RFK Jr. The Defender - Fire Engineering Politics and Tactics with Frank Ricci and PJ Norwood

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, we're doing another firefighter podcast today.

00:00:04.000 I'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.

00:00:17.000 I'm retired, and this is the biggest firefighter podcast in the country, but we're playing it simultaneously on my own podcast.

00:00:24.000 So I want to thank both of our guests.

00:00:27.000 They're going to be asking me questions today.

00:00:29.000 Thank you, guys.

00:00:30.000 Thank you, Frank.

00:00:31.000 Thank you, BJ. Welcome to my show.

00:00:34.000 Honored to be on your show, sir.

00:00:35.000 Thank you very much.

00:00:36.000 And make sure you check out the book, Command Presence, Increase Your Influence.

00:00:42.000 Welcome to Politics and Tactics.

00:00:43.000 We have a great show for you today.

00:00:46.000 PJ, can you introduce our distinguished guests?

00:00:50.000 We have a guest today that has continuously been fighting for our health by fighting against corporations for over 40 years.

00:00:57.000 He is someone who is not afraid to rock the boat.

00:01:00.000 He'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.

00:01:10.000 So now they attack his character.

00:01:13.000 These attacks have not stopped him, but yes, has impacted the public opinion of our guest today.

00:01:21.000 Today is our high honor to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:01:25.000 on 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.

00:01:36.000 Born into a legacy of public service, RFK Jr.

00:01:38.000 faced significant adversity and challenges throughout his life, but yet he has persevered with remarkable resilience.

00:01:45.000 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 unyielding dedication to the well-being of our communities and natural resources.

00:02:00.000 RFK Jr.

00:02:01.000 encourages healthy debate and honest conversation.

00:02:05.000 He 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.

00:02:17.000 RFK Jr.

00:02:18.000 has also demonstrated immense courage in questioning political narratives, pushing back against those who pervert science for their own advantage.

00:02:27.000 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.

00:02:37.000 Through his tireless efforts, RFK Jr.

00:02:40.000 has shown that one's perseverance can indeed make America a better place.

00:02:46.000 RFK Jr., thank you for joining us today.

00:02:49.000 As president, please highlight what is your vision for your administration and how does that vision benefit members of the fire service?

00:02:58.000 Yeah, thank you very much, BJ, and thanks, Frank.

00:03:03.000 For having me on this show.

00:03:04.000 I've been looking forward to this.

00:03:06.000 As you know, I represented a lot of the firefighters during the pandemic on mandate issues in Los Angeles.

00:03:13.000 We helped out in Chicago.

00:03:15.000 We won the case in New York.

00:03:18.000 And 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,

00:03:35.000 brought 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.

00:03:55.000 Firefighters now have probably the highest cancer rate of any profession.

00:04:01.000 67% of firefighters will get cancer.

00:04:06.000 It's astronomical and clearly a lot of that is from the PFAS. I hope we...

00:04:14.000 I'll get to talk more about that later in the show.

00:04:17.000 In terms of my presidency, I ran for president.

00:04:22.000 I didn't intend to run for president.

00:04:24.000 I wasn't sitting around waiting for an opportunity to run for the White House.

00:04:32.000 I 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.

00:04:47.000 We 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.

00:05:01.000 We 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.

00:05:21.000 And then they got rid of jury trials.

00:05:23.000 The Seventh Amendment guarantee of jury trials and the Fourth Amendment prohibition against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance.

00:05:36.000 And firefighters across the country were at the front line.

00:05:41.000 Firefighters and cops.

00:05:43.000 And we had this wonderful...

00:05:46.000 Police Chief John Catanza in Chicago who said, my men and women are not going to get vaccinated.

00:05:57.000 And 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.

00:06:09.000 So I saw that happening and then I saw so many other things.

00:06:14.000 I 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.

00:06:31.000 I 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.

00:06:40.000 All these 3.3 million businesses, 41% of black-owned businesses will never reopen.

00:06:47.000 I saw this explosion of chronic disease that we're seeing now in our country.

00:06:52.000 When my uncle was president, 6% of American kids had chronic disease today and 60%.

00:06:58.000 When I was a little boy, a typical pediatrician Would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime, in a 40 or 50 year career.

00:07:10.000 Today, 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.

00:07:19.000 The autism rates, well you all know kids with autism Our parents, kids with autism, we didn't know that when I was a kid.

00:07:27.000 I knew nobody, and I was at the spear tip of the battle to get rights for people with intellectual disabilities.

00:07:35.000 My aunt, Eunice Shriver, Founded Special Olympics.

00:07:39.000 I worked in Special Olympics from when I was 8 years old.

00:07:42.000 We never saw any autistic kid.

00:07:44.000 In fact, in my age group, 70-year-old men, the autism rates today are 1 in 10,000 today.

00:07:52.000 In my kids' generation, it's 1 in every 34 kids, according to CDC, 1 in every 22 boys.

00:07:59.000 Something happened.

00:08:01.000 We're mass poisoning this generation of kids with autoimmune disease, neurological disease, obesity.

00:08:07.000 Kids didn't suddenly get lazy and start liking food.

00:08:12.000 This 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.

00:08:41.000 Speaking of the military, I want to wind down our military commitments abroad.

00:08:45.000 The forever wars are destroying our country.

00:08:48.000 They're destroying our economy.

00:08:52.000 They're destroying the safety and undermining the safety of and the reputation, the moral authority of America across the globe.

00:09:01.000 When my uncle was president, he made the resolution not to get America into wars, but instead to project economic power abroad.

