Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM for 14h 59m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
All peoples in all eras have been afflicted now & again with conspiracy theories. Different times, however, are of different severities. We now seem to suffer more of this foul condition than our forefathers. At the least, our malady is serious. Populist candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, now lies to our people when he suggests that covid was designed to spare Jews, Chinese people:
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advanced a dangerous conspiracy theory this week that the coronavirus could have been a bioweapon “deliberately targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while disproportionately attacking White and Black people, according to a video of the remarks published Saturday by the New York Post. “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said during a dinner on New York’s Upper East Side on Tuesday evening. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
His remarks at the gathering — a dinner party attended by members of the media and Kennedy’s campaign manager at Tony’s Di Napoli on East 63rd Street — amplify racist and antisemitic tropes, including theories that blame Jews for the spread of the coronavirus to expand influence and financial gain, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League.
‘There is an argument’ is the language of a guarded crackpot, just askin’ questions along the way to his dark insinuation. In fact, the only dispute about Kennendy’s remarks is whether he says ‘an‘ argument or ‘no‘ argument about COVID-19 as an ethnic bio-weapon. The first is wrong, the second is simply a firmer commitment to the wrong.
Years of tolerating milder versions of bad reasoning and bad arguments weaken the intellect, making it susceptible to utter mendacity.
Yair Rosenberg, consistently informative and compelling, explains how conspiracy theories so often begin in one place but arrive at anti-Semitism:
Anti-Semitism is arguably the world’s oldest and most durable conspiracy theory. It presents Jews as the string-pulling puppet masters behind the world’s political, economic, and social problems. For those seeking simple solutions to life’s complexities, this outlook offers a ready-made explanation—and enemy. Anyone seeking a single source for society’s travails may start with run-of-the mill conspiracy theories but will soon end up parroting anti-Jewish ideas. As I’ve written before, “Conspiracy theorists begin by rejecting mainstream explanations for social and political events in favor of supposedly suppressed knowledge and hidden hands. These individuals may not start out as anti-Semites. But anti-Semitism has a multi-thousand-year head start on their crooked conception of the world, and has produced centuries of material casting the Jews as its chief culprit. Once a person has convinced themselves that an invisible hand is manipulating the masses, they are just a couple of Google searches away from discovering that it belongs to an invisible Jew.”