Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr... is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines. And his and others' work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences.

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is an American lawyer, and conspiracy theorist. He is the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy. Many of his court cases involved claims of product safety violations and pollution by corporations. He has co-hosted liberal talk radio show Ring of Fire, syndicated by Westwood One.

He began suffering from a rare voice disorder, in 2001. This causes his voice to sound strained.

In April 2023, Kennedy Jr. announced that he was running for US president in 2024 as a Democrat, in a long-shot attempt to primary Joe Biden. By and large, the rest of the Kennedy family strongly opposed his campaign, due to Kennedy Jr's conspiracy theories on vaccines and other topics.

While he is a member of the Kennedy political dynasty, his incessant prattling about anti-vaccine conspiracy theories has thoroughly alienated him from most of his family members, a tragically common fate for people who get sucked into these obsessions. Most of his notable family members openly endorsed President Biden, and only a handful of his children and grandchildren even bothered to show up when he launched his campaign. In 2023, his brother, Chris Kennedy, pretended not to know Robert Jr. was running for president, and his sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, outright refused to discuss him.

His own wife, actress Cheryl Hines, has at times expressed her disapproval of his anti-vaccine activism, although she has at least publicly stated she supports her husband for president. This isn't new, either. In 2019, Kathleen, her daughter, and Rep. Joe Kennedy II co-authored a Politico article expressing their "heartbreak" over Robert Kennedy Jr.'s harmful preoccupation with spreading misinformation. The harshest words came from JFK's grandson Jack Schlossberg, who said:

Anti-vaccination stance
They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country. Since 2005, he has succumbed to vaccine hysteria and makes the sad mistake of peddling false hope regarding the vaccine/autism conspiracy theory, a stance which earned him the chair of Donald Trump's "vaccination safety" committee. This is the point where his family members distanced themselves from him. In addition, Kennedy endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Republicans rigged the 2004 election. By 2020, Kennedy Jr.'s embrace of conspiracy theories extended into believing the COVID-19 hysteric story that Bill Gates was going to put microchips in vaccines. Kennedy is also against water fluoridation. He is one of the "Disinformation Dozen", which are the twelve people behind 65% of all vaccine misinformation shared on social media.

Kennedy's anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense (in alliance with a group called the World Mercury Project) was one of the top two groups that spread misinformation about vaccines on Facebook via anti-vaccination advertisements in 2019. Facebook (sort of) finally started to crack down on groups that spread bullshit like this in 2020. CHD responded by suing Facebook for "censorship". (Despite his prior experience as a lawyer, Kennedy somehow failed to recognize what long-established case law currently says. Generally speaking, what's protected by the First Amendment in this case is )

One of Kennedy's favorite rhetorical devices is to evoke Godwin's Law by comparing vaccines and other COVID-19 public health safety measures to Nazis and the Holocaust. On 25 January 2022, for instance, Kennedy was widely denounced for comparing vaccine mandate opponents to Jews who hid from Nazis during the Holocaust, even implying that for some reason actually had it better than the so-called "fascism" NIAID head  was orchestrating. This was hardly the first time that Kennedy had used Nazi analogies in his remarks on the subject.

On September 29, 2021, Kennedy (along with fellow anti-vaccination advocate Joseph Mercola) was booted off YouTube for being a prominent spreader of anti-vaccination bullshit.

COVID conspiracies
The issue with Kennedy is that he long ago entered his own curated world of pseudoscience, in which every respectable position was presumptively false and every major world event presumptively engineered by secretive elites. This is a mental model that has no braking system. Kennedy can only go further and further into his fever swamp, and every effort to contradict him merely demonstrates that his enemies are determined to silence him. Unsurprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy Jr. started regurgitating many of the other conspiracy theories that sprung up during that time period, such as conspiracy theories surrounding Bill Gates and 5G.

In mid-November 2021, he wrote a book of conspiratorial bullshit linking Gates,, and Big Pharma to some kind of "Global War On Democracy and Public Health", which earned Kennedy high endorsements from the conspiracy theorists and/or alternative medicine folks that you'd expect (e.g. Tucker Carlson, Mike Adams, , Joseph Mercola, etc.).

