Do You Take Robert Kennedy Jr Seriously As A Democratic Presidential Candidate?

How About As A VP Candidate On A GOP Ticket?

Apparently, some people are taking Steve Bannon-plant Robert Kennedy Jr seriously as a presidential candidate. There’s no chance I would ever vote for Joe Biden— and, for entirely different reasons, I won’t be voting for Kennedy either. The latest poll of Democratic primary voters from Fox showed Kennedy with a startling 19%. No wonder Ramaswarmy wants him as a running mate! On Sunday, Kennedy was on the air with big time Republican Party donor John Catsimatidis reminding people that his anti-vax nuttery isn’t the only conspiracy thoughts in his mind. He told Catsimatidis that “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his [uncle JFK’s] murder. I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point… When my uncle was president, he was surrounded by a military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus that was constantly trying to get him to go to war in Laos, Vietnam, etc. He refused. He said that the job of the American presidency is to keep the nation out of war.” He also said that CIA involvement with his father’s assassination is “very convincing, but is circumstantial… We do not have the really strong documentary testimonial evidence that we have with my uncle.” [I should probably mention that when I was 16 I worked for RFK as an elevator operator and heard intense conversations he had with his top staffers everyday all summer long, all of whom treated me like... furniture.]

A couple of days ago, Alex Seitz-Wald reported that Kennedy’s “first appearance as a presidential candidate will be at a cryptocurrency conference in Miami this month as the iconoclastic Democrat embraces a controversial industry that environmentalists say is a major contributor to climate change… Before stumping in an early primary state like New Hampshire, Kennedy will keynote the Bitcoin 2023 conference, billed as the ‘biggest bitcoin event in the world,’ where tickets start at $899 and the all-access VIP ‘Whale’ pass goes for $9,999.”

While many policymakers turned away from the crypto industry after a series of high-profile failures that wiped out small-time investors and led to federal fraud charges, Kennedy has positioned himself as one of the nation’s most prominent political champions of cryptocurrency.

Anthony Scaramucci, the crypto-friendly investor who briefly served as Trump's communications director, said Kennedy’s promotion of cryptocurrency could endear him to its millions of devoted users.

“In my mind, there’s this shadow fandom or currently invisible lobbying group— and it’s probably currently about 77 million people— of bitcoin or other cryptocurrency holders in the United States,” said Scaramucci, who was quick to say he did not agree with all of Kennedy’s beliefs. “I think it’s going to be a topical issue in 2024, and I would imagine that one of these presidential nominees will embrace bitcoin. And if they do, that’ll give them an edge.”

While the bitcoin community has “a libertarian bent by nature" that may not align with most Democrats, Scaramucci said, “these are people who are typically agnostic to party."

The only other political leaders speaking at Bitcoin 2023 are Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy— who said he considered picking Kennedy as his running mate— Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and the governor of the Indonesian state of West Java.

In a series of tweets, Kennedy echoed libertarian views of cryptocurrency as a tool to fight repressive governments and hailed it as "a major innovation engine."

“Monetary freedom is as important as freedom of speech. Without it, we are slaves,” Kennedy wrote. “It’s not outlandish to imagine that even here in America, your bank account could one day be frozen because of your politics, or comments you’ve made on social media.”

As U.S. regulators look to impose new guardrails on cryptocurrency, Kennedy defended the industry from what he called an “extra-legal war on crypto” and suggested the “FDIC/SEC war on crypto caused failures of [Silicon Valley Bank], Signature and Silvergate banks.”

The stance puts Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who founded the nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance, at odds with most other environmentalists, who say cryptocurrencies' enormous energy consumption is a major contributor to climate change.

A major study published last year found that crypto may contribute as much to climate change as the beef or crude oil industries, especially since miners seeking rock-bottom electricity rates often turn to dirtier sources of electricity.

And that brings us to Who What Why and Russ Baker’s essay, How Robert F. Kennedy Jr., His Presidential Candidacy and Vaccine Views, Help Trump. Baker supports Kennedy’s skepticism about how his uncle and father were murdered. “Bobby Jr.’s willingness to endure a broad range of risks for talking about that topic impressed me,” wrote Baker, “and led me to look at what else he has said, including his bracing critique of the military-intelligence-industrial complex.”

Beyond that… Well, Baker wrote, “Unfortunately, the good news ends there. It’s one thing to recognize real conspiracies and another to embrace all kinds of disinformation in keeping with his preconceived ideas, which are not supported by fact. Which takes us to RFK Jr.’s views on public health.

His outspoken positions and continuous leadership of the anti-vaccination movement are a huge blot on his overall record. Because it’s such a striking and profound departure from evidence-based logic, I think it instantly disqualifies him as a presidential candidate.

Now, I know plenty of people who buy the line that the COVID-19 vaccines— or all vaccines— are dangerous. Such people cite so-called “experts” and outliers who present “evidence” of grave danger from vaccines— evidence that has been discredited by the vast majority of medical and scientific personnel worldwide. A number of anti-vax celebrities are known to have personal grudges against the establishment that affect their motives and their credibility.

I am far from an expert, but as a journalist with a bias toward evidence that has been carefully and neutrally vetted, I see the overwhelming benefit of vaccines in general, and the COVID-19 vaccines in particular.

The number of people who have benefited appears to be exponentially greater than those suffering complications.

To be sure, any intelligent person should welcome continuous close scrutiny of big pharma, our profit-driven medical institutions, and big government. That’s just common sense and applicable to everything.

But assertions on the issues that Kennedy and his coterie are using to trigger a significant minority in this country simply don’t check out.

Yet, as with the MAGA contingent and the avid Fox News audience, any contradictory facts only harden their views. There’s a reason this is very generously called “magical thinking.”

Kennedy is one of these people, a magical thinker, at least on this topic. A mutual friend of his and mine told me that if anyone, even family members, tries to raise doubts, he bristles and warns them to drop it.

…Taking an extreme position against public health measures for the common good— the kind of measures that over time have been preponderantly successful— he claimed that anyone who dared to resist vaccination faced some horrible fate at the hands of a tyrannous state. To underscore this point, he reached for extreme and grossly inappropriate examples. To wit:

Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

There are moments when Kennedy sounds like Marjorie Taylor Greene, as in this Instagram post:

And in a tweet he sent out on April 24, Kennedy implies Tucker Carlson was fired because he “told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content,” as if there were no other reasons.

Fox fires Tucker Carlson five days after he crosses the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers. Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless…

This country faces too many complex challenges and perils to turn the presidency over to someone who lacks good judgment on a subject as important as this. He shouldn’t be president, and even his spoiler role is a bad and terribly dangerous idea— given the overall stakes.

None other than the villainous Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser, spent months trying to convince RFK Jr. to run. Bannon is expert at generating chaos, and he’s found the perfect vehicle.

Meanwhile, Roger Stone has proposed a “dream ticket”— Trump and Kennedy, together. Yes, this is actually happening.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where this is headed. It’s obviously not good for the country, not good for humanity. Now is the time to speak up to head off potential disaster.

And I’m sure Bannon approves of— or wrote— his sad, crackpot views on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine: