Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Endorses Democrat and Conspiracy Theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Shortly After Using a Vile Slur to Describe the Democratic Party

There’s reason to think that the shocking recent endorsement of a fringe Democrat by the increasingly right-learning tech guru is a bid to destroy—not save—the Democratic Party in the 2024 election.

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Introduction

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—who followed the Proof Twitter feed for years, only to unfollow it around the time it became clear that Joe Biden was the leading 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee—has recently undergone an extreme right-ward political shift. That shift has manifested in public antipathy toward the now-leader of the Democratic Party, President Biden. Dorsey was recently seen on Twitter strongly implying that Biden could no longer serve effectively as POTUS because he tripped on a black sandbag wrongly placed in his path on a black stage.

This isn’t the only indication that Dorsey wants chaos within the Democratic Party.

In fact, just tonight—Sunday, June 4, 2023—Dorsey formally endorsed a man running against Biden for the 2024 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

That man is infamous conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of assassinated Democratic Party hero (and a former Attorney General of the United States) Bobby Kennedy and a nephew of assassinated Democratic Party president John F. Kennedy.

By most accounts, the gravelly-voiced, almost 70-year-old Kennedy Jr. unironically resides at the fringes of American society—in many more ways than one, candidly.

Kennedy Jr. says he “has a lot of conversations with dead people”, and indeed does so every day. His views on vaccines are so aggressively and dishonestly anti-science that he was banned from Instagram. He says he’s absolutely certain that the CIA killed his uncle, the nation’s thirty-fifth president. His own sister calls his anti-science views “very dangerous.” His obscene analogy of vaccine programs to Nazi extermination protocols earned him a public rebuke from the Auschwitz Memorial and was very publicly “disowned” by his own wife, who was disgusted by it. He is a member of the infamous, detested Disinformation Dozen, a moniker applied to “twelve anti-vaccine advocates [who], according to research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, were responsible for nearly two-thirds of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook and Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic.” He has called Bitcoin, the infamously dodgy cryptocurrency that’s wreaked havoc around the world and been the locus of countless scams, “the perfect currency.” He has given aid and comfort and encouragement to those who falsely claim that American elections are “rigged.” He has falsely claimed that, under President Biden, “[the country’s rights are] under attack like never before in history.” He insists that anyone who trusts the government is “out of [their] mind.” He earned the ire of both Israelis and Germans for quickly defending musician Roger Waters from “totalitarian orthodoxies” after the latter wore full Nazi regalia at a recent concert (an incident that admittedly may have been blown out of proportion given the context in which Waters did what he did, but also stands as the sort of issue that Kennedy wading into so eagerly suggests an attempt to dog-whistle to bigoted independent voters in the United States).

According to a recent CBS News report, prior to Kennedy Jr.’s announcement of a presidential bid,

[f]ormer Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon had been encouraging [him] to run for months, believing he could be both a useful chaos agent in the 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vaccine sentiment around the country.

Kennedy has been linked with far-right figures, and has appeared on InfoWars. He has also appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In short, Kennedy Jr. appears to have done all he can to harm the Democratic Party as he seeks to become its new leader in 2024, to the point of launching exceptionally false attacks upon the leader of the Democratic Party and the United States writ large.

So it was against this backdrop that—just a week ago—former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey began sharing videos of Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories online, as NBC News reports.

And it was against this backdrop that Dorsey expressed his hope that the Democratic National Committee would be sidelined completely during the 2024 presidential campaign, something that would be a first in major-party politics in the United States.

And it was against this backdrop that America learned that Jack Dorsey doesn’t even call the Democratic Party what I’ve already called it eleven times so far in this article.

In fact, Jack Dorsey appears to refuse to call the Democratic Party by its name. And that might hold the key for understanding Dorsey’s otherwise stunning and indeed inexplicable endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President of the United States—an endorsement that comes in the same 24-hour window in which current Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a friend of Dorsey’s, will gift Kennedy Jr. the largest megaphone that he’s ever received (in the form of a Twitter Spaces event sure to have a massive reach).

