Introduction

On August 6, the New York Times published an article by Peter Baker titled “Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family”. The article’s one-sentence summary states, “The presidential bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tested the bonds of an iconic Democratic clan that does not want him to run and does not know what to do about it.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also known as Bobby, is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. He is the son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the presidency. (Despite this family history, the Biden administration recently declined RFK Jr.’s request for Secret Service protection, and the media as usual have been misinforming the public about the significance of this decision.)

Baker’s one-sentence summary conveys the message that RFK Jr.’s family is united in opposing his candidacy, which is untrue. The article’s featured image is of Kennedy giving a speech in Boston, Massachusetts, to announce his candidacy on April 19, 2023. To the left and above the photographer, out of view of the telephoto lens, were members of his family who were there to support him.

The aim of the New York Times article is to inform us how certain members of Kennedy’s family oppose his candidacy due to their disagreement with certain of his views.

However, Baker’s article is not journalism. It is a work of political propaganda aimed at prejudicing us against Kennedy as a presidential candidate who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

You can tell this by the way the Times portrays RFK Jr.’s critical relatives as though holding correct opinions about him, which portrayal is accompanied by the Times’s own reliance on strawman argumentation for the purpose of demonization.

A strawman argument is logical fallacy whereby a false characterization of an opposing view is presented, and then a counterargument is made to challenge that “strawman” instead of addressing the actual opposing view. This is a favored propaganda device utilized by the mainstream media to deflect from real issues and to control people’s thoughts by deceiving them into holding mistaken beliefs.

In this instance, we are supposed to believe that Kennedy is a crazy conspiracy theorist prone to bigoted rants. To persuade us into drawing this false conclusion about Kennedy, the Times demonstrably lies about his views and statements.

The Power of the Mainstream Media’s Political Propaganda

The type of political propaganda produced by the New York Times is highly effective. As illuminated in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal treatise on the subject, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the mainstream media serve a propaganda function, limiting the range of allowable opinion to a very narrow spectrum in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of harmful and outright criminal government policies.

This function of the media helps to explain why Democrats tended to place even more faith in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after it repeatedly lied to the public about COVID‑19-related matters than they did before the pandemic.

The lies propagated by the CDC included falsehoods aimed at serving the financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies, such as deceiving people into the belief that two doses of an mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine would confer durable sterilizing immunity, ending the pandemic by stopping infection and transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2. The reliance on this lie by government officials reveals how the aim was to manufacture consent for the policy aim of achieving high vaccination rates rather than to properly educate the public with respect for the right to informed consent.

The consequence of the media’s parroting of the government’s lies was the systematic violation of this fundamental human right.

Throughout the pandemic, the government colluded with social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor factually accurate information that didn’t align with the adopted political agenda, while the Big Tech companies in turn partnered with the media’s faux “fact check” industry to suppress truth while spreading deceitful government and pharmaceutical industry propaganda.

I was banned by LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting how the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines confer better protection than natural immunity was contradicted at the time by virtually all the non-CDC-originating scientific literature and was later falsified by the CDC’s own data as reported by its own researchers in its own MMWR journal.

Yet a recent poll showed that, instead of being repulsed by how the government sought to systematically violate the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is supposed to protect our freedom of speech and freedom of the press, most Democrats now favor continued censorship and trust the government to tell them what to think.

The malevolent influence of the New York Times and other propaganda outlets helps to explain how this situation can exist in a supposedly free country supposedly populated by free-thinking individuals.

In fact, such statist propaganda is so effective—as Peter Baker’s article clearly demonstrates—that members of the Kennedy clan who oppose Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy have themselves fallen prey to the brazen lies being told about him by mainstream media outlets, with the standard for deception being set by America’s “newspaper of record”, the New York Times.

The ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Canard

The New York Times’ “Anguish in Camelot” article opens by reporting that the “only grandson of President John F. Kennedy”, Jack Schlossberg, has “had enough” with his cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Just days before Schlossberg published an Instagram post criticizing RFK Jr., the Times states, “his conspiracy-minded cousin had suggested that Covid‑19 had been engineered to protect Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

This claim about RFK Jr. happens to be untrue, but we’ll come back to that.

Undisclosed by the Times is that Schlossberg’s Instagram post was a political statement in which he endorsed Joe Biden for president, showering Biden with praise to such an extent that he ludicrously credited Biden with having “ended the COVID pandemic”. (One lesson from the pandemic that must surely have been hard not to learn is that the virus does not obey the whims of politicians.)

While it should be obvious that such ridiculous political propaganda is not to be taken seriously, the New York Times does just that. To try to get us to take Schlossberg’s criticism of his cousin seriously, Baker goes on to ridicule what he describes as Kennedy’s “conspiratorial musings”.

Here, Baker links to another Times article published on July 6, from which we can learn that one of these “conspiratorial musings” is the belief that JFK’s assassination was not the work of a lone gunman but the result of a conspiracy—a view that happens to be shared by most Americans.

That President Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” was also the conclusion drawn in 1979 by the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations.

On August 15, reporter Tucker Carlson published an interview with RFK Jr in which Kennedy explains his view about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the motives for his uncle’s assassination. Viewers can watch starting at about the 16-minute mark in part two of the interview judge for themselves whether he sounds crazy and his conclusions implausible (and why hasn’t the government declassified the documents?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oHsX-3lmNw

(In part one, Kennedy also discussed the Biden administration’s denial of his request for Secret Service protection, and he mentions my name and the article I published on that topic on August 7. Other important topics discussed included the war in Ukraine, the migrant humanitarian crisis, and the harms of inflation.)

Incidentally, Kennedy explains during the interview that it was the CIA with its malevolent influence on the media that popularized the use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” to dismiss legitimate perspectives as though loony. The New York Times of today would surely make the CIA of JFK’s era proud.

Deflecting from Real Tyranny with the ‘Microchip’ Strawman

Another “conspiracy theory” propagated by RFK Jr., according to the New York Times, is that “coronavirus vaccines were developed to control people via microchips.”

The Times evidently wants us to believe that Kennedy has propagated the claim that COVID‑19 vaccines contain microchips. In a paper published in the journal PLoS One titled “COVID‑19 vaccine rumors and conspiracy theories”, we find the following paraphrased summary of this microchip claim:

With the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine, microchips (nano-chips) will also be introduced into the human body, then 5G networks will enter the business, through which the world elite will send various signals to the chips, thereby controlling humanity.

The Times notably makes no effort to substantiate its claim that Kennedy has been among those spreading the claim that the vaccines contain microchips.

The simple explanation for this omission of evidence by the Times is that Kennedy has never claimed that the vaccines contain microchips.

This is a good lesson for the savvy news consumer: Whenever you see the media saying that somebody said something, but they do not provide a quote or otherwise provide a source for you to verify that the person said the thing, that is a huge red flag that you are consuming propaganda rather than journalism.

The New York Times is not the only mainstream propaganda outlet to spread this disinformation about Kennedy. Numerous others have utilized the same strawman argument to demonize him, and the Times is simply regurgitating the lie.

In an article published on June 22, for example, Slate falsely claimed that Kennedy had claimed that Microsoft founder Bill Gates “is implanting tracking devices into humans through microchips in the vaccine.”

That article cited a Forbes article from August 15, 2020, that similarly tried to connect Kennedy to the “conspiracy theory that Gates plans to install tracking devices into humans with the coronavirus vaccine”.

The same day as Forbes, The Daily Beast ran an article likewise trying to connect Kennedy to “the notion that Gates planned to insert microchips in would-be vaccine patients to monitor and control their behavior”.

Both Forbes and The Daily Beast referenced an Instagram post from Kennedy on August 11, 2020, that, by The Daily Beast’s account, propagated the “conspiracy theory” that “Bill Gates has hatched a plot to implement tracking devices on billions of people under the guise of a COVID‑19 vaccine.”

In fact, Kennedy’s Instagram post did not claim that the vaccines were being used to implant microchips into people.

His post instead included a meme with an image of Bill Gates laughing and the words “The digitalized economy? We get rid of cash and coins. We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!”

It is obvious from the actual text of the meme that the chip being referred to is not one that would be implanted into people via vaccination (because, logically, there would be no chip in unvaccinated people to turn off).

Hence, the claim that Kennedy claimed that there were microchips in the vaccines is a brazen and deliberate lie.

The purposeful effect of that lie, in addition to simply demonizing Kennedy for something he never said, is to deflect from the meme’s legitimate underlying message about the threat of authoritarian governance. The meme was obviously intended as a darkly humorous tongue-in-cheek warning about a possible dystopian future based on current realities.

For instance, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has advocated the “benefits of a cashless society” in a future “digital economy”, and it is of course true that the powers-that-be have been moving toward implementation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Among the central banks moving in this direction is the Federal Reserve.

At the “Bitcoin 2023” event in Miami, Florida, on May 19, 2023, Kennedy gave a talk in which he discussed the existential threat of governments abusing their power to control access to currency as a means of silencing critics and controlling people’s behavior.

An example is China’s “social credit” system.

We also witnessed how the government of Canada froze bank accounts of people who protested its authoritarian lockdown measures including vaccine mandates.

More recently, in the UK, former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage had his personal and business accounts with Coutts bank closed on what he claimed were “political grounds”. As reported by The New American, the BBC disputed this with a report claiming that the reason for his account’s closure was that his account balances had fallen below the required threshold:

The broadcaster was forced to issue a significant correction to its report and send a formal letter of apology to Farage after he obtained a 40-page dossier that Coutts had compiled to make the case for debanking him. That document revealed that although the bank found that Farage met the “criteria for commercial retention,” it was closing his accounts because his “values … do not align with the bank’s.”

The BBC changed its headline and acknowledged “that the information we reported—that Coutts’ decision on Mr Farage’s account did not involve considerations about his political views—turned out not to be accurate and have apologized to Mr Farage.”

