by Sharon Rondeau
(Apr. 28, 2023) — In an “exclusive” on Thursday, ABC News’s Linsey Davis interviewed Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 69, who officially launched his campaign on April 19 in Boston.
At the time, Joe Biden had not yet announced his campaign for re-election, which occurred on Tuesday despite his 2019 pledge not to seek a second term were he to be elected in 2020.
Even before RFK Jr.’s announcement, the media launched a campaign to characterize his candidacy as “quixotic” and a “long shot,” citing his history with drugs and alcohol beginning after his father’s 1968 assassination, which RFK Jr. acknowledged in a 2018 memoir, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family.”
In its reportage The Daily Mail accentuated Kennedy’s personal life, including his three marriages, the last of which took place after his second wife committed suicide.
In 1983, Kennedy was arrested for “heroin possession” while he served as an assistant district attorney in New York City. He entered a “guilty” plea and was sentenced to two years of probation and community service, according to Wikipedia. He recovered from addiction through the Twelve Step Program, Kennedy states in his book, and worked for an environmental organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, during his probation.
The following year he went on to become an investigator for Riverkeeper, which “protects and restores the Hudson River from source to sea and safeguards drinking water supplies, through advocacy rooted in community partnerships, science and law.”
Consequently, Time Magazine deemed Kennedy among its “‘Heroes for the Planet’ for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River.”
In 2018 Kennedy won a landmark lawsuit against Monsanto for $290 million. The following year, he helped facilitate a settlement between Southern California Gas and the state of California for the company’s 2015 natural gas leak at the Aliso Canyon storage facility found to have released ethane and methane into the atmosphere in significant quantities.
The consent decree between SoCalGas and then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, now Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, included an obligation on the part of the company to donate to the Aliso Fund established to advance six environmental projects, among them, “Improvement of Air Quality in Public Schools in Environmental Justice Communities in the City or County of Los Angeles; Enhanced Air Monitoring and Environmental Reporting in Porter Ranch and Other Locations in Los Angeles County; and Purchase of Electric School Buses and Infrastructure for LAUSD and/or School Districts within County of LA.”
In 2011 under a different organizational name, Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a non-profit aimed at improving the health and well-being of children. According to Wikipedia, CHD became “a major disinformation hub during the COVID-19 pandemic” and “its revenue reached $6.8 million in 2020, more than doubling its revenue from the previous year.[8]”
In February 2021, Kennedy was temporarily barred from posting on Instagram and again in August 2022. Calls in 2021 for Twitter to ban him emanated from a New York state senator, and a PhD writing for the American Council on Science and Health, and the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which seeks to root out “bad actors” participating in “identity-based hate, climate change denial and health disinformation.”
Kennedy was included in the White House‘s “Disinformation Dozen” for allegedly being “responsible for a majority of coronavirus misinformation.”
In March CHD filed a class-action suit against Biden and former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, MD; the U.S. Justice Department; Biden White House officials on the “Covid-19 Response Team” and otherwise participating in the White House’s public communications regarding the pandemic; and several employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and State Department, alleging that the defendants actively pressured social-media platforms to censor the plaintiffs’ right to free speech.
“Beginning in early 2020 and continuing to the present day, the federal government has
waged a systematic, concerted campaign, astonishing in its breadth and effectiveness, to “induce, encourage, [and] promote” the nation’s three largest social-media platforms “to accomplish what [the government] is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish”—namely, the censorship of constitutionally protected speech,” the complaint reads on page 8.
Kennedy is taking a leave of absence from CHD as he seeks the Democratic primary nomination.
On April 18, The Daily Mail (UK), citing “bestselling biographer” Jerry Oppenheimer’s book, “RFK Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream,” reported:
Nearly six decades after his uncle John F. Kennedy became president and then his father was gunned down on the road to the presidency – RFK Jr. has decided that he too should try to win the White House following in his forebears’ fatal political footsteps.
Few think he has a chance and the skeletons in his closet will be enough to defeat his bid for the Democratic nomination in 2024.
Nicknamed ‘The Toxic Avenger,’ Kennedy has long been involved in environmental crusades, most notably the clean-up of the Hudson River.
But in recent years he has turned against vaccinations and has been highly critical of efforts to curb Covid, to such an extent that he’s now considered by some to be a conspiracy theorist.
On April 24, People Magazine wrote that “The now-presidential candidate has previously lobbied Congress to allow parents to opt out of state requirements for vaccinating their children, and a 2019 study found that his nonprofit, called Children’s Health Defense, had paid for more than half of the ads on Facebook that promoted false claims about vaccines, according to The New York Times.”
People also referenced Oppenheimer, though revealing that RFK Jr. refuted many of the claims made in the book and claiming Oppenheimer never contacted him prior to publication.
Thursday’s segment, part of a live broadcast of “ABC News Prime” though prerecorded, begins at the 19:00 mark.
In her introduction, Davis described Kennedy as “political royalty” who nonetheless is “regularly distributing misinformation and disinformation about vaccines which scientific and medical experts overwhelmingly say are safe and effective based on rigorous scientific studies.”
Other than such lone voices as Fox News Channel’s Rachel Campos-Duffy and Tucker Carlson, the latter of whom was terminated from his highly popular shows, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “Tucker Carlson Today” in a curt press release Monday morning, the mainstream media has maintained a blackout on increasing evidence of serious harms up through death which appear to be casually-related to COVID-19 vaccinations as well as the initiation of government compensation to those claiming such injuries.
Some research has shown that vaccines “recommended” by the CDC for children and adolescents may not be as rigorously tested as previously touted.
