Here Are 10 Absolutely Bananapants Things RFK Jr. Has Said Or Done
He is a dangerous, dangerous man.
Yesterday, Donald Trump officially announced that his choice to run our nation’s Department of Health and Human Services is none other than Robert “Bloody Whale Head” Kennedy Jr.
It’s an especially terrifying prospect for Pennsylvania, now that I think of it. What with the state currently leading the nation in whooping cough diagnoses, and all. Good job on voting for more sick infants, Pennsylvania!
While Kennedy, who has had his heart set on this for a while, has promised that he won’t “take anybody’s vaccines away,” he’s also told people within the Trump camp that his actual plan is to have the vaccines studied so he can “prove” they are dangerous so that pharmaceutical companies will take them off the market.
“He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe.’ And then if you pull the product liability (protections), the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market,” Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick told CNN in October.
This will be quite difficult, as there are decades upon decades of data showing that vaccines are safe and that they save lives. Though I guess if he’s interpreting that data himself, he could come to any conclusion.
Anyway, in honor of RFK Jr.’s tentative appointment to run HHS, let’s take a look back at some of his greatest hits, old school listicle style. (The ones that don’t involve animal mutilation, anyway.)
1. Claiming that COVID was bioengineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people …
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said at a private event, footage of which was obtained by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Jr., who also previously got into some trouble for his claim that people living under vaccine mandates had it worse than Anne Frank, later swore he did not say the thing he was videotaped saying.
2. Remember when all of the wackos thought Bill Gates was putting microchips in the vaccine? RFK Jr. was one of them!
“I urge you to contact Bill Gates on his social media,” RFK Jr. posted on Instagram. “Gently explain that tagging and tracking humans may appeal to his government cronies in totalitarian China, but those activities are inconsistent with American values and traditions.”
What I really love about that nonsense is that it turns out that fellow Trump appointee-in-waiting Elon Musk actually does have plans for brain chips. Those will be fine though, of course. Well, except for the fact that the monkeys they tested them on had to be euthanized after the chips caused “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema.”
3. Telling Joe Rogan That Wifi Causes Cancer, “Leaky Brain”
In an 2003 interview with Joe Rogan, RFK Jr. said he was representing “hundreds” of people with glioblastomas (the most common form of brain cancer) behind their ears as a result of cell phones, because of the wifi. Repeated studies, however, have found that there is no link between glioblastomas and cell phones and that cases of brain cancer have not increased with the use of cellphones as one would expect if they were a cause.
But wait, it gets dumber!
“The cancer’s not the worst thing. They also — WiFi radiation opens up your blood brain barrier,” he told Rogan. “And so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.” He later explained that this is a condition called “leaky brain.”
So! Not gonna get into “toxins” or whether or not “leaky brain” is a thing right now (seems like no!), but glioblastomas are often fatal and treatment for them involves things like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, while the “cures” for leaky brain include “eating less gluten,” “drinking more coffee,” B vitamins and getting good bacteria into your gut (which itself may be leaky?), so I’m going to say that the cancer, were it to be caused by WiFi, which it’s not, would definitely be the worst thing.
4. Promoting the very wacky “Great Reset” conspiracy theory
Kennedy promoted a movie featuring Catherine Austin Fitts, a major proponent of the Great Reset conspiracy theory that basically held that COVID was all a ruse to take over the world and turn us all into bug-eating slaves or whatever. It was very stupid!
5. They’re using 5G to control our braaaaains!
In the aforementioned rant about how vaccine mandates are the Holocaust, RFK Jr. explained that “[t]hey're putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.”
Well, that just seems true.
6. Hey! Here’s a picture of RFK Jr with convicted sex offender Scott Ritter!
Aw, aren’t they just adorbs! This isn’t a conspiracy, but it does seem worthwhile to point out that Scott Ritter, the guy sitting next to “Bobby,” went to prison after getting To Catch A Predator-ed twice by law enforcement. In one case he tried to lure a cop posing as a 16-year-old girl to a Burger King — and was not charged. In the second, he masturbated in front of a webcam being sent to what he thought was a 15-year-old girl but was, in fact, another undercover cop, and did end up being convicted.
There is no question that Ritter was, at one point, helpful as an early critic of the Iraq War and as one of the former UN Weapons Inspectors who were repeatedly saying there was no way Iraq had any WMDs. But that good really, really does not cancel out the evil of trying to sex up teenage girls online, certainly not enough to warrant taking a photo with the guy.
7. Saying AIDS is not caused by HIV, but by poppers and “the gay lifestyle”
“There were people that were part of a gay lifestyle, they were burning the candle at both ends, there were poppers on sale everywhere at the gay bars,” he said, giving a speech in which he explained that AIDS was actually caused by poppers and not HIV, which should probably come as a surprise to all of the people out there who have managed to get it while never having taken a popper (amyl nitrate) in their lives.
He notably promoted HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiori, a woman who contracted HIV and later died of AIDS. She denied it so hard that she insisted on breastfeeding her baby, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of three.
8. The water is transing the kids!
Hey! So remember when Alex Jones screamed, “I don’t like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin’ frogs gay!” Well, RFK Jr. jumped from that to claiming that atrazine, an herbicide, in the water is actually, maybe, turning the kids gay and trans.
Via CNN:
A study Kennedy discussed on multiple podcast episodes exposed male African clawed frogs to atrazine in a lab, castrating 75% of the male frogs and turning one in 10 males into females.
On an episode of Jordan Peterson’s podcast, a video of which was removed from YouTube, Kennedy said children are “swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals.” He further discussed how atrazine can “chemically castrate and forcibly feminize” frogs, saying “if it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.” Kennedy did not offer any proof of similar changes happening in human beings.
Actual scientists have explained that there is no evidence that this has or would have a similar effect on humans, because of how humans are not frogs and that for humans “atrazine is metabolized and excreted from the body within 12 hours.”
9. Do antidepressants cause school shootings? RFK Jr. thinks so!
“Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” RFK Jr. told Bill Maher on his “Club Random With Bill Maher” podcast. “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”
Apparently, RFK Jr. did not actually check to see how many school shooters were on antidepressants, because the answer is “not too many!” And, in the few cases in which the shooters were actually on antidepressants, a causal relationship was not found.
The particularly insidious thing about this kind of nonsense is that it discourages parents and kids from getting psychological treatment, which would likely do a hell of a lot more to prevent a school shooting than cause it. I’m not saying they should all be on SSRIs, but that it would be great if more troubled kids could see therapists and psychiatrists to find the best course of treatment for them, whether or not that involves SSRIs. But I guess that’s just too nuanced!
10. The time he was largely responsible for a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa
In 2018, in Samoa, two infants died after getting their measles vaccine. Immediately, groups like Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense jumped on the opportunity to start shit-talking vaccines, and soon enough the measles vaccination rate dropped down to 31 percent.
By 2019, there was a deadly outbreak of the virus, killing 83 people, most of whom were children.
Via Mother Jones:
During the stretch in which the vaccination coverage was dropping in Samoa, Kennedy visited the nation in June 2019 and gave a boost to anti-vaxxers there who had used the death of those two infants to help cause the drop in vaccination rates.[…]
Public health experts complained Kennedy’s visit to Samoa helped amplifly anti-vax voices.
Kennedy later claimed his encounter with Winterstein was a chance occurrence. But he acknowledged his trip to Samoa had been arranged by coconut farmer Edwin Tamasese, another prominent Samoan anti-vaxxer, and paid for by Children’s Health Defense. The point of the trip, he insisted, was to discuss with government officials “the introduction of a medical informatics system that would allow Samoa’s health officials to assess, in real time, the efficacy and safety of every medical intervention or drug on overall health.” This would include questioning the value of vaccinations.
The most fucked up part of all of this is that the infants who died weren’t even actually given the vaccine, they were given a muscle relaxant by mistake, and that is what killed them — not the vaccine.
RFK Jr. denies responsibility for this outbreak, which he claimed may have been caused by the vaccine itself. But the fact is, even if he hadn’t gone rushing over there the second he thought he could blame some deaths on a vaccine, he’d still be partly responsible — simply by virtue of being one of the loudest anti-vaccine voices around.
There are people in the United States who are not vaccinating their kids because of him, and in some places, they’re allowed to send those kids to schools with other kids who may be unable to take vaccines because they are immunocompromised or other kids for whom the vaccine didn’t work, and they can compromise herd immunity and cause an outbreak of a deadly virus or disease that no one ever needs to have again, because “there’s a vaccine for that.”
Thankfully, none of these appointments are real yet. Assuming Trump doesn’t change his mind, they will still have to be confirmed by the Senate. So go and harass the living hell out of your senators and encourage them to vote against putting Rasputin 2.0 in charge of our health.
I hope all ghosts of little bears rise in vengeance
It feels like we’re about to play the fucking Oregon Trail for real over the next four years.
I would like cheap eggs.
Sorry, you have died of dysentery.