Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.

“He is entirely unqualified.”

Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.

Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.

While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.” 

The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)

When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause. 

Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.” 

“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”

“All of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.” 

Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”

“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)

Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”

As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?” 

“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.” 

Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.

“He is entirely unqualified.”

Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.

Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.

While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.” 

The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)

When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause. 

Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.” 

“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”

“All of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.” 

Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”

“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)

Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”

As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?” 

“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.” 

Weekend Fox News host Pete Hegseth has already been an exceedingly controversial choice as Donald Trump’s pick for his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth and the Trump camp have spent recent days pushing back against two simultaneous controversies: allegations that Hegseth has “extremist” tattoos, as some critics have charged, and news broken by Vanity Fair on Thursday that Hegseth was previously investigated by police in California over a sexual misconduct claim. Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were ever filed against him. 

Hegseth is a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, media scrutiny has focused on his tattoos, one of which depicts a Jerusalem cross, a Christian symbol first popularized during the Crusades, and one that reads “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin), which refers to divine providence. A slogan for Catholics during the First Crusade, this phrase has more recently been chanted by white supremacists and co-opted by the far right. 

Hegseth confirmed in a November interview with a podcaster that he was one of 12 National Guard members removed from working at Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI and U.S. military, adding: “I was deemed an extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington, D.C., and my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration.” A fellow National Guardsmen, DeRicko Gaither, confirmed to CBS that he’d reported Hegseth as being a possible “insider threat” due to the Deus Vult tattoo.  

The other controversy is fresh: journalist Gabriel Sherman reported on Thursday that Hegseth was investigated by Monterey Park police in 2017 over an allegation of sexual misconduct. He was not arrested or charged with a crime. 

Rather than denying that the investigation took place, Trump campaign spokesperson (and future Trump administration communications director) Steven Cheung told Sherman in a statement that Hegseth “has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.” 

On X, Hegseth has retweeted posts expressing support for him, including one that reads, “The fact Pete was banned from duty for expressing his Christian beliefs is exactly why he needs to be SECDEF.” Vice presidential nominee JD Vance called the Associated Press’ coverage of the controversy “disgusting anti-Christian bigotry,” writing, “They’re attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm.”

Hegseth agreed, reposting the tweet and adding, “Amen @JDVance. Anti-Christian bigotry in the media on full display. They can target me—I don’t give a damn—but this type of targeting of Christians, conservatives, patriots and everyday Americans will stop on DAY ONE at DJT’s DoD.”

Hegseth hasn’t responded publicly to Vanity Fair’s story about the sexual misconduct investigation; Sherman reported that Trump’s lawyers and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, both spoke to him about it on Thursday.  

In his time on Fox News, Hegseth has devoted air time to railing against “woke” policies he claims are harming military readiness, also the subject of a book he published in June titled The War on Warriors. Hegseth said in a podcast appearance with Ben Shapiro that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles, adding that “men in those positions are more capable.” (He also went mildly viral in 2019 for saying on Fox and Friends that he “hasn’t washed [his] hands for ten years,” joking—at least we think—that “germs are not a real thing, I can’t see them.”) 

Hegseth also has deep connections with the so-called TheoBros, a collection of ultra-conservative and extremely online millennial Christian men who follow an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson. Some of Wilson’s followers believe that the United States should, as Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler has written, “be subject to Biblical law.” 

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.

An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.

As this odd situation played out, however, Infowars’ website came back online on Friday afternoon; soon after, Jones and his staff had also returned to Infowars‘ studios. Throughout Friday and Saturday morning, the site was full of stories preemptively declaring Jones’ victory over the Onion. 

“I told you,” Jones crowed during a Friday night broadcast, back behind his usual desk. “If you want a fight, you got one.”

(After the original publication of this article, Collins responded to the revival of Infowars in a Twitter thread, reiterating that the Onion won the bid and writing that his company “left the hearing with clear next steps to complete the sale. InfoWars’ current management asked to continue operating until then. We always knew the guys who currently run InfoWars were going to take this badly and use a loss to fundraise off of it. They did not disappoint!”)

Jones also vowed that even if Infowars is sold he would sue anyone who “impersonates” him, as well as “the big Democrat gun control group,” involved in the sale. (The New York Times has reported that Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun law reform, plans to advertise on the relaunched, satire version of the site.)

Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas’ Southern District has been overseeing the years-long bankruptcy process for Infowars. The company and Jones personally filed for bankruptcy protection amid civil lawsuits brought by the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook. Jones was found liable by default for defaming the Sandy Hook families by repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a “hoax” and suggesting some of the parents were actors. In the Thursday hearing, Lopez said, “nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing was held. Christopher Murray, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who declared the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, to be the auction’s winner, considered the bids in private. According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. 

“I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.” 

Jones has made it clear that he was working with a group of what he dubbed “good guy” bidders, who he hoped would buy the site and keep him on air. The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store. 

The evidentiary hearing is expected to be held next week. 

Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.

“He will do great harm—generational harm.”

The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.

Kennedy’s nomination didn’t come as a surprise. After Kennedy abandoned his own independent presidential campaign, he promptly endorsed Trump’s. As they campaigned together, Trump pledged to let him “go wild on health” in a new administration, as he phrased it, as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—proposals that amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.

Having Kennedy in such a powerful role, according to University of Alberta law and public health professor Timothy Caulfield, is “horrifying. A genuine catastrophe.”

“This is a person who has spread deadly lies and conspiracy theories,” Caulfield, the author of several books on pseudoscience’s impact on public health, added. “He ignores evidence. He ignores experts. I have no doubt that he will do great harm—generational harm—to public health, trust in science, and biomedical research. Moreover, at the international level, he will platform, normalize, and legitimize pseudoscience and health misinformation, making it more ubiquitous and difficult to fact check.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, a recognized expert on vaccines and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is also deeply concerned. He told Mother Jones that he’s preparing a paper on “what could happen to our vaccine ecosystem,” he said. 

