“THE ENEMY OF YOUR ENEMY IS NOT YOUR FRIEND; HE’S A GUY WHO MIGHT WANT TO THROW YOU IN JAIL:” The Very Strange New Respect for Authoritarian Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) “should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals” and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are “contemptible human beings” of whom he “wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under”:

After this lock-’em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as “a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society”), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual “climate-deniers,” but stressing that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”

He’s had climate apocalypticism long before AOC decided to fight what Kevin Williamson dubbed “Sandy’s War.” In 2008, RFK Jr. “wrote an article raising the alarm about global warming and the resultant lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.”

More recently (i.e. Thursday night): ABC News cuts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vaccine remarks out of interview.