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The History of a Vile Slur Against the Democratic Party

“When a political party is led to believe that it can downgrade its opponent by removing an adjectival suffix from its name, it reduces itself to childishness.”

—conservative columnist George Sokolsky, 1956

The phrase “Democrat Party” is a slur. Full stop.

It has been a slur for more than seven decades, and the history of it being a slur is both unambiguous and well-chronicled.

So when the controversial tech bro who elevated the budding white supremacist Musk to the head of Twitter says he wants Democrats to hold onto the White House in 2024 but also writes this—

—people do notice. And they should. Because it indicates that something is very wrong.

Especially when Dorsey is using this slur against the Democratic Party as a way of underscoring his belief that while Donald Trump recently being found liable for Sexual Abuse isn’t disqualifying in a run for POTUS—let alone his ongoing criminal case in Manhattan and his apparently soon-to-arrive state and federal criminal cases in Georgia and D.C.—Joe Biden understandably tripping over a misplaced sandbag is.

So why is “Democrat Party” a known slur against the Democratic Party?

Here’s the history, in brief.

Seventy-seven years ago—a few months after the end of World War II—Republicans were desperate to change the national narrative about their major-party opponents, a party whose leader, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had just led the United States to victory over fascism in Europe and Asia. The GOP was particularly invested in turning Americans’ attention to domestic policy, where the immediate pre-war and wartime political environment had been conducive to what was undoubtedly the most successful and transformative American policy agenda in the history of the nation: the Democratic Party’s “New Deal.” The New Deal was such a big deal that it had helped end the Great Depression.

In 1946, though, the head of the political arm of the Republican Party, Republican National Committee chair B. Carroll Reece—a segregation-era GOP congressman from Tennessee—launched the phrase “Democrat Party” as both a smear and a slur rather than just a grammatical hiccup. As Slate reports,

Reece built on two key Republican claims of the previous decade, both arising in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The first was that, under FDR, the Democratic Party had been dangerously radicalized.

Frank Knox, the 1936 Republican vice presidential candidate, in a typical version of the critique, said the party had been “seized by alien and un-American elements.”

The second basis for this vile attack against the Democratic Party was, somehow, even more insidious—as it stretched beyond unfounded partisan opinion and into the realm of political disinformation:

Knox said [that] “[the Democratic Party] no longer uses the word ‘Democratic.’” This doesn’t seem to be true—the 1940 and 1944 Democratic Party platforms use the [word] “Democratic” multiple times.

Needless to say, these false accusations were intended to work in unison. Reece and Knox and other segregationists first falsely if vaguely charged the Democratic Party with seditious activity, then falsely alleged an attempt to obscure that Sedition with a subtle change in the party’s name the Democrats were hoping most people would miss.

It was, in other words, a conspiracy theory wrapped up in a libel.

Worse still, Knox himself, though a Republican, had long worked inside the Roosevelt administration, so he was spreading lies in an era of war (both World War II and then, not long post-administration, the Korean War) about men and women he well knew to be patriotic Americans without any ties to Communism. Indeed, the men and women in the Democratic Party who both Knox and Reece served alongside were doing their all at the time to combat the postwar spread of Communism on the Korean peninsula.

And yet there is something even more nefarious in all this than appears at first glance.

Consider Slate’s analogy of the early uses of this smear to attempts to “own the libs”:

In the immediate post–World War II moment, Reece expanded the anti–New Deal argument that the Democratic Party “no longer is the historic Democratic party.”

In the context of the nascent Cold War, he did so more systematically, using the phrase “Democrat party” to signal that the party was not just no longer itself, but outside of the American mainstream and potentially subversive.

“The radicals who have stolen the Democrat party”, he charged, act as if they are “working for Moscow.”

In using the wrong name for the Democratic Party….Reece [had] pioneered a tactic whose primary goal is to demean, upset, and annoy political opponents. The reporter Earl Mazo described the “phrasemaker” Reece as drawing applause at the 1948 Republican National Convention “when he ripped into what he calls the ‘Democrat party’ with lacerating wordage.”

