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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories Go Beyond Vaccines

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      A longtime vaccine skeptic, Mr. Kennedy is leaning heavily on misinformation as he mounts a long-shot 2024 campaign.He has promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus vaccines were developed to control people via microchips. He has endorsed the false notion that antidepressants are linked to school shootings. And he has pushed the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, is a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories who has leaned heavily on misinformation as he mounts his long-shot 2024 campaign for the Democratic nomination.But as voters express discontentment at a likely rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Kennedy has garnered as much as 20 percent of the vote in recent Democratic primary polling.Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee have not publicly acknowledged Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy and have declined to comment on his campaign. Nevertheless, the public scrutiny that accompanies a White House bid has highlighted other questionable beliefs and statements Mr. Kennedy has elevated over the years.Here are five of the many baseless claims Mr. Kennedy has peddled on the campaign trail and beyond.He has falsely linked vaccines to various medical conditions.Mr. Kennedy has promoted many false, specious or unproven claims that center on public health and the pharmaceutical industry — most notably, the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism.That notion has been rejected by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies across multiple countries. The National Academy of Medicine reviewed eight vaccines for children and adults and found that with rare exceptions, the vaccines are very safe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Seen by many as the face of the vaccine resistance movement, Mr. Kennedy has asserted that he is “not anti-vaccine” and seeks to make vaccines more safe. But he has advertised misleading information about vaccine ingredients and circulated retracted studies linking vaccines to various medical conditions. At a rally in Washington last year, he compared the vaccination records some called “vaccine passports” to life in Germany during the Holocaust, a statement he later apologized for. And he falsely told Louisiana lawmakers in 2021 that the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”Children’s Health Defense, an organization Mr. Kennedy originally founded as the World Mercury Project, has frequently campaigned against vaccines. Facebook and Instagram removed the group’s accounts last year for espousing vaccine misinformation, and Mr. Kennedy has often lamented the perils of “censorship” in campaign speeches since.Mr. Kennedy, who many see as a prominent representative for the vaccine resistance movement, attended the New York Rally for Vaccine Injury and Vaccine Rights in Albany in 2019.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesHe has made baseless claims about a connection between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.In an interview last month with Jordan Peterson, a conservative Canadian psychologist and public speaker, Mr. Kennedy falsely linked chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity.“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” he said. He referred to research on an herbicide, atrazine, in which scientists found that it “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in certain frogs.But no evidence exists to indicate that the chemical, typically used on farms to kill weeds, causes the same effects in humans, let alone gender dysphoria. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Most people are not exposed to atrazine on a regular basis.”He has falsely linked antidepressants to school shootings.Drawing on longstanding dubious claims, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly endorsed the idea that mass shootings have increased because of heightened use of antidepressants.“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,” he told the comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of the podcast, “Club Random With Bill Maher.” “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”While both antidepressant use and mass shooting occurrences have increased in the last several decades, the scientific community has found “no biological plausibility” to back a link between the two, according to Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.Antidepressants often have warnings that reference suicidal thoughts, Mr. Girgis said. But those warnings refer to the possibility that people who already experience suicidal ideation might share pre-existing beliefs aloud once they take the medicine as part of their treatment.Mr. Kennedy, however, has pointed to such warnings as evidence of the false notion that the drugs might induce “homicidal tendencies.”Several high-profile figures, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have amplified similar claims following recent mass shootings.Most school shooters were not prescribed with psychotropic medications before committing acts of violence, a 2019 study found. And even when they were, researchers wrote, “no direct or causal association was found.”He has bolstered a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. assassinated his uncle.Former President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, the former first lady, are shown in the back of a car minutes before Mr. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.Bettmann, Getty ImagesMr. Kennedy has long promoted a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.He claimed, without evidence, during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in May that Allen W. Dulles, a C.I.A. director fired by President Kennedy, helped cover up evidence of the organization’s involvement when he served on the Warren Commission, convened in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination.Referencing a House committee inquiry in 1976, he said: “Most of the people in that investigation believed it was the C.I.A. that was behind it because the evidence was so overwhelming to them.”But even that investigation, which found that President Kennedy was “probably” the victim of a conspiracy of some kind, flatly concluded that the C.I.A. was “not involved.”The Warren Commission found that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone and was not connected to any governmental agency.And he has said that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election.Mr. Kennedy told The Washington Post in June that he still believed that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, had won the 2004 presidential election.Mr. Kennedy first promoted that idea in a 2006 article in Rolling Stone, asserting that Republicans had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people” and assure the re-election of President George W. Bush. He claimed that their efforts “prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted.”But it is one thing to complain of vote suppression; it is another thing to demonstrate that Mr. Kerry won more of the votes cast.Mr. Bush defeated Mr. Kerry by a margin of 35 electoral college votes nationally; he carried Ohio and its 20 electoral votes by more than 118,000 ballots.The Times reported in 2004 that a glitch in an electronic Ohio voting machine added 3,893 votes to Mr. Bush’s tally. That error was caught in preliminary vote counts, officials said. But the event, alongside other voting controversies nationwide, spurred widespread questions about election integrity that caught traction with people like Mr. Kennedy.Mr. Kerry, however, conceded the race a day after the election. More

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      Kennedy, Christie and the Supreme Court: Are They Changing the Race?

