RFK Jr. Claims Neither His Father Nor Uncle ‘Would Recognize the Democratic Party’ As Fact Checker Calls Convention Speech ‘Most Falsehood Filled’

CNN fact checker Daniel Dale took to X to eviscerate Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s GOP Convention speech, pointing out almost half a dozen falsehoods before saying he didn’t have time to check the rest.

RFK Jr. spoke at length during Thursday’s convention, making a number of claims and dourly proclaiming his famed uncle and father — President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — would not recognize today’s Democratic party.

“So I’m,  I’m 72 years old and for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention,” he said in his opening remarks.

“The irony of my presence here is inescapable. I attended my first Democratic Convention in 1960 when I was six-years-old and I attended most of the conventions, Democratic conventions after that and I spoke as a keynote speaker in many of them,” he said.

At one point he insisted, “The Democratic Party lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today.”

Dale wasted no time slamming the factual content of RFK Jr.’s remarks:

In one speech tonight…

RFK Jr. falsely claimed Democrats canceled their 2024 convention and didn’t let delegates vote on the nominee.

There was a convention. Delegates voted for Harris.

RFK Jr. falsely claimed Democrats closed every single church in the US for a year during the pandemic. Some Dem-run states did not forbid religious gatherings, while some GOP-run states did at least briefly.

RFK Jr. falsely claimed Trump ended nine wars. It’s not even true that Trump ended the eight he cites himself.

RFK Jr. baselessly claimed Democrats lost 360,000 kids. Not what happened.

RFK Jr. claimed the Trump administration has reversed a 30-year decline in longevity. Not clear what stat he’s citing, but US life expectancy rose for years, dropped briefly during the pandemic, then started to rebound in 2022 under Biden before hitting a new record high in 2024 under Biden.

And that’s just a smattering of the checkable claims, many of which I don’t have time to check.

The controversial two-day convention saw President Donald Trump — whom RFK Jr. described in his remarks as “a self effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues and in molecular detail” — asking the audience to raise their right hands and pledge to go vote in the midterms.

Dale annointed RFK Jr.’s turn at the mic as the “most falsehood-filled” speech of the day at the convention.

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