“It could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks,” he said. “And, of course, preparedness for H5N1 and other pandemic threats could suffer.”

Love, who tracks health misinformation online and recently faced vitriol from people aligned with the MAHA movement, sees a laundry list of threats to public health under a Kennedy-run department. “Honestly,” Love said, “if you look at the purview of HHS secretary, the damage he could do is near infinite. And none of his long history gives any indication he will actually do anything to improve health, especially for those of lower socioeconomic status.”

“I can honestly say it has never been this bad.”

He could “skew, redirect, and reallocate grant and research funding” toward “fringe research,” Love warns, “cut funding for education and public health initiatives like vaccine campaigns or other public health interventions like fluoridation,” and slow or halt regulatory approval “for vaccines, biologics, immunotherapies, and other critical medical interventions.” Because Kennedy has wrongly demonized Covid vaccines as “gene therapy,” Love suspects that he will be hostile to genuine applications of that science—“the leading edge of our research in cancer, autoimmunity, genetic disease, and latent viral infections. The hit to biotech is sure to be substantial.”

“Conversely, he could also loosen regulatory requirements for less-robust wellness interventions like his ‘peptides’ and ‘chelating’ therapies to get those through regulatory and give them an appearance of legitimacy,” she explained.

“This role would give him a global platform to spread misinformation…He can lie, spread falsehoods, and undermine scientific evidence beyond what he’s already done,” Love says. “I would expect he would spread more lies about causes of cancer, the ‘chronic disease’ epidemic, ‘toxic chemicals,’ and more. He can also delay or withhold communicating actual factual information” during public health crises like epidemics.

In charge of HHS, Kennedy could appoint what Love called “unqualified and ideological individuals” within the department and the agencies it oversees, who could “erode and erase these critical agencies from within. He could replace qualified advisory board members with unqualified people, further dismantling these agencies.” 

Not everyone responded negatively to Kennedy’s nomination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), himself a physician and former member of a fringe medical group that promoted vaccine suspicion, cheered the news, writing on Twitter/X: “Finally, someone to detox the place after the Fauci era. Get ready for health care freedom and MAHA!” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also posted a welcoming message, saying Kennedy “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.” (A Polis spokesperson later released a statement saying the governor remained “opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation.”)

Even before Trump tapped him, Kennedy signaled a radical vision to reshape some of the US’ public health agencies to his liking. At an entrepreneurship conference last week, he laid out plans to fire and replace 600 workers at the National Institutes of Health. The NIH declined to comment on the plan, but the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees civil service workers, provided a statement: “OPM and the Biden-Harris Administration have a deep appreciation and respect for our country’s civil servants and the importance of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. We cannot comment on the actions of future administrations.” 

Caulfield, the University of Alberta professor, summed up what many medical and public health professionals seem to be feeling as they look toward the prospect of Kennedy taking the job. “As someone who has worked in this space for decades,” he said, “I can honestly say it has never been this bad. It feels like we are stepping toward a new Dark Age.”

Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.

“He will do great harm—generational harm.”

The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.

Kennedy’s nomination didn’t come as a surprise. After Kennedy abandoned his own independent presidential campaign, he promptly endorsed Trump’s. As they campaigned together, Trump pledged to let him “go wild on health” in a new administration, as he phrased it, as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—proposals that amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.

Having Kennedy in such a powerful role, according to University of Alberta law and public health professor Timothy Caulfield, is “horrifying. A genuine catastrophe.”

“This is a person who has spread deadly lies and conspiracy theories,” Caulfield, the author of several books on pseudoscience’s impact on public health, added. “He ignores evidence. He ignores experts. I have no doubt that he will do great harm—generational harm—to public health, trust in science, and biomedical research. Moreover, at the international level, he will platform, normalize, and legitimize pseudoscience and health misinformation, making it more ubiquitous and difficult to fact check.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, a recognized expert on vaccines and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is also deeply concerned. He told Mother Jones that he’s preparing a paper on “what could happen to our vaccine ecosystem,” he said. 

“It could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks,” he said. “And, of course, preparedness for H5N1 and other pandemic threats could suffer.”

Love, who tracks health misinformation online and recently faced vitriol from people aligned with the MAHA movement, sees a laundry list of threats to public health under a Kennedy-run department. “Honestly,” Love said, “if you look at the purview of HHS secretary, the damage he could do is near infinite. And none of his long history gives any indication he will actually do anything to improve health, especially for those of lower socioeconomic status.”

“I can honestly say it has never been this bad.”

He could “skew, redirect, and reallocate grant and research funding” toward “fringe research,” Love warns, “cut funding for education and public health initiatives like vaccine campaigns or other public health interventions like fluoridation,” and slow or halt regulatory approval “for vaccines, biologics, immunotherapies, and other critical medical interventions.” Because Kennedy has wrongly demonized Covid vaccines as “gene therapy,” Love suspects that he will be hostile to genuine applications of that science—“the leading edge of our research in cancer, autoimmunity, genetic disease, and latent viral infections. The hit to biotech is sure to be substantial.”

“Conversely, he could also loosen regulatory requirements for less-robust wellness interventions like his ‘peptides’ and ‘chelating’ therapies to get those through regulatory and give them an appearance of legitimacy,” she explained.

“This role would give him a global platform to spread misinformation…He can lie, spread falsehoods, and undermine scientific evidence beyond what he’s already done,” Love says. “I would expect he would spread more lies about causes of cancer, the ‘chronic disease’ epidemic, ‘toxic chemicals,’ and more. He can also delay or withhold communicating actual factual information” during public health crises like epidemics.

In charge of HHS, Kennedy could appoint what Love called “unqualified and ideological individuals” within the department and the agencies it oversees, who could “erode and erase these critical agencies from within. He could replace qualified advisory board members with unqualified people, further dismantling these agencies.” 

Not everyone responded negatively to Kennedy’s nomination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), himself a physician and former member of a fringe medical group that promoted vaccine suspicion, cheered the news, writing on Twitter/X: “Finally, someone to detox the place after the Fauci era. Get ready for health care freedom and MAHA!” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also posted a welcoming message, saying Kennedy “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.” (A Polis spokesperson later released a statement saying the governor remained “opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation.”)

Even before Trump tapped him, Kennedy signaled a radical vision to reshape some of the US’ public health agencies to his liking. At an entrepreneurship conference last week, he laid out plans to fire and replace 600 workers at the National Institutes of Health. The NIH declined to comment on the plan, but the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees civil service workers, provided a statement: “OPM and the Biden-Harris Administration have a deep appreciation and respect for our country’s civil servants and the importance of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. We cannot comment on the actions of future administrations.” 

Caulfield, the University of Alberta professor, summed up what many medical and public health professionals seem to be feeling as they look toward the prospect of Kennedy taking the job. “As someone who has worked in this space for decades,” he said, “I can honestly say it has never been this bad. It feels like we are stepping toward a new Dark Age.”

Conspiracy mega-site Infowars, whose founder and main host Alex Jones has become the face of monetized suspicion in America, has been acquired at a bankruptcy auction by the satirical news company The Onion. They plan to relaunch Infowars as a parody of itself, with backing from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun law reform. The news was first reported by the New York Times.

On Thursday morning, Jones broadcast a flabbergasted and defiant monologue, calling the news “insane” saying he wouldn’t go off air until someone came in and forced him out with a court order. “They’re in the control room,” Jones said on air. “Imperial Troops are through the glass.”

“It is a distinct honor to be here in defiance of the tyrants,” Jones declared at one point. 

“They’re here,” Jones said, glancing off-screen, “saying the building is theirs.”

Ben Collins, The Onion’s CEO and a former journalist covering disinformation at NBC News, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The bankruptcy court-ordered auction process for Infowars concluded yesterday; the bids were secret and considered behind closed doors by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, Christopher Murray. The process surprised some close to the situation, who told Mother Jones they’d thought the bids should be considered publicly. Murray also did not respond to a request for comment. 

During Thursday morning’s broadcast, a producer came in as Jones continued to broadcast and announced off-camera that “they” were working on “shutting it down momentarily,” meaning both Infowars and Banned.video, another site that’s used to broadcast Infowars content. Jones then called Steve Bannon on speakerphone, who released a string of audible profanity before Jones cut him off. Bannon implored Jones’ crew to film the supposed raid.

In an interview with the Times, Collins didn’t disclose how much The Onion paid for Infowars but said it would re-launch in January making fun of “weird internet personalities” like Alex Jones. He also said the Sandy Hook families were “supportive,” as the Times put it, of the bid.

Jones had signaled that he was “working with” a group of what he called “good guy” buyers, including former Trump advisor and longtime Infowars personality Roger Stone, who apparently did not, in the eyes of the trustee, mount the best bid. Jones, unsurprisingly, declared the process to be rigged.

As Jones continued to frantically broadcast, he also, rather unconvincingly, declared himself to be at peace with the decision and encouraged people to visit a new, eponymous news site he had already set up. “All you’re doing is shutting down the building and taking away AlexJones.com and the Infowars store,” he said, listing virtually everything of value in his company. “We got funds coming in. We got high-powered lawyers. We’re moving forward. The tide has turned.” 

At another point, Jones explained, “You’ll notice I got really fat years ago because I just didn’t care about myself.” It was during this time he realized “these people really want to destroy me,” he said, leading him to take up hiking and exercise.

“You want me depressed, you want me sad, you want me out of the game, you’re going to get the opposite,” he declared. “You’re going to get total peaceful information resistance. And I’ve got the people’s backing.”

Jones also said he would “spend time with my family,” “fight corruption” and “remove the Deep State from power.”  In the meantime, Infowars could be shut down at any moment, though Jones said later in the broadcast that even if it went down temporarily he would seek an emergency court order to get back on air.

“They’re here,” Jones said, glancing off-screen, “saying the building is theirs.”

The court-ordered auction of conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones’ company Infowars took place on Wednesday. By late morning Texas time, Jones said the auction had been closed, but the winner, to be chosen by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, had not yet been announced.

The proceeds will be distributed to Infowars’ creditors, with the large majority going to the Sandy Hook families who won a series of enormous judgments, roughly totaling $1.5 billion, against Jones and Infowars for lying about the deaths of their children on air. 

Jones pushed back on suggestions the sale could end his broadcasting career.

The bids for the company’s assets are sealed, but Jones has made it clear for months that he hopes a supporter will acquire the company and keep him in place, saying on Wednesday that he was “working with” one such bidding group. But he also signaled on Wednesday that if the “bad guys,” as he put it, won the auction, he might not accept the results and would demand a judge get involved. 

Each potential purchaser had to submit a non-disclosure agreement in order to bid on Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, and its various holdings. CNN reported that one interested party, described as a supporter of Jones “who wants the host to continue broadcasting on the Infowars platform he founded,” submitted a bid in the “seven-figure” range. (The name of that person or entity has not been publicly reported.) The Associated Press reported that one bidder is believed to be Trump ally Roger Stone. In Jones’ “bad guys” camp were bids from the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters and The Barbed Wire, a Texas-based progressive site, neither of which were expected to win.

As his fate was being decided behind closed doors on Wednesday, Jones took to the air, sitting behind his desk, surrounded by his usual piles of printouts and trying to approximate his normal level of bluster. “It’s a little stressful, but no word has come in yet,” he said at one point, at an uncharacteristically normal tone and volume. 

