RFK Jr. on how he can get past attacks from legacy media
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke with Fox News Digital about how he can get past the attacks he receives from the legacy media.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hoping to get past what he calls the legacy media's "comic book characterizations" of him as he pursues his longshot primary challenge against President Biden.
Kennedy has been facing severe criticism in the media since he launched his 2024 bid in April, particularly over his longtime campaign against vaccines, such as linking childhood vaccinations to autism and accusing the COVID-19 vaccines of killing more people than they've saved. Outlets like the New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic, New York Magazine and others have penned scathing profiles depicting him as a dangerous crank and have pointed out times he's been forced to retract past claims or pushed false information.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Kennedy was asked how he can get past such consistent attacks on the campaign trail.
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"What I'm trying to do is to speak directly to the American people," Kennedy told Fox News Digital following his speech at FreedomFest 2023 in Memphis, Tenn. on Saturday. "And I've been able to do that on podcasts. I've been silenced for 18 years but there's a lot of media opportunities right now that allow me to actually speak directly to Americans."
He continued, "And that's important because the story that, you know, the characterizations that people have of me are largely from hostile sources that are kind of comic book characterizations of me as a conspiracy theorist that are made by legacy media sites that don't want Americans to hear my actual arguments or positions."
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knocked the "comic book characterizations" of him from the legacy media in an interview with Fox News Digital. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
Kennedy went viral on Saturday for comments he made at a press dinner on Tuesday sounding the alarm about bioweapons being developed by countries including the U.S. and China and how there was an "argument" that COVID may have been "ethnically targeted."
"COVID-19- there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately," Kennedy is heard saying in the video obtained by The New York Post. "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. But we don't know if it was deliberately targeted or not."
Critics blasted Kennedy, claiming he was peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories, something he flatly rejected.
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"It had nothing to do with antisemitic, and it's not a conspiracy theory," Kennedy told Fox News Digital. "I simply said that we ought to be worried about the billions of dollars that are being spent by the most powerful governments in the world to develop ethnic bioweapons, and that this is happening now all over the world."
"I cited a 2021 paper by the Cleveland Clinic that suggested that COVID-19 was not deliberately created in this way but that it disproportionately impacted certain races and the races that were most impacted because of the docking mechanism configuration on the furin cleave was most compatible with African Americ- Africans, people of African descent and with Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese and Finns and Ashkenazi Jews," he explained. "I never suggested that that was deliberately made by the Chinese or anybody else. It's just a fact."
He added, "The idea that I should be slandered with the worst possible slander, which is antisemitism, that is targeted propaganda. That's a way of trying to silence me by making me look like a crank or like an evil person in order to discredit all the things I'm saying. What I said is legitimate. It's something that should be the subject of debate… And the people who are slandering me that way are people who do not want to have that discussion."
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke to a large libertarian crowd at the FreedomFest conference in Memphis on Saturday July 15, 2023. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
Kennedy was also asked for his reaction to the growing corruption allegations against the Biden family, something he refused to comment on.
"What I've tried to do in this campaign is to focus on issues and focus on the values and not focus on ad hominem attacks on people," Kennedy said.
"Isn't alleged corruption an issue that voters should be concerned about?" Fox News Digital asked.
"I think on every side it's something that people should be concerned about, but it's not something that I'm making a spear tip to my campaign," Kennedy responded.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to comment on the growing corruption allegations against the Biden family during a interview with Fox News Digital. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
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Kennedy was among three presidential candidates who attended the annual libertarian-focused event, the other two being GOP hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Larry Elder.
In a recent Fox News poll, Kennedy earned 17% among primary voters against President Biden's 64%, suggesting there is a solid portion of Democrats that do not want to see the president at the top of the ticket in 2024.
Kennedy has long linked vaccinations to childhood autism, but the vast majority of medical experts reject his claims as unfounded. He wrote a 2005 piece published in left-wing sites Rolling Stone and Salon that laid out an extensive conspiracy about vaccines and autism that had to be heavily corrected and included supposedly damning quotes that were taken out of context; Salon ultimately retracted it.
Fox News' David Unsworth, David Rutz and Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
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