Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scourge of Big Pharma and scion of one of America’s most powerful political families, has filed a run for President in a challenge to Joe Biden. The Telegraph has more.
Mr Kennedy, 69, filed a statement of candidacy on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, which would likely pit him against incumbent Mr. Biden, who is expected to declare his own run for 2024.
The former attorney becomes the second candidate to throw their hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination after self-help author Marianne Williamson declared a run.
Mr. Kennedy’s chance at ending up in the White House is a long shot. Mr. Biden, 80, the oldest president in U.S. history, still has considerable support among Democratic voters.
Mr. Kennedy is the son of former New York Senator, U.S. Attorney General and assassinated 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy.
He was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer and had been long involved in the anti-vaccine movement, but the effort intensified during the Covid pandemic.
Kennedy is founder and Chairman of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an organisation which seeks to protect children from harmful medical interventions and other damaging exposures. Since 2021 Covid vaccines have been prominent among its concerns. In 2020 CHD’s revenue was $6.8 million, according to filings made with charity regulators, more than double the level the previous year.
Kennedy hinted in March that he was considering a run. He told a crowd in New Hampshire: “I am thinking about it, yes. I have passed the biggest hurdle, that my wife has greenlighted it.”
He later posted on his Twitter account: “If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilise enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race. If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.”
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A really absorbing article. Thankyou.
I’m glad you enjoyed it
Mr MacKay’s extreme puritanism sounds very similar to the Taliban’s morality code.
Actually it made me think of Ed Milliband!
Actually, there is something awfully po-faced, joyless about the current Labour cabinet: Starmer, Reeves, Milliband, Yvette Cooper (Pixie-Balls) – those strained expressions, furrowed eyebrows, permanently seriou, humorless faces…
I’m much more concerned about what comes out of their brains and their mouths than I am about what they look like [but you also forgot to mention their flat, adenoidal voices, which one would run a mile from at a drinks party…!]. I can recall visiting Inverness in the 1970’s – sports centres closed on Sundays thanks to the church. Luckily, religion is in retreat in Scotland
P.S. Enjoyed the music. Have you heard this splendid Scottish compilation album https://open.spotify.com/track/1AVeoXQjOlTCK23WCcJJjm
Beware of these moral zealots, for them there is no going back.
At least the Puritans knew the difference between a penis and a vagina. They also knew that in the no too distant past many of their white ancestors were slaves.
I doubt the article is half accurate re the ‘joylessness’ of it all.
As opposed to what? Porn, drugs, mindless entertainment, wetting your diapers if your fav footie team loses? Relativity and anti-reality?
Please.
Maybe the article scribbler would have made more sense if he bothered to write about the 3 years of Medical Nazism.
Was the tyranny of Rona not a ‘joy killer’ then?
And Orthodox Judaism.
Very very evocative. And a warning. Thank you.
I’m guessing the St Kilda in Melbourne was named by or after the islanders that went to Australia to sheep farm?
Thanks James. Re St Kilda in Melbourne. The 1854 migrants from St Kilda to Melbourne had a terrible voyage, our of 36 of them, only 14 survived the voyage. Fever struck the ship and it was quarantined on arrival, by the time the quarantine had lifted only 14 St Kildans remained alive, they died in far greater numbers than the other migrants because they lacked the immune systems of those from the mainland.
Although they settled in Melbourne, the St Kilda district is not named after them. in 1844 that area was named after a schooner, The Lady of St Kilda.
I’ve not researched what happened to the St Kildans in Australia, However, Steel indicates that they did not flourish as subsistance farmers.
The St Kildans who emigrated to the mainland did a bit better, one of them ended up as a senior member of the Metropolitan Police in London.
