Writes Tom Woods in his newsletter today:

Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., officially announced his bid for president.

And his speech had some great bits in it.

Have I gone soft, and love politicians now?

Don’t worry about that.

What I do genuinely respect is a disruptor. Because if anything deserves to be disrupted, it’s the way what we laughingly call our national conversation is carried on.

RFK spent a chunk of time denouncing the lockdown regime — and of course it’s important to make minds explode by having a prominent Democrat do that.

He said:

Lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history. And I blame President Trump for the lockdown…. President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things and he didn’t do and he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country, was the lockdown.

Now, President Trump, in fairness, let me just make this point. He’ll tell people, well, lockdown wasn’t my idea. My bureaucrats sold me on it. I was saying we shouldn’t do it. But that’s not a good enough excuse. He was the president of the United States. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

On May 2nd, 2020, 600 doctors wrote a signed a letter to President Trump begging him not to allow the lockdowns. Because at that time, all of the pandemic protocols anywhere in the world, the WHO, CDC, everywhere, the European Health Agency, all say you never do mass lockdowns. It causes much worse havoc and deaths and injuries. You do the standard protocol, which is you lock down the sick, you protect the vulnerable, and you let everybody else go back to work. Otherwise, you are going to wreak havoc.

I wrote about it on Instagram. I was writing every day. I was citing these economic studies that showed that with every point in unemployment, you get you get 37,000 excess deaths: from heart attack, suicides, plus imprisonment. And they dumped me from Instagram. They said that’s misinformation. But it was not. But people were saying it. People knew it. It wasn’t just me.

And we now know, of course, that it’s true. There’s now study after study and every comparison between the states and nations that locked down compared to those who didn’t…. The more you locked down, the worse you got. Worse COVID deaths. Worse excess deaths.

Sweden’s numbers came out this week. Sweden was the only country in Europe that didn’t lock down. It had the lowest excess deaths in Europe….

The the IMF and Harvard study by Larry Summers says the cost of the lockdown to the United States was $16 trillion. 16 trillion for nothing. $16 trillion. We shifted $4 trillion from the middle class in this country to the super rich….

These lockdowns were a war on the poor and they were a war on American children. According to a Brown University study, toddlers lost 22 IQ points. A third of children throughout  their school careers are going to need remedial education. Children all over the country have missed their milestones.

What is CDC’s response? Here’s CDC’s response. The CDC five months ago revised its milestones so that now a child no longer is expected to walk at one year. They have it at 18 months. And a child now does not have to have 50 words at 24 months. It’s 30 months. So instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to cover it up….

As soon as they knew they could censor us they then went after the other part of the First Amendment, freedom of worship. They closed every church in this country, without any scientific citation, for a year….

They told us we had to social distance. They went after our property rights, the Fifth Amendment. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.

He went on to talk about chronic disease and the strange conditions, including all the food allergies, that nobody his age remembers anyone having when they were growing up.

And then Ukraine: the authorities are lying about their intentions, he said, and the current policy is not in our interest.

There were some traditional Democratic talking points, too, particularly with regard to the environment. He spent a great deal of time on that.

I think the opinions of RFK, Jr., are fundamentally wrongheaded on a lot of things. But at this particular moment in history, the issues on which RFK is right are more critical than the ones on which he’s wrong, and they’re issues that no other prominent figure in the Democratic Party will raise.

He is saying things that need to be said, and I hope he keeps on doing it.

If you missed it, here is my interview with RFK, Jr., in which among other things I asked if he would describe Anthony Fauci as a sinister person.

(Hint: the answer wasn’t no.)

Link