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Ken Cedeno\/CNP\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last week,<\/span> baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he\u2019s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have ended HHS\u2019s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,\u201d Kennedy declared. \u201cDuring the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We\u2019re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor people who aren\u2019t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one\u2019s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it\u2019s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kennedy\u2019s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet\u2014sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms.\u00a0Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an \u201cEpstein client list\u201d<\/a> that probably isn\u2019t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from \u201cfetus debris<\/a>,\u201d which is a lie,<\/a> and promising to fight chemtrails<\/a>, which don\u2019t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky<\/a>? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into \u201cwhat actually happened\u201d on September 11, as he claimed a \u201ccontrolled demolition<\/a>\u201d brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox<\/a> might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory<\/a>? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were \u201ctwo shooters<\/a>\u201d involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way<\/a> proved that?<\/p>\n Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they\u2019re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOP <\/strong>is\u2014and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation \u201call the time<\/a>,\u201d and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. \u201cIf true, this would be a really really big deal,\u201d tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. \u201cArrest and prosecute!!!!\u201d \u201cHOLY SHLIT,\u201d tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok.\u00a0<\/p>\n The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy\u2019s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas<\/a> claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.<\/p>\n The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized <\/a>by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children\u2014in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss\u2014were sent to places where they were labor trafficked<\/a>, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories. <\/p>\n While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors<\/a> as quickly as possible, Kennedy\u2019s more QAnon-ish claim\u2014that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air\u2014seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report<\/a>\u00a0from the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government \u201ccould not monitor the location and status\u201d of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked.\u00a0As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice\u2019s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS<\/a>, this isn\u2019t a problem of \u201cmissing kids\u201d but one of \u201cmissing paperwork.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are \u201cmissing,\u201d let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line<\/a> in a December Time<\/em> interview. \u201cWe have 325,000 children here during Democrats\u2014and this was done by Democrats\u2014who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.\u201d That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the \u201cmissing\u201d youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.<\/p>\n To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one\u2019s brain to be thoroughly bathed in corrosive acid .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But while most people who heard about Kennedy\u2019s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild<\/a>, the QAnon community celebrated.<\/p>\n \u201cKennedy\u2019s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting\/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,\u201d Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon<\/a> and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories<\/a>, explains.<\/p>\n Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, \u201cKennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago<\/a>,\u201d namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor people who aren\u2019t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,\u201d Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it\u2019s finding a large and receptive audience.\u201d<\/p>\n Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess<\/a> once it became clear the files weren\u2019t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week<\/a> that the FBI is combing through \u201ctens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.\u201d While Rep. Luna\u2019s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she\u2019s said she\u2019s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide \u201cneeded transparency about federal secrets to the American people,\u201d including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.<\/p>\n And while Kennedy\u2019s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there\u2019s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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