Who's Trying to Stop America Becoming Healthy Again?

Untangling the century of dark industry tactics that have poisoned the health of America

Now that RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings are about to begin, we are about to enter one of the most pivotal moments in the history of America’s health. Because of this, I believe it is critical to understand the context of what’s actually going on, and for each of us to immediately contact our Senators by phone and email (whose contact information can be found here).

I thus significantly revised a seven week old article on the war against America’s health that provided much of the critical context over what’s actually going on behind the scenes now. This was done both so that we can pre-empt those tactics and secure RFK’s nomination, but also so that you see exactly what they are doing and hence can spot the next time it’s done, or perhaps, even predict it (e.g., much of what’s occurred since I wrote the original article matched my predictions of what would happen as the same playbook is always used by these people).

Note: I make a point to avoid repeatedly posting on political subjects (rather than those directly related to our health), but given how consequential RFK’s nomination will be for that, I made an exception.

Silencing Dissent

Since COVID-19 began, those who tried to warn the public about the clear dangers of how we were addressing COVID-19 (e.g., lockdowns, vaccines, and remdesivir) have been targeted and silenced. While many were initially in disbelief our government could do something like this, more cynical parties (e.g., myself) suspected something like this would happen (as it always does) and caught the early warning signs of it.

In my eyes, beyond the over-the-top marketing throughout the media to promote the COVID boondoggle, there were three particularly noteworthy (and interwoven) facets to this campaign:

1. Widespread censorship of opposing ideas (e.g., GoFundMe deleting fundraisers for individuals who had severe COVID vaccine injuries and nowhere else to turn for help since those fundraisers alerted people to the vaccines not being completely “safe and effective” and most of the news networks refusing to question the COVID narrative). Of note, from the start, I assumed there had to be shadow banning occurring (as I could see the effects of it happen in real time) and coordination between the social media platforms and the Biden administration—an illegal activity which was gradually confirmed by lawsuits (e.g., due to the Twitter file) and other leaks that revealed shadow banning was widespread on the tech platforms.

2. The establishment targeted anyone who dissented against the narrative in a coordinated fashion. For example, many absurd complaints were used to target the medical licenses of physicians who were saving patients from dying from COVID (e.g., Meryl Nass, whose suspension was so absurd that 13 members of Maine’s legislature formally complained to the medical board about it).

3. A very aggressive and coordinated campaign to neutralize anyone who disputed the narrative on social media. Early on, I began to suspect this was happening because I’d see the same bad actors (typically doctors) use the same sculpted talking points. In April 2024, I found out an industry funded group did indeed exist, and that:
•Many of the people I’d suspected were in a coordinated conspiracy did indeed belong to a secret group (“Shots Heard”) dedicated to fighting misinformation online.
•That group was tied to the Federal Government and funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
•That group, one by one, would target dissident healthcare workers and attempt to both get them removed from social media, to have their medical licenses taken away or get them fired from work, and in some cases, to directly harass them at their homes.

Fortunately, while these individuals were highly coordinated and had a significant amount of support behind them, they lacked an effective understanding of how to effectively influence online opinion (in part because their positions are lies—which makes them much harder to sell the public). As such, while they were able to create a great deal of misery for activists who bravely challenged the COVID cartel, they were fairly ineffective at defending the narrative.

Recently, it began to be disclosed that the pharmaceutical and processed food lobbyists were targeting RFK Jr. to block him from getting his appointment as HHS (so they could continue poisoning America for profit). As I looked into what was happening, I noticed numerous similarities to what I’d observed with Shots Heard. I thus reached out to two Substack investigative journalists who have done great work throughout the pandemic, Sonia Elijah and John Davidson and asked them to help me look into this. Sure enough, they found what I’d expected would be there.

Lydia Green

Recently CNN hosted a hit pierce on RFK Jr. which featured a mom trying to find a way to explain how RFK “betrayed her” by convincing her to raise her child in a healthy manner.

