His Own Words: Why RFK Jr now Backs Trump
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/08/his-own-words-why-rfk-jr-now-backs-trump/
On Friday (US time) the unthinkable came to pass: A Kennedy, the closest America gets to political royalty, endorsed Donald Trump. Below, the edited text of his announcement, in which he lays out his reasons: lawfare, the corruption of a forever lying media, the fear, as he puts it, that a party beholding to ‘Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money’ represents not democracy but its betrayal. — rf
___________________
SIXTEEN months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote.
I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and 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 all know, I left that party last 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 cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent…
…I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party.
In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.
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. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
My uncles and my father both relished debate and 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 for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.
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, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.
I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as ten. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters.
What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates.
What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest…
…The DNC prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me.
During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power.
Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.
The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”
Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden’s White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.
The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth….
Three great causes — free speech; the war in Ukraine and the war on our children — drove me to enter this race in the first place. These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.
Comments are closed.
