(Article by Ben Bartee republished from ArmageddonProse.Substack.com)
The older I get, the truer the adage “if you live long enough, your heroes always disappoint you” becomes.
RFK Jr., to be clear, was never a hero of mine — I don’t have many of those and very few are politicians — but he was a rare one whom I respected.
Talking to a friend of mine a few months back, when RFK Jr. was still running as a Democrat, about the value of his dissident candidacy, he broached the topic of RFK Jr.’s peculiar statements of unconditional political support for Israel, as if he were running for Prime Minister of a Middle Eastern ethnostate rather than the United States of America. What was always most peculiar about his sycophantic position on Israel was its stark juxtaposition against his otherwise non-interventionist foreign policy.
My answer at the time was to shrug my shoulders: “It’s not a dealbreaker to me.” To me, his stance on draining the administrative state of its pernicious influences was much more important. We had bigger fish to fry, in my view, so I was willing to overlook his bizarre devotion to Israel.
But recent events have shone a brighter light on the unsettling extent to which RFK Jr. is willing to compromise his professed core values for the sake of the Israeli political project.
Some un-American censorious hack billionaire hedge fund manager called Bill Ackman recently wrote an open letter to the president of Harvard demanding censorship of speech on campus because it hurt his fee-fees so he wanted some speech suppression relief:
“I am writing this letter to you regretfully. Never did I think I would have to write a letter to the president of my alma mater about the impact of her actions and inactions on the health and safety of its student body in order to help catalyze necessary change. For the past four weeks since the horrors of October 7th, I have been in dialogue with members of the corporation board, other alumni, as well as students and faculty sharing and comparing our concerns about the growing number of antisemitic incidents on campus, as we wait for you and the University to act. Four weeks after the barbaric terrorist acts of October 7th, I have lost confidence that you and the University will do what is required…
Slack message boards are replete with antisemitic statements, memes, and images. On-campus protesters on the Widener Library steps and elsewhere shout “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada! From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free!” as they knowingly call for violent insurrection and use eliminationist language seeking the destruction of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”
So, let’s be very clear: this petty tyrant is not complaining merely about physical assaults or threats of violence against Jewish students, which is already clearly illegal. Rather, his demand — with the threat being that no more of his filthy banker money will be funneled to Harvard if it’s not met — is that speech on applications like Slack policed by Harvard administrators under the guise of fighting “hate speech.”
You can read the whole screed if you like. It’s full of vague references to “antisemitic” “hate speech” and similar bullsh#t, amorphous terms like that with the widest possible interpretation so as to maximize the justification for silencing speech.
“It’s time to hold college administrations responsible for the epidemic of campus antisemitism by insisting on zero-tolerance policies.,” RFK Jr. wrote in reply, endorsing the banker’s call to censorship.
“Zero tolerance policies” for unapproved speech — the RFK position on speech.
Bravo @BillAckman. It’s time to hold college administrations responsible for the epidemic of campus antisemitism by insisting on zero-tolerance policies. https://t.co/spd87qv0Go
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 6, 2023
This is really sick stuff — rank un-American trash of intolerable scale.
Of course, it’s ironic that RFK Jr. is so willing to go to bat against free speech on behalf of the state of Israel to quash “antisemitism” given that he himself has been the target of cynical weaponized accusations of the same by Social Justice™ retards based on the concurrent appearance of the numbers 14 and 88 in a Tweet.
I’ve tolerated a lot of questionable stances from RFK Jr., and have until now been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But this is a bridge too far.
In a painful internal about-face as I grapple with human cognitive dissonance, I am forced to concede that the criticism of RFK Jr. as a trojan horse appears to have been right all along. He has outed himself as nothing less than a total enemy of the sacred right to free expression and, as a result, my political enemy. I wish him nothing but failure and, moving forward, I will do nothing to promote his candidacy, no matter how satisfying the consternation that he causes the duopoly might be.
He simply cannot be trusted.
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