In his broadcast, Jones framed the auction as an existential threat—and repeatedly called on his supporters to buy his products and donate money and Bitcoin. He declared himself to be “happy as a pig in you-know-what” in the midst of “battle” and dismissed the attorneys for the Sandy Hook families as “clowns.” 

“Infowars is an idea,” he declared at another point. “Infowars is a family. Infowars is stronger than ever.” 

He also suggested that the auction was rigged. “The good guys I’m working with were told in writing it would take a month to certify their purchase,” he groused, “but they were told if the bad guys won they would get it instantly.” That, he said, was an example of how “Christians and conservatives” are held to different rules, adding that it “is why the American people are mad.”

As he spoke, he bitterly pushed back on suggestions the sale could result in the end of his broadcasting career. He said he’d set up another studio to continue working from if Infowars is seized and shut down, representing a supposedly new media entity, dubbed the Alex Jones Network.

“It’s all set up,” he said on air. “The crew, the studios.” Indeed, the new company already has a website shilling products, including a “commemorative” Star Wars-style poster with Jones depicted as Luke Skywalker and George Soros as Darth Vader, and a $150 knife dubbed the “1776 Devastator Tactical Blade” that is signed by Jones. 

None of this, however, means that Jones can get out of paying the Sandy Hook families. They’ll have license to go after his future earnings until the judgment they’re owed is paid in full.

A second auction featuring additional Infowars and Jones assets is scheduled for December; the auction house said in an announcement that those items may include “production equipment, office furniture, computers, gym equipment, a Terradyne Armored truck, a Winnebago Motorhome and more.”

The court-ordered auction of conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones’ company Infowars took place on Wednesday. By late morning Texas time, Jones said the auction had been closed, but the winner, to be chosen by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee, had not yet been announced.

The proceeds will be distributed to Infowars’ creditors, with the large majority going to the Sandy Hook families who won a series of enormous judgments, roughly totaling $1.5 billion, against Jones and Infowars for lying about the deaths of their children on air. 

Jones pushed back on suggestions the sale could end his broadcasting career.

The bids for the company’s assets are sealed, but Jones has made it clear for months that he hopes a supporter will acquire the company and keep him in place, saying on Wednesday that he was “working with” one such bidding group. But he also signaled on Wednesday that if the “bad guys,” as he put it, won the auction, he might not accept the results and would demand a judge get involved. 

Each potential purchaser had to submit a non-disclosure agreement in order to bid on Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, and its various holdings. CNN reported that one interested party, described as a supporter of Jones “who wants the host to continue broadcasting on the Infowars platform he founded,” submitted a bid in the “seven-figure” range. (The name of that person or entity has not been publicly reported.) The Associated Press reported that one bidder is believed to be Trump ally Roger Stone. In Jones’ “bad guys” camp were bids from the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters and The Barbed Wire, a Texas-based progressive site, neither of which were expected to win.

As his fate was being decided behind closed doors on Wednesday, Jones took to the air, sitting behind his desk, surrounded by his usual piles of printouts and trying to approximate his normal level of bluster. “It’s a little stressful, but no word has come in yet,” he said at one point, at an uncharacteristically normal tone and volume. 

In his broadcast, Jones framed the auction as an existential threat—and repeatedly called on his supporters to buy his products and donate money and Bitcoin. He declared himself to be “happy as a pig in you-know-what” in the midst of “battle” and dismissed the attorneys for the Sandy Hook families as “clowns.” 

“Infowars is an idea,” he declared at another point. “Infowars is a family. Infowars is stronger than ever.” 

He also suggested that the auction was rigged. “The good guys I’m working with were told in writing it would take a month to certify their purchase,” he groused, “but they were told if the bad guys won they would get it instantly.” That, he said, was an example of how “Christians and conservatives” are held to different rules, adding that it “is why the American people are mad.”

As he spoke, he bitterly pushed back on suggestions the sale could result in the end of his broadcasting career. He said he’d set up another studio to continue working from if Infowars is seized and shut down, representing a supposedly new media entity, dubbed the Alex Jones Network.

“It’s all set up,” he said on air. “The crew, the studios.” Indeed, the new company already has a website shilling products, including a “commemorative” Star Wars-style poster with Jones depicted as Luke Skywalker and George Soros as Darth Vader, and a $150 knife dubbed the “1776 Devastator Tactical Blade” that is signed by Jones. 

None of this, however, means that Jones can get out of paying the Sandy Hook families. They’ll have license to go after his future earnings until the judgment they’re owed is paid in full.

A second auction featuring additional Infowars and Jones assets is scheduled for December; the auction house said in an announcement that those items may include “production equipment, office furniture, computers, gym equipment, a Terradyne Armored truck, a Winnebago Motorhome and more.”

At an event late last week in Arizona, anti-vaccine activist and Donald Trump transition team member Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’d fire and replace 600 people from the National Institutes of Health on day one of a second Trump term. The NIH is one of the public health agencies Kennedy loathes the most—and despite still lacking any defined role in a new administration, he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to promise retribution against them. 

Kennedy made eyebrow-raising claims while fawning over Trump.

In comments that were first reported by ABC News, Kennedy declared, “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave.” 

Kennedy, a long-standing opponent of vaccines, has consistently been critical of the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control, and other federal agencies that are part of the basic infrastructure of public health. His The Real Anthony Fauci attacked Fauci, a former NIH director, at book length, albeit with what one physician reviewer called “many errors and gross misrepresentations.”

The remarks offering some concrete details about Kennedy’s Trump-aligned and so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda came during an onstage interview at an entrepreneurship event in Scottsdale, which included discussions of Kennedy’s workout routine and his relationship with the once and future president.

Calley Means, a self-described health care reform activist who played a role in Kennedy’s independent presidential run sat alongside him for part of the interview. He framed the MAHA movement as “kicking the special interests and the Deep State” out of government, calling the NIH “an orgy of corruption.” 

