Mike Tracey Does the Bobber

And in doing so he places himself in a kosher "journalist" sandwich, between slices of marbled rye: alt-promoter Greenwald and legacy-destroyer Hersh

It’s funny to me how mindlessly perusing the disinformation-industrial complex on the web can so easily trigger subjects worthy of analyzing more deeply. Case in point - here is a System Update video cover image I saw that momentarily surprised me:

Momentarily because I quickly read the fine print and saw that it’s reporting by Michael Tracey and not slippery Glenn Greenwald, and when I got into it further I discovered that it’s not a single story by Tracey on a Greenwald-hosted episode but rather just one story on a show with Mike filling in yet again for Glenn across the board. The reasoning behind this relates to Greenwald’s previous promotion of the RFK Jr candidacy in its various iterations going back to late spring of last year.

Here is Tracey’s intro to the video, which is connected to an article that he published on his Substack several days ago:

There are a few matters there which I’m going to bore down on here, the least of which is the actual claimed heart of Tracey’s story, which is the negative impact on these state-level micro-parties of the alliances they made with independent candidate RFK Jr before he did to them what he had only months earlier done to Democrats who had supported his run for that nomination. Rather the matters that I am going to explore are touched on around 45 seconds into that clip:

- “And lo and behold, perhaps based on the strength of his vaunted surname or for whatever other reason… because they were so enamored with his familial credentials…”

- “… there’s a lot of credulous podcasters who brought him on and just showered him with awe and kindness…”

- “He did become, according to a good deal of polling, the most formidable third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. And Ross Perot in 1992 made a huge electoral impact, there were points in the 1992 campaign in which Ross Perot was actually polling ahead of both Bill Clinton and George HW Bush, so it looked like he could actually win the election outright.”

So let's tackle those in stated order, starting with the dynastic Kennedys.

Sy Hersh Does JFK

A major part of his Substack piece is about RFK Jr’s familial history and his use of that in his campaigning, and the opportunity that gave Tracey to attack JFK and RFK Sr during the Kennedy administration. Here is how he leads into that assault:

One of the nagging issues I’ve always had with the RFK 2024 saga is that it’s been overwhelmingly fueled by the self-serving “anti-establishment” slant that he puts on standard-fare Kennedy clan mythology — which then gets mindlessly amplified by the gullible podcaster crowd. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that anyone would have ever even heard of this middling environmental lawyer if not for his allegedly awe-inspiring initials. And for bogus dynastic mythology to underpin the core rationale of a presidential campaign was a tell-tale sign that something was fundamentally amiss about the whole enterprise.

A full examination of the history-warping bunk that RFK Jr. and Co. peddle is beyond the scope of this article. But I know there will be people brimming with anger that I have desecrated the storied Kennedy legacy, so I will offer a truncated summary. (Oddly, lots of these same people would have been the most gleeful Kennedy excoriators in an earlier political era, probably heckling Ted Kennedy about “Chappaquiddick” and so forth.)

The historical distortions are perhaps best encapsulated by a widely-circulated John F. Kennedy quote that RFK Jr. has frequently repeated, including at his April 2023 presidential announcement speech: that his martyred uncle wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” — with RFK Jr. endeavoring to complete that allegedly unfinished business. The origin of this chronically misused quote is the April 26, 1966 edition of the New York Times, in which an anonymous source sought to posthumously characterize JFK’s alleged attitude toward the CIA:

Hence, there is no direct quote of JFK ever saying this. But even if he had, the clear context — entirely unbeknownst to legions of RFK Jr. followers — was JFK in the throes of pique after he had ordered a CIA invasion and aerial bombardment of Cuba, in hopes of killing Fidel Castro and imposing regime change — and the CIA failed to deliver. Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK did not move to “splinter” the CIA; instead, he radically empowered it to better advance his interests, including by authorizing the CIA to conduct combat operations in Vietnam, hugely boosting its budget, and turning it into his own personal assassination outfit to take out Castro. JFK only wanted to “splinter” the CIA insofar as it failed to achieve his initial regime change objective, and therefore required some reorganization to enhance its efficacy and lethality.

In 1997, Seymour Hersh published The Dark Side of Camelot, quite possibly the best available corrective to persistent Kennedy mythology. The book is well worth reading in full, and it’s a shame that it’s been so relatively under-recognized within Hersh’s body of work. Hersh spent years reporting what would become the definitive dissection of the glittering aura around JFK, as well as his personal and political bagman Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. — sometimes touchingly referred to as “Jack and Bobby,” whose lionization in liberal circles had long insulated them from sustained critique. (Imagine any President today installing their own brother as Attorney General and it being depicted as a touching tale of fraternal bonding.) But in a peculiar twist, the most fervent Kennedy defenders nowadays are Republicans, by virtue of their devotion to RFK Jr. — at whose direction they now proselytize with the zeal of recent converts.

Now, Hersh is someone who is almost universally lauded as the greatest investigative journalist of the last half century and maybe all time. But I’ve long been skeptical about that, because he’s a guy who almost disappears for years at a time and then suddenly reappears pushing some mammoth story. He’s also a Jew who worked from the Jewish-owned NY Times when he made his bones as the Great Investigator in Vietnam (My Lai), in the same era as the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers business, an era before the Jewish deep state had arisen to real power, when the (Jewish-influenced/managed/owned) media still challenged power in a way people today harken back to wistfully. In October of 1969 while Ellsberg was copying the materials that would become the Pentagon Papers published by the Times, Hersh was first hearing about a soldier being held in the stockade in Georgia whose name was William Calley.

Here is what his wiki says about his Kennedy book:

Hersh's 1997 best-seller The Dark Side of Camelot, about the political career of John F. Kennedy, was controversial and heavily criticized. Shortly before publication, it emerged in the press that Hersh had removed claims at the last minute which were based on forged documents provided to him by fraudster Lex Cusack, including a fake hush money contract between Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. An article about the controversy in The Washington Post said: "The strange and twisted saga of the JFK file is part cautionary tale, part slapstick farce, a story of deception and self-delusion in the service of commerce and journalism". Hersh and a one-time co-author had received a $800,000 advance for the project. Other aspects of the book also came under criticism, including its prying into Kennedy's alleged sexual escapades based on interviews with his Secret Service guards, and its claim that Kennedy used Judith Exner as a courier to deliver cash to mobster Sam Giancana, made by a source who later recanted it before the Assassination Records Review Board.

The mention of the Assassination Records Review Board there is important, because it puts the book into the context of its time. In 1991 Oliver Stone’s JFK was released, and that ramped up renewed interest in Dallas, ultimately resulting in the JFK records act that created that board. In 1993 the largely-unknown and shadowy Jew Gerald Posner published his book Case Closed which supported the Warren Commission’s findings, and he became the media’s go-to source on all things Dallas for many years, pissing on the conspiracy theorists. (Btw, his first book was about Josef Mengele and the book he wrote right before the JFK book was titled Hitler’s Children, so if one wants to claim he’s not Jewish because only his father was Jewish, go ahead). Then Hersh’s attack on the Kennedys was published in 1997, long after the media’s reversal on the JFK legend had begun in the early 1970s, that determined to erase the Camelot legend and more - the mourning period was definitely over; it’s not like that legend was living happily until Hersh came along and burst the bubble.

The footnote to that wiki section is an article in the Columbia Journalism Review from 2005 titled The Avenger: Sy Hersh, Then and Now. Here is how the JFK book was introduced:

Hersh's career has been cyclical, with plenty of rough spots. In 1979 he left The New York Times under controversial circumstances, and his career floundered in the 1980s. To his evident frustration, he has never achieved the financial success of his rival, Bob Woodward. The low point of Hersh's career came in 1997 with the publication of his book about John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. The attacks on him began even before the book appeared, and the reviews were lethal: "It is an astonishing spectacle, this book," Garry Wills, himself the author of a critical book on the Kennedys, wrote in The New York Review of Books. "In his mad zeal to destroy Camelot . . . Hersh has with precision and method disassembled and obliterated his own career and reputation."

And here is the entirety of what the piece had to say about the book:

Both books sold poorly at a time when Hersh's rival, Woodward, was churning out a steady stream of best-sellers. Hersh, in the early 1990s, apparently felt it was time to cash in. By 1996 he and a one-time co-author received a reported $800,000 advance for a book on John Kennedy. "I started the book on Kennedy," he told a group of Nieman fellows in 1998, "for a couple of reasons. One, I had a publisher who was going to give me a lot of money to do it. That's very important, you know, these days."

Early in his research, Hersh came across an astonishing trove of handwritten documents about JFK — showing, for instance, that the president allegedly had paid hush money to Marilyn Monroe. But the people peddling the documents were charlatans, and most of the papers themselves were forgeries. Some of his peers tried to warn him. At one point Hersh called a Kennedy biographer, Richard Reeves for assistance. "When he said," Reeves recalls, "that he had a 'contract between JFK and Marilyn Monroe,' I said that could not possibly be authentic, that whatever actually went on in those days, JFK was far too cautious (and sensible) to ever sign something like that. And I never heard from him again."

Hersh removed the documents from the book shortly before it went to press, but the news media pounced on his credulousness. A long article about the controversy in The Washington Post began: "The strange and twisted saga of the JFK file is part cautionary tale, part slapstick farce, a story of deception and self-delusion in the service of commerce and journalism."

By and large, The Dark Side of Camelot was savaged by reviewers, and much attention was paid to the book's salacious details about JFK's sexual appetite — details that Hersh obtained from interviews with members of JFK's Secret Service team. People close to Hersh insist that he has a puritanical streak, and that those sentiments burst forth in the Kennedy book. "Sy is a very bad judge of other men's behavior," a close friend says. "He has led a very decorous life in a certain way. I was against the book from the beginning because he was so shocked by what Jack had done. Another man would not have been quite so shocked."

Hersh himself now expresses misgivings about the material he obtained from the Secret Service agents. "Am I ambivalent about it? Yeah. I wish they hadn't spoken on the record. I wouldn't have used it."

Dark Side's critics allege errors in the book that go beyond sex. Max Holland, a Nation contributing editor who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, notes that the final report of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) — which was created in response to Oliver Stone's film, JFK — invalidates some of Hersh's key revelations. Hersh, for instance, wrote that JFK used Judith Campbell Exner as a courier to deliver cash to the mobster Sam Giancana; his source was a political operative named Martin Underwood, who told a believing Hersh that he followed Exner on a train from Washington to Chicago, and watched her hand over the satchel. But Holland notes that "when sitting across from a government lawyer instead of a reporter," Underwood recanted his story. In the final ARRB report, published a year after Hersh's book appeared, the following statement appears: "Underwood denied that he followed Judith Campbell Exner on a train."

To a certain extent, The Dark Side of Camelot damaged Hersh's standing among colleagues. "I don't read him anymore because I don't trust him," says Holland. "I find Hersh a perplexing character," says Newsweek's Evan Thomas, who has written extensively about the Kennedys. "He's done great work, but he wildly overreached with the Kennedy book." These days, Thomas reads Hersh differently. "I read what he writes with some skepticism or doubt or uncertainty."

Now, one shouldn’t take this article as gospel of course, but it does call into question Tracey’s apparent near-total reliance on Hersh’s book as a source on the Kennedys. I think the rivalry with Woodward thing is interesting, because I have long called him Deep State Bob, the Great Chronicler of the deep state’s desired narrative. In other words, something very close to what I suspect Hersh has often been, just in a different way.

One of the two books mentioned at the beginning of that section was his 1991 The Samson Option, and here is part of what Hersh’s wiki says about that:

In The Samson Option (1991), Hersh chronicled the history of Israel's nuclear weapon program, arguing that a nuclear capability was sought from the state's founding, and that it was achieved under a U.S. policy of feigned ignorance and indirect assistance.

The wiki on the book includes this:

The New Scientist book review lists specific examples of U.S. official's suppression of information:

- IA analysts kept quiet about what they found in Lockheed U-2 spy plane photographs of Dimona during the 1950s.

- Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the 1950s, probably knew about and supported the Israeli nuclear weapons program.

The review also notes the revelation that U.S. President John F. Kennedy attempted to persuade Israel to abandon its nuclear program, and angry notes were exchanged between Kennedy and Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion in 1963.

It seems like part of the theme of the book is addressing/inflating US culpability in Israel having the bomb. But that last bit indicates that JFK was pushing back on that, and hard, which is a fairly well-known aspect of JFK today, and thought of by some as part of the reason for his elimination in Dallas.

But Tracey says nothing about that at all, which is telling at this moment when Israeli nuclear weapons play such a huge part in current world politics and global survival prospects. Boo.

Btw, Lewis Strauss was the antagonist in the 2023 film Oppenheimer.

After using the book as the basis for JFK-condemning on Cuba, foreign assassinations and Vietnam escalation, here is the total of what Tracey says about the Hersh book upon which he so much relies in his efforts to flush the Kennedys:

At the time it was published, the biggest critics of Hersh’s book were mainstream liberals who took great umbrage at his audacity to degrade their cherished Kennedy fables with original reporting; today, the liberals are being replaced by vaguely right-wing types who have bought into the dimwitted idea that RFK Jr. is joining forces with Trump, “Avengers” style, to dismantle the “Deep State.” Which I suppose in practice means that Trump might deign to offer RFK Jr. some obscure position at the Food and Drug Administration — surely sending shivers down the spine of the National Security State and “military-industrial complex,” both of which Trump otherwise pledges to further empower, just as he did in his first term. (As previously pointed out by RFK Jr. himself.)

I should mention another notable book published in the 1990s about JFK, Peter Dale Scott’s 1993 essential Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. I doubt Tracey has read that one, or even heard of it.

