WND Loves RFK Jr.'s Trump Flip

WorldNetDaily wavered a little when Robert Kennedy Jr. (mostly) returned to spouting right-wing-friendly things, but it was fully on board when he quit the presidential race to endorse Donald Trump.

WorldNetDaily started out loving Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign because he was running as a Democrat and might harm President Biden’s re-election chances — but when Kennedy switched to running as an independent, WND suddenly realized he might hurt Donald Trump’s election chances and started noticing his non-right-wing views. But Kennedy returned to spouting right-wing friendly things, and WND got back on board. A March 17 article by Joe Kovacs hyped that Kennedy would be choosing a “fresh face” as his running mate:

It looks like NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers will not be the presidential running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after all.

A published report by Mediaite indicates the independent candidate is planning to select Nicole Shanahan, a California-based attorney and entrepreneur once married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Kovacs noted in passing that Shanahan “was behind Kennedy’s Super Bowl commercial,” but didn’t explain that the ad dishonestly tried to appropriate the legacy of his uncle, assassinated president John F. Kennedy.

An April 2 article by Bob Unruh cheered another right-wing talking point Kennedy spouted (while also noting some of his not-so-right-wing views):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as a third-party candidate this year.

But he long has been a prominent Democrat [sic] party leader. As have many of his family members, including his father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was the nation’s attorney general, and his uncle, John F. Kennedy, who was president.

He’s been active in environment fights, battled misinformation about vaccinations, leads Children’s Health Defense, and takes part in water, renewable energy and indigenous population issues.

Now he’s turned blunt on the issue of the threat to democracy, a charge that Joe Biden and other leaders of the Democrat party have been lobbing at President Donald Trump for years already.

It’s not Trump who is the greater threat, it’s Biden, Kennedy said.

It’s in a report at the Washington Examiner that he explains.

“I can make the argument that President Biden is the 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, so to censor his opponent,” he explained, “He’s weaponizing the federal agencies. Those are really critical threats.”

Actually, Children’s Health Defense doesn’t “battle misinformation about vaccinations” — it spreads misinformation about vaccines.

An April 5 article by Unruh gushing over Kennedy embracing a right-wing narrative about the Capitol riot began with a lengthy editorializing preamble:

Democrats for years now have claimed that the Jan. 6, 2021, protest-turned-riot at the U.S. Capitol was a full-fledged “insurrection.”

That would include plans by the rioters to seize the government, its economy, its military, is executive branch, its legislature, its courts and international relations.

Despite the fact that the evidence of that was simply not there, Democrats have championed their talking point because they want, under an obscure constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War, to prevent President Donald Trump from running for office again.

In fact, charges of “insurrection” are ostentatious by their absence from the hundreds and hundreds of court cases brought against those who protested, including the small number who vandalized the Capitol that day. And when leftists in several states, including Colorado, simply decided on their own and without evidence, that they would banish Trump from the ballot, the Supreme Court had to step in and rein them in.

The protesters that day were concerned over the undue influences on the 2020 election, which was hit by the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to elections officials, who often used it to recruit Democrat voters. Never before had such a sum been injected into an American election.

Yes, Unruh is repeating the Zuckerberg lie again. Finally, in the eighth paragraph of his article, Unruh finally got around to Kennedy:

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat but running as an independent because of Democrat party allegiance to Biden as a candidate, says if elected president, he’d have a special counsel look at the disputes.

And he debunked the standard Democrat talking point against Trump and his voters.

“January 6 is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape. I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed. I want to hear every side,” he said.

“It is quite clear that many of the January 6 protestors broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot. Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his delusion that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection.

“I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully,'” he said.

But he does have concern for how Joe Biden and his appointees have manipulated the situation.

An April 4 column by David Harsanyi similarly endorsed Kennedy’s attack on Biden:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can be an unhinged leftist and crackpot, but he also happens to be correct about President Joe Biden’s attacks on constitutional order, particularly free expression.

Speaking to an incredulous Erin Burnett on CNN this week, Kennedy argued that Biden was a bigger threat to “democracy” than Donald Trump, a position that clashes with the media’s entire 2024 campaign messaging.

In a more decent world, we’d be debating which presidential candidate was better at upholding the constitutional order, rather than which one was worse. That is not our fate. And yet, the unique thing about the 2024 presidential contest is that voters are given a chance to compare existing presidential records.

Kennedy contends that Biden “is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech or censor his opponent.” One suspects Eugene Debs might quibble with this characterization, though not since the Committee on Public Information has there been a White House that has shown such disdain for free expression and debate.

Of course, much of that “censorship” involves addressing misinformation or blatant lies. Harsanyi doesn’t explain why lies and misinformation should never be challenged.

Scott Lively served up an April 17 column praising Kennedy for making the Michigan election ballot through the Natural Law Party, which is linked to those “advocating the use of Transcendental Meditation”; despite being a rabidly right-wing Christian, Lively added that “culturally speaking I think TM is relatively benign, and its Hindu-leaning emphasis on natural law is a positive counter to the anti-theist, transhumanist agenda of the ‘elite’ Secular Humanists who now dominate America and most of Western civilization.”

