Progressives who think casting a vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a protest got another jolt of reality over the weekend, when it emerged that Jr. is on the side of the one group of “good people” who trampled Charlottesville in 2017 over Confederate statues.
“I have a visceral reaction against, against the attacks on those statues,” Kennedy said in an appearance on the podcast of far-right activist Tim Pool that dropped on Friday. “There were heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves and, you know, I just, I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it. I think we should celebrate who we are.”
In case you missed it, this is Kennedy trying his best to sound like one Donald Trump, who, after the 2017 Unite the Right violence in Charlottesville that led to the deaths of three people and injuries of several dozen counterprotestors, embraced the far right with his “good people on both sides” blather.
Kennedy, the scion of the liberal political family dynasty of the 1960s, was already actively courting the far right with his anti-vax advocacy.
This embrace of the Confederacy is a new low for a guy who is starting to come across as a serial panderer.
He directly criticized the years-ago effort of Charlottesville city leaders to remove Confederate statues that precipitated the violent summer of 2017, saying he “wouldn’t have done that,” and would have allowed the monuments to stay.
“Values change throughout history, and we need to be able to be sophisticated enough to live with, you know, our ancestors who didn’t agree with us on everything and who did things that are now regarded as immoral or wrong. Maybe they had other qualities that we wanted to celebrate, and clearly Robert E. Lee had extraordinary qualities of leadership,” Kennedy said.
Robert E. Lee also owned slaves, so, there’s that.
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Chris Graham
