At FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Kennedy Says Only an Independent Can Unify the Country

By Leah Watson, Breaking News Reporter, The Kennedy Beacon

On July 12, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas. He spoke at length about how desperately Americans need to unify. 

A day later, shots rang out at a rally in a small Pennsylvania town. Shaken up, blood on his face, former president Donald Trump survived an attempted assassination, a grotesque representation of the crisis of division within the United States. 

Following the shooting, Kennedy posted a short message on X, in support of the Trump family, urging Americans to “step back from the division.”

As Kennedy had said at FreedomFest, “Our country faces some steep challenges right now in its history, and we cannot hope to meet them if we’re all at each other’s throats.” 

In his speech, Kennedy also eloquently referenced the U.S Constitution:

The framers wrote the Constitution not for easy times. They didn’t write the First Amendment to protect convenient speech or likable speech or politically correct speech. They wrote it to protect the kind of speech that nobody wants to hear. The speech that's going to offend you, that's going to hurt your feelings. It's going to insult your sensibilities. They wrote the Constitution for hard times, not for easy times. They wrote it for Pandemics. There's no pandemic exception in the United States Constitution.

In the past, politicians have promised to heal the divide by reaching across the political aisle, but they rarely follow through. When a Democrat or Republican assumes office, they find themselves entrenched in nonstop partisan warfare. 

“They are elected as the champion of one side and the nemesis of the other,” said Kennedy. 

Democrats and Republicans have failed to cultivate unity. Kennedy believes it’s now time for an independent to have a chance, for someone independent of corporate interests to implement the best elements from a spectrum of political parties.

President Biden and Trump have thrived on an unsustainable polarization, and Kennedy believes that neither of them is committed to solving the national crisis of disunity. At FreedomFest, Kennedy pitched to his audience a new plan to heal the divisions within the country titled “#AmericaStrong.” 

Kennedy pledged to “appoint a cabinet comprising members of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, and people from the Green Party and other parties, and parties outside the political process.” He vowed to create a “cross-partisan advisory committee to propose and select Supreme Court Justices.” 

Kennedy wishes to follow the lead of his father, who as attorney general strove to make sure that “justice in this country is blind and is neutral,” without hinging on whether a defendant is a Republican or a Democrat. Following this example, Kennedy stated that, if elected, he will pardon victims of political persecution, such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, as written about in the Beacon, as well as Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht.

Kennedy, alluding to former president Trump’s recent guilty verdict, said he would also consider pardoning any past president or members of their families if he finds that the charges held against them are politically motivated.

“Our country is already in a kind of Civil War, a cold Civil War,” Kennedy told his FreedomFest audience. “What this country needs now is Unity. What this country needs is healing [and] forgiveness.”