Puff the Magic Pardon

You might only recognize one face in this trio of photos: a young girl named Barbara Winter from the 1960s, Peter Yarrow of the iconic folk group Peter, Paul & Mary, and former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on December 29, coincidentally just a week before Yarrow’s death on January 7. The connection between them is not immediately obvious, but their shared history reveals a disturbing and largely forgotten story.

On January 19, 1981 (9/11)—Carter’s final day in office—he issued a pardon for Peter Yarrow, who had been convicted of molesting Barbara Winter when she was just 14. This pardon, one of Carter’s last acts as president, was the only one in U.S. history to erase a conviction for a sexual offense against a child. The timing was fortuitous for Yarrow, as the pardon was overshadowed by the high-profile release of American hostages in Iran that same day.

Yarrow, who had pled guilty to “taking indecent liberties with a child,” received a prison sentence of one to three years but served only three months. At his sentencing, Yarrow expressed remorse, stating, “I have hurt myself deeply. I hurt my wife and the people who love me. It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made.” Conspicuously absent from his apology was any mention of Barbara Winter or acknowledgment of the harm he had caused her. Later, in a legal hearing, Yarrow audaciously argued that Winter had been a “willing participant,” while his lawyer dismissed her as a “groupie” seeking a relationship with a music star.

Despite his conviction, Yarrow’s career was far from ruined. By 1972, he was back on stage, campaigning for Senator George McGovern’s presidential bid. Throughout the 1970s and beyond, he remained a prominent figure in liberal activism, performing at events advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, nuclear disarmament, and the abolition of the death penalty. He also produced children’s specials based on Puff the Magic Dragon, a song he described as representing the loss of childhood innocence—an observation chillingly reminiscent of what Barbara Winter said she experienced as a result of Yarrow’s actions.

Yarrow’s privileged upbringing and family connections may offer insight into how he managed to evade lasting consequences. Born in Manhattan on May 31, 1938 (9/11), Yarrow was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Bernard Yarrow, a man whose career reads like a tour of elite institutions and shadowy influence. Bernard was an assistant district attorney in New York City, a decorated member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and a co-founder of Radio Free Europe, an anti-Communist organization funded by the CIA. He later joined Sullivan & Cromwell, the powerful law firm of the Dulles brothers, known for its entanglements in global controversies and financial scandals.

The elder Yarrow’s connections may help explain why Carter, a devout born-again Christian and longtime Sunday school teacher, would grant a pardon for such an egregious crime. Carter never publicly addressed the decision, leaving questions about his motivations unanswered. Was it an act of compassion for a fellow humanitarian? A favor to a connected family? Or something more opaque, tied to larger webs of influence?

The pardon and its aftermath raise broader, troubling questions about accountability, privilege, and the selective application of justice. While Yarrow’s life continued with little interruption—his reputation shielded by his activism and artistry—Barbara Winter’s innocence and trust were irreparably shattered. Her story, largely forgotten, serves as a stark reminder of the imbalance of power that allows perpetrators to thrive while survivors are left to bear the scars.

In the end, the convergence of Carter and Yarrow’s deaths in the same week feels almost poetic, though not in the uplifting sense. It is a reminder of how even those we lionize for their ideals—whether a president devoted to peace or a folk singer advocating for justice—can participate in systems that prioritize image over accountability. Perhaps the real lesson is this: the innocence lost, whether in Barbara Winter’s story or in the broader public’s trust, is far harder to restore than a reputation, no matter how carefully curated.

The Colonoscopy Song—because CBS Cares

39 thoughts on “Puff the Magic Pardon”

  2. True story: Jimmy Carter stayed at my next door neighbors house in 1976. My parents were invited over to meet him, but declined. They later regretted it, but he was just an unknown at the time, and my dad was a Republican.

