Bobby's Bounce: RFK Jr’s Lesser-Evilism

 

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1656323009139953667

Oops. I didn’t see that one coming.

So, let’s talk about RFK Jr.’s decision to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.

Because, to be clear, Bobby is not just—excuse me, not even dropping out of the race. He could have done that, correctly denouncing the Democratic party’s anti-democratic legal and electoral tactics that made it impossible for his campaign to compete within the party or as a third party, and, indeed, denouncing the whole duopoly-enforced structure of American electoral politics that makes it impossible for any non-duopoly candidate to succeed. If he were really interested in building the possibility of a progressive third party, he could have stuck with his very recent critique of how  “President Biden[/Harris], President Trump offer no solutions” and ended his campaign without transferring allegiance to either of the duopoly parties or candidates. He could have approached Jill Stein—as he apparently did both Kamala and Trump—and tried to negotiate agreements on highlighting issues that were important to him in return for urging his supporters to vote for her.

Instead, he is re-positioning himself and his campaign as supporting elements of the campaign of one of the extant duopoly parties—the Trump-Republican Party campaign. He will take himself off the ballot in battleground states, in order not to “likely hand the election to the Democrats,” and he’ll stay on the ballot in “safe” red or blue states where it won’t make any difference. This mirrors the “safe states” strategy of previous “left” third-party candidates, and it defines him as an auxiliary Republican, just as it defined those candidates as auxiliary Democrats. Whether he or they want to admit it, it’s an abdication of any effective third-party building, and a capitulation to one of the two duopoly parties and to duopoly politics tout court.

So, why is RFK Jr. doing this? Why is he abandoning a third-party building effort and any pretense of duopoly non-partisanship, and instead—in an astounding turn for a Kennedy—dedicating himself to the defeat of Kamala and the Democrats, and the victory of Trump and the Republicans? Here’s his campaign-suspending address, with his three reasons highlighted:

Devil’s Advocate: Farewell to Fauci

Devil’s Advocate: Farewell to Fauci

Jim Kavanagh

Noble Heart

I watched the emergence of Anthony Fauci into international prominence over the past two years with particular interest. He and I are graduates of the same New York City high school, a commonality that gives me some insight into his intellectual formation. Though it was some years after him, I played on the basketball team, too. Somewhere, there’s a picture of me in those cool shorts, that I promise you will never see.

Regis High School is a unique institution. It is a highly selective, academically rigorous, all-boys Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is widely considered the best Catholic high school (and one of the best overall) in the country. It gave Anthony Fauci (and me) a strong classical rhetoric-and-logic education in the Jesuit tradition —the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid and Caesar’s Wars, in the original Greek and Latin. It’s an education that, at its best, laid the foundation for logical and critical thinking, and prepared students for the best liberal arts colleges. It also fostered Catholic and Jesuit ethical values, which, of course, have changed over the years.

The Jesuits were formed as the vanguard of the Counter-Reformation and have historically been attached to reactionary politics, but the order is also highly adaptable to the changes in social ideology, while maintaining a consistent commitment to educating the future elite. By the time I was in high school, some good men like Daniel Berrigan, were teaching smart students to see the world through lenses of intellectual and moral honesty, helping them lapse to the left. Like Fidel, who said the Jesuits who ran the high school he attended, “influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. … They influenced my sense of justice.”

Even more unusual for an academically elite school on the Upper East Side, Regis is tuition-free. Unique, indeed. That’s because it was endowed in 1914, by the widow of New York City mayor Hugh Grant, to offer a free rigorous education to the boys from the city’s poor Catholic (Irish, Italian, etc.) immigrant families. Yup, before it was the home of the UN and Gossip Girl, the East Side was a neighborhood of slaughterhouses and the East Side Kids.

So, into the 70s at least, Regis was a school to which middle strata (virtually all white) Catholic families—from dockworkers and firemen to lawyers and pharmacists (Fauci’s father)—throughout the NYC region strove to have their sons accepted. Many kids commuted over an hour each way every day. It was understood as the ticket to a solid professional career. And, indeed, it produced a slew of very smart lawyers, doctors, and professors (not so much bankers) who become loyal alumni. Here's a prototypical testimony—including the “it changed my life” part—from a well-known alumnus:

It was definitely my ticket out of Staten Island, because it got me into a Catholic high school called Regis, which would change the course of the rest of my life. I was extremely lucky to get accepted to Regis, because (a) it’s one of the best high schools in the country and (b) it’s free. For Catholics in New York, Regis is almost like the Watchtower building for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Tens of thousands of kids apply for a hundred and twenty spots in each class. To this day, if a Catholic mother hears that I went to Regis, she will grab my face and say, “God bless! What a wonderful place!” --Colin Jost

