TIME DC Report: Inside the Very Online Campaign of RFK Jr.
TIME Senior Correspondents Vera Bergengruen and Molly Ball discuss the controversial 2024 presidential candidate RFK Jr. Vera Bergengruen visited Kennedy at his Los Angeles home for a profile in TIME.com.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hi, I'm Molly Ball of Time Magazine.
00:07 I'm here with my colleague Vera Bergen-Gruen.
00:10 Welcome, Vera.
00:11 - Thank you.
00:12 - So we're here to talk about your new profile
00:14 of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
00:16 Now, you normally cover disinformation,
00:19 far-right online communities.
00:21 How did that lead you to a profile of Bobby Kennedy?
00:24 - Yeah, so I'm usually kind of an investigative correspondent.
00:27 I cover a lot of online movements,
00:29 you know, where these kind of ideas come from
00:31 that seem to mobilize large groups of people,
00:33 especially on the internet.
00:34 And I was covering a lot,
00:36 the anti-vaccine movement during COVID,
00:38 how that was taking off and who the big personalities were
00:40 that whose name kind of became synonymous with the movement.
00:43 And one of them was RFK Jr.
00:45 And people really responded to him,
00:48 partly maybe because he's a Kennedy,
00:49 they recognize his name,
00:51 but he had been running an anti-vaccine organization
00:53 for decades before it became, you know, trendy,
00:55 as people kind of said during COVID,
00:57 before it became much more of a mainstream idea.
01:00 And so I actually went to a big rally on the Lincoln Memorial.
01:04 It was called Defeat the Mandates.
01:06 It was last January in 2022.
01:09 And he was one of the keynote speakers.
01:10 It was a very right-wing rally.
01:13 It was the, you know,
01:13 everyone was holding all these signs
01:15 that had a range of very right-wing slogans,
01:19 the proud boys were there.
01:20 And he is, you know, he's a Democrat,
01:23 and he was there as one of the main speakers.
01:25 And a lot of people really responded to him,
01:28 to his message about, you know, the dangers of vaccines,
01:31 what he said was a big cover-up by the government.
01:33 And, you know, all of them were Republicans,
01:35 all of them were very conservative.
01:37 And they told me that they really admired him,
01:39 and were going to keep following, you know, his career
01:42 and see what he did next.
01:43 And so I also kept covering what he did next.
01:45 And now, you know, he's running as a Democrat,
01:47 but seems to have a very odd coalition of support
01:50 from the far left, the far right,
01:51 and kind of everything in between.
01:53 - Right, so he's now running for president
01:55 in the Democratic primary against President Joe Biden.
01:59 But it's a very unconventional campaign.
02:01 Talk about the time you spent with him,
02:02 the reporting that you did.
02:04 - Yeah, so he actually lives in LA.
02:06 You know, he's married to Cheryl Hines,
02:08 who's a famous actress from "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
02:11 And, you know, he lives in a very kind of unusual world,
02:15 usually for someone who wants to go into politics
02:17 in that particular route.
02:18 And I went to his house, he lives, you know,
02:20 up, you know, thousand feet above sea level,
02:22 you lose reception when you drive up
02:24 to his house in Mandeville Canyon.
02:26 And, you know, his entire home, his living room,
02:29 it's a shrine to his famous uncle, famous father.
02:32 He has, you know, a bust of, you know, JFK.
02:35 He's got all these framed memorabilia from his dad.
02:38 He was nine when his uncle was assassinated
02:41 and 14 when his dad was shot.
02:43 And so it's almost, you know, he's created this,
02:46 like time has kind of stopped at that moment.
02:48 He's got, you know, they were both so young
02:51 when they were killed.
02:51 And so they're all very,
02:53 they have all these campaign posters, you know,
02:56 RFK Jr. himself is 69.
02:59 And so, you know, it's almost like that's frozen in time
03:01 as these very young charismatic politicians
03:04 were cut down in their prime.
