Front Burner - Conspiracy campaign: RFK’s presidential bid

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., John F. Kennedy’s nephew, is running for U.S. president. Like his forefathers, he’s vying to lead the Democrats – but his political focus is noticeably different. For decades, RFK Jr. has been spreading false information about vaccines, and has more recently been peddling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and 5G. Vera Bergengruen, a senior correspondent at TIME, recently interviewed RFK Jr. Today, she explains why RFK is campaigning on conspiracy theories and how he reflects a conspiratorial shift in U.S. society. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I have a short announcement to read. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. a short announcement to read. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1.44 a.m. today. When we learned Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed in 1968,

his son, RFK Jr., was just 14 years old. This was five years after the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. At the time, RFK Jr. was only nine. There's no way of calculating the millions of words that have been uttered in the course of this day in all countries of the world as human beings fumble for words to express their offended senses at what has happened in the United States. 55 years after his father's death, RFK Jr. is now following in both of their footsteps and running to be the Democratic nominee for president. But there's a stark difference between what we heard from the elder Kennedys.

And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. There are speeches made about the fact we're going to treat everybody equally, and yet we don't treat everybody equally. And what we're hearing from RFK Jr. In fact, COVID-19, there's an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. 2019 attacked certain races disproportionately. Last week, the New York Post published a video of RFK Jr., where he makes racist comments suggesting COVID could have been bioengineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

He's also been spreading false information about vaccines and autism for decades and is deep into conspiracies about 5G and totalitarian control. What we're seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control, to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent. Despite this, RFK has gained celebrity followers and unusual support across party lines in a polarized America.

Initially, he got one in five votes in polling for the Democratic primaries. Vera Bergen-Gruen is a senior correspondent at Time who recently did a long interview with RFK Jr. She's on the show today, and we're going to talk about why he's campaigning on conspiracies. Hi, Vera. Hello. So I want to start with who RFK Jr. was before he was known for peddling conspiracy theories. After the death of his father and his uncle, he struggled for a while. He became an addict.

He got kicked out of schools, eventually got busted for heroin possession. But he ended up becoming really successful in environmental law, right? That's right. I think that's something that a lot of people don't know about him because he's best known for being a Kennedy and then for everything that's happened in the last decade or so. But he was a very respected environmental lawyer. You know, he started working for the National Resources Defense Council. He was very focused on cleaning up water around New York. I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River in 1983 when I first got sober.

We forced polluters to spend almost $ billion dollars on remediation of the Hudson and today you know partially as a result of our work the Hudson is now the richest waterway in the North Atlantic and you know he was kind of hailed as the hero of the Hudson by local newspapers this was in the 70s the 80s and he started really kind of going after what he called you know any anyone he saw as a polluter so as as you know, coal companies, pesticide companies, oil companies, and he was very proud of kind of standing up for the little guy against evil big corporations that sought to poison them. He was on the magazine covers, you know, it seemed to a lot of people that he was kind of fulfilling his destiny as the son of RFK by taking on this particular mission. You show me any polluter and I'll show you a subsidy.

When those coal companies are, you know, are cutting down the mountains, which degrades the value of our country, that's a cost on the public. And making it so that children can't breathe, that's a cost. OK, so he was this respected environmental lawyer. But in the 2000s, he turned his attention to vaccines. And this was long before the anti-vax movement became what it is today. How did RFK start speaking out against vaccines? So in his telling, in his crusade against anyone he saw as a polluter, he started receiving visits from parents who said their children had been injured by mercury and vaccines. And they said that no one was doing anything about it, that health agencies were lying about the safety of vaccines. And again,

in his telling, he dismissed it for a while, and then finally sat down with this big stack of research and went through it and increasingly became convinced that health agencies were lying about the safety of vaccines in the same way that, you know, he had that health agencies were lying about the safety of vaccines in the same way that, you know, he had found that they were lying about, you know, pollution and water and all these other things he had previously done. And he always likes to portray himself as someone who, you know, studies the science and, you know, really delves deep and knows all of these details. And he fell further and further into that. And I do think it's interesting to note, there was some personal sacrifice involved in this

because everything, invitations started drying up. People started seeing him as a conspiracy theorist because there was a lot of people back then and now kind of questioning little parts of vaccine science, but he was just falling deeper and deeper into a link between autism and vaccines, which there's no medical evidence for it. And he just kept kind of using his platform as a Kennedy and as someone who, like, as we said, was on magazine covers and was a very prominent person to push widely

