The Ben Shapiro Show - Is He The Last Real Democrat? | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:00:00.000 It's not just a tragedy, it's a crime against the child because the child has an independent interest.

00:00:05.000 What do you say to that?

00:00:06.000 The solution of having the state come in and dictate choices that the woman is making, that's not a good solution. 1.00

00:00:19.000 You don't believe that the child has an independent right to life, for example?

00:00:22.000 At any point during the pregnancy?

00:00:24.000 You know, you and I all differ on that.

00:00:25.000 And that's just a place where I differ.

00:00:27.000 And I understand your position.

00:00:29.000 I have tremendous respect for you.

00:00:31.000 For, you know, for having that kind of that absolute moral clarity on that position.

00:00:40.000 But I think it's more nuanced and complex than that.

00:00:46.000 Today we're joined by a figure whose family legacy is etched into Democratic Party and American history, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:00:52.000 RFK Jr.

00:00:53.000 is not just known for his storied lineage, but for his own advocacy of indigenous land rights and the environment, public health and political commentary.

00:01:00.000 A lawyer by training, Kennedy has been at the forefront of the environmental movement and has worked on issues related to vaccines through his organization, Children's Health Defense.

00:01:08.000 Born into the Kennedy dynasty on January 17, 1954, RFK Jr.

00:01:12.000 is the third of 11 children of the late Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.

00:01:17.000 RFK Jr.' early life was marked by personal and family tragedy,

00:01:21.000 including the assassinations of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and

00:01:24.000 his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He's overcome personal struggles,

00:01:27.000 including a battle with drug addiction and legal issues. However, Kennedy's resilience

00:01:31.000 is evident carving out his path and pursuing education at once prestigious

00:01:34.000 institutions like Harvard University and the University of Virginia, before

00:01:38.000 dedicating his career to environmental advocacy and legal practice. Kennedy is known

00:01:42.000 as a defender of the environment.

00:01:43.000 His work has set environmental legal standards that continue to influence policy and advocacy.

00:01:48.000 This commitment to environmental causes led him to prominent roles, including serving as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the board for the Waterkeeper Alliance.

00:01:58.000 Now, RFK Jr.

00:01:59.000 is making waves as a candidate in this presidential race.

00:02:02.000 First running as a Democrat in the primaries, then shifting his bid in October 23 to run as an independent, polling data as recently as April 10, 2024, placed him at 8.5% against incumbent President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, with Trump in the lead at 41.9% and Biden at 40.3%.

00:02:17.000 This would make him the single most successful third-party candidate since Ross Perot.

00:02:22.000 Today, we delve into RFK Jr.' 's vision for America and his hope for the Democratic Party, discussing a range of topics from chronic disease to AI, culture and entitlements to foreign policy, and his position on abortion.

00:02:33.000 Join us as we explore these critical issues with Robert F.

00:02:36.000 Kennedy Jr., seeking insights into his campaign and what it represents

00:02:39.000 for the future of American politics.

00:02:41.000 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you so much for joining us.

00:02:55.000 Really appreciate the time.

00:02:56.000 Well, thanks for having me here.

00:02:59.000 It's good to finally meet you, Ben.

00:03:01.000 Yeah.

00:03:01.000 So, let's start by talking a little bit about kind of the background stuff.

00:03:06.000 So, I mean, first of all, obviously, you're a Kennedy. 0.50

00:03:08.000 What was it like growing up in the Kennedy family?

00:03:13.000 Well, I grew up, you know, I grew up, we have a large Irish Catholic family.

00:03:19.000 I was very, very close-knit.

00:03:20.000 I had 29 cousins.

00:03:22.000 my and very kind of, you know, I had 29 cousins.

00:03:30.000 My grandfather and grandmother is Josephine Rose Kennedy.

00:03:35.000 I had nine kids, including my uncle.

00:03:40.000 Well, their eldest son was Joe Kennedy, who was killed during World War II.

00:03:44.000 Their eldest daughter was Kathleen, who was killed in an airplane crash immediately after the war.

00:03:53.000 Joe Kennedy was kind of the big hope for my grandfather.

00:03:57.000 He was his golden child, and he really never recovered from that death.

00:04:05.000 His next child was John Kennedy, who became the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.

00:04:13.000 My father was his brother's campaign manager and his attorney general.

00:04:22.000 Later, after my uncle was killed in 1963, my father ran for Senate, became senator from New York, and was killed running for president in 1968 in Los Angeles.

00:04:33.000 My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, was one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate.

00:04:41.000 He was in the Senate for over 50 years.

00:04:43.000 He has more legislation with his name on it than any senator in history.

00:04:50.000 My aunt, Eunice Schreiber, was the founder of Special Olympics, and so we were raised kind of in a milieu of public service and politics, and it was all around us.

00:05:03.000 I was at the convention in 1960 as a six-year-old boy, and we had front-row seats on everything that happened during that Camelot period.

00:05:18.000 I became, after my dad's death in 68, I was, my mom had 11 kids, so I had 10 siblings.

00:05:32.000 And my family was, at that point, after my dad was killed, it was very chaotic.

00:05:38.000 I began a 14-year experiment with drugs that turned into an addiction to heroin.

00:05:44.000 I got sober in 1928 and then became one of the, I would say, the leading environmental lawyers and activists in the country.

00:05:54.000 I founded or co-founded a group that became Waterkeeper Alliance that became the biggest water protection group in the world.

00:06:06.000 against polluters. And in I think around 2015 or 2016 I started another group

00:06:17.000 called Children's Health Defense that focuses on on children and public health.

00:06:22.000 So you know looking at you know the history of your family obviously it's

00:06:27.000 intertwined intimately with with Democratic Party politics.

00:06:31.000 You're running as an independent.

00:06:32.000 You're the highest polling independent since Ross Perot in the race right now.

00:06:36.000 So I think the obvious question for a lot of people is why aren't you running as a Democrat?

00:06:42.000 Or more importantly, now that Joe Biden has wrapped up the nomination, why aren't you simply supporting Joe Biden for the presidency?

00:06:48.000 Well, I began running as a Democrat.

00:06:51.000 You know, the reason I ran is because I saw the Democratic Party, my country, but also the Democratic Party, departing from a lot of the values that I was raised with.

00:07:01.000 People call it Kennedy Democrat Party.

00:07:04.000 I think if my father, my uncle, if you outlined There are top 20 policy priorities that I would check the box for each one of them.

00:07:16.000 And, you know, I'm kind of a traditional Kennedy Democrat, traditional liberal.

00:07:23.000 I believe in free speech.

00:07:24.000 I believe in the Constitution of the United States.

00:07:27.000 I believe that corporations should not dominate our government.

00:07:32.000 My inclination is to be against war and very suspicious of the rise of the military-industrial complex.

00:07:43.000 I'm an environmentalist.

00:07:45.000 I think particularly reducing the toxic exposures to our children Improving the sustainability of our soils, protecting water, clean air, all of those issues are Purple Mountain's majesty.

00:08:03.000 Those were the centerpieces of my career.

00:08:06.000 Environmental justice was another.

00:08:09.000 Civil rights was a priority for the Democratic Party.

00:08:15.000 And personal freedom.

00:08:18.000 And the party has, I think particularly since the Citizens United case in 2008, the party has become the party not of the middle class, which it was when I was growing up.

00:08:33.000 It was the cops and the firefighters, factory workers, but it has become the party of Wall Street and the party of pharma and the party of the military industrial complex.

00:08:46.000 And when I ran, you know, I was really, I would say, triggered to run during COVID when we saw the censorship happen and Democratic politicians sign on to censorship of speech in this country for the first time in our history.

00:09:02.000 And the support of the Democratic Party for the war in Ukraine, which I see as a contrived war, And that really prompted me to run.

00:09:22.000 But I ran as a Democrat and my intention was to try to call the Democratic Party back to its core values.

00:09:34.000 What I found was, and my campaign manager during the outset of the campaign was Dennis Kucinich, who's run for president a couple times himself and was kind of the conscience of the Democratic Party, a core figure and beloved figure for his integrity, for his courage.

00:09:56.000 And he said from the beginning, they're not going to let you run in this party and you're going to have to leave.

00:10:01.000 And I was the last person in my campaign to believe that.

00:10:04.000 But the Democratic Party began taking all kinds of steps to make sure that no matter, even if I won the primaries, that I still could not win the nomination.

00:10:16.000 They canceled primaries.

00:10:18.000 They passed a rule that's just one of 60 different things they did.

00:10:24.000 They passed a rule.

00:10:26.000 That any candidate who stepped into the state of New Hampshire during the election could not, that all of those, all of the delegates that that candidate won in New Hampshire would go to President Biden.

00:10:40.000 And there were a number of sort of transparent efforts to fix the election that came from the Democratic Party.

00:10:52.000 That prompted me ultimately to make the decision that if I wanted to make a serious run that I had to leave the party.

00:11:00.000 So I declared independent, I forget, maybe three months, four months ago.

00:11:06.000 And I've been running as an independent ever since.

00:11:08.000 So, you know, that answers why you're not backing President Biden.

00:11:11.000 But, you know, many of the issues on which you disagree with President Biden have a lot of crossover with President Trump, who obviously is running on the other side of the aisle.

00:11:17.000 So, you know, you're in a strange position where Democrats are suggesting that you're a President Trump plant in order to take votes away from Biden.

00:11:24.000 Some members of the Trump camp are claiming you're a Biden plant in order to take away votes from President Trump.

00:11:30.000 Why not support President Trump as an alternative to President Biden?

00:11:34.000 Yeah, I don't see it that way.

00:11:36.000 I think that President Biden and President Trump are much more like each other than most people.

00:11:43.000 And Democrats and Republicans like to acknowledge it.

00:11:47.000 And let me say this, because that's going to be a controversial statement.

00:11:52.000 I want to qualify it.

00:11:55.000 President Trump and President Biden are very different in their temperaments, and extremely different.

00:12:01.000 They're different in their professed ideologies.

00:12:05.000 They're different in their personalities and their rhetoric.

00:12:13.000 But the issues that they differ on are in a very, very narrow band.

00:12:18.000 They're mainly culture war issues.

00:12:20.000 They're abortion, it's guns, the border. 0.89

00:12:24.000 You know, woke ideology, those kind of transgenders, some of them very, very important issues.

00:12:31.000 You know, the border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential.

00:12:37.000 But the big issues at America that are existential to our country.

00:12:46.000 And really threaten all of us that are most concerned, all of us.

00:12:51.000 Neither of them has even taken positions on the debt, for example.