In the US just last month, Dr. Joseph Mercola, the founder of the leading natural health website Mercola.com, reported that “JP Morgan Chase Bank informed me they are closing all of my business accounts, along with the personal accounts of my CEO, my CFO and their respective spouses and children”.

Mercola commented, “This is what the new social credit system looks like, and what every soul on the planet can expect from the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that are being rolled out. Go against the prevailing narrative of the day, and your financial life will be deleted with the push of a button.”

There are numerous other examples of individuals being debanked for expressing views unapproved by the political establishment.

It is also true that the powers-that-be have envisioned the use of microchips as part of the envisioned digitalized economy.

For example, the lead paragraph of a World Economic Forum article on the subject in 2017 stated, “When we talk about a cashless society, we usually mean using contactless bank cards or smartphones to make everyday purchases. But what if you don’t need to carry a device at all?” The article went on to discuss “the tantalizing prospect” of implanting microchips into workers that would in time become a “passport for everything”.

A news roundup post from the WEF linked to that article with the creepy advice, “When your mobile phone isn’t mobile enough. Try an implanted microchip.”

A WEF article in August 2022 stated that “implant technologies could become the norm in the future”. The article included the less-than-reassuring remark, “Are we moving towards a ‘brave new world’? As scary as chip implants may sound, they form part of a natural evolution that wearables once underwent.”

We are further advised by the WEF, “If the idea of a chip in your body makes you cringe, consider all the pharmaceuticals you take without question.”

The telling assumption underling that piece of advice is that we should set aside our own intuition and do what we’re told without question as opposed to considering our own feelings and thinking for ourselves.

The WEF has also advocated the use of “vaccine passports” as a means of coercing people into accepting vaccinations and penalizing individuals who choose not to accept these pharmaceutical products. The World Health Organization (WHO), too, has pushed for a global vaccine passport system; and in the wake of the COVID‑19 lockdowns, the WHO has been aiming to acquire even more centralized power to implement authoritarian measures in the event of another pandemic.

In February 2021, the WHO issued an interim position paper that advised against countries implementing vaccine passport systems not on any ethical or legal grounds but only because of the technicality that the COVID‑19 vaccines hadn’t been shown to prevent transmission (a fact acknowledgeable for such internal deliberations but withheld from the public relations messaging about vaccine effectiveness). Hence, basic medical ethics and the legally protected right to informed consent were not among the WHO’s considerations.

The WHO receives funding from vaccine manufacturers, including GSK, Sanofi, and Merck. Presently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the WHO’s second largest source of funding (after Germany and before the US).

In addition to funding the WHO’s “Global Vaccine Action Plan”, the Gates Foundation has also joined the US government in partnering with Moderna in the development of the mRNA technologies used in its COVID‑19 vaccine.

It is also true that Bill Gates has funded the development of implantable biotech specifically to track individuals’ vaccination status. (The digital vaccine certificate utilized a “quantum dot dye” technology rather than a microchip—“something like a bar-code tattoo”.)

Gates was among the most prominent advocates of the disastrous authoritarian lockdowns and has advocated the use of vaccine passports.

Journalists Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal in October 2021 published a detailed exposé of Bill Gates’ role in the global “public health” establishment titled “Public health or private wealth? How digital vaccine passports pave way for unprecedented surveillance capitalism”. They reported how “The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid‑19 crisis to institute social credit-style ID systems across the West.” (Note that the “capitalism” that Loffredo and Blumenthal refer to is the opposite of free market capitalism, more rightly labeled “crony capitalism” or perhaps most appropriately “fascism”.)

The Gates Foundation had, for example, funded “a WHO paper providing ‘implementation guidance’ for proof of vaccination certifications across the world.”

Another Gates-funded effort is “the world’s largest digital ID database, known as Aadhaar”, which “is named for a 12 digit number that serves as proof of identity and address, among other markers, anywhere in India.” As Loffredo and Blumenthal reported,

In 2016, the Gates Foundation ponied up funding for a World Bank project called the Identity for Development (ID4D) Initiative for the declared purpose of bringing the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.”

To date, the World Bank has invested $1.2 billion into the ID4D initiative, with the official aim of creating “identification systems using 21st Century solutions.”

. . . Back in 2016, Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), Microsoft, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation established a new consortium to provide digital ID certificates to infants when they receive their routine immunizations. They called it ID2020, incidentally naming it for the year that a global pandemic would be declared.

ID2020 says it is “dedicated to spearheading a global digital biometric identity standard,” and claims Digital IDs will lead to “financial independence.”

In February 2021, ID2020 announced the launch of the “Good Health Pass Collaborative”, whose website’s homepage features former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair—who joined US President George W. Bush in initiating an illegal war of aggression against Iraq on the basis of lies about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—saying that we “urgently require an internationally-recognized system of health passes” for travelers to “prove their health status” as a step “to limit the spread of new COVID‑19 variants.”

The “Interoperability Blueprint” page of the site makes clear that “health status” includes “proof of vaccination”.

