If you haven't looked into their claims, you are always going to underestimate just how much and how blatantly anti-vaxxers lie.

If you are on the right, I want you to open your mind and realize that no matter what problems you have with the left, Robert F Kennedy is a uniquely sinister figure who should have no role in public life. Here's just one example as to why.

RFK wrote the foreword for a book by an anti-vaxx organization he once led that claimed to list young people dropping dead from the covid vaccine. The 12-year-old boy on the cover hadn't even been vaccinated against covid. He was just a random kid who died for unrelated reasons, anti-vaxxers put him on the cover of a book, and RFK promoted it.

When the family tried to tell them about this, the publisher ignored them.

The AP reports:

When 12-year-old Braden Fahey collapsed during football practice and died, it was just the beginning of his parents’ nightmare.

Deep in their grief a few months later, Gina and Padrig Fahey received news that shocked them to their core: A favorite photo of their beloved son was plastered on the cover of a book that falsely argues COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike of sudden deaths among healthy young people.

The book, called “Cause Unknown,” was co-published by an anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, who is now running for president. Kennedy wrote the foreword and promoted the book, tweeting that it details data showing “ COVID shots are a crime against humanity.”

The Faheys couldn’t understand how Braden’s face appeared on the book’s cover, or why his name appeared inside it.

Braden never received the vaccine. His death in August 2022 was due to a malformed blood vessel in his brain. No one ever contacted them to ask about their son’s death, or for permission to use the photo. No one asked to confirm the date of his death — which the book misdated by a year. When the Faheys and residents of their town in California tried to contact the publisher and author to get Braden and his picture taken out of the book, no one responded.

They finally took the boy off the cover of the book after it became a story during Kennedy's 2024 run. Kennedy supporters have harassed the boy's parents, maybe because they believe they're lying about the covid vaccine and part of the conspiracy.

12-year-old Branden Fahey isn't the only person they were lying about. They were just taking random people who died and made a book about them. One even died in 2019, before covid vaccines were invented.

The AP found dozens of individuals included in the book died of known causes not related to vaccines, including suicide, choking while intoxicated, overdose and allergic reaction. One person died in 2019.

AP asked Kennedy’s campaign, CHD, Dowd and Skyhorse president Tony Lyons several questions about the book, including why they chose to feature Braden, why they didn’t speak to his family first and what steps they took to fact check.

Kennedy's former organization says that Fahey's obituary didn't list a cause of death, so they just decided to take his picture and put it on the cover of their anti-vaxx book. I'm serious. This is how anti-vaxxers reason. "Maybe your son who died in 2019 actually died because he was vaxxed? Just asking questions! Why are you afraid of debate? What are you hiding?"

In emails, Lyons did not address why Braden specifically was chosen for the cover but defended his inclusion by saying that news stories and his obituary did not mention his cause of death.

Hundreds of deaths are cited in the book, though Lyons said it only attributes nine of them to the vaccine. Lyons said Braden’s death and others are never explicitly attributed to the vaccine, and that the book explores many possible reasons for deaths that have appeared in headlines since 2021.

Still, the book several times refers to its “thesis” that mass administration of COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike in deaths. Braden’s parents said his appearance in the context of the book implies he died of the vaccine, putting his death in a false light.

Anti-vaxxers are very dedicated and put out a lot of material. People see this and assume that there must be something to what they're saying. How can they produce so many books, papers, and podcasts if vaccines are safe? What's wrong with opening up a debate?

You'll never have the time to go through all of their claims. The thing to realize is that these are some of the stupidest and most dishonest people in public life. They've been shunned from mainstream institutions for good reason, and it's a troubling sign that they're now being given political power.

If you think elites are the problem, know that they at least want nothing to do with anti-vaxxers. I consider this a litmus test. The degree to which institutions reject these people can be taken as a direct measure of how well they're functioning. Remember that RFK personally lobbied against vaccines in Samoa, where over 80 children died due to lowering rates.

Oh yeah, and here's the story about how he drove his wife to suicide after she found a notebook of all the women he cheated with.

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1827882382843867483

NYT on one of the first things Kamala Harris did after becoming vice president:

Paging through intelligence reports just weeks after she was sworn in as vice president, Kamala Harris was struck by the way two female foreign leaders were described. The reports used adjectives that, in her view, were rarely used to describe male leaders.

Ms. Harris, the first woman to hold her office, ordered up a review that scrutinized multiple years of briefing reports from various intelligence agencies, looking for possible gender bias.

