RFK Jr And the Slinging of Mud

Why Personal Lives Should Not Matter in the Presidency

It’s difficult even to follow the trajectory of the story, since legacy media propaganda and hit-piece campaigns are so co-ordinated now, and so universalized.

But on Friday Sept 20 2024 “the story” appeared all at once, in the constellation of news outlets guaranteed (developed?) to jump on any smear train that neo-Marxist globalists (yes, we need to coin that term) set in motion.

Puck.com ran a salacious summary of what the news site called, providing no evidence, “the sexting scandal”. The Daily Beast reported that the married RFK Jr had what the news outlet overtly and in a thoroughly defamatory way, termed an “affair.” A “source”, meaning an unnamed source, said that the Presidential candidate had also boasted that he had “intimate” photos of 31-year-old New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi. The word “Intimate”, also included in the headline, is not attributed to anyone. It is just floating around, as if RFK Jr said it, but there is no evidence presented that RFK Jr said it.

Then TheWrap.com also termed whatever this interaction may have been, an “Affair,” and also included that radioactive word (and let us not forget, one painful to any spouse) in the article’s headine:

“Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr’s Affair Was Exposed Because He Bragged to Friends About Her Nudes (Report)”

Lower in the body of the article, TheWrap.com refers to “the affair” or “the relationship” a total of four times:

The 71-year-old former independent presidential candidate reportedly [italics mine] boasted about the affair [italics mine], and about nude photos Nuzzi, 31, sent to him, so widely that word reached NY Magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell.

According to Daily Beast, Haskell subsequently confronted Nuzzi about it in a one-on-one meeting held Sept. 13 at the publication’s New York offices. The star Washington correspondent denied the affair [italics mine] several times before, as DB put it, Haskell “gave Nuzzi the option to come clean.”

As Haskell explained in an email to NY Mag staff on Friday, after Nuzzi confessed to the relationship [italics mine] she was taken off of all coverage of the 2024 presidential election and subsequently went on leave. He also revealed that, according to Nuzzi, the relationship [italics mine] began in December of last year, after the publication of a cover story she wrote about Kennedy, and ended near the end of August.

Haskell also reiterated the company position that an internal investigation found “no evidence of bias” in Nuzzi’s coverage of the election during her affair, [italics mine] or inaccuracies in her reporting. However, an “independent third party” is conducting a much more thorough investigation, the results of which will determine “final” disciplinary actions.

Far below all this, in this same article, we see that Ms Nuzzi calls whatever “it” was, never “physical” but rather “emotional and digital in nature”:

“In public statements and while speaking to Haskell, Nuzzi has insisted her relationship with Kennedy was never “physical.” Citing an individual close to Nuzzi, CNN reported that the affair “was emotional and digital in nature.” Puck News, citing another individual said to be close to Nuzzi, reported that she sent “demure nudes” to Kennedy.

Corollary “damning” story lines are unfolding all at once, including about Ms Nuzzi’s former fiance, also a reporter, having broken up with her. This random and personal information is spun, with no evidence, as if he broke up with Nuzzi over the alleged “affair”.

In yet another article about this alleged affair that is not “physical”, TheWrap.com commits this headline:

“Olivia Nuzzi’s Affair With RFK Jr Lasted Almost 9 Months, New York Magazine Editor Tells Staff”

But again, further down, we learn that the alleged affair is not an affair and was not “physical.”

So can we please take a breath here and address this sordid mess of what must be called anti-journalism, with its editorial and reportorial lapses so alarming as to be almost unprecendented?

Everyone is citing everyone else, in a circular way, with just one and a half named sources in total at this point.

In TheWrap.com, PuckNews.com cited an unnamed individual “close to Nuzzi” as being the only source for the existence of the alleged “demure nudes” that were allegedly sent to RFK Jr’s phone. CNN also cited an unnamed “individual close to Nuzzi.” TheWrap.com is also citing The Daily Beast. All these publications cite each other, with no more actual reporting or sourcing being done, and then outer-extending news sites cite the original maelstrom of innermost news sites that cite the other news sites.

Olivia Nuzzi or someone close to her is the one on the record source; and someone who appeared to share an email from Nuzzi’s editor David Haskell, is half of another.

In spite of this complete lack of verification or sourcing beyond Nuzzi, all of these publications are freely using the word “affair” - thus imprinting in the consciousness of the exhausted American public that “RFK Jr must have had an affair” — even though buried in the steaming mass of fecal non-journalism presented here are the nuggets of acknowledgement (sorry for the graphic metaphor but that’s the disgusting reality of this) that there was no affair.

