Opinion: Why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential bid is the second coming of Donald Trump

A man speaking into a microphone with protesters carrying placards

June 21, 2023 3 AM PT

It’s a serious sign of something when as many as 20% of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents tell pollsters they support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Perhaps it’s a sign that their brains have been addled by Wi-Fi radiation coming at them from their cellphones, something Kennedy claims happens all the time.

Or maybe it’s a sign that 5G high-speed transmission towers are warping people’s abilities to think clearly, yet another favorite Kennedy conspiracy theory.

Opinion Columnist

Robin Abcarian

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More likely, in my view, it’s a sign that some Democrats are worried about President Biden’s advanced age, and that a (slightly) younger man from a beloved Democratic political dynasty seems at first glance to offer a reasonable alternative.

Do not be fooled.

Robert Kennedy Jr. is off his rocker.

It’s not totally obvious at first, which is why there is a bit of cognitive dissonance at play. Kennedy, after all, with his Kennedy-esque full head of hair, piercing blue eyes and blinding white smile, looks like presidential material. He is an environmental attorney who has spent decades crusading for a cleaner environment (although detractors say he has done more harm than good, or taken credit where none has been earned). His liberal bona fides seem in good order. He has spoken of closing the wealth gap, of restoring our “hollowed-out” middle class, of the urgency of confronting global warming, and so on.

And yet, when he opens his mouth, as he did for more than three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast the other day, the inanities that come out are positively Trump-esque.

“Wi-Fi radiation opens your blood-brain barrier, and all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain,” he told Rogan.

“How does Wi-Fi open up your blood-brain barrier?” Rogan asked, in perhaps his most incisive follow-up question of the entire fawning puffcast.

“Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise,” replied Kennedy.

No duh.

Kennedy wants to seal our southern border “permanently.” He believes antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings. (“Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events,” he told Elon Musk earlier this month during a Twitter Spaces conversation.)

He believes that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, were assassinated by the CIA, and he told Rogan that he, RFK Jr., could be an intelligence agency target as well. (“I’m aware of that danger,” said Kennedy. “I don’t live in fear of it, at all, but I’m not stupid about it, and I take precautions.”)

He has questioned the scientifically unassailable relationship between HIV and AIDS. He has written a popular book demonizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of sabotaging treatments for AIDS, and trashing him as “a powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.” (Fauci has called Kennedy “a very disturbed individual.” I am on Team Fauci.)

Most dangerously, of course, Kennedy is a fount of anti-vaccine misinformation. He has embraced the prolifically debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He is chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a virulently anti-vax group that positions itself, per its website, as “the global uprising against medical tyranny to defend human rights.”

The group is a mega-spreader of vaccine disinformation on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In one Facebook post, Kennedy claimed — without evidence — that COVID-19 vaccine is not safe for pregnant women. Studies have shown there is no specific vaccine risk to pregnant women.

Kennedy has also encouraged Black Americans, who have suffered disproportionately from COVID-19, to distrust COVID-19 vaccines, comparing them to the horrific Tuskegee syphilis study, in which over a period of 40 years, hundreds of Black men were denied medical treatment for syphilis without their knowledge, while public health officials studied the disease.

And yet, in 2021, when he and his third wife, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actor Cheryl Hines, threw a holiday party at their Brentwood home, guests were instructed to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19.

“I guess I’m not always the boss at my own house,” Kennedy told Politico.

Once you get on the anti-vax bandwagon, I guess it makes sense to blame almost all physical problems on immunization. Kennedy has even suggested that vaccines may have caused the disorder that affects his larynx, spasmodic dysphonia, making his voice sound tremulous or strained. In 2007, though, he did not contradict Oprah Winfrey when, during an interview, she asked him about his “genetic neurological condition” and he replied that it came on when he was in his early 40s. By 2021, however, he told a podcaster he thought a flu shot may have caused it.

It is true that vaccination carries a vanishingly small amount of risk, and there are some cases of children experiencing injury from vaccines, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that childhood vaccines save at least 4 million lives worldwide a year, and adult vaccination also saves multitudes each year.

On the campaign trail, Kennedy has mostly downplayed his aversion to vaccines. Democrats, after all, are way more likely than Republicans to embrace vaccination. In a recent NBC News profile of Kennedy, reporter Brandy Zadrozny mentioned a Facebook group of Kennedy supporters who have decided to label their candidate a “Vaccine Safety Advocate” as a way of making his anti-vax sentiments more palatable to Democratic voters.

Well, you can call him anything you want. His views are dangerous and he belongs nowhere near the White House, or any position of real political power. He’s already done enough damage.

Kennedy dynasty, schmynasty.

@robinkabcarian