Censorship, Academia and the JFK Case:
Taboos of the Deep State
© David Lempert, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., E.D. (Hon.)
superlemp@yahoo.com
After nearly SEVEN YEARS, I am finally able to publish in an academic journal, Peace Studies Journal, a joint book review of Lisa Pease's book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, on the RFK Assassination and also of Peter Dale Scott's book, The American Deep State (Lempert, 2026), offering a social science and legal perspective on both works, some two weeks after that journal did agree to publish it, and now has. I wrote this article on what happens in academia today to works simply seeking to discuss issues like political assassination and the “deep state”, at that time in 2024, and it is only now that I can send this essay. What I write here is a focus on why topics like these are not only key in social science, in connection with private research and journalism, but also how and why they continue to be hindered.
Back in 2021, when I found my completed review refused without any explanation and had already spent months challenging the rescinding of my publication agreement as academic censorship, I shared materials on that challenge with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then a law professor, now U.S. Secretary of Health. I let him know that a review by a fellow lawyer and academic of a book on his father’s assassination could not be published. He wrote in support, telling me he agreed with everything I had presented on the violation of a book publication contract and academic standards on this review, titling the e-mail, “Censorship”1. I agree with that characterization, but think that what has been happening in academia has actually been a dismantling of disciplines to prevent study of reality and possibilities of improving the human condition that does not target one political view, but multiple approaches.
Taking both books seriously in academia was a cause for the review to be banned by the original journal that commissioned it and where I had published often before, but it wasn’t the only censorship that I faced in reviews from that same journal, New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture, that was once progressive and anti-war. New Political Science, the journal of the New Political Studies caucus of the American Political Science Association, the journal that had commissioned this review (after my suggestion that both books be reviewed), also would not publish my review of a book that they had specifically sent me for review at their suggestion, Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy. That book, I criticized for being unscientific and for failing to consider peaceful, negotiated solutions and mutuality, let alone the emotion of “love”. (That review is now also published in the same issue of Peace Studies Journal.) This suppression of two contracted book reviews in an academic journal, in violation of both contract law and established professional policies in academia for protecting the free speech of scholars (as long as reviews meet the basic pro forma specifications for reviews), was not the first time I have experienced this censorship. It was merely the first in that journal, where I had previously published three reviews without any incident, between 2008 and 2014. Bans of work and pressures to politicize academic reviews are now the norm rather than the exception in the U.S., and it is happening in other journals where thoughtful, innovative work of public benefit had once been welcomed.
Indeed, in 2008, I had been commissioned by the Journal of Legal Anthropology (after my suggestion of the book) to review James Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable. That review was also refused without explanation after I completed it. Unsolicited reviews are usually not welcome, and it took me two years to find a place to publish that review, and it was outside of social science journals, in a journal of the American Bar Association, Human Rights Quarterly (Lempert, 2010). That journal, however, did not even answer my query this time, when I had to look for a place for my review of Pease’s and Scott’s books, and noted that they had published my previous review.
New Political Science, the journal that agreed to my reviews and then suppressed them, was not only established as a progressive alternative to mainstream political science journals, but it still has eminent progressive scholars Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Angela Davis, and Adolph Reed on its board (Editorial Board | New Political Science | Duke University Press), even after having switched its publisher now to Duke University Press. I sought the help of these specific board members in protecting my free speech rights in the journal, for publishing the two reviews, letting them know how their reputation was now being used to support censorship of work that I was certain that they would support. The only one who responded (other than Michael Parenti’s son, Christian, who said his father had Alzheimer’s and no longer had capacity to respond2; Michael Parenti remains on the Board as of August 2026, though he died in January) was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky wrote, “I can’t do anything,” and noted that his role on the Board was only “pro forma”3. He would not agree to take his name off the Editorial Board when I asked if he would do so, noting that his name was being used to support censorship.
