The problems with RFK Jr.
Kicking off with issues in your wheelhouse is one thing. Developing a manifesto on all the other issues is another.
Getting Kennedy in tests the man to the point that if he fails to live up to his own lofty ideals, you can walk away from the system knowing that it and all the players need to be burned to the ground because there’s nothing and no one left but an endless rogue’s gallery jammed in two rotating doors that spin just above the glass ceiling.
This article was originally published in August 2023. Regaining
Revisit it now as a backtest of RFK Jr. and the system itself, now that he has taken public office.
VST urges you to think critically about what this article showed you, the issues it raised and what RFK Jr. is proving himself to be.
This way, you can judge the system itself and the man. Then ask yourself if citizens have won anything and how.
Original Article
Before announcing his candidacy, RFK Jr. was a multiple supporter of Hillary Clinton while also having racked up an interesting, even attractive track record as an environmental lawyer and, latterly, a campaigner on health issues. COVID was an opportunity for him to come to the fore as his opposition to the COVID gene therapies, policies and acceleration into totalitarianism chimed and continues to resonate with possibly up to a third of the population, although that’s probably a theoretical maximum. It is likely that still less than a third of the US population is fully aware of let alone onboard with the full range of anti-narrative/WEF/WHO/UN/Gatesian statements that Kennedy has made since COVID kicked off.
Starting early in the race was likely a good move given the inescapable fact that he is an outsider in more ways than one. As a lifelong Democrat, the DNC and wider party have been set on shutting him down and out by any and every means, and will never allow him a shot at the candidacy, which remains an issue that he has refused to discuss. The DNC has learned the lesson of Trump and rather than giving him airtime that mocks and ridicules Kennedy, it is locked into a maximal cancellation strategy as seen during Kennedy’s recent Congressional testimony. The Democrats constantly and repeatedly lied about, defamed, misrepresented and tried to censor and cancel Kennedy in a hearing about state censorship and cancellation culture. It was some of the most bizarre, childish and openly corrupt behaviour yet seen in this year’s hearings. For acting as a foil to expose that behaviour and being able to challenge it on the fly, Kennedy deserves some thanks.
What has interested VST about Kennedy is this seemingly educated, outsider stance coupled with a dark heritage and purported will to openly call out the corrupt fascism that grips not just the USA but the majority of the Western world. All of these characteristics makes Kennedy a threat from the outset, despite being denied a platform in elements of the mainstream and attacked from the start in highly predictable fashion via the meaningless “anti-vax” and “conspiracy theory” label. In some casual circles, VST has witnessed how powerful these labels still are.
Despite what you may think, rest assured that there are swathes of people who claim to be incisive, critical, reasonably objective and capable of adult reading comprehension who prove themselves utterly incapable on all counts. By way of example, a self-proclaimed well informed citizen repeatedly called Kennedy an “anti-vaxer”, “funded by the Koch brothers” and “running a website that was totally anti-vax” (CHD). When asked to define “anti-vax”, they refused to provide a clear definition or scope in regards to Kennedy. When asked how Kennedy could be considered “anti-vax” in any sense while having had, along with his children, every US vaccination on the age-appropriate schedule except for COVID gene therapies, the person was totally incapable of justifying their claim. They then sought refuge in the “CHD is anti-vax” claim but could not cite a single specific piece of CHD output that told people to reject vaccinations in general or totality, indicating that they were not personally familiar with the website’s content and were simply repeating a standard attack slogan. When challenged about the Koch brother’s claim they provided a link to a pitifully written piece (that VST can’t find) that had zero evidence, while ignoring the published previous animosity between Kennedy and the Kochs on environmental issues, as well as Kennedy’s early, direct denial of any funding connection to the Kochs.
