On April 27, 1961, John F. Kennedy remarked that “the very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, secret oaths, and secret proceedings.” In his speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Kennedy rallied the audience around the heavy responsibility of being watchdogs for the people who read their papers—to especially ensure that enemies did not infiltrate our government and impose their tyrannical ideologies that suppress our will, and deprive us of our freedom to exercise it.
The press has come far since that speech. The mainstream media is now comprised of networks owned by five or six major corporations, depending on how one reads the corporate filings. Information was once overseen by blue-collar grinder reporters who kept tabs on big tech and big corporations. For example, DuPont was exposed by the New York Times in the 1980s for contaminating the world with “forever chemicals” that cause a myriad of diseases. Now, independent newspapers like the Federalist report that the New York Times has much to gain from covering corporate tracks. Chrissy Clark writes that the newspaper’s anti-Trump and anti-American activism comes honestly. It is largely owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. He has deep ties with China and has entered into agreements with them to circumvent Trump’s revised trade policies aimed at protecting American jobs. Mainstream media information is now filtered by the very entities who wish to operate in secret. Kennedy was perhaps the last of the democratic populist presidents who inveighed against the idea that government could solve all the people’s ills. Books and movies abound that speculate about the hidden actors behind his assassination. It is well known that Kennedy had it out for two organizations that had become government bureaucratic policing bodies by the time he took office: the CIA and the Federal Reserve Banking system. One polices intelligence and the spread of information, the other polices everything from how we manage our portfolios, to which wars to fight, to how the economy will do in the next few months.
His speech on that evening began with a light anecdote about Karl Marx. Kennedy, half facetious in his tone, recalled for the listener that it was the New York Tribune responsible for the threat of Communism, for it was publisher Horace Greeley who refused Marx a meager raise as his London correspondent, which ultimately drove the German reporter to commit to writing down his egalitarian economic ideologies. The crowd chuckled. Kennedy’s tone needed that levity, for the truth that he spoke unveiled a dark and foreboding reality that he felt compelled to expose that night—a reality that has been forgotten by a generation of university-educated Americans. Most are young Americans victimized by the utopian dreams of failed aristocrats and elites who, scores ago, decided to hold the line from the universities, posing as faculty members and administrators.
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In fact, Kennedy’s entire speech became a harbinger for us all. His words that echoed through one of the banquet rooms of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel fifty-nine years ago offer us a dire warning today:
[W]e are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Ironically, even the elections are now part of that subversion. Kennedy would never have guessed it. He would have never imagined, that in the face of a clearly stolen election, Americans would have forgotten all about those evil forces that he implored the press to help him combat. In perfect Noam Chomsky fashion, many Americans have accepted Marx’s ideology under their new monikers. It has become a common antithesis to our individual liberties and free-market society. The Communism that took so many lives in Russia was reborn as socialism. Then, when it was clear that socialism was no longer vogue because the killing fields of Vietnam and the bread lines of Venezuela were too horrific to deny, socialism was reborn as postmodernism in the universities. Finally, the hibernating postmodernists’ proud graduates became the minions who have infiltrated the press and bureaucracy of government. Welcome most of your progressive democrats and democratic-socialists. We have come full circle: Bill De Blasio, Mayor of New York City (a town that, last I checked, was still located in the United States of America), quotes Marx in his explanation to a reporter—who doesn’t call him on the specifics of course—to defend his lockdown policies. Still more alarming, Alexander Ocasio Cortez, according to the head of the DNC, has become the “face of the new democratic party.” The former bartender who has visions of a renewable energy paradise, universal incomes, and a utopian American society without personal property ownership (except for her own property, of course) is now voting on the laws that govern this land where once communist regimes like China were sanctioned; now American professional athletes and politicians are kowtowing to their leaders. It would be funny, were it not so frightening.
It is, at best, taxing for a reasonable mind to call coincidence Trump’s hard line against The Chinese Communist Party and the timeliness of COVID-19, the origin and recent sale of Dominion Voting Systems (which runs elections in 28 states now) to a Chinese investment firm, and the strange and unethical business dealings between the Biden family (now the press’s “President-Elect”) and Chinese investment firms. It requires much more faith to believe in coincidence, in fact, than to believe in the notion these connections are merely a far-fetched conspiracy theory triggered and perpetuated by “Q” drops. But conspiracy theory becomes an easy phrase to use when memory has faded, and when the looming threats of yesterday have fed and grown gargantuan among the shadows beyond. We need a light and a jolt today to jar our memories. These forces have become more powerful than ever while we’ve slept. So powerful it may be too late to claw our way back.
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