Gabbard and RFK Jr. Were Nominated to Destroy, Not to Lead

Both nominees have shared bizarre conspiracy theories about the organizations they may soon oversee.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

DONALD TRUMP, IN HIS SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, promised to make America “merit-based” again. This week, the Senate will hold hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—Trump’s nominations for secretary of health and human services and director of national intelligence, respectively. Kennedy is a professional conspiracy theorist whose top qualification (if it can be called that) to run America’s public health agencies is his chairmanship of an anti-vaccine advocacy group. Gabbard is a former House member and Army veteran with no intelligence experience. Of course, the nominees’ merits or lack thereof are irrelevant—they’re MAGA sycophants who are being considered for two of the most important jobs in the country because they’re loyal to Trump.

In truth, it would be a relief if Kennedy and Gabbard were merely grossly unqualified. The deeper issue is that Kennedy and Gabbard are anti-qualified. The only conceivable reason to elevate them to the top of the United States’s public health apparatus and intelligence services is to destroy the agencies they have been selected to run.

In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy accuses his subject of leading a “historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” He argues that the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the “onset of totalitarianism” in the United States, that American democracy has been “shattered,” and that the pandemic turned the country into a totalitarian police state: “Some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over.”

Kennedy relentlessly attacks the Department of Health and Human Services throughout the book. For example, he explains that HHS led a “virus war game scenario” (called “Crimson Contagion”) just months before the pandemic hit, which “achieved eerily accurate forecasting with numbers that precisely predicted the official casualty data for COVID-19.” He implies that this was no coincidence.

Kennedy has special ire for HHS Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec, who oversaw Operation Warp Speed and Crimson Contagion. He writes that Kadlec had spent two decades “writing scripts for using a pandemic to overthrow democracy and curtail constitutional rights.” He continues: “With this virus simulation, he [Kadlec] included all the key players who would manage what was to become a de facto coup d’état sixty days hence.” Kennedy concludes:

Crimson Contagion’s planners precisely predicted every element of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the shortage of masks to specific death numbers—months before COVID-19 was ever identified as a threat and . . . their overarching countermeasure was the pre-planned demolition of the American Constitution by a scrupulously choreographed palace coup.

Trump’s nominee to lead HHS believes the department used the COVID-19 pandemic to destroy American democracy—while Trump was still in office. Will any GOP senators ask him about his paranoid hatred for the department he’s nominated to lead? Will they ask if he still believes American democracy was destroyed during the pandemic?

The list of Kennedy’s disqualifying statements and beliefs is long. He believes vaccines cause autism but HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. He says unvaccinated Americans were worse off during the pandemic than Jews were during the Holocaust, and he has suggested that the “people who are most immune” to COVID-19 are “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He has claimed that the COVID vaccine is the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Operation Warp Speed was a Trump administration initiative, so Kennedy thinks the president he wants to serve is implicated in the creation of a deadly vaccine and a totalitarian police state.

Kennedy now promises that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” He says he just wants to “make sure that Americans have good information” and calls for “evidence-based science and medicine.” Kennedy knows he needs to sane-wash himself in a hurry. But his oft-repeated past statements are readily available to anyone who cares to look, and they demonstrate that Kennedy is a rabid conspiracy theorist who has spent many years targeting the very department Trump nominated him to run. Any senator who doesn’t make this the focus of his confirmation hearings is derelict in their duty.

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GABBARD HAS A LONG HISTORY of attacking American intelligence agencies. She has argued that the intelligence community is part of a “shadow government pulling the strings” in the United States. She claimed that the “real power lies with the Deep State, Intel agencies, and propaganda media who got [Biden] elected.” She accused intelligence agencies of working with social media companies in an “unholy alliance” which “threatens to destroy what is left of our fragile democracy.” She added: “Dictatorships need to control the flow of information—and that’s what’s going on here.”

In Gabbard’s 2024 book For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, she expressed her horror at Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2017 comment that Trump was “really dumb” for attacking intelligence agencies: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Here’s how Gabbard interpreted this comment:

I was not at all naive about the power of the national security state. This admission, however, from one of the most high-ranking, powerful Democrats in the country accepted as normal the fact that we are not the free democratic republic we are supposed to be. He was admitting that our democracy is a charade and that our elected leaders, who have been charged with the critical task of overseeing the national security state, are too afraid to do so.

