The Better Angels of Our Nature

On RFK Jr.'s bid for the presidency

1. We Are the Angels We Once Read About

In a time of seemingly unprecedented social chaos and political corruption, it comes as a great relief to know that there are what Abraham Lincoln described as “the better angels of our nature” out there. The Covid crisis was a crucible that—just like the metal smelting process implied by that metaphor—separated the human dross from the gold. (More on who they are in a moment.) Of course, in Biblical terms, there were the angels who fought for God and those who opted to follow the Devil, often pictured as the hidden actors behind the scenes of human affairs. I much prefer the Jungian analysis that these forces are not outside us but inside us—that each of us carries both light and shadow. Each of us, unless we guard our spirits closely, has the capacity to be either a liberator or a destroyer. This was the tragic truth that Hannah Arendt realized in the investigations that led to her important book The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Carl Jung devoted a great deal of nuanced thought to what the human ‘shadow’ represented, arguing that the only way to true psychological health is to integrate the shadow, or in today’s parlance to “own” it. In simple terms, this means accepting that we each have faults, that—left unchecked—we have the capacity to foster evil as much as the next person. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius—probably the closest any human has ever come to Plato’s philosopher king—spoke in his Meditations of the need to govern one’s passions, especially those in positions of authority. Often the most dangerous people are those who insist they have no dark side at all. In Jungian terms, they then project this shadow onto others by their actions, which can range from simple blame to all-out attacks. Whole nations are not exempt from the phenomenon if they choose to project a squeaky clean international image that is belied by the facts. This is quite apart from that especially dangerous subset of humans, the psychopaths, who lack the capacity for any form of remorse or good faith behavior. Fortunately, they represent only about one percent of the human race, but that tiny percentile has cut a terrible swath of death and destruction through history, from Genghis Khan to Mao and Stalin. I suspect we’ll have a new rogue’s gallery of Covid psychopaths to add to the history books when the dust finally settles. I’ll leave others to name those names for now.

Keep in mind that when I say “angels,” I’m not referring to perfect beings without any blemish of character, but flawed humans who make a choice to do what’s right even when it costs them their livelihood, their reputations and in some cases historically, their lives. Often these “better angels” are whistleblowers whose consciences cannot let them rest unless they release vital information that has been withheld from the public. Julian Assange springs immediately to mind. That this man still languishes in prison is a marker for just how corrupt our civilization has become. For anyone with a strong enough stomach, all you need to know about why this is so is found in David Talbot’s explosive book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Essentially, it reveals that since the end of the Second World War, the West has been governed by a secret cabal of intelligence agencies and officials like Allen Dulles who have no qualms whatsoever about enforcing their power through assassinations, foreign invasions, torture, experimentation on their own civilian populations, and constant manipulation of the masses through the media. “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” said former CIA chief William Casey.^[1] And that was in the 1980s!

So which “better angels of our nature” am I talking about now? Well fortunately the list is long: Brian Peckford, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Byram Bridle, Dr. Jessica Rose, Dr. Charles Hoffe, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Jordan Peterson, Steve Kirsch, Dr. Jay Battacharya, Dr. Scott Atlas, Tamara Lich, to name only a few. It’s entirely possible Elon Musk is now among them.^[2] I won’t belabor the point since lists have a way of making my eyes glaze over. There are many more. Suffice to say that for every public demon we’ve had to battle, one of these “better angels” has stepped up. Most of them probably aren’t as famous as the ones listed; the most public ones are merely “the tip of the spear,” as a friend of mine puts it. But for now I want to acknowledge one of these well-known individuals, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Recent photo of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Note the fish tiepin, a nod to his epic achievement in establishing the international Riverkeepers NGO, whose actions returned fish populations to the formerly polluted Hudson River in New York. RFK Jr. discusses this achievement in his inaugural presidential campaign speech, noting that, “Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy.”

While returning from a brief book tour recently I watched RFK Jr.’s entire inaugural campaign speech for the American presidency. As a Canadian I don’t usually pay much attention to American politics but this event had a gravitas about it that sparked my intuition—this speech needed to be heard, not just by Americans but by anyone who thirsts for truth and freedom in a world gone mad. It brought tears to my eyes. I can’t recall at any time in my more than 60 years on this planet hearing a speech by a politician that was so erudite (RFK Jr. spoke without notes or teleprompter), so impassioned for the truth, so dedicated to ending “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power,” which sums up his campaign platform. (He also pledged to end America’s epidemic of chronic disease among children, now estimated at 54%.)

I have literally never watched a political speech to its end, usually disgusted by the partisan bickering and finger-pointing, the patent lies and shallowness of most politicians. Yet I watched all two-hours plus of RFK Jr.’s speech. To be fair, Kennedy is not, unlike many of his family, a career politician, which in fact may be another excellent reason for the Democratic Party to choose him as their presidential candidate. He was disarmingly candid about his own skeletons in the closet, anticipating the shark attacks that typically come from the media and opponents in any political contest. Yet he didn’t waste five minutes of that two hours attacking other presidential candidates, noting that he and his family are friends of the Bidens. Trump received only a passing mention. In my opinion Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s 2023 inaugural Presidential Campaign Speech^[3] deserves to go down in history alongside other famous American speeches, for example, Chief Seattle’s famous speech or Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

2. The Long Shadow of Mainstream Media

However, serious questions remain. Will the mainstream media continue to pretend RFK Jr.’s candidacy is a non-event, a “fringe” contender? This is hardly surprising, given the recent revelations of the Twitter files that the CIA and FBI regularly collude with social media to suppress and censor material that contradicts their agenda. Mainstream media has devolved to an official propaganda arm of the Deep State, with “former” intelligence and military experts openly consulted on nightly news broadcasts. We’ve known this since at least the Church Committee Senate hearings in the late 1970s that exposed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, with its long reach into news media even then. Yet many in the public seem reluctant to accept this reality. Canadians are particularly naïve, since for generations the CBC actually practiced good journalism before it succumbed to state-supporting groupthink.

The good news is that polls are showing fewer and fewer people trust the media anymore, especially since Covid. RFK Jr. pointed this out in his speech, noting that in 1963 when his uncle JFK was assassinated, “about 80% of Americans said they trusted their government. Today 22% trust their government and 22% trust the press—the lowest level ever. The media is at its lowest because we know the media lies to us, and everybody knows that. When they start lying to us, Americans look for other sources because they know they’re being lied to. And they look for other sources of the truth.” When asked by Epoch Times reporter Jeff Sanders, who is slated to testify before the National Citizens’ Inquiry hearings in Vancouver, what I thought the solution might be, I said, without hesitation: independent journalists. James Corbett, Whitney Webb, Glenn Greenwald, Del Bigtree, Clayton and Natali Morris of Redacted—the list is long and growing longer, thankfully. In other words, the shift is already happening.

Tucker Carlson—another voice for truth silenced? Or the beginning of the end of mainstream media as a socially relevant force?

Some commentators such as Megan Kelly have predicted that with Fox News firing Tucker Carlson—their top audience draw—mainstream media has made a fatal mistake. One might even go so far as to say that in future historians can draw a red line under that event, marked: “The End of Mainstream Media as a Relevant Social Force.” Carlson’s speech at the Heritage Foundation, as of today (May 1^st) has 5.2 million views. That easily trounces any of the top anchors from any mainstream media news outlet. That speech, by the way, is another one that is essential viewing (or listening),^[4] another candidate for the Hall of Fame of Great American Speeches. As with RFK Jr., Carlson emphasizes that while the truth is an ever-expanding force, one that enlarges a person’s sphere of being, lies are a constricting force that become a prison for both individuals and society. “Once you say one true thing, more follow. The truth is contagious but lying is as well.” I wish I had the space to transcribe here both Carlson’s and RFK Jr.’s speeches, but do yourself a favour and find the time to listen to both. (NOTE: About the first 10 minutes of Carlson’s speech is about his early career with the Heritage Foundation so skip that if you don’t find it interesting.)

3. Calling All Angels…^[5]

And finally, with deep trepidation I must pose another question regarding RFK Jr.’s bid for the presidential candidacy. Will the Democratic National Convention allow a truly honest vote when party members are asked to choose whether to nominate Joe Biden or Bobby Kennedy Jr.? Or will they pull another fraud like the one they did in the 2016 DNC, when party members overwhelmingly voted to have Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate, yet the ballots were fouled to select Hilary Clinton instead. I still remember people in the stands at that convention, weeping as they held up signs reading: “Bernie Won NOT Hilary!”