00:12:56.000 They're both equally bad on the debt.

00:12:57.000 The debt is the most important issue.

00:13:00.000 It's $34 trillion.

00:13:03.000 The service on that debt is now larger than our defense budget, and our defense budget is larger Then the next 10 defense budgets for the next 10 countries in the world all put together.

00:13:17.000 So that is, and you know, President Trump and President Biden are largely responsible individually for that debt.

00:13:25.000 President Trump ran up the biggest debt in history.

00:13:30.000 He put a trillion dollars on that number.

00:13:35.000 And that is more than all the presidents in 283 years of history before him.

00:13:43.000 And President Biden put almost that much on it.

00:13:49.000 Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that is collected in taxes is going to go to servicing the debt.

00:13:57.000 Within 10 years, and particularly if interest rates rise, Within 10 years, 100% of every dollar collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt.

00:14:10.000 This is really an existential crisis for our country, and you don't hear President Biden or President Trump ever talk about it, and they have no solutions for it.

00:14:20.000 I wanted to ask you about what your solutions are to that, because we can talk about the defense budget, but the reality is two-thirds of the American budget is entitlement programs that nobody wants to touch.

00:14:30.000 Well, the biggest cost is our medical costs, and the medical costs are preventable.

00:14:39.000 And, you know, this goes to another issue, which neither of them ever talk about, which I believe is the biggest issue, which is the chronic disease, even bigger than the budget.

00:14:48.000 which is existential, which is the chronic disease epidemic.

00:14:52.000 When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease.

00:14:57.000 Today, 60% have chronic disease.

00:15:00.000 And that, more than any country in the world.

00:15:03.000 I mean, one of the reasons we had, during COVID, we had the highest death rate, the highest body count

00:15:10.000 of any country in the world.

00:15:12.000 We had 16% of the COVID deaths globally were in the United States.

00:15:16.000 We only have 4.2% of the world's population.

00:15:21.000 And a lot of that was mismanagement.

00:15:23.000 But a lot of it was also because we have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.

00:15:28.000 The CDC says that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.

00:15:35.000 Now, you take these practices individually.

00:15:39.000 Juvenile diabetes, when I was a kid, A typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime, his entire career, his 40-year career.

00:15:51.000 Today, one out of every three children who walk into his office is pre-diabetic or diabetic.

00:15:56.000 The cost of diabetes now in this country is higher than the defense budget.

00:16:02.000 One disease, and that doesn't even include Alzheimer's, which we now know, which has now been reclassified as type 3 diabetes.

00:16:13.000 Alzheimer's coming from the same cause that's causing the diabetes, which is food.

00:16:20.000 Poisoned food.

00:16:21.000 We have a thousand ingredients in our food that are banned in Europe and other countries.

00:16:26.000 And they're killing us, literally.

00:16:29.000 The autism rate in our country has gone from 1 in 10,000.

00:16:32.000 1 in 10,000 in my generation, 70-year-old men, 1 in 10,000 has full-blown autism.

00:16:39.000 In my kids' generation, it's one in every 34 kids, according to CDC, one in every 22 boys.

00:16:46.000 So, this is a national security issue.

00:16:51.000 It's the cost.

00:16:53.000 Mark Blackson just published a peer-reviewed publication that shows that the cost of treating autism alone is a trillion dollars a year.

00:17:04.000 This is, like I say, this is existential for us.

00:17:08.000 And then there's all these other diseases that suddenly appeared around 1989.

00:17:14.000 All these allergic diseases, food allergies, peanut allergies, eczema, asthma exploded.

00:17:21.000 We had that early.

00:17:21.000 You know, when I was a kid, I knew people with asthma.

00:17:26.000 But today they're in every classroom.

00:17:27.000 There's albuterol inhalers in every classroom.

00:17:30.000 There's EpiPens in every classroom.

00:17:33.000 Nobody's talking about this and explaining why the neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome.

00:17:42.000 Narcolepsy, ASD, autism, these are diseases that I never heard of when I was a kid.

00:17:51.000 Nobody ever knew about them.

00:17:52.000 They were unknown to any except for esoteric specialties in the medical profession.

00:18:01.000 The autoimmune diseases that suddenly exploded.

00:18:05.000 I mean, the great bulk of my followers are young people, and I do selfie lines after every speech, and one at a time they come up to me and say, I have POTS, I have, you know, ADHD, I have all these autoimmune diseases.

00:18:21.000 And rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, things that we never heard of when I was a kid, and suddenly they're exploded.

00:18:30.000 And then all of these other, you know, the autoimmune and the allergic diseases and neurological diseases and obesity.

00:18:40.000 My uncle was president.

00:18:43.000 13% of kids are obese, today it's almost 50%.

00:18:47.000 So, you know, and that, this is killing us as a country in so many ways.

00:18:52.000 Not only national security and our ability to find people who will actually defend this, who are in shape enough to defend this country, but the cost of it is 4.3 trillion a year.

00:19:05.000 So it is five times our defense budget.

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00:20:07.000 So, what's the solution to that?

00:20:09.000 I mean, it sounds like tremendous regulation of the food industry.

00:20:12.000 Well, that's not the way I would do it.

00:20:14.000 I think that that's very hard to do.

00:20:16.000 I think even if, you know, it ought to be fixable through regulation, but politically that, because of the control that the food industry and the, you know, big ag The food industry and, you know, the big companies that own them all, like BlackRock and the State Street Vanguard, which own both the food processors that are poisoning us and the pharmaceutical companies that are making a killing on the disease.

00:20:43.000 They all want to keep us sick from just a pure financial incentive.

00:20:49.000 And it's hard because they own Congress.

00:20:51.000 They control the regulatory agencies.

00:20:54.000 All those agencies are captured.

00:20:55.000 But there's ways that you can do it.

00:20:57.000 And the way that you do it is through good science.

00:21:02.000 If you have good science, and that's why NIH will not study any of these diseases,

00:21:08.000 the ideology of these diseases, NIH will not because they know

00:21:12.000 that if they try to figure out what's causing the obesity epidemic,

00:21:17.000 they're going to end up offending the high fructose corn syrup industry

00:21:24.000 and other industries that are so entrenched in our political system and our economic system

00:21:32.000 and our financial system that none of the regulatory agencies

00:21:36.000 want to lift up that rock.

00:21:39.000 What's causing the autism epidemic?

00:21:41.000 What's causing the diabetes epidemic and all these allergic disease epidemic?

00:21:47.000 They won't look at it.

00:21:48.000 So, and if you are a college researcher, And you try to do that research, NIH will shut you down.

00:21:56.000 NIH controls the university systems because NIH has a $42 billion budget.

00:22:04.000 It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists, most of whom are at American universities and the medical schools.

00:22:13.000 And the budget of NIH dwarfs the budget of those medical schools, so they have to comply.

00:22:20.000 So nobody will look at this issue.

00:22:24.000 What I'm going to do as soon as I get in there, I'm going to go down to NIH, and I'm going to say, you know, NIH, when I was a kid, NIH was 10 minutes from my home, and I used to go there because I had friends who were scientists there.

00:22:40.000 I was fascinated by science when I was a kid, and I would go look at the rats and the mice and the guinea pigs and the monkeys.

00:22:50.000 And the microscopes, et cetera.

00:22:54.000 At that time in the history, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency in the world.

00:23:00.000 There were, in fact, a lot of these new countries.

00:23:04.000 After World War II, 122 new countries were formed.

00:23:07.000 And a lot of those were new democracies that were modeled on the US.

00:23:13.000 But they didn't have the budget to have their own scientific agency.

00:23:16.000 So they would say in their constitutions, Um, anything approved by FDA or NIH is approved in our country.

00:23:25.000 So the whole world was relying on our science and with good reason.

00:23:29.000 We had gold standard science at that time.

00:23:32.000 And in 1980, we passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act.

00:23:38.000 And that law allowed NIH scientists and NIH as an agency to collect royalties on any new drug that it helped develop, including the scientists who worked on that drug.

00:23:49.000 So, for example, the Moderna vaccine, there are between four and six individuals at NIH who will get $150,000 a year as long, forever, as long as that mRNA technology is on the market.

00:24:05.000 NIH owns half the patent.

00:24:08.000 And they get 50%.

00:24:10.000 So if you're a regulator working for these agencies, and you're making royalties, and you're paying for your mortgage, and your boat, and your alimony, and your kid's education, based upon the performance of that drug in the marketplace, because you helped develop it, it tends to subvert the regulatory function of the agency, because you have the regulators who are supposed to be looking for problems in that drug, who are instead I'm making sure they don't see any problems.

00:24:41.000 So, assuming that you can go in and clean out NIH and restore... I'll summarize this.

00:24:48.000 What I'm going to do is I'm going to redirect the science away.

00:24:53.000 NIH has now become the primary incubator for new pharmaceutical products.

00:24:57.000 And then it spends a lot of its time studying infectious disease, doing gain-of-function studies, and we see where that ends up, etc.

00:25:06.000 What I'm going to say to them is, look, we're going to mainly give infectious disease and drug development a little bit of a break for a couple of years, and we're going to find out what's causing the chronic disease epidemic in this country.

00:25:20.000 And we're going to start doing studies on all of these injuries and linking them.

00:25:27.000 We know there's an environmental toxin.

00:25:29.000 You know, genes do not cause epidemics.

00:25:33.000 They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.

00:25:36.000 And there's a famous toxicologist called Phil Landrigan who looked at this issue and he said, you know, this problem began in 1989.

00:25:46.000 In fact, EPA, Congress said to EPA, why here did the autism epidemic begin?

00:25:51.000 And EPA came back and said, it's a red line, 1989.

00:25:54.000 Well, a lot of these diseases exploded in 1989.

00:25:57.000 So Phil Landrigan said, let's look at what it could be.

00:26:03.000 And he said, you need a toxic exposure that became ubiquitous in 1989.

00:26:10.000 It affected every demographic from Cubans in Key Biscayne to Inuit in Alaska.

00:26:15.000 And that it has other characteristics.

00:26:17.000 Neurological injuries affect boys at a 4 to 1 ratio to girls.

00:26:21.000 So there's other kind of signals that you can look for.

00:26:25.000 So he went through all of the exposures that began that year.

00:26:30.000 I mean, all of the exposures that followed that approximate timeline.

00:26:37.000 And he came down with about 13 things, and they're, you know, it's predictable things.

00:26:42.000 It's glyphosate, it's, you know, fluoride.

00:26:46.000 Glyphosate was an herbicide.

00:26:49.000 It became ubiquitous at that time.

00:26:51.000 Neonicotinoid pesticides, atrazine, aspartame, you know, the food sweetener.

00:27:00.000 High fructose corn syrup, cell phone radiation, PFOAs, PFASs, this is a class of what they call forever chemicals.

00:27:11.000 I've litigated a lot on it and they are, you know, they're in all of our, put around that timeline in all of our children's pajamas, furniture, et cetera.

00:27:20.000 And so Landrigan came down with this list and said, it's gotta be one of these things.

00:27:25.000 It's easy science to do.

00:27:27.000 But NIH won't let anybody do it, and what I'm going to do is do it.

00:27:32.000 Once you figure it out, and once you have a threshold of scientific studies, of high-quality scientific studies, animal studies, bench studies, clinical studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, then you pass a threshold, a legal threshold called DALBERT.

00:27:54.000 In the federal courts, and there is an analogous threshold in the state courts, that threshold says until you have a certain critical mass of science, you cannot bring to a jury any claim that a certain exposure caused a certain injury.

00:28:11.000 Once you have about 15 or 20 really good studies, then you set the lawyers loose.

00:28:17.000 And if you have, you know, 15 studies that say high fructose corn syrup is one of the major causes of the diabetes epidemic, And you have lawyers who can step in and say, I'm representing 10,000 kids who have juvenile diabetes and shouldn't, and we can litigate them.

00:28:35.000 Now, people said to me, before we did the Monsanto cases, they said, you can never regulate glyphosate out of existence.

00:28:44.000 It's too powerful.

00:28:45.000 It's got Cargill and Monsanto and, you know, the whole Senate Agricultural Committee that will go to the wall and die on that hill.

00:28:54.000 But we were able to win a $13 billion settlement, three judgments that ended up with this big settlement.

00:29:03.000 We won three jury trials in San Francisco.

00:29:05.000 The first one, $289 million.

00:29:07.000 The second one, $89 million.

00:29:10.000 The third one, we asked the jury for a billion, and they gave us $2.2 billion.

00:29:15.000 Then Monsanto settled the case for $13 billion.

00:29:19.000 At that time, 40,000 cases.

00:29:20.000 We were going to try one at a time.

00:29:23.000 Monsanto also agreed to remove glyphosate from all gardening products.

00:29:28.000 So you can get them to do it if you have the science out there.

00:29:32.000 So obviously this is an issue on which you're really passionate.

00:29:34.000 Another sort of existential issue or something you've discussed in existential terms, unless I'm wrong and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is climate change.

00:29:42.000 So what are your opinions on climate change?

00:29:44.000 Obviously that is a hot button issue.

00:29:45.000 Let me just finish what I was saying because there are a number of existential issues which are One of those is polarization in our country.

00:29:55.000 And, you know, there's this toxic polarization that has us at all each other's throats.

00:30:00.000 And nobody can really say, particularly with the social media algorithms feeding on that and driving us further and further apart.

00:30:08.000 You know, we have not been so divided since the American Civil War.

00:30:13.000 That's another issue.

00:30:14.000 The state of our soils is another existential issue that we're going to hit a wall with just in soil productivity, but a lot of other.

00:30:25.000 These are all issues that are ultimately the result of a corrupted system, a merger of state and corporate power, that no matter who the president is, These, that capture, that corruption virus system is going to spit out bad policies on this issue.

00:30:44.000 Keep running up the debt, keep destroying our soil, keep poisoning our children, keep the chronic disease epidemic and no way to solve it.

00:30:53.000 That's why you can vote for Trump and Biden.

00:30:56.000 you're going to get more of the same. We already knew they were both at four years in there and

00:31:00.000 they didn't change any of these things. They're not able to avert this train that's coming

00:31:06.000 at us from all these different directions. They won't even talk about it because those policies

00:31:11.000 are the products of a corrupt system and I have the capacity to fix that system.

00:31:17.000 So when you look at that system, I mean, obviously you're looking at a variety of areas in the Congress, but it seems like the vast majority of rulemaking and corruption that happens is actually not, I think, the kind of baseline theory that members of Congress are getting paid off as much as it is that you have a gigantic regulatory state where regulatory capture is really easy.

00:31:34.000 The Congress people aren't even reading the bills.

00:31:35.000 I mean, it's agencies Or committees that are largely having these things written by outside lawyers or by outside forces.

00:31:42.000 So you become president of the United States.

00:31:44.000 What do you do about the size and scope of the executive branch?

00:31:46.000 It's completely unwieldy.

00:31:47.000 You have enormous numbers of people who are supposed experts in their particular fields.

00:31:51.000 How do you clean that out?

00:31:54.000 You do it one agency at a time, and I've sued almost all these agencies.

00:31:58.000 I've sued NIH, CDC, FDA, EPA.

00:32:02.000 I've sued USDA multiple times.

00:32:06.000 And, you know, almost all the other agencies are coming that are the problem.

00:32:14.000 When you sue them, you get a PhD in how to unravel corporate capture.

00:32:19.000 And, you know, they didn't start out corrupted.

00:32:24.000 They started out idealistic.

00:32:25.000 They started out models for the rest of the world.

00:32:28.000 They started out serving the public interest.

00:32:30.000 And they didn't always do that perfectly, because bureaucracies make mistakes.

00:32:36.000 But you can restore those cultures, and I can tell you how to do it.

00:32:41.000 Depending on which agency it is, you do it in different ways.

00:32:45.000 You stop the profiteering.

00:32:48.000 The FDA gets 50% of its budget from the pharmaceutical company.

00:32:52.000 Of course that's not going to work.

00:32:55.000 NIH scientists should not be able to collect royalties.

00:32:57.000 They're revolving doors.

00:33:01.000 And amplify and put corporate capture on steroids. 0.95

00:33:05.000 We have to get rid of those.

00:33:06.000 A lot of this I can do with executive order.

00:33:09.000 There's also, in these agencies, there are individuals at high levels who have corrupted them.

00:33:16.000 And I'm not just talking about the agencies that I've visited, but also the CIA.

00:33:20.000 Mike Pompeo, I had dinner with Mike Pompeo about four months ago.

00:33:25.000 in Las Vegas and he said to me, he said, my one biggest regret in life

00:33:30.000 is that I didn't clean up the CIA when I had a chance when I was running it.

00:33:34.000 And he said, virtually the entire upper echelon of that agency are made up of individuals

00:33:40.000 who do not believe in the democratic institutions of the United States of America.

00:33:46.000 Now my daughter-in-law, Emerilus Fox Kennedy, who's running my campaign, spent her career 0.98

00:33:53.000 as a Clinton-signed agent for the CIA.

00:33:56.000 She says, yeah, that's right, there's 29,000 people who are employed by that agency

00:34:01.000 and most of them are patriots and good public servants, but the upper echelons are controlled

00:34:07.000 by the military-industrial complex and people who would do its bidding.

00:34:12.000 The same is true in NIH.

00:34:14.000 When I sued Monsanto, when we sued Monsanto, we got discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division at EPA for over a decade was a guy called Jess Rowland.

00:34:32.000 Who was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, and he was taking his orders from the highest officials of Monsanto to kill studies, to fix studies, to hire these, bring in these phonies, mercenary scientists, we call them by ostitutes, to ghostwrite studies, and that he was the one that kept those studies.

00:34:54.000 His job was to make sure no study got done that would look at the links between Glyphosate and cancer.

00:35:02.000 I can tell you who those individuals are at CDC.

00:35:05.000 Colleen Boyle, Frank DiStefano.

00:35:07.000 I know the names because I've dealt with them.

00:35:10.000 I know who has to be moved.

00:35:14.000 And, you know, President Trump wanted to do this.

00:35:16.000 President Trump came in saying, I'm going to drain the swamp.

00:35:20.000 But he didn't know how to do it.

00:35:21.000 He's confronted by this big bureaucracy.

00:35:24.000 And at every level of these, you know, some of these are 60,000 people working for these agencies.

00:35:30.000 And at all sort of higher levels of that bureaucracy you have individuals who are capable of committing civil disobedience that will turn off the lights some will flood the streets and that will embarrass the

00:35:46.000 president.

00:35:46.000 So they tiptoe around these agencies and they never do anything about it

00:35:50.000 because they don't know how to do it.

00:35:52.000 But I know how. I know exactly what to do.

00:35:54.000 And I know how to do it at a granular level.

00:35:57.000 And President Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.

00:36:00.000 And he brings John Bolton in to run the NSA.

00:36:07.000 That is like putting a swamp creature in charge of draining the swamp.

00:36:13.000 He brought Scott Gottlieb, and Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical lobbyist.

00:36:19.000 Scott Gottlieb is a business partner of Pfizer.

00:36:22.000 President Trump appoints him to run the FDA, and Scott Gottlieb gets in there and does a $100 billion favor for Pfizer.

00:36:30.000 When it comes to the regulatory capture, I think that even President Trump would admit at this point that he would have to do a much better job in his second term with regard to staffing.

00:36:40.000 But why do you give him a second term if he's messed it up so badly the first time?

00:36:45.000 He said he was going to do that the first time.

00:36:48.000 If I had been president, I would have done it.

00:36:51.000 And even when he knew what was wrong, he said, well, I'll never lock down this country.

00:36:58.000 But he got rolled by his bureaucrats.

00:37:00.000 I mean, I think that a lot of people who support President Trump, myself included, will believe that he got rolled by his own state.

00:37:05.000 And that's why 2020 was a disaster.

00:37:07.000 We need somebody in there who will not get rolled by their bureaucrats.

00:37:10.000 This is what my uncle, you know, when my uncle was president

00:37:14.000 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were 13 people on the excomm committee

00:37:19.000 who were, you know, living at the White House, including my father,

00:37:23.000 who who who got a cut at the White House.

00:37:26.000 And we didn't see him for 13 days, even though we're only 14 minutes from the White House, my

00:37:32.000 home at Hickory Hill.

00:37:33.000 My father was there and Bob McNamara, Dean Acheson, all the great beards from the diplomatic corps and the and

00:37:42.000 the, you know, Curtis O'Mea and Louis Lemons are from the Joint Chiefs of

00:37:46.000 Staff.

00:37:46.000 Well, they were all meeting sometimes 24 hour day on and off.

00:37:51.000 And the first time they voted, there was an 11 to 13 vote that we invade Cuba and we bomb the missile sites. 0.55

00:37:59.000 There were 64 Russian missile sites that the Russians had secretly erected there.

00:38:05.000 My uncle said to them, But are there warheads, active warheads on those missiles?

00:38:13.000 The CIA didn't know.

