Kennedy Brings Excitement to a Snowy Jackson Hole, Wyoming

By Raquel Master, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

By Raquel Master, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

On February 8, 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. excited locals and visitors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, attending an intimate fundraiser at the Cloudveil/ Luxury Hotel on Town Square,  hosted by super PAC  American Values 2024, which funds The Kennedy Beacon. 

The event’s host, Mohammed Sharaf, is one of Kennedy’s most exuberant young supporters.

Kennedy has been an active skier for over 65 years, and an advocate for preserving the vitality of the environment for longer. The Grand Teton mountains were the perfect backdrop for the fundraiser, with Jackson Hole receiving the most snowfall of the year, getting 3 feet of snow within 72 hours. 

At the Jackson Hole Ski Mountain, I was fortunate to jump on the aerial tram line with Sharaf and his friends, four young republican business professionals from Texas. The men spoke of Kennedy’s honesty, the impressive nature of his open-mindedness towards evidence-based knowledge, and their hope to vote for a candidate who is far from just “the lesser of two evils.”

Sharaf told me Kennedy exemplifies “incredible humility, has never met a stranger, is completely genuine, and wants to explore and understand the perspectives of everyone he meets, whether he agrees with them or not.”

Sharaf hopes to contribute to initiatives such as ballot access in all 50 states and advertising to inform the public on the Kennedy movement. 

As evening fell, festivities began at the Cloudveil event suite, with a lively cocktail hour during which business owners, influential activists, filmmakers, doctors, and even pro-snowboarders mingled.

After Sharaf introduced Kennedy, he spoke eloquently about the environment. “If we treat the planet as a liquidation, we will have a few years of pollution-based prosperity,” Kennedy said. “It will make a few people billionaires while impoverishing the rest of us. Our children are going to pay for our choices.”

He continued, “Preserving nature is an investment in infrastructure we must make, same as investing in telecommunications, as efforts to sustain economic vitality. We are protecting the environment not just for the birds and the trees, but for our own sake. Our economy sustains itself on this functioning ecosystem. These global commons, the air, the water, the wildlife, the aquifers, the beaches, the landscapes, the purple mountains majesty, they connect us to our past, to our history, providing context for our communities, sourcing virtues and character, and ultimately our relationship with our creator. God talks to people through many factors, organized religions, wise people, prophets, through great books, through art and literature and music and poetry, with color and texture. When we destroy these, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine and what our own potential is as human beings. We deserve a president who understands how important these things are.”

After Kennedy’s talk, I spoke with Francine, a local Native American healer. She’s heavily involved in local politics, but until now could not succumb to voting for one of these “lesser evil” presidential candidates. Finally, she’s excited to see a solid choice on the ballot.

Her biggest take away from Kennedy’s speech: His focus on bringing  healing, to take care of his country’s health and human rights first, as a president should. She said the U.S. needs stability and support on its own front. We need our country to sustain a stronger voice for itself, to lead by example, as it has throughout history. 

As Francine put it, our people appear “programmed, colonized, trained, poisoned; between what we eat, drink, our education, our hospitals, it’s all so messed up, so skewed from the truth, we are programmed to take the poison, until we don’t even feel the need to fight for ourselves anymore. We skip over ourselves to worry about other countries.”