Robert F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, conspiracy theorist and political gadfly set to next week transform his run for the Democratic presidential nomination into an independent campaign, was announced on Friday as a speaker at an event staged by the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
“Robert F Kennedy Jr has a unique voice in advocating for the defunding of the weaponised bureaucracy and ensuring the constitutional right of medical freedom,” said the CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp.
Kennedy, 69, will speak at the CPAC Investor Summit to Save America, in Las Vegas, Nevada, between 18 and 21 October. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor who has performed unexpectedly strongly in the Republican primary, will also speak.
Kennedy comes from a storied US political family – the son of former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy. He built a public profile as an attorney and environmental campaigner but has now emerged as a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A claim that Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews have greater immunity from Covid caused huge controversy. So did a comparison of government public health mandates to laws in Nazi Germany, invoking the name of Anne Frank. Last month, Kennedy repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.
Kennedy has polled relatively strongly against Joe Biden, the incumbent Democratic president. Standing next to no chance of winning the nomination, however, Kennedy’s announcement of an independent run was trailed last week. The announcement is set for Philadelphia on Monday.
Polling shows the potential for a third-party candidate to pull votes from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the president’s expected challenger in what would be a contest between aging and unpopular candidates.
This week, a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven US voters”.
Some observers think Biden likely to sustain worse damage from a strong third-party candidate, perhaps handing the White House back to Trump: a twice-impeached ex-president who faces 91 criminal charges, 17 over election subversion culminating in the January 6 attack on Congress, as well as assorted civil trials.
Nonetheless, Kennedy’s links to rightwingers including the mega-donor Timothy Mellon and Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, have been widely reported and his more extreme stances could also attract support from Republicans.
Bannon was among other figures listed to appear at the CPAC Las Vegas event. So were Ric Grenell, a former Trump aide; Kari Lake, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running for US Senate in Arizona; the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee; and Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted Texas attorney general.
Schlapp, the CPAC chair, is a former White House political director under George W Bush now the subject of claims of sexual misconduct, which he denies.
Schlapp said: “Kennedy joining such an important event is a reflection of the splintering of the leftwing coalition that has gone full woke Marxist to the point that traditional liberals don’t feel welcome anymore.”
Not everyone thinks a Kennedy candidacy will only damage Biden. This week, a “Kennedy campaign insider” told Mediate: “This is going to fuck Trump. Bobby’s values are much more in line with patriots. He’s against Big Pharma. He’s pro-Bitcoin. Decentralise so the government can’t control it.”
That prompted Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, to say: “Blame Bannon. His monster got out of the cage.”
