Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
BONUS: What's New With RFK Jr.?
Because we live in hell, here is last month's bonus episode about RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign with a new intro about what he could do at HHS.
See you next year!
Michael: My first thought when I was looking at the election results, I was like, “Oh, we're going to have to keep talking about this fucking guy for the next four years.”
Aubrey: Yeah, you're correct.
Michael: I was like, “I want to make this about me.”
Aubrey: The guy who works from home.
Michael: [laughs] I know the literal luckiest person who's literally living his dream [Aubrey laughs] as a journalist has to talk about obnoxious paintball.
Aubrey: I absolutely had a conversation last night with a family friend who was fucking fluoride pilled.
Michael: No.
Aubrey: And I was like, “I can't, I can't, I can't do it, I can’t do it.”
Michael: Well, here we are. Listeners, we love you. We miss you.
Aubrey: Are you tagging us in? What are we?
Michael: I guess. I mean, are we even tagging for this? I don't know.
Aubrey: I don't really know what the approach is.
Michael: I mean, I guess we should just say welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that will eventually start recommending raw milk and stuff, because otherwise this [Aubrey laughs] administration is going to put us in fucking jail.
Aubrey: The Onion bought Infowars, but we bought the supplement business. [Michael laughs] Surprise, get your brain force from us.
Michael: I'm in so many group chats where people keep posting links and I just keep replying with, “We live in hell.” I don't know what else to say. [Aubrey laughs] I don't even click on the links anymore. I'm just like, “We live in hell.”
Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon.
Michael: I'm Michael Hobbes. Let's get this over with. Let's get this over with.
Aubrey: We're here for reasons that we don't want to be. On November 14, 2024, Donald Trump officially announced RFK Jr. as his nominee for HHS secretary. We did a follow up on RFK Jr. when we thought he was riding off into the sunset and this was going to be the last time we had to talk to him. It's so painful to think in those terms.
Michael: Sweet Aubrey. Sweet Michael.
Aubrey: We are releasing that bonus episode onto the main feed today, and before we get into that, we're going to talk a little bit about what has happened since RFK Jr.'s nomination and about how folks in the US can impact this nomination. So, the announcement of RFK Jr.’s nomination leads to a bunch of really weird politics makes for strange bedfellow moments.
Michael: Oh, yeah. God.
Aubrey: And a lot of those feel to me, as someone who's been making this show with you for several years now, like we're getting the band back together.
Michael: Yeah, I know.
Aubrey: On November 19th, Michael Pollan tweets a link to a piece from The American Conservative called They're Lying About RFK Jr.
Michael: Wait, what? I didn't even know this.
Aubrey: Yes, Pollan has since clarified that he's not endorsing RFK Jr. But-
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: Come on, man. Regardless of whether or not he feels like that was technically an endorsement, he did tweet out something that ostensibly reads as strong support, right?
Michael: Yeah or at least like, he's being falsely accused of things, which is not the thing to focus on right now. He's also being correctly accused of promoting antivax beliefs. Children have died of measles outbreaks that he has been connected to. So, that's the stuff that people are upset about.
Aubrey: He's riding so hard right now on like, “RTs do not equal endorsements.” In his bio where you're just like come on man.
Michael: Come on man, why is everyone so dumb? Why is everything so dumb, all the time?
Aubrey: Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, tweeted his excitement about RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary.
Michael: What? We live in hell. I'm just going to keep saying it.
Aubrey: On November 19th, Pete Evans got on Telegram to announce that his new cookbook, Healthy Food for Healthy Kids, is being published by RFK Jr.'s Children's Health Defense Organization. This is getting billed as they're writing a book together, like their coauthors. That's not quite it. It's being published by an organization that RFK Jr. is the board chair and founder of.
Michael: I'm sure the actual recipes are like, “We'd like to feed your children a bowl of the measles virus. Just a large green bowl of goop just entirely consisting of viruses.”
Aubrey: Suspended in pure vitamin A.
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Aubrey: So, that's what I wanted to do next is talk through what RFK Jr., has specifically said he's going to do in office as HHS secretary. One of the clearest mission statements that we've gotten from RFK Jr., came to us, of course via Twitter in a tweet on October 25, 2024, he wrote the following.
Michael: He says, “FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by Pharma. If you work at the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. One, preserve your records and two, pack your bags. Well, if they're leaving, Robert, what's the point of preserving their records?”
Aubrey: Hey, future staff-
Michael: I fucking hate you but please help me achieve my goals.
Aubrey: Also, I'm sick and tired of you suppressing sunshine.
Michael: I love that. It's just a list of things which are not suppressed.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Again, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been extensively studied and the results indicate that they don't work for COVID. Vitamins are something your doctor has fucking told you about. Go out and get exercise and get some sunshine completely establishment advice from like every public health agency. It's like, “This is just things that are not suppressed” and then it's mixed in with things like raw milk where it's like, yeah, it's actually good to like kill bacteria.
Aubrey: You don't want TB milk. You're not into it.
Michael: [laughs] Oh, my God.
Aubrey: He's also against the suppression of nutraceuticals. [Michael laughs] Nutraceutical is a fucking marketing term.
Michael: And that's a huge benefit to corporate interest too, that you're basically going to allow companies to market their products with whatever like, “Oh, this will like cure cancer” and then they can sell it at fucking Whole Foods or whatever.
Aubrey: Right. He's not against industry involvement in healthcare.
Michael: No.
Aubrey: He's against regulated industry involvement. [laughs]
Michael: Exactly, exactly.
Aubrey: Healthcare, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: He keeps using the language of like, “I'm going to stand up to these industries and I'm going to stand up to blah, blah, blah.”
Michael: Yeah, sure.
Aubrey: And you're like, “No, you're going to open the door for them and show them in.”
Michael: You want it to be even easier to lie to us in America. I don't get enough scam phone calls you want me to get more?
Aubrey: I mean, I think this is very similar to what he says and has said about vaccines, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: He keeps saying he just wants the data.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: But safety data and long-term research are publicly available and have been for a really long time.
Michael: The funniest possible outcome of this would be that he takes charge and he calls a press conference and he's like, “We looked into it and Fauci was actually correct.”
Aubrey: Yeah, I told you I just wanted the information, now I have the information.
Michael: Turns out everyone's trying their hardest and now we'll move on that basis.
Aubrey: So, essentially, on the vaccine front, there are a couple of things that he can do around vaccines. It's pretty unheard of to revoke the approval of a drug or vaccine, and that would be exceedingly difficult since so many states have state level mandates for children to be vaccinated.
Michael: Good, good, good.
Aubrey: He can shape the kinds of clinical trials that are required of drug companies. He can slow down the review of those trials and the approval processes. There's stuff that he can do to just gum up the works. But in terms of like broad mandates that like no one's getting a vaccine, like that kind of stuff is much, much, much trickier to pull off and a lot of it doesn't live at the federal level.
Michael: Although a friend of mine is a public high school teacher in Seattle and had his first student with pertussis this year, which is the P in the DTAP vaccine. But now people are not getting the vaccine. So, we're getting whooping cough or we're making whooping cough great again.
Aubrey: He has also said that he wants to defluoridate all US water supplies. This is a future mega episode for us.
Michael: Yeah, I know you've been working this for months.
Aubrey: His views on this counter the CDC's own long-standing recommendation which lauds water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health victories of the 20th century.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: He could issue recommendations and like suggest to local governments that they should defluoridate, but he doesn't actually have the power to flip a switch and actually defluorinate water. What would need to happen is that Congress would have to ban fluoride nationwide or the EPA would have to put fluoride on a dangerous chemicals list. Neither of those are in his control solely.
