RFK Jr.’s presidential marketing campaign is pushed by conspiracy theories : NPR

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 mind,” Kennedy instructed podcaster Joe Rogan final month. Antidepressants are accountable for varsity shootings, he mused throughout an look with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemical substances within the water provide may flip kids transgender, he instructed right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS will not be attributable to HIV, he has prompt a number of instances.

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

But Kennedy is constructing a marketing campaign for the very best workplace round these conspiracy theories and the concept that 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.

“That is what occurs while you censor anyone for 18 years,” Kennedy instructed a cheering crowd at his April marketing campaign kickoff in Boston. “They should not have shut me up that lengthy, ‘trigger now I am actually going to let free on them for the subsequent 18 months.”

It is an obvious guess that the political, cultural and media dynamics that elevated Kennedy and the anti-vaccination motion through the COVID-19 pandemic can equally propel him to the White Home.

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 Huge Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Richard Nixon blamed Jews for orchestrating communist plots and controlling the federal government.

However 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 prime spreaders of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media. He was kicked off Instagram, alongside along with his group, Youngsters’s Well being Protection, which was additionally faraway from Fb (Instagram reinstated Kennedy after he introduced his presidential bid).

He instructed NPR that yr that the social media bans had value him “lots of of 1000’s of {dollars}” in donations. However federal tax filings present in any other case: Youngsters’s Well being Protection’s income surged through the pandemic, from $3 million in 2019 to $7 million in 2020 to $16 million in 2021.

As we speak, 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 Home of orchestrating his deplatforming. He’s suing the Biden administration and media retailers together with The Related Press, The Washington Put up, 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 businesses and firms that he believes is the foundation of the USA’ issues.

“My mission over the subsequent 18 months of this marketing campaign and all through my presidency might be to finish the corrupt merger of state and company energy that’s threatening now to impose a brand new form of company feudalism on our nation,” he mentioned in his April marketing campaign announcement.

Claims of censorship have additionally change 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. lawyer 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 greatest often called 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 world motion to guard waterways.

It was his work preventing mercury air pollution that led him into the world of vaccine skepticism. As he tells it, after listening to from moms satisfied their kids 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 referred to as “Lethal 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 ultimately retracted in 2011.

Regardless of 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.

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 know a fast-moving illness about which little was recognized.

“There was nothing else that occurred on this planet that might have globally made anti-vaccine ideology and content material so mainstream,” mentioned Kolina Koltai, a researcher who research the anti-vaccine motion. “The worldwide pandemic made vaccines and illness the dialog.”

The disaster additionally supplied Kennedy, by then probably the most 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 prime infectious illness skilled and previously a White Home adviser through the pandemic, of “assist[ing] orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat in opposition to Western democracy.”

He in contrast vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and promoted a movie focusing on disproven claims about vaccines to Black People. 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 various teams that would not actually have crossed paths earlier than the pandemic,” mentioned Aoife Gallagher, a analysis analyst on the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which research extremism and disinformation. “What this allowed teams like Youngsters’s Well being Protection and Robert F. Kennedy to do was to achieve a a lot wider viewers.”

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

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Training Middle on the Youngsters’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 got here alongside in December 2020, I assumed folks would simply rush to get it and 100% of this inhabitants could be vaccinated and that the anti-vaccine motion could be neutered,” he mentioned. “Incorrect.”

As a substitute, Offit mentioned, “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

Whereas Kennedy is operating as a Democrat, promising to “heal the divide” in American politics, lots of his views are out of step with the mainstream. People of each events resoundingly help 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 completely” and blames the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying Moscow acted in “good religion.”

At his April marketing campaign launch, Kennedy solely obliquely nodded to his issues about vaccines, as an alternative referring to a “continual illness epidemic” hurting People. He steadily tells interviewers that he isn’t anti-vaccine however as an alternative an advocate for elevated security — whereas persevering with to repeat disproven claims.

Vaccines undergo in depth medical trials, security testing and monitoring in the USA. However the security framing utilized by Kennedy and different vaccine skeptics makes their message “approachable,” Koltai mentioned. “They’re … degrading the belief and security now we have in institutional organizations just like the CDC or the FDA and making an attempt to govern knowledge to make it seem to be vaccines are much less secure than they’re,” she mentioned.

“Everybody desires secure vaccines. Nobody is saying we would like much less secure vaccines,” she mentioned. “They could body this in a method that appears very interesting to everybody. However in actuality, they’re utilizing the identical form of tropes and arguments and narratives that folks in conspiratorial communities use.”

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s message has discovered fertile floor amongst an odd-bedfellows coalition of supporters, from vaccine opponents to far-right conspiracy theorists resembling 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.

“Folks have actually embraced the thought of being anti-establishment over the previous few years,” Gallagher mentioned. “That contrarian standpoint of at all times going in opposition to regardless of the mainstream is … has change into half and parcel of this wider conspiratorial world I feel that lots of people reside in.”

A podcast-centric presidential marketing campaign

Kennedy’s media technique displays his heat reception amongst an especially on-line, right-leaning viewers. He has turned up on a flurry of podcasts, from The Joe Rogan Expertise to exhibits hosted by Peterson, former Fox Information anchor Megyn Kelly, actor Russell Model 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 will not be tuning in to conventional information sources.

“I feel the podcasts have the capability this election for reaching folks and permitting, you understand, form of dissident and rebel candidates like myself to end-run the company media monoliths and to achieve giant numbers of People with out going onto the networks,” Kennedy instructed Peterson in an episode later faraway from YouTube for holding vaccine misinformation.

In his prolonged podcast appearances, Kennedy is usually given free rein to query the security of vaccines and spout a bunch of different deceptive or false claims — topics that he averted 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. Regardless of a medical situation that makes his voice hoarse and choked, as soon as he will get going he can converse 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 feel it makes whole sense that that is the ecosystem that he has chosen,” mentioned Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior knowledge analyst on the Brookings Establishment who research political podcasts. “Not solely is it an area the place you possibly can actually say no matter you need with little or no repercussions or little or no form of pushback — it is also an area the place people who find themselves listening are inclined to consider something that you simply say.”

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

Amongst Democrats, Kennedy’s ballot numbers vary from 8% to twenty%. To what diploma that represents precise help versus affection for the Kennedy household identify, urge for food for a candidate who isn’t Biden and the very early levels 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 observe document of undermining science and spreading doubtful claims.

“He has an infinite platform. He’s going to, over the subsequent many months, do a sequence of city corridor conferences the place he’ll proceed to place unhealthy data on the market that may trigger folks to make unhealthy selections for themselves and their households, once more placing kids in danger and inflicting kids to endure,” Offit mentioned. “As a result of it is at all times probably the most weak amongst us that suffer our ignorance.”