The Ben Shapiro Show - BREAKING: RFK Jr. Suspends Campaign

00:00:00.000 So, Robert F. Kennedy is expected momentarily to drop out of the presidential race.

00:00:05.000 There was some speculation a little bit earlier today that he was not in fact going to endorse Donald Trump.

00:00:09.000 It now appears that he will.

00:00:10.000 His filed forms in Pennsylvania to remove himself from the Pennsylvania state ballot.

00:00:16.000 In those forms, apparently he has suggested he's going to endorse Donald Trump.

00:00:20.000 He's supposed to be speaking in Arizona momentarily.

00:00:23.000 The speech was originally supposed to take place at 2 p.m.

00:00:26.000 Then it was 2.30 p.m.

00:00:27.000 Eastern Time.

00:00:28.000 Now it's supposed to take place at 2.45.

00:00:30.000 There had been a bit of speculation a little bit earlier that perhaps he would not, in fact, endorse Donald Trump.

00:00:36.000 That speculation was added to by Nicole Shanahan, his vice presidential pick, who had gone on a podcast and suggested that unless Donald Trump walked back his support for Operation Warp Speed, which of course is the gigantic scientific project to push forward the vaccine for COVID, that unless he walked that back and acknowledged his mistakes that an endorsement would not take place, that appears not to have been true.

00:00:57.000 Here was Nicole Shanahan a little bit earlier today trying to push this idea.

00:01:02.000 The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologized or publicly come out and said Operation Warp Speed was my fault, it was a failure, and I let it happen.

00:01:14.000 I'll never let it happen again.

00:01:15.000 The vaccinations, right.

00:01:17.000 I mean, all of it.

00:01:18.000 The lockdowns, letting Fauci and Francis Collins run the show, the firing of the other folks at the NIH and individuals at the CDC that were censored.

00:01:33.000 I mean, there was a lot that happened under Donald Trump's watch that should not have happened and cannot happen again.

00:01:42.000 And if we are going to Um, put our bet with him and we haven't, we have not confirmed anything, but we need absolute assurance that he, you know, it's, this is a tough one.

00:01:59.000 Well, you know, obviously something changed, and possibly one of the reasons this has now been pushed back a few minutes is because there were ongoing negotiations with presumably the Trump campaign.

00:02:09.000 We'll have to see if he receives some sort of slot in a prospective Trump administration for doing so, if Trump announces that he will put RFK in charge of some segment of his campaign, what concessions were made to RFK Jr.

00:02:20.000 to actually receive his support.

00:02:22.000 It would have been particularly foolish if RFK had in fact not endorsed Trump, because then you don't even get the effect of him dropping out.

00:02:29.000 Presumably there would have been some voters of RFK who shifted over to Trump, but RFK full-scale endorsing Donald Trump means that the people who support RFK now, which is likely a disproportionately Trump-friendly base considering that most of the Democrats who supported RFK did so because they didn't like Joe Biden and have now gone back to Kamala Harris.

00:02:47.000 It's not an insignificant thing that RFK Jr.

00:02:49.000 will be dropping out of the race and presumably endorsing Donald Trump.

00:02:53.000 It could have a significant impact on the race, in fact.

00:02:55.000 Now, Nate Silver suggests that it may be less than one percentage point in the swing states, but that may be a lot in a race that is coming down to bare numbers of votes.

00:03:06.000 If you're looking at the polling statistic in virtually every swing state, every swing state is now within margin of error.

00:03:13.000 All of them.

00:03:13.000 Pennsylvania is effectively dead even.

00:03:15.000 Michigan is about two points in favor of Harris.

00:03:17.000 Wisconsin is within one point in favor of Harris, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

00:03:22.000 RFK, in many of these polls, is driving 2, 3, 4 percent.

00:03:26.000 So it is not insignificant dropping out.

00:03:29.000 And according to Nate Silver, he says, we've long thought the conventional wisdom RFK would hurt Democrats was a little backward.

00:03:35.000 He says, maybe in the early going because of the Kennedy name, but his anti-establishment, sometimes verging on conspiratorial positions, were always a little Trumpy.

00:03:41.000 And even when Biden was on the ballot and RFK served as a free parking space for voters who had concerns about Biden's age, we found him taking votes about evenly from both candidates.

00:03:49.000 And he's not trying to outflank Democrats from the left.

00:03:52.000 He's not Cornel West or Jill Stein, neither of whom are dropping out of the race.

00:03:55.000 They're going to maintain in the race.

00:03:56.000 That is going to be particularly true after Kamala Harris's comments at the DNC, in which she had some warm words for Israel before, of course, turning around and then having some very warm words about self-determination for Palestinians who, if given the vote, would immediately elect Hamas.

00:04:10.000 According to Nate Silver's breakdown, he suggests that the polling averages will likely make a net difference of maybe 0.4 points.

00:04:17.000 That may be plenty in some of these states.

00:04:19.000 These states are extraordinarily tight.

00:04:21.000 More than that, this also drives a feeling of momentum back into the Trump campaign.

00:04:26.000 Trump has been effectively floundering in the water since Kamala Harris entered the race. 0.99

00:04:32.000 Until that point, Trump was sailing.

00:04:35.000 Obviously, Joe Biden dropping out drilled a hole directly in the bottom of the boat for Donald Trump.

00:04:40.000 Kamala Harris got this big upsurge in enthusiasm.

00:04:42.000 We went from 25-30% Democratic enthusiasm to 60-70% Democratic enthusiasm.

00:04:48.000 The numbers started to swing in her favor.

00:04:51.000 The late breaking polls suggest that, for example, Donald Trump may be trailing by as much as six points, but with RFK Jr.

00:04:59.000 out of the race, it may be somewhere between two and four points.

00:05:01.000 We're going to go live now to Arizona where we are about to hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:05:05.000 make his dropping out speech.

00:05:07.000 I'm sorry to keep everybody waiting.

00:05:14.000 16.

00:05:16.000 16 months ago in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States.

00:05:24.000 I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.

00:05:36.000 I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960.

00:05:44.000 And back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights.

00:05:50.000 The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars.

00:06:01.000 We were the party of labor, of the working class.

00:06:06.000 The Democrats were the party of government transparency, and the champion of the environment.

00:06:13.000 Our party was a bulwark against big money interests and corporate power.

00:06:18.000 True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

00:06:22.000 As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with.

00:06:32.000 It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.

00:06:43.000 When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.

00:06:56.000 The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision.

00:07:02.000 Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent because each state poses an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures.

00:07:16.000 I would need over a million signatures, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved.

00:07:23.000 And then I'd need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC.

00:07:32.000 The naysayers told us that we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible.

00:07:39.000 So the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong.

00:07:43.000 We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, We inspired a massive independent political movement.

00:07:52.000 More than 100,000 volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation's decline.

00:08:00.000 Many worked 10-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat.

00:08:04.000 They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation Healed of its divisions, they set up tables at churches and farmers' markets.

00:08:20.000 They canvassed door-to-door.

00:08:23.000 In Utah and in New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, to take off their gloves, and to sign legibly.

00:08:36.000 During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer.

00:08:41.000 Who cheerfully told me that he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117 degree heat.

00:08:49.000 To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money and senior citizens gave up part of their social security checks.

00:09:00.000 Our 50-state organization collected those millions of signatures and more.

00:09:04.000 No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

00:09:10.000 And so I want to thank all of those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat.

00:09:23.000 Your accomplishments were regarded as impossible.

00:09:28.000 You carried me up that glass mountain.

00:09:30.000 You pulled off a miracle.

00:09:33.000 You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done.

00:09:37.000 You have my deepest gratitude and I'm never going to forget that.

00:09:41.000 Not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because you love our country.

00:09:50.000 You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here.

00:09:54.000 It continues to survive in the press and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath a canvas of neglect.

00:10:04.000 And of official and institutional corruption.

00:10:08.000 Today I'm here to tell you that I will not allow your efforts to go to waste.

00:10:14.000 I'm here to tell you that I will leverage your tremendous accomplishments to serve the ideals that we share.

00:10:21.000 The ideals of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of health.

00:10:27.000 All the ideals that motivated my campaign.

00:10:31.000 I mean, here's a describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and with your hard labors.

00:10:39.000 Now, in an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election.

00:10:46.000 In a system that my father and my uncles thrived in, a system with open debates, with fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with fair primaries, and with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, Everything would be different.

00:11:13.000 After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates, both in favorability and also in head-to-head match-ups.

00:11:24.000 But I'm sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, and for our government, and most sadly at all for me, for the Democratic Party.

00:11:42.000 In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it.

00:11:48.000 Lacking confidence in its candidate, that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.

00:12:04.000 Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, The DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions.

00:12:23.000 It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.

00:12:33.000 It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

00:12:40.000 Then when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election.

00:12:56.000 They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.

00:13:06.000 My uncle and my father both relished debate.

00:13:10.000 They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas.

00:13:18.000 They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days.

00:13:33.000 This is profoundly undemocratic.

00:13:35.000 How are people to choose And they don't know whom they are choosing.

00:13:41.000 And how can this look to the rest of the world?

00:13:45.000 My father and my uncle were always conscious of America's image abroad because of our nation's role as the template for democracy, a role model for democratic processes, and the leader of the free world.

00:14:00.000 Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs I engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon nothing.

00:14:14.000 No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.

00:14:25.000 There, in Chicago, is a string of Democratic speakers Mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day.

00:14:36.000 Oh, who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?

00:14:41.000 In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.

00:14:48.000 I do interviews every day.

00:14:50.000 Many of you have interviewed me.

00:14:52.000 Anybody who asks gets to interview me.

00:14:55.000 Some days I do as many as 10.

00:14:57.000 President Trump, who actually was nominated and won an election, also does interviews daily.

00:15:06.000 How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?

00:15:14.000 We know the answers.

00:15:16.000 They did it by weaponizing the government agencies.

00:15:19.000 They did it by abandoning democracy.

00:15:21.000 They did it by suing the opposition.

00:15:25.000 And by disenfranchising American voters.

00:15:29.000 What most alarms me isn't how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates.

00:15:37.000 What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies.

00:15:46.000 When a U.S.

00:15:47.000 president colludes with or outright coerces Media companies to censor political speech.

00:15:53.000 It's an attack on our most sacred right of free expression.

00:15:57.000 And that's the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

00:16:04.000 President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin's 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press.

00:16:17.000 And that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.

00:16:22.000 But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot.

00:16:28.000 And our television networks expose themselves as Democratic Party organs.

00:16:34.000 Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high 20s, the DNC lied mainstream media networks Maintain a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me.

00:16:50.000 During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks.

00:17:01.000 In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews from me.

00:17:17.000 Those networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejoratives and defamatory smears.

00:17:27.000 Some of those same networks included with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.

00:17:34.000 Representatives of those networks are in this room right now, and I'll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility, the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and to challenge always the party in power.

00:17:56.000 Instead of maintaining that posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, Your institutions have made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.

00:18:12.000 You didn't alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.

00:18:18.000 The Democratic Party's censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power.

00:18:27.000 This week, a federal judge, Terry Doty, I've held my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House's censorship project, quote, the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.

00:18:43.000 His previous 155 page decision details how just 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden And his White House opened up a portal and then invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA, which is a censorship agency, it's the center of the censorship industrial complex, DHS, the IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.

00:19:21.000 Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards.

00:19:30.000 Two days after Judge Odie rendered his decision this week, Facebook was still attaching warning labels to an online petition Calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

00:19:44.000 They said that violates community standards, their community standards.

00:19:50.000 The mainstream media was once the guardian of the first amendment and democratic principles.

00:19:56.000 And it's joined this systemic attack on democracy.

00:20:01.000 It also, the media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combating misinformation.

00:20:08.000 But governments and oppressors don't censor lies.

00:20:15.000 They don't fear lies.

00:20:18.000 They fear the truth.

00:20:19.000 And that's what they censor.

00:20:22.000 And I don't want any of this to sound like a personal complaint, because it's not.

00:20:27.000 For me, It's all part of a journey and it's a journey that I signed up with.

00:20:36.000 But I need to make these observations because I think they're critical for us doing the thing that we need to do as citizens in a democracy to assess where we are in this country and what our democracy still looks like and the assumptions about U.S.

00:20:54.000 leadership around the globe.

00:20:56.000 And are we really still a role model for democracy in this country?

00:21:02.000 Or have we made it a kind of a joke?

00:21:08.000 Here's the good news.

00:21:10.000 While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn't shut down my ideas which have especially flourished among young voters and independent voters thanks to the alternative media.

00:21:24.000 Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler.

00:21:30.000 A spoiler is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning.

00:21:36.000 In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless systematic censorship and media control.

00:21:48.000 So I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House.

00:22:02.000 Furthermore, our polling consistently showed By staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the most existential issues.

00:22:19.000 Censorship, war, and chronic disease.

00:22:23.000 I want everyone to know that I am not terminating my campaign.

00:22:28.000 I am simply suspending it and not ending it.

00:22:36.000 My name will remain on the ballot in most states.

00:22:42.000 If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris.

00:22:51.000 In red states, the same will apply.

00:22:53.000 I encourage you to vote for me.

00:22:57.000 And if enough of you do vote for me, and neither of the major party candidates win 270 votes, which is quite possible, in fact, Today our polling shows them tying at 269 to 269.

00:23:10.000 And I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election.

00:23:17.000 But in about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I'm going to remove my name.

00:23:27.000 And I've already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me.

00:23:32.000 It's with a sense of victory.

00:23:35.000 And not defeat that I'm suspending my campaign activities.

00:23:40.000 Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, we changed the national political conversation forever.

00:23:48.000 Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, breaking our addiction to war, have moved to the center of politics.

00:23:57.000 I can say to all who have worked so hard the last year and a half, thank you for a job well done.

00:24:05.000 Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily.

00:24:11.000 And these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent.

