Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.
Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) “should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals” and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are “contemptible human beings” of whom he “wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under”…..
After this lock-’em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as “a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society”), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual “climate-deniers,” but stressing that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”
Pierre Lemieux understandably wonders what the term “marginalized group” means.
Scott Sumner decries the costs of economic nationalism.
How many millions of hours of regulatory paperwork has Biden added since his inauguration?
Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley ably defends the stance taken by Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, on covid vaccines for young people. Here’s her conclusion:
Dr. Ladapo’s findings might not be accepted by the “broader medical community,” but they also aren’t outliers. A study in Nature Communications in March found a 70% increased risk of cardiac death after a second mRNA vaccine dose among 12- to 29-year-old males in England. (The study still found the absolute risk of death to be very small—about 1 in 360,000.)
The orthodox view is that the myocarditis risk for young men from vaccines pales in comparison to Covid infection, but that isn’t clear since their risk of severe illness from the virus is tiny and the vaccines don’t prevent infection. That’s why Dr. Ladapo recommended against them for young men. If he’s wrong, why are his critics responding with personal attacks rather than data and analysis?
Alas, her “detail” omitted a few things. Such as her description in July 2020 of the Trump Administration’s push to reopen schools for in-person learning that autumn as “this reckless, this callous, this cruel.” That summer she also endorsed teacher “safety strikes” if unions deemed local reopening protocols to be inadequate. Hundreds of private and charter schools did open that fall without the surge of illness that Ms. Weingarten claimed to fear.
She also left out the detail that local union affiliates were the most aggressive opponents of school reopening throughout 2021 and even into 2022. “We are practically begging [the Chicago Teachers Union] to come to the table so we can get a deal done,” Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in February 2021.