    From ‘Jimmy Who?’ to president and statesman

    Anyhow I used to be an admirer of Carter, but after waking up realize he was just another actor playing president. His navy service under Admiral Rickover makes him a significant person in history, being a significant player in the nuclear weapons hoax. By the way it has been now 80 years! since a so called nuclear weapon was used in war. And then never again! With no accidents. After assembling tens of thousands of weapons. Those nuclear weapons engineers seem to defy all previous laws of new technology development, and got it perfect 80 years ago.

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  3. This is so funny: I swear I didn’t read the article before posting, just looked it up. They have my dads quote below, I can’t believe it:

    “Even our neighbors across the street raised the question of ‘Jimmy Who?’” he recalled in a recent interview at his home. “They had no knowledge of who he was or that he was a candidate and they didn’t even come over.”

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  4. And lets not forget Carters participation in the 3 mile island hoax. I do not believe so called nuclear chain reactions are possible. Chemical chain reactions are certainly. But I can not think of reliable historical account of a nuclear chain reaction – that would a be a nuclear reactor meltdown, which has never occurred (almost zero effects from Chernobyl) or nuclear weapons test, which have all been shown to be faked on film.

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    1. During Carter’s term in 1979 a triple live album called “No Nukes: The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future” was released. The main culprits…er key organizers being Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt and John Hall. I remember seeing Jackson Browne in concert in the mid-80s and he was still beating the drum, preaching between songs about the evils of Nukes. MUSE stood for “Musicians United for Safe Energy”. They care so much about us.

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      1. No nukes was such a milky teat to grift off of in the 1970-80s. Somehow the children have forgotten the risks. Why, oh why, do we still live on the brink of annihilation?

        And I want to hurl every time that 99 Luft balloons shite is played on the old jukebox. It is certainly programmed by the programmers to be played as often as possible (aoap – my new acronym!) at bar trivia contests, to subliminally remind the brain dead of the 70s and 80s, which constitute 99% of my demographic, that we could die within 15 minutes notice at any time.

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      2. I was video-skimming through a documentary on Jackson Brown several months ago and recall the scene where he is testifying with Bonnie Raitt in front of congress in the 80s, and he looks more irritated and bored than Michael Corleone in Godfather 2.

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      3. Great piece, Kevin. All of this was new to me. I was a huge fan of Peter, Paul and Mary in my younger years, and they were a talented group, able to put on live concerts in the pre-Autotune era. I went to one in Seattle in 1970, and sat on the floor cross-legged, something I cannot even contemplate now.

        “Puff the Magic Dragon” – I don’t know who penned it, maybe Peter and Paul, as advertised, but it is layered to perfection. Indeed it strokes loss of innocence, but the underlying message is of course “Puff”, or marijuana. Not controversial now, at that time for a message like that to go out, you had to “lay it between the lines.”

        I’ve got no issues with potheads, other than they are, when using, dullards and intellectually useless. That they have legalized it, and its use so widespread, speaks heavily to the state of the nation. Life is really hard for all of us, more so for some, less so for others, but hard. We have to face our problems, go through them and not around them. Pot is an escape route.

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        1. Mark, you’re harshing my buzz. I do agree with some of your points, but as someone with who has deeply studied cannabinoids, the endocannabinoid system during my postdoctoral research, and having ingested many exogenous yet naturally produced cannabinoids, which I consider completely different classes of molecules than opiates and stimulants I’d like clarification on what you define as a pothead. And you say they are intellectually useless. Please define what you mean by intellectual, why that is important, and a some contemporary intellectuals. I know of no living intellectuals so I am interested who you consider an intellectual.

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        3. Hi Mark, sorry for my modest over-reaction. I have smoked on and off for 40 years and was looked down upon for that. As if it’s a moral failure. Anyhow I don’t see it as any different or worse than drinking coffee, if you like it more power to you. You’d be surprised how many secret stoners there are, and many are elite athletes, engineers and scientists. Weed will make a stupid person sound stupid because they start talking more, but it won’t make a smart person stupid or unmotivated, more just a general calming effect which I find useful especially in sitting in long meetings with people I don’t like.

