Robert F. Kennedy - A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals

Copyright 2022 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Cover design by Brian Peterson

ISBN: 978-1-5107-7558-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7559-6

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

AUTHORS NOTE

[A]ttacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.... So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and scientist, youre really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science.... You have to be asleep not to see that.

NIAID director Anthony Fauci, Meet the Press, June 9, 2021

It is troubling enough that our countrys leading public health technocrat and the fiat leader of the National Institute of Health (NIH)the worlds principal funder of scientific researchwould make such a narcissistic and scientifically absurd statement. The more serious concern is that the majority of my political partythe Democratsand the mainstream media generally accept Dr. Faucis assertion as gospel. Journalistseven science journalistsact as if they believe that any pronouncement by Dr. Anthony Fauci (or FDA, CDC, or WHO) should mark the end of scientific inquiry. It is my hope that this short book will remind all Americans that blind faith in authority is a feature of religion and autocracy, but not of science nor democracy.

In what was arguably one of the most important speeches in American history, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned our citizenry precisely against this kind of misplaced faith in federal scientific bureaucrats:

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.... The prospect of domination of the nations scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.We must... be alert to the... danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

This essay emerged from a congenial and ongoing conversation, during the COVID pandemic, between myself and my longtime friend and former law partner, John Morgan, a lifelong champion of the Democrat Party and liberal values.

I invited Johnwho reveres Anthony Fauci and accepts the scientific validity of the governments COVID countermeasuresto reengage his critical thinking skills and to accept my challenge to science-based debate, which he did. I hope this little book will encourage other liberal Democrats to do the same.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A Challenge to Debate

My dear fellow Liberal,

Just before his death in 1642, Galileo complained that the authors of his 1615 censure were not just the clergyunderstandably fearful that heliocentrism would subvert Church cosmologiesbut, oddly, his fellow scientists, who universally refused to look through his telescope.

I am an FDR/Kennedy liberal, but my choice to openly question government policies for managing the pandemicunder both Presidents Biden and Trump has made me pariah, primarily in liberal circles. Many traditional liberalsreacting to the orchestrated fear and propagandahave embraced Lockdown Liberalism, an ideology that departs dramatically from the tenets of traditional liberalism. Like Galileos colleagues, so many of todays Lockdown Liberals refuse to read or debate the science that they believe supports the governments COVID countermeasures. Instead, they place their faith in the official orthodoxies of famously corrupt pharmaceutical companies and their notoriously captive federal agencies and expect others to do the same. This blind obedience is itself a kind of novel virus that now infects the entire upper deck of the Democratic Party. The core of this ideology is a cult-like fealty to COVID-19 countermeasures that are, in fact, scientifically indefensible. By necessity then, the acolytes of this theology must be ferociously hostile toward debate that might expose errors in government dogma and must, like the Roman Inquisition that extracted Galileos recantation under threat of burning at the stake, mercilessly suppress every utterance of heresy or dissent. Moreover, Lockdown Liberalisms enthusiastic embrace of censorshiponce anathema to liberalshas expanded into a repudiation of almost all the precepts of traditional FDR/Kennedy liberalism.

This letter is a challenge to my fellow liberals to reexamine the scientific assertions upon which rest the oppressive policies that have savaged the presumptions of classical liberalism and the United States Constitution. It is past time that our nation had an open conversation about the strategies supposedly enacted for ending the pandemic, and the best measures for avoiding future crises.

An Incongruous Liberal Allergy to Debate

The word liberal derives from the Latin liber, which the Etymology Dictionary renders as freedom from restraint in speech or action and freedom from bigotry. Conventional FDR/JFK liberalism prided itself on its open-minded tolerance of contrary opinion, its implacable protectiveness of the right to dissent, its embrace of new ideas, and its fearless love for contention and disputation. Democrats were once the party of intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and faith in scientific and liberal empiricism. Liberalisms foundational assumption, after all, is that freedom of speech and expression are essential to a functioning democracy; the free flow of information yields governing policies that have been annealed in the cauldron of fierce, open debate before triumphing on the battlefield of ideas.

We Democrats once took pride in ourselves as the party that understood how to read science critically. We confrontedand mercilessly deconstructedthe fatally flawed faux-science contrived by the carbon industrys PhD biostitutes to support climate change denialism. We also exercised healthy skepticism toward the corrupt drug companies that brought us the opioid crisis and that have paid $86 billion in criminal and civil penalties for a wide assortment of frauds and other crimes since 2000. We were disgusted by the phenomenon of agency capture and felt a deep revulsion for Pharmas pervasive control of Congress, the media, and the scientific journals. How is it, then, that todays Democrats become angry at the mere suggestion that the prevailing COVID drug and vaccine narrative may be heavily manipulated through orchestrated propaganda by a Pharma cartel with billions at stake in promoting COVID countermeasures?