Conservative commentators’ red carpets are rolled out for independent presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy Jr., whose name recognition is off the scale thanks to the accident of his birth.

But whether Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, and others who have loaned him their microphones of late, wanted to experience a little glow from the relics of Camelot or, more likely, sought to shift votes away from President Joe Biden, it is very clear this election year that hyping RFK Jr. in any way is something no one on the side of freedom in America should be doing.

The son of President John F. Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, whose facial resemblance to others in the family clan is unmissable, presides over a campaign taking advantage of the agonizing times in which Americans live.

An enfeebled Democrat sits as president, his legacy the worst inflation in 40 years, racially charged violent public disorder, and a foreign policy so weak it enticed Russia to invade Ukraine and Hamas and its enablers in Tehran to wage a terrorist war on Israel, the mayhem having now spread to major college campuses across this country.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is impeded from taking full campaign advantage of one of the weakest presidencies in history because ideologically hostile federal and state prosecutors chose an election year to pursue him to the ends of the earth and keep him from returning to the White House.

Five months out, with Trump now a “convicted felon” until a lengthy appeals process overturns the verdict and exposes his trial as a political vendetta, a significant number of voters wonder if there might be a third way. Some foolishly believe they have found it and that the road leads straight to Hyannis Port and the Kennedy Compound.

RFK Jr., whose father in 1968 would have attained the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination but for a Palestinian assassin, claims to have set his candidacy squarely against the establishment, as did his father in his strident opposition to the Vietnam war. The younger RFK is gathering support, be it oftentimes grudging, from left-leaning voters seeking an alternative to a doddering old man whose radical staff runs the show, as well as from populists on the right who doubt the Republican nominee can win or are angry that he locked down the country in response to COVID-19 and warp-drove the production of vaccines they don’t trust.

Polling now finds Kennedy to be as much a threat to Trump’s support as to Biden’s, with a Quinnipiac survey in February finding some 15% of voters supporting him in a five-way race that included independent Cornel West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein. (The I&I/TIPP Poll this month gives him 10%, still a big piece of the vote).

It is a safe bet that the Biden campaign and allied groups will launch a potent offensive against RFK, with the objective not only of preventing a hemorrhage of voters from their own camp but transfusing Trump voters over to Kennedy.

Indeed, those willing to part with $30 can already purchase an “I’m a Kennedy Republican” T-shirt (not to mention tees embossed with “I’m a Kennedy Democrat,” “I’m a Kennedy Independent” and even “I’m a Kennedy American” – all that’s absent in appealing to populists who are fickle about Trump is “I’m Kennedy MAGA” and “Make America Kennedy’s Again”).

Not long after launching his campaign, RFK Jr. gave YouTubers a virtual tour of the multiple Kennedy properties in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, on the ritzy Massachusetts coast, in which it was obvious that he was trying to resurrect the dazzle of the early 1960s that propelled his uncle, JFK, into the White House, and his other uncle, Teddy, and his father, the elder Bobby Kennedy, into the U.S. Senate representing Massachusetts and New York, respectively. He pointed to the touch football field on the compound property where the three Marine helicopters would land every Friday.

“My uncle would get out, President Kennedy, with my uncle Teddy, who was in the Senate beginning in 1962, my uncle Steve Smith, who was the chief of staff in the White House, my uncle Sarge Shriver, who was the head of the Peace Corps, and my father, who was attorney general,” Kennedy told viewers. It smacked of the royal family arriving at Buckingham Palace, this taxpayer-financed squiring of so many members of one family with so much political power, unprecedented in the history of a nation that spilled blood to sever its ties with hereditary monarchy.

Flying in the faces of those who find charm more persuasive than facts, however, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite the independent image he has fashioned for himself, is such an extreme radical that he might as well sign up with the far-left Squad in the House of Representatives, alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of the Bronx, Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis, Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Rashida Tlaib of Detroit.

Kennedy in early 2019 tweeted an unreserved defense of AOC’s proposal for a 70% top marginal tax rate, which would bring America’s tax code back to the low-growth, high-unemployment and stagflation days of President Jimmy Carter, before the across-the-board income tax cuts that ignited the economic boom under President Ronald Reagan. He offered as evidence of the wisdom of AOC’s massive tax increase an article by Matthew Yglesias, who was identified by Politico as one of the “top Biden Twitter influencers,” apparently read regularly by one out of every four high-ranking Biden staffers, alongside Ezra Klein and David Frum.

That article cited arguments for a 73% top tax rate published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist Peter Diamond, whom President Barack Obama spent 14 months trying to appoint to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2010 and 2011 but who was rejected by the Senate because he was an inflationist who, in the words of then-Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, “will use the institution to finance” Obama’s “profligate spending and agenda.” 

The same article also favorably cites even more extreme economists who believe “confiscatory taxation would be good for the economy because it would discourage talented people from entering lucrative lines of work.” They argue that “Higher marginal tax rates incent [sic] workers to ‘follow their passion’ by reducing the relative after-tax pecuniary compensation of the more lucrative professions.”

