by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Last week the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page hit-piece against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of America’s most famous political family and an underdog challenger to President Joseph Biden in the Democratic Primaries.
Kennedy’s unexpectedly strong campaign had recently stumbled when the novice candidate made some incautious remarks at a private dinner regarding the ethnic skew of Covid vulnerability, and a video clip of his explosive words touched off a media feeding-frenzy. The Times and the rest of the mainstream media are intensely hostile to Kennedy’s effort and the editors may have hoped that this piling-on attack might permanently cripple his fledgling campaign.
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Probably few readers, whether Kennedy supporters or opponents, found anything unexpected in the article authored by Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker. Near the beginning, we were told that Kennedy “has become a source of deep anguish among his many siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.” The candidate was described as a former drug-addict, expelled from his private schools, who had been married three times and whose second wife had committed suicide. Meanwhile, almost any mention of the great accomplishments in his long and successful career as an environmental attorney were left on the cutting-room floor.
The main focus of the piece was Kennedy’s frayed relations with his extended family, die-hard Democrats all, who were bewildered and saddened by the strange and self-destructive political behavior of their errant relative. The text was heavily laced with harshly negative quotes regarding his beliefs—“deplorable and untruthful” according to his sister Kerry Kennedy, “morally and factually wrong” by his brother Joseph P. Kennedy II, while his nephew Joseph P. Kennedy III Tweeted “I unequivocally condemn what he said.” The article opened with a denunciation by the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, who declared that his “conspiracy-minded” cousin was “tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather and their storied family” with his “vanity project.” I counted a total of 13 different Kennedys cited in the piece, almost all of them providing these sorts of unflattering remarks.
The entire tone of the article was unrelentingly negative and clearly intended to present the dissenting Democratic candidate as someone who held bizarre beliefs or was even unhinged, definitely not an individual to be entrusted with our nation’s future. I’d assume that the Democratic Party’s lavishly-funded corps of opposition researchers have carefully parsed every spoken or written word of Kennedy for the last couple of decades and then gifted the choicest morsels they uncovered to their numerous media allies including the Times.
Thus, we can safely assume that every misstep or bit of dirt about Kennedy would have been discovered by now, allowing us to draw some important inferences from any silence. So as I carefully read the Times article, I focused not so much on what it contained but rather what it strangely omitted.
Over the years, Kennedy has publicly and repeatedly declared that both his father and his uncle had died at the hands of a conspiracy, pointing to the CIA as the most likely culprit. Probably at least a couple of million Americans have read his words or listened to his interviews, clearly establishing him as the most explicit sort of “conspiracy theorist,” a highly pejorative term that the media always eagerly seeks to inflict upon disfavored political candidates.