All of this combined with his early stirring, humanity-reaffirming speeches on the deep state, WEF, CIA and more served to bolster Kennedy’s superficial appeal to those in the anti-narrative camp. Indeed, on many of the issues that Kennedy has spoken about up to now, he appears to be potentially formidable. Trouble is, he’s only been talking about things well within his own wheelhouse. As he steps further into the limelight, we get to start scrutinising more of his wrinkles.
The Kennedy Heritage
The Kennedy mythos is something that RFK Jr. is not ashamed to use as a base for his own political legitimacy and temporal or cyclical political validity. In most of his speeches he recounts certain political stances of his uncle and father, their assassinations, corollary issues and brief recollections of a version of history that plays to his favour. Kennedy uses this to set himself up as the anti-CIA, anti-deep state actor who intends to revive his forebears’ challenge to these structures in the greater fight against fascism and corruption. What he has not addressed is Seymour Hersh’s version of history in which, amongst other things, the Kennedy brothers specifically used the CIA for their own political ends to the point that the CIA and the Mafia did away with them.
If the end of the sixties was the high watermark for American Democracy, who could blame RFK Jr. for riding that wave now in the hope of washing away a little of the filth that now fills the halls of power in modern day Rome? It is the job of candidates and Presidents to sell their citizens on a fantasy and keep pretending it is real irrespective of inconvenient facts. One particularly fervent critic on this and other counts is journalist Michael Tracey who, having taken the advice to stop criticising RFK Jr’s voice, simply doesn’t buy his family history whitewashing and his general candidacy.
Lesser of family evils?
VST argues that this pro-versioning of one’s own history or lineage is to be expected of anyone in the pursuit of power, exposure or glory as a function of political marketing. Most upper level politicians and candidates resort to telling blatant lies about themselves, like Clinton claiming to have landed in Bosnia under active sniper fire, or Biden’s claims to have visited Afghanistan and Iraq as President. Whether these egregious and constant liars are held to account is only a matter of how partisan the press and the general swamp is towards them. Clinton and Biden get free passes to spin constant fantasies. Trump was mocked for what could be called bombast, until he actually got in then he became a constant target of the most extreme forms of modern lawfare, to the point that Trump is being pursued with, in the words of Michael Tracey, “sprawling, freewheeling creativity” generating “elaborate, convoluted, new legal theories… confabulated… specifically to go after Trump.” What’s odd about Trump is that a lot of his headline statements are grounded in quite a lot more truth than is claimed by his opposition, while he has also been on the receiving end of more lies than he’s ever told. Despite that, on issues of, say, nepotism and accompanying rule-breaking, by some accounts Trump and his family are up there with the rest, although probably considerably less bad than Team Biden who were dumb enough to write shit down, keep their receipts and video tape their own drug-fuelled wankofuckathons, before betraying their own key employees. To see how the other half lives, take a flick through the attached brochure of Hunter Biden’s self-promotional material, which he no doubt used to win over new clients. Then rejoice in Ashley Biden’s ringing endorsements of her own wholesome upbringing at the hands of Joe, the world’s greatest father, which includes the following gems:
I remember having sex with friends @ a young age; showers w/my dad (probably not appropriate); Being turned on when I wasn't suppose[sic] to be…beating my vagina due to overhearing parents having sex;
What made me so attached?
My father was – message – I could get love from men.
Not letting myself go to bathroom
Being wiped until too late in the game
There is an open question of whether Kennedy’s version of his own family history comes back to bite him in the form of some direct challenges to his version of events, and whether he overplays his heritage-based credentials. Once in office, he will be instantly and constantly judgeable against his own anti-deep state and anti-corruption agenda. VST suspects that this will be one of the biggest failings of a Kennedy administration. Just as Obama could not end Gitmo and Trump didn’t drain the swamp or jail Hilary or help Assange, Kennedy will not undo the CIA or the interlocking web of deep state entities that grows at exponential rate (see Other Uses, below). All the players, from those in the Houses to the faceless layers of bureaucracy, will close ranks on any attempt to derail their gravy train. A current bellwether of this is the progress of Josh Hawley’s PELOSI Act designed to stop Congressional stock trading. Good luck with that, Josh!