00:09:10.000 And that's what we're going to do under the new Kennedy administration.

00:09:13.000 There is no more because of my uncle's commitment.

00:09:16.000 He told his best friend, Ben Bradley, who asked him, what do you want in your gravestone?

00:09:23.000 And my uncle said he kept the peace.

00:09:25.000 He said the primary job of a president of the United States is to keep the country out of war.

00:09:31.000 And, you know, he kept us out of Laos in 1961.

00:09:35.000 He kept us out of Cuba in 1961, out of Berlin during the Checkpoint Charlie crisis in 1962.

00:09:42.000 He kept us out of Cuba again in 1963.

00:09:46.000 He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam despite the demands of everybody in his administration, the intelligence apparatus.

00:09:56.000 The 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.

00:10:06.000 He 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.

00:10:20.000 And in October of 1963, He learned that Green Beret had been killed and he asked Walt Rostow to give a full casualty list.

00:10:32.000 And Walt Rostow brought him a casualty list that showed that 75 Americans had died.

00:10:38.000 And he said, that's too many.

00:10:40.000 I'm bringing them all home. 0.75

00:10:42.000 And 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.

00:11:03.000 The end of November, just before that evacuation happened on November 22nd, one month after he signed that order, he was murdered.

00:11:11.000 President Johnson came in, remanded the order, sent 250,000 troops to Vietnam, and it became our war.

00:11:19.000 And Nixon brought that up to 560,000.

00:11:22.000 My father ran against the war in 1968.

00:11:24.000 He was killed.

00:11:26.000 Martin Luther King, who became a primary peace activist in our country, was killed a month before my father.

00:11:34.000 And we sent all the, you know, 560,000 Americans over there.

00:11:40.000 56,000 never came back, including my cousin, George Skagel, who died in the Tet Offensive.

00:11:47.000 But my uncle refused to send troops abroad anytime, combat troops abroad, anytime during his administration.

00:11:56.000 But 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.

00:12:05.000 He 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.

00:12:30.000 As 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.

00:13:01.000 Oh, I'm going to do that.

00:13:02.000 I'm going to end the chronic disease epidemic.

00:13:05.000 I'm going to get every American kid into a home. 1.00

00:13:08.000 I'm going to build 10 million homes a year.

00:13:10.000 We've got a housing shortage now.

00:13:15.000 Of the American middle class.

00:13:16.000 If our kids can't get into homes, that means they can't get equity.

00:13:20.000 Which means they can't borrow money and they can't start a business.

00:13:24.000 They can't pursue their entrepreneurial impulses.

00:13:28.000 And we go from being an ownership society to a rental society.

00:13:32.000 And that's a colonial model, it's a feudal model, and it's not what America's supposed to be.

00:13:39.000 We need to get all of these kids into homes, and that is going to be the primary thing that I do, and to end the chronic disease epidemic.

00:13:47.000 And we need to stop spending money on the military.

00:13:52.000 We now have $34 trillion in debt.

00:13:55.000 We're paying more for the service of that debt than our entire military budget.

00:14:01.000 Within 5 years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we collect in taxes is going to go to servicing that debt.

00:14:10.000 Within 10 years, 100%.

00:14:14.000 And 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.

00:14:21.000 President Trump said he's going to balance the budget.

00:14:24.000 Instead, 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.

00:14:38.000 And President Biden is in a race to catch up with him.

00:14:43.000 President Biden is now running up another trillion dollars every 90 days.

00:14:49.000 So, you know, we're dead.

00:14:51.000 This is existential to our country and neither of these guys can fix it.

00:14:56.000 I'm going to fix it.

00:14:58.000 So those are, I'd say, you know, I also want to end the division in this country, end the polarization.

00:15:05.000 I 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.

00:15:24.000 You 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.

00:15:37.000 And that's, you know, that's one of my objectives.

00:15:41.000 Robby, I applaud you for talking to everybody.

00:15:44.000 And here today, you're talking to the American Fire Service.

00:15:47.000 You're talking to career firefighters and volunteers.

00:15:50.000 So here, you took time from your campaign to speak to the middle class.

00:15:54.000 Because firefighters make up that middle class.

00:15:57.000 You know, you look at any...

00:15:59.000 The men and women of the fire service, they would...

00:16:02.000 Make their spouse a widow and their kids orphans for the community they serve. 0.93

00:16:06.000 They're out there answering the call every day.

00:16:08.000 And I always say that the American Fire Service represents the very best in America.

00:16:14.000 You call 911 and they just show up.

00:16:16.000 No paperwork, just ready to help.

00:16:19.000 But 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.

00:16:34.000 So PJ, can you ask a question about Forever Chemicals and kind of bring this in focus?

00:16:40.000 Because what I really appreciate and admire about Bobby Kennedy is that you give the little guy the voice.

00:16:47.000 Like David Whiteside, it's about the fishermen on the side of the river.

00:16:51.000 Who's depending on that water.

00:16:53.000 The mom who has to give the kids breakfast in the morning. 0.76

00:16:56.000 It's about clean water and you give a voice to those who wouldn't have a voice.

00:17:01.000 The middle class.

00:17:02.000 The ones that couldn't afford to buy that high, get that high dollar law firm.

00:17:07.000 PJ? Yeah, Bobby, thank you.

00:17:10.000 And 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.

00:17:23.000 As firefighters, we know the cancer rate is automatically higher than the average citizen.

00:17:27.000 What 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.

