The HHS nominee has taken legal action against a Daily Kos blogger in four different states over a post about Kennedy’s 2020 appearance with German “neo-Nazis.”
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has marketed himself as a soldier for free speech and anti-censorship in addition to a star of the so-called “health freedom” movement.
But, as has proven to be something of a pattern among MAGA First Amendment warrior types, it is a “free speech for me and not for thee” agenda.
While painting himself as a victim of government censorship online, Kennedy has leveraged his deep pockets and the legal system in an attempt to personally silence an independent and anonymous writer who blogged about him.
Kennedy’s organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a leading source of online vaccine misinformation, hosted “The Rally to Reclaim Free Speech” outside of the Supreme Court last March during oral arguments for the Murthy v. Missouri case, the plaintiffs to which alleged that social media companies were colluding with the government to censor misinformation about the 2020 election and COVID-19.
The case was originally filed as Missouri v. Biden in 2022, and Kennedy filed a copycat lawsuit, Kennedy v. Biden, in federal court in Louisiana in 2023. The Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs in the Murthy case lacked standing last summer and an appeals court dismissed Kennedy’s case late last year.
Also last summer, Google defeated Kennedy’s appeal in his legal attempt to force them to restore anti-vaccine YouTube videos and Meta beat CHD’s appeal over censorship allegations.
Kennedy dropped the Google case in November, but CHD continues to push its legal efforts against Meta — which removed their accounts in 2022 for spreading misinformation in violation of pre-existing platform content policies — and recently petitioned the Supreme Court to hear CHD’s case.
While he has gone to such great lengths to fight for his “free speech,” Kennedy sued an anonymous Daily Kos blogger over an article about Kennedy’s appearance at a 2020 COVID-19 rally in Berlin that featured elements of the German far-Right.
In August 2020, “DowneastDem” wrote a short post about Kennedy for Daily Kos titled “Anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-Corona’ Protest.” As previously examined, the event protesting mitigation policies was organized by the German conspiracy-friendly group Querdenken and promoted by the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), both accused of having neo-Nazi ties. Kennedy announced the launch of CHD’s European branch a day ahead of the rally.
The offending Daily Kos post linked to coverage of the 2020 Berlin rally from Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel. Kennedy’s appearance at this rally was also discussed at the time by mainstream American outlets like CBS News, though he notably did not go after their coverage. Kennedy, who years ago praised a description of Trump supporters as “Nazis,” took particular offense at the blog and its headline invoking the neo-Nazi ties.
Kennedy initially sought an intimidating minimum settlement of $1 million. As Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas said, Kennedy “went after someone he thought couldn’t defend himself.”
In 2021 Kennedy sued Daily Kos in an attempt to force the website to reveal the identity of “DowneastDem,” filing the lawsuit in New York, which does not have protections for anonymous speech as other states do. Daily Kos is based in California and a judge there quashed the subpoena Kennedy sent.
Kennedy later filed a libel suit against the anonymous writer in New Hampshire. This choice of filing location may have again been strategic, as the writer, who eventually revealed his identity as David Vickrey, lives in Maine, but its neighboring New England state does not have an anti-SLAPP statute, which would allow defendants to file a motion to dismiss a case involving protected speech.
The defense of Vickrey ultimately became an opportunity for actual defense of free speech. He was supported by Public Citizen, and several mainstream outlets including the The New York Times came to the aide of Daily Kos, filing an amicus brief in the New York case.
On their blog The Defender, CHD accused Public Citizen and Daily Kos of “pinch-hitting for big pharma” in their defense of Vickrey — which is very clearly not what was happening in this case that had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry.
In February of last year the New Hampshire case was thrown out on jurisdictional grounds. Further, the judge dismissed Kennedy’s “plainly false” assertion that the blog post had been written with the aim of harming his then still active presidential campaign, and stated that multiple claims in the suit were “entirely unsupported by the citations he provides.”
Kennedy missed the appeal deadline, apparently owing to his lawyer’s error over time zone differences between California and New Hampshire. Nevertheless, he has continued on with this legal battle.
In October Kennedy filed another suit, this time in Maine, which takes another bite at the same apple and also goes after Vickrey for comments about the 2019 Samoan measles tragedy — from which Kennedy has bent double trying to distance himself.
Kennedy’s abusive use of the legal system should expose him as yet another MAGA free speech hypocrite. And the failure of this legal action should ideally cause a Streisand effect, drawing more attention to Kennedy’s concerning early and international involvement in COVID-19 agitation efforts.
Vickrey’s lawyer filed a motion to dismiss the Maine lawsuit the following month. Kennedy’s lawyers fired back in early December and CHD, which claims to be providing financial support for this latest lawsuit, continues to target Vickrey on their blog.
Kennedy, who was “on leave” from CHD for his presidential campaign, officially resigned from his position as CHD chairman last month in preparation for his HHS confirmation hearings. He has come under scrutiny for failure to fully report the extent of his earnings from CHD in his financial disclosures for the confirmation process.
Kennedy’s abusive use of the legal system should expose him as yet another MAGA free speech hypocrite. And the failure of this legal action should ideally cause a Streisand effect, drawing more attention to Kennedy’s concerning early and international involvement in COVID-19 agitation efforts.
“DowneastDem” was correct to raise the alarms about whom Kennedy was choosing to work with back in 2020. What Vickrey wrote about, and the ongoing attack on his free speech for doing so, should be discussed ahead of confirmation voting for Kennedy so that senators — and the public they represent — may better understand the character of the man nominated to oversee America’s health infrastructure.
Karam Bales is a UK-based disinformation researcher and freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Byline Times as well as his own initiative, the Counter Disinformation Project. He is a former executive for the National Education Union, Europe’s largest education trade union.
