Last Friday, a 30-year-old white guy shot up the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. He fired over 180 bullets into the building and killed a police officer. Unsurprisingly, the shooter is a vaccine conspiracist who was trying to make a violently convoluted point about Covid vaccines. These deadly conspiracies have proliferated under the “management” of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, a man with a dead brain worm and a long history of pseudoscience promotion. Kennedy has crippled America’s vaccine production and pandemic readiness, and it often seems like he wants Americans to die of measles and rubella. Kennedy is married to Cheryl Hines, his third wife. Well, Cheryl has written a memoir called Unscripted. She gave her first promotional interview to the Wall Street Journal, and this piece is bonkers from start to finish. Some highlights:
Her current political views: Once a registered Democrat, she now calls herself an independent. She avoids expressing her political opinions but still lives in Trump World, eating dinner in the East Room of the White House, befriending the spouses of other cabinet officials, developing “a nice friendship” with the president.
She doesn’t get why people are mad at her: “At first, you’re thinking, Wow. Why are they so angry or disappointed? Some people can’t even, I don’t know, they can’t even talk about it. It’s really rather strange, actually.”
Laurie David said Cheryl is “setting women back decades.” Hines says she found the post “odd,” adding, “I don’t really have a relationship with her, so that was also even more surprising that she had so many feelings about me sitting behind my husband, supporting him.”
On the Olivia Nuzzi situation: Hines and Kennedy declined to comment on the sexting allegations for this story. “I don’t think there’s any point to going through every rumor and headline to try to defend or explain it,” Hines says. At another point, she says: “Bobby and I talk about everything, so that’s how we move through everything, and we’re really good friends, and we trust each other.”
Hines believes in MAHA: She thinks Kennedy is racking up wins and praises her husband’s campaign to make food and baby formula safer. She’s unafraid to support the movement even though critics say it promotes misinformation and lacks scientific rigor. “I feel very connected to MAHA. I feel like everything they’re doing is to be more mindful of what is going into all of it, into food, into drinks, and educating people. So there’s nothing that I can think of that I would have been against.” Yes, she says, she’d drink raw milk, which many doctors consider dangerous due to the bacteria it contains. “Something like that doesn’t worry me or scare me,” she says. She’s a vegetarian, she adds, and doesn’t actually like milk.
On scientific consensus: “Is science ever settled? Everything’s changing. Technology changes. Everything changes. So how could something be settled and then not talked about again? It’s like any drug that goes on the market that at the beginning everybody thinks is great and then 10 years later they realize it’s causing some sort of issue. Well, there was probably settled science at the beginning.”
On Caroline Kennedy’s statement about RFK Jr: “Her comments did make me angry. I didn’t understand why she called him a predator—that didn’t make sense to me, but [she] clearly wanted to use a word that would strike people,” she says. She considered it a transparent attempt to defame his character. “And then to talk about him feeding his birds when he was 18 just seemed bizarre to me. I was surprised because we never see her or talk to her.”
On Jack Schlossberg: Hines spoke slowly and coolly of Caroline Kennedy’s child. “Her son’s behavior—I don’t even want to say anything, because anything I say, he’s going to think, he’s going to be, umm, excited that someone’s talking about him,” she says. “I don’t understand what’s going on with him.”
It’s like watching someone get brainwashed in real time. People used to feel sorry for Hines, stuck in a marriage with a brain-wormed adulterer with all of these asinine beliefs about vaccines and science. But clearly, she’s all-in. Those comments about “settled science” are straight from the anti-Vaxx playbook. She and Kennedy already have blood on their hands, and it’s going to get so much worse.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
