363. Rekindling the Spirit of the Classic Democrat | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

[0] Hello everyone.

[1] Today I'm speaking with writer, attorney, environmentalist, and 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We discuss how the Democratic Party has become one of fear and ideology.

[2] It's inexplicable conclusion with legacy media and big pharma.

[3] how the COVID -19 pandemic became an issue of tribal allegiance, the use of the doomsday climate narrative for political gains, what can actually be done with renewable energy, and why the era of Kennedy Democrats cannot only be revived, but uniting for Americans across boundaries, both physical and philosophical.

[4] What made you decide to throw your hat in the ring on the presidency for the presidency at this point?

[5] Well, I saw the country going in a direction and my political party going in a direction that was very troubling to me. You know, the country won really because it needs a reboot.

[6] But, you know, the role of my political party, I felt like the Democrats kind of got derailed and became the party suddenly and mysteriously of war.

[7] When they were always skeptical of the military industrial complex, they became the, party of censorship, which is abhorrent to every definition of liberalism, they became the party of fear, which is against our, you know, traditions.

[8] Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1932 inaugural address said that the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself, and he understood that fear is a weapon of totalitarian elements and totalitarian control.

[9] It became the party of the neocons, which again was antithetical.

[10] The neocons were a Republican, very belligerent, pugnacious foreign policy about subduing the world and establishing hegemony through violence.

[11] It became the party of Wall Street.

[12] President Biden has surrounded himself with Wall Street.

[13] And, you know, the party that had forgotten its roots in the middle class of our country and started regarding people, you know, the cops, the firefighters, the union members, the people who were the bedrock of the Democratic Party as deplorables.

[14] And all of those trends and others were disturbing to me. And I actually, Jordan, started thinking about.

[15] running before it was really viable, before I considered it viable, but just to, you know, to be able to take advantage of the fact that you're protected somewhat from censorship if you're running for president.

[16] There's actually federal rules that make it illegal for, for the network TV to censor presidential candidates.

[17] And, but my wife would never have let me run for for president if it was not a you know if i didn't intend to win and then last spring a pollster named jeremy's ogby who once runs one of the biggest polling houses in north america um and had been polling me without my knowledge for several months uh asked to see me and he sat down with me and showed me the polling results that that showed up a you know, a very clear path that I could have till victory.

[18] And with those, I was able to, over time, persuade my wife and my kids that this was a good idea.

[19] And I think at this point, they're pretty happy with, you know, the last two months.

[20] How are you doing in the polls at the moment, as far as you can tell, with a credible pool?

[21] Well, the public poll, I average about 20%, which is good.

[22] I mean, my candidacy is not being treated as serious by the mainstream media.

[23] I think maybe it is a little bit more so, but it was originally dismissed as kind of a fringe candidacy.

[24] But I'm actually doing much better than DeSantis, Governor DeSantis against Trump.

[25] I'm doing much better against Biden.

[26] So I think that that is just a media bias.

[27] And our internal poll numbers are much, much better.

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

[29] So I beat him by almost double the percentage that President Biden does.

[30] And I do even better against Governor DeSantis.

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

[32] And I think a lot of Democrats who don't like me, I think mainly because of the propaganda that has dominated.

[33] very, very negative propaganda, negative portrayals of me and the misinterpretations of my viewpoints which have dominated the media and the public consciousness over the past several years, that that will begin to recede a little, the more that people see of me, and the more that, you know, if the polling shows that I am more likely to be President Trump than President Biden, I think it will force.

[34] a lot of Democrats to take a second look at me. Why do you think that people feel that you might be a better alternative to Trump than Biden is?

[35] Like, what is it about what you bring to the table that's making you more credible on that front?

[36] Well, I think the reason my numbers show that is that I've been able to bridge the divide between Republicans, Democrats.

[37] So a lot of my supporters, I think I do better than any candidate with independence, which are now the biggest political party.

[38] And I appeal to a lot of Republicans as well.

[39] And so, and I don't think, you know, President Biden can do that.

[40] And if you just do the math, you know, in the end, it's likely that I'll get almost all the Democrats who vote.

[41] If I'm right, if it's me against, let's say, President.

[42] and Trump, the likelihood is that most Democrats would vote for me and that he will get very little crossover, whereas I will still get a lot of Republican votes and I'll get, I'll dominate the independent votes.

[43] And I think that will continue.

[44] I mean, that is not, that observation or that is not just an artifact of our polling, but it's, you know, it's reflected in conversations that I. have every single day of people approaching me in airports of on airplanes of you know when I'm doing you know when I'm in the countryside which I have to go to a lot in rural areas urban areas I'm getting I'm getting a strong response and the response across the board so I think it's true you know the polling is reflecting something that's really happening right well it isn't obvious to me, and this leads into another line of question exactly why you're running on the Democrat ticket, because as you just pointed out, your policies, at least in principle, could appeal to Republicans as well, and that might make you a unique candidate on the Democrat side.

[45] I guess I'm curious about why do you...

[46] So, there's an analogy, I believe, between what's happened to the universities and what's happened to the Democrats.

[47] So, what I saw happen in the universities was that the administration took over the faculty.

[48] The faculty retreated in 3 ,000 microsteps, and the administration moved forward.

[49] And that happened over about a 25 -year period until the administration had captured the universities completely.

[50] And then the DEI types took over the administration.

[51] And it looks to me like something analogous happened within the Democrats.

[52] I worked with the Democrats for a long time in California trying to help by DEI do you mean diverse diversity equity and inclusivity yeah yeah the social justice warrior types within the universities and so what I saw among the Democrats that I worked with was that they were unable to draw a dividing line between the moderate types and the radicals so and this is something maybe I'll push you about So, for example, I went to Washington, I talked to a lot of Democrats, senators and congressmen, about what I saw happening in the broad public sphere, but also in the Democrat Party.

[53] And I asked them this question, when does the left go too far?

[54] And none of them were able to answer.

[55] And even though it's completely obvious that the left can go too far, I mean, that's one of the cardinal lessons of the 20th century.

[56] And I suggested that the left goes too far when it pushes equity.

[57] And all I got as a response from the Democrats, senators, and congressmen like, was, well, the people who say equity, they just mean equality of opportunity.

[58] And that's not what they mean.

[59] They mean equality of outcome, and that's not the same thing at all.

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

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

[62] It just didn't seem possible.

[63] And so why do you think, I don't think the universities are salvageable, by the way.

[64] So why do you think the Democrats are salvageable?

[65] Well, I don't think we have a choice.

[66] We have a two -party system, and I, you know, I'm a lifelong Democrat.

[67] I feel like my party is being taken away from me in some ways by the, you know, the kind of ideologies, the extreme ideologies, and really, you know, the departure of common sense that I think trouble.

[68] you and a lot of, you know, the things that you think about.

[69] And, but I mean, why do I think it's salvageable?

[70] Because I'm talking to people on the street.

[71] You know, there are so many people who have responded to my candidacy positively because they see it as returned to, you know, being a Kennedy Democrat, you know, the Democratic Party that they loved and that they, you know, that they thought reflected their values, their ideologies, and their best interests and the best interest of this country, and that was likely to build on America that they can be proud of, that their children can be proud of, and that has moral authority around the world and, you know, all the things that we'd like to see, I think most people would like to see.

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

[73] And I think the idea of returning it to common sense is appealing to a lot of people.

[74] And I'm just you know, I'm just thinking those things but they seem to be reflected both in my polling and in the kind of reaction I get from people on the street and on Twitter and, you know, so it's a melange of things that makes me feel that way, but, you know, I could be wrong.

[75] Well, I mean, part of the reason that I was willing to work with the Democrats to begin with, and I did that for about five years, was because I thought, I think, like you do, according to what you just said, that, well, you kind of have to work with the institutions that exist, because those are the institutions that exist, and there seems to be some utility in trying to pull the Democrats, let's say, back towards the center as much as that's possible.

[76] But I found that I think we had some success in that regard, but it was in particular the and I see this on the conservative side too, by the way, with the unwillingness to see, this is probably more true in Canada even, what is really at the core of this progressive ideology that stresses equity, for example, because equity is an unbelievably dangerous doctrine.

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

[78] And it isn't obvious to me at all that the Democrats have taken this with any degree of seriousness.

[79] And that's producing all sorts of strange pathologies on the cultural front.

[80] You've documented a fair bit, and this brings us into another area that's adjacent to that, I guess.

[81] you spent a lot of time.

[82] Your last book, Letter to Liberals, I think I've got that title right, concentrated on the strange collusion that has occurred between the Democrats and Big Pharma.

[83] And this is also something I find completely inexplicable.

[84] Like 20 years ago, if you would have said that in 2020, the leftist types and the liberals, including the Democrats, would be colluding with Big Pharma, people would have thought you were completely out of your mind because for an endless amount of time, the number one corporate enemies of people who were liberal or on the left were Big Pharma and Big Energy.

[85] And so how do you explain what happened in relationship to the liberal attitude towards Big Pharma during the COVID epidemic because I haven't been able to sort that out at all?

[86] What do you think is behind that?

[87] Well, I watched that happen kind of like a slow -motion train wreck, and you're right that traditionally pharmaceutical industries are, you know, it is a criminal enterprise and, you know, I'm not saying that lightly.

[88] The four principal companies of Merks, and OV, Pfizer, and Glaxo that produce, for example, all the vaccines in America have paid $35 billion collectively over the last decade in criminal penalties and, you know, damages for lying to doctors for defrauding regulators, for falsifying science, and for killing hundreds of thousands of people.

[89] I mean, the whole opioid crisis was engineered by the Sacklers and by the other big pharmaceutical companies, along with corrupt FDA officials.

[90] And that is a crisis that now kills this year, killed 106 ,000 American kids, twice the number of kids that died during the 20 -year Vietnam War.

[91] Viox is another good example.

[92] That was another symptom of the corrupt collusion between pharma and the regulatory agencies, and the capture of those agencies by that industry, which has become the agencies themselves have become sock puppets for that industry.

[93] And they killed between 120 ,000, 500 ,000 people with a drug.

[94] they marketed as a headache medicine and arthritis medicine when they knew that it caused heart attacks and they didn't tell the public that they concealed that from the public so you know a lot of people would have said oh it caused heart attacks well i'll take an aspirin but they weren't allowed to make that choice because the pharma and the collusion with the collusion of the regulators took that information deprive the public of informed consent Now, the question is, Democrats knew that there's more pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justice combined more than any other industry.

[95] They give double in terms of lobbying what the next biggest industry gives.

[96] And, you know, it's easy for them to own Congress still.

[97] it was an ideological resistant among Democrats until a decade ago and or really a decade.

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

[99] And they have unlimited money.

[100] The Democrats traditionally could only get big money, reliable big money from two sources.

[101] One was the labor unions, and the other was the trial lawyers.

[102] And they don't have anywhere near the kind of money that these industries have to give away.

[103] And so something changed during Obamacare.

[104] And that was that the Obama administration, and my uncle, Ted Kennedy, was head of it, was chairing the Senate Health Committee at this time.

[105] So I watched this whole thing very, you know, very carefully and was disturbed at that time.

[106] Or because of the lobbying power of pharma, Obama could not get Obamacare passed without the collaboration of the pharmaceutical industry.

[107] So he basically had to make a gold in a handshake with the devil.

[108] And the agreement they made was that, number one, Obamacare will, will, is going to benefit you because it's going to pay for all your products, the pharmaceutical drugs to Americans.

[109] But, and here was the, you know, the key, we will not bargain over prices with you, which, you know, Medicare used to do, that Canadian government bargains when it, you know, provides health care to Canadians.

[110] it bargains against really good deals, which is why Americans go to Canada to buy drugs, because they're much cheaper there.

[111] But here they could charge the top rate, and the Obamacare would have to pay.

[112] And that is how Obama got the pharmaceutical industry support, and after that, it became permissible for Democrats to accept pharmaceutical money.

[113] The pharmaceutical money began pouring into the Democratic Party.

[114] But on issues like vaccines, the Democrats and Republican were pretty evenly split up to 2016.

[115] And then you had these, then you had Trump run for presidency.

[116] And during his campaign, on several occasions, he mentioned that he believed that vaccines were causing autism.

[117] And this was anecdotal to him.

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

[119] And so he and it, you know, his belief was that it was that the link was real.

[120] And he said it out loud on several occasions, I think three separate occasions.

[121] And at that time, anything that Trump said was immediately that the reaction of the Democratic Party is, whatever he says, we've got to do the opposite.

[122] So even though we've hated NAFTA for our entire existence for our party, if Trump now says he hates NAFTA, we've got to start liking NAFTA.

[123] And that, so that was kind of what happened was those pronouncements by Trump were put by the Democratic Party doyons into the same any science dumpster as his climate denial.

[124] And it became a, and a tribal issue.

[125] And so that, you know, it was a culture war issue.

[126] If you were, if you thought vaccines caused autism, you were a Republican.

[127] And if you thought maybe they, if you thought they definitely did not.

[128] And that's been proven beyond.

[129] any doubt, you were a Democrat, and there was no in between, there was no dialogue, there was no room for dissent or debate, it was a tribal issue, and it was life or death.

[130] And, you know, that's the way that I saw that history happen, because I watched the change in 2016.

[131] Okay, so you saw two things happen.

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

[133] So also, I'm wondering, it wasn't that long ago, well, I guess it's 20 years now, so it's some reasonable amount of time that the laws in the United States were changed so that Big Pharma could advertise their products directly to the consumer.

[134] That was actually a revolution in messaging.

[135] And now, as you pointed out in your last book, Big Pharma controls about 75 % of the advertising on legacy media, and even more on the news shows.

[136] And so...

[137] I think it's about 75 % on the news shows.

[138] I'm not sure.

[139] I think there are even bigger advertisers if you look at the entire sort of landscape.

[140] Automobiles may be bigger.

[141] But certainly on the evening news shows, the evening news is kind of the perfect landscape to advertise pharmaceuticals.

[142] because everybody who watches the evening news, essentially the entire demographic is over 60.

[143] You know, my kids would not dream of turning on the evening news.

[144] They get their news from the, you know, from their screens.

[145] But the people who are sitting down and watching the evening news are your age and they're my age.

[146] And as you know, when you get to our age, you spend a lot of time at doctors and you're on, and those people are on a lot of drugs.

[147] And so they're watching it.

[148] And Roger Ailes told me, I think it was in 2014, and he, of course, was the founder and CEO of Fox News.

[149] And I was trying to get a, I had participated in the making of a documentary about the impacts of mercury in vaccines on neurodevelopmental disorders and children.

[150] This is a sudden epidemic that had begun in 1989 of neurodevelopmental disorders.

[151] And he had a relative who had been affected that he believed was vaccine injured.

[152] And he always would put me on his shows.

[153] I had this weird relationship with Roger Hales because I had spent three months in a tent with him when I was 19 years old in Africa.

[154] And we had this friendship, you know, he was a very clever, witty guy, and he had not started Fox News.

[155] because he had just left the running the Nixon campaign communications.

[156] And he had stepped down for the Merv Griffin Show.

[157] But I had this lasting friendship with him, and he was a very loyal friend.

[158] And he would always make the host of Fox TV to put me on to talk about environmental issues.

[159] So I was the only environmentalist for a decade that was going on Fox News.

[160] And I looked at him kind of as a Darth Vader, you know, of what he had done to, do American television and communications, but I still had this strange friendship with him.

[161] So he would always whip me on, and I went to him to try to get on to talk about this documentary.

[162] He looked at it.

[163] His assistant, Mike Clemente, he was running the station at that time.

[164] The network looked at it, and both of them loved it, but he said, we can't let you on.

[165] And he told me at that time, he said, if any of my host independently let you on to talk about this, I would fire them.

[166] I would have to fire them.

[167] And he said, if I didn't fire them, I would get a call from Rupert within 10 minutes, meaning Rupert Murdoch.

[168] And he said to me, at that time, he said 75 % of my evening news division advertising revenues are coming from pharmaceutical companies.

[169] And he told me, he told me that of the 22 ads on the typical evening news show, that typically 17 or 18 of those were pharmaceutical ads.

[170] And so that, you know, that tells it all.

[171] And I've seen again and again and again, you know, people like Jake Tapper, who did this, worked with me for three weeks doing this incredible documentary on an article that I published in 2005 about a secret meeting at DEC sponsored with 75 vaccine makers about how to hide from the American public the links between autism and vaccines.

[172] And I obtained the transcript for these from those meetings.

[173] I publish them in Rolling Zone.

[174] And Jake Tapper, prior, as the Rolling Stone publication data approach, he spent three weeks with me doing an exclusive for ABC, which he was then working for.

[175] On my article, a companion piece.

[176] And the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and he said, the piece just got killed by corporate.

[177] He said in all my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate, and I'm so mad.

[178] And then after that, I called him the next day, and he went dark.

[179] And I've never spoken to him again, but he's become kind of this shill for pharma since then.

[180] So, and I've watched that happen to so many, you know, announcers on TV.

[181] Do you think that's what happened to Tucker Carlson?

[182] Well, I think it might be.

[183] I mean, the timing is good, but there was a lot of reasons they may have wanted to get rid of Tucker.

[184] Yeah, but it's a strange move, Abe, because I think Fox probably got rid of Fox News by getting rid of Tucker.

[185] You know, it's such a movie that seems to be in...

[186] They seem to have lost a big audience, and it is weird.

[187] I mean, Tucker was getting 4 .5 million viewers a night, and compare that to CNN.

[188] CNN gets about three, the prime time CNN has three.

[189] 345 ,000 viewers.

[190] So Tucker was getting more than 10 times with CNN.

[191] He dwarfed anybody else on Fox.

[192] I mean, he was clearly the breadwinner.

[193] He was the anchor.

[194] And they fired him.

[195] They were making some kind of a point.

[196] And, you know, maybe he just pissed off Rupert by being, you know, Fox News is important to us in this country.

[197] But to Rupert Murdoch's empire, it's just a...

[198] in the bucket.

[199] So, you know, and he may, who knows, it may have been pharma, it may have been Rupert Murdoch's ego.

[200] I don't know what it was.

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

[202] Yeah, I mean, well, that's right, and I looked into that.

[203] And, you know, the change happened Jordan in 1997, and that's when FCC changed its rules, and FDA approved, which was the rule before that was that there could be no direct consumer advertising of pharmaceutical products on TV or anywhere.

[204] And the only other nation in the world that allows that is New Zealand.

[205] And, you know, because we have that rule, it's one of the reasons that we, we're We use three times the number of pharmaceutical drugs as any other European country.

[206] The average American today is on four pharmaceutical drugs, and it has not helped public health.

[207] It is, you know, pharmaceutical drugs are now the third largest killer of Americans after cancer and heart attacks.

[208] And we pay more for public health than any other country in the world.

[209] Right, so that means that that's the third leading cause of death is medical error.

[210] Is that, is it third?

[211] I think it actually pharmaceutical drugs.

[212] I think it's pharmaceutical drugs.

[213] And the source for that is the Cochran Collaboration.

[214] It's a report by Peter Gosha, I think, of the who is the founder of the Cochran Collaboration, which is kind of the ultimate arbiter of, you know.

[215] of pharmaceutical companies.

[216] Well, there are also the company that produced the recent report, Cocker Review, showing that masks are completely ineffective in relationship to COVID transmission.

[217] Yeah.

[218] Of course, that's being debated now, although I can't see how, because as you pointed out, the Cocker Reviews are, people have accepted them as gold standard for conservative reviews, careful scientific reviews for years.

[219] Yeah, you know, the thing is that Bill Gates has played a huge role in trying to take over Cochran.

[220] And they've got, you know, they're the big founders of Cochran, Thomas Jefferson, who is, you know, the leading clinical trial expert in Europe, and Peter Gosha, who is the other co -founder, have both been run out of Cochran.

[221] And the Gates Foundation has been pumping tens of millions of dollars in, so I don't know what's going to become of Cochran now.

[222] Yeah.

[223] Well, the whole thing is at risk.

[224] So that people know what we're losing is these were a group of very independent scientists who started looking at what was happening to the medical journals.

[225] The medical journals get most of their money from pharmaceutical companies for both advertising and preprints.

[226] Preprints are the, you know, the pharmaceutical companies have these phony studies that they they use their financial cloud to get the Lancet, New England Journal Medicine, or JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association to publish.

[227] And then they get a preprint, so they get the journal then to print out just that article but with the cover of the journal in it, which gives it this imprimatur of total legitimacy.

[228] They print out two or three hundred thousand of them, and they pay a lot of money, millions of dollars for that run, printing run from the Lancet, and then they're pharmaceutical reps, you know, the former playboy models who go around to each doctor's office, take the doctor out of lunch and give one of these preprints and say, look, the drug I'm doing, Lancet says it's a great thing.

[229] That's where these journals make all their money.

[230] Well, so I think it was the 80s, 70, 80s, 90s, these groups of scientists got together who were independent scientists and said, what we're seeing now coming out of the journals, it's not real science, it's pharmaceutical propaganda.

[231] Even the journal editors, like Marcia Engel from the New England Journal Medicine, Richard Horton from the Lancet, said, you cannot believe anything in the journals anymore.

[232] We are vessels for pharmaceutical propaganda.

[233] This group of scientists said, we're going to get volunteer scientists from all over the world who will now look over the journal.

[234] and see whether it actually was good science or where they're lying to us and do and critically read it, do it basically a second round of peer review that's real.

[235] And they put together this extraordinary organization of over 30 ,000 volunteer scientists, top scientists, independent scientists from around the world, who systematically review journal articles to see whether the science is real or fake and inform the public.

[236] And it was an absolutely critical organization, and, you know, Gates has gone in there trying to undermine it, and it's very, very troubling.

[237] A couple of questions.

[238] We talked here a little bit now about, let's say, the corruption of the legacy media on the news front by Big Pharma, and you just made reference to the same thing happening in the scientific domain, which is really awful to see journals like New England Journal of Medicine at Lancet and so forth, and science, for that matter, and you're seeing it with nature.

[239] as well, degenerate into organs that are no longer producing trustworthy science.

[240] That's a real catastrophe.

[241] You saw recently, like yesterday, that DeSantis basically bypassed the legacy media, and Pierre Pahliav did that in Canada when he ran for the leader of the Conservative Party, by the way, he just skipped over the legacy media entirely, and DeSantis announced his presidency on Twitter.

[242] And here you are also talking to me on YouTube, right?

[243] And so that's not exactly a standard political.

[244] That's not standard political practice.

[245] And so what do you think of, why did you decide to talk to me today on my YouTube channel?

[246] And what do you think of DeSantis' use of Twitter?

[247] Has your campaign also been considering, for example, utilizing Twitter?

[248] Because obviously Musk has made that open to any candidate.

[249] And how are you guys conceptualizing your move forward on the presidency campaign front in relationship to non -traditional media?

[250] Well, you know, Jordan, I've been censored in the corporate media for 18 years.

[251] So since 2005, I've been actively censored, you know, not just for vaccine articles, but for all of my articles.

[252] And I was very, very active on those media fronts for, you know, decades.

[253] But I've been slowly censored now to complete wall -to -wall.

[254] censorship.

[255] And particularly during the 13 years, the last three years, we've had to figure out ways to get around that censorship.

[256] And so, you know, we've done that by using non -traditional media.

[257] I was on Instagram.

[258] I had almost a million followers on Instagram at one point.