00:24:20.000 And now, to throw my support to President Trump, the causes were free speech, a war in Ukraine, I've already described some of my personal experiences and struggles with the government's censorship-industrial complex.

00:24:41.000 I want to say a word about the Ukraine war.

00:24:43.000 The military-industrial complex has provided us with a familiar comic book justification, like they do on every war, that this one is a noble effort to stop a supervillain, Vladimir Putin, I'm invading Ukraine and then to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe.

00:25:05.000 In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S.

00:25:13.000 neocons or American global hegemony.

00:25:18.000 I'm not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine.

00:25:21.000 He had other options.

00:25:23.000 The war is Russia's predictable response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia. 0.51

00:25:33.000 A hostile act.

00:25:35.000 The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland.

00:25:49.000 This is a hostile, hostile act.

00:25:56.000 And that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia's offer to settle this war peacefully.

00:26:03.000 The Ukraine war began in 2014 when U.S.

00:26:07.000 agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine.

00:26:12.000 and installed a hand-picked pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

00:26:22.000 In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk Agreement, that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations.

00:26:32.000 And then in April of 2022, we wanted the war. 0.94

00:26:33.000 In April of 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine.

00:26:42.000 to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed and the Russians were withdrawing troops from Kiev and Donbass and Lugansk.

00:26:54.000 And that peace agreement would have brought peace to the region and would have allowed Donbass and Lugansk to remain part of Ukraine.

00:27:02.000 President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia.

00:27:10.000 His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America's purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army, to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world.

00:27:23.000 These objectives, of course, have nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine's sovereignty.

00:27:32.000 Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it's a victim of the West. 0.87

00:27:37.000 Since then, we have since tearing up that agreement, forcing Zelensky to tear up the agreement, we've squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth, as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids, and over 100,000 Russian kids, none of whom, all of whom we should be mourning, have died, and Ukraine's infrastructure is destroyed.

00:28:07.000 The war has been a disaster for our country as well.

00:28:10.000 We squandered nearly 200 billion dollars already.

00:28:14.000 And these are badly needed dollars in our communities, suffering communities all over our country.

00:28:21.000 The Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe's industrial base, which formed the bulwark of US national security.

00:28:31.000 A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much, much stronger deterrent to Russia And a Germany that is de-industrialized and turned into just an extension of U.S. 0.90

00:28:45.000 military base.

00:28:46.000 We've pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. 0.97

00:28:52.000 We're closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962.

00:28:59.000 And the neocons and the White House don't seem to care at all.

00:29:03.000 Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles.

00:29:07.000 And the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

00:29:14.000 This is a first-class calamity for our country.

00:29:19.000 Judging by her bellicose belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures.

00:29:34.000 And President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president.

00:29:44.000 This alone would justify my support for his campaign.

00:29:49.000 Last summer it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government, or to defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism.

00:30:10.000 But now one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own.

00:30:16.000 To the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration.

00:30:21.000 I'm speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

00:30:25.000 Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Callie Means called me on my cell phone.

00:30:34.000 I was then in Las Vegas.

00:30:37.000 Callie is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, for soil regeneration, And for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America's health and ruining our economy.

00:30:50.000 Gali has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, the NIH, the HHS, and the USDA that has caused the epidemic.

00:31:00.000 Allie had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects since the beginning, and those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years.

00:31:13.000 I was delighted when Callie told me that day that he had also been advising President Trump.

00:31:20.000 He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation.

00:31:30.000 He asked if I would take a call from the president.

00:31:33.000 President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later and I met with him the following day.

00:31:39.000 A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and close advisors in Florida.

00:31:48.000 In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.

00:31:57.000 In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party.

00:32:02.000 We talked about Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals.

00:32:06.000 That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely if need be on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.

00:32:23.000 I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences.

00:32:41.000 We are aligned with each other on other key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemic, securing the border.

00:32:51.000 Protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the US intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections.

00:33:09.000 Following my first discussion with President Trump.

00:33:13.000 I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris.

00:33:19.000 Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.

00:33:25.000 Suspending my candidacy is a hard-rending decision for me, but I'm convinced that it's the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation's vitality from the inside, and for finally protecting free speech.

00:33:43.000 I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children, above all things.

00:33:52.000 In case some of you don't realize how dire the condition is of our children's health and chronic disease in general, I would urge you to view Dr. Carlson's recent interview with Callie Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who is the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School.

00:34:13.000 This is an issue that affects all of us far more directly and urgently than any culture war issue and all the other issues that we obsess on and that are tearing apart our country.

00:34:24.000 This is the most important issue.

00:34:27.000 Therefore, it has the potential Bring us together.

00:34:32.000 So let me share a little bit about why I believe it's so urgent.

