A grenade was tossed under the tent of the Democrats by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a party stalwart who suspended his campaign for president and endorsed Republican Donald Trump.
In announcing his split from the Democrats, the nephew of the 35th president whose father also ran for the White House, Kennedy said, “I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It has become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big AG, and big money.”
Stealing the spotlight from Kamala Harris by timing his announcement with the end of the Democrat national convention where she was nominated for president, Kennedy described a campaign of lawfare to keep him off the ballot and a conspiracy by the media and deep state actors to discredit him.
“In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” said the candidate who initially campaigned against President Joe Biden before he dropped out and the Democrats anointed his vice president. “In the system that my father and uncle thrived in, a system with open debates, with fair primaries and with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, and a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different,” he stated. “When they abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.”
Also weighing into Kennedy’s decision was the Biden administration’s refusal to provide him with secret service protection even though his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, were assassinated while campaigning for the Oval Office. The issue became even more critical after an assassination attempt was made on Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania.
“I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six, in 1960,” RFK, Jr. related. “And back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.” None of that is no longer true, he charged.
Kennedy has met with Trump and his advisors, but while both insist he was not promised a cabinet position, he will work with Trump to push the issues important to him. These include fighting chronic disease in children, free speech, government corruption, and breaking the war addiction of the nation’s military-industrial complex.
Detailing the efforts of the Democrat Party to control the election process, Kennedy said: “It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably awful debate performance precipitated a palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.”
Kennedy asked: “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. It did it by weaponizing the government agencies. It did it by abandoning democracy. It did it by suing the opposition and disenfranchising American voters.”
He went on to say: “What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of the federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with, or outright coerces, media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.”
Kennedy excoriated the Mainstream Media as well. “In the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, combined, gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks, instead, ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.”
Pointing to the reporters covering his announcement, Kennedy said: “I’ll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated your really sacred responsibility. It’s the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and to challenge always the party in power. Instead of maintaining that posture, of fierce skepticism toward authority, your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.”
Technically, Kennedy said he is not terminating his campaign. “My name will remain on the ballot in most states,” he explained. “If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states, the same will apply.”