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In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications.

This army of covert operatives (exposed as “Operation Mockingbird” in a historic 1977 Rolling Stone article by Carl Bernstein) extended all the way up to world famous columnists, bureau chiefs, managing editors, newspaper publishers and CEOs of major radio and television broadcasting networks.

What did the CIA’s secret memo instruct its media assets to do?

Entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” the memo provided guidance for countering “conspiracy theorists” who challenged the Warren Report’s false conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy.

It recommended the strategy of smearing critics of the Warren Report by describing them as being financially motivated; or having “anti-American, far-left or communist sympathies,” or being hasty, inaccurate or ego-driven in their research.

Sound familiar? Although five decades old, the tactics recommended by the memo seem chillingly current, a virtual operating manual for how the present-day CIA tries to smear and discredit anyone who dares to question official government propaganda.

Although the specific term “conspiracy theorist” pre-dates the JFK assassination, it was enthusiastically embraced and deployed by the CIA as one of its most powerful psychological weapons, to be wielded against anyone who suspects the government of secret wrongdoing. It is an effective way to silence dissenting voices by marginalizing them and leaving them open to ridicule.

Source: reddit.com

Ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his candidacy for the Presidency on April 19, mainstream media have attacked him with the very same tactics outlined in the CIA’s secret memo of 1967.

This is not surprising since Kennedy has re-invoked the ghosts of Earl Warren and Lyndon B. Johnson, who set up the Warren Committee, by publicly asserting that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin of his uncle (JFK), and that his father had considered the work of the Warren Commission to be a “shoddy work of craftsmanship.”

LBJ next to Earl Warren and the rest of the Warren Commission, whose work Robert F. Kennedy called “a shoddy work of craftsmanship.” [Source: jfkfacts.org]

According to Kennedy Jr.:

“the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt. As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.”

Kennedy has criticized the CIA for other major crimes that it carried out during the Cold War, tweeting out, for example, an article from Truthout about MK-ULTRA (unethical drug testing) and its abuse of black and indigenous children. Kennedy stated in the tweet that: “CIA conspiracy theories are not just ‘right wing’ and they are not just theories.”

This is not what the CIA wants to hear; or has ever heard from a Democratic Party presidential contender in recent decades, and so not surprisingly is out to get Kennedy.

A characteristic hit piece in the June 26 New York Times by columnist Farhad Manjoo was titled “It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Kennedy.” The subtitle read: “Conspiracy theorists don’t care about facts, just attention.”^[1]

Manjoo started the article by asserting that, in the summer of 2006, he entered a debate with Kennedy about the 2004 election, which Kennedy claimed had been stolen from John Kerry.

Manjoo said that Kennedy’s position was based on reckless claims and did not hold up—though in fact Kennedy was presenting considerable evidence to corroborate his view.

As he outlined at the time, nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad never received their ballots, and a consulting firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.

Additionally in New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots and, in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched George W. Bush’s victory in the Electoral College, local officials purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.^[2]

Manjoo says that he was a reporter at Salon during the 2004 election cycle and investigated Kennedy’s theories about the election and concedes that Kennedy was right that the 2004 election was “rife with irregularities,” particularly in Ohio. Nevertheless, he writes that “pretty much every expert that I talked to said it was unlikely that any of the issues were big enough to have undone Bush’s win.”

So Kennedy is thus branded a conspiracy theorist even though Manjoo admits that he was right about the existence of irregularities, but disputes the extent to which those irregularities ultimately impacted the final results based on “experts” he consulted and also the findings of a report issued by the Democratic National Committee.

Source: rollingstone.com

However, another expert, journalist Craig Unger, who wrote a biography of Republican Party kingmaker Karl Rove, suggests that Kennedy may have been correct and that Kerry was cheated out of an election victory when voting data in Ohio was inexplicably switched over to a technology service company, SmarTech, after the news networks had called Florida for George W. Bush.

