I am a candidate for the 2024 Libertarian Party presidential nomination: jacobforliberty.com.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: The New Republican-Lite Libertarian Party Heartthrob, Part 1
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: The New Republican-Lite Libertarian Party Heartthrob, Part 2
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: The New Republican-Lite Libertarian Party Heartthrob, Part 3
Immigration
Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has made it clear that he supports the standard Democrat-Republican position favoring America’s socialist system of immigration controls.
And it is a socialist system, in that it is based on the core socialist principle of central planning. That is, government officials plan, in a top-down, command-and-control manner, the movements of millions of people in one of the most complex labor markets in history.
It simply cannot be done. As we have learned, time and time again, socialism produces nothing but crisis, chaos, death, and suffering, which is what immigration socialism has done for decades along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Nonetheless, Kennedy makes it clear that he will be the president who absolutely seals the border. He says that he intends to turn America into a “fortress,” one in which not one single immigrant will be able to enter the United States illegally.
In other words, he wants everyone to know that he would be fiercer enforcer of America’s socialist system of immigration controls than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Ron de Santis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and all the other Republican presidential candidates.
Of course, that necessarily means keeping, fortifying, and expanding Trump’s Berlin Wall. It also means sending tens of thousands of additional troops to the border. It also means expanding the immigration police state along the border. In fact, to turn America into a “fortress” where no immigrant will be permitted to illegally enter will entail sealing the border as effectively as North Korea seals its border with South Korea. Kennedy’s immigration reform plan would naturally also mean lots more death, suffering, crisis, and chaos along the border.
Democrats say they support the welfare state because they supposedly love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Yet, the hypocritical irony is that they support an immigration-control system that brutalizes and abuses people who are among the poorest people in the world — people who are just trying to sustain their lives through labor by going to work for American employers who wish to hire them.
More than 30 years ago, I was invited to serve on the Libertarian Party Platform Committee. The reason I said yes was the L.P.’s principled commitment to liberty, which included unwavering support for genuine open borders — that is, the abolition of the Border Patrol, the Immigration Service, and all restrictions on the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders.
We Libertarians are the only hope for the poor, the downtrodden, the “wretched refuse of your teeming shores,” the “tempest-tossed,” and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would be a disaster if the L.P. were ever to abandon its principled commitment to open borders and to the natural and God-given rights of freedom of movement, freedom of association, economic liberty, and freedom of contract. It would also be a disaster if the L.P. were to nominate as its presidential candidate a big-government, welfare-state liberal Democrat who stands in fierce opposition to this fundamental prerequisite for a genuinely free society.
Corporate capture
Kennedy complains that corporations have captured the federal government’s regulatory agencies. But his analysis is incomplete, and his solution is misguided.
The reason that corporations strived to gain control over regulatory agencies was to protect themselves from leftist, anti-free-market bureaucrats who were using the power of regulatory agencies to harass and even destroy their businesses.
What’s the real solution to this regulatory morass? Abolish the regulatory agencies! Separate economy and state! Leave businesses free to operate without governmental interference. That’s what “free enterprise” really means — enterprise that is free of governmental control, regulation, and harassment. That’s the libertarian solution.
But that’s not Kennedy’s solution. His solution is the statist one. He loves the controlled, centrally managed, and regulated economy. He wants to keep regulatory agencies intact so that he can appoint fierce ideological leftists to run them, where they can continue to harass and eat out the substance of every private enterprise in the land.
Foreign policy
Kennedy rails against America’s “forever wars,” which is another reason why some Republican-Lite Libertarians fantasize about making him the 2024 L.P. presidential nominee.
But a closer examination of Kennedy’s foreign-policy position reveals that it’s not so attractive as his Republican-Lite Libertarian supporters think it is.
Kennedy has made it clear that he will support any foreign war or intervention that is in America’s “national interest.”
The problem, of course, is that that condition can be used to justify any foreign war or intervention. I will guarantee you that the officials who got us into the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Syrian War, the “war on terrorism,” and all the other foreign wars and interventions believed that such wars were in our “national interest.”
After all, keep in mind that once the power is given to officials to wage wars that are supposedly in our “national interest,” it is the officials themselves, not we the people, who decide what is in our “national interest.”
In fact, given Kennedy’s professed unconditional support for the Israeli government, there is no reasonable doubt that he would willingly send America into war on behalf of that nation. My hunch is that as a leftist, he would also be willing to wage wars for humanitarian concerns, based on a belief that they would be in our “national interests.”
The CIA and the Kennedy assassination
Kennedy also rails against the national-security state and blames the CIA for the murder of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
Unfortunately, however, and somewhat bizarrely, he wants to keep the CIA and the rest of the national-security state in existence.
