Would you vote for an anti-trans, anti-vax, AIDS denialist just because he was named Kennedy?

The one thing that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has going for him as a presidential candidate is his name. While most candidates struggle to make themselves known to voters, Kennedy has a built-in advantage. They already know him from his family’s golden legacy.

But any curiosity about Kennedy himself comes to a quick end once you know anything about the actual candidate. Instead of the representative of liberal values that his name implies, Kennedy is a science-denying, conspiracy-mongering oddball who hangs around with some of the worst characters on the right and whose candidacy is promoted by some of the most reprehensible figures from the MAGA world.

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Kennedy is gaining outsized attention as a supposedly credible challenger to President Joe Biden. In part, that’s because of the mainstream media’s desperation for a horse race and its addiction to the allure of the Kennedy name. Kennedy is also getting a boost from wealthy Silicon Valley types like former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “He has no fear in exploring topics that are a little bit controversial and in the future,” Dorsey declared.

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If by a little controversial, he means groundless and harmful, that’s correct. If by “in the future,” he means “floating around since the 1980s,” that’s also true.

Kennedy has become the avatar of the most destructive anti-health beliefs circulating today. He’s widely known for his stand against vaccines of all kinds, despite their long history of protecting humanity from death. It began in 2005, when he advocated the false belief that vaccines caused autism. That link has been disproven – the study that purported to show a connection was revealed to be a fraud – and reached a crescendo during the COVID pandemic.

That’s when Kennedy found himself on the same side as the far right, who objected to COVID restrictions. He joined cause with them, going far as to say that least under the Nazis, “You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” (He apologized for that remark.)

But that’s not the only reason why the right wing loves Kennedy so much. When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues, he echoes some of the rhetoric that extremists like Alex Jones do.

For example, last month Kennedy said that chemicals in the water are turning kids trans. His proof? It’s happening to frogs.

“There’s atrazine throughout our water supply,” Kennedy claimed. “If you, in a lab, put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there. And 10 percent of the frogs, the male frogs, will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs. If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”

If this particular rant sounds familiar, it’s because Alex Jones has used it as well. No one has ever suggested that Jones, who claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, was a credible presidential candidate.

Kennedy has also said he opposes trans athletes participating in sports. “I am against people participating in women’s sports who are biologically male,” Kennedy said on CNN last April.

Kennedy’s disdain for the health of LGBTQ+ people extends to HIV as well. In his worldview, AIDS is actually caused by poppers. In a nice blame-the-victim touch that would have made the Reagan administration proud, he also sounds as if he believes gay men were at fault for their own deaths.

“A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, which are known to cause Kaposi sarcoma in rats,” Kennedy said. “And they were people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.”

Kennedy believes that AZT, one of the earliest treatments for AIDS, killed more people than the disease itself would have if left untreated. (It didn’t.) He has blamed Anthony Fauci for deliberately sabotaging treatments that were cheaper and more effective and even accused Fauci of essentially murdering 80 Black children in a clinical trial and burying them in a mass grave. Kennedy recently endorsed a book that argues that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Kennedy’s fringe (to be polite) beliefs will no doubt come out as the campaign wears on. But it’s in the interest of the far right to promote him as a legitimate alternative to Biden during the primary. The more votes Kennedy might siphon from Biden, the weaker Biden will appear, softening him up for the general election.

That’s the apparent reason why such Trump-world figures as Steve Bannon and Roger Stone are singing the praises of Kennedy. Bannon actually encouraged Kennedy to run for president as, in the words of CBS reporter Bob Costa “a useful chaos agent.” Stone has said that a Trump-Kennedy ticket would be a “dream.” Michael Flynn and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk have also expressed their admiration.

The right is certainly doing its best to create a race between Biden and Kennedy. “With RFK Jr. … surging in the Democratic primary, is Biden in trouble?” Sean Hannity asked on one recent show. As it turns out, Kennedy is rising in the polls – among Republicans. Democrats have had an increasingly unfavorable opinion of him as they learn more about him.

That’s a problem for someone who is running as a Democrat. The other problem Kennedy has is that his family isn’t lining up to support him either. Three years ago, two of his siblings and a niece wrote an op-ed in which they said they loved him but called his anti-vax stance “tragically wrong” and “an outlier in the Kennedy family.”

Meanwhile, the foundation named after his father, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, is carrying on exactly the kind of mission that Junior is not. It has decried last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing selective discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, criticized the attack on books, and, most telling of all, advocated for the rights of trans people.

The president of the group is Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s sister.