Adviser Bails on RFK Jr.: ‘Hateful and Divisive Atmosphere’
An adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday announced that she is leaving his independent presidential campaign, explaining her decision had been informed by an “increasingly hateful and divisive atmosphere” that “no longer aligns” with her values.
Angela Stanton King, the campaign’s Black voter outreach director and a key figure in the drama surrounding Kennedy’s shifting position on abortion, said in a statement posted on X that she had “decided to step away from the political theatre.” Stanton King said she would nevertheless “continue to advise RFK Jr. on key community issues.”
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Stanton King later told The New York Times she had “switched to an informal role” but did not elaborate on the reasons for the switch beyond making reference to her X post. On Wednesday, she wrote in another post on the site that reports suggesting she had “been let go” from the campaign “for ANY reason are 100% ABSOLUTELY FALSE.”
Her departure comes after Kennedy walked back comments he made on a podcast saying he opposed government limits on abortion and that he supported keeping terminations legal “even if it’s full term.” His remarks appeared to contradict what his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said was her understanding of his position, and he ultimately released a statement saying he did support legal restrictions after all.
That clarification came after Stanton King, an anti-abortion activist, put out a video saying people on Kennedy’s campaign had “all come to the agreement that late-term abortion is not something that this campaign is going to support.”
Before joining the Kennedy campaign payroll in December, Stanton King had previously made an unsuccessful bid for a House seat in 2020 running as a Republican in Georgia. Her race for Congress came just weeks after then-President Donald Trump pardoned her following a 2004 conviction for her part in a car theft conspiracy.
During her congressional run, Stanton King was a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory and, in 2021, she backed the idea of a military coup to remove President Joe Biden from power.
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