Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins me to talk about his life and career as an environmentalist, and why he believes climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed. Robert Kennedy Jr is a former presidential candidate, environmental activist, journalist, and environmentalist. He is also the author of the new book, The Dark Side of the Sun, and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times, and is a frequent contributor to environmental publications such as The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone. He is the brother of former Vice President Joe Kennedy Jr, who was assassinated in 1968, and served as a vice presidential candidate in the campaign for John Kerry s presidential campaign in the 1980s and 1990s, and was a member of the presidential campaign team for John McCain s campaign, John Kerry's presidential campaign, and also served as an adviser to John McCain's campaign and was an early supporter of his wife, Michelle Obama, and her husband Robert Kennedy s campaign for President John Kerry. We talk about the Kennedy s legacy, his environmentalist roots, and what makes him such a good environmentalist and what it takes to live up to his reputation as one of the most influential people in the country. in the 21st century. Thanks to our sponsor, The Nature Conservancy, for sponsoring this episode of the podcast, and for making this podcast possible. Thank you so much to Bob Kennedy Jr for coming on the podcast and for being kind enough to sit down with me to share his story and his wisdom and wisdom. to share it with us. Thank you, Robert. Robert, Robert, for being a good friend and a good human being kind and a great human being and a wonderful human being thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy this episode. and for sharing it with others who are listening and sharing your stories and listening to this podcast and sharing it so much of what we can all be inspired to do what we all can do to make a difference in the world and making a difference, and making it a little bit more of a day to day in our world. Love you, Mr. Kennedy, thank you, Bob, I really appreciate you, much love you. XOXO, Caitlyn, Rachael, for coming here, R.J. and Sarah, Sarah, for your support and support us all, for listening, and much more.
00:00:00.000I'm here, as people probably have guessed by now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:00:05.000There's nobody I'd rather talk to, Charles.
00:00:07.000You have one of the most interesting minds that I've ever encountered.
00:00:12.000It's really, really brilliant, and I love your books.
00:00:15.000And particularly, I think your climate book is probably the best book written on climate, and it's so nuanced and unusual and beautiful.
00:00:23.000But you and I also, we spoke, I think, about a year ago on my podcast, so Yeah, I remember that podcast.
00:00:29.000If we really want to change things, we've got to step out of this conflict dynamic because it's just a logjam.
00:00:38.000You have to figure out a different way to do it.
00:00:40.000A lot of the stuff you talk about, if you try to summarize it, it sounds almost corny or kind of fluffy, but actually it's quite practical as we're now figuring out and And it's being effective people on both sides want to hear about solutions rather than just more tribalism.
00:00:59.000One of the points I make in the book is into why am I an environmentalist?
00:01:26.000And we were looking at a flock of birds, a big flock of birds.
00:01:29.000And that's when he told me about the passenger pigeons, whose flocks would go from horizon to horizon for hours and hours, darkening the sun, and that they're extinct.
00:01:46.000And I'm wondering if you have any experiences like that, because you're known first and foremost, or should be known first and foremost for your lifelong environmental work.
00:01:55.000So is there an event like that that made you into an environmentalist?
00:01:59.000I mean, I had the same thing that you did.
00:02:02.000I heard about the passenger pigeons when I was young and the dodo bird and learned that the dodo bird, you know, I knew that dinosaurs had gone extinct, but it was so disheartening to me and troubling to me that in art, In the last hundred years, the dodo bird had gone extinct.
00:02:21.000And I was like, how could people let that happen?
00:02:24.000It was something that I experienced as kind of a theft, an assault on our rights.
00:02:32.000There was a stream that I, you know, when I was growing up, I was in McLean, Virginia, which at that time was a very rural community.
00:02:39.000It was kind of a, it was farm and horses and, you know, the shop downtown was the saddle shop and the feed store.
00:02:49.000And, you know, it was really a rural community, which is hard to imagine.
00:02:53.000Imagine today, because now it's just kind of a suburb of Tyson's Corners, a pavement stuck between Washington, D.C. and Tyson's Corners.
00:03:02.000I grew up in the 50s, and it was Eisenhower's highway program.
00:03:06.000And they built the first of these highways.
