J. Michael Springmann and I opened this week’s False Flag Weekly News by plugging RFK Jr.’s newly-minted presidential campaign. We noted that he is going to have to run against the media, like Donald Trump did in 2016.
Running against the media in politics is like betting against the house in gambling: The odds are against you, to say the least. I know that from personal experience, having run for Congress on a 9/11 truth platform in 2008. But it isn’t just me: There are countless examples of campaigns whose outcomes were determined by the media’s slanted coverage. (To cite an extreme example, big media’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story likely prevented Donald Trump from being re-elected in 2020.)
The power of the mainstream media is such that almost no serious politicians—people whose goal is to win, not just to make a statement or call attention to neglected issues, as I did in my 2008 run—ever dare to take any positions or voice any sentiments outside of the media’s Overton Window of acceptability. The major exception to that rule, of course, is Donald Trump, who defeated the media in his 2016 run for president.
Trump’s method was deceptively simple: Keep saying outrageous things that the media won’t be able to resist deriding and deploring and generally calling attention to. Lo and behold, the hoary bromide “any publicity is good publicity” came true. Trump recognized that a yu-uge tranche of voters was angry and alienated and ready to support someone the Establishment obviously hated. And since he had a Twitter account at hand to tweet his side of the story, Trump wasn’t handicapped like pre-social-media politicians, who had depended almost entirely on corporate-owned one-to-many media to communicate with voters. What’s more, turning his rallies into countercultural festivals allowed him to speak directly to throngs of people. Between Twitter and the Trump rallies, it became obvious that the media’s most important way of suppressing outside-the-Overton-Window candidacies—fostering the impression that only a tiny, widely-hated minority of fringe conspiracy theorists would ever say or believe such things—wasn’t going to work.
Trump composed his triumphant 2016 electoral symphony in the key of invective, scapegoating, demonization, and hatred (or “righteous anger” if you prefer, though not all of it was righteous). His needling and insults, which included allusions to the alleged complicity of George W. Bush in 9/11 and Ted Cruz’s father in the JFK assassination, were refreshing to those of us who have discovered the almost unimaginable corruption of the American political establishment. And his harsh treatment of Hillary Clinton, who on October 9th 2016 was forced to debate Trump with three of her husband Bill’s sexual assault victims glaring at her from the audience, and who cannot have been pleased by the tens of thousands of people at Trump rallies chanting “lock her up,” may not have been chivalrous, but it was effective.
Trump did not keep his promises. He didn’t lock her up. And he didn’t drain the swamp—he stocked it. His administration offered no meaningful change, except for completely surrendering to the ultra-extremist Zionist agenda of Bibi Netanyahu. Trump failed to withdraw from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. He didn’t terminate NATO, but instead armed Ukraine to the teeth and set the stage for the current war on Russia. His administration nearly started World War III three times: once by bombing Syria, once by murdering Gen. Soleimani, and once by attacking Wuhan and Qom with the bioweapon known as COVID-19.
Though he failed to even attempt to dismantle the Establishment, Trump’s erratic words and behavior made him a destabilizing factor, so the consensus of the oligarchs was that he had to go.
To defeat Trump in 2020, the media and its oligarch owners had to go full-totalitarian. They began by spreading the lie that Trump had been elected because Russia had somehow taken over the internet. That provided the excuse the Establishment needed to impose a draconian regime of internet censorship that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. Then the COVID-19 pandemic was used to further stampede public opinion into tolerating the near-total destruction of meaningful internet freedom. In the wake of the 2020 election, a new, freedom-free information regime was erected over the smoldering ruins of the Trump Administration (and the First Amendment).
Trump’s entire project turned out to be suspiciously convenient for the oligarchy he supposedly hates. Thanks to Trump, they got what they want: More war, more wealth transfer from bottom-to-top, draconian internet censorship, and a hyperpolarized nation full of angry people fighting about things the oligarchy doesn’t really care about. As Sam Husseini keeps telling us, it sure looks like Trump is the opposable thumb of the Establishment.
So did Trump accomplish anything positive? Yes: He showed it’s possible to run against the media and win. Let’s hope and pray that lightning strikes twice, and that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can pull off the same trick.
How RFK Jr.’s Run Against the Media Will Differ from Trump’s
RFK Jr. enters the 2024 presidential race far more hated by the media than Donald Trump was at the beginning of his 2016 campaign. Before that campaign, Trump was cast as a relatively benign buffoon, a rich talk show host with a bloated ego who might add some entertainment value and boost ratings but who had no realistic chance of winning. The fact that the Establishment “misunderestimated” Trump allowed him to sneak up on them. By the time they knew what hit them, it was too late.
RFK Jr., unlike the pre-2016 Trump, is a known threat to the hyper-corrupt wing of the oligarchical Establishment. He carries the mythic Kennedy name, with all the baggage that implies. He has repeatedly made it clear that he knows the Establishment murdered his uncle and father to terminate/prevent their presidencies. There is absolutely no chance that he is going to sneak up on anybody.
