“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people.
The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenged the incumbent, Joe Biden, to become the Democratic Party candidate for the general election in November 2024. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the son of Senator Robert Kennedy, who in 1968 ran for the presidential election from the Democrats and died in June by assassination. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also the nephew of the 35th President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
After graduating from Harvard University, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. He then attended Pace University School of Law, which awarded him a Master’s Degree in Environmental Law. He served on the Pace Law School faculty from 1986 to 2018 and cofounded and supervised Pace's Environmental Litigation Clinic. Bobby began a career of public services as soon as he passed the NY State Bar, eventually becoming one of the most influential environmentalists in the United States.
Rather than immediately enter politics, RFK, Jr. carried on his family’s legacy of public service by devoting himself to environmental causes and children’s welfare. Bobby started his career in 1985 as a young attorney for the environmental nonprofit RiverKeeper, prosecuting polluters, ensuring safe drinking water for American families and preserving fishing as a viable livelihood in the United States. During his tenure there, he successfully sued dozens of corrupt municipalities to force compliance with the Clean Water Act. The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. He won cases against corporate giants too, including a suit against General Electric for toxic runoff from its corporate jet hangar and a court order against ExxonMobil mandating they clean up tens of millions of gallons of spilled oil in Brooklyn, NY.
Building on the success of the local Riverkeeper model, Bobby co-founded the WaterKeeper Alliance and served as its President for 21 years. This achievement helped spawn more than 300 Waterkeeper organizations across the globe. Under his direction, it became the world's largest nonprofit devoted to clean water and now protects 2.7 million miles of waterways with over a million volunteers in the United States and 46 other countries. Bobby’s work has especially emphasized marginalized communities in their battle against corporate and government polluters.
He then went on to found Children’s Health Defense, a mass membership organization where he served as chairman and chief litigation counsel in its campaign to address childhood chronic disease and toxic exposures. Kennedy’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment and children’s health stems from hundreds of successful legal actions. TIME Magazine named Kennedy its “Hero for the Planet” for his leadership in the fight to restore the Hudson River.
Kennedy enjoyed legal victories in many milestone environmental battles over the past four decades in Latin America, Canada, and the United States. Most recently, Kennedy was on the trial team in the landmark victories against Monsanto in 2018, and against DuPont in 2019 in the contamination case that inspired the movie “Dark Waters.” In addition to his environmental work, he has represented Indigenous groups asserting legal and treaty rights across Latin America and Canada.
Kennedy is also an award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Nation, Outside Magazine, the Village Voice, and many others. Among his published books are two New York Times’ bestsellers: “Crimes Against Nature” (2005) and “The Real Anthony Fauci” (2021). His highly reviewed biography is American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family. Kennedy is the author of two children’s books on American history and a third on Saint Francis of Assisi.
In the June 15, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. considered this question: Did Bush steal the 2004 election? Greg Palast later wrote "Bobby jumped into an evidence-free crazy-world in a cringeworthy article for Rolling Stone speculating about voting machines that magically switched Kerry votes to Bush."
In 2012, his wife, Mary Kennedy, after a call to him, hung herself. Mary Kennedy was an architect and designer, known for her work in green architecture and environmentally friendly design. Unfortunately, Mary Kennedy is often remembered for her tragic death. She struggled with mental health issues, and on May 16, 2012, she died by suicide at her home in Bedford, New York. Her death was widely covered in the media, and it brought attention to the challenges of mental health, especially within high-profile families. The New York tabloids were blaming her suicide on him, a cruel and unjustified attack that had to make it an even heavier psychological burden.
In 2016, RFK Jr. published a book about the conviction of his cousin Michael Skakel, in 2002, for the 1975 murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She had been beaten to death with a golf club, which was later traced back to the Skakel household. Kennedy’s version of events was widely seen as outlandish. His book raised the possibility that the crime had been committed by two young men of color from New York City—“unusually big, muscular, and tall”.
The politician’s Instagram page was suspended in 2021 over what its parent company, Meta, described as “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” The account was reinstated in 2022, shortly after Kennedy announced his election campaign. In December, the Supreme Court barred him from joining a challenge to a case dealing with the Biden administration’s communication with social media platforms over posts the government considered disinformation. The politician also had a similar case pending in a lower court.
In 2023, Kennedy testified before the House Judiciary’s subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, where he spoke as part of a House Republicans’ inquiry into alleged social media censorship against conservatives. The politician also made freedom of speech a focus of his presidential campaign.
