2024 will be America’s ‘Unreality Election,’ and the truth is already losing

I’m going out on a pretty sturdy limb here and predicting that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not be the 47th president of the United States. And yet somehow, this defective product from the Kennedy family charisma factory — the main challenger to President Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries — has become the avatar of the 2024 election, a kind of a John the Baptist of a disinformation apocalypse. He is building the foundation for the most cataclysmic White House contest in history by shoveling a giant mound of horse manure.

And people are listening. Cheering, even.

A sneak peek of where a big chunk of the electorate — maybe just over half, maybe just under, there’s the rub — is marching along with this pied piper took place Tuesday on the nightly unreality show of Fox News, when RFK Jr. staged a televised town hall with Sean Hannity. The forum gave the 69-year-old son of the late senator and slain 1968 presidential candidate a chance to spin his bizarro-world version of the ongoing war in Ukraine. He claims it happened not because a power-mad Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks across the border in February 2022, but because the United States and the West pushed Ukraine into the conflict.

“Putin, in good faith, began withdrawing troops from the Ukraine,” Kennedy said. “What happened? We sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it because we don’t want peace. We want the war with Russia.” The only sentence in that entire quote that is not demonstrably false is, “What happened?” Even the right-wing Hannity somehow summoned some journalistic skepticism, but the crowd howled with delight at the notion that Joe Biden’s America wants a war with Putin.

The applause shouldn’t have been surprising. After all, they came to see and to cheer this celebrity quack even after his bizarre suggestion that not only was COVID-19 engineered, but that it was created in a plot to spare certain Jewish and Chinese people. And his recent run of inane statements and conspiracy theories that chemicals in the water supply are causing a spike in transgender youth, or that Wi-Fi is causing cancer. Once one of the nation’s top environmental lawyers, Kennedy recently claimed that climate change is an excuse for the government to “control you through fear” and can be solved by the same free market that gave us Big Oil in the first place.

It would be easy to dismiss the RFK Jr. disinformation campaign as a sideshow — Kennedy may be winning the attention primary but he’s never gotten more than 20% against Biden in a poll — but this virus has been engineered to infect the body politic. The out-there Democrat is just pushing an edgier version of the anti-elite canon of millions of conservatives, mostly Republicans, who don’t just think the government is lying to them but also scientists, the media, and anyone else who dare pass themselves off as an expert.

Just listen to the top runner-up on the GOP side (for now) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who was asked this week whether he would consider taking RFK Jr. as a running mate. The leader of America’s third-largest state wasn’t sure about that, but said he agreed 100% with Kennedy on “the medical stuff” and that he could “sic” Kennedy — whose profile rose with debunked theories around vaccines and autism — on the white-coated experts by naming him director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Food and Drug Administration.

This idea is bat-guano crazy, but the wacky is becoming numbingly routine.

There is one class of experts who’s getting it wrong: the political pundits, who don’t seem to grasp the true, appalling nature of America’s growing chasm. Sure, democracy is under increasing assault from authoritarianism, and, yes, there’s a widening cultural and political divide over education (I wrote a book about it!). But increasingly the United States is split down the middle between truth and fiction, facts and fantasy, science and hocus pocus.

In 1932, the fate of capitalism was on the ballot. In 1968, it was “law and order.” Welcome to the dawn of 2024: “The Unreality Election.” In January 2025, America might come under a regime of lies, blessed at the ballot box by a working plurality. The more than 40% who don’t believe that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. The 45% who doubted vaccine safety — before COVID-19. The long-running U.S. world leadership in climate denial, even as heat waves and intensified floods rattle the nation and the planet.

You can even see the divide at your local movie theater. While the nation’s movie reviewers, cultural commentators, and a huge chunk of the viewing public were obsessed last week with the dueling releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the other half of America was packing heartland cinemas for a film called Sound of Freedom, a movie about child trafficking in the mindset of the debunked-yet-widely-held QAnon conspiracy theory. The filmmakers have made wild, fact-free claims about international trafficking, even as their movie blows past $125 million at the box office. Most people in New York or L.A. have never heard of it.

» READ MORE: RFK’s assassination and 55 years of paranoia | Will Bunch Newsletter

When historians someday dig through the burned-out rubble of America in the 21st century, two quotes will stand out. “We choose truth over facts,” Biden famously gaffed at the Iowa State Fair in 2019 — a statement that seems to capture both the 46th president’s determination to be the leader of a reality-based world, and his tenuous grip on that. From the Oval Office, Biden has pushed for a better life in the heartland with expanded broadband or new semiconductor factories — trying to appeal to voters who didn’t notice because they were busy posting on Facebook that the Obamas murdered their chef (they didn’t murder their chef.)

“The real opposition is the media,” Steve Bannon, Trump World impresario, said in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with” excrement. In seeking a “chaos agent” with the ultimate goal of electing the wounded Donald Trump in 2024, Bannon found the ideal raw sewage overflow in RFK Jr., whom he encouraged to run. Why? Because Bannon and friends know that Trump can only be swept back to the White House by this tsunami of human waste — a stench of misinformation so foul that voters don’t know whom to believe.

The only way, after all, that a man with at least two and probably four or more felony indictments can be elected is if half the public believes that each new count showing Trump’s fundamental criminality is instead an indictment of the elites in the media and “the deep state” determined to take down a defender of “the forgotten people.” Voters must believe, as Trump said in 2018, that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” They must believe in unreality, and RFK Jr. is priming the pump.

In fact, Bannon could not have invented a better chaos agent than this Kennedy heir. There’s a reason that the most wackadoodle QAnon supporters think that RFK Jr.’s late cousin, John F. Kennedy Jr., is still alive and will reveal himself as the nation’s true leader. The 1963 JFK assassination — 60 years ago this November, blamed by RFK Jr. on the CIA — was the start of a long slide in public trust in authority.

Today, voters in the so-called heartland distrust the government for a mix of things it absolutely shouldn’t have done — from Vietnam and Watergate to the 2003 Iraq War — and things it should have done, like the Voting Rights Act or our first Black president. Is Middle America more troubled by the loss of millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs, or by the threatened loss of white supremacist, patriarchal hierarchies? These are difficult questions, but this much is clear: Charlatans like Bannon, Trump, DeSantis and Kennedy can work with this distrust to mold it into something much, much more sinister.

If Trump can dodge all the legal bullets to somehow emerge on top of this foul, stinking heap of untruth on Nov. 5, 2024, his team has ambitious plans to undo nearly 250 years of checks and balances. They would forge an American dictatorship which would, among other things, halt all efforts to prevent climate change. Those things aren’t fantasy, but facts. Next year’s “Unreality Election” will decide if voters still know the difference.

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