The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 363. Rekindling the Spirit of the Classic Democrat ｜ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everyone.

00:01:09.820 Today I'm speaking with writer, attorney, environmentalist, and 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

00:01:18.560 We discuss how the Democratic Party has become one of fear and ideology, its inexplicable conclusion with legacy media and big pharma, how the COVID-19 pandemic became an issue of tribal allegiance, the use of the doomsday climate narrative for political gains,

00:01:38.080 what can actually be done with renewable energy, what can actually be done with renewable energy, and why the era of Kennedy Democrats can not only be revived, but uniting for Americans across boundaries, both physical and philosophical.

00:01:52.040 What made you decide to throw your hat in the ring for the presidency at this point?

00:01:57.940 Well, I saw the country going in a direction, and my political party going in a direction that was very troubling to me.

00:02:07.460 You know, the country one really needs a reboot.

00:02:12.980 But, you know, the role of my political party, I felt like the Democrats kind of got derailed and became the party suddenly and mysteriously of war,

00:02:23.900 when they were always skeptical of the military-industrial complex, they became the party of censorship, which is abhorrent to every definition of liberalism.

00:02:35.160 They became the party of fear, which is against our, you know, traditions.

00:02:41.180 Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1932 inaugural address, said that the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself,

00:02:49.740 and he understood that fear is a weapon of totalitarian elements and totalitarian control.

00:02:58.900 It became the party of the neocons, which, again, was antithetical.

00:03:05.500 The neocons were Republican, very, you know, belligerent, pugnacious.

00:03:10.800 Foreign policy about subduing the world and establishing hegemony through violence.

00:03:17.220 It became the party of Wall Street.

00:03:21.500 President Biden has surrounded himself with Wall Street.

00:03:26.660 And, you know, the party that had forgotten its roots in the middle class of our country

00:03:31.660 and started regarding people, you know, the cops, the firefighters, the union members,

00:03:40.340 the people who were the bedrock of the Democratic Party as deplorables.

00:03:44.700 And all of those trends and others were disturbing to me.

00:03:52.020 And I actually, Jordan, started thinking about running before it was really viable,

00:03:59.860 before I considered it viable, but just to, you know, to be able to take advantage of the fact

00:04:04.860 that you're protected so much from censorship if you're running for president.

00:04:08.420 And there's actually federal rules that make it illegal for the network TV to censor presidential candidates.

00:04:20.080 But my wife would never have let me run for president if it was not a, you know, if I didn't intend to win.

00:04:27.820 And then last spring, a pollster named Jeremy Zogby, who runs one of the biggest polling houses in North America,

00:04:38.920 and had been polling me without my knowledge for several months, asked to see me.

00:04:46.900 And he sat down with me and showed me the polling results that showed a, you know, a very clear path that I could have till victory.

00:04:56.520 And with those, I was able to, over time, persuade my wife and my kids that this was a good idea.

00:05:03.720 And I think at this point, they're pretty happy with, you know, the last two months.

00:05:08.760 How are you doing in the polls at the moment, as far as you can tell, with credible polls?

00:05:14.820 Well, the public poll, I average about 20%, which is good.

00:05:20.920 I mean, my candidacy is not being treated as serious by the mainstream media.

00:05:29.900 I think maybe it is a little bit more so, but it was originally dismissed as kind of a fringe candidacy.

00:05:35.760 But I'm actually doing much better than DeSantis, Governor DeSantis, against Trump.

00:05:42.760 I'm doing much better against Biden.

00:05:44.860 So it's, I think that that is just a media bias.

00:05:50.900 And my, our internal poll numbers are much, much better.

00:05:55.120 And I think the most significant thing for Democrats over the long term is that our internal polls show that I do much better against President Trump than President Biden does.

00:06:09.960 So I beat him by almost double the percentage that President Biden does.

00:06:14.940 And I do even better against Governor DeSantis.

00:06:17.560 So, and I think that, you know, if the public polling reflects that, I think that that's going to be very persuasive to a lot of Democrats who really see the, you know, the election as just a battle to keep Donald Trump from retaking the White House again.

00:06:37.560 And I think a lot of Democrats who don't like me, I think mainly because of the propaganda that has dominated the very, very negative propaganda and negative portrayals of me.

00:06:50.980 And the misinterpretations of my viewpoints, which have dominated the media and the public consciousness over the past several years, that that will begin to recede a little, the more that people see of me and the more that, you know, if the polling shows that I am more likely to be President Trump than President Biden, I think it will, it will force a lot of Democrats to take a second look at me.

00:07:19.900 Why do you think that people feel that you might be a better alternative to Trump than Biden is?

00:07:26.600 Like, what is it about what you bring to the table that's making you more credible on that front?

00:07:31.280 Well, I think the reason my numbers show that is that I've been able to bridge the divide between Republicans and Democrats.

00:07:41.100 So a lot of my supporters, I have, I think I do better than any candidate with independents, which are now the biggest political party.

00:07:50.440 And I, I appeal to a lot of Republicans as well.

00:07:55.440 And so, and I don't think, you know, President Biden can do that.

00:08:00.560 And if you just do the math, you know, I, in the end, I'm going to, it's likely that I'll get almost all the Democrats who vote.

00:08:07.600 If I, if I'm right, if it's me against, let's say, President Trump, the likelihood is that most Democrats would vote for me and that he will get very little crossover.

00:08:18.200 Whereas I will still get a lot of Republican votes and I'll get, I'll dominate the independent votes.

00:08:26.500 Absolutely. And I think that will continue.

00:08:29.160 I mean, that, that is not, that observation or that is not just an artifact of our polling, but it's, you know, it's reflected in conversations that I have every single day.

00:08:42.380 I have people approaching me in airports of, um, on airplanes of, you know, when I'm, I'm doing, you know, when I'm in the countryside, which I have to go to a lot in rural areas, urban areas.

00:08:54.820 Uh, I'm getting, uh, I'm getting, I'm getting a strong response and the response across the board.

00:09:00.920 So I think it's a true, you know, the polling is reflecting something that's really happening.

00:09:06.440 Right. Well, it isn't obvious to me, and this leads into another line of questioning, exactly why you're running on the Democrat ticket.

00:09:15.080 Because you, as you just pointed out, your policies, at least in principle, could appeal to Republicans as well.

00:09:22.100 And that might make you a unique candidate on the Democrat, on the Democrat side.

00:09:26.160 I guess I'm curious about why do you, so there's an analogy, I believe, between what's happened to the universities and what's happened to the Democrats.

00:09:37.460 So what I saw happen in the universities was that the administration took over the faculty.

00:09:44.740 The faculty retreated in 3000 micro steps and the administration moved forward.

00:09:50.340 And that happened over about a 25-year period until the administration had captured the universities completely.

00:09:57.460 And then the DEI types took over the administration.

00:10:01.320 And it looks to me like something analogous happened within the Democrats.

00:10:04.980 Like, I worked with the Democrats for a long time in California trying to help the Democrat messages.

00:10:10.140 By DEI, you mean?

00:10:12.720 Diversity, equity, and inclusivity.

00:10:14.820 Okay, okay.

00:10:16.040 Yeah, yeah, the social justice warrior types within the universities.

00:10:20.100 And so what I saw among the Democrats that I worked with was that they were unable to draw a dividing line between the moderate types and the radicals.

00:10:30.560 So, and this is something maybe I'll push you about.

00:10:32.820 So, for example, I went to Washington.

00:10:34.280 And I talked to a lot of Democrats, senators and congressmen about what I saw happening in the broad public sphere, but also in the Democrat Party.

00:10:42.920 And I asked them this question.

00:10:46.240 When does the left go too far?

00:10:49.860 And none of them were able to answer.

00:10:52.060 And even though it's completely obvious that the left can go too far.

00:10:55.660 I mean, that's one of the cardinal lessons of the 20th century.

00:10:58.640 And I suggested that the left goes too far when it pushes equity.

00:11:03.620 And all I got as a response from the Democrats, senators and congressmen alike was, well, the people who say equity, they just mean equality of opportunity.

00:11:13.180 And that's not what they mean.

00:11:15.080 They mean equality of outcome.

00:11:16.440 And that's not the same thing at all.

00:11:17.900 And I saw in that inability to draw that distinction part of the reason that the Democrats have shifted in the direction that you described, in the direction that seems to be opposed in many ways to the best interests of both the working class and the middle class, but also characterized by this incredible strain of illiberalism and corporate fascist collusion, the sort of thing that you document, for example, in the relationship between the power elites and big pharma.

00:11:45.940 And so my sense on the Democrat side, I couldn't shift the Democrats to the point, the ones that I was talking to, to the point where they would draw a distinction between them and the radicals.

00:11:56.120 It just didn't seem possible.

00:11:57.820 And so why do you think, I don't think the universities are salvageable, by the way.

00:12:01.440 So why do you think the Democrats are salvageable?

00:12:04.880 Well, I don't think we have a choice.

00:12:07.100 We have a two-party system.

00:12:10.180 And I, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat.

00:12:13.440 I feel like my party's being taken away from me in some ways by the, you know, the kind of ideologies, extreme ideologies, and really, you know, the departure of common sense that I think troubles you and a lot of, you know, the things that you think about.

00:12:34.440 But, and, but I, I mean, why do I think it's salvageable?

00:12:39.360 Because I, I'm talking to people on the street.

00:12:41.880 I, you know, there are so many people who have responded to my candidacy positively because they see it as return to, you know, being a Kennedy Democrat.

00:12:53.540 There has the, you know, the Democratic Party that they loved and that they, you know, that they thought reflected their values, their ideologies, and their best interests and the best interests of this country.

00:13:06.840 And that was likely to, you know, you know, build an America that they can be proud of, that their children can be proud of, that has moral authority around the world.

00:13:16.460 And, you know, all the things that we'd like to see, that I think most people would like to see.

00:13:23.520 I think the Democratic Party has been hijacked, as you say, by kind of some extreme ideologies and, in some cases, kind of irrational, I don't know, thought patterns.

00:13:37.620 And I think that kind of the idea of returning it to common sense is appealing to a lot of people.

00:13:45.960 And I'm just, you know, I'm just thinking those things, but they seem to be reflected both in my polling and in the kind of reaction I get from people on the street and on Twitter and, you know.

00:13:58.620 So it's a melange of things that makes me feel that way, but, you know, I could be wrong.

00:14:04.180 Well, I mean, part of the reason that I was willing to work with the Democrats to begin with, and I did that for about five years, was because I thought, I think like you do, according to what you just said,

00:14:14.960 that, well, you kind of have to work with the institutions that exist, because those are the institutions that exist.

00:14:21.180 And there seems to be some utility in trying to pull the Democrats, let's say, back towards the center, as much as that's possible.

00:14:28.940 But I found that, I think we had some success in that regard.

00:14:32.580 But it was in particular the, and I see this on the conservative side too, by the way, with the unwillingness to see, this is probably more true in Canada even,

00:14:43.520 what is really at the core of this progressive ideology that stresses equity, for example, because equity is an unbelievably dangerous doctrine.

00:14:52.160 And as far as I can tell, it's indistinguishable from the sort of Marxist ideas that swept across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and China, for that matter, in the 20th century, and that still prevail, certainly in China.

00:15:06.720 And it isn't obvious to me at all that the Democrats have taken this with any degree of seriousness.

00:15:11.160 And, you know, that's producing all sorts of strange pathologies on the cultural front.

00:15:16.860 You've documented a fair bit, and this brings us into another area that's adjacent to that, I guess.

00:15:22.980 You've spent a lot of time, your last book, Letter to Liberals, I think I've got that title right,

00:15:29.740 concentrated on the strange collusion that has occurred between the Democrats and Big Pharma.

00:15:38.280 And this is also something I find completely inexplicable.

00:15:41.280 Like, 20 years ago, if you would have said that in 2020, the leftist types and the liberals, including the Democrats, would be colluding with Big Pharma,

00:15:52.260 people would have thought you were completely out of your mind.

00:15:54.120 Because for an endless amount of time, the number one corporate enemies of people who were liberal or on the left were Big Pharma and Big Energy.

00:16:02.860 And so, how do you explain what happened in relationship to the liberal attitude towards Big Pharma during the COVID epidemic?

00:16:12.200 Because I haven't been able to sort that out at all.

00:16:14.300 What do you think's behind that?

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00:17:51.560 Well, I watched that happen kind of like a slow motion train wreck.

00:17:59.200 And you're right that traditionally, you know, pharmaceutical industries are, you know, it is a criminal enterprise.

00:18:05.440 And, you know, I'm not saying that lightly.

00:18:08.960 The four principal companies, Merckx, Anofi, Pfizer, and Glaxo, that produce, for example, all the vaccines in America,

00:18:18.180 have paid $35 billion collectively over the last decade in criminal penalties and, you know, damages for lying to doctors, for defrauding regulators, for falsifying science, and for killing hundreds of thousands of people.

00:18:36.940 I mean, the whole opioid crisis was engineered by the Sacklers and by the other big pharmaceutical companies along with corrupt FDA officials.

00:18:51.000 And that is a crisis that now kills 100, this year killed 106,000 American kids, twice the number of kids that died during the 20-year Vietnam War.

00:19:02.000 Vioxx is another good example.

00:19:03.660 That was another symptom of the corrupt collusion between pharma and the regulatory agencies.

00:19:11.460 And the capture of those agencies by that industry, which has become the agencies themselves have become sock puppets for that industry.

00:19:20.140 And they killed between 120,000, 500,000 people with a drug they marketed as a headache medicine and, you know, arthritis medicine when they knew that it caused heart attacks.

00:19:33.420 And they didn't tell the public that, they concealed that from the public.

00:19:37.140 So, you know, a lot of people would have said, oh, it caused heart attacks, well, I'll take an aspirin.

00:19:43.100 But they weren't allowed to make that choice because the pharma and the collusion, with the collusion of the regulators, took that information, deprived the public of informed consent.

00:19:56.660 Now, the question is, Democrats knew that there's more pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices combined more than any other industry.

00:20:09.680 They give double in terms of lobbying what the next biggest industry gives.

00:20:15.260 And, you know, it's easy for them to own Congress still.

00:20:20.800 There was an ideological resistance among Democrats until a decade ago, or really a decade.

00:20:27.900 What happened was that during – Democrats are always starved for money, for campaign money, because Republicans can take money from dirty industries and from, you know, sort of people, disreputable people, you know, from whether it's the oil industry, the tobacco industry, the NRA, or, you know, things that a lot of Democrats consider disreputable.

00:20:54.780 So, and they have unlimited money.

00:20:58.220 The Democrats traditionally could only get big money, reliable big money from two sources.

00:21:04.840 One was the labor unions, and the other was the trial lawyers.

00:21:09.240 And they don't have anywhere near the kind of money that, you know, these industries have to give away.

00:21:15.220 And so something changed during Obamacare.

00:21:18.360 And that was that the Obama administration – and my uncle, Ted Kennedy, was head of the – was chairing the Senate Health Committee at this time.

00:21:28.400 So I watched this whole thing very, you know, very carefully and was disturbed at that time.

00:21:35.140 In order – because of the lobbying power of pharma, Obama could not get Obamacare passed without the cooperation of the pharmaceutical industry.

00:21:44.620 So he basically had to make a golden handshake with the devil.

00:21:48.800 And the agreement they made was that, number one, Obamacare will – is going to benefit you because it's going to pay for all of your products, the pharmaceutical drugs to Americans.

00:21:58.480 But – and here was the, you know, the key.

00:22:03.600 We will not bargain over prices with you, which, you know, Medicare used to do.

00:22:10.220 The Canadian government bargains when it, you know, provides health care to Canadians.

00:22:14.960 It bargains against really good deals, which is why Americans go to Canada to buy drugs because they're, you know, they're much cheaper there.

00:22:22.140 But here they could pay – they could charge the top rate and the Obamacare would have to pay it. 1.00

00:22:30.540 And that is how Obama got the pharmaceutical industry's support.

00:22:35.280 And after that, it became permissible for Democrats to accept pharmaceutical money.

00:22:42.120 The pharmaceutical money began pouring into the Democratic Party.

00:22:45.680 But, you know, on issues like vaccines, the Democrats and Republicans were pretty evenly split up to 2016.

00:22:53.020 And then you had these – then you had Trump run for presidency.

00:22:59.880 And during his campaign, he – on several occasions, he mentioned that he believed that vaccines were causing autism.

00:23:10.700 And this was anecdotal to him.

00:23:12.400 He had three friends who were women, who were mothers, whose children had been completely healthy and then had regressed into, you know, lost their language and regressed into stereotypical behavior of autism associated with autism after receiving MMR vaccines.

00:23:32.980 And so he and – you know, his belief was that the link was real.

00:23:39.920 And he said it out loud on several occasions, I think three separate occasions.

00:23:44.460 And at that time, anything that Trump said was immediately – the reaction of the Democratic Party is whatever he says, we got to do the opposite.

00:23:55.580 So even though we've hated NAFTA for our entire, you know, existence of our party, if Trump now says he hates NAFTA, we've got to start liking NAFTA.

00:24:06.020 And that – but that – so that was kind of what happened was those pronouncements by Trump were put by the Democratic Party doyens into the same anti-science dumpster as his climate denial.

00:24:19.560 And it became a tribal issue.

00:24:21.860 And so that, you know, it was a culture war issue if you were – if you thought vaccines cause autism, it made you a Republican.

00:24:30.520 And if you thought maybe they – if you thought they definitely did not, and that's been proven beyond any doubt, you were a Democrat.

00:24:38.780 And there was no in-between.

00:24:40.440 There was no dialogue.

00:24:42.620 There was no room for dissent or debate.

00:24:45.960 It was a tribal issue, and it was life or death.

00:24:49.060 And, you know, that's what – that's the way that I saw that history happen, because I watched the change in 2016.

00:24:57.180 Okay, so you saw two things happen.

00:24:59.280 You saw a collusion emerge because of the agreement that Obama made with big pharma companies, and then there was this twist that was thrown into it as a consequence of the Trump candidacy.

00:25:09.300 So, also, I'm wondering, it wasn't that long ago – well, I guess it's 20 years now, so it's some reasonable amount of time – that the laws in the United States were changed so that big pharma could advertise their products directly to the consumer.

00:25:23.940 And that was actually a revolution in messaging.

00:25:26.480 And now, as you pointed out in your last book, big pharma controls about 75% of the advertising on legacy media, and even more on the news shows.

00:25:35.740 I think it's about 75% on the news shows.

00:25:41.640 I'm not sure.

00:25:43.760 I think there are even bigger advertisers if you look at the entire sort of landscape.

00:25:49.540 Automobiles may be bigger.

00:25:52.240 But certainly on the evening news shows, the evening news is kind of the – is the perfect landscape to advertise pharmaceuticals, because everybody who watches the evening news, essentially, the entire demographic is over 60.

00:26:10.580 Young – you know, my kids would not dream of turning on the evening news.

00:26:14.700 They get their news from the – you know, from their screens.

00:26:18.780 But the people who are sitting down and watching the evening news are your age and they're my age.

00:26:25.320 And as you know, when you get to our age, you spend a lot of time at doctors and you're on – and those people are on a lot of drugs.

00:26:33.160 And so they're watching it.

00:26:34.260 And Roger Ailes told me, I think it was in 2014, and he, of course, was the founder and CEO of Fox News.

00:26:45.400 And I was trying to get – I had made a – or participated in the making of a documentary about the impacts of mercury in vaccines on neurodevelopmental disorders in children.

00:26:56.960 This is a sudden epidemic that had begun in 1989 of neurodevelopmental disorders.

00:27:03.240 And he had a relative who had been affected that he believed was vaccine-injured.

00:27:10.600 And he always would put me on his shows.

00:27:13.880 I had this weird relationship with Roger Ailes because I had spent three months in a tent with him when I was 19 years old in Africa.

00:27:20.960 And we had this friendship.

00:27:23.940 You know, he was a very clever, witty guy, and he had not started Fox News.

00:27:27.660 He had just left the running the Nixon campaign communications.

00:27:32.880 And he had stepped down from the Merv Griffin show.

