Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential candidacy is a stale meme that’s yet to go viral, unlike the more than 100 U.S. children who’ve contracted measles so far this year because some silver spoon loaf-brain told their parents vaccinations were for losers.
But while Kennedy is likely to become president right around the time Donald Trump scrawls a working unified field theory into his mashed potatoes, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still dangerous. One of RFK Jr.’s campaign consultants has already confirmed he’s a likely spoiler for Donald Trump, but he could still leach more votes away from Trump than Biden, despite his progressive-ish pedigree. And hey, we can help make that happen—by showing the world that this longtime “Democrat” turned independent presidential candidate has a lot more in common with Trump than any Democrat.
The latest evidence that Kennedy is more dog-whistling, conspiracy reactionary than True Blue Democrat comes in the form of a podcast interview he did with right-wing something-or-other Tim Pool. His answer on Confederate statues—and the appropriateness of “honoring” a seditious, virulently racist government that barely lasted four years—could have come from any Southern Republican. Or, if you sprinkled in a few non sequiturs about the apocalyptic repercussions of low-flow shower heads, from Trump himself.
Asked if he condemned the melting down of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kennedy responded that he didn’t like it at all. Nope, not one bit.
Watch:
RFK Jr.: I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues. I grew up in Virginia. I know that there were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves. I just have a visceral reaction to destroying history. I don’t like it. I think we should celebrate who we are, and that, you know, we should celebrate the good qualities of everybody. If we want to find people who were completely virtuous on every issue throughout history we would erase all of history. And, you know, values change throughout history and we need to be able to be sophisticated enough to live with, you know, our ancestors who didn’t agree with us on everything and who did things that are now regarded as immoral or wrong. Because maybe they had other qualities that we want to celebrate, and clearly Robert E. Lee had extraordinary qualities of leadership and, you know … I wouldn’t have done that.
Of course, there are several ways to debunk Kennedy’s horribly shopworn “argument.” First of all, as University of Chicago history professor Jane Daily told NPR in 2017—while Confederate iconography was being dismantled across the country and Trump was vigorously defending it—Confederate statues were never really about honoring anyone’s heritage.
“Most of the people who were involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past,” said Dailey, “but were rather erecting them toward a white supremacist future.”
Indeed, most of the statues went up well after the end of the Civil War—during periods of notable progress for Black Americans.
James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, says that the increase in statues and monuments was clearly meant to send a message.
“These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy,” Grossman said. “Why would you put a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in 1948 in Baltimore?”
So, clearly, these statues were about promoting white supremacy, and had nothing to do with any legitimate preservation of anyone’s “heritage.”
Meanwhile, the good citizens of Germany—who clearly have no intention of erasing the history of World War II, lest its grave sins be forgotten—nevertheless manage to get through each new day without engaging in knock-down, drag-out fights over Nazi flags and Hitler statues. There’s no German version of Bo and Luke Duke driving around rural Rhineland in their tricked-out van The Doctor Mengele. Slavery—and the secessionist government that fought a ruinous war on its behalf—were moral obscenities, just like Germany’s Final Solution. So clearly it’s possible to preserve history—in all its nuances—without lionizing its villains.
Kennedy is smart enough to know this, of course, so it’s worth asking whether his answer is just right-wing agitprop meant to signal to MAGA voters that he’s a viable option for them. After all, he’s running against a guy who reportedly said “Hitler did a lot of good things.” (If Germany is determined to bury its short-lived Nazi “heritage,” Trump appears equally as determined to resurrect it.)
Of course, this isn’t the first time RFK Jr. has sounded more like a garden-variety MAGA mouse than the scion of a celebrated Democratic family.
For instance, last month, NBC News reviewed several of his public statements and found he’s “repeatedly dismissed the severity” of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, at one point saying Trump’s failed coup “is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape. I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed.” In other words, this “Democrat” is keen to both-sides a violent insurrection led by a Republican president who’s almost universally hated by Democrats.
Also, like Trump, Kennedy is apparently a big fan of racist conspiracy theories, having once claimed that COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted.”
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Kennedy said during a July 2023 press event in New York City. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
Yo, Bobby—the 12th century called. It wants its blood libel back.
Meanwhile, Trump is hoping you don’t notice that Kennedy has far more in common with him than with Joe Biden. Perhaps sensing Kennedy’s natural appeal to reality-skeptical MAGAs, on Truth Social Trump has called Kennedy a “Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked [sic] Joe Biden.”
And we already know about Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism—a stance that appeals far more to MAGA Republicans than Biden Democrats. Trump appears to be well aware that unnecessarily spreading easily preventable diseases is tres chic these days, and that Kennedy is at the vanguard of this important social reform. So Trump has taken to the stump to say crap like this …
TRUMP: And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate.
Okay, sure. But every state in the union requires schoolchildren to be vaccinated against communicable diseases, so what Trump appears to be saying—whether he knows it or not—is that he’ll eliminate all federal funding for schools. He may eventually discover that’s not all that popular.
If we’re lucky, Trump’s and Kennedy’s race to the bottom will end in tears for both of them as they split the bonkers vote, and Joe Biden, this cycle’s only reasonable presidential hopeful, will easily prevail. And if not—well, hope you really dig polio, man.
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