RFK Jr. Takes on Trump and Biden Over Four ‘Existential’ Issues

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this wide-ranging interview, I get independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candid take on the biggest challenges he sees facing America today.

What does RFK Jr. see as the path forward when it comes to the rise in chronic diseases among young Americans, big tech manipulation, the Israel-Gaza war, and the threat of communist China?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Robert Kennedy Jr., such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Robert Kennedy Jr.:
Thank you for having me, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said you’re running to win. The most recent RealClearPolitics poll says 41 percent for Trump, 39 percent for Biden, and 11 percent for you.
How can you be running to win?

Mr. Kennedy:
Every poll that has been done that looks at me in a head-to-head, two-person race with President Biden, I win by a landslide. If it was just me and President Biden in the race, I would beat him in a landslide. In a head-to-head race against President Trump, I beat him as well. President Biden loses to him. My favorability ratings are better than both of them. All of this data indicates people would prefer to vote for me over the two of them.

My challenge is the fear factor. You can ask people, “Why are you voting for President Biden?” They will very rarely say that he’s brought great vigor and energy to the office, and we expect things to happen in the next term. Almost 100 percent of people will tell you they are voting for him because they are scared President Trump will get elected and it’s going to be the end of the republic.

The same is true to a lesser extent with President Trump. A lot of the people who are supporting him fear that President Biden is going to get reelected and get us into a war or just deteriorate in office. People are generally voting out of fear. Depending on what poll you read, between 70 and 80 percent of Americans don’t want to vote for either President Trump or President Biden.

They don’t want to see that contest again. They would rather vote for me. My challenge is how do I get Americans to vote out of hope rather than out of fear? My challenge over the next six months is to see if democracy still works. During the convention in 1932 President Roosevelt said, “The only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.”

He was saying that because he was watching what was happening in Europe. The global depression had given rise to demagogues on the Left in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and on the Right in Italy, Spain, and Germany. All of them were using fear to manipulate public opinion.

That’s why President Roosevelt said to the American public, “Whatever we do, we can’t give in to fear. We have to have confidence in our system. We’re supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. The reason that we are the land of the free is because we are the home of the brave.” That has always been the presumption. My job is to remind Americans that we can’t be responding out of fear.

Mr. Jekielek:
People often vote for the lesser of two evils. You’re telling me there are barriers to the democratic process playing out here. But you’re still only polling at 11 percent. There are these legal cases against former President Trump where he might not be able to run in the election. A lot of our analysts are saying that’s the end game, but that would actually be a barrier to the democratic process. It’s almost like you would perform well in that situation because it would be you vs. Biden.

Mr. Kennedy:
I’m not sitting around hoping that something happens to President Trump or President Biden, but it is a very bizarre election year. I’m looking at two candidates right now who are very different in disposition, in personality, in ideology, and in the way they relate to people. On the issues where they differ, there is this very narrow Overton window.

They differ on guns. They differ on abortion. They differ on transgender rights and the border and a few other culture war issues. They’re all important issues. But our country is facing a series of existential issues and neither of them even has an opinion on them, and neither of them can do anything about them.

One of those is the debt. We have a $34 trillion debt. We’ve added a trillion dollars in the last hundred days and it’s growing exponentially. The cost of servicing that debt now exceeds our defense budget. Within five years, the cost of servicing this debt will be 50 cents out of every dollar that the federal government collects in taxes.

Within 10 years, it will be 100 percent, so this is existential for our country. It means defaulting on the debt or taking some other radical course that will be devastating to the middle class, to private ownership, and to everything that we believe in.

Yet, President Trump and President Biden have no capacity to deal with this issue. Why is that, and why do they never discuss it? Because those presidents ran up a bigger portion of that debt than any other presidents in history.

President Trump, in just four short years, ran up $8 trillion, which is more than all the presidents combined from George Washington to George W. Bush. That is 283 years of history. President Biden is in a rush during his four years to match that. This is an issue neither of them have the capacity to resolve. It’s an existential issue.

