Why Do Some of RFK Jr.’s Own Family Members Believe the Media’s Lies about Him?

Introduction

On August 6, the New York Times published an article by Peter Baker titled “Anguish in Camelot: Kennedy Campaign Roils Storied Political Family”. The article’s one-sentence summary states, “The presidential bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tested the bonds of an iconic Democratic clan that does not want him to run and does not know what to do about it.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also known as Bobby, is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. He is the son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the presidency. (Despite this family history, the Biden administration recently declined RFK Jr.’s request for Secret Service protection, and the media as usual have been misinforming the public about the significance of this decision.)

Baker’s one-sentence summary conveys the message that RFK Jr.’s family is united in opposing his candidacy, which is untrue. The article’s featured image is of Kennedy giving a speech in Boston, Massachusetts, to announce his candidacy on April 19, 2023. To the left and above the photographer, out of view of the telephoto lens, were members of his family who were there to support him.

The aim of the New York Times article is to inform us how certain members of Kennedy’s family oppose his candidacy due to their disagreement with certain of his views.

However, Baker’s article is not journalism. It is a work of political propaganda aimed at prejudicing us against Kennedy as a presidential candidate who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

You can tell this by the way the Times portrays RFK Jr.’s critical relatives as though holding correct opinions about him, which portrayal is accompanied by the Times’s own reliance on strawman argumentation for the purpose of demonization.

A strawman argument is logical fallacy whereby a false characterization of an opposing view is presented, and then a counterargument is made to challenge that “strawman” instead of addressing the actual opposing view. This is a favored propaganda device utilized by the mainstream media to deflect from real issues and to control people’s thoughts by deceiving them into holding mistaken beliefs.

In this instance, we are supposed to believe that Kennedy is a crazy conspiracy theorist prone to bigoted rants. To persuade us into drawing this false conclusion about Kennedy, the Times demonstrably lies about his views and statements.

The Power of the Mainstream Media’s Political Propaganda

The type of political propaganda produced by the New York Times is highly effective. As illuminated in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal treatise on the subject, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the mainstream media serve a propaganda function, limiting the range of allowable opinion to a very narrow spectrum in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of harmful and outright criminal government policies.

This function of the media helps to explain why Democrats tended to place even more faith in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after it repeatedly lied to the public about COVID‑19-related matters than they did before the pandemic.

The lies propagated by the CDC included falsehoods aimed at serving the financial interests of the pharmaceutical companies, such as deceiving people into the belief that two doses of an mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine would confer durable sterilizing immunity, ending the pandemic by stopping infection and transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2. The reliance on this lie by government officials reveals how the aim was to manufacture consent for the policy aim of achieving high vaccination rates rather than to properly educate the public with respect for the right to informed consent.

The consequence of the media’s parroting of the government’s lies was the systematic violation of this fundamental human right.

Throughout the pandemic, the government colluded with social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor factually accurate information that didn’t align with the adopted political agenda, while the Big Tech companies in turn partnered with the media’s faux “fact check” industry to suppress truth while spreading deceitful government and pharmaceutical industry propaganda.

I was banned by LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting how the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines confer better protection than natural immunity was contradicted at the time by virtually all the non-CDC-originating scientific literature and was later falsified by the CDC’s own data as reported by its own researchers in its own MMWR journal.

Yet a recent poll showed that, instead of being repulsed by how the government sought to systematically violate the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is supposed to protect our freedom of speech and freedom of the press, most Democrats now favor continued censorship and trust the government to tell them what to think.

The malevolent influence of the New York Times and other propaganda outlets helps to explain how this situation can exist in a supposedly free country supposedly populated by free-thinking individuals.

In fact, such statist propaganda is so effective—as Peter Baker’s article clearly demonstrates—that members of the Kennedy clan who oppose Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy have themselves fallen prey to the brazen lies being told about him by mainstream media outlets, with the standard for deception being set by America’s “newspaper of record”, the New York Times.