Kennedy made other eyebrow-raising claims during the interview, for instance claiming that “pilot studies” showed that anorexia could be cured with a “keto diets and other kind of diets.”

“NIH won’t do those studies because they don’t want to know the source or the cure or the treatment of chronic disease,” he declared. He also returned to his hobby horse, claiming links between vaccines and a spread in autism.

“I never saw anybody who was autistic when I was a kid,” Kennedy claimed. “Never.” He added that men his age—Kennedy is 70—don’t have “full blown autism,” which he defined as “wearing helmets” and “not being toilet trained” and “head-banging, stimming, toe-walking.”

(Experts believe that autism was underdiagnosed until recent decades; the earliest prevalence studies weren’t conducted until the 1960s and ’70s. Autistic adults have a range of abilities, and autistic self-advocates have said that Kennedy uses offensive and ableist language to talk about autism: rather than “full blown,” public health experts would generally say “profound autism.” Kennedy also still uses the term “Aspergers,” an outdated phrase referencing a scientist who worked with Nazis during the Holocaust.)

Kennedy also used his appearance in Scottsdale to continue fawning over Trump, saying the incoming president “has an aura of greatness around him” for his role in standing up to what he called “the globalist project.”

He also spoke critically about his own extended family, many of whom were critical of his presidential run, and some of whom called him “tragically wrong” about vaccines as far back as 2019. Kennedy said those relatives were “all under this kind of hypnosis” and have been “persuaded by this propaganda wall to turn on their own values.” 

In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.

“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Infowars’ Alex Jones claimed Democrats attempted pro-Harris fraud but simply failed.

Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right. 

On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a broader level, Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports it has “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

The Meta-owned social media site Threads has been particularly full of left-and-liberal election denialism. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, the situation illustrates “how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news.” It’s also a clear sign that some social media users are finding that dabbling in election conspiracy theories earns much-craved attention and engagement, with some posts alleging a Starlink plot racking up thousands of views.

There were early signs America was heading toward a post-election season characterized by broad suspicions of fraud: in an October 3 Marist poll, 58 percent of respondents said they were either “concerned” or “very concerned” that voter fraud might occur this year. Of course, fears of voter fraud have haunted American elections for almost as long as we’ve been a country, and have been harnessed by politicians and activists since the early 19th century to motivate their own base to vote—and to change the rules to try to keep some voters, especially immigrants and the poor, from the polls. 

In the run up to last week’s vote, Trump and his allies regularly pushed such fears, raising the false specter of American voters being overwhelmed at the polls by illegal non-citizen voters. That came on top of years of similar claims, and against the backdrop of Trump’s false contention he won the 2020 election. But while the firehose of voter fraud accusations slowed down dramatically after Trump’s win last week, it didn’t stop entirely.

In the very early morning of November 6, not long after polls closed, Mike Adams, who runs the conspiracy site Natural News, wrote that “Dems still have a chance to cheat their way to ‘victory’ in the hours ahead, and trucks of ballots are now seen unloading tens of thousands of ballots in Philadelphia.” While multiple conspiracy peddlers reported on a supposed convoy of trucks bringing fraudulent ballots to Pennsylvania, most dropped the claim after Trump’s win in the state was secured.

Conspiracy theories are for “losers….suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

A similar pattern played out in Arizona, where TruthSocial and right-wing Twitter users claimed early on that voter fraud was occurring against Donald Trump. The day after the election, far-right news site Real America’s Voice devoted a lengthy segment to “apparent voter fraud” in Arizona. “This is such a shady state,” commentator Ben Bergquam proclaimed, claiming that “they are allowing people to vote who they know are not registered voters. They’re allowing fraudulent votes.”

But when Trump’s victory in the state became clear on November 11, prominent Trump fans and conspiratorial news sites maintained that fraud had somehow taken place in down-ballot races, even if it had not in deciding the presidency. After Democrat Ruben Gallego triumphed over ultra-conservative Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative commentator who uses the handle DC Draino on Twitter, claimed without evidence (as Lake has) that Gallego was “cartel-linked,” and suggested that had something to do with his win: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s fraud.”

Twitter’s “Election Integrity Community” also focused its muddled attention on Arizona, as well as on the Wisconsin Senate race. In an otherwise triumphal tweet the night after the election, Musk himself conspiratorially wrote that the “few states that didn’t go red are mostly ones without voter ID requirements. Must be a coincidence,” punctuated with an eye-roll emoji. His America PAC tweeted a similar claim earlier in the day; these claims ignore that 36 states already request or require some form of voter ID. Many of the ones that don’t are ideologically Democratic-leaning states where Harris was heavily favored to win.

In what seems to be an emerging narrative on the far-right, Infowars conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones claimed that Democrats tried to carry out election fraud on behalf of Harris and simply failed. “I think the face of the police and the poll watchers and the lawyers, they went, ‘We just can’t do this anymore, this is too obvious,’” he declared. “And then boom, we saw Trump win. That’s not even conjecture. That’s what happened.” 

But true to form, Jones also couldn’t resist pointing to supposed fraud somewhere, darkly claiming that “glitches” flipping seats from Republican to Democrat had been “exposed” by Lara Trump and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. That narrative echoed one pushed by Gateway Pundit, which speciously seized on a report that the apparent winners of some county-level races in Michigan could change as votes continue to be tabulated, a process known colloquially as “counting votes.”   

Even Donald Trump himself had to find ways to reconcile an uncomplicated victory with his incessant advance warnings of fraud. He turned to newly relevant slogan, posting a red-tinted photo of a crowd of his supporters, overlaid with the words “TOO BIG TO RIG.”

The day after Election Day, predominantly Black recipients received racist, trollish text messages telling them they had been “selected” to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The messages were sent from varying numbers and area codes, and sent to recipients in at least eight states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama. Students at both Alabama State University and the University of Alabama reported getting the messages; some Twitter users reported that children or teens too young to vote also received them.

