Politics
A comedy show where RFK Jr. was not the butt of the joke
Prominent anti-vaxxer and misinformation disseminator Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the butt of many late-night jokes since announcing his bid for the presidency last spring. But this week the son of the late Robert Kennedy finally found an audience to laugh with him, not at him.
The Kennedy campaign hosted “A Night of Laughter with RFK Jr. & Friends,” a fundraiser at downtown L.A.’s Million Dollar Theater, with RFK Jr. himself in attendance. The two-hour-plus show attracted a sold-out crowd of supporters who paid upward of $150 a ticket for the rare opportunity to watch their Democrat-turned-independent candidate championed by comedians rather than lampooned.
Billed as “the first of several comedy shows around the country as we forge our way to the White House,” the show featured sets from seven stand-up comics, and was emceed by RFK Jr’s wife, Cheryl Hines, the actor who plays Larry David’s ex-wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Ticket holders clad in “Kennedy 2024” hats and “Declare your independence” promotional garb lined up around 2½ city blocks near Grand Central Market to attend.
Adam Carolla reached back in time Wednesday night to joke about the journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush in Iraq.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The majority of Wednesday night’s audience appeared to skew younger than the typical crowds at former President Trump‘s rallies and President Biden‘s pressers. The RFK Jr. devotees, mostly white men and women in their 30s and 40s, packed into the small lobby of the historic venue, talking selfies next to cleverly designed reimaginations of classic movie posters with Kennedy’s image. There he was in a leather jacket for “Rebel with a Cause,” on a rearing stallion for “The Lone Ranger,” and so on.
Folks willing to speak to the mainstream media (one of many nefarious enemies on Kennedy’s list) said they were registered Republicans who’d voted for Trump in the last election, but were seeking change — and someone younger. And Bobby, as they call him, is 70, so he’s a mere pup next to Biden and Trump.
But aside from the oddball positioning of the fundraising event itself, was it actually funny? Not particularly.
Openers Tre Stewart, Dustin Ybarra and Erica Rhodes fared better than the older, top-billed veterans simply because they delivered material that wasn’t based in the G.H.W. Bush/Clinton/G.W. Bush era. Otherwise, it was radio talk show host and podcaster Adam Carolla joking about the “Iraqi guy” who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush — in 2008.
Rob Schneider, the ’90s “Saturday Night Live” cast member, made jokes about Mexicans (It’s OK. His wife is one). Surprise guest Jeremy Piven reminded the crowd that 20 years ago he starred in the HBO series “Entourage,” and how a show about four white guys now would be mistaken for Jan. 6 insurrection footage.
Mike Binder repeated several times that he was going to get in trouble for what he said about gays, women, Jews and other perennial targets of American comedy since the dawn of stand-up. Maybe in 2000, but not now, when entire media ecosystems are fueled by outrage against woke, liberal, pronoun-obsessed Pelosi Nazis. Wednesday’s analogue jokes about “little people,” “African American Blacks” and “all the gays” felt more like callbacks than controversial zingers.
Kennedy supporters who were willing to speak with the mainstream media at Wednesday’s show said they were Republicans and had voted for Trump in 2020.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
So what got the crowd going? Jokes about lockdown masking, Biden’s age, the pathetic Democrats — and more masking. Isn’t it funny how you had to mask when walking in a restaurant, but not at the table? How about on a plane? Or when visiting your elderly mom? It was as if the dark days of the pandemic, replete with the fear that our constitutional rights were under attacks by N95s, never ended.
RFK Jr.’s staunch anti-vaxxer stance has been an effective rallying cry for the presidential hopeful, and a central hub that tethers many of his other baseless beliefs together. They include HIV/AIDS denialism, the CIA’s supposed involvement in his uncle’s assassination, linking the increase in mass shootings to antidepressants and 5G cell service speeds to the population’s diminishing health. The latter warning did not stop many in Wednesday night’s crowd from sending selfies of themselves from the event, but perhaps they were using 4G.
Kennedy appeared in a short campaign clip that opened the festivities. The son of American political royalty lamented the “partisan elite” before rallying the crowd to “go take back our country!” He waited until the close of the event to climb onstage and thank the night’s talent and the crowd, some of whom he’d be meeting in person at the after-party — if they paid the $1,000 to $1,500 ticket price.
Hines wrapped up the evening by urging folks to register with the We the People Party of California. Kennedy, who hasn’t made it on any one party’s ticket, announced Monday that he’d launched the new political party to get on the California ballot. The We the People Party hopes to register 75,000 people in the state and get his name before voters in November. If successful, he’ll prove once and for all that RFK Jr. is no joke. Or at least he wasn’t at his own comedy show.
WASHINGTON — Months after wildfires ravaged Los Angeles County, California Sen. Alex Padilla is hoping his bill to overhaul forest management and prevent wildfires might be the first bipartisan measure for President Trump to sign.
“I don’t think anything could completely prevent wildfires, but through this work, if we can prevent just one more community from experiencing the heartbreak felt by the families in Santa Rosa or in Paradise or the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, then this effort would’ve been worth it,” Padilla said Thursday.
Padilla, who chairs the Senate Wildfire Caucus, joined with a bipartisan group of senators from the West — Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) — to introduce the Fix Our Forests Act, which mirrors a bipartisan measure of the same name that the House passed in January.
The Fix Our Forests Act would usher in sweeping changes to how the federal government manages its land — which constitutes 45% of the uninhabited, wildfire-prone land in California, according to the Congressional Research Service. It would create a wildfire intelligence center to centralize federal management, require assessments of fireshed areas and streamline how communities reduce their wildfire risk. It also would ramp up research into wildfire mitigation technologies and change some forestation treatments.
Although the House handily passed the measure, it was not completely welcome among environmental groups. Dozens wrote a letter decrying the measure for rolling back protections for endangered species and removing accountability against “extractive industries.”
“Gutting wildlife protections and community input on managing our public lands have never made forests healthier or reduced wildfire risk, and that won’t change with this legislation,” Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Thursday. “Not a single community will be safer from wildfires if this becomes law.”
Padilla argued that his bill improved upon issues brought by those groups, including adding a provision for prescribed burns, “building on the expertise and experience of Native American tribes that have been implementing prescribed fires for generations.”
The Senate version also redefined projects eligible for grants, “to make sure that the L.A. would be eligible right now,” said Matt Weiner, chief executive and founder of the advocacy organization Megafire Action, which pushed for the legislation.
“I think it’s pretty crazy, frankly, that we’re on the cusp of getting to the president’s desk here a bill that he could sign into law that would be bipartisan and one of the most comprehensive rewrites of federal wildfire policy in decades,” Weiner said. “Amid all the chaos, there’s an opportunity to do something really meaningful here in a bipartisan way.”
The legislation started with an airplane conversation between Democratic Rep. Scott Peters of San Diego and his Republican colleague Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas. The two were traveling together on an international congressional trip, when Westerman sat beside Peters and asked if he could tell him a story about California’s sequoias.
“He couldn’t get away,” Westerman said with a laugh. As a licensed forester, Westerman wanted to overhaul federal forest management. Peters, an environmental lawyer by trade who came to Congress to push climate solutions, was “interested because it’s California.”
“The people in the 1970s who drew up our environmental laws were meeting the challenges of those days,” Peters said in January. “Time is our enemy. … The longer we wait, the more we have these catastrophic fires. And I just think that environmental groups haven’t caught up with that, some of them.”
A previous version of the bill passed the House but was not taken up for a vote in the Senate. Westerman and Peters reintroduced it in January on the heels of the L.A. fires, hoping they could capture their colleagues’ attention.
“The great thing about this bill is we can do something outside of disaster,” Westerman said at the time. “This is about preventing future disasters.”
California’s leaders — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Cal Fire Chief Joe Tyler — applauded the Senate version of the bill. Newsom pointed to his own efforts temporarily lifting state regulations to speed up rebuilding in the wake of the L.A. fires.
“The Fix Our Forest Act is a step forward that will build on this progress — enabling good projects to happen faster on federal lands,” Newsom said in a statement.
The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
In an unsigned order, the court stopped short of ordering the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, indicating that courts may not have the power to require the executive branch to do so.
But the court endorsed part of a trial judge’s order that had required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the district court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the district court’s authority.”
The case will now return to the trial court, and it is not clear whether and when Mr. Abrego Garcia will be returned to the United States.
“The district court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “For its part, the government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
The ruling appeared to be unanimous. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a statement that was harshly critical of the government’s conduct and said she would have upheld every part of the trial judge’s order.
“To this day,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
Justice Sotomayor urged the trial judge, Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland, to “continue to ensure that the government lives up to its obligations to follow the law.”
