WorldNetDaily started out loving Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign because he was running as a Democrat and might harm President Biden’s re-election chances — but when Kennedy switched to running as an independent, WND suddenly realized he might hurt Donald Trump’s election chances and started noticing his non-right-wing views. But Kennedy returned to spouting right-wing friendly things, and WND got back on board. A March 17 article by Joe Kovacs hyped that Kennedy would be choosing a “fresh face” as his running mate:
Kovacs noted in passing that Shanahan “was behind Kennedy’s Super Bowl commercial,” but didn’t explain that the ad dishonestly tried to appropriate the legacy of his uncle, assassinated president John F. Kennedy.
An April 2 article by Bob Unruh cheered another right-wing talking point Kennedy spouted (while also noting some of his not-so-right-wing views):
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as a third-party candidate this year.
But he long has been a prominent Democrat party leader. As have many of his family members, including his father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was the nation’s attorney general, and his uncle, John F. Kennedy, who was president.
He’s been active in environment fights, battled misinformation about vaccinations, leads Children’s Health Defense, and takes part in water, renewable energy and indigenous population issues.
Now he’s turned blunt on the issue of the threat to democracy, a charge that Joe Biden and other leaders of the Democrat party have been lobbing at President Donald Trump for years already.
It’s not Trump who is the greater threat, it’s Biden, Kennedy said.
It’s in a report at the Washington Examiner that he explains.
“I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history — the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent,” he explained, “He’s weaponizing the federal agencies. Those are really critical threats.”
Actually, Children’s Health Defense doesn’t “battle misinformation about vaccinations” — it spreads misinformation about vaccines.
An April 5 article by Unruh gushing over Kennedy embracing a right-wing narrative about the Capitol riot began with a lengthy editorializing preamble:
Democrats for years now have claimed that the Jan. 6, 2021, protest-turned-riot at the U.S. Capitol was a full-fledged “insurrection.”
That would include plans by the rioters to seize the government, its economy, its military, is executive branch, its legislature, its courts and international relations.
Despite the fact that the evidence of that was simply not there, Democrats have championed their talking point because they want, under an obscure constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War, to prevent President Donald Trump from running for office again.
In fact, charges of “insurrection” are ostentatious by their absence from the hundreds and hundreds of court cases brought against those who protested, including the small number who vandalized the Capitol that day. And when leftists in several states, including Colorado, simply decided on their own and without evidence, that they would banish Trump from the ballot, the Supreme Court had to step in and rein them in.
The protesters that day were concerned over the undue influences on the 2020 election, which was hit by the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to elections officials, who often used it to recruit Democrat voters. Never before had such a sum been injected into an American election.
Yes, Unruh is repeating the Zuckerberg lie again. Finally, in the eighth paragraph of his article, Unruh finally got around to Kennedy:
Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat but running as an independent because of Democrat party allegiance to Biden as a candidate, says if elected president, he’d have a special counsel look at the disputes.
And he debunked the standard Democrat talking point against Trump and his voters.
“January 6 is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape. I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed. I want to hear every side,” he said.
“It is quite clear that many of the January 6 protestors broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot. Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his delusion that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection.
“I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully,'” he said.
But he does have concern for how Joe Biden and his appointees have manipulated the situation.
An April 4 column by David Harsanyi similarly endorsed Kennedy’s attack on Biden:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can be an unhinged leftist and crackpot, but he also happens to be correct about President Joe Biden’s attacks on constitutional order, particularly free expression.
Speaking to an incredulous Erin Burnett on CNN this week, Kennedy argued that Biden was a bigger threat to “democracy” than Donald Trump, a position that clashes with the media’s entire 2024 campaign messaging.
In a more decent world, we’d be debating which presidential candidate was better at upholding the constitutional order, rather than which one was worse. That is not our fate. And yet, the unique thing about the 2024 presidential contest is that voters are given a chance to compare existing presidential records.
Kennedy contends that Biden “is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech or censor his opponent.” One suspects Eugene Debs might quibble with this characterization, though not since the Committee on Public Information has there been a White House that has shown such disdain for free expression and debate.
Of course, much of that “censorship” involves addressing misinformation or blatant lies. Harsanyi doesn’t explain why lies and misinformation should never be challenged.
Scott Lively served up an April 17 column praising Kennedy for making the Michigan election ballot through the Natural Law Party, which is linked to those “advocating the use of Transcendental Meditation”; despite being a rabidly right-wing Christian, Lively added that “culturally speaking I think TM is relatively benign, and its Hindu-leaning emphasis on natural law is a positive counter to the anti-theist, transhumanist agenda of the ‘elite’ Secular Humanists who now dominate America and most of Western civilization.”