If you must add yet another layer of self-torture to what already promises to be an excrutiatingly-difficult-to-watch debate tonight, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., notorious anti-vaxxer and member of the Center for Countering Digital Hate's "Disinformation Dozen" (who collectively are responsible for roughly two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating across social media) is hosting what he's calling "The Real Debate." He explains in a video on the debate's website that:
Over 70% of americans want a different choice than Presidents Biden or Trump. They're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. Presidents Trump and Biden colluded with CNN to block me from representing your voices. But I'm not going to let them silence us. Go to The RealDebate.com to watch me answer the same debate questions live. I'm going to be on that debate stage with or without their permission.
The website further describes why RFK, Jr. believes the world needs "The Real Debate":
The smurfs in Washington don't trust you to make up your own mind. They restrict the videos you can watch and the posts you can read, the way we put "parental controls" on Netflix for our children.
They limit the names you're permitted to choose on your ballot, and the voices you're allowed to hear during an electoral debate.
They aren't just keeping a candidate off the debate stage. They are keeping ideas outside your awareness.
But you have a right to hear the opinions they don't want you to hear. You pay for their salaries and their mistakes and their wars.
You are an American voter in the land of the free.
The Real Debate will present all the choices. It will bring in the ideas they're trying to keep away from you. You may not agree with all of those ideas. The point is that you will be able to hear them and decide for yourself.
I definitely won't be watching RFK, Jr.'s "Real Debate," unless it's strictly for research purposes. He's the candidate whose own sister said voting him would be "dangerous." He's also the candidate who founded the anti-vaccine organization, "Children's Health Defense." Two appeals filed by Children's Health Defense were recently declined hearings by the Supreme Court. One involved a group of parents suing the FDA for authorizing COVID-19 vaccines and claiming that the vaccines were, according to The Hill, "ineffective and lacked proper vetting." The other involved suing Rutgers University for mandating vaccines for students attending on-campus classes.
Project Syndicate also sums up nicely why I would never give RFK, Jr. my vote:
Kennedy. . . sees a[n American] landscape littered with carnage. But his narrative gives prominence to "chronic illness," "depression," "mental illness," and "loneliness." Like Trump, he complains of dilapidated infrastructure and a middle class that has been "hollowed out." And like Trump, he blames the elites: "All the new wealth of the last generation has gone to the billionaires and to transnational corporations." But, from Kennedy's perspective, the greatest evil of all is that America has become "the sickest country on Earth." His pledge is to 'make America healthy again.' . . .
He sees a cabal of sinister corporations and public officials conspiring to poison the environment and the body politic – one body at a time. At the height of the pandemic, he falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines were "proven to have negative efficacy, causing people to be more prone to infection than doing nothing at all." He reportedly even went so far as to assert that COVID-19 was "ethnically targeted" to spare "Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people." . . .
Like Kennedy, [his VP pick Nicole] Shanahan also appears to be channeling personal affliction. She describes grappling with infertility, as well as the difficulties associated with raising her five-year-old daughter, Echo, who suffers from autism, which Shanahan says she spends 60% of her time researching. "Our children are not well," Shanahan tells us. She firmly believes, despite numerous scientific studies disproving the claim, that vaccinating children has caused a steep rise in autism cases. She wants to stop pharmaceutical corporations from "contaminating" science and "capturing" regulatory agencies. Evincing a distinctly QAnon-style paranoia, she demands that they stop "guarding" the "mysteries" that "we can solve." . . .
Armed with paranoid conspiracy theories about America's descent into chronic sickness, loneliness, and depression, Kennedy has heedlessly spread lies about the putative dangers of life-saving vaccines while mouthing platitudes about resilience and healing. To all appearances, he remains caught in a twisted fantasy that he just might be the one who will realize his father's idealistic dreams of a better America.
Have "fun" watching the debates, tonight, y'all!
