Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is feeding Americans’ appetite for conspiracies.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech is warbling, crackling, scratchy—sort of like Marge Simpson’s. His voice, he told me, is “fucked up.” The official medical diagnosis is spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the larynx. He didn’t always sound this way; his speaking style changed when he was in his 40s. Kennedy has said he suspects an influenza vaccine might have been the catalyst. This idea is not supported by science.
He was telling me about his life with one arm outstretched on the velvet sofa of his suite at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It was the end of May, and a breeze blew in through the open doors leading to a private terrace. Two of his aides sat nearby, typing and eavesdropping. A security guard stood in the hallway.
Kennedy was finishing a plate of room-service risotto, and his navy tie was carefully tucked into his white button-down shirt. He’s taller, tanner, and buffer than the average 69-year-old. He is, after all, a Kennedy. His blue eyes oscillate between piercing and adrift, depending on the topic of discussion.
He told me that he’s surrounded by “integrative medical people”—naturopaths, osteopaths, healers of all sorts. “A lot of them think that they can cure me,” he said. Last year, Kennedy traveled to Japan for surgery to try to fix his voice. “I’ve got these doctors that have given me a formula,” he said. “They’re not even doctors, actually, these guys.”
I asked him what, exactly, he was taking.
“The stuff that they gave me? I don’t know what it is. It’s supposed to reorient your electric energy.” He believes it’s working.
When he was 19, Kennedy jumped off a dock into shallow water, which he says left him nearly paralyzed. For decades, he could hardly turn his head. Seven years ago, at a convention of chiropractors, a healer performed a 30-minute “manipulation of energy”—making chanting noises while holding his hands six inches over Kennedy’s body. The next morning, his neck felt better. “I don’t know if they had anything to do with each other, but, you know, it was weird,” he said.
Though he’s been a member of the premier American political dynasty his whole life and a noted environmentalist for decades, most people are just now discovering the breadth and depth of Kennedy’s belief system. He has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”
Kennedy reached a new level of notoriety in 2021, after the publication of his conspiratorial treatise The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It has sold more than 1 million copies, according to his publisher, “despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.” The book cemented his status as one of America’s foremost anti-vaxxers. It also helped lay the foundation for his Democratic presidential primary campaign against Joe Biden.
On the campaign trail, he paints a conspiratorial picture of collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. If elected, he has said he would gut the Food and Drug Administration and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.” His most ominous message is also his simplest: He feels his country is being taken away from him. It’s a familiar theme, similar to former President Donald Trump’s. But whereas Trump relies heavily on white identity politics, Kennedy is spinning up a more diverse web of supporters: anti-vaxxers, anti-government individuals, Silicon Valley magnates, “freethinking” celebrities, libertarians, Trump-weary Republicans, and Democrats who believe Biden is too old and feeble for a second term.
So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent. What had initially been written off as a stunt has evolved into a complex threat to both Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way: Kennedy’s support is real.
He is tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche. Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them. Falling down conspiratorial internet rabbit holes has become an entirely normal pastime. Study after study confirms a very real “epidemic of loneliness.” Scores of people are bored and depressed and searching for narratives to help explain their anxiety and isolation. Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.
Even though Kennedy remains a long-shot candidate, his presence in the 2024 race cannot be ignored. “My goal is to do the right thing, and whatever God wants is going to happen,” Kennedy told me. He now earnestly believes that in 12 months, he will be the Democratic nominee for president…..