The MRC's Ironic Promotion Of RFK Jr., Part 3
Robert Kennedy Jr. may have flamed out as a convenient foil to President Biden, but he still remained useful to the Media Research Center as a purported victim of "censorship."
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 and glom onto 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 adin 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:
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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.
Baldwin bestowed victimhood on Kennedy once again in a May 7 post:
Meta has once again deemed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas too dangerous to be allowed on Facebook and Instagram.
Kennedy’s Super PAC American Values 2024 (AV24) announced Sunday that it will file a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram’s parent company after the platforms suppressed links to Kennedy’s newly released documentary, “Who is Bobby Kennedy?”
“Facebook is putting its thumb on the scale this election,” Kennedy posted on X. “Please help me understand how this Woody Harrelson film about my life violates Facebook’s community standards?”
Kennedy uploaded the 30-minute film to Facebook on May 3. But when Facebook users tried to share links to the film’s website, the platform claimed the content violated its “Community Guidelines” and would not allow users to post. Instagram users had a similar experience when trying to post the link in Instagram stories, according to screenshots included in a TikTok video that Kennedy’s team posted on May 5.
[…]
Meta has since claimed that the video being labeled spam was a mistake rather than overt censorship.
“It was mistakenly blocked and corrected within a few hours,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone told The Times.
Baldwin failed to mention that the video was filled with lies and misinformation about vaccines — so, yes, those lies are “dangerous” and arguably justifying being blocked, accidentally or otherwise.
The brain worm
Fondacaro went into deflection mode over Kennedy’s revelation over having been diagnosed with a worm in his brain in a May 9 post:
Masters of the subject, the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View kicked off their Thursday show by sounding off on independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his past diagnosis of having a dead worm in his brain. The irony that they, of all people, were going to mock someone else for having a parasite in their brain was completely lost on the cast.
Following a soundbite of Kennedy explaining that he got the parasite while in India and that he had made a full recovery, moderator Whoopi Goldberg scoffed at his confidence. “Really? But he insists he’s still up for the gig, and even tweeted – and I don’t know why – that he could eat five more worms and still beat you-know-who and Biden in a debate,” she said.
Co-host and “comedian” Joy Behar suggested – without evidence – that the brain worm was “the reason for his irrational behavior,” but wanted to know: “what is Trump’s excuse?” “Does he also have a worm in his brain?” she quipped. “We know he suffers from narcolepsy. He’s always falling asleep.”
[…]
Kennedy might have a dead worm in his brain, but how does The View cast explain the things that come out of their mouths?
Then again, none of the hosts are anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists like Kennedy is, something Fondacaro failed to point out.
A May 29 post by Sarah Butler sorta admitted the truth about the MRC’s promotion of Kennedy:
On Tuesday, CNN This Morning host Kasie Hunt asked former White House correspondent Margaret Talev which major party candidate would suffer the most damage if Robert Kennedy Jr. were on the ballot in November. With the presidential election drawing near, RFK Jr. Kennedy was at 15 percent in the polls. Hunt described RFK Jr. as “dangerous” for the Biden team after he reportedly met the requirements to get on the Michigan ballot, a critical state President Biden was faltering in.
Former President Donald Trump and Kennedy attended the Libertarian Party’s convention last Saturday as they worked to potentially win over third-party voters. Talev noted that Trump “has made inroads into the Libertarian Party just as he has made some inroads into every facet of American politics” but followed that by saying Kennedy has the potential to be a “spoiler” in the upcoming presidential election.
When Hunt asked Talev which majority party candidate would suffer the most damage if Kennedy was on the ballot, her answer speculated that both candidates would be affected. Talev stated that he was seen, by swing voters, as a middle ground between Trump and Biden’s policies. Describing him as a “fascination to many” who may not know his policies or stances on certain issues outside of knowing the “Kennedy” family name.
Of course, Butler offered no information about Kennedy’s “policies or stances on certain issues” — that’s because the MRC largely opposes what he’s actually running on, as Tierin-Rose Mandelburg admitted in a May 9 post:
It’s absolutely jaw dropping to me that people openly support what can be summed up as nothing less than infanticide.
In an interview with podcaster Sage Steele, Democratic Presidential nominee Robert Kennedy Jr. was asked about his ideas when it comes to abortion restrictions. Kennedy, very confidently, insisted that all abortion decisions should be made by a mother and that he supports abortion “even if it’s full term.”
[…]
Steele pushed back in order to get Kennedy to clarify his stance: “Even if it’s full term?”
What Kennedy said next shocked me. “Even if it’s full term,” he said, meaning that he’d support a woman’s decision to abort her child, even if it is fully formed and merely a few inches up the birth canal.
LifeNews.com did indicate that even though Kennedy claims that he “may not support late-term abortions personally, his answer makes it crystal clear that his political policy would allow late-term abortions with no limits.”
In response to the clip, many pro-lifers were stunned and heartbroken.
[…]
I pray for the day that pro-aborts either wake up or stop ignoring the realities of what abortion is. Until then, that population, the most vulnerable population in our society, is under eminent risk with mindsets like Kennedy’s.
Mandelburg wouldn’t explain why her employer continues to promote a candidate whose actual views — as opposed to his Biden spoiler potential — it finds so abhorrent. Indeed, Mandelburg appears to be so detached from anything beyond her anti-abortion extremist activism that she bizarrely, and falsely, called Kennedy the “Democratic Presidential nominee,” apparently oblivious to the fact not only that Biden has sealed up the nomination but that Kennedy stopped running as a Democrat months earlier.)
Staying useful to the MRC
despite his being an anti-vaxxer and whale carcass mutilator, Kennedy stayed useful to the MRC as a “victim” because his lies about vaccines and other medical issues fed into its so-called “censorship” agenda (even though correcting lies and misinformation is not “censorship”). Luis Cornelio wrote in an Aug. 23 post:
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rebuked the Biden-Harris administration for exploiting government power to censor their political opposition.
During an announcement speech suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing former President Donald Trump, RFK. Jr. addressed reporters in Arizona and directly cited Big Tech censorship as a main reason for not winning the Democratic presidential nomination for the 2024 election. Mincing no words, he blasted the federal government and the Democratic National Committee for their involvement.
“What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates; what alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control, and the weaponization of the federal agencies,” RFK Jr. said while standing before a podium with two American flags behind him.
During his speech, RFK Jr. highlighted the damning consequences of the censorship collusion between Biden officials and social media platforms to censor constitutionally-protected, yet inconvenient free speech.
Cornelio didn’t explain why the lies and misinformation Kennedy repeatedly spreads should be treated as “free speech” — let alone that they are constitutionally protected — and should apparently never be corrected by anyone.
Cornelio gushed some more over Kennedy spouting those “censorship” talking points again in an Aug. 26 post:
The battle against censorship could soon be at the forefront of a potential Trump administration, according to former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.
RFK Jr., speaking on the Sunday edition of Fox News Sunday, and Vance, speaking on NBC News’s Meet the Press also on Sunday, hinted at what could be a significant offensive against the dystopian government censorship regime if Trump emerges victorious in 2024 and if RFK Jr. is called to serve in some capacity.
Speaking with Fox News anchor Shannon Bream, RFK Jr. said that Trump’s eagerness to dismantle censorship was one of the primary issues that led him to endorse the Trump-Vance ticket ahead of the upcoming election.
“The broad issues that were most important to me, the ones that brought me into the campaign, which was ending the Ukraine war, ending the censorship and protecting children’s health were all, reforming our food supply — all the things that we need to do to make our children healthy again — those are all things that President Trump also wanted to work on,” RFK Jr. said.
RFK Jr. then affirmed that Trump had invited him to “form a unity government,” and that while the two may disagree on other policies, the fight against censorship is among those issues most “important for unifying our country.”
Again, no explanation was offered for portraying correction of lies and misinformation as “censorship.”
