Ken Cedeno/CNP/Zuma

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration Cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves. 

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which

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