In any case, it seems like Tracey is a GenX/millennial guy who grew up during the time when anything remotely Camelot had already been erased and condemned as propaganda, and then read Hersh’s book which cemented his view in spades. When RFK Jr came along and there were plenty of things to criticize, he chose to pull out this easy one which isn’t really that relative at all to RFK Jr’s candidacy. No, I’m going to condemn him because he’s a Kennedy and not because he’s a charlatan anti-vaxx loon who has in one election managed to somehow identify with all three major political groups - Democrats, Republicans and independents.

To conclude where I started, Tracey acts as if he’s uncovered a real scoop when he says JFK’s thousand pieces quote wasn’t actually an on-the-record direct quote, and it was as a reaction to the BoP disaster. Me, I’ve known those things for years, decades even. What I didn’t know is the spin Tracey puts on it, that it’s the poor CIA who were ordered to do this doomed mission by this radically anti-communist new president (Allen Dulles no doubt protesting all the while), and then felt his wrath after it failed just as they advised him it would.

What Tracey somehow forgot to tell us is that JFK also ordered the Pentagon to initiate the planning for what would become Operation Northwoods… 🙄

After this segment Tracey interviewed ex-Intercept Lee Fang, and he went back to this same legacy matter:

Here Fang takes a political story I thought we all knew, that JFK ran to the right of Nixon on communism, because Nixon had chops on this going back to the Alger Hiss case and JFK was potentially vulnerable on this issue then, at the height of the cold war. He claims JFK “mobilized a new red scare around the 1960 election” - was JFK making accusations about communists everywhere in the Eisenhower/Nixon administration? Gosh, not that I’m aware of. Did he start rooting them out after taking office, and marching them down Pennsylvania Avenue in chains? Jeez, maybe… 🤔

Then he gets into Vietnam and Nixon, and of course Hersh famously was also involved in that reporting:

Hersh contributed to the revelations around Operation Menu, the secret U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia in 1969–1970. On June 11, 1972, an article by Hersh alleged that General John D. Lavelle, who had recently been relieved as commander of the Air Force in Southeast Asia, was ousted because he had ordered repeated, unauthorized bombings of North Vietnam. The ensuing "Lavelle affair" led to Senate Armed Services Committee hearings in September 1972. After reading Hersh's articles on the affair, Major Hal Knight, who had supervised radar crews in Vietnam, realized that the Senate "was unaware of what had taken place while I was out there", and in early 1973 wrote a letter to the committee that confessed his role in the cover-up of Operation Menu, in which he recorded fake bombing coordinates and burned his orders. Hersh learned of Knight's letter after exposing a different scandal on May 17, 1973, in which Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had authorized wiretaps of employees of the National Security Council after early bombings of Cambodia were exposed in the Times in May 1969. Hersh interviewed Knight and detailed the cover-up of Menu in an article on July 15, 1973, one day before the start of Knight's public testimony. On July 16, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger admitted that the Air Force had flown 3,630 raids over Cambodia in 14 months, dropping more than 100,000 tons of bombs. Hersh continued to investigate who had ordered the cover-up; in a rare telephone interview, Kissinger stated Nixon had "neither ordered nor was aware of any falsification".

That of course resulted in another Hersh award-winning book:

Hersh's 1983 book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which involved four years of exhaustive work and more than 1,000 interviews, was a best-seller and won hi m the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. The 698-page book contained 41 chapters, including 13 devoted to Kissinger's role in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia; other topics included his role in the Chilean coup, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, domestic wiretapping, and the White House Plumbers, as well as Hersh's criticism of his former Times colleagues, such as Max Frankel and James Reston, for their proximity to him. One much-discussed allegation was that Kissinger, originally an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries before his defeat to Nixon, had offered Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey damaging material on Nixon before going to the Nixon campaign with secret information he had gathered from the Vietnam War's Paris peace negotiations. The book also alleges that Kissinger alerted Nixon to President Johnson's October 31, 1968, bombing halt 12 hours in advance, securing his position in the administration. The book is noted for its density of information and prosecutorial tone, and it has been credited with preventing Kissinger from returning to a government position during the Reagan administration.

So instead of Rockefellerist Kissinger we got the baby neocons, and the rest is history. Great! I kind of get the impression that Hersh is the Gnome Chomsky of journalism and particularly on the millennial left, where he and his narratives seem to almost be worshipped uncritically.

Greenwald the Right-Wing Promoter of RFK Jr

As I said at the start, what I found most fascinating about this video was that Tracey was bashing right-wing alt talking heads who have embraced the RFK Jr candidacy, and he was doing it on Greenwald’s show, a closet right-winger who had effectively promoted the RFK Jr candidacy ever since he first announced his oppositional run inside the much-despised Dem party.

I have addressed that many times, one of which was a piece titled RFK Jr and the Leftish Take in June of last year, after RFK had recently been interviewed by both Greenwald and Joe Rogan. Here is a sizable chunk of that article, including a few clips:

Greenwald isn’t someone who I follow with any regularity, but I see him as very similar to Max Blumenthal, a “Brooklyn leftist” who moved into the media space as a result of the events of the aughts and has been willing to toe up to the line on aspects of the Jewish Question, one commonality being the open opposition to the Jewish narrative of Russiagate. To me his defining moment wasn’t the Snowden thing, it was when he called neo-atheist Sam Harris a self-identified Jew with political intentions back in 2015.

I thought it was interesting that Greenwald felt compelled to do a 20-minute video followup to the interview to express his view on what was said and what he took away from that. Note the image he used for the video, and in comparison to the video title:

Then this week on his livestream show he got back into the RFK Jr Question, this time with no appearance of being a disinterested or neutral journalist, at least in his intro:

But back to the interview, which I thought was very valuable in getting a better picture on RFK and his candidacy and in significant part because of the questions Greenwald posed. In that discussion one of the most revealing and enlightening parts was on Israel, which is a kind of barometer on mainstream/establishment compliance versus alternative thinking and the degree of that (meaning in large part the degree of one’s antisemitism in that establishment view).

On this subject RFK gets a clear fail, he is the almost-inevitable product of his American Holocaustist upbringing and his current Hollywood environment, by all indications. But Greenwald tries to spin positively even that in his followup, suggesting that RFK’s open-mindedness was meaningfully evidenced in his final comment on the ridiculousness of massive US aid to the apartheid ethnostate. [Which, I saw somewhere this week, comes to about $23,000 per Israeli family - wtf!] Here is the end of that discussion and then the way Greenwald spins it in his followup video:

Now, my take on that was that RFK wanted to end that discussion and so made a kind of concession that means nothing - “we need to look at all those things”. How many times have politicians claimed to be intending to look at something and then done nothing, or maybe have done the opposite? At least the Jewess cultural leftist Marianne Williamson openly declares she’s not going to do a damned thing about the billions going from American taxpayer wallets to her co-ethnics on the other side of the planet.

And right before that he referred to a “long and supportive relationship with our country” - for chrissakes, when has Israel ever been supportive of the US in any meaningful way?? They are an absolute boat anchor around the US neck internationally, and at minimum a financial burden domestically.

Is this evidence of that supportive relationship?

How about this?

That ending about debating Biden is another left paradigm/meme that is essentially dishonest as well as rather absurd - people in this camp seem almost universally outraged at the Dem Party and the Biden camp for their lack of willingness to debate RFK and Williamson, and play it as evidence of growing anti-democratic behavior of the Dems. But has any sitting president debated his rivals for renomination in his party? Did Trump debate anyone on the GOP side in 2020? Did Obama debate anyone on the Dem side in 2012? Did Bush debate anyone in 2004? Did his father debate Pat Buchanan in 1992? Did Jimmy Carter debate RFK’s uncle Teddy in 1980? This doesn’t happen, political parties don’t actively undermine their sitting presidents running for reelection. And you expect the Dems to change this understandable tradition so grandpa Joe can debate a couple amateurs, a former junkie and anti-vaxxer (a love-hate relationship with needles?) and a culture warrior who got run out of the 2020 race at the beginning by the electorate, never coming close to reaching even 2% in the Dem polls??

Greenwald mentioned Russiagate in that last clip, and here is how he earlier spun that subject in his followup (starting again with the debate thing):

“Everyone in Hollywood basically is a Democrat… a liberal…” …a Jew, Glenn? 😄 Just say it, big guy!

So on Israel - remember that was more than three months before 10/7 - Greenwald ended up being completely wrong about the flexibility in RFK’s thinking and I ended up completely right. Yet again. There’s really no reason for me to waste more of your time going beyond that.

Related to Russiagate and its consequence, the US support of the Ukraine war against the New Hitler, here is what Tracey had to say in his piece:

I did get a brief opportunity to ask RFK a question at the presidential debate last month in Philadelphia, when he was sauntering around the “Spin Room” as a surrogate for Trump, surrounded by a phalanx of minders and guards diligently shielding him from unsanctioned questioning, as he navigated back and forth to all the “corporate media” interviews he was previously scheduled for.

Our interaction can be viewed here.

My question was prompted by the very simple premise that, as of just this past summer, RFK had stridently denounced Trump as partially responsible for causing the Ukraine war, and being wholly unrepentant about it. “He also walked away unilaterally from the intermediate range nuclear missile treaty with Russia, destabilizing our relationship,” RFK said of Trump. “He also exacerbated tensions between Ukraine and Russia that ultimately caused a war.”

