Will LI's Rita Palma hurt RFK Jr.'s prez bid?

Daily Point

The Long Island-RFK Jr. connection

All eyes following Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for president have turned to Long Island.

Rita Palma, a well-known anti-vaccine activist from Blue Point and a longtime vocal supporter of RFK Jr., has been making national news the last few days, after video surfaced in which she noted that her primary goal was defeating President Joe Biden, and described how a vote for Kennedy could help elect Republican Donald Trump.

“Our mutual enemy is Biden,” Palma said during a Hudson Valley gathering last week.

That remark is likely true. But some observers have since suggested that making explicit the linkage between a vote for Kennedy and a possible victory for Trump is the iceberg that could sink Kennedy’s campaign.

Not so fast. Judging by the constant honking as a small group of Kennedy supporters, including Palma, gathered on a Long Island Expressway overpass on Wednesday to hang a large banner, wave flags and cheer on their candidate, Kennedy may still have a significant base of support here.

Palma, who donated $250 to Kennedy, previously had said she was Kennedy’s New York campaign director and is still listed on his website as the contact person for New York ballot access training. But recently she was removed from the list of several point people for a Melville fundraiser planned for later this month that Kennedy is expected to attend. Palma told The Point Wednesday at the rally that she was now working for the campaign in a “volunteer capacity.”

“I hold no ill will,” Palma said. “I adore Team Kennedy.”

Long Island history

While Palma may be a new face to the national media landscape, she has a long history on Long Island and in Albany, especially on vaccination-related issues. Palma heads an organization called My Kids, My Choice, through which she has fought for religious and other exemptions to New York’s school-related vaccination requirements. Her battles began nearly two decades ago, when she was first seeking immunization waivers for her own children. She told The Point that she met Kennedy in 2015, as they advocated on issues related to, as she described it, “health freedom and injured children” in Albany.

But her advocacy heated up in 2019, when a measles epidemic hit New York and the State Legislature debated banning the religious exemption to vaccination, which was a loophole many anti-vaxxers used. Palma then worked with two groups — the New York Alliance for Vaccine Rights and Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s group — to fight the measure and any state lawmakers who voted for it.

Connection with RFK Jr. still strong

“Long Island is where this is all happening,” Palma told The Point in May 2019. “We are a strong group down here and we’re leading the way in the state” on vaccine mandate opposition.

After the bill became law, Kennedy led a losing legal fight to overturn ending the religious exemption. But the connections between Kennedy and Palma would remain strong.

Palma took to Facebook on Tuesday to explain the “back story” of her comments about Kennedy, Biden and Trump. She said she supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, saying Trump “truly loves America,” but noted the events that shifted her focus.

“Then Covid. Then OWS [Operation Warp Speed]. Then vaccines. Then mandates. (yes I know that was Biden.) Then careers held hostage, bodies damaged, lives lost,” Palma wrote. Trump’s response, she said, was “disappointing.”

“He lost me on the vaccine,” Palma said Wednesday. “This is one issue where he’s got to see the light.”

Then came Kennedy: “Hero of health freedom, truth teller … deeply brilliant, thoughtful, compassionate, authentic, humble … and on a mission. He truly loves America,” Palma wrote.

“And on the day my precious son passed and my life went black, he called to express sorrow for me — a nobody he knew from Albany and a month into announcing his Presidential run,” Palma wrote. “I have never, ever wanted someone to win the Presidential race more than I want Bobby to win. And I have never, ever wanted anyone to lose the Presidential race more than I want Biden to lose, and miserably.

“So, I figured out a message to try and get both. Just me. No one else,” Palma added in her post.

During the conversation with The Point, Palma expressed some misgivings.

“I probably pandered a bit too much to a very red audience because I wanted them to listen,” she said, noting that the clip that’s been quoted was just a small piece of a 2 ½ hour event. “But I don’t regret it … All I know is I was honest. I’ve had this nagging at me for a while.”

A passionate dissenter

Palma isn’t new to controversy — and doesn’t shy away from it. She has been in Newsday’s pages and in The Point many times over the years, dating back to at least 2014, when she obtained a set of job-performance ratings of her children’s teachers that, she said, “makes no sense”. During and after the religious exemption fight, Palma became even more of a regional figure. She tried to use that recognition during COVID-19, fighting against mask and vaccine mandates and arguing for an earlier, broader reopening of schools.. Right after the November 2020 election, shortly before the COVID vaccine became available, Palma claimed “healthy credit for the defeat of a robust list of Freedom Thieves,” referring to candidates who voted for the religious exemption ban.

By the following summer, Palma was focused on the COVID-19 vaccine, speaking at an event at a small church in East Northport that featured Northport pediatrician Lawrence Palevsky spouting misinformation and fanning fears about the dangers of the COVID vaccine.

“I’m telling people don’t take this thing,” Palma said then. “It’s poison. It could kill you.”

Opposing mandatory vaccines

Months later, Palma was set to participate in an event regarding mandatory vaccination organized by Assembs. Doug Smith and Jodi Giglio, who canceled it in the wake of an angry response from local physicians and other vaccine advocates. Also scheduled to appear was an attorney affiliated with Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense organization. In 2022, she supported GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin in his campaign for governor, again because of his opposition to vaccine mandates.

It doesn’t seem Palma is ready to back down this time, either.

“Ready or not, I’m here,” Palma commented on Facebook on Wednesday.

Getting the message out

Earlier in the week, she noted on Facebook that RFK Jr. supporters were expected to gather Wednesday on the Pinelawn Road overpass above the LIE to hang a large banner supporting their candidate. “Join us!” she wrote.

The banner read “Get RFK Jr. On Ballot For President” in capital letters.

“His message and his messaging are appealing to people,” Palma told The Point Wednesday over the supportive din of honking horns. “I want to see Bobby win just as much as I want to see Biden lose.”

The banner may not remain for long, as a state DOT spokesman said “banners over highways are always removed by NYSDOT forces in the interest of highway safety.”

Palma added that the freedom to take vaccines was just “one of many” issues on which she agrees with Kennedy, saying that she thinks Kennedy has opened voters’ eyes to that and other topics.

“Once he’s on the ballot in all 50 states, and I think he will be, the temperature will change and people will listen,” Palma said. “It’s hard not to listen to Bobby and say, ‘That makes a lot of sense.’”

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

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A big hit

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