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Is RFK Jr., the conspiracist scion of American political royalty, merely a nuisance, or will he present a genuine threat in 2024?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

China changed its mind about World War II. What is Israel trying to accomplish? Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

A Wild Card

The Kennedy family is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And, for a time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed his long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination as that of a “Kennedy Democrat” who believes in strong unions and the middle class. But last week, he broke with the party.

RFK Jr., who rose to prominence as a respected environmental lawyer before veering into conspiracism and anti-vaccine activism around 2005, said last Monday that he is now running for president as a third-party candidate. “We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our home and who amplify our divisions,” he said, announcing his decision in Philadelphia. “And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties.” Putting aside the irony of a Kennedy criticizing elites, RFK Jr.’s announcement could add an element of uncertainty into the near-inevitable rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2024. My colleague John Hendrickson, who profiled Kennedy in June and has covered his campaign, told me that, because of various state-level qualifying rules, Kennedy does not appear to have a viable path to collecting the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency as an independent candidate. But even if the possibility of Kennedy actually becoming president is moot, he “could siphon voters away from Biden and Trump, and make it harder for either of them to hit 270,” John said. In a presidential race that may be close, especially in key swing states, a wild-card factor could cause headaches for both sides.

An independent run like RFK Jr.’s could also damage the American public’s already fragile trust in the integrity of the electoral system. As Jesse Wegman wrote in The New York Times this week, if a single candidate is unable to garner 270 electoral votes, a little-known provision in the Twelfth Amendment would kick in, enabling the House to elect the president; each state would cast one vote, and their tally would decide the presidency. “This is about as far from the principle of majority rule as you can get,” Wegman writes, noting that Thomas Jefferson called the provision “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution.”

The likely rematch between Trump and Biden is unwelcome news for many voters: “Americans are suffering a bit of 2020 PTSD, and the prospect of replaying that whole year over again is filling people with dread,” John told me. Poll results released by the Monmouth University Polling Institute earlier this month found that just 19 percent of voters are very enthusiastic about Trump running as the party nominee, and 14 percent are very enthusiastic about Biden. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s favorability ratings have at times surpassed those of both Trump and Biden. But Jon Krosnick, a political-science professor at Stanford University, told me that Kennedy will likely take such a small number of votes from Trump and Biden that his presence will prove inconsequential. “The only way he’s going to be influential in the outcome of the election is if he participates in debates,” which would give him a major platform for his ideas, Krosnick told me. Those experts who do believe that Kennedy could hurt the major-party candidates are divided on whether his presence in the race might inspire anti-vax or libertarian voters to divert their votes from Trump, or cause Biden-weary Democrats to jump ship, hurting the incumbent.

Third-party candidates have always been on the sidelines of American politics. Krosnick explained that sometimes, votes for them make no difference in electoral outcomes, because they tend to attract voters who just wouldn’t have voted otherwise. But these candidates have exerted power at key moments. No candidate from outside the two dominant parties has ever won a presidential election, but third-party candidates have sometimes served as “spoilers,” pulling votes from candidates in close matchups. In 2000, Ralph Nader, who received some 97,000 votes, siphoned votes in the close race—the difference in Florida was about 500 votes—between George Bush and Al Gore. In 2016, Jill Stein garnered votes that could have helped Hillary Clinton in her race against Trump.

“Some third-party independent candidate could arrive at that moment and grab the spotlight” in 2024, but “Robert Kennedy doesn’t strike me as that type of candidate,” Krosnick said. Kennedy isn’t the only third-party contender entering the fray: A third-party centrist group called No Labels has reportedly raised $60 million and qualified for 11 states’ ballots. Some Democrats are threatened by this: No Labels is “going to help the other guy,” Biden told ProPublica. And in July, my colleague Russell Berman wrote that, according to surveys and polling, a moderate independent candidate could capture a decisive number of votes in a close race. Cornel West, the intellectual and activist, is also running; he switched from the Green Party to an independent run earlier this month.

“Extreme polarization,” Krosnick told me, “does make this a special moment in history.” Some voters, desperate for an alternative to Trump or Biden, may vote for whomever they genuinely hope to see in the White House—even if that person has no chance of winning. People who vote for Kennedy, Krosnick said, are voters who think, “I don’t care whether he wins or not. I will feel best about myself if I vote for him.”

Related:

The first MAGA Democrat Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk.