Michael: But they are in control of the people who run all three branches of government and the EPA.
Aubrey: He keeps saying like, “On day one we're going to defluorinate.” And it's like, “No, you're not. You can't do that.”
Michael: It'll be like day three or four. [Aubrey laughs] Don't worry everybody.
Aubrey: Many of the changes that we've talked about here would require a process called rulemaking in the US changing federal rules, which are like the guidelines on how to implement the law, requires a lot of public disclosure and public comment. So, there will be these long like 30- or 90-day public comment periods that are opportunities to publicly push back, to organize and to arm staff within those agencies with some additional reasons that X, Y or Z is a bad idea or a great idea or whatever. I would argue that is where a ton of stuff is going to happen at HHS. So, I think all of us just got to get better at paying attention to federal rulemaking and being prepared to submit comment on stuff and all of that, right?
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: I want to talk a little bit about what happens next, where we go from here.
Michael: Mike and Aubrey lose their minds slowly and just become just a series of vowels.
Aubrey: You think this, what we've been recording today has been slow? [Michael laughs] In order to be confirmed as HHS Secretary, RFK Jr., has to be confirmed by the Senate. If you are in the US, you actually can impact this process. You can call the Capitol switchboard directly and tell them whether or not you think RFK Jr. should be confirmed. That phone number is 202-224-3121. This is the thing that people tell you to do a lot. The reason that they tell you to do it a lot is that it really matters. It's easy to get fatalistic about this kind of stuff, but it's important to remember that this is not actually a done deal.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: When you call the Capitol switchboard, when you get in touch with your senator, there is a staffer who is literally sitting there with a tally sheet for how many calls they get in favor and how many calls they get a post.
Michael: And there's also things like, giving money, and there's also local things that you can do. I mean, I think everybody's really worried that everyone's so fatigued from the previous Trump administration that no one's going to engage. I try not to make predictions as part of my journalism career. I have no idea what's going to happen, but I think complacency is one of the ways that authoritarian regimes flourish, is when everybody gets tired. And I also get it if people just really can't fucking do it at this point. But if you are somebody with the ability or with the finances or with the time or whatever, it's really important to engage to the extent that you can.
Aubrey: So, that's what's happened since we recorded this bonus episode.
Michael: Two weeks ago.
Aubrey: Will now sound unbearably lighthearted. [laughs]
Michael: God.
Aubrey: Compared to where we are [laughs]
Michael: And also, so naive. We're maybe we'll never have to talk about this guy again. But it's like, nope.
Aubrey: LOL. Nope.
Michael: We will have to talk about him for the rest of our lives until we die of measles, [Aubrey laughs] which I think is about a 50:50 chance at this point.
[Maintenance Phase theme]
Aubrey: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where for Halloween, we're zombies, but we only eat brain's worms.
[laughter]
Michael: That had so much potential, Aubrey. And then it just didn't land.
[laughter]
Aubrey: That's me booing myself.
Michael: Brain’s worms.
Aubrey: [laughs] I'm not Aubrey Gordon here to disappoint you.
Michael: [laughs] I'm Michael Hobbes, here specifically to disappoint you.
Aubrey: Michael, I feel like I have a broad sense of what we're in for, but I have generally, not done a deep dive into the RFK Jr. updates. What I'm aware of involves animal carcasses-
Michael: Dude.
Aubrey: -sexual assault allegations.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: And a suspended New York magazine reporter.
Michael: The body count, both animal and human, of this episode is deranged.
Aubrey: And HHS secretary rumors. Every time, we talk about him, I'm like, “Thank God we never have to talk about this fucking guy again.” But this is going to be the rest of our lives. So, content warning. There's some domestic violence stuff, there's some sexual assault stuff, and there's some suicide stuff in this episode. We apologize for the kind of person that RFK Jr. is and associates with.
Aubrey: Boy, Michael. If there's one thing I've learned in therapy, you got to stop apologizing for other people's behavior.
[laughter]
Michael: So, okay, this we come to you with great reluctance. This, we did our last RFK Jr., episode on, I checked, August 1, 2023, and since then there have been numerous developments in the RFK Jr., story, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., And we have gotten a million requests to talk about what's been going on with RFK Jr., because he keeps fucking popping up in the news. And, there's always weird animals involved. There's an emu thing that I skipped.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: I was like, “There's too many fucking animals, we can't do emus.
Aubrey: There's a sea creature one too.
Michael: There's a bear, a whale, and a worm.
Aubrey: This simply must be a fever dream.
Michael: So, I basically, I went on the New York Times website and I did a search for RFK Jr. And I opened every single story they have published since August 1, 2023. And I was like, “I'm just going to fucking read all of these and put a timeline together.” And then I did some extra research and stuff. And so, we're just going to go through it basically chronologically, like, “What has this man been up to?”
Aubrey: Okay.
Michael: We have to start with just talking about his presidential run. So, this is ongoing, so it's difficult to put it in chronological time. But as of August 1, 2023, when last we discussed RFK Jr., basically, he's running his presidential campaign. But the presidential campaign is weird because he originally was running as a Democrat, but then he switches and he's running as an independent, like a third-party guy. What that actually means in practice is that you have to get on the ballot in all 50 states. And the process for getting on the ballot is completely different in every single state where you have in some states you have to get like 42,000 signatures on a petition. And in some states, you need like 10,000 signatures and then you have to file them by this date.
And then there's a whole weird subplot where his signatures get thrown out. I can't even remember which state, but they get thrown out because he didn't have the vice president listed on the petition. There's all this weird technical stuff to get on the ballot, which honestly is fucked up. [laughs] I think it should be easier. But also, it's RFK Jr., so, I don't know how much I care.
Aubrey: It is a super complicated process and usually there's a team of people in every state and a director of states is a position that is usually part of a presidential campaign.
Michael: Speaking of which, this is exactly what I wanted you to read.
Aubrey: Oh, no.
Michael: We have our first excerpt is from a really interesting New Yorker article. This is like the main theme of this episode and something that I don't think I got across in our episode episodes is how much of just a piece of shit RFK Jr., is just like as a person. So here is a paragraph from this New Yorker article about him staffing up his campaign.
Aubrey: Kennedy ultimately appointed Nick Branagh, a former national political outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders and the founder of the progressive group the People's Party, to run his ballot access operation. Two years earlier, Branagh had allegedly tried to force himself onto a female colleague. Holy fuck.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: An accusation that was corroborated by a woman who had walked in on the scene. Branagh has said that the allegation is, “False and politically motivated.” The campaign and its super PAC have spent millions of dollars working with firms associated with a ballot access consultant named Trent Poole. In May, Poole was arrested in New York City for choking and punching a woman. A lawyer for Poole called it, “A completely unjustified prosecution.” So far, Kennedy has got his name on the ballot in about a dozen states.
Michael: This is the kind of person that he surrounds himself with. It's people who seem to have crashed out of more traditional politics and can't get hired.
Aubrey: There is a person who gets drawn to short-term, large-scale campaigns. It's not every person who works on them, not by a long shot. But it's an environment. It's like a little petri dish that allows them to thrive. And those are people who will do anything to get their way-
Michael: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Aubrey: -and to win their thing. Because when you're running a short-term campaign, that's a year or less, which a lot of these, styles of campaigns are, you're not really accountable to a community of people. You're not really accountable to a lasting board or anything like that. You have one job and your one job is to win.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: And if you win, whatever you did in the course of winning will be forgiven by your side, is sort of the understanding.
Michael: That's a good point.
