Thread by @P_Kallioniemi

In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American conspiracy theorist, lawyer and politician, Robert Kennedy Jr. (@RobertKennedyJr). He's best-known for being the nephew of JFK, and for constantly promoting conspiratorial and false information.

1/25

Robert comes from the prestigious Kennedy family, and his father was the senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. He was just 9-years-old when his uncle, JFK, was assassinated. Five years later, his father was also murdered.

2/25

During the early 80s, Robert had to resign as the Assistant District Attorney for Manhattan after failing his bar exam. A year later he was charged with heroin possession, and went into rehab. He soon became active in the environmental justice, and started lobbying and...

3/25

...litigating for the protection of waterways and renewable energy. RFK Jr. is a strong advocate for environmental issues, and has sued factory farms in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Iowa. He's also a strong opponent of the oil and coal industries.

4/25

Robert is one of the key figures in the anti-vaccine movement. He's claimed to be pro-vaccine, but as the chairman of Children's Health Defense (CHD), an anti-vaccine advocacy group, he's made connections between autism, ADHD, cancer, and autoimmune diseases and...

5/25

vaccines, fluoride, and wireless communications like 5G. CHD was one of the top buyers of anti-vaccine advertisement on Facebook during late 2018 and early 2019.

RFK Jr. was among the 12 so-called "superspreaders" of vaccine-related disinformation.

6/25

In Jan 2017, Bob Jr. met with Donald Trump to discuss a position in the Trump administration, and RFK Jr. was supposed to become the chairman of the Vaccine Safety Task Force, but Trump's spokeswoman stated that "no final decision had been made."

7/25

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert promoted the idea that Bill Gates would cut off access to money of people who refused the get vaccinated. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, he called Fauci "a powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020s historic..
8/25

..coup d’etat against Western democracy". In his Jan 2022 speech at the Auschwitz memorial, Robert declared that vaccine-hesitant people in the US had it worse than Anne Frank under Nazi occupation: "Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did."
9/25

He's also suggested that CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, and that Sirhan Sirhan wasn't responsible for his father's murder. He visited him in prison in 2017.

As a Democrat, RFK Jr. has gone into weird places. On the one hand, he supports abortion...

10/25

... rights and gun control. On the other hand, he's a rabid antivaxxer and a frequent visitor at outlets like Fox News and InfoWars.

He was also about to appear as a speaker at the ReAwaken America Tour, a far-right and Christian Nationalist protest movement with...

11/25

...prominent conservative speakers like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, but his participation was eventually cancelled. These rallies have been promoting several conspiracy theories, including COVID-19 related disinformation, QAnon and Stop The Steal.

12/25

In May 2023, RFK Jr. gave an interview to UnHerd, talking about vaccines, Big Pharma, and of course Ukraine. Now let's see how many pro-Kremlin narratives he can fit in one interview: 1) He said that "the Russians have repeatedly offered to settle", and that they respected..13/25

..the Minsk agreement - both Russians & Ukrainians broke the agreement,2) "the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8", using data from serial liar Douglas Macgregor and/or from the doctored Teixeira leaks,3) "The Donbas region, which is 80% ethnic..14/25

..Russian — and Russians that were being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government", referring to the "genocide in Donbas" bullshit,4) "We need to remove our Aegis missile systems [...] — from 70 miles from the Russian border",there are no Aegis on Russian border,..
15/25

...5) "We made a commitment to Russia, to Gorbachev, that we would not move Nato one inch to the east", of course this was never promised, 6) "What happened in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected...

16/25

...government of Ukraine" - not a coup by any measure and democracy in Ukraine was supported only by the US NGO's like NED,7) "We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the White House,handpicking the new cabinet",Nuland never picked any..
17/25

...cabinet, but wanted to fast-track the democracy process in Ukraine instead of stalling like the EU did (hence, "fuck the EU"), 7) "they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government", yeah, no. As you can see,RFK Jr. believes everything that's spoon-fed to..
18/25

him by the "antiwar coalition".

In Apr 2023, it became official: RFK Jr. is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. The support for this came from the strangest places: the Republican PR powerhouses and serial liars, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.

19/25

CBS News report claimed that Steve Bannon spent "months" in coaxing RFK Jr. into running. According to them, Bannon had stated that RFK Jr. campaigning could have two-fold benefits: he'd be a "useful chaos agent", and could also promote "anti-vaccine sentiment around the...
20/25

...country." Robert has denied these allegations, tweeting that "Bannon has nothing to do with my presidential campaign." On his "War Room" podcast, Bannon stated that RFK Jr. received a "standing ovation" from a fervent MAGA crowd, and people even started suggesting a ...

21/25

Trump-Kennedy ticket. Stone agreed with this sentiment, calling Trump-Kennedy a "dream ticket".

It also seems that Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, is another RFK Jr. fan, tweeting that he really likes "this presidential candidate's attitude".

22/25

Naturally, this is all just show. What the MAGA gang wants is a Trojan horse inside the Democrat party, so that the PR damage against Joe Biden can be maximized. All the other candidates were kinda meh and mostly agreed with Joe on everything, so it made sense to them to...
23/25

...promote a conspiracy theorist who is pretty much a Democrat version of Donald Trump. I'm pretty sure we're going to see yet another wave of "stolen election" accusations after RFK Jr. loses against Biden... except maybe from Fox News, as the last time cost them dearly.

24/25

Well, at least @SusanSarandon (the actress from Thelma & Louise) will probably vote for Bob Jr.

Oh, and maybe "far-left" fake news bloggers, @aaronjmate and @MaxBlumenthal and the pro-authoritarian folk over from @codepink.

25/25

Support my work: buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi
Past soups: vatniksoup.com

Related soups:
Douglas Macgregor:

https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1609831498156331008

Steve Bannon:

https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1656611885469319168

NATO expansion:

https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1616000266352078849

Genocide in Donbas:

https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1611980244252258304