Republican strategist and Wall Street Journal columnist Karl Rove is troubled about all the crazy beliefs being circulated by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
Mr. Kennedy created the largest antivax group in the U.S. and has long argued that vaccines cause autism and needless deaths. On Sunday in Colorado, he offered 1,200 enthusiastic supporters enough weird theories to qualify as a QAnon convention keynoter. He asserted that the CIA is a bigger threat to America than China, that the Seventh Amendment right of trial by jury is routinely violated, and that a “war machine” is working with corrupt U.S. corporations and Washington to enrich itself at our expense.
He has plenty of other moonbat ideas that didn’t make the Sunday rally: Al Qaeda might not have been responsible for 9/11. Agribusiness is waging war on our health through the food pyramid and degrading our soil. The 2004 election was stolen. Wi-Fi and 5G cause cancer. Chemicals in our water may spread transgenderism. HIV may not cause AIDS. Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill RFK Sr. Antidepressants may cause school shootings.
That is a normal thing to worry about.
Except Rove’s concern isn’t that Kennedy is spreading misinformation and paranoia. It’s that Kennedy’s misinformation and paranoia will attract misinformed, paranoid voters that the Republican Party needs to vote for them:
In a normal election, these wild ideas would devastate a campaign. But this isn’t a normal year. After stunts like Russiagate, decades of mainstream media bias, and years of QAnon nonsense, voters on the right are particularly prone to embrace conspiracies from fringe sources. Mr. Kennedy could use these outlandish claims to pry more than a few wackos off Mr. Trump, perhaps enough to hand the election to Mr. Biden.
He’s appealing to wackos. That’s our base!
As an empirical matter, I think Rove is probably correct about this. It’s difficult to predict whether Kennedy will pull more votes from Biden or Trump. His name appeals more to Democrats, but his ideas appeal more to Republicans — specifically because his ideas are unhinged.
If you want Biden to win, this aspect is helpful — the Kennedy brain worm is a hero. If, like Rove, you want Trump to win, it’s a problem. You’ve created a party of lunatics, and now Kennedy is dividing the lunatic vote.
It’s almost as if building a political party around a deranged cult might have some practical downsides.
