Cheryl Hines Is a Bad Person

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | August 30, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | August 30, 2024 |

Last week, anti-vaxxer and animal corpse defiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the Presidential election and then immediately endorsed Donald Trump. it was no real surprise given that Kennedy has spent decades being a lie-spreading crank with active disdain for everyone he considers inferior to himself (which is pretty much everyone on the planet.) His own siblings have condemned his ‘obscene’ backing of Trump and we’ve all been reminded once more of how truly repugnant this man has been on practically every issue. Standing by his side during it all is his wife Cheryl Hines, best known to most of us for her work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. She’s been married to Kennedy for a decade, and declared her support for her husband when he announced his Presidential campaign. As he now becomes the latest spineless stooge to cozy up to the Orange One, a lot of people online have shared their hopes that Hines will leave his ass. Escape, Cheryl! Don’t become the next Melania! Surely you’re better than this?

Guys, she’s not. I think all you Curb fans need to accept that Hines is a bad person.

We’re still wedded to this idea that political wives are passive participants in their husbands’ evil. They’re forced to be accessories to the campaign, clad in Jackie Kennedy drag as they wave to the crowd and offer vague platitudes on why their loved one should be allowed to ruin the country. The role of the politician’s wife is a poorly defined one that remains rigid in its demands. It asks for perfection, submissiveness, and a slate blank enough for everyone to project their own ideas of you onto. Those who move out of those boundaries are usually slammed, from Hillary Clinton to Michelle Obama. You’re not meant to be ‘ambitious’ like a man, even if you’re way more qualified than the guy on the posters. It’s the most soul-crushing unpaid internship there is.

So, it’s easy to convey this image of poor Cheryl Hines being the unwitting supporting player in Kennedy’s nonsense, just as it was to imagine Melania Trump as the trophy wife who hates her husband and everything he stands for (for the record, I believe she does hate Trump, but she also keeps acting as his hype-woman and cashing in on his crookedness so she’s no victim.) There are instances when we are curiously comforted by the notion of denying a woman her autonomy, as though it’s too much to reckon with the nasty truth that a lot of our gender hate us and will sell us all out in a second. There is no solidarity with the likes of Hines, nor is there any plausible deniability about her knowledge of Kennedy’s bigotry.

Aside from being a Kennedy, the thing RFK Jr. was most famous for pre-Presidential run was being an anti-vaccine propagandist who spread dangerous lies to vulnerable people. The Children’s Health Defense, a group Kennedy chairs that is widely considered to be one of the biggest sources of misinformation on vaccines, pushed the lie that they cause autism. He claims that world governments are conspiring to cover this up, and he’s regularly appeared in conversations with discredited former doctor Andrew Wakefield. In 2005, he wrote an article that alleged a government conspiracy to conceal a connection between thimerosal and childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. That piece was eventually retracted.

In 2015, he called increased rates of autism diagnoses worldwide a ‘holocaust.’ During the COVID-19 lockdown, he promoted multiple conspiracies surrounding the coronavirus until his Instagram account was deleted for spreading misinformation. He produced a ‘documentary’ on how the COVID-19 vaccine was part of a cover to conduct experiments on Black and Latin communities. He also published a book smearing Dr. Anthony Fauci and claimed he had sabotaged treatments for AIDS. Speaking of AIDS, Kennedy is also a big fan of AIDS denialism, amplifying people like Peter Duesberg who claims there’s no connection between AIDS and the HIV virus.

You can deal with marrying someone whose politics don’t 100% line up with yours. That’s just life. But you don’t marry an anti-vaxxer AIDS denialist then hold his hand on-stage as he runs for President based on those ideals without endorsing them, implicitly or otherwise. When you meet and fall in love with a man who makes his living from lying to the world about vaccines, you have to make the choice to stay with him. Even if you hate everything they stand for, by staying married to them and acting as the doting political spouse, you’re empowering them. All the ‘sources’ running around claiming Hines is mad at Kennedy for endorsing Trump don’t mean sh*t unless she leaves him, publicly calls out his hatred, and makes amends.

Kennedy said in an interview that he had offered to divorce Hines to spare her any embarrassment from his political run (this was before all the weird animal stuff but after, you know, everything else.) She said she would stay. Hines is exactly where she wants to be, holding her husband’s hand as they visit American Samoa on a trip organized by anti-vaxxers as dozens of kids died during a measles epidemic.