9 months ago
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A new set of campaign finance reports have dropped, and with them comes another revelation as to who's funding far-right conspiracy crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s supposed "Democratic presidential" bid. Surprise: It's a Republican megadonor. Yeah, I know—if you need to take a minute to lie down here, you go ahead and do that. It's a shocker for all of us, really.
NBC News has the report, and the headline news is that of the $9.8 million raised by the pro-Kennedy super PAC "American Values 2024" this year, $5 million of it was a donation from just one Republican: perennial megadonor Timothy Mellon.
“The fact that Kennedy gets so much bipartisan support tells me two things: that he’s the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption and that he’s the one Democrat who can win in the general election,” Mellon said in a statement the super PAC circulated on Sunday.Ha ha ha ha oh my gawd, this guy is shameless. Yeah, a man who shelled out $20 million to keep Donald effing Trump in office has thoughts on unity and "corruption." And of all the potential candidates in America, he thinks the anti-vaxx conspiracy crank shunned by his own family is the one to fix it all.
Who’s Mellon going to back as Kennedy’s running mate?
For the record, Kennedy has a 0.0% chance of winning the Democratic nomination to anything, in large part because he's not courting Democratic voters to begin with. Kennedy's publicity tour has him chatting up far-right hoax site Newsmax, showing up to give speeches to the hate group Moms for Liberty and to seditionist Michael Flynn's Christian nationalist tour, spending time with toxic righty crank Jordan Peterson, and, of course, palling around with Nazis.
His support among Democratic voters continues to be from people who know his family name but not him, which puts Kennedy in a position where he can't promote himself to Democratic groups for fear of those voters actually hearing the things that come out of his mouth.
So, yes, it makes sense that Kennedy's super PAC has gotten over half of its money from just one motivated Republican. On the other hand, if Mellon was willing to back Donald Trump even after four years of Donald Trump rubbing his behind on the Oval Office carpets, perhaps Mellon is simply the worst judge of character in America. Who are we to say?
As for the other half of the super PAC's money, that's interesting as well. Almost all of the rest of the PAC's funds came from Gaven de Becker, a security specialist whose name you might remember because he was the investigator Amazon's Jeff Bezos hired to determine how the National Enquirer had gotten hold of texts proving Bezos was cheating on his then-wife. De Becker, who's had a long career catering to celebrity clients, forked over nearly as much as Mellon: $4.7 million so far this year. Those two donors alone account for all but $100,000 of the Kennedy super PAC’s $9.8 million in raised funds this year.
Again, it makes perfect sense. Kennedy is a pariah in his own family, and the sort of people Kennedy hangs out with on his so-called campaign trail don't exactly have a lot of pocket change. If he's going to fund a vanity run to sell himself to America's hate groups and paranoid fringe, he's going to need to rely on a handful of megadonors rather than scraping together McDonald's money from the Jordan Peterson crowd.
But he's not actually running for president, and his donors are suckers if they think he is. If he were running for president he'd be looking to appeal to actual Democratic voters, not the various deplorables of Gab. This is Kennedy's bid to boost his own support among anti-vaxxers and conspiracy cranks, a purely narcissistic bid to be king of all the worst people you know.
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