BOSTON—During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential announcement speech before a surprisingly large standing-room-only crowd in the grand ballroom of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel on April 19, he made sure to tip his hat to President Joe Biden as if to say the differences between them weren’t all that great.
He clearly didn’t want to rock his party’s boat any more than necessary. He’s still running as a Democrat. He also brought back—for reasons hard to fathom other than to check that box—kookie ultra-liberal former Cleveland mayor and twice-failed presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to make an introductory speech about what a Kennedy Democrat is.
But the truth was, given many of his views, notably a solidly Trumpian desire to rid us forever of the Deep State, RFK Jr. sounded a lot more like Donald Trump, or even newcomer GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, than Biden.
Nevertheless—especially when he spoke vehemently of our country’s destruction, particularly of its young, via the COVID-19 vaccines and lockdowns and, yet more dramatically, when he related how his uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, wanted to “break the CIA in a thousand pieces” (shades of Oliver Stone’s “JFK”)—the speech drew a wildly positive response with sustained applause.
It was almost as if the audience of roughly 1,000 people was filled with Republicans. Undoubtedly some percentage of it was.
If there was one occupation that predominated in that audience, at least judging from my own conversations, it was doctors, many of whom had lost their licenses to practice or were otherwise censored in our health care fascism. RFK Jr. had become their champion, his campaign poised to reveal the astonishing level of scientific dishonesty that had caused them so much grief, not to mention their patients.
I had previously thought Kennedy’s campaign—much as I admired his book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which told the truth about one of the most execrable people in American history–would basically be a sideshow.
No longer.
He’s trying to do what seems impossible, bringing the Humpy-Dumpty of America together again. He said in his speech:
“During this campaign and during my administration, my objective will be to make as many Americans as possible forget that they are Republicans or Democrats and remember that they are Americans. We need to focus on the values we share, instead of the issues that divide us.”
Cliché? Yes, many have said the same, including the meretricious Barack Obama in his famous speech about no red and blue Americas, only the United States of America.
He did exactly the opposite, further dividing us along racial and other lines and then passing that rancid torch to Biden, with Obama continuing to call the shots, he was all too willing to admit, from the basement.
Unlike Obama, somehow, I think RFK Jr. really means it.
As he also put it in the speech, “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now—threatening now—to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”
If I were Obama, Biden, and the rest of the corrupt liars in politics, media, entertainment, our corporations, and the academy that have made today’s “woke” Democratic Party what it is, I’d be very scared of this man.
Trump, too, has something to fear. As Kennedy pointed out in his speech, through Operation Warp Speed and the embrace of the mRNA vaccines, he allowed pharmaceutical companies to make billions in profit.
Of course, things got worse under Biden and Trump did many things well, but he’s been strangely silent on a subject of great importance to many of his followers, making him vulnerable in that area until he explains himself. An RFK Jr. candidacy would force him to do so to his and everyone else’s benefit.
The good news is that this year, for the first time in ages, actual ideas will be discussed and debated in the Democratic Party. It may even be reformed and brought back down to Earth from the craziness of “wokeland,” where nobody can even define a woman.
Just as Trump did the Republican rank-and-file an immense favor by rescuing their party from the RINOs and remaking it as a true people’s party, Kennedy may be saving the Democratic Party from itself.
The American people as a whole can only benefit from this. While it seemed not so long ago that Election 2024 would be a stultified rerun of 2020, it’s now shaping up as one of the most unpredictable and intriguing elections in years.
This is because of the arrival of what Ramaswamy has been calling on the hustings “fresh legs.” He was speaking of himself, of course, not Kennedy, but it’s a good thing all the way around.
