A silent war has been raging between a group of scientific reformers committed to restoring public trust in the nation’s vaccine program through gold-standard science and transparency, and a Big Pharma ghost army committed to the status quo.

This second group is composed of legacy media’s selected talking head ‘experts’, lawyers retained by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and a shadowy cabal of troll commenters whose job is to discredit scientists doing nearly any work perceived to threaten Big Pharma narratives and control.

That the AAP is captured by Big Pharma is beyond question as their website’s list of current corporate ‘partners’ clearly reveals.

That’s why what happened in a Boston courtroom on March 16 is no great surprise.

To remind you: The AAP is one of the medical associations that brought a lawsuit against the CDC’s newly-configured Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that resulted in a March 16 decision by District Judge Brian E. Murphy to temporarily block all reforms related to vaccines under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Murphy’s court also ruled to shut down an ACIP meeting that had been scheduled for March 18 and 19.

A Biden-appointee, Judge Murphy has restored the vaccine schedule to how it was during the Biden years, in defiance of the will of the voters.

If his decision holds (it likely won’t), mercury will be allowed back into vaccines, all one-day old infants will be forced to take the Hep B vaccine, and children across the nation will be required to take Covid vaccine boosters to stay in school.

One federal judge – and all the Covid-era insanity is back.

It was Covid-era insanity that the ACIP had scheduled to review last week. The organization created a workgroup to study diverse reactions to Covid-19 vaccines. The memo is called, “Post Covid-19 Vaccination Chronic Injuries – Proposed Action.”

This memo was to be unveiled during the ACIP meeting. But the AAP convinced Judge Murphy to cancel that meeting and to invalidate the historical changes HHS Secretary Kennedy and President Trump have made over the past year.

Why was the ACIP meeting canceled? That’s fairly obvious. The memo contains disclosures about vaccine injuries that directly challenge Big Pharma’s narrative about the vaccines’ safety profile.

Dated February 15, 2026, the memo presented published, unpublished and clinical data about Covid-19, culled by the ACIP, all related to chronic injuries from Covid vaccines. It also proposed voting language for potential future ACIP deliberations.

The memo also announces and acknowledges a novel medical condition its ACIP authors call “Post-Acute-COVID-19-Vaccination Syndrome” (PACVS).

This syndrome, which afflicts a large swath of Americans who took the Covid vaccines, has not been legitimized by the AAP and legacy media. Despite the hundreds of thousands of people who have reported suffering from the post-vaccine condition, leading medical groups and the media are adamant that it does not exist.

It does.

The memo makes the ACIP case: “Patients suffering from PACVS present with heterogenous, prolonged symptoms that typically involve multiple organ systems, many of which overlap with chronic post SARS CoV-2infection syndrome, often referred to as Long-COVID.”

People with PACVS have been suffering silently, without support from doctors who often attribute their illness to psychosomatic symptoms. The ACIP workgroup noted that Covid vaccine-injured Americans often suffer from systematic under-recognition, suppression, abandonment, and being labeled ‘antivaxxers.’

The working group memo describes PACVS symptoms as “persistent post-vaccination multi-organ symptom clusters involving neurologic, cardiovascular, immunologic, endocrine, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, and autonomic systems.”

From the same memo, we also learn that the vaccine-injured suffer from neuropathies, dysautonomia, cognitive impairment, immune dysregulation, chronic fatigue, type1 diabetes, gastrointestinal, neuro-endocrine, and autoimmune presentations, myocarditis, vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), venous and arterial thromboembolism, and other thrombophilia associated with clotting.

Don’t be steamrolled: People with PACVS are sick and the mainstream medical establishment is not treating their illness because it does not fit neatly into any medical box.

Most physicians lack awareness and do not have the training and diagnostic categories that would enable them to recognize the cluster of Covid vaccine injury symptoms. PACVS rarely fits into currently used diagnosis codes. Symptoms patients experience overlap with commonly observed short-term, post vaccination side effects but PACVS patients experience symptoms for prolonged periods of time.

Current diagnostic frameworks and the lack of adequate surveillance systems is restricting syndrome identification. This is allowing a potentially reversible vaccine injury to “progress unchecked to chronic deregulation.”

The workgroup proposes establishing a PACVS surveillance system; clinical care coordination; disability recognition; reimbursement and patient support; research and international data sharing; and pharmacovigilance – the identification, evaluation, and mitigation of adverse effects and other drug-related problems.

The workgroup also recommends establishing ICD codes to identify aspects of PACVS so that treatments can be covered by insurance and health care.

Establishing ICD codes may seem like an uninteresting bureaucratic maneuver. However, establishing codes for vaccine injuries would force the medical establishment to acknowledge that vaccines they administered have caused significant harm to their patients.

All of this would be unremarkable if it were in response to a newly-identified disease or disorder. But what makes it unprecedented is that the workgroup recommends such steps following vaccine injuries.

For the AAP and their allies, this is totally unacceptable. Acknowledgement of PACVS is an attack on their belief system – on the normative, on ‘settled science.’

For years, it was heresy to question any aspect of vaccine safety. Instead of being like every other category of medicine, vaccinology became a cult, controlled by nefarious forces that profited handsomely from the compliance of millions of people who were never allowed to question their faith.

For now, a Boston Judge has put a hold on Secretary Kennedy’s reforms and helped keep PACVS out of the news cycle.

But the silent war continues.

Judge Murphy’s decision won’t hold because the Supreme Court has already turned back similar decisions involving lower courts found to over-reach their authority.

The American people know or sense the truth about Covid vaccine injuries. These injuries are all too real for each person who discovered, post-jab, that they had one. They are too real for their friends and family, too.

But the AAP doesn’t want you to know anything about such injuries and certainly not that some are settled in a vaccine court. Along with their allies in Big Pharma, the AAP’s mandate is to obfuscate and free themselves from accountability.

On July 10, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign announced it had submitted the required number of signatures needed to gain ballot access in Georgia. Petitioning began January 11 and 7,500 signatures were required. Team Kennedy handed in 21,000 signatures, almost three times the number required.

Unfortunately, the certification process has been hampered by Democratic National Committee-backed lawfare and other partisan efforts. 

The election code in Georgia allowed only a three-day window for legal challenges, due on July 12. That very day, Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that national and Georgia Democrats have initiated a legal challenge to ballot access for independents Kennedy and Cornel West, as well as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Claudia De la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

As predicted, the Democrats had their cases ready to file and met the July 12 deadline.

These actions are the latest attempt by Democrats to take away voters’ options. They reveal the party’s fear that Biden cannot win independent votes. 

Recent partisan legislation, along with a history of alleged voting fraud, further complicates the political landscape in this battleground state.

Georgia Election Law Changes 

Georgia state law previously required signatures of 1% of registered voters, equal to about 70,000 signatures. The state’s current ballot access law was established in part by Green Party of Ga. v. Kemp (2016), in which a US district court ruled that the petitioning requirements for presidential candidates were “burdensome and onerous” and that 7,500 signatures – about 0.0009% of currently registered Georgia voters – are sufficient. The Georgia Secretary of State’s Election Data Hub estimates that there are just over 8 million registered voters in Georgia, 7,062,283 of whom are active voters. 

Six months before the 2024 election, Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, approved significant legislation that will ease the process for securing ballot access for minor parties. However, Georgia Senate Bill 189 provides ballot access only for third-party candidates who have already qualified for the ballots of 20 other US states or territories. The bill’s language does not include independent candidates, so it may be considered biased against candidates running without a party’s backing. Political parties are not mentioned in the US Constitution, and candidates are not required by law to be members of a party to run for office.

Georgia has 16 electoral votes at stake and is often described as a battleground state, as previous election lawsuits indicate. Along with the updated requirements for minor parties, Senate Bill 189 also allows state residents to challenge a voter’s qualification, if they can provide evidence that the voter is deceased, has voted in another jurisdiction, has obtained a homestead exemption on their taxes, or is registered to cast their ballot from a nonresidential address. QR codes are currently used in Georgia for vote-counting purposes, but the bill calls for these to be eliminated by 2026. The bill also requires absentee ballots to be tabulated and reported one hour after polls close. 

Voters can also be taken off the rolls within 45 days of an election; previously, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 barred removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. Although critics of the recent Georgia legislation say the changes suppress voters, supporters claim they remove opportunities for fraud and ensure a legitimate election. 

In addition to SB 189, Governor Kemp signed HB 974, calling for election transparency, into law this May. It will now be possible for the public to view a database of scanned ballots that have personal identifying information removed. Digital images of scanned ballots will be available by 5 p.m. on the second Friday after the election. These are slated to be available for the 2024 presidential election.

Finally, HB 1207, also passed in May, reduces the number of voting machines and requires poll workers to be US citizens. The new number of voting machines will be one per 250 voters. The reduced number of voting machines is interpreted as voter suppression by critics of the new legislation.

Election Fraud and Voter Fraud Problems in Georgia

Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU, has threatened to sue Governor Kemp, stating that these are unfair requirements for election workers, voters, and unhoused citizens. However, these changes to Georgia election law have resulted, as The Kennedy Beacon reported, from widespread allegations of fraud and missing votes in the 2020 election. Those allegations triggered former president Trump’s infamous call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking for a recount in hopes that it might result in more votes for him. In addition, Stacey Abrams has contended that there were irregularities and voter suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election, in which she was the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Although Kennedy and Shanahan have made great strides toward being on the ballot in all 50 states, recent changes to Georgia law are designed to help those already backed by a party. SB 189, in particular, is ripe for legal challenge due to its exclusion of independents.

Melissa Orrison is a journalist who co-presented “The Kennedy Tragedies Through a Risk Management Lens” at the In2Risk 2022 conference in San Francisco. She has also worked in higher education and tourism. She lives in Georgia with her husband and son.

On June 5, The News & Observer reported that a new campaign is underway to obstruct ballot access efforts by independent candidates in the 2024 presidential election, specifically targeting voters who signed petitions to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West on the ballot in North Carolina.

Signers received text messages from an organization called Clear Choice Action questioning their decision to sign the petitions. Recipients, whose names were disclosed through a public records request, were invited to fill out a survey, apparently resulting in “over 100 responses from voters” wanting to withdraw their signatures. The News & Observer also reported on similar efforts by the North Carolina Democratic Party against the Green Party in the 2022 midterm elections. In April, a federal judge ruled that the Democrats’ efforts to block ballot access were “frivolous” and “without foundation.”

On June 6, Clear Choice filed a complaint with the New York Board of Elections alleging that Kennedy does not reside at the address listed on his paperwork, as reported by The New York Times, which also notes that Kennedy’s driver’s license, automobile registration, and voter registration do list that New York address. This complaint was swiftly followed by a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court against the candidate, per USA Today, alleging that 115,000 of the 146,135 signatures gathered to get Kennedy on the ballot are invalid. 

While only 45,000 signatures are required to meet the state’s eligibility requirements, the Kennedy campaign submitted triple that number in anticipation of challenges over some portion of the signatures. As noted by Leah Watson, Kennedy’s opponents had just nine days to identify at least 90,519 invalid signatures – a strikingly high threshold to meet.

The suit also alleges that campaign workers improperly gathered signatures; however, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon, those workers were outed as third-party saboteurs who were quickly discovered by the campaign, fired, and their petitions disposed of. The plaintiffs, Elaine Portuondo Smith and Andrena Wyatt, both served as delegates for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

This pair of complaints is just the latest in a series of efforts led by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s anti-independent and anti-third-party task force. As previously reported by The Kennedy Beacon, the DNC is coordinating with a “constellation of outside groups” led by Third Way to “stockpile money and stymie third parties.” The stated purpose of this campaign is to “neutralize Kennedy’s third-party threat to President Joe Biden’s reelection” by pushing negative headlines in the media, according to Politico, and filing frivolous lawsuits to distract the campaign and drain its resources.

Who’s behind Clear Choice, and what is their motivation for preventing Kennedy from participating in the 2024 election?

Another Arm of the Machine

Clear Choice consists of two organizations, Clear Choice PAC and Clear Choice Action. Both entities were founded in February 2024 by Pete Kavanaugh, described by The Washington Post as a political strategist who was deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2020 run. Clear Choice was launched as “another arm in the unfurling Democratic-aligned machine” with a focus on opposition research and propaganda. Kavanaugh told the Post that the group would “push storylines in the media aimed at dissuading voters” from supporting Kennedy, West, or the No Labels party. 

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings reveal that since its launch just a few months ago, Clear Choice PAC has been funded by just two donors, both of whom are major players in liberal politics: Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. 

Hoffman is co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn and a member of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” as noted by Business Insider, credited with helping shape the modern Silicon Valley. He has also played a significant role in funding pro-Biden efforts; in January 2024, Reuters named the “billionaire Democratic megadonor” as the primary financier behind Third Way’s anti-third-party campaign, to the tune of at least $1 million. Hoffman previously bankrolled Indivisible’s “Truth Brigade” project to “purge conservative disinformation from social media,” as reported by The Washington Free Beacon. As highlighted by The Daily Caller, Hoffman was among the select list of billionaires confirmed to have visited Little Saint James, the private island owned by notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Ron Conway runs SV Angel, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Conway was an early investor in Big Tech giants Facebook and Google, as highlighted by The Wall Street Journal, both of which are being sued by Kennedy for censoring and removing his content under coercion by the Biden administration. SV Angel’s portfolio includes DoorDash and Instacart, which exploded in popularity due to COVID-related lockdown policies, as reported by Bloomberg. Conway was a member of the COVID-19 Technology Task Force, founded in March 2020 as the contact point between Big Tech and the government to coordinate the country’s pandemic response.

Clear Choice Action does not disclose its donors.

Pete Kavanaugh, DNC Operative

According to Clear Choice founder Pete Kavanaugh’s LinkedIn profile, he was a principal at Hilltop Public Solutions from 2009 to 2011. He briefly left the firm in September 2011 to work as New Hampshire director of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, before returning to Hilltop in January 2013 as a partner. He then served as a senior advisor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. During Kavanaugh’s tenure, Hilltop’s clientele included (per OpenSecrets) the DNC, the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and multiple state branches of the Democratic Party, as well as American Bridge 21st Century, another member of the DNC/Third Way “constellation.”

Kavanaugh founded a political consulting firm called Highbury Strategies in February 2021. Highbury claims on its website to “work with a small handful of partners,” though a search of FEC data reveals just a single client since the firm’s founding: the Democratic National Committee. Kavanaugh is also a partner at Revolution Field Strategies, which lists the DNC and Biden’s 2020 campaign as recent partners, along with the Progressive Turnout Project, previously profiled in The Kennedy Beacon. In late 2021, Kavanaugh co-founded Optimize, a firm which provides human resources services for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and US Representative Ilhan Omar, among others.

Clear Choice Staff

Ashton Narzisi, Clear Choice’s treasurer, is a compliance manager for Blue Wave Political Partners, according to her LinkedIn profile. Blue Wave is a national political consulting firm that also worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign. Its client list includes Everytown for Gun Safety, whose leadership also founded Third Way; the Biden Victory Fund, which The Kennedy Beacon previously identified as the DNC’s largest single donor; and Future Forward USA, which Politico described as the “flagship pro-Biden super PAC.” Another notable client is the North Carolina Democratic Party, suggesting that Clear Choice’s text messaging campaign may be more directly tied to the party than previously reported.

Harrell Kirstein, identified by The News & Observer as a consultant for Clear Choice Action, previously worked as communications director for the New Hampshire Democratic Party. He also worked in lead communications roles for the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns, before becoming communications director of the Trump War Room at American Bridge 21st Century. The News & Observer article also identifies Jessica Post as a director of Clear Choice Action, pointing to a now scrubbed biography on the website of Civitas Public Affairs Group, where she is a principal. Post did not reply by press time to a request for confirmation of her role with Clear Choice.

While the pair of complaints against Kennedy’s presidential run risks rocking the boat for his campaign in the short term, it is unlikely that either will be successful at preventing the independent candidate from appearing on the ballot in North Carolina and New York.

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

A May 9 New York Times article titled “Are R.F.K. Jr. Signature Gatherers Misleading New Yorkers for Ballot Access?” reports that “more than half a dozen New York City residents” were approached by canvassers who did not disclose to signers that their petition was to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot. If true, this could open up the Kennedy campaign to legal challenges.

But a closer look at the story reveals that a DNC-aligned petitioning company may have tried to set the Kennedy campaign up, and The New York Times just happened to be there to report it.

Within nine minutes of the article’s publication, Lis Smith, whom the Beacon has identified as a “Democratic operative and master of the smear,” amplified the article in a multi-post thread on X (formerly known as Twitter). This strongly suggests she and her employer, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), had foreknowledge of the piece and prepared their media campaign in advance.

The “newspaper of record” has a history of being used to push politically-motivated narratives, as previously covered in The Kennedy Beacon. And this time, it appears individuals tied to the Democratic Party may have played a role in creating the story for the Times to report, which apparently even fooled one of their own reporters.

As the Beacon has also reported, Smith is spokesperson for the DNC’s anti-third party and independent candidate task force, announced by NBC News in March 2024, taking particular aim at Kennedy’s efforts to get on the 2024 presidential ballot in all 50 states. Smith’s work was the subject of a glowing piece in the Times earlier this month, which celebrated her role in “handling the public-facing effort to take down Mr. Kennedy and his kind.” 

The DNC’s attacks have thus far involved weaponizing the court system to block RFK Jr.’s candidacy. Indeed, as noted in the Times article, any improper signature-gathering activities could “be used as fodder for court challenges.”

But some Times readers were quick to point out that, of the half dozen or so people whose alleged encounters were described in the article, two happened to be Times reporters, while another two admitted they “worked in Democratic politics,” as noted by the Times itself.

Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, isn’t buying the story at all. “Our volunteers, decked out in Kennedy hats and buttons, are collecting tens of thousands of signatures in NY, no problem,” she wrote in a May 11 X post. She revealed that the accused canvassers worked for a subcontractor, Meridian Strategies. Fox Kennedy remarked that of the campaign’s “entire fifty state operation,” Meridian “is the only subcontractor that has ever been accused of misconduct.”

Meridian had published a job posting on April 19 for a “canvassing opportunity” on a subreddit called NYCJobs, offering “$30 an hour to collect petition signatures for independents and democrats,” between April 16 and May 21. Since the Meridian canvassers were being paid by the hour, there was no obvious financial incentive to increase the number of ballots collected by cutting corners.

Meridian was founded in January 2019 by two 19-year-olds, Justin Chae and Evan Sheaffer, according to a profile by New York University’s Washington Square News. Its early clientele mostly consisted of Democrat candidates seeking local office. 

But almost a year into the declared COVID-19 pandemic, Meridian was hired to help run New York City’s Test & Trace Corps. When COVID-19 vaccines were rushed to market, Meridian’s canvassers became vaccine salespeople. “We spent nine months going door to door persuading people to get their first shot,” Chae told Crain’s New York. Meridian’s website boasts that “over 142,000 vaccine-hesitant NYers were signed up by our team.”

As noted by The New York Times in its May 2021 article about the Test & Trace Corps, the companies hired “to do door-to-door outreach and talk up the vaccine on street corners” had “little public health experience.” 

According to Fox Kennedy, Meridian was contracted on the “unabashed endorsement” of Joe Reubens, a long-time Democratic Party strategist and partner of The Parkside Group.

Listed on Meridian’s clients page is Sheinkopf Communications, a firm run by Hank Sheinkopf, described by City & State New York as Meridian’s “senior advisor.” As discovered by Fox Kennedy, Sheinkopf told The Hill in June 2023 that the Democratic Party should “get in behind the scenes” of the Kennedy campaign “and take him apart.” He added, “attacks from groups that are not directly affiliated with Biden might be more effective.”

It’s not just the Kennedy camp raising the alarm.

“Democratic Party operatives are on the streets in New York carrying petitions for the @DrJillStein and RFK campaigns,” wrote congressional candidate Jason Call in a May 14 post on X. Call is running to represent Washington State’s 2nd District on behalf of the Green Party. “They are trying to prevent us from being on the NY ballot using dirty tricks they know can tie us up with legal challenges.” 

A former public school teacher, Call previously held state-level office as a “Bernie-wing” Democrat. But like Kennedy, he left the party in 2023 over its “disgustingly undemocratic” policies and practices. According to Call, the questionable signature gatherers were caught carrying petitions for both RFK Jr. and Jill Stein, an illegal practice that Green Party petitioners are trained not to engage in.

Fox Kennedy stated that the campaign had alerted law enforcement of Meridian’s apparent misconduct. Call similarly suggested the Green Party would take legal action “if anything becomes an issue in actuality.”

As to the potential effect on the campaign, Fox Kennedy confirmed that the campaign had excluded Meridian’s “contaminated petitions” to preempt any legal challenges, and stated that with “more signatures than we need already collected, Kennedy will be on the ballot in New York.”  

On May 28, the campaign turned in 135,519 signatures, as reported in the Beacon, far exceeding the required number of 45,000.

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

The Democratic National Committee is engaged in an all-out war against third-party and independent presidential candidates in an attempt to secure Joe Biden’s reelection. At the heart of the campaign is Third Way, an organization with a decades-long legacy of opposing civil rights, promoting war, and appropriating liberal and conservative values alike for profit and power, giving a whole new meaning to “political compromise.”

As reported by The Kennedy Beacon, for the past several months, a team of party veterans has engaged in lawfare and propaganda, and colluded with a “constellation of outside groups” to “stockpile money and stymie third parties,” according to New York Magazine and NBC News. Now, Politico is reporting that this “coalition of Democratic groups,” which succeeded in sinking No Labels, is “turning its sights on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

Third Way, a “centrist” think tank, serves as the groups’ coordinating hub. A photo of Biden features prominently on the organization’s “About Us” page, highlighting a previous collaboration with the then vice president in 2014. 

The New York Times identified Third Way as “a clearinghouse for Democrats’ effort to block third-party and independent candidates” back in October 2023. The Times reported that “Mr. Biden’s top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive,” funded by “tapping the resources of the Democratic National Committee.” 

Since then, Third Way has pulled the strings of organizations like MoveOn, American Bridge 21st Century, Clear Choice PAC, and Future Forward.

On February 16, 2024, Third Way sent letters to the Secretaries of State of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, urging them to block American Values 2024’s ballot access efforts. Then, on March 26, 2024, Third Way described Kennedy’s campaign as “a disgrace to the Kennedy name and a disaster for the country,” citing its co-founder Matt Bennett.

What exactly is Third Way? And why was this organization chosen to lead the effort to predetermine who the American people can elect in 2024?

Third Way, the “Idea Broker”

Third Way was incorporated in October 2004 and formally launched in 2005 by Matt Bennett, Jonathan Cowan, Nancy Hale and Jim Kessler. The four had previously co-founded Americans for Gun Safety, and sought to apply their success in gun control activism to “help progressives retake the initiative and win the war of ideas,” as explained in Third Way’s prospectus. Senators Evan Bayh, Tom Carper and Blanche Lincoln are listed as honorary co-chairs.

Third Way’s mission: “restore the progressive ‘brand’” and call for “a return to the ‘progressive centrism’ that defined the Clinton presidency.”

The prospectus explains how “difficult or impossible [it is] to market a political ideology with a brand that has become devalued or mistrusted,” and as such, the progressive brand must appropriate the qualities which attract voters to either liberalism or conservatism, while rejecting the labels. In other words, Third Way didn’t simply aim to advance progressivism; it aimed to capture and redefine it. Third Way pitched itself as an “idea broker” leading an “ideas network” – a model it is currently executing in its role as the DNC’s ideological puppeteer.

Democratic Leadership Council: Third Way incubator

Third Way’s mission continues the work of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which served as its incubator. The DLC was founded in 1985 after the humiliating defeat of the “unabashedly liberal Democrat” Walter Mondale to Republican Ronald Reagan, according to Greenville News. Founding members included Bill Clinton and Al Gore, along with Virginia Governor Chuck Robb (son-in-law of President Lyndon Johnson) and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, each hailing from the “Southern Democrat” pedigree of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden was also an early DLC “leader,” according to Jacobin Magazine.

According to The Hill, the DLC led the charge in attempting to regain support of voters the Democratic Party had lost to Reagan. “To the DLC of the 1980s,” writes Robert Dreyfuss in The American Prospect, “that meant a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic issues – in other words, less liberal generally.” The DLC sought to “rescue the Democratic Party from the influence of 1960s-era activists and the AFL-CIO” labor union and “to ease its identification with hot-button social issues.”

Coalition for a Democratic Majority

This sentiment can be traced to the DLC’s own direct predecessor, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM). Just like the DLC, CDM was founded following Democrat George McGovern’s failed attempt to unseat Richard Nixon, which some “neoconservative Democrats” blamed on “the left.” 

“McGovern’s candidacy signaled the capture of the Democratic Party by the hard left, who had taken control of it through a lethal combination of radical opposition to the war in Vietnam, the radicalization of the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation,” recounted Midge Decter, a CDM co-founder, in her 2001 memoir. The JFK era had empowered dissident voices on each of these issues, a form of “new politics” threatening to dismantle the unaccountable “old politics” which institutional Democrats were used to.

Within the CDM we find numerous future members of the Democratic Leadership Council, including Sam Nunn and Chuck Robb. Also a member was James Woolsey, Clinton’s future CIA director. According to Joel Kotkin, the DLC intentionally modeled itself after the CDM, illustrating the direct continuity between the organizations. 

That continuity continues directly through to Third Way. The DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, describes itself as “the intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements,” as well as Clinton’s “idea mill.” Per Newsweek, funding for this “intellectual birthing” was provided by the likes of DuPont, Merck, Microsoft, Philip Morris and Koch Industries – corporations not generally thought of as all that “progressive.”

When the DLC closed its doors, founder Al From announced that its historical records had “become part of” the Clinton Foundation, eliminating any lingering doubts about the group’s ultimate allegiance.

Third Way’s founders are primarily alumni from the DLC/Clinton machine; Bennett and Cowan worked in the Clinton-Gore White House, while Senators Bayh, Carper and Lincoln were DLC chair, vice chair, and member respectively. Third Way trustee Bill Budinger, another Clinton alum, is also a director of the Progressive Policy Institute. In its prospectus, Third Way adopted the DLC’s 1996 New Progressive Declaration, which “served as a restatement of President Clinton’s governing philosophy,” as its own.

Through this lens, Bennett’s visceral opposition to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. begins to make sense. Third Way’s leadership team is chock full of folks with ideological and financial interests threatened by Kennedy’s candidacy. Josh Freed, Third Way’s senior vice president for climate and energy, was a political consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds the Third Way Institute. As revealed by Alex Kotch at PR Watch, Third Way’s donors include DuPont, Facebook and Google – each of whom have faced Kennedy in court either for pollution or censorship.

Just like the DLC and the CDM before it, Third Way is doing everything it can to oppose the election of a candidate who could rock (or sink) their Uniparty boat. This time around, that means preventing Kennedy from reaching the White House at any cost, will of the American people be damned.

is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

Note: this article was updated to correct the use of the term “Southern Democrats.”

If you’ve been reading The New York Times lately, you might have noticed that it’s looking more and more like a mouthpiece of the Democratic National Committee, its array of quick-fire articles suggestive of slick PR flacks pulling the strings. 

The coordination is both outside the press and within it. Feeling that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will take votes from Biden? Send in a cluster of Kennedys who support the president. On April 18, that’s exactly what happened: Members of the Kennedy family took their Bobby-bashing one step further, endorsing President Biden. The Times’ “news analysis” subtitle reads, “The rollout of endorsements from the Kennedys signaled the urgency the Biden campaign feels toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid, and its desire to discredit him.” 

Sounds promising enough as a piece of analysis, but the article quickly collapses, pandering to democrats’ fear that Kennedy will help Trump and doom the country. And the piece fails to spell out how many of the Kennedy family have endorsed Biden (roughly a dozen, one learns elsewhere) or which members work for the Biden administration. Both omissions of convenience. 

In a second article published by the Times on the same day, in the news section, the story headline does all the work for the reader, telegraphing the intended take-away: “Kennedy Clan Endorse Biden, in a Show of Force Against R.F.K Jr: Well-known members of the storied political family endorsed the president in Philadelphia, rejecting one of their own as he worries Democrats with an independent bid.” 

In truth, as The Kennedy Beacon has reminded readers continuously, Kennedy has over 100 relatives and a solid cluster of relatives who do support his presidential run. Leave it to the news agency, CBC, of Canada, to more accurately write about the endorsement, “Several notable members of the family were not endorsing, including U.S.ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy and non-profit leader Maria Shriver.” 

On X, Kennedy graciously took the high road. “I hear some of my family will be endorsing President Biden today,” he wrote. “I am pleased they are politically active — it’s a family tradition. We are divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other.”

As if all this was not enough for the DNC’s hired hacks to feed a hungry press in one news cycle, they appear to have coordinated two additional well-crafted pieces of spin that also, conveniently, landed in the Times, both on April 19. 

The first, titled, “The Ex-Bernie Sanders Pollster Raising Alarms About R.F.K. Jr.’s Appeal Among Latinos and Young Voters,” is essentially a profile of a man who is sounding the alarm about the possibility that Kennedy, like Bernie Sanders, will take voters from two traditional democratic constituencies - Latinos and young people - away from Biden. Where is the profile of someone who thinks that could be a good thing for our country? 

The second article is titled, “R.F.K. Jr.’s Environmental Colleagues Urge Him to Drop Presidential Bid: Nearly 50 Leaders and activists who worked with Mr. Kennedy at an environmental nonprofit group will run ads calling on him to ‘Honor our planet, drop out.’” 

What’s significant about this final piece in the two-day blitzkrieg against Kennedy is 1) that it comes the day after the Kennedy family action and on the same day as the Latinos/ youth piece; and 2) how it's focused on push-back by members of one environmental organization among the many for which Kennedy has worked: The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Not a single voice quoted in the article comes from the Riverkeeper Alliance, for which Kennedy worked longest and arguably most impactfully.

While written as a ‘news’ story, the ‘tell’ in this coverage comes toward the bottom of the article. The reporter, Lisa Friedman, correctly cites some of Kennedy’s criticism of Biden’s environmental track record: “He accused Mr. Biden of turning his back on the environment by approving the Willow project, an $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska; for overseeing record oil and gas production; and for signing the Inflation Reduction Act, which ensures continued offshore oil drilling.” 

Friedman does not weigh in on whether these criticisms are valid (a journalistic lapse), and yet she freely cuts-and-pastes the Biden administrations’ environmental “achievements” talking points as though they were facts: 

“Mr. Biden has enacted the most aggressive climate agenda of any president,” she writes. “In addition to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing more than $370 billion for clean energy over the next decade, he is limiting emissions from automobiles, is poised to cut carbon pollution from power plants and has reined in future oil and gas drilling by limiting the available tracts of land and water that companies can lease.”

And what about the Willow drilling project in Alaska, Ms. Friedman?

