Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently came under fire for referencing the Holocaust in a speech he gave on January 23rd at the Defeat the Mandates March in D.C.  After being slammed and shamed by his fellow travelers on the left -- including his liberal wife Cheryl Hines who called his comments “reprehensible and insensitive” -- Kennedy was forced into multiple apologies. 

But what did he actually say that was so offensive?  Like the boy who shouted that the emperor had no clothes, he exposed the Biden administration for its pernicious COVID policies -- and, in the process, risked losing everything from his stature as an elite, left-wing environmental activist to possibly even his marriage.  That alone should make everyone stand up and take notice of what RFK, Jr. had to say.  

Crackpot or Cassandra?  Kennedy simply states the obvious: it is increasingly difficult to evade or escape a malign government or to even have our own thoughts about government diktats when tracking and surveillance technologies allow governments to quash dissent in ways that were not technologically achievable for past fascist regimes. 

If you didn’t know it was RFK, Jr. speaking, you’d think the words that follow are from Rand Paul or Josh Hawley:

If you give government the license to silence its critics, you have given them the capacity to commit any atrocity they want and to obliterate all the amendments and rights of the Constitution. 

…They took away due process rulemaking. They’ve taken away our right to be free of warrants, of searches and seizures, with this very intrusive track and trace surveillance, etc. Oh, we are watching something now that I never believed that I would see in my lifetime. And I read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and dystopian science fiction novels warning that one day the United States would be overtaken by fascism. 

Fascism incidentally is defined -- Mussolini defined it -- as a merger of state and corporate power -- as orchestrated by Tony Fauci. What we’re seeing today -- what we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we’ve never seen before. It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct or thought and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity. 

Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did. I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father, and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped. So it was possible. Many died truly, but it was possible. 

Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide. Within five years, we’re going to see 415,000 low orbit satellites. Bill Gates says his 65,000 satellites alone will be able to look at every square inch of the planet 24 hours a day. 

They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior -- digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply -- vaccine passports. 

You have a series of rights. As flawed as our government is, you can still go out and go to a bar. You can go to a sporting event. You can get on a bus or an airplane and you can travel. You have certain freedoms. You can get educated, et cetera. 

The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates. It will make you a slave.  [Italics added.]                       

I have never been a fan of RFK, Jr. and I don’t agree with his stance on vaccines in general and against the pharmaceutical companies in toto. 

However, public pushback against the mandates and restrictions for over two years has exposed grave flaws in our public health policies and regulatory checks and balances, calling into question the trustworthiness of the NIH, CDC, NIAID, and the FDA.  We have seen firsthand the harm they can do when fully shrouded from legal responsibility and are tempted by billions.

While I do not embrace the broad-sweeping accusations against Big Pharma and vaccines that RFK, Jr and his Children’s Health Defense organization espouse or everything that he maintains in his book, it is well written, well researched, and very compelling.  He could be a kook but he could also be the one guy screaming that the Earth revolves around the Sun.  He might be right about some things and wrong about others. 

Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, his Holocaust analogy was not inappropriate. It is perfectly acceptable to reference the Holocaust, Soviet Gulags, the Inquisition, Slavery, Jim Crow, the Killing Fields, and the Trail of Tears any time we can learn something from the comparison that opens our eyes and helps prevent other atrocities.  That is the entire point of teaching and remembering.  

Moreover, no one should claim ownership over some sort of entitlement to condemn wickedness.  It is part of our shared history and belongs to us all.  That some of us personally experienced atrocities, had family who did, or are members of a persecuted group, doesn’t translate into a right to speak out that is exclusive only to the victims.  To that end, forbidding people from commenting about an atrocity because they are not members of a class of victims is specious and undermines the very lessons we seek to impart.  Part of the human experience is our ability to experience empathy, compassion, and understanding.  We actually can put ourselves in others’ shoes and walk the path of another.  We have imagination and pathos precisely for that.  What would be the sense of every documentary, movie, and novel if it weren’t possible to see something through the eyes of another? 

As a Jewish individual who embraces her religion and has family directly impacted by the Holocaust, I encourage people to remind others of history’s horrors when apt, as long as the reference isn’t gratuitous, frivolous, or dramatic for the sake of being dramatic.

Admittedly, those lines aren’t always clear.  Nancy Pelosi called Tea Partiers Nazis.  To lefties, Trump really is Hitler.  But when the Holocaust or any tragedy becomes politicized, we trivialize it and that goes against everything we want to achieve by keeping the accounts alive. 

It’s not really hard to understand the left-wing outrage at Kennedy’s Holocaust comment once you grasp that the true goal is to undercut the pith of his speech -- that bureaucrats in the government, the Biden administration, and Big Pharma have colluded and lied to the public, undermined our democracy, and happen to have invasive surveillance and tracking technologies in their cache of weapons.   

Image: Gage Skidmore