Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running for president in 2024

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ASPartOfMe
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05 Apr 2023, 8:46 pm

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is running for president as a Democrat, according to a statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday.

Kennedy, an outspoken anti-vaccine activist and the chair of the anti-vaccine nonprofit group Children’s Health Defense, is the second Democrat to officially enter the 2024 race. Self-help author Marianne Williamson launched her second White House bid in March.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is running for president as a Democrat, according to a statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday.

Kennedy, an outspoken anti-vaccine activist and the chair of the anti-vaccine nonprofit group Children’s Health Defense, is the second Democrat to officially enter the 2024 race. Self-help author Marianne Williamson launched her second White House bid in March.


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06 Apr 2023, 7:33 am

Steve Bannon encouraged him to run

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had been encouraging Kennedy to run for months, believing he could be both a useful chaos agent in the 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vaccine sentiment around the country, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News' Robert Costa.

His push against the COVID-19 vaccine has linked him at times with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with former President Donald Trump's ally Roger Stone, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen. The photo was posted but later removed by Bollinger, who has appeared with Kennedy at multiple events.

Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has sometimes apologized for those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 had it worse than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.

Kennedy has at times invoked his family's legacy in his anti-vaccine work, including sometimes using images of the late President Kennedy.

His sister Kerry Kennedy, who runs Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the international rights group founded by their mother, Ethel, said her brother has at times removed some of the content at her request.


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06 Apr 2023, 5:27 pm

His first clue this would be a bad idea should have been that steve bannon was encouraging him to run.


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06 Apr 2023, 8:44 pm

Luckily the millenials and genZers don't have any emotional connection to the Kennedy name.


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07 Apr 2023, 8:15 am

He sounds awful.


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13 Apr 2023, 2:22 am

CHD Responds to Significant Increase in Autism Prevalence: 1 in 36 Children - March 24, 2023

Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote:
It’s clear why CDC steadfastly refuses to investigate the cause of the exploding Autism epidemic, a national cataclysm that dwarfs the devastating impacts from COVID-19: The principal culprits are regulatory capture and poorly tested vaccines.

Do I need to say that Autism has not killed 1,127,104 Americans as of this writing.


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16 Apr 2023, 10:17 am

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can’t count on family support to take on Biden

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The Kennedys have been through a lot. They don’t want to go through this.

No name has appeared on more ballots or lawn signs. Even across branches of the family that have grown distant and divided since the first generation rose to power in the 1960s, they celebrate each cousin’s achievement – whether that’s a seat in the House or a new children’s book or an expansion of the Special Olympics.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination – set to be announced Wednesday in Boston – is too much for a family that defined the modern Democratic Party. They’re frustrated, sad and completely opposed.

They say they love him. They use words like “heartbroken” and “tragic.”

It’s the vaccine skepticism, which includes a book about “The Real Anthony Fauci” and saying Anne Frank was better off than Americans under supposed vaccine mandates because she could at least hide from the Nazis. It’s insisting that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t actually shoot Kennedy’s father, and breaking with many in the family years ago to argue for the assassin’s parole. Now, it’s going up against a president whose administration is stocked with Kennedys in prominent positions and who has decades of personal and emotional connections to multiple members of the family.

They see the very namesake of one of the original brothers trying to leverage the most storied family legacy in Democratic politics, for what many of them have been saying privately is a vanity run that is doomed. And that they want to be doomed.

“They’re angry to be put in this position – because they always want to support the family, but they’re being put in a position that makes that impossible,” said one person who has spoken to several members of a family generally so guarded that even longtime aides often feel like they barely understand the dynamics themselves.

“Which brother?” Chris Kennedy, a former gubernatorial candidate in Illinois, joked when asked by CNN about his thoughts on his brother’s campaign.

“This is a difficult situation for me. I love my older brother Bobby. He has extraordinary charisma and is a very gifted speaker,” Rory Kennedy, the filmmaker and youngest child of Robert F. Kennedy, told CNN. “I admire his past work as an environmentalist – because of him, we can swim in the Hudson. But due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.”

“I prefer not to talk,” texted Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who’s now an adviser on retirement at the Labor Department, when asked about the frustration within the family about her brother’s run.

