Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Secret Campaign Weapon: New Media

How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using podcasts and counter-narrative tactics against legacy news media outlets to leverage a formidable campaign.

In American political campaigns, two things are guaranteed: calculated and performative political candidates, and the calculated and strategic bolstering of these candidates by the corporate news media. It’s all a dog and pony show to see who can best manipulate the voter base, with the support of legacy news media outlets, to achieve a desired goal, whether it’s a seat at the congressional table or at the Oval Office.

In recent months, however, it’s been interesting to witness the rise of Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the polls. Quite the anomaly, RFK Jr., prior to his presidential campaign announcement, did not seem like a character that would typically fit into the current political landscape. He's taken on the largest corporations as an environmental lawyer, he’s courageously fought on behalf of the safety and health of everyday Americans, and he’s vastly unpopular within the Washington DC establishment bubble. That his campaign has garnered such a strong support thus far is no surprise—people are clamoring for something new, someone who’s audacious and authentic, and someone who is not Biden or Trump. Were this four years ago, I, too, would’ve been thrilled about investing into his campaign, but these days, I have no optimistic outlook for any politician, or the impact they may be capable of. Witnessing the shameful, self-immolation of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and the brazen abandonment of his supposed principles in the years that followed, was all I needed to justify my long-held belief that politics is one big psyop. But I think it’s worth noting how RFK Jr., a rather unique phenomenon, has managed to stand out and hold attention.

From the very beginning of his campaign, while he was still, naively, running as a Democratic candidate (they railed against him at every turn), it was clear that he’d surrounded himself with the right communications strategists to handle the unusual campaign of a figure who hails from arguably the most famous political family in modern American history, yet had become so widely unpopular among establishment circles that once revered and celebrated his work as an environmental lawyer. Surely, any communications team handling such a figure would have to get pretty creative and be willing to implement brand new strategies that other candidates are unlikely to utilize to their advantage. And to that end, I think they’ve been very successful. I rarely go searching for his campaign, but somehow his ads find me and keep my attention.

His campaign launch video leaned into the thread of values that connect the visions of his father, United States senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, with his. The ad wove pictures and video clips of all three figures together, pulling on the heartstrings of viewers and briefly reminding them of the groundbreaking personalities that once defined what American politics could be, a Democratic party worth returning to, and the candidate who can see all of that vision through in the present time.

In the months that followed, he made appearances on some of the largest podcasts in world including The Joe Rogan Experience, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald’s System Update, Elon Musk on Spaces, Lex Fridman, and the Kim Iversen Show, all neatly curated on his campaign website for viewing. Rarely do politicians on the campaign trail make the podcast circuit a part of their strategy to reach voters. And why would they? Opening their campaigns up to an informal and unscripted podcast environment coupled with unrestricted lines of questions with no time limits would quickly unravel the persona they've worked so carefully to craft to nail short news media segments with predictable lines of questions from politically biased anchors.

But if you’re RFK Jr., podcasts are one of the most powerful ways to cut through the propagandistic noise that is the mainstream media. Where outlets like The New Yorker, Washington Post, and others operate with the sole agenda to misrepresent as many of his views and positions as they can, long-form podcast platforms such as the Joe Rogan Experience and Greenwald’s System Update grant him hours of uninterrupted time to properly flesh out his ideas and positions, offer evidence-based pushback to attacks against his character, and clearly make his case to hosts who are actually curious about his findings, not corporate anchors and “journalists” who are ideologically/politically driven to misinterpret his findings. I’ve heard a few of these longform interviews and they’ve been thoroughly illuminating, especially as it relates to his work as a litigator, fighting corrupt corporations at the behest of everyday Americans, pushing for safer and properly tested vaccines, and much more.

American voters rarely get to hear hours of unfiltered streams of consciousness from their political candidates, especially during the vetting stages. Instead, what they get are the typical canned speeches, rehearsed talking points, and a biased media’s portrayal of those candidates. In many ways, I believe open discourse platforms have been the bedrock of RFK Jr.’s campaign. He’s been able to wrestle back control of his narrative. He’s a man who speaks plainly, earnestly, and authoritatively on the subject matters he knows very well. It never seems that he’s relying on prepared scripts or talking points, which is why hours-long interviews is not a deterrence for him. (Although, I’d be remiss not to mention that all of this quickly falls apart when it comes to the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict. On this, RFK Jr. displays the opposite of all of the qualities that make him endearing—there is zero authenticity, what comes off as a pressured stance, and undoubtedly some scripted talking points—but that’s an article for another day.)