At the end of her article, the Times reporter almost reluctantly acknowledges some of Kennedy’s accolades in the environmental space, in which he has been a successful attorney and advocate for 35 years. Predictably, she fails to interview or quote a single supporter of Kennedy’s environmental record.

And so, in the course of two days, readers of the Times are presented with a matrix of propaganda against Kennedy targeted at democrats and progressives. These articles are laser-focused on sounding the alarm about the independent candidate who, the well-honed narrative goes, is hell-bent on destroying our democracy by handing over the country to Trump and spoiling it for an all-deserving Biden.

Lawyers for presidential candidates generally work quietly behind the scenes. Now a few of the legal minds behind President Joe Biden are coming out of the shadows.

Biden’s primary legal fixer is Marc Elias, who leads the Democratic Party’s efforts to manipulate ballot access and limit voter choice, as reported in the Beacon. Two additional lawyers, Dana Remus and Robert Lenhard, have been tasked with carrying out tactics to scare off Biden challengers. 

In short, these three are the type of attorneys who give lawyers a bad name. They use the law to stay in power. They stand in contrast to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has used the law to advocate for people and public health.

While Remus and Lenhard have less name recognition than Elias, they are leading figures in the Democratic Party despite their early ties with Republicans. 

Lenhard cut his teeth in Washington as an appointee of the Federal Election Commission, having been nominated by George W. Bush. Although Lenhard has spent most of his career in private practice, his area of expertise pertains to election law. 

A recent New York Times article outlining the Democrats’ upcoming strategy quotes Lenhard, who reveals that the aim of his party’s legal strategy “is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules” and to “hold them accountable when they are not.” The article outlines the goal of these legal fixers to target Kennedy in particular, a candidate who has polled above 20% and should appear on ballots if Lenhard cares about “playing by the rules” of democracy.

A graduate of Harvard undergraduate and Yale Law School, Remus clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Bush appointee who serves as one of the Republican Party’s most dependable judicial allies. 

Remus has become a favorite of the Biden administration, having served as legal counsel for the president’s 2020 campaign. She also worked for the Obama Foundation, representing former first lady Michelle Obama and working for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a prestigious white-shoe law firm that specializes in bringing “deep government experience to bear in counseling clients across industries on high‑stakes regulatory, enforcement, compliance and investigations matters,” according to its website.

Remus later served as official White House Counsel from November 2020 to January 2022. She is married to Brett Holmgren, a Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research in the Biden administration. Barack Obama officiated their wedding.

Since Kennedy presents a possible challenge to the Democrat incumbent who employs them, these attorneys are focused on harming his campaign so that they can stay in power.

In fact, the party (with Remus’s help) already introduced this strategy in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles when they targeted Green Party candidates, and often successfully kept them off ballots in key states. The lawsuits were based on minute formalities that in Wisconsin, for example, led to invalidating petitions for Green Party vice presidential nominee, Angela Walter. She wasn’t allowed on the state’s ballot because she had obtained signatures of support before changing addresses.

In Texas, Democrats sued the Green Party over filing fees and the Greens couldn’t afford to fight back. Given that the Democrats claim climate change is a “global emergency,” it seems hypocritical to banish candidates from the most ecologically-focused political party in the country, while Biden’s administration has undertaken the most federal drilling in history, as reported by CNN.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed the policies of the Biden administration, but this legal team provides more evidence that the party’s priority is neither the American people nor principles, but holding onto power. 

Remus and Lenhard are forces to be reckoned with, as demonstrated by their records. They’re actions against Kennedy, specifically related to his ballot access drive have shown an all-eager to undermine and discredit, already reaping fruit in states like Nevada, as reported by ABC.

Even though the Kennedy campaign had collected the required signatures in Nevada, as instructed, and they had submitted them successfully to the Board of Elections (BoE), those signatures were later thrown out because the campaign had been advised incorrectly by the BoE about the requirement to name the VP pick on the petition, first. Local news in Nevada reports that the Kennedy campaign, “intends to depose the Secretary of State to find out exactly which White House or DNC official concocted this scheme.” 

The legal strategy led by Lenhard and Remus aligns with the DNC’s larger, substantial push to discredit challengers like Kennedy They have been employing a team of publicity spin masters, as previously explained in the Beacon, who worked with journalists to shape media narratives to their liking. These savvy men and woman are tasked with placing stories in the most influential news outlets, designed to make Kennedy not only look crazy but also fringe, a potential spoiler, a man who must be stopped at all cost — for the sake of ‘democracy.’”

Attack strategies, which use top lawyers in tandem with PR teams against presidential candidates, have succeeded in derailing campaigns before, as revealed in the cases against Green Party members. But as the legal top guns come out of the shadows to target Kennedy, his supporters and the media have an opportunity to turn the tables: to expose the corrupt and dirty ways these games are played.

Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos studied government at Georgetown University and interned for several Democratic elected officials and their campaigns, and other affiliated groups. He then earned a master’s degree in urban studies in France, where extremely strict COVID-19 lockdowns led to his political reawakening and inspired him to try to help fix the broken two-party system.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Veshi on April 5, Epting takes the counter-intuitive position that the fewer choices on the ballot in 2024, the better.

“Robert Kennedy Jr. has the same math and the same path to zero victory in the presidential election that No Labels had,” Epting told Velshi. “And No Labels just did the right thing this week, and that is a great thing for democracy. And we expect Robert Kennedy Jr. should do the same.”

No Labels, a third-party political organization, announced late last week that it was abandoning its efforts to form a ticket, citing its failure to “identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House.” 

As previously reported in The Kennedy Beacon, MoveOn is part of a “coalition of outside groups” working with the Democratic National Committee to undermine independent and third party candidates in 2024. Having successfully harassed and intimidated No Labels into submission, their attention is now squarely focused on Kennedy, as reported by New York Magazine. So far, MoveOn has published unconvincing videos labeling all nonpartisan candidates as pro-Trump, and has apparently deployed fake protestors to try to disrupt Kennedy campaign events.

Epting argues, “there is no pathway for a third-party presidential candidate in this two-party system to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.” 

She fails to mention that, with 43% of U.S. adults listed as independents, that voting bloc represents the largest swath of the electorate: only 27% identify as Republicans and 27% as Democrats. 

Still, Epting asserts that voters must choose between one of the two party-approved candidates, with independent and third-party candidates apparently being incompatible with American-style democracy. “I think it’s really dangerous third party candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr. are out there saying that they could actually win the presidency. That is not true.” 

Without elaborating on how a second Trump term would be worse than a second Biden term, Epting continues, “We’re incredibly worried that Robert Kennedy will actually swing the election to Donald Trump.”

However, Epting’s lack of enthusiasm for Biden becomes apparent throughout the interview, as she provides increasingly disjointed answers. She admits that she’s sympathetic to Democrats who oppose Biden’s fumbled diplomacy in the “catastrophic” Israel-Palestine conflict; “It’s completely understandable that folks are heading to the polls in the primary to vote ‘uncommitted’... I struggle with this challenge myself personally.”

In January, The New York Times reported that MoveOn was pouring $32 million “into an effort to generate enthusiasm” for Biden, which Epting said, “will focus more on reminders of what former President Donald J. Trump would do if he and Republicans return to power than on promoting Mr. Biden’s record in office.”

Epting’s striking lack of enthusiasm for Biden mirrors the sentiment of legacy Democrats across the country. As Biden and the Democratic Party continue to bleed voters to Kennedy—who is also picking up support from disillusioned Trump voters—Americans can expect to hear increasingly absurd arguments that suppressing voter choice is “a great thing for democracy.”

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

“The DNC, via MoveOn, is openly hiring people to harass our campaign,” wrote Amaryllis Fox, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign manager, in a March 30 Twitter/X post. According to Fox, the “protestors” didn’t speak much English and carried signs written in identical handwriting. “[They] said that they had been paid and were homeless, so needed the money.”

According to Newsweek, one of the protesters admitted to refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, despite holding a sign criticizing Kennedy for “attacking” the shots. Furthermore, “when the protesters were shown a photo of Kennedy, none recognized him,” Fox told Newsweek.

Fox linked to a job posting by MoveOn, hosted on GAIN Power Career Center, a self-described “networking, marketing, and career development platform for Democratic and Progressive Professionals.” The site currently hosts 52 listings for the Democratic National Committee. MoveOn scrubbed its original listing seeking an operative to organize such “protests,” but archived versions from LinkedIn, Wellfound, and GAIN Power’s official Substack page remain.

According to the listing, MoveOn is seeking a “senior level political organizer to organize and support institutions and activists to drive campaigns to help inoculate progressive and other non-MAGA constituencies from voting for RFK Jr and other third-party presidential spoiler candidates in key battleground states.” Among other things, the operative will “strategize ways of countering the threats, including digital and in-person organizing” and “serve as a spokesperson to the anti-RFK Jr efforts” in the press and to “national and state partners.” 

Share

It also advocates for the use of “bird-dogging,” which MoveOn describes as “a fairly pressure-oriented tactic” to force politicians to answer questions, which should be used only when one is “willing to create some friction with the target.” Bird-dogging is a signature tactic of Indivisible, another aggressively pro-Biden group previously profiled in The Kennedy Beacon.

MoveOn spokesman Joel Payne dismissed Fox’s accusations as a “conspiracy theory” and declined to comment on the job listing.

MoveOn’s recent efforts follow the DNC’s declaration of war on third-party and independent candidates in the 2024 election. In March, the DNC deployed a four-person team of “veteran democratic operative[s]” coordinating with a “coalition of outside groups” working “to stymie third parties,” specifically naming MoveOn as a collaborator.

MoveOn’s History

MoveOn is an activist network run primarily through MoveOn.org, claiming to be “the largest independent, progressive, digitally-connected organizing group in the United States,” powered by “real people,” not “Washington insiders and special interests.”

Officially, MoveOn is made up of two primary entities: MoveOn Civic Action, a nonprofit organization, and MoveOn Political Action, a political action committee.

MoveOn began in September 1998 in the form of an online petition asking Congress to “Move On” from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair, garnering 100,000 signatures in one week. As profiled on Discover the Networks, “move on” became a buzz phrase among Clinton supporters and administration officials. 

The petition’s authors, married wealthy computer entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, “realized that their petition’s success only hinted at the internet’s potential to impact politics,” and that their new tool could “disrupt and fundamentally alter the course of our democracy.” One month after launching their petition, Boyd and Blades founded MoveOn PAC. 

While MoveOn’s petition claimed bipartisanship and financial independence, the newly-founded PAC immediately began supporting Democratic candidates, with early donations from Laurance Rockefeller Jr. and the late Richard Rockefeller (great-grandsons of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller). Other notable early supporters included actor Matt Damon, Joanie Bronfman of the influential Bronfman family, and Pam Omidyar, co-founder of the Omidyar Network with her husband Pierre, co-founder of eBay—casting doubt on the claim that they are powered by “real people” without “special interests.”

In 2003, the couple founded the MoveOn.org Voter Fund to oppose President George W. Bush, and collaborated with a “constellation of groups” with the same agenda, including John Podesta’s Center for American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters for America. It quickly raised $15 million, with large amounts coming from Democratic mega donor George Soros.

In April 2004, the FEC notified MoveOn that its Voter Fund was violating campaign finance laws, later issuing a $150,000 fine for failure to properly report its income and expenses. Still, MoveOn attracted millions of dollars from Soros and his Open Society Institute, the Bill Gates-connected Shefa Fund, and later received funding from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Same party, new tricks

In 2016, MoveOn celebrated the cancellation of a Trump campaign event in Chicago due to protests which caused “security concerns,” with MoveOn.org Political Action’s executive director Ilya Sheyman warning pro-Trump Republicans that they were “on notice.” Promising more disruptions, MoveOn used the unrest to solicit donations, per the Washington Times. MoveOn’s national spokesperson around this time was Karine Jean-Pierre, who now serves as Biden’s press secretary.

MoveOn was named in a now infamous February 2021 Time article detailing their questionable tactics, entitled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election,” describing “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” by a “loosely organized coalition of operatives” to “influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” 

Unlike in 2020, MoveOn and the DNC apparatus does not appear to have the ground support of real protesters to disrupt the campaigns of Biden’s political opponents.

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

“Nuland is to Ukraine as Fauci is to Covid,” wrote David Sacks on X, after Nuland’s departure as Under Secretary of State earlier in the week.

Sacks, the uber-successful serial investor, continued: “What was Nuland’s job at the State Department supposed to be? Diplomacy. What did she actually do? Foment conflict with Russia. What was Fauci’s job at NIH? Public health. What did he actually do? Fund dangerous gain-of-function research. These powerful unelected bureaucrats, who run the government across administrations, are literally doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to. They’re not making us safe. They’re causing crisis after crisis. Nothing will change until we get rid of them.”

In a quick tweet on March 5, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote, “Notorious Neocon Architect of Ukraine War Resigns.”

Kennedy has called the war in Ukraine a proxy war and has been crying for a negotiated end to the bloodshed since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency last April. He has long been critical of Nuland’s role in triggering Russia’s war with Ukraine. 

Nuland has a long relationship with Ukraine. She was criticized for undiplomatic language in a secretly recorded 2014 telephone call during which she revealed that the US was more than interfering in Ukraine’s elections. 

With hardly any criticism from the legacy media, President Biden enlisted Nuland, a known neoconservative or “neocon,” to serve in his administration in 2021.

Nuland, a Democrat, was an influential assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration, advocating for the Iraq War, which cost US taxpayers more than $728 billion and resulted in an estimated 200,000 civilian deaths, according to NBC. The war in Ukraine, now over two years old, has become a meat grinder with shocking numbers of fatalities, as reported by The Independent. 

Although Nuland’s official role was as a diplomat negotiating for peace, The Hill reports, she spent more time advocating for weapons of war. To date, the Biden administration has given $75 billion to Ukraine in military, financial, and humanitarian aid, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Glenn Greenwald recounts the legacy of Nuland’s neoconservative approach to foreign policy, noting that she served “comfortably” under Democrat presidents. 

While Nuland’s departure is welcome news to critics of how neocons have usurped the Democratic Party and turned it into a party of war, it is also important to note that Biden remains committed to his ongoing failing strategies in Ukraine.

Louis Conte is a writer and investigator with over 39 years of experience. He has authored two novels and one work of nonfiction. Conte lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and sons. 

By Sanna Hannele Voltti, The Kennedy Beacon

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) spokesperson Alex Floyd published a statement after the much-talked-about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Super Bowl ad, calling Kennedy a “Trump stalking horse in this race.” 

A “stalking horse” is used by a hunter as cover as he stalks his prey. In politics, the term refers to a person put forward as a candidate only to divide the opposition.

Share

Floyd further claimed that the Super Bowl ad “was bought and paid for” by Timothy Mellon, a Trump supporter, which is false. As The New York Times reported and The Kennedy Beacon confirmed, Nicole Shanahan, former Biden supporter and ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, donated $4 million toward the $7 million ad and provided creative guidance.

Despite the inaccuracy of Floyd’s accusation, multiple mainstream news outlets have taken the “stalking horse” conspiracy theory hook, line, and sinker as President Biden’s polling numbers plunge.

In Michigan, in a move to counter those sliding poll numbers, the DNC bought several billboards promoting the “stalking horse” conspiracy theory; they promoted the fact that Kennedy and Trump are supported by the same “MAGA” donor, Timothy Mellon, as if that proves an agenda.

Mellon countered the DNC’s allegations that he is pushing Kennedy as Trump’s “stalking horse.” On billboards in Michigan (paid for by the American Values 2024 super PAC), Mellon suggests that Kennedy is Trump’s only real opponent, with Biden’s mental capacity revealed in an official report by Special Counsel Robert Hur. Biden, that report states, is an “elderly man with a poor memory.” 

Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to lap up the DNC’s “stalking horse” narrative, despite lack of evidence.

“Democratic strategist Lis Smith last week suggested that Kennedy is a ‘stalking horse’ candidate intent on helping Trump by attracting voters who would otherwise support Biden,” wrote ABC News. 

CNN wrote: “In a call with reporters outlining the complaint, DNC adviser Ramsey Reid blamed Trump and his donors for turning Kennedy into a ‘stalking horse’ by funding the PAC.”

The Seattle Times reported Alex Floyd saying that “RFK Jr. is nothing more than a Trump stalking horse in this race.”

Rachel Hutchinson of FairVote Action wrote, “DNC officials have also accused Trump donors of funding the PAC and using Kennedy as a ‘stalking horse.’”

“In interviews, multiple Democrats referred to Kennedy as ‘a stalking horse’ for Trump,” reported Jake Lahut in the Daily Beast.

Politico reported that “Ramsey Reid, a senior adviser at the DNC said, ‘It’s pretty clear that Trump and his megadonors are propping up RFK Jr. as a stalking horse.’”

The Democratic Party’s promotion of the false theory that the Kennedy campaign is part of a secret plan to reelect Trump as president underscores growing desperation within the Biden campaign. And for good reason. Biden’s recent poll numbers, as reported by Sarah Fortinsky in The Hill, reveal: “Only one-third of US adults say they approve of President Biden’s job performance – a record low for his presidency and for any president in the last 15 years.”

Biden’s disapproval rating, at 58%, is higher than that of former president Trump.

Late last year, the Honest Media project, our sister publication also funded by American Values 2024, published an article titled “Reporter Kiera Butler is a Disinfo Dupe.” Butler is a reporter for Mother Jones magazine whose areas of focus include former president Donald Trump, “Russian disinformation,” and “anti-vaxxers,” infamously describing natural immunity to COVID-19 as a “conspiracy theory.” As highlighted by Honest Media, Butler’s articles are frequently composed of a “mix of truth, lies, and spin” – a pattern that has extended to her coverage of independent presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Mother Jones has yet to respond to requests to issue corrections to the false statements identified by Honest Media. As we have frequently discovered through our investigations at The Kennedy Beacon, today’s ostensibly “liberal” and “independent” media is far too often captured by corporate and political interests – the very interests Mother Jones claims to push back against. For this reason, we decided to look into the history of Mother Jones and explore who may be influencing its agenda.

Background

Mother Jones magazine was named after "Mother" Mary Harris Jones (1837-1930), described by Women in History as a union activist and legendary advocate for workers rights. She was jailed multiple times for her efforts.

Following in her example, a group of liberal activist journalists gathered in early 1974 to begin planning Mother Jones magazine, as recounted in a retrospective article by Adam Hochschild. A non-profit organization called the Foundation for National Progress was incorporated in March 1975 to act as the magazine’s publisher and fundraising arm. The first issue of Mother Jones was published in 1976. Hochschild described the early days defined by “the afterglow of the 1960s,” which saw the magazine champion important issues of women’s rights, racial equality, and the anti-war movement. 

Current Controversies

In recent years, however, the magazine has come under fire from liberals who feel it has failed to live up to its namesake. In her article for Paste Magazine following the 2016 presidential election, investigative reporter Naomi LaChance criticized Mother Jones for its rejection of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, arguing that “its namesake was, in fact, his ideological forerunner.” She quoted a former Mother Jones reader who described the magazine as “sort of the worst example of a lot of neoliberal media posing under the kind of classic leftist flag.”

Mother Jones has leveled numerous personal and political attacks against RFK Jr., including a long hit piece by its Washington, D.C. bureau chief, David Corn. Published on July 15, 2023 (while Kennedy was seeking the Democratic Party nomination), the article included dozens of false claims and misrepresentations about the candidate, whom he described as a “political virus” at risk of spreading among Democratic voters. Corn characterizes Kennedy’s positions on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, vaccine safety, his uncle’s assassination, and the potential health risks of 5G telecommunications technology as “dangerous nonsense,” lumping him together with Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson (whom he described as “egomaniacal bullshitters who propagate disinformation for profit and personal gain”). “Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to America,” Corn concludes, “because he relentlessly and ruthlessly purveys conspiracism and irrationality.” Rather than engaging with Kennedy’s positions, Corn suggests that “[a]ny coverage of Kennedy that does not focus on this [conspiracism and irrationality] aids the destructive forces of distortion and disinformation.”

Corn is no stranger to controversy. In November 2017, Politico reported that Mother Jones executives had investigated reports of “inappropriate workplace behavior” by Corn towards multiple female staff members as far back as 2014. Mother Jones’ CEO and Editor-in-Chief both confirmed that they had conducted an investigation, and had “warn[ed] him about touching female staffers and insensitive descriptions of sexual violence.” FOX News took a more aggressive stance in its coverage, reporting that Mother Jones was reopening its investigation after new emails had surfaced documenting allegations of sexual assault.

Prior to the accusations, Corn was already an established talking head for the institutional media. As described by his alma mater, Brown University, Corn began his career with an internship at The Nation magazine, where he then took a job as an editorial assistant. He later became The Nation’s Washington editor where he remained until he joined Mother Jones in 2007. 

On more than one occasion, Corn has been found to be playing defense for the establishment against its skeptics. In 1994, he published a book titled Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades, a biography of former Central Intelligence Agency official Theodore Shackley. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Joseph Finder argued that Corn had “blame[d] Mr. Shackley for an enormous number of the C.I.A.'s failures over the past several decades,” offloading culpability from the agency to Shackley and his “rampant ambition.” While Shackley was undoubtedly worthy of intense criticism for his role in the CIA’s range of controversial activities during his tenure, Finder warned that Corn’s heavy focus on Shackley “seriously distorts the recent history of American intelligence.” 

Similarly, Corn was criticized in an open letter by David Ray Griffin, founder of the Center for Progress Studies, for demonizing his fellow liberals who challenged any aspect of the government-sanctioned narrative surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. In an article condemning CNN host and environmental activist Van Jones for signing a “9/11 Truth” petition, Corn described skepticism around the event as an “unsound idea” that “would infect the left and other quarters.” 

Notably, Corn has repeatedly used the term “infect” to describe ideas with which he disagrees. In January 2023, he published an op-ed on so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” in which he described supporters of the former president as “eager to infect others with their psychosis.” Prior to that, in an October 2020 Mother Jones piece, he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of “plotting to infect and undermine the 2020 presidential election.”

Funding and Supporters

At the bottom of various online Mother Jones articles is a note explaining that the magazine adopted a non-profit model “because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.” While that may have been true at the outset, it certainly is not today.

The MacArthur Foundation – built on the wealth of the MacArthur banking family, identified by Duke University as “one of the largest private foundations in the United States” – has provided just shy of $3 million to Mother Jones, with the largest grants made between 2014 and 2023. Liberal mega donor George Soros had donated over $1 million to the organization as of 2008 through his Open Society Foundations, according to a review of its financial statements published by Mike Ciandella in 2013. The Ford Foundation has provided just shy of $1 million in grants to Mother Jones from 2016-2021. Without a doubt, most Americans would qualify these donors as “corporate billionaires.”

But it’s not just big money funding Mother Jones. As reported in Inside Philanthropy, the magazine has successfully “cultivated a substantial base of small donors.” Notably, a substantial portion of this base appeared following the surprise election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. In a March 2017 article for the San Francisco Chronicle, the editorial staff at Mother Jones was quoted as hoping that “much more is to come” on the Trump front, after “the magazine saw a 160 percent increase” in small donations and “tripled revenue” from recurring donors. In short, Mother Jones profited handsomely from its enthusiastic coverage of the former president, motivated by what the magazine’s editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery described as a “reward” for its “probative, investigative journalism.” One such reward came from big tech executive Rob Glaser, whose foundation provided Mother Jones a $250,000 grant to investigate alleged links between Trump and Russia (after the magazine launched a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign to fund its efforts in May 2017).

Given the fact that much of the narrative underlying Mother Jones’ “Trump-Russia Investigation” was written based on “speculation portrayed as fact,” discerning readers might wonder if the financial incentive outweighed the magazine’s interest in journalistic integrity. 

Of course, organizations need funding to survive, and Mother Jones shouldn’t be faulted simply for attracting the support of high-powered donors and politically-charged readers. To help maintain the independence of this non-profit venture, one might expect that the fundraising and editorial operations would be kept separate. In the case of the Foundation for National Progress and Mother Jones, however, it doesn’t appear any walls exist whatsoever. Comparing Mother Jones’ staff and board of directors pages to the Foundation for National Progress’ records on OpenCorporates reveals that its executive leadership hold the same positions at both organizations. Further linking the business and editorial sides is the fact that Monika Bauerlein, the organizations’ CEO, previously served for nine years as co-editor of the magazine. Similarly, Secretary Sara Frankel originally worked as a fellow with the magazine.

Looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joined several other concerned philanthropists in providing nearly $1 million in “dedicated funding” for Mother Jones’ “ambitious democracy reporting,” which the magazine claims will allow it to “continue pursuing investigative reporting on voter suppression, disinformation, extremism, and political corruption.” Newmark is also a primary benefactor for the Poynter Institute, which recently gave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. its “Lie of the Year” award for his alleged “campaign of conspiracy theories.”

Rather than hold true to the populist values of its namesake, or the anti-corporate charter with which it started, Mother Jones appears to have long since succumbed to the influence of its funders. While journalistic activism has an important role to play in modern discourse, one would not be faulted for placing Mother Jones alongside the Associated Press as a well-funded, agenda-driven machine masquerading as a virtuous non-profit initiative.

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of Sturgess Prime Productions. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections, following a request from the North Carolina Democratic Party, unanimously voted on Tuesday that President Joe Biden will be the only Democrat on the Tarheel State’s primary ballot this year. 

Ostensibly, the reason for the party’s petition was that Biden is the only Democratic candidate who is seriously campaigning in North Carolina and raising money there. In addition, there are also signature requirements that the president’s challengers to meet but apparently did not. 

Still, both the party’s request and the board’s decision are bad for Democrats… and democracy. 

One of the big reasons why the party outperformed the GOP in 2022 is that Republicans, and especially their standard-bearer Donald Trump, are viewed as a serious threat to democracy. 

And that is a theme that Biden, should he be the nominee, will certainly run on this fall if he is up against his predecessor in a rematch of 2020.

Share

Obviously, the case against Trump as an anti-democratic force is strong. After losing by 7 million votes, he refused to concede, sowed doubt about the integrity of US elections without presenting any tangible evidence, plotted a coup to stay in power, and sparked an insurrection that led to a violent attack on Congress. 

However, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot if they do not run a primary that is viewed as completely above board. 

Decisions like that in North Carolina, and previously in Florida and Tennessee, do nothing to help in that regard. Many progressives already view the Democratic National Convention (DNC) as horribly corrupt for putting its thumb on the scale to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 nomination against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), so any action that reinforces that notion may end up hurting Biden in the general election.

It’s also completely pointless. Barring unforeseen circumstances, there is no doubt that the president will be the party’s nominee, so there is no harm in allowing other candidates to run against him in the primary… even if they did not meet all requirements. 

None of his challengers are a threat to him at all. What is, however, is diluting the message that he is a champion of democracy when his party is keeping other names off primary ballots in a closely contested state like North Carolina. 

That is a narrative that could end up costing votes when it matters.

Look no further than the scathing response from Marianne Williamson, who is also running for the Democratic nomination. 

She accused the state party of “circumvent[ing] democracy,” adding that the “crisis of Democracy in our nation is institutional.” Finally, Williamson argued that the “decision to protect political parties instead of voters is a failure to protect democracy itself.”

It’s tough to argue with that. 

The smart move for Biden would be to try to intervene and advocate that his rivals be placed on the ballots in North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee after all to show he is not just paying lip service to democracy.

Shame. It isn’t one of the seven deadly sins, but it’s deadly-sin adjacent. It’s pretty certain the founding premise of the entire New Age movement was to heal the shame that people have internalized since Adam and Eve decided that knowing is more interesting than an unformed mind, and a person can get used to wearing a fig leaf. 

There are many scientific studies on the subject of shame. But to understand it in the context of how to get a person to vote a certain way, it might be helpful to note that shame tends to light up the limbic “fight or flight” system, which is more likely to induce a fearful response than logical problem solving. Noted professor, author and TEDTalk speaker, Brené Brown, says, “Shame is the most powerful, master emotion.” 

Even though humans have billions of complex processes going on inside our bodies every second, most of our thoughts and reactions are patterns that were set in our brains like grooves on a screw. As Sandy Loder reports in Peak Dynamics, the average person has 60,000 thoughts a day and 45,000 of those land, habitually, in the negative category, which may explain the success of negative campaign ads, as Katelyn Howard reports for NPR.

Shaming succeeds by preying on people’s anxieties, often about rejection. Most people want to belong or, at a minimum, they don’t want to be seen as outliers. Insecurity is a key element in a society that puts a lot of value on how things appear. How many of us have bought something we didn’t need, couldn’t afford, and later regretted?

What does this have to do with the 2024 presidential election? 

As the new year looms, or dawns, depending on your level of optimism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is up against more obstacles than any other candidate in modern times. Having left the Democratic Party to run as an independent, he is the DNC’s public enemy #1. And despite the fact that his own father’s assassination is what led to the use of Secret Service protection for presidential candidates, President Biden’s administration persistently refuses Kennedy’s requests for protection — even though there have been two credible threats that led to arrests, and one of the men arrested was armed and posing as a member of Kennedy’s security team. There’s a punishing, “you deserve whatever happens to you” tone in how Biden has intentionally left this man vulnerable. Forcing Kennedy to spend millions on his own security is a deliberate tactic designed to bleed his campaign finances dry, as will the legal challenges the DNC will deploy, courtesy of pit bulls like Marc Elias, to stop him from getting onto the ballot, especially in swing states.

Back to Shaming: On the surface, vote shaming is fairly straightforward. Embarrass a person to capture or guide their vote by appealing to their sense of uncertainty or embarrassment over an issue. A good example happened in 2020, when Joe Rogan told his 7 million YouTube followers that he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. As reported by Zack Beauchamp in Vox, Democrats accused Sanders of not reining in the Bernie Bros, or “dirtbag left,” while transgender activists tied Sanders’ supporters to some of Rogan’s anti-trans commentary. From the moment the Sanders campaign retweeted what Rogan said, according to Greg Krieg reporting in CNN, he was besieged by criticism from colleagues in Congress and pundits in the mainstream media, all of whom know that no candidate can control every opinion of potential voters. Just the mention of Rogan and Sanders in the same sentence became the dog whistle for anyone looking for a reason to doubt Sanders. 

People want to be on the so-called right side of history, and nobody wants to become a target, especially on social media where rumors and accusations easily go viral and take on the monstrous (ether) air of a mob. In politics, a lie doesn’t need to have a long shelf life. Once a negative impression is made, it’s like a bite from a venomous snake; good luck getting the poison out fast enough for the truth to matter. 

Media has the power to persuade people to believe something even years after it’s been proven to be factually untrue. As reported by the Los Angeles Daily News, on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, one-third of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was somehow involved and 40% believed Iraq supported Al-Qaeda. 

Whether or not one has an opinion that might breach the walls of the blue or red camp, the tone of political discourse in the US is vitriolic, stifling, and excruciatingly narrow. “Our democracy is under attack,” and “Trump… Trump, anything Trump,” and “Identity politics bad, virtue signaling A-OK.” And then there’s the biggie: Woke… to be it, or not to be it, that is the question.