After I saw this, my first thought was, “that was quite the attempt to make following a healthy lifestyle seem bad” followed by “her language was very sculpted, I wonder if a public relations firm hired her.” I then asked John Davidson about her background, and sure enough (as Davidson shows here) found out that she was in ‘Shots Heard’ and had a long history of working to promote the vaccine industry.

Furthermore (as you often see with PR firms after they’ve finished crafting the rhetoric most likely to benefit their client), her talking points were also featured in many other mainstream left-wing publications (e.g., NPR, Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan UK, AP, The Guardian, Newsweek, MSN)—something I find noteworthy because of just how absurd and nonsensical her arguments were.

Sometimes, the sculpted language they use is very clever, but other times it is patently ridiculous, especially when looked back upon after the current social hysteria has passed (e.g., consider many of the absurd lines used to sell the COVID vaccines or what Lydia Greene is saying). One particularly noteworthy one was used on national television to sell a smallpox vaccine campaign George W. Bush pushed for prior to invading Iraq (under the lie Saddam had smallpox he could release on the United States) that was quickly terminated because it gave too many people myocarditis.

Marsha: I want to see the vaccination made available, I want to see the vaccine made available soon, and I want my children to get it.

Announcer: After September 11th, Marsha Jordan-Burk asked her pediatrician to vaccinate her children against Smallpox.

Pediatrician: Their sense of urgency is, they don’t want their children getting destroyed the way the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Announcer: But Dr. Barnett had to tell her and many other parents since that there is no vaccine. The reason is a lack of supply.

Note: the disastrous experimental anthrax vaccine campaign (which disabled 250,000 military personnel) was initially justified under the Gulf War belief Saddam would unleash anthrax on our soldiers (which he never did).

In short, to quote Davidson’s investigation of that CNN segment:

So we have yet another organization masquerading as concerned former anti-vax moms who have been given an unbelievable amount of domestic and international press but are nothing more than an astroturf organization entirely funded completely by the HHS/CDC to spread their pro-vaccine messaging.

Note: Davidson also highlighted how another prominent “grassroots” and “parent-created” vaccine advocacy organization (Voices for Vaccines) takes money from almost every large pharmaceutical company on the planet.

Food Lobbyists

In a recent article, I discussed the chronology of the FDA’s War Against America’s Health and life-changing natural medicines like DMSO (which rapidly addresses chronic pain and a wide range of injuries) and GHB (which safely cures insomnia and the illness that results from chronic sleep deprivation).

Unfortunately, after industry failed to convince Congress or the Courts to block these efforts (as science was not on their side), they pivoted to directly pressuring the executive branch (e.g., the Secretary of Agriculture) to sabotage the FDA’s efforts to regulate industry, and just six years after he started, Harvey Wiley, the first head of the FDA (who was one of the most respected public servants in the country) resigned as he felt he could do more to help us as a private citizen than from within the government.

Because of this, many toxic food additives got “grandfathered” into our food supply as “generally recognized as safe” and to this day many chemicals that are legal to put in American foods have been banned in Europe.

In my eyes, the key takeaway from this time was how relentless the food industry would be to protect selling toxic and adulterated foods and that they used many of the same tactics we see now (e.g., cutthroat lobbying, blackmailing newspapers they advertised in not to support clean food laws and aggressively peddling paid off scientific “experts” to promote junk science). This in turn, led Wiley to argue that the only way to create political change to ensure a safe food supply was for the public at large to demand it.

The Monopolization of Food

Throughout history, two realities have always governed food.

First, food shortages are one of the greatest things which threaten a government’s stability. As such, leaders throughout history have been terrified of famine (to the point some were willing to start wars to reduce their population) as it often leads to rebellion and the ruling class being kicked out.

