RFK Jr is a conservative passing as a liberal in a remake of 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'
Like every presidential aspirant, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is two people. There is the man his PR people celebrate on his campaign website. And there is the flesh and blood person. Campaign websites rarely tell us much about that guy. They merely outline an idealized version of the subject.
These hagiographies usually list the aspiring incumbent’s policies (although there is a trend for campaign websites to skip that bit.) And if the candidate is running for either the Republican or Democratic nomination, those policies are predictable and little customized.
RFK's campaign site paints him as a liberal. But booby traps await in the details. Kennedy has a lifelong passion for the environment, but he relegates that passion to third place on his priorities list. First is Honest Government, and who could object to that? But let us look at what he has to say.
A democratic government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. But government institutions have betrayed our trust. The intelligence agencies spy on our own people. Government and tech platforms conspire to surveil and censor the public. Regulatory agencies have been captured by those they are supposed to regulate.
Liberals will largely agree with the last sentence. And hopefully, every American will agree — if only superficially — with the first. But the middle two point to conservative paranoia. When Congress passed the Orwellian-named USA Patriot Act (full title: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Restrict, Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) liberals were concerned about the overreach of the government monitoring what books people checked out of libraries et al.
However, the ‘government spying on the citizens’ paranoia has become a causus belli for conservatives — do not get me wrong, there are plenty of liberals worried about government overreach, but it is never in the first paragraph of the first policy listed.
As for tech platforms, ‘conspiring to censor’, that silliness is a standard conservative spin on the attempt by social media sites to stem the tide of lies and junk science on the internet. Kennedy is particularly aware of that as anti-vaxxer nonsense (he is second to none in the discipline) is one of the targets.
His second priority is Heal the Divide. Obviously, there are Republican and Democratic voters, so in that sense, there is a divide. But the deepness of that divide is a product of cable news looking for ratings and politicians winding up the base. Regardless, Kennedy says both sides contribute equally to the division, so the solution is to meet in the middle.
Take one sentence from his manifesto.
Few relish the thought of dead fetuses, nor do they want to force women to have unwanted babies.
It sounds so even-handed. But while liberals agree that abortions should be “safe, legal — and rare” to quote Bill Clinton, many conservatives are giddy at forced-birth laws. When one side of a position is sensible, and the other is extreme, meeting in the middle means the solution is not sensible, just less extreme.
The world is round. If a group says it is flat, it does not change shape. It is a disservice to the truth to “teach the controversy.”
His third priority, as mentioned above, is the Environment. Here RFK espouses liberal policies unequivocally. If the rest of his positions were like this, and he was not a paranoid conspiracy theorist (more on that later), Kennedy would have a shot at being a quality Democratic candidate.
His fourth priority is Revitalization. In the first half of this section, he identifies the problems facing America.
Our country faces a widening wealth gap (the most unequal since the 1920s), rampant debt, decaying infrastructure, and a hollowed-out industrial base.
He gets partial credit — put another way, three out of four ain’t bad. He is right about the wealth gap, infrastructure, and the industrial base.
On the last issue, “rampant debt”, Kennedy might just as well put on a MAGA hat and have done with it. Taxing the wealthy their fair share, getting corporations to pay what they owe, and raising wages so more Americans get into higher tax brackets are the ticket. Kennedy offers no word on taxes.
He is equally good/bad in the second half. He points out that America spends more money on healthcare for poorer results than other industrial counties. Absolutely true. Then he says
We face today a terrible pandemic—not of Covid, but of chronic disease. Autoimmunity, allergies, diabetes, obesity, addiction, anxiety, and depression afflict two-thirds of the population, up from a few percent in our grandparents’ time. A Kennedy administration will go beyond making existing modalities available to all, to include low-cost alternative and holistic therapies that have been marginalized in a pharma-dominated system.
I am not a fan of Big Pharma, but the real problem is cost. Kennedy has nothing on that. “Holistic therapies” sounds like something an anti-vaxxer would say — especially one who just said Covid was not a pandemic. And I have no idea what “existing modalities” are. I would put that in the “baffle them with bullshit” bin.
His fifth priority is Peace. Kennedy's idea is to bring all the troops home and hope for the best. It is reminiscent of the wishful thinking of 1930s conservative isolationists. I think the US has fought way too many wars. But to believe that withdrawing American troops from everywhere will make peace more likely is magical thinking.
Kennedy gets specific with Ukraine.
We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first. He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine.
This is complete bullshit. Ukraine’s sovereignty means they regain all the territory the Russians have illegally annexed. Russia will never negotiate to leave the country. By all means, claim Ukraine is not our fight. But do not offer nonsense about a diplomatic solution restoring Ukrainian sovereignty.
His sixth and last priority is Civil Liberties. Anyone hoping to hear echoes of his dad will have to wait until the bottom of this section. Kennedy starts by bemoaning the loss of civil rights. He then says
These liberties have endured constant assault for over twenty years, starting with the Bush/Cheney War on Terror, and accelerating in the era of Covid lockdowns.
Is Kennedy unaware there are no longer Covid ‘lockdowns’? Time and research will no doubt prove that some anti-Covid measures were excessive or unnecessary. But we did not know that at the time. Terrorism in its worst year killed 3,000 Americans. In the 20 years since 9/11, terrorists have killed 549 Americans, globally — 27 a year. Covid has killed a total of 1,167,342 Americans. At its peak, Covid was killing over 4,000 Americans every day.
Kennedy is a joyful user of a favorite conservative tool, false equivalency. He also likes lying.
We will therefore dismantle the censorship-industrial complex, in which Big Tech censors, deplatforms, shadowbans, and algorithmically suppresses any person or opinion the government asks them to.
It is a MAGA talking point.
Leaving aside that Kennedy is not a Democrat, he is unqualified to be President. I do not mean constitutionally — the Founders rather stupidly did not anticipate that people would vote for crooks, charlatans, and paranoids — I mean he does not have the mental stability to be President.
He is an infamous anti-vaccination zealot. He has spent millions encouraging Americans to get sick unnecessarily. Personal experience informs his antipathy for social media. His anti-vax crusade had him banned by both Instagram and Twitter.
So unfounded were his diatribes against vaccines that even his niece Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a doctor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, wrote an opinion essay in The New York Times calling him out.
“I love my uncle Bobby. I admire him for many reasons, chief among them his decades-long fight for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.”
This did not stop Kennedy from making his insanity personal. In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy accused the doctor of promoting "a historic coup d'etat against Western democracy." And that was not all. At an anti-vax rally, he said that anti-Covid measures were as bad as anything in Nazi Germany. Worse, in fact.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
He is unchastened. Now he is teamed up with Joe Rogan and egged on by Elon Musk in trying to goad one of America's leading infectious disease specialists, Dr. Peter Hotez, into a vaccine debate. Not for any medical purpose — none of the doctor's antagonists has any medical training — but simply for shits and giggles.
But even that does not plumb the depths of Kennedy’s derangement. When Joe Rogan asked him, “What do you think happens when you get into office? Like, if you’re talking about your uncle who was assassinated and you believe the intelligence agencies were a part of that, what happens to you?” Kennedy replied
“Well, I got to be careful. And I’m aware of that — I’m aware of that danger."
He might be assassinated by the CIA? He sounds like a movie caricature of a mental hospital patient. No wonder Steve Bannon and Alex Jones love him.