Those darn Jews!

A couple quick thoughts on conspiracy theorists before "they" take this down. This is, of course, sarcastic.

When Robert Kennedy the Junior announced his candidacy for president I, like a lot of people, thought why? This is a person who has never held elected office or run anything larger than an environmental organization. Before he declared, all I really knew about him was that he advocated for wind power until a proposed wind farm project threatened the views from his beach house and that, until very recently, he regularly drunkenly hit on much younger girls in the same beach community. I also knew that he believed vaccines caused autism. If I had an opinion of the guy at all, it was that he was a louche crank but harmless; what I didn’t know is that he was nuts enough to believe he should be President of the United States.

Because I have no desire to put RFK’s mug up here, I choose Mark Rylance.

Today, the NY Post published video of him saying “There is an argument that [Covid] is ethnically targeted… it 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.”

In other words, the Jews did Covid. With an assist from those rascally Chinese. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, fuck this guy.

This isn’t Kennedy’s first brush with anti-Semitism. In January, during an anti-vaccine rally, he said ““Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

Both his sister and wife condemned his remarks, for which he later apologized.

But wait there’s more! The group he founded in 2011, Children’s Health Defense, regularly posts to Gab, the far right social media platform whose founder, Andrew Torba, according to this Rolling Stone article, “is openly antisemitic and has said American Christians are  ‘done being controlled’ in ‘our own country’ by the ‘two-percent minority,’ meaning Jewish people.”

All of this to say, scratch a conspiracy theorist and you’ll find an anti-Semite.

It’s so disheartening when we can’t even have a good bioweapons conspiracy theory without it turning into Jew bashing. Conspiracy theories, by definition, require some secret “they” manipulating others to carry out their nefarious plans. What better They than the rascally Jews? Why not? They blame us for everything else – why not Covid? I’m not saying every conspiracy theory comes down to blaming the Jews, but let’s be honest, every conspiracy theory comes down to blaming the Jews.

(Even RFK’s uncle, JFK, has an anti-Semitic version attached to his assassination. The theory is that Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, had Kennedy killed because he objected to Israel’s drive to develop a nuclear weapon. This is, of course, utter bunk.)

We normally think of conspiracy theorists as the befuddled and paranoid. They’re the people thumbtacking strings to giant wall maps hoping to find patterns where none exist. So how fucked up is it that a member of one of the nation’s most popular and powerful families is so lost up his own ass that he has to look at the Jews to blame for a world he neither understands nor has contributing much towards? Did the Jews also cause his heroin habit?

So it gives me no joy to admit that I, too, am something of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to evidence of the otherworldly. Even occasional readers to this blog know that I am a believer in some sort of ill-formed conspiracy regarding UFOs. I say “ill-formed” because while I suspect this is true, I do not understand the contours of this alleged conspiracy, only that elements of the government and private industry have kept secret much of what they know about extraterrestrial (for lack of a better word) vehicles and, potentially, entities that operate them. Ugh. It’s embarrassing even to write that but it’s true. For better or for worse, I’m a conspiracy theorist, too.

And yes, the UFO community has its own anti-Semitic guru, a guy named David Icke, who believes a Reptilian extraterrestrial race of shapeshifters (Jews) secretly controls the world. He too believes Jews caused Covid-19 and that, in conjunction with Bill Gates, are using 5G to make the global population more vulnerable to this disease. Icke’s videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s made a nice little cottage industry of being a prick.

The embarrassing thing about believing in any sort of conspiracy theory, however lightly, opens the mind to engaging in others. This may work the other way, too. Challenging the mainstream consensus on conventional wisdom can push boundaries in healthy ways; for example, I just watched a play about Ignaz Semmelweiss, a Hungarian doctor who discovered bacteria by comparing mortality rates in the Vienna maternity ward in which he worked between doctors who delivered babies and midwives. He was roundly criticized and ostracized by the medical community for his views that doctors should – gasp – wash their hands before performing medical procedures on patients. In a very real sense, he fought against the conspiracy of ignorance. Semmelweiss, I’m proud to report, was a Jew.

Conventional wisdom demands scrutiny. Maybe it pushes one towards new insights, new opportunities, new ideas. It need not push one towards hate.

And for the record: this Ashkenazi Jew got Covid.