Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a man who has been fighting for our health by fighting against corporations for over 40 years. Born into a legacy of public service, he faced significant adversity and challenges throughout his life, but yet he has persevered with remarkable resilience. His fight to clean up America s rivers and hold chemical companies accountable for their pollution required not only immense political courage, but also an unielding dedication to the well-being of our communities and natural resources. RFK Jr. has also demonstrated immense courage in questioning political narratives and pushing back against those who pervert science for their own advantage. His staunch defense of the First Amendment and his relentless advocacy for transparency and truth have further solidified his reputation as a fearless champion for America. As President of the Firefighter's Union, he has a vision for his administration, and how that vision benefits members of the fire service. He is a dedicated advocate for firefighters across the country, and a man whose unwavering commitment to the environment, science, and upholding our founding principles enshrined in the first amendment has left a permanent mark on our nation. He is someone who is not afraid to rock the boat, and has been successful against corporate America, and the media and the government have worked very hard to silence him. He has been a champion of the fight against corporate greed and corporate greed. He s someone who has always been willing to fight for firefighters and fight for the fight for our country. . . . . and he s not only for firefighters, but for firefighters and firefighters everywhere. Thank you for being on the front line of our fire service, and for standing up to corporate greed, and fighting for firefighters everywhere! Thank you, Mr. Kennedy, and thank you for joining us on Politics and Tactics! -PJ Norwood, Frank, and Mr. R.J. Rachael, and Dr. Frank, for coming on the show, for being brave enough to share their stories and for being a fighter for firefighters in the fight to protect our firefighters . . Thank you so much for being out there. -BJ, for doing what s good and standing up for our firefighters, and not letting corporate greed get in the way of our firefighters getting their day to day jobs. , and for fighting for us all of our health and our families . and for supporting us to have a safe and fair day to live in a world that s good day to breathe. --
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, we're doing another firefighter podcast today.
00:00:04.000I've got two great guests, Frank Ricci, who is a former union leader from the Firefighters Union from New Haven, and P.J. Norwood, another Connecticut firefighter.
00:00:17.000I'm retired, and this is the biggest firefighter podcast in the country, but we're playing it simultaneously on my own podcast.
00:00:24.000So I want to thank both of our guests.
00:00:27.000They're going to be asking me questions today.
00:00:46.000PJ, can you introduce our distinguished guests?
00:00:50.000We have a guest today that has continuously been fighting for our health by fighting against corporations for over 40 years.
00:00:57.000He is someone who is not afraid to rock the boat.
00:01:00.000He's been so successful against corporate America, the media and the government have worked very hard to silence him, which has not worked out so well.
00:01:13.000These attacks have not stopped him, but yes, has impacted the public opinion of our guest today.
00:01:21.000Today is our high honor to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:01:25.000on our show, a man whose unwavering commitment to the environment, science, and upholding our founding principles enshrined in the First Amendment has left a permanent mark on our nation.
00:01:36.000Born into a legacy of public service, RFK Jr.
00:01:38.000faced significant adversity and challenges throughout his life, but yet he has persevered with remarkable resilience.
00:01:45.000His fight to clean up America's rivers and hold chemical companies accountable for their pollution required not only immense political courage, but also an unyielding dedication to the well-being of our communities and natural resources.
00:02:01.000encourages healthy debate and honest conversation.
00:02:05.000He was involved with one of our friends, Attorney Rob Bulat, who held 3M accountable for the deception of the environmental and health impacts from PFAS. This fight was highlighted in the movie Dark Waters.
00:02:18.000has also demonstrated immense courage in questioning political narratives, pushing back against those who pervert science for their own advantage.
00:02:27.000His staunch defense of the First Amendment and his relentless advocacy for transparency and truth have further solidified his reputation as a fearless champion for America.
00:03:18.000And I've worked across the country on the PFAS issues and, you know, beginning with Rob Bellat's case and then One of my organizations, the Tennessee Riverkeeper,
00:03:35.000brought the case against 3M. 3M has now agreed next year to stop producing PFAS and PFOAs and all these Forever chemicals that it's been selling to us and poisoning firefighters for many years.
00:03:55.000Firefighters now have probably the highest cancer rate of any profession.
00:04:24.000I wasn't sitting around waiting for an opportunity to run for the White House.
00:04:32.000I ran because I saw our country abandoning its values, particularly during COVID when we saw this use for the first time of government-enforced censorship.
00:04:47.000We saw the violation of The First Amendment right to worship when all the churches were closed for a year with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation.
00:05:01.000We saw property rights in the Fifth Amendment abandoned as the government closed down 3.3 million businesses again with no public hearings, no environmental impact statements, no Oh, scientific citations.
00:05:23.000The Seventh Amendment guarantee of jury trials and the Fourth Amendment prohibition against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance.
00:05:36.000And firefighters across the country were at the front line.
00:05:46.000Police Chief John Catanza in Chicago who said, my men and women are not going to get vaccinated.
00:05:57.000And 1,500 of them threatened to walk off the job and they just – the city just backed down and said, OK, cops and firefighters don't have to take the jab.
00:06:09.000So I saw that happening and then I saw so many other things.
00:06:14.000I saw my party, the Democratic Party, that I've been a lifelong member, abandon the middle class, abandon cops, abandon firefighters, abandon labor unions – And become the party of big tech and these kind of global elites.
