The Witness Chronicles, April 6, 2024

RFK Jr & DJT

Photo by Mohammad Shahhosseini on Unsplash

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There Are Two Crazed Men Running for President

And Biden is not one of them

Let me get RFK Jr out of the way (please). This man is mentally ill and the evidence is his obsession with vaccines. I come from a generation where virtually every kid got vaccinated, in school, for things like measles and chicken pox. And a generation where what we know as the autism spectrum was unknown.

Of course by today’s standards there were almost certainly many kids on the spectrum back then. Or maybe not. It certainly was not as widespread as it is today. Or maybe it was. The point is that tying something like autism to vaccines in general is not backed up by any science, you know, the real kind.

Despite this fact, anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr insist on spreading this deadly myth and citing studies that have been debunked or withdrawn because other scientists could not replicate their results or found flaws in their methodology.

I call it a deadly myth because vaccines save lives, thousands if not millions of lives. Yet we have a kook running for President with this obsession as the centerpiece of his campaign, and the scary part is he gets a significant percentage of votes in polls. Enough to disrupt the final results and possibly tip our country into the disaster that is Donald Trump, our other crazy candidate.

RFK shares another frankly disgusting viewpoint that has surfaced this week. He is making excuses for and whitewashing the crimes of the January Sixth insurrectionists, seemingly ignoring the fact that Capitol Police were attacked, with some ending up dead. There is simply no excuse for supporting these violent criminals.

Fortunately third party candidates like RFK Jr typically start to lose voters as we near the election. Some wealthy Republican donors have been funding him, betting that this spoiler role will bolster Trump and take votes from Biden, the sane guy.

Which gets us to Trump, the far more dangerous candidate. The sociopathic candidate. If you don’t think he is mentally unhinged, go online and find one of his recent speeches. Make sure you watch the entire rant and you will see exactly how messed up and dangerous this man is. Enough said about him. 

In any other circumstance a kook like Kennedy would be going nowhere, but he will attract some voters who are looking for an alternative to the front runners because of their age, stance on various issues like Palestine (Biden), or their criminal behavior (Trump).

Even considering a man like RFK as legitimate is a failure of our responsibility to be informed voters who make decisions based on what we see as good for the future of the country. It’s irresponsible laziness and worse.

What’s even worse is the fact that two mentally ill men are even on the ticket. It speaks volumes about the media coverage of this election and the apathy of those who should know better. The media, in its pursuit of fair and balanced reporting, has tried to equate the crazies with the sane as though there is some kind of equivalence. There is no comparison.

Besides being nuts, RFK and Trump share another similarity. Neither has accomplished anything beneficial to the country, democracy, or the economy, in fact they have empty records pumped up by lies and exaggeration.

Yes, in his youth, RFK Jr was an environmentalist who helped clean up the Hudson River. But the environmental movement eventually started questioning many of his crazy, conspiratorial views and distanced themselves from him.

Biden, on the other hand, has a long list of concrete, measurable accomplishments including massive infrastructure investment, protection of American intellectual property, specifically advanced semiconductors, and helped return high end manufacturing to the US. The economy is booming and unemployment is at a 60 year low.

The contrast between these accomplishments and the crazy men’s paranoid fantasies is bizarre to say the least. And it reflects very poorly on a lot of Americans who seem to be too lazy to even bother with learning the truth. If you watch the people at a Trump rally, you see a crowd there for a spectacle, an entertainment event comparable to a circus. Gawkers and geeks.

Unfortunately there are enough of these rubes to keep Trump going and he gives them what they want, including his constant lies, fear mongering, permission to be violent, and, apparently, golden sneakers and red, white, and blue bibles. For a price of course.

Fortunately there are not enough of these rubes to get him elected again, in my humble opinion, and more will peel away as his court cases mount and his possible dementia gets worse and worse, as it appears to be doing.

But because we are dealing with craziness, Trump and his loyal cult will not accept any outcome where he loses the election, and the events of January Sixth will be repeated in some unforeseeable way. So, the months up to the election will continue to bring us constant displays of increasingly dangerous and unhinged rhetoric and incitements to violence.

And we will deserve it as long as we give men like Trump and RFK Jr a platform to tell their lies, spread their conspiracies, and turn us against each other, all to support their own need for power and attention.

The only way to counter this is to not stand for it, to stand for decency, civility, the rule of law, science, and the democracy we have so painstakingly built since 1776.

~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen. 

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