00:34:36.000 Today, two-thirds, we spend more on health care than any country on earth.

00:34:41.000 Twice what they pay in Europe.

00:34:44.000 And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world.

00:34:48.000 We're about 79th in Health outcomes behind Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Mongolia and other countries.

00:34:57.000 Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have.

00:35:00.000 And during the COVID epidemic, we have the highest body count of any country in the world.

00:35:06.000 We had 16% of the COVID deaths and we only have 4.2% of the world's population.

00:35:12.000 And CDC says that's because we are the sickest people on earth.

00:35:16.000 We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth.

00:35:19.000 And the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.

00:35:26.000 So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction.

00:35:33.000 And no other country has anything like this.

00:35:36.000 Two thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues.

00:35:42.000 50 years ago, that number was less than 1%.

00:35:45.000 So we've gone from 1% To 66%.

00:35:52.000 In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, and 50% of our children.

00:36:01.000 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus.

00:36:07.000 There were literally case reports done about them.

00:36:10.000 Obesity was almost unknown.

00:36:14.000 In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%.

00:36:18.000 Compared to 50% a year.

00:36:21.000 Half of Americans have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

00:36:25.000 When my uncle was president, I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively non-existent.

00:36:31.000 A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire career, a 40 or 50 year career.

00:36:38.000 Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic, and the mitochondrial disorder caused diabetes, also causing Alzheimer's, which is now classified as diabetes, and it's causing this country more than our military budget every year.

00:36:59.000 There's been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid.

00:37:04.000 ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger's, autism.

00:37:14.000 In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 1500.

00:37:19.000 Now autism rates in kids are 1 in 36, according to CDC nationally.

00:37:24.000 Nobody's talking about this.

00:37:27.000 One in every 22 kids in California has autism.

00:37:31.000 And this is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military.

00:37:43.000 What is happening to our country?

00:37:45.000 And why isn't this in the headlines every single day?

00:37:49.000 There's nobody else in the world that is experiencing this.

00:37:52.000 This is only happening in America.

00:37:56.000 About 18%, and by the way, you know, there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes likes to say.

00:38:06.000 There has been no change in screening.

00:38:09.000 This is a change in incidence.

00:38:12.000 In my generation, 70-year-old men, the autism rates are about 1 in 10,000.

00:38:20.000 In my kids' generation, 1 in 34.

00:38:23.000 I'll repeat, in California, 1 in 22.

00:38:28.000 Why are we letting this happen?

00:38:30.000 Why are we allowing this to happen to our children?

00:38:33.000 These are the most precious assets that we have in this country.

00:38:38.000 How can we let this happen to them?

00:38:40.000 About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease.

00:38:45.000 That's like one out of every five.

00:38:48.000 That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly.

00:38:55.000 Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old.

00:38:58.000 Young adult cancers are up 79%.

00:39:00.000 One in four American women is on antidepressant medication.

00:39:06.000 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis.

00:39:12.000 And 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children on SSRIs.

00:39:19.000 So what's causing this suffering?

00:39:22.000 I'll name two culprits.

00:39:24.000 First and the worst is ultra-processed food.

00:39:28.000 About 70% of American children's diet is ultra-processed.

00:39:32.000 That means industrial, manufactured in a factory.

00:39:36.000 These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains.

00:39:43.000 And seed oils.

00:39:44.000 Laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and 80s, deployed thousands of scientists to figure out chemicals, new chemicals, to make the food more addictive.

00:40:03.000 And these ingredients didn't exist 100 years ago.

00:40:08.000 Humans aren't biologically adapted to eat them.

00:40:12.000 Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in American processed foods.

00:40:19.000 The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, and our environment.

00:40:25.000 Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies.

00:40:33.000 The assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting.

00:40:38.000 Name just one problem.

00:40:39.000 Many of these chemicals increase estrogen.

00:40:43.000 Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America's puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900.

00:41:02.000 Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth.

00:41:08.000 And no, this isn't because of better nutrition.

00:41:10.000 This is not normal.

00:41:13.000 Breast cancer is also estrogen-driven, and it now strikes one in eight women.

00:41:18.000 We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults.

00:41:24.000 Considering the grievous human cause of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy.

00:41:33.000 But I'll say, It is crippling the nation's finances.

00:41:37.000 When my uncle was president, our country spent $0 on chronic disease.

00:41:43.000 Today, government health care spending is almost all for chronic disease.

00:41:49.000 And it's double the military budget.

00:41:51.000 And it is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget.

00:41:57.000 Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole.

00:42:00.000 It costs at least $4 trillion, five times our military budget.

00:42:05.000 And that's a 20% drag on everything we do and everything we aspire to.

00:42:13.000 Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately.