As Kennedy moved toward throwing his support to Trump, Salgado helped him boost those dubious talking points again in a Sept. 19 post:
It appears Democrat [sic] vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has taken the Big Tech bait in calling for censorship of so-called “hate speech” and “misinformation.” But former Independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. corrected Walz for his outrageous take on America’s first principles.
Walz claimed in Dec. 2022 on MSNBC’s The ReidOut that U.S. law does not protect supposed “misinformation” or “hate speech.” RFK Jr. slammed Walz’s argument in a Sept. 18 post on X, pointing out that there is, in fact, a protection for speech that leftists consider “hateful”: “It is called the U.S. Constitution.” As for the leftist buzzword “misinformation,” Kennedy retorted, “who decides what is true and what is false? The government? In authoritarian countries, yes, the government. That is why freedom of speech lies at the very heart of democracy.” Walz’s running mate Kamala Harris has called five times for her now-presidential opponent Donald Trump to be censored by Big Tech, including in a 2019 CNN interview.
Big Tech platforms, including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, have policies penalizing or banning alleged “hateful conduct,” “hate speech,” and/or “misinformation.” These platforms also use so-called fact checking to censor speech that, according to the left, is “misinformation” or “false information.”
Is Salgado arguing that is no objective definition of lies or misinformation? That seems like sloppiness designed to obscure such lies and misinformation when they come from the right. She continued:
Kennedy, who was running for president as an Independent before dropping out and endorsing GOP nominee Donald Trump, continued, “Yes, I understand, some forms of speech are repugnant, such as expressions of racial bigotry. Problem is, the category of hate speech expands to include everything the censors ‘hate.’”
Kennedy correctly points out the subjective nature of defining “hate” and discerning what should or should not be censored as misinformation online.
What, exactly, about obvious misinformation should be considered subjective? Salgado doesn’t explain.
Fondacaro spent a Sept. 23 post being mad that the co-hosts of “The View” were holding Kennedy responsible for his part in a non-physical affair with reporter Olivia Nuzzi:
Last week, news broke that New York magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi was in a sexting relationship with her source, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while writing about him, and aggressively sending him nude pictures of herself. But instead of decrying Nuzzi for doing a disservice to female reporters everywhere by engaging in the type of unethical actively she once insisted didn’t really happen, most of the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View defended her on Monday’s show and blamed all men for the scandal.
The ridiculous spin started with the show’s opening tease for the segment, where the announcer huffed: “Breaking nudes? RFK Jr. ignites a scandal for reportedly bragging about being sent nude photos from a prominent journalist Olivia Nuzzi. But is most of the fallout landing on her?”
Coming back from their first commercial break, moderator Whoopi Goldberg suggested that Kennedy should be getting all the flack because he cheated on his wife, while ignoring the fact that Nuzzi was cheating on her fiancé, Ryan Lizza of Politico (who left his family to be with Nuzzi). She didn’t understand why Nuzzi had to live up to journalistic ethics:
[…]
Farah Griffin tried to downplay what happened by suggested Nuzzi simply “blurred ethical lines.” She had a meltdown over people calling it an “Olivia Nuzzi Scandal” and demanded people call it an “RFK scandal.”
She proceeded to cry “sexism” about the whole incident – which Nuzzi willing took an aggressive part in – and demanded that all men be blamed for it:
[…]
Surprisingly, the only cast member to bring any semblance of sense to the table was Ana Navarro. After taking some shots at Kennedy, by calling him “a dog and a ho,” she pointed out that the scandal boiled down to it being a major conflict of interest for Nuzzi, who “had more to lose”:
Fondacaro didn’t explain why he and his employer wouldn’t hold Kennedy to the same standards they held Bill Clinton over his affair (though decades later, Tim Graham was still trying to slut-shame Lewinsky over it).
Christian Toto bestowed victimhood on Kennedy via his wife in his Oct. 5 column: “The Hollywood Reporter just suggested liberal actress Cheryl Hines could be “shunned” by Hollywood. Why? She supports her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now supports Trump.” Toto didn’t mention the emotional affair Kennedy had with a reporter — apparently that’s OK at the MRC these days.