Gen. Alexander Roberts Brewer Voss, USSF (COS) EDF

To the Mainstream Media Every time you write "roadkill," I will mention dirty C.I.A. regime-change wars and our $35 trillion debt. Every time you write "barbecued goat," I will invoke normalized government censorship, vanishing topsoil, threatened wilderness, the epidemics of addiction and loneliness, the deaths of despair, and the world’s largest chronic disease burden. Every time you write "vaccine crank,” I will remind you of an industry with a well-documented track record of putting profits before people, an industry with unreliable regulatory oversight, an industry which is one of the most powerful entities in the world. Every time you write “fringe,” I will remind you of my pledge to heal the divide and center us in our shared humanity. Every time you write "brain worm," I will mention our blundering foreign policy, which has helped bring our precious earth to the brink of World War III. Your opportunistic fidelity to a monstrous status quo has turned you into the Red Herring Machine. The Defamation Industrial Complex. The Abettor of the Social Lie. We are a beautiful but polarized and ailing nation. The more you smear me, the more I'll keep speaking.

Plato famously tells us of prisoners chained in a cave, unable to move their bodies, looking at a blank wall. Behind them are puppeteers holding up puppets and a fire. The prisoners can’t see the puppeteers, or the puppets, or the fire. What the prisoners see are conjured shadows on the wall. And the prisoners mistake those shadows for life, for reality, for truth. This old story speaks to us now. It describes the way the media projects a distorted shadow of reality onto our televisions and computer screens. It describes the way politicians from the two parties distort fellow Americans into black-and-white abstractions and hate-objects. America, we need to escape this captivity. We need to leave the cave. We can no longer mistake shadows for the truth. Outside the cave there are sobering problems, yes, but there are also rivers and trees and sunlight. And fellow human beings. And a beautiful nation. #Kennedy24