It is one of the tenets of the QAnon crowd that John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and walking the Earth just waiting for the storm to start, or whatever the fuck it is that those loons are always going on about, so that he may reveal himself to the public, join Donald Trump’s ticket, and who knows, lead American politics back to its glory days when the government worked for the people and politicians like JFK Jr.’s father could not read on Twitter or a gazillion gossip blogs the rumors about him banging Marilyn Monroe in the White House literally while he was in the act of banging Marilyn Monroe in the White House.
So following this what we guess you could call logic, it makes sense that some QAnon believer would have revived George, the inexplicably popular, mainstream centrist magazine about politics that JFK Jr. founded in 1995. And it makes even more sense, in this topsy-turvy Bizarro universe that America got sucked into around 2009 and from which we have yet to emerge, that JFK Jr.’s first cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would in 2023 give the newly insane-fringe-owned magazine an interview to promote his quixotic independent presidential campaign, which members of his own family have publicly denounced, an interview in which he pushes the message that both major parties suck.
We have said it before and will say it again: We are all living in a Christopher Buckley novel, if Christopher Buckley wrote all his novels while microdosing ketamine.
The interview is here if you feel like subjecting yourself to the rantings of people who at one time would have been reduced to leaving these thoughts on mimeographed sheets of paper stuck under all the car windshields in the faculty parking lot at Berkeley. Here’s a little bit of the flavor from RFK (Jr.):
“President Obama signed [an executive order] in 2016 that basically immunized the CIA against propagandizing Americans. Since then, we’ve seen a number of the leading journals that appear to have very, very strong connections with the intelligence agencies, including Daily Beast, Daily Kos, and strangely, Rolling Stone. Noah Shachtman, who took the magazine over from Jann Wenner, has strong ties to the intelligence agencies.”
Noah Shachtman did some reporting on the defense industry and the military early in his career, ergo he is now a CIA-controlled propagandist convincing Americans that the mercury in vaccines won’t cause your children to be born with multiple heads. QED.
Anyway, Noah, if you’re reading this, the pudding is in the blender. We repeat, the pudding is in the blender.
Back in the old days, the original George was a goofy early effort to make politics more interesting by treating it like entertainment. Or, as a Mother Jones reporter put it when she first heard about the QAnon revival and went looking for a copy of the ‘90s edition:
The magazine I unearthed was an incredible period piece—the ultimate Gen X nostalgia trigger and the type of general interest magazine that could not happen today. A young George Clooney in a powdered wig graced the cover for a profile of the star written by Carrie Fisher.
Our memories of the original George are somewhat more limited:
A) It existed.
B) We’re pretty sure we read or at least skimmed a few issues while sitting in a doctor’s office or hanging out by the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble or Borders.
C) Uh, that’s it.
But George was, as we mentioned already, inexplicably popular and really impressed the inside-the-Beltway crowd, as Original Wonkette snarked about back in 2005 when Tom freaking Brokaw was leading symposiums about the magazine on the tenth anniversary of its founding, and four years after it had folded following JFK Jr.’s tragic death.
We feel confident in saying that, contra RFK (Jr.), his cousin would not “really like this” revival created by people who have been exploiting his death by making it a part of their weirdo cult mythology. That’s the nice thing about attributing beliefs to the dead, though: They are not here to tell you that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
[Media Matters / George / Mother Jones]
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