discredited conspiracies about vaccines. And by 2010 or so, he really was kind of an outcast. TV shows, political campaigns, you know, he basically just wasn't asked back because they couldn't platform someone who was spreading this dangerous misinformation. I've never been anti-vaccine. I'm called anti-vaccine because that's a way of kind of marginalizing and discrediting me in the view of the public. What I've said is I'm pro-science and pro-safety. And he says he himself was hurt by vaccines, right? Yeah. Anyone who's heard him recently, he speaks in this very strained voice. And it's from this vocal cord disorder he has. And he told me and he said recently that he studied some of the

side effects of the flu shot. And he thinks that's why he got it. But he actually has gotten a lot of credibility among the community that he represents by saying that he himself has suffered a vaccine injury. Yeah. So you mentioned that he says he was censored and ostracized for almost two decades because of his beliefs around this. But that changed when COVID hit in 2020. this. But that changed when COVID hit in 2020. As the US locked down and vaccines arrived,

where did RFK find popularity again? That's right. Because as you noted, he was really early to that particular kind of movement. I mean, the anti-vaccine movement has existed for decades. But this was before it really kind of started taking off. And so suddenly, he kind of seemed prescient, like it looked like he was a sage, like he had known all along that vaccines were dangerous, and that he should question them. And so when more and more people started being nervous about taking the COVID vaccine, about the rapid development of it, suddenly, he was kind of the most prominent person. And again, the Kennedy name always ends up helping a lot in this case because, you know, one does wonder how far he would get

if he wasn't a Kennedy. But, you know, he seemed like a very respected person who supported all of these views. He's part of America's most famous political dynasty, commanding an audience in a way his uncle JFK once might have. This is an anti-vaccine mandate rally, but many in this crowd hold extreme and scientifically unproven views about the COVID-19 vaccine.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is encouraging them. And, you know, I spend a lot of time reporting on the anti-vaccine movement over the course of the pandemic. And I was in all of these groups online, on Telegram, on Facebook, and among them, the name, you know, RFK Jr., it's a god, it's a hero, it's someone who they really, really believe in. And it's the name they pull out to end all arguments. You know, if RFK Jr. says something, that is basically the gospel. says something that that is basically the gospel. The Centre for Disease Control says you're 14 times less likely to die from COVID if you have the vaccine. Are you putting people's lives at

risk? Show me the scientific study that shows that. No, we are saving people's lives and we're saving democracy because children should not be getting this vaccine. So with his new following, RFK Jr. is now running for the Democratic candidacy, just like his father and his uncle did. And you've described his ideology as sort of like Trump's make America great again, but for Democrats. Can you unpack that for me? What do you mean by that? Yeah, it struck me as I was listening to him talk when he announced his candidacy that, you know, he keeps describing this ideal world. And again, knowing what happened to him in his childhood, you know, his uncle was assassinated when he was nine. His father was assassinated when he was 14. And he seems to have this very rosy particular memory of the 60s of public service and of a time when,

you know, people respected America globally. And, you know, he speaks in these terms of rivers didn't used to be polluted and companies used to be, you know, you used to be able to trust the government. It did strike me that it was somewhat similar to Trump, you know, make America great again. And I asked him about that. I asked, it strikes me that it actually sounds quite similar. You want to return to something. And he said, yeah, I want to return to the America of my youth. You know, the America that I grew up in. I wanted my children to grow up with the same pride in our country and the same love. We had, you know, communities that were filled with dignity and enrichment, and we were an exemplary nation. And he keeps repeating this particular sentence that I find very striking,

which is, I felt like my country was being taken away from me, which is pretty much the same thing that Trump says. And we're losing our country and we're losing the spirit of our country. But I will tell you, make America great again. And MAGA. Beyond vaccines, what are some of the other conspiracy theories that he's talking about in his campaign? Because it's gone way beyond just that, right? Right. And it's been interesting to see more people discover those because obviously he's very well known for his anti-vaccine activism. But, you know, he believes that 5G Wi-Fi is harvesting all of our data and trying to control us. Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run

and none of us can hide. They're 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. He has several conspiracy theories about the role of the CIA in his father and uncle's assassination, which, again, are fairly widespread. But he always seems to take them a step further. There's a lot of people who are giving him a good amount of leeway with the anti-vaccine activism, thinking he was just kind of, you know, a vaccine safety crusader.

