MY EXPERT OPINION 191: ROBERT F KENNEDY JR BREAKS DOWN THE STATE OF AMERICA

foreign opinion the greatest show in the world world world world world yeah we're doing doing some amazing things here hit that like hit that share let everybody know you in here this cost you any paper unless you is a mother Hater Hater Hater Penguins hit the Subscribe buttons ah we got something special for y'all today back what up bro how you doing my shoulders kind of messed up trying to tell you you gotta stretch first wow rest in peace young cheese yes stop it Philadelphia stop it condolences and prayers go out to Gilly wallow and this whole family no father should have to bury their child no son should have to grow up without his father gotta knock it off stop that rest in peace condolences to the whole family then we have a moment of silence okay thank you yeah that's a tough thing we'll get to that um Sean bigger peace everyone great day happy to be alive God woke me up this morning let's do it oh why you got that suit one of us got a represent all right somebody has to dress like a grown-up yeah oh please Chastity what's up how you doing after an hour that's crazy yeah house and all that's crazy yeah yeah I actually feel like yourself but everything is good everything's great happy to be here happy to be free alive just as a [ __ ] said and everything is moving exponentially as it should Positive Vibes positive vibrations and we gonna keep vibrating high enough so so now if you are unfamiliar with the man sitting next to Champ he catches rattlesnakes with his bare hands that's all I have to say that's all I have to say and he's also running for president when uh he's uh a member of a family that America has loved for so long um unfortunately this been you know a lot of controversy around his family but he's here to tell his story so oh man yeah yeah how you doing sir I'm very good thank you I'm happy to be here thank you for having me yes first question I wanted to ask you have you ever been bitten or one of the rattlesnakes that you catch with your barehead I've never been bitten by a poison snake but I've been bitten by a lot of other snakes you had to master your Technique as a politician that answer could have a bunch of different meanings to it been bitten by a bunch of different other guys metaphorically yeah that was my first is that so wow was that so too by literals like so yeah um I was with my kids in Ecuador one time on a Plantation where a banana plantation and there were canals in it and they were taking the uh when they caught the snakes and the canals they would throw them into a cage and so there were about 20 or 30 of them in a cage and I reached in to grab one of them and a lot of them why why why why why why you know what they buy these are like little anacondas instructors when they bite you they leave their teeth in you and and some of those teeth didn't come out of my hand for over a year what did you know that yeah did you know that the teeth do that when you reach for the snake yeah I did but I I hadn't had that experience before I was surprised about how many of them decided to bite me wow wow that's a lot like it's a Kennedy get them it's crazy now I wanted to um you know but usually when uh it's presidential candidates um not many people are aversed in who these people are before we see them standing behind a Podium telling us things so I like to start from the beginning um it's childhood what were your earliest memories right so I'm one of 11 kids I'm the third of 11 kids on my father was Robert Kennedy who was the Attorney General when I was born he was an attorney who was and he was working for my uncle John Kennedy who was Senate Senator right and I was born in 1954 and this was uh and my uncle ran for president 1960. oh I I remember that campaign very well I went out to Los Angeles for the convention it was the first time I'd ever stayed up all night okay um how old were you I was at that time I was seven oh and there's pictures of me in the convention with my brother playing with a snake on the table that I had costumes so my uncle is attorney general my father was uh um was president and that you know that was at a time when the their principal preoccupational the Civil Rights Movement they were you know fighting uh to get uh James Meredith they said 20 000 troops down to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi and they sent troops to Alabama 16 000 troops to get um Veronica alone and five other students into the University of Alabama they were in a fight with George Wallace it was a segregation as he famously without segregation now segregation forever as his sort of campaign slogan and he was their Nemesis and they uh and they you know they they got to play an important role in making this country a true constitutional democracy for the first time in its history I was saying to somebody the other day that I I was born in Virginia at a time when there was still Jim Crow so it was illegal for example for a black man to marry a white woman a vice versa right and I had we had a groom like a handyman who worked for us who became very close to me because um I spent a lot of time out hunting and trapping Hawks and other animals and he would drive me around the state of Virginia he was a had been a CB um in World War II acts weren't allowed to [ __ ] men were not allowed to fight World War II until the very very end right um but they could they served in the military but they usually served on construction Crews and he had been a construction crew in the South Pacific he was about six foot five extremely intelligent a very articulate and um and dignified but when we drove around Virginia we when we stopped for lunch I would have to go into the diner and buy food for both of us and then come back and eat it in the car together because uh because of segregation laws he one time asked me to buy to come with him to Solana Village which is a little shopping uh Like a Village near where there was a shoe store and because he was allowed on the juice bar and I had to go in if it sized the salesman and bring out the shoes and um and I he tried them on the sidewalk and and if they didn't fit he couldn't bring them back at that time um it was very common for black people to have corns because of that problem because once they tried on the shoe they could not hand it back so if it was too tight and you would see at that time a lot of black people that had cut uh pieces out of their shoes you know to alleviate the pain well um but you know my father my uncle got to play this is very important role with Dr King working with him they organized together with him the on the Civil Rights march in 1963 when he gets I Have a Dream speech on my father um and you know continued to work with Dr King after my my uncle was killed in 63. um his uh he had uh he had been an a war with his own CIA and with his intelligence apparatus and um he was uh he was killed in Dallas assassinated in Dallas in 1963. yeah I um he didn't want to go to the Vietnam War so he said his his uh advisors honored him and his intelligence apparatus he fired the heads of the CIA right as soon as he became president because they tricked him into the Pigs invasion and he knew that they had lied to him and he came out of a meeting that night and he said I want to take the CIA and shattered into a thousand pieces and Scatter into the winds and he fired out and told us Richard this is what Charles got all the three top guys the CIA but he was surrounded by an intelligence apparatus a military that wanted to go to war that considered war with the Soviet Union at war with Cuba both um inevitable and advisable desirable and he didn't want to do that he said they wanted to send 250 000 troops to Vietnam and he refused he sent 16 000 advisors so he never sent a combat troop abroad he told his best friend the primary job of the president United States is to keep the country out of War and he refused to send combat troops of Vietnamese and Green Berets to advise the Vietnamese some of them did fight which was against the world of Engagement a month before he died he asked for a um he heard that one of the Green Berets had been killed and he has for a casualty report and his his Aid brought him the report and showed that 75 Americans had died and he said that's too many I'm pulling them all out and he saw it in that day National Security order 263 ordering all troops come from Vietnam I'm with the first thousand coming home in December this was October a month later he was killed and a week after that Linda Johnson remanded that order and then ended up within a year sending 250 000 troops over it then became an American War Nixon who came in after him said in uh 560 000 uh 56 000 never came home including my cousin George gecko who was killed in the Tet Offensive my father ran against the war in 68 so five years later against Johnson it forced Johnson out of the race so he ran against the incumbent president to say Amazon now doing in the Democratic Party it forced Johnson out of the race and then my father was shot and um after winning the California primary my father was shot in June of 1968 on June 5th and I was with him when he died I was 14 years old then and I we flew him back on vice president Humphrey's plane and we wake them here in uh and uh St Patrick's Cathedral and I I remember coming out it was crowds that were eight eight deep on the sidewalk as far down Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue as you can see and when we came back out of the church I was one of the pallbearers there was a black lady who was very very large and she um she broke down she knelt down on that you know like fell down on the sidewalk and she was all the actor Jeff and saying shouting at my father you did your best you did your best it was very moving moment for me then we took him to um to Penn Station and we brought him down to Washington DC on the train that train where I was supposed to take two and a half hours it took seven and a half hours because there was two and a half million people on the tracks and it was it was a whole cross-section of the American Experience I was a 14 year old boy riding on that trade with all the people who would have been part of his government government there was poets and there was economists and writers and Priests and rabbis but the the crowd along the track was a cross-section of the entire American experience and all the major cities I'm in Trenton Newark Baltimore Wilmington um we we crawled through the train stations at maybe one mile an hour because there was so many people in the station all black phases they were singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic Glory Glory Hallelujah which was the same in him when Lincoln had died and they brought him back to Illinois on the train and I'm in the countryside there were whites and they were you know people in military uniform that there were Boy Scout Troops down to get attention I remember passing a Little League field where all the people the players on both sides were standing at attention holding their gloves at their chest the coaches all the people in the sand uh there were I remember outside of Wilmington looking down on a field and there were six nuns standing in the back of a yellow pickup truck and they were all waving their rosaries and handkerchiefs at us as we passed people were holding signs that said goodbye body pray for his body um and they were holding uh American flags and they were hippies there were people in military uniform it was uh you know and then when we got to Washington President Johnson met us there and you know and and then drove it was in a convoy up past the mall at that time on the Washington Mall there was probably six or seven maybe eight thousand men in Camp my father had been communicating with Dr King and at that time the Vietnam War was robbing the poverty program and Dr King broke with the rest of the civil rights movement because he said we need to be opposing the war that has to be because and and the rest of the you know even Walter fondler Roy and Ralph Abernathy and many of the other leaders of civil rights movement we're telling him that stay in our lane we need to focus on civil rights don't get involved in the war and he said if you can't separate because that word is robbing the problem the poverty programs but also it's black people are fighting their Uber and they are going to and the and the violence is going to come home you cannot be an imperial country abroad and still be a democracy at um it's going to turn us into a surveillance State a Security State and the violence is going to come back and and all of the issues the oppression the hunger the virus the deprecation um is you can't it is going to come home so my father and he got together and ate honored they had both worried at that time about uh about how do you get legislation from the poor and my father had said to Dr King the only way to do it is do it the same way we did with the Civil Rights Marge have four people come to Washington camp on the mall and don't leave until there's legislation you know taking care of a homelessness Etc so they had both put together this woman called um Marion Wright Edelman who was friends with both of them and to organize the Poor People's campaign Dr King had been killed two months earlier my father spoiled my father was in Indiana when Dr King was when his death was announced when my father learned and my father was in the black sack was going into the black neighborhood in Indianapolis and the the uh chief police said you can't go in there it's going to erupt environments when they finally find out my father went alone because the police wouldn't come accompany him and he gave a speech that's very one of his most famous speeches in which he talked about his own brother being killed by a white man and that what our nation needs is not hatred and anger and division what we need is love and he uh any um any talk he quoted askless to a you know to a group of Americans black Americans I'm a famous poem whereas where esophagus says um that you know our objective is to tame the Savage that's the man and make gentle the life of the world that night because of his speech Indiana was the only city that didn't burn in our country wow there were rise every other city so even so now two months later my father's killed and um and the all these poor men are encamped on the mall and as we drove by them they all came to the sidewalk and they stood with their heads bowed and their hats against their chest now each of my father up the hill and buried him next to his brother and I remember four years after that looking at um as I was at College then in Boston I looked at this demographic data I was studying politics in American history and it showed that in 1972 four years later the the white people who had lined that track and with who had supported my father strongly during the 1968 election four years later they didn't vote for George McGovern who was aligned with my father and very close good friends with him but instead they voted for George Wallace who was running that year too who was antithetical to everything my father believed in oh out of these whites oh we're aligned with blacks and this idealistic Vision that my father had of this country suddenly four years later they were angry bitter racist segregationists and um you know it occurred to me then and it struck me many many times since at every nation like every individual has a darker side and a lighter side the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our fear our greed our hatred our anger or our xenophobia and that you know what my father did was to try to do something different we just to kind of a solid seeds so each other as part of a community and to take risks for people who don't look like you know and to feel like we're all part of a noble Adventure you know to make this on this experiment democracy uh worked for our country and for the rest of the world and he was able to do that to get people to find a hero inside of them themselves and put aside a lot of their fears about their neighbors and avoid this adduction of the notion that we can advance ourselves to People by leaving our poor brothers and sisters while I or people don't look like us I I went to college and in law school I worked at the D.A in Manhattan for a couple years and then I became an Environmental Lawyer and I I can't you know I ended up starting this uh this group called River Keeper I'm my first case was representing the NAACP up on the Hudson River in Ossining New York the uh the City of Austin England wanted to build a um a waste transfer transfer station in the the the the oldest black neighborhood in New York state which is an awesome thing the neighborhood that's been there since before the Civil War and it wasn't they weren't poor they just didn't have the political Cloud to keep that waste transfer station moving and they asked me to represent them and I did and we killed that proposal then I went to work for fisherman on the Hudson River and we started a group called River Keeper we had on the Hudson we have the oldest commercial fishery in North America it's 350 years old many of the people I represented for the past 35 years I'm from families that have been fishing the river continue to see since Dutch Colonial time you guys see the odds and you see this sort of dirty water but there's so many fish it's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic it produces more pounds of fish per acre yeah yes excuse me excuse me there are they're sturgeon in that river that are 11 feet long how many heads do they have they have 200 pounds of caviar in them wow and there used to be a huge caviar fishery on the Hudson but you know they're striped bass and sturgeon and Harry and Hell wives and blue crab and and Bluefish and all the saltwater fish because the Hudson is tied all the way up to Albany and a rise then so the salt line goes up the river and we've had sharks and even whales go all the way up 30 or 40 miles up the river oh we have this commercial fishery that I represented and it's most of the people in that fishery are in up in grotonville New York a little village um uh you know and the people there are are not you're prototypical environmentalists they're Factory workers Carpenters lasers electricians half the people in Gross Mill made their living or at least some part of it fishing or grabbing the Hudson and in 1966 Penn Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and a half foot pipe into the Croton Harmon rail yard from the rail yard into the river and the oil went up on the River on the tides and made it black in the beaches it made the Shad Taste of diesel so they couldn't sell them down here at the Fulton Fish Market in New York City and all the people on grotonville came together and the only public building in the town which was the American Legion Hall this was a there's a very patriotic Village Greenville had one of the highest mortality rates in World War II of any community in our country almost all the original Founders and board members of of riverkeeper my group were former Marines they were combat veterans from World War II and Korea they weren't radicals they weren't militants they were people whose patriotism was rooted in the Bedrock of our country but that night they started talking about violence and they uh somebody said they had been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution um but they were given the Buns rush they were told these are important people Penn Central Railroad the richest people in the state we can't force them to comply with the law and all of these men and women 300 people came together in this American Legion Hall in March of 1966 and they started talking about violence and they somebody said that they should put a match to the oils like coming out of the pen Central pipe and burn up the pipe somebody else said they should roll a wrap mattress up the pipe and jam it up there and and flood the rail yard with its own way somebody else said they should float a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point power plant which at that time was killing a million fish a day on its intake screens and taking food off their family tables and then this guy stood up who was a former Marine uh and he was the outdoor writer for Sports Illustrated his name was Bob Boyle and he said um he he had researched he'd been he had done an article about angling in the Hudson about people there was these fishing clubs sewer fishing clubs in New York City that were fascinating and people who were fished Up and Down the River 200 pieces of speeds of fish it's in this article two years before and in researching it he found this ancient navigational statute called the 1888 rivers and harbors Act and said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States you had to pay a big penalty if you got caught but also there was a bounty provision that said that anybody who turned the polluter got to keep half the fine and nobody had ever enforced this law before and on that night he stood up in front of him with a copy of that law and he said we shouldn't be talking about breaking the law we should be talking about enforcing him they start a group that night called The Hudson fisherman it later became River Keeper and they started suing polluters and 18 months later they collected the first bounty in the United States history under this 19th century statue they got to keep two thousand dollars they shut down the Penn Central pipe they used that money to go after see magogi duct tape standard brand American Siam at the biggest corporation is America winning tens of thousands of dollars in Bounties in in 1973 they collected the highest penalty in the United States history against the corporate polluter and got two hundred thousand dollars from Anaconda wire and cable for dumping toxics from Hastings to New York used that money to build a boat and they began patrolling the river and they hired me as a their full-time attorney and we sued over 500 polluters on the river we forced them to spend five billion dollars um wow and uh and the uh today the Hudson's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic and the miraculous Resurrection the Hudson inspired the creation of river Keepers water Keepers all over the world don't we now have 350 of them each with a patrol boat and it's the biggest water protection um a group on Earth you know one of the things I mentioned is that you know one of the things I learned very early on I've been a lot of work um here you know in Harlem and and uh you know elsewhere um is that uh pollution disproportionately harms the poor out of every five toxic waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood the largest toxic waste of in America is amio Alabama which is 85 black highest concentration of toxic waste up in America is the south side of Chicago wow the most contaminated zip code is east L.A and you know probably you know you can name a lot of problems at the black community has but you know one of the worst is toxicity is you know that comes from lead that comes from these that comes from whitening toxic exposures yeah yeah and bad food by the way I mean 75 of food stamps aren't spent on processed food which is just poison it's just poison 10 goes to uh soda but um you know black kids in Harlem are have a a uh 44 of them have toxic levels of lead in their blood um they are more likely to die of a brain tumor than a bullet and uh and they're most likely to die of suicide than anything else now today since the pandemic and these are environmental exposures and um you know they're uh and you know it's a it's a it's a huge issue that I've been litigating on for many years I sued at one point I said the New York City water supply New York has the best drinking water in the world of any City it it has this incomparable taste that accounts for the amazing Taste of unique taste of New York City Pizza New York City Bagels yeah I do taste tap water sometimes that's a good thing and it comes from two Water Supplies one of them in the Catskills that's very very pure to actually juice it the Delaware and classical system very very good water on the east side Hudson is um the Croton system and it's very small it's only 10 of the water but it has 102 sewage treatment plants discharge again to it and there's no filtration so that the water from those wastewater treatment plants going right to people's taps and during the you know dry summer months if you drink a cup of coffee if you're in the distribution District that that growing water your cup of coffee is going to be about three percent uh sewage from you know a plant that's been through a plant wow well I asked New York City to give me the distribution because I want to see the neighborhoods that were getting this and they they wouldn't they said it was National Security this was long before 9 11 this is like in the 90s right and so I sued them and they for a year they stonewalled me and then they gave me the distribution maps on the on the courthouse steps and the map said the neighborhoods that were getting the crote and water were colored dark on those maps and it was Harlem South Bronx Lower East Side Hell's Kitchen wow and um and it was when you went down the Upper East Side there was one little tiny dot of white where it was getting the good water in this kind of sea of Blackness and I had to get that magnifying glass out to look at it it was Gracie Mansion so the mayor's house was getting the good water but all the surrounding neighborhoods were you know getting the poor water and whose fault is that who's directly to blame for that happen who made the decision that this water goes together you know what it is it's a it's a quiet it's not so much I don't believe it's from direct racism I think it's from the powerlessness of black community they know people can't complain you know there's sewage treatment plant it's over on the on in North Harlem on the west side it's called the North River plant that plant was supposed to be put at the 79th Street both days which is the logical place for that plant because that Boat Basin was the outlet of a river what and that's where you want the sewage because it means there's a it you're you're going downgrade at all you know it's the bottom of a of a gradient of a watershed so you don't have to put in pumps and it's very cheap because the water it flows directly into that plant right the same that all the water in that area let's try to put it on 79th Street uh but the people who were there at 79th Street said we don't want it here and they were wealthy people so they could call the mayor they had given them contributions Etc and said you got to move this we don't want this air we we paid a lot for these properties the smell of that plan is going to degrade our property values do not put it here so they kicked it up down again and again and again and it finally landed you know guys know where it is right right under it almost you know almost to the George Washington Bridge but that's not you know that big plan it's out in the river yep right and um but and that neighborhood is not a poor neighborhood it's black but it's not poor it's professionals who live there it's like doctors lawyers you know people of means people who own their own Apartments Etc but they just weren't connected and so they did not have the political clout to you know to kick it somewhere else and that's how to me that's how you know I see this environmental racism all the time right no I never you know I've never found papers where people said let's put this in a black neighborhood it's just that's when the the place of least resistance when it comes to you know it doesn't have to say black neighborhood afford to be racist or for for that to even if it's passive racism we know who doesn't have the power we know who's not going to fight back a bunch of people who have means and who are doing well still still end up with a sewage treatment plan because these guys didn't want it oh yeah I know for the same reason that there's more police presence and impoverished neighborhoods because they don't have the money to fight the cases well you know I had a case in Puerto Rico um the Navy was bombing the island of Vieques and it was it was there's people that lived there the poorest people in the Caribbean and uh in Puerto Rico the highest cancer rate because the Dead Nation of Naval ordinance has released all these chemicals like antimony arsenic lead Benzene tolerance Island really bad stuff and they're all poisoned and they had no economy because they were bombing it all the time there were much better places for them to do that bombing up on the North Carolina coast but Puerto Rico doesn't have a congress person and they didn't have and this was the poorest part of Puerto Rico and so it's the same thing and I I ended up putting a in prison down there for in Maximum Security Prison for the whole summer of 2001 I ended up down there because I was you know from from litigating this case wow wow well I gotta ask I want to rewind that uh you said the light and dark side stick everywhere seeing what what your uncle and your father went through in politics what's the driving force for you to also take that path oh I never intended to go into Pub since I never you know I toyed with it a couple of times what did you want to do well I liked what I was doing yeah I'm like you know I like don't work on the environment I'm Outdoors all the time and I'm uh you know I are having life I I um you know and I have a I have a very happy marriage and you know my wife is amazing my wife is an actress Cheryl Hines who's on a Curb Your Enthusiasm yes sure yeah way to go thank you yeah that's how I feel and um and then I have so we have seven kids and I have you know a really good life and I do litigation I'm suing big polluters so I feel good about you know what I do like I have a mission so why take this path but I because you know I've been censored now I I first Trump Administration Administration um and uh and then um I saw what was happening with the War I see what's happening with the Democratic party that it's abandoned you know the ideals that my father had that my uncle had and I um I felt like I was in a unique place to be able to challenge that so um and that I whatever happened I needed to talk about it I needed to tell people you know this is not right what's happening you know Democrats don't censor people and the Democratic party is not the party of war and and you know listen we give 113 billion dollars to Ukraine we topped it off in March yeah so that same month in March um I have a buddy who's of commercial fisherman who's worked his whole life as hard as he could he got a lot of injuries and the kind of business that he had he doesn't have a pension you know he had his own business oh he was on he's been on um on food stamps he's getting 283 dollars a month from snap and he was I got a phone call an automated phone call and by the way 283 doesn't go so far no for a month okay it's like nine dollars hey and the price of food because paying for all the wars the price of food you know is going up 76 in two years of they tell you the government says the price of food's gone up 20 in two years but for good decent uh Basic Foods chicken dairy milk dairy eggs 76 percent so my friend getting 283 a month and trying to live he got a phone call automated phone call the first day of March saying his food stamps have been cut by 90 to 23 24 a month 30 million Americans got that call 15 million Americans got their Medicaid cut that month same month we send top off our Aid to Ukraine 113 billion if we weren't sending that to Ukraine we could feed these Americans and um and that same month we print 300 billion dollars to pay off the Silicon Valley Bank because it failed so we have a lot of money or the people who are rich and for the military industrial complex but for you know 57 of Americans could not put their hands on a thousand dollars if they have an emergency and 25 of Americans are now hungry we need to get our priorities straight and we didn't need to have that work the ukrainians that we we Force Ukraine into that war you should have just minded our business hey not only yeah business they had already signed a peace treaty and a pastry they call the Minsk Accords that everybody had agreed to zolenski rans got 70 percent of the vote saying that he was going to sign it it left all of Ukraine intact it just protected Russian ethnic Russians and dumbass uh protected them so they could speak their own language and they wouldn't be killed by the government which we installed we you know we paid for that coup in 2014 put our own government in and they started killing Russians so they had settled in and we went in and told him he couldn't sell it and then in April of 2022 just after the Russians invaded the Russians wanted to settle it and they only sent 40 000 troops and they wanted us to come to the table so lensky signs and Putin sign a peace agreement and Putin starts withdrawing all of his troops we send a Boris uh Johnson over there the former prime minister of England to kill the agreement and say we don't want to settle we want to war with Russia when when Biden was asked why do we we're doing this war he's at regime change in Russia that's her objective that's not good for the Ukraine we my son went over there and fought because he was he's idealistic he didn't tell me where he was going he went over there he joined the Special Forces Unit he was a machine gunner I was in the car keep offensive and you know um and you know it risk his life and now 350 000 kids have been killed from the Ukrainian side alone and it's a war that should never happen that we you know we uh the story that we're told that you know um there was an revoked Invasion by um by Putin is not the awkward story there's another story and that is that the U.S wanted this war Lloyd Austin on the same month in April when we sabotage it was a secretary of defense was asked by um uh by the Press why are we in this word he said because we're going to we want to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world and we don't even feel American you know he didn't say this but but earlier position papers that said we should draw Russia into war with a country like Afghanistan or the Ukraine where you know their soldiers are going to be dying we'll provide them the equipment and uh um and we'll exhaust them and that's not it it's not a good outcome for uh for uh you for Ukraine wow by the way the same people who are engineering the Ukraine or are the same ones who engineered the Iraq War the neocons Victoria Newland the Senate the Iraq War I don't know how old you guys are you're 47. so you remember you cannot listen to him he barely remembers his Battle Raps but right you know we were strict in the war of Iraq we were told there were weapons of mass destruction we were led to believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9 11 which he didn't um that he was harboring terrorists which he wasn't had he had weapons of mass destruction which he didn't oh we had to go in there and do a preemptive War which America has never done before we go in there and we get rid of Sodom and say it caused us in the end that war led us into Syria Yemen Libya the whole thing cost eight trillion dollars so what do we get for eight trillion dollars and that's bankrupted the middle class in this country the way they pay for that is through inflation which is a tax on the middle class and the poor and what do we get for that war well here's what we got Iraq is worse off than we found than what it was under Saddam we killed more Iraqis than he ever did we killed between 600 000 a million Iraq today is just a is an incoherent Nation that's a battle between Shia and Sunni death squads it's not a safe place to do business or to live we've pushed Iraq into a proxy posture with Iran so Iran is now controlling Iraq which is exactly the outcome we were trying to avoid right we created Isis we drove 2 million refugees to Europe and you know the riots that are happening in France now are those refugees yeah and and Breck said you know Israel that that uh that immigration is what drove you know the brexit and broke up Europe you know the outcomes that we got for eight trillion dollars and now we don't have a middle class and that's really our strength comes from our strength comes from the middle class two questions who benefits and what can we as a people and I know you know people ask this question all the time but what specifically can raise the awareness where the people in these neighborhoods the people who who are not uh in in in connection with the the politicians what can we do what on the ground level I'm talking about from Step One whether it's pickable phone or or go to this website or or stop supporting this what exactly can we do I mean I people that need to be educated and Martin Luther King's time he was educating people and saying you know 45 of every paratrooper movement unit in Vietnam is black and you know today for you know if you're not a sports star or a rap star like yourselves during hip-hop stars when you live in the easy life like yourselves is that what this is I missed it completely you know what what is your choice if you're in this neighborhood and you know I I admire you so much because you told me that you never took a drug you know and I and that you know coming from from where you came from I mean you know with all the challenges that takes Incredible characters you know that is that you are a man of a men's character oh thank you you know it's true it is but thank you so but what what is available to a kid who wants to escape you know this life well if you're not a you know an NBA athlete and if you're not a Hip-Hop star your your main choice is the military if you don't want to go into a gang are you going to the military because you're gonna pay for your education they're going to pay for your housing they're going to give you a Health Care Program but the the the the fix is that you've got to go kill people and that is going to that is going to [ __ ] you yeah I have family members who who kind of struggle with that they've been in the military for years you know they had to work these operations where when they come home all they do is drink yeah and they've got you know yeah pts today yeah yeah the same kind of drugs that these kids are looking to escape these vets are coming home looking to escape they don't want to think about what they do who's to blame I think so many more presidential and and candidates period of course across the map would get so much further if you would tell us this is the guy who made the decision to do XYZ a b and c one two and three yeah or these three guys like when you tell us about somebody putting a plan where it shouldn't be right or you tell us about somebody saying hey we're gonna go do this war regardless of what you think or or we're going to spend this money falls under the category of this thing right who's that who made the decision to say hey we're going to spend this much money on the Ukraine instead of feeding white Eisenhower who was aren't the general and world you know the Commanding General of the Allied Forces World War II that ran for president and the day that he left office January 17 1961 my birthday my and I was in Washington three days later I'd watch my uncle take the other office um but Eisenhower made the most important speech probably now in American history where he warned America that if you um that if we were not careful on that the military in touch with this permanent Warfare economy and machine that we created would destroy our democracy which subverted all of the institutions that we've created would impoverish our country and turn us into a surveillance and Security State and um my uncle okay he actually tried to make peace with the Soviet Union but the CIA thwarted him Alan told us worded him and my uncle comes in what was the guy's name he's the guy who he was the big villain in American history okay who turned the CIA into this you know machine for overthrowing democracies and um and you know turn it against the American people and he was you know he then lied to my uncle about the Bay of Pigs my uncle said why are we going down because that they're my uncle comes into office and they said they said first you need to know is we're about to invade Cuba it's a secret we've trained 2 000 Cuban troops they're you know they're uh they're armed they're dangerous and we're going to send them down and we're going to overthrow Castro and we're gonna need U.S military support court and my uncle said I'm not doing that why he said I don't like that Castro as a communist government let's ask Cuba's business it's not American Business people can choose their own governments and experiment with them and we don't have to like them but we don't have the right to change them and America is not going to you know invade a little tiny country that's a bad look and be a bully and he said abdullah's and his joint Chief said well don't worry uh the troops are going to go over there and you just we need to carry them the Navy then they'll do all the fighting and my uncle said well Castro's got 200 000 an army at 200 000 men how are these two thousand I'm gonna defeat that Army and he's a that CIA lied to him and they said we've infiltrated the Army we know that they're going to rise up and turn on cash so as soon as our men land and my uncle said well you're not using the U.S military my uncle didn't want to send them but the CIA said if you keep these guys here they're going to cause terrible trouble because they're armed and dangerous and they're gonna they're gonna consider you a traitor and they're going to cause a lot of trouble so my uncle said you're not going to use the US military so thank God United Fruit which owned all the sugarcane before cash withdrawn out to give them boats to bring those men over and the men died on the beach or were captured by kasham and that's what my uncle said I want to shatter him the CIA in a thousand pieces and Scatter into the winds my uncle then you know the CIA wanted him to go into Laos he refused they wanted to go to Vietnam he refused they wanted him to go to war in 62 with Russia instead he made friends secretly with Khrushchev they started corresponding with each other and they both realized that they were surrounded by people who wanted them to go to war and I and my uncle kept kept him out about the military but and my uncle's killed almost certainly by the CIA and military industrial complex my father then runs against them he also gets killed um again almost certainly by the CIA the man who actually fired the shots that killed him was a CIA asset sir uh Lee Harvey Oswald we now know was a CIA asset yeah um so I and they you know the military industrial and we went through all of these traumas my father said Dr King's death Malcolm X death the Vietnam War the um 911 and covet each one pushed us further down the road into a Security State into becoming more a possession of the military when Mitch McConnell was asked about well you know why are we spending 113 billion in in uh Ukraine he said oh well the uh he said don't worry about it because that money is not actually staying in Ukraine it is going to military contractors is it's just going over you know technically going to Ukraine but we're actually just by going to General time yeah he said so it's all American companies and that's good for our country yeah and that's so funny to ratchet out and that and over there they're killing Ukrainian kids so nobody here is going to complain because nobody hears you know we're watching the coffins come home and so it's the perfect War for the military they get to you know get re-up their contracts and you know and those are the people who drive policy in Washington D so so is Mitch McConnell they he's part of them I think Joe Biden his day because when you say the military industrial complex I'm still looking for names like where the my Victoria Newland Joe Biden Anthony blanken those are the people who are Dr Who are driving those those three names yeah those three names okay so when you get in Joe Biden will go and you'll fire the other guys is that no no yeah all of those you know I I will reorganize the CIA and I'm gonna we have 800 bases abroad you know how many of the Chinese have one and a half the Russians may have one I don't know but we have 800 and each one is just a platform for a new war and the function of the CIA is to provide the military industrial complex because my uh my uncle discovered this with this a pipeline of continual new Wars you know to uh to fuel that and and that money is being paid by the American middle class that's why we don't have a middle class left in this country wow okay okay so now we know who day is and you I mean with with the resistance that the that your father and your uncle face you don't have a fear of this you want to pick a fight with these people you know what I am I'm much more scared of that I'm dying I am much more afraid than my kids are going to grow up in America where they don't have rights and that you know where we're now just addicted to permanent War and there was a whole generation of Americans in 1776 it gave us this Constitution that many of them died between 25 000 and 70 000 Americans died in the Revolutionary War to give us the Bill of Rights now and then we created this incredible middle class and that's all being stripped from us now and so you know I think all of us have to be willing to make you know take risks and make sacrifices it's so that our kids can have those same rights when we speak about today because we often in this room speaks about the day um Biden and the other names that you name those are people that you know they're going to deteriorate they're not going to last so who comes after them or would you say that it is a force that's maybe even Beyond human beings yeah I I both now both we used to at least have one party that was any War you know the Democratic party was always anti-war and the Republican party was pro-war but now they're both pro-war and you know so it's self-propicating the people who rise to the top of those parties and get the contribution so that they can run for office and get the promotions are the people who support the War Machine and you know I'm running against the War Machine oh and I you know I'm a threat to those to all of those interests if there any state any satanic thing behind me like that any satanic thing that is beyond my range of knowledge it sounds it's I'm sure you've heard things because we hear things you know we hear things out here and we hear that the powers that be are really a satanic group that is being disguised so you know I'm not in your profession you will know something like that I'm sure they don't see themselves that way but maybe they do I don't know we all have a we all have a capacity to judge ourselves based upon our intentions rather than our actions you know what I mean and people you know have can convince themselves that what they're doing whatever it is is right I mean people as I people think you know people believe that we're there helping the Ukrainian people in a fight for freedom and that is the narrative you know we're given these kind of comic book narratives there's a good guy and a bad guy and we're always on the good side we've been involved in you know uh you know in hundreds of Foreign Wars and you know and Russia and China have it uh we need to start looking at our own involvement and you're not bothered by the idea that bringing this kind of stuff to the Forefront puts you in danger by people who don't want it to stop I I am but I'm and I'm here you know I take what care that I can um but I I think it's more important I mean for me I feel like I I don't have a choice that I need to fight this okay okay why should anyone believe you well nobody should believe me people should do their own investigation and you know if what I turn at say I think if you investigate it that you'll be convinced that it's correct but you shouldn't believe me just because I'm sitting here talking to you okay secondly why should anyone trust you that your agenda is what you say it is that once you get in office these are the things that you're gonna attempt to change yeah well that's a cliche is it doesn't yeah that's an easy one because I have a track record you know I have a track record over the last 18 years of standing up against corporate power and against government corruption and uh and being punished for it constantly being censored being uh you know having uh uh suffering a lot of you know laws of friendship losses of uh of relationships laws dramatic losses of income um and you know and uh laws of status um and the you know the power that I once I wield it because I'm I'm a member of this family and because I had a long credible record as an environmentalist and I walked away from that this battle and people have watched me over years fight this battle so um you know I think I have a I I I think if you talk to me because you guys don't have not been following me but I think if you talk to people or you know read about my uh track record I think that that would uh convince you that I that the one thing I am is trustworthy I wasn't sure you were going to answer that question at all the important question is will you consider Kanye West for the vice president I'm thinking Killer Mike or camera my kids love killing Mike I love Killer Mike I I'm I I would love to I I you know I can't get them on the phone anymore that was one of the things that I did identify with you or taking that stance so all right well if you're on YouTube we shouldn't talk about that yes at all at all what's the position of reparations well my oh my gosh yeah um all right listen can I tell you about a little bit about my background so my father in 1966 I'm walk through beds die and he walked down full of the Street Atlantic Avenue and bedside at that time was like mostly into his chef of you know that by which you measured poverty it was one of the most extreme levels of poverty in America and comparable oh you know why it's your Compton or but there was something unique about that stock excuse me which was that um there was a huge very very high level of home ownership that which is unlike Harlem which was at there was a lot of absentee owners in Harlem the beds I a lot of those families have been there since right after the Civil War and the house were humble but people own their own houses and you saw you know people there were flowers on the on the Stoops and you know the houses were sort of painted and people cared about the community and my father fell in love with that community and actually Arthur Schlesinger who wrote a book about who wrote the most famous biography of my father and in that book that when Robert Kennedy was not at home the place that he wanted to be more than any other was Bedford and what he saw in that Community is that there was this this also this entrepreneurial spirit there are people you know we wanted to be in business and they were they were Innovative and energetic but they didn't have access to Capital and they didn't they you know they were redlined from the banks the banks would not make laws in that area I thought they were red line from insurance companies that you know car insurance and a lot of other things that were disadvantages that's a big disadvantage they didn't have access to Capital and they did not have access to knowledge to it to my father you know grew up among people where if he needed to call somebody from Harvard Business School to ask a business problem he could call somebody but there was no access in that neighborhoods that so a businessman who you know who was smart and everything but did not have I just couldn't he didn't have that accumulated um acts as to uh to that kind of to business knowledge so my father put together a group of top level businessman Andre Meyer from Lizard prayers Tom Watson from IBM and a bunch of others and got them to make a commitment to come to beds I regulate and to Mentor businesses and then I want my my father died I went on the board of Bedford Stuyvesant reservation we build restoration plots over there and when I first went over there I don't know if you are are you from Brooklyn yeah restoration is all full yeah yeah yeah right so my father built that and you know I was on the board for for 35 years we bought the Pathmark store there when we when we first when I first went out there the closest grocery store was 75 blocks three bus rides so a woman who was trying to feed her kids had to get on three buses get her loads of grocery climb climb back on those buses at 75 blocks and we got Pathmark to move into restoration Plaza which is it changed a lot of people and then we built the theater there they built you know sports centers and um and uh and uh um and you know and we we started giving access to micro loans to Grants um to opportunity on districts where you know it would be lower taxes and when I first started going out there and when my father went all the business on Fulton Street were boarded up was nothing and you know I have now because when I'm all right Cheryl and moved out West California I I stepped down off the board at that point um but uh the last time I was there Fulton Street was thriving there were you know all of these door fronts were were crowded yeah and and that is good not only for the black community but it's good for everybody and for so when you ask me about reparations I I got to tell you one other thing I spent 20 of my time I'm representing Indians during my career and the United States in Latin America and uh in Canada and a lot of the Indian tribes at that point were getting gambling and there would be arguments fights within the tribe how do you distribute the gambling money do you and the traditional Chiefs would say do not give it in cash payments because it it is not this this money belongs to the entire community over the generations and um and it should be uh distributed that way and what we saw is the tribes that that put it into institutions like clinics scholarships business loans micro loans on Factory building factories those things those tribes really flourished the community is flourished and that sense of community was right and all the tribes that did cash payments was a catastrophe oh I would be against if there was no other if there was no other issue I would be against cash payment reparations but the word reparation means repair and you know I grew up in a Jim Crow and I saw this was not just the the injury did not end with slavery the injury and the deliberate suppression the institutionalization of poverty in black neighborhoods is uh systematic it's systemic and it it uh and it continues today in a million different ways and we need to rebuild them they are black communities and and so that you know my approach to doing that would be to do it in a way that I think is going to be most effective which is what we did at bedside we created what we call it Community Development Corporation there and it is now the model for hundreds of Community Development corporations around the country because it works and that it it's it's less likely to contribute to the polarization between blacks and wise because it benefits everybody everybody even of people who are trumpers who I see all the time because I represent them in lawsuits against big polluters they if you talk about business loans the black communities everybody's for it everybody wants business to work and to flourish and so for me that would be my approach to do everything I can uh to make and you know I was in Cleveland a couple of weeks ago covet wiped out the black they they let me buy systemic racism in 2008 America got wiped out by the Same by the loan you know by these exotic loan instruments on each other like mushroom mortgages and balloon mortgages for 10 years before those same banks have been trying that out experimenting in the black community with us and it stripped the equity out because a lot of those those homes like in bedside they were in those Valley for generation and you could go get a mortgage increase your mortgage and you could start a small business buy a selling machine to whatever you know and but then these you know the the bags were going to these families and saying you've got a great home you know we'll give you this new kind of mortgage you don't have to pay anything for the first five years and it's all going to be great and they signed on to them they got sucked into it and then they lost the home and that's ripped Equity out of the community and then they and then the hospital consolidation happened the same thing they tried it at first out in the black communities and they closed all the Community Hospitals wow and then covet happened covered they closed 3.3 million businesses without due process without judge compensation 41 of black owned business will never reopen many of those businesses had three generations of equity in them I know you had three generations like the barbershop like this may have three generations putting you know caring for this business nurturing and growing it and making it a growing concern and they got wiped out and I was in Cleveland like three weeks ago and one of the poorest districts in Cleveland it's called Lee Harvard and the whole place boarded up it is it's like a dystopian nightmare there's a couple of businesses left and I met with the owners of those businesses a very very interesting black owned businesses and um and they said we are going under right now because we cannot get lost because inflation hurts the poor but the interest rates hurt the poor worse right because the local banks um will not loan because they're that value of their treasury bills has gone underwater and they have to retain their they have to hoard their liquidity and so it because to avoid being taken over by one of the big Banks well none of them make it I sat in the room across from a woman who is an elderly uh African-American woman who's had a thought such a company that is an inherd a family for five generations and it is a it's a local institution 80 years it's been operating this country and she's shutting it down not because there's problem with the business she needs a loan to upgrade some of the machinery and she cannot get along anywhere and I you know this and that the the community is being systematically stripped I I I'd say 20 I think I saw a statistic recently by 20 40. um there the the value of equity equity in Black communities is going to be zero there's a systematic stripping of equity out of lack of ownership of wealth and and what that is that is the same thing as slavery ultimately yeah if you got no equity in your community there's nobody even going to go to this barber shop there's no cash people get their hair cut at home it destroys the communities oh to me um the way you know the reparations is about figuring out every way that we can to build black owned businesses back up and that and if you talk about it in that way it doesn't Inspire the polarization and the racism that if you talk about cash reparations that you know that reaction I hear you I hear you and I I hear exactly where you're coming from but I gotta say with all due respect we in the black community I I'll speak for myself but I think there's other people I speak for too we in the black community are not really overly concerned about the feelings of other people who are polarized by the idea of us getting cash reparations back yeah that hurts your feelings that's kind of on you and I'm not really and I'm also just to continue to circle the wagons I'm also not really overly interested and what's good for everybody when I start talking about reparations when we start having that conversation concerned about what's good what what's good for the black people who have always been systemically behind the eight ball right due to people who will deny that that system even exists they'll tell you there is no systemic racism they'll tell you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps which don't exist that's after they've stolen your boots right well you know I'm not even wearing boots you know please I I don't I I completely I completely get what you're saying and that is one way to do it but I don't want our financial future or or or I mean maybe not even financial future but I don't want reparations contingent on how another group feels about it or how another group is going to look at it or get upset about it like I think maybe if we start maybe if we admit to the 800 pound gorilla in the room and what that represents and what it's done and what it's continuing to do maybe now that it's out on the table we can deal with it maybe reparations won't hurt so bad if we're not trying to rewrite the history if we're not trying to pretend that these things don't exist there is no systemic racism you just need to work harder you had a black president so it's not that bad like basically it's not that stuff off reparations won't feel so bad if you get them we're really just paying back we already said we were doing I kind of see it from both sides but I do agree with Mech because it's not like slavery benefited us it did so I feel like in the repair or the the reparations of that it shouldn't there shouldn't be a thought of anyone else and how they feel about it however I get what he's saying as far as what works over time what what is it going to actually fix the community and not just seem like Christmas for two weeks and then it's back to regularly scheduled programming and I'm that's where I said I and I that's why I said I get it I completely get and I get it too and I you know I hear what you're saying too and I you know my Approach is a practical approach because you just had a supreme court that threw out affirmative action which I You Know spoken out against that decision but um I think reparations even a heavier lift constitutionally for this court so I I you know I'm fine is that right yeah so but but let me ask you something just to because we're talking kind of theoretically here where because I spent a lot of time working with American Indians who had the whole Place taken away from them they're the only place that was paid for was Manhattan Island for 24 bucks um but the rest of it was taken illegally by force right so where would they stand on the reparations scale oh God this is gonna sound terrible let me let me let me let me get a let me get a good way to say he's trying to figure out how to say he doesn't care about that right yeah because as much as much love as I have for Native Americans as much love as I have for Asian Americans as much love as I have white Americans as much as I can sit here and tell you I have all the above in my family and I'll hug them love them fist fight for him in the whole nine yards when it's time to circle the wagons no one else ever asked this question of other people no one else has asked to think about how are these guys gonna feel if we do this no one asks the black community how we would feel when the money went to the Ukraine no one cared what are the black people gonna say nobody asked that question nobody cared what we thought when when Asians got the stop Asian hate bill which I was you know hey stop beating up people just because they're Asian like what are you doing that's [ __ ] ridiculous that's [ __ ] nobody asked us how we felt about that so I'm not of the mind to consider other people when I'm looking out for what's good for my brothers and sisters in this struggle with me because when the cops show up it's just us when when you know when we're being over police it's just us we're when we're receiving higher sentences it's just us nobody else is jumping in when we get a treatment plant near our communities it's just us when we get pollution it's just when our water is poisoned when Michigan can't when Flint can't get clean water just us nobody else pulls up and says hey well wait a minute I'm not saying other people don't support but no one else no one else is being asked how they feel about what's happening to us so when it's when it's something for us I don't want to have to consider how someone else is going to be made to feel by the fact that 40 acres in a mule is now coming back to the people who never got it I don't want it I don't want to have to ask that question I don't think it's fair that we should have to bear that emotional burden or or have that on our conscience I don't think we should be made to to uh empathize with you know feel bad about getting something that we we were stipped on well no one no one else no one else does that I think uh what about the blacks that own slaves what about them I'm not and I don't want to split those heads either like these these were people who were living these would be that's a good question we have descendants of those with some stories to tell you that they were actually slave owners for sure and those people had to go Pro just like everybody lasted if they got red lines just like everybody else like and I'm not I don't want to split again how about how about once we get the fun together we figure that out but we figure that out so my position is just a little bit you know I understand what you're saying so I don't believe money is the solution I never say money is a solution financially it's not going to save anybody I can give you a million dollars right now you still want to die you still want to be faced with the facts of if your spirit and your soul is right so money is not the solution if you give the Indians the money like you said if they messed up spiritually they gonna go out and get drunk so building back the community definitely key but how do now if who's in control of that and like you said Equity how does that benefit the direct families well I mean the theory is I believe that it Bears out when you create businesses that um you you enrich the whole community and look at this barbershop you know what the and the community that it's created in here you know through the existence or a grocery store and how important it is there's a gourmet deli across the street you know if that disappeared imagine uh how bad it would be for this community because I saw what happened in bed's eye when there was no uh you know every business that you build uh enriches the community more and it reaches everybody in the community but we don't I mean you're doing it in an organic way that's the next one that's the next key so it's not our own bios right but what I'm saying is that we need to be fostering the growth of eops right black owned businesses gosh yeah and that's what you yeah we're including the loans and programs to to kind of educate people on business and more of that in these communities right mentorship programs on microphone programs opportunity districts where you have you know where there's an incentive um for Outsiders to invest in Black startups um I'll be startups uh and all you know and all of those different mechanisms for making uh these uh you know these communities hubs for investment and for thriving businesses right and to me that's and it's also sustainable because no you're creating a sense of community you're creating independent interdependent dependency of that community and uh it benefits everybody and it's not just handing somebody a check it's it's you know it's giving um it's giving them uh you know the knowledge it's like you know the use of that cliche but it's teaching a man to fish right so it's more about access it's about access to Capital and access to the knowledge to be able to know how to run a business right and uh and you know that that could help and that's what you know we did in bedside in a way and it worked there one time for the Native American folks don't don't think don't think that I don't care one's objective once after the evening from under the bus is pretty nice no I think I think another huge issue that we want to know your stance on is um mass incarceration one of the questions is um me personally being affected by mass incarceration right and the problem of recidivism right now 13 I mean uh yeah 13 of the population in America is us right it's black people and 38 of the people incarcerated are black people so there's already a disparity there right um due to covid obviously that that uh number came down some it was at 2 million plus at one time now it's about 1.3 million um where no we no longer lead the con the world in mass incarceration it's China now and my question to you is what would you do if you get into office to help quell this mass incarceration issue in America well a number of things one is I don't um you know I I don't like the privatization of the prison systems yeah and I I think that that is you know that contributes the problem right um and it also uh contributes to the sort of degrading conditions in those in the prison um a a quarter of those prisoners and you're right hey a a black American committing the same crime as a white American as three times the uh the chance of going to jail so the exact same product right and the sentences alone and yeah and it was much longer it sentence with the same thing um a quarter of those and a quarter of the people in prison are for non-violent drug offenses and you know for me I'm a former drug addict um and uh you know I think we should be focusing on Rehabilitation treatment mental health help um and uh and try to restore people to the society rather than encourage Freedom right so you so it would be something where you would incorporate certain programs right Rehabilitation instead of right and you know one of the things that I like that I you know it's kind of my piece my uncle started the Peace Corps and it was this kind of branded program but I'm I want to I'm going to start a program uh to create essentially Rehabilitation farms around the country and rural areas all over the country where people can grow healthy food where drug addicts people who are convicted of non-violent crimes people are trying to improve their lives recover from some kind of addiction or or you know ssris we've got an entire generation that is now on these you know psychiatric drugs and it's very hard to get off and if if you're not in a controlled environment and I've um you know I've had a lot of experience I and I visited a this this place and on this in Italy where I had a family member go which is uh and actually Kanye went over there at one point with with my daughter um but it's a it's a farm it has 2 000 people kids living on it who are recovering or you know we're going to go to prison or whatever they have a Vineyard they grow organic high quality food they're not allowed to have cell phones screens of any kind um but it's a it's this it's it and they um and they there's a whole bunch of different Industries there they have a Furniture uh Factory they have an upholstery factory they have and they make very very high quality purses for the de la Valley for Gucci for others and um and they made they have a bakery with some of the most famous bread in um in the Italy and people go there and they make a commitment to go there for a couple of years and they come out and they're recovered and they go go back you know they could go back and and um and have lives where they can now start contributing and paying taxes and it's all free um 106 000 kids dying every year in Fentanyl the addiction epidemic that you know started with oxycodone and now is you know being fueled by the the fentanyl epidemic is killing our young people and we need to go back and rescue them and uh and and the answer is not sending them to prison because they if you're a drug addict you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna commit a crime well it's just it's eventually going to happen oh and then you're gonna end up in prison and your life is growing now so what about those that have to go to prison right so I hear you speaking specifically about non-violent offenders right and them being being rehabilitated the people that do have to go to prison for violent crimes or whatever it is um what do you see that can happen in these institutions that can rehabilitate them instead of it being restorative well I mean I think you know I'm going to only have control of the federal prisons okay my father had control of the federal prison and he implemented a lot of different reforms in the federal prisons for the federal prisons by the way and I was in federal prison right I was at Maximum Security Prison you know um and uh and I've been in many state prisons and the federal prisons are a lot better than the state principles I was in prison for uh the summer of 2001 actually wait no you said that yeah yeah he told us that but we didn't touch on it yeah an inmate no my I wanted to there was 140 men on my cell block 60 of them were political prisoners I was in there um and I was in solitary confinement for four days which you know was not fun and then you know I was in population for the rest of the time and uh and I actually had a good time relaxing summer yeah nobody was calling me on that I didn't have to make a decision wow my wife had a baby while I was in there you know that's a lot of work if you if your wife's having a baby yeah and I didn't um I I saw my son for the first time when they brought it on him to me on on visiting day I played basketball every day I did I read a lot of books that I I've been sitting on my shelf you couldn't take it the books I had to tear the covers off the books because you couldn't have books on covers because people can make shifts with them right yeah well I would say I must definitely not be a part of the day because there's no way they would have let day stay so you must not be a part of today you know because they can make a phone calling you know hold on a second kids don't listen to the presidential candidate go to jail it's not fun the reason the reason why I ask you these questions just to Circle back real quick is because I was in state prison and I know a lot of people in New York state I've been in that prison many times really yeah you were the one on the south side of the highway of the north side I was on the North side so you know it's like two zeros and one so I was on the hill yeah you know the old one that old Victorian jail that's yeah that's the one I've been too I I never went but I had when I first went to work for a River Keeper the uh somebody had given us a um a farmhouse up in the Hudson Valley that was owned by the Department of Environmental Conservation and they said okay you guys can use that as your office but you have to fix it up and they said well we'll give you some prisoners and I was put in charge of of the prisoners outside clearance girls what the outside clearance yeah