On Friday, January 12, Beth Boswell traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend a rally for independent presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Dr. Boswell, who works as a physician at the Durham VA, said “profiteering and fearmongering during COVID” brought her into Kennedy’s camp.
“Big Pharma’s got us by the tail,” Boswell continued, adding that RFK Jr.’s “got more of a health perspective than any other candidate.”
Like many of those who came to meet Kennedy at the downtown Raleigh event, Boswell expressed disillusionment with the party of Kennedy’s uncle and father.
“When people say ‘threat to democracy,’ they really mean threat to the Democrats,” she said.
Derrel Mack, a veteran from Fayetteville, North Carolina, made the journey to support Kennedy’s stance on America’s Forever Wars, “our poisoned crops,” and “protecting our kids and cleaning up the environment.”
Kennedy addressed Mack’sand Boswell’s shared concerns about public health and its relationship to recent assaults on North Carolina.
The candidate’s speech Friday night began with the story of Kennedy and his Riverkeeper organization’s efforts to restore the ecosystem of the Hudson River in the late twentieth century. Kennedy then placed North Carolina’s struggle front and center as an extension of that work in the twenty-first century. The candidate hammered on Smithfield Foods, the pork producer that runs slaughterhouses across the state.
At various points during Kennedy’s speech, the crowd erupted with chants of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.”
“By raising hogs in factories,” Kennedy said, Smithfield “dropped the price of pork, in about a two-year period, from $0.60/lb to $0.02/lb.” The independent candidate added that this corporate model of agriculture not only impacted the rivers and soils near the manure lagoons of the Smithfield factories, but also cost the workers of North Carolina thousands of jobs.
“There were 28,000 independent hog farmers in this state,” Kennedy said, “and it [Smithfield] put all of them out of business and left hog production in the hands of 2,000 industrial outfits, all of them either owned or operated by, or had contracts with one company: Smithfield.”
Like his father, the assassinated senator from New York, former Attorney General, and 1968 presidential candidate, RFK Jr. has a track record, as a lawyer, of taking on corrupt corporations and their captive government agencies. So when Kennedy told the overflow audience in Raleigh that he was “going to hold Smithfield responsible,” the crowd’s response was nearly as loud as it was when the candidate promised to free Julian Assange, the imprisoned journalist and founder of Wikileaks.
Free speech seemed to be a primary concern for Kennedy’s North Carolina constituents. The fact that Donald Trump’s CIA plotted to assassinate Assange and that Joe Biden’s DOJ refuses to rescind Trump’s prosecution of the journalist (on the night the American reporter Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian prison) suggests that America’s war on journalism is not a red problem or a blue problem.
It’s a uniparty problem.
Greg and Gianina Mills of Cary, North Carolina, both emphasized war and free speech as reasons for migrating to Kennedy’s camp. Greg, who grew up during the twentieth century when it seemed “Dems were the hippies from Woodstock whereas conservatives were pro-war,” now sees the narrative flipped. Gianina, who grew up under communist rule in Romania, said, “As an outsider, I thought America was the most democratic country, but what I’m seeing reminds me of the old Romania.”