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      A painful ruling from the court can sometimes free a party from an unpopular stance.A recent Supreme Court decision won’t necessarily hurt Democrats politically. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressWhen I returned from a trip to China almost exactly eight years ago, I found my inbox full of requests from editors to write about two huge stories that unfolded while I was gone: the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage and the emergence of a surprising candidate who entered the race after my departure, Donald J. Trump.Needless to say, my inbox this week after a couple of weeks off in the Pacific Northwest does not have nearly as many requests as it did in the wake of the Obergefell decision and Mr. Trump’s trip down the escalator. But the requests I do have nonetheless center on a similar set of topics: a major Supreme Court decision, this time to end affirmative action programs, and two upstart candidates who weren’t receiving a lot of attention before I left, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chris Christie.Court gives Democrats some coverAs I wrote at the time, the Supreme Court’s decision to make same-sex marriage a fundamental right was probably politically advantageous for Republicans. Yes, the court decision was popular and the Republican position on same-sex marriage was increasingly unpopular, but that’s precisely why that decision did them a favor: It all but removed the issue from political discourse, freeing Republicans from an issue that might have otherwise hobbled them.In theory, something similar can be said for the court’s affirmative action ruling, but this time with the decision helping Democrats. Here again, the court is taking a popular position that potentially frees a political party — this time the Democrats — from an issue that could hurt it, including with the fast-growing group of Asian American voters.It’s worth noting that this would be nothing like how the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade helped Democrats. Then, the court ruling sparked a backlash that energized liberals and gave Democrats a new campaign issue with appeal to the base and moderates alike. If the most recent case were to help Democrats, it would do so in nearly the opposite manner: To take advantage of the ruling politically, Democrats might need to stop talking about it.It was fairly easy for Republican elites to stop talking about same-sex marriage in 2015, as many were already keen to move on from a losing political fight. It is not as obvious that Democratic elites are keen to move away from the fight over affirmative action or whether they even can, given their base’s passion for racial equality.About those other candidatesObviously, any analogy between the first few weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the slow emergence of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie will be much more strained. For one, Mr. Christie and Mr. Kennedy were already making ripples in the race when I left, and I did think I might need to write about them at some point. In contrast, Mr. Trump couldn’t have been further from my mind in mid-June 2015. Upon hearing about his bid on my return, I thought he might fade so quickly that I would never even have to write about him. Whatever you think about Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie, there’s not much reason to think they simply might go “pop.”Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie don’t have much in common — other than their unequivocally low chance of actually winning — but they have, in their own ways, become factors in the race simply by being the best or even only vessel for expressing explicit opposition to their party’s front-runners, Joe Biden and Mr. Trump.Chris Christie has been direct in his criticism of Donald Trump.John Tully for The New York TimesUsually, willingness to oppose a front-runner isn’t enough to distinguish an aspiring candidate. This year, it is. No current or former elected official has challenged the incumbent president thus far in the Democratic primary. And while many prominent Republicans appear willing to enter the race against Mr. Trump, few appear willing to directly, forcefully and consistently attack him. When they do attack him — as Ron DeSantis recently did for supporting L.G.B.T.Q. people a decade ago — it’s often from the right, and not on the issues that animate the base of any hypothetical not-Trump coalition: relatively moderate, highly educated Republicans.Of the two, Mr. Christie is probably the one who is most effectively fulfilling this demand for direct opposition to the front-runner. There may not be a large constituency for anti-Trump campaigning, but it exists and Mr. Christie is feeding it what it wants. Just as important, directly attacking Mr. Trump ensures a steady diet of media coverage.All of this makes Mr. Christie a classic factional candidate, the kind that doesn’t usually win presidential nominations but can nonetheless play an important role in the outcome of the campaign. If he gains the allegiance of those outright opposed to Mr. Trump, he’ll deny an essential not-Trump voting bloc to another Republican who might have broader appeal throughout the party — say, Mr. DeSantis. This is most likely to play out in New Hampshire, where fragmentary survey data (often from Republican-aligned firms) shows Mr. Christie creeping up into the mid-to-high single digits.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of vaccination.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy is a more complicated case. With the help of a famous family name, he’s nudged ahead of Marianne Williamson for the minor distinction of being Mr. Biden’s top rival in Democratic primary polls. On average, Mr. Kennedy polls in the mid-teens, with some surveys still showing him in the single digits and one poll showing him above 20 percent. That’s more than Mr. Christie can say.But unlike Mr. Christie, Mr. Kennedy is not exactly feeding Biden skeptics what they want. Instead, he’s advancing conspiracy theories, appearing on right-wing media and earning praise from conservative figures. And unlike Mr. Trump, whose most ardent opposition is probably toward the center, Mr. Biden is probably most vulnerable to a challenge from the ideological left. This is not what Mr. Kennedy is offering, and it’s reflected in the polls. While Times/Siena polling last summer showed Mr. Biden most vulnerable among “very liberal” voters and on progressive issues, Mr. Kennedy actually fares much better among self-described moderates than liberals. He doesn’t clearly fare better among younger Democrats than older ones, despite Mr. Biden’s longstanding weakness among the younger group.It’s too early to say whether Mr. Kennedy’s modest foothold among moderate and conservative Democrats reflects a constituency for anti-modernist, anti-establishment liberalism, or whether Mr. Kennedy’s family name is simply getting him farther among less engaged Democrats, who are likelier to identify as moderate. Either way, his ability to play an important role in the race is limited by embracing conservatives and conspiratorial positions, even if he may continue to earn modest support in the race because of the absence of another prominent not-Biden option. More

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      Pro-Vaccine Views Are Winning. Don’t Fear the Skeptics.

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      With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, vaccine skepticism has been back in the headlines. Though Kennedy has said he isn’t anti-vaccine and that his children have had vaccines, and his campaign manager (the former Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich) says calling Kennedy “anti-vax” is a “left-handed smear,” Kennedy continues to suggest a link between vaccines and autism — a link that has leaned heavily on flawed and retracted science. He’s also been a vocal opponent of Covid vaccines.When a flurry of April polls indicated that Kennedy would enjoy double-digit support in a Democratic primary, I wondered if the respondents knew about his views on vaccines and agreed with them, if they were intrigued about the possibility of a contested primary or if they just had warm feelings about the Kennedy name. I worried that Covid vaccine skepticism had potentially sullied Americans’ feelings about all vaccines: If a meaningful slice of the Democratic electorate was either vaccine hesitant or indifferent to vaccine skepticism, I’d be concerned about dangerous diseases like polio, diphtheria, measles and mumps making a comeback.I was relieved, then, to see a survey from Pew Research in May that found that in 2023, 88 percent of American adults believe that the benefits of the M.M.R. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine outweigh the risk — the same percentage that Pew found in 2016 and 2019. Per Pew, there’s been some softening in vaccine trust, particularly among Republicans and white evangelical Christians (who lean Republican), and this jibes with Republicans’ negative views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several other government agencies. But overall, the picture isn’t dire.When you look at rates of vaccination among young children for potentially dangerous infectious diseases, the data is encouraging. According to a study published in January in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report:Vaccination coverage among young children has remained high and stable for most vaccines, although disparities persist. The National Immunization Survey-Child identified no decline overall in routine vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic among children born during 2018-2019, although declines were observed among children living below the federal poverty level and in rural areas.Per the C.D.C., for children born in 2018 and 2019, coverage was over 90 percent for the polio, M.M.R., hepatitis B and varicella (chickenpox) vaccines. A major barrier to receiving vaccines seems to be access to health care — according to the C.D.C., “The proportion of children who were unvaccinated by age 24 months was eight times higher for uninsured compared with privately insured children.”Even for children who missed routine visits and vaccine doses in the darkest days of 2020, the C.D.C. “did not identify any consistent or persistent decline in vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.” When there were “transient declines” in coverage of some vaccines, children appeared to catch up with their doses at later dates.Acceptance of Covid vaccines is also one the rise in the United States. In a survey of Covid vaccine acceptance in 23 countries in 2022, published in January in the journal Nature, researchers found that 80.2 percent of Americans accepted the Covid vaccine, higher than the global average of 79.1 percent. (Vaccine acceptance was defined as “having received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and, if not, willingness to take the Covid-19 vaccine when it is available to them.”)Still, parents in the United States are more hesitant about getting the vaccines for their kids than for themselves. Though 33.1 percent of American parents were hesitant about the vaccine in 2022, that was a nearly 12.9 percent decrease in hesitancy from 2021 — with time, more parents are able to trust that the vaccines’ benefits matter. (Hesitancy for children among parents was defined as “having reported ‘no’ to the question of whether children received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and also ‘unsure/no opinion’, ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ to the question of whether children will take a Covid-19 vaccine when available to them.”That it was going to take time for parents to get comfortable with Covid vaccines for their kids was predictable. As Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and the chief health officer at Indiana University, wrote for The Atlantic in 2021: “Parents tend to be skeptical of new vaccines. Whenever one is introduced, many of them are initially hesitant to adopt it.” He went on to explain that though the highly effective varicella vaccine was approved in 1995, “uptake levels were initially low, with only 34 percent of eligible adolescents fully immunized by 2008,” despite recipients showing few side effects. But now, as noted above, the vaccination rate for varicella is over 90 percent.Two years ago, when I talked to parents who were skeptical about Covid vaccines for their children, they weren’t broadly anti-vaccine. They were worried about the newness of the vaccines, about allergies and about side effects. As one mom put it, “I’m not anti-vax but this all seems just too fast for me. I don’t want my children to be responding to those lawyer ads you see on TV 25 years from now. You know the ones: ‘If you were under the age of 16 in the years 2021-2022 and received the Covid-19 vaccination you could be entitled to compensation …’.”I know there’s some concern that amplifying Kennedy’s beliefs about vaccines will make the vaccine hesitant even more hesitant. But I wonder if all of the attention paid to vaccine skeptics in recent years could be having the opposite effect — that people are being exposed to skeptics’ unfettered theories on podcasts and social media and ultimately finding those views unconvincing. In June, my Opinion colleague Michelle Goldberg went to a Kennedy rally to talk to some of his supporters and she wrote: “As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent St. Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent” among registered voters in the early and influential primary state of New Hampshire.Many scientific experts have worked to promote accurate and up-to-date information about vaccines, including Covid vaccines. In some cases, they’ve spent a lot of social capital in their efforts to debunk falsehoods. Many journalists have asked vaccine skeptics tough questions. Simply shaming those who don’t want to get their children vaccinated, for whatever reason, is not effective.What does work? As Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Kristen Panthagani write for the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, some people have serious, good-faith questions about vaccines, and they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand:Legitimate concerns exist. In fact, the vast majority of people who have questions or doubts about vaccines don’t outright deny vaccines as beneficial. They are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.Answering people with valid questions needs to be scientists’ priority. We need to meet them where they are, answer their questions from a place of empathy not condescension, equip trusted messengers, and anticipate concerns so we can prevent information voids that will otherwise be filled with false rumors.This is happening all the time. And looking at the data, I have confidence that it’s working. More

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      Pro-Kennedy Super PAC Says It Has Raised $10 Million

