Opinion | RFK Jr.’s latest Covid conspiracy theory is predictably toxic

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Democratic presidential candidate and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, made news again last week with comments at a perennial sand trap for politicians with presidential aspirations: the private dinner.

“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said in remarks first published by the New York Post (the Post also provided video). “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

On Twitter, Kennedy called the story “mistaken,” writing, “I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews…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.”

To be clear, Kennedy, in this tweet, reiterates the same central claim he made on video: Governments are developing “ethnically targeted” bioweapons and COVID-19 appeared to be less bad for Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people (and Finns, a group that, it must be said, often gets overlooked by conspiracy theorists).

So much about this episode, including even the reactions to Kennedy’s comments, is par for the antisemitic conspiracy course.

First, there is the conspiracy itself. Is it surprising that a person who is conspiratorial about vaccines would also end up convincing himself of a conspiracy involving Jewish people? It is not. Historically and presently, antisemitism often invokes the image of Jewish people as not only powerful and controlling, but perpetually other, distinct from the main population. In the antisemitic calculus, we Jews live amongst the rest of society, content to undermine and corrode the health and well-being of a society of which we are never really truly a part. Antisemitism also encourages paranoia: Nothing can ever really be what it seems if secret, undisclosed Jewish forces are really behind everything. Conspiracy theories and antisemitism, then, go together nicely.

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Second, there is Kennedy’s defense to being caught and called out. In addition to making his case again, but this time publicly, Kennedy blamed the mainstream media (“MSM”) for printing his “off-the-record” comments, allegedly misunderstanding those comments and creating the ensuing brouhaha. When criticized for implying that there was potentially a nefarious plot that meant COVID-19 was designed in such a way as to spare Jews, Kennedy pointed to another nefarious plot. Conspiracy begets conspiracy. (And, though Kennedy may or may not be aware of it, “the media is controlled by Jews’’ is also an antisemitic trope.)

Third, there was the response by some of Kennedy’s allies, including, in some cases, Jews. For example, Mort Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, to whom Kennedy apparently went for advice on issues pertaining to Jews and Israel, put out a statement in Kennedy’s defense. The statement read, “he is no antisemite, he is a philo-Semite.” But “philosemitism,” or particular, notable love for Jews, is often the other side of the antisemitic coin: In both cases, Jews are seen as an “other.” Klein, in his statement, also held up his own Zionist credentials. This, too, is a tired defense of antisemites. The idea here, presumably, is that Kennedy is a supporter of Israel, and friends with supporters of Israel, and thus cannot be antisemitic. At this point, the idea that one can be a supporter of the state of Israel and also spew antisemitic rhetoric is so obvious that it hardly bears repeating, but just in case: Not only can one both be a supporter of the state of Israel and also spew antisemitic rhetoric, but many are and do.

Finally, there was the understandable rush of people to fact-check Kennedy, pointing out that he wildly misunderstood the study he cited and that many Jews (and Chinese people, and Finns) died of COVID-19. This is true. And the impulse to correct the record is completely understandable: COVID-19 hit New York City’s Hasidic community, for example, and hundreds of Holocaust survivors died from the virus. One young man dedicated himself to tracking every Jewish person who lost their life to COVID-19. It is tempting to shout this at Kennedy, and to ask what doesn’t he understand about how callous it is to suggest that these real lives lost during a once-in-a-century global calamity were not also victims of this virus, which was not an “ethnically-targeted” plot.

But Kennedy has long had access to this information. What number of sick or deceased people would be high enough to convince him? What news article would finally compel him to drop his conspiracies and engage with the world around him as it is? The issue here is not that he does not know, but that he has evidently decided that that information — real information about real people who had families and loved ones and friends they will never see or hold again — is less compelling than conspiracy. But then, that too is typical of antisemitic conspiracy.