03:05 And he says he's trying to continue on their legacy.
03:08 And you can tell by being in his home that, you know,
03:10 he's kind of spent his whole life in that shadow
03:12 and thinking about that legacy.
03:14 - Wow.
03:15 What's he like?
03:16 What's his personality?
03:17 - He's a really interesting guy.
03:20 You can tell that he has the demeanor of someone
03:23 who's used to being listened to.
03:24 He was born at Kennedy.
03:26 He was always, you know, he had a very political,
03:29 obviously famous political family.
03:30 And it's almost like he's used to being listened to
03:33 on any topic, whether it's cryptocurrency or Ukraine.
03:37 You know, he goes, he studies it,
03:38 and then, you know, he goes out
03:40 and talks about what he's learned
03:42 and he's used to people taking him seriously.
03:44 And so he's, you know, it's odd in some ways
03:47 'cause you look at him and you,
03:48 he bears a striking resemblance to his dad.
03:51 Everyone always said that he was the one
03:53 that was the most similar
03:54 and the one that most kind of had his political talents,
03:57 but he has a vocal disorder.
03:59 He lost his voice when he was 42.
04:01 He says it's a side effect of a vaccine.
04:04 There's no proof of that.
04:06 But it's almost like you're looking at his dad
04:08 or at his uncle, at someone who looks pretty familiar,
04:11 but, you know, he got old and they never did.
04:13 And so he kind of has this, again,
04:16 this very kind of '60s look,
04:18 a very similar way of expressing himself.
04:21 But then when you listen to what he's actually saying,
04:24 he's someone who clearly spends a lot of time online.
04:27 He speaks kind of in the parlance of someone
04:30 who spends a lot of time on Twitter spaces
04:32 and talks a lot on kind of right-wing telegram groups.
04:35 And so it's a really odd combination
04:38 of that kind of '60s nostalgic style.
04:40 You know, he wears the skinny ties
04:42 that were popular in the '60s,
04:43 just like his uncle and his dad.
04:45 He always has his sleeves rolled up.
04:47 There's a certain look that,
04:49 whether consciously or unconsciously,
04:50 he's trying to emulate.
04:52 And at the same time,
04:52 he's probably the most online candidate.
04:54 He's got a TikTok, he's out there talking about censorship
04:58 and, you know, all those kinds of things.
05:00 And so it was a very interesting conversation
05:03 to listen to someone who, again,
05:05 it seems stuck in such different kind of spheres.
05:08 - Yeah, when you talk about him sort of going on
05:10 and on and on at length, to your point.
05:13 But you also, you describe his appeal
05:15 as being a sort of MAGA for Democrats.
05:18 It seems like it's a nostalgia
05:20 that goes beyond just the Kennedy family, right?
05:22 It's an older America that he's trying to invoke.
05:25 - Yeah, it really struck me from, you know,
05:27 his work throughout his life in different ways.
05:30 He keeps referring back to, you know,
05:32 and even before he was even alive,
05:34 I mean, he's kind of talking about, you know,
05:35 people used to be able to go out when they lost their job
05:37 and, you know, catch fish in the river
05:39 and feed their families.
05:39 And now the rivers are polluted.
05:41 And so what I'm trying to say is it goes all the way back.
05:45 He really kind of has this very nostalgic vision of America,
05:49 but especially kind of from what he considers
05:51 the golden era of the '60s, which again, you know,
05:54 his life was kind of divided into
05:56 before and after his father was assassinated.
05:58 And, you know, it cut short this campaign
06:00 that was so much about optimism, about forward-looking.
06:04 Bobby Kennedy's campaign was,
06:06 it was just all about the future and about, you know,
06:08 this particular vision for America.
06:11 And he sees himself as the heir of that,
06:13 but really all he talks about is the past.
06:15 He kind of talks about, you know,
06:17 the companies didn't used to be able to poison medicines
06:19 without anyone holding them accountable.
