The Paranoid Style in American Politics

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, October 12, 2023

 

There is a type of person who spends decades making one terrifying prediction after another. Great calamities await us. Economic depressions. Acts of terror. Devastating pandemics. When tragedy finally strikes, because tragedy always strikes, this person is elevated to prominence and treated like Nostradamus.

 

One such figure, a man who has been loitering on the fringes of respectability, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of former U.S. attorney general and assassinated Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

 

Now, I’m not a person who reflexively assumes nepotism. Plenty of talented people have famous parents. I am merely pointing out that if RFK Jr.’s initials were “RFM” or “RFS,” he’d be on Reddit yelling in all caps about the CIA’s plot to inject your dog with nanotechnological spyware.

 

Instead, Kennedy, who recently dropped out of the Democratic primary against Joe Biden to launch an independent campaign, will be a guest speaker at a Conservative Political Action Conference event this month. I’m unsure whom RFK’s run will hurt more, Biden or the GOP nominee. But there are plenty of conservatives who have embraced a self-destructive reactionary outlook that makes RFK an attractive option. One can certainly understand how the recklessness and corruption of our many institutions over the past decade — from politics to public health to the media — would send voters into the arms of contrarians. RFK Jr., though, has never believed in open inquiry or scientific skepticism. Rather, he’s a Malthusian climate extremist and authoritarian. And I don’t mean the irritating kind of authoritarian who wants to force you to ride a bike to an un-air-conditioned solar-panel-factory union job every morning. I mean the scary kind who would throw you in jail if you questioned why.

 

Kennedy once argued that climate-deniers should be executed. Not all individuals, mind you — he’s not a monster. “I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty,” Kennedy explained at EcoWatch. Later he walked that position back to “three hots and a cot at The Hague.”

 

Among those Kennedy proposed imprisoning were people who worked at places such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute, the State Policy Network, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. Listen, I know some of these people. I’ve read their white papers. I’m not going to sit here and pretend they don’t deserve to go to prison. But, lucky for them, we are still a free country.

 

Proposing that Americans who differ with you on policy be imprisoned isn’t like debating the merits of lower marginal tax rates. It speaks to the unhinged nature of the man.

 

Not long ago, RFK Jr. floated the idea that Covid-19 had been “ethnically targeted” at “certain races,” namely “Caucasians and black people,” but designed to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He was just asking questions. When the New York Post reported his comments, he demanded that the editors retract and apologize for “this false, underhanded, and inflammatory article.” But there was video of him saying those words verbatim. None of it was exceptionally surprising coming from a man who had hailed Nation of Islam leader and noted racist Louis Farrakhan as a “truly great partner” when Farrakhan was helping him push pseudoscientific theories about vaccines and autism. I’m not proposing that RFK Jr. is a bigot. I’m simply pointing out that he’s a complete nutter.

 

Also, he’s an “election denier.” In a 2006 Rolling Stone piece, RFK Jr. claimed to be “convinced” that voter fraud had handed George W. Bush the 2004 election. Then again, not only isn’t RFK Jr. convinced that his uncle John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a communist gunman, he also wonders whether Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian terrorist who confessed to assassinating his father, wasn’t framed by the CIA.

 

I am sympathetic to the contrarian. Skepticism is good. But in the end, an unhinged skeptic is unhinged. Simply because the right people hate him doesn’t make him right. And just because a conspiracy theorist finally steps on some morsels of truth doesn’t make him any less of a paranoid crank.