Remember when the Media Research Center ironically touted Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential because it thought it might hurt President Biden’s re-election chances (not that any MRC employee would ever vote for him), only to abandon him after he dropped his Democratic Party run to campaign as an independent? The MRC then found another Democratic candidate to ironically tout, Dean Phillips, until he too flamed out. Meanwhile, the MRC did keep a flame burning for RFK Jr. — an apparent hope that he would continue to mess with Democrats. Catherine Salgado cheered on his anti-vaxxer conspiracies in a Feb. 16 post:
A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against government efforts to silence the COVID-19 debate, to take effect after a historic Supreme Court ruling.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his fellow plaintiffs received a partial legal victory on Feb. 14 in their suit against the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans. Louisiana District Court Judge Terry Doughty granted part of the plaintiff’s requested preliminary injunction in his ruling for Kennedy v. Biden. He ordered that certain government agencies halt their anti-First Amendment collusion with Big Tech.
[…]The “Kennedy Plaintiffs” had accused the government defendants, including Joe Biden and members of his administration, of violating the “Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”
Doughty’s ruling agreed that the plaintiffs provided evidence that “not only have the Defendants shown willingness to coerce and/or to give significant encouragement to social-media platforms to suppress free speech with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and national elections, but they have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues.” These include the climate, abortion, and critiques of Biden.
Salgado didn’t mention that Kennedy was spewing discredited anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, nor did she explain why there is a right to lie to people without consequence.
Nicholas Fondacaro spent his daily hate-watch of “The View” smearing the hosts as “low I.Q.” for pointing out (not inaccurately) that Kennedy is effectively trying to buy the election by choosing a rich running mate in a March 28 post:
The low I.Q. members of ABC’s Cackling Coven (aka The View) were terrified on Thursday because they were apparently feeling the heat of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent campaign and feared it would hurt President Biden’s chances in November. They were so scared that they cooked up a fringe conspiracy theory accusing Kennedy of trying to “buy” the election by picking billionaire Nicole Shanahan to be his vice president.
[…]Staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) was the first to dive into the election conspiracy waters. She clutched her pearls and suggested that Kennedy chose Shanahan, the daughter of an immigrant, for dark and sketchy motives: “Didn’t he just choose a billionaire vice president? Who can help him get on the ballots in different states in battleground states.”
Decrying that a candidate was trying to get on ballots, which required signatures and not cash, sounded very anti-democratic. She provided no evidence that Kennedy was buying off election officials to get on ballots.
Moderator Whoopi Goldberg really bought into the conspiracy theories. She said Kennedy’s pick sent a “bad message for folks” and accuse him of trying to “buy the election.” It was a serious allegation that she provided no proof for, but she received broad approval from the rest of the cast anyway.
Fondacaro censored the fact that Shanahan has, in fact, lavished millions of dollars on Kennedy’s campaign and related PACs, and she was the primary donor behind the notorious Super Bowl ad in which he tried to steal glory from his uncle, John F. Kennedy.
(Also, Fondacaro makes serious allegations all the time without proof; consider this another piece of evidence for Hostin’s eventual lawsuit against Fondacaro and his employer for his filthy lies about her.)
Fondacaro returned for an April 1 post complaining that Donald Trump got throw into the mix about cultish behavior:
The Kennedy family has a cult following in the Democratic Party and an endorsement from them has been viewed as critical in the primaries, hence the left’s concern with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running for president as an independent against President Biden. This meant that irony levels were off the charts on Monday’s Good Morning America when ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos utilized Rory Kennedy’s cult documentary to campaign against former President Donald Trump and her brother Bobby.
On the show to hawk her new HBO documentary about the Synanon cult, Stephanopoulos queued Kennedy to draw parallels between the cult’s founder, Charles Dederich Sr., and Trump. “And you also say that we are seeing the kind of dynamic we saw in Synanon with a cult-like leader playing out in our politics today,” he stated.
