Aside from being the son of the Attorney General and Presidential Candidate of the same name, and the nephew of our 35th President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is famous for his environmental advocacy for fishermen and more recently his work with vaccines.
He was on the Tucker Carlson Show this week (Ep 16, 08/14/23), an episode billed by Carlson as RFK, Jr. not talking about vaccines. In the first 40 or so minutes Kennedy gives his explanation of the politics of Putin, Russia, Ukraine, the neo-cons and their propensity to get the US involved in wars, and how all this relates to the current war in Ukraine. Kennedy opposes the war in Ukraine, hence his motivation to explain the neo-con movement.
Kennedy mentions that the US made promises to the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand eastward. He was referring to the negotiations over the reunification of Germany that produced a treaty that the four powers occupying Germany since World War II signed in 1990, uniting East and West Germany as a western NATO country. Whether or not that promise was made has been disputed ever since.1 He also labels the Ukraine war as a proxy war with Russia, that also happens to enrich US armament manufacturers.2
Carlson comments at one point that everything that Kennedy says is easily verified and wonders why the smart people in the Biden administration haven’t come to the same conclusion. Kennedy refuses to “try to get into other’s heads” and impute motives to them but that question certainly hangs in the air unresolved.
I know enough about NATO, Victoria Nuland and color revolutions and the military industrial complex to know that Kennedy makes sense but further investigation is needed to, as Carlson puts it, verify what Kennedy says. Meanwhile, this episode is certainly worth a listen.
When RFK, Jr was on Joe Rogan’s podcast this spring (#1999, 06/15/23) he did spend the first hour and a half talking about vaccines. If you listen to that 90 minutes, you will understand all the ways that Kennedy has been both misunderstood and maligned over the years. He makes it clear that he has never said that vaccines cause autism but rather that the dramatic increase in autism is positively correlated with the equally dramatic increase in childhood vaccines. There is a large body of first hand reports by parents of the rapid onset of autistic symptoms within days of the inoculations of their children. RFK, Jr. insists that this positive correlation, coupled with first hand reports, is sufficient that any reasonable person would investigate this correlation to determine if the dramatic increase in autism is caused by the vaccines or merely coincidentally correlated. Kennedy says that correlation is not causation, but if the vaccines have not caused this dramatic increase in autism, what has?
A quick search will reveal that there has been much written about autism and many studies addressing the increase in autism. The first cause mentioned is that improved clinical definition and increased public awareness has caused cases of autism (that had been missed in the past) to be diagnosed. There is no doubt that this accounts for some (much?) of the increase. And while I found several studies comparing autism in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations, I found no direct clinical studies examining vaccinations as a possible contributing factor.
Kennedy claims that pharmaceutical companies, shielded from liability for the vaccines they produce can produce new vaccines with impunity.3 And the government experts assigned to protect our health at the CDC and FDA were cut in on the profits.4 With the trusted pharmaceutical companies issuing products to improve our health, and the trusted government regulators assuring us of the safety of their products, state legislatures naturally adopted the CDC recommendations and required all of these vaccines for children in their states.
So here again, the very articulate Kennedy raises some issues that appear to merit further investigation. It is certainly in character for Big Pharma to pursue profit over all other considerations (if nothing else, the past few years have revealed that) so further investigation is warranted to verify what Kennedy says.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for President. He is (obviously) a life-long Democrat and is at 15% in the polls against Joe Biden. That makes him the fourth Kennedy to run for President (along with his uncles John and Ted and father Bobby). His platform is populist Democrat and he is gaining traction with both Democrats and Republicans. His social positions appear to be traditional democrat positions but he is against the war in Ukraine and sees himself as uniquely positioned to dismantle the administrative state and Constitutionally return power to the people.
We now have two populist candidates, Kennedy and Trump, willing to stand against the uniparty and entrenched bureaucracy. And both candidates are hated and opposed at every turn by the left wing media and the powers that be in both political parties. It should be an especially interesting 2024 Presidential year.
As part of the discussions about this treaty reuniting Germany, Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east." The US and NATO have insisted ever since that this statement referred only to the German reunification process and it was in fact never included in any agreement. It has been a matter of great debate, however, as the Soviet Union and now Putin insist that these comments made during the negotiations over German reunification constituted a promise that NATO would not extend beyond then-East Germany. "You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly," Putin said at a news conference in December 2021.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said we shouldn’t worry about sending billions to Ukraine because it all comes back to US arms manufacturers. https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/aid-to-ukraine-is-an-investment-in-americas-security
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was passed by Congress in 1986 and signed into law by Ronald Reagan that absolved pharmaceutical companies of (most) liability for harm caused by the vaccines they produce by establishing a federal fund to cover vaccine injuries. It is described on the HRSA website: The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury petitions.