Great – thanks! You never know with people moving around the world in those days. My own lot (mother’s side), left Ireland after Cromwell did his thing there. We don’t know why – could have been another famine or getting on the wrong side in the Lord Protector punch up. Anyway they settled in my home county of Lincolnshire and worked the land until the mid-18 hundreds. Then another agricultural downturn happened to the vast number of farm workers in that county. Might have been the Corn Laws, anyway, three of the Leary family brothers (they dropped the O’ when they moved here) and their families left for New Zealand under NZ government sponsorship. Recruiters were travelling the English countryside signing up prospective workers to fill labour gaps in NZ. Sheep and wool were the source of Lincolnshire’s considerable wealth as can be seen from the huge numbers of large, mostly abandoned churches across the county. Every wool baron had to build a bigger one than his neighbour. NZ, sheep, experienced workers. A match.
We have all their names, the ship they sailed in, and the ship’s log and passenger list. My cousin does this kind of thing professionally.
I’m still writing to a distant cousin there in Waiuku, near Auckland, whom I’ve never met but found me via my company and just a name. He’s 98 and his daughters have confiscated his ladder because he insisted on maintaining his roof himself.
Their voyage was much better it seems but they must have been lucky. There’s a very good museum in Antwerp in the building the Red Star Line operated out of which documents the Europeans journeys to the New World. The Americans had started quarantining refugees this side of the Atlantic after all their problems with cholera & typhus etc.
For more see this:
https://redstarline.be/en
“After Cromwell did his thing there…” which was after the Irish had done their thing to the Protestant settlers.
Yes, including selling the entire Protestant village of Baltimore into slavery, as Scottish historian Neil Oliver recounted in an episode of “Coast”.
Thanks for this; very interesting and yes plenty of echoes of this today
A timely gentle reminder of what we are loosing (or rather, being deprived of ) – our culture. Last week we watched that bravura reminder of who we are, the Last Night of the Proms, and perhaps for the last time we were ‘allowed’ to enjoy, and even participate in, what is one of the last remnants of public celebration of our heritage and identity.
The irony of the entire Albert Hall audience repeatedly belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, led by Finnish conductor, Sakari Oramo, sadly emphasized just how far down the road to mediocracy our country has stumbled, and now races headlong towards total anonymity. Unless we can recapture that ‘Proms’ spirit in all our lives, and not just one evening a year, we should in all consciousness stop calling ourselves ‘British’.
Like the St. Kildans, we who were ‘born of Thee’ are now approaching extinction. We here face a present that cannot survive, a future that will only continue our tradition if we reinvent ourselves with full understanding of our homeland and its enormous, but politically inconvenient potential.
Our planet has survived because life itself has become an essential part of it, self-regulating its dynamics regardless of what one temporarily dominant species – us – can do to wreck it. Like the St. Kildans, our society now faces imminent extinction, as the maniacal proponents of the emergent suicidal death cult of Net Zero move in and attempt to overthrow our real world culture with their evil lunacy. These new arrivals are entirely the modern day equivalent of those bearers of the obsessional imposition of their own religious intolerance who wrecked the stable human community of St. Kilda.
Are the present attempts by our Chief Witchfinder Starmtrooper General to re-link us with the Continent aimed at opening the door for we indigenous people to move out to a ‘mainland’ where we too can migrate in the hope of finding a better life (or, indeed, one at all, given that winter is coming on) safely out from under his supposedly enlightened feet?
Sadly, I find little hope in our land these days. And as for glory, I imagine it will shortly become a banned word if wokism prevails, which heaven knows, I hope it will not, though it seems our schools are hell bent on ensuring that it is.
OFF – T I just heard BBC4 banging on about the measles vaccine and the decline in the uptake is not about trust, but about ‘access’…Aye, whatever you say!
They mentioned how Wakefield was ‘debunked’….From what I remember reading was how the GMC did a Great Barrington on their ass. Or how the climate propaganda keeps criticism at bay. This was according to the UKHMRA. But notice how they didn’t bother interview a Dr or anyone that DOES NOT want the measles jab. OFcom anyone!
Received today,
Dear hux,
A free flu vaccine is available for you at the practice. Please follow the link to book your appointment
If you don’t want one, or have already received it elsewhere please let us know.
