You’re Welcome, Mr. Kennedy

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On August 20, 2024, Michelle Obama gave one of the most dishonest speeches in American history.

Speaking at the Democrat party’s convention in Chicago, she claimed the following: “We don’t get to change the rules so we always win.  If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top.  No.  We put our heads down.  We get to work.  In America, we do something.”

She said this while standing onstage at a convention that had held no primary.  In fact, Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee, never earned one vote from a Democrat party member.

Ms. Harris became the nominee for two reasons: first, her party changed the rules to make it legally impossible for Democrats to vote for Marianne Williamson or Bobby Kennedy.  These two authentic Democrats sought to challenge President Biden for the presidency.  Second, Ms. Harris’s party lied to the American people for well over a year, claiming that this circumvention of democratic process was justified because Biden, the sitting president, had every intention of running for a second term and was healthy enough to do so.

Long after the primary season had ended and registered Democrats had been barred from voting for a nominee who could earn their trust, Biden suddenly announced that he would not run, and Harris would be crowned as a nominee who did nothing to prove that Democrats wanted her in office.

In other words, everything that Michelle Obama commemorated on August 20 was the exact opposite of what she was saying.  The party had changed the rules so that her small clique of extremely wealthy bigwigs could avoid accountability to the little people who make the Democrat party’s power possible.

What do I mean by the “little people”?  People like me, a Hispanic schoolteacher who was actually named “Robert” after Bobby Kennedy.  My parents were such devoted Democrats that my father persuaded my mother, after seeing Bobby Kennedy get assassinated in 1968, to name any future sons born after him.  I was, from early childhood, an old-fashioned Democrat who believed in the obligations of government to intervene to protect working men from abuse by the capitalist classes.  The Peter Thiel and Paul Singer types would classify me as a lefty loon because I believe in collective bargaining, debt forgiveness, and minimum wage laws.

True to my roots in the late 1960s, I have always been suspicious of bourgeois decadence.  I am antiwar, favorable to anti-discrimination protections, and pro-family in the vein of Jimmy Carter, whose Baptist faith I share. By “pro-family,” I mean that I believe that the government needs to invest in families by pursuing job security for working fathers; keeping mothers and fathers with their children whenever possible; providing affordable education to youth; and guaranteeing access to medical care (real medical care, not abortion), daycare, and nutrition.  I also mean, by the way, that intercourse should be reserved for marriage, which should follow the biblical definition of a God-ordained union between a woman and man.

In no sane universe would I have ever been drawn into the Republican fold and surrounded by MAGA activists who rail against big government, militate against immigration, and demand the dismantling of public schools.  But a lot happened since Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.  First of all, the LGBT movement and second-wave feminism happened, which suddenly pitted pro-family Christian beliefs against the Democrat party leaders, who wanted to eliminate the primacy of the mother-father-child household in favor of endless permutations of Mrs. Doubtfire.

Women largely left the home to work because wages failed to keep pace with the cost of living, and people couldn’t raise children on one income by the 1980s.  But feminists in the Democrat party had little interest in advocating for working-class male earnings, preferring to focus endlessly on the need for women to have sex without judgment or the burden of having children.  As women became the majority of the Democrat constituency, misogynist Democrat leaders decided they could hold females hostage with silly, catty issues at one extreme and heavy-handed tragic issues at the other extreme.  Frivolous fare included gossipy priggishness about sexual harassment against Hollywood actresses.  At the opposite — and conversation-stopping — extreme, almost all female empowerment became reduced to the issue of abortion, which became reduced to the issue of rape.

Even with the Democrats’ abandonment of working-class men’s interests, I might have remained a lifelong Democrat were it not for the feminists’ adoption of LGBT agendas and expulsion of the radical antiwar movement.  I belonged wholeheartedly to the Democrat masses protesting against Bush’s neocon wars.  Lest Michelle Obama forget, she became the first lady only because we believed her husband’s claims to be antiwar, and we propelled him past Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2008.  But Proposition 8 exploded the Democrat party’s priorities in 2008, just in time for Obama to cosplay as a macho war president, thereby casting out the pesky peaceniks he never liked in the first place.  Now he could deflect attention from his increasing subordination to the military-industrial complex by smothering Washington, D.C. in rainbow flags.

And so in 2009, as Michelle and Barack settled in at the White House, the antiwar, pro-marriage black Christian Obamas vanished, replaced by the Stepford Obamas, who were anxious to bomb the Arab world into oblivion, overthrow the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, and gin up anger at Muslims and Russians for not supporting gay adoption.

I left the Democrat fold with a great deal of pain and hesitation.  But the Democrat elites made the decision for me.  During Obama’s two terms, I was a tenure-track professor at California State University, where my dean held a position in the Clinton Foundation and one of our most famous alumni was Doug Emhof, husband of a shady attorney general named Kamala Harris.  If you want a nauseating summary of the twists and turns by which I was driven out of this vortex, feel free to slog through hundreds of articles I wrote chronicling it on American Thinker.

When Bobby Kennedy emerged as a new political possibility, I felt reinvigorated after decades of feeling lost.  Not only was he my literal namesake, but Kennedy spoke to people like me who were constantly alienated from the two-party system.

In the whirlwind of commentary following Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump last week, one thing I haven’t heard from anyone (other than Bobby) is curiosity about who his followers were.  We see polls that show Kennedy supporters splitting more for Trump than for Harris by a margin of 1.5 to 1 or so, but nobody seems to wonder who we were.

So let me tell you.  I loved serving in the Bobby Kennedy campaign in 2023 and 2024, two years of my life I’ll never forget.  In the same room you had former Clinton, Sanders, Paul, Trump, McCain, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy supporters.  We followed Bobby’s strict instructions to stay positive and not demonize each other over past choices.  This set the stage for a movement full of grace, forgiveness, and generosity.  My online writing disappeared once I got involved because I wanted to break away from the vitriol of previous decades.

We were, at the core, the old-fashioned Democrats who believed in Bobby’s economic, environmental, and foreign-policy visions.  We were drawn to his free speech platform because all of us, for various dumb reasons, had been exiled from political communities who barred us based on counterproductive litmus tests.

Three issues created tension in our movement: the vaccines, abortion, and Israel.  As a pro-life and pro-Palestinian person, I had to step back and accept that Bobby wouldn’t agree with me on everything.  I knew, from the start, that Bobby’s movement was about finding an outlet for everyone who could agree with him on the foundational principles, those ideas that once girded the Democrat party.

Bobby’s campaign directors took the time to speak with his supporters.  They made it clear that my involvement was welcome even though I had conservative Christian views that might clash with his socially liberal colleagues, and even though I rejected Zionism.  Still, I had the honor of serving as the leader of volunteer efforts in Tarrant County and even became one of Bobby’s Texas electors.

It’s all over now.  Or is it?

I wish Bobby hadn’t suspended his campaign and sided with Trump.  If I liked Trump, I would’ve never signed up with Kennedy in the first place.  But I understand why Bobby did what he did.  The two parties are both messed up, but the Democrats are far deeper into the abyss.  We saw that working for Bobby.  It was the Democrats who blocked anyone from running in their primary, which forced Bobby to go independent in the fall of 2023.  The Democrats kept suing him, not the GOP.  And the subversion of government agencies like the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Secret Service has been a Democrat disease.

Many of us who worked for Bobby’s campaign knew that, because we’d been driven out by a party that decided it didn’t want our vote.  So we get it.  I can’t honor the work I did on the Kennedy campaign and then become ungenerous and judgmental about his ultimate decision.  Bobby was the only political figure I can say I trusted in the last 30 years.  I have to trust his judgment this time.

But support Trump?  I’m not sure.  I need to consider the Green and Libertarian parties.  In Kennedy’s speech, he thanked his supporters for making huge personal sacrifices to gather the signatures and assemble a volunteer team to make his run possible.  I did sacrifice a lot of time with my family.  I angered many of my pro-Trump neighbors in Texas and lost the respect of my Democrat relatives in New York.  It was a lot of hours of unpaid labor.  I am glad he thanked us.

So I am honored to say, “You’re welcome, Mr. Kennedy.”  It has been a pleasure.

I hope to say, in a few years, “Thank you” as well.  But I have to hold off.  To Bobby I must say: Please don’t stop fighting for the Democrats of your father’s generation.  We are here, and nobody is speaking for us.  In our hearts, we know that MAGA can never be our home because we are still the working men, like the Appalachians Bobby Kennedy visited in the 1960s.  We just want the dignity of living in a country that rewards our hard work with a chance at decent family life.  We want a government that will help us when we need it, and we know that isn’t Marxism, but just a humane society in which to live.

If you fight for us so we don’t become forgotten again, in a few years, I promise I’ll write a piece called “Thank You, Mr. Kennedy.”  And you can say, “You’re welcome” back to me.

Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Image: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.