The Ballad of Dicky and Bobby
An exclusive article from the American issue of Pit Magazine
Hello everyone, the American issue of Pit Magazine that Anna Ansari and I co-edited was shipped out from the printers a couple weeks ago, and it’s been really cool to see it in real life, and in the hands of so many attractive and intelligent readers. Are you among them? You should be! You can order your copy here if you haven’t yet.
This is my feature from the issue, which you’ll only find here and in the magazine itself, along with a multitude of other fascinating articles from a stellar lineup of writers (not to mention gorgeous photography and illustrations). It’s about food additives, anti-vax conspiracy theories, the alt-right, the nature of reality… and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
Also: Anna’s been busy. She published a whole book the same week Pit came out! And what a book. Order it here.
Enjoy!
Part 1: Dicky and Me
The strange state of American food policy can be understood through the dovetailing downfalls of two men from Massachusetts: Robert Francis “Bobby” Kennedy Jr., and Richard Michael “Dicky” Barrett.
Dicky Barrett was the charismatic lead singer of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. If you’re a millennial or Gen X, you may remember their 1997 hit “The Impression That I Get” (that “knock on wood” song), or you might remember them from the warehouse party scene in Clueless. Alicia Silverstone called them “kickin’!” before being charmed by a young Paul Rudd, watching him pogo dorkily with an even younger Brittany Murphy.
If you’re Gen Z, this probably sounds like gibberish. The Mighty Mighty what? Brittany who? The guy from Ant-Man? Well kids, this was the 90s. The Simpsons was in its hilarious heyday. Twenty bucks could get you a full tank of gas, with enough change leftover for a Big Mac meal. Nobody knew who Elon Musk was. Those were the days! No wonder we were all boppin’ cluelessly to goofy ska-punk bands.
In the church of 90s ska, Dicky Barrett was our pope. He had a voice like a jackhammer, pounding drunken dancehall energy into heartfelt lyrics with a compassionate, egalitarian social conscience. He sang about gun violence, racism, gentrification, and the crack and heroin epidemics. ‘The Impression That I Get’ was first released on a compilation to benefit victims of an abortion clinic shooting in Brookline, Massachusetts.
After I bailed on religion as a teenager, Barrett set new political and ethical standards for me. Whereas the Catholic church I grew up attending was harsh and judgmental, the Bosstones were tolerant and empathetic. They were a moral compass, and I would have followed them anywhere.
But oh, how the mighty mighty have fallen.
Part 2: The Curious Quirks of Bobby Kennedy, Jr.
In January 2022, the Bosstones abruptly announced their breakup without any explanation. Nobody knew why, after almost four decades together, they were calling it quits.
But the mystery didn’t last long. A few weeks prior, Barrett left his post as the announcer for Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, a job he’d held since 2004. It emerged that he resigned because he refused to accept the studio’s COVID-19 vaccination rules. Like all touring musicians, the Bosstones also had to reckon with policies requiring masks, vaccines, and distancing at venues. The rest of the band were willing to comply – but not Dicky. The Bosstones finally had enough when Barrett independently produced a song for an anti-vax rally fronted by one Bobby Kennedy Jr.
In a country full of bizarre political figures, RFK Jr. stands out as especially odd. After a period of mental health and drug problems following the assassination of his father (culminating in a 1983 arrest for heroin possession), Kennedy went on to become a hugely successful environmental lawyer and activist. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he negotiated a series of high-profile legal victories, including a $670 million settlement with DuPont for contaminating the Ohio River, and a lawsuit brought against Ford for dumping toxic waste on tribal lands of the Ramapough Lenape Nation.
Kennedy felt a moral imperative to pursue these issues, and expressed political ambitions since the early 2000s. Finally, in 2023, Kennedy ran for president, first as a Democrat and then as an independent. As his campaign faltered in 2024, he solicited both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for cabinet positions in exchange for his endorsement. Rebuffed by Harris, Kennedy threw his considerable clout behind Trump – a man he once called a “sociopath” – in one of the most Machiavellian moves in modern American politics.