The idea is to have a tax code that would pressure, say, would-be brokers or attorneys to choose to become public school teachers instead, because “raising marginal tax rates can generate social welfare gains from the movement of workers into socially productive professions” – a form of social engineering that even the aides who run the White House under Biden seem not yet to have embraced.

Also like AOC, RFK Jr. is an unalloyed environmentalist wacko. In 2014 he supported states actually suppressing the First Amendment free speech rights of fossil-fuel companies and their affiliates. “An attorney general,” Kennedy posited, “could revoke the charters [of] not just oil industry surrogates like AEI and CEI [the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, both based in Washington], he or she could also withdraw state operating authority from the soulless, nationless oil companies that have sponsored ‘Big Lie’ campaigns and force them to sell their in-state assets to more responsible competitors.” 

Koch Industries and ExxonMobil are “candidates for corporate death,” Kennedy argued, animated by a “greedy, immoral, anti-social pathology” manifested in their “mendacious crusade.” RFK also named conservative stalwarts that include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, and the Heartland Institute as targets for legal annihilation.

Kennedy came out fully in support of AOC’s Green New Deal in 2020, though with a few of his own pet tweaks, calling the U.S. economy “a market that is governed by rules that were written by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most war-mongering fields from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome and patriotic fields from heaven.” Kennedy said: “I think the Green New Deal — and all that stuff — is important” and “We ought to be pursuing it,” but added that “my approach is more market-based than kind of top down dictates. 

Market based? It turns out that what he calls his “market mechanisms” are things “like carbon taxes.” In 2016, Kennedy tweeted that “The only safe #Fracking regulation is a ban” and in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, RFK called hog farmers a greater threat to Americans than Osama bin Laden, confirming that he still held that same view when asked in 2009.

Does all this sound like someone who is going to temper Biden’s war on cars? Or does it sound like a fanatic who will take the extreme global warming agenda leaps and bounds beyond Biden’s fondest imaginings?

Although RFK has told gun rights-friendly audiences that he would not confiscate weapons, in a NewsNation town hall last June he said he would sign a ban on “assault weapons” if it garnered bipartisan support in Congress. In 2018, he tweeted that the National Rifle Association is “a terror group.”

Kennedy was agitating against Voter ID laws in 2008, claiming to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “One in five Democratic – one in five black voters – does not have a driver‘s license. That means if you require a driver‘s license, you’re getting rid of 20% of the black voters in this country.” Voter ID, of course, has nothing to do with race, and is indispensable in protecting against voter fraud and illegal aliens posing as citizens and casting ballots.

Interviewed by Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro in April, Kennedy expressed firm support for legalized abortion on demand. Last summer, he reversed his acceptance of an invitation to speak to the Moms For Liberty group that opposes the mutilation of children in sex reassignment. He claims “I don’t know” enough about trans issues to take a position.

RFK’s campaign formally supports financial reparations as compensation for the slavery that ended in the 19th century and its aftermath in the South – and takes the idea a step further. Kennedy promises to “complement direct redress payments or tax credits to the descendants of the victims of Jim Crow and other victims of persecution” with additional “federal dollars” set aside “to rebuild black infrastructure.”

He’s also tight with the luminaries of the Democratic Party left. “I’m very close to Bernie, and a huge admirer of Bernie Sanders,” Kennedy declared as he expressed his endorsement for Hillary Clinton for president against Donald Trump in 2016. “I’m very, very gratified that Hillary and Bernie have reconciled and that some of the issues that he’s raised are now part of Hillary’s agenda.”

Until he gave up his quest for the Democrat presidential nomination to take the independent route, RFK’s campaign manager was Dennis Kucinich, presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008 and one of the farthest-to-the-left congressmen in the history of the House of Representatives. Kucinich was replaced by Kennedy’s daughter-in-law, the 43-year-old ex-CIA officer Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who married Robert F. Kennedy III in 2018, her second husband, after meeting him at the annual “Burning Man” festival in the Nevada desert, a hippie extravaganza that attracts more than 75,000 people and features a group sex “orgy dome.”

There are even photos of RFK Jr. paying personal homage to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 2015; Farrakhan triumphantly tweeted photos of the two of them, smiles all around, and Kennedy called Farrakhan a “truly great partner” on the issue of vaccines targeting blacks.

Counterculture underpins the life history of RFK Jr. At age 30 he pled guilty to a felony heroin charge. His second wife hanged herself in 2012, two years after he filed for divorce, she having seen his diary chronicling sexual affairs with 37 women in 2001, seven years into their marriage. That was the same year he launched a “Clean Coal is a Deadly Lie” initiative.

Everything that can be observed points to Bobby Kennedy Jr. being, despite his clever camouflage, a big government Democrat who is as willing as any European-style socialist to silence the voices of businesses in the forum of public discourse and exchange of ideas, and even legally dismantle firms identified as enemies, not to mention impose massive new taxes upon them that ordinary citizens pay for via layoffs and higher prices passed down the line. Indeed, there are indications that RFK Jr. is further to the left than any Democrat now in Congress. Yet he uses some of the fringe positions he has held in his sly appeals to the populist right.

Any voter who thinks this scion of the notorious Kennedys is some kind of Trump-minus-the-rough-edges has not been looking at the facts.

— Written by Thomas McArdle