and so they came they you know they had it was guard there with guns I was telling them what to do and why one day one of them escaped oh sure and he went down to the railroad track and then he walked all the way to Brooklyn on the way around the track was about 40 miles and then his father got him and tied him to the bed and they came back and picked them up what year was this this was like an 80 uh oh good 84. all right and um I had them they were I was supposed to uh paint a barn but um and they painted it up to about seven feet but they didn't want to go up on the ladder none of them wanted to climb a ladder so I had to paint the upper part of the barn myself anyway so yeah no I'll get where you're coming from some of your friends in Fishkill is this oh these were some of your guys they were awesome they were awful yeah I was like two years old yeah he's not as old definitely not but the reason I asked these questions um and specifically for the state institutions across the country is because what I realized when you get your education in prison it changes the mindset right I'm someone who was a recidivist who constantly went in and out most of my life more than being out in the Free World and once I got my education I got a Bachelor's degree because it was an opportunity available to me it changed my way of thinking and now not only myself but a plethora of men in women who do it they're not going back so my my question to you is is that something that you think you can Institute as a a foundation in these state prison systems in order for people to be paroled like you have to get an associate if you want to be paroled yeah I mean I don't know how I would do that with that if I would well certainly and that's an inspiring story really a very convincing story and I'm certainly and my father devoted himself to that in fact when he died I have a friend um who's in a 12-step program with me when I first came in and he was a prisoner and sing sing in Austin and he said that the day my father died that they all were um that he had been an addict at that point he had and they all were he was um they all were a lot of the prisoners were black armbands because of the you know care that my father had taken to try to provide those kind of opportunities new people increases across the country it's something I want to do it clearly is uh cost efficient and if we're educating people and stopping recidivism what better outcome can you have exactly or that you know is an inspiring story if I do get elected I want you to you know Call Me Up and Hold Me Together Lobby for that man seriously I'm ready to love me I'm going to give you my cell phone and I got a job uh liberal arts is there I'm not in that lane at all but the great thing about getting education is because it helped me with critical analysis skills to help me be a better writer it helped me see things way differently in the Free World and inside help me build businesses so it wasn't so much for the actual liberal arts degree it was more so for the skills he actually helped build the business while he was inside a publication business or a social media magazine for uh prisoners that's great yeah and it's like all over the country now what is it called now you got a joke why it's called YK TV magazine iktv it's an acronym for you know the Box but that that's what it's called it's an informational tool for incarcerated individuals to stay in tune with the times learn about laws that are changing you know look at some girls too um comedy exclusive interviews a lot of stuff that comes I've been on the cover yeah he's been on the cover yeah uh a lot of the guests that come here we take those interviews we put them in the magazine so that way they could be informed on what's on what's going on with some of their favorite celebrities and politicians I'm advertising it it's great he's advertising me as well great yeah I wanted to ask you you you you've talked about your addiction issues uh I've never the only presidential hopeful I've ever heard admit that he used any kind of barbiturate with Bill Clinton talking about smoking weed and he didn't inhale but sure I didn't help for sure and that's partly what I'm talking about like you're very open about the fact that this is a part of your history and before the interview really kicked off you talked about having a whole yes yes in your soul that you felt like shout out to Aerosmith that you felt like you couldn't feel yeah is that what caused you to yeah I mean a lot of people you know I've been going to 12 7 in I've probably been to I don't know 20 000 of them so you hear people's stories and there's a high percentage of people like me who believe they were born with the attention and then there's other people who think that they got it later on in life that they'd crossed a line and once you you know they say once you become a uh if you're a cucumber it wants to become a pickle you can't become a cucumber again that once you cross this certain line then you know you can't go back for me I felt that um that kind of gnawing empty hole from when I was a little kid and uh when I uh you know the first time I took a place like you did because you were you were saying at the beginning of the you know before we started right I think you had made this pledge to your dad and that your dad uh and your dad said when you whenever you first do it you do with me and then when your dad died you didn't do it which I saw you know incredibly impressed well in the Irish Catholic communities that I grew up in and there was uh it was a tradition of taking the pledge which is I will never drink because it was known that our race is disproportionately impacted by um out particularly alcohol addiction it's got we call it the Irish flu oh and and they would give you in Catholic school they would give you a pledge pen you would wear on your collar and it was I took the pledge I'm never going to try and thumb my whole life very common in Ireland too and I did that um and I took it seriously and when my you know my father died when I was 14. and by the time I was 15 I hadn't never even tasted coffee and that summer I went to a um hey uh a party of the elder brother this is when I was living in Cape Cod the elder brother of a friend of mine was had been drafted and it was going to Vietnam and there was a going away party for him and uh he didn't want to go and at the party there was a melee and he ended up hitting a cop and going to jail and he didn't go to Vietnam but I was hitchhiking home from that party an older boy picked me up oh I knew but not well and he offered me LSD and LSD had come to that town that night this was in 1969. so um and I wouldn't have taken it but it was that there was a comic book okay I would we read there was a little story The Only store in our town was a news story sold ice cream candy and then the comics and the comics would come every Tuesday and my favorite comic was a comic called Pure rocks on a stone which was these two Indians and uh you know you're nodding your head I can't believe that you've heard of it but correct yeah I've definitely heard a tour right yeah so uh uh it's not Tupac man okay that was a girl it's all right so anyway the week before there was an episode where the Indians had eaten like peyote or something and they had had hallucinations they'd seen dinosaurs it was like it was like I'm transferred back in time yeah and uh and so when this guy offered it to me I said I had an interest in paleontology when I was little and I said if I eat that well I see dinosaurs and he said you might and I and so I took it and I had this you know incredibly Vivid hallucinations and then in the morning you know it lasted all night and you know what I got in trouble a lot of people in the town took it that night and I um and I was walking home from the town about three miles in the morning but I was crashing on the drug and I was getting depressed and remorseful and telling myself I'm never going to do this again I did something that was wrong and I I got I got near my and I had to go home and face the music because I had violated my curfew and my mother was you know invented tough love and I was going to get in a lot of trouble and she and I um I saw these boys in the woods and I went in to see what they were doing and I told them they they saw me and I said I'm really crashing on this stuff and they said try some of this and it was and I've been saying to myself I'm never gonna take a drug again and they offered me a line of crystal meth and I snorted it and I felt great and that was really the template for my addiction for the next 14 years 14 14 years I I got summer when I was 28. and I don't constantly I'm saying I'm not going to do this again and I'm not being able to keep promises to myself and that you know I had iron willpower in other parts of my life like I gave up candy for Lent when I was 13. I never ate Candy again so I was in college and I I gave up desserts the next year and I um I never ate another dessert until I was in college and I was playing rugby at college and was trying to bulk up so I started eating desserts again but I felt like I could do anything with my willpower but somehow I it was impervious to the addiction it just didn't work against it I was cunning baffling powerful and the most immoralizing part of addiction is not being able to keep contracts with yourself of telling yourself I'm gonna do this and then doing it where I'm not going to do that and then you know four hours and believing earnestly sincerely honestly and I'm not gonna ever do that again and four hours later you're doing it and you don't know how it happened right and it's I you know it's really demoralizing what's natural out of it well then I guess I my progression was very fascinating is always progressed it always gets worse and I my driving Choice was heroin So within four weeks of that I was shooting heroin and I I had been around you know animals my whole life and and given them hypodermic needles and it made sense to me um you know that it would be more efficient to uh to inject the drug so I I you know I did that and I was addicted before until I was 28 years old and then I got sober I was trying the whole time what was the difference in 28 well I got into a 12-step program and I had a spiritual awakening and it was like it was lifted so and it you know it was it was like a miracle as much a miracle for me as if I'd been able to walk on water because I had tried really tried in every way and could not do it on my own and then I did that you know that well snap programs are designed to induce a spiritual awakening a a profound spiritual realignment and uh and I had that very very quickly and the problem and as soon as I committed myself that it happened to me and I and you know it just disappeared did you go willingly to the toaster program somebody oh I was no what happened is I got arrested and I got arrested on an airplane somebody saw me going in the bathroom I was actually on my way to a rehab but before I went to the rehab based on 106th Street the cop and then I went out to LaGuardia and I was flying at the rehabit and I in Minnesota but I you know I got one last one before going and somebody saw me on the airplane going to the bathroom with it and when I landed and when I landed the police arrested me but I was a good thing for me because I could because of my name and because my notoriety I could have never gone into a meeting and you know and and and spoken truthfully about my life because I was guarded you know and I I'd been you know raised in a family where if you talked about stuff publicly it would you know it would be their neighbors yeah and so it was an impossible situation but as soon as that happened there was nothing to hide anymore and I was able to cover these meetings and get you know and talk honestly and um and so it was like a gift for me the arrest and it was well it was probably the greatest gift I got because it gave me then access to the 12-step program sent to the arrest you know the spiritual way here and I want to ask what was the spiritual awakening if you don't mind this action well I'll tell you what happened is that I I knew I you know I have been struggling all of this time to quit right and um so I didn't want to be my life to be that okay I'm gonna quit but I'm gonna be white knuckling it the whole time and thinking about it and stuff I I was like how do I how do I just become a different person who some you know a person who never thinks about it like a normal person wow and I knew I'd read the lives of the Saints you know Saint Augustine and uh alcoholic and then he had a spiritual awakening and walked away Saint Francis easy so I knew it happened to other people I had a friend my brother who was best friends with my brother I had two brothers who died of this disease of addiction or addiction related um that's one of them you know skied into a tree but but this guy was a friend really close friend of my brothers and he used to take drugs with us he'd take them with the Saints and atticism that I had the same compulsion the same impulse that was uncontrollable and then he joined the unification church and we became a Muni right you guys know what that is no no it's a it's like a cult it's like there's a Korean guy called reverend Sun young Moon oh I've heard of that yeah refer to him yeah and and he has a lot of followers and this guy joined it and he had a spiritual awakening and he didn't want to take drugs anymore and he would be with us and I'd be saying drugs in front of him but he didn't want him and I used to think about this guy you know when I when I was after you know I got arrested and I knew that I I had to get sober I think about this guy and I would say to myself I'd rather be dead than be a money but I wish that I could get whatever it was distill whatever it was that allowed him to be impervious to this impulse without becoming a religious nuisance you know or I got cold or whatever and um and then I I picked up a book hi Carl Young that was just sitting on the on the you know on a table somewhere and it was called synchronicity and the word synchronicity means it means coincidence kind of it's like it's a kind of coincidence that happens if you're if you're talking about somebody that you haven't thought about in 20 years you sure but the phone rings it's that guy in the world and that's synchronously Carl Jung was and the reason I picked that that book up is because there was an album by the police at that time by the same name I didn't know what the word meant I started reading it and young was the one of the fathers of Psychiatry he was a Sigmund Freud was his mentor but Freud was an atheist and young was a deeply spiritual man he had these incredible spiritual experiences starting when he was three or four years old very authentic experiences and his form of Psychiatry is very connected to spiritual transformations and he had had a he had this experience one where where he was sitting in the third floor of his uh of his sanitarium he ran the biggest sanitarium in Europe it was up on the third floor and he's and what with a patient it was a woman and she's talking to him and she's talking about a dream and he was very much um you know his his style therapy is very oriented towards dream interpretation right she was telling him about this dream and the fulcrum of that dream was a scarab beetle which is a creature that is uh it's a piece of iconography on the on that hieroglyphics in Egypt and on the Obelisk the tombs there really doesn't exist in northern Europe where he was so easy hearing while he's talking to this woman he's hearing this bing bing bing bing on the window behind him and he doesn't want to turn and take his attention away from his patients but finally he gets exasperated and he swings around and he throws open the window in a Scarab people flies and lands in his pop wow and he turns and he shows the woman he says this way you were dreaming about and she goes yeah so he he thought these little incidents of synchronicity are are God's way of cutting through the rules and regulations that God have set up like the rules of mathematics and nature and physics and every once in a while he breaks his own rules and comes in and and Taps you on the shoulder and you know because the sad the chance of that happening it never happened right but but it seems so obvious like yeah you just said it and this happened yeah it has to be connected it has to be connected yeah it's key sounds I believe they represent New Life yeah but they they have all this kind of spiritual significance right but um he but he had this uh so he then tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting so he would put one guy in one room and the other guy in another room and he'd have them flip cards and then guess what the other guy flipped and he thought that if he could if he could beat the laws of chance beat the laws of of nature the natural law it would have proven the existence of a super of a supernatural of some Force I was not explained by natural law where the laws of mathematics or chance or whatever but he's never able to do that so in this book he says I can't prove the existence of a god using empirical tools or scientific tools but he's having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his Hospital I can prove that people who believe in God get better faster and that their recovery is more enduring than people who don't oh in that sense it's irrelevant if there's God up there if you believe in one your chance of living a happy life are better well that's what he was saying right and that was really significant for me at that time it was much more significant than if he had said I approved the existence of a god which I wouldn't have believed but him saying that I can improve your jam I can improve my chances of recovering I'm never having to take this drug again if I believe in God I said okay I'm going to do it and then I have the problem of how do you start how do you start on believing in something that you can't see or smell or touch or feel or acquire with your senses right and he gives the solution you fake it here make it you act as if and um and so that's what I did I started saying okay I'm just gonna act as if there's a God up there watching me all the time and life is just a series of tests and that I have to behave myself even when I don't have an audience I have to do the right thing okay yeah and that and so you know then uh and I and every day is broken down into like 40 little choices and each one for me now has a moral implication you know when I when I wake up in the morning um the alarm goes off you know do I lie in bed for an extra 15 minutes with my indolent pornographic thoughts or do I get jumped right now and then when I go do I brush my teeth do I hang up the towels where you know when they do I make the bed that's the most important decision every day and start out big in the bed do I put the water in the ice tray before I put the ice tray back in the freezer right do I when I reach into my closet and pull out a pair of blue jeans and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor do I actually go and hang them back out or do I say you know that's somebody else's job I'm too much of a big shot for that job right do I put the shopping cart with the shopping cart is supposed to go you know when I or do I leave it in the middle of the parking lot like everybody else I had this experience when I was when I first got sober in my life I'm very small through addiction and it started getting big very quickly when I you know when I got sober and I was running through national airport and I was at there was a plane that I was going to miss and it was mission critical that I got on that airplane I had to get on it you know I would have been away from that point man and it was it was a whole bunch of consequences that would have happened so I had to get that plane and I was gonna miss it and I'm running through the airport in my mouth and I I'm rolling up the rapper and as I'm running I I threw the wrapper into a garbage can and it did a perfect art swish right but Kobe but out of the corner of my eye I saw it must have hit something in there because it jumped back out in my dog I was like that's God's fault because I made the show I was running running trying to get the plane but it then it just started eating at me and I got about 50 feet down and I went dad I gotta go back and pick it up I pick it up but that you know I end up making a plan but that to me was probably the most important thing I did is that not maintaining that posture of surrender when your life is broken and everything's going wrong it's easy to be you know in surrender to God about what all the cash and prizes start falling back in you know my inclination is to say okay thanks God I got it from here and I take the wheel and drive the car off the cliff again you know and I'm yeah but I'll tell you the answer your question very quickly what happened to me the day that I finished reading that book synchronicity I went out to play volleyball and um you know so what the synchronous about all these coincidences and I go out to play volleyball and they somebody has a volleyball in this very powerful uh you know hit where it went up on a kind of Aaron flight and it comes down and hits the top of the post and as it's going up again I said it out loud that ball is gonna get hit by a Mack truck I said I don't know why I said it but I said it and everybody heard me say and then the ball went up again it came down and he hit the top of a chain link fence and dropped on the other side and then it rolled down this driveway for about I don't know 50 60 feet out into the middle of a a little Highway and a big 18-wheeler with a bulldog on the front comes and Pops it you know bang pop that's crazy everybody says everybody looks at me for a second like wow wow and then they went on but you know for me it was significant because I just finished that book and went out and then it happened to me and it was like okay so I'm reaching out I was like that was a cheater you know poor man Spiritual Awakening but that's what it was yeah yeah we're worse it opens me to start looking at those things and saying you know I should pay attention to those things when they happen instead of just just missing them you believe them oh yeah now I don't have to now you know but now I see it in every day you know do I believe that you can change this country well you know what the way that I live my life I keep doing the next right thing and the results are in God's hands oh God wants me to be president to be president I'm gonna do everything I need to do to get there but I don't have any control over the outcome the only thing I have control over is this little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes now it's the only thing I have control over and I got to keep doing the next right thing the next right thing but I don't have expectations I you know I'm an environmentalist for years if you have expectations when you're environmentalist your your heart is going to be broken because every Victory is temporary every defeat that you suffer is permanent you know when they extinguish the species when they destroy a special place is never coming back and every time you save something it's just a new battle because somebody else wants it and they're gonna pour concrete on it or pollute it and I saw so many people just get crushed and uh and get broken and burn out and so I said to myself I'm not going to have any expectations I'm going to fight I'm going to get up every day say reporting for Duty sir and I'm going to go out and try to save lots and River but if I lose the battle I'm not going to get defeated by it I'm not going to have any expectations and and if you don't have expectations you never get disappointed and if you can't get disappointed it makes you relentless because nobody can permanently defeat you you're always going to get back up and fight again and to me I think that's where my power comes from is that I no matter what they did to me I'm always going to go back dude you got to get Bernie Sanders as you're running mate man yeah all right we already decided thank you for grace in the shop we've been present very much the inspiration and your wisdom Bobby Kennedy y'all Junior you heard

Channel: MATH HOFFA

Views: 175,052

Keywords: Math Hoffa, My Expert Opinion, mathhoffa, my expert opinion math hoffa, expert opinion, math hoffa my expert opinion, Viral, Viral clip, Joe Budden podcast, Best podcast, Top 5 podcast, Joe Rogan experience, The daily, Barbershop, Entertainment, Asmr, Million dollar worth of game, joe rogan robert f kennedy jr full podcast, robert f kennedy jr, robert f kennedy jr voice before, robert f kennedy jr joe rogan show, jordan peterson robert f kennedy jr, robert f kennedy jr town hall

Id: v0XFMqHu2Ok

Length: 125min 19sec (7519 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023