Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #464
What this video covers
Kennedy’s third appearance on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” — recorded in September 2023, deep in his independent presidential campaign — is the most purely conversational of his big podcast hits. Von’s meandering, comic interview style draws out a Kennedy who is relaxed, funny, and expansive, less the policy advocate than the storyteller.
The nominal subjects are the campaign: Kennedy’s ideas for restoring the middle class, why he believes he can beat both Biden and Trump, what it would take to restore Americans’ faith in their institutions, and the security threats he says the campaign faced (including the long fight for Secret Service protection). Von also gets Kennedy reflecting on how news media has changed across his lifetime — from the era his father and uncle inhabited to the fragmented present.
The episode’s most vivid stretch is Kennedy recounting his Monsanto litigation: trying the Roundup cases one at a time in San Francisco, the first jury awarding $289 million to Dewayne Johnson — a school groundskeeper whose backpack sprayer leaked — and a later case where the lawyer asked the jury for $1 billion and got $2.2 billion, for a couple who were both home gardeners (and whose Labrador died of the same lymphoma). Kennedy uses the story to argue the system only moves when juries punish corporate misconduct.
For the site’s purposes, the episode matters as a document of Kennedy’s campaign persona at its peak: the bridge-builder pitching unity to an audience that doesn’t follow politics closely, making the case that the country’s divisions are manufactured by institutions that profit from them.
Key points
- Kennedy pitches his campaign as a middle-class restoration project, arguing both parties have presided over the class’s decline.
- He discusses security threats against the campaign and the denied-then-delayed Secret Service protection as evidence of institutional hostility.
- Kennedy argues Americans’ loss of faith in institutions — media, government, public health — is rational, given those institutions’ records.
- He reflects on the transformation of news from the mid-20th century to the social-media era, with himself as a case study in coverage he calls a blackout.
- Kennedy makes the electability argument in comic-friendly terms: he can draw from both parties and beat either major-party nominee.
- Von’s questions pull out biographical color — Kennedy’s voice condition, his family, his outdoor life — that rarely surfaces in adversarial interviews.
- The episode’s tone is warm throughout; it contains little of the confrontational edge of Kennedy’s hearing or cable-news appearances.