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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes an announcement on the future of his campaign in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. August 23, 2024.
RFK Jr. bows out, backs Trump, and bucks Democrats
Robert F Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump after suspending his independent campaign for president on Friday. In his speech, he thanked his supporters and accused the Democratic Party of “abandoning democracy” by nominating Kamala Harris without a primary.
His endorsement of Trump was not entirely enthusiastic, with Kennedy saying that the decision to back him was “a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children.” He implied that if Trump wins the White House, he would be given a role that would allow him to “staff agencies with honest scientists,” and “reform the entire food system.”
Kennedy’s campaign was a potluck of populist economics, anti-war leanings, and government skepticism that once had the potential to be a scion for both parties. He peaked in momentum in the fall, when he began to get on state ballots, often polling in the double digits. But as an independent, he had to get on each state ballot independently, an incredibly time consuming and costly effort – his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley investor, has sunk more than $14 million into the campaign alone.
By August, his campaign was out of money and down to 5% in the polls, as much of his support came from voters who wanted an alternative to Trump or Joe Biden. Many of those voters have gone back to the Democratic Party now that Harris is in the race.
What now? Trump is expected to gain one or two points from Kennedy dropping out, as well as pick up a few of his donors. 2% of Democrats, 3% of Republicans, and 12% of independents supported Kennedy. We will be watching to see whether the independents heed Kennedy’s calls to vote for Trump, though it is likely that many may choose to not vote altogether.
The Disinformation Election: Will the wildfire of conspiracy theories impact the vote?
Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and only 44% of Americans have confidence in the honesty of elections. Distrust and election-related disinformation are leaving society vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, notes that American democracy is in crisis largely because “one thing not in short supply this election season: conspiracy theories.”
As part of GZERO Media’s election coverage, we are tracking the impact of disinformation and conspiracy theories on democracy. To get a sense of how this election may be pulled down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole, click here for our interactive guide to conspiracy theories.
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during the Republican presidential primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
The Algorithm Candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy
Let’s talk about Vivek Ramaswamy, who I call The Algorithm Candidate. Why does a guy polling at 5% with little-to-no shot of winning the Republican race matter so much?
For one, winning is beside the point to Ramaswamy. He is auditioning for either a Trump vice presidency or for the next campaign, where he hopes to hot-wire the MAGA right for his quest for power. How will he do this?
By becoming a creature of the algorithm. Ramaswamy, even more than Trump, is a candidate self-created to maximize and amplify algorithmically generated outrage, conspiracy, and chaos. He has created a self-perpetuating feedback loop, seeking out the populist paranoias promoted by algorithms, and repeating them publicly, which supercharges the algorithms and re-amplifies them again online. Round and round it goes.
It is a dynamic that Max Fisher exposed in his superb book “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” “It was as if your community had suddenly decided that it valued provocation and outrage above all else, rewarding it with waves of attention that were, in reality, algorithmically generated,” writes Fisher. “And because the algorithm down-sorted posts it judged as unengaging, the inverse was true, too. It felt as if your peers suddenly scorned nuance and emotional moderation with the implicit rejection of ignoring you. Users seemed to absorb those cues, growing meaner and angrier, intent on humiliating out-group members, punishing social transgressors, and validating one another’s worldviews.”
This is a near-perfect description of the Ramaswamy campaign and why in debates he doesn’t answer questions but creates algorithm-friendly memes to supercharge outrage that supports his campaign. He is the Chaos Machine candidate incarnate.
The 38-year-old, Harvard-educated lawyer and multi-millionaire entrepreneur speaks with the laminar flow velocity of a tap on full blast. He began his public life as an anti-woke crusader but has now expanded into a full-blown conspiracy-touting flamethrower. He has grown with the algorithm.
If you watched him last night on his CNN town hall – or any of the debates or his rallies – Ramaswamy confidently now shills extreme beliefs, conveniently deleting facts and reality to package them into pretty little meme boxes that he calls “truths” that he promptly releases online to fundraise for his fury-driven campaign.