Members of the community of U.S. political assassination researchers suggested that I document in writing how the academic community treats their work and what has been happening in publications that were once founded to promote free inquiry and debate, and I thank James DiEugenio for welcoming this essay for Kennedys and King. I will present information here in five sections that I believe readers, members of this research community, will find useful for understanding and interacting with the academic community in ways that are of mutual benefit:
•Why and How the Study of U.S. Political Assassinations is So Important for Social Science and Applications;
•The New Control Systems to Eliminate the Study of Political Reality: Using what happened to my Review as a Case Study with Documentation of How Censorship Works in Publishing in Academia Today;
•Analysis of the Breakdown of Social Science, Political and Civic Culture, and Rule of Law in the U.S. since the 1960s and the Assassinations;
•The Challenges to Rebuilding Political/Civic and Legal Culture, Including Educational Institutions; and
•What Researchers Can Do for Mutual Benefit with Interested Academics.
Why and How the Study of U.S. Political Assassinations is So Important for Social Science and Applications: As a social scientist, lawyer and legal scholar, trying to model, predict and improve how political systems actually work, I find deep investigations and the testing of multiple hypotheses of how key political events occur in a country like the U.S. to be invaluable. Such investigations uncover and present documentation on motives, powers and activities of government bureaucracies, public officials, and private power that exercises quasi-public roles, from organized crime and economic institutions to the media. My work as a scholar and practitioner is to put this information in contexts to derive models of how political systems actually work behind the fairy tales and formal presentations of official “branches” of government, slogans about “democracy” and “citizen sovereignty”, and the rule of law. Here is how I see that role in various aspects:
•Modeling Political and Legal Systems and their “Deep Structures” to find the actual sources of power (military/police, formal and economic power including “organized crime” and networks) as well as control systems and ideologies (Lempert, 2017). This is part of the classic goals of legal and political anthropology, political sociology, political economy and political science.
•Comparing systems of different types to see how they work, such as industrial systems and empires (Lempert, 2012). For example, my doctoral work took me to the Soviet Union to model that system and to look at comparisons with the U.S. beyond mythical ideological characterizations and the similarities rather than the differences, including the ethnic structures and control systems (Lempert, 1998). The replacement of reformer Nikita Khrushchev by the Soviet military in 1964 was in parallel with changes in the U.S. (Lempert, 1996). Political-economic choices in the U.S. since the 1980s have paralleled and in many ways copied the former Soviet Union, particularly in the growth of the national security state on a similar model with similar names. Civics education in these systems is also now not very different (Lempert, 2025).
•Predicting what types of political systems are possible and arise in different conditions (Lempert, 2016), and how systems change. For example, I test theories of systems “converging” in parallel to similar forms based on similar conditions (technology) or mutual influence (Duncan, 2014).
•Offering models of solutions to address failures and to achieve key goals of social contract, direct public oversight of deep structures of power, balancing of and protection of ethnic groups, protection of sustainability over multiple generations (avoiding collapse and socio-economic failures that drive authoritarianism as well as implications of technological change that drive consolidations of power and concentration of decision-making), and protection of democratic culture and rule of law through democratic participatory education and socialization (Lempert, 1995, 2013).
The New Control Systems to Eliminate the Study of Political Reality: Using what happened to my Review as a Case Study with Documentation of How Censorship Works in Publishing in Academia Today: The thwarting of free speech in book reviews in social sciences today in a way that works to eliminate reviews and discussions of work on political reality occurs in four steps that I have now confronted several times and can document in this case.
1.Finding journals and why the process eliminates reality and debate today: The big problem today, despite the apparent increase in the number of academic journals, is finding one that publishes anything beyond a tiny group of scholars whose works and careers they wish to promote, let alone then finding one that will uphold contract agreements and standards of professionalism and free speech. Most journals won’t allow authors to suggest works to review that aren’t just those of members or sent by a major corporate academic publisher, or that don’t use a specific methodology even if they might be relevant and important to a disciplinary field and help the field grow.
PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review, for example, now won’t allow reviews of anything that is other than a narrow “ethnography,” which means stories about one group and citations to a group they want to promote.