Neither of them has the capacity to resolve the polarization of our country, which is existential. People look at this and say, “How is this ever going to have a good ending?” It’s more toxic than probably any time since the American Civil War. But now it’s driven by these social media algorithms which are self-executing and self-learning.

Those algorithms have discovered that the way to keep people’s eyeballs on that site, which is their money-generating capacity, is to feed people information that fortifies their existing worldview. If you’re a Republican living next door to a Democrat, you can ask the same question on Google and you’ll get two different answers. Each one of you will feel that the answer that you got actually fortifies and pours concrete on the things you already believe, so the chasm between us gets deeper and deeper and harder and harder to bridge.

Something has to happen. Neither President Trump or President Biden are capable of ending that polarization because both of them are the products of it. Both of them feed it. Both of them are telling their followers, “You have to vote for me because that person is evil.”

There is a chronic disease epidemic. When my uncle was president, six percent of kids had chronic disease. Today, it’s 60 percent. Diabetes, which is mitochondrial dysfunction, is now larger. The costs of dealing with it are now greater than our defense budget. Autism has gone from either one in 2,500 or one in 10,000 in my generation, depending on what study you believe.

In 70-year-old men today, one in 10,000 of us or one in 2,500 of us has full blown autism. In my kids generation, it’s one in every 22 boys, or one in every 34 kids. This is existential. It’s not sustainable, and it’s getting worse and worse, exponentially.

Both of these presidents were part of the Covid response. They are incapable of challenging the institutions that could actually end that chronic disease epidemic. If we’re going to survive as a nation, we need to end it.

Military recruiting is now down 41 percent this year, and they can’t find people who are capable to serve anymore. That’s just one issue. But again, the impact on our budget is existential. The addiction to forever wars is existential. President Biden is for all these wars. He’s a big proponent of war as the leading option in U.S. foreign policy.

President Trump, on the other hand, has said that he’s anti-war, but he just colluded with Speaker Johnson and President Biden to send $61 billion to Ukraine. He came into office on an anti-war platform, but he appointed John Bolton to be National Security Advisor, and Mike Pompeo to run the State Department. These are neocon warmongers.

If people want more of the same, which I don’t think anybody does, they can vote for one of those two candidates. My job is to say to people, “You have an option. You don’t have to choose those people.” More people want to vote for me, but they know they’re not going to ,because they’re scared of wasting their vote and letting one of the other guys win.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right.

Mr. Kennedy:
My job is to convince people that I can win. Once people are convinced that I can win, then I will win.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to talk about polarization. Recently, you talked about how you intend to challenge Congress. What about the constitutionality of this new TikTok divestment bill that the president just signed? TikTok is a great instigator of that polarization by a regime that is literally running a people’s war against America. It’s one of its most potent influence weapons. It’s not difficult to understand why you would view this as a free speech issue, but this platform is in the hands of a malign regime that seeks to harm this country.

Mr. Kennedy:
I don’t think it’s a good thing that China owns part of TikTok. The company that owns TikTok is partially owned by the Chinese government. But I don’t think it’s a major engine of polarization. All the social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are all being used. I haven’t actually heard that China is manipulating through TikTok.

What I’ve heard is that they are harvesting data, and that was the justification for the ban. There are much greater intrusions by China in our economy that I worry about a lot more, like China controlling our food supply and our agricultural landscape. China owns Smithfield Foods, which is a real national security issue.

It’s a colonial model. China is up to all kinds of mischief with our landscape. It is in the business of poisoning rivers and streams and aquifers all around the country. It controls 30 to 40 percent of our pork production. Why would we allow our potential adversary of ours to control our food supply?

There are a lot of other things China is doing that are priorities to deal with. It’s a balance with TikTok. For 150 million American users per month, mainly young people, TikTok has become a gateway for their entrepreneurial impulses. There are millions and millions of jobs that young people have created on TikTok, and that’s important for this generation.