Later, in an interview done by in January 2022, Kennedy promoted the sort of conspiracy bullshit that fueled this book:
 * Kennedy made an unsupported conspiratorial claim that an early drug to treat HIV, (which he falsely claimed to be a  drug), ended up causing "dramatically shortened" lives (also a false claim). Naturally, since Fauci was involved in HIV drug research at the time, Kennedy uses these falsehoods to attack him as an agent of Big Pharma who conspired to promote expensive drugs at the expense of cheap generics in order to pad Big Pharma profits. To further this argument, he bizarrely stated that a medicine called  was very effective against HIV. (Pentamidine does not treat HIV directly; it was approved by the FDA in 1989 to treat  a condition largely seen (but not exclusively) in AIDS patients, and at present is far from the only drug available to treat this condition.  )
 * Kennedy promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly believing that these drugs were being oppressed solely due to Big Pharma not wanting to promote out-of-patent medications. Contrary to the medical literature of the time, he also believed that these medications worked. To prove this, he cited high usage of these drugs in Africa and Asia, and low death rates per capita in many nations in these continents. (This, of course, completely ignores that perhaps other factors contributed to these low mortality rates, such as massive under-reporting in Africa, and greater acceptance of public health measures like face masks in many Asian countries. This also ignores the high mortality rate in other countries that also use hydroxychloroquine to treat and ivermectin to treat, such as many Latin American countries.  )
 * He repeated an unproven theory, often iterated and grossly exaggerated by Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson, that "gain of function" research in Wuhan may have been a factor in starting the pandemic.
 * He insisted that the COVID-19 virus was man-made, citing a theory that linked the COVID-19 virus to the a theory which has been discredited in a January 2022  journal study.
 * He bizarrely compared Australia COVID-19 quarantine hotels, used to isolate unvaccinated travelers returning to the country for 14 days to reduce COVID-19 transmission risk, to "concentration camps".
 * He claimed, without any foundation, that COVID-19 public health measures were a "coup d'état against democracy"
 * To top things off, he endorsed the Epoch Times as the best source for "real news".

When confronted by the interviewer with the fact that new COVID-19 cases at the time were overwhelmingly the un-vaccinated, he handwaved away this argument by claiming that this was the result of "crazy statistical gimmicks", citing a bit of his "statistical dancing" of his own imagination to "prove" this.

Fauci responded by calling Kennedy a "very disturbed individual" who was "just full of inaccuracies and distortions".

Ethnic bioweapon
The respite from antisemitism was doomed to end. Conspiracy theorists are drawn gravitationally to the Jews, and Kennedy was only able to defy it for so long before his natural and predetermined course set in. On July 15 2023, the New York Post published a video at a press event in Manhattan, where Kennedy Jr. argued that COVID-19 was an "ethnically targeted" microbe ("COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.") with an implication that the virus was engineered. These comments triggered significant backlash, with multiple organizations accusing Kennedy Jr. of antisemitism and racism/Sinophobia. Multiple members of the Kennedy family likewise condemned the remarks as "deplorable", "hurtful", and "wrong".

Responding to the backlash, Kennedy took to Twitter to deny his seemingly antisemitic remarks. Instead, he claimed that what he meant was that he believed the United States and other governments were developing ethnically targeted bio-weapons. To "prove" his point, he cited a single study of a very narrow and specific topic (genetic susceptibility of COVID-19 due to various and   ) that hardly justified Kennedy's sweeping claims.

Contrary to his idea, people of Chinese descent were among the most severely affected in New York in 2020. According to a study now published in Public Health Reports, Chinese New Yorkers from March 1 through May 31, 2020 actually had the highest mortality rate (35.7%) of any ethnicity observed. That study didn't distinguish people of Jewish descent as a group, however Hasidic (a subcategory of Haredi Jews) communities in New York were noted at the time to have been hard-hit by the pandemic. One person in the community stated in April 2020: "There is not a single Hasidic family that has been untouched. It is a plague on a biblical scale."

Chemicals are turning the frogs trans!
Echoing the infamous "gay frogs" of Alex Jones, in an interview with Jordan Peterson in June 2023 (later repeated on a Joe Rogan podcast that same month), Kennedy theorized that certain chemicals in the "soup of toxic chemicals" in the water supply could be turning kids transgender. Kennedy based this conspiracy theory on the same 2002 study that Jones used, which claimed that caused frogs to develop hermaphrodite characteristics. Kennedy's conspiracy theory is obviously bogus; aside from the fact that human biology and frog biology are quite different, later experiments have been unable to replicate the results of that 2002 study.

Antidepressants cause school shootings! (And Elon Musk is great)
Surprising no one, the gullible Elon Musk has a positive view of Kennedy, and the two have traded praise. During Kennedy's campaign launch, Musk hosted a two hour conversation with the candidate on Twitter, where the candidate issued some interestingly wacky statements like, "Prior to the introduction of Prozac," school shootings weren't a problem. There is, of course, absolutely no scientifically established link between antidepressants and school shootings, and the conspiracy theory is notably widely spread by the Church of Scientology (who take an anti-psychiatry stance). Rather than address the school shooting crisis with commonsense gun control, Kennedy decided to take the Republican approach and endorse outfitting schools with metal detectors, bag screeners, and bans on sharp objects. Have fun sending your kids to class in a world like that.

