A songwriter who produces rap songs with conspiracy theories about Covid; an academic who has championed debunked and bizarre notions about 9/11, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, the 2020 election, and other public events; a polygraph examiner who wrote a novel tying Russian mobsters and sexual predators who exploit disabled children to a government plot to cover up the tie between vaccines and childhood autism; and the head of an autism activists group who believes pharmaceutical companies, Big Tech, the media, and the government are scheming to acquire total control of humanity—these are some of the people hired as consultants by American Values 2024, the super-PAC that’s supporting the independent presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy Jr.
American Values 2024, which spent $7 million to air a controversial pro-RFK Jr. ad during the recent Super Bowl, was co-founded by Mark Gorton, the chair of a computerized trading firm, and Tony Lyons, the head of Skyhorse Publishing, which has published books by Kennedy that promote conspiracy theories and debunked notions about vaccines and Covid. (One big seller: The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.) In 2022, Skyhorse released a book—with a foreword written by Kennedy—that advanced the unsubstantiated claim that Covid vaccinations have led to an epidemic of “sudden deaths.” Lyons’ firm has also put out books by Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen, Michael Cohen, and Norman Mailer, as well as several tomes from dirty trickster and Trump-schemer Roger Stone, including Stone’s book claiming that Lyndon Baines Johnson killed John Kennedy. Lyons’ company recently acquired Regnery, a conservative press that has published Donald Trump, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Ann Coulter. The firm proclaims on its website that it “maintains a firm stance against censorship and aims to provide a full spectrum of political, theological, cultural, and philosophical viewpoints to counter the increasingly biased environment in mainstream media.”
Given the close and lucrative relationship connecting Lyons and Skyhorse to Kennedy and his conspiracy-mongering, it may not be surprising that the super-PAC Lyons leads has fierce anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists on its payroll. But it is unusual for a political action committee to be home to such a collection of paranoia peddlers. Here’s a list of several.
John Gilmore
Gilmore is the head of a nonprofit called the Autism Action Network that grew out of a group of parents of “vaccine-injured children” who maintained there was a link between the use of mercury in vaccines and autism—a notion that public health experts have rejected. AAN is listed as a partner on the website of Children’s Health Defense, the well-funded anti-vax nonprofit that Kennedy has led. In 2021, Gilmore’s group and Children’s Health Defense held an online panel discussion titled “The Covid Vaccine on Trial: If You Only Knew…” that featured Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers. That list included Gilmore, and he asserted that Covid vaccines were part of an immense plot mounted by “oligarchs” worth “literally trillions of dollars” to gain control of the world. Gilmore said: “We’re living in extraordinary times, and we’re also living in dangerous times. With the advent of Covid-19, it is obvious to everyone that big pharma, big media, big tech and big government have coalesced into a tightly interlocked oligarchy unprecedented in American history, or world history for that matter. And the oligarchy has insatiable desire for power. It seeks to control everything: What we see, what we say, what we think, what we buy, what happens to our bodies. And they want to force you to inject Covid-19 shots into your body and to your children’s bodies, but we aren’t going to let that happen.”
In January, Gilmore tweeted, “I wonder how much the Mexican cartels are paying the Biden gang to keep the border open?” In another recent X post, he called Covid “a US financed bioweapons project.” According to American Values 2024’s filings with the Federal Election Commission, in 2023 Gilmore received $157,500 from American Values 2024 for what the super-PAC called “management consulting.”
Louis Conte
The father of two children with autism, Conte is a board member of the Autism Action Network and a member of the executive leadership team of HealthChoice, a nonprofit that notes on its website that it “embraces a philosophy that sets a goal of zero vaccine and other medical adverse events.” In 2014, he co-wrote a book with Lyons titled Vaccine Injuries that was released by Skyhorse. That year, Skyhorse also published a novel by Conte, The Autism War. In this book, according to the publisher’s description, a suburban cop and father of a child with autism confronts corrupt government officials, the pharmaceutical industry, Russian gangsters, and sex offenders who prey on disabled children to challenge shadowy forces that “viciously attack those who question vaccine safety.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Conte has been an acquisitions editor at Skyhorse since 2014. He also has run a polygraph examination business. The firm’s website—which recently ceased operating—notes that Conte conducts lie detector tests “for pre-employment, personal matters including infidelity, sex offender post conviction, domestic violence, tenant screening and sexual addiction.” American Values 2024 paid Conte, Lyons’ co-author and employee, $52,200 for research services.
Billy Kozis
Kozis has worked for Children’s Health Defense. He is a also a rapper who goes by the handle Kozi-19 ; he has written or co-written rap songs that spread conspiracy theories about Covid vaccinations. On “I’m Unvaccinated,” he suggests these vaccinations lead to merging “humans with robots.” On “Pushing Poison,” a reggae-ish song by Venice Beach Dub Club that features Kozi-19, the lead singer claims that Covid vaccines cause blood clots and death, that the scientists advocating vaccination believe “there are too many people living in this world,” that vaccination proponents are “merchants of death” who benefit from “physical distress,” and that these people who are “pushing poison” want control of the world. Kozis was paid $47,600 by American Values 2024 last year for social media consulting.
