Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Celebrity Fight Night XXIII in 2017.

Needles are scary Anti-vaccination movement

Pricks against pricks

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“”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.

—Article co-written by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Maeve Kennedy McKean. May 08, 2019.

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (1954–) is an American lawyer, conspiracy theorist, and former Democratic Presidential candidate for the 2024 election who only appears on right-wing podcasts (big brain move). He is most known for his role in the anti-vaccination movement, the cause to which he has dedicated most of his energy in recent years. Kennedy didn’t know anyone with peanut allergies as a kid, so it must be the vaccines.^{[No, not The Onion]} By the way, if you are seeing this on a computer, throw it away immediately! It uses Wi-Fi which destroys the brains of its users!

He is the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy. However, while he is a member of the Kennedy political dynasty, his incessant prattling about anti-vaccine conspiracy theories has caused many to go public with their opposition. According to a Vanity Fair exposé:

“”The portrait family members paint of Bobby is of a man of exceptional charm, wit, brains, and generosity who has championed important environmental causes, but whose worst traits—an unnerving ease with blending fact and fiction; a powerful ability to deny the collateral damage of his own destructive actions—have engulfed his better angels. The source of these pathologies, they observe, are found in his long and troubling biography, a life story marked by personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and, perhaps most perniciously of all, public adulation.

In October 2023, he dropped out of the Democratic Party and announced that he was running as an independent, much to the chagrin of Donald Trump, who was propping him up in the hopes that he'd weaken Joe Biden and subsequently faced a spoiler candidate who always appealed far more to Republicans than he did his erstwhile fellow Democrats. To reduce any doubt that RFK continues to be a spoiler candidate after his running as an independent, as late as March 2024, the largest donor to RFK's campaign was also a major donor to Trump's campaign, billionaire Tim Mellon (heir to the Mellon family fortune). On August 23, 2024, Kennedy Jr.'s mask fully dropped: Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump for president. As an apparent quid pro quo of sorts, that now means he may well set national health policy. As of November 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be nominated to join the Trump Administration in 2025 as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

A house divided…

President John F. Kennedy with his nephew Robert Jr. in the Oval Office, 1961.

RFK Sr. vs. RFK Jr. on vaccination

See the main article on this topic: Robert F. Kennedy

“”The accomplishments of United States foreign assistance are already substantial — they are being felt in dozens of countries, all over the world. … Three quarters of a billion people will be safe from malaria, 77 million from smallpox, 7 million from cholera, because of vaccinations given in 1966 alone…. I believe the American people are ready to recognize that foreign aid is not a "give-away," but rather a moral obligation and a sound and necessary investment in the future.

—Robert F. Kennedy

“”There's no vaccine that is safe and effective.

—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

JFK vs. RFK Jr. on the polio vaccine

See the main article on this topic: John F. Kennedy

“”Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is also the anniversary of the announcement that a vaccine has been discovered to prevent paralytic polio. … I hope that the renewed drive this spring and summer to provide vaccination for all Americans, and particularly those who are young, will have the wholehearted support of every parent in America. I hope that they, knowing some of the long range suffering which comes from an attack of polio — with this miraculous drug I hope that everyone takes advantage of it.

—John F. Kennedy, 1961

“”The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40, SV40. It’s one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man.

—Robert F. Kennedy Jr, 2023

Ted Kennedy vs. RFK Jr. on HIV/AIDS

Robert Jr. (center) poses with the rest of the Kennedy family during the naming ceremony of the USNS Robert Kennedy auxiliary ship, 2016.

See the main articles on this topic: Ted Kennedy and HIV/AIDS

“”It is now all the more important to provide resources to assist people with HIV disease obtain essential treatment. Science has given us the tools to help hundreds of thousands of people fight for life. What is lacking is an equitable formula for delivering those tools to Americans in need.

—Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy

“”They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people, without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS.

—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Other family

When he tried to run for the 2024 Democratic nomination, 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 had publicly stated that she supports her husband for president. This family tension isn't new, either. In 2019, Kathleen, Kathleen's daughter Maeve, and 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:

I've listened to him, I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment.

JFK's last living child, Caroline Kennedy, also spoke on it after Trump announced he would nominate RFK Jr. to be his HHS Secretary:

I think Bobby Kennedy's views on vaccines are dangerous, but I don't think that most Americans share them, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. I grew up with him, so I've known all this for a long time; others are just getting to know him.

