April 20, 2023 at 11:51 a.m.
River News: Our View
RFK Jr. for the Democratic presidential nomination
That's not an endorsement of Kennedy for president - at least at this point - but it is an endorsement of him for the Democratic nomination. And it is to acknowledge that, in this authoritarian age, and especially with an authoritarian Democratic Party, all candidates who stand up for our constitutional rights and against globalism should be seen as allies, no matter what may be significant differences on particular policies.
One question in this race is whether Kennedy can mount a credible challenge, given the Democratic establishment's overwhelming support for the president and also given Kennedy's controversial career as a vaccine skeptic and critic. Those who think he cannot win - as the mainstream media has assessed it so far - need only think back to 2016 when another populist outsider rode a wave of public discontent to win the Republican nomination and the presidency. This New York Daily News headline the day Trump announced his candidacy captured the prevailing mainstream attitude: "Clown runs for president." As it turns out, Trump turned out to be no clown, but he did get the last laugh, along the way exposing the clownish caricature of itself that the national media had become.
So yes, it is highly improbable, but it is not completely out of the question that another populist could do so again, or at least win the Democratic nomination, even if he would be riding a wave of discontent from the populist left rather than from the populist right.
Biden's so-called inevitability might be a suit of Emperors clothes anyway. Polls continue to show that a majority of Democrats don't want Biden to run again - just 37 percent in the latest Associated Press poll, and that mirrors a string of other polls. Even those who like Biden's policies say they want him to stand down; it's a constant running beneath the surface, a silent scream for another candidate.
The Democratic establishment - not to mention its servile progressive water carriers, including Bernie, AOC, and her squad - is determined not to let them have one. But if a candidate with his own charisma and iconic name, not to mention that Kennedy money, were to get loose in a Democratic primary and tap that desire for change, there's no telling what might happen. Much stranger things have happened.
Indeed, a Kennedy campaign would likely draw support from the populist right as well as the populist left, as former Trump chief of staff Steve Bannon told Mike Lindell on Lindell TV:
"RFK Jr. could jump into the Republican primary for president, and only DeSantis and Trump, I think, would do better."
That analysis looks sound, given Kennedy's rousing reception at conservative Hillsdale College this past weekend.
That is as it should be because, win or lose, a Kennedy candidacy would make a crucial contribution to the cause of freedom. We conservatives might (and do) disagree with many of his liberal policy proposals, but at his fundamental core he is not merely a committed civil liberties advocate but a staunch opponent of the bureaucratic, government, and corporate cartels that pose such an enormous threat to liberty today.
Simply put, a Kennedy candidacy would pose one more direct challenge to globalism, much like Trump's and DeSantis's candidacies do, and, when the constitution is at stake, every such candidacy is an ally in the cause of freedom, whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative. It's just that you don't expect one to arise from within the modern Democratic Party.
Of course, the establishment is already using the globalist media to try and destroy Kennedy's credibility, and they try to do so by resurrecting all those charges that he is just an anti-vax wing-nut. But, actually, when they do that, that just might make Kennedy's day, for several reasons.
The first is that Kennedy is not anti-vax, and neither is anyone else in the so-called anti-vax crazy house. What those who are wary of vaccines are opposed to is the onslaught of over-vaccination that Big Pharma and the government have imposed on the world, and on America especially.
Now the mRNA vaccines have been a debacle, with critics of their safety and efficacy increasingly prevailing in the public eye. Suddenly alternative vaccine schedules, and the safety and efficacy of all vaccines, are being revisited, while the CDC and the pharmaceutical companies have been exposed as the liars they are. In other words, Kennedy suddenly stands tall in a universe of compliant authoritarians. If not all his claims have been validated, they all now seem legitimate questions to pose and inquiries to undertake. For if the government was lying about the mRNA shots - and we believe they were - what others were they lying about?
Bottom line, the American public is more likely to listen to a reasoned voice on vaccines and questions about the public health establishment, as well as to a voice that has passionately stood up for civil liberties and who has called out lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. With Kennedy vindicated, the media's predictable attack on him - when the media itself has no credibility - seems destined to enhance rather destroy his campaign.
