It’s Sunday afternoon near the Washington Monument and the clouds overhead are suitably dark and impenetrable. All your friends are here. The accidentally Russia-funded Tim Pool slips into a VIP tent while Russell Brand shows off his chest hair to his partner Jordan Peterson, the victor in many imagined battles against cultural Marxism. He is dressed as a cartoon villain in a suit that is half red and half blue. Nearby, Bashar al-Assad and Putin cheerleader Tulsi Gabbard prepares to call Kamala Harris a warmonger from the stage.
Welcome to the Rescue the Republic rally, featuring many stars of the fabled Vaccines Are Bullshit rally of 2022. The “just because I am paranoid it doesn’t mean that the Feds are not following me” crowd is here for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but first there are many warmup acts. Comedy edgelord Rob Schneider is the master of ceremonies, and has already trotted out his Saturday Night Live Mexican-stereotype character that was created a third of a century ago. (The crowd here is almost all-white, and the number of Latinos and African Americans here could fit into a Hampton Inn conference room.)
Joints are loosened by stretching exercises administered by Nathaniel Garrard “Garry” Lineham, the leader of a wellness organization called Human Garage. Lineham has few credentials in the health field, but he does have a felony conviction from 2010 for creating and distributing encrypted cellphones to a West Coast drug ring. Something called Tennessee Jet sings a protest song of sorts:
The kids are overdosing on fentanyl
The door is wide open at the border wall
D.C.’s busy sellin’ out us all
Unless it’s Ukraine, they ain’t takin’ calls
Politicians whorin’ for the war machine
Laundering money in the name of peace
Dressing up Zelensky in Army green
Marchin’ us right off into World War III
Can’t wait for Jet to rhyme Netanyahu with boogaloo. That won’t happen because there is almost zero mention of the Israeli war on Gaza today, maybe because RFK Jr. supports the conflict. Maybe it was because he suffered blowback when he said the status of anti-vaxxers in America was akin to Anne Frank’s plight. Or maybe it’s because Kennedy once proclaimed, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Anyway, Schneider brings out a conga line of discredited scientists and doctors, some wearing lab coats. Dr. Pierre Kory takes the podium. He is an ivermectin evangelist who once said, “I think what happened is that at the outset of the pandemic, it was decided that all information must go in one direction, from the gods of science down.” Kory, whose medical license expired in 2022, now oversees a telemedicine clinic that, according to The Washington Post, “can receive prescriptions for ivermectin, costing $1,650 for a video consultation and two follow-ups.”
Today, he describes the Covid-19 vaccine as a catastrophe that has cost “millions” of lives. This is exactly untrue, but absolutely on point. The crowd claps, but they are getting itchy. They start to chant.
“Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.”
SURE, I AM HERE IN DRIZZLY D.C. for the unintentional comedy, but also because this is fucking important. In its now 248-year history, ignoring bullshit hasn’t worked out well for the United States. In 1898, William Randolph Hearst, the Andrew Breitbart of his time, drove us into the Spanish Civil War with cries of “Remember the Maine,” an American ship not blown up by the Spanish. A century later, Colin Powell spoke of aluminum tubes as a pretext to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Conspiracies have infected our political parties for centuries. In the 1840s, there was an actual Know-Nothing Party that spread hate and lies about Catholics. The John Birch Society emerged in the 1950s and preached that President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent. It’s not a long way from that fantastical claim to Donald Trump arguing that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
HBO has a new documentary, Stopping the Steal, on Trump’s efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election. The preponderance of the election officials believed that no one could possibly take seriously a movement led by a lawyer invoking Venezuelan involvement and “releasing the Kraken,” while Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye ran down his jowls. Four years later, the vast majority of Republicans believe that the whole election was rigged. Ignore it at our own peril.
It’s hard to gauge how much impact RFK’s depleted army will have on the election, but to overlook his nonsense forgets the fact that crackpots like Pat Buchanan and Jill Stein had outsize impact on the 2000 and 2016 elections that set this country on a path of misery and death. I can already hear the Kennedy folk suggesting I am calling for censorship of inconvenient ideas and candidates. Nope, I say there is no better time than 30 days out from Election Day to put RFK Jr. and his followers under the microscope, ants exposed to a thousand beams of light.
