The portly Bush-era GOP strategist Karl Rove appeared on Fox News with his goofy whiteboard to denounce RFK Jr. as a “conspiracy theorist,” etc. — all the smears you would expect from any run-of-the-mill MSNBC talking head — while also criticizing GOP candidate Ron DeSantis for mulling the appointment of RFK Jr. to head the CDC or FDA if he emerges victorious in November 2024.
Via Washington Examiner:
Former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove slammed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for suggesting he could appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead either the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration if elected president.
During a Thursday interview on Fox News, Rove called DeSantis’s hypothetical pick for heading the two U.S. health agencies “a nutty idea.”
“[Kennedy] is a guy who’s got incredible conspiracy theories that are just outrageous,” Rove said, before reading off his healthcare-related beliefs from a whiteboard. The listed “conspiracy theories” included RFK Jr.’s claims about vaccines causing autism, WiFi causing cancer, and antidepressants causing school shootings.
Rove added, “[Kennedy’s] got lots of conspiracies” besides healthcare, and he switched to another whiteboard.
Karl Rove on RFK Jr.: “this guy’s a nut”
(The first conspiracy he mentions is the 2004 election being stolen)
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 27, 2023
Neoliberal rag The Daily Beast piled on, criticizing Bill Hemmer for nominally pushing back on Rove’s smears, writing, “so-called ‘straight news’ anchor Bill Hemmer defended the anti-vaccine conspiracist as ‘the kind of Democrat’ he had grown up with.”
When such a publication as The Daily Beast is boosting your rhetoric as a nominal Republican pundit, it may be time to wonder whether you’ve lost the plot.
Rove has also repeatedly attacked Donald Trump, and for this reason, he has become very popular with the MSNBC faction in the post-Obama era.
Here Rove is, for instance, brought onto MSNBC in late 2015 to pre-preemptively declare with no compelling evidence that Trump had no shot at winning the general election — the conventional wisdom of all out-of-touch D.C. pundits with no real understanding of the electorate they are governing.
Having apparently learned nothing and not having been sufficiently shamed to crawl into a hole or else find a new career, here Rove returned just a month ago going to war with Trump on the network following a thinkpiece published in the Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for human liberty, it’s not obvious what constituency Rove has any clout with or who will be swayed by his rhetoric of any ideological stripe.
Rove is clearly a product of the establishment, and the donor class he represents is clearly siccing Rove on RFK Jr. and Trump as a prophylactic measure. Will it work, though? Or has the establishment once again overestimated its minions’ persuasive power with the electorate?
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