Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Falls for Online Misinformation “All the Time”

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.

In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”

“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)  

RFK Jr. said he regularly “gets manipulated by AI.”

While Carroll has no particular public profile on AI, his persona tracks with the campaign’s focus on tech figures and influencers as it courts a young, male, and extremely online audience. When opening the panel on the “perils and promise of AI,” Carroll introduced himself as “just a regular guy who likes to ask questions.” Indeed, the conspiracy-minded podcaster and videomaker didn’t say much aside from asking questions of the panelists: Kennedy, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, Gmail-creator Paul Buchheit, and Creon Levit, a former NASA scientist who has appeared on the heterodox podcast circuit.

The discussion broke little ground. The group agreed that AI represented an exciting and complex new frontier. Kennedy, despite having admitted his own personal AI-enabled disinformation crisis, downplayed concerns that AI technology would be broadly used to misinform.

Yet Shanahan speculated about how AI could be used for “mind control” and “manipulate us in very powerful ways,” and Kennedy worried that AI could, in the end, serve “the ultimate ambition of every totalitarian regime through all of humankind.”

Unsurprisingly, Kennedy mused about the technology’s potential for his core issue, saying that he “looks forward to using AI to do real studies on vaccines,” speculating that the algorithms, given access to databases “that CDC has kept closed” would produce valuable insights. In a similar bit of techy-wishcasting, Shanahan said she had “run some models” about Kennedy’s candidacy, which she said demonstrated that if their campaign “didn’t have as much interference as we’ve had, we would win this election.”

Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor Carroll responded to requests for comment about why Carroll was chosen to helm the panel or his prolific and bigoted internet history. As the publication Jewish Insider pointed out on Wednesday, just a few weeks ago he proclaimed on X that the US is “controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism.’”

Carroll has also tweeted that popular understanding of the Holocaust is characterized by “lots of bad numbers and misreporting,” and suggested in March that there’s something suspicious about the three marriages Shanahan has shared with Jewish men, while promising he would dig into the matter. (It’s not clear he did, and, even before Wednesday’s panel, Shanahan had since appeared on his podcast.)

Carroll’s videos share his musings about the CIA, COINTELPRO, and the complex webs between various corporations that control the world. In recent weeks, he’s speculated that there may have been a second shooter involved in Trump’s assassination attempt.

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, more fringe media figures have begun making antisemitic statements while claiming they are objecting specifically to Zionism. While Carroll sometimes claims to draw a distinction between “Zionists” and other, blameless Jews—he once wrote he believes “Jewish people are wonderful”—he has traded in overt conspiracies about them. In April, Carroll shared a video that he described as featuring an escapee from a “Satanic ritual abuse compound” where “they were breeding Jewish bloodlines and he was selected for his more than 99% pure Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and apparent decendancy [sic] directly from King Solomon.”  

In contrast to Carroll’s many concerns about Jewish cabals and Zionist control, Kennedy has largely avoided discussing Gaza or Israel since March. That’s when, in an interview with Reuters, he was asked about its assault following Hamas’ October 7 massacre and declared himself to be a staunch supporter of Israel, calling it a “moral nation.” Kennedy has since reiterated that he does not support a ceasefire.