Book Review: Letter to Liberals

Title: A Letter to Liberals 

Author: Robert F. Kennedy (Jr.)

Date: 2022

Publisher: Children's Health Defense

ISBN: none

Length: 57 pages

Quote: "It is my hope that this short book will remind all Americans that blind faith in authority is a feature of religion and autocracy, but not of science nor democracy." 

With so many People of the Burro spouting pure Stalinist insanity these days it's easy for Elephant People to question whether Reason itself has left the Democratic party. Here Robert Kennedy stands to prove that there are still people who identify as Ds for reasons other than dependency on government handouts or on government jobs...and they're righteously ticked off with the rest of their party. 

As an Independent who tries to practice good will toward the people who make up both parties, I say: Ds need to read this e-book. They should take it as spinach--natural, unsprayed spinach--bitter, but cleansing and ultimately soothing to the body. 

They should of course remember that it's a lawyer's book. While Kennedy presents over 300 documents for his statements of fact, at some points he is accusing, not merely reporting. Check the references to be sure which is which before quoting this book.

So what is he saying? His argument won't surprise anyone who reads The Defender, though some of his documented evidence may. Government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and especially Anthony Fauci exploited the coronavirus panic for their own gain, both of wealth and of power. Poor people and ethnic minorities were disproportionately harmed. Certain symptom-blocking medications, which doctors don't like to recommend because they already know these chemicals have risks, seemed to work for some people with bad cases of COVID-19 and may have been more effective than the vaccines were.

I don't want to start a stampede here. I want to remind people that if you took a personal health class at a college or university in the 1980s, when this stuff was breaking news, you saw it coming and it didn't surprise you and you should feel no urge to start screaming about evil conspiracies blah blah. If you are currently in your forties, fifties, or sixties, you should have been reminding panic-prone friends of some things all along...

* Coronavirus, the "chest cold" or "cough" or "bird flu" virus, has some peculiar qualities. One of them is that healthy humans barely notice having it at all, feel able to work through it and usually are (though COVID-19 did bring a few people down with remarkable speed). Another is that when people do feel it as a disease, they lack normal resistance to it and may have it several times, or it may become chronic, as in "Long COVID." Another is that nearly all people who are seriously ill, or die, from coronavirus were already very ill and not expected to have normal lives again. 

* Resistance to infections is an individual thing. People inherit specific patterns of immune system strength and weakness, and our health alters those patterns. If your resistance to an infection is high you may feel energized rather than drained by your immune system's mopping it up. If other people's resistance is much lower you may still reasonably be asked to observe quarantine for those other people's sake. 

* Virus mutate quickly, so any new vaccine for a virus infection is always going to be a hit-or-miss experimental treatment that may do more harm than good, and nobody even knows just why the vax that do work for some people may have worked against others. If you try a new vaccine for a virus, you are volunteering to be a medical experiment. There's reason to believe that the new vaccine won't actually kill you, but, for reasons unknown and unforeseen, it might. If you had the disease and would rather have it again, quarantine and all, than go to the clinic and have the shot, you should probably let people more vulnerable to the disease have your share of the vaccine.

* No government should ever make any vaccine mandatory, although schools or employers could reasonably make vaccines conditions of admission to their buildings, especially when you have other alternatives like distance learning or working from home.

Kennedy seems to take this knowledge base for granted. That's reasonable when talking to people our age, not so reasonable when talking to people who are older, and not necessairly reasonable when talking to people who are younger.

He goes on to elaborate the case against the COVID vaccine. I didn't know, for example, that there was actually a federal law forbidding the government to mandate vaccines for diseaes against which effective symptom-blockers are known. How effective the symptom-blockers for COVID were is still a matter for debate. In fact many people who were harmed by the vaccines were not at any personal risk for injury from COVID-19. They were young, active, healthy, with robust immune systems; they'd probably already had the virus and not noticed. 

(For me one of the most annoying things about this whole episode in history is that several people who were harmed by COVID vaccines had those vaccines for someone else's sake. My Significant Other's ability to bounce back from things that would have killed most people is already legendary, so there was some question about how much it would reassure other people if he didn't react badly to the COVID vaccine. He went first, anyway, because he's been the "I'll go first and find out whether it's safe for you" sort of person. His perkiness encouraged other people to have the vaccine in 2021, and I've yet to hear his voice in 2022. He's been very ill, because of his overconfident public spirit. I suspect part of what's making this bout so hard to recover from is a feeling that he led people the wrong way.)

Then there's the case against the U.S. government's response, specifically, as an "Assault on the Bill of Rights." For "conservative" readers, this will be preaching to the choir. Kennedy is not a "conservative" and it's his "Fellow Liberals" who need this message. That's why the book is addressed to them. 

There are probably "conservatives" who will want this book just to gloat over. See! A brave, honest, and intelligent D must admit that...Well, actually, President Trump did not stand firm against the pressure from those who wanted to build and exploit the panic for power-grabbing (and smokescreening) purposes. I doubt the R response to the coronavirus panic cost Trump many informed votes in 2020, but among those who vote against an incumbent President or former Vice-President whenever they think the state of the Union has gone down it must have been a great boost to the Biden campaign. Kennedy is in agreement with some libertarian Tea Party types, both left and right, and in disagreement with poll-conscious "moderate," "mainstream," and "liberal: types in both parties. 

There are surprises in this part of the book, too, even for people who've been following the story. Glyphosate Awareness is certainly aware of censorship--youall realize I went into this cause as an officially recognized Twitter "influencer"? And I've been shadowbanned to the point that long-term e-friends don't know I've kept the same Twitter account?--but I didn't realize how deep the rot had penetrated. Kennedy documents that several news sources I've trusted actually formed something they called a "Trusted News" pact to censor information about coronavirus. Reuters? Yes, Reuters, and also the BBC. Read the book for details about this.

What's not to like? Assuming you're not working for an organization whose role in the COVID story is indicted here, what you won't like is the formatting. Multiple-column formatting is a bad idea for e-books. To get the whole page to display on any given computer screen you may have to change the size to a point where the type is hard to read. I have been known to copy text out of a PDF document into a Word document and reformat it for readability, but this book contains enough graphs that much meaning would be lost that way. Readers have no remedy but to print out the e-book as they find it, which always works better with some computers and printers than with others. 

But you can download this e-book free from ChildrensHealthDefense.org, and you should. Even if you have to pay $11.40 for printing (in my town it'd be $6.84) this material is worth its price.