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April 28, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:35:53

Is He The Last Real Democrat? | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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	It's not just a tragedy, it's a crime against the child because the child has an independent interest.
	What do you say to that?
	The solution of having the state come in and dictate choices that the woman is making, that's not a good solution.
	You don't believe that the child has an independent right to life, for example?
	At any point during the pregnancy?
	You know, you and I all differ on that.
	And that's just a place where I differ.
	And I understand your position.
	I have tremendous respect for you.
	For, you know, for having that kind of that absolute moral clarity on that position.
	But I think it's more nuanced and complex than that.
	Today we're joined by a figure whose family legacy is etched into Democratic Party and American history, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
	RFK Jr.
	is not just known for his storied lineage, but for his own advocacy of indigenous land rights and the environment, public health and political commentary.
	A lawyer by training, Kennedy has been at the forefront of the environmental movement and has worked on issues related to vaccines through his organization, Children's Health Defense.
	Born into the Kennedy dynasty on January 17, 1954, RFK Jr.
	is the third of 11 children of the late Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.
	RFK Jr.' early life was marked by personal and family tragedy,
	including the assassinations of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and
	his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He's overcome personal struggles,
	including a battle with drug addiction and legal issues. However, Kennedy's resilience
	is evident carving out his path and pursuing education at once prestigious
	institutions like Harvard University and the University of Virginia, before
	dedicating his career to environmental advocacy and legal practice. Kennedy is known
	as a defender of the environment.
	His work has set environmental legal standards that continue to influence policy and advocacy.
	This commitment to environmental causes led him to prominent roles, including serving as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the board for the Waterkeeper Alliance.
	Now, RFK Jr.
	is making waves as a candidate in this presidential race.
	First running as a Democrat in the primaries, then shifting his bid in October 23 to run as an independent, polling data as recently as April 10, 2024, placed him at 8.5% against incumbent President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, with Trump in the lead at 41.9% and Biden at 40.3%.
	This would make him the single most successful third-party candidate since Ross Perot.
	Today, we delve into RFK Jr.' 's vision for America and his hope for the Democratic Party, discussing a range of topics from chronic disease to AI, culture and entitlements to foreign policy, and his position on abortion.
	Join us as we explore these critical issues with Robert F.
	Kennedy Jr., seeking insights into his campaign and what it represents
	for the future of American politics.
	Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you so much for joining us.
	Really appreciate the time.
	Well, thanks for having me here.
	It's good to finally meet you, Ben.
	Yeah.
	So, let's start by talking a little bit about kind of the background stuff.
	So, I mean, first of all, obviously, you're a Kennedy.
	What was it like growing up in the Kennedy family?
	Well, I grew up, you know, I grew up, we have a large Irish Catholic family.
	I was very, very close-knit.
	I had 29 cousins.
	my and very kind of, you know, I had 29 cousins.
	My grandfather and grandmother is Josephine Rose Kennedy.
	I had nine kids, including my uncle.
	Well, their eldest son was Joe Kennedy, who was killed during World War II.
	Their eldest daughter was Kathleen, who was killed in an airplane crash immediately after the war.
	Joe Kennedy was kind of the big hope for my grandfather.
	He was his golden child, and he really never recovered from that death.
	His next child was John Kennedy, who became the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.
	My father was his brother's campaign manager and his attorney general.
	Later, after my uncle was killed in 1963, my father ran for Senate, became senator from New York, and was killed running for president in 1968 in Los Angeles.
	My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, was one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate.
	He was in the Senate for over 50 years.
	He has more legislation with his name on it than any senator in history.
	My aunt, Eunice Schreiber, was the founder of Special Olympics, and so we were raised kind of in a milieu of public service and politics, and it was all around us.
	I was at the convention in 1960 as a six-year-old boy, and we had front-row seats on everything that happened during that Camelot period.
	I became, after my dad's death in 68, I was, my mom had 11 kids, so I had 10 siblings.
	And my family was, at that point, after my dad was killed, it was very chaotic.
	I began a 14-year experiment with drugs that turned into an addiction to heroin.
	I got sober in 1928 and then became one of the, I would say, the leading environmental lawyers and activists in the country.
	I founded or co-founded a group that became Waterkeeper Alliance that became the biggest water protection group in the world.
	against polluters. And in I think around 2015 or 2016 I started another group
	called Children's Health Defense that focuses on on children and public health.
	So you know looking at you know the history of your family obviously it's
	intertwined intimately with with Democratic Party politics.
	You're running as an independent.
	You're the highest polling independent since Ross Perot in the race right now.
	So I think the obvious question for a lot of people is why aren't you running as a Democrat?
	Or more importantly, now that Joe Biden has wrapped up the nomination, why aren't you simply supporting Joe Biden for the presidency?
	Well, I began running as a Democrat.
	You know, the reason I ran is because I saw the Democratic Party, my country, but also the Democratic Party, departing from a lot of the values that I was raised with.
	People call it Kennedy Democrat Party.
	I think if my father, my uncle, if you outlined There are top 20 policy priorities that I would check the box for each one of them.
	And, you know, I'm kind of a traditional Kennedy Democrat, traditional liberal.
	I believe in free speech.
	I believe in the Constitution of the United States.
	I believe that corporations should not dominate our government.
	My inclination is to be against war and very suspicious of the rise of the military-industrial complex.
	I'm an environmentalist.
	I think particularly reducing the toxic exposures to our children Improving the sustainability of our soils, protecting water, clean air, all of those issues are Purple Mountain's majesty.
	Those were the centerpieces of my career.
	Environmental justice was another.
	Civil rights was a priority for the Democratic Party.
	And personal freedom.
	And the party has, I think particularly since the Citizens United case in 2008, the party has become the party not of the middle class, which it was when I was growing up.
	It was the cops and the firefighters, factory workers, but it has become the party of Wall Street and the party of pharma and the party of the military industrial complex.
	And when I ran, you know, I was really, I would say, triggered to run during COVID when we saw the censorship happen and Democratic politicians sign on to censorship of speech in this country for the first time in our history.
	And the support of the Democratic Party for the war in Ukraine, which I see as a contrived war, And that really prompted me to run.
	But I ran as a Democrat and my intention was to try to call the Democratic Party back to its core values.
	What I found was, and my campaign manager during the outset of the campaign was Dennis Kucinich, who's run for president a couple times himself and was kind of the conscience of the Democratic Party, a core figure and beloved figure for his integrity, for his courage.
	And he said from the beginning, they're not going to let you run in this party and you're going to have to leave.
	And I was the last person in my campaign to believe that.
	But the Democratic Party began taking all kinds of steps to make sure that no matter, even if I won the primaries, that I still could not win the nomination.
	They canceled primaries.
	They passed a rule that's just one of 60 different things they did.
	They passed a rule.
	That any candidate who stepped into the state of New Hampshire during the election could not, that all of those, all of the delegates that that candidate won in New Hampshire would go to President Biden.
	And there were a number of sort of transparent efforts to fix the election that came from the Democratic Party.
	That prompted me ultimately to make the decision that if I wanted to make a serious run that I had to leave the party.
	So I declared independent, I forget, maybe three months, four months ago.
	And I've been running as an independent ever since.
	So, you know, that answers why you're not backing President Biden.
	But, you know, many of the issues on which you disagree with President Biden have a lot of crossover with President Trump, who obviously is running on the other side of the aisle.
	So, you know, you're in a strange position where Democrats are suggesting that you're a President Trump plant in order to take votes away from Biden.
	Some members of the Trump camp are claiming you're a Biden plant in order to take away votes from President Trump.
	Why not support President Trump as an alternative to President Biden?
	Yeah, I don't see it that way.
	I think that President Biden and President Trump are much more like each other than most people.
	And Democrats and Republicans like to acknowledge it.
	And let me say this, because that's going to be a controversial statement.
	I want to qualify it.
	President Trump and President Biden are very different in their temperaments, and extremely different.
	They're different in their professed ideologies.
	They're different in their personalities and their rhetoric.
	But the issues that they differ on are in a very, very narrow band.
	They're mainly culture war issues.
	They're abortion, it's guns, the border.
	You know, woke ideology, those kind of transgenders, some of them very, very important issues.
	You know, the border is the only one that I would say is even vaguely existential.
	But the big issues at America that are existential to our country.
