Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most recent member of the Kennedy dynasty to run for president, often shares a dizzying vary of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Joseph Prezioso/AFP through Getty Images

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Joseph Prezioso/AFP through Getty Images

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most recent member of the Kennedy dynasty to run for president, often shares a dizzying vary of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Joseph Prezioso/AFP through Getty Images

Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his marketing campaign difficult President Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, he has given hours of interviews to podcasts, magazines and TV networks. He paints a darkish, conspiratorial image of the world, bristling with debunked theories, deceptive claims and outright falsehoods.

Wi-Fi causes most cancers and “leaky brain,” Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan final month. Antidepressants are accountable for college shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals within the water provide might flip youngsters transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS might not be brought on by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.

There’s no credible proof for any of those assertions or for Kennedy’s longest-running false claims: that vaccines cause autism and are extra dangerous than the illnesses they’re designed to guard towards.

Yet Kennedy is constructing a marketing campaign for the very best workplace round these conspiracy theories and the concept fact-checking or criticizing them quantities to censorship. His throughline is the bedrock conspiratorial premise that “they” (the federal government, pharmaceutical corporations, the media) are mendacity to you — however that he’s telling the reality.

“This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” Kennedy advised a cheering crowd at his April marketing campaign kickoff in Boston. “They shouldn’t have shut me up that long, ’cause now I’m really going to let loose on them for the next 18 months.”

It’s an obvious wager that the political, cultural and media dynamics that elevated Kennedy and the anti-vaccination movement throughout the COVID-19 pandemic can equally propel him to the White House.

The Kennedy marketing campaign didn’t reply to NPR’s questions for this story.

Allegations of censorship and collusion

Kennedy is not the primary American politician to actively advance conspiracy theories. Donald Trump promoted birtherism and, later, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Richard Nixon blamed Jews for orchestrating communist plots and controlling the government.

But what stands out in Kennedy’s case is the sheer quantity of what he has asserted over time, from his insistence that Republicans stole the 2004 election to his claims that 5G networks are getting used for mass surveillance to his perception that the CIA assassinated his uncle.

In 2021, he was named one of many high spreaders of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media. He was kicked off Instagram, alongside along with his group, Children’s Health Defense, which was additionally faraway from Facebook (Instagram reinstated Kennedy after he introduced his presidential bid).

He advised NPR that yr that the social media bans had price him “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in donations. But federal tax filings present in any other case: Children’s Health Defense’s revenue surged throughout the pandemic, from $3 million in 2019 to $7 million in 2020 to $16 million in 2021.

Today, Kennedy says the social media bans and the media’s rejection of his views over time are what galvanized him to run for president.

He accuses the White House of orchestrating his deplatforming. He is suing the Biden administration and media outlets together with The Associated Press, The Washington Post, the BBC and Reuters for alleged censorship.

For Kennedy, his conviction that he is being censored is one other instance of the collusion between authorities companies and companies that he believes is the foundation of the United States’ issues.

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country,” he stated in his April marketing campaign announcement.

Claims of censorship have additionally develop into a core grievance of many conservatives and disaffected liberals, who see the rise of social media insurance policies to fight dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories and election interference as infringing on their free speech rights.

From political scion to anti-vaccine crusader

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the son of the late U.S. legal professional basic, New York senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, in addition to the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. For years, he was finest often known as a wayward member of a well-known, tragedy-stricken household and as a crusading environmental lawyer who helped clear up the Hudson River and launched a worldwide motion to guard waterways.

It was his work combating mercury air pollution that led him into the world of vaccine skepticism. As he tells it, after listening to from moms satisfied their youngsters had been harmed by a mercury-based preservative in routine vaccines, he grew to become a convert to their trigger. (The preservative in query was faraway from most childhood vaccines in 2001 out of an abundance of warning and was by no means used within the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines that have been the focus for issues about autism.)

In 2005, he made this argument in an exposé known as “Deadly Immunity” in Rolling Stone and on Salon.com. The piece turned out to be deeply compromised by errors and selective use of proof and was finally retracted in 2011.

Despite research after research discovering no connection between vaccines and autism, Kennedy has solely dug in deeper to his discredited beliefs. For years, they put him on the perimeter of American public discourse — till COVID-19.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., following a march in opposition to COVID-19 mandates on Jan. 23, 2022.

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Tom Brenner/Reuters

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., following a march in opposition to COVID-19 mandates on Jan. 23, 2022.

Tom Brenner/Reuters

How the pandemic united anti-vaccine and anti-government teams

The pandemic gave anti-vaccination activists new prominence and traction by providing simple solutions to a public struggling to grasp a fast-moving illness about which little was recognized.

“There was nothing else that happened in the world that could have globally made anti-vaccine ideology and content so mainstream,” stated Kolina Koltai, a researcher who research the anti-vaccine motion. “The global pandemic made vaccines and disease the conversation.”

The disaster additionally supplied Kennedy, by then some of the outstanding figures in anti-vaccination circles, a broader set of targets within the type of altering public well being tips, college and enterprise shutdowns, and vaccine and masks mandates.

He wrote a e-book accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s high infectious illness knowledgeable and previously a White House adviser throughout the pandemic, of “help[ing] orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”

He in contrast vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and promoted a film targeting disproven claims about vaccines to Black Americans. He touted the choice remedies ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which haven’t been discovered to be efficient at treating COVID-19. He appeared on the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour alongside MAGA stars Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

“There was this coalescing of different groups that wouldn’t really have crossed paths before the pandemic,” stated Aoife Gallagher, a analysis analyst on the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which research extremism and disinformation. “What this allowed groups like Children’s Health Defense and Robert F. Kennedy to do was to reach a much wider audience.”

