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      Hunter Biden’s Daughter and a Tale of Two Families

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      The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who has not yet met her father or her grandfather, is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright.There is a 4-year-old girl in rural Arkansas who is learning to ride a camouflage-patterned four-wheeler alongside her cousins. Some days, she wears a bow in her hair, and on other days, she threads her long blond ponytail through the back of a baseball cap. When she is old enough, she will learn to hunt, just like her mother did when she was young.The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the president of the United States. She speaks about both of them often, but she has not met them. Her maternal grandfather, Rob Roberts, described her as whip-smart and funny.“I may not be the POTUS,” Mr. Roberts said in a text message, using an acronym for the president, but he said he would do anything for his granddaughter. He said she “needs for nothing and never will.”The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who is not named in court papers, is a tale of two families, one of them powerful, one of them not. But at its core, the story is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright.Her parents ended a yearslong court battle over child support on Thursday, agreeing that Mr. Biden, who has embarked on a second career as a painter whose pieces have been offered for as much as $500,000 each, would turn over a number of his paintings to his daughter in addition to providing a monthly support payment. The little girl will select the paintings from Mr. Biden, according to court documents.“We worked it out amongst ourselves,” Lunden Roberts, the girl’s mother, said in an interview with The New York Times. “It was settled” in a discussion with Mr. Biden, she said.Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment for this article.Hunter Biden remains close to his father and often appears at White House events.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Roberts said she dropped a request to have the girl’s last name changed from Roberts to Biden. (Mr. Biden had fought against giving their daughter the Biden surname.) Ms. Roberts would only say that the decision to drop the request was mutual. “We both want what is best for our daughter, and that is our only focus,” she said.Though a trial planned for mid-July has been averted, people on both sides fear that the political toxicity surrounding the case will remain. Already, it has been extensively covered in conservative media, from Breitbart to Fox News, and conservative commentators assailed the Biden family after news of the settlement.Both Hunter Biden, the privileged and troubled son of a president, and Ms. Roberts, the daughter of a rural gun maker, have allies whose actions have made the situation more politicized. There is no evidence the White House is involved in those actions.Clint Lancaster, Ms. Roberts’s attorney, has represented the Trump campaign. He also called Garrett Ziegler, an activist and former Trump White House aide who has cataloged and published messages from a cache of Hunter Biden’s files that appear to have come from a laptop he left at a repair shop, to serve as an expert witness in the child support case. In the other corner, allies of Democratic groups dedicated to helping the Biden family have disseminated information about Mr. Ziegler and the Roberts family, seeking to highlight their Trump ties.And then there is President Biden.His public image is centered around his devotion to his family — including to Hunter, his only surviving son. In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told that the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the discussions.The White House did not respond to questions about the case, in keeping with how officials have answered questions about the Biden family before.Several of the president’s allies fear that the case could damage his re-election prospects by bringing more attention to a son whom some Democrats see as a liability. Others say the far right has focused on Hunter Biden, a private citizen, but ignored any moral and ethical failings of the former president, Donald J. Trump.“He’s under more indictments than two Super Bowl teams’ worth of players,” the author and political strategist Stuart Stevens, who left the Republican Party in 2016, said of Mr. Trump. “But that doesn’t matter: You have Hunter Biden. It’s just anger in search of an argument.”‘People Have an Image of Me’Lunden Roberts, 32, comes from a clan as tight-knit as the Bidens. Her father is a red-state gun manufacturer whose hunting buddies have included Donald Trump Jr., and who taught her at a young age how to hunt turkeys and alligators. She works for the family business, which sits on a winding country road dotted with pastures on the outskirts of Batesville.The pride of her family, the 5-foot-8 Ms. Roberts graduated with honors from Southside High School in Batesville and played basketball for Arkansas State University, where a team biography said she enjoyed hunting and skeet shooting. After graduating, she moved to Washington to study forensic investigation at George Washington University. She never completed the program. Photos from that time show her attending baseball games at Nationals Park and attending Drake and Kanye West concerts.Lunden Roberts arriving for a hearing in the paternity case in Batesville, Ark., in May. Ms. Roberts and Mr. Biden settled the case on Thursday.Karen Pulfer Focht/ReutersAlong the way, she met the son of a future president who was sliding into addiction and visiting Washington strip clubs.In mid-2018, Ms. Roberts was working as a personal assistant to Mr. Biden, according to a person close to her and messages from a cache of Mr. Biden’s files. Their daughter was born later that year, but by then, Mr. Biden had stopped responding to Ms. Roberts’s messages, including one informing him of the child’s birth date. Shortly after their daughter was born in November 2018, he removed Ms. Roberts and the child from his health insurance, which led Ms. Roberts to contact Mr. Lancaster.She filed a lawsuit in May 2019, and DNA testing that year established that Mr. Biden was the father of the child. In a motion for custody filing in December 2019, Ms. Roberts said that he had never met their child and “could not identify the child out of a photo lineup.”Ms. Roberts said in an interview that she had grown used to the onslaught of scrutiny around the case: “I read things about myself that I have no clue about,” she said. But one thing she said she can’t stand is being called a bad mother. “People can call me whatever they want, but they can’t call me that,” she said.Her public Instagram account tells its own story: “I hope one day when you look back you find yourself proud of who you are, where you come from, and most importantly, who raised you,” she captioned a photo of the two of them at the beach earlier this year. In another photo, shared to her account in April 2022, her daughter wore an Air Force One baseball cap and stood in front of the Jefferson Memorial.“People have an image of me, but few get the picture,” Ms. Roberts wrote on another photo in July 2022.Ms. Roberts posted a photo of herself and her daughter in Washington last year. Seen through one prism, the photos are a powerful public testament of love from a mother to her daughter. Seen through another, they are exploitative, certainly from the perspective of Biden allies, who fear the images — and the child — are being weaponized against the Biden family.For her part, Ms. Roberts said she did not bring her daughter to Washington to punish the Bidens. She said she brought her to Washington because not many little girls get to say that their grandfather is the president.“She’s very proud of who her grandfather is and who her dad is,” Ms. Roberts said. “That is something that I would never allow her to think otherwise.”A Troubled SonHunter Biden, 53, is recovering from crack cocaine addiction and is the last surviving son of the president, who lost his eldest, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. The younger Mr. Biden has five children, and has said that he fathered his fourth at a low point in his life.“I had no recollection of our encounter,” Mr. Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir. “That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.”Before Thursday’s settlement, Mr. Biden had paid Ms. Roberts upward of $750,000, according to his attorneys, and had sought to reduce his $20,000-a-month child support payment on the grounds that he did not have the money. The new amount is lower than what had been originally ordered by the court, according to a person familiar with the case.“I’m very proud of my son,” President Biden told reporters recently.Al Drago for The New York TimesTrial or no trial, Mr. Biden will remain one of his father’s political vulnerabilities. Since his addiction spiraled out of control and his dealings with foreign governments caught the attention of conservatives, the younger Mr. Biden’s choices have become grist for memes, conservative cable news panels and Republican fund-raising. The most recent round kicked off after he struck a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge.On top of that, Mr. Biden has been the subject of multiple congressional investigations, and the contents of the laptop he left at a repair shop have been pored over and disseminated by activists, who say his private communications show criminal wrongdoing.In the White House, matters involving Hunter are so sensitive that only the president’s most senior advisers talk to him about his son, according to people familiar with the arrangement.Through it all, the president has been staunchly supportive. Rather than distance himself, Mr. Biden has included Hunter on official trips, traveled with him aboard Marine One, and ensured that he is on the guest list at state dinners.“I’m very proud of my son,” the president told reporters recently.‘Life’s Greatest Blessing’President Biden has worked over the past half-century to make his last name synonymous with family values and loyalty. The strength of his political persona, which emphasizes decency, family and duty, was enough to defeat Mr. Trump the first time around, and he would need to keep it intact if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.On a proclamation issued on Father’s Day, Mr. Biden said that his father had “taught me that, above all, family is the beginning, middle and end — a lesson I have passed down to my children and grandchildren.” He added that “family is life’s greatest blessing and responsibility.”President Biden; Jill Biden, the first lady; and their children and grandchildren watching fireworks from the White House after Mr. Biden’s inauguration in 2021.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSince they entered the White House, President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, have centered their family lives around their grandchildren, and have given them the benefits that come with living in close contact with the White House.Naomi Biden, 29, is Hunter’s eldest child, from his first marriage, to Kathleen Buhle, which ended in 2017. Ms. Biden was married on the South Lawn of the White House last year in a Ralph Lauren dress that she called the product of her “American(a) dreams.” She and her sisters have taken trips around the world with the president and first lady. Hunter married Melissa Cohen in 2019. His youngest child, who is named for Beau and was born in 2020, is photographed frequently with his grandparents.In April, President Biden told a group of children that he had “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.”Hunter Biden’s youngest son, Beau, is frequently seen traveling and attending events with his grandparents.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBut the president has not yet met or publicly mentioned his other grandchild. His White House has not answered questions about whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled.Still, Mr. Stevens, the political strategist, said that Mr. Biden’s support of his son, even against an onslaught of Republican criticism and ugly scandals, has only emphasized his unconditional love for his family.“The net positive of this has gone to Biden, by the way,” Mr. Stevens said of the president. “He stuck by him.”Political ConcernsFew involved think the particulars of this case, even though it has been settled, will stay at a simmer, especially given its ubiquity in right-wing media.“In yet another sweetheart deal, Hunter Biden got off easy in his child support case,” wrote the editorial board of The New York Post, which has followed the proceedings closely.Aside from the news coverage and commentary, allies of the Biden family are privately worried that the involvement of right-wing operatives in the matter has made any engagement harder for the family.Mr. Ziegler, who was named as an expert witness in the case, had a footnote role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results: In December 2020, Mr. Ziegler escorted Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the attorney Sidney Powell into the Oval Office, where a group discussed with Mr. Trump a plan to seize control of voting machines in key states. Mr. Ziegler’s White House guest privileges were later revoked.Mr. Ziegler declined to confirm his involvement in the child support case.Ms. Roberts’s attorney, Mr. Lancaster, also has a background in conservative activism. He is vocal on social media about his support for Mr. Trump, often retweeting criticism from conservative outlets and Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter. He also worked as an attorney for the Trump campaign during an electoral vote recount in Wisconsin after the 2020 election.Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in 2020. Allies of the Biden family are concerned that the paternity case will be used against President Biden in the 2024 campaign.Al Drago for The New York TimesOn the other side, people affiliated with left-leaning organizations, including Facts First USA, an advocacy group run by David Brock, are wary of what the team surrounding Ms. Roberts may do as the 2024 campaign gets underway.Members of the group, which operates independently of the White House and has taken a more adversarial approach to critics than the Biden administration does, have circulated a photo of Ms. Roberts’s father posing with Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Roberts said in a text message that he has gone hunting with Mr. Trump but that he did not recall when they had first met.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz said it was “a waste of time” for activists to focus on attacking the president’s family because voters do not care about Hunter Biden as much as they care about other issues, including Ukraine and inflation.“You have the responsibility to hold people accountable, but I want to be clear: It will not change a single vote,” he said of Hunter Biden’s legal and personal problems.If the Roberts family is taking political advice — outside of any that might come from the family attorney — they aren’t saying. In Batesville, the girl’s maternal grandmother, Kimberly Roberts, said in a brief telephone interview that she would not comment on the case.She did have one thing to say, though.“My granddaughter is happy, healthy, and very loved,” Ms. Roberts said, before hanging up.Kenneth P. Vogel More

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      Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

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      The decisions this week on affirmative action and student loans give Democrats a way to make a case on class and appeal to voters who have drifted away from the party.Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “mend it, don’t end it,” affirmative action has had an uneasy place in the Democratic coalition, as omnipresent as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education — but unpopular with much of the public.Now, in striking down race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has handed the Democrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.The question is, will the party pivot?“This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, whose upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the bleeding of working-class voters over the last decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”Conservative voters have long been more animated by the Supreme Court’s composition than liberals have. But the last two sessions of a high court remade by Donald J. Trump may have flipped that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energized Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024. Several Republican presidential hopefuls had centered their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.In that sense, the staunchly conservative new Supreme Court is doing the ugly political work for Democrats. Its decision last year to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than it did secular liberals.The University of North Carolina and Harvard University were at the center of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action.Kate Medley for The New York TimesFriday’s decision to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan enraged progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Generation Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-oriented Sunrise Movement, said on Friday that the court “has openly declared war on young people.”But while the Supreme Court made retroactive higher education assistance far more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid, through expanded Pell grants and scholarships that do not saddle graduates with crushing debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed expanded grant programs and legislative loan-forgiveness programs for graduates who embark on low-paid public service careers. Those efforts will get a lift in the wake of the court’s decision.The high court’s declaration that race-based admission to colleges and universities is unconstitutional infuriated key elements of the Democratic coalition — Black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups who said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” said Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, after the decision was handed down on Thursday. “I stand with the unified community.”But while they have expressed anger and disappointment over the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and the right to an abortion in the foreseeable future, as long as the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court holds.“There’s a constitutional challenge in bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a longtime Democratic leader on the House education committee.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pressing his party to expand its outreach to the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to augment racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s pitch that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to the benefit of workers.Infrastructure spending, electric vehicles investment, broadband expansion and semiconductor manufacturing have promoted jobs — especially union jobs — all over the country but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in Republican states.“By next year, Democrats will be able to say we’ve invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We’re not like the Republicans. We’re for everybody.”But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party base, Mr. Rosenberg said. The Supreme Court’s siding on Friday with a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from the affirmative action, student loan and abortion decisions.Mr. Teixeira said Democrats were not likely to see their new opportunities at first.“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, this should be a gimme,” he said of pivoting from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to do that.”Representative Judy Chu said conservatives “were using the Asian community as a wedge” against affirmative action.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIndeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on striking down other areas of privilege, especially the legacy admission preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “If they get rid of affirmative action and leave rampant legacy admissions, they’re making merit a slogan, not a reality.”Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign ad by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina featured white hands crumpling a job rejection to denounce “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.Mr. Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” formulation came after a 1995 speech before California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We do have to ask ourselves, ‘Are they all working? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters are largely unified in their opposition, while Democratic voters are split.After Mr. Biden expressed his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the campaign arm of the Senate Republicans issued a statement calling out three vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get their way,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support of racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”The House Republican campaign arm called Democratic outrage “the great limousine liberal meltdown.”But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its decisions — based on class. The affluent will always have access to abortions, by traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have legacy pull and the means to pay tuition.Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races were dealt a blow when the court declared that the president did not have the authority to unilaterally forgive their student loans.Representative Marilyn Strickland, Democrat of Washington, said her party now needs to recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court’s case against affirmative action, and “respect all types of education and all types of opportunity,” mentioning union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.Mr. Scott agreed. “This is going to cause some heartburn,” he said, “but what we need to campaign on is that we’re opening opportunities for everybody.” More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr. Reports Income of $7.8 Million

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      The presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist made nearly $1.6 million from consulting work for a law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies, a filing showed.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent vaccine skeptic who is challenging President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, reported an income of $7.8 million in the year leading up to his entry into the race, including nearly $1.6 million from his consulting work for a personal injury law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies.The details came in a financial disclosure form filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission. It shows that Mr. Kennedy earned $5 million at his environmental law firm, Kennedy & Madonna, and a $516,000 salary and bonus as chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group he formed that has campaigned against vaccines. (The disclosure says he has been on leave from the organization since April, when he announced his campaign.)Mr. Kennedy, a leading skeptic of vaccinations and prescription medications, has gained a foothold in the race even as he has contorted facts about vaccine development and public health authorities and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.His support among Democrats has reached as high as 20 percent in polls, although a more recent Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll in June put his Democratic support in New Hampshire at 9 percent. He has also appealed to prospective voters outside the party: A Quinnipiac University poll in June found that 40 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats.Friday was also the final day of campaign fund-raising for the second quarter for the presidential race. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign sent out solicitations asking donors to help him meet a $5 million goal by the end of the day. His campaign highlighted a $1 million haul in the 24 hours leading up to Friday’s final push.Official numbers will be available in two weeks, when the campaign files reports with the F.E.C.On his disclosure form, Mr. Kennedy reported nearly $1.6 million in consulting fees from Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles-based personal injury law firm formerly known as Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. The firm’s website lists him as co-counsel on ongoing litigation over Gardasil — an HPV vaccine manufactured by Merck — as well as lawsuits over Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and California wildfires.Mr. Kennedy also reported $150,000 in consulting fees from the Marwood Group, which describes itself as a health care advisory firm based in New York. And he reported $125,000 from Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes his books and, according to the disclosure, pays him as a consultant.Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said the disclosure “speaks for itself.” More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful

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      Before Covid, Gabe Whitney, a 41-year-old from West Bath, Maine, didn’t think much about vaccines. He wasn’t very political — he didn’t vote in 2020, he said, because he thought Donald Trump was a “psycho” and Joe Biden was “corrupt.” It wasn’t until the pandemic that Whitney started regularly watching the news, but as he did, he felt like things weren’t adding up. He doubted what he called “the narrative” and struggled with the hostility his questions about vaccines and other mitigations elicited from those close to him. He described being “blamed and labeled as someone who’s part of the problem because you’re questioning. Like not taking a stance on it, but just questioning. That was the worst.”Whitney started gravitating toward people who see skepticism of mainstream public health directives as a sign of courage rather than selfishness and delusion. He began following anti-vax figures like Del Bigtree, Robert Malone and, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Whitney already admired for his environmental work. Kennedy has long touted an illusory connection between vaccines and autism, and has repeatedly said that pandemic restrictions arose from a C.I.A. plan to “clamp down totalitarian control.” If Kennedy was so wrong, Whitney thought, it didn’t make sense that his critics wouldn’t debate him. “When someone is taking such an unpopular position, and then nobody wants to debate them, that says something to me,” he said.I met Whitney this month at a rally for Kennedy, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at Saint Anselm College, just outside Manchester, N.H. I’d gone because I was curious about who was turning out to see the candidate. Among many Democrats, there’s an assumption that Kennedy’s surprising strength in some polls — an Emerson College survey from April showed him getting 21 percent in a Democratic primary — is mostly attributable to the magic of his name and anxiety about Joe Biden’s age. This is probably at least partly true. As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent Saint Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent, barely ahead of Marianne Williamson.At the same time, Kennedy has a sincere and passionate following. When I arrived at the St. Anselm venue, I was surprised by the enormous line snaking out the door. It quickly became clear that many people weren’t going to make it into the 580-seat auditorium. (I requested an interview with Kennedy, but never heard back from the person I was told could schedule it.)In New Hampshire, I didn’t meet any loyal Democrats who were there just to scope out the alternatives. The 2020 Biden voters I encountered were dead set against voting for him again; some, disenchanted by vaccine mandates and American support for Ukraine, even said they preferred Donald Trump. Like Whitney, several people I spoke to hadn’t voted at all in 2020 because they didn’t like their choices. Some attendees said they leaned right, and others identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.What brought them all together was a peculiar combination of cynicism and credulity. The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.In 2021, Charles Eisenstein, an influential New Age writer, described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the primal wound that brought America to its current lamentable state. “It is like a radioactive pellet lodged inside the body politic,” he wrote, “generating an endlessly metastasizing cancer that no one has been able to trace to its source.”Eisenstein takes it for granted that J.F.K.’s murder was orchestrated by the national security state, a view also held by R.F.K. Jr., the former president’s nephew. Because the official story “beggars belief,” Eisenstein argued, it engendered in the populace a festering distrust of all official narratives. At the same time, the cover-up led the government to regard the people it’s been continually deceiving with contempt, as “unruly schoolchildren who must be managed, surveilled, tracked, locked up and locked down for their own good.”A Kennedy restoration, Eisenstein believes, would heal the corrosive injury that separates the people from their putative leaders, putting America back on the confident and optimistic trajectory from which it was diverted in 1963. In May, he joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign as a senior adviser working on messaging and strategy.“There was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving towards greater and greater virtue,” Eisenstein said in a podcast he and Kennedy recorded together. J.F.K.’s assassination jolted America onto a different, darker timeline, but perhaps not permanently. “I feel like maybe that timeline hasn’t died,” Eisenstein said of the earlier era. “Maybe we can pick up that thread. And it’s so significant that a Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. It’s one of the synchronicities that speak to, or speak from, a larger organizing intelligence in the world.”To those of us who see Kennedy as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick, one boosted by MAGA figures like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon to weaken Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election. But to many in his substantial following, it has a messianic cast, promising deliverance from the division and confusion that began with J.F.K.’s assassination and reached a terrifying apotheosis during the Covid pandemic. “We are in the last battle,” Kennedy said in a 2021 speech at a California church famous for defying pandemic restrictions. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”In Kennedy’s campaign, this chiliastic vision is translated into a story about the renewal of a lost American golden age, before the murders of his uncle and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. In New Hampshire, his appearance was more than just a campaign stop — it commemorated the 60th anniversary of J.F.K.’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where the young president had called on his countrymen “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”Standing before a row of American flags in that packed Saint Anselm auditorium, wearing a suit and a 1960s-style skinny tie, Kennedy reworked his uncle’s speech as a call to empathize with Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine. He cast American support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a continuation of our country’s forever wars, which he posited as the cause of American decline. As he often does, he mixed highly tendentious arguments — attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in part to “repeated deliberate provocations” by America — with resonant truths. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” he said. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.”A new Kennedy presidency, he claimed, could revive us. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he said. It was a softer, more eloquent version of Make America Great Again, and the audience loved it.When the speech was over, the crowd was invited to join one of three breakout sessions. I chose “Peace Consciousness in Foreign Policy,” a dialogue led by Eisenstein. “You could say manifest, or you can say prophesize, but we need to see that this is possible,” a woman at the talk said about the prospect of a Kennedy presidency. “We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.” The people around her hooted and applauded.It is in fact possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.It’s also both a show of strength and a potential recruiting vehicle for what Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker call “conspirituality,” the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture that flowered during the pandemic. In their new book, “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” they show how crunchy yoga influencers were pulled into the paranoid orbit of QAnon. Conspiritualists warned that “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, Big Pharma and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination,” they wrote. “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.”In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.“There’s a huge political realignment going on in this country, where a lot of the old categories — liberal, conservative — just don’t make sense anymore,” Eisenstein told me after the New Hampshire event. The Kennedy campaign, he said, “is unifying people who have really lost trust in the system, lost trust in politicians, lost trust — no offense intended — in the media.”A few days after the speech, I met Aubrey Marcus, who co-founded a multimillion-dollar nutritional supplement company, Onnit, with the podcaster Joe Rogan, at the cafe in the Soho Grand Hotel. Marcus, a self-help guru, author, podcaster and ayahuasca promoter based in Austin, Texas, who recently led the football star Aaron Rodgers on a darkness retreat in Oregon, is an ardent Kennedy backer, though he’s never voted in his life. “This is as strong a belief in a cause as I’ve ever had,” he said. Many people he knows, he told me, share his enthusiasm: There’s “more excitement than I’ve ever seen about any politician, ever.”That excitement is only intensified by a sense that the establishment is trying to silence Kennedy, who during the pandemic was booted from major social media platforms for promoting untruths about vaccines. Marcus denounced “the broad application of censorship for very complicated issues” and attempts to “remove people from the conversation and saying they don’t deserve a voice.”The celebration of Kennedy as a free-speech icon creates a dilemma for those who think that by discouraging lifesaving vaccinations, he’s going to get people killed. This month, after Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine scientist, criticized Joe Rogan for letting Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he’d debate Kennedy on his show. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, offered an additional $150,000, and one Covid contrarian after another chimed in to add to the pot. “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Elon Musk tweeted. As the pile-on mounted, anti-vaccine activists showed up at Hotez’s house, harassing him for his refusal to square off against Kennedy.Hotez, whose book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” was inspired by his autistic daughter, has actually spoken to Kennedy several times in the past in an effort to convince him that he’s wrong about vaccines. It was, Hotez told me, frustrating and fruitless. “You’d debunk one thing and then he’d come up with something else,” he said. Hotez has been a guest on Rogan’s podcast before and is more than willing to return, but said, “Having Bobby there will just turn it into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”I sympathize with Hotez’s position, which is the same one taken by experts in many fields when challenged to debate cranks. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, refuses to debate creationists because he doesn’t want to treat them as legitimate interlocutors. Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian and diplomat, has written that trying to debate Holocaust deniers is like “trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. It’s impossible because no matter what you say to them, they’re going to make something up.” To debate a conspiracy theorist, one must be fluent not just in facts but also in a near-limitless arsenal of non-facts.Still, it’s obvious enough why Kennedy’s sympathizers view it as a moral victory when experts refuse to engage with him. To successfully quarantine certain ideas, you need some sort of social consensus about what is and isn’t beyond the pale. In America, that consensus has broken down. Liberals, justifiably panicked by epistemological chaos, have sometimes tried to reassert consensus by treating more and more subjects — like the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — as unworthy of public argument. But the proliferation of taboos can give stigmatized ideas the sheen of secret knowledge. When the boundaries of acceptable discourse are policed too stringently — and with too much unearned certainty — that can be a recipe for red pills.A Kennedy presidency, some of the candidate’s supporters hope, will knock those boundaries down. One of those supporters is my old boss David Talbot, a co-founder of the online magazine Salon.com. “Bobby talks about the censorship culture coming out of the left,” Talbot told me when we talked recently. “I think that’s a dangerous trend. On the left, liberals used to be against censorship. We’re now shutting down free speech.”This is, no doubt, a lament you’ve heard before, and maybe one you agree with. A common theme among old-school liberals disenchanted with contemporary progressivism is that it’s sanctimonious and intolerant. But talking to Kennedy fans, I heard something more than just complaints about cancel culture. I heard an almost spiritual belief that Kennedy, by being brave enough to speak some unspeakable truth, could heal the hatred and suspicions that make Americans want to shut one another down.For Talbot, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” that truth is that the American government killed both J.F.K. and R.F.K., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared the former president’s assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “It’s the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that’s stinking up our house of democracy,” he said. Being honest about it, he believes, “would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who’s willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.”This notion of wiping the slate clean — or Eisenstein’s idea about returning to an aborted timeline — is a powerful one. Who wouldn’t want to reach into the past and undo the errors and accidents that have brought us to this miserable moment? As politics it’s a harmful fantasy; movements that promise to restore a halcyon era of national unity always are. As a quasi-religious impulse — or as the drive of a candidate seeking to return to a time before his uncle and father were murdered — it’s perhaps more understandable. “A lot of people fall into despair when they take in the hopelessness of our situation,” Eisenstein said on Marcus’s podcast last week. “And it is in fact hopeless if you don’t incorporate what we’re calling miracles.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democrats to Use $20 Million Equal Rights Push to Aid 2024 N.Y. House Bids

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      Numerous left-leaning groups are behind a statewide effort to focus attention on a 2024 equal-rights referendum, hoping to increase voter turnout.New York Democrats’ substandard performance in the midterm elections last year helped their party lose control of the House of Representatives, threatened its national agenda, and angered national Democrats.In an effort to avoid repeating the same mistake, New York Democrats on Thursday will announce support for a statewide effort to pass a women’s rights amendment that they hope will also supercharge turnout in 2024, when President Biden and House members will be up for re-election.Their strategy: Get Democrats to the polls by focusing attention on a 2024 statewide referendum, the New York Equal Rights Amendment, that will explicitly bar New York from using its power and resources to penalize those who have abortions.The campaign, backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, among others, plans to raise at least $20 million to spend on television ads, direct mail and organizing in support of the initiative. The effort is designed to complement the House Democrats’ main super PAC’s $45 million bid to win six New York swing districts next year, including four that just flipped Republican. The campaign is launching a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and ushering in near-total abortion bans in 14 states. It is in step with a national Democratic strategy highlighting the abortion record of the Republican Party — a game plan that Gov. Hochul embraced last year with mixed results, beating her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, by only six points..In an interview on Monday, Ms. Hochul argued that the threat to women’s reproductive rights represents “a highly mobilizing force” that is a proven electoral strategy in New York, her own history notwithstanding. She pointed to the victory last year of Representative Pat Ryan, a Hudson Valley Democrat, over Marc Molinaro, a Republican who favored giving states the discretion to govern the legality of abortion.The New York Equal Rights Amendment campaign is being supported by numerous left-leaning groups, including Planned Parenthood, the New York Immigration Coalition, the New York Civil Liberties Union, NAACP New York and Make the Road New York.Ms. Hochul added that the campaign chose to bring the amendment to a statewide vote in 2024, rather than this year as the state is legally entitled, to create space for its message to penetrate. The timing, during a presidential election year, should maximize the campaign’s efforts“Having a ballot initiative in our state is going to drive voter turnout overall, which will definitely help Democrats,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “The biggest reason we lost House seats was because of voter turnout.”Mr. Jeffries, the House minority leader, took a slightly different tack. “This has nothing to do with voter turnout and everything to do with ensuring that a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions is protected in New York State,” he said.The New York Equal Rights Amendment is backed by the state’s Democratic leaders, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, right, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act, which protected abortion rights in New York State. Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, regarded the law as necessary in case a more conservative Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade.That act and others render the ballot amendment “largely gratuitous and symbolic,” said Dennis Poust, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference.“The reality is, abortion is already widely available and accessible in New York,” Mr. Poust said. He urged New York to put “at least as much effort into helping to empower women who might seek to keep their baby if only they had the necessary resources and support.”But Ms. Hochul argues that the Reproductive Health Act is no longer enough.