Kennedy Townsend’s assessment is clear, though: She co-authored a 2019 article with her brother former Rep. Joe Kennedy II and her late daughter bemoaning that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Among her many pro-Biden tweets, meanwhile, is one a few weeks ago with a picture of the president walking in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling them, with a JFK nod, “Two Profiles in Courage.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged his family’s “close personal friendship” with Biden in a statement to CNN in which called out Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine as of one of “the bad decisions” he disagrees with: “It has been my difficult choice to put my principles ahead of my personal affections for the President which remain undiminished. Some members of my family agree with me and others do not. I bear them no ill will. Families can disagree and still love each other. We hold that possibility for the entire country too.”

But he’s leaning hard into his family connections from the start: He’s launching the campaign in Boston – a city where he never lived but that is closely associated with his family – in a hotel where his uncle, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, often appeared. He devoted three of the six sentences in the news release about his candidacy to the fact that he “hails from one of the most famous families in American political history” and the winking, semi-accurate statement that his father “mounted a major campaign in a tumultuous primary that dislodged the incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.” Promoting the announcement, he tweeted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with the image of a 1960s “KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT” campaign button.

Kerry Kennedy, another sister and the president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, drew a larger distinction between the family and the campaign.

“I love my brother Bobby,” she said, “but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues, including the COVID pandemic, vaccinations, and the role of social media platforms in policing false information. It is also important to note that Bobby’s views are not reflected in or influence the mission or work of our organization.”

Her cousin Bobby Shriver, the former mayor of Santa Monica, California, and a co-founder of the (RED) corporate anti-AIDS campaign, subtweeted the news Kennedy filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission earlier this month: “A good day to say I was thrilled to be an early support[er] of Joe Biden in 2015? Excited to work hard again!”

Patrick Kennedy, the former Rhode Island congressman who’s the son of Ted Kennedy, the younger cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an advocate for mental health and addiction issues, told CNN his feelings on the campaign are clear: “I support President Biden.”

Among other reasons, he said, that’s because Biden has done “more than any other president” to enforce a bill that prohibits insurance companies from discriminating against people with mental illnesses or addictions and because of his broader support for efforts to reform the mental health and substance use disorder system.

For many Kennedys, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taps into a deeper existential fear for the family. The Americans who revered the original brothers are well into retirement age and starting to die. Even the memories of the next generations’ tabloid dramas and curse-like tragedies have begun to fade. They worry that the real effect of this presidential campaign may not be taking many delegates from Biden but making people think that what he stands for is what the family’s all about.

Decades of deep Kennedy connections for Biden
Biden has been quoting one of the less famous lines from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 moonshot speech since his first doomed run for president in 1987. He usually says it as, “We refuse to postpone,” though the actual quote Kennedy quote was, “We are unwilling to postpone.” He has a clipped section of the original prompter script, given to him by Caroline Kennedy, framed and hanging in his private study in the White House. Bobby Kennedy, Biden has often said, was one of two heroes – along with Martin Luther King Jr. – for him as a young man entering politics. He keeps busts of both on his desk in the Oval Office.

But the connection for Biden is about more than political inspiration. After the car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and baby daughter a few weeks after he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, Ted Kennedy was a consoler and confidant, another young senator who had worked his way through grief and mourning in office.

That meant many long sessions in Kennedy’s office in the Hart Senate Office Building. Less known, though arguably more meaningful to the future president, were multiple train trips Kennedy made to Delaware to see Biden and his family in those months.

Biden has said that the late senator made him feel like he was his little brother. At the opening of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the US Senate in 2015, then-Vice President Biden called him “my tutor and my guide.”

On Air Force One last week en route to Belfast with former Rep. Joe Kennedy III (RFK’s grandson, RFK Jr.’s nephew and now Biden’s special envoy to Northern Ireland), Biden called Ethel Kennedy (RFK’s widow and his soon-to-be primary challenger’s mother) to wish her a happy 95th birthday.

“He said he went into politics because of Robert Kennedy, Uncle Ted was a great help when his family died in the car crash and Jack Kennedy was the first Irish president going to Ireland and now he’s the second, and he hopes he can fill Jack’s shoes,” Kerry Kennedy recounted on Instagram with an old picture of Biden and Ethel Kennedy together, framed by a heart. “Mum replied, ‘We love you Joe and Joe!’”

A Biden-Kennedy administration
At almost the same moment Biden was on that call, second gentleman Doug Emhoff was at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, across the bay from the planned presidential announcement, talking about combating hate and antisemitism in a speech introduced by John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg.