An affair is not even in the realm of the allegations.

Far down in the articles, where many fewer people will be reading, you see that whatever happened, which to date has only been sourced on the record from the woman making the assertions and from someone “close to” her, which could be the woman herself (that is how some people leak information), it was not an affair. And the only evidence that exists to this point reveals that the “relationship,” such as it is, was on her side.

Nuzzi maintained that she had had a “digital and personal relationship” with RFK Jr that spanned six months. The alleged “demure nudes” were sent from her.

The only sourcing that asserts that RFK Jr “boasted” about this is unnamed.

This is an evidence-free personal attack. If we can call six months of texts from one woman “an affair”, with no evidence of how the recipient responded, then the Marxist migration of language into weaponized meaninglessness has attained another milestone.

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I don’t know what actually happened or did not happen here, of course, and perhaps by Monday mine will be a lonely voice for my having wished to do what I can to defend this candidate, whom I respect so much.

But a great deal is at stake here — far more than an early “October Surprise,” and far more than whatever did or did not happen “digitally and personally” between this subject and this reporter.

We need to understand that the media can now cultivate and concoct a scandal out of thin air, and can replicate it on many platforms at once via AI, and that by the time the target of this concocted or hyped or exaggerated “scandal” corrects the record, the damage will have been done.

I have experienced this mechanism myself, and it is terrifying — not just for the targets but in relation to our future as Americans trying to make serious decisions.

Times Now World, an international news site, noted only that the relationship was a “personal connection” and that Ms Nuzzi had acknowledged a “personal relationship” with RFK Jr to her New York Magazine editor, David Haskell, who placed her on leave for a purported conflict of interest as he reviews her coverage of RFK Jr.

Of course, RFK Jr’s camp pushed back. The New York Post ran a counter-piece on Saturday afternoon, Sept 21 2024, depicting Ms Nuzzi as virtually stalking RFK Jr and describing the politician as being forced to block her on multiple occasions. This article too had unnamed sources.

Of course, again, I don’t know what did or did not happen here. But I think context is important.

RFK Jr is incredibly responsive and accessible to almost anyone, including by email and text, because he really wants to save this country.

I’ve seen his staff try to keep him from giving his contact information to random Americans who just want to keep talking to him, texting him and emailing him.

Almost everyone I know, in my large circle of health freedom activists, texts RFK Jr. Incredibly, he is likely to text back. In this way, he is remarkably humble and courteous. (And I really don’t understand how he has the time).

The Daily Beast, after using “[I]ntimate” in the headline, “affair” twice and “relationship” twice in the body of its article about Ms Nuzzi, acknowledged far down:

“A source familiar with the matter said the two had met multiple times, though they cautioned those meetings included public functions and maintained Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship was never physical.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/married-rfk-jr-70-bragged-he-had-intimate-photographs-of-reporter-31

I text with RFK Jr from time to time. “How are you doing?” (A “personal and digital” question.) My husband Brian O’Shea also texts with him once in a while.

Like Ms Nuzzi, we have been present with him at public events.

Brian O’Shea and I also have met RFK Jr “multiple times,” and those meetings “included public functions.” Our relationship with him also was “never physical.”

We like him a lot. If we were insane, we could call the above a “texting relationship.” But the fact is, we hardly know him.

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Also — and this is difficult and awkward to discuss — there is the demented way that many women relate to this candidate. Except for in the case of his wonderful cousin, the late JFK Jr, who was my editor at George Magazine, I’ve never seen anything like it.

This candidate is an incredibly serious person, with ideas for healing this country the importance of which cannot be overstated.

At the same time, RFK Jr labors under the burden of the Kennedy men. That is, many people experience him as having a palpable charisma. I recognize this forcefield as being the touch of history upon certain individuals. But this energy field does make some people — some women especially — behave improperly, even as the candidate is behaving with perfect propriety and appropriateness.

I have seen this at every event I have attended, at which this candidate was present.

People in my networks, who know the staff and follow the events, observe commonly, that some women do indeed seek to stalk and harass this candidate. Women who are strangers to him try to relate to him in a familiar way or drop hints to others that they are “close” to him, and it is all utterly imaginary. I knew a woman professionally who believed — I actually thought, dangerously — that she was in a relationship with him, and it was all an hallucination.

This issue in relation to RFK Jr is a real problem, especially during the last days of a hotly contested, life-and-death campaign.

But it is one that is hard for the campaign to address, when something like the Nuzzi allegations erupt.

