Bobby Kennedy Jr. and the September Report - How We Got Here
The knives are really coming out... Here is why
TL;DR
Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a man of his word. At the start of his independent bid for President, he said he would drop out if it became clear he would only be a spoiler. That day came shortly after the assassination attempt on President Trump. I believe the president was humbled by what happened in Butler, PA. I believe Butler formed a bond between the President and Kennedy; the President has to wonder why he was spared the fate that befell Kennedy’s father and uncle. For Kennedy, it has always been his prayer to be in a position to end the scourge of childhood chronic disease. These two men are on the cusp of doing just that - and industry is in an existential panic.
Below I’ll share a video I took of Mr. Kennedy speaking at a campaign fundraiser in March of 2024. Listen carefully and today’s news will make complete sense. This is how we got where we are today.
A whole new round of hit pieces on Bobby Kennedy, Jr. are dropping because he and his team are about to drop a nuclear bomb on the industrial players that have crippled an entire generation with chronic disease. I’m going to share a video below that I took at a Kennedy campaign rally in a San Diego County suburb in March of 2024 because - all the way back shortly after he launched his independent bid for President - he laid out exactly how he would approach public health.
But before I do that...
We’re still meeting, active, and ready
I was a communications lead for the Kennedy California volunteer team. After the 2024 Republican Primary (in March) I switched my registration from Republican to Kennedy’s early effort to bootstrap the “We the People” party in California. Later in June the American Independent Party of California (AIP) - one of six formally recognized parties with access to the ballot for President and Vice President in California - nominated Kennedy and Nicole Shanahan as their candidates. I volunteered over the Spring and Summer and in October was formally named by the AIP as a primary elector (each primary elector has an alternate) for the Electoral College. If Kennedy had remained in the race and had been able to gain a plurality across the six candidates on California’s ballot, I would have been one of Kennedy’s 54 Electoral College votes.
From the start, Kennedy made it clear to us that if polling showed him merely as a spoiler, he would drop out. During the race, he spent a considerable amount (with Zogby polling, I believe) on a poll with a margin of error of next to zero. He made it clear he wanted the true picture of the race. And it looked entirely possible that we could see a “Contingent Election.” This is where no one gets a majority of Electoral College votes and the selection of President is thrown to the House of Representatives. (The Senate chooses the VP.)
California has the largest number of Electoral College votes at 54. With six candidates appearing on the ballot, a plurality merely requires 17% of the popular vote to win all 54 of the Electoral College votes. A majority of all Electoral College votes is 270. The California contingent of 54 is exactly 20% of the votes needed to become President. If we could take those from Trump and Biden (as we thought at the time) we might deny both of them a majority and force a Contingent Election.
While the chance Kennedy could win in the House seemed slim, we were undeterred because just by triggering the Contingent Election we would have taken a sledge hammer to the image of inevitability people tend to have of the two party system. (The two parties assiduously collude to maintain that aura of inevitability.) It would have been an absolutely historic crack in the status quo.
But even though the odds seemed slim, what would have happened in that case is that we (our ground game of volunteers) would have made something abundantly clear to ALL members of the House (Rs and Ds alike). If they voted for Mr. Kennedy we would support them two years later (the 2026 cycle), without regard to party affiliation. If they didn’t, we would guarantee they would face a well-funded and well-staffed primary challenger from their own party. And if you don’t think it is possible to pull together a national team of volunteers who come from both sides of the traditional aisle and are willing to stand together like this - well, you weren’t in the meetings I was in. So we were quite motivated on the California team.
How Butler, PA changed the race
And then came the assassination attempt. You can imagine how fraught that moment was for Mr. Kennedy, with both his father and uncle having been assassinated. What made it even more fraught was how Mr. Trump reacted. The polls changed immediately and dramatically. A large part of the undecided voters who polled as seriously considering Kennedy made up their minds for Trump.
And then we saw Mr. Kennedy for who he is; he is a man of his word. He had warned us about this day. The polling - again, he sunk a lot of money into getting the most accurate polling numbers possible - showed that remaining in the race would throw the election to Kamala Harris. He did exactly what he said he would so; he dropped out. I believe the assassination attempt humbled Trump and created a bond between him and Kennedy. I think Trump appreciated Kennedy’s deeply felt prayer that God would allow him to be in a position to put and end to the scourge of childhood chronic disease. I think this resonated with Trump as he had to grapple with his own questions of why he was spared the fate Kennedy’s father and uncle had met.
I vividly recall the next conference call with the California team; not everyone was happy with the move. I raised my hand and when my turn came I said something like this: “If we’re looking at this from a public health policy standpoint, having Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services is actually a bigger win than having him as President.” You’ll see in the video below, and in my explanation of Kennedy’s remarks, why I felt that way.