RFK Jr. initially announced his intention to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. However, as his campaign evolved, he declared his candidacy as an independent, citing dissatisfaction with the current political system and its inability to address the needs of the American people. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the first presidential candidate in US history to receive campaign contributions and donations in Bitcoin, according to an announcement on 19 May 2023. Kennedy Jr. shared his own experience with the virtual currency, warning that the technology could enable government totalitarianism across the world. He pledged to protect the rights of Bitcoin users if elected. "Almost everyone in this room is aware of the link between Bitcoin and democracy and freedom," he said. "They're passionate because of the deep representation of a deep need that we have for liberty and democracy and the promise that this innovation has to guarantee those virtues."
A handful of Silicon Valley moguls were backing the Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., causing concern for incumbent Joe Biden. Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya have signaled their support of US lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr., the son of former US Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. Dorsey openly endorsed the Democratic candidate on Twitter on June 4. Per the ex-Twitter CEO, Kennedy "can and will" beat both Donald Trump and DeSantis, the GOP presidential nomination frontrunners.
However, the US mainstream media treated RFK Jr. as a "longshot candidate", ridiculing him for what they call conspiracy theories and his anti-vaccine stance. They also criticize him for breaking with the Democratic orthodoxy and voicing ideas similar to those of MAGA Republicans when it comes to the US migration problem and the war in Ukraine.
Kennedy commanded a 20% support among Democratic voters with his campaign continuing to gain momentum. The US press notes that Democrats are growing concerned that RFK Jr.'s profile is rising as Joe Biden faced a tough election fight. American observers drew attention to the fact that in addition to increasing media attention and decent poll numbers, he also has a "media-ready image" being an heir to the famous political dynasty.
"What we’re doing in Ukraine now is just a massive assault on Ukrainians. We have trapped Ukraine in a proxy war against [Russia] and they are being devoured by the geopolitical machinations of neocons in the White House who have this comic book depiction that a lot of Americans have swallowed about what is happening," RFK Jr. said, speaking to Canadian psychologist and media commentator Jordan Peterson.
Explaining what separates his position on Ukraine from that of the incumbent, Joe Biden, RFK Jr. said that although he understood many ordinary Americans' support for Ukraine out of "compassion" and as a "humanitarian mission," in reality, "every step we have taken, every decision we have made appears to have been intended to prolong the war and to increase the bloodshed."
"The Russians have wanted to settle this from the beginning and they’ve been very clear about what they want. They want NATO to make a pledge to not come into Ukraine, which we should have done. We shouldn’t have put NATO into fourteen countries [in Eastern Europe, ed.]. We told the Russians when they dismantled the Soviet Union in 1991 and they moved 400,000 troops out of East Germany, and they allowed NATO to reunify Germany under NATO - and they said ‘our condition for doing that for this tremendous conciliation that we’re making is that you never move NATO to the East'. And George Bush told them 'we will not move NATO one inch to the East'. And in 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out the plan which is that we moved it not one inch but a thousand miles to the East, 14 nations and then we put AEGIS missile systems in Poland and Romania which are nuclear capable. So they’re a few minutes from Russia – they can decapitate the entire Russian leadership if we wanted to start a preemptive war. That is inexcusable," RFK Jr. said.
The candidate also characterized the conflict as a "money-laundering scheme" for the US military-industrial complex.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a conspiracy theorist, member of the most iconic political family in U.S. history, was an embodiment of post-pandemic politics. Portraying himself as a populist crusader and a rejected outsider, Kennedy is in fact using all of the levers of power at his disposal. His poll numbers are rooted in an inside game. "If he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground," Rebecca Traister wrote, "it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches."
Ukrainians are dying for the sake of a US proxy war against Russia, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, shortly after announcing he would challenge President Joe Biden for the presidential nomination as a Democrat. "We're killing a lot of Ukrainians as pawns in a proxy war between two great powers," Kennedy told Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight on 20 April 2023. "Nobody talks about this. There's 14,000 Ukrainian civilians that died, but 300,000 troops. Russians are killing Ukrainians at a 7:1 to 8:1 ratio. They cannot sustain this. What we're being told about this war is just not true." Kennedy did not cite a source for his casualty figures. RFK Jr. is the nephew of the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the son of Robert Kennedy, JFK's attorney general.
In July 2023, Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, McArdle said they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.” In a June 2023 interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Kennedy acknowledged “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.” Kennedy said the D.N.C. is “trying to make sure that I can’t participate at all in the political process, and so I’m going to keep all my options open,” according to ABC News.
