Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s legendary takedown of the Democratic Party and Media - * Must Watch* press conference for the ages!
Calls Dem Party the party of WAR, CENSORSHIP and CORRUPTION - No Policies - No Ideas - NOT Democratic; Says JFK and RFK would be ‘astonished’ that Kamala Harris has not given an interview in 35 days
By Margaret Menge
In a stunning Friday afternoon press conference, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced he is suspending his campaign for president, but NOT dropping out…only removing his name from the ballot in 10 battleground states and encouraging people in those states to vote for Donald Trump.
But first, he spoke at length about the Democratic Party, what it meant to him and to his family, and what it’s become.
“I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote,” he said. “I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six, in 1960. And back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and 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.”
“As you know,” he continued, “I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag and big money. When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.”
Kennedy stood alone at the podium in a dark blue suit, with giant American flags on his left and right. His voice was raspy, and yet he spoke clearly, with a steady and unwavering sense of purpose, his ruddy and tanned face serious and his tone somber.
He launched his campaign for president in April of 2023. It was his first run for political office.
When in October of 2023 he announced he was running not as a Democrat, but as an independent, mainstream media knocked his decision, saying it would be almost impossible for him to get the more than 1 million signatures that would be required to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states and to raise enough money to hire the teams of attorneys that would be required to defend against ballot challenges.
“The naysayers told us that we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible,” Kennedy said. “So the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong.”
He went on to talk about the more than 100,000 volunteers who stepped up to collect signatures in every state, some of whom worked 10-12 hour days in extreme cold and heat, and who did it because they believed that together could reverse the nation’s decline.
Their dream, said Kennedy, was of a nation “healed of its divisions.”
But the Democratic Party fought them at every turn.
“The DNC dragged us into court in state after state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters, who had signed those petitions,” he said. “It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.”
Kennedy went on to describe the events of the last several months, with no Democrat primary debates held, and only one candidate given any kind of platform by the Democratic Party – President Joe Biden.
“It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden,” he said. “Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election.”
Kennedy spoke less than 24 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris had accepted the Democratic nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago following an extraordinary pressure campaign that saw Biden, the sitting president, forced out of the race by fellow Democrats, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate,” said Kennedy of Harris. “My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with ANY opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview, or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose when they don’t know whom they are choosing, and how can this look to the rest of the world?”
Kennedy is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated just four and a half years earlier, in 1963. He is the third oldest of 11 children.
For most of the latter half the Twentieth Century, the Kennedy family was known as the most famous Democratic family in America. In addition to JFK and Robert Kennedy, who served as his older brother’s attorney general, another brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, served as a longtime U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Three other Kennedys — Joseph P. Kennedy II (RFK, Jr.’s older brother), Joe Kennedy III and Patrick Kennedy — served in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2022, Joe Kennedy III was appointed by President Biden to serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland.
“My father and my uncle were always conscious of America’s image abroad because of our nation’s role as the template for democracy, the role model for democratic processes, and the leader of the free world,” said Kennedy on Friday. “Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon…nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors.”
He referred to the Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago this week, as a “highly produced Chicago circus.”
“There, in Chicago, a stream of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times, just on the first day. Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?” he asked. “In contrast, at the RNC Convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.”
*****
For years, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was known as an environmental lawyer in New York state, representing Hudson River fishermen as the lead counsel for the Waterkeeper Alliance and for the organization Riverkeeper, focused on the cleanup of the Hudson River.
But over the years, he began to be better known for his advocacy on behalf of vaccine-damaged children and their families.
With the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, he become a leader in the medical freedom movement, attracting hundreds of thousands of conservative Republican supporters with his warnings about Dr. Anthony Fauci and the new Covid-19 vaccines.
In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci” he told the incredible story of the regulatory capture of federal health agencies, including the CDC, FDA and NIAD, and in particular focused on NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and his decision to make Remdesivir the sole government-approved treatment for Covid-19, though it had killed one of every four people years earlier in trials for Ebola. The book became a runaway bestseller, spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was widely praised by others in the medical free movement, including Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough.
In the Friday afternoon press conference, Kennedy spoke of his campaign for president and his willingness to talk to reporters and anyone else who wanted to interview him. He said that some days he did as many as 10 interviews, similar to President Donald Trump, saying Trump — “who actually was nominated and won an election” — also does several interviews daily.
“How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or a debate during the entire election cycle?” Kennedy asked, rhetorically. “We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.”
He then pivoted to the shocking revelations of censorship by the Biden administration.
“What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates,” he said. “What alarms me is the resort to censorship and 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 and the organization he heads, Children’s Health Defense, filed a class action lawsuit on March 24, 2023 against President Biden, Anthony Fauci, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and several other federal government officials alleging that the defendants “colluded with, encouraged and pressured” Facebook, Google and Twitter to suppress speech that the government did not want the public to hear and to silence those who were critical of federal policy.
“President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88-percent landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party control the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot,” Kennedy said. “But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.”
He said that over the course of his 16-month campaign, where his poll numbers reached into the high 20s at times, the “DNC-aligned mainstream media” maintained a “near imperfect embargo” on interviews with him.
He compared himself with another independent candidate from three decades ago.
“During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks,” he said. “In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN combined gave only two live interviews of me. Those networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces, with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. Representatives of those networks are in this room right now. And I’ll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility, 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 have 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.”
He went on to talk about his suit, RFK, Jr. et al v. Biden et al, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
“The Democratic Party censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power,” he said, saying just this week, the judge in the case called the Biden White House’s censorship of him and others on social media “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”
He went on to describe what was divulged in the 155-page decision – that just 37 hours after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, swearing to uphold the Constitution, he and his staff opened up a portal, inviting the CIA, the FBI, CISA, DHS, the IRS and other agencies to censor Kennedy and other political dissidents on social media.
“Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards,” said Kennedy.
“The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles and it’s joined this systemic attack on democracy. The media justified their censorship on the grounds of combatting misinformation. But government and oppressors don’t censor lies. They don’t fear lies, and that’s what they censor.”
He said what he was detailing was not a personal complaint, but that it was necessary to assess where we are as a country, and the assumptions about U.S. leadership in the world.
“Are we really still a role model for democracy in this country, or have we made it kind of a joke?” he asked.
There was no answer from the crowd.
##
NB: This is Part 1 in a Series on the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speech from Aug. 23.
Very good summary of what was one of the best speeches in recent history. Thanks for doing this!