From hankschannel.

I have spent a fair amount of time with RFK Jr.’s work at this point and it really started out as a mystery to me. I had a really hard time reconciling how effective he seemed to be at understanding some statistics while a paragraph later he would be completely misundestanding something. At first I chalked that up to confirmation bias.

But then I kept having a hard time figuring out if he really believed the stuff he was saying because of his various biases and his desire for attention or whether he knew he was lying and manipulating people.

What I’ve realized is that that’s actually just the same thing for him. Lying and manipulaiton doesn’t seem to be different from belief. The thing that really fixed it for me was moving from my frame (a YouTuber…a career that largely operates inside of the attention economy) to his frame (a lawyer who operates inside of the courtroom.)

Understanding RFK Jr. as a lawyer who is trying to win a case, and who knows that winning a cases (regardless of why you win) is the ultimate version of success, everything about him makes so so so much more sense. The fact that he can interpret some statistics correctly while others he interprets wildly incorrectly, the fact that he is always referring to his sources as the highest level of expert in whatever field he’s discussing, the fact that he picks the scariest possible topics to cover (a secret cabal of people are getting wealthy by poisoning your children) all start to make perfect sense.

Makes my stomach hurt…but it makes sense.

Thanks to Nies for the help with the edit https://bsky.app/profile/nies.bsky.social