“The real opposition is the media,” Steve Bannon famously boasted in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Bannon’s strategy is to spew such an endless firehose of invective and misinformation that journalists give up reporting on truth and simply document the spectacle. And if you do it successfully enough, eventually people believe in nothing. Or they believe in everything you tell them, no matter how facially preposterous. Or they give up believing that truth is knowable at all.
As part of his plan for 2024, Bannon is backing the vanity presidential run of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an antivaxx loon who is JUST ASKING QUESTIONS about whether his father and uncle were killed by the CIA.
Welcome to the sewer, RFK! And before you get it twisted, you’re not the rat swimming against the fecal tide. You are the shit.
Kennedy toiled in relative obscurity for years as an environmental lawyer, but only got the spotlight when he threw his famous name behind the OG vaccine panic of the early aughts that routine immunizations cause autism. (They don’t!) Since then, he fed his voracious appetite for attention by flogging various conspiracy theories, delivered in his signature rasp, which he blames on the flu vaccine, of course. In 2020, he hit the motherlode with COVID-19, becoming one of the worst purveyors of coronavirus misinformation.
But three left turns is a right, as they say, so naturally Kennedy wound up bedding down with stochastic terrorists like Tucker Carlson who wanted to make political hay out of pretending that public health measures were part of a Democratic plot to weaken the economy and defeat Trump — and who didn’t care how many people died because they believed the anti-mask, anti-vax, let’s-lick-each-other’s-faces-during-a-pandemic rhetoric. Because when your family name conjures up associations of unabashed liberalism and the civil rights movement, why not allow it to be coopted the nation’s premier white nationalist?
But with Tuckkker temporarily out of commission, Kennedy has been making some new friends. And not the kind who might suggest that a little yoga and some therapy would be preferable to acting as a human shield as the very worst people in America try to soften Joe Biden up in the primaries so they can sneak Donald Trump back into the White House.
Here he is whining that Instagram won’t let him flog vaccine misinformation on its platform. But never fear, Uncle Elon will ride to the rescue.
Are you listening to their Twitter space? Was it every bit the technical coup and celebration of Elon Musk’s leadership showcased two weeks ago in that coffee klatch with Ron DeSantis? We are unable to tune in, because we are here making words for you, and anyway, our appetite for kink only extends so far.
The best Bannon and his pals can hope for is to take a bite out of Biden in the primary, then cast Kennedy as this season’s Jill Stein in the general. Literally no one earth thinks this guy is going to beat Biden out for the Democratic nomination.
Well, okay, that’s not quite true.
Christ, these people. Let the record reflect that Jack Dorsey predicted that Elon Musk would be an amazing steward of Twitter and would use his power to actually promote free speech. So take his predictions with a giant grain of salt.
But, hey, congrats to RFK, who transformed himself from a respected figure into a loon, and now a walking shitpost. Surely your family must be proud. (Or not.)
[WaPo]
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