Why is it never ‘anti-socialists’ & ‘segregationists’ (and libertarians) who killed JFK?

“The guy starts a Substack and now he’s a conspiracy theorist!!!” Not at all: Who isn’t thinking, “What if Trump gets JFK-ed before November?”

But who killed JFK, anyway? The answer isn’t mere trivia for conspiracy theorists but obviously says a great, great deal about the nature of who is in power in the American hegemon today.

This article is going to give a clear answer, and it’s one which is never stated even though the answer is obvious: anti-socialists and segregationists (-cum-libertarians). Ask yourself: why is it that these hugely influential groups are never even mentioned as possible killers of JFK?

As you can read in reports of the time, the immediate assumption in 1963 was that segregationists were behind the murder. Anti-socialists were only not named because of their very ubiquitousness in US culture at the time, but this doesn’t mean that anti-socialists were not involved.

I can imagine that on this subject it’s easy for people to click away, so I will get right to the interesting original impetus for this article: to call attention to who was once an intensely important figure but whom only the older readers may remember, Major General Edwin Walker.

To pique your interest as to why this is actually an interesting article about the JFK assassination: The one and only Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate Walker before allegedly assassinating Kennedy. Quite a connection, eh?

Walker only gets more interesting from here… and yet Walker is deliberately forgotten.

He is forgotten in the same way that all far-right figures in liberal democracy are purposely excised from liberal democratic history: from automaker Henry Ford’s founding of modern anti-Semitism, to the founder of Action Française Charles Maurras in France or to the reactionary John Birch Society, the action of these far-right leaders are alleged to have played - after the fact - no role in the ideology of the “right-wing” today, when that’s of course false revisionist history.

(Bob Dylan sang about the the John Birch Society’s anti-Communist paranoia. He wanted to sing that song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962 but they rejected its political nature, and Dylan - in one of the first of his seemingly never-ending courageous artistic actions - walked off the set of the star-making, legendary TV show.)

This perpetual amnesia is absolutely critical to understanding Western liberal democracy. We can even go back to the role of French Third Republic “heroes” in their collusion with Bismarck to lay a four-month siege to the Paris Commune in 1871, i.e. these liberal democratic “patriots” committed treason against their own people.

If Americans want to ignore Joe McCarthy, likely the least popular American of the 20th century, then they want to forget about Walker even more. However, he was so well-known at the time that he was the model for the fanatical anti-communist General Jack Ripper in one of the best political satire movies of all time, Dr. Strangelove, by Stanley Kubrick (1964).

Paranoid anti-communist Brig. Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) barking orders to seal the base off from intruders or outside communications. Anti-communism cuts very deep in the American mind, and even today many US officers are indoctrinated to regard communism as an "urgent and present danger."

I referred to the insane, sexually-dysfunctional Ripper’s hysterical explanation for launching nuclear weapons on the USSR in the last chapter of my book explaining the Western war on Iranian Islamic Socialism, but with one change, and as a way to explain the fanaticism of the secular West towards a government which dared to give a huge mass of mostly lower-class clerics a partial voice:

“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist (religious) infiltration, Communist (religious) indoctrination, Communist (religious) subversion, and the international Communist (religious) conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

More on Walker soon, because he may be the one thing you don’t know about the JFK assassination, but what’s vital to impress on readers is this:

In the years around JFK’s assassination there were two dominant political trends: one which feared nuclear annihilation above all, and one which feared the economic redistribution, racial unity and big government of socialism above all (a “better dead than red” anti-socialist hysteria) typified by Walker.

Kennedy was of the former, and that made him “soft on communism”. This refusal to engage in nuclear war in order to defeat socialism is why he was assassinated, and seemingly certainly by collusion between rabid anti-communists and segregationists, both of whom abounded at all levels of US society and US government.

This combination was exemplified by the “dashing” Texan Walker, who should not be deliberately forgotten, and whose role around the JFK assassination was rather spectacularly prominent.

The VERY curious case of General Edwin A. Walker, America’s ‘leading fascist’

Gen. Edwin Walker

Dr. Strangelove wasn’t enough to encapsulate what a curious case Walker was: he was a mix of fanatical anti-communism, rabid Texan segregationism and would be finally outed as an apparently repressed homosexual.