Aubrey: In some ways it's uniquely bad because it's fucking RFK Jr., so of course it's worse.
Michael: But it's only like 5% worse. [laughs]
Aubrey: No, it's not 5%. It's more than 5%, but it is just like Glengarry Glen Ross bit of elections, you know what I mean? Do whatever you got to do.
Michael: Yeah. Always be groping.
Aubrey: Brain worms are for closers.
Michael: But I mean, this leads very well into like the next little chapter of this. So, there's two aspects of getting on the ballot in all 50 states. So, one of them is you start from scratch in these various states. You have to get X number of signatures, whatever. And so, you usually hire a firm to do that. There's like companies that will go and get 100,000 signatures for you. It's very expensive. But this is just part of kind of running a campaign. So, over the course of the campaign, there start to be questions about the kinds of firms that he's hiring and the kinds of tactics that they are using. So, I'm going to send you the first two paragraphs of an article from the New York Times.
Aubrey: “Amy Bernstein, a traffic court judge in Brooklyn was heading home from work one night in late April when a young man carrying a clipboard approached her on the subway platform asking if she would sign a petition to help place independents on the ballot in New York. The top of the petition was folded underneath itself.”
Michael: Uh-huh.
Aubrey: “So, that the names of the candidates were not visible. Ms. Bernstein said “She asked for more details and told the man she was a judge,” at which point he yanked the clipboard away and asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
Michael: So, they're like, “Do you want to sign this petition?” You're like, “What's the petition for?’ And they just like turn and run away.
Aubrey: Yikes.
Michael Hobbes: [laughs] This New York Times article is really funny because you can tell how it came about. So, after it tells the story of the judge, it says more than a half dozen New York City residents, including two who are journalists at the New York Times and were approached randomly.
Aubrey: Oh, my God.
Michael: Have described similar encounters with signature gatherers to Mr. Kennedy. [laughs] So, basically, New York Times reporters get these people come up to them and they're like, “Wait, what the fuck is this?” And people won't explain what the petition is actually for. These are not New York Times reporters, but one guy says this is a petition to get Biden on the ballot.
Aubrey: Jesus Christ.
Michael: This is after the primary. He's like, “What?”
Aubrey: Right. But before Biden dropped out. So, it's not that wild a swing as it might sound now.
Michael: RFK Jr., says, “Of course the campaign denies anything, like, “Oh, we must have hired the wrong third-party contractor. We're very disappointed.” RFK Jr says, “We take ballot access, voter rights, and truthfulness extremely seriously around here.” Mr. Kennedy said, “It's the very substance of what motivates us to fight the establishment parties in the first place.” So, the guy who says that there's mercury in the vaccines is very, very concerned about truthfulness.
Aubrey: Here's the thing that blows my mind about RFK Jr. among other things. He is an attorney, and law is figuring out how to color in the lines in a lot of ways. And it's also figuring out how to build a persuasive argument for something. And I think the thing that I find stunning about RFK Jr., is how unpersuasive he is for an attorney.
Michael: Well, keep in mind, Aubrey, he was never really an attorney. [laughs]
Aubrey: Alright, okay. Sorry, sorry.
Michael: When he was fired in disgrace. [laughs] He's not a real attorney. And when he was, “An environmental lawyer,” he was mostly like a figurehead who was good at getting funding from rich people.
Aubrey: I love that you're like, counterpoint. Don't forget, he's bad at it.
Michael: He is fake. [laughs]
Aubrey: That is technically his job, but he is bad at it.
Michael: Your last shred of good faith [Aubrey laughs] that you're putting in this episode.
Aubrey: I was really holding out hope for.
Michael: Yeah, you're like, “What a conundrum.” It's like, “No”
Aubrey: [laughs] Until this moment.
Michael: Just the lifelong failure is also failing at this.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: So, one thread of his campaign is this starting from scratch thing where you need to get a bunch of petitions to get on the ballot. Another thread is he's convincing existing political parties to name him as their candidate. So, this is another thing that, you know, when you get the ballot, there's the Make Seattle Safer Party.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: They run a candidate every year. And this is like a weird tangent, but I was not aware of the fact that in California specifically, the third largest political party, bigger than the Libertarians, bigger than the Greens, is something called the American Independent Party.
Aubrey: Oh, my God, Michael.
Michael: Do you know about this?
Aubrey: I can't tell you how much I know about and resent. [laughs]
Michael: Wait, you know about the I have not heard about this before.
Aubrey: We independent party. Yes. So, listen, one of the campaigns that I worked on, Oregon, was one of the very first states to create truly automatic voter registration.
Michael: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: There was one political party that threw real shit fit about automatic voter reg. And that was the Independent Party, because before it was Republican, Democrat, Independent. So, people were getting confused and they thought that independent meant unaffiliated-crosstalk]
Michael: Aubrey yes.
Aubrey: -and they were accidentally registering with a party.
Michael: Dude, this is exactly the thing in California. So, the reason it's the third biggest party is not because people want this to be members of this political party. They endorse Kanye West in the last election. [laughs]
Aubrey: They are bad, guys.
Michael: We don't do this in Washington, but in other states, you register as a Democrat or a Republican. People see the choice of, you can register as a member of the American Independent Party, and they think that means, “Oh, I'm an independent voter.”
Aubrey: Yes.
Michael: They don't actually [laughs] want anything to do with this party. So, apparently there's been a whole celebrity campaign to get people not to tick this box, including the actresses Emma Stone and Demi Moore have both been fooled by this and have come out and a bunch of other. I read a whole article about this, of other prominent people who are like, I accidentally ticked the box, you guys. [laughs]
Aubrey: Yeah. Yes. Secretary of State also should have been saying, “That can't be the name of your party.”
Michael: Look, we do this with vanity plates. We should be doing political parties.
Aubrey: Look, if my friend can't get a vanity plate that says two dykes [Michael laughs] and asked has to go to court for it.
Michael: She's Dutch. She's just talking about infrastructure. [Aubrey laughs] Water infrastructure.
Aubrey: She specializes in fluid flow engineering. Well, I guess-- never mind.
Michael: It's below sea level.
Aubrey: I feel like you really missed my fluid flow lesbian joke.
Michael: Oh, see, I don't know the lesbian jokes. There's no way. [Aubrey laughs] Just give the as a genre of joke on this show. Aubrey, give up.
Aubrey: Fluid is flowing. That's all.
[laughter]
Michael: Okay, so that is the logistics of the campaign. There's also the content of the campaign. People are so mad. We're not talking about the bear and the whale right now, [Aubrey laughs] but we're going to talk about the actual political issues at play. So, one thing that I think is interesting, like looking over old articles, is that RFK Jr., at the beginning of his campaign tried to appeal to more left-wing people and because he's a Kennedy and he ran as a Democrat and stuff, he was explicitly saying that “Oh, I'm a Democrat, but I'm like the better kind of Democrat.” So, we are going to read a relatively long excerpt from a New Yorker interview where I am going to be RFK Jr., You are going to be David Remnick, who is asking the questions. Do like an NPR podcast voice.
Aubrey: I have a podcast voice, Mike.
Michael: Oh, wait, shit, sorry.
[laughter]
Michael: I sometimes forget that we're not just like, talking. Okay. Yes. [Aubrey laughs] Wow. You'd be good on a podcast, Aubrey. Anyone ever told you that?
Aubrey: Oh, what a voice for a podcast.
Michael: So, here is the first excerpt. We're starting with you.
Aubrey: You're running as a Democrat for president, and I wonder, who in the Democratic Party do you feel is kindred to you? Obviously not Joe Biden, but AOC or Joe Manchin or are you something new entirely? How would you define your ideology?
