What I Saw At Kennedy Karaoke
Notes on America’s new skeptic-in-chief.
Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a cabinet-level position and the foremost advisor to the president on all health-related matters. The secretary oversees the financing of Medicare and Medicaid, sets the agenda for public health initiatives and marshals the resources of the federal government for pursuits as varied as decoding the human genome to leading the fight against cancer.
For Kennedy and the movement he leads, his confirmation is nothing less than a coup—the crowning moment for a certain type of Southern California-flavored “wellness” ideology that pervades the ranks of his supporters, and which encompasses a belief that it’s not enough to feel good, that one has to look good (and that, in fact, there actually isn’t much difference between the two); in which a penchant for shopping at health-food stores and starting each day with a Super Green smoothie and a yoga session can fit neatly beside a skepticism of vaccines and a wariness of seed oils, bleached flour, and (most justifiably) high-fructose corn syrup. The gospel of RFK has a legion behind it, and as HHS secretary, he couldn’t want for a better mountaintop from which to preach it.
But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, RFK was a much-derided crank at the head of a sputtering third-party campaign, tilting at Big Pharma windmills and crowing about the evils of the dye Red 40. I got a glimpse of this world this past June, when I walked into a jerk chicken restaurant in a middle-class, predominantly Caribbean American area of Queens, New York.
I was there for “Kennedy Karaoke.”
I’d been volunteered earlier in the month by my editors to write about the “typical” Kennedy voter, to really put gum on my shoe and get to know this median person on the assumption that, according to the polls, 15% of the country was planning to vote for Kennedy and that he might just swing the election for Biden (or, less probably, Trump).
Frustrated in basically all attempts to contact a living, breathing staffer for the Kennedy campaign, I started emailing organizers listed on the campaign website.
One finally got back. Asked about Kennedy Karaoke (“how often do you have these,” “how many attendees,” etc.), he gave one- or two-word answers, repeatedly directing me to the campaign website. Trying to elicit something, anything substantive, I pressed further: “Is it a fun time?”
“I haven’t gotten any complaints.”
In other words: Go away.
Nonetheless, chasing my own tail in this way was only necessary because 2024 was shaping up to be a three-man race, and a third party candidate with Kennedy’s poll numbers could be decisive.
Then the first debate blew a hole in Biden’s candidacy. Then you get the Kennedy-eats-dog story. Then the Central Park bear carcass bombshell, which Kennedy thought he could get ahead of by copping to every single detail on video (“I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car, because that would be… bad [before going on to describe a course of action much worse than just leaving it in the car].” And then, last but certainly not least, the creep allegations.
But the unsubstantiated story that Kennedy had eaten a dog (he says it was a goat), in particular, was devastating to his candidacy because it reinforced the initial impression—formed by the May revelation of Kennedy’s brain worm—of a possibly unstable personality. The two coming in succession dealt his candidacy a lethal blow. And after all that, as if for good measure, a decade-old account resurfaced of Kennedy using a chainsaw to decapitate a beached whale on Cape Cod.
“That was just normal day-to-day stuff for us,” said his daughter, “Kick” Kennedy, as she recalled her father stringing the gory head to the top of the family minivan with a bungee cord. Though other Kennedy men have infamously exhibited adolescent behavior long into adulthood, this was covered in the news not as mere puckish hi-jinks, but as possibly felonious—the type of act that would sink a regular person like a lead weight. No matter—he didn’t deny it. Nor did he bother to deny the accusation that he had groped his child’s 23-year-old babysitter in the 1990s either, instead claiming that he is “not a church boy.”
Meanwhile, Biden dropped out, giving natural Democratic voters a reason to “come home” and clarifying the choice in November as a traditional contest of red-versus-blue.
Kennedy’s campaign was as dead as any of the animals featured in his necro-zootopia. There would be no third-party spoiler.
But on the evening I attended Kennedy Karaoke, these tabloid ructions were still smoking in the distance.
The sun was setting on one of the hottest days of the year, and I was running through my mental list of karaoke standards, hopefully to land on one which would melt some of the ice sure to be separating me, the putative reporter, from a room full of ostensible Kennedy superfans.
But as I fussed with the Velcro mosquito curtain entrance, I could make out only a few customers inside. No sooner was I actually inside than I realized they weren’t customers at all, but a family—the owner’s. He, his wife, his teenage son, and his young daughter, all pausing their conversation to look directly at me.
Kennedy Karaoke was supposed to start at 7 p.m. It was 7:30. There was no one else inside the restaurant.
Stammering, I asked if I could use the restroom, offering that I would at least order a Red Stripe.
After shooting off a few panicked texts from inside the cramped bathroom (No, really, I’m the only one here, yes, really), I slid onto a bar stool and began sipping my Red Stripe, remarking to the owner—mid-forties-ish (we’ll call him “Joe”)—that the karaoke turnout seemed light. Sometime in between exiting the bathroom and taking my seat at the bar I’d come clean about my purpose, to only mild bemusement.
“Yeah, there was a nice lady here a little while ago, but…”
Do you get many Kennedy supporters at these things?
“Sometimes.”
Does the campaign ever help with that?
“Nah. They don’t seem very organized over there.”