06:21 The government, you know,
06:22 people used to trust the government and, you know,
06:24 trust the government not to lie to them or censor them,
06:26 which if you know the '60s, I don't think it's quite accurate
06:29 but he speaks about this era
06:32 and clearly wants to return to it.
06:34 And so I specifically just asked him, I said,
06:36 it actually strikes me as pretty Maga, pretty Trumpian.
06:40 And he said, he's like, you know,
06:41 I want to go back to the America of my youth.
06:43 And he wants to, you know,
06:46 when you go to his campaign rallies,
06:47 the signs are I'm a Kennedy Democrat
06:49 and then the same font
06:51 and the same blue block letters from the '60s.
06:54 And even though I think most people now,
06:57 most voters are younger than him,
06:59 but it still kind of seems to bring up something
07:01 in most Democrats.
07:03 Again, this era that's clearly been kind of idealized,
07:06 but they, you know, it sounds pretty good to people to say,
07:08 sure, we want to go back to that.
07:09 We're dissatisfied with the current political sphere.
07:12 We're okay with Biden.
07:13 We don't really like him all that much.
07:14 And we'd love to go back to what you're describing.
07:18 - Well, and people probably know the famous name.
07:20 They may know his anti-vaccine activism,
07:23 but talk a little bit about his career before that.
07:26 - Yeah, so he, you know,
07:28 he got really into environmental law when he was younger.
07:31 He spent three decades, you know,
07:33 becoming a very famous environmental lawyer.
07:36 He got all kinds of awards, accolades,
07:39 and he was extremely respected in that field.
07:41 He was, you know,
07:42 he's pretty intense and obsessive about his passions.
07:45 Everyone says that.
07:46 You can tell, no matter what he focuses on,
07:49 he kind of tends to be that way.
07:51 And so he just, you know,
07:52 relentlessly pursued polluters.
07:54 He was credited with cleaning up the Hudson,
07:57 you know, kind of suing all these companies,
08:00 coal, oil, and, you know,
08:02 focusing a lot on indigenous communities.
08:04 He traveled a lot to South America.
08:06 And, you know, again, like,
08:07 that's what many people do remember.
08:09 I think he was on magazine covers as, you know,
08:11 the Kennedy who matters,
08:12 the one who's going to be the,
08:14 the one who has the political future.
08:16 And then in the 2000s,
08:19 and it's important to realize
08:20 that this is a continuation of his worldview.
08:22 It's not, a lot of people have been asking recently,
08:25 since it's become so prominent, you know,
08:27 what happened to RFK Jr.?
08:28 You know, when did he kind of,
08:30 when did he go off the deep end?
08:32 But when you, it's important to understand that
08:34 for him, he was pursuing polluters.
08:36 And then he decided that vaccines were polluted
08:39 with mercury, none of this as a scientific basis,
08:42 scientists and, you know, experts dispute this.
08:45 And, you know, they, they say it's not true,
08:48 but, you know, he basically decided that
08:50 vaccines were being polluted, that, you know,
08:53 he says that when he was younger, there was no autism.
08:56 There weren't as many peanut allergies.
08:59 He basically pulls this, all these facts together,
09:01 which, you know, experts say he takes out of context
09:04 and basically decided that, you know,
09:07 kind of with the same idea of going backwards,
09:09 the thing that had changed were vaccines
09:12 and that vaccines are dangerous for children.
09:14 And again, there's no factual basis to this,
09:16 but he founded, with that same obsessive energy,
09:20 basically builds the largest anti-vaccine organization
09:23 in the United States.
09:24 And the Kennedy name kind of helped with that
09:27 because if you come out of nowhere
09:28 and start saying these things, you might not get very far,
09:31 but he used his family name to kind of
09:33 give some respectability to very fringe anti-vaccine views,
09:37 which remained fringe until recently, until the pandemic.
