RFK Jr., the Martha Moxley Murder, and MAGA's Ever-Present Racial Underbelly

I listen to podcasts when I run. I often listen to - I know, cringe - true crime podcasts of various kinds. If it's a series on a single true crime topic with episodes in the 45 minutes to an hour and thirty range, all the better, as that will occupy me for several runs of different kinds. That's what brought me to Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder, a recent NBC News podcast series about the 1975 murder of 15 year old Martha Moxley in tony Greenwich, Connecticut. As you may remember, Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, a neighbor of Ms. Moxley, was eventually convicted of the murder, served about a decade in prison, and was then released when his conviction was overturned.

The conceit of the podcast series is that the narrator was once convinced of Skakel's guilt (like everybody else, goes the usual genre convention), but has since come to view the case more broadly and thinks Skakel was factually innocent. OK, that's the set up. But what does this have to do with RFJ Jr. or MAGA?

First, let me just say this: I think RFK Jr.'s decision to support Trump in the 2024 election was the deathblow to Harris' chances. I think it was the single most important event of the 2024 campaign. It gave permission to a lot of MAHA moderates to vote for Trump, and the MAGAs were triumphant about grabbing the mantle of the Kennedys. If you don't interact with a lot of MAGAs you will probably underestimate the importance of RFK Jr.'s endorsement. For me, it was the major event. I get this is a controversial point.

Back to the murder in Greenwich. RFK Jr., who is, of course, Michael Skakel's first cousin, took an interest in the case and wrote a book about it, also attempting to absolve Skakel. The book, called Framed, was published in 2016. The theory espoused in the book is covered in Episode 10 of Dead Certain, an episode called The Out of Towners. Without going into details, the theory goes like this: Martha Moxley, the young, blonde teenage girl, was not killed by any of the white suspects from Greenwich, but by a group of black teenagers visiting from New York City. Indeed, according to the account, one of the black teenagers couldn't stop talking about "going caveman" on a white girl from Greenwich. This is all based on the account of one of the black teenagers (strangely, Koby Bryant's cousin) who denies involvement, but points to his two then-friends. Notably, Tony Bryant turns out to be a criminal and fraudster, but let's put that aside.

The remarkable thing about Kennedy's claims is that they play on tropes pulled directly from something like Birth of a Nation: the marauding black "out of towners" raping and viciously murdering the young white teenage girl. They don't belong there, they're poor, they're violent, they want to go caveman, primitive. This is MAGA race politics at its finest (or lowest), and if there is a blameless rich white kid who is falsely accused for it all, so much the better. I point to this mainly because RFK Jr. has mostly gotten a pass on the race politics of MAGA. He's been seen as this MAHA kook, perhaps, but is largely outside the vicious racism exhibited by Miller, Cheung, and, of course, Trump himself. But we're talking about a guy who became so invested in a goofy racial theory of the murder of a white teenage girl that he wrote a book about it. RFK Jr. is never far from the Trump of the Central Park Jogger case: they're all of a piece.

Even where you least expect it, MAGA politics are racialized (and - which is the same thing in the US - deeply sexualized).