Today, Explained - RFK goes rogue

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ditching his family’s party. David Freedlander explains how the candidate might have just gone from being a problem for the current president to a problem for the former one. This episode was produced by Jon Ehrens with help from Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Robert Francis Kennedy. What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. No, not that one. His large adult son. I need my speech. Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was running for president as a Democrat. Of course he was. He's a Kennedy.

You can't read anything. You can't read anything. But as of this week, he's running as an Independent. It's upside down. It's upside down. Who's going to hurt more as a result, the current president or the former one? Coming up on Today Explained. What?

This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout. Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. David Friedlander, I'm a contributor to Politico magazine. Great. And you recently wrote a piece for Politico titled RFK Jr.'s ultimate vanity project. Why did you call it that? I think Robert Kennedy is not going to be the next president of the United States. We should be loathe to make predictions over the last decade or so of American politics because they often proved to be wrong. But, you know, it does sort of seem like this is a little bit of a quixotic run and it's not really clear,

you know, why he's doing it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to be running for president because he got kicked off of Instagram during the COVID vaccine rollout. And he's really mad about that. They had to invent a new word called malinformation to censor people like me.

There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. He says he was kicked off for what was a sort of fact about the Wuhan lab. And it was at least, you know, in dispute about whether or not he was right. What Instagram said at the time was he was kicked off for serial inaccuracies about COVID and about the vaccine. We are saving people's lives and we're saving democracy because children should not be getting this vaccine. So he seems like he's sort of running for like this banner of free speech. That's the sort of like in many ways, the kind of crux of his candidacy. Were you there when he kicked off his initial campaign as a Democrat, David? I was. I was in Boston. Part of it felt like a kind of, you know, old home meeting of sort of Kennedy fans, if not really Kennedy family members, because most of his family has disavowed him. I've listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president.

But it was this weird mix of voters who sort of like traditionally, I think, are thought of as being sort of on the left side of the spectrum. There was a kind of like hippie-ish quality to them. And they were concerned about wellness. They were anti-vaccine, but a lot of their anti-vaccine concerns were about, you know, big pharma and, you know, healthy living and sort of natural living in a way. That kind of vibe has drifted into like the sort of right wing of the American political spectrum. And it includes a sort of distrust of government, suspicion of big institutions, a suspicion of business, all of which, you know, I think are now kind of more conservative and right leaning. I don't actually ask this of journalists on this show that often, but you wrote about the speech itself in such vivid detail. I found it so bonkers. I wonder, would you read a section of your piece to us?

Would that be too much to ask? No, no, no. When Kennedy kicked off his candidacy in April at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, he began by talking about the history of the Kennedys in America. There was legalized oppression against Irish Catholics. Segregated into the origins of the American Revolution, it was really, he claimed, about the corrupt merger of state and corporate power. Bounced over to Gary Powers getting shot down over the Soviet Union in his U-2 spy plane. And the Eisenhower administration denied that we had a U-2 program.

That was 1960. Then on to the Pentagon Papers, his father's 1968 presidential campaign, the Penn Central Railroad's pollution of the Hudson River. Penn Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and a half foot pipe in the Groton-Armond rail yard. How God reveals himself through art and nature. God talks to human beings through many vectors. He then paused, saying he's about halfway through.

I want to move on to another issue that nobody's going to really want to talk about, but I need to. Before launching a new discourse on COVID, lockdown, censorship, of course, the vanishing middle class, how in March 2020, public health authorities went to every Black neighborhood and locked down the basketball courts, which, what? The smallpox outbreak that tore through the Continental Army in 1775, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the industry capture of government agencies, the chronic disease epidemic, the origins of75, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the industry capture of government agencies, the chronic disease epidemic, the origins of autism, the war in Ukraine, the

national debt, WMDs in Iraq, vaccines, and Pete Buttigieg's stewardship of the Department of Transportation. He's not a fan. Almost entirely missing were any plans to tackle democratic priorities like raising wages, decreasing inequality, combating climate change, reducing gun violence, or wrestling with aspiring costs of health care. Every Friday, Keith goes and picks up 30 oysters, brings them to my house, and I pay for the oysters. He shucks them.