The foul texts generated anger, fear, and a somewhat muted response from law enforcement, with the FBI confirming in a statement that it was “aware” of the incident and is in communication with the Justice Department and “other federal authorities” on the matter. Now, political violence researchers at Princeton University have a theory about how the messages targeted Black recipients, and advice for those who received them. 

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

The Princeton researchers also wrote that they consider the security risk posed by the messages to be “low,” considering they didn’t contain other personally identifying information targeting the recipients, like their addresses. They advise recipients not to post screenshots of the messages that could inadvertently expose identifying information like phone numbers. They also recommend reporting the texts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has condemned the messages and said it’s investigating their origin, or to local law enforcement.

Along with the FBI, Virginia’s attorney general has condemned the messages; a spokesperson with the Federal Communications Commission told Virginia’s 13News Now that the agency is also looking into the messages “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson explicitly tied them to the election results, writing in a statement: “The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes.  These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Johnson added that the threat contained in the messages “is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.” The NAACP also said it’s encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement “to take these messages seriously and respond appropriately.”

The elites of the anti-vaccine, “medical freedom” world saw the presidential election unfold at a hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a giddy, rising sense of what was unfolding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump booster, turned up at the event before heading to Mar a Lago; at the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and the founder of Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent litigator who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have devoted their adult lives to opposing a basic tenet of public health.

“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom.” 

The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and fellow traveler. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” a glistening, freshly bronzed Trump promised in his victory remarks. From the crowd, a chorus broke out chanting: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!” 

Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said. 

These are heady times for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and endorse Trump’s has resulted in a promise from the soon-to-be-president that Kennedy will serve some role in the second Trump administration relevant to what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the largest such group in the nation. While he’s currently described by the organization as its “chairman on leave,” its staff have spent the time since Trump’s win discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.

The day after the election, in a morning show on CHD’s web-only TV channel, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal good fortune. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, an attorney and CHD’s CEO, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner from England and the mother of a child she says was injured by a vaccine. 

“One of us is going to be in the White House,” said Tommey. “Or around the White House. And that, for us, is a major breakthrough.” 

The two women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a teacher in New York and the executive director of a smaller, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.” 

Gilmore added that he believes Trump is “sincere” in his support for the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injury in his own family that I think he wants to address,” he explained, without specifying who he believes to be affected by those injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.” 

Gilmore recounted how he’d been at the West Palm Beach hotel watch party, and how Kennedy had told the room “how confident he is that his agenda is going to be fully represented in Washington D.C.”

One huge shift, Gilmore added, is that the movement is “no longer on the fringe…Our people will be at the CDC and the NIH and the HHS and all the other alphabet agencies in Washington. Not just being there, but we’re going to be in a policymaking position.” 

Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “sitting on” data showing that vaccine injuries exist, and showing “the connection between vaccines and autism.” With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “that data is going to be unleashed and that will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami. It’s going to be huge.” (Vaccine injuries, while rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay settlements to people who can document harms. CHD has opposed the program and called for vaccine manufacturers to once again be sued in civil court, which would prove a massive windfall for the many personal injury lawyers involved in the movement. In an omnibus hearing, the vaccine court system, whose judges are experts in vaccine safety law, ruled in 2010 that vaccines definitively cannot be shown to cause autism.)

Holland agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era, and voiced a hope that what she called “the new press”—“the podcasters, the independent journalists on the internet”—would cover vaccine safety issues the way CHD prefers. “That’s what the zeitgeist is, finally,” she said. 

Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she’d wept while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We have to break up the CDC,” she added. “We have to take vaccine safety out of the CDC.” Such a goal seems in line with Project 2025, the Trump-linked policy agenda, which calls for splitting the CDC into two agencies. The American Public Health Association has called the proposal “concerning,” and warned it would “slow down emergency responses and take away the already limited authority for CDC to provide public health guidance.” 

Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt whether Kennedy can move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two met, after which Kennedy claimed that he’d been asked to serve on a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No particular vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise during one debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccine schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists were also bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed program. During his own 2024 presidential run, Kennedy assailed Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.

“Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his Covid era mistakes,” Kennedy tweeted in March, citing “documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have exceedingly rare side effects for a small number of people.)

Kennedy’s tune quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily reverse course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, cheered that Kennedy is “headed to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, CHD’s work remained more important than ever, “to cheerlead the administration’s efforts to make kids healthy again, and to hold their feet to the fire if they fall down on promises to make children’s health one of their top priorities.”

The day after Election Day, predominantly Black recipients received racist, trollish text messages telling them they had been “selected” to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The messages were sent from varying numbers and area codes, and sent to recipients in at least eight states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama. Students at both Alabama State University and the University of Alabama reported getting the messages; some Twitter users reported that children or teens too young to vote also received them.

The foul texts generated anger, fear, and a somewhat muted response from law enforcement, with the FBI confirming in a statement that it was “aware” of the incident and is in communication with the Justice Department and “other federal authorities” on the matter. Now, political violence researchers at Princeton University have a theory about how the messages targeted Black recipients, and advice for those who received them. 

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

The Princeton researchers also wrote that they consider the security risk posed by the messages to be “low,” considering they didn’t contain other personally identifying information targeting the recipients, like their addresses. They advise recipients not to post screenshots of the messages that could inadvertently expose identifying information like phone numbers. They also recommend reporting the texts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has condemned the messages and said it’s investigating their origin, or to local law enforcement.

Along with the FBI, Virginia’s attorney general has condemned the messages; a spokesperson with the Federal Communications Commission told Virginia’s 13News Now that the agency is also looking into the messages “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson explicitly tied them to the election results, writing in a statement: “The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes.  These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Johnson added that the threat contained in the messages “is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.” The NAACP also said it’s encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement “to take these messages seriously and respond appropriately.”