In the United States, compensation is severely limited by the fact that the vaccines were approved under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), thereby excluding most individuals claiming harm or the death of a loved one.
Through April 1, nearly 12,000 Americans have applied for compensation under the CICP between 2010 and April 1, 2023, with nearly all pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination and more than 10,000 still under review, according to the government’s reports. The CICP is the only program applicable to recipients of the COVID-19 shots given that they were administered as a “countermeasure” to a public health emergency,
Only a small fraction of cases claiming COVID-19 vaccination injuries have been approved for compensation and only three payouts completed, the Health Resources and Administration (HRSA) states.
On Thursday, CHD hosted a “Twitter Space” titled, “Exploring theRealitiesof COVID-19 Vax Injuries Amongst Our Veterans.”
Kennedy’s organization also claims fully-approved and decades-old vaccines such as DTP and MMR can cause autism and other harms in infants and children. More recently, it has publicized cases of injury apparently stemming from the Gardasil vaccine.
Davis began by asking some standard questions, the first of which was, “Why did you decide to run for president?”
“I felt like my country was being taken away from me,” Kennedy responded. “I felt like I wanted my children to grow up with the same pride in our country and the same love for our country and the same idea that we had this, you know, this idealism, these opportunities [in] our country, and we had, you know, communities that are filled with dignity and enrichment and we were an exemplary nation and that those things are being lost, and they’re being lost because — for a lot of reasons — really, because the rise of corporatism in this country and this addiction that we have to war. And my party also is becoming the party of war, the party of censorship, the party of fear, and the party of neocons and Wall Street, and I just felt like I was in a unique opportunity to change that.”
“And how so…?” Davis pressed, acknowledging his role as an environmental attorney for “more than three decades” but lack of experience in politics. “What do you feel qualifies you for the highest position in the land?”
“I think I know more about how to fix regulatory agencies than any other politician in this country because I’ve spent forty years suing them,” Kennedy responded, stating a need to “unravel this kind of culture of corporate capture and corruption.”
Citing that he had been “very critical” of such agencies as the EPA, CIA, CDC, FDA and others on which he had “cast so many aspersions.” “How would you run them…?” Davis asked.
After stating that most employees in “those agencies are good Americans,” Kennedy said, “The people who rise to power in those agencies usually are the people who are in the tank with industry or are willing to carry water for the industry, and they’re the ones that last for 50 years. They rise because they’re willing to do favors for industry and take direction from industry.”
Biden’s “approach” to “government” and leading the party, Kennedy said, is not in keeping with “traditional Democratic Party values.”
When asked, Kennedy said he finds it “troubling” that the DNC has scheduled no primary debates.
Ultimately, Kennedy told Davis, whether he wins the nomination “is in God’s hands” (24:36).
At 27:00, after Davis asked what the “fairest criticism” of him might be, Kennedy acknowledged he has enough “skeletons in his closet that if they could vote, I’d win president of the world by a landslide.”
Davis criticized Kennedy for having appeared on the “platforms” of “known conspiracy theorists” Alex Jones of Infowars and “War Room” founder Steve Bannon with, “You go on their talk shows and at the same time, tell America that the media is lying to you. How do you square that with voters?”
“Those are two different issues,” Kennedy said. “…When I go on those platforms, I’m not lying to people. I’m telling the truth…”
“But you legitimize the platforms,” Davis retorted.
“To me, there’s no way you can overcome the polarization without talking to people on the other side. I’ve done that my whole life,…” Kennedy responded. “If we don’t talk to them, how can we persuade them? So I will talk to anybody.”
At 28:39, Davis raised the matter of Kennedy’s claim “that there is a correlation bewtween vaccines leading to autism that’s totally been debunked.”
“Wait a minute; who debunked it?” Kennedy quickly replied.
“We have not seen any kind of scientific connection from the CDC, the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences…” Davis said.
“But those organizations are captive agencies,” Kennedy asserted.
“And so you think they’re all in cahoots,” Davis shot back.
“Yeah, they’re all captive,” Kennedy said.
The interview continues for several more minutes, but it was Davis’s closing statement at 32:55 which caught the attention of many on Twitter Friday morning. In what was arguably a mechanically-delivered, prepared statement, Davis said:
We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination and autism. Research shows that vaccines and the ingredients used for the vaccines do not cause autism, including multiple studies involving more than a million children and major medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the advocacy group, Autism Speaks. We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions of that exchange in our interview. We thank Mr. Kennedy for the conversation.
At 2:35 p.m. EDT, The Post & Email sent the following through ABC News’s contact form:
Regarding Linsey Davis’s interview of RFK Jr. on Thursday, why does ABC News perceive the need to exercise “editorial judgment,” essentially amounting to censorship of a presidential candidate? Shouldn’t the public have the right to know Mr. Kennedy’s full thoughts on any subject in order to evaluate his abilities and intentions? Is it the role of the media to censor topics it doesn’t like?
Is there an underlying reason why ABC has chosen to throttle information, now readily available, supporting many of Mr. Kennedy’s contentions, including that Pfizer knew during its clinical trials that COVID-19 vaccines were proceeded in proximity by a myriad of serious adverse events, including miscarriage, stroke, cardiac events and death?
Sharon Rondeau, Editor
The Post & Email
Wow. Great summary of RFK, Jr’s history … and his bid for the Presidency. Plus some great reasons why I never watch ABC (Always Biased Content) News.
Kudos for your response with ABCs ‘Response Form’, Sharon. I will not hold my breath for a ‘response’ from those discombobulated, dis-informed and duplicitous dispensers of gas-lighting garbage.
Thank you, sir. I received a template acknowledgement but nothing else. I think I should not hold my breath!