RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/04/rfk-jr-vs-the-democratic-elites/

He still bears the name of the US Democratic Party’s most famous and revered family. But that hasn’t stopped the Democratic elites and liberal media from relentlessly attacking Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Since RFK Jr – son of Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy – announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in April, he has principally been attacked for his anti-vaccine views, including his belief in the long-discredited idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

As a result, Kennedy has been called a conspiracy theorist, a spreader of disinformation and a kook. The New York Times says he is ‘shaking Americans’ faith in science’. A Democratic representative and adviser to Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has called Kennedy’s views ‘dangerous’. The condemnation has been relentless.

Last month, a vaccine expert, Dr Peter Hotez, declined an invitation to debate Kennedy on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He said that it would be fruitless to debate a committed anti-vaxxer like RFK Jr. The liberal media have generally sided with Hotez. As one pundit put it, ‘vaccine science isn’t up for debate’.

Some outlets have gone as far as censoring Kennedy’s views. In a recent interview, ABC News cut out his comments about the Covid vaccines. Last month, YouTube removed his interview with Jordan Peterson, citing its ‘vaccine misinformation policy’.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/29/inevitable-suppression-awaits-the-rfk-jr-movement/

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of reasons as to why the Right should support, directly or tacitly, the quixotic bid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President of the United States. The hopelessness of his campaign might be the biggest one.

The Enemy of My Enemy?

Many conservative commentators suggest that RFK Jr. is worth supporting because he represents a more “conservative” brand of Democrat than any presidential candidate since Jim Webb in 2016.

And indeed, on a handful of cultural touchstone issues, the son of the late senator and would-be president of the same name does seem to agree with the Right: Most prominently, he has been critical of efforts to mandate COVID-19 vaccines. He also has spoken out against the rise of transgenderism. And he has engaged with such free-thinkers of the Internet as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, which in turn have led to him getting censored by Big Tech, an achievement often limited exclusively to conservatives.

Furthermore, his status as the latest standard-bearer of the outsider Democratic candidate waging a one-man war against the party machine also will naturally draw a lot of conservative sympathy, if not support, due to the Right’s universal opposition to Joe Biden. The previous symbol of this resistance to the Democrat Party elite was Bernie Sanders, who also had the race for the nomination rigged against him not once, but twice.

But, ironically, the aging socialist senator from Vermont was probably more ideologically aligned with President Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden – or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for that matter. Sanders, for his many flaws, was nearly in complete agreement with Trump when it came to trade and tariffs, as both were opposed to such free trade deals as NAFTA and TPP. They shared a similar outlook on foreign policy, in favor of non-interventionism. And, once upon a time, Sanders was just as critical of open borders and mass immigration as Trump was.

Kennedy, by contrast, harbors views that are just as dangerous as Sanders’, if not even more so. He once advocated for passing a law that would “punish” anyone who doesn’t accept the pseudo-scientific belief that is global warming. He tows the party line on many other issues too, including his pro-choice stance when it comes to the ongoing abortion battle.

And, for a man who claims to be in complete opposition to the Deep State, JFK’s nephew once eagerly parroted all of the same DNC talking points when it came to the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory against Trump, thus propping up one of the biggest Deep State lies of all time.

RFK’s Pyrrhic Victories

If conservatives shouldn’t support RFK Jr. based on his politics or ideology, then perhaps they’d be better off supporting the idea of his campaign rather than what he actually stands for: Giving Biden a political black eye ahead of the 2024 general election.

https://thehill.com/opinion/4069137-feehery-is-democrats-mr-perfectly-fine-a-reelection-disaster/

When Democrats settled on Joe Biden as their candidate in 2020, they seemed to think he would be perfectly fine. He wasn’t completely crazy, he seemed moderate, he was happy enough to hide away in his basement to make the campaign all about President Trump, and he had enough experience in Washington to go along the established order that the nabobs of the capital city prefer.

But like Taylor Swift pointed out in her 2008 hit song, sometimes Mr. Perfectly Fine turns out to be a disaster. Or as one friend of mine likes to put it, everything is fine until it is not fine.

Biden has had some bad breaks in his life, and we should acknowledge the tragedy that he has had to endure up front. But when it comes to politics, Biden has been far luckier than good.

He is prone to wide exaggerations about his own life experiences and has a penchant for at times stealing the words of another. He often says things that have no possibility of being true. Because voters seemingly grade on a curve, Biden’s gift for gab and Irish charm has carried him to a position of power that just about nobody saw in his future. That includes his former boss, President Obama, who talked him out of running in 2016 and who made clear to anybody who would listen that he didn’t think Biden was up to the job.