AFTER SELLING WHAT WAS LEFT of his ideals down the Potomac with his endorsement of Donald Trump, few of Kennedy’s alt-famous cohorts have abandoned him. Many of them are here today. Most of them have been canceled or shamed or blown up their own careers, just like RFK has done repeatedly. Others just share his character trait of being egomaniac assholes. They have congealed behind Kennedy into a political movement based on the credo “Give me your arrested, your discredited, your huddled victims yearning to blame their problems on the deep state.” They now follow Bobby in a new sect of the no-shamers.
Today’s rally is organized by evolutionary biologist and longtime Tucker Carlson friend Bret Weinstein. Weinstein is a former professor at Evergreen College who was driven out by idiot students who wanted all white people to leave the campus for a day of protest. Weinstein, an early Bernie Sanders supporter, became the tip of the spear of right-wing conversion therapy that can be summarized as, “I experienced a traumatic political event, and rather than get over it, I have abandoned all my core beliefs. And now I am an AM Radio Republican.”
Weinstein takes the stage early in the day and declares Rescue the Republic a nonpartisan event. He suggests that everyone here is possibly risking their life, and makes the second joke — after Schneider — about how many extremists here were FBI. I laugh and hitch up my khakis. Weinstein stresses the profound importance of everyone having a voice, no matter their views, no matter their past.
“If millions of Americans are afraid to exercise their most fundamental right in their own capital, that implies the capital is held by a force that is hostile to the republic and her people,” says Weinstein, his brow furrowed. “Speech is our right and our duty. It is the alternative to violence, coercion, and tyranny.”
His noble words crumble a few hours later. Weinstein is approached by an obnoxious media prankster. The dude asks the Rescue the Republic founder whether his “brother” Harvey is innocent. Weinstein unravels. He grabs the guy’s camera, removes the memory card, and storms away. The camera is eventually returned without the memory card.
A whiff of moral superiority permeates the rally. I received a long email the week before the event from someone named Mindy after I contacted Rescue the Republic about getting a credential.
I have looked into some of your articles. I would like to personally inquire with you that you are open to being a strength in the media who might step up for the better of the American people and not for a biased agenda…Maybe not everyone believes you care enough to be willing to try to be fair, but I personally believe in creating a bridge between the divide and offering the opportunity to everyone to stand together…
This cri de coeur is followed up by a distressed voicemail from a man named Trevor. I call him back, and he immediately declares our conversation on background, but I will say that he kept me on the phone for a half hour with an unnatural stew of New Age empty calories excusing RFK’s endorsement of Donald Trump. I want to jump out a window, but I am in a friend’s basement.
Trevor name-drops some of his former clients — the Intercept, Planned Parenthood, and Moveon.org — to suggest he was a true progressive. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out it is Trevor FitzGibbon, who closed his public-relations firm in 2015 amid multiple sex-pest allegations. He was never charged, but eventually released a statement saying, “I am sincerely sorry for my behavior and for any women who were harmed.”
It reminds me of something RFK’s new friend once said: “Only the best people.”
IT HAS BEEN A HELL OF A SUMMER FOR RFK Jr. even by Kennedy-family standards. As his independent presidential campaign floundered, Kennedy was denied a meeting with Kamala Harris. He then called Trump and inadvertently posted video of the confidential call, and had to apologize for his oopsie. It was then reported, in descending order, that he faked a bike collision in Central Park with a dead bear he had stashed in his trunk, cut off the head of a dead whale and strapped it to the roof of his car with the blood dripping on his children, and then was implicated in a sexting scandal with a magazine reporter who had recently profiled him.
Still, Kennedy would undoubtedly describe his summer as full brat because he tied his wagon to Trump’s presidential campaign. How it all went down is described from the stage by Del Bigtree, his longtime colleague in vaccine nonsense who was communications director for Kennedy’s campaign. According to Bigtree, Trump called Kennedy and uttered the following request: “I want you to help me clean this system up. I want you to help me make America healthy again. I want you to help me stop them poisoning our kids.” (The statistical probability that the Big Mac-chugging Trump said those words is 0.000000003 percent.)
