How Utterly Devoid Of Good Sense Does Someone Have To Be To Want To Vote For RFK, Jr?

RFK, Jr Lost His Mind Long Ago

At one point, it appeared that something like 5% of American voters were ready to cast their ballots for crackpot conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. If my estimate of around 160 million voters is accurate, that means at one point there were as many as 8 million people who wanted to vote for him. That started sinking before he dropped out to around 1%— still something between one and two million. Have you ever met one? I hadn’t either… until the phone ran a few nights ago. “Potential spam” the phone announced, but then the caller started leaving a message— and it was a very old friend. He was visiting L.A.

I met him when we both were living in Amsterdam 50 years ago. We were all still hippies back then. He was also an oddball and very mysterious but an excellent multi-instrumental musician and something of a philosopher. I was infatuated with one of the women who ran the center where I was working and I was so excited when she invited me over to her place for dinner one night. I got there and… that guy was there; they were lovers. Ugghh.

He wasn’t Dutch and no one knew where he was from; it was part of the “mystery.” He tried passing himself off as an American but that might work with Europeans, but not for 2 seconds with an actual American. Anyway, many years later he finally told me he was originally from Turkey and many years after that I was in Istanbul and he said I could go visit his mother. That’s when I realized he was from a very wealthy family. Years after that, he told me it was more than just rich. He was from an old Ottoman family with vast estates and he actually had the deed to the library of Rhodes (now in Greece so, not in his grasp). He’s in his eighties now, and still battling for his rightful inheritance, stolen by uncles and cousins when his father died.

Anyway— long story short— he didn’t bother to let me know in advance that he was driving over the Rockies in his 50 year old jalopy of a van and would be in L.A. Instead it was just “I’m here.” I took him to a Turkish-California restaurant and he was disappointed there was no baba ganoush on the high end, chefy menu. 

He’s an American citizen now and I asked him if he would be voting, half expecting he could say Trump. But he still has enough of his mind intact to say he doesn’t like Trump— before repeating every lame GOP talking point about Kamala, thinking that he had come to all these conclusions about her on his own. And then the curveball I should have seen: he wanted to vote for the one candidate he admired: RFK, Jr, who he referred to as “Bill Kennedy.” 

I shouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised. Ever since I met him, he’s been the most likely person I knew to be taken in by conspiracy theories— every single one of them. It’s like he has no filter. In recent years it’s gotten much worse.

He contracted SARS and he had COVID 4 times. He thinks he knows everything about what’s wrong with vaccines, which he doesn’t allow in his body. He also knows how the Chinese made and released COVID and he knows that the estimates that between 7 and 15 million people having died of COVID worldwide is false and that the 2 million figure of deaths in the U.S. is made up. He knows it. When I originally knew him in Holland he still had some kind of grudging respect for expertise. That’s long gone— other than expertise in things related to musicianship as far as I can tell… but certainly not science or medicine. I forgot to ask him about crypto; damn! That's because he accused me of being a Scientologist— and urging be to abandon them— because of some of the nutty numerology he still believes in and how he interprets my phone number.

So yeah, Bill Kennedy was the perfect candidate for him. The Kennedy who took a $100,000 bribe, possibly just a downpayment, to endorse Trump and the guy who is now starring in a this minute-long TV ad:

Dave Weigel wrote that “Republicans have been portraying the Harris campaign and Democratic Party as anti-Christian and anti-Catholic all year, and stepped up that criticism after Harris sent a video to the Al Smith dinner, instead of attending in person. (Kennedy and his wife Cheryl Hines did attend.) Kennedy has been campaigning for Trump, often alongside Democrat-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard, with the sort of frustrated anti-establishment voters who were attracted to his own presidential campaign. His appeal has not typically centered on faith issues. But this is the first TV ad, with money behind it, in which Kennedy makes the case for Trump. The lack of any abortion line in the 60-second ad is notable— polling has found that issue helping Democrats, even among self-identified Catholics. The messaging is more subtle, leaning on more than 60 years of warm feelings toward the Kennedys from Democratic Catholics.”