Tag: robert f kennedy
Why Is A Kennedy Democrat Mimicking Donald Trump's Madness?

Why Is A Kennedy Democrat Mimicking Donald Trump's Madness?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is causing eyebrows to arch all over the political world. The 69-year-old son of slain Sen. Robert F. Kennedy is a former environmental lawyer turned vaccine conspiracist. On April 19, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. His aim? To "end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power."

Would you imagine such a platform attracting followers? Well, he's been racking up some startling poll numbers. Fox News put him at 19%, and Emerson College found 21% support. Those are some impressive percentages for a challenger to a sitting president.

Let's start with the name. About a dozen Kennedys have dotted the political landscape over the decades, and no other political family has matched their glamor or celebrity. But this is a different kind of Kennedy.

Let's review. Just after Donald Trump was elected, a parade of notables trooped to Trump Tower to be interviewed by the president-elect: Kanye West, Rick Santorum, Sonny Perdue, Rick Perry, Omarosa Manigault, Mike Flynn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was there, too. Odd, you might say, for a major Democratic figure? But not when you consider that he went off the rails decades ago amid his manias about dark forces and evil schemes. It all fits smoothly into Trump's own cracked obsessions. He was an early proponent and superspreader of the thoroughly debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.

Perhaps you've heard of the crazed theory that Microsoft's Bill Gates was implanting microchips into patients through vaccines? Thank RFK Jr. for giving it oxygen. He posted a YouTube video that accused Gates of developing this "injectable chip" to enable Big Tech to track people's movements. RFK Jr. has also circulated the bogus notion that 5G alters human DNA, causes cancer and is part of a vast program of surveillance. He does not believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed his uncle; he fingers the CIA. Not surprisingly, he also believes that Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing his father, is innocent and has urged his release. Kennedy's view of who murdered his father? Also the CIA.

Unsurprisingly, when COVID hit, RFK Jr. was ready. On December 6, 2021, he said that the COVID vaccine is "the deadliest vaccine ever made." He published a book accusing Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates of being in cahoots to profit off vaccines and told a rally crowd in 2022 that things were worse today than during the Holocaust: "Even in Hitler's Germany ... you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did," whereas "the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide."

RFK Jr.'s nonprofit has been banned from Instagram and Facebook for spreading disinformation about COVID. He has wallowed in martyrdom, complaining that Big Tech is silencing him for "disagreeing."

One more item to complete this grim picture: RFK Jr. is anti-Ukraine, spouting Russian propaganda about provocations from "fascists" in Volodymyr Zelensky's regime and American "neo-cons." This is not out of character. A couple of decades ago, he was agog for Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who holds a record for the speed with which he plunged a reasonably prosperous country into chaos and destitution (before posthumously stealing the 2020 election for Joe Biden, of course).

It is difficult to imagine that his poll numbers will hold up once Democrats draw a bead on what he believes. But there is another audience that is proving quite receptive — Republicans.

Benjamin Braddock, writing in The American Mind, a Claremont Institute outlet, praised him because "RFK Jr. is thus far the only announced presidential candidate who has declared his intention to prosecute officials who betrayed the public trust in the course of the pandemic."

Of course. Jailing Fauci.

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty notes mildly that some of RFK Jr.'s message "resonates" with him: "The government lies to us. The media lies to us."

Just for the record, it isn't "crony capitalism" RFK Jr. despises; it's straight-up capitalism. He wanted to jail the Koch brothers before sending them to the Hague as war criminals. He described the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, ExxonMobil and a raft of other entities as "snake pits for sociopaths" before recommending treason charges against Southern Company and Exxon. Any fan of Hugo Chavez is not against "crony capitalism"; he hates the real thing.

RFK Jr., like Trump, has swum for decades in the cesspool of conspiracies, lies, baseless accusations and ginned-up outrage. We hardly pause to note it, because Trump has committed so many other outrages, but he cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives thanks to minimizing the seriousness of COVID. RFK Jr., too, belongs in the select company of major figures who have used their power for harm. Perhaps he isn't quite right in the head. Who knows? But the fact that he appeals to significant numbers of Americans, and particularly to those who have always been on the other side of the aisle, suggests that he is far from alone in that.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

The 1968 RFK Speech On Violence That Joe Biden Should Deliver Now

The 1968 RFK Speech On Violence That Joe Biden Should Deliver Now

While Joe Biden's Democratic nomination acceptance speech was well-crafted, deftly delivered, and widely viewed (by many more Americans than watched Donald Trump's), the most important speech of his career—and of the 2020 Presidential Campaign—has already been written, and is just waiting for Biden's touch of humanity.

