Do Conservatives Actually Like RFK Jr., or Do They Just Think He’ll Hurt Biden?
After saying he would problem President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noticed a burst of recognition, polling as excessive as 21 %. Extra notable than a Kennedy polling properly amongst Democrats, nevertheless, could be that RFK Jr. has obtained substantial help from figures on the suitable. This raises the query of whether or not that help is honest.
“Dismissing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could be a mistake,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote at Nationwide Evaluation, arguing that Kennedy might “revive left-leaning skepticism of presidency and company energy” and “denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA as well.” Tucker Carlson mentioned of Kennedy on his Fox Information present, “it is good to have a reality teller round.”
Former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully went additional this week, describing Kennedy in Nationwide Evaluation as a fearless iconoclast. “The supply of Kennedy’s troubles is a power incapacity to tolerate the mental dishonesty he finds in his antagonists,” Scully wrote. “He would totally get better, returning to the lifetime of liberal accolades he as soon as knew, if solely he did not have a lot integrity.”
As Motive‘s Matt Welch has written, Kennedy has an extended and shameful historical past of authoritarian pronouncements, together with stating that his political opponents ought to be arrested and dissenting firms “given the dying penalty.” Kennedy additionally praised Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez because the “type of chief my father and President Kennedy have been on the lookout for.”
And that is to say nothing of what turned Kennedy’s signature difficulty for almost 20 years: a full-scale opposition to vaccines that solely intensified in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the years, he has repeatedly in contrast vaccination to Nazi experiments, together with utilizing the time period “holocaust.”
Scully huffs that tarring Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer is “lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing concerning the deserves of his arguments or about what has or has not really been ‘debunked.'” Nevertheless, Kennedy’s long-held insistence that there’s a causal hyperlink between childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum dysfunction has been debunked. Kennedy’s prediction that Invoice Gates would design a COVID-19 vaccine with a microchip, ushering in a cashless society, has additionally proved incorrect. He has additional claimed, with out proof, that 5G wi-fi alerts “might have nearly unimaginably devastating impacts on our well being [and] surroundings”; and that they’ll allow insidious forces to “harvest our knowledge and management our conduct.”
Throughout the pandemic, many conservatives turned in opposition to vaccines, each the businesses that make them and the individuals who mandate we take them. However there may be one other difficulty that places Kennedy and the suitable at odds.
Final 12 months, Nationwide Evaluation—in whose pages Dougherty and Scully gushed over Kennedy’s refreshing seriousness—revealed a employees editorial claiming, “The U.S. ought to have zero hesitation to utilize its power assets,” summing it up with, “Drill, child, drill!” And in July 2022, Carlson mentioned on his Fox present, “Fossil fuels are the one factor that make america a wealthy nation and never a poor nation.”
Kennedy, in the meantime, served on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fee on hydraulic fracturing, higher often known as “fracking”; the fee efficiently lobbied Cuomo to ban the follow. In 2016, Kennedy secretly lobbied New York Legal professional Basic Eric Schneiderman to impose a “company dying penalty” by terminating ExxonMobil’s authority to function inside the state. Kennedy’s marketing campaign web site guarantees that his platform will embody “curbing mining, logging, oil drilling, and suburban sprawl.”
So, why would conservatives help a leftist with whom they agree on precisely one difficulty?
Final 12 months, teams aligned with Democrats spent tens of tens of millions of {dollars} boosting intolerant Republican main candidates to sabotage reasonable Republicans who would’ve had a greater probability of successful a normal election. These fringe Republicans received their respective primaries however misplaced to Democrats within the November normal elections. The follow was controversial even inside the social gathering: Thirty-five former Democratic elected officers condemned the tactic in the course of the main season, calling it “harmful” and “dangerous and unethical.”
Maybe Republicans at the moment are boosting Kennedy—an eco-warrior who needs to jail his opponents and shut down corporations that disagree with him—not out of a honest want to see him prevail however to weaken Joe Biden. Or perhaps jailing opponents and shutting down dissident corporations at the moment are tenets of American conservatism.
Kennedy’s precise viability in a Democratic main is anybody’s guess, however he’s already polling higher in opposition to Biden than any of President Donald Trump’s intraparty challengers did in 2020.
