How do we account for the unfortunate phenomenon that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Blessed at birth with the noblest of American political names, he has, at age 69, launched a pernicious Democratic primary challenge to Joe Biden fueled by conspiracy theories. In the R.F.K. Jr. worldview, vaccine mandates are a scheme to enrich pharmaceutical executives, the coronavirus may have been intentionally engineered to spare Jews and Asians, and 5G networks are tools governments use to “harvest our data and control our behavior … allow[ing] them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.”
Does his campaign represent what America is becoming—a strange new land in which paranoia is so rampant that even a Kennedy trades the customs of Camelot for those of QAnon? Or could it be that R.F.K. Jr. and the host of other conspiracist provocateurs in contemporary politics in fact represent something different, if no less disturbing: the country America has always been?