00:17:39.000 Thankfully, through a mutual friend, Diane Cotter, and her quest to make sense of her husband's Paul's cancer diagnosis.

00:17:45.000 Today, PFAS is a daily conversation in firehouses across America.

00:17:49.000 You 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?

00:18:00.000 Yeah, I mean, here, first of all, let me just talk about PFAS for a while.

00:18:04.000 We 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.

00:18:32.000 We took that case at Waterkeeper.

00:18:35.000 Waterkeeper is the group I co-founded.

00:18:39.000 It 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.

00:18:52.000 When I started working there in the early 80s, the Hudson was catching fire.

00:18:56.000 It was Turning colors every week, depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown.

00:19:04.000 It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City, south of Albany.

00:19:08.000 Zero dissolved oxygen in the water.

00:19:10.000 The fish were gone.

00:19:12.000 Today, it's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.

00:19:15.000 It 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.

00:19:25.000 Inspired the creation of river keepers all over our country and the rest of the world.

00:19:31.000 We now have 350 water keepers, river keepers, sound keepers, bay keepers, lake keepers.

00:19:40.000 We own the keeper name.

00:19:42.000 We license these groups to get started.

00:19:44.000 Each one has to have a patrol boat.

00:19:45.000 They each have to be willing to sue polluters and they each have to have a full-time water keeper.

00:19:52.000 We have one of those on the Tennessee River in Nashville, the gentleman that you mentioned, David Whiteside.

00:19:59.000 And David discovered high, high levels of PFAS in the fish in the river and in the southern states, particularly Tennessee.

00:20:10.000 We have the highest levels of fish consumption in the country.

00:20:14.000 They have big, big recreational fishing communities and people and subsistence fishery.

00:20:20.000 And people are being poisoned, methodically, systematically poisoned by the 3M plant and DuPont is the other big maker.

00:20:31.000 Well, this is a huge profit center for them, and they market it as a flame retardant.

00:20:40.000 So they put it in.

00:20:44.000 It's the basis for the aqueous foams, the firefighters.

00:20:48.000 Firefighters get hit in three different ways.

00:20:51.000 One, it's in all of our furniture, you know, beginning in the 80s and 80s.

00:20:56.000 It'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.

00:21:11.000 That's one.

00:21:12.000 Number 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.

00:21:26.000 So 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.

00:21:38.000 The last place and probably the largest factor It is the turnout gear and you mentioned Paul Cotter and Diane Cotter.

00:21:49.000 Diane is an incredible activist who went to war when her husband got testicular cancer.

00:21:56.000 This 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.

00:22:09.000 Cancers 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.

00:22:25.000 Cancer is the second biggest killer of firefighters after cardiac arrest, and it's approaching Cardiac arrest.

00:22:37.000 And 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.

00:22:48.000 There's all kinds of carcinogens and incinerated material.

00:22:51.000 Probably the biggest.

00:22:53.000 And you're looking at these particular kind of cancers.

00:22:57.000 Testicular 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.

00:23:15.000 So with that turnout gear that's supposed to protect your life, it's actually killing you.

00:23:20.000 And Diane has been this extraordinary activist exposing this to the American public.

00:23:27.000 And people are waking up to this.

00:23:29.000 And 3M, because of the litigation, 3M has pledged that they're getting out of the business.

00:23:37.000 But if you look at, you know, they've known for a long time that this person, they've hit it.

00:23:45.000 And they go, you know, they seduce the firefighters because they go, they finance the firefighters' conventions. 0.85

00:23:52.000 These companies put up their, you know, their booths and they proclaim the fact that they're paying.

00:23:59.000 There's advertisements in all the firefighters' magazines saying, we got your back.

00:24:04.000 Well, you know, we got your back pocket because we're taking your money, but we don't have your back.

00:24:10.000 We're killing It's really great about exposing that to the American public.

00:24:19.000 What I'm going to do as president, I recognize the power that these industries Have over Congress, over the – they own the regulatory agencies.

00:24:31.000 All of these agencies have been captured by the industries they're supposed to regulate.

00:24:35.000 There's been this corrupt merger of state and corporate power.

00:24:39.000 I've sued all these agencies.

00:24:41.000 I've sued CDC, NIH. I probably sued CDC more than any other attorney.

00:24:48.000 I've sued EPA repeatedly.

00:24:50.000 I've sued FDA. I've sued the USDA, which is giving us, the Department of Agriculture, all this poison process.

00:24:58.000 There's a thousand ingredients in our food in this country that are illegal in Europe.

00:25:04.000 Illegal.

00:25:05.000 And we have the highest chronic disease epidemic.

00:25:07.000 And nobody else has anything like this.

00:25:09.000 In fact, during COVID, we had the highest death rate of any country in the world We had 16% of the COVID deaths in the United States.

00:25:20.000 We only have 4.2% of the global population.

00:25:23.000 We literally had the worst record of any country in the world.

00:25:27.000 Whatever we were doing in this country was wrong.

00:25:30.000 People should run away from it.

00:25:32.000 CDC, when you ask them, they say, oh, it wasn't our fault. 0.78

00:25:36.000 It was because Americans are so sick, which is weird because they're the ones who are in charge. 1.00

00:25:42.000 They've presided over this. 0.90

00:25:45.000 They said the average person who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic disease.

00:25:51.000 So they had asthma, they had maybe obesity, they maybe have asthma, and one other thing.

00:26:00.000 No other country in the world is anything like this.

00:26:02.000 We are literally the sickest country in the world.

00:26:05.000 We spend more on healthcare than any other country, and we have the sickest population.

00:26:10.000 And it's because they're mass poisoning us.

00:26:13.000 And so how do you stop that?

00:26:16.000 It'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.

00:26:39.000 And 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.

00:27:07.000 Here's how we did it.

00:27:08.000 We had 40,000 people who got home gardeners who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup.

00:27:15.000 We brought multi-district litigation against them.

00:27:19.000 We had enough science by that time, about 15 or 20 studies that all said they were animal studies, epidemiological studies.

00:27:27.000 Clinical 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.

00:27:41.000 Once 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,

00:28:02.000 he 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.

00:28:16.000 So that's called the Daubert threshold, and we just surpassed that with Monsanto.

00:28:21.000 Once we did that, we were able to go to court.

00:28:23.000 The 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.

00:28:33.000 The first case we tried in San Francisco, we won $289 million.

00:28:38.000 The second A school superintendent, African-American, who had been forced, against his will, to spray Roundup with a leaky backpack. 0.98

00:28:51.000 He got nine Hodgkin's lymphoma all over his body.

00:28:54.000 The second case we tried in Oakland, we won $89 million.

00:28:59.000 The third case was a couple of home gardeners that had been spraying together for years.

00:29:05.000 First, their laboratory retriever, who was with them every day in the garden, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

00:29:11.000 And the two of them got it at the exact same time.

00:29:15.000 And we asked the jury in that case for a billion dollars.

00:29:21.000 And they came back with 2.2 billion.

00:29:23.000 And at that point, Monsanto came to the negotiating table and said, we're done.

00:29:29.000 Let's settle this.

00:29:31.000 They settled it for 13 billion and they agreed to take Roundup or to take glyphosate out of Roundup for home gardening purposes.

00:29:41.000 So that's how you beat them.

00:29:43.000 You get enough science out there.

00:29:45.000 And right now, CDC is looking at all these chronic diseases.

00:29:50.000 What's causing rheumatoid arthritis epidemic?

00:29:54.000 What's causing the juvenile diabetes epidemic?

00:29:57.000 What's causing food allergies?

00:29:59.000 Why did food allergies suddenly appear in 1989?

00:30:02.000 Peanut allergies and all these other allergies, anaphylaxis, eczema, all of them appear around 1989.

00:30:08.000 Something happened.

00:30:11.000 All 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.

00:30:26.000 Suddenly exploded around 1989.

00:30:28.000 Kids who were born after 1989, their epidemic. 0.73

00:30:32.000 What happened?

00:30:34.000 And so there's a whole bunch of different exposures that could explain it.

00:30:38.000 There's high fructose corn syrup.

00:30:39.000 There's PFOAs and PFASs.

00:30:43.000 The forever chemicals that are not only in firefighter gear, they're in Teflon.

00:30:49.000 They're in that we started cooking with.

00:30:52.000 You know, they're in all of our pots and pans.

00:30:54.000 They're in polar bears and polar bears haven't been eaten firefighters, but they just put more of it in the firefighting gear.

00:31:02.000 And I just got to echo what you say.

00:31:04.000 Thank God and bless Paul and Diane for bringing this forward because...

00:31:10.000 At 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.

00:31:31.000 We 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.

00:31:40.000 We looked at Detroit, LA, New York City, New Haven, and we're like, well, why aren't the cancer rates higher in these cities?

00:31:48.000 Where firefighters are exposed more often to the products of combustion.

00:31:52.000 And 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.

00:32:02.000 But yet our cancer rates are across the board from paid and career firefighters.

00:32:08.000 And 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.

00:32:33.000 President Kennedy went to Choate Rosemary Hall in our town.

00:32:36.000 So that's a source of pride in Wallingford, Connecticut.

00:32:40.000 But he was also part of the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and himself.

00:32:46.000 And I think the debates are so important to the fabric of America.

00:32:50.000 And we've seen this institutional debate.

00:32:55.000 We 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. 0.92

00:33:04.000 We're hoping that these debates are engineering to keep you out of the debates to further diminish this critical part of fair elections.

00:33:14.000 Can you tell firefighters in America what's the status of getting you in the debates?

00:33:18.000 Because I think your voice needs to be heard because I think you're willing to talk to anybody.

00:33:24.000 Yeah, I mean I'm willing to talk to anybody.

00:33:28.000 But they ought to let me on the debate.

00:33:32.000 I meet the metrics that they've talked about.

00:33:36.000 I'm at 15 percent in the polls that they want me to be in.

00:33:40.000 They asked for four polls.

00:33:42.000 We gave them five from a specific list of polling firms.

00:33:49.000 And 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.

00:34:04.000 And 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.

00:34:14.000 We don't know.

00:34:16.000 But they themselves are not on the ballot anywhere, and I am.

00:34:19.000 So 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.

00:34:34.000 But, you know, neither of these gentlemen, neither President Biden or President Trump wants to debate me.

00:34:42.000 I don't think either of them can talk about the really big issues that are facing the existential issues that are facing this nation.

00:34:56.000 You know, LGBT rights, and they'll talk about abortion, and they'll talk about guns. 0.98

00:35:01.000 They'll talk about the border, which is a really critical issue, and they do differ on that.

00:35:06.000 I think we should need to shut down the border right away.

00:35:10.000 But 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.

00:35:25.000 The chronic disease epidemic, the addiction to war, the polarization, the emergence of AI, okay?

00:35:36.000 And, 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.

00:35:46.000 AI has this tremendous potential to help our country, to help humanity, but it also has the potential to enslave us.

00:35:54.000 And, you know, Elon Musk famously said, AI first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.

00:36:05.000 It'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.

00:36:23.000 And we need to regulate it.

00:36:25.000 We 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.

00:36:37.000 So you can't over-regulate it here.

00:36:40.000 But we need to make agreements with other nations about how it's going to be regulated and make sure to protect humanity.

00:36:49.000 This is really a spiritual warfare and it's a war not between Republicans and Democrats.

00:36:55.000 The conflict between Republicans and Democrats are orchestrated.

00:37:00.000 This is really a battle by elites against the rest of us.

00:37:05.000 And it is a spiritual battle.

00:37:10.000 And AI is going to play critical.

00:37:14.000 AI 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.

00:37:27.000 And we need to make sure that it's used in the way that actually benefits humanity and democracy.

00:37:35.000 And 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.

00:37:45.000 We 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.

00:37:56.000 Speaking 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.

00:38:12.000 Where are we at with Secret Service protection for you?

00:38:15.000 If we can't protect our candidates in America, how can we expect America to be that shining city on the hill?

00:38:24.000 We've tragically lost your uncle.

00:38:27.000 We lost your father.

00:38:28.000 I'm sure your father would be very proud of your accomplishments today.

00:38:31.000 But 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.

00:38:40.000 Can you speak to that?

00:38:41.000 Because that's a concern for the fire service, because we're the ones that answer the calls when things go wrong.

00:38:47.000 Yeah, and I'm the first candidate.

00:38:51.000 You know, the Secret Service protection was only given to nominees of the parties after their conventions prior to 1968.

00:38:59.000 And my father, of course, was assassinated that year.

00:39:02.000 And that year, Immediately after his shooting, all of the presidential candidates, Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon were immediately given protection.

00:39:17.000 And 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.

00:39:41.000 So 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.

00:40:01.000 There'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. 0.68

00:40:07.000 I'm worried not about my own safety.

00:40:11.000 I'm worried about my family's safety.

00:40:12.000 I'm worried about bystanders and every presidential assassination attempt, there's been virtually every one of them, there's been bystanders injured.

00:40:22.000 You know, there were six people shot with my father, including one of his best friends, Paul Schrade, who took a bullet to his head.

00:40:30.000 When my uncle was shot, there were numerous other people, including Governor John Conley, who was also shot at that time.

00:40:38.000 And I've made this clear to the Biden White House.

00:40:42.000 President Biden has a bust of my father behind him at the Oval Office.

00:40:46.000 I'm sure he knows what happened to my father.

00:40:49.000 I've had, in fact...

00:40:52.000 I 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.

00:41:09.000 A 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.

00:41:33.000 And 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.

00:41:48.000 And 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.

00:41:57.000 He 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.

00:42:09.000 I may not make it back alive.

00:42:13.000 Here's what you do.

00:42:14.000 Report to your commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump, if I don't make it back alive.

00:42:21.000 So, you know, there's a lot of indicia that he was ill-intentioned toward me.

00:42:28.000 All of these things.

00:42:30.000 Even 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.

00:42:43.000 And yet the White House has refused to give me protection.

00:42:47.000 The White House blames Senator Schumer, who's on this.

00:42:51.000 There'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.

00:43:01.000 But the whole process is obscure.

00:43:04.000 There have been 33 presidential candidates Who've been given Secret Service protection.

00:43:11.000 Everyone who's ever asked for it.

00:43:13.000 I'm the first person in history who has requested it and not gotten it.

00:43:17.000 And most of the people who've gotten it before me do not have my polling performance.

00:43:23.000 You know, Pat Buchanan had 1% of the votes.

00:43:25.000 Shirley Chisholm had less than 1%.

00:43:30.000 You know, Barack Obama got it over a year early.

00:43:34.000 My uncle, Ted Kennedy, got it before he even declared, 550 days out.

00:43:41.000 Jesse Jackson, look at all these candidates.

00:43:46.000 And 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.

00:44:14.000 I think you have to assume that's a political decision.

00:44:18.000 I don't think it's good for our country.

00:44:21.000 I'm worried about my family.

00:44:24.000 But I just think it's bad for our country that we're now weaponizing the federal agencies and the enforcement agencies.

00:44:32.000 And I think this is a worry from both sides.

00:44:35.000 You 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.

00:44:46.000 And it's not good when anybody does it.

00:44:48.000 We 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.

00:45:05.000 Your safety is an American issue and your family's safety is an American issue and that should transcend politics.

00:45:12.000 So, 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.

00:45:25.000 Another 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.

00:45:39.000 And they're individuals that are from the middle class.

00:45:42.000 And we found that individuals that have important voices like your own have been shut down.

00:45:49.000 And 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.

00:46:01.000 You had firefighters like Andy Pittman with four kids with six years on the job in Seattle, Washington, forced out of the job.

00:46:08.000 And this is not a, you know, you talked about lowering the temperature and about getting away from divisive politics.

00:46:14.000 This isn't a red or a blue issue.

00:46:17.000 Connecticut, our governor, we're a very blue state.

00:46:20.000 We didn't have forced vaccinations.

00:46:22.000 You could have testing or the vaccination.

00:46:26.000 So Governor Lamont got that right.

00:46:28.000 Houston, Texas is a blue city and a red state.

00:46:31.000 The mayor...

00:46:33.000 And the fire chief worked hard to give a testing option to firefighters so that they wouldn't put in these draconian measures.

00:46:40.000 And I think one of the issues is when we silence dissenting views, we can't have that cogent policy debate.

