Trump-Kennedy 2024 and a nightmare victory was not on yet on my list of things that keep me up at night. Thanks for making sure that no anxiety provoking scenario goes unexamined 😳
I have no doubt the RFK Jr would find some way to run with the person who gave us Operation Warp Speed. Or voters where cognitive dissonance is not a problem.
I'm not sure that Trump's ego would allow him to choose a running mate who might, at some point, upstage him. Kennedy's family background alone offers that possibility. I do, however, think that you're on to something as to where right and left conspiracy theories collide and the growing appeal of those theories in an increasingly complex world flooded with both information and misinformation, all of which the individual is left to sort out.
At the risk of being reductive......most voters are NOT smart, most voters are NOT rational, most voters are NOT logical. Some percentage of the population is capable of looking at a "bigger picture", I would argue that percentage is very limited. We are tribal, selfish, illogical beings that look for certainty in a world that offers NONE.(Conspiracy theories offer so much comfort to the folks that aren't good at critical thinking) Trump/Kennedy is the perfect distillation of popularity married to ignorance. (How may f'ing times does the vaccine shit have to be debunked?)
Religion and Politics have been getting chummier and chummier for decades. They have almost reached singularity in this country. IMO The sooner we acknowledge there is no magic man in the sky, the better we will be at sustaining governments.
Damon, check out the Rogan interview with RFK from yesterday, I think your misunderstanding the appeal, his support is coming from much of the tech world, so highly educated, but maybe to much time online, I’ll give you that, but his appeal is not so much about “conspiracy”, it’s something much simpler, it’s about companies, especially those with government contracts, that’s grift off the system, which has been around since the beginning of time, War Inc is something the left understood my entire life, how they trust those forces now is beyond my ability to understand, and big pharna was another grifter that everyone understood through the opioid crisis, this one I do understand, because I used to be a full blown believer in big pharna, that doesn’t make you a conspiracist, it’s seeing something obvious that you have private companies with a profit motive, period
From Mark Zuckerberg on being asked to lie for the government just this week,
“Just take some of the stuff around Covid earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. . . Unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust.” Why should anyone be suspicious?
"there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. . . " and there's the rub. You have a brand new virus that is overloading hospital systems and on the way to killing millions. You don't have the luxury of saying 'we don't know enough, we need more information before we can do anything' and have to proceed with past historical events.
But 'censoring'. I don't know how I managed to hear such asinine nonsense as 'mRNA will change your DNA' if there really was the censoring that some insist existed.
Think about this one example, Fauci saying, “If you get vaccinated, your body becomes a dead end to the virus”, that wasn’t even close to correct, it’s like 0% good at keeping you from getting Covid, that doesn’t make you angry? Imagine any other product, where you are told it does something extremely well, remember 94% effective? And it doesn’t do that at all, you’d be mad, I think the reason people let Fauci off the hook on this, is because they wanted it to work so badly, plus, they shamed family members, lost friends, telling people their evil, and when it turns out they were wrong, it takes incredibly humility to muster that
At the same time he said "dead end", he also said “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it.”
I guess if you want to go through these nonsense arguments again, you'll just have to talk to the mirror. I'm not surprised that 'mRNA will change your DNA' didn't rankle you at all.
I agree that there were plenty of crazy talk from all over the place, and platforms do have to at least flag stuff, but I’m talking about huge mistakes from the very top, just last month Fauci says in the New York Times interview that masks were only 10% effective, I was appalled, it’s exactly what he said at the beginning in February of 2020, we divided entire communities over something he knew didn’t have a prayer at working
Did you get that from the NY Times or from the Clay Travis tweet? Because this is from the Times: "Fauci: It’s a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit. From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.
But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. "
So, for the general population, who received conflicting (and often erroneous) information from a plethora of sources, I'm sure we've all seen persons who didn't wear even the less effective surgical masks, that were the most easily available, properly. Why should anyone be surprised that the effectiveness was substantially less? Where I live, we've even had a security guard murdered because they asked persons to wear their mask. These are not "mistakes from the very top". These are people who don't give a damn about other people.
And with that, I'm done rehashing these arguments. It will never stop and the next epidemic will just have the same arguments brought up again. Maybe next time, it will hit the 'first-born' worst; that's likely what is needed to change the pharaonic obstinancy.
