RFK Jr., in a Fiery Address, Blasts Democrats’ Spiral Under Biden and Harris
At Madison Square Garden, the former Democratic and independent presidential candidate unloads on Democrats as agents of war and censorship.
It would be easy to call President Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden an instance of the medium, or perhaps venue, being the message — bright lights and a big crowd galvanized by the promise of restoring America’s greatness. Beyond the theatrical aspects, however, came a lashing of the Democratic Party leveled by a former member of it, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For the onetime independent presidential candidate, who joined Mr. Trump’s transition team in August, today’s radicalized Democratic Party “is not the party anymore of Martin Luther King, of Robert Kennedy, of John Kennedy.”
That admission may not be much of a stretch, but it is what Mr. Kennedy had to say about what is in his estimation the Democrats’ deep-state drift and institutionalized intolerance of dissenting views that were also noteworthy.
He slammed Democrats as “the people that are trying to undermine voting rights in this country by weaponizing the federal agencies against political candidates, including me and Donald Trump.” He said it is the party that “wants to divide Americans and is dismantling women’s sports by letting men play women’s sports,” reminding the audience that it was his uncle, Ted Kennedy, who in 1972 “wrote Title IX, which protected women’s sports in college.”
While thorny domestic issues like the economy and immigration have emerged as the issues dominating this election, with foreign affairs relegated to the backstage for many voters, Mr. Kennedy did not hold back in that department either.
“Today’s Democratic Party is the party of war, it’s the party of the CIA. You had Kamala giving a speech at the Democratic Convention that was written by neocons, that was belligerent,” he told the energized crowd.
The Harris campaign, he said, “is very proud that it received the endorsement of 50 former CIA agents and officers, and of John Bolton, and of Dick Cheney. These are the people that gave us a war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy catastrophe that’s ever happened to this country. These are the people that gave us the Patriot Act that launched the surveillance state.”
“This is the party of Wall Street, of big banks, of big data, of big tech, of the military contractors, and the party of big pharma, big agriculture, big food, and big chemicals.”
With respect to his support for President Trump, Mr. Kennedy asked the audience, “Don’t you think that we deserve a president in this country who’s going to restore the moral authority of the United States of America? Don’t you think that we deserve a president who’s going to end the warfare state and rebuild the middle class? Don’t you want a president who’s going to put America first?”
While he did not cite any foreign country other than Iraq, the unambiguous criticism of the Democrats as the party of “military contractors” has relevance as Americans go to the polls. That is to a large degree because the Biden administration continues to pour billions of dollars into the defense of Ukraine, often with little accountability.
Under the Trump administration, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, though never sanctioned, was largely kept in check. Mr. Kennedy’s distaste for Mr. Biden’s uneven management of a protracted war in Europe echoes the misgivings expressed by Senator Paul, who has repeatedly called for an audit of the monies going to Ukraine.
Mr. Kennedy’s query to the audience, “Don’t you want a president who’s going to end the corruption at the federal agencies, at FDA, at NIH, at CDC, and at the CIA?” can be seen less as criticism of those agencies per se than the manner in which the Biden-Harris administration has sometimes commandeered them for dubious domestic political purposes and ill-conceived geopolitical aims.
Messrs. Kennedy and Trump appear to have a good working relationship. Mr. Kennedy, who spoke at length with the Sun’s publisher, Dovid Efune, in September, said that President Trump called him just three hours after the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 and said that Mr. Trump told him “There are some things that we can agree on and some that we disagree on, but the landscapes on which we agree are so much larger.”
He told the arena audience that Mr. Trump said he wanted “to end the wars and the surveillance and censorship” and that he wanted “to protect the Constitution and protect freedom of speech.”