00:06:31.000I saw the destruction of the middle class in this country, particularly during COVID when we kept Walmart open, we kept Amazon open, we closed down.
00:06:40.000All these 3.3 million businesses, 41% of black-owned businesses will never reopen.
00:06:47.000I saw this explosion of chronic disease that we're seeing now in our country.
00:06:52.000When my uncle was president, 6% of American kids had chronic disease today and 60%.
00:06:58.000When I was a little boy, a typical pediatrician Would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime, in a 40 or 50 year career.
00:07:10.000Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic and nobody's asking why is this happening.
00:07:19.000The autism rates, well you all know kids with autism Our parents, kids with autism, we didn't know that when I was a kid.
00:07:27.000I knew nobody, and I was at the spear tip of the battle to get rights for people with intellectual disabilities.
00:07:35.000My aunt, Eunice Shriver, Founded Special Olympics.
00:07:39.000I worked in Special Olympics from when I was 8 years old.
00:08:01.000We're mass poisoning this generation of kids with autoimmune disease, neurological disease, obesity.
00:08:07.000Kids didn't suddenly get lazy and start liking food.
00:08:12.000This is poisoning that's happening and we are killing them and we're killing our firefighters with, you know, with the turnout gear, with the Aqueous foams with the burning furniture that is loaded with PFOA. So I want to end this toxic assault on the American public and the chronic disease epidemic that's now costing us $4.3 trillion a year, five times our military budget.
00:08:41.000Speaking of the military, I want to wind down our military commitments abroad.
00:08:45.000The forever wars are destroying our country.
00:09:46.000He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam despite the demands of everybody in his administration, the intelligence apparatus.
00:09:56.000The brass at the Pentagon, they said that we needed 250,000 combat troops in Vietnam where the government was going to collapse, and he said it's their government.
00:10:06.000He ended up under pressure sending 16,000 military advisors, mainly Green Berets, and they weren't allowed to participate under the rules of engagement in fighting, but they did anyway.
00:10:20.000And in October of 1963, He learned that Green Beret had been killed and he asked Walt Rostow to give a full casualty list.
00:10:32.000And Walt Rostow brought him a casualty list that showed that 75 Americans had died.
00:10:42.000And that afternoon, October 22nd, 1963, he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all U.S. military personnel home from Vietnam by the end of 65, with the first thousand coming home in November, so the next month.
00:11:03.000The end of November, just before that evacuation happened on November 22nd, one month after he signed that order, he was murdered.
00:11:11.000President Johnson came in, remanded the order, sent 250,000 troops to Vietnam, and it became our war.
00:11:26.000Martin Luther King, who became a primary peace activist in our country, was killed a month before my father.
00:11:34.000And we sent all the, you know, 560,000 Americans over there.
00:11:40.00056,000 never came back, including my cousin, George Skagel, who died in the Tet Offensive.
00:11:47.000But my uncle refused to send troops abroad anytime, combat troops abroad, anytime during his administration.
00:11:56.000But he said he didn't want African kids and Latin American kids when they heard the United States of America to think of a man in a military uniform.
00:12:05.000He said he wanted to think of a Peace Corps volunteer and the Alliance for Progress, USAID, which he started to raise up and run the oligarchs and raise up the military to give aid directly to the poor, to build the middle classes in those countries and the economic stability that would create the foundation for middle class, for stable middle class in those countries.
00:12:30.000As a result of that, there's now more statues to my uncle, more boulevards named after him, more hospitals, schools, universities, parks, neighborhoods in Africa, Latin America, and Asia than any other the US president, probably more than and Asia than any other the US president, probably more than any other All the other presidents combined And that, you know, was the power, the moral authority of our foreign policy when we project economic power abroad and not military power.
00:14:14.000And the two guys who are running for president against me, they can't fix this because they're the ones who ran up the debt.
00:14:21.000President Trump said he's going to balance the budget.
00:14:24.000Instead, he spent more money, eight trillion dollars in four years, more money than every president in the United States history combined, since George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years of history.
00:14:38.000And President Biden is in a race to catch up with him.
00:14:43.000President Biden is now running up another trillion dollars every 90 days.
00:14:58.000So those are, I'd say, you know, I also want to end the division in this country, end the polarization.
00:15:05.000I think my campaign has been all about that, and that's why I attract roughly a third for Republicans, a third Democrats, and a third Independents, because I've refused to engage in the vitriol The hatred, the polarization, the finger pointing.
00:15:24.000You know, I said when I gave my announcement speech, if I'm successful at the end of this campaign, a lot of Americans are going to forget they're Republicans or Democrats and just remember that they're Americans.
00:15:37.000And that's, you know, that's one of my objectives.
00:15:41.000Robby, I applaud you for talking to everybody.
00:15:44.000And here today, you're talking to the American Fire Service.
00:15:47.000You're talking to career firefighters and volunteers.
00:15:50.000So here, you took time from your campaign to speak to the middle class.
00:15:54.000Because firefighters make up that middle class.
00:16:19.000But yet, we find chemicals in our gear that were put in there not to help us, but what I believe was to give chemical companies a To protect their advantage and to reduce competition.
00:16:34.000So PJ, can you ask a question about Forever Chemicals and kind of bring this in focus?
00:16:40.000Because what I really appreciate and admire about Bobby Kennedy is that you give the little guy the voice.
00:16:47.000Like David Whiteside, it's about the fishermen on the side of the river.
00:17:10.000And you know, as you've already mentioned, and we've talked about in your intro, you fought really hard to clean up our rivers, especially with your work with Tennessee River Keepers and David Whiteside, who even sued DuPont for PFAS issues, and they won.
00:17:23.000As firefighters, we know the cancer rate is automatically higher than the average citizen.
00:17:27.000What we did not know is the mere gear, the protective clothing that we wear, is also loaded with those same PFASs contributing to those high cancer rates that you already mentioned.
00:17:39.000Thankfully, through a mutual friend, Diane Cotter, and her quest to make sense of her husband's Paul's cancer diagnosis.
00:17:45.000Today, PFAS is a daily conversation in firehouses across America.
00:17:49.000You have already put a lot of work in on this, but as President of the United States, what would you do to further eliminate PFAS and how will that directly impact our firefighters?
00:18:00.000Yeah, I mean, here, first of all, let me just talk about PFAS for a while.
00:18:04.000We brought, I think it was 2015 or 2016, we brought the case that was, you know, that Mark Ruffalo, Mark Ballad, who is my law partner, Brought the case against – in Cleveland, Ohio or Cincinnati, Ohio on the original PFAS case and Mark Ruffalo made the movie about him, Dark Waters.
00:18:35.000Waterkeeper is the group I co-founded.
00:18:39.000It began on the Hudson River in 1966 with a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized to reclaim the Hudson River from its polluters.
00:18:52.000When I started working there in the early 80s, the Hudson was catching fire.
00:18:56.000It was Turning colors every week, depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown.
00:19:04.000It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City, south of Albany.
00:19:12.000Today, it's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.
00:19:15.000It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean, north of the equator, and the miraculous resurrection of the Hudson River.
00:19:25.000Inspired the creation of river keepers all over our country and the rest of the world.
00:19:31.000We now have 350 water keepers, river keepers, sound keepers, bay keepers, lake keepers.
00:20:44.000It's the basis for the aqueous foams, the firefighters.
00:20:48.000Firefighters get hit in three different ways.
00:20:51.000One, it's in all of our furniture, you know, beginning in the 80s and 80s.
00:20:56.000It's in all of our, it's in foam rubber, it's in our childhood's pajamas, Churchill's pajamas, and when firefighters go into those buildings, they are breathing, you know, when it incinerates, that stuff gets in the air.
00:21:12.000Number two, it's in the acquiescent foams that the firefighters use, particularly at airports, etc., but they practice with those foams, so they're there, and it volatizes out of those foams very easily.
00:21:26.000So they're breathing it and it's getting on their skin and there's dermal penetration and there's all these other kind of factors for getting into your body that's highly, highly carcinogenic.
00:21:38.000The last place and probably the largest factor It is the turnout gear and you mentioned Paul Cotter and Diane Cotter.
00:21:49.000Diane is an incredible activist who went to war when her husband got testicular cancer.
00:21:56.000This is a very active, life-loving man who is engaged in everything and he got these terrible cancers which are now very common with firefighters.
00:22:09.000Cancers most associated with PFAS, testicular cancer, kidney cancers, bladder cancers, prostate cancers, and ultimately brain cancers as well, and firefighters have the highest cancer rate of any profession right now.
00:22:25.000Cancer is the second biggest killer of firefighters after cardiac arrest, and it's approaching Cardiac arrest.
00:22:37.000And it's, you know, we believe and the science shows that, you know, firefighters of other vectors who can't because they're breathing smoke all the time.
00:22:48.000There's all kinds of carcinogens and incinerated material.
00:22:53.000And you're looking at these particular kind of cancers.
00:22:57.000Testicular cancer and a lot of times firefighters will notice that there's a deterioration in their crotch area of the turnout gear that these little holes form and that's that those PFAS volatizing deteriorating and they're going into your skin.
00:23:15.000So with that turnout gear that's supposed to protect your life, it's actually killing you.
00:23:20.000And Diane has been this extraordinary activist exposing this to the American public.
00:23:29.000And 3M, because of the litigation, 3M has pledged that they're getting out of the business.
00:23:37.000But if you look at, you know, they've known for a long time that this person, they've hit it.
00:23:45.000And they go, you know, they seduce the firefighters because they go, they finance the firefighters' conventions.
00:23:52.000These companies put up their, you know, their booths and they proclaim the fact that they're paying.
00:23:59.000There's advertisements in all the firefighters' magazines saying, we got your back.
00:24:04.000Well, you know, we got your back pocket because we're taking your money, but we don't have your back.
00:24:10.000We're killing It's really great about exposing that to the American public.
00:24:19.000What I'm going to do as president, I recognize the power that these industries Have over Congress, over the – they own the regulatory agencies.
00:24:31.000All of these agencies have been captured by the industries they're supposed to regulate.
00:24:35.000There's been this corrupt merger of state and corporate power.
00:26:16.000It's very difficult to do it through legislation because, you know, when I brought the Monsanto cases, we had 40,000 clients Who were home gardeners, mainly, who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup, which the active ingredient of Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate.
