Democratic establishment fears RFK Jr. has a path to victory
Brian Robertson
Video Embed
After 18 years of being canceled by the corporate legacy media, then targeted specifically for social media censorship by the Biden administration for promulgating “misinformation” during the pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing a remarkable end run around the long media blackout by forcing discussion of officially verboten issues with a presidential run. Now, with renewed interest in his views as a result of that run, the blackout is collapsing. And it’s driving the legacy media, as well as their handlers in the Democratic Party, insane with desperation.
Kennedy’s surprising strength in the polls and robust fundraising numbers have led to an abrupt change in tactics on the part of Democratic strategists, who until recently had been advising party leaders to treat RFK Jr.’s presidential run as if it didn’t exist. This shift was reflected in the recent concerted denunciations of Kennedy as a “racist anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist” by former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in the wake of a piece about remarks he made about the danger of existing ethnically-targeted bioweapon research.
DONALD TRUMP INDICTED: JACK SMITH LOCKED EYES WITH FORMER PRESIDENT DURING HISTORIC ARRAIGNMENT
Interestingly, none of the coordinated smear jobs or ritual denunciations of Kennedy as a “conspiracy theorist” appear to be working anymore, to the great consternation of a D.C. establishment that has long used the slur as a way of shutting down debate about useful but unfounded orthodoxies they don’t wish to see challenged. The problem is, after all the manifest gaslighting and propaganda of the last three years on the part of media, medical authorities, and government officials, the “conspiracy theory” trope has become, for many, a clear sign that those with power and influence in Washington are seeking to shut down debate and impose an official narrative. Rather than working as an effective smear, it has almost become an endorsement.
This mood of profound skepticism is seen in a recent Harvard/Harris poll showing RFK Jr. with the highest favorability (and by far the lowest unfavorability) ratings among all the declared candidates seeking the presidency. When the most trusted and admired candidate is the one who has been subject to the most concerted effort at character assassination and blackballing in modern political history, you know that the official narrative has not only failed, it’s become the kiss of death for anyone foolish enough to adhere to it.
So does RFK Jr. actually have a viable path to victory? Ask yourself: If the DNC didn’t believe him to be a viable threat, why would they be wasting time and resources attacking him?
But given the DNC’s successful rigging of the 2016 and 2020 primaries to prevent the nomination of Bernie Sanders at any cost, what chance does Kennedy stand when he is even more boxed out? Sanders, at least, was granted the opportunity of debating the anointed candidate, if only for appearance’s sake.
The key difference is that, compared with RFK Jr., Sanders had relatively little appeal with the unaffiliated and independent voters that were the key to former President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. These voters are now up for grabs, and they can vote in a lot of the early open primary states.
Moreover, Trump has clearly lost luster with these voters, disillusioned in part because of his calamitous response to the COVID pandemic. Trump has argued that he was not responsible for the economic, educational, and mental health devastation of the COVID shutdowns because, though he pushed to keep things open, he was overruled by the powerful public health bureaucracy. Kennedy makes the case that this is a poor excuse for the leader of the free world, particularly one who promotes himself as a dragon-slayer of the deep state. In fact, Trump was consistently outmaneuvered by opponents throughout his administration, most of them being his own “disloyal” appointees. But his incompetence, narcissism, and lack of understanding of how Washington works were never more apparent than in his handling of the COVID crisis.
This presents an enormous opportunity for RFK Jr., who is effectively making the case that he knows how to prevail where Trump so abjectly failed. This applies not just to effectively reforming the health bureaucracy but also to taming the out-of-control intelligence agencies, addressing spiraling crime and disorder in the cities, dealing with the humanitarian disaster at the southern border, fighting censorship, grappling with looming new methods of surveillance and control (such as the imposition of digital currency), and taking back foreign policy from the military-industrial complex. On every one of these issues that motivate his base, Trump has only divisive, impotent rhetoric, while RFK has a plan.
If Kennedy can get these voters to support him in the early, open primary states, all bets are off.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Brian Robertson is a writer and literary agent living in Maryland.