Anthropology in Action allowed me to review Wayne Madsen’s book, The Manufacturing of a President, and to write about Barack Obama’s possible links to the security state and his identity, but they withheld it for three years until he left office, and recent editors seem to focus only on academic methodology.
Transcience: a Journal of Global Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin welcomed me as editor of two issues and sponsored me as a Visiting Scholar, until the editor, Professor Boike Rehbein, died suddenly and his colleagues broke the contract, purged the journal, jeopardized my family’s visas, and then used the journal for their own work on things like “the narrative of authenticity and the language of emotion,” as shown in museum visitor books (in Volume 15:1 in 2024).
New Political Science, founded in 1979 for “The Socialist Academic” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/07393147908429476?needAccess=true) but currently a commercial journal of Taylor & Francis, welcomed my two reviews on December 3, 2019, telling me to “feel free to write it” in the way I described I would and did. Curiously, though, the Book Review Editor, Robert Kirsch, still an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, wrote, “we are considering a special issue of symposium on ‘what the state does right’ and I could see that fitting in there”.4
After sending the two completed reviews, I then received a letter from Kirsch (now an Associate Editor of the journal), rescinding the publication agreement, saying “neither piece is a good fit … for the journal’s aims or our audience’s expectations [and] scholar-practitioners research and pedagogy needs”. There was no explanation of what was specifically wrong, of what had changed since my three previous published reviews and why my approaches were no longer consistent with other members of NPS or why I was essentially being blacklisted and purged. There was no offer to me to improve the piece.5 Kirsch never answered my queries with explanations, nor did Sarah M. Surak, Associate Professor at Salisbury University, then and now again co-editor, nor Jocelyn M. Boryczka, now Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Detroit Mercy, then co-editor and also now an Associate Editor, nor the follow-up book review editor, Andrew-Joseph Scerri, an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech University, now promoted to co-editor in Chief.
One can explain this censorship and shunning today by looking at how this group of editors, now controlling the journal and publishing their own works, views the “journal’s … research and pedagogy needs” in abstracts of their work on the journal’s website (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cnps20) and what they prioritize over discussion of political systems and global survival.
•Boryczka writes on: “The Colonized Vagina”. She writes, “Contemporary feminists, I conclude, should claim their ‘right to return,’ in this case to the vagina as home and place of belonging on the fluid borderlands between the hymen and uterus, as a step toward ending sexism”
•Surak writes on: “Displaying Garbage: Installations as Spaces of Domination and Resistance”. She focuses on “Marcuse’s conceptions of aesthetics, liberation, and ecology in capitalism” and “attempts to discern where we might find hope, encouragement, and active imagination of another possible future through artistic installations.”
•Kirsch focuses on handicrafts and how they promote consumption, in a way that he is the first to describe as “handicrafting the apocalypse, conspicuously consuming even at the end of the world.”
2.Institutions won’t enforce the rules above the journals: The New Political Science journal is overseen by the NPS caucus, which is a part of the American Political Science Association. Both of these groups have written charters/constitutions which are legally binding under U.S. non-profit laws, and they include commitments to free speech, fair treatment of colleagues, open procedures, and promotion of the disciplines. Today, they are meaningless. I carefully appealed to both in several letters, in the form of a colleague/member and as an attorney.
The response from Nancy S. Love, President of NPS and Professor at Appalachian State University, who is on the editorial Board of the journal, was the bureaucratic assertion, “I have no editorial authority over the journal,”6 despite being on the Board, followed by the assertion when challenged, “I affirm the authority of the editors to reject your book review,” along with “Best wishes, Nancy”7.
3.Universities won’t discipline their scholars: Universities also have clear codes of conduct for their faculty members, including honest and respectful relations with colleagues, protection of speech and openness of disciplines, and adherence to legal agreements. I have tested these codes and the procedures several times. They are also meaningless today and seem to be used mostly by universities to prepare themselves against being sued and to size up complainants and undermine their challenges. There are never formal procedures with standards for challenges on these particular grounds, and the universities in fact have conflicts of interest in their faculty remaining in leadership positions in journals. Public concerns and disciplinary standards are jettisoned. Sometimes the claim is that the “unions” of faculty members are what actually prevent actual investigations or sanctions, let alone the time spent on resolution.
