Robert F. Kennedy Jr: The Center Cannot Hold

RFK Jr's Bizarre Press Conference

One of the major takeaways from RFK Jr’s Friday press conference announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race, was noticing how much ground the worm in his brain has traversed, and how rather heartily it has dined. I’m speaking in metaphor, of course. The real worm died long ago, presumably the victim of severe indigestion. Kennedy has always had crackpot beliefs, sure. Whether it be a long debunked trope about vaccines causing autism, or Wi-Fi radiation disrupting your blood-brain barrier, or Atrazine in the water supply causing children to become trans, or prescription drugs causing school shootings—whether it be any of these, the man’s kite seems to soar high at the faintest breeze of bullshit that passes his way. He hasn’t heard a conspiracy theory that he doesn't like.

But Friday seemed different. He appeared exhausted and embittered, and even his conspiracy theories—about the Democrats, about the environment, about Ukraine—were at odds with one another. What sense does it make to complain about not being accepted warmly within the Democratic establishment as a primary challenger, and then later on say the party you wanted to represent is the party you “disagree with on the most existential issues?” What sense does it make to say that you could, with fairer treatment, have topped the Democratic ticket, while simultaneously saying that, as an independent, your own polling data shows you draw away more Republican votes? What sense does it make to say that it was undemocratic for the delegates to be handed to Vice President Harris after Biden dropped out (it’s not), then go on to say, that hey, maybe if you get enough votes in the states where you remain on the ballot, you can be bestowed the presidency by congress in the event of a contingent election? Ultimately, none of it makes sense, and once you strip away the bizarre rationalizations for his Trump endorsement (many of which I’ll discuss) what you have left is a man who tried to leverage his family name for political relevancy, and when that didn’t work, approached both parties for a smaller slice in the form of a cabinet position.

The irony of Kennedy’s complaints about intraparty obstacles and state requirements for ballot access, is that they exist, among other reasons, precisely for candidates like Kennedy. They prevent someone who doesn’t represent the core values of a party from attaining it’s highest position. Or, as with state laws, they prevent bad actors from appearing on ballots as an independent in order to take away votes from one candidate in favor of another. Imagine if it was much easier. Couldn’t someone like Roger Stone simply run in Pennsylvania with the promise of ending all aid to Israel, and free weed to college kids, in an effort to siphon off low information Democratic voters? In other words, it should be hard to get on the ballot, and should necessitate close scrutiny. The lawsuits filed against Kennedy were the result of that type of applied scrutiny, and they found inconsistencies in what the Kennedy campaign was reporting to the states he was petitioning. In one instance, it was found that he had listed a highly improbable residency address, possibly to skirt national election rules that state a candidate and his/her running mate, if they are from the same state (Kennedy’s running mate was from California, the state where Kennedy lives with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines), cannot be awarded that state’s electoral votes. Another lawsuit, for example, centered around the methods by which Kennedy gathered signatures for his campaign in Arizona. It found that he may have, in effect, taken an illegal campaign contribution by having a super pac provide all the legwork. Yes, Democratic aligned groups backed those lawsuits, but why shouldn’t they considering Kennedy’s suspicious behavior? In any case, how does he square his complaints about the Democratic Party placing its thumb on the scale for a candidate, with his decision to back the party whose primary committee, the RNC, is run by its candidate’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump?

This cognitive dissonance was scattered like birdshot throughout Kennedy’s whole speech. He bemoans the loss of the party he grew up in and what it has now become. But the upshot of all his complaints—that he’s endorsing Trump—is the result of living on another planet. He is either lying or being obtuse. The Democrats are now the party of war, he says (He misremembers the old Halcyon days of his youth. RFK Jr’s uncle was the first to send large numbers of troops to Vietnam. And his uncle’s successor, also a Democrat, started the war in full), so he’s decided to back the candidate who gave aid to Saudi Arabia for its proxy war in Yemen against the wishes of both houses of congress. The Democrats are the party of Big Pharma, so he’s endorsing the party that receives the most lobbying money from the pharmaceutical industry. The Democrats are no longer the party of the environment, so he’s hitting the campaign trail with the guy who calls Climate Change “a hoax.” The Democrats are now the party of Big Tech, so he’s joining the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Theil (who actually funded the political rise of Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance) among many others in hoisting that red MAGA flag. The Democrats are now the party of Big Agro, so he’s throwing in with Donald J. Trump, the President who sent the farming industry tens of billions of dollars that had not been appropriated by congress. The Democrats are pro censorship because they asked Facebook to follow their own standards and remove his wackjob medical advice during a pandemic, so he has no choice but to support the candidate who routinely recommends jailing journalists. The Democratic party is no longer the party of democracy, so he will slap his seal of approval on the attempt to subvert democracy through the use of false electors. This can go on and on, but there are just so many that I would have to be careful not to accidentally list one twice. Grasping the logic of any in his quick succession of justifications, feels like trying to grasp a ledge of any one floor while falling down an elevator shaft.

