Source: Unz.com
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Then in February 2022 the Ukraine war erupted, and foreign policy concerns superseded all else.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 as 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:
COVID-19. 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….