That speech, delivered by the late Robert F. Kennedy on April 5, 1968, at the Cleveland City Club, has long been overshadowed by the powerful and historic speech he made the night before in Indianapolis, when he learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Kennedy's extraordinarily emotional speech, sharing the pain of losing his own brother to an assassin's bullet, helped keep Indianapolis peaceful that night, when cities across the country erupted in grief, anger, and violence to the news of Dr.King's killing.

While the Indianapolis speech by RFK is available all over YouTube, and taught in speech, communications, and history programs across the country as a shining example of public speaking having an immediate, positive impact, the mostly forgotten address he delivered at the Cleveland City Club the following day—to a mostly wealthy, white audience — is far more relevant to this dangerous moment in our nation's history. The Biden-Harris campaign would be wise to adapt it for delivery immediately, in a troubled American city like Kenosha or Minneapolis.

The Biden-Harris team can get the full text of RFK's speech from the John F, Kennedy Library archives (or use this text, with some italicized additions and transitions of my own).:

…. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. (The killing of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, and the shooting of Jacob Blake are but the most current examples).

This is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands, (and of the clearly preventable deaths of more than 180,000 of our fellow Americans by a current killer called COVID.)

We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire (and to turn those deadly weapons on schools filled with young children, concerts, or stores filled with friends and neighbors, or on crowds of law-abiding Americans of all ages, backgrounds and skin color, exercising their Constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly).

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others (as Donald Trump did in 1989, when he took out full-page newspaper ads in NYC advocating the death penalty, for five young men of color who were later aquitted by DNA evidence of committing the crime for which they served years in prison). Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Kennedy continued before the packed Cleveland City Club audience, sounding as if he was eerily foreshadowing the rise of Trump and his supporters among Q-Anon, the Boogaloo boys, and others:

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Then Kennedy, like many citizens participating in today's Black Lives Matter movement, spoke eloquently of systemic, institutional racism in the United States:

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

… When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies - to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. (That doesn't reflect the standard of equal justice under law in this democracy.)

We learn… to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet, we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

(Pay attention, Donald Trump—this part is all about you.)

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

But, perhaps, we can remember (the teachings of all the great religions of the world): That those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness…

(Nothing else matters. That's why we each must rise to meet this moment.)



Echoing RFK, Biden Converts Progressive Values Into Mainstream Power

Echoing RFK, Biden Converts Progressive Values Into Mainstream Power

This article was produced by Face to Face, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s stunning Super Tuesday victory, in which he swept at least nine of 14 states, has been attributed mostly to a variety of important tactical developments. These include South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn’s endorsement, leading to the momentum producing a blowout victory in South Carolina, and the consolidation of moderate candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar behind Biden.

All these were important, but also significant may have been Biden’s brilliant appeal to American values in his South Carolina victory speech on the night of February 29. The 12-minute speech, which Biden explicitly directed to a national audience, conveyed a set of values that speak deeply to a broad cross-section of Americans—but which progressives sometimes struggle to articulate.

Biden spoke of faith, family, country, and other values that were reminiscent of another progressive political figure from an earlier era: Robert F. Kennedy. As we note in a new report, RFK’s short-lived 1968 campaign for president spoke directly to seven values and had considerable appeal across sometimes-conflicting constituencies.

When Kennedy ran, our country was deeply divided, as it is today. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed that spring, race riots set cities on fire summer after summer, and the war in Vietnam raged on, yet RFK found a way to be the candidate most likely in the public’s eyes to make progress on race relations and was also seen as the law and order candidate. He had deep support among African Americans and he had appeal to working-class white people; even some who had supported segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.

RFK’s campaign reflected seven values that we believe were crucial to his broad and deep support. Candidate Biden’s South Carolina victory speech hit on many of them. So let’s review them in order.

To begin with, RFK punched up, but never down. Robert Kennedy criticized privileged people who didn’t pay their fair share of taxes, but he never looked down on less educated whites, the way some contemporary progressives can do. Biden opened his speech in this spirit, “For all those of you who’ve been knocked down, counted out, left behind. This is your campaign. Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared this candidacy dead.”

He continued, “Stand up and give the poor a fighting chance and the middle class get restored.”