I had no knowledge of RFK Jr. before 2024. But when he endorsed Trump, my left-wing media bubble began to fill up with wild, troubling stories of Kennedy’s sordid past and bizarre behavior. There was talk of his womanizing, which was concerning, but also something I (unfortunately) have simply come to expect from powerful men. But some of the stories were just too outlandish to ignore.
Let’s play two truths and a lie:
Kennedy had a flesh-eating worm in his brain.
Kennedy cut the head off a beached whale with a chainsaw and took it home.
Kennedy dumped the carcass of a bear cub onto a cycle path in Central Park as a prank.
Trick question – they’re all true! Actually, the thing about the whale might not be true, but Kennedy’s own daughter broke that story, so make of that what you will.
The motley crew of anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Joe Rogan dads and tradwife moms that make up Kennedy’s fanbase say these stories are nothing more than a smear campaign, and that his past transgressions and eccentricities shouldn’t negate his completely reasonable policy proposals. Maybe they’re right. We’ve all done dodgy stuff, and it’s important to look past that, to what politicians actually stand for.
The problem is, what Kennedy stands for is all over the map. Brain worms and bear carcasses aside, it’s when you look at his actual policies that things start to get mighty, mighty weird.
Part 3: RFK vs. UPF
Kennedy’s name is synonymous with the anti-vax movement. He’s been outspoken on the issue for years, generating an endless churn of hot-topic headlines. Still, RFK insists that he’s not anti-vaccine; he’s pro-safety, pro-freedom, pro-bodily autonomy. His acolytes have even appropriated the “my body, my choice” slogan from the pro-choice movement. He has stated that he elected to have his own children vaccinated, but he’s also repeatedly (and falsely) claimed that vaccines cause autism, asthma, and sudden death.
In 2019, Kennedy visited Samoa to take part in an anti-vaccine campaign. Later that year, a measles outbreak killed 83 people in the island country – 76 of whom were children. Kennedy’s positions can’t be dismissed as kooky rhetoric. They have fatal, real-world consequences.
As the current administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has overthrown long-standing political and scientific norms in both healthcare and food policy. After Trump signed the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) order in February, Kennedy swiftly fired 10,000 (!) employees across the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA. He also fired every single member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing them with a panel of like-minded quacktivists. These slash-and-burn tactics are shocking, but they’re also exactly what you’d expect from a notorious peddler of pseudoscience working in tandem with DOGE.
However, Kennedy’s approach to food policy is far more grounded. His proposals have even garnered some degree of consensus among politicians, voters, and the scientific establishment. Kennedy has vowed to re-evaluate the thousands of additives currently allowed in American food – something I personally am all for. One of his pet projects is to eliminate synthetic food dyes, which are at best unnecessary and at worst hazardous, potentially causing cancer or hyperactivity in children. These are actually quite left-wing causes: the Biden administration already banned Red No. 3, which had previously been outlawed in California along with brominated vegetable oil and potassium bromate.
Kennedy is also targeting glyphosate, the most common herbicide in American agriculture, as well as the very lifeblood of American cuisine: high-fructose corn syrup. Trump and Kennedy have recently announced a major MAHA victory after convincing Coca-Cola to switch from corn syrup to cane sugar. On Truth Social, Trump posted: “You’ll see. It just tastes better!” – which could make a pretty good (if slightly defensive) advertising slogan.
I should say that I am not someone who readily accepts sweeping criticisms of UPFs or “chemicals” in food. I think additives should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. But they do need to be assessed – and many of them simply aren’t. Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People details how the FDA has enshrined a massive loophole – the “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) category – that allows manufacturers to self-certify the safety of new additives, without government oversight. It seems obvious that RFK is absolutely right to close this loophole. Maybe he’s even right to clear out the whole agency and start over.
And if he’s right about all of that… maybe his other points are worth considering, too?
Part 4: The Hall of Mirrors
Or maybe not.
I’m politically and socially predisposed to distrust Kennedy. And on the whole, I absolutely do not trust him. I think he’s a paranoid, hypocritical, power-hungry libertarian who exhibits no coherence or consistency. For example: RFK has recently promoted Mom’s Meals, an Oklahoma manufacturer of “medically-tailored” ready meals that are, in fact, UPFs. He has also defended Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a convoluted budgetary agenda that makes disastrous cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), throwing millions of Americans into food insecurity. And the whole “I’m not anti-vax, I’m anti-mandate” bodily autonomy argument is undermined by his own regulation of food additives. If I want to gorge myself on candy that’s full of neurotoxic dyes, surely I should be allowed this indulgence. My body, my choice, right?
But while I don’t trust Kennedy, I’m also disinclined to trust mega-corporate food manufacturers, and RFK’s policies address concerns that I share with many others, across the political spectrum. The anti-processed food contingent incorporates all sorts of all-natural diet advocates, described by The Atlantic as the “woo-woo caucus,” or more pointedly, the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline.” Research on this demographic led me to a podcast called “Modern Ancestral Mamas” which began with an ad for Wholestix – “beyond organic” Pepperami-type things made with 10 per cent beef offal. Their slogans? “Take the STRESSFUL out of ANCESTRAL” and “When organ meat becomes a treat!” (I thought they were dog treats at first.)
While most of these MAHA people are probably harmless – a little weird, sure, but aren’t we all? – some of them are clearly more sinister. Not long after the Bosstones disbanded, Dicky Barrett formed a new punk outfit with like-minded outcasts called The Defiant. Continuing the support Barrett provided for RFK’s rally in 2022, The Defiant performed at another Kennedy-fronted, more flagrantly right-wing event in September 2024 called “Rescue the Republic.” When I showed my wife their website, she said, “Is this a horrible man convention?” The line-up was, indeed, full of horrible men, including:
Russell Brand, alleged rapist, who isn’t even American
Dr. Jordan Peterson, professional wise-ass, also not American
Jack Posobiec, white supremacist
Rob Schneider, star of Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo
Ron Johnson, hard-right Wisconsin senator, climate change denier and January 6th insurrection apologist
… and many more! Along with my man Dicky, right there rockin’ in the free world, onstage alongside them at the Horrible Man Convention.
Maybe we shouldn’t judge people by the company they keep, or evaluate opinions based on who shares them. But the communities we choose to be a part of say a lot about who we are, and what’s more, they influence our perception of reality. We all seek the comfort of confirmation bias and find strength in numbers. But if those numbers are made up of racists, misogynists, and Rob Schneider? No thanks. I’d rather take my chances with dicey food dyes.
It’s now easier than ever to cloister ourselves within ideological bubbles that continuously reaffirm our beliefs, and the outcome of this is a fracturing of our shared reality. Nobody can convince Dicky Barrett that he may have been misinformed about vaccines, because he’s seen an abundance of compelling evidence to the contrary. And what if he’s right? Maybe I’m the one in the dark, brainwashed by Big Food and Big Pharma’s insidious propaganda. Maybe all of our institutions are so corrupt and conniving that we fundamentally can’t trust any of them.
I know that the food and pharmaceutical industries have caused real harm – my grandma was a casualty of the American opioid crisis. But this doesn’t compel me to forfeit consensual reality completely. It’s all very punk rock to question authority, to stand against the grain, to be defiant. But what both Bobby and Dicky don’t seem to realize (or conveniently ignore) is that, by standing in solidarity with a community they chose to reinforce their worldview, they’re standing in defiance of their own principles. They’re living in a fun-house hall of mirrors, warping and reflecting their fears and frustrations back at them, and now they’re helping Donald Trump force his own warped reality onto the rest of us. They say they’re fighting for freedom – but that’s not the impression that I get.