Kennedy also spent the interview lavishing praise on Elon Musk, comparing him to the Patriots of the American Revolution saying "What is it in your background that you think gave you such firm convictions where you'd be willing to take this huge, massive, unspeakable economic hit on behalf of a principle for a country in which you weren't even born?" How pathetic.

The 2004 election was stolen!
Foreshadowing later, more dangerous claims by President Donald Trump, Kennedy spent years chasing his theory that George W. Bush rigged the 2004 election against Democratic candidate John Kerry. His conspiracy theory centers on Ohio, claiming that Republican state officials acted on orders from the White House to intentionally purge registered Democrats from the voter registration system, preventing them from casting ballots for Kerry.

While there were a large number of voters, 129,543 to be exact, who encountered this problem at their polling places, audits and Democratic Party investigations found that the impacted voters were roughly evenly split between the two parties. Also, Kerry actually won more votes than Al Gore in many areas, including 88,500 more votes from Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is. Most damningly for the theory, Ohio elections are run at the county level by boards that are careful to have bipartisan makeup, so the various fuckups on Election Day were not a grand Republican conspiracy. Ohio pretty much did exactly what polls predicted: vote for Bush by a fairly narrow margin. Thus, there is no evidence to indicate that Kerry won Ohio either way. But a good conspiracy theorist never lets a debunking keep him down.

The CIA killed JFK!
Never one to miss a chance to further piss off his own family members, Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His theory, piggybacking on a broader cultural belief, claims that the CIA killed the president because he was refusing to embroil the United States in the growing crisis in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The CIA apparently wanted a war in Southeast Asia in order to fuel the military-industrial complex. As recently as 2023, RFK Jr. claimed the evidence is "overwhelming" that the CIA was responsible.

To double down on the crazy, Kennedy then told Joe Rogan he "takes precautions" on the off chance that the CIA decides to gun for him. Again, the prospect of a man who thinks like this taking charge of United States national security is quite frightening.

Presidential run
In April 2023, Kennedy announced his plans to run for President in the Democratic Primary against Joe Biden.

Kennedy's campaign has been described as a Democratic version of Trump, a "cynical mix of star power and misinformation" and a "dark strand of populism mixed with self-grandeur and self-created reality." Kennedy has also been described as combining a smattering of progressive views (such as on wealth inequality) with positions more in line with MAGA (e.g. anti-vaccination stances, aminosity towards and Vladimir Putin boot-licking on the Russian invasion of Ukraine)  and libertarians (e.g. his first appearance as a presidential candidate was at a cryptocurrency conference).

In a sign of his heavy tilt, in defiance of his declared political affiliation, towards the crank side of Republicans, on June 20 2023, Kennedy Jr. was announced as a guest speaker at a gathering in Philadelphia that month of the anti-government extremist group Moms for Liberty, a group who also made headlines that week when one chapter featured (and seemingly endorsed) an Adolf Hitler quote in their online newsletter. Tellingly, also appearing at the conference were many of the Republican 2024 primary election candidates (Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley), as well as other conservative figures such as Dennis Prager and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. At the time of the announcement, Kennedy appeared to be the only Democrat scheduled to speak at this gathering. Prior to this, Kennedy Jr. had made appearances on podcasts hosted by other figures with a notable appetite for crankery, such as Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, and Jordan Peterson.

As a sign of his appeal to crank libertarians, Kennedy Jr. was endorsed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, most likely due to shared sympathies for cryptocurrencies. Also, in early June 2023, the then-current Twitter owner Elon Musk (fresh off of a disastrously botched presidential launch for Ron DeSantis) boosted Kennedy Jr. with an online audio chat on Twitter. During this chat, true to form, Kennedy Jr. blamed Prozac for the rise of mass shootings in America, claimed without evidence that "Covid was clearly a bioweapons problem", and was outspoken against the US military support of Ukraine. Kennedy also fielded questions during the chat from other public figures with similar stances to Musk and Kennedy, such as the Putin apologist Tulsi Gabbard and the anti-progressive, anti-woke, anti-renewable energy and transphobic hysteric

Donors
As of June 30, 2023, a plurality (38.5%) of his donors, among those who contributed the maximum individual amount (96 individuals total), were GOP donors. 19.8% were Democratic donors, 31.3% had no such history of recorded political contributions, 8.3% had donated to both parties, and 2.1% had donated to third parties. The campaign reported that it had received about $6.3 million dollars in donations altogether, as of July 2023. At least $100,000 of that came from donors who were also Trump or DeSantis committee donors. Six notable big donors to RFK Jr.'s campaign, in particular, are hedge fund billionaire (also a Vivek Ramaswamy fan), former PayPal executive  (an Elon Musk ally), billionaire  Wall Street banking executive Omeed Malik, former Bank of America executive Joe Voboril, and apparently even racist English musician Eric Clapton, despite the fact that such donations from foreign nationals would be illegal according to CNBC.