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.
More likely, in my view, it’s a sign that some Democrats are worried about President Joe 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.)