• Beginning in 1959 Walker becomes the nation’s leading anti-Communist, following the death of Joe McCarthy in 1957, and the most famous member of the John Birch Society.

• In 1961, as his “pro-Blue” (anti-red communist) indoctrination program for US troops was being disbanded, Walker accuses Harry Truman, his foreign policy chief Dean Acheson, Eleanor Roosevelt and others of being “pink”, leading to even more official rebukes.

• JFK accepts his resignation offer in 1961, making Walker the only US general to resign during the 20th century. Certainly some motive for revenge, one would think.

• Arrested for insurrection in 1962 for promoting the bloody riots in Mississippi over the desegregation of the state university by James Meredith. This required over 30,000 National Guard troops, the most for a single disturbance in US history.

• On April 10, 1963 Walker was lightly wounded in an assassination attempt at his home that missed by an inch: Oswald is declared to have been the lone rifleman, and his Russian wife insisted that this attempt was really Oswald’s, but raised doubts about his involvement in the JFK assassination.

(Yes, amid the depth of the Cold War Oswald defected to Russia, got married, then somehow persuaded the US to let him back in, and his wife to boot, and never got arrested… stunning. This incredibly easy globetrotting reminds me of Mohamed Merah in 2012, France’s first “homegrown terrorist”, and who seemed like an obvious French intelligence agent who turned against his handlers. To many it’s obvious that Oswald was working with US intelligence, and that he actually was what he claimed to be: a “patsy” in the JFK murder.  However, this alone is a good reason why I’m keeping this article as short as possible - there’s just too much to get into regarding the JFK assassination.)

• The Warren Commission (aka the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy) traced classic “Wanted” style ads run in the Dallas Morning News on the day of JFK’s assassination to Walker. The ads read "Wanted for Treason: JFK”.

• Pled no contest in 1976 and 1977 for fondling and propositioning male undercover police officers in a public restroom.

• The man often accused of seeing “demons and goblins of communism” everywhere died on Halloween in 1993, unmarried and with no children.

These are all real events from history, as amazing as they are, and yet who remembers Walker today?

A final example reflecting Walker’s enormous importance during this era is the award-nominated Hollywood movie Seven Days in May, with stars like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Eva Gardner, which was about a military cabal's angry takeover of the government following the presidential negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the USSR. The book was written in 1961 and inspired by Walker and the two most vital political trends of that period: to be “better dead than red” or to make peace to avoid nuclear catastrophe. Only two actual US politicians were mentioned by name (and negatively, of course): the long-dead McCarthy and his popular successor Walker. This is how very prominent Walker was, and yet nobody knows him now.

JFK even vacated the White House to allow the filming of this movie - he knew how important its message was, and he knew exactly which groups were coming for him.

Blaming (war) capitalists for JFK is a way to make all of capitalism-loving America feel complicit

It’s amazing to me that The New York Times still treats the physics-defying “magic bullet theory” and the totally-discredited Warren Commission with complete respect. From an article in September: “As it turns out, if his recollections are correct, the much-discussed ‘magic bullet’ may not have been so magic after all.”

Pathetic. They are such kowtowers to the US uniparty line - such “anti-journalists” - that they print what few could possibly believe. In 1976 - when many who truly remembered the era were actually alive - 80% of Americans disbelieved the Oswald lone gunman theory. You can’t get 80% of Americans to agree on anything political, in my experience. That number has dropped to 65% today - still a major majority - with college-educated Democrats the biggest believers of the official uniparty line, and aren’t these fake-leftists consistently amusing?

Another example of journalistic kowtowing is Life magazine’s refusal to show the Zapruder assassination film - which obviously disproves the lone gunman theory - until forced to by Supreme Court order.

Regardless of this MSM nonsense, the dominant theory in the United States is that John F. Kennedy was killed because he was going to pull out of the Vietnam War, and thus it was the “military industrial complex” which was behind the murder. Castro is occasionally alleged to be involved - which would have been an insane escalation for the leader of a tiny country with a new revolution to focus on. The Chicago mafia is also occasionally supposed to be involved - their vote-rigging is alleged to have tipped the 1960 election in JFK’s favor. Absurd, because the Outfit didn’t have the pull to kill a president, and it’s unthinkable that the US government wouldn’t prosecute but instead cover it up. But the overall idea is: War is big business, but JFK was going to (allegedly) bring peace, which also meant he would dismantle the US spy agencies, and a combination of these forces colluded to kill him.

