Confessions of a Kennedy Supporter
It’s been a difficult year to be a Libertarian, our party has been pretty much destroyed and has been taken over by edgelords who have no experience running campaigns and with Cornel West seeking the green party nomination for president it’s likely that the LP is in its worst position since 2008. As a result I’ve felt politically homeless for the last couple of years, bouncing between defending Libertarianism as a whole and searching for candidates up and down the ballot that I can connect with on some level. This has resulted in me supporting two questionable candidates the first being Tulsi Gabbard (whom I consider to have a good voting record in congress) who after leaving office sounds more like Steve Bannon than Dennis Kuccinich, or Mike Gravel (two progressives that endorsed her) and the second being Robert F Kennedy Jr. During 2019 and 2020 I openly defended Tulsi Gabbard, always wore one of the many campaign buttons I received from her campaign, phone banked for her and donated, I did receive backlash from friends but still openly supported her. My support for Robert F Kennedy Jr in 2023 has been a very different experience.
I’ve always been critical of Kennedys, I think the family is corrupt and has a very dark history, I think JFK is somewhat overrated and is presented as a more anti-establishment president than he really was, and after living in a district represented by a Kennedy (Joe Kennedy III) I donated and volunteered against his opponent in a senate race. But something attracted me to RFK Jr, probably more than anything else it was the enemies he made, seemed to be the same ones that I felt I had. The Democratic establishment opposed him, the mainstream media censored him, and even Kennedys own family criticized him. I’m a contrarian by nature so I try to always catch myself when I play devil’s advocate. I hope I have been able to do that in regards to my support of Robert F Kennedy Jr, but I am not sure.
Kennedy has a lot of good and important things to say, especially compared to Joe Biden, the man he is running against. Biden is corrupt, old, and rarely speaks unscripted for more than a couple of minutes. Kennedy is not young but is over a decade younger than Biden, while he MIGHT spread misinformation I don’t see much evidence of his corruption and he seems honest albeit possibly wrong, and Kennedy speaks constantly, appearing on just about every podcast you can think of, every alternative media program, and even somewhat regularly appears on mainstream media programs. Since announcing his run for re-election the longest interview Biden has done was a 20 minute conversation with CNNs Fareed Zakaria which I can’t say was scripted but definitely appeared pretty well planned.
Kennedy is critical of the military industrial complex, for the most part this seems to be a prerequisite for me to support a candidate. Kennedy, like his uncle, has discussed reforming the CIA, and FBI. Kennedy has been critical of the Biden administration’s involvement in the war in Ukraine and has advocated finding a diplomatic solution. Kennedy has been unequivocally pro-choice which is also important to me particularly in the wake of Roe V Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, Biden claims to be pro-choice but has been a very fairweather defender of abortion rights throughout his career and has done very little to protect abortion access since being elected president. I am also attracted to Kennedy’s record on the environment and his belief in climate change.
Kennedy is most known for his criticism of vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry. I have been critical of what people call big pharma for years, going back to 2016 and my support for the Bernie Sanders campaign which ran hard against it. As a non-expert I am not a doctor and am in fact quite ignorant of medicine, Kennedy has been dismissed as an anti-science crank, media publications will frequently censor him and most recently Dr. Peter Hotez refused an opportunity to debate him for charity, when you see an interview with Kennedy he frequently cites government funded, and peer-reviewed studies to back up his claims, now when you look at these studies it does seem like they largely do support Kennedys claims but again it is difficult as a non-expert to evaluate them properly. On the other side the argument dismissing Kennedys claims goes more or less as follows “the scientific community has said that Kennedy is wrong”, which to me is not a very compelling argument.
There are valid criticisms to be had of Kennedy though, a couple months ago now Kennedy tweeted a defense of Roger Waters who was being ignorantly smeared for his wearing a leather jacket during concert performances (while performing the anti-fascist track “Run Like Hell”), however after backlash he deleted the tweet and launched a full throated defense of Israel disappointing many of his supporters. Now in the wake of comments made at a private dinner, where he said “”COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” and “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.” Kennedy runs to the arms of Israel again, to tell people that he is not anti-semetic. Now I don’t think Kennedy is anti-semetic but even though he did post a research paper that did confirm (at least in the abstract) his comments, his obsession with a relatively obscure study and mentioning it seemingly out of the blue is just kind of weird and unhelpful.
Kennedy has a ton of other red flags, he has no experience serving in government, no legislative experience, and has been inconsistent on issues like freedom of speech (at a protest several years ago he claimed that climate change deniers should be imprisoned), gun rights (supports gun control but “won’t take anybodys guns away”), and has flip flopped on healthcare many times, at current he seems to favor public option. I don’t know if my assessments of Kennedy are accurate, I think a lot of speaks to the problem every voter is having right now, “who do we trust?”, how do we avoid all the propaganda around us? Is it a choice between US propaganda, Chinese propaganda, Russian propaganda? How do we find the space between a healthy distrust of government and corporations and being a conspiracy nut? I don’t know and it scares me that a person as obsessed with history and politics as myself cannot come to a conclusion. These are scary times.