Second, one of the most reliable strategies for generating wealth and power has been to monopolize life-essential resources, and ever since the post-civil war era of the Robber Barons (where Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry), this tactic has become increasingly popular. For example, America’s public transportation industry was monopolized and then gutted (making sure cars were necessary), Rockefeller took over and transformed education into something that enslaved rather than empowered the populace, and many of the problems we face in medicine resulted from oligarchs like Rockefeller monopolizing American medicine (e.g., they funded the American Medical Association which aggressively eliminated superior natural therapies from competing with the medical industry).

Because of this principle, there has been increasing pushes to monopolize the food supply. On one end, Communist nations have done it by trying to eliminate independent farmers so the citizenry are forced to rely upon the state to be fed—policies which have led to some of the greatest carnage in history (e.g., Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine and Mao's Great Leap Forward).

In Western society, this monopolization often follows a similar pattern once a viable strategy to monopolize a life-essential resource is discovered:
•An improved (scientific) way of obtaining the same life-essential resource is introduced to the society.
•Because of the apparent superiority of this approach and aggressive marketing and lobbying in favor of it, the population gradually shifts to using it rather than the traditional means of obtaining the life essential resource.
•In time, almost all of the population has lost the ability to obtain resources as they had traditionally done.
•Once all sources of competition are eliminated, the costs of (often unsustainable) the new way of doing things are continually raised until it becomes significantly worse than what preceded it.

Note: there are many examples of how this was done in medicine (e.g., I’m currently working on the medicalization of childbirth). Likewise, many clean and affordable energy technologies have been ruthlessly suppressed so that the costly and environmentally damaging technologies we use now can remain commercially viable (which I covered here).

In the case of agriculture, one of the most pivotal shifts occurred after World War I, when our newly created industrial capacity to create phosphate explosives was repurposed to create phosphate fertilizers. In tandem with this, the scientific consensus shifted to plant nutrition being primarily a product of the available nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) in the soil.
Note: ammonium nitrate, another common fertilizer, was also a key explosive used in World War I.

The NPK approach to agriculture initially dramatically increased crop yields, but was also quite problematic as it did not take into consideration the micronutrients (e.g., minerals) plants needed for growth, resulting in over-farmed soil quickly becoming nutritionally depleted and a variety of issues following (e.g., poor farming practices creating the devastating Dust Bowl during the great depression and large monoculture plantations which required increasing amounts of pesticides and herbicides to keep those nutritionally deprived plants viable).

Note: many believe the nutritional depletion of our soil is one of the root causes of the loss of vitality, which has gradually emerged over the last century (although I believe it began with the smallpox vaccine due to the blood stasis it created throughout the body, an issue which worsened with each subsequent vaccine [due to them also adversely affecting the physiologic zeta potential)). For those interested in learning more about the massive and sustained loss of vitality that has occurred over the last century (and what caused it), I synopsized our exploration of the subject here.

In my eyes, three other pivotal shifts in the food supply also help paint a critical picture of what happened to the food supply.

First, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture made the decision that America needed to transition from small family farms to large monoculture operations (his motto was “get big or get out”), a policy which coincided with major agribusinesses taking over the farming sector and farming subsidies which entrenched this new status quo. In contrast, family farms began to disappear from America.
Note: the farming subsidies work by setting a base price for each cash crop (e.g., corn) and then compensating farmers if they receive less for a crop than its set value. This forces farmers to overproduce the crops to compensate for the small margins and gives the processed food industry an incredibly cheap source of raw food materials. As a result, most of the processed foods we eat are components of those raw materials (e.g., corn, wheat, soy), along with chemical additives to turn them into “foods.”

Second, the tobacco industry (which had suffered numerous devastating defeats in court), in the 1980s decided to diversify by investing in the processed food industry. There, the industry scientists who had figured out how to make cigarettes highly addictive directed their focus to doing the same with processed foods (and from a young age marketing them to the entire population). As a result, these foods became extremely addictive—a Machiavellian tactic that allowed them to override the natural reflex humans would have to reject their unhealthy foods with a craving to consume as much of them as possible.
Note: David Kessler, the former head of the FDA, in his book The End of Overeating, shares that industry heads in the processed food industry admitted to him they deliberately engineered their foods to be addictive.

