(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In an interview published this week, Democratic presidential spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasted a major figure of his party, Barack Obama, for reactivating a program to use government agencies to propagandize the American people.
Speaking to conservative journalist James O’Keefe, Kennedy said “high-level intelligence officials” are running some of the country’s largest publications, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone and the Daily Beast.
The nephew of John F. Kennedy recounted the history of what led to mainstream media serving as cutouts for the CIA, FBI and other agencies.
Kennedy explained that it began with the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, which was a Cold War-era program to co-opt international and domestic media for the U.S. government’s own purposes.
As noted in The Brothers—a biography of 1950s-era CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—Operation Mockingbird funneled state propaganda through reporters such as James Reston of the New York Times, Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek and syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop.
“The high level people at those journals were working for the agency or signed secrecy agreements with the CIA,” Kennedy said.
Operation Mockingbird was made public in the 1970s during the Church Committee hearings—historical congressional investigations into CIA and FBI malfeasance. At the time, CIA promised to stop propagandizing Americans and use Mockingbird tactics only on foreign media.
But about 40 years later, Obama reactivated a Mockingbird-like program when he signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, Kennedy told O’Keefe.
Indeed, the 2012 NDAA contained an amendment to “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors—the independent federal agency that oversees all U.S. civilian international media.
Fast forward another decade, and “today [the U.S. government is] the biggest funder of journalism in the world,” Kennedy said.
“They fund it through USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development],” he added.
The Biden administration’s USAID administrator is Samantha Power, who was the United Nations Ambassador during the Obama administration and regarded as a close surrogate of the former president. Her name has been linked to several globalist plots and conspiracies.
Kennedy further suggested that the present-day iteration of Operation Mockingbird focuses on social media more than traditional media. Scandals such as the Twitter Files—a trove of internal company documents showing the U.S. government’s efforts to censor online content—stem from Mockingbird-like programs, he said.
“We know from the Twitter Files that both the FBI and CIA were operating portals within the Twitter and Facebook that allowed them to manipulate information and deplatform people,” Kennedy said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