00:46:47.000 And sometimes it slides in.

00:46:50.000 I was talking to Matt...

00:46:53.000 Matt 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.

00:47:02.000 We 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.

00:47:13.000 Can 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?

00:47:25.000 We know that the public policy was based off a faulty premise that if you got the shot, you couldn't spread it.

00:47:33.000 So 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.

00:47:44.000 It's not a compelling government interest.

00:47:47.000 What'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?

00:47:57.000 Yeah, and let me add something to your question, which is this.

00:48:04.000 Right now, CDC is recommending a ninth booster.

00:48:08.000 So that's where we are, ninth booster.

00:48:11.000 There's fewer than 10% of Americans are going to do that, a lot fewer.

00:48:17.000 That means that over 90% of Americans have completely lost faith in CDC. CDC was recommending the first vaccine, you know, way back when.

00:48:29.000 In 2020, and we were all told, you know, you can't go to your work.

00:48:33.000 You're gonna get fired if you don't take it.

00:48:35.000 You can't get on an airplane.

00:48:37.000 You can't.

00:48:38.000 Your rights are no longer rights.

00:48:40.000 They'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.

00:48:51.000 I knew back in 2020, The vaccines weren't going to prevent transmission.

00:48:56.000 Why did I know that?

00:48:57.000 Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, which is what I was called, but because I was actually looking at the monkey studies.

00:49:04.000 And 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.

00:49:22.000 Well, they knew that they didn't prevent illness and they didn't prevent transmission.

00:49:26.000 And yet for a year, they were telling us, yeah, if you get the vaccine, your grandma will be protected.

00:49:32.000 And they were lying.

00:49:35.000 And they all admit it now.

00:49:36.000 Now that is mainstream dogma.

00:49:38.000 But you have to think this.

00:49:40.000 What if CDC said today, you know, we want you to take your ninth.

00:49:46.000 If you don't take it, you can't go to work.

00:49:50.000 Well, that's, you know, that is the way that we need to think about this.

00:49:56.000 So we represented Bravest for Choice in New York.

00:50:01.000 I represented Firefighters for Freedom in LA, and we won that suit.

00:50:05.000 We 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.

00:50:16.000 And we're still representing firefighters all over the country who were fired.

00:50:25.000 And, you know, the big case are now in front of the Second Circuit in New York.

00:50:31.000 Sujata Gibson is our attorney in those cases.

00:50:34.000 And we financed a lot of those cases for the individual firefighters.

00:50:41.000 And the courts have said to date...

00:50:46.000 That they're entitled to be rehired and they're entitled to their pass pay.

00:50:50.000 But so far, we don't know of any of them who've actually collected.

00:50:54.000 So that's where we are on that.

00:50:58.000 One of the saddest cases is a firefighter named Velasquez who was being represented by Cristina Martinez.

00:51:07.000 And he refused to get the vaccine.

00:51:10.000 And they said, well, we're going to fire you unless you did it.

00:51:13.000 He then went and got it, and he was permanently and catastrophically disabled.

00:51:20.000 And that, unfortunately, has been the story for many, many, many people.

00:51:25.000 And, 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.

00:51:36.000 The 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.

00:52:01.000 But unfortunately, during COVID, they all saw their role as manipulating the public into compliance, repeating again and again government propaganda, frightening the public.

00:52:15.000 And thank you for pushing for cogent debate.

00:52:19.000 And, 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.

00:52:28.000 And 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.

00:52:46.000 It's so important for our republic to be able to have cogent debate.

00:52:51.000 We wouldn't have had the learning loss that we had with our kids losing education over the pandemic.

00:52:57.000 The fact that they silenced or throttled down your social media accounts so that we couldn't talk about what Robert Kennedy was talking about.

00:53:06.000 This is Trump says a lot of things, but this was actually done by the Biden administration where they used proxies to silence dissenting views.

00:53:19.000 And 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.

00:53:29.000 We need to be able to have these conversations, these courageous conversations.

00:53:34.000 And we need to be able to ask simple questions.

00:53:37.000 And 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.

00:53:53.000 Often it's all caught up in the talking points.

00:53:56.000 But you try to break through that.

00:53:58.000 And I think how you even been treated in the press, you talk about, you know, the press talking truth to power.

00:54:04.000 I've seen so many interviews where the the person Bill Maher, OK, who I watch it.

00:54:10.000 I'm a conservative, but I watch Bill Maher.

00:54:12.000 Instead of just asking you a question, he put out a faulty premise first, and so here you had to defend your position.

00:54:20.000 I just think it's unfair what we're doing in our republic.

00:54:23.000 We need more honest conversations in our politics.

00:54:27.000 So 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.

00:54:34.000 Yeah, 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.

00:54:43.000 If a government has the capacity to silence its critics, it has license for any atrocity.

00:54:49.000 And, 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.

00:55:09.000 They all talked about a future kind of dystopian totalitarianism.

00:55:14.000 And 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.

00:55:23.000 And then we saw it happening to us.

00:55:25.000 And, you know, what they were saying is that the first step toward totalitarianism always begins with the censorship of speech.

00:55:34.000 American 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.

00:55:56.000 Democracy is sloppy.

00:55:57.000 It's difficult.

00:55:59.000 It goes, you know, inches and fits and starts two steps forward, one step back, etc.

00:56:04.000 But 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.

00:56:18.000 And that's what all of the founders talked about.

00:56:21.000 You need free flow of information.

00:56:23.000 And when you stop debating things, You're on a bad path.