Of course, Kennedy obliged:
[…]It’s incredibly hypocritical for a Kennedy to chide others for “cult-like” behavior. The Kennedys have been treated like royalty in the Democratic Party for decades and their political endorsements, handed out from the family compound, have been coveted. The media put a lot of weight on them to, trumpeting their endorsements of candidates Obama and Biden like a new pope was selected.
And for the liberal media, describing something as a “cult” was actually good when it was used for Democrats. In 2019, NPR anchor Audie Cornish praised Obama as the “ultimate cult of personality candidate.”
Fondacaro failed to disclose that he’s part of the Trump cult that enthusiastically supports him no matter what — even after committing crimes and inciting an insurrection against the United States. He also overlooks the fact that the RFK Jr. cult, unlike that around the rest of the Kennedy family, is built around spreading lies about vaccines and pushing other health-related conspiracy theories.
Christian Baldwin presented Kennedy as a sage in an April 2 post for spouting his employer’s bogus “censorship” narrative (and for bashing Biden):
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. provided a fresh perspective on CNN, lambasting President Joe Biden’s vast censorship enterprise.
RFK Jr. appeared for an interview on April 1 with CNN anchor Erin Burnett. The third-party presidential candidate was asked if he really thought that Biden was a worse threat to democracy than former President Donald Trump.
“Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent,” Kennedy said. “I can say that because I just won a case in the federal court of appeals and now before the Supreme Court that shows that he started censoring not just me 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me.”
After describing Biden’s actions as dangerous, Kennedy stated that these pro-censorship measures cannot be compared to any of Trump’s.
“No president in the country has ever done that,” Kennedy insisted. “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns but a president of the United States, who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies—Facebook, Instagram [and] Twitter—-to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH, to censor his political critics.”
Baldwin failed to tell his readers that Trump and other right-wing activists didn’t merely “question election returns” — they continued to spread false conspiracy theories bout “election fraud” long after those claims had been discredited, and in doing so undermined public confidence in elections. Still, Baldwin continued to defend Kennedy:
Various federal agencies and even the White House have targeted Kennedy for posts he made relating to COVID-19. On Jan. 22, 2021, White House official Clark Humphrey emailed Twitter (now known as X) demanding that RFK Jr. be censored for a tweet calling attention to a “wave of suspicious deaths” that were occurring in patients who received COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy specifically cited the death of baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who died shortly after publically [sic] receiving the Moderna vaccine to encourage mass vaccinations among black Americans.
In fact, Kennedy spread a demonstrable lie that the COVID vaccine killed Aaron; he actually died of natural causes. Baldwin clearly doesn’t believe that Kennedy should be held accountable for the malicious lies he spreads.
Kennedy continued to be convenient to the MRC’s anti-Biden narratives, so Baldwin gushed over him again in an April 15 post:
Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the game away on how the Biden White House used fear and intimidation to push social media censorship.
Kennedy Jr. appeared on the April 14 episode of Dave Rubin’s The Rubin Report. During the podcast, Kennedy elucidated more on his heated interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, in which he categorized President Joe Biden as a worse threat to democracy than former President Donald Trump, much to the astonishment of the CNN host.
Kennedy used this appearance with Rubin to further justify his claims on CNN by categorizing Biden’s anti-free speech actions as a unique, unprecedented betrayal of the American identity, and that, unlike Trump, Biden has been proven to have engaged in anti-democratic activity.
Further elaborating on his CNN remarks, Kennedy said that “President Biden did something no other president in history, and a court has found this. There’s no court that’s found that President Trump tried to steal the election, tried to derail the election, or tried to start an insurrection. There may be plenty of evidence that he did that. There’s no court that has found that. But there is a court that had found that President Biden was censoring his opponents.”
Given that Kennedy has been repeatedly caught lying by spreading anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, there’s no reason to trust what he says here, and Baldwin offered none. But Kennedy is saying all the conservatively correct things, so Baldwin has no incentive to fact-check him.