When Rhetoric Replaces Responsibility

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before thousands in Nashville and offered a story that few would contest on its surface. He spoke of heroin addiction, of pain, of spiritual rebirth. He evoked God, connection, family, community, and the aching vacuum inside that drives so many to fill their emptiness with drugs. And as he delivered these words at a summit dedicated to the growing crisis of addiction in America, he cast himself as both survivor and seer, someone who had emerged from darkness and now sought to light the path for others.

But there is something fundamentally off-kilter about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. occupying a pulpit on public health. There is a kind of betrayal in watching a man who has repeatedly undermined science, stoked mistrust in medicine, and pushed debunked theories about vaccines now attempt to don the mantle of moral leadership. His performance in Nashville wasn’t just a contradiction—it was an insult to the communities, families, and public servants still reeling from the very disinformation he has spread.

Kennedy may have survived addiction, but he has not reckoned with the damage he continues to inflict. For all his rage at the pharmaceutical industry, what has he done? He did not file the lawsuits that held opioid manufacturers accountable. That was Kamala Harris, then Attorney General of California, who played a leading role in prosecuting those responsible for unleashing a flood of prescription narcotics. Gavin Newsom helped secure a massive settlement to fund treatment and education programs across the state. Meanwhile, Kennedy, with all his fury and moral outrage, has little to show in terms of policy, law, or recovery infrastructure. His war on Big Pharma exists almost entirely in the realm of rhetoric—profitable, performative, and disconnected from the levers of change.

He has built his brand around speaking truth to power, yet rarely engages with power in a way that produces outcomes. Instead, he operates in a theatre of grievance, elevating personal conviction over collective responsibility. He presents himself as the maverick outsider, a lone wolf howling against the machine. But this aesthetic masks a troubling truth: Kennedy has made a career out of sowing distrust in public health, even as he now claims to speak for it.

His views on vaccines are the most glaring example. For decades, Kennedy has pushed the idea that vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary. He has used his family name to amplify fringe studies and long-debunked claims, ignoring the mountains of evidence affirming vaccine safety and efficacy. And while he couches his views in the language of freedom and parental choice, the outcomes speak for themselves. Measles, mumps, and whooping cough—diseases once nearly eradicated—have resurged in communities where vaccine skepticism, often fueled by voices like Kennedy's, has taken hold. It is not simply a matter of misinformation; it is a public health crisis. And it is a crisis Kennedy helped manufacture.

The autism claim is particularly egregious. It is one of the most hurtful and persistent myths to plague families and public discourse alike. Kennedy’s insistence on linking vaccines to autism—even as every credible health organization around the world has debunked this connection—has caused real harm. It has stigmatized autistic individuals, suggested their condition is a tragedy to be prevented rather than a form of human diversity to be understood, and fueled a culture of fear among parents. Most damning of all is his continued defense—explicit or implied—of the fraudulent Wakefield study, long since retracted and universally discredited. To continue invoking this study, or to ignore its proven fabrication while drawing from its conclusions, is not just an oversight. It is intellectual negligence. It is ethically bankrupt. It betrays the very communities Kennedy claims to care about.

And to do all of this while profiting financially off the message only compounds the moral failure. Kennedy has made a market out of mistrust. The fear and confusion he amplifies are not unfortunate byproducts—they are currency. Each speaking engagement, each book sold, each dollar raised by Children’s Health Defense furthers the damage. The organization Kennedy chairs has become the principal vehicle for amplifying his anti-vaccine platform. Founded under the pretense of protecting children's health, the group has instead become a major purveyor of vaccine misinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience. It has produced slickly packaged videos, launched high-profile lawsuits designed more for media attention than legal success, and seeded doubt about everything from measles vaccines to COVID-19 mitigation strategies. In 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate named it one of the "Disinformation Dozen"—a handful of individuals and groups responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content online. The organization's influence is outsized, its funding robust, and its messaging relentless. One of its most misleading tools is the use of a website that presents itself with the authority of an official adverse event tracking system, but which distorts data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). CHD has used these cherry-picked and unverified reports to suggest a causal link between vaccines and death or disability—without any scientific process or statistical context. This misrepresentation contributes to public fear while masquerading as legitimate analysis. All of it flows back to Kennedy, who uses the organization as both a platform and shield, allowing him to speak with the authority of an activist while remaining insulated from direct accountability. The image he sells—the enlightened rebel, the truth-teller cast out by corrupt elites—is good for business, even as it corrodes the public square.

The damage extends beyond vaccines. As Health Secretary, Kennedy now presides over an agency that has slashed funding to programs addressing climate-related health threats, such as heat-related illness and respiratory conditions linked to pollution. This comes despite his legacy as an environmental lawyer and advocate. Once celebrated for his work defending waterways and prosecuting polluters, Kennedy has aligned himself with an administration that dismantles environmental safeguards and opposes clean energy infrastructure, including offshore wind projects. The contradiction is not just philosophical—it is tangible, with real consequences for vulnerable populations.

