Who’s Behind “BAN RFK Jr”?

Over the weekend, Democrats across the country received a text message “begging” them to sign a petition to “BAN Robert F. Kennedy from the ballot.” Signed “PTP,” the hyperlink leads recipients to the website for the Progressive Turnout Project, where a survey asks a series of politically-charged questions.

Grassroots campaigns like this are not new. However, the attempt to prevent the American people from having the choice to vote for their preferred candidate is. This continues an unprecedented string of attacks on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the First Amendment itself.

The group behind the campaign is the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee (PAC) that has been described as “the largest voter contact organization in the country.” It has a series of sub-organizations operating under different names, two of which are also engaged in the BAN RFK petition: Stop Republicans and Progressive Takeover.

We at The Kennedy Beacon were curious why this pro-Democrat PAC would be pushing for RFK Jr.’s removal from the ballot, so we followed the money.

Using the most recent publicly-available data from OpenSecrets, we discovered that the single largest donation to the PTP came from Dustin Moskovitz.

Moskovitz is most famous for co-founding Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Facebook is a co-defendant in a lawsuit brought by Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense and other plaintiffs censored by the platform in collusion with the Biden administration.

Moskovitz also co-founded a project management application called Asana in 2008. Between these two massively profitable companies, Moskovitz generated so much wealth that he was identified by Forbes in 2011 as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, even beating out Zuckerberg.

After earning his fortune in big tech, Moskovitz and his future wife, Cari Tuna, signed on to “The Giving Pledge,” committing to give away the vast majority of their money before the end of their lives. The Giving Pledge was the creation of mega-millionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with co-signatories including Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, George Lucas, David Rockefeller, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the recently-collapsed FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.

To accomplish their goal, Moskovitz and Tuna embraced a philosophy of “effective altruism.” According to its proponents, effective altruists seek to direct funding towards the people and organizations most likely to accomplish a given intended outcome for the betterment of humanity and the planet —often focusing on topics such as artificial intelligence, natural disasters, and combating “misinformation/disinformation.”

With effective altruism as their anchor, Moskovitz and Tuna started the Good Ventures Foundation in 2011. The focus of their philanthropy was to include biomedical research, pandemics & bioterrorism, education, food security, foreign aid, geoengineering, global health & development, immigration, nanotechnology and treatment of animals. Good Ventures also partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to co-fund research related to infectious diseases in Africa.

In August 2014, Good Ventures partnered with a similar organization called GiveWell to launch the Open Philanthropy Project, which would recommend grants for Good Ventures to fulfill (paid for by Moskovitz).

In the years leading up to COVID-19, Moskovitz used Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures to provide significant funding toward pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Open Philanthropy is also listed as the primary sponsor of a series of tabletop pandemic “war games,” during which world leaders practice how they might respond to various scenarios involving outbreaks of novel viruses, whether man-made or of natural origin. Some examples include Clade X (May 2018); A Spreading Plague (February 2019); and of course, the infamous Event 201 (October 2019). 

Open Philanthropy also funded an exercise in March 2021 that was eerily accurate in its predictions of the upcoming outbreak of monkeypox, which appeared right on schedule a year later.

Each of these pandemic war games led to a set of recommendations, all of which emphasized the need to merge the public and private sectors in order to reduce regulatory barriers, combat mis/disinformation, and minimize accountability. (Kennedy provides a comprehensive summary of these war games in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci.)

As the COVID-19 crisis emerged, Open Philanthropy began providing millions of dollars to help shape America’s institutional response. In March 2020, they provided a $250,000 grant to a think tank called the Center for Global Development to support work “developing COVID-19 response guidelines and decision support tools to disseminate to local leaders,” which were “intended to help local leaders take appropriate measures to limit the spread of the virus.” 

They provided further funding for projects involving “long-haul COVID,” COVID-19 testing, coverage of COVID-19 in the media, lockdown policies, bioethics, and Pfizer’s experimental drug Paxlovid – all areas where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that the Trump and Biden administrations completely failed Americans, if they were even necessary to begin with.

In our news roundup yesterday, Louis Conte highlighted an interview on The Hill: Rising, with progressive educator and activist Sabby Sabs addressing the “BAN RFK Jr.” petition. Sabs raises the point that a co-founder of Facebook was involved in another attempt to suppress Kennedy’s campaign, after that same social media platform had admitted to censoring political opposition (such as in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop story). 

“Here you have social media platforms working hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party, and this is very much a problem,” Sabs said. “I think everybody should be concerned,” Sabs continued. “Whether you support RFK Jr.’s campaign or not, who are they to tell you to kick someone off of the ballot?”

Moskovitz likely no longer holds a formal position with Facebook or its parent company, Meta, but a good chunk of his wealth appears to be from Facebook stock he still owns. Will Moskovitz’s own political and personal interests be jeopardized if Kennedy makes it to the White House? 

The Kennedy Beacon reached out to Moskovitz for comment through both Open Philanthropy and the Effective Ventures Foundation. By press time, we did not receive a response.