	And really threaten all of us that are most concerned, all of us.
	Neither of them has even taken positions on the debt, for example.
	They're both equally bad on the debt.
	The debt is the most important issue.
	It's $34 trillion.
	The service on that debt is now larger than our defense budget, and our defense budget is larger Then the next 10 defense budgets for the next 10 countries in the world all put together.
	So that is, and you know, President Trump and President Biden are largely responsible individually for that debt.
	President Trump ran up the biggest debt in history.
	He put a trillion dollars on that number.
	And that is more than all the presidents in 283 years of history before him.
	And President Biden put almost that much on it.
	Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that is collected in taxes is going to go to servicing the debt.
	Within 10 years, and particularly if interest rates rise, Within 10 years, 100% of every dollar collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt.
	This is really an existential crisis for our country, and you don't hear President Biden or President Trump ever talk about it, and they have no solutions for it.
	I wanted to ask you about what your solutions are to that, because we can talk about the defense budget, but the reality is two-thirds of the American budget is entitlement programs that nobody wants to touch.
	Well, the biggest cost is our medical costs, and the medical costs are preventable.
	And, you know, this goes to another issue, which neither of them ever talk about, which I believe is the biggest issue, which is the chronic disease, even bigger than the budget.
	which is existential, which is the chronic disease epidemic.
	When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease.
	Today, 60% have chronic disease.
	And that, more than any country in the world.
	I mean, one of the reasons we had, during COVID, we had the highest death rate, the highest body count
	of any country in the world.
	We had 16% of the COVID deaths globally were in the United States.
	We only have 4.2% of the world's population.
	And a lot of that was mismanagement.
	But a lot of it was also because we have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.
	The CDC says that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
	Now, you take these practices individually.
	Juvenile diabetes, when I was a kid, A typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime, his entire career, his 40-year career.
	Today, one out of every three children who walk into his office is pre-diabetic or diabetic.
	The cost of diabetes now in this country is higher than the defense budget.
	One disease, and that doesn't even include Alzheimer's, which we now know, which has now been reclassified as type 3 diabetes.
	Alzheimer's coming from the same cause that's causing the diabetes, which is food.
	Poisoned food.
	We have a thousand ingredients in our food that are banned in Europe and other countries.
	And they're killing us, literally.
	The autism rate in our country has gone from 1 in 10,000.
	1 in 10,000 in my generation, 70-year-old men, 1 in 10,000 has full-blown autism.
	In my kids' generation, it's one in every 34 kids, according to CDC, one in every 22 boys.
	So, this is a national security issue.
	It's the cost.
	Mark Blackson just published a peer-reviewed publication that shows that the cost of treating autism alone is a trillion dollars a year.
	This is, like I say, this is existential for us.
	And then there's all these other diseases that suddenly appeared around 1989.
	All these allergic diseases, food allergies, peanut allergies, eczema, asthma exploded.
	We had that early.
	You know, when I was a kid, I knew people with asthma.
	But today they're in every classroom.
	There's albuterol inhalers in every classroom.
	There's EpiPens in every classroom.
	Nobody's talking about this and explaining why the neurological disorders, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome.
	Narcolepsy, ASD, autism, these are diseases that I never heard of when I was a kid.
	Nobody ever knew about them.
	They were unknown to any except for esoteric specialties in the medical profession.
	The autoimmune diseases that suddenly exploded.
	I mean, the great bulk of my followers are young people, and I do selfie lines after every speech, and one at a time they come up to me and say, I have POTS, I have, you know, ADHD, I have all these autoimmune diseases.
	And rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, things that we never heard of when I was a kid, and suddenly they're exploded.
	And then all of these other, you know, the autoimmune and the allergic diseases and neurological diseases and obesity.
	My uncle was president.
	13% of kids are obese, today it's almost 50%.
	So, you know, and that, this is killing us as a country in so many ways.
	Not only national security and our ability to find people who will actually defend this, who are in shape enough to defend this country, but the cost of it is 4.3 trillion a year.
	So it is five times our defense budget.
	We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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	So, what's the solution to that?
	I mean, it sounds like tremendous regulation of the food industry.
	Well, that's not the way I would do it.
	I think that that's very hard to do.
	I think even if, you know, it ought to be fixable through regulation, but politically that, because of the control that the food industry and the, you know, big ag The food industry and, you know, the big companies that own them all, like BlackRock and the State Street Vanguard, which own both the food processors that are poisoning us and the pharmaceutical companies that are making a killing on the disease.
	They all want to keep us sick from just a pure financial incentive.
	And it's hard because they own Congress.
	They control the regulatory agencies.
	All those agencies are captured.
	But there's ways that you can do it.
	And the way that you do it is through good science.
	If you have good science, and that's why NIH will not study any of these diseases,
	the ideology of these diseases, NIH will not because they know
	that if they try to figure out what's causing the obesity epidemic,
	they're going to end up offending the high fructose corn syrup industry
	and other industries that are so entrenched in our political system and our economic system
	and our financial system that none of the regulatory agencies
	want to lift up that rock.
	What's causing the autism epidemic?
	What's causing the diabetes epidemic and all these allergic disease epidemic?
	They won't look at it.
	So, and if you are a college researcher, And you try to do that research, NIH will shut you down.
	NIH controls the university systems because NIH has a $42 billion budget.
	It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists, most of whom are at American universities and the medical schools.
	And the budget of NIH dwarfs the budget of those medical schools, so they have to comply.
	So nobody will look at this issue.
	What I'm going to do as soon as I get in there, I'm going to go down to NIH, and I'm going to say, you know, NIH, when I was a kid, NIH was 10 minutes from my home, and I used to go there because I had friends who were scientists there.
	I was fascinated by science when I was a kid, and I would go look at the rats and the mice and the guinea pigs and the monkeys.
	And the microscopes, et cetera.
	At that time in the history, NIH was the gold standard scientific agency in the world.
	There were, in fact, a lot of these new countries.
	After World War II, 122 new countries were formed.
	And a lot of those were new democracies that were modeled on the US.
	But they didn't have the budget to have their own scientific agency.
	So they would say in their constitutions, Um, anything approved by FDA or NIH is approved in our country.
	So the whole world was relying on our science and with good reason.
	We had gold standard science at that time.
	And in 1980, we passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act.
	And that law allowed NIH scientists and NIH as an agency to collect royalties on any new drug that it helped develop, including the scientists who worked on that drug.
	So, for example, the Moderna vaccine, there are between four and six individuals at NIH who will get $150,000 a year as long, forever, as long as that mRNA technology is on the market.
	NIH owns half the patent.
	And they get 50%.
	So if you're a regulator working for these agencies, and you're making royalties, and you're paying for your mortgage, and your boat, and your alimony, and your kid's education, based upon the performance of that drug in the marketplace, because you helped develop it, it tends to subvert the regulatory function of the agency, because you have the regulators who are supposed to be looking for problems in that drug, who are instead I'm making sure they don't see any problems.
	So, assuming that you can go in and clean out NIH and restore... I'll summarize this.
	What I'm going to do is I'm going to redirect the science away.
	NIH has now become the primary incubator for new pharmaceutical products.
	And then it spends a lot of its time studying infectious disease, doing gain-of-function studies, and we see where that ends up, etc.
	What I'm going to say to them is, look, we're going to mainly give infectious disease and drug development a little bit of a break for a couple of years, and we're going to find out what's causing the chronic disease epidemic in this country.
	And we're going to start doing studies on all of these injuries and linking them.
	We know there's an environmental toxin.
	You know, genes do not cause epidemics.
	They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.
	And there's a famous toxicologist called Phil Landrigan who looked at this issue and he said, you know, this problem began in 1989.
	In fact, EPA, Congress said to EPA, why here did the autism epidemic begin?
	And EPA came back and said, it's a red line, 1989.
	Well, a lot of these diseases exploded in 1989.
	So Phil Landrigan said, let's look at what it could be.
	And he said, you need a toxic exposure that became ubiquitous in 1989.
	It affected every demographic from Cubans in Key Biscayne to Inuit in Alaska.
	And that it has other characteristics.
	Neurological injuries affect boys at a 4 to 1 ratio to girls.
	So there's other kind of signals that you can look for.
	So he went through all of the exposures that began that year.