In this case, I appealed to Laura Belmonte, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Virginia Tech, claiming that the new NPS Book Review editor, Andrew Scerri, was violating their academic conduct code8. She sent it to the Faculty Ethics Committee, where Elena Serrano claimed that “this matter does not fit within the scope of our committee. Best to you, Elena,” without any explanation of why they would not follow their own rules9. My letters to the Vice Provost and Provost, as well as to the school newspaper, were never answered.
4.Legal protections are unenforceable: For any attorney, a case like this of a book review is very easily identifiable as a contract in which authors of the review offer their labor with the expectation that their work will be published, subject to their following simple stylistic and form guidelines and agreeing to simple copy editing. In reality, this is a legal “right” without a “remedy” because there are no monetary “damages” (because there are no payments to authors and no measurable benefits of the publication). Today, even if an author can find a lawyer, judges just want to throw out cases like this. In the U.S. today, a scholar’s time is generally considered to be worthless.
What did not happen here, but what I have experienced recently when I have been able to publish work, is that rather than censor, what follows once an article appears that takes the “wrong view”, even now in academic journals, is a defamatory attack that does not address the issues in the piece but is a smear to which there is no opportunity to reply, followed by a de facto blacklist on future work.
Analysis of the Breakdown of Social Science, Political and Civic Culture, and Rule of Law in the U.S. Since the 1960s and the Assassinations: The United States is not an exception among industrial societies in burying crimes of its recent past until the perpetrators are all dead and creating national mythologies about its history so that the same practices largely continue but in new forms that aren’t easily recognizable. The problem is that industrial societies rely on scientific objectivity in science as well as in social science in order to adapt and avoid collapse, and that isn’t happening. What is happening is that the social sciences are dying (Lempert, 2018) and their institutional structures are collapsing in a way that returns them to forms of church scholarship and ideology. That may be a result of the assassinations and their impact on political culture in the 1960s or just symptoms of a common process.
The key institutional failures are those that I have described above:
•The shifting and the decline in disciplines and in journals, reflecting the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”. Which, in my view, stands for “representational hiring”; that destroys ethnic and intellectual diversity and is non-inclusive (Duncan, 2018). Added to this is the ideology of neo-liberalism, one of inequality, perpetual war, corporatism and concentration of power--accompanying the rise of the national security state.
•This influence results in the destruction of oversight in universities subject to controls of corporate/ economic and military interests; and the
•Destruction of the rule of law and the legal system for rights protections and accountability.
Scholarship has become ideology that is “non-science and nonsense” (Sly, 2018) with no predictions; little or no public application; terms with no content; no research questions or models; just dogma. Teaching has become indoctrination without empirical skills and contact with reality (Lempert, 1995). Under the pretense of “decolonization”, disciplines like my Ph.D. discipline of anthropology have become advocates of U.S. militarism (Lempert, 2022). “Decolonizing” doesn’t mean anti-war, independence and rights; it means eliminating history, standards, ethnic approaches, measures, and reality. Under the pretense of promoting “diversity”, they are the first to suppress ethnic identities, sustainability and survival (Lempert, unpublished).
In journals like New Political Science that were established by the progressive “New Left”, the “New Left” is now the “Left Out”. Cabals of academics promote themselves in a bubble of irrelevance backed by corporate journals and fake boards, with no transparency or oversight, resorting to smearing and blacklisting. The neo-liberal ideology is essentially one of identity politics and censorship, in violation of contract agreements, disciplinary standards, and public benefit scholarship.
Backing it up is a national security state policy of fear in which the study of truth and reality, even overseas, can now be a cause for imprisonment of scholars like journalists (Lempert, 2019).
This represents a breakdown of civic culture, of political and legal culture and of the rule of law.