There is so much ‘othering’ happening in every direction it’s hard to keep up with who or what idea is being demonized or weaponized week after week. 

But vote shaming goes beyond online bullying and gifs with vomit or vulgar hand gestures, and should be seen as part of the structural apparatus of electoral politics, like one of its limbs. North Carolina, a swing state, is a prime example of how these things work in tandem. 

In 2014, Colin Campbell reported in The News & Observer that the North Carolina Democratic Party and the Sierra Club used a mailer to vote shame as many as 650,000 registered voters. How? By threatening to reveal the public records that track who votes and who doesn’t. In 2018, the GOP also sent targeted mailers to North Carolinians, and informed their neighbors, too, about their voting habits. While that may be offensive and intrusive to some, both parties insist that engaging in such activities gets people out to vote.

Now, six years later, the practice of tracking who votes, combined with the enhanced digital technologies and an unlimited amount of money in politics, will focus heavily on securing electoral votes rather than the popular vote. It’s estimated that only 2% of North Carolina’s voters need to be persuaded to vote a certain way. As Michael Scherer et al. reported in The Washington Post, according to North Carolina’s Republican Party Chair, when it comes to whether or not a Republican wins there, “It’ll be down to 100,000 voters who are undecided going into the election….We can target them.”

As Sara Fisher reports in Axios, according to the advertising agency, GroupM, political advertising in 2024 is projected to be as high as $15.9 billion. Another firm, AdImpact, puts that number at only $10.2 billion. But either way, we should expect between a four and sixfold increase in election spending above the $2.5 billion spent in 2016. With the endless real estate available for digital ads, and speculation about the role of AI, who and what is - or is not - promulgated by the algorithms will depend on who controls that technology and where the money is placed. 

How does this expanded digital capacity and vote shaming impact Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party bid for the presidency? In a sense, vote shaming is not that different from vaccine shaming, which makes Kennedy uniquely positioned to become the most controversial candidate of 2024. He’s labeled as “anti-vax” and he is identified as a threat to the Democratic Party’s ticket. In Democratic Party-think, that makes him a threat to democracy itself. 

In a September 1, 2022 speech, President Biden railed about the endless danger of Trump, saying, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” With that as the guiding logic, anyone who doesn’t support Biden is allegedly setting the stage for the re-election of Trump, and nobody is accused of doing that more than Kennedy.

When actor/comedian Michael Rapaport interviewed actor/producer Rob Reiner last month on his podcast, I Am Rapaport, Reiner swiftly presented the Democratic Party’s line. He said, “I even called Bobby Kennedy up, and I said ‘Bobby, you’re gonna put Trump back in the White House’ and he said, ‘No, no. I’m gonna draw more votes from Trump than I will from Biden.’ That’s not true. We don’t know. There are polls that say the exact opposite.” And Rapaport replied, “He thinks he can win? Win what? What the [expletive] is he talking about?”

A few moments later, after Rapaport dumped a truckload of expletive-laden criticism on Kennedy, Reiner said, “The point is, those third-party candidates swing elections [referring to Perot and Nader] one way or the other. And that’s fine when you have a choice between Clinton, or it’s gonna be George HW. Or, you know, I’d rather have Clinton. But this is not that kind of choice. This is, do you want democracy or autocracy? That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Jon Favreau, a former Obama aide and co-host of Pod Save America, said this of third-party votes: “All people need to know is that, if the people who voted for Jill Stein in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary instead, Donald Trump would have never become president. That’s it, right? And so, you know, I’m sure there’s a lot of Cornel West fans out there… living in a swing state… you vote for Cornel West, and you are helping Trump become president. That’s it. And you can say ‘Oh well, that’s Joe Biden’s fault...’ No, no, it’s your decision. You get to decide whether you want to help Donald Trump become president or you don’t.”

Share

When it comes to shaming anyone who supports Kennedy, so far, the Democrats are far more ruthless than the Republicans. They seem to think the answer to the alleged “threat to democracy” that his candidacy represents is less democracy, not more. That’s like saying the truth is in danger, so, maybe a little less truth is the way to go.

Perhaps vote shaming isn’t that different from Adam and Eve’s dilemma. For better or worse, they bit into that apple. They chose knowledge and the discomfort of accountability over naked innocence and a perfectly contained life without imagination.

There are generations of people who will reap or mourn the outcome of the decisions we make now about who we choose to lead us. We can let ourselves be shamed into or out of voting this way or that, but maybe what is called for in these times is a remembrance of, or a desire to feel, the opposite of shame. Honor. We have that right. We have that power.  

The Democratic Party has declared war on democracy.

That’s right. The party that I proudly belonged to all of my long adult life, the party that has traditionally fought for freedom, is seeking to control the voting process. They want to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and, in fact, all of the candidates not named Joe Biden — off the ballot in 2024. It is hard and expensive enough for a challenger in a presidential election to get on all 50 state ballots. The Democratic establishment is now making this process more arduous and costly by taking candidates to court. They don’t call it “lawfare” for nothing.

Leading the legal campaign to block President Biden’s opponents is Washington D.C. power attorney Marc Elias. He’s been hired by American Bridge, the Democratic Party’s primary opposition research group, to challenge ballot-qualification efforts by competing candidates. Over the years, Elias — who’s become the Democratic Party’s go-to guy for election battles and campaign finance law — has received generous donations from George Soros and other deep-pocketed Democratic benefactors.

The bald, bespectacled, 54-year-old lawyer looks cuddly enough. In fact, in X (formerly Twitter) posts and elsewhere, Elias is often seen romping with Bode, his shaggy Portuguese Water Dog. But Elias is a pit bull when it comes to advancing the interests of the Democratic Party. He pugnaciously makes his case on MSNBC and other friendly platforms, and his law firm seems to have unlimited financial resources. 

“My firm is currently litigating 47 voting and election cases in 19 states,” recently boasted Elias, who also launched a digital platform named Democracy Docket to promote his lawfare campaigns. 

Share

Elias frames his legal battles as crusades for American democracy. And many of his court challenges of Republican redistricting plans and other disenfranchisement schemes are, indeed, on the side of the angels.

“Over the last few years,” he wrote last week on Democracy Docket, “we have experienced a never-ending series of attacks on our democracy by a man (Donald Trump) who stands for nothing other than his own power. We have seen one of our two major parties turn its back on the American experiment in favor of raw power.”

Elias credited the courts – “as imperfect as our judiciary is” – with providing a “powerful check” on this anti-democratic tilt. And Elias himself deserves praise for those cases in which he has battled for voting rights.

But now Elias is turning his legal acumen against electoral movements that are trying to extend the democratic franchise.

American Values, the super PAC that is supporting the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign (as well as The Kennedy Beacon), is being compelled to spend millions of dollars to ensure that its candidate will be on all 50 state ballots in 2024. Even though RFK Jr. has been polling at over 20 percent and has clearly emerged as a viable candidate. Selecting the candidate of your choice is a “cornerstone” of American democracy, Kennedy has said: “In a democracy, the people are supposed to decide with their votes who gets into office.” But elections have become so expensive and so managed that democracy is now largely a sham, he has charged.

Elias’s aggressive partisanship on behalf of his Democratic clients has sometimes gotten him into trouble with judges and even with President Biden’s advisors, who have questioned his scorched-earth approach. 

In April 2016, he hired the investigative firm Fusion GPS on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS then paid for the notorious Steele dossier, oppositional research linking Trump with Russia that has since been debunked.

And now Elias is subverting his own progressive rhetoric by trying to block third-party and independent candidates. He — and his Democratic Party patrons — are sabotaging democracy by orchestrating the coronation of an unpopular president.

According to a poll released earlier this month by Associated Press and NORC Research Center, few voters are excited by a possible Biden-Trump rematch, with one independent from Maine quoted as saying, “This is probably the most uniquely horrible choice I’ve had in my life.” 

And yet Elias frames the 2024 presidential election in stark, binary terms. “Hear me loud and clear,” he posted this month in a video. “If you vote for Jill Stein, you are voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for RFK (Jr.), you are voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for No Labels, you are voting for Donald Trump.”

Actually, political pundits have been frantically trying to figure out whether Kennedy’s candidacy hurts Biden or Trump more. Though they haven’t come to a conclusion, the Trump camp has targeted Kennedy as a liberal masquerading as a conservative. And the Biden campaign, in lockstep with big media, either ignores Kennedy or casts him as a conservative-leaning lunatic. In truth, RFK Jr. is neither a traditional liberal or conservative, combining ideas from across the political spectrum in a way that makes sense to many voters.

This rare hybrid thinking is what makes Kennedy so threatening to blue-versus-red warriors like Elias. In their hearts, Elias and other color-coded partisans know that no party has a lock on wisdom, that both Democratic and Republican leaders are corruptly beholden to their corporate sponsors and to fading imperial ideologies.

But snapping pit bulls like Elias must keep snarling whenever they’re taken out of their cages. He must growl menacingly at his political enemies. No defeat, no surrender — no compromise, even if it’s good for the country. “They hate me because I fight, they fear me because I win,” he blasted on an X post this week like, well, Donald Trump.

If that’s the bitterly divided America we want to live in, we’ll keep letting Marc Elias and his breed off the leash.

Upside down, inside out, round and round. You get the feeling that the Americans driving the US propaganda machine against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have Diana Ross’s song playing in the background, inspiring them to ever-greater leaps of the imagination, twisting Kennedy’s words every which way and turning his character and ideas upside-down. 

Kennedy is the target of a vicious character assassination campaign. Staging its signature fictional drama of good vs. evil, the US propaganda machine pits the powerfully intelligent Kennedy and his supporters on the side of falsehood, absurdity, and anti-scientific thought, while, unbelievably, casting the US government and the media as defenders of truth, logic, and science, eternally protecting democracy at home and abroad with their authoritarian toolkit of dogma, censorship, propaganda, coups, and invasions. 

Share

In its effort to portray Kennedy as the “bad guy,” the machine is obviously compelled to omit from media discussion the vast bulk of his campaign platform, along with his integrity, genuine character, and decades of passionate commitment as an environmental lawyer. 

The machine also omits discussion of Kennedy’s eye-opening books Crimes Against Nature, which describes polluting corporations’ staggering degree of control over environmental policy, and The Real Anthony Fauci, which documents greed-inspired individuals’ and pharmaceutical companies’ harmful control over health agencies, as well as eerie military-intelligence-health-agency collaboration in “germ game” simulations centered on coercive responses to pandemics. 

The slim percentage of Kennedy’s words that do enter the media are first run through the US propaganda machine’s special tool: the scrambler. The scrambler ingests Kennedy’s words, discards several, tosses in more, scrambles them up, spits them out, and then applies much negative innuendo in order to portray his words as hinting at something scandalous.

The scrambler’s results are absurd. Policy and media makers, for example, accuse him of insensitivity to Holocaust victims because he drew comparisons between Nazi totalitarianism and sweeping, undemocratic COVID-era mandates—as if his warning were an insult and not a wake-up call about precarious freedoms. 

Crucial to the machine’s success is its refusal to allow Kennedy to defend himself in the arenas where he’s criticized. Instead of conversing with Kennedy, the machine illogically misrepresents his arguments and then dismisses them as illogical. 

For example, machine operatives ignorantly label Kennedy a “capitalist apologist” who really doesn’t care about the environment. Why? They’re confused by the words profit motive and free market. If they were to speak with him, or simply read up on his views, they’d learn that Kennedy maintains, quite logically, that if taxpayer-funded subsidies to the fossil fuel industry were cut and polluting companies were required to fully pay for the environmental and health damage they cause, degrading the environment would no longer be profitable—these industries would have to clean up their act or go out of business. Far from putting the profit motive first, he would like to put it in service to environmental protection.

Photo: Kennedy, center, with a group of fellow Waterkeepers. Enjeuux Energies on X

Kennedy also emphasizes the need for a broader focus in our stewardship of the environment—a focus that will not only help remedy climate change, but that will also include other crucial goals such as habitat preservation and regenerative agricultural practices. Together, all of these goals can serve the larger mission of detoxifying, restoring, and protecting the environment. He astutely warns of an imbalanced emphasis on artificial carbon capture that shows signs of being geared more towards earning corporate profits than truly caring for the environment in manifold ways. 

Another favorite tactic of the machine is ridicule—the old “Ha, ha!” line of argument that substitutes for investigation. For instance, the machine nonsensically mocks Kennedy as being anti-science for his revelations that US health authorities promote dogma, not necessarily science. Kennedy documents how their dogma actually suppresses scientists’ and doctors’ discoveries and instead supports illogic, skewed studies, and corruption. Incredibly, the machine resorts to “disproving” his accusations of authorities’ dishonesty by quoting statements from those same authorities.

Desperately hiding behind the curtain of Oz, the machine applies its “Ha, ha!” argument to mock Kennedy’s evidence-based accusations—of widespread US agency corruption, distortion of agencies’ missions, collaborative censorship by the US government and the media, US provocations of Russia, US biolabs in Ukraine, and ethnically targeted bioweapons—as indicators of Kennedy’s own allegedly crazed mind. 

Take note that on page 60 of its report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, cofounded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan—husband of Biden’s undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland—was already writing with shameless enthusiasm 23 years ago about the development of bioweapons that can target specific genotypes. 

The machine next pulls out its “lone wolf” tactic, portraying Kennedy as unworthy of the Kennedy pack because certain other Kennedys disagree with him, including those connected to Biden’s administration. Without convincing evidence, the machine implies that it’s these other Kennedys who know what they’re talking about—rather than the other way around.

The machine then turns to far-fetched theorizing. Disregarding Kennedy’s own stated reasons for running for president, including his crucial mission of separating avaricious corporate power from government policy, US machine “experts” skip out onto limbs and offer their own unflattering theories as to why Kennedy is campaigning and why he draws supporters. 

According to the machine, which ignores supporters’ tremendous admiration for Kennedy’s character and platform, we’re allegedly attracted primarily to his last name—as if certain other Kennedys could ever hope to win our votes. Our support for his views is trivialized by the machine as indicating nothing more than our relishing the thrill of being “contrarian.” 

Notice another tactic the machine employs: the double standard. What better way to distort reality into a good vs. evil drama than to judge an action as bad when allegedly performed by the “bad side,” and then describe that same action as good—even when taken to a greater extreme—when performed by the “good side”? 

For instance, while Kennedy—despite providing extensive documentation—is incessantly accused of being a conspiracy theorist who lacks evidence, the theories that US “experts” concoct about him—their own conspiracy theories—are supposed to be accepted as fact, even without compelling evidence. 

Subscribe now

Similarly, Kennedy is disparaged by left-wing media sites for conversing with right-wing Americans—as if he’s fake for striving to overcome polarization. Yet it’s another double standard, for the Biden administration itself is a marriage of left-wing interventionist hawks and right-wing neoconservatives! If politicians on the left and the right will bond together to serve war, corruption, kleptocracy, censorship, diminished liberties, and environmental degradation, why can’t the rest of us bond together, from the left and the right, to support a vision of peace, honesty, democracy, freedom, and environmental integrity?

Double standards are also provided by US representative and ousted Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who describes Kennedy in highly impolite terms and accuses him of “inflammatory and racist discrimination against Asians.” Why? Because of his informal mention of a scientific study that stated that Chinese were among the populations found to be less vulnerable to COVID-19. He was not disparaging. He was not accusatory. Yet Wasserman Schultz viewed such talk as Sinophobic rather than scientific, and she condemned Kennedy for thereby encouraging violence against Asians. 