00:26:39.000And everybody said, even if you can prove that glyphosate causes these cancers, you can never get rid of it, because 95% of the herbicides in the world are that one Roundup, and they own the Corn industry, they own Cargill, they own Monsanto, these are the biggest corporations in the world and they own the agricultural committees and it's impossible to challenge them, they own the regulatory agencies.
00:27:08.000We had 40,000 people who got home gardeners who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup.
00:27:15.000We brought multi-district litigation against them.
00:27:19.000We had enough science by that time, about 15 or 20 studies that all said they were animal studies, epidemiological studies.
00:27:27.000Clinical study, observational studies, bench trial studies, all of these different mishmash of studies that all said the same thing, that this causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
00:27:41.000Once you get that critical mass of studies, you can surpass the threshold That's called the Daubert threshold in federal courts where a federal judge, before he lets you go to a jury with a case in which you're saying a chemical exposure caused such and such an effect,
00:28:02.000he has to make an independent determination that sufficient science, a sufficient threshold of science, a critical mass of a whole different blend of studies is out there that supports this.
00:28:16.000So that's called the Daubert threshold, and we just surpassed that with Monsanto.
00:28:21.000Once we did that, we were able to go to court.
00:28:23.000The way that multidistrict litigation works is you get a whole bunch of cases, and then you try them one at a time until somebody says uncle.
00:28:33.000The first case we tried in San Francisco, we won $289 million.
00:28:38.000The second A school superintendent, African-American, who had been forced, against his will, to spray Roundup with a leaky backpack.
00:28:51.000He got nine Hodgkin's lymphoma all over his body.
00:28:54.000The second case we tried in Oakland, we won $89 million.
00:28:59.000The third case was a couple of home gardeners that had been spraying together for years.
00:29:05.000First, their laboratory retriever, who was with them every day in the garden, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
00:29:11.000And the two of them got it at the exact same time.
00:29:15.000And we asked the jury in that case for a billion dollars.
00:30:11.000All these neurological disorders that appeared around 1989, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy, all of these things that we never heard of when I was a kid.
00:31:04.000Thank God and bless Paul and Diane for bringing this forward because...
00:31:10.000At the time, and I applaud the unions for what they're doing now, but at the time, she had to face some of that tough adversity that you faced in your life, but without the family legacy, without the law on her side and just pushing and persistence and just trying to bring this issue to the forefront, and everybody questioned her, but her persistence.
00:31:31.000We brought it through, so we really thank Diane for bringing this up, and we thank you for always questioning science, because that's what science is, looking at the data.
00:31:40.000We looked at Detroit, LA, New York City, New Haven, and we're like, well, why aren't the cancer rates higher in these cities?
00:31:48.000Where firefighters are exposed more often to the products of combustion.
00:31:52.000And we know because of those flame retardants that we're breathing in a chemical cocktail of hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide, acrylin, all of these nasty reactors.
00:32:02.000But yet our cancer rates are across the board from paid and career firefighters.
00:32:08.000And it was Diane who really made us look and said, well, what's the commonality between all these firefighters that have these PFAS and these forever chemicals We're good to go.
00:32:33.000President Kennedy went to Choate Rosemary Hall in our town.
00:32:36.000So that's a source of pride in Wallingford, Connecticut.
00:32:40.000But he was also part of the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and himself.
00:32:46.000And I think the debates are so important to the fabric of America.
00:32:50.000And we've seen this institutional debate.
00:32:55.000We kind of witnessed this institutional norm diminished a little bit when we found out through emails that Donna Brazile was caught giving Hillary the questions.
00:33:04.000We're hoping that these debates are engineering to keep you out of the debates to further diminish this critical part of fair elections.
00:33:14.000Can you tell firefighters in America what's the status of getting you in the debates?
00:33:18.000Because I think your voice needs to be heard because I think you're willing to talk to anybody.
00:33:24.000Yeah, I mean I'm willing to talk to anybody.
00:33:28.000But they ought to let me on the debate.
00:33:32.000I meet the metrics that they've talked about.
00:33:36.000I'm at 15 percent in the polls that they want me to be in.
00:33:42.000We gave them five from a specific list of polling firms.
00:33:49.000And I'll be on the ballot, and by June 20th, I'll have enough signatures to get on the ballot and enough states to earn 340 electoral votes, and they only want 270.
00:34:04.000And incidentally, President Biden, President Trump won't be on any state at that point because they have an expectation that they're going to get the Democratic and Republican nomination.
00:34:16.000But they themselves are not on the ballot anywhere, and I am.
00:34:19.000So I actually qualify more than they do, and we have filed a complaint with the FEC, which if it was an honest agency and not a captured agency, they would order me on the debate stage.
00:34:34.000But, you know, neither of these gentlemen, neither President Biden or President Trump wants to debate me.
00:34:42.000I don't think either of them can talk about the really big issues that are facing the existential issues that are facing this nation.
00:34:56.000You know, LGBT rights, and they'll talk about abortion, and they'll talk about guns.
00:35:01.000They'll talk about the border, which is a really critical issue, and they do differ on that.
00:35:06.000I think we should need to shut down the border right away.
00:35:10.000But the really big issues, the big issues that are going to destroy our country, the debt, the $34 trillion debt That is, you know, growing exponentially.
