April 14, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Aaron said to me, you know, she was talking about Trump being a threat to democracy. | ||
| And I said, Trump, ironically, had said that very morning that Biden is such a threat to democracy that this will probably be the last election if he gets elected. | ||
| But they say that about each other. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's, you know, part of this game that they're playing. | ||
| They're trying to pump up fear. | ||
| Ayn has $3 billion that he's going to have, according to the New York Times, for this campaign, more than any, probably double any campaign in history. | ||
| But he's not going to use that money to amplify his voice. | ||
| He's going to use it to try to get Trump off the ballot, to try to get me off the ballot, to try to make sure that he doesn't have anybody to run against. | ||
| And it's ironic because The Democrats are all blam-passing Vladimir Putin because | ||
| he won 88% of the vote because he didn't have any opponents. | ||
| But that's the situation they're trying to engineer for us with a party picks a candidate and nobody else is allowed | ||
| to run against him. | ||
| All right, Bobby, we're going to do this without an intro unless you want an intro, but I feel like you're going to | ||
| be all right. | ||
| Cheryl Hines' husband. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That is the best thing that anybody says about me. | ||
| So we could talk about Curb for an hour, but instead, let's talk about what's going on at the moment because we're rolling into April here. | ||
| Things are starting to get serious. | ||
| There are three guys left and you're one of them. | ||
| But you got to figure out how you take some of the Trump people and some of the Biden people. | ||
| So we just had lunch with about a dozen people, kind of discussing a bit of that, but what, what does that pitch look like? | ||
| What is the, what is the move you have to make and how is it different taking some of the Trump people and taking some of the Biden people? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, we are, I wish I could, I wish we had recorded our conversation. | ||
| We realized that at the end. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, I talked a little bit about how Trump and Biden are kind of mirror images of each other in one way. | ||
| Of course, they're very, very different, right? | ||
| And they're different in temperament and their rhetoric and their personalities. | ||
| But on the issues, there's not a huge amount of difference, except on the cultural issues, abortion, guns. | ||
| The border, all important issues, but they're not the issues that really have our country on the rocks, right? | ||
| They're more towards the margins. | ||
| I mean, the border could be existential, ultimately, but the big issues, the debt, $34 trillion debt, that can sink our country. | ||
| Ten years, that debt, within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we pay in taxes is going to go to the debt. | ||
| It's going to go to servicing the debt. | ||
| And within 10 years, it could be 100%. | ||
| Nobody can figure out how to make that sustainable. | ||
| That, the chronic disease epidemic, which now affects 60% of our population, the biggest cause, 4.3 trillion a year. | ||
| It's almost five times our military budget. | ||
| We talked at lunch about diabetes, diabetes. | ||
| When I was a kid, the average pediatrician saw maybe one case of juvenile diabetes during his entire career. | ||
| Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic, and nobody's talking about it. | ||
| Why is this happening? | ||
| We're now paying more for diabetes than our defense budget. | ||
| And it's existential. | ||
| And you know, that's just one chronic disease. | ||
| And there's rheumatoid arthritis, there's all these allergic diseases. | ||
| Autism is in my generation, 70-year-old men today, one in 10,000 has autism. | ||
| In my kids' generation, it's one in every 34. | ||
| One in every 22 boys. | ||
| And you know, the cause of that is of just handling that one disease. | ||
| Is by 2030 will be a trillion dollars a year. | ||
| So, and these are unnecessary costs. | ||
| We should be figuring out what's causing them. | ||
| And there's no other country in the world that has this. | ||
| That's existential. | ||
| Biden and Trump can't do anything about the debt. | ||
| They were the ones who caused the debt crisis. | ||
| It was their style of governance. | ||
| The two of them together in just four years that were given to each of them together. | ||
| They drove up the debt equivalent to what all the presidents since George Washington did. | ||
| So they can't come in and say, I'm going to solve the debt problem. | ||
| They can't say I'm going to solve the chronic disease problem because they presided over it. | ||
| They can't solve the addiction to war. | ||
| President Trump actually said he was going to end the warfare state. | ||
| But that's not what he did. | ||
| Instead, he brought in John Bolton as head of NSA. | ||
| And then the other issues, the polarization of our country, they're both feeding on that. | ||
| That's how they get elected, by polarization. | ||
| If you want to talk about assaults on our democracy, the big danger to our democracy, So we're going to get torn apart by this toxic polarization that is worse today than probably any time since the American Civil War. | ||
