Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not doing himself any favors. After hosting a particularly flatulent dinner party, he’s only continued to stink up his reputation after comparing the imaginary negative health effects of vaccine programs to the Holocaust. I can assure you this that the actual Holocaust had way more adverse effects on people’s health than any vaccine in existence, since, you know … vaccines save lives despite what anti-vaxxers want you to believe, and the Holocaust was genocide.
An avid vaccine conspiracy theorist, RFK Jr. has made multiple public appearances where he compared the number of children with autism—which he incorrectly believes is caused by vaccines—to the Holocaust. His statements have come in response to a proposed California bill that would restrict parents’ ability to opt out of immunization requirements for their children.
“I want to apologize to all whom I offended by my use of the word ‘holocaust’ to describe the autism epidemic,” he has now said in a statement about those remarks. “I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled to find an expression to convey the catastrophic tragedy of autism, which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families. I am acutely aware of the profound power attached to that word, and I will find other terms to describe the autism crisis in the future.”
According to writer Michael Hobbes, this apology belongs in a museum.
Opponents of the bill maintained willful ignorance of RJK Jr.’s apology and began bombarding Sen. Richard Pan—a sponsor of the bill—with online attacks that compare him to Nazi officials. One Photoshop-wielding troll imposed a Hitler mustache on the senator’s face and captioned the photo, “Act like a Nazi, get depicted as a Nazi.” Everything else that is very wrong with that aside … they couldn’t come up with something less clunky than “get depicted”? Another opponent of the bill posted to Facebook asking, “Can we hang Pan with a noose instead?” These people are criminally out of pocket.
Evidently, they’re learning from the best. RFK Jr.’s Holocaust comments aren’t the first time that the lawyer has made the absurd comparison between vaccines and Nazi Germany. He is also responsible for the braindead take “Jewish people in Nazi Germany had more freedom than Americans facing Covid health restrictions,” a statement for which he was reprimanded by U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
He denied making this statement, though he is on record saying it. Wasserman Schultz then proceeded to further grill the already well-done Kennedy on some of his other statements, such as “Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” as if Nazi Germany was easier to escape than American Covid-19 restrictions. It also just makes RFK Jr. look ignorant because Anne Frank didn’t survive the Holocaust, despite hiding, which he would know if he cared about the Holocaust as more than a prop for his conspiracy theories.
It’s astounding that the mere accident of this man’s birth into the Kennedy family has allowed him a platform to make these asinine and antisemitic statements.
(featured image: Lisa Lake/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
