Robert F. Kennedy Jr. critiques the U.S. government's surveillance overreach and alleged election conspiracies revealed in the Durham report, contrasting his father's anti-war legacy with current neoconservative strategies. He argues that pushing Ukraine into a war of attrition, costing 300,000 to 350,000 lives, risks forcing Russia into a fatal alliance with China, America's primary adversary. Citing Henry Kissinger and Paul Kennedy, he warns that overextending military power while neglecting economic diplomacy accelerates imperial decline, as nations like Brazil shift toward the yuan, costing the U.S. up to $750 billion annually in lost currency dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fear and the Democratic Party00:06:24
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very special episode today.
I'm very excited about this show.
We have joining us a guest who I'm thrilled to have on the show.
He is a current candidate for President of the United States on the Democratic Party.
He is one of the most interesting political figures in America today, at least in my humble opinion.
Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you so much for taking some time.
You know, I've known of you for a long time, but I became really interested in you during the COVID response insanity.
It was really nice to see people of prominence who hadn't lost their mind during that time.
And of course, I've been very interested in your presidential campaign.
Well, where should I start here?
Was it just in your blood that you were destined to run for president?
Did you think you were going to run for president or something?
I never thought I was going to run for president.
But I, you know, what happened during COVID was just, it seemed like not only the country, but the party, my party, had completely gone off the rails and had was departing from all of the, you know, the principles and beliefs that liberals and Democrats parties always stood for.
We became the party of war when Democrats were always skeptical of war.
We became the party of fear.
And, you know, FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
And the reason that he said that, he said that in 1932 during his inaugural, his first inaugural during his first presidency.
And he said that because the Depression had scared everybody.
And there were people in our country who were taking their money out of the banks and putting it in their mattresses.
The unemployment was at historical highs.
Banks were closing.
Businesses were closing.
The same thing was happening in Europe.
And Roosevelt saw what was happening in Italy and Spain and Germany, where totalitarian, right-wing totalitarian elements were promoting and using fear in order to erase democratic rights and constitutional rights.
Germany was the most democratic nation in Europe and to erect these totalitarian infrastructures.
In Eastern Europe and Russia and the Soviet Union, the same thing was happening.
You had Stalin and others using fear to create left-wing totalitarianism.
And what Roosevelt, in our country, a third of the people had lost faith in democracy and wanted to mimic what was happening in Western Europe with the fascist regime.
And another third had lost faith in democracy and wanted to be communist.
And so he was saying to the American people, the thing we need to fear is fear.
Because fear is a tool of totalitarian elements, whether they're left-wing or right-wing.
And if we stay the course and stay calm, this ship is going to right itself.
And so that was a warning, you know, that I grew up thinking that America was the home of the free and the land of the brave.
And the reason that we were the home of the free is because we were the land of the brave.
And all of a sudden, you had the Democratic Party that was just, you know, pumping up fear and stoking it and, you know, and inflaming it and telling us we all had to obey and we all had to abandon our constitutional rights.
And they, you know, they dismantled in front of my eyes.
They dismantled the Constitution.
They went after first freedom of speech, which Madison, Hamilton, Adams said, we put that in the free expression of the First Amendment because all the other amendments are dependent on it.
If a government can silence its critics, it has a license for any atrocity.
And as soon as they realize, okay, they're putting up with it, you know, they're actually going to put up with this.
They went after the other plank and the First Amendment was freedom of worship.
They closed all the churches for a year without any scientific citation, no democratic process, no notice and comment rulemaking, all the things that I've been suing government corporation for years of enacting rules without notice and comment rumick.
Suddenly they had one unelected bureaucrat who was telling everybody to stay in your homes.
They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.
They banned jury trials for pharmaceutical companies who injured their customers.
And they got rid of, they made an all-out assault on the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with all this surveillance and intrusion, intrusion and questions about we have to produce our medical records before we leave our home and go into a building or fly on an airplane or whatever.
So I saw this happening and the Democratic Party, everybody just going along with it.
And that was when I started, because I was getting, I was the target of a lot of this censorship.
You know, the White House, we now know from the Twitter files and from the Facebook email releases, the White House was directly collaborating with Mark Zuckerberg and with Twitter.
And they had given a portal with the CIA and the FBI censoring American citizens, including me.
And so at that point, I said, well, the only way that I'm going to be allowed to speak is if I run.
Corporate Press Manipulation00:14:29
But my wife would never let me run.
She would not allow me to run just to make a point, make an argument.
But then we started seeing these polls.
There was a poll, famous pollster called Jeremy Zogby that started polling me without me knowing it.
And he brought me the polls and that showed that I could win.
And I showed those to Cheryl and she said, okay, I'm on board.
Wow.
Okay.
That's it.
See, my wife would have the opposite attitude.
She'd go, if there's a chance you could win, you can't do it.
But if you're definitely not going to win, then go for it.
Make your point.
But that is, no, listen, if you were trying to just make a point and not win, and you're looking at some of these polls, I think I'd be a little concerned because you are, it is very interesting to see the way the corporate press is trying to deal with you.
Now, I talk about on this show constantly the dishonesty of the corporate press and the propaganda and the misinformation.
