Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a candidate for president supported by one in five Democratic voters in some recent polls, campaigns on the idea that powerful people have been working in secret to deceive you.
He began a recent speech here by recounting the Eisenhower Administration’s 1960 decision to lie when the Soviets downed an American spy plane by calling it weather research. Then came further alleged deceptions — some proven, some refuted, many just conjecture.
Before long, Kennedy was arguing that a 2019 tabletop exercise about a mock pandemic archived on YouTube actually revealed a secret plan, involving U.S. spymasters, to enrich drug companies and suppress free speech. He then rattled off clinical data from a coronavirus vaccine trial that was not designed to measure mortality, falsely suggesting clear evidence that vaccines killed more people than they saved.