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Good afternoon, and welcome back to Press Pass. I want to give a special thank you to our Bulwark+ members who sent me their communications with members of Congress on the war in Iran. We always say The Bulwark isn’t just a news outlet but a community, and that’s never truer than when our members are contributing directly to our reporting. If you want to join our Bulwark+ community and support a truly independent media, you can upgrade your subscription at the link below—at 20 percent off the normal annual price.
Today’s edition is a weird one. If you’ve been watching the FX miniseries about John F. Kennedy Jr.’s tragic romance with Carolyn Bessette, or if you were just really into glossy mags in the late ’90s, you are keenly aware of George magazine. What may surprise you is what happened to JFK Jr.’s old politics/society/fashion publication: It’s come back—and worse than ever. The magazine is now helmed by a former Trump photographer and QAnon conspiracy theorist. And its website is full of AI slop and conspiratorial nonsense. To put it another way: If the old George was JFK Jr., the new George is RFK Jr.
In other news, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has released a new bill to ban prediction markets after it became apparent that people with inside knowledge are gambling on and potentially manipulating the markets related to U.S. foreign policy. We’ll evaluate whether the proposal has a chance of advancing anytime soon. Place your bets! Lastly, FBI Director Kash Patel has made some custom sneakers. I hate them. Read all about it, below.
JFK Jr.’s Former Magazine Zombified Into a Conspiracy Theorist Slop Shop
The new ‘George’ is detached from its original style and reality.
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Boy, George.
If you live in a major American city, particularly New York or Washington, D.C., you’ve probably seen a young man (or several) wearing a backwards Kangol flat cap lately.¹ It’s not a sudden Samuel L. Jackson infatuation or even Date Mike cosplay. It’s the renewed cultural influence of the late John F. Kennedy Jr., thanks to the popular FX miniseries Love Story, which details the political scion’s romance with and marriage to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the years before their tragic deaths.
But JFK Jr.’s style choices, which are great but hard to replicate, are not the only part of his legacy that’s coming back. George magazine, the political and lifestyle publication that he launched in 1996 and that shut down in 2001, is also operating again.
Unfortunately, the new George only vestigially resembles the original magazine, looking instead like an AI-powered MAGA slop factory.²
The publication’s comeback actually antedates the FX miniseries by several years: It re-emerged in 2022 with Gene Ho, who had been Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign photographer, as its owner and editor-in-chief.
Ho had previously attempted to run for mayor of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, only to encounter some political trouble because of his QAnon beliefs. But that was hardly a speed bump for an aspiring MAGA-coded publisher. And in 2023, he scored Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the George cover, after Kennedy—the family’s black sheep and current health and human services secretary—announced his presidential run.
Yet somehow RFK Jr. appears to be the least-weird thing about the new incarnation of the magazine. The George website features a section on cryptocurrency, a special project about time travel, and an e-book about “the cost of knowing too much.”
The magazine’s covers are no longer graced by A-list celebrities like Cindy Crawford, Robert De Niro, and George Clooney. They frequently feature strange graphics like, well, this:
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The magazine also has an online store, where shoppers can buy ties featuring Jesus overseeing a man who looks eerily similar to Nathan Drake with a glowing chest, a mousepad featuring AI-generated steampunk cats named Cogsworth and Whiskerbolt, and