Americans no longer trust their government, and they no longer trust the press. As President, I promise that the government will start telling the truth again,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy made restoring faith in the American government a key plank in his presidential campaign platform, but many media outlets have joined the Democratic political establishment in trying to deny credibility and prestige to the fourth member of the Kennedy family running for president.
The son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who also served as a New York senator, and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, both Democrats assassinated in the 1960s, the junior Kennedy has acknowledged that having the family name will help him in the race.
A Harvard graduate, Kennedy worked at several environmental nonprofits, serving as a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council and as president of the Waterkeeper Alliance for more than 20 years.
His advocacy focused on clean water, the environment, energy, and human rights.
He started a nonprofit, the Children’s Health Defense, in 2011, which is working to end childhood health epidemics by eliminating harmful exposures.
Kennedy defends his views on vaccines and his criticism for how the government handled the pandemic to those who say his views aren’t based on facts.
“It’s irrelevant,” said Kennedy. “There’s no Democratic version of the truth or Republican version of the truth. We should have evidence-based policy, and I think everybody ultimately would like to support that.”
Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
“Those three social-media companies—Facebook,1 Google,2 and Twitter3—wield a power over the content of American public discourse far greater than any entity, private or public, has ever wielded before,” says the complaint. “Since 2020, an ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government— from the White House itself to the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the CDC, the Office of the Surgeon General, and numerous less-well-known federal entities—has been engaged in the effort to induce those companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.”
In the 1973 Supreme Court case Norwood v. Harrison, the Justices set forth the principle the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
“A democratic government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. But government institutions have betrayed our trust,” says Kennedy’s website. “The intelligence agencies spy on our own people. Government and tech platforms conspire to surveil and censor the public. Regulatory agencies have been captured by those they are supposed to regulate: Wall Street controls the SEC. Polluters and extractive industries dominate the EPA and BLM. Pharma controls the CDC, NIH, and FDA. Big Ag controls the USDA. Big Tech has captured the FTC. No wonder trust in government is at all-time lows. It’s time to earn it back.”
“From his long experience and familiarity with systems of power, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. understands that most people in corporations and government are perfectly decent human beings,” says Kennedy’s website. “They play the game, but a lot of them are fed up with its phoniness, and cynical about the paralysis of the system. They feel trapped in it. Clean government isn’t just about removing corrupt individuals. It is about changing a system in which perfectly decent people become agents of corruption without even knowing it.”
“We are going to remake public institutions to serve the public,” says Kennedy’s website. “We will roll back the secrecy and make government transparent. We will protect whistleblowers and prosecute officials who abuse the public trust. We will rein in the lobbyists and slam shut the revolving door that shunts people from government agencies to lucrative positions in the companies they were supposed to regulate, and back again. We will get money out of politics. We will open our institutions to real citizen involvement. We will restore integrity to government.”
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