MoveOn Doesn’t Want You to Vote for Kennedy. Are They Hiring Fake Protestors to Help?
Liam Sturgess | April 8, 2024
Progressive activist group MoveOn is recruiting operatives to lead “anti-RFK Jr. efforts,” apparently deploying fake protestors to campaign events.
“The DNC, via MoveOn, is openly hiring people to harass our campaign,”
According to Newsweek, one of the protesters admitted to refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, despite holding a sign criticizing Kennedy for “attacking” the shots. Furthermore, “when the protesters were shown a photo of Kennedy, none recognized him,” Fox told Newsweek.
Image source: Amaryllis Fox via Twitter Fox linked to a job posting by MoveOn, hosted on GAIN Power Career Center, a self-described “networking, marketing, and career development platform for Democratic and Progressive Professionals.” The site currently hosts 52 listings for the Democratic National Committee. MoveOn scrubbed its original listing seeking an operative to organize such “protests,” but archived versions from LinkedIn, Wellfound, and GAIN Power’s official Substack page remain.
According to the listing, MoveOn is seeking a “senior level political organizer to organize and support institutions and activists to drive campaigns to help inoculate progressive and other non-MAGA constituencies from voting for RFK Jr and other third-party presidential spoiler candidates in key battleground states.” Among other things, the operative will “strategize ways of countering the threats, including digital and in-person organizing” and “serve as a spokesperson to the anti-RFK Jr efforts” in the press and to “national and state partners.”
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It also advocates for the use of “bird-dogging,” which MoveOn describes as “a fairly pressure-oriented tactic” to force politicians to answer questions, which should be used only when one is “willing to create some friction with the target.” Bird-dogging is a signature tactic of Indivisible, another aggressively pro-Biden group previously profiled in The Kennedy Beacon.
MoveOn spokesman Joel Payne dismissed Fox’s accusations as a “conspiracy theory” and declined to comment on the job listing.
MoveOn’s recent efforts follow the DNC’s declaration of war on third-party and independent candidates in the 2024 election. In March, the DNC deployed a four-person team of “veteran democratic operative[s]” coordinating with a “coalition of outside groups” working “to stymie third parties,” specifically naming MoveOn as a collaborator.
MoveOn’s History
MoveOn is an activist network run primarily through MoveOn.org, claiming to be “the largest independent, progressive, digitally-connected organizing group in the United States,” powered by “real people,” not “Washington insiders and special interests.”
Officially, MoveOn is made up of two primary entities: MoveOn Civic Action, a nonprofit organization, and MoveOn Political Action, a political action committee.
MoveOn began in September 1998 in the form of an online petition asking Congress to “Move On” from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair, garnering 100,000 signatures in one week. As profiled on Discover the Networks, “move on” became a buzz phrase among Clinton supporters and administration officials.
The petition’s authors, married wealthy computer entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, “realized that their petition’s success only hinted at the internet’s potential to impact politics,” and that their new tool could “disrupt and fundamentally alter the course of our democracy.” One month after launching their petition, Boyd and Blades founded MoveOn PAC.
While MoveOn’s petition claimed bipartisanship and financial independence, the newly-founded PAC immediately began supporting Democratic candidates, with early donations from Laurance Rockefeller Jr. and the late Richard Rockefeller (great-grandsons of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller). Other notable early supporters included actor Matt Damon, Joanie Bronfman of the influential Bronfman family, and Pam Omidyar, co-founder of the Omidyar Network with her husband Pierre, co-founder of eBay—casting doubt on the claim that they are powered by “real people” without “special interests.”
In 2003, the couple founded the MoveOn.org Voter Fund to oppose President George W. Bush, and collaborated with a “constellation of groups” with the same agenda, including John Podesta’s Center for American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters for America. It quickly raised $15 million, with large amounts coming from Democratic mega donor George Soros.
In April 2004, the FEC notified MoveOn that its Voter Fund was violating campaign finance laws, later issuing a $150,000 fine for failure to properly report its income and expenses. Still, MoveOn attracted millions of dollars from Soros and his Open Society Institute, the Bill Gates-connected Shefa Fund, and later received funding from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Same party, new tricks
In 2016, MoveOn celebrated the cancellation of a Trump campaign event in Chicago due to protests which caused “security concerns,” with MoveOn.org Political Action’s executive director Ilya Sheyman warning pro-Trump Republicans that they were “on notice.” Promising more disruptions, MoveOn used the unrest to solicit donations, per the Washington Times. MoveOn’s national spokesperson around this time was Karine Jean-Pierre, who now serves as Biden’s press secretary.
MoveOn was named in a now infamous February 2021 Time article detailing their questionable tactics, entitled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election,” describing “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” by a “loosely organized coalition of operatives” to “influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Unlike in 2020, MoveOn and the DNC apparatus does not appear to have the ground support of real protesters to disrupt the campaigns of Biden’s political opponents.
Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.
