In an appearance this weekend on “The Kim Iversen Show,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and journalist Kim Iversen discussed resistance during the pandemic, strategies for rebuilding democracy and the power of fear — and of new technologies — to control dissent.
Iversen called Kennedy, chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense, “one of the most prominent voices against the authoritarian pandemic response.”
On the subject of dissent, Iversen asked Kennedy what he thought made a heterogeneous group of people, about 30% of the American population, question or resist the official COVID-19 narrative when most people went along with it.
Kennedy pointed to a history of CIA research experiments, called MKUltra, which involved manipulating the human mind.
The most famous of these, he said, was the Milgram experiment, in which psychologist Stanley Milgram studied the willingness of research subjects from all walks of life to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
Sixty-seven percent of people in the experiment were willing, against their better judgment, to cause pain and even potential death to others when ordered to — while 33% of the subjects refused.
“It has struck me many, many times in the last year that we’re all now in the grips of this huge Milgram experiment,” Kennedy said, adding:
“We have a Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is this trusted authority, who’s telling us to do things that we know are wrong — like censor speech, like close all the churches in the country for a year with no scientific evidence, no citation, no public hearings, no public debate … who’s ordering us to put on masks, even though he admitted a week before that masks don’t work, who’s ordering us to close every business in the country — 3.3 million businesses — with no due process, no just compensation, in violation of the Constitution, who’s telling us to get rid of jury trials, the Sixth and SeventhAmendments.”
But in the Constitution, “there is no pandemic exception,” Kennedy said, regardless of the magnitude of a crisis.
There was no exception during malaria and smallpox epidemics that disabled entire armies during the Revolutionary War, or during the Spanish flu in 1918 that killed 50 million people.
Even during the Civil War, which nearly destroyed the country, the Supreme Court refused to let President Lincoln eliminate habeas corpus, Kennedy said.
What happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people consented to have their constitutional rights suspended was new. People gave up these rights, he said, because they were scared.
“Fear is a really potent motivator,” he said. “It’s a potent instrument of totalitarian control.”
“Fear is the enemy because it allows totalitarian systems to take control of people and destroy institutions and values. And he [Roosevelt] said, we’re not gonna do that.”
Will the next crisis be even worse?
Iversen said recent events suggest the tide is changing. For example, some legal battles against the mandates have been successful.
But, she said, she’s still worried. “We actually lost in the long run. They now know how to manipulate us better. They learned through the pandemic. Thirty percent of us just weren’t scared enough,” Iversen said.
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