1 June 2023
The Nephew Also Rises
by J.R. Thomas
In the latest episode of “Succession – White House” a shock manoeuvre against President Joe sees his son Hunter stand against his father for the Presidential nomination. Can he win? Joe rings Kamala to ask her views – but Kamala has gone out. Maybe back next Wednesday.
No, I’m wrong, it’s not that episode. The one scheduled seems to be one in which the nephew of the ex-President decides to run against the current President, even though he (the nephew candidate) has argued against almost every aspect of current and recent Presidential policy. And in which Kamala has gone out, maybe back two weeks on Thursday.
The first episode proposed was fiction, so far as I know but who can be certain, but the second is unfolding in Washington at this time. Robert Kennedy Jr, aged 69, son of the Attorney General of the same name so horribly assassinated in 1968, and of course nephew of JFK, America’s lost hero who was slain in Dallas in 1963, has announced that he intends to run for the Democrat nomination for President in 2024. And he is doing surprisingly well in the polls, rising from a very low figure when he declared in April to around 20% currently.
We should say at this point, if only to get it out of the way, that there is a third candidate running for the nomination – no, not Hunter Biden, but Marianne Williamson. Ms Williamson is 70, becomes angry if described as a “new age guru” so we won’t, and also began a run in 2020, but pulled out to support Bernie Sanders. She has never held political office, has written a number of books that appeal to readers whose views are definitely off piste – but not new age guru’ish, oh no, certainly not. Her views are to the left of almost anybody that you may have heard of in the Democrat Party, together with presumably quite a lot of chanting and holding hands and dancing in shuffling circles. The Democrat Party is a broad gathering and we hope she continues to make her run and lighten the proceedings up to the selection convention in Chicago next August.
But back to Mr Kennedy. Robert would also presumably be regarded as a faintly wacky candidate if he were not a Kennedy and if the Democrat Party was currently more…conventional, should we say? He too has views that fit uneasily inside mainstream Democrat politics, though in areas where eccentricity is becoming normalised – such as swingeing increases in tax on the rich, the introduction of a wealth tax, the banning of nuclear power, the cessation of oil and gas drilling, and a greater toughening of environmental protection, though coupled with measures that will benefit the American middle class. But at this point Robert casts off from the good ship Democrat and steers a course of his own.
He is a man who loves a conspiracy theory, a tendency which began, perhaps understandably, with his expressed opinions that both his uncle and father were the victims of organised assassinations by mysterious groups. Such views are of course not uncommon, but like many promoting them, Mr Kennedy has not been able to bring any evidence forward as to who might be involved in these groups, or what their objectives were. More controversially, he has also suggested that his cousin Michael Skakel was innocent of the murder of Martha Moxley, a controversial case but more for legal mis-procedures than any serious doubts about the identity of the killer.
Robert has also accused many major drug companies of unethical and illegal behaviour, saying that they have created or misrepresented a number of pandemics and diseases as dangerous and thus requiring expensive drug interventions, such as HIV\AIDS, autism (which Kennedy (and others) suggest is caused by inadequately tested drugs), and food allergies where he draws links again with inadequate testing and the development of, in particular, nut allergies.
But what has really brought him to public attention in recent years is his strong stance on Covid vaccines. Mr Kennedy early in the Covid crisis “came out” as a noisy anti-vaxxer, suggesting that Anthony Fauci (the Surgeon General) was deliberately misleading the American public as to the nature of Covid and as to the remedies. He further suggested that Bill Gates, ex Microsoft, and his charitable foundation were in league with Mr Fauci to increase the rate of vaccinations and thus personally profit from the inoculation programme.
When we say “thus” it was not made clear how any of these parties were profiting or what other motive they had or have or how Mr Kennedy and a few backers were proposing to prove these remarkable allegations and other remarks and suggestions that they made. Before hundreds of Shaw Sheet readers grab their laptops to scold us for this cynical view of what one might broadly call Covid scepticism let us make clear we are not taking a stance one way or the other on this; indeed the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight do suggest indeed that there was a strong over-reaction to the threat that Covid was initially thought to pose to human life and happiness. But here we are just setting out some, we hope, useful background as to Mr K’s political beliefs.
Robert’s beliefs resonate well with certain sections of the American public, though not entirely appealing to the same interest groups in the same way – the Green lobby is far from contiguous with the anti-vax lobby, for instance. But at the moment he has one powerful advantage with Democrat voters, and that is that he is not Joe Biden, nor is he Marianne Williamson, and indeed that he is a Kennedy. The President is going through a period of, how should we put this, slight frailty, and some of his recent speeches have been somewhat rambling and the great man has tended to lose his way mid-peroration. That lively President who last year invoked universal admiration for his extra-ordinary trip to Kiev, ending by running up the steps of Air Force One at Warsaw Airport has not been visible for a while. He looks tired and pale and there is increasing concern as to his ability to stand a year or more of campaigning, against a candidate who is likely to be either D Trump or a much younger man or woman. Even the budget negotiations in Washington, presumably concluded by the time you read this, have taken their toil. He really needs to get more support from his vice-President. In the meantime there is increasing muttering in those famous smoke filled rooms (certainly not tobacco smoke now of course) that Joe won’t do. But if not Joe, who? If this is not resolved quickly, Robert could become unstoppable.
Which brings us to the non-candidate who is more likely to end up President that anybody except Joe. Over to Kamala Harris: “Kamala, how is it going?” “Hey, Kamala?” Oh, hang on. Sorry readers, she has gone out. Maybe back mid-June. We’ll let you know on that one.