09:40 - Yeah, as you said,
09:41 the COVID sort of brought a lot of these,
09:44 probably important to emphasize,
09:45 very dangerous, unscientific, non-factual ideas
09:49 about vaccines into the mainstream, very dangerous ideas.
09:53 But he's had this appetite for conspiracy theories
09:56 for a long time, in addition to the vaccine stuff,
09:58 even stuff about his dad, right?
10:00 - Right, and he seemed to be a bit more low-key about that
10:03 back when he was, again,
10:05 he was constantly asked to go on TV interviews
10:07 to talk about his family,
10:08 to talk about his environmental work.
10:10 And once he really veered hard into these
10:13 dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines,
10:16 he was kind of ostracized.
10:17 He wasn't allowed to go on the documentaries about his dad.
10:20 People basically didn't want to interview him about anything.
10:23 And so he started going further and further
10:25 into every kind of, into other conspiracies,
10:27 which he may have kind of believed before,
10:29 but clearly now felt he might as well go into them.
10:32 So he had a very extensive theory
10:34 about the 2004 election being stolen.
10:36 He thinks the CIA killed his dad.
10:39 And then he just kind of goes on,
10:42 he thinks 5G is being installed in order to harvest
10:46 all kinds of different information about us.
10:48 And all these things he usually positions in a way
10:50 that many people would kind of agree with,
10:52 and then he kind of goes way, way further.
10:54 And it's a specific tactic that is pretty effective
10:57 to get people to believe these conspiracies.
10:59 - Does he have a governing philosophy
11:01 beyond this sort of idea
11:04 that there's a conspiracy out there?
11:05 Does he have a set of political beliefs
11:08 that you could imagine being president
11:11 and working from that?
11:13 - Right, I mean, his main idea,
11:15 and he hasn't set out very detailed policy proposals
11:19 or anything like that for most areas.
11:22 His main idea is that there's this corporate control
11:25 of government of every agency,
11:27 and he needs to root that out.
11:29 He needs to get rid of all those
11:30 financial conflicts of interest,
11:32 all those entanglements,
11:33 and basically return the government to the people.
11:37 And his tagline for his campaign is "Reclaim Democracy,"
11:40 which is pretty stark in that particular way too.
11:43 And again, I asked him, how would you do that?
11:47 I think few people would disagree
11:50 that rooting out any corruption,
11:54 all these things he says on their face
11:56 sound good to most people.
11:57 He said it would be very easy.
11:59 He was fully confident.
12:00 He said, "I'm just," you know,
12:01 he says he sued so many of these agencies
12:03 that he knows exactly who's a good person and a bad person,
12:05 and he'll be able to basically get rid of them.
12:08 And I just kind of started giving him some agencies.
12:10 I said, you know, "What about the FDA?"
12:12 He's like, "Oh yeah, that guy's a bad guy.
12:14 "I'm going to put in the people
12:15 "I used to work with when I was a lawyer."
12:17 And then I asked him about the CIA,
12:19 and he said most people were dutiful civil servants
12:22 just trying to do their best,
12:23 but again, you need to kind of get rid of the top people
12:27 who are, in his mind, kind of completely controlled
12:31 by all these corrupt corporations
12:33 that are pulling the strings.
12:34 And that's just his main message,
12:38 is basically get me in there,
12:39 and I will kind of go back
12:41 to this particular version of things.
12:42 You know, he doesn't have, from what our discussion,
12:44 a particular immigration policy.
12:46 He doesn't have comprehensive policies for healthcare.
12:50 Maybe, you know, it's obviously early days,
12:52 but the two main things are, you know,
12:54 ending the kind of corporate control,
12:56 what he says the corporate control of American government,
12:59 and also ending, you know, he says ending endless wars.
13:02 He says he's going to stop support for Ukraine
13:04 and kind of get America out of this cycle
13:06 of being involved abroad.
13:08 - And one of the most interesting things
13:09 I thought about your story was
13:12 this very unconventional set of fans that he's attracted.
13:16 He obviously runs in some very elite circles,
13:20 but his campaign now is attracting support
13:22 from everyone from Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback,
13:25 to Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder,
13:28 Alicia Silverstone, other Hollywood figures.
13:31 So talk a little bit about
13:32 the sort of very unconventional campaign he's running.
13:35 - Yeah, it's very odd.
13:37 The kind of people he's attracting
13:38 have pretty big megaphones.
13:39 You know, they're very well-known people, some of them.
13:42 Again, I think a lot of them are kind of drawn,
13:44 they're not excited about Joe Biden.
13:47 And it's not that they're necessarily behind everything
13:51 RFK Jr. is selling, because it's still unclear,
13:54 like we said, what exactly he's selling for the most part,
13:56 but they like having an alternative.
13:58 And what they're mainly drawn to, I think,
14:01 is being able to discuss these pet issues,
14:03 which a lot of them have as well.
14:05 You know, Alicia Silverstone, the actress,
14:06 was very involved with this anti-vaccine organization,
14:09 you know, which is called the Children's Health Defense Fund.
14:12 So it's like, it's all around the idea of children
14:15 and like, you know, kind of saving the children, I guess.
14:19 Other people like what he says about censorship.
14:21 This has been a very long, ongoing debate,
14:24 especially in the last couple of years
14:25 about people being canceled,
14:26 about people who, you know,
14:27 who decides what is misinformation,
14:29 why can't people be on Twitter?
14:31 You know, this is the kind of free speech absolutist,
14:33 Elon Musk style people.
14:35 He basically just, because of his name
14:39 and because of the way he is,
14:40 he's basically giving all these people a platform
14:43 in order to discuss these ideas
14:44 in a way that you would never have with even Trump,
14:46 with anyone who's kind of in the current political mainstream.
14:51 And so people, you know, Musk wants to have him on,
14:54 he had a two hour conversation
14:56 where RFK Jr. mainly interviewed Musk.
14:58 He said, "What do you think?"
14:59 And so Musk was thrilled to tell him what he thought.
15:02 And so he's, I think that's the reason
15:04 he's attracting this very unlikely coalition.
15:07 It's partly, it's less because people,
15:09 most people don't want to necessarily hear
15:12 what RFK Jr. thinks in terms of fixing the country,
15:15 but he's presenting an opportunity
15:17 to have these conversations.
15:18 - Interesting.
15:19 So as you report, even most members of his family
15:22 don't support what he's doing.
15:24 They've written op-eds saying, you know,
15:26 he's sort of abusing the Kennedy name,
15:28 but he does seem to be getting traction.
15:30 There's consistently now in a lot of these early polls
15:33 of the Democratic primary,
15:34 he's in solid double digits, as high as 20%.
15:38 Should we be taking him seriously as a candidate?
15:41 Could he win?
15:42 - Well, that's a good question.
15:44 I think, you know, again,
15:45 there aren't many people challenging Joe Biden.
15:48 So I think in terms of polls,
15:50 he has a lot of name recognition.
15:51 Again, he's a Kennedy people, you know,
15:53 you talk to pollsters and they say, okay,
15:54 a lot of people are just saying, yes, I would support him
15:57 because they aren't excited about Biden
15:59 and the Kennedy name means something.
16:01 But he is attracting like, I was skeptical,
16:04 but he is attracting an interesting amount of support.
16:08 I've spoken to a lot of people who either didn't vote
16:10 in the last election or, you know,
16:12 just kind of seem for different reasons
16:15 motivated about this guy.
16:17 And he is running what he calls kind of, you know,
16:20 he's going on a lot of podcasts.
16:22 He's kind of attracting these really,
16:24 he's spending, he's getting a lot of oxygen
16:27 from a lot of new mediums, not that new,
16:30 but that aren't really used as much in campaigning.
16:32 And so a lot of people are basically listening to him.
