Meet the Rich Guys Who Want RFK Jr. to Be President – By Keira Butler (Mother Jones) / June 28, 2023
Including Steve Kirsch, inventor of the computer mouse turned anti-vaccine crusader.
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When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his bid for the presidency at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel on April 19, 2023, he pledged to a cheering crowd to “end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country; to commoditize our children, our purple mountain’s majesty; to poison our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs; to strip-mine our assets; to hollow out the middle class and keep us in a constant state of war.” Put simply, not very many people expected that the Kennedy campaign would garner sufficient support to further explain those lofty goals, much less accomplish them. The New York Times pronounced him “unlikely to pose a serious threat to Mr. Biden.”
But now, two months later, the anti-vaccine activist turned presidential hopeful is doing a lot better in his bid for the Democratic nomination than anyone had expected. It’s early days, of course, but a May CNN poll suggested that he should not be consigned to being a mere curiosity, or a fringe candidate: A fifth of Democratic and Democratic-leaning Independent voters said they favored him over President Biden. As for his financial support, his campaign disclosures will not be released until mid-July.
Over the last month, the percentages have dwindled to between 8 and 15, but for any challenger to a sitting president from the same party, these numbers are pretty high. By comparison, as of last week, among Republicans, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was polling at 21 percent, to Donald Trump’s 59 percent. The support Kennedy commands is even more notable considering that Kennedy’s platform is, to put it mildly, eccentric. The founder of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, he recently remarked to podcast host Joe Rogan, “Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier, and so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.” In a conversation earlier this month with Twitter executive chairman Elon Musk, Kennedy raved about how Covid was a bioweapon and suggested that secret labs the world over are designing special weapons designed to kill only people of certain races. Last week, in a SiriusXM interview, he said that he believed that Russia was “acting in good faith” in its invasion of Ukraine. Despite his storied last name and the fact that he is running as a Democrat, over the last two years, Kennedy has allied himself with prominent right-wing activists. In 2021, he spoke at the ReAwaken America tour organized by former national security adviser to former President Donald Trump and conspiracy theorist Mike Flynn.
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