| It's probably worse than when my father ran in 1968, where there was terrible polarization. | ||
| Do you fear that more than the external threats or even some of these other issues that you're bringing up? | ||
| I think the polarization is, I mean, all of them are ultimately existential. | ||
| No, you know, particularly the polarization is particularly intractable. | ||
| I don't think it's unsolvable. | ||
| I think, you know, and you use this wonderful phrase during lunch, which is, it doesn't have to be this way. | ||
| And I think all of them look insurmountable, but none of them are. | ||
| There's ways, imaginative and beautiful ways out of all of them. | ||
| The polarization is Particularly acute today because of the social media algorithms that are commercially incentivized to keep eyeballs on that site as long as possible. | ||
| As it turns out, the way that you keep eyeballs on that site is by feeding people Confirmation of what they already believe in. | ||
| So if you're a Republican and you ask one question, you're going to get a different answer than if you're a Democrat and ask the same question. | ||
| You're going to get an answer that reinforces your biases. | ||
| And that drives us all further and further apart. | ||
| So it's more difficult. | ||
| It's solvable. | ||
| I see this every day, Dave, because, you know, what I said at the beginning of the campaign is I'm not going to feed into the vitriol or the rancor, the demonization, all this. | ||
| I'm going to try to identify the common ground, the things that we all share in common, rather than focusing on those little issues that keep us all apart. | ||
| And what I found is that the landscapes that are occupied by that common ground are so much bigger. | ||
| You know, we all think we're so different as Americans, but we actually share the same values. | ||
| Everybody wants to have a great education for our kids. | ||
| Nobody thinks it's a good idea that this low-end drug cartel is running America's border policy. | ||
| Nobody thinks that's a good idea, right? | ||
| Everybody wants to make sure our veterans are cared for, that they're not eating in soup kitchens, | ||
| and that PTSD and these brain injuries, we're taking care of them. | ||
| Everybody wants to take care of the environment. | ||
| If you want to start a fist fight, talk about climate change. | ||
|
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No. | |
| But if you want to find out a place where everybody agrees, talk about toxicity in our water, in our food, in our air. | ||
| And, you know, when we did the protests in Flint, Michigan, against the lead in the water that they had out there, we had Hells Angels standing shoulder to shoulder with urban blacks. | ||
| Everybody feels the same way. | ||
| If you want to talk about The Appalachian Mountains, how they're being cut down by mount top removal mining. | ||
| Almost everybody is going to agree. | ||
| Nobody wants to see the acidification of the oceans. | ||
| Nobody wants to see the, you know, acid rain destroy the forest cover on the high peaks of the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec. | ||
| You know, I grew up fishing and hunting in the Adirondack Mountains. | ||
| It's the oldest protected wilderness in our country. | ||
| And yet 20% of the lakes, one out of every five lakes is sterilized. | ||
| There's nothing in it because of acid rain. | ||
| Nobody thinks that's good. | ||
| Republicans or Democrats, they're all going to say that's a bad outcome. | ||
| So, and then everybody wants the soils restored in our country, which could solve so many problems. | ||
| The path out of our debt is in the soils, a path out of climate. | ||
| You know, whether you believe in it or not, if you believe in it, the best solution is not top-down controls. | ||
| But rather restoring our soil because that's the biggest carbon sink that there is. | ||
| So, you know, there are there are solutions for all of these and there's ways of talking about these issues that bring us together, but that's not going to come from President Biden or President Trump. | ||
| Both of them feed on the polarization. | ||
| Both of them are saying the principal reason you should vote for me is if you vote for the other guy, democracy is going to be over and that there's no way if that's what you're telling the public, | ||
| that you're gonna be capable of ending the polarization. | ||
| So in a weird way, your campaign is sort of, in some respects, fighting human nature | ||
| to always be worried about everything in a certain respect, but also fighting an algorithmic manipulation | ||
| at the same time. | ||
| So how do you peel off the people on both sides? | ||
| I think that's what most people are wondering. | ||
| I mean, most of my audience, I think, absolutely could vote for you, but they're going, all right, well, what does the path look like? | ||
| What is the road to the promised land? | ||
| Yeah, and I think my challenge is to achieve two things. | ||
| One is the big impediment that people, that the mainstream media and other media says about me | ||
| is that there's no way that I can get on the ballot everywhere. | ||
| And we're gonna show very quickly that we can get on the ballot everywhere, | ||
| and we're gonna do that very quickly. | ||
