-I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
and I'm running for president of the United States.
-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
was born with one of the most recognizable names
in American politics.
The golden Kennedy name appeared to give him
a boost right off the bat.
-When he initially sort of came onto the scene,
he was getting polls of about 20%.
So 1 in 5 Democratic voters, which is substantial.
And there was actually evidence in the polling
that the main reason some people were supporting him
was because he had the Kennedy name.
-That number has gone down to 14%,
according to a July Quinnipiac poll.
But that is still considerable support
for someone who has never held office
and competing against a sitting president
and also for a Democrat
who openly espouses anti-vaccine conspiracies.
Democrats were the group that most embraced vaccines.
But Kennedy has repeatedly made comments
that are anti-vaccine
and at times even anti-Asian and anti-Semitic.
-COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians
and -- and Black people.
The people who are most immune
are Ashkenazi Jews and -- and Chinese.
-Sometimes he miscites things.
Sometimes he corrects himself.
Sometimes he will make an argument.
He argued in the Indianapolis speech
that there was more all-cause mortality
in the six month study of the Pfizer vaccine trial
for people who did take the vaccine
than for people who did not take the vaccine.
And he used that as an argument to say
that the vaccine may have been killing more people
than it was saving in that trial.
Now, that's a misreading of the study.
I pointed that out to him in our conversations.
He went on Joe Rogan's podcast several weeks later.
He told the same story again, repeating this idea.
And then he added at the end of that exchange,
a sort of one-line mention about how,
"Well people say this is not enough
of the data wasn't --
the study wasn't large enough to make these conclusions.
But that's all the data that we have."
-Kennedy is not the only current presidential candidate
openly misinforming the public.
-That was a rigged election.
-We wanted to give you a chance to acknowledge the results.
Elections -- We have elections that were horrible.
-Misinformation has been a part of politics
for a long time,
but its presence in American politics
went to another level
after one particular candidate ran for president.
-The situation has really changed
since Donald Trump came onto the scene,
whereas before Donald Trump,
politicians felt compelled to make statements
that were at least rooted in some factual basis.
They might exaggerate.
They might take things out of context.
But generally there was a factual basis
for what they were saying post Trump
what you see not only in the United States
but across the world,
politicians much more comfortable
simply saying things that are not true,
repeating them over and over
if it somehow serves their political interests.
It's utterly shameless.
He paved the way that others are following.
-And those false claims spread around the globe
at an alarming rate via social media.
-It's the internationalization of misinformation,
the rapid spread of misinformation.
Someone like RFK Jr. now has a platform
that wasn't available to someone like that 2025 years ago.
What happens is that people don't know
what to believe anymore.
They left people who aren't necessarily experts themselves,
unclear who to believe.
And sometimes they want to put their faith in a demagogue.
-There's enormous skepticism right now in the country
about previously respected institutions,
whether the media, the government,
regulatory agencies, corporate America.
And I think it's a bipartisan concern
about all these institutions
basically being out for themselves.
-Breakdown of democracy is when people no longer feel
they can trust institutions
and people who they used to trust before.
That is definitely happening right now.