The vax was incredible good at keeping people from severe Illness, which was a huge blessing, we should have focused our efforts on the vulnerable, I think the lies upfront only made people more cynical, which ended up keeping it from very vulnerable people, if they just told the truth, which they did not, the Provincetown outbreak was among an 100% vaxed community in early summer of 21, they kept mandates going for the next 18 months, even when they knew it didn’t keep you from getting or spreading Covid, my only conclusion was they kept it all going to sell more vaxes, which Pharma made a lot of money doing that
Have you read "The Premonition"? Our response to Covid was determined long before its appearance, and based on history of previous outbreaks.
As for the Provincetown outbreak "Critically, the study found that vaccinated individuals carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals, strongly suggesting that vaccinated people could spread the virus to others. "
Plus "Critically, the study found that vaccinated individuals carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals, strongly suggesting that vaccinated people could spread the virus to others. " with "Antibodies in the nasal fluid (known as immunoglobulin A, or IgA) provide first-line defence against COVID-19 by blocking SARS-CoV-2 virus when it first enters the respiratory tract. "
That is the exact quote from Fauci that I was referring to, that doesn’t make you upset? when he says, “I don’t know”, he sure sounded like he knew when it mattered, and again it’s back to what he said on 60 minutes in February 2020, that “cloth masks” don’t work, which is what school kids were being forced to wear, there useless, he now thinks the same thing he did before, and we vilified our neighbors that we used to love over an issue that never had a snowballs chance of working, Fauci isn’t some fringe person going off on misinformation, he was the guy
It's an interesting thought, and if I could run a simulation to see how well the Populist-Conspiracy Party would perform I would be interested in the results. But I don't think Trump/Kennedy would be successful and certainly not 57% of the electorate successful. For one, everything we know indicates the VP choices have basically no effect. For two, if the GOP continued to trend towards conspiracy-populism, they would continue to bleed voters from their normal flank, which I think cancels out any gains from the left end of the horseshoe.
Given that the most exceptional thing about the United States is the exceptional moron stupidity of the average America, your nightmare scenario does have "legs."
What this essay is really about--and something I've been worried about since Trump and Bernie ignited the populist forces on both spectrums--is how easy or difficult it is to fuse of the Paranoid Style of Politics that can be found on both the left and the right. Yes, while Hofstadter suggests most of the Paranoid Style came from the Right, he conceded the Left had a (lesser) tendency as well. If Bernie was as amoral as Trump, he'd have sucked millions on the left into the dark corners of our political ethos. But Bernie has integrity, so it was up to 2nd tier lefties like RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to lead the vulnerable Left into madness.
I agree that many "followers" are looking for easy answers to complex problems, where what seems to be random outcomes MUST have a cause and effect that is simple to understand. The long term question is what can "we" do to assuage the fears and mysteries in life, so that people can live in at least a semi-reality that gets most of us through the day?
This is a great idea! I certainly hope Trump takes you up on it. But he's probably not going to, because being upstaged by Kennedy is too real of a possibility for his ego to tolerate. He'll be looking for a Pence 2.0, someone who will fall in line with a glassy-eyed stare. Chris Christie maybe, he did that so well in 2016 and will happily do it again if there's enough in it for him, and VP should be more than enough.
EDIT: I see that Michelle B Togut had already made the point about Trump's fear of being upstaged.
Thank you for the lucid explication of a serious problem in our country. What do the non-institutionalists think will happen after they destroy all the institutions--many of which come to us through the US Constitution.
I am concerned, however, about your dismissive attitude toward Russia-gate. I have studied Russia for many decades, and I read the Mueller report. At the very least, the connections between Trump and his team and Russia constitute a bad look. Trump’s attitude toward Putin is truly frightening. And consider how hard Russia will have worked to gather “kompromat” on Trump every time he was there. The Russians are awfully good at that.
Trump-Kennedy 2024 and a nightmare victory was not on yet on my list of things that keep me up at night. Thanks for making sure that no anxiety provoking scenario goes unexamined 😳
I have no doubt the RFK Jr would find some way to run with the person who gave us Operation Warp Speed. Or voters where cognitive dissonance is not a problem.
I'm not sure that Trump's ego would allow him to choose a running mate who might, at some point, upstage him. Kennedy's family background alone offers that possibility. I do, however, think that you're on to something as to where right and left conspiracy theories collide and the growing appeal of those theories in an increasingly complex world flooded with both information and misinformation, all of which the individual is left to sort out.
He might like attaching the Kennedy aura to himself — especially when the Kennedy is in a subordinate position and can be treated as such
The kid with his nose pressed against the glass door to the world he will never be invited in to join would absolutely love this as you say.
But will Kennedy be the kind of lickspittle Trump requires--someone who'll fawn over him like Pence did? I doubt it.
Good point. You can’t have everything.
At the risk of being reductive......most voters are NOT smart, most voters are NOT rational, most voters are NOT logical. Some percentage of the population is capable of looking at a "bigger picture", I would argue that percentage is very limited. We are tribal, selfish, illogical beings that look for certainty in a world that offers NONE.(Conspiracy theories offer so much comfort to the folks that aren't good at critical thinking) Trump/Kennedy is the perfect distillation of popularity married to ignorance. (How may f'ing times does the vaccine shit have to be debunked?)
Religion and Politics have been getting chummier and chummier for decades. They have almost reached singularity in this country. IMO The sooner we acknowledge there is no magic man in the sky, the better we will be at sustaining governments.
Damon, check out the Rogan interview with RFK from yesterday, I think your misunderstanding the appeal, his support is coming from much of the tech world, so highly educated, but maybe to much time online, I’ll give you that, but his appeal is not so much about “conspiracy”, it’s something much simpler, it’s about companies, especially those with government contracts, that’s grift off the system, which has been around since the beginning of time, War Inc is something the left understood my entire life, how they trust those forces now is beyond my ability to understand, and big pharna was another grifter that everyone understood through the opioid crisis, this one I do understand, because I used to be a full blown believer in big pharna, that doesn’t make you a conspiracist, it’s seeing something obvious that you have private companies with a profit motive, period
From Mark Zuckerberg on being asked to lie for the government just this week,
“Just take some of the stuff around Covid earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. . . Unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust.” Why should anyone be suspicious?
"there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. . . " and there's the rub. You have a brand new virus that is overloading hospital systems and on the way to killing millions. You don't have the luxury of saying 'we don't know enough, we need more information before we can do anything' and have to proceed with past historical events.
But 'censoring'. I don't know how I managed to hear such asinine nonsense as 'mRNA will change your DNA' if there really was the censoring that some insist existed.
Think about this one example, Fauci saying, “If you get vaccinated, your body becomes a dead end to the virus”, that wasn’t even close to correct, it’s like 0% good at keeping you from getting Covid, that doesn’t make you angry? Imagine any other product, where you are told it does something extremely well, remember 94% effective? And it doesn’t do that at all, you’d be mad, I think the reason people let Fauci off the hook on this, is because they wanted it to work so badly, plus, they shamed family members, lost friends, telling people their evil, and when it turns out they were wrong, it takes incredibly humility to muster that
At the same time he said "dead end", he also said “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it.”
I guess if you want to go through these nonsense arguments again, you'll just have to talk to the mirror. I'm not surprised that 'mRNA will change your DNA' didn't rankle you at all.
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/
I agree that there were plenty of crazy talk from all over the place, and platforms do have to at least flag stuff, but I’m talking about huge mistakes from the very top, just last month Fauci says in the New York Times interview that masks were only 10% effective, I was appalled, it’s exactly what he said at the beginning in February of 2020, we divided entire communities over something he knew didn’t have a prayer at working
Did you get that from the NY Times or from the Clay Travis tweet? Because this is from the Times: "Fauci: It’s a good point in general, but I disagree with your premise a bit. From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.
But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. "
So, for the general population, who received conflicting (and often erroneous) information from a plethora of sources, I'm sure we've all seen persons who didn't wear even the less effective surgical masks, that were the most easily available, properly. Why should anyone be surprised that the effectiveness was substantially less? Where I live, we've even had a security guard murdered because they asked persons to wear their mask. These are not "mistakes from the very top". These are people who don't give a damn about other people.
And with that, I'm done rehashing these arguments. It will never stop and the next epidemic will just have the same arguments brought up again. Maybe next time, it will hit the 'first-born' worst; that's likely what is needed to change the pharaonic obstinancy.