The event, planned long before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed his presidential paperwork, was just the latest example of how intertwined the Kennedys are with the Biden administration. In addition to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend at the Labor Department and Joe Kennedy in Northern Ireland, Caroline Kennedy – John F. Kennedy’s daughter and Schlossberg’s mother – is the ambassador to Australia, and Vicki Kennedy – Ted Kennedy’s widow – is the ambassador to Austria.

Asked for Vicki Kennedy’s thoughts about her nephew’s campaign – or how the family connection might affect her diplomatic work for the man he’s challenging – a spokesperson from the US Embassy in Austria said only that the “ambassador does not make any statements concerning the family, including any political activities of family members.”

Then again, the first thing in her personal Twitter account bio after being a proud mother, grandmother and dog lover is that she “believe[s] in vaccinations.”

An aide to Caroline Kennedy in the US Embassy in Australia did not return a request for comment.

Worries about the personal toll for a sibling, cousin, uncle
Multiple Kennedys and friends of Kennedys talk wistfully about the Bobby they say they used to know, with stories about him saving birds with broken wings and giving them to siblings as gifts, or his environmental work in New York with the group Riverkeeper, which many assumed would lead to a potentially front-running campaign for New York attorney general in 2006 that never materialized.

That’s been overtaken in their minds by a sense that he’s lost his way. In addition to their other worries about the campaign, several Kennedys and friends told CNN that out of love for him, they are concerned that a campaign will lead to digging up past pain like his drug problems in the 1980s and a troubled marriage to his second wife, who died in 2012.

So the best they can hope for, several said, is that this campaign ends quickly and quietly.

If his campaign starts to make waves, though, and if Biden launches his own campaign as expected, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may end up being what unites the disparate family, one of them joked – for an event where many Kennedys stand together to endorse Biden.


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19 Apr 2023, 9:18 pm

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. formally announces bid for president

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In a speech in Boston, Kennedy stressed his 30 years as an environmental lawyer and said the country is living in toxic polarization. But he notably did not mention his own anti-vaccine views or group, the Children's Health Defense, which researchers have found is among the most influential spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation. Facebook and Instagram have both removed the group's accounts for spreading misinformation.

Members of the famously tight-knight Kennedy family have spoken out against his anti-vaccine advocacy, and he joked Wednesday that they were not in attendance.

But a large part of his speech was spent blasting the response to coronavirus pandemic and specifically lockdowns, calling them the biggest transfer of wealth in the country and claiming they did not work. He blamed former President Donald Trump for caving to bureaucracy.

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"A lot of people say President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things that he didn't do. And he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country is lockdowns," Kennedy said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy had repeatedly criticized the government's approach, and at a 2022 event, he said that "even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did." He later apologized for those remarks.

In Wednesday's speech, Kennedy also slammed the U.S. health care system, and vowed to end the "chronic disease epidemic as president."

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had been encouraging Kennedy to run for months, believing he could be both a useful chaos agent in the 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vaccine sentiment around the country, CBS News previously reported.

Kennedy has been linked with far-right figures, and has appeared on InfoWars. He has also appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

At Wednesday's announcement, Kennedy tried to instead link himself with the Democratic Party, calling himself a "Kennedy Democrat." He was introduced by two-time presidential candidate and former congressman Dennis Kucinich and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines.


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22 Apr 2023, 4:28 am

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's Chances of Beating Biden, According to Polls

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On Wednesday, Kennedy announced his long-shot bid for 2024 and launched his campaign from Boston, where he spoke about his father's 1968 campaign, his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry and his career as an environmental lawyer in a nearly two-hour speech.

Although one recent poll showed that a number of Biden voters are prepared to swing to Kennedy, the president fares well in a hypothetical matchup against the political newcomer. The only name that could close that gap into single digits has been former First Lady Michelle Obama, who has not signaled any plans to run for the White House.

In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll conducted Saturday through Tuesday, 14 percent of Biden's 2020 supporters said they would vote for Kennedy. Comparably, 67 percent of those voters said they would re-elect Biden, 13 percent remained undecided and 5 percent backed Williamson.

Despite there being an overwhelming number of voters who support a second Biden term, David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said that the survey indicates Democratic voters are receptive to another option.

"In 2020, Joe Biden received more votes than any other president in U.S. history, yet the poll tells us that those same voters are open to other Democrats to wage a spirited primary," Paleologos told USA Today. "Kennedy, although a long shot at this point, starts in double digits and can't be ignored".

