You’ve probably seen the brouhaha about ersatz Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting in trouble for saying that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to “spare the Jews.” I wanted to take a moment to dig into just what happened, just what he said and what if anything it all means. This is one of those crazy and yet in many ways predictable stories that manages to be both deeply stupid and yet also quite illustrative of our times.

First, what’s the story? I noticed immediately that all the coverage stemmed from a single story in The New York Post (not a great sign) by Jonathan Levine. I’ve had a couple run-ins with Levine over the years, or at least I’ve seen pieces of his that struck me as tendentious, either by design or lack of familiarity with certain political questions. Don’t get hung up on whether I was right or wrong about him. I note this only to highlight that even though I have an extremely low opinion of RFK Jr. I went into this story with more than a little skepticism.

But in this case, Levine was right on the mark. Kennedy’s words are his words. In fact Levine was so right on the mark it’s a bit shocking he was the only one to write it up. Lots of reporters were at this dinner and a lot of them wrote it up. But none mentioned this. The most one can say about Levine’s reporting in this case is that he drew out the obvious implication of Kennedy’s remark which was necessary because Kennedy used the standard many-people-are-saying and just-asking-questions type phrasings that are the calling card of his brand of conspiracy freaks. But again, his words are his words. He’s guilty as charged.

Here’s what he said …

If you’ll remember the last time we discussed Incel Chieftain Ron DeSantis the story was that even though his polling numbers had faltered and campaign discourse had settled into describing his deep personal weirdness he was still sitting on a mountain of money. Well, maybe not. Now DeSantis has been forced to fire staff amid a spending crunch. A campaign insider tells Politico the number was “fewer than 10 staffers.” NBC says it was a dozen. The first reports tried to suggest this was part of a strategy shift as opposed to spending woes. But in those terms the new strategy seems to be to not run out of money before the end of the summer.

If you spend time listening to Trump/Musk/Sacks/Bitcoin anti-Ukraine discourse you’ll hear the following argument: while the U.S. launched (by remote control presumably) its Russia/Ukraine proxy war to degrade Russian military power, quite the opposite has happened. Now the U.S. is running out of artillery shells, thus degrading its own military power. Meanwhile, Ukraine is doomed because we can’t send them any more and Russia can sustain its supply forever. In other words, the U.S. is owned; Russia is on the march; Ukraine is doomed.

This is a bogus argument. The U.S. hasn’t run out of artillery ammunition. Not even close. The U.S. has what amounts to a one-and-a-half-war doctrine. The U.S. needs to be able to fight two major wars simultaneously or, short of that, needs to be able to defeat its adversary in one major war while holding its adversary in the second at bay long enough to win war one and move on to winning war two. A bureaucracy like the Pentagon takes the official doctrine and computes what amount of human and material resources are required to make good on it and then is responsible for making sure all of that is available if and when those wars break out. This is basically what Joint Staffs do. That includes, among many other things, stockpiling enough artillery and ammunition to meet the needs of fighting those two wars. That’s an almost unimaginable amount of stuff that is still sitting in U.S. stockpiles.

Ron DeSantis is struggling in the polls, and at acting like a human being in public. The Murdochs are losing patience with his flailing efforts to become the alt-Trump for voters exhausted by MAGA. He’s getting a lot of negative headlines now that his Republican-dominated state legislature back home has ended its legislative session and is therefore no longer producing anti-woke bills for him to sign into law and pump into Fox’s news cycle.

So naturally he’s turning to a key voting bloc that — at times reluctantly — got behind Donald Trump in droves in 2016 to propel him to the White House: white evangelicals. It’s an intrinsic shift for any Republican but especially for one who is banking his entire 2024 bid on what he perceives to be his unique ability to scoop up disaffected Trump voters looking for an alternative to the former president’s various disagreeable features.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Very Serious Republican Investigations, the Supreme Court’s upcoming term and Iowa’s new abortion ban.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

I want to follow up on Nicole’s Where Things Stand from yesterday afternoon, where she notes that the Murdoch family seems to be wearying of Meatball Ron⁽™⁾ as his hapless campaign continues to stumble and the prospect of his ridding billionaire GOP donors of Donald Trump seems ever more remote.

At the moment, DeSantis’s zombie campaign rests on the support of an odd-couple mix of the incel-adjacent far right, the GOP donor class and the operatives who serve them. But if you accept that DeSantis won’t be the GOP nominee, which you should (trust me), who replaces him as the Great Hope of the GOP Donor Class? Or, to put it differently, who is the next non-Trump GOP memestock who will get all the investment and attention before plummeting back to the ground?

There are two new reports out this week that dig in on where Rupert Murdoch is leaning ahead of the 2024 Republican primary, as he creates distance between his conservative media empire and Donald Trump, whose 2020 election lies have already cost Murdoch’s Fox News three-quarters of a billionaire dollars in just one defamation suit settlement. Murdoch reportedly is doing whatever he can to avoid being “stuck” with Trump again in 2024, privately expressing repeatedly over the last two years that he thinks Trump is unhealthy for the Republican Party, according to the New York Times.

You’ve probably seen some coverage of the NATO summit in Vilnius this week. With that meeting we’ve seen an acrimonious debate over whether Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO now, arguably when it needs to most. Ukraine wants it. Indeed, it’s demanding it. Many of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters in Europe and North America are too. So I wanted to take a moment to go on record as saying this is unwise, unnecessary and, to a non-trivial extent, borderline insane.

The arguments I’ve at least seen come down to versions of “moral clarity,” the importance of making a clear and emphatic statement about Western commitment to Ukraine and the unacceptability of Russian behavior. These are important goals. But it’s a good rule of thumb that when people lean too hard on “moral clarity” there are good reasons to believe it’s because more considered and logical arguments can’t sustain the idea.

Republicans are continuing to backtrack on years of conspiracy-theory precedent after last year’s midterms taught them that demonizing certain popular types of voting for the sake of Donald Trump’s grievances might not be the best way to win friends and influence people.

The latest MAGA fan and one-time Big Liar to embrace the Republican National Committee’s early-voting about-face initiative: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

It’s certainly true that mainstream media organizations have published stories on the sometimes clownish work of House Republican investigators. But even this doesn’t detract from the fact that new accusations from the same folks are routinely presented to the public as credible, serious, even damning news. I was considering this this afternoon and it’s hard to think of any other part of life, personal or professional, in which someone’s claims are so consistently shown not only to be inaccurate but comically cynical and dishonest and yet continue to be treated with great seriousness and respect. It’s a sort of credibility Groundhog Day, in the sense of the movie. Just the same damn thing from scratch every time.