	I mean, all of the exposures that followed that approximate timeline.
	And he came down with about 13 things, and they're, you know, it's predictable things.
	It's glyphosate, it's, you know, fluoride.
	Glyphosate was an herbicide.
	It became ubiquitous at that time.
	Neonicotinoid pesticides, atrazine, aspartame, you know, the food sweetener.
	High fructose corn syrup, cell phone radiation, PFOAs, PFASs, this is a class of what they call forever chemicals.
	I've litigated a lot on it and they are, you know, they're in all of our, put around that timeline in all of our children's pajamas, furniture, et cetera.
	And so Landrigan came down with this list and said, it's gotta be one of these things.
	It's easy science to do.
	But NIH won't let anybody do it, and what I'm going to do is do it.
	Once you figure it out, and once you have a threshold of scientific studies, of high-quality scientific studies, animal studies, bench studies, clinical studies, observational studies, epidemiological studies, then you pass a threshold, a legal threshold called DALBERT.
	In the federal courts, and there is an analogous threshold in the state courts, that threshold says until you have a certain critical mass of science, you cannot bring to a jury any claim that a certain exposure caused a certain injury.
	Once you have about 15 or 20 really good studies, then you set the lawyers loose.
	And if you have, you know, 15 studies that say high fructose corn syrup is one of the major causes of the diabetes epidemic, And you have lawyers who can step in and say, I'm representing 10,000 kids who have juvenile diabetes and shouldn't, and we can litigate them.
	Now, people said to me, before we did the Monsanto cases, they said, you can never regulate glyphosate out of existence.
	It's too powerful.
	It's got Cargill and Monsanto and, you know, the whole Senate Agricultural Committee that will go to the wall and die on that hill.
	But we were able to win a $13 billion settlement, three judgments that ended up with this big settlement.
	We won three jury trials in San Francisco.
	The first one, $289 million.
	The second one, $89 million.
	The third one, we asked the jury for a billion, and they gave us $2.2 billion.
	Then Monsanto settled the case for $13 billion.
	At that time, 40,000 cases.
	We were going to try one at a time.
	Monsanto also agreed to remove glyphosate from all gardening products.
	So you can get them to do it if you have the science out there.
	So obviously this is an issue on which you're really passionate.
	Another sort of existential issue or something you've discussed in existential terms, unless I'm wrong and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is climate change.
	So what are your opinions on climate change?
	Obviously that is a hot button issue.
	Let me just finish what I was saying because there are a number of existential issues which are One of those is polarization in our country.
	And, you know, there's this toxic polarization that has us at all each other's throats.
	And nobody can really say, particularly with the social media algorithms feeding on that and driving us further and further apart.
	You know, we have not been so divided since the American Civil War.
	That's another issue.
	The state of our soils is another existential issue that we're going to hit a wall with just in soil productivity, but a lot of other.
	These are all issues that are ultimately the result of a corrupted system, a merger of state and corporate power, that no matter who the president is, These, that capture, that corruption virus system is going to spit out bad policies on this issue.
	Keep running up the debt, keep destroying our soil, keep poisoning our children, keep the chronic disease epidemic and no way to solve it.
	That's why you can vote for Trump and Biden.
	you're going to get more of the same. We already knew they were both at four years in there and
	they didn't change any of these things. They're not able to avert this train that's coming
	at us from all these different directions. They won't even talk about it because those policies
	are the products of a corrupt system and I have the capacity to fix that system.
	So when you look at that system, I mean, obviously you're looking at a variety of areas in the Congress, but it seems like the vast majority of rulemaking and corruption that happens is actually not, I think, the kind of baseline theory that members of Congress are getting paid off as much as it is that you have a gigantic regulatory state where regulatory capture is really easy.
	The Congress people aren't even reading the bills.
	I mean, it's agencies Or committees that are largely having these things written by outside lawyers or by outside forces.
	So you become president of the United States.
	What do you do about the size and scope of the executive branch?
	It's completely unwieldy.
	You have enormous numbers of people who are supposed experts in their particular fields.
	How do you clean that out?
	You do it one agency at a time, and I've sued almost all these agencies.
	I've sued NIH, CDC, FDA, EPA.
	I've sued USDA multiple times.
	And, you know, almost all the other agencies are coming that are the problem.
	When you sue them, you get a PhD in how to unravel corporate capture.
	And, you know, they didn't start out corrupted.
	They started out idealistic.
	They started out models for the rest of the world.
	They started out serving the public interest.
	And they didn't always do that perfectly, because bureaucracies make mistakes.
	But you can restore those cultures, and I can tell you how to do it.
	Depending on which agency it is, you do it in different ways.
	You stop the profiteering.
	The FDA gets 50% of its budget from the pharmaceutical company.
	Of course that's not going to work.
	NIH scientists should not be able to collect royalties.
	They're revolving doors.
	And amplify and put corporate capture on steroids.
	We have to get rid of those.
	A lot of this I can do with executive order.
	There's also, in these agencies, there are individuals at high levels who have corrupted them.
	And I'm not just talking about the agencies that I've visited, but also the CIA.
	Mike Pompeo, I had dinner with Mike Pompeo about four months ago.
	in Las Vegas and he said to me, he said, my one biggest regret in life
	is that I didn't clean up the CIA when I had a chance when I was running it.
	And he said, virtually the entire upper echelon of that agency are made up of individuals
	who do not believe in the democratic institutions of the United States of America.
	Now my daughter-in-law, Emerilus Fox Kennedy, who's running my campaign, spent her career
	as a Clinton-signed agent for the CIA.
	She says, yeah, that's right, there's 29,000 people who are employed by that agency
	and most of them are patriots and good public servants, but the upper echelons are controlled
	by the military-industrial complex and people who would do its bidding.
	The same is true in NIH.
	When I sued Monsanto, when we sued Monsanto, we got discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division at EPA for over a decade was a guy called Jess Rowland.
	Who was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, and he was taking his orders from the highest officials of Monsanto to kill studies, to fix studies, to hire these, bring in these phonies, mercenary scientists, we call them by ostitutes, to ghostwrite studies, and that he was the one that kept those studies.
	His job was to make sure no study got done that would look at the links between Glyphosate and cancer.
	I can tell you who those individuals are at CDC.
	Colleen Boyle, Frank DiStefano.
	I know the names because I've dealt with them.
	I know who has to be moved.
	And, you know, President Trump wanted to do this.
	President Trump came in saying, I'm going to drain the swamp.
	But he didn't know how to do it.
	He's confronted by this big bureaucracy.
	And at every level of these, you know, some of these are 60,000 people working for these agencies.
	And at all sort of higher levels of that bureaucracy you have individuals who are capable of committing civil disobedience that will turn off the lights some will flood the streets and that will embarrass the
	president.
	So they tiptoe around these agencies and they never do anything about it
	because they don't know how to do it.
	But I know how. I know exactly what to do.
	And I know how to do it at a granular level.
	And President Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.
	And he brings John Bolton in to run the NSA.
	That is like putting a swamp creature in charge of draining the swamp.
	He brought Scott Gottlieb, and Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical lobbyist.
	Scott Gottlieb is a business partner of Pfizer.
	President Trump appoints him to run the FDA, and Scott Gottlieb gets in there and does a $100 billion favor for Pfizer.
	When it comes to the regulatory capture, I think that even President Trump would admit at this point that he would have to do a much better job in his second term with regard to staffing.
	But why do you give him a second term if he's messed it up so badly the first time?
	He said he was going to do that the first time.
	If I had been president, I would have done it.
	And even when he knew what was wrong, he said, well, I'll never lock down this country.
	But he got rolled by his bureaucrats.
	I mean, I think that a lot of people who support President Trump, myself included, will believe that he got rolled by his own state.
	And that's why 2020 was a disaster.
	We need somebody in there who will not get rolled by their bureaucrats.
	This is what my uncle, you know, when my uncle was president
	during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were 13 people on the excomm committee
	who were, you know, living at the White House, including my father,
	who who who got a cut at the White House.
	And we didn't see him for 13 days, even though we're only 14 minutes from the White House, my
	home at Hickory Hill.
	My father was there and Bob McNamara, Dean Acheson, all the great beards from the diplomatic corps and the and
	the, you know, Curtis O'Mea and Louis Lemons are from the Joint Chiefs of
	Staff.