00:03:09.000It was called Dolly-Madison, and it was connecting to this web of interstates, practically through our backyard, through a neighbor's yard.
00:03:18.000And that was a place where my brothers and I used to go every afternoon when we got off of school to catch salamanders and bullfrogs and green frogs and crayfish and mud puppies.
00:03:30.000And we would spend, you know, particularly in the springtime, we would spend hour after hour in that stream and in the pond turning over rocks.
00:03:39.000And then, you know, the bulldozers came one day and plowed it under.
00:03:43.000And I experienced that as this, you know, momentous sense of loss.
00:03:48.000There was a net, there was a tree there, a snag, where there were great horned owls that nested every year.
00:03:55.000And I took one of those one year, climbed the tree and took him And Ray, you know, raised him and he was like a member of our family.
00:04:05.000But all of those, you know, those little places were sacred to me.
00:04:09.000And when the first cars started driving on the highway, my brother and I went up on the hill and threw rocks at them because we felt like, you know, it was an invasion.
00:04:17.000And we got caught and got punished and the whole event was kind of dramatic for us.
00:04:23.000And then, you know, I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson when I was older, when I was 29 years old.
00:04:31.000I went to work for the fishermen, and they had had the same experience.
00:04:35.000We had a booming fishery on the Hudson, 350 years old.
00:04:39.000It was many of the families I represented, and it was a very diverse group of fishermen.
00:04:45.000There were blacks and whites and Hispanics, but many of the people were the descendants of Of the Dutch fishermen who had been fishing the river since Dutch colonial times.
00:04:58.000And it was a traditional gear fishery.
00:05:00.000They used the same fishing methods that the Algonquin Indians used to talk to the original Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and then pass down through the generations.
00:05:21.000And that's really the place where you need to regulate fisheries because then you can count, you know, the recruiting stock and you can calculate how many you need for the next year and make sure.
00:05:32.000And the fishermen, depending on what the stock was like, they would lift their nets one day a week or two days a week so nobody would fish the river to allow what they call recruiters, which were the breeders.
00:05:45.000And to preserve the free flow of the river during that point.
00:05:47.000And so it's the perfect way to kind of regulate a public fishery where everybody agrees to do it.
00:05:53.000And you can actually count all the stocks.
00:05:56.000You're not catching fish out in the ocean.
00:05:58.000And so it had been this incredibly well regulated fishery for 350 years.
00:06:03.000They had a business model that worked.
00:06:05.000And then the General Electric Company dumped its PCBs in the river, and Penn Central Railroad dumped oil in the river and made the shad taste of diesel so they couldn't sell the fish anymore.
00:06:15.000And they were under assault from big polluters who were breaking the law, but they had the political call to get away with it.
00:06:23.000And I recognized at that point that dynamic which really would define my career, which was, you know, this dynamic of agency capture.
00:06:31.000The story of losing the stream where you and your brother played when you were kids, that's such a defining image of childhood, finding frogs and turtles, you know, and playing in the water.
00:06:42.000What makes me sad, and I have a loss like that as well, the place where I grew up, for the same reason, you know, a highway came through.
00:06:49.000But what makes me even sadder now is that a lot of kids never even have that to begin with.
00:06:54.000Because childhood has migrated indoors almost completely.
00:06:58.000And children rarely have time outdoors that's unsupervised.
00:07:03.000And even if the parents shove them outdoors, there's not other kids playing outdoors in the kingdom of childhood.
00:07:10.000You know, this is something, it's related to the decline of community.
00:07:13.000It's related to the decline of public life.
00:07:15.000It's related to the rising levels of fear.
00:07:18.000And it transcends any political conversation, really.
00:07:21.000Like when I talk to, it doesn't matter, liberals, conservatives, anybody, Yeah, we don't know our neighbors anymore.
00:07:27.000So yeah, but that experience of loss, I shared the experience of losing the place I loved to an audience.
00:07:34.000And a woman said, Oh, come on, Charles, don't feel sorry for yourself.
00:08:08.000And that kind of relationship, you know, even if it hadn't been destroyed by the polluters, when the industrial fisheries come in, they're completely oblivious to that.