He makes a thing of it. The speech clocked in at nearly two hours. In the middle of it, I wondered if Kennedy believed he had to do this because it was the last speech he would ever give. About three quarters of the way through, just as Kennedy was talking about how Saudi Arabia and Brazil were ditching the U.S. dollars in new trade agreements for their own currencies, an alarm went off in the hotel ballroom and a voice came over the loudspeaker telling everyone to calmly leave. There was an emergency. Kennedy told the crowd that an aide had told him,

There is no emergency that affects us, and tried to make a joke that the powers that an aide had told him, there is no emergency that affects us, and tried to make a joke that the powers that be were trying to shut him up. Nice try. But then he just kept on plowing through, willfully oblivious to the sirens. All of which is to say, the man can be kind of exhausting. If you've ever found yourself in a college dorm room talking with someone who can't believe how you don't know how Mumia Abdul-Jamal was framed, or how about the fluoride in the water, because you have been turned into a sheep by the corporate overlords who control the media and the government.

Well, talking with Kennedy is kind of like that. This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years. I mean, you know, it's funny, like when he, when he first came into the race, I mean, there was like, he had a kind of 15 to 20% that he was polling in the Democrat primary polls. And I think that was really like alarming to a lot of political pundits, professional Democrats, you know, is this 20% as he just started campaigning? Is it going to grow? Is it going to be 30%, 40%? And instead, it kind of sunk a little bit, the more he spoke. A lot of that 15% or 20% or whatever it was, you know, there's just a place for people who sort of aren't totally sold on Joe Biden or who are mad with him

to kind of park their disapproval of him. And, you know, some of it was probably a little bit of a reverence for the Kennedy name or familiarity with the Kennedy name. And then some of it was this like anti-vax, conspiracy laden, wellness driven vote that doesn't really get aired a lot in Democratic Party politics. And there are some fears that that vote is like bigger than we know that it's sort of growing on Facebook, but it doesn't feel as if it's like a major block in the Democratic Party right now. So when does it become clear to RFK Jr. that he's got to ditch Democratic politics and run as an independent? Well, it's funny.

The places where he got like the most interest in his campaign and was promoted were on right wing media sites. He was like the favorite of right wing podcasters. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not going to win the Democratic nomination. What you have is this anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian populist movement that doesn't trust the administrative state, doesn't trust the deep state. Twitter space hosts and YouTube personalities. Fox News had him on several times. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is here to react. Good morning to you. Morning.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., welcome. Thank you, Iris. Bobby Kennedy Jr., thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Mr. Kennedy, welcome back to the program. It's always good to have you with us. Thanks for having me, Martha. What was sort of unique about it was it was kind of obvious that the reason they had him on was because he was a Democrat who was willing to criticize Joe Biden. So, in other words, here's this guy who sort of sees the world as this multilayered conspiracy that kind of infuses all that we see and touch and taste.

He was actually in many ways the kind of like subject of a conspiracy and an unwitting one, if that makes sense. Like he was, in some ways, he was the sort of useful dude of all of these right-wingers who liked the fact that he was willing to criticize a Democrat. And he seemed sort of unaware of that. I'm proud that President Trump likes me. But regardless, it was really where he was finding an audience was in those spaces.

And I think that's why he ended up leaving the Democratic Party. So he has another kickoff on Monday when there's no other major news going on, conveniently for him. How does it go? I think it mostly went fine, but I still think he hasn't figured out that the point of these things is to get viral clips that can go on CNN, MSNBC, maybe the evening news, or at least on social media. And he just kind of tends to talk and talk and talk. You know, running as an independent is like a little bit of a better fit for him. One of the problems or issues of his candidacy was that because he was always sort of being cheered on by right wingers, he would say things that they want to hear, you know, on

