According to a recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the backing of 22% of Americans in a hypothetical presidential contest against President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Is RFK Jr. a credible challenger to the status quo? Not at all.
The United States faces innumerable problems, both at home and abroad. Runaway federal spending has resulted in painful inflation, which has devalued the savings and purchasing power of the American people.
The American people are as polarized as they have ever been, increasingly retreating to respective cultural and media silos, rendering many incapable of engaging with those with different ideas than themselves. America continues to find itself dragged into conflicts on the other side of the planet, risking further loss of American blood and treasure.
It’s frankly bad enough that the offerings of the two major parties are Biden and Trump, who have both proven incapable of doing their jobs with the support of even close to a majority of the American people. But those looking for an alternative should certainly not look to someone like RFK Jr. to guide America out of this difficult time.
Yes, he has a stellar name in politics. And sure, like anyone, he is capable of saying some things that make sense. But let’s be real. If he didn’t have the name he has, if he didn’t come from the political and financial fortune of the Kennedy family, he would be just another conspiracy theorist hawking bizarro books.
RFK Jr. built his personal reputation as a relentless foe of one of the most successful medical interventions in human history: the vaccine. Through his writings and public pronouncement, he has fueled the long-debunked idea that vaccinations are linked to autism, which is fundamentally just preying on the fears of parents. He has gone so far as to describe the impact of vaccines as a “holocaust.”
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he said in 2021.
And like any conspiracy theorist, he finds conspiracies everywhere. Just this year, he has suggested COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews. While on the Joe Rogan podcast, he breathlessly explained “WiFi radiation opens up your blood brain barrier. And so all these toxics that are in your body can now go into your brain.”
None of this speaks well of RFK Jr.’s ability to separate fact from fiction, a skill all Americans should expect a president to be able to have.
RFK Jr.’s misapplied intelligence spills over to his political judgments. He once praised Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez as the “kind of leader my father and President Kennedy were looking for,” which is ahistorical at best and fantasist at worse. Not to mention a weird way to praise a communist tyrant.
The political status quo is untenable. Both the Republican Party and Democratic Party have failed to govern responsibly, instead fixating on wedge issues in order to just win the next election. But that doesn’t make RFK Jr. a credible alternative.
—The Editorial Board, Southern California News Group
