What’s shocking isn’t that Kennedy voiced an anti-Jewish conspiracy, however that it took this lengthy.
Last week, at a dinner occasion in Manhattan, the Democratic main candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared his unvarnished ideas concerning the nature of the coronavirus. “There’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” he defined, in remarks captured on video. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” To be certain, Kennedy added, “we don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not.” In different phrases, Kennedy apparently believes it’s an open query whether or not the pandemic was engineered by a shadowy cabal to spare Chinese and Jewish individuals.
At least 1 million individuals in China have died from COVID-19; removed from being proof against the virus, Jews in locations like New York had been usually unfairly accused of spreading it. As a Jew who had his personal bout with the coronavirus, Kennedy’s claims had been information to me. But given the supply, in addition they weren’t a shock. That’s as a result of Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist, and the arc of conspiracy is brief and bends towards the Jews.
Here is only a small sampling of what Kennedy believes: that radiation from wi-fi web causes most cancers; that chemical substances within the water provide are producing gender dysphoria; that the CIA killed each his father and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy; that antidepressants trigger at this time’s mass shootings; that George W. Bush stole the 2004 presidential election; and that your telephone’s 5G connection is a part of a plot “to harvest our data and control our behavior.”
Seen within the context of Kennedy’s profession, what’s shocking will not be his foray into anti-Semitism however that it took him this lengthy to reach right here. As I’ve written earlier than:
Anti-Semitism is arguably the world’s oldest and most sturdy conspiracy principle. It presents Jews because the string-pulling puppet masters behind the world’s political, financial, and social issues. For these searching for easy options to life’s complexities, this outlook provides a ready-made clarification—and enemy. Anyone searching for a single supply for society’s travails might begin with run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories however will quickly find yourself parroting anti-Jewish concepts.
Because anti-Semitism has produced centuries of fabric pinning humanity’s issues on its Jews, an individual satisfied that an invisible hand is conducting world affairs will finally uncover that it belongs to an invisible Jew.
For this cause, it’s unattainable to flow into on the conspiratorial fringe and never encounter anti-Semitism. This is why Kennedy has continually discovered himself within the firm of those that imagine and categorical anti-Jewish concepts. Last week, he trumpeted his assembly with the rapper Ice Cube, a fellow conspiracy theorist who has a lengthy historical past of weird anti-Semitic tweets and track lyrics. In the previous, Kennedy has additionally made widespread trigger with the hate preacher Louis Farrakhan, who repeatedly rails towards alleged Jewish management of media and authorities.
That Kennedy would in the end echo the anti-Semitic assumptions of his conspiratorial cohort was inevitable. Indeed, he’s removed from the primary traveler on the well-trodden path from conspiracism to outright anti-Semitism. In current years, people as various as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyrie Irving, and Elon Musk have graduated from garden-variety conspiracy theories to anti-Jewish arguments. Even the content material of Kennedy’s COVID-19 conjecture isn’t authentic: Jews have been blamed for spreading plagues for hundreds of years, most famously throughout Europe’s Black Death.
Over the weekend, Kennedy furiously tweeted denials and clarifications, insisting that he meant solely that COVID served “as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons,” not that “the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered,” although he’d clearly raised that actual chance in his authentic remarks.
Kennedy himself has no prior historical past of anti-Semitism, and has by no means evinced private prejudice towards Jewish individuals. But his conspiratorial compass ensured that he would finally arrive at this vacation spot, as a result of it factors in just one path.