00:27:36.520 But I had this lasting friendship with him, and he was a very loyal friend.

00:27:40.320 And he would always make the host of Fox TV to put me on to talk about environmental issues.

00:27:46.900 So I was the only environmentalist for a decade that was going on Fox News.

00:27:50.640 And I looked at him kind of as a Darth Vader, you know, of what he had done to American television and communications.

00:27:59.700 But I still had this strange friendship with him.

00:28:02.380 So he would always put me on.

00:28:03.740 And I went to him to try to get on to talk about this documentary.

00:28:08.520 He looked at it.

00:28:09.880 His assistant, Mike Clemente, who was running the station at that time, the network looked at it.

00:28:14.980 And both of them loved it.

00:28:16.700 But he said, we can't let you on.

00:28:18.420 And he told me at that time, he said, if any of my hosts independently let you on to talk about this, I would fire them.

00:28:27.080 I would have to fire them.

00:28:28.720 And he said, if I didn't fire them, I would get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes, meaning Rupert Murdoch.

00:28:34.200 And he said to me at that time, he said, 75% of my evening news division advertising revenues are coming from pharmaceutical companies.

00:28:43.720 And he told me that of the 22 ads on the typical evening news show, that typically 17 or 18 of those were pharmaceutical ads.

00:28:55.460 And so that, you know, that tells it all.

00:29:00.020 And I've seen again and again and again, you know, people like Jake Tapper, who did this, who worked with me for three weeks doing this incredible documentary on an article that I published in 2005 about a secret meeting at DEC, sponsored with 75 vaccine makers,

00:29:18.660 about how to hide from the American public, the links between autism and vaccines.

00:29:23.260 And I obtained the transcript for these from those meetings.

00:29:28.780 And I published them in Rolling Stone.

00:29:31.240 And Jake Tapper, prior as the Rolling Stone publication data approach, he spent three weeks with me doing an exclusive for ABC, which he was then working for,

00:29:42.160 on my article, a companion piece.

00:29:45.320 And the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and he said, the piece just got killed by corporate.

00:29:52.820 And he said, in all my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate.

00:29:57.600 And I'm so mad.

00:29:59.780 And then after that, I called him, I called him the next day and he went dark.

00:30:04.840 And I've never spoken to him again, but he's become kind of this shill for pharma since then.

00:30:09.780 And so, and I've watched that happen to so many, you know, announcers on TV.

00:30:16.940 Do you think that's what happened to Tucker Carlson?

00:30:19.500 Well, I think it might be.

00:30:21.300 I mean, the timing is good, but there was a lot of reasons they may have wanted to get rid of Tucker.

00:30:27.560 Yeah, but it's a strange move, eh?

00:30:29.120 Because I think Fox probably got rid of Fox News by getting rid of Tucker.

00:30:33.620 You know, it's such a, it's a movie that seems to be in.

00:30:35.760 They seem to have lost a big audience.

00:30:37.720 And it is weird.

00:30:38.900 I mean, he, Tucker was getting 4.5 million viewers a night.

00:30:43.880 And compare that to CNN.

00:30:46.240 CNN gets about, the primetime CNN has 345,000 viewers.

00:30:53.860 So Tucker was getting more than 10 times with CNN.

00:30:57.500 He dwarfed anybody else on Fox.

00:30:59.940 I mean, he was clearly the breadwinner.

00:31:01.880 He was the anchor, and they fired him.

00:31:06.580 They were making some kind of a point.

00:31:08.900 And, you know, maybe he just pissed off Rupert by being, you know, Fox News is important to us in this country.

00:31:18.520 But to Rupert Murdoch's empire, it's just a drop in the bucket.

00:31:22.100 So, you know, and he may, who knows?

00:31:25.320 It may have been pharma.

00:31:26.860 It may have been Rupert Murdoch's ego.

00:31:29.540 I don't know what it was.

00:31:32.040 Yeah, well, I wonder if a policy transformation that made it illegal for big pharma to market direct to consumer would go some distance to rectifying this pharma problem.

00:31:41.220 Yeah, I mean, well, that's right, and I looked into that, and, you know, the change happened, Jordan, in 1997, and that's when FCC changed its rules and FDA approved, which was the rule before that was that there could be no direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceutical products on TV or anywhere.

00:32:07.000 And the only other nation in the world that allows that is New Zealand.

00:32:13.000 And, you know, because we have that rule, it's one of the reasons that we use three times the number of pharmaceutical drugs as any other European country.

00:32:23.960 The average American today is on four pharmaceutical drugs, and it has not helped public health.

00:32:29.560 It is, you know, pharmaceutical drugs are now the third-largest killer of Americans after cancer and heart attacks.

00:32:41.580 And we pay more for public health than any other country in the world.

00:32:47.560 And I think—

00:32:47.960 Right, so that means that the third leading cause of death is medical error.

00:32:52.240 Is it third of the—

00:32:53.040 I think it's actually pharmaceutical drugs.

00:32:55.780 I think it's pharmaceutical drugs.

00:32:57.160 Yeah, and the source for that is the Cochran Collaboration.

00:33:01.120 It's a report by Peter Gosia, I think, who is the founder of the Cochran Collaboration, which is kind of the ultimate arbiter of pharmaceutical companies.

00:33:18.100 Well, they're also the company that produced the recent report, the Cochran Review, showing that masks are completely ineffective in relationship to COVID transmission.

00:33:27.480 Yeah.

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00:34:36.860 Of course, that's being debated now, although I can't see how, because as you pointed out, the Cochran Reviews are,

00:34:42.140 people have accepted them as gold standard for conservative reviews, careful scientific reviews for years.

00:34:47.980 Yeah, you know, the thing is that Gates, Bill Gates, has played a huge role in trying to take over Cochran.

00:34:56.980 And they've got, you know, the big founders of Cochran, Thomas Jefferson, who is, you know,

00:35:02.960 the leading clinical trial expert in Europe, and Peter Gosia, who is the other co-founder, have both been run out of Cochran.

00:35:13.360 And the Gates Foundation has been pumping, pumping tens of millions of dollars in.

00:35:18.560 So I don't know what's going to become of Cochran now.

00:35:20.700 So, yeah, well, the whole thing is at risk.

00:35:22.900 But so people know, so that people know what we're losing is, these were a group of very independent scientists who started looking at what was happening to the medical journals.

00:35:34.600 The medical journals get most of their money from pharmaceutical companies for both advertising and preprints.

00:35:41.080 And preprints are the, you know, the pharmaceutical companies have these phony studies that they use their financial clout to get the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine,

00:35:55.280 or JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association, to publish.

00:36:00.080 And then they get a preprint.

00:36:01.820 So they get the journal then to print out just that article, but with the cover of the journal in it,

00:36:07.960 which gives it this imprimatur of total legitimacy, they print out two or three hundred thousand of them.

00:36:15.620 And they pay a lot of money, millions of dollars for that run, that printing run from the Lancet.

00:36:21.740 And then their pharmaceutical reps, you know, the former Playboy models who go around to each doctor's office,

00:36:29.020 take the doctor out to lunch and give them one of these preprints and say, look, the drug I'm doing, Lancet says it's a great thing.

00:36:35.940 And that's where these journals make all their money.

00:36:40.980 Well, so I think it was the 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s, these groups of scientists got together who were independent scientists and said,

00:36:49.280 what we're seeing now coming out of the journals is not real science, it's pharmaceutical propaganda.

00:36:54.640 Even the journal editors, like Marsha Engel from the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Horton from the Lancet,

00:37:01.300 said you cannot believe anything in the journals anymore.

00:37:04.140 We are vessels for pharmaceutical propaganda.

00:37:07.580 This group of scientists said we're going to get volunteer scientists from all over the world

00:37:13.240 who will now look over the journal articles and see whether it actually was good science or where they're lying to us

00:37:21.680 and critically read it, do it basically a second round of peer review that's real.

00:37:26.680 And they put together this extraordinary organization of over 30,000 volunteer scientists, top scientists, independent scientists from around the world

00:37:37.720 who systematically reviewed journal articles to see whether the science is real or fake and informed the public.

00:37:44.560 And it was an absolutely critical organization.

00:37:48.480 And, you know, Gates has gone in there trying to undermine it.

00:37:51.300 And it's very, very troubling.

00:37:55.220 A couple of questions.

00:37:56.660 We talked here a little bit now about, let's say, the corruption of the legacy media on the news front by Big Pharma.

00:38:02.420 And you just made reference to the same thing happening in the scientific domain,

00:38:05.600 which is really awful to see journals like New England Journal of Medicine at Lancet and so forth,

00:38:11.740 and science for that matter, and you're seeing it with nature as well,

00:38:14.680 degenerate into organs that are no longer producing trustworthy science.

00:38:18.820 That's a real catastrophe.

00:38:19.780 You saw recently, like yesterday, that DeSantis basically bypassed the legacy media.

00:38:26.720 And Pierre Polyev did that in Canada when he ran for the leader of the Conservative Party, by the way.

00:38:31.920 He just skipped over the legacy media entirely.

00:38:34.140 And DeSantis announced his presidency on Twitter.

00:38:38.460 And here you are also talking to me on YouTube, right?

00:38:41.800 And so that's not exactly a standard political, that's not standard political practice.

00:38:46.800 And so what do you think of, why did you decide to talk to me today on my YouTube channel?

00:38:52.680 And what do you think of DeSantis' use of Twitter?

00:38:55.900 Has your campaign also been considering, for example, utilizing Twitter?

00:39:01.440 Because obviously Musk has made that open to any candidate.

00:39:03.820 How are you guys conceptualizing your move forward on the presidency campaign front in relationship to non-traditional media?

00:39:13.260 Well, you know, Jordan, I've been censored in the corporate media for 18 years.

00:39:21.300 So since 2005, I've been actively censored, you know, not just for vaccine articles, but for all of my articles.

00:39:29.440 And I was very, very active on those media fronts for, you know, decades.

00:39:36.360 But I've been slowly censored now to complete wall-to-wall censorship.

00:39:42.720 And particularly during the 13 years, the last three years, we've had to figure out ways to get around that censorship.