The shift coincided with serious anomalies that saw an increase in votes favorable to Bush, who decisively won the state.^[3]

With regard to vaccines, Manjoo in his column admits that “some vaccines have serious side effects,” which is Kennedy’s position, but again smears him as a “conspiracy theorist” on this matter without either effectively articulating or challenging his views on the topic.

Manjoo’s column is par for the course these days in the mainstream media.

Every time that Kennedy’s name is mentioned in an article in The New York Times and most other mainstream media, it is with the qualifying statement that defines him as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Kennedy is also routinely disparaged for “cavorting with right-wing figures.”^[4] This inverts the old smear of being a Marxist or of the far-left, primarily because the right wing is now identified with “conspiratorial views” and criticism of the CIA and “deep state,” as Kennedy has pointed out, and is also much stronger than the left.

That Kennedy’s political supporters include libertarians opposed to what they consider coercive medical practices and government surveillance, and that he is branding himself as a candidate capable of bringing together Americans on the right and left, should not generally be considered a bad thing; it makes sense for someone who wants to win people’s votes.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg acknowledged that Kennedy was bringing together a “coalition of the distrustful” cutting across traditional “divisions of right and left” and that this is “giving him surprising strength in many polls.”^[5]

On June 26, The Atlantic ran a characteristic hit piece on Kennedy titled “The First MAGA Democrat: Robert Kennedy Jr. is Feeding America’s Appetite for Conspiracies,” which scoffed at Kennedy’s sensible belief that “Ukraine is engaged in a ‘proxy’ war” and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”^[6]

On June 22, Slate ran another typical smear piece right out of the CIA’s playbook by Molly Olmstead entitled “RFK Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories Go Way Beyond Vaccines.”

The subtitle of the article was: “The 2024 candidate sure is a man of, um, ‘ideas.’”

Kennedy is indeed a man of ideas; but not in a negative way. By any objective measure, his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse, 2021), is an impressive feat of scholarship that sold more than a million copies.

The book provides a deeply researched account of the corruption of Anthony Fauci and Big Pharma along with insightful analysis about the CIA’s involvement in and cover-up of lethal and unethical Gain of Function research and germ warfare practices that date to the era of the Cold War.

In her article, Olmstead suggests that Kennedy’s claim about Gain of Function research is part of his conspiratorial view, when that research is known to have been carried out.^[7]

She also maligns Kennedy for his warning about the growth of the surveillance state and suggesting that “the orchestrated, planned use of pandemics [aimed] to clamp down totalitarian control.”

We know for a fact, however, that the current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, participated in a simulation on coronavirus and pandemics in New York City in October 2019, known as Event 201, whose primary purpose was to explore how government authorities could exploit the situation to clamp down using censorship, and to force mask wearing, mandatory vaccinations, and lockdowns on the population.

Olmstead repeats in her piece the false claim that Kennedy advances “anti-vaccine conspiracy theories” when Kennedy has never said he was against vaccines, but only against certain vaccines that he believes were unethically manufactured.

When another reporter used the term “anti-vax” to describe Kennedy, former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Kennedy’s campaign manager, responded that the term was a “left-handed smear” and “a clipped assessment that has been used for political purposes by the adherents of the pharmaceutical industry,” when Kennedy stands for vaccine safety.

While people might legitimately contest some of Kennedy’s views about vaccines and COVID-19 or other topics including the Israel Palestine conflict, the trend seen in the mainstream media is to simplify, caricature and/or misrepresent Kennedy’s perspective, while failing to engage with any of the evidence that Kennedy presents to back it up.^[8]

Kennedy is well read in scientific literature and cites many scientific authorities on medical topics though is still mocked. A different standard is applied to most other politicians who are treated not only more respectfully but usually deferentially, particularly centrist Democrats or moderate Republicans in the mainstream liberal outlets that Kennedy is attacked in.

