Robert F Kennedy Jr denies comparing Covid mandates to the Holocaust

Controversial presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is beginning his campaign for the presidency with a move that no White House hopeful ever wants to have to make – by clarifying comments about the Holocaust.

The Kennedy family scion posted on Twitter a lengthy denouncement of media organisations including CNN and more recently The New York Times for what he said was a mischaracterisation of remarks he gave in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 2022. According to Mr Kennedy, the two news companies (and others) were incorrectly claiming that he had compared the Holocaust and specifically the treatment of Anne Frank to Covid vaccine mandates.

“For the record, I never compared the government’s Covid mandates to the Holocaust as the @nytimes falsely reported this week. Listen to my Lincoln Memorial speech and verify for yourself that I mentioned Ann Frank in an entirely different context. I was warning against the alarming totalitarian potential of AI + surveillance technologies,” said Mr Kennedy.

During the January 2022 speech, Mr Kennedy, a vocal skeptic of vaccines, declared: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you can hide in the attic like Anne Frank did… Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”

While his remarks could be seen as referring to mass surveillance as a whole, with Covid mandates being merely a part of that concept, the explanation does not touch on the general issue of using the atrocities of the Holocaust to score political points, or the comparison (even indirectly) between surveillance conducted by countries like the United States and the targeted murders of Nazi German authorities.

“@CNN originated this mischaracterization, and media censors made sure that nobody heard my objection. The onslaught of relentless media indignation finally compelled me to apologize for a statement I never made in order to protect my family,” he added in the tweet.

Mr Kennedy is one of a handful of candidates running for the presidency as Democrats in the 2024 election; another is author Marianne Williamson, who launched her campaign earlier this year. They and others face a massive structural disadvantage in their quest for the nomination in the form of President Joe Biden, who remains publicly committed to seeking reelection in 2024 and is rumoured to be planning an official announcement for the coming days.

Mr Biden, as the incumbent president, is a shoo-in for his party’s nomination should he run again; no elected Democrat is likely to mount a bid to challenge him.