RFK, Jr Saturday, Part 2— Bernie Weighs The Pros And Cons

I Have Anti-Trump Friends Who Are Rooting For His RFK, Jr Pick

In the mid-70s I lived in Amsterdam and much of my life centered on the Kosmos, Europe’s largest meditation center, where I worked in their macrobiotic restaurant, starting as a dishwasher and ending as a chef and manager. Earlier, in college, my girlfriend was an amazing cook— and a vegetarian. We never discussed it but she turned me into a vegetarian. On my overland trip across Asia to India (“the Hippie Trail”), when everyone else was getting grotesquely ill with diseases like the Kabul Runs, my vegetarianism kept me unaffected. Healthy eating has been part of my life since the ‘60s. Most of my life has been spent as a vegan, although now I would have to describe myself as pescaterian, even if I just eat fish a couple times a month. I swim every day and exercise daily. For years I only ate raw food. I don’t eat much cheese at all but when I do, it’s raw cheese— like RFK, Jr. does.

Many of my Kosmos friends eschew vaccines and made no exception when COVID hit. One visited me in L.A. recently and told me he had gotten COVID 6 times as well as a very serious case of SARS that nearly killed him.

When I was in Amsterdam recently some of my Kosmos friends who I visited looked at me like I was insane— and a traitor— when I told them I had been vaccinated and boosted. They had been severely ill, but were glad they hadn’t been vaccinated. All of these people were rooting for RFK, Jr to be president. They didn’t see him as a crackpot at all. They saw him as a hero who represented central tenets of their lives.

I doubt Bernie will vote to confirm him as Secretary of Health and Human Services but on Thursday, he told Natalie Brand of CBS News that “I think what he’s saying about the food industry is exactly correct. I think you have a food industry concerned about their profits, could care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.”

Yesterday, writing for the right-wing National Review, Brittany Bernstein reported that “In several interviews this week, Sanders, chair of the Senate health committee, has found common ground with Kennedy over their shared criticism of processed food and corporate greed in the food industry. ‘When Kennedy talks about an unhealthy society, he’s right,’ Sanders told Business Insider in an interview published Thursday. ‘The amount of chronic illness that we have is just extraordinary. We want our people to have long lives, productive lives, happy lives. That’s what we want,’ he said. ‘And if the industry is giving our kids food that’s making them overweight, leading to diabetes and other illnesses, clearly that’s an issue that we’ve got to deal with.’”

Still, Sanders said some of Kennedy’s other stances— including his outspoken position against vaccines and his desire to remove fluoride from public water— are “kind of crazy” and “extremely dangerous.”

But overall, Sanders acknowledged  “some of what he’s saying is not crazy.”