00:42:17.000 People who worry about DEI or about bigotry of any kind, this dwarfs anything.

00:42:25.000 We are poisoning the poor.

00:42:27.000 We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country. 0.99

00:42:33.000 The industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp launch program about 70% of food stamps and 70 or 77% of school lunches are processed foods.

00:42:46.000 There's no vegetables.

00:42:47.000 There's nothing that you would want to eat.

00:42:50.000 We are just poisoning the poor citizens and that's why they have the highest chronic disease burden of anybody, any demographic in our country and the highest in the world.

00:43:02.000 The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feedstock of processed

00:43:12.000 food industry.

00:43:14.000 These policies are destroying small farms and they're destroying our soils.

00:43:20.000 We give about, I think, eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco than we do to fruits

00:43:30.000 and vegetables.

00:43:31.000 It makes no sense.

00:43:33.000 We want a healthy country.

00:43:34.000 The good news is that we can change all this.

00:43:40.000 We can change it very, very quickly.

00:43:42.000 America can get healthy again.

00:43:45.000 To do that, we need to do three things.

00:43:48.000 First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies.

00:43:53.000 Second, we need to change incentives in our health care system.

00:43:56.000 And third, We need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.

00:44:01.000 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest.

00:44:06.000 These, these are the people, virtually everybody who says Joe Biden just appointed a new panel to NIH to decide.

00:44:22.000 The food recommendations, and they're all people who are from the industry.

00:44:26.000 They're all people who are from the processed food companies.

00:44:30.000 They're deciding what Americans, you know, hear is healthy.

00:44:35.000 And the recommendations on the food pyramid, and what goes to our school lunch programs, which go to the Swiss program, the food stamp programs, they're all corrupted and conflicted individuals. 0.66

00:44:52.000 These agencies, the FDA, USDA, CDC, all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations.

00:44:58.000 75% of the FDA's funding doesn't come from taxpayer, it comes from pharma.

00:45:04.000 And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies with President Trump's backing.

00:45:12.000 I'm going to change that.

00:45:13.000 We're going to staff these agencies with honored scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding.

00:45:21.000 We're going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.

00:45:29.000 A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry when American children Or adults get sick with a chronic condition.

00:45:38.000 They're put on medication for their entire life.

00:45:42.000 Imagine what will happen when Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month, and it's being recommended for children as young as six.

00:45:53.000 All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable, and barely even existed 100 years ago.

00:45:58.000 And 74% of Americans are obese.

00:46:03.000 The cost, if all of them took their ozempic prescription, is $3 trillion a year.

00:46:10.000 This is a drug that is made by Novo Nordisk, the biggest company in Europe.

00:46:17.000 It's a Danish company, and the Danish government does not recommend it.

00:46:22.000 It recommends change in diet to treat obesity and exercise.

00:46:27.000 And in our country, the recommendation now is for Ozempic to children at age six.

00:46:33.000 Novo Nord is the biggest company in Europe and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of what it's going to sell, of the Ozempic it's going to sell to America.

00:46:44.000 And we have the food lobbyists have a bill in front of Congress today that is backed by the White House, backed by Vice President Harris and President Biden, to allow this to happen.

00:46:58.000 This $3 trillion cost is going to bankrupt our country.

00:47:03.000 For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for every American family, three meals a day and eliminate diabetes altogether.

00:47:11.000 We're going to bring healthy food back to school lunches.

00:47:17.000 We're going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies.

00:47:23.000 We're going to get toxic chemicals out of our food.

00:47:25.000 We're going to reform the entire food system.

00:47:27.000 And for that, we need new leadership in Washington.

00:47:31.000 Because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big Ag, which are among the DNC's major donors.

00:47:43.000 Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue.

00:47:48.000 Four more years of democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and neocon power, and our children will be the ones who suffer most.

00:47:57.000 I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to.

00:48:03.000 It was essentially thrust upon me.

00:48:06.000 It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement.

00:48:10.000 I was a central leader at that time.

00:48:13.000 It was widely ignored by all the institutions, including the NGOs, who should have been protecting our kids against toxins.

00:48:22.000 It was an orphaned issue, and I had a weakness for orphans.

00:48:26.000 I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker.

00:48:29.000 I had 11 siblings, and I had 7 kids myself.

00:48:33.000 I was conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends.

00:48:37.000 And I watched these sick kids, these damaged kids.

00:48:41.000 In that generation, almost all of them are damaged.

00:48:45.000 And nobody in power seemed to care or to even notice.

00:48:49.000 For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity.

00:48:58.000 The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president.

00:49:04.000 Along with ending censorship in the Ukraine war.

00:49:07.000 It's the reason I've made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump.

00:49:15.000 This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends.

