Robert Kennedy, Jr. celebrating Ralph Lauren's 40^th Anniversary in the Conservancy Garden, Central Park, New York, September 8, 2007.

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Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (1954–) is the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy. He is a lawyer and staunch environmentalist. 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 spasmodic dysphonia, a rare voice disorder, in 2001. This causes his voice to sound strained.^[1][2]

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.^[3] He was apparently drafted to run for president by Steve Bannon; Bannon told Kennedy Jr. that he would be a "useful chaos agent".^[4]

Anti-vaccination stance[edit]

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.^[5] This is the point where his family members distanced themselves from him.^[6] In addition, Kennedy endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Republicans rigged the 2004 election.^[7] 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.^[8] Kennedy is also against water fluoridation.^[9] He is one of the "Disinformation Dozen", which are the twelve people behind 65% of all vaccine misinformation shared on social media.^[10]

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.^[11] Facebook (sort of) finally started to crack down on groups that spread bullshit like this in 2020. CHD responded by suing Facebook for "censorship".^[12] (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.)

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 Anne Frank actually had it better than the so-called "fascism" NIAID head Anthony Fauci was orchestrating. This was hardly the first time that Kennedy had used Nazi analogies in his remarks on the subject.^[13][14]

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.^[15]

COVID conspiracies[edit]

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^[16] and 5G.^[17]

In mid-November 2021, he wrote a book of conspiratorial bullshit linking Gates, Anthony Fauci, and Big Pharma to some kind of "Global War On Democracy and Public Health",^[18] 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, etc.).

Later, in an interview done by SPIN in January 2022, Kennedy promoted the sort of conspiracy bullshit that fueled this book:^[19]

• 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).^[20] 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.^[21][22])
• 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,^[23] and greater acceptance of public health measures like face masks in many Asian countries.^[24] 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.^[25][26])
• He repeated an unproven theory,^[27] 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 Environmental Research journal study. ^[28]
• 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,^[29] 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.^[19]

Fauci responded by calling Kennedy a "very disturbed individual" who was "just full of inaccuracies and distortions".^[30]

External links[edit]

• Ring of Fire program website
• 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[edit]