| But we're gonna probably do at least two states from now on till we get all of, | ||
| the next 20 weeks we're going to do. | ||
| So two states a week for about 20 weeks. | ||
| And you believe you'll be on all 50? | ||
| Yeah, I will be on 50 in 50 states and the District of Columbia. | ||
| So that, you know, that's just a sort of a mechanical impediment that I have to overcome. | ||
| And I think that that, you know, for a lot of people that that's the biggest impediment. | ||
| And then the other is, uh, I need polling numbers that actually show that I'm competitive with President Trump and President Biden. | ||
| And I, you know, I think that that's happening. | ||
| I'm already, there's a, I think it's a Quinnipiac poll showing me at 27 points in Michigan. | ||
| So that's within, you know, all I need to do is take two points from each of them and I, I win and I have seven months to do that. | ||
| Uh, 26 points in Arizona. | ||
| So, you know, I think it's going to happen. | ||
| I'm already beating President Trump and President Biden among young people, people under 45 in the battleground states, people under 35 nationally. | ||
| I'm beating them with the biggest cohort, which is independent voters. | ||
| This is the first, Dave, this is the first Uh, election in United States history or modern history where independents have, uh, have outpolled self-identified independents are a larger party than either Republicans or Democrats. | ||
| Self-identified independents are now 43% of the electorate, um, versus 27 who say they're Democrats, 27 who say they're Republicans. | ||
| And I'm winning in that cohort, which is the biggest. | ||
| The group that I'm very, that I'm weakest in, which is ironic, is Boomers, which is my generation. | ||
| And I should be, you would think, very strong there because they all remember Camelot and, you know, they were part of the Kennedy era. | ||
| And I was also, when I was known as the leading environmental champion, I was very, very popular with that cohort. | ||
| But my problem with them is that They're getting their news from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post and the New York Times. | ||
| And if that's your ecosystem, your information ecosystem, you're going to have a low opinion of me. | ||
| Did you think you were going to have to fight the machine the way you've had to fight it? | ||
| Or did you think that just by name alone, if not resume, it was going to be a little kinder to you? | ||
| No, I knew that I was going to be a fistfight because I had been doing this You know, the vaccine stuff since 2005, and I know the heat that they can generate. | ||
| Oh, I knew that it was going to be tough. | ||
| The weird thing is my name. | ||
| Although, you know, clearly it's a net plus for me. | ||
| But the people with whom I'm most popular are the people who know almost nothing about the Kennedys. | ||
| They're, you know, they're Gen Z, they're millennials, and they, you know, for them, they didn't grow up with a picture of my uncle and father over their fireplace. | ||
| Their parents did. | ||
| But they didn't, and they don't really know anything about the Kennedys. | ||
| They have a vague knowledge, but, you know, it's all, I think, kind of a jumble for them, and they certainly didn't I grew up with the kind of, you know, looking at the Kennedys with almost a deity status that a different generation of Americans said. | ||
| So when I saw you, or last time I interviewed you was about six months ago or five months ago or so in LA, and I said to you that the day you announced, I said on my show that he may not be a Republican at the end of this thing, but he will not be a Democrat. | ||
| And it was only, it was only a couple of months later that you officially are not a Democrat. | ||
| So if you're not surprised, well, if you're not surprised. | ||
| I had a really good time at that. | ||
| You and I did like a fireside chat. | ||
| It was really, really fun. | ||
| And you know, I said to my, Well, I appreciate that, but I think also what I think the thing that unites us is a love of country. | ||
| I think we both, I think, probably describe ourselves as classical liberals, and I think that that's what most of the country actually is. | ||
| But it's that polarization that you're talking about with these two guys that is not allowing anyone else, it's not allowing people to think there's a way out. | ||
| And I think that that's what we're left with. | ||
| But so with that in mind, you aren't a Democrat anymore, but you are what your uncle and what your father represented with the Democrats. | ||
| So where do these people fit right now? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| You know, I had a conversation this week with Aaron Burnett on CNN. | ||
| And, you know, if you took all the things that my father believed in or President Kennedy, my uncle believed in, I would check every one of those boxes. | ||
| So I feel like I'm a classic Kennedy Democrat. | ||
| And, you know, I guess you'd call me a classic liberal, the last liberal. | ||
| I had this conversation with Erin Burnett and I'm very grateful to her for letting me on CNN. | ||
| I'm sure that she took a lot of flack and she gave me a fair interview. | ||
| And so I'm very, very grateful. | ||
| It's the first time in a decade that I've been on that network and had a live interview that they couldn't slice and dice. | ||