However, a poll conducted by Morning Consult earlier this month showed slightly stronger odds for Biden, who had a 60-point lead over Kennedy, 70 to 10 percent. Four percent of those respondents chose Williamson.


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30 Apr 2023, 3:04 pm

Why Steve Bannon and Alex Jones love Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Before entering the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat, Robert Kennedy Jr. spent years cultivating the kind of following on the far-right that now has prominent Donald Trump allies urging the former president to consider Kennedy as his running mate.

Kennedy inhabits an ambiguous ideological space. He's proudly running as a Democrat who supports abortion rights and gun control, but his views on vaccines and other issues — and frequent appearances on outlets from Fox News to Alex Jones’ Infowars — have made him popular among far-right conspiracy theorists.

That groundwork is paying off in the form of widespread praise from conservative media influencers who have urged their audiences to keep an open mind about Kennedy, perhaps eager to use him as a foil against President Joe Biden.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said he received a “standing ovation” from a “hardcore MAGA” crowd at a recent speaking engagement for floating the idea of a bipartisan Trump-Kennedy ticket. “Bobby Kennedy would be, I think, an excellent choice for President Trump to consider” as a running mate, Bannon said this week on his War Room show.

Roger Stone, the former Richard Nixon aide who was one of Trump’s early political advisers, called Trump-Kennedy a “dream ticket” on the news program Real America.

While Stone said he disagrees with Kennedy on some issues, he likes the candidate's opposition to “globalists” and skepticism of continued U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia. “On those geopolitical ideas, he makes a lot of sense. In fact, he sounds a lot like Donald Trump,” Stone said.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, on Friday tweeted, “I am really starting to like this presidential candidate’s attitude.”

Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk on April 6 called Kennedy “one of the most articulate and thoughtful political activists going after the administrative state.”

A day earlier, conservative talk show host Steve Deace posted a picture with Kennedy on Twitter saying, “As long as he doesn’t go trans, a man with high character and courage like RFK Jr will be tempting.” And QAnon influencer Jordan Sather posted to Trump’s Truth Social platform saying he hopes to see “RFK Jr. redpilling the hell out of libs on the vaccine.”

While Biden is overwhelmingly favored to reclaim the Democratic nomination, early polls show a sizable portion of the party's base interested in Kennedy — though most mainstream Democratic operatives dismiss that as a product of his recognizable last name.

A recent Emerson College poll found Kennedy with 21% of the vote among Democrats, while a Fox News poll had him at 19% among Democratic primary voters. Marianne Williamson, the other declared Democratic candidate in the race, had smaller but not insignificant support in both polls.

Asked for comment about the praise from conservatives, Kennedy campaign communications director Stefanie Spear said only, “He is a candidate for the Democratic nomination.”

Kennedy has pushed back on reports that Bannon encouraged him to run for president as a chaos agent against Biden, tweeting on April 8, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign.”

That hasn't stopped Kennedy from receiving praise from right-wing influencers who may be trying to draft the scion of the famous political family into a similar role as the one Rep. Tulsi Gabbard played in the 2020 Democratic primary, when she made common cause with the right by claiming the primary was rigged against her.

Ignored or fact-checked by mainstream news outlets, Kennedy has found a friendlier reception in contrarian alternative media, which promote alternative medicine alongside conspiracy theories about UFOs about the CIA, which Kennedy has blamed for killing his father and uncle.

“I don’t agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on some topics, but he’s a man of integrity that fights fluoride and poison shots and fentanyl and everything else. He’s a good man,” Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist said on his Infowars broadcast this month. “He’s got a lot of guts, and I really support him for the Democratic nomination.”

“If he backed off gun control, which he doesn’t really talk about, and became more pro-life, which he is starting to do, I would support him over most RINO Republicans. So I would actually vote Democrat,” Jones continued. “I mean, I would vote for Trump over him or [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, but if he won the presidency, that’s a classy guy who is a good man and who cares about people and who is against the establishment. He’s a good man. That’s why the whole media is attacking him right now.”

A few days later, when a caller told Jones he was surprised how much of Kennedy’s messaged resonated with him, Jones replied, “Kennedy’s definitely awake, and knows what’s going on, and has been listening to the show for a very long time.”

“I’ve been at the forefront of the JFK assassination and Robert F. Kennedy assassination information and of course covered it forever. Well, he knows better than anybody what really happened, so that’ll kind of wake you up when the government kills your dad and your uncle.”

Kennedy was also one of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s final guests this month. He received what he called a “very kind introduction” from Carlson, who said he agreed with “most” of what Kennedy said.

After Carlson was fired, Kennedy defended him for a “breathtakingly courageous” monologue against Covid vaccines, suggesting he was fired because he “crosse[d] the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers.”


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06 May 2023, 8:51 pm

Robert Kennedy Jr. to make campaign debut at bitcoin conference

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first appearance as a presidential candidate will be at a cryptocurrency conference in Miami this month as the iconoclastic Democrat embraces a controversial industry that environmentalists say is a major contributor to climate change.

Kennedy, the vaccine-skeptic environmental lawyer whose uncle was President John Kennedy, has not held any public campaign events since he launched his Democratic primary bid against President Joe Biden last month in Boston, the homeland of his famous family.

Before stumping in an early primary state like New Hampshire, Kennedy will keynote the Bitcoin 2023 conference, billed as the “biggest bitcoin event in the world,” where tickets start at $899 and the all-access VIP “Whale” pass goes for $9,999.

“We asked him to speak after hearing his positive comments toward the bitcoin industry,” said Brandon Green, chief of staff to conference organizer BTC Media.

Kennedy will not be paid for his appearance, Green said. And his spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, said Kennedy would not accept speaking fees for any events during his 2024 presidential campaign.

While many policymakers turned away from the crypto industry after a series of high-profile failures that wiped out small-time investors and led to federal fraud charges, Kennedy has positioned himself as one of the nation’s most prominent political champions of cryptocurrency.

Anthony Scaramucci, the crypto-friendly investor who briefly served as former President Donald Trump's communications director, said Kennedy’s promotion of cryptocurrency could endear him to its millions of devoted users.

“In my mind, there’s this shadow fandom or currently invisible lobbying group — and it’s probably currently about 77 million people — of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency holders in the United States,” said Scaramucci, who was quick to say he did not agree with all of Kennedy’s beliefs. “I think it’s going to be a topical issue in 2024, and I would imagine that one of these presidential nominees will embrace bitcoin. And if they do, that’ll give them an edge.”

While the bitcoin community has “a libertarian bent by nature" that may not align with most Democrats, Scaramucci said, “these are people who are typically agnostic to party."

The only other political leaders speaking at Bitcoin 2023 are Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — who said he considered picking Kennedy as his running mate — Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and the governor of the Indonesian state of West Java.

In a series of tweets, Kennedy echoed libertarian views of cryptocurrency as a tool to fight repressive governments and hailed it as "a major innovation engine."


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07 May 2023, 5:44 am

I hope he doesn't get in. I don't like his stance on autism and vaccines.


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18 May 2023, 9:15 pm

Longtime Democrat, former presidential candidate makes return to politics to run RFK, Jr. campaign, oust Biden

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A longtime Democratic figure and former presidential candidate stepped back onto the public political stage Thursday when it was announced he will be serving as campaign manager for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s effort to beat out President Biden for the party's 2024 nomination.

Dennis Kucinich, a former Ohio Congressman who unsuccessfully ran for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination against then Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, has been advising Kennedy for months, and introduced him at his campaign kickoff in Boston last month.

Kennedy's campaign made the appointment official in a press release touting Kucinich's experience and referred to him as "one of the foremost progressive voices in American politics."


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03 Jun 2023, 8:32 am

Elon Musk Makes a Surprise Offer to Joe Biden's Rival

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Critics also accused Musk of politicizing Twitter by publicly endorsing a political party candidate. Most social networks try as much as possible to put a distance between themselves and politicians, often limiting themselves to supporting efforts to encourage people to vote.

To sweep away the criticism, Musk had said that all candidates were welcome. The billionaire has just put this promise into practice by inviting one of President Joe Biden's rivals for the Democratic nomination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The invitation came after Kennedy complained on Twitter about being censored by Instagram, one of social-media giant Meta Platforms' (META) - Get Free Report sites.

"Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening?" the presidential hopeful wrote on June 1.

He added that: "To silence a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic. Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square. How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?"

Musk then did not hesitate to make him an offer.

"Would you like to do a Spaces discussion with me next week?" the tech luminary asked Kennedy on June 2.

Kennedy jumped at the offer and accepted it.

"Yes! How's Monday at 2 p.m. ET?" he responded.

The exchange between the two men was welcomed by many Twitter users including Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter.

"This would be great," Dorsey commented.

Kennedy has a following among conspiracy theory fans on the right. While he supports abortion rights and gun control, his positions against vaccines make him a darling in the right-wing media where he is often invited.

The scion of the Democrats' most prominent family also questions the U.S.'s support for Ukraine in the war with Russia.


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08 Jun 2023, 11:10 am

Silicon Valley's loudest moguls get behind RFK Jr.

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Several of Silicon Valley's noisiest tech moguls have begun to support the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vocal anti-vax activist who's challenging President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination.

Why it matters: This could increase pressure on Biden to debate Kennedy, something he's thus far declined to entertain.

Driving the news:Jack Dorsey endorsed RFK Jr. last week, while venture capitalists and popular podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya next week will jointly host a fundraiser in the Bay Area.

Elon Musk also hosted RFK Jr. on a Twitter Spaces event earlier this week, a platform he's offered to all presidential candidates.

What they're saying: "He's going to hopefully have lots of time to explain what he believes [about vaccines] in enough nuance," argues Palihapitiya, who adds that RFK Jr. "is allowed to have beliefs I don’t 100% agree with."

Palihapitiya also stressed that while RFK Jr. is "really dynamic and credible," his support is also being driven by a belief that Democratic Party voters need to see Biden debate in order "to know he's ready for another four years."

The bottom line: A handful of Silicon Valley elites won't determine the presidential nominee, let alone topple an incumbent president. But they could help narrow the money gap and keep Kennedy in the race longer than a typical long shot.


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14 Jul 2023, 3:52 pm

Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC Has Deep Ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos

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LAST MONTH, SUPPORTERS of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid created a Super PAC titled Heal the Divide. On its website, the group — whose name is borrowed from Kennedy’s own campaign slogan — advises voters that “Only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can unite the Nation to start healing America,” and allows visitors to donate both in dollars and cryptocurrency.

There’s nothing abnormal about a candidate getting a Super PAC, even a candidate making a long-shot bid like Kennedy’s. What is abnormal, however, is that Kennedy is running as a Democrat in the Democratic primary, while the creators of the Super PAC have a deeply pro-Donald Trump bent — including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, and Herschel Walker.

Federal Election Commission filings list Jason D. Boles of RTA Strategy as its treasurer and use RTA’s website and mailing address. In 2022, Greene’s campaign and leadership PAC, Save America Stop Socialism, paid the firm more than $372,000 for work on her 2022 congressional race, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

The Georgia-based RTA, founded by political consultant Rick Thompson, also worked for Walker in his failed 2022 Senate race in Georgia. Thompson served as custodian for Walker’s campaign committee and Boles worked as treasurer of the committee, earning the firm roughly $50,000, according to campaign-finance records. More recently, Boles and Thompson have signed on as treasurer and designated agent, respectively, for the embattled Santos after the indicted congressman struggled to find personnel to handle his campaign finances.

Reached by phone, Thompson declined to comment on the Kennedy Super PAC. “We have a strict policy at our firm that we don’t discuss our clients,” he tells Rolling Stone. And the Heal the Divide site does not advertise its Republican backing. But a mistake on the group’s website gives away its origins: The site’s terms of service appear to have been copied and pasted from MAGA PAC, a Trump Super PAC, and incorrectly refers to the Heal the Divide site as MAGApac.com.

t’s not just one MAGAfied Super PAC, however, that’s backing Kennedy’s run against President Biden in the Democratic primary. His bid is awash in support from Donald Trump’s allies in MAGA World, conservative media, and some of the Republican-donor elite. Broadly, they’re hoping Kennedy will make Biden look weak in the primary, hurting his chances against Trump — or whichever candidate emerges from the GOP primary.

MAGA influencers and longtime Trump associates such as Roger Stone have praised Kennedy’s candidacy as a way to “soften Joe Biden up.” Former top Trump political adviser and campaign strategist Steve Bannon also reportedly spent “months” encouraging Kennedy to run in order to energize anti-vaxxers who make up much of Trump’s base, according to CBS News.

But whether he wants pro-Trump support or not — he’s certainly getting it.

At Fox News, three staffers and a producer tell Rolling Stone that some higher-ups have privately discussed how much they value not just interviewing Kennedy on the network, but featuring segment after segment about his candidacy and his unexpected poll numbers in the 2024 Democratic field. “Management loves RFK [Jr.] coverage because it makes Biden look weak. You can expect a lot of it,” the Fox producer says.