Even if we temporarily ignore the gaping illogic in her accusations, consider Biden’s National Security Strategy (NSS) 2022, much of which is aimed at competing against China and its “darker vision.” Biden proclaims that “the prosperity of Americans is linked to the Indo-Pacific” and that the next decade “will demand more of the United States in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since the Second World War” (p. 38). US action in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will pale in comparison!

Does Wasserman Schultz express outrage that Biden’s NSS 2022 lays the competitive groundwork for cold or hot war with China in the name of winning “a race to the top,” promoting US investments in the Indo-Pacific, competing over a “sphere of influence,” and pushing China out of its own backyard? Is she at all concerned that such hostile competition, as well as the “bad guy” portrayal Biden creates of China—a portrayal colored with vague, unsubstantiated allusions to China’s allegedly sinister nature and goals, will likely brew prejudice and violence against Asian Americans? How dare she accuse Kennedy of Sinophobia! Sinophobia is written all over Biden’s NSS 2022. 

The final propagandistic device used in this campaign to smear Kennedy as the “bad guy” is one which helps the “good guy” appear deceptively good. Any remote chance of successfully staging this good vs. evil drama requires concealment of the greed, corruption, lies, stupidity, and aggression of Kennedy’s opponents. In foreign policy, for example, evaluations of Victoria Nuland’s involvement in the 2014 Ukraine coup, Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukraine’s Burisma, Biden officials’ reported role in the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, and weapon corporations’ influence on foreign policy are locked out of discussion so as not to taint the “good guy” image. 

The propagandistic devices used against Kennedy can be summarized as 10 red flags of falsehood:

1. Staging the good vs. evil drama.

2. Omitting significant proportions of content about Kennedy.

3. Scrambling and misinterpreting Kennedy’s words.

4. Not inviting Kennedy to defend his views.

5. Dismissing Kennedy’s claims instead of conversing with him.

6. Ridiculing Kennedy’s ideas instead of impartially evaluating them.

7. Concocting false theories about Kennedy’s goals. 

8. Isolating Kennedy as a lone wolf.

9. Employing double standards.

10. Concealing the vices of Kennedy’s opponents.

Note that this formula for character assassination has been applied elsewhere with equally manipulative, undemocratic goals. To see every one of these 10 devices in action again, we need look no further than the US character assassination program against Russia’s President Putin, the leader with whom Kennedy, as US president, intends to engage in dialogue to increase understanding and take gradual steps of de-escalation. 

For the machine, such a dialogue would be a nightmare come true. Developing understanding, revealing the US machine’s reckless lies about Putin, and nurturing US cooperation with Putin would destroy the good vs. evil broomstick upon which the machine rides. And so it dishonestly labels Kennedy as “isolationist” for seeking constructive dialogue rather than destructive war.

The machine’s mission is to promote the one-sided truths and one-sided empathy that keep the good vs. evil narrative alive. Like the Wicked Witch who melts and dissolves, screaming, from contact with a bucket of clean water, what the US machine fears above all else are 360 degrees of empathy and truth.

Those who participate in the machine may do so consciously or unconsciously—for reasons ranging from deliberate deceit to unconscious prejudice to groupthink. Yet, regardless of the motive, the collaborative use of these 10 propagandistic devices across the bulk of US media outlets to manipulate American voters is a subversion of democracy and a violation of the very purpose of our nation.

Kennedy made a promise in Philadelphia: “My promise to you as President is that on every issue, I will listen to stakeholders from every side and beyond any side.” Better for us all to strive to care for the other side of any conflict and to always be open to hearing positive perspectives about those who are deemed the “bad guy,” lest we get pulled into the machine. 

Offit’s Logical Fallacies vs. Kennedy’s Call for Comprehensive Research

Dr. Offit's commentary, while persuasive to some, employs several logical fallacies that need to be addressed. For instance, he often resorts to ad hominem attacks, dismissing those who question vaccine safety as "anti-vaccine," rather than addressing the scientific concerns they raise. This tactic serves to undermine the credibility of his opponents without actually engaging with their arguments, a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy.

The need for more comprehensive research is not a fringe opinion but a scientific necessity. A study published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health highlights the limitations of existing research on thimerosal, calling for more thorough studies to understand its pharmacokinetics and toxicology. Another study in BMC Immunology emphasizes the need to study the interactions between risk factors for serious adverse events and vaccine doses, types, and co-administration—areas that have been insufficiently studied.

Offit also frequently cites “the consensus” as somehow being above scrutiny when vaccine safety is on center stage. Citing consensus among medical organizations does not provide definitive proof of universal nor sufficient vaccine safety. While consensus is important, it should not replace rigorous, unbiased scientific investigation. Science progresses by questioning established norms, and the field of vaccine safety should be no exception.

Furthermore, Dr. Offit employs a strawman argument, misrepresenting the positions of those who question vaccine safety to make them easier to refute. In this case, his strawman is created by labeling those who question vaccine safety as "anti-vaccine." This is a gross oversimplification of the nuanced concerns many people have - and ignoring them won’t make them go away. There are many who fully support vaccination but are calling for more rigorous studies to ensure that vaccines are as safe as they can be, especially for vulnerable populations. Labeling them as "anti-vaccine" serves only to shut down meaningful dialogue.

Furthermore, Dr. Offit uses the slippery slope fallacy, suggesting that questioning the safety of vaccines could lead to widespread disease outbreaks. Concern over vaccine safety does not necessarily mean wholescale abandonment of vaccination. But Offit’s concern does not mean that somehow all vaccines are equally safe or effective for all individuals, nor does it mean that the public shouldn't scrutinize new or existing vaccines for safety and efficacy. One cannot effectively replace rigorous data with fear.

While Dr. Offit is considered by many to be an authority in the field of vaccinology, his arguments often rely on logical fallacies rather than robust scientific evidence. These tactics may serve to sway public opinion, but they do little to advance a nuanced, evidence-based discussion on vaccine safety.

Share

Thimerosal and Its Understated Risks

One of the most significant concerns regarding vaccine safety is the use of thimerosal, a mercury-containing compound included in multi-dose vials.

Dr. Offit asserts that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in some vaccines, is safe and does not contribute to adverse health outcomes. However, this claim overlooks a body of evidence suggesting otherwise.

Vaccine-Derived Inorganic Mercury Accumulation in the Brain

A major point of concern is the accumulation of inorganic mercury in the brain, as indicated by a study involving monkeys exposed to methyl and ethyl mercury (See: Burbacher et al., Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Aug; 113(8): 1015–1021.PubMed: PMC1280342). While the clearance rate for inorganic mercury from methyl mercury could be estimated, the same could not be said for inorganic mercury derived from thimerosal, implying potential accumulation and long-term risks.

Contrary to Dr. Offit's assertion that ethylmercury (the type of mercury in thimerosal) is less toxic and is eliminated from the body more quickly than methylmercury, the study shows that inorganic mercury levels in the brain remained flat over time for monkeys exposed to thimerosal. This flat line suggests potential accumulation under repeated dosing, a finding that was not observed in monkeys exposed to methylmercury.

Thimerosal Impairs Immunity

The Impact of Thimerosal on Our Immune System

Recent research has shown that a substance called thimerosal, which is sometimes used in vaccines, can mess with an important part of our immune system. This part is called ERAP1, and it's like a helper that makes sure our immune system is working the way it should. When ERAP1 isn't working well, our body's defense system can get out of whack, making us more likely to get sick.

One study, published in a science journal called ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, found that thimerosal can actually stop ERAP1 from doing its job. This is a big deal because it could mean that our immune system won't respond as well as it should when we're exposed to germs.

Another study, this one in the journal BMC Immunology, also found that thimerosal can interfere with the same protein. This study reported that ERAP1 helps control inflammation in our bodies. When ERAP1 isn't working right, we can get more inflammation, which is a sign that our body is struggling to fight off something harmful. Inflammation is known to be involved in chronic illnesses such as autoimmunity, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.

This means that we should be truly careful about putting substances like thimerosal into our bodies, especially when they can mess with something as important as our immune system. Society should expect that someone like Dr. Offit, who is in charge of educating people about vaccines as a major, would not only know about these risks but that he would also discuss them openly.

(See the studies: Stamogiannos, A. et al., ACS Med. Lett. DOI: 10.1021/acsmedchemlett.6b00084) and Blake et al., 2022, BMC Immunology volume 23, Article number: 9 (2022) )

CDC Studies Fall Far Short

It's also worth noting that the CDC's list of studies claiming to exonerate thimerosal has been critically analyzed and found lacking in methodological rigor. Many of these studies rely on highly adjusted models without proper model selection criteria, leading to unwarranted generalizations about vaccine safety. (Hooker et al., 2014).

Paul Offit’s Conflicts of Interest

When evaluating the credibility of any claim by persons involved a scientific debate, it's essential to consider potential conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions. Dr. Paul Offit, often cited as an authority on vaccine safety, has several financial ties that are worth noting for a balanced perspective.

Dr. Offit is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). He also holds a consultant position with Merck, a major pharmaceutical company. Notably, Merck funds his research chair at CHOP to the tune of $1.5 million. Dr. Offit has also received a $350,000 grant from Merck for the development of a rotavirus vaccine in the past.

In 1998, Dr. Offit was part of the U.S. CDC advisory board that approved the use of a rotavirus vaccine for the U.S. National Immunization Program. At that time, he held a patent for a competing rotavirus vaccine produced by Merck, from which he stood to gain financially. The first approved rotavirus vaccine was later found to be harmful and was withdrawn from the market, leading to a government investigation into the FDA and CDC's policy decisions. The investigation concluded that these agencies did not adequately enforce conflict of interest rules. Offit did not recuse himself from the discussion of RotaTeq with his peers before the final vote.

In 2006, when Merck's rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq was approved, Dr. Offit received patent rights along with his co-inventors. This entitled them to ongoing royalties, amounting to millions of dollars, from institutions to which they ceded their inventor rights. These financial gains raise questions about Dr. Offit's impartiality in matters related to vaccine safety and efficacy.

This information was brought forward in Robert F. Kennedy’s book, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak. Showing how Offit misrepresents the facts to mislead, here’s the exact quote from that book:

“In a 2008 Newsweek article, Offit acknowledged receiving a portion of the $182 million CHOP earned by selling its interest in future royalties for the vaccine; an investigation by Age of Autism estimated the minimum amount received by Offit as $29 million.”

The book cites The Daily Beast as the source of that admission, and points to an Age of Autism by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill for further information. But the ultimate source was the Newsweek article, which read:

“Offit isn't apologizing. He acknowledges that he got a ‘small percentage’ of the $182 million Children's Hospital of Philadelphia received when it sold its interest in future royalties for the vaccine RotaTeq. (He won't give a precise amount, but says ‘it's like winning the lottery.’) And he has served as both a paid and unpaid member of a scientific advisory board at Merck, which makes RotaTeq. Drug companies routinely hire experts as consultants, despite concerns by some that these relationships can undermine scientific credibility.”

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. . Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury, a Known Neurotoxin, from Vaccines (pp. 272-273). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.

Given these substantial financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, it's reasonable to question whether Dr. Offit's advocacy for vaccines is influenced by factors other than unbiased scientific inquiry. While financial incentives do not necessarily invalidate someone's scientific contributions, they do provide context that should be considered when weighing the validity of their arguments.

While Dr. Offit is a prominent figure in the field of vaccinology, it's important to note that he has had financial ties to vaccine manufacturers. Transparency and acknowledgment of such ties are crucial for an unbiased scientific discourse.

Conclusion

It is essential to approach the topic of vaccine safety with scientific rigor and impartiality. Logical fallacies and conflicts of interest have no place in this important discussion. We call for more rigorous, unbiased scientific investigation into the safety and efficacy of vaccines, particularly concerning the effects of thimerosal on ERAP1. Also, there’s a history related to the likely accumulation of inorganic mercury from thimerosal in the brain: It’s the point that Robert F. Kennedy raised with Offit during their conversation that Offit could not address. And it’s an important point that Offit failed to answer in his recent letter.

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler is the CEO and Director of IPAK, The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, and Founder of IPAK-EDU.org, an online institution that has been helping the public empower themselves through knowledge since 2020. He publishes Popular Rationalism on Substack.

“My fundraising emails were increasingly directed into supporters’ Spam folders, likely by Google algorithms; my campaign posts were hidden from view on social media by Facebook algorithms; and my campaign Facebook page was eventually deplatformed without explanation or opportunity to appeal. This is the world we now find ourselves in, where Kafka meets George Orwell.” — Tim Canova

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent decision to run for president as an independent seemed inevitable once it became clear the Democratic National Committee (DNC) would never stop rigging its primary schedule and nomination process against him. The DNC did much the same against Bernie Sanders in 2016 when their lawyers admitted, in a federal lawsuit filed by then-Sanders supporters Jared and Elizabeth Beck, that the DNC was free to violate its own charter, rig its own primaries, and choose its candidates in “smoke-filled back rooms.” Sanders capitulated and endorsed those who rigged the primaries against him in 2016 and again in 2020, helping to normalize election rigging and push the party further into the hands of the powerful, predatory interests that control the DNC.

In choosing to run as an independent, Kennedy is refusing to be complicit in the corruption swallowing what’s left of the Democratic Party. 

My own experience running as an independent in 2018 against the corporate-backed uniparty revealed many of the roadblocks that Kennedy is now facing in his presidential campaign. We experienced the full wrath of the establishment, foreshadowing the Trump campaign’s allegations in the 2020 presidential election, including the weaponization of the corporate media, the suspicious shuttling of thousands of ballots in the darkness of election night, mathematical anomalies in electronic vote tabulations engineered by opaque electronic voting machine firms, and the politicization of election officials and law enforcement agencies alike.

In 2018, when I found myself at this same fork in the road, I too chose to leave the Democratic Party to run as an independent. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, another former Democrat, I did not leave the Democratic Party, the party left me. The DNC had become a Wall Street corporate-funded party pushing a predatory globalization agenda and endless wars of regime change. Since then, the party has only gotten worse. Liberal and progressive Democrats used to stand for free speech, civil liberties, medical freedom, secure borders, peace, and diplomacy. The Democratic Party now pushes censorship and cancel culture. It has championed Big Pharma vaccine mandates and draconian lockdowns that mercilessly punished working families. It backs endless funding for the war in Ukraine, a bottomless pit of corruption, even risking escalation and possible nuclear confrontation with Russia. It has opened our borders, inviting unsustainable levels of illegal immigration, an invasion of unvetted multitudes that may undermine our national security, destabilizes society, and overwhelms social welfare systems in cities and states across the country.

Kennedy’s candidacy as a Democrat, while it lasted, had represented perhaps the last hope of restoring the Democratic Party to its past leadership as a defender of freedom, champion of working people, and opponent of predatory corporate power. He reminded us of what it meant to be a Kennedy Democrat, to take on the war industrial complex and seek peace through strength, not through endless foreign wars that ultimately bleeds and weakens us as a nation. In leaving the Democratic Party, Kennedy has no doubt concluded that there is a better chance of both getting elected and reversing our national decline by running as an independent. 

My Decision to Run as an Independent

In 2016, as I reported earlier in The Kennedy Beacon, I had run as a Democrat against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her House seat when she was the chair of the DNC. There was good reason to doubt the validity of the official election results. Even though Broward County election officials admitted to their illegal destruction of all ballots cast, we could not find any elected officials, Democrat or Republican, to help us challenge that crooked election in Congress or through criminal prosecutions, or even in the court of public opinion. It had become clear to many of us that the DNC is run as a top-down criminal syndicate, willing to use any means necessary to crush any opposition within the party itself. That frustration led to my decision to exit the Democratic Party and run against Wasserman Schultz in a 2018 rematch instead as an independent. 

