Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the only Georgia stop in his October “Independence Tour” Saturday in Augusta.
The environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist who’s the nephew of John F. Kennedy and son of Bobby Kennedy announced Monday he’ll run for president as an independent, ending a Democratic primary challenge to Joe Biden.
Kennedy, 69, canceled Friday stops in Savannah and Jacksonville, Fla., for unspecified reasons. He connected himself to an Augusta crowd of about 100 Saturday with a nod to Lyn Redwood, who’s assisting with his Georgia campaign.
He and the Peachtree City nurse practitioner co-founded Children’s Health Defense, a vaccine “safety” organization that promotes unfounded connections between childhood vaccines and autism and other ill effects.
It’s a stance that could serve him well in Georgia, which is among the 10 U.S. states with the lowest vaccination rate, at about 57%.
Kennedy spent most of a 50-minute speech on topics other than vaccines. They included homelessness, which he said is caused by the un-affordability of housing ownership to most people.
As giant corporations gradually acquire much of America’s single-family housing stock, “we will become a nation of renters,” he said.
Those who attended his appearance at Augusta Marriott at the Convention Center cheered Kennedy’s critique of federal agencies and corporate greed.
“He’s our only hope. Biden and Trump are hopeless,” Augusta attorney Jeff Bowman said.
Patricia Larmon said she’d voted for the elder Kennedys in the 1960s. She had her photo taken with Kennedy after his talk.
“All my Republican friends will be mad, but I don’t care,” Larmon said.
In his remarks, Kennedy recalled traveling European countries as a youth with his illustrious family, when American cars, TV and entertainment were the envy of the world.
“More importantly, they wanted our leadership,” he said.
While politicians today say other nations hate Americans for their freedoms, that’s not true, he said.
“They don’t like us now because we have backtracked on our freedoms. We’ve changed direction. We are no longer the nation of freedom – we’re the nation of war,” he said.
In military-heavy Augusta, Kennedy made the remainder of his remarks about the “military-industrial complex,” the dominance of which President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans against.
Eisenhower gave the speech days before John F. Kennedy took office. The 35th U.S. president said the president’s primary job is “to keep the country out of war,” Kennedy said.
President Kennedy spent the next three years keeping America out of war, Kennedy said. But within 30 days of his signing National Security Order 263 – withdrawing American troops from Vietnam – he was murdered, he said.
A week later, President Lyndon Johnson amended the order and sent 250,000 American troops to Vietnam, he said. “It became America’s war,” Kennedy said.
Robert F. Kennedy Sr. – his father – ran against the war in 1968, and the day he won Democratic primaries he was murdered, Kennedy said. Two months earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed.
The assassinations, the Vietnam War, 9/11 and COVID-19 all figure into today’s disillusionment, he said.
“Each of those traumas pushed us farther and farther down that path that Eisenhower warned us against,” he said.
Eight trillion dollars spent on wars in the last 20 years, “and we are less safe than when we began,” Kennedy said.
American foreign policy created ISIS, Brexit and now the war in Ukraine, he said.
Kennedy didn’t mention in his remarks Israel’s declaration of war, following the deadliest attack in history on the Jewish state, on Hamas last week.
The military-industrial grip continues in Ukraine, where American aid dollars merely flow back to American military contractors, he said.
“When the bankers need it and the military contractors need it, the doors are wide open to the safe,” Kennedy said. “When our fellow Americans are starving or they are sick or need help, the door is shut.”
