How RFK Jr. Supporters Are Trying to Spin His Anti-Vax Stance

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RFK Jr.’s campaign-run Slack account had a lot of questionable content being spewed and posted in its channels, as Daily Beast politics reporter Ursula Perano recently reported. The most common theme, though, was anti-vax rhetoric.

Perano came on this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast to share what she found while she had access to the Slack account, including a deeper dive into the kinds of anti-vax posts that RFK Jr.’s supporters made while she was in there.

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She tells TNA co-host Andy Levy there were memes and also brainstorms on how to spin the Republican’s anti-vax perception.

“The majority of people thought it was important to switch the language when somebody would come and say that RFK is anti-vax. A lot of supporters said that when they were having conversations with their friends, with their families about Kennedy, that was often a point of holdup in what people knew about him the most,” Perano told Andy.

And yet, that wasn’t the worst of it.

“There were comparisons of vaccines to cigarettes and opioids and at one point in conversation,” says Perano, she saw supporters comparing vaccine safety claims to “1900s-era recommendations for household cleaners to be used as vaginal douches.”

Plus! The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks what’s next for new social media app Threads and the feature that could change platforms forever—if Mark Zuckerberg enables it in Europe.

And of course, hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie unpack Elon Musk’s dick-measuring comments they for sure thought were fake, and the latest lawsuit hitting Fox News.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.