A senior campaign adviser to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been critical of the man he is working for on a personal website while maintaining his commitment to the campaign.
Charles Eisenstein, a public speaker known for environmental activism, has been working on the Kennedy campaign for about a year despite being critical of some of his policies and saying winning is not the end goal of the campaign. Wednesday, Eisenstein, who has over 78,000 subscribers on Substack, said he would be suspending some of his writing to focus on campaign work.
“I have decided to take a break from Substack for the duration of the 2024 RFK Jr. presidential campaign. I had intended to keep writing, in order to exercise the parts of my brain that aren’t, ahem, appropriate for the political realm, and to say things that I believe need to be said but which I cannot convey through the agency of a political candidate and political organization,” Eisenstein wrote.
He said he disagrees with Kennedy’s sentiments on the Israel-Hamas war.
“Speaking of the Kennedy campaign, I am deep in it again, despite my passionate and ongoing disagreement with the candidate about Israel and Palestine,” Eisenstein said.
“But I fail to see how leaving the campaign would help anyone there. And there are so many other issues on which Kennedy is by far the best candidate in the race. I believe that if either of the other two viable candidates, Trump or Biden, win a second term, it will be a catastrophe for this country and, by extension, for the world,” he continued.
Recently, Kennedy was hesitant to call for a ceasefire and has been a supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself since the Hamas attack on the nation on Oct. 7.
In one post, he described a congressional hearing he attended in which Kennedy was described as an antisemite. Eisenstein said that was false but reiterated his disagreement with Kennedy on Israel.
“It did not matter that the man is obviously no anti-Semite. He is one of the most ardently pro-Israel politicians around. (I don’t agree with him on this issue—if I’m on any “side” of it at all, it is the side of the Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.),” Eisenstein wrote.
The campaign recently sent Eisenstein on a “spiritual trip” to Costa Rica, according to the Wall Street Journal, where he recorded a podcast calling some of Kennedy’s ideas “actually repugnant.” On return from the trip, he took a pay cut, decreasing his rate from $21,000 a month to $14,000. The outlet reported at least one other staffer voiced concerns over how disruptive Eisenstein was to the campaign, being so outspoken against the candidate on issues like the Israel-Hamas war.
Eisenstein, who joined the Kennedy campaign as early as May 2023, also said on his Substack that winning the presidency was not the main goal of the Kennedy campaign.
“Because winning the campaign is not the end goal. Ultimately the campaign is serving the same thing I have striven to serve through my writing,” Eisenstein said.
He later reiterated that claim, adding his confidence in Kennedy winning.
“Although I said that winning the campaign is not the ultimate goal, I am confident RFK Jr. will win,” he wrote.
Eisenstein joined the Kennedy campaign as early as May 2023.
“I don’t necessarily agree with Mr. Kennedy on every issue,” Eisenstein wrote when he joined the campaign.
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Eisenstein also expressed hesitancy toward the COVID-19 vaccine and other public health initiatives during the pandemic, similar to Kennedy.
“It all started a couple months ago with a ‘coincidence.’ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. knew my work vaguely before then, as a fellow Covid dissident and environmentalist. But that had little to do with this coincidence,” he wrote.