guns. I'm not going to take away anybody's guns. Even kind of on the environment in a funny way, when he would be asked about them by mainstream news reporters, he would have to kind of quickly backtrack because he was, I remember that he was still like running in a Democratic Party primary. And so I think that this enables him to not have to do that anymore. Do you think an independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is different in terms of campaigning than a Democratic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Well, you know, he's funny because he's like a lefty Democrat from like another era, a kind of like pre-Bernie Sanders era. He's kind of a 2004 version of a lefty Democrat,

which doesn't really exist anymore. It's a kind of Democrat who focuses on the environment in this kind of neighborhood-y backyard kind of way, where it's about like clean water, you know, not having sort of like new development in open spaces, but not about like global warming and climate change. These issues that are now like really what the BS sort of lefty environmentalists are all about. My approach to climate, I mean, my approach to reducing, to energy, let's say my approach to energy is using free markets and not top down control.

Now that he's running, not in the Democratic Party primary, he's kind of free to not pay heed to Democratic Party politics in a way, which he was doing a poor job of anyway. I mean, his sort of training is as an environmental lawyer. And so you would think he would sort of be foregrounding that the latest activists on the Democratic left are saying about the environment. But he's not really. I mean, he's sort of talking about the environment in this

river keepers sort of way and not about, you know, zeroing out carbon emissions. So I think he's just sort of a better fit for the kind of like idiosyncratic politics he was appealing to anyway. Spoiler alert, Bobby Jr. is not going to be president, but how he might impact this race when we're back on Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards

to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained.

Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Explained. 2024 Explained. Today Explained is back. David, can I ask you about third party candidates for a moment? Can we do a little history? I think the thing to know about American politics is that it's just not built for third party candidacies. The last really successful third party in American politics was the Republican Party. Most of those who were members of the Free Soil Party eventually became members of the Republican Party, which also began its life as an anti-slavery third party. You know, in 1992, Ross Perot's Reform Party got about 20 percent of the vote. I don't have any spin doctors. I don't have any speechwriters, probably shows. And there's still been like a lot of debate about whether or not, you know, that sort of took the presidency away from George H.W. Bush and handed

it to Bill Clinton. I think, you know, the numbers seem to say that that wasn't the case. But, you know, what Perot did in that race was he really sort of changed the conversation and made it on terrain that was friendly to Bill Clinton. And then, you know, more recently, I think what third parties mostly have done is sort of play a spoiler role, getting very, very, very little of the vote. But in the last 20 years or so, our elections have just been so close that even if a little bit of your coalition kind of drifts away, it can hand the election to the other guy. I think that there's some evidence that we saw that in 2000 with Ralph Nader's Green Party bid, you know, handing the election to George W. Bush.

And then, you know, again in 2016, you know, Jill Stein, again, just did not, by any measure, did not do very well in that election, but kind of took enough votes away from Hillary Clinton that handed the election to Donald Trump. And who can even remember what happened next? What is it about the American political system that makes a third party run so challenging? The issue is that in our sort of two party system, what ends up happening is that the parties are kind of this coalition of various factions. Like in most other countries, you wouldn't have a Democratic Party that had both like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and AOC in it and Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat. They would all be separate parties.

But what happens in American politics is they all kind of become subsumed into this one party. And the same thing happens on the Republican side, where you really wouldn't have Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump be in the same party. But again, what ends up happening is that our politics are just, because we have this two-party system and because our politics are so closely divided, and because we also have this kind of like winner-take-all political system, it just doesn't make sense for anybody to kind of go their own way and stake out their own path, right? I mean, think of it this way. We have this electoral college, and the way it works is that if

you win a state by a single vote, you then get all of those electoral college votes, right? So, you know, Ross Perot did pretty well in the election. He got 20% of the popular vote and he got zero electoral votes. And so when you have this winner-take-all system, it means that all the forces are kind of geared towards like defeating the other side, rather than on your own sort of pet political project. Unless you really do feel, you know, the sort of righteousness of your cause, which bubbles up every so often, but that ends up just kind of getting again, just kind of absorbed into the two major political parties. Tell me, I don't think it's just RFK jr running as a third party candidate this time around can

