The 2004 presidential candidate has teamed up with three Brits to make films to counter fake news, dirty tricks and misinformation – things of which he has been on the receiving end
In 2004, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, John Kerry, was on the receiving end of one of the most egregious smear campaigns in modern history. At the height of the Iraq war, the Republicans came up with a strategy to combat the glaring military mismatch between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, and the incumbent George W Bush, whose record consisted of a spell in the Texas Air National Guard. They concocted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had lied about and exaggerated his record. The claims were later discredited, but the lies travelled around the world, and the damage was done.
“It was really the first of the fake news elections,” says Kerry, speaking via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Where you can take a legitimate military record, which the US navy had certified, and you can lie about it. And that’s where we are today: massive lies. We’ve had tens of thousands of lies told by the president of the United States. We’re just completely divorced from the reality of what is happening to people’s lives.”
