2023-07-08 15:13:31
The day in April that Robert Kennedy Jr. threw his candidacy challenging the president Joe Biden to clinch the Democratic nomination for 2024 an evacuation alarm sounded at the Boston hotel hosting the launch. The applicant took the opportunity to suggest that dark forces They tried to stop him, just like ensures that the CIA he killed his uncle, JFKand was involved in the assassination of her father, Bobby Kennedy, or that he personally has been a victim of “censorship” for years because of his positions. “Nice try,” he teased her when he raised the alarm. Neither he nor any of those present moved from the room during the two hours of the act.
That entry into the electoral race of the member of the most famous political dynasty in the United States, with a illustrious career as an environmental lawyer in the 1990s which led to his conversion into one of the most iconic figures for the anti-vaccine movement, was received mostly as an anecdote. ‘The New York Times’, among other media, wrote that it was “unlikely to pose a serious threat to Biden.”
Things have changed. Now the same ‘Times’ acknowledges that Kennedy is “a headachefor the president as he seeks re-election, “a high-profile reminder that many Democratic voters would prefer new blood“. And while the White House, the party apparatus and the Biden campaign have coordinated to publicly ignore it, it is becoming increasingly difficult and more and more are realizing that, as Naomi Klein has written in ‘The Guardian’, “ignoring it is not an option“.
The numbers help to understand why. In two polls in April and May, Kennedy, fueled in large part by his name recognition, came in at No. 21% and 20% support among voters who are or are leaning Democrat. In other accounts, their percentages have dropped to 8% or 9%, but in the average that RealClearPolitics maintains now moves at 14% support. A supporting Political Action Super Committee announced Monday that it has raised $10.5 million, including two donations of more than a million and with funds coming “evenly” from Democrats and Republicans. And what is undeniable is that the 69-year-old candidate has become a stone in the shoe of an octogenarian president that, according to some polls, more than 60% of Democrats see themselves as too old to run again.
controversial positions
In the general media, the lists of conspiracy theories, misinformation or falsehoods what Kennedy has embraced, thrown or supported, and its most controversial positions. This includes the idea that mass shootings are linked to the use of antidepressants (opposes ban on assault weapons), that exposure to atrazine herbicide is after the gender dysphoriathat the 5G networks have been deployed to “collect our data and control our behavior“, that the radiation of the Wi-Fi networks allows toxins from the blood to enter the brain or the HIV it does not cause AIDS.
At the same time, Kennedy, with his raspy voice from the spasmodic dysphonia (a neurological disorder that is at least partially linked to a flu vaccination) wins space, echo and support in conservative and ultra-conservative mediain podcasts y spaces with a libertarian vein or who present themselves as redoubts of free speech that secure under assault. He has also been embraced by figures from Silicon Valley as Jack Dorseythe creator of Twitter, or David Sacksand by far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon o Roger Stone. Donald Trump He has described him as “a very intelligent guy”.
Vaccines and the pandemic
Defined in the 90s by ‘Time’ as a “hero to the planet” for his environmental work, Kennedy, who studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics and the University of Virginia and overcame a heroin addiction, found the thread of mercurio until discredited theses linking vaccines, and specifically thiomersal, with autism. An explosive article of his making that claim, published in 2005 in Rolling Stone and Salon.com, was pulled by the publications in 2011 after various error corrections. (In ‘Rolling Stone’ he also published an article in 2006 assuring that the 2004 elections, which George Bush won against John Kerry, were stolen).
Through the Children’s Defense Fund, Kennedy continued to promote what he says is an effort to ensure the “vaccine safety,” not total opposition to immunizations. But she became Featured Actor for Anti-Vaccines, and a key figure in the “healthcare freedom” movement. And when the pandemic contributed to those radicals combining in an indissoluble magma with people who questioned or resisted the government, big pharma, the media and social networks for what they saw as tackling and silencing any opinion that was dissonant or posed challenges to the measures that were adopted, their status was elevated.
Kennedy went so far as to say that “even in the germany of Hitler you could cross the alps to switzerland, you could hide in the attic like he did Ana Frank“, a comment that was publicly condemned by his third and current wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, and for which he later He apologized with the victims of the Holocaust. But he did not abandon his quest against vaccines and government measures, to the despair of most of his family members.
has ensured that the covid was a “weapon of war“, that the restrictions arose from a CIA plan to impose “authoritarian control”something that ensures that it is also being done with the climate emergency. He has said that there are secret laboratories designing weapons to kill people of specific races.
He sold over a million copies of his book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’subtitled ‘Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the global war against democracy and public health’, in which he denounced that the epidemiologist “helped to orchestrate and execute a historic coup against western democracy“. And went banned on social media like Instagram for spreading misinformation, but their accounts have been reinstated now that he is a candidate.
The “First MAGA Democrat”
Kennedy’s campaign, which several outlets define as “democrat MAGA” (the acronym for the Trump movement Make America Great Again), is directed by Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman who in 2008 brought together the most progressive wing of the Democratic party trying to challenge Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And his candidacy goes according to the times.
arrives when the paradigm of the two parties is leaking in the USand when it is in record lows confidence of citizenship in the system, the institutions, the politicians, the press, the justice system… It also comes to a society in which the disenchantmentthe anti-government streak and the feeling of pushback against big corporationsin which today a quarter of Americans remain skeptical of covid vaccines and where the ground is increasingly fertile for conspiracy theories.
And columnist Michelle Goldberg has identified in the movement that supports her the reflection of “a sisignificant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that skips divisions between left and right“There they appear from anti-vaxxers and libertarians to Democrats with no appetite for more Biden or Republicans aligned with Trump’s message but fed up with the former president.
against orthodoxy
Before the voters, Kennedy presents himself as a politician willing to break with orthodoxies, to “lfight against censorship” already “recover democracy“, which ensures that “it is becoming a kind of corporate plutocracy” for “a corrupt fusion of state power and corporations” which “threatens to create a new kind of corporate feudalismAnd his message about the impact, power and influence of big industries like agri-food, chemicals and pharmaceuticals resonates with some voters in both parties.
“People don’t trust authority because they’ve been lying to them.“Kennedy also said, launched against the Democratic Party (“the party of censorship”, in his words) and media (“propagandists of the powerful”). In immigration ensures that “it is not racist to say that we need close the borders“. He has said that the ukrainians are being used as “pawns in a proxy war between two great powers“and he has defended that Russia “acted in good faith” in the invasion of Ukraine. And he affirms that he wants to change the approaches of industrial military spending with an interventionist mind to what he has called “Fortress America: arm ourselves at home to the teeth”.
Although his path to nomination is highly unlikelythat does not mean that it cannot affect Biden’s candidacy, especially if he wins in new hampshire, a state relegated in primaries by the new calendar promoted by the Democratic National Committee at the behest of the president, who wants to start in South Carolina. And the ‘National Review’, one of the conservative media launched to praise Kennedy, even speculates that it may be being used to undermine Bidenforce the withdrawal of the president of the race and let the game come into play California Governor Gavin Newsomor even the vice president, Kamala Harris.
#Robert #Kennedy #thorn #Joe #Bidens #shoe