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  4.  » NYTimes’ Farhad Manjoo recounts his moment “in the mud” with Kennedy—but only ends up spattering himself

Mark Crispin-Miller – News From the Underground July 9, 2023

Recently the New York Times enhanced its daily dump on RFK, Jr. with a new hit-piece by Times columnist Farhad Manjoo: “It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Kennedy.” That title is, of course, no compliment. It means that no one can best Kennedy in a debate—not because the latter knows his stuff, has all the pertinent data at his fingertips, and argues with extraordinary clarity (and civility): on the contrary. According to Manjoo, Bobby does not win debates for real, through such forensic skill and intellectual ability, but only seems to win them (or, as the headline puts it, “win” them) by fogging everybody’s minds with sophistry, intermingled craftily with bits of truth. This is good enough for him, because he doesn’t really care about the issues, claims Manjoo: “Conspiracy theorists don’t care about facts, just attention.”

That crack about the “facts” is pure projection—as I’ll show here, by telling the whole story of Manjoo’s attacks on Bobby in the summer of 2006; but let’s begin with Manjoo’s version of that story. Here I’m going to paraphrase, and gloss, his version in detail, both because (unlike Manjoo) I want to get it absolutely right, and—what matters more—because it perfectly exemplifies the propaganda that’s been used to smear the candidate since he declared his run, and that’s been used against him (and others) for many years. In other words, this op ed perfectly exemplifies the gaslighting technique that’s been deployed relentlessly—and catastrophically—by the “free press” throughout the West since 1967, when the CIA first weaponized the phrase “conspiracy theory” (and coined the phrase “conspiracy theorist”), urging journalists to use that mocking language to discredit critics of the Warren Report.

Since then, that dismissive tactic has been used to maintain one Official Story after another, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 (both, like JFK, killed by “lone gunmen”), to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 (not enabled by a secret deal with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, to keep the hostages locked up through the election), to Iran/contra (not overseen by George H.W. Bush), to the Oklahoma City bombing (carried out by two angry amateurs, using a truckload of fertilizer), to the 2000 election (not stolen), to 9/11 (the staggeringly lucky work of nineteen Saudi jihadists), to the 2004 election (not stolen), to Ukraine’s “Maidan Revolution” in 2014 (not another coup run by the CIA), to Bashar Assad’s two “gas attacks on his own people” in 2017 and 2018 (the first not perpetrated by the “rebels,” the second not accidentally caused by the explosion of a rebel arsenal); and so on—a history far richer even than this paragraph suggests, since comprehensive treatment would take much more space than I have here.

Throughout those years, the tactic largely worked, as dissident analyses were kept out on the margins, so that most people couldn’t know them in detail, and/or figured that such counter-narratives were just as loony as “our free press” always claimed; but now the tactic doesn’t work so well—the COVID crisis having variously broken it (though millions are still falling for it, and all too many always will). “Our free press” has called too many truths “conspiracy theory,” and too many have been proven true, for the tactic to keep working as it did before “the virus” started stressing it. Thus (certain) millions have been disenchanted at long last— an awakening that’s made this Kennedy campaign a bid far likelier to go the distance—and even, possibly, to win—than they’re all bellowing throughout the media, while also struggling otherwise to make the rest of us not hear, or not believe, what Bobby Kennedy is saying.

Here, then, is how Fahrad Manjoo—the New York Times behind him (and, no doubt, the usual players behind them both)—attempts (again) to tell us not to listen to this Kennedy, or (by implication) anyone except himself, and all the other “journalists”:

 

 

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