Michael: I'm something old. I'm a Kennedy Democrat. I believe in labor unions. I believe in a strong, robust middle class. I believe in racial justice and policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.
Aubrey: I don't think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.
Michael: Well, then why did he do the lockdowns?
Aubrey: What?
[laughter]
Aubrey: Sir.
Michael: I love it. This is like 30 seconds into the interview.
Aubrey: Wow.
Michael: Remember, remember the plandemic lady, [laughs] they’re like, “Are you antivaxxer?” She's like, “No,” but Fauci's killed millions.
[laughter]
Just like 0 to 60.
[laughter]
Okay, that was excerpt number one.
Aubrey: I believe in labor unions. That's why I've partnered with Donald J. Trump.
Michael: Okay, this one is even longer.
Aubrey: I'm finding it curious and maybe even disturbing that some of your early admirers include Trumpists like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. Do you welcome that? Or do you think maybe, just maybe, someone like that is delighted that a strong Democratic opponent will wound Joe Biden and in the long run help Donald Trump?
Michael: I'm trying to unite the country, David. I'm not going to do what you do, which is to pick out people and say that they're evil. They should be canceled or whatever. I'm a Democrat. I know what my values are. I've always spoken to Republicans my entire life. During all the years that I was a leader of the environmental movement, dubious. I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News. And when Tucker Carlson recently did a special on endocrine disruptors and he was condemned by the left, I thought that was crazy. I think what we ought to be doing is inviting people into our tent without changing our values. I think the tribalism that you're advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it's toxic.
Aubrey: At what point do you say, with respect, that this is not about tribalism or cancellation or the terms that you're using, but just an insistence on a certain level of decency and principle? Somebody like Alex Jones comes forward and he has nice things to say to you. At what point do you say, “You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don't want your support.”
Michael: I'm not a cancel culture guy. [laughs]
Aubrey: Good. Yes.
Michael: [laughs] It's not funny, but it's like, this is the weird ideology of this guy, this thing of cancellation, which no one can quite define, of course.
Aubrey: Of course.
Michael: It's like the number one issue for him.
Aubrey: It's just a really weird, clear sort of front for some, bad political action. And it's a place for people to put their feelings. And I think that's part of what I think is happening here with RFK Jr. Is he's like, “I'm not a cancel culture guy” because I suspect, feels like he has been canceled or is being canceled.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Nah, dude. People are just judging you based on your beliefs and actions. I don't know what to tell you here.
Michael: [laughs] So, this actually leads into the final excerpt from this, which is RFK Jr. just very explicitly talking about his resentment. So, here's this. I think I start this one. Yeah. He says, “This is the first administration in our history that has colluded with the press to censor Americans directly out of the White House, including me by name.”
Aubrey: How are you being censored out of the White House?
Michael: The White House was ordering the social media sites to censor me.
Aubrey: You're everywhere in the press. You're in what you call mainstream media. You're on Joe Rogan. Who censored you?
Michael: I am since I declared for president. But before that, I was deplatformed. I was deplatformed completely. 800,000 followers were taken away from me on Instagram at the behest of The White House.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: Citation. Citation needed. I don't think the New Yorker bothered being like, this is not a real fact. [laughs] I don't think the White house cares honestly. 800,000 followers isn't even that many followers. [laughs]
Aubrey: This could absolutely be the text of a conversation between an influencer who got locked out of their account and Shein, [Michael laughs] God, I don't want a presidential candidate who sounds like that.
Michael: I also think what's so interesting too is that like, it feels very clear to me that this whole thing is driven by resentment, but it's not even like fact-based resentment. He's basically mad that his account got taken away or taken down or whatever for posting deranged antivax shit. But that has nothing to do with the White House. Companies have terms of service. You can't post. You can't post like ISIS beheadings and shit on social media. They'll block you. And so, he's mad at the terms of service of Instagram ultimately.
Aubrey: Right. If you start a fight at a bar and the bouncer kicks you out, they’re not like censoring you.
Michael: Exactly.
Aubrey: They're like, “You can't fight here.”
Michael: And also, they're not following orders from like the mayor.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. That doesn't mean the president told him to do that.
Michael: Yeah. So, this runs through the entire campaign. He's just a vessel for all this resentment. And it's really that leads us to the next couple chapters of this. So, over the course of the campaign, he starts to drift. I'm not going to go through every single issue, but one of the things that I remember from researching the first couple RFK Jr., episodes was that he maintained like a shred of integrity. So, he would go on these like super right-wing podcasts and talk about like, “Fauci should be locked up” and all this like antivax garbage. But then every once in a while, one of these right-wing hosts would be like, “Oh, and the Democrats are lying about climate change.”
And then RFK Jr., because he was an environmental guy for so long, he'd be like, “Oh actually, climate change is real.” That one actually I happen to be with the Democrats on. It was like he had this one thing, but then starting like this summer, he appoints a climate denier, like an open climate denier, as one of the managers of his campaign. And then he starts talking about like, “Oh, he wants to have climate policy.” He says that makes sense to skeptics and activists alike.”
Aubrey: What?
Michael: And then when people ask him about specific climate policies, he can't name a single thing that he would do to rein in fossil fuels. So, it's like his one issue, the thing that he dedicated his life to, he just completely sold out to get right wing votes, basically. There's something so, I don't want to say sad because I have no sympathy for this man, but it's just pathetic.
Aubrey: It's also interesting because normally the way that you do things, if you're like, “We're going to appease everyone and therefore do nothing, is usually what that means. Right.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Is like, you make like a blue-ribbon commission.
Michael: Yeah. And you just delay, delay, delay.
Aubrey: That is the number one thing that climate change activists will absolutely not tolerate at this point. It's like, what if we just talk about it some more?
Michael: We also, in March and April start getting more signs of his right-wing ideology and flirting with the right. In April, he gives an interview where he says, “This is the reality that every American citizen faces, from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activist sitting in Washington D.C. jail, stripped of their constitutional liberties.”
Aubrey: What?
Michael: He then goes on Tim Poole's podcast to say that he's against this move to take down the Confederate statues.
Aubrey: Good Lord.
Michael: This is a masterpiece of a paragraph from a New York Times article. It says, “While defending the statues, Mr. Kennedy also said there were, “Heroes” in the Confederacy who didn't have slaves, though when he later picked an example of a Confederate whom he idolized, he singled out Robert E. Lee, a prominent general in the rebel army who owned slaves.” [laughs]
Aubrey: When you're that writer and you get to write that paragraph, I have to imagine that you're like, in your office just quietly going like, LeBron James. [Michael laughs] You know what I mean? Yes.
Michael: You know exactly what you're doing, absolutely.
Aubrey: 1,000, it's the best day of your week, if not your year.
Michael: So, okay, but then this is Aubrey Bate. So, we now get to the Aubrey Bate’s section as he does more of these fucking podcasts. He keeps bringing up obesity.
Aubrey: Great.
Michael: For all that we bitch about the framing of this issue, it hasn't really been an election issue.
Aubrey: Yeah, right.
Michael: This isn't something that comes up in presidential debates. And so, he makes it the cornerstone of his campaign. He's always talking about chronic disease, etc. And he's like, “You shouldn't take medications. You should eat foods. This whole food is medicine thing. I mean, that's what he means, right? If you really don't want to get measles, eat blueberries, like whatever the fuck he's talking about. So, this is an excerpt from, I believe, an interview with Chris Hayes.
Aubrey: Oh, Jesus. Fucking hell.
Michael: It's so boring. It's so boring.
