Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Great Unmentionables

Written by Ron Unz on August 1, 2023. Posted in Current News

As the 69-year-old heir to the most famous political dynasty in our country’s modern history and the son and nephew of slain American leaders, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has lived his entire life in the public eye

But although he’s had a successful career as an environmental lawyer and political activist, America is a large country and until the last couple of years I’d only had the vaguest impression of him.

That all changed with the Covid epidemic and the vaccines developed to control it.

Over the previous dozen years, Kennedy had become a leading vaccine skeptic and in 2021, America’s anti-vaxxing movement was suddenly transformed from a marginalized, eccentric cause of the affluent liberal suburbs into a force at the white-hot center of American politics, overwhelmingly situated on the conspiratorial Republican Right.

During this long public health crisis, the mainstream media had elevated Anthony Fauci to the role of our national savior, but in late 2021 Kennedy published a blistering book attacking him and his long career, which quickly became a #1 Amazon bestseller despite the lack of any significant advertising or press coverage, and I bought and read it.

Although I’d been extremely critical of the anti-vaxxing movement, regarding it both then and now as mostly crackpottery, I was very impressed by the astonishing information he provided in his text, and wrote a strongly favorable review that was widely read and circulated:

• American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 6, 2021 • 6,100 Words

Then in February 2022 the Ukraine war erupted, and foreign policy concerns superseded all else. Both the Democratic and the Republican Party establishments became implacably hostile towards Russia, enthusiastically backing unprecedented economic sanctions against that country and its citizens, while providing a gusher of military and financial aid to the embattled Ukrainian regime.

Only a handful of prominent figures from either side of the ideological aisle were willing to challenge this near-unanimous media consensus. These naysayers emphasized the extreme risks of our military brinksmanship in fighting a NATO proxy-war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border, and Kennedy eventually joined this small group.

With the 2024 elections approaching and President Joe Biden standing arm-in-arm with the Republican establishment in support of our aggresssive Russia policy, Kennedy took the daring step of entering the race, boldly challenging the incumbent President of his own party on issues of war and peace, much like his own father had once done in his fateful 1968 campaign.

The difficulties Kennedy faced were enormous. Although he might be tremendously popular among committed anti-vaxxers, such individuals were overwhelmingly Republican, hardly of much help in a Democratic primary.

Kennedy had never previously held public office, and with virtually all elected Democrats lining up against him, the media scoffed at what it portrayed as his hopeless effort.

But then several polls came out, showing him drawing around 20% Democratic support against President Biden, an astonishing figure so early in the race.

Much like the old Soviet Pravda had protected the ruling Communist Party of the USSR, our own mainstream media fiercely defends our reigning Democratic-Republican “Uniparty” against any outsider, whether he be named Trump or Kennedy, and the latter soon became the target of vicious, biased attacks on real or contrived issues.

Most of these early media blows seem to have had little impact, but unlike lifelong career politicians, Kennedy is quite passionate and outspoken on his issues and his nascent campaign lacks the army of handlers and speechwriters that guard the candidate against controversial words.

So at a small dinner in NYC, a few of his theories regarding Covid were captured on video and soon blasted out by the hostile New York Post.

The explosive Post headline read “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews,” and the same publication then ran two additional stories within the next 24-hours. A national media firestorm soon erupted, with the New York Times headline denouncing Kennedy for his “Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory.”

Kennedy had few early defenders and some of these may hardly have helped his cause. A writer for a white racialist website praised Kennedy’s courage in speculating that the Covid virus had been bioengineered to kill white Gentiles.

The political establishment and its media allies obviously hate Kennedy and have been doing their utmost to injure his campaign, freely indulging in wild exaggerations and nasty slurs. But in this particular case, their accusations seem almost entirely correct.

Consider, for example, the vocal defense of Kennedy mounted by liberal writer Patrick Lawrence.

• The Stoning of R.F.K. Jr.
  How low will the media go?
  Patrick Lawrence • Substack • July 19, 2023 • 2,900 Words

Lawrence claimed that the media attacks on Kennedy were extremely unfair, but he included the following two quotes from Kennedy’s remarks:

There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese…

We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.

And we need to talk about bioweapons. I know a lot about bioweapons because I’ve been doing a book on them for the past two and a half years. And… the technology we now have… we’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes.

The Chinese have done the same thing…. We know the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnically targeted bioweapons, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.

That’s what all those labs in the Ukraine are about. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so they can target people by race.

Kennedy was clearly suggesting that Covid may have been developed as an ethnically-targeted bioweapon, aimed at killing white Gentiles and blacks.

Since he also claims that Jews and Chinese “are most immune,” he seems to be implying that they are the likeliest suspects in the release of a virus that has probably killed over twenty million people worldwide, including more than a million Americans.

These are absolutely incendiary statements by a Presidential candidate, far more outrageous than anything Donald Trump ever spouted, and therefore the incident fully warranted the heavy coverage that resulted.

However, the media attacked Kennedy for his remarks without attempting to refute him, leading Lawrence and many other observers to assume he had been “politically incorrect” but “scientifically correct.”