I told the group while we were going to continue to table for Kennedy at county fairs and the like, we needed to be ready if Trump won and then nominated Kennedy to HHS. At that point we (as a national team) needed to pivot. I provided a list of every Republican Senator who would have to run for reelection in 2026. I said that if Bobby were to be nominated, we needed to be on the phone, making it very clear to that batch of Senators that we were still together, still motivated, and fully ready to support primary challengers if need be.
And that is exactly what happened. Kennedy was nominated and confirmed because every Republican Senator saw the handwriting on the wall. That was our handwriting.
And now to the video... I’ll come back to the matter of the 2026 mid-term election in a moment.
There are about 10 minutes here and I’ll apologize up front for the poor audio and shaky video. This is just me holding up my phone. I realize that readers might not have the time or inclination to listen through these ten minutes. But I urge you to do so anyway. You simply have to understand the lessons Kennedy has learned litigating against companies for polluting the environment and selling harmful products.
Once you hear him explain his approach - right here all the way back to March of 2024 - you will immediately understand the subtext of what you are reading and hearing in the news. Here is a preview of what you will hear in the video below.
0:00: Kennedy talks about a toxicologist who has served as an expert witness in Kennedy’s cases. He then asks why in one generation there has been an explosion of autoimmune diseases. The toxicologist observes: “There's only about 13 things it could be...”
Why this matters: Our legal protections do not just come to us from legislatures in our state and in Congress. They come first from our tradition of common law. This reaches as far back as the English King Henry II in 1154 - even before the Magna Carta! The idea of “precedent” developed such that a present case was expected to be decided in a way consistent with past similar cases. The idea is that precedent predates, and then outlives, the current ruler and lays a foundation for a truly independent system of justice.
The U.S. legal system, both at the state and federal level, allows for persons to bring cases based on common law principles drawn from this history - not just on laws passed by our legislatures. One of these principles includes ‘product liability’.
So let’s go back to Kennedy’s toxicologist. If there are only about 13 things that can be causing the epidemic of autoimmune disease, the manufacturers of these things can end up on the hook for instances where people have been made sick. Because this is rooted in the tradition of common law, the principles of justice predate, and will outlive, whatever party happens to control Congress and the White House.
Kennedy’s famous case against Monsanto (now Bayer) over their Roundup weed killer is an example of what happens when a product is adequately proven to cause sickness. This is why it is important to listen to Kennedy throughout this video.
5:10 Kennedy gives voice to the skeptical who understand the problem of chemicals in the food supply and environment, but do not think anything can be done about it. “A lot people say, well, even if you can prove... there's nothing you can do about it... because industry is so powerful, so ingrained in our agricultural model...”
5:43: Kennedy answers the concern: “I know how to fix it... They way to fix it is you do good science... Because when you have enough science out there; when you have a critical threshold of science, then the lawyers come in...” (Please forgive me, I am one laughing loudly at that in the video.)
6:00: The Daubert Rule:1 “The Daubert rule says that if you are claiming that you got sick from an exposure... the judge is not allowed to let your lawyer make that argument to the jury unless there is a critical threshold of science...”
Why this matters: First, because a product liability case is based on common law - not on laws passed by Congress. In a very real sense, the common law is our last refuge in a system of laws (statutes passed by Congress) almost entirely bought and paid for otherwise.
It also matters because if we are to prevail in court in a case where we have been made sick by a product sold to us, we will have to show “proximate cause.” This is just a fancy way to say that we will have to make some reasonably objective case that our sickness was, in fact, caused by the product. And as we learned in high school science, “cause and effect” can only be “proven” by doing controlled experiments. “Anecdotes” help the scientist ask the right questions, but they are not proof. Statistical correlations help the scientist further refine their hypotheses, but “correlation is not causation.”
7:05: Industry is desperate to prevent these studies: “But, at about 2016 there were enough studies being done all over the world... and Monsanto was trying to stop them all... that the International Agency for Research on Cancer made a definitive finding that [Roundup] was a probable cause of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma...”
Why this matters: This is the whole ball of wax, folks! This is literally everything. Industry cannot abolish the common law without completely overturning the entire United States judicial system. While they can - and do - wield tremendous influence over what does and does not become law by way of statutes passed by Congress, they cannot repeal the tradition of common law, which reaches back even further than the Magna Carta! So they have to corrupt publicly funded science to prevent those who are made sick by their products from being able to prove their case in a common law court.
8:50 Enough science: “If we have enough science out there... that's what I am going to do... to make sure that every one of these exposures for every one of these chronic diseases, that we know what the cause is... and then we can clean up our country.”