00:38:16.000 And my uncle said, are the gun crews Cuban or are they Russian?

00:38:21.000 The CIA said, we don't know, but we think they're Russian.

00:38:23.000 How many people in the gun crews?

00:38:26.000 Up to 600 on each gun crew, 64 gun crews. 0.99

00:38:31.000 My uncle said, if we bomb them and kill all those Russians, Isn't Khrushchev going to have to come to Berlin? 0.98

00:38:39.000 And they said to him, we don't think he has the guts to do that. 0.99

00:38:43.000 My uncle said, I'm not going to take that risk.

00:38:47.000 He asked them for the aerial photos and he examined them himself.

00:38:52.000 He went granular, and then the last day, after the 13th day, this is the 13th most dangerous day in history.

00:38:58.000 There are many times during that period that many of those people believe that they may wake up dead the next morning, because a nuclear exchange would wipe out the East Coast.

00:39:08.000 The last day my uncle took a vote, and he already knew what he was going to do with the embargo.

00:39:14.000 He said, he took a vote, he said, this is the final vote, and they voted eight to six to invade.

00:39:23.000 And my uncle said, the six is habit.

00:39:26.000 So what he was saying is, I'm listening to you, you're experts, I value your advice, but I'm going to make up my own mind about what's best for this country.

00:39:37.000 Unfortunately, President Trump has shown that he doesn't have that capacity.

00:39:42.000 Well, when it comes to deregulation and regulatory policy, that's one aspect of being president, obviously, and it's a very important aspect of being president.

00:39:47.000 When it comes to general policy, that's another aspect.

00:39:50.000 And so I want to talk about some of your kind of general political policies, not just the implementation side, but with regard to, say, things like climate change or tax policy.

00:39:59.000 So you're the President of the United States.

00:40:01.000 What does America's tax policy look like?

00:40:03.000 Because the reality is that Well, we're talking about solving health problems that down the road will have an impact on Medicaid or Medicare spending.

00:40:10.000 The reality is that the tax burden on the United States is actually more progressive than it is in virtually any other country.

00:40:16.000 It is very stacked on the top, much more than Europe.

00:40:19.000 Europe actually has a much significantly higher tax base.

00:40:23.000 The highest rate kicks in much lower in terms of income in Europe.

00:40:27.000 Unless you mean to Radically increased taxes on the middle class, for example.

00:40:33.000 There is no way to continue to sustain the kind of spending that we're doing on into the future.

00:40:38.000 There are really only two things that can be done.

00:40:39.000 One is a massively booming economy, and the other is to raise the tax rates.

00:40:43.000 When you look at the state of the American economy, what are the chief issues for you?

00:40:46.000 What does a good tax policy look like?

00:40:50.000 Well, first of all, I think we can cut a lot of costs.

00:40:52.000 We can cut costs.

00:40:53.000 We can cut our military budget almost in half.

00:40:56.000 We can cut our military down to about $500 billion a year.

00:40:59.000 Okay, so explain that to me.

00:41:01.000 Why would we do that given the threats of China, given the threats of Russia, given an increasingly aggressive world?

00:41:07.000 We, you know, we are our military.

00:41:12.000 expenditures and our posturing around the world makes it a dangerous world.

00:41:19.000 The military-industrial complex, which controls a lot of US foreign policy, is looking for

00:41:27.000 war.

00:41:28.000 You say Russia and China are aggressive, and I think clearly, particularly China, wants 0.59

00:41:33.000 to dominate the world.

00:41:34.000 It doesn't want to do it in a hot war with us.

00:41:38.000 China has one and a half bases around the world.

00:41:40.000 Russia has two bases.

00:41:43.000 We have 800.

00:41:45.000 Yes, I mean, we have been in the post-war era, the global guarantor of, for example, freedom of the sea.

00:41:51.000 But have we done that really?

00:41:52.000 I mean, look what's happening.

00:41:57.000 First of all, they don't have freedom of speech in Europe anymore.

00:41:59.000 I mean, look at the algorithms now.

00:42:02.000 If you criticize an mRNA vaccine in Europe, you get a multi-million dollar fine.

00:42:07.000 That's not freedom of speech.

00:42:08.000 I mean, I certainly agree there are limitations on freedom of speech in Europe.

00:42:10.000 Those are not comparable to freedom of speech limitations in China.

00:42:14.000 I mean, in China, if you oppose the regime, you go to a gulag.

00:42:16.000 Yeah, I'm not saying we should adopt the Chinese system here.

00:42:22.000 What I'm saying is, does China want a war with us?

00:42:25.000 No, of course not.

00:42:26.000 What they want... China wants economic domination in the world, and it's doing that by adopting the policy that my uncle John Kennedy thought that we should adopt, which is not to reject military power, but which is counterproductive. 0.55

00:42:44.000 To project economic power abroad.

00:42:47.000 And the Chinese in doing that, because they have done that, we've spent eight trillion dollars over the past 20 years.

00:42:56.000 Bombing ports, bridges, schools, universities, hospitals.

00:43:02.000 Here's what we got for it.

00:43:04.000 Four of that, four trillion of that went to Iraq.

00:43:07.000 Iraq is now worse off than we found it. 1.00

00:43:10.000 Iraq, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. 0.98

00:43:13.000 Iraq is now an incoherent collection of battling Shia and Sunni death squads.

00:43:18.000 It is a proxy of Iran, which is exactly the foreign policy outcome that we were trying to prevent. 0.95

00:43:25.000 What happened in Gaza with Hamas would never have happened if we hadn't destroyed Iraq in the first place, 1.00

00:43:31.000 because Saddam was the bulwark in that region against Iranian expansion, and now there is no bulwark.

00:43:40.000 Now we have to send troops and put bases in Syria where we do not belong to make up for the vacuum we created 0.92

00:43:48.000 by destroying Saddam Hussein.

00:43:50.000 We created ISIS. 0.98

00:43:52.000 That is not good for our national security.

00:43:55.000 We started a war in Syria that drove four million refugees into Europe and destabilized 0.99

00:44:01.000 every democracy in Europe and created, almost certainly, without that, Brexit wouldn't have

00:44:08.000 happened.

00:44:09.000 So this is what we got for those military expenditures.

00:44:14.000 Americans are less safe.

00:44:15.000 The rise of BRICS means that the... 0.97

00:44:17.000 I think there'd be very few people who disagree at this point on the war in Iraq.

00:44:22.000 But what I'm talking about is the situation right now.

00:44:24.000 But what you're trying to do is defend these, you know, these huge military expenditures.

00:44:28.000 What I'm saying is they do not make us safer.

00:44:31.000 But these are two separate issues.

00:44:32.000 The use of the military and the military expenditures are not quite the same thing.

00:44:35.000 Meaning Ronald Reagan, and by the way, your uncle, did pursue military buildup vis-a-vis the Soviets.

00:44:40.000 It's the deployments of the military that you're disagreeing with, not necessarily the military buildup.

00:44:43.000 Well, no, what I would say is if you got the weapons, you're going to use them.

00:44:47.000 And, you know, you look at the Ukraine and, you know, the excuses. 0.94

00:44:52.000 and Mitch McConnell and a lot of the Republican senators are now saying is they're saying don't

00:44:57.000 worry we need the Ukraine war because our weaponry was getting old and we were inventorying in

00:45:05.000 warehouses and we're unloading all that stuff on there so that we can make new stuff and that's 0.78

00:45:12.000 I find that to be a foolish argument.

00:45:16.000 Listen, I watch what's happening on IC. 0.94

00:45:20.000 Who owns all the military contractors who are making a profit north of Grumman?

00:45:28.000 Lockheed Martin.

00:45:29.000 General Dynamics.

00:45:31.000 They're all owned by BlackRock.

00:45:34.000 So BlackRock is now making a profit destroying Ukraine.

00:45:38.000 And who got the contract?

00:45:39.000 To be fair, BlackRock did not invade Ukraine.

00:45:42.000 I mean, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the question that I would ask is when it comes to Ukraine— But why did we feel like—that war, in my view, is a war about the expansion of NATO, our right to expand NATO into Ukraine, and was something that we promised that we would never do.

00:45:58.000 I mean, that's factually untrue.

00:45:59.000 We did not actually promise the Russians that we would never expand NATO.

00:46:02.000 Well, we did.

00:46:03.000 Gorbachev himself has said that this is not the case.

00:46:05.000 Yeah, well, but there have been all kinds of analyses that look at—I mean, listen, I'm not suggesting that Putin doesn't care.

00:46:13.000 Putin certainly fears it.

00:46:14.000 Putin admits that he told Gorbachev, when Gorbachev said, you know, the question is

00:46:21.000 not whether we made the promise, Ben, whether it was memorialized in a proper writing that

00:46:26.000 memorialized in a proper writing that it was part of an understood agreement.

00:46:29.000 it was part of an understood agreement.

00:46:31.000 It was an agreement at that time.

00:46:33.000 He unified, Gorbachev allowed the unification of Germany under NATO, which was a huge concession

00:46:39.000 for him that made it so.

00:46:41.000 He was loathed in Russia ever since.

00:46:43.000 And the one thing he said is that to President Bush and James Baker and John Major at that

00:46:50.000 time is, I want your agreement that you'll never move NATO to peace.

00:46:54.000 Gorbachev has denied this, but beyond that, the real question is, let's assume that all

00:46:58.000 that's true.

00:46:59.000 Let's assume this is about fear of Ukraine joining NATO.

00:47:02.000 So first of all, Zelensky himself, when he was a comedian, made all sorts of shorts about

00:47:06.000 the fact that NATO actually kept flirting with Ukraine.

00:47:09.000 I agree the West's policy with regards to NATO and Ukraine was flirtatious, but it never reached the point of consummation, which is one of the big complaints in Ukraine, was sort of that Zelensky, believe it or not, before the war was actually sort of the left-wing peacenik version of the leadership in Ukraine.

00:47:23.000 He was hit from the right before he actually was elected president of Ukraine.

00:47:27.000 But even assuming all this, and I'll assume your case for the sake of argument, Right now, Russia has obvious control of huge sections of the Donbass.

00:47:36.000 They retain control of Crimea.

00:47:39.000 Is it in America's interest to withdraw aid to the point where Ukraine itself is in danger of Russian ingestion?

00:47:48.000 Gorbachev, as you point out, Zelensky ran in 2019 on the Minsk Accords saying that he promised he was a peacenik and that he would sign the Minsk Accords.

00:48:00.000 The Minsk Accords basically had three demands from the Russians that everybody agreed to. 0.92

00:48:07.000 The UK agreed, Germany agreed, France agreed.

