Yes, we all know Donald Trump is a threat to Joe Biden winning in 2024. But what about a threat in his own party to winning the nomination?
Liberal pundits are shaking their heads, straining to understand why Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a 2024 Democratic fringe candidate, is tracking around 20 percent against incumbent President Joe Biden.
Kennedy is running on the idea that “powerful people have been working in secret to deceive you,” as The Washington Post described it. Well? Are we really so surprised that such a message is resonating in 2023?
Kennedy’s “alarmist” messaging “has so far allowed 69-year-old Kennedy, in the six weeks since announcing his long-shot campaign, to become President Biden’s most surprising and successful competitor.”
And again, rather than taking a look around, or trying to understand why a guy like Kennedy might be trending, Democrats dismiss the candidate and the message out of hand. It’s the attitude and the response that helped get Trump elected in 2016. It’s the eye roll. It’s the instant and demeaning categorization (Tulsi Gabbard is an isolationist, Trump is a racist, Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist).
It’s the behavior that has helped create the perception that the Democratic Party is blissfully removed from the concerns of the average American.
The Kennedy appeal should worry Joe Biden
I’m not going to vouch for every idea that comes out of RFK, Jr’s mouth. This article is less about the specifics of RFK’s arguments and more about the receptiveness of the American public to those arguments (and the Democratic Party’s willful ignorance of that receptiveness).
However, I will say that, although RFK says some things I’m not on board with, there is something reasonable about one of his foundational points. Maybe I’m framing things in a way that is overly charitable towards RFK, but here it is: RFK was an environmental lawyer who saw firsthand how devious and harmful oil companies could be. With that lesson in hand, RFK developed a deep skepticism toward pharmaceutical companies and the vaccines those companies were distributing.
Unreasonable? At its core, no. RFK may go too far, but I think anyone who has read Empire of Pain or Dopesick can appreciate that treating pharmaceutical companies with skepticism is a best practice. And of course, RFK’s message is resonating now because of the COVID pandemic, in which society shut down while we all waited for everyone to get vaccinated, and then we got vaccinated, and then we learned firsthand that the vaccine failed to prevent us from contracting the coronavirus and perhaps didn’t even prevent transmission, which of course was the primary function of the vaccine and the primary reason that society and the economy and life itself ground to a halt while we waited for the vaccine to become readily available. I’m angry about it. A lot of reasonable people are angry about it. Yet when a candidate spouts rhetoric that taps into that anger, the liberal punditry scoffs.
And it’s not even about the specifics – it’s not about vaccines or quarantine. And it’s not even about the pandemic. It’s about the procedure, it’s about the conversation. Democrats have settled into an abhorrent habit of automatically smearing anyone that says anything that does not immediately and comprehensively conform with the approved-of narrative.
The result is that important conversations (i.e. should society shut down while we wait for this vaccine?) are being bypassed. And anyone who suggests that the conversation not be bypassed, anyone who challenges the approved-of narrative, is written off as a quack or a racist or a zealot. The result has been a noxious climate that chills debate and free thought and if you see a guy like RFK trending it’s because I’m not the only one sick of it.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
From 19FortyFive
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