| I mean, Jake Tapper said that he will not interview you on his show. | ||
| He said that you're too, I don't remember the exact words, too conspiratorial or radical or something to that effect. | ||
| I mean, that just tells you how out of touch they are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that that's the prevailing attitude there. | ||
| That they all tell each other. | ||
| And it's kind of, I think it's an echo chamber. | ||
| So, you know, they believe that the propaganda and the descriptions that they've been propagating about me over the last 10 years. | ||
| And they don't really want their audience to, you know, to see me or hear me because they think I have dangerous thoughts or, you know, I'll put dangerous thoughts into the heads of the audience. | ||
| Which is weird because, you know, in the old days, that's what journalism was about. | ||
| It was about, you know, it was about having conversations and debating issues. | ||
| And then, you know, if somebody was saying something absurd, letting that either win or die in the marketplace of ideas, you know, and reporters and journalists had enough confidence in their own opinions and their own judgment That they could sit there and make an argument rather than just saying, we're going to silence this person, we're going to cancel this person. | ||
| But anyway, that's a different subject. | ||
| But one of the, it's related though, because one of the things I said, uh, Erin said to me, um, you know, she was talking about Trump being a threat to democracy. | ||
| And I said, Trump ironically had said that very morning, That Biden is such a threat to democracy that this will probably be the last election if he gets elected. | ||
| But they say that about each other. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's, you know, part of this game that they all, that they're playing. | ||
| They're trying to pump up fear. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| Biden has $3 billion that he's going to have, according to the New York Times, for this campaign, more than any, probably double any campaign in history. | ||
| But he's not going to use that money to amplify his voice. | ||
| He's going to use it to try to get Trump off the ballot, to try to get me off the ballot, to try to make sure that he doesn't have anybody to run against. | ||
| And it's ironic because the Democrats are all lampassing Vladimir Putin because he won 88% of the vote because he didn't have any opponents. | ||
| But that's the situation they're trying to engineer for us with a party picks a candidate and nobody else is allowed to run against him. | ||
| I said to, um, and she asked me, does, do I really, you know, don't I think Trump is very dangerous for the Republic? | ||
| And I said to her, I can make an argument that president Biden is even more dangerous to the Republic. | ||
| And she had this kind of astonished look, which, you know, her brain stopped working. | ||
| And, um, and I said, you know, the reason for that, that I would say that is because President Biden did something no other president in history, and a court has found that. | ||
| There's no court that's found that President Trump tried to steal the election or tried to derail the election or tried to start an insurrection. | ||
| There may be plenty of evidence that he did that. | ||
| There's no court that's found that, but there's courts that have found that President Biden was censoring his opponents, and not just me, although he did censor me, and I did win that suit, so it's not me making it up. | ||
| And by the way, they were censoring me not because I was Promoting misinformation, because they have not been able to point to a single post that I made that was factually erroneous. | ||
| And we're very, very careful about making sure that everything I put up there, I think I have got the best fact-checking operation in journalism. | ||
| We have 350 PhD scientists and MD physicians who are on an advisory board that look at the stuff we post. | ||
| And you know, everything I post is cited in source. | ||
| to peer-reviewed publications or to government databases. | ||
| So in these conversations that you're watching between the White House censors and their compatriots at Facebook, the Facebook people are saying, well, actually what he's saying is factually correct. | ||
| They had to come up with a new word to describe my post. | ||
| And the word is mal- it's not misinformation or disinformation, it's mal-information, which is information that is factually correct, but it's nevertheless inconvenient for the government. | ||
| So they were censoring me. | ||
| But they also were censoring, as you know. | ||
| I'm on the list. | ||
| Jim Gordon released the list. | ||
| My name was on there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Related to the Twitter files. | ||
| Including people who had nothing to do with any kind of criticism of lockdowns or masks or vaccines or any of that stuff. | ||
| There are people who are criticizing the Ukraine war or, you know, the military industrial complex. | ||
| And those people are now getting censored by the, by order of the president. | ||
| And that's never happened before. | ||
| And the president had leverage. | ||
| To make these companies comply, which is they were threatening to pull antitrust lawsuits, but also to pull their Section 230 immunity. | ||