Before Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox in April, the network’s then-top host would promote Kennedy and argue that the candidate somehow wasn’t an extremist. “So, at this point, the question isn’t who in public life is corrupt? Too many to count. The question is, who is telling the truth? There are not many of those. One of them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Carlson said on Fox earlier this year.

In the time since, other hosts have praised or interviewed Kennedy, though some not quite as sympathetically as Carlson once did. Still, Kennedy has continued to enjoy a wellspring of backing from influential right-wing media outlets, including among the top tier at Fox.

Pete Hegseth, another Fox News host who, like Carlson, has privately advised Donald Trump on policy over the years, defended Kennedy in an April segment, saying: “The establishment will do whatever it takes to keep Biden in the White House. You know that. He’s very useful to them.… The deep state gets deeper every day. They work quietly while Joe does other things. They’re already trying to kneecap Joe’s primary opponents. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — he’s surging in the polls.… Now that he’s a threat, [the mainstream media is] going for his throat.”

Meanwhile, Trump and some of his senior aides have delighted in Kennedy’s presence in the 2024 race, viewing him as a useful anti-Biden agent of chaos, according to three sources on and close to the Trump campaign. The ex-president and 2024 GOP front-runner briefly praised Kennedy during this month’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, while getting his name wrong, calling Kennedy “very nice” and a “very, very fine person” who Trump knows “very well.”

Members of Trump’s team are also pushing the message that Kennedy’s candidacy is a sign of Biden’s weakness.

Wealthy right-wing donors and activist groups have also pitched in to support and amplify the long-shot presidential campaign.

David Sacks, the South African-born venture capitalist who has donated to Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign and hosted his campaign launch on Twitter, recently held a fundraiser for Kennedy last week. He was joined by fellow venture-capital investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The event included “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents,” according to Palihapitiya.

The far-right anti-gay group Moms for Liberty has also scheduled Kennedy to speak at its annual summit in Philadelphia next week. In advertising the summit, the group leads with a quote from conservative 2016 presidential-primary candidate Ben Carson: “A lot of individuals in the room have decided to get up and do something about what they believe because that is what is going to save us as a nation.”

Kennedy’s claim that he’s running to defeat Trump contrasts with his stance when the 45th president was first heading to the White House. During the Obama-Trump presidential transition in January 2017, Kennedy visited the then-president-elect at Trump Tower in Manhattan — for a job interview.

According to a former senior Trump transition official, Kennedy “wanted to have some kind of role in vaccine research and the questions he raised about the safety of the vaccines,” and had been following some of what Trump had been saying about vaccines, including regarding the widely debunked theories about links to autism. Just after Kennedy left this meeting, Trump said to staff, “Oh, he’s gonna help us with vaccines,” according to the former official.

Kennedy’s senior role on so-called “vaccine safety” never happened in Trump’s four years in office. Several of Trump’s closest advisers during the transition and early administration urged him never to appoint Kennedy to that kind of position, arguing that Kennedy had too much baggage and would be too much of a public-relations nightmare for the young presidency, former White House aides say. “It took longer to talk him out of it than it should have,” says a former senior administration official, who recalls trying to talk Trump out of officially appointing Kennedy in the Oval Office. But ultimately, Trump got talked out of it. In the years since, Kennedy has publicly trashed Trump for helping to launch the “tyranny” of Covid-19 vaccination.

The 2024 campaign is far from the first time that Kennedy has rubbed elbows with MAGA donors. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy’s political ecosystem often tilted to the fringes of the left, capitalizing on liberal skepticism of large pharmaceutical companies. But as Trump pushed Covid-19 myths and attacked public-health experts in 2020, the far-right swelled the ranks of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and offered Kennedy a new audience.

In particular, Kennedy has courted Ty and Charlene Bollinger, two pro-Trump political activists who held a rally outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 to promote Trump’s lies about a stolen election. The couple, labeled as members of the “Disinformation Dozen” for their prominence in posting vaccine myths on social media, have featured Kenendy in an interview on their United Medical Freedom Super PAC, and as a speaker at their Truth About Cancer Live anti-vaccine conference alongside Eric Trump.

David and Leila Centner, two big-dollar donors who forked over $1 million for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and attended the former president’s Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally on the mall, also briefly served on the board of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense nonprofit.


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman