Kennedy's Ethics

the middle of the road is a dangerous place to stand

For a hot second, this video was on YT’s ‘up next’ and racked up 300 views in the blink of an eye. But I suspect that most wanted gossip about addictions and suicides. As Bobby says, he has so many skeletons in his closet that, if they could vote, he’d rule the world. That line alone was enough for me to let go of his past.

And if it wasn’t, this interview by Charles Eisenstein, would have been. Bobby talks about his twelve-step program and the AA groups he meets with, sometimes twice a day during the pandemic. He’s humble in a way that rings true to me. His walking meditation is an essential start to his day, which he compares to running a river and he asks for help in navigating the situations he’ll encounter. I found that so beautiful I’ve incorporated it into my own meditation.

Why we care: A conversation with RFK, Jr.

When I talk about Kennedy’s ethics, I mean in relationship to Israel, to Robert Malone and to Bitcoin. But first, I need to explain the difference between a position on issues and an ethical position: proper nouns. An issue is a position on a proper noun, where you first need to know who before you can determine if it’s right or wrong.

The blindfold over the eyes of Justice indicates that right and wrong doesn’t need to know who. A statement of ethics should be like an algebra equation with no values defined. Anything in the category of X can be substituted, and the statement would still be true. The equation can be flipped, and it’s still true.

A major turning point in my life was a simple line graph that plotted US aid given to foreign gov’ts against their human rights violations. Once I saw the direct correlation, I knew it wasn’t an accident, a fluke. It was a strategy. And Israel topped both lists.

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Glenn Greenwald also interviewed Bobby, which I didn’t hear but caught the Locals program where Glenn discussed it later. He mentioned that many viewers were dismayed/ disappointed/ disgusted by Bobby’s unequivocal support of Israel. Glenn shared that feeling (or one of them). But what he heard was Bobby willing to admit he might be wrong. Glenn compared support of Israel to support for Ukraine, which Bobby had said we can’t afford. And when Glenn made that argument for Israel, Bobby replied that it was a good point and he would need to think about it.

Bobby had retracted a tweet supporting Roger Waters, saying, “I made the tweet applauding Roger Waters' courage in opposing the Covid mandates and the Ukraine war. I was unaware of his position on Israel. And when I learned that I immediately took it down.” In response, Cornel West wrote:

You want a presidential candidate, and I think you just want this in any human being, to have backbone, to have integrity, to have consistency, not to check what you deeply believe after you've had some dialogue or discourse with a group of people or community that's going to be shaping and molding how you perceive the world. If he thinks somehow that each [Palestinian] baby who was killed somehow was never in any way, intentional, deliberate, they didn't know what they were doing ... he needs to really get off the crack pipe.

While agreeing with Cornel’s sentiments, I find his insult immature coming from a third-party rival. But it’s just one of the underhanded methods being used to discredit Bobby, including ignoring his existence. A Town & Country photo-op read:

This was on Sage Hana’s post The Ukraine War Looks Kind of Glamorous. I commented that this must be Bobby’s son, since it mentioned Cheryl as his stepmom, but why say “RFK’s grandson … fought in Ukraine’s international legion” and not mention the living RFK running for President who’s his dad? I’m thinking it’s another youthful act of rebellion: go fight undercover in the war your Dad is against.

But this confusion has been helpful when I tried to find out RFK Jr’s position on Israel and found this article on Sr: Bobby Kennedy’s admiration for Israel on Tablet by Shalom Goldman. It goes back pre-Israel and before Kennedy was a household name:

In the 1940s, some Americans with political and cultural clout began organizing against the Zionist cause. They had a variety of reasons: Some were isolationists who did not want the United States entangled in Middle Eastern affairs; others sympathized with the Arab view that Zionism was a new form of European colonialism; and without a doubt, some in the emerging anti-Zionist camp were antisemites.

Among the most influential and strident opponents of such Jewish causes was Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch and architect of the famed political dynasty. Though he was better known as a politician and a financier than as a member of the creative class, he worked during the 1920s in the Hollywood film industry, and it was there, two decades before the mid-1940s, that he developed and propagated his criticism of Jews and Jewish nationalism. …

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy, who had helped FDR in his 1936 election campaign, as the U.S. ambassador to Britain. In London, Kennedy allied himself with British advocates for appeasement and befriended the Nazi-appointed German ambassador, who described him as “Germany’s best friend in London.” When war broke out in September 1939, Kennedy’s call for U.S. neutrality in the European conflict put him increasingly at odds with FDR. Kennedy blamed the “Jew Media” and the “Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles” for Roosevelt’s 1940 election victory and for moving toward U.S. support of England in its struggle against the Nazis.

Before he left his post in London, Kennedy made a trip to California. In Hollywood, he invited some 50 studio executives, producers, and writers—almost all of them Jews—to meet with him. During the meeting, Kennedy harangued the assembled group, warning them of the dangers anti-Nazi films posed to “world peace.” According to actor and producer Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who attended the meeting, Kennedy “threw the fear of God into many of our producers and executives by telling them that the Jews were on the spot and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures.” … President Roosevelt’s decision to ask for Kennedy’s resignation stemmed in part from the account of that meeting supplied by Fairbanks, who was a close friend of the president.

Let’s examine the semantic tricks here. Both Zionists and Nazis were nationalist movements, in the first case where the nation belonged to other people and the second where the people already lived there. To be anti-Zionist, however, is to be anti-Semitic despite two valid reasons given: opposing intervention in the Middle East and opposing a new form of colonization. Those who don’t send armed forces into other countries are ‘isolationists’.

To make anti-Nazi propaganda (media with a political purpose) is not to be anti-German, even though being anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic. To criticize a political faction that dominates an industry like media or banking is anti-Semitic—picking on those who are victims even though the criticism is of domination. And in a self-confirming loop, the historical veracity of anti-Nazi media presented by Zionists can never be questioned.

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Rebelling against his own father, Bobby Kennedy Sr. took the summer after college and before law school to be a Middle Eastern correspondent in Palestine for the Boston Post:

RFK chose a side: “Jews Have a Fine Fighting Force—Make Up for Lack of Arms With Undying Spirit, Unparalleled Courage—Impress the World.” The article gets directly to the point: “The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.” Many similar articles appeared in the American press of the day. The surprising thing about these Boston Post articles was not their pro-Zionist sentiments, but the fact that they had been written by Joseph P. Kennedy’s son.

That wasn’t enough, though, to lift the curse of the Hasadim. Shalom writes:

As a 15-year-old student at an Orthodox yeshiva on New York’s Lower East Side, I attended the public funeral of one of the great Torah scholars of the generation. Thousands gathered to hear the eulogies. The speech that made the deepest impression on me was by a well-known rabbi who said that the families of politicians, like the Kennedys, who were indifferent to the fate of the murdered Jews of Europe, would be cursed for generations. Their children, to invoke biblical language, would have to suffer for the sins of their fathers. Though I forgot much of what I learned in that yeshiva, I never forgot that speech. And I was reminded of it each time I learned that a member of the Kennedy family had come to catastrophic harm. …

In contrast to their father and their eldest brother, John and Robert Kennedy did not seem to harbor hostility toward Jews. In fact, as they entered politics, they developed sympathetic attitudes toward Jews and Zionism. They found their father’s opposition to a Jewish state, couched as it was in antisemitic and isolationist terms, deeply troubling. And they worked hard to change the perception that the Kennedys were antisemitic.

As I illustrated in The Devil & Naomi Wolf, those who believe that God backs blessings and curses don’t wait for God to intervene. They take the land with which God blessed the Shemites, descendants of Shem, Noah’s son. And the descendants of Canaan that Noah cursed to be their slaves in perpetuity can be treated as such with ethical impunity, because it’s God’s will.

So perhaps this curse on the Kennedys, to be inflicted on generation after generation no matter if they ‘repent’, is not a prediction but a threat. Who killed Bobby Kennedy? The motive has been openly stated and just needs the means.

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For Bobby Kennedy Jr, the middle of the road seems like a dangerous place to stand. From Haaretz: ‘Champion for Israel’ RFK Flip-Flops on Roger Waters, Holocaust & Anti-Semitism:

Kennedy also said he saw the matter of the United States providing unconditional aid to Israel as “a long and complex question.”