thinking he was just kind of, you know, a vaccine safety crusader. But some of this other stuff, I mean, he really believes a really wide swath of conspiracies and they're all kind of rooted in this very dark view of the world. And so I think that's kind of the thing that's connecting all of them. The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates. It will make you a slave. What sense did you get from him about why he's running for president? So my sense was that he is very relieved to have a platform again. He says, I asked him and he says, that's not it, right? But when you talk to him, you can tell, I mean, this is someone who again, was quote unquote censored

and who loves to talk. He can talk about a variety of topics with a lot of confidence. And he couldn't do that for 15 years. And now he's on, you know, even though most mainstream sources are treating him carefully, because obviously, you can't, you know, they don't want to give a platform to a lot of these conspiracies. He has not said no to almost, you know, a single podcast, a single TV show, he goes on stage, he goes to Bitcoin conferences, you know, he, the sense I got is someone who is just relieved to have all these people to speak to again. And you know, he basically said as much himself when I asked him, he said, you know, running for president makes it much more difficult for people to censor me. And he has repeated this to many other people

as well. So I think he partly is running because, you know, he sees it as some kind of continuation of his family legacy, but really partly because, you know, he likes to talk and he likes to have people listen. Yeah, I love the love the tidbit in your piece about how he loves podcasts and he thinks that podcasts are going to be the way that he wins this election. That was pretty funny. So obviously, part of the shock of seeing RFK promoting conspiracy theories is that he's American political royalty, the lineage of JFK and Bobby Kennedy. What role is that playing in his presidential campaign? His entire presidential campaign is basically built on the legacy of his father and his uncle.

I've come here today to announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. You know, his announcement speech was, I think I counted between the two of them, he mentioned them, you know, more than two dozen times. The Kennedy for president signs at his rallies have these vintage blue block letters that look very similar for any of us who've watched footage from the 60s. And, you know, he looks a lot like his father. He kind of wears these skinny ties that were popular in the 60s. He has a rolled up sleeves. And he just, you know, seems to really willingly and knowingly lean into that. And he gave us, you know, a speech about, you know, what he said it was a peace speech that was in the tradition of JFK's 1963 speech.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war. So he does a lot of these things very knowingly to kind of remind Democrats or people in general of this other era of the Kennedy Democrats, even though, again, the things he kind of embraces do seem very different. And can you tell me about what you saw when you went to interview him at his home and what you learned about the way that he feels about the Kennedy legacy? Yeah, I mean, he lives in the hills outside of LA. And when you enter his house, you know, it's a shrine to his family to the point where it's, you know, it's a little strange,

because you will have a bust of his uncle, for example, a metal bronze bust in the corner, just kind of watching you. There is a blown up photo of himself with JFK in the Oval Office. There's, you know, his father's voter registration card is framed in the corner. There's, you know, a really big cover of Life magazine with his father on it from when he summited a mountain. We all have family heirlooms in our homes. But this is very clearly something he surrounds himself with, something he wants people who visit him to surround themselves with. And you can tell, you know, that he's grown up in the shadow of that legacy his whole life. And again, that kind of adds to his current sense of destiny.

He does, I think it's sincere. He sincerely feels like he is carrying on this legacy. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and

podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So I'm curious about who RFK's campaign has been resonating with. Why have we seen some pretty big celebrities come out in support of him? People like football player Aaron Rodgers, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, actor Alicia Silverstone from Clueless? That's the question everyone seems to be asking because in terms of his actual positions, to an extent, that's not what's drawing most people. I think it's partly, you know, there's some disenchantment with the options.

With Joe Biden, you know, there isn't like this fervent, you know, there's a lot of people who feel very ambivalent about him. And even if they wouldn't usually support someone like RFK Jr., they do seem to kind of want to use his candidacy as a platform to discuss these issues. And he seems to be attracting a lot of what I kind of call, you know, contrarian tech bros, a lot of people who just kind of love, you know, they're just asking questions, quote, unquote,