00:08:18.000You know, the things that I mourn also is just the thrill of finding a box turtle, you know, which I don't think my kids have ever seen a box turtle, a wild box turtle, which is, you know, I would catch maybe one or two a week and You know, it was such an extraordinary creature because, you know, the color, every one of them was completely different in the color scheme.
00:08:41.000And they're all these very brilliant colors.
00:08:43.000And then they had this very interesting lifestyle where they kind of, you know, they have a territory.
00:08:49.000And those were all disrupted by the highways because the territories were intersected and the box turtles kind of run over.
00:08:56.000But they were, you know, common enough that you could find them.
00:08:59.000If you went out looking for a box turtle when I was a kid, you could find them.
00:09:03.000And then, you know, I talked in my speech in Boston about what the puddles were like.
00:09:07.000You have these kind of intermittent ponds and streams where the, you know, salamanders are bred and the frogs are bred.
00:09:14.000A frog and a salamander can't breed in a fish pond because the fish will eat the eggs and then they'll eat the tadpoles as soon as they're born.
00:09:22.000So the only place they can really flora, they lay their eggs, is in these intermittent streams that dry up during certain times of the year.
00:09:30.000And so they won't support fish populations.
00:09:33.000And so, you know, those were sort of critical areas.
00:09:36.000And then we got big rain storms and thunderstorms in the springtime in Virginia.
00:09:41.000And the mud bottles would form on the road in the ditches and the rivets in the road.
00:09:46.000And those would be loaded with tadpoles and frogs' eggs.
00:09:50.000And they'd just be bubbling cauldron of life when I was a kid.
00:10:05.000They'll never see the explosions of color that I saw when I was a kid when I walked into the garden and there were monarch butterflies and swallowtails and all these different species of butterflies.
00:10:17.000I could go out any day with my butterfly net and catch butterflies.
00:10:25.000You know, you and I talked one time about the bug smears on the windshield.
00:10:29.000Driving in Virginia particularly, driving in the springtime, you had to periodically get out and scrape the bugs off the windshield and off the head of the car.
00:10:40.000You have to drive with your windshield wipers on sometimes.
00:11:09.000Augustine talked about it and said, he talked about the idea that God talks to us most eloquently through creation.
00:11:18.000And that creation is like that every rock is a word, every brook and every leaf is a phrase or a lesson that God has for us.
00:11:29.000There's something that we can learn from just sitting and observing nature, that we can learn about our creator.
00:11:36.000And when we destroy that, we destroy this critical part of our relationship with God and the capacity to imagine, the capacity to understand, to comprehend through observations.
00:11:50.000And Augustine compared it to a tapestry.
00:11:53.000The entire tapestry shows the face of God.
00:11:56.000And that through all of these different vectors, through leaves and flowers and grasses and wandering animals and fisheries, and that, you know, today we're pulling the strings out of that tapestry and it's getting more and more ragged and, and bare and, and dull.
00:12:12.000And, you know, the colors are muted and the stars are not even visible anymore.
00:12:18.000So no wonder we're attracted to the garish colors and fast-moving images of, you know, the internet and entertainment media.
00:12:28.000So just to slightly change the subject, so you're so acutely aware of this loss and then spent so many years basically fighting corporate polluters.
00:12:42.000And I wonder, you know, so often loss and grief, when it's not fully processed, can turn into rage, can turn into blame.
00:12:52.000And, you know, you've been very much a crusader.
00:12:55.000But now I sense that you're undergoing kind of a transformation, you know, where, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you recognize that the crusade against evil isn't enough to solve the problem.
00:13:06.000So maybe you can tell me a little bit about Or your theory, why do these corporate polluters, why do these government agencies, why are they committing so much evil?
00:13:18.000Is it because they're full of evil people?
00:13:21.000I mean, I think they're locked in a system that they can't get out of.
00:13:27.000And, you know, human beings have the capacity to blind themselves to the consequences of their actions if those, if seeing, if recognizing the consequences will affect their salaries.
00:13:39.000You know, I think it was H.L. Mencken or maybe Upton Sinclair, you know, pointed out something to that effect that, you know, you can't convince a man of a fact.
00:13:48.000If the existence of that fact It is going to affect his salary.
00:13:53.000And so people have a way of talking them into, you know, creating narratives that justify behaviors that are very, very destructive.