A Justice Department spokesman responded to the order by focusing on its reference to the executive branch.
“As the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs,” the spokesman said. “By directly noting the deference owed to the executive branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”
Andrew J. Rossman, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, expressed satisfaction with the Supreme Court’s action.
“The rule of law won today,” he said. “Time to bring him home.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife described the effect the case has had on their family and said she would keep pursuing his return to the United States.
“This continues to be an emotional roller coaster for my children, Kilmar’s mother, his brother and siblings,” Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, his wife, said on Thursday, adding that “I will continue fighting until my husband is home.”
Judge Xinis had said the Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge. The immigration judge granted him a special status known as “withholding from removal,” finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador.
The administration contends that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization.
Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said those claims were based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
In the administration’s emergency application seeking to block Judge Xinis’s order, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said she had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”
In a response to the court, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said their client “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
They added: “The district court’s order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is routine. It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case.”
Mr. Sauer said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said there was no evidence that he posed a risk.
“Abrego Garcia has lived freely in the United States for years, yet has never been charged for a crime,” they wrote. “The government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible.”
Mr. Sauer said Judge Xinis’s order was one in a series of rulings from courts exceeding their constitutional authority.
“It is the latest in a litany of injunctions or temporary restraining orders from the same handful of district courts that demand immediate or near-immediate compliance, on absurdly short deadlines,” he wrote.
In her statement on Thursday, Justice Sotomayor wrote that it would be shameful “to leave Abrego Garcia, a husband and father without a criminal record, in a Salvadoran prison for no reason recognized by the law.”
She added that the government’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
“That view,” the justice wrote, “refutes itself.”
Alan Feuer, Aishvarya Kavi and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
The Trump administration was handed another win on Thursday after a federal judge ruled that everyone in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation.
The Associated Press reported that Judge Trevor Neil McFadden, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, sided with the administration after arguing it was enforcing an existing requirement for everyone in the country who is not a citizen of the U.S.
Rather than rule on the substance of the Trump administration’s arguments, McFadden ruled that the group pushing to stop the requirement did not have standing to pursue their claims.
McFadden’s ruling will go into effect Friday.
NOEM SENDS MESSAGE TO THOSE CONSIDERING ENTERING US ILLEGALLY: ‘DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT’
Asylum seekers wait to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States in 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Thursday that the deadline to register for anyone who has been in the country for 30 days or more is Friday, adding that the registration requirement will be enforced to the fullest.
“President Trump and I have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now. If you leave now, you may have the opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in the statement. “The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws — we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce. We must know who is in our country for the safety and security of our homeland and all Americans.”
The DHS began warning illegal immigrants in February that they should leave the country or face serious consequences.
DHS SECRETARY NOEM APPEARS TO ACCUSE ‘CORRUPT’ FBI OF LEAKING LA ICE RAIDS
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visits the Mariposa Port of Entry, Saturday, March 15, 2025, in Nogales, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The secretary said DHS will enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was enacted in 1952 and created several tools to track illegal aliens and compel them to voluntarily leave the U.S.
DHS said the tools include criminal penalties for migrants who choose not to leave the U.S., fail to register with the federal government and get fingerprinted, and fail to notify the federal government of changes to their address.
Illegal immigrants who fail to depart the U.S. will be charged with a crime resulting in a “significant penalty,” DHS said.
NOEM ENDS BIDEN-ERA USE OF CONTROVERSIAL APP TO ALLOW MIGRANTS TO BOARD FLIGHTS, EXCEPT TO SELF-DEPORT
ICE is conducting flights to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S. and back to their home countries. (ICE Seattle)
But migrants who fail to register with the federal government could be fined, imprisoned or both.
Registration is mandatory for anyone 14 and older without legal status. Anyone registering will be required to provide their fingerprints and address.
Canadians are also required to go through the registration process if they have been in the U.S. for more than 30 days – this includes “snowbirds,” who spend winter months in warmer areas like Florida.
While it has long been required for people who live in the U.S. and are not American citizens, the requirement has only been enforced in rare circumstances.
For instance, the requirement was enforced in a limited way after Sept. 11, 2001, when the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System required noncitizen males 16 and older from 25 countries – all but one of them Arab or Muslim – to register with the U.S. government.
Even though the program did not lead to terrorism convictions, it pulled over 13,000 people into deportation proceedings. The program was suspended in 2011 and dissolved in 2016.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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