Will the Don be back or who will he back?
Is Biden giving Harris a run after a four-year stint.
Is NIkki Haley going to run away with it?
What a time to be alive.
AOC
AOC
AOC
AOC
AOC
Kid Rock vs The Rock
FOUR MORE YEARS!
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The racist right flexing their elbows already, lets hope the GOP find the balls to rise above next time around
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This should trigger a few of the usual suspects.
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Here comes the Donald. An incredibly well kept secret.
In Moscow, the possibility that former President Donald Trump might end up in prison or even seek asylum in Russia has long been a topic of discussion on the Kremlin-controlled state television. A federal indictment that was unsealed on Friday revealed that Trump is facing 37 felony counts, because of a trove of classified documents he retained, including America’s military plans and nuclear secrets.
Troubled by the magnitude of the criminal jeopardy their favored candidate is facing, the Kremlin’s mouthpieces on state media’s airwaves are openly brainstorming how to help Trump by undermining President Joe Biden—reflecting the efforts that are likely taking place behind the scenes. After all, Trump represents Moscow’s best hope that the U.S. will eventually stop supporting Ukraine, which would in turn allow Russia to swallow it whole.
When it was first revealed that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was searched by the FBI and contained hundreds of classified documents, Russian state TV host Evgeny Popov mockingly noted: “Turns out that the investigation against Trump has to do with the disappearance of secret documents from the White House, related to the development of new nuclear weapons by the United States… Obviously, if there were any important documents, they’ve been studying them in Moscow for a while. What’s the point of searching?”
Now that the search has resulted in a multitude of charges, Popov and his fellow propagandists are not nearly as giddy but still hold out the hope that the Republicans and their mouthpieces—like Russia’s beloved Tucker Carlson—will manage to harm Biden and undermine U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Appearing on Vladimir Solovyov’s morning broadcast of Full Contact, “Americanologist” Dmitry Drobnitsky mockingly predicted that in light of the criminal charges that threaten the main contenders of the presidential race, the final battle might be between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nikki Haley. He pointed out that RFK Jr. surprised everyone with higher-than-anticipated popularity ratings but noted that he is unlikely to prevail. Nonetheless, Drobnitsky said, Kennedy’s participation in the elections will enable him to inject his pro-Russian talking points about Ukraine into the mainstream—a beneficial side effect for Moscow.
During Thursday’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, experts proposed being more proactive, weighing various ways to boost their favorite candidate and sink his opponent. Dmitry Evstafiev, Professor at the School of Integrated Communications, suggested: “In the West, we should be supporting crooks, scumbags, and idiots—then we will succeed! We should support them and convince them that they are geniuses.”
Drobnitsky surmised: “It’s possible that none of the leading presidential candidates will make it to the 2024 elections as free men. There is a number of pending and potential criminal cases against all of them!” He suggested: “In addition to demonstrating our successes, both in the economic field and on the frontlines of the special military operation, it’s time for us to take advantage of this. The new cornerstone of our foreign policy should be to constantly demonstrate the toxicity of the American world, the Pax Americana that previously suited everyone.” He later added: “Let all the flowers bloom, as long as our adversaries are allergic to them… We should do whatever we can to shove them out of our Eurasia.”
The grand plan of forcing the U.S. to focus predominately on its internal issues is in line with Trump’s long-standing pledge to greatly limit America’s global involvement, concentrating mainly on trade and financial dealings.
Drobnitsky, a self-described fan of former President Trump, proposed: “Let’s release a story where we’ll write that Biden was personally getting $10 million for every day of the war in Ukraine. Who can prove it isn’t so? There are so many criminal cases out there!”
Back in the dawn of the Trump era — just prior to his 2017 inauguration — the line of would-be suck-ups queuing up for face time with the president-elect included a man with a distinguished name.
He was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of one of the leading families of Democratic Party politics. What brought him together with Trump was their shared interest in the anti-vaccination movement.
At least Kennedy, who had been an anti-vaccine crusader for well more than a decade and was pushing a long-discredited claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism, thought so. He announced upon emerging from the meeting that Trump had asked him to chair a commission “on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.”
On this issue, Bobby is an outlier in the Kennedy family.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sister, brother and niece on his anti-vaccination crusade
Trump promptly denied that, but acknowledged that he was “exploring the possibility” of such a commission and “look[ing] forward to continuing the discussion about all aspects of autism with many groups and individuals.”
Kennedy has never backed off from pushing the vaccine-autism link, which can be traced back to a British study that was eventually retracted because of charges that the data were fabricated. Its main author was stripped of his medical license in Britain amid accusations of research fraud.