The study found some questionable word choices but no widespread pattern, according to a senior intelligence official, one of five who requested anonymity to discuss the review. (None would disclose the words flagged by Ms. Harris because the reports were classified.)

Still, the exercise had an impact: Intelligence officials added a new training class for analysts on how to judge and assess female foreign leaders, according to another official.

Remember all the race craziness during covid? Guess who was the driving force behind it in the administration:

During the pandemic, she repeatedly asked her vice-presidential staff for demographic breakdowns on Covid vaccination recipients and pressed the administration’s health officials to address gaps, according to two former administration officials.

She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities.

When Trump says that these are stupid, unserious people, stories like this are what make his charges sound credible.
She doesn’t talk about it during the campaign. But this is where her heart is at. nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/…

The human capital problem on the right is bad and getting worse. Eating pets and imaginary whistleblowers today. What's next? Diagnosing it is easy. Finding solutions is hard.

I do have one though: conservatives should help abolish the electoral college.
richardhanania.com/p/the-conserva… My theory of our politics would suggest it's hopeless. There are lots of stupid people out there, and they used to be kept out by gatekeepers and distributed across the parties. Now they're increasingly in one party, and have the internet. A simple story of supply and demand.

Happy Labor Day.

To celebrate, I've written an article on why you should not support labor unions.

They are anti-meritocratic cartels that achieve gains by harming the rest of society. If you are concerned with poverty, there are better ways to help. richardhanania.com/p/unions-are-n… We can have reasonable debates about the size of government or how much it should distribute wealth. But the way to help the working class is not to favor one group of people and let them take from everyone else, lower economic efficiency, and harm consumers and other workers.

How to understand the RFK phenomenon? I explain Dale Gribble voters. The ultra paranoid have always been around, but before they were divided between the parties.

Now they've consolidated in the GOP, and they are making its human capital problem worse. 🧵richardhanania.com/p/the-rise-of-… Top two podcasts in the country are Rogan and Tucker. They're considered on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both are RFK fans. Other alt media personalities like Alex Jones and Bret Weinstein are also part of this group. It's not right/left, but something diff.

The selection of JD Vance can be seen as a triumph for the Tech Right. I explain where they came from and what makes them different from others in the GOP. They're socially liberal, anti-egalitarian, and ultimately for dynamism and progress. 🧵 richardhanania.com/p/understandin…
Ironically, there is a group of leftists who saw this coming. They came up with the acronym TESCREAL, which is so ugly that it's actually catchy. The leftists paying the most attention knew that tech elites were different from other elites in academia and journalism.

The time Israel sent a commando team into downtown Beirut that assassinated three high-ranking members of the PLO and got out. The team was led by Ehud Barak.

Westerners hate Israel because it fills them with a sense of inferiority by showing that heroism is still possible.

Stop and read about the Entebbe Raid, after a plane was hijacked and taken to Uganda. The Israelis secretly flew a team from Suez to Uganda, slaughtered the Palestinian terrorists, their German allies, and Idi Amin’s soldiers, bringing almost all of the hostages home alive.

Fascinating analysis of the trendiness of baby names.

Since the 1960s, the endings of names rise and fall together, especially for boys. The fates of Mason, Jackson, Grayson, etc are all linked.

What names sound good to parents depends on subtle signals they’re not aware of.





This is associated with the decline of traditional names. The lesson here is people really feel the need to conform on a very deep subconscious level! If they don’t conform to tradition, they’ll look for arbitrary signs of trendiness.

Time Magazine in 1958: Blacks are 10% of the population in 1,551 cities but commit 60% of violent crime. Northern mayors consider this their biggest problem and are afraid to talk about it. Black leaders blame racist law enforcement.

Black problems didn’t start with LBJ.



Time in 1958: NAACP tries to get people not to talk about black crime. Many whites are uncomfortable about the subject, and newspapers go out of their way not to mention a crime suspect’s race.

Academic who researches the right realizes he can’t get a job because he’s a white male.

He complains, gets laughed at by a woman at Yale. He accuses her of “punching down” at him, thinking lack of employment makes up for his race and sex.

Talk about a teachable moment.





Screenshots from @hradzka, as David Austin Walsh has locked his account.

Since October 7, many of us have been asking how we can be better allies to Israel.

I explain that what Israel needs is not better PR, or "hasbara," but pushback on narratives that are hostile to civilization itself, which Israel represents. richardhanania.com/p/article-in-t… Israel doesn't have an "optics" problem because the rest of the world hated Israel before this war, and one can see this in the obsessive focus on its flaws compared to everything else in global politics. The problem is with Israel's existence.