Across social media platforms, although he’s faced censorship, including the ban of his Instagram account, and continues to push back against an algorithmic limitation of reach since the account’s reinstatement, he’s tapped into the sensitivities of a younger voter base. On platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X, he shares many of the videos we’ve all seen at this point that feature him engaged in a myriad of physical activities, in his natural habitat, from skiing and diving to hiking and weight training. While these serve as a visual cue for the difference in agility between the candidates on the field, it also serves as a teaching tool for voters as they're often tied back to the ethos of his campaign. While politicians often have a knack for pandering to voters by doing the “cool” and “hip” thing on the campaign trail (see Hillary Clinton), in RFK Jr.’s case, there’s an argument to be made that it’s a strategy that doesn’t ring as inauthentic given that he’s long been a man of the outdoors.

Recently, his campaign released a remarkable short film/ad, Who is Bobby Kennedy?. Narrated by actor Woody Harrelson, the film/ad highlighted one of RFK Jr.’s most impactful media strategies to date: lean hard into the media’s smear campaigns, and neutralize every single talking point with the truth and a compelling narrative to back it up.

When legacy news media outlets run hit-pieces and smear campaigns against target individuals, their goal is to cause reputational damage, character assassination, a shift of focus away from doing impactful work toward putting out public relations fires, and, eventually, wear down the individual to a point where surrender is the only option. RFK Jr. has faced a variation of these tactics for years—primarily as a result of his firm stance on vaccine safety protocols, corporate malfeasance, free speech and censorship, and more—but he remains unshaken.

Instead of surrendering, in this recent ad, RFK Jr. uses the opportunity to directly expose the mechanisms that legacy news media outlets often employ to destroy their most formidable opponents, dissidents, or individuals whose actions pose a threat to the status quo. He begins by calling attention to all of the outlandish headlines, labels, and unwarranted attacks that have come from the likes of Vanity Fair, New York Post, New York Times, and The Guardian. And he counters, assertively addressing every hit-piece in narrative form, to show viewers and voters just how far the legacy news media has sunken that they would collectively and strategically launch a barrage of attacks against a political candidate whose values and propositions pose a threat to the Democratic Party’s stranglehold of the country. To “save our democracy” as they are often heard lamenting, they’re willing to destroy the democratic process to ensure that a candidate they do not like has no chance at winning.

In a particularly revealing segment of the film/ad, the tactical strategy that corporations and their legacy news media affiliates usually employ, to take down dissident voices whose disclosures usually disrupt official narratives, is put on full display. The strategy involves three simple, propagandistic steps, that if successively executed across all of the major news publications and outlets across the country, end up leaving people like you with the impression you likely currently have about RFK Jr.:

1. Broad attacks and obtuse “fact-checks” against your claims.

2. Outright character assassination.

3. Stigmatization via association with toxic labels or groups.

If you’re going to successfully counter personal attacks against your character, you’ll need to devote some effort to exposing, in detail, how this style of propaganda works so that those who are uninitiated to it can see it for themselves. I think this segment of the film does just that.

The more these entities can taint and misrepresent an individual’s claims and character to the public, the more they can steer and control the narrative in their favor. This is how propaganda has shaped both our history and the World as we know it today. Yet, the more individuals and candidates like RFK. Jr. can use visual narratives (photography, commercials, short films, etc.) to not only educate voters on how legacy media works against their interests, but to tactically reveal their deceptive methods, the more it’s likely that control of the narrative slips away from these powerful institutions.

Regardless of my reservations about RFK Jr. as a political candidate, I have to admire any individual’s efforts to countering the tactics of morally bankrupt news media institutions. If anything I believe this is one of the driving forces behind his unorthodox campaign—by pushing back against the machine, he’s perceived as the people’s champion, something he’s not entirely new to. We’ll see how this all shakes out in due time.

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