Yair Rosenberg: “That Kennedy would ultimately echo the anti-Semitic assumptions of his conspiratorial cohort was inevitable. Indeed, he is far from the first traveler on the well-trodden path from conspiracism to outright anti-Semitism. In recent years, individuals as diverse as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyrie Irving, and Elon Musk have graduated from garden-variety conspiracy theories to anti-Jewish arguments. Even the content of Kennedy’s COVID-19 conjecture isn’t original: Jews have been blamed for spreading plagues for centuries, most famously during Europe’s Black Death.”
“Over the weekend, Kennedy furiously tweeted denials and clarifications, insisting that he meant only that COVID served ‘as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons,’ not that ‘the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered,’ though he’d clearly raised that exact possibility in his original remarks.”
“Kennedy himself has no prior history of anti-Semitism, and has never evinced personal prejudice toward Jewish people. But his conspiratorial compass ensured that he would eventually arrive at this destination, because it points in only one direction.”