Ukraine
While Kennedy himself lays out well enough the greater extent of the conflict and its contributory factors going right back to the deliberate US strategy of NATO expansion, Kennedy has admitted to his own son having actively served as a mercenary machine gunner in Ukraine against Russia. While his son is independent, this raises questions that he has not been seriously challenged on. In short, Kennedy’s own son may have committed criminal acts and Kennedy has not described them as such.
A separate U.S. law dating back to 1794, the Neutrality Act, prohibits citizens from making war against foreign governments at peace with Washington and carries a prison sentence of up to three years. The law, which could technically apply to volunteer military action against Russia, was used to prosecute Americans involved in an attempted coup in Gambia in 2014. But otherwise it has been rarely enforced in modern history, according to David Malet, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C.
If Kennedy knows and understands the genesis of the conflict and seeks a rapid and total cessation of it, what was his sentiment towards his son’s intent and ultimate choice to break a largely unenforced US law prohibiting acting as a mercenary against a state with which the USA is at peace? He hasn’t said but he probably should. Too little is made of the mercenary forces that western governments have endorsed and tolerated, despite mercenaries being illegal under international law governing armed conflict, as well as the use of PMCs including Wagner and Mozart. Nothing is said about Russia’s treatment of captured mercenaries as POWs when, under international law, they have no such status or rights.
What is obvious is that anything any candidate says now about the conflict is largely irrelevant because, come January 2025, the war will not look anything like it does today. It will either be over, with Ukraine hacked to pieces, utterly wrecked and probably non-existent as a nation state, or the conflict will have gained a second immediate front and a possible third remote African front where the same “overextend” strategy is pursued by the ever rising Nuland-Blinken-Sullivan neocon triumvirate of political insanity and incompetence.
Environmentalism vs. Climate Catastrophising
There is a quantum difference between the sliding scale of environmentalism and the perverse, enforced narrative of unevidenced claims that the world is burning and boiling due to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), which has had to be rebranded with the vaguer “Climate Change” moniker in order to instil general fear without specific and testable evidence. The latest evolution of this escalation is weather forecasts being replaced by depictions of Hell on Earth for idiots who have been convinced to abandon the evidence of their own senses and ability to search for other and critical sources.
Kennedy has a solid track record on environmentalism tied to the market and the legal system such that he has brought about measurable positive change at scale. However, three years ago he laid out a view of impending doom in keeping with the AGW narrative and went on to make a market-based energy argument that sounds viable but is extremely questionable, depending upon the breadth of one’s view.
Here Kennedy mentioned that he lives on the West coast but anticipated impending doom in the form of cataclysmic events foretold by human modelling, while citing two previous years of “unusual” fire activity in his West coast region. This is little short of the same form of extremist bullshit peddling that Al Gore’s been up to for decades. Kennedy is talking in frightening soundbites that aren’t supported by the IPCC.
Firstly, climate modelling is not accurate, as demonstrated by the human race’s inability to accurately model and predict the state of the world due to “climate change” since it started trying to predict it. This lack of accuracy is highlighted by Roger A. Pielke in his article “What the IPCC actually says about extreme weather” (our bold).
The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:
to date (today), i.e., specifically when IPCC AR6 was completed in 2021,
by 2050 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, and
by 2100 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.
Those three dates are displayed as the 3 right-most column in the table below.
A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.
Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.
The IPCC has concluded that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability for the following phenomena:
River floods
Heavy precipitation and pluvial floods
Landslides
Drought (all types)
Severe wind storms
Tropical cyclones
Sand and dust storms
Heavy snowfall and ice storms
Hail
Snow avalanche
Coastal flooding
Marine heat waves
Furthermore, the emergence of a climate change signal is not expected under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario by 2100 for any of these phenomena, except heavy precipitation and pluvial floods and that with only medium confidence. Since we know that RCP8.5 is extreme and implausible, that means that there would even less confidence in emergence under a more plausible upper bound, like RCP4.5
Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat, the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.