The Sometimes Surgery.
This is the second invite in a week. I just ignore them. I am not wasting my time by responding. If they are that bothered they can phone me but the answer will still be negative.
And we have an ideal place the wokesters can be shipped to..
In the interest of protection of the sea birds, I must protest that. If cats aren’t allowed to roam this island, hunting sea birds to sustain themselves, Eds and Keirs and Eluneds certainly shouldn’t, either.
Banging on about the African slave trade is nothing but a way of the former US pro-slavery party (yes, that’s the Democrats) trying to absolve itself of its own past by blaming others for it. The Atlantic slave trade ended about 200 years ago and it was Britain which first abolished it formally and then shut it down by military force. Until then, slavery had been an institution which had existed at all times in all cultures and which is probably as old as mankind itself. All of this is past history and the past cannot be fixed or atoned for by lining the pockets of current-day preachers of their own enlightenend self-interest, ie, politician-beggars with a megaphone and more than their share of an attitude. They’ll keep coming for as long as they’re getting paid for that.
Putting this in two simple sentences:
The notion of inherited guilt is nothing but the Christian original sin these people misappropriated, putting themselves in place of God: God decreed man was forever guilty which he could do because he was God. The people behind this also decreed that man is forever guilty because in their opinion, they’re just as good as God. But outside of their megalomanic fantasies, they aren’t.
One reason that other Scottish islands were abandoned in the 20th century, though closer to the mainland than St Kilda, was modern transport. It was easier to live a life on the mainland than on the islands.
In past centuries these islands would have been part of a sea highway that stretched from Scandinavia to Ireland. It was easier at that time to travel by boat than overland. They were not remote by the standards of the day.
If the argument is to be made concerning the effects of authoritarians revolutionising culture it is necessary to understand how these religious preachers, as officers of the Church, gained their authority. It has a connection with the attempt at world rule today. Otherwise, it might have been thought that the St Kildans could have freed themselves from Sabbatarian restrictions by referring to the Gospel passage where Jesus criticised the religious leaders of His day for pressing similar counter-productive restrictions on the people.
Originally in the earliest churches the officers were simply responsible for certain administrative duties. The Apostle Paul emphasises that Christians are not rated according to class or office but by spiritual power. As these spiritual gifts had one source and were manifestations of the same Divine Spirit, all the members of the church were included in their operation, regardless of who practised them. In other words, all the members of the church were equals.
Paul tailored his preaching to his audience. What he says to one group cannot be applied to others, at least not with the same purpose. Though Paul laid down strict modes of behaviour for his Greek converts in Corinth, this is only because they were from this city that was notorious for moral corruption.
It’s hardly likely that the small community on St Kilda were so dissolute as the people of a city in the ancient Greek world that they needed strict rules unnecessary previously. Nor is it likely that these cragsmen would have needed warning, as Paul does to his fellow Jews in his letter to ‘the Romans’, about the allure of the same-sex relations – merely matters of personal taste – that prevailed among the Latins.
After the destruction of Roman authority in Western Europe, the Church was the only institution that survived intact. A city may be governed by a barbarian king, but it was still the seat of the bishop’s see. Dressed in the robes of a Roman magistrate and speaking the imperial tongue, the authority of the officers of the Church were magnified. For the ‘pagani’, the countryfolk of Gaul or Spain, or to the Germans who came to fight over the British Isles, the clergy would only have been known as those having a special position and special powers. Among the St Kildans one might suspect the same.
As a small community already close-knit, and one in the 19th century increasingly remote, the St Kildans would have been particularly susceptible to a charismatic preacher. More Jonestown, Guiana, than Western Isles.
The Apostles had no discernible objective in creating a Christian civilisation. Even before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple around which the early churches circulated, the churches had become associated with the Roman Empire merely as part of Roman civic society, organised as they were as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world.