We should therefore consider whether the Presidential candidate had any factual basis for his shocking theories.

The possible creation of ethnically-targeted bioweapons has been discussed for decades and over the years there have been news reports of major research efforts to develop them.

For example, as far back in November 1998, the London Sunday Times revealed that Israel was developing an “ethnic-bomb” weapon targeting the genetic characteristics of Arab populations, and surely other countries have been doing similar military research during the decades since then.

In 2007, Russia discovered that various Western organizations were collecting Russian DNA samples, raising plausible concerns that we were developing ethnic bioweapons aimed at their population.

So in a broad sense, Kennedy’s concerns are perfectly reasonable ones and a very appropriate topic for a potential American leader. However, anyone—let alone a Presidential candidate—who raises ultra-controversial issues should be ultra-careful with his facts, and that doesn’t seem to have been the case with Kennedy.

For example, I strongly suspect that America’s massive biowarfare infrastructure—the largest and oldest in the world—has indeed done research and development work on ethnically-targeted bioweapons, but I’ve never seen any solid evidence of that, and unless he has such evidence, Kennedy shouldn’t have stated it as a fact.

Moreover, he also declared “We know the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnically targeted bioweapons.” I’ve read several of the fiercely anti-China Covid books, and I don’t recall any of them making such a claim let alone providing any documentation to back it up.

So either Kennedy has a unique source of vital intelligence information, or he’s merely promoting as fact the propaganda-lies of fringe conspiracy-activists, a very serious failing for a Presidential candidate.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect it’s the latter situation. Over the last couple of years, exactly those sorts of wild accusations have become widespread among anti-China activists, none of whom have ever had any solid evidence, and that group heavily overlaps with the anti-vaxxers who probably constitute an important part of Kennedy’s personal political circle.

It’s natural for a candidate to gradually absorb the beliefs of those around him who share his views on other subjects.

Kennedy’s claim that Jews and Chinese are much less vulnerable to Covid than blacks or white Gentiles seems equally doubtful, being based upon a 2020 scientific research study that has been widely misinterpreted in fringe conspiratorial circles.

That paper had looked at one particular genetic susceptibility trait involving ACE2 receptors and found that the deleterious variations were fairly common among blacks and white Gentiles while being rare among Latinos, East and South Asians, and Jews.

But the paper never quantified the impact of those variants: was the increase in Covid susceptibility two percent or 20 percent or 50 percent?

Furthermore, for Covid any ethnic skew in that range would be completely swamped by other factors, especially the impact of age.

Individuals over 60 are perhaps 10,000 percent more vulnerable to Covid than those under 40, so a difference of 15 or 20 percent due to genetic factors would be totally negligible by comparison.

Anyway, the best means of determining ethnic vulnerability to Covid is to rely upon actual empirical data rather than the ambiguous theoretical arguments of a paper published very early in the outbreak.

Kennedy lives in California, and the 39 million residents of his state include enormous numbers of whites, Asians, Latinos, and blacks, with the local government carefully reporting the mortality rates for all of those groups.

It only took me five minutes to locate that data on the Internet and another ten minutes to produce a simple chart showing their relative death rates, stratified by different age ranges.

As anyone can see, these real-world mortality statistics are totally different than those suggested by the theoretical research paper that Kennedy had cited. Although the Asian death rate is somewhat lower than that for whites, the difference is not large and is totally negligible across the working-age 18-64-year-old population.

The small white-Asian gap could easily be explained by differences in lifestyle, obesity, or cultural factors rather than any genetic difference. Furthermore, the research study had predicted that Latino death rates would be lower than those for whites, but instead they have been far, far higher, especially in the working-age years.

The California government doesn’t separate out Jewish mortality rates, but given that all the other scientific claims in that early study turned out to be totally wrong, we have no reason to believe that those regarding Jews were any better.

Empirical reality always trumps theoretical speculation, and Kennedy should be sharply criticized for never having bothered examining the actual data before expounding his explosive and erroneous claims.

But Kennedy is hardly alone in that failing. Consider that all the media attacks against his statements merely denounced them as “bigoted” without ever challenging them as factually inaccurate, leading Lawrence and other observers to reasonably conclude that Kennedy was right.

This certainly suggests that none of America’s large media outlets ever bothered looking at those ethnic mortality statistics either. These major media organizations command investigative resources perhaps a thousand times larger than those of Kennedy’s shoe-string campaign, and their reaction to this incident once again demonstrates their total incompetence.

Kennedy is a lawyer by training rather than a scientist, and as a non-scientist he probably has an inflated respect for any published scientific paper. So he casually misconstrued the implications of an academic journal article and never bothered checking his conclusions against easily available public statistics.

For a private individual, that’s hardly a major problem, but a far more serious failing for a Presidential candidate making such incendiary public accusations.

However, his campaign is still at a very early stage and this unfortunate controversy might have a silver lining if it forces him to become much more careful with his facts and cautious in his words.

Furthermore, given his personal background we can easily understand why he would be so extremely suspicious of the claims made by the political establishment and its media allies on a whole range of important subjects.

See more here unz.com

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