Kennedy has now paddled back into the American political discourse by announcing his candidacy for president in April on the Democratic ticket. His family connection appears to have brought attention to his campaign; the question is whether the dazzlement of the Kennedy name will be sufficient to blind voters to his history of promoting spectacularly dangerous health policies through misrepresentations and outright lies.
Kennedy certainly can’t claim to lack a platform to disseminate his misinformation and disinformation. On June 15 he received a tongue bath on Spotify from that outstanding ignoramus Joe Rogan, who allowed him to spout his anti-science spiel for three hours with virtually no pushback.
After vaccine expert Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine tweeted a link to a comprehensive takedown of the Spotify webcast by Vice.com, Rogan challenged Hotez to participate in a public debate with Kennedy. Hotez has quite properly refused, which led to his being accosted at his home by some misguided soul demanding that he take the bait.
The dangers from Kennedy’s campaign should be clear. One is that a Kennedy candidacy that gains any real traction alone will increase the political credibility of anti-vax claptrap, which already has more than enough.
Another is that it could cut into the vote in 2024 for a responsible Democrat, whether President Biden or anyone else, which could sweep Trump or a Trump clone into office, along with the thuggish attacks on diversity, inclusion and voting rights that have become the alpha and omega of GOP politics.
It’s proper, in other words, to take a close look at Kennedy’s record on health policy and the real consequences of his anti-vaccination crusade.
Kennedy first made a splash as an anti-vax figure in 2005, when Salon.com and Rolling Stone jointly published an article under his byline headlined “Deadly Immunity.” The article asserted a link between a purported increase in autism and the presence of thimerosal, a compound of mercury used as a preservative, in childhood vaccines.
The fact is that there has never been any scientifically valid evidence for this link, and in any case thimerosal ceased to be used in the U.S. in 2001. The rise in autism diagnoses before then or since has been attributed by experts to a broadening of clinical definitions for the condition and more awareness of its multiple manifestations.
Salon ended up appending no fewer than five corrections to Kennedy’s article, and finally bowed to proliferating professional critiques of the piece by removing it from its website in 2011.
In trying to make his case, Kennedy misrepresented a conference about vaccines held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the Simpsonwood conference center outside Atlanta in June 2000. He implied that it was a secret conference, though the entire transcript was published by the CDC later that month. He used selective quotations from participants to suggest that their purpose was to hide evidence about vaccines and autism, when in truth it was nothing of the kind.
Kennedy continued to spread anti-vaccine hysteria, emerging as a walking public health hazard. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, appearing in public with a prominent local anti-vaccination figure.
By that September, the island nation was in the grip of a measles outbreak that eventually took the lives of more than 80 people. Experts blamed the outbreak on a sharp drop in measles vaccination rates, which had fallen to about 34% in 2018 from 74% the year before.
While the epidemic was still in full cry that November, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister denying that the outbreak could be blamed on “the so-called ‘anti-vaccine’ movement,” and pointed his finger instead at “a defective vaccine” that failed to target a “mutated” virus and allowed it to spread to children.
“It is a regrettable possibility that these children are [casualties] of Merck’s vaccine,” he wrote. The veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski described the letter as “a masterpiece of antivaccine dissembling, misinformation, distortion, and lies,” seemingly aimed at providing cover for anti-vaccine quacks trying to deflect responsibility for “discouraging people from vaccinating their children.”
Kennedy’s spiel has become only more febrile and inflammatory over the years. At an appearance in Sacramento in 2015, while the California Legislature was debating a measure to narrow the ability of parents to avoid immunizing their children (it passed), he called the impact of vaccines on children a “holocaust.”
Kennedy claims not to be “anti-vaccine,” but says he is merely “a vaccine safety advocate.” That’s a well-worn dodge of the anti-vaxxer movement. In 2017, Kennedy told Helen Branswell of Stat that he wanted to ensure “that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are subject to.” As vaccine expert Paul Offit observed in response, “in fact, vaccines are subjected to greater scrutiny than drugs” by the Food and Drug Administration.
During the Rogan webcast, Kennedy expanded his attack to encompass electromagnetic, wireless and 5G technology: “Wi-Fi radiation” could be causing autism, food allergies, asthma, eczema or other chronic conditions, he said. “I think it degrades your mitochondria and it opens your blood-brain barrier.”
He also promoted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19, medicines that have been approved for other conditions but have been found through repeated, painstaking studies to be useless against COVID. He retailed the familiar anti-vaccine trope that those nostrums have been deliberately suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry and government authorities.
