The Dictatorship
RFK Jr. is asking Americans to give the government something he warned against for years
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants Americans to turn over their health data to tech companies and the government. It’s the very thing — prior to his takeover of the nation’s public health — that he’d been warning his followers to fear.
“It’s connecting all the things in your life, anything that you call smart, that could be your Apple Watch, it could be your telephone, your GPS on your telephone, the GPS on your car, your garage door opener,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on his podcast in 2020produced by his then-employer, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. “They have so much data now that they have access to … They’re going to take billions of terabytes of data and then they’re gonna do analytics on them and monetize them and sell them back to companies that want to turn you into a permanent consumer.”
Kennedy spent years warning his followers that wearable devices enabled tyranny.
Kennedy spent years warning his followers that wearable devices and the tech that they rely on were part of a sinister plan to surveil and control Americans — that they enabled tyranny, caused cancer and turned users into “permanent consumers” in a 5G-powered system of behavioral control orchestrated by Big Tech. Citing companies Apple, Google and Facebook, Kennedy cautioned on a 2023 podcast“Those are the companies that are going to be the mechanisms for controlling our conduct, our behavior and exploiting our marketing behavior.” He was talking not just about wearables, but also all smart devices, generally known as “the Internet of Things.”
“What are you actually going to get out of it?” Kennedy asked, referencing 5G broadband technology that would connect the devices. “How is that actually going to benefit human beings? As it turns out, it has nothing to do with making our lives better. It has everything to do with creating an infrastructure for artificial intelligence, which is going to rob us of our jobs, and for surveillance and for data harvesting by big companies.”
But as health secretary, Kennedy is now trumpeting the kind of data gathering and sharing program that he and his followers would have likely opposed and spun into conspiracy catnip: a new government partnership with tech companies that will collect and track the health data and medical records of Americans.
“For decades, bureaucrats and entrenched interests buried health data and blocked patients from taking control of their health,” Kennedy said at the White House on Wednesday, in a stark departure from his past comments. “That ends today. We’re tearing down digital walls, returning power to patients and rebuilding a health system that serves the people. This is how we begin to Make America Healthy Again.”
The new initiative was announced at a ”Make Health Tech Great Again” event hosted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Representatives pledging to support the program included Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google and OpenAI. The goal of the program seems to be making it easier for Americans to access their own medical records and share their data with services, including health care providers, health devices and wellness trackers.
This isn’t the first time Kennedy has backed away from or watered down conspiracy theories and extreme statements he made building the anti-vaccine and MAHA movements. During his failed presidential run and his campaign for HHS secretary, Kennedy morphed from staunch anti-vaxxer to a moderate who sought only “safe vaccines.” That he has been so far successful in his reinventions shows how conspiracy theorists and extremists can rebrand themselves once in positions of power.
They have so much data now that they have access to … They’re going to take billions of terabytes of data and then they’re gonna do analytics on them and monetize them and sell them back to companies that want to turn you into a permanent consumer.
rfk jr. on his podcast in 2020
Digital privacy watchdogs, civil rights advocates and progressive groups have voiced concern that patients’ personal health data is at risk of being monetized or misused under such a program. Conservative conspiracy theorists, including Laura Loomerhave suggested without evidence that Kennedy is looking to personally cash in on a data grab. And the extreme wing of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, the anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists who make up his most ardent supporters, have also balked at his turn toward trackers and data sharing.
Children’s Health Defense came out against its founder and former chairman’s position on wearables in Junecalling it “not a vision we share.”
“Wearables are spy devices,” Mike Adams, a Kennedy ally known to his audience as “the Health Ranger,” posted on X in June. “RFK Jr. claims they “empower consumers,” but they actually upload their data to centralized corporations, which gives them power over you.”
Kennedy began flirting with health trackers soon after taking office. In Mayhe held a roundtable with wellness influencers, device makers and app developers. In JuneKennedy told lawmakers that he wanted all Americans wearing a health tracker within four years and announced “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history,” to make it happen.
Under Kennedy, the NIH has reportedly been using private medical data from federal and commercial databases to study autism. And President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, co-founded a company that sells a subscription app linked to a wearable sensor that provides real-time data on how food and lifestyle impact blood sugar.
Kennedy and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kennedy has previously argued falsely that Wi-Fi and technologies like 5G that power health trackers cause cancer and introduce toxins into the brain.
“Wi-Fi radiation does all kinds of adverse things, including causing cancer,” Kennedy said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2023. “Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier, so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.” When pushed by Rogan on how Wi-Fi did that, Kennedy conceded, “Now you’re going beyond my expertise.”
Kennedy has previously argued falsely that Wi-Fi and technologies like 5G that power health trackers cause cancer and introduce toxins into the brain.
“They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior,” Kennedy claimed in a speech at an anti-vaccine protest on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 2022, in which he referenced Bill Gates and said satellites “will be able to look at every square inch of the planet 24 hours a day. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.”
He warned that tech companies would collect biometric data used to manipulate consumer behavior and claimed 5G would enable a global surveillance regime.
On the 2023 podcastDark Journalist, Kennedy said, “You know, Siri is sitting there listening to your conversations all day. And that is really good information. It knows when you cough. It knows when you change your diaper — your baby’s diaper. It can hear the baby crying and know whether you need more diapers or whatever. So that’s very valuable information for somebody to know. Right now under the current internet, they have no way of harvesting and exploiting all that. Now they’re going to know exactly where you’ve been 24 hours a day, they’re going to follow you on your GPS, on your Apple Watch, they’re going to know what your heartbeat is, what your heart rate is, what, whether you’ve been to the beach, where you went to the store, what you bought at the store.”
What Kennedy really believes, a question often posed to me as a reporter who has covered him for the better part of a decade, I don’t know. Either Kenendy believes what he said before, that smart devices and data sharing would usher in a totalitarian state and is abandoning those beliefs to remain in a position of power — or he never believed it. A third possibility exists: That once in charge of the nation’s health, Kennedy was swayed — by experts or technologists or the White House to abandon the conspiracy theories he had spun, about this subject at least.
I can tell you this: Representatives for several of the tech companies that Kennedy once villainized as perpetrators of data theft and a looming surveillance state were at Wednesday’s White House event. Now, with Kennedy in power, they are partners.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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