I must register a strong dissent to Matthew Scully’s paean to the virtues of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Scully’s suggestion that RFK Jr. is some sort of daring truth-teller to be admired evinces a startling degree of amnesia about RFK Jr’s actual record.

Scully writes, “The source of Kennedy’s troubles is a chronic inability to tolerate the intellectual dishonesty he finds in his antagonists.” More accurately, Kennedy’s troubles are rooted in his own chronic intellectual dishonesty across a range of issues going back decades, much of which I chronicled in these very pages. Not only did Kennedy repeatedly make demonstrably false claims about the environmental policy record of President George W. Bush (for whom Scully worked), he peddled 2004 election-conspiracy claims and wrote a pre-Covid anti-vax screed so riddled with errors that Salon, of all places, felt compelled to unpublish it. RFK Jr is not labeled an anti-vaxxer because of his criticism of Anthony Fauci or skepticism about Covid vaccines, but because he has been campaigning against MMR vaccines for decades. And lest you think RFK Jr. is a tribune for free speech, it’s worth remembering he called for putting “climate deniers” in jail.

That like a blind squirrel RFK Jr. has managed to find a few nuts in our current political moment does not change the fact that he has a longstanding record of peddling conspiratorial falsehoods and lies. However much schadenfreude his torment of the Democratic establishment may produce, his recent resurgence is nothing any serious conservative should cheer.