00:39:51.280 And so, you know, we've done that by using non-traditional media.

00:39:54.740 I was on Instagram.

00:39:56.240 I had almost a million followers on Instagram at one point.

00:39:59.360 But then in the pandemic, they deplatformed me.

00:40:03.480 Right.

00:40:03.740 You're still banned on Instagram.

00:40:06.040 Is that the case?

00:40:07.320 Instagram and banned on TikTok.

00:40:10.360 You know, I'm interested to see what happens to you with YouTube.

00:40:15.700 Well, you know, they've left me alone.

00:40:17.540 YouTube has left me alone.

00:40:18.620 It's quite surprising.

00:40:19.820 Because I've said things many times that, in principle, should have got me in trouble on YouTube.

00:40:24.380 But they haven't even put any strikes against my channel.

00:40:27.180 They demonetized my daughter for a whole year for reasons we never did discover.

00:40:31.940 But they've been completely hands-off with me.

00:40:34.640 You know, they've added those warnings or clarifications now.

00:40:38.520 And then especially when I talk to people like Bjorn Lomberg.

00:40:40.880 And we'll get to that later.

00:40:42.220 But I don't know what it is.

00:40:43.880 YouTube has been hands-off.

00:40:46.020 In answer to your question, when my uncle ran in 1960, television was a new phenomena.

00:40:57.980 And he recognized the power of television, that that would play a key role in that presidential campaign for the first time in history.

00:41:07.600 And, you know, he was able to exploit that and to win that election.

00:41:12.980 In the 2016 election, Twitter played a key role in getting Donald Trump elected.

00:41:18.520 You know, absolutely critical.

00:41:20.180 He probably would.

00:41:21.200 If he didn't have that Twitter account, he probably would not have been elected.

00:41:24.560 Who knows?

00:41:25.340 But I would say there's a good chance he wouldn't.

00:41:28.580 Today, Twitter is still important.

00:41:30.480 And I, you know, I have now 1.2 million followers on Twitter.

00:41:35.780 You know, I really didn't start actively doing Twitter until Elon freed it up.

00:41:41.820 You know, because if I, you know, during the pandemic, I was mainly posting, you know, kitty cats and rainbows and unicorns.

00:41:50.120 Because if I said anything that was, if I talked about what I was thinking about, I would have been deplatformed.

00:41:58.400 But once Elon took over, I started, you know, they, they, they unshackled me.

00:42:04.580 And, but also, I think this is going to be, this year is going to be the political campaign that will be decided on by podcasts.

00:42:14.540 And particularly because the candidates are not wanting to debate.

00:42:19.700 So I'm not only, not only is Biden not debating, but I think Trump may not debate.

00:42:24.840 And so I think people like me are going to end up going to, are going to, you know, we're going to really test whether these podcasts, and, you know, I was talking about, about Tucker having 4.5 million nightly views.

00:42:47.500 Well, the, the, the podcast that Joe Rogan did with Peter McCulloch got 40 million views.

00:42:55.220 Right, right.

00:42:56.060 Yeah, well, Rogan's a force of nature.

00:42:57.840 Yeah, so Tucker is 10 times what CNN is, you know, gets, and, and Rogan's audience is potentially 10 times what Tucker was getting.

00:43:07.760 So I think the, I think the podcasts have the capacity this election for reaching people and allowing, you know, sort of distant and insurgent candidates like myself to end run the corporate media monolith and to reach large numbers of Americans without going to, onto the networks.

00:43:28.020 So I'm hoping that works.

00:43:29.240 Now you asked about DeSantis, you know, I think, you know, I, I, I felt bad for DeSantis, badly for DeSantis because, uh, of what happened on his, you know, Twitter announcement where it, it went off, you know, and I'm kind of rooting for Elon.

00:43:47.720 So I don't, you know, I don't, you know, I don't obviously want DeSantis to win, but I do, um, I liked how he handled COVID in Florida.

00:43:57.340 There's other things that he's doing now that I don't like, but I do, you know, I, politics is hard for everybody.

00:44:03.920 And, you know, it would be, uh, it would, you know, I, I think it's unfortunate if somebody wants to speak to the American people and doesn't get that chance because the, uh, you know, because the media, um, vessel vector is not, uh, for some reason is not able to reach, reach them.

00:44:24.120 And I think he may have made a mistake in going on, um, with Elon, but I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe not.

00:44:33.360 I think, you know, President Trump is, uh, is, uh, is portraying DeSantis as a tool of, of the Jeb Bush.

00:44:45.120 That's kind of his, you know, strategy of, for, um, for characterizing, uh, DeSantis as a tool of Wall Street and the billionaire class and, you know, the Bushes, et cetera.

00:44:58.100 And it may not have been, I think it probably would have been better for DeSantis if he, I'm sure he thinks so now, if he had done a more traditional announcement where he would have gotten a lot of media coverage.

00:45:10.240 Yeah, well, like you said, like you said, well, time will tell, like you said, because it is a new technology and, and it is extraordinarily powerful in the way you described.

00:45:19.660 I mean, Rogan's podcast is number one in 97 countries.

00:45:22.960 He's clearly the most powerful journalist who's ever lived.

00:45:26.420 And so I think that big, I think the legacy media in the United States will die first.

00:45:31.140 And I think legacy media will die everywhere, but I already think it's probably dead in the United States.

00:45:35.780 It's a walking corpse and turning to podcasts and non-traditional media seems to me to be entirely appropriate for people who are forward-looking.

00:45:45.340 Like I said, in Canada, Pierre Polyev, who now runs the Conservative Party and who's the most likely next prime minister, he ran his entire campaign for leadership on non-traditional media.

00:45:54.520 And he was producing ads on his own that were generating, you know, 500,000 views.

00:46:00.060 And people were voluntarily watching his ads, which was like 100 times the view count he would have got on our state-funded media, 69% state-funded media, CBC.

00:46:10.980 And so, you know, I think the tide has already turned and the U.S. is at the forefront of that.

00:46:15.740 Now, I'm going to return to an earlier question I had.

00:46:18.460 But you've been on the receiving end of cancel culture, and one of the things I really have noticed is that, you know, I have colleagues and compatriots, friends across the political spectrum.

00:46:29.740 And one of the things I really have noticed that differentiates the left from the right is that the left will engage in cancel culture behavior to a degree that is virtually unheard of on the right.

00:46:42.120 Now, that may change, but at the moment that seems to be the case.

00:46:45.820 Now, you've been on the receiving end of cancellation, as you said, for almost 20 years.

00:46:50.360 And this begs the same question that I brought up earlier, is that why do you think under those conditions, given the treatment that you've received, that the left is salvageable?

00:47:02.380 Or do you revert to the idea, well, that's what we have to work with, and you're going to do what you can to revitalize the Democrat Party?

00:47:08.580 Because it isn't obvious to me that this cancel culture phenomenon has gone so far that it isn't obvious to me how it can be turned around.

00:47:16.400 I don't think everybody on the left is, you know, has co-signed counterculture.

00:47:25.080 I think that's, you know, it's a, it's a vocal, I would, I think it's probably a vocal minority.

00:47:32.180 I don't know, you know, I have no reason, I have no, I have no reason to say that other than just that's my feeling.

00:47:38.600 But I, you know, I just, I don't think most people think that way, that you should.

00:47:45.220 I mean, it's very, it's anti-American.

00:47:47.060 You don't, you know, we should be courageous enough and confident enough of our viewpoint that we can argue them and have them triumph in the marketplace of ideas.

00:47:59.800 And the way that you deal with, you know, with viewpoints that you don't like or that you believe are inaccurate is not through censorship, but, you know, with argument and more information and, you know, and facts.

00:48:15.080 And, and that's how we've always functioned.

00:48:18.200 That's a, it's a critical, it's a critical foundation stone for democracy.

00:48:23.980 This idea that the free flow of information is the water, it's the sunlight, it's the fertilizer or democracy.

00:48:31.060 And if you cut it off, democracy itself will wither and die.

00:48:34.620 There's just never been a time in history when they, you know, when the good guys were the people who were censoring stuff.

00:48:41.140 They're always the bad guys.

00:48:42.980 And we know that.

00:48:44.040 We, we read, you know, Orwell and we read Aldous Huxley and we read, you know, all of the great thinkers that were warning us from, you know, from when we were little kids that, you know, the censors are bad.

00:48:57.620 And when you, when you start censoring people, then you, you're, you're on the slippery slope of totalitarianism.

00:49:05.680 I mean, in 1977, liberals in our country strongly supported the ACLU for going to bat for the Nazis who were walking through Skokie, Illinois, you know, on a march through a Jewish neighborhood.

00:49:21.980 And, you know, we understood that we could be appalled by the things they were saying, but at the same time, you know, that it was more, that it was important for them to be able to say it.

00:49:34.760 Because if, if somebody can shut them up, they can shut us up.

00:49:38.180 Well, you know, it, I think, I think your, your claim that it's a minority of radicals on the leftist side, I think the data supports that quite clearly.

00:49:47.060 But, but, okay, so let me tell you two stories and tell me what you think about this.

00:49:51.120 So when the Democrats I worked with in the, in the U.S. and California, I had a conversation with them one day, very intelligent people, by the way, about Antifa.

00:50:00.260 And they were on about QAnon and about right-wing radical groups.

00:50:03.640 And they regarded them as entirely real and entirely credible threats.

00:50:07.780 And that was partly as a consequence of the January 6th occurrences, let's say.

00:50:12.940 And so I said, well, what do you guys think of Antifa?

00:50:16.260 And they said, well, you know, they don't really exist.

00:50:19.600 And I thought, well, that's interesting, because you think the right-wing conspirators exist, but you don't think the left-wing.

00:50:24.580 But, but like I said, they were smart people.

00:50:26.260 So I investigated further and they said, well, you know, it has no centralized organization.

00:50:29.560 It's, it's not a formal group.

00:50:31.720 It's a very small minority of people.

00:50:33.940 And, and it's extremely, it's, it's extremely loosely structured.

00:50:39.480 And it isn't representative of even the radical left, much, much less the centrist Democrats.

00:50:45.700 And I thought, okay, that's interesting.

00:50:47.120 So then I went and talked to Andy Ngo, who's a journalist who's covered Antifa in more detail than anyone else in the world.

00:50:54.120 And who knows their organizational structure and their routines inside and out.

00:50:58.900 And who's put his life on the line to, to cover this sort of, this Antifa activity.

00:51:04.440 And I asked him, how many Antifa cells do you think there are in the United States?

00:51:11.140 And he said, well, there's probably about 20.

00:51:15.840 And I said, well, how many full-time equivalent employees, so to speak, how many people do you think are in each cell that are dedicating themselves to the Antifa cause?

00:51:24.640 And he said, well, maybe 40.

00:51:26.460 And I said, oh, so that's 800 people.

00:51:28.740 So that's one in 400,000.

00:51:31.720 And, well, that's almost none.

00:51:33.860 And so you could take that data and you could take the case, you could make the case the Democrats made, which is, well, the Antifa doesn't even exist.

00:51:40.780 It's one in 400,000, you know.

00:51:43.800 In a city of a million, there'd be two Antifa members who were full-fledged, you know, committed, full-time advocates.

00:51:51.860 But then you think, well, look at all the damage those people did.

00:51:55.360 And then you think, well, maybe it only takes a trivial minority of people who are off the rails to cause a tremendous amount of damage.

00:52:01.640 That's what happened when the Soviets took over the Russian society in the aftermath of the monarchies after World War I.

00:52:09.360 It was a tiny percentage of people.

00:52:11.380 And this is what made me worried on the Democrat side.

00:52:13.800 So this is why when I went to Washington, I pushed the Democrats that I talked to.

00:52:18.220 He said, well, when do you think the left goes too far?

00:52:21.500 And so let me ask you that question, like, fairly bluntly.

00:52:25.040 You're trying to pull the Democrats to the center.

00:52:27.320 You think it's a salvageable enterprise.

00:52:28.860 And you think it's necessary to salvage it.

00:52:31.520 It's a two-party system.

00:52:32.700 It's half the country.

00:52:33.860 When do you think the left goes too far?

00:52:37.120 And how would you, in your administration, draw a line between those who are reasonable and who show common sense and those who have, like, gone off the rail?

00:52:46.660 Where is off the rail on the leftist side?

00:52:51.840 Under what circumstance would I be called upon to make that determination?

00:52:57.220 Well, OK, so when the Biden administration took office, one of the things I also discussed with the Democrats I knew was how the positions that were going to be filled that were now vacant because of the transition and the presidency, how those positions would be filled and who would they be filled with?

00:53:19.620 And one of the things I was told was that there was a dearth of available bodies on the Democrat side.

00:53:24.760 And, you know, it's hard to get people involved in politics.

00:53:27.180 And so that many of the positions were filled by people whose views were quite radical in comparison to the centrist, into the, say, mainstream centrist Democrat ideal.

00:53:37.860 And so, and I see this as, like, I would say Kamala Harris is a good example of that because I think Kamala Harris is inexcusably radical.

00:53:46.500 She tweets out support for the notion of equity nonstop.

00:53:50.980 And equity is not equality of opportunity.

00:53:53.040 And so, I mean, I think you'll be called on to make those decisions, for example, if you did establish a presidency when you were trying to figure out who was going to make up the bulk of your administration.

00:54:04.080 You know, and I don't, I know Democrats, because they like the free flow of ideas, have a hard time drawing distinguishing lines.

00:54:10.940 And so they have a hard time distinguishing the centrists from the radicals.

00:54:14.000 But they have been captured in many ways by the radical viewpoint.

00:54:16.920 And it's very dangerous.

00:54:18.860 I mean, you've been subject to that to some degree on the censorship side.

00:54:21.900 And so I've not seen the Democrats contend seriously with the problem of how to differentiate the mainstream centrists from the dangerous radicals.

00:54:31.140 And they seem to continue enabling them.

00:54:33.300 I've seen that right now on the trans front, for example.

00:54:35.720 You know, like Norway and Finland and Sweden and Holland and the U.K. have now banned gender transition surgery for minors.

00:54:44.660 And yet it's still being promoted assiduously, for example, in California by Gavin Newsom.

00:54:49.340 And I think that's criminal, personally.

00:54:51.360 I think it's inexcusable.

00:54:53.060 And that's a good example of the capture of the Democrats by the radicals, in my estimation.

00:54:59.160 So it's a curious problem.

00:55:01.320 I have so many people right now who are flocking to my campaign that are high, high-quality people whose views about life and politics I respect.

00:55:16.840 Some of them are Republicans.

00:55:18.220 Some of them are independents.

00:55:19.420 Some of them are Democrats.

00:55:20.280 And I don't have any anxiety about being able to fill all the key positions in my administration with people who have, you know, who I think have a common-sense approach to life.

00:55:38.820 Okay, so you think you have a talent pool at hand that is broad enough so that you can find people who are qualified enough to occupy the centrist position appropriately and pull the Democrats back to, you know, something more approximating the ideals, let's say, well, of the latter part of the 20th century as opposed to now.

00:55:58.780 Okay, so let me ask you another question then.

00:56:01.100 There are these ideas on the left that are troublesome, let's say.

00:56:06.680 What do you think the central ideas on the left, what are the central ideas on the left that are troublesome in your estimation?

00:56:15.040 You know what, what I try to focus on, Jordan, is the values that Americans hold in common rather than, you know, getting caught up in these issues that drive people apart.

00:56:30.200 So that, you know, I don't want to do finger pointing.

00:56:35.800 You know, if you ask me what I believe about certain issues, I'll tell you.

00:56:39.640 But I'm not, you know, I'm not looking to, you know, to finger point at people or to alienate people or I'm trying to, you know, run a campaign that brings people together rather than a campaign that tries, you know, that is based upon, you know, that kind of tribalism of, you know, of condemning people for, you know, for ideologies that I don't necessarily agree with.

00:57:07.820 If they're relevant to something I'm doing, I'll take that into consideration.

00:57:14.180 But I don't spend a lot of time sort of, I don't know.

00:57:17.560 You know, I really try to focus on how do you, you know, where are the bridges where people can come together, you know?

00:57:27.620 Well, I can, I can understand that.

00:57:29.980 You know, I have this enterprise starting up in the Great Britain called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

00:57:36.520 And we're trying to put together a positive vision for the future as opposed to the apocalyptic vision that's been, well, that's been circulating for some time now and that's demoralizing young people to a degree that's almost incomprehensible.

00:57:49.340 And I can understand your concern about, your concern for putting forward a positive vision rather than for drawing distinctions.

00:57:57.440 But by the same token, you know, for example, in the universities, I've seen the diversity, equity and inclusivity advocates take the enterprise over and destroy it.

00:58:06.720 And there are some truly pathological ideas circulating in that realm of the ideological space.

00:58:12.920 And I don't, and I'm not saying I know the answer to this because I have some sympathy for your desire to put forward a positive vision.

00:58:19.580 But by the same token, it does seem to me to be incumbent upon the Democrats to draw a line.

00:58:25.880 And I do think that one of the lines that should be drawn is with relationship to the notion of equity.

00:58:30.840 Because equity is a very pathological idea.

00:58:33.660 And wherever it's been implemented around the world in the past, it's caused nothing but mayhem.

00:58:38.940 And so anyways, I won't push that any farther because, you know, I have some appreciation for your perspective.

00:58:44.100 I do, I have another set of questions that I want to address.

00:58:47.920 Yes, you mentioned at the beginning of our talk, your concern that, your concern in relationship to the use of fear.

00:58:56.240 And we could say on the vaccine front that the vaccine mandates were pushed forward, especially the lockdown mandates.

00:59:05.280 They were pushed forward with the use of fear and that that was conscious policy.

00:59:08.960 I know in Canada, for example, that even the conservative types who were just as bad on the lockdown front, they polled the public.

00:59:16.900 They made the public afraid first.

00:59:19.520 Then they polled the public to find out what their fears were.

00:59:22.220 Then they produced all sorts of lockdown regulations that were advanced to improve their standing in the polls.

00:59:30.280 Then they told their scientists to justify those with scientific hypotheses post hoc.

00:59:35.420 And so I've been thinking about that.

00:59:36.800 So here, here's the, here's the conclusion.

00:59:40.280 If there's a crisis that emerges, real or not, but let's say real, and your response to the crisis is that you become a fear-mongering tyrant, then you're the wrong leader for the time.

00:59:53.660 It's that no matter what the crisis is, you are not morally, it is not morally acceptable for you to use fear and compulsion to put your policy platform forward.

01:00:03.620 And so I wanted to talk about that a bit on the climate front.

01:00:07.280 I was actually concerned about talking to you today because I generally don't give my guests a rough time.

01:00:11.900 But we, I think, have a profound difference of opinion in relationship to climate issues.

01:00:19.220 And so one of the things that I've seen as I've traveled around the world is that the climate narrative, the apocalyptic climate narrative, we're destroying the planet and doom is nigh, has demoralized young people to a degree that's almost incomprehensible.

01:00:34.820 I mean, you see it in the rising rates of depression and anxiety that characterize young women who, and they're more susceptible to such things.

01:00:42.460 But in men, you see it as this widespread dropping out of educational institutions and marriage and sexual relationships and employment.

01:00:50.280 I think it's 20%, something like that, 20% of work-age men in the United States now haven't had any employment whatsoever in the last year.

01:00:58.180 And so, and I see this particularly paramount in Europe where the climate apocalypse narrative has not only demoralized people en masse, especially young people, but it's produced a plethora of policies, and Germany is a canonical example, that have been, to put it mildly, counterproductive.

01:01:16.520 So Germany has energy now that's five times as expensive as it should be.

01:01:20.620 It's unreliable.

01:01:21.400 They're dependent on the Russians and other totalitarians on the fossil fuel front, and they pollute more than they did before they started this whole green enterprise. 0.92

01:01:31.120 And so, I know that you're a long-term environmentalist and you're concerned on the climate front, but I've seen the climate apocalypse use fear to induce something approximating the same kind of level of tyranny, as far as I'm concerned, that characterized the vaccine lockdown.

01:01:49.180 So, well, so help me sort that out, because, you know, you put forward a very interesting candidacy, and one of the crucial problems that we're facing at the moment is to sort out the environmental issues.

01:02:03.780 Like, I'm a big admirer of people like Lomberg, for example, Bjorn Lomberg, who's put forward a multidimensional view of the environmental concerns that confront us, not reduced it to carbon excess, and not put forward an apocalyptic nightmare as the most likely scenario.

01:02:18.640 So, help me sort that out and understand where you stand.

01:02:22.820 Let me just start by, with kind of a footnote, you know, I see these huge levels of depression and despair, loneliness in kids, and I don't think that there's a single cause to it.

01:02:41.880 And I think blaming it on, you know, depression about climate is probably oversimplistic.

01:02:46.960 And, in fact, I think a lot of the problems we see in kids, and particularly boys, it's probably underappreciated that how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we're seeing.

01:03:05.080 You know, these kids are being overwhelmed by a tsunami.

01:03:09.880 I mean, they're swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today, and many of those are endocrine disruptors.

01:03:16.580 There's atrazine throughout our water supply.

01:03:19.020 Atrazine, by the way, if you, in a lab, put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there.

01:03:36.100 And 10% of the frogs, the male frogs, will turn into fully viable females, able to produce viable eggs.

01:03:47.320 And if you, if it's doing that to frogs, it could, there's a lot of other evidence that it's doing it to human beings as well.

01:03:57.440 So, and, you know, I'm happy to talk about that later, but I don't think blaming this epidemic of depression and despair on people who are, you know, fanning fears of climate is, I think that's oversimplistic.

01:04:15.680 I think you're right.

01:04:17.860 You put your finger on, first of all, let me just say this about climate.

01:04:22.820 I believe that carbon in the atmosphere and methane does increase warming.

01:04:32.580 Why do I believe that?

01:04:34.520 I believe it because it makes sense, one, and I believe it because I read reports in the 1970s.

01:04:42.140 I, you know, on issues like vaccines, I read the science myself.

01:04:45.760 I read it critically.

01:04:46.540 I'm able to do that because, you know, I, I try cases on these issues and I've, I've been involved in probably more 500 to 600, 700 cases.

01:04:59.140 And almost all of them have some kind of scientific controversy.

01:05:03.720 And so I, you know, I wouldn't be good at my job if I couldn't read science critically.

01:05:08.240 And all of my cases involve intense critical reading of science and cross-examination of scientists.

01:05:14.880 And you have to have pretty much complete domain knowledge to be able to do that.

01:05:21.620 And if you're going to win cases.

01:05:23.440 So I, I'm used to doing that.

01:05:25.220 And, and I've read, I would say, at least the abstracts for, for every vaccine study.

01:05:32.860 You know, I've, I did a compilation of all the vaccine science involving thimerosal.

01:05:38.440 Where I digested 450 studies, the leading studies.

01:05:44.480 I have 1400 references in that book.

01:05:47.360 That book was an earlier book I did called thimerosal with the science speak.

01:05:50.860 So I know if somebody asks me, I can tell you, you know, this effect is, is highly likely being produced.

01:05:58.280 I cannot do that with climate science.

01:06:00.380 But there's, there's, there's tens of thousands of, of studies.

01:06:04.060 Most of them say, yes, you know, virtually all of them say, yes, not all of them, but virtually all of them say that carbon is contributing to the warming.

01:06:16.180 I mean, if you ask me, is, if you're, if your position is the warming's not happening, then I just, that's like somebody saying the autism epidemic is not happening.

01:06:26.480 You look around, you can see it everywhere.

01:06:28.900 You know, the ice caps are melting, et cetera, the Greenland ice sheet.

01:06:33.460 I, I spent a lot of time outdoors and I see the, over 69 years, I've seen the changes.

01:06:40.140 You know, I've seen them, you know, the mass migration of, of animals, of Southern animals, like black vultures and stuff that, you know, the, the, the, the Northern increase in their ranges.

01:06:51.500 I've seen the way that the, I've kept track since I was a kid about when the leaves turned.

01:06:56.540 So, you know, and, and it steadily moved up each year.

01:07:02.200 And, and so I see that all of my senses are telling me that, you know, the warming is occurring now.

01:07:09.880 Why is the warming occurring?

01:07:11.400 You know, people, there's people out there who say the warming's not occurring.

01:07:14.900 There's other people who say, yeah, the warming's occurring, but it's not, it's not from carbon, trapping carbon.

01:07:22.840 And what I, my opinion, you know, is basically, as I said, it's based on common sense, but also I read the, the science, the, the memos that I have read from the 1970s, from Exxon Science.

01:07:39.880 To Exxon Management.

01:07:42.340 And Exxon, during that time, had what it bragged were the best scientists in the world who knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule in the atmosphere, in the environment, in, you know, in every circumstance than any other scientist.

01:07:55.980 And in the 70s, they were telling their management at Exxon, if we keep burning oil at this rate, we're going to warm the globe.

01:08:05.300 It's, it's, it's high school math to them.

01:08:08.840 And they said, and they, it will be a good thing for the company.

01:08:12.680 It will be a bad thing for humanity and for the wildlife and the planet, but it will be a good thing for the company because we're going to melt the Arctic.

01:08:22.220 And there's a lot of oil onto the Arctic and we should be getting ready to exploit it because it is going to be melted if we continue doing this.

01:08:29.500 So, you know, my feeling is if those were the top scientists in the world, they had no interest in lying about it.

01:08:38.880 And this is what they were, you know, saying.

01:08:41.100 So, I think it's probably more likely to be true than false.

01:08:45.000 Now, I also agree, I also, I want to say this because, and you asked me to interrupt you at the beginning.

01:08:52.700 Yes, yes, let's do.

01:08:54.080 So, I want to respond to what you said.

01:08:57.740 I agree 100% with you that this crisis is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls the same way that the COVID crisis was.

01:09:08.380 And it's the same people, it's intelligence agencies, it's the, you know, it's the World Economic Forum, it's the Billionaire's Voice Club at Davos.

01:09:18.720 And it's the same kind of cabal of people who are used, who will use every crisis to stratify society toward, you know, greater power for the super rich and greater power for the military, greater power for the intelligence apparatus and less power for everybody else.

01:09:38.640 And so, you know, my approach to this, Jordan, is that I have a personal belief that the climate crisis is real.

01:09:48.860 I do not insist that anybody else share my belief.

01:09:52.640 And I, I feel like Lundgren is correct in saying that it, you know, the climate orthodoxy gets it wrong, that the carbon orthodoxy, the people who describe to that get it wrong.

01:10:09.340 There are actually a lot more important things than carbon that is, you know, than carbon sequestration and geoengineering.

01:10:17.540 I think there's habitat preservation, the most important thing we can do.

01:10:21.300 We've forgotten completely about that because of the obsession with reducing carbon.

01:10:26.500 There's regenerative agriculture, which is absolutely critical, including for carbon sequestration, but also that we have good foods, that we preserve the soil and all of these other impacts from a warming climate,

01:10:40.600 which are, you know, which are, you know, the, the shrinkage of lakes and agriculture, the destruction of the soils and ecosystems.

01:10:48.300 We need to do those things.

01:10:51.080 And that the preservation of fisheries and all of these, which are all tied into climate and the preservation of whales, for example, you know, which in subtle ways also, you know,

01:11:01.080 but very, very, very certain, but almost unmeasurable ways are part of the overall attack on the living planet, which is really the way that we need to look at this.

01:11:13.620 And if there's not just a war on carbon is not going to solve the problem if we don't have a habitat left at the end.

01:11:19.980 So when I talk about these issues, I rarely talk about climate.

01:11:23.760 I think we need to get rid of coal and oil, but I don't say we need to do that to save the climate because it's not convincing.

01:11:31.500 And even if you say, oh, tens of thousands of scientists agree with me, people today have a good reason to not believe scientific orthodoxies or pronouncements, right?

01:11:42.460 We went through that in COVID where we were told, oh, the science, you know, the established science has said this is all real.

01:11:48.420 And there's a lot of people who are saying, yeah, but it wasn't real and it isn't real.

01:11:54.400 And showing somebody a graph and saying this is what's going to happen to you if you don't behave is not a good way to get good behavior, right?

01:12:02.900 And it's going to happen to you in a long way.

01:12:04.880 But the thing is that both Republicans and Democrats, I found in 40 years, love the environment.

01:12:12.780 They want to keep sacred places.

01:12:14.800 They want to have healthy food.

01:12:16.160 They don't want toxics for their children. 0.66

01:12:19.120 They don't want to see 22-story machines cutting down the Appalachian Mountains.

01:12:25.680 And, you know, the 500 biggest peaks have been cut to the ground.

01:12:29.700 An area of the Appalachians the size of Delaware has been leveled.

01:12:33.560 These are our Purple Mountains Majesty where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed.

01:12:37.620 And, you know, we're industrializing these landscapes and nothing will ever grow on them again.

01:12:43.700 2,200 miles of rivers has been filled.

01:12:46.340 So we have poisoned every freshwater fish in North America from discharges of mercury from coal-burning power plants.

01:12:53.860 Nobody wants that.

01:12:55.960 The high peaks of the Appalachians, the forest cover is gone from Georgia to northern Quebec because of acid rain.

01:13:02.840 You know, all of those high altitude lakes are now sterile.

01:13:06.560 Nobody wants that.

01:13:08.460 And so how do you how do you think we have an OK, so let me make a couple of things clear on my side and then I'll allow it.

01:13:15.420 And, by the way, my approach to climate, I mean, my approach to reducing, to energy, let's say my approach to energy, is using free markets and that not top-down control.

01:13:27.720 So what I would do is I would end subsidies and then I would let marketplace determine.

01:13:31.920 And what's going to happen is renewable energy is going to triumph because you can build a solar plant for $1 billion a gigawatt today.

01:13:40.140 A wind plant costs about $1.2 billion.

01:13:42.660 A coal plant costs $3.6 billion.

01:13:45.820 And then dual-cycle gas turbines cost probably a couple billion a gigawatt.

01:13:52.480 But once you build a wind or solar, it's free energy forever.

01:13:55.240 So it's always going to be cheaper.

01:13:57.860 The problem with renewable energies like that is we do not have a transportation system to get them to market.

01:14:05.140 So we need a marketplace.

01:14:06.600 We need a grid system that can allow every individual in our country to become an energy entrepreneur, produce rooftop solar, sell it back to the grid at the same price that the utilities are getting.

01:14:20.080 Have every farmer in North Dakota be able to put wind turbines on their cornfields.

01:14:24.840 They all want to do it.

01:14:26.780 A cornfield in North Dakota is worth $800.

01:14:29.780 A cornfield with a wind turbine on it is worth $3,200.

01:14:33.100 Every farmer in North Dakota wants to put a wind turbine on their property.

01:14:37.440 The problem is they cannot get those electrons to the markets in Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, New York, because we do not have an efficient grid system.

01:14:46.540 And we need to build that the same as Eisenhower did with a highway system when I was a kid.

01:14:52.700 We need to build a grid system that will create a marketplace.

01:14:58.100 And once we have that marketplace, we'll have free energy forever.

01:15:01.700 Just like when we built the ARPANET grid for information, the cost of information went to zero.

01:15:07.340 We built the telecom grid, the cost of phone calls went to zero.

01:15:10.800 When we build an energy grid, the cost of electrons will go to zero.

01:15:15.680 And that will be a huge economic boom for our country.

01:15:18.260 And nobody's going to be using oil and coal anymore.

01:15:21.500 Okay.

01:15:22.020 So you agreed that there is a danger on the environment apocalypse front that the same old criminals, let's say, will utilize that potential crisis for tyrannical ants.

01:15:35.860 And so let's leave that aside.

01:15:37.200 That's something we agree on.

01:15:38.360 I should point out that, you know, I'm, and as Lomberg does, I accept the IPCC projections that there'll be some temperature increase over the next hundred years.

01:15:48.800 And that some proportion of that is a consequence of man-made activity.

01:15:52.800 Now, Lomberg has produced economic projections based on current rates of GDP growth, showing that, I'm not going to get the figures exactly right, but this is close to right,

01:16:03.020 that in a hundred years from now, we'll be about 400% richer than we are now, but with the negative consequences of climate transformation, we'll be 350% richer.

01:16:13.880 And that's not nothing.

01:16:15.160 There's some actual decrement in potential future value as a consequence of that.

01:16:19.480 But it's within the range that we can, that we can actually intelligently manage.

01:16:24.480 And he's also documented quite well the host of environmental concerns that confront us in a, in a manner that's very similar to what you just did.

01:16:31.840 It's like, we don't have one problem on the environmental front.

01:16:34.180 We have many problems and we should deal with them intelligently.

01:16:36.860 How do you think that it's possible to have a discussion about the environmental challenges that confront us without opening the door to the people who are going to use fear to introduce tyranny?

01:16:53.340 And is this associated with, in some manner, with your notion of a positive vision?

01:16:57.600 Like how, because what is happening, and I've seen this happen in Europe, it's crystal clear, and this is especially the case in Germany, although it's also true in the UK, is that like these more tyrannical policies on the energy front, they're not looming.

01:17:10.360 They're already in place and they're really hurting poor people, like really badly and destabilizing the entire power grid and de-industrializing Germany, which is also like part of the plan for some people.

01:17:21.060 Like how can we confront the environmental issues that do in fact loom in front of us without inviting in that top-down tyrannical control?

01:17:31.720 Well, I mean, I think that's what I'm trying to do with my candidacy, is to, you know, reboot some of this so that, you know, that we can find a common ground, that people can understand that you can love the environment.

01:17:49.080 I mean, you know, the reason that I became an environmentalist, Jordan, was not because I was scared of something, you know, scared of the end of the world.

01:17:58.900 It was because I was in love with the creeks and the, you know, and climbing the trees to get a baby crow when I was a kid and training hawks and doing whitewater kayaking.

01:18:11.020 And, you know, the little streams and creeks around my home where I could go and turn over rocks and find mud puppies and salamanders and crayfish and collect them and bring them home.

01:18:23.720 Or seeing the, you know, the tadpoles bubbling in these little mud puddles that became cauldrons in the early spring, stuff my kids will never see.

01:18:33.500 The explosion of color on the butterflies when I walked into the garden that my kids will never see, you know, because those, you know, they're gone now.

01:18:45.140 And that's why I fell in love with the environment.

01:18:49.700 And that, and it was out of love.

01:18:52.240 It was not out of fear.

01:18:53.380 And I think we have to bring people back to that place of love and say, you know, what kind of world do we want to live in?

01:19:02.340 You know, is it a live, is it a world where we can hear the songbirds and where there's amphibians out in the road, but you can still see pox turtles?

01:19:13.120 Or is it, you know, are we, either side is trying to make us fearful and, and fear is not a good, you never get a good response from fear.

01:19:22.720 You never get, you know, so I think we have to appeal to people through that love, through that kind of appeal.

01:19:29.860 And that, you know, my whole career has been doing that.

01:19:32.800 I, I, I had a chance when I was, when I, you know, in 1983, when I switched careers and became a full-time, you know, I've always been an environmentalist.

01:19:43.340 But when I came, became a full-time environmental attorney and advocate, I was given a choice of going to Washington and working for an Inside the Beltway, you know, at a high level, doing lobbying, doing, you know, fundraising and doing maybe land conservation on a grand scale.

01:20:04.140 And I didn't want to do that.

01:20:05.560 I wanted to work with, you know, communities that were living in the environment and that were, had been marginalized by environmentalists.

01:20:14.240 My first case as an environmental lawyer was for the NAACP blocking a, a, a, a, a waste transfer station that had been cited in the, in the oldest black neighborhood in the Hudson Valley because they didn't have the political power.

01:20:31.400 And I saw that then, and I saw that, you know, four out of every five toxic waste dumps in America was in a black neighborhood. 1.00

01:20:37.940 The highest, the largest toxic waste dump in America is Emile, Alabama, which is 85% black. 1.00

01:20:44.500 The highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in North America is the south side of Chicago.

01:20:51.400 The most contaminated zip code in California is East LA. 0.98

01:20:54.520 It was all Hispanic neighborhoods, black neighborhoods with these obnoxious, dangerous, toxic facilities were being cited. 1.00

01:21:02.200 And then I went to work for, you know, what was my passion for most of my life, which was for fishermen on the Hudson River, commercial fishermen and recreational fishermen. 0.94

01:21:12.720 Most of these people were Republicans.

01:21:14.960 They're people who were environmentalists as, as, as radical as you can get, but they didn't call themselves that because they felt estranged from the mainstream environmental community.

01:21:25.420 They, they were people whose livelihoods, you know, depended on a clean environment, who's, you know, they, who love the fisheries, their property values, their recreation.

01:21:36.160 These are people who, who were never going to see Yosemite or Yellowstone National Park, but then the environment was their back row yard.

01:21:44.360 It was the bathing beaches, the swimming holes, the fishing holes, the Hudson River that was there.

01:21:48.600 You know, you know, you know, it was Richie Garrett, who was the founder of the Hudson River Fishermen Association, which I, you know, joined and later turned into Riverkeeper.

01:21:59.400 He used to say about the Hudson, it's our Riviera, it's our Monte Carlo.

01:22:03.040 He was a combat veteran from Korea and he was a full-time grave digger. 0.88

01:22:09.200 You know, he was, these were, these were people who, you know, who were the salt of the earth and they should have been environmentalists, but they felt estranged from the environmental community.

01:22:21.300 And I spent my livelihood with the hook and bullet people, you know, bringing them into the environmental movement. 1.00

01:22:29.440 And they came in because of love, not because of fear.

01:22:32.780 Right. So you're willing, you're willing to, you're willing to avoid or would like to avoid using, using fear as a motivating factor when you're making your case for environmental concerns.

01:22:43.520 Okay, well that, you know, that seems to be a good answer on the motivational front.

01:22:46.780 The reason that FDR said the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.

01:22:52.740 And he said that, you know, it wasn't during World War II, it was in 1932.

01:22:56.760 And he said that because the depression had landed, you know, in the United States and Europe.

01:23:02.820 And he, he saw, we, we had, you know, we had left-wing leaders, demagogues like Huey Long that a third of the country wanted to turn, you know, essentially socialists or communists.

01:23:17.260 We had a right-wing like, like, like Father Charles Coughlin who wanted to bring the, the, the, the nation fascists.

01:23:26.920 The people had lost faith in democracy.

01:23:29.600 It was, one out of every four Americans was unemployed.

01:23:33.200 2,200 banks had closed.

01:23:35.480 You know, it was crashing.

01:23:36.860 And everybody was convinced that democracy and capitalism had failed.

01:23:41.020 We had to look for a new system.

01:23:42.840 In Europe, Roosevelt saw the same depression, the reaction in Germany and Spain and, and, and Italy was that right-wing tyrants were using fear to engineer a shift to the far right and to fascism.

01:24:00.480 And, and, and, and the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, left-wing tyrants were doing the same thing, but to shift the population towards communism.

01:24:09.560 And that's why he said to the American people, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

01:24:14.120 This, we will, we can write this.

01:24:16.160 We can change it.

01:24:17.160 We can recover what we had, but we just have to stay out of fear because that is the weapon of tyrants.

01:24:23.320 Okay.

01:24:23.560 So, okay.

01:24:24.220 We're, we're going to run out of time on this side.

01:24:26.160 There's two other questions I'd, I'd like to pose, but I don't have a lot of time for them and I'll, I'll put both questions forward.

01:24:32.540 The first would be, why should Democrats prefer you to Biden?

01:24:37.920 And the second question is, what are your opinions on the Russia, Ukraine situation?

01:24:43.300 So let's start with, if you don't mind, let's start with the Biden situation.

01:24:46.580 Why should Democrats, they have an incumbent president and why should Democrats prefer you to Biden?

01:24:53.420 Well, I mean, philosophically, we're just, we're an other, you know, opposite ends of the party.

01:25:00.620 President Biden believes in, you know, the Ukraine war, which I think is, you know, I think it's a huge, what we're doing in the Ukraine now is a, just a massive assault on, on Ukrainians.