00:14:02.000And then they're all locked in systems that incentivize, you know, these quick returns from destroying things that And nobody really wants to lose.
00:14:12.000And there's an economic rule called tragedy of the commons that says that each one of us, if left to our own devices, and where the only motive is self-interest, that it is always in our self-interest to catch the last fish in the ocean.
00:14:30.000Even if that fish is booming or bursting with eggs and able to perhaps replenish the species, we still won't let them do it.
00:14:42.000We're going to eat that last fish because that's what self-interest says.
00:14:47.000And somehow we have to step away from self-interest and embrace a communal model.
00:14:53.000And it's really, it's like a transformation of the kind that you described at the beginning of this when you said you didn't become an environmentalist out of fear.
00:15:01.000You became an environmentalist out of love.
00:15:04.000It's interesting because I read Carl Jung's biography about a year ago, and he was the son of a preacher.
00:15:12.000Who was very brilliant and who was very accomplished.
00:15:16.000But his father had this very, you know, sort of angry God and he had the conventional, he had the rhetoric down for conventional religion that was fear-driven, that was anger-driven, that was kind of a...
00:15:32.000This angry paternal model of God who is a punishing God and lecturing people in his Sunday sermons about the fire and brimstone version of hell.
00:15:45.000And that's why people should behave, because otherwise they were going to endure this nightmare for all of eternity.
00:15:51.000But Jung himself had these very authentic spiritual experiences from when he was a very young boy, like maybe three or four years old.
00:16:00.000He began having these very vivid dreams and these experiences of synchronicity that he interpreted as God kind of intervening through the laws that he had set up, the natural laws to set up, that he was intervening and breaking those laws in order to kind of notify that he was intervening and breaking those laws in order to We're all of eternity.
00:16:18.000Us as individuals that, you know, I'm here and there's something higher than all these natural laws that I've set up.
00:16:26.000And Jung had this very beautiful kind of love affair with God from when he was a little kid, which is an authentic spiritual experience.
00:16:34.000And his father died a very miserable...
00:16:37.000Father in the end lost all of his faith and died this very kind of miserable death.
00:17:00.000It's the same kind of, it's a metaphor for, you know, are we going to be, for the way that you think about the environment, was Is that the only way we're really going to save this is if everybody falls in love with it again?
00:17:13.000You know, fearing some distant graph is going to show them that doom is going to come in 10 years, which nobody actually believes, you know?
00:17:23.000Yeah, they've been predicting that for 30 years, that doom is going to come in 10 years.
00:17:57.000And for me, this idea that someday we're going to die, too, if we don't change our ways is actually kind of dangerous.
00:18:06.000Because it's suggesting that the reason we should change our ways is primarily what will happen to us.
00:18:13.000And so it plays into the basic paradigm of the instrumentalization of nature that uses it and exploits it for self-interest.
00:18:23.000And requires that we deny what's actually human nature, which is to love and respect and honor and hold sacred the beings around us.
00:18:31.000And that's why I've been advocating for, you know, a change of strategy and rhetoric in the environmental movement to really tap back into that fundamental biophilic impulse.
00:18:44.000From the beginning of my career, I kind of instinctively followed that course because I remember I remember there was a time when, you know, I had worked simultaneously for NRDC and for the fishermen at Riverkeeper.
00:18:57.000You know, I was dealing with people who had real lives rooted in, you know, wearing waders up to their hips in mud and water, removing fish from nets, and that the joy of You know,
00:19:14.000an 11-foot sturgeon with 200 pounds of caviar in it, which we have in the Hudson, or a full net of shad, or just of catching eel on the weekend and catching goldfish for collectors and exploring all these hundreds of species of fish that we have in the Hudson.
00:19:34.000There's a fish that paves the tiles the bottom Of the Hudson called hog chokers that looks like a hairy flounder.
00:19:42.000And then we get all these tropical fish that come up, you know, from on the Gulf Stream that they still think they're in Belize, you know, until the winter hits.
00:19:52.000We get, you know, really the, you know, extraordinary tropical fish.
00:19:55.000And they were so in love with the river.
00:19:57.000And that's what motivated them to basically devote their lives to saving it.
00:20:03.000And I was basically captured by that dynamic And spent my career, you know, working with people who were protecting places that were sacred and habitats that were sacred and their livelihoods and communities.
00:20:18.000And at a time when the environmental movement was increasingly getting caught in climate, which, you know, I believe that the climate is changing.
00:20:27.000I believe it's carbon-induced changes and methane and other molecules that are trapping heat.
00:20:35.000By the way, I'm not believing necessarily all the climate modelers and everything, but I read the documents that Exxon's scientists produced back in the 70s.
00:20:49.000Exxon hired scientists who were the best carbon.
00:20:52.000They knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule in the environment, and they prided themselves on that than any scientist on Earth.
00:20:59.000And they wrote memos to the executive board of Exxon saying, if we continue to burn carbon, we are going to eat the globe.
00:21:07.000And by the way, it's going to be a good thing for Exxon because it will melt the polar ice cap and there's a lot of oil in there that we can't get at now and we should be ready to get at it after we've melted the globe.
00:21:19.000Well, they wrote letters saying that to their chief executive officer of Exxon.
00:21:24.000So it wasn't just a bunch of hippie scientists or paid government scientists.
00:21:33.000I know there's large amounts of people.
00:21:35.000Scientists who, you know, are terrified of climate change, but I was seeing the impacts of carbon on my, you know, that the fish were now filled with mercury, and the mercury, every freshwater fish in America has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh, mainly coming from coal-burning power plants.
00:21:57.000The high peaks of the Appalachians, the waterways on those are basically all sterilized from acid rain.
00:22:05.000We are acidifying the ocean, which to me is more frightening than climate change.
00:22:10.000You acidify the ocean and the whole fabric of life, you know, all of those little zooplankton require, they need to mobilize calcium out of the water column and they can't do that in order to make their shells, in order to do it.
00:22:25.000You know, I mean, I've researched this topic front, back, left and right, you know, in writing my book.
00:22:31.000And what I came to is that the things that we need to do most, we have to do whether or not the standard global warming narrative is right.
00:22:40.000And you just named an example of that.
00:22:42.000The coal, the mercury, the particulates, the mining that destroys ecosystems.
00:22:48.000What I also came to is that the most important thing to do right now is to preserve any intact ecosystem from development, from mining, from drilling, and also to restore and regenerate, especially agricultural land.
00:23:02.000And if we do that, it's actually not even that hard to completely solve the climate crisis if you agree that it is caused by carbon emissions.
00:23:15.000And if you don't agree about that, it's still a good idea because it restores aquifers, it restores biodiversity, it restores soil productivity down the line.
00:23:53.000Something I've been kind of curious about, you know, both of us were, I would say, COVID dissidents who resisted and publicly criticized various aspects of the COVID narrative.
00:24:03.000You know, there came, like people sometimes ask me, you know, Charles, how did you stay sane?
00:24:08.000You know, how did you stay upbeat when all that was going on and when you were being denounced, you know, and deplatformed and stuff?
00:24:15.000And I'm like, how do you know that I stayed upbeat?
00:24:18.000I've actually went through some periods of darkness, you know, and even like a really deep kind of doubt where I had moments of, you know, maybe the world isn't crazy.
00:24:35.000Maybe this isn't Maybe I've been wrong my entire life about everything I've written on.
00:24:40.000And I spent actually months, in some cases, not writing anything and really getting back in touch with what I knew directly.
00:24:49.000As opposed to, like you were saying before, people believe whatever story is convenient for them to believe, not only for their financial gain, but also to maintain the integrity of their worldview and their self-image.
00:25:00.000So I'm curious, I'd like to kind of ask you the question, like, how do you stay so positive and upbeat and energetic?
00:25:24.000You know, I would say a couple of things.
00:25:27.000One is I have a real kind of spiritual discipline, which is I really rely on 12-step meetings, and I was going to nine a week during the I've been doing that for 40 years.
00:25:40.000And, you know, because that's where I get kind of spiritual renewal and confirmation and validation, and also the opportunities for service that you get through that, which is really what keeps people sane.
00:25:52.000You know, if you're feeling depressed or if you're feeling disconsolate or uncertain or anxious, the one thing that will transform that immediately like magic is if you try to help somebody else.
