In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."
Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.
In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”
“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)
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Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor Carroll responded to requests for comment about why Carroll was chosen to helm the panel or his prolific and bigoted internet history. As the publication Jewish Insider pointed out on Wednesday, just a few weeks ago he proclaimed on X that the US is “controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism.’”
Carroll has also tweeted that popular understanding of the Holocaust is characterized by “lots of bad numbers and misreporting,” and suggested in March that there’s something suspicious about the three marriages Shanahan has shared with Jewish men, while promising he would dig into the matter. (It’s not clear he did, and, even before Wednesday’s panel, Shanahan had since appeared on his podcast.)
