Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission last week. The filing suggests that he intends to challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AP story on his filing is here.

I hope he makes a race of it. At the least it would be good to see Cheryl Hines out there supporting him on the campaign trail. You don’t have to call her “Dr.” either. “Mrs. Kennedy” will probably suffice.

There seems to be a substantial market for somebody other than Biden even among Democrats. The AP story linked above suggests that the mainstream media remain in Biden’s corner. The AP pounds RJK Jr. It gives you some idea what the AP could do to Biden if it didn’t support him.

By contrast, PJ Media has posted Ben Bartee’s column cheering RJK Jr. on. Bartee contemplates the possibilities: “What will the DNC do to stop RFK Jr.? Nothing should be considered a bridge too far with these people. The CIA, backed by corporate interests, almost assuredly killed his uncle sixty years ago.” Bartee may have been channeling RJK Jr. himself on this point — via Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, no less — but it is nuts.

In his monologue commenting on RJK Jr.’s filing last week, another Fox News opinion host (Jesse Watters) asserted that “they” killed JFK in 1963 (“Kennedy was unstoppable — that’s why they shot him”). And that’s not all. “They” struck again on Bobby Kenned in 1968 (“Bobby Kennedy was steamrolling his way to the nomination back in ’68…and then they took him out”). If you have a few brain cells you can afford to lose, you can watch the whole thing here.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK all by himself. He was a Castro-loving Communist who may have been influenced by Cuban intelligence along the way to November 22, but you can be sure that isn’t what these people are talking about. They’re talking about a “coup” orchestrated by the CIA, the evidence of which is nil. For an account of the destructive effects of the line that “they” did it, one can’t do better than James Piereson’s brilliant Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.

Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. He hated RFK for his support of Israel. On this point I have no idea what Jesse Watters was talking about and I doubt he does either.

We know who did it. “They” didn’t do it. It is irresponsible and destructive to parrot the line that “they” did.

JOHN adds: The Kennedy assassination is the most thoroughly-understood event in human history. For the facts, read Conspiracy Of One, by Jim Moore, a former conspiracy theorist–he helped design the public exhibit on the 6th floor of the Texas book depository–who came to his senses. Also worthwhile is Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner, which covers much the same ground on the facts but adds a short biography of Lee Oswald. It is disgraceful that in the face of all the evidence, some continue to try to make political hay out of Oswald’s murderous act.

STEVE adds: One other detail of Watters’s account is surely wrong: that RFK was “steamrolling his way to the nomination back in ’68.” We can’t know a counterfactual, of course, but it is almost certain that RFK would not have won the nomination if he had lived. First, keep in mind that LBJ, still in command of a lot of the party, hated RFK, and would have used all his power to keep him from getting the nomination. “I’d be very surprised,” Richard Nixon remarked to an aide when Kennedy announced, “if Johnson let Bobby Kennedy have it on a platter.”

Further, in 1968 only 19 percent of Democratic convention delegates were selected by primaries; a New York Times canvas in April estimated that 70 percent of county chairmen in the Democratic Party were backing Hubert Humphrey. By the time of the California primary, Humphrey had already secured the lopsided majority of the delegates from key states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas. On the morning of the California primary (where Humphrey was not on the ballot, having become a candidate after the primary filing deadline), Humphrey remarked to an aide: “I want Bobby to win big. Number one, there are too many party leaders opposed to him for him to have any real chance of winning the nomination. Number two, since Oregon [where Kennedy had lost to Gene McCarthy], he can’t use the argument that he went right through the primaries.” [Kennedy only won California over McCarthy by five points.]

That RFK was on his way to the nomination was an artifact of the Kennedy Legend Machine going into action after his murder. Keep one small but important fact in mind. RFK was said to have “the youth” on his side. Maybe so, but in 1968 the voting age was still 21. None of those college hippies (who mostly hated RFK before he was killed) could cast a vote for him.