I'm glad you wrote this. Please, keep looking at RFK Jr, I'm amazed you paid him no attention so far. Also, you should really check into some of the things you blindly dismiss him on, such as the story of Boris Johnson working to pull the Ukrainians back from the negotiating table. That has been confirmed by several different accounts from officials, if I recall. I'm kind of disappointed, this reads like a bunch of very initial and dismissive thoughts that you wrote down after watching one interview with RFK Jr. It kind of goes to show that everyone else writing articles on him really hasn't even bothered to do that, but you're still not very well informed on what he has to say and what his positions are.
You should really listen to a few of his interviews and speeches. There's something there you're missing.
That being said, you're spot on correct about him being the Trump of 2024. If Trump had not been running, he would have absolutely filled that role. Trump took a lot of oxygen out of the room though, there's not quite enough room for two different populists in the race. And that's why RFK is so interesting and resonant. He's quite articulate and his memory is pretty remarkable. He does up to 8-10 interviews in a day, which is a lot more than we can say for a certain other candidate.
Hey, I tried hard to be fair in this and give him credit for diagnosing the correct problems while offering treatments that I think are incorrect. I agree with you that media haven't bothered to look at what he says.
For that I am very appreciative, sorry if I came across too strong. Like I said, I'm glad you took a look. My frustration is less with you and more with the coverage he got from everyone. It definitely feels like the media and their friends at tech platforms, fact checking NGO's, etc. have all circled the wagons since 2016 and agreed to never let anyone remotely like Trump get the oxygen they might need to run an effective campaign.
On top of that, Kennedy was one of the first people whom the Biden administration started organizing content takedowns against within hours of them entering the White House.
You weren’t specific when you said his comments were “riddled with inaccuracy”. What are your thoughts on the relentless expansion of NATO when everyone knew it was a red line for the Kremlin for decades?
Great points. Harris is leaving votes on the table not addressing healthcare. This would be a great issue for Walz to take because he's so gifted at speaking to regular people.
Surely, there's a typo here: "Thirty-one percent of Americans say it’s too much aid, whereas 25 percent say it’s too much and 18 percent say they’re not sure" Please fix this.
So, RFK Jr. appeals to what exactly? He’s not an option for President. He spewed a bunch of inaccurate “information” about forever wars (that Trump will just ignore). Is the bar so low that this passes for a good reason to vote for the felon, because he let a desperate, potentially unstable candidate join his team in hopes of a cabinet position?
I’m scratching my head on this one. Rfk Jr. will have no opportunity to do anything you think is good, assuming he can leverage his capitulation into a cabinet position. What this race comes down to is whether you want a President Vance or a President Harris.
Trump isn’t going to last long, and if he manages to get into office, his VP and the rest of his donors/cronies (who are just tolerating him) will have him ousted for incapacity. Then you can forget about tax money going overseas - it will be used to enhance the wealth of the 1% and bulk up the MIC to control threats to oligarchs from within and without. Democracy will be just a dim memory.
You think this is far fetched? Take it from Vance himself: "I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program. [...] We should seize the administrative state for our own purposes.
"I think what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every single public servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts... because you will get taken to court... And when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it."
We got lucky with Trump in Round 1 - he didn’t know what he was doing, his worst impulses kept in check by principled people. But unlike Donald Trump, Vance is cogent, strategic, methodical, disciplined, and calculated.
Vance has made dangerous friends through Peter Theil, a billionaire who does not believe in democracy. It’s comically obvious that these folks (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, David Sacks, Charlie Kirk, Rupert Murdoch, et al.) plan to use Section 4 of the 25th amendment to declare Trump incompetent (if he doesn’t have a cardiac event or fall down some stairs first).
They just need the VP and at least half of the cabinet officers (Musk and the Project 2025 crew) to declare him incompetent to perform the duties of office. Once presented to the President of the Senate pro tempore and the House Speaker, maybe after an “incident”, the VP immediately becomes the acting President, while Trump challenges the coup in court for years.
