Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent running for president, now wins more than 7 percent of the vote in a tight race, according to polls.
Last week he took personal aim at President Biden.
“I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy [than former President Donald Trump,” Kennedy said. To justify this claim, he said that Biden had “used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”
Kennedy blames the Biden administration because his Instagram account was suspended three years ago “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” according to Facebook. His account was reinstated when he started his run for the White House.
Vaccines and Biden aren’t the only targets of RFK’s conspiracy-mongering. Kennedy has at various times claimed that wifi causes cancer and that antidepressants cause school shootings. He has even claimed that chemicals in drinking water might be turning children transgender. This comes after he had promoted for decades the debunked idea of a link between routine childhood vaccinations and autism.
There is a pattern here.
Baseless conspiracy theories spread on the internet built Kennedy’s following, and they are now the basis of his presidential campaign.
Social media companies take no responsibility for giving a platform to false claims. They simply benefit from the bigger audience attracted by such alarming claims.
The strategy Kennedy is using in his presidential run is also on display in the House of Representatives. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) recently won attention for a baseless slander against House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“Is he being blackmailed?,” she said to podcast host Tucker Carlson. “What would make this man do this?”
She was complaining about the Speaker compromising on a last-minute budget deal and working on ways to get more funding for Ukraine’s fight against a Russian takeover. Within hours, the phrase “Blackmail Scandal Rocks House Speaker” was trending on X.
Her interviewer, Carlson, is a hero of right-wing conspiracy theorists. He pushed the narrative that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was a false-flag conspiracy involving the Capitol Police themselves.
Greene is an internet celebrity known for her rants. Once she alleged that “Jewish space lasers” had caused the “California wildfires.”
In the era of news being distorted by social media algorithms where “enragement equals engagement,” total nonsense once confined to the fringes now fills the mainstream.
And in Kennedy’s case, it is now part of a presidential election.
Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, recently wrote that angry right-wing readers were complaining to him that “Biden, not Trump, is the criminal dictator.” He responded that it is a “false equivalency” to draw political comparisons between Trump and Biden.
“We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents,” Quinn said. “But Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is.”
Trump, not Biden, “sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power,” he continued. “No President in our history has done worse. This is not subjective. We all saw it.”
But Kennedy, Greene, Trump and their followers prefer the titillation they get from conspiracy theories to honest journalism.
The toxic theories that excite them erode public faith in American leaders and institutions.
One jarring consequence is that Congress, preoccupied with distortions on social media, is unable to do its basic work, such as properly funding the government on an annual basis.
Congress can’t solve big national problems like securing the border because Trump-supporting Republicans prefer to get attention on the internet by complaining about illegal immigrants instead of finding a solution through compromise.
“This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” former Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told CNN, just before he resigned early from Congress last month.
House Republicans and Democrats did join together to pass a ban on TikTok if it doesn’t divest from its parent company. But the bill remains stalled in the Senate. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party, which heavily restricts TikTok’s content in China.
As former Google employee and Center for Humane Technology founder Tristan Harris put it, TikTok gives Chinese kids “Spinach” and gives American kids “opium.”
A New York Times report from last month found that the Chinese government is using tactics reminiscent of the Russians in 2016 to promote anti-Biden content on social media using more sophisticated technology such as artificial intelligence.
That is quite literally an existential threat to our democracy. And it won’t end well.
Historian Arnold Toynbee famously said that civilizations die by suicide, not murder. The conspiracy theories spewed by Kennedy, Greene and Trump — as well as the Chinese and Russians — have a rope around America’s neck right now.
The absence of social media restraint has created a wobbly stool, and Kennedy, Greene and the Trump Republicans are kicking at its legs.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.