A September 2023 Rasmussen Reports poll showed that 57% of Democrats plan to vote for Biden in the party’s primary elections, compared with 25% who back Kennedy. The same survey found that 33% of Democrat voters will likely support Kennedy if he runs as a third-party candidate, including 14 percent who would be "very likely" to back him. Among likely voters as a whole, 25 percent said they would likely vote for Kennedy if he runs against Biden and Trump, including 14 percent of Republicans, with 10 percent saying they are "very likely" to cast their ballots this way.
Another poll indicated that Kennedy would win 22 percent of the vote in 2024, trailing Trump on 36 percent and Biden on 39 percent.
Kennedy identified ballot access as a major challenge for his team. The US has a notoriously prohibitive system that makes it hard for candidates without the backing of one major party or the other to be included in elections in all 50 states. Half of them require a designated nominee for vice president, before even allowing an independent contender to collect signatures. Kennedy on 26 March 2024 picked California-based tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in the “spoiler” campaign for the White House. Shanahan is not a national household name, but Kennedy insisted that she is the right choice for his presidential bid, the stated aim of which is to disrupt the “corporate kleptocracy” of the US political system. Kennedy has embraced the “spoiler” tag for his presidential run, vowing to “bring down the Democratic and Republican duopoly” during an introductory speech with Shanahan in Oakland, California, where she was raised in an impoverished family.
“It gave us this ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture. The same Trump-Biden uniparty has captured and appropriated democracy and turned it over to BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard,” Kennedy said, naming the three biggest institutional investors in the country. The independent candidate insisted that he and Shanahan offer hope to millions of disillusioned American voters, unlike the Democrats and Republicans, who force citizens into choosing “the lesser evil.”
A profile of Shanahan shown during the event highlighted her humble origins, expertise in Silicon Valley, and acute interest in environmental issues. She said that motherhood has brought her joy since her daughter from her former husband, Russian-American tech mogul Sergey Brin, was born in 2018. The two married the same year but divorced in 2023. She gave $4 million to a PAC that funded a 30-second ad for Kennedy shown during the Super Bowl in February, which invoked the legacy of his famous family. Shanahan was the creative force behind the ad, she told US media.
He had questioned the established link between HIV and AIDS and also was a leading proponent of the debunked claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” Kennedy said at an appearance last week at Tony’s Di Napoli, a restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazic Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential of impact.”
“There’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” he said immediately beforehand, according to the New York Post, which published video of the remarks. Kennedy’s habit of comparing U.S. vaccine policies to Nazi Germany predated his presidential bid and immediately caused trouble for him. During a 2022 anti-vaccine rally, he declared, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did” — a remark he later apologized for. He also has a history of using the word “holocaust” to refer to vaccine policies.
In May 2024, Kennedy admitted that memory loss and mental fogginess he experienced in 2010 was “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Cysticercosis, a parasitic disease caused by T. solium, the eggs of pork tapeworms, which account for the vast majority of brain worms requiring medical attention. Though less common, other parasites are also a possibility. His campaign said the worm no longer affected his health and “the issue was resolved more than 10 years ago.” It added that he is in “robust physical and mental health” as evidenced by his shirtless-in-jeans-and-a-belt pushups he posted online.
In early July 2024, a Vanity Fair article alleged Kennedy sexually assaulted a former family babysitter. In response, Kennedy said that he has “so many skeletons” in his closet he wished they could vote. The same article featured a photo of Kennedy smiling and pretending to take a bite out of what appeared to be a barbecued dog carcass. Kennedy later said the photo was actually a goat they were about to eat. While he prides himself on being an environmental attorney, he’s been fired from every job he’s ever had and ousted from multiple environmental organizations. Natural Resources Defense Council parted ways with Kennedy over the vaccine issue in 2014. He opposed eco-friendly wind-powered turbines off Hyannis Port that happened to mar his family’s ocean views.
In August 2024, Kennedy confessed to a decade-old mystery: He was the one who dumped a dead bear cub in Manhattan’s Central Park. Kennedy explained that he picked up the roadkill bear with the intention of keeping the meat, but instead decided to leave it in the city staged with a bicycle to look like that’s what killed the bear.
