Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Conspirituality Explored

“God communicates with human beings through various means,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted on April 19th, 2023, when he announced his primary challenge to Joe Biden. “However, nowhere is this communication as detailed, graceful, and joyful as through creation. When we harm nature, we weaken our ability to sense the divine.” This profound opening signifies the careful journey Kennedy has taken to reach the national stage. It is not his name recognition or his reputation as an environmental lawyer fighting for justice that has put him in the game. It is not his involvement in founding the Waterkeeper Alliance, a global network advocating for the protection of water sources, or his successful track record defending Indigenous peoples against industrial land encroachments and pollution. It is not even his strong Catholic beliefs. One critical reason why Kennedy is polling at around 15% in the early stages of the race is due to his association with a movement spreading anti-vaccine misinformation that attracts a swarm of conspiracy theorists—a range of individuals from far-right radio host Alex Jones to left-leaning New Age “COVID-dissident” Charles Eisenstein, who currently serves as Kennedy’s Director of Messaging.

It is easy to understand why Kennedy has become a favorite among fragmented thought leaders. He openly expresses doubt about the official account of his uncle, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which stated that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He firmly believes that Sirhan Sirhan was part of a broader operation when he allegedly killed his father, Bobby Kennedy, in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen in 1968. In addition to these grand narratives, a more concerning strategy led Kennedy further into the realm of conspiracism: medical libertarianism. As Kennedy explains in a 2017 foreword to the third edition of Heather Fraser’s book, The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, his son Conor faced severe allergies and anaphylactic shock, requiring 29 visits to the emergency room before the age of three. This persistent stress led Kennedy to question the distinction between industrial and pharmaceutical crimes. While Fraser’s book falsely argues that childhood vaccines cause fatal food allergies, Kennedy approached the issue from a different angle through his nonprofit organization, Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Since its establishment in 2016, CHD has propagated the false notion that the mercury compound thimerosal makes vaccines unsafe, despite thimerosal being largely phased out in 2001. For Kennedy, who was passionate about fighting mercury poisoning in water systems and food chains as an environmental lawyer, this equation seemed plausible. By 2019, Kennedy had become the highest spender on anti-vaccine advertisements on Facebook and was implicated in a measles outbreak in Samoa that infected 5,700 people and resulted in 83 deaths. This outbreak followed the tragic deaths of two children who received contaminated vaccines. Kennedy visited Samoa and was pictured alongside a local antivax advocate. Subsequently, Children’s Health Defense sent a letter to the Prime Minister of Samoa, urging him to scrutinize the overall safety of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine. This tragic incident echoed earlier measles outbreaks in Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota in 2011 and 2017. The Somali community had specifically been targeted by anti-vaccine propagandist Andrew Wakefield, whose debunked 1998 study initiated the persistent conspiracy theory linking the MMR vaccine to autism. Over a year before Kennedy’s Instagram account was suspended for spreading medical misinformation, he used the platform to laud Wakefield’s contributions, calling him “one of the most unfairly vilified figures of modern history.” In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate included Kennedy in their list of the top 12 influencers responsible for up to 73% of all anti-vaccine content on Facebook and 65% of all digital anti-vaccine content overall. (Kennedy’s Instagram account was reinstated on June 4, 2023, on the basis of his presidential candidacy.)

Presently, Kennedy is striving to downplay this controversial record in favor of a more mainstream appeal. He aims to be recognized as an environmental prophet and an anti-corporate, anti-interventionist truth-seeker. His Twitter feed combines eco-spirituality, Catholic-icon-style photos of his late uncle John F. Kennedy, and quotes that emphasize his commitment to free speech and fearlessness in the face of “unpleasant facts.” So far, this strategy seems to be succeeding, as he has yet to face challenging prime-time questions about his involvement with Samoa, Wakefield, or the support he receives from right-wing extremists who employ anti-vaccine rhetoric as a recruiting tool. Why does Alex Jones believe Kennedy is “awake”? Why did Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist for Donald Trump, advise him to run for—or disrupt—the Democratic Party? Why does conservative political consultant Roger Stone consider Trump-Kennedy a dream ticket for 2024? The influence of this MAGA-influenced, medical libertarian fanbase is perplexing for those who associate the Kennedy name with the Camelot era of idealistic governance. In 1960, JFK’s New Frontier advocated for the expansion of unemployment benefits, a new Housing Act, the Clean Air Act, and the establishment of the Peace Corps. It placed great emphasis on equal rights for women, proposed a Medicare plan, and supported a new Vaccination Assistance Act. JFK was also renowned for championing civil rights, anti-racism initiatives, and early attempts at affirmative action. However, his nephew has turned this aspect of his family’s political legacy into a distorted interpretation of social justice, resulting in an increased risk of vaccine hesitancy within Black communities. Kennedy has opportunistically aligned himself with fringe Black leaders like Tony Muhammad, exploiting the historical trauma of medical racism in the United States to provide the predominantly white anti-vaccine movement with a facade of diversity. Muhammad, a minister in the Nation of Islam, is designated as a Black nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to their promotion of anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Since 2015, Muhammad has perpetuated the false claim that the CDC genetically engineered MMR vaccines to harm Black and Latino boys. In his speeches and his 2021 documentary-style film, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, Kennedy repeatedly invokes the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, insinuating that COVID-19 mitigation measures constitute a comparable medical atrocity. The infamous study, conducted from 1932 to 1972, recruited Black men with syphilis in order for predominantly white government researchers to study the long-term effects of the disease. The men were not informed of their diagnosis and were only given placebos to alleviate their symptoms. The study aimed to document the natural progression of syphilis. However, Black pro-vaccine activists reject the comparison to Tuskegee, emphasizing that the main source of vaccine hesitancy within their communities stems from sustained structural racism, resulting in unequal access to healthcare—an issue that Kennedy and other white anti-vaccine activists conveniently overlook. Kennedy’s exploitation of Black liberation movements in the context of community health distorts a complex history. For instance, he fails to mention how the Black Panthers made access to free, evidence-based healthcare a core part of their revolutionary vision in the 1970s. They established 13 free health clinics across the United States, offering physical examinations, gynecological and dental care, and cancer screenings. They also supported groundbreaking research and provided free vaccinations.

On January 23rd, 2022, Kennedy elevated his COVID-era anti-vaccine conspiracies to new heights. As a speaker at the Defeat the Mandates march in Washington, D.C., he stood on the stage and proclaimed that America had experienced “a coup d’etat against democracy and the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights” over the past two years. He passionately denounced the suppression of free speech—ironically, while speaking to thousands through a microphone from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and being live-streamed by fellow anti-vaccine advocate Del Bigtree. Despite his privileged background, Ivy League education, and left-leaning leanings, Kennedy’s rhetoric resonated with the predominantly right-wing crowd at the march. He passionately declared that what the nation is witnessing today is what he terms “turnkey totalitarianism.” According to Kennedy, every totalitarian regime throughout history has attempted to control every aspect of people’s lives without success—until now. He asserted that with the technological capacity available today, Bill Gates would soon be spying on everyone using his 65,000 satellites and that the 5G wireless system would have control over all financial transactions and the global food supply. Kennedy even suggested that the issuance of vaccine passports would lead to unimaginable consequences…