Indeed, Oliver Stone’s JFK begins with Eisenhower’s famous speech warning of the military-industrial complex — the blame is essentially put on “military capitalists”. Stone never mentions segregationists, or anti-socialists or certainly libertarians, and that’s even though in the early 1960s these were the dominant conservative ideologies raging in America. Stone doesn’t mention “fascists” either, and regardless of your opinion on if such ideologies were fascistic the reality is that none of them openly claimed the mantle of “fascist” - in fact all rejected it - so it’s not accurate, nor even helpfully descriptive, to say “fascists" killed Kennedy, either.

If history repeats itself - at least, according to this reading - then a Trump assassination would be blamed on this same military-industrial complex: for trying to end the war in Ukraine. After all, terribly corrupt Ukraine is poised to join the EU and open itself up to Western capitalist exploitation and 1%-er profiteering more than Vietnam ever potentially could. The same “military capitalists” are still in power, it is widely assumed by those who adhere to this reading of history, and they are apparently opposed to the “fascist” Trump, per the MSM - so there’s another assassination looming, right? This is another column, but this paragraph reminds us that when one doesn’t take a class-based, anti-imperialist view of history the conclusions and even the very terms become totally distorted and useless.

Stone, whose rights to Ukraine on Fire were actually purchased by PressTV, made a critical mistake: by blaming “military capitalists” instead of at least blaming the anti-socialists of the era. Please do not conflate these two groups, as they are not the same thing: the latter includes a huge grassroots and non-bourgeois-class element.

By placing the blame on “military capitalists” the movie JFK, while shocking and groundbreaking, provoked no major changes because it essentially caused Americans to merely shrug their shoulders at JFK’s murder as yet another a byproduct of the capitalist system they love and support despite its awfulness. America is so ardently pro-capitalist that they are still ok with capitalism even if it took out JFK - capitalism takes out so many Americans, after all.

Had Stone openly defended socialism and pinned the blame on the rampant anti-socialist hysteria - his movie doesn’t get made, of course.

But when we openly examine the rabid anti-socialists of the era a very different result is produced:  the mass-murdering, international, multi-decade violence of the phrase “soft on communism” gains proper historical focus.

It is not mere “Vietnam War profits” which got JFK killed but America’s fanatical need to reject the sovereignty of other nations - its need to control the minds and hearts of non-Americans - which becomes clear as the real problem, and as a very long-running problem.

The refusal to accept the sovereignty of other nations to go their own way is the fundamental problem of today’s multipolar world, just as it was during the unipolar world (1992-2008), and just as it was during the Cold War, where the USSR was criminalised simply for encouraging other countries to reject capitalism-imperialism.

The JFK murder and cover-up only makes sense via the following paragraph:

The whole “JFK was killed for war profits” is wrong because it ignores the fact that anti-socialism is far more threatening than the profit loss from one imperialist war. It also ignores something as genuinely far-reaching as even mighty Marxism when it comes to the United States context: the concurrent breakup of the 350-year long racial state.

And yet “segregationists” are never accused as JFK’s killer? And yet “anti-communists” are never mentioned either? This is even though these two groups in 1963 were the most combative, the most hysterical and the most willing to kill JFK.

It’s amazing that Stone was allowed to make JFK, but what was the harm? He didn’t point the finger at the true groups which killed JFK. By remembering Edwin Walker we remember the crystal-clear connection between the two groups in the 1960s and their very real perceived threat.

Excising and forgetting this connection - like liberal democracy does with all the crimes of colonialism, or the crimes which led to the disasters of World War I and II - is a fundamental duty of the historical revisionists and apologists of Western liberal democracy and Western capitalism.

Reading this article we are reminded of what ideologies were at the root of JFK’s murder: those who opposed the revolutionary end of the US racial state (segregationists), and those who insisted on imperialist world domination (anti-socialists).

Sorry Mick Jagger, but we’re not all ardent capitalists so we don’t feel the guilt you do: “I shouted out / Who killed the Kennedys? / When after all / It was you and me” ( from “Sympathy for the Devil”). Fight for capitalism and against big government and I’d see how you might feel a bit culpable.

The end of the racial state (segregationism) and hatred of socialism’s big government (libertarianism/anti-socialism) is a multi-century, multi-assassination affair

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker is a book from 1961 which was published by Bircherite (the group began in 1958, and would be headquartered in the Wisconsin birthplace of Joseph McCarthy) and Barry Goldwater supporter Kent Courtney and his nascent Conservative Society of America. It’s a fascinating look into the actual ideologies swirling around during the actual era of JFK’s murder.

The book is a defense of America’s leading fascist, and it is apoplectic that Walker has been rebuked by the army for preaching anti-communism to his troops.

Walker, a General MacArthur devotee, had employed his “pro-Blue” indoctrination program while training troops in the 24th infantry division stationed in Germany. Like Strangelove’s Ripper, it insisted that communist subversion, infiltration and propaganda was being introduced into all aspects of US domestic, military and political life. The book appreciated this obvious overreaction: “General Walker’s Pro-Blue program clearly recognised that only when the American people are awakened to the dangers of Socialist-Communist infiltration in this nation and take political action can the World Communist Conspiracy be destroyed.”

A note here on the terminology which was ubiquitous at the time: these right-wingers were emphatic that communism was definitely not an ideology, philosophy or a political party, but that it was a mere criminal gang bent on domination of the entire world. This is the true origin of the idiotic term “communist conspiracy”. The irony is that this is exactly what Marx correctly accused capitalism of being: collusion of the 1% class to control the world.

Walker lost his commission because he violated the federal Hatch Act of 1939, titled An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, which forbids employees of the federal government from engaging in partisan political activity.

The book defends Walker and the idea that US troops must be politically indoctrinated into what they are supposed to be fighting for. The author surely didn’t know this, but this is actually a very socialist idea:

Socialist-inspired nations such as Iran, Cuba and China insist on the politicisation of their armies - for them the fear is actually that they become de-politicised, and thus forget the capitalist-imperialist meddling which caused them to be formed in the first place. Contrarily, the US and the West believe their armies must be totally ignorant of and removed from politics… because, of course, were they to learn about pro-99% politics they would immediately overthrow their awful capitalist-imperialist leaders, who want them to be their unreflecting killer robots.

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker is, from cover to cover, a defense of the primary motives of JFK’s assassins: segregationism, anti-socialism and modern American “libertarianism”.

The book is filled with speeches from the two champions of these ideological groups: Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater, respectively, two names who are well-known to anyone who follows American politics.

Thurmond: Dixiecrat, champion of segregationism, one of the longest-serving senators ever, had a Black love child and was eulogised by Biden at his funeral (of course).

Goldwater: the most right-wing senator from Arizona ever, and that’s despite John McCain being his successor. Goldwater is the most successful proponent of what I call “Yosemite Sam-ism”: the modern anti-government libertarian movement. This movement led to the election of Ronald Reagan, the grassroots realignment of the Republican Party, deeply influences today’s Trumpism and tarnishes the political viewpoints of many a Bitcoin holder - you cannot understate its political success. Indeed, Goldwater is the political figurehead of libertarianism just as Nietzsche is its philosophical figurehead, with his slogan of “as little state as possible”.

While segregationists failed, it certainly is logical that libertarians have been the most successful political group in the past 40 years - after all, the anti-big government forces in the US succeeded in their attempted coup in 1963 (and 1968), neutering the social democrats of the US.

It’s easy to see why segregationism and libertarianism shared the same ideological goal: opposition to a powerful central state. Both also shared another key ideological tenet: total opposition to the basic welfare programs which have been championed by socialists since 1848 France (slogan back then: “work, bread or lead!”). Heaven forbid poor, recently unslaved Blacks get things like decent affordable housing - surely that would bankrupt American corporations!

However, recall the timeline of Western history: both of these groups were on the losing side of these issues after World War II - in 1963 social democracy was prevailing over mere liberal democracy.

