RFK Jr. to Challenge Biden for 2024 Dem Nomination

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

The anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a statement of candidacy on Wednesday with the Federal Elections Commission, officially seeking to challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

The son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of Former president John F. Kennedy has become one of the leading voices in America challenging the efficacy of vaccines.

In March, he had teased the idea of vying for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

“If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms,” he tweeted last month.

In 2021, RFK Jr. published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, accusing America’s leading public-health official of collaborating in “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”

“Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability,” RFK Jr. argued in another section.

The scion of the Kennedy family, RFJ Jr. leads an anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, which reportedly doubled its revenues in the first year of the pandemic, garnering nearly $7 million in donations.

However, family members including his sister Kerry Kennedy, the chief executive of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, have called her brother’s views “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous.”

The announcement was reportedly greeted by Steven Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.

“Bannon had been encouraging this for months and believes RFK Jr. could be both a useful chaos agent in 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country,” Robert Costa, the chief election correspondent for CBS News tweeted, citing “several people familiar” with the situation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins Marianne Williamson, a New York Times bestselling author of self-help books, as the only other declared Biden challenger.

More from National Review