00:48:10.000 Three things that Putin wanted, and it's what not only Putin, but the entire Kremlin leadership and generation of leader back to 1992, not beginning with Putin, they wanted a guarantee of neutrality for Ukraine, which means keeping NATO out.

00:48:28.000 They wanted a, you know, a denazification of the government that we put in place in 2014 when we helped overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine.

00:48:40.000 The CIA and Victoria Nuland helped overthrow them. 0.89

00:48:45.000 And brought in five ministers who are, you know, calling them ultra-nationalists is a polite description.

00:48:52.000 And you well know the Nazi history in Ukraine.

00:49:01.000 And these five ministers who were legacies of Stephen Bonder, et cetera.

00:49:06.000 And the last thing that he wanted was that protection for the ethnic Russian population of Donbass and Lugansk.

00:49:19.000 Who were being brutalized, 14,000 have been killed.

00:49:23.000 And the first thing that got, when we put the new government in in 2014,

00:49:27.000 one of the first things it did was to get rid of the Russian language.

00:49:31.000 Used, half the people- There's no question that, first of all, the Minsk Accords 0.57

00:49:35.000 were extremely poorly written and violated extraordinarily on both sides of that

00:49:39.000 particular agreement.

00:49:41.000 Including by the Russians, Little Green Men in Donbass and Crimea. 0.69

00:49:44.000 But again, this doesn't answer the question as to whether the United States, I don't really care about the internal politics of Ukraine nearly at all.

00:49:49.000 The question is, is it in the interest of the United States at this point, given the fact that Vladimir Putin has not really gotten back to the off-ramp that I was pushing for, and I think you were both, we were both pushing for, I think in the middle of 2022.

00:50:00.000 So it's Henry Kissinger, this sort of off-ramp, let's get out of this war as fast as possible, negotiated settlement, That's just not true.

00:50:07.000 the wayside and so now we're in 2024 still discussing the war. Putin has not offered

00:50:11.000 any sort of material off-ramp at this point to Zelensky and Zelensky has not opted to take

00:50:16.000 any off-ramp. So what is in America's interest? If we if we use that it's not true.

00:50:20.000 It's just not true. First of all the Minsk Accords, although you know you can complain about

00:50:28.000 some of the language, it was agreed upon by France, by Germany, by the UK, and Zelensky campaigned in

00:50:38.000 2019 on the promise that he was going to sign it and ratify it before the Parliament.

00:50:44.000 I'm...

00:50:46.000 He was then, when he got in, he pivoted.

00:50:50.000 The suspicion is that he pivoted for two reasons.

00:50:52.000 One, his life was threatened by the ultra-rightists in his own government.

00:50:56.000 And two, Victoria Nuland from the State Department said, we don't want peace with the Russians.

00:51:02.000 In April of 2022, and that was what prompted the invasion of Crimea, which, by the way, my uncle, you know, was going to invade Cuba in 1962.

00:51:16.000 Because the Russians put missiles there. 0.79

00:51:19.000 And the Russians put missiles in Cuba because we had put Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

00:51:26.000 Everybody knew that neither of our powers wanted nuclear missiles within range of our capital.

00:51:35.000 And not only did we put missiles in Romania and Poland, Aegis Missile Systems, which are Tomahawk missiles, which are nuclear-ready Lockheed missiles, 12 minutes from the Kremlin, able to decapitate the entire Kremlin leadership, 12 minutes.

00:51:53.000 Not only did we do that, President Trump and his predecessor walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviet Union, with Russia.

00:52:04.000 So we said to Russia, we're unilaterally walking away from these nuke treaties and we're putting nukes in your backyard. 0.94

00:52:10.000 What kind of message?

00:52:11.000 If they did that to us, put them in Mexico, Canada, Cuba, we would invade. 0.83

00:52:17.000 Now, you know, in terms of what Putin's offer was, Putin only went into Crimea after we rejected, after Zelensky broke his promise.

00:52:31.000 Although the Donbass and Crimea weren't invaded until 2014.

00:52:33.000 Right.

00:52:33.000 So in April of 2022, after... The invasion was February 2022, yes.

00:52:36.000 In April of 2022, after the invasion of February 2022, yes, yeah, April 2022, Zelensky, we will not help Zelensky 0.99

00:52:51.000 negotiate a treaty with the Russians.

00:52:53.000 So he goes to Erdogan in Turkey, and he goes to Naftali Bennett from Israel.

00:52:58.000 They negotiate essentially Minsk too, which does the same thing.

00:53:04.000 Right.

00:53:05.000 What now we know from Naftali Bennett, from Erdogan, from the Ukrainian negotiators, is that everybody, and from Putin himself, she talked about in the Tucker interview, is that everybody agreed to it.

00:53:20.000 Both sides initialed that agreement.

00:53:23.000 Putin was withdrawing his troops from Kiev.

00:53:27.000 When Biden sent Boris Johnson over to force Zelensky to tear up the agreement.

00:53:33.000 Well, I mean, to be fair, that was also the same time that they walked into Bakhmut and solved the human rights violations.

00:53:37.000 And that's the excuse that Zelensky uses, if you want to put it that way.

00:53:40.000 Yeah, you're exact.

00:53:42.000 But that's fine.

00:53:43.000 That's fine.

00:53:43.000 That's the perfect word to use, an excuse.

00:53:46.000 That's all fine.

00:53:46.000 I just come back to the same question.

00:53:48.000 Is it in America's interest to let Russia walk into Kiev and take control of Ukraine?

00:53:52.000 But I didn't say that.

00:53:54.000 No, I'm not putting it in your mouth.

00:53:55.000 It's a literal question.

00:53:56.000 I don't think Russia wants to control Kiev.

00:53:59.000 That was literally the purpose of the war.

00:54:00.000 The original purpose of the war was to take Kiev.

00:54:03.000 Putin tried to invade Kiev.

00:54:06.000 They were in the outskirts of Kiev.

00:54:07.000 They tried to land on helicopters.

00:54:08.000 What he has said consistently is that we need to do this.

00:54:12.000 to keep NATO out, and he's got support of his own people, he's got support of the Kremlin.

00:54:17.000 And what I said is it's not either, you know, him and all of these comic book descriptions,

00:54:24.000 which you, I know you're a really smart guy, and I don't know, you know, how you end up

00:54:29.000 how you end up endorsing this, the super villains that we're given every couple of years.

00:54:30.000 endorsing this, the super villains that we're given every couple of years.

00:54:33.000 No, he's a hardcore political realist.

00:54:35.000 Vladimir Putin is a hard power political realpolitik expert.

00:54:35.000 But Vladimir Putin is a hard power political realpolitik expert.

00:54:39.000 Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly, I want to negotiate this, and Zelensky has passed

00:54:39.000 Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly, I want to negotiate this.

00:54:43.000 And Zelensky has passed a law in Ukraine that says we can't negotiate with him.

00:54:49.000 I've actively suggested as a solution that Joe Biden go to Putin around Zelensky and 0.77

00:54:54.000 negotiate a solution and then make America hate Ukraine.

00:54:57.000 You and I agree on that.

00:54:59.000 Okay, so but until that point happens, until that negotiation happens.

00:55:02.000 Well, why doesn't it happen tomorrow?

00:55:04.000 I'll tell you what is going to happen the day I get into office.

00:55:06.000 Okay, let's assume that you go with Putin and you have a disagreement.

00:55:10.000 Do you continue to fund Ukraine up to the point where agreement is reached?

00:55:13.000 Of course you continue, but I'm going to have a ceasefire and I'm going to negotiate agreement.

00:55:19.000 I'm not going to give ground until we have an agreement.

00:55:21.000 Okay, fair enough.

00:55:22.000 So that was the question because this started off with kind of a broader discussion of American military.

00:55:25.000 Yeah, no, I would never suggest that.

00:55:27.000 I've been negotiating my whole life.

00:55:29.000 I've negotiated 500 cases.

00:55:31.000 We'll get to more on this in just a moment. 1.00

00:55:32.000 First, you want to know what's stupid. 1.00

00:55:34.000 Putting a ejector seat on a helicopter. 1.00

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00:55:37.000 Not having life insurance, which you might need if you actually put an ejector seat on a helicopter. 0.99

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00:56:35.000 So when it comes to American military policy, because you had suggested that we can sort of slash America's military budget in half.

00:56:40.000 Yeah.

00:56:40.000 And what I had said is that Russia is very aggressive on the world stage.

00:56:43.000 China's obviously an aggressive player, not just with regard to its economy, but Taiwan obviously feels threatened.

00:56:48.000 That's a very difficult place for the United States to defend.

00:56:51.000 We do require a significantly more powerful Navy to maintain the seaways and waterways

00:56:56.000 that allow for a free global market to occur.

00:56:59.000 I mean, we're watching right now as a bunch of ragtag hoothies hold up half the shipping in the planet in the Red Sea 1.00

00:57:04.000 because the American Navy has been unable or unwilling under President Biden to actually make sure

00:57:08.000 that there's freedom of the seas in the Red Sea.

00:57:10.000 When you look at the terror tentacles of Iran, It's not that we should have bases we are unwilling to defend in places like Jordan or Syria. 0.65

00:57:19.000 It is to say that a muscular American presence on the world stage has been a guarantor of world peace in a way that a reticent America and an isolationist-minded America would not be.

00:57:30.000 Somebody's going to fill the gap, in other words.

00:57:33.000 I don't want to repeat what I said about the cause of American military Muscle flexing.

00:57:40.000 We're broad, but, you know, it cost us eight trillion dollars and we're worse off.

00:57:44.000 We're watching the rise of BRICS.

00:57:46.000 We, you know, we saw the destruction of Iraq. 0.86

00:57:51.000 We saw the destruction of Europe because of America's bad military policy.

00:57:56.000 So I don't agree with you.

00:57:58.000 And, and, you know, I don't, I look at China very differently.

00:58:01.000 I think China, we spend three times what China spends on our military.

00:58:09.000 And by the way, the kind of strategy that you're talking about is establishing dominance in the South China Sea.

00:58:19.000 That's a 20th century strategy.

00:58:21.000 You know, Iran and the Houthis don't have hypersonic missiles.

00:58:27.000 We have 12 aircraft carrier, Ben.

00:58:29.000 That is the heart of our Navy, right?

00:58:31.000 That and the nuclear sub fleet.

00:58:37.000 China has two aircraft carriers, and they're kind of older.