That’s how we end up with President Vance, who thinks Andrew Jackson did a good thing when he openly defied SCOTUS to allow the state of Georgia to steal Cherokee land and parcel it out to white settlers, sending 1/4 of them to their deaths on the infamous Trail of Tears.
Except this time, it will be all the modern undesirables getting rounded up and put in camps. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. Like those uppity women who think they’re equal to men; those who got abortions or used birth control; those who are LGBTQ+ or not “Christian” in the right way or at all, and any groups like racial or other minorities who threaten the alt-right vision of using biblical imperatives to return control of this nation to the landed gentry (wealthy, white, cishet men).
This is not just distant history — it is a successful, well-studied template of how to impose autocratic rule in the US. Vance sponsored a bill called the Dismantle DEI Act of 2024 that would make it illegal to talk about racially-based systemic oppression. What else would a President Vance curtail? The billionaires don’t like dissent.
Curtis Yarvin, who Vance referenced right before invoking Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the law, wants to establish “realms” that would be controlled by corporate heads with unchecked power. In his realm, Yarvis has stated, people would be genotyped.
Yarvis writes, “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
Rfk Jr. will be a footnote in history, but sure, tell me how appealing he is because he talks more about your priorities than Harris did during her DNC speech. Convince people to vote for Trump, an antisocial bully with no morals or conscience.
Harris is doing just fine alienating sections of her base she needs to win all on her own. I don't think it's fair to accuse a journalist covering reasons why RFK Jr might be popular with some voters as throwing the election. I also think you're giving the RNC way more independence from Trump than they are going to have if they win.
What is the purpose of this coverage? That’s what I question. Why praise a guy who just dropped out unless it is to encourage others to vote for Trump (who he endorsed after being rebuffed by Harris and getting some kind of offer from Trump)?
I find it incomprehensible. But I’ve been watching otherwise intelligent people throw their votes away on 3rd party candidates since Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, so I’ve got decades of experience viewing this particular circus. Bernie Sanders came closest but even he couldn’t overcome the “winner takes all” election system prevalent in the US.
Electoral politics is a math problem. Rfk Jr. never got more than 5% of voters to support his campaign. Even if I’m generous and give him double that figure to 10%, there is no way possible for him to do anything but split the vote. If you think voting for Trump or abstaining from voting are good ideas, then you haven’t been around long enough to see how this will play out. Never in the history of the US has a presidential election loss caused a candidate or a major party to abandon their prior policy positions. Literally never. The end result has always been the election of the GOP candidate, which was usually far worse for everyone, and took us longer to recover from.
Now we have reached the grand finale of all this foolishness. We have one shot to keep this country from descending into an autocratic hellscape of a fundamentalist theocracy. If Harris doesn’t win, we won’t have to worry about voting ever again. We’ve been told this in these words. You think they’re joking? They have a 900+ page blueprint. They’ve spent nearly 50 years stacking the federal judiciary, governorships and state legislatures with loyalists. This is as serious as a heart attack and you think I’m being unfair for questioning the purpose and effects of this article. Wow.
This is why I say ranked choice voting should be everywhere. But I don't think the solution to third party candidates is to police journalists from covering them.
I agree that ranked choice voting would be better and more representative. I’m not sure what you mean by “policing” a journalist. I’m challenging the premise of the article, which seemed kind of useless and potentially harmful to progressive goals. I believe my feedback is good for this journalist and this newsletter, which aims to provoke thought. I support the effort, but it’s ok, we can disagree.
You are a braver man than I, Ken. I have a hard time listening to the man talk. I personally know a bunch of Rogan listeners that like him for the exact reasons you stated.
Just wanna add my voice to those asking for more specifics on how his statements are riddled with inaccuracies. It's not that I don't believe it--I do think it's quite possible. And I do think that you've hit on something about his appeal having to do with his talking about issues that others don't mention. (To that, I'd add, he's the one that most feels like a fellow human being than a power-hungry automaton.)
I feel, more and more, that voting is an exercise of choosing the least terrible candidate. And for all his imperfections, he still feels like that, to me.
“He doesn’t understand Putin’s thinking (or iniquity) in mounting a full scale invasion.”
