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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Insists He Is Not Antisemitic During House Hearing

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      At a hearing convened by House Republicans, the Democratic presidential candidate defended himself against charges of racism and antisemitism.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Capitol Hill on Thursday and pointedly declared that he is neither an antisemite nor a racist, while giving a fiery defense of free speech and accusing the Biden administration and his political opponents of trying to silence him.Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who turned to anti-vaccine activism and has trafficked in conspiracy theories, was referring to the storm that erupted after The New York Post published a video in which he told a private audience that Covid-19 “attacks certain races disproportionately” and may have been “ethnically targeted” to do more harm to white and Black people than to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.Mr. Kennedy appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — a panel created by Republicans to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of federal law enforcement and national security agencies. He said he had “never been anti-vax” and had taken all recommended vaccines except the coronavirus vaccine.Thursday’s hearing was devoted to allegations by Mr. Kennedy and Republicans that the Biden administration is trying to censor people with differing views. It was rooted in a lawsuit, filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and known as Missouri v. Biden, that accused the administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress free speech on Covid-19, elections and other matters.The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, opened the hearing by citing an email that emerged in that case, in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet in which Mr. Kennedy suggested — without evidence — that the baseball legend Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.The tweet, which was not taken down, said Mr. Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” following vaccination. There was no such wave of suspicious deaths. As Mr. Kennedy often does, he phrased his language carefully; he did not explicitly link the vaccine to the deaths, but rather said the deaths occurred “closely following administration of #COVID #vaccines.”Representative Jim Jordan opened the hearing by citing an email in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet by Mr. Kennedy.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThursday’s session had all the makings of a Washington spectacle. A long line had formed outside the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building by the time Mr. Kennedy arrived. Kennedy supporters stood outside the building holding a Kennedy 2024 banner.Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?Democrats accused Republicans of giving Mr. Kennedy a forum for bigotry and pseudoscience. “Free speech is not an absolute,” said Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. “The Supreme Court has stated that. And others’ free speech that is allowed — hateful, abusive rhetoric — does not need to be promoted in the halls of the People’s House.”Even by Mr. Kennedy’s standards for stoking controversy, his recent comments about Covid-19 were shocking. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who is Jewish, tried unsuccessfully on Thursday to force the panel into executive session; she insisted that Mr. Kennedy had violated House rules by making “despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.” She also helped organize Democrats to sign a letter calling on Republican leaders to disinvite him from the hearing.Mr. Kennedy waved the letter about during his opening remarks. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who signed this letter who believes I’m antisemitic.”Mr. Kennedy has been steeped in Democratic politics for his entire life, but his campaign has drawn supporters from the fringes of both political parties. He has made common cause with Republicans and Trump supporters who accuse the federal government of conspiring with social media companies to suppress conservative content.Thursday’s hearing was billed as a session to “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.” One of the lawyers involved in that case, D. John Sauer, also testified, as did Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.Mr. Kennedy showed a flash of the old Kennedy style, invoking his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat and legislative giant who frequently worked across the aisle. He called for kindness and respect, recalling how his uncle brought Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican with whom he partnered on major legislation, to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.And Mr. Kennedy was joined by a former member of Congress: Dennis J. Kucinich, who served in the House as a Democrat from Ohio and is Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager.“We need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times,” Mr. Kennedy declared at one point, “and that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”Amid the vitriol, members of both parties did come together around a lament from Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia.“I’ve been in this Congress 15 years, and I never thought we’d descend to this level of Orwellian dystopia,” Mr. Connolly said.Representatives Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Harriet M. Hageman, Republican of Wyoming, nodded their heads and smiled. “I agree with that,” they said in unison. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Where Paranoia Meets Legacy Admissions

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      It feels dangerous to write about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: In the lag between when I put the finishing touches on this and when it becomes publicly available, I could be a conspiracy theory or two behind.I could be mulling his apparent belief that the coronavirus was diabolically engineered to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while he has already moved on to the hypothesis that Ron DeSantis is a hologram gone haywire (I could buy into this one), the revelation that earbuds deliver subconsciously perceptible government propaganda through our auditory canals or the epiphany that French bulldogs cause global warming. He’s a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?Oh, I understand the appeal of the perspective that narcissists like Trump and Kennedy peddle: that sinister operators deploy nefarious tricks to shore up their own dominance and keep hard-working, well-intentioned, regular folks in their places. It’s an exaggeration of inequities and injustices that really do exist, and it simplifies a maddeningly complex world. Ranting about George Soros or Anthony Fauci feels a whole lot better than raging at the vicissitudes of fate.But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.And Kennedy? He belongs to perhaps the most storied family in American political life. His uncle’s White House was nicknamed Camelot, for heaven’s sake.That legacy is suffused with immeasurable heartache. I can’t imagine his pain at seeing that uncle murdered and then having his own father meet the same fate. I bet it stings to this day.But Kennedy’s place in a bona fide dynasty has also meant access, influence, mulligans. “Kicked out of an elite roster of prep schools, he still managed to arrive at Harvard in 1972,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an excellent recent profile of him and his presidential campaign in New York magazine, where she also described how he is “leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign.”In an insightful column in The Times, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted how, at a June rally in New Hampshire, Kennedy pitched his presidential bid as a return of his family’s magic and majesty. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he told an adoring crowd.It takes a yachtload of nerve to flaunt that pedigree while disparaging an entrenched political class, but across his speeches and interviews, Kennedy tries to have it all ways. He’s marginalized! He’s royalty! He’s the skunk at the garden party! He’s the cucumber sandwiches!All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.He has complained of being “deplatformed” for his, um, unconventional thinking, but he has conventional platforms aplenty. He does interviews galore. If there’s a conspiracy afoot, it’s working to his advantage. His visage, voice and views are everywhere I turn.And they speak to what a strange and scary time this is. So many Americans are so angry and distrustful that they’ll look for answers in the strangest of places. They’ll bow down to and elevate the unlikeliest of prophets. Trump and Kennedy are the self-proclaimed martyrs of the moment. There will be more where they came from.For the Love of SentencesDiane Keaton in the 1984 film adaptation of the John le Carré novel “The Little Drummer Girl.”Everett CollectionAs someone who has barely scratched the surface of John le Carré’s oeuvre, I very much needed Sam Adler-Bell’s recent guide in The Times to the best plotted, best written and most alluring of the prolific novelist’s works. It was, additionally, a lode of deft prose, such as his pitch for “A Perfect Spy,” published in 1986: “This is a great, whooshing thrill of a book! I recommend it constantly, the way annoying people recommend hydration.” (Thanks to Eric Andrus of Chelmsford, Mass., for nominating this.)Also in The Times, Kevin Roose wrestled with the grim undercurrent of the work done at a company trying to develop safe, responsible A.I. tools: “Not every conversation I had at Anthropic revolved around existential risk. But dread was a dominant theme. At times, I felt like a food writer who was assigned to cover a trendy new restaurant, only to discover that the kitchen staff wanted to talk about nothing but food poisoning.” (Ralph Begleiter, Ocean View, Del.)And Nick Kristof contrasted the dynamism and visual vibrancy of Eastern European countries today with their drabness when he traveled through them during the Soviet era and his “main impression was that in the Communist bloc you didn’t need color film.” (Jim Grout, Brentwood, Tenn.)In The Atlantic, Matt Seaton described his area of Vermont after the recent deluge: “If you were close enough to the river on Monday, above the roar of millions of gallons of raging brown murk, you could hear the uncanny kerthunk of huge rocks being smashed into one another, like a terrifying subaquatic game of pinball played by angry rain gods.” (Donna Meadows, Houston)Also in The Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg assessed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s antisemitic rant about Covid: “Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist, and the arc of conspiracy is short and bends toward the Jews.” (Rhoda Leichter, Pacific Palisades, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Susan Orlean conducted a funny, incisive tour of cooking gadgets come and gone: “The graveyard of kitchen fads is wide and deep, littered with the domestic equivalent of white dwarf stars that blazed with astonishing luminosity for a moment and then deteriorated into space junk.” (Ray Smith, Lutz, Fla.)In The New York Review of Books, Jessica Riskin assessed the limits of a new kind of student shortcut: “My teaching assistants and I became expert at sniffing out A.I.-generated essays by their flat, featureless feel, the literary equivalent of fluorescent lighting.” (Paul Ansell, Tampa Bay, Fla.)In The Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang managed, in his review of “Barbie,” to allude to its pink-and-purple palette and its opening on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer” in the same sentence: “I must point out the existence of Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie, who presumably discovered the secrets of nuclear fuchsian.” (Bob Meadow, Los Angeles) That review also had an aptly playful headline that made rhyming reference to the movie’s stars, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling: “With Robbie in pink and Gosling in mink, ‘Barbie’ (wink-wink) will make you think.”And in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay appraised Carlos Alcaraz’s victory over Novak Djokovic in an epic five-set showdown at Wimbledon by noting Djokovic’s preternatural stamina. “There may be no harder opponent to close out in sports,” Gay wrote, adding: “Even after you defeat Djokovic, you should go up to the scorekeeper and get the result in writing, just to confirm.” (Barbara Gaynes, Harrison, N.Y.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Watching and DoingFrank BruniThe work of the Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle is a mainstay of the For the Love of Sentences section. His recently published book, “The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man,” is a gorgeously written examination of one centenarian’s eventful past as an example of all the disruption that life can mete out — and all the fortitude with which a human being can respond.A line from Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker of “Master Gardener,” Paul Schrader’s latest movie, appeared in For the Love of Sentences in early June, but I hadn’t seen the film at that point. I subsequently watched it. While it doesn’t rise nearly to the level of “First Reformed,” the first installment of what Schrader has called a trilogy of movies about boxed-in, haunted men — the second was “The Card Counter” — it has one sublime supporting performance, by the actress who plays Norma Haverhill, the owner of an estate with extensive formal gardens “whose name is like a mash-up of Norma Desmond and Miss Havisham, and whose gaze could nip the buds off a damask rose at 40 yards,” as Lane wrote. Lane went on to pay fitting tribute to that performer: “One thing I do believe in is the power of Sigourney Weaver. She makes Norma authentically scary, investing every gesture with the fierce languor of entitlement.” (“Master Gardener” is streaming on several platforms and can, for example, be rented through Prime Video or Apple TV+.)I