RFK Jr. Is Even Dumber Than We Thought

His latest comments about Martin Luther King and the FBI are all the proof you need.

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To the extent that vanity candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a career in politics (he doesn’t really, but bear with me) it’s one that’s based almost entirely on his iconic family name, rather than any sense of personal accomplishment or compelling vision for the country. Neither an inspiring orator nor a particularly coherent one, Kennedy is essentially a walking, talking “Hi, My Name Is _____” sticker slapped onto the worst Reddit thread you can imagine. He rants about “leaky brain” and “ethnic bioweapons” and assumes everyone wants to hear about his “love of hawking.” Were his name Robert F. Jones, he could be easily written off as an annoying boomer kook about whom no one but the most dedicated anti-vaxer freaks need ever give a second thought. But, because he is who he is (or more accurately: because his family is who his family is) we find ourselves assessing him not as a person, but as a sort of psychic extension of his far more accomplished father and uncles.

Kennedy, for his part, knows this too. He is all too willing to leverage his family’s legacy to add buoyancy to what would otherwise be a jumbled assortment of disparate conspiracy theories and rich-person picadillos. But because he’s the sort of detached weirdo with no real understanding of how anyone not named “Kennedy” moves through this world, he can’t help but invoke his family’s name in the dumbest, most tone-deaf way possible. For instance: he has now decided to publicly defend the Kennedy administration’s role in the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. In King’s hometown of Atlanta. The day before MLK Day. Yep. The man is even dumber than we thought.

Here’s Bobert Kennedy Jr speaking with Politico over the weekend (emphasis mine):

“[President John F. Kennedy and brother/Attorney General Robert] were betting not only the civil rights movement but their own careers. And they knew that Hoover was out to ruin King,” said Robert Kennedy Jr., referring to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time.

He argued that the Kennedy administration had a legitimate reason to go along with Hoover’s determination to surveil King. The FBI director saw King as a dangerous radical with Communists in his inner circle.

“There was good reason for them doing that at the time,” Kennedy said, “because J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist.

“My father gave permission to Hoover to wiretap them so he could prove that his suspicions about King were either right or wrong,” he continued. “I think, politically, they had to do it.”

Let’s follow the logic here, such as it is:

1. The president and his brother knew a rabid bigot in their employ had an agenda to dismantle a national civil rights movement and its leader with extreme prejudice.

2. In order to stop him from doing so, they, uh…allowed him to do so.

3. Beside, they had no choice politically. Are the Kennedys the real victims here? Who can say…

To be clear, Kennedy is holding his family’s water for something the FBI itself has not only apologized for, but actively denounced. As the Bureau told Fox News in a statement literally just yesterday:

The FBI has long acknowledged the abuses of power that took place under Director J. Edgar Hoover and the deplorable actions taken against Dr. King and others involved in the civil rights movement.

Bobby, baby, what are you doing? If even the Ef-Bee-Eye knows it’s a good idea to say “Hey, this was shitty of us, and we fucking sucked for doing it” then you do NOT, under any circumstances, need to swoop in out of nowhere to say why your daddy and uncle were doing the right thing here. How does this help their legacy, to say nothing—as you are clearly hoping—of yours?

Two more exciting tidbits from Politico:

He claimed, however, that his uncle as president would have fired Hoover in a second term, had he not been assassinated in the fall of 1963.

Kennedy also said he believed that President Kennedy had alerted King to the eavesdropping in a private conversation.

Ah, well then. Water under the bridge I guess!

There is, admittedly, something admirable about sticking up for your own family. That’s what families are supposed to do: support one another. But there’s something even more admirable about having the courage to say when your family has done wrong. That’s hard to do for just about anyone, no matter what their last name is. But for RFK Jr., a man whose entire life seems predicated on that “K,”, it’s apparently impossible.