The IPCC itself blows Kennedy’s subscription to the apocalyptic zeitgeist out of the water.
Second, Kennedy refers to fires as a bellwether of climate change that has caused the evacuation of his West coast home not once, but twice. This again is an extremely misleading approach to take. The National Park Service explains that 85% of forest fires are caused by humans in acts of arson or avoidable error, with the other 15% being caused by other conditions like, say, a storm causing a powerline break that could ignite a fire, or lightning. The fires that are apparently raging now in Greece are all caused by arson, while CBS News takes half an article to admit that the cause of Canadian fires are still largely unknown, despite at least half of Canadian forest fires being started directly by people (including arson). Dive on Twitter for a selection of conflicting graphs and links that will leave the casual panicker unsure of what to panic about. For the sake of your mental health, we’ll show you this, although it’s probably not definitive.
Third, he admits to living on the West coast and having a summer house in Cape Cod, where finally, after 100 years, storms took out a pier. That’s a pretty good run for a pier and a purely observational data point of a single event via which Kennedy segways straight into the assertion that “all modelling” shows we’re on for catastrophe. If that’s true, why has he got two homes on opposite coasts? Why isn’t he living inland on the high ground above a flood plain? That’s a common feature of climate fearmongers; they all own coastal properties then tell you to stop living so that they don’t need to spend money redoing their sea walls. Still, if it wasn’t for the nearby sea, it would be even trickier to dispose of staff.
Fourth, Kennedy makes specific claims about how the market should be used properly to set energy prices so renewables that, according to him, are net cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear are more heavily developed. He claims that fossil fuels are heavily subsided into the multi trillions without which they would be 5x+ the price of solar. To say this about solar (and wind) is to clearly ignore the holistic view of the total cost, including carbon, of a power source.
According to Professor Michael Kelly of Cambridge, when one considers demand and consumption levels, energy density, carbon cost, longevity and more, by far and away nuclear then other fossil fuels are and will remain the dominant source of our energy economic paradigm, unless totally untenable collapse in energy consumption arises. This, he states, would have to equate to either a reversion to energy consumption levels seen circa 1870 or a “90% depopulation event” (sound familiar?). It’s well known that solar and wind energy are grossly inadequate, inconsistent, massively carbon positive, grossly space inefficient, short-lived, toxic to make and scrap, and totally unrecyclable. Without batteries to store such energy, they represent an un-optimisable source of electricity. They are also massively subsidised to the point of being the subject of practical fraud in the UK and elsewhere. See an Australian perspective from someone who claims to have worked on the inside of Aussie government renewable energy “schemes”.
Israel
This is probably Kennedy’s biggest area of contention to date. He has chosen to fully ally to Israel to the point that he has committed to a highly questionable characterisation of recent events in Jenin and a blanket justification of Israeli combat forces in the city.
His stance has triggered umbrage amongst the supporters of the two state solution and anyone who believes that Palestinians have some form of rights. Max Blumenthal, Editor-in-Chief of The Grayzone and its contributing writer, Aaron Maté, have called out Kennedy in detail on multiple claims about and characterisations of the state of Israel and its ruling elites. Blumenthal has requested a one-to-one interview with Kennedy who recently agreed to it publicly on the Jimmy Dore show, only for his press team to renege the next day. In their latest episode, The Grayzone deconstruct Kennedy’s recent statements that Blumenthal has described as “racist lies about Palestinians.”
VST leaves it to you to watch the first 45 minutes of this episode and judge the veracity of their critiques of Kennedy’s statements. Hopefully, Kennedy will face off against Blumenthal and have his mettle tested. At time of writing, Kennedy has restated that he will talk to Blumenthal and in saying so he has put himself in a corner. If he doesn’t engage, he looks weak and afraid to defend his fairly extreme claims. If he does, he stands to be beaten around the ring by Blumenthal who, as a multiple author on Israel and Gaza, and a Jew is unlikely to pull his punches.
What is Kennedy?
So, given the above, what is RFK Jr? In VST’s view, he’s several things, and not all of them good.
The simplest and most charitable take sees him as a well-intended specialist non-politician of political lineage, who is standing for fairly decent reasons with decent, idealistic intent. He is both somewhat politically naïve and trying to develop as he goes the myriad positions that a seasoned politician would have developed long ago and be skilled in keeping fluid enough to please a working majority while staving off pointed hate from vocal lobby groups. In this, he stands for the US trying to retake some of the moral high ground it has utterly abandoned and is selling a vision of common unity enshrined within “One Nation Under God” and the primacy of the Constitution. This gives him the base on which to claim he’ll reduce attacks on rights and put peace at home first, from which peace elsewhere might follow.
A much less charitable take would describe him as keen and opportunistic enough to sense a zeitgeist that chimes with a certain combination of spun Kennedy mythos and anti-COVID backlash. He’s a guy who’s not as principled as he sounds and is busy building up his “manifesto” positions on myriad issues he hasn’t had to publicly speak on to date. Macro economic issues including budget, jobs, and the state of US cities, infrastructure and law and order - which is in such a nose dive that micro and macro economics are being hammered - are all still in the Kennedy pipeline. Within all this lies the opportunity to run for a seat that:
would give him access to answers about his uncle’s and father’s murders, from which a certain political power paradigm can be forged, including a questioning of the deep state e.g. CIA, NSA, FBI;
gives the means to set a near term “green” trajectory for the US in line with whatever climate dogma he currently believes;
in the face of certain US hegemony decline, carries political opportunity in a military global retraction and re-peacing deal that starts internally and projects outwards to reset US foreign relations.
In both of these views, Kennedy’s stance on Israel, which he claims precedes his run on a long standing and consistent basis, could be seen as somewhat immaterial. In short, no one gets to become President of the USA without supporting Israel and without the support of the Israeli lobby. Whether he is a maximalist or a just-about-enough-ist doesn’t matter in reality. Every wannabe ultimately ends up saying “I support Israel” then does actually support Israel in practise. If he’s held enough of a vocal and polarised stance to date, he might as well own it and in being a maximalist he keeps Israel fully on side and just has to hope that stance doesn’t alienate too many voters ahead of other issues closer to home and the purse strings. Once in power, he could modify his position under the guise of encouraging peace, then he’ll have to take shit off the lobby he may have “betrayed”.
More likely, in VST’s view, is the inescapable need to maintain the Israeli relationship as the rest of the Middle East closes ranks and solidifies against the USA and Israel on a regional and BRICS+ basis. Under those circumstances, Israel’s nukes will need to be protected as it becomes the single US-friendly nation in the region. Everyone else has been done over and pissed off by the USA, making Russia’s and China’s job of coming across as rational and pretty nice in comparison fairly easy. They’ve already achieved, via 18 months of war in Europe, what America claimed to be endlessly working towards for decades: an outbreak of peace between the majority of Middle Eastern nations. Soon the USA will be ousted from Syria entirely and Israel and Turkey will be the axis of American power projection in the region while NATO continues to collapse. Turkey will continue to play a multi-sided game while Erdogan remains in power. Iraq intends to join BRICS and is dumping the dollar, having increased co-operation with Iran.
