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If you Google Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you’re assaulted by this nasty little description courtesy of Wikipedia: “Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials RFK Jr., is an American politician, environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine activist, and conspiracy theorist.” But with the … nomination of Bobby Kennedy to HHS, those who need to be held accountable ought to be shaking in their boots. That’s the opening line in what serves as the go-to bio on RFK Jr., unchanged for several years now, back to the COVID era. And as Kennedy told us at The American Spectator, the page is frozen. It will not accept edits — or corrections — from him or his staff. When I interviewed Bobby Kennedy Jr. at our annual gala of The American Spectator at the National Press Club in September (click here to watch), I asked him about censorship and that ugly smear of his good name and life of work in public health. Here’s a portion of his response: A nation that can silence, a government that can silence its opponents, has license for every atrocity…. The free flow of information is the sunlight, the soil, the water, the air, the fertilizer for a democracy. If you strangle free speech, democracy also dies…. [T]hey dutifully removed my entire Instagram account, a million followers…. Everything that I ever put up I sourced and cited the government databases or peer-reviewed publications. They said, “Well, you know some of this is actually not factually erroneous.” The White House had to devise a new term called “malinformation,” which is information that is factually correct but nevertheless inconvenient for the government…. I’ve always said, “Show me where I got it wrong.” Because, you know what I would do if I got something wrong? I would correct it. So just show me the fact — that’s what I said repeatedly to Instagram when they took me down. I said, “Show me one thing I got wrong, that you think I got wrong,” and they would not do it. Kennedy laid out the tentacles of a public-private “censorship industrial complex” designed to control Americans’ speech and thought and to violate their First Amendment freedoms. That censorship of Kennedy, the smears if not outright calumny, pushed him away from the party of his family. The party and ideology of vax and mask mandates pushed him toward the Republicans and Donald Trump. To borrow from Ronald Reagan, he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him. It mistreated RFK Jr. callously, abusively, even perilously. The Biden administration unconscionably, indefensibly refused to provide him with Secret Service protection, despite multiple threats to his life. Such protection has been standard practice for presidential candidates since the assassination of Kennedy’s father in June 1968. I wrote about that egregious refusal several times and talked to Kennedy about it at the gala. What he told us (listen at the 30-minute mark) is chilling. Likewise outrageous was the liberals’ mistreatment of Kennedy and all Americans during COVID. These advocates of “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “my body, my choice,” tried to force everyone to get the jab, the mRNA clot-shot. They coerced you even if you already had COVID and thus had natural immunity, even if you had a statement from your doctor saying the shot could be hazardous to your health (particularly if you survived a bad bout of COVID and had sky-high antibodies), and even if you invoked your rights of religious freedom and conscience. Liberals who champion bodily autonomy morphed into authoritarians, demanding you get the shot or lose your job, leave the military, resign the police force or as an EMT, withdraw from your college. They snidely and stupidly put quote marks around “natural immunity,” as if it were some sort of bizarre novelty invented by “anti-science” crackpots. They displayed a stunning ignorance of basic biology and medicine. Folks like RFK Jr. who spent years studying public health were suddenly pariahs — laughable heretics for questioning the prevailing orthodoxy. They were de-platformed by cancel-culture thugs for spreading “misinformation” and a new circumlocution “malinformation,” with no recourse or ability to protest. Some faceless twit behind a computer screen in Silicon Valley held the power to block them and render their information “false.” And there was nothing they could do about it. Kennedy was one of many such victims. Joe Rogan was another, accused of treating himself with “horse dewormer,” the liberals’ idiotic caricature of Ivermectin. I experienced this treatment myself, which was ironic. Readers might recall that in 2020-21 I had written a lot about President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to develop and fast-track a vaccine, which I fully supported. I assumed that a traditional, conventional vaccine would be developed and that people certainly wouldn’t be coerced into being injected against their will. My pre-politics background was in the field of medicine, and specifically immunology. I worked for the organ-transplant team of pioneering surgeon Dr. Thomas Starzl at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987-91. I did research on the so-called “miracle drug” (initially codenamed FK 506) that revolutionized and resolved the overwhelming immunosuppressant challenges involved in transplantation. I know vaccines. I wrote here about Dr. Jonas Salk’s historic development of the Polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh. All of which is to say that I was shocked when I learned that leading Big Pharma companies cooked up their vaccine from mRNA rather than traditional, reliable, safe, tried and true and tested technology. I was aghast when I saw that liberals wanted to unnecessarily vax even those who had COVID and thus had natural immunity, and despite frightening reports of horrific side effects experienced by people who received the shots, especially young people. I know of a tragic case near me in the Pittsburgh area of a teenage girl whose heart went so haywire within 48 hours after receiving the jab against her will that she had to undergo an emergency heart transplant. Yes, a heart transplant! She went through hell. Her health is forever compromised. Golden Opportunity With Kennedy at the Helm Bobby Kennedy knew of similar travesties. And that’s why his appointment at HHS is so exciting. He has the knowledge, courage, and now the opportunity to uncover what happened with these drug companies and those who aided and abetted them during the reign of COVID madness, including countless Human Resources bullies who have never answered for their assault on employees’ civil rights. The vax fanatics who perpetuated this form of medical authoritarianism, forcing you against your will to do unnecessary harm to your health, need to be held accountable. Justice has never been served. Had Kamala Harris been elected — she who morphed from opposing “Trump’s vaccine” to coercing others to get the jab once her party took power — no one would have ever been held accountable. But with the election of Donald Trump and nomination of Bobby Kennedy to HHS, those who need to be held accountable ought to be shaking in their boots. The handmaidens of Faucism denounced RFK Jr. as a conspiracy theorist; let him now unravel the silent conspiracies among those who concealed data on the harm caused by their “vaccines.” Kennedy needs to expose what his ally and our good friend at The American Spectator, Dr. Rand Paul, dubs the Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up. (Senator Paul gave the brilliant keynote address at our September gala, speaking prior to RFK Jr., who called Rand Paul a “personal hero” of his.) It’s time for justice. Time to uncover the truth and prevent such madness from happening again. I’ll conclude with a key concern regarding RFK Jr.’s confirmation process and potential voices of opposition among conservatives who don’t like his position on abortion. There’s no issue more important to me than abortion. And though Bobby Kennedy Jr. would not be deemed a pro-lifer, he’s not a radical pro-choicer. He has said that every abortion is a tragedy. But more to my point in this article, Kennedy doesn’t want the HHS position in order to be a Kamala-like pal of Planned Parenthood. That is categorically not his focus. It isn’t even on his radar. His concern is Big Pharma, Big Food, to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), and to expose what crimes occurred under the siege of the COVID vax/mask fanatics. READ MORE from Paul Kengor: That’s How You Overturn an Election Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Cherokee Leader Stand Watie The post Justice Comes to HHS: Trump Taps Kennedy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

This was supposed to be a column on President-elect Trump’s cabinet and other nominations, but that’s too limited a subject this week. (For those just joining us, the term “SGO,” an acronym for “s**t goin’ on,” was invented by my late friend and former Navy SEAL Al Clark.) There’s too much SGO to be dealt with by any single cabinet member. And Hegseth will have the job of repairing our navy, which has only about 300 combatant vessels in its fleet of about 470 ships. Trump’s nominees range from the excellent (former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe for CIA Director, Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel) to the hopelessly inexperienced (Tulsi Gabbard for DNI and Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense) and the bloody awful (Cong. Matt Gaetz for Attorney General). The best part of this is that Gaetz — who has been investigated by the FBI and was facing a House Ethics Committee investigation for drug use and having sex with a minor — probably won’t get confirmed. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that he firmly opposes the release of the House Ethics report which absolutely ensures that it will be leaked to Senate Democrats. And we need to mention, at least in passing, Trump’s unwisdom in chipping away at the very small majority that the House Republicans will have. Pulling Elise Stefanik and Mike Walz out of the House — not to mention Gaetz who has already resigned his seat — was not a good idea. Trump won’t get the recess appointments that he wants to speed the confirmation process. Even Republican senators won’t go along with that. We need to gain some altitude over these nominations to analyze some of the biggest challenges that people such as John Ratcliffe and Pete Hegseth will have assuming they are confirmed.(READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Undoing Biden: Trump’s First-Month Agenda) Ratcliffe Must Reign in Intelligence Agencies Ratcliffe faces a highly-politicized intelligence community of 18 agencies, the CIA chief among them. As this column has said many times, unless a president can get intelligence information that’s not colored by politics, policy-making is just guesswork. Ratcliffe must do everything he can to de-politicize the CIA. The first thing he must do is fire, or at least move out of responsible positions, every Biden hanger-on as well as the leftovers from the Obama years. He may not be able to fire them all but, as I wrote last week, he can transfer them to nice places such as Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Ratcliffe cannot reform the CIA without removing these people from positions of influence. Next, he can — with Trump’s backing — cancel the security clearances of people such as former CIA director John Brennan and all the rest of the 51 former and current intelligence officials who signed the letter (released just before and intended to influence the 2020 election) that proclaimed the Hunter Biden laptop story to be Russian disinformation. I’m not sure whether Ratcliffe will be able to cancel the security clearances of Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton but he should try — and try hard — to do so. Ratcliffe can and should also have an internal study done — to report a month or so after he’s confirmed — about whether we have enough “HUMINT,” human intelligence, meaning spies on the ground, and whether we’re relying too much on our spy satellites. Ever since Carter-era CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner shifted away from “HUMINT” to satellites, our intelligence gathering has suffered more than we, outside the intelligence community, can even fathom. Ratcliffe needs to find our equivalent of George Smiley and put him in charge of that study. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, is unprepared for the job of Secretary of Defense. I fear he’ll be eaten alive by the Pentagon bureaucracy but he may prove to be a very pleasant surprise. That won’t happen unless he has a strong like-minded deputy, close advisers, and service secretaries. A Dispirited and Weakened Military for Hegseth Hegseth is a fervent opponent of Biden’s “woke” policies that have disunited and depressed our military. Trump is apparently planning an executive order that would create a board of senior officers charged with vetting all admirals and generals and purging those who have bought into the “woke” policies. Doing away with “wokeness” in the military will go a long way to improve all the services’ pride and fix recruitment woes. He will have the same responsibility that Ratcliffe will have in cleaning out the Biden and Obama hangers-on and either firing them or isolating them so that they cannot affect policy decisions. Hegseth will have to do a lot of things at once, and ridding the military of “wokeness” is only one of them. We have, since the Obama years, fallen behind our principal adversaries in developing military weapon systems and recruiting the right sort of people. Lethality and readiness of the force, as I’ve written frequently, should be Hegseth’s guiding concerns. China’s new J-35 fighter-bomber is just one case. Built on a design reportedly stolen from Lockheed, the J-35 looks just like our F-35. I’ve never been a fan of the F-35 which is an attack aircraft and is now being pushed as an air superiority fighter which it was never designed to be. If confirmed, Hegseth will have to reduce, if not end, purchases of the F-35 and push a lot more money into the Next Generation Air Defense fighter program. If Hegseth has the right people advising him he’ll realize that we need to return to the “high-low” mix which the old “fighter mafia” insisted on when our Air Force was at its best. The “high” fighters had only one responsibility — air supremacy — without which we cannot win wars either small or large. The “low” aircraft were responsible for everything else including the close air support mission of the A-10, a new version of which should be created as soon as possible. And Hegseth will have the job of repairing our navy, which has only about 300 combatant vessels in its fleet of about 470 ships. The Navy plans to build hundreds of more ships over the next ten years, but it isn’t capable of fighting enemies such as China right now. (READ MORE: For Trump, Personnel Decisions Will Be Crucial) That will take an enormous amount of money. The Pentagon budget is almost $900 billion and perhaps Elon Musk can help shift investments to where they will do a lot more good. We’re behind China, Russia, and other adversaries in artificial intelligence, hypersonic aircraft and missiles, unmanned aerial systems, and a lot more. Hegseth needs to study carefully — and my naval aviation friends will disagree — whether we need to do away with our much too vulnerable aircraft carriers and create other systems that can perform carriers’ missions. A shift in naval strategy is obviously in order. There’s a lot more Ratcliffe and Hegseth will have to do and do quickly to meet the threats our adversaries pose. We have to hope that they can live up to the challenges they will face. The post Hegseth and Ratcliffe Face Big Challenges appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I had little to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago. Like the billions who grew up with the monstrous structure, I thrilled to watch it get torn down by Germans on each side of it. And I celebrated the man responsible for the glorious sight, in journalism and fiction, although he was no longer President. Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union with a singular vision which dispelled a 70-year-old belief — that the Cold War was the permanent status quo. He’d articulated it a decade earlier and shaken the world. “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War,” Reagan said. “We win, they lose.” You can almost feel sorry for the poor, indoctrinated Zegler, discovering the limits of her Hollywoke bubble. I felt the same elation two weeks back on Election Night, but with an added thrill. This time, I’d done my bit to save the West — by covering the Culture War. I chronicled how Donald Trump turned the tide, as Reagan did. And he too was shot and nearly killed in the process. But while both men were attacked by the media and their political opposition, Trump by far got the worst of it. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Trump Victory Is the American Counter-Reformation) Reagan’s inner circle — James Baker, Michael Deaver, Attorney General Ed Meese, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and, yes, Vice-President George H. W. Bush — were mostly loyal to him. Yet many on Trump’s team — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley, National Security Advisor John Bolton, others — kept stabbing him in the back. Worse, though still traditionally rulebound in the Eighties, by Trump’s time, both the media and the Democratic Party had fused into one massive Swamp Dragon that blew fire on him pre, during, and post his presidency. Trump endured hoax after hoax — “White supremacists were fine people”, “Inject bleach”; lie after lie — “Veterans are sucker and losers,” Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation; impeachment after impeachment — abuse of power, incitement of insurrection; indictment after indictment — falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, trying to overturn the 2020 election, many more; assassination attempt after assassination attempt — July 13, September 15; and finally opposing candidate after opposing candidate — Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. Trump beat back all of them and stood tall. Then, in the biggest Republican electoral landslide since Reagan, also winning the popular vote. But politics, as my late mentor Andrew Breitbart most famously said, is downstream of culture. And the Culture War is my beat, and my literary frontier. Consequently, I knew long before the last election what the enemy forces would be. I’d been exiled from Hollywood after making producers money writing about strong men and beautiful women — by weak men and unattractive women, in other words, feminists. Disdain for Obama and support for Trump sealed my fate. Understanding the Left’s hatred of masculinity and femininity led me back to my first loves — journalism and fiction. My initial article for The American Spectator, an astounding six years ago, posited how Hollywood would never greenlight a sure hit like Taken. Because the concept of a loving macho dad brutally rescuing his nubile teen daughter from minority white slavers is anathema to modern PC producers. Today, they would rather lose money by imposing unwanted fantasy dreck about butt-kicking women (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Marvels), mutating boy-friendly franchises into girl-driven flops (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Mad Max), and defeminizing beloved fairy tales. On that third point, nothing has been more unintentionally entertaining than Snow White starlet Rachel Zegler being a one girl wrecking crew against her movie, once trusted Disney, and the beloved film that built it. As I wrote last summer, Zegler obnoxiously ridiculed the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as “weird, weird” and Prince Charming as “a stalker.” “She’s not going to be saved by the Prince,” Zegler snorted. “And she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Scratch every romance-loving girl and mom from the potential audience. A panicked Disney delayed the movie till next year, had Rachel issue a hostage-video apology, then sent her into hiding. All seemed tranquil until the Night that Wrecked Hollywoke — Trump’s blowout of Kamala Harris. It drove Zegler back into the spotlight with a Trump Derangement Instagram screed against his voters, the traditional family base for a Disney film: I find myself speechless in the midst of this. Another four years of hatred, leaning us towards a world I do not want to live in. Leaning us towards a world that will be hard to raise my daughter in. Leaning us towards a world that will force her to have a baby she doesn’t want. Leaning us towards a world that is fearful. I shouldn’t be this shocked. But I am. I am heartbroken for my friends who awoke in fear this morning. And I am here with you. To cry, to yell, to hug. To wax poetic on how the left continues to fail us in forging a new path forward. This loss should not have been. And it certainly should not have been by so many votes. Zegler ends with the coup de grace on Snow White and possibly her career, an actual threat. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.” Naturally Disney made her walk the plank again with another groveling insincere apology. “I let my emotions get the best of me,” Zegler wrote on Instagram.” Hatred and anger have caused us to move further and further away from peace and understanding, and I am sorry I contributed to the negative discourse.” (READ MORE: We Can Be Heroes for One Day — Election Day) “This week has been emotional for so many of us but I firmly believe that everyone has the right to their opinion, even when it differs from my own,” she continued. You can almost feel sorry for the poor, indoctrinated Zegler, discovering the limits of her Hollywoke bubble. If she thought November 5th, 2024 was a rough night, she should wait till March 21st, 2025, premiere date for Snow White. She’ll be begging Trump voters to fill those empty theater seats. ___________ “You got a problem with women in combat?” Amy asked. “More than the Chinese will when they take us on,” said Slade. If you approve of Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, you’ll like Mark Slade, the ex-Army Ranger turned DC private eye in my shockingly timely new political thriller, The Washington Trail, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever fun mysteries are sold. The post The Night That Wrecked Hollywoke appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.