Bill Gates has also expressed his desire for global depopulation and has advocated mass vaccination as a means to get there on the grounds that people in developing countries wouldn’t have so many children if they had a higher odds of surviving childhood—a belief that ignores the scientific evidence that non-live vaccines like the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine are actually associated with an increased risk of childhood mortality.

In his Instagram post, Kennedy recommended the investigative reporting of independent journalist James Corbett, who in a major video series on Bill Gates has observed how the Gates Foundation has funded “the research, development and deployment of injectable contraceptives to the developing world.”

Corbett continues:

In 2014 it was announced that Microchips Biotech, Inc., a company in Lexington, Massachusetts, had developed a new form of birth control: “a wireless implant that can be turned on and off with a remote control and that is designed to last up to 16 years.” According to MIT Technology Review, the idea originated when Bill Gates visited Robert Langer’s MIT lab in 2012 and asked him if it would be possible to create an implantable birth control device that could be turned on or off remotely. Langer referred Gates to the controlled release microchip technology he had invented and licensed to MicroCHIPS Biotechnology, and the Gates Foundation granted $20 million to the firm to develop the implants.

Corbett goes on to accurately report how Gates has aimed to reduce the global population while maintaining a “core mission of vaccinating every child on the planet to providing every child with a digital biometric identity.”

The Gates Foundation is also a major funder of “The Vaccine Alliance” organization known as Gavi, which in 2018, Corbett notes, “issued a call for innovation in digital technologies ‘for finding, identifying and registering the most vulnerable children.’ The call specifically requested technologies for capturing, storing and enrolling the biometric details of infants on ‘rugged biometric devices.’”

In sum, the message communicated by the meme in Kennedy’s Instagram post is firmly grounded in the truth that powerful individuals like Bill Gates want to move us into a cashless society in which we buy and sell using central bank digital currencies in connection with digital IDs, implants, and vaccine passport systems.

Here is the meme Kennedy shared for your consideration it in light of all of the above information about the push toward centralized global governance; compare its true message with how the mainstream media distort it to falsely claim that Kennedy claimed that COVID‑19 vaccines contain microchips:

This meme speaks accurately to how emerging technologies could be used and how the powers-that-be evidently would use them if We the People do not act to defend our precious liberty.

After falsely suggesting that Kennedy is among those who have claimed that the COVID‑19 vaccines contain microchips, the Times notes that Kennedy issued a statement in April responding to public criticisms against him from family members by saying, “I bear them no ill will. Families can disagree and still love each other.”

Asked to provide a comment to the Times, Kennedy responded, “It’s pretty clear that the Times is not going to treat me fairly honestly so I’m going to decline.”

Indeed, Baker’s article clearly and incontrovertibly demonstrates the Times’ dishonesty and prejudicial treatment of Mr. Kennedy.

That the Times is so dishonest is unsurprising; the newspaper is just fulfilling its usual function. What is truly remarkable is the fact that some of Kennedy’s own family members choose to believe the media’s lies about him.

The Unproven Mortality Benefit of COVID‑19 Vaccines

“For years,” the Times article goes on, “Mr. Kennedy has made himself into a champion of the vaccine resistance movement, promoting spurious assertions about the dangers of inoculations and once calling the Covid‑19 vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made.’”

It is notable that the Times in this instance chose to describe the movement Mr. Kennedy has been at the forefront of as “the vaccine resistance movement” instead of the usual “anti-vaccine movement”. This might represent progress since “anti-vaxxer” is the derogatory label used by the media to dismiss legitimate concerns about government vaccine policies. This is presumably a result of Kennedy’s consistent insistence that he is not “anti-vaccine” but rather pro-informed consent.

At the same time, the Times’ description of the movement appropriately conjures up the Borg characters from Star Trek: “Resistance is futile. All will be assimilated.”

This results from the Times’ effort to avoid describing the movement in a way that accurately characterizes Bobby Kennedy’s views—such as by calling it the “health freedom movement”.

It is also notable that the Times dismisses Kennedy’s remark about COVID‑19 vaccines as false without even attempting to provide a counterargument. If COVID‑19 vaccines are not, then which vaccine is the deadliest?

The context of the quote matters, as well. The quote is from a presentation from Kennedy to the Louisiana House of Representatives on December 6, 2021.

During that presentation, Kennedy pointed out the fact that the clinical trial data from the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine showed that those who received the vaccine were more likely to die than those who did not. This outcome was most notably due to an imbalance in outcomes whereby more subjects died from cardiac arrest in the vaccine group—deaths that were plausibly caused by the vaccine.

As observed by leading researchers into the “non-specific effects” of vaccines, the clinical trial data for mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines showed no mortality benefit of vaccination.

The authors of a study in Clinical Research in Cardiology looked at autopsy reports of people who died unexpectedly within 20 days of receiving COVID‑19 vaccination and concluded, “Overall, autopsy findings indicated death due to acute arrhythmogenic cardiac failure. Thus, myocarditis can be a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS‑CoV‑2 vaccination.”

A systematic review of autopsy findings in deaths following COVID‑19 vaccination published on the preprint server Zenodo found, “The most implicated organ system in COVID‑19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%), and multiple organ systems (7%).” Out of a total of 44 papers containing 325 autopsy cases, “A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID‑19 vaccination.”