00:56:27.000 There's no time in American history When we look back and we say the people who were censoring speech were the good guys.

00:56:35.000 They're always the bad guys.

00:56:37.000 They're always the people who are trying to manipulate the public to try to increase their power, increase their wealth.

00:56:45.000 And, 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.

00:57:00.000 The 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

00:57:31.000 of these tech overlords, the robber barons.

00:57:35.000 Who, you know, now are locked in our homes.

00:57:38.000 They were giving surfers right up the road here $1,000 tickets because they were surfing out on the ocean.

00:57:46.000 And they closed the playground so kids couldn't get sunlight.

00:57:50.000 They couldn't go outside.

00:57:53.000 They 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.

00:58:03.000 So they knew at that point that COVID was not spreading outside.

00:58:09.000 It only spread indoors, and yet they were locking us all indoors.

00:58:13.000 They were getting us out of the vitamin D, promoting sunlight, the fresh air, all the stuff that would have kept us...

00:58:19.000 They're sending us home.

00:58:22.000 They eat potato chips and gain weight, and the people who were dying were the people who were eating potato chips and were overweight.

00:58:29.000 So this was not a public health effort.

00:58:32.000 It was an exercise in control.

00:58:35.000 They were testing us.

00:58:38.000 To see if we put up with this.

00:58:40.000 And unfortunately, we did.

00:58:42.000 You know, I think a lot of Americans are now coming out of that and saying we're never going to do that again.

00:58:48.000 It's not going to happen the next time.

00:58:50.000 So I'm hoping that that was the result.

00:58:53.000 Because 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.

00:59:02.000 And that's what I worry about.

00:59:04.000 I worry about We're living in this era now, these emerging control technologies, facial recognition systems.

00:59:13.000 We 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.

00:59:27.000 We have technology that can look through walls so you can't hide in your house.

00:59:32.000 We have, you know, Alexis is in your house, right?

00:59:35.000 And Siri.

00:59:38.000 You think they're working for you.

00:59:40.000 They're not.

00:59:40.000 They're working for Bill Gates and they're working for the NSA and they're getting all of your information every time you sneeze.

00:59:49.000 That's recorded somewhere and somebody then is monetizing that to sell you a drug.

00:59:54.000 When you say, I didn't sleep last night, you get mattress ads.

00:59:59.000 All of that stuff, you know, they're harvesting the data.

01:00:02.000 They are mining your data, stealing it from you, not paying you for it.

01:00:07.000 They'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.

01:00:31.000 And that's frightening.

01:00:34.000 You know, governments never...

01:00:36.000 The ambition of every totalitarian regime in the history of mankind has been absolute control over every aspect of human behavior.

01:00:46.000 All of our interactions, our movements, what we read, what we talk about.

01:00:51.000 They've never been able to do it in the past.

01:00:54.000 People have been able to keep parts of their lives secret.

01:00:56.000 Every purchase.

01:01:00.000 They know about it.

01:01:01.000 You go buy a porn magazine or look on the internet.

01:01:05.000 They know you did that.

01:01:11.000 They know it, and it gives them all these opportunities to control human behavior in nefarious ways.

01:01:20.000 Bobby, I want to be respectful of your time because you've been so generous today.

01:01:25.000 I want to just give you an opportunity to just clear something up because you did make a comment about immigration.

01:01:30.000 And I don't want somebody to just pull the clip and kind of paint it in a different light.

01:01:37.000 I think we agree that we need controlled immigration because we need a quality safety net in America. 0.88

01:01:44.000 And if we just open the gates and we have so many people coming in.

01:01:49.000 I 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.

01:02:03.000 Do you want to just expand on your answer?

01:02:06.000 Thanks for letting me do that.

01:02:08.000 America needs to continue to be a compassionate country and to welcome immigrants who come in legally.

01:02:17.000 So we have a long line of people.

01:02:20.000 I 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.

01:02:35.000 We 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.

01:02:50.000 But 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.

01:02:59.000 I watched 300 people come across Between 2 a.m.

01:03:03.000 and 4 a.m.

01:03:04.000 On my first trip there to Yuma, I've been back since then.

01:03:08.000 I 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.

01:03:22.000 They made me so proud to be American because this problem has been dumped on them.

01:03:28.000 And they're rising.

01:03:29.000 They're rising with compassion to where the immigrants are coming in.

01:03:32.000 But the immigrants themselves, I interviewed.

01:03:36.000 I watched 300 come across.

01:03:37.000 They brought to the border all night long in these big white buses that are owned by the Sinelon drug cartel.

01:03:46.000 They weren't coming from only two the whole night.

01:03:48.000 I saw from Latin America who both had asylum claims, one from Colombia, one from Peru.

01:03:55.000 The rest were all from that.

01:03:56.000 The first 110 were from West Africa, all young men of military age.

01:04:02.000 The second two buses were all coming from Asia, from China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Nepal, Tibet, some from India and Bangladesh, but mainly China.

01:04:17.000 And I asked them, you know, why are you here?

01:04:19.000 And they said, we're here for a job.

01:04:21.000 It's illegal.

01:04:22.000 But 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...

01:04:37.000 We will get you a visa when you get to Mexico City for internal flights, domestic flights.

01:04:42.000 And you fly to Mexicali.

01:04:44.000 We will pick you up in the airport at Mexicali. 0.85

01:04:47.000 We'll bring you to the wall.

01:04:48.000 We will walk you across the wall.

01:04:50.000 When you get there, you will be fingerprinted by the Border Patrol.