	Well, they were all meeting sometimes 24 hour day on and off.
	And the first time they voted, there was an 11 to 13 vote that we invade Cuba and we bomb the missile sites.
	There were 64 Russian missile sites that the Russians had secretly erected there.
	My uncle said to them, But are there warheads, active warheads on those missiles?
	The CIA didn't know.
	And my uncle said, are the gun crews Cuban or are they Russian?
	The CIA said, we don't know, but we think they're Russian.
	How many people in the gun crews?
	Up to 600 on each gun crew, 64 gun crews.
	My uncle said, if we bomb them and kill all those Russians, Isn't Khrushchev going to have to come to Berlin?
	And they said to him, we don't think he has the guts to do that.
	My uncle said, I'm not going to take that risk.
	He asked them for the aerial photos and he examined them himself.
	He went granular, and then the last day, after the 13th day, this is the 13th most dangerous day in history.
	There are many times during that period that many of those people believe that they may wake up dead the next morning, because a nuclear exchange would wipe out the East Coast.
	The last day my uncle took a vote, and he already knew what he was going to do with the embargo.
	He said, he took a vote, he said, this is the final vote, and they voted eight to six to invade.
	And my uncle said, the six is habit.
	So what he was saying is, I'm listening to you, you're experts, I value your advice, but I'm going to make up my own mind about what's best for this country.
	Unfortunately, President Trump has shown that he doesn't have that capacity.
	Well, when it comes to deregulation and regulatory policy, that's one aspect of being president, obviously, and it's a very important aspect of being president.
	When it comes to general policy, that's another aspect.
	And so I want to talk about some of your kind of general political policies, not just the implementation side, but with regard to, say, things like climate change or tax policy.
	So you're the President of the United States.
	What does America's tax policy look like?
	Because the reality is that Well, we're talking about solving health problems that down the road will have an impact on Medicaid or Medicare spending.
	The reality is that the tax burden on the United States is actually more progressive than it is in virtually any other country.
	It is very stacked on the top, much more than Europe.
	Europe actually has a much significantly higher tax base.
	The highest rate kicks in much lower in terms of income in Europe.
	Unless you mean to Radically increased taxes on the middle class, for example.
	There is no way to continue to sustain the kind of spending that we're doing on into the future.
	There are really only two things that can be done.
	One is a massively booming economy, and the other is to raise the tax rates.
	When you look at the state of the American economy, what are the chief issues for you?
	What does a good tax policy look like?
	Well, first of all, I think we can cut a lot of costs.
	We can cut costs.
	We can cut our military budget almost in half.
	We can cut our military down to about $500 billion a year.
	Okay, so explain that to me.
	Why would we do that given the threats of China, given the threats of Russia, given an increasingly aggressive world?
	We, you know, we are our military.
	expenditures and our posturing around the world makes it a dangerous world.
	The military-industrial complex, which controls a lot of US foreign policy, is looking for
	war.
	You say Russia and China are aggressive, and I think clearly, particularly China, wants
	to dominate the world.
	It doesn't want to do it in a hot war with us.
	China has one and a half bases around the world.
	Russia has two bases.
	We have 800.
	Yes, I mean, we have been in the post-war era, the global guarantor of, for example, freedom of the sea.
	But have we done that really?
	I mean, look what's happening.
	First of all, they don't have freedom of speech in Europe anymore.
	I mean, look at the algorithms now.
	If you criticize an mRNA vaccine in Europe, you get a multi-million dollar fine.
	That's not freedom of speech.
	I mean, I certainly agree there are limitations on freedom of speech in Europe.
	Those are not comparable to freedom of speech limitations in China.
	I mean, in China, if you oppose the regime, you go to a gulag.
	Yeah, I'm not saying we should adopt the Chinese system here.
	What I'm saying is, does China want a war with us?
	No, of course not.
	What they want... China wants economic domination in the world, and it's doing that by adopting the policy that my uncle John Kennedy thought that we should adopt, which is not to reject military power, but which is counterproductive.
	To project economic power abroad.
	And the Chinese in doing that, because they have done that, we've spent eight trillion dollars over the past 20 years.
	Bombing ports, bridges, schools, universities, hospitals.
	Here's what we got for it.
	Four of that, four trillion of that went to Iraq.
	Iraq is now worse off than we found it.
	Iraq, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein.
	Iraq is now an incoherent collection of battling Shia and Sunni death squads.
	It is a proxy of Iran, which is exactly the foreign policy outcome that we were trying to prevent.
	What happened in Gaza with Hamas would never have happened if we hadn't destroyed Iraq in the first place,
	because Saddam was the bulwark in that region against Iranian expansion, and now there is no bulwark.
	Now we have to send troops and put bases in Syria where we do not belong to make up for the vacuum we created
	by destroying Saddam Hussein.
	We created ISIS.
	That is not good for our national security.
	We started a war in Syria that drove four million refugees into Europe and destabilized
	every democracy in Europe and created, almost certainly, without that, Brexit wouldn't have
	happened.
	So this is what we got for those military expenditures.
	Americans are less safe.
	The rise of BRICS means that the...
	I think there'd be very few people who disagree at this point on the war in Iraq.
	But what I'm talking about is the situation right now.
	But what you're trying to do is defend these, you know, these huge military expenditures.
	What I'm saying is they do not make us safer.
	But these are two separate issues.
	The use of the military and the military expenditures are not quite the same thing.
	Meaning Ronald Reagan, and by the way, your uncle, did pursue military buildup vis-a-vis the Soviets.
	It's the deployments of the military that you're disagreeing with, not necessarily the military buildup.
	Well, no, what I would say is if you got the weapons, you're going to use them.
	And, you know, you look at the Ukraine and, you know, the excuses.
	and Mitch McConnell and a lot of the Republican senators are now saying is they're saying don't
	worry we need the Ukraine war because our weaponry was getting old and we were inventorying in
	warehouses and we're unloading all that stuff on there so that we can make new stuff and that's
	I find that to be a foolish argument.
	Listen, I watch what's happening on IC.
	Who owns all the military contractors who are making a profit north of Grumman?
	Lockheed Martin.
	General Dynamics.
	They're all owned by BlackRock.
	So BlackRock is now making a profit destroying Ukraine.
	And who got the contract?
	To be fair, BlackRock did not invade Ukraine.
	I mean, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the question that I would ask is when it comes to Ukraine— But why did we feel like—that war, in my view, is a war about the expansion of NATO, our right to expand NATO into Ukraine, and was something that we promised that we would never do.
	I mean, that's factually untrue.
	We did not actually promise the Russians that we would never expand NATO.
	Well, we did.
	Gorbachev himself has said that this is not the case.
	Yeah, well, but there have been all kinds of analyses that look at—I mean, listen, I'm not suggesting that Putin doesn't care.
	Putin certainly fears it.
	Putin admits that he told Gorbachev, when Gorbachev said, you know, the question is
	not whether we made the promise, Ben, whether it was memorialized in a proper writing that
	memorialized in a proper writing that it was part of an understood agreement.
	it was part of an understood agreement.
	It was an agreement at that time.
	It was an agreement at that time.
	He unified, Gorbachev allowed the unification of Germany under NATO, which was a huge concession
	He unified, Gorbachev allowed the unification of Germany under NATO, which was a huge concession
	for him that made it so.
	for him that made it so.
	He was loathed in Russia ever since.
	He was loathed in Russia ever since.
	And the one thing he said is that to President Bush and James Baker and John Major at that
	time is, I want your agreement that you'll never move NATO to peace.
	Gorbachev has denied this, but beyond that, the real question is, let's assume that all
	that's true.
	Let's assume this is about fear of Ukraine joining NATO.
	So first of all, Zelensky himself, when he was a comedian, made all sorts of shorts about
	the fact that NATO actually kept flirting with Ukraine.
	I agree the West's policy with regards to NATO and Ukraine was flirtatious, but it never reached the point of consummation, which is one of the big complaints in Ukraine, was sort of that Zelensky, believe it or not, before the war was actually sort of the left-wing peacenik version of the leadership in Ukraine.
	He was hit from the right before he actually was elected president of Ukraine.
	But even assuming all this, and I'll assume your case for the sake of argument, Right now, Russia has obvious control of huge sections of the Donbass.
	They retain control of Crimea.
	Is it in America's interest to withdraw aid to the point where Ukraine itself is in danger of Russian ingestion?
	Gorbachev, as you point out, Zelensky ran in 2019 on the Minsk Accords saying that he promised he was a peacenik and that he would sign the Minsk Accords.
	The Minsk Accords basically had three demands from the Russians that everybody agreed to.
	The UK agreed, Germany agreed, France agreed.
	Three things that Putin wanted, and it's what not only Putin, but the entire Kremlin leadership and generation of leader back to 1992, not beginning with Putin, they wanted a guarantee of neutrality for Ukraine, which means keeping NATO out.
	They wanted a, you know, a denazification of the government that we put in place in 2014 when we helped overthrow the elected government of the Ukraine.
	The CIA and Victoria Nuland helped overthrow them.
	And brought in five ministers who are, you know, calling them ultra-nationalists is a polite description.
	And you well know the Nazi history in Ukraine.
	And these five ministers who were legacies of Stephen Bonder, et cetera.
	And the last thing that he wanted was that protection for the ethnic Russian population of Donbass and Lugansk.
	Who were being brutalized, 14,000 have been killed.
	And the first thing that got, when we put the new government in in 2014,
	one of the first things it did was to get rid of the Russian language.
	Used, half the people- There's no question that, first of all, the Minsk Accords
	were extremely poorly written and violated extraordinarily on both sides of that
	particular agreement.
	Including by the Russians, Little Green Men in Donbass and Crimea.
	But again, this doesn't answer the question as to whether the United States, I don't really care about the internal politics of Ukraine nearly at all.
	The question is, is it in the interest of the United States at this point, given the fact that Vladimir Putin has not really gotten back to the off-ramp that I was pushing for, and I think you were both, we were both pushing for, I think in the middle of 2022.
	So it's Henry Kissinger, this sort of off-ramp, let's get out of this war as fast as possible, negotiated settlement, That's just not true.
	the wayside and so now we're in 2024 still discussing the war. Putin has not offered
	any sort of material off-ramp at this point to Zelensky and Zelensky has not opted to take
	any off-ramp. So what is in America's interest? If we if we use that it's not true.
	It's just not true. First of all the Minsk Accords, although you know you can complain about
	some of the language, it was agreed upon by France, by Germany, by the UK, and Zelensky campaigned in
	2019 on the promise that he was going to sign it and ratify it before the Parliament.
	I'm...
	He was then, when he got in, he pivoted.
	The suspicion is that he pivoted for two reasons.
	One, his life was threatened by the ultra-rightists in his own government.
	And two, Victoria Nuland from the State Department said, we don't want peace with the Russians.
	In April of 2022, and that was what prompted the invasion of Crimea, which, by the way, my uncle, you know, was going to invade Cuba in 1962.
	Because the Russians put missiles there.
	And the Russians put missiles in Cuba because we had put Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
	Everybody knew that neither of our powers wanted nuclear missiles within range of our capital.
	And not only did we put missiles in Romania and Poland, Aegis Missile Systems, which are Tomahawk missiles, which are nuclear-ready Lockheed missiles, 12 minutes from the Kremlin, able to decapitate the entire Kremlin leadership, 12 minutes.
	Not only did we do that, President Trump and his predecessor walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviet Union, with Russia.
	So we said to Russia, we're unilaterally walking away from these nuke treaties and we're putting nukes in your backyard.
	What kind of message?
	If they did that to us, put them in Mexico, Canada, Cuba, we would invade.
	Now, you know, in terms of what Putin's offer was, Putin only went into Crimea after we rejected, after Zelensky broke his promise.
	Although the Donbass and Crimea weren't invaded until 2014.
	Right.
	So in April of 2022, after... The invasion was February 2022, yes.
	In April of 2022, after the invasion of February 2022, yes, yeah, April 2022, Zelensky, we will not help Zelensky
	negotiate a treaty with the Russians.
	So he goes to Erdogan in Turkey, and he goes to Naftali Bennett from Israel.
	They negotiate essentially Minsk too, which does the same thing.
	Right.
	What now we know from Naftali Bennett, from Erdogan, from the Ukrainian negotiators, is that everybody, and from Putin himself, she talked about in the Tucker interview, is that everybody agreed to it.
	Both sides initialed that agreement.
	Putin was withdrawing his troops from Kiev.
	When Biden sent Boris Johnson over to force Zelensky to tear up the agreement.
	Well, I mean, to be fair, that was also the same time that they walked into Bakhmut and solved the human rights violations.
	And that's the excuse that Zelensky uses, if you want to put it that way.
	Yeah, you're exact.
	But that's fine.
	That's fine.
	That's the perfect word to use, an excuse.
	That's all fine.
	I just come back to the same question.
	Is it in America's interest to let Russia walk into Kiev and take control of Ukraine?
	But I didn't say that.
	No, I'm not putting it in your mouth.
	It's a literal question.
	I don't think Russia wants to control Kiev.
	That was literally the purpose of the war.
	The original purpose of the war was to take Kiev.
	Putin tried to invade Kiev.
	They were in the outskirts of Kiev.
	They tried to land on helicopters.
	What he has said consistently is that we need to do this.
	to keep NATO out, and he's got support of his own people, he's got support of the Kremlin.
	And what I said is it's not either, you know, him and all of these comic book descriptions,
	which you, I know you're a really smart guy, and I don't know, you know, how you end up
	how you end up endorsing this, the super villains that we're given every couple of years.
	endorsing this, the super villains that we're given every couple of years.
	No, he's a hardcore political realist.
	No, he's a hardcore political realist.
	Vladimir Putin is a hard power political realpolitik expert.
	But Vladimir Putin is a hard power political realpolitik expert.
	Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly, I want to negotiate this.
	Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly, I want to negotiate this, and Zelensky has passed
	And Zelensky has passed a law in Ukraine that says we can't negotiate with him.
	I've actively suggested as a solution that Joe Biden go to Putin around Zelensky and
	negotiate a solution and then make America hate Ukraine.
	You and I agree on that.
	Okay, so but until that point happens, until that negotiation happens.
	Well, why doesn't it happen tomorrow?
	I'll tell you what is going to happen the day I get into office.
	Okay, let's assume that you go with Putin and you have a disagreement.
	Do you continue to fund Ukraine up to the point where agreement is reached?
	Of course you continue, but I'm going to have a ceasefire and I'm going to negotiate agreement.
	I'm not going to give ground until we have an agreement.
	Okay, fair enough.
	So that was the question because this started off with kind of a broader discussion of American military.
	Yeah, no, I would never suggest that.
	I've been negotiating my whole life.
	I've negotiated 500 cases.
	We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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	So when it comes to American military policy, because you had suggested that we can sort of slash America's military budget in half.
	Yeah.
	And what I had said is that Russia is very aggressive on the world stage.
	China's obviously an aggressive player, not just with regard to its economy, but Taiwan obviously feels threatened.
	That's a very difficult place for the United States to defend.
	We do require a significantly more powerful Navy to maintain the seaways and waterways
	that allow for a free global market to occur.
	I mean, we're watching right now as a bunch of ragtag hoothies hold up half the shipping in the planet in the Red Sea
	because the American Navy has been unable or unwilling under President Biden to actually make sure
	that there's freedom of the seas in the Red Sea.
	When you look at the terror tentacles of Iran, It's not that we should have bases we are unwilling to defend in places like Jordan or Syria.
	It is to say that a muscular American presence on the world stage has been a guarantor of world peace in a way that a reticent America and an isolationist-minded America would not be.
	Somebody's going to fill the gap, in other words.
	I don't want to repeat what I said about the cause of American military Muscle flexing.
	We're broad, but, you know, it cost us eight trillion dollars and we're worse off.
	We're watching the rise of BRICS.
	We, you know, we saw the destruction of Iraq.
	We saw the destruction of Europe because of America's bad military policy.
	So I don't agree with you.
	And, and, you know, I don't, I look at China very differently.
	I think China, we spend three times what China spends on our military.
	And by the way, the kind of strategy that you're talking about is establishing dominance in the South China Sea.
	That's a 20th century strategy.
	You know, Iran and the Houthis don't have hypersonic missiles.
	We have 12 aircraft carrier, Ben.
	That is the heart of our Navy, right?
	That and the nuclear sub fleet.
	China has two aircraft carriers, and they're kind of older.
	I think they got them from the Russians.
	But the minute a hot war starts with China, every one of our aircraft carriers was going to be at the
	bottom of the ocean this is what we don't you know that this is why NATO we
	have to rethink NATO completely we can't get a million people
	troops across the Atlantic anymore no it's
	they would all be sunk we have to understand
	the stringencies of modern warfare of what it's going to look like and there's also
	the only reason that we care about Taiwan is because of TSMC Correct.
	Right?
	Because of the microchip capacity of one company, which makes all the microchip in our refrigerators and our automobiles.
	And our F-35s, by the way.
	Right.
	Our missiles, our jets, everything.
	So, militarily, we're really hurting if we don't have access.
	We can't replicate it.
	We're trying now, but it would take decades to get where the Taiwanese are right now.
	So you can make an argument that Taiwan is an absolutely critical national security asset for us, and we cannot let the Chinese invade.
	The thing is that there's another reality.
	One is that The Chinese control, with bases, the South China Sea.
	Our nearest base is Guam.
	And modern warfare with battleships and with, you know, the domination by aircraft carrier, as we just talked about, is now a strategy that's very, very dubious military strategy.
	There are other reasons that China does not want a war about this.
	Number one, the Taiwanese don't want MC plants are going to do every if the second that China
	looks like it's going to they're going to do everything in their power to get to the United
	States.
	So, you know, they're going to lose a lot of their capacity to innovate and to maintain
	the production of microchips.
	Number two, that plant is not operating in a vacuum.
	The lasers that they use, they're all the different they have a huge supply
	chain that they rely on and the supply chain.
	A lot of it comes from Silicon Valley.
	A lot of it comes from Amsterdam.
	A lot of it comes from the capitals all over Europe.
	And they can't function without that.
	So China can't just capture that plant and say, okay, we now run all the microchips they're going to get hurt, too.
	Number three, China dies without Walmart.
	They have a population that is on the edge of potential revolt.
	They made all these promises to them, and the only thing that is keeping them even their nose above water is Walmart.
	And if they lose Walmart, they get hurt a lot more than we do.
	And this may be the most important.
	China dies in a week without Mideast oil.
	We don't need to control the South China Sea to dominate China.
	They can't get the oil to China without the shipping lanes open.
	And we are able to close those shipping lanes so we can literally strangle China.
	That doesn't require naval power, by the way.
	But what I would say is what we should be thinking of Instead of a hot war with China, let's fight the war that China wants, which is by projecting economic power.
	China, during the last 20 years that we've spent on bombing bridges, ports, schools, churches, universities, mosques, etc.
	$8 trillion we've spent on that enterprise.
	The Chinese spent $8 trillion building ports, building roads, building schools, universities.
	With their Belt and Road program, 15 years ago, we were the largest creditor in every country in Latin America.
	Today, China is on virtually all of them.
	The same is true in China.
	I mean, in Africa.
	Africa is now throwing out the U.S.
	military.
	And we've left behind all these kind of resentments, and they're embracing the Chinese.
	My uncle, President Kennedy, never sent a combat troop abroad to die, and he was begged to in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie twice in Cuba, called a traitor in the State Department for not sending 250,000 troops to Vietnam.
	They want it, and he refused to do it.
	He said, no, we need to be projecting economic power abroad.
	I don't want African children, when they hear of the United States of America, to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun.
	I want them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.
	I want them to think of the Alliance for Progress.
	want them to think of USAID, where we were and running the oligarchs in these countries
	and the military juntas, and bringing economic development directly to the poor to try to
	build a middle class, which is the foundation stone for stable democracies in those countries
	as a counter to the promises of communism.
	That was his policy.
	Today, as a result of that, there are more statues to John Kennedy, more buildings named
	after him, more schools, more universities, more hospitals, more parks in Africa, Latin
	America, and Asia than any other president, certainly, and probably more than all other
	US presidents combined.
	That was working foreign policy.
	We project economic power abroad.
	Meanwhile, we fortify ourselves at home.
	We arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders so that we're too expensive to ever invade.
	We maintain a military sufficient to keep the sea lanes open in a neutral place like the Arctic.
	We have a two-strike capacity around the world to punish bad behavior if we need to.
	And then we, you know, we start bringing money home.
	And if you can find a way to do all those things militarily and cut the budget by half?
	Yeah, this is a $500 billion budget.
	And by the way, that's the same budget that Eisenhower had during the height of the Cold War when we were, you know, had an existential threat from the Soviet Union.
	And that's what we were also promised to cut down.
	In 1992, when the walls came down in Europe, and, you know, there was all kinds of convocations about the peace dividend, how do we, where do we cut the, to achieve those things, how big should our military?
	The promise then was that we were going to cut it from 600 billion to 200 billion, and that we could do all those things.
	Now, that'll cost us 500 billion.
	But, you know, what our true military costs, although the actual Pentagon spending is $940 billion, the truth, if you look at the National Security costs and then the foreign aid costs, which is just, we give money to Ukraine or Israel or wherever, and then they, under contract, have to buy our weapons.
	The whole cost of that is $1.3 trillion.
	So, you know, we need to cut We need to cut back.
	My biggest savings are going to come from ending the chronic disease epidemic.
	But also, the GAO does a study every year on the most wasteful Government programs.
	The stuff that is just comical.
	It's like, you know, it will make you laugh if you read about it.
	That's the Golden Toilets and all of this.
	Right, the Golden Toilets.
	So those reports are this thick and they're all brought to some shelf in the Library of Congress and they're put there and that's, you know, the bureaucrats have done their job and identify them.
	I'm going to go through those and I'm going to use AI.
	To identify waste, and I'm going to have a transparent system, a budgetary system, blockchain budgetary system, so that every American can see every expenditure that we have on the budget, everything.
	And I'm going to use that system to identify waste and gut it.
	And, you know, I'm going to take the worst of all those programs and put them in a single and I'm going to send it to Congress like we did with the
	base closure commission for an up or down vote, right?
	And stuff that nobody can defend, I'm going to send it for an up or down vote so they
	have to vote for it.
	So when you look, again, you know, we've been talking a lot about the budget and the military
	and how much money we're spending.
	Social Security is a looming crisis.
	That one is not going away because even if people are healthy, in fact, especially if they're healthy, they're living longer.
	The retirement age, people can start receiving partial social security at 62, then 65, then it finally kicks in in total in 67.
	The life expectancy of people who live to 67 is well above 80 at this point.
	So, what do you propose to do when you're talking about the budgetary crisis?
	The reality is that within 10 years, the biggest cost on the books, I don't know.
	I don't know yet what to do about that.
	Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, bigger than the military.
	And so when you look at that, what do you do about something like Social Security?
	We have an aging population, we have a base of a demographic inversion in which we don't
	have enough young people.
	People are trying to fix that by bringing in extraordinary numbers of illegal immigrants
	as though this is going to somehow solve the problem.
	What do we do about that?
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I don't know yet what to do about that.
	I think Social Security is a particular problem because it's not really an entitlement, it's
	a contract.
	We took people's paychecks for 40 years and then we said to them, when you reach the age
	of 65, you're going to get that money.
	So I don't think that the United States should break its promise to those people.
	So I'm going to look, and I'll tell you what, a lot of the budgetary stuff is
	We can't even comprehend it now because of what AI is going to do to our economy.
	And, you know, if we don't manage it very, very carefully, and that's another reason that I think that, you know, is an argument for me becoming president, because I don't think President Biden or That's going to change our country.
	And the promise of AI to solve a lot of our most intractable problems,
	but also this terrible peril from AI, its capacity to alter our realities and to enforce
	compliance and to control our behavior,
	not only our...
	You know, to press these, to activate these neuronal pathways
	in all of our brains that are hardwired in there from, you know,
	20,000 generations of tribal evolution and, you know, being scientifically to activate those to make people
	behave in certain ways, to make them believe certain things.
	And I think it's going to be the biggest battle in the history of democracy,
	to see if democracy can survive AI.
	I mean, so this actually...
	I don't think they are thinking about this.
	And I think we need the smartest people in the country because we also don't want to lose the, you know, you can't regulate it in ways that punish it because we want to be the hub of it in this country.