The Challenges to Rebuilding Political/Civic and Legal Culture, Including Educational Institutions: Much of what I am documenting and reporting is likely not a surprise to readers of Kennedys and King, but what I hope is new is the number of layers in which control systems and institutional failures exist and how deeply the culture and institutions of academia and of political and legal culture are now failing.
Even in the “progressive” publications where one sees progressive scholars who themselves speak out against today’s “cancel culture”, and where politically active scholars like Cornel West and Noam Chomsky are on an Editorial Board, with the status and potential authority to protect something as basic as free speech on book reviews examining key U.S. political events, they themselves are embedded in beliefs and structures in which they are rendered as apologists and in which they perpetuate the failures of the system while benefiting from the prestige that it offers.
RFK Jr. addressed the general issue of constitutional free speech protections in public debate in his political campaign this year in 2024, in which he frequently invoked the legacy of his father (and also mentioned Lisa Pease’s book), but neither he nor Cornel West, also a 2024 Presidential candidate and member of the New Political Science Board, nor Jill Stein, the 2024 Presidential candidate of the Green Party, has addressed this form of censorship in university disciplines/publications and discussed the layers of changes that are needed. It will require changes in university chartering to hold them accountable, changes in access to lawyers and the courts, changes in disciplines and oversight of education. I challenge them to do so.
What Researchers Can Do for Mutual Benefit with Interested Academics: There are two things that we can do together to promote research into the “taboos” of political reality by journalists and independent investigators seeking to discover facts and truth and to further the scholarship that puts it into context along with the teaching that introduces it to students.
1.Help support the formation of an open-access e-journal that is open to contextualizing this research, where theories like those I mention can be presented and discussed across disciplines and where new books from the Kennedys and King research community will be reviewed and discussed by academics from diverse perspectives. There are universities that can host these journals. All you really need is a list of academics (like me) who are ready to review key books and will do so if we learn of them, and can avoid the waste of time battling journal editors and bureaucracies and just do real work. In this journal, encourage presentations of syllabi that include such works and discussion, including the research skills that you use in your research, so that they become part of curricula in transmission to students. This helps your books, and it helps scholarship. Publishers also benefit, so they could be encouraged to easily provide the books for review.
2.Work with publishers and a journal like this one and others to put pressure on journals and universities to expose them individually for their censorship and blinders, and to challenge them to live up to openness to diverse ideas by considering with an open mind the specific work that comes from outside the mainstream, and that is stigmatized. There are too few of us doing this with a true passion for discussion of ideas, of equity, democracy, social justice and human progress, in a challenge to the fake approaches of the so-called “leftist” universities and their academics today and of the corporatist and militarist right; both of which seek to replace open inquiry and diverse perspectives in the search for truths with single dogmas and avoidance.
Sources:
Duncan, Brooks (2014). “Convergence Theory Revisited: Kafkaesque Global Bureaucracies of Our Times: With an Example of a Tool for Measuring Whether Approaches to Accountability are Real or Sham,” Social Evolution and History, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2014, pages 67 – 98. http://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/242735/
Duncan, Brooks (2018). “Professor Rip Van Winklestein Applies for a Teaching Job … and Finds His Disciplines (and Much of Social Science) Have Disappeared”, Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum, Vol. 8, Issue 1, Article 3, pages 53 – 58. http://trace.tennessee.edu/catalyst/vol8/iss1/3
Lempert, David (1995). Escape from the Ivory Tower: Student Adventures in Democratic Experiential Education, Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers/ Simon & Schuster.
Lempert, David (1996). Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy. Columbia University Press/ Eastern European Monographs.
Lempert, David (1998). "The 'Jewish Question' in Russia and the Rewriting of History," Legal Studies Forum, Spring 1998, Volume 22, No. 3.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339080825_The_'Jewish_Question'_in_Russia_and_the_Rewriting_of_History_Legal_Studies_Forum_Spring_1998_Volume_22_No_3
Lempert, David (2010). “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters,” James Douglass and “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” Vincent Bugliosi (Double Book Review), Human Rights Quarterly, 32:3, August 2010, pages 773-776.