Crimes

In 1984, RFK pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of heroin possession in South Dakota, and was sentenced to probation. In 2002, he was also convicted of criminal trespass at the Vieques, Puerto Rico military base for his part in a civil disobedience action against pollution of the island by the military. For this, he was incarcerated for 30 days either in jail (as most news sources have reported) or in a maximum security prison by his own account. He was temporarily relieved of his compulsive sexual behaviour disorder during his incarceration.

Dumping a bear carcass on public property

In 2014, a bear cub was found dead beneath some bushes that had a bicycle sticking out in the middle of Central Park in New York City. Many residents were disturbed by this occurrence, and as it was unlikely that a bear cub would wander so far into an urban area the NYPD was investigating this as animal cruelty, but the mystery wasn't solved and the case vanished from the public's memories. That was until a decade later, the New York Post was about to publish a story about the mystery including a photo of Kennedy with his hand in the dead bear's mouth. Kennedy decided he needed to get ahead of the the story and so preemptively admitted that he was responsible in an interview with fellow-kook Roseanne Barr. According to Kennedy, when he was going falconing in upstate New York, he saw a bear cub get hit by someone else's car and decided to put the carcass in the back of the van so he could eat it later, but as he was running late to catch a plane, he decided instead to dump the carcass in Central Park alongside a bicycle he wanted to get rid of in order to make it look like the cub was killed in a cycling accident. These offenses of possession of a bear without a tag and illegal disposal of a bear would have been worth $250 in fines, but he could no longer be charged as the statute of limitations had passed. Bears can host parasitic worms, and RFK Jr. made the unlikely speculation that he may have gotten his brain worm from the bear, unlikely because he did not eat the bear. Was his pre-existing worm seeking a mate?

Riverkeeper

Prior to becoming an antivaxxer, Kennedy worked for the Riverkeeper environmentalist organization as an attorney. He helped to win lawsuits against polluters and brought large donations to the organization from his celebrity connections. He was also known as a serial fabricator among his colleagues, even going so far as to lie about founding Riverkeeper on his resignation letter. More damaging though was his hiring of a convicted wildlife smuggler to serve on the organization, which caused the actual founder and several board members to resign. A former treasurer of Riverkeeper who had resigned with the other board members believed that Kennedy had not changed from his time at Riverkeeper to his time as antivaxxer, by his use of omitting and distorting facts to manipulate people.

Officially, Kennedy Jr. resigned from Riverkeeper in 2017. In reality, Riverkeeper staff, increasingly tired of Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccination bullshit, revolted when Kennedy Jr. met with Donald Trump in January 2017 and afterwards claimed that Trump asked him to chair a "commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity" (a claim denied by Trump officials). Under pressure, rather than being forced out of the organization, Kennedy Jr. agreed to resign instead. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccination stances had previously led to similar conflicts and resignations with other environmental groups (such as the Natural Resources Defense Council) prior to this event.

Anti-vaccine activism

Kennedy gives a speech in Illinois, 2007.

“”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.

—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wins the "What The Fuck Is He Talking About?" Award for April 2015.

At one point, Kennedy co-hosted a liberal talk radio show called Ring of Fire, syndicated by Westwood One. Any of his broadcasts from before the pandemic had the exact same message, just in a more broadly palatable way with all of the less-savoury stuff firmly sandwiched in deniability. Kennedy departed from the show sometime in 2018.

Many of Kennedy's previous court cases involved claims of product safety violations and pollution by corporations. 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 initially earned him the chair of Donald Trump's "vaccination safety" committee, before Trump changed his mind in 2018. 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. He is one of the "Disinformation Dozen", who are the twelve people behind 65% of all vaccine misinformation shared on social media.

Kennedy's anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense (CHD) (formerly 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 Facebook's right to utilize editorial judgment to prevent the publication of bullshit on their platform.). The damage by Facebook's laissez-faire attitude prior to 2020 had already been done however, Children’s Health Defense and three other antivax and COVID denialist groups profited and expanded enormously during the COVID-19 pandemic. The three other groups were Del Bigtree's Informed Consent Action Network, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and Simone Gold's America’s Frontline Doctors.

