Is RFK Jr. Campaign Part of an Establishment Agenda — a More Insidious Sheepdog?

Kennedy's campaign seems intent on further splintering antiestablishment forces while failing to meaningfully advance real accountability for pandemic criminality.

Much of my work — particularly my VotePact.org project — has been about antiestablishment forces working together to stop the designs of the US establishment. As I’ve long argued, antiwar and pro-civil liberties forces from the left and right can come together and work together and even back candidates jointly. See my recent talk on the subject with Liam McCollum.

What RFK Jr. is doing, especially with his spouting Israeli propaganda, is the exact opposite. He is further splintering antiestablishment forces.

Further, he has failed to meaningfully advance the movement for accountability regarding the pandemic, something virtually everyone expected he would. I noted in April about his speech launching his campaign:

I was actually shocked that Kennedy made no reference in his speech to biowarfare or “gain-of-function” — it would have fit in well after his speaking remarkably eloquently of the power of Nature.

He has remained remarkably silent on “gain-of-function” lab work, which creates deadly pathogens, lab origins of Covid, as well as what many activists are charging is a power grab by the World Health Organization and other related issues. I’ve written about propagandist Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist for the WHO — and one would have expected Kennedy to demand his resignation. One would be disappointed.

Of course Kennedy has probably said something recently about some of those issues, and he’s made extensive remarks on some of them prior to launching his campaign. But, he has had access to major media with his campaign and he hasn’t used it to advance these issues which are allegedly near and dear to his heart.

Kennedy was recently on Joe Rogan — a friendly host with a huge audience — and didn’t talk about any of those issues.

Instead, Kennedy has been drawn into long discussions on vaccines and autism, which are defensive and have nothing directly to do with one of the most critical events in human history, the Covid pandemic and the propaganda and criminality around it.

Jared Beck has notably charged that Kennedy is a “sheepdog” — a candidate designed not to actually win, but to keep people confined to the politics of the duopoly.

But it could be worse. His campaign could be “GoFing” the sheepdog. GoF — “gain-of-function”. While viruses created in this way threaten humanity, political apparatchiks threaten to become more effective at further deforming our politics. He could be worse than a sheepdog. He could be a Judas goat.

While past sheepdogs, like Sanders, sucked energy into the demented Democratic Party, they at least brought the ideas — like income inequality — behind their candidacy to the mainstream to an extent. Kennedy isn’t even really doing that.

By avoiding it, Kennedy is effectively helping memory-hole what happened during the pandemic.

Instead, he is using his fame to spout non-stop Israeli propaganda of the vilest variety. A series of people have taken issue with his remarks, and I’m sure there’s some value in that, but his propaganda on Israel is so extensive, one could not possibly debunk all his falsehoods in a concise manner, though Max Blumenthal did some. Nor are they confined to Israel per se. He recent rendition of Mideast history on Jimmy Dore’s show virtually omitted the role of European colonialism in the region altogether. And Palestine, as the leading target of continued settler colonialism, has been a fairly good litmus test for political seriousness.

Dore seemed flabbergasted at Kennedy’s statements. With some good reason. The simple power of the Israeli lobby doesn’t explain what is happening. The obvious thing to do for Kennedy would have been to follow Sanders’s statements on the issue. He didn’t. He is doing something else and the main effect of it is to divide antiestablishment forces so they can more easily be conquered.

As recently outlined, the establishment uses presidents of whatever stripe to further its overall agenda depending on their background and features. There is no reason why the establishment cannot similarly instrumentalize mere candidates.

Indeed, as previously discussed, in 2020, “the DNC or other establishment forces molded the campaign to produce this outcome” — that is, candidates entered and left the race to ensure Biden’s nomination.

The timeline of recent events deserves special attention:

There were important recent Congressional hearings about Covid origins on July 11, but Kennedy made virtually no mass media reference to them. Thus, the wider public is far more in the dark about this critical issue than they should be.

Then, on July 15, the New York Post reported that he said: “COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

This lead to predictable attacks on Kennedy and then he made increasingly pro-Israel remarks under the pretense of refuting the charges of antisemitism. This tactic has been employed in the past, but Kennedy’s use of it has been particularly pungent.

On July 19, the president of Israel spoke before Congress.

The very same day, Kennedy outflanked ardent Zionist Biden and pledged “my support for Israel will be unconditional.” This is tantamount to greenlighting further massive criminality by Israel.

The day after that — July 20 — RFK Jr. spoke to the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It was supposed to be about censorship and free speech, but it was largely an exercise in Israel worship.

In what was supposed to be a hearing about censorship, which I live-tweeted, Kennedy put aside his prepared remarks, which had some good content like this:

The TNI is a news censorship cartel whose members include the BBC, the Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.  Whenever non-mainstream online news publishers report facts or viewpoints deemed by the TNI to be “misinformation,” TNI members censor, shadow-ban, or deplatform those publishers. This so-called “misinformation” has frequently included wholly legitimate, accurate reporting, for example that COVID might have originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, or that the COVID vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission.

He didn’t share such critical info to the audience watching the hearings on C-SPAN, but he did do a lot to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a great goal of the establishment.

Another remarkable “accomplishment” of how things unfolded for the establishment is that Kennedy’s pro-Israel propaganda obscured very serious connections between the attack on Palestinian rights and Covid.

A serious hearing on censorship and free speech would get into how Big Tech went after Palestinians before it went after pandemic issues. See “Twitter censors news from Palestine” from the Electronic Intifada from 2019 and “Facebook Says It is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. And Israeli Governments” by Glenn Greenwald from 2017.

Kennedy instead is further fragmenting antiestablishment forces. He is dividing people who saw through the pandemic lies from those who have focused on seeing through the imperial-Zionist agenda.

Indeed, when discussing the censorship around Covid, we should note how the “war on terror” was used as a pretext for censorship. In 2014, Ronan Farrow lead the charge with “Why aren’t YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter doing more to stop terrorists from inciting violence?” in the Washington Post. See response by Glenn Greenwald.

And his remarks on ethnic bioweapons, which hindered accountability for pandemic criminality, similarly may immunize Israel’s biological weapons from scrutiny. They have thus far received a minimum of coverage. This even though Israel is the only state with a substantial military capacity that has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention. In 1998, the mainstream Sunday Times of London reported: “Israel is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources.” Apartheid South Africa — which is known to have worked with Israel to develop nuclear weapons — is believed to have attempted and failed to develop ethnic bioweapons. But there has been scant followup on this subject to date.

Kennedy — who wrote a celebrated book on Fauci — at one point has spoken disparagingly over attempting to assign blame to Fauci and his cohorts. Then he got pushback from activists and backtracked some.

It’s notable that Kennedy is friends with Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Sachs. The latter is especially notable because Sachs named Peter Daszak as head of the Lancet Commission’s committee on pandemic origins, effectively helping delay a partial reckoning regarding Covid origins for the better part of a year. Yet, apparently, Kennedy never picked up the phone and asked Sachs what he was doing.

And, since he’s regarded as a great dissenter regarding the pandemic, him not talking about biowarfare has been having the effect of muting the subject altogether. Indeed, if it were another candidate and not Kennedy doing what he’s doing, I’d suspect that Children’s Health Defense and others might be criticizing his campaign. The negative aspects of his campaign may even threaten such non-profits which might be (unfairly) targeted for doing election work.

There is a deep need for there to be accountability regarding what happened during the pandemic. Most obviously, the origins of Covid, as I’ve documented from early 2020, point to a massive coverup and a larger structure involving the creation of bioweapons.

As to the mechanisms for this, some have speculated that Kennedy may be compromised in an Epstein-like manner; that pro-Israeli money is the factor; that his wife’s career in Hollywood may be dependent on pro-Israeli individuals; or that it is tied to the possibility that his uncle and father may have been assassinated at least in part over their attempts to stop Israel from getting nuclear weapons and attempts to designate Zionist organizations as foreign agents respectively.

But what seems evident now is that this Kennedy is acting as a functionary of the establishment. He thus takes on traits of past such figures. He generates excitement among his base, as Obama and Trump did, but is not giving them what they need (accountability regarding pandemic criminality). Like both of them, he appears to be opposed to the establishment, but like an opposable thumb, may simply be helping it grab more.

Kennedy is closely associated with Robert Malone, who appeared to many as a dissident of the establishment achieving fame on Joe Rogan’s show, but is still of it. Malone just posted a piece that — while citing Whitney Webb’s work on Robert Kadlec as the “head of the hydra” — effectively sides with him.

Kennedy’s rhetoric regarding pandemic origins has tended to be blaming China and he may well step up his anti-China rhetoric just as his book comes out. This may well dovetail with an escalation in general demonization of China, which certainly the Musk-backed Tucker Carlson corner of the US establishment are well versed in, but that the Biden section is also very comfortable with.

And, like Trump, Kennedy mixes relatively refreshing truths (on Ukraine war, corporate control for example) with ridiculous statements. This serves to keep him in the limelight and may have the effect of propagandizing those who take him seriously — and poisoning the truths he says to people who think everything he says is false. A Kennedy Derangement Syndrome.

What is happening with Kennedy may be part of an overall agenda. The pro-Israel group No Labels is attempting to forge a pro-establishment center, rather like the Kadima party in Israel did for a time. This is the opposite of what VotePact aims to do, which is to unite the antiestablishment forces and defeat the establishment. The Wall Street Journal published a piece by its founding chairman, corporate apparatchik Joe Lieberman, hyping the group on July 23. These forces might dovetail to produce an “alternative” to the duopoly which will effectively maintain the bulk of establishment policies.

Meanwhile, Cornel West is rather the inverse of Kennedy, making some reasonable statements regarding Israel and other foreign policy issues while largely going with the establishment narrative re the pandemic. There have been attacks between the two camps, producing a circular firing squad among antiestablishment forces instead of forging a united strategy to bring down the pro-war, anti-civil liberties duopoly.

Also, West shifted from the Peoples Party, which helped organize the left-right Rally Against the War Machine in February and is running Green Party which has continuously failed to utilize VotePact and not coincidentally has performed incredibly poorly for decades. The Libertarian candidacy of Gary Johnson in 2016, while fatally flawed in many ways, did have supporters who rebranded VotePact as The Balanced Rebellion — and had the most successful third party run since Ross Perot.

Particularly noteworthy is the role of Dennis Kucinich, Kennedy’s campaign manager, who has frequently spoken of Palestinian rights, and was the only person at the Rage Against the War Machine Rally to talk about “gain-of-function” lab work. If he has been questioned about all this, I am unaware of it.

For further reading, see my prior writing on RFK Jr., including the piece from April: