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Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.

American politician, environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine activist, and conspiracy theorist (born 1954)

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.. (born 17 January 1954), commonly referred to as RFK Jr, is the third of eleven children of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy in 2007

Kennedy is an environmental lawyer known for promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and co-hosts Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network. In the 2000, he gained attention for his conspiracy theories about vaccines and, later, the COVID-19 pandemic. In late August 2024, he endorsed Donald Trump in that year's US presidential election after running a third-party campaign. The following November, president-elect Trump nominated Kennedy to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services in his second administration.

Quotes

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2003–2015

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  • Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.
    • From "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (December 11, 2003).
  • Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.
    • From "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (December 11, 2003).
  • I had my own mercury levels tested recently, Bill, and my levels are about three times what are considered safe, just from eating fish. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury would have children with cognitive impairment, with permanent brain damage, probably an IQ loss of 5 to 7 points... Under Clinton rules, they would have had to remove 90% of that mercury within three-and-a-half years. But this president, eight weeks ago, announced he was scrapping those rules and substituting rules that were written by industry lobbyists that will require that they never have to clean up. This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people and directly impacts the health of millions and millions of Americans. But you don't see it in the newspaper. It should be the headlines every single day. But we don't know about it.
  • The news departments have become corporate profit centers. And their only obligation now is to their shareholders. Which is to create large audiences and viewership so they can sell more ad space. So they're airing stories that appeal to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain: for sex and celebrity gossip. And now, for terror. So they give us Kobe Bryant and they give us Michael Jackson. And they give us Laci Peterson and they give us lots and lots of terror alerts. But they're not telling us the really critical stories that impact our way of life.
    • Real Time with Bill Maher (October 22, 2004).
  • [According to a specialist, an abnormality seen in his brain scans] was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.
  • [After the mercury poisoning (cited above)] I have cognitive problems, clearly [...] I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.
  • Thimerosal is a controversial mercury based (sic) vaccine preservative that research scientists and vaccine safety advocates have connected to the epidemic of brain disorders in children.

2020–2022

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  • My father believed moral courage to be the rarest species of bravery. Rarer even than the physical courage of soldiers in battle or great intelligence. He thought it the one vital quality required to salvage the world.
    • From his foreword to Plague of Corruption by Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits, blurb cited by AP News (April 30, 2020)
  • Dr. Mikovits joined NIH in 1980 as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Molecular Virology at the National Cancer Institute and began a 20-year collaboration with Frank Ruscetti, a pioneer in the field of human retro virology. She helped Dr Russetti isolate the HIV virus and link it to #AIDS in 1983. Her NIH boss Anthony Fauci delayed publication of that critical paper for 6 months to let his protégé Robert Gallo replicate, publish and claim credit. The delay in mass HIV testing let AIDS further spread around the globe and helped Fauci win promotion to director NIAID... Appropriating her (Judy Mikovits') work wasn’t the worst of it. This delayed the development of testing and spread the HIV epidemic through the world, killing millions. Driven by greed and cronyism, Anthony Fauci—”America’s Doctor”—is directly responsible for the further spread of HIV throughout the world. Rather than being punished for his actions, six months later he was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–a position he still holds today.
    • The Truth About Fauci—Featuring Dr. Judy Mikovits,Children's Health Defense (April 20, 2020)
    • Note: In 2007, Mikovits met a co-discoverer of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV), Robert Silverman, at a conference. Silverman had found XMRV sequences, which are highly similar to mouse genomic sequences, in prostate cancer specimens several years earlier. Using tools obtained from Silverman, Mikovits began to look for XMRV in her CFS samples. In late 2008, a graduate student, who subsequently was hired as her technician, obtained two positive results from a group of twenty samples. He and Mikovits successively altered the experimental conditions until all samples gave a positive signal. In 2009, Mikovits and co-workers reported in the journal Science that they had detected XMRV DNA in CFS patients and control subjects. Negative results were published soon after, disputing Mikovits's findings. Two of the original authors of this paper subsequently reanalyzed the samples used in the research and found that the samples were contaminated with XMRV plasmid DNA, leading them to publish a partial retraction of their original results. In December 2011, after a request by first author Robert Silverman, the editors of Science retracted the paper in its entirety. On September 29, 2011, Mikovits was terminated by the WPI due to disputes over the control of lab samples and the integrity of her work; she subsequently came under investigation for alleged manipulation of data in her publications related to XMRV. (See Judy Mikovits#XMRV and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue)
  • In 2006, Dr Mikovits became director of Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease and collaborated with Dr Ruscetti searching for the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which suddenly became epidemic in the 1980s.... Dr. Mikovits discovered that 67% of affected women carried a virus—called Xenotropic Murine Leukemia related Virus—that appeared in healthy women only 4% of the time. XMRV is also associated with prostate, breast, ovarian cancers, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. Many women with XMRV bore children with autism. In 2009, Drs. Mikovits and Ruscetti published their explosive findings in the journal Science. But the question remained: how was XMRV getting into people? Other researchers linked the first CFS outbreak to a polio vaccine given to doctors and nurses that resulted in the “1934 Los Angeles County Hospital Epidemic.” That vaccine was cultivated on pulverized mouse brains. Retroviruses from dead animals can survive in cell lines and permanently contaminate vaccines.
    Dr Mikovits’ studies suggested that the XMRV Virus was present in the MMR, Polio and Encephalitis vaccines given to American children and soldiers. XMRV is so hazardous that the mere presence of mouse tissue in a laboratory can contaminate other tissues in the same room. Dr Fauci ordered Mikovits to keep her mouth shut. When she refused, he illegally confiscated her work books and hard drives, drove her from government work and blackballed her from receiving NIH grants ending her science career. XMRV remains in American vaccines.

