American Values 2024 Up Close: Kyle Warner, Professional Athlete Strategist

By Leah Watson, The Kennedy Beacon

By Leah Watson, The Kennedy Beacon

Biking down the side of a mountain, with trees and bushes whipping past, is one of the most daring activities anybody might experience. Part of the mountain biker’s adrenaline rush is the persistent worry of whether a wheel on the bike will lose its traction or if a slight miscalculation while going over a in jump will result in catastrophic injury. Kyle Warner, a mountain bike champion of the North American Enduro Cup and no stranger to risks, never expected that a vaccination might be the greatest risk he’d ever take.

Following a second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in June 2021, Warner began experiencing adverse reactions, and his burgeoning presence on social media suddenly darkened. Warner and his girlfriend, April, stopped posting to their increasingly popular YouTube channel dedicated to mountain biking and focused on Warner’s health. For about three months, as Warner was in and out of hospitals and visiting various doctors, he didn’t share anything with his audience. Following this hiatus, Warner finally decided to say something. “The statement I made was essentially: I don’t want this to be pro-vax or anti-vax. I’m not targeting Liberals or Republicans. This is just why we haven’t been making videos and what happened to me.” 

The statement, however, was met with an extremely negative response. In a wave of hostility, people began to send death threats and issued demands to Warner’s YouTube sponsors to get them to fire him. “It was a character assassination,” Warner said, stemming from his stated concerns over the safety of the vaccine. Dr. John Campbell, who also has a popular YouTube channel, reached out to Warner and offered to interview him about his reactions to the vaccine. 

The resulting video featuring Warner, uploaded to Campbell’s channel, went viral. It currently has over 2.5 million views and over 30,000 comments. 

In the comments, Warner could see that other people were experiencing the same thing he was. Shortly thereafter, the vaccine-injury support organization React19 reached out to Warner and asked him to share his story by testifying in Washington, DC. According to Warner, React19 has raised over $750,000 for people in need and has provided 105 grants to vaccine-injured people. Those 105 grants stand in stark contrast to the six claims that the US government has approved for COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Furthermore, “the total payout of all six of those claims is just under $18,000,” said Warner.

Two weeks after receiving his second dose of the vaccine, Warner developed myocarditis and experienced an inflammation of his heart. He also was diagnosed with pericarditis and POTS (an autonomic nervous system disorder). The vaccine also increased his autoimmunity and caused him to develop mast cell activation syndrome, a condition where the body breaks out in hives during exertion or stress. Only recently – two years after the fateful second dose and after undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other treatments – has Warner reached a point where his quality of life is decent.

Warner was vilified for sharing his story on social media, and thereafter he adjusted his perspective on the media, because “the things that I was saying were not the things being projected about myself. People label you without even listening to you.” 

Warner observes that the same thing is happening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as people have labeled him a conspiracy theorist and dismissed his ideas without truly listening to them. “There are so many things said about [Kennedy] in the media,” Warner says, “but when you ask him to explain or talk to him or read an in-depth article, [you learn that] those are not the things that he stands for.” Warner believes that Kennedy is often misunderstood because of the way he’s portrayed and that if people took the time to understand what he is saying they would realize that “he’s not a guy who’s tearing apart other candidates, he’s not focused on the negatives of other people.” Rather, Kennedy is focused on how to help the American people and make things better. 

What initially intrigued Warner about Kennedy was his advocacy for medical freedom and vaccine safety. In encouraging others to advocate for themselves, Warner has come to believe that reforms are desperately needed in vaccine injury compensations and that the stories people share about their injuries need to be listened to and not ignored. 

Warner joined the American Values 2024 super PAC (AV24) a few months ago, working for the Sports Outreach Team. He reaches out to athletes who have expressed interest in Kennedy and secures their endorsements through written op-eds or video testimonials. These include Hall of Fame NBA player John Stockton and Ken Ruettgers, a former NFL player from the Green Bay Packers. The Sports Outreach program is also in contact with Kelly Slater, a World Surf League champion, and is working to get in touch with NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has already endorsed RFK Jr. on his own. 

Professional athletes have proven to be persuasive for political campaigns because their professions are respected as having a strong sense of discipline. “An NBA Hall of Fame player is someone who has dedicated their life to a passion and has pursued it with all of their heart,” said Warner. Professional athletes have the respect of their audience, and people look up to them. “It takes a really strong character to become a champion, in whatever field you’re in, and that adds credibility.”

Warner is seeking out people whose core values align with Kennedy’s, and “one of the biggest things that keeps popping up is trying to heal the division within the nation,” he said. “The mainstream media has done a really great job of separating and dividing people, which leads to audience capture.” News organizations develop audience allegiance by characterizing other news sources as misleading, and this leads to polarized systems of narrative management where people subjectively listen to a source they believe they can trust and don’t fact-check information or look at news independently. 

With Kennedy running as an independent, Warner has noticed some interesting changes while soliciting endorsements. “When I reach out to a lot of the athletes, there’s been a lot of them who are very pro-Trump,” said Warner. They state that while they like what RFK Jr. is doing, they feel like Trump is their candidate. Since Kennedy switched to running as an independent, however, athletes who were “unwilling to vote for a Democratic candidate, regardless of who it was, are now open to vote for Kennedy.”

“I think Robert is doing a great job of being open to hearing from both sides of any given subject,” Warner said. “He is open to debate, even with things that he feels very strongly about.” A quality that is often lacking in politicians is willingness to question their ideas and be open to respectful conversations and debates. Warner believes that it is important to “have strong moral conviction, but hold your ideas lightly so they can be proven wrong and it doesn’t affect your self-worth or your self-esteem.” He appreciates the example Kennedy sets in this regard.

AV24 stands out to Warner because of the amount of character present in the organization. He has observed that Mark Gorton and Tony Lyons, founders of the super PAC, “are really passionate about this [organization] and it’s not just something they’re doing because they want to make money or get donations or control something.” Everyone at AV24 truly believes that with RFK Jr. in office, people’s lives will get better. “There’s not a single person who I’ve talked to who seems like they’re in it just for the money, or for the clout, or the reputation, or the résumé builder,” said Warner. The biggest hurdle that he feels AV24 has to tackle is trying to reach the people who aren’t willing to listen to Kennedy yet. “I’m hoping that through sports outreach and other influencers and celebrities, we can get people in the middle to pay attention [to Kennedy],” he said.

In addition to his work for AV24, Warner is very passionate about helping people share their stories of vaccine injury, and one of his goals is to help them do so in a nonpartisan way “The political climate is so polarized that even if you are sharing your personal story without any political connotation,” he said, “people will automatically assign you to a camp and will call you a Trumper or a Liberal.” 

Because hardly any progress has been made toward compensation reform, people with vaccine injuries and complications are forced to advocate for themselves. The people sharing their stories are not sharing them to fuel an anti-vax movement, they are sharing them because the government has failed them and they need help. “The vast majority of the people who were injured never wanted to speak out and never wanted to advocate for themselves,” said Warner. “If there were a proper governmental program in place to help support the injured, then a lot of us would stop talking.”

Until the government’s compensation programs are fixed, such talk will continue and not be silenced.