Biden has a habit of making exactly the wrong decisions. On international issues, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

From his vaccine mandates to his mask mandates, from his reckless spending plans that helped to spur inflation to his embrace of the defund the police crowd, from his doubling down on the climate change hysteria to his confusing rhetoric on Ukraine before the conflict started, Biden has consistently made bad situations immeasurably worse.

Three things are now confronting Biden as he seeks reelection, outside his less than stellar performance. First, his age. Second, very real questions about how he got elected in the first place. Third, his corrupt business deals with his son, Hunter.

Biden’s geriatric bearing has long concerned voters, and it frequently is one of most cited reasons why voters voice discomfort with his reelection. He was old when he ran for vice president. He will be the oldest president by close to a decade should he win reelection and serve out his second term. And despite the aviator sunglasses and cool sports car, Biden is not a young old man. The voters notice and they don’t like it.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/06/20/rfk-jr-is-really-scaring-them-now-la-times-says-hes-a-threat-to-our-democracy-n1704885

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the Leftist political and media elites deeply rattled, and that’s utterly delightful.

Imagine this scenario: a wildly unpopular and manifestly incapable president is running, however haltingly, for reelection. Initially he seemed like a lock, but then he encountered an unexpected challenge from a scion of an old American political family, a man who defies all the conventional categorization of political candidates and has set the establishment on its ear by challenging not only the superannuated corruptocrat in the White House but many of that establishment’s most cherished assumptions.

It would make a great novel, but it’s real life, and it’s an exhilarating reminder that America is still a republic, still a place where the elites can be challenged at all, however entrenched they may appear to be. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not only challenged the elites, he has frightened them to the core, and that’s wonderful to see. The latest indication of how much of a threat they consider him to be comes from the Los Angeles Times, always a reliable organ for far-Left propaganda. The Left Coast Times is so scared of RFK Jr. that on Monday, it proclaimed, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to your health — and our democracy.”

Now, this is absurd on its face and an insult to the intelligence of the handful of remaining Los Angeles Times readers. The Left has now become so divorced from reality that Times writer Michael Hiltzik would have us believe that a contested Democrat party primary is bad for “our democracy.” But a full-out coronation of Old Joe to serve another four years as the figurehead for the shadowy individuals who are really running things? Why, that would be “our democracy” personified. One candidate, inevitable outcome? Good democracy! Two candidates, unclear outcome? Bad democracy!

https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/19/majority-voters-want-joe-biden-robert-kennedy-debate-democratic/

A majority of Democratic voters want President Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to engage in presidential primary debates for 2024, according to a Monday poll.

Roughly 78% of likely general election voters hope Biden and Kennedy will debate, including 57.5% of Democrats, 92.8% of Republicans and 80.1% of those not affiliated with either major party, according to a Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action poll. The Democratic National Committee is not holding debates for the 2024 primaries, which has drawn criticism from many who want the two leading contenders to take the stage.

The Real Clear Politics (RCP) average for a 2024 national Democratic primary, based on polls conducted between May 17 and June 15, indicate that Biden and Kennedy have 62% and 15.6% support, respectively, and author Marianne Williamson has 6.1%.

Kennedy continues to gain momentum nationally, and recently received the endorsement from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey believes Kennedy is the best Democratic candidate to beat the GOP’s leading contenders, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (RELATED: Biden’s Primary Strategy May Lead To RFK Jr Wins In First Two States)

A majority of voters think Biden, who is already the oldest U.S. president in history, is too old to serve a second term, according to the poll. Though Republicans and other voters agree Biden’s age is a problem, only 29.3% of Democrats believe the president is too old for reelection.

The poll surveyed 1,088 likely general election voters from June 5 to June 9, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/06/19/now-they-tell-us-new-report-reveals-critical-vulnerabilities-in-dominion-voting-machines-n1704516

As we all know, the 2020 presidential election was the most honest, above-board exercise of popular suffrage in the recorded history of mankind, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a racist, bigoted redneck yahoo who wants to install Donald Trump as dictator-for-life of this once-proud republic. That said, however, there has been a steady trickle of revelations suggesting that the 2020 election was not actually the pristine civics lesson that we have been forced to affirm it to have been (on pain of vilification and deplatforming). The latest is the belated release this week of the 2021 Halderman Report, which shows that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines are not quite the unimpeachable fortresses they’ve been touted to be.

This is odd in the extreme, as it was just a few weeks ago that Fox News settled with Dominion for an eye-watering $787.5 million and fired its top host, Tucker Carlson, on top of that, all for suggesting that the election may not have been up to the standard of elections in bastions of democracy such as Cuba or Zimbabwe. But on Sunday, the National Pulse reported that the Halderman Report “lays bare a litany of ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Dominion Voting Systems’ machines, currently being used in a number of states, and in all voting locations in the U.S. state of Georgia.”