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      A super PAC backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said an even mix of Republicans and Democrats contributed to its $10.25 million haul. A political action committee supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign has raised a total of $10.25 million, one of its leaders said on Monday, a signal that his long-shot challenge to President Biden has gained traction among donors, including many Republicans.The precise level of fund-raising by the super PAC, American Values 2024, will not be known until later this month, when political action committees file midyear reports with the Federal Election Commission. But Tony Lyons, Mr. Kennedy’s publisher and the super PAC’s co-chair, said that the $10.25 million included two “very large” donations that each exceed $1 million, and that the contributions came from a “right down the middle” mix of Republicans and Democrats.Mr. Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer and prominent skeptic of vaccines and prescription medications, often cites contorted statistics and unfounded theories. He has gained a foothold in the race, even as he has railed against the Democratic Party, accused public health authorities of corruption and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.Mr. Kennedy will not come close to summoning the kind of financial support that will flow to Mr. Biden, who as the incumbent has the might of the Democratic National Committee and a robust donor infrastructure behind him. Mr. Kennedy’s support among Democrats has reached as high as 20 percent in polls, although a poll conducted in June by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center put his Democratic support in New Hampshire at 9 percent. He has also appealed to prospective voters outside the party: A Quinnipiac University poll in June found that 40 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats.Mr. Biden’s campaign has not yet announced fund-raising numbers. The super PAC American Values 2024 was formed last year as the People’s Pharma Movement, and was initially financed by $500,000 in contributions from Mark Gorton, a New York City investor, records show. Mr. Gorton, who is supporting Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy, has said he knows Mr. Kennedy through the “health freedom” movement, which broadly opposes vaccinations and the regulation of health practices.The committee was renamed this past spring, after Mr. Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic nomination in April. A majority of the $10.25 million has come since then, Mr. Lyons said. As recently as the first week of June, the PAC’s total haul was $5.7 million, committee officials said, indicating that nearly $5 million more arrived in the weeks before the June 30 reporting deadline. The range of political affiliations among the donors, Mr. Lyons said, showed that “there really are people across the political spectrum who feel he’s going to fight corruption in government and corporate takeover of government agencies.” In recent speeches and appearances, Mr. Kennedy has leaned on his family’s storied political history, and framed his race as a bid to “heal the divide” in American politics, which he has described as being captive to corporate power.The PAC is separate from his campaign, which last week sent out requests to hit a $5 million goal to close out its first full quarter of fund-raising. On Friday, the campaign boasted of a $1 million haul in a 24-hour period. Dennis Kucinich, the former presidential candidate and former Ohio congressman who is serving as Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said the campaign expected to make a fund-raising announcement this week. Official numbers will be filed with the F.E.C. this month.A second group supporting Mr. Kennedy, Common Sense PAC, was formed in Los Angeles in April by Sofia Karstens, an actress who has been active in the health freedom movement. Common Sense hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Kennedy last month in San Francisco along with two tech investors, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya. That event raised nearly $1 million, Ms. Karstens said.Ms. Karstens did not have the PAC’s latest total fund-raising immediately available on Monday. More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr. Reports Income of $7.8 Million

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      The presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist made nearly $1.6 million from consulting work for a law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies, a filing showed.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent vaccine skeptic who is challenging President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, reported an income of $7.8 million in the year leading up to his entry into the race, including nearly $1.6 million from his consulting work for a personal injury law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies.The details came in a financial disclosure form filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission. It shows that Mr. Kennedy earned $5 million at his environmental law firm, Kennedy & Madonna, and a $516,000 salary and bonus as chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group he formed that has campaigned against vaccines. (The disclosure says he has been on leave from the organization since April, when he announced his campaign.)Mr. Kennedy, a leading skeptic of vaccinations and prescription medications, has gained a foothold in the race even as he has contorted facts about vaccine development and public health authorities and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.His support among Democrats has reached as high as 20 percent in polls, although a more recent Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll in June put his Democratic support in New Hampshire at 9 percent. He has also appealed to prospective voters outside the party: A Quinnipiac University poll in June found that 40 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats.Friday was also the final day of campaign fund-raising for the second quarter for the presidential race. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign sent out solicitations asking donors to help him meet a $5 million goal by the end of the day. His campaign highlighted a $1 million haul in the 24 hours leading up to Friday’s final push.Official numbers will be available in two weeks, when the campaign files reports with the F.E.C.On his disclosure form, Mr. Kennedy reported nearly $1.6 million in consulting fees from Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles-based personal injury law firm formerly known as Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. The firm’s website lists him as co-counsel on ongoing litigation over Gardasil — an HPV vaccine manufactured by Merck — as well as lawsuits over Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and California wildfires.Mr. Kennedy also reported $150,000 in consulting fees from the Marwood Group, which describes itself as a health care advisory firm based in New York. And he reported $125,000 from Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes his books and, according to the disclosure, pays him as a consultant.Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said the disclosure “speaks for itself.” More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful

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      Before Covid, Gabe Whitney, a 41-year-old from West Bath, Maine, didn’t think much about vaccines. He wasn’t very political — he didn’t vote in 2020, he said, because he thought Donald Trump was a “psycho” and Joe Biden was “corrupt.” It wasn’t until the pandemic that Whitney started regularly watching the news, but as he did, he felt like things weren’t adding up. He doubted what he called “the narrative” and struggled with the hostility his questions about vaccines and other mitigations elicited from those close to him. He described being “blamed and labeled as someone who’s part of the problem because you’re questioning. Like not taking a stance on it, but just questioning. That was the worst.”Whitney started gravitating toward people who see skepticism of mainstream public health directives as a sign of courage rather than selfishness and delusion. He began following anti-vax figures like Del Bigtree, Robert Malone and, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Whitney already admired for his environmental work. Kennedy has long touted an illusory connection between vaccines and autism, and has repeatedly said that pandemic restrictions arose from a C.I.A. plan to “clamp down totalitarian control.” If Kennedy was so wrong, Whitney thought, it didn’t make sense that his critics wouldn’t debate him. “When someone is taking such an unpopular position, and then nobody wants to debate them, that says something to me,” he said.I met Whitney this month at a rally for Kennedy, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at Saint Anselm College, just outside Manchester, N.H. I’d gone because I was curious about who was turning out to see the candidate. Among many Democrats, there’s an assumption that Kennedy’s surprising strength in some polls — an Emerson College survey from April showed him getting 21 percent in a Democratic primary — is mostly attributable to the magic of his name and anxiety about Joe Biden’s age. This is probably at least partly true. As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent Saint Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent, barely ahead of Marianne Williamson.At the same time, Kennedy has a sincere and passionate following. When I arrived at the St. Anselm venue, I was surprised by the enormous line snaking out the door. It quickly became clear that many people weren’t going to make it into the 580-seat auditorium. (I requested an interview with Kennedy, but never heard back from the person I was told could schedule it.)In New Hampshire, I didn’t meet any loyal Democrats who were there just to scope out the alternatives. The 2020 Biden voters I encountered were dead set against voting for him again; some, disenchanted by vaccine mandates and American support for Ukraine, even said they preferred Donald Trump. Like Whitney, several people I spoke to hadn’t voted at all in 2020 because they didn’t like their choices. Some attendees said they leaned right, and others identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.What brought them all together was a peculiar combination of cynicism and credulity. The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.In 2021, Charles Eisenstein, an influential New Age writer, described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the primal wound that brought America to its current lamentable state. “It is like a radioactive pellet lodged inside the body politic,” he wrote, “generating an endlessly metastasizing cancer that no one has been able to trace to its source.”Eisenstein takes it for granted that J.F.K.’s murder was orchestrated by the national security state, a view also held by R.F.K. Jr., the former president’s nephew. Because the official story “beggars belief,” Eisenstein argued, it engendered in the populace a festering distrust of all official narratives. At the same time, the cover-up led the government to regard the people it’s been continually deceiving with contempt, as “unruly schoolchildren who must be managed, surveilled, tracked, locked up and locked down for their own good.”A Kennedy restoration, Eisenstein believes, would heal the corrosive injury that separates the people from their putative leaders, putting America back on the confident and optimistic trajectory from which it was diverted in 1963. In May, he joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign as a senior adviser working on messaging and strategy.“There was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving towards greater and greater virtue,” Eisenstein said in a podcast he and Kennedy recorded together. J.F.K.’s assassination jolted America onto a different, darker timeline, but perhaps not permanently. “I feel like maybe that timeline hasn’t died,” Eisenstein said of the earlier era. “Maybe we can pick up that thread. And it’s so significant that a Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. It’s one of the synchronicities that speak to, or speak from, a larger organizing intelligence in the world.”To those of us who see Kennedy as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick, one boosted by MAGA figures like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon to weaken Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election. But to many in his substantial following, it has a messianic cast, promising deliverance from the division and confusion that began with J.F.K.’s assassination and reached a terrifying apotheosis during the Covid pandemic. “We are in the last battle,” Kennedy said in a 2021 speech at a California church famous for defying pandemic restrictions. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”In Kennedy’s campaign, this chiliastic vision is translated into a story about the renewal of a lost American golden age, before the murders of his uncle and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. In New Hampshire, his appearance was more than just a campaign stop — it commemorated the 60th anniversary of J.F.K.’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where the young president had called on his countrymen “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”Standing before a row of American flags in that packed Saint Anselm auditorium, wearing a suit and a 1960s-style skinny tie, Kennedy reworked his uncle’s speech as a call to empathize with Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine. He cast American support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a continuation of our country’s forever wars, which he posited as the cause of American decline. As he often does, he mixed highly tendentious arguments — attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in part to “repeated deliberate provocations” by America — with resonant truths. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” he said. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.”A new Kennedy presidency, he claimed, could revive us. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he said. It was a softer, more eloquent version of Make America Great Again, and the audience loved it.When the speech was over, the crowd was invited to join one of three breakout sessions. I chose “Peace Consciousness in Foreign Policy,” a dialogue led by Eisenstein. “You could say manifest, or you can say prophesize, but we need to see that this is possible,” a woman at the talk said about the prospect of a Kennedy presidency. “We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.” The people around her hooted and applauded.It is in fact possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.It’s also both a show of strength and a potential recruiting vehicle for what Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker call “conspirituality,” the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture that flowered during the pandemic. In their new book, “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” they show how crunchy yoga influencers were pulled into the paranoid orbit of QAnon. Conspiritualists warned that “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, Big Pharma and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination,” they wrote. “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.”In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.