INTERVIEW: RFK Jr. on Russiagate, Israel/Roger Waters, JFK Assassination, Ukraine, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #97
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has long followed a trajectory that made him an ideal Democrat and a beloved liberal.
He obviously bears the name of one of the most admired political families of the 20th century in the Democratic Party.
His father was the Attorney General of the United States, a senator from New York, and one of the most consequential primary challengers to a sitting American president, having driven President Lyndon Johnson out of the race in 1968 with his surging campaign based on his opposition to the Vietnam War, which LBJ had championed in that Campaign ended only when his father was assassinated.
And with a pedigree from Harvard and the London School of Economics, he was also a longtime environmental lawyer.
But rather than simply slotting himself into the easy path available to him as the progeny of one of America's most storied political families, he has instead chosen the much more difficult path Being an independent thinker, a dissident to some of the political establishment's most cherished pieties, and is now featuring a deeply heterodox and trans-partisan platform on the basis of which he's seeking the Democratic Party nomination against the incumbent President Joe Biden.
It's hard to pin down RFK Jr.
ideologically, as is true of almost anyone interesting these days.
He has become an outspoken opponent of the U.S.
proxy war in Ukraine, a vehement critic of the U.S.
security state, especially the CIA and FBI, and an ardent opponent of the extremes of corporatist and crony capitalism, warning that the U.S.
has become a corporatist oligarchy, all as a result of a government that relies on a merger of state and corporate power for the benefit of a tiny wealthy elite.
All of those views comfortably fit into the mainstream left-liberal political framework of the past.
But other views he advocates, including his skepticism about vaccines, his harsh criticism of COVID orthodoxies and the health policy establishment that imposed them, and his warnings about the crisis of the border, are harder to place.
And he's as comfortable speaking with Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon as he is traditional allies in the Democratic Party.
But something about his candidacy is exciting Democratic voters.
Some of that could be the affection Democrats harbor for his family name, while part of it is likely just a generalized dissatisfaction with Joe Biden and concern about whether he's able to withstand the rigors of a COVID-free, full presidential campaign to say nothing of four more years of governing.
But there must be more to it than that.
RFK Jr.
has been making the rounds in media for months now, and the support he's claiming among Democratic voters is only increasing.
The latest polls show him with 20% of Democratic voters supporting him, while another 8% support Biden's other primary challenger, Marianne Williamson.
Democratic Party elites and their media allies may want to pretend it's not true, but there is clearly a real primary challenge to Joe Biden, and right now the leading challenger is RFK Jr.
We're excited to sit down with him and speak with him today about a broad range of issues, including what led him to launch this primary bid from within the Democratic Party, the extent to which he's willing to go to advocate and pursue his heterodox agenda, and why he's become such an outspoken critic of the U.S.
security state and its foreign policy community, both regarding Ukraine and far beyond.
Here's our interview tonight with RFK Jr. - So first of all, congratulations on announcing your run for president.
It's obviously not an easy thing to do and we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about your candidacy.
Thanks for joining us.
It's a pleasure to be here, Glenn.
Absolutely.
Pleasure to talk to you.
So let me start off.
We've interviewed a couple of other presidential candidates and I've asked this same question as the first one, which is, I do think it takes a lot to run for president.
It is sometimes a thankless thing to do, especially challenging a sitting president in your own party.
I believe to do that, you have to have some pretty strong policy objections to how the government is currently conducting itself.
What are the kind of core motivating issues that caused you to decide to run?
Well, I think, you know, when I first started thinking about it, the core issue was the management of the COVID crisis and particularly the lockdowns, which seemed just, you know, really inadvised which seemed just, you know, really inadvised and a bad policy from the beginning.
They were countered to everything that WHO, that CDC, that the European Medical Agency, and the NHS, National Health Service, and England, on all their standard pandemic preparedness protocols, had always Advise against general lockdowns.
D.A.
Henderson, who was the deity of pandemic response, who is the guy who almost single-handedly extinguished smallpox, also wrote these extraordinary Essays and white papers saying how bad it would be to ever do a generalized lockdown.
Everybody knew it was wrong, and yet they did it, and even when all the evidence was rolling in that it was having this calamitous effect not only on mortalities and, you know, having no effect against the disease, but was having this really traumatic effect on our society.
I, you know, at that point, Republicans and Democrats were all supporting lockdowns, and I could see that it just seemed wrong to me.
And then the censorship that came from people who protested the lockdowns seemed antithetical to American traditions and values, and particularly the values of my political party.
And yet the White House suddenly, for the first time in history, was collaborating with Social media and media outlets to censor political dissent and criticisms of White House policies.
And then the war in Iraq.
I mean, the war in Ukraine just It was one of the last straws because it was, again, being sold to the American public with the same kind of comic book depictions that we saw for the Iraq War and for the Vietnam War and all these other wars.
And it just, it seemed like, you know, and again, you had both political parties, at least it used to be, there'd be some Democrats opposing these new forever wars, now that the opposition had utterly disappeared.
And I saw the neocons, the same neocons we thought we had run out of town after the Iraq war and were pariahs and would never be allowed near a government agency again, suddenly were flooding the White House the same as they did in Yeah, we'll definitely get to those and I definitely want to dig a little bit deeper into those two in particular as well.
Before I do though, I just want to ask a couple of questions kind of more broadly about your candidacy.
I have, I can go on. - Yeah, well, we'll definitely get to those.
And I definitely wanna dig a little bit deeper into those two in particular as well.
Before I do though, I just wanna ask a couple of questions kind of more broadly about your candidacy.
I've heard you talk before about the presidential primary challenge your father ran against LBJ in 1968 that drove him out of the race.
And it was largely based on his opposition to the Vietnam War.
Your uncle, Ted Kennedy, ran a presidential primary challenge against the then sitting president, Jimmy Carter in 1980.
And that to me is kind of a model for how this can work.
On the other hand, it also illustrates the fact that you do come from this very well-known and dynastic political family.
I remember in 2016 when people thought it would be Jeb Bush against Hillary Clinton, the son and brother of a former president The wife of a former president.
People were talking about the problematic nature of running our politics dynastically.
That power just gets kind of passed back and forth between a small handful of very wealthy and well-known families.
Is that a valid concern when it comes to people's concerns about American democracy more broadly?
I don't know.
I mean, I can't really help who I am, so I can't really change that.
So I focus on the things that I can change.
And the things that I feel like I can change are, you know, are the policies.
And, you know, my family, Name gives me a higher profile, it gives me a voice, it gives me accessibility to some of the levers of power, the media, etc.
So I'm just going to try to use that as best I can.
The fact that you do have this kind of, you know, connection to this storied family and it does give you access to American media channels makes it, to me at least, kind of remarkable, shocking even, that the posture of the Democratic Party in the Biden White House thus far seems to simply pretend that you don't exist.
Their explicit view is there is no primary.
To be conducted.
There's no reason to have any presidential debates within the Democratic Party.
They basically want to pretend you don't exist even though you're already at 20% in the polls before the campaign has really even gotten underway.
What is your strategy to change that?
To force the Democratic Party to acknowledge the existence of your campaign and most importantly of all to have debates so Democratic voters can decide?
Well, I think realistically, Glenn, the only way that I'm going to force the Democratic Party to acknowledge my existence is by winning a couple of primaries.
And so, you know, that's what I'm focused on.
And I've been, you know, over three years of being blanket censored and 18 years of being at least throttled and, you know, and censored on many, many of the mainstream outlets.
I've developed a series of strategies for end running the mainstream media, the corporate media.
It's not just the White House that's trying to censor me, but a lot of the allied media groups, you know, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and some of the others that are very, very closely allied with the White House, the Daily Beast, even nowadays Rolling Stone. the Daily Beast, even nowadays Rolling Stone.
And, you know, but there are, because of the social media, for example, Twitter allows me to communicate with large parts of the American public without getting permission, without those gatekeepers in the corporate press. without those gatekeepers in the corporate press.
My uncle ran in 1960 at a time when television had only recently become ubiquitous, and my uncle recognized that that media was very friendly to him for a variety of reasons.
And he took advantage of that and it helped him win the White House.
President Trump in 2016 recognized that Twitter was a very friendly medium for his style of politicking.
And a lot of people saw how he was using Twitter at the beginning and thought, oh, he's going to self-implode.
This is, you know, he's gone.
He's doing extreme of consciousness on Twitter with no filter and no gatekeepers and everybody's going to see how nuts he is.
And the opposite happened.
I think that his relationship with Twitter really helped him get into the White House.
I think this year there's a new technology.
Which is podcasts.
And, you know, podcasts are reaching lots and lots of people.
Joe Rogan reaches a hundred times what the typical CNN audience is.
I think Tucker's new Twitter space reached 110 million people last week.
That's more than any media, you know, probably since, you know, I don't know, maybe ever.
Um, and so, uh, so, and I, you know, I've been able to get on the podcast.
People are allowing me on without, uh, censoring me.
And it's a very, it's a good media for me because my worst media Glenn is a short soundbite TV network TV show for a couple of reasons.
One, I'm, I'm really not good at spinning stuff.
You know, I don't feel comfortable with it.
And number two, My voice really doesn't kick in for the first five minutes of a broadcast, so after I talk for a while, either people get used to hearing me and can decipher what I'm saying, or my voice also just gets better after the longer that I'm talking.
If I can interject there, because I think there's a really interesting component to what you're saying.
I think that the kind of collapse of the authority of the corporate media, along with the explosion of independent media, as you're describing, is one of the greatest causes for optimism.
Noam Chomsky has talked for a long time about the fact that the kind of concision requirement of corporate television, where you basically have to answer everything in 90 seconds, you have to speak in 7-minute bursts between television commercials.
Does Morda ensure that prevailing establishment orthodoxies get affirmed?
Because if you want to affirm establishment orthodoxies, you don't need much time.
You just go on and say, the Russians are evil, we have to protect democracy, and everybody nods.
But if you want to delve into the reason why this propaganda is so pervasive, you need time.
You need a format.
to kind of be able to develop an argument to convince people that they've been deceived and propagandized.
I'm wondering whether that's something that you see as a challenge as well, that as someone who's really kind of a dissident now, a critic of establishment thinking on COVID, on Ukraine and lots of other things, whether the constraints of television make it more difficult for you to kind of make your case.
You know what the Overton window is, right?
Yeah, of course.
Okay, why don't you tell people what the Overton window is?
Yeah, so the Overton Window, the idea is it kind of defines what the acceptable views are for people to say or think.
So if you're able to move that Overton Window by kind of bringing into mainstream discourse ideas that had been relegated to the margins or even declared taboo, you open and expand the range of opinions that people will consider.
Yeah, and I think the podcasts do that because in a You know, it allows for different, the color and the richness and the gray areas of all these debates, you know, that you can get away from this.
This, as I said, this kind of comic book depiction that, you know, Vladimir Putin is Darth Vader and, you know, Zelensky is, you know, is, into that again.
And you can talk about some of the provocations that the United States was involved in and the neocons in the White House.
And you can talk about the Ace Off Battalion and suppression of the press.
And some of the nuance here, and you cannot do that on the mainstream corporate media.
The Overton window is very narrow about what you're allowed to talk about And, you know, and if you say anything outside of those parameters, you become a conspiracy theorist.
Exactly.
They just snickered.
They didn't even need to make an argument.
There's no time to make an argument.
In fact, let me just ask you this one last question, kind of like about the candidacy itself before we delve into the substance, which I'm excited to do.
You alluded earlier to the fact that you think the Democratic Party has kind of changed and the fact that neocons have kind of re-migrated back to the Democratic Party.
It has this very bellicose foreign policy.
There's no space.
Every single last Democrat in the Democratic Party voted to fund the proxy war in Ukraine.
Not a single no vote.
What is your posture toward the Democratic Party in the sense that obviously you want to talk about what you will do if you do get the nomination and you do win.
I think we have to acknowledge though there's a possibility that you might not.
If Joe Biden does end up as the nominee of the Democratic Party, would you endorse and support him regardless of who the Republican nominee is, regardless of what other third-party candidates there are?
Are you open to supporting a non-Democratic Party candidate?
Yeah, I'm going to say that I don't have a plan B.
I'm focused on plan A, which is winning.
All right, fair enough.
A couple weeks ago I was talking about your candidacy and doing so in a largely positive way, but alluded to the fact that there were some differences I had with you.
Mentioned the fact that you seemed to me to be a kind of vehement supporter of Russiagate.
Your campaign contacted me, said they thought that was an unfair characterization.
I went back and looked and concluded that at least it was excessive.
And I went on the air a couple days later and kind of withdrew that characterization and said there's no need for me to kind of try and describe his views because he's going to be here and I can ask him.
So here you are.
In terms of this Russiagate narrative that really dominated our politics for five or six years, and the two prongs of it were that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Kremlin to hack into the DMC emails and manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election, and the subsidiary claim was that Trump was some sort of a puppet of Vladimir Putin or controlled by the Kremlin due to blackmail and other leverage.
What is your view now about the veracity of those two claims?
Well, I think that there was a period, which you're correct about, that I just accepted the mainstream narrative.
And, you know, part of that is just my own fault of not being skeptical about it.
And part of it also may have been just my natal, you know, bias against Donald Trump, which I, you know, I was like most Democrats, I was probably just, Happy to hear anything that confirmed my own notion of Donald Trump.
The first time that I had any kind of inkling that that narrative may not be complete or accurate was when I was having dinner with Oliver Stone.
Oliver Stone lives about a half mile from where I live, and he had Cheryl and I for dinner one night with his son Sean, who's a podcaster and a political critic.
The two of them, I don't know how it came up, but maybe one of us, Cheryl, I mentioned it, Um, but he scoffed in a way that was very dismissive and, uh, and then had a sort of a brief dialogue about, um, a brief monologue about how there was nothing to that story.
And it seemed to me, you know, and you, of course you're, you're with Oliver Stone.
So you think, well, he's a guy who's embracing French theories anyway.
And, you know, you never, you just don't know, but it, but it put the first seed of doubt into my head.
And then.
In 2020, when people started criticizing, including myself, the methodology that was being used to prove the COVID vaccines, I all of a sudden started seeing these propaganda tropes, or these tropes that were appearing all the time, saying anybody who Criticized vaccines is probably a Russian.
Oh, okay.
So here's what they're doing.
And, uh, and it, you know, it may be orchestrated and then as the, uh, as the, you know, I think at that point I was open to hearing a different story.
And then I started seeing the piles of evidence and, but I still was neutral on it.
I mean, in my mind, the jury was out on this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I focused on it so much was not necessarily because I thought it was an unfair and baseless conspiracy theory that was being propagated by the U.S.
security state and the corporate media, which I do think it was.
I thought the much more important implication It was essentially making it so that it was virtually criminalized, inherently so, for American officials to talk to Russian officials.
Michael Flynn almost went to prison for calling the Russian ambassador to talk about US-Russian relations.
People were petrified of having conversations with Russians because of fear that it would be used to suggest they were sort of a Kremlin loyalist or a traitor.
When I look now at the kind of fervor, the anti-Russian fervor that's driving the war in Ukraine, to me a lot of it seems to have come from this kind of anti-Russian sentiment that Democrats in particular were encouraged to feed on for all these years as part of Russiagate, going back to 2016 when they blamed Russia rather than the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton for her defeat.
I'm wondering if that's something that concerns you, this idea that so many Americans are being taught to view the Russians kind of the way we looked at them in the Cold War as this grave existential threat to the United States, and that in part is what is driving what you described as this bellicose mindset toward Moscow.
The answer to your question is yes.
I, you know, I now I see in some way that Ukraine, that I see a lot of those, you know, that the Russian propaganda tropes that we were being, that we were being force fed through the mainstream media and always, you know, with the source to a U.S.
intelligence agent, an unnamed U.S.
intelligence agency, which is always suspect.
Uh, and usually coming out of the Washington Post and the New York Times, which, you know, have these deep relation, almost Mockingbird like relationships with the U.S.
intelligence agencies.
And now I see that as kind of the runway to the, uh, to the Ukraine or that it was all, you know, that we were being, Right.
Let me ask you about a recent controversy in which you found yourself.
More as a window to understand some of your broader views, which was the praise you originally offered for Roger Waters with regard to his stance on both Ukraine, which he is opposed to in terms of the U.S.
proxy war, as well as COVID.
He was questioning a lot of the same Orthodoxy as you were, and then you ended up deleting that tweet where you praised him and made clear that the reason was because he had held views on Israel and Palestine that you didn't share.
I want to ask you about the specific kind of divergencies that you have with him on that question.
But before I get into that, why was it necessary for you to delete your praise for Roger Waters just because you disagree with him on Israel?
Can't you praise him on Ukraine and COVID and then at the same time say, but there are other issues including Israel where I have differences?
Why did you delete the praise entirely?
Well, first of all, the reasons that I praised him was because of his position on the war, his position on COVID, which I thought was very courageous at a time when nobody and also his position on Julian Assange.
Right.
I disagree, I would say fiercely, with his criticism of Israel.
And I'm not, you know, there are enough people who characterize those political differences anti-Semitic that me endorsing him felt like I was buying into that, you know, into there are enough people who characterize those political differences anti-Semitic that me endorsing him felt like I was buying I'm not.
I really disagree with his thinking, Roger, like many critics.
First of all, people who criticize Israeli policy should not be characterized as anti-Semitic.
Look, people who apply a different standard to judging Israel than they would to judging an Arab country, I think then that you've crossed a line there.
And I do think that Roger does that.
You know, I've now looked at some of his stuff and I think You know, like I said, I do not think that people who criticize Israel policies should not be called anti-Semitic, but I do think that many people are applying, or Israel's critics are applying, a double standard.
So just to be clear, when you were interviewed by Crystal Ball on Breaking Point, it became kind of a very talked about interview, particularly the part where she was disagreeing with you about your view on vaccines.
We did a segment on this show talking about that interview and my main critique with her, and she's a friend of mine.
Was that I didn't have a problem with her disagreeing with your views on vaccines.
Lots of people do.
She described it, though, as a red line, which seemed to me her way of saying, I don't disagree with you here, but you're so far beyond the pale about an issue that I regard is so sacred that the fact that I disagree with you here means you're basically off limits, like you're radioactive.
You're not susceptible to consideration for support no matter what, in a way that, say, Joe Biden wouldn't be.
That's the impression I got when you didn't just disagree with Roger Waters on Israel, but deleted the praise.
Namely, it doesn't matter how much I agree with him.
I regard him as a person who's so radioactive that he should never be praised under any circumstances because of his view on Israel.
That's a red line for me.
Is that essentially what motivated your deletion and how you view people like Roger Waters and those who share his views on Israel?
No, not at all.
In fact, I continue to admire Roger Waters.
Or his positions on, you know, for his courageous positions on the Ukraine, on Julian Assange, on COVID, but, you know, my, because of the, that issue is so sensitive and radioactive to people.
I did not want to leave any, any opportunity for Peter to misunderstand, since apparently, I guess, as I understand it now, he's more well known for his anti-Israel position than probably any other position.
And so me charging me, praising him without making really clear what I was praising him for, and that I did not buy into his other stuff, was a source of confusion to people that I did not want to leave up there.
Fair enough.
I mean, I think the reason why he's most known for that is sometimes the same reason you're most known for your views on vaccines, even though you have views on lots of other things, which is because a lot of times people look for ways to take establishment critics and kind of render them radioactive by focusing on the one issue they know people will be most hostile to.
But let me let me ask you about the substance of the Israel position.
You know, you alluded to the fact that your family had long been supporters of Israel.
That was kind of the standard Democratic Party position for a long time, still is.
At the same time, Israel has clearly changed over the years.
The demographic shifts in the population have made it a much more religious society, more right-wing society.
And I think any honest observer in the region or anywhere acknowledges that a two-state solution, the kind of way that people justify defending Israel, is now essentially impossible.
There's way too many settlements in the West Bank and those people are never moving, those settlers.
You'd need a civil war between the government and Israel to do it.
From the position of someone who's running for U.S.
President, would your view be that the U.S.
should continue to provide billions of dollars every year in aid to Israel unconditionally, meaning no matter how they treat the Palestinians, no matter what it is that they become politically, or would you condition that aid on them treating the Palestinians more humanely and more fairly?
Yeah, I mean, that's a long and complex question, and I've been to Israel, I've visited, Specifically, Palestinian settlements within Israel and in, however you want to call it, West Bank or Judea and Samaria.
I've been visited, I've spoken with government officials there.
I understand that Palestinians are mistreated in Israel.
I've seen, you know, the water allocations that were very, very unfairly allocated to the new settlements rather than to traditional settlements that have been In terms of the evolution, I think everything has a historical context in Israel.
And if you look at why we don't have a two-step, two-state solution in Israel, which everybody now says they want, But both in 1947 and 1948, and then again in 2001, it was the Palestinian leadership that walked away from a two-state solution and pledged itself to the destruction of the Jewish people.
And that's a very, very clear history, and I think at a time when they had a very, very generous solution on the table.
Now, the other thing I say is, Israel is a democracy.
But it's a flawed democracy, just like the United States.
If I was a dissonant Arab-Palestinian, would I rather be a dissonant in Israel or in Saudi Arabia or Oman or Qatar or any other Arab nation?
If you're a dissonant, you get up in the middle of the public square, And denounce the government, where would you rather be?
You'd rather be in Israel, because it's the only place you're not going to get in trouble.
And that does not mean that it's a perfect democracy.
It isn't.
It's very, very flawed.
And I do not, you know, I differ vociferously with the views of the right-wing, religious right-wing groups that have, in many ways, been dictating policy in Israel over the last few years.
I think part of the responsibility of the United States is to try to find a path to justice for the Palestinians.
But on all these issues, you know, if you live in any of these other countries and you're gay, for example, you can be killed for that.
Israel is the only place where you have freedom.
If you're a transvestite, if you have other kind of dissonant views, You'd much rather be in Israel than any other place.
I get that argument.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
You can finish.
I just wanted to ask you.
You know, Israel, you know, and we need to have the same standard for judging Israel as we judge other Arab countries.
And Israel is going into the West Bank and killing children.
It's never doing that deliberately.
Never.
And nobody has ever said it is.
Well, a lot of people have said it is.
But let me just ask you, because I just want to focus... In all of those other countries, it is the deliberate policy of those countries to attack and target civilians and to kill them.
Okay, so let me just... I just want to focus the question, though, because you have the kind of abstract question that you're talking about, which is who's better, Israel or Saudi Arabia?
And I don't think anybody would doubt you'd rather live in Israel than Saudi Arabia if that's the choice.
Just like people say, I'd rather live in Ukraine than Russia.
Ukraine seems more democratic to me than Russia.
But when it comes to Ukraine, I've heard you making the argument that even though Ukraine might be our ally, even though they might be more democratic than Russia, We have so many people that you speak eloquently about suffering here at home that this is a word we can't afford.
So if you were to go around the United States, as you're already doing and will continue to do, and the question is not who's better, the Israeli or the Palestinians, the question is why are we in the United States transferring billions of dollars of aid each year to a country, Israel, whose citizens in a lot of ways enjoy better standards of living than a lot of the ways American citizens live, What is your argument for why we should send so much money to Israel but not to Ukraine?
Well, I mean, historically, that argument has been that Israel is a model democracy in the Mideast.
It's the only democracy in the Mideast.
And as a democracy, it's a model for peacekeeping.
And there's never been a time in history when a democracy has gone to war with another democracy.
So I think our policy in the United States should be to support the The growth of democracies around the world.
But that was the argument for going into invading Iraq.
We're going to spread democracy in the Middle East.
That's the argument for supporting the Ukrainians, which is the Ukrainians are a democracy and Russia is an autocracy.
Glenn, I agree with you, but I do think there's a difference between...
What we did in Iraq, which is imposing a U.S.
system, which I don't think was really democracy at the point of a gun, and going in a preemptive war, which we've never done in our history, on a pretext in which we lied to the American public about weapons of mass destruction.
And, you know, and our policy of assisting an existing democracy in the Mideast that has had a long relationship with our country and long and supportive relationship with our country.
But, you know, I think you raised some important points.
I think it probably, at this point in history, Israel is much better able to take care of itself than it was in the past, and we need to look at all those things.
Just on the question of the history of doing a preemptive war to impose democracy at the point of a gun, the specter of Vietnam hangs a lot over your candidacy, in part because your father did drive out a Democratic incumbent based on his opposition to the Vietnam War in a way that I think could be a model for your candidacy, but also because Your uncle and then the administration of which your father was a part as well, which is the Johnson administration, is credited or blamed for starting the war.
Do you see the war in Vietnam also as an example of a war started based on false pretenses with the Gulf of Tonkin, one where we tried to impose democracy at the point of a rifle?
Yeah, of course.
We were trying to stop democracy.
The U.S.
objective in Vietnam was literally trying to stop the effect of democracy.
Ho Chi Minh had fought side by side with Americans against the Japanese.
In fact, he called his army the American Liberation Army because he had such admiration for the United States.
During World War II, the French were, of course, captured by Germany, and they withdrew from Southeast Asia, which was their major source of income.
And after the war, because of the Atlantic Charter, the agreement was that the people of Vietnam could vote on whether they wanted Ho Chi Minh to lead them or whether they wanted some other government.
And when it became clear that they were going to vote overwhelmingly, For Ho Chi Minh and the communist government, the CIA went in there with the French and made sure that those elections never took place.
I want to clarify my uncle's position on Vietnam.
He was surrounded by war hawks who were trying to get him to go into first Laos, which he refused, and they considered that treasonous.
And then to Vietnam, both his intelligence apparatus and his military brass.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were trying to get him for his entire term, his three years in office, to send 250,000 combat troops to Vietnam.
He refused.
He thought Vietnam should Fight its own wars.
But he said, I'll send some advisors in, just the way that the French sent us advisors during the Revolutionary War.
They're not going to fight.
And he never sent one combat troop into Vietnam.
Of course, the advisors under the rules of engagement were not allowed to fight, but many of them did.
A month before he died, there were 16,000 of them, and that's the maximum he would send, even though he was being asked to send 250,000.
He sent fewer troops to Vietnam than he sent to Ole Miss to put James Meredith into the University of Mississippi.
In Jackson, University of Mississippi, one black man.
So there were fewer troops in Vietnam than he sent who were Green Berets.
They were helicopter instructors and other kind of instructors.
A month before he died, he heard that Green Beret had been killed in Vietnam.
And he asked one of his aides, give me the entire combat fatality list in Vietnam.
And they came back to him and there were 75 Americans who had been killed, which he didn't know.
And that day, he said, I want them all out.
That's too many men, too many deaths.
And he signed a national security order ordering all American troops home from Vietnam by the end of 1965, with the first thousand out by December of 64, which would have been a month later.
November of 64, or 63, sorry, by December of 64, a thousand out.
So they would have had to be out during the month of November, December.
November 22nd, he was killed.
And a week later, President Johnson came in, revoked that order, and left those troops in Vietnam.
And then a year later, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which of course was a, I guess you'd call it a false flag event.
It was a non-event that was, you know, that was pretended to be a military attack on our Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin that never took place.
I mean, Johnson himself said, Those boys were shooting against flying fish.
They weren't against an attack by the Viet Cong or by the Army of North Vietnam.
And we then sent 250,000 in and then my father ran against Johnson.
He was killed.
Nixon gets elected and then sends 568,000 in.
So, you know, blaming my uncle for Vietnam is a stretch, although my father did accept that blame, but he, you know, he shouldn't have.
There's, I think one of the most amazing parts of our political discourse, and it's amazing people accept it, is that a lot of documents, key documents, relating to your uncle's assassination continue to be classified 60 years later, even though almost everybody involved, not everybody, but almost everybody involved is dead for quite a long time.
Do you believe that his resistance to escalating the war in Vietnam in the way you just described was a reason For that assassination, indeed, would you intend to declassify all of those documents immediately upon being president?
I mean, legally, they gotta be declassified.
They should have been declassified in 2016.
Trump promised he'd do it, and then he never did it.
Who knows why they didn't do it.
That is a real mystery, because he doesn't like the CIA much, so I don't know why he didn't declassify them.
Of course I would declassify them.
This is a 60-year-old murder.
Why are they still hiding stuff?
All the people who were involved in it are dead.
Why is the institution of the CIA?
Still hiding material on my uncle's death.
It's a good question.
Let me ask you about Ukraine.
Just one more question, which is, I've heard you before criticize President Biden the way a lot of people have, that it seems very striking.
There's no effort, seemingly, to try and end this war diplomatically.
If anything, there seems to be an attempt on the United States to block diplomatic efforts to end this war.
Do you think it would have been possible to diplomatically avert the war beforehand or to end it now?
And if so, how would you do that?
Yeah, I think it could be ended immediately.
To me, it seems clear that Putin did not want this war, that he didn't, you know, that, I mean, even in, you know, when the Donbass voted 90 to 10 to join Russia, Putin didn't Putin said, no, you stay in Ukraine.
And then, you know, he was part of the proposal of the Minsk Accords.
Which would have left Donbass part of Ukraine and, you know, an autonomous region so that they could protect their Russian ethnic citizens who were then being murdered by the Azov battalion and by the Ukrainian government.
And that they could continue to practice their own language and culture And with that, you know, I think that's the basis for a peace agreement.
And the key part of the Minsk Accords was that NATO would not go into, would agree permanently, we are not going into Ukraine, which is an understandable request from Russia, who has been invaded three times through the Ukraine.
The last time in 1940, '41, one out of every seven Russians was killed.
And a third of the Russians were, a Russian was reduced to rubble.
So of course they don't want an enemy military in charge of the Ukraine.
And they made that clear since 1992, since they took the wall down and the one request they made, He said, you can put NATO troops in United Germany.
We will withdraw 400,000 troops from United Germany, but do not make us a promise.
You will not move NATO to the east.
And we promised them, yeah, we won't move it one inch to the east.
Well, we moved it a thousand miles to the east and to 14 new countries.
And now we've surrounded and encircled the Russians and we're treating them like the enemy.
And of course, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then, you know, Glenn, the clear evidence that the United States was involved in the 2014 coup that removed Viktor Yanukovych's government, which is a Russian government, Ukrainian government that was duly elected by the Ukrainian people.
And that we regard it as too sympathetic to the government of Russia.
And so, you know, we pump $5 billion into the project of overthrowing that government.
And then we install our own government, which is Victoria Nuland.
We have her take on the phone, picking the new cabinet.
And of course, the Russians aren't going to like that too much.
Ukraine is 400 miles from Moscow.
And we've already been installing missile systems, Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland that are nuclear capable.
When my uncle, you know, in 1962, when the Russians did that to us in Cuba, we would have invaded them.
Of course we would invade them today.
Exactly.
Let me ask you about China.
You just alluded to the fact that we're treating the Russians baselessly as an enemy.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do you see China in the same way?
Do you see them necessarily as an enemy of the United States who needs to be treated as an enemy?
Or do you think we can also foster more collaborative or at least less antagonistic relationships with Beijing?
Well, I do see them as an adversary of the United States, I think.
They're competitive with us, they're ambitious, and the indications are that the Chinese leadership does want to dominate the globe and have access to the natural resources in the developing world.
But the worst thing, the Chinese do not want to compete with us militarily, and they shouldn't.
I mean, we have three times the military budget than they do.
We spend more on our military than the next top 10 nations combined.
And we have bases all over.
We have 800 bases all over the world.
The Chinese have one and a half bases outside of China.
So they're not looking for a military competition and we shouldn't be either.
I'm not scared of America competing with China on an economic plane.
And I think we should welcome that competition.
It would be good for the Chinese.
Good for the Americans and good for the rest of the world.
We should welcome that and we should de-escalate the military confrontations.
Take the pressure off of China and Taiwan.
Stop, de-escalate that controversy and let them figure it out for themselves.
And let's compete with them.
Let's close most of those bases, bring the money home, get the peace dividend, rebuild our industrial base.
and have an economic competition against the Chinese that's friendly, that's congenial, but that's vigorous and robust.
And I'm not scared of that.
I'm not scared that America cannot outcompete China head to head on economic issues.
One of the flashpoints, obviously, between the U.S.-Chinese relationship is Taiwan.
The peace has been maintained between the two countries based on this one China policy that said everybody recognizes Taiwan as part of China, but the U.S.
would maintain strategic ambiguity in the event of what it would do if China invaded Taiwan and tried to physically control it.
Biden, on several occasions, whether planned or otherwise, seemed to have abandoned that five-decade-old posture of the U.S.
government by saying, no, I absolutely would use military force in order to protect Taiwan in the event the Chinese invaded.
Do you think That China would actually invade Taiwan if we did what you recommend, namely kind of de-escalate, pull back a little bit from surrounding their country with all the bases we have.
And what would be your posture if asked what you would do if China did invade Taiwan?
Would you maintain this ambiguity or would you agree with Biden to say no, we would absolutely go to war with China to stop them?
Well, that strategic ambiguity only works up to the point of invasion.
Once they invade, then your policy is no longer ambiguous.
Strategic ambiguity, I think, is the best posture for the United States, and I intend to maintain it.
So I'm not going to tell you what I would do on this TV show and lose that advantage.
But I don't think the Chinese want a military confrontation with Taiwan.
He's armed to the teeth.
And you know, it's been preparing for 40 years for a war with China, if there's an invasion, to repel an invasion.
It would be a catastrophe for China and the rest of the world if Taiwan went to war and we lost the source of a lot of our computer chips and many, many of the electronics that are now used in Taiwan that are absolutely vital to our industries.
The Chinese have the same dependence.
I don't think the Chinese want to go to war with Taiwan.
Exert pressures to have a greater degree of reunification like they did with Hong Kong, but I think we should try to let them settle it on their own before we start making military threats and rattling sabers, which I think just makes it More difficult for everybody and makes it more likely that we'll end up in a military confrontation.
I think you answered this question in the previous answer, but I just want to be very clear about it because I'm super interested in it, which is you described the way in which you thought, and I think clearly it's true, that the U.S.
has been provoking Russia, kind of expanding NATO right up into its borders, right on the most sensitive part of their border, changing their government, the democratically elected government, from a pro-Russia to an anti-Russia.
Russia government, imagine if the Chinese did that to a government in Mexico while arming them, all the other analogies that you pointed out in the way that we're kind of encircling Russia, making them more aggressive and paranoid.
Do you think we're doing the same thing when it comes to China with all of these bases we're putting in Guam and Australia and South Korea and the Philippines, including nuclear-tipped missiles, sending B-52s that are nuclear capable?
Do you think a lot of what is happening is that the U.S.
itself is being provocative unnecessarily?
Yeah, I think it's the same people as the neocons in the White House and the State Department who want a war with China.
I don't think they're ambiguous about it.
They believe that the United States should use its military force while we still have this incredible superiority.
Dominate the globe with violence.
That is the entire philosophy of the neocons.
And I think it's it's it's been a catastrophe.
Every venture that they brought us into has been a cataclysm and China war.
Without question.
They do not seem to care.
They do not.
I don't know.
We seem to have lost our fear of nuclear war.
It's absolutely incredible.
Like, it's something that just cannot happen, even though we got close on several occasions to having it happen.
Let me conclude by asking you a couple of questions about COVID and vaccines and the like.
You alluded earlier to the fact that The kind of health establishment, health officials at the beginning of the pandemic use things like lockdowns, even though they have long been discredited.
And I've heard you before talk about the fact that obviously things Tony Fauci said and the World Health Organization said ended up being proven untrue.
What do you think the motives there were?
Do you think there was deliberate deceit on the part of these health policy officials?
And what was motivating that behavior?
You know, I never discuss that because I don't know for sure.
If you read my book on Anthony Fauci, I never speculate about what's going on in his head or why he's doing certain things or why Bill Gates does certain things because I don't know.
My currency is facts and provable facts.
I have 2200 footnotes that show what happened and detail and chronicle the decisions that people made that were irrational and that were utterly irrational and that they clearly knew were irrational and I can show that.
But I can't show why they were making those decisions.
And I wouldn't want to speculate about it.
I leave that to other people.
I don't know if you saw it, but this week Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook and Meta, gave an interview in which he said that Facebook was being continuously pressured to censor views about the pandemic and about COVID, about the origins of COVID, about the measures necessary for the lockdown, about the efficacy of vaccines.
And many of those claims that they wanted censored proved to be either highly debatable or in fact true.
In other words, the government was demanding censorship, not just of dissent from their views, but of ideas that were true, including many of the views that you were expressing.
And a lot of those were censored from the internet, from our most significant internet platforms, including questioning the origins of the pandemic and the efficacy of the vaccines and the like.
Obviously, you have concerns about the collaboration between Big Tech and the government when it came to censoring COVID.
You talked about that earlier.
What is your view overall on the way in which the U.S.
security state and Big Tech seem to be collaborating to censor our most important political debates, including on Ukraine, Russiagate, and lots of other questions?
I mean, well, the good news is that I'm becoming more and more convinced At the big tech, you know, everything that happened, Glenn, during the pandemic was obscure.
You know, we saw kind of these outcomes that made no sense and that looked very sinister.
But we really had no way of knowing exactly what was happening.
So it's hard to explain the cooperation.
What levels of cooperation between the big tech companies and the government was happening?
It was clearly happening.
And why was it happening?
How is the government pressuring them?
Was it cooperative?
Were they both in on it?
And I think more and more, the story that we're getting out of Silicon Valley is we didn't want to do it.
They made us do it.
And I think that's encouraging a little bit, because these are the companies that promised us they were going to democratize communications across the globe.
And then they became the primary weapons for totalitarian control of populations.
But And you wonder whether, you know, how much they were, how much was Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Sergey Brin, how much were they embracing enthusiastically the government propaganda efforts.
But I think more and more we're seeing that they were doing it pretty much unwillingly.
At least that's what they're saying now, that it was the government, it was the NSA and the CIA.
That were essentially forcing them to censor things that they knew were true.
Criticism they knew were true.
The whole trope of vaccine misinformation, that phrase from the beginning, we've known from the beginning because we've seen the emails two years ago.
It had nothing to do with factual accuracy or inaccuracy.
It was simply a euphemism for any statement that departed from government orthodoxies and government assurances to the public and government proclamations.
They can't point to a single statement that I've made about vaccines that was inaccurate or about lockdowns or masks or anything else.
Everything that I put up on social media was cited and sourced.
The government databases or to peer reviewed publications.
So, you know, but they were calling it misinformation because they wanted to get rid of it.
They wanted to censor it.
And that's, you know, we fought a revolution in this country and between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died in that, you know, during that period.
in order to make sure that governments couldn't censor its critics.
You know, American citizens are allowed to criticize their government.
That's what the First Amendment says. - Yeah, it would be good if that reality returned.
Just a couple more questions.
You said that, you know, just now that there's nothing that you ever said about vaccines that has been proven untrue.
You know, you can hear all kinds of claims being made about things you believe about vaccines, even though you wrote a bestselling book that was on the New York Times bestseller list that made those views very clear.
There still seems to be some confusion.
I think a lot of it is deliberate.
So let me ask you while you're here, just kind of the core issues.
Do you believe that there are vaccines that provide benefits on the net that you would encourage people to take or that you yourself would take?
And then the second part of that is, do you believe the link between vaccines and the increasing rates of autism has been proven or is that something that you think needs more research?
No, to answer your second question first, science is so overwhelming on the link between vaccines and autism, it needs no further research.
The research is out there, the CDC's own research, you know, the data that we now have that shows that the CDC knew from 1999, when they went out and researched themselves secretly, they hired a A Belgian epidemiologist who ran a team of scientists that went into the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is the biggest repository for vaccine and health information.
It's all the data for the top 10 HMOs, and there's millions and millions of lives in there.
They did a study, Glenn, because this was a definitive study.
They looked at children who got Somebody who got hepatitis B vaccines during the first 30 days of their lives, and they compared that to kids who did not.
In other words, kids who got it later than for 30 days or didn't get them at all.
And there was an 1135% increased risk of autism among the kids who got that vaccine early.
And they knew at that moment what was causing the autism epidemic.
And then they had a two-day meeting In which they decided there's 70 people at that meeting who from all the vaccine companies and all of the health agencies and the academics who were involved in developing and promoting vaccines.
And they had a two-day meeting in which they developed strategies about how to hide that from the American public.
And I got a hold of those transcripts and I published a lot of them.
They're now available on our website.
But from then on, There have been hundreds of studies now, and you can go to our website and look at them that confirm and validate the link between autism and vaccines.
Not only autism, but this entire explosion of chronic disease that began in 1989.
Neurological diseases like ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, and all of those began around 1989 and the same year that the vaccine schedule exploded.
Three vaccines a kid, my kid's got 72 and that vaccine generation is where you see this huge explosion of chronic disease.
I want to say this, it's not the only culprit.
It's clearly a culprit and all of those illnesses are listed on the manufacturer's inserts of those 72 vaccines as vaccine side effects.