The danger is that he is also amplifying disinformation and conspiracy theories that benefit the malign intentions of countries like Russia and China. At times, it looks like his platform was written specifically by Moscow and Beijing.
Hey Putin, want the US out of Ukraine so you can take over the country? Ramaswamy is your man. He called the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Nazi, and he argues that the US should stop support for Ukraine and cede the country to Russia, as long as Moscow stops its relationship with … China.
His idea is that Russia will somehow become a US ally in exchange for Ukraine and no more sanctions, and that will make China scared to invade Taiwan because now the US won’t have to fight two superpower enemies. Do you follow? Ok. Putin is all in on this one.
And for you President Xi?
Ramaswamy is also ready to cede Taiwan to China, but … only after the US no longer needs Taiwan to provide it with superconductors, which he claims will happen by 2028. So, the US would arm Taiwan for four years, and then, after semiconductor independence, China, it is all yours.
Destabilize US intuitions and democracy? Got you covered with a bouquet of conspiracy theories:
- “January 6th now does look like it was an inside job?" he said at the last debate, with very little evidence.
- 9/11 was likely orchestrated by the US government, he told The Atlantic.
- The 2022 election was “rigged by Big Tech” is a fan favorite.
Now he’s even promoting the far-right racist “Great Replacement Theory,” which alleges that there is a plan to wipe out the white race. “The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory,” he yelled at the last debate. “But a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform.”
That one had far-right racist antisemites like Nick Fuentes, who dined with Donald Trump and who recently said on his Rumble show that Christians in America should wipe out and kill all Jews, delighted.
Ramaswamy calls climate change a hoax. He wants to fire 1 million federal workers, and close the Department of Education and the FBI. And on it goes.
In other words, the more chaos, the more the algorithms love him, the more popular he gets, and the more damage is done.
In 2016, I wrote a piece about Justin Trudeau calling him the first “viral Prime Minister, creating political ‘moments’ specifically so they become shareable.”
But soon everyone was doing that. Times have changed. In 2015, the candidate could control the algorithms to create viral moments. In 2023, the algorithms control the candidate to create viral moments.
With the acceleration capabilities of AI, this will get worse.
At the height of the Cold War, Frank Sinatra starred in a film called "The Manchurian Candidate," which was remade with Denzel Washington in 2004. It was about a soldier brainwashed by communist Korean forces to destabilize and help overthrow the US government. It was a paranoid fantasy that captured the zeitgeist of a paranoid era.
Now, things are different. No need to brainwash one soldier when you can brainwash millions online and then get a leader to market it at no cost? Who needs The Manchurian Candidate when The Algorithm Candidate gets the chaos job done much faster? Ramaswamy is just the beginning.
Is the US covering up UFOs?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and we're talking about aliens, a Quick Take. Very exciting, of course.
A Congressional testimony by a whistleblower, a former Air Force intelligence officer. His name is David Grusch, Major David Grusch, who says that the US government has been covering up UFOs.
David Grusch: “I like to use the term non-human, I don't like to denote origin, it keeps the aperture open.”
They come from other galaxies. We have no idea, but it's a coverup, and the fact that it's covered up is clearly evidence of an even deeper state than we had been aware of before. It's one thing when the deep state can fake your elections. It's another when they can actually cover up extraterrestrial species. And we know that, because if you look at all of the sightings of aliens that have happened over the past decades, they've mostly come over the United States, not just continental, Alaska too, a little Hawaii. But still, we should be the ones that find the real ones and then cover up the real ones if that's where the sightings are.
They're blurry. They're usually pretty blurry. And it is true that all the technologies around sensors are improving, and that's why we have great photos of Chinese surveillance balloons when they come over the United States. The UFOs are still blurry, but that's not necessarily because they don't exist. It could be because the alien technology at evading improved surveillance technology in the United States is also improving. It's not like the aliens are just going to stay still while our technology improves.