They accuse us of spreading misinformation, but the real misinformation that comes out, I mean, just in the last 20 years, misinformation with catastrophic consequences, like claiming that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin Laden to plan a new weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons of mass destruction, you know.
And that was an $8 trillion lie.
Yeah, yeah.
And a million human beings.
A million Iraqis and 3,500 Americans, more people than died in the World Trade Center.
And by the way, that's not counting the soldiers who came home and blew their brains out from the trauma.
Right.
So make it more like 23 a day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's horrific.
And so that's like the misinformation they put.
And then, of course, through the COVID and all of the vaccine, if you get the vaccine, you can't get the virus.
You can't spread the virus.
And none of those guys ever get labeled as someone who spread COVID misinformation.
But I got to say, even as somebody who focuses very intently on the propaganda spread by the corporate press, I was really blown away by ABC's handling of your interview where they actually,
these people who all day long are shouting about the threats to democracy decided you, the viewer, cannot hear what this presidential candidate who in the latest Rest Museum poll is tied with the sitting president.
What this candidate has to say to you, you cannot hear, but we will inform you that it's wrong.
And there was something about that that really, like, I was like, I can't believe they're actually going for this.
And I think obviously it's because people, because they know that you're making a really good point about this stuff and they don't want their viewers to hear it because they're worried they might be persuaded by what you have to say.
Yeah, but it is weird that they think, you know, that they think that their job now, it used to be that the press considered itself the guardian of the First Amendment and that any intrusions or impingements on free speech, they all had to get up and shut them down.
And now they're purveyors of censorship.
And on that, you know, I mean, what they did on ABC was particularly egregious because they just were doing it right in front of us.
She asked me that, you know, the host asked me a question, said, it was a setup question.
I didn't go on there to talk about vaccines.
I'm not leading with vaccines.
I don't talk about vaccines in my speeches unless the group wants me to.
And it's not the reason that I'm running.
But if somebody asks me about them, I'm going to tell the truth and I know a lot about it.
And so she said to me, you know, something to the extent it was like not just a question, but it was a speech in a question.
It was, everything you've said about vaccines and autism has been debunked.
How do you explain yourself?
So I, you know, I let loose and I know a lot about it.
And I was citing studies and, you know, the names of studies.
And so when she aired it, she got to do her little question was on.
And then it, and then everything I said was removed.
And at the end, and they started out, she bracketed the segment with a little speech about pharma at the beginning and saying I was condemning me as a spreader, promoter of misinformation.
And then she did the same thing at the end.
And she said we had to censor him because he was saying something that wasn't true.
And we know you appreciate that as our audience.
It's very, very strange and disturbing.
Yeah.
And then a couple weeks later, Donald Trump has this town hall on CNN where I guess they did let him speak.
But they're getting a lot of pushback from people who are saying, oh, you shouldn't have given him a platform.
We shouldn't have let him speak.
I mean, however you feel about Donald Trump, this just seems to me to be a crazy position that the former president of the United States of America ought be silenced so that the current frontrunner in the Republican field,
that the Americans, it's just, it's very bizarre to me how every single day these people talk about the threats to democracy, and yet they seem to be the first ones who embrace censorship of political figures who are not like fringe, this guy's at 1% political figures, but guys who are polling very well.
I mean, if they can't speak, then what is democracy?
What's the, you get to vote, but you can't hear what people are running on and make your own decisions.
This is something out of like a cartoon world.
Yeah.
And, you know, the Democrats don't like, and the mainstream media is not really talking about the Durham report.
But for me, because I've been concerned for so many years about, you know, the, the, uh, about the CIA's illegal propagandizing American people, which it's not legally allowed to do, that report is appalling.
And it's not just the report and the guy who did it, which you can say, okay, you know, he had some motive or whatever.
But, you know, it's the transcripts of the conversations that the CIA and FBI agents were having where they were acknowledging that what they were doing was wrong, that it had no basis.
And so you have the CIA coming in 50 CIA, top-level CIA agents who agree to collaborate in a project to fix an election and to discredit one of the candidates.
And, you know, I'm not, I don't like Donald Trump.
I don't think he was a good president.
But people are allowed to disagree with that.
And I can be friends with people who don't agree with me.
And I can listen to their point of view.
And, you know, we need to apply rules across the board.
Yeah, like we can't just say it's okay to shut up Donald Trump.
It's okay for CIA agents to, you know, to fix an election against him.
Yeah.
Exactly.
It's unbelievable how many people have this binary thinking because I'll say something about this, like how horrible this whole Russian investigation was.
And people would be like, oh, so you love Donald Trump?
And I'm like, no, I think Donald Trump was a horrible president on many fronts.
I think I will never forgive Donald Trump for funding the Saudi war in Yemen.
I will never forgive Donald Trump for blowing up budgets in the reckless way that he did.
And I will never forgive him for keeping Fauci as the head of the task force through the fall of 2020.
Or how about locking down the whole country?
Yeah, and supporting it at least, as the governors were doing it.
However, I can also look at the information here and go, look, it's pretty clear that this was a frame job.
