President John F. Kennedy’s nephew wants his uncle’s old job and hopes to give Joe Biden a run for his money. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is challenging Biden from the center and has declared his candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination.
Kennedy will be an interesting challenger to Biden, as he has some interesting views, to say the least.
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Kennedy is best known for his activism against vaccines and the COVID-19 vaccine and its related mandates. Most coverage of his announcement has focused on this and editorialized that Kennedy is a “vaccine conspiracy theorist” because he links vaccines with autism.
He represents the old-style populist liberalism of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle. He strongly opposes the contemporary Democratic Party’s merger of state and corporate power exemplified by Big Tech monopolies and the radicalism represented by “The Squad.”
His father was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan while campaigning for president in California in 1968.
“If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race,” he wrote in a tweet announcing his intent to run. “If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.”
Kennedy’s outspoken controversial views on vaccines have gotten him banned from Facebook and Instagram.
He represents the ideology held by his father and his uncle that has fallen out of favor in the Democratic Party in recent years.
Kennedy has been outspoken against the national security state and its weaponization against political opponents. He filed a class-action lawsuit last month against Biden, Anthony Fauci, other top administration officials and numerous federal agencies including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury Department, and FBI.
“The collaboration between the White House and health and intelligence agency bureaucrats to silence criticism of presidential policies is an assault on the most fundamental foundation stone of American Democracy,” Kennedy wrote on Twitter.
Kennedy Hates the CIA
Disdain for the CIA is a Kennedy family tradition.
Kennedy’s father believed the CIA killed President John F. Kennedy, and he similarly blamed the agency for murdering his uncle. President Kennedy reportedly disliked the CIA in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the New York Times reported after his assassination that he wanted to “splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces.”
He has questioned the CIA’s effort to keep information about the Kennedy assassination from coming to light.
On foreign policy, Kennedy has criticized the “Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power.” He blames it for the rise of Chinese influence and the recent deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon’s short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence,” Kennedy wrote on Twitter.
The Family Is Not Aligned With Him
Kennedy has generated controversy within his own family due to his stances. His sister, Kerry Kennedy, who regards herself as a “Progressive” slammed his stances on Twitter last year saying, “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric. He does not represent the views of @RFKHumanRights or our family.”
She made her comment after her brother compared vaccine mandates with the Nazis.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said. “Today the mechanisms are being put in place to make it so that none of us can run and none of us can hide.
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Kennedy continued: “They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.”
Kennedy’s bid for his party’s nomination is a long shot. His ideas are embraced by more Republicans today than Democrats.
An appearance at an event with longtime Republican fixer and Trump backer Roger Stone in 2021 exemplifies this.
John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.