Rabbit Hole: Consensus Failure Has Powered RFK, Jr.'s Rise

The Establishment hates the mainstreaming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. They have only themselves to blame.

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Last week — in June of 2023 — former CNN legal analyst and prominent Zoom enthusiast Jeffrey Toobin was defending vaccine mandates. “You’re not free to put other people in danger,” he told YouTube host Patrick Bet-David during a guest appearance. When asked about people in the military “forced” to leave their jobs over the mandates, Toobin dug in. “Nobody forced them. Your choice was to take the vaccine,” he said. “And that’s a good thing.”

It was a great encapsulation of the sort of COVID consensus orthodoxy pushed so hard by the political and media establishment in this country that these people have become incapable of introspection or rationality. “Follow the science,” they said, until you follow the science directly off a critical thinking cliff.

But it also got me thinking about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Democratic candidate for president who has amassed upwards of 20% of the vote in recent polls, despite the fact that he was deplatformed off most social media networks years ago, and marginalized out of polite society for decades. Suddenly, he’s having a moment in bringing out the curious on the left and right, and in bringing out the hyperbolic attacks from the corporate media and mainstream left.

What’s behind it? It’s not that his positions have changed, and it’s not that suddenly new information has emerged validating his positions either. No, it’s not really about him at all. It is the same establishment who most hates RFK that is responsible for his rise to relative power — it is their failure on various elements of COVID and other "consensus" points of view that allowed someone like RFK to suddenly develop an interested following.

This particular moment for RFK is happening thanks to his appearance on the most consumed podcast in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience, out earlier this month. Following that gigantic platform, the uproar was expectedly enormous. (For a rational look at what he said that was accurate and inaccurate, check this out from fellow Substack-er Vinay Prasad.) But after Dr. Peter Hotez, a cable news regular who rose to fame during the pandemic, criticized Rogan and the interview, was offered to debate RFK back on Rogan’s podcast, with all the money going to charity, that’s when the panic really began.

“Very cool to watch all these millionaires and billionaires push an anti-vax line that has killed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of working people,” tweeted MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, one of the more hysterical members of the Acela Media on these sorts of issues that push outside the consensus boundaries. Or take Kara Swisher, whose brand is dependent on cultivating a faux journalistic bravery but is at her core an incurious consensus pusher who will never ruffle feathers with the established narrative, who tweeted about the “demented con man that certain fatheaded tech bros…think is worthy of our time by their hand wavy offers to create a ‘debate.’”

There was mainstream article after mainstream article urging Hotez not to debate RFK. No, instead he went running to his safe space — the MSNBC show hosted by Mehdi Hasan, who literally has written a book called “How To Win Every Argument” but has such a disdain for the practice itself it might as well be a parody. There, under a chyron about the “wild conspiracy theories” being “spewed” by RFK serving as a security blanket for the conversation, Hotez was given a gentle patting by the host instead. (For context, Hasan tweeted two days ago “The same people who have consistently downplayed Covid, compared it to the flu, said we should learn to live with it, & not take precautions, etc, are also the people who are now obsessed with finding out the origins of Covid & uncovering wrongdoing” — to give you an idea about the intellect housed at this venue.)

It’s worth noting here that Hotez has lots of areas to be challenged on. Like comments he’s made over the past few years related to COVID vaccine efficacy, or vaccine safety, or his changing story about how long it takes to develop a vaccine, or… if vaccines could make COVID worse?

Now, it isn’t Hotez’ fault for getting elements of what would happen with COVID, or COVID vaccines specifically, wrong. But a little media-driven humility and introspection would be nice. But the consensus establishment orthodoxy in 2023 is to suppress points of view, and to avoid debate. That's why the situation with the Hotez debate challenge has materialized the way it has publicly — Hotez believes there's no incentive to have a substantive discussion about a point of view the consensus he's a part of has already determined is settled “science.” And, in a way, he's right — he's protected by the corporate press that demands zero accountability on topics like COVID vaccine mandates or vaccine efficacy, let alone masks or school closures or lockdowns. 

That protection worked in an environment where choice didn't exist — where the gatekeepers had control of the narrative. Now there are so many choices, and people can find honesty outside the mainstream. The total monopoly on the consensus messaging and protection from gatekeepers is gone, and in that wake there is going to be a lot of hysterical flailing. They are terrified to compete on a level playing field.

But to really understand how we got here, we have to look back, to 2021.