Aubrey: We're paying more now, Chris, for diabetes than for our defense budget. So, when I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Today, one out of every three kids who walks into his office has juvenile diabetes, and nobody is talking about it. It is costing us $4.3 trillion a year, three times our defense budget. Okay, so question.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: No, it's not.
[laughter]
Michael: Not a question, but proceed, proceed, Governor.
Aubrey: This is fucking garbage. It's not fucking true. It's not one of every three kids does not have diabetes.
Michael: Honestly, this is like a quasar of misinformation. Basically, every single thing that he says is false here. So, we do not spend more on diabetes than our defense budget. [laughs] The defense budget is around $900 billion a year. The actual spending on diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association, is about 300 billion a year. So, one third of the defense budget. But that is one of those statistics that is massively inflated. They're basically saying that “All heart attacks, all strokes,” because they're downstream effects of diabetes. They're throwing in all this extra stuff and saying that's like the cost of diabetes. So, we don't really know. But even the high-end estimates are one third of the defense budget. So that's just like, not true. He says one in three kids has juvenile diabetes.
We talked about this on our Zombie Statistics episodes that's one in three people will eventually, at some point in their lives, be diagnosed with diabetes, which is also not true because the population as a whole, 11% of people have diabetes in America, and among kids, it's 0.35%. And most of that is type 1 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes rates are rising among children, but they're very, very small as an absolute percentage. I feel like people get things, like, mixed up in their heads. [laughs]
Aubrey: And I think the alarm around kids getting type 2 diabetes is based in an outdated understanding of type 2 diabetes. We have this idea that type 1 is the blameless kind and type 2 is the, “You fucked up so hard, you got diabetes kind.”
Michael: Oh, are you about to say that the type 1 people need to be blamed as well? [Aubrey laughs] We're coming for the type 1 people.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah, they've had it too good for too long.
Michael: Sorry, guys. It's time for you to suffer with the rest of us.
Aubrey: It calls up a series of images. And I think he knows that he's doing that, right?
Michael: Oh, yeah, he's weaponizing. He's weaponizing all this existing stigma. I mean, he's not going to propose anything that makes anybody healthier. What he wants to do is get rid of vaccines. [laughs]
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: He's not actually going to improve school lunches or anything.
Aubrey: Gross.
Michael: So that was gross. We now get to the more comedic elements of this story , well, actually, this one isn't comedic. Well, we'll get there. [Aubrey laughs] So, on May 8th, we get an article in the New York Times called RFK Jr., says “Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain: The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.” So, this is exactly what it sounds like. They find court filings from 2012 where he says, “I have a worm in my brain.” And he says he got it from a trip to South Asia where he ate some contaminated food and then the little worm swam up to his brain and then ate part of his brain and then died.
And when a little worm dies in your brain, it creates a little calcified little thing kind of like a tumor, and that can affect your cognitive abilities. What's funny about this is it makes him look quite bad, but he's exaggerating how bad it is. So, they actually investigate. And people getting parasites is relatively common in the world. And there are literal brainworms. And this does, in fact, happen, and it can spread through diet. So, the fact that he got a brainworm is actually not that weird. And most people who get parasites never have any symptoms. They live the rest of their lives. So, in the New York Times, they say it is unlikely that a parasite would eat part of the brain. There is different tapeworms that sit in your intestine or whatever, and they can be a foot long. It's so fucking gross to think about. In the article, they say, “Unlike tapeworm larva in the intestines, those in the brain remain relatively small, about a third of an inch.” But that sounds really big to me. [laughs]
Aubrey: That sounds so big.
Michael: I don't want-- I don't want a third of an inch worm in my fucking brain.
Aubrey: God. I just absolutely caught a chill.
Michael: Oh, it's so nasty. There is one funny element of this that this was the one aspect of the research for this episode where I was like, “All right, Robert, I'll give you this one.” So, it says in the article, “On Wednesday afternoon, hours after this article was published, Mr. Kennedy posted a comment on his Twitter profile. I offered to eat five more brainworms and still beat President Biden and President Trump in a debate.”
[laughter]
Michael: That's actually pretty good.
Aubrey: Good job, social media manager. [laughs]
Michael: Okay, but then it's about to get sad. So, the actual context of this, this is from a 2012 legal case where him and his wife are divorcing and she's trying to get child support. And the reason he's doing this is he's saying my cognitive faculties were impaired, therefore I have lower earning potential, therefore she's entitled to less child support.
Aubrey: Oh.
Michael: The way that this article is framed in the New York Times is as like, a political fucking horse race story. They're like, “Ooh, the candidate has emphasized his fitness for office and he's done pushups on camera. But actually, he has a brainworm,” and he's clearly lying about the extent to which the brainworm has affected his cognition. He also says that he has mercury poisoning, something he hasn't mentioned anywhere else. He's lying so that his wife does not get any money. And this happens so he doesn't have to pay any child support. As we discussed in our previous episode, his wife ends up killing herself.
Aubrey: Jesus, hell.
Michael: You never want to attribute it to one cause, but this ruined her life, right?
Aubrey: Right. It's not helping. Yeah, it's not helping.
Michael: This whole story is really sad.
Aubrey: It feels like the more you scratch the surface with this guy, the more you're like, oh, he's less like a comic political side character and more just a standard issue garbage dude who's trying to avoid paying alimony and is sexually harassing or sexually assaulting people, allegedly. Despite all of the bear heads and whale carcasses and brainworms of it all.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: He is just like, “You're fucking your friend's shitty ex-boyfriend.”
Michael: Yeah. No, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Where you're like, “Oh, Todd's back. Fuck that guy.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah. No kidding. [laughs] He's Dennis from 30 Rock. Yeah.
Aubrey: This feels very classic Maintenance Phase. “Oh, did you come here to laugh about the brainworms? Just kidding. It's real sad.”
Michael: I actually. I don't know why I did this, but I actually have a list of latenight jokes about the worm. Do you want to hear some of them.
Aubrey: Ohhh, oh sure, let's do some worms jokes.
Michael: So, this is from the Daily Show. I don't know what's worse, that RFK Jr. had a worm that was eating his brain or that his brain is so poisoned that it killed the worm. That's pretty good. That is good. Stephen Colbert said, “Cause of death, starvation,” which I kind of like. [Aubrey laughs] So, we then in July get a Vanity Fair. Like a big, long investigative feature by Vanity Fair where they interview a million people who knew him. And this produces a series of sub scandals. So, we're going to talk about two of them. The first is, do you remember the dog allegations? The dog eating?
Aubrey: No. What?
Michael: I was going to send you a link, but that will spoil it for you. So, I'm going to send you a screenshot. Hang on. There's a New York Post headline that says, “Unsettling photo appears to show RFK Jr., with barbecued carcass of dog.”
Aubrey: It's a picture of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and a person with long hair and their face, mostly censored, holding a big rotisserie, spit that has a roasted animal carcass of some kind, whole roasted animal of some kind on it. I'm guessing that's not a dog.
Michael: He says this is a photo of him in the Chilean Andes, and it's a lamb. And the minute people look into it, they're like, “Oh, yeah, it looks weird the way that it's on the spit.” It looks untraditional, but it's like you can find a million photos on Flickr of people doing this like, a traditional way to cook goat and lamb and various other things. So, this is just like a normal thing that they do in Chile. But then again, this photo, whatever the context of it, is so much worse. So, the reason we know about this is that he texted this to a friend and said it was a friend who's like, “I'm on my way to Asia.” Like, a completely whatever, normal text.
And so, he texts this friend back and says, “Well, you're going to have to eat a bunch of dogs there because they eat dogs in Asia. And so, here's me eating a dog.”