A public opinion survey by Rasmussen Reports in March 2023 found that “Nearly as many Americans believe someone close to them died from side effects of the COVID‑19 vaccine as died from the disease itself.”

The specific argument of Kennedy’s that the New York Times references from his testimony to the Louisiana House of Representatives is that there have been more deaths reported to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) than to all other vaccines combined for the 30-year life of the surveillance system.

Here is what the VAERS data look like in graphical form from a study published by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), with reported deaths on the right:

VAERS was established under a 1986 law that granted broad legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers against vaccine injury lawsuits and created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) to shift the financial burden for vaccine injuries away from the pharmaceutical industry and onto the taxpaying consumers (the program is funded by an excise tax included in the price of each vaccine dose).

While the VAERS data do not prove that COVID‑19 vaccines were the cause of the reported deaths, this is certainly an alarming safety signal that the New York Times has previously tried to dismiss and deflect attention from.

Instructively, the Times has two virtually opposite descriptions of VAERS depending solely on the criterion of whether the data are being used to support the claim of vaccine safety or to draw attention to signals of potential harms from vaccination.

When attempting to reassure its readers about vaccine safety, the Times describes VAERS as a reliable system for rapidly identifying any possible harms, “an aggressive system to track and detect side effects so they can be addressed”.

Yet, in response to observations about the alarming number of deaths reported to VAERS following COVID‑19 vaccination, the Times dismisses VAERS as “a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers”, a system that “generally cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness.” Health officials, the Times tells us in this alternative context, “warn against using VAERS to make determinations about vaccine risks.”

Thus, to support its own claims of vaccine safety, the Times describes VAERS as a reliable surveillance system for rapidly identifying any possible harms from vaccines, whereas when VAERS data reveal an alarming safety signal, the Times dismisses it as an outdated system that is practically worthless for that purpose.

The Times instructively does not dispute the facts presented by Kennedy that the clinical trials for the Pfizer vaccine showed no mortality benefit or that there have been more deaths reported after receipt of COVID‑19 vaccines than for all other vaccines throughout the life of the VAERS program.

For the obvious reason, the Times also declines to substantiate its dismissal of Kennedy’s conclusion that more people have died from COVID‑19 vaccines than from any other vaccine over in the past three decades by enlightening us as to which other vaccine it thinks has been deadlier.

Lying about Kennedy’s Anne Frank Comment

The New York Times next regurgitates one of the usual propaganda talking points about Bobby Kennedy emanating from the mainstream media, which is that he “has said Anne Frank had more freedom during the Holocaust than Americans pressured to take the vaccine”.

The claim that Kennedy has claimed that unvaccinated Americans experienced worse tyranny during the lockdowns than Jews did during the Holocaust is a complete fabrication on the part of the mainstream media.

Kennedy never said any such thing. This claim is yet another outright lie, as anyone can verify for themselves by watching the speech he gave at a “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington, DC, and seeing how the media take his statement about Anne Frank completely out of context.

Evidently, Times writer Peter Baker couldn’t be bothered to do journalism by actually watching Kennedy’s speech, as indicated by the fact that, instead of providing a link to the speech, he supports his own gross mischaracterization of it by lazily relying on a Washington Post article with a headline falsely claiming that RFK Jr. said that “the unvaccinated have less freedom than Anne Frank did”.

What Kennedy actually said during the speech was that governments today “are putting in place all these technological mechanisms for control that we’ve never seen before” and that “would be the ambition of every totalitarian state since the beginning of mankind, to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent.”

The point he was making about Jews hiding or fleeing over the mountains was that Nazi Germany did not have the technological capabilities that governments have today to surveil and control people’s behavior—which is obviously true.

Kennedy additionally mentioned having visited East Germany in 1962 with his father and meeting people who had escaped the communist regime by climbing over the Berlin Wall. “Today, the mechanisms are being put in place”, Kennedy immediately added, “that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”

Thus, contrary to false characterization from the New York Times and the Washington Post, Kennedy was not saying that what unvaccinated Americans experienced during the lockdowns was worse than what Jews faced during the Holocaust. He was instead simply emphasizing the need to fight the authoritarian governance because it set dangerous precedents, including implementation of “vaccine passport” systems that would prevent people from being able to travel unless they accepted COVID‑19 vaccination (even if those individuals already had superior natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2).

What Kennedy was rather expressing is that, if Americans don’t stand up and fight for their freedom, the government will continue escalating its violations of the US Constitution and fundamental human rights to such an extent that, at some point in the future, we will be living in a dystopian system of absolute totalitarian control over the population that, with technologies like satellite surveillance, central bank digital currencies, digital IDs, and vaccine passports, would be far beyond the control achieved by any totalitarian regime in history, including Nazi Germany.

Thus, we can see that Kennedy’s true offense was merely having criticized the lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination, and we can see how the New York Times and Washington Post choose to defend these criminal policies by twisting his words out of context with the intent to demonize any form of dissent from the totalitarian agenda.

