RFK Jr. and the Jews

What would Sigmund Freud say?

Video link

To say that RFK Jr. goes out of his way to avoid offending Jews would be an understatement. He presents himself as the world’s biggest friend of the Jewish people in general and the Jewish (supremacist) state of Israel in particular.

The first mainstream article that covered RFK’s presidential run with a positive spin was David Samuels’s piece in the Jewish magazine Tablet. But since then there hasn’t exactly been a groundswell of Kennedy support in the mainstream Jewish community. Aside from free-thinking outliers like Naomi Wolf and some of my radio guests (Josh Mitteldorf, Barry Kissin, Steve Brown, Ron Rattner) it seems that most of American Jewry, or at least its media wing, views RFK Jr.’s candidacy with trepidation.

That trepidation metamorphosed into hysterical denunciation last week, when the candidate’s off-the-record dinner-table remarks about ethnic-specific bioweapons and COVID-19 triggered the biggest two-minute anti-Semitism media hatefest since Kanye West went defcon 3. The New York Post broke the story with a lying headline: “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews.” What Kennedy actually said, in informal conversation, was:

COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 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…We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

The candidate could be fairly accused of hyperbole: The study he was citing did not indicate how disproportionally COVID affected different ethnicities, but only analyzed one genetic factor, which may or may not have had much real-world effect. But that study does say pretty much what RFK says it does. What it does not say, and what RFK Jr. did not say, is that COVID was a Jewish-Chinese bioweapon designed to kill white and black people.

But you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage. Nor would you know it from remarks of Congressional reps like Debbie Wasserman Schulz, who tried to censor Kennedy’s anti-censorship testimony, saying “Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.”

The witch hunt, of course, was unsurprising. What was surprising was that RFK Jr. would say something that was begging to be misinterpreted as “anti-Semitic.” This is the guy, after all, who presents himself as the most pro-Jewish, pro-Israel candidate in the known universe. Why would he even bring up the “ethnic targeting” study, much less exaggerate it in such a way as to practically force the ADL and its friends to accuse him of blaming COVID on the Jews?

Some RFK supporters might wonder if their hero, like Trump before him, is playing 3D chess. Maybe RFK knows full well who really killed his father and uncle. In that case, his exaggerated philosemitic pro-Israel schtick would be a ruse. Like his father before him, who kept publicly quiet about the murder of his brother JFK in hopes of winning the presidency and undoing the coup, RFK Jr. could be blowing (pro-Zionist) smoke to camouflage the reality of his mission. Could he have deliberately provoked the hysterical attacks in order to garner free publicity and let the media and political establishment further discredit itself—the sort of thing that Trump has made a political career out of?

All things considered, the 3D chess scenario is unlikely. RFK is considerably smarter than Trump, but he is less manipulative. Unlike Trump, RFK is sincere. He is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get candidate. I don’t think he’s lying or being manipulative when he professes undying love for Israel, hatred for Nazi Germany, and concern about COVID affecting ethnicities differently in light of what we know about ethnic-specific bioweapon research.

But the question remains: Why is Kennedy so irrationally extremist in his support for Israel? And why did he intemperately exaggerate the COVID-ethnicity study in such a way as to invite attacks? Both his rabidly Likudnik Zionism and his ill-considered “anti-Semitic” bioweapon speculation seem, shall we say, immoderate, if not a little unhinged.

So let’s put RFK Jr. on Dr. Freud’s proverbial couch. Freud coined the term reaction formation: “a defense mechanism in which people express the opposite of their true feelings, sometimes to an exaggerated extent. For instance, a man who feels insecure about his masculinity might act overly aggressive. Or a woman with substance use disorder may extol the virtues of abstinence.” In many cases, the subjects are not even consciously aware of their true feelings. The peacenik who is so bellicose in his pacifism that he is always starting fights—I have known several—is generally unaware that his real motivation is not dedication to peace, but smoldering inner aggression. And then there are the greedy, ambitious, competitive, materialistic people who adopt leftist politics to conceal their real feelings about money and status. I’ve known more than a few of those too. And don’t get me started about the ranting anti-global-warming fanatics who seem to think their bloviations will save the world while your skepticism will destroy it, even as their excessively comfortable lifestyles emit far more carbon in week than you do in a month.

So reaction formations are quite common, and often a big driver of people’s political views. RFK Jr.’s grossly exaggerated, seemingly irrational pro-Israel extremism has all the hallmarks of a classic reaction formation. If such is the case, Kennedy would be hiding his repressed hostility to the Jewish state not only from others, but also from himself.

But why would Kennedy hate Israel, yet remain in deep denial of his real feelings? For the same reason that Hamlet hated his stepfather Claudius but couldn’t bring himself to act. Israel killed Kennedy’s father, just like Claudius killed Hamlet’s. But just as Hamlet grew up in Claudius’s household, vulnerable to Claudius’s despotic power, RFK Jr. grew up in post-Zionist-coup America, helpless and defenseless. Vulnerable people in the household of an abuser, especially children, have a tendency to engage in identification with the aggressor: “an unconscious mechanism in which an individual identifies with someone who poses a threat or with an opponent who cannot be mastered.” From RFK Jr.’s perspective, that would be the Zionists. He totally identifies with them, even with their most disgustingly vulgar mediocrities like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and hyperbolically deems himself the biggest Zionist of all.