“There’s a huge political realignment going on in this country, where a lot of the old categories — liberal, conservative — just don’t make sense anymore,” Eisenstein told me after the New Hampshire event. The Kennedy campaign, he said, “is unifying people who have really lost trust in the system, lost trust in politicians, lost trust — no offense intended — in the media.”A few days after the speech, I met Aubrey Marcus, who co-founded a multimillion-dollar nutritional supplement company, Onnit, with the podcaster Joe Rogan, at the cafe in the Soho Grand Hotel. Marcus, a self-help guru, author, podcaster and ayahuasca promoter based in Austin, Texas, who recently led the football star Aaron Rodgers on a darkness retreat in Oregon, is an ardent Kennedy backer, though he’s never voted in his life. “This is as strong a belief in a cause as I’ve ever had,” he said. Many people he knows, he told me, share his enthusiasm: There’s “more excitement than I’ve ever seen about any politician, ever.”That excitement is only intensified by a sense that the establishment is trying to silence Kennedy, who during the pandemic was booted from major social media platforms for promoting untruths about vaccines. Marcus denounced “the broad application of censorship for very complicated issues” and attempts to “remove people from the conversation and saying they don’t deserve a voice.”The celebration of Kennedy as a free-speech icon creates a dilemma for those who think that by discouraging lifesaving vaccinations, he’s going to get people killed. This month, after Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine scientist, criticized Joe Rogan for letting Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he’d debate Kennedy on his show. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, offered an additional $150,000, and one Covid contrarian after another chimed in to add to the pot. “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Elon Musk tweeted. As the pile-on mounted, anti-vaccine activists showed up at Hotez’s house, harassing him for his refusal to square off against Kennedy.Hotez, whose book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” was inspired by his autistic daughter, has actually spoken to Kennedy several times in the past in an effort to convince him that he’s wrong about vaccines. It was, Hotez told me, frustrating and fruitless. “You’d debunk one thing and then he’d come up with something else,” he said. Hotez has been a guest on Rogan’s podcast before and is more than willing to return, but said, “Having Bobby there will just turn it into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”I sympathize with Hotez’s position, which is the same one taken by experts in many fields when challenged to debate cranks. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, refuses to debate creationists because he doesn’t want to treat them as legitimate interlocutors. Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian and diplomat, has written that trying to debate Holocaust deniers is like “trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. It’s impossible because no matter what you say to them, they’re going to make something up.” To debate a conspiracy theorist, one must be fluent not just in facts but also in a near-limitless arsenal of non-facts.Still, it’s obvious enough why Kennedy’s sympathizers view it as a moral victory when experts refuse to engage with him. To successfully quarantine certain ideas, you need some sort of social consensus about what is and isn’t beyond the pale. In America, that consensus has broken down. Liberals, justifiably panicked by epistemological chaos, have sometimes tried to reassert consensus by treating more and more subjects — like the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — as unworthy of public argument. But the proliferation of taboos can give stigmatized ideas the sheen of secret knowledge. When the boundaries of acceptable discourse are policed too stringently — and with too much unearned certainty — that can be a recipe for red pills.A Kennedy presidency, some of the candidate’s supporters hope, will knock those boundaries down. One of those supporters is my old boss David Talbot, a co-founder of the online magazine Salon.com. “Bobby talks about the censorship culture coming out of the left,” Talbot told me when we talked recently. “I think that’s a dangerous trend. On the left, liberals used to be against censorship. We’re now shutting down free speech.”This is, no doubt, a lament you’ve heard before, and maybe one you agree with. A common theme among old-school liberals disenchanted with contemporary progressivism is that it’s sanctimonious and intolerant. But talking to Kennedy fans, I heard something more than just complaints about cancel culture. I heard an almost spiritual belief that Kennedy, by being brave enough to speak some unspeakable truth, could heal the hatred and suspicions that make Americans want to shut one another down.For Talbot, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” that truth is that the American government killed both J.F.K. and R.F.K., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared the former president’s assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “It’s the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that’s stinking up our house of democracy,” he said. Being honest about it, he believes, “would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who’s willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.”This notion of wiping the slate clean — or Eisenstein’s idea about returning to an aborted timeline — is a powerful one. Who wouldn’t want to reach into the past and undo the errors and accidents that have brought us to this miserable moment? As politics it’s a harmful fantasy; movements that promise to restore a halcyon era of national unity always are. As a quasi-religious impulse — or as the drive of a candidate seeking to return to a time before his uncle and father were murdered — it’s perhaps more understandable. “A lot of people fall into despair when they take in the hopelessness of our situation,” Eisenstein said on Marcus’s podcast last week. “And it is in fact hopeless if you don’t incorporate what we’re calling miracles.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Behind RFK Jr.’s Popularity With Tech Elites Like Jack Dorsey

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      Robert Kennedy Jr.’s contentious claims on issue including vaccines are drawing acclaim from tech executives who are giving him money and exposure.Tech executives are drawn to Robert Kennedy Jr.’s iconoclastic takes.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesThe money men aiding Robert Kennedy Jr.’s political surge As the 2024 race heats up, President Biden faces a persistent thorn in his side: Robert Kennedy Jr., the scion of the Democratic dynasty, who both touts an array of fringe theories and boasts surprisingly durable poll numbers.The Times notes that Mr. Kennedy is drawing support from an array of political outsiders. But perhaps his most powerful base is a group of financial and tech moguls, including the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who have given him money and something arguably more important: exposure.Kennedy speaks to many of their interests. That includes things like cryptocurrency — he has spoken at industry conferences and accepts campaign donations in Bitcoin. Mr. Kennedy has also embraced some of their favored podcasts, speaking with popular hosts like Joe Rogan and the venture capitalists behind the show “All-In.”And in endorsing Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Dorsey (who’s also a major Bitcoin booster) cited the candidate’s criticism of government censorship.But Mr. Kennedy’s most powerful draw may be his iconoclasm, particularly his willingness to buck institutional thinking on matters like the benefits of vaccines. (That has led to YouTube removing a Kennedy interview because it promoted vaccine misinformation.)