On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in his eponymous New York tower to announce his presidential campaign. Since then, the media-political establishment has had their knives out to get him in any way possible – but Russia collusion allegations, multiple impeachments, and indictments over alleged hush money payments, as well as his handling of classified information, are not stopping Trump. He’s gaining in the polls and is more fired up than ever before. But even with the left’s targeted focus on destroying Trump, he’s not the most hated politician that’s running for president.
In his latest monologue posted on Twitter, Tucker Carlson spends more than 18 minutes explaining just who that person is – and why.
“There's never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump, of course it must. But go check the coverage: Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison,” Carlson said.
Carlson compared The New York Times's coverage of Trump’s announcement in 2015 to Kennedy’s, finding that while the paper waited until the 17th paragraph to attack the real estate mogul, their piece on RFK Jr. attacked him in the first line as a campaign “built on relitigating COVID-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans' faith in science.”
CBS News viewers likely were appalled in its coverage of Kennedy's announcement. CBS denounced the candidates views as “misleading and dangerous.” The LA Times called him “a threat to democracy.”
At the offices of National Public Radio in Washington, a full-blown Category 5 hysteria typhoon broke out. NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy not just as a candidate but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who - for his own perverse reasons - has made “debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists Who rally under the banner of what they call Liberty or freedom.”
People magazine didn't even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him. Kennedy’s younger sister Carrie, the magazine reported solemnly, does not approve of Bobby Jr's harmful views… his harmful views.
Carlson then points to the moment Kennedy drew the left’s ire. In July 2005, Kennedy ran a magazine article suggesting there could be a connection between a rise in diagnosed autism cases and the schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.
The day that story was published Kennedy's reporting was considered so solid that two outlets ran it simultaneously: Rollingstone and Salon.com. Unfortunately neither one of them understood what they were up against. The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both publications swiftly caved; both pulled the story and then disavowed it, groveling as they did.
No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn't the vaccines - and maybe it wasn't - then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead reporters just attack Bobby Kennedy. They've called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account. YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson citing unspecified misinformation.
Carlson goes on to discuss how Joe Rogan gave Kennedy a platform, prompting outrage from the left, including from Dr. Peter Hotez. Rogan invited him on the program to debate Kennedy, but the pediatrician declined, even when the podcaster offered to donate $100,000 to his favorite charity—a prize pool that eventually swelled to over $1 million.
Kennedy, for his part, wasn’t surprised. “Nobody in 18 years has been willing to debate me,” he said in response.
Carlson pointed out that one of the reasons RFK Jr. is “winning” is because the American medical establishment has “beclowned” itself through positions on “vaccines, psychiatric drugs, puberty blockers, reassignment surgeries, a long list of other politically factual priorities [which] have no connection whatsoever to legitimate science. It's all effectively witchcraft.”
He continued, “They're insane. Compared to them, Bobby Kennedy is a mainstream figure, and people understand that that's why he's winning. And you know he's winning by how his critics are doing.”
Watch the full segment below:
Ep. 6 Bobby Kennedy is winning pic.twitter.com/jW51PYahLV
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 22, 2023