[259] But then in the pandemic, they de -platform me. So I'm fine.

[260] You're still banned on Instagram.

[261] Is that the case?

[262] Instagram and Ben on TikTok.

[263] You know, I'm interested to see what happens to you with YouTube.

[264] Well, you know, they've left me alone.

[265] YouTube has left me alone.

[266] It's quite surprising because I've said things many times that in principle should have got me in trouble on YouTube, but they haven't even put any strikes against my channel.

[267] They demonetized my daughter for a whole year for reasons we never did discover, but they've been completely hands -off with me. You know, they've added those warnings or clarifications now, and then, especially when I talk to people like Bjorn Longberg, and we'll get to that later.

[268] But I don't know what it is.

[269] YouTube has been hands off.

[270] In answer to your question, when my uncle ran in 1960, television was a new phenomenon.

[271] And he recognized the power of television that that would play a key role in that presidential campaign for the first.

[272] time in history, and, you know, he was able to exploit that and to win that election.

[273] In the 2016 election, Twitter played a key role in getting Donald Trump elected, you know, absolutely critical.

[274] He probably, if he didn't have that Twitter account, he probably would not have been elected.

[275] Who knows?

[276] But I would say there's a good chance he wouldn't.

[277] Today, Twitter is still important, and I, you know, I have now 1 .2 million followers on Twitter.

[278] You know, I really didn't start actively doing Twitter until Elon freed it up, you know, because if I, you know, during the pandemic, I was mainly posting, you know, kitty cats and rainbows and unicorns, because if I said anything that was, that was, if I talked about what I was thinking about, it would have, I would have been deplatformed.

[279] But once Elon took over, I started, you know, they, they unshackled me. and but also I think this is going to be this year is going to be the political campaign that will be decided on my podcast and particularly because the candidates are not wanting to debate so I not only not only is Biden not debating but I think Trump may not debate and so I think people like me are going to end up going to are going to, you know, we're going to really test whether these podcasts.

[280] And, you know, I was talking about Tucker having 4 .5 million nightly views.

[281] Well, the podcast that Joe Rogan did with Peter McCulloch got 40 million views.

[282] Right, right.

[283] Yeah, well, Rogan's a force of nature.

[284] Yeah, so Tucker is 10 times what CNN is, you know, gets, and a Rogan's audience is potentially ten times what Tucker was getting.

[285] So I think the podcast has the capacity this election for reaching people and allowing sort of distant and insurgent candidates like myself to end run the corporate media monolith and to reach large numbers of Americans without going onto the networks.

[286] Oh, I'm hoping that works.

[287] Now you asked about DeSantis, you know, I think, you know, I felt bad for DeSantis, badly for DeSantis because of what happened on his, you know, Twitter announcement where it went off, you know, and I'm kind of rooting for Elon, so I don't, you know, I don't obviously want DeSantis to win, but I do, I liked how he handled COVID in Florida.

[288] There's other things that he's doing now that I don't like, but I do, you know, politics is hard for him.

[289] everybody and, you know, it would be, it would, you know, I think it's unfortunate if somebody wants to speak to the American people and doesn't get that chance because the, you know, because the media vessel vector is not, for some reason, is not able to reach them.

[290] I think he may have made a mistake and going on with Elon, but I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe I think, you know, President Trump is portraying DeSantis as a tool of the Jeb Bush.

[291] That's kind of his, you know, strategy for characterizing DeSantis as a tool of Wall Street and the billionaire class and, you know, the Bush's, et cetera.

[292] And it may not have been, I think it probably would have been better for DeSantis if he had.

[293] I'm sure he thinks so now, if he had done a more traditional announcement, where he would have gotten a lot of media coverage.

[294] Yeah, well, like you said, like you said, well, time will tell, like you said, because it is a new technology, and it is extraordinarily powerful in the way you described.

[295] I mean, Rogan's podcast is number one in 97 countries.

[296] He's clearly the most powerful journalist who's ever lived.

[297] And so I think that big, I think the legacy media in the United States will die first, and I think legacy media will die everywhere, but I already think it's probably dead in the United States.

[298] It's a walking corpse, and turning two podcasts and non -traditional media seems to me to be entirely appropriate for people who are forward -looking.

[299] Like I said, in Canada, Pierre Pahliav, who now runs the Conservative Party, and who's the most likely next Prime Minister, he ran his entire campaign for leadership on non -traditional media, and he was producing ads on his own that were generating, you know, 500 ,000 views, and people were voluntarily watching his ads, which was like a hundred times the View County would have got on our state -funded media, 69 % state -funded media, CBC.

[300] And so, you know, I think the tide has already turned, and the U .S. is at the forefront of that.

[301] Now, I'm going to return to an earlier question I had.

[302] You've been on the receiving end of council culture, and one of the things I really have noticed is that, you know, I have colleagues and compatriots, friends across the political spectrum, And one of the things I really have noticed that differentiates the left from the right is that the left will engage in cancel culture behavior to a degree that is virtually unheard of on the right.

[303] Now, that may change, but at the moment, that seems to be the case.

[304] Now, you've been on the receiving end of cancellation, as you said, for almost 20 years.

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

[306] Or do you revert to the idea, well, that's what we have to work with, and you're going to do what you can to revitalize the Democrat Party?

[307] Because it isn't obvious to me that this cancel culture phenomenon has gone so far that it isn't obvious to me how it can be turned around.

[308] I don't think everybody on the left has co -signed counterculture.

[309] I think that's you know, it's a it's a focal.

[310] I would I think it's probably a vocal minority.

[311] I don't know.

[312] You know, I have no reason.

[313] I have no reason to say that other than just that's my feeling.

[314] But I, you know, I just, I don't think most people think that way that you should.

[315] I mean, it's very, it's anti -American.

[316] You don't, you know, we should be courageous enough and confident enough of our viewpoint that we can argue them and have the triumph in the marketplace of ideas and the way that you deal with, you know, with viewpoints that you don't like or that you believe are inaccurate is not through censorship, but, you know, with argument and more information and, you know, and facts.

[317] And that's how we've always functioned.

[318] It's a critical foundation zone for democracy.

[319] This idea that the free flow of information is the water, it's the sunlight, it's the fertilizer, or democracy.

[320] And if you cut it off, democracy itself will wither and die.

[321] There's just never been a time in history when the good guys were the people who are censoring stuff.

[322] They're always the bad guys.

[323] And we know that.

[324] We read, you know, Orwell, and we read Aldous Huxley, and we read, you know, all of the great thinkers who were warning us from, you know, when we were little kids that, you know, the censors are bad.

[325] And when you start censoring people, then you're on the slippery slope to totalitarianism.

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

[327] And, you know, we understood that we could be appalled by the things they were saying.

[328] But at the same time, you know, that it was more, that it was important for them to be able to say it.

[329] Because if somebody can shut them up, they can shut us up.

[330] Well, you know, I think your claim that it's a minority of radicals on the leftist side.

[331] I think the data supports that quite clearly.

[332] But, okay, so let me tell you two stories and tell me what you think about this.

[333] So when the Democrats I worked with in the U .S. in California, I had a conversation with them one day.

[334] Very intelligent people, by the way, about Antifa.

[335] And they were on about Q &O and on and about right -wing radical groups.

[336] And they regarded them as entirely real and entirely credible threats.

[337] And that was partly as a consequence of the January 6th occurrences, let's say.

[338] And so I said, well, what do you guys think of Antifa?

[339] And they said, well, you know, they don't really exist.

[340] And I thought, well, that's interesting.

[341] because you think the right -wing conspirators exist, but you don't think the left -wing.

[342] But like I said, they were smart people, so I investigated further.

[343] And they said, well, you know, it has no centralized organization.

[344] It's not a formal group.

[345] It's a very small minority of people.

[346] And it's extremely, it's extremely loosely structured, and it isn't representative of even the radical left, much less the centrist Democrats.

[347] And I thought, okay, that's interesting.

[348] So then I went and talked to Andy No, who's a journalist who's covered Antifa in more detail than anyone else in the world and who knows their organizational structure and their routines inside and out and who's put his life on the line to cover this sort of this Antifa activity.

[349] And I asked him, how many Antifa cells do you think there are in the United States?

[350] And he said, well, there's probably about 20.

[351] And I said, well, how many full -time equivalent employees, so to speak?

[352] How many people do you think are in each cell that are dedicating themselves to the Antifa cause?

[353] And he said, well, maybe 40.

[354] And I said, oh, so that's 800 people.

[355] So that's one in 400 ,000.

[356] And, well, that's almost none.

[357] And so you could take that data, and you could take the case, you could make the case the Democrats made, which is, well, the Antifa doesn't even exist.

[358] It's one in 400 ,000, you know.

[359] In a city of a million, there'd be two.

[360] Antifa members who were full -fledged, you know, committed full -time advocates.

[361] But then you think, well, look at all the damage those people did.

[362] And then you think, well, maybe it only takes a trivial minority of people who are off the rails to cause a tremendous amount of damage.

[363] That's what happened when the Soviets took over the Russian society in the aftermath of the monarchies after World War I. It was a tiny percentage of people.

[364] And this is what made me worried on the Democrat side.

[365] So this is why when I went to Washington, I pushed the Democrats that I talked to.

[366] He said, well, when do you think the left goes too far?

[367] And so let me ask you that question, like fairly bluntly.

[368] You're trying to pull the Democrats to the center.

[369] You think it's a salvageable enterprise, and you think it's necessary to salvage it.

[370] It's a two -party system.

[371] It's half the country.

[372] When do you think the left goes too far?

[373] And how would you, in your administration, draw a line between those who are reasonable and who show common sense and those who have, like, gone off the rail?

[374] Where is off the rail on the leftist side?

[375] Under what circumstance would I be called upon to make that determination?

[376] Well, okay, I can...

[377] Okay, so when the Biden administration took office, one of the things I also discussed with the Democrats I knew was how the positions that were going to be filled that were now vacant because of the transition and the presidency, how those positions would be filled and who would they be filled with?

[378] And one of the things I was told was that there was a dearth of available bodies on the Democrat side.

[379] And you know, it's hard to get people involved in politics.

[380] And so that many of the positions were filled by people whose views were quite radical in comparison to the centrist, into the, say, mainstream centrist Democrat ideal.

[381] And so, and I see this as, like I would say Kamala Harris is a good example of that, because I think Camel Harris is inexcusably radical.

[382] She tweets out support for the notion of equity nonstop.

[383] And equity is not equality of opportunity.

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

[385] You know, and I know Democrats, because they like the free flow of ideas, have a hard time drawing distinguishing lines.

[386] and so they have a hard time distinguishing the centrists from the radicals, but they have been captured in many ways by the radical viewpoint, and it's very dangerous.

[387] I mean, you've been subject to that to some degree on the censorship side.

[388] And so I've not seen the Democrats contend seriously with the problem of how to differentiate the mainstream centrists from the dangerous radicals, and they seem to continue enabling them.

[389] I've seen that right now on the transfront, for example.

[390] You know, like Norway and Finland and Sweden and Holland and the UK, have now banned gender transition surgery for minors.

[391] And yet it's still being promoted assiduously, for example, in California by Gavin Newsom.

[392] And I think that's criminal personally.

[393] I think it's inexcusable.

[394] And that's a good example of the capture of the Democrats by the radicals in my estimation.

[395] So it's a curious problem.

[396] I have so many people right now who are flocking to my campaign that are high, high -quality people that I whose views about life and politics I respect some of them are Republicans some of them are independents some of them are Democrats and I don't have any anxiety about being able to fill all the key positions in my administration with people who have you know who I think have a common sense approach to life okay so you think you have a talent pool at hand that is broad enough so that you can find people who are qualified enough to occupy the centrist's position appropriately and pull the Democrats back to something more approximating the ideals, let's say, well, of the latter part of the 20th century as opposed to now.

[397] Okay, so let me ask you another question then.

[398] There are these ideas on the left that are troublesome, let's say.

[399] What do you think the central ideas on the left, What are the central ideas on the left that are troublesome in your estimation?

[400] You know what I try to focus on, Jordan, is the values that Americans hold in common rather than getting caught up in these issues that drive people apart.

[401] So that, you know, I don't want to do finger -pointing.

[402] If you ask me what I believe about certain issues, I'll tell you.

[403] But I'm not, you know, I'm not looking to, you know, to fingerpoint of people or to alienate people or I'm trying to, you know, run a campaign that brings people together rather than a campaign that tries, you know, that is based upon, you know, that kind of tribalism of, you know, of condemning people for, you know, for ideologies that I don't necessarily agree with.

[404] If they're relevant to something I'm doing, I'll take that into consideration.

[405] But I don't spend a lot of time sort of, I don't know.

[406] I really try to focus on how do you, you know, where are the bridges where people can come together, you know.

[407] Well, I can understand that.

[408] You know, I have this enterprise starting up in the Great Britain called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and we're trying to put together a positive vision for the future as opposed to the apocalyptic vision that's been, well, that's been circulating for some time now and that's demoralizing young people to a degree that's almost incomprehensible.

[409] And I can understand your concern about your concern for putting forward a positive vision rather than for drawing distinctions.

[410] But by the same token, you know, for example, in the universities, I've seen the diversity, equity, and inclusivity advocates take the enterprise over and destroy it.

[411] And there are some truly pathological ideas circulating in that realm of the ideological space.

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

[413] But by the same token, it does seem to me to be incumbent upon the Democrats to draw a line.

[414] And I do think that one of the lines that should be drawn is with relationship to the notion of equity.

[415] Because equity is a very pathological idea.

[416] And wherever it's been implemented around the world in the past, it's caused.

[417] It's caused nothing but mayhem.

[418] And so anyways, I won't push that any farther because, you know, I have some appreciation for your perspective.

[419] I do, I have another set of questions that I want to address.

[420] You mentioned at the beginning of our talk, your concern that, you're concerned in relationship to the use of fear.

[421] And we could say on the vaccine front that the vaccine mandates were pushed forward, especially the lockdown mandates.

[422] they were pushed forward with the use of fear and that that was conscious policy.

[423] I know in Canada, for example, that even the conservative types who were just as bad on the lockdown front, they polled the public.

[424] They made the public afraid first.

[425] Then they polled the public to find out what their fears were.

[426] Then they produced all sorts of lockdown regulations that were advanced to improve their standing in the polls.

[427] Then they told their scientists to justify those with scientific hypotheses post -hawk.

[428] And so I've been thinking about that.

[429] So here's the conclusion.

[430] If there's a crisis that emerges, real or not, but let's say real.

[431] And your response to the crisis is that you become a fear -mongering tyrant, then you're the wrong leader for the time, is that no matter what the crisis is, you are not morally, it is not morally acceptable for you to use fear and compulsion to put your policy platform forward.

[432] And so I wanted to talk about that a bit on the climate.

[433] climate front.

[434] Well, I was actually concerned about talking to you today because I generally don't give my guests a rough time.

[435] But we, I think, have a profound difference of opinion in relationship to climate issues.

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

[437] I mean, you see it in the rising rates of depression and anxiety that characterize young women, and they're more susceptible to such things.

[438] But in men, you see it as this widespread dropping out of educational institutions and marriage and sexual relationships and employment.

[439] I think it's 20 percent, something like that, 20 percent of work -age men in the United States now haven't had any employment whatsoever in the last year.

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

[441] So Germany has energy now that's five times as expensive as it should be.

[442] It's unreliable.

[443] They're dependent on the Russians and other totalitarians on the fossil fuel front, and they pollute more than they did before they started this whole green enterprise.

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

[445] So, well, so help me sort that out because, you know, you put forward a very interesting candidacy.

[446] And one of the crucial problems that we're facing at the moment is to sort out the environmental issues.

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

[448] So help me sort that out and understand where you stand.

[449] Let me just start by, with kind of a footnote.

[450] You know, I see these huge levels of depression and despair, loneliness in kids.

[451] And I don't think that there's a single cause to it.

[452] And I think blaming it on, you know, depression about climate is probably over simplistic.

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

[454] These kids are being overwhelmed by a tsunami.

[455] I mean, they're swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today, and many of those are endocrine disruptors.

[456] There's atrazine throughout our water supply.

[457] Atrazine, by the way, if you, in a lab put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forceably feminize every frog in there and 10 % of the frogs, the male frogs will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs.

[458] And if you, if it's doing that to frogs, it could there's a lot of other evidence that it's doing it to human beings as well and you know I'm happy to talk about that later but I don't think blaming this epidemic of depression despair on people who are you know fanning fears of climate are is I think that's over simplistic I think you're right you put your finger on first of all let me just say this about climate.

[459] I believe that carbon in the atmosphere and methane does increase warming.

[460] Why do I believe that?

[461] I believe it because it makes sense one, and I believe it because I read reports in the 1970.

[462] I, you know, on issues like vaccines, I read the science myself.

[463] I read it critically.

[464] I'm able to do that because, you know, I try cases on these issues.

[465] and I've been involved in probably more 500 to 6 ,700 cases, and almost all of them have some kind of scientific controversy, and so I wouldn't be good at my job if I couldn't read science critically, and all of my cases involve intense critical reading of science and cross -examination of scientists, and you have to have pretty much complete domain knowledge to be able to do that.

[466] if you're going to win cases.

[467] So I'm used to doing that.

[468] And I've read, I would say, at least the abstracts for every vaccine study.

[469] You know, I did a compilation of all the vaccine science involving thimerosol where I digested 450 studies, the leading studies.

[470] I have 1 ,400 references in that book.

[471] That book was an earlier book I did called dimerosol with the size of it.

[472] So I know if somebody asks me, I can tell you, you know, this effect is highly likely being produced.

[473] I cannot do that with climate science.

[474] There's tens of thousands of studies.

[475] Most of them say yes.

[476] You know, virtually all of them say yes.

[477] Not all of them, but virtually all of them say that carbon is contributing to the warming.

[478] If you ask me, if your position is the warming is not happening, then.

[479] I just that's like somebody's saying the autism epidemic is not happening I look around you can see it everywhere the you know the ice caps are melting etc the Greenland ice sheet I I spent a lot of time outdoors and I see the over 69 years I've seen the changes and I've seen them you know the mass migration of animals of southern animals like black vultures and stuff that you know the the northern increase in their ranges I've seen the way that the, I've kept track since I was a kid about when the leaves turned.

[480] So, you know, and it steadily moved up each year.

[481] And so I see that.

[482] All of my senses are telling me that, you know, the warming is occurring.

[483] Now, why is the warming occurring?

[484] You know, people out there say the warming's not occurring.

[485] There's other people who say, yeah, the warming's occurring.

[486] But it's not from carbon.

[487] trapping carbon and what I my opinion you know is basically as I said it's based on common sense but also I read the science the memos that I have read from the 1970s from Exxon scientists to Exxon management Exxon during that time had what it bragged were this best scientists in the world who knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule in the atmosphere in the environment in, you know, in every circumstance than any other scientists.

[488] And in the 70s, they were telling their management at Exxon, if we keep burning oil at this rate, we're going to warm the globe.

[489] It's high school math to them.

[490] And they said, and it will be a good thing for the company.

[491] It will be a bad thing for humanity and for wildlife and the planet.

[492] It will be a good thing for the company because we're going to melt the Arctic.

[493] And there's a lot of oil onto the Arctic, and we should be ready to exploit it because it is going to be melted if we continue doing this.

[494] So, you know, my feeling is if those were the top scientists in the world, they had no interest in lying about it, and this is what they were, you know, saying.

[495] So I think it's probably more likely to be true than false.

[496] Now, I also agree.

[497] I also, I want to say this, because I'm – and you asked me, interrupt you at the beginning.

[498] Yes, yes, let's do.

[499] I want to respond to what you said.

[500] I agree 100 % with you that this crisis is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls the same way that the COVID crisis was.

[501] And it's the same people.

[502] It's intelligence agencies.

[503] It's the world economic forum.

[504] It's the Billionaires' Voice Club at Davos.

[505] And it's the same kind of cabal of people who will use every crisis to stratify society toward, you know, greater power for the super rich and greater power for the military, greater power for the intelligence apparatus and less power for everybody else.

[506] And so, you know, my approach to this, Jordan, is that I have a personal belief that the climate crisis is real.

[507] I do not insist that anybody else share my belief.

[508] And I feel like Lundgren is correct in saying that it, you know, the climate orthodoxy gets it wrong.

[509] The carbon orthodoxy, the people who describe to that get it wrong, there are actually a lot more important things than carbon.

[510] That is, you know, than carbon sequestration and geoengineering.

[511] and geoengineering, there's habitat of preservation the most important thing we can do it.

[512] We've forgotten completely about that because of the obsession with reducing carbon.

[513] There's regenerative agriculture, which is absolutely critical, including for carbon sequestration, but also that we have good foods that we preserve the soil and all of these other impacts from a warming climate, which are, you know, the shrinkage of lakes and agriculture, the destruction of soils and ecosystems.

[514] We need to do those things.

[515] And the preservation of fisheries and all of these, which are all tied into climate, and the preservation of whales, for example, which in subtle ways also, you know, very, very certain but almost unmeasurable ways, are part of the overall attack on the living planet.

[516] which is really the way that we need to look at this.

[517] And there's not just a war on carbon is not going to solve the problem.

[518] If we don't have a habitat left at the end.

[519] So when I talk about these issues, I rarely talk about climate.

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

[521] And even if you say, oh, tens of thousands of scientists agree with me, people today have a good reason to not believe scientific orthodox.

[522] or pronouncements, right?

[523] We went through that in COVID where we were told all of the science, you know, the established science that said this is all real.

[524] And there's a lot of people who are saying, yeah, but it wasn't real, and it isn't real.

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

[526] And it's going to happen to you in a long way.

[527] But the thing is that both Republicans and Democrats, I found in 40 years, love the environment.

[528] They want to keep sacred places.

[529] They want to have healthy food.

[530] They don't want toxic for their children.

[531] They don't want to see 22 -story machines cutting down the Appalachian Mountains and, you know, the 500 biggest peaks have been cut to the ground.

[532] An area of the Appalachians, the size of Delaware, has been leveled.

[533] These are our Purple Mountains Majesty where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed and, you know, we're, we're, we are industrializing these landscapes and nothing will ever grow on them again 2 ,200 miles of rivers has been filled we have poisoned every freshwater fish in North America from discharges of mercury from coal -burning power plants nobody wants that the high peaks of the Appalachians the forest cover is gone from Georgia to northern Quebec because of acid rain all of those high altitude legs are now sterile nobody wants that And so how do you think we have an, okay, so let me make a couple of things clear on my side and then I'll ask.

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

[535] So what I would do is I would end subsidies and then I would let marketplace determine.

[536] And what's going to happen is renewable energies is going to triumph because you can build a solar plant.

[537] for $1 billion a gigawatt today, a wind plant costs about $1 .2 billion, a coal plant costs $3 .6 billion, and a dual cycle gas turbines cost probably a couple billion a gigawatt.

[538] But once you build a wind or solar, it's free energy forever.

[539] So it's always going to be cheaper.

[540] The problem with renewable energies like that is we do not have a transportation system to get them to market.

[541] So we need a marketplace.

[542] We need a grid system.

[543] that can allow every individual in our country to become an energy entrepreneur, produce rooftop solar, sell it back to the grid at the same price that the utilities are getting, have every farmer in North Dakota be able to put wind turbines on their cornfields.

[544] They all want to do it.

[545] A cornfield in North Dakota is worth $800.

[546] A cornfield with a wind turbine on it is worth $3 ,200.

[547] Every farmer in North Dakota wants to put a wind turbine on their property.

[548] the problem is they cannot get those electrons to the markets in Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, New York, because we do not have an efficient grid system, and we need to build that the same as Eisenhower did with a highway system.

[549] When I was a kid, we need to build a grid system that will create a marketplace.

[550] And once we have that marketplace, we'll have free energy forever.

[551] Just like when we built the Arbinet grid for information, the cost of information went to, zero.

[552] We built the telecom grid, the cost of phone calls went to zero.

[553] When we build an energy grid, the cost of electrons will go to zero.

[554] And that will be a huge economic boom for our country, and nobody's going to be using oil and coal anymore.

[555] Okay, so you agreed that there is a danger on the environment apocalypse front that the same old criminals, let's say, will utilize that potential crisis for tyrannical ants.

[556] And so, Let's leave that aside.

[557] That's something we agree on.

[558] I should point out that, you know, I'm, and as Lomberg does, I accept the IPCC projections that there'll be some temperature increase over the next 100 years, and that some proportion of that is a consequence of man -made activity.

[559] Now, Lomburg has produced economic projections based on current rates of GDP growth, showing that I'm not going to get the figures exactly right, but this is close to right, that in 100 years from now, will be about 400 % richer than we are now.

[560] But with the negative consequences of climate transformation will be 350 % richer.

[561] And that's not nothing.

[562] There's some actual decrement in potential future value as a consequence of that.

[563] But it's within the range that we can actually intelligently manage.

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

[565] It's like we don't have one problem on the environmental front.

[566] We have many problems, and we should deal with them intelligently.

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

[568] And is this associated in some matter with your notion of a positive vision?

[569] Because what is happening, and I see this happen in Europe, it's crystal clear, and this is especially the case in Germany, although it's also true in the UK, is that these more tyrannical policies on the energy front, they're not looming, they're already in place, and they're really hurting poor people, like really badly, and destabilizing the entire power grid and de -industrializing Germany, which is also part of the plan for some people.

[570] Like, how can we confront the environmental issues that do, in fact, loom in front of us without inviting in that top -down tyrannical control?

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

[572] I mean, you know, the reason that I became an environmentalist Jordan was not because I was scared of something, you know, scared of the end of the world.

[573] it was because I was in love with the creeks and the, you know, and climbing the trees to get a baby crow when I was a kid and training hawks and doing whitewater kayaking and, you know, the little streams and creeks around my home where I could go and turn over rocks and find mud puppies and salamanders and crayfish and collect them and bring them home.

[574] or seeing the tadpoles bubbling in these little mud puddles that became cauldrons in the early spring stuff my kids will never see the explosion of color on the butterflies when I walked into the garden that my kids will never see you know because those you know they're gone now and um and that's why I fell in love with the environment and that and it was out of love it was not out of fear And I think we have to bring people back to that place of love and say, you know, what kind of world do we want to live in?

[575] You know, is it a world where we can hear the songbirds and where there's amphibians out in the road and you can still see pox turtles?

[576] Or is it, you know, either side is trying to make us fearful and fear is not a good.

[577] You never get a good response from fear.

[578] You never get, you know, so I think we have to appeal to people through that love, through that kind of appeal.

[579] And that, you know, my whole career has been doing that.

[580] I had a chance when I was, when I, you know, in 1983, when I switched careers and became a full -time, you know, I've always been environmentalist.

[581] When I became a full -time environmental attorney and advocate, I was given a choice of going to, Washington and working for an inside the beltway, you know, at a high level, doing lobbying, doing, you know, fundraising and doing maybe land conservation on a grand scale.

[582] And I didn't want to do that.

[583] I wanted to work with, you know, communities that were living in the environment and that were, had been marginalized by environmentalists.

[584] My first case as an environmental lawyer was for the NAACP blocking a waste transfer.

[585] station that had been cited in the oldest black neighborhood in the Hudson Valley because they didn't have the political power.

[586] And I saw that then, and I saw that, you know, four out of every five toxic waste dumps in America was in a black neighborhood.

[587] The highest, the largest toxic waste dump in America is Emil Alabama, which is 85 % black.

[588] The highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in North America is the south side of Chicago, The most contaminated zip code in California is East L .A. It was all Hispanic neighborhoods, black neighborhoods with these obnoxious, dangerous, toxic facilities were being cited.

[589] And then I went to work for, you know, what was my passion for most of my life, which was for fishermen on the Hudson River, commercial fishermen, and recreational fishermen.

[590] Most of these people were Republicans.

[591] They're people who were environmentalists as radical as you can get, but they didn't call it.

[592] of themselves as that because they felt estranged from the mainstream environmental community.

[593] They were people whose livelihoods who depended on a clean environment who's, you know, who love the fisheries, their property values, their recreation.

[594] These are people who were never going to see Yosemite or Yelison National Park, but then the environment was their back yard.

[595] It was the bathing beaches, the swimming holes, the fishing holes, the Hudson River that was there, you know, it was, but Ritchie Garrett, who is the founder of the Hudson River Fishermen Association, which I, you know, joined and later turned into Riverkeeper.

[596] He used to say about the Hudson, it's our Riviera, it's Armani Carlo.

[597] He was a combat veteran from Korea, and he was a full -time grave digger.

[598] You know, he was, these were people who, you know, who were the salt of the earth, and they should have been environmentalist, but they felt estranged from the environment.

[599] community.

[600] And I spent my livelihood with the hook and bullet people, you know, bringing them into the environmental movement.

[601] And they came in because of love, not because of fear.

[602] Right.

[603] So you're willing to, you're willing to avoid or would like to avoid using fear as a motivating factor when you're making your case for environmental concerns.

[604] Okay, well, that, you know, that seems to be a good answer on the motivational front.

[605] The reason that FDR said the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.

[606] And he said that, you know, it wasn't during World War II, it was in 1932.

[607] And he said that because the Depression had landed, you know, in the United States and Europe.

[608] And he saw, we had, you know, we had left -wing leaders, demagogues, like Huey Long, that a third of the country wanted to turn, you know, essentially socialists or communist.

[609] We had a right wing, like Father Charles Coughlin, who wanted to bring the nation fascists.

[610] The people had lost faith in democracy.

[611] It was one out of every four Americans was unemployed.

[612] Twenty -two hundred banks had closed.

[613] It was crashing, and everybody was convinced that democracy and capitalism had failed.

[614] We had to look for a new system.

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

[616] And in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, left -wing tyrants were doing the same thing but to shift the population towards communism.

[617] And that's why he said the American people, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

[618] Well, we can write this, we can change it, we can recover what we had, but we just have to stay out of fear because that is the weapon of tyrants.

[619] Okay, so, okay, we're going to run out of time on this side.

[620] There's two other questions I'd like to pose.

[621] We don't have a lot of time for them, and I'll put both questions forward.

[622] The first would be, why should Democrats prefer you to Biden?

[623] And the second question is, what are your opinions on the Russia -Ukraine situation?

[624] So let's start with, if you don't mind, let's start with the Biden situation.

[625] Why should Democrats, they have an incumbent president, and why should Democrats prefer you to Biden?

[626] Well, I mean, philosophically, we're just, we're at other, you know, opposite ends of the party.

[627] President Biden believes in, you know, the Ukraine war, which I think is a, you know, I think it's a huge, what we're doing in the Ukraine now is just a massive, assault on Ukrainians and that you know we have trapped Ukraine in a in a proxy war against the Soviets and they are being devoured by these geopolitical imaginations of neocons in the White House who have this comic book depiction that you know a lot of Americans have swallowed about you know what is happening in the war but what It's really, and let me just say something about the war.

[628] I think Americans supported that war for all the right reasons because, you know, Abraham Lincoln said, we are a great nation because we're a good nation.

[629] I think Americans are good people.

[630] They have compassion towards Ukrainian people, an illegal invasion of, you know, and brutal invasion by, you know, a man who is a homicidal tyrant.

[631] And they saw it and they had, you know, tremendous admiration.

[632] for the valor and the courage of the Ukrainian people.

[633] My son got her a 26 -year -old left law school without telling us and went to the Ukraine and joined the Foreign Legion and fought in a special forces group as a machine gunner during the Kharkiv Offensive.

[634] And he was motivated by that goodness that so many Americans have.

[635] But we were told that this was a humanitarian mission.

[636] And yet every step that we have taken, every decision we have been made, has been appears to have been intended to prolong the war and to increase the bloodshed.

[637] And President Biden has recently confessed that our purpose is to depose Vladimir Putin, which is the two -decade aspiration of the neocons who surround him.

[638] They've been saying that for decades.

[639] They've also been saying Zabigmer represents.

[640] who was their, you know, their doionate philosopher said that our U .S. strategy should be to suck Russia into a series of wars in little countries where we can then exhaust them.

[641] Lloyd Austin, Lloyd Austin, who is the President Biden's Defense Secretary in April 2022, said our purpose for being in the Ukraine is to degrade the Russian army to exhaust it and degrade its capacity to fight anywhere in the world.

[642] Well, that is the opposite of a humanitarian mission.

[643] That is a war of attrition, and that's what it's turned out to be.

[644] We have now turned Ukraine into an abattoir that has devoured 350 ,000 young Ukraine as they are lying about how many people have died.

[645] They're concealing it from us.

[646] They're concealing it from the Pentagon is concealing it from the American people.

[647] The Ukraine is concealing it from them people, but 350 ,000 people.

[648] Russians are killing Ukraine.

[649] Ukrainians at a ratio of seven to one.

[650] And we have turned that poor little nation into, you know, just a killing field for these idealistic young kids.

[651] And in order to advance a geopolitical agenda that, you know, has nothing to do with the Ukraine.

[652] Okay.

[653] So it seems to me that your summary, from what I know, your summary of the right, rationale for the war is accurate, is that the hypothesis on the pro -war with Russia front, let's say, is that it's a worthwhile expenditure of American money to take Russia out as a conventional military power.

[654] And I do believe that's what's happening.

[655] And there's a side benefit to that, which is the funneling of billions of dollars into Eisenhower's military industrial complex.

[656] Yeah, it's a money laundering scheme for the military industrial complex.

[657] Right, right.

[658] Okay.

[659] But now, so I could say, well, what's wrong with the goal of degrading Russia's conventional military policy?

[660] Why is that not in the best interests, let's say, of the West?

[661] And what do you see it as an alternative?

[662] And what would you do in relationship to the Russia -Ukraine conflict if you had, well, the decision -making power to actually do something about it?

[663] I know there's no peace talks going on at the moment, for example, which is quite a miracle.

[664] and the Russians have wanted to do peace talks from the beginning, and we've rebuffed them.

[665] Right.

[666] I will settle this on day one.

[667] I will stop the killing on day one.

[668] I'll stop the killing, and I'll, you know, I mean, the settlement is obvious, right?

[669] The Russians have wanted to settle this from the beginning, and they've been very clear about what they want.

[670] They want NATO to make a pledge to not come into the Ukraine, which we should have done.

[671] We shouldn't have put NATO into 14 countries.

[672] we told the Russians when they dismantled the Soviet Union in 1991 and they moved 400 ,000 troops out of East Germany and they allowed NATO to reunify Germany under NATO.

[673] And they said our condition for doing that, this tremendous conciliation that we're making is that you never move NATO to the east.

[674] And George Bush told them we will not move NATO one inch to the east And in 1997, Big No, Brzynski, laid out the plan, which has then happened, where we moved it not one inch, but a thousand miles to the east, 14 nations.

[675] And then we put ages missile systems in Poland and Romania, which are nuclear capable.

[676] So there are a few minutes from Russia.

[677] They can decapitate the entire Russian leadership before, you know, if we wanted to start a preemptive war.

[678] And that is inexcusable.

[679] I mean, the Russian, we wouldn't live with that.

[680] My uncle did not live with that in 1962.

[681] We would have gone in.

[682] If they hadn't removed them from Cuba, we would have gone in.

[683] And then we overthrew the democratically elected government, Viktor Yuganovic in 2014.

[684] We spent five billion, the CIA through USAID and the national endowment for democracy.

[685] It spent $5 billion to violently overthrow that government.

[686] and which was democratically elected.

[687] So we destroyed this democracy and put in our own government, which we now know the neocons and the White House, Victoria Newland, selected two months before in a telephone.

[688] So we handpicked a new government before the coup.

[689] We put a new government in that immediately makes a civil war against the Russian population of Dumbass, bans the Russian language, kills 14 ,000 of them, and then, you know, and then starts training.

[690] with NATO.

[691] And yeah, you know, there were a lot of provocation.

[692] You know, it's not just me saying this George Kennan, who is the architect of, you know, the entire Cold War containment policy said in 1998, the year after Brasinski wrote that memo, he said, it is the greatest calamity ever to expand NATO to the east.

[693] He said, Russia lost the Cold War.

[694] The people who are running Russia are the ones who are.

[695] oppose the Cold War.

[696] We should be making friends with them.

[697] We shouldn't be pushing them into the hands of China.

[698] Mr. Kennedy, let me summarize.

[699] We're going to run out of time, and I want to be very respectful of your time.

[700] I know you have a tight deadline.

[701] So I want to summarize what we've talked about, and if you have any closing remarks, and give you an opportunity to do that.

[702] So we started out by talking about the necessity for your presidency and the twist in the tail of the Democrat Party and Democratic Party and your notion, which you reiterated later, that you're on the opposite side of the political spectrum within the Democrats from Biden and that what you would like to do is to pull the party back to its more traditional center.

[703] And we talked about the capture of the legacy media and your censorship and the potential.

[704] movement of political dialogue into alternative forms.

[705] We talked about environmental issues and came to an agreement, for example, that there are other fish to fry than the carbon fish, let's say, and that the use of fear in the environmental movement is an invitation to totalitarianism.

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

[707] and you made a case for how we in some ways set up the Russians to engage in this conflict.

[708] And in doing so, and in doing all of that, you laid out some of the principles of your candidacy and described why you regard yourself as a credible and necessary alternative to Biden.

[709] And so two questions.

[710] Did I summarize that properly?

[711] And is there anything else that you would like to bring to the attention of people before we draw this part of this to a close?

[712] I don't think I want to start another long discussion with you, but there's plenty more to talk about if you want to have me back another time, and that was a fine summary, Jordan.

[713] Okay, well, look, we will definitely continue this discussion because, well, why not?

[714] There's lots of other things to talk about.

[715] And so, okay, so then I would like to thank you for sitting down and talking to me today.

[716] I would like to talk to you at some point about this vision that we're developing for this ARC enterprise in London and trying to put forward a positive vision of the future instead of the apocalyptic nightmare, you must turn to tyranny vision, which I think is ruling at the moment, and so we can do that in the future.

[717] For everybody who's watching and listening on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention, and to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating this conversation, setting up this studio in Edmonton, Alberta.

[718] That's where I am today, and then the studio also.

[719] Where are you located at the moment, Mr. Kennedy?

[720] Indianapolis, Indiana, the home of the Indianapolis Speedway.

[721] which is at this moment running their annual race.

[722] Well, thank you for everyone setting that up on that front.

[723] I'm going to talk to Mr. Kennedy for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[724] We'll do more biographical interview on that end of things.

[725] And so if you're interested, please consider turning to that.

[726] Apart from that, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

[727] And I'm looking forward hopefully at some point to meeting in person, but also to continuing our discussion.

[728] if you're open to that in the future.

[729] Absolutely.

[730] Any time.

[731] Thank you for having me, Jordan.

[732] Hello, everyone.

[733] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.