RFK JR. DOESN'T HAVE TO TRY VERY HARD TO OUT-DEBATE DAVID REMNICK

David Remnick recently interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for The New Yorker Radio Hour. An edited version of the interview appears on the New Yorker website.

There's no good reason for this. Remnick gives Kennedy this opportunity despite the fact that Kennedy trails Joe Biden by 50 points in the polls. It's impressive that Kennedy is in double digits, but his polling average seems unlikely to break beyond the high teens. Remnick surely won't offer to interview Marianne Williamson, whose poll numbers are a lot closer to Kennedy's than Kennedy's are to Biden's. So why talk to him at all? Is it just because Remnick is a white male baby boomer who, like most white male baby boomers in the media, has a bad case of Kennedy brain?

In the text version of the interview, I give Remnick credit for asserting that Kennedy is a nutjob:

The experience of interviewing him and listening to his previous interviews, I found, was like settling in for a long train ride with a seemingly amiable stranger in the next seat. You ask a straightforward question and, an hour later, as you race by Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, he is still going on about the fraud of COVID vaccines and how he was unfairly “deplatformed” for spouting conspiracy theories. By the time you’ve pulled into Wilmington, he might be talking about how drugs known as poppers helped cause the AIDS epidemic, or how “toxic chemicals” might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. As you head south, he is talking about being “censored” by Instagram, the F.B.I., and the Biden White House. New technologies like 5G towers and digital currencies are totalitarian instruments that could “control our behavior.” Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” After a while, you begin to wonder why you bought a ticket. But it’s too late. You’re pinned into the window seat.

But in the course of the interview itself, Remnick gets sidetracked by irrelevancies. First, there's a prolonged exchange on the subject of whether Kennedy is impertinently running for an office he's not qualified to hold. Remnick asks:

Experience of attending conventions and being around politics is not the same as being involved in the making of policy, either as an executive or as a legislator or as a governor. Are you saying that that kind of experience is not necessary to be President of the United States? The one President I can think of who hasn’t had any experience at that level is Donald Trump.

This is the worst form of elitist credentialism. If Kennedy weren't a crackpot, his experience would read as that of a serious person engaged in relevant issues -- corporate power, the environment, public health. He'd be as qualified for the presidency as, say, Carly Fiorina was in 2016. The reason he shouldn't run is that he's a lunatic.

Kennedy is a bamboozler -- but Remnick also seems to be easily bamboozled, or perhaps he's just too darn polite to call Kennedy on his bullshit. Consider this exchange:

You’re running as a Democrat for President, and I wonder, Who in the Democratic Party do you feel is kindred to you? Obviously not Joe Biden, but—A.O.C.? Or Joe Manchin? Or are you something new entirely? How would you define your ideology?

I’m something old. I’m a Kennedy Democrat. I believe in labor unions. I believe in a strong, robust middle class. I believe in racial justice, in policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.

I don’t think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.

Well, then, why did he do the lockdowns? Lockdowns robbed four trillion [dollars] from the middle class and the poor in this country and transferred it to the super rich. We created five hundred new billionaires—a billionaire a day, every day.

Remnick annotates this by fact-checking Kennedy's numbers. That's nice -- but what he doesn't do is make the obvious point: The lockdowns happened on Donald Trump's watch, not Joe Biden's.

Remnick allows Kennedy to portray himself as the soul of reason. Remnick asks Kennedy whether his candidacy might help elect Donald Trump, who has praised him, as have many of Trump's allies. Kennedy says:

I’m trying to unite the country, David. I’m not going to do what you do, which is to pick out people and say that they’re evil, they should be cancelled, or whatever.... I think the kind of tribalism that you’re advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it’s toxic. It’s created a polarization, a division, in this country that is more dangerous than at any time since the American Civil War.

Remnick asks:

At what point do you say, with respect, that this is not about “tribalism” or “cancellation” or the terms that you’re using, but just an insistence on a certain level of decency and principle? Somebody like Alex Jones comes forward and he has nice things to say to you. At what point do you say, “You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don’t want your support”?

Kennedy replies:

I’m not a cancel-culture guy.

He's not? That's absurd. Kennedy wants to cancel Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, all mainstream medical journals, and all drug companies. And that's an incomplete list.

Jones sicced his audience on the parents of murdered Sandy Hook children, whom he accused of participating in a fabricated massacre. We all know that Kennedy's father and uncle were assassinated, and Remnick gets a bit weepy when asking Kennedy about those deaths -- "You suffered something that I think is just beyond imagination," he says. But the Sandy Hook parents also suffered something that is beyond imagination -- and they had to endure the aftermath of the murder of family members in public, just like the Kennedys. Shouldn't that give Kennedy a special empathy for those parents? In the audio version of the interview, Kennedy says of Jones, "What he did with the Sandy Hook [families] is reprehensible." But he adds, "I'm not going to permanently write him off as a human being." Why not? Does no one ever reach the point of being iredeemable for Kennedy? Actually, we know the answer to that. To Kennedy, Fauci, Gates, and the entire medical establishment are iredeemable -- yet Alex Jones gets a do-over.

But the utter disgrace here is the way the text interview concludes. Remnick confronts Kennedy on his thoroughly debunked belief that vaccines cause autism. Kennedy replies:

Remnick gives Kennedy the last word. And the last word is: There sure is a lot of autism these days -- do you have a better explanation than mine? It's completely irresponsible. There's no mention of the most common mainstream explanation for the increase -- that public awareness of autism has meant more children are tested and diagnosed. There's no mention of the fact that mercury -- Kennedy's original culprit -- hasn't been used as a preservative for most vaccines since 2001. Kennedy's dramatic question is just left hanging.

That's journalistic malpractice. David Remnick should be ashamed of himself.