10 Things You Didn’t Know About RFK

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., or RFK for short, is the controversial, anti-vaxxer, independent candidate on the ballot.

He is controversial mainly because of his fervent condemnation of the COVID vaccine.

He has also authored several books that express resentment of the democratic party, like “A Letter To Liberals,” where he featured commentary from Tucker Carlson.

He’s aligned himself with other firebrands and controversial people in the media. Coupled with his longstanding rally against the vaccine, Dr. Fauci, and the CDC, he’s earned the public perception of somewhat of a kook.

But compared against an ultra-conservative self proclaimed sexual assailant and a confused old man, is RFK really that bad?

I don’t know. And I don’t really care, this country is probably screwed regardless.

But here are some cool RFK facts I learned from his Wikipedia page and now I share them with you:

1. RFK’s DAD WAS KILLED BY AN ANTI-ZIONIST

Robert F. Kennedy, RFK’s dad, was assasinated in 1968 by an anti-zionist named Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan had shot RFK’s dad because of anti-zionist motives.

It was the first major incident of political violence in the United States stemming from the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

Kennedy, a United States senator and a leading candidate in the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries, won the California and South Dakota primaries on June 4. He addressed his campaign supporters in the Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Ballroom. After leaving the podium, and exiting through a kitchen hallway, he was mortally wounded by multiple shots fired by Sirhan. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital nearly 25 hours later.

Sirhan, a Palestinian who held strong anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian beliefs, testified in 1969 that he killed Kennedy “with 20 years of malice aforethought”; he was convicted and sentenced to death.

RFK was with his father when he died. He was a pallbearer at his father’s funeral, where he spoke and read excerpts from his father’s speeches at the mass commemorating his death at Arlington National Cemetery.

2. RFK STRUGGLED WITH SUBSTANCE ABUSE

After his father’s death, RFK struggled with substance abuse.

When he was 16, he was arrested in Massachusetts from Marijuana.

In 1983, when he was a prosecutor in NY, he was arrested for heroin possession.

To satisfy one of the conditions of his probation, Kennedy worked as a volunteer for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and was required to attend regular drug-rehabilitation sessions.

This experience served was a springboard into environmental law and consumer advocacy.

3. HE Failed The Bar His First Time

This isn’t a big deal, plenty of people don’t pass on the first go, but it’s an interesting tidbit about his life.

4. HE HAD SOME BIG WINS AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST

Prior to becoming known as a national anti-vaxxer, RFK was a successful environmental attorney.

He worked for Kennedy & Madonna, a law firm that was profiled in the 2010 HBO documentary Mann v. Ford, which chronicles four years of litigation by the firm on behalf of the Ramapough Mountain Indians against the Ford Motor Company for dumping toxic waste on tribal lands in northern New Jersey. In addition to a monetary settlement for the tribe, the lawsuit contributed to the community’s land being re-listed on the federal Superfund list, the first time that a de-listed site was re-listed

In 2007, Kennedy was one of three finalists nominated as “Trial Lawyer of the Year” by Public Justice for his role in the $396 million jury verdict against DuPont for contamination from its Spelter, West Virginia zinc plant.

5. RFK SUED MONSANTO

In 2016, Kennedy became counsel to the goliath personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan. In 2017, Kennedy and his partners sued Monsanto in federal court in San Francisco, on behalf of plaintiffs seeking to recover damages for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, that, the plaintiffs allege, were a result of exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup. Kennedy and his team also filed a class action lawsuit against Monsanto for failing to warn consumers about the dangers allegedly posed by exposure to Roundup.

In September 2018, Kennedy and his partners filed a class-action lawsuit against Columbia Gas of Massachusetts alleging negligence following gas explosions in three towns north of Boston. Of Columbia Gas, Kennedy said “as they build new miles of pipe, the same company is ignoring its existing infrastructure, which we now know is eroding and is dilapidated”

6. HE WAS ONE OF THE ORIGINAL INVESTORS IN TESLA

In 1999, Kennedy, Chris Bartle and John Hoving created a bottled-water company, Keeper Springs, which donated all of its profits to Waterkeeper Alliance.

Kennedy was a venture partner and senior advisor at VantagePoint Capital Partners, one of the world’s largest cleantech venture capital firms. Among other activities, VantagePoint was the original and largest pre-IPO institutional investor in Tesla. VantagePoint also backed BrightSource Energy and Solazyme, amongst others. Kennedy is a board member and counselor to several of Vantage Point’s portfolio companies in the water and energy space, including Ostara, a Vancouver-based company that markets the technology to remove phosphorus and other excessive nutrients from wastewater, transforming otherwise pollution directly into high-grade fertilizer.