Third, the “Gene Revolution” (which was brought on by the US completely relaxing all regulatory safeguards on genetically modified foods) caused our food supply to be flooded with a wide range of experimental genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While a variety of issues exist with these organisms, I believe the most consequential ones are:
•They typically require much higher amounts of agricultural chemicals (e.g., Roundup) to grow and hence adversely affect people sensitive to higher levels of pesticides (which is a sizable portion of the population).
•There are a variety of ways GMOs adversely affect human health (that will almost never be studied by mainstream science).
•They can be patented and thus are aggressively used to monopolize agriculture. For example, many GMO crops are engineered not to produce seeds, so farmers have to purchase them each time they want to farm. Likewise, one of Monsanto’s infamous tactics was successfully suing farmers who had Monsanto’s GMO crops growing in their field because they drifted over from a neighbor’s farm. Most tragically, many of the predatory agricultural corporations (and groups like The Gates Foundation) have pushed GMOs on less affluent peoples and nation-states.
Note: Monsanto was acquired by Bayer in 2018 and technically no longer exists.

Ozempic and the Food Supply

The phrase "the root causes of disease" is often mentioned when discussing health, yet due to powerful lobbyists defending industries that contribute to poor health, basic actions to address these causes are never taken. For example, essential steps like funding a food system that promotes health (or supporting sustainable farming practices that produce nutritious food) are ignored. As such, chronic illness keeps on skyrocketing in America and comes closer and closer to bankrupting the country.

One of the best illustrations of this has been the relentless push to put everyone (including children) on Ozempic, a costly weight loss drug with significant side effects that causes you to regain the lost weight once you stop using it (hence making you a customer for life). A push that is extremely detrimental to both the health and finances of our country, but nonetheless is being relentlessly promoted by our leading medical organizations (e.g., The American Academy of Pediatrics) and the FDA (whose head was the keynote speaker at a massive pharmaceutical investor conference that pitched Ozempic as the investment of the decade.

In turn, because of how well the current push for Ozempic illustrates the systemic corruption and dysfunction throughout the healthcare system, I edited a series of interview clips together that concisely portray the magnitude of this problem:

Likewise, I also previously published a detailed article on the subject.

Public Enemy Number One

Since starting his campaign, in addition to questioning the assumed safety of vaccines, RFK Jr. has also called out our food system for making Americans chronically ill and destroying the environment. Given how much money is each of these industries, this has made him a lot of enemies.

For example, the moment RFK Jr. began gaining traction in the national election, a wide range of dirty tricks were used against him (concisely summarized in this video, which illustrates why I never had the courage to pursue politics):

Likewise, on 10/24/24, a viral 𝕏 post (28 millions views) by fellow Substack journalist The Vigilant Fox highlighted the recent discovery that the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate (who had been working behind the scenes to “kill 𝕏”) had in January at a meeting stated that “RFK - black ops being set up to look at RFK. Nervous about the impact of him on the election.”

Note: even more egregious was that the Biden administration repeatedly refused to give RFK Jr. Secret Service protection despite him being one of the highest risk assassination targets in presidential history. Kennedy, having already been targeted by assailants and that refusal persisting despite a national uproar over the Biden administration’s conduct (e.g., this post got 30.8 million views).

Similarly, after Pierre Kory testified in favor of ivermectin, he had an experience akin to stepping on a hornet's nest and was suddenly blitzed with attacks on his character from every direction. Amid this disorienting assault, Willian Grant, a leading vitamin D researcher reached out to him and stated, “This is what they’ve been doing to vitamin D research for decades,” and forwarded Kory an article by The Union of Concerned Scientists describing the playbook industry always uses to suppress inconvenient science. This playbook was made famous decades ago by the tobacco industry.

