RFK Jr. Gives Speech To Crowd Containing German Neo-Nazis, Sues Blogger For Noticing
Sounds like a lot of Goebbels-dygook to us.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a problem. Okay, more than one. Okay, way more than one.
But specifically we’re talking about his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Which is going poorly! According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, his numbers have dropped by over one-third since the beginning of the summer. It’s hard to say what happened, exactly, but we’re going with the likelihood that Democratic voters heard him speak and realized within about two sentences that he’s nuttier than squirrel poop.
What’s the scion of a political dynasty supposed to do? Sue an anonymous blogger for (extremely Dr. Evil voice) one meeee-llllllllion dollars simply because the blogger once wrote something accurate about him?
Oh, it is? Beg your pardon.
Back in 2020, an anonymous DailyKos blogger — remember those? — wrote about Kennedy giving a speech to an anti-lockdown rally in Berlin organized by various right-wing groups, in a piece titled “Anti-Vaxxer RFK Jr. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-corona’ protests.”
Now, as related by the Daily Beast, a lot of outlets in a lot of places wrote up this appearance. The DailyKos blogger himself, who went by the name DowneastDem, was summarizing an article in the German daily Der Tagesspiegel.
Kennedy and his lawyer said no no no, everyone has it all wrong:
The crux of Kennedy’s claims is that, while Nazis and their collaborators abounded outside the Bundestag that day—and some even tried to storm the German parliament—the American jet-setter addressed a separate assembly elsewhere in the Tiergarten park organized by a group of wholesome folks called Querdenken.
Except, as the Daily Beast has also reported elsewhere, Querdenken (which loosely translates as “thinking outside the box”) is a right-wing QAnon-curious group that has been linked to neo-Nazi networks in Germany and thinks so highly of Vladimir Putin that it invited him to speak at the same event about “Peace in Europe.” (Putin declined, possibly because he was busy deciding to send the entire Russian military into Ukraine.)
In other words, DowneastDem, whose real name is David Vickrey, appears to have described the gathering accurately. Or else it was just a HUGE coincidence that the neo-Nazi-linked group just happened to put on an event protesting imaginary right-wing boogeymen at the exact same time that a bunch of other neo-Nazis were at the exact same park doing the exact same thing.
And Kennedy has a history of hanging out with the Nazi-adjacent. We just wrote about one instance two months ago. Just because the most generous interpretation here is that he’s too whacked out of his gourd to notice doesn’t mean we have to play along.
Kennedy’s lawsuit was rejected in courts in both California and New York. Nonetheless, around the time this spring that Kennedy officially declared he was running for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy’s lawyer Robert Barnes (a hardcore right-winger once represented Kyle Rittenhouse) sent Vickrey a menacing letter demanding the blogger settle for a minimum of $1 million. Otherwise, Kennedy and Barnes would revive the lawsuit.
Barnes gave Vickrey a deadline of May 22, then pushed it back to August 30, then requested a jury trial in Rockingham, New Hampshire, for some reason. Maybe so Kennedy will have an excuse to hang out in New Hampshire for the next few months.
The annoying part of this story, besides literally everything, is that Kennedy loves to posture as a free speech warrior. Apparently that principle does not apply to noticing that he gave a speech to a crowd that at a minimum contained neo-Nazis.
On a lark, we dug up the speech he gave that day in Berlin, and we would like to note that no one, not even Vickrey, is saying Kennedy needs to be prevented from going on 12-minute rants accusing world governments of using the pandemic as cover to control their populations, make 5G a widespread broadband standard, use it to gather data for Bill Gates and Jeff Zuckerberg (presumably he meant Mark but who knows) and Jeff Bezos, introduce digital currency that will lead to slavery, or flatter the neo-Nazi crowd by implying that Western governments are following Herman Goering’s playbook for using propaganda and fear to get the people on their side.
No no, we actually encourage Kennedy to say all that to the public and then file frivolous lawsuits when people notice. The sooner his poll numbers plunge into negative territory, the better.
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If neo nazis kept showing up to events I held and headlined, I would seriously reconsider what the fuck I was doing.
To prove I am not a Nazi I am co-suing the ADL with Elon Musk.
By RFK Jr