In 2022, Kennedy spoke a 2020 anti-vaxxer rally in Germany sponsored by the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany that included neo-Nazis and Hare Krishnas. In response to a Daily Kos blogger reporting about Kennedy's speaking at the rally, the blogger was bullied by Kennedy and by his lawyer, Robert Barnes. The duo had threatened a lawsuit against the blogger unless the blogger took down the article, and consequently put the lie to Kennedy being pro-free speech.

Starting a measles outbreak in American Samoa

“”In 2018 Kennedy involved himself in a largely forgotten vaccine controversy in the American Samoan islands. That year, two children died after receiving the MMR vaccine, sparking an island-wide furor. Though it was later revealed that two nurses made a critical error administering the vaccines, accidentally introducing expired muscle relaxants into the formula, Kennedy’s nonprofit took to social media to hype the deaths as evidence of vaccine dangers. Under public pressure, the Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi halted MMR vaccines on the island. In June of 2019 Kennedy and Hines flew to Samoa, lending celebrity wattage to local anti-vaccine advocates, giving press interviews, and taking a private meeting with the PM. Over the ensuing months, the island was hit by the largest measles outbreak in its history, infecting 5,707 citizens and killing 83 people, most of them children. The outbreak was so lethal, the prime minister declared a state of emergency and ordered mandatory vaccinations, eventually curtailing the spread.

—Vanity Fair.

Three years after Kennedy's disastrous presence in Samoa, he characterized the measles outbreak as "mild", while cluelessly linking to the pro-vaccination UNICEF article about their response to combatting the outbreak with a vaccination campaign.

In 2024, after Kennedy's nomination to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Aiono Prof Alec Ekeroma, the director general of health for American Samoa's Health Ministry, said that should Kennedy lead the DHHS, he "will be directly responsible for killing thousands of children around the world by allowing preventable infectious diseases to run rampant." Several other health and medical experts have also called the idea of Kennedy's appointment to lead the DHHS as disastrous not just for US health but for global health because the US Food and Drug Administration (part of DHHS) has been a global leader in health standards.

Anti-epidemiology activism

Although it can be accurately argued that his anti-vaccine activism is in itself a form of opposition to the research and treatment of infectious diseases, Kennedy is elsewhere quite explicit in that anyhow. He promised to order the National Institutes of Health to cease any research of infectious diseases for "about eight years" if elected president; he believes they should research obesity and diabetes instead (a view that presents this as a false dichotomy or zero sum game). He also said in June 2023: "I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health." That pretty well speaks for itself. He has also attempted to tie the true cause of various diseases (even "Spanish Flu") to vaccine research, and has even promoted HIV/AIDS denialism. The proposed end of infectious disease research essentially amounts to germ theory denialism, or at least serious callousness on his part, since significant numbers of deaths in the United States are due to infectious bacterial diseases (e.g., tuberculosis, salmonella, Lyme disease and meningococcal disease). Infectious diseases also cause many deaths caused abroad. As confirmation of Kennedy's germ theory denialism, he was photographed walking barefoot out of an airplane toilet, and issuing a non-apology apology for doing this while he was barefoot in the airport waiting area. Somebody tell him he might accidentally step on a vaccine needle, please.

COVID conspiracy theories

Copies of RFK Jr's conspiracy theory book displayed next to a photo of his uncle (who is turning in his grave).

“”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.

—Johnathan Chait

Unsurprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy started regurgitating many of the other conspiracy theories that sprang up during that time period, such as conspiracy theories surrounding Bill Gates and 5G. Kennedy's embrace of conspiracy theories extended to believing the COVID-19 hysteria story that Bill Gates was going to put microchips in vaccines. 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.

One of Kennedy's favorite rhetorical devices is to evoke Nazi analogies by comparing vaccines and other COVID-19 public health safety measures to Nazis and the Holocaust. On January 25, 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 Anne Frank actually had it better than the so-called "fascism" that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) head Anthony Fauci was orchestrating. This was hardly the first time that Kennedy had used Nazi analogies in his remarks on the subject.

Feud with Fauci

In mid-November 2021, Kennedy wrote The Real Anthony Fauci, a book of conspiratorial bullshit linking Gates, Fauci, 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, Robert W. Malone, Joseph Mercola, Sayer Ji, Sherri Tenpenny, etc.).