Lempert, David (2012). “The Social Science of Empire,” (Review Essay using four books of “The American Empire Project” as a take-off point), Journal of Developing Societies, Fall 2012, Volume 28, No. 4; 441-68.
Lempert, David (2013). “Taking History Back to the People: An Approach to Making History Popular, Relevant and Intellectual,” Democracy and Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, Article 1, Fall. http://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol21/iss2/1
Lempert, David (2016). “Predicting Political Systems Using Economic, Environmental and Relational Variables,” Social Evolution and History, 15:2:164-194, September.
Longer Version on the web: https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/588599/
Lempert, David. (2017). “The ‘Deep Structure’ of U.S. Political Culture: An Anthropological View of ‘Deep Politics’.” Peace Studies Journal 10:1: 20-56, February. Online at: http://peaceconsortium.org/peace-studies-journal/archives/psj-vol-10-issue-1
Lempert, David (2018). “Foreword: The Death of Social Sciences in an Era of Multi-Cultural Corporatism (Neo-Liberalism): With Efforts at Resuscitation”, Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum, 2018, Vol. 8, Issue 1, Article 2, pages 1 – 52. Available at: http://trace.tennessee.edu/catalyst/vol8/iss1/2
Lempert, David (2019). “Are Social Scientists Next to be Imprisoned and Tortured?: A Call to Unite and Oppose the Criminalization of Social Science,” Contexts (American Sociological Association), 2019. Available at: https://contexts.org/blog/are-social-scientists-next-to-be-imprisoned-and-tortured-a-call-to-unite-and-oppose-the-criminalization-of-social-science/
Lempert, David (2022). “The Embarrassing Failure of Anthropology on the Russian Ukrainian War: An Anthropological Analysis of the ‘Joint SAE/Soyuz Statement on the War in Ukraine’”, Website of the Society for Anthropology of Europe (SAE), March 13, 2022. https://sae.americananthro.org/2022/03/joint-sae-soyuz-statement-on-the-war-in-ukraine/
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.19664.99840
Lempert, David (2025). “Civic Education for Democracy: An Indicator for Civic Skills Teaching and Democracy vs. Authoritarianism” Law, Social Justice, and Global Development, Issue 28, 2005, pages 42-108.
https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/lgdjournal/article/view/2059
https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/lgdjournal/article/view/2059/1549
Lempert, David (2026). “Modeling Vigilantism, Deep Structure and Rule of Law in Political Science: A Review Essay” (Essay using Peter Dale Scott, “The American Deep State” and Lisa Pease, “A Lie Too Big to Fail”), Peace Studies Journal, September 2026, pages 142-153. PSJ Volume 19 Issue 2 September 2026 | Peace Studies Journal
https://peacestudiesjournal.org/psj-volume-19-issue-2-september-2026/
Lempert, David (unpublished). “The Ghettoized “Diversity” of Anthropology and Social Sciences: Pandering versus Cultural Protection, Restoration and Innovative Approaches” (230,000 words)
Sly, Polly (2018). “The Nonsense and Non-Science of Political Science: A Politically Incorrect View of “Poly-T(r)icks”, Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum, Vol. 8, Issue 1, Article 9, pages 268-300. Available at: http://trace.tennessee.edu/catalyst/vol8/iss1/9
______________
1. E-mail to author, “Censorship”, sent on February 27, 2021.↩︎
2. E-mail to author, sent on December 17, 2020.↩︎
3. E-mails to author on December 21 and 22, 2021, “Re: Cancel Culture at New Political Science, where you are on the Editorial Board”.↩︎
4. E-mail to author, December 3, 2019.↩︎
5. E-mail to author, February 3, 2020.↩︎
6. E-mail to author, March 3, 2020.↩︎
7. E-mail to author, March 4, 2020.↩︎
8. E-mail sent by author, February 22, 2021.↩︎
9. E-mail to author, March 17, 2021.↩︎