It’s critical that they have those kinds of options as other options are now closing for them. It has also become a vehicle for free speech. Many of them get their news there and they communicate with each other. Every avenue we have for exercising our free speech is important. I would preserve it, even with the danger that the information is being harvested by China.

I’ll tell you this, Jan. I am worried about China, but I’m equally worried about our own intelligence agencies harvesting our data and propagandizing us. In 2012 and 2013, we got rid of the Smith-Mundt Act in this country that
forbade the CIA from harvesting data and from propagandizing American citizens. We know that the CIA has very strong ties with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube, and with all the others. Everybody has to assume that with any social media there are multiple governments taking our data and doing all kinds of nefarious things with it.

What happened with this TikTok ban is a kind of empty posturing by the political classes where they can all flex their muscles and say, “I did something against China.” But I don’t think China cares that much about this. It gives the illusion that they’re doing something real about China when it’s just an empty gesture. If we’re going to worry about the intelligence apparatus from various countries mining our data, we should start with the United States. There’s more important stuff to worry about.

Mr. Jekielek:
The concerns about this TikTok divestiture would be that it would become another tool of the security state. I can see why people would be concerned given the record we’ve seen over the last few years. It strikes me as nihilistic to leave that power in the hands of the Chinese regime. The algorithm for TikTok is not just a proprietary secret of TikTok, but it’s a state secret for China.

Mr. Kennedy:
A better way to handle that is to make it mandatory for all of the social media companies to have transparent algorithms. Then you’re doing something that’s actually real. I’ve spent a lot of time with Jack Dorsey. I asked him on a number of occasions, “What is the best thing we can do to stop this manipulation, because we’re all being manipulated by social media at a dangerous level?”

As AI develops, they can figure out how to stimulate the neuronal activity in the reptilian core of our brains and manipulate us in ways that we don’t even understand. They can then bend and distort reality so that all of our perceptions are now under their control and in doubt. It’s really terrifying.

I said to Jack Dorsey, “How do we deal with that?” He said, “You have to make the algorithms transparent.” We’re still going to be manipulated by him, but people will have a choice. Somebody can say, “I want a Republican algorithm.” Somebody else can say, “I want a Democratic algorithm.” Then someone can say, “I want a Chinese algorithm.” But at least we’ll know how we’re being manipulated.

I said to Jack Dorsey, “That’s kind of ingenious. It seems like common sense. Why doesn’t Congress do it?” He said, “I have testified five times. I’ve told them the same thing every time, and it doesn’t make a ripple.”
The point you make is a good one. We should apply this across the board.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, that seems reasonable. You were talking about this process that we’re in and we’re being manipulated all the time. Dr. Robert Epstein has shown that you can manipulate people’s voting behavior by using a Google-like system. If they were undecided, and without them even realizing it, they have shifted their view. Our election process is constantly being influenced in many ways. In your situation, you’ve got quite a few large entities against you. You’re fighting for ballot access in all the states. How is that playing out? There were problems, but are you being stopped in this area?

Mr. Kennedy:
The Democratic Party is trying to make sure we don’t get ballot access. They’re litigating against us, but we’ve won every case so far. We’re on track to get ballot access in every case. We already have nine states where we’ve collected enough signatures to get on the ballot. We’ll have another three in major states by the time this show airs.

We’re holding them, because we want to give the DNC as little time as possible to go through and challenge our signatures. In some cases they’ve actually called up people who have signed one at a time to get them to change their minds. That has been upheld by one of the courts, so we don’t want to give them those opportunities.

In terms of other kinds of manipulation, we see the mainstream media, which is very much aligned with the DNC, making constant attacks on us.
We see fingerprints of nefarious activities by intelligence agencies and others that seem to be very hostile to our campaign. There is no way for us to ascertain exactly what is happening with those kinds of interventions.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the most damaging thing that your campaign is facing, and what would be a solution for it?