And what you have here is the intelligence agencies framing the sitting president of the United States for treason.
This is a very serious offense.
Now, I'm sure you've never heard of the CIA working against a sitting president before.
Nothing in your family history that could possibly maybe bring that up.
But that obviously is not a problem.
They're doing it right in front of us.
Yes, that's right.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So let me ask you, because look, it's a little bit of a...
Can I take things off?
Yeah, if you want to, whatever you want to do.
Sure.
It's almost a little look.
Do you take my tie off though?
To whatever you want.
Take it all off, sir.
To me, there is a there.
This is like I'm talking about American history.
And I tried to segue in with a bad joke, but I know when I'm talking to you about this, I'm talking about like your father and your uncle.
So it's a little bit more personal.
But I know you've talked about this before, but isn't this kind of in some way, doesn't it kind of remind you of like what happened with your uncle, what seems to have happened with Donald Trump?
Not saying whether you agree with the policies either way, but it does seem like you ask the question, like, what's really going on here in this government when we have these unelected, secretive three-letter organizations that are working against the duly elected president of the United States.
You know, if for all the people freaking out about democracy, it seems to me like that would be a real threat to democracy.
Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I just, I think it's so, you know, I use the word appalling.
But, you know, and January 6th was a really, you know, was a horrible thing day for our country.
And the people who broke the law should go to jail.
But is it more threatening to our country if you have a bunch of, you know, Yahoos storming the Capitol?
Because you know, okay, they make great havoc for a day, but the whole, you know, United States military is sitting there to protect our government.
And they're not going to bring down American democracy.
Even when you have a president who, you know, would like to fix the vote or whatever, there's a lot of checks and balances.
But what happens when the CIA is interfering with elections?
There's no checks and balances.
That is a real threat to American democracy.
What happens when the CIA is involved in censoring people like me who are critical of government policies?
And by the way, if I was promoting misinformation, the Constitution protects that.
Oh, you know, the remedy for misinformation is not censorship.
It's more information.
But having said that, I was not promoting misinformation.
If I was promoting misinformation, show me a statement I made that was factually incorrect.
Well, that's why it's so...
Well, guess what?
I'll correct it.
Right.
Well, that's why the ABC reaction was so crazy.
Because look, obviously, if you're a journalist and you claim someone is promoting misinformation, well, then your job is to know 10 times more than they know about the subject and demonstrate to your viewer how they're wrong about this and then let your viewer decide, like, oh, yeah, it did seem like that journalist actually knew a lot more about the vaccine than RFK Jr. did and therefore she was able to expose him.
However, they know that you know 10 times more than them and that they can't do that.
So they just silence you.
But I do, I just want to.
And I wouldn't object even if they asked me the question and let me answer and then have their whole army of researchers go out and look at everything I said and parse it and then put up, you know, some, you know, a defense saying he was wrong here, was wrong there.
They can do that.
But to just say we're going to censor him is really shows contempt for the law because the law makes it illegal to censor on the publicly owned airwaves.
ABC does not own the airwaves.
ABC has a license to use them and it must use them for the public benefit.
And part of the public benefit, there's a provision in the Code of Federal Regulations, 45 CFR, I think it's 413. that says you can't censor a presidential candidate.
So they were showing contempt for the law, but they were really showing contempt for their function, which is to not to manipulate information, but to tell the truth unvarnished to the American people and let us make up our mind.
Instead, they were manipulating the public.
They were saying, you are not mature enough to hear things that, and we're going to decide what you can and cannot hear.
And we're only going to allow you to hear things that promote the rating orthodoxies.
Right.
Well, I think one of the things that you are ironically, I think you're benefiting from this treatment that the media is giving you.
I do.
And I think that's part of the reason why I think your poll numbers have gone up since some of this treatment from the media, because I do think that for the majority of people.
Look, even in that ABC interview, one of the things that I thought was kind of amusing was they started with trying to like throw at you that some of your family disagrees with the positions you've been taking.
Root Causes of Issues00:02:41
And they're like, well, this family member of yours doesn't agree with you.
And this family member said this.
And I'm sitting there listening to it.
And the only thing I feel when I hear that is I go, oh, well, that's kind of courageous that this guy will take a position that is even going to get him some heat from within people very close in his life, but he really believes it.
So he's going to take this position.
And they don't even see it from that angle.
And I think for a lot of people, I think this is one of the things that Donald Trump benefited from a lot in 2016 and then throughout his presidency is that whether you like him or not, I used to say this all the time.
I'd be like, I can't stand Donald Trump, but the media makes me want to root for him because they're so unfair to him that it just makes you want to root for them.
And I like you much better.
And the media is making me want to root for you.
And especially because I also happen to think you're right about these issues that you're talking about.
You know, the other thing about that, you know, my family, first of all, I mean, and what I said to her is I said, does your family support everything you say?
Because my family, you know, like coming home to the dinner table and my parents encouraged this when we were kids, they're, you know, 11 kids.
And they encourage us to argue with each other and to, you know, and to stand up for ourselves.
And, you know, our dinner table was like hand-to-hand combat, you know, but we still love each other.
We know we can disagree on issues.
And if you read anything about my grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, that's what he did with his kids.
He would take a position and then make them argue against it.
So, you know, there's many things that I've differed over the history with my family.
There are people in my family who like legalized marijuana.
There are people who don't.
You know, there's people in my family now who like the war in Ukraine.
And, you know, I and other members don't.
But it doesn't make us hate each other.
And that's something we need to learn to do as a country.
But, you know, the reference to that is so ubiquitous in every article about me.
His own family disagrees with him.
But, you know, show me, let's talk about the issues.
Let's talk about why I'm wrong on the issues.
And, you know, that's, I think that would be more productive.
One of the things that happened during the pandemic that was really kind of disturbing to me was that appeals to authority, which is a logical fallacy, displaced actual evidence-based arguments so that you could say, you're wrong about this issue because CDC says, you know, you're wrong.
Trusting Experts Over Authority00:04:19
CDC says something different.
WHO says something different.
And we have to trust the experts.
But trusting the experts is not a function of science and it's not a function of democracy.
It's a function of, you know, religion and totalitarian regimes.
Science is dynamic.
It changes constantly.
I've brought over 500 lawsuits.
And every lawsuit that I bring, almost all of them involve scientific controversy.
And there's always experts on both sides.
So when we sued Monsanto, there were experts.
Monsanto brought in experts from Stanford, from Yale and Harvard.
And we had experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard.
And they were looking at the same evidence and saying completely different things.
And so trusting the experts is not something that we do and is not something that's done in science.
If we trusted the experts, we'd still believe that the sun revolved around the earth.
It was one dissident, Galileo and also Copernicus who said, no, the sun is stationary and we're revolving around it.
And that was heresy.
And all the experts at that time disagreed with them.
And experts disagreed about many things in the modern era about smoking cigarettes.
Doctors recommended it for many years.
X-rays, X-raying pregnant women, which was causing all these cancers.
And every doctor was supporting it.
Thalidomide, Viox, opioids.
The entire regulatory superstructure was saying opioids are not, you know, oxycodone is not addictive.
All the doctors, you know, people say, oh, I have to trust my doctor.
All the doctors were saying that.
I have friends of mine and most people around my age, I'm 40.
A lot of people around my age know this.
I have friends of mine who became drug addicts because they, in the 90s, they were just prescribing opioids like crazy.
It was just like whatever.
Some kid, you know, broke his leg or something like that.
They just give him tons of opioids.
And I mean, I know one kid who's dead now, went into heroin.
It's horrible.
Many, many.
I mean, you know, I have many people who died too, including family members.
But 100,000 kids die a year now from that, that mistake, you know, that FDA made by collaborating secretly with the opioid industry, with the SACLAS, making secret deals, overruling people within the agency who are saying, wait a minute, this is not right.
And then going ahead and putting that recommendation on the, you know, on the on the bottles and on their manufacturers' inserts where they could say it's not addictive.
And the doctors were reading that saying, oh, FDA says it's not addictive.
The same thing they did with the vaccines.
And, you know, and so you can't really trust the experts, especially when it's the regulatory agencies that are, you know, who are a captive agency.
They're basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah.
And somehow it's like a one-two punch because all the people who are saying trust the experts or the regimes that insist you trust the experts also come down the hardest on any expert who deviates from what the experts are supposed to be saying.
So it's like, it's like, trust the experts, but this one must be ruined.
You know, like he can't, not that expert, not the Great Barrington Declaration.
Like, those aren't experts all of a sudden.
So it's this interesting thing.
When you gave, I listened to your announcement speech that you gave a few weeks back, which was a really great speech.
It was over an hour long, and the central theme of it really was on what you were just saying, that essentially there is this unholy alliance between big business and big government that is screwing over average Americans.
And I really love that because I don't think, I don't know that there's been a presidential campaign since, I would say Ron Paul's campaigns got at that.
I don't really think there's been a presidential campaign since where that has been the central issue of what they're saying, that it's like, look, this is obviously all of it, like all the major crises that are facing this country are a rigged game on behalf of the powerful.
The Minsk Accords Debate00:14:54
And you can get here from like a liberal Democrat point of view or from a libertarian point of view.
Either way, we could have our, but look, if you're talking about the warfare machine, you're talking about, look, however you feel about the war in Ukraine, like I'm completely opposed to American intervention and support for it.
But even if you support it, you can recognize that there are weapons companies that are raking in tens of billions of dollars off this.
It's a money laundering scheme for, you know, we give our $113 billion to the Ukraine, but 90% of that comes right back to the, you know, to the military industrial, the big contractors, you know, General Dynamics, et cetera, Lockheed, who are making the weapons that are being sold over there.
And by the way, then you look at all the generals who are appearing on CNN and saying, oh, we need to be over there.
And they're retired generals.
And you look at where they're working.
Well, they're working for those contractors.
So you have this whole thing that's rigged to keep us in this constant, to provide a constant pipeline of new wars in order to feed the military industrial complex.
And, you know, the CIA is a captive agency.
And my uncle recognized that.
My uncle, when he came into office two months in, and he sat down with Alan Dulles, Richard Bissell from the CIA and Charles Cabell.