00:35:25.000The chronic disease epidemic, the addiction to war, the polarization, the emergence of AI, okay?
00:35:36.000And, you know, neither of them is going to talk about that AI. Anybody who looks at what's happening with AI right now should be terrified.
00:35:46.000AI has this tremendous potential to help our country, to help humanity, but it also has the potential to enslave us.
00:35:54.000And, you know, Elon Musk famously said, AI first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.
00:36:05.000It's going to give our intelligence agencies, intelligence agencies all across the world, the capacity to manipulate human behavior in ways that nobody even understands, to change our perceptions of reality in dramatic, dramatic ways.
00:36:25.000We need to regulate it in a very thoughtful way because we want to make sure that the industry, the innovators, the entrepreneurs stay here in the United States because there's tremendous growth potential.
00:37:14.000AI is either going to be used by the public to hold government responsible, or it's going to be used by the government to subdue and enslave the public.
00:37:27.000And we need to make sure that it's used in the way that actually benefits humanity and democracy.
00:37:35.000And I don't think President Biden or President Trump has ever even considered anything about it, and it's going to happen in the next three years.
00:37:45.000We need to make sure that we have somebody in office who can deal with this with a level of sophistication and concern and sensitivity that I don't think either of them is capable of.
00:37:56.000Speaking of the dangers to the Republic, as a battalion chief retired in New Haven, I oversaw special operations and I had the distinct honor of being on the protection detail for former President Carter when he came to give a speech at Yale.
00:38:12.000Where are we at with Secret Service protection for you?
00:38:15.000If we can't protect our candidates in America, how can we expect America to be that shining city on the hill?
00:38:28.000I'm sure your father would be very proud of your accomplishments today.
00:38:31.000But here you're running for president to give a voice to the middle class, and yet As far as I know, you still haven't been given Secret Service protection.
00:38:51.000You know, the Secret Service protection was only given to nominees of the parties after their conventions prior to 1968.
00:38:59.000And my father, of course, was assassinated that year.
00:39:02.000And that year, Immediately after his shooting, all of the presidential candidates, Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon were immediately given protection.
00:39:17.000And that's been – Congress then passed a rule that all candidates 120 days out are – who meet certain metrics – Our polling metrics are entitled to Secret Service protection, but prior to 120 days, the president has discretion to give it to people who, you know, who need it.
00:39:41.000So I've been, you know, the Secret Service actually was very good when they dealt with us and we gave them a 68-page threat assessment that showed numerous death threats to me and then also, you know, since I announced There have been several attacks on my home.
00:40:01.000There's been three people who have made it into my yard or one of them, a mentally ill person, who made it to the second floor of my home.
00:40:12.000I'm worried about bystanders and every presidential assassination attempt, there's been virtually every one of them, there's been bystanders injured.
00:40:22.000You know, there were six people shot with my father, including one of his best friends, Paul Schrade, who took a bullet to his head.
00:40:30.000When my uncle was shot, there were numerous other people, including Governor John Conley, who was also shot at that time.
00:40:38.000And I've made this clear to the Biden White House.
00:40:42.000President Biden has a bust of my father behind him at the Oval Office.
00:40:46.000I'm sure he knows what happened to my father.
00:40:52.000I show up a couple of months ago at one of my speeches in Los Angeles who was carrying concealed weapons that were fully loaded, pistols, two-shoulder holsters, numerous knives, other weapons.
00:41:09.000A dozen ammunition clips, a laser-guided pistol in a backpack, or laser-sighted pistol, and he had fake ID from the U.S. Marshal badge, and he had fake federal ID on his belt, photo ID, and he asked to see me in my green room.
00:41:33.000And luckily one of the private security firm, Gavin DeBecker Associates that I've hired at great cost, noticed that his US Marshal badge was shinier than it ought to be.
00:41:48.000And they questioned the guy and they found all these weapons on him and he had no good explanation about whether He wanted to see me.
00:41:57.000He had opened an Instagram account that morning, or a TikTok account, and he made one post, and the post was a goodbye post to his friend saying, I'm going on a mission now.
00:42:30.000Even before that happened, the Secret Service looked at the number of death threats that I get on a daily basis and said that I was at an elevated risk.
00:42:43.000And yet the White House has refused to give me protection.
00:42:47.000The White House blames Senator Schumer, who's on this.
00:42:51.000There's a committee of three in the Senate, and they say that Senator Schumer is the one who is, and the other two people on this committee are the ones who are recommending that I don't get protection.
00:43:30.000You know, Barack Obama got it over a year early.
00:43:34.000My uncle, Ted Kennedy, got it before he even declared, 550 days out.
00:43:41.000Jesse Jackson, look at all these candidates.
00:43:46.000And many of them had polling numbers, a tiny fraction of mine, and they were given it We've made six requests to the White House with extensive documentation including the Secret Service own assessment that says I'm at elevated risk and they've made a decision not to give it to me.
00:44:14.000I think you have to assume that's a political decision.
00:44:18.000I don't think it's good for our country.
00:44:24.000But I just think it's bad for our country that we're now weaponizing the federal agencies and the enforcement agencies.
00:44:32.000And I think this is a worry from both sides.
00:44:35.000You know, when President Trump was running, he said, He was going to lock up Hillary Clinton, and now the Biden White House is trying to lock him up.