“I’ve been to Israel, specifically on Palestinian settlements within Israel, and however you want to call it—the West Bank or Judea and Samaria—and I’ve spoken with government officials there,” he said, mistakenly attributing the ownership of settlements and describing the occupied territory by a biblical name favored by Jewish settlers.

“I understand that Palestinians are mistreated in Israel. I’ve seen the water allocations that were very, very unfairly allocated to the new settlements rather than to traditional settlements—in some cases for a hundred years,” Kennedy added.

He went on to blame the lack of a two-state solution on the Palestinians, charging that the Palestinian leadership had prioritized killing Jews over reaching a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

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Now let’s turn to Kennedy’s statement on Robert Malone from the Vermont Daily Chronicle in which the reporter’s leading question is “What do you admire the most about [mRNA vaccine inventor and Covid-19 vaccine critic] Robert Malone?”:

I think Robert Malone has tremendous integrity and tremendous courage. And here’s a guy who’s spent his whole life at the center of the vaccine industrial complex, and invented the key technology of the mRNA vaccine, and was in a position where he could have made himself a billionaire during the pandemic. Instead, he took a much more difficult role that destroyed his relationships, that destroyed his credibility in his own industry that put him in a very challenging place economically. It takes a lot of guts. If you’re Bob Malone, every day of your life is really hard because people are coming at you from every angle.

You know what I think is really hard? Waking up every day with $25M hanging over your head and needing to hire lawyers to protect you. That seems much harder than “People are criticizing me and I may need to use my 1M twitter followers or $1M Substack to refute what they’re saying.”

Let’s examine whether Malone could have made himself a billionaire during the pandemic, in ways that he didn’t try. We know that he didn’t own the mRNA technology, since he’s told the story repeatedly of only getting a Susan B. Anthony dollar for his work. So it doesn’t seem like he could have cashed in on that.

He tried to get BARDA approval for famotidine and to help Steve Kirsch get it for his SSRI. Either of those could have been lucrative ways of cashing in on the pandemic, if they’d worked. Unlike HCQ or ivermectin, which are generics, their products were under patent protection and Steve’s cost three times a similar product. What else could he have done to make money that he chose not to?

As a lawyer, I wonder if Bobby has read Malone’s filing of the lawsuit? As not a lawyer, that was what changed my mind. I read it in full anticipation of being on Malone’s side. But I ended saying “Where’s the defamation?” In everything I read, it was obvious that what the Breggins—who I’d never read before—were making valid points with logic and facts to back them up. There was no malice.

And certainly, before making public statements like this, Bobby should read the Breggins’ Motion to Dismiss. He has written about their book: “No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity…”

The motion cites the Fourth Circuit Court of Virginia in finding that “the First Amendment ‘reaches its apogee’ where the challenged speech involves matters of public concern … where the parties are public figures or the subject matter of the supposed libel touches on a matter of public concern.” As a lawyer and Presidential candidate, I can’t see how Kennedy could argue against this.

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And finally, Mathew Crawford posted his recent:

Election 2024: The Bitcoin Presidential Election

It included this video:

I don’t see this as an ethical issue, just a strategic one. For protecting financial assets from the overreach of the State or the plummeting dollar, Bitcoin is a fine thing. But for restoring community sovereignty and family security, I think we need a localized system backed by the common wealth: the land, the homes, the infrastructure, the knowledge.

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To follow up, this is What Do I Want in a President?:

Answer: Decentralize, and get out of the way. Mathew Crawford interviewed me on his Rounding the Earth podcast. In this video, I summarize some points and elaborate on others. We talked about geoengineering, the duodecimal system, cryptocurrencies, the Greater Reset, trust in the resistance movement, and telling the truth. I quote from Ellen Brown on How the War on Crypto Triggered a Banking Crisis and CJ Hopkins on The Great Divide. The 90-min interview is linked in the Substack.

and this is Kennedy & Malone:

How would it affect Robert F. Kennedy's Presidency if Robert Malone was secretly operating for the CIA? Would Malone head up his FDA, HHS or CDC? Is this a legitimate question Kennedy should be asking? I recount my phone call with the Breggins and a conversation with Tessa Lena, then ask if we should scatter the HHS to the four corners of the commonwealths.