Kennedy’s public trajectory echoed the growing politicization of opposition to vaccines that emerged throughout the pandemic.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center on the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime antagonist of Kennedy, says that earlier than COVID-19, the anti-vaccine motion did not map onto conventional political divides.

“When vaccines came along in December 2020, I thought people would just rush to get it and 100% of this population would be vaccinated and that the anti-vaccine movement would be neutered,” he stated. “Wrong.”

Instead, Offit stated, “that is the primary virus within the historical past of humankind the place you usually tend to die based mostly in your political affiliation.”

Why vaccine security is usually a rallying cry for anti-vaccine activists

While Kennedy is working as a Democrat, promising to “heal the divide” in American politics, lots of his views are out of step with the mainstream. Americans of each events resoundingly support childhood vaccines.

His extraordinarily isolationist positions on immigration and international coverage sound extra like a candidate within the Republican main. He says he would “seal the [U.S.-Mexico] border permanently” and blames the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Moscow acted in “good faith.”

At his April marketing campaign launch, Kennedy solely obliquely nodded to his issues about vaccines, as a substitute referring to a “chronic disease epidemic” hurting Americans. He continuously tells interviewers that he is not anti-vaccine however as a substitute an advocate for elevated security — whereas persevering with to repeat disproven claims.

Vaccines undergo extensive clinical trials, safety testing and monitoring within the United States. But the protection framing utilized by Kennedy and different vaccine skeptics makes their message “approachable,” Koltai stated. “They are … degrading the trust and safety we have in institutional organizations like the CDC or the FDA and trying to manipulate data to make it seem like vaccines are less safe than they are,” she stated.

“Everyone wants safe vaccines. No one is saying we want less safe vaccines,” she stated. “They might frame this in a way that seems very appealing to everyone. But in reality, they’re using the same sort of tropes and arguments and narratives that people in conspiratorial communities use.”

Still, Kennedy’s message has discovered fertile floor amongst an odd-bedfellows coalition of supporters, from vaccine opponents to far-right conspiracy theorists comparable to Jones, Stone and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley magnates together with Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and enterprise capitalist David Sacks, who maintain Kennedy up as a contrarian free-thinker.

“People have really embraced the idea of being anti-establishment over the past few years,” Gallagher stated. “That contrarian point of view of always going against whatever the mainstream is … has become part and parcel of this wider conspiratorial world I think that a lot of people live in.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is interviewed by radio host Michael Smerconish throughout a city corridor in Philadelphia final month.

Lisa Lake/SiriusXM through Getty Images

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Lisa Lake/SiriusXM through Getty Images

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is interviewed by radio host Michael Smerconish throughout a city corridor in Philadelphia final month.

Lisa Lake/SiriusXM through Getty Images

A podcast-centric presidential marketing campaign

Kennedy’s media technique displays his heat reception amongst a particularly on-line, right-leaning viewers. He has turned up on a flurry of podcasts, from The Joe Rogan Experience to reveals hosted by Peterson, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, actor Russell Brand and enterprise capitalists Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg.

The medium permits him to achieve an enormous viewers — Rogan’s present, the nation’s hottest podcast, is estimated to attract as many as 11 million listeners per episode — and an viewers that might not be tuning in to conventional information sources.

“I think the podcasts have the capacity this election for reaching people and allowing, you know, sort of dissident and insurgent candidates like myself to end-run the corporate media monoliths and to reach large numbers of Americans without going onto the networks,” Kennedy advised Peterson in an episode later removed from YouTube for holding vaccine misinformation.

In his prolonged podcast appearances, Kennedy is usually given free rein to query the protection of vaccines and spout a number of different deceptive or false claims — topics that he prevented in his two-hour kickoff speech in April and that get no point out on his official marketing campaign web site.

Kennedy is a very well-suited podcast visitor. Despite a medical situation that makes his voice hoarse and choked, as soon as he will get going he can communicate fluently and at size about any method of topics, from his authorized victories to U.S. international coverage historical past to colourful, emotional anecdotes of rising up in America’s most storied political household.

“I think it makes total sense that this is the ecosystem that he has chosen,” stated Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior knowledge analyst on the Brookings Institution who research political podcasts. “Not only is it a space where you can really say whatever you want with very little repercussions or very little sort of pushback — it’s also a space where people who are listening are inclined to believe anything that you say.”

Kennedy’s marketing campaign has given him a platform that has lengthy been denied him, with profiles in seemingly each media outlet. But he stays a long-shot candidate, and his marketing campaign seems to be resonating more with Republicans than the Democrats who will vote within the main.

Among Democrats, Kennedy’s poll numbers vary from 8% to twenty%. To what diploma that represents precise help versus affection for the Kennedy household title, urge for food for a candidate who shouldn’t be Biden and the very early phases of the presidential contest is up within the air.

What’s not up for debate for scientists, researchers and public well being officers is Kennedy’s lengthy monitor report of undermining science and spreading doubtful claims.

“He has an enormous platform. He is going to, over the next many months, do a series of town hall meetings where he will continue to put bad information out there that will cause people to make bad decisions for themselves and their families, again putting children at risk and causing children to suffer,” Offit stated. “Because it’s always the most vulnerable among us who suffer our ignorance.”