What if Robert Kennedy Jr. Runs for President?
What will his success or failure tell us about the nation's ruling class?
Robert Kennedy Jr. has announced that he is contemplating a run for President, and some people think it’s a done deal. Assuming this plays out, what are his chances? A Kennedy run will give us the opportunity to examine the power dynamics in the ruling class, particularly in relation to that part of the elite that aligns itself with the Democrat Party. One of the ironies of a Kennedy bid for the President is that his views on the mRNA vaccines find much more support on the conservative and Republican side of the spectrum than on the Democrat and progressive side. Eighty percent of Democrats believe the Covid-19 vaccines were at least somewhat effective in battling the virus, while only forty percent of Republicans shared that confidence. So the first point at issue is whether Kennedy’s so-called status as a prominent “anti-vaxxer” will turn Democrats against him. Bear in mind that the mainstream press will almost certainly be against Kennedy—or if not against Kennedy, definitely against what they perceive to be his views on vaccines. We’re already seeing anti-Kennedy articles in the press. Here is what Joe Battenfeld, a columnist for the Boston Herald, wrote about Kennedy earlier in March:
In what could be the final political humiliation for the once proud Kennedy family, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is seriously considering throwing his hat in the 2024 ring.
The anti-vaxxer and second eldest son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy RFK Jr. was up in New Hampshire recently to lay the groundwork for his Democratic presidential campaign….
RKF Jr. is all but the black sheep of the Kennedys. The family has condemned him for his anti-vaccine views, even his own wife refuted his comments comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany….
Kennedy, who has been sharply critical of the pharmaceutical industry, was blackballed in the mainstream media and banned on social media for his anti-vax views, but now feels exonerated by new evidence about the effectiveness of the vaccine.
“Show me where I got it wrong,” he said.
If his campaign doesn’t get derailed by those comments, don’t worry, chances are he’ll make some kind of horrible gaffe that forces him out of the race.
If Kennedy runs for President in the Democratic primary he will have to face this level of bias from the “mainstream” (i.e., left-wing) press on a daily basis. Ironically, he’ll likely be treated better in the conservative press. But this will do him little good in reaching primary voters as not many democrats frequent conservative media. So from the start he’ll be treading upstream. On the plus side, he will likely be far and away the most impressive candidate on the Democratic side of things. To be sure, that isn’t really saying much if you consider how awful most of the candidates in the Democratic Party are likely to be. The infusion of radical leftism in the party seems to have eroded any sense of merit or standards. Without so much as an ounce of cautionary reflection, Democrats in over the last two election cycles have brazenly elected two candidates with serious cognitive deficits, President Joe Biden and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman. And when they’re not electing the brain-damaged, they’re electing and/or promoting the congenitally stupid (e.g., the members of the so-called “squad,” vice President Kamala Harris, secretary of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, perennial electoral loser “Beto" O'Rourke, etc. etc.). Such mountebanks make up the better part of the chief luminaries in the Democrat Party, and someone of Robert Kennedy jr.’s intelligence and education will easily run circles around most of them. The only question is whether such signs of intellectual acumen might be resented by a Democrat electorate who, if their voting record is anything to go by, don’t seem all that smart themselves and ipso facto may in fact harbor resentment toward persons of greater intellectual acumen than themselves. Let’s face it: there’s a growing segment on the left that has been actively seeking to drag this country down to the lowest common denominator in terms of intelligence, competence, conscientiousness and any other characteristic that would be deemed positive by those of our ancestors who played a part in making this country great. It would seem as if people on the left experience an innate resentment toward just those characteristics that helped to raise the civilization of the West. In some quarters such characteristics are identified with “whiteness” and are thus condemned as “racist.”
So does Kennedy have a chance in the Democratic primary or not? The betting odds would likely be against him, and not merely because of the left’s suspicion of anything that smacks of competence. There are other forces arrayed against Kennedy, powerful and even, to a degree, intelligent (or at least diabolically clever) forces. Of course I have in mind Corporate America, in both its medical, technological, and financial guises. Big Pharma, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street will likely regard Kennedy as a potential threat, and they may act quickly to make certain he doesn’t win the Democratic primary; for if he were to somehow secure the Democratic nomination, he would win the general against the Republican hopeful.
For those of us who merely wish to gain greater understanding of the nation’s ruling elite, a Kennedy run will grant us the opportunity to gauge the various strengths and weaknesses of the main factions that vie for ultimate power in Washington D.C. If, for example, Kennedy should somehow win the Democratic primary, we would be able to conclude from that:
Big Pharma is likely not as powerful as we had heretofore assumed.
The mainstream media has much less influence than is generally thought.
The pro-vaccine narrative has lost much of its sway over the left.
The Democratic primary is not as fixed as the primaries in 2016 and 2020 would have us believe.
There is one possible alternative scenario that, if it played out, could give Kennedy a clear path to the nomination and the Presidency. Nearly half of Americans believe the Covid jabs have caused “unexplained deaths.” It is always possible that if enough people become convinced that the mRNA vaccines were deadly killers that the mainstream press and the liberal Washington establishment nonetheless recklessly pushed upon the citizenry, that this might trigger an immense backlash against those in the Washington establishment (i.e., most of the ruling class) who championed the jabs. Under such conditions, the elites in the Democratic Party might decide to throw Big Pharma to the wolves and cast their lot with Kennedy. After all, their only other choice would be to allow whoever wins the Republican nomination (probably Trump but possibly Desantis) to win the general, and most neo-liberal and/or corporate elites nowadays would prefer even a Democrat like Kennedy to a Trump or a Desantis.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.