I am sorry to say that I truly do not support RFK Jr as a Presidential candidate. From what I have seen, he is either a dangerous crank or a calculated liar (probably some melange of the two) who may help get Trump reelected, thus further tearing our society to shreds. I am weirded out by the outpouring of support he is getting from people in my community and adjacent communities. I think these people are being taken in, and, in what follows, I will explain why I think this.
As I will explore in depth next time, I am also weirded out by my old friend Charles Eisenstein’s bizarre trajectory over the last years. In Charles' descent into Conspiritual flakiness, the formerly esteemed “New Age thought leader” has taken the job of messaging director — ambient myth-maker — for RFK Jr’s campaign. This comes after many years of Charles expressing Hamlet-like indecision over making any kind of commitment to the old “Game A” political system.
I started to form my views on RFK Jr after the hour-long interview I did with him on Instagram Live. I was very hopeful about him before we spoke, but I found him strangely defensive when I simply tried to do my due diligence as a journalist and ask him some skeptical questions. I also closely read and reviewed his bestselling book on Anthony Fauci, which I found very problematic and slanted. I have watched a number of his recent interviews, including the one conducted by Reason Magazine as well as parts of the Rogan, Marcus, Eisenstein, and Fridman interviews (all utterly lacking in journalistic rigor). And I continue to read many articles about him, on a daily basis.
While I am sympathetic to some of RFK Jr’s marginal ideas (such as the prospect that the CIA had a hand in his uncle’s and father’s assassinations, and that estrogen-mimicking chemicals might be influencing gender fluidity) and I understand why people feel drawn to his outsider stance and family pedigree, I find myself put off by him. First of all, we have to reckon with his rejection of vaccines — not just the experimental mRNA Covid vaccines, but vaccines resoundingly considered to be among the greatest triumphs of modern medicine, such as the Polio and Measles vaccines.
Before writing this, I reviewed a book on critical thinking, Weaponized Lies by Daniel Levitin, a respected if mainstream author (I greatly enjoyed Levitin’s book, This is Your Brain on Music, which explored the science behind our enjoyment of rhythm and melody). Levitin worries that, as a society, we are losing the capacity to distinguish between facts, falsehoods, and theories — to think critically. He notes that a theory “is not just an idea—it is an idea based on a careful evaluation of evidence. And not just any evidence—evidence that is relevant to the issue at hand, gathered in an unbiased and rigorous fashion.” He continues:
I believe we need to get back to using plain old “truth” again—and fast. And we need to reject the idea that truth doesn’t exist anymore… The phrase “fake news” sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test. … There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists—and the rest of us—must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have a fact-based opposing side. Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.
Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Maybe journalists don’t want to call “fake news” what it is, a lie, because they don’t want to offend the liars. But I say offend them! Call them on the carpet.
In his book, Levitin explores the set of basic techniques we can use for evaluating all sorts of claims — of course, none of them are foolproof or perfect. For example, he notes that expertise in a particular area matters, but that expertise is typically narrow. Just because someone is an expert in pediatrics doesn’t mean they are an expert in epidemiology, for instance.
Levitin also proposes something he calls a “source hierarchy”: “Some publications are more likely to consult true experts than others, and there exists a hierarchy of information sources. Some sources are simply more consistently reliable than others.” I realize this is hard for many people to swallow these days, but I believe we still have to admit it is the case.
An article in a peer-reviewed academic journal is more likely to have been rigorously fact-checked than an article that appears in a random Medium blog. An article in The New York Times or The Atlantic, similarly, will have gone through extensive levels of research and verification before it sees the light of day. This doesn’t mean that articles from more established sources are always correct. The Times frequently prints retractions and sometimes has to fire journalists who make up stories. “Some people, including Noam Chomsky, have argued that the Times is a vessel of propaganda, reporting news about the U.S. government without a proper amount of skepticism,” Levitin notes. “It’s a matter of averages—the great majority of what you read in the New York Times is likelier to be true than what you read in, for example, the New York Post.”
As someone who has written for establishment outlets like The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and so on, and has also been written about in many of these publications, I have a great deal of direct experience in the process. When you write for The New York Times Magazine, for example, anything factual is nailed down by a team of voracious fact checkers, but the interpretative spin is carefully calibrated by the editors, who are meant to uphold a particular ideology. In fact, I was shocked by the uncharacteristically shady reporting about me when I was featured in Rolling Stone many years ago. The reporter made up details (and probably some anonymous quotes) about our meetings and interactions to amplify her negative spin. Other than these intimate details, however, the basic facts were still accurately presented.
Without some means of establishing at least a baseline coherence — some kind of collective agreement about what constitutes evidence, and, indeed, truth — we are lost. Levitin notes:
We are a storytelling species, and a social species, easily swayed by the opinions of others. We have three ways to acquire information: We can discover it ourselves, we can absorb it implicitly, or we can be told it explicitly. Much of what we know about the world falls in this last category—somewhere along the line, someone told us a fact or we read about it, and so we know it only secondhand. We rely on people with expertise to tell us.
There are many things about the world that we accept as true — or, at least, true enough — without being able to directly verify it for ourselves. For example, we accept that the Earth is round (although a kooky, aperspectival fringe contests even this). We accept that scientists have managed to define the speed of light and other cosmological constants in a way that allows them to make accurate predictions about the world. Most (but not all) of us accept that germs cause diseases, antibiotics cure certain maladies, and so on. I may not have a very definitive idea, at this moment, of why electricity works, but I know that I could look up, at least, the generally accepted scientific explanation, if I desire.
It is often the case that fringe counter-examples or counter-theories become popular. We need critical thinking skills to be able to look at and evaluate these theories dispassionately. As Levitin writes:
We rely on experts, certifications, licenses, encyclopedias, and textbooks. But we also need to rely on ourselves, on our own wits and powers of reasoning. Lying weasels who want to separate us from our money, or get us to vote against our own best interests, will try to snow us with pseudo-facts, confuse us with numbers that have no basis, or distract us with information that, upon closer examination, is not actually relevant. They will masquerade as experts.
Sadly, I find that RFK Jr has mastered a number of these particular techniques: He is an expert at snowing the listener under with pseudo-facts, confusing complex issue with numbers and statistics that have no legitimacy, and distracting the unwary with information that is not actually relevant. He does all of this with an almost Jordan Peterson-esque level of quavering emotion, conveying a particular kind of wounded masculine energy that still has an effect on many people for various psychological reasons that are not easy to unpack, as well as, in his case, historical reasons that are more obvious.
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