Escalating battle: RFK Jr vs. the Dem Establishment — broke new ground Sunday
Democrat candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. went farther on Sunday than he has previously in criticizing President Joe Biden for the latter's (alleged) corruption. During a live in-studio interview with FOX News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures at 10:30 A.M. E.T. (video and article here), Kennedy, when first asked about how he feels about Biden, said as he has on other occasions that "I have avoided criticizing the president because I'm trying to bring people together."
After Bartiromo said, "But corruption is corruption," Kennedy commented without hesitation, "But you're right. And I think that the issues that are now coming up are worrying enough that we need a real investigation of what happened. These revelations about [unintelligible] Burisma, which is a notoriously corrupt company, paid out $10 million to Hunter and his dad — if that's true, then it is really troubling. So I think that needs to be investigated."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures, July 23, 2023.
Still photo from FOX News video.
The first part of the ten-minute interview was about the efforts by leading Democrat politicians to censor Kennedy, who was invited to give testimony at a congressional hearing about censorship "and Big Tech's collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech" last Thursday. Kennedy was met with attempts by the committee's Democrat members to shut him down and prevent him from answering their questions and responding to their attacks, including that he is a dangerous racist and anti-Semite.
On Saturday, The Hill reported that the Democrat party has now shifted its strategy to combat Kennedy, who is perceived as a growing threat to the re-election of President Biden. In "Democrats put RFK Jr. on blast in change of strategy," The Hill reports:
Democrats are no longer trying to ignore Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and have taken to calling him out in public after a week of controversies.
National party leaders for the first time acknowledged Kennedy's disruptive presidential bid with sharp criticism, and lawmakers met his claims of censorship head-on during his testimony on Capitol Hill.
It's a notable change from their previous approach, in which Democratic leaders and party officials hoped Kennedy would simply fade away on his own. ...
"On his own, he was doing a really good job of showing everyone his initials stood for Real F------ [K]razy, so it made sense to let him be," said Eddie Vale, a strategist who has worked on numerous Democratic campaigns.
The mainstream media, which take their marching orders from the left wing of the political establishment (AKA the Democrats), have also been falling over themselves to attack and smear Kennedy as an anti-Semite, a racist, and a kook. A prime example was a segment that aired live on CNN on Saturday, July 22 at 5:30 P.M. E.T. during a program hosted by Jim Acosta. The guest was Larry Sabato, a reliable establishment political pooh-bah on permanent call who can be counted on to reflect the dominant MSM and Democrat-left spin of the day. From the CNN transcript of the program:
JIM ACOSTA, CNN ANCHOR: Larry, I wanted to talk to you because I know you studied the Kennedys for so many years. Just your initial take on this bizarre behavior that we have seen from RFK Jr.
LARRY SABATO, DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA CENTER FOR POLITICS & AUTHOR: Well, I wish I weren't a political scientist for this one. I wish I were a psychologist. I'd probably be able to give you a better answer. . .
ACOSTA: And this week, Republicans invited RFK Jr to Capitol Hill to testify at a hearing on government censorship, weaponizing government.
RFK Jr has not been censored. He's been able to say pretty much everything he wants, every outlandish theory. I don't know why he says he's being censored.
He tried to rewrite history on previous comments he made about Anne Frank and vaccines, all sorts of Anti-Semitic comments. Do you think elevating him will come back to bite Republicans?
SABATO: I don't know whether it will, but it ought to. It's disgraceful. It's disgusting. And they [Republicans] know most of what he is saying is absolutely untrue.
And they [Republicans] are participating in the misinformation and disinformation spread because they think it will benefit them politically. Both their nominee for president [presumably President Trump in Sabato's view] and probably their own re-election races.
Politics sinks to low depths sometimes. And this is setting a new standard for at least the 2024 presidential election.
Sabato concluded his remarks with this comment: "You know, normally, when you come across someone like that [RFK Jr.], you should feel sympathy for them and then you should ignore them."
Very telling was that interview with Sabato, which is emblematic of the MSM's — and the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities' — ongoing efforts to construe opinions they don't approve of as "misinformation and disinformation" and to take action (both clandestine and out in the open) to suppress them.
Regarding the allegations spreading like wildfire through Democrat politics and the media, RFK did not make anti-Semitic comments recently when he mentioned reports that government research has been going on to develop ethnically targeted bioweapons. What he did was to cite the scientific literature that noted some disparities in the death rates from COVID depending on an individual's racial and ethnic characteristics.
I deconstructed the allegations against Kennedy in an article at American Thinker one week ago here. An even lengthier and more detailed review is "This Jewess Says RFK Jr is Right — A presidential candidate is assailed for speaking the truth" by feminist author and icon Naomi Wolf, Ph.D. Wolf's article was originally published at her Substack and was reprinted two days later at FrontPage Magazine, a venerable conservative outlet founded two decades ago by David Horowitz.
RFK Jr. on Sunday Morning Futures, FOX News Channel, July 23, 2023.
Still photo from FOX News video.
POLITICO titled an article about RFK Jr.'s appearance on Bartiromo's Sunday Morning Futures program on FOX News yesterday morning "RFK Jr.: Media hitting me harder than Trump." That was essentially the lede in my blog post at American Thinker last Friday. And now it has apparently come to pass. Rolling Stone noted, quoting Kennedy:
"It's interesting to me because I've been really slammed in a way that I think is unprecedented, even more than President Trump was slammed by the mainstream corporate media," Kennedy said on Maria Bartiromo's Fox News show, Sunday Morning Futures.
Tomorrow, by the way (Tuesday, July 25), Kennedy will make his third appearance in six days on the FOX News channel, this time in a town hall before a live audience in NYC on Sean Hannity's program which airs from 9-10 PM ET with a replay at 11 P.M. P.T. One wonders if Kennedy's frequent appearances on the Democrats' most hated mainstream media outlet and his apparent rise in popularity and fundraising perhaps as a result of that exposure on the nations #1 cable news channel prompted the Biden Democrats — as The Hill termed it — to "put RFK Jr on blast."
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who has covered national politics and the politics and economics of health care, popular culture, and media for over five decades. He is a regular contributor to the BBC Radio and Television. His web page with links to his work is http://peter.media. Peter's extensive American Thinker archive: http://tinyurl.com/pcathinker. Peter's Twitter account is @pchowka.