Keller @ Large: Are RFK Jr. and his conspiracy theories just Republican trolling?
BOSTON - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken heat many times for promoting conspiracy theories.
But now the Democratic presidential candidate is struggling to deflect intense blowback over recent comments about alleged ethnic targeting of the COVID-19 virus.
In video obtained by the New York Post, Kennedy - citing a July 2020 study by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic - tells a group at a dinner party: "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."
The study doesn't imply what Kennedy claimed. And his comments were quickly denounced by Jewish and Asian anti-defamation groups, the chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, and two of his siblings.
"Let me just put it in context," said Kennedy in a video released on his Twitter feed over the weekend. But the truly relevant context is Kennedy's long, deep history of promoting wild, unproven conspiracy theories.
About Internet mind control: "They're putting in 5G [high-speed broadband service] to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply."
About an imaginary link between anti-depressant drugs and gender issues in children: "The capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society."
And most famously, his longtime vaccine disinformation campaign: "Don't listen to your doctor," he advises at the end of an hour-long anti-vaccine documentary he helped make.
"There's a new kind of censorship called targeted propaganda that is designed to make me look unpalatable, unhinged, crazy, a crank, a conspiracy theorist," said Kennedy in his most recent Twitter video.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
Meanwhile House Republicans have invited Kennedy to testify at a Judiciary Committee hearing on alleged censorship, and committee Chairman Jim Jordan says his appearance is still on, which tells you what the Kennedy candidacy is really all about. It is essentially a Republican-backed trolling operation that hopes to use that famous last name to embarass Joe Biden and promote broader acceptance of the conspiracy theories that are the animating force for elements of the party's base.
The Kennedy name has been used and abused before but never quite like this.
