Kennedy Welcomes Student Protests - But Calls for Debate and Common Ground

“We should welcome protest, yes — but also foster debate and dialogue to reach common ground.” – Robert Kennedy Jr.

By Blake Fleetwood, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

Campus protests are erupting all over the country. The two major presidential candidates have been quick to condemn the pro-Palestinian peace demonstrations for different but essentially political reasons.

Kennedy takes a different approach. He is not hamstrung by the narrow political stances of his two opponents. 

President Biden is facing an impossible dilemma. He wants the demonstrations to end quickly but is fearful of alienating his already soft support among young voters. His approval rating on his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict is down to 13%, in contrast to his overall approval rating by Gen Z of 40%. The Democrats are panic-stricken that the protests will linger and escalate violently through the summer to the Democratic convention in Chicago and until the November election. 

The Democrats fear that the evening news and the mainstream media will flood the airways with chaos and turmoil, images of pro and anti-Palestinian protestors clashing. A country out of control. 

If it bleeds, it leads. They fear these images will feed into Trump’s main campaign theme that Biden is weak on crime, immigration, and law and order.

Biden is desperate. If he cannot stop the mass killing in Gaza before the Democratic convention in Chicago, protesters will continue to blame him for the Gaza bombings, and the chaos will continue to spread.

It will be a painful echo of 1968. Already, some protesters are chanting, “Joe! Joe! Genocide Joe has to Go!” for what they feel is his too strong support of Israel.

Republican candidate Richard Nixon ran a campaign in 1968 based on fear-mongering and was able to take advantage of the Chicago convention chaos and anti-Vietnam protests to narrowly defeat Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. 

Humphrey, like Senator Robert Kennedy, eventually came to support anti-war students who were trying to end the senseless carnage in Southeast Asia.

This week, Biden forcefully condemned student protests but resisted Republican calls to deploy the National Guard to rein them in on campuses. 

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is trying to escalate and prolong the conflicts by encouraging aggressive police repercussions and by bringing in the National Guard and riot squads against even peaceful campus protesters. Ironically he wants to win as the anti-chaos candidate 

To idealistic college students, this is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Meanwhile, the hard-core protesters and agitators welcome aggressive riot squad actions, which bring more attention to their cause. 

Trump is thrilled with the chaos, and his supporters have publicly urged right-wing “frat boys” to wade in and create violence.

He wants to provoke the protesters by calling them a “disgrace” and urges aggressive actions by police riot squads. Trump wants to weaponize the protests as a campaign cudgel against the Democrats. Republicans seek to use the resulting violence to paint the Democrats as supporting lawlessness and highlighting Biden's inability to deal with the situation. 

Robert Kennedy Jr.—who is fundamentally a peace candidate like his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy—takes a more nuanced approach to a complicated situation. 

Instead of encouraging prolonged violence, as Trump wants to do, or bringing about aggressive tactics to make the protesters go away quickly, which Biden wants to do, Kennedy’s message is to do away with the polarization that is dividing so many Americans.

He wants to bring Americans together: Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. He wants different sides to listen to each other and try to see different points of view as President Kennedy sought to do. 

R.F.K. Jr. has said, “We should be producing leaders and innovations to help build a new, peaceful future for the region. Instead, we see a crisis on American campuses that is adding to division, hatred, and fear.” 

In a May 4 post on X (formerly Twitter), he wrote, “We should welcome protest, yes — but also foster debate and dialogue to reach common ground. We should be producing leaders and innovations to help build a new, peaceful future for the region. Instead, we see a crisis on American campuses that is adding to division, hatred, and fear — not just in the Middle East but also in our own country. This is a crisis of civil rights — the right to be seen and heard, the right to live and to study without fear.”

He continued, “American universities can be part of the solution in the Middle East,” suggesting three basic steps he would take as president to diffuse the situation: 

1. Direct the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to investigate the state of civil rights at our nation’s universities. Whatever our views of the Middle East, we cannot tolerate a situation in which Jewish and Israeli students are afraid to walk to class. Pro-Palestinian students should also be able to protest without fear of retaliation. 

2. Direct the Attorney General to deploy the Department of Justice Community Relations Service (CRS) to universities to provide conflict resolution expertise so that tensions on campus can be kept within bounds. 

3. Direct the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights to develop guidelines for universities that deal with the question of overnight encampments, which create new challenges for free speech and safety.”

This week Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, removed a short film about Kennedy because it claimed that “It looks like you shared or sent nudity or sexual content.” The film, narrated by Woody Harrelson, is called “Who is Bobby Kennedy?” 

Kennedy responded to Meta’s auto-generated label stating the film contained nudity (as a rationale for suppressing it) with a tweet, “I must have missed the nude scenes in it. Hafta watch it again.”

As Kennedy has said many times, “Freedom of speech is the capstone of all other rights and freedoms. Once a government has the power to silence its opponents, no other right is safe. Without free speech, there can be no democracy.”

He’s determined to dismantle what he calls the censorship-industrial complex in which, as he’s written, “Big Tech censors, deplatforms, shadowbans, and algorithmically suppresses any person or opinion the government asks them to.” 

Continues Kennedy, “We will respect the right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures by ending mass surveillance of American citizens and the abuse of civil asset forfeiture.” 

Students’ rights to protest, for Kennedy, fall under the same umbrella as protected speech in our democracy. They have been and should be part of the American fabric – whether we agree with the positions expressed, on one side or the other.

Blake Fleetwood was a reporter for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice,The Hill, The Atlantic and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues.