Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., also known as RFK Jr., was born January 17, 1954. A member of the Kennedy family, known for their public service actitives, he is a son of the U.S. attorney general and senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a nephew of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy and senator Ted Kennedy. He has a family resemblance to his father and uncles. He has a strange sounding voice, attributed to spasmodic dysphonia is a chronic neurological voice disorder and a focal laryngeal dystonia. It results in involuntary spasms of the muscles that open or close the vocal folds, causing a voice that presents with breaks and strained/strangled quality or breathy quality. The cause of laryngeal dystonia is know to be neurologial, but the source is unknown.
He was educated at Harvard and Kennedy and the University of Virginia School of Law. He practiced environmental law, and his greatest achievement was cleaning up the Hudson River in New York. He was, for a time, the apparent inheritor of the Kennedy charisma, but about five years ago he began to disseminate misinformation. Vanity Fair quoted his sister Rory as saying her brother, though a prominent and successful environmental lawyer known for suing polluters, could be fast and loose with the facts. “He can say some crazy sh*t, even though he might come across as an expert,” she said. “That’s who he is.” RFK Jr can turn confidence and assurance for expertise and credibility while disseminating misinformation.
Forbes magazine (June 2023) reported that Kennedy had said “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of eastern European background, associated with the Yiddish language and culture. The other major group of Jews are Sephardic, a Jewish diaspora population with origins in the Iberian Peninsula, Chinese and Black people.”
Vanity Fair magazine described his problematic personality — the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the “savior complex” (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.”
Kennedy started as s candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, but failed to get approval. He then switched to an independent candidacy, but again was unable to get on the ballots of enough states to be a viable candidate, running mostly on the Kennedy name and the idealism that led uncle JFK to victory – “Put A Kennedy In The White House.” This also failed, but Kennedy attacked some of the leaders of science and industry with his book, “Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” (Children’s Health Defense, 2021). The unsigned Amazon blurb says, “‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ reveals how ‘America’s Doctor’ launched his career during the early AIDS crisis by partnering with pharmaceutical companies to sabotage safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS. Fauci orchestrated fraudulent do-nothing studies, and then pressured US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators into approving a deadly chemotherapy treatment he had good reason to know was worthless against AIDS. Fauci did the unthinkable and repeatedly violated federal laws to allow his Pharma partners to use impoverished and dark-skinned children as lab rats in beyond order, deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies...”
The New York Times (7/26/23) published a report, “5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Promoted.” “Mr. Kennedy had said he is not an anti-vaxer but wants to make vaccines safe. Nonetheless he has associated vaccines with autism,” The Times reported, also stating “Drawing on longstanding dubious claims, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly endorsed the idea that mass shootings have increased because of heightened use of antidepressants.”
Before Trump announced Kennedy would be his secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy showed his anticipated loyalty, putting together a collection of memorabilia, including baseball caps with the slogan “Make America Healthy Again” ($35), t-shirts ($35) and coffee cups with a picture of Kennedy with Trump ($17). Another product is a cap with the slogan “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again”($35). Tallow has some advantages as a frying oil, but it has dropped in usage because of its saturated fat content. Saturated fats may increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, increases risk of heart disease and obesity. The American Heart Association recommends only 5-6% of your daily calories come from saturated fats.
There are no good statistics of the benefits of vaccination, but the Salk Vaccine, first approved in 1955 has almost completely eradicated polio. Fluoridated water has reduced dental cavities by an estimated 40%. Drugs now approved for use in the United States are reviewed by a blue-ribbon panel of physicians and scientists — but we can expect a severe retrogression in quality of care.
In the 1950s chickenpox was a rite of childhood and as recently as the early 1990s, more than four million people got chickenpox, hospitalizations reached 10,500 to 13,500, and 100 to 150 died. Half of those deaths were children. Now, chickenpox is rare in the United States. Each year, there are fewer than 150,000 cases, 1,400 hospitalizations, 30 deaths.
It looks bad.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sam.uretsky@gmail.com
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us