The Case for Kennedy
The latest corporate media hit piece against Robert Kennedy Jr., this one by pseudo journalist John Oliver on his popular HBO program “Last Week Tonight” (August 4, 2024), was so disgraceful that it demands a swift and honest riposte.
In his 30 minute segment about RFK Jr., Oliver serves up the same old “he’s a crazy anti-vaxxer!” propaganda, dredging through thousands of hours of interviews and statements from Kennedy’s 40 years as a public figure, to present only the most embarrassing gaffs without context or balance, in order to carry Big Pharma’s water by painting the independent presidential candidate as a dangerous looney.
In doing so, Oliver skillfully avoids dealing with any of the actual issues on which Kennedy’s candidacy is based, such as: our endless wars, perpetuated by the neo-cons who have thoroughly infiltrated the Democratic party; the near total capture of our regulatory agencies by the industries they are supposed to regulate; the ballooning national debt that will force the next generations into indentured servitude; the erosion of our civil rights in the form of state censorship, under the guise of “combating misinformation/hate speech”; and the chronic disease crisis plaguing America, wherein we have the highest rates of illness in the world despite spending by far the most money on our “healthcare” system.
It is no surprise that Big Pharma — as well as Big Ag, Big Oil, and the Military Industrial Complex — want people to dismiss Kennedy as “crazy” or “dangerous.” He is indeed dangerous… to the their stock market value. RFK has spent the last 40 years as an environmental lawyer, suing polluters and big corporate ne’er-do-wells of all stripes. For example, in 2018 it was Kennedy who won the landmark case against Monsanto, demonstrating that their flagship weedkiller product Roundup causes cancer. Since then, thousands of cancer sufferers have sued the chemical giant, which is now facing damages in the ballpark of $11 billion.
Sadly, John Oliver makes no mention of this little tidbit, nor any of Kennedy’s many victories and ongoing advocacy on behalf of powerless people and the environment. Instead, the TV host lazily serves up the same story about how Kennedy may have done some “genuinely laudable work” in the past, before he went crazy and started going after Big Pharma.
A point-by-point rejoinder to Oliver’s many slanders and half-truths would be as tedious to read as the episode was to watch, but one example will serve to demonstrate the misleading nature of his “reporting.” Oliver accuses Kennedy of “AIDS denialism,” suggesting that Kennedy claims HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and even going so far as to implicitly blame Kennedy for the deaths of 330,000 people in South Africa.
In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci” Kennedy devotes several chapters (chapters 4–7) to the AIDS epidemic, as this period was significant in the rise to power of America’s (now former) public health czar, who is the subject of the book. Kennedy details the outrage that early sufferers of AIDS directed at Anthony Fauci, who blamed him for delaying the testing and prescription of generic medications to treat AIDS, in order to pave the way for Big Pharma’s patentable treatment, AZT. Prominent activists in the gay community at the time accused Anthony Fauci of “murder” for letting AIDS patients die, by denying them potentially life saving medicine. (Kennedy, p. 157)
While the book provides a detailed account of the scientific debates that surrounded the role of HIV in causing AIDS, the author states:
From the outset, I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS. I include this history because it provides an important case study illustrating how — some four hundred years after Galileo — politics and power continue to dictate “scientific consensus,” rather than empiricism, critical thinking, or the established steps of the scientific method. It is a hazard to both democracy and public health when a kind of religious faith in authoritative pronouncements supplants disciplined observation, rigorous proofs, and reproducible results as the source of “truth” in the medical field. (Kennedy p. 178)
Perhaps if Oliver had taken the time to read Kennedy’s book, he might have had something useful to contribute to the conversation — although that clearly was not his aim in the first place. In fact, RFK Jr. has published two extensively researched books of over 500 pages each since the pandemic, detailing decades of corrupt collusion between Big Pharma, our captured regulatory agencies, powerful billionaires like Bill Gates, and the Military Industrial Complex. The damning accusations contained in “The Real Anthony Fauci” and its sequel “The Wuhan Cover-Up” rely on thousands of citations, including hundreds of dense scientific articles.
Oliver could do a genuine service to society by setting a team of researchers to go through these thousands of citations in detail, verifying their contents and credibility. But he prefers to flaunt his excessive budget with ridiculously expensive gags, and publicity stunts. This is his right, as an entertainer, but it proves that he is not a serious journalist nor truth seeker.
