Hello, everyone, and welcome to
UnHerd I'm Freddie Sayers. Robert Kennedy Jr. was nine
years old when his uncle President Jack Kennedy was
assassinated. He was 14 when his father, Senator Bobby Kennedy,
was himself assassinated on the cusp of what was starting to
look like a historic victory. For decades. RFK Jr, was himself
a hero of the Democratic establishment, advocating on
behalf of environmental causes such as reducing pollution in
rivers and waterways. But when he moved into more controversial
areas, such as questions about the safety of vaccines, he
became an outlier, the black sheep of the Kennedy family. To
many people, his views on vaccines, in particular, have
made him somewhat untouchable. In fact, I'm pretty sure after
this interview, I will get messages asking why I am
quote-un-quote 'platforming' someone who is committed to
spreading 'misinformation'? Well, first of all, we don't
believe in the concept of no platforming at UnHerd. We think
it's stupid. Journalists are there to investigate and
challenge views. So if this is the way you think, you probably
should tune out now. Also, he's running for president,
challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and he's
already polling at 20% of voters of the governing party. So it
seems a pretty important exercise to try to understand
what he really thinks about the world. He joins me now. Welcome,
Mr. Kennedy. Thanks for having me. So, I absolutely do not want to
get bogged down in the vaccines question. It feels like to sort
of spend our time litigating that, when you're so much on the
record about it would be a waste of time, but I feel we have to
address it. I notice that it was almost absent from your long
campaign launch speech. Are you making the decision to talk less
about vaccines for for this campaign? And are you being
advised to lay it to one side for now? My approach is that, unless I'm
talking to a group that specifically wants to talk about
that issue, like doctors groups or whatever, which I
occasionally get invited to- I would say more than
occasionally. I would not lead with this issues. The issues
that I want to lead with are the issues I talked about in my
speech. If somebody asked me about vaccines, I'm gonna tell
them the truth. But it's an issue that I think most
Americans, it's not on their top list of issues. And I think
there are a lot of other issues that are important and that we
ought to be talking about. I guess It's going to plague you
somewhat, because every interview, will start with, it's
almost something that has to be said, now. I saw there was an
ABC interview with you that first of all said a few kind of
phrases that have become commonplace about vaccines. And
then they actually edited out chunks of the interview when you
were talking about it, which they thought was misinformation.
I guess this would be my question, what would your
message be to mainstream Democrats who are interested in
some of the things you're saying but have have made their
decision about you based on the vaccines question? And maybe
they're angry with you? Maybe they feel it was irresponsible?
And you're probably not going to change their mind on the
substance between now and the election day. What's your
message to those voters? I'm talking about other issues
that I think most Americans and probably most Democrats are
concerned about, which is the systematic gutting of the middle
class, the elevation of corporations, and particularly
polluting corporations, from the financial industry, from the
military industrial complex, this kind of corrupt merger of
the state and corporate power, which is systematically
hollowing out the American middle class, through wars,
through bank bailouts, through lockdowns, etc. We're just
printing money to make billionaires richer. During the
COVID lockdown, there was a $4 trillion shift in wealth from
the middle American middle class to this new oligarchy of
billionaires. We created 500 new billionaires with a lockdown and
the billionaires that we already had, increased their wealth by
30%. That's just one of the assaults. And then you go to the
bailout of the Silicon Valley Bank, and the War in Ukraine,
which is costing us $113 billion, the war in Iraq, and
the wars that followed that have cost us $8 trillion. The total
cost of the lockdowns was $16 trillion, and we didn't get
anything. For all those wars, we fought the $8 trillion, we got
to zero. We got worse than nothing. The lockdowns, of
course, we got nothing for. So that's $24 trillion in total and
is it any wonder that we don't have a middle class left in the
United States of America? And unless we rebuild the middle
class and rebuild our economy, our national security is going
to fail, and our democracy is going to fail? You cannot have
democracy very long when you've got high concentrations of
wealth in the same place with widespread poverty. This word 'corporatism' that
you're using quite a lot, I guess most people would not
really know what that means. What do you mean by it exactly?