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          1. Didn’t meant to trip a nerve there. No doubt I’d be surprised at the number of people who take weed in one form or another. My experience as a younger fella was that weed smokers were people like grocery clerks and tin men … it just never appealed to me. I’ll take your word on it all.

            [I do drink coffee… it tastes good to me, coffee and milk in the morning. I don’t think it stimulates me, but maybe so.]

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  5. Biden was just lately in the news for his round of pardons of course.. a presidential tradition, although I don’t know how far back it goes.

    To me it feels like a curtain going down on a whole bunch of minor ops. Somewhere offstage a producer is saying “Okay, great work everybody.. That’s a wrap! We’ll call you if we need anything..”

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      1. Darn I meant Clinton. Anyhow yes it’s a nice tradition of them to pardon their rich buddies so there’s nothing they have to worry about. Did Trump pardon himself yet?

        If anyone has ever had the pleasure of dealing with the federal prosecution system, as I unfortunately have via friends and family getting wrapped up in it, I will say there’s nothing that will make you hate the federal government faster than encountering a federal prosecutor. I told them explicitly at the time I had no respect for them and their criminal system. And I strongly advise anyone with a backbone to do likewise.

        Ken asked yesterday what we can do. Here’s what I do personally: show open contempt for corrupt politicians and government officials, to their face.

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    2. Sort of like after a TV “program” has run it’s course. Biden’s character jumped the shark and the Kamala character wasn’t generating the views so cancellation was inevitable. Now the actors can move on to their next project.

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      1. Did anyone else look into the Hunter Biden laptop thing? I believe it was conspiracy candy for the right wing. I downloaded someone’s analysis of it that had day by day details on Hunters travails. I actually found it convincing at first, as in real, the first time I looked at it. Because it is packed with details, and pictures of him with escorts, smoking crack. Moreover, I can totally see where a rich, entitled, connected guy like Hunter would and could just go hog wild on escorts, and drugs as a side thing, with his money and position. And the Biden family appears completely void of any morals or anything else a decent, or leading family would pursue.

        Which is why I find accounts like the Epstein island Lolita express completely unconvincing. The higher up you go, and more work you take on as an “elite”, the less time you have for shenanigans like this, or time wasting reckless affairs. Moreover, at this level they are surrounded by security, including secret service and private contractors, whom they would need total trust, which would not necessarily be possible if they were committing crimes beyond the pale, like child trafficking.

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        1. That would be my guess too, conspiracy candy.. Tim Ozman, infinite plane radio,has a good framework or propaganda model.. there’s MSM, and MSM “plus”… There’s a plus for both left and right, ie dark conspiracy candy added onto the mainstream narrative for both factions. Ozman advocates for his MSM “minus,” fake until proven real for all of it

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          1. I will have to check him out. I got worn on out after looking through the output of some prominent so-called truthers, who started getting sloppy in the their late work. People like Simon Shack, MM, MAG bitter truth, and Alan Weisbecker. The latter, has a very interesting website, with some great photography, but he is super-suspect IMO – he openly admitted to smuggling multiple millions of weed in the 1970s – and having lots of CIA connections. Great photography though, and he did some good work on SpaceX before his somewhat early demise – does anyone know his cause of death?

            Isn’t Tim Ozman the supposed real name of the CIA agent who played Osama bin Laden?

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            1. Definitely worth checking out, give him a few hours to see where he’s coming from. Most people find him repetitive eventually if you listen to everything. But repetition helps to absorb the concepts. I listen on Odysee, seems to update regularly. On his pseudonym, maybe he chose it as a reference to that?

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  6. Please let us not forget 45’s extremely generous pardon of his daughter’s father-in-law after his particularly egregious crimes, as well as subsequently naming him the Ambassador to France. Money always talks.