The elites of the anti-vaccine, “medical freedom” world saw the presidential election unfold at a hotel watch party in West Palm Beach, with a giddy, rising sense of what was unfolding.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most famous anti-vaccine activist turned presidential candidate turned Trump booster, turned up at the event before heading to Mar a Lago; at the hotel, he sat alongside Del Bigtree, his campaign’s communications manager and the founder of Informed Consent Action Network, another major anti-vax group. They were joined by people like Aaron Siri, a prominent litigator who focuses on vaccine injury cases, educators who advocate for “vaccine choice” in schools, and others who have devoted their adult lives to opposing a basic tenet of public health.

“This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom.” 

The group watched on screen as President-elect Donald Trump praised Kennedy, their longtime friend and fellow traveler. “He’s going to make America healthy again,” a glistening, freshly bronzed Trump promised in his victory remarks. From the crowd, a chorus broke out chanting: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!” 

Trump smiled. “Go have fun, Bobby,” he said. 

These are heady times for Kennedy and his anti-vaccine allies. While his own presidential campaign failed spectacularly, his choice to suspend it and endorse Trump’s has resulted in a promise from the soon-to-be-president that Kennedy will serve some role in the second Trump administration relevant to what Kennedy has called his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Kennedy is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the largest such group in the nation. While he’s currently described by the organization as its “chairman on leave,” its staff have spent the time since Trump’s win discussing their hopes for what Kennedy will do for the cause in Washington.

The day after the election, in a morning show on CHD’s web-only TV channel, a group of people affiliated with the organization celebrated their surreal good fortune. The show was hosted by Mary Holland, an attorney and CHD’s CEO, and Polly Tommey, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner from England and the mother of a child she says was injured by a vaccine. 

“One of us is going to be in the White House,” said Tommey. “Or around the White House. And that, for us, is a major breakthrough.” 

The two women beamed as they interviewed John Gilmore, a teacher in New York and the executive director of a smaller, decades-old anti-vaccine group, the Autism Action Network. “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in medical freedom in my lifetime,” Gilmore told Tommey and Holland. “Everything is going to be different.” 

Gilmore added that he believes Trump is “sincere” in his support for the so-called medical freedom movement. “There are real incidents of vaccine injury in his own family that I think he wants to address,” he explained, without specifying who he believes to be affected by those injuries. “And this is finally his opportunity to do it.” 

Gilmore recounted how he’d been at the West Palm Beach hotel watch party, and how Kennedy had told the room “how confident he is that his agenda is going to be fully represented in Washington D.C.”

One huge shift, Gilmore added, is that the movement is “no longer on the fringe…Our people will be at the CDC and the NIH and the HHS and all the other alphabet agencies in Washington. Not just being there, but we’re going to be in a policymaking position.” 

Gilmore also expressed a common view in the anti-vaccine world: that the federal government is “sitting on” data showing that vaccine injuries exist, and showing “the connection between vaccines and autism.” With Trump at the helm and Kennedy in place, he said, “that data is going to be unleashed and that will hit the medical establishment like a tsunami. It’s going to be huge.” (Vaccine injuries, while rare, do exist, and a federal compensation program and specialized court system has existed since the late 1980s to pay settlements to people who can document harms. CHD has opposed the program and called for vaccine manufacturers to once again be sued in civil court, which would prove a massive windfall for the many personal injury lawyers involved in the movement. In an omnibus hearing, the vaccine court system, whose judges are experts in vaccine safety law, ruled in 2010 that vaccines definitively cannot be shown to cause autism.)

Holland agreed with Gilmore that their movement was entering a new era, and voiced a hope that what she called “the new press”—“the podcasters, the independent journalists on the internet”—would cover vaccine safety issues the way CHD prefers. “That’s what the zeitgeist is, finally,” she said. 

Dawn Richardson of the National Vaccine Information Center, another anti-vaccine group, also appeared on the program. She said she’d wept while watching Trump’s acceptance speech. “We have to break up the CDC,” she added. “We have to take vaccine safety out of the CDC.” Such a goal seems in line with Project 2025, the Trump-linked policy agenda, which calls for splitting the CDC into two agencies. The American Public Health Association has called the proposal “concerning,” and warned it would “slow down emergency responses and take away the already limited authority for CDC to provide public health guidance.” 

Amid all the excitement, there is precedent that casts doubt whether Kennedy can move the needle on their pet issue. The first time Trump was elected president, the two met, after which Kennedy claimed that he’d been asked to serve on a “vaccine safety and scientific integrity” commission. But that never happened. No particular vaccine “disclosures” or reforms were made during his first administration, despite his promise during one debate to “slow down” the childhood vaccine schedule. Many anti-vaccine activists were also bitterly disappointed in Trump for his Operation Warp Speed program. During his own 2024 presidential run, Kennedy assailed Trump for supporting a Covid vaccine.

“Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his Covid era mistakes,” Kennedy tweeted in March, citing “documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis and brain inflammation.” (Covid vaccines have exceedingly rare side effects for a small number of people.)

Kennedy’s tune quickly changed when he was drawn into the Trumpverse, but there are signs that CHD is aware that Trump could easily reverse course. In a fundraising email, Holland, CHD’s CEO, cheered that Kennedy is “headed to Washington, D.C. to serve in President Trump’s inner circle.” But, with that, she added, CHD’s work remained more important than ever, “to cheerlead the administration’s efforts to make kids healthy again, and to hold their feet to the fire if they fall down on promises to make children’s health one of their top priorities.”

There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly formed pro-Trump super-PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions. 

As Trump put it, “A star is born: Elon.”

At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.

Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”  

Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.) 

In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”

Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”

There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly-formed pro-Trump super PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions. 

As Trump put it, “A star is born: Elon.”

At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely-publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.

Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”  

Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.) 

