, while Biden's favorability rating is 35%. In an interview with

Starting point is 00:10:51 Sivodnik, Kennedy said that Biden is a function of a system that a growing majority of Americans don't trust. I see him doing things that I know at his core he cannot possibly believe in. The censorship that's coming out of the White House, it's so contrary to everything that he stood for over his life. Kennedy further decried the relationship between the most powerful technology companies and the American government. It's become a war party, Kennedy said of the Democrats. It's become the party of the neocons. It's become the party of Wall Street and the party of censorship, which I think was, you know, antithetical to liberal values. Kennedy's popularity is due to a real confusion and sense of loss on the left, Savodnik wrote, and just as it upended right-wing norms and expectations, it will upend the whole progressive project. It will redefine it. In the National Review, Noah Rothman dismissed Kennedy, asking

Starting point is 00:11:41 why his supporters are backing him. There's been quite a lot of debate, for now mostly academic, about what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s primary challenge to Joe Biden says about this political moment, Rothman said. Some have said there's a marketplace for his heterodox ideas. Others characterize much of that heterodoxy as paranoia, but admit the public demand for irrationality. I come down on the side of the ledger that views Kennedy's political outlook as, on balance, crankish. As a blunt instrument, Kennedy's candidacy has a lot to say for it if you're a disaffected Democratic voter who wants to broadcast displeasure with the party as an enterprise, Rothman said. Kennedy's candidacy, along with the mystic self-help guru Marianne Williamson's, are telling a consistent story about Joe Biden's presidency

Starting point is 00:12:25 and his appeal to Democratic primary voters. What these alternative candidates say about the candidate themselves, however, is too nebulous to constitute anything other than a negative verdict on the incumbent. In Reason, Matt Welch criticized libertarians and or right of center journalists expressing strange new respect for Hugo Chavez admiring Scion of the establishment. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried

Starting point is 00:13:05 history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The newly Kennedy curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser's potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies, the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates, Welch wrote. But recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and a potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he'll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy's son has

Starting point is 00:13:45 repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science. In a September 2014 interview, he argued that the Koch brothers should be in jail and politicians who were equally skeptical about global warming were contemptible human beings whom he wished there was a law that you can punish them under. He wrote an entire piece headlined Jailing Climate Deniers. This episode was not some momentary anti-speech glitch to RFK Jr.'s otherwise civil libertarian matrix, yet he now tries to claim the mantle of anti-censorship for being on the receiving end of big social media's government-pressured pandemic speech policing. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. First, I don't want to spend too much time on the anti-vaxxer label because I think it is mostly unimportant. RFK Jr.'s views on vaccines could be charitably described as nuanced

Starting point is 00:14:47 and critically described as totally contradictory. This quote, I am pro-vaccine, I had all six of my children vaccinated, I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century, and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health, paired with his belief in the debunked nonsense that vaccines can cause autism, basically says it all. And yes, it is debunked. As Savodnik put it, under what the right is saying, there is zero scientific evidence to back this up. The 1998

Starting point is 00:15:16 article in the journal Lancet that first posited a link between vaccines and autism has been debunked and retracted. I will say this, though. The dismissal of RFK Jr. as little more than some rabid anti-vaxxer says more about the corporate media's laziness and groupthink than it does about him as a person. What I find far more interesting is why he's getting the support of 1 in 5 Democrats and why he could potentially get a larger share of voters in an actual election. Much like Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016, I think RFK Jr. is a reminder that for much of our country, things are just not going that well. And COVID-19 has accelerated this. Fundamentally,

Starting point is 00:15:56 this reality is what so many people writing about politics from Washington, D.C. or New York City miss. It's the environment he's running in more than the candidate. It is not hard for a new face to tell those voters the story that the only way forward is to burn down the empire. Today, almost half of all Americans are in low-wage jobs, paying median annual wages of $18,000. Most middle-class Americans can't support their cost of living. The Rust Belt continues to rust. Our cities are too expensive and increasingly dangerous, while the suburbs are out of reach for many. Health insurance prices continue to rise, as does the cost of everything else. Our young adults are dying of addiction and

Starting point is 00:16:35 crippled by anxiety and depression. There's another major war in Europe, one we're already dumping money into and seem increasingly likely to get dragged into. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has now allied itself with intelligence agencies, corporate elites, and big tech, apparently willing to silence dissenters while totally abandoning its once-vibrant anti-war credentials. The Republican Party is on an anti-abortion crusade, can't find a cultural issue it won't go to war on, elevates unqualified extremist candidates, and seems increasingly uninterested in the ideals of democracy. The leaders of both parties are basically loathed by half the people who are supposed to love them, and yet we're likely to face a rerun of 2020 at

Starting point is 00:17:15 the top, something the vast majority of voters don't want. All of this comes after three years of fighting a pandemic where the quote-unquote experts got a lot wrong, and even with hindsight being mostly removed from the pandemic, nobody seems to agree on what we got right and what we got wrong. More than one million people died from or with the virus right here in America, impacting an untold number of families. Thousands of others were injured by the vaccines meant to save us from that virus or living with never-ending symptoms after contracting it. Amidst all this, some groundbreaking journalism has given us an unprecedented and shocking look at how our government, mainstream media, and big tech conglomerates work behind the scenes on everything from the Trump-Russia

Starting point is 00:17:58 collusion narrative to where COVID-19 originated. This is the environment RFK Jr. is entering. 19 originated. This is the environment RFK Jr. is entering. It's much like the environment in 2016, only all the things a candidate like Trump or Bernie was supposed to address appear to have gotten worse. Kennedy's appeal doesn't come through a traditional story over immigration or gun control or abortion, but it's through a story about something much more sinister, something in the shadows, something darker and more malevolent. We live in a dying environment under the watchful eye of government surveillance and the crushing weight of our jobs moving offshore and our medicine making us sick. That story's appeal doesn't just speak to the weakness of Biden, but to the readiness of a significant portion of both parties to listen to it. It's a story about the psyche of a country that is increasingly distrustful of