In her Slate piece, Olmstead claims that Kennedy has progressed from being an anti-vaxxer to advancing more conspiracies, such as one that “Wi-Fi radiation from cellphones causes cancer—or, more specifically, ‘Wi-Fi radiation’ from cellphones causes ‘cellphone tumors.”

In fact, there is a growing body of scientific research that verifies these latter concerns, including by highly reputable scientists like Dr. Joel Moskowitz, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, who has been on a decades-long quest to prove that radiation from cell phones is unsafe, which he says most people do not want to hear because they are addicted to their smart phones.^[9]

So who is the real conspiracy theorist? Kennedy or Olmstead?

And if conspiracy theorist means a real intellectual who probes beneath the surface to try to expose government corruption and uncover the truth, then I too strive to be a conspiracy theorist—proudly so.

David Talbot, the author of an acclaimed book on former CIA director Allen Dulles (who was involved in the coverup of the JFK assassination as a member of the Warren Commission), The Devil’s Chessboard, said that Kennedy is someone who “who thinks like I do, outside the box, willing to take risks.”

Jan Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine, which has published some of Kennedy’s writings, characterized him as a “crusader much like his father: pursuing justice and fairness for people….The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Olmstead at the end of her piece has the gall to attack Kennedy for promoting “conspiracy theories about his own family,” including related to the murder of his uncle and father, both of which, he believes, the CIA was behind.

CovertAction Magazine investigations along with a small library of books have found that RFK Jr’s views are well founded.

The refrain about Kennedy and his father and uncle’s assassination was nevertheless echoed in

a) a New York Times article by Rebecca Davis O’Brien on June 29,

b) a New Yorker article by David Remnick entitled “The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,”^[10]

c) a New York Magazine profile by Rebecca Traister that calls Kennedy’s ideas on the assassination “unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible,” and

d) in yet another New York Times piece on July 6 by Anjali Huynh, which invokes the authority of the widely discredited Warren Commission.

Characterized by Richard Nixon in the Watergate tapes as the “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated,” the Warren Commission advanced the magic bullet theory postulating that a single bullet caused eight wounds in JFK and his car-mate, Texas Governor John Connally, which is impossible by the laws of physics.^[11]

David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., leading expert on the medical evidence in the case of JFK, plotted the official trajectory of the bullet that officials claim passed through JFK’s neck and entered Connally’s back and discovered that it is anatomically impossible because cervical vertebra intervene. Former Tulsa police detective Craig Roberts points out that the supposed “magic bullet” would have had to have made “two 90 degree turns, and had to pause 1.8 seconds in flight at the same time.”

Source: eyemagazine.com

Olmstead in her Slate piece acknowledges that the CIA may have indeed had some involvement in JFK and RFK’s deaths, but criticized RFK Jr. for “turn[ing] his belief into a crusade, conducting months of research into the assassination and leading a campaign to have Sirhan [who was fingered as the lone assassin] released from prison,” which others in his family did not support.^[12]

Sirhan Sirhan, on the left, who, Robert Kennedy, Jr., believes based upon photographic evidence of the assassination scene, was falsely framed for his father’s murder in June 1968. [Source: radaronline.com]

These comments actually paint Kennedy in a flattering light as someone who will invest the time to carry out deep research to try to validate his suspicions. They reveal further that he is a compassionate man who is trying to right a wrong by freeing the man he has come to believe was wrongfully convicted of his father’s murder—which others in his family are not willing to do.

Call for Détente Like His Uncle

Kennedy beautifully invoked the legacy of his father and uncle in a foreign policy speech that he delivered at St. Anselm College in June that was ignored in the media. The speech was delivered on the 60^th anniversary of a historic peace speech that President John F. Kennedy gave at American University advocating for détente with the Soviet Union.

JFK giving famous peace speech at American University that some historians believe marked him for death. [Source: wikipedia.org]

See JFK’s speech here; and RFK Jr.’s speech here.

RFK Jr. in his speech discussed how military provocations by the U.S. towards Russia had left the world at a dangerous risk of nuclear war similar to the era of the Cuban missile crisis.