A third, more cynical or realistic take is this: Kennedy knows for certain he cannot win the Presidency as a Democrat because the DNC will never, ever allow him to. It has the power to fully control the candidacy and it is actively cancelling him with accusations of being anti-Semitic, anti-vax and a conspiracy theorist. Therefore, his limited run is either the highest form of book tour (like it is for many) or he is going to have to either switch to independent, negotiate a VP ticket, or in extremis find a way to hold the DNC to ransom and literally force or blackmail the DNC to back him. By that time he will be up against Gavin Newsom (VST thinks Biden will be taken out on health grounds to cover for the insane corruption) and Kennedy’s leverage will have to be in provable polling that Newsom’s dark tetrad personality cannot beat, along with some kind of actionable dirt. As of now, Kennedy has begun suing big tech for censorship against him. As a skilled litigator, he could spin that into an attack on the DNC with whom these big tech platforms are in toxic and corrupt, anti-Constitutional partnership, or he could launch other attacks e.g. defamation lawsuits for the claims made of him in the press and by Democrats in the Congressional hearing.
As for other issues, Kennedy’s manifesto is a work in progress in a race where no one has a real manifesto. They just have the current noise that comes out of their mouth and goes across a web page until the earliest moment it can be abandoned, deleted, forgotten by the electorate and denied by the candidate.
Other Uses
This is the key question. VST’s position may come across as somewhat perverse.
Kennedy serves a purpose that is borne out of his lineage and exploits it for the purposes of challenging the extremes of the system and deliberately trying to expose it and Kennedy for what they both are, simultaneously.
If Kennedy is a true outsider Democrat who is relatively true to his word, he should be a bigger threat to the system than Trump because Kennedy understands enough about law to be able to effectively weaponise it against targets that matter: businesses and the deep state. To attack those two targets while seeking to actively shrink America’s foreign military footprint is to go against the neocon, neoliberal agenda harder than Trump did. If he actively starts trying to bring calm and generate internal and external peace, he will move from a threat to a target. Any attempt to credibly restructure or otherwise disrupt the power of the FBI, CIA, NSA or any of the other periphery agencies through which authoritarianism flows risks provoking a serious, possibly terminal reaction from any or all of them.
It is the test of that reaction and Kennedy against his own promises that are his real value. On the one hand if, like Obama, Kennedy turns out to be a turncoat with a spine made of jelly, everyone will finally understand and admit that the system is what they all know it to be: so utterly corrupt and alluringly powerful that even the last vestiges of hope carried by an idealistic, childhood victim of the system gave in or was a tool of it all along. On the other, if Kennedy is something a little like a white knight who goes too far in making good on his more difficult promises that he gets seriously knobbled (beyond the ways they tried to knobble Trump) or actually assassinated tells everyone what the system really is. In this second case, that will be the watershed moment for American society: if Kennedy were to be assassinated and some form of revolution or revolt didn’t follow in a country that keeps telling itself the second amendment means something then there will never, ever be any form of uprising in America. It should have already happened by now but the blend of cognitive, financial and actual warfare is far more powerful than average citizens either understand or are willing to admit.
Getting Kennedy in tests the man to the point that if he fails to live up to his own lofty ideals, you can walk away from the system knowing that it and all the players need to be burned to the ground because there’s nothing and no one left but an endless rogue’s gallery jammed in two rotating doors that spin just above the glass ceiling. If Kennedy half-asses his test, there’s a chance that a little good can be done but this mediocre outcome is a loss because it is the system optimally tolerating, containing and ameliorating a supposed threat. If Kennedy aces the test he’ll either be able to seriously unpick some crap and show people that they should expect more from their puppet leaders, or he’ll be killed and the state will have again ripped off its mask, justifying an appropriate response from the citizens in a time between COVID and the final stages of the WEF/WHO/UN/Gatesian nightmare.
Whatever Kennedy is deep down, he’s worth backing as though he were a stick to be jammed into the spokes of the school bully’s front wheel. It’ll either break and we’ll know to expect ongoing beatings, or it’ll flip the bike and there’ll be a moment when the bully loses a tooth on the floor. We won’t know if the bully goes home crying or goes berserk without having tested the strength of the stick.
Thank you - timely and excellent analysis & insights.