So, given that RFK had just been castigating Trump for “bragging about arming Ukraine,” and Trump to this day has never stopped “bragging about arming Ukraine” — not to mention that Trump played a crucial role in getting the largest-ever provision of Ukraine funding enacted this past April — I wanted to know more about RFK’s sudden about-face. RFK told me his “opinions have evolved” on Trump thanks to a “series of conversations” the two had, which gave RFK “a lot of confidence” that Trump is going to end the war. But apparently, no concrete details from these secret consultations are forthcoming for the public to evaluate. Instead we’re all expected to remain politely entranced by RFK’s family legacy, and just take his word for it.

When details do trickle out about how Trump would magically end the war in 24 hours, he intimates that he could supply weapons to Ukraine with even more tenacity in order to force Putin into submission, which indeed has been a regular demand of self-described MAGA Congressional Republicans. Moreover, Zelensky emerged from his recent meeting with Trump optimistically indicating that Trump gave him “very direct information that he will be on our side, that he would support Ukraine.” In light of this, it might be worth getting some clarity as to what caused RFK’s dramatic Trump-related epiphany, but for now his lips are largely sealed.

Now, I have never believed that Trump would end the war on inauguration day or anything of that sort, rather I thought and think he would continue to do essentially what the US “foreign policy establishment” (the neocon establishment) has demanded of Biden through its operatives in his administration, J-people like Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan and Haines. Of course I have never really believed that RFK Jr would quickly end the war either, doubts which I addressed in my first article on his candidacy posted on May 1 of last year, and again in my piece The Election Goes Nuts two months ago after RFK had endorsed Trump.

Here is what Tracey said about Ukraine in this video:

Obviously Michael has a very different view on RFK Jr than Glenn, and most clearly involving foreign policy and the wars. Which makes me wonder why he’s expressing them the first chance he gets on Glenn’s show. I mean, when Kyle Kulinski goes on vacation he doesn't have Nick Fuentes come in to fill in for him.

One thought I had was that Mike might not quite realize what Greenie’s editorial viewpoint actually is, given the nature of his post-progressive transition over the last several years and the covert slipperiness of it all.

But then I thought maybe Greenwald is fine with this, because he can always disown it down the road if that suits him and his agenda, or he can own it if that ends up suiting his agenda. He’s wrong about so much so much of the time that having that kind of flexibility might be seen as useful.

Anyway, I found it interesting that Tracey went off the Greenwald reservation like that while actually on the Greenwald rumble-green reservation, in a way that points the hairy finger right at Greenwald.

1992: Glengarry Glen Ross Perot versus Downtown Jerry Brown

The last panel in my Tracey tryptic is the critical 1992 election, which I have discussed extensively on my blog, most recently on the civil war then going on in the GOP right. But I’ve also repeatedly referred to Clinton’s nomination and election as the Jewish faction of the deep state taking over the Democratic Party, the Clinton Sellout. Here is how Tracey addresses that election in his piece:

At certain points in the 2024 election cycle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed poised to become the most formidable Third Party presidential candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. Reputable national polls showed RFK Jr. receiving as high as 17% of the vote — just a hair shy of Perot’s ultimate result in 1992, which was 18.9%. Perot, some may recall, came within striking distance of winning multiple states that year, having received a larger share of the vote than George H. W. Bush in Maine and Bill Clinton in Utah. If he hadn’t dropped out of the race under bizarre circumstances and then re-entered several months later, it’s not out of the question that Perot could have won the election outright. National polls from May 1992 showed Perot leading both Clinton and H.W. Bush, but his trajectory was interrupted when he suspended his campaign in July, claiming that Republican rivals were conspiring to sabotage his daughter’s wedding. Still, when he re-declared that October, Perot ultimately outperformed — in terms of national popular vote — any Third Party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

And so into the 2024 void leaped RFK Jr., with widespread discontent in the electorate strongly suggesting a mass constituency for some alternative to Donald Trump and (at the time) Joe Biden. RFK Jr. thus triumphantly launched his supposed Independent candidacy in October 2023, withdrawing from the Democratic primaries he initially claimed to be running in. The core argument of his latter-stage candidacy was a soaring pledge to dismantle the two-party “duopoly” that dominates US politics.