Watch and listen for yourselves.
September is almost here. We are on the cusp of seeing Kennedy - with the support of President Trump - make good on this promise. That is why the knives are really coming out now.
Before I go on, let me make this one sidebar point. For reasons that will have to wait for another article, I am suspicious of anyone who attaches a “movement” label to themselves. We do not need a “movement” - medical freedom, food safety, you name it - we just need honest science. When we have honest science we can then vindicate our rights under common law and there isn’t a damn thing either the Ds or the Rs can do about it on behalf of their corporate clients.
Unless the government is literally required to ignore honest science.
House Appropriations Bill (Sections 453 & 507)
The Republican led House is moving an appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior in a way that observers have described as hasty. It is possible their haste is to get in front of the September report from HHS.
It is also believed that “Section 453” of this bill was added at the insistence of companies like Bayer (who acquired Monsanto) to overcome an adverse decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which the Supreme Court refused to review. This decision came in the aftermath of the Monsanto case Kennedy describes in the video. On appeal, Bayer argued that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) pre-empted California's common law standard for “duty to warn.” The Ninth Circuit disagreed and SCOTUS refused to take the case. Section 453 seems to be industry's answer:
“SEC. 453. None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling that is inconsistent with or in any respect different from the conclusion of (a) a human health assessment performed pursuant to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (7 U.S.C. 136 et seq.); or (b) a carcinogenicity classification for a pesticide.”
Section 507 says something similar about an industrial sludge byproduct referred to euphemistically as “biosolids” and used as “fertilizer” in agriculture.
“SEC. 507. None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to finalize, implement, administer, or enforce the draft risk assessment titled ‘Draft Sewage Sludge Risk Assessment for Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctane Sulfonic Acid (PFOS)’ published by the Environmental Protection Agency in the Federal Register on January 15, 2025 (90 Fed. Reg. 4 3859)”
Let’s work our way back from getting sick and seeking to vindicate our common law right not to be harmed by the product that made us sick. We will have to show that the manufacturer knew or should have known the product was harmful, and that they failed in their “duty to warn.” This was basically the case made by Kennedy against Monsanto.
There are two streams of information to consider here:
That “threshold of science” spoken of by Kennedy. These are independent studies that, in the aggregate, overcome Daubert Rule limitations. Or...
As for Section 453, the “human health assessment” under FIFRA. Each registered pesticide must be reviewed every 15 years, and the process can take between four and 15 years to complete. The assessment includes a classification as to whether the pesticide causes cancer. And as for Section 507, it is even more egregious. These chemicals have already been identified as harmful.
If these sections remain in the bill the government will not be allowed to “follow the science.” It will be prevented from requiring appropriate warnings on product labels even in the face of a “threshold of science” showing that they cause cancer or otherwise are harmful. And for the toxic sludge passed off as fertilizer, it will not be able to take any action based on the harm science has already proven.
Let me say this again for emphasis: If these sections remain in the bill the government will not be allowed to “follow the science.”
This, in turn, will allow the manufacturer to claim that federal law does not allow them to add warnings to their labels beyond what has been previously approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is not quite accurate to say this grants “immunity” from being sued. Rather, it makes it practically impossible to prevail in a suit claiming a breach of the “duty to warn.” By hiding behind the FIFRA process, industry is all but guaranteed the ability to wait out the current administration - under which they are no longer able to control what science is funded - in hopes they can regain that control when Kennedy is no longer head of Health and Human Services.
Simply put: Sections 453 and 507 strip us of the ability to vindicate our common law rights.
Back to the 2026 Election
House Republicans, already with a razor slim majority, simply need to understand that Mr. Kennedy inspired a movement that defied the myth of two party inevitability. Former Democrats and former Republicans joined forces, and then followed as Mr. Kennedy showed himself to be a man of his word. And we have watched as he has pursued his goal of Mak[ing] America Healthy Again EXACTLY as he said he would.
He was confirmed for a very simple reason. Senate Republicans were made to understand - in no uncertain terms - that the force that voted with them in November of 2024 can very easily vote against them in 2026. Honest science - in support of our common law right not to be harmed by products sold to us - is what we voted for. It is what was promised. Promises made. Promises kept. It really is that simple.
This is now Main Street vs “K Street”2 and House Republicans need to understand - again, in no uncertain terms - that the language of Sections 453 and 507 is the language of their political tombstone.
I am an expert witness in cybersecurity. The Daubert Rule governs when an expert witness is needed, how they are qualified, and how their testimony is evaluated.
K Street in Washington DC is where the bulk of corporate lobbyists have their offices.