Sanitising a Paranoid Crank
Misleading and irresponsible journalism is being used to launder the reputation of RFK Jr.
In a recent article for the Free Press, Vinay Prasad informs us that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has plenty of perfectly reasonable suggestions for how to improve public health in the United States. It is therefore regrettable, Prasad writes, that the legacy press and sundry contemptible elites have treated Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services “poorly and unfairly.” Kennedy, he maintains, “should not be called a conspiracy theorist” merely for advancing arguments that are “well within the bounds of discussion.”
This is the second time that Prasad has found it necessary to respond to Kennedy’s critics. Back in June 2023, when Kennedy was running a doomed campaign for the Democratic nomination, Prasad wrote another article for the Free Press titled “What RFK Jr. Gets Right—And What He Gets Wrong.” In that essay, he criticised Kennedy for pushing alternative COVID-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He also said that he “vehemently” disagrees with Kennedy’s insistence that early childhood vaccines cause autism, observing that there’s “no proof” for this claim and that the “net impact” of these vaccines is “overwhelmingly positive.” He observed that “faith in standard childhood vaccines is declining, which I think is an unmitigated public health disaster.”
But Prasad also maintained that Kennedy expresses “deep truths about the public’s current—and very understandable—epidemic of distrust, the corruption of our institutions, and more.” He said he expected Kennedy to be an “important force in the Democratic Party.” He provided two examples of what Kennedy “got right”—regulatory capture and the “death of trust” in US public-health institutions—and two examples of what he “got wrong”—MMR vaccines and snake-oil COVID cures—before concluding that he was unable to pass “a final verdict” on the man. He failed to point out that Kennedy’s beliefs about the corruption of public-health institutions, the media, regulators, and so on are all grounded in rank conspiracism.
Now that Kennedy’s views are being subjected to renewed scrutiny following Trump’s decision to place him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Prasad has returned with a second assessment of Kennedy and his critics. Kennedy, he believes, is right to argue that “some childhood vaccines should be reconsidered” and that “it is not crazy to think fluoride is unnecessary” in the US water supply. He believes Kennedy was also correct about government overreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prasad offers a perfunctory criticism of Kennedy’s “long-debunked” belief that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine causes autism, but he now treats this position as a ripple of unreason in an otherwise tranquil sea of defensible positions. With that in mind, let’s review some of Kennedy’s beliefs that, for some reason, didn’t get a mention in Prasad’s second article.
Kennedy devotes long sections of his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci to the false claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Fauci and other public-health officials only claim otherwise, he writes, because antiretroviral HIV drugs are a “multibillion-dollar global enterprise,” the profits of which they are eager to protect. Kennedy declares that he hasn’t “found any evidence that HIV ever actually kills a T-cell” and promotes the views of “dissident” researchers who “argue the collapse of the immune system cannot be plausibly explained merely by the presence of HIV.” He approvingly cites German molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, a notorious proponent of HIV/AIDS denialism, who believes that HIV appears to be “an innocent bystander or a passenger virus.”
During a speech delivered at a “Defeat the Mandates” rally held at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial in January 2022, Kennedy declared that an unidentified “they” are “putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior, digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.” During a June appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy told his host’s listeners that, “WiFi radiation does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.” He went on to claim that WiFi “opens up your blood-brain barrier, and so all of these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.” In his June 2023 article for the Free Press, Prasad parenthetically allows that Kennedy’s “loose comments” on topics like WiFi “repel” him, but they are left unmentioned in his defence of Kennedy this time around.
Even when Kennedy’s positions sound superficially defensible, they are products of a deeply conspiratorial worldview. Consider, for instance, his views on COVID-19, of which Prasad generally approves. Prasad observes that Kennedy criticised lockdowns, opposed the masking and vaccination of children, and argued that the vaccines wouldn’t stop transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Prasad uses these positions to support his contention that Kennedy is a much-maligned speaker of truth to power: “Much of what [Kennedy] said was treated as ‘misinformation.’ But in each case he was right.”
Well, okay. But much of what Kennedy has said about COVID is also completely crazy. Kennedy didn’t just oppose vaccination for children—at a speech in a California church in December 2021, he said it was “criminal medical malpractice to give a child one of these vaccines” and claimed that the Pfizer shot killed more people than it saved. During his 2022 rally speech in Washington, Kennedy described the COVID vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made” and stated that unvaccinated Americans had less freedom during the pandemic than Jews were permitted during the Holocaust (a claim so stupid and offensive that he later apologised). In an August 2020 Instagram post (since deleted but archived here), Kennedy posted an infographic that pictured Bill Gates alongside the following text: “The digitalized economy? We get rid of cash and coins. We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!”
Claire Berlinski and Yuri Deigin
In July 2023, the New York Post obtained a recording of remarks Kennedy made during a press event, at which he declared, “There is an argument that [COVID-19] is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.” That final disclaimer does not change the fact that the man Trump has nominated to head the country’s Health and Human Services department is entertaining the possibility that COVID-19 was designed (as usual, we are not told by whom) to sicken and kill blacks and Caucasians but spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.
Prasad reproaches “hand-wringing” journalists for their alarmism about Kennedy without mentioning any of this. Nor does he mention Kennedy’s belief that the private sector colluded with state power during the pandemic to “indefinitely suspend” the Bill of Rights and oversee the “calamitous collapse of America’s exemplary constitutional democracy.” As Kennedy explains in The Real Anthony Fauci:
After twenty years of modeling exercises, the CIA—working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci and billionaire Internet tycoons—had pulled off the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over.
A claim that silly ought to be the headline item in any article about Kennedy’s fitness to do the job for which he has been nominated. But Prasad prefers to focus on the views he feels he can defend—like the idea that children were kept out of school for too long during the pandemic—rather than providing a full and truthful account of Kennedy’s overarching narrative, which identifies sinister plots for totalitarian domination lurking around every corner.