The report, which according to the National Pulse was “compiled by Prof. Alex Halderman and Prof. Drew Springall as part of the lawsuit Curling v. Raffensperger,” explains how “ballot scanners and ballot marking devices (ICX) ‘can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms’ and that ‘ICX could be used to change the votes of individual Georgia voters.’” And if it can be done in Georgia and the same machines are in use elsewhere, it can be done in other states as well.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/a_mustsee_video_to_understand_how_bad_the_deep_state_really_is.html

The real power in America lies with the permanent, Democrat- and union-controlled, and very unconstitutional administrative state. Vivek Ramaswamy spoke about this problem with Philip Howard, who has been writing for decades about the problems with America’s overwhelming bureaucracy. If we are to change America’s destiny, a conservative president must break the Deep State.

1. The Deep State is unconstitutional. The Constitution does not authorize a permanent bureaucracy as a fourth branch of government. It says only that the Article II executive is responsible for certain tasks and implies that he may hire the people he needs to execute them. Congress has a say in the matter depending on its willingness to fund the people hired. This means that, under the Constitution, the president of the United States is the big boss.

Today, America has an all-powerful bureaucracy that exists separate from the president and acts as a legislature to create binding rules and as the police, judge, jury, and executioner to enforce the rules. This is patently extra-constitutional and, therefore, unconstitutional.

Image: Vivek and Philip Howard. YouTube screen grab.

2. Government unions are a huge part of the problem. When private sector unions began, there were no government protections for workers, and those workers on the lowest end of the economic scale had no negotiating power, making them vulnerable to abuse. Unions gave them the representation they needed to make demands about wages and humane working conditions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/presidential-election-2024-biden-trump-2c1e9bcc?mod=hp_lead_pos1

As Donald Trump entered a Miami courtroom earlier this week to face federal charges, drawing a raucous crowd and a crush of news media, John Newman felt fatigued by the thought that 16 months of a presidential campaign were yet to come.

“I wish I had a fast-forward button,” said Newman, a political independent in Chicago who is looking for a moderate Republican to support but fears Trump will crowd out his rivals.

Welcome to the election of dread.

Trump’s legal troubles are a sign of the country’s divisions, says John Newman of Chicago. 

If there’s one thing that voters of both parties—and independents—agree on, it’s that few are looking forward to the run-up to November 2024. The two leading candidates, Trump and President Biden, look to be heading for a repeat of 2020, and few see much to relish in that.

The two men are universally known, robbing the electorate of the potential to fall in love with someone new. “We know based on past performance what you’re going to bring to the table. There is nothing more to learn,” said Patrick Gray, a Democrat in Bay City, Mich. “I’m tired of it already.”

Within their own parties, Biden and Trump stoke plenty of anxiety to match whatever enthusiasm they can generate from the faithful. Polling suggests a substantial majority of Democrats don’t want Biden to run for office again. Trump remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, but many say they are open to someone new who doesn’t bring the former president’s combative divisiveness—or the distraction of a grueling court battle.

And no one can claim with a straight face that Biden, at 80 years old—or Trump, 77—represents the youthful vigor or embodiment of America’s bright future that many have found appealing in past presidential candidates.

Neither Biden nor Trump can even claim that a majority of Americans approve of his job performance in office, and so the potential rematch is shaping up to be a battle of who is less unpopular.

‘There is nothing more to learn’ from a Biden-Trump rematch, says Patrick Gray of Michigan. 

If 2020 is any guide, and if the two ultimately top their tickets come Election Day, it will be a razor-thin contest: Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 in the states that decided the election was less than 77,000 votes across four states, although he won the popular vote by seven million.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-gavin-newsom-debate-sean-hannity-florida-california-donald-trump-joe-biden-a746e8f7?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The two shouty debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020 were not exactly the stuff of Lincoln and Douglas, and if next year brings a rerun, many TV viewers would probably flip the channel in favor of something else, anything else, “Fast & Furious 17” or women’s air hockey finals. Yet serious public arguments can matter.

So kudos to Fox News’s Sean Hannity, who floated a series of “great debates” in an interview this week with Gavin Newsom. “Love it,” the California Governor said.

Mr. Hannity: “You would do a two-hour debate with Ron DeSantis?”

Mr. Newsom: “I’d make it three.”

The Florida Governor responded at a news conference Thursday, without addressing Mr. Newsom’s hurled gauntlet. “What I would tell him is, you know what, stop pussyfooting around,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Are you going to throw your hat in the ring and challenge Joe [Biden]? Are you going to get in and do it? Or are you just going to sit on the sidelines and chirp?”