you give us the slate yeah that's right i mean so kennedy is running as an independent it was also last week cornell west the um philosopher academic social justice activist who had been running for the green party nomination he was no longer going running for the Green Party nomination. He was no longer going to seek the Green Party nomination, which is what Ralph Dader and Jill Stein ran on. He was actually also going to run as an independent. This two-party system that impedes, it gets in the way of the unleashing of the kind of policies of abolishing poverty and homelessness. Now, pause here and note that, you know, it's really hard to run like as a true independent without a sort of party backing you as both Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy are trying to do. It takes a lot of money. It takes

a lot of like legal know-how. It takes a lot of effort to get on the ballot. So I think in both cases, we're going to have to see how they do. They're just onerous rules to get on the ballot. If you don't have major party backing, I mean, in a lot of states, like for example, the Green Party, they're on the ballot because they want candidates every year. They are a small party, but a national political party. And so they're used to this and they're already on the ballot. But if you're not on the ballot, you have to go out and gather signatures. It costs money. You have all these sort of hoops you have to jump through that I don't think these people necessarily all thought through. And then there's also a third

option out there, which is no labels, which is this group that they're a little hard to define. The problem is not the third choice that no labels is offering the American people. The problem is the American people are not buying what the two parties are selling anymore. They don't have a label, so they're a little hard to define. But they sort of believe that there is this moderate middle in American politics that is being unaddressed by the two major parties. And they are on the ballot in several swing states, and they are planning on running a candidate. My guess will be, I think, a sort of like one Republican and one Democrat as a ticket to compete alongside Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Democrats are really, really worried about this. I think they're

very worried about Cornel West, maybe a little less worried about Robert F. Kennedy because they think he may take votes from Donald Trump right now. But this no labels thing, it seems like what they're trying to do is kind of be a party for, in a way, for Republicans who are sort of just don't really like Donald Trump, but also think that Democrats are too liberal. And some Democrats who think the same thing, they're also hanging out there. Is it fair to say that of all these other candidates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the biggest chance of being a spoiler in this race? As of now, I think he's polling the highest. And I think that may change as more people sort of tune in to the stuff he's saying. And the interesting thing about Robert F. Kennedy is that literally until yesterday, he was a Democrat. There's a belief that he may actually

take more votes from Donald Trump because, you know, a lot of the things he's talking about are the sort of like fringe elements of the MAGA coalition. I mean, the vaccine suspicion, the sort of suspicion of 5G wireless, you know, a kind of return to a kind of small and local community building kind of way that that sort of divorced from the national government. And so you can see him sort of hurting Trump more than hurting Biden. How do you think he might feel if he manages to throw this race in favor of the former president or the current one? Would that be something of an accomplishment for him? Would he then go away? So he's not going to go away, I think, is my answer. I mean, he's really, you know, he has this sort of like, you know, the fervor of the righteous and he believes in his cause and he believes that he has been censored from speaking about his cause which is a ridiculous thing to

think i mean even when he was kicked off instagram he was still on massive other had massive fall into other social media platforms i think know, wrote or contributed to something like three or four books that are available on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. So all of which is a long way of saying, no, I don't think he would be satisfied or go away regardless. He's here to stay. That's right. And many Kennedys after him, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's funny, right, because they're all sort of disavowing him. All these Kennedys that I don't think anyone quite really knew who they were until they were listed as disavowing their brother or cousin or uncle. It's been great and terrible publicity for the Kennedys.

Exactly. Exactly. David Friedlander catches words at Politico and also in New York Magazine. Our program today was produced by John Ahrens with help from Hadi Mawagdi. They both had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, David Herman, and me. I'm Sean Ramos from the rest of the Today Explained team includes Halima Shah, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, Amanda Llewellyn, Siona Petros, Isabel Angel, Abishai Artsy, Patrick Boyd, Rob Byers, Amna Alsadi, Miranda Kennedy, and Abhi Noel King. We maybe use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. And Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of Vox,

which is totally free, thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give. Thanks! Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова