The eye-opening level of support that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has received so far in the Democratic presidential race reminds us not only that many aren’t thrilled with Joe Biden but that the left still loves its lunatics. This early polling — at least for the one in five onboard RFK’s ship of fools — also debunks what being a Democrat became in the Trump era.
During the final years of the last decade, Democrat lawmakers arrogantly claimed to be the “party of science” and thus be trusted as experts to safeguard us through a public health crisis. If the facts of COVID-19 didn’t shatter this absurd presumption, RFK Jr. does.
Kennedy is a devout conspiracy theorist. His war against vaccines long preceded the mRNA shots that liberals have worshipped for nearly three years. He was a proponent of a notorious study that failed to establish a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism. Even as this was refuted, RFK Jr. remained unconvinced. He then persisted in aberrant claims that vaccines are how an “injectable chip” or “subdermal biometric tattoos” into their subjects.
In a recent interview, Kennedy’s half-baked views were censored by ABC News, ostensibly to protect the public from being exposed to his “false claims.”
The impulse to censor harkens back to the Trump era when disingenuous progressive hacks rendered judgments about assertions they had no business evaluating.
Now, the Democrats’ media allies must apparently shield us from the irresponsibility of one of their own since he’s enjoying a level of support.
So, the supercilious notion that liberals reject conspiratorial logic should be reevaluated now that the “party of truth, facts, and science” has an avowed conspiracy theorist gaining popularity.
Kennedy’s list of mentally unhinged statements is endless.
According to RFK Jr., his father was not assassinated by a Palestinian terrorist on live television — which even gunman Sirhan Sirhan admitted. No other conspiracy theories about what happened to Bobby Kennedy 55 years ago reached RFK Jr.’s hair-brained conclusions.
Kennedy once promoted an anti-science view that 5G cell towers are designed to “control our behavior” and called for the Koch brothers to be imprisoned “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” As a true environmental nut job, he believes “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty” and once called for jailing those skeptical of climate change hysteria.
He also dabbles in presidential election denial, accusing Republicans of engaging in “a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election” in 2004.
Could some of these un-American rantings deter MSNBC and PBS hosts from deeming themselves members of “the party of truth”?
It might also prove a reminder that in the pre-COVID age, vicious anti-vaccine agitation found its home on the American Left. And guess where it gained its most receptive audience? The affluent, educated elites.
Before Donald Trump, Democrats happily embraced cranks who idiotically believed George W. Bush was complicit in the 9/11 attacks; nefarious voting machines changed the 2004 election; and, yes, Russia influenced the 2016 presidential outcome.
The Trump years, however, showed philosophical agreement between the Bernie Sanders Left and MAGA Right. Both fringes blame America first.
A great irony is RFK is a lot like Tucker Carlson, a man the left abhors but who fawned over RFK and the candidate recently lauded. Both are wealthy yet anti-military, anti-business, full of grievance and attracted to conspiracy.
This phenomenon has forced the populist fringes whose beliefs run antithetical to American values — Steve Bannon, Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Donald Trump Jr. — to eschew partisanship and bond over paranoia and disdain for the United States.
RFK’s success would show how much of today’s sanctimonious rhetoric from Democrats is actually a ruse.
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Ari Kaufman is a correspondent for several U.S. newspapers and magazines from Minnesota and Ohio to Tennessee and Virginia. He taught school and served as a military historian before beginning his journalism career. He is the author of three books and a frequent guest on radio programs, and contributes to Israel National News and here at The Lid.
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