Some call it the Kennedy Legacy. Others, the Kennedy Curse. I prefer to call it the last rites of Camelot. Once, the name conjured up a dynasty of flawed but formidable men: Joe Sr., the ruthless patriarch; Joe Jr., killed in the war before destiny could crown him; John, the war hero turned president whose eloquence lit up the republic; Bobby, the people’s tribune who marched toward martyrdom; and Ted, the lumbering but persistent lion of the Senate. They were not saints—bootlegging, infidelity, and ambition oiled the family machinery—but they were leaders. They carried themselves with a patrician sense of duty. For all their sins, they inspired.
But that Camelot is gone. Buried with John Jr. in the Atlantic. What remains is the farcical afterlife of the dynasty, where charisma has curdled into conspiracy and nobility into notoriety.
Enter Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the ghastly caricature of a family once mythologized. A man who spent fourteen years addicted to heroin, who peddled drugs to his brother, who betrayed his wife and perhaps helped push her toward the abyss. A man who, with no degree in medicine, no training in science, and no discipline in truth, now presumes to dictate the nation’s health policy.
This is not Camelot. This is Bedlam.
Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter and perhaps the last family member with a sense of proportion, described him as a predator “addicted to attention and power.” She is right. His career has been one long audition for cult leader, dressing delusion in the borrowed clothes of science. He insists vaccines are dangerous despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. He insists parasites have eaten his brain, a claim his speeches do nothing to contradict. He insists HIV does not cause AIDS, that fluoride is a communist plot in the water supply, that COVID somehow spared Jews and Chinese people—as if plague itself were bound by the protocols of a lunatic’s imagination.
He surrounds himself with the unqualified and the disgraced. David Geier, a fraud who posed as a doctor to push snake oil about vaccines and autism, is not an exception but a template. In this new bureaucracy, the qualification is not expertise but loyalty—loyalty of the Himmler variety: blind, fanatical, and lucrative.
Kennedy has compared the unvaccinated to Anne Frank. He has argued against cancer screenings, STD testing, and vaccines for pregnant women. He has promoted raw milk, because who wouldn’t want a shot of salmonella with their breakfast? He has cut funding for research while promoting conspiracies debunked long before he was born. Even his own child tells stories of him decapitating a beached whale, tying its head to a minivan, and trailing gore down the highway—an image almost too perfect as metaphor.
And now, this man is entrusted with the health of the United States. Not by accident, but by appointment—chosen by a president who recognized in Kennedy his own reflection: a man of low quality, addicted to grievance, contemptuous of truth, and desperate for attention.
The Kennedy name once symbolized hope, courage, and—yes—myth. Today it stands for a grotesque parody of leadership, for a dynasty that has ended not with a bullet in Dallas or Los Angeles but with a whimper in the swamp of anti-science madness. Camelot is over. The kingdom has fallen to a madman in a lab coat he never earned.
Why it Matters
The fall of the Kennedy legacy shows how far America has sunk into anti-science politics. When dynasties collapse into conspiracy, truth itself becomes collateral damage. National health cannot survive leadership that treats ignorance as virtue.
The Kennedy dynasty once stood for hope and courage. Today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turns it into parody—peddling conspiracies, rejecting science, and endangering national health. The fall of Camelot is complete: not by tragedy, but by self-inflicted farce
Further Reading
- Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire – Kurt Andersen.
A sweeping history of America’s addiction to magical thinking and conspiracy. https://civilheresy.com/fantasyland - The Doctor Who Fooled the World – Brian Deer
Investigates the rise of the anti-vaccine movement and its dangerous consequences. https://civilheresy.com/doctor who fooled the world