It's a sense that somehow the state and big money in the form
of corporations have become too close and you want to put some
more space between them? It's the domination of
government and particularly democratic governments by
corporate power. And what are the examples in
your head that are most egregious of that? I could go on about that all
day, because I've spent 40 years litigating against the agencies,
the regulatory agencies in the United States. I can tell you
that Environmental Protection Agency is effectively run by the
oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry. When
we sued... I was on that trial team that brought the Monsanto
cases and we ended up with a $13 billion settlement after
winning three trials. But during those trials, we uncovered
through discovery, email traffic, going back years that
showed that the head of the pesticide division at EPA was
secretly working for Monsanto, and was running that agency to
to promote the mercantile ambitions of that business
rather than the public interest. He was killing studies, he was
fixing, he was ghostwriting studies. And that's true
throughout the agencies. If you look at the pharmaceutical
industry in our country, it runs Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA gets 50% of its budget from Big Pharma. The CDC spends
half of its budget purchasing vaccines from Big Pharma, and
then distributing it. So it is a partner and National Institutes
of Health, essentially is just an incubator for new
pharmaceutical products. It doesn't really do the basic
research that we want them to be doing about where all these
diseases, these chronic diseases, and allergic diseases
are coming from, autoimmune disease and neurological
diseases, why are we seeing this explosion? Those kinds of
studies don't get done. The studies that do get done are
studies that develop pharmaceutical products. And
then NIH collects royalties when the pharma company sells those
product. You have the regulator that is essentially a partner
with the regulated industry. Department of Transport is run
by the railroads in our country, and by the airlines. The banks
have utterly corrupted the Securities and Exchange
Commission. And you know, with all these, with the worst media
has corrupted the FEC. With all these different
examples. Is it your sense and I'm trying to draw a distinction
here, between actual corruption. Do you feel like there are
individuals within these agencies who are improperly
maybe even illegally benefiting from these corporate ties? Or is
it more of a general sense that they come from the same kind of
class, there's a revolving door between those positions, and
they tend to sign up to the same way of viewing the world? It's both. It's legalised
bribery, and illegalised bribery. It's both things and
they get rewarded when they leave. The rules governing
conflicts of interest are just ignored. And that's illegal,
they're just systematically ignored. And then the rules
started out not strong enough to really to protect the public
interest. You have both things going on. You have what they
call honest graft and dishonest graft. So, this sounds like a very
traditional Left-of-centre critique of these bodies but
you're now being accused of being Right wing, or there's
some confusion about where you come from politically. Do you
think concepts of Left and Right are less useful than they used
to be? Do you think there's a kind of horseshoe happening
within politics? well, I would say that I consider
myself a traditional Kennedy liberal. I don't know any of the
values that my uncle John Kennedy harboured or my on my
father share that I don't share. So they had an antipathy and
suspicion of war and the military industrial complex.
They did not want corporations running the American government.
They were completely against censorship. They were against
the use of fear as a governing tool, and they spoke out about
it often. And you go down the list of the things that they
believe in, and I don't think that there's really any daylight
between me and what they believed. So I would say it's
traditional liberal, but I do think that there is a growing
coalition of the Left and Right in our country- of populist
forces on the Left and Right, that are convening now and that
are finding common ground. And I think that that really is
probably the only thing that is gonna rescue American democracy. So you're quite open about
hoping to get interest from potentially conservative voters
as well? that, you know, I always have been. I spent 35
years as probably the leading, arguably, and I don't want to
toot my own horn, but as arguably the leading
environmentalist in the country, and I was the only
environmentalist who was going on Fox News constantly on Sean
Hannity on Neil Cavuto on Bill O'Reilly on Tucker Carlson. And
people would say to me, 'you're legitimising those platforms by
going on there'. And I said, 'I'm not compromising my values
when I go on there. I'm talking to their audiences and I want to
speak to their audiences.' How are we going to persuade people?
How are we going to end the polarisation if we're not
talking to each other? I'll go on any platform. The only
platforms I won't go on are ones that my wife just can't live
with. If it was up to me, I would go on Steve Bannon and I
would go on... I would even go on Alex Jones because I want to
talk to those audiences. And I think there's a rebellion
happening in our country now. There's a populist rebellion and
if we don't capture that rebellion, or the forces of
idealism, and the forces of generosity and kindness and
making our country an exemplary nation again, somebody else is
going to hijack that rebellion for much darker purposes. And I
don't think it's a good idea to say we're not going to talk to
American populists because they're deplorable. They're are
Americans, they're our brothers and sisters, and we need to
listen to them and their backs are against the wall because of
policies that have come down from both Republican and
Democratic parties. One name that you didn't mention
there, but it's being talked about quite a lot at the moment
is Tucker Carlson, who obviously lost his job in the last week,
but he tends to surprisingly agree with you about quite a lot
of things, even though he's thought of as a Right wing
conservative. What is your view of Tucker Carlson? I think Tucker is now at this
point... And by the way, there was nobody during most of his
career, who was more critical of Tucker Carlson than I was of his
policies. I would still go on his show, because I want to talk
to his audience. But I think Tucker has evolved over the past
three years into probably one of the leading populist voices in
our country. And he's one of the only people on American
television that's talking about free speech. It's extraordinary,
because it used to be when I was growing up, the people who were
most militant, who were the First Amendment absolutist were
journalists. And journalists do not seem, the average American
journalist seems not the least bit concerned by
government-orchestrated censorship. It's very, very
strange. Obviously, you are trying to win
the Democratic nomination. Is there any world in which you
would actually do some kind of deal with Tucker Carlson? I
mean, it's been speculated, there could be a surprise
cross-party ticket involving both of your names. Is that
something you would ever consider? I wouldn't speculate about any
of that. I can't see Tucker Carlson running as a Democrat,
and I'm running as a Democrat. And is it worth saying, if
you're not successful in the primary, whether you would
consider running as an independent? or I intend to be successful. I
don't have a plan B. One, There are some issues, where you
and someone like Tucker Carlson might still disagree quite
strongly. I don't have a very strong sense of your views on
some of the more cultural war issues, issues of gender, for
example. I know, you've said that you believe biological
males should not compete in women's sport, but is your view
generally that the Democratic Party has become to
quote-un-quote, 'woke' on those things and has lost sight of
reality or do you take a more mainstream Democrat position? You know, I wouldn't add on, I'm not going to cast judgement
on a generalised description of the Democratic Party, or where
it is today. If you ask me what I feel about an issue, I'm happy
to talk about it. I feel like we should take a common sense
approach to these issues, and to all issues. And by the way, I
don't even feel there's a lot of issues that I would have nothing
to do with as President, and that are very divisive, and
there's no reason for me to comment on them, because I'm
trying to figure out ways to emphasise the values that we
have in common, rather than the issues that are tearing our
country apart. So I don't feel the need to take a position on
every issue. And if it's an issue that I will have nothing
to do with on a federal, as President than I'm very unlikely
to take a position on it. Let me be specific, then, the
concept of equity, which President Biden talks about a
lot is the idea that- and it's really quite central to his
ideas about governing- which is that racial and other minority
groups should be retrofitted into positions via quota rather
than just through a normal meritocratic process and it
needs that extra effort. Do you agree with the principle of
equity or do you take a more? I wouldn't have, I wouldn't agree with the policy
that you just described. My family has been deeply involved
in the Civil Rights Movement, and I've been involved with,
with environmental justice issues. My first case was
representing the NAACP. In 2001, I spent the entire summer in
maximum security prison in Puerto Rico, for a civil
disobedience that I did in conjunction with a case that I
brought defending the poorest Black and Hispanic population in
America, probably arguably, the population of Vieques. I brought
probably as many environmental justice cases during my career
as anybody else. And I understand that there is
institutional racism in our country. You see it in many
police departments, although not all of them, and certainly not
all police are are racist, but it is a huge problem. But also
the blacks in our country are living not only with the legacy
of slavery, but legacy of another 100 years of Jim Crow
and of having their leaders systematically murdered. on a
local level and on a national level, and then being redlined.
In the 2008 mortgage securities collapse, it was it was black
homeowners who were targeted first, by those banks, and those
communities were robbed of equity at that point, When we
closed all of the community hospitals in our country again,
in the mid 2000s, it was black community. So I think we need to
figure out ways to make sure that those communities are
participating in the American experiment. Which I guess The question, really, and I do
think it's an important philosophical one, for a
potential president is, is the best way to address those
inequalities through trying to improve equality of opportunity,
which would be a more classical liberal, I suppose, viewpoint.
Or do you think, for example, let's be really specific when
the President announced that he was going to find an African
American female to fill the latest Supreme Court vacancy
before having started the selection process, did that make
you uncomfortable in a, as you call it, traditional Kennedy
liberal sense that it wasn't an open meritocratic choice? Or did
you feel actually yes, that is the right thing to do? well, Listen, I'm not gonna second
guess, President Biden, on that choice. I can say, again, I've
sat for 20 years on the board of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration,
which was the the first community development
corporation in our country. And I watched that, by bringing
capital and bringing mentorship into one of the poorest black
communities in this country, we saw a renaissance in Bedford
Stuyvesant because of that. And I think that black Americans
want want to feel represented. And I think a black child ought
to be able to look at our cabinet and our courts and be
able to see people that they, a possibility of positions that
they can aspire to. But I also think that our real target needs
to be getting capital into those communities, getting
homeownership more widespread in those communities, which is
again, a source of capital, and reducing crime, making
healthcare available, and all of those things that will invite
black Americans into the American experience. Let me ask you about climate and
the environment, which is a lifelong issue for you. It's
been interesting to observe in the last few years, in
particular, how that has shifted from being an anti-establishment
position to care deeply about those things and feel like it's
the number one priority to a pretty establishment, maybe even
corporate endorsed position? Do you think there is a good
version of the green movement and more corporate, Davos-style
version of the green movement and and how would you
distinguish between them if so? I would say definitely that
that's happened that climate has become polarised, even more
polarised than ever, and polarised and with good reason.
I think that the crisis has been to some extent co-opted by Bill
Gates, by the World Economic Forum. And the billionaires'
boys club in Davos in the same way that the COVID crisis was
appropriated by them, to make themselves richer, to impose
totalitarian controls on society and to stratify our society with
a group of very, very powerful and wealthy people at the top,
and then the vast majority of human beings with very little
power and very little sovereignty over their own
lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to
clamp down controls and then you also see, with climate, there's
been a shift from habitat preservation, from regenerative
farming too and trying to reduce the power of a carbon industry,
which is also toxic. We need to reduce carbon, whether you
believe in climate change or not, because anywhere there's
carbon, there's also mercury, there's ozone particulates,
there's aluminium. There's all these other kinds of really
horrible toxins that come from burning hydrocarbons. What
you're seeing is a shift away from those concerns and more
towards corporate carbon capture, which can be monetized
by the corporations and exploited without seeing any
real benefit on the ground. And also geo-engineering solutions,
which I oppose. Look at the kind of geoengineering solutions that
are being pushed. It tends to be that people who are pushing them
also have IP rights in other words, patent rights in a lot of
those technologies. And there is definitely an optic of
self-interest and self-serving. We had one example here in
Europe recently, which were the farmers protests taking place in
the Netherlands, because there were environmental rules that
came into place about using nitrate fertilisers, and so on,
that were very severe an appeared to for the kind of
populist, frankly, the kind of voters who might be interested
in you, they were very angry about it and they they took to
the streets. And there was a sense that the environmental
policy wasn't actually paying attention to ordinary people's
economic reality. Did you observe that and where would you
have stood on that? I fell on the side of the
farmers in that debate, because I saw what happened over the
years, which I've been fighting, which is that the increase, the
power of corporations and this combination of corporate and
government power, which colluded to get those farmers to switch
over to heavily nitrate fertiliser dependent for farming
and chemical dependent farming. And that was a deliberate
systematic and GMO farming. And that was deliberate. It was
purposeful and systematic. and so once you get all of those
farmers to switch it to carbon-based fertilisers and to
monocultures then you say, 'okay, those things are bad. and
now we're gonna shut you all down'. So that is what happened.
And you know, I had a long conversation on my podcast about
this issue with Vandana Shiva, who felt the same way, took the
same position I did. This is a bait and switch. This is a way
of destroying smll farmers. And if we want to have democracy, we
need a broad ownership of our land by a wide variety of yeoman
farmers, each with a stake in our system. What Thomas
Jefferson said, and wiping out the small farmers and giving
control of food production to coorporation is not in the
interest of humanity, and we need to help those farmers
transition off the addiction that we imposed upon them in the
first place. Another issue, related to that,
which I guess leads us into the Ukraine issue is the nuclear
issue because that again, to be against nuclear, such as you've
been for decades, has been a sort of anti-establishment
position and now suddenly, it feels like it's flipping because
countries like Germany, that have been so strong on shutting
down all their nuclear power, are finding themselves
vulnerable in that they're overly dependent on Russian gas,
and it's now being viewed as an error. What's your view on that?
Have your views evolved on nuclear? No, my views have always been
the same on nucular. I'm all for nucular if they can make it safe
and if they can make it economic. Right now, it is
literally the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that has
ever been devised. We were told that nuke energy would be too
cheap to metre and actually it's so expensive that no utility in
the world will build a nuclear power plant without vast public
subsidies by the taxpayer. And then in our country, we had to
pass the Price-Anderson Act because, I say a nuke is
dangerous, it is dangerous. and it's too dangerous for humanity.
Look at Fukushima, look at what is happening there now. There is
there's there is so much water, contaminated water that is
pouring out and contaminating the entire Pacific Ocean.
They're finding radiation in fishes all over the ocean. And
the only solution is for them to pump the water into these huge
tanks, and then store it forever. And if you go look at
the picture of Fukushima now, there are these giant vast tanks
that just go on as far as the eye can see. Look at your
Chernobyl. Now you may say well, there's new forms of new power
that are safer, which I would say is not true but don't listen
to me. Listen to the insurance industry, listen to AIG and
Lloyd's of London and ask them, would you ever insure one of
these plants and they won't. So until they can buy an insurance
policy, they shouldn't be saying it's safe. In our country, they
had to go in with that sleazy legislative manoeuvre in the
middle of the night and pas the Price-Anderson Act, which shifts
the burden of their accidents onto the public. So it's not
hippies and tie-dye t-shirts who are saying it's dangerous. It's
guys on Wall Street with suits and ties. This is so dangerous
that they can't get an insurance policy. And then they have to
store the stuff at taxpayer expense, for the next 30,000
years, which is five times the length of recorded human
history. How can that ever be economic? If they had to
internalise the costs, nobody would ever build one of these
plants. Nobody would. There's nobody in the world. To build a
solar plant, a gigawatt of solar and costs about a billion
dollars. To build a nuke plant, it's between nine and sixteen
billion for one gigawatt from the same thing. So it's nine to
sixteen times with a capital expense. And then you have to
get the uranium, you have to use regular outages for maintenance. Just in the European context,
anyway, France that has such a lot of nuclear is sitting quite
pretty now with this Russia situation whilst Germany has had
to restart its coal-fired plants. Well, my solution to that is to
stop making oil wars. That takes us into this pressing
question one thing that you talk about a lot, in your interviews,
in your speeches is America being in a permanent state of
war? And how you want to put an end to that. With regard to
Ukraine, how do you propose to do that? Oh, settle it. The Russians have
repeatedly offered to settle and particularly if you look at the
Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for-
That looks like a really good deal today. So let's be honest,
it's a US war against Russia, for geopolitical reasons,
geopolitical machinations that had been going on since 2014,
with the intelligence agencies and the Neocons, and to
essentially sacrifice the full hour of Ukrainian youth and in
an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical
ambition of the Neocons oft stated of regime change for
Vladimir Putin and of exhausting the Russian military so that
they can't fight anywhere else in the world. And President
Biden has said that was his intention to depose, to get rid
of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin in April
2022 is at our you know, our purpose here is to exhaust the
Russian army. Well, what does that mean 'exhaust'? It means
throwing Ukrainians at them. And you know, my son fought over
there side by side with the Ukrainians. And we've sacrificed
300,000 Ukrainians. The commander of the special forces
unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite and the
best fighting force in Europe, arguably, has said that 80% of
his troops are dead or wounded and that they cannot rebuild the
unit. Right now Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of
either one to five or one to eight, depending on what data
you believe. So if you became president, you
would inherit the situation as it is. So although there might
be missteps in the past that you regret, the situation as it is,
that both sides are very dug in, public opinion in most of
Ukraine is now very violently against Russia and vice versa.
There is a front... What would the policy actually be? To
basically say, territory that Russia has already conquered,
they can keep? And would you then be accused of surrendering? well, you What I'm accused is irrelevant
to me, as you may have figured out by now. Let's do what's
sensible, no matter what I'm accused of. Let's do what makes
sense, what saves lives. This was supposed to be a
humanitarian mission. That's how they sold it to us in the United
States. But that would imply that the poor purpose of the
mission was to reduce bloodshed and to shorten the conflict and
every step that we've taken has been to enlarge the conflict and
to maximise bloodshed. That's not what we should be doing. If
you look at the Minsk Accords, it sets the groundwork for a
final settlement. In the Minsk accords, the Donbass region,
which is 80% ethnic Russian, and Russians there were being
systematically killed by the Ukrainian government, would
become autonomous within Ukraine and would be protected. And I
would say, let's protect those populations with the United
Nations force or whatever we have to do to make sure the
bloodshed stops. In addition to that, we need to remove our
Aegis Missile systems, which can house the Tomahawk missiles,
nuclear missiles, 70 miles from the Russian border. When the
Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba, 1500 miles from Washington
DC, we were ready to invade them, and we would have invaded
them if they hadn't removed them. So the way they got
removed, ultimately, is my uncle and father made a deal with
Ambassador Dobrynin and Khrushchev, who they had a close
relationship with, and they could talk directly to at that
point. And they said, and the deal was, 'we will remove our
Jupiter missiles from Turkey on your border, because we know
that's intolerable to you'. Russia has been invaded twice,
in the previous 100 years with the vast costs that we can't
even comprehend in the United States. And one could see why
they wouldn't want US nuclear missile systems in hostile
countries on their border. We should also agree to keep NATO
out of the Ukraine, which is what the Russians have asked.
And I think based upon those three points, somebody like me,
could settle this war. I don't think the Neocons are capable of
settling it and the people who surround President Biden, I
don't think they're capable of because they were the ones who
created the problems and I don't think they'll ever recognise
that. I think part of a Russian settlement is to recognise that
some of this history that went into this war with them, with
the geopolitical machinations on both sides. And by the way, I am
not excusing or justifying Vladimir Putin's barbaric and
illegal invasion of the Ukraine. I'm just saying, we need to
figure out a way- My uncle always said, if you want to
actually achieve peace, you've got to put yourself in the other
guy's shoes. And you got to figure out the pressures, the
local pressures on him too. I mean, You mentioned the Cuban missile
crisis there and your uncle's strategy. You could look at that
another way, which is that he stared them down with that. It
was a very frightening moment, would the ships turn around? He
played chicken and he won in a sense with that standoff, but
there was a real sense that facing that kind of aggression,
you have to take a firm stand. And I think it's not just
corporate interest. There are lots of good people who feel
about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it is just such a
moment and that somehow a stand needs to be taken and he can't
be rewarded for it, rather like your uncle did at the Cuban
Missile Crisis. What do you say to those people? well, you know, you can I can argue the history of it.
And I can also argue, my uncle, he was surrounded by a military,
by Joint Chiefs of Staff, by an intelligence apparatus that was
trying to get him to go to war. And the fact that there was one
confrontation with a Russian ship that was carrying supplies
to Cuba, stopped before it hit the embargo wall of us of US
ships, that wasn't the end of the crisis. That was just a
midpoint, and it could have gone anywhere from there. And the end
of the crisis happened because my uncle reached out to
Khrushchev directly, and said, 'let's settle this between us'
and their settlement was secret. And it remained secret for many
years. When my uncle wanted to settle it, and he understood
that he had to put himself in Khrushchev's position and that
Khrushchev didn't want war, and neither did he but they were
both surrounded by people who did want to go to war. But what is the wise equivalent
thing that the US President should have done when Russian
tanks started rolling across Ukrainian borders in three
different directions, headed to the capital? We should have listened maybe to
Putin over many years. We made a commitment to Russia, to
Gorbachev, that we would not move NATO one inch to the east.
Oh, you know, why didn't win it. Then we went in, we lied. We
went into 13 NATO countries, we put missile systems in with
nuclear capacity. We did joint exercises with the Ukraine and
these others for NATO. What is the purpose of NATO? In NATO,
this is what George Kennan asked. This is what Jack Matlock
asked. All of the the doyens of US foreign policy were saying,
Russia lost the Cold War. Let's do to Russia what we did do to
Europe, when we gave them the Marshall Plan, we're the
victors. Let's help lift them up, let's integrate them into
European society. So you would have had Russia
inside NATO? I think that that's something we
should have considered. What is the purpose of NATO, other than
to oppose Russia? And if you're addressing Russia hostility from
the beginning, of course, their reaction is going to be a
hostile reaction back. And if you're slowly moving in, all of
these states that we said would never be become part of NATO,
were to suddenly becoming part of NATO and we know what
happened to Ukraine when the US supported essentially a coup
d'etat in 2014, against the democratically elected
Government of Ukraine. And we put in place, and we now have
the telephone call transcripts. Victoria Nuland and the Neocons
in the White House then, handpicking the new cabinet that
was hostile to the Soviet Union. So, if you look at that, and you
put yourself in Russia's position, and you say, 'okay,
the United States, our biggest enemy is treating us as an
enemy.' It's taken over, the government of a nation and made
them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are
prejudicial to this giant Russian population.' If Mexico
did that- They killed 14,000 Russians in Donbass, the
Ukrainian government. If Mexico did that to expatriate
Americans, we'd invade in a second. So, I think we have to
we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents and it
doesn't mean saying that Vladimir Putin is not a
gangster, he is and he's not a thug, he is, that he's not a
bully, he is. But going to war is not in his interest either.
And he repeatedly told us, these are red lines, you're crossing. The challenge is that we are
where we are now. And a day by day the news emerges of some of
the atrocities happening inside the Russian-controlled parts of
Ukraine. And the idea that it's going to slip back to peaceful
Minsk-style Accords is maybe not realistic at this point. So
should we take it from what you're saying that, in practice,
that means your support for NATO as president would be different
to what is currently..? I don't know What I that is
something that I'm gonna look at as President, I'm going to look
at how do we de escalate tensions between the great
powers between China between the United States and Russia? and,
you know, how do wehow do we let how do we let these countries
deal with their neighbours in way without pressure from the
United States that that makes them feel like they're gonna
have to go into a military mode. and I'm not saying that What
happened here, I'm saying that's something that we need to look
at. and the reason that we need to look at that is we have
institutional 1960-61. When he said, what he
realised during the Bay of Pigs crisis is that the CIA had
devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the
military industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars.