“Laws can be repealed,” she said. “There’s a much higher threshold to change the Constitution.”Voter sentiments about abortion have begun to shift nationally, in step with a drumbeat of stories about pregnant women being denied medical care and facing near-death experiences. Polls have found that pro-choice Democratic voters are more motivated to vote on the issue, and Republicans less so. Democratic leaders have taken notice.“Let’s be honest,” said Letitia James, the state attorney general. “As I travel, reproductive rights is an issue which comes up over and over again.”Electoral strategy aside, the campaign’s supporters also back the initiative on the merits. Other states have passed their own versions of an equal rights amendment, but many generally ban sex discrimination alone, the organizers said. New York’s ballot initiative would go further.Not only would it prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, but also on the basis of “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, reproductive health care and autonomy.” It would ban government discrimination based on age, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.Sasha Neha Ahuja, the former national director for strategic partnerships at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who is spearheading the new campaign, said the amendment would mean that “for the first time, discrimination of folks on the basis of their reproductive health decisions will be categorized as explicitly sex discrimination.” More

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      Republicans’ Problem in Attacking Biden: They Helped Pass His Economic Bills

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      No doubt they will take swings at him anyway. But it may be more difficult to land punches given that plenty of them voted for the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing bills.President Biden isn’t the only one doing a full summer embrace of federal spending on infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing — so are some of the Republicans aiming to remove him from office next year.The White House has labeled the president’s new economic campaign Bidenomics, a portmanteau that until now has been a pejorative used by Republicans and conservative news outlets primarily to underscore inflation.But in a speech on Wednesday in Chicago about the economy, Mr. Biden latched on, with a renewed focus on the two most significant bipartisan legislative accomplishments of his term, the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act. He hopes these measures will help brand him as the cross-aisle deal maker he sold to voters in 2020, appeal to political moderates who formed a core of his winning electoral coalition and impress upon tuned-out voters what he has done in office.One significant benefit for Mr. Biden: Republicans helped pass those bills.While G.O.P. presidential candidates and the Republican National Committee continue to paint Mr. Biden’s economic stewardship as a rolling disaster, Republican senators who helped shape the legislation say they anticipated that those accomplishments would accrue to Mr. Biden’s political advantage — as well as to their own.Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who helped write the enormous bill aimed at revitalizing the domestic semiconductor industry, said the work on a law that he called “off-the-charts popular” had started with Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, during President Donald J. Trump’s administration.“The Biden administration deserves credit for advancing the proposal and, irrespective of the timing of its origin, helping it become law,” Mr. Young said.“The Biden administration deserves credit for advancing the proposal and, irrespective of the timing of its origin, helping it become law,” Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, said of the CHIPS and Science Act.Al Drago for The New York TimesSenator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, more grudgingly acknowledged the president’s role in securing a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that had eluded the past two administrations.“When senators from different parties come together to work on solutions to our nation’s problems and then the president jumps in front of the parade, it does not mean he’s the grand marshal,” Mr. Cassidy said.Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill won votes from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican House members. Sixteen Senate Republicans and 24 Republicans in the House voted for the semiconductor legislation.It will be difficult for Republicans to land criticism when they themselves are taking credit for the same achievements. The White House on Wednesday highlighted praise for the Biden administration’s broadband spending from Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Gus Bilirakis of Florida, Republicans who both voted against the infrastructure legislation that funded it, along with Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.But perhaps no Republican acclaim for the infrastructure legislation brought Mr. Biden more joy than a tweet from Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama that said it was “great to see Alabama receive crucial funds.”“To no one’s surprise, it’s bringing along some converts,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday of his bipartisan legislation. “There’s a guy named Tuberville from Alabama, a senator from Alabama, who announced that he strongly opposed the legislation. Now he’s hailing its passage.” Mr. Biden then dryly drew the sign of the cross on his chest.Steven Stafford, a spokesman for Mr. Tuberville, said that Mr. Biden and his allies had “twisted” the senator’s words. “Now that the bill is law of the land, the people of Alabama deserve their fair share,” he said.And even as Mr. Biden on Monday played up the $42 billion of broadband spending in the infrastructure law, another Republican senator who did vote for it, Susan Collins of Maine, was trumpeting the $272 million from it that is going to her state.Of course, the White House’s celebration of Republican plaudits for legislation Mr. Biden signed will matter little unless the president can persuade voters that these achievements are improving their material well-being.Mr. Biden’s defenders have long maintained that the economic policies he is highlighting in the Bidenomics rebrand are very popular with voters. The problem, these allies say, is that few people connect them with Mr. Biden.And Wednesday’s speech came at a moment when Mr. Biden’s approval ratings on the economy are in dangerous territory.“When senators from different parties come together to work on solutions to our nation’s problems and then the president jumps in front of the parade, it does not mean he’s the grand marshal,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAn Associated Press/NORC poll released Wednesday found that just 34 percent of adults approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy. Among Democrats, only 60 percent — and a mere 47 percent of those 45 years old or younger — approved of his economic stewardship.The millstone is inflation, which has tempered sharply from its peak last year but remains above the norm. Whether inflation is at 9 percent or 4 percent, prices remain high, which may be why the president speaks less about the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan, which passed early in his tenure and has been blamed even by the Federal Reserve for part of the surge of inflation. It is also why Republicans continue to mock what they call the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022 on strictly Democratic votes.“It makes sense for him to emphasize the bipartisan bills that passed that should have economic impact as opposed to the totally partisan bills that drove inflation,” said former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who voted for both the infrastructure and semiconductor bills before his retirement early this year.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, made clear that his party intended to lump all of the achievements being promoted by Mr. Biden into the inflationary maw, including the infrastructure and semiconductor legislation.“Both of those bills caused inflation, which is Biden’s biggest albatross in the upcoming election,” he said, “so I don’t think they did him any favors,” referring to Republicans who helped pass the measures.In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said that the pandemic relief plan had driven unemployment down from above 6 percent to below 4 percent. He suggested that his economic leadership would achieve an even broader goal he placed at the center of his 2020 campaign: restoring the soul of America.