In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”

Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”

The FBI issued a warning on Election Day about a hoax video that purports to be a news clip relaying a warning from the agency warning of a “high terror threat” at polling places.

“No such warning has been issued by U.S. officials.”

“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the agency said in a press release about the video, which appeared to have been designed to frighten Americans away from voting.

According to the FBI, the fake video falsely states that Americans should “vote remotely” due to the supposed threat. CBS News has reported that the fake news clip was designed to look like it came from their network, adding, “No such warning has been issued by U.S. officials and no such report has been produced by CBS News.”

While at least two Twitter accounts sharing the fake have already been suspended, there’s little evidence that the video has been widely seen, even on free-for-all platforms like Twitter or Rumble where misinformation and fake videos have circulated freely throughout the election. 

In the same release, the agency also warned about another hoax video “containing a fabricated FBI press release,” which “alleges that the management of five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona rigged inmate voting and colluded with a political party.” The FBI says this “video is also not authentic, and its contents are false.” As with the “high terror threat” video, there’s little evidence the prisons video is in wide circulation, though a Twitter account sharing it has been suspended.

While the source of these videos wasn’t immediately clear, they shared some resemblances with hoax videos produced by Storm-1516, a Russian government-backed propaganda unit. Storm-1516 looks to have been particularly busy in the waning months of this election cycle, allegedly faking a video designed to make it look like Haitian immigrants were illegally voting in Georgia, and numerous other videos purporting to feature “whistleblowers” drawing attention to alleged American political corruption.

An anonymous pro-Trump influencer who pays for a blue-check Twitter account told CNN in a report published Monday that he’d been paid $100 to post the Haitian immigrants video by Simeon Boikov, whom CNN describes as “a Russian propagandist podcaster.”

Something unusual happened the other week, when podcasting megastar Joe Rogan sat down with Ohio Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In the midst of a conversation about abortion, Vance claimed that liberal women publicly celebrate terminating their pregnancies with elaborate displays on social media: “They’re baking birthday cakes and posting about it,” he declared. 

In 2024, rich men fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate.

Unusually, Rogan actually pushed back. “I think there’s very few people that are celebrating,” he responded.

This basic fact-checking—a brief display of a bare minimum, basement level of common sense—was not only rare for Rogan, but it was rare in an election season where some of the country’s richest and most powerful men have relentlessly promoted hoaxes, politically charged lies, and conspiracy theories of varying degrees of absurdity.

That addled tendency was on full display at other moments in Vance’s interview with Rogan, with the two agreeing that teens are transitioning genders or becoming non-binary to get into Harvard or Yale and to “reject [their] white privilege.” (Vance also nudged into anti-vaccine territory, saying he’d become “red-pilled on the whole vax thing” after two days of illness following a shot.)

If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people—rich men, particularly, and even more particularly ones who support Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate. Separate from simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing talking points, they promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could possibly believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly fake documents.

Take billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who spent days this fall promoting a ludicrous conspiracy theory that an “ABC News whistleblower” had emerged to prove the presidential debate the channel hosted had been rigged for Kamala Harris. The hoax was promulgated by a Twitter user calling himself Black Insurrectionist, who pushed a typo-filled “affidavit” from the “whistleblower” that it appeared he had written himself. Later, the poster tried to promote even more lurid, and clearly fake, sexual assault claims against Tim Walz before apparently deleting his account entirely. When the Associated Press tracked down the person behind “Black Insurrectionist,” he turned out to be a white serial fraudster in upstate New York.

Ackman hasn’t publicly commented on Palmer’s unmasking, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He did, weeks after promoting the ABC whistleblower story, eventually allow that it was “pretty clear” that it had turned out to be false. But he immediately pivoted to join Trump and others in accusing CBS News of misleadingly editing an interview with Kamala Harris, calling an FCC complaint filed against the network by a right-wing law firm “irrefutable.”

Ackman, of course, wasn’t alone in pushing such false or flimsy notions. As the Atlantic noted, other Trump-loving venture capitalists spend unimaginable amounts of time on Twitter—if there’s a contagious disease at work here, the site would be where they caught it—pumping out endless quantities of suspicion and unsourced claims. For example, Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital publicly backed Donald Trump this spring, then went all-in on voter fraud allegations, reposting texts a “general contractor friend” sent him claiming “hundreds of ballots” had been mailed to a vacant house he worked on in 2020. Maguire speculated that the ballots had been sent there so that “antifa” could do voter fraud. Earlier this year, after the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump, he speculated that the shooter “will almost certainly be discovered to be a member” of antifa. (The shooter turned out to be a 20-year-old registered Republican.) 

And of course, there was the richest of the rich men, and the one most willing to repeat lies of any variety: Elon Musk turned himself into a one-man conveyor belt for false claims, especially election disinformation and endless false claims about illegal immigration and undocumented people voting. (He also reposted Maguire’s ballots post, adding, “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?”) 

In his own conversation with Joe Rogan on Monday, Musk made a final preemptive claim of Democratic voter fraud, and signaled an atmosphere of permanent, perpetual suspicion going forward, should Harris win. 

“Everything they accuse Trump of, they are guilty of,” he said. “If Trump doesn’t win, this will be the last real election in America. And… if the big government, Kamala puppet machine wins, they will legalize the illegals in the swing states. There will be no swing states. Every election going forward will be a guaranteed Democrat win.”

“This is,” he promised solemnly, a few moments later, “the last chance.”

With all of these very rich men, of course, there is a basic unanswerable question: how much of these ideas they actually believe, and how much they repeat simply because they think it will help Donald Trump, or at least cloud a potential Harris win.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter: they’ve thrown the unimaginable weight of their money, power, and influence behind these lies. Their impulse towards suspicion and paranoia—and their willingness to make extreme claims of fraud—won’t go away after Election Day. And the next target is anyone’s guess.