Do Conservatives Actually Like RFK Jr., or Do They Just Think He’ll Hurt Biden?

After announcing he would challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. saw a burst of popularity, polling as high as 21 percent. More notable than a Kennedy polling well among Democrats, however, might be that RFK Jr. has received substantial support from figures on the right. This raises the question of whether that support is sincere.

“Dismissing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might be a mistake,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote at National Review, arguing that Kennedy could “revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power” and “denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.” Tucker Carlson said of Kennedy on his Fox News show, “it’s nice to have a truth teller around.”

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully went further this week, describing Kennedy in National Review as a fearless iconoclast. “The source of Kennedy’s troubles is a chronic inability to tolerate the intellectual dishonesty he finds in his antagonists,” Scully wrote. “He would fully recover, returning to the life of liberal accolades he once knew, if only he didn’t have so much integrity.”

As Reason‘s Matt Welch has written, Kennedy has a long and shameful history of authoritarian pronouncements, including stating that his political opponents should be arrested and dissenting corporations “given the death penalty.” Kennedy also praised Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez as the “kind of leader my father and President Kennedy were looking for.”

And that’s to say nothing of what became Kennedy’s signature issue for nearly two decades: a full-scale opposition to vaccines that only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years, he has repeatedly compared vaccination to Nazi experiments, including using the term “holocaust.”

Scully huffs that tarring Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer is “lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing about the merits of his arguments or about what has or has not actually been ‘debunked.'” However, Kennedy’s long-held insistence that there is a causal link between childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder has been debunked. Kennedy’s prediction that Bill Gates would design a COVID-19 vaccine with a microchip, ushering in a cashless society, has also proved incorrect. He has further claimed, without evidence, that 5G wireless signals “could have almost unimaginably devastating impacts on our health