00:58:40.000 I think they got them from the Russians. 0.70

00:58:42.000 But the minute a hot war starts with China, every one of our aircraft carriers was going to be at the

00:58:49.000 bottom of the ocean this is what we don't you know that this is why NATO we

00:58:53.000 have to rethink NATO completely we can't get a million people

00:58:56.000 troops across the Atlantic anymore no it's

00:58:59.000 they would all be sunk we have to understand

00:59:04.000 the stringencies of modern warfare of what it's going to look like and there's also

00:59:10.000 the only reason that we care about Taiwan is because of TSMC Correct.

00:59:15.000 Right?

00:59:16.000 Because of the microchip capacity of one company, which makes all the microchip in our refrigerators and our automobiles.

00:59:24.000 And our F-35s, by the way.

00:59:26.000 Right.

00:59:26.000 Our missiles, our jets, everything.

00:59:28.000 So, militarily, we're really hurting if we don't have access.

00:59:33.000 We can't replicate it.

00:59:36.000 We're trying now, but it would take decades to get where the Taiwanese are right now. 1.00

00:59:44.000 So you can make an argument that Taiwan is an absolutely critical national security asset for us, and we cannot let the Chinese invade. 0.94

00:59:55.000 The thing is that there's another reality.

00:59:59.000 One is that The Chinese control, with bases, the South China Sea.

01:00:05.000 Our nearest base is Guam.

01:00:08.000 And modern warfare with battleships and with, you know, the domination by aircraft carrier, as we just talked about, is now a strategy that's very, very dubious military strategy.

01:00:23.000 There are other reasons that China does not want a war about this.

01:00:26.000 Number one, the Taiwanese don't want MC plants are going to do every if the second that China 0.82

01:00:36.000 looks like it's going to they're going to do everything in their power to get to the United

01:00:41.000 States.

01:00:42.000 So, you know, they're going to lose a lot of their capacity to innovate and to maintain

01:00:47.000 the production of microchips.

01:00:50.000 Number two, that plant is not operating in a vacuum.

01:00:55.000 The lasers that they use, they're all the different they have a huge supply

01:01:01.000 chain that they rely on and the supply chain.

01:01:04.000 A lot of it comes from Silicon Valley.

01:01:05.000 A lot of it comes from Amsterdam.

01:01:09.000 A lot of it comes from the capitals all over Europe.

01:01:11.000 And they can't function without that.

01:01:14.000 So China can't just capture that plant and say, okay, we now run all the microchips they're going to get hurt, too.

01:01:21.000 Number three, China dies without Walmart.

01:01:25.000 They have a population that is on the edge of potential revolt.

01:01:31.000 They made all these promises to them, and the only thing that is keeping them even their nose above water is Walmart.

01:01:39.000 And if they lose Walmart, they get hurt a lot more than we do.

01:01:46.000 And this may be the most important.

01:01:48.000 China dies in a week without Mideast oil.

01:01:52.000 We don't need to control the South China Sea to dominate China.

01:02:01.000 They can't get the oil to China without the shipping lanes open.

01:02:05.000 And we are able to close those shipping lanes so we can literally strangle China. 0.94

01:02:10.000 That doesn't require naval power, by the way.

01:02:12.000 But what I would say is what we should be thinking of Instead of a hot war with China, let's fight the war that China wants, which is by projecting economic power.

01:02:23.000 China, during the last 20 years that we've spent on bombing bridges, ports, schools, churches, universities, mosques, etc. 0.86

01:02:33.000 $8 trillion we've spent on that enterprise.

01:02:36.000 The Chinese spent $8 trillion building ports, building roads, building schools, universities.

01:02:43.000 With their Belt and Road program, 15 years ago, we were the largest creditor in every country in Latin America.

01:02:49.000 Today, China is on virtually all of them. 0.96

01:02:53.000 The same is true in China.

01:02:55.000 I mean, in Africa.

01:02:56.000 Africa is now throwing out the U.S. 0.99

01:02:58.000 military.

01:02:59.000 And we've left behind all these kind of resentments, and they're embracing the Chinese.

01:03:06.000 My uncle, President Kennedy, never sent a combat troop abroad to die, and he was begged to in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie twice in Cuba, called a traitor in the State Department for not sending 250,000 troops to Vietnam.

01:03:25.000 They want it, and he refused to do it.

01:03:30.000 He said, no, we need to be projecting economic power abroad.

01:03:33.000 I don't want African children, when they hear of the United States of America, to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun.

01:03:41.000 I want them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.

01:03:43.000 I want them to think of the Alliance for Progress.

01:03:45.000 want them to think of USAID, where we were and running the oligarchs in these countries

01:03:50.000 and the military juntas, and bringing economic development directly to the poor to try to

01:03:56.000 build a middle class, which is the foundation stone for stable democracies in those countries

01:04:01.000 as a counter to the promises of communism.

01:04:05.000 That was his policy.

01:04:06.000 Today, as a result of that, there are more statues to John Kennedy, more buildings named

01:04:13.000 after him, more schools, more universities, more hospitals, more parks in Africa, Latin

01:04:21.000 America, and Asia than any other president, certainly, and probably more than all other

01:04:25.000 US presidents combined.

01:04:27.000 That was working foreign policy.

01:04:30.000 We project economic power abroad.

01:04:33.000 Meanwhile, we fortify ourselves at home.

01:04:35.000 We arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders so that we're too expensive to ever invade.

01:04:40.000 We maintain a military sufficient to keep the sea lanes open in a neutral place like the Arctic.

01:04:47.000 We have a two-strike capacity around the world to punish bad behavior if we need to.

01:04:53.000 And then we, you know, we start bringing money home.

01:04:56.000 And if you can find a way to do all those things militarily and cut the budget by half?

01:05:00.000 Yeah, this is a $500 billion budget.

01:05:03.000 And by the way, that's the same budget that Eisenhower had during the height of the Cold War when we were, you know, had an existential threat from the Soviet Union.

01:05:14.000 And that's what we were also promised to cut down.

01:05:18.000 In 1992, when the walls came down in Europe, and, you know, there was all kinds of convocations about the peace dividend, how do we, where do we cut the, to achieve those things, how big should our military?

01:05:34.000 The promise then was that we were going to cut it from 600 billion to 200 billion, and that we could do all those things.

01:05:40.000 Now, that'll cost us 500 billion.

01:05:43.000 But, you know, what our true military costs, although the actual Pentagon spending is $940 billion, the truth, if you look at the National Security costs and then the foreign aid costs, which is just, we give money to Ukraine or Israel or wherever, and then they, under contract, have to buy our weapons.

01:06:05.000 The whole cost of that is $1.3 trillion.

01:06:09.000 So, you know, we need to cut We need to cut back.

01:06:13.000 My biggest savings are going to come from ending the chronic disease epidemic.

01:06:17.000 But also, the GAO does a study every year on the most wasteful Government programs.

01:06:29.000 The stuff that is just comical.

01:06:31.000 It's like, you know, it will make you laugh if you read about it.

01:06:34.000 That's the Golden Toilets and all of this.

01:06:35.000 Right, the Golden Toilets.

01:06:37.000 So those reports are this thick and they're all brought to some shelf in the Library of Congress and they're put there and that's, you know, the bureaucrats have done their job and identify them.

01:06:50.000 I'm going to go through those and I'm going to use AI.

01:06:54.000 To identify waste, and I'm going to have a transparent system, a budgetary system, blockchain budgetary system, so that every American can see every expenditure that we have on the budget, everything.

01:07:08.000 And I'm going to use that system to identify waste and gut it.

01:07:11.000 And, you know, I'm going to take the worst of all those programs and put them in a single and I'm going to send it to Congress like we did with the

01:07:22.000 base closure commission for an up or down vote, right?

01:07:25.000 And stuff that nobody can defend, I'm going to send it for an up or down vote so they

01:07:30.000 have to vote for it.

01:07:32.000 So when you look, again, you know, we've been talking a lot about the budget and the military

01:07:36.000 and how much money we're spending.

01:07:38.000 Social Security is a looming crisis.

01:07:40.000 That one is not going away because even if people are healthy, in fact, especially if they're healthy, they're living longer.

01:07:45.000 The retirement age, people can start receiving partial social security at 62, then 65, then it finally kicks in in total in 67.

01:07:51.000 The life expectancy of people who live to 67 is well above 80 at this point.

01:07:56.000 So, what do you propose to do when you're talking about the budgetary crisis?

01:08:00.000 The reality is that within 10 years, the biggest cost on the books, I don't know.

01:08:04.000 I don't know yet what to do about that.

01:08:05.000 Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, bigger than the military.

01:08:09.000 And so when you look at that, what do you do about something like Social Security?

01:08:12.000 We have an aging population, we have a base of a demographic inversion in which we don't 0.98

01:08:18.000 have enough young people.

01:08:20.000 People are trying to fix that by bringing in extraordinary numbers of illegal immigrants 1.00

01:08:23.000 as though this is going to somehow solve the problem.

01:08:25.000 What do we do about that?

01:08:26.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:08:28.000 I don't know yet what to do about that.

01:08:30.000 I think Social Security is a particular problem because it's not really an entitlement, it's

01:08:40.000 a contract.

01:08:42.000 We took people's paychecks for 40 years and then we said to them, when you reach the age

01:08:48.000 of 65, you're going to get that money.

01:08:52.000 So I don't think that the United States should break its promise to those people.

01:08:57.000 So I'm going to look, and I'll tell you what, a lot of the budgetary stuff is

01:09:08.000 We can't even comprehend it now because of what AI is going to do to our economy.

01:09:16.000 And, you know, if we don't manage it very, very carefully, and that's another reason that I think that, you know, is an argument for me becoming president, because I don't think President Biden or That's going to change our country.

01:09:35.000 And the promise of AI to solve a lot of our most intractable problems,

01:09:41.000 but also this terrible peril from AI, its capacity to alter our realities and to enforce

01:09:49.000 compliance and to control our behavior,

01:09:56.000 not only our...

01:09:58.000 You know, to press these, to activate these neuronal pathways

01:10:03.000 in all of our brains that are hardwired in there from, you know,

01:10:06.000 20,000 generations of tribal evolution and, you know, being scientifically to activate those to make people

01:10:15.000 behave in certain ways, to make them believe certain things.

01:10:20.000 And I think it's going to be the biggest battle in the history of democracy,

01:10:25.000 to see if democracy can survive AI.

01:10:27.000 I mean, so this actually...

01:10:28.000 I don't think they are thinking about this.

01:10:31.000 And I think we need the smartest people in the country because we also don't want to lose the, you know, you can't regulate it in ways that punish it because we want to be the hub of it in this country.

01:10:45.000 We don't want to drive it to China.

01:10:47.000 We don't want to drive it to Europe.

01:10:48.000 We want it to be here.

01:10:50.000 And so in order to do that, we need kind of entrepreneurial freedom to experiment.

01:10:55.000 And at the same time, We want to make sure that we regulate it in ways that don't get out of control, that we have agreements with the Russians, the Chinese, people we're fighting wars with right now.

01:11:05.000 You know, we're all... This is the war of our life.

01:11:08.000 It's the war of survival, like Elon Musk.

01:11:10.000 At first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.

01:11:13.000 It's going to kill all of us, right?

01:11:15.000 I saw today that Elon and somebody else had a statement that said, By 2030, AI is going to be smarter than all the human beings in the world combined, and it's already lying to us.

01:11:33.000 It's already doing some really scary stuff, and I just don't think any of this Goes into Biden's head.

01:11:42.000 I don't think that President Trump is really capable of looking at this thoughtfully and saying, you know, OK, I'm going to bring in people who I don't like, I don't agree with.

01:11:54.000 And because I need them to solve this problem, we need to bring in the smartest people in the country and including, you know, people that we don't like.

01:12:05.000 There are a couple of things that are crossing streams here that are really interesting.

01:12:08.000 So when you talk about AI, obviously there's the economic aspects, which are fascinating, and you have the techno-optimists, and you have the techno-pessimists, and all of this.

01:12:16.000 What's more interesting to me is sort of the social aspect that you're pointing out, which is how AI is going to mess with our entire perception of the world.

01:12:22.000 We can already see this in miniature, and it doesn't feel like in miniature since the

01:12:26.000 rise of the smartphone, since the rise of social media, which has driven, as you mentioned

01:12:29.000 right at the top, this extraordinary level of political polarization in the country,

01:12:34.000 people hating each other who have never met each other and will never meet each other.

01:12:38.000 As a religious person, I know you're a religious person also, the sort of death of church, 0.98

01:12:44.000 the death of community in the United States, that seems to be one of the giant creeping

01:12:49.000 problems that everyone is ignoring, is the fact that we do, in fact, need people to go

01:12:55.000 to church.

01:12:56.000 We do need people to get in church together and be with each other and touch grass once

01:13:00.000 in a while, for lack of a better phrase.

01:13:02.000 Now, what do you think is going to happen in terms of community building?

01:13:07.000 How do we fill that gap?

01:13:08.000 Well, you know, what you said is controversial and I tend to sort of visually agree with it, but I also, you know, churches don't necessarily bring people together, they also divide people.

01:13:22.000 But I think the underlying The underlying assertion that you just made hits it right in the center of this problem.

01:13:35.000 How do we use these technologies to build communities rather than fragment them?

01:13:41.000 And right now, our experience with this technology is total fragmentation, and dissolution, and atomization.

01:13:49.000 We have a whole generation of kids who are growing up lonely, and dispirited, and disconnected,

01:13:57.000 and disaffected, and alienated.

01:14:00.000 And, you know, and it's, you know, any of us, you have young kids, I have kids who have been through their teenage years.

01:14:08.000 And you watch kids who are, my kids luckily escaped a lot of this,

01:14:16.000 but so many of my friends who have kids who are just lost and they don't know how to make connections.

01:14:23.000 They don't have, a lot of them are, this generation is, don't have just basic

01:14:30.000 social intelligence skills.

01:14:32.000 And I think a lot of that may be from, you know, the toxicity in the environment, but a lot of it is also just from, you know, spending so much of your childhood on video games and, you know, Swipe Right.

01:14:45.000 You know, one of the, I talk about this, one of the sort of encouraging things that I see

01:14:54.000 is coming out of the podcast world.

01:14:58.000 I always make fun of my kids because they have no attention.

01:15:01.000 They have the attention of a cricket because they're used to getting instantaneous simulation.

01:15:07.000 When I was a kid, I'd go out on the side of a hill and I'd sit there for hours and wait for a snake to move

01:15:17.000 or watch a hawk or watch the cloud go overhead.

01:15:20.000 My kids, there's no way they could do that.

01:15:23.000 You know, they need simulation constantly.

01:15:27.000 One of the encouraging things that I see is that what they do with podcasts is they listen to you, they listen to Jordan Peterson.

01:15:36.000 Listen to Joe Rogan and it's like they're really smart, you know, and they're getting this very high level of information because they're hearing these, you know, very energetic debates, very intelligent debates among super smart people.

01:15:50.000 And, you know, what we have to figure out is how that is the good part of technology, right?

01:15:59.000 How do you make people smarter, more engaged?

01:16:03.000 And the bad part is this part that's just driving us all apart, and the algorithms prey on that.

01:16:10.000 As you know, the algorithms, what they, you know, inadvertently, the algorithms are designed to keep eyeballs on the site.

01:16:19.000 But as it turns out, this part of human nature, our hardwiring, is we will pay more attention to something if it is reinforcing our already held worldview.

01:16:31.000 So if you're a Republican and you ask a question of Google, you're going to get a slightly different answer than a Democrat.

01:16:38.000 You're going to get an answer that, you know, or images or whatever, that reinforces your existing biases.

01:16:46.000 And that means that we're systematically, by this, you know, through this incredible mechanism of subtle control, but overwhelming control, being driven further and further apart than our poured on our biases, our prejudices, our hatreds.

01:17:04.000 And so to me, that's why during this campaign, Ben, I've really tried to...

01:17:14.000 It's just that this campaign is really an experiment.

01:17:16.000 Is there a way to find a middle ground, to find landscapes where Americans can talk to each other again, where we can find brotherhood and sisterhood with each other?

01:17:26.000 And what I find, and so I avoid the culture war issues.

01:17:29.000 I try not to talk about them, you know, and I try to talk about the things that hold us all

01:17:36.000 together, the values that we share.

01:17:38.000 And what I found is those landscapes are just huge.

01:17:41.000 Everybody wants a good education for our kids.

01:17:44.000 Everybody wants to have clean, good soils, regenerative agriculture, good foods.

01:17:51.000 Everybody wants to take care of our veterans.

01:17:54.000 They don't want them eating in soup kitchens.

01:17:59.000 They want to make sure the ones that have PTSD are taken care of.

01:18:02.000 Everybody wants to end the fentanyl epidemic.

01:18:05.000 Nobody thinks it's a good idea.

01:18:07.000 When you come right down to it, for the Sinaloa drug cartel to be running U.S.

01:18:11.000 border policy, you know, if you frame that issue in a certain way, which is, I hate immigrants, you're going to get division.

01:18:18.000 But if you frame it in a way that, do you think this is right?

01:18:22.000 If you want to talk about the environment, And you want a fist fight, talk about climate.

01:18:28.000 But if you want to get people together, talk about toxicity, talk about clean water, talk about clean air, about the destruction of the Appalachians, about all of these other issues that, you know, when I was fighting the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, we had Hell's Angels standing shoulder-to-shoulder with, you know, with urban blacks, because everybody wanted clean water. 0.81

01:18:53.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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01:19:53.000 Get 35% off that first set.

01:19:55.000 What do we do about those issues?

01:19:57.000 You mentioned, you know, the hot-button issues, and we really haven't spent a lot of time on them, specifically because I want to talk about the things that you're most passionate about and that you're most interested in with your campaign.

01:20:05.000 But these hot-button issues obviously do divide Americans.

01:20:08.000 You become president of the United States, you're going to have to decide what to do on issues like what sort of legislation you sign on, say, abortions.

01:20:15.000 What do you do on an issue like that?

01:20:17.000 Abortion? 0.89

01:20:18.000 Yes.

01:20:19.000 I mean, to take the most top-button issue in the country.

01:20:22.000 My take on abortion is this.

01:20:23.000 I grew up in a family where there are both pro-life and pro-choice people in my family, a deeply Catholic family, and so I think we should be able to talk about these issues without, you know, hating each other.

01:20:39.000 I've been a medical freedom advocate for my entire career.

01:20:43.000 I think people should have bodily autonomy.

01:20:46.000 I don't trust government to make decisions about what we should be doing with our own bodies.

01:20:52.000 I think that the only solution for me is that a woman has to make that choice for herself. 0.90

01:21:00.000 I believe that every abortion is a tragedy at one level or another,

01:21:07.000 and that we should do everything we can as a society to try to make sure women have other choices. 0.99

01:21:14.000 And particularly, you know, I don't think, I don't like federal policy that channels women 1.00

01:21:20.000 to one solution, which is abortion.

01:21:22.000 I think if a woman, you know, I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I've been repeatedly back to, called Angie's House.

01:21:36.000 And it's run by Angela Stanton King, who's kind of a relative of Martin Luther King's family.

01:21:45.000 She had a baby when she was in prison.

01:21:48.000 She was literally handcuffed to a bed, and everybody was telling her to get an abortion. 0.60

01:21:56.000 She didn't.

01:21:56.000 She had the baby in prison, and that girl just won the Harvard Debating Prize.

01:22:02.000 She is full scholarship at MIT.

01:22:04.000 And Angie now takes care of women who People are being pressured to have abortions because they don't have the money to take care of the baby. 1.00

01:22:16.000 I don't think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child to terms. 0.97

01:22:22.000 This is a place where obviously you're going to bump heads and I'm not sure there's a way around it in the sense that a pro-lifer looks at a position like a woman ought to have bodily autonomy and they say that's completely missing the point.

01:22:31.000 We're not talking about the woman's bodily autonomy, we're talking about the baby's bodily autonomy.

01:22:35.000 Which is obviously not only the pro-life position, but the position of many mainstream religions, including the Catholic Church.

01:22:41.000 And so when you look at pro-lifers who say, okay, well, I understand that you believe it's a tragedy, but along those same baseline biological lines, it's not just a tragedy, it's a crime against the child, because the child has an independent interest.

01:22:56.000 What do you say to that?

01:22:58.000 I say that I understand that position, and I don't agree with it.

01:23:03.000 I think that the solution of having the state come in and dictate choices that the woman is making, that's not a good solution to me.

01:23:18.000 To have a bureaucrat making these These very, very difficult moral choices.

01:23:21.000 I think that choice should be between the woman, her pastor, her spiritual advisors, the people who she consults in her life, and that it's a very, very difficult decision.

01:23:35.000 So you don't believe that the child has an independent right to life, for example, at any point during the pregnancy?

01:23:40.000 I mean, how far is the right choice?

01:23:41.000 Here's what I would say, man.

01:23:42.000 There's no woman who gets pregnant carries that baby for eight months and then decides to have 1.00

01:23:52.000 an abortion for some frivolous reason.

01:23:55.000 They're, you know, they're in that kind of case and nobody in their right mind would do that.

01:24:00.000 In those kind of cases, there's some kind of, those very, very rare cases where that happens.

01:24:07.000 There's some, always some kind of extenuating circumstances that I don't feel prepared

01:24:14.000 to turn that over to the government.

01:24:16.000 So that, you know, you and I all differ on that, and that's just a place where I differ, and I understand your position.

01:24:22.000 I have tremendous respect for you.

01:24:25.000 I'm for, you know, for having that kind of absolute moral clarity on that position.

01:24:33.000 But I think it's more nuanced and complex than that.

01:24:38.000 So, you know, we only have a few more minutes.

01:24:40.000 I want to ask you about the theme of your campaign and your hope for the country.

01:24:44.000 So obviously, most Americans are incredibly pessimistic about the future.

01:24:48.000 Young Americans in particular are very pessimistic about the future.

01:24:51.000 It does feel like things are falling apart on the foreign front.

01:24:54.000 It feels like at home, despite the fact we have a low unemployment rate, it does feel

01:24:58.000 as though things are falling apart economically speaking with high inflation.

01:25:02.000 Americans' hopes seem to be at low ebb right now in the country, which I'm sure is one 1.00

01:25:07.000 reason why you're doing so well as an independent candidate.

01:25:09.000 What do you think is the prospect of America being able to turn this around, given all

01:25:14.000 of the systemic obstacles that you're talking about?

01:25:17.000 I feel 100% confident that I'll be able to turn it around as president.

01:25:23.000 I have practically zero confidence that President Trump or President Biden will be able to do

01:25:28.000 that.

01:25:29.000 And I don't, I stay away from personal criticism of either of them.

01:25:33.000 I try to be respectful, particularly, they held the highest office in the land,

01:25:38.000 but I just think we all need to be able to talk to each other

01:25:41.000 in a way that steps back from the rancor and from the vitriol and from the vilification

01:25:50.000 and demonization of each other.

01:25:52.000 The issues that are most critical like to this generation of kids, my kids' generation,

01:25:58.000 the big promise of the American dream when I was a kid was that if you worked hard and you played by the rules

01:26:05.000 that you could finance a house, you could take a summer vacation, you could raise a family,

01:26:09.000 you could put something aside for your retirement on one job.

01:26:13.000 And there is not a single member of my kids' generation that believes that that promise applies to them.

01:26:21.000 them. One of my sons is 39 years old and he owns a home.

01:26:30.000 But all the other ones went to the best schools in our country, the best schools you could

01:26:35.000 possibly go to. They're smart, they're very capable, they have great jobs. None of

01:26:43.000 them is looking for a house because it's just out of their reach and none of us are

01:26:47.000 generated.

01:26:48.000 You don't own a home.

01:26:49.000 I mean, you're talking about community.

01:26:52.000 We need to reestablish the ownership society here, because that's the only way America survives. 0.78

01:26:59.000 If you own a home, you care about your community.

01:27:02.000 You care about the police, the firefighters, you show up at the PTA meeting, you care about the transportation, you care about the appearance of your property, and you care about your neighbors.

01:27:13.000 If you, you know, once you become a renter, which is what BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard want us all, you know, this is the new oligarch, this feudal oligarchy of, you know, controlling the land base.

01:27:27.000 We go from being citizens to being the subjects.

01:27:29.000 And the main thing is that if you own property, you have equity, which means you can Entrepreneurial impulses.

01:27:46.000 So if you decide, I want to build a yoga studio, or a bowling alley, or a juice bar, or you know, whatever, you can borrow on your house, you can beg your house on it, and then you can go to the bank and get that money, and you can, and that's why, one of the reasons that our country exploded.

01:28:04.000 The American middle class after World War II became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.

01:28:09.000 And a large part of that, you know, of course we had destroyed the industrial base of Europe and we owned everything.

01:28:15.000 But also we put that, we spent that money wisely in making sure every veteran got into a house, every member of that generation basically.

01:28:24.000 was able to own a home and you had this ferment of entrepreneurial energy, what Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius that was released.

01:28:34.000 And, you know, when I was in 1960, when I was a kid, we owned half the wealth on the face of the earth.

01:28:41.000 And it wasn't owned by an oligarchy.

01:28:43.000 It was owned by the American middle class.

01:28:46.000 And, you know, we've adopted a lot of policies, and particularly the way the Fed is operated, which is a criminal agency, right?

01:28:56.000 It's just a vacuum cleaner for Wall Street to shift wealth upward to this kleptocracy.

01:29:05.000 And it's a captured agency.

01:29:08.000 You know, they're all captured, right?

01:29:09.000 The CIA is captured by the military industrial complex.

01:29:12.000 Its function is just to give us a pipeline of new wars.

01:29:15.000 The Fed is captured by Wall Street to consolidate all the banks, so all of them are too big to fail.

01:29:21.000 You know, it's not making more banks, right?

01:29:24.000 It's making fewer and fewer every year.

01:29:26.000 And it's all, you know, it's all designed to shift wealth upward, and we financialize the economy.

01:29:34.000 and destroyed our industrial base, and we need to reverse those policies.

01:29:37.000 And the good news is this.

01:29:41.000 We have a terrible, you know, economic forecast, right?

01:29:47.000 We have the most entrepreneurial and imaginative entrepreneurs in the world in this country.

01:29:51.000 You don't see that.

01:29:52.000 I travel all over the world, and everybody says something unusual about the United States.

01:29:58.000 The entrepreneurial energy of this country is extraordinary.

01:30:01.000 And, you know, We can encourage that.

01:30:05.000 The Australians did it with this superannuation program that gives everybody a little piece of the stock market, you know, and they have to hold it. 0.83

01:30:15.000 And they choose which investments to make.

01:30:19.000 So you're educating an entire generation.

01:30:26.000 Financial IQ.

01:30:27.000 I want to do everything I can to do it.

01:30:30.000 The other thing, we have terrible soils in this country, but we have the most imaginative farmers and regenerative agriculture.

01:30:38.000 We have the worst health in the world in this country, but we have the best doctors, these integrative medicine and allopathic, integrative medicine, functional medicine doctors.

01:30:47.000 We're doing all this breakthrough science, the very, very new, exciting technology, and when you unify it with AI, The potential is extraordinary.

01:30:57.000 So I think there's a tremendous reason to hope in this country if we have the right leadership.

01:31:03.000 And 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 over the horizon and see which direction and provide the kind of leadership that we're going to need to make this transition.

01:31:24.000 Listen, President Trump, President Biden both had a chance.

01:31:28.000 If you want more of the same, you know what you're going to get if you elect them.

01:31:32.000 You're going to get more polarization.

01:31:34.000 You're going to get more, you know, more debt.

01:31:37.000 The more chronic disease, if you want more of that, then you should vote for them.

01:31:41.000 If you want something completely different, if you want this country to live up to its idealism, to have people listen, to have a president who actually wants to build communities, who wants to bring us together, actually, Then you'll be supporting me.

01:32:00.000 Final question for you.

01:32:01.000 You look back at the 1968 campaign in which your father was murdered, and now you're running for President of the United States.

01:32:07.000 That must be emotionally a journey for you.

01:32:10.000 If you can describe what that's like.

01:32:14.000 Well, there's a lot of parallels between my father's run in 1968.

01:32:20.000 My father ran at a time, he ran against a war, which is what I'm doing. 0.69

01:32:25.000 He ran at a time that there was greater division in our country than any time since the Civil War.

01:32:33.000 And, you know, it's comparable to what we have today.

01:32:36.000 You had actually I think the night that Martin Luther King died, over 100 cities burned.

01:32:43.000 You know, we haven't seen that yet, right?

01:32:46.000 There were terrorist groups that were bombing buildings on campuses in New York City.

01:32:54.000 The army National Guard was shooting people on campuses.

01:33:00.000 You had civil rights issues, Vietnam, mass protests, all this.

01:33:05.000 So it was a really divided country.

01:33:07.000 My father, on the last day of his life, he won the most rural state in our country, South Dakota, and the most urban state, California.

01:33:17.000 And he succeeded in bridging that gap.

01:33:19.000 He was also running against the impossible odds.

01:33:21.000 Nobody gave him a chance.

01:33:23.000 He didn't have, you know, every power structure was against him.

01:33:27.000 The liberal media from the New York Times and the Village Voice were all horrified, appalled by his running.

01:33:34.000 The labor unions who, he had run my uncle's campaign in 60, so eight years earlier, and he had all the labor unions.

01:33:42.000 This time, The only unions, all the unions were against him, except for the UAW and for the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez Union.

01:33:52.000 He had all the big city mayors against him.

01:33:55.000 You know, they had all been for him in 1960.

01:33:57.000 Mayor Daley was, you know, angry and threatening.

01:34:03.000 So my father really didn't have any of the, and all of the New Frontier people who he had brought into office, We're all working for Johnson.

01:34:15.000 So they were in the White House.

01:34:16.000 So he didn't even have his team.

01:34:18.000 And, you know, he ran.

01:34:19.000 And, you know, a month later, Johnson withdrew from the race.

01:34:23.000 And then my father started winning the primaries in the last day of his life.

01:34:28.000 He won the primaries.

01:34:29.000 One of the last calls he took was from Mayor Daley saying, you know, Mayor Daley controlled the delegates in Chicago.

01:34:35.000 So he would have gotten the The nomination, and he'd already beaten Hubert Humphrey once in 60.

01:34:42.000 He'd already beaten Nixon once in 60.

01:34:45.000 I think he had a very clear path to the White House.

01:34:50.000 I look at that.

01:34:56.000 I was there.

01:34:56.000 I was 14 years old.

01:34:57.000 I was with my dad when he died in Los Angeles.

01:35:02.000 But I look at his history of that campaign, and I take inspiration and hope from it.

01:35:09.000 Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., really appreciate your time, and obviously good luck in the campaign.

01:35:13.000 Yeah, thank you very much, man.

01:35:14.000 Thanks for having me.

01:35:15.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:35:24.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Savannah Dominguez Morris.

01:35:27.000 Associate producer is Jake Pollock.

01:35:29.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:35:31.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:35:33.000 Post-production is managed by Matt Kemp.

01:35:35.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:35:37.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:35:40.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:35:42.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:35:44.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:35:47.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

01:35:48.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:35:50.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 28, 2024

Is He The Last Real Democrat? | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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