WND was still wavering a bit, though, when Kennedy made another non-right-wing pronouncement, as Bob Unruh wrote in a May 10 article:

Conservatives across America have been reminded of Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s complete adherence to the abortion ideology.

In fact, his position of supporting even at “full-term” appeared to surprise his hand-selected runningmate, Nicole Shanahan.

[…]

Kennedy’s campaign soon put out a statement saying that the candidate ‘misunderstood’ repeated questions on the topic,” NBC said.

Notice Unruh’s rhetorical trick of labeling any view that diverges from right-wing orthodoxy as an “ideology” — as if right-wingers like you aren’t ideologues.

But WND was back on the RFK agenda in a July 16 article by Andrew Powell cheering how Kennedy was inculcating Donald Trump with anti-vaxxer ideology (see how that works?):

A leaked video of a conversation between former President Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shows Trump criticizing what is presumed to be COVID-19 vaccines, and the effects he has personally seen.

“I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system, and it’s the doctors you find,” Trump can be heard telling RFK, who is well known for his criticism of vaccinations.

Trump goes on to note vaccine doses meant for small babies look like they are “meant for a horse.”

[…]

Trump then went on to say he has seen many instances of babies suffering from adverse reactions to vaccines.

The Trump flip

Powell made no apparent attempt to verify anything Trump or Kennedy said. But it’s that kind of extremism that got WND’s Joe Kovacs excited when rumors started to spread that Kennedy might drop out of the race and endorse Trump, as he wrote in an Aug. 20 article:

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seriously considering quitting the 2024 race and endorsing former President Donald Trump, according to RFK’s running mate Nicole Shanahan.

“There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump, or we draw somehow more votes from Trump,” Shanahan said on the “Impact Theory” podcast.

“Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump and you know, we walk away from that and explain to our base why we’re making this decision,” she told interviewer Tom Bilyeu.

[…]

Regarding Kennedy, Trump told CNN on Tuesday: “I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it.”

Trump said he’d “love that endorsement, because I’ve always liked” Kennedy.

Asked if he would consider appointing RFK Jr. to a role in his future administration, Trump said he “probably would.”

“I like him a lot. I respect him a lot,” Trump said. “I probably would, if something like that would happen. He’s a very different kind of a guy, a very smart guy. And, yeah, I would be honored by that endorsement, certainly.”

The next day, Kovacs giddily touted that “Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will address the nation on Friday” about “about the present historical moment and his path forward,” adding: “Interestingly, Trump will be attending a rally in the same area late Friday afternoon in Glendale, Arizona, fueling speculation Kennedy will be joining the Trump team, as RFK is railing against Democrats for trying to keep him off the presidential ballot.”

It fell to Unruh to write about Kennedy’s actual dropping out a couple days later:

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of a family with decades of adherence to the Democrat party in America, on Friday suspended his campaign and threw his support behind President Donald Trump because he simply could not agree with the nation’s current Democrat party.

He criticized the party for abandoning – in fact, trying to destroy – democracy with a government-tech censorship campaign that he blamed for working to try to keep him off the ballot and to put President Donald Trump in jail.

He said Trump’s commitment to work to end the Ukraine-Russia war is enough, alone, for him to support this year’s GOP nominee.

He said Trump has asked him to help in a new Trump administration.

He said he met multiple times with Trump and found that he and Trump agree on “many” key issues.

Unruh made no mention of Kennedy’s discredited anti-vaxxer ideology.

WND then published an Aug. 25 article from the discredited Gateway Pundit touting Kennedy’s claim that “President Trump is going to make a series of announcements of other Democrats who are joining his campaign.” An Aug. 27 column by Andy Schlafly claimed without evidence that Kennedy aligning with Trump “brings many voters to the Republican side. It creates a coalition of the anti-war left and conservatives who recognize that only Trump can end the war in Ukraine and restore peace through strength for our country.” Neither Unruh nor Schlafly identified anything Trump has actually done to try and stop Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Victor Joecks followed up with his own odd Aug. 27 column:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and my wife have done the impossible – make me want to buy organic food. 

Kennedy’s long-shot presidential bid came to an end on Friday. Third-party candidates face a nearly impossible task. After Democrats forced President Joe Biden to give up the nomination, Kennedy’s polling plummeted. 

While he didn’t win the election, Kennedy used his campaign to draw attention to the “chronic disease epidemic.” When you step back and look at health trends, it’s hard to miss.

Joecks followed with anti-vaxxer talking points like “U.S. children born in 1992 had an autism rate of 1 in 150. For those born in 2012, it was 1 in 36.” In fact, the increase is driven by increased awareness and more accurate diagnosis.

This was followed by an Aug. 28 syndicated column by John Stossel in which pointed out that Kennedy has spread lies about vaccines, though he oddly added that “Although Kennedy and I disagree about a lot, I’m grateful that he will debate.”

After that, however, WND pretty much stopped featuring Kennedy. The last article it published about him was a Sept. 17 article taken from the Daily Caller on how a federal agency was “investigating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for an incident involving the alleged decapitation of a dead whale carcass.”