“Hi, I’m Jack Schlossberg, and I have something to say,” the 30-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy said at the start of a video message he posted on July 21, denouncing his cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for waging a presidential campaign for “personal gain and fame” and for spreading conspiracy theories over COVID-19.” [JFK’s] legacy is important,” said Jack. “It’s about a lot more than Camelot and conspiracy theories. It’s about public service and courage. It’s about civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, and landing a man on the moon. Joe Biden shares my grandfather’s vision for America. That we do things not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
According to Jack, Joe Biden is “in the middle of becoming the greatest progressive president we’ve ever had. Under Biden, we’ve added 13 million jobs. Unemployment is at its lowest in 60 years. Biden passed the largest investment in infrastructure since The New Deal. And the largest investment in green energy ever. He’s appointed more federal judges than any president since my grandfather. He ended our longest war. He ended the COVID pandemic. And he ended Donald Trump.”
“These are the issues that matter,” said Schlossberg, “and if my cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr., cared about any of them, he would support Joe Biden, too. Instead, he’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories, and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted, again, by somebody’s vanity project.”
From there, Jack said he was excited to vote for Joe Biden in both the Democratic primary and in the general election.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 69, appeared to endorse the idea that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab and may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Chinese people. “COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said in a video obtained by the New York Post. “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.”
RFK Jr. later defended himself against the allegations of racism and antisemitism. “The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” Kennedy wrote on Twitter after the story went viral. “I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons.” He linked to a study about “unique genetic susceptibility across different populations,” claiming that this “serves as kind of proof for the concept of ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
On July 19, Quinnipiac University released a poll showing Republicans continue to like Kennedy with a more than 2-to-1 margin, per the Washington Post. RFK Jr. is running as a Democratic primary challenger to President Joe Biden. That poll said that Democrats disliked Kennedy at more than 2-to-1 negative, with 47% polled having an unfavorable view of him. Other polls indicate he doesn’t seem to have a chance to upend Biden’s role as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024.