	We don't want to drive it to China.
	We don't want to drive it to Europe.
	We want it to be here.
	And so in order to do that, we need kind of entrepreneurial freedom to experiment.
	And at the same time, We want to make sure that we regulate it in ways that don't get out of control, that we have agreements with the Russians, the Chinese, people we're fighting wars with right now.
	You know, we're all... This is the war of our life.
	It's the war of survival, like Elon Musk.
	At first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.
	It's going to kill all of us, right?
	I saw today that Elon and somebody else had a statement that said, By 2030, AI is going to be smarter than all the human beings in the world combined, and it's already lying to us.
	It's already doing some really scary stuff, and I just don't think any of this Goes into Biden's head.
	I don't think that President Trump is really capable of looking at this thoughtfully and saying, you know, OK, I'm going to bring in people who I don't like, I don't agree with.
	And because I need them to solve this problem, we need to bring in the smartest people in the country and including, you know, people that we don't like.
	There are a couple of things that are crossing streams here that are really interesting.
	So when you talk about AI, obviously there's the economic aspects, which are fascinating, and you have the techno-optimists, and you have the techno-pessimists, and all of this.
	What's more interesting to me is sort of the social aspect that you're pointing out, which is how AI is going to mess with our entire perception of the world.
	We can already see this in miniature, and it doesn't feel like in miniature since the
	rise of the smartphone, since the rise of social media, which has driven, as you mentioned
	right at the top, this extraordinary level of political polarization in the country,
	people hating each other who have never met each other and will never meet each other.
	As a religious person, I know you're a religious person also, the sort of death of church,
	the death of community in the United States, that seems to be one of the giant creeping
	problems that everyone is ignoring, is the fact that we do, in fact, need people to go
	to church.
	We do need people to get in church together and be with each other and touch grass once
	in a while, for lack of a better phrase.
	Now, what do you think is going to happen in terms of community building?
	How do we fill that gap?
	Well, you know, what you said is controversial and I tend to sort of visually agree with it, but I also, you know, churches don't necessarily bring people together, they also divide people.
	But I think the underlying The underlying assertion that you just made hits it right in the center of this problem.
	How do we use these technologies to build communities rather than fragment them?
	And right now, our experience with this technology is total fragmentation, and dissolution, and atomization.
	We have a whole generation of kids who are growing up lonely, and dispirited, and disconnected,
	and disaffected, and alienated.
	And, you know, and it's, you know, any of us, you have young kids, I have kids who have been through their teenage years.
	And you watch kids who are, my kids luckily escaped a lot of this,
	but so many of my friends who have kids who are just lost and they don't know how to make connections.
	They don't have, a lot of them are, this generation is, don't have just basic
	social intelligence skills.
	And I think a lot of that may be from, you know, the toxicity in the environment, but a lot of it is also just from, you know, spending so much of your childhood on video games and, you know, Swipe Right.
	You know, one of the, I talk about this, one of the sort of encouraging things that I see
	is coming out of the podcast world.
	I always make fun of my kids because they have no attention.
	They have the attention of a cricket because they're used to getting instantaneous simulation.
	When I was a kid, I'd go out on the side of a hill and I'd sit there for hours and wait for a snake to move
	or watch a hawk or watch the cloud go overhead.
	My kids, there's no way they could do that.
	You know, they need simulation constantly.
	One of the encouraging things that I see is that what they do with podcasts is they listen to you, they listen to Jordan Peterson.
	Listen to Joe Rogan and it's like they're really smart, you know, and they're getting this very high level of information because they're hearing these, you know, very energetic debates, very intelligent debates among super smart people.
	And, you know, what we have to figure out is how that is the good part of technology, right?
	How do you make people smarter, more engaged?
	And the bad part is this part that's just driving us all apart, and the algorithms prey on that.
	As you know, the algorithms, what they, you know, inadvertently, the algorithms are designed to keep eyeballs on the site.
	But as it turns out, this part of human nature, our hardwiring, is we will pay more attention to something if it is reinforcing our already held worldview.
	So if you're a Republican and you ask a question of Google, you're going to get a slightly different answer than a Democrat.
	You're going to get an answer that, you know, or images or whatever, that reinforces your existing biases.
	And that means that we're systematically, by this, you know, through this incredible mechanism of subtle control, but overwhelming control, being driven further and further apart than our poured on our biases, our prejudices, our hatreds.
	And so to me, that's why during this campaign, Ben, I've really tried to...
	It's just that this campaign is really an experiment.
	Is there a way to find a middle ground, to find landscapes where Americans can talk to each other again, where we can find brotherhood and sisterhood with each other?
	And what I find, and so I avoid the culture war issues.
	I try not to talk about them, you know, and I try to talk about the things that hold us all
	together, the values that we share.
	And what I found is those landscapes are just huge.
	Everybody wants a good education for our kids.
	Everybody wants to have clean, good soils, regenerative agriculture, good foods.
	Everybody wants to take care of our veterans.
	They don't want them eating in soup kitchens.
	They want to make sure the ones that have PTSD are taken care of.
	Everybody wants to end the fentanyl epidemic.
	Nobody thinks it's a good idea.
	When you come right down to it, for the Sinaloa drug cartel to be running U.S.
	border policy, you know, if you frame that issue in a certain way, which is, I hate immigrants, you're going to get division.
	But if you frame it in a way that, do you think this is right?
	If you want to talk about the environment, And you want a fist fight, talk about climate.
	But if you want to get people together, talk about toxicity, talk about clean water, talk about clean air, about the destruction of the Appalachians, about all of these other issues that, you know, when I was fighting the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, we had Hell's Angels standing shoulder-to-shoulder with, you know, with urban blacks, because everybody wanted clean water.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
	First, let's be real.
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	What do we do about those issues?
	You mentioned, you know, the hot-button issues, and we really haven't spent a lot of time on them, specifically because I want to talk about the things that you're most passionate about and that you're most interested in with your campaign.
	But these hot-button issues obviously do divide Americans.
	You become president of the United States, you're going to have to decide what to do on issues like what sort of legislation you sign on, say, abortions.
	What do you do on an issue like that?
	Abortion?
	Yes.
	I mean, to take the most top-button issue in the country.
	My take on abortion is this.
	I grew up in a family where there are both pro-life and pro-choice people in my family, a deeply Catholic family, and so I think we should be able to talk about these issues without, you know, hating each other.
	I've been a medical freedom advocate for my entire career.
	I think people should have bodily autonomy.
	I don't trust government to make decisions about what we should be doing with our own bodies.
	I think that the only solution for me is that a woman has to make that choice for herself.
	I believe that every abortion is a tragedy at one level or another,
	and that we should do everything we can as a society to try to make sure women have other choices.
	And particularly, you know, I don't think, I don't like federal policy that channels women
	to one solution, which is abortion.
	I think if a woman, you know, I talked to some mothers in the last couple of weeks in Atlanta, Georgia, in this facility where I've been repeatedly back to, called Angie's House.
	And it's run by Angela Stanton King, who's kind of a relative of Martin Luther King's family.
	She had a baby when she was in prison.
	She was literally handcuffed to a bed, and everybody was telling her to get an abortion.
	She didn't.
	She had the baby in prison, and that girl just won the Harvard Debating Prize.
	She is full scholarship at MIT.
	And Angie now takes care of women who People are being pressured to have abortions because they don't have the money to take care of the baby.
	I don't think that that should ever be a reason in this country for a woman not carrying her child to terms.
	This is a place where obviously you're going to bump heads and I'm not sure there's a way around it in the sense that a pro-lifer looks at a position like a woman ought to have bodily autonomy and they say that's completely missing the point.
	We're not talking about the woman's bodily autonomy, we're talking about the baby's bodily autonomy.
	Which is obviously not only the pro-life position, but the position of many mainstream religions, including the Catholic Church.
	And so when you look at pro-lifers who say, okay, well, I understand that you believe it's a tragedy, but along those same baseline biological lines, it's not just a tragedy, it's a crime against the child, because the child has an independent interest.
	What do you say to that?
	I say that I understand that position, and I don't agree with it.
	I think that the solution of having the state come in and dictate choices that the woman is making, that's not a good solution to me.
	To have a bureaucrat making these These very, very difficult moral choices.