The vax was incredible good at keeping people from severe Illness, which was a huge blessing, we should have focused our efforts on the vulnerable, I think the lies upfront only made people more cynical, which ended up keeping it from very vulnerable people, if they just told the truth, which they did not, the Provincetown outbreak was among an 100% vaxed community in early summer of 21, they kept mandates going for the next 18 months, even when they knew it didn’t keep you from getting or spreading Covid, my only conclusion was they kept it all going to sell more vaxes, which Pharma made a lot of money doing that
Have you read "The Premonition"? Our response to Covid was determined long before its appearance, and based on history of previous outbreaks.
As for the Provincetown outbreak "Critically, the study found that vaccinated individuals carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals, strongly suggesting that vaccinated people could spread the virus to others. "
Plus "Critically, the study found that vaccinated individuals carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals, strongly suggesting that vaccinated people could spread the virus to others. " with "Antibodies in the nasal fluid (known as immunoglobulin A, or IgA) provide first-line defence against COVID-19 by blocking SARS-CoV-2 virus when it first enters the respiratory tract. "
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/30/provincetown-covid-outbreak-vaccinated/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20221220/Nasal-antibodies-decline-nine-months-after-COVID-19-infection-study-finds.aspx#:~:text=Antibodies%20in%20the%20nasal%20fluid,first%20enters%20the%20respiratory%20tract.
Now, do you have any evidence that other vaccines are more effective against nasal 'infection' from airborne viruses?
That is the exact quote from Fauci that I was referring to, that doesn’t make you upset? when he says, “I don’t know”, he sure sounded like he knew when it mattered, and again it’s back to what he said on 60 minutes in February 2020, that “cloth masks” don’t work, which is what school kids were being forced to wear, there useless, he now thinks the same thing he did before, and we vilified our neighbors that we used to love over an issue that never had a snowballs chance of working, Fauci isn’t some fringe person going off on misinformation, he was the guy
It's an interesting thought, and if I could run a simulation to see how well the Populist-Conspiracy Party would perform I would be interested in the results. But I don't think Trump/Kennedy would be successful and certainly not 57% of the electorate successful. For one, everything we know indicates the VP choices have basically no effect. For two, if the GOP continued to trend towards conspiracy-populism, they would continue to bleed voters from their normal flank, which I think cancels out any gains from the left end of the horseshoe.
Dear lord Damon. Are you trying to get me to put some whiskey in my morning coffee? I am going to have nightmares.
One of the sadder things, and it is hard to feel true sadness for many of the Kennedys, is to hear them talk about their sibling/cousin/uncle RFKJr.
Given that the most exceptional thing about the United States is the exceptional moron stupidity of the average America, your nightmare scenario does have "legs."
If he runs at all, RFK will be uniting himself to Trump because he will benefit Trump’s re-election.
What this essay is really about--and something I've been worried about since Trump and Bernie ignited the populist forces on both spectrums--is how easy or difficult it is to fuse of the Paranoid Style of Politics that can be found on both the left and the right. Yes, while Hofstadter suggests most of the Paranoid Style came from the Right, he conceded the Left had a (lesser) tendency as well. If Bernie was as amoral as Trump, he'd have sucked millions on the left into the dark corners of our political ethos. But Bernie has integrity, so it was up to 2nd tier lefties like RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard to lead the vulnerable Left into madness.
I agree that many "followers" are looking for easy answers to complex problems, where what seems to be random outcomes MUST have a cause and effect that is simple to understand. The long term question is what can "we" do to assuage the fears and mysteries in life, so that people can live in at least a semi-reality that gets most of us through the day?
L. Ron Hubbard said, "Start your own Religion!"
Naomi Klein is an intelligent and engaging writer.
This is a great idea! I certainly hope Trump takes you up on it. But he's probably not going to, because being upstaged by Kennedy is too real of a possibility for his ego to tolerate. He'll be looking for a Pence 2.0, someone who will fall in line with a glassy-eyed stare. Chris Christie maybe, he did that so well in 2016 and will happily do it again if there's enough in it for him, and VP should be more than enough.
EDIT: I see that Michelle B Togut had already made the point about Trump's fear of being upstaged.
Thank you for the lucid explication of a serious problem in our country. What do the non-institutionalists think will happen after they destroy all the institutions--many of which come to us through the US Constitution.
I am concerned, however, about your dismissive attitude toward Russia-gate. I have studied Russia for many decades, and I read the Mueller report. At the very least, the connections between Trump and his team and Russia constitute a bad look. Trump’s attitude toward Putin is truly frightening. And consider how hard Russia will have worked to gather “kompromat” on Trump every time he was there. The Russians are awfully good at that.