​​I received that email at a time of my life and that of the FLCCC that was going sideways fast. I/we just could not understand what the hell was going on. We had identified a solution to the pandemic and not only was no-one listening, they were attacking our findings, our paper, and our credibility. Then I read that article and..Everything. Started. To. Make. Sense.

In short, as stated earlier in the article, many of the unscrupulous things the food industry will do to protect its interests are simply a more evolved version of the playbook they’ve used for over a century.

Public Relations

Public relations (PR) describes the science of combining marketing with propaganda. What most people don’t appreciate is how incredibly effective PR is (e.g., effective PR is a major reason why so many bad medical practices have persisted) or that (until very recently) PR completely controlled the public’s perception—to the point it essentially transformed governance (and “Democracy”) from policies being chosen based on how much the electorate supported them, to how much it would cost to sell them to the public with a PR campaign. This flow chart for examples describes how I’ve watched government actually work for decades:

Remarkably, despite the PR industry’s tactics being incredibly repetitive and thus something you’d expect people to see through (especially the over-the-top global PR campaign used to sell the COVID vaccines)—until recently, most people simply didn’t. The PR industry has fortunately greatly struggled in the online era as their approaches (e.g., blasting a well-sculpted lie on every media platform without allowing anyone to question its narrative) no longer work once everyone has a voice and the ridiculous lies can be quickly exposed.

While much more could be said about the PR industry, the best metaphor I’ve ever seen for it comes from the cult-classic “They Live” where invisible aliens have infiltrated and enslaved society. The main character gets access to glasses, which allow him to see the aliens amongst us and the subliminal messages in the media they use to control us.

Essentially, I believe recognizing the PR industry’s campaigns is analogous to obtaining those glasses, and it is astounding how different the world looks once you can see their (incredibly repetitive) tactics.

Protect Our Care

One common PR tactic is to pay a trusted third party (e.g., an “expert”) promote their message, as in most cases (at least until recently) people did not see through it. One way this is commonly done is to create an organization with a name that implies the opposite of what the group actually does and then have that front group promote policies that harm their stated cause to support the industry.

Note: another common example is that many medical charities are essentially pharmaceutical front groups, and use all the money they raise to promote pharmaceutical products while simultaneously disparaging or attacking natural therapies that actually cure the disease (e.g., I showed how this was done with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society here).

Two weeks ago, I saw an article on Politico that stated:

Democratic-aligned healthcare advocacy groups are putting together a strategy to fight Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be HHS secretary.

During an organizing call on Monday, the details of which have not been reported publicly, more than 200 people from several dozen of those groups, along with other advocacy organizations, discussed strategies to oppose Kennedy’s nomination. That included which Republican senators to target and the most effective way to talk to them, according to Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care.

Protect Our Care is hiring teams in several states, including Alaska, Idaho, Maine, and West Virginia, to lobby senators at the state and local level through experts and personal stories, with events slated to begin as soon as next week.

As I read the article, four things immediately jumped out at me.

1. Lydia Green was likely one of those “personal stories.”

2. Many of the people on this call reminded me of the food industry executives and paid-off scientists who continuously fought against Wiley (the first FDA commissioner), but much later on (e.g., when their health had fallen apart) confessed to Wiley he had been entirely correct and that they regretted sabotaging his efforts to save America’s health.

3. The fact that this was publicly being announced in the mainstream media was likely an attempt to solicit donations to fund their PR operation against RFK Jr. (and not long after Politico shared that they’d raised over a million dollars to stop RFK Jr.).

4. I needed to know who was funding “Protect Our Care.”

After a bit of digging, I found out Protect Our Care was financed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a 501(c)(4), a special type of non-profit that is allowed to engage in political lobbying and more importantly, does not have to disclose its donors. This group in turn, has been used to fund various left-wing political causes and has been repeatedly criticized by left-leaning media outlets (e.g., the New York Times) as a “dark money” organization that exceeds the scope of anything the Republicans had done in the past.

