RFK Jr.'s Success Is Forcing the Media to Acknowledge COVID Vaccine Skeptics on the Left | Opinion

Among President Biden's challengers for the presidential nomination in the Democratic primary, one in particular has the President's team sweating: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has emerged with 20 percent support since announcing his campaign for president. But RFK Jr.'s auspicious rise is not due to anything he personally believes or any unique charisma; he's most well known for being an anti-vaxxer long before the COVID vaccine even existed. Instead, his success is a direct reflection of the authoritarian approach the President and his party took to managing COVID—and how poorly that has gone over within the President's own party.

RFK Jr.'s success is forcing the media to learn a lesson it has done its best to stave off: that it wasn't just wacko conservatives who opposed the silencing of skepticism around everything that had to do with the pandemic, but many on the Left, too. Kennedy's reputation as someone open to questioning orthodoxy around vaccines and his more general adversarial approach to Big Pharma is being seen by many Democrats as not only not a turn-off, but something we can use a lot more of these days.

Of course, the media is not learning this lesson willingly. When he sat for an interview on ABC news, they cut him off and then added their own context to his words. The New York Times simply labeled him a Right-Winger and moved on. While appearing on Michael Smerconish's Sirius XM show, the host could barely wrap his brain around the idea that vaccine and Fauci skepticism could be coming from large swaths of reliable Democrat party voting base, including Hollywood and African Americans.

RFK Jr. would know. The notorious anti-vaxxer and borderline conspiracist is also a Hollywood stalwart; he's married to Cheryl Hines of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fame. Which makes him well positioned to shine a very uncomfortable light for our corporate media into the corners of the anti-vax, celebrity Left.

For a long time, that corner of the Democratic coalition was content to lay low and let the media pretend it was only the crazy QAnon MAGA Trump Right refusing the shot. The media conveniently ignored the vaccine skepticism of Leftists under President Trump, but now Robert Kennedy Jr. and his surprisingly fledging presidential campaign have renewed that discussion, and it's not going to just disappear.

Kennedy is forcing the Democrats and their media lackeys to acknowledge that they weren't only harming their political opponents with their vaccine authoritarianism, but their own voters, too.

Kamala Harris, then a candidate for office, may have promised she wouldn't take a Donald Trump endorsed vaccine, but when she and Biden won the election, it became an all hands on deck effort to force people to take the vaccine—force being the key word.

The Biden administration, with Fauci at the forefront, did not engage in a persuasion campaign to vaccinate Americans, but rather a campaign of force and threats, attempting to use the employer OSHA mandate to force employees to take the vaccine or lose their jobs.

Americans of all political stripes were impacted by this, and it seems the resentment around it has not died. This is the lens through which to view Kennedy's surprising success in the polls. Meanwhile, he's secured the endorsement of Jack Dorsey and Alicia Silverstone, tech and Hollywood bigwigs who could open the floodgates.

Kennedy does not pose an imminent threat to another Biden nomination (yet). But if he continues to draw support, particularly from the A-List corners of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, a known bastion of vaccine skepticism, he might at the least force a protest debate against the DNC and appear on stage with Biden in front of a national primary audience. And then the media will truly no longer be able to point the anti-vax finger unfairly at the political and conservative Right.

Stephen L. Miller has written for National Review, The Spectator, the New York Post and Fox News, and hosts the independent podcast Versus Media on Substack.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.