Mr. Kennedy:
Some of it is just the systemic corruption of the media. Honestly, Epoch Times is one of the last readouts of real journalism in this country. I’m not saying that to flatter you, and I’ve said that to you before. I read the Epoch Times every day because it’s very rigorous about good reporting and ethical reporting and truthful reporting.

Almost everybody else now is agenda driven. In my view, Fox News was the first of the networks to openly do agenda-driven news, and now they all do it. Worst of all, the mainstream media is unquestioning about government pronouncements now. It used to be that the job of the media was to have skepticism toward the government and large accretions of power like corporations.

But today, particularly during Covid, we saw this great shift in the media where their job was to manipulate public opinion, not to tell you the truth, and not to ask questions of government officials. They constantly assaulted you with the mantra that you should trust the experts, trust your government, and trust the institutions and obey them. They said that the good people trust and obey them.

I saw so many times when people were chided by comedians who are doing their own research, like Stephen Colbert. With comedians like Lenny Bruce, their comedy was about questioning the government and ridiculing the absurdity of large accumulations of power. Now, comedians have become the ridiculers of little people who question power. That’s dismaying for democracy.

Mr. Jekielek:
That hurts your chances.

Mr. Kennedy:
It hurts our campaign because we’re an insurgency. If you look at who runs the Democratic Party and Republican Party now and who funds them, it’s these giant corporations; BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, plus all the defense companies; Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. They got the contracts to destroy Ukraine and then Blackrock got the contracts to rebuild it. They’re digging the hole and then filling it back up again. They are making money on both ends.

The pharmaceutical companies are all owned by those same giant investment firms. The pharmaceutical companies are making people sick and selling them the treatments for lifelong chronic disease, and the government is their partner. This is the extraordinary growth of a corporate kleptocracy. It’s an oligarchical or colonial or feudal style of government, rather than the exemplary democracy that America is supposed to be.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve heard you say in interviews that President Trump vowed to drain the swamp, but he failed to drain the swamp. The swamp acted very aggressively against him with Russiagate. You can imagine with a Russiagate going on, that would limit your ability to act as a president and change policy and do this so-called draining of the swamp. Now, there are all these different lawsuits against Trump which people believe are politically motivated. How would this be different in an RFK Jr. presidency?

Mr. Kennedy:
I agree with you. It is very disturbing how the enforcement agencies have become politicized. I can see it with my own campaign with the Secret Service protection being denied to me. It’s the politicization of an enforcement agency. But in my case, Kennedy v. Biden, which I’ve won now in the United States Court of Appeals, we saw all these agencies involved in censoring Americans. I was one of those Americans. But I’m not talking about this as a personal issue.

You had CISA, the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, the NIH, the CDC and the FDA all involved. They were all given access to portals at the social media platforms where they could go in and manipulate people’s postings and remove people and slow walk them and shadow ban them. It’s frightening that the government is now politicized to that extent.

The thing that opened my eyes most was when all those current and former CIA agents signed the letter right before the election assuring the American public that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a fake. That was election manipulation by the intelligence agencies who are supposed to stay out of politics. As it turns out, the laptop was real.

Yet the most powerful people in the CIA were assuring the American public at a critical time in our history, at a time that was calculated to influence the result of the election, that it was fake. We saw this all over with Russiagate, although I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. This is terrible for America.

My father, when he got into the Justice Department, brought in all the branch chairs and division chairs in his first week. He said, “Number one rule, we stay out of politics. We never ask whether somebody is Democrat or Republican. If we’re going to prosecute them, we keep politics completely out of this institution.”

There were some exceptions during the Nixon administration when Nixon tried to get the CIA and the FBI involved in politics, but that was scandalous. At the time, everybody in our country was outraged when that came out.

But now the liberal media embraces it and says that they should be involved because it’s the only way to stop Trump. They’re creating precedents that really harken the end of our democracy. I’m very, very worried about that. We’re seeing it everyday now.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is tough to prevent that if the system doesn’t like you as a candidate.