In 2018, the demographics of my congressional district looked very good for an independent candidate. About 40% of the voters were Democrats, nearly 35% were independent, and about 25% Republican. We had built a big base of support among grassroots Democrats throughout our district and hoped to draw enough independent and Republican voters to put us over the top in a three-way race. I continued to reject any corporate PAC money, and if elected, I would be the only House member not affiliated with either party and free to take independent positions on the issues without regard to partisan politics. Now the issue of election integrity would be front-and-center given the illegal ballot destruction that marred our previous election. But it was also clear that the political establishment in both major parties had gotten away with blatantly violating election laws with impunity, providing them with incentive to do so again. 

Early on, one political consultant reported back to me on a meeting he was in with Wasserman Schultz, a billionaire backer of hers and top state party leaders, where they spoke of their plans to “absolutely crush” my campaign. It was already a David versus Goliath battle, and I was uncertain what to expect from political opponents who would illegally destroy every ballot cast. What else were they capable of doing to destroy me and my campaign?

Big Tech Social Media Censorship

In only eight months in 2016, I had built a significant base of grassroots support on social media, with more than 150,000 Facebook followers and 50,000 Twitter, more than 209,000 online donors, and an email fundraising list of around 150,000 supporters. Now in 2018, I found myself being throttled and shadow banned on social media by the Big Tech giants that are allied with the Democrat establishment. My fundraising emails were increasingly directed into supporters’ Spam folders, likely by Google algorithms; my campaign posts were hidden from view on social media by Facebook algorithms; and my campaign Facebook page was eventually deplatformed without explanation or opportunity to appeal. This is the world we now find ourselves in, where Kafka meets George Orwell.

Big Media Bias and the Wrap-Up Smears

The Wasserman Schultz machine was mobilizing every resource to crush my campaign, especially among its Big Media allies. Tellingly, now that we had proved in court that Broward election officials had destroyed the ballots from our 2016 election, I found myself suddenly blacklisted on MSNBC, CNN, FOX, and all the rest of the cable and network TV and radio stations, where I had previously appeared frequently. This time, I had to get my message out through social media and interviews with anchors who had also been banished from mainstream media, including Larry King, Ed Schultz, and Tom Hartmann, who were by then on RT TV, Russia’s overseas TV network, a platform which would soon be used against me even though I had never taken a penny to appear on RT and never pushed any foreign agenda.

Incredibly, Wasserman Schultz’s allies on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a staff report claiming I was pushing Russia’s foreign economic interests based on my opposition to fracking in Florida with its shallow water table and my opposition to building the Sabal Trail pipeline through ecologically fragile areas. The staff report was then weaponized with a hit piece against me in the Miami Herald in September 2018, just six weeks before Election Day. As evidence that I was serving the Kremlin, they pointed out that my words had been retweeted by Russian bots, meaning paid bots with Russian IP addresses. In addition, the hit piece added that I had publicly doubted DNC claims that the Russians had hacked the DNC server when I suggested it was more likely a DNC insider leak. 

This technique is what Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, had infamously referred to in 2017 as “the wrap-up smear”: you demonize and smear somebody with falsehoods and then you merchandise it, then you write it, and it gets validation when it’s reported in the press. The only difference is the uniparty was now using the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help merchandise the smears against me. Robert Kennedy Jr. can expect similar wrap-up smears attempting to tie him to the Kremlin for his opposition to the foolhardy war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, throughout my independent campaign, the Miami Herald, along with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, refused to report on any developments in the ballot destruction case, and instead published repeated hit pieces against me. The Herald and Sentinel, which dominate South Florida print media, were owned by McClatchy and Tribune Publishing, respectively, the second and third largest national newspaper chains in the country at the time, which highlights the concentration of corporate power routinely mobilized against any grassroots challenge to corporate funded incumbents. 

The concentration of corporate power has only intensified in recent years, with six giant conglomerates now controlling, through their subsidiaries, nearly 90% of all TV, cable, and radio broadcast, and print media. In addition, three investment management giants, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, using other people’s money, have now become the largest shareholders in about 90% of corporate America, including in the Big Media and Big Tech giants. As a result, any grassroots independent candidate like Kennedy who opposes today’s predatory corporate agendas can expect to be ignored at best and attacked and smeared across a wide spectrum of media platforms. 

Political Bias of Corrupt Election Officials

Down the homestretch of our 2018 campaign, Wasserman Schultz was spotted openly campaigning with Brenda Snipes, the same Broward County Elections Supervisor who had admitted under oath to illegally destroying all ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Wasserman Schultz. Suddenly photos were everywhere of the two of them campaigning together at early voting sites. Apparently, they felt no need to even hide the bias and cronyism of the county’s top election official since Snipes had already gotten away with felonies in our prior race.

Although Wasserman Schultz was raising a ton of corporate money, her campaign had published no polls. I had heard for weeks from a trusted media source that private DNC and Republican Party polls were showing that Wasserman Schultz had a “low ceiling” of support, in the low 30s, due to her toxic image and high negatives. Then, in the final days of the campaign, The Floridian Press, a conservative media outlet, reported that the Republicans were sitting on a poll showing Wasserman Schultz and Canova in a 34-34% dead heat, the Republican candidate in a distant 3^rd place at 13%, and with 19% undecided. That poll gave us a real lift at early voting sites and on Election Day. Many disgruntled Democrats suddenly realized that a vote for me would not result in electing the Republican candidate, while many Republican voters eager to get rid of Wasserman Schultz once and for all did not want to waste their vote on a weak Republican candidate. The momentum seemed to be shifting our way.

As the polls closed, our supporters were barred from observing the ballot counting at voting sites in several key precincts. One supporter took video outside the Volunteer Park election precinct in Plantation showing a line of cars, perhaps from other precincts, pulling up in the parking lot in the dark of night to transfer, what appeared to be the blue satchels used by election officials to contain cast ballots, into the back of a rented truck. With only one person in each of those cars and no sheriff’s deputies to provide receipts, this violated all chain-of-custody protocols and election rules, according to leading election experts in Florida. When we posted the video on Twitter, it got more than 2 million views right away.

Video source: Tim Canova on X

Statistical Evidence of Electronic Election Rigging

When the November 2018 official election results were finally posted, Wasserman Schultz was reported to have won big, with the Republican in second, and me a distant third at around 5%. What immediately cast doubt on the official results was that my vote totals were “capped” at the same 5% low level in every demographic group, including among blacks, whites, and Hispanics, among both men and women, among Democrats and non-Democrats, and across precincts regardless of size. 

Dr. David Bader, then the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science & Engineering, and now a distinguished professor and director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, would later testify to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights that my election results were mathematically as unlikely as winning the lottery every single day for a year. Unfortunately, many Democrats and Republicans, who talk about trusting science, apparently have no interest in mathematical science when it comes to election integrity.

Once again, we considered the possibility of suing to inspect the paper ballots, but in light of the clandestine shuttling of ballots on election night in violation of chain of custody protocols and rules, we could not be certain that the ballots we would ultimately inspect would even be the ballots actually cast.

According to software experts far and wide, all it would take to cap a candidate at any given level is to manipulate a few lines of source code in the software, either by an insider or outside hacking. A major election integrity advocate, visiting from Arizona to observe my election, detected modems on the electronic vote tabulation machines used that day in Broward County – modems that could connect to the internet and thereby provide an easy entry for an outside hacker. On his cellphone camera, he recorded these modems apparently in use, contrary to prior assurances made by both state election officials and spokespersons for Election Systems & Software (ES&S) ––the huge vendor that made those electronic machines––that they absolutely do not contain such modems. ES&S, along with Dominion Voting and Hart InterCivic, are the three firms in the cartel that dominate our elections, and all three are owned by opaque private equity firms accountable to no one, except their billionaire investors who no doubt have their own vested interests in the outcome of our elections.

The 2018 Election Crash Lands in Broward County

Meanwhile, also in November 2018, the elections for Florida governor and the U.S. Senate both crash-landed in Broward County. With both races too close to call and the entire state waiting for final vote totals in Broward County, Snipes was still discovering thousands of uncounted ballots days after the election. For months leading up to the election, I had called on Governor Rick Scott to prosecute Snipes for the ballot destruction. Now he was locked in a photo finish with the incumbent Senator Bill Nelson for Nelson’s Senate seat while Snipes appeared either corrupt or completely incompetent. The race for Governor, between Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum, was also too close to call. Bernie Sanders suddenly appeared at a rally with Andrew Gillum to “Count Every Vote!” including the suspicious additional ballots that Snipes kept discovering in her office, in a car parked at the airport, and who knows where else. On MSNBC, Joy Reid claimed that Snipes was being attacked only because she was an elderly black woman in the Deep South.

It was at this time that conservative media remembered that Snipes had destroyed all the ballots in my previous race and FOX News had me on three mornings in a row. I said that any election official who illegally destroyed every ballot cast in 2016 could not now be trusted when claiming to discover thousands of uncounted ballots days after the election. Within days, Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush was calling for Snipes to step down. Under intense scrutiny, Snipes finally stopped finding new uncounted ballots, and the two tight elections were ultimately called for Scott and DeSantis after machine recounts presumably using the same software source code as in the original vote counts.

Ron DeSantis and his Uniparty Complicity in Covering Up Election Crimes

On his way out as governor, Rick Scott issued an executive order formally removing Snipes as the Broward Elections Supervisor. Her illegal destruction of the ballots in my 2016 race was first in a list of her incompetent and illegal conduct. As President Trump recently posted on Truth Social with a photo of Snipes, “If no one goes to jail for election fraud, what incentive is there not to cheat.” For those of us longing for election justice and reform in Florida, we now hoped for state investigations and prosecutions. But then DeSantis, in his first act as the new governor, reinstated Snipes to her position, just so she could promptly retire on a $135,000 a year annual pension. Perhaps he had reached some kind of dirty deal with the Democrats — the uniparty was sweeping each party’s corruption under the rug.

DeSantis would soon create a new Election Crimes Office and declare Florida the “gold standard” in election integrity. In front of the TV cameras, he and his new election prosecutors soon brought charges against several dozen former felons, who, though newly franchised by the state’s successful referendum to allow rehabilitated felons to vote after serving their sentences, had voted without first properly filling out their paperwork and they were now arrested. Meanwhile, his new election prosecutors allowed the statute of limitations against Snipes to expire without so much as an investigation.

When asked last year by journalist Lara Logan if we should ban the electronic voting machines and replace them with a system of public hand counting of paper ballots that would be transparent and verifiable, DeSantis said no, that would be returning to the Stone Age. Instead, DeSantis and the uniparty keep us in a Silicon Age where election software can be manipulated so easily that most Americans now have lost confidence in the integrity of election outcomes no matter who is declared the victor. 

The Prospects for Kennedy’s Independent Grassroots Campaign

This now is what Kennedy is up against as an independent presidential candidate – a uniparty establishment willing to lie, cheat, and steal elections; a corporate cartel media that weaponizes smears on behalf of the establishment; a Big Tech oligarchy that will shadow ban Kennedy with their algorithms; and electronic voting machines run by hedge fund billionaires that are inherently vulnerable to outside hacking and insider software manipulation. These are monumental challenges and yet Kennedy’s independent campaign may be one of our last hopes to restore representative democracy and the rule of law to our Republic.

In many ways, Kennedy’s independent campaign prospects will turn on the activism of his huge grassroots support. It will be up to his supporters to amplify their voices by posting on social media to evade the Big Media censorship. He will need an army of supporters to volunteer at every polling station across the country to prevent fraud and to record and report when it happens. And finally, there is still time for Kennedy supporters along with those who support other candidates, to demand that every state ban the inherently vulnerable and fraudulent electronic voting machines and replace them with a system of hand-counting paper ballots in public as the only way to ensure election transparency and restore public confidence in the integrity of our elections.

Timothy A. Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and can be reached at tim@timcanova.com

By Timothy A. Canova, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decided to run for president as a Democrat, many of us who have challenged the Party establishment in the past fully expected the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to rig the primary process against him. My own experience revealed many of the roadblocks the establishment uses on a regular basis against their own grassroots. 

In 2016, I challenged my local Congresswoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a Democratic primary election for her House seat. As a tenured law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, the only law school in her district, I was well aware that as chair of the DNC, Wasserman Schultz was making herself toxic among grassroot voters by helping to rig the primaries against Senator Bernie Sanders on behalf of Hillary Clinton. 

When Kennedy testified in July about federal government collusion with Big Tech companies to censor speech before a House Judiciary Select Subcommittee hearing on government censorship, it was Wasserman Schultz who tried to censor Kennedy at the hearing. Her resolution was voted down.

In 2016, Wasserman Schultz had reason to worry about a challenger. She had tied herself to predatory corporate interests, from payday lenders and Wall Street banks to Big Pharma and private prison companies, while also backing unpopular Obama administration policies like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the one-sided Iran nuclear deal.

My campaign went viral from the start, and by the end eight months later, I had raised $3.8 million, all in small online donations, from more than 209,000 individual donations averaging $17 each, a record at the time for the highest percentage of small online donations for any campaign for a federal office. Fully 76% of our funding came from online donations of $200 or less, and we took not a penny in corporate PAC money. 

Political consultants came out of the woodwork urging me to spend on their services. But I was modeling my campaign on the late great progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone’s first breakthrough campaign. With all the money we were raising, I built a grassroots army of hundreds of field organizers and volunteers to knock on more than 12,000 doors a week throughout the summer of 2016. We had volunteers and billboards in every corner of the district and opened an unheard-of four field offices, including in my hometown of Hollywood, as well as Pembroke Pines, Plantation, and then in Wasserman Schultz’s home base of Weston.

Early in the campaign, one mainstream poll had Wasserman Schultz ahead by 13 points, with many undecideds. Her disapproval numbers were high and rising fast. Meanwhile, our own poll showed her lead in single digits, with one in five likely voters still undecided. 

Then, in mid-May, I received an unexpected and unsolicited endorsement from Bernie Sanders. When news of Sanders’ endorsement spread through social media, small donations surged. Without even sending out a fundraising email, we raised a quarter million dollars that day in small online donations. 

By the summer, Sanders was out of the race, but the Democratic National Convention was marred by the DNC Wikileaks revelations that Wasserman Schultz had worked hard to smear Sanders and rig the primary schedule and party machinery for Clinton. The leaked DNC emails also revealed that Wasserman Schultz was using the DNC to surveil and undermine my campaign, both within the party and with her big media allies. On the first day of the Convention, she was forced to resign in disgrace as the DNC chair.

Wasserman Schultz now turned her attention to keeping her House seat by hook or by crook. She received a tepid endorsement from President Obama. It soon became clear that I was being shadow banned on social media and throttled by Big Tech giants, making me perhaps the first Congressional candidate to be on the receiving end of such a coordinated attack. 

In the final weeks, our campaign website and fundraising platform came under repeated Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, disrupting our fundraising. Our lawyers contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the FBI did nothing and would not even return our calls. Meanwhile, our fundraising emails were somehow being directed into people’s Spam boxes. White vans were seen driving around the district pulling up our lawn signs, while our field organizers and volunteers were harassed by local police. 

Wasserman Schultz, like many incumbents, had a built-in advantage in the vote-by-mail since the party had placed its “mules” within the nursing homes and senior citizen centers throughout the district. We knew we would have to overcome that advantage in the 10-day early voting period and on primary election day. But the momentum was clearly on our side. Wasserman Schultz, afraid of her own constituents, dodged debates for months and even stayed away from the annual July 4^th parade in Weston. Her campaign spent millions on political consultants but had hardly a footprint on the ground. 