00:44:46.000And it's not good when anybody does it.
00:44:48.000We need to stop weaponizing our federal enforcement agencies and understand that we need to be fostering public support and public trust in these institutions and not subverting and eroding it.
00:45:05.000Your safety is an American issue and your family's safety is an American issue and that should transcend politics.
00:45:12.000So, you know, we need any political leader, President Trump, President Biden, you know, they should be advocating along with the senators and representatives to get your family the protection that you deserve.
00:45:25.000Another thing that should transcend politics that has a huge impact on firefighters, but beyond firefighters, teachers, nurses, doctors, is that the fact that the pandemic's over, but so are individuals' careers.
00:45:39.000And they're individuals that are from the middle class.
00:45:42.000And we found that individuals that have important voices like your own have been shut down.
00:45:49.000And we see, you know, individuals in New York City where you had Battalion Chief Tom LaPolla, one of the only Battalion Chiefs that had the courage to speak out for the rank and file, forced off the job.
00:46:01.000You had firefighters like Andy Pittman with four kids with six years on the job in Seattle, Washington, forced out of the job.
00:46:08.000And this is not a, you know, you talked about lowering the temperature and about getting away from divisive politics.
00:46:53.000Matt Conner from New York City this morning and he met you when you were out talking to teachers who lost their job and firefighters in New York City.
00:47:02.000We know that this issue for you isn't about political expedience, but you're actually giving a voice to people who need to have a voice and this needs to be an issue.
00:47:13.000Can you weigh in on why the political class in this country has gotten so caught up in the right and the left instead of just saying, wait, you can get hired in all these fire departments without a vaccination now?
00:47:25.000We know that the public policy was based off a faulty premise that if you got the shot, you couldn't spread it.
00:47:33.000So now that we know you can get the shot, and I was vaccinated, and I gave it to my lovely wife, Christine, even after getting the three shots, So we know now that, wait, this isn't narrowly tailored.
00:47:44.000It's not a compelling government interest.
00:47:47.000What's your message to the firefighters, the cops, and the teachers and the hospital workers who feel like the pandemic's over and they're for God?
00:47:57.000Yeah, and let me add something to your question, which is this.
00:48:04.000Right now, CDC is recommending a ninth booster.
00:48:08.000So that's where we are, ninth booster.
00:48:11.000There's fewer than 10% of Americans are going to do that, a lot fewer.
00:48:17.000That means that over 90% of Americans have completely lost faith in CDC. CDC was recommending the first vaccine, you know, way back when.
00:48:29.000In 2020, and we were all told, you know, you can't go to your work.
00:48:33.000You're gonna get fired if you don't take it.
00:48:40.000They're now privileges contingent on you obeying, on you submitting to an unwanted medical intervention and participating in a mass experiment that they were lying about constantly.
00:48:51.000I knew back in 2020, The vaccines weren't going to prevent transmission.
00:48:57.000Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, which is what I was called, but because I was actually looking at the monkey studies.
00:49:04.000And in the monkey studies, you know, they gave half the monkeys vaccine and half were not, and then they exposed them to COVID. And at the same time, the monkeys had the same level of concentrations of COVID virus in their nasal pharynxes.
00:49:22.000Well, they knew that they didn't prevent illness and they didn't prevent transmission.
00:49:26.000And yet for a year, they were telling us, yeah, if you get the vaccine, your grandma will be protected.
00:49:40.000What if CDC said today, you know, we want you to take your ninth.
00:49:46.000If you don't take it, you can't go to work.
00:49:50.000Well, that's, you know, that is the way that we need to think about this.
00:49:56.000So we represented Bravest for Choice in New York.
00:50:01.000I represented Firefighters for Freedom in LA, and we won that suit.
00:50:05.000We won the big suit for the teachers where the firefighters were also included in New York that illegalized the mandates and said you can't do that.
00:50:16.000And we're still representing firefighters all over the country who were fired.
00:50:25.000And, you know, the big case are now in front of the Second Circuit in New York.
00:50:31.000Sujata Gibson is our attorney in those cases.
00:50:34.000And we financed a lot of those cases for the individual firefighters.
00:51:10.000And they said, well, we're going to fire you unless you did it.
00:51:13.000He then went and got it, and he was permanently and catastrophically disabled.
00:51:20.000And that, unfortunately, has been the story for many, many, many people.
00:51:25.000And, you know, the levels of, unfortunately, we're still seeing in the media censorship of The injuries, you're not allowed to talk about vaccine injuries on the media.
00:51:36.000The media now no longer sees itself as a vessel for speaking truth to power, a vital democratic institution that should maintain a posture of fear skepticism toward Official proclamations of government authority, that is the function of the press in a democracy.
00:52:01.000But unfortunately, during COVID, they all saw their role as manipulating the public into compliance, repeating again and again government propaganda, frightening the public.
00:52:15.000And thank you for pushing for cogent debate.
00:52:19.000And, you know, I wrote an article for the Daily Caller for the Yankee Institute, and I found a quote from Benjamin Franklin that I think says it all.
00:52:28.000And he said, in apologies for a printer, he said, And when truth and error have fair play, the former is always overmatched for the later.
00:52:46.000It's so important for our republic to be able to have cogent debate.