Later, in an interview done by SPIN 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, AZT (which he falsely claimed to be a chemotherapy 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 pentamidine was very effective against HIV. (Pentamidine does not treat HIV directly; it was approved by the FDA in 1989 to treat pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, 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 such as face masks in many Asian countries. This also ignores the high mortality rate in other countries that also use hydroxychloroquine to treat malaria and ivermectin to treat river blindness, 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 Mòjiāng virus, a theory which has been discredited in a January 2022 study.
• He bizarrely compared Australian COVID-19 quarantine hotels, used to isolate unvaccinated travellers 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", if for no other reason than he gets voluminous favorable coverage there.

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

For more information, see: 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.

—Johnathan Chait

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 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 ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphisms) 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 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 COVID-19. 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."

Presidential run

…in alienating your family members through your obsession with conspiracy theories!

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 RFK Jr.'s conspiracy theories on vaccines and other topics.

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 {Anthony Fauci, 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, Vivek Ramaswamy, 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 had made appearances on podcasts hosted by other figures with a notable appetite for crankery, such as Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, and Jordan Peterson.

The ratfuckers' choice! Left-to-right: QAnon promoter Michael Flynn, RFK Jr., COVID denialist grifter Charlene Bollinger, ratfucker-in-chief Roger Stone

As a sign of his appeal to crank libertarians, Kennedy 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 with an online audio chat on Twitter. During this chat, true to form, Kennedy 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 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 Michael Shellenberger.

In California, Kennedy and his running-mate Shanahan were on the American Independent Party ticket, which has long been associated with segregationists and racists, starting with its founder, George Wallace. Kennedy has claimed that the party has changed since its founding, but the evidence seems otherwise: in the 2020 Presidential Election raging antisemite Ye was their Vice Presidential candidate, and as recently as 2022, they were promoting their former chairman Robert J. Walters' racialist book.

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 Bill Ackman (also a Vivek Ramaswamy fan), former PayPal executive David O. Sacks (an Elon Musk ally), billionaire Kenneth Fisher, 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.

On July 31, 2023, a super PAC supporting RFK Jr., American Values 2024, released its mid-year financial disclosures. This disclosed that more than half ($5 million) of the PAC's money for the first half of 2023 ($9.8 million) came from GOP megadonor Timothy Mellon. Mellon has previously donated millions of dollars to pro-Trump groups. A further $4.7 million came from another individual, Gavin de Becker. De Becker was previously a donor to US Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, although de Becker otherwise identifies himself as a Democrat.

Kennedy picked Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. Prior to being picked, she had been a major donor to the American Values PAC that supported Kennedy. She is the former spouse of Google co-founder Sergei Brin. Shanahan is also an anti-vaxxer, but she tries to confuse people by denying this and claiming that she is just skeptical of vaccines.

Nothing bad ever happens to the Kennedys

In September 2023, a man falsely impersonating a federal officer and wielding a loaded gun was arrested at an RFK Jr. event. The Kennedy campaign claimed the man asked to be "immediately" taken to Kennedy and erroneously claimed to be part of his security detail. It doesn't take a genius to figure out this joker may have wanted to become the next Lee Harvey Oswald.

Switch to an independent run

Former pro-wrestler/Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura campaigning for Kennedy in the critical swing state of Arizona in 2024.

On October 9, 2023, Kennedy Jr. ended his primary challenge and announced that he was running for president as an independent. Reports suggest that by March 2024, Kennedy and his team had approached at least half a dozen people to serve as his running mate on an independent ticket, including Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul and Andrew Yang, but that only fellow cranks Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura had shown any interest. He received the nominations of the American Independent Party and the Reform Party.

Vanity Fair exposé

On July 2, 2024, the magazine Vanity Fair posted a long expose of Kennedy with several unflattering allegations. Among the revelations were an allegation that he bragged about eating a dog in Korea; that Kennedy was sexually involved with dozens of women during his marriage to second wife Mary Richardson; that Kennedy had a habit of texting nude photos of women to friends during this same marriage; and that in the late 1990s, Kennedy sexually assaulted a babysitter. The article also detailed his involvement in the Murder of Martha Moxley case, where Kennedy attested to the innocence of convicted murderer (and cousin) Michael Skakel with what Martha Moxley's mother Dorthy (and others) saw as a series of twisted truths and flat out falsehoods.

Kennedy denied the dog-eating allegation but brushed off other allegations in the article, calling the Vanity Fair article "a lot of garbage" but simultaneously stating "I'm not a church boy… I had a very, very rambunctious youth". Kennedy also refused to comment on the alleged sexual assault.