US President Joe Biden could be a bigger danger to US democracy than former president and presumptive 2024 election rival Donald Trump, said another presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Speaking on CNN on 02 April 2024, Kennedy Jr pointed to his being blocked on various social media platforms during Biden’s term in office and branded this as an effort to “censor political speech” that violated the First Amendment of America’s constitution. He also attributed the ‘censorship’ to pressure from the White House, RT reported.
Pressed by CNN’s Erin Burnett on who he believes poses a bigger threat to democracy, Kennedy stated that he still views Biden as a bigger danger, even though Trump played a role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. “The question was, who is a worse threat to democracy? And what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question. But I can argue that President Biden is, because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” the candidate told presenter Erin Burnett. “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history – the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”
On 03 July 2024 brutal new reporting from Vanity Fair, reveals disturbing details about RFK Jr., completely upending his claims of being the most transparent candidate in history and a moral authority. The endless list of RFK Jr.’s dangerous and grotesque behavior casts doubts on his fitness for office. As one friend put it, RFK Jr.’s campaign could cause him to go down as “one of the greatest villains in American history.” Vanity Fair revealed RFK Jr. groped and assaulted the family babysitter and kept x-rated photos on his phone of multiple women – possibly without their consent. While he prides himself on being an environmental attorney, he’s been fired from every job he’s ever had and ousted from multiple environmental organizations. And to top off these twisted stories, the story includes a photo of a grinning RFK Jr. holding up a barbequed dog like a prize. When Kennedy emerged as a candidate for president, in April 2023, his body and face had become transfigured by what he has called a regimen of “organic testosterone.” Kennedy showed off his unusually puffy body in campaign workouts, going shirtless in an infamous push-up video.
On 05 August 2024, in a damaging new profile from The New Yorker, RFK Jr. is once again revealed to be a troubled, reckless, and dangerous man who is more than comfortable being a spoiler for Donald Trump. In a new quote, his campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, told The New Yorker that the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services “is an incredibly interesting one” for RFK Jr. and that he was not opposed to serving in a Trump administration.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on August 23 that he was suspending his election campaign and supporting Republican candidate Donald Trump. He said this in an address to the nation. Kennedy Jr. fears that his continued involvement in the presidential race will draw support away from Trump in a showdown with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Kennedy's team had already asked to remove him from the ballot in Pennsylvania - even before the official announcement that the politician is leaving the race. It came a day after he also asked to be struck off the ballot in Arizona.
DNC Senior Advisor Mary Beth Cahill issued the following statement: “The more voters learned about RFK Jr. the less they liked him. Donald Trump isn’t earning an endorsement that’s going to help build support, he’s inheriting the baggage of a failed fringe candidate. Good riddance.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters on a 28 October 2024 Zoom call that Donald Trump pledged to give him control over the the federal government’s entire public-health apparatus. “The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others … and then also the USDA,” he said.
The man Donald Trump selected to run the nation’s health agencies has expressed a strong belief in the existence of “chemtrails. In February 2023, Kennedy hosted a chemtrails true believer on his RFK Jr. Podcast, also known as the Defender Show. Some of these comments, surfaced in a review of his shows by The Bulwark, have not been previously reported. A spokesperson for Kennedy declined to comment.The guest, Dane Wigington of the website GeoEngineering Watch, offered a lengthy presentation on the existence of “chemtrails”—massive amounts of chemicals that nefarious actors are supposedly using commercial airlines to spray into the atmosphere. By the end, RFK Jr. seemed convinced: “I am persuaded by what you’re saying.”
“I think one of the other parts of your story that’s important to understand is the military programs to weaponize climate, because of course they’re doing that,” Kennedy went on. “Of course we know they’re doing that, because they do it with everything else. They do it with chemicals, they do it with biology. Anything that they can weaponize, they’re going to.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump as health and human services secretary, has vowed to remove fluoride from public water systems in the US if his appointment is approved by the Senate. “Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease," tweeted RFK Jr.
Community water fluoridation envisages adjusting the amount of fluoride in drinking water to a current recommended level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1945 Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city in the world to fluoridate its public water supply as part of a controlled study. This experiment showed a dramatic reduction in tooth decay among children. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society (JBS), noted for promotion of various conspiracy theories, opposed the fluoridation of public water supplies, alleging it was a communist plot to undermine American health and intellect. CDC reports that water fluoridation prevents cavities and saves $6.5 billion in dental treatment costs for the nation annually. If the EPA recognizes it as a toxic substance, it could stop the practice, despite scientific evidence supporting its safety and effectiveness in preventing tooth decay.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
