RFK Jr. Denies Antisemitism—but It’s the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suggestion that COVID-19 may have been maliciously engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people was many things—but surprising wasn’t one of them. As unhinged as the mind of a conspiracy theorist may be, it can always be trusted, sooner or later, to land on the Jews.
And that’s just what the Democratic presidential candidate did at a Manhattan dinner last week when offering his thoughts on the virus’s origins. “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he explained. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Of course, he belatedly conceded, “we don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not.”
Evidently, Kennedy isn’t bothered by the fact that COVID has killed between 1 and 1.5 million people in China, nor its devastating impact on Jewish communities. But facts are of little import to a man who believes the CIA was behind his uncle’s and father’s murders; blamed vaccines for a rise in autism; accused the Republican Party of mounting “a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people” in stealing the 2004 presidential election from John Kerry; claimed 5G internet towers are being used “to harvest our data and control our behavior”; and said that Wi-Fi breaches “the blood-brain barrier” and causes “leaky brain.”
And so, when he implicated Jews in one of history’s deadliest pandemics, the question wasn’t why, but rather, as others have wondered, what took so long? After all, antisemitism is not a mere bigotry, but a conspiratorial worldview that takes any society’s ills or perceived evils, and rather than addressing them, scapegoats Jews.
It is exceptionally malleable; in many ways, it is the ultimate conspiracy theory. It is also, as the late historian Paul Johnson observed, “a disease of the mind.” Kennedy has swum in conspiratorial waters for years; from the moment he began looking for the malevolent puppeteer behind the world’s ills, he was bound to eventually set his sights on the Jews.
Such demented thinking goes back centuries and can invariably be found in attempts to explain contemporary economic, social, religious, and political problems. In pious medieval Christian Europe, Jews were falsely accused of “deicide” for killing Jesus Christ. In the 14th century, they were blamed for the Black Death (if Kennedy thought scapegoating Jews for a disease was original, he’ll be disappointed).
In a Germany reeling from defeat in World War I, the “stab in the back” myth—that disloyal Jews caused Germany’s humiliating loss—gained widespread popularity. Years later, during the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler blamed German Jewry for the country’s economic woes. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, decried Jews it deemed disloyal as “rootless cosmopolitans” in the lead-up to its anti-Jewish purges.
For thousands of years, people’s minds were inculcated with the image of the all-powerful Jew scheming to exploit and harm the masses. As a result, it is baked into Western DNA and is far more prevalent today than what many realize.
Given conspiracy theories’ farcical nature, their expressions often provoke an instinctive laugh, such as when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed a Jewish space laser was behind deadly California wildfires. Other times, they make more surprising appearances, such as when The New York Times suggested that “powerful” rabbis pressured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to change her vote on U.S. funding for Israel’s defensive Iron Dome system. Some would perhaps place Kennedy’s assertion in this category of patently absurd but seemingly harmless anti-Jewish accusations.
They’d be wrong.
Words have consequences; when enough people blame omnipotent, wicked Jews for the world’s ills, those consequences turn deadly. Robert Bowers, who in 2018 murdered 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, specifically targeted that synagogue over its affiliation with an organization that helps refugees—described by Bowers as “invaders… that kill our people.” In 2019, after killing one and injuring three at Chabad of Poway synagogue, John Earnest claimed he was defending “our nation against the Jewish people, who are trying to destroy all white people.”
In January 2022, when Malik Faisal Akram held Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel hostage for 10 hours, he forced the congregation’s rabbi to call Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York’s Central Synagogue, convinced that Buchdahl could help release Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year sentence in Fort Worth.
“This was somebody who literally thought that Jews control the world,” Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker later said about Akram. “He thought he could come into a synagogue, and we could get on the phone with the ‘Chief Rabbi of America’ and he would get what he needed.”
There’s scant evidence suggesting Kennedy holds hostile feelings towards Jews. Indeed, following the uproar over his remarks, he slammed accusations of antisemitism as “a disgusting fabrication.”
At the same time, with incoherence befitting a conspiracy theorist, he tweeted that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” while maintaining that “the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons,” that COVID “serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons,” and that “ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews” are disproportionately untouched by the virus.
While Kennedy may not personally harbor any anti-Jewish hatred, his words followed the centuries-old tradition of blaming Jews for all that is wrong in the world. And once someone determines that the shady Jew is responsible for their grievances, they’re all the more likely to take the resultant anger out on Jews—as have countless others throughout history. Kennedy is yet to do so, but rest assured, somebody else will.
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