Typically it’s more durable to forgive a politician’s oddball, eccentric, merely mean-spirited positions, even when they’re expressed offhand and should not the primary plank within the platform, than it’s their elementary beliefs.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s elementary perception, apart from his previous primary plank of pondering that the tens of thousands and thousands of lives saved by the miracle of medical vaccines within the final century are all a part of some harmful conspiratorial fraud.
No matter, could be the correct response to such nonsense, besides that this man thinks he must be president.
However, once more, it’s typically the down-ticket nonsense on a candidate’s listing of priorities that bothers. For me, it’s akin to discovering a few small lies {that a} candidate for workplace advised me throughout this spring’s endorsement season. In the event that they have been mendacity in regards to the little stuff, what in regards to the huge?
RFK Jr. is unhealthy information — already knew that.
Simply one other entitled, not notably vibrant spoiler. No less than Ralph Nader and Ross Perot have been very good spoilers.
However someway, after I learn just lately that Kennedy was going out of his method to protest the removing of Accomplice statues from Southern metropolis parks the place they’ve stood too lengthy as an unforgivable insult to the descendants of enslaved People, the unhealthy information acquired worse.
“I’ve a visceral response towards the assaults on these statues,” Kennedy mentioned on a podcast hosted by Tim Pool, apparently a right-wing commentator.
Cliche-watch: to take them down is “destroying historical past.”
He went on to quote “heroes within the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves,” The New York Instances report.
However then, requested to call a hero of his personal from the Southern facet within the Civil Warfare, he cited Robert E. Lee — who very a lot did “personal” slaves.
Effectively, he mentioned, “if we need to discover people who find themselves fully virtuous on each subject all through historical past, we’d erase all of historical past.”
It’s at this level within the dialogue of Accomplice monuments, hundreds of which stay in Dixie together with the a number of outstanding ones which were eliminated, that it’s properly to recollect when most of them have been erected.
It was not at all proper after the Civil Warfare.
They have been a very long time coming.
They have been largely proposed and created through the lengthy effort from the Eighteen Nineties into the Nineteen Twenties to create the parable of the Misplaced Trigger within the American South.
These have been the years of the Jim Crow South, of the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and many of the statues of Basic Lee and his fellow martyrs to the trigger have been put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sought to additional the parable of the genteel plantation-era South of their grandparents because it was about to vanish into reminiscence within the twentieth century.
It was all nothing greater than propaganda to counter the truth that the plantations and the financial success of the agrarian South had been completely constructed on the backs of enslaved human beings.
And the son of Bobby Kennedy — who despatched federal troops to the College of Mississippi to implement a federal court docket order admitting James Meredith, an African American, to what had beforehand been a segregated college — defends the propagandist historical past of the Misplaced Trigger?
That People would vote for such an individual exhibits that issues are worse than we expect.
Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California Information Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
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