It is worth spending a little time, however, on his commentary about the Ukrainian war, because, I feel here, he is at his most insidious or daft. The United States is unusual in that, historically, isolationism exists on both the right and the left sides of the aisle. One of the forms it takes on the left, is the unspoken assumption that the other countries of the world don’t have agency while the United States does. I would cite Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi as quintessential examples. Kennedy follows this line confidently, deploying junk history and distortion of fact in its defense. Nearly everything he says on the topic is wrong. While he pays lip service to Putin being at fault for invading a sovereign country (“he had other options,” he remarks), the blame clearly lies with the U.S. No one else had agency. “The Ukraine war began in 2014, when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine” (a ghastly fabrication). “Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it is a victim of the West… both Russia and the West.” “We have forced Zelenskyy to tear up the agreement.” “We’ve pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran.” In addition to all of this being patently false, it is a completely unforgiveable insult to the Ukrainian people who have fought heroically when they could have simply folded in the initial days of the invasion. The United States did not force Vladimir Zelenskyy to drop out of negotiations, nor was there a finalized deal. Nor did the U.S send Boris Johnson (again, no other country has their own agency) to sabotage the talks. It’s true that the U.S and other western countries were wary about any proposed deal, but that was because many of the suggested requirements of a ceasefire would lock them into a security guarantee should the sovereignty of Ukraine be violated again. So the Biden administration, contrary to Kennedy’s suspicions of Neo Con warmongering, was positioning itself away from a possible future confrontation with Russia. But, make no mistake about it, the negotiations are between Russia and Ukraine, and we don’t know yet the exact reason why they dissolved. Some think that it was because of the hesitancy of western countries to provide that security guarantee. Some think territorial disputes. Others suggest it was Russia insisting that a clause be inserted cracking down on Naziism in Ukraine, which, need I remind you, was the very false pretense for Russia invading Ukrainian territory in the first place. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t blame Zelenskyy for shutting down talks. Putin could lie again and say that Ukraine is not following through on its commitments. Then what would a ceasefire treaty be worth? Kennedy is presuming to know things he cannot know. Or, he is lying.

A few other observations on Russia and Ukraine. Kennedy equating Russian owned media broadcasting propaganda with independent media companies in the United States covering a candidate favorably is profoundly unserious. Blaming the U.S. for squandering “the flower of Ukrainian youth” and the deaths of “as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids” (!) is an obscene statement to make even when not framed on stage by American flags. And even if we excuse his elisions on the history of supposed NATO expansion, and the U.S withdrawing from treaties (the two missile treaties that he mentions the U.S withdrawing from with particular ire, we rightly did in 2019 when we discovered Russia had been cheating, under the administration of a president he now endorses), where would that leave us? I guess we’re led to believe that Russia only invaded Ukraine because the U.S. was indicating perhaps, maybe at some future date, they would stand up for Ukraine should Russia invade, and the presumption that they would was so insulting to Moscow, that they went ahead and invaded Ukraine. And it’s America’s fault. What? If you follow this logic down to its bottom you reach absolute bedlam.

So is Kennedy being dishonest or has his mind reached the point where the center cannot hold? It’s not for me to say. But the fact that he claimed Biden was only mentioned twice in four days at the Republican National Convention, when it was in fact, spoken 393 times, makes me think there’s a lot of bad faith here. Notwithstanding the jumble in his head. Ultimately, RFK Jr’s endorsement of Trump, I think, is going to mean very little. When Democrats have already struck upon an effective strategy of calling MAGA culture “weird,” it probably doesn’t help Trump to have an old man get on stage at rallies and drone on about the puberty rates in adolescent girls. Imagine: “And now ladies and gentlemen, we bring out the guy who secretly dumped a bear carcass in Central Park to say a few words on behalf of Donald Trump.” Nor is each new story that comes out, and trust me they will, going to polish his image. In fact, just now as I’m writing this, it was announced that he was being investigated for illegally transporting the skull of a dead whale that he had lopped off with a chainsaw back in 1994. Good grief. What’s next?