RFK Jr. Is the Only True Kennedy Left
By Grace Gilmore
“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth,” former president John F. Kennedy said in an address to the United Nations in 1961.
Last week, RFK. Jr., the lone non-conformist of the Kennedy clan, suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK’s far-left relatives predictably denounced the decision: “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” it read. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Embarrassing for them, nothing could be further from the truth. Of all the Kennedy family members alive today, RFK Jr. might have earned their patriarch’s greatest respect for diverging from political orthodoxy and speaking his mind. JFK stood for an America that could engage in political debate without compromising core values. He was not easily swayed to one side over the other and rebuffed those who threatened his beloved nation.
His pride for his country superseded everything. He famously said, “Politics is a jungle-torn between doing the right thing and staying in office.”
Currently, five members of the Kennedy family are working for the Biden-Harris administration. They are politically motivated in backing 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Their blind loyalty to party is despite the fact that she has yet to release a clear policy platform or conduct a single non-scripted interview with media.
The Kennedy dynasty’s only concern is staying relevant, even if that means supporting a tone-deaf phony whose politics, if you can call them that, represent a radical departure from JFK’s.
In his announcement speech, RFK said that the Democrats had betrayed their old worldview.
“The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars,” he said. “We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.”
Whether the Democratic Party was ever for or against any of those things is up for debate. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. is right. This is not Jack Schlossberg’s grandfather’s Democratic Party. Gone is the day of the blue-collar Democrat. In his place is an authoritarian elitist, pushing transparently Soviet-style ideas, such as price controls, that the DNC condemned in 1960.
Embedded in that year’s platform was this statement: “We believe your Communist ideology to be sterile, unsound, and doomed to failure. We believe that your children will reject the intellectual prison in which you seek to confine them and that ultimately they will choose the eternal principles of freedom.”
The few policy proposals the Harris-Walz campaign has introduced are an open embrace of socialism and a repudiation of economic freedom. Imagine JFK’s response to Harris wanting bureaucrats to set prices for groceries, a failed experiment of communist nations that JFK fought during his abbreviated tenure.
This is the administration that his progressive descendants bow to. And yet they invoke their last name to gaslight the public into believing that JFK would have approved of Harris.
But the Democratic Party lost its claim to use JFK’s name as a bargaining chip when it deviated so far left that it caused RFK Jr. to leave. When it conceded to Big Pharma and advocated for draconian CDC guidelines during the pandemic. When it demonized the nuclear family. When it sought to censor anyone that disagrees with them.
The only sad story here is that the kin of a patriotic, old-school Democrat of yesteryear are exploiting his legacy to elect a woman whose record and values bear no resemblance to the party he once presided over.
JFK was a Democrat. But he was also a man of courage, strength, and fierce belief in questioning those in power. The only modern-day Kennedy embodying such qualities is his nephew.
Grace Gilmore is the Executive Assistant for Policy and Research for the Republican Caucus at the TN House of Representatives. She is a graduate of the University of Florida, and lives in Nashville. Find her on Instagram @gracebgilmore.
