President Joe Biden has gained another potential opponent for the 2024 presidential race.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, filed a statement of candidacy Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, reported the Associated Press (AP). Kennedy is running as a Democrat.
Kennedy is an environmental lawyer and bestselling author, making a name for himself in the anti-vaccine movement, including launching the nonprofit Children's Health Defense, an activist group denouncing vaccine efficacy.
Kennedy has been particularly vocal since the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the COVID vaccine. In January 2022, he appeared as guest speaker at the Defeat the Mandates protest in Washington, D.C., a demonstration that coincided with other anti-vaccine protest groups that had ties with conspiracy theorist organizations like QAnon.
Last month, Kennedy, alongside the Children's Health Defense, took legal action against Biden and several other federal officials for allegedly encouraging platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google to censor "constitutionally protected speech." The 59 defendants in Kennedy's class-action suit include Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Andrew Slavitt, Biden's former senior COVID-19 adviser.
Kennedy is also suing the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the 120-page lawsuit, Kennedy argues that the federal government purposely suppressed "facts" that it "does not want the public to hear" on topics relating to COVID-19, the 2020 presidential election and the New York Post's 2020 article about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Kennedy also filed a lawsuit in January against the Trust News Initiative, launched by the BBC in partnership with several other media outlets to combat vaccine misinformation. The complaint—which lists the BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters and AP as defendants—alleges that these media organizations broke antitrust laws by working with companies like Twitter, Meta and Google, and claims that the media outlets "censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded" other online news publishers listed as plaintiffs alongside Kennedy.
In 2021, Kennedy released the book The Real Anthony Fauci as an attack on the former top infectious-disease doctor, claiming that he enabled "a historic coup d'etat against Western democracy." He also released a book this year titled The Wuhan Cover-Up, which accuses U.S. officials of plotting with China to hide the origins of COVID-19.
The Biden administration has already faced heavy attacks from House Republicans over allegedly censoring social media users from spreading misinformation, including on topics like the COVID-19 vaccine and Hunter Biden's laptop. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has also launched several investigations into the "weaponization" of the federal government, dedicating a new committee to the effort.
Biden has yet to announce if he is running for another term in 2024, although doing so could hypothetically pin him against former President Donald Trump in a rematch of the 2020 election. Spiritual adviser and author Marianne Williamson was the first major Democrat to launch her election campaign last month.
Newsweek has reached out to the White House via email for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Kaitlin Lewis is a Newsweek reporter on the Night Team based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her focus is reporting on national ... Read more
