Taking issue with Fox News contributor Karl Rove labeling Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a “nut” on Thursday, so-called “straight news” anchor Bill Hemmer defended the anti-vaccine conspiracist as “the kind of Democrat” he had grown up with.
While Democratic voters have grown increasingly repulsed by Kennedy’s conspiracy-mongering and unhinged rhetoric, Fox News has aggressively boosted his longshot White House bid in an obvious attempt to hurt President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. Just this week, in fact, pro-Trump Fox News star Sean Hannity hosted Kennedy for a primetime town hall event.
With Trump allies pushing Kennedy as a “chaos agent” in the Democratic primary, GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis seemingly pandered to “based” conservatives this week by saying he’d appoint the anti-vax activist to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or Food and Drug Administration. Though many DeSantis supporters bashed the idea as “embarrassingly bad,” Hemmer appeared impressed by the bipartisanship proposed by the Florida governor.
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“What’s wrong with suggesting that you could pick somebody from the other side and work with them?” Hemmer wondered on America’s Newsroom before turning to Rove.
Rove, a longtime GOP strategist and former George W. Bush adviser, pulled out his trademarked whiteboard to explain to the Fox News anchor why it would be a “nutty idea” to place Kennedy in charge of public health departments.
“He has incredible conspiracy theories that are just outrageous,” Rove declared. “Vaccines cause autism because they have mercury preservatives and they are worse than the diseases that they say they are going to save you from. We haven’t used mercury since 2001 in children’s vaccines. It was never used in the three most common vaccines for children. And no scientific evidence supports this theory.”
He added that Kennedy has pushed other insanely baseless claims, such as the notion that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, Wi-Fi creates “leaky brains,” chemicals in water are making kids transgender, the United States is genetically targeting the Russian and Chinese with bioweapons, and antidepressants cause school shootings.
“This is just nutty stuff. It is not just health care that Robert Kennedy is a conspiracy buff on. He’s got lots of conspiracies,” Rove continued, pulling out a second whiteboard displaying more groundless assertions from Kennedy.
“2004 election was stolen as computers switched nearly a quarter million votes in Ohio from John Kerry to George Bush and thereby gave him the election,” Rove exclaimed. “5G is a mass surveillance tool and the telephone companies are in on it. CIA killed his uncle. Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill his father. And he defends Russia in Ukraine, it’s all Ukraine’s fault Russia invaded them and is killing its people. I mean, this guy’s a nut.”
Hemmer, however, not only seemed unbothered by Kennedy’s long track record of peddling deranged conspiracies, but the newsman also hyped him up as a “different kind of Democrat” who can appeal to a wide swath of voters.
“Despite all that, he is attracting 20 percent in a lot of polling. So his message on some of these issues is getting through to—or at least cutting through to—some in the electorate,” Hemmer insisted.
After Rove objected to Hemmer’s claims about Kennedy’s popularity, noting that early polling likely just reflected name recognition of Kennedy’s famous family and Biden’s seemingly weak candidacy and not support for conspiracy theories, Hemmer continued to gush over Kennedy.
“They might like his message about the environment, which he’s been on for decades,” the veteran anchor proclaimed. “He’s always said clean up the water and clean up the air. He was never on the Green New Deal. He was never on electric chargers running from California to the state of Maine. He’s a different kind of Democrat, the kind of Democrat that, frankly, you and I grew up with.”
Left out of Hemmer’s spiel was the fact that Kennedy recently suggested that COVID-19 is a genetically engineered bioweapon that is “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish people. Or that Kennedy’s favorability rating has plummeted to just 9 percent among Democrats in New Hampshire, an early primary voting state.