The U.S. betrayed a pledge not to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) towards Russia’s borders, has pointed missiles stationed in Eastern Europe at Russia, and has openly called for regime change and the dismembering of Russia, while using Ukraine as a pawn in a dangerous and deadly proxy war.

War mongers inside the U.S. administration—who have predominated since his uncle and father’s death—are staging war games and seem to believe that nuclear war is winnable.

Before his assassination, JFK set an excellent model by banning nuclear weapon testing, meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and traveling around the country telling Americans to put themselves in the shoes of the Russians and try and see things from their point of view.

Kennedy said that it is particularly important today to consider the legitimate security needs of the Russians and to change the mindset undergirding a period of endless wars.

The dominant foreign policy discourse constantly warns about foreign enemies and threats and adopts a comic book narrative in which America and allies like Israel are good, and their enemies like Russia and Iran are evil, leaving no room for complexity or compromise.

Peace can only come about when Americans examine their own attitudes and begin to try and better understand and empathize with peoples around the world and abandon the reflex towards violence as a response for any and all crises.

Now is the time to build a new peace movement that will reject the insanity of the present foreign policy course and compel the Biden administration to de escalate the conflict with Russia and China and reverse the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about and his uncle and father were trying to fight before they got killed.

He Has It Worse Than Bernie—Though There Is a Silver Lining

The biased media coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign seems worse than for Bernie Sanders, who was repeatedly attacked during the 2016 and 2020 primaries for supporting supposed socialist dictatorships, like in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

In 2016, the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that the Washington Post ran a stunning 16 negative stories on Sanders in just 16 hours.

When Sanders was ahead in the polls in Iowa, The New York Times reported misleadingly that he had been “eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttgieg.” The Onion subsequently wrote a parody entitled: “MSNBC Poll Finds Support For Bernie Sanders Has Plummeted 2 Points Up”—which might as well have been said about any major outlet.

Collage of critical articles of Bernie Sanders that appeared in The Washington Post in a 16-hour period. [Source: fair.org]

Though Sanders was more committed than Kennedy to taxing the wealthy and financial regulation and better on immigration, Kennedy is more radical than Sanders in challenging the military-industrial complex and CIA.^[13] (Sanders has repeatedly advanced CIA disinformation about Russia, and voted for emergency aid measures to Ukraine).^[14]

RFK Jr. has additionally spoken out more forcefully on censorship and challenged the dominant political and media narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic—which Sanders never questioned—while taking on the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex in a way that Bernie has never done.

Kennedy’s vilification in the media, ironically, may be one major source of his popularity across the country in an electorate that no longer has much faith in the mainstream media.

The denunciation of critics of government policy as conspiracy theorists over many years may be beginning to backfire as more and more people understand how the term has been used as a weapon against truth-seekers, of whom Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is surely one.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Farhad Manjoo, “It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Kennedy,” The New York Times, June 26, 2023, A22. 

