Environmental lawyer and vaccine safety activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to run for president in 2024 as a Democrat. RFK Jr. is the son of former U.S. attorney general and assassinated 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy.
The 69-year-old reportedly plans to make a formal announcement of his candidacy on April 19 in Boston, with a campaign slogan of “freedom first.” He is the second candidate to declare a run for the Democratic nomination, joining the eclectic spiritualist Marianne Williamson, who announced her candidacy on March 4.
As a member of the Kennedy political dynasty, RFK Jr. was once highly revered in Democratic political circles. But now, as his Wikipedia page tells us, he is known primarily for “promoting anti-vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper dismissively refers to Kennedy as an “anti-vaccine quack.”
CNN's Fake Jack Tapper Smears Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as an "Anti-Vaccine Quack" pic.twitter.com/Hyy0zedS8U
— 1776 (@TheWakeninq) April 6, 2023
Kennedy, in turn, argues that his critics can’t point to a single erroneous statement he’s made.
“Everything we post is vetted, it is sourced and cited to government databases or peer-reviewed publications,” he said after he was suspended from Instagram.
“When they use the term ‘vaccine misinformation,’ they are using it as a euphemism for any statement that departs from official government policies and pharmaceutical industry profit-making,” RFK Jr. added. “It has nothing to do with whether it’s true or false, it only has to do with what the political implications are.”
Instagram banned the historical Kennedy family of the USA 🇺🇸@RobertKennedyJr Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself, has been banned from @instagram , but he can't be silenced. Let's show our support and continue to post his videos on @instagram or through other platforms that support… pic.twitter.com/K4dhPPYXoJ
— Augustus Pallante (@Human_Augustus) April 5, 2023
It’s true that Kennedy has been vocal about the harms associated with vaccines, and most recently, the COVID-19 gene therapy “vaccines,” but what most people don’t realize is that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the anti-vax world.
As he explained in his speech last October at the first Children’s Health Defense conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, Kennedy had all of his kids duly vaccinated and always got the flu vaccine himself every year. The Kennedy family, he noted, had been “immersed in public health” for decades. His deceased uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), for example, sat on the Senate Health Committee for 50 years and wrote appropriations for NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins.
His worldview changed about 20 years ago, after he kept encountering the parents of severely vaccine-injured children, who at the time, were the only people standing up to Big Pharma and the regulatory agencies.
As the founder of Waterkeeper Alliance, the world’s largest clean water advocacy organization, Kennedy was traveling the country in 2004 giving lectures about the dangers of mercury emissions in the water, which, he noted, “had contaminated virtually every freshwater fish in America.”
Following many of these appearances, mothers would approach him, Kennedy said, and they would tell him in “a polite, respectful, scolding way” that if he was serious about eliminating the perils of mercury, he would need to look at the toxic mercury-based preservative thimerosal, which is used in vaccines. Thimerosal contains 49.6 percent mercury by weight.
“At every speech I gave, these women started showing up and occupying the front row,” Kennedy explained, noting that they tended to be “well to do” doctors, pharmacists, and scientists with enough time on their hands to attend his speeches.
He said they told him that the mercury in vaccines was more harmful than the mercury in fish, but as someone who had always trusted vaccines, he was skeptical.
“I didn’t know enough about it, and didn’t want to learn it,” he admitted.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, when psychologist Sarah Bridges, the mother of a severely vaccine injured little boy, paid him a visit at his house on Cape Cod, that the tide turned.
After an eight-year legal battle, Bridges had received a $20 million judgment from the vaccine court, with an acknowledgement that her son Porter had gotten his autism, seizures, and brain damage from the thimerosal in the pertussis vaccines.
“The vaccine court at that time was still admitting it,” Kennedy explained. “She brought me a big pile—about an 18 inch stack of scientific studies—and she said ‘I’m not leaving here until you read these.'”
Kennedy said that he sat down and started reading through the abstracts, and he was able to quickly determine that “we were being lied to.”
At that point, he added, he realized that what the public health agencies and the pharmaceutical companies were telling people about vaccine safety contradicted what the actual science was saying. Kennedy said he started making phone calls to the regulators and found that they couldn’t answer his questions.