And after the destruction of the Temple and the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the officers of the church were propelled into the highest ranks of imperial rule. It was only at this point did Roman law dictate that heresy was a crime not just against the Church but also against the State. To the Romans, the Empire was ‘the empire of the whole earth’ and being associated with it the Church became identified with world rule and its officers world rulers.
If a warning is to be issued against the culture revolutionaries, one should be issued against its champions. For patriotic social conservatives the worst champion they could have chosen is Trump. Even if he is right about mass migration, he isn’t the right person to say it, damaging the argument with absurdities. Churchill was belligerent but being well-read and articulate he didn’t resort to the crude insults that Trump does.
Churchill could be advised out of his daft ideas without having to appeal to a sense his self-advantage, as Trump’s advisors had to do. Churchill could speak to his audience’s emotions but not at the same time dislocate their reason. Churchill accepted the humiliating result of the 1945 general election when he could have claimed the right to rule as saviour of Britain.
you have to understand that the first significant engagement with Christianity the St Kildans experienced was pre Reformation Irish monks, the same monks that settled North Rona and other remote islands, undoubtably visited St Kilda although there is no archaeological evidence avaliable yet and until the 19th C history was the oral tradition.
This would have been around the time of the Colomban mission to Scotland so we are talking 6th C. These monks belonged to the Celtic Church which was not brought into communion with Rome until the Synod of Whitby in the 7th C.
We don’t know what happened to early Christian Settlement on the remoter islands pre reformation but we do know that periodically catastrophes tipped the islands’ finely balanced economies into freefall resulting in famine. North Rona, which lies 50 miles north of Lewis was uninhabited when the entire population of 30 starved to death in 1685 probably after an infestation of black rats from an earlier ship wreck ate the barley food reserves.
We know that in the early 1700s an outbreak of smallpox killed 90% of the population of St Kilda. By the time presbyterian missionaries arrived on the islands in the early 1800s, the islands followed a faith that was very different from any form of mainland Christianity. The form of Christianity that took hold in the 19th C did so among a people that had no knowledge of St Paul, the early church fathers or alternative forms of Christianity, there are no records of any active church engagement prior to the 18th C only that there was obviously some because the religion of the islanders involved a mix of Christianity, no doubt recalled from the dar age monks.
St Kilda is so remote it doesn’t feature in the argument around transport being a cause of depopulation, it’s remoteness was due to distance but also the sea and weather conditions which made landing their perilous 9 months out of 12. There was no economic benefit to owning the islands, until fulmar oil was discovered as a refined enough lubricant for watches and precision instruments, even that was soon uneconomical thanks to industrial whaling and then with the discovery of oil distillation, there was no requirement for either as sources of oil.
So the Christianity the St Kildans experienced in the 19th C was that of the Kirk and then the Free Kirk. I must stress that not all of this was bad, after McKay retired, the islands were allocated a trainee minister, who was not ordained who would serve for 2 years with his family and there were some extremely competent men and especially their wives who held this role for the last 3o years or so of occupation, we are grateful to their memoirs in understanding the condition of the islands. The faith was still the Free Kirk, but nowhere near as restrictive and intrusive as it had been under Mackay. Indeed, it was the elders on the island, not the Kirk men who latterly were the ones demanding the faith of their youths, that of MacKay.
As I mentioned in the article, the reasons for the evacuation were numerous and complex, the lack of a safe anchorage meant that unlike Fair Isle or the Faroes, fishing, whaling or sealing weren’t viable activities. But the two events that seem to have finally finished the islands were firstly the consequences of the schism and the closing of the Church after MacKenzie left in 1844, and the subsequent depopulation by the 36 who left for Australia (likely the most active and ambitious of the islanders – sadly fever took on the ship and by the time they landed in Melbourne, only 14 remained alive). The second event was the arrival of Mackay and his ridiculous sabbatarianism. Had a more enlightened minister been appointed, like another MacKenzie then it is quite possible the islands would have survived. Unfortunately, the cultural malaise, the oppression, the self loathing and the suspicion of anything that wasn’t downright miserable, fatally undermined any chance the islands had of getting back on their feet.
