The director of a new organization founded to advance the priorities of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has extensively promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a famous antisemitic forgery.
Leland Lehrman, who last month was named executive director of the MAHA Institute, also believes Israel may have been behind the 9/11 terror attacks, and has inveighed against “high-level Jewish Illuminists, or Lucifer worshipers.”
That’s according to a new report from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a social justice watchdog group founded by an acclaimed Jewish researcher on white nationalism, detailing Lehrman’s views and writing.
MAHA, short for Make America Healthy Again, is a slogan adopted by Kennedy and his supporters since the anti-vaccine activist dropped his independent presidential bid and endorsed Donald Trump. The institute bearing its name says it is committed to “rebuilding America’s health policy and infrastructure” and welcomed several White House personnel to an inaugural conference last month. Opposition to most vaccines is a key MAHA plank — one that runs directly counter to scientific consensus.
Lehrman’s beliefs about Jews — despite having a Jewish father himself, the conservative politician and investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, the grandson of the founder of Rite Aid — reflect classical antisemitic tropes and conspiratorial thinking.
In 2005, Lehrman penned an article entitled “ADL, Zionist Policies Causing Rise in Anti-Jewish Sentiment” for a website run by Jeff Rense, whom the Anti-Defamation League has deemed an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. In the piece, Lehrman repeatedly praised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 19th-century Russian forgery purporting to outline a secret Jewish leadership conspiracy for world domination.
Lehrman wrote that the Protocols were “most likely authentic, and therefore represent the most thorough indictment of Jewish Supremacism known to man.” He also asserted that the document would “virtually guarantee a political and historical awakening which will unavoidably lead to an understanding of the continuing problem of Jewish racism and supremacism,” and said Jews were responsible for bringing about “the New World Order.” (In the piece, he claimed he had a prior association with the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which is now defunct.)
He also said Jews are disloyal to the United States. “I am an American citizen of Jewish heritage concerned about the methods and doctrines that the criminal leadership of the Jewish and Zionist hierarchy have promoted worldwide,” he wrote. “I feel that Jewish Americans need to affirm loyalty to the Constitution of the United States of America as well as the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, rather than the racist attitudes of the Talmud and other Jewish scriptures.”
Lehrman extensively defended his views in an interview with Rense, in which Lehrman said that Jews should “accept some degree of responsibility for the harassment that they have suffered.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, Lehrman attended but did not graduate from Yale University, his father’s alma mater, in the 1990s and subsequently worked for himself in a variety of outfits related to health and, at times, spirituality. He also volunteered with the 2004 presidential campaign of Democrat Dennis Kucinich and claims to have consulted for the president of the New Mexico state Senate.
His endorsement of the Protocols appears to have emerged as a product of his journey into the 9/11 Truther movement, which predated his anti-vaccine advocacy and which led to him proclaiming that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence operation, was “a leading candidate for architect of the 9/11 attacks.”
Since shifting his focus to vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lehrman became a vocal booster of Kennedy’s presidential campaign. On LinkedIn, he claims that he started as a volunteer before he “was hired to do research and provide ideas for Bobby and the campaign on policy issues, news briefs, and tweets.”
Since Kennedy was appointed to Trump’s cabinet, Lehrman has touted inside knowledge of the secretary’s policies on COVID vaccines prior to their official announcements.
There are other signs that Lehrman has close ties to Kennedy. The MAHA Institute began life as a pro-Kennedy Super PAC; another co-president, book publisher Tony Lyons, published several books by Kennedy, while the third, Mark Gorton, is a New York Jew who has promoted both safe streets and conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s uncle. At the conference, Lehrman introduced policy figures including HHS advisor Calley Means, an RFK ally.
Kennedy himself has dabbled in antisemitic commentary, comparing COVID vaccines to Nazi-era policies on the campaign trail and suggesting that the pandemic was “ethnically targeted” to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. This week he continued transforming his anti-vaccine activism into official policy, dismissing all members of a COVID vaccine advisory panel.