In my last piece I addressed the 1984 and 1988 Dem nomination races and the candidacy of Jesse Jackson. I also talked about my personal support of Gary Hart and Al Gore Jr in those races. In 1992 my choice ended up being former and future CA governor Edmund G. Brown Jr:

The reasons for my choice were refreshed some in my mind when I read the section of his wiki on that run (he had previously run in 1976, when I eventually also ended up supporting him against Carter, after Mo Udall had narrowly lost to Carter in my critical home primary in Wisconsin):

When Brown announced his intention to run for president against President George H. W. Bush, many in the media and his own party dismissed his campaign as having little chance of gaining significant support. Ignoring them, Brown embarked on a grassroots campaign to, in his own words, "take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington". In his stump speech, first used while officially announcing his candidacy on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Brown told listeners that he would be accepting campaign contributions from individuals only and that he would not accept more than $100. Continuing with his populist reform theme, he assailed what he dubbed "the bipartisan Incumbent Party in Washington" and called for term limits for members of Congress. Citing various recent scandals on Capitol Hill, particularly the recent House banking scandal and the large congressional pay-raises from 1990, he promised to put an end to Congress being a "Stop-and-Shop for the moneyed special interests".

As Brown campaigned in various primary states, he would eventually expand his platform beyond a policy of strict campaign finance reform. Although he focused on a variety of issues throughout the campaign, he highlighted his endorsement of living wage laws and opposition to free trade agreements such as NAFTA; he mostly concentrated on his tax policy, which had been created specifically for him by Arthur Laffer, the famous supporter of supply-side economics who created the Laffer curve. This plan, which called for the replacement of the progressive income tax with a flat tax and a value added tax, both at a fixed 13-percent rate, was decried by his opponents as regressive. Nevertheless, it was endorsed by The New York Times, The New Republic, and Forbes, and its raising of taxes on corporations and elimination of various loopholes which tended to favor the very wealthy proved to be popular with voters. Various opinion polls taken at the time found that as many as three-quarters of all Americans believed the current tax code to be unfairly biased toward the wealthy. Jesse Walker wrote in The American Conservative that he "seemed to be the most left-wing and right-wing man in the field ... [calling] for term limits, a flat tax, reforming social security, and the abolition of the Department of Education". Brown scored surprising wins in Connecticut and Colorado and seemed poised to overtake Clinton.

Due to his limited budget, Brown began to use a mixture of alternative media and unusual fundraising techniques. Unable to pay for actual commercials, he frequently used cable television and talk radio interviews as a form of free media to get his message to voters.

Clinton at that point had been suffering under the Gennifer Flowers scandal, and it was the financial war chest that Rahm Emanuel had raised, from “‘heavily-Jewish’ donors”, that saved his campaign.

That last paragraph echoes down to the RFK Jr campaign and the use of internet talking heads, which was one of the subjects discussed in the Greenwald RFK interview.

It’s after that in his wiki that ties this back to what I covered on Jackson in my last piece:

It was not until shortly after Super Tuesday, when the field had been narrowed to Brown, former senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and front-runner then-governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, that Brown began to emerge as a major contender in the eyes of the press. On March 17, Brown received a strong third-place showing in the Illinois and Michigan primaries, and Tsongas dropped out of the race. Exactly one week later, he cemented his position as a major threat to Clinton when he eked out a narrow win in the bitterly fought Connecticut primary. As the press focused on the primaries in New York and Wisconsin, which were both to be held on the same day, Brown, who had taken the lead in polls in both states, made a gaffe: He announced to an audience of various leaders of New York City's Jewish community that, if nominated, he would consider the Reverend Jesse Jackson as a vice-presidential candidate. Jackson, who had made a pair of anti-semitic comments about Jews in general, and New York City's Jews in particular, while running for president in 1984, was still mistrusted within the Jewish community. Jackson also had ties to Louis Farrakhan, infamous for his own anti-semitic statements, and with Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Brown's polling numbers suffered. On April 7, he lost narrowly to Bill Clinton in Wisconsin (37%–34%), and dramatically in New York (41%–26%).

Although Brown continued to campaign in a number of states, he won no further primaries. Despite being overwhelmingly outspent, Brown won upset victories in seven states and his "votes won to the money raised ratio" was by far the best of any candidate in the race. He still had a sizable number of delegates, and a big win in his home state of California would deprive Clinton of sufficient support to win the Democratic nomination, possibly bringing about a brokered convention. After nearly a month of intense campaigning and multiple debates between the two candidates, Clinton managed to defeat Brown in this final primary by a margin of 48% to 41%.

Now, I think it’s rather optimistic to think a California primary win alone could have led to a brokered convention, considering the numbers in the graphic above. But the Jackson gaffe could have made a real difference, which shows both the ceiling for Jesse in ‘84 and ‘88 and the power of Jews in our politics even then.

It also shows a path to victory for Brown that simply didn't exist for Perot. The best that Tracey could do was to point out that Perot had beaten both major candidates for second in a single state each, which still left him 270 electoral votes shy of victory. 19% of the vote nationwide is impressive, but zero electoral votes isn’t. In 1968 Wallace got 13.5% of the vote but also 46 electoral votes from winning five states, because he was a regional candidate and not really a national candidate.

