Boy, did Robert Kennedy Jr. ever strip Jake Tapper down to his corporate skivvies, exposing the CNN anchor as the naked shill for Big Pharma that he is.
It all took place back in 2005, as we learn in an essay by Kennedy called "The Day Jake Tapper Sold His Soul to Pharma," Kennedy writes in the first person because he was there, and he writes at all in response to a slew of stupid insults recently tweeted by a bilious Tapper, the CNN anchor's gut almost certainly grinding in coils of dyspeptic rancor over Kennedy's runaway bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci. When you realize how much trouble Tapper has gone to to hide the real Anthony Fauci that Kennedy's book exposes -- hiding the real Fauci & Co. looks like Tapper's golden ticket to corporate media success -- you will begin understand the CNN star's foul outburst, and more.
I should note that Kennedy's initial reply to Tapper's stink bomb via Twitter was a request to debate:
We both feel passionate about our views on vaccine mandates. Let's have a debate for the benefit of Americans. We can debate your enthusiastic support of censorship and our divergent opinions on Dr. Fauci's effectiveness as the covid pandemic manager.
Tapper's response:
Truly embarrassing.
No, I’m not going to lend credence to a conspiracy theorist whose views are so false, unhinged, and dangerous to public health his own siblings feel the need publish op-eds against him.
Gotta hand it to you, Jake, you're right about that: Debating Robert Kennedy Jr. on vaccine mandates (or anything else) would be "truly embarassing" for you. But tell me: Was your use of the hackneyed phrase "conspiracy theorist" just your being hackneyed, or were you on "mockingbird media" duty calling out the intelligence asset's lexicon? Surely you're aware to the point of conscious trollling that the term "conspiracy theorist" was coined by the CIA? It appears in the 1967 memo marked "psych" and "CS" (clandestine service?) which the CIA put together to assist in "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report," the US government whitewash of the assassination of President John Kennedy. Given Robert Jr.'s belief that the CIA was involved in both the assassination of his uncle John and father Robert, and given his assertion that the CIA is the architect of the militarized pandemic response developed over the past twenty years (see Chapter 12 "Germ Games," you might want to do a segment on it whoops sorry I forgot journalism verboten), the term here is not just loaded, but super-over-loaded.
In the article, Kennedy writes:
If my book is baseless conspiracy theories, then shouldn’t Mr. Tapper welcome an opportunity to correct me with facts or arguments that go beyond name-calling?
Allow me, then, to offer my own theory for Mr. Tapper’s apoplexy.
Once upon a time --
I happened to have a front-row seat when Jake Tapper had his moment of moral crisis. I’m guessing his fierce vitriol toward me is a reaction to his embarrassment that I was witness to the instant when Mr. Tapper chose career over character.
In July 2005, Jake Tapper was ABC’s senior producer when the network ordered him to pull a lengthy exposé on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) secret 2000 Simpsonwood conference.
Here is the background:
In 1999, in response to exploding epidemics of autism and other neurological disorders, CDC decided to study its vast Vaccine Safety Datalink — the medical and vaccination record of millions of Americans, archived by the top HMOs — to learn whether the dramatic escalation of the vaccine schedule, beginning in 1989, was a culprit. CDC’s in-house epidemiologist, Thomas Verstraeten, led the effort.
Verstraeten’s initial data run suggested that mercury-containing hepatitis B vaccines — administered during the first month of life — were associated with a wide range of neurological injuries, including a dramatic 1,135% rise in autism risks among vaccinated children.
Verstraeten’s findings propelled CDC into DEFCON 1. The agency’s top vaccine officials summoned 52 pharmaceutical industry leaders, the foremost vaccinologists from academia and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and public health regulators from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and European Medicines Agency to a secret two-day meeting at the remote Simpsonwood retreat center in Norcross, Georgia, to strategize about how to hide these awful revelations from the public.
In 2005, I obtained the explosive transcripts of this meeting and was about to publish excerpts in Rolling Stone (Deadly Immunity, July 18, 2005). Those recordings, ironically, portrayed these leading kingpins of the vaccine cartel poised at their own moral brink, and chronicled their collapse into corruption over two sickening days of debate.
Kennedy goes to recount those two sickening days of debate. At the end, "Big Pharma operatives and government technocrats persuaded each other to transform their disastrous error into villainy — by doubling down and hiding their mistake from the public."
The article continues:
Tapper saw an early draft of my Rolling Stone story and proposed that, in exchange for exclusivity, he would do a companion piece for ABC timed to air on the magazine’s publication day.
Tapper spent several weeks working on the story with me and a team of enthusiastic ABC reporters and technicians. During his frequent conversations with me over that period, he was on fire with indignation over the Simpsonwood revelations. He acted like a journalist hoping to win an Emmy.
The day before the piece was to air, an exasperated Tapper called me to say that ABC’s corporate officials ordered him to pull the story. The network’s pharmaceutical advertisers were threatening to cancel their advertising.
“Corporate told us to shut it down,” Tapper fumed. Tapper told me that it was the first time in his career that ABC officials had ordered him to kill a story.
ABC had advertised the Simpsonwood exposé, and its sudden cancellation disappointed an army of vaccine safety advocates and parents of injured children who deluged the network with a maelstrom of angry emails.
In response, ABC changed tack and publicly promised to air the piece. Instead, following a one-week delay, the network duplicitously aired a hastily assembled puff piece promoting vaccines and assuring listeners that mercury-laden vaccines were safe.
The new “bait and switch” segment precisely followed Pharma’s talking points. “I’m putting my faith in the Institute of Medicine,” ABC’s obsequious medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, declared in closing. Two pharmaceutical advertisements bracketed the story.
After that piece aired, I called Jake to complain. He neither answered nor returned my calls.
Right down to his corporate skivvies.
Kennedy continues:
During the 16 intervening years, Pharma has returned Mr. Tapper’s favor by aggressively promoting his career. Pfizer shamelessly sponsors Tapper’s CNN news show, announcing its ownership of the space — and Mr. Tapper’s indentured servitude — before each episode with the loaded phrase: “Brought to you by Pfizer.”
Under the apparent terms of that sponsorship, CNN and Tapper provide Pfizer a platform to market its products and allow the drug company — a serial felon — to dictate content on CNN.
This arrangement has transformed CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper into a propaganda vehicle for Pharma and effectively reduced Mr. Tapper to the role of a drug rep — shamelessly promoting fear porn, confusion, and germophobia, and ushering his audience toward high-yield patent pharmaceuticals.
Another thing about Robert Jr., he wields a wicked good pen.
Tapper’s main thrust during the pandemic has been to promote levels of public terror sufficient to indemnify all the official lies against critical thinking.
All that Pharma money naturally requires that Mr. Tapper kowtow to Dr. Fauci, and the CNN host’s slavishness has helped make Tapper’s show the go-to pulpit for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director.
It’s a safe place for Dr. Fauci to hit all Jake’s reliable softballs out of the park.
“The bootlicking competition at CNN is pretty nauseating,” observed investigative journalist Celia Farber who has chronicled Dr. Fauci’s mismanagement at NIAID for more than 25 years. “It’s ruinous for both democracy and for public health.”
Another journalist has compared Tapper’s mortifying on-air servility toward Dr. Fauci to the adulation of a loyal and obedient canine. “It’s like a dog watching a chess match,” says former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. “So much intensity and so little understanding.”
Good ones, guys, bell-ringers to kick off the piece's final round of hooks, jabs, and other point-scoring punches against the whole Tapper/Fauci/Pfizer gang with which Kennedy finishes off the piece, also Jake Tapper. (Again, read the whole thing here.)
Kennedy concludes:
The critical functions of journalism in a democracy are to speak truth to power, relentlessly expose official corruption, and to forever maintain a posture of skepticism toward government and corporate power centers.
What Jake Tapper does is the opposite of journalism. Tapper, instead, aligns himself with power, and makes himself a propagandist for official narratives and a servile publicist for powerful elites and government technocrats.
But don't they all? What Kennedy has described here applies to more than one corrupt journalist and more than one corrupt network. His indictment fits the news biz writ large because it is all of it largely underwritten by Pfizer, which has been controlling and corralling not just its critics but the facts for who knows how long.
After such an expose, it's hard to imagine going back on the air. But Tapper will, they all will. That's how Faustian bargains work, till the end.