Kennedy Stands Up to 5G

By Tom Valovic, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

“5G is dangerous and under-regulated. Other countries regulate it much better than the US. We need to protect our children and we should not be having these antennas placed on elementary schools. We should be warning people appropriately.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As the major telecom carriers feverishly work to deploy 5G small cells and upgrade existing cell towers to 5G across the nation, only one presidential candidate has demonstrated concern: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has taken a strong stand on 5G safety, sharply questioning 5G's health effects.

But he’s up against the biggest corporations in the US. 5G has the full support of Big Tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon looking for it to become the supporting infrastructure for a wide range of new technology initiatives broadly characterized as the Internet of Things (IoT). 

In this technocratic vision of the future, everything—including homes, businesses, automobiles, and virtually all essential aspects of modern life—will be microchipped and wirelessly interconnected using blanket penetration of interconnected 5G or 6G networks. 

This, of course, is a scenario that will provide enormous benefits to corporations. But the benefits to the public, already saturated with complicated and cumbersome technology “solutions” that discriminate against and limit services to minorities, the elderly, and those struggling financially are, at best, questionable. This goal is so intensely sought after that, in some cases, major telecom carriers that normally compete with one another are even cooperating to implement this untested and unproven technology with respect to its effects on consumer health and safety. 

In this endeavor, corporations have the full support of the federal government and state governments. Through a complicated funding apparatus that’s difficult to parse, significant levels of federal monies are being made available to support these corporate efforts that only serve to increase our technological dependency on their products and services. More technology begets even more technology in an endless repeating loop. The approach being taken by all parties represents a classic example of how public/private partnerships have become an important mechanism for fusing state and corporate power, a funding sleight-of-hand that often favors corporate agendas over and above what remains of our democratic process and masks the hidden agendas involved.

While Kennedy has the courage to address an issue that challenges the strategies of the most powerful companies in the US, there’s little public awareness of his fight and of the problem. That’s due to a large amount of confusing coverage about 5G in the corporate media, which has muddied the water about this complex issue and created public confusion. Many reporters, who are not supposed to be offering their own opinions, are encouraged by their employers to freely and reflexively make value judgments by branding any questioning of official narratives as conspiracy theory.

Kennedy is questioning 5G technology because the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting the public have, in many cases, abnegated that responsibility. In their massive plans for “5G everywhere,” telecom carriers are fully supported by the FCC, the agency responsible for regulating 5G. But precisely because the FCC wasn’t doing its job, Kennedy’s non-profit along with another nonprofit, the Environmental Health Trust, sued the FCC for not providing adequate and updated health and safety information about 5G and including that data in its decision-making. After reviewing over 11,000 pages of evidence of harm, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC in August 2021 mandating that they go back to the drawing board to bring public radiation exposure limits in line with the science. 

Resistance to 5G Is Significant and Growing

Technology is a useful servant but a terrible master. Arguably, the high degree of cooperation between the federal and state government, Big Tech, and telecom companies constitutes a kind of technocratic power base in which various technologies are undemocratically implemented and, therefore, in effect mandated. Despite this blatant force-feeding of corporate agendas regardless of popular concerns or wishes, there has been a strong and surprising amount of pushback to the 5G juggernaut in cities and towns across the nation. 

According to the Environmental Health Trust: “In the United States, Hawaii County passed a resolution to halt 5G as well as Farragut, Tennessee, and Easton, Connecticut… Cities such as Petaluma, Mill Valley, Monterey in California, and Doylestown in Pennsylvania have voted and passed policies to halt 5G or restrict the rollout into neighborhoods. Los Altos, California voted to prohibit the installation of small cells on public utility easements in residential neighborhoods and established a 500-foot setback from a small cell to schools.”

These are just a few examples of cities and towns that have attempted to exercise their right to shape how 5G is deployed in their neighborhoods, underscoring a kind of David and Goliath scenario. The overwhelming combination of corporate and federal power that Kennedy frequently criticizes has been poised to erode the rights and self-determination of local governments to decide upon critical matters of health and safety in their own jurisdictions. 

Recent developments are even more concerning. In an attempt to make resistance futile, there are now a large number of federal bills either passed or before Congress that would drastically preempt the already curtailed legal rights that cities and towns now have to make decisions about the health, safety, aesthetic, and property value issues surrounding wireless deployment. This includes a new and draconian bill, H.R. 4141. This bill is largely a gift to telecom companies and seeks to nullify critical environmental impact requirements and fast-track 5G rollouts. 

Kennedy Clarifies His Position 

Kennedy’s position on the safety and viability of 5G is clear and unequivocal. He laid out the key issues in a News Nation Town Hall in June. When a member of the audience asked a question about 5G, Kennedy said: “My concern about 5G is that the RF radiation is dangerous. It disrupts the blood-brain barrier and is also associated with… cancers and causes a lot of other dramatic health effects. There are literally thousands of studies on that.” 

Addressing the now shopworn notion that the safety of 5G is a conspiracy theory, Kennedy said: “I've litigated on that issue, and I've won in a federal court of appeals. You can say it’s a conspiracy theory… but I also won a case on Monsanto’s glyphosate and Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that was called a conspiracy theory. 5G is dangerous and under-regulated. Other countries regulate it much better than the US. We need to protect our children and we should not be having these antennas placed on elementary schools. We should be warning people appropriately.”

The topic of 5G remains complicated and controversial. But while the corporate media obfuscates with its “nothing to see here” stance, Kennedy educates the public with the facts on the ground and the widely accepted science about its concerning health effects. 

The 5G controversy is about health and safety. But it’s also about whether corporations alone will have the final say about the quality of our lives. 

However, many billions of corporate investment dollars are at stake. It’s important to recognize that we have been here many times before in earlier decades: Love Canal and hazardous waste in the environment; the deleterious health effects of tobacco; and many other examples where corporate interests have conflicted with health and safety and vital information was suppressed. 

The American public cannot afford to look the other way, especially when our government regulatory agencies are doing exactly that.

Tom Valovic is a journalist and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press). Tom has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in-chief of Telecommunications magazine where he was the first journalist to report on the advent of the public Internet. Tom has written for the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, Common Dreams, Scheerpost, Alternet, Counterpunch, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal and many other publications.