And what that meant to RFK Jr was the moment he left the Dem race to run as an independent he gave up any chance of victory. What I believed when he first announced was that he had an actual shot at winning if a small one, but his real problem was the nomination race and not the general election. And I didn’t mean the lack of debates.

Had he managed to inflict damage on Biden early in the primaries, what would have resulted is what happened anyway, Biden would have dropped out and handed his delegates to Harris, and then RFK would have to run against someone else not loaded up with all the Biden baggage. While the majority of his strongest supporters were outside of the Democratic Party. And she would have run to his left and not what she’s doing now against Trump.

Tracey doesn't address those dynamics because he basically starts the clock last year in October after RFK quit the Dem race and announced his independent run. A moment which should have set off alarms all over the independent mediasphere, because that meant he couldn’t win, and he knew that. So what was his real mission? That’s been the question from the beginning. The fear of course was that he was just another Dem faker like Bernie who would collapse into the Biden camp.

Here is Greenwald boring down hard on that question, not letting him wiggle out of not answering the question, and also an update on Little Bobby this week:

So it turns out that the Bobber not only had a Plan B but also a Plan C, which is where we are today. And maybe even a Plan D if Kamala had only ponied up the cabinet slot at HHS. At the end off-camera Matt crystalizes the whole matter when he brings up the 83 Samoan lives taken by a measles outbreak exacerbated by anti-vaxxers including RFK Jr several years ago. A matter which people like Greenwald and Rogan somehow failed to raise in their hard-hitting interviews with Junior.

Of course one has to assume the RFK punishment being discussed by Theo Von and Shady Vance probably includes the new media giant platforms’ censoring of what he was saying during the pandemic, which Sam doesn’t really want to get into. Again journalism by exclusion, which perhaps gets us back to Hersh. It’s not what you decide to report that really matters, it’s what you decide not to report.

Again back to Fang, starting with election mechanics:

What Fang is talking about with regard to the electoral college is that the process could be made to better reflect the national popular vote without a constitutional amendment changing the process, which sadly is a practical impossibility. In the KKK-BJ Gray debate I included a clip from in my last piece the matter of getting rank-choice voting in presidential elections came up as the path to viability for 3rd party candidates, and that’s living in some kind of fantasy world. But Fang’s solution to the swing state problem is possible, never mind the 3rd party problem. What matters is making everyone’s vote count and not just the voters in seven states or whatever.

Fang’s comparison with 1968, which was Trump ‘24 being Nixon ‘68 regarding the wars as he discussed in that first clip, is a reasonable one I think, but Tracey’s fixation on ‘60 is again sourced in his anti-Kennedy fixation rooted in Hersh. From there they get into the media problem today, including the alternative disinformation-industrial complex internet media, a great example of which was that Theo bull session with Shady.

Fang frames the problem, but he really doesn't take much of a stand on it because he’s part of the problem. Just before this he was trying to put a positive face on the RFK-Trump marriage by talking about the MAHA thing and RFK pushing the environmental toxin business. But anyone with a brain has to know or strongly suspect that this is just cover code for his anti-vaxx mission, which never came up in this discussion, and that gets us right back to Samoa. You cannot deal with the matter of RFK Jr in government without dealing with Samoa, just as Tracey would say you cannot deal with Teddy Kennedy’s career in government without dealing with Chappaquiddick. Of course the death count score was 83 to 1, and most of the 83 were children, so sort of like 10/7 vs Gaza genocide. Which, btw, RFK Jr also supports - a merchant of death only focused on improving America’s health. Right.

But back to Perot. As I’ve said before, the success of his candidacy as compared to all 3rd party runs since then was founded in his political positioning as a centrist and a populist. 3rd parties have no chance no matter what the election mechanics are, because they have fringe politics and are always ideologues and not really populists. I would argue that the success of Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders was due to their populism, and their failures were largely due to their rather extremist ideologies.

I thought about this relative to the past Dem candidates I supported, which I had not thought about in a very long time. Hart, Gore and Brown were all centrists of a sort, but were also different in some ways from conventional Dem centrism, there was a different kind of mix of positions and policies that they were pushing.

And again, it was possible that Brown could have won that 1992 nomination race, had he not floated Jackson as VP of course, which means he could have won that election. And how would that have changed everything since then? You couldn’t have had Clintonite candidates and presidents if you didn’t have Clinton. You wouldn’t have had the Clinton Sellout without Clinton and the mountain of Jewish money behind him. Without Bill we never get to Killary, and without Killary perhaps we never get to Trump. And without the Clinton Revolution in the party and without Trump, do we ever get to RFK Jr as anything but a barely-known anti-vaxx loon reinforcing the dark side of legacy Camelot?

Perhaps revolutionary change doesn't require revolutionaries…