Keeping up with RFK Jr.’s falsehoods at KC event is impossible. Let’s give it a try | Opinion
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said so many things that just aren’t true at his campaign event in Kansas City on Wednesday night that I’m afraid I might not live long enough to fact-check the whole thing.
Yet the first thing a supporter told me she liked about him is that he’s “so honest.” Yes, just as Trump supporters say about our fibbingest president.
I’ve decided not to name any of the supporters or merely Kennedy-curious voters I interviewed, because they were nice enough to talk to me, and why embarrass them in pages that should really only shame the abusive and the corrupt?
OK, and I’m also fine with at least attempting to correct those so mistaken about any number of things that they’re running for president on a platform that might actually unite the conspiracy theorists on the right and left in one big propaganda fest.
The “he-did-not-just-say-that” riff that made me exhale most audibly was when RFK Jr. said that Vladimir Putin, who had perfectly good reason to invade Ukraine, has made multiple generous and good faith offers of a peace deal to Ukraine. According to Kennedy, Vlad asked for hardly anything in return, in his ongoing efforts to end a war that’s all Joe Biden’s fault anyway.
But then, “Biden made them tear up the agreement,” Kennedy said. And if you get your news from Tass, the Russian state faux news outlet, then yes, you’d already heard this.
FYI to any who might be inclined to see the poisoner Putin’s word as his bond: Ukraine insists that their team believed the negotiations conducted as the war was just beginning was a “smokescreen” intended to buy time as Russia prepared to invade. A Reuters story headlined, “As war began, Putin rejected a Ukraine peace deal recommended by aide,” reported that even Russian negotiators said it was Putin who had nixed the tentative agreement and had gone to war anyway. A second negotiation went nowhere because Ukraine did not, if you can believe it, have confidence that Putin would keep his end of the bargain.
Calls Ukraine war ‘money laundering scheme’
According to Kennedy, though, “this is a war we wanted.” Because American defense contractors are benefiting, the whole thing is supposedly “a money laundering scheme to their biggest contributors.”
Because Biden is not insane, no, he didn’t want this. In fact, I’m old enough to remember him publicly, frantically trying to warn the world that an invasion was imminent, at a time when even Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t want to believe it.
This is a war of aggression, Putin’s. Though it is true that the five cents on the defense dollar that we’re spending in Ukraine mostly lines American pockets, that’s not the main benefit.
If we don’t flake out, as more and more Trumpublicans want us to do, this support is going to prevent us from having to put American boots on the ground in Europe. Which we will end up doing if Russia rolls over Ukraine and just keeps going, as Putin wants to do.
I strongly recommend historian Timothy Snyder’s free online Yale course, The Making of Modern Ukraine. Professor Snyder, who knows, says that Putin’s greatest hope is that Trump wins the election and by pulling our support helps him win the war, which would be a disaster for the entire world. Putin would be pulling for RFK Jr., too, if he had a chance, which he doesn’t, though Kennedy could help swing the thing to Trump.
Some of RFK’s other whoppers in Kansas City involved COVID-19 — he claims the vaccine killed more people than it saved, which is 1,000% false. He also implied that the whole thing was a corporate conspiracy designed to put mom-and-pop stores out of business.
He suggested that San Francisco’s Union Square is now completely boarded up — a number of stores there have closed post-pandemic, but more than 100 are still open. And he said that’s because of a homeless population that’s “not addicted, not mentally ill,” and only there because housing has gotten so expensive that “two flat tires” or the equivalent landed them there.
But on this, too, the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I spent much of last year in California talking to homeless people, and while it’s true that the lack of affordable housing is a huge problem, the people I talked to told me they do have serious substance abuse and mental health challenges, which along with physical disabilities and domestic violence and all kinds of other trauma had preceded their evictions.
Former Biden supporter will only vote for Kennedy
Everything Kennedy said presented a cartoon version of reality, with easily identifiable villains — Biden, corporate America, Wall Street— and no real solutions.
When he complained that six of his own seven Kennedy kids know they’ll never be able to own a home, you kind of had to think, well Jesu Cristo, man, for you who had everything, whose fault is that, and if you can’t put a roof over their heads, how does this make you the guy with the answers?
So what is it his supporters see that I do not?
They are against the war in Ukraine, and impressed that he’s promising to “end the chronic disease epidemic in this country.”
Of the 10 people who told me they were definitely supporting him, nine voted for Biden last time, and the other one voted for neither of the major party nominees.
One woman said she’s extremely worried about Trump being reelected and ending our democracy, but likes that RFK Jr. is a Kennedy, and definitely won’t vote for Biden again: “You’ve got to know when to quit. You can lead a horse to water, but if it’s bad water, do you drink it?”
Because of RFK’s “moxie” and honesty, “I won’t vote for anybody else,” said another former Biden supporter.
A young mom who voted third party last time said that with Kennedy’s privileged background, the fact that he’s out in the trenches running this campaign makes him “like Princess Diana walking the minefields when he doesn’t have to.”
Speaking of royalty, Kennedy says that when he’s elected, he’ll lead the people “over the castle wall and take back what was stolen.” Which is a plan straight out of a fairy tale.
This story was originally published December 14, 2023 at 6:32 AM with the headline "Keeping up with RFK Jr.’s falsehoods at KC event is impossible. Let’s give it a try | Opinion."