Schumer’s comment was careless, but Gabbard’s response was far more revealing—particularly for a possible director of national intelligence. She believes American democracy is a “charade” that is totally subordinate to “supremely powerful” intelligence agencies. She says it’s a “fact” that the United States is no longer a “free democratic republic.” These comments are consistent with her long record of paranoid denunciations of the intelligence community, and it’s not as if she made them decades ago—her book was published last year.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Gabbard has repeatedly contradicted the intelligence community. After Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians in April 2017, Gabbard immediately declared that she was “skeptical” that the regime was responsible—despite its gruesome record of atrocities against civilians and the fact that she couldn’t have assessed any information about the attack at that point. A few months before the attack, Gabbard met with Assad, whom she would later declare was “not the enemy of the United States.” She opposed U.S. intervention to support Assad’s opponents, so a chemical attack on civilians launched by the regime was politically inconvenient.

Gabbard would continue denying Assad’s guilt long after American intelligence agencies determined he was responsible. She refused to accept the conclusions of U.S. and French intelligence, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and the UN. But for some reason, she trusted Theodore Postol—an emeritus professor at MIT and a frequent guest for the Russian propaganda outlet RT who has repeatedly questioned the Assad regime’s culpability for chemical attacks.

On Gabbard’s 2019 campaign website, she claimed there was “evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.” This was an echo of Russian propaganda, as was Gabbard’s claim that Putin deserved credit for fighting terrorism in Syria. Russia was actually involved in the war to prevent a brutal client state from collapsing, and it carried out one of the most indiscriminately destructive bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century (a glimpse at what was in store for Ukraine)—not predominantly against ISIS but against the more moderate opposition to Assad, and often against civilians.

Gabbard’s rhetoric often echoes Moscow’s. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, she blamed the United States for failing to address “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” In November 2023, she declared: “The Biden Admin, intel agencies, and propaganda media lied and are still lying to the American people about Ukraine/US sabotage of Nord Stream pipeline.” While there’s evidence that American intelligence agencies knew about plans to attack the pipeline, the idea that the U.S. government took part in the operation is unsubstantiated. If anything, the CIA apparently urged Ukraine not to go through with it.

Gabbard has consistently demonstrated a complete inability to assess intelligence objectively. What’s even more disturbing is that her politicized assessments reliably favor the United States’s adversaries. And what’s more disturbing still is that she believes the intelligence community she’s been selected to lead has been working behind the scenes to destroy American democracy.

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KENNEDY AND GABBARD HAVE A LOT IN COMMON. They’re both former Democrats who opportunistically joined the MAGA movement when their own presidential aspirations fizzled. They’re both conspiracy theorists and alarmists who routinely announce the death of American democracy at the hands of their political foes. And they’re both talented demagogues who put their skills to use for Trump—and are on the cusp of receiving rich rewards for doing so.

Trump has always been heavily invested in a narrative of American decline. His political opponents, in his telling, aren’t just wrong, they’re destroying the United States. Immigration isn’t just a problem—immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump has spent the past few years at war with the American institutions that attempted to hold him accountable for his effort to overthrow the 2020 election—from the House January 6th Committee to the justice system. He needed surrogates who could speak the language of anti-institutional paranoia and hostility to convince American voters that, despite appearances, his political opponents posed the true threat to democracy. Kennedy and Gabbard were perfect for the job.

“When you undermine the authority of the president,” Gabbard writes in For Love of Country, referring to the investigation of Trump’s alleged ties to Russia in 2016, “you take away the power the American people gave him to carry out his presidential duties. This, in effect, is a slow-rolling coup.” She continues:

The entire permanent Washington machine was activated to play their role in carrying this out: the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, Big Tech, the FBI, the CIA, and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels of our government. If you weren’t already aware, when you hear people talking about the Deep State, this is who they’re referring to.

Kennedy and Gabbard see “deep state” schemes and coups around every corner. They’ve spent years raging against the “Washington machine,” but if they become integral parts of that machine, there’s no telling how much damage they’ll cause. Kennedy and Gabbard weren’t just chosen because Trump wanted to reward loyal surrogates—they were chosen because they will happily indulge his paranoia and any conspiracy theory that serves his purposes. Conspiracism and opportunism have always come naturally to both of them, and these are the only necessary qualifications in Trump’s “merit-based” government.