In all seriousness, I don't believe that he is telling us the truth, even though he is under oath, about the cover-up and the aliens. And Major Grusch, if it turns out that you're actually telling the truth, and this is all a big conspiratorial cover up, the lack of evidence of which is only more proof that the cover-up exists, I will apologize, in person if you like, or certainly on video, but for now I think you're full of crap.
It's good. My mother used to buy the National Enquirer at the Stop & Shop every week, and it was 15 cents, and I enjoyed reading it. It was the articles. It wasn't just the two-headed baby and the she-wolf and all of that stuff. And I learned how to BS people for money from the Enquirer. I stopped. I did not decide to take that on as a profession. You apparently have. I wish you wouldn't do that.
I do believe in aliens. I don't think we're the only intelligent life in the universe. I think it's quite likely we may be the only observable intelligent life in the universe right now, because we only have existed as intelligent life for a cosmological eye-blink. And I might not have said this 30 years ago, but when I look at the acceleration of technology and just how fast we are moving in terms of especially artificial intelligence, this does not seem sustainable. It seems very, very unlikely to me that we are around as an identifiable species in, say, a hundred years. And given that, if you assume that intelligent life is able to develop technologies anywhere in the universe, it's around, it explodes, and then it either becomes something really cool that we don't understand, or it blows itself up. And so, I suspect that the aliens that are around are in the future or in the past, or they're us, but they're not the ones that Grusch is lying about.
That's it from me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
On Dr. Seuss and cancel culture
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hey everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Welcome to your week, life looking better every day in the United States, coronavirus land. But I thought I'd talk about, this week, all of this cancel culture that everyone's talking about right now. If you're on the wrong political side, your opponents are trying to shut you down and you take massive umbrage. I see this everywhere, and it's starting to annoy.
Last week, maybe, the biggest story was about Dr. Seuss and the fact that a few books were taken down, no longer being published by the Seuss Foundation, the publisher of those books, because of ethnic and racial stereotypes that were promoted in those books from decades and decades ago. Publishers in the private sector have the right to publish whatever they do and don't want that they have intellectual property control over. One thing that seemed silly on the back of it was all of these people then deciding to spend massive amounts of money, pushing Dr. Seuss to the top of the charts, for a whole bunch of books that were not getting canceled, that were still being published, money of which would be going to the same publisher that had decided to cancel the few books in the first place.
So very bizarre, and maybe makes everybody happy or everybody unhappy at the same time. But of course, the big story is that you had, then, this huge fodder for people on the left and right to come after each other. If you're on the left, of course, these books are horrible and need to be removed from the public dialogue. That of course also means that you're smearing Dr. Seuss as a whole, who, from many of our perspectives, were children's books that we grew up on and were just fine.
Then on the conservative side, you have people saying, "This is an outrage. Can you believe that they're trying to burn books and ban books? It's the beginning of authoritarianism and we're being canceled." Kevin McCarthy doing a reading of Green Eggs and Ham, which is perfectly fine, and you can still buy... A lot of people like to stand up and read perfectly innocuous Dr. Seuss books, but now there's strong politics behind it.
The problem is that any political issue, at a period of time that the United States is more politically divided, more politically dysfunctional, where political opponents are not just political opponents but are considered to be bad, fundamentally evil, means any issue that can be made into tribal warfare inside politics in the United States becomes precisely that. It drives people kind of batshit, right? We saw that with the Muppets, too. Those of you that know me know that I am a big fan of the Muppets, both as a show and puppets as a concept, so much so that it's like Hair Club For Men. I decided to become an owner.
Now, because done it back in the '70s, a lot of the skits that were done are now considered insensitive. So, Disney has decided to put a warning label on all of the Muppet shows from back then, warning of negative depictions and or mistreatment of people and cultures. To be fair, this is like the warning symbol that you see on your McDonald's apple pie that contents are indeed hot and could hurt you. It's because the United States is an incredibly litigious society and overly litigious society. This is corporate speak for, please don't sue us. We've done what we needed to do," but anybody that wants to watch the Muppets can still watch the Muppets.
It should not be a big deal, but of course you see Donald Trump Jr. coming out and saying, "They're banning the Muppets," and all of these other folks on the right saying, "How dare they. How can they possibly be banning the Muppets?" Which, of course, no one is actually doing. So, you see how we have a lot of folks' partisan ship on the right going crazy about cancel culture.
But what about on the left? Yeah, it's happening on the left, too. I saw this last week when Governor Abbott in Texas came out and said he's opening everything. So, 100% businesses are being open and no more mask mandate, which struck me as... I understand the business opening because there is an economic tradeoff between opening businesses and having quarantines, and when people are getting vaccinated, there's a much greater move in favor of economic openings. But saying you're ending the mask mandate is stupid and just playing politics. So, I was annoyed about that.
But then I saw people with millions of followers from the left on social media, like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, who were so angry with Abbott that they said, "This is Texas, and you see what they're like in Texas. If that's the way you feel well, then we shouldn't be sending Texas any vaccines." Who the hell is we? We're Americans. First of all, Texas is a diverse state that has both Democrats and Republicans. It's increasingly purple. It's not red or blue. Even if it was red, everybody needs vaccines. The entire country is rolling vaccines out and it's really important for us to do that in the US and do it around the world.
But there is such incredible dysfunction psychologically in this us versus them, bad versus good, black versus white, that you have partisans that have just lost their minds, that have lost their humanity in the spirit of being on the same team. The one that bothered me from the left the most in the last week was about CPAC. Some of you may have seen that when the CPAC Conference occurred down in Orlando, Florida at the Hyatt hotel, there was a stage and the design of the stage looked like, design-wise, a rune. They're not the swastika, but a rune that was worn by some Nazi officers.
Of course, everybody on the left goes crazy. Not everybody. A lot of people on the left go crazy, that it must've been intentional, this is a dog whistle for white nationalists and white supremacists. So, you have people with significant followings on the internet intranet saying that this is a Nazi support, and that you should be banning the GOP and banning Hyatt, which was hosting all of us. Alyssa Milano, with well over three million followers on Twitter, saying, "Hyatt is totally fine hosting Nazis. Boycott Hyatt."
Of course, anyone could understand that this was vastly overdone. This is conspiracy thinking that no one is doing research into figuring out what the actual stage looks like and this obscure rune from the Nazi-era Germany. Then we find out, we get the actual facts, which is it was a design, an event design company, that came up with the stage design for a fairly awkward space to do something that large. Company was called Design Foundry based in Maryland. Small company, 98%, more than 98%, of their political donations from their employees in the last year went to Democrats, not Republicans. They were the ones that came up with the design and they apologized.
The GOP said they're not going to use them for further events and all of that. Well, you would think on the back of that that, of course, Alyssa and others are going to take down their posts and they're going to say, "We got it wrong," and apologize. No, no. As of today, that post is still up there with thousands and thousands of retweets saying to boycott Hyatt, and Hyatt losing money on the back of this.
A small piece of advice if anyone sees this, post this out for Alyssa. Alyssa, do them a favor. Go stay at a Hyatt and take a post of yourself at the Hyatt and tell your fans the next time they're going to a hotel, they should stay at a Hyatt. Why? Because you caused economic damage out of political lunacy. It was completely wrong. It was completely without merit. They did nothing wrong. This is hurtful. It's hurtful to the country. It's hurtful to the corporation, but most importantly, it's hurtful to us. It's hurtful to the people who are no longer looking at each other as human beings, but instead as political sport, as scoring a point.
It doesn't matter if more of this is being done by one side or the other. What matters is that it's lunacy. It's fake news. It's not facts. It's conspiracy thinking. It's really going to cause much more damage to our polity, something that, I think, deeply, we all still want to believe in, and we want to make better.
So that is my little rant for today, for Monday, for kicking off the week. I hope everyone does well, and increasingly we aren't going to need to avoid people. Just a little bit longer. Looking forward to that. Take it easy. Be good.