As with others, like Senator Joe McCarthy, who followed in his footsteps, Reece’s main point, commentators noted, appeared to be humiliation. “Nothing seems to annoy a Democrat more than to have his Democratic party called the ‘Democrat’ party”, wrote Fletcher Knebel in 1955. “On the other hand, nothing seems to give the Republicans more pleasure than to shear this last syllable off the name of their adversaries.”

If the first paragraph above notes Republican usage of the slur “Democrat Party” as a casual allegation of treasonous sentiment while the United States was between two major wars—the effects of the last war still being keenly felt, and the inevitability of the next one already having registered in the corridors of power in Washington—and if the second then trivializes this loathsome rhetorical assault by comparing it to a sort of joke or lark, what the two paragraphs taken in combination do is presage how the phrase “Democrat Party” would be used by Republicans in the Civil Rights Era.

Once a Democratic president (Lyndon B. Johnson) had signed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, essentially seeking an end to the Jim Crow era in the American South Reece had helped preside over, white Democrats all over the South began wondering what had happened to their once relentlessly pro-segregation party—in short (and I don’t think I need to hammer this home too hard given the lede of this report), they wondered what had happened to the Democratic Party after Kennedy. They were, in a real sense, missing the Kennedy Democratic Party.

This is not to say that Kennedy was pro-segregation—as he wasn’t—but that it was only after Kennedy’s death, in the view of many political neophytes, that the “old” Democratic Party became something else altogether: a party with a commitment to social justice that was easily slandered as “Communism” by the segregationists. In any case, it wasn’t the policy agenda that had been associated with Kennedy (whose most notable actions involved combatting Communism abroad) or the Democratic Party.

It seemed to some, rather, to be the new face of a new party: the Democrat Party.

These voters, many of them racist and white and Southern, were looking to the GOP to explain to them why the Democrats had suddenly gone soft on a key issue (in their minds, at least): namely, keeping Black Americans second-class citizens permanently.

And Republicans were only too happy to oblige.

The answer to this riddle, the Republican Party explained to bigoted Southern whites, was Communism. That is, the party whose stronghold had once been the American South had been infiltrated by a foreign political ideology that wickedly counseled both (a) the equality of all persons, and (b) the near-term destruction of the United States—including everything that (in the view of many bigoted Southern whites) had made America “great,” such as racial segregation, countless Jim Crow-era statutes, anti-miscegenation constitutional provisions, and so on.

Even worse, these new Republican fear- and hate-mongers told Southern whites, the Democrats were trying to hide the fact that they no longer believed in American democracy by slyly moving away from calling themselves the “Democratic Party” at all. By instead referring to themselves as the “Democrat Party”—these far-right demagogues confided in would-be Republican voters—the Democrats were revealing exactly the proper terms of the emerging debate in America over the dangers of Communism. Indeed, the GOP averred, it was almost the duty of a patriotic American to begin calling the Communists in the Democratic Party fighting for equal rights for all Americans members of a distinctly un-American “Democrat Party.”

Yet Reece was even more devious than I’ve implied here. He so understood the shape of successful political disinformation that he saw the utility of attacking his political opponents from both the left and the right simultaneously—a strategy so ahead of its time that we must almost append the label metamodern to tactics Reece employed thirty years before that term was even coined. So how did Reece play both sides of a rhetorical assault he himself had engineered? By applying the then widely admired—I know it’s hard to imagine now—term “liberalism” to the Republican Party, despite it having conventionally been associated with the Democratic Party, and by occasionally railing against racist Southern Democratic leaders even as Reece sought to woo racist Southern Democratic voters by arguing that their leaders had abandoned them for the implicit social-justice tenets of Communism. {Note: Careful readers will be aware that Communism actually has nothing at all to do with equal rights; it is Marxism that arguably advocates for a cultural evolution toward such rights, but neither the Americans of the 1940s nor the Americans of the 2020s have ever drawn much of a distinction between Communism and Marxism, despite higher education having always drawn a very clear line between the two.}

Here’s Slate on Reece’s both-sides-of-his-mouth gambit:

Although Reece said, “I am not asserting that the democrat party is the communist party or the socialist party or the fascist party, or that as a whole it is devoted to un-American theories of government”, he implied exactly this when he declared things like “the American form of government will be ruined completely if Democrats are elected at the next election”, or that the left calls “the tune to which the administration dances, and the tune is strangely like the Internationale.”