don’t keep careful track, but it has apparently been about a month and a half since I gave you a report or photo of my four-legged companion. And you let me know it! I love that many of you miss Regan and ask after her and even worry that her absence from the newsletter means that something’s wrong. She and I recently hit the road for just a bit to visit a few friends, and as you can see from the picture above, Regan has an awful time trying to get comfortable in new surroundings. If only she could learn to relax.On a Personal NoteChristopher Dubia/Gallery StockAlmost every afternoon last week, I took a very long, very fast walk with intervals of running mixed in; just once, I didn’t bother to stretch when I was done. The next morning, I paid for that. My creaky knees! My knotted calves! There was no forgiveness for my lapse, not the way there was in years past, when my stretching was reliably unreliable.Similarly, I get no allowance anymore for evenings of gluttony. Back when I was The Times’s restaurant critic in my early 40s, I could atone for an excessive dinner and erase its effects by just increasing my exercise in its immediate aftermath. Now I need the better part of a week to get back to where I was.At 58, I reflect often on the differences between youth and age. One of the biggest is the margin for error. You have a big, broad one when you’re young, and that applies not just to muscles and midriffs but also to relationships, jobs and more.You can be sloppy, and the wages are modest. You can be heedless and recover. You can squander an opportunity and still find another (and maybe even another) and make the most of it, having learned from your mistakes. You have time. You have flexibility. Everything is more elastic — your knees, your calves, your skin, your heart.Don’t get me wrong: Age has its benefits. I much prefer 58 to 28. As I described in my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk,” age can bring a perspective and sense of peace that are so elusive in youth, when many of us are too distracted — by self-doubt, by want, by envy, by vanity — to learn the trick of contentment.But age also compels us to proceed with caution. To take greater care. The flesh-and-blood vessels that we occupy are more fragile. The promises we mean to keep and the plans we intend to execute can be postponed only so much. Time is of the essence. Which is perhaps why we’re graced with the wisdom to see that. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Relatives Condemn His Comments About Covid

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      His sister Kerry Kennedy criticized his remarks, and his brother Joseph Kennedy II said “they play on antisemitic myths and stoke mistrust of the Chinese.”Several members of the Kennedy family have condemned a bigoted conspiracy theory from the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suggested that the coronavirus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and Chinese people.In comments at a recent event in New York City, a recording of which was first published by The New York Post, Mr. Kennedy said: “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He added, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not.”His sister Kerry Kennedy called his remarks “deplorable and untruthful” and said they did not represent the principles espoused by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the organization she leads — named after their father, the former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.His brother Joseph Kennedy II issued a similar statement, telling The Boston Globe: “Bobby’s comments are morally and factually wrong. They play on antisemitic myths and stoke mistrust of the Chinese. His remarks in no way reflect the words and actions of our father, Robert F. Kennedy.”And former Representative Joseph Kennedy III wrote on Twitter on Monday afternoon: “My uncle’s comments were hurtful and wrong. I unequivocally condemn what he said.”Mr. Kennedy rejected criticism of his comments on Sunday, saying in a lengthy Twitter post, “The insinuation by @nypost and others that, as a result of my quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, I am somehow antisemitic, is a disgusting fabrication.” (The paper he referred to did not support the claims he made.)It was far from the first time that Mr. Kennedy’s relatives felt compelled to disavow his words or actions.Once an environmental lawyer known for his work to clean up the Hudson River, Mr. Kennedy — now a long-shot candidate running against President Biden for next year’s Democratic nomination — has become a leading purveyor of anti-vaccine misinformation. Long before the coronavirus pandemic, he helped popularize false claims of a connection between childhood vaccines and autism, and since Covid vaccines became available, he has sought loudly and frequently to cast doubt on their well-documented safety.Last year, Mr. Kennedy suggested that unvaccinated Americans would soon be more persecuted than Anne Frank, who was murdered by the Nazis. Several of his siblings criticized him for that comment, as did his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, who called it “reprehensible and insensitive.”He has advanced many other conspiracy theories as well, including claiming that there is a link between antidepressants and mass shootings (there isn’t) and that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election (they didn’t).Despite his promotion of misinformation and some policy views more aligned with the Republican base than the Democratic one, Mr. Kennedy is polling relatively strongly — between 10 and 20 percent in several surveys, nowhere near enough to overtake Mr. Biden, but nonetheless striking numbers against an incumbent. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese

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      The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of embracing conspiracy theories. His latest comments claimed the virus spared certain ethnic and religious groups.A conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people has stirred accusations of antisemitism and racism in the Democratic candidate’s long-shot run for president.“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Mr. Kennedy said at a private gathering in New York that was captured on videotape by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”Mr. Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from Wi-Fi and a “stolen” election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W. Bush.But his suggestion that the coronavirus pandemic spared Chinese people and Jews of European descent strayed into new and bigoted territory.Asian Americans suffered through a brutal spate of assaults at the beginning of the Covid pandemic by people who blamed the Chinese for intentionally releasing the virus on the world. And Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels.Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Eastern Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D. Sephardic Jews went to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain.The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries, and the conspiracy of Jewish immunity from tragedy has been part of antisemitic attacks as far back as the Black Plague and as recently as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Abraham Foxman, who worked for decades as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, condemned “antisemitic stereotypes going back to the Middle Ages that claimed Jews protected themselves from diseases.”“It cannot be ignorance because he is not ignorant, so he must believe it,” Mr. Foxman said Saturday night.Mr. Kennedy responded to The New York Post story with a defense that only deepened his conspiratorial theories. He wrote on Twitter that he “accurately pointed out” that the United States is “developing ethnically targeted bioweapons” — a point he made in his remarks captured on video, when he repeated Russian propaganda that the United States is collecting D.N.A. in Ukraine to target Russians with tailored bioweapons.Mr. Kennedy also linked to a scientific paper that he said showed the structure of the Covid-19 virus made Black and Caucasian people more susceptible, and “ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews” were less receptive.But the study he linked to, published in July 2020, early in the pandemic and before effective treatments had emerged, made no reference to Chinese people as more receptive to the virus, nor did it speak of targeting the virus. It said one particular receptor for the virus appeared not to be present in Amish and Ashkenazi Jews.His conclusions were roundly dismissed by scientists.“Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.Mr. Kennedy returned to Twitter just after midnight on Sunday to call charges of antisemitism against him “a disgusting fabrication.”“I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors,” he wrote in a lengthy post. “My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority.”Mr. Kennedy’s comments are not the first time he has strayed into the intersection of Judaism and Covid. In his zeal for condemning steps to stem the spread of the virus, he spoke last year at an anti-vaccination mandate rally in Washington, saying, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” suggesting Covid restrictions were worse.Even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, condemned the comment about Anne Frank.“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” she wrote on Twitter.The anger from Jewish leaders over his Covid remarks was immediate.The Anti-Defamation League wrote, “The claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote on Twitter, “RFK Jr. is a disgrace to the Kennedy name and the Democratic Party. For the record, my whole family, who is Jewish, got Covid.” More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Covid Remarks Raise Questions of Antisemitism

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      The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of conspiracy theories. His latest comments claimed the virus spared certain ethnic and religious groups. A conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people has stirred accusations of antisemitism and racism in the Democratic candidate’s long-shot run for president.“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Mr. Kennedy said at a private gathering in New York that was captured on videotape by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”Mr. Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from Wi-Fi and a “stolen” election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W. Bush.But his suggestion that the coronavirus pandemic spared Chinese people and Jews of European descent strayed into new territory that struck many as bigoted. Asian Americans suffered through a brutal spate of assaults at the beginning of the Covid pandemic by people who blamed the Chinese for intentionally releasing the virus on the world. And Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels. Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Eastern Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D. Sephardic Jews went to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain.The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries, and the conspiracy of Jewish immunity from tragedy has been part of antisemitic attacks as far back as the Black Plague and as recently as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Abraham Foxman, who worked for decades as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, condemned “antisemitic stereotypes going back to the Middle Ages that claimed Jews protected themselves from diseases.”“It cannot be ignorance because he is not ignorant,” Mr. Foxman said Saturday night.Mr. Kennedy responded to The New York Post story with a defense that only deepened his conspiratorial theories. He wrote on Twitter that he “accurately pointed out” that the United States is “developing ethnically targeted bioweapons” — a point he made in his remarks captured on video, when he repeated fanciful Russian propaganda that the United States is collecting Russian D.N.A. in Ukraine to target Russians with tailored bioweapons.Mr. Kennedy linked to a scientific paper that he said showed the structure of the Covid-19 virus made Black and Caucasian people more susceptible, and “ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews” were less receptive.But the study he linked to made no reference to “Ashkenazi Jews” and his conclusions were roundly dismissed by scientists.“Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.Mr. Kennedy’s comments are not the first time he has strayed into the intersection of Judaism and Covid. In his zeal for condemning steps to stem the spread of the virus, he spoke last year at an anti-vaccination mandate rally in Washington, saying, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” suggesting Covid restrictions were worse.Even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, condemned the comment about Anne Frank.“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” she wrote on Twitter.The anger from Jewish leaders over his Covid remarks was immediate. The Anti-Defamation League wrote, “The claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote on Twitter, “RFK Jr. is a disgrace to the Kennedy name and the Democratic Party. For the record, my whole family, who is Jewish, got Covid.” More

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      Los ricos están más locos que tú y yo

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. está delirando. Sus posturas son una mezcla de fantasías de derecha con remanentes del progresista que fue alguna vez: veneración al bitcoin, teorías de conspiración antivacunas, afirmaciones de que el Prozac ocasiona tiroteos masivos, oposición al apoyo estadounidense a Ucrania, pero además habla bien del seguro médico de pagador único. Si no fuera por su apellido, nadie le prestaría atención y, a pesar de ese apellido, tiene cero posibilidades de ganar la nominación presidencial demócrata.Sin embargo, ahora que la campaña de Ron DeSantis (con su lema: “Concienciados, inmigrantes, concienciados, ‘woke’”) parece estar derrapándose, de repente Kennedy está recibiendo el apoyo de algunos de los nombres más importantes de Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, fundador de Twitter, le dio su apoyo, mientras que otras figuras destacadas de la tecnología han organizado actos de recaudación de fondos en su nombre. Elon Musk, quien está en proceso de destruir lo que Dorsey construyó, fue su anfitrión en un evento en un Espacio de Twitter.Pero ¿qué nos dice todo esto sobre el papel de los multimillonarios de la industria tecnológica en la vida política moderna de Estados Unidos? Hace poco escribí sobre una serie de tech bros, algo así como hombres alfa de la tecnología, que se han convertido en truthers, quienes creen conocer la verdad, sobre la recesión y la inflación, y han insistido en que las noticias sobre la mejora de la economía son falsas (olvidé mencionar la declaración de Dorsey en 2021 de que la hiperinflación estaba “sucediendo”, ¿cómo va eso?). Lo que el pequeño auge de Kennedy en Silicon Valley muestra es que esto es en realidad parte de un fenómeno más amplio.Lo que parece atraer a algunos de los magnates de la tecnología a RFK Jr. es su gusto por llevar la contra, su contrarianismo: su desprecio por la sabiduría convencional y la opinión de los expertos. Así que antes de adentrarme en los aspectos específicos de los hombres de la tecnología de este momento político tan extraño, permítanme decir algunas cosas sobre llevar la contra.Un hecho triste pero cierto de la vida es que la mayoría de las veces, la sabiduría convencional y la opinión de los expertos están en lo correcto; sin embargo, puede que encontrar los puntos en los que se equivocan tenga grandes beneficios personales y sociales. El truco para conseguirlo consiste en mantener el equilibrio entre un escepticismo excesivo y una credulidad excesiva.Es muy fácil caer en el filo de la navaja en cualquier dirección. Cuando era un académico joven y ambicioso, solía reírme de los economistas mayores y aburridos cuya reacción ante cualquier idea nueva era: “Es banal, está mal y lo dije en 1962”. Estos días, a veces me preocupa haberme convertido en ese tipo.Por otra parte, como lo dice el economista Adam Ozimek, el contrarianismo reflexivo es una “droga que pudre el cerebro”. Quienes sucumben a esa droga “pierden la capacidad de juzgar a otros que consideran contrarios, se vuelven incapaces de distinguir las buenas pruebas de las malas, lo cual provoca un desapego total de la creencia que los lleva a aferrarse a modas contrarias de baja calidad”.Los hombres de la tecnología parecen ser en particular susceptibles a la podredumbre cerebral del contrarianismo. Su éxito financiero suele convencerlos de que son excepcionalmente brillantes, capaces de dominar al instante cualquier tema, sin necesidad de consultar a personas que realmente han trabajado duro para entender los problemas. Y en muchos casos, se hicieron ricos desafiando la sabiduría convencional, lo que los predispone a creer que ese desafío está justificado por dondequiera que se le mire.A esto hay que añadir el hecho de que una gran riqueza hace que sea demasiado fácil rodearse de personas que te dicen lo que quieres oír y validan tu creencia en tu propia brillantez, una suerte de versión intelectual del traje nuevo del emperador.Y si los hombres de la tecnología que llevan la contra hablan, es entre ellos. El empresario tecnológico y escritor Anil Dash nos dice que “es imposible exagerar el grado en que muchos directores ejecutivos de grandes empresas tecnológicas y capitalistas de riesgo se están radicalizando al vivir dentro de su propia burbuja cultural y social”. Llama a este fenómeno del capitalismo de riesgo, venture capitalism en inglés, “VC QAnon”, un concepto que me parece que ayuda a explicar muchas de las extrañas posturas adoptadas últimamente por los multimillonarios tecnológicos.Permítanme añadir una especulación personal. Pudiera parecer extraño ver a hombres de una inmensa riqueza e influencia creyéndose teorías de la conspiración sobre élites que dirigen el mundo. ¿No son ellos las élites? Pero sospecho que los hombres famosos y ricos pueden sentirse especialmente frustrados por su incapacidad para controlar los acontecimientos o incluso para evitar que la gente los ridiculice en internet. Así que en lugar de aceptar que el mundo es un lugar complicado que nadie puede controlar, son susceptibles a la idea de que hay conspiraciones secretas que los tienen en la mira.Aquí hay un precedente histórico. Viendo el descenso de Elon Musk, sé que no soy el único que piensa en Henry Ford, quien sigue siendo en muchos sentidos el ejemplo definitivo de empresario famoso e influyente y que también se convirtió en un teórico de la conspiración furibundo y antisemita. Incluso pagó la reimpresión de Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión, una falsificación que probablemente fue promovida por la policía secreta rusa (el tiempo es un círculo plano).En todo caso, lo que estamos viendo ahora es algo extraordinario. Podría decirse que la facción más alocada de la política estadounidense en este momento no son los obreros de gorra roja en los comedores; son los multimillonarios de la tecnología que viven en enormes mansiones y vuelan en jets privados. De cierto modo, es bastante divertido. Pero, por desgracia, esta gente tiene dinero suficiente para hacer mucho daño.Paul Krugman ha sido columnista de Opinión desde 2000 y también es profesor distinguido en el Centro de Graduados de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York. Ganó el Premio Nobel de Ciencias Económicas en 2008 por sus trabajos sobre comercio internacional y geografía económica. @PaulKrugman More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories Go Beyond Vaccines

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      A longtime vaccine skeptic, Mr. Kennedy is leaning heavily on misinformation as he mounts a long-shot 2024 campaign.He has promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus vaccines were developed to control people via microchips. He has endorsed the false notion that antidepressants are linked to school shootings. And he has pushed the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, is a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories who has leaned heavily on misinformation as he mounts his long-shot 2024 campaign for the Democratic nomination.But as voters express discontentment at a likely rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Kennedy has garnered as much as 20 percent of the vote in recent Democratic primary polling.Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee have not publicly acknowledged Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy and have declined to comment on his campaign. Nevertheless, the public scrutiny that accompanies a White House bid has highlighted other questionable beliefs and statements Mr. Kennedy has elevated over the years.Here are five of the many baseless claims Mr. Kennedy has peddled on the campaign trail and beyond.He has falsely linked vaccines to various medical conditions.Mr. Kennedy has promoted many false, specious or unproven claims that center on public health and the pharmaceutical industry — most notably, the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism.That notion has been rejected by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies across multiple countries. The National Academy of Medicine reviewed eight vaccines for children and adults and found that with rare exceptions, the vaccines are very safe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Seen by many as the face of the vaccine resistance movement, Mr. Kennedy has asserted that he is “not anti-vaccine” and seeks to make vaccines more safe. But he has advertised misleading information about vaccine ingredients and circulated retracted studies linking vaccines to various medical conditions. At a rally in Washington last year, he compared the vaccination records some called “vaccine passports” to life in Germany during the Holocaust, a statement he later apologized for. And he falsely told Louisiana lawmakers in 2021 that the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”Children’s Health Defense, an organization Mr. Kennedy originally founded as the World Mercury Project, has frequently campaigned against vaccines. Facebook and Instagram removed the group’s accounts last year for espousing vaccine misinformation, and Mr. Kennedy has often lamented the perils of “censorship” in campaign speeches since.Mr. Kennedy, who many see as a prominent representative for the vaccine resistance movement, attended the New York Rally for Vaccine Injury and Vaccine Rights in Albany in 2019.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesHe has made baseless claims about a connection between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.In an interview last month with Jordan Peterson, a conservative Canadian psychologist and public speaker, Mr. Kennedy falsely linked chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity.“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” he said. He referred to research on an herbicide, atrazine, in which scientists found that it “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in certain frogs.But no evidence exists to indicate that the chemical, typically used on farms to kill weeds, causes the same effects in humans, let alone gender dysphoria. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Most people are not exposed to atrazine on a regular basis.”He has falsely linked antidepressants to school shootings.Drawing on longstanding dubious claims, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly endorsed the idea that mass shootings have increased because of heightened use of antidepressants.“Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” he told the comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of the podcast, “Club Random With Bill Maher.” “It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”While both antidepressant use and mass shooting occurrences have increased in the last several decades, the scientific community has found “no biological plausibility” to back a link between the two, according to Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.Antidepressants often have warnings that reference suicidal thoughts, Mr. Girgis said. But those warnings refer to the possibility that people who already experience suicidal ideation might share pre-existing beliefs aloud once they take the medicine as part of their treatment.Mr. Kennedy, however, has pointed to such warnings as evidence of the false notion that the drugs might induce “homicidal tendencies.”Several high-profile figures, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have amplified similar claims following recent mass shootings.Most school shooters were not prescribed with psychotropic medications before committing acts of violence, a 2019 study found. And even when they were, researchers wrote, “no direct or causal association was found.”He has bolstered a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. assassinated his uncle.Former President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, the former first lady, are shown in the back of a car minutes before Mr. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.Bettmann, Getty ImagesMr. Kennedy has long promoted a conspiracy theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.He claimed, without evidence, during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in May that Allen W. Dulles, a C.I.A. director fired by President Kennedy, helped cover up evidence of the organization’s involvement when he served on the Warren Commission, convened in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination.Referencing a House committee inquiry in 1976, he said: “Most of the people in that investigation believed it was the C.I.A. that was behind it because the evidence was so overwhelming to them.”But even that investigation, which found that President Kennedy was “probably” the victim of a conspiracy of some kind, flatly concluded that the C.I.A. was “not involved.”The Warren Commission found that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone and was not connected to any governmental agency.And he has said that Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election.Mr. Kennedy told The Washington Post in June that he still believed that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, had won the 2004 presidential election.Mr. Kennedy first promoted that idea in a 2006 article in Rolling Stone, asserting that Republicans had “mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people” and assure the re-election of President George W. Bush. He claimed that their efforts “prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted.”But it is one thing to complain of vote suppression; it is another thing to demonstrate that Mr. Kerry won more of the votes cast.Mr. Bush defeated Mr. Kerry by a margin of 35 electoral college votes nationally; he carried Ohio and its 20 electoral votes by more than 118,000 ballots.The Times reported in 2004 that a glitch in an electronic Ohio voting machine added 3,893 votes to Mr. Bush’s tally. That error was caught in preliminary vote counts, officials said. But the event, alongside other voting controversies nationwide, spurred widespread questions about election integrity that caught traction with people like Mr. Kennedy.Mr. Kerry, however, conceded the race a day after the election. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful

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      Before Covid, Gabe Whitney, a 41-year-old from West Bath, Maine, didn’t think much about vaccines. He wasn’t very political — he didn’t vote in 2020, he said, because he thought Donald Trump was a “psycho” and Joe Biden was “corrupt.” It wasn’t until the pandemic that Whitney started regularly watching the news, but as he did, he felt like things weren’t adding up. He doubted what he called “the narrative” and struggled with the hostility his questions about vaccines and other mitigations elicited from those close to him. He described being “blamed and labeled as someone who’s part of the problem because you’re questioning. Like not taking a stance on it, but just questioning. That was the worst.”Whitney started gravitating toward people who see skepticism of mainstream public health directives as a sign of courage rather than selfishness and delusion. He began following anti-vax figures like Del Bigtree, Robert Malone and, of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Whitney already admired for his environmental work. Kennedy has long touted an illusory connection between vaccines and autism, and has repeatedly said that pandemic restrictions arose from a C.I.A. plan to “clamp down totalitarian control.” If Kennedy was so wrong, Whitney thought, it didn’t make sense that his critics wouldn’t debate him. “When someone is taking such an unpopular position, and then nobody wants to debate them, that says something to me,” he said.I met Whitney this month at a rally for Kennedy, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, at Saint Anselm College, just outside Manchester, N.H. I’d gone because I was curious about who was turning out to see the candidate. Among many Democrats, there’s an assumption that Kennedy’s surprising strength in some polls — an Emerson College survey from April showed him getting 21 percent in a Democratic primary — is mostly attributable to the magic of his name and anxiety about Joe Biden’s age. This is probably at least partly true. As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent Saint Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent, barely ahead of Marianne Williamson.At the same time, Kennedy has a sincere and passionate following. When I arrived at the St. Anselm venue, I was surprised by the enormous line snaking out the door. It quickly became clear that many people weren’t going to make it into the 580-seat auditorium. (I requested an interview with Kennedy, but never heard back from the person I was told could schedule it.)In New Hampshire, I didn’t meet any loyal Democrats who were there just to scope out the alternatives. The 2020 Biden voters I encountered were dead set against voting for him again; some, disenchanted by vaccine mandates and American support for Ukraine, even said they preferred Donald Trump. Like Whitney, several people I spoke to hadn’t voted at all in 2020 because they didn’t like their choices. Some attendees said they leaned right, and others identified with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.What brought them all together was a peculiar combination of cynicism and credulity. The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.In 2021, Charles Eisenstein, an influential New Age writer, described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the primal wound that brought America to its current lamentable state. “It is like a radioactive pellet lodged inside the body politic,” he wrote, “generating an endlessly metastasizing cancer that no one has been able to trace to its source.”Eisenstein takes it for granted that J.F.K.’s murder was orchestrated by the national security state, a view also held by R.F.K. Jr., the former president’s nephew. Because the official story “beggars belief,” Eisenstein argued, it engendered in the populace a festering distrust of all official narratives. At the same time, the cover-up led the government to regard the people it’s been continually deceiving with contempt, as “unruly schoolchildren who must be managed, surveilled, tracked, locked up and locked down for their own good.”A Kennedy restoration, Eisenstein believes, would heal the corrosive injury that separates the people from their putative leaders, putting America back on the confident and optimistic trajectory from which it was diverted in 1963. In May, he joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign as a senior adviser working on messaging and strategy.“There was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving towards greater and greater virtue,” Eisenstein said in a podcast he and Kennedy recorded together. J.F.K.’s assassination jolted America onto a different, darker timeline, but perhaps not permanently. “I feel like maybe that timeline hasn’t died,” Eisenstein said of the earlier era. “Maybe we can pick up that thread. And it’s so significant that a Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. It’s one of the synchronicities that speak to, or speak from, a larger organizing intelligence in the world.”To those of us who see Kennedy as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, his campaign looks like either a farce or a dirty trick, one boosted by MAGA figures like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon to weaken Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election. But to many in his substantial following, it has a messianic cast, promising deliverance from the division and confusion that began with J.F.K.’s assassination and reached a terrifying apotheosis during the Covid pandemic. “We are in the last battle,” Kennedy said in a 2021 speech at a California church famous for defying pandemic restrictions. “This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.”In Kennedy’s campaign, this chiliastic vision is translated into a story about the renewal of a lost American golden age, before the murders of his uncle and then his father, Robert F. Kennedy. In New Hampshire, his appearance was more than just a campaign stop — it commemorated the 60th anniversary of J.F.K.’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where the young president had called on his countrymen “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”Standing before a row of American flags in that packed Saint Anselm auditorium, wearing a suit and a 1960s-style skinny tie, Kennedy reworked his uncle’s speech as a call to empathize with Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine. He cast American support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government as a continuation of our country’s forever wars, which he posited as the cause of American decline. As he often does, he mixed highly tendentious arguments — attributing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in part to “repeated deliberate provocations” by America — with resonant truths. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” he said. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.”A new Kennedy presidency, he claimed, could revive us. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he said. It was a softer, more eloquent version of Make America Great Again, and the audience loved it.When the speech was over, the crowd was invited to join one of three breakout sessions. I chose “Peace Consciousness in Foreign Policy,” a dialogue led by Eisenstein. “You could say manifest, or you can say prophesize, but we need to see that this is possible,” a woman at the talk said about the prospect of a Kennedy presidency. “We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.” The people around her hooted and applauded.It is in fact possible that Kennedy will win the primary in New Hampshire, because, as a result of a dispute over the Democratic National Committee’s changes to the primary calendar, Biden might not be on the ballot. That doesn’t mean Kennedy poses an electoral threat to Biden; he almost certainly does not. Still, the movement around him represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.It’s also both a show of strength and a potential recruiting vehicle for what Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker call “conspirituality,” the intermarriage of conspiracy theorism and wellness culture that flowered during the pandemic. In their new book, “Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,” they show how crunchy yoga influencers were pulled into the paranoid orbit of QAnon. Conspiritualists warned that “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, Big Pharma and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination,” they wrote. “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.”In their book, the writers describe Kennedy’s adviser Eisenstein as “a kind of Covid mystic for conspirituality intellectuals.” Eisenstein’s viral 9,000-word essay “The Coronation,” published in March 2020, was a key document among Covid skeptics and dissidents, championed by the formerly leftist actor Russell Brand, quoted by Ivanka Trump and tweeted by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, who recently endorsed Kennedy.