01:04:54.000 And 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.

01:05:06.000 110,000 have ended up in New York City.

01:05:08.000 They're living on the streets.

01:05:10.000 They 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.

01:05:23.000 And those companies are bidding against union shops that would be paying $35 an hour or $40 an hour for, you know, more skilled wages.

01:05:34.000 And everybody gets hurt.

01:05:36.000 The taxes aren't getting paid.

01:05:37.000 The social safety system is being crushed.

01:05:41.000 And, you know, what I say is we welcome immigrants in this country, but every country needs a secure border.

01:05:47.000 Otherwise, it's going to cease to exist.

01:05:49.000 And this is existential for us.

01:05:51.000 And by the way, the immigrants themselves, the stories I heard from them were harrowing. 0.98

01:05:59.000 Many of them are raped.

01:06:02.000 Most of the ones that I talked to have been robbed by the cartels.

01:06:05.000 There's a tree right across the border which is famous.

01:06:10.000 It's called the rape tree. 1.00

01:06:12.000 And the Border Patrol says this is where the cartels extract final payment from women, from children who they bring to the border.

01:06:25.000 And it's just, it's horrific.

01:06:27.000 I talked to a Peruvian family.

01:06:30.000 They 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.

01:06:39.000 And then they show up in America, they can't pay what they're supposed to pay to the cartel.

01:06:45.000 So 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.

01:06:57.000 And they're essentially slaves in this country.

01:07:00.000 This is not a good situation.

01:07:02.000 Anybody who tries to defend this, you know, I'm just telling you, whatever you think, you're wrong if you think this is defensible.

01:07:10.000 No, I can't agree more.

01:07:12.000 It's not compassion.

01:07:13.000 We can't incentivize.

01:07:15.000 We still have a terrorism risk.

01:07:16.000 We have so many kids that have died for fentanyl overdoses.

01:07:20.000 We need to control the border so we can have that safety net.

01:07:24.000 I just want to really thank you for your time.

01:07:26.000 If 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.

01:07:34.000 And again, thank you so much for talking to the American Fire Service.

01:07:38.000 We need to rebuild the middle class in this country.

01:07:44.000 I grew up during my Uncle President Kennedy's administration when America was the richest country in the world.

01:07:54.000 We owned half the wealth on the earth.

01:07:56.000 The American middle class became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.

01:08:02.000 And some of that was because we still had an industrial base after World War II when Europe had been flattened.

01:08:10.000 But the other part was we got everybody into a home.

01:08:13.000 We 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.

01:08:22.000 The housing prices then were roughly one year's salary.

01:08:27.000 With one year's salary, you could get into a house.

01:08:30.000 You could take a summer vacation.

01:08:33.000 You could raise a family.

01:08:35.000 You could put something aside for retirement on one job.

01:08:38.000 And today that is gone.

01:08:39.000 I have seven kids.

01:08:40.000 They all went to the best colleges and none of them is going to be able to get a home.

01:08:46.000 And 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.

01:09:07.000 And now they're trying to buy all of our land and all of our houses.

01:09:10.000 And, you know, when you own a house, you care about your community.

01:09:14.000 You care about your firefighters, your police.

01:09:16.000 You go to the PTA meetings.

01:09:18.000 You care about the appearance of your home.

01:09:20.000 You care about your neighbors.

01:09:22.000 But most importantly, you have equity.

01:09:25.000 So you can borrow money.

01:09:26.000 If you want to start a bowling alley or a sporting goods shop or a bar or a yoga studio, you can get the financing to do it.

01:09:34.000 And so you can pursue...

01:09:37.000 Your entrepreneurial impulses.

01:09:39.000 And right now, we got a generation of kids who's never going to see the inside of their own home.

01:09:45.000 They're turning into renters.

01:09:46.000 And we're turning this society from a democratic society into a feudal society.

01:09:51.000 And our people are going to go from being citizens to being subjects.

01:09:55.000 And I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen.

01:09:58.000 You heard it here from RFK Jr.

01:10:00.000 himself.

01:10:01.000 Honored to have him on the show.

01:10:03.000 Remember, Speaking out matters.

01:10:06.000 Right now, the unions have failed in protecting these firefighters and cops and teachers and hospital workers that lost their jobs.

01:10:15.000 Remember, if you're a union leader out there, one of your responsibilities is to protect due process.

01:10:20.000 Sometimes, even if you disagreed with the action, invoke your inner John Adams and support these Seattle firefighters, New York City firefighters.

01:10:28.000 We need to make this an issue because the pandemic's over, but these workers cannot be forgotten.

01:10:34.000 Bobby Kennedy, honored to have you on the show.

01:10:37.000 PJ, can you take us off?

01:10:40.000 RFK Jr., thank you.

01:10:42.000 Thank you for joining us and speaking to the fire service and highlighting your vision for America's firefighters.

01:10:50.000 Wow.

01:10:51.000 What a great show, highlighting an individual who fights for our health and safety.

01:10:56.000 As a reminder, FDIC 2025 deadlines for submissions is June 17th.

01:11:02.000 Don't miss your opportunity to speak at the largest and most attended firefighter conference in the world.

01:11:08.000 FDIC 2024 attracted more than 36,000 firefighters.

01:11:12.000 Don't miss your opportunity to speak at the world's largest firefighter conference.

01:11:17.000 Hope everybody has a great afternoon.

RFK Jr. The Defender - June 08, 2024

Fire Engineering Politics and Tactics with Frank Ricci and PJ Norwood

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