Perhaps, but I also don’t buy the general suggestion in the media from various government sources that Putin is interested in invading Poland as a follow up, let alone Germany or France.
I also don’t see any evidence that the current administration has a realistic end goal in mind for the conflict, let alone a plan or strategy to achieve it.
Like other commenters have said, if you have issues with his specifics in his speech, can you at least point them out? The Ukraine timeline comes across as pretty accurate, as does our government agencies being captured by big business.
(Notably, it seems the one thing Republican and Democrat talking heads point to is getting rid of Lina Khan, head of the one agency that is going after the biggest players.)
Compared to your document-driven reporting this comes across as half-baked.
RFK Jr had my vote and still has my interest. His passion shows an honest broker who has spent years fighting corrupt corporations and studying the issues. His Children’s Heath Defense book on Fauci and Big Pharma might have inaccuracies, I do not know, but it is one of the most well documented I have ever read. RFK Jr came on my radar when I saw the movie
Dark Waters and investigated his role addressing environmental concerns.
I'm not going to lie and say his addition changed my vote. It didn't. I was already voting for Trump based on 1st and 2nd amendment protection, protection of women's sports, his embrace of masculinity (I have two sons), and his anti-war attitude generally. However, with the addition of RFK, Jr., Shannahan, and Gabbard, I'm more excited than ever to vote. In the 90's and early 00's, I was a Democrat. My principles haven't really changed, but theirs have. I still respect everyone's right to vote for whoever they want. I just happen to think this is truly a dream team of ideas.
I can't give it a thumbs down, but I would like to hear anyone discuss Stein more. I have a feeling that she's to get more votes than the DNC is prepared to accept and most of them will be in response to Harris refusing to listen to what her base wants. I don't want Trump to win and I know Stein won't. But I can't vote for Harris unless she changes her positions on some of things she's not addressing.
I'm glad you wrote this. Please, keep looking at RFK Jr, I'm amazed you paid him no attention so far. Also, you should really check into some of the things you blindly dismiss him on, such as the story of Boris Johnson working to pull the Ukrainians back from the negotiating table. That has been confirmed by several different accounts from officials, if I recall. I'm kind of disappointed, this reads like a bunch of very initial and dismissive thoughts that you wrote down after watching one interview with RFK Jr. It kind of goes to show that everyone else writing articles on him really hasn't even bothered to do that, but you're still not very well informed on what he has to say and what his positions are.
You should really listen to a few of his interviews and speeches. There's something there you're missing.
That being said, you're spot on correct about him being the Trump of 2024. If Trump had not been running, he would have absolutely filled that role. Trump took a lot of oxygen out of the room though, there's not quite enough room for two different populists in the race. And that's why RFK is so interesting and resonant. He's quite articulate and his memory is pretty remarkable. He does up to 8-10 interviews in a day, which is a lot more than we can say for a certain other candidate.
Hey, I tried hard to be fair in this and give him credit for diagnosing the correct problems while offering treatments that I think are incorrect. I agree with you that media haven't bothered to look at what he says.
For that I am very appreciative, sorry if I came across too strong. Like I said, I'm glad you took a look. My frustration is less with you and more with the coverage he got from everyone. It definitely feels like the media and their friends at tech platforms, fact checking NGO's, etc. have all circled the wagons since 2016 and agreed to never let anyone remotely like Trump get the oxygen they might need to run an effective campaign.
On top of that, Kennedy was one of the first people whom the Biden administration started organizing content takedowns against within hours of them entering the White House.
You weren’t specific when you said his comments were “riddled with inaccuracy”. What are your thoughts on the relentless expansion of NATO when everyone knew it was a red line for the Kremlin for decades?
Great points. Harris is leaving votes on the table not addressing healthcare. This would be a great issue for Walz to take because he's so gifted at speaking to regular people.
I think Kennedy also gets at a general feeling that the current politicians aren’t prioritizing domestic problems at the moment.
Surely, there's a typo here: "Thirty-one percent of Americans say it’s too much aid, whereas 25 percent say it’s too much and 18 percent say they’re not sure" Please fix this.