Miners suffering from black lung disease are now seeing essential protections rolled back, as Kennedy's agency executes layoffs and restructures that gut occupational safety programs. These are not abstract policy shifts; they are decisions that affect who lives, who breathes, and who gets care. And yet Kennedy offers no reckoning, no explanation for why the environmentalist has become the executioner of environmental health programs. He speaks in Nashville of God and mercy, but acts in Washington with the cold calculus of political allegiance.

What Kennedy offers is not a solution, but a parable. He gives us redemption without restitution, insight without impact. He presents recovery as a personal transformation rather than a communal obligation. His empathy for the addict is performative—it plays well on stage but withers under scrutiny. It does not propose policy, build systems, or offer tangible pathways forward. Real options, strategies, and solutions do exist—they are being tested, funded, and implemented in communities across the country by those who understand the structural nature of addiction. But Kennedy ignores these, pokes at the wound instead, extracting emotional and political currency. He deepens the injury and calls it awareness, profits off despair while claiming moral clarity, and manipulates trauma as if the revenue it generates were redemption enough. Instead, he substitutes platitudes for solutions and pretends real options do not exist. He reduces addiction to a metaphor rather than treating it as a crisis that demands action. He asks us to see addiction as a spiritual wound—and it is—but he refuses to acknowledge how spiritual wounds are deepened when trust is broken by those in power—especially when men like Kennedy preach the theoretical as if it were substance, offering illusion in place of action. He leverages the aesthetics of insight while sidestepping the labor of accountability. By treating theory as solution and commentary as cure, he obscures the reality that solving addiction requires resources, policies, and sustained effort. What he offers is a ritual of empathy detached from reform, one that soothes without healing and preaches without building.

Worse, much of what he speaks of are not even direct experiences, but stories inherited, studied, or strategically absorbed. He casts himself as a vessel for collective suffering, but stands emotionally and materially indifferent to it. He offers platitudes where substance is needed, and casts conspiracies as coping mechanisms for the gaps in his narrative. There are solutions—real, urgent, actionable solutions—to the crises he identifies. But Kennedy prefers derailment to delivery. He preaches from a platform of entitlement, sabotaging progress with the ease of a man who has never had to bear the costs of his own failures, cushioned by the privileges of a revered family name. The Kennedy legacy gives him gravity he hasn’t earned, a spotlight he has exploited, and a lineage that shields him from the consequences that would bury a lesser-known provocateur.

His refusal to own the full scope of his influence is what makes him an unreliable narrator on addiction. His stubborn resistance to acknowledging the falsehoods and alliances of his past is rooted not in conviction but in protecting a lucrative influencer business built on peddling misinformation. To admit fault would be to open the door to liability—not just moral, but financial. And so he clings to discredited narratives, repackaging them as insight, shielding himself behind a platform that thrives on fear, and ignoring the human cost that trails behind him. He knows the language of suffering. He knows how to frame pain as a crucible of wisdom. But wisdom demands humility, and Kennedy has yet to demonstrate it. He speaks of contracts broken during his years of using heroin—promises made to himself and others that he could not keep. But what about the contracts broken since his recovery? What about the social contracts shattered by his role in fomenting distrust, his complicity in the return of diseases once vanquished, his silence as vital public health systems are dismantled?

Kennedy says that young people are lost, that they are searching for meaning and finding only despair. He is right. But he cannot see that he has played a role in this very erosion of meaning. He speaks of the public square as though it were some sacred commons yet untouched, ready to be restored with the right rituals and rhetoric. But the public is already there—in the square, in the streets, in the homes, saturated in despair, addiction, and economic alienation. They do not need to be summoned; they need to be heard. The very people he preaches to are the ones who have long borne the consequences of policies he ignores and narratives he distorts. When Kennedy talks about solutions, it is often with the removed detachment of someone floating above the wreckage, mistaking commentary for commitment.

When leaders reject science, mock institutions, and trade evidence for ideology, they leave behind a vacuum. And nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. That emptiness fills with doubt, with resentment, with easy answers and hard consequences.

If Kennedy wants to be a force for healing, let him begin not with speeches, but with apologies. Let him take responsibility for the harm his words and actions have done. Let him meet with the families of children who died of measles because they weren’t vaccinated. Let him sit with coal miners whose protections have been stripped under his watch. Let him talk not about God in the abstract, but about justice in the concrete.

Recovery is not just about telling your story. It is about repairing what was broken. It is about acknowledging your role, however uncomfortable, in the stories of others. Kennedy tells us that God speaks to him through those who curse at him in traffic. That may be true. But it’s time he listened to those who have been harmed by his crusades—not just to hear God, but to hear the people.

Until he does, his version of recovery will remain incomplete. It will be therapy without accountability, ministry without repentance, performance without consequence. And in the meantime, others—quietly, without fanfare—will continue the work of real healing, real science, and real reform. Not because it is profitable. But because it is necessary.

In the end, Kennedy’s problem is not that he believes in something. It’s that he refuses to accept when he’s been wrong. And in public health, that refusal doesn’t just make you unreliable. It makes you dangerous.