Attacks on RFK Jr. as “Conspiracy Theorist” Show Hallmarks of CIA Disinformation

[Source: foxnews.com]

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Covert Action Magazine

Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him

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.”

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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]

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/07/12/attacks-on-rfk-jr-as-a-conspiracy-theorist-show-all-the-hallmarks-of-cia-disinformation/