If this thinly veiled reference to what’s now sneeringly called “globalism” sounds familiar, it should—as it’s the same tune neo-Nazis now regularly sing on Twitter.

On Twitter, the “Democrat Party” is said to be beholden to “globalist” interests and institutions (like the United Nations and the WEF) and struck through with a secret commitment to Communism. The election of Democrats to public office is equated to the near-term destruction of America via a “deep state” that dances to the tune of foreign nationals—nearly all of them, the neo-Nazis on Twitter aver, Jewish persons.

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The “Democrat Party” Slur in Practice

While certain journalists in the 19th century and early 20th century on occasion used the word “Democrat” as an adjective, historians confirm that there was no partisan intent behind it: it was simply a harmless variation on a known phrase, sort of like the way Americans spell “color” one way and the British (“colour”) another. “Democrat Party” only became a slur and smear when the Republican Party chose to do the most vile thing one can imagine: call a party that had just led America to victory in a world war un-American.

By July 1952, at the Republican National Convention, “speaker after speaker”, Slate reports, was using the phrase “Democrat Party” as a “slur” against its political foes.

By January 1953, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy had become the chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, whose subcommittee the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations McCarthy improperly deployed to try to root out supposed “Communists” in government (a task that normally would have fallen to the Internal Security Subcommittee that McCarthy’s Republican peers had deliberately and wisely denied him access to).

Under Senator McCarthy, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was every bit the moral cipher the current House Weaponization Committee is under Trump capo Jim Jordan (R-OH): it was a bared blade whose target was the small of the nation’s back, as it intended to divide the country—to the point of creating a domestic national security risk the Kremlin would have been (and is) absolutely thrilled to see—for the sake of Republicans winning future elections. McCarthyism, precisely like the Jordanism of the House Weaponization Committee, is exactly the lack of patriotism it claims to be rooting out.

With all this in mind, it’s surprising that the usage of the “Democrat Party” slur was for many decades limited primarily (if not exclusively) to only the most vile far-right partisan hucksters—people like the late Rush Limbaugh, who also referred to any Democratic presidential administration as a “regime” rather than a government, thus implying its illegitimacy and implicitly endorsing almost any behavior at all aimed at undermining it.

Rush Limbaugh’s usage of the phrase “Democrat Party” was just as vile as that of his predecessors, and just as motivated by the corporate “culture war” narrative that has made generations of far-right grifters and equally far-right propagandistic “media outlets” rich. The Republicans of the 1940s and 1950s implying that The New Deal, which raised the standard of living for tens of millions of Americans, was the opening salvo of a clandestine Communist operation inside America was precisely the sort of insidious, self-interested corporatist doublespeak the nation’s millionaires wanted to see from the Republican Party both at that time and today. The only saving grace was that these profoundly unprincipled forces couldn’t seem to get the phrase “Democrat Party” to catch on widely.

So the fact that this seems to be changing—and fast—is deeply worrying for America.

Slate writes that “instances of the use of the childish ploy have not abated.” And per the Associated Press, the use of the “Democrat Party” slur is “on the rise.”

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The Blame American Media Bears

What’s remarkable about all this is that major media itself could help put a stop to it.

For example, major media could:

1. Employ the time-honored “[sic]” construction in quotes whenever a Republican misnames his or her political opponents via the use of a slur. This is a way for the media to underscore that it neither endorses nor accepts as grammatically or historically correct a phrase Republicans habitually use to smear their enemies.

2. Tell interviewees that slurs are not permitted on-air. Republicans have freedom of speech, of course, but as Elon Musk has said—perhaps the only thing he has said that I agree with, because unlike most of what he says it comports with both law and history—“freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.” Republicans do not have the right to live interviews with private media companies, and those private media companies are not obligated to allow interviewees to use slurs on-air. In fact, journalists frequently challenge far-right guests about their verbiage, often decline to re-invite certain guests who misbehave, and habitually set the rules of the road for interviews with interviewees beforehand. Obviously none of this is happening if the phrase “Democrat Party” is repeatedly being used on-air.