2. Kennedy further noted that a heavily Republican precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98%, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland, which is overwhelmingly Democrat, recorded an equally impossible turnout of only 7%. In Warren County, GOP election officials invented a non-existent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count. For further evidence of GOP manipulation that corroborates Kennedy’s view, see Craig Unger, Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power (New York: Scribner, 2014). 
3. Unger told The Daily Banter: “One of the frustrating things of course if you want to make an absolutely conclusive case forensically what you find is that so much of the evidence has disappeared, so I should have that caveat up front. At the same time. the sequence of events was highly highly disturbing.” 
4. See, for example, Reid J. Epstein, “Why Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 Bid Is a Headache for Biden,” The New York Times, June 19, 2023. 
5. Michelle Goldberg, “The Coalition of the DIstrustful,” The New York Times, July 2, 2023, 5. Despite some sober judgments in her piece, Goldberg fits the norm in her demonization of Kennedy, referring to him as a “crank.” 
6. CAM has detailed U.S. provocations in numerous articles. 
7. See Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the biggest Lie in History(New York: Skyhorse, 2022). 
8. The left media is often no better than the mainstream. Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunchregularly rips and belittles Kennedy, for example. Naomi Klein, author of books critical of corporate power and a left-wing celebrity, characterized Kennedy as a “huckster” and “spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories,” in her column in The Guardian. The Nation Magazine’s editor Katrina Vanden Heuval called Kennedy an “anti-vaccine crank” in an article entitled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Flawed Heretic,” though did acknowledge that Kennedy “offered common sense too rare in our political discourse” on U.S. foreign policy and the war in Ukraine. Rather than pointing to the media bias as it normally does, the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting(FAIR) published an article by Ari Paul attacking Kennedy for being essentially a “MAGA Democrat.” He suggests that while Kennedy “claims that he is carrying on the liberal torch of his father and uncle …everything he says sounds to the right of Richard Nixon.” Really, however, the only thing RFK Jr. would agree with Nixon on was Nixon’s support for détente with the Soviets, opening to China, and embrace of some Keynesian ideas. Nixon escalated the Vietnam War whereas Kennedy has called for the revitalization of the U.S. peace movement and significant cuts in military spending to fund social programs. Nixon also waged war on drugs and on the political left through the FBI and Huston Plan, when Kennedy is a strong civil libertarian. He is further a staunch environmentalist who wants to block oil drilling on public lands and hazardous mining. Most of Kennedy’s policy positions are generally ones traditionally adopted by liberal democrats, including his support for labor unions, and his outlook is similar to his father and uncle whom he often invokes in speeches. 
9. Many cell phones actually come with warnings in the settings about the risks of cancer from prolonged use. 
10. In an exchange revealing the moral bankruptcy of elite liberal intellectual culture today; what Chris Hedges termed the “Death of the Liberal Class,” Remnick asked Kennedy during an interview with him what news sources he read. When Kennedy responded that he read alternative media, including commentary on Ukraine by Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Remnick responded by quoting favorably from Liz Cheney (R-WY) who said that Macgregor represented “the Putin wing of the GOP.” Joseph McCarthy couldn’t have said it better. 
11. Phil Nelson, LBJ Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 459; JFK: Who, How, and Why: Solving the World’s Greatest Murder Mystery, ed. Jim Fetzer and Mike Palecek (Crestview, Florida: Moon Rock Books, 2017); Craig Roberts, A Sniper Looks at Dealy Plaza (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Consolidated Press International, 1997), 61. 
12. Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan recently that the military, the intelligence community and his uncle were “at war” with each other during JFK’s presidency and that the two entities were “trying to trick” the late president into deploying troops to various countries, including Cuba and Vietnam. Kennedy added that his uncle was so fed up with the CIA that he wanted to “shatter” the agency and “scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy additionally said he has to “be careful” that the CIA doesn’t take him out, and that if he were elected president, he would be assassinated by the CIA—as he has claimed the agency was involved in the assassination of his uncle. “I gotta be careful,” Kennedy said. “I’m aware of that, you know, I’m aware of that danger. I don’t live in fear of it at all.” 
13. Kennedy’s belief in the “free market” follows in the pattern of his father and uncle, whom Bruce Miroff in Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (New York: Longman, 1976) defines as an “enlightened conservative” and “corporation liberal” whose economic policies served to hold wages down and underwrite new corporate investment while “stabilizing” and “rationalizing the corporate economy.” Regarding border policy, RFK Jr. said that he would restore an abandoned operation named Streamline under which the U.S. targeted illegal migrants for criminal prosecution and rapid deportation. 

14. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Bernie Sanders Claims the Mantle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Has He Earned It?” CovertAction Magazine, April 12, 2022, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/12/bernie-sanders-claims-the-mantle-of-franklin-delano-roosevelt-has-he-earned-it/. 

Featured image is from Bracing Views