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  7. I feel compelled to run this Yarrow character through the autohoaxer. First of all he’s jewiced- see what I did there? The son of a major spook. Wiki says Pete had children by Mary Beth McCarthy, Clean Eugene’s niece (!) the presidential candidate Yarrow was stumping for, but since Yarrow was showbiz, I’ll default to him being gay and this was an IVF royal bastard donation thing. I agree, that’s my fetish, but I’ll stand by that as the motivation for these elite homosexuals reproducing. Even the minor bloodlines need to keep pumping.

    As the curtain was closing, this Mary Beth woman, who Yarrow divorced years ago, remarried him. My suspicion is as he drooled himself to death, he may have been talking out of turn and she was a familiar face that this fading spook could deal with as a handler.

    As for the completely out of character diddling with a teenage girl, that mishigas reeks of a Free Masonic public humiliation ritual. And the truth is these particular showbiz types, if we’re being told they are after little girls, it’s likely they are really after little boys, which we are not paying attention to, but which carries major currency if we are to give any credence to the cult stories of the uber-inbred elites.

    Like a lot of show people who are also political gadflies, my assumption is that Yarrow was some sort of procurer or an information mule who appeared to be an innocent, like the sibling team of Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty, who in the 60’s and 70’s popularized lefty political positions that Mom and Pop America probably weren’t all that familiar with. I mean, if you’re a Democrat, the overwhelming charisma of a Hubert Humphrey probably isn’t enough to make you pay attention to the details, but if Warren Beatty, Shirley, MacLaine, Peter Yarrow, and some of these other show busy yahoos advocate for certain positions, you might pay a little more attention, making persuasion to support family destroying policies more compelling. 

    Anyway, Yarrow’s “crime”, something the accompanying sister of the victim said she did not witness, and later was “settled” by an undisclosed payment/paycheck, was dismissed by Jimmy Carter, shuttling Yarrow out the back door while the Iranian hostages were coming through the front door.  And why not pitch the Yarrow persona in the grave with his protector Jimmy Carter just to clean up the files in a nice and convenient package.

    All of this slander is, of course, as the comedic stylings of “Dr.”Joseph P Farrell would label it, high octane speculation, nothing more. Plus, Yarrow is “dead” so you can say anything you want about him in an oath-free zone.

    PS- And what about that “fiddle and banjo crap” that Martin Mull labeled the folk scene, pre-Beatles? What are these elite assholes like Pete Seeger, et al, doing advocating for worker’s rights in story and song? The folk scene, from where I stand, seemed to be nothing more than pandering to the white guilt college kids who were largely guaranteed a job post grad. Seems like an earlier version of this social justice warrior circle jerk we have today which has terrorized mom and pop America into buying the woke agenda. 

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    1. I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but Jimmy Carter is very closely related to Berry Gordy of Motown fame. So Carter was basically a music industry insider.

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      1. President James Earl “Ray?” Carter was ONI which is as elite as spooks get, especially when installed as POTUS. Jimmy was like Kamala, descended from slave owners. I wonder if those two share blood.

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    2. Wow, Tyrone is on fire. Elite assholes like Pete Seeger, I’m lovin’ it. I can still remember the g-damn American Studies class I took senior year high school, where our lezzy and hippie leftover teachers subjected us to weeks of “Los Weavers” videos, and Pete Seeger nostalgia. We added the “Los” to “the” Weavers, because we were all in 4th year Spanish, and fluent at Spanglish.

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      1. I think half the semester of “American Studies” was devoted to Joe McCarthy and the “black lists”, and weeping over all those poor Hollywood actors who got blacklisted and had to work “B movies” for a while before being rehabilitated. I’m playing the worlds smallest violin right now for those who were blacklisted..

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    3. Little boys is 100% on the mark. For years the Public Service Annoucement or PSA was that they were after our daughters. Not quite true, based on the Catholic church scandals they were all into the “Rough Boys”, sans girls. Most convenient for all the Boy Scout leaders and priests managing the old choir boys.

