"Real Time" host Bill Maher said he was "surprised" at how much support Biden challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is already getting days after officially entering the Democratic primary.
During Friday's "Overtime" segment, Maher read a submitted viewer question asking for the panel's reaction to a Fox News poll that showed RFK Jr., at 19%, a substantial percentage against President Biden, who despite how he benefits from the power of incumbency is only at 62% among Democratic primary voters.
The only other declared Democratic candidate, spiritual guru and former 2020 presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson, reached 9% in the same poll.
"I must say, I'm surprised that right off the bat, he's polling at 19%," Maher reacted to RFK Jr.'s polling.
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"The Fifth Column" podcast co-host Michael Moynihan responded by pointing to other polls showing as much as 70% of Americans don't want Biden to seek re-election, which proves "people are looking for alternatives."
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"And I really wish it wasn't Robert Kennedy, but the DNC right now is lining up the troops and is going to prevent him from doing any damage," Moynihan said. "They're not going to have debates. There is going to be no primary debates. He is just going to be pushed aside. He is running as a Democrat. If he decides to then run as a third-party candidate, you have a situation."
When asked by Maher why he wished RFK Jr. wasn't the leading Democratic alternative to Biden, Moynihan responded by pointing to the candidate's past positions and rhetoric notwithstanding his opposition to vaccines like his proposal to jail climate change deniers and his past praise for former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
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"He's becoming more conspiratorial too — the sort of ‘they’re censoring me all the time.' I just don't — you're a Kennedy. Your last book sold 2 million copies. No one is censoring you," Moynihan said.
Maher rejected critics who accuse RFK Jr. of being wrong about COVID, pointing out how the U.S. government "got a lot wrong."
"He might be getting stuff wrong, but he's not a nut," Maher said. "He's not a nut and he's not a nut about COVID either or vaccines."
"The thing about this is that, you know, it's hard to tell these days. It's hard to tell because you could get kicked off of Facebook, of YouTube, of all this stuff for saying that this came from a lab in Wuhan — not from a wet market in Wuhan — but the lab did bad viruses that was down the street," Moynihan said. "That kicked off people, like lots of people, not just one errant person that was kicked off once. No, this was very, very common. That was all these things you couldn't say then, which are now conventional wisdom."
"What we know about medicine is always changing on a day-to-day basis," Maher said. "I'm not saying it's corrupt, although there is quite a bit of that. Somehow, when it's the Sackler family with the opioids, it's like, ‘Oh, see? Corporations and pharmaceutical companies,’ but when it's COVID, ‘Oh, no. They must have everything on the up and up.’ OK, but say it's not mostly that, they were trying and they did a great thing. They come up with a vaccine with many people, most people needed, and I've saved millions of lives. That's true too. Robert Kennedy and I may not agree with that."