Bigtree then describes the scene as Kennedy wrestled with the decision of whether to endorse Trump.
“Put yourself in his shoes,” shouts Bigtree. “My family doesn’t want me to do this. The party of my family doesn’t want me to do this, and everybody that’s worked so hard to put me into a position so that maybe I could win, they don’t want me to do this.”
Kennedy did it anyway, just like he ran for president without their blessings. I’m not sure if discarding the pleading of everyone who ever loved you and stood by you as you battled heroin addiction and repeated allegations of sexual creepiness would fall under his uncle’s definition of a profile in courage. No matter. RFK’s endorsement speech in Phoenix was Totally Bobby, a garden hose of narcissism, half-truths, and no truths. Kennedy declared Trump was on board with his Make America Healthy Again plan, which involves the country moving away from processed foods promoted by Big Agriculture and Big Cereal to a Whole Foods lifestyle of berries and free-range chickens. This seems profoundly unlikely, since corporate execs give Trump tons of money and the ex-president’s bloodstream is 43 percent McNuggets. (At the rally, I ask Kennedy ally and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson how he was going to get America’s fast-food president to embrace a less-processed world. Johnson replies it would be on the preponderance of evidence he gathers for Trump. “When Trump sees the results of that,” Johnson tells me, “he might do what I did and give up my powdered-sugar doughnuts and turn to a healthier diet.”)
A month ago, in Phoenix, RFK relitigated his grievances against the Democratic Party, stating with confidence: “In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election. In the system that my father and uncle thrived in. A system with open debates, with fair primaries.”
Standing nearby was Trump, who debated his 2024 primary opponents exactly zero times. JFK, Bobby’s uncle, was nominated in 1960 based on 12 inconsequential primaries. RFK’s presidential ambitions were predicated on being appointed attorney general by his brother and a carpetbagging New York move to claim a Senate seat. RFK didn’t even risk a presidential run in 1968 until Eugene McCarthy drove LBJ out of the race. And the younger Kennedy? He complained that Harris was added to the presidential ballot despite not receiving a single vote. According to my notes, RFK Jr. didn’t receive any votes before successfully getting on the majority of the country’s presidential ballots.
RFK Jr. went on to say that one of the reasons he was endorsing Trump was over his concerns about the curbing of free speech in America. (In the days before and after the speech, Trump called for imprisoning Americans who burned the flag.) Kennedy then mentioned a court case where a federal judge curbed the Biden administration’s ability to meet with social media companies to stop the flow of misinformation. Kennedy claimed all the credit.
“This week, a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden,” said Kennedy, “calling the White House’s censorship project ‘the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.’”
This was — surprise! — misinformation. The quote he attributed to Judge Doughty was from the brief of two states’ attorneys general arguing Kennedy’s point in a connected case. If Tim Walz made that mistake, the right-wing press would have an erection lasting longer than the prescribed four hours.
BACK IN WASHINGTON, I notice that God and ivermectin are battling for supremacy. Both get cheers every time their names come up. The two concepts are equally represented when Russell Brand and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson take the stage.
What can you say about a non-American power couple of a man in a joker suit who almost died while on a meat-only diet and an aging libertine who found Christ four months ago but has already tweeted photos of himself in his tighty-whities baptizing some poor sap? Well, kids, gather around the fireplace and hear a story as old as time. In surely a case of coincidental timing, Brand converted to Christianity just six months after The Sunday Times of London and Channel 4 published allegations that Brand had sexually assaulted multiple women between 2006 and 2013. (Brand told the paper that the relationships were consensual.)
Brand was already Joe Rogan-curious, but now he’s gone full John the Batshit.
“I have arrived on this stage via Hollywood, via liberalism, via all sorts of images of freedom in the form of decadence and Epicureanism, the mindless pursuit of pleasure as a god,” says Brand, sounding very much like his character from Get Him to the Greek if he had been involved in a terrible motorcycle accident. “But I stand before you today, thankfully with a professional psychologist, because I could go crazy at any moment, baby.”