This Regis High School background might help you to understand a couple of things about how I understand the phenomenon of Anthony Fauci. First of all: Think you've seen Fauci worship in mainstream media over the past two years?  Nothing compared to the Zoom meetings with my Regis classmates! Anathema is the precise word for any criticism of Anthony Fauci in that circle. When I sent them the link to my anti-mandate article last year, I got a slew of derogatory responses, including this wish to see me die in agony: "My one regret is not being present in the COVID ICU to witness the author struggling for his final agonal breath." From a medical doctor. At a Catholic hospital. Noble Hearts, as we Regians call ourselves. (“My Ours Be The Noble Heart” is the school anthem.)

But what best explains the relevance of Regis to Anthony Fauci is an anecdote regarding my nephew, who applied to the school some years after me. His father, my oldest brother (who had not gotten into Regis and pooh-poohed it, though unavoidably respecting it) wanted his son to go, but my nephew was more interested in going to high school with his friends in Queens rather than commuting to the geeky school in Manhattan. Having passed the exam, my nephew headed into the obligatory personal interview with a Jesuit, who asked him a stock interview question: "Who is the historical personage you admire most?"  Sensing the chance to shock the sensibilities of the old priest and the old man, and to banish the prospect of four years in nerdville, my nephew replied: "Judas Iscariot."  When asked to elaborate, he pointed out that Judas did the dirty but necessary work that nobody else would, though it brought shame and scorn on him from all quarters, and performed the key act without which the rest of the story would not have been able to unfold in the gloriously celebrated way that it did, yada, yada.

My nephew was not showing off his knowledge of a recently discovered Gnostic gospel. He was just being a smart-ass. But, "smart" was the operative word. Much to his surprise—though not to those who are familiar with the intricate wiles of the mind that is known as "Jesuitical"—he was accepted. One can just hear the good fathers: "Now that is the kind of student we want at Regis."

And that is what I heard every time Anthony Fauci spoke: The rhetorical skill that crafts a sinuous and compelling narrative that fixes our attention on the best of a worst case and obfuscates the rest. The ability to deceive and dissemble without (for the most) part saying anything demonstrably false, by soliciting sympathetic identification with what his audience likes to think is true about the subject in question, but above all about how smart he and they are. That is the perfect intellectual persona for the apex medical bureaucrat speaking for the most corrupt corporate-captured “public” agency. Pharma is a devil, and Fauci is the Devil’s Advocate. And I know where he developed that rhetorical (in the classical sense of the word) skill and intelligence.

The Wrinkle: Abortion Rights, Vaccine Passports, and Bodily Autonomy

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade marks an enormous defeat for women’s rights in the United States. We must not underestimate its importance, and how difficult it will be to overcome. There is a slew of things to consider about how this defeat occurred, and about how supporters of women’s rights and abortion rights can best organize to win a decisive and irreversible victory for a right that so many of us, mistakenly, thought had already been secured.

I’ll go over a number of those considerations in another essay. But here I want quickly to break out and discuss one wrinkle that has developed during the past two years—one that is of serious consequence for the abortion-rights argument because it directly touches on its essential element, and one that has enmired many leftists and abortion-rights supporters in confusion and contradiction that have weakened their abortion-rights position in ways they do not want to acknowledge.

That wrinkle is the dominant leftist attitude toward the mandatory covid vaccination policies, an attitude that is based, I think, on a strange and increasingly common epistemological stance—an inability, or stubborn refusal, to think things through honestly and consistently, considering all the arguments without pre-ordained conclusion.

Failing to have a consistent position based on bodily autonomy in regard to the forced intrusions of vaccine mandates/passports and abortion criminalization is a mistake of grave consequence, politically and epistemologically. Those who don’t recognize that mistake are undermining their political position in support of abortion rights, fooling themselves, and confusing and harming the movement.

And here’s the proof:

Twitter Censorship, Vaccine Risk, and Myocarditis Mumbo-Jumbo

 Twitter Censorship, Vaccine Risk, and Myocarditis Mumbo-Jumbo

Jim Kavanagh

I received this email from Twitter at 12:56 PM, Thursday, April 7, in response to a Tuesday tweet of mine:

Here is my transgressive tweet in the context of the thread as it displayed on Friday, with Twitter’s warning (It seems to have disappeared since):

The important thing here is, of course, the substance of my tweet, which is neither “misleading” nor “potentially harmful” but true. This incident prompts me to address one of my pet peeves in the vaccine mandate debate (because here, as always, the issue of the vaccine always becomes an issue of a mandate): the conversation in which stating the fact that the mRNA vaccines carry an elevated risk of myocarditis (especially to young males) is met with the riposte that “But Covid carries a greater risk!”—delivered, and usually accepted, as a mic drop that shuts down the concern over the vaccine.

