This Guy Has Started to Be Pretty Useful to the GOP

On Thursday, a 2024 Democratic presidential candidate appeared at a House hearing on an invitation from Republican members of Congress and over the protest of their Democratic counterparts. That candidate—a Kennedy, no less—was excoriated on camera by Democrats, who angrily accused him of spreading bigotry and dangerous misinformation.

It was such an odd and messy situation that Fox News took delight in it. “Can you believe we are at a day when the Democrats are calling a Kennedy disparaging names?” Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said Thursday.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a falsehood–filled appearance Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a panel created by Republicans to interrogate federal law enforcement and national security agencies over Republicans’ belief that the agencies had been used to persecute conservatives. Thursday’s panel dealt with censorship, and on that topic, Republicans found kinship with a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family. Already, Kennedy had appeared repeatedly on Fox News and on various podcasts and shows from right-wing figures. But Thursday marked a new role for the candidate: He became the face, alone in the spotlight, of Republican political talking points. Just how Kennedy sees his relationship with Republicans is unclear; but it seems obvious from the testimony that he’s become a useful tool for the right.

There’s some natural reason that such an alliance would come more easily than it would for other Democrats, of course. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist. And not just a humdrum anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, but an off-the-deep-end paranoiac, with bizarre claims about bioweapons, tracking devices, 5G, and the CIA. On COVID, specifically, the right has reason to love Kennedy: He wrote an entire book accusing Anthony Fauci of being a criminal. And he spouts something very similar to “deep state” rantings about authoritarian government plotting. So there’s a strong foundation for genuine love.

That affection is clear from his media treatment. “He does his homework, he’s extremely bright, and you better bring your A-game,” Kilmeade said recently of debating Kennedy. Earlier in the month, on Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy exclaimed to Kennedy, “You’ve gone viral, not only with your message, but just your sheer masculinity!” He was then asked how many pushups he could do.

And as the liberal group Media Matters noted, that friendly coverage extended to treatment of Kennedy’s biggest controversies. Fox News barely mentioned his strange antisemitic and racist comments about COVID being potentially “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Other networks covered the comments more extensively; Democrats made them even more newsworthy by protesting his appearance at the hearing. Kennedy simply used the reaction to support his argument.

“The statements being twisted and distorted to make them seem like I said these controversial things is simply another way that the DNC and its allies are using to silence me, to marginalize me, to make me look crazy,” he said. Republicans stood by him.

But there’s a specific, utilitarian reason Republicans in Congress should boost Kennedy. Up to this point, many of Kennedy’s beliefs have seemed appealing to conservatives, but not too useful to their political ends. COVID, at least politically, is behind us, so anti-vaccine rantings don’t excite people like they used to. And vague suspicion of government does not make for anything too useful without specifics. Instead, where Kennedy became truly useful to the Republican Party was in the exact context of this hearing: in his specific, concrete claims of censorship. More specifically, it’s in making those claims with credentials as a lifelong Democrat.

“I was the first person censored by the Biden administration,” Kennedy said in the hearing, referring to a ban from Instagram over spreading COVID misinformation. (A White House official had flagged one of Kennedy’s misleading tweets about COVID to Twitter, and Kennedy has since blamed the administration for his deplatforming.)

Logically, Kennedy’s conspiratorial-minded thinking can lead nowhere but to claims of nefarious censorship. Once you believe that the pharmaceutical industry, with the help of government agencies, is pushing dangerous lies, then any resistance to efforts to spread the truth—in reality, dangerous misinformation that could lead to untold numbers of deaths if unchecked—must be politically villainous. That logic can—and did—extend to other wacky ideas. And in the hearing, Republicans ate it up.

“It’s why Mr. Kennedy is running for president—to help us expose and stop what’s going on,” Rep. Jim Jordan, the panel’s chairman, said in his opening remarks.

Hearing Republican talking points from a prominent Democrat can do a lot to make right-wing complaints seem legitimate. Republicans are perhaps most worked up over Hunter Biden theories, which Kennedy clearly doesn’t really follow. But COVID-related censorship, while a bit stale as a news item, still can make voters believe in general partisan censorship from the left.

Worse for Democrats, though, was the visual of it all. It was embarrassing for Democrats that their primary candidate polling second to the president was bad-mouthing them on a televised panel. That embarrassment—or at least conservatives’ perception of it—was reflected in the glee with which conservative news covered the event. Fox News carried much of Kennedy’s testimony, while MSNBC and CNN did not. And after the hearing, Kennedy went back to Fox News to share his thoughts.

“He dispensed with his written statement; he gave it passionately from the heart,” Dana Perino of the cable network said. “He actually got applause at the end of that. He might obviously have some friends in the room.”

That political victory for Republicans was something Democrats noted, too. “You are here for cynical reasons to be used politically by that side of the aisle,” Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said during the hearing. “And it brings shame on a storied name that I revere.”

But more than mere embarrassment, there’s a larger way in which Kennedy has become valuable to the Republicans: Many conservatives and progressives alike see a Kennedy candidacy as inherently damaging to Joe Biden. It’s hardly surprising that so many of Kennedy’s donors have Republican ties, or why a known DeSantis supporter held a fundraiser for Kennedy.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Kennedy a “living, breathing false-flag operation” whose “whole campaign is being run by right-wing political operatives who have one objective: try to take down President Joe Biden.”

Because even if Kennedy makes no dent on Biden’s electoral map, any kind of abnormally high performance—as was seen in some polling when he first entered the race—would emphasize Biden’s unpopularity, potentially shaking the faith of potential voters.

As Roger Stone put it in one interview: “I think it will help, in the end, soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump.”

Kennedy, for his part, knows of these claims and has rejected them. (“I’m running because I expect to win the presidency,” he said on Fox News. “I’m not running to help Donald Trump.”) But we can probably expect, as we move deeper into campaign season, that Republicans will try to find more ways to harness Kennedy’s outsider energy to bolster their own credibility—and make Joe Biden look weak.