01:25:16.260 And that, you know, it's, it's, it's, we have trapped Ukraine in a, in a, in a proxy war against the Soviets and they are being devoured by the geopolitical machinations of neocons in the White House who, who, you know, have this comic book depiction that, you know, a lot of Americans have swallowed about, you know, what is happening in the war, but what's really, and let me just say something about the war.

01:25:45.680 I think Americans supported that war for all the right reasons, because, you know, Abraham Lincoln said, we're, we are a great nation because we're a good nation.

01:25:55.200 I think Americans are good people.

01:25:58.140 They have compassion towards Ukrainian people, illegal invasion of, you know, and brutal invasion by, you know, a man who is a homicidal tyrant.

01:26:07.480 And, and, and, and they saw, and they had, you know, tremendous admiration for the valor and the courage of them, of the Ukrainian people.

01:26:16.260 My son, Connor, at 26 years old, left law school without telling us and went to the Ukraine and joined the foreign legion and, and fought in a, in a special forces group during, as a machine gunner during the Kharkiv offensive.

01:26:33.620 And he was motivated by that goodness that so many Americans have.

01:26:40.160 But we were told that this was a humanitarian mission.

01:26:43.620 And yet every step that we have taken, every decision we have been made has been, appears to have been intended to prolong the war and to increase the bloodshed.

01:26:54.700 And, and President Biden has, you know, recently confessed that our purpose is to depose Vladimir Putin, which is the two decade aspiration of the neocons who surround him.

01:27:08.180 They've been saying that for decades.

01:27:09.720 They've also been saying, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was their, you know, their doyen and philosopher, said that our, that U.S. strategy should be to suck Russia into a series of wars in little countries where we can then exhaust them.

01:27:24.700 Lloyd Austin, Lloyd Austin, Lloyd Austin, who is the, uh, President Biden's defense secretary in April, 2022, said our purpose for being in the Ukraine is to degrade the Russian army to exhaust it and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere in the world.

01:27:42.320 Well, that is the opposite of a humanitarian mission.

01:27:46.280 And that is a war of attrition.

01:27:47.680 And that's what it's turned out to be.

01:27:49.540 We have now turned, uh, Ukraine into an abattoir that has devoured 350,000 young Ukrainians. 1.00

01:27:58.780 They are lying about how many people have died.

01:28:01.380 They're concealing it from us.

01:28:02.800 They're concealing it from, the Pentagon is concealing it from the American people.

01:28:07.160 The Ukraine is concealing it from them people. 1.00

01:28:09.140 But 350,000 people, Russians are killing Ukrainians at a rate of, at a ratio of seven to one.

01:28:16.280 And we have turned that poor little nation into, uh, uh, you know, uh, just, uh, uh, a killing field for these idealistic young kids.

01:28:28.920 And in order to advance a geopolitical agenda that, you know, has nothing to do with the Ukraine.

01:28:35.120 Okay, so, so it seems to me that your summary, from what I know, your summary of the rationale for the war is accurate.

01:28:44.300 Is that the, the hypothesis on the pro-war with Russia front, let's say, is that it's a worthwhile expenditure of American money to take Russia out as a conventional military power.

01:28:57.740 And I do believe that's what's happening.

01:28:59.240 And there's a side benefit to that, which is the funneling of billions of dollars into Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.

01:29:06.620 And so, yeah, it's a money, it's a money laundering scheme for the military-industrial complex.

01:29:12.700 Right, right.

01:29:13.360 Okay.

01:29:13.720 But now, so, so I could say, well, what's wrong with the goal of degrading Russia's conventional military policy?

01:29:21.040 Why is that not in the best interests, let's say, of the West?

01:29:24.380 And what do you see it as an alternative?

01:29:26.140 And what would you do in relationship to the Russia-Ukraine conflict if you had, well, the decision-making power to actually do something about it?

01:29:33.980 I know there's no peace talks going on at the moment, for example, which is quite a miracle.

01:29:38.840 And the Russians have wanted to do peace talks from the beginning, and we've rebuffed them.

01:29:43.120 Right.

01:29:43.420 I will settle this on day one.

01:29:45.860 I will stop the killing on day one.

01:29:47.780 I'll stop the killing, and I'll, you know, I mean, the settlement is obvious, right?

01:29:53.020 The Russians have wanted to settle this from the beginning, and they've been very clear about what they want.

01:29:58.820 They want NATO to make a pledge to not come into the Ukraine, which we should have done. 1.00

01:30:03.200 We shouldn't have put NATO into 14 countries.

01:30:05.660 We told the Russians when they dismantled the Soviet Union in 1991, and they moved 400,000 troops out of East Germany, and they allowed NATO to reunify Germany under NATO.

01:30:21.600 And they said our condition for doing that, this, you know, tremendous conciliation that we're making, is that you never move NATO to the east.

01:30:31.540 And George Bush told them we will not move NATO one inch to the east.

01:30:35.620 And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out the plan, which has then happened, where we moved it not one inch, but 1,000 miles to the east, 14 nations.

01:30:47.460 And then we put Aegis missile systems in Poland and Romania, which are nuclear capable.

01:30:54.300 So they're a few minutes from Russia.

01:30:56.220 They can decapitate the entire Russian leadership before, you know, if we wanted to start a preemptive war. 0.52

01:31:02.760 And that is inexcusable.

01:31:04.360 I mean, the Russians, we wouldn't live with that. 1.00

01:31:06.520 My uncle did not live with that in 1962.

01:31:09.360 We would have gone in.

01:31:10.080 If they hadn't removed them from Cuba, we would have gone in. 1.00

01:31:12.820 And then we overthrew the democratically elected government, Viktor Yaganovkovich, in 2014.

01:31:23.700 We spent $5 billion, the CIA through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, spent $5 billion to violently overthrow that government, which was democratically elected.

01:31:37.600 So we destroyed this democracy and put in our own government, which we now know the neocons in the White House, Victoria Nuland, selected two months before in a telephone.

01:31:49.060 So we handpicked the new government before the coup.

01:31:52.400 We put a new government in that immediately makes a civil war against the Russian population of Donbass, bans the Russian language, kills 14,000 of them, and then, you know, and then starts training with NATO.

01:32:04.680 And, yeah, you know, there were a lot of provocation.

01:32:08.980 You know, it's not just me saying this.

01:32:10.980 George Kennan, who is the architect of, you know, the entire Cold War containment policy, said in 1998, the year after Brzezinski wrote that memo, he said,

01:32:23.260 it is the greatest calamity ever to expand NATO to the east.

01:32:29.560 He said, Russia lost the Cold War.

01:32:31.940 The people who are running Russia are the ones who opposed the Cold War.

01:32:36.360 We should be making friends with them.

01:32:39.960 We shouldn't be pushing them into the hands of China. 0.99

01:32:42.400 Okay, Mr. Kennedy, let me summarize.

01:32:45.340 We're going to run out of time, and I want to be very respectful of your time.

01:32:48.860 I know you have a tight deadline.

01:32:50.280 So I want to summarize what we've talked about, and if you have any closing remarks, I'll give you an opportunity to do that.

01:32:56.240 So we started out by talking about the necessity for your presidency and the twist in the tail of the Democrat Party and Democratic Party,

01:33:06.700 and your notion, which you reiterated later, that you're on the opposite side of the political spectrum within the Democrats from Biden,

01:33:12.880 and that what you would like to do is to pull the party back to its more traditional center.

01:33:18.680 And we talked about the capture of the legacy media and your censorship and the potential movement of political dialogue into alternative forms.

01:33:29.500 We talked about environmental issues and came to an agreement, for example, that there are other fish to fry than the carbon fish, let's say,

01:33:39.300 and that the use of fear in the environmental movement is an invitation to totalitarianism.

01:33:44.680 And we essentially concluded with a discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war, which you characterized as an attempt by the neocons to degrade Russian military capacity.

01:33:55.480 And you made a case for how we, in some ways, set up the Russians to engage in this conflict.

01:34:02.600 And in doing so, in doing all of that, you laid out some of the principles of your candidacy

01:34:08.740 and described why you regard yourself as a credible and necessary alternative to Biden.

01:34:14.520 And so, two questions.

01:34:15.840 Did I summarize that properly?

01:34:17.420 And is there anything else that you would like to bring to the attention of people before we draw this part of this to a close?

01:34:22.960 I don't think I want to start another long discussion with you,

01:34:26.120 but there's plenty more to talk about if you want to have me back another time.

01:34:29.300 And that was a fine summary, Jordan.

01:34:31.560 Okay, well, look, we will definitely continue this discussion because, well, why not?

01:34:36.220 There's lots of other things to talk about.

01:34:37.740 And so, okay, so then I would like to thank you for sitting down and talking to me today.

01:34:42.980 I would like to talk to you at some point about this vision that we're developing for this ARC enterprise in London

01:34:48.200 and trying to put forward a positive vision of the future instead of the apocalyptic nightmare.

01:34:53.220 You must turn to tyranny vision, which I think is ruling at the moment.

01:34:57.460 And so we can do that in the future.

01:34:59.080 For everybody who's watching and listening on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:35:03.100 And to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating this conversation, setting up this studio in Edmonton, Alberta.

01:35:09.380 That's where I am today.

01:35:10.340 And then the studio also.

01:35:11.620 Where are you located at the moment, Mr. Kennedy?

01:35:14.440 In Indianapolis, Indiana, the home of the Indianapolis Speedway, which is at this moment running their annual race.

01:35:24.120 Well, thank you for everyone setting that up on that front.

01:35:27.940 I'm going to talk to Mr. Kennedy for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:35:32.400 We'll do a more biographical interview on that end of things.

01:35:36.260 And so if you're interested, please consider turning to that.

01:35:39.760 Apart from that, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:35:43.120 And I'm looking forward, hopefully at some point, to meeting in person, but also to continuing our discussion, if you're open to that in the future.

01:35:52.280 Absolutely.

01:35:53.020 Anytime.

01:35:53.600 Thank you for having me, Jordan.

01:35:57.400 Hello, everyone.

01:35:58.680 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 05, 2023

363. Rekindling the Spirit of the Classic Democrat ｜ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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