When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. first announced that he was standing for the nomination for the US presidency, he promised that – if he got elected to the White House – he would use his position to find out why American children had become so sick.
It remains an excellent question. And we are not so far behind in this country either.
But whatever the explanation – whether we blame wifi signals or chemicals in the food or pollution or too many vaccines, or whether we are simply expecting too much of them – I trust Kennedy to find out.
I wasn’t surprised that he chose to break with the Democrats, given that – within 36 hours of Biden being sworn in as president, his underlings had contacted the social media outlets and warned them to deny Kennedy their services.
In a country where no third party candidate has won the presidency since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago, why is he getting so much attention?
The answer is partly that – as well as leading in the polls – he is younger than either of the others. He is a mere stripling of at 69 in comparison.
But he is also steeped in what we might call the American health movement.
There are now hundreds of online newsletters. if not more, many of which waft across and onto my computer screen every day. It is at least partly my fault that the past year has wafted quite so many of them to me—because I have been scouring the internet for possible solutions for my various Parkinsonian symptoms.
As a whole, the newsletters reflect an amazing variety of voices—everything from new age hippy to full-on conspiracy theories, to Ocean Robbins, scion of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream franchise, talking about diet, who claims a membership of half a million. What holds them all together is a strong belief that to face chronic ill-health you need to look at your diet.
This is also seen as the antidote to increasing gaps between pockets of medical knowledge— basically, it means that the treatment is much the same whatever the diagnosis.
Politically, most of them are hard to read, but those that express a preference are clearly Republican. My worry is that this is a burgeoning group of voters who feel sidelined and lied to. It is a dangerous precedent for the US presidential election next year.
Like most Europeans, I look on Trump as a terrifying monster—the latest in a long line of lesser monsters which the American system has foisted on the world. But then you look at their rivals in the Democrats and see a strange looking-glass reflection with similarly authoritarian tendencies.
So when Kennedy promised he would find out why so many American children are sick, he was taking the lead of a growing movement that would otherwise have swung to Trump.
I know some on the left will have difficulties with his scepticism about covid and most vaccines, which is why the Biden administration has been trying – so dangerously to cancel him.
But I am not sure how useful it is to clamp down on freedom of speech. If the left had been as suspicious of scepticism a few decades ago, then we would probably still be coping with thalidomide. We would never have discovered that mad cow disease CJD was real. It seems to me that Kennedy and his scepticism are vital tools – and also genuinely of the radical centre.
It is only when we debate these issues that the truth will emerge. As it is beginning to do in the USA, thanks partly to Kennedy’s own organisation, Children’s Health Defense.
It is now mainstream in the USA to say that covid may in fact have been manmade and escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, probably with funding from the the USA.
But I am much more concerned about my own country where scepticism about official statements and denials about health seems to have gone entirely to sleep.
Why, for example, do I have to get the news from the USA that data in the UK shows a worrying spike in deaths from turbo-cancers among people under 44 in the UK since 2022?
Why is that not leading the news over here? Is it because we are worried about what all those NHS volunteers will feel if they discover they were unwittingly involved in facilitating the American Pfizer vaccine among other Brits? Or is it because we are afraid we will be playing into the hands of Trump and the far right by talking about it? Or is it just that our sceptical abilities are now fast asleep?
So, personally, I hope that Kennedy continues to lead the pack. as he currently does in the polls. And I hope he can re-infect us on the other side of the Atlantic with some of his radicalism.
The Kennedy name is worth a lot of recognition but won’t translate at votes next year. The more interesting question which you raise is he does he damage most – Biden or Trump. The assumption is the former because he is a Kennedy and a Democrats but your article suggests he might take votes from the Republications. Any polling on that?