RFK Jr on the Ukraine War and the Plot to Smear Him

The news media controlled by the neocon elite want to destroy RFK, Jr. He tells the truth about the war in the Ukraine, which threatens to incinerate mankind. Even worse, from their point of view, he is popular and has a good chance to beat brain-dead Biden for the Democratic nomination. That would ruin their plans for world domination through unleashing wars against Russia and China.

Let’s look at what he says about the Ukraine war. Julia Hill, writing in The Hill, June 28, 2023, tells the story: “Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday said the United States’ role in the Russia-Ukraine war is “terrible for the Ukrainian people.”

“We have neglected many, many opportunities to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy said in a live town hall event with NewsNation, moderated by Elizabeth Vargas. “I think the way that we have conducted the war is bad … is terrible for the Ukrainian people.”

The 2024 presidential candidate said he doesn’t know exactly what a negotiated peace would look like, or whether it would mean ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia. But he blamed decades of U.S. and NATO policy toward Ukraine and Russia for creating conditions for the war.

“We’ve turned that nation into a proxy war between — a pawn in a proxy war between Russia and the United States,” Kennedy said.

“We were told this was a humanitarian exercise. … But when President Biden was asked why are we over there, he said for regime change of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin,” Kennedy said.

Early last year, Biden remarked that Putin “cannot remain in power,” but later said he was not calling for a regime change.

Kennedy also referenced comments from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that among the U.S.’s goals in aiding Ukraine is to “see Russia weakened.”

“That is the opposite of a humanitarian mission, that is a mission about a war of attrition in which the people dying are Ukrainians,” Kennedy said at the NewsNation event.”

RFK,Jr.’s comments about the war are part of a fundamental criticism of US foreign policy. He wants to cut back radically on American military involvement abroad and slash defense spending. Here is a report by Nichals Kerr from NBC News, June 21, 2023: “Robert F. Kennedy,Jr.spoke at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday night in what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address for the long shot Democratic presidential candidate.

He told the crowd that he believes the U.S. government bears some responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a view rejected by America and many Western countries — and said that the “danger of reckless escalation and nuclear brinksmanship” was “real and present.”

On Tuesday night, Kennedy took direct aim at U.S. foreign policy while laying out his own global vision, calling the war in Ukraine a “creation of a relentless mentality of foreign domination” on the part of the United States and accusing the West — without evidence — of intentionally sabotaging peace talks in the spring of 2022 and, more specifically, claiming the U.S. wants to remove Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin.

“I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion of that nation,” Kennedy told the crowd. “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”

At times, he leaned heavily on the foreign policy legacy of former President John F. Kennedy, telling attendees that nuclear tensions are on the rise today as in the time of his uncle, but that there is an opportunity “to take a radically different path, a path towards peace.”

Kennedy has been a frequent critic of America’s involvement in supporting Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, which he has repeatedly referred to as a “proxy war” that he claims, as he wrote on Twitter this week, is being fought “all for the sake of U.S. (imagined) geopolitical interests.”

“They wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion,” Kennedy tweeted in May, launching into a critique of the Biden administration. “They only pretend to think it was unprovoked. They are lying to us, manufacturing consent for war.”

That view has been broadly rejected by leading politicians on both sides of the aisle as well as America’s military leaders.

“The United States continues to stand with the people of Ukraine, whose enduring courage and solidarity inspires the world,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement last week, adding, “Russia could end [the war] at any time by withdrawing its forces from Ukraine and stopping its brutal attacks against Ukraine’s cities and people.

In a June interview on the “Breaking Points” podcast, Kennedy said that his “primary platform” on the economy would be cutting military spending and reinvesting that money into domestic spending and development.

“My primary platform is to cut the costs on the military,” Kennedy said on the show. “Again, what we were told was a peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union. … We were going to cut our military budget from about $600 billion a year to $200 billion a year.” See this.

Given his views on the Ukraine war, it’s no wonder the Left has mounted a smear campaign against him. A Fox News story by Peter Kasperowicz says: “House Democrats on Thursday tried unsuccessfully to remove Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from a hearing on federal government censorship, after claiming he was in violation of House rules aimed at preventing defamatory or degrading testimony.

That effort and others by Democrats to silence him at the hearing prompted Kennedy to say, “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

Kennedy, who is running for president against President Biden, was invited by Republicans to testify at a hearing at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. But after Kennedy’s opening remarks, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., moved to take the hearing into executive session to discuss Kennedy’s alleged violation of a House rule aimed at banning testimony that defames or degrades others.

Wasserman Schultz said the witness made “despicable” antisemitic and anti-Asian comments in the last few days, referring to his comment that COVID may have been “ethnically targeted” because those who are most immune to COVID appear to be Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy later said he was not accusing anyone of deliberately engineering COVID to spare certain ethnic populations.

Wasserman Schultz’s move to halt the hearing and go to executive session was voted down 10-8 due to the Republican majority in the committee. Some Democrats made comments like “no to hate speech” as they voted against the GOP push to kill Wasserman Schultz’s motion.

Democrats also tried to limit Kennedy’s remarks right from the start by noting that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs the subcommittee, planned to give him 10 minutes to speak. Stacey Plaskett, the Democrat delegate from the Virgin Islands, asked why he should get 10 minutes when witnesses usually get five minutes.

When Jordan said the committee often lets lawmakers and former lawmakers speak for a longer time, Plaskett said, “He’s neither.”

Jordan acquiesced to giving him five minutes on the clock, and said to Plaskett, “If you want to cut him off and censor him some more, you’re welcome to do it.”

“Oh, that’s not my job,” Plaskett said. “That’s your job. Why don’t you threaten the witness so that they do not want to be a witness?”

Kennedy used his opening remarks to lament the Democrats’ efforts to censor his speech, and broader efforts to censor his run for the White House. He said his speech announcing his candidacy was censored five minutes into his speech by YouTube.

“Censorship is antithetical to our party,” he said. “It was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, to Harry Truman, to Thomas Jefferson, as the chairman referred to. It is the basis for democracy.”

“The First Amendment was not written for easy speech,” he added. “It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”

Kennedy noted recent emails that show the Biden administration tried to censor his comments about vaccines, just three days into the start of that administration.

“They had to invent a new word called ‘malinformation’ to censor people like me,” he said. “Malinformation is information that is true, but it is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear.”

Eric Wayne notes the reason for the smears: RFK Jr. is challenging the elites that rule over us. “We’ve all heard about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing he’s running for president. We’ve been informed that he’s “crazy”, a “fringe candidate”, and an “anti-vaxxer” wingnut. We’ve been told that his candidacy could hurt Biden’s run and put Trump back in office. He has also been called “political royalty”, and accused of running on the “family name”. Is that accurate? Is that what you’ve heard from your trusted news outlets?

Did they mention his main goal is to roll back the merger of big corporate interests and politics and, in so doing, to rescue the middle class from being extinguished? Or did they leave out that part?

Such demonization and slander of a political candidate as we’ve seen of Kennedy is so comical and transparent that it piqued my curiosity. Who is this guy the corporate media hacks are so eager to disqualify with soundbites that are an insult to our intelligence? I’ve never cared about celebrities, royalty, or anything like that, probably because I don’t have any myself and can’t hope to compete in that arena, in which case I had no interest in the Kennedy family and knew virtually nothing about RFK Jr.. But I do know from adult life and lots of job experience that malicious gossip, slander, and character assassination are extremely effective tools, and if I want to give anyone a fair chance before judging them, I need to listen to them make their own case. In the case of a serious political candidate, which Kennedy is in spades, no matter what the PR departments of the corporations he tries to protect us from have to say, I feel it’s a bit of my duty as an educated, independent-thinking adult American to give the guy a chance and not just regurgitate the slurs coined by the corporate media. I checked out what RFK had to say for himself, watched his full announcement speech of his intent to run, and it was a big surprise.

First off, he’s almost intimidatingly knowledgeable, learned, intelligent, rational, and outspoken. Kennedy ain’t no W! He is NOT, once and for all, any kind of royalty. He has a long career of working very hard fighting for causes he believes in, which is not just living the life of luxury while resting on the laurels of his family name. His main goal is to disengage selfish business interests from political policy and to rescue the middle class from being crushed. This, he sees as necessary to save our democracy. Before seeing this, I’d already decided that if a candidate doesn’t talk about class issues, I can’t take them seriously. Here he was, knocking it out of the park.”

Let’s do everything we can to counter the smear campaign against RFK Jr. and to end our disastrous policy in the Ukraine war.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.