And my uncle came out of one of those meetings as the Bay of
Pigs invasion collapsed and he said he realised that the CIA
had lied to him, and he fired ultimately, Allen Dulles, the
head of the CIA, Charles Cabelle, Richard Bissell, the
three top evils of the CIA, for lying to him but he said at that
time, 'I want to take the CIA and the shatter into a thousand
pieces and scatter it to the wind.' We have to recognise that
it's not just our civilian agencies that have been captured
by industry, the military agencies, the Pentagon, and
particularly the intelligence agencies have been captured by
the military industrial complex. And we have to recognise that
and we have to say, 'okay, we don't want constant wars in our
country, we can't afford them.' So do you see yourself finishing
the job they started, then? Do you want to take the CIA and
shatter into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind? I think the CIA needs to be
reorganised in a way. Most of the people who work at the CIA
are patriotic Americans. They're very, very good public servants,
and we need them to function. I think we really need to separate
the espionage functions of that agency and the plans division,
the division that actually does dirty tricks, that kills people,
that makes wars that involves itself in actions because what
happens is, that tail, the operations tail begins to wag
the espionage dog. The term 'espionage' means basically
information gathering and analysis and that is the
function that the CIA was created to perform. And very,
very early on Allen Dulles, essentially corrupted the
purpose of it by getting the CIA involved in assassinations and
fixing elections. And the CIA has been involved now in fixing
coup d'etats or attempted coup d'etats in about a third of the
countries in the world, most of them democracies. So our
national policy as a country is to promote democracy. The CIA's
policy has been the opposite. And at odds with the United
States. And my father recognised this too. His plan was to
reorganise the CIA along those lines to separate the espionage
and the analysis and information gathering functions from the you
know, the black functions because otherwise the espionage
section sees its job as justifying all of these
nefarious activities they're involved in and there's no
accountability. So there's never any accountability. And you
overthrow a government in Iraq and what happens? You create
ISIS. You then get involved in Syria from ISIS and you drive 2
million civilians or 2 million refugees into Europe, which
destabilises democracy all over Europe and basically causes
Brexit. And that is the outcome of what the CIA considers a
successful operation to depose Saddam Hussein. Is it really
successful? I don't think so. And unfortunately, we have a 60
year war with Iraq. And that war began when the CIA overthrew the
first democratically elected government, in the six thousand
year history of Persia. And we are still living with a blowback
from that operation.There's no accountability and these
agencies need to be accountable, and I would break up the CIA in
a way that would make them accountable. If I could just ask more
generally, the way you talk about the CIA, the way you talk
about a lot of these agencies, emphasising, as you put it, that
people have been lied to, that the heads of these organisations
are corrupt, that the media is corrupt. At the same time, you
talk about how you want to bring people together, and you're
worried about how divided society is. Is there not a sense
that your rhetoric is divisive, in that it leads people to
believe that a big chunk of their own country is kind of
against them? There's an enemy within in the RFK worldview and
that needs to be destroyed. How do you respond to that sense? The way that you bring people
together is by telling people the truth and getting them to
agree on facts. If I'm wrong, I need the facts, I told you
should challenge me and other people should challenge me
because I really, I feel that my job is to search for empirical
truths. And then to be honest with people about it, because
you can't... If you try to censor people, if you try to lie
to them about what's happening- our government is broken, if you
try a lie about that, it just divides them further. You have
to acknowledge, 'okay, there's a problem.' I'm a former drug
addict, and the first thing that you do, if you want to deal with
drug addiction, you admit there's a problem. And then you
can deal with everything. And we need to admit there's a problem
in our government before we're able to heal it, before we're able to heal our country, the rot, I guess, in your sense
of things goes deep and wide. We're talking about
big swathes of the government, as well as the media, heads of
corporations. It almost feels a little bit like a revolution
when you talk about it, because there must be many, many
thousands of people who are in positions of power, who you
would want out. Do you think of it as a revolution? I think of it as a... We need a
revolution, I would say that, a peaceful revolution. And a
revolution that brings us back to our values that have been
robbed from us over the past 40 years, systematically. I watched
it happen. I was watching what happened in 1980. We had a
functioning government there, and we were in the middle of the
great prosperity and most Americans trusted the government
and we all trusted the media. And today 22% of Americans trust
their government, 22% trust the media and the reason we have
this blizzard of 'misinformation', what is called
'misinformation', is because people are looking for other
sources of information that they can actually trust because the
people who are supposed to be giving us good information are
not. It's spin, it's propaganda, it's government orchestrated and
people know it. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows we were lied
to about COVID. Everybody knows we are lied to about Vietnam.
Everybody knows we are lied to about Iraq, weapons of mass
destruction. My opinion about these agencies is not happening
in a vacuum. Everybody knows Big Pharma lied to us about opioids,
and about Vioxx. These are not things that are conspiracy
theories. You know, Robert Kennedy is crazy because he
thinks a corrupted FDA helped the pharmaceutical companies
create the opioid crisis.' This is a fact that is well known,
well documented, and that happened. And the question is,
how are we going to stop it from happening again? And the answer
that is we got to start by telling the truth about it. My final question to you Mr.
Kennedy is we started with vaccines and in a way it brings
it back to that, do you think you went too far at any stage?
And I'm offering this almost as an opportunity to say to
Democrats who might be interested in you, but be
freaked out by some of the vaccine stuff, is there any
sense in which you yourself by fighting so hard on these things
might have lost perspective, might have gone down the
wormhole too far, might have not been confronted or aware of the
truth yourself? Do you feel that there's a danger? Here's what I would say. Show me
where I got it wrong. Show me one fact that I've said in all
of my social media postings, that was actually erroneous. And
if you show me that, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna fix
it, I'll change it. And if it's appropriate, I'll apologise for
it but that's not what's happened. What's happened is the
media has said, 'oh, he passes on misinformation'. And when I
say, 'what peace of misinformation?' Show me one
thing that I've ever posted on this subject that is factually
incorrect. Everything I post is cited and sourced, government
databases and to peer reviewed publications. I have probably
the most robust fact-checking operation in America today. I
have 320 MD physicians and PhD scientists, including until
recently Nobel Prize winner, Luc Montagnier on our advisory
board, looking at everything I post. If I get something wrong
and I will ultimately get something wrong but so far,
nobody's been able to show me anything that I've gotten wrong.
And I wrote a book on Anthony Fauci, the biggest bestseller in
America for a year, not reviewed anywhere, not acknowledged but
nevertheless, it's almost 240,000 words, and nobody has
been able to find, and I invite people at the beginning. And by
the way, every there's 2200 citations, every one of them
with a barcode on it, so that you can go, if you got your
telephone there, you can look up the citation while you read the
book. I invite people at the beginning to show me anything I
got wrong. We've had 12 or 15 editions. And so if there was
something wrong, we would correct it- It sounds like an invitation to
a second session, maybe that we can have later in the campaign
where we get stuck into the detail of some of the science.
Happy to talk about it anytime. Happy to talk about it anytime. You've talked a lot today about
the corruption of America, its foreign policy missteps, its
internal problems, its internal corruptions. Do you think a good
version of America is even achievable anymore? Yeah, I do think it's achievable
and I think it's achievable very quickly. But I think we need
somebody in there who can do what- and this is gonna sound
immodest but I think only I can do it at this point, because I
know how to fix these agencies, because I've spent so many years
litigating against them so they don't intimidate me. I know, in
many cases, who the bad apples are, who the individuals are who
have who have misguided it. But I also I've spent most of my
career studying the problem of how do you unravel a corrupt
agency? How do you fix it? And I'm very excited about doing
that for my country. And I think my ultimate ambition is to
restore the faith and the love of America and the pride in
America that my children can grow up with the kind of pride
that I felt about my country. I can restore our moral authority
around the world and restore the reputation of America as an
exemplary nation, as something that the rest of the world can
look to as an example and that they will want to copy rather
than a threat. My uncle believed that America should be a leader,
but we should not be a bully. And people understand the
difference between those two things. Because my uncle
steadfastly avoided war and instead said, 'I don't want the
picture of Americans around the world to be somebody with a gun.
I want it to be a Peace Corps volunteer, I want it to be the
Kennedy milk programme and all the countries in Latin America
and Africa, USAID which was built to foster the growth of
middle class in those countries and the Alliance for Progress.
And because of that, people around the world love John
Kennedy more than any president in our history. There's more
boulevards named after him or avenues, more statues to him,
more universities and hospitals in Africa and Latin America and
all over the world than any other US president. And that's
because he had a different vision that was not based on
conquering people, but on helping them. Robert Kennedy, thanks for
talking to us today. Thanks for having me. That was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
challenger to Joe Biden to be the Democratic candidate in
2024. For those of you who were hoping we were going to get into
the vaccines debate or some of the other COVID controversies,
perhaps we'll do that later in the campaign. For now, we wanted
to get a broader sense of what his offer was, how it fitted
into the political spectrum, and the way he thinks about his
country in the world. Hope you found it interesting. This was
UnHerd
