Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be running for the Democratic presidential nomination, but on Wednesday night he found himself addressing one of Vermont’s most reliably conservative organizations: the Ethan Allen Institute.
The Kennedy political dynasty member is perhaps best known for his controversial views on vaccines, but in his remarks to more than 100 attendees at the DoubleTree by Hilton in South Burlington, he focused largely on climate and energy policy.
“The climate crisis is existential,” Kennedy said as he outlined his career as an environmental activist and lawyer.
He described his work advocating for those traditionally “alienated from the environmental movement,” including Black communities in the Hudson Valley, those who depend on fishing in the Hudson River and Indigenous communities at Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas.
“One of the primary, lead features of every totalitarian system includes efforts to privatize public trust resources, to privatize the commons,” he said.
Kennedy painted a picture of a “government in cahoots with the polluters,” and oil, gas and coal companies openly violating environmental protection laws. The country has fallen, he said, to “a system of corporate crony capitalism.”
Wednesday’s event brought together an eclectic collection of the politically engaged. More than a few in the crowd had small elephant GOP pins on their lapels. Ethan Allen Institute president Myers Mermel, a former Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, as well as Ethan Allen vice president and founder John McClaughry, a former Reagan administration official, declined to comment on how the event came to be.
Though Kennedy has been viewed by some as a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination — particularly against incumbent President Joe Biden — a CNN/SSRS poll conducted in late May found that 20% of Democratic or Democrat-leaning voters were “currently supporting” Kennedy. In that same poll, 60% said they’d back Biden, while 36% said they would not support Kennedy “under any circumstances.”
Kennedy’s name and family ties have likely contributed to awareness of his candidacy, in spite of his lack of government service.
He is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and son of former Attorney General and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated in the 1960s. (Kennedy has said he believes his father’s death was a CIA plot and recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to say he is “aware” that he could be next and is taking “precautions.”)
Kennedy doled out plenty of anecdotes about his family throughout the night, including a story about losing his front tooth while skiing with his father and then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a child. The same tooth had come out earlier Wednesday evening during the salad course, he noted.
“I look like a pirate,” he cracked, revealing a gap in his teeth.
Kennedy had come to Vermont from New Hampshire, where the night before he had claimed the U.S. had intentionally undermined peace talks with Russia and Ukraine last spring, and where he had called for an end to all “proxy wars.”
Though the Burlington event was billed on the website as “purely educational” and “not a political fundraiser or tied to any political campaign in any way,” it was clear that many of those who had paid the $100 fee to attend were there to assess Kennedy as a candidate.
Some appeared to have already made up their minds. Two wore “Kennedy ’24” T-shirts, while another circled the room, soliciting signatures for a greeting card expressing excitement for his candidacy.
One of Kennedy’s supporters, Paul Bean, 23, who ran as a Republican candidate for a Washington County state Senate seat last year, said he views Kennedy as a centrist seeking to unify the country.
“He’s trying to lead a populist movement that doesn’t necessarily draw a line between the two major divides, the conservatives and liberals,” Bean said. “I genuinely believe he wants to bring the country together.”
Others appeared unconvinced. Sarah Soule, a Democrat and daughter of former Chittenden County state legislator Sallie Soule, said she plans to vote for Biden. Of Kennedy, she said, “I don’t believe he has a lot of the qualities that his uncle had, Jack Kennedy. He’s a little too off-center for me. But I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say.”
‘I have trouble with the anti-vaccine thing’
Noticeably absent from Kennedy’s hourlong speech was any explicit mention of vaccines. His decade-long history of touting anti-vaccine rhetoric has seen him booted off social media platforms for violating their misinformation policies and has alienated many Democratic voters.
Most recently, Kennedy repeated the long-debunked theory linking vaccines to autism and took part in a Twitter Space interview hosted by Elon Musk, who has drawn attention to conspiracy theories on the platform and promoted conservative candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate.
Kennedy chairs Children’s Health Defense, which campaigns against mandatory vaccination policies and attempts to attribute a range of diseases in children to vaccines, pesticides and more. According to the organization’s tax filings, revenue doubled to $6.8 million in 2019 during the pandemic, when vaccine skepticism grew, and leapt to $15.9 million in 2021.
In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that advocates for large tech companies to de-platform individuals disseminating hate and misinformation, named Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense as one of the “disinformation dozen” for its consistent promotions of Covid-19 vaccine-related myths.
Even family members — including Kennedy’s sister, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend — have spoken out against his views, calling them “dangerous.”
But even though Kennedy avoided the topic of vaccines Wednesday night, the specter of his most polarizing belief was visible still in the copies of his book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which several attendees had brought with them. In the book, Kennedy accuses Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of overreaching in his authority during the HIV epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, and goes on to question the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and promote unproven treatments.
Some attendees at Wednesday’s event said they were repelled by Kennedy’s stance on vaccines, but came despite it.
Doug Levine, an independent who drove from Manchester Center to hear Kennedy speak, said, “I still have trouble with the anti-vaccine thing, but I’m open to learning more. I think he could get some traction because I know there’s a lot of dissatisfaction. And I hate to say it but [Biden’s] age does have something to do with it.”
Others who share Kennedy’s views believe he has been wrongfully silenced. “He has a story to tell,” said Allison Judge. “And he has been censored, ridiculed, I fear, which is a shame.”
‘Free energy forever’
In his talk, Kennedy appealed to climate fear, political outrage and nostalgia. He spoke of acid rain destroying forest cover on the Appalachian peaks and the degradation of the Appalachians through mountaintop removal coal mining, which uses explosives that Kennedy equated to “a Hiroshima bomb every week.”
Mercury contamination of fish, he said, had killed the “seminal primal activity of American youth,” going fishing with family and then eating the catch.
He rattled off U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics to illustrate the impact of mercury contamination on pregnant women and pollution on rates of respiratory disease and asthma. “Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the cause of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children,” he said.
As president, Kennedy said he would ensure “free energy forever,” by offering state governments incentives to reform a regulatory system governed by “byzantine rules” and end subsidies favorable to carbon industries.
He also said he would expand the country’s electric grid to make renewable energy nationally accessible. This, he said, would enable homeowners to profit off of their solar panels and geothermal energy. There would be “free energy forever,” he repeated, adding that it would create “an economic boom.”
“Every home will be a power plant,” he said. “Every American will be an energy entrepreneur.”
Heads nodded and applause erupted from the crowd. The free market embrace sounded more like a typical Ethan Allen Institute event.