Prasad says Kennedy was “mostly correct” that pharmaceutical companies exploited the pandemic to make money, and he agrees that these companies “should be held accountable when their products lead to harm.” He adds that FDA officials should stop “cashing in on their government stints by joining pharma companies as soon as they leave the agency.” These statements have been selected to make Kennedy sound like a principled reformer, and readers who encounter this whitewashed summary of Kennedy’s positions will be no wiser about why critics believe a Kennedy-led HHS is such a dangerous prospect.
Plenty of mainstream journalists have covered issues like the revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, but Kennedy’s fevered speculations reach far beyond garden-variety concerns about conflicts of interest. In The Real Anthony Fauci, he denounces a “carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that has left American health ailing and its democracy shattered.” And he believes that companies like Microsoft and Oracle colluded with the US government to construct a vast authoritarian surveillance state. According to Kennedy, the parties to this sinister “government/industry collaboration” have “stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.”
During a speech in August 2020, Kennedy described government efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” He went on:
Many people argue that this pandemic was a “plandemic,” that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.
Whether he’s talking about WiFi and 5G, vaccines, or measures introduced in an effort to control the spread of a novel virus, Kennedy always returns to his grand narrative: shadowy forces are conspiring to eliminate Americans’ freedoms and transform their country into a terrifying police state. He uses the word “totalitarian” promiscuously throughout The Real Anthony Fauci. For example, he accuses Fauci of playing a “central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism.” Elsewhere in the book, he claims Fauci’s “extraordinary capacity to ruthlessly silence, censor, ridicule, defund, and ruin prominent dissidents” is comparable to “Soviet and other totalitarian systems.”
The word “coup” also makes frequent appearances:
I wrote this book so that Americans—both Democrat and Republican—can understand Dr. Fauci’s pernicious role in allowing pharmaceutical companies to dominate our government and subvert our democracy, and to chronicle the key role Dr. Fauci has played in the current coup d’état against democracy.
Kennedy speculates that HHS—the very agency Trump wants him to run—might have had advanced knowledge of the pandemic and used that knowledge to push the United States toward outright despotism. He describes a “war game code-named Crimson Contagion,” which was allegedly part of a long-incubated plan to “overthrow democracy and curtail constitutional rights.” He summarises his suspicions like this:
The Crimson Contagion’s planners precisely predicted every element of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the shortage of masks to specific death numbers—months before COVID-19 was ever identified as a threat … [T]heir overarching countermeasure was the pre-planned demolition of the American constitution by a scrupulously choreographed palace coup.
Americans’ trust in institutions has collapsed in recent years. But placing a thoroughgoing conspiracy theorist at the helm of the United States’ public-health agencies would be like putting an arsonist in charge of firefighting. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the death rate for unvaccinated Americans was several times higher than for those who received the vaccine, and partisanship is a strong predictor of vaccination status. Imagine what public-health messaging would have looked like if Kennedy had been in charge of HHS at the time. Consider how much more politicised the pandemic would have been, and how many more lives that would have cost.
Vinay Prasad is by no means the only person sanitising Kennedy, but readers of the Free Press should expect more rigour and integrity from a publication promising to uphold “the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” They did publish an opposing view by Jeffrey Flier titled “The Case Against RFK Jr.,” but this only serves to provide readers with an evenly balanced diet of lunacy and sense. And why? Because no matter how deranged Kennedy’s various pronouncements about human health and welfare may be, Prasad and his editors are unwilling to countenance the idea that he is worse than the New York Times or the other elites they hold in contempt.
Prasad repeatedly attacks mainstream media outlets in his articles about Kennedy. The “legacy press,” he writes, is guilty of “censorship” which is “insulting and infantilizing to their own viewers and helps explain why so many are tuning out.” He complains that “elites” treat Kennedy unfairly and refuse to take him seriously. And he argues that alternative media outlets (like the Free Press) are the ones covering Kennedy responsibly: “Kennedy has been widely interviewed in the world of independent media—including on the current episode of Honestly. These conversations are free-flowing and far longer than cable news hits, so they offer a more detailed portrait of his ideas.”
But if the idea is to offer a “detailed portrait” of Kennedy’s ideas, then Prasad’s Free Press articles are a failure. In its eagerness to promote voices marginalised or disdained by the mainstream, the alternative media commits its own mistakes by treating anyone or anything “anti-establishment” with timidity and credulity. Joe Rogan prefaced his interminable chat with Kennedy by saying, “One of the things I wanted to make sure I did in this conversation is not interrupt you.” He kept that promise, and Kennedy proceeded to offer three hours of unchallenged nonsense about vaccine safety, WiFi, and much else besides. This isn’t journalism—it’s advocacy for cranks.
Under the glare of increased public scrutiny, Kennedy is now busy trying to rebrand himself as a reasonable dissenting voice—he says he just wants to bring transparency to regulatory agencies and promote “evidence-based science and medicine.” He now talks about public-health issues without the undercurrent of conspiracism that has long motivated his interest in these issues. “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” he claims. Americans should ask themselves if they want an HHS secretary who finds it necessary to offer this kind of reassurance.
The normalisation of Kennedy by people who ought to know better is unlikely to end well. The man has successfully built a career around some of the most hysterical and scientifically illiterate conspiracy theories currently in circulation. His apologists are fooling themselves if they think he will suddenly become a responsible public-health official upon taking control of the United States’ health agencies. When US senators come to decide if they ought to confirm his nomination, they will hopefully disregard the deodorised version of his beliefs presented by his defenders and look instead at the positions he has freely and enthusiastically expressed for decades.