They relied increasingly on charity until the eventual evacuation.
Very interesting article and thanks for the additional information.
Pre-war (WWI) English contemporaries of Churchill have described him (polemically, obviously) as someone whose intellect was equivalent in value to that of a piggy bank with a single penny rattling in it whenever it was shaken. He was also the spiritus rector behind the military fiasco at the Dardanelles 1915. Later, he was instrumental in saving France from the blunder of declaring war on Germany because of the joint German – Russian invasion of Poland but only at the expense of abandoning almost all of Europe eastwards of the Elbe to about 50 years of Bolshevist reign of terror. Lastly, he was also the politician responsible for ‘morale’ firebombing, ie, the attempt to burn every historical building ever erected in Germany to the ground and kill all people living there. He should count himself lucky that he had no English propagandists working against him, as they might as well have depicted him with the head of his umbrella proudly driven into the charred corpse of a toddler in front of a burning town. Maybe with the neat text like “For freedom, democracy and human rights!”
He certainly didn’t save Britain from anything as there was no way the Germans could have staged a successful invasion of the British Isles at any time in the 1940s and the Germans wouldn’t – in all likeliness – have gone to war against it hadn’t the anglo-french desire to hand all of Poland over to the Russians instead of only half of it been so overwhelmingly strong.
Rw one of the stupid ignorant and spiteful posts we have seen here.
It’s – to the best of my knowledge – historically accurate. Eg, the source for the piggy bank remark, which originally uses a few nickels instead of a single penny, is here (in German, indirectly quoted but unfortunately, without source itself)
https://digi.landesbibliothek.at/viewer/image/AC04184756/48/#topDocAnchor
This is a from a book title The Secret Prehistory Of The World War (Die geheime Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges) written by Dr Hans F Helmholt in 1914.
Just in case someone except me cares about this kind of stuff:
It’s claimed that the quote is from a letter written by an ambassdor during the an ambassador conference in London in winter 1912/13 and it’s really about Sir Edward Grey. The relevant part is
Recently, when a temperamental foreign diplomat expressed admiration for Grey’s calm nature which always hid his real inner mood, a cheeky secretary opined “If a piggy bank made of clay is completely filled with gold coins, it obviously won’t rattle when shaken. But neither will it if there’s not a single penny inside. In the case of Winston Churchill, a few nickels keep rattling so loud that this gets onto everybody’s nerves. And with Grey, there’s just silence. Only someone holding the piggy bank in his hands can tell if it’s full or empty!”
No, it is NOT historically accurate.
One very curious historical snippet about the Firebombing of Dresden, ordered by Clement Attlee in collusion with Stalin (on one of the Illuminati Ritual Human Sacrifice nights, Feb 13-14), is that, amongst all the huge numbers of refugees killed there, none were Jewish, because the Jews had been forewarned by their own vast information network, and quietly escaped from the city in time.
FALSE!
It was the Evil Closet Communist Clement Attlee, eaten up with envy of Churchill, who colluded with Stalin to order the Firebombing of Dresden BEHIND CHURCHILL’S BACK. When Churchill was on his way to Yalta, the Traitor Clement Attlee was in temporary charge of Britain in Churchill’s absence, and ordered the Firebombing of Dresden at Stalin’s secret urging.
Churchill only found out about it at Yalta, when Stalin gloatingly mentioned it.
“…nation without a history is not a nation, for it is the history, culture, traditions and customs of a nation that provide the foundations of the nation state.”
A point I have been making repeatedly on DS.
The assault on our language, the assault on private schools, the attacks against our Christian churches, the criminalisation of anti Islam discussions, the criminalisation of our flags for God’s sake, the dumbing down of education, theatre productions museums and art galleries, the destruction of our pubs and nightlife, persistent criticism of the greatest nation on earth and unrelenting insistence on rewriting our history and rubbishing our achievements, all insidious and ongoing and let us not forget the great replacement with hordes of third world barbarians. The deliberate aim to destroy all that Great Britain has ever been and could be is unending.