So, RFK Jr. appeals to what exactly? He’s not an option for President. He spewed a bunch of inaccurate “information” about forever wars (that Trump will just ignore). Is the bar so low that this passes for a good reason to vote for the felon, because he let a desperate, potentially unstable candidate join his team in hopes of a cabinet position?
I’m scratching my head on this one. Rfk Jr. will have no opportunity to do anything you think is good, assuming he can leverage his capitulation into a cabinet position. What this race comes down to is whether you want a President Vance or a President Harris.
Trump isn’t going to last long, and if he manages to get into office, his VP and the rest of his donors/cronies (who are just tolerating him) will have him ousted for incapacity. Then you can forget about tax money going overseas - it will be used to enhance the wealth of the 1% and bulk up the MIC to control threats to oligarchs from within and without. Democracy will be just a dim memory.
You think this is far fetched? Take it from Vance himself: "I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program. [...] We should seize the administrative state for our own purposes.
"I think what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every single public servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts... because you will get taken to court... And when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it."
We got lucky with Trump in Round 1 - he didn’t know what he was doing, his worst impulses kept in check by principled people. But unlike Donald Trump, Vance is cogent, strategic, methodical, disciplined, and calculated.
Vance has made dangerous friends through Peter Theil, a billionaire who does not believe in democracy. It’s comically obvious that these folks (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, David Sacks, Charlie Kirk, Rupert Murdoch, et al.) plan to use Section 4 of the 25th amendment to declare Trump incompetent (if he doesn’t have a cardiac event or fall down some stairs first).
They just need the VP and at least half of the cabinet officers (Musk and the Project 2025 crew) to declare him incompetent to perform the duties of office. Once presented to the President of the Senate pro tempore and the House Speaker, maybe after an “incident”, the VP immediately becomes the acting President, while Trump challenges the coup in court for years.
That’s how we end up with President Vance, who thinks Andrew Jackson did a good thing when he openly defied SCOTUS to allow the state of Georgia to steal Cherokee land and parcel it out to white settlers, sending 1/4 of them to their deaths on the infamous Trail of Tears.
Except this time, it will be all the modern undesirables getting rounded up and put in camps. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. Like those uppity women who think they’re equal to men; those who got abortions or used birth control; those who are LGBTQ+ or not “Christian” in the right way or at all, and any groups like racial or other minorities who threaten the alt-right vision of using biblical imperatives to return control of this nation to the landed gentry (wealthy, white, cishet men).
This is not just distant history — it is a successful, well-studied template of how to impose autocratic rule in the US. Vance sponsored a bill called the Dismantle DEI Act of 2024 that would make it illegal to talk about racially-based systemic oppression. What else would a President Vance curtail? The billionaires don’t like dissent.
Curtis Yarvin, who Vance referenced right before invoking Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the law, wants to establish “realms” that would be controlled by corporate heads with unchecked power. In his realm, Yarvis has stated, people would be genotyped.
Yarvis writes, “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
Rfk Jr. will be a footnote in history, but sure, tell me how appealing he is because he talks more about your priorities than Harris did during her DNC speech. Convince people to vote for Trump, an antisocial bully with no morals or conscience.
Harris is doing just fine alienating sections of her base she needs to win all on her own. I don't think it's fair to accuse a journalist covering reasons why RFK Jr might be popular with some voters as throwing the election. I also think you're giving the RNC way more independence from Trump than they are going to have if they win.
What is the purpose of this coverage? That’s what I question. Why praise a guy who just dropped out unless it is to encourage others to vote for Trump (who he endorsed after being rebuffed by Harris and getting some kind of offer from Trump)?
I find it incomprehensible. But I’ve been watching otherwise intelligent people throw their votes away on 3rd party candidates since Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, so I’ve got decades of experience viewing this particular circus. Bernie Sanders came closest but even he couldn’t overcome the “winner takes all” election system prevalent in the US.