Arabella [which runs the Sixteen Thirty Fund] and its nonprofit network have been criticized as “dark money” funders both for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing organizations and for hosting hundreds of “pop-up groups”—websites designed to look like standalone nonprofits that are really projects of an Arabella-run nonprofit.

Note: complaints have also been filed against the Sixteen Thirty Fund for taking in large amounts of foreign money, which is then spent on political campaigns (something illegal under US law), publishing fake news websites designed to appear to be real local media organizations, and it engaging in political advertising not legally permitted for a 501(c)(4), and avoiding the disclosures required for those types of political activities.

Furthermore, according to Politico, the Sixteen Thirty Fund (which received 51.7 million from a single anonymous donor to influence the 2018 elections) was one of the largest television advertisers during the 2018 midterm elections—elections where coincidently a massive number of military intelligence operatives (e.g., from the CIA) ran as Democrats for Congressional seats and completely changed the direction of the party. As such, I feel it’s reasonable to suspect some of those invisible donors also have financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry.

Note: Protect Our Care originated from the group Healthcare for America Now (HCN), another 501(c)(4), which was criticized for being another dark money organization that took a lot of foreign money and published misleading advertisements. HCN was created to persuade the public to support Obamacare. This law ended up being highly detrimental to the public as lobbying eliminated its critical provisions and transformed it into a boondoggle for the healthcare industry, which doubled the cost of health insurance and put a variety of provisions in place that made it much more difficult for physicians to practice independently and pushed healthcare workers to “improve” care by pushing things like more vaccinations and gender-affirming care.

In short, the group targeting RFK’s HHS secretary nomination is also one of the largest funders of the Democratic party, financed the Congressional campaigns of numerous members of the military-industrial complex, deliberately hides who it gets its money from, and engages in a variety of highly questionable tactics. This concisely encapsulates the shift many of us witnessed in the Democratic party after Obama became president, and the party shifted to promoting overseas wars and the medical-industrial complex.

This is an important point to keep in mind because even though most of the opposition to RFK’s nomination are coming from Democrat Senators, until very recently, many of the policies RFK is advocating for (e.g., cleaning up the food supply) were widely widely supported by the Democrat party (and to some extent still are).

Who Funds This?

Based on everything described thus far (along with the prominent left-wing philanthropists like Bill Gates, who tend to fund lucrative pharmaceutical and agrochemical initiatives aggressively), it seems reasonable to assume that Protect Our Care is being covertly funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

Previously, John Davidson did an extensive dissection of who was funding Shots Heard (which can be viewed here), and who was funding Team Halo, another online group that harassed anyone who challenged the COVID cartel (which can be viewed here). Concisely, these maps show how interlocked the pharmaceutical industry is with many prominent left-wing politicians, businessmen, philanthropists, and non-profits.

Here’s what he found for Protect Our Care (which can be viewed in more detail here).

Likewise, one of the main funders of the Sixteen Thirty Fund (Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who lives in Wyoming and is sometimes called the “New George Soros”) has attracted controversy for using his fortune to fund left-wing politicians throughout the United States (which is technically illegal as he is not a US Citizen). Interestingly, Wyss made his fortune from a medical device company (Synthes), which he sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for 19.7 billion (3.2 billion in cash and 97.4 million J&J shares)—making him heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry.

Furthermore, in 2009, his company (which makes orthopedic hardware and implants) was indicted by US Attorneys for selling experimental (unauthorized) bone cement, which killed at least three patients. Remarkably, while three Synthes executives went to prison, Wyss (who was intimately involved in his company’s product design) was not charged.

Additionally, Protect Our Care is also being funded by the Hopewell Fund, another large Left-wing dark money which is not only funded by Wyss but also George Soros (along with various Silicon Valley billionaires who have extensive ties to globalist organizations). While less is known about the Hopewell Fund, they have become notorious for putting out online political advertisements they falsely disguise as authentic local news reports.

In turn, both the Hopewell Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund are now being managed by Arabella Advisors, which in turn is funded by billionaires such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Note: in the not too distant past, Left-wing groups (e.g., the New York Times^1,2,3) actively spoken out about the dangers Dark Money in politics poses to our Democracy.

More remarkably, recently, a Right-wing lobbying firm run by Mike Pence (which also is a dark money group that hides its donors but has many links to the pharmaceutical industry) has implemented its own costly campaign against RFK Jr. In this case, unlike the Left-wing lobbyists attacking RFK for “taking away our medical choices”they’re instead accused RFK Jr. of the opposite and attacked him for being “too pro-choice” (despite Trump being one of the most pro-life presidents in history) and thus an unacceptable nominee for any Senator opposed to abortion. In my eyes, this suggests that the pharmaceutical industry has realized the money being put into Protect Our Care is unlikely to stop RFK Jr.’s nomination, so they are trying to come at him from another angle (and that Pence’s opposition to RFK Jr. is primarily due to him being paid to do lobby against him).

Note: given that all these groups are designed to hide where their funding is coming from, but there are nonetheless many strong links between them and the pharmaceutical industry, I feel it is fair to assume there is significantly more pharmaceutical money we can’t see behind them.

Fortunately however, the widespread distrust created in the mass media by the Trump presidency and COVID-19, along with uncensored social media platforms like Twitter (𝕏) has broken the grip PR had on our society, and now when its tactics are used the audacious lies often have to be so over the top to reach people that more and more of the public has lost in their trust in all of it (e.g., many have not forgotten that the “miraculous” COVID vaccines were sold to us with lotteries, gift cards, drugs, alcohol, free brothel sessions, free KFC or that we were repeatedly told to socially distance while having sex). Of these, the one I best remember was CNN repeatedly promoting a year of free donuts if you got vaccinated.

Public Relations Campaigns

In my eyes, there are two critical things to understand about PR:

•It’s incredibly effective (at least it was until recently).

•The same tactics are used over and over (e.g., paying off “independent” third parties to promote your message or sculpting emotionally manipulative phrases and blasting them everywhere), so once you can recognize them, it all becomes very fake and transparent.

In turn, since all this money was raised by these Dark Money groups to stop RFK Jr., I expected so see many classic PR campaigns, which is exactly what followed their initial Politico announcement. These included:

•The New York Times (or a PR firm) recently writing a series of hit pieces on RFK Jr. (many of which were deliberately misleading) that catastrophized the threat he poses to vaccine program.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16}

•Other prominent mainstream publications such as The Wall Street Journal recently joining this bandwagon (and for the first time are suddenly concerned about a HSS’s nominees financial conflicts of interest). Of these, the hit piece I was most surprised by was a 1/27 one by the New York Post (as this Fox owned publication tends to support Trump’s positions). In turn, I took as a sign of how desperate the medical-industrial-complex is becoming to stop RFK Jr. (as nothing thus far has worked).

Note: the only other Trump nominee who has been repeatedly attacked in the media (Hegseth for Secretary of Defense) was likely targeted because of his opposition to costly overseas military interventions. However, the attacks against Hegseth got were much smaller than those against RFK, something I believe is reflective of the fact healthcare spending vastly exceeds defense spending. For example, due to his popularity as the number one news host in the nation and a lack of dependency on corporate advertisers, Tucker Carlson was able to cover a lot of stories no one else was allowed to (e.g., criticism of the War in Ukraine). However, as his final broadcast jeopardized Fox New’s pharmaceutical sponsorship, he was immediately dismissed from the network.

•Trying to cement a variety of false narratives (e.g., through the NYT) that will create a hysteria that justifies not confirming him (e.g., falsely claiming RFK tried to ban the polio vaccine or stating that RFK was responsible for the Measles outbreak in Samoa despite it, until recently, was attributed to two nurses accidentally killing two babies they vaccinated and covering it up).