about the war in Ukraine, about vaccines, about censorship, about all these things that he loves to talk about, often very pinched with conspiracy. And having someone like RFK Jr. run gives them an excuse. You know, we saw him go on Joe Rogan's podcast, we saw him, you know, he goes on, he goes on all kinds of right wing podcasts as well. And a lot of people kind of enjoy that, you know, they enjoy having someone run that means that they can kind of raise all these provocative questions and have these discussions. That being said, it's unclear how many of them actually really support him politically. He does seem to be drawing a certain contingent of both kind of more right wing and also left wing people who share some of his views, you know, in terms of vaccines, things like that, there's a lot of kind of West Coast, more hippie types, Hollywood types, even who kind of seem to support him for that. I've spoken to a couple of people

in Silicon Valley who said that they don't really consider themselves political. They didn't vote in the last election or two, but they kind of like what he has to say. And they a lot of people kind of think that he transcends politics, even though he's running as a Democrat. And he says he's carrying on the legacy of the Kennedy Democrats. He's not most of his positions aren't particularly falling into the Democratic Party. And so a lot of people kind of think that he's, you know, a centrist and they can get behind that. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about how how this is all changing. But just really quickly, this is kind of an obscure Canadian thing. I don't know if you've heard of this, but

there was an RFK branded RV that was spotted driving around our capital, Ottawa, this month. And the person behind the wheel was this guy, Kyle Kemper. He's an anti-vaxxer and also the stepbrother of our prime minister. And it was apparently blasting the song, Stop Children, What's That Sound? Yeah. I did not hear about that. But I do know that he was very supportive of the Canadian truckers in the protest last year. It was clearly a peaceful demonstration. This was the principal theme of it. It was an organizing feature of the convoy from the beginning that it was about peace and love and justice and democracy. So maybe he was more known because of that as well.

So yeah, RFK was initially polling at 20% among Democrats. But since then, he's been spending a lot of time talking about conspiracy theories. And that video of him saying COVID could be an ethnically targeted bioweapon came out last week. How has that affected his popularity? That statistic was very striking, the 20 percent. It's important to, again, remember how far name recognition takes you. So I think people were very alarmed or interested in the fact that he was polling at 20%. But you know, his favorability among Democrats has just kind of nosedived in the last couple of weeks. And while his favorability among Republicans has continued

to increase because he goes on all of these right wing shows, he seems to attract much more of that particular audience. Again, it's not really clear how many people will truly support him if he actually runs. There's some concerns that he might run as an independent and kind of play spoiler for Joe Biden. But it's really hard to tell. I mean, he's doing what he, I think, intended to do, which is take up a huge amount of oxygen. And despite, you know, media outlets and politicians and many of the American political groups trying really hard not to give him the attention that he's craving, it's very difficult not to. When, you know, Elon Musk is having him on Twitter spaces and when all Joe Rogan has him on his podcast, which has 11 million listeners, he's kind of correctly calculated that if he just kind of goes on every single alternative medium, you know, the media and the establishment will have to pay attention to him. And so it's still it remains to be seen

what that ends up doing in terms of politics. But you know, he definitely is getting the attention that he was looking for. So just to wrap up here, given that the WHO says the global COVID emergency is over, although not the pandemic itself. Vaccine mandates and travel restrictions are basically all gone. With so much of that controversy in the rear view, why do you think there are people who are still driven to RFK because of these conspiracies? I think the pandemic was such a once-generation jarring event. There's a lot of people, even though technically many of our lives have gone back to normal and a lot of these issues that animated the people who supported RFK Jr. aren't really happening anymore, like the mandates and all of that. There's a significant part of the American electorate that wants to relitigate COVID. They want to talk about the shutdowns and about the economic pain. And, you know, and again, it was it was just a massively

tragic and just extremely disconcerting and displacing event. And there's a lot of people who are have different levels of dealing with it. But the legacy of that is a lot of conspiracies of about censorship about it's increased the number of people who are willing to kind of have those discussions. And, you know, it's having a pretty concerning effect all over the place. There's been the embrace of anti-government rhetoric, which has gotten just much bigger than it used to be before the pandemic. All the millions of Americans who are now distrusting regular vaccines, regular childhood vaccines that have nothing to do with the COVID vaccine, which before they didn't have any questions about. So it just kind of opened up this bigger appetite

for conspiracies. And again, like I said, to kind of rehash what happened in the last three years, and RFK Jr.'s candidacy kind of gives them a platform to do that. And I think even though much of the world has moved on, and many of these things aren't as relevant anymore, he's counting on the fact that enough people do want to do that. Vera, this was really interesting. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you so much. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thanks so much for listening and I will talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.