President John F. Kennedy’s grandson slammed his cousin’s White House bid Friday, calling Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to nab the Democratic nomination an “embarrassment.”
In an Instagram video, Jack Schlossberg told his followers to ignore Kennedy’s “vanity project” of a campaign.
“He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” said Schlossberg, whose mother is Caroline Kennedy. “I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted again by somebody’s vanity project.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a conspiracy theorist who has long been a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, espousing false claims that immunizations are responsible for autism, allergies, cancer and various other ailments in children.
(Before HuffPost shuttered its unpaid contributor platform in 2017, Kennedy also wrote several blog posts denigrating vaccines; those posts, along with others spreading misinformation about vaccines, have since been taken down from the site.)
He announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in April, joining a small list of people with long-shot aspirations to oust Biden, for whom Schlossberg urged his followers to cast their votes.
Biden has “appointed more federal judges than any president since my grandfather,” Schlossberg said in his Instagram video. “He ended our longest war, he ended the COVID pandemic and he ended Donald Trump. These are the issues that matter. And if my cousin Bobby Kennedy Jr. cared about any of them, he would support Joe Biden too.”
Schlossberg isn’t the only member of the Kennedy clan to disparage his cousin once removed. Earlier this week, one of the candidate’s sisters blasted him for saying COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to affect certain people.
“I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement.
Back when the conspiracy theorist was first launching his campaign, she said, “I love my brother Bobby, but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues, including the COVID pandemic, vaccinations, and the role of social media platforms in policing false information.”