The Threat of Genetically Targeted Bioweapons

As already noted, the second paragraph of the Times’ “Anguish in Camelot” article claims that Kennedy “suggested that the Covid‑19 virus had been engineered to protect Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

Further into the article, the Times claims that Kennedy “declared that the coronavirus was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people’ and that ‘the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.’”

Note closely which parts of that statement are a quote from Kennedy and which parts are the Times’ paraphrasing of what he said.

The Times adds, “He later said he was misinterpreted, writing on Twitter that the disparate effect of the virus ‘serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons’ but ‘I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.’”

Thus, the Times characterizes Kennedy as a liar vainly attempting to deny having said something that he did in fact say.

The truth is that the Times is once again persisting in taking his statements out of context for the purpose of demonization.

To support the insistence that Kennedy did claim that the COVID‑19 vaccines are a bioweapon deliberately designed to spare Jews and Chinese, Baker cites a past Times article titled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese”. That article stated that “his suggestion that the coronavirus pandemic spared Chinese people and Jews of European descent strayed into new and bigoted territory. . . . And Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels.”

That article in turn cited a New York Post article from July 15 titled “RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews”. The Post similarly asserted that “Kennedy’s remark echoes well-worn anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus”.

Usefully, the Post provides a video clip of Kennedy’s comments, which enables us to compare the media’s characterization with what Kennedy actually said. In doing so, we can see how the Times and the Post are both deliberately misrepresenting him.

Here is what Kennedy said:

And we need to talk about bioweapons. I know a lot now about bioweapons because I’ve been doing work on it for the past two-and-a-half years, and the technology that we now have to develop these microbes, we have hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing.

In fact, COVID‑19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID‑19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune, because of the genetic differentials among different races, of the ACE2 receptor, 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 if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that.

The first point to be made here is that Kennedy in no way suggested that Jews were responsible for creating and releasing SARS‑CoV‑2. Anyone familiar with Kennedy’s views on the question of the virus’s origins knows that he rather favors the hypothesis that the virus was the result of “gain of function” experiments done by researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where the first outbreak of COVID‑19 occurred. For the Post to suggest that Kennedy was rolling out some anti-Semitic trope is totally dishonest. There is not a shred of truth to this accusation, which is demonstrative of moral and intellectual cowardice on the part of the so-called “journalists” leveling it.

The second point is that the idea that the virus was created in a lab is not a “conspiracy theory” but a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Indeed, evidence indicates that SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19, was created in a lab, and individuals involved in the “gain of function” research that appears to have resulted in the creation of this virus—including Dr. Anthony Fauci—have from the start of the pandemic sought to control the media narrative by dismissing any talk of a lab origin as a “conspiracy theory”.

For a time, Facebook even banned posts suggesting that the virus might have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak first occurred.

The New York Times, of course, has consistently downplayed the lab origin hypothesis, such as by touting now-discredited research by a group of scientists claiming the virus likely leapt from raccoon dogs to humans at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, which include several individuals who are known to have closely collaborated with Fauci to suppress discussion of a lab origin by publishing the now infamous commentary in Nature “The proximal origin of SARS‑CoV‑2”.

Earlier in the pandemic, the Times contributed to the propaganda campaign designed to deflect attention from the role of the US government in funding dangerous gain-of-function research by editorially endorsing the description of the idea that “the virus was engineered in a laboratory” as a “conspiracy theory”.

Since it became public how key players responsible for funding or participating in the research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought to control the media narrative, the media have come to acknowledge—although they persist in trying to downplay—the possibility that SARS‑CoV‑2 was created in a lab.

The third point is that Kennedy did not say that the virus was created as a bioweapon, much less that it was deliberately created to spare certain races. His comments are rather consistent with the hypothesis that the COVID‑19 outbreak was the result of an unintentional escape from the lab as opposed to the virus having been deliberately released as a bioweapon.

He simply stated that an argument can be made that COVID‑19 disproportionately affects certain races due to differences in the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, which is the cell receptor with which the spike protein of the virus binds, which enables the virus to enter and replicate inside the cell.

Moreover, he explicitly stated that it wasn’t known whether these effects were an intentional result of engineering or not, so the media’s claim that he said that the virus was a bioweapon deliberately engineered to spare certain races is yet another bald-faced lie illustrating how they take his statements out of context for the purpose of demonization.

This once again proves the willingness of the New York Times and other major media outlets to deliberately fabricate a claim and falsely attribute it to RFK Jr.—yet another illustration of the media’s routine reliance on the strawman fallacy for the purpose of manipulating public perception in service to a clear political agenda.

The fourth point is that evidence does indicate that there are genetic factors in the pathogenesis of COVID‑19. For the media to deny this and dismiss the idea as somehow racist is utterly absurd.

As Kennedy clarified on Twitter on July 15 in response to the New York Post article:

The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races since the furin cleave docking site is most compatible with Blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered. That study is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/

The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 15, 2023

On July 16, the Kennedy campaign issued a statement correctly noting how the author of the New York Post article had engaged in dishonest strawman argumentation. “Levine is fabricating an opinion, attributing it to me, and trolling for scandal,” Kennedy said.