Today’s communications environment, especially the internet, is not nearly as free as it was in 2016. The great majority of Democratic voters have been subjected to trauma-based mind control and accept the new COVID-era mantra “misinformation kills millions.” RFK Jr. has been endlessly and mendaciously slandered by the media as one of the “misinformation purveyors” who deserves to be censored because he is guilty of killing millions of innocent people. (In fact, RFK Jr.’s views on COVID and vaccine issues are quite moderate and in line with the best scientific evidence, but try telling that to a pack of hysterical witch-hunters.)
So compared to Trump in 2016, RFK Jr.’s 2024 run begins by finding itself behind the proverbial 8-ball. Just days after his announcement, the media has already ganged up on him. More and worse will surely follow.
So is there even a ghost of a chance that he could win? A superficial overview suggests it’s almost unthinkable. But allowing for the possibility of surprisingly rapid changes in public opinion—a phenomenon for which there is some precedent—I submit that RFK Jr. could conceivably pull off a miracle along the lines of what his uncle John nearly accomplished in 1963.
James Douglas’s JFK and the Unspeakable (among other sources) makes clear the astounding shift in public opinion, and to some extent electoral politics, that JFK somehow inspired beginning with his American University speech on June 10, 1963.
JFK managed to push through the Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty during the summer and fall of 1963 in the face of initially overwhelming opposition from the Establishment and its media. Public opinion, too, began as hawkish and anti-treaty. But by appealing to people’s better nature, and mobilizing his charisma to inspire, JFK first swung public opinion, then Congress. He signed the Treaty on October 7, 1963, six weeks before he was murdered in a coup d’état.
If RFK Jr. is to have a chance at winning the presidency, he will need to emulate his uncle’s summer-of-1963 miracle by inspiring a radical shift in public opinion through a charismatic appeal to people’s better natures. To do so, he’ll have to employ the polar opposite approach from the one Trump used against the media in 2016: Instead of fighting back with nasty invective and scapegoating, Bobby will need to return love for hate, return truth for lies, and relentlessly focus on the positive and inspirational while the media piles on with its negativity and cynicism.
Could that actually work? Yes, it might. Just as people were sick of the media’s anodyne bullshit in 2016 and found Trump’s verbal aggression refreshing, today more and more of us are sick of not only the lies, which grow more outrageous every year, but also the complete lack of any idealistic or inspirational vision. The media, including social media, have put us in “permanent emergency” mode in which the world is always about to end: whether it’s the Ukraine quagmire spiraling inevitably into bankruptcy and/or nuclear war, or the COVID or 9/11 emergencies that will never really be over, or the threats of runaway A.I. or toxic train crashes or climate change or white supremacism or crime or the oppression of trannies or the even worse oppression of anti-trannies or what-have-you, it’s all one big stew of disasters and feel-bad stories without the slightest hint of any visionary transcendence of the mass-mediated depiction of unfolding ultra-polarized horror. To get that transcendence, we would need to move beyond the polarization and step outside the media’s imposed Overton Window and consider the various problems, and possible solutions, from an entirely new, hopeful perspective.
And if anyone is the man for the job, it’s RFK Jr. Besides the “vision thing” that comes with the Kennedy name, he embodies a refreshingly non-polarized perspective. Though a Democrat, his critical thinking and activism on vaccine and COVID issues resonates more with Republicans. And he wisely avoids entanglement with the oddities of gender ideology and cultural Marxism in general, instead trying to find common ground with the sensible middle. As he told The Epoch Times:
“America is enduring an apocalyptic tribal polarization more toxic and dangerous than any time since the Civil War. And while Democrats battle Republicans, elites are strip-mining our middle class, poisoning our children, and commoditizing our landscapes.
“I will focus my campaign, not on the issues that divide us but the values we have in common.”
Wow. That’s crazy enough that it just might work.
And the fact that he’s running against an ever-more-decrepit-looking “Sleepy Joe” Biden, just as the economy will be heading seriously south, just adds to the impression that anything could happen.
By now I’m sure many readers are thinking: But even if Bobby pulls off the kind of miracle you’re suggesting, and somehow becomes what the bad guys will consider an actionable threat to assume the Oval Office, won’t those same bad guys just whack him the way they whacked his dad and his uncle (not to mention his cousin)?
That’s obviously a possibility. But to my way of thinking, it just adds to the aura of courage and heroism that surrounds his decision to run for president. To shrink from supporting him wholeheartedly because he might be murdered would be churlish. If he’s willing to put his life on the line, the least a decent person can do is line up behind him.
And one more thing: This time around, the bad guys lack the element of surprise. In 1963, hardly anybody could imagine the possibility of a blood-soaked coup in America—much less that the CIA-Mossad interface and their mafia and media assets were in such a strong position to pull it off and cover it up. Even in 1968, after Mark Lane and Jim Garrison among others had spread the news about 1963 to a certain extent, the vast majority of Americans couldn’t really grasp the enormity of what just happened in the Ambassador Hotel.
So just as RFK Jr. won’t be able to sneak up on the Establishment the way Trump did in 2016, the Establishment likewise won’t enjoy the element of surprise if some of its members decide to violently terminate or prevent the presidency of yet another Kennedy. And the more support he has from people who know the score, the harder it will be for them to think they can get away with it.
RFK Jr.’s run for president is admittedly a long shot. But whether or not you think he has a chance, his campaign (join it HERE) is by far the most positive current development in American politics.
By Kevin Barrett