“They had to discredit ivermectin,” Kennedy told Rogan. “Because there’s a federal law, the emergency use authorization statute, says you cannot issue an emergency use authorization to a vaccine if there’s an existing medication that has been approved for any purpose that is demonstrated effective against the target illness. So they had to destroy ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.”
That’s a baseless claim. The truth is that there is no such rule.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccination and anti-government spiel appeals to prominent entertainment and business figures who like to be thought of as iconoclasts. For instance, he’s been embraced by Elon Musk, whose apparent determination to tell it like it is has been hampered by his towering ignorance.
One group of people who are immune to Kennedy’s influence is his own family. In 2019, his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (a former lieutenant governor of Maryland), brother Joseph Kennedy II (a former congressman from Massachusetts) and Kathleen’s daughter Maeve Kennedy McKean, who died in 2020, upbraided Kennedy in Politico for having “helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media” and being “complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.”
As they pointed out, President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. were leaders in improving access to vaccines and better healthcare to Americans and others around the world.
“The fact is that immunizations prevent some 2 million to 3 million deaths a year, and have the potential to save another 1.5 million lives every year with broader vaccine coverage,” they wrote. “On this issue, Bobby is an outlier in the Kennedy family.”
Voters, take heed.
The more you dig, the more utterly batshit Robert Kennedy Junior looks.
I’d say he’s a live contender to be Trump’s running mate.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his organization, Children’s Health Defense, have frequently allied with QAnon conspiracy theorists over the past several years, appearing with them at events, praising them, partnering with them on lawsuits, and featuring them in videos.
Kennedy founded and has chaired the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (although he is currently on leave from the organization as he runs for president). As Media Matters recently documented, CHD has a history of conducting outreach to neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and QAnon supporters on Gab, a far-right social media platform that has been a haven for violent threats against Jewish people.
In recent years, Kennedy has built alliances with anti-vaccine and far-right figures. He has been a guest on the programs of Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Stew Peters, and Charlie Kirk. He has also promoted right-wing organizations Project Veritas, The Epoch Times, and Judicial Watch.
Right-wing media, in turn, have praised his presidential campaign and expressed hope that it will help Trump win the 2024 election. Trump ally and self-described Kennedy “friend” Roger Stone, for instance, said Kennedy’s campaign “will help in the end soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump in the general election.”
Kennedy and CHD have also allied with numerous QAnon conspiracy theorists. The intersection is part of a larger convergence between the anti-vaccine and QAnon movements that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The following are numerous examples of Kennedy and/or Children’s Health Defense promoting, partnering, or participating in events with QAnon conspiracy theorists in recent years.
Charlene and Ty Bollinger
Screenshot via Center for Countering Digital Hate
Charlene and Ty Bollinger are COVID-19 and health conspiracy theorists. The Bollingers have repeatedly promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, as the Center for Countering Digital Hate has documented, including tweeting the hashtags “QAnon” and “WWG1WGA” (an acronym for the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all”). Kennedy has also been incorporated into the Bollingers’ QAnon branding: When Charlene Bollinger interviewed Kennedy, the Brighteon video page of the Bollingers’ PAC included the tag: “truth wwg1wga.”
Kennedy and the Bollingers are closely connected: The Associated Press wrote in a May 2021 investigation that “the couple work closely with others prominent in the anti-vaccine movement — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Children’s Health Defense — to drive sales through affiliate marketing relationships.”
Kennedy also partnered with them in lawsuits over alleged “censorship” and recently tweeted at them: “Love you two warriors!” The Bollingers have also appeared in CHD videos.
Stephanie Locricchio
Stephanie Locricchio, whose Twitter bio includes the hashtag “MAGA,” is the advocacy and outreach manager for CHD. She also hosts videos for the organization. As Media Matters previously noted, she has spread QAnon content on social media.
Larry Cook
Larry Cook is the founder of the anti-vaccine misinformation network Stop Mandatory Vaccination. He has also attempted to increase his influence by pushing QAnon.
In June 2020, for instance, he published “step-by-step QAnon instructions” for people to network with QAnon followers. He added (emphasis in original): “Once you have a firm understanding of what’s really going on, share in social media and defend President Trump and Q with the truth. We are in an INFORMATION WAR. The first step is for us all to be informed – I am giving you the path to that – and then to share it yourself with others.”
CHD featured Cook in a 2022 video on its website, where he discussed “the first in his series of short documentary films about healthy unvaccinated families.”
Kanekoa
Kanekoa is a QAnon influencer who is active on social media. CHD published an anti-vaccine post by Kanekoa in January 2023 and cited the account in another piece. Kennedy has also promoted Kanekoa on his Twitter account.
