“What my father said about businessmen applies to liberals,” said the late Robert F. Kennedy Sr. “They’re sons of bitches.”
Kennedy’s son, RFK Jr., has reason to agree. For four years, liberals scorned him, smeared him, labeled him an “anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist” and cast all sorts of other epithets at the man, dubbing him everything from an anti-Semite to an “anti-science” crackpot peddling “misinformation.” They trashed him for not advocating vax mandates, even for individuals with natural immunity or who pleaded for religious/conscience exemptions. Kamala Harris, who refused to take “Donald Trump’s vaccine,” did a total reversal once she and Joe Biden were elected, turning from anti-vaxxer to vax maniac.
RFK Jr., like his father, is no partisan hack. You don’t reflexively get their support simply for having a “D” aside your name.
Team Biden then worked diligently in every state to block Kennedy from ballots. As liberals squawked “DEMOCRACY!,” they relentlessly engaged in lawfare to prevent voters from the democratic option of voting for Kennedy. These champions of cancel culture sought to cancel RFK Jr. anywhere and everywhere, prompting Kennedy in turn to constantly file lawsuits to protect himself. As they did with Donald Trump, they dashed to the courts to banish Kennedy’s name from voting booths. (READ: Paul Kengor, “RFK Jr.: Biden’s and the Democrats’ Ongoing Nightmare.”)
These self-proclaimed apostles of “democracy” then orchestrated what RFK Jr. rightly dubbed a “sham primary.” They undemocratically handed all of President Joe Biden’s primary votes to Kamala Harris without even a convention debate let alone battle. Harris, in turn, refused to meet with Kennedy when he reached out to her.
And yet still, the liberals did much worse to the junior Kennedy. For a year, their Democrat administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris denied Bobby Kennedy Jr. Secret Service protection, despite numerous threats to his life. It was one of the most egregious acts I’ve seen in politics, and especially unforgivable given that the refusal was to the son of the assassinated senior Kennedy.
I twice interviewed Kennedy about this for The American Spectator.
“It’s not right for the President to provide protection to his family and political favorites while denying it to political rivals,” RFK Jr. told me last October. “During his first week as Attorney General, my father assembled all the DOJ’s senior prosecutors to tell them that he would not tolerate any politicization of law-enforcement. President Biden displays a bust of my father in the oval office, but he seems to have forgotten this critical tenet of American democracy. During his administration, we’ve seen the wholesale cooption of federal law-enforcement agencies to censor criticism of White House policies and to serve other political ambitions.” (READ MORE: Paul Kengor, “EXCLUSIVE: RFK Jr., Threatened Again, Sues the Biden Administration.”)
And yet, Kennedy faced multiple threats to his life. Nonetheless, he pushed on. He told The American Spectator: “I don’t spend time worrying about my personal safety. I do worry about the safety of my family and their sense of wellbeing — and about the safety of bystanders if there is a more serious incident.”
And as we saw in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Secret Service protection fails a presidential candidate, the safety of bystanders can be directly affected. Look at Corey Comperatore.
Only then — after someone was shot and killed — did Kennedy finally get the Secret Service protection he repeatedly requested from the Biden administration.
And alas, after all of that, the liberals that RFK Jr.’s dad called sons of bitches now have the audacity to scream bloody murder because RFK Jr. endorsed not their candidate but Donald Trump. How dare he! What an ingrate! What a betrayer of “democracy!”
Democrats are furious. They were already livid over Kennedy for breaking party ranks to run as an independent. Now, they’re framing him as some sort of gargoyle. They’re enraged, foaming at the mouth. If I were to quote them at length here, it might set your laptop on fire.
I shall quote a milder expression of disappointment from Obama image-maker David Axelrod: “Robert F. Kennedy was my political hero,” responded David Axelrod. “He battled fiercely & eloquently against poverty, injustice and for economic fairness. Sadly RFK Jr, who made a rambling exit from the race today, proves that sometimes an apple DOES fall far from the tree … in this case, down a hill and over a cliff.”
