In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.
“There’s a huge political realignment going on in this country, where a lot of the old categories — liberal, conservative — just don’t make sense anymore,” Eisenstein told me after the New Hampshire event. The Kennedy campaign, he said, “is unifying people who have really lost trust in the system, lost trust in politicians, lost trust — no offense intended — in the media.”
A few days after the speech, I met Aubrey Marcus, who co-founded a multimillion-dollar nutritional supplement company, Onnit, with the podcaster Joe Rogan, at the cafe in the Soho Grand Hotel. Marcus, a self-help guru, author, podcaster and ayahuasca promoter based in Austin, Texas, who recently led the football star Aaron Rodgers on a darkness retreat in Oregon, is an ardent Kennedy backer, though he’s never voted in his life. “This is as strong a belief in a cause as I’ve ever had,” he said. Many people he knows, he told me, share his enthusiasm: There’s “more excitement than I’ve ever seen about any politician, ever.”
That excitement is only intensified by a sense that the establishment is trying to silence Kennedy, who during the pandemic was booted from major social media platforms for promoting untruths about vaccines. Marcus denounced “the broad application of censorship for very complicated issues” and attempts to “remove people from the conversation and saying they don’t deserve a voice.”
The celebration of Kennedy as a free-speech icon creates a dilemma for those who think that by discouraging lifesaving vaccinations, he’s going to get people killed. This month, after Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine scientist, criticized Joe Rogan for letting Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he’d debate Kennedy on his show. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, offered an additional $150,000, and one Covid contrarian after another chimed in to add to the pot. “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Elon Musk tweeted. As the pile-on mounted, anti-vaccine activists showed up at Hotez’s house, harassing him for his refusal to square off against Kennedy.