Aubrey: Oh, it's just him making a shitty racist joke.
Michael: It's just like, a racist joke that he made. Neat. So, the other thing that comes out of this Vanity Fair article is the sexual assault allegations. There's a weird thing where there's one paragraph in the article, and this gets no play in secondary media, that when he was married to his second wife. He allegedly would send nude photos of the women he was sleeping with to his friends.
Aubrey: Oh, God.
Michael: It says, those friends assumed Kennedy himself had taken the pictures, but they didn't know whether the subjects had consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people.
Aubrey: Weird that a Kennedy would have issues with women.
Michael: Oh, I know.
Aubrey: Huh.
Michael: So, the sexual assault allegations are around a 23-year-old babysitter who lives with Kennedy and his wife in the fall of 1998, there's three incidents of harassment. So, in one, they're having dinner and he starts rubbing her leg under the table. She then writes about it in her diary. And then a little while later, she comes into her room and he's like, in her room and her diary is like on the desk. And she's like, confused, like, “Is he reading my diary?” But we still don't really know what the fuck happened there. But he has his shirt off and he's like, “Can you rub this?” I think it's like sunscreen on my back or like lotion on my back. And she's like, “This is just really weird. He was in his 40s at the time.”
And then the third one is, she's like in the kitchen doing something, chopping vegetables or whatever. And he comes up behind her and just gropes her and rubs her butt up her body.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: This is somebody who basically was interested in working with him because she wants to be part of the environmental movement. She's someone who's really into environmentalism. And after this, she leaves the environmental movement.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: When contacted by Vanity Fair and when the story comes out, he doesn't really say anything about these specific incidents, but he just says, “I've got a lot of skeletons in my closet.”
Aubrey: What a deeply weird fucking way to talk about.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah. God Damn it.
Michael: But then also this woman, the victim, gets a text from him after the story comes out that says, “I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm, and if I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so. If you feel comfortable, I'd like to tell you this by phone and preferably face to face. I recognize that this might not be possible. I have no agenda for sending this text other than making the most sincere and earnest amends.” And her name is Eliza Cooney. This is from the New York Times.
It says, “Ms. Cooney did not respond to his outreach and did not welcome it. She told the Times, sending a text at 12:33 AM is not considering his action's effect on someone else, me, she said “At that time, on 4th of July weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to him. He claims to have no memory of not one, not two, but three examples of his predatory behavior. He expects a societal pass and forgiveness for saying that he's no church boy. I have paid the cost for his sexual misconduct for decades.”
Aubrey: Correct.
Michael: So, fuck, yes. Eliza Cooney.
Aubrey: Correct.
Michael: Was just like, “I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I have no interest in talking to you about this.”
Aubrey: Boy. It's been a while since I felt such an immediate strong allegiance to someone.
Michael: Yeah, exactly. I'm like, “Hell, yeah. Spell it out, Eliza.”
Aubrey: Absolutely.
Michael: We then enter August, which is a very packed month for RFK Jr. So, on August 4, 2024, we get the story of the bear.
Aubrey: Are you familiar with this?
Michael: Jeremy Allen White?
Michael: What?
Aubrey: We're not doing Yes, Chef.
Michael: How dare you think that I would get a TV reference?
Aubrey: I know you only get video game references.
Michael: Exactly. [laughs]
Aubrey: And I only get TV references. Never the twain shall meet.
Michael: Give it to me in Tekken 3, then I would get the bear reference.
Aubrey: Oh, he took it home and he was like, “You're allowed to take it home for meat.”
Michael: Aubrey, I read so much about whether or not you're actually allowed to take it home for meat.
[laughter]
Michael: I really hate that. I know so much about Department of Fish and Wildlife protocol in New York State now. So, we are going to watch his telling of this. This is in preemptive response to the New Yorker, which is writing a long feature profile on RFK Jr. They're doing the same thing. They're sniffing around his life. They're interviewing a bunch of people who knew him. The fact checker contacts him right before the story is set to publish and is like, “We're going to say this thing about the bear.” So, to get ahead of it, RFK Jr., posts a video of him telling the full story. So, I'm going to send you a link to a tweet.
Aubrey: Wow. Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one at New Yorker.
Michael: So, the text of this tweet makes no fucking sense. We're going to watch a brief part of this, and then we're going to pause and we're going to talk about Fish and Wildlife regulations. So, [Aubrey laughs] I know, I hate this, I hate this.
Aubrey: That's what's making me laugh.
Michael: So dumb.
Aubrey: Okay, right.
Michael: Okay.
[video starts]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: I was taking a group of people up in Goshen, New York, up Knots and Valley and I was supposed to meet them there at like, maybe 8 or 9. I was driving up maybe, really early, like seven and that woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear. So, I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and it was very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York State. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.
[video ends]
Aubrey: I have to say, I love the cutaways to the face of the person he's telling this story.
Michael: Do you know who that is?
Aubrey: Who is it?
Michael: It's Roseanne Barr.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: Isn't this so weird? She's like a deranged right wing and we went to her Twitter profile. It's dark.
Aubrey: I mean, I knew she was deranged. I stopped paying attention to her, but I just wasn't accustomed to her current blonde ringlet thing. And, this is just all surprising.
Michael: And even her, who appears to be a friend of his or something, like a sympathetic listener, she has this look on her face of like, “What the fuck is this?”
Aubrey: Totally. She's doing a full Jim Halpert at the camera.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[laughter]
So, this is the story that he tells. He's driving around New York State,-
Aubrey: Jesus, God.
Michael: -the person in front of him hits a bear, not him and then it is legal to pick up roadkill and eat and use roadkill as long as you notify the authorities. There's a lot of weird fact checking of this. A lot of people say that this is false, but it appears to be that this is true. You just have to notify the authorities. He says, “You can get a tag for the bear.” And there's this weird thing where it's like, there's some local paper. It's like a hunting license does not apply to roadkill. But if you have roadkill and you want to eat it, you can call the Fish and Wildlife people and they can approve of you eating the roadkill.
This whole thing seems very weird to me, but apparently a lot of Fish and Wildlife departments around the country want people to eat roadkill. People find it really disgusting, but it's like these animals are just going to sit there and rot on the side of the road if somebody doesn't take them.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. This is a wastefulness thing. Every government department is understaffed, and they're like, “Hey, could you do that for us? That'd be great.”
Michael: It's a little bit of a moot point because he didn't notify the authorities, as far as we know.
[laughter]
Michael: So, it's sort of like he's like, “Well, well it's okay to do this as long as you notify the authorities, which I did not do.”
Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael: But we'll just go ahead and watch the rest of the clip together.
[video starts]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: And so, then we went hawking, and I had the bear in my car. And then we had a really good day, and went late. We were catching a lot of game, and the people really loved it, so we stayed late. And instead of going back to my home in Westchester, I had to go right to the city because there was a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House. And at the end of the dinner, it went late, and I realized I couldn't go home. I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn't want to leave the bear in the car. At that time, this was the little bit of the redneck in me. There'd been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and saw a couple of people got killed, and it was every day, and people had gotten badly injured. I wasn't drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea.
And I said, “I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of.” And I said, “Let's go put the bear in Central Park, and we'll make it look like he got hit by the bike [audience laughter] it will be fun and funny for people.” So, everybody thought that's a great idea. So, we went and did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something. The next day, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper. And I turned on the TV, and there was like mile of yellow tape, and there were 20 [unintelligible 00:54:29].
[video ends]
Aubrey: Once again-- [crosstalk]
Michael: It's so weird.