Mel K
Mel K is a streaming host who has repeatedly promoted QAnon and claimed that “99%” of the conspiracy theory has been proven true. She appeared at an October 2021 anti-vaccine event in New York alongside Kennedy; a CHD tweet embedded a promotional image for the event with an image of Kennedy near an image of Mel K. And CHD’s website streamed her and Kennedy’s remarks.
Zach Vorhies
Zach Vorhies is an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who previously leaked documents to far-right group Project Veritas. He has frequently promoted QAnon, including writing: “We are in full revolution mode. Follow Q and join in”; “Boom, new Q - very important”; and “I use Q as one source of many that I use to share information with you.”
CHD has featured him in videos and quoted him in articles on its website.
Creative Destruction Media
Creative Destruction Media is an outlet operated by L. Todd Wood. It published a November 2020 piece headlined “Q Was Right.” The piece, which carried the byline “CD Media Staff,” told readers: “After exhaustive meetings with sources in Ukraine, who provided reams of documentary evidence for hours, CDMedia has been exposed to a massive international criminal conspiracy which spans continents and decades. Q was right. Our wold is run by a criminal syndicate unlike mankind has ever known.”
Kennedy has partnered with Creative Destruction Media in lawsuits over alleged free speech violations. CHD’s Ohio chapter partnered with Creative Destruction Media for a May 2022 event.
Querdenken 711
Querdenken 711 is a German group that hosted Kennedy during an August 2020 anti-vaccine rally. Querdenken has tied itself to the QAnon movement, as The Daily Beast reported.
The New York Times also wrote in October 2020: “Michael Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based software entrepreneur who founded Querdenken-711, the organization that has been at the center of protests against coronavirus restrictions, recently started referencing QAnon.” (Kennedy claimed in response to criticism that Querdenken is not QAnon.)
The Reawaken America Tour
Kennedy has been a “featured” speaker on the Reawaken America tour, which has frequently featured QAnon influencers. He spoke at the tour’s Anaheim, California, stop on July 17, 2021.
That event also featured, among others, QAnon conspiracy theorists Scott McKay, Rachel Hamm, Charlene Bollinger, and Ann Vandersteel. QAnon supporter Michael Flynn is the co-founder of the tour and spoke in Anaheim.
As The Associated Press noted, Kennedy appeared in a group photo — since removed — with Charlene Bollinger, Flynn, and Trump ally Roger Stone at the time of the event. (Kennedy later distanced himself from the tour after its antisemitic connections, including to McKay, were documented.)
“NCSWIC” and state Sen. Janae Shamp
The Arizona chapter of Children’s Health Defense co-sponsored the May 2023 Novel Coronavirus South Western Intergovernmental Committee, which Republicans call “NCSWIC.” That acronym also happens to stand for the QAnon slogan “nothing can stop what is coming.” In response to criticism, Republicans initially denied that it was a nod to QAnon, but Media Matters later reported that committee chair and state Sen. Janae Shamp is a QAnon supporter who previously used the QAnon phrase. CHD’s website streamed the committee’s activities.
CHD’s Arizona chapter appears to also be familiar with QAnon propaganda — under a directory for “podcasts and live tv,” it lists Brighteon TV, writing that it streams “Matrixxx Grooove,” a QAnon show.
The most heartwarming failure since Dasani bottled water:
Kennedy should be locked up in a lunatic asylum and so should the fruit loops here who support him.
Did you watch the video ?
Yes, the reports are literally quoting his words.
He’s a total nut job and is an obvious chaos agent for the Russia-affiliated Republicans and anybody who gives him the time of day should be dismissed as a crank and moron because it’s so obvious what he is.
The guy might be right. Of course he probably isn’t, but he might be. The claim that states like China and the U.S. have been trying to produce something like this is not implausible, when we think back to what they manufactured to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Howwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwever, if you’re trying to get elected as U.S. President and you harbour this knowledge or suspicion, it’s best to shut the hell up about it as most are going to see you as a complete crackpot and those who are the power brokers will see you as someone not to be trusted with national security level of classified information that he would become privy to if he were elected. The guy doesn’t stand a chance anyway. He’d be quite the attractive candidate if he didn’t open his mouth.
The reason people see RFK as a complete crackpot is because that’s exactly what he is.
Yeah, I watched the video earlier. The jewish looking chap beside him’s reactions were pretty priceless. Too much cocaine in the 80’s possibly.
Weren’t certain areas hit much worse.? New York and Italy seemed very bad
He sounds like Frank Costanza.