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Abstract
Excluded from the CNN presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on June 27, impartial candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. livestreamed a parallel debate on social media, answering the identical questions put to the most important social gathering candidates.
In our reality examine of the CNN debate, we described a “relentless barrage of false and deceptive statements” from the 2 candidates, and in Kennedy’s addition — what he referred to as the “actual debate” — he added just a few of his personal distortions and falsehoods.
- Kennedy made just a few unsupported and inaccurate claims about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives for the invasion.
- He falsely claimed that Trump “spent more cash in workplace than each president in the US historical past mixed.” Federal outlays throughout Trump’s presidency didn’t come shut the $79 trillion the federal government spent earlier than he took workplace.
- Kennedy incorrectly claimed Trump and Biden “shut down each enterprise in our nation” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, falsely including that the companies have been compelled to shut for “no scientific motive.”
- He additionally blamed Trump and Biden’s pandemic insurance policies for transferring wealth to billionaires, however misleadingly used international statistics.
- Kennedy misleadingly claimed that “Russians are in Cuba firing missiles” as a warning to the U.S. about its resolve to win the warfare with Ukraine. Russian warships on the best way to an annual journey to Cuba performed simulated missile drills within the Atlantic however didn’t fireplace stay missiles from Cuba.
- Kennedy proposed taxing marijuana to fund free “rehabilitation farms” to deal with “melancholy … alcoholism, drug dependancy to unlawful medicine, but additionally dependancy to SSRI’s, to Benzos, Adderall.” Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI, should not thought of to be addictive.
Kennedy’s rival “debate” was livestreamed June 27 on X, previously referred to as Twitter.
Evaluation
Kennedy on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Kennedy made just a few unsupported and inaccurate claims about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives for the invasion.
Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who’s now a nonresident senior fellow on the Brookings Establishment, stated Kennedy’s remarks have been “stuffed with inaccuracies.”
Kennedy, son of the late U.S. Lawyer Common Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, deceptive claimed that “the one factor Putin wished was to maintain NATO out of the Ukraine,” falsely including that Putin “didn’t even wish to take Ukraine.”
He additionally blamed Biden for extending the warfare when Putin was prepared to simply accept a deal to finish it, and he incorrectly stated that Putin “first invaded” Ukraine “with solely 40,000 troops.”
Putin illegally annexed Crimea, then a part of Ukraine, in March 2014, and has been attempting for years to forestall Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO. However he has signaled that his targets transcend that.
In an article final month for the Council on International Relations, Russian knowledgeable and council fellow Thomas E. Graham writes that Putin’s “targets fall into three baskets: weakening or disrupting Ukraine’s ties with the North Atlantic Treaty Group (NATO), stymieing Ukrainian nationalism, and increasing territorial beneficial properties.”
Peter Dickinson, editor of the UkraineAlert weblog on the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Middle, wrote that Putin’s aim is to create a “new Russian Empire.”
“Putin has launched the most important European battle since WWII for the easy motive that he needs to beat Ukraine,” Dickinson writes. “Impressed by the czars of outdated, Putin goals to crush his neighbor and incorporate it into a brand new Russian Empire.”
In his article, Dickinson cites Putin’s remarks on the 350th anniversary of Russian Czar Peter the Nice on June 9, 2022, when Putin spoke about eager to “return” Russian territory, as Reuters wrote.
Reuters, June 9, 2022: “Peter the Nice waged the Nice Northern Struggle for 21 years. It might appear that he was at warfare with Sweden, he took one thing from them. He didn’t take something from them, he returned (what was Russia’s),” Putin stated after a visiting an exhibition devoted to the tsar.
In televised feedback on day 106 of his warfare in Ukraine, he in contrast Peter’s marketing campaign with the duty dealing with Russia at present.
“Apparently, it additionally fell to us to return (what’s Russia’s) and strengthen (the nation). And if we proceed from the truth that these primary values kind the idea of our existence, we will definitely reach fixing the duties that we face.”
In response, a senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed what he referred to as any try to legalise the theft of land.
Kennedy, who claimed that Putin “has been asking to settle this warfare from the start,” blamed Biden for extending the warfare “to weaken Russia.”
“Putin was withdrawing his troops, leaving Donbas and Luhansk,” Kennedy stated, referring to japanese Ukraine. “And what occurred? President Joe Biden despatched [then-UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson over to Kyiv and compelled Zelenskyy to tear up that settlement as a result of that they had one other agenda, which is to weaken Russia.”
However Pifer, the Brookings Establishment senior fellow, referred to as Kennedy’s declare “nonsense.”
“In March 2022, the Russians, having didn’t take Kyiv, withdrew their forces from northern Ukraine and introduced that they’d shift the main target of their assault to Donbas (which is Luhansk and Donetsk mixed),” Pifer stated. “At that time, the Ukrainians have been liberating cities resembling Bucha and noticed the various atrocities (abstract executions, torture chambers, kids deported to Russia) and their angle hardened on negotiations.”
As for its troop dimension at the beginning of the Ukraine warfare, Russia constructed its forces on the Ukraine border all through 2021, as we wrote in a timeline of events main as much as the warfare. In early December 2021 — greater than two months earlier than the warfare began — U.S. intelligence estimated that Russia had about 70,000 troops alongside the Ukrainian border, according to the Washington Submit.
On Feb. 22, 2022, Russia first entered Ukraine’s Donbas area in what Russian officers described as a peace-keeping mission. The subsequent day, the Pentagon said Russia had between 160,000 and 190,000 troops on the Ukraine border.
The complete scale invasion occurred on Feb. 24, 2020, and inside 4 days the Pentagon estimated that nearly 75% of Putin’s military entered Ukraine — which, on the low finish, could be 120,000 of the 160,000 troops that have been amassed on the Ukraine border in preparation for warfare. That’s thrice bigger than Kennedy’s declare of solely 40,000 Russian troopers.
Pifer stated it was even greater than that.
“No critical analyst has advised the Russian invasion drive numbered solely 40,000 troops,” Pifer stated. “The commonly accepted quantity is nearer to 200,000.”
Trump’s Spending
Kennedy made a false declare about Trump whereas criticizing the quantity of federal spending throughout his administration.
“President Trump got here into workplace promising to steadiness the price range,” Kennedy stated. “As an alternative, he spent more cash in workplace than each president in the US historical past mixed. George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years of historical past.”
Kennedy’s spending comparability is fallacious.
From fiscal yr 2017 to fiscal yr 2020, which incorporates all however three months of Trump’s four-year time period, federal outlays totaled about $19 trillion, according to data from the Workplace of Administration and Funds. There was an extra $6.8 trillion spent in fiscal 2021, when Trump was president for roughly three and a half months and signed some spending payments.
However that doesn’t come near the mixed whole of about $79 trillion spent throughout the administrations of all different presidents earlier than Trump took workplace.
If Kennedy meant to seek advice from debt, contemplating that he later talked about the debt going up by greater than $6 trillion underneath President Joe Biden, his declare would nonetheless be inaccurate.
Below Trump, the entire nationwide debt increased by about $7.8 trillion and there was a $7.2 trillion enhance within the debt held by the general public, which excludes cash the federal government owes to itself. As we’ve written, Trump alone isn’t answerable for all that debt, for the reason that debt added throughout a president’s time period contains the fiscal influence of actions that predate their administration. Congress additionally performs a task.
Nevertheless, when Trump was inaugurated in January 2021, the publicly held debt already was roughly $14.4 trillion and the entire nationwide debt was over $19.9 trillion. So, the quantity added to the debt throughout his administration was nonetheless lower than the cumulative debt of all of the presidents who preceded him.
COVID-19
Kennedy confused and exaggerated a number of points of the COVID-19 response and the ensuing financial results.
“These two presidents shut down each enterprise in our nation, 3.3 million companies with no due course of, no simply compensation,” he stated. “There was no scientific motive to do that.”
As we’ve defined before, when Kennedy blamed Biden for enterprise shutdowns, the pandemic closures occurred on Trump’s watch, since that was when the pandemic started. However Trump didn’t have the authority to close down companies. The federal authorities issued tips; many state and native jurisdictions then carried out short-term non-essential enterprise closures.
Not “each” enterprise closed, in fact. Important companies have been allowed to remain open. Kennedy’s determine of three.3 million possible comes from an August 2020 study from a College of California, Santa Cruz economist, and displays the variety of working small companies misplaced between February and April of 2020. By June 2020, there was a “partial rebound,” in response to the research, with a internet decline of 1.2 million small companies since February.
It’s price noting that the federal government did present some financial assistance to companies affected by the pandemic.