I was relieved to see that as Bobby Kennedy’s speech ended, he was ushered out of the auditorium by a phalanx of security personnel. Given his family’s history, he’s wise to take no chances. David Talbot’s book—to name only one—makes clear the connection between the CIA and the assassination of JFK and Bobby’s father RFK. Oliver Stone’s JFK research is just the latest to lay any remaining doubts to rest. For me all it took was Mark Lane’s early book on the topic, Rush to Judgment, revealing the gaping holes in the Warren Commission report. Lane had been an attorney on the panel that interviewed witnesses before the report was manipulated by Allen Dulles into its final form. Here is Talbot’s conclusion:

“Those resolute voices in American public life that continue to deny the existence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy argue that ‘someone would have talked.’ This line of reasoning is often used by journalists who have made no effort themselves to closely inspect the growing body of evidence and have not undertaken any of their own investigative reporting. The argument betrays a touchingly naïve media bias—a belief that the American press establishment itself, that great slumbering watchdog, could be counted on to solve such a monumental crime, one that sprung from the very system of governance of which corporate media is an essential part… In fact, many people have talked during the past half of a century—including some directly connected to the plot against Kennedy. But the media simply refused to listen.”^[6]

“The media refused to listen.” Big surprise there. Even in the ’60s though, Lane wasn’t the only skeptic, and there were several books that challenged the Warren Commission’s interpretation of events, including Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash, and Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas.^[7] The impact of this was surprising, given the success of CIA media manipulation of public opinion. Already by 1967, “polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin.”^[8] Fast-forward a half century and that figure holds steady at 61% of Americans—a clear majority—who aren’t buying the story.^[9] Talbot goes on to explain why the official explanation of Bobby Kennedy’s murder in 1968 is another pathetic patchwork of lies: “…evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman.”^[10] Which is another reason Bobby Kennedy Jr. is so amazing—that he would take such a huge risk given this history, and that he has such composure about it in a public speech. As he said, entering politics wasn’t something he would normally have chosen to do, but circumstances compelled him to try to save his country.

This is what makes me so concerned for him announcing his bid for the presidency in the 2024 American election. We have no one like him in Canada with the possible exception of Pierre Polievre, but the jury on him is still out. He’s an erudite and accomplished speaker who does a fine job of challenging the Trudeau Liberals in Parliament but his condemnation of European MP Christine Anderson sent a distinctly false note. (And as my friend Steve Friedman reminds me, Maxime Bernier has been a much more consistent supporter of the Freedom movement in Canada.) Instead of an RFK Jr. we have mini-me dictator Justin Trudeau, adopting the old Soviet tactic of rewriting history even as it unfolds: “I never compelled anyone to get vaccinated.” Right. Roll the tape… As Hannah Arendt and other experts on totalitarianism have explained, in such regimes truth is not important. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, the Party decides what is truth and what is history.

Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the West’s greatest hope for turning our civilization back from the brink of utter destruction. That said, I’m not naïve about the immensity of the forces he’s challenging—Big Pharma, Big Tech, the Deep State represented by today’s counterparts of the late Allen Dulles, and what RFK Jr. himself has aptly described as government “agency capture” by corporations. How soon we forget that Mussolini himself described the merger of state and corporate power “fascism.” These people will not “go gently into that good night.” One can only pray—and I do, daily—that the “better angels of our nature” rise up to defeat this evil cabal, that history fires one of its magic bullets that none of these sociopaths can possibly dodge. It’s happened before—the X factor of unforeseen consequences that even the best CIA minds can’t anticipate, a sudden confluence of events that manifests in an eruption of the collective consciousness with a power akin to a force of nature. Pray it happens again—soon.

I also pray for RFK Jr., that, in another of Shakespeare’s many immortal phrases, may “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” And by that I mean not the Bard’s equating of rest with death, but of the rest that comes from a person of integrity standing for truth and freedom, supported by millions of “the better angels of our nature.”

POSTSCRIPT: It has been pointed out to me that there are genuine dangers inherent in identifying “heroes” or, as I prefer to call them, “the better angels of our nature,” though I did make clear in this article that “when I say “angels,” I’m not referring to perfect beings without any blemish of character, but flawed humans who make a choice to do what’s right…” despite great personal risk or cost. That said, fellow Substacker Caitlin Johnstone has some astute observations to offer:

“I think it’s probably a good thing when our idols get knocked off the pedestals we put them on. Chomsky. Bernie. The Dalai Lama. It’s not healthy to elevate others to a lofty status above ourselves instead of seeing them as normal human beings who are as capable of error as anyone else.”

“One of the worst mistakes you can make is neglecting your responsibility to cultivate a truth-based understanding of reality for yourself. People hand off that responsibility to journalists, pundits, ‘thought leaders,’ teachers, preachers and gurus, but to do this is to neglect a very sacred duty.”

“It’s disempowering to have idols on pedestals, because they create the false impression that the solution to our problems exists somewhere outside ourselves. In reality no one individual will ever solve the massive problems humanity now faces. It’s going to take all of us.”

Another Substack commenter pointed out that RFK Jr. has made some rather shocking comments in the past about jailing “climate change deniers,” although to be fair, this comment was made 8 years ago according to the YouTube time stamp, so one would hope Bobby has since modified his stance. (Thanks to Eugene Nier for providing the link.) He has already noted in his inaugural campaign speech how he was forced to change his opinion of the childhood vaccine schedule when he was confronted with mothers of vaccine-damaged children at his speeches, and then did his own follow-up research. So that suggests to me that, in his own words, he is willing to be proven wrong if the data supports it. This in itself is virtually unprecedented in politics—someone willing to be challenged and then to personally re-examine the evidence for himself and modify his opinion.

Finally, I did not intend to convey the idea that I support celebrity culture or hero worship in any way. As I said in the main article above: “for every public demon we’ve had to battle, one of these “better angels” has stepped up. Most of them probably aren’t as famous as the ones listed; the most public ones are merely “the tip of the spear,” as a friend of mine puts it.” That includes you and me. Note also that Part 1 is subtitled “We Are the Angels We Once Read About.”

The great investigative journalist James Corbett has written and spoken extensively about what he calls “hopium,” the idea that we can offshore our responsibility for change to distant leaders—an idea that is constantly exploited by politicians, for example in this extensive interview.

However, I do believe that humans benefit by having inspiring exemplars; within the arts, for example, every artist will cite mentoring figures who originally inspired their own work and informed their aesthetic. One does not have to agree with everything in a mentor one admires to remain inspired by them. There’s no point refusing to listen to Beethoven because he was, at times, a raging lunatic who was hard on those around him. (Not an unusual description of most artistic types, by the way.) Or refusing to listen to Mozart because he was a Freemason, or David Bowie because in a delusional moment he flirted with the ideas of fascism.

The key distinction, as Johnstone says, is that we take responsibility for cultivating “a truth-based understanding of reality for yourself.” And even more so, that we recognize “the better angels of our nature” within ourselves, and resolve to act on these higher impulses and resolutely resisting the pull to the lower nature we also all share.

Amazing synchronicity: Just as I updated my post on RFK Jr. today, noting that “he is willing to be proven wrong if the data supports it,” the Epoch Times runs this story with Bobby saying the World Economic Forum has co-opted the climate change narrative in order to implement totalitarian control: theepochtimes.com/rfk-jr-says-climate-c…

You can read Johnstone’s full comments here:

---

^[1] https://historyheist.com/william-casey-well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-american-public-believes-is-false/

^[2] There are still many in the Freedom movement who see Musk as an integral part of the global elites represented by the World Economic Forum, pointing out that he was formerly among its Young Global Leaders program. However, this fails to account for the fact that with time, a thoughtful and informed individual has the capacity to change their beliefs. A pattern is emerging that suggests to me Musk may have had his epiphany, a kind of conversion experience represented by the New Testament story of Saul on the road to Damascus. Saul had been an ardent persecutor of Christians until Jesus appeared to him asking, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” After which, Saul became the apostle Paul, writing several of the books of the New Testament and founding many new Christian congregations in Asia Minor. Several of Musk’s recent public statements lead me to believe he may indeed have had such an epiphany: his release of the Twitter files; his condemnation of 15-minute cities; his signing the public statement calling for a pause on the development of AI—something he helped develop with Google executive Larry Page—until ethical and safety parameters can be established; his statement contradicting the falsehood that there are too many people on the planet when in fact nations around the world are experiencing population and fertility crashes, etc. Are you seeing the pattern I’m seeing?

^[3] “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Historic Presidential Announcement in Boston, MA—April 19, 2023,”

Also available on C-SPAN with transcription: https://www.c-span.org/video/?527511-1/robert-kennedy-jr-announces-2024-presidential-campaign

^[4] “FULL SPEECH: Tucker Carlson’s Last Address Before Leaving Fox News,” The Heritage Foundation:

^[5] Subtitle inspired by the Jane Siberry song of that title; although she names exclusively female saints in her spoken introduction, the song is deeply moving. Have a listen:

Another beautiful song on this theme is Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel”:

^[6] The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, Harper/Perennial, New York, 2015, p. 494.

^[7] The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, ibid., p. 593.

^[8] The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, ibid., p. 596.

^[9] “Majority in U.S. Still Believe JFK Killed in a Conspiracy,” Gallup polls: https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx

^[10] The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, ibid., p. 611.