Monday, 19 June 2023 03:30

Robert Kennedy Jr. has the Establishment Worried

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Robert Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president has raised the ire of many people in the MSM establishment. Let us examine some of those attacks and analyze what the late Hunter Thompson called this “fear and loathing” on the campaign trail.


On April 19th, Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his candidacy for the presidency. At that time, not very many people took him to be a serious threat. In fact, some reporters claimed this was really a stunt set up by, of all people, Steve Bannon. (Mediaite story by Jennifer Bahney, 4/5/23) Or perhaps by another notorious GOP operative Roger Stone. Kennedy had to go on Twitter to deny these spurious accusations.

The MSM, as noted above, did everything to try and snuff out Kennedy’s candidacy out of the gate, before it could get started. There was no round of interviews on the MSM. According to the Democratic National Committee, there will be no debates between President Biden, Kennedy and Marianne Williamson.

As an example of the MSM coverage, on the day he announced, CNN printed a story that said how members of his family had forcefully denounced his vaccine views in an online magazine. (Story by Jeff Zeleny and Eric Bradner) It also mentioned that he had been banned from Instagram “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”

Yet—even though it was in dispute and resisted mightily by the MSM—a claim Kennedy made about the origins of the virus has now turned out to be true. If one recalls, Anthony Fauci and the like have always insisted that CV 19 did not originate at the infamous Wuhan Lab in China or as a result of ‘gain of function’ research. It supposedly started as a species jumping virus that went from a bat to a human at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. In sworn testimony before congress, Fauci mightily resisted the lab leak story under questioning by Rand Paul. And the entire MSM backed him, ridiculing the Wuhan leak as a conspiracy theory.

Today, we can say that Paul was pretty much correct and Fauci was either mistaken or part of a deception. It turns out that patient zero in the pandemic was scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of ‘gain of function’ research at Wuhan Institute of Virology. This story was posted by Matt Taibbi at Scheer Post on June 16th. As Taibbi notes: why was the American investigation so incredibly slow? As the reporter says “numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19’s origins to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.” Robert Kennedy’s upcoming book, entitled The Wuhan Cover-up, will explore this discovery—which he suspected a long time ago—and its implications. (For more about Fauci’s monumental errors, click here)

Robert Kennedy has another serious ingrained problem—he is a sworn enemy of what he calls Big Pharma. That is corporate giants like Merck and Pfizer. As he has noted on many programs, he is strongly against what he calls ‘agency capture”. That is the process by which there is a revolving door between those companies and government agencies which are supposed to guard our health e.g. the Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization. This is, to say the least, incestuous, since those companies approve of and then distribute Merck’s products. He has promised to clean that operation up from top to bottom.

Well, this entails a big problem for the candidate. Because as many have noted, Big Pharma is a major player in TV advertising. From 2018 to 2022, they spent a combined 6.5 billion buying television ads. As part of the corporate ad structure, they cranked in at number four, after retail, finance and real estate, and tech. This may help explain why Jake Tapper of CNN wanted no part of a debate with Kennedy on the subject of CV-19. Tapper is also the guy who once said on Twitter that Al Gore was never ahead in the Florida recount in 2000. What he left out was that Gore was gaining votes by the hour when Justice Antonin Scalia issued a stay for irreparable damages on George W. Bush’s behalf. That Tapper said this is even more shocking since, while at Salon, he wrote a book about the whole Florida heist: Down and Dirty in 2001.

It is telling that Bobby Kennedy has appointed Dennis Kucinich as his campaign manager. As Howard Dean once said about himself, “I am from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” So is Dennis. Kucinich began his career in Ohio as a member of the city’s council and then mayor. He rose to national prominence as a congressman from 1997-2013. On Capitol Hill, he was a strong opponent of the Iraq War—in fact he moved to have George W. Bush impeached over the invasion. He was a strong proponent of single payer health care, and he was also for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney, and against the NATO bombing of Libya. He ran for president in 2004 and 2008. He was voted out of office when his district was redrawn after the 2010 census. You don’t get much more populist or progressive than Kucinich. The Mafia actually plotted to kill him. If you go to Robert Kennedy’s website and click through the topics—the environment, ending perpetual wars, freedom of speech—you will see why someone like Kucinich would be in step with Kennedy.

Either due to his campaign, his name background or the weakness of the incumbent. Bobby Kennedy is doing pretty well in this early stage. For example, 68% of the public feels that President Biden is too old for another term as president. (ABC News, May 6, 2023 story by Gary Langer) In a more recent poll, it is revealed that Kennedy, at 49 percent, ranks higher in favorability ratings than Biden and Marianne Williamson; and unfavorably by only 30 per cent. His net favorability rating of 19 was the highest among all candidates. (The Hill, story by Jared Gans, 6/14/23)

Because the MSM would rather belittle him than talk to him in an open setting, Bobby Kennedy has decided to go around the MSM. Some of his recent appearances have been at a town hall setting with Michael Scermonish on June 5th. (Click here) But the two recent appearances that have really driven the MSM daffy were with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. Let us speculate as to why.