There's a dead worm in my brain!

Sorry, but this image is too funny to not put here.

“”O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

—William Blake

In 2024, RFK announced that there was a dead parasitic worm in his brain, and that it was inoperable. It was suspected to be a pork tapeworm, which is exceedingly rare in the United States, but that he may have picked up in his travels. He was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning apparently from his insatiable appetite for tunafish sandwiches, and with short- and long-term memory loss in 2012. He claimed to have recovered from the memory loss, but gave the wrong answer about the worm:

I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate. I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.

Alliance with Trump

Kennedy campaigns with Donald Trump in Arizona.

Dropping out to endorse Trump

“”My fellow worms and Americans, It is I, your friend, the worm who ate part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain, then died. […] Ultimately, this came down to values. I say now what I have said this whole campaign: I am a parasite and I do not have the country’s best interests at heart. So it is clear to me now that I have no choice but to drop out of the race and support Donald Trump.

—Alexandra Petri

In August 2024, following the judicial ruling that Kennedy is a resident of California and thus he is not Constitutionally allowed to run for the presidency with a vice president from the same state (Nicole Shanahan of California), the duo withdew from the race, and RFK Jr. endorsed Trump for president. His decision to endorse Trump came after an alleged attempt to arrange a meeting to negotiate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, an attempt which was apparently (and justifiably) snubbed. The announcement also followed Shanahan's public grousing that she had to pay $19 million of her own money to get them on the ballot of 50 (or 49 states).

His announcement of the endorsement included a litany of complaints against the Democratic Party, including but not limited to, "abandoning democracy," not taking him seriously, conspiring against his campaign, victimizing him with "legal warfare," and nominating Harris without holding a primary. The real reason behind his endorsement was that Trump's campaign had noticed that Kennedy was primarily taking votes from Trump and was therefore willing to reach out to him and negotiate for his leaving the race and endorsing Trump.

Kennedy had previously lambasted Trump and his followers in 2016 on his "Ring of Fire" radio show, calling Trump's followers "belligerent idiots", suggesting some were "outright Nazis" and "spineless fellow travelers". Following Trump's victory in the 2016 election, Kennedy compared him to Hitler except that "Hitler was interested in policy." So who's the spineless fellow traveler, now?

Campaigning for Trump

Kennedy speaks next to a very bored-looking Trump.

Pollster Nate Silver noted that Kennedy's endorsement coincided with a slight dip in Harris' polling and a boost for Trump. After teaming up with Trump, Kennedy frantically went about removing his name from the ballot in swing states to avoid cutting into Trump's vote share. His efforts were successful in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. His efforts notably failed in Wisconsin and Michigan, where he got into a legal slap-fight with both states due to their deadlines for ballot withdrawals having already passed.

Kennedy also became a frequent campaigner for Donald Trump, appearing as an opening act in many of Trump's events alongside fellow idiot Tulsi Gabbard. On 4 September, Kennedy attacked Harris as being unworthy of the presidency, saying, "I think we need to have a president who can give an interview, who can articulate a vision, who can put together an English sentence, who can articulate her and defend her policies and her record and who can engage in a debate with, and regular debates unscripted appearances, president or vice president." The irony appeared lost on Kennedy that he said this while backing a gaffe-machine with serious memory problems.

Whatever his many shortcomings, Kennedy proved effective at reaching the large cohort of voters who were expressing deep distrust towards the news media and government institutions. His strange beliefs and his alienation from his family contributed to Kennedy's image of being an outsider who threatened the establishment. Trump also adopted Kennedy's slogan "Make America Healthy Again."

Role in the second Trump administration

Kennedy eats McDonald's with Team Trump after the 2024 election. Left-to-right: Elon Musk, Trump Sr., Trump Jr., Mike Johnson, RFK Jr.

On 27 October, Trump promised that his second administration would let Kennedy "go wild" on health, food, and medicines. At the same time, Kennedy's health promises like reducing the amount of "ultraprocessed food" in the American diet ran counter to the actions the Trump administration had taken during Trump's first term.

