This was supposed to be Ron DeSantis’ turf. When the Florida governor appeared last month in a Twitter Space with Elon Musk to announce the launch of his 2024 presidential campaign, it was arguably the high water mark (technical difficulties aside) for a new strain of techno-libertarian right-wing politics embodied by Musk and his ilk — the coronation of an appropriately youthful standard-bearer for their progress-oriented conservatism. So… what was the nearly 70-year-old heir to one of America’s most enduring political dynasties — and a contestant in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary — doing in the same place on Monday? Seemingly in a flash, the DeSantis-friendly tech crowd has bear-hugged Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the gadfly Democratic presidential candidate heretofore known for being one of America’s most prominent spreaders of false information about the effects of vaccines. Quote-tweeting a Fox News segment where RFK Jr. made the claim that he could beat both the former President Donald Trump in a primary and his successor Joe Biden in a general, Twitter co-founder and Bitcoin-loving social media obsessive Jack Dorsey said: “He can and will.” RFK Jr.’s appearance on Twitter Spaces was a stemwinder, cracking the two-hour mark and covering everything from the Project For a New American Century to the death of the gold standard. At times it was more like Kennedy was interviewing Musk instead of the other way around, praising him for the release of the Twitter Files and his outspokenness against the U.S.’ military support of Ukraine. At one point he asked Balaji Srinivasan, the Chicken Little-like venture capitalist and economic doomsayer, to be his secretary of the treasury should he win the presidency. These guys really hit it off. Why? Superficially, Kennedy would seem to embody everything this crowd loathes: a Northeasterner and the scion of a dynasty that puts the Clintons or the Bushes to shame. Hell, he even supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. But rather than what he is, it’s what he’s not, or rather what he’s against, that has earned him the adoration of the Musk-Balaji-David Sacks cadre. Kennedy’s connection to an imagined American past, combined with his facts-be-damned insistence on an elite conspiracy to engineer its future, creates the perfect messaging platform for Musk et alia’s vision of national decline. The Kennedy name is synonymous in the American imagination — at least for those above a certain age — with a misty-eyed view of national ascendance, the post-World War II status quo that saw a lordly, stylish Jack and Jackie presiding over Camelot and an age of miracle and wonder. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” referenced in his 1960 DNC acceptance speech, was the appropriately optimistic domestic agenda to match it — a promise to eradicate poverty and supercharge the space program, so appealing it’s still invoked today by technological and political entrepreneurs alike. That’s the sunny side of the program. Every conservative, after all, needs something to look back at fondly and conserve. As JFK’s actual nephew, RFK Jr. stands in all too neatly as an embodiment of the conspiratorial baby-boomer worldview popularized by Oliver Stone’s (extremely) quasi-historical 1991 film “JFK”: That this American utopia was once within reach, until a bloodthirsty defense industry intervened to have Kennedy killed and replaced by a vice president more eager to escalate the war in Vietnam and fill their coffers. And make no doubt about it, a huge part of the Musk set’s attraction to RFK Jr. has to do with his foreign policy. Massive chunks of their discussion Monday were dedicated to the U.S.’ alleged provocation of Russia and China, with Kennedy echoing Sacks’ repeated remarks that the U.S. is encouraging the war in Ukraine to bolster its domestic agenda. Their guiding heuristic is that any action the United States takes internationally, regardless of the details, should first be assumed a nefarious manifestation of that shadowy deep state’s tentacles. And then, of course, there are the vaccines. Musk has been opposed to them since the beginning, and Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism long predates Covid-19. The actual science of vaccination or virology here is less important than the philosophical stance being taken: that especially when it comes to personal health, the state — and the companies making the vaccines — should automatically face the harshest possibly scrutiny, if not outright suspicion of malicious intent. One could also note that new medicines are already the most tightly regulated part of the American economy. But then you get into collusion between the government and corporations, and further down the rabbit hole — through the looking glass, if you will. As has been noted extensively by political commentators since Donald Trump’s own policy-heterodoxical 2016 campaign, this kind of thinking was once primarily the province of the left. Kennedy is running, after all, as a Democrat, and performing surprisingly strongly in (albeit limited) polling. Rather than surprising, that’s what makes the right-leaning tech set’s embrace of him so totally consistent. A nominally populist, conspiratorial version of can-do American optimism doesn’t map easily onto our previously existing view of partisanship, but it’s been one of the most ascendant new forces in American politics over the past decade. Kennedy might be a longshot for the presidency, but if he wants it, there’s probably a spot on the “All-In” podcast for him long after the ‘24 ballots are counted.
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