To be sure, Kennedy is a civil libertarian running in a deeply authoritarian party. That is to say, he could find himself a lone warrior facing a massive army of liberal coastal elites, woke corporations, bureaucratic collectivists, deep state apparatchiks, and military industrial warmongers. They all live within the Democratic Party. They are the Democratic Party that we conservatives have come to know and loathe.
The question, still unanswered, is whether rank-and-file Democrats are cut from the same cloth. We do understand that many who would seem open to support a Kennedy campaign and who once resided comfortably inside the party's confines, have actually fled the party, from Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald to former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to once proudly progressive Jenin Younes, who has helped launch a real civil liberties alternative to the now dishonorable ACLU.
In all, the old civil liberties wing of the party, once its anchor, set sail after the authoritarians rose to power. Will they return to support a Kennedy candidacy? Or will they stay away? The answer to those questions determines whether it is too late for the Democratic Party as a democratic and liberal alternative to a robust conservative and democratic party, as things once were.
More than anything, conservatives should care about Kennedy's campaign because the titanic struggle we face today is the struggle for liberty itself, and, at its core, that is a struggle against globalism and the tyranny that globalism represents. From the World Health Organization to the World Economic Forum to the UN and all their corporate and multinational partners, a giant metastasizing totalitarian order is coming to pass right before our very eyes, and it can only be confronted directly.
Nothing less than individual freedom is at stake. Now is no time for candidates to parade around pretending this totalitarian machine doesn't exist. Three years after the pandemic, that no longer is arguable. Who among the candidates gets that?
Well, Ron DeSantis does when he says: "I want to have the values not of Davos imposed on us but of places like Destin and Dunedin, where I grew up. Things like the World Economic Forum, those policies are dead on arrival in the state of Florida. We are not going to go down that road."
And Trump himself, ever the anti-globalist, gets it, too, as he says: "Globalization has made the financial elites who donate to politicians very wealthy, but it's left millions and millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache - and our towns and cities with empty factories and plants. We're fighting for Main Street, not Wall Street. We have rejected globalism and embraced patriotism."
Over in the Democratic Party, they are pretty much all corporate-bureaucratic globalists. But not Kennedy. His remarks are much more in line with those of DeSantis and Trump than of his fellow Democrats:
"Stop identifying yourself," Kennedy said last year. "The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity."
Kennedy understands that our own deep-state government is an undemocratic cabal and that the CIA not only has overthrown foreign governments (remember Salvador Allende?) but our own: "The CIA's murder of my uncle was a successful coup d'état from which our democracy has never recovered," Kennedy tweeted recently.
Now all that said, as we mentioned before, move beyond the foundational commitment to constitutional principles - these days that alone makes you a conservative - and into the larger house of political policy and there is much about Kennedy's positions to criticize. To cite just one example, climate change. While he is on record as a free market guy, he sadly supports much - though not all - of the Green New Deal, including carbon taxes and emission caps that would eviscerate the American economy.
In other words, his energy policy would jump us from the frying pan to the fire.
But the task there is to educate him as a misguided ally rather than as a political enemy. Kennedy the liberal is surely a different species than Kennedy the civil libertarian, and the latter is now the litmus test we should apply to any candidate of any party, for, without civil liberties, there will be no liberalism or conservatism, and certainly no debate between them and us, there will only be those in power and the rest of us without power.
The real dichotomy these days is not left-right so much as it is authoritarian-anti-authoritarian, and that latter category should be the first thing examined when considering candidates, though obviously not the last.
In the end, if Kennedy were to somehow capture the Democratic nomination, improbable as it might seem, in a face off in which perhaps most of us would support the GOP nominee, be it Trump or DeSantis, we could at the very least sleep well at night knowing the constitution was safe, no matter who won: No more lockdowns, no more censorship, no more mandates, less bureaucratic control over our lives, and an absolutist approach to the constitution and civil liberties.
And so we welcome Mr. Kennedy to the campaign trail and wholeheartedly support his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
How could we not, when we have such a candidate who knows the stakes? The other night, in his speech at Hillsdale College, Kennedy left his audience with three thoughts, and we pass them on to you in this historic week:
"Any power that government takes from the people, it will never return voluntarily," Kennedy said. "Every power that government takes, it will ultimately be abused to the maximum extent possible. And nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism. The only thing we can do is resist."
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