In 2011, Kennedy founded the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which is dedicated to solving “chronic health conditions caused by environmental exposures.” Wikipedia, of course, describes CHD as “a group mainly known for anti-vaccine propaganda and has been identified as one of the main sources of misinformation on vaccines.”
RFK Jr. told the audience in Knoxville that the American people need to resist the fascist merger of state and corporate power, calling it “one of the great battles in American history.”
“What we have to understand as a people is that fascism is the domination of government by business. Communism is the domination of business by government, and it’s not on a linear surface,” he explained. “It’s on a circle. If you push either of those philosophies, by logical conclusion, you end up in the same place, and that’s exactly what’s happened in China today, where there is no distinction between a Chinese corporation and the Chinese government.”
Kennedy said that outcome “is the most scary thing of all” because the people become commoditized, the landscape becomes commoditized . . . and that’s what’s happening to us today.” He said the American people need to walk that narrow trail of free-market capitalism and democracy where “big business is kept at bay with our left hand, and government is kept at bay with our right hand.”
The only way to accomplish this, Kennedy argued, is “with an educated public that is capable of critical thinking,” but “equally important, we need an independent, fiercely skeptical, robust press that is always speaking truth to power!”
“We’ve lost that completely,” he lamented. “We have a press that has become vessels for corporate and government propaganda and that is crushing the powerless.”
Kennedy has fought against many of the Biden regime policies, especially those related to the COVID-19 shots, but has also been critical of former president Donald Trump for failing to drain the swamp, as promised. He recounted in an interview with podcast host Jimmy Dore how after the 2016 election, Trump had tapped him to be on a vaccine safety commission.
“When that news got out, Pfizer gave him $1 million for his Inaugural party, and then he appointed two of Pfizer’s lobbyists, Scott Gottlieb and Alex Azar to run HHS and they killed the vaccine safety commission, and then Gottlieb went on to serve on Pfizer’s board,” he told podcast host Jimmy Dore. “That is the swamp.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on President Trump draining the swamp: pic.twitter.com/Uo18ZV2rez
— STACKS (@stacksNoWO) April 5, 2023
Kennedy suffers from a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which causes his voice to quaver and makes speech difficult.
In a recent interview with Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders,” Kennedy lamented America is no longer a democracy and that its elections are controlled by wealthy donors.
“It’s more of an oligarchy or a plutocracy that only is responding to the needs of the rich and to the needs of corporations, who are paying the lobbying election costs of the politicians, who then become their indentured servants on Capitol Hill,” Kennedy told host Jan Jekielek.
Perhaps more than any other 2024 hopeful, RFK Jr. has decried the corrupt “capture” of American regulatory agencies that become beholden to the industries they’re supposed to regulate, particularly the pharmaceutical industry.
“When I began litigating and advocating on the vaccine issue in 2005, I was immediately dumbstruck by not only the level of agency capture within the public health agencies, but the financial entanglements, which were unprecedented in other agencies that basically put agency capture on steroids,” he said in the EpochTV interview.
Kennedy noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration receives 75 percent of its drug approval budget and 45 percent of its total budget from the pharmaceutical industry.
“Not only NIH [National Institutes of Health] as an agency, but individual scientists within NIH are allowed to patent drugs that they work on and then turn over to the pharmaceutical industry and collect royalties on them. Those scientists over the past decade or so have collected some $300 million in royalties,” he said.
Kennedy also warned against the Fed’s “FedNow” Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which is slated to launch in July.
“CBDCs grease the slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny,” RFK Jr. tweeted on Wednesday.
The Fed just announced it will introduce its “FedNow” Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in July. CBDCs grease the slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny.
While cash transactions are anonymous, a #CBDC will allow the government to surveil all our private…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 5, 2023
“America is enduring an apocalyptic tribal polarization more toxic and dangerous than any time since the Civil War, and while Democrats battle Republicans, elites are strip-mining our middle class, poisoning our children, and commoditizing our landscapes.” Kennedy told the Epoch Times after filing the election paperwork. “I will focus my campaign, not on the issues that divide us but the values we have in common.”