RFK Jr. Talks Himself Out of the Presidency
Turns out the CIA wasn’t needed
Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for president of these (not very) United States is running on near-empty.
He’s running on a platform consisting of a little of this and and a little of that, aiming to (in his mind) bridge the gap between left and right, salted with a good shake of conspiracy theories.
He alleges that mainstream media outlets are being run by undercover CIA operatives or are controlled in some other way by the CIA, as part of a secret government plot to manipulate Americans' minds. This is based on widely disseminated allegations about a CIA program dubbed "Operation Mockingbird" secretly recruiting journalists to brainwash Americans.
As is true with many conspiracies, there's a kernel of truth in there, followed by assumption upon fantasy upon assumption because some guy said in CounterPunch that a former CIA agent had confirmed something to somebody.
I’m not saying the CIA hasn’t manipulated the media – I’ve lived that experience–, but the overarching magnification of Cold War programs blended into a massive plot boggles the imagination. There are humans out there in Langley, prone to bureaucratic fu*k ups, petty squabbles and tons of mistakes.
You want conspiracies? …take a look at Project 2025, the end-all vision for a second Trump term.
The more voters hear from Kennedy, the less they like him. Last fall, the pollster analysts at 538 had RFK Jr’s favorability rating at plus 8 points. Now his favorability has descended into the ranks of the big boys with a minus 22 rating in a recent YouGov/Economist poll.
Despite the famous name, Kennedy’s promises and campaigning style hasn’t lit a fire under voters.
Here’s Alex Shepard at The New Republic:
Kennedy Jr.’s platform is a mishmash of ideas that hints at another big problem with his campaign: It is the deranged marriage of consultant-driven nonsense on one hand and the candidate’s own conspiracy-addled bullshit on the other. It is a pro-environmental campaign that also enjoys speaking ominously about the national deficit and the need to balance the budget. It is a campaign that is critical of America’s support for Ukraine but sees little wrong with Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza. At every turn it is overrun with strange conspiracy theories about vaccines, medicine, and public health. For every plank in his platform that appeals to a Trump supporter there are three that repel them; for every liberal point he makes in a stump speech he makes seven that would leave a potential Biden voter scowling or shaking their head.
Despite his famous name, Kennedy Jr. is also a shockingly unpolished and uncharismatic presence. He’s prone to rambling on the stump and has a stodgy mien that’s hardly inviting—particularly given his tendency to get lost in the feverswamps.
CNN announced RFK Jr didn’t make the cut for next week’s presidential debate.*
Via The New York Times:
To qualify, Mr. Kennedy needed to earn at least 15 percent support in four approved national polls. By Thursday, however, he had only three such polls — one from CNN, one from Quinnipiac University and one from Marquette University Law School. The last approved poll that could have qualified Mr. Kennedy, published by Fox News on Wednesday, showed him at 10 percent support.
Mr. Kennedy also needed to be officially on the ballot in enough states that he could win 270 votes in the Electoral College — the threshold for winning the presidency. As of Thursday, Mr. Kennedy had less than a third of that number, according to an analysis by The New York Times. He is officially on the ballot in only six states — California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma and Utah — totaling 89 Electoral College votes.
(*Story on debate coming Monday)
His campaign filed a protest with the Federal Election Commission, saying CNN’s had participated in a conspiracy to keep him out and that their sponsorship amounted to a campaign contribution.
FYI- Biden and Trump do not technically have ballot access in a sufficient number of states to qualify either because neither has been officially nominated at party conventions yet, which don’t take place until later this summer.
Another harbinger of doom for the Kennedy campaign is a weak fundraising report for the month of May: just $2.6 million. They spent more than $6.3 million in the same month, mostly focused on gaining ballot access.
Vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, with a personal fortune estimated around $1 billion following her divorce from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, contributed $8 million in April. If Shanahan decided to go all-in for the campaign things could change, but without the national exposure possible from the debate such a move won’t be likely.
The Veep candidate, who has largely stayed out of the spotlight, sat down for an interview at Fox News this week. She probably should have stayed off the stage.
Via The Daily Beast:
Michaelson asked Shanahan–bluntly—what in her background would make her a good president if, in a “worst-case scenario,” she had to lead the country.
“I think that I have a very sophisticated view on foreign affairs due to my previous work in intellectual property law (sic),” she said. “I understand how global commerce works. I understand how we build batteries around the world.”
The head-scratcher of a response went further off the rails shortly after.
“I understand the importance of semiconductors. I understand that big foreign policy decisions are made specifically around semiconductors, and I also am multicultural,” she continued. “My background is one in which I’ve spent most of my spiritual life studying world religions, and I think it’s really important right now for us to understand and respect each other’s religious alignment and understand the depths and the nuances of it.”
There are so many fallacies underlying the RFK Jr campaign that it can be hard to know where to start… like….the assumption that the polarities in US politics can be bridged with compromise, the assumption that most people really care about politics, and, most of all that third party bids in our first-past-the-post political system are essentially impossible.
A candidate whose initial primary funder was also funding the Trump campaign should clue people in to what game was being played. Now, both mainstream candidates have grasped the spoiler threat RFK Jr poses to them. What little publicity his campaign is getting is all negative, because now there really is a conspiracy; neither candidate can pull off a clean win with a spoiler in the race.
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Friday Finds in the News World
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Gilead’s twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV succeeds in late-stage trial via CNBC
Gilead’s experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday.
None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot had contracted HIV by an interim analysis, prompting the independent data monitoring committee to recommend Gilead unblind the Phase 3 trial and offer the treatment to everyone in the study. Other participants had received standard daily pills.
The results bring Gilead one step closer to introducing a new form of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, and broadening its HIV business. Shares of the company rose about 7% on Thursday.
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Border Patrol reports arrests are down 25% since Biden announced new asylum restrictions via The Associated Press (Would somebody send this link to Jim Desmond, please?)
The number of arrests by Border Patrol agents of people illegally crossing into the United States fell in May to the third lowest of any month during the Biden presidency, while preliminary figures released Thursday show encounters with migrants falling even more in the roughly two weeks since the president announced new rules restricting asylum.
The figures are likely welcome news for a White House that has been struggling to show to voters concerned over immigration that it has control of the southern border. But the number of people coming to the border is often in flux, dependent on conditions in countries far from the U.S. and on smugglers who profit from global migration.
Border Patrol made 117,900 arrests of people entering the country between the official border crossing points in May, Customs and Border Protection said in a news release. That’s 9% lower than during April, the agency said. The agency said preliminary data since President Joe Biden’s June 4 announcement restricting asylum access shows arrests have fallen by 25%.
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Conservative Temecula school board president officially loses recall vote via The Los Angeles Times
We did it! We did it!” said Monica La Combe, a district resident for 21 years whose children graduated from high school in Temecula Valley. A son graduated this year, and another child, who is nonbinary, graduated in 2022.
“What this board came in and did was was crazy. They just came in and made everybody scared and made our community look really, really bad with respect to who we are and how our children are educated,” La Combe said. “This recall election was important in order to get our district back on the trajectory of progress that we were headed toward.
“We have conservatives and liberals,” she added, speaking of the community, “but what they were doing was just really extreme.”