•Falsely claiming 17,000 doctors had signed a letter from Protect Our Care against RFK’s nomination which then received widespread coverage throughout the mainstream media.

•The day before his confirmation hearing, having one of RFK’s relatives issue a scathing (but fairly empty) attack on his character that highlighted things like RFK’s love for falconry “making him a predator.” This letter was then rapidly paraded across numerous media outlets, something you frequently see in PR campaigns.

•Having television guests provide (often ridiculous) PR sculpted testimonies to discredit RFK Jr. such as the one from Lydia Green I shared above.

•Convincing Senators to promote those same talking points. Consider for example, this widely seen statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren (a politician who has branded herself as a tireless advocate for America’s health).

After I saw this, I decided to look into Warren’s sponsorship and discovered:

Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4.

Remarkably, the online community caught onto this very quickly, and now whenever Senator Sanders or Warren Promote vaccines and attack RFK, almost all of the replies they receive are negative and frequently highlight their conflicts of interest. For example:

A similar ratio was also seen on subsequent posts Sanders made about his hearing.

Likewise, captioned shares of his hearing like this one have attracted more views than the hearing itself.

I cannot overstate how profound of a change this is, as just a few years ago, PR campaigns would sway the entire population and individuals like Bernie would likely have received 95% support in the comments rather than 2%. This is earth shattering, and I feel the shift is so profound that the establishment simply has not come to terms with how much power they’ve lost over the last ten years (which is why they continue to double down on their now outdated and ineffective tactics). In turn, I believe the single most important thing us contacting our representatives will accomplish is simply making the reality settle in that now if they to stay in office, they have to support what their constituents want.

Note: I am personally looking forward to RFK Jr.’s hearing, both because the Senators (who are simply repeating industry talking points) will likely not know how to respond when confronted with actual data and because of the fact a large portion of the public will see through what they are doing.

Conclusion

One of the things I find truly remarkable about RFK’s nomination is that most of the opposition to it (and the money to fund that opposition) is coming from the same people who constantly claim to advocate for our health—but in truth have only let things get far far worse.

This touches on why I believe public relations is so toxic to Democracy—by turning public opinion into something that could be shaped with well-crafted campaigns, it made it much easier for governments and corporations to create the perception they were doing good, rather than actually earn the public’s trust through doing the right thing.

Fortunately, the core aspects of human nature rarely change, and Harvey Wiley’s lessons from fighting the food and pharmaceutical industry over a century ago are just as applicable now as they were back then. He faced the same unscrupulous tactics and junk science we see now. He correctly concluded that the only way to fix that mess was to galvanize the public into demanding it—something we are finally seeing again with the Make America Healthy Again Movement.

Likewise, when Wiley proposed his reforms (e.g., not using toxic food preservatives or selling adulterated foods), he was met with stiff opposition from the industry that widely decried the severe damage his unnecessary policies would do to their businesses.

Yet, as time went forward, the industry eventually adopted many of his policies because they indeed helped them (e.g., once they improved the quality of their products the public bought far more of them). This in many ways is similar to the experience RFK Jr. is having—initially his detractors assume he is unhinged and a danger to America’s health—yet once they actually talk with him, they realize they’re on the same page and his policies are what they also want.

I am now extremely hopeful that the 2024 elections marked a turning point where dynasties behind the systemic corruption that’s infected our system at last lost their grip on Democracy, and voices like Kennedy’s will shift from being “fringe viewpoints” to self-evident truths thanks to being in a climate where we can openly discuss them with those around us. That’s been a long time coming, and it’s been wonderful to be a part of this historic change with all of you!

If you have not done so, please contact your Senator (via the phone numbers and emails in this directory), particularly if you live in Maine, Alaska, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Jersey, or Nevada (as the most pivotal Senators are there).

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