The CIA is undoubtedly the most evil agency in U.S. history, especially given its sordid history of dark-side activity, including, but not limited to, the secret hiring of Nazi officials after World War II, MKULTRA, state-sponsored murders of foreign leaders, Operation Mockingbird, coups, partnering with the Mafia, and Operation Condor.
Regardless of what one thinks about the Kennedy assassination, the CIA should have been abolished a long time ago. In fact, it should never have been brought into existence. The worst mistake America has ever made was to abandon its founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, which came with a relatively small, basic army, and instead adopt the totalitarian, dark-side governmental system of a national-security state.
RFK, Jr., obviously operates under the quaint notion that he will be able to bend the CIA, the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, and the NSA to his will and thereby bring an end to their forever wars as well as their state-sponsored assassinations.
Really? How did that work out for his uncle, President Kennedy? By RFK, Jr.’s, own admission, it didn’t work out well at all. Although JFK vowed to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds, he instead simply fired the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles (who Lyndon Johnson later corruptly appointed to the Warren Commission), and put his own person in charge of the agency. Even worse, JFK and his brother Bobby then used the CIA to initiate a campaign of state-sponsored sabotage and terrorism in Cuba called Operation Mongoose, something that RFK, Jr., rarely, if ever, mentions, much less condemns.
Before the end of his first term as president, JFK was left dead at the hands of the national-security establishment that he thought he would bend to his will. And his assassination was soon followed by the national-security establishment’s forever war in Vietnam.
Courage and incompetence
To RFK, Jr,’s credit, he has displayed great courage in pointing out that the CIA played an essential role in this uncle’s assassination. No other Democrat or Republican presidential candidate, including the Republican candidates who now rail against the “deep state,” has displayed the courage to do that.
But it’s been said that nothing worse can befall a good cause than to have it ineptly defended. And that principle applies to RFK’s understanding of the Kennedy assassination. Whenever he is asked about why he contends that the CIA felled his uncle, it is clear that he lacks the competence to defend his position. For example, one time he answered that he had read a book called The Unspeakable.
Well, the book is not called The Unspeakable. It’s called JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. RFK, Jr., is right to mention the book, but it’s not enough to just mention it. It is necessary to explain to people why that book is so profound and why every American should read it.
Moreover, notice that Kennedy gives a pass to the military establishment in the assassination of his uncle. What’s up with that? The military establishment was up to its neck in the assassination, as established by the fraudulent autopsy that it conducted on the very evening of the assassination. There is nothing innocent about a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily means criminal culpability in the assassination itself. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)
Yet, as far as I know, RFK, Jr., has never mentioned the military’s fraudulent autopsy in any of his commentaries on the Kennedy assassination. Why not?
Moreover, the evidence that convicts the CIA beyond a reasonable doubt of its role in the JFK assassination is its top-secret production of an altered, fraudulent copy of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination. There is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent copy of a film of the assassination, any more than there is for a fraudulent military autopsy. It necessarily equates to criminal culpability in the assassination itself. See my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
Yet, as far as I know, Kennedy has never mentioned the CIA’s production of an altered, fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film in his commentaries on the Kennedy assassination. Why not?
I submit it’s because he simply has not steeped himself in the assassination literature, as he has with respect to vaccines. Thus, rather than incompetently make the case for the national-security state’s assassination of JFK, RFK, Jr., would be better off simply referring people to those who can, such as James Douglass and his deeply profound book JFK and the Unspeakable and Douglas Horne, the author of the five-volume watershed book on the assassination, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. Horne served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, the agency charged with forcing the Pentagon, the CIA, and other federal agencies to disclose their long-secret assassination-related records to the public.
Conclusion
Both Democrats and Republicans have plunged our nation into a statist morass of socialism, regulation, empire, and interventionism, which has brought nothing but poverty, death, suffering, conflict, war, and hostility to our nation. As Martin Luther King correctly pointed out, the U.S. national-security state is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Today, it has brought us perilously close to nuclear war, just as it did back in 1962.
There is only one way out of this statist morass — libertarianism — genuine libertarianism — not some sort of warmed-over welfare-warfare-state reform that is billed as libertarianism.
The Libertarian Party is the only political party that can lead America and the world out of the statist morass into which Democrats and Republicans have plunged our nation. But to do so requires a fierce and uncompromising commitment to genuine libertarian principles.
The worst thing we could ever do is make a “liberty-leaning” Democratic Party statist or a “liberty-leaning” Republican Party statist as our party’s 2024 presidential nominee.
The second-worst thing we could do is run another standard, boring, unexciting, reform-oriented, Republican-Lite presidential campaign, one that will garner us no more than the regular .5%-3% of the national vote.
The best thing we could ever do in 2024 is to do something bold, different, and exciting by running a presidential campaign of pure principle for the Party of Principle, one that is apt to garner us 7-10% (or higher) of the national vote with us fighting as Libertarians and employing pure, genuine libertarian principles as our weapons.