In contrast, our huge door-to-door canvassing efforts were making all the difference. Our canvassers entered data on every voter engagement into the voter database on their smartphones, ranking each engagement on a 5-point scale reflecting the voter’s level of support for each candidate. And they returned to each door several times throughout the hot summer. Those thousands of entries created a far larger statistical sampling size than establishment voter surveys based on a few hundred supposedly random telephone calls. 

According to our field numbers, we reached a tipping point in the early summer and started to pull ahead of Wasserman Schultz. By the start of early voting, we were ahead by more than enough to overcome Wasserman Schultz’s vote-by-mail advantage. 

By the time of the August 30^th Primary Election Day, our field numbers showed that those who were strongly or leaning toward Canova outnumbered Wasserman Schultz supporters by an astounding margin of more than 4 to 1. Wasserman Schultz could have gotten every undecided voter and we still would have won.

But a funny thing happened the day before the primary. The local NBC-6 television station had a preview of the next day’s primaries posted on its website. All the other races, from county commissioners to sheriff, were zeroed out, reflecting that no votes had yet been counted. But for Florida’s 23^rd Congressional District, the NBC website showed that Wasserman Schultz was leading me by 16 percentage points (58% to 42%) with 69% of the precincts reporting. We took screen shots and called NBC6. They took down the bogus results but provided no explanation. 

The next day was the Primary Election Day and once again we had a commanding presence across the district. The polls closed on election night and almost immediately the establishment media reported that Wasserman Schultz was the projected winner by about the same margin as had been “mistakenly” reported a day earlier on the NBC website. I was naturally suspicious and asked my election lawyer and experienced election observers if the software of the electronic voting machines could be rigged. No one wanted to believe this was possible, including me. 

I had too many questions to concede, even though Democrat Party leaders offered to make me the Stacy Abrams of Florida if I did. Over the next several days, we received calls from Broward voters who reported seeing my vote totals decline on TV as more votes were counted. I was also contacted by numerous election experts who had analyzed our election results and raised concerns about mathematical anomalies in the official results that they claimed could only be explained by either hacking or insider manipulation of the election systems software. Similar anomalies were found in several of Bernie Sanders’ suspicious primary losses to Hillary Clinton.

I am not a computer expert or statistician. So I thought the best way to verify the election results and put these rumors to rest was to make a public records request to inspect the paper ballots cast, as was my right under the Florida Constitution and state statutes. In response, I was initially informed by Brenda Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections, that they had not maintained copies of any digital scanned images of the ballots even though the ballots were all scanned to electronically tabulate the votes. Their failure to keep the digital scanned images for 22 months was a clear violation of state and federal law, punishable as crimes.

After months of obstruction, I finally filed suit in June of 2017 in Florida's 17th Circuit Judicial Court. It was clear that Wasserman Schultz herself was trying to block our ballot inspection, as we discovered when Snipes’ attorney offered to provide the court with a sworn affidavit from Wasserman Schultz with a bogus claim that I was seeking to inspect the ballots for an improper purpose, an offer the court swiftly declined. 

Three days after serving our pre-trial discovery demands for the paper ballots, Snipes signed an order, carried out immediately, to destroy all of the ballots cast in our August 30th, 2016 primary. And in signing that order, she falsely certified that the ballots were not the subject of pending litigation. Snipes and her attorney then concealed the ballot destruction from the court and from me and my attorneys for another two months, evidence of Snipes’ willful obstruction and the criminal intent required under state and federal statutes. 

Even after admitting to the illegal ballot destruction, first in open court and then in sworn videotaped deposition testimony, Snipes continued to litigate for months, using taxpayer funds to bleed my campaign. To add insult to injury, Snipes eventually claimed that her office had digital scanned ballot images after all, which we then inspected in a few precincts and found some discrepancies, all the while doubting their authenticity since computer experts can easily manipulate and produce doctored digital images. 

In May 2018, Judge Raag Singhal finally put an end to the charade and granted my motion for summary judgment. His 10-page order recounted the list of legal violations by Broward election officials in destroying the paper ballots, including felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each violation. But at the end of the day our only relief was a settlement of attorney’s fees at taxpayer expense. 

The paper ballots were gone and there would never be any way to conclusively verify the suspicious election results.

We now hoped that Judge Singhal’s findings of criminal violations would open the floodgates and lead to law enforcement agencies stepping in to investigate and clean up the presumed corruption in our voting system. After all, we had sworn videotaped confessions and a Florida court finding. We were handing prosecutors an easy case on a silver platter that any second year law student could successfully prosecute. 

But our hopes were soon disappointed. The Acting US Attorney Benjamin Greenberg was initially interested, but after a week of meetings at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, he returned with news that there would be no federal investigation. Apparently, that was stopped by Rod Rosenstein, the same Deputy Attorney General who had appointed Robert Mueller to investigate President Trump for alleged collusion with Russia when all the evidence suggested it was Wasserman Schultz’s DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign that had colluded with Russians and other foreign intelligence agencies in paying for the fraudulent Steele dossier.

We also hit a brick wall with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement under then Governor Rick Scott. My election lawyer was told that Scott was afraid to prosecute Snipes for reasons of identity politics since she was an elderly black woman and Scott was running for the US Senate. We doubted this excuse since replacing Snipes with an honest and competent black woman was apparently rejected as an option. No, it was something more. Even the Broward Republicans had fallen silent after years of calling for Snipes’ removal. 

A Republican election lawyer finally reported back to me that no Florida Republicans would step up because they had the same friends as Wasserman Schultz, by which he meant they have the same corporate financial backers, lobbyists, and even political consultants. The “uniparty” was closing ranks to protect one of their own from an outsider grassroots candidate without corporate backers, lobbyists and political consultants to protect him.

Finally, our attempts to challenge the election results in the House of Representatives were met by complete silence from Democrat and Republican members alike, and the House Committee for Administration never so much as acknowledged receiving our complaint. 

Running within the Democratic Party against an entrenched incumbent revealed the establishment’s commitment to win at all costs, even if that meant lying, cheating, rigging, and covering up the crimes of election officials. It also demonstrated the range of techniques deployed to rig election outcomes, including the corruption of election officials, their dependence on “black box” electronic voting machines dominated by a shadowy hedge fund cartel, the cynical use of identity politics, the weaponization of the mass media and Big Tech, and the politicization of law enforcement agencies. 

It was at this moment of frustration that I decided to finally “walk away” from the Democratic Party that I had voted for regularly my entire life, and to run again, but this time as an independent.

In Part 2, I will discuss the particular challenges and frauds I encountered when running as an independent in my rematch against Wasserman Schultz—the kinds of challenges that today’s Kennedy campaign will need to overcome should Kennedy decide to run for President in 2024 as an independent.

Timothy A. Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and can be reached at tim@timcanova.com

Unlike almost all the other members of his famous family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not mince words about the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. He recently stated his perspective succinctly on New York City radio: “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder. […] I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.” Kennedy is also a signatory to the Truth & Reconciliation Committee’s “Joint Statement on the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X Assassinations and Ongoing Cover-Ups.” The statement closes with this powerful summation:

The JFK assassination was just one of four major political murders that traumatized American life in the 1960s and have cast a shadow over the country for decades thereafter. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were each in his own unique way attempting to turn the United States away from war toward disarmament and peace, away from domestic violence and division toward civil amity and justice. Their killings were together a savage, concerted assault on American democracy and the tragic consequences of these assassinations still haunt our nation.

These assassinations were a key element in the story of how the US was beset by what RFK Jr. has called “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.” The relationship between the corporate oligarchy, corporate media, and the CIA has been a crucial feature of these dynamics. Decisively, this nexus serves to obscure the deadly veto power which the clandestine state exercises over democracy. The “free press” in America has been captured, and one of its main functions is to obscure this antidemocratic and covertly fascistic element of our system.

An examination of the JFK assassination and its aftermath in light of these facts will tell us much about the structure and life cycle of the US empire, the reasons for our deep distrust of politicians and the corporate media, and the urgency of voting Kennedy into the White House in 2024.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was himself assassinated on Sunday, November 24, 1963. He was shot by Dallas underworld figure Jack Ruby in a room full of journalists and police officers. Less than three hours after Oswald was pronounced dead, an establishment lobbying campaign commenced. Its target was the new president, Lyndon Johnson. It appears that the campaign began with a call to White House aide Bill Moyers from the Dean of the Yale Law School, Eugene Rostow—a man who also happened to be the brother of Walt Rostow, deputy to JFK’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy. During that call on November 24, Rostow suggested to Moyers that a “Presidential commission be appointed of very distinguished citizens in the very near future.”

Rostow would be joined in this campaign by Joseph Alsop, another blue blood establishment figure. Alsop, as discussed in Part 2, was later revealed to be one of the CIA’s most notable assets in the US media. When more documentation from the aftermath of the assassination was eventually declassified, it became clear that these men were likely acting on behalf of establishment luminary Dean Acheson—Harry Truman’s Secretary of State. Acheson was the man whose subordinates penned the “Long Telegram” and NSC-68, laying the strategic bases for the Cold War and the military industrial complex, respectively. In short, Acheson represented the apex of observable US establishment power.

One day after Rostow’s call, Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s acting deputy in the Justice Department, Nicholas Katzenbach, sent a memo to LBJ’s aide, Moyers. The November 25, 1963 memo stated:

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat—too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.

Share

As the JFK assassination archivists at the Mary Ferrell Foundation point out, “Given that the authorities could not possibly by November 25 know these things to be true, and Katzenbach later admitted he knew very little at this stage, the memo is clearly advocating a political course irrespective of the truth of the assassination.” In other words, there is no way that President Johnson, or the FBI, or establishment figures—Rostow, Alsop, and Acheson—could have possibly known that there was not a conspiracy behind the bullets in Dealey Plaza.

When the president finally agreed to create an ad hoc, blue-ribbon panel to handle the official investigation, he used the threat of nuclear war to convince reluctant candidates to join the commission. Most notably, Johnson used this angle to browbeat Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell into serving on the president’s panel, later to be known as the Warren Commission.

Nominally, Earl Warren was in charge. In practice, however, the most active commissioner was Allen Dulles—a Wall Street lawyer, former president of Wall Street’s Council on Foreign Relations, and retired director of the CIA. Dulles was also a bitter enemy of JFK after the president fired him for his role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

The question of how Dulles came to serve on the Warren Commission has been disputed for many years. In a 1971 memoir, Lyndon Johnson himself wrote that he appointed both Dulles and John McCloy to the panel because these were “the two men Bobby Kennedy asked me to put on it.” But as David Talbot points out in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, LBJ likely went with this gambit in his memoir because Bobby was dead and could not correct the record. As Talbot writes, “[T]he idea that LBJ would huddle with the man he considered his rival and tormentor, in order to discuss the politically sensitive composition of the commission is ludicrous.” Rather, “It was the national security establishment, not Bobby Kennedy, that advised the new president to put Dulles and McCloy on the Warren Commission.”

To arrive at this conclusion, Talbot cites numerous members of the Dulles camp. Secretary of State Dean Rusk—an ex-president of the Rockefeller Foundation—urged LBJ to appoint Dulles. Johnson’s CIA director, Richard Helms himself, told history professor Michael Kurtz that he “personally persuaded” the president to appoint Dulles to the commission. He did so, as Kurtz explained, so that Dulles could “make sure no agency secrets came out during the investigation.” William Corson, a former officer in the Marines and an agent for Naval intelligence, stated that Dulles, “lobbied hard for the job [on the Warren Commission].” Dulles even assigned Corson to investigate various leads on Jack Ruby. Eventually, Corson came to suspect that Dulles was intentionally wasting Corson’s time: “It is entirely possible I was sent on an assignment which would go nowhere. […] Allen Dulles had a lot to hide.”

On November 29, 1963, Dulles accepted Johnson’s appointment to the Warren Commission. One week earlier, on November 22, JFK had been assassinated in Dallas. Dulles spent that day at a CIA outpost nicknamed “The Farm.” Talbot and other researchers speculate that his outpost at “The Farm” probably served as a sort of boiler room that day, from which Dulles could respond to events as the assassination was carried out and covered up. Unfortunately, Dulles was never deposed under oath about this.

The deficiencies of the Warren Report are too vast to catalog here. Suffice it to say, the report bore Dulles’ imprint. The same could be said for the media response to the report. After all, Dulles’ friends included Time-Life/Fortune publisher Henry Luce—Mr. “American Century” himself (see Part 1). Dulles was also friends with the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, as well as CBS executive William Paley. Predictably, the establishment press heralded the Warren Report’s integrity upon its publication. For example, The Washington Post described the report as “a masterpiece of its kind.” This may be true, depending on what “kind” of thing we want to call the Warren Report.

Dulles and the CIA had great influence in the media, but they weren’t going to passively stand by as critics discredited the Warren Report. A 1967 CIA memo spelled out what would become a stock CIA response to public suspicion. The memo’s authors sought “to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists” (emphasis added). To that end, CIA officers should “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics.” As political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith pointed out, it was after this memo was issued that the term “conspiracy theorist” began appearing in the media with greater and greater frequency. Today, of course, it is constantly used as a nonsensical propaganda cudgel to summarily discredit narratives and narrators who question or falsify official stories—including, of course, RFK Jr. and his supporters.

Vast fortunes were made as a result of the assassination of President Kennedy. The Vietnam War went on to become a murderous boondoggle for the military industrial complex. Oil and gold mining interests made untold fortunes in Indonesia as a result of policy changes after JFK’s demise. Brazil and Congo were also made safe for neocolonial plunder. Greece, the Dominican Republic, and Italy all experienced years of violence and tumult as a result of the Johnson administration’s imperial turn in foreign policy. While the Vietnam War seems on the surface to have been a defeat for the US, the material wealth and power that the US subtly acquired and expanded before and during that era gave rise to a new dollar-based monetary order that was finally consolidated under President Reagan. 

In the intervening years, the US and the world have been dominated by an imperial-minded oligarchy of American corporate wealth. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy sought to confront these forces back in 1968. RFK had encouraged MLK to lead a multiracial march on Washington—and to stay there until the government agreed to divert war spending to anti-poverty programs. Kennedy also planned to reinvestigate his brother’s assassination once he won the presidency. Beginning on November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy suspected that Dallas was the work of the CIA and its friends in the mafia and Cuban exile community. Tragically, Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy was assassinated that June, just after winning the California primary.

To wit: after John Kennedy was assassinated, his brother Robert planned to eventually attain the presidency and use presidential power to seek justice for his brother’s murder. Today, the evidence is overwhelming that both Kennedy brothers were murdered because they challenged the US oligarchy and its overriding commitment to global empire.

Now, as we approach the 2024 election, this imperial project is nearing the end of its life cycle. The US Empire is going the way of all empires. The weight of suppressed history can no longer be ignored or obscured. The public’s current distrust of politicians and of the corporate media is well earned, to put it mildly. 

The best near-term hope for responding sensibly and forcefully to these crises is represented by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign and his call for an American Truth and Reconciliation process.

It is hard to see how US politics could even begin to move in a positive direction for regular people as long as an oligarchy of corporate wealth can rig democracy—or veto it with clandestine state violence when standard rigging fails. Some on the Left may despair that Kennedy is not a socialist, but currently there is no viable socialist political formation in the US. While socialism may be a nonstarter in the 2024 election, Americans do believe in—or loudly profess to believe in—democracy.

Kennedy seeks to restore democracy and reinstitute the rule of law. He aims to wind down the US Empire. In sum, he seeks to renew his uncle’s quest for peace. In so doing, he is on a mission to achieve what his father was killed for trying to accomplish.