BY MICHAEL HURLEY

The American independent presidential hopeful, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., posted a brilliant rebuttal to President Biden’s recent State of the Union Speech. You can watch it below:

A rarity among political videos, it’s honest, compelling, and well worth your time. But I found myself watching it with sadness and remorse for reasons I felt compelled to explain in the comment, below:

Mr. Kennedy, everything you say in this video is spot-on. Bravo. But it’s what you’re not saying that has sunk your efforts and, I regret to say, will continue to drag your campaign under.

I am 66 years old. I have written about culture and politics for most of my life. I remember distinctly the day your father was shot and the day your uncle was shot. Like many people, I grew more conservative as I grew older and wiser, but I had campaigned for McGovern as a teenager in ’72.

So, I watched with excitement your initial appearances on Tucker Carlson and many conservative podcasts and YouTube channels. There was once a genuine buzz about your candidacy among conservatives who know in their hearts that Trump is neither a very deep thinker nor an insightful man but someone who, as you rightly noted, got rolled by his own bureaucracy on Covid and whose brilliant judgment of character gave us such luminaries as Omarosa, Michael Cohen, and Scaramucci, to name just a few.

So yes, there was palpable excitement about you among Republicans who know that the Republican party even under Trump is no longer a force for radical change but, at best, a competent manager of America’s decline.

For this very reason, I watched with sadness as the air went out of your balloon, last fall, when the story broke on Revolver and Breitbart that you are – still, apparently – an unrepentant left-wing nutter who believes that the world is ending due to man-made climate change and that race reparations are the way forward on racial inequality. Few on the right have taken you seriously since that day, although I assure you that many had done so until that moment. They even had a name: the “Bobby Bros,” but after news of your positions on climate change and reparations broke, Trump loyalists mocked them for being so naïve as ever to have taken you seriously.

Never mind the illogic and injustice of race reparations: the very idea, after the trillions spent to no effect since LBJ’s Great Society, that just a little more money placed in the right pockets is what’s really going to transform black America into a New Jerusalem, is a folly that only the hard left still believes. And as for the planet, it will still be here long after November, but if you do not loudly and openly distance yourself from the climate-change loonies, I assure you your candidacy will not.

Bobby, we hardly knew ye, and more’s the pity for that.

Michael Hurley is an American Catholic, husband, father, and Jesuit-trained trial-attorney who spent 31 years in private practice. He is a third-degree member of the Knights of Columbus and has served parishes in North Carolina and Texas as parish council chairman, CCD instructor, and youth-group director. He is the author of seven books and numerous articles. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Conservative Woman, The Daily Skeptic, and The American Thinker. He has previously written on divorce and remarriage in the Catholic Church in his memoir, Once Upon A Gypsy Moon (Hachette Book Group, 2013).