The media outlets propagating this lie about him remained unapologetic, opting to respond to his explicit clarification by persisting in the lie. Just as the New York Times dishonestly attempted to portray Kennedy’s Twitter post as a vain attempt to deny that he had parroted some anti-Semitic trope, the New York Post ludicrously portrayed it as “attempted damage control” for having dished out a “wild conspiracy”.

While acknowledging that Kennedy cited a study “that discussed genetic factors in the spread of the deadly bug”, the Post pretended as though the study did not support Kennedy’s statement by persisting that “there is no evidence that the virus was deliberately engineered to spare certain ethnic groups”—a repetition of the same deliberate strawman argument exposed by Kennedy in his tweet.

The authors of the study Kennedy cited reasonably hypothesized that human genetic factors may play a role in the pathogenesis of COVID‑19, so they “investigated genetic susceptibility to COVID‑19 by examining DNA polymorphisms” in ACE2 and the gene TMPRSS2, “two key host factors” determining susceptibility to SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. Their findings suggested that there was “unique genetic susceptibility across different populations”.

The Times article falsely accusing Kennedy of repeating anti-Semitic tropes acknowledged the existence of the study he was referencing but asserted that it “made no reference to Chinese people as less receptive to the virus” while acknowledging that “one particular receptor for the virus appeared not to be present in Amish and Ashkenazi Jews.”

The Times withholds the fact that the “one particular receptor” is the key cell receptor that the virus’s spike protein binds with in order to infect the cell.

Moreover, the study authors pointed out that East Asian as well as Ashkenazi Jewish populations “do not appear to carry” the “deleterious variants in ACE2” that they had identified. East Asia, of course, includes China, by far the largest country in that region and the second most populous country in the world with over 1.4 billion people.

The fact that the word “Chinese” doesn’t appear in the paper is thus a moot point, but it illustrates how the purpose of the Times is not to inform but to advance its own political agenda by senselessly demonizing Biden’s leading opponent for the Democratic nomination.

Other research has found that Ashkenazi Jews commonly express an ACE2 variant that has a higher binding affinity for the spike protein, suggesting increased susceptibility, but this study, too, supports Kennedy’s main point since the authors of that study agreed that genetic factors are “likely” involved in the pathogenesis of COVID‑19. The “substantially increased affinity” of certain ACE2 variants for the spike protein “raises the possibility that they could be risk factors for severe COVID‑19.”

A study in JAMA Network Open pointed out that there were many factors that might explain racial disparities in COVID‑19 outcomes, likely including genetic factors. On August 2, 2023, JAMA published an article providing “A Genetic Explanation for Why Some People Had Asymptomatic COVID‑19”, which cited a study in Nature finding an association between asymptomatic infection and a common allele of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA).

A search for “genetic susceptibility covid-19” at PubMed.gov, a database of the medical literature operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), turns up hundreds of results. Selecting a few of the more obviously relevant ones, a study in the Lancet journal eBioMedicine in October 2021 stated that genetic predisposition to COVID‑19 “is now increasingly recognized”. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the journal Gene in August 2022 found that the evidence indicated genetic risk factors contributing to COVID‑19 susceptibility, including variations in ACE2 receptor. A review of the topic in Infection, Genetics and Evolution in June 2023 emphasized that “we are still in the need of better understanding the causal relationships between host genetics and COVID-19, in order to identify biomarkers for individuals at risk, as well as to provide potential targets for therapy.”

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, the founder of IPAK, published an article on July 17 pointing out the absurdity of the media attempting to characterize the observation that there are genetic risk factors as somehow bigoted or racist by citing two additional studies indicating that “host susceptibility variation is based on differences in ACE2 receptors.”

The fifth point to be made is that Kennedy is right to raise the alarm about the possibility of bioweapons being developed to target people based on their DNA. This is the key point that the Times stupidly deflects attention from with its libelous accusation that Kennedy is racist.

In October 2004, for instance, the British Medical Association (BMA) issued a report warning that the construction of genetically targeted bioweapons was “now approaching reality”.

In October 2005, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement including the warning that “The potential to target a particular ethnic group with a biological agent is probably not far off.”

In June 2008, the concern was raised in a hearing before the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade that “We now need to add bioweaponry incorporating human genetic technology to our arms control portfolio.”

In April 2018, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) published an article warning that governments could conceivably “edit the genes of a deadly virus so that it would affect only a single target based on his or her genetic code”. Advances in gene editing “could allow scientists to develop biological weapons capable of discriminating among target populations based on ethnic, racial, or other genetically defined characteristics.”

In August 2019, researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk published a report warning that biological weapons could be made to target specific ethnic groups.

In June 2022, at the Aspen Security Forum held by the Aspen Institute, Representative Jason Crow, a member of the House Committee on Armed Services and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, stated that

There are now weapons under development and developed that are designed to target specific people. Right? That’s what this is, where you can actually take someone’s DNA, take, you know, their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person, or take them off the battlefield, or make them inoperable.