We are at war and that war was formally declared in March 2020. At some point it must get bloody.
A sad evocative and timely tale, thank you C.J.
I just find it so hard to grasp how individuals like that McKay can possibly function.
And as for drowning the working dogs, that is hideous.
Sadly we wiped out all thr truth and beauty in the hope that we had something better to offer. We destroyed them and gave them nothing but a wasteland in every place where the spirit was still strong. Blindly compelled to destroy these places. It has been official Christian doctrine since the council of Constantinople in the ninth century. That there is material and soul but the realm of the spirit is inaccessible to man. One day we will understand the gravity of this false turning.
Brilliant, thank you so much.
A very bigoted article, typical of the modern Scottish hatred of the protestantism that made it a great country. I have read a great deal of 19th century Scottish history, so I know whereof I speak. It was the Scottish Reformation that made it the most literate and objectively honest nation on earth.
And Scottish Calvinism is not at all like the modern “woke” religion, with its positive effects on morality and human dignity, its holding of the existence of objective truth, and unfearing openness to examination of its tenets.
Shabby writing.
Meanwhile ‘God’ laughs at the great joke he plays on believers.
How to tell us all you didn’t read the article without telling us you didn’t read the article.
You saw the headline, skimmed it and thought: this guy is blaming the end of occupation in St Kilda on the Presbyterian Church.
You then think you are qualified to condemn the article as ‘bigoted’ and presumably extend the same to me.
If you HAD read the article you would have noticed that I did not condemn Christianity, Presbyterianism, the Kirk or the Free Kirk..what I did was highlight how some historians including Steel condemned Rev John Mackay’s ludicrous and extreme sabbatarianism as a cause of the islands economic ruin.
Steel was not the only person to condemn MacKay, his contemporaries in the Free Church did.
I also stress that church men like MacKenzie ( pre schism) and the Free Church missionaries who came after Mackay did an excellent job.
You seem to assume that I am somehow an opponent of Reformation Scotland.
I wonder if you have ever lived in that country because the history of religion in Scotland is both nuanced, complex and violent and is not a simple matter of one side vs the other, native Scots understand this because we have lived with the consequences of religious sectarianism in our society.
No matter.
It’s polite to read articles carefully before commenting, I’d recommend you do so in the future before commenting.
BTW I was brought up in the Kirk, I’m also from Argyll and understand the impact of all the churches on the Isles, for good and bad.
I’m now a practicing and somewhat devout Catholic.
Shabby review.
Thank you for telling this story – a moving and tragic example of the impact of ideological thinking. There are contemporary examples of similar dangerous madness in this piece: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/54-madness-and-the-evaporation-of-authority
Thanks Hugh, I’ll take a look
What an excellent thought provoking article.
i think Mr Strachsn would have got on well with Edmund Burke.Their messaging is as important today as it was in Pitts time
Thank you for the musical link.
Quite mournful music.
What an absolutely fascinating article. But what a tragedy for the St Kilda archipelago. I shall listen to the music. Thank you very much, Mr Strachan.
That was a really interesting article, in fact I am going to research more, I think one of the clear points, as if we weren’t aware, is how one persons ideaology can destroy a whole society. Thank you
What a fascinating and sad story.
It demonstrates that extremist religious zealots (whether they represent Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Gaia/Net Zero) are basically bullies, control freaks and entirely destructive.
We seem to have an abundance of them in Government.
My great grandfather was the last teacher on St.Kilda. I believe he acted as the last, part time, minister of the Free Church and he moved on to be a minister at Blair Athol where he is buried. My grandfather trained as a doctor and escaped to Wolverhampton!
That’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing. It’s Thanks to men like your great grandfather we know about the lives of the islanders.
Brilliant piece. Thank you.
Thanks Simon
Well done to C.S. Strachan for such an outstanding article.
Thank you