Second, RFK represented the importance of family. Kennedy family members were widely known for their loyalty to one another, and Kennedy talked frequently on the campaign trail about his children.

In South Carolina, Biden spoke from the heart about the tragic shooting of nine worshipers at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston four and a half years ago as it related to the importance of family. He explained, “That’s why the Sunday after, Jill and I and my family, we came back to Mother Emanuel on Sunday services after the funeral of the victims because six weeks earlier, we had lost our son Beau, and we needed to be healed too. … We needed whatever they were exuding. … We left here, having arrived in overwhelming pain, thinking, ‘We can do this. We can get through this.’”

Third, RFK emphasized the patriotic duty of Americans. He believed America was a special country, and that all Americans have a duty to make it better.

In his South Carolina victory speech, Biden conveyed how much he loves this country and how pained he was to see it divided: “This is a battle for the soul of the United States of America. We are in an incredibly perilous moment, as all of you know. Winning means uniting America, not sowing more division and anger. It means not only fighting but healing the country. We have to beat Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but here’s the deal: We can’t become like them. … We can’t have a never-ending war. Above all, it’s time for America to get back up.”

Then Biden reached to the best ideals of the founders. “The country is so ready, so ready. Once again, fight for the proposition that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights. We say it all the time, but we’ve never fully lived up to it. But we’ve never before until this president walked away from it. And it’s the reason why Jim and I and all of us are in this. I believe with every fiber of my being, that all men and women are created equal.”

Fourth, RFK signaled a respect for people’s religious faith. He took communion with Farm Workers union leader Cesar Chavez, and was at ease using spiritual language that resonates with millions of Americans.

In South Carolina, Biden deeply honored faith as he offered details about Christians at prayer: “You know, I saw it a few days ago in a town hall in Charleston. … I spoke with Reverend Anthony Thompson, whose wife Myra was studying the words of her Bible with eight other parishioners in Mother Emanuel. … It was a weekly routine reading scripture and finding purpose and faith in God and each other.”

Fifth, RFK continually underlined the dignity of work. Kennedy favored jobs over welfare, and once remarked: “Unemployment means having nothing to do—which means having nothing to do with the rest of us.”

Biden hit this note in South Carolina when he said we need “an economy that works [and that] rewards work, not just wealth. My dad used to say, ‘Joe, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck; it’s about your dignity. It’s about decency; it’s respect. It’s about your place in the community—being able to look your kid in the eye and say, honey, it’s going to be okay.’ For all our families, for all our communities, because that’s the right thing to do.”

Sixth, RFK denounced excessive materialism in favor of what really matters in American life. The gross domestic product, Kennedy said, does not measure “the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. … It can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Likewise, Biden called us to something deeper, more profound: “you know what I found the most remarkable thing in my career thus far—remarkable about Reverend Thompson and the families of the Emanuel Nine? It’s through all that pain, all that grief, they forgave. And here’s the deal: In their forgiveness, they brought more change to South Carolina than any that’s occurred over the previous 100 years.”

He added, “And with every season that’s passed, they’ve gotten up and found purpose to live life worthy of the ones they lost.”

Seventh, RFK emphasized the importance of respecting the law. Unlike other candidates in 1968, RFK saw no contradiction between advocating justice and civil rights and also emphasizing that as attorney general, he had been the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer.”

Biden, likewise, has long supported law enforcement and blended that support with protection of civil rights. In the South Carolina speech, he combined the two by talking about the importance of stamping out hate crimes like the one committed at Mother Emanuel Church.

He rejected the call from some right-wing pundits to use crime as a racial wedge and instead sought to unify people of different races. “We need to build on the coalition and legacy of the most successful president in our lifetime, Barack Obama. And the way we do this is by bringing Americans together of every race, ethnicity, gender, economic station, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people of every stripe.”

As Biden concluded his remarks, he effectively wove together the love of country, commitment to family and a call to something deeper—all the time punching up and not down.

“The days of Donald Trump’s divisiveness will soon be over,” he said. “This multi-ethnic country we call our democracy, America, it can’t survive unless we focus on our goodness. We can build a more perfect union because the American people in the last three and a half years have seen the alternative. … They’ve seen how utterly mean, selfish, [with a] lack of any sense of empathy or concern for anybody else” President Trump has been. “A president who not only has horrible policies, but the way he mocks and makes fun of other people.”

Addressing the audience, Biden said, “We can say without fear of contradiction, the Bidens love you guys, man. The Bidens love you. That’s real.”

He concluded: “We’re better than this present. So, get up; take back our country. This is the United States of America. There’s nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Jim Clyburn said on a CNN interview on March 4 that he needed to “feel” Joe Biden. He elaborated by explaining that sometimes his constituents will say to him, “I hear you, but I need to feel you.”

In what some have called Biden’s best speech of the campaign, he began to make people “feel” him, in a way that is reminiscent of another very special progressive politician who ran at a time of national division more than a half-century earlier, RFK. While the recent tactical developments (the endorsements for Biden by Clyburn, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar) help explain the resurrection of Joe Biden, something deeper, related to profound American values, may have played a part as well.

Simon Greer is a writing fellow for Face to Face, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been involved in social change work for more than 25 years. Greer is the founder of Cambridge Heath Ventures, a strategic advisory firm that works with private sector companies, purpose-driven organizations and governments to help them overcome their most pressing challenges. Greer is also a leading thinker, practitioner and speaker on organizational design, unconventional strategies and common good politics.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the editor of The Future of Affirmative Action: New Paths to Higher Education Diversity after Fisher v. University of Texas (2014).

Holder And RFK’s Legacy

Holder And RFK’s Legacy

WASHINGTON — When he announced his leave-taking last week, Attorney General Eric Holder spoke of Robert F. Kennedy as his inspiration for believing that the Justice Department “can and must always be a force for that which is right.”

There are many reasons why our nation’s first African-American attorney general might see Kennedy as his guide, but this one may be the most important: If ever a public figure was exempt from Holder’s much contested depiction of our country as a “nation of cowards” on race, it was RFK, a man who was in constant struggle with his demons and his conscience.

Few white men were as searing as Kennedy in describing how the world looked to a young black man in the late 1960s. “He is told that the Negro is making progress,” Kennedy wrote, following the racial etiquette of his time. “But what does that mean to him? He cannot experience the progress of others, nor should we seriously expect him to feel grateful because he is no longer a slave, or because he can vote or eat at some lunch counters.”

“How overwhelming must be the frustration of this young man — this young American,” Kennedy continued, “who, desperately wanting to believe and half believing, finds himself locked in the slums, his education second-rate, unable to get a job, confronted by the open prejudice and subtle hostilities of a white world, and seemingly powerless to change his condition or shape his future.”

Yet Kennedy was never one to let individuals escape responsibility for their own fates. So he also spoke of others who would tell this young black man “to work his way up, as other minorities have done; and so he must. For he knows, and we know, that only by his efforts and his own labor will the Negro come to full equality.”

Holder and his friend President Obama have lived both halves of Kennedy’s parable. Like social reformers in every time, they strived to balance their own determination to succeed with their obligations to justice. Doing this is never easy. It can’t be.

Kennedy was not alone among Americans in being tormented by how much racism has scarred our national story. That’s why I was one of many who bristled back in 2009 when Holder called us all cowards. For all our flaws, few nations have faced up to a history of racial subjugation as regularly and comprehensively as we have. And Holder and Obama have both testified to our progress.

Yet rereading Kennedy is to understand why Holder spoke as he did. That the young man Kennedy described is still so present and recognizable tells us that complacency remains a subtle but corrosive sin. One of Holder’s finest hours as attorney general was his visit to Ferguson, MO, after the killing of Michael Brown. Many young black men still fear they will be shot, a sign that the “open prejudice and subtle hostilities of a white world” have not gone away. We have moved forward, yet we still must overcome.

Holder leaves two big legacies in this area from which his successors must not turn away. In the face of a regressive Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, he has found other ways to press against renewed efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. And it is a beacon of hope that sentencing reform and over-incarceration, central Holder concerns, are matters now engaging conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike.

The New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo captured the irony of Holder’s tenure with the observation that his time as attorney general “is unique in that his biggest supporters are also among his loudest critics.” Many progressives have been troubled by his record on civil liberties in the battle against terrorism, his aggressive pursuit of journalists’ emails and phone records in leak investigations, and his reluctance to prosecute individual Wall Street malefactors.

That these issues will long be debated is a reminder that Holder was first a lawyer and public servant, most of whose work had nothing to do with race. That he singled out Kennedy as his hero shows that none of us need be imprisoned by race. That Holder cajoled and provoked us on the need “to confront our racial past, and our racial present” is itself an achievement that transcends the color line.

Kennedy, who spoke of those who braved “the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society,” would understand the risks that Holder ran.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

AFP Photo/Alex Wong

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