The Tucker Carlson-RFK Junior Interview
This hit the internet on Tuesday, and people have been chewing on it ever since. It’s one of the more thought-provoking items we’ve seen in a while, but of course that’s what you’re commonly going to get when Carlson gets to do a long-form interview with people the legacy corporate media has declared personae non grata.
And that includes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who by all rights should have been a media darling given the media elite’s professed love and fascination for his family.
But of course, it’s the dead Kennedys the media loves, not the live ones.
And that’s reasonably fair, as most of the surviving Kennedys aren’t much to speak of, in the sense that they tend to be self-indulgent, entitled creeps who don’t possess much in the way of character or insight. RFK Junior isn’t totally immune from that; he’s a recovering heroin addict, after all. In his younger days there were some parallels to be had between him and Hunter Biden of more recent vintage.
That said, Kennedy has found himself in recent years as an advocate for people the ruling class has left behind, and while his positions on, for example, vaccination are a bit out of the mainstream it’s clear the number one reason why he’s castigated as a kook and a conspiracy theorist is that he questioned the blind acceptance of the current practice of making young children take some 70-odd vaccine shots. You hear that RFK Junior is an anti-vaxx nut, and you hear it everywhere, but then when he speaks on the topic you find out that he’s not really anti-vaxx so much as he’s an advocate for consumer product safety, and the more you look into the subject of those vaccinations the more you realize how thin the protection for folks really is.
At a time when parents are commonly panicked about things like autism among their kids, that is.
Kennedy can’t get on TV because his questioning of the medical-industrial complex on vaccines is bad for the business of large pharmaceutical companies for whom vaccines are a sizable profit center. And large pharmaceutical companies have a grossly outsized share of the advertising which appears on broadcast and cable TV, not to mention an even more grossly outsized share of print advertising.
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Meaning that he’s very bad for business for those media conglomerates who own the cable news channels, and because of that the narrative discrediting him is as or more intense than it is for anybody in politics not named Donald Trump.
But as I noted in my American Spectator column on Tuesday, RFK Junior is a pariah for a different reason as well. He’s an old-school Kennedy liberal, or liberal Kennedy, if you want to be more specific, and as such he’s a dinosaur on the current political scene…
And perhaps the best exposition of this fact is the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has, through an upstart primary challenge to Joe Biden, breathed just a little bit of life into the old Kennedy brand and old-fashioned liberalism.
RFK Jr. seems to have garnered a lot more appreciation on the right than within his own party, though it looks as though most of that appreciation comes from Trump voters, who aren’t going to cross party lines in a general election. But polling indicates that he does hold on to some 15–20 percent of the Democrat vote, which represents what’s left of the Kennedy liberal faction.
It isn’t his share of the vote as reflected in those polls being so paltry that speaks volumes about where Kennedy liberalism stands inside the Democrat party. It’s how he’s treated.
Disgracefully, Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection, something virtually all major political candidates get as a matter of course within three weeks or so of asking for it. In his case, RFK Jr. was made to wait almost three months before the utterly impeachable Alejandro Mayorkas told him to sod off, something of a colossal insult to him given the history of his uncle and father falling at the hands of assassins.
And that came after he was inexplicably (not really) accused of anti-Semitism for the mere reference to a study indicating that Ashkenazi Jews (as well as ethnic Chinese) fared better during the COVID pandemic than most, noting that if genetic markers could inform survivability of certain viruses, it might be indicative of present or future biological warfare. That was a serious, and rather alarming, observation that led to his being tarred and feathered by such nincompoops as Stacey Plaskett and Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a congressional hearing on — I’m not kidding — censorship. According to his fellow Democrats, Kennedy should have been canceled and deplatformed as a Jew-hater despite never uttering a word to that effect.
And, of course, he’s been almost completely blackballed from broadcast television as well as CNN and MSNBC.
Kennedy is being treated as a right-wing plant inside the Democrat Party, which is hilarious. Those Trump voters who appreciate his willingness to stand against the tyrannical impulses of the radical left inside his party agree with him on virtually nothing save his stance on COVID vaccine mandates and federal attempts to stifle social media discussions. He’s way out there on environmental policy, he’s anti-corporate in ways even the most populist Republicans wouldn’t endorse, and his economics and tax policies look reasonable only in comparison to what Team Biden has inflicted.
He’s no conservative. But to the radical Left, an old-school liberal is, nonetheless, an enemy. A return of old-school liberalism threatens the hard Left’s control over the woke institutions it’s corrupted, including the DNC, and it won’t have it.
The interview ranges through a bunch of topics, from the denial of Secret Service protection to Ukraine, to the border and to the JFK assassination and beyond. You don’t have to agree with RFK Junior on every issue to find it interesting and thought-provoking, but most of all what you realize is that while he certainly might be wrong – I’ve seen little to no evidence for his contention that the Russians could shoot down our nukes but we can’t shoot theirs down, for example – he certainly isn’t the kook he’s made out to be.
And if Democrat voters can’t see an obvious, yawning gap in cognitive ability and clear thinking between their two announced candidates in Kennedy and Biden, then it’s no secret where the real problem lies.