3. Issue live corrections. Nothing whatsoever prevents journalists from—and journalistic ethics in fact requires—correcting slurs and smears on-air. To be clear, a Republican using the phrase “Democrat Party” isn’t the same thing as, say, a Democrat calling a Republican opponent a “Rethuglican” (something that, to my knowledge, has never happened). Calling your political opponents “thugs”, as in fact Republicans often do Democrats—it’s actually nominal GOP leader Donald Trump’s current favorite slur on Truth Social—is sufficiently indecorous that it could in theory lead to an in situ remonstration from an interviewer about keeping things civil, but it doesn’t require a correction as a matter of journalistic ethics. In contrast, for decades Republicans have attempted to convince voters that there is no Democratic Party, only a “Democrat Party”; in other words, the slur in question is part of a campaign of disinformation about both the Democratic Party platform and the administration of the Democratic Party that competent journalists should expect to have to make redress for if they allow it to flourish on their air.

4. Launch an education campaign. Certainly, Republicans are getting a lot of play for their slur at local rallies, but mass dissemination of a slur is necessary for it to gain traction. And to the extent that’s happening—and it definitely is—such mass dissemination can only be laid at the feet of major media, which in recent years has made no change to its programming or booking strategies in light of the fact that virtually all its Republican guests come on-air to use a known slur against the Democratic Party that goes back to one of the ugliest times in American history.

In short, at what point must we conclude that major media has an obligation to include in its programming a counterbalancing—far more importantly, exclusively accurate—narrative regarding the history of a political slur? If even one media outlet has ever launched an education campaign on this, whether through a brief “special” or even a “C block” report, I’ve never seen it.

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Conclusion

The simple fact is that Jack Dorsey is one of the most digitally savvy men on Earth as well as a universally recognized genius—if not (or not necessarily) a principled one.

The longstanding debate over the phrase “Democrat Party” couldn’t have been missed by Dorsey, and few doubt that his usage of the term was deliberate—particularly as it came in conjunction with (a) his concerted digital campaign against the leader of the Democratic Party; (b) his endorsement of a man who wants to rip up the Democratic Party by its roots and replace it with a madness the party wouldn’t soon recover from; (c) his public opposition to the idea of the Democratic National Committee—the chief political arm of the Democratic Party—continuing to have any power in U.S. politics; (d) his elevation of Musk, a far-right supporter of far-right authoritarian governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to absolute control of the company he co-founded, Twitter; and (e) his increasingly illiberal views and actions, including (i) his excessive confidence in cryptocurrency, (ii) speaking on anti-vaxxer podcasts (including the podcast of Ben Greenfield, a man who tries to discredit leading fact-checking websites), (iii) allegedly not just consorting with insurrectionist leaders but making them personal advisers, (iv) only eating once a day, (v) allegedly sending an envelope of his hair to Azealia Banks, (vi) vacationing in Myanmar during a genocide, (vii) declining to say he would ban Donald Trump from Twitter if he unambiguously called for his followers to kill a journalist, (viii) overseeing Twitter at a time its algorithm had a proven but secret far-right bias, (ix) allegedly letting Twitter maintain “negligent” security protocols, and…

…well, you get the point. Dorsey is eccentric but not stupid, and seems quite sure of his core beliefs even as he nibbles at the margins when it comes to corporate tactics.

So at a time when Dorsey’s apparent friend and under-fire successor at Twitter, Elon Musk, is dragging the platform wildly to the right, Dorsey using a slur used daily by everyone from Trump to longtime Trump domestic policy adviser Sean Hannity to Donald Trump Jr. to Trump family friend Charlie Kirk to insurrectionists all over the internet—and using the slur in conjunction with his rollout of a political endorsement that aims to upend the Democratic Party—is extremely concerning.

Americans should stay tuned to this story, as fears are growing that Twitter and its progeny will interfere in the 2024 Democratic primaries to try to harm President Biden’s political fortunes.

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