American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.

Guest Post by Ron Unz

Investigating the Sounds of Silence

Last week the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page hit-piece against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of America’s most famous political family and an underdog challenger to President Joseph Biden in the Democratic Primaries.

Kennedy’s unexpectedly strong campaign had recently stumbled when the novice candidate made some incautious remarks at a private dinner regarding the ethnic skew of Covid vulnerability, and a video clip of his explosive words touched off a media feeding-frenzy. The Times and the rest of the mainstream media are intensely hostile to Kennedy’s effort and the editors may have hoped that this piling-on attack might permanently cripple his fledgling campaign.

• Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family
  Peter Baker • The New York Times • August 6, 2023 • 2,600 Words

Probably few readers, whether Kennedy supporters or opponents, found anything unexpected in the article authored by Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker. Near the beginning, we were told that Kennedy “has become a source of deep anguish among his many siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews.” The candidate was described as a former drug-addict, expelled from his private schools, who had been married three times and whose second wife had committed suicide. Meanwhile, almost any mention of the great accomplishments in his long and successful career as an environmental attorney were left on the cutting-room floor.

The main focus of the piece was Kennedy’s frayed relations with his extended family, die-hard Democrats all, who were bewildered and saddened by the strange and self-destructive political behavior of their errant relative. The text was heavily laced with harshly negative quotes regarding his beliefs—“deplorable and untruthful” according to his sister Kerry Kennedy, “morally and factually wrong” by his brother Joseph P. Kennedy II, while his nephew Joseph P. Kennedy III Tweeted “I unequivocally condemn what he said.” The article opened with a denunciation by the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, who declared that his “conspiracy-minded” cousin was “tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather and their storied family” with his “vanity project.” I counted a total of 13 different Kennedys cited in the piece, almost all of them providing these sorts of unflattering remarks.

The entire tone of the article was unrelentingly negative and clearly intended to present the dissenting Democratic candidate as someone who held bizarre beliefs or was even unhinged, definitely not an individual to be entrusted with our nation’s future. I’d assume that the Democratic Party’s lavishly-funded corps of opposition researchers have carefully parsed every spoken or written word of Kennedy for the last couple of decades and then gifted the choicest morsels they uncovered to their numerous media allies including the Times.

Thus, we can safely assume that every misstep or bit of dirt about Kennedy would have been discovered by now, allowing us to draw some important inferences from any silence. So as I carefully read the Times article, I focused not so much on what it contained but rather what it strangely omitted.

Over the years, Kennedy has publicly and repeatedly declared that both his father and his uncle had died at the hands of a conspiracy, pointing to the CIA as the most likely culprit. Probably at least a couple of million Americans have read his words or listened to his interviews, clearly establishing him as the most explicit sort of “conspiracy theorist,” a highly pejorative term that the media always eagerly seeks to inflict upon disfavored political candidates.

Yet across the full 2,600 words of the article, most of it heavily focused upon Kennedy family matters, mention of that topic was limited to just a single glancing sentence. Why would the Times have almost entirely avoided such a tempting target, one that seemingly supported its portrayal of Kennedy as holding bizarre and irrational beliefs? I think that the best explanation is that the editors knew perfectly well that Kennedy’s facts were rock-solid on that issue, and that challenging him would merely bring his information to much wider attention, perhaps leading many additional millions of Americans to conclude that their own media had been lying to them for six decades just as Kennedy himself had Tweeted out last year:

The year before sending that Tweet, Kennedy had published a long piece in the San Francisco Chronicle presenting the incontrovertible facts of his own father’s killing, and if these came to widespread attention, decades of media lies might begin to unravel.

• Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father. Gov. Newsom should set him free
  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • The San Francisco Chronicle • December 8, 2021 • 1,000 Words

Consider, for example, prominent liberal pundit Bill Maher, someone who would certainly never classify himself as a “conspiracy theorist.” When he interviewed Kennedy a few weeks ago and heard the factual evidence regarding the assassination of the candidate’s father in 1968, he immediately declared himself completely convinced that Kennedy was correct about the existence of a conspiracy.

Moreover, the particular focus of the Times article would have put the newspaper on especially risky ground. With thirteen different members of the Kennedy family mentioned or quoted in the text, any substantial discussion of the 1960s assassinations might reveal that many or most of Kennedy’s relatives fully agreed with the candidate about the existence of a conspiracy, thereby blowing a huge hole in the media’s decades-long blockade of the truth. If the American people discovered that the entire Kennedy family was filled with “Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists,” tens of millions of minds might be changed.

Consider another piece published a couple of months earlier by Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, which had appeared as part of a large barrage of media attacks and insults against the conspiratorial beliefs of Kennedy and his supporters. Although she treated his views on the assassinations as an element of his irrationality, she couldn’t help mentioning that Salon founder David Talbot, her old boss and a highly-regarded national journalist, entirely agreed with Kennedy about those historical facts.

Indeed, I regard Talbot’s 2005 national bestseller Brothers as probably the most important Kennedy assassination book of the last twenty years because it revealed that so many individuals near the top of the American government, including most of the Kennedy family itself, had almost immediately concluded that our 35th President died in a conspiracy. A leading mainstream historian lavishly praised Talbot’s research in the Times itself and suggested that the existence of a conspiracy was obvious. But the editors running the Times news pages have continued to avert their eyes from these facts, perhaps leading their younger colleagues such as Goldberg to remain blissfully unaware.

Totally Ignoring Kennedy’s AIDS Denialism

When hostile journalists seek to destroy a candidate, they naturally direct their coverage where they believe he is most vulnerable and do their best to ignore his greatest strengths. A shrewd campaign might use such biased reporting as a road-map, one that provides the photographic negative of the issues that should be emphasized. So if the Times and other media outlets seek to avoid the Kennedy assassination conspiracies, perhaps those are exactly the right issues to discuss.

But there is another incendiary topic on which the silence surrounding Kennedy’s position has been far more absolute across both the mainstream and the alternative media, so much so that probably only the tiniest sliver of Americans are even aware of Kennedy’s views. Based upon his extremely controversial writings, the candidate would seem so tremendously vulnerable that any such media coverage would immediately destroy his campaign and his reputation. Yet not a single hostile publication has ever reported those facts, suggesting that the true situation is actually quite different from what it appears to be. Perhaps this total silence implies that the Times and other media outlets dread that subject, fearing that it could destroy their entire media establishment if the facts came out and Kennedy were proven correct.

Until late 2021 I’d been only slightly aware of Kennedy, having vaguely heard that he’d become a leading figure in the growing anti-vaxxing movement. My own views on vaccines had always been quite conventional, not too different from those advocated by the Times, but I was persuaded to read his new book in order to get his side of the story.

To my utter amazement I discovered that the main subject of his text was something entirely different than what I had been led to believe. Kennedy had devoted nearly half the length—200 pages—to promoting the theory that AIDS did not exist as a real disease and was instead merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies. But not a single one of those describing his book, whether supportive or critical, had ever hinted at this. Indeed, when I mentioned the true subject of Kennedy’s text to a couple of people, they almost seemed to think that I was delusional, considering it impossible that no one would have revealed such a startling fact.

Kennedy’s book quickly became the #1 Amazon bestseller and he soon drew extremely harsh media attacks, including a 4,000 word article produced by a large team of Associated Press journalists. But as I noted, although they denounced him on every other point none of them ever mentioned his explosive AIDS claims.

A great deal of effort had obviously been invested in this attack, and the byline of the named author was shared by five additional AP writers and researchers, underscoring the journalistic resources devoted to demolishing the reputation of an individual who has obviously made such powerful enemies. But in reading the article, the phrase that came to my mind was “the Sounds of Silence” or perhaps the famous Sherlockian clue of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”

Almost half of the entire book under attack—around 200 pages—is devoted to presenting and promoting the astonishing claim that everything we have been told about HIV/AIDS for more than 35 years probably amounts to a hoax.

By any reasonable standard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has now established himself as America’s #1 “HIV/AIDS Denier,” and prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had probably spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, reportedly absorbing some two trillion dollars in research and treatment costs. So for someone to essentially claim that the disease doesn’t actually exist would seem the height of utter lunacy, on a par with Flat Earthism. Yet not a single word of this astonishing situation appears in the long AP article, that attacks Kennedy on almost all other possible grounds, fair or unfair. Did all six of the AP writers and researchers somehow skip over those 200 pages in Kennedy’s bestseller?

That large team of AP journalists seems to have spent at least ten days working on their lengthy article, mining Kennedy’s record for almost everything controversial they could possibly find, even highlighting a photograph that merely shows him standing next to Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.

• How a Kennedy Built an Anti-Vaccine Juggernaut Amid COVID-19
  Michelle R. Smith et. al. • The Associated Press • December 15, 2021 • 4,000 Words

I noticed this same total silence about AIDS was maintained in a similar attack the following month by the managing editor of Counterpunch.

• Vaccines, RFK Jr. and The Science of Misinformation
  Joshua Frank • Counterpunch • January 14, 2022 • 1,900 Words

With Kennedy’s book passing the million mark in sales and his influence still growing, this pattern of omission continued and became even stranger. In late February, the New York Times launched a blistering front-page attack against him, tarring the author and his book as a font of total irrationality and dangerous misinformation, but the 2,600 words never hinted at his central focus on AIDS.

Moreover, the writer was longtime Times journalist Adam Nagourney, identified as the co-author of a history of the modern Gay Rights movement, and surely the AIDS epidemic must have been a central part of his research for that 2001 volume. But he never mentioned the 200 pages in which Kennedy had made the incendiary claim that AIDS was just a medical media hoax, an omission perhaps suggesting that he feared that Kennedy might well be correct and that certain doors should be kept firmly closed.

• A Kennedy’s Crusade Against Covid Vaccines Anguishes Family and Friends
  Adam Nagourney • The New York Times • February 26, 2022 • 2,600 Words

As I later noted, this silence very suspiciously contrasted with the firestorms of media outrage that had once greeted those who raised even mild doubts about the AIDS issue.

Since the 1980s AIDS has been an explosive topic in the public sphere, and anyone—whether scientist or layman—who questioned the orthodox narrative was viciously denounced as having blood on his hands. During the early 2000s South African President Thabo Mbeki had cautiously raised such possibilities and was massively vilified by the international media and the academic community. Yet when Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller went much farther, devoting seven full chapters to making the case that HIV/AIDS was merely a medical hoax, his media antagonists carefully avoided that subject even while they attacked him on all other grounds.

Once again, the only plausible explanation is that the hostile journalists and their editors have recognized that Kennedy’s factual evidence was too strong and any such attacks might prove disastrously counter-productive. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had publicly declared that the AIDS hoax was as great a scientific scandal as the notorious Lysenko fraud, and if a substantial portion of the American public concluded that AIDS was indeed a medical phantom that had been promoted for 35 years by our gullible and dishonest media, the credibility of the latter on current vaccination issues might be completely annihilated.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the media to accurately blast Kennedy as “a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax,” and that simple, short phrase would have immediately dealt a massive body-blow to his public reputation. But many people would then have begun looking into the facts, and once they did so, the tables might have quickly turned, destroying the credibility of his critics. The total silence of the media suggests that they greatly feared that possibility.

Understanding the Bitter HIV/AIDS Controversy

After reading Kennedy’s book in December 2021, I published a long and favorable review, which attracted a great deal of readership and squarely emphasized his heretical AIDS claims, thereby finally bringing them into the public square. Websites closely allied with Kennedy highlighted my piece so it seems unlikely that any of his media adversaries could have still remained unaware.

As all of us know from the media, AIDS is a deadly auto-immune disease that was first diagnosed in the early 1980s, primarily afflicting gay men and intervenous drug users. Transmitted by bodily fluids, the disease usually spread through sexual activity, blood transfusions, or the sharing of needles, and HIV, the virus responsible, was finally discovered in 1984. Over the years, a variety of medical treatments were developed, mostly ineffective at first, but more recently so successful that although being HIV-positive was once considered a death-sentence, the infection has now become a chronic, controllable condition. The current Wikipedia page on HIV/AIDS runs more than 20,000 words, including over 300 references.

Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.

I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.

In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.

Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.

Prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, absorbing perhaps a couple of trillion dollars of funding and becoming the central focus of an army of scientists and medical experts. It simply boggles the mind for someone to suggest that HIV/AIDS might have largely been a hoax, and that the vast majority of deaths were not from the illness but from the drugs taken to treat it.

My science textbooks sometimes mentioned that during the benighted 18th century, leading Western physicians treated all manner of ailments with bleeding, a quack practice that regularly caused the deaths of their patients, with our own George Washington often numbered among the victims. Indeed, some have argued that for several centuries prior to modern times, standard medical treatments inadvertently took far more lives than they saved, and those too poor or backward to consult a doctor probably benefited from that lack. But I had never dreamed that this same situation might have occurred during the most recent decades of our modern scientific age.

From reading the newspapers during the early 1990s, I had been dimly aware of the dispute regarding the true nature of AIDS, but had never paid much attention to the controversy at the time. So when the media coverage faded away, I assumed that the debate had been successfully resolved.

But according to Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this was not the case. He claimed that for three decades the entire Western media has been promoting and maintaining a gigantic medical hoax, a conspiracy orchestrated by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his greedy corporate allies that had cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Such bizarre accusations seemed almost impossible to me, more like the ranting of a deranged lunatic than anything that could happen in the real world. But the case he laid out across his 200 pages of text was a surprisingly persuasive one.

Extraordinary claims obviously require extraordinary evidence. Kennedy’s chapters on AIDS include more than 900 source-references, many of them to academic journal articles or other supposedly authoritative scientific information. But although I have a strong science background, with my original academic training having been in theoretical physics, I am not a medical doctor nor a virologist, let alone someone with specialized expertise in AIDS research, and these articles would mean nothing to me even if I had attempted to read them. So I was forced to seek other indications that Kennedy’s 200 pages on AIDS represented something more than sheerest lunacy.

His book carries glowing praise from a long list of medical doctors and scientists, but their names and backgrounds are completely unknown to me, and with nearly a million practicing physicians in America, a few could surely be found to endorse almost anything. However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”

Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.

And he was hardly alone. Kennedy explains that the following year, a top Harvard microbiologist organized a group containing some of the world’s most distinguished virologists and immunologists and they issued a public statement, endorsed by three additional science Nobel Laureates, that raised the same questions:

It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be designed and undertaken.

As Kennedy tells the story, by that point AIDS researchers and the mainstream media were completely in thrall to the ocean of government funding and pharmaceutical advertising controlled by Fauci and his corporate allies, so these calls by eminent scientists were almost entirely ignored and unreported. According to one journalist, some two trillion dollars has been spent on HIV/AIDS research and treatment over the decades, and with so many research careers and personal livelihoods dependent upon what amounts to an “HIV/AIDS industrial-complex,” few have been willing to critically examine the basic foundations of that empire.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never given any thought to questioning AIDS orthodoxy. But discovering the longstanding scientific skepticism of so many knowledgeable experts, including four Nobel Laureates, one of them the actual discoverer of the HIV virus, has completely shifted my perspective. I cannot easily ignore or dismiss the theories Kennedy presents, but can only briefly summarize them and leave it to individual readers to investigate further then decide for themselves. And in basic fairness to the author, he himself also repeatedly emphasizes that he can “take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS” but is simply disturbed that Fauci has successfully used his government funding and media clout to suppress an ongoing and perfectly legitimate scientific debate. According to Kennedy, his book is intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.”

His narrative of the origins of the HIV/AIDS connection is absolutely stunning and seems well-documented. Dr. Robert Gallo, an NIH researcher in Fauci’s orbit, originally announced HIV as the apparent cause of AIDS at a packed 1984 press conference, which he held before any of his supportive research findings had actually been published and reviewed by his scientific peers. Only long after the theory had become firmly embedded in the national media did it come out that only 26 of the 76 AIDS victims in his seminal study showed any traces of the HIV virus, an extremely slender reed for such a momentous conclusion.

Furthermore, critics eventually noted that many thousands of documented AIDS victims similarly lacked any signs of the HIV virus, while millions of those infected by HIV exhibited absolutely no symptoms of AIDS. Correlation does not imply causality, but in this case, even the correlation seemed a very loose one. According to Kennedy, fully orthodox AIDS researchers grudgingly admit that no scientific study has ever demonstrated that HIV causes AIDS. The widespread accusations of serious scientific misbehavior and outright intellectual theft that long swirled around Gallo’s laboratory research were eventually confirmed by legal proceedings, and that helped explain why his name was not included on the Nobel Prize for the HIV discovery.

AIDS had originally come under the purview of the National Cancer Institute, but once it was blamed on a virus, Fauci’s own infectious disease center managed to gain control. That resulted in an enormous gusher of Congressional funding and media attention for what had previously been a sleepy and obscure corner of the NIH, and Fauci soon established himself as America’s reigning “AIDS Czar.” The HIV-AIDS link may or may not be scientifically valid, but it carried enormous political and financial implications for Fauci’s career.

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One of the major scientific heroes in Kennedy’s account is Prof. Peter H. Duesberg of Berkeley. During the 1970s and 1980s, Duesberg had been widely regarded as among the world’s foremost virologists, elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at age 50, making him one of its youngest members in history. As early as 1987 he began raising serious doubts about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and highlighting the dangers of AZT, eventually publishing a series of journal articles on the subject that gradually won over many others, including Montagnier. In 1996 he published Inventing the AIDS Virus, a massive 712 page volume setting forth his case, with the Foreword provided by Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the renowned inventor of PCR technology and himself another leading public critic of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg even underscored the confidence of his HIV skepticism by offering to be injected with HIV-tainted blood.

But rather than openly debate such a strong scientific opponent, Fauci and his allies blacklisted Duesberg from receiving any government funding, thereby wrecking his research career, while also vilifying him and pressuring others to do the same. According to fellow researchers quoted by Kennedy, Duesberg was destroyed as a warning and an example to others. Meanwhile, Fauci deployed his influence to have his critics banned from the major national media, ensuring that few outside a narrow segment of the scientific community ever even became aware of the continuing controversy.

• American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 6, 2021 • 6,100 Words

Investigating the Duesberg Hypothesis on HIV/AIDS

I subsequently spent several weeks carefully reading the arguments of Duesberg and his scientific allies as well as those of their opponents, and then described the results of my inquiry:

So the theory I needed to investigate amounted to the Duesberg Hypothesis, the long-suppressed challenger to our reigning HIV/AIDS orthodoxy.

Fortunately for my purposes, scientific heresies starved of research funding and blacklisted from leading journals tend to produce a very manageable body of work. The annual billions spent on orthodox AIDS research has spawned well over 100,000 academic journal articles, more than a diligent reader could digest in a dozen lifetimes. But the most recent academic publication I could locate on the other side was a lengthy review article published eighteen years ago by Duesberg and two of his collaborators. Indeed, according to their Epilogue, the authors had spent several years struggling to get their article into print against the unremitting hostility of the reigning AIDS establishment, which had successfully pressured two previous journals into cancelling publication.

• The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition (PDF)
  Peter Duesberg, Claus Koehnlein, and David Rasnick • Journal of Bioscience • June 2003 • 24,000 Words

Although I have a strong scientific background, I lack the necessary expertise in medicine or microbiology to properly evaluate their paper. But reading it carefully as a layman, I found it solid and persuasive, certainly worthy of publication. And when I passed it along to someone with a professional medical background, he considered it extremely impressive, a convincing exposition of the authors’ revolutionary thesis.

One of Duesberg’s central claims was that the disease known as “AIDS” didn’t actually exist, but was merely the official label attached to a group of more than two dozen different illnesses, all of which had a variety of different causes, with only some of these being infectious agents. Indeed, most of these illnesses had been known and treated for many decades, but they were only designated “AIDS” if the victim was also found to test positive for the HIV virus, which probably had nothing to do with the condition.

In support of their contrary position, the authors noted that the various groups at high risk for “AIDS” only tended to get particular versions of the disease, with the “AIDS” suffered by hemophiliacs usually being very different from the “AIDS” of African villagers and only slightly overlapping with the diseases of gay men or intervenous drug addicts. Indeed, the pattern of “AIDS” in Africa seemed utterly divergent from that in the developed world. But if all these different illnesses were actually caused by a single HIV virus, such completely disparate syndromes would seem puzzling anomalies, difficult to explain from a scientific perspective.

In 2009, a half-dozen years after the publication of that lengthy article, an independent film-maker named Brent Leung produced a 90 minute documentary on AIDS, strongly sympathetic to Duesberg’s thesis, and someone recently brought it to my attention. There is a great paucity of pro-Duesberg material, so although I only rarely find videos useful sources of information, this case was an important exception. The film highlighted the tremendous inconsistencies of the orthodox scientific position, and also included important interviews with Duesberg, Mullis, Fauci, and numerous other key researchers and journalists on all sides of the debate. The entire documentary is conveniently available on Youtube, so those interested can watch it and decide for themselves.

Journalist John Lauritsen had been covering the HIV/AIDS controversy for decades, writing two books on the subject and serving as an important source for Kennedy’s own work. He recently joined one of the discussion-threads on our website, and suggested that I republish his 2018 conference talk, which usefully summarized the history and current state of the issue.

• Making Our Case In the Battle for Truth
  Challenging Avaricious Viral Paradigms
  John Lauritsen • Vers Pont du Gard Conference • June 16, 2018 • 2,500 Words

 

Although I found all this pro-Duesberg material helpful in fleshing out the arguments, most of it overlapped with the contents of the Kennedy book, and the analysis was necessarily one-sided. Under pressure of the medical establishment and its AIDS lobby, the mainstream media has almost entirely shut its doors to any dissent on the issue and refuses to engage the critics, instead seeming to rely upon the blacklist and the boycott. This suggested the relative weakness of the orthodox case, but lacking the give-and-take of argument and counter-argument, I could not easily weigh the strength of the two sides. Fortunately, I discovered that this situation had been quite different in the past.

I spent most of the early 2000s creating a content-archiving system that includes near-complete collections of a couple of hundred of our leading opinion magazines of the last 150 years, those influential publications that have shaped our understanding of the world. The project was nearly a total failure since very few people have ever used it, but it still comes in handy when I want to investigate something, and I easily located a long list of articles focused on the Duesberg Hypothesis, most of them from the 1990s. During that period, the iron wall of censorship had not yet come down, and the topic had been widely and respectfully treated in major publications.

I carefully read more than a dozen of the most substantial articles, all of which had appeared in fully mainstream and respectable liberal, conservative, and libertarian periodicals. One major surprise was how little the debate seemed to have changed. The evidence and arguments that Duesberg and his scientific allies had been making thirty years ago seemed remarkably similar to what was presented in Kennedy’s book published only just last month.

The Summer 1990 issue of Policy Review, one of America’s most sober and influential conservative policy journals, had offered Duesberg and a co-author a platform for the controversial theory, and their resulting piece ran nearly 9,000 words. According to the editor, this topic provoked more letters and responses—both positive and negative—than anything in the publication’s history, and became one of their most talked-about articles. As a result, the next issue of the quarterly featured some of those reactions as well as the replies of the two authors, with the entire exchange running almost 13,000 words.

• Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction? (PDF)
  Immunosuppressive Behavior, not HIV, May Be the Cause of AIDS
  Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison • Policy Review • Summer 1990 • 8,800 Words
• Is HIV the Cause of AIDS? (PDF)
  Critics Respond • Policy Review • Fall 1990 • 12,700 Words

Several years later, a similar development unfolded at Reason, the glossy flagship publication of America’s libertarian movement. The magazine ran a long cover story endorsing Duesberg’s claims and authored by three of his scientific allies, one of them a former Harvard Medical School professor and another a recent Nobel Laureate. Once again the result was a huge outpouring of both supportive and critical reactions, and the lengthy debate was published in a subsequent issue.

• What Causes AIDS? (PDF)
  We still don’t know what causes AIDS
  Charles A. Thomas Jr., Kary B. Mullis, and Phillip E. Johnson • Reason • June 1994 • 4,600 Words
• What Causes AIDS? The Debate Continues (PDF)
  Critics Respond • Reason • December 1994 • 9,100 Words

The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals and in 1996, the year after he become its chief editor, Richard Horton took to the pages of the intellectually-prestigious New York Review of Books to produce a 10,000 word discussion of Duesberg’s theories, as propounded in three of the researcher’s recent books and collections. Horton was obviously among the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, but although he mostly came down in support of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, he presented Duesberg’s entirely contrary perspective in a fair-minded manner, respectfully though not uncritically.

However, what struck me most about Horton’s account was how appalled he seemed at Duesberg’s treatment by America’s ruling medical-industrial complex, as suggested by his title “Truth and Heresy about AIDS.”

The very first sentence of his long review article mentioned the “vast academic and commercial industry built around…HIV” along with the fundamental challenge Duesberg posed to its scientific basis. As a consequence, the “brilliant virologist” had become “the most vilified scientist alive” and the subject of “excoriating attacks.” The leading professional science journals had displayed an “alarmingly uneven attitude,” and partly as a consequence, other potential dissidents had been dissuaded from pursuing their alternative theories.

According to Horton, financial considerations had become a central element of the scientific process, and he noted with horror that a press conference on research questioning the effectiveness of a particular anti-AIDS drug was actually packed with financial journalists, focused on the efforts of the corporate executives to destroy the credibility of a study that they themselves had helped to design but which had now gone against their own product.

Most importantly, although Horton was generally skeptical of Duesberg’s conclusions, he was absolutely scathing towards the opponents of the dissident virologist.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the dispute between Duesberg and the AIDS establishment is the way in which Duesberg has been denied the opportunity to test his hypothesis. In a discipline governed by empirical claims to truth, experimental evidence would seem the obvious way to confirm or refute Duesberg’s claims. But Duesberg has found the doors of the scientific establishment closed to his frequent calls for tests…

Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science…At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?”

That ringing last sentence closed the entire review, which appeared in a prestigious and influential publication over a quarter-century ago. But as near as I can tell, Horton’s heartfelt criticism fell entirely on deaf ears, and the AIDS establishment simply ignored the entire controversy while gradually pressuring the media to end any coverage. This seems to fully confirm the narrative history provided in Kennedy’s current bestseller.

• Truth and Heresy About AIDS
  Richard Horton • The New York Review of Books • May 23, 1996 • 10,100 Words

Taken together, these five articles run more than 45,000 words, the length of a short book, and probably provide as good and even-handed a debate on the Duesberg Hypothesis as can be found anywhere. Individual readers may judge for themselves, but I thought the that Duesberg camp certainly got the better of all those exchanges.

American Pravda: AIDS and the Revival of the Duesberg Hypothesis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 29, 2021 • 4,100 Words

In 1996 Duesberg had published a book setting forth his controversial theories for a general audience, but its length of more than 700 pages initially intimidated me and the used copies on Amazon started at over $600. However, I soon learned that the public-spirited author had simultaneously released a freely downloadable PDF copy on the Internet, and I discovered that academic journal articles and end notes filled almost half the length, reducing the body of the main text to very manageable proportions, considerably shorter than the Kennedy book.

The endorsement and Foreword by Nobel Laureate Mullis persuaded me to try a chapter or two, and I found the material so fascinating I quickly read the entire work. Duesberg very persuasively placed the HIV/AIDS controversy within the broader context of past public health debacles and the massive professional pressures faced by infectious disease researchers. His book had apparently been produced under difficult political circumstances and was ultimately released by the Regnery Company, the leading conservative press, whose publisher provided an unusual explanatory Preface, containing the following paragraphs:

The book you are about to read has been a long time in coming. Why? It is at once enormously controversial and impeccably documented. It comes from a scientist and writer of great ability and courage. It will cause, we believe, a firestorm of yet undetermined proportions in both the scientific and lay communities. And it is, I think I am safe in saying, about the most difficult book that the Regnery Company has published in nearly 50 years in the business.

If Duesberg is right in what he says about AIDS, and we think he is, he documents one of the great science scandals of the century. AIDS is the first political disease, the disease that consumes more government research money, more press time, and indeed probably more heartache—much of it unnecessary—than any other. Duesberg tells us why.

Although the text is easy reading, well-written for a general audience, it contains a huge amount of surprising medical information difficult for the non-specialist to check, and this would normally leave me cautious. However, the Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals, and although its editor was a strong supporter of the orthodox HIV/AIDS consensus, his 10,000 word review in the New York Review of Books treated both Duesberg and his book very respectfully, so I doubt the work contains any obvious errors or blatant falsehoods. Although Duesberg’s opus is now a quarter-century old, as far as I can tell, very little has changed since it was written, and the same disputes of the mid-1990s are just as relevant today, so I would urge everyone interested in the subject to read it. Since the original PDF was so enormous, I have broken it up by chapters for the convenience of readers.

• Inventing the AIDS Virus
  Peter H. Duesberg • Regnery Publishing • 1996 • 712 Pages

The story that Duesberg tells is a simple one. After the successful eradication of polio in the 1950s, America’s enormous existing infrastructure of infectious disease professionals lost most of the reason for its existence, and its leaders eventually began searching for some new means of justifying their continued government funding. The War on Cancer begun in the late 1960s proved a dismal failure and the massively-hyped warnings of a deadly Swine Flu epidemic in 1976 became a complete debacle, leading to the ouster of some top officials. So a few years later when the AIDS label was affixed to a group of apparently unrelated illnesses, Anthony Fauci and others had a tremendous incentive to claim that the cause was an infectious agent, and despite the lack of any solid evidence soon fingered the HIV virus as the culprit. Once that original misdiagnosis had spawned an enormous multi-billion-dollar industry, its researchers, administrators, and corporate beneficiaries were committed to protecting it.

Celia Farber was a leading AIDS journalist during the 1990s, who covered Duesberg and the other main figures in the controversy, and just a few days ago she released on Substack a long 2004 article she had originally written for Harpers on the controversial Berkeley researcher, which later became the first chapter of one of her books.

• The Passion of Peter Duesberg
  How Anthony Fauci And His AIDS Industry Sacrificed One Of America’s Greatest Cancer Scientists
  Celia Farber • Substack • January 2, 2022 • 11,000 Words

 

Duesberg’s writings provide by far the most comprehensive exposition of his material, but for those who prefer a different format, I would strongly recommend his hour-long Red Ice podcast interview from a decade ago, conveniently available on Youtube.

Youtube videos are widely popular among those less inclined to read, and the same year that Duesberg’s opus was published, Starvision Productions released a two hour documentary entitled “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud,” which very effectively covers much of the same material. The feature includes interviews with the Berkeley researcher and several of his key scientific allies in the controversy, one of whom describes the scandal in American medical science as worse than the notorious Lysenko fraud of the old Soviet Union.

Among the many telling points, the documentary notes that although nearly 90% of those Americans suffering from AIDS are male, HIV tests administered to our new military recruits indicate that the general rate of HIV infection in the population is equal between men and women, a very strange divergence between the illness and its alleged cause. Furthermore, the incidence rates of sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV have sharply diverged over the years, raising serious doubts about whether the virus actually follows that mode of transmission.

Although both Duesberg and most of the other scientists in his camp seemed to be very conventional and even buttoned-down researchers, an important exception was Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, widely regarded as a brilliant but eccentric and iconoclastic figure. For those interested in his views on the HIV/AIDS debate, I would recommend the following two hour interview by Dr. Gary Null, also released in 1996.

Mullis’s demeanor is extremely informal and almost boyish, and some of the questions he raises have an “Emperor’s New Clothes” feel about them. He notes that substantial numbers of the young military enlistees who annually test positive for HIV grew up in small rural towns that are hardly likely to be AIDS hotbeds, and suggests that their mothers be tested for the virus, which is known to be transmitted to the newborn. If those women also tested positive, that would prove the virus had already been widespread eighteen or twenty years earlier, completely demolishing the established AIDS narrative. Naturally, none of our many thousands of dedicated AIDS researchers showed any interest in implementing this extremely simple research proposal.

• American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 10, 2022 • 5,500 Words

Interpreting the Sounds of Silence on AIDS Denial

I am not a medical professional let alone an expert virologist, and I’ve spent only a few weeks exploring the complex and longstanding scientific dispute regarding the true nature of AIDS, a subject that has absorbed the efforts of top researchers for decades. The summary material presented above is merely intended to provide an introductory roadmap for those who might wish to investigate the subject in much greater depth.

However, in recent years I have become quite experienced in analyzing the severe distortions and deliberate omissions so often found in our media, a skill that I had honed during the production of my lengthy American Pravda series. And the evidence I see in the total media silence surrounding the astonishing claims about HIV/AIDS advanced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his #1 Amazon bestseller seems decisive to me.

As a consequence of the publication of his book and especially since the recent rise of his Presidential campaign, Kennedy has endured an endless barrage of very harsh media criticism, including a couple of front-page stories in the New York Times. These attacks portrayed him as a reckless purveyor of bizarre, irrational, and harmful beliefs, the worst sort of dangerous conspiracy-monger. The controversial ideas presented in his book were often the focus of this relentless vilification.

Yet the largest portion of Kennedy’s book—seven full chapters totaling some 200 pages—promoted the astonishing theory that AIDS doesn’t really exist as a disease but was merely a medical media hoax concocted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his profit-hungry corporate allies, a hoax that ultimately cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Americans. It is difficult to imagine a more outrageous accusation or one so apparently indicative of severe mental illness.

A single sentence uttered by Kennedy’s bitter enemies in the media could have seemingly destroyed him: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax.”

However, our entire media establishment—so eager to attack Kennedy on every other matter—has completely avoided engaging him on that issue. One of the early attacks on his book came from a Times journalist with deep expertise in Gay Rights history, but he completely excluded any mention of Kennedy’s extreme AIDS Denialism. “The Dog That Didn’t Bark.”

The only logical explanation I see for this total reluctance to engage Kennedy on what would seem his greatest vulnerability is that the media fears that he might very well be right. So after consulting trusted medical experts who had carefully reviewed Kennedy’s 200 pages of analysis, all these different editors concluded that discretion was the better part of valor.

If Kennedy is correct, our entire American media has spent the last 35 years promoting and protecting a medical fraud that cost us many hundreds of billions of dollars and many hundreds of thousands of lives. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had declared that the AIDS hoax was a worse scientific scandal than the notorious Lysenko fraud. So the media rightly fears that if they engage Kennedy on the issue, they themselves would suffer the total destruction of their reputation.

Some 700,000 Americans died in the AIDS epidemic, but according to Kennedy the overwhelming majority of these victims were perfectly healthy individuals whose agonizing deaths were caused by the lethal but very lucrative AIDS drugs they were prescribed, a public health policy enthusiastically supported by our entire media establishment. More than half of those casualties were gay men, and gay activists are an influential and highly-organized political force. The desperate effort of the media to prevent Kennedy’s accusations from receiving any significant attention is quite understandable.

Ironically enough, I think it was the sheer magnitude of Kennedy’s AIDS heresy that insulated him from any public attack. If his book had contained just a few sentences suggesting such shocking claims, his enemies would have eagerly seized on those statements and denounced him as a deranged AIDS Denier. But his 200 pages of text and 900 end notes made too strong a case so instead they fearfully went into hiding. I’ve become quite familiar with that sort of reaction.

Kennedy should recognize that his true opponent in this 2024 campaign is not the elderly and enfeebled Joseph Biden nor the incompetent and unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris, both of whom were dragged across the 2020 finish line by their establishment backers. Kennedy’s true opponent is the American media, and they should be a primary target of his attacks.

The topics that the media most avoids are the topics that the media most fears, and Kennedy should make those topics a major part of his current political campaign.

If he successfully brought some of these long suppressed truths to widespread public awareness, he will have won a great political victory even if his campaign ultimately falls short of reaching the White House.

Related Reading:

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Great Unmentionables
• RFK Jr. vs. I.F. Stone on the Kennedy Assassinations
• American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS
• American Pravda: AIDS and the Revival of the Duesberg Hypothesis
• American Pravda: Anne Frank, Sirhan Sirhan, and AIDS
• RFK Jr. as America’s #1 HIV/AIDS Denier and the Sounds of Media Silence
• American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems

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