Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s choice of Nicole Shanahan that I predicted a few days ago—don’t take a victory lap, Roger—was a terrific choice ... for former President Donald Trump.
In fact, I wrote the article, in part, in the hopes of disabusing Mr. Kennedy, whom I had previously interviewed, of the choice, not that I had much chance of doing that. A number of names had been bandied about from footballer Aaron Rodgers to former Hawaiian congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, all of whom were probably better picks.
No right-leaning person no matter how #NeverTrump will be able to swallow the mega-progressive Ms. Shanahan. Only disaffected Biden voters, those who think the president isn’t sufficiently “woke,” or awake, need apply.
For Mr. Kennedy’s part, he has proven once again that journalist H.L. Mencken knew best: “When someone says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
What other reason could he really have for choosing such an unknown person with a record of generous donations to extreme left candidates such as Mr. Defund the Police himself, Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascon, among those most responsible for the extraordinary decline of the once-great city?
Ms. Shanahan is the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, among the planet’s richest and most powerful men. Indeed, there is reason to believe that multinational tech giants such as Mr. Brin have more power these days than most, if not all, heads of state.
They live on a plane so distant from the working man and woman that they seem to come from another universe. Ditto for the minorities they claim so determinedly to support. Black-on-black crime has been by far the most dominant in our country for years now, but they dare not speak its name because that undermines their narrative and diminishes their power. Out of their selfish silence comes the continued ruination of poor black lives. This is particularly true of black children who are being gunned down with a terrifying frequency.
Speaking of which, Ms. Shanahan had no mention of that tragedy in her introductory speech, a series of puerile clichés emphasizing her generalized support “for the children,” something almost all of us share.
No word, however, about how the multiple woke lies about sex and race in our schools, and how the fixation on critical race theory, pronouns, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and the putative glories of a transgender life instead of real education, are turning our youth passive and mush brained.
No word either of the open border with anybody and everybody coming through it, of a national debt whose astronomical numbers won’t fit on a slide rule and may never be recovered, or of what to do about a planet on the brink of World War III.
Oh, but she’s worried about the environment. Again, who isn’t? We’re all for conservation, but we just wonder if the unproven fixation on anthropogenic global warming or its euphemism climate change is not vastly exaggerated or even entirely bogus.
Ms. Shanahan’s selection made me rethink my encounters with Mr. Kennedy. Had I been gulled or, just as possibly, had Mr. Kennedy gulled himself?
Or had I gulled myself as well, admittedly a frequent misstep of journalists/pundits anxious to find something, or anything, positive to say in the tawdry world of politics?
Two subjects had initially attracted me to Mr. Kennedy. One was his critical view of the COVID-19 vaccines and of Dr. Anthony Fauci, about whom he wrote a withering and excellent book. He still deserves great credit for this.
The second was his skepticism of the CIA and our intelligence agencies in general derived from his experiences with the tragic assassinations of his father and uncle. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, expressed what is likely the strongest disapproval ever of the CIA by an American president when he said he wanted to shatter the agency into a thousand pieces and throw it to the winds.
So when I interviewed Mr. Kennedy for Epoch TV’s “Presidential Roller Coaster” series, topmost in my mind was questioning him about what he would do about the CIA, particularly in regard to our culture in which privacy was disappearing or possibly already disappeared.
But when I did, Mr. Kennedy seemed oddly unprepared, talking about handcuffing the more kinetic side of the agency but not its prying capabilities. Perhaps I was wrong. Candidates on the trail get barraged with questions and, as mere mortals, are not always on their games.
But it left me with the feeling that in this area, too, President Trump was the one with the steel spine to confront the people who Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) once said, as a warning to President Trump but almost approvingly, had “six ways to Sunday” to make you pay.
In any case, Mr. Kennedy may now have the money to finance his campaign, but has he sacrificed too much to get it?
