Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants everyone to know he’s in on the jokes about his brain worm.
At the Libertarian National Convention on Friday, the struggling presidential candidate included a punchline about the dead worm that doctors discovered in his brain, during one of his classic speeches about the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Again and again, they’ve cited some pretext to suspend and volunteer, and violate our constitutional rights. There is always a reason why right now the rights are an inconvenience that we can’t afford. It was the red scare in the 1920s. It was John McCarthy in the 1950s. It was civil rights protests and Vietnam war protesters in the 1960s. It was the war on drugs in the 1970s. It was the war on terror after 2001. And most recently, it was the COVID pandemic,” he said.
“Maybe a brain worm ate that part of my memory, but I don’t recall any part of the United States constitution where there is any exemption for pandemics,” he quipped.
The joke couldn’t distract from his overall message, in which he seemingly tried to defend himself for relaying misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines by citing the First Amendment. He also criticized federal lockdown measures put in place over three years ago to prevent the spread of the disease which would go on to kill almost 2 million people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and resulted in severe health issues for thousands of people.
He also told a story about a time when he was asked why he wasn’t wearing a mask at an event. “I said to them, there's a lot worse things than dying. They said to me, ‘like what?’ I said like living like a slave.”