Walker and his cohorts were fighting against this, and after taking out a president their ideologies would truly take control of US society.

We’re in a 3rd US Red Scare now, the 2nd one killed JFK & the 1st gave Hitler his inspiration

The Case of General Edwin A. Walker gives us invaluable insights on how the 2nd Red Scare developed, but let’s return briefly to the 1st US Red Scare, 1917-21.

Of course, the Russian Revolution is the impetus, but this era’s American crimes are covered up or apologised away. Mainstream historians say this era ran from 1917-20, but it wasn’t until 1921 that the Socialist Party of America’s presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was finally released from prison?

Perhaps nothing from that era is more wilfully forgotten than this: modern anti-Semitism is entirely American in birthright. It truly began with Henry Ford’s attacks found in “The International Jew: The World's Problem” from his newspaper in Dearborn, Michigan, outside of Detroit. These works were widely republished in the Third Reich; Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his Munich office; in 1922 even The New York Times had to report on rumours Ford was financially backing the German Nazis; Ford gave the Protocols of Zion its first English mass production.

I haven’t read either of those two texts, but I’ll assume Ford combines radical anti-socialism (those ungrateful autoworkers of mine!) with an inland Michigander’s hatred for Wall Street. Hitler combined radical anti-socialism with the eugenics-inspired idea (so very crucial in understanding Hitler) that 1917 had a racial, and not ideological, basis because Jews and Bolshevism were one and the same, to him.

Also incredibly repressed in allegedly freedom-respecting America is the 2nd Great Red Scare, exemplified by McCarthyism and which is supposed to run from 1947-1957. However, after reading this article you should find it easy to agree that a far better ending to this era would be in 1963 with the assassination of JFK.

From the Walker book: “Prior to 1954, anti-Semitic groups seemed to outnumber the few responsible and respectable anti-communist groups or publications then in existence.”

On the 1954 televised McCarthy-Stevens anti-communist hearings: “The whole nation watched in their living rooms as a new element entered into the fight against Communism. Here was an anti-communist fighter who was not anti-Semitic!”

The author asserts that the McCarthy hearings made anti-socialism a grassroots movement for this generation: “The result of the McCarthy hearings was that millions of straight-thinking, non-bigoted (i.e. not anti-Jew) Americans woke up to the dangers of Communist infiltration.”

However, it was not just the televised McCarthy hearings that inflamed many Americans - it was the fact that the US was losing, and big time. It’s impossible to understand the JFK assassination without grasping the predominant right-wing sentiment that socialists kept on beating them. The vital reality is that right-wingers viewed their contemporary times like this:

“At the end of World War II, the United States was the most powerful nation on earth, respected by friend and foe alike. By 1961 the prestige of the United States had sunk to the lowest level in the history of this country. During the past decade the nations of the world have witnessed the once-powerful United States bend its knee in appeasement to the Soviet Union, and retreat step by ignominious step before all communist aggression or threat of aggression.”

This statement includes so very many socialist victories since WWII: the 1949 Chinese revolution, the victory of North Korea, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, and it would soon encompass the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a major socialist victory because it saw Cuba firmly freed from US invasion in return for not stationing Soviet missiles. (From a Latin America-centric point of view JFK appears to have been killed in order to preserve the Monroe Doctrine.) The fanatical anti-communists had reasons to be apoplectic, and the very real view of the right wing was, to continue quoting the Walker book, “…abject appeasement of Communism has become the permanent policy of the Kennedy administration,” which rightly feared nuclear war more than socialism.

Indeed, the critical understanding behind the JFK murder was not capitalist profits but this: Did one fear nuclear annihilation or socialism more? If the answer wasn’t socialism you might get your face put on a Wanted ad in Texas.

The fundamental idea rejected by JFK was that the US should hit communism with “everything we’ve got”, including nuclear weapons, which made him “soft on communism”. Furthermore, when we combine this hysterical anti-communism with the hysteria induced on the cultural front - the break-up of the 350-year racial state - we get people who were willing to commit a political coup to forestall the obvious desire for change.

Profits from Vietnam? Mere peanuts….

Conclusion: The individual killers aren’t known but their reasons clearly are

The mafia, Castro, the end of the Vietnam military-industrial complex - such things pale in comparison to the societal complexity of the death of the US racial state and the fanatical anti-socialist movement in the United States.

The problem was not merely “war is business” but the very heart of US culture - the demand of all imperialists to control, and the demand of all capitalists to extract maximum profit.

One problem with this theory of mine: the killing of Kennedy by segregationists typified by Walker actually increased the breaking-up of the racial state. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was pushed through by JFK’s successor, the Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson. How can we explain this?

Firstly, let’s recall that JFK voted against the Civil Rights Bill in 1957, and that he said little about civil rights before winning the presidency (and that he was the first US president to ramp up the conflict in Vietnam). It’s possible he changed - Kennedy devotees insist that he saw the light and was going to lead a new America - but a more accurate guess is this: nobody in the 1% really wanted a change to the status quo, but the racial status quo was indeed forced to change thanks to unstoppable grassroots agitation by the 99%.

LBJ understood this inevitability, and he represents the concession of the 1% encapsulated by the JFK murder: ending the racial state in order to maintain overall control; in order to continue the hysterical anti-socialist fight and the hysterical libertarian fight (against big government ).

Ending segregation was the price which had to be paid in order for these two forces to keep power - and it worked.

The 2nd Great Red Scare - surely it must include the assassination of JFK, as anti-socialist sentiment was so clearly involved. Segregation: Scholars often call the 1960s the “2nd Civil War” because this is when the 1st US Civil War finally reached a conclusion - rights were observed for African-Americans, finally.

Robert F. Kennedy would be killed five years later, in what certainly seems like a repeat created by the two same forces I have described.

The only person close enough to put the bullet a half-inch from RFK’s ear was security guard Thane Eugene Caesar, a known far-righter who had publicly said he believed that if elected, RFK would have, "sold the country down the road to the commies or minorities like his brother did.”

He just described anti-socialism and segregationism - these are the exact two groups I have been describing, no?

RFK’s son, the 2024 presidential candidate RFK Jr., doesn’t believe the lone gunman theory for his father's death and does believe that Caesar was the second shooter.

A book from this year which looks interesting for those who want to learn more about Walker is The Insurrectionist: Major General Edwin A. Walker and the Birth of the Deep State Conspiracy. I’m not all that interested because I think the US army has become so depoliticised that I don’t know who could possibly rise to the level of Walker’s prominence as a right-winger today? General Mark Milley rose to tremendous non-wartime prominence by opposing Trump, but who’s the true right-winger among those two? Which of the two US parties isn’t right wing and is actually in favor of mere social democracy? If any uber-right-wing military man does rise to prominence then everyone will start unearthing Walker.

A book which does look worth reading is Dallas 1963, which examines the epicentre of American extremism and often called the “City of Hate”. The month before JFK was killed Walker led a shocking anti-internationalist attack on visiting Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations. Here’s a brief excerpt from a New Republic article:

“One man stands up and chants: ‘Kennedy will get his reward in hell. Stevenson is going to die. His heart will stop, stop, stop. And he will burn, burn, burn.’

People begin streaming into the aisles, holding American flags upside down, a tactic they have learned from General Walker to signal a nation in distress or under attack. Halfway through Stevenson’s speech, a group of Walker’s commandos dart behind the stage and pull on a rope. The large banner that reads WELCOME ADLAI flips down to reveal another message in huge letters: UN RED FRONT.

One Stevenson supporter turns to another in disbelief: ‘This must be what it was like in Munich during the Beer Hall Putsch.’

More scuffles are breaking out, but Stevenson is insisting on staying on stage—and directly addressing the extremists in Dallas:

‘I understand that some of these fearful groups are trying to establish a United States Day in competition with United Nations Day. This is the first time I have heard that the United States and the United Nations are rivals.’

Beer Hall Putsch indeed; anti-internationalism and anti-socialism are synonymous; the UN is just a commie front to American jingoists. Quite a climate in the City of Hate… it produced presidential assassins.

The assassination of JFK - and RFK and MLK: the root cause was obviously anti-socialism and not just “military-industrial capitalism as usual”.

This article should remind why the US views war with China as “inevitable” - “better dead than red” prevailed in 1963 and has never been pushed out of office.