Shortly after his victory in the election, Donald Trump honored his agreement with Kennedy by announcing that he would nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). For his part, Kennedy pledged to rid the department of "corruption" and improve "transparency." Placing an anti-vaxxer in charge of the HHS Department is essentially placing the inmates in charge of the asylum. Of course, electing Trump again is also placing the inmates in charge of the asylum, so this tracks.

Although it is not legally possible for the Health Secretary to ban vaccines, Kennedy’s position could potentially allow him to withdraw vaccine recommendations, make changes in agencies that regulate vaccines, and restrict legal protections for vaccine manufacturers.

By late November, Kennedy was also rumored to have teamed up with Melania Trump to encourage the president-elect to eat "fewer Big Macs and less KFC, and more lean protein, salad and veggies for energy and to improve his overall well-being." The president-elect seemed to have retaliated by having Kennedy participate in a photograph of Team Trump dining on McDonald's food. Trump is known for his longtime and genuine love for McDonald's, and two of his top aides (Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie) have claimed that Trump's average meal from McDonald's consists of two Big-Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate milkshake. So Kennedy has a point on this one, though he shows hypocrisy with lack of follow-up in the photo.

In November 2024, the head of the Food and Drug Administration (part of DHHS) during the first Trump administration, Scott Gottlieb, warned senators against confirming Kennedy, saying that his confirmation would increase the likelihood of measles outbreaks and lead to the deaths of children.

But that's not all, folks!

Kennedy is also against water fluoridation.

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 gay or transgender. Kennedy based this conspiracy theory on the same 2002 study that Jones used, which claimed that atrazine caused frogs to develop hermaphroditic 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 had a positive view of Kennedy when he was running for President, 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 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 common-sense 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 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.

Drink raw milk!

See the main article on this topic: Raw milk

Kennedy is an advocate of raw milk even though (or because?) it is unsafe to consume, often containing infectious viruses and bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli and listeria. He claims to personally drink raw milk, and he's attacked the FDA for its "aggressive suppression" of raw milk.

Stem cell therapy!

See the main article on this topic: Stem cell research

Kennedy has advocated for stem cell therapy, which is not a problem in and of itself: some such therapies are effective treatments. It is doubtful given all of Kennedy's other crankery that he would be able to distinguish the difference. Some stem cell therapies have blinded patients. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at the University of California at Davis and expert on the subject, has expressed concern about Kennedy's advocacy because there are many dubious stem cell therapies that are promoted on the web.

Chemtrails!

See the main article on this topic: Chemtrails

In 2024, just after endorsing rapist/felon Trump's campaign for president, he endorsed some random chemtrail nut on Twitter, writing, "We are going to stop this crime."

The government is out to get us!

See the main article on this topic: Paranoia

In 2024, Kennedy told Fox News:

“”The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public.

Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, responded:

“”That's just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality. I've worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.

The 2004 election was stolen!

See the main article on this topic: 2004 U.S. presidential election

Yeah, we wish Kerry had won Ohio, too. But he didn't.

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 centered 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!

See the main article on this topic: John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

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. Apparently, Kennedy ignores the fact that his uncle already was embroiling the United States in Vietnam at the time he was assassinated. As recently as 2023, RFK Jr. claimed the evidence is "overwhelming" that the CIA was responsible. Kennedy told Joe Rogan he "takes precautions" on the off chance that the CIA decides to gun for him.

His voice

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

External links

• Ring of Fire program website
• Articles tagged "Robert F Kennedy Jr." at Science-Based Medicine.
• RFK, Jr. peddling his conspiracies at a Green Our Vaccines rally
• Skeptico on Deadly Immunity article and Retraction Watch's coverage.
• Orac on RFK, Jr.
• A Daily Show interview that unfortunately questioned his vaccine hysteria not.
• Farhad Manjoo debunks Kennedy's claims of 2004 election rigging.

References

2024 United States presidential election articles on RationalWiki

Topics: Abortion - Inflation - Israel/Palestine - Project 2025 - Supreme Court - Ukraine - Undocumented immigration
Parties: Democratic Party - Green Party of the United States - Libertarian Party - Republican Party
Candidates: Biden (D) - Burgum (R) - Christie (R) - DeSantis (R) - Elder (R) - Haley (R) - Harris (D) - Kennedy Jr. (Independent) - Pence (R) - Ramaswamy (R) - Stein (Green) - Trump (R) - West (Independent) - Williamson (D) • Running mates: Walz (D) - Vance (R)
Winner: Donald Trump