Every one of those disease that became epidemic in 89, all of them are lists, they list them themselves as potential side effects from the vaccine, but it's not the only thing.
But I guess the question is, and that was the first part of my question in fairness to you, which was a lot of medications that we take, that everybody would take if they had a certain disease has side effects, things that can go wrong in certain cases when you take them.
So with regard to your view of vaccines, is your view that there are side effects that are taking place that the pharmaceutical industry and government have been lying about and concealing?
Or is it that these vaccines, because of these side effects on the net, are actually do more harm than good?
In other words, are things that should not be taken that you would not want your kids taking that you would not take yourself if you had the choice to do it again?
Yeah, the problem with answering that question is that for all of the vaccines, we do not have the data.
And the reason we don't have the data is vaccines are the only medication that are exempt from pre-licensing placebo-controlled trials.
So the only way that you get that information, Glenn, is if you test a large cohort of people We're vaccinated and and measure them against a large cohort that are unvaccinated and then watch them for about five years and those studies are never done the entire safety study for the hepatitis B vaccine was four days and you won't see anything in four days and the problem and you know you want you need to look at because there's a lot of
side effects that have long incubation periods and long diagnostics horizons that just will remain invisible forever.
And I'll just give you a really good example.
The DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, is the most popular vaccine in the world.
It's given to 161 million African kids a year.
It was no longer given to Americans because it was causing so many injuries.
One in every 300 kids was getting permanent brain damage or dead.
But they're still getting it to kids in Africa and South Asia.
And the Danish government, Bill Gates, when he tried to get money for this program because he said 30 million kids have been saved.
He went to the Danish government in 2017 and he said, well, we use support this program because we're saving all these lives.
And the Danish government said, show us the data.
He couldn't do it.
So they went and did a study in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, where half the kids have been vaccinated over 30 years and half had not between two and three years of age or two and three months of age.
Sorry, two and six months of age.
Half of that period, exactly half were vaccinated, exactly half were not.
And it was a perfect natural experiment.
And when they looked at the data for 30 years, what they found was that the girls who got that vaccine were 10 times more likely to die over the next three months than children who didn't.
And they weren't dying of anything anybody ever associated with the vaccine.
They were not dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
They were protected against it, but they were dying of anemia, and bilharzia, and malaria, and pulmonary diseases, and other sort of local diseases, and cuts and scratches.
And nobody noticed, over 30 years, that it was only the vaccinated girls who were dying, or that they were the ones who were dying disproportionately.
And what had happened is the vaccine was protecting them against the target disease.
But it had ruined their immune system so they couldn't defend themselves against other illnesses and that's the problem.
Nobody noticed that for 30 years.
You need to have studies that actually measure those things in order to make a real determination about whether the vaccine is averting more harm than it's causing.
Yeah, I think one of the problems with this is, you know, you really have to delve in for a lot of years as you've done in order to kind of be conversant in these studies.
And at the same time, there's a huge profit motive to discrediting the things you're saying.
There's a lot of scientists who are paid by pharmaceutical companies.
There's enormous profit model and profit motive to kind of depict what you're saying.
as crazy or conspiracy theories and the like.
So I think it's important to kind of give you the platform to make your case because otherwise we're just bombarded by this profit-driven propaganda from Big Pharma.
Let me conclude by asking you, you talked a lot about the extreme deceit on the part of the intelligence communities when it comes to these various wars.
In the Vietnam War, there was someone named Daniel Ellsberg, who kind of was an original advocate of the war, helped to plan it, got to the point where because of his access to top secret information, he turned against it, released the Pentagon Papers to show the government was lying about that war.
He was turned into a criminal.
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden are two people who did the same thing, Chelsea Manning.
But as part of the war on terror, they're now being turned into criminals.
Chelsea Manning spent time in prison.
Julian Assange is trying to be extradited.
Snowden is in asylum.
What do you think about that group of whistleblowers or people who have published these massive amounts of information that were labeled top secret?
And would you use your presidential power to pardon them and to protect them from further criminal liability?
Yeah, I mean, I would put a statue of Snowden in Washington.
I mean, I think, you know, when Snowden released, nobody in our country knew about that the intelligence agencies were mining all of our data and spying on Americans.
Members of Congress didn't know.
I remember members of Congress calling me and saying, tell me what's going on.
I'm not on the Intelligence Committee and I haven't heard this.
Yeah, and Congress then went and acted on what he told them to change the rules.
Oh, how are you making this guy a criminal?
He's an American hero.
Yeah, I'm going to pardon those guys, you know, up front.
I mean, I'm going to look at their cases.
Assange, I'm going to pardon on day one because it is insane.
He's effectively a newspaper publisher.
And I don't see why every newspaper publisher in this country is not out there, you know, with pitchforks and George is in front of the White House saying, let this guy go.
He didn't, you know, what did he do wrong?
A lot of them published the same documents he did.
He partnered with the New York Times and The Guardian and El Pais.
And it's amazing what a threat it is to every journalist in this country.
I think the problem is a lot of these journalists don't actually.
Well, let me just say, unlike a lot of journalists, we do not intend to pretend your campaign doesn't exist.
We have been reporting on it.
We're going to continue to report on it.
I hope you'll come back on the show as you continue to campaign around the country.
It was great to talk to you.
I really appreciate your taking so much time to go over so many issues in depth with us, and good luck on the campaign trail.
Thank you very much.
And, you know, I want to thank you for all the years that you've spent in the hinterlands trying to do journalism.
I mean, you can name the number of journalists with integrity that are still out there.
You know, it's you, it's Matt Taibbi, it's Paul Thacker.
I don't know.
You can probably name some other ones.
It's a very, very small number of people who continue to do investigative journalism.
And I think you had to leave the country because you were Under such abuse.
But anyway, so you're, you know, you are in my book a hero too.
And, you know, thank you for what you've done for our country.
I really appreciate that.
It's nice for you to say.
Hope to talk to you again soon.
Have a great evening.
You too.
All right, bye-bye.
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