Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., scion of America’s most illustrious Democrat political family, gave what I consider to be not only the finest speech from the podium of those presented at this year’s first-ever Mid-term Republican Convention held in Dallas, Texas on September 9 and 10, but among the best and certainly most stirring political speeches I’ve ever heard.
If RFK, Jr. isn’t invited to give the same kind of speech at the Republican Convention in the summer of 2028, that would be a travesty.
Other standout speakers included President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Jr., Mehmet Oz, Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump Jr., Scott Bessent, and even (via pre-taped video) Democrat Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, but, it was RFK, Jr., who lit up the room most passionately and laid out precisely why he is no longer a Democrat and what’s at stake in the upcoming presidential election scheduled for November 2028.
The convention featured the Republican Party’s best, including a rousing finale by JD Vance that should help tee up his presidential campaign.
Kennedy began modestly, admitting that, “For seventy years of my life [he’s 72], I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention.” He called the irony of his presence there as “inescapable” to most in the audience.
His raspy throat malady stayed mostly under control, thanks to diligent efforts of his speech coach and his own steely determination.
He explained that he’d been attending Democrat conventions since he was six years old, and had been a keynote speaker at many.
“I grew up,” he says, “in a Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my uncle John Kennedy, of my father Robert Kennedy, and ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring, idealistic vision for democracy.”
He noted that his uncle “ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism” and that “the Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat,” he noted, implying that was no longer the case, and subtly suggesting that most of his Republican audience would agree.
He said that the things that were no longer true about what the Democrat Party he had once belonged to stood for today included its stand as “a champion of the Bill of Rights,” of “unbridled free speech,” “wary of centralized government power, corporate privilege,” and “secret intelligence agencies.”
His uncle and his father “were all for competition, for meritocracy, for the benefits of America, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans.”
“They,” he says, “saw Israel as America’s most critical front-line ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism… an ideology that has subjugated, impoverished and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promise to do the same to us.”
Kennedy proffered nostalgically that “Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border.”
Then he got to the heart of his speech.
“During COVID, I watched the Democratic Party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles, and all of the policies that define my party.”
It was apparent that RFK, Jr. was furious that the Party he’d pledged his allegiance to throughout his seven decades of life, had abandoned the principles he still holds dear.
“The Democrats – which were once the champions of the American Constitution – systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights… Beginning with the First Amendment… Democrats censored hundreds of scientists and physicians who questioned the government’s dubious COVID pronouncements and orthodoxies.”
All that Kennedy said was received enthusiastically by a full stadium of mostly Trump supporters, Republicans all.
Kennedy continued: “Thirty-seven hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts in order to prevent public debate.
“Democrats obliterated the second leg of the First Amendment, to the guaranteed Right of Assembly by social distancing regulations…
“Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the Freedom to Worship. They closed every church in our country for a year. Who could imagine that would have happened? And they kept open the liquor stores and the big box stores as essential businesses.”
Boos and hisses aimed at the Democrat Party followed.
Here’s more:
“Democrats torpedoed the Seventh Amendment Right to Jury Trial by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue them.
“Democrats violated the Fifth Amendment, by shutting down three million businesses with no Due Process and no Just Compensation.
“Democrats shut down the Fourth Amendment, Protection from Unlawful Searches and Seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights.”
He wasn’t finished.
“In a single year, my party obliterated two-hundred-fifty years of Constitutional Guarantees. The only Bill of Right that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment, and probably only because there is a Second Amendment. (This received a loud and boisterous response.)
Kennedy was in his stride now, gaining strength from the audience reaction and garnering all the energy his gruff and nearly hoarse voice could muster.
“The party of ‘my body, my choice,’ forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills…
“They silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries.
“The Democrats declared war on women’s sports, effectively destroying Title IX.
“The Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity.
“The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as ‘deplorables.’
“The Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media. They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines.
“They abolished my uncle’s physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.
“The Democrats abandoned all of these values. And all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy.
“The one policy that they stood for: the unbridled, sociopathic, and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump.
“The Democrats dismantled the public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleeced the American medical regulatory agencies for a hundred billion dollars annually during every year of the Biden administration.
“And they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.
“The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today.
“It struck me this was no longer about left and right.
“It was about sane and insane.
“It was about common sense and communism.
If Kennedy had been running for president as a Republican, I believe he could have snatched the nomination right then.
“In April 2023,” he noted, “I ran for president, hoping to summon my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters, and utterly, ironically lost faith in American democracy.
“To prevent an election from occurring, they sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden. And in an attempt to remove us all from the ballot, a lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him, but they sued Dean Phillips, they sued Marianne Williamson, they sued Cornel West, they sued Donald Trump fifty times in thirty-eight states to remove him from the ballot. And they sued me in twelve states to remove me from ballots where I had legally qualified.
“And then – this is almost comical – after I endorsed President Trump and I tried to remove myself from the ballot so that he could have my votes, they sued me to keep me on the ballot…
“They excluded me from the debates; they canceled the primaries; the Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they canceled their own convention.
“No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted.
“The party of ‘No Kings’ simply anointed a queen.”
President Trump and RFK, Jr., Bridge the Gap
Kennedy deserved a break, but must have realized his time was nearly up, and continued with renewed energy, explaining that:
“The day President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, within three hours of his shooting, he called me and asked me for a meeting. And during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything that I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie.
“Everything.
“I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopaedic grasp of the issues in molecular detail, and most of all, a near reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies.
“I found a man who cared deeply about transparency in government, who believed in protecting free speech more than anything and the entire United States Constitution.
“These conversations changed the course of my campaign and my life.”
The following line received the loudest and longest applause of the night:
“I realized that many of the foundational values of the Democratic Party had found a new home, and it was called the Republican Party.”
After the applause, and the hooting and hollering had finally died down, he began to wrap it up in a more intimate way:
“Out of a sense of fairness, after my conversation with President Trump, I tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris.
“You think she would agree to meet with me?
“Did she even pick up the telephone?
“No.
“So, on August 23, 2024, I suspended my campaign and I endorsed President Trump. that moment would never have happened without my friend, Charlie Kirk. Charlie played a critical and indispensable role at bringing me and President Trump together. He helped build the bridge that President Trump and I walked across that day.
“That afternoon, President Trump and I stood together in front of thousands of Americans. We shook hands and we made a promise to the American people. Together, we promised to make America healthy again.
“Some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting President Trump. And so I want to make the record clear right now. President Trump has kept every single promise that he made to me without exception. And we have kept our promise to the American people.
“President Trump has ended nine wars. He’s restored competency to our government. He’s restored public faith. He’s restored America’s leadership across the globe.
“And I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this. I’m grateful to President Trump for including me in his administration and giving me a place in this extraordinary revolution that is happening in our country where we’re going to restore American democracy and restore the America that my uncle and father believed in, the exemplary nation respected and emulated across the globe. We are making America healthy again.
‘It’s up to you now. We need to elect a Republican Congress to keep this momentum going. Let’s go out and do that.
“God bless you. God bless America. Thank you all very much.”
It really was a speech for the ages.
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Jim, I fully share your finding his speech to be the finest of the convention. I turned to Tanis and simply said wow, over and over again! The companion slice of excellence is Victor Davis Hansen’s latest book, The Counter Revolution. Kennedy’s speech and this book, taken together, should cement the fact that Trump will go down in history as our greatest president ever.
How anyone continues to vote democrat is baffling