Peterson looks tired, maybe because this is his third stage appearance, including a 20-minute lecture about writing your own story rather than accepting the Big State’s narrative. (A monetizing opportunity has been lost if this is not already a class at Bari Weiss University.) The two foreign nationals have a conversation of sorts about why America is the last bulwark against the fall of Western civilization.
“I made an allusion this morning to the fact that we’re trying to get our story straight,” says Peterson without a touch of irony. “We’re trying to understand what is the foundation on which we all stand that allows us to maintain the freedoms that ennoble us and give us an unlimited horizon of opportunity. What are they in the United States? How are they related to, let’s say, the Judeo-Christian enterprise as a whole, and what is it to bring us together as avatars of the freedom-loving democracies across the world?”
I will buy you a burrito if you can parse that sentence.
Brand thinks he knows what has befallen America.
“One thing that struck me, Dr. Peterson, is the banalization of our culture,” says Brand, who began his career as an MTV presenter in the U.K. and once hosted Big Brother’s Big Mouth, a Big Brother offshoot. “That means making it ordinary and sterile and lacking in glory and lacking in valor, the desacralization. That means the taking away of God from all things. It seems that there is a globalist and totalitarian scheme to replace God.”
It is hard to artfully summarize someone who speaks like an AI version of the biggest dipshit you knew at art school, but here we are. Brand moves into fire-and-brimstone talk delivered in a twee accent.
“I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning; the principle of separateness, the principle of self-centeredness, the principle of the principle of solipsism, upon which this great culture is being steered towards, not community and congregation.”
Friends, sit up straight and listen when Russell Brand talks of solipsism. Dude knows of what he speaks. The crowd titters. Maybe we are entering some kind of Joaquin Phoenix I’m Still Here stunt and Brand is filming a mockumentary. Perhaps sensing this, Brand heads back to simple bangers-and-mash conspiracy talk.
“Note that George Soros just bought 300 radio stations,” says Brand. “You’ll know that Bill Gates invested $300 million in media donations in the last few years. It’s centralized control.”
I want to shout “What about Elon Musk buying Twitter,” but the crowd is in full Give Us Barabbas! mode.
Brand then asks if he can end their talk with a prayer.
“Christ, I call upon your name on this occasion.… May these institutions that were once regarded sacred, so sacred, in fact, that any incursion upon them as on January 6 was regarded as a kind of heresy. May the values that warrant these buildings, these institutions that flag this nation being regarded as one nation under God return to the forefront. May I pray, Lord Jesus Christ, in your holy name, that all Americans, of all cultures and colors and persuasions, come together in your name. I ask Heavenly Father for a new era of peace, that Satan be cast out in your name, in all his forms, but in particular the bizarre Kafka-esque, Hitler-esque, late-Orwellian form of totalitarianism, bureaucracy in the name of care.”
Somehow, there’s more.
“Lord, I ask for true republicanism and true democracy, that every individual may feel their freedom, their freedom to engage in discourse and conversation with one another in good faith, and an end to the deception, the lies and the censorship.”
The Joker and Charlatan U.K. then recite the Lord’s Prayer. Now, I’ve seen many things in my 143 years of reporting, but this is a true WTF moment. Not even televangelists have the balls to offer pseudo-intellectual political commentary embedded within an actual prayer. Then, former 60 Minutes correspondent turned cray cray impresario Lara Logan emerges from the wings. She self-introduces herself as one of the world’s last real reporters.
And that’s when I realize God has taken his own life.
“BOBBY! BOBBY! BOBBY!”
The chants continue as Kennedy takes his place behind a podium protected by bulletproof glass. Clad in a blue suit, white shirt, and tie, RFK Jr. hears the words previously reserved for his father when he was just a boy. What human would not love that?
But his own words bear little resemblance to anything his father or uncle would have ever said. The central premise of any RFK Jr. speech is the fusion of vaccine bullshit — he never mentions the dozens of Samoans who died from the measles shortly after Kennedy stopped by the island to speak against vaccines — and the fervent belief that freedom of speech in America is on life support because he and his followers have been silenced by a conspiracy between media conglomerates and the government.
