RFK Jr.’s Long-Shot Bid Is Shockingly Alive. Thank His Brain Worm Coalition.

The worm that allegedly ate part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain may be dead, but the man’s presidential campaign certainly isn’t. Freshly empowered by ballot-access victories in key states like Michigan, financial support from his wealthy vice presidential pick, and mass indifference among the electorate to the Biden-Trump rematch, RFK Jr. continues a strong, worrisome third-party run that’s scrambling American politics in the lead-up to Election Day. He’s also been able to keep himself out there with the assistance of a strange array of media celebrities and brand-name executives: woo-woo Hollywooders, conspiratorial podcasters, and weirdo Silicon Valley disrupters all brought in to prop up an especially big tent of support. You might call them RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm Coalition.

Of particular interest are the tech and finance members of this Brain Worm Coalition, who include the candidate’s VP pick, Nicole Shanahan, a well-connected venture capitalist who was formerly married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and donated to both Joe Biden and Marianne Williamson in 2020; Bill Ackman, the short seller and onetime Democrat whose pro-Israel, anti-diversity crusades have led him to embrace RFK Jr. and Donald Trump; Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO and ice-bath enthusiast who withdrew a planned $5 million Bitcoin donation to RFK Jr.’s campaign after employees from his company Block began expressing their concerns; the megawealthy VCs behind the All-In podcast, whom Kennedy credits with boosting his candidacy; Elon Musk, who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and has since completely enmeshed himself in racist right-wing paranoia related to immigrants and nonwhite Americans; cryptocurrency and blockchain pioneer Charles Hoskinson, who says he’s done with “voting for the lesser of two evils”; Eric Weinstein, the former managing director of Peter Thiel’s VC fund; and LimeWire creator Mark Gorton, whose COVID-era vaccine skepticism led him to co-found and co-chair an amply funded pro–RFK Jr. super PAC called American Values 2024.

That tech barons love Kennedy isn’t new. Many of these same people were enthusiastic fans of his early last year, when the independent long shot first launched his bid as a Democrat and spoke at the 2023 Bitcoin Conference. Back then, the presidential race was much more open, with potentially serious challengers attempting to thwart Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s chances at securing the major-party nominations. Still, it’s striking that many of these folks remain staunch in their RFK Jr. endorsements, even as he went independent, persisted in the arduous process of qualifying for each state’s ballot, and carried a zero percent chance of earning more votes than either Biden or Trump—let alone winning the presidency.

If RFK Jr.’s early support was meant to signal that Democrats and Republicans needed to rethink their front-runners, what does the lingering support mean now as this Kennedy scion threatens their respective chances at general-election victory?

There are a few key ideas that united the Brain Worm Coalition behind the imperfect avatar of RFK Jr. For one, rich guys like Chamath Palihapitiya who funded Biden in 2020 are fed up with his supposed “radical” policies. There’s his administration’s attempts at increasing the country’s historically low tax liabilities for corporations and top-income-bracket dwellers, a re-empowered Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission that have gone after tech companies like Apple and Google, and a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s hounding the crypto sector. On top of all that, Biden is also (at least vocally) a pro-worker chief executive who visited a UAW picket line and recorded a message in favor of Amazon union organizers.

It’s not just class war driving the brain rot. Another factor is the way the electorate has shifted its perceptions of scientific consensus and the wider infosphere in the years since the COVID pandemic’s peak. Skepticism of vaccines, climate science, and general public health measures is far more mainstream than it was even a few years ago. (See also: the public backlash to alternative milks and lab-cultivated meat.) Eager conspiracy theorists took advantage of indoor audiences to start up their own fact-free yet lucrative media enterprises through podcasts and video—and RFK Jr. has appeared on many of those.

Silicon Valley elites, despite their professed devotion to reason and scientific wisdom, have often hawked quack medical cures or advocated for bizarre trends like consuming “raw water.” That—along with their anger at the government concern (which was not, as they’d characterize it, any sort of explicit interference) in widespread COVID disinformation, as showcased by reports on “the Twitter Files” and Facebook’s COVID flip-flopping—has encouraged these oligarchs to discard the mainstream media and embrace their own media bubbles. Hence, Musk’s Twitter takeover on behalf of “free speech,” despite his actual lack of commitment to that ideal.

RFK Jr. has done quite a lot to appeal to these folks. He’s praised the “Twitter Files” and the Musk era of the website, has harped on his vaccine questions and invective against Dr. Anthony Fauci, and taken bizarre “middle ground” positions on just about everything from abortion to Jan. 6 to the “TikTok ban.” He sticks to his environmentalist background, but tacks harder to the right on arming Israel, opposing aid to Ukraine, and cracking down on immigration through the southern border.

He’s also lodged a high-profile lawsuit against Meta over “election interference” and “censorship” after Facebook and Instagram accidentally removed a “biographical film” about Kennedy that was launched by the aforementioned American Values PAC (and which was narrated in part by Woody Harrelson). With such acts, Kennedy endears himself to tech guys’ most fervent fixations while also presenting himself as so ideologically heterodox (read: incoherent) as to appear “moderate.”

United only in certain superficial commonalities—lots of money, a disaffection with liberalism, COVID-era journeys down online rabbit holes—the techie members of RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm Coalition want to leverage their influence through a particular type of candidate. One who doesn’t seem to know what he believes, who’ll play both sides on basic issues of democratic governance, and who promises at best to throw politics as usual into disarray—which is more than enough for these tech lords.

America, has a 2020 rematch got you down? Have no fear. The same tech “disrupters” who’ve hoarded gobs of wealth for themselves, completely decimated any reliability in our information ecosystem, and fashioned themselves into political pundits are going to “disrupt” this election too. They’ll do it by boosting a chaos candidate in a time where voters want to tear the whole political system down. As for the consequences of their actions and disruptions? They’ll just wait to see how things shake out for themselves and their own bottom line, as they’ve always done. And that’s always gone so well for the rest of us, right?