Starting point is 00:18:46 everything around them and finding very, very few reasons not to double down on that distrust. Do I think RFK Jr. has a chance? No, of course not. He has zero establishment support or experience, and he is mostly unknown to voters who seem open to him primarily because his name is Kennedy. He is out of step on the environment with too many moderates and on COVID-19 with too many Democrats. He is basically an unabashed far-left progressive who also happens to distrust vaccines and loathes the intelligence agencies that are now in vogue on the left. Much like Marianne Williamson, he shouldn't be a viable candidate. I don't believe anyone with zero governing experience should be able to walk into the hardest job in the world. I stand firm in that belief,

Starting point is 00:19:29 and I think his candidacy will ultimately burn out. Yet, I also think his relevance now, even if only for a brief moment, is instructive. It's a reminder of how many people in our country feel their views are not represented by the politicians we have, and how unsatisfied so many are with our political duopoly. No matter how you feel about him, that'd be a great lesson to take from Kennedy's brief moment in the sun, one that politicians on both sides would be wise to learn. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Matt in Anchorage, Alaska. Matt said, greetings from Alaska. I've got a question about the

Starting point is 00:20:10 seemingly inevitable Trump v. Biden too. Has there been much talk about Biden getting a new VP? As you've mentioned a few times, Kamala Harris has just not been popular. Trump, assuming he wins the nomination, will definitely have a new vice president candidate. Wouldn't it be smart politically for Biden to add someone to the bottom of the ticket? So I think smart money is on a Biden-Harris ticket out of the Democratic Party. I mean, it's basically a guarantee at this point. You make a good point about her approval rating. If Biden's approval rating is a problem at 41%, then Harris's 38% isn't doing anything to help. As many of the pieces we quoted today mentioned, Democratic voters aren't very excited about Biden. So it's a pretty simple calculus. Take an unpopular, unexciting ticket, subtract an

Starting point is 00:20:57 unpopular, unexciting VP, add a more popular, exciting VP, and you get a more popular and more exciting ticket. But there's more to it than that. For one, despite her underwhelming job performance thus far, she and President Biden reportedly have a good working relationship. Second, DNC Chair Donna Brazile has suggested she will not be replaced and flat out said she will be the nominee if Biden were to decide not to run. But most importantly, it's not just the thing incumbents seem to do anymore. The last time an incumbent president ran for a re-election with their elected vice president was 1944, when President Roosevelt swapped out Henry A. Wallace for Harry S. Truman.

Starting point is 00:21:36 Making that change would signal to voters that there's something wrong with the current dynamic in the White House, and do we really think today's Democratic Party and today's President Biden would want to send that kind of message? Even if the Democrats could get a running mate to make a stronger ticket, and it's not like new and exciting prominent Democrats are flooding the national landscape, I just don't see it happening. Democrats are running as the party of stability, and Biden as the candidate of compromise. I don't think they want to rock the boat ahead of a likely showdown with Donald Trump. All right, that is it for today's reader question. A quick reminder not to forget, we are hosting an event in Philadelphia on August 3rd. Tickets for that event are now live. You're going to hear me promoting it a lot until you go buy your tickets. We got to sell this

Starting point is 00:22:24 event out. That way we can start booking some others across the country. Guests will be announced soon and details can be found with a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our under the radar section. Insurers are fleeing California. This week, State Farm said it would stop selling new insurance policies to homeowners in California, worsening an already dire situation for thousands of residents who face a consistent threat of wildfires. State Farm's provider of homeowners insurance said it made the decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.

Starting point is 00:23:08 Some commentators on the left blame the decision on worsening climate change, while others on the right suggested it is California's hostile insurance environment where there are stringent regulations on how insurers can price plans. Reuters has a roundup and there are links to both those arguments in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of Democratic voters who back Biden for next year's Democratic ticket is 60%, according to a new CNN poll. The percentage of Democratic voters who back Robert F. Kennedy is 20%. The percentage of Democratic voters who back Marianne Williamson is 8%. The percentage of Democratic voters who said they'd support an unnamed someone else was also 8%. The percentage of Biden's primary voters who said they were definitely going to support him was 58%, while 42% said they could change their minds. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day story. Scientists in Denmark believe they've discovered a new tool in the fight against climate change, powdered rock.

Starting point is 00:24:09 Rock flour, as they call it, comes from rocks that were ground down beneath the massive glaciers, can be spread on fields to absorb massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere while also increasing crop yield. Plus, since the rock flour that researchers use comes from mud flowing from underneath the ice sheet in Greenland, the supply is virtually unlimited. The process has the potential to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. You can't have very sophisticated things with all kinds of high-tech components, Professor Minnick-Rosing from the University of Copenhagen said. So the simpler, the better, and nothing is simpler than mud. The Guardian has the story, and there's a link to it in today's episode description.

Starting point is 00:24:58 All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, we are going to be coming out tomorrow with a members, subscribers only Friday edition. It is an interview with Daniel Stone about his new book, Undue Hate, in which we talk about why people feel the way they do about folks they disagree with and what they get wrong when they disagree with other people. A reminder that Friday editions come out for members only. You can become a member at readtangle.com backslash membership. All right, everybody. If not tomorrow, we'll see you back here on Monday. Have a good one. Peace. was designed by Magdalena Bukova, who's also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more on Tangle, please go to readtangle.com

Starting point is 00:25:50 and check out our website. We'll see you next time. inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.

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Tangle - RFK Jr. is running against Biden.

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