Mark Crispin Miller
A tenured professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, Miller has been a cheerleader for a variety of conspiracy theories. (Miller considers the term “conspiracy theory” a “meme” used to “discredit people engaged in really necessary kinds of investigation and inquiry.”) Miller, who once was a regular contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, has been a prominent 9/11 truther, claiming the Bush-Cheney administration allowed the attacks to occur to accrue a political advantage. He has promoted the idea that the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting was faked to increase popular support for gun safety measures. He has also questioned the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. He insists that the Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump in 2020. As the Chronicle of Higher Education noted in a 2021 article headlined, “The Professor of Paranoia,” Miller “suggests the beheading of the journalist James Foley by ISIS combatants was faked” and “excoriates Black Lives Matter as a CIA-funded operation intended to ‘demonize white people’ in order to ‘foment as much violent division as possible.'”
Naturally, Miller applied his conspiracism to the Covid pandemic, decrying lockdowns as “corona-fascism,” assailing mask mandates as “the most successful fear campaign in world history,” and declaring coronavirus vaccines were a “rushed, inhuman witch’s brew of nanoparticles, human DNA (from fetal cells), and toxic adjuvants.” He also suggested that Covid was part of a covert operation to kill off “useless eaters” in nursing homes. In 2020, one of his students complained Miller was pushing Covid disinformation in the classroom and sending students links to “many far-right and conspiracy websites, such as The Charlie Kirk Show, Zero Hedge,…WorldNetDaily.” This sparked a controversy, with faculty members calling for a review of his conduct. Miller claimed “academic freedom” and sued his colleagues for libel. His lawsuit was dismissed last year. The pro-RFK Jr. super-PAC paid Miller $3,000 in June for “consulting.”
It’s unclear exactly what these four campaign aides have done for American Values 2024. The descriptions provided in the super-PAC’s financial disclosure filings are vague. None of them responded to requests for comments. Asked by Mother Jones to discuss these campaign aides and their work, Lyons replied with a text message: “Our policy is to keep the internal workings, policies and strategies of the super-PAC strictly confidential. All payments are of course public information. I’m happy to discuss the Super Bowl ad or why we support Kennedy, what we like about his policies, how our ballot access initiatives are going etc.”
While Mother Jones was reporting this article, it was contacted by Michael Kane, who identified himself as the grassroots manager for American Values 2024 and an employee of Children’s Health Defense. He attacked Mother Jones‘ coverage of both the anti-vax movement and Russia’s covert operation to help Donald Trump during the 2016 election. He insisted that the terms “anti-vax” and “conspiracy theorist” are “slurs.” (Kane, a founder of the anti-vax group Teachers for Choice, recently published on Instagram a post suggesting that Bill Gates and Bill Clinton are on “#TeamPedophile.”) Mother Jones asked Kane if he could provide details about Gilmore, Conte, Kozis, and Miller. “Send me an email,” he said. Kane did not respond to a subsequent email. Kane was paid at least $52,7000 by American Values 2024 for communications consulting and grassroots organizing in the last five months of 2023, according to FEC records.
For years, Kennedy has sat atop an empire that disseminates false information and encourages conspiracy theories. And it’s been a profitable enterprise. Children’s Health Defense raised $23.5 million in 2022, and Skyhorse presumably has made millions of dollars publishing his books for readers who reside within Kennedy’s anti-vax cosmos. Now veterans of that world are making money off the Kennedy campaign, as the super-PAC and the campaign each haul in millions of dollars.
Recently, Kennedy hired Del Bigtree, one of most notorious anti-vaxxers, to be his campaign’s communications director. Bigtree produced an anti-vax film that has been debunked. He has said that tycoon John D. Rockefeller, back in the day, tried to “seize control of humanity through the regulation of medicine.” He recently sent a letter to supporters calling the Covid pandemic “the greatest psychological operation the world has ever experienced” and asserted that “in order to stop the globalist’s New World Order, we need a miracle.” He hailed Kennedy as that miracle. Bigtree has also been an election denier. On January 6, 2021, he spoke at a “MAGA Freedom Rally DC,” a block from the Capitol, and declared election machines did not work. In the second half of last year, the Kennedy campaign paid Bigtree’s company, KFP Consulting, $128,550 for communications consulting, according to FEC records.
Conspiracism resides at the center of Kennedy’s politics. As he has steered his paranoia- and misinformation-drenched movement into the political realm, his comrades in conspiracy have joined him for what appears to be a profitable ride.
