2023-08-29 22:08:43
The only minimally viable alternative in the Democratic Party to Joe Biden’s candidacy for the 2024 presidential elections has a well-known surname within the formation: Robert F. Kennedy, nephew of former President John Fitzerald Kennedy (JFK) and son of Senator Bobby Kennedy, both tragically assassinated half a century ago.
Don Levy, head of the ‘New York Times’ poll: “The 2024 elections are going to be similar to those of 2016 and they are going to be very close”
Further
Unlike his predecessors, the last representative of the most influential political dynasty in the United States presents himself as a outsiderwilling to break scientific and ideological consensus in his party, to which he has declared war.
“I am up against a very formidable force: the Democratic Party,” he said in late July on an interview with Sean Hannitystar Fox News anchor, “but I have multiple paths to victory.”
Ignored by the mainstream US media and criticized for his anti-vaccine positions, his trivialization of Nazi Germany and his pursuit of conspiracy theories, Kennedy is focusing his strategy on seducing the electorate about trump. And it does so in far-right media spaces, such as Fox News, the chain that elevated the tycoon, as well as in ultra-conservative podcasts such as Steve Bannon (The War Room), Alex Jones (Infowars), Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, among others.
One of Donald Trump’s main donors in the last two presidential elections, the conservative Timothy Mellon, has announced that he is withdrawing his support for the former president and will invest $5 million in the American Values political action committee, the main source of income for the Kennedy campaign. Mellon, who made his fortune in the transportation sector, thus joins a small number of ultra-rich who have found an alternative to Trump and DeSantis in the Democrat.
Among them is Gavin de Becker, a security adviser close to the world’s third-richest man, Jeff Bezos, who has already given $4.5 million to American Values. Another who has shown financial support for him is Patrick Bryne, CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond (a major company that went bankrupt earlier this year and starred in mass layoffs of thousands of workers, and has been reborn under the name of Overstock); as well as the investor David Sacks, founder of Pay Pal. All of them supported the Republican Party in the past.
Conspiracy in conservative media
The nephew of Democratic President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the third of Senator Bobby Kennedy’s 11 children became a Fox News regular during the pandemic. From the US far-right media speaker, the most watched channel in the country, he waged his battle against scientific consensus, expressing strong criticism of the measures applied by the Biden Administration to stop the advance of a virus that had to do with the death of 15 million people in the world between 2020 and 2021.
As COVID-19 spread, Kennedy built his image by criticizing the use of masks, vaccinations and mandatory quarantines. In one of the largest anti-vaccine demonstrations, at the beginning of 2022 in Washington, he became the leader of the movement with an incendiary speech, in which he even invoked Nazi Germany: “At least in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps towards to Switzerland or hide in the attic, like Anne Frank did”.
A year earlier, he had published a book against the epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, who designed the strategy against the pandemic in the US. The same year, Instagram went so far as to delete his account on this social network for “repeatedly sharing discredited claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”
In recent weeks, he has once again starred in a media scandal with the leak of a recording in which he claimed that the coronavirus was “ethnically directed” to save the Jews and the Chinese. A conspiracy theory that has dusted off the accusations of anti-Semitism against him, of which defended himself claiming that he made them in “a closed-door meeting” and stating that it was “an accurate statement about a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.”
It is not the first conspiracy theory that the candidate to beat Biden in the Democratic primaries joins. In June he stated in the podcast of conservative Joe Rogan, the most listened to in the country, that Wi-Fi radio frequency signals cause cancer and “brain leaks”. In another appearance on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk (owner of the social network Twitter, now X) assured that the blame for school shootings is the use of antidepressants such as Prozac (and not gun-friendly legislation).
He also had no qualms about participate in the Jordan Peterson podcast, a transphobic and misogynistic Canadian psychologist who is popular with young people, where he echoed a conspiracy theory that chemicals in the water supply turn children into transsexuals. In addition to all this, in the past he has said that vaccines cause autism, that HIV was manufactured so that pharmaceutical companies could get rich selling medicines and that 5G is a surveillance tool.
In a recent interviewhe was convinced and concerned that the US government and big technology companies monitor and control citizens through technology and artificial intelligence, especially if “you are doing something that has to do with dissenting or disobeying government orders ”.
The conservative hook
Robert Kennedy lags far behind in the polls: about 50 points separate him from Joe Biden, according to the FiveThirtyEight modelwhich at the end of August estimates a support of almost 64% for the current president compared to just over 12% for Kennedy among the Democratic electorate.
Although party supporters have made it clear that they are open to an alternative, Kennedy’s paranoid populist profile puts them off.
As an environmental lawyer, in the past he has championed environmental causes, such as cleaning up and protecting the Hudson River, and has litigated numerous governments and companies for its pollution.
In 2010, it won a lawsuit against ExxonMobil (one of the most polluting oil companies in the world), which was forced to clean up tens of millions of barrels of oil leaked in Newtown Creek (New York). In addition, from an anti-establishment position, his speech has always gone against large corporations, especially pharmaceutical ones.
However, instead of trying to fight Biden on the left, Kennedy is embracing many of the banners of the conservative voter.
He has also questioned the role of the US in the war in Ukraine, which he considers “terrible for the Ukrainian people.” In his view, NATO created “the conditions for war” by expanding eastward in the decades after the Cold War, and he says his country should end the conflict by brokering a negotiated peace in which the Ukrainians cede territory to Russia. .
Kennedy is a staunch defender of cryptocurrencies, a world with special significance among young conservatives who defend a free and extremely volatile financial market, detached from state regulation. In June he gave a speech in Miami at one of the major bitcoin conferences of the year – a currency he, by the way, accepts as part of his donations.
Kennedy, who presents himself as a victim reviled by the media and by his own party – he calls it “the party of censorship” – is defended more by Republicans than by Democrats: 40% of Republican voters have a positive opinion, compared to 31% of independents and 25% of Democrats, according to a Quinnipac University survey. Perhaps the sympathy of characters like Rudi Giuliani, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon o Alex Jones have something to do with it.
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