Ron Unz
THE UNZ REVIEW
Disgusting smear job by the New York Times, which has set the tone for the media's coverage of the candidate.
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:
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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Then in February 2022 the Ukraine war erupted, and foreign policy concerns superseded all else.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.
Showing how the establishment is united and fully bipartisan in its refusal to accept any "outsiders" into its privileged precincts, the Republican New York Post comes out with a filthy broadside against Kennedy.
The explosive Post headline read “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews,” and the same publication then ran twoadditional 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.
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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.
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 Timesrevealed 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 2% or 20% or 50%?
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% more vulnerable to Covid than those under 40, so a difference of 15% or 20% 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.
In late 2021, Kennedy had published a powerful opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle explaining how he had lived nearly his entire life not knowing how his own father had died, only learning the bitter truth in 2016. During all of those previous decades, he had believed that his father, Presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been killed by Sirhan Sirhan, a crazed lone assassin, rather than dying at the hands of a conspiracy.
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Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father. Gov. Newsom should set him free
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • San Francisco Chronicle • December 8, 2021 • 1,000 Words
Under normal circumstances, the media would be exceptionally eager to stigmatize any disfavored candidate as a “conspiracy theorist” for taking such positions. But in this case, the media has instead gone to extreme lengths to avoid raising this issue as I discussed last year:
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The obvious reason for this strange media reticence was that Kennedy’s position was very solidly grounded in hard factual evidence. In 2018 I drew upon some of the material in David Talbot’s widely-praised 2008 book Brothers to describe the strange aspects of the assassination. If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America. All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them. |
So we have a situation in which the American media directed a firestorm of outrage against some casual remarks that Kennedy made at a private dinner in New York City, but almost totally ignored his repeated public statements and writings regarding the conspiracy that claimed the life of his own father and also that of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. It is not difficult to see that the hostile media feels very comfortable discussing the first topic but desperately seeks to avoid the second. The Kennedy assassinations constitute a terrifying threat to the credibility of the media; if the cover-up unraveled, the American public would be outraged at discovering they had been fed lies for sixty straight years.
And the media seems even more terrified by the true contents of Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller. As I wrote last year:
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I had opened Kennedy’s book assuming that it would focus almost entirely on the vaccination issues with which the author had long been identified. Yet I soon discovered that nearly half the text—some 200 pages—was instead devoted to the disease of AIDS, an entirely different topic, and that the claims he made were absolutely incendiary. As I wrote in December: Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions. I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered. Under normal circumstances, I would have been extremely reluctant to embrace such seemingly outlandish claims, but the credibility of some of the adherents was difficult to disregard. However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.” Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role. As Kennedy explains, three additional science Nobel Laureates have also expressed similar public skepticism for the conventional HIV/AIDS narrative, one of them being Kary Mullis, the renowned creator of the revolutionary PCR test. In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer. Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT. Prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, absorbing perhaps a couple of trillion dollars of funding and becoming the central focus of an army of scientists and medical experts. It simply boggles the mind for someone to suggest that HIV/AIDS might have largely been a hoax, and that the vast majority of deaths were not from the illness but from the drugs taken to treat it. My science textbooks sometimes mentioned that during the benighted 18th century, leading Western physicians treated all manner of ailments with bleeding, a quack practice that regularly caused the deaths of their patients, with our own George Washington often numbered among the victims. Indeed, some have argued that for several centuries prior to modern times, standard medical treatments inadvertently took far more lives than they saved, and those too poor or backward to consult a doctor probably benefited from that lack. But I had never dreamed that this same situation might have occurred during the most recent decades of our modern scientific age. Since the 1980s AIDS has been an explosive topic in the public sphere, and anyone—whether scientist or layman—who questioned the orthodox narrative was viciously denounced as having blood on his hands. During the early 2000s South African President Thabo Mbeki had cautiously raised such possibilities and was massively vilified by the international media and the academic community. Yet when Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller went much farther, devoting seven full chapters to making the case that HIV/AIDS was merely a medical hoax, his media antagonists carefully avoided that subject even while they attacked him on all other grounds. Once again, the only plausible explanation is that the hostile journalists and their editors have recognized that Kennedy’s factual evidence was too strong and any such attacks might prove disastrously counter-productive. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had publicly declared that the AIDS hoax was as great a scientific scandal as the notorious Lysenko fraud, and if a substantial portion of the American public concluded that AIDS was indeed a medical phantom that had been promoted for 35 years by our gullible and dishonest media, the credibility of the latter on current vaccination issues might be completely annihilated. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the media to accurately blast Kennedy as “a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax,” and that simple, short phrase would have immediately dealt a massive body-blow to his public reputation. But many people would then have begun looking into the facts, and once they did so, the tables might have quickly turned, destroying the credibility of his critics. The total silence of the media suggests that they greatly feared that possibility.
Kennedy should recognize that his true opponent in this 2024 race is not Joseph Biden, who was dragged across the finish line of the 2020 primary and general election campaigns by his establishment supporters. Instead, his true opponent is the American establishment media, and by its very silence, it has revealed those issues it most dreads to face. Kennedy should consider focusing on some of those vulnerabilities, the “great unmentionables” that the mainstream media so fears. |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCERon Unz is a leading free-speech activist, and founding editor of the Unz Review.
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