And they lied to him to his face about Cuba.
He said, how are these 1,200 guys going to conquer an army, a casual army of 200,000 men really well trained and the best intelligence service in the Western hemisphere?
How is this going to happen?
They said there's so much discontent against Castro that the people, as soon as they land, they don't need military support.
As soon as they land, the people are going to rise up and support them.
And they sent them to a place where there was no place they could hide, you know.
And my uncle realized when those men were dying on the beach, he realized that the CIA had lied to him.
And he came out of his office and he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
And he recognized then and thereafter that he was surrounded by an intelligence apparatus and by Pentagon Brass, his joint chiefs, who believe, whose, you know, the intelligence apparatus had devolved into a function of just providing this constant parade of new wars.
And the Pentagon chiefs wanted to get into the war because that's how they get promotion.
That's how they expand.
He said at one point, we get it in a nuclear conflict with the Russians and 30 million Americans die, 130 million Russians.
And then who's in charge?
It's going to be these guys.
So they're going to win no matter what.
And he recognized that he was surrounded by this cabal that wanted to go to war.
And my uncle, his best friend, one of his two best friends, Ben Bradley, who was the publisher of the Washington Post, asked him one day, what do you want in your grave, Stone?
And my uncle said instantly, he said he kept the peace.
And he said to Bradley, the primary job of a president of the United States is to keep the country out of war.
And, you know, if he, you know, and he was able to do that during his regime, he never sent any combat troops abroad.
They wanted him to send 250,000 combat troops to Vietnam.
They said it would fall.
And he said, it's not our war.
They need to win it themselves.
We'll send advisors.
He sent 16,000 Green Berets.
And they weren't, by the rules of engagement, allowed to participate in combat, which they violated.
And 75 of them died.
And he asked for a casualty report one day from one of his aides.
And they came back and said 75.
And he said, we're not going to lose another one.
This is not worth an American life.
And that day, this was October of 63, less than a month before he died.
He ordered, he signed a national security order that afternoon, ordering all those troops home by the end of 65, and the first thousand in the next month.
And, you know, by the way, he sent more people, more troops, federal troops, to Jackson, Mississippi to get Meredith into old miss.
So, you know, this was a very minimal commitment.
But he managed to keep Americans out of Vietnam and out of wars.
He refused to go into Laos.
He refused to go into Berlin when the military all wanted him.
He figured out how to resolve this huge conflict that we had in 62 at Checkpoint Charlie.
And he became in the process friends with Khrushchev.
And he put a telephone in our house, you know, that's in my brother's house now.
The lines are still coming out.
But we knew when we were kids that, you know, his house at the Cape, which we wandered through all the time, you know, walked in every day, that if we picked up that red phone, that Khrushchev would answer.
Because he didn't trust his own people.
And he knew Khrushchev didn't answer.
For good reason.
Yeah, both probably for a good reason.
You know, it's interesting because one of the craziest aspects over the last year plus now, during this war in Ukraine, is that there isn't communication.
And in fact, that Blinkett brags about the fact that he's not negotiating with Sergei Lavrov, that he's not negotiating.
And in fact, at least according to Fiona Hill's reporting and a couple other reports, that we've been discouraging negotiations between the Ukrainians and the Russians.
And it's like, my God.
I mean, just imagine, imagine if your uncle was not willing to talk to the Russians during, say, the Cuban missile crisis or something.
They've wiped out humanity.
Right.
I mean, and so it's like the game that they're playing.
There's no language strong enough for how reckless it is.
It's insane.
And the tell is that Zelensky calls up Prime Minister Xi from China and says to him, will you settle this war?
Because I know that my supporters don't want it settled.
And by the way, Zelensky ran in 2019.
He ran, here's a guy who's a comedian and an actor, which I'm not saying in a disparaging way.
Go ahead.
It's fine.
I'm married to one of those two.
But he won with 70% of the vote.
And the reason he won is he ran on a peace platform.
And he ran saying, I'm going to sign the Minsk Accords.
And people need to know the Minsk Accords were the, you know, I mean, just to go through some of the history, in 2014, Ukraine had a democratically elected government, Yanukovych.
And that was neutral, but very open and welcoming to the Russia.
And then we overthrow that.
Let me put it this way.
We spent $5 billion creating protest movements to fund protest movements over there that ended in 2014 with the overthrow of that government.
And it's unclear how much America, the United States government was orchestrating the actual violent part of that that happened at the very end.
But we do know that Victoria Newland, who's one of the neocons, has been around since, you know, forever, since the Iraq war.
Real deal neocon, Robert Kagan's wife, the founder of Project for New American Century, like real high-level neocons.
Yeah, and these are the people who got us into Iraq.
Yes.
So, you know, they went into Iraq.
It was an $8 trillion mistake that ended up with leaving Iraq much worse.
As you pointed out, we killed a million Iraqis, far more Iraq.
We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did.
We left that nation this kind of incoherent mess, a battle between Sunni and Shihada squads.
We pushed it into a proxy posture with Iran, which is the foreign policy objective that we've tried to avoid for 40 years.
We created ISIS.
We then, you know, it led into the Yemen War.
It led into Syria.
And we created 2 million refugees who then flooded Europe and destabilized every democracy in Europe and probably almost certainly led to Brexit and the breakup of Europe.
So that's what we got for that $8 trillion that Victoria Newland and her gang spent.
So now she wants to do the same thing, regime trains with Russia, which they're very open about.
That is the aspiration of the neocons.
So they have her on a telephone that was recorded choosing the next cabinet when we overthrow, when the government gets overthrown.
Russia then, you put yourself, my uncle always said, you got to put yourself into the shoes of the adversary.
Russia then says, okay, there's a U.S. government.
There's a U.S. created government now in Ukraine on our border.
The Russians are worried about Ukraine because they've been invaded three times through Ukraine.
And the last time they were invaded in World War II, Hitler invaded through Ukraine and killed one out of every seven Russians.
13% of the country was killed.
And we reduced to rubble a third of the country.
So they're sensitive about the Ukraine.
They don't want NATO in the Ukraine and they don't want U.S. weapons systems in the Ukraine.
And they made that really clear.
So now they say, okay, now we have a hostile U.S. government, U.S.-based government in the Ukraine.
And so they go in immediately and invade Crimea.
Why?
Because they're scared that the U.S. Navy is going to make Sevastopol a U.S. base, a naval base, because the U.S. Navy is already in the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
And that's their nightmare.
It's their only warm water port.
It's been their port for 370 years.
So we would do exactly the same thing if we were in that position.
We would go in and we could take control of the port.
It is critical to our national security before the U.S. Navy arrives.
Sure, sure, sure.
And then the U.S. meanwhile, Trump walks away from the intermediate nuclear weapons treaty, which was critical to Russia.
We also walked away from the ABM treaty.
We start funneling offensive weapons in to Ukraine and we start training the Ukrainian army for interoperability with NATO.
And so the Russians are looking at this.
Plus, the new government comes in and the nation and starts killing Russians and the Donbass, ethnic Russians and the Donbass.
The people vote, Donbass then has an election and they vote to join Russia.
Russia says, we don't want it.
We don't want to break up Ukraine.
Here's what you do.
And they work out with Germany and France.
The Minsk Accord, the Minsk Accord says, okay, Donbass is going to say part of Ukraine, but it's going to be autonomous so they can have their own language because the new government had banished the Russian language.
That was their first act.
The first act after they came in, right?
Yeah, so they were treating the Dumbas like red-headed stepchildren and, you know, like foreign, you know, threats.
And the Russians who live in, has voted to go to Russia.
Russia doesn't want them.
But Russia supports the Minsk Accords.
And the Minsk Accords get NATO out of, pledge that NATO will never envelop Ukraine.
And that and that Donbass will have an autonomy within Ukraine so it can have its own language, have its own culture, and protect its citizens from aggression by the Ukrainian government.
And Zelensky runs in 2019 saying, I'm going to ratify the Minsk Accords.
He gets in there and then the U.S. government moves in and says, you know, we don't want that.
We want, essentially, we want a war with Russia.
And, you know, now, you know, I think anybody in Ukraine would accept the Minsk Accords with, you know, that outcome, you know, which I think is going to be hard to reach at this point because the Russians are now already changed their constitution to make Donbas part of Russia.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
You know, a couple things that come to mind, and I know you know this, but in that cable that was released by WikiLeaks, the Nyet Means Nyet memo back to Condoleezza Rice.
So this was Bill Burns, who is the current head of the CIA.
Projecting Military Power Abroad00:14:34
He himself, when he was informing the Secretary of State, the memo basically reads that, hey, if you continue with this talk about Ukrainian entry into NATO, Russia's very concerned that this is going to happen and this is going to happen.
And if there's a civil war, Russia will have to decide whether to intervene.
And he says, in his own words, the head of the CIA, he says, a choice Russia does not want to have to make.
And it seems pretty clear that they did not want it to get to this point.
Now, again, people who hear this will say, so you're justifying Putin invading the country.
So you love, you love it.
Which is nonsense.
Of course, he's not justified in invading.
But let's just understand the situation here, that it does seem that he wanted to avoid this.
And it seems like, man, it seems like the higher ups in the U.S. government wanted him to be put into this position.
And as Zbigny, as Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged in his memoir that they wanted to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam, that this seems like once again, that's the place.
We've done it before, and it seems like we probably did it again.
And look, like, again, and the last thing I'll say, and then I'll turn it over to you because I know we got to wrap soon.
Your uncle, I think, very reasonably said when the Soviets wanted to put missiles in Cuba, he said, no, that is a deal breaker for us.
Like, I know technically Cuba is not U.S. territory, but you cannot have nuclear missiles pointed at our country from a few miles off of our shores.
That is a deal, but we will not stand that.
We're taking that as an act of aggression.
And almost all Americans look at that and say, yeah, that's reasonable.
That's reasonable to say there's no reason for Russian missiles to be a few miles off of our border.
And before Putin invaded, to say, hey, Ukraine cannot be a part of your military alliance, I think is a reasonable position for the Russians to have.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
By the way, when my uncle and my father made the deal with Khrushchev, they made a secret deal.
And the secret deal was, we will take the U.S.
The reason Russia wanted to put the missiles in Cuba is because we had put Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
And by the way, Ukraine, there's parts of Ukraine that are only 400 miles from Moscow.
That's a lot farther than Cuba was from Washington, D.C.
And we have a rule in our hemisphere.
We've never been invaded.
We have a rule in our hemisphere called the Monroe Doctrine that says nobody can put any weapons or any of their soldiers.
No European country can put any Asian country anywhere in our hemisphere, even Argentina, Sierra Del Fuego.
You're not allowed to do it.
So, you know, for us to say, okay, we're going to enforce that here, but we're going to have a different set of rules for Russia because Russia's the enemy.
And by the way, when didn't Russia become the enemy?
You know, when we told Russia in 1991 and 1992, we were trying to get, you know, Gorbachev said, look, I'm going to dismantle the Soviet Union.
You need to make me a pledge.
You're not going to move NATO to the east because what did that mean dismantling the Soviet Union?
It meant allowing reunification in Germany.
There are 400,000 Soviet troops in Germany.
And Gorbachev agreed to remove those troops and allow NATO to take over Germany.
So he was allowing a hostile force to take over and moving his own troops out.
But he said, you've got to promise me before you do this.
And we, you know, there's all of these documents that are now available in the archives.
You cannot move NATO to the east.
And Bush told him, we will not move NATO one inch to the east.
Well, now we've brought it 1,000 miles to the east.
We have 14 countries.
We put Aegis missile systems, which are nuclear adaptable.
So they brag, Lockheed brags on the, you know, the manufacturers' promotional materials.
These will take the Tomahawk missiles, which have nuclear warheads and can be in minutes in Moscow.
We put those in Romania.
We put them in Poland.
Clearly, you know, they were worried that we were now going to make Ukraine part of NATO and put them there.
So to say that they don't have some legitimate security, national security concerns is, I don't know, there has to be something, you have to have some kind of cognitive dissonance.
And, you know, to the point that you were making about kind of how the mission had changed from that, because my son went over there to fight.
So, you know, my son didn't tell anybody what he was going to do.
And I sent Connor and I told her, he had a summer job for Bombheadland, which is, you know, the best law firm on the West Coast.
And he was going to live with us.
And I was really excited about it.
And he, you know, at the beginning in the spring, I said, when do you start work at Baum Hedland?
And he said, he said, I gave them notice I'm not going there.
And I was like, what are you doing?
And he said, he was at dinner with me and Cheryl and his girlfriend who knew what he was doing, but didn't tell us.
And he said, I'm doing something.
And dad, I don't want you to ask me what I'm doing.
And then he disappeared.
And so, you know, Cheryl and I were like, wow, that's unusual.
But, you know, what are we going to do with it?
He's a grown-up.
So then he disappears.
And we do see a credit card bill.
I had access to his credit card bills.
And we saw a credit card bill from Poland.
So I thought, oh, he may be, you know, doing something in Ukraine.
And then we got another one from the Ukraine.
Then they just stopped.
And for two months, we didn't really hear from him.
And he joined a special forces unit.
He joined the Foreign Legion.
He was assigned to a special forces unit and he was a machine gunner for the Union.
So he went over there because he was motivated for the same reason that they take advantage of all Americans.
I'm not saying he was taking advantage of it.
I supported, you know, support for Ukraine.
And he did too.
And he thought, you know, I shouldn't, but I argued with him a lot about the Ukraine and he felt like I shouldn't be arguing and, you know, for it and letting other people fight the war.
So he went over there and for the same reason we all did.
It was a humanitarian.
We have huge compassion for the Ukrainian people who've been illegally invaded and the brutality and violence of that invasion.
And for admiration for their valor and their courage and standing up, this incredible courage they've demonstrated.
But then, you know, we start, it starts looking a lot less like a humanitarian mission.
Every choice we make is about prolonging the war.
And it's not about, you know, if it's humanitarian, it means curtailing the war and reducing the bloodshed.
Then Biden comes out and says, oh, what we're doing over there is actually regime change against Putin, which is this old ambition of Victoria Newton and the neocons.
And then Lloyd Austin, who's the Secretary of Defense, says that, you know, our purpose over there is to degrade the Russian army and exhaust its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world.
Well, that's the opposite of humanitarian.
That is a war of attrition.
And who is getting killed?
It's the Ukrainians.
And I've used this figure that 300,000 Ukrainians, we know the U.S. government and Ukrainian government are lying about the cost to Ukrainian kids, how many have died in this war.
But when General Zelushny and Vladimir Zelensky came to Washington in December, they had a private meeting in the Pentagon in the Pentagon with Mark Milley, who was the head of the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin.
And during that meeting, some of the staffers said afterward that Zelushny said, we have lost 300,000 troops already.
And I talked to Colonel Doug McGregor yesterday, who was the former senior advisor.
Yeah, we've had him on the show before.
He's great.
Yeah, he's terrific.
And he said that it's probably at 350,000 now because 2,000 were killed this weekend.
Ukrainians, and the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a rate of five to one or six to one.