Kennedy additionally misleadingly claimed that there was no scientific rationale for the enterprise closures — a declare he repeated when discussing restrictions on church gatherings. On the time, scientists knew a brand new respiratory virus — with no vaccine or therapies out there — was simply spreading between folks. One of many few instruments out there was to restrict folks’s publicity to others, which included closing non-essential companies and recommending towards massive gatherings, together with non secular providers. A number of studies have since discovered protecting results of such mitigation measures, though others haven’t.
Kennedy repeated two of his favourite claims concerning the pandemic enriching the rich. Talking of each Trump and Biden, he stated, “They shifted $4.3 trillion upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires … They created a billionaire a day, in 500 days.”
As we’ve defined before, the five hundred new billionaires determine possible comes from a Forbes article, which reported 493 newcomers to the outlet’s billionaire checklist for 2021. However the tally is international, with solely 98 within the U.S. Equally, whereas it’s unclear the place Kennedy sourced his roughly $4 trillion determine, he could also be citing a 2022 Oxfam analysis, which can also be international and never particular to the U.S. or its insurance policies.
Russians Not ‘in Cuba Firing Missiles’
Kennedy misleadingly claimed that “Russians are in Cuba firing missiles as a result of they’ve warned us: ‘We aren’t going to … lose the warfare in Ukraine.’” Russian warships on the best way to an annual journey to Cuba performed simulated missile drills within the Atlantic and didn’t fireplace stay missiles from Cuba, which lies simply a number of hundred miles from the Florida coast.
Kennedy’s declare mirrors a preferred social media meme that we debunked on June 14. The social media posts shared clips of a years-old video of missiles launched from a Russian ship and a submarine surfacing, to falsely declare the Russian ships just lately fired stay missiles “off the coast of Florida” to indicate off their firepower to the U.S.
A spokesperson for the Division of Protection, which was intently monitoring the actions of the ships, informed us by way of electronic mail that claims {that a} Russian ship fired missiles close to the Florida coast whereas en path to Cuba, is “not true.”
U.S. officers told the New York Times that the Russian warships posed no risk and weren’t carrying nuclear weapons. The Division of Protection has been monitoring the motion of the ships by way of the Atlantic Ocean, a spokesperson informed the Instances. The Russian Ministry of Protection stated the warships practiced finding targets and used precision missiles to simulate destroying these targets at distances of greater than 350 miles, in response to the Instances.
In accordance with Al Jazeera, “The drills, by the submarine Kazan and the warship Admiral Gorshkov, concerned firing high-precision missiles at mock enemy targets from a distance of greater than 600km (370 miles), it stated in a press release on Tuesday. The Admiral Gorshkov additionally performed coaching in latest days to repel an air assault, the ministry stated.”
Al Jazeera cited an nameless U.S. official that the Russian workouts have been “about Russia exhibiting that it’s nonetheless able to some degree of world energy projection.”
SSRI Antidepressants
When speaking concerning the opioid disaster, Kennedy stated each Biden and Trump “missed the purpose.” The issue isn’t the border, he stated, however “one thing a lot bigger than that — it’s a technology that’s alienated, that’s dispossessed, that’s depressed, that’s suicidal, that’s disconnected from neighborhood, and that’s the reason they’re turning to medicine.”
His proposed resolution is to tax marijuana and with these funds — “8.5 billion {dollars} in income,” he stated, citing this report — construct “rehabilitation farms” the place folks might be handled free of charge from melancholy, drug and alcohol dependancy, “but additionally dependancy to SSRI’s, to Benzos, Adderall,” he stated, referring to benzodiazepines, a medicine that decelerate the nervous system.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are a quite common kind of antidepressant. Individuals who cease taking them abruptly would possibly expertise signs much like these of withdrawal, resembling nausea, dizziness and lethargy, that are described as “discontinuation syndrome.” However SSRIs should not thought of to be addictive.
SSRI antidepressants are considered safe and side effects are often short-term or gentle. There are considerations that kids and adolescents taking SSRI antidepressants might have an elevated danger for suicidal conduct, however research are not conclusive and a few have found that the lower of antidepressant use have in flip elevated suicidal makes an attempt. Generally, the benefits of therapy outweigh the dangers of not treating melancholy, together with suicide.
Kennedy has repeatedly blamed these antidepressants for the rise in class shootings.
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