Danger to Society: Against Vaccine Passports

Danger to Society: Against Vaccine Passports

Jim Kavanagh

The Dictatorship of the Virus

We are in the midst of a radical restructuring of American society that involves imposing a regime of comprehensive discrimination, segregation, and social control not seen since the dismantling of Jim Crow.

To be clear, my central concern here is the policy of vaccine passports. Whatever one thinks many of the other issues involved here– lockdowns, masks, etc.—forcing people to inject a novel pharmaceutical into their bodies is something of an entirely different order of intrusion.

The first thing is to recognize that this is what vaccine passports and mandates of the kind Bill De Blasio (in New York) and Joe Biden (nationally) are doing. It is not a matter of some temporary, minor inconvenience to a few people that can be waived off as no-big-deal. “If you want to participate in our society fully, you've got to get vaccinated” is an extraordinary, radically divisive directive.

It is telling millions of Americans, for whom our Dear Leader’s “patience is wearing thin”—including me and >70% of black Americans—that they are going to be thrown out of work, school, and social life unless they agree to surrender their bodily integrity and right of informed consent, and submit to being injected with a pharmaceutical treatment of a kind that has never been used widely on humans before, that induces their bodies to produce a toxic protein, that has unknown medium- and long-term effects, that does not prevent them from getting or spreading the targeted disease, and that’s going to have to be re-administered every 5 months.

This will change our lives and transform society. Not just the lives of the unvaccinated, who will be thrown out of normal society, be refused probation, and lose their kids, but all of our lives—starting with the friends, loved ones, and workmates of the unvaccinated, who will have to leave them behind. If you are unvaccinated, you will not be able to go to a restaurant, a movie, a museum, or a political meeting with your friends. You and your vaccinated friends will be subject to constant demands for proof of your extraordinary eligibility to exercise what should be normal and unquestionable social rights.

Interview with Kate Frey of We Are Many, They Are Few (2/19/2020)

We Are Many, They Are Few

A wide-ranging interview with Jim Kavanagh

My interview with political commentator and editor of the Polemicist, Jim Kavanagh. We discuss US imperialism in the Middle East, Israel, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic primaries, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Vexed by Vaxxed

“Ideology, after all, is more influential than laws.….[N]o one…would dream of making legislation to force people to read certain books and prevent them from reading others.”¹

--Literary critic H. Bruce Franklin

The treatment of the movie Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is an astounding example of ideological discipline performed by the American cultural elite.

As everybody knows by now, Robert DeNiro selected Vaxxed for his Tribeca Film Festival. Because he and Grace Hightower have a child with autism, he thought it was important that the issues raised in the film be shown to the public. 

Vaxxed presents a personal admission and documentary evidence from Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist and the lead author of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) study that purported to disprove a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. His evidence indicates that the panel actually found a link—and specifically a 300% increase in risk among African-American boys—and contrived to hide it. The panel’s effort to manipulate the data and destroy evidence in order to bury the link extended an inquiry that was meant to take six months into four years. 

Thompson says that he, his co-authors, and the CDC, “omitted statistically significant information”; that “my supervisors have broken laws”; that they destroyed evidence in a way he “assumed … was illegal and would violate both FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and DOJ [Department of Justice] requests”; that he has stopped lying,” and has “great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism because I have been part of the problem….I was complicit, and I went along with this, we did not report significant findings.” He also describes the atmosphere that reigned in the CDC thusly: “The federal government is hostile to anyone who says anything negative about any industry.”²

That is the crux of the movie. It makes the case that this participant’s stunning statement-against-interest evidence of fraud should be seriously investigated. You’ll be excused if you had no idea this is what the film is about, or if you thought—i.e., if the media coverage of it led you to believe—it was about something else entirely, about making some “anti-vaccination” argument. There is nothing in the film that is “anti-vaccination.” Unless criticizing the side-effects (now acknowledged, but once completely ignored) of Lipitor makes one “anti-drug.” Believe me, there are some voices out there that reject the efficacy and theory of vaccines in general. Neither Vaxxed nor anybody in it is one of them. In fact, the film explicitly supports vaccination, even as it urges more serious attention to the safety of one specific vaccine.  But you’d have to see the movie to know that.  (If you want a good idea of what the film is like beyond the trailer, take a look at this segment from Thom Hartmann’s show.)