00:26:04.000And you get a lot of those opportunities in 12-step programs.
00:26:07.000I do meditation every day, so that centers me spiritually.
00:26:12.000It's like, you know, I did a lot of whitewater kayaking.
00:26:17.000And a lot of first descents on big rivers all over the world.
00:26:22.000And when you're scouting a rapid, you climb a bluff above the rapid and you look at it for a long time and make a plan.
00:26:30.000You make a line, how you're going to get through it and the moves you're going to have to make.
00:26:35.000And then you try to stay on that line.
00:26:37.000And if you can do that, you're going to be okay.
00:26:40.000And a lot of times you'll wash out and then you're at the mercy of the river.
00:26:43.000And that's what, to me, meditations are like.
00:26:46.000It's like sitting still and planning your day and say, how am I going to stay spiritually centered during this day?
00:26:53.000And these difficulties, asking for help, you know, and then trying to say, okay, when I speak to this child, I'm not going to get angry.
00:27:00.000I'm A business partner or whatever, I'm going to do it in a way that's calm and not give in to anger or fear or whatever.
00:27:15.000And so, you know, that helps me a lot.
00:27:17.000And of course, a lot of times you can't stick with your plan.
00:27:21.000You end up washing out and then you're, you know, but you get another chance the next day.
00:27:26.000The gift of time, but he cut it into these manageable units called days.
00:27:30.000And every day you can start over and try to do better.
00:27:35.000And then my family is really important to me.
00:27:38.000My family had a much harder time During the pandemic, because of me, because of my, you know, resistance and skepticism, you know, ended up, in some cases, hurting them, you know, in their lives.
00:27:53.000And that, to me, was the most difficult part of it.
00:27:55.000But otherwise, I just, you know, I tried to just stay spiritually centered.
00:28:00.000And as long as I do that, I feel like I can bear anything.
00:28:05.000Have you been able to maintain a meditation practice during the rigors and the daily intensity of the campaign?
00:30:34.000A year or two ago, I wrote an essay called The America That Almost Was and Yet May Be.
00:30:40.000And it was about the JFK assassination and actually your father's assassination as well.
00:30:45.000And I basically said, well, for one thing, that a certain...
00:30:51.000I can't remember actually exactly what I said, but the idea is that there was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving toward greater and greater virtue.
00:31:03.000And by the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was underway, and we had in JFK an anti-imperialist president who was picking up where Roosevelt and some of his more radical cabinet had left off, who wanted to dismantle the British Empire and not Take over its helm.
00:31:23.000JFK wanted to support independence movements around the world.
00:31:26.000He was an anti-imperialist and wanted peace with the Soviet Union and to scale down the military industrial complex.
00:31:34.000And imagine all of that wealth that hadn't been devoted toward war, Johnson's war on poverty could have succeeded.
00:31:41.000We would be living in a completely different, if we hadn't been trying to assert dominance over the world by violence for 60 years.
00:31:49.000And had turned all of that resource toward the healing and flourishing of America.
00:32:19.000And it's so significant that Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that.
00:32:25.000It's one of the synchronicities that speak to or speak from a larger organizing intelligence in the world.
00:32:35.000Yeah, the way that I look at that history is you had Eisenhower give that famous speech, which was the most, probably looking back at it now, it may be the most important speech in American history.
00:32:45.000There's probably five in that category that I would, you know, point to.
00:32:50.000Winthrop's speech on the slip of the Arbella in 1608, in which he said, you know, the City on the Hill speech, and then the Gettysburg address.
00:32:59.000You know, Roosevelt's speech in 1932 about the only thing we have to fear, fear itself.
00:33:04.000But probably Eisenhower's speech is the most important because he warned America against the emergence of a military-industrial complex.
00:33:11.000And he was, you know, the leading general in World War II, the commander of all the Allied forces.
00:33:16.000And for him to say the biggest threat to democracy is the rise of the military-industrial complex...
00:33:22.000You know, he was the perfect person to say that message.
00:33:37.000He could have done it when he was, but, you know, he wanted to.
00:33:41.000And that's one of the reasons he started relying on the CIA so much, is because he did not want to go to war with the Soviets, and he believed that.