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  8. Someone posted this DNA investigation to the fakeologist forums –

    https://controlstudies.substack.com/p/the-dna-hoax

    Mark, no slight to your personal story you shared here recently but it’s one data point that could have other explanations. I remain skeptical of their claims about DNA, virology, etc. As a commenter at that link says –

    “Being in public safety for 20 years, my peers would always say how are they solving crimes all the time with DNA. Are They(under my breath). Then I go, I didn’t say there weren’t identifying “components-markers-materials”. It’s just not the cartoon science we were giving. Thanks, for this post Jamie”

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    1. Yeah, must always be open. My story: Daughter raped in March of 1987 – broke into our house as we all slept. He knew where to go in the house to find the room he wanted, and by coincidence two bathroom windows were unlocked, probably from the inside on a prior visit that night. I was out to meetings until late, the house was asleep when I got home.

      It was quite the story, and one of the worst crimes in Montana history, an 8-year old girl brutally raped three times, each time with the threat “Shut up or I’ll kill you.”

      Fast forward – it was not a crime that could go unsolved. Would be bad PR. The police narrowed in on a local troublemaker, Jimmy, who was framed using fraudulent hair sample evidence in court. Years later, with the advance of DNA evidence, he was set free, and won a $3.5 million settlement for malicious prosecution after 15 years in prison. God bless him, he earned it. At that time, we had no perpetrator, and no clue who might have done this.

      Fast forward again, mid-2010s, a man living in a trailer in White Sulfur Springs, Montana is busted for drugs. He plea bargains, part of which is submission of DNA. It is sent to Washington, and gets a hit, my daughter. Police had preserved the evidence. Police arrest him for the crime. I called a friend in Billings and ask him to make a trip to the local library there to review phone books from the time, to see if there was a Tipton living near us. Yes, there was, two blocks away. Totally random? Could not be. Too specific.

      He is tried and set free on Statute of Limitations. AGs from several states band together to petition the US Supreme Court to allow the S of L to be extended in cases like this were evidence is discovered years after the commission of the crime.

      US Supreme Court says no. Ronald Tipton is set free. In the end, our justice system could do no more that arrest and imprison an innocent man, and let a guilty one go free.

      Nonetheless, I was left with a belief that DNA evidence, when the PCR machine is used as intended, works.

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      1. The idea of DNA as a hoax is pretty sad. I had not yet posted this, but I got pretty fed up watching Dr Cowans talks where he systematically called nearly all known facts about biochemistry fake. Like ribosomes, DNA, RNA, lysosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum. They base the idea of a DNA hoax on the evidence that Watson and Crick had weak data and just guessed at a model. The complementary pairs of DNA is 100% proven, many times over, Whether or not it is a true “double helix” is beside the point, A base pairs with T, and G with C. And there are ribosomes, a genetic code, RNA, etc.

        How do i know? I have done many single nulceotide mutations of plasmid DNA to change the structure and function of the protein. And then transfected the cells with the mutated DNA containing plasmid to overexpress and purify the protein. I did this for over 15 years, there is nothing fake about it.

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      2. Mark, DNA evidence does indeed work. If specific certain protocols used and followed appropriately etc. A few senior people I work with now worked in the area of DNA forensics for many years, and have told me they are confident the methods are reliable. The instruments that run these tests are very finicky, and results can not be faked without the most extreme measures. I.e. a positive match would be nearly impossible if not real, unless you think some technician is sprinkling the right DNA into the sample. Every scientific technician i know is basically honest, they don’t get paid enough to fake things.

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        1. That’s amazing you have that background, thanks for the perspective. Hope you’ll check out that link at least a little and give some critique or opinion on his experiments. Surely you understand though how laypeople might be a little skeptical of such a black box type of idea, and given the fraud in related areas (PCR, virus scares and vaccines, etc.) I’m looking forward to reading more of that blog anyway. Just trying to figure it out, wherever the chips fall.

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