00:52:51.000We wouldn't have had the learning loss that we had with our kids losing education over the pandemic.
00:52:57.000The fact that they silenced or throttled down your social media accounts so that we couldn't talk about what Robert Kennedy was talking about.
00:53:06.000This is Trump says a lot of things, but this was actually done by the Biden administration where they used proxies to silence dissenting views.
00:53:19.000And that's one of the things that your uncle, whether it was the lion in the Senate, whether it was your uncle that was president, has always fought for was to protect the First Amendment.
00:53:29.000We need to be able to have these conversations, these courageous conversations.
00:53:34.000And we need to be able to ask simple questions.
00:53:37.000And that's one of the reasons like even you coming on this show today means so much to the fire service, because we normally don't get access to a presidential candidate who takes his time to come in and finds value in talking to volunteer and career firefighters and middle class America.
00:53:53.000Often it's all caught up in the talking points.
00:53:58.000And I think how you even been treated in the press, you talk about, you know, the press talking truth to power.
00:54:04.000I've seen so many interviews where the the person Bill Maher, OK, who I watch it.
00:54:10.000I'm a conservative, but I watch Bill Maher.
00:54:12.000Instead of just asking you a question, he put out a faulty premise first, and so here you had to defend your position.
00:54:20.000I just think it's unfair what we're doing in our republic.
00:54:23.000We need more honest conversations in our politics.
00:54:27.000So if you'd like to weigh in on the First Amendment, I really appreciate it because I think you're a valuable voice in America.
00:54:34.000Yeah, I mean Hamilton, Madison, Adams said that they put freedom of speech in the First Amendment because all of the other rights depend on it.
00:54:43.000If a government has the capacity to silence its critics, it has license for any atrocity.
00:54:49.000And, you know, listen, we all read, at least I did growing up, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Robert Heinlein and And Kessler and all of these other authors who talked about – we were taught in civics class and literature class.
00:55:09.000They all talked about a future kind of dystopian totalitarianism.
00:55:14.000And we thought, yeah, that might happen sometimes, but so far in the future, you know, it's fun to think about it, but it's never going to happen to us.
00:55:25.000And, you know, what they were saying is that the first step toward totalitarianism always begins with the censorship of speech.
00:55:34.000American democracy is rooted in this assumption of the free flow of information and that, you know, democracies are less efficient than totalitarian systems where you can just have one guy making all the decisions with no Congress, no regulatory agency, just, you know, just top-down, you know, and it's much more efficient.
00:55:59.000It goes, you know, inches and fits and starts two steps forward, one step back, etc.
00:56:04.000But the big advantage it has is that the free flow of information annealed in the furnace of debate yields these policies that have triumphed in a marketplace of ideas.
00:56:18.000And that's what all of the founders talked about.
00:56:37.000They're always the people who are trying to manipulate the public to try to increase their power, increase their wealth.
00:56:45.000And, you know, that's what we saw during COVID. We saw systematic censorship and it was taking place in the Trump administration and it was taking place in the Biden administration and all of it ultimately was designed To shift wealth and power upward.
00:57:00.000The Trump lockdowns which were continued during the Biden administration lasted 500 days and created a billionaire a day for 500 days and shifted 4.3 trillion dollars Upward from the American middle class to just strip-mined the American middle class and created this new oligarchy of billionaires and the people who profited were Bill Gates and Jeffrey Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and all
00:57:31.000of these tech overlords, the robber barons.
00:57:35.000Who, you know, now are locked in our homes.
00:57:38.000They were giving surfers right up the road here $1,000 tickets because they were surfing out on the ocean.
00:57:46.000And they closed the playground so kids couldn't get sunlight.
00:57:53.000They poured sand on the skate parks, the half pipes down in Venice, which is a few blocks from here, to make sure that nobody could go skateboarding.
00:58:03.000So they knew at that point that COVID was not spreading outside.
00:58:09.000It only spread indoors, and yet they were locking us all indoors.
00:58:13.000They were getting us out of the vitamin D, promoting sunlight, the fresh air, all the stuff that would have kept us...
00:58:42.000You know, I think a lot of Americans are now coming out of that and saying we're never going to do that again.
00:58:48.000It's not going to happen the next time.
00:58:50.000So I'm hoping that that was the result.
00:58:53.000Because once they take away it right, even when they give it back, it's never as strong as it was before they took it away in the first place.
00:59:04.000I worry about We're living in this era now, these emerging control technologies, facial recognition systems.
00:59:13.000We have 415,000 low-altitude satellites that have now been given permits that are going to look at every square inch of the earth every hour of the day, know exactly where you are.
00:59:27.000We have technology that can look through walls so you can't hide in your house.
00:59:32.000We have, you know, Alexis is in your house, right?
00:59:40.000They're working for Bill Gates and they're working for the NSA and they're getting all of your information every time you sneeze.
00:59:49.000That's recorded somewhere and somebody then is monetizing that to sell you a drug.
00:59:54.000When you say, I didn't sleep last night, you get mattress ads.
00:59:59.000All of that stuff, you know, they're harvesting the data.
01:00:02.000They are mining your data, stealing it from you, not paying you for it.
01:00:07.000They're monetizing it in these big Data centers that Gates and the other ones are building all over the desert southwest, and then they sell it to the NSA. And so that gives them not only, you know, a new flows of income, but it also gives them this capacity to To control us and to monitor us.
