RFK Jr. Reveals Death Threats

The news broke on Tucker Carlson last night

“I get a lot of threats, death threats,” RFK Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter last night. “For example, about two weeks ago, a mentally ill person got on the second floor of my house, and this is very, very common.”

The news comes less than a week after Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, former journalist and National Assembly member, was shot and killed following an evening campaign rally in Quito on August 9. The murder occurred just two weeks before the first round of nationwide voting in Ecuador, scheduled for August 20.

On the last day of July, Villavicencio had informed the media that he had received death threats from drug gangs linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. These threats apparently came in response to Villavicencio’s campaign messaging, which had focused on ending drug trafficking and gang violence. 

Since the gangland killing, police in Quito have taken six Colombian nationals into custody.  

Villavicencio’s assassination, and the newly revealed threats against Kennedy, are deeply disturbing to American Values 2024, which owns and funds The Kennedy Beacon. As widely reported, on July 21 Kennedy was denied U.S. Secret Service protection.

“For the Biden administration to actively attack Kennedy, target him, vilify him, spread vicious lies about him which are designed to make people hate him, and then deny him Secret Service protection may actually constitute criminal activity,” said American Values 2024 co-founder, Tony Lyons.

After the assassination of RFK Jr’s father during the 1968 presidential primaries, Congress passed legislation to provide security for all major candidates running for the Oval Office. Although the legislation specifies that protection must be given within 120 days of the general election, over the years the Secret Service has clearly used a wide amount of discretion. For example, in the case of candidate Barack Obama, the U.S. Secret Service provided him with protection 551 days before the election. In 1972, RFK Jr’s uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, received Secret Service protection before he even announced his candidacy, while in 1979, the Secret Service again provided day-to-day security to the senator, this time 400 days prior to the election.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, denied Kennedy’s 67-page request for protection in spite of the seriousness of its risk assessment.

As for his thinking about the cartels, Kennedy shares many of the same concerns as the now murdered fifty-nine-year-old Ecuadoran candidate, who leaves behind a wife and five children. On a recent trip to the southern U.S. border, Kennedy observed that open immigration has become a “business proposition for the cartels. It’s become a multibillion dollar business every month, smuggling people across.” 

Kennedy has pledged to end the “dystopian nightmare” at the border and make legal immigration a more orderly and expedited process. He also promised to make shutting down cartel-led immigration a top priority if he were to become our next president.