But What About the Blurt-Out?

If a reaction formation explains RFK’s ultra-Zionism, then what explains his COVID-targeted-to-spare-Jews blurt-out? Paging Dr. Freud again!

Actually, you don’t really need serious psychoanalytic chops to figure this one out. RFK’s repressed, unconscious hostility to Zionists, kept under wraps by his hyper-Zionist reaction formation, found a way of expressing itself. So although RFK was never consciously aware that what he was saying sounded a whole lot like “COVID was targeted to spare the Jews,” his unconscious mind was all-too-aware, and indeed put those equivocal words right into his mouth.

Like the classic Freudian slip, this kind of blurt-out scenario illustrates how the unconscious mind can occasionally short-circuit the conscious mind and speak unspeakable truths. Translation: “Outrageous Jewish anti-goy conspiracies are not always imaginary.” So the paranoid reaction of people like Debby Wasserman Schulz is not quite as crazy as it sounds: Debby’s unconscious is getting the gist of what Bobby’s unconscious is saying, and she doesn’t like it.

Intergenerational Trauma

The psychiatric symptoms on both sides stem from deeply-rooted intergenerational trauma. RFK Jr., of course, grew up with the trauma of his president-uncle’s dastardly murder in 1963, and his father’s equally dastardly murder (presumably by the same parties) in 1968. A modern-day Hamlet, he spent his formative years under tremendous social pressure to refrain from challenging his fathers’ and uncles’ murderers. We could also speculate about the Kennedy family’s roots in the holocausted earth of Ireland—the Irish have suffered real genocide and persecution to more than rival the Jews’ mostly-mythical suffering at the hands of alleged anti-Semites who supposedly hate them for no reason whatsoever—but let’s not go there, lest some of my less-enlightened readers start succumbing to Irish Holocaust denial.

On Wasserman-Schulz’s side, the intergenerational trauma is apparently so horrific that it can only be cured by psychedelic drugs. In “Can We Cure Anti-Semitism with Molly?” the Jewish Daily Forward’s senior editor Rob Eshman opens with a question:

“If you learned that a single pill had led a neo-Nazi to renounce his hateful beliefs, would you:

• Demand more research to find out if the pill really works

• Ignore existing evidence and continue to outlaw the pill?

Eshman notes that Israel, the world’s MDMA capital, uses the “love drug” to treat PTSD. We may imagine that child-murdering IDF snipers like the “I shot 13 kids today” tweeter are gradually eased back into what passes for Israeli normalcy with the help of psychedelic sessions that rewire their brains for love (of fellow Zionist Jews at least) instead of drooling 24/7/365 hatred of Palestinian kids (“little snakes”) and the mothers who bear them.

But can MDMA cure Zionist Jewry of its 3000-year-old collective case of PTSD? To answer that question, we would need to know whether individual Jews really suffer the pain experienced by their persecuted ancestors. Scientists are working hard to convince us that they do.

An alternative explanation of why so many ultra-privileged Jews experience so much suffering from historical collective memories blames culture, not genetics. The film Defamation memorably shows Israeli children being horrifically traumatized by their elders, who drum it into their impressionable little heads that the goys all want to exterminate them.

And speaking of Jews traumatizing Jews, what about infant circumcision? Paging Dr. Bowlby!

Attachment studies have shown that very young children—babies, really—are extremely vulnerable to psychological trauma. A terrible experience at eight months of age or even earlier is likely to ruin your life in a way that a vastly worse experience at a later age might not. Traumatic experiences involving damage to the mother-child bond, in particular, seem to be responsible for much if not most of the world’s misery. (Moral: To form a happy and peaceful person, keep the baby in skin-to-skin contact with the mother, and breastfeed on demand, for the first two years of life, as many traditional cultures do.)

What you do NOT want to do is rip the baby out of the mother’s arms and inflict unspeakable torture by carving up the most sensitive part of its anatomy with a knife. This will wreck the mother-child bond due to the mother’s perceived betrayal of her child (and create overcompensation in the form of the Jewish mother syndrome) while forming an unconscious memory of a horrific attack by a terrifying outsider. Later in life, the child will be culturally conditioned to transfer its fear and loathing onto the imaginary figure of a new terrifying outsider: the evil goy who wants to kill us. It’s the perfect formula for creating a profoundly neurotic, powerfully ethnocentric group identity.

So to summarize: RFK Jr.’s dysfunctional relationship with Zionism—which stems from the willingness of traumatized Zionists like Ben Gurion to commit outrageous crimes in order to preserve the nuclear weapons they imagine they need to save their lives from the evil Jew-hating goys—is a complete mess. I doubt that even the best therapist, armed with all the MDMA in Israel, could effect a cure.