The Long and Winding Road to RFK Jr. Supporter

This past June I started watching and listening to every podcast I could find which interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr.  After about of week of binging RFK Jr. content, I realized that he never said a thing I disagreed with.  Well, in truth, there were some things I disagreed with, but those disagreements paled in comparison to larger issues of war and peace, corporate/government collusion and corruption, issues of personal liberty and wider civil rights such as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience and thought, and the need to emphasize the values that should unite us.

An unholy alliance has been made between the status quo in Washington and large corporations (you name it: Big Pharma, military-industrial complex, Big Social Media, entertainment, Big News Media), and this alliance is squashing liberty and freedom of association. The ruling group in Washington continues to implement divisive policies that are setting Americans against each other. The idea that American politics is intended to unite America is, by those who appeal to that intention, a canard.  American politics is not the art of getting things done. American politics has become the art of dividing the electorate such that one side gets 50%+1 of the votes.  And it’s been that way for a long time.  It’s just that right now, it’s out in the open.

Look at where we’re at: We are involved in endless war. Our never-ending funding of the war in Ukraine is doing nothing but destroying that nation. Because of the foreign policy experience Joe Biden brought into the Presidency, why did he fail to intervene before Russia’s war on Ukraine started, and why has he opposed a negotiated end to that war? 

Domestically, the Administration approves the printing trillions of paper money intended to provide relief from disastrous policies, and then expects recipients’ votes in return.

On foreign policy, it appears that President Biden is still trying to win the Cold War, and on domestic policy his Administration is still trying to implement LBJ’s Great Society.  The Administration seems stuck in the 1970s when the world was defined by conflict and competition between opposing superpowers; and when the dream to create a quasi-utopia through Big Government was still alive.

We desperately need a new vision of leadership, not a vision that is 50 years in the past; a leadership that lessens tensions both across the world and in our own country. We need a rejuvenated vision of what makes America special and what makes us great. We need leadership that stops dividing us, that ends the deliberate use of hatred of one group for another as a means of “winning” elections.  Robert Kennedy Jr. is the right candidate at the right time to bring real change to the way things are done in government and in the country.

Why I came to support RFK Jr. —

• He’s right about the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.
• He’s right about Ukraine. He would place his emphasis on ending the fighting, not on perpetuating it in a US/NATO proxy war intended to achieve some perceived grand geopolitical goal.  He recognizes that the real losers in the conflict are the Ukrainian people, over 350,000 of whom have died in combat.  RFK Jr. considers it immoral that both Ukraine and Russia were open to a negotiated settlement of the war in February, but Ukraine was dissuaded by the White House and by NATO from seeking peace, and so the fighting goes on.
• He’s right about media censorship being coercive to democracy.
• He was right about the COVID lockdowns, particularly the lockdown of small businesses, schools and churches.
• He speaks from a depth of knowledge on major issues, rather than in glib generalities.
• Rather than being anti-vax, he’s articulated the need to unlink the pharmaceutical industry from the government’s process of approving new medications. His priority is increasing drug safety.  His lawsuits against federal public health agencies have been to promote discovery of what both regulators and the pharmaceutical industry knew of health risk side effects of new drugs, and then making those findings public.
• He believes that climate change is real but thinks that the marketplace should and will find solutions.
• He reasons that confiscating privately owned guns won’t work. He would work to find a consensus to enhance gun safety and the protection of soft targets such as schools from being sites of mass shootings.

In the face of real problems – some arguably existential threats – people are increasingly reaching the conclusion that ideological labels are not only useless, but dangerous.  Conservative, progressive.  They no longer mean anything, and those who wrap themselves in such labels have betrayed what those ideologies used to stand for.  Our politics are dominated by extremes and by tribalists.  The two main poles are increasingly offering a choice between reaction or repression.  Instead of falling into the old paradigm of identifying with a label or a tribe, Robert Kennedy Jr’s. campaign lifts freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom to assemble, freedom from fear, freedom from domineering anyone else, and freedom to do what is right.

When I registered independent in 2016, I thought that nothing could be more liberating than registering independent.  Over the past few months, I’ve found something even more liberating:  finding a candidate I could be proud of supporting.