While accusing Kennedy of echoing racist tropes by suggesting genetic risk factors for severe COVID‑19, the New York Post in July 2022 reported on Crow’s comments, adding that Senator Joni Ernst, who sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, had “warned about US enemies intentionally spreading diseases and harming agriculture, in turn causing food scarcity.”

Instructively, there was nothing in that New York Post article suggesting that we should not take these warnings seriously, much less that we should dismiss them as racist tropes.

As accurately observed by Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger of Public, a Substack publication that has producing real journalism (as opposed to what the mainstream media do), “there was nothing anti-Semitic about Kennedy’s remarks, nor did he say that the Chinese government deliberately targeted whites and blacks and spared Jews and Chinese people.”

On the contrary, “Kennedy is right to raise the alarm about China’s bioweapons program. And the debate over bioweapons research, which includes research into vaccines to protect against them, is long overdue.”

(Indeed, a major reason Dr. Anthony Fauci has long defended and supported gain of function research is to “facilitate the early stages of manufacturing vaccines” in the event of an outbreak of a novel virus.)

“We are deeply concerned about China’s potential ability to generate ethnically targeted products,” an anonymous source in the US intelligence community told Public. “And there are other countries with similar capabilities, such as Russia and Iran.”

“When discussing bioweapons,” a senior investigator in the US government said, “‘ethnic targeting’ is absolutely a goal that the Chinese government has declared. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] markets ‘ethnic targeting’ with a positive spin for ‘public health.’ In public health arenas, ‘ethnic targeting’ becomes ‘precision medicine.’”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., it’s worth noting, has written a forthcoming book titled The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race, which is currently available for pre-order.

Bobby Kennedy was raising a serious concern about the threat of genetically targeted bioweapons. The New York Times, however, does not wish for serious discussions about important issues to occur. Instead, it aims to help Biden win the election by producing deceitful political propaganda to demonize Biden’s leading challenger for the Democratic nomination.

Conclusion

The New York Times’ “Anguish in Camelot” article goes on to say that RFK Jr.’s warning about genetically targeted bioweapons was “too much for several family members”, prompting scathing denunciations by his sister Kerry Kennedy and his brother Joseph P. Kennedy II, as well as his cousin Jack Schlossberg.

Most of the rest of the article goes on about how much the Kennedy clan loves Joe Biden.

This raises the question: Why are even members of Bobby Kennedy’s own family so susceptible to being duped by the mainstream media’s brazen lies about him?

The Times wants us to dismiss him as a “conspiracy theorist” for expressing the belief shared by most Americans as well as the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations that the death of his uncle John F. Kennedy was not the work of a lone gunman but the result of a wider conspiracy.

The Times falsely suggests that Kennedy is among those who have spread the claim that COVID‑19 vaccines contain microchips, which is a deliberate misrepresentation of a meme he posted on Instagram humorously communicating a legitimate concern about the attempts by the powers-that-be to control our behavior, such as the movement toward central bank digital currencies and “social credit” systems, the debanking of people who speak out against medical tyranny, the development of digital IDs and even implantable microchips that will serve as people’s “passport for everything”, and coerced vaccination including “vaccine passports” aimed at penalizing individuals who decline these pharmaceutical products.

The Times accuses Kennedy of spreading misinformation for saying that the COVID‑19 vaccines have caused more deaths than any other vaccine in the past three decades, but it fails to address the legitimate points he made about the clinical trial data showing no mortality benefit and the alarming safety signal in VAERS data. The Times reveals its lack of seriousness on this topic, too, by using two virtually opposite descriptions of the utility of VAERS depending on the sole criterion of whether the data does or does not show a safety signal. Instructively, while rejecting Kennedy’s conclusion, the Times also declines to identify what other vaccine it is implicitly claiming has caused more deaths.

The Times falsely claims that Kennedy said that unvaccinated Americans during the lockdowns faced worse oppression than Jews living in Nazi Germany, which is a deliberate misrepresentation of what Kennedy said during his speech at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally—a strawman that, in addition to demonizing him, serves to deflect attention from the legitimate point he was making about the existential threat of authoritarian governance.

Finally, the Times falsely claims that Kennedy repeated an anti-Semitic trope by claiming that SARS‑CoV‑2 is a bioweapon deliberately engineered to spare Jews, yet another deliberate misrepresentation of his point about evidence indicating genetic risk factors in the pathogenesis of severe COVID‑19. Once again, in addition to demonizing Biden’s leading rival for the nomination, this misinformation serves to deflect from Kennedy’s legitimate point about the threat of genetically targeted bioweapons.

This case study illustrates the true function fulfilled by the New York Times and other mainstream outlets, which is not to do journalism but to generate dangerous political propaganda designed to manufacture consent for authoritarian and criminal government policies.

The fact that some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s own family members believe the lies about him emanating from major media outlets like the New York Times serves as a remarkable testimony to the extraordinary effectiveness of such deceitful mainstream propaganda.