Today’s News

Jim Jordan did not secure enough Republican votes to become speaker of the House in a first vote. At least 500 people were killed by an airstrike at a hospital in Gaza City, according to Palestinian authorities; Israel says the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket from the group Islamic Jihad. President Biden will visit Israel tomorrow. Ukraine struck Russian helicopters in its eastern region using long-range missiles newly supplied by the United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Elise Hardy; Shalom Ormsby; Tim Platt; dobok / Getty

An Awkward Evolutionary Theory for One of Pregnancy’s Biggest Complications

By Katherine J. Wu

In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby. But Robillard, now a neonatologist and epidemiologist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de La Réunion, on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, kept seeing the condition crop up during second, third, or fourth pregnancies—a pattern that a few other studies had documented, but had yet to fully explain. Then, Robillard noticed something else. “These women had changed the father,” he told me. The catalyst in these cases of preeclampsia, he eventually surmised, wasn’t the newness of pregnancy. It was the newness of paternal genetic material that, maybe, the mother hadn’t had enough exposure to before.

Robillard’s idea was unconventional not only because it challenged the dogma of the time, but because it implied certain evolutionary consequences … If preeclampsia is a kind of immune overreaction, then perhaps unprotected sex is the world’s most unconventional allergy shot.

Read the full article.

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Palestinian officials say an Israeli air strike on a hospital in Gaza City has killed hundreds.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza awaits the parting of clouds. Clear skies favor Israel, which dominates the airspace and wants to be able to look down to see what awaits its ground forces. Early morning yesterday brought rain, and at dawn, orange cumulus clouds rolled over the Mediterranean. Today’s forecast calls for more rain, and therefore probably another day without Israeli infantry in Gaza. Rarely has the Weather Channel been such ominous and thrilling viewing.

Everyone knows the invasion is coming. Less obvious is what it will ultimately bring for Palestinians. Within about a day of Hamas’s attack on October 7, an Israeli consensus emerged that no response short of total annihilation of Hamas would suffice. A second, corollary consensus didn’t take much longer: To annihilate Hamas, Israel would have to invade Gaza. Hamas has given Israel the best possible excuse to do so. Hamas hides in the civilian population, stores its weapons there, and fires those weapons from civilian areas. It does this by choice. And that gives Israel the rationale of self-defense, the most ironclad right of either a person or a nation.

Yesterday, the Israeli government brought a busload of journalists to Sderot, the Israeli town closest to the northern tip of Gaza. Sderot is vacant and partly destroyed. Rockets from Gaza barely need any fuel to reach the town—it’s so close that even a catapult or trebuchet might suffice—and as a result, it was badly battered on October 7. In the past few days, the entire population, 30,000 people, has been displaced to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the resort city of Eilat. A wrecked city is an awesome sight, both eerie and infuriating. In Sderot, there is a children’s park with a splash pad still running. The police station was the site of the Hamas gunmen’s last stand. Once the Israelis had determined that no police officers remained alive within, they fired up bulldozers and demolished the building with the gunmen still inside.

[Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me]

Nearby buildings have broken windows and bullet scarring. On the ground, one can still see spent brass casings from the battle, as well as the recoil spring from a Kalashnikov. Parking lots are still filled with cars, many with smashed windows and ajar glove compartments, as if someone had been searching for a spare key to commandeer a vehicle, or perhaps for a gun stashed away. Sderot’s mayor came out to say that his community had previously enjoyed friendly relations with the many Gazans who came through the checkpoints to work. He said that while Hamas is still in charge in Gaza, he would use his own body to block the passage of any Palestinian who tried to enter his town.

Israel is now calling for Gazans to abandon their homes in Gaza City, in the north, and go south. The Israel Defense Forces are calling cellphones and dropping leaflets, begging civilians to vacate a whole city that is, by Hamas’s own admission, a labyrinth of tunnels (500 kilometers’ worth, across all of Gaza) used for military purposes. The best-case scenario for the fate of their city will be its conversion into a necropolis 20 times the size of Sderot, with buildings that once contained families or public services instead haunted by the last bloody gasps of those who remained.