Now we were getting somewhere. In fact, it wasn’t at all clear to me that there was any there “over there.” For some time before he suspended his run and endorsed Trump, Kennedy wasn’t campaigning or holding rallies seemingly at all (certainly not in the swing states), preferring to appear on podcasts where he could spout his absurd views mostly unchallenged. To the extent that RFK Jr.-for-President actually existed, it appeared to be almost entirely an online thing, without rallies, without stump speeches, without surrogates, without town halls—a shoddy, hyper-modern simulacrum of a presidential campaign. And now, at least with regard to Kennedy Karaoke, the same could be said for his supporters—except for one.
Joe, as it turned out, was not some disinterested or cynical opportunist but something of a true believer. In fact, he thought he might recognize me from somewhere—one of the rallies, maybe?
No, I said—I hadn’t attended any of the anti-vaccine mandate gatherings in the city, as a reporter or otherwise. But he had. And he’d sacrificed more than a few afternoons for his advocacy. He’d had a public school teaching career of more than two decades, most recently as a social studies dean in a Brooklyn middle school—but continuing as such, he indicated, was incompatible with his notion of bodily autonomy.
Out of a job, he’d done the only sensible thing and started a restaurant, leaning on the knowledge of Jamaican cooking he received from his mother.
Not that I could really tell with great exactness, but he didn’t strike me as the lone, dissenting, man-of-conscience type. For one, he seemed mostly worn out. In fairness, it was after 8 p.m. Or maybe the fire of those pandemic-era debates seemed so remote to me, sitting there in the quiet jerk shop and chewing my oxtail. Or maybe the exertions required of the full-time owner/operator of a Caribbean restaurant, who is also raising two kids, leaves little room for harboring old grievances.
So, why Kennedy, beyond the vax stuff?
Joe shrugged. “He seems smart.” Besides, everyone knows that elections are rigged, anyway (Would they let such important decisions fall to us, the regular people?); so, he doesn’t vote. Well, would you vote for Kennedy? Shrug. “Maybe.”
One thing led to another, and Joe suddenly became loquacious, citing the examples of the Tuskegee experiment, a study in which the army heinously denied treatment to thousands of black men in Alabama so as to observe the cruelly debilitating effects of syphilis—an eminently treatable disease, even at the time—on their bodies. And he followed that up with another case, one I wasn’t familiar with: Henrietta Lacks, whose stem cells were harvested without her knowledge by a doctor treating her for cervical cancer—a massive violation of the most basic medical ethics, and, as it happens, the germ of one of medical science’s great breakthroughs.
The stolen “HeLa” cells (Henrietta Lacks), as they came to be called, were a miracle. They didn’t quickly die in a lab setting like every other sample, but survived and even multiplied at vast rates, leading to a revolution in vaccines and, in 1955, the development of the first successful polio inoculation. Seventy years later, the basis of knowledge formed by the historical study of the HeLa cells directly contributed to the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine—which Joe would refuse.
So, he asked me, if that’s history, why should I assume that what’s happening now is any different?
It wasn’t the kind of logic I could argue with. It would’ve been like taking the side of Galileo and heliocentrism in the court of the Inquisition. There was too much space between us. Besides, I wasn’t there to convince Joe of anything. I was there to listen and to try to understand.
Like “Kennedy Karaoke,” RFK’s actual run for president was surpassingly ephemeral.
And yet, Kennedy was still able to trade up, dropping out and endorsing Trump for unspecified guarantees. RFK was in the market for a political patron, openly selling himself to both the Harris and Trump campaigns at the 11th hour, and he found one.
I doubt he had to pitch himself hard. Trump likes characters and oddballs, especially those with a bit of glitz and glamour, which Kennedy satisfies with his famous surname and actress wife (and, clearly, he was willing to praise and flatter Trump, which definitely matters a lot). Obviously, Trump has no ideas whatsoever for any sort of health-related agenda. It’s conceivable that Kennedy came along as a relief, to deliver him from the squishy, uncomfortable reality: Operation Warp Speed and the invention of the COVID vaccines are one of Trump’s singular achievements in his first administration—and yet, given the paranoid and delusional qualities of his base, he is incapable of touting or taking any sort of credit for them at all.
But unlike Trump, for whom all these debates are purely instrumental, Kennedy is a true believer. Rooted in a complete and total disregard for conventional medical authorities, a stubborn narcissism, and an equally persistent misreading of the medical literature, it’s conceivable that his crusade could incur a body count. Considering his activism in Samoa—in which his organization exploited a tragedy to sow doubt about vaccines—it wouldn’t be the first time.
Having eaten my oxtail and settled the check, I turned to leave, when Joe looked at me (we’d built up a pretty friendly rapport over the course of an hour) and, quoting something a family member used to say, said, “God is still writing your story—don’t try to steal the pen.”
All of us, Joe. All of us.
I wished him the best and went out.
Brendan Ruberry is a writer and journalist based in New York.
A version of this piece originally appeared on the McBrodie substack.
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Yeah, you are not very alert.
He was trying to tell you something.
You didn't listen. And you still don't get it.
Stuck in your religion, you can't see people suffering.
You are convinced the way to judge truth in medical science, is to hire a paralegal to check the website of the Institutions that Control Science.
Actually it has to do with talking with scientists about their observations. Clinicians included. Talking to people about their observations and experience.
A scientist observes and models nature.
A medical industry trade association representative tells us what Wall Street needs.
Since Neo-liberalization in the 1990's, all our reg agencies are "user fee" funded and essentially trade association. You haven't noticed!
We didn't need an opioid pandemic.
It's not legal to sell opium to the masses.
No private company could do that.
The FDA did that.
No one has been held accountable.
And you are part of the problem.
Turning a blind eye to excruciating suffering.