Mr. Kennedy:
Yes. That was your question that I didn’t get to. I feel that I have more competence in actually addressing these issues as president, if I get in there. I’ve spent my career litigating against these agencies, so I’m not intimidated. When you sue an agency like NIH, FDA, EPA, or USDA, all of which I have sued, you get a PhD in corporate capture and you understand how to unravel it.

In many of those agencies, I know the individuals that have to be moved. I’m aware of the perverse incentives that have to be dismantled that put corporate capture on steroids. For example, the FDA gets 50 percent of its budget from outside sources, mainly pharmaceutical companies, and their scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs they develop. These are the regulators who are supposed to be looking for problems in those products and protecting us against them.

But now they’re getting $150,000 a year forever for that product. They’re paying for their boat and their car and their children’s education
and their mortgages and their alimonies with that money. That inevitably has a corrupting influence. We have to get rid of those, what I call, perverse incentives.

The most difficult agency to reform is the CIA, which really is the core of the deep state. My father had a plan for reorganizing the CIA. In fact, the plan that he had was originally developed by my uncle, President Kennedy. Interestingly, that document was recently released.

It was a memo by Arthur Schlesinger and Dick Goodwin with recommendations on how to reorganize the CIA to make it conform to American democratic priorities rather than what it has become, which is a secret government unto itself with secret budgets, zero accountability, and zero assessment of blowback from all sides.

We have to get rid of all of its operations that now work domestically to propagandize our people. The CIA doesn’t have any barriers anymore. Because with the dismantlement of the Smith-Mundt Act, it is no longer strictly illegal for them to do that.

Mr. Jekielek:
If President Trump is not able to run, how would you react to that situation?

Mr. Kennedy:
First of all, even if President Trump were convicted, he would still be able to run. There are only three requirements in the Constitution for running for president. One is that you’re born in this country. Two is that you’re a citizen of this country. Three is that you’re over 35 years of age. Theoretically, you could be serving time in prison and still be elected president. There’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents that from happening. The polling shows that if he is convicted, he does lose a significant number of his followers.

I don’t know how that bears out in real life. Six months from now is light years from now. I’m just taking it one day at a time and trying to tell the truth to the American people. If there is an appetite for the truth in our country, I will be president, and in the end, I will be elected next November.

Mr. Jekielek:
You go out of your way to not say overly bad things about anybody. That’s my observation. Recently, President Trump said. “I take Biden over Jr.” You’ve read this, I’m sure. He said your views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about your candidacy. How do you react to that?

Mr. Kennedy:
My reaction is to say let’s debate that. Let’s have a congenial, respectful debate. President Trump is arguably the best debater in modern political history, probably since the Lincoln-Douglas debates.The fact is that he went through 16 Republican candidates with no previous political experience. It was like a bullfighter that got up there and massively dispatched every single one of his opponents.

He’s certainly the most formidable debater that we’ve seen in this century. He shouldn’t be intimidated about debating me on the stage. I know that he’s been calling on President Biden to debate him. But I’d like to talk about these issues.

I’d like to talk to him about why he came into office saying that he was going to treat the government like a business and that he had a special acumen for that. Then he closed down all of our businesses during Covid,
after saying he wasn’t going to do it. Why did he run up the biggest debt in history? Why did his policies shift $4.3 trillion from the American middle class to the super rich?

He knew during the pandemic that hydroxychloroquine worked and he said so. Then his bureaucrats rolled him and he let them do it. That’s the problem. He has good instincts about a lot of the things that he wants to do. But he doesn’t have the ability to stand up to his bureaucracy.
When I’m on the stage with him, that’s why I will argue that he should not be given a second chance at the presidency.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have the Israel-Gaza war that’s happening right now. In America, we have these protests that are happening. Columbia University is the one that I’ve been following closely. There are extreme views being voiced like, “From the river to the sea,” and, “Death to the Jews.” There’s something bigger going on than just the war over there. How do you view this whole situation?