The fear that the worst-case scenario will happen is not something Israel is trying its hardest to dispel. It is a promise of permanent demographic change. When Israeli forces left Gaza 18 years ago, Israeli settlements had been established, chiefly in the southern portion of Gaza, and it took the authority of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to order their forcible removal. Pangs of conscience over Palestinian dispossession were not, shall we say, his principal motivation. The Jewish state could most easily maintain its Jewish character when it was not mixed up with non-Jews. And Gaza, particularly Gaza City, is so packed with Muslims that no amount of Israeli-settlement construction could tip the balance toward Jews. That would take ethnic cleansing.

One can see why residents of Gaza City might, in this context, be reluctant to leave just because Israel tells them to. Gazans know that if they leave, they will have to rely on the goodwill of Israel to let them back in and not use this moment to remake the region’s demography. Even if Israel cannot empty the city and replace the population, the government could render the area uninhabitable and nudge some portion of its Arab inhabitants into permanent exile.

I have no reason to doubt the wickedness of those who raided Sderot and nearby kibbutzim. But the government officials who came to the press conference denounced them in terms that might worry even the Palestinians who are themselves oppressed by Hamas.

The Israeli government was unabashedly right-wing long before Hamas attacked, and even its recent emergency broadening of the coalition to include more centrist figures has not erased its tilt. The Israeli left has called the government’s leaders “fascists,” “fanatics,” and “unhinged.” The government representative who came to address the press gaggle in Sderot was a fine specimen of the cartoonish aggression that the left sees in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies. Amichai Chikli, who leads two relatively minor ministries, Diaspora Affairs and Social Equality, showed up with a Glock tucked tightly against the small of his back. His main message was that the enemy was “not just Hamas,” and that “ordinary Gaza citizens” had been among those looting, “murdering people, burning people in their homes, beheading people—including babies.” He repeated the now-common Israeli-government line that “Hamas is ISIS,” a bit of rhetorical hyperbole echoed by even U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. (The groups are both nasty, but they’re different, and in ways that matter.)

[Yair Rosenberg: The Israeli minister who is defending Elon Musk]

The more Chikli spoke, the more one doubted his commitment to avoiding the worst-case scenario. It’s true that Hamas’s trained killers were not the only ones who partook in the previous week’s pogrom. But his emphasis on the pervasiveness of the group’s violent ideology suggested that he thought the problem extended to just about everyone living in Gaza. Chikli noted Hamas’s tendency to poison their children’s minds. “In Gaza, they are forcing their children to witness how they slaughter animals on Eid al-Adha, to take the heart of the animal and to hold it, so they can be mean and brutal when they grow up,” he said.

Sacrificing a ram on Eid al-Adha, and the distribution of its meat to the poor, will not win you any awards from PETA, but it is a standard Muslim practice. It is based on a story known at least as well to Jews as to Muslims: God kept Abraham from sacrificing his son, and replaced the poor boy with a ram. Many parents might prefer to spare their own children the sight of an animal bleeding to death. But this ritual is not meant to train killers, and it sounded a lot like Chikli thought that even ordinary Muslims were homicidal child abusers.

Under what circumstances would an Israeli who shares this view allow Gazans to return? Giving up murder is easy; giving up a religious ritual is not. Chikli said the sole condition for Sderot’s repopulation was the total destruction of Hamas. He didn’t say whether Gazans could return under the same condition. But he did say, “There is no room for another military in the land of Israel—not in Judea and Samaria, and not in Gaza.” Having a security force to protect one’s citizens is the first function of any state. He’s against it for Gaza—which means permanent occupation, if not annexation, by Israel, and possibly the exclusion of Palestinians from Gaza entirely.

He said that his position reflected his own view, as well as that of the “Likud movement” that dominates the Israeli government. But other elements of the government, such as the National Unity alliance, have reportedly demanded that the government devise an “exit strategy” from Gaza. Sharon was Likud as well, and left Gaza because staying was even worse than leaving. The current version of Likud might make the same discovery.

Gazans are waiting for the clouds to part, too. What will happen immediately after they do is not a mystery to them or anyone else. Israel will go in hard; it will lose many soldiers; Hamas will lose many fighters; and many civilians who stayed behind will die. Israel has long claimed, with some moral and legal justification, that any fighter who uses a human shield is responsible for that civilian’s fate. But the civilians stick around and take their chances with Hamas because Israeli officials have led them to wonder whether, if they left, they could ever come back. Intolerant rhetoric has consequences, and one of them is that Israel’s vengeance will be messier and more miserable for all involved than it needs to be. That, also, is a heavy moral burden.