“I think he is a lower-intellect, Democratic version of Donald Trump, so he attracts libertarian-leaning, anti-‘woke,’ socially liberal folks as a protest vote,” Robert Nelsen, an investor at Arch Venture Partners, told KFF Health News.Well-heeled supporters have given him money and airtime. Figures including Elon Musk and the investor David Sacks have pushed for a public debate between Mr. Kennedy and Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher who criticized Mr. Rogan’s decision to let the candidate spout unfounded conspiracy theories on his show.Mr. Sacks and his fellow “All-In” co-hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya have had Kennedy on their podcast as well, praising him for being “willing to engage in vibrant debates” and “tearing down all these institutions of power.” Mr. Sacks, who with Mr. Musk also interviewed Kennedy in a Twitter Spaces event, and Mr. Palihapitiya held a fund-raiser for him this month that, according to CNBC, raised $500,000.Meanwhile, the entrepreneur Mark Gorton helped create a Kennedy-focused PAC that, its leaders say, has raised at least $5.7 million. And CNBC reported that the investor Omeed Malik plans to host a $6,600-a-head fund-raiser in the Hamptons for Kennedy next month.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Smoke from Canadian wildfires again threatens U.S. cities. New York City and other places in the Northeast are facing the return of hazardous air quality, after whitish smoke enveloped Midwestern cities like Chicago. Mayors warned residents to take precautions, raising the prospect of further disruptions to outdoor activities and businesses.The Kremlin moves to seize the Wagner Group’s empire. Russian officials told leaders in countries like Syria and the Central African Republic, where the mercenary group operated, that Moscow was assuming its operations there. Meanwhile, a top Russian general who had prior knowledge about the Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion has reportedly been detained.Nvidia warns against further U.S. curbs on A.I. chip exports. The semiconductor giant’s C.F.O. said that additional steps to limit sales to China of chips meant for artificial intelligence systems could “result in a permanent loss of opportunities” for U.S. companies in a major market. Shares of Nvidia fell yesterday after The Wall Street Journal reported on White House deliberations about new export rules.Aspartame reportedly will be declared “possibly carcinogenic.” The World Health Organization will say next month that one of the world’s most popular artificial sweeteners could cause cancer, according to Reuters. Aspartame is used in countless products, including diet sodas, chewing gum and candy.The fate of Microsoft’s big deal may be decided soonYesterday was a big day in proceedings over the F.T.C.’s effort to block Microsoft’s $70 billion takeover of the video game titan Activision Blizzard, with three key players testifying: Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O.; Bobby Kotick, Activision’s leader; and Jim Ryan, who heads Sony’s PlayStation division (and gave evidence by video).If the presiding judge agrees to delay the transaction, as the F.T.C. is asking, Microsoft’s deal will probably die. But if she doesn’t, the agency may drop its opposition.Mr. Nadella and Mr. Kotick said the takeover wouldn’t hurt consumers. The Microsoft chief reiterated that top titles like Call of Duty wouldn’t be restricted to its Xbox platform. “If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire ‘exclusives on consoles,’” Mr. Nadella said — and blamed Sony for maintaining that business model.Mr. Kotick agreed: “You would have a revolt if you were to remove the game from one platform.” (That said, Mr. Ryan testified that he was worried about PlayStation receiving “degraded” versions of Call of Duty if the deal went through.)But testimony showed that Microsoft isn’t averse to exclusives. The company’s gaming chief, Phil Spencer, has acknowledged that the company held discussions about excluding other Activision games from PlayStation. The F.T.C. sought to highlight contradictions in Microsoft’s case, including Mr. Nadella’s recent boasts about sales figures for the latest Xbox console despite Mr. Spencer saying the platform was “not a robust business.” And the agency’s lawyers noted that Mr. Nadella had told investors the new business of cloud gaming was “one of the big bets that’s paying off,” despite downplaying the importance of that market in court.A decision is expected as soon as Monday. At points, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley seemed skeptical of the F.T.C.’s questions. Historically, the F.T.C. drops its opposition to a deal if it loses an injunction request.If that happens, the last hurdle for Microsoft would be an appeal of a British regulator’s decision to block the transaction — a potentially even more uphill battle.Central bankers issue a warning on inflation Two big themes emerged from this week’s central bankers’ meeting in Portugal: Policymakers are far from finished raising interest rates as inflation remains stubbornly high, and it is not yet clear how high they will go.A significant data dump on inflation comes tomorrow. The Commerce Department will publish its report on personal consumption expenditures (P.C.E.) at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, a few hours after the eurozone’s preliminary report on consumer prices is released.Both reports are expected to show that headline inflation is cooling, but that prices are still well above policymakers’ 2 percent target. Jay Powell, the Fed chair, said yesterday that “core” inflation — which excludes energy and food prices — will probably not reach that level until 2025.That is forcing the Fed’s hand on interest rates. Mr. Powell added that the Fed could raise rates at consecutive meetings — and keep them at a “restrictive” level for some time. On the subject of cuts, he said “we’re a long way from that,” adding, “That’s not something we’re thinking about now.”The futures market this morning seems to be getting that message, betting on further rate increases this year and pushing out the forecast for cuts well into 2024.The good news: Powell and his counterparts, including Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor, said that a strong labor market was keeping their countries out of recession — for now.What to watch tomorrow: Economists forecast that “headline” P.C.E. came in at 3.8 percent in May, its lowest reading in two years. But “core” P.C.E. is expected to tell a different story, hitting 4.7 percent. A possible bright spot: Some economists expect that used car prices and rents will begin to recede this summer.In Europe, inflation is running hotter. Its C.P.I. data is expected to show that prices rose by 5.7 percent from a year ago. Christine Lagarde, the E.C.B. president, has warned that inflation is beginning to become entrenched in all layers of the economy. Her antidote to that: More interest-rate increases are in the cards.