I do not claim to believe that Robert Kennedy Jr. is infallible, but infallibility is not a criterion to be President of the United States. He is the only candidate speaking openly about the truly perilous times we are living in, and certainly the only one with any practical ideas for what to do about it.
Both major parties are entirely consumed by the culture wars, which is just how the plutocrats who own both parties like it. The hyper-rich know perfectly well that as long as we are busy bickering about abortions and bathrooms, it will be impossible for the populace to mount an effective resistance against their nearly complete conquest of our government and all our institutions, from Ivy League Universities all the way down to the local HVAC repair companies and neighborhood daycares.
As a lifelong Democrat, I find the Blue Team’s abandonment of all traditional liberal values especially worrisome, and saddening. The end run around the primary system they just pulled displays a level of corruption beyond anything I could have imagined. The party that claims to be the party of democracy and free elections is brazenly anointing Kamala Harris as their candidate, despite her never having received a single primary vote.
Of course, I cannot prove that this was the plan of the DNC elites all along. However, if their design was to keep Biden propped up long enough to avoid any real primaries, and then sideline him and install a loyal party apparatchik who has demonstrated that she will say anything the party wants in order to advance her drive to power, at a point in time late enough that no meaningful challenge to her nomination could be mounted but early enough for her to build a strong campaign for president… Then it’s hard to imagine how it could have gone any better.
That aside, the DNC’s behavior toward RFK proves beyond a doubt that they have abandoned any love for real democracy. Against all odds, the Kennedy campaign gathered approximately 1 million signatures across 50 states, enough to put him on the ballot in every state in the union. This was repeatedly deemed to be impossible, because the two major parties have successfully colluded in recent years to make independent ballot access nearly insurmountably difficult to achieve. But, thanks to the tireless work of thousands of volunteers, the Kennedy campaign did the “impossible.”
What was the Democratic Party’s response? Did they raise a cheer for freedom of choice, open elections, and democracy in action? Lol no! They are suing Kennedy in all 50 states to block him from the ballot, in a shameless and contemptible attempt to restrict voters’ choices to the old Red Team v. Blue Team binary. And these are the people who constantly claim to be “saving democracy”! I would call their commitment to democracy a joke, except that, like most of the Blue Team’s humor of late, it’s just not funny.
As for the Red Team, while I personally find Donald Trump abhorrent (albeit entertaining), I can understand his appeal on two fronts: management of the economy, and his pledge to “drain the swamp.” However, I hope his supporters will soon come to see that these are both false hopes.
When it comes to the economy, it is true that things appeared to be going well under Trump. But things were much uglier under the hood. Trump pumped up the markets with massive government financed debt spending, adding more dollars to the national debt than any prior administration (the massive spending pre-dated COVID-19). And as far as “draining the swamp,” he filled his cabinet with swamp creatures the likes of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Like his adversaries, his main activity is fanning the flames of the culture wars.
Only Robert Kennedy is waging a campaign that transcends the endless fighting amongst ourselves, and provides a positive vision for the future. We are living in a dangerous moment. Authoritarianism is knocking on our door — or more likely already in the house. The risk is not from some charismatic dictator, as the Blue Team would have us believe we should fear from Donald Trump. The existential danger to our liberties comes from the consolidation of power between corporations and our own government.
New technology has provided the Surveillance State with unprecedented capabilities. The news media are all owned by the same giant corporations. Our Supreme Court has paved the way for digital state censorship of anyone who dissents from official government orthodoxy — and, most tragically, self styled “liberals” are going along with it, so frightened by the threat of “misinformation” that they are embracing the role of government as arbiter of what speech is considered acceptable.
The purpose of this article is not to depress you, by reminding you of how bad things are looking and how dark the road ahead appears, but to give you hope. In Robert Kennedy Jr. we have a man who, at the very least, sees what is happening in this country, and is able to articulate it in all its vastness and complexity. The propaganda smear campaign waged against him by big business and the state is formidable, but the truth is always the most powerful weapon against falsehood.
Anyone who is genuinely curious to learn the truth about Robert Kennedy Jr. has but one recourse: primary documents. Do not rely on 3rd party accounts or pronouncements, including this one. Read his books, or at least listen to his podcast. The only way to learn the truth about the man is from the man himself.
