Bobby’s Kid Moves Up On The Rail

In late April Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that he is running for President, challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. In May a poll put his support among rank-and-file Democrats at 20%. In June the New York Times began disparaging him in earnest. My interest was sparked because the term they use to define Kennedy’s political perspective is “right wing,” which didn’t jibe with what little I knew about him.“Robert Kennedy Jr., With Musk, Pushes Right-Wing Ideas and Misinformation” was the headline over a news story on June 5: “For more than two hours Mr. Kennedy participated in an online audio chat on Twitter with the platform’s increasingly rightward-leaning chief executive… They engaged in a friendly back-and-forth with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman turned right-wing commentator.” 

This is the ultimate editorial chutzpah — to intentionally misuse words until they lose meaning. “Right-wing” now means “a point of view not shared by the Democratic National Committee and the publishers of the New York Times. Forget the dictionary, erase your vocabulary. According to the story, “Mr. Kennedy spent nine uninterrupted minutes attacking Mr. Biden as a warmonger and claimed that their party was under the control of the pharmaceutical industry.” How is that “right-wing?”

An answer was provided by Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist who is now a liberal opinionist: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank,” was his blunt lede July 6. “His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care.”

Let’s consider the four “right-wing fantasies” Kennedy is said to propound.

1. “Bitcoin boosterism.” The glaciers are melting fast enough without having to cool vast computer servers “mining” Bitcoins. Maybe RFK Jr’s campaign is so dependent on financial support from the tech bros that he can’t alienate them at this point, but might in due course. You can be a hypocrite without being a crank — especially when the name of the game is Electoral Politics. Plus he’s Bobby’s kid.

2. “Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.” Expressing concerns about the marketing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is hardly “right-wing,” Nor is questioning the wisdom of “gain-of-function research” (the manipulation of viruses being conducted in Wuhan with funding from the US). Kennedy’s bigger point — Big Pharma Rules via Wall Street — is a criticism of capitalism that US voters need to understand. Not exactly a “right-wing” thesis. 

3. Prozac and SSRI antidepressants are “associated,” as they say in the Medical Literature, with bizarre flip outs, including mass shootings. This fact and the corroborating data have been well concealed from US Americans for more than 30 years. The drug companies have the best lobbyists and PR specialists money can buy. The media depend on them for ad revenue. When Channel 2 reports on whether “drugs or alcohol” were involved in an unusual murder, they’re not referring to pharmaceuticals but to illicit drugs. Police reports generally respect doctor-patient confidentiality, so drug companies whose products may have influenced a perp’s behavior are spared embarrassment from that direction.

I covered the marketing of SSRIs in the ’90s and documented the mounting evidence of dangerous side effects. My outlets, the AVA and Counterpunch, were below the radar. A piece Alexander Cockburn thought we’d sold to the LA Times Sunday Magazine got spiked. One of the few tragedies in which SSRI use by a perpetrator made the news was the shooting at the high school in Columbine, Colorado in April ‘99. CNN reported that a few days before the shooting, Erik Harris had been rejected by Marine Corps recruiters because “he was under a doctor’s care and had been prescribed an anti-depressant medication.” (It was Luvox.) 

4. “Opposition to US support for Ukraine” is “right wing,” according to Krugman of the Times. I’m writing this on the day the US began providing cluster bombs to Ukraine’s military, a significant escalation. So I’m opposed. Meaning I’m with Bobby’s kid on three out of four of his right-wing fantasies.

Am I actually a righty? Who says you can’t have an identity crisis in old age?