Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Luis Granena
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was 14 years old when his father was assassinated. Senator Bobby Kennedy was a rising star who honored the presidential bid until a Palestinian immigrant took his own life after a rally in Los Angeles. This crime, committed in June 1968, is considered by many to be the late 1960s in the United States. For RFK Jr., it’s an unanswered mystery. The current Democratic presidential nominee has asserted that the man serving a life sentence for the shooting death of the former attorney general is innocent and that a second gunman was involved. A few years ago he called for the case to be reopened and the guts removed from one of the assassinations that shaped the United States.
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Kennedy Jr., 69, was convinced after conducting an independent investigation that included interviewing witnesses and reviewing police and autopsy reports. The investigation brought him only one conclusion: he needed to meet with Sirhan Sirhan, who was accused of murder. In December 2017, the environmental lawyer with degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia went to a San Diego prison to meet with his father’s killer. He was in there for three hours. He never revealed the details of the meeting to the press, but when he spoke up, his beliefs were reaffirmed. A second gunman had killed his father five years after another gunman killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
The third of Bobby Kennedy’s eleven children with Ethel Skakel, he has built his reputation on a long list of controversial conspiracy theories, including that Vladimir Putin was acting in good faith in the conflict with Ukraine. He has claimed that the 2004 election was stolen from Senator John Kerry; that the HIV emergency was invented to get companies to sell more AIDS drugs; that vaccines cause autism, that Prozac is responsible for mass school shootings in the US, that 5G technology is being used for surveillance, or that WiFi radio frequency signals can cause cancer. That the chemicals in the water make children transgender. He recently sparked another controversy when he claimed Chinese and Jews are immune to Covid-19.
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All of these claims have been disproved or unproven by science, but their arguments have been praised by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon. But they have also aroused sympathy in parts of the left. Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, the pioneering American counterculture publication, borrowed the pages of her magazine for various Kennedy articles. There he stated that George W. Bush cheated himself out of the presidency.
Kennedy Jr. has his big moment in the United States. The pandemic made him a very common voice in the conservative media when they needed a critical voice against vaccination requirements, masks and government-mandated quarantines. These are measures of authoritarian regimes, says RFK Jr. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Swiss Alps, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said at a rally in Washington early last year against the management of the Biden administration. The comments prompted his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, who plays comedian Larry David’s wife on the HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, to condemn his comments as “insensitive” and “reprehensible.”
In 2021, he published a book against epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, who has spearheaded the response to the pandemic in the United States. Kennedy Jr. called him a “powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute the historic coup against democracy in the West.” The title became a bestseller, selling more than a million copies. The attorney made part of his fortune litigating lawsuits against major drug companies from his firm, Kennedy & Madonna. This brought in $5 million in revenue last year.
Kennedy announced in April that he was running for the 2024 election. Despite his positions shared by the Republican and Trump constituencies, he aspires to become the presidential nominee of the party founded by his Democrat father and uncle. Up to 20% of his fellow believers perceive his interference positively. Despite enjoying a moment of popularity, President Biden is clearly ahead in the race, by a margin that hovers between 40 and 50 points in the polls.
A critical discourse with the major media pushed Kennedy into other areas. He is a popular guest on Joe Rogan, the most listened-to podcast on Spotify and a show that has been widely criticized for spreading misinformation to its large audience. His campaign has resonated with Silicon Valley libertarians, San Francisco financiers and tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter. In early July, his campaign reported raising $10.2 million from both Republican and Democratic supporters.
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