On June 5th, Kennedy gave a 2.5 hour long interview to Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. Yet, stories about the interview were written on the same day it was broadcast.(For example, see the New York Times article) Reminds this writer of CBS reading the 888 page Warren Report and broadcasting about it the next day. That interview got close to 3 million views in about 72 hours. More than the candidate could get on any cable TV outlet or any major newspaper. One of the reasons that the candidate wanted to do this with Musk was because, as the new owner of Twitter, he had exposed their cooperation with the FBI and CIA in censoring certain views and opinions. And the candidate, also a victim of censorship, complemented him for that. This got turned into Kennedy taking up rightwing positions.

On June 15th, Joe Rogan posted his Kennedy interview on Spotify’s The Joe Rogan Experience. Oliver Stone’s appearance for JFK Revisited on that program now has about 4 million views. Rogan has been known to get as many as 11 million. So by successfully going around the MSM, this has in turn enraged the MSM. A really good example of this was in Rolling Stone.

On the same day the 3 hour Rogan interview was posted, a reporter for that publication named Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote an essay about it. The headline was “RFK Jr. Tells Joe Rogan He’s Aware of possibility CIA Could Assassinate him.” Since Rogan has a strong interest in the assassinations of the sixties, that subject would inevitably have come up. Ramirez wrote that the candidate believed that his uncle John Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA. This is not news of course. And it is a belief that is held by many other people in the limelight like Tucker Carlson and Ron Paul. According to testimony before the Church Committee, Marvin Watson told the FBI that Lyndon Johnson thought pretty much the same thing. (Washington Post, 12/13/77)

Its amazing what is left out of the article. Namely that Bobby Kennedy used to write for Rolling Stone! In the June 15, 2006 issue, he wrote about the possibility that the 2004 presidential election may have been stolen by George W Bush. For another example, in 2013 he wrote about JFK’s peace speech. (Click here for that) That 2013 article was aided by the estimable Jim Douglass. Douglass’ book JFK and The Unspeakable was the volume that convinced Kennedy of a CIA plot. (August 2021 interview with the author)

But then, the universe was altered. From 2017-19, Rolling Stone was the subject of a takeover by Penske Media Corporation. From upholding the idea of a JFK conspiracy as far back as the seventies and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, they suddenly did a turnaround. Here comes Tim Weiner from the NY Times, and any intimation of such a plot was now considered KGB disinfo. (Click here)

What is clearly disinformation is that:

  1. Kennedy was not killed by a conspiracy, and
  2. Somehow the CIA was not involved

The turning of the screw at Rolling Stone was the appointment of Noah Shactman. Shactman was executive editor at Daily Beast when they printed Max Holland’s utterly spurious story about how Jim Garrison was fooled by the KGB into arresting Clay Shaw on CIA grounds. As I pointed out, since Garrison had arrested Shaw before the story appeared, this created a serious problem for Holland and Daily Beast. That did not matter to Noah. Who had begun his career by founding Defensetech.org which was bought by Military.com in 2004. In 2013, he left Wired and went to Foreign Policy. He joined Daily Beast in 2014. In July 2021 he was named editor in chief of the Rolling Stone.

Gone were the days of Jann Wenner and Carl Bernstein’s “The CIA and the Media”. Hello to Tim Weiner and Max Holland. (Click here for Bernstein’s milestone article)

But Bobby Kennedy has learned, like Oliver Stone, to circle around the MSM and hit them from behind. It seems to be working. And we should also add in something else that is at work. There is a Jungian collective remembrance of what his uncle and father meant to this country. The candidate talked about this in his book American Values. That book remains the only volume ever published by a son or daughter of the two slain Kennedys to address their assassinations. The candidate also did a series of interviews for the Washington Post with Tom Jackman as to why he did not think Sirhan Sirhan killed his father. (Washington Post, June 5, 2018) Disgracefully, he is the only candidate who has said he will release the last of the still classified JFK assassination files. Which should have been released in 2017. But both President Trump and President Biden have refused to obey the law on this. In fact they were in defiance of both the spirit of the law and the letter of the law on this issue. (See this essay) All of these are further reasons for the MSM to take up the cudgel against the candidate. As these issues will open up a Pandora’s Box of past evils that have remained closed for far too long and plague the social fabric of this country. And if and when that happens the question will be: Where was the MSM in the midst of all this? Were they in on the cover-up? (Click here)

Make no mistake, Bobby Kennedy understands this. During his interview with Oliver Stone for the film JFK Revisited, he addressed it. Stone asked him, do you think there is any connection between the assassinations of your uncle and father. He said that there were many holes in the story about his father’s death since there had never been a real formal inquiry into that case. And that there might be leads that do form a crossover to some of the people involved in the JFK case.

What other presidential candidate could address that enormous issue that draws such a psychic chasm over this country?

Addendum

Highlights from the Joe Rogan/RFK Jr. interview of June 14th. Rely on the actual broadcast and not the spin.

Last modified on Monday, 19 June 2023 07:51
James DiEugenio

One of the most respected researchers and writers on the political assassinations of the 1960s, Jim DiEugenio is the author of two books, Destiny Betrayed (1992/2012) and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today (2018), co-author of The Assassinations, and co-edited Probe Magazine (1993-2000).   See "About Us" for a fuller bio.

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