Electoral politics is a math problem. Rfk Jr. never got more than 5% of voters to support his campaign. Even if I’m generous and give him double that figure to 10%, there is no way possible for him to do anything but split the vote. If you think voting for Trump or abstaining from voting are good ideas, then you haven’t been around long enough to see how this will play out. Never in the history of the US has a presidential election loss caused a candidate or a major party to abandon their prior policy positions. Literally never. The end result has always been the election of the GOP candidate, which was usually far worse for everyone, and took us longer to recover from.
Now we have reached the grand finale of all this foolishness. We have one shot to keep this country from descending into an autocratic hellscape of a fundamentalist theocracy. If Harris doesn’t win, we won’t have to worry about voting ever again. We’ve been told this in these words. You think they’re joking? They have a 900+ page blueprint. They’ve spent nearly 50 years stacking the federal judiciary, governorships and state legislatures with loyalists. This is as serious as a heart attack and you think I’m being unfair for questioning the purpose and effects of this article. Wow.
This is why I say ranked choice voting should be everywhere. But I don't think the solution to third party candidates is to police journalists from covering them.
I agree that ranked choice voting would be better and more representative. I’m not sure what you mean by “policing” a journalist. I’m challenging the premise of the article, which seemed kind of useless and potentially harmful to progressive goals. I believe my feedback is good for this journalist and this newsletter, which aims to provoke thought. I support the effort, but it’s ok, we can disagree.
Yes, of course.
You are a braver man than I, Ken. I have a hard time listening to the man talk. I personally know a bunch of Rogan listeners that like him for the exact reasons you stated.
Just wanna add my voice to those asking for more specifics on how his statements are riddled with inaccuracies. It's not that I don't believe it--I do think it's quite possible. And I do think that you've hit on something about his appeal having to do with his talking about issues that others don't mention. (To that, I'd add, he's the one that most feels like a fellow human being than a power-hungry automaton.)
I feel, more and more, that voting is an exercise of choosing the least terrible candidate. And for all his imperfections, he still feels like that, to me.
“He doesn’t understand Putin’s thinking (or iniquity) in mounting a full scale invasion.”
Perhaps, but I also don’t buy the general suggestion in the media from various government sources that Putin is interested in invading Poland as a follow up, let alone Germany or France.
I also don’t see any evidence that the current administration has a realistic end goal in mind for the conflict, let alone a plan or strategy to achieve it.
Like other commenters have said, if you have issues with his specifics in his speech, can you at least point them out? The Ukraine timeline comes across as pretty accurate, as does our government agencies being captured by big business.
(Notably, it seems the one thing Republican and Democrat talking heads point to is getting rid of Lina Khan, head of the one agency that is going after the biggest players.)
Compared to your document-driven reporting this comes across as half-baked.
RFK Jr had my vote and still has my interest. His passion shows an honest broker who has spent years fighting corrupt corporations and studying the issues. His Children’s Heath Defense book on Fauci and Big Pharma might have inaccuracies, I do not know, but it is one of the most well documented I have ever read. RFK Jr came on my radar when I saw the movie
Dark Waters and investigated his role addressing environmental concerns.
I'm not going to lie and say his addition changed my vote. It didn't. I was already voting for Trump based on 1st and 2nd amendment protection, protection of women's sports, his embrace of masculinity (I have two sons), and his anti-war attitude generally. However, with the addition of RFK, Jr., Shannahan, and Gabbard, I'm more excited than ever to vote. In the 90's and early 00's, I was a Democrat. My principles haven't really changed, but theirs have. I still respect everyone's right to vote for whoever they want. I just happen to think this is truly a dream team of ideas.
🤮
Good piece. By analysing RFK's speech, you put your finger on what has not been said on the Dem side.
I can't give it a thumbs down, but I would like to hear anyone discuss Stein more. I have a feeling that she's to get more votes than the DNC is prepared to accept and most of them will be in response to Harris refusing to listen to what her base wants. I don't want Trump to win and I know Stein won't. But I can't vote for Harris unless she changes her positions on some of things she's not addressing.
Same. I just wish we had ranked choice voting for all 50 states for presidential elections at least.