But it's not, you know, I feel like, okay, we were tricked.
This was not a war of humanitarian war.
We have turned Ukraine into a pawn in these geopolitical machinations that have created this proxy war between two great powers.
And we're grinding this poor little nation to dust in between them.
And Ukraine will be lucky if it comes out as a country even at this point.
The Russians, this is a critical issue with the Russians.
They cannot lose this war.
It would be like us losing a war to Mexico.
We can't afford to do it.
And if China was putting missiles in Mexico and Mexico was killed 14,000 American expatriates, we would go in and stop it.
And we can't afford to lose it.
And for us, Ukraine is an afterthought.
It has nothing to do with our national security.
For the Russian, it's critical.
And our national security should be, dictates that we should not be at war with Russia because our primary adversary right now is China.
And pushing the Russians into alliance with China, as Kissinger said, is the worst possible outcome for national security of the United States of America.
And it's already been achieved, it seems.
It seems like we've pushed them into an alliance.
You know, it's funny, just as you mentioned, I told you before we started recording that kind of my political origin story was the Ron Paul campaign in 2008.
And this was really essentially the point he was making when he was talking about why there is so much hatred for us in the Muslim world.
And he was saying, well, look at our foreign policy and how many Muslims get killed over there.
This makes them very angry.
And it's just like the most basic, just put the shoe on the other foot.
Like just as you're saying now, like just it's crazy to me that people can't just see this.
Like, what would we do if Russia was interfering in Mexico and overthrowing their government and putting military bases in there?
And it's like, oh, yes, obviously we wouldn't put up with that.
So of course we can expect that they wouldn't either.
This to me just seems like common sense, but I'm very glad that someone who's running for president and someone who's doing as well as you are is actually saying this.
So before I've been told we got to wrap, what can people do if they want to support your campaign or find out more about you?
What's any website or where can they go?
Yeah, they could go to kennedy24.com.
And please, God, please do so.
And if you can contribute, do that, if you can volunteer to do that.
Let me make one other point.
Of course, absolutely.
When my uncle was president, he kept us out of war.
And he said, I don't want the face of America abroad to be a soldier with a gun.
I want them to be a Peace Corps volunteer.
And he launched the Kennedy Milk Program that provided nutrition to millions of undernourished kids all over the developing world.
He launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID to try to build the middle class, to go around, no longer support military dictators, but to actually build the middle class.
He said, there's a revolution that's going to come in these countries, and either Russia is going to own it or we are going to.
And we want to.
We want to be on the side of the oppressed.
America should be.
And, you know, as a result of that, there's more statutes to my uncle.
There's more boulevards named after him, more avenues, more universities and hospitals than any other U.S. president.
And that's good for our national security.
You know, I'm just saying this because it's the inverse of what Ron Paul said.
And what we ought to be doing is not projecting military power abroad.
We ought to be projecting economic power, which is what the Chinese do.
You know, we should build ourselves.
As my grandfather said, America should be Fortress America.
We arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders and make ourselves too expensive to conquer.
And then we put all that money into building infrastructure and building a generator for economic growth because that is the real power of a nation.
Paul Kennedy, who's a great Yale historian, did this book called The End of Empires, the Decline and Fall of Empires.
And he goes through all the empires over 500 years.
And each one of them met its demise through overextending its military abroad.
Right.
And why do we want to follow that?
The Chinese learned the lesson from my uncle.
They're projecting.
We've spent $8 trillion since Iraq bombing bridges and airports and ports and hospitals and homes.
And they've spent $8 trillion, the same amount building those things.
And they have permanent friendships.
And our friendships, you know, our friendships are like, I said this on part of this metaphor on the all-in podcast the other day that we're like the alcoholic who's behind on his mortgage.
And he goes into the bar with some milk money and he buys rounds for strangers and he thinks he's making friends.
Yeah, that's right.
But the moment that money runs out, they're no longer his friends.
And that's what we've done.
That's our strategy around the world.
The Chinese go in, they don't ask attached.
They build you a road.
They build you a hospital.
They build you a university.
And people want to do business with them.
And the whole world now is, Brazil just went over, switched the Chinese currency.
Argentina is about to go.
They just brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And they're switching the Chinese.
That's going to cost us the loss of that global currency.
It's going to cost us a minimum of $750 billion a year.
Three quarters of a trillion dollars.
And, you know, we're letting it all happen because we're addicted to war.
And, you know, look, as commander-in-chief, I'm going to defend our country, but I'm going to ask this question.
China's Development Strategy00:00:43
Is this important for U.S. national security?
Is that a bad guy?
Not are we helping somebody?
Is it good for this country?
And if it's not, I'm not going to do it.
Wow, that would be such an improvement over current policy.
I cannot tell you how much I hope Joe Biden makes the mistake of debating you.
I really hope that they're pushed into it because I would just love to see that.
And look, I will say for the rest of your presidential campaign and beyond, this platform is open to you anytime you want to.
Even if you're not in town, if you want to do it over the computer, I'd love to talk more because I found this all interesting.
And thank you so much for taking the time and coming in and best of luck with the rest of the campaign.