“It’s going to help lessen the division in this country by bringing us back together,” Mr. Biden said. “It makes it awful hard to demagogue something when it’s working.”The Republicans aiming to unseat Mr. Biden weren’t buying the economic kumbaya. The Trump campaign on Wednesday said “Bidenomics has created the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in a Fox News appearance, said Mr. Biden’s policies mean “everybody pays more for basic staples of life.”Republicans are loath to concede that the passage of two major bills makes Mr. Biden a bipartisan statesman. Those bills are “not only not emblematic, it’s the exception,” said Josh Holmes, a longtime political adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who voted for the infrastructure bill.In truth, more bills than those passed with bipartisan support in the last Congress. Mr. Biden enters the 2024 election cycle as the beneficiary of an extraordinary bout of productivity that included a modest gun control law, a legal codification of same-sex marriage, and a revamping of procedures for counting Electoral College votes after Mr. Trump tried to hijack that obscure process.Senators from both parties put aside their tendency to push for only the legislation they want or pocket the issue for the next election.“We can’t get in a place in the country where you don’t vote for something you believe needs to pass because you think it might help the other side,” Mr. Blunt said.Democrats point to the circumstances that Mr. Biden inherited in 2021 — the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the election results.“There was a sizable group of Senate Republicans who looked the death of democracy in the eye on Jan. 6 and decided to try to show people that democracy could still work,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.But Mr. Murphy also credited the legislative skills of Mr. Biden, honed over 36 years in the Senate.“A lot of my progressive friends were angry he wasn’t punching Republicans in the mouth so much,” Mr. Murphy said, “but he kept the door open for Republicans to work with us on infrastructure, guns and industrial policy.”Cecilia Kang More

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      R.F.K. Jr. Is a Walking, Talking Conspiracy Theory

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      Let’s start with some positive things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for president.Tick, tick, tick …OK, I really do have some. Sort of. But let’s get the downside out of the way first.There’s his anti-vax crusade. Kennedy has claimed that Covid vaccinations are responsible for practically every evil in the world — last year, in a best-selling book, he accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of using the pandemic to trigger a “coup d’état against Western democracy.”And he’s lashed into Joe Biden for pandemic restrictions that he once compared to Nazi Germany. Some of his relatives recoiled at that point. But R.F.K. Jr. holds no grudges. In his announcement speech he assured the crowd: “I bear no ill will … to any of them.”Which is certainly a good thing, given that even Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, disagreed when he claimed that the pandemic regulations were worse than Nazi Germany. (Back then, he argued, you could at least “hide in the attic like Anne Frank.”)Now Kennedy is running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Joe Biden. And while he isn’t going to win, he’ll certainly draw a lot of attention. Even loyal Democrats have gotten kinda bored with our current president, and nobody really loves the idea of him celebrating his 86th birthday in the White House.It’s very clear that many of the folks who’ve told pollsters they want to nominate R.F.K. Jr. for president are just relating to the name. But he’s earned some of his high profile. There was a time — a very long time ago — when the world knew him mainly as a battler for the environment. Talking with everybody from Oprah to the Waterbury Democratic Town Committee.Mentioning that last one so I can tell you a story about a visit Kennedy made there once, back during the Clinton era. “He spoke forever,” a Connecticut friend of mine recalled. “He explained how estuaries work. He used that word.” It was not the normal pitch you gave to the regular Democrats in Waterbury, but nevertheless, my friend remembers the audience rapt from beginning to end.That was then. Now, Kennedy is troubled by spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder that makes his voice sound hoarse and strange. And even though he must realize his anti-pharmaceutical ranting is not going to win him the nomination, he doesn’t seem quite able to contain himself. Recently, he’s claimed vaccine research and prescription drugs have been responsible for everything from H.I.V. to school shootings.“Prior to the introduction of Prozac,” he told an online audience, “we had almost none of these events in our country and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people.”Obviously even a great environmental record won’t wipe away all this crazy stuff. But one very good thing about Kennedy’s presidential campaign is that he’s actually planning to run in the presidential primaries. Take on Joe Biden, head-to-head. Could be a problem for the president, what with his likely decision to skip the first two contests in New Hampshire and Iowa in order to start in the more diverse South Carolina. If Kennedy wins instead, a lot of Democrats who are dissatisfied with the status quo may be seriously tempted to look his way.That’s Biden’s problem. He’ll survive. But so far, what Kennedy is apparently not going to do is run as a third-party candidate.Let’s celebrate him for that. After all, it’d be a lot easier to run as a third-party candidate than trying to beat back Biden in Democratic primaries around the country. Your name will be in the news all the way through to Election Day. Only problem is that you can easily siphon votes away from the regular party candidate and throw the race to somebody none of your supporters really want at all.Chances are, for instance, that all the conservatives who voted for Ross Perot in 1992 weren’t really hoping he’d tilt the election to Bill Clinton. Or that the liberals who backed Ralph Nader in 2000 weren’t intending to help George Bush sneak past Al Gore. And if you’re ever in the mood to obsess about this matter, we’ll get together and have a long conversation about William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt.But for the moment, let’s look at Cornel West, a former Harvard professor now seeking the nomination of the Green Party, a perfect example of a group that promotes liberal causes in a way that can help the least-liberal candidate win.West is being assisted by Jill Stein, who was the Green Party nominee in 2016. When she won more votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania than Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in each state.Just saying.To summarize: People, if you’re bored with Joe Biden and believe that what this country really needs is a Democratic presidential nominee who seems to feel pandemic restrictions are nearly as dangerous as Nazis, go ahead and vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.It’s a free country, after all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Draws Support From Outside the Democratic Party

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      His family name, libertarian bent and support from the tech world, along with his views on censorship and vaccines, have given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a foothold in the 2024 contest.Speaking at a festival hosted by a libertarian group in New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. railed against the “mainstream media” for serving as “propagandists for the powerful.” Each time he mentioned the perfidy of the press — for silencing dissent, for toeing the government line, for labeling him a conspiracy theorist — he drew a supportive hail of jeers.It was a page out of the playbook of Donald J. Trump. But for Mr. Kennedy, who is running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, it was more than a rhetorical flourish.Censorship is a central theme of his campaign, uniting an unlikely coalition that includes longtime acolytes in what is known as the “health freedom” movement; donors from Silicon Valley; and new admirers from across the political spectrum.