| Section 230 of the Communications Act is the section that makes Facebook and, you know, the platforms immune from defamation suits. | ||
| And just so people understand what that means. | ||
| I used to write a lot for the New York Times for their op-ed page. | ||
| Every time I published these little eight, 750 word stories on their op-ed page, I'd spend maybe an hour or 45 minutes or an hour on the phone with attorneys for the New York Times that were vetting every line in there to make sure that if I said something that was vaguely defamatory, I had an adequate source, I could prove the truth of the matter, assert it, et cetera. | ||
| So they have to do that with every article that's published. | ||
| A lawyer has to read every article that the New York Times publishes before it appears in print. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because if I said something defamatory in my article on the editorial page, The person who was defamed would sue not just me. | ||
| They could sue the New York Times. | ||
| And so, if Twitter had to do that, if Facebook had to do that, if Google had to do that... They'd have to censor us to oblivion, basically, to avoid lawsuits. | ||
| Not only censor, but they'd have to have lawyers vetting every post, you know, from every... The billion posts, they couldn't do it. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg said it's existential. | ||
| So Congress included this provision called Section 230 that makes them immune. | ||
| Well, the White House was threatening these platforms that if you don't censor RFK and other people, We're going to go after your Section 230 immunity. | ||
| And that is existential for them. | ||
| So of course they complied. | ||
| But that, you know, listen, Facebook and Twitter can censor me all they want. | ||
| And they should censor stuff. | ||
| They should censor, you know, there's pedophilia or, you know, people inciting violence. | ||
| Yeah, they should censor them. | ||
| But when the government is telling them to censor them, then the First Amendment is implicated. | ||
| So let me ask you something that I asked Jim Jordan at the Capitol about just that. | ||
| So, OK, so the government put pressure on a corporation to silence you. | ||
| That is, by most legal standards, that would be a violation of the First Amendment. | ||
| They had my tweets taken down. | ||
| That's a violation of the First Amendment. | ||
| But nothing happens and there is no recourse. | ||
| And Jim Jordan said, you're never gonna get a note, no one's gonna pat you on the back or anything else. | ||
| And I think that, people understanding that, that they do it and they get away with it, | ||
| and then they do it again, that has led to so many people just thinking, | ||
| oh, the system just doesn't work and there's just no point in any of this. | ||
| How do you overcome that hurdle? | ||
| Well, with my case, I actually won the case, like an injunction against President Biden, | ||
| So I didn't get the note. | ||
| So you got the note? | ||
| Wow, I want to see the note. | ||
| But okay, so you got a note. | ||
| I didn't get a note of apology from the President, but I got a judge slapping their wrists and saying, You can't do that anymore. | ||
| And then there's a companion case to my case called Biden versus Kennedy, or Kennedy versus Biden. | ||
| And then the companion case is Murthy versus Biden. | ||
| Which was brought by Jeff Landry, who's the Kentucky, or the Louisiana Attorney General, and then Eric Schmidt, who is the Missouri Attorney General. | ||
| And a really good case, and they did a really good job on discovery, and that's the one with the Twitter files. | ||
| Which, uh, which, uh, Elon Musk voluntarily released an insane mood that all of all his attorneys told him don't do that when he bought Twitter. | ||
| He found millions of documents that showed collusion between the White House and Twitter employees on censorship. | ||
| And instead of kind of burning them or going through them, parsing through them carefully, he invited Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker, these great, you know, the last living investigative journalists. | ||
| And a bunch of other journalists and he gave him a room and he said, here's all the documents, do whatever you want with them. | ||
| And his lawyers were just screaming, you can't do that. | ||
| And, you know, I will always love Elon because he, he did that. | ||
| It was such a bold, brazen move. | ||
| And it was, you know, I asked him why you do that. | ||
| And he said, look, I grew up in South Africa. | ||
| I moved here, and I moved here partially because of the First Amendment, because I love the freedom of this country. | ||
| And he said, I'm a citizen of this country now. | ||
| I have a lot of money. | ||
| I could buy houses all over the world. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Everything I own is here. | ||
| And I want this country to be what it's supposed to be. | ||
| So it was a very extraordinary conversation. | ||
| Now, let me say this. | ||
| Elon is censoring stuff all over Europe. | ||
| Because in Europe now, censorship is just out of control. | ||
| You know, they give you a $50 million fine if you write something contrary to official | ||
| medical recommendations. | ||
| So if you criticize mRNA vaccines, you pay millions of dollars in fines. | ||
| So, you know, all the social media companies are buckling under. | ||
| China, you have to buckle under and Twitter does whatever it's told over there. | ||
| But in this country, Elon is at this point standing up for free speech. | ||
| And I think that's great. | ||
| And it's particularly great because You know his whole livelihood depends on government contracts. | ||
| SpaceX is just is virtually a hundred percent dependent on government contracts and. | ||
| Even twitter you know all the social media companies are tied in with the intelligence agencies and. | ||
| So what he's done, I think, is particularly courageous. | ||
| But anyway, because of what he did, which is to release all these documents, and the Missouri Attorney General And Jeffrey Landry from Louisiana got all these other documents from Facebook and from Instagram and from Google that corroborated that this was happening across the whole landscapes, that the White House was hammering these companies and ordering them to censor. | ||
| And that's how we know what was happening. | ||
| Otherwise, we wouldn't know anything about it. | ||
| So I did win and I got an injunction. | ||
| I thought it was extraordinary the clip with you and Erin Burnett because it was a moment of truth happening on CNN and there's so little truth. | ||
| You get something from the lawyer. | ||
| But okay, so when you brought that up, so we played that clip. | ||
| I thought it was extraordinary, the clip with you and Erin Burnett, | ||
| because it was a moment of truth happening on CNN, and there's so little truth. | ||
| So when you have that moment with her, and then do you just walk out of there and go, | ||
| okay, I'll just keep playing ball there? | ||
| It's interesting, because you are doing really well with the online world. | ||
| That's where you're having long conversations and agreeing to disagree with people, | ||
| and when I had you on last time, we disagreed about a couple things, it's fine. | ||
| But then you go on to these other shows, and it's like, it struck me like | ||
| she didn't really know how to respond to hearing something that was counter. | ||
| And that isn't the job of the journalists that you just described. | ||
| No, I mean, I'll tell you what, I'm not gonna say anything. | ||
| you Negative about Erin Burnett because I think she is probably getting lambasted for letting me on. | ||
| And she actually, you know, and I, she was going to have me on just for 10 minutes. | ||
| And for one reason or another, she kept me on for 29 minutes. | ||
| And she had a whole, she had a lot of other clips that she was going to show me. | ||
| You know, the way she does it, she has clips of my family bat-mouthing me or whatever. | ||
| And she plays those clips and says, what do you think? | ||
| So she had a bunch of those lined up. | ||
| That's journalism. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| But she said at the end, you know, I had so many other things I really wanted to talk to you about. | ||
| She wanted to, she very, very differs with me on Ukraine. | ||
| I'm pretty sure she differs with me on Gaza. | ||
| And she told me specifically, I wanted to talk to you about those issues. | ||
| So I'm hoping she has me back, you know, I'm hoping she doesn't get into too much trouble. | ||
| Yeah, so let's back up to where you started for a second because when, and this is what we discussed at lunch, but when you mentioned the big issues, you first thing you talked about debt and health. | ||
| And it's interesting because those are clearly not things that we're really talking about in at a national conversation at all. | ||
| How do you get people to focus on the right things? | ||
| So like when you tell me numbers on the debt, it's like intellectually I get it and I know why we shouldn't be a debtor nation and that eventually you got to pay your debts and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But how do you actually get people to focus and realize that that is something you have to care about more so than some of the culture war stuff that I think we're kind of getting past in a certain extent? | ||
| I mean, I don't think anybody's, the answer is I don't really know the answer to that question. | ||
| My experience is that when I talk to people about it and say, how come nobody else is talking about this? | ||
| I feel a lot of lights going on in people's heads saying, yeah, that actually is what we ought to be talking about. | ||
| We ought to be talking about diabetes. | ||
| We ought to be talking about. | ||
| You know, Alzheimer's, which, you know, we talked at lunch that Alzheimer's recently was reclassified as type 3 diabetes. | ||
| People now understand that it's dietary, that we're poisoning this whole generation. | ||
| Shouldn't we be talking about that? | ||
| Should we be talking about the fact that we have a thousand ingredients in our foods | ||
| that are illegal in other countries, in Europe, et cetera, and that, you know, we're just systematically | ||
| poisoning this generation of kids. | ||
| When I talk about it, people, I feel like people's lights go on and they say, | ||
| yeah, that is what this election should be about. | ||
| It shouldn't be about the fear. | ||
| I think people will wanna talk about those issues. | ||
| They want to solve those issues and that the solution and at the, the RNC and the DNC don't want people talking about it. | ||
| They, because they're both paid by BlackRock and BlackRock owns the processed food companies that are poisoning us. | ||
| And they own the pharmaceutical companies that are making $4.3 trillion a year, five times our defense budget. | ||
| Treating the chronic disease that's being caused by BlackRock's other group of companies. | ||
| BlackRock owns all the military contractors, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, etc., that are destroying all the ports and bridges and schools and roads in Ukraine, and they also have the contract for rebuilding Ukraine. | ||
| So you have, you know, both parties are being supported by BlackRock. | ||
| Both of them are the war party, and both of them are kind of captured of that system. | ||
| And it's all the issues that would challenge their hegemony over our democracy are issues that are never talked about, | ||
| although when Americans hear about them, so Americans think, oh, this election's about abortion | ||
| and guns on the border. | ||
| That's all the news. | ||
| By the way, CNN, they're all ultimately owned by BlackRock too. | ||
| So you're in this closed loop bubble where you're not allowed to really talk about what's important. | ||
| And everybody thinks, oh, elections are about abortions, guns and the border and about hating the other guy. | ||
| And when you start talking about the issues that are really important to people, the chronic disease, the debt, the addiction to war, restoring our soils, having healthy foods. | ||
| I see that there's a tremendous receptivity by Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| And of course, they want to make sure Republicans and Democrats never get together on anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So what do you think happened to the Democrat Party? | ||
| What do you think your father and your uncle and you? | ||
| Because I should be a Democrat by any sane estimation, and I am definitely not a Democrat. | ||
| You should be a Democrat by any sane estimation, and you're not. | ||
| So what do you think happened and did you, did it fully crystallize for you once you ran? | ||
| I mean, was that, was there a moment that you were like, wow, I, I mean, clearly there was, you're not a Democrat anymore, but, but I guess what was the moment or what was the afternoon like when you were like, I am not what this is anymore? | ||
| Well, I, you know, I watched it in slow motion because if you ask what the change point was, I'd say 2008. | ||
| When, with the Citizens United case, and Citizens United, you know, we had, we lost democracy early on in American history in the 1880s and 1890s, which is called the Gilded Age, because that was, it was a rise of a gilded class at that point that, you know, owned everything in our country. | ||
| And you had families like the Rockefellers and the Mellons and the Carnegie's and the Fricks and the Whitney's. | ||
| That all sat on the boards of these interlocking boards of all these giant trusts, the sugar trust, the steel trust, the railroad trust, the oil trust. | ||
| And those trusts controlled everything, the entire economy. | ||
| And at that time, There was no direct election of senators. | ||
| The senators were chosen by the legislature. | ||
| The legislature were easy to buy. | ||
| For a couple thousand dollars, you could buy not just one, the entire legislature. | ||
| It was said at that time that the Pennsylvania legislature was the only one that was not for sale, and it was because John D. Rockefeller owned it, and he wasn't selling anything. | ||
| And they chose the senators, and ultimately, you know, they were in the convention, chose the president. | ||
| The whole system was run by what today would be called billionaires. | ||
| At that time, they were millionaires and multimillionaires. | ||
| And then something happened at the first part of the century. | ||
| Or you had a confluence of an unconsolidated rebellion. | ||
| In the countryside, you had the populist movement, which was democratic. | ||
| In the cities, you had the progressive movement, which was Republican moderates who wanted clean government. | ||
| And you had these muckraking journalists mainly writing for one magazine called McClure's. | ||
| Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and a bunch of others. | ||
| that started writing exposés about the Robert Barons, about John D. Rockefeller, et cetera. | ||
| And then you had one guy, Teddy Roosevelt, who was part of the oligarchy, | ||
| but wasn't intimidated by it, and had an idea about what American democracy | ||
| was supposed to look like, and was fearless. | ||
| And he became president, and we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, | ||
| which broke up these trusts, and they broke up Standard Oil, | ||
| which is the biggest company in the world. | ||
| They passed the 40-hour work week. | ||
| They banned child labor. | ||
| They gave women the vote. | ||
| They allowed unions to organize. | ||
| They passed the first graduated income tax, which means that wealthy people had to pay | ||
| their share of the economy. | ||
| They passed the first corporate income tax. | ||
| The biggest thing they did is in 2008, they passed a law that made it illegal for corporations | ||
| to donate to federal political candidates. | ||
| So that law, all of those things restored democracy and uprighted it. | ||
| That law lasted for a hundred years. | ||