$1 trillion — The drop in the value of deals announced in the first half of 2023, compared with the same period last year, according to Bloomberg. The fall in mergers, acquisitions and I.P.O.s makes this one of the worst periods for deal making in a decade, as high inflation, financing pressures and geopolitical tension have sapped activity.How strong are the nation’s banks, really? Months after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse set off a panic over America’s smaller lenders, the Fed yesterday gave the country’s biggest banks a clean bill of health. But regulators warned that their recently concluded stress tests were just one way of evaluating stability — and that other risks could still pose a threat.What the tests found: The country’s 23 biggest banks could withstand a 40 percent drop in commercial real estate prices — a major concern for lenders now — and $541 billion in losses without failing. They could also handle steep unemployment and sharp drops in home prices.Though the examinations began well before SVB’s troubles in March, regulators did explore whether eight banks heavily involved in trading could withstand sudden panics in the markets for stocks, bonds and other financial instruments. Bank investors were keenly watching the tests, since strong results mean that lenders are likely to have their capital requirements lowered, allowing them to buy back more stock or pay increased dividends.Banks are expected to unveil their new capital requirements tomorrow, along with any changes in investor payouts.But regulators warned that the stress tests aren’t the final word on banks’ health. “This stress test is only one way to measure that strength,” said Michael Barr, the Fed’s top banking supervisor.Regulators are still overhauling the rules. Beyond ramping up supervision, authorities are expected to tighten capital requirements, including for smaller lenders. That said, even if SVB had been subject to this year’s tests, The Financial Times notes, it might still have passed.In other banking news: Bank of America is sitting on more than $100 billion in paper losses tied to bad bond trades, far more than its rivals. THE SPEED READ DealsHong Kong conglomerates have announced more than $8 billion worth of asset sales to help cut their debt loads amid rising borrowing costs. (Bloomberg)The investment firm Silver Lake plans to focus on only giant takeovers, as its rivals instead keep busy with smaller deals. (FT)Artificial intelligenceTop news publishers, including The New York Times Company, are reportedly discussing the creation of a coalition to address the effects of artificial intelligence on their industry. (WSJ)“How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools?” (NYT)Best of the restSome applicants for jobs at Bill Gates’s private investment firm were reportedly asked invasive personal questions by a third-party contractor that some experts contend were illegal. (WSJ)OPEC banned reporters from three major news organizations from its next meeting, the second time it has done so in a month. (Bloomberg)Britain could renationalize its biggest water utility after the sudden exit of its C.E.O. and its struggles under $17 billion worth of debt. (Sky News)South Koreans became a year or two younger instantly yesterday. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      R.F.K. Jr. Is a Walking, Talking Conspiracy Theory

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      Let’s start with some positive things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for president.Tick, tick, tick …OK, I really do have some. Sort of. But let’s get the downside out of the way first.There’s his anti-vax crusade. Kennedy has claimed that Covid vaccinations are responsible for practically every evil in the world — last year, in a best-selling book, he accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of using the pandemic to trigger a “coup d’état against Western democracy.”And he’s lashed into Joe Biden for pandemic restrictions that he once compared to Nazi Germany. Some of his relatives recoiled at that point. But R.F.K. Jr. holds no grudges. In his announcement speech he assured the crowd: “I bear no ill will … to any of them.”Which is certainly a good thing, given that even Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, disagreed when he claimed that the pandemic regulations were worse than Nazi Germany. (Back then, he argued, you could at least “hide in the attic like Anne Frank.”)Now Kennedy is running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Joe Biden. And while he isn’t going to win, he’ll certainly draw a lot of attention. Even loyal Democrats have gotten kinda bored with our current president, and nobody really loves the idea of him celebrating his 86th birthday in the White House.It’s very clear that many of the folks who’ve told pollsters they want to nominate R.F.K. Jr. for president are just relating to the name. But he’s earned some of his high profile. There was a time — a very long time ago — when the world knew him mainly as a battler for the environment. Talking with everybody from Oprah to the Waterbury Democratic Town Committee.Mentioning that last one so I can tell you a story about a visit Kennedy made there once, back during the Clinton era. “He spoke forever,” a Connecticut friend of mine recalled. “He explained how estuaries work. He used that word.” It was not the normal pitch you gave to the regular Democrats in Waterbury, but nevertheless, my friend remembers the audience rapt from beginning to end.That was then. Now, Kennedy is troubled by spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder that makes his voice sound hoarse and strange. And even though he must realize his anti-pharmaceutical ranting is not going to win him the nomination, he doesn’t seem quite able to contain himself. Recently, he’s claimed vaccine research and prescription drugs have been responsible for everything from H.I.V. to school shootings.“Prior to the introduction of Prozac,” he told an online audience, “we had almost none of these events in our country and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people.”Obviously even a great environmental record won’t wipe away all this crazy stuff. But one very good thing about Kennedy’s presidential campaign is that he’s actually planning to run in the presidential primaries. Take on Joe Biden, head-to-head. Could be a problem for the president, what with his likely decision to skip the first two contests in New Hampshire and Iowa in order to start in the more diverse South Carolina. If Kennedy wins instead, a lot of Democrats who are dissatisfied with the status quo may be seriously tempted to look his way.That’s Biden’s problem. He’ll survive. But so far, what Kennedy is apparently not going to do is run as a third-party candidate.Let’s celebrate him for that. After all, it’d be a lot easier to run as a third-party candidate than trying to beat back Biden in Democratic primaries around the country. Your name will be in the news all the way through to Election Day. Only problem is that you can easily siphon votes away from the regular party candidate and throw the race to somebody none of your supporters really want at all.Chances are, for instance, that all the conservatives who voted for Ross Perot in 1992 weren’t really hoping he’d tilt the election to Bill Clinton. Or that the liberals who backed Ralph Nader in 2000 weren’t intending to help George Bush sneak past Al Gore. And if you’re ever in the mood to obsess about this matter, we’ll get together and have a long conversation about William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt.But for the moment, let’s look at Cornel West, a former Harvard professor now seeking the nomination of the Green Party, a perfect example of a group that promotes liberal causes in a way that can help the least-liberal candidate win.West is being assisted by Jill Stein, who was the Green Party nominee in 2016. When she won more votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania than Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in each state.Just saying.To summarize: People, if you’re bored with Joe Biden and believe that what this country really needs is a Democratic presidential nominee who seems to feel pandemic restrictions are nearly as dangerous as Nazis, go ahead and vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.It’s a free country, after all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More