2023–present

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  • Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.
    • At an anti-vaxxer rally (January 23, 2022), cited in "Robert Kennedy Jr apologizes for Holocaust remarks at anti-vaxxer rally" Reuters (January 25, 2022). On January 25., he said: "I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors. My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry."
  • I can’t answer that.
    • Answered to the question "What do you see as more harmful to America: another term of Joe Biden, or Donald Trump returning to power?“ in the spring of 2023, quoted in "Why RFK Jr. Endorsed Trump", The Atlantic (August 23, 2024)
  • The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world. The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon's short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence.
    • From his post on Facebook (April 4, 2023)
  • The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let's be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can't fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, "exhaust"? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we've sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe.
  • What happened in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine. We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the White House, handpicking the new cabinet that was hostile to the Soviet Union. If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia’s position, and you say: "Okay, the United States, our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy, has now taken over the government of a nation and made them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are prejudicial to this giant Russian population." If Mexico did that and then started killing — they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government — if Mexico did that to expatriate Americans, we'd invade in a second. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents.
  • [On the suggestion "You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don't want your support" is "a principled insistence" Jones represents a "a bridge too far"] If you're just saying you're going to dismiss certain people because this human being is so irredeemable that I am going to exclude him or her from any future activity on the planet—I just don’t think that's consistent with my spiritual beliefs. It's not consistent with my political philosophy. I believe that we should invite our enemies into the tent with us to the extent that they want to break bread with us, that they may want to endorse some of the values that we hold dear.
  • [On the Assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963] I can guarantee you, looking at this case, that I could prove that my uncle's death was caused by the C.I.A. I have enough evidence right now, without any depositions, to go to prove that my uncle's death was the result of a conspiracy. And that the C.I.A. was involved—not only in the original conspiracy but in the sixty-year coverup—and continues to maintain the coverup.
  • [Donald Trump is] probably the most successful debater in this country since Lincoln-Douglas.
  • [Trump] has his own technique that people like, and it is like going to a prize fight and you need practice. And that usually happens during a primary, and asking [Biden] not to debate during the primary is like asking a prize fighter to practice for his big bout by sitting on the couch and eating Chick-fil-A
  • I don't know what happened on 9/11. I mean, I understand what the official explanation [for 9/11] is, I understand that there is dissent. I have not looked into it. I haven't examined it. I'm not a good person to talk to about it.
  • Well, I know … there’s strange things that happened, that don't seem … One of the buildings [in New York] came down that wasn't hit by a plane, so, you know, was it building seven or building 10?
  • [Bergen said the twin towers collapsed on top (of WTC7)] No, they didn't collapse on top of it. My offices were down there [at the bottom of Manhattan]. My offices were closed and you know … there's pictures of it collapsing. There's nothing collapsing on top of it.
    I mean, listen, I don't want to argue any theories about this because all I've heard is questions. I have no explanation. I have no knowledge of it. But ... what you’re repeating now, I know not to be true.
  • It's not something that I, you know, any part of [it] I endorse one way or the other, but I do think that it ought to be permissible in this country to question official narratives.
    • In the Room podcast hosted by Peter Bergen, as cited in "Robert F Kennedy Jr expresses skepticism at official 9/11 account", The Guardian (26 September 2023)
    • Bergen said after the interview: "To clarify … the government’s official report found that building seven was hit with debris from the north tower [of the World Trade Center]. That impact caused fires, which led to the building collapse. It's very well documented and there's nothing 'strange' about it.”

