RFK Jr. on running against Biden: ‘I just disagree fundamentally with him’

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he is running against President Biden for the Democratic nomination because he “fundamentally” disagrees with him about the country’s direction. 

Kennedy, an environmental attorney and prominent anti-vaccine activist who declared his candidacy for president earlier this month, told radio talk show hosts John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats & Cosby Show” that he has a long relationship with Biden but disagrees with him on key issues. 

“I’m not running a mean-spirited campaign against Joe Biden. I’ve been friends with Joe Biden for 40 years,” he said. “I’m grateful for his service to our country and his family’s service to our country. But I just disagree fundamentally with him on where the country is going.”

“I don’t want Wall Street running the country. I don’t want the neocons running our foreign policy. I don’t like censorship. I think I’m skeptical about war,” Kennedy continued, adding that he believes the United States should look to “settle” the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

He hails from the prominent Kennedy family, with his uncle being former President John F. Kennedy and his father being former Attorney General Robert Kennedy. But, he has been the subject of controversy as the leader of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that has promoted misinformation about vaccines. 

Early polling has shown Biden with a large lead over Kennedy and his other challenger, self-help author and 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, but a USA Today-Suffolk University poll from last week found that 14 percent of Biden 2020 voters said they supported Kennedy.

He also noted that an Emerson College poll released Thursday had him at 21 percent. 

Kennedy said he has been “attacked pretty solidly by the mainstream media” for the past three years without an opportunity to answer — but added that he has been on media a lot in the past 10 days and been left “unedited,” leading to the support he has gained so far. 

“I think a lot of the people began remembering that I’m not really a crazy person. When they see me, I don’t look like the mischaracterizations,” he said. “That may be the case. It may be that people just want something different.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy has pushed against the use of vaccines developed to protect the public from the effects of the virus. He claimed on Saturday that the middle class was “systematically” wiped out because of lockdowns during the pandemic. 

Kennedy said his campaign is intended to “get people to forget that they’re Democrats or Republicans and remember that we’re all Americans.” He said people should focus on shared values instead of the issues that divide them. 

He added that he is willing to talk to anyone and make appearances on any media network. 

The attorney said he still has the same values of his father and uncle: opposing censorship, war, Wall Street and companies “merging the state and government power in this corrupt collusion that is hollowing out the American middle class.” 

“I want to be proud of my country,” he said. “I want my children to grow up in a country that they could be proud of the way I was growing up in the United States of America in the 1960s and ‘70s.”