00:49:24.000 But I have the certainty that this is what I'm meant to do.

00:49:28.000 And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.

00:49:35.000 If I'm given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch chronic disease burden lift dramatically.

00:49:48.000 We will make Americans healthy again.

00:49:50.000 Within four years, America will be a healthy country.

00:49:54.000 We will be stronger, more resilient, More optimistic and happier.

00:49:59.000 I won't fail in doing this.

00:50:01.000 Ultimately, the future, however it happens, is in God's hands and in the hands of the American voters and those of President Trump.

00:50:11.000 If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.

00:50:22.000 This is a spiritual journey for me.

00:50:25.000 I reached my decision through deep prayer, through hard-nosed logic, and I asked myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America's children and restore national health?

00:50:40.000 I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror, knowing that I could have saved lives of countless children and reversed this country's chronic disease epidemic.

00:50:53.000 I'm 70 years old.

00:50:55.000 I may have a decade to be effective.

00:50:59.000 I can't imagine that President Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these dire problems.

00:51:08.000 After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.

00:51:16.000 President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy.

00:51:21.000 I'm choosing to believe that this time he will follow through.

00:51:25.000 His son, his biggest donors, his closest friends, and all support this objective.

00:51:32.000 My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there's even a small chance of saving these kids.

00:51:45.000 Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children Is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.

00:51:57.000 That's why I launched my campaign to unify America.

00:52:01.000 My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation.

00:52:07.000 Not so much because of any particular policies that they promoted, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country.

00:52:17.000 And to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by ideals.

00:52:24.000 They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans.

00:52:30.000 And to unify a national populist movement of Americans, blacks and whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans, inspired affection and love and high hopes and a culture of kindness That continue to radiate among Americans from their memory.

00:52:53.000 That's the spirit on which I ran my campaign and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump.

00:53:00.000 Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us.

00:53:06.000 The goals that we could achieve if only we weren't at each other's throats.

00:53:11.000 The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children.

00:53:18.000 If we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.

00:53:27.000 Thank you all very much.

00:53:34.000 And with that speech, RFK Junior steps out of the race and throws his endorsement to President Trump.

00:53:43.000 He apparently has made some sort of agreement with President Trump to enter his cabinet if President Trump is indeed re-elected.

00:53:50.000 There's a lot in that speech.

00:53:52.000 The first 15 minutes were a true barn burner.

00:53:54.000 I mean, really a barn burner.

00:53:55.000 The single most cohesive statement against the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris and the media of this entire campaign from anyone, that includes President Trump, that includes J.D.

00:54:02.000 Vance, it was a full-scale attack on the Democratic Party for rigging their primary process in order to cover the senility of Joe Biden, then elevating a person who's never won a primary vote, Kamala Harris, to a position of power.

00:54:14.000 He ripped on Kamala Harris for being smoke and mirrors, for not providing a single policy position. 1.00

00:54:19.000 He ripped on the media for denying not only him access to the airwaves, but also for hiding all of the things from Joe Biden's infirmity to Kamala Harris's lack of policy positions.

00:54:31.000 It was a frontal assault on that triumvirate.

00:54:34.000 The Democratic Party, the media, and the Democratic Party, the media, as well as the Institutional structures of the judiciary, for example, that he says have the governmental structures that have been used against him social media tech and all the rest.

00:54:55.000 A very powerful speech there.

00:54:56.000 Obviously, I disagree with many of the things that RFK says.

00:54:58.000 You can watch the interview that I did with RFK Jr.

00:55:02.000 just a few months back, and we talked about many of the things that he talked about right there.

00:55:05.000 He obviously has a passion for children's health when he is talking about the uncleanliness of the food supply, when he's talking about the generalized bad standards of health and safety in the United States.

00:55:17.000 However, here he was speaking with me.

00:55:19.000 Here was his critique of Joe Biden at the time.

00:55:23.000 I think there's a tremendous reason to hope in this country if we have the right leadership.

00:55:28.000 And I don't, the reason I'm running is because I just don't believe that President Biden, who I've known for many years and like personally, that he has any capacity to even see, you know, over the horizon and see which direction and provide the kind of leadership that we're going to need to make this transition.

00:55:49.000 He laid out several reasons in his speech why he believes that Donald Trump is a better pick for him than Kamala Harris.

00:55:55.000 Obviously, one of those reasons that the Democratic Party legitimately forced him out of the race very, very early.

00:56:00.000 They wouldn't even allow him on the primary ballot.

00:56:03.000 He suggested that his top priorities are protecting freedom of speech, That was a big priority for him and that meant not allowing the vitiation of the borderline between the government and the media that has happened under the Biden administration.

00:56:16.000 He mentioned bringing back manufacturing and protecting the dollar and of course his health priorities.

00:56:22.000 Now obviously he and I disagree very strenuously on the Ukraine-Russia war I think that his narrative is not in line with the facts about what Russia's actual ambitions are in Ukraine or why that war broke out.

00:56:33.000 But his generalized idea, which is that Donald Trump is better for peace in the world than Kamala Harris, is obviously and certainly true, and that is empirically true.

00:56:42.000 So he has stepped out of the race, he has endorsed Donald Trump, and he is going to be an attack dog, for sure, against Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party that are doing their best to avoid any and all scrutiny.

00:56:52.000 For his part, President Trump has made quick comment about RFK's endorsement.

00:56:57.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:56:59.000 We just had a very nice endorsement from RFK Jr., Bobby.

00:57:08.000 And I'll be talking about that.

00:57:09.000 We're heading out right after this.

00:57:11.000 We're going to be going to Arizona.

00:57:12.000 We'll be talking about that and a lot of other things, too.

00:57:16.000 But I just want to thank everybody.

00:57:18.000 And I want to thank Bobby.

00:57:19.000 That was very nice.

00:57:20.000 That was really very nice.

00:57:22.000 That's big.

00:57:23.000 He's a great guy.

00:57:24.000 Respected by everybody.

00:57:28.000 Okay, well, CNN, for its part, cut directly out of that speech, so we played you the whole speech.

00:57:32.000 CNN, about 10 minutes in, when they realized that he was going to turn his guns on CNN and the mainstream media and the legacy media's cover-up of the Kamala Harris campaign, their cover-up of Joe Biden's senility, they tuned out of that almost immediately because, again, they could not risk the exposure of The democratic media human centipede that has been created for this campaign.

00:57:53.000 I think that RFK Jr., for all of his flaws in my thinking with regard to some of his policy prescriptions, I think what he does bring is independence, obviously.

00:58:03.000 There are a bunch of independents who like RFK Jr.

00:58:05.000 He's somebody who's heterodox.

00:58:06.000 He's somebody who obviously has high levels of name recognition.

00:58:10.000 And he just moved some momentum back into Donald Trump's camp, particularly in the swing states.

00:58:15.000 And frankly, his plan is pretty smart, right?

00:58:17.000 His plan is that he's going to take his name off the ballot in the 10 most competitive states and leave it on the ballot in all the other states.

00:58:23.000 In the other states, he says it's not going to make a difference, and it will signify how many people are dissatisfied with both parties.

00:58:28.000 And that's a smart move moving forward for him.

00:58:30.000 And in the swing states, he says, I'm not going to be the spoiler.

00:58:33.000 So he is stepping out of the race, obviously.

00:58:35.000 That is the biggest news of the day.

00:58:38.000 In terms of the actual effect, it could dwarf the effect

00:58:41.000 of the actual Democratic National Convention, which of course was just a highly produced slick spectacle

00:58:45.000 in which we're all supposed to worship the altar of joy or some such.

00:58:49.000 But the theme that he hit and the theme that Trump has to hit,

00:58:51.000 the theme from here until election day is, every time Kamala Harris says,

00:58:55.000 we should do X, Y, or Z, the question should be from Donald Trump,

00:59:01.000 from RFK Jr., for everyone else.

00:59:03.000 So why didn't you do it?

00:59:05.000 So why didn't you do it?

00:59:06.000 You're the Vice President of the United States.

00:59:08.000 Hell, why don't you do it right now?

00:59:10.000 She's not answered a single question.

00:59:12.000 And again, RFK Jr.

00:59:14.000 did the same thing I've been doing on the show.

00:59:15.000 He literally named the number of days she has not done a sit-down press conference, she has not done a sit-down interview, she has not explicated any of her policies.

00:59:23.000 It is time to force her to actually answer questions about what she is going to be as president. 0.66

00:59:29.000 And we all know the answer.

00:59:30.000 It's going to be Biden Part 2.

00:59:30.000 So if you liked Biden Part 1, then maybe you're up for Biden Part 2, but with a younger face.

00:59:37.000 Or maybe if you're like most Americans, if you don't like the direction of the country right now, you might want to think about a change.

00:59:42.000 Even if you're not particularly fond of Donald Trump as a human being.

00:59:46.000 Alrighty, folks.

00:59:46.000 So we'll be back here on Monday.

00:59:48.000 I'm sure we'll have more updates as the weekend continues, if there are more updates to bring.

00:59:52.000 Again, you can't miss a minute.

00:59:53.000 There's one reason you should subscribe over at Daily Wire Plus, because we're constantly bringing you updates throughout this election season.

00:59:58.000 Man, this election season is moving fast and taking no prisoners.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 23, 2024

BREAKING: RFK Jr. Suspends Campaign

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