RFK Jr. Can’t Keep Up ‘Moderate’ Facade While Celebrating Violent Radical Cesar Chavez
Before the corporate media were tarring and feathering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a vaxx denier who consorted with the likes of “Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn,” they lauded the Kennedy family scion as a heroic defender of the environment.
Time Magazine once named Bobby Kennedy’s son as one of its “Heroes for the Planet” for his environmental activism as an attorney with New York’s Riverkeeper Inc. Today, Time publishes stories about what a crackpot its “hero” is for raising red flags about Covid vaccines rushed onto the market that have not proved “safe” and “effective,” as their manufacturers promised.
But despite finding an area of common ground or two with Americans outside of the elitist politics bubble, Kennedy remains a liberal to his core — so much so that he’s hosting a celebration for one of the more brutal socialists to come out of the Marxist movement.
The independent candidate for president — who earlier this year left a Democrat Party his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, would not recognize — is hosting a Cesar Chavez Day event to “celebrate the life and legacy” of the socialist co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association predecessor of the United Farm Workers. RFK Jr.’s party for the late leftist will be held on Saturday, March 30, at Union Station in Los Angeles.
“This event, on Chavez’s birthday holiday weekend, will include remarks by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., music by the all-female mariachi group Las Colibrí, inspiring words by Bishop Juan Carlos Mendez, words of support from former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, Mexican food, voter registration assistance, and more,” according to a campaign press release.
Would the Real Cesar Chavez Please Stand Up?
Kennedy’s hero, lifted up as a “saint” to some on the left, was known to be a violent union boss and a self-righteous Catholic with a penchant for philandering. While Chavez has been heralded by liberal Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, his legacy on the left — particularly among open-border leftists — is, well, complicated.
The accomplice media are generally loathe to call out Chavez’s shortcomings, particularly when his character warts bump up against the modern-day left’s agenda. Any depiction other than Chavez as a selfless defender of the poor field hand leading a worker revolution seems off limits. But liberal publication Medium in 2018 published a piece headlined, “A Flawed Hero: The Complex Legacy of Cesar Chavez.”
What was the Chicano saint’s major flaw? He was an “advocate for strong border security,” according to the publication. Chavez didn’t like illegal immigrants breaking his powerful strike lines and taking jobs from his would-be union farm workers.
“He went to great lengths to make sure immigrants couldn’t get into the country by creating what the UFW [United Farm Workers] called ‘wet lines,’” the piece laments. “The wet lines’ initiative consisted of UFW members who would stop people from crossing the border between Yuma, Arizona and San Luis, Mexico. Led by Chávez’s cousin Manuel, UFW members would even brutally beat border crossers and rob them of their possessions, according to Marian Pawel, author of ‘The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.’”
Chavez, according the Latin Times, launched the “Illegals Campaign,” directing union members to report illegal immigrants working in the fields to federal immigration agents.
That doesn’t sound like the Gandhi-like principles of nonviolent protest supposedly at the core of Chavez’s “La Causa.” The union boss’s position on “newcomers” — the descriptor for illegal aliens the White House was auditioning before Biden’s expressed “regret” for using the term “illegal” during his State of the Union address — certainly doesn’t fit the modern left’s vision of illegals and “dreamers” parading through a borderless country.
Runs in the Family
Biden is so enamored of Chavez that he put up a 22-inch bust of the radical labor leader in the Oval Office as one of his first acts as president. He gave the bust of Winston Churchill the boot at the same time.
“There is a new radical socialist in the White House, and Joe Biden also moved in yesterday,” the Daily Mail reported.
Of course, Biden’s boss, Barack Obama, co-opted Chavez’s rallying cry, “Si Se Puede!” (Yes We Can), in his 2008 campaign for the White House. Obama paid the long-deceased union leader back with a proclamation creating the informal federal holiday Cesar Chavez Day each March 31. Years before, Clinton posthumously awarded Chavez the Medal of Freedom.
The proclamations and speeches didn’t include anything about the civil rights activist’s iron fist rule of his union, the “brutal purges of his enemies,” or his reported ties to communists. Chavez began his life’s work as a full-time organizer paid by king radical and modern left icon Saul Alinsky, father of community organizing.
Leftists love true-blue socialists almost as much as they love rewriting history. And any enemy of capitalism is a friend to the left.
RFK Jr. is a leftist who has long had a man crush on Cesar Chavez. Junior was a pallbearer at the activist’s funeral in 1993. Said affection runs in the family. Kennedy’s father, slain New York senator and Democrat presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, apparently thought the unfaithful, heavy-handed Chavez walked on water. The senior Kennedy met with Chavez in 1968 on the California vineyards strike lines.
“By the end of the day, Kennedy had embraced Chavez and La Causa,” PBS reported, quoting biographer Arthur Schlesinger’s work, in a glowing review of Chavez’s life that reads more like an application for sainthood.
RFK Jr. says he is continuing the legacy of his father, who was a “staunch supporter of farmworkers throughout his life.” Bobby Kennedy also veered further and further left following his brother’s assassination. But he remained solidly anti-communist, like his older brother, Jack, throughout his life, even if he respected communist-consorting Chavez.
His son, although no longer a Democrat, remains on the far left of the political spectrum in most of his policy positions — just like the environmental hero’s hero, Cesar Chavez.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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