Mr. Kennedy:
With regard to the Gaza war, I’m very much on the record saying I am against war, but there are a few moral wars. World War II was a moral war. The other wars we fought in the last hundred years have all been wars of choice, including World War I. We were attacked in World War II by an implacable enemy that was sworn to the destruction of democracy and all the Western institutions and all humanitarian considerations.

I think Israel is in the same position now. Hamas is an implacable enemy that’s content with nothing else but the annihilation of Israel. It has been attacking Israel for 16 years with 2,000 rockets a year. Israel has exercised extraordinary forbearance by not going into Gaza earlier than any other nation would have.

Part of the charter of Hamas is that it’s against Islamic law to even negotiate with Israel. How do you have a ceasefire with an organization that’s pledged to your destruction and the extermination of your people? The question you asked is a more difficult question. To me there’s a clear moral right and wrong in this case.

But there is a tremendous amount of moral confusion on the U.S. campuses. There’s a tremendous amount of ignorance about history. There are clashing narratives. Hamas is winning the international propaganda debate on U.S. campuses. How do you deal with that without interfering with free speech?

That’s a huge question because I’m a free speech absolutist. The answer is different on private campuses vs. state campuses. The private campuses have all kinds of rules that are designed to protect non-white people. They are good rules and they are community standards and if you’re a private organization you can do that.

But if you have those rules then you ought to have the same rules applied to Jewish students. Those kinds of statements that you mentioned can be punished, because there are very specific rules about this. It’s harder when you’re a state school, because when the government gets into the realm of censorship there’s a lot of other problems, so it’s more complex.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said, “We ought to have foreign policy that restores America as the embodiment of moral authority around the world.” What would restore that moral authority back to America without endangering the
world?

Mr. Kennedy:
Or ourselves? I would cut the military budget. We now spend more than the next 10 nations combined and we can’t afford it. The real strength of a nation, as my grandfather always pointed out, comes from a strong economy and then the other strengths follow. We have a strong economy, but we’re bankrupting our country now. We’re spending much more on the military than we need to.

We need to arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders and make ourselves too expensive to ever invade. We need enough money to protect the sea lanes. We need to protect neutral areas like Antarctica and have a two-strike capacity around the world. But during the height of the cold war when Eisenhower was president, we had a military budget equivalent to about $500 billion.

Mr. Jekielek:
You want to decrease the military budget, but also arm ourselves to the teeth, which means peace through strength. You said that we must protect ourselves around our borders as opposed to doing military interventions around the world. But we have communist China, our biggest adversary,
arming itself to the teeth. People might take issue with this idea that we have to reduce the budget, but we still have to spend on protecting ourselves. How do you make this equation work?

Mr. Kennedy:
There are a number of problems with our military in the modern era, with the things we’re spending money on and the deterioration of the American military. Our equipment doesn’t work, our planes don’t work, and we’re not recruiting enough people. Our recruitments are way down below safety level. The money that is getting spent is not being spent wisely.

There are many things that have to be reviewed. Our whole
relationship with NATO is based upon the idea that we can get a million men across the Atlantic to deal with a war in Europe. Today, with hypersonic missiles, it’s doubtful that we can do that. Our entire 12 aircraft carrier fleet would be at the bottom of the Atlantic within the first 24 hours. China and Russia have those missiles.

We need a capacity that actually works, which is the most important thing. But we’re overextended all over the world. We have 800 bases. The Chinese have one or two, and Russia has one or two. China has made itself an expert at projecting economic power abroad. We’ve lost the war with them in Latin America. They’re now the primary creditor in almost every nation in Latin America.

The rise of BRICS is an illustration of the bankruptcy of our single-minded reliance on the military. It’s weakening us against China. I’m not scared of going head-to-head with China in projecting economic power and competing with them. We can out-compete them. But the way that we’re competing now, which is solely leading with the military, is actually weakening us.

Mr. Jekielek:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Kennedy:
Happy to come back anytime, Jan. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.