“The mainstream media that is here today is going to report that I, you know, have paranoid conspiracy theories, which is what they always say, but I’m just going to tell you facts,” Mr. Kennedy said at the event last week. He added, “When the press believes it is their job to protect you from dangerous information, they are manipulating you.”Indeed, Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and scion of the storied Kennedy Democratic clan, is now a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has twisted facts about vaccine development by presenting information out of context; embraced unsubstantiated claims that some clouds are chemical agents being spread by the government; and promoted the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.The idea that the press has a stranglehold on public information is a core, animating belief in the health freedom movement, which broadly opposes regulation of health practices, including vaccinations. Two political action committees supporting Mr. Kennedy were formed by people who knew him through this movement, which accounts for some of his most ardent support.Censorship, and specifically disdain for attempts to regulate the flow of disinformation and hate speech, is also a motivating factor for his powerful backers in Silicon Valley. Tech executives and investors have amplified Mr. Kennedy’s anti-establishment message and celebrated his willingness to challenge liberal orthodoxies and scientific consensus — never mind that in doing so, he has often spread widely discredited claims about vaccines and other public health measures.And, for many prospective voters drawn to Mr. Kennedy, anger about censorship is a natural outgrowth of a deep distrust of authority that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in response to the lockdowns that public officials called on to halt the virus’s spread.It is the latter group that is most diverse. Some are libertarians, searching for a standard-bearer; others are disaffected Democrats; some are Republicans looking for an alternative to Mr. Trump. Mr. Kennedy’s audience in New Hampshire of at least 250 people included at least one person wearing a Trump 2020 hat.A fund-raising email from his campaign on Tuesday said it had raised “less than $4 million” since he entered the race in April. Official figures will be released in July, along with numbers from his PACs, which have separately said they brought in several million dollars.Mr. Kennedy’s recent public appearances have tended to be before conservative or libertarian audiences. Last week, he spoke about environmental stewardship at a sold-out dinner hosted by the Ethan Allen Institute, a free-market, right-of-center think tank in Burlington, Vt. This week, he had been scheduled to speak at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization that has, among other things, pushed for the banning of books that discuss race, gender and sexuality, but later canceled that appearance, citing a scheduling conflict, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.“We are here to protect the soul of America,” said Debra Sheldon, 48, a registered Democrat from New York State, who attended a Kennedy event in Lancaster, N.H., with her son, Cass Sheldon Misri.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesDespite this rightward tilt, Mr. Kennedy has emerged as a persistent thorn in the side of Mr. Biden, posing not so much a serious threat to the president’s renomination as a high-profile reminder that many Democratic voters would prefer new blood.Mr. Kennedy’s support among Democrats reached as high as 20 percent in polls in recent months, but a Quinnipiac University poll this month also found Mr. Kennedy’s standing among Republicans to be fairly high: 40 percent viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats. In New Hampshire, a Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll put his Democratic support in June at 9 percent.Mr. Kennedy’s longtime admirers are not surprised. Debra Sheldon, 48, a Democrat from New York State, campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008. But when she had a child, she said, Mr. Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense — a nonprofit group he formed that has campaigned against vaccines — “really helped inform me, as a new mom, about what was good for my kid.”Children’s Health Defense has been widely criticized for spreading disinformation about vaccines, included discredited claims linking them to autism.Ms. Sheldon is now a volunteer for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, and was in New Hampshire selling his books and other materials about autism at the libertarian retreat, the Porcupine Freedom Festival. She described her mission in almost spiritual terms: “We are here to protect the soul of America.”Some of Mr. Kennedy’s newer supporters said they were drawn to what they saw as his message of unity and fairness, an almost nostalgic perspective he often anchors in stories of his childhood in one of America’s most famous political families. But others described feeling “awakened” during the pandemic by questions Mr. Kennedy posed about vaccines, masks and school lockdowns, issues they felt were ignored — or, worse, stifled — by the mainstream media.“All of those people watched over many years where Bobby was censored in every mainstream venue,” said Tony Lyons, whose company, Skyhorse Publishing, has picked up authors deemed unsavory or risky by other presses, including the filmmaker Woody Allen, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Lyons is a co-chair of a PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy.“Every TV show, venue — they just wouldn’t let him on to talk about his views on what Big Pharma companies were doing to the American public,” Mr. Lyons said. “He then kind of became a hero of the freedom of speech people,” a group that includes many political identities, he said.Mr. Kennedy was kicked off social media platforms during the pandemic on the grounds that he had spread debunked claims about the virus. Instagram lifted its suspension in June, citing his presidential candidacy, after Mr. Kennedy complained about the suspension on Twitter. The complaint prompted Elon Musk — who calls himself a free speech absolutist — to invite him to a discussion on Twitter Spaces.Mr. Kennedy at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, N.H.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy has embraced cryptocurrency, as well: He spoke at a major Bitcoin conference in Miami last month, and his campaign is accepting Bitcoin donations.He has also embraced podcasts, and recently recorded a more than three-hour-long appearance with Joe Rogan, whose immensely popular show reaches 11 million listeners per episode. The show, which has been criticized for spreading misinformation, largely caters to young men, and many of his listeners fall on the center-right of the political spectrum.On the show, Mr. Kennedy described the modern Democratic Party as the “party of censorship.”Jason Calacanis, a co-host of a popular podcast on which Mr. Kennedy appeared in May, said in response to questions about Mr. Kennedy’s appeal that his willingness to talk for hours on a podcast stood in contrast to Mr. Biden, who has held few news conferences.“In the age of podcasting, Americans want someone sharp and willing to engage in vibrant debates,” Mr. Calacanis said. “Trump won in 2016 because of social media, and the next president will win because of podcasts.”Mr. Kennedy and his PAC are drawing significant support from the tech world, including Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter who endorsed Mr. Kennedy, and David Sacks, a venture capitalist who has raised money for Republicans and Democrats alike.Mark Gorton, a New York City trader who created the file-sharing service LimeWire, helped create and fund a PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy. The PAC, American Values 2024, has taken in at least $5.7 million, its leadership says — official numbers will be released next month.Mr. Gorton said the pandemic “unlocked all this energy” among a “very marginalized group” of people pushing back against public health protocols who found themselves ostracized or “de-platformed” on social media. In Mr. Kennedy, they saw a hero.Bill Barger, a 31-year-old from Manchester, N.H., who attended Mr. Kennedy’s speech Thursday, said he was “definitely interested” in Mr. Kennedy. But he wasn’t yet sold on Mr. Kennedy’s commitment to free speech.He said he would like to see Mr. Kennedy debate Mr. Trump, whom he described as “funny as hell.”On a radio show Monday, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Kennedy’s poll numbers, calling him a “very smart guy.”The two candidates share common fixations. During his speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Kennedy repeatedly invoked The New York Times as an example of corrupt media.“The New York Times, which is in this room today,” he said, as an audience member pointed down at the Times reporter’s seat, prompting a chorus of boos so angry, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager — the former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — told the audience member to stop it.Mr. Kennedy smiled for a few moments, then walked back across the stage. “I’m not saying the reporter who is here. She’s a very sweet person, by all accounts.”Ruth Igielnik More