“There’s a huge political realignment going on in this country, where a lot of the old categories — liberal, conservative — just don’t make sense anymore,” Eisenstein told me after the New Hampshire event. The Kennedy campaign, he said, “is unifying people who have really lost trust in the system, lost trust in politicians, lost trust — no offense intended — in the media.”A few days after the speech, I met Aubrey Marcus, who co-founded a multimillion-dollar nutritional supplement company, Onnit, with the podcaster Joe Rogan, at the cafe in the Soho Grand Hotel. Marcus, a self-help guru, author, podcaster and ayahuasca promoter based in Austin, Texas, who recently led the football star Aaron Rodgers on a darkness retreat in Oregon, is an ardent Kennedy backer, though he’s never voted in his life. “This is as strong a belief in a cause as I’ve ever had,” he said. Many people he knows, he told me, share his enthusiasm: There’s “more excitement than I’ve ever seen about any politician, ever.”That excitement is only intensified by a sense that the establishment is trying to silence Kennedy, who during the pandemic was booted from major social media platforms for promoting untruths about vaccines. Marcus denounced “the broad application of censorship for very complicated issues” and attempts to “remove people from the conversation and saying they don’t deserve a voice.”The celebration of Kennedy as a free-speech icon creates a dilemma for those who think that by discouraging lifesaving vaccinations, he’s going to get people killed. This month, after Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine scientist, criticized Joe Rogan for letting Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation on his podcast, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he’d debate Kennedy on his show. A billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, offered an additional $150,000, and one Covid contrarian after another chimed in to add to the pot. “He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Elon Musk tweeted. As the pile-on mounted, anti-vaccine activists showed up at Hotez’s house, harassing him for his refusal to square off against Kennedy.Hotez, whose book “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism” was inspired by his autistic daughter, has actually spoken to Kennedy several times in the past in an effort to convince him that he’s wrong about vaccines. It was, Hotez told me, frustrating and fruitless. “You’d debunk one thing and then he’d come up with something else,” he said. Hotez has been a guest on Rogan’s podcast before and is more than willing to return, but said, “Having Bobby there will just turn it into ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”I sympathize with Hotez’s position, which is the same one taken by experts in many fields when challenged to debate cranks. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, refuses to debate creationists because he doesn’t want to treat them as legitimate interlocutors. Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian and diplomat, has written that trying to debate Holocaust deniers is like “trying to nail a blob of jelly to the wall. It’s impossible because no matter what you say to them, they’re going to make something up.” To debate a conspiracy theorist, one must be fluent not just in facts but also in a near-limitless arsenal of non-facts.Still, it’s obvious enough why Kennedy’s sympathizers view it as a moral victory when experts refuse to engage with him. To successfully quarantine certain ideas, you need some sort of social consensus about what is and isn’t beyond the pale. In America, that consensus has broken down. Liberals, justifiably panicked by epistemological chaos, have sometimes tried to reassert consensus by treating more and more subjects — like the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — as unworthy of public argument. But the proliferation of taboos can give stigmatized ideas the sheen of secret knowledge. When the boundaries of acceptable discourse are policed too stringently — and with too much unearned certainty — that can be a recipe for red pills.A Kennedy presidency, some of the candidate’s supporters hope, will knock those boundaries down. One of those supporters is my old boss David Talbot, a co-founder of the online magazine Salon.com. “Bobby talks about the censorship culture coming out of the left,” Talbot told me when we talked recently. “I think that’s a dangerous trend. On the left, liberals used to be against censorship. We’re now shutting down free speech.”This is, no doubt, a lament you’ve heard before, and maybe one you agree with. A common theme among old-school liberals disenchanted with contemporary progressivism is that it’s sanctimonious and intolerant. But talking to Kennedy fans, I heard something more than just complaints about cancel culture. I heard an almost spiritual belief that Kennedy, by being brave enough to speak some unspeakable truth, could heal the hatred and suspicions that make Americans want to shut one another down.For Talbot, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” that truth is that the American government killed both J.F.K. and R.F.K., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared the former president’s assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “It’s the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that’s stinking up our house of democracy,” he said. Being honest about it, he believes, “would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who’s willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.”This notion of wiping the slate clean — or Eisenstein’s idea about returning to an aborted timeline — is a powerful one. Who wouldn’t want to reach into the past and undo the errors and accidents that have brought us to this miserable moment? As politics it’s a harmful fantasy; movements that promise to restore a halcyon era of national unity always are. As a quasi-religious impulse — or as the drive of a candidate seeking to return to a time before his uncle and father were murdered — it’s perhaps more understandable. “A lot of people fall into despair when they take in the hopelessness of our situation,” Eisenstein said on Marcus’s podcast last week. “And it is in fact hopeless if you don’t incorporate what we’re calling miracles.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More