John Spencer, expert in urban warfare, explains to Sam Harris what was unique about the October 7 footage. First, Hamas members were absolutely euophoric as they were going off to rape and murder. As someone who has led men into battle, he tells us that “this is not normal”.

Most striking was the reaction to the sound of a young boy moaning to death. In a normal battlefield situation, even when there is an enemy combatant, there is usually an instinct to render aid. Here, a boy’s eyes were gone, his father just killed, and the Hamas fighter nonchalantly goes and grabs a beverage from the refrigerator.

This war has clarified so much for me. I keep talking about why Hamas is worse than Nazis, and the moral culpability of Palestinian civilians. People don’t like these opinions. They still remain true. If you have a position on this conflict other than “Israel keeps going until Hamas is destroyed” you have failed one of the great moral tests of our time. Sam Harris on the overwhelming sadistic joy regular Palestinians felt at seeing Jewish mothers clutching their babies, and defiling the bodies of dead girls.

We simply refuse to face the truth about this culture.

You've probably heard about Americans fleeing blue states like CA for FL and TX.

But this isn't new.

I've dived into 40 years of GDP and population data and show it's been happening for generations.

Here's how we know economic freedom is better.🧵
richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-… First, to give one example of how states differ in policy, here's tax burden by state. It varies from less than 5% to 15.9% in New York. They also vary in regulation, minimum wage, strength of civil rights, unions, etc. Here's one map of economic freedom.

Jewish woman moves to the Bay Area for the "progressive values," shocked that the half-literate DEI types who control the school system take the side of the Palestinians.

"At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys."

So weird! Wonder how that happened.

Conservatism has a low human capital problem. Most smart people are leftists, particularly in the influential professions that are High Status, Low Pay (HSLP).

Does that mean conservatism is doomed? Not at all. I explain how it can still win.🧵 richardhanania.com/p/coping-with-… It's not simply that engaged liberals are smarter, though they are. It's that they have a near monopoly on HSLPs, people who go into fields like academia, the arts, journalism, etc.

Maybe in the long run you inspire a change here, but this going to be a problem for a while.

Leftists are trying to pretend like they never had a problem with women's bodies.

We were all there during Gamergate, the opening shot of the culture war.

We're actually doing this. Yes, Sydney Sweeney's boobs are anti-woke. richardhanania.com/p/yes-sydney-s… My tweets on this topic have gotten 80 million+ views and two Know Your Meme pages, while inspiring too many think pieces to count. You may call it a troll, but the best trolls are based in truths that everyone understands but no one has explained.

You can't make this up.

The Biden administration tried to make financial aid easier to get for those in the country illegally.

But the system broke down because it froze you out if you didn't have a social security number.

The whole system is backlogged and now in chaos.





The Department of Education was too busy finding ways to forgive loans to be able to distribute this year's financial aid and loans. Also, to deal with school reopenings after teachers unions forced them to close. Every leftist cause just feeds the cycle of incompetence.

New racial insanity in California.

Nonwhite felons can now ask for a new trial based on the argument that whites were arrested less or got shorter sentences for the same crime.

Courts are not to consider criminal history in the analysis because that's also due to racism!

San Francisco man caught with a loaded gun, finds a "race expert" to argue he shouldn't have been arrested and prosecuted because a police officer used the phrase "high crime area."

New form of welfare for CRT scholars who get to advocate for emptying the jails.

There was cultural tension when Napoleon conquered Egypt.

The Egyptians were angry that French women behaved so freely and were a bad influence on local women.

Also, the Egyptians were confused as to why the French liked women in the first place instead of young boys.





French and Egyptians had different standards of female beauty.

The Egyptians liked their women big. They had an expression: “She was so beautiful she could not fit through the door.”

Texas banned DEI in universities.

What happened?

University of Texas changed the name of its DEI bureaucracy and just went on as before, keeping most of their diversity goals and programs on the website.

One bureaucrat didn't even bother changing her job title at LinkedIn.

Full report here. dc.claremont.org/where-are-they…

This is beyond parody. Hard hitting American journalist finds that in a poor country food is cheaper, says it has radicalized him against his own society. I can understand the subway one. American urban dysfunction is something to be ashamed of, and there’s a point to make

But supermarkets are clearly one thing we’re very good at! If you’re critiquing America on the issue of supermarkets, you’re showing your anti-American bias.