What I saw and heard convinced me that Bobby Kennedy cannot be president

By now, you undoubtedly know presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a press dinner last Tuesday night that COVID-19 was an “ethnically targeted bio weapon” designed by the Chinese government to be deadly for Caucasians and Blacks, but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

I was there to write a column about Kennedy’s positions on domestic and foreign issues.

Unfortunately, the dinner soon dissolved into a screaming-and-flatulence farce between host, Doug Dechert, and guest, Anthony Haden-Guest, who had asked the candidate about climate change. “The climate scam hoax,” interrupted Dechert, letting one go for emphasis. My follow-up on the climate set off Dechert again.

Needless to say, I didn’t write the column I intended to. Regrettably, I wrote this one instead.

Twenty five journalists sat at the large, square banquet table. Call me paranoid, but Bobby was looking directly at me when he made his wrong-headed assertion that the coronavirus had passed over the homes of Ashkenazi Jews.

The stunning moment was surreal and incomprehensible. But I’ve seen the video and heard the audio, so I know it’s true.

“COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” said Kennedy. “The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Sitting next to Kennedy at that moment was an Ashkenazi Jew, New York Post reporter Jon Levine. Check out his baffled expression on the video.

Contrary to Bobby’s hair-brained theory, I got the coronavirus. My son, brother, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, nephews, niece, cousins and friends also got COVID. My neurologist’s medical partner got COVID and died. Ashkenazi Jews all.

Bobby knows who I am. My wife, Liz, and I donated to his Riverkeeper nonprofit organization and watched him fly falcons at the Hudson River home of then-Gov. George Pataki. Bobby should also know that Frydman is a Jewish name of European ancestry. I’m not Sephardic. I’m fair-haired and light-skinned. That makes me Ashkenazi.

You’d think his campaign manager, former Ohio congressman and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, and staff would’ve prepped Bobby about the probability of Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese journalists being in attendance. In fact, there was a Chinese reporter from the Epoch Times at the table.

That prep session wouldn’t have helped. Bobby knew what he was saying. He has clearly made a political calculation to forsake liberal Jews and, instead, play on the conservative side to Orthodox Jews like Mort Klein, president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America.

But even Klein, a prominent anti-vaxxer and good friend of RFK Jr. who’s advised him on Israel, is reportedly “worried” about Bobby’s kooky COVID comments.

“This is crazy,” Klein was quoted as saying. “It makes no sense that they would do that. I read everything. I was totally against the vaccine…I wanted to convince myself it was correct not to take it. I have never seen anything like this.”

The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in. “The claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

StopAntisemitism added, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.”

Truth is, I always liked Bobby.

Until, that is, he became a leading voice of the anti-vax movement and fell out with his family by claiming Sirhan Sirhan didn’t assassinate his father. At first, I thought Bobby was a Kennedy contrarian, staking out his own political path as a right-of-center Democrat. I was a wrong. He’s a conspiracist.

Considering running in his father’s footsteps for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, Bobby visited me in my office in 1998. He wanted my strategic media advice about an upcoming New York magazine story that would re-report his arrest for marijuana possession with cousin Bobby Shriver in Barnstable, Mass. when they were both 16 and his guilty plea in 1984 to possessing heroin in Rapid City, S.D. when he was 29.

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In both cases, Bobby received probation, plus community service. Better known as a Kennedy slap-on-the wrist.

The story ran, but Bobby didn’t.

When we met, Bobby never made eye contact with me. I chalked up that disconcerting characteristic to the trauma he suffered as a 14-year-old boy while watching his father murdered live on television on June 5, 1968. I decided then to give him a break. That break is over.

Bobby’s crazy COVID commentary is dangerously irresponsible.

The last thing this country needs is more antisemitism and hatred of Asian-Americans.

This Ashkenazi Jew says RFK Jr. has disqualified himself from being president of the United States.

Frydman is CEO of Source Communications, a Manhattan strategic communications firm.