Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. just released a video on X that suggests that he’s not really anti-vaccine but has just been mischaracterized and silenced by the “public health machine.” The tactics used in the video should be familiar to anyone who’s followed RFK, Jr., or any other highly public anti-vaccine figure. In this video, RFK Jr. frames himself as a charismatic leader, characterized as someone who believes he’s been pushed to the fringes, marginalized, and silenced. He, therefore, implicitly promises to rise up from those purported margins and speak truth to power. He also engages with two other familiar anti-science tactics: impossible expectations (insisting that in order to be deemed safe, vaccines must have a 0 percent risk profile) and taking things out of context (especially with his quotations of former public health leaders, whose comments on the possibilities of vaccine adverse side effects are not put in their proper place of weighing risks and benefits).

As a conspiracy theorist, the way RFK, Jr. has conducted himself during this election cycle is........

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