7. HE ONCE HAD A WORM IN HIS BRAIN

Kennedy began experiencing severe short- and long-term memory loss and mental fog in 2010. In a 2012 divorce court deposition, he said that parasitic worms had been found in his brain and chest, and that his neurological issues had been caused by “a worm eating a portion of his brain”, in addition to mercury poisoning from eating large quantities of tuna fish. Kennedy said the worms did not require treatment as they had already died upon discovery.

8. HE HAS A VOICE DISORDER

In his 40s Kennedy developed adductor spasmodic dysphonia, an organic voice disorder that causes his voice to quaver and makes speech difficult. It is a form of involuntary movement affecting the larynx, related to dystonia. Kennedy said he traveled to Kyoto, Japan, for Type II thyroplasty (lateralization thyroplasty),[citation needed] in which a titanium bridge was inserted between his vocal cords to relieve the disorder.

9. HE MAKES $500k/YEAR AT HIS NON-PROFIT

RFK founded Children’s Health Defense, where he makes $510k/year as chief legal counsel.

The non-profit is devoted to keepong a watchful eye on government agencies like the FDA, CDC, and EPA, ensuring that they are held accountable for their actions.

Many of his non-profit efforts are devoted to promoting anti-vax theories and alternative science.

10. HE LITIGATED CASES AS AN ACTIVIST FOR INDIGENOUS AND MINORITY COMMUNITIES

In his first case as an environmental attorney, Kennedy represented the NAACP in a lawsuit against a proposal to build a garbage transfer station in a minority neighborhood in Ossining, New York.[84]

In 1987, he successfully sued Westchester County, New York, to reopen the Croton Point Park, which was heavily used primarily by poor and minority communities from the Bronx. He then forced the reopening of the Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which New York City had closed to the public and converted to a police firing range.

Kennedy has argued that poor communities shoulder the disproportionate burden of environmental pollution. Speaking at the 2016 South by Southwest environment conference in Austin, Texas, he said, “Polluters always choose the soft target of poverty”, noting that Chicago’s south side has the highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in America. Furthermore, he added that 80 percent of “uncontrolled toxic waste dumps” can be found in black neighborhoods, with the largest site in the United States being in Emelle, Alabama, which is 90 percent black.

Starting in 1985, Kennedy helped develop the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program for environmental, energy, and human rights, traveling to Canada and Latin America to assist indigenous tribes in protecting their homelands and opposing large-scale energy and extractive projects in remote wilderness areas.

In 1990, Kennedy assisted indigenous Pehuenches in Chile in a partially successful campaign to stop the construction of a series of dams on Chile’s iconic Biobío River. That campaign derailed all but one of the proposed dams. Beginning in 1992, he assisted the Cree Indians of northern Quebec in their campaign against Hydro-Québec to halt construction of some 600 proposed dams on eleven rivers in James Bay.

In 1993, Kennedy and NRDC, working with the indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival, clashed with other American environmental groups in a dispute about the rights of Indians to govern their own lands in the Oriente region of Ecuador. Kennedy represented the CONFENIAE, a confederation of Indian peoples, in negotiation with the American oil company Conoco to limit oil development in Ecuadorian Amazon and, at the same time, obtain benefits from resource extraction for Amazonian tribes.Kennedy was a vocal critic of Texaco for its previous record for polluting the Ecuadoran Amazon.

From 1993 to 1999, Kennedy worked with five Vancouver Island Indian tribes in their campaign to end industrial logging by MacMillan Bloedel in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia.

In 1996, Kennedy met with Cuban President Fidel Castro to persuade the leader to halt his plans to construct a nuclear power plant at Juraguá. During a lengthy latenight encounter, Castro reminisced about Kennedy’s father and uncle, speculating that U.S. relations with Cuba would have been far better had President Kennedy not been assassinated.

Between 1996 and 2000, Kennedy and NRDC helped Mexican commercial fishermen to halt Mitsubishi’s proposal to build a salt facility in the Laguna San Ignacio, a known area in Baja where gray whales bred, and nursed their calves. Kennedy wrote in opposition to the project, and took the campaign to Japan, meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.

In 2000, he assisted local environmental activists to stop proposals by Chaffin Light, a real estate developer, and U.S. engineering giant Bechtel from building a large hotel and resort development that, Kennedy argued, threatened coral reefs and public beaches used by local Bahamians, at Clifton Bay, New Providence Island.

Kennedy was one of the early editors of Indian Country Today, North America’s largest Native American newspaper. He helped lead the opposition to the damming of the Futaleufú River in the Patagonia region of Chile. In 2016, citing the pressure precipitated by the Futaleufú Riverkeeper’s campaign against the dams, the Spanish power company, Endesa, which owned the right to dam the river, reversed its decision and relinquished all claims to the Futaleufú.