Aubrey: Bless this editor for the cutaways to Roseanne's face.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: When your judgment is being questioned in real time by Roseanne Barr.
[laughter]
Michael: Also, it's so funny to me that he tweets this with looking forward to seeing how you spin this one. It's like, “This is a deranged, weird story.” [laughs] There's no spin required.
Aubrey: It's also like, a couple of things. There's a point at which he says “Something about like, I guess that's a little redneck in me.” And I'm like, “You're a Kennedy.”
Michael: It's so weird.
Aubrey: It's such a weird caricature of a rich villain thing to be like, it'll be so funny to dump this bear carcass in Central Park.
Michael: Why would someone think it's funny to find a dead bear? He's like, “Oh, they might get a kick out of it. What?”
Aubrey: And the other thing that he doesn't appear to be clocking here is he's like, “Oh, my God, it was on the news.” A, that's a wild ass thing, of course the cops were called. And B, if it wasn't on the news for there being a dead bear in Central Park from ?? origins, there would be eventually a story on the news that was like, “A Kennedy put a dead bear in Central Park.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Dude, this was always going to be news.
Michael: [laughs] Also, Aubrey, I am in incandescent that you have not mentioned his slander of bicyclists. This is what jumped out to me about it. He's like, “I'm going to make it seem like a cyclist killed the bear.”
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: A, that wouldn't even really happen. You'd have to be a really fast biker to kill a fucking bear.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: And secondly, why the fuck would you frame a cyclist? God's chosen creatures.
Aubrey: That is another weird underscore of his unrelatable rich dude shit where he's like, “These cyclists are always buch-buch-buch.”
Michael: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: That is such a weird, shitty guy who's been driving a giant and expensive car for a very long time.
Michael: One thing I did actually find cathartic about this is that I went back to the original coverage of this, like the AP stories and New York Times stories that were published in 2014 when they found a bear in Central Park. And the reason it was a big deal is because there are no fucking bears in New York. There's no bears in the zoo in New York. So, it's like, “How did a bear get into Central Park?” So, of course it was a news story. They do an investigation and immediately clock it. They're like, “Oh, somebody hit this with their car elsewhere and drove it here for some reason.”
Aubrey: Oh, God.
Michael: Nobody falls for this fucking stupid prank. This is from the AP story in 2014. It says, “The initial details of the case were clear. A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed the dead bear cub, which was lying under some bushes, partially concealed by an abandoned bicycle.” [Aubrey laughs] There's a bicycle on top of this bear for some reason. This is from the New York Times article. Florence Slatkin, who lives near the park, said that “She and a friend were leaving when her friend's terrier spotted something near a bicycle lying on the ground.” At first, we thought it was a bag of clothes or maybe a dead dog, she told the Associated Press. But then as they got closer, they realized it was a very small bear with its mouth wide open and scratches on the side.
The cub's head was on top of a back bicycle wheel, Slatkin said, “It was terrible, and it was the strangest thing.” She added, “Why was the bike there?”
[laughter]
Michael: So, he seems to have just put this bear in Central Park and just thrown a bicycle on top of it to act like, “I'm a cyclist. I'm biking through Central Park. I hit and kill a bear.”
Aubrey: And I leave my bike.
[laughter]
Aubrey: This plan has all the sophistication of those Chick-fil-A billboards that are just cows holding signs that say, “Eat more chicken.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: He's just very bad at framing people. Oh, my God, Mike, when do we get the ripped from the headlines Law and Order episode. [Michael laughs] One tiny thing about this video that I would not have clocked except that this video shows up in my thread with you right next to the picture of the “Eating a dog.”
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: Is that this whole video is filmed while he's sitting in front of a giant hotel pan of beef ribs.
Michael: No, I know. It's these giant ribs, huge Flintstones meat.
Aubrey: I get it. You like meat.
Michael: So that story comes out August 4th. There's all this discourse about the bear. Starting in July and through August, we start to get stories of how his campaign is running out of money, basically. There's also this thing in Arizona where they can't get enough signatures for the ballot. They're supposed to have 42,000. They can only get 9,000. And then out of nowhere, this is like sketchy PAC delivers 110,000 signatures to the Secretary of State, and you're not supposed to coordinate. This is the whole Citizens United garbage thing, where it's like, you can't give money to candidates, but you can give money to super PACs, but the super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns, which we all know they fucking do all the time.
And this according to election law, may count as an in-kind donation to the campaign because this PAC was basically doing work for the campaign and that may count as coordination. So, this may be illegal. So, even before RFK drops out, he drops off the ballot in Arizona because there's all these like legal questions and like legal challenges and he's like, “Oh, this looks really bad.” So, he's already off the ballot in Arizona. In mid-August, we start to get reports that he's speaking to the Harris and the Trump campaign. It seems like he tried to get a bunch of meetings with Harris of like, “What are you going to give me if I drop out?” And the Harris campaign was just not interested.
Aubrey: Speaks highly of them. Good job.
Michael: And then the weirdest fucking cameo in this is that we start getting these anonymous source quotes about him in detailed weeks long talks with Donald Trump's campaign, brokered by Tucker Carlson. He then on August 23rd, he announces that he's dropping out. Annoyingly, he's still in the fucking media, so he's still around. So, on September 16th, we get the story of the whale. The whole thing is basically, it's a clip from an old obscure documentary where his daughter is talking about they're in some fucking house in Long Island or Martha's Vineyard or some bullshit and a whale washes up on the beach, a dead whale. And RFK Jr., sees this and immediately runs to the garage, grabs a chainsaw, runs down to the beach and chops its head off and then drives it back to his other house and I guess like mounts it on the wall. I don't know what the fuck he does with it, but he does that. This is also illegal.
So, Noah is investigating this. Who knows, whatever, he might have to pay a fine or something. And then the final chapter of this, which I really should not have spent this much time on is the Ballad of Robert and Olivia.
Aubrey: Oh, this one makes me sad.
Michael: This one's just a huge bummer.
Aubrey: It's such a bummer.
Michael: We're not going to go super into this one. This is the only story I've ever looked into for any podcast that I'm like, I want to know less about this. I think everyone should know less about this. [laughs] This is just so weird.
Aubrey: I started to read about it and then I was like, “I don't feel good knowing these things.”
Michael: Anyway, we're both deep into this, so we're previewing it, but this is the story of a political reporter for New York magazine named Olivia Nuzzi, who's a rising star on the political scene. She's one of these 30 under 30 people. I don't know how these people get on these fucking lists.
Aubrey: Boy, spoken like somebody who wasn't on a list, [laughs] me too.
Michael: There's no 40 over 40 people who somehow keeping it together despite their back hurting.
Aubrey: Yeah, where's the anemic 40-year-old gay man?
Michael: I feel like I would at least be like number seven on that list. Okay, so she works for New York magazine. In October of 2023, she flies out to California to meet with RFK Jr. They go on a hike. We're not going to go too far into this. I went down like a deep rabbit hole of her work and I think me and Peter are going to do a bonus episode about just this type of journalism that is all based on access. She flies all the way to California. She spends the day with RFK Jr. She goes hiking with him and yields no useful insight. It's like he strode up the trail strongly. He said, “Ooh, there's a bird in the distance” or whatever. And you're like, yeah, he likes birds.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: You don't need-- like going hiking with him is so that you can brag that like, “Oh, I went hiking with RFK Jr.” It's not about getting any actual useful information. This whole form of journalism is like a self-aggrandizement. He's written numerous books. You can read his fucking books if you want to know what he believes.
Aubrey: It seems like the allure is the, “She knows everybody.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, no, totally, totally.
Aubrey: That's the selling point rather than the like, “Oh, there's an insight here that I find useful or there's analysis here, there's context,-”
Michael: Nothing.
Aubrey: -or there's history or there's anything.” No, no. It's just like, “Can you believe. She has so and so's cell phone number.
Michael: Yeah sure, she has this person on speed dial. I don't think speed dial exists anymore.
Aubrey: I'm going to star 69.
Michael: Yeah, [laughs]. We're just going to go quickly through this. I hate this shit. Apparently, they start after the story comes out. He is unhappy with it. He later characterizes it as a hit piece, which it is not. It's way too nice to him. And then they start like dealing with stuff over text. This text becomes flirtatious. This becomes apparently like a sexting thing. They then have FaceTime sex or whatever and it's also a really weird story in that neither one of the participants in this affair are really talking about it. So, all of the quotes are from friends of theirs like, anonymous quotes from friends of theirs. Like, talking to the New York Post and shit. But then, of course, these are biased actors because they're only getting a depiction of the relationship from the people involved. So, all of his friends are like, “She threw herself at him. He had to block her. It's like she couldn't stop texting.”
Aubrey: It definitely wasn't this serial sexual abuse. [laughs]
Michael: Exactly. Who's had numerous affairs, right?
Aubrey: Allegedly. Yes.
Michael: Yeah. And maybe that is true. But also, he's not a remotely reliable narrator, nor are his friends remotely reliable. There's one of his friends who's like another antivax weirdo, says, “This had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.”
Aubrey: Wow.
Michael: [laughs] Which is not a real thing.
Aubrey: There's also something about this that just sucks from a media representation of lady journalist’s thing.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: Which is part of the reason there was an undercurrent of the freakout about Spotlight being such a great movie. That was lady journalists who were excited that it was a story about a lady journalist who didn't get the story by sleeping with a source.
Michael: Whenever people are yelling and making fun of a woman on the Internet, there's always an under threat of misogyny to it that just makes me uncomfortable. And a weird sex shamy element to it. And even if she deserves a lot of criticism, whenever it's a woman, the criticism just goes to 11 really quickly.
Aubrey: Yeah. And it goes to a place that it goes from deserved critique to totally undeserved and personal in the blink of an eye.
Michael: I also, when I first heard about this, I didn't look too much into the details. And I just thought, “Well, obviously they had some tryst, but they never actually met.
Aubrey: Yeah. It was all virtual, right?
Michael: Yeah. It's all just phone stuff.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: She was engaged at the time. He was married. Her engagement has now been broken off and they're filing restraining orders against each other in court.
Aubrey: Oh Jesus.
Michael: And it's all fucking weird. She is accusing her fiancé of leaking the story. We still don't know who went to the media with this story. It's weird that we know this. It could have just been an employment issue with New York magazine, which has now put her on leave. But the fact that we know about this and also the fact that her boss found out about it. Somebody had to tell him. So, we don't really know who that person is. She says it's her fiancé. Her fiancé says that it's not him. It's a whole big ugly, dumb thing.
Aubrey: That's another one of those things where I'm like, “I don't feel like I should know this about relationship.”
Michael: I know the whole thing though. I was trying to get the PDFs of the court filings between her and her fiancé. And then I was like, “What is my life? What am I? what I am? I don’t won’t to know this shit.
Aubrey: Totally, absolutely, 100%.
Michael: [laughs] I think as someone who exercised unbelievably poor judgment, I think whatever happens between her and her fiancé really isn't any of my business. And whatever happens between RFK Jr., and his wife, also none of my business. He's also a piece of shit due to what he does in public. [laughs]
Aubrey: For real.
Michael: There's a really fucked up article in the New York Post during when his diary is coming out and when this whole really ugly divorce case is going on that says he basically has the phone habits of a middle-aged gay man. So, it says that he has 43 women, mistresses or whatever saved in his phone. It says in the post, “At the time, it appeared Kennedy had a woman in almost every city, including at least five in Toronto, one in Paris, others in Palm Beach and Pensacola, Alaska, Aspen, Colorado, Miami, Montreal, and Cleveland. One of the women had the note airplane after her name, while another was denoted with farm and a third with teacher.
Aubrey: Jesus.
Michael: Yet another was only cryptically referred to as Z. And apparently, he saved them all under the letter “G for goomar,” which is remember in the Sopranos that means like, “You're like girl on the side, goomar,” right? Oh, don't make me do that again.
Aubrey: I think maybe I should probably cut it out. [laughs]
Michael: I was probably going to do that. That was bad. That was quite bad. [Aubrey laughs] That was my [crosstalk].
Aubrey: Leave it in along with us talking about it.
Michael: Miserable. But also, it's like there's something darkly funny about the fact that he just has Susan Airplane in his phone. He's like, everyone I know does this.
Aubrey: Yes.
Michael: They're like, Steve Lawyer.
Aubrey: Yep.
Michael: Todd Seattle.
Aubrey: Like, yep.
Michael: Because everyone's on the apps now. And it's like, it's not specific enough to be like, Jessica Hinge. There's like three Jessica Hinges.
[laughter]
Michael: I was looking through my phone the other day deleting people, and I have David Bicep. [Aubrey laughs] I don't know what that means.
Aubrey: Yes, you do.
Michael: I don't know who any of these people are.
Aubrey: Weirdly, RFK Jr.’s ringtone was just the Rambler. That song from the 60s. I'm the type of guy who likes to roam around.
Michael: No, that's The Wanderer. I love that song.
Aubrey: Oh, The Wanderer. Excuse me.
Michael: It's the original. I've got hoes in different area codes.
Aubrey: Yes, absolutely.
Michael: I want to end with a really good quote. This Vanity Fair article is actually quite good. Just like about him, I think for the love of God, I hope this is the last time we have to talk about this person. This is a good conclusion. So. here's this.
Aubrey: “Kennedy's personal history is not dissimilar to Trump's. A bottomless well of scandal that over time has immunized people against its real-world consequences. The Kennedy name, the fantasy and celebrity of it, is its own shield, blinding people to the fine details of Kennedy's actual beliefs and thereby making him an appealing and easy vessel for discontent with Biden and Trump. “Like all the rest of us, Bobby grew up feeling that being a Kennedy, you could do virtually anything you wanted.” Kennedy's cousin Chris Lawford told the authors of the Kennedys, an American Drama. “It was good because you got away with things other people wouldn't dream of. It was bad because it destroyed your sense of what was worth doing.” Bears in Central Park.”
Michael: Dude, I know.
Aubrey: Bears in Central Park.
Michael: Whale heads everywhere.
Aubrey: Whale heads, whale heads.
Michael: If you think about Kennedy, I mean, we already talked about how he's essentially this like fairly mediocre dude who has failed upwards into these prestigious institutions his entire life.
Aubrey: It is real classic fail son scenario.
Michael: Its huge fail son thing. Spoiled kid eventually makes good because he has 85 layers of safety nets below him. But then you look at what he leaves behind, you've got this babysitter who left the environmental NGO. You've got his wife who killed herself. You've got this outbreak of measles in Samoa that we barely even got to talk about where 83 people died, partly because RFK Jr., promoted a bunch of antivax garbage. It's like you've got this wake of damage behind him and yet he himself has only become wealthier, more prominent. And it just like sucks. We need to not have so many fucking mediocre ass people in American life who just never leave.
Aubrey: You can't see it, but I'm Roseanne Barr grimacing at the [unintelligible 01:11:34].
[laughter]
Michael: You have a giant plate of ribs in front of you. [laughs]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