It is almost impossible in our culture for a man to say, “I have a problem with women stalking and harassing me.” This sentence would get a belly laugh, even though this is a serious issue for this candidate and no doubt for other well-known men (not to mention a security concern).

This issue — that members of the opposite (or the same) sex imagine that they are in an intimate relationship with a famous person, or engage in actual stalking and harassment — is a problem that many people in the public eye endure repeatedly. It happens to every presentable public figure I know; it is called “erotomania.” But add the Kennedy story and glamour and power, and 10x the derangement factor.

Again, for the record, I do not know what happened here. It may or may not be improper.

But while I am a feminist and a champion of women’s empowerment, I do not agree that one should always “believe the women” reflexively in relationship to women’s assertions about what men did or did not do to them, or with them. Some women lie, and some women imagine things, just as some men do.

But I do think we should take a breath and pay close attention to how the news can create an “appearance of impropriety” with unclear evidence.

*****

Lastly — assuming for the sake of argument that there might be more to this story - we need to ask ourselves a larger question.

Should we even care?

I personally care a great deal about fidelity. I personally believe in monogamy.

But do I have a right to demand that of my elected officials?

America has a very bad habit, only recently established.

We don’t just want our leaders to be strong advocates, sharp drivers of policy, and astute defenders of our civilization.

We also, somehow, want them to be sexually pure, at a level of chastity that goes back to the Puritans.

The Puritans may have put people in the stocks, or worse, for infidelity. But our wise Founders did not treat personal sexual probity as a must-have for leadership of the nation.

Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, Sally Hemings, was also his property as his slave. I am not saying that that was not heinous behavior. I am saying that it probably happened, and that he was also a great leader of our nation.

Benjamin Franklin’s humorous “Advice to a Young Man on Choice of a Mistress” recommended out-of-wedlock amours with older rather than with younger women because, among other reasons, “in the dark all Cats are grey.” In the Journal of the American Revolution, an article on Franklin’s extensive love life is titled “Benjamin Franklin’s Battery of Lovers.”

Franklin’s reputation with the ladies was well known; when he was on a diplomatic mission to France for our young nation, he sent love letters to a Madame Brillion de Jouy, and he lined up Parisian ladies to give him a wreath, and kisses. “But aghast, Franklin’s fellow diplomat Arthur Lee of Virginia wrote Congress that Franklin had made Paris “a corrupt hotbed of vice.” Franklin, the man who tamed electricity, would counter, speaking in French, that it was “the power of the attraction”[13] and almost shruggingly wrote that the ladies desperately wanted “to have their necks kissed.”[14] 

“Madame Brillion summed up what made Ben irresistible to women: “that gaiety and that gallantry that cause all women to love you, because you love them all.”[22]”

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Would we have been better off without the Treaty of Paris, which recognized our Independence? Would we have been better off without winning World War II, or de-escalating the Cuban Missile Crisis?

If we had applied the scrutiny and expectations to those Presidents that we apply to Presidential candidates today, we would not have had those crucial high points in our history.

You may value perfect fidelity. I value perfect fidelity.

So — go be faithful.

If a Presidential candidate or a President is not forcing an adult or abusing a minor, I believe it is literally none of our business what he or she does sexually in private.

We hire these people to serve our nation as leaders, not to expose and submit their innermost beings to our hypocritical and sadistic scrutiny and censure.

We need to drop that bizarre and somewhat perverted expectation of punitive sexual access to our candidates and our Presidents.

So Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — and FDR Jr too, for that matter, who died in the presence of his mistress, Lucy Mercer; and JFK, one of our greatest presidents — were not Puritan-pure in their personal sexual lives.

That is their spouses’ business.

But is that really our business?

Does that really mean anything at all in relation to their fitness to serve our nation?

Who made Puritanical sexual behavior for one’s entire life — a bar which most Americans do not set for themselves — a condition of the modern Presidency?

It wasn’t a condition of the US Presidency in the 18th century, or the 19th, or the mid-20th century.

These Puritan expectations, as I noted, emerged fairly recently.

I do not know why these expectations emerged. I do note that they emerged at just the same time as other forces and expectations emerged, designed to destroy our nation, its leadership and unity.

I also know this:

Those very few Americans whose entire personal lives, from adolescence on, would survive this level of scrutiny from a press and public that is at once Puritanical and salacious —

They may exist.

But do you want them to be the only pool from which to choose, for the leadership of our nation?

What a real mess that would prove to be.

Until we remove this weird sexual intrusiveness we and the press have now, from our expectation of who candidates and Presidents should be —

We will never have a Jefferson or Franklin or FDR or JFK, again.

And we will have no one to blame for it

But ourselves.