16:34 You know, he's recently gone on Joe Rogan,
16:36 11 million people listen to every episode,
16:39 that's an average.
16:39 And so that's a lot of people for someone like him,
16:43 who four years ago was completely on the fringes
16:45 and nobody would really have on their platform
16:48 just to talk about some pretty dangerous
16:50 conspiracy theories that, you know,
16:51 the doctors and experts say, you know,
16:53 this is going to get people killed.
16:55 And he says, he told me straight up, he said,
16:57 "Running for president makes it harder for me to be censored."
17:00 And so he's kind of doing this to an extent
17:02 to be listened to.
17:03 And when you talk to him, you really get the sense
17:05 that he was very upset and very hurt by all these,
17:10 by his family members, by the political establishment,
17:13 by everyone turning their backs on someone
17:15 they used to call during campaign season to endorse them.
17:17 You know?
17:18 And so he feels like he's in his element,
17:20 he's doing what he's meant to be doing.
17:22 And so just by going out there and constantly
17:26 not refusing a single interview, going on every podcast,
17:29 I don't think he can win, but I think he's exposing,
17:33 his real goal seems to be to also just expose
17:35 the more people that he can to these ideas.
17:38 - It sounds like it's almost a form of vindication for him.
17:40 - Kind of, I'll go, yeah.
17:42 - Well, you write at the end of your piece
17:44 that his candidacy may say more about America in 2023
17:48 than about him specifically.
17:50 What to you is the larger phenomenon that he represents?
17:53 - I think he's giving, you know, this is,
17:57 it started before COVID, but it really became really
18:01 apparent to most people during COVID.
18:03 These conversations that people wanted to have,
18:05 this kind of bottomless appetite to discuss,
18:08 we can call it conspiracy theories,
18:09 we can call it disinformation,
18:11 but really wanting to be out there,
18:14 challenging, you know, challenging the kind of
18:17 what they would call the mainstream narrative
18:18 about whether it's COVID, whether it's about Ukraine.
18:21 There's a lot of kind of anti-establishment,
18:22 contrarian people who have pretty big platforms
18:26 who are, you know, pretty well off.
18:28 And they want to be having these conversations
18:30 in a political context.
18:32 And he's basically giving them the excuse to do that.
18:35 And so I think, you know,
18:35 people love discussing this kind of stuff.
18:37 People have a lot of the pandemic, the disruption of it,
18:41 and just, you know, just the amount of confusion
18:44 that there was with the health maintenance,
18:45 with everything else, you know,
18:47 people had a lot of legitimate questions about that.
18:49 It also allowed, you know,
18:51 gave an opening for a lot of conspiracy theories,
18:54 you know, a deepened distrust of government,
18:56 of government agencies, of the government telling you
18:58 what to do, you know, the vaccine, again,
19:00 vaccine mandates kind of only expanded that.
19:03 And he used that to his advantage because he's basically,
19:07 you know, he and many other people want to keep
19:10 relitigating what happened during COVID.
19:13 And, you know, with everything,
19:14 with the 2020 election, January 6th,
19:17 so many very big moment, disruptive moments happened.
19:21 And these people want to keep discussing it.
19:22 And kind of what they want to say is we were right.
19:25 So he's kind of, you know, he's like,
19:26 we were right about this.
19:27 You know, they said that you should wear a mask
19:30 and then they said this, and then they say that.
19:31 And some people want to keep discussing it.
19:33 A lot of people who really fell into those things,
19:36 you know, lost family members over it, lost jobs over it.
19:39 You know, they were ostracized by people
19:41 and now he's giving them a chance to kind of,
19:44 again, be kind of vindicated and to have a very high
19:47 platform discussion of these things,
19:48 which a year ago probably wouldn't be getting
19:51 this much oxygen, if that makes sense.
19:53 - Right.
19:54 Such a fascinating piece.
19:55 Vera, thank you so much.
19:56 - Thanks, Molly.
19:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]