“Louis Brandeis said that the remedy for bad speech is not censorship,” says Kennedy. “It’s never censorship, it’s more speech.… Hillary Clinton, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris all said the same thing. They said if the Democrats get back into office, that they are going to make sure that misinformation and disinformation is censored.”
No one thinks this will happen. The proof? RFK Jr. is reciting multiple disproved theories, and he is speaking into a microphone that seemingly can be heard from the Capitol to Arlington Cemetery. No independent presidential candidate, brain worm or not, has been more exhaustively covered than RFK Jr.
Kennedy spends some time on the need to get chemicals and plastics out of our foods, an admirable goal if it wasn’t covered with so much insanity, like a grass-fed steak drenched in ketchup. Kennedy then moves into the territory where rational people do not dare go. Not only was Covid-19 a governmental failure, it was also a government conspiracy.
“What was the point of it all?” asks Kennedy. “Well, look at what the outcome was. They closed all the small businesses in this country, 41 percent of Black-owned businesses will never reopen. They shifted money upward. They strengthened Big Tech institutions like Amazon and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Google, and they weakened Main Street and small business and the American worker. And they shifted $4.3 trillion from the American middle class to this new oligarchy of billionaires.”
I try to fact check the $4.3 trillion figure, and, as far as I can tell, this is the amount of federal aid given to individuals and businesses so they could survive the pandemic. Facebook sucks, but I’m pretty sure that a trillion dollars did not end up in Mark Zuckerberg’s Venmo account.
Kennedy wraps up his speech with deep-throated support of Trump, his new master.
“Do you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again, and who’s going to make America free again, and is going to make America once again the greatest nation and the moral authority around the globe?” asks Kennedy. “You need to go to the polls and get your friends there and get Donald Trump and me into Washington, D.C.”
I check my phone. RFK Jr. has not been added to the ticket. Almost simultaneously, Trump is speaking in Erie, Pennsylvania. He suggests a Purge-like period that will end violent crime in America. It doesn’t reflect much respect for the Bill of Rights or making America healthy again, the twin pillars of RFK Jr.’s political ideology.
“Now, if you had one really violent day,” says Trump. “One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it [crime] will end immediately.”
I make my way to the media tent where FitzGibbons promised that RFK Jr. would speak after his speech. It’s a chaotic Babylon of broken people, podcasters, and Tim Pool. I wait for a half hour, passing the time by arguing with Col. Douglas Macgregor over why he has predicted Ukraine’s collapse daily since the first night of Russia’s invasion. (The colonel says his mistake, and I’m paraphrasing, was he thought Vladimir Putin was going to be more ruthless.)
Eventually, I text FitzGibbons to ask him when RFK Jr. might appear.
“He’s not. So sorry.”
A little later, RFK Jr. and Brand are spotted coming out of the Capitol Hill office of Gavin de Becker, security consultant to the stars. A reporter shouts out a question about Bobby’s involvement with New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. He doesn’t answer.
On the stage, Lara Logan reappears. Logan began her career as a war correspondent, but her recent career trajectory has been shaped by insisting that Anthony Fauci is the new Josef Mengele. She has also suggested that the Rothschild family was responsible for the assassinations of JFK and, heavy sigh, Abraham Lincoln.
Logan has been on my mind lately because on Friday night I ate a delicious pizza at D.C.’s Comet Pizza, the center of a bullshit 2016 child-trafficking conspiracy that ended up with an AR-15-wielding man showing up to “liberate” kids. The former 60 Minutes correspondent apparently didn’t get the memo from eight years ago about it not being true, because in February she introduced one of the Pizzagate super-spreaders with the observation, “It was years before I realized and started to investigate, and discovered — holy guacamole! — this actually is all true.”
More like holy fuck. The crowd of a few thousand is thinning, those leaving will miss Pizzagate enthusiast Jack Posobiec bringing out his six-year-old son and handing him the mic so he can yell “Free Steve Bannon.” Logan senses a loss of momentum so she turns up the volume.
“I just want to say, if there are any journalists here today who are going to write that this is a far-right gathering, that anyone here is ultra-right, that anyone here’s a conspiracy theorist, I don’t know, excuse my French, but you can go fuck yourselves.”
Lara, right back at you.