	I think that choice should be between the woman, her pastor, her spiritual advisors, the people who she consults in her life, and that it's a very, very difficult decision.
	So you don't believe that the child has an independent right to life, for example, at any point during the pregnancy?
	I mean, how far is the right choice?
	Here's what I would say, man.
	There's no woman who gets pregnant carries that baby for eight months and then decides to have
	an abortion for some frivolous reason.
	They're, you know, they're in that kind of case and nobody in their right mind would do that.
	In those kind of cases, there's some kind of, those very, very rare cases where that happens.
	There's some, always some kind of extenuating circumstances that I don't feel prepared
	to turn that over to the government.
	So that, you know, you and I all differ on that, and that's just a place where I differ, and I understand your position.
	I have tremendous respect for you.
	I'm for, you know, for having that kind of absolute moral clarity on that position.
	But I think it's more nuanced and complex than that.
	So, you know, we only have a few more minutes.
	I want to ask you about the theme of your campaign and your hope for the country.
	So obviously, most Americans are incredibly pessimistic about the future.
	Young Americans in particular are very pessimistic about the future.
	It does feel like things are falling apart on the foreign front.
	It feels like at home, despite the fact we have a low unemployment rate, it does feel
	as though things are falling apart economically speaking with high inflation.
	Americans' hopes seem to be at low ebb right now in the country, which I'm sure is one
	reason why you're doing so well as an independent candidate.
	What do you think is the prospect of America being able to turn this around, given all
	of the systemic obstacles that you're talking about?
	I feel 100% confident that I'll be able to turn it around as president.
	I have practically zero confidence that President Trump or President Biden will be able to do
	that.
	And I don't, I stay away from personal criticism of either of them.
	I try to be respectful, particularly, they held the highest office in the land,
	but I just think we all need to be able to talk to each other
	in a way that steps back from the rancor and from the vitriol and from the vilification
	and demonization of each other.
	The issues that are most critical like to this generation of kids, my kids' generation,
	the big promise of the American dream when I was a kid was that if you worked hard and you played by the rules
	that you could finance a house, you could take a summer vacation, you could raise a family,
	you could put something aside for your retirement on one job.
	And there is not a single member of my kids' generation that believes that that promise applies to them.
	them. One of my sons is 39 years old and he owns a home.
	But all the other ones went to the best schools in our country, the best schools you could
	possibly go to. They're smart, they're very capable, they have great jobs. None of
	them is looking for a house because it's just out of their reach and none of us are
	generated.
	You don't own a home.
	I mean, you're talking about community.
	We need to reestablish the ownership society here, because that's the only way America survives.
	If you own a home, you care about your community.
	You care about the police, the firefighters, you show up at the PTA meeting, you care about the transportation, you care about the appearance of your property, and you care about your neighbors.
	If you, you know, once you become a renter, which is what BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard want us all, you know, this is the new oligarch, this feudal oligarchy of, you know, controlling the land base.
	We go from being citizens to being the subjects.
	And the main thing is that if you own property, you have equity, which means you can Entrepreneurial impulses.
	So if you decide, I want to build a yoga studio, or a bowling alley, or a juice bar, or you know, whatever, you can borrow on your house, you can beg your house on it, and then you can go to the bank and get that money, and you can, and that's why, one of the reasons that our country exploded.
	The American middle class after World War II became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
	And a large part of that, you know, of course we had destroyed the industrial base of Europe and we owned everything.
	But also we put that, we spent that money wisely in making sure every veteran got into a house, every member of that generation basically.
	was able to own a home and you had this ferment of entrepreneurial energy, what Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius that was released.
	And, you know, when I was in 1960, when I was a kid, we owned half the wealth on the face of the earth.
	And it wasn't owned by an oligarchy.
	It was owned by the American middle class.
	And, you know, we've adopted a lot of policies, and particularly the way the Fed is operated, which is a criminal agency, right?
	It's just a vacuum cleaner for Wall Street to shift wealth upward to this kleptocracy.
	And it's a captured agency.
	You know, they're all captured, right?
	The CIA is captured by the military industrial complex.
	Its function is just to give us a pipeline of new wars.
	The Fed is captured by Wall Street to consolidate all the banks, so all of them are too big to fail.
	You know, it's not making more banks, right?
	It's making fewer and fewer every year.
	And it's all, you know, it's all designed to shift wealth upward, and we financialize the economy.
	and destroyed our industrial base, and we need to reverse those policies.
	And the good news is this.
	We have a terrible, you know, economic forecast, right?
	We have the most entrepreneurial and imaginative entrepreneurs in the world in this country.
	You don't see that.
	I travel all over the world, and everybody says something unusual about the United States.
	The entrepreneurial energy of this country is extraordinary.
	And, you know, We can encourage that.
	The Australians did it with this superannuation program that gives everybody a little piece of the stock market, you know, and they have to hold it.
	And they choose which investments to make.
	So you're educating an entire generation.
	Financial IQ.
	I want to do everything I can to do it.
	The other thing, we have terrible soils in this country, but we have the most imaginative farmers and regenerative agriculture.
	We have the worst health in the world in this country, but we have the best doctors, these integrative medicine and allopathic, integrative medicine, functional medicine doctors.
	We're doing all this breakthrough science, the very, very new, exciting technology, and when you unify it with AI, The potential is extraordinary.
	So I think there's a tremendous reason to hope in this country if we have the right leadership.
	And the reason I'm running is because I just don't believe that President Biden, who I've known for many years and like personally, that he has any capacity to even see over the horizon and see which direction and provide the kind of leadership that we're going to need to make this transition.
	Listen, President Trump, President Biden both had a chance.
	If you want more of the same, you know what you're going to get if you elect them.
	You're going to get more polarization.
	You're going to get more, you know, more debt.
	The more chronic disease, if you want more of that, then you should vote for them.
	If you want something completely different, if you want this country to live up to its idealism, to have people listen, to have a president who actually wants to build communities, who wants to bring us together, actually, Then you'll be supporting me.
	Final question for you.
	You look back at the 1968 campaign in which your father was murdered, and now you're running for President of the United States.
	That must be emotionally a journey for you.
	If you can describe what that's like.
	Well, there's a lot of parallels between my father's run in 1968.
	My father ran at a time, he ran against a war, which is what I'm doing.
	He ran at a time that there was greater division in our country than any time since the Civil War.
	And, you know, it's comparable to what we have today.
	You had actually I think the night that Martin Luther King died, over 100 cities burned.
	You know, we haven't seen that yet, right?
	There were terrorist groups that were bombing buildings on campuses in New York City.
	The army National Guard was shooting people on campuses.
	You had civil rights issues, Vietnam, mass protests, all this.
	So it was a really divided country.
	My father, on the last day of his life, he won the most rural state in our country, South Dakota, and the most urban state, California.
	And he succeeded in bridging that gap.
	He was also running against the impossible odds.
	Nobody gave him a chance.
	He didn't have, you know, every power structure was against him.
	The liberal media from the New York Times and the Village Voice were all horrified, appalled by his running.
	The labor unions who, he had run my uncle's campaign in 60, so eight years earlier, and he had all the labor unions.
	This time, The only unions, all the unions were against him, except for the UAW and for the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez Union.
	He had all the big city mayors against him.
	You know, they had all been for him in 1960.
	Mayor Daley was, you know, angry and threatening.
	So my father really didn't have any of the, and all of the New Frontier people who he had brought into office, We're all working for Johnson.
	So they were in the White House.
	So he didn't even have his team.
	And, you know, he ran.
	And, you know, a month later, Johnson withdrew from the race.
	And then my father started winning the primaries in the last day of his life.
	He won the primaries.
	One of the last calls he took was from Mayor Daley saying, you know, Mayor Daley controlled the delegates in Chicago.
	So he would have gotten the The nomination, and he'd already beaten Hubert Humphrey once in 60.
	He'd already beaten Nixon once in 60.
	I think he had a very clear path to the White House.
	I look at that.
	I was there.
	I was 14 years old.
	I was with my dad when he died in Los Angeles.
	But I look at his history of that campaign, and I take inspiration and hope from it.
	Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., really appreciate your time, and obviously good luck in the campaign.
	Yeah, thank you very much, man.
	Thanks for having me.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Savannah Dominguez Morris.
	Associate producer is Jake Pollock.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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