00:33:50.000You know, empowering Alan Dulles that Dulles could somehow keep him out of war and then giving Dulles the capacity to make these little wars all over the world and kill people and fix elections.
00:34:02.000You could do it without, you know, confronting nuclear war.
00:34:06.000But, you know, so then my uncle comes into office and has a three-year hand-to-hand combat with his military brass and his intelligence apparatus to keep us out of war, which he successfully does.
00:34:32.000He sent 16,000 military advisors and said it's their fight.
00:34:36.000And if they can't win it, it's not our fight.
00:34:39.000But immediately after he died, Johnson revoked that order and then sent, you know, after the Duncan Gulf incident a year later, sent the $250,000, ultimately $500,000 over.
00:34:52.000And $56,000 would never return, including my cousin George Skakel, who died during the Tet Offensive.
00:34:58.000And many, many other people that I knew at that time, and I'm sure that you knew too.
00:35:03.000So we had that trauma, and that added, you know, that was another trauma that pushed us down the road to the military-industrial complex.
00:35:11.000And then, you know, the last big trauma was 9-11, which kind of sealed the deal and turned America into a surveillance state at home, you know, an imperial state abroad, a Of constant, unending, forever wars.
00:35:27.000I had a conversation, actually, this morning, a long conversation with Joel Pollack, who is the editor-in-chief and kind of, you know, a co-founder with Andrew Breitbart's.
00:35:39.000Why would I be talking to a guy from one of the big conservative newspapers?
00:35:49.000He was saying that you just said that we need to go back to that time and that fork in the road when John Kennedy was killed.
00:35:58.000And he said to me that Trump kept saying, make America great again.
00:36:03.000And a lot of people thought, oh, he means go back to the 1950s and Jim Crow laws and all that.
00:36:08.000But most people, when they say, make America great again, are really thinking of the time during the Kennedy administration, the time up to then, And that fork in the road that we took, you know, when my uncle died.
00:36:22.000And then my father comes along and he runs against the military industrial complex.
00:36:27.000He's running against the war and then he gets killed.
00:36:29.000So that trauma and then the trauma of Vietnam and 9-11 pushes down the road in that war.
00:36:35.000And what Pollock said to me, and I had this wonderful conversation with him where, you know, we ended up, Figuring out the values that we really shared rather than the issues that keep us apart, the tribal issues, which both of us can retreat to anytime.
00:36:51.000We were really talking about what are the things we have in common, what are the things that we can...
00:36:57.000Build a common bridge for all Americans to cross these kind of tribal divides and become one people again.
00:37:05.000And, you know, that's what he said to me.
00:37:08.000He said, when he thinks of Make America Great, it's going back to that time, to the time we took that fork down this bad road, down the road to Imperium and National Security State.
00:37:21.000And I know a lot of people resonate with that.
00:37:24.000So many people are sick of the vitriol, you know, and the venom that characterizes, like everything's people shouting at each other and trying to incite as much indignation and outrage as possible against the horrible people on the other side.
00:37:42.000And that's another reason why I've been so much attracted to this campaign, you know, to your candidacy.
00:38:17.000I think people are so tired of the division which has even penetrated to their families.
00:38:21.000I mean, are we really that different in our basic values?
00:38:25.000And if not, how have we been maneuvered into spending 99% of our energy fighting each other and almost 0% actually changing the disastrous course of our society?
00:38:38.000It feels almost orchestrated, all of this vitriol towards each other.
00:38:44.000It was part of what they used to call the birthplace.
00:38:48.000You know, they called it that during the Civil War in the South, the elite class, which was called the Bourbons, which were like the Yankees of New England.
00:38:59.000The aristocracy kept the blacks and whites fighting each other and hating each other because it then allowed them.
00:39:07.000them to be manipulated, the ruling class, the elites, to basically strip mine their wealth, their assets, their rights, and while they were in the battle against each other.
00:39:19.000And I feel a lot of times like that's what we're living in that today, that all of this, these, you know, like you say, the orchestrated anger and indignation that is just part of the daily, you know, drill that CNN is telling us that we need to do that and Fox News, drill that CNN is telling us that we need to do that and Fox News, that we need and that the people who are getting the advantage of that are the advertisers and the upper elites.
00:39:46.000Is there any final thing you'd like to say before we...