Really, David? I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The senior Bobby Kennedy didn’t have kind words for liberals. He was never the liberal that you folks thought he was. In fact, he had even harsher things to say. In the full quote, the late RFK referred to liberals as “sons of bitches” who were “in love with death.”
Yes, “in love with death.” (READ: Paul Kengor, “On the Politics and Fate of RFK.”)
I’m inspired here to invoke a similar phrase. It comes from a longtime close friend of The American Spectator, the late Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote of what he called “The Great Liberal Death Wish.”
Muggeridge wrote of how past civilizations collapsed from “being overrun by barbarians from without; ours has the unusual characteristic of having nurtured its own destroyers at the public expense by … [our] own intellectual elite.”
Our great republic has been destroyed from within. Our liberals have led the way.
Robert F. Kennedy Sr., had he lived, would have appreciated those words of Muggeridge. He had developed a contempt for liberals. Yes, contempt. In his book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, Chris Matthews, the longtime liberal and former MSNBC host, says that Kennedy developed such a “contempt for liberals” during the Adlai Stevenson 1956 presidential campaign that he ended up crossing party lines and voting for Eisenhower.
And not just Ike. In 1950, Bobby and his brother John and their father Joe crossed party lines to support Republican Richard Nixon when he ran against Democrat nominee Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat in California. They worked against the so-called “Pink Lady.”
And then there was Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who was so close to the Kennedy family that he dated one of the Kennedy girls and spent time at the family compound in Hyannis Port. Bobby actually worked for Senator McCarthy, a fellow Irish Catholic that he respected and loved. (“Very upsetting for me,” Bobby wrote in his diary the day he got the news of McCarthy’s death. “I dismissed the office for the day…. I have lost an important part of my life.” Bobby quickly caught a plane to be at McCarthy’s burial in Wisconsin, where he wept at his graveside.)
RFK Jr., like his father, is no partisan hack. You don’t reflexively get their support simply for having a “D” aside your name, especially if you’re a “D” and an SOB.
But don’t tell that to the Kennedy family today.
The family this past weekend issued a perverse statement accusing RFK Jr. of betrayal: “We believe in Harris and Walz,” says the statement. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
No. The true story isn’t the one conveniently made up by Kennedy family partisans. In reality, RFK Jr. is much more like his father and his uncle and his grandfather than they are. Bobby Sr. and JFK and the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, were not partisan hacks. They were Democrats who many times supported Republicans.
Ronald Steel, a liberal professor who wrote a fascinating and insightful biography of the senior RFK, notes that Kennedy had forged a curious kinship with certain white radicals because they at least agreed on one thing: “they had a common enemy: liberals.”
Well, now RFK Jr. shares that common enemy with his father. And it wasn’t his doing. The liberals made themselves an enemy of Bobby Kennedy Jr. This was their doing. They and their Biden administration didn’t treat Bobby Jr. as an old Democrat ally. They treated him like a political enemy. They drove him away.
To borrow from another ex-Democrat, Ronald Reagan, RFK Jr. didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him.
“I left the party,” RFK Jr. said this past weekend. “And, most sadly — for me, for the Democratic Party — in the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth.”
And now, after four years of liberal Democrats smearing RFK Jr. and even refusing him the very Secret Service protection that had been created because of the assassination of his father in June 1968, they have the audacity to be angry with him rather than themselves. Now it will come back to bite them.
Sure, many of them are playing it cool, trying to shrug off Kennedy’s Trump endorsement as no big deal. But the vitriol slung from their various platforms belies their denials. They’re worried. Very worried. As our Scott McKay nicely put it, “This Is No Longer The Presidential Race You Think It Is.” That’s especially true in the swing states, where Kennedy quite strikingly removed himself from the ballot to put his weight behind Donald Trump.
It was an extraordinary move that really sticks the knife to the liberals who so richly deserve it. It could spell political death for their party at the ballot box on November 5, 2024.
Perhaps RFK Jr. has granted liberals that death wish.
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