Quotes about Kennedy

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From the Kennedy family

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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Joe and Kathleen's brother and Maeve’s uncle—is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.
  • We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. And his and others' work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences. The challenge for public health officials right now is that many people are more afraid of the vaccines than the diseases, because they've been lucky enough to have never seen the diseases and their devastating impact. But that’s not luck; it's the result of concerted vaccination efforts over many years.
  • Those who delay or refuse vaccinations, or encourage others to do so, put themselves and others, especially children, at risk. It is in all our interests to make sure that immunizations reach every child on the globe through safe, effective and affordable vaccines. Everyone must communicate the benefits and safety of vaccines, and advocate for the respect and confidence of the institutions which make them possible. To do otherwise risks even further erosion of one of public health’s greatest achievements.
  • We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby's decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our familiy hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.

Other individuals and sources

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  • "Hi. Bobby," Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. "This is my brother Joe." That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman.
  • He [RFK, Jr] poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.
  • Donald Trump, if he becomes president as Kennedy is now working to make happen, wants to start executing drug dealers.
  • [T]he respite from anti-Semitism was doomed to end. Conspiracy theorists are drawn gravitationally to the Jews, and Kennedy was only able to defy it for so long before his natural and predetermined course set in.
  • The issue with Kennedy is that he long ago entered his own curated world of pseudo-science, in which every respectable position was presumptively false, and every major world event presumptively engineered by secretive elites. This is a mental model that has no braking system.
  • Robert F Kennedy Jr is the perfect Kennedy for the post-Trump era, because in many ways, the Kennedy family represents America: like them, the country looks great, is rich and generally has high ideals. But so much of the reputation of both has rested on a willingness to overlook their flaws and victims.
  • He is not an aberration but a culmination, one who shows the worst of his family and country, with both looking played out, wacky and — despite or because of its privileges — disproportionately prone to the worst of human behaviour.
  • Kennedy Jr. lacks Trump's political abilities, but he presents to his admirers the same proposition: I suffer on your behalf. For the faithful, every correction of their champion’s falsehoods, every criticism of the harm he is inflicting on others, is a further proof of his heroic self-sacrifice. Kennedy, who has enjoyed privileged access to the political and media elites since his childhood, paints himself as a victim of censorship by—who else?—the elites.
  • Don't waste any Republican or Conservative votes on Junior. He's one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office.
  • He's radical left; RFK Jr. is radical left. Reminds me of this fly that's driving me crazy up here. This fly is brutal. I don't like flies.
  • So bad that FoxNews puts RFK Jr., considered the dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan, on their fairly conservative platform so much. Competitive networks don't want anything to do with him. He's a Radical Left Lunatic whose crazy Climate Change views make the Democrat's Green New Scam look Conservative.

See also

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