01:01:11.000They know it, and it gives them all these opportunities to control human behavior in nefarious ways.
01:01:20.000Bobby, I want to be respectful of your time because you've been so generous today.
01:01:25.000I want to just give you an opportunity to just clear something up because you did make a comment about immigration.
01:01:30.000And I don't want somebody to just pull the clip and kind of paint it in a different light.
01:01:37.000I think we agree that we need controlled immigration because we need a quality safety net in America.
01:01:44.000And if we just open the gates and we have so many people coming in.
01:01:49.000I mean, I work in a socioeconomically deprived city and there's so many wonderful people that have either fallen on high time, hard times, substance abuse or mental illness that we need to have that quality safety net.
01:02:03.000Do you want to just expand on your answer?
01:02:20.000I intend to widen the gates so that legal immigration is easier so that all the – there's 10 million businesses that are looking for workers from abroad with certain skills.
01:02:35.000We need to be able to give them that flow so that we can build our economy, so that we can grow our way out of the $34 trillion debt, so that we can pay for the Social Security and it's not going to go insolvent and that we can continue to live up to our highest ideals.
01:02:50.000But I've been down to the border in Mexico and I originally was a critic of Trump's walls but I turned around when I saw what's happening there.
01:02:59.000I watched 300 people come across Between 2 a.m.
01:03:04.000On my first trip there to Yuma, I've been back since then.
01:03:08.000I spent three days down there talking to the Border Patrol, talking to local law enforcement, to ranchers, the people running the rape centers, the hospitals, everybody in these incredibly kind-hearted communities.
01:03:22.000They made me so proud to be American because this problem has been dumped on them.
01:03:56.000The first 110 were from West Africa, all young men of military age.
01:04:02.000The second two buses were all coming from Asia, from China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Nepal, Tibet, some from India and Bangladesh, but mainly China.
01:04:17.000And I asked them, you know, why are you here?
01:04:22.000But they knew exactly what was going to happen to them because the Sinaloa cartel is advertising on TikTok and YouTube all over the world and it says, you send us $10,000 and you get on a plane to Mexico City, then you...
01:04:37.000We will get you a visa when you get to Mexico City for internal flights, domestic flights.
01:04:50.000When you get there, you will be fingerprinted by the Border Patrol.
01:04:54.000And then if you don't have a criminal record, you'll be brought to the Yuma airport and put on a plane at U.S. taxpayer expense at any destination that you want to go to.
01:05:06.000110,000 have ended up in New York City.
01:05:10.000They can't legally work so they're victimized by predatory employers who are hiring them to do construction sites or, you know, hotel maze or $6 an hour.
01:05:23.000And those companies are bidding against union shops that would be paying $35 an hour or $40 an hour for, you know, more skilled wages.
01:06:30.000They had paid their $10,000 and then, you know, just before they got to the border, they were searched by the cartel and all of their lifetime savings was taken from them.
01:06:39.000And then they show up in America, they can't pay what they're supposed to pay to the cartel.
01:06:45.000So they're sent to a job in specific places and then they have people from the cartel who come visit them to make sure to collect their paycheck every week.
01:06:57.000And they're essentially slaves in this country.
01:07:16.000We have so many kids that have died for fentanyl overdoses.
01:07:20.000We need to control the border so we can have that safety net.
01:07:24.000I just want to really thank you for your time.
01:07:26.000If you want to give us the last 30-second or 60-second pitch on why you should be president of the United States, and then I'll have PJ take us off.
01:07:34.000And again, thank you so much for talking to the American Fire Service.
01:07:38.000We need to rebuild the middle class in this country.
01:07:44.000I grew up during my Uncle President Kennedy's administration when America was the richest country in the world.
01:07:54.000We owned half the wealth on the earth.
01:07:56.000The American middle class became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
01:08:02.000And some of that was because we still had an industrial base after World War II when Europe had been flattened.
01:08:10.000But the other part was we got everybody into a home.
01:08:13.000We got, you know, we got through the veterans bill, a lot of other bills, through the highway system, etc., We made sure every American could get in a home.
01:08:22.000The housing prices then were roughly one year's salary.
01:08:27.000With one year's salary, you could get into a house.
01:08:40.000They all went to the best colleges and none of them is going to be able to get a home.
01:08:46.000And you know, it's, housing prices have doubled in the last year and the interest rates have doubled in the last year and they're competing against BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, these big investment houses that own 89% of the these big investment houses that own 89% of the S&P 500, those three houses.
01:09:07.000And now they're trying to buy all of our land and all of our houses.
01:09:10.000And, you know, when you own a house, you care about your community.
01:09:14.000You care about your firefighters, your police.
01:10:06.000Right now, the unions have failed in protecting these firefighters and cops and teachers and hospital workers that lost their jobs.
01:10:15.000Remember, if you're a union leader out there, one of your responsibilities is to protect due process.
01:10:20.000Sometimes, even if you disagreed with the action, invoke your inner John Adams and support these Seattle firefighters, New York City firefighters.
01:10:28.000We need to make this an issue because the pandemic's over, but these workers cannot be forgotten.
01:10:34.000Bobby Kennedy, honored to have you on the show.