In his continuing effort to convince the public he should not be president of any entity larger than a Hyundai Elantra, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has apparently spent time cozying up to a wingnut who thinks Hitler was misunderstood or something. Which, now that we think about it, might not be that weird a thing for a Kennedy to think.
The nut du jour is James Corbett, an Alex Jones clone, Sandy Hook truther, 9-11 truther, climate change truther, the World Health Organization has a secret plan to take over the world truther, the Rockefellers are conspiring with the Vatican to fake an alien invasion truther, and who knows what else.
We’re not making any of those up, by the way. We lack that level of imagination.
But it is the vaccine truther arm of Corbett’s octopus of crazy that captivates RFK and his organization, the Children’s Health Defense, an Orwellian name for a group advocating against vaccines if we’ve ever heard one:
Kennedy has thanked Corbett for his supposedly “extraordinary work for keeping the public informed,” and Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group has featured Corbett in numerous videos and at a recent symposium.
Corbett is a regular guest on the organization’s podcast “Good Morning CHD,” hosted by a quack who recently had her license to practice medicine in Maine suspended due to all the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine she kept prescribing to fight COVID-19 instead of anything that might have actually helped.
Corbett also spoke at CHD’s “The Attack on Food” symposium, because of course he’s a GMO truther as well. A little more prosaic than accusing Paul Krugman of helping the pope gin up fear of an alien invasion, sure, but there’s probably a symposium for that somewhere that he can speak at eventually, perhaps organized by David Icke.
Well you know what they say: The enemy (Corbett) of my enemy (vaccines, Anthony Faucci, objective reality) is my friend. Now we have to add “people who think Hitler was in fact not a patsy for international bankers” to that list. Thanks, Media Matters:
Corbett has claimed that Hitler was actually a member of the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family that has been the focus of antisemitic conspiracy theories for years and been blamed for the world’s problems, including World War II. On his show in July 2013, Corbett said: “Hitler was a Rothschild. … Funny how that works, isn’t it? Hitler and the Nazis were one hundred percent completely and utterly set up and made it into what they were by the international banking community and the international crony capitalists, including those in America.”
Yr Wonkette has heard a lot of conspiracy theories, but we admit we had not ever heard that Hitler was a Rothschild, a “stooge of global capitalists,” and that he was set up for his crimes like a Gene Hackman character in a ’70s-era Alan Pakula movie.
Conventional wisdom has it that RFK Jr. has been cruising on his family name, which is why early polls showed him pulling 20 percent of the Democratic primary vote. He has since sunk back into the teens, which is still too high for a ratfucking campaign dreamed up and supported by right-wing ratfuckers such as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.
But he is fulfilling our prediction that he would start losing ground when he opened his mouth and started talking. The Kennedy name still has magic in some quarters, but not that much.
Still, remember when Obama had to renounce Jeremiah Wright? What Corbett said is so much worse, to the point where it feels offensive just to bring both incidents up in the same sentence. We’re guessing RFK Jr. will get a fraction of the questions about his association with Corbett that Obama got for sitting through some sermons in a church.