| And in 2008, the Supreme Court threw out that law and they said that political donations are the equivalent of a speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they're therefore protected by the first amendment. | ||
| So if you give a million dollar bribe to a politician, essentially it's a legalized bribe. | ||
| That's free speech. | ||
| Nobody can stop you. | ||
| There's no other country that allows that. | ||
| We allow it. | ||
| So, um, and that, you know, I think that changed all the political parties in this country because now if it costs $3 billion to run for president, You're not getting that from little people, right? | ||
| And, you know, it costs a hundred million to run for Senate in New York. | ||
| What does that mean you have to do? | ||
| I mean, now you're not allowed to make solicitations from the Senate office, right? | ||
| Using that Senate phone, that's illegal. | ||
| So the Senate and the House of Republicans, Democrats got together and they got a building next door to the Senate. | ||
| Which is called the Dialing for Dollars building. | ||
| We're on their break, they all run over there, and that's where they have the phone bank set up, and they just work the phones, and they're talking to people who at a minimum can write a $10,000 check. | ||
| So let's say you get 1,000 of those, that's $10 million, that's one-fifth of what you need. | ||
| You have to make 1,000 calls, so now there's 1,000 guys you owe a favor to. | ||
| Okay, now, they're running New York, You have 10,000 people you owe a favor to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And those are the people that when they call your office a year later and say, I need to get my kid into West Point or I need a tax break for my company, at very least you got to take a meeting with them. | ||
| That's 10,000 people you got to take meetings with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So if you're a little guy who can't write that check, You know, there's no chance that you're going to get into that Senate office. | ||
| You know, maybe you'll get a picture taken or something like that, but nobody is taking you seriously. | ||
| We put our whole government into the hands of these, you know, of donors and those donors, most of them are not giving million dollar checks for patriotic reasons or out of a humanitarian impulse. | ||
| They're doing it because it's an investment for them and they expect an ROI, they expect a return on investment, and that return on investment is going to come at taxpayer expense. | ||
| The whole government is for sale, it's a system of legalized bribery, and I watched it happen from then. | ||
| I'll tell you very quickly, on healthcare, I watched this happen, on vaccines in particular. | ||
| Because like my uncle, you know, had, my uncle Ted Kennedy, and he chaired the health committee for 50 years in the United States Senate. | ||
| And the women who've ultimately persuaded me to start looking at the vaccine issue, these mothers of injured kids who just kept coming at me and coming at me. | ||
| And finally I had to say, they all had the same story. | ||
| Literally now I've talked to thousands of them. | ||
| And I couldn't really say, you know, these people are crazy because they weren't. | ||
| They were telling me something they believed, and I felt like I have to listen. | ||
| We should listen to women when they tell us about their kids, right? | ||
| Democrats even say you should listen to women. | ||
| I started listening to them, and then I started reading the science, which is what I do for a living. | ||
| I read science for a living. | ||
| I brought over 500 lawsuits. | ||
| They all involve scientific controversies. | ||
| My job is to deconstruct science, to read it critically. | ||
| So I'm very comfortable reading it. | ||
| And I started reading it and I saw something that, you know, I saw that the government was not telling us the truth about what the science says. | ||
| My uncle, during his time, these women were coming to him and he was listening to them. | ||
| And he was, he knew something was wrong and he was doing things to help them. | ||
| Oh, and the Democratic Party was like, yeah, we should be listening to these people. | ||
| Then what happened? | ||
| When Obama passed Obamacare, my uncle was involved, they had to make a bargain with the pharmaceutical companies because the pharmaceutical companies control Congress. | ||
| They're the biggest lobbyists. | ||
| They give three times what the next lobbyist, which is oil and coal. | ||
| There's more lobbyists on Capitol Hill from pharma than any other industry, and they control Congress. | ||
| Obama knew he could not get Obamacare passed without pharmaceuticals, that they could kill it. | ||
| So he said, okay, what do you want? | ||
| And what they said is, we want it so that when Medicare, Medicare, or Obamacare buy drugs, that you will not try to bargain the price down. | ||
| The government has to pay whatever we ask. | ||
| And even though Canada, they're paying one-fifth of the same drug, you're going to pay whatever we ask. | ||
| And Obama said, okay. | ||
| Then the pharmaceutical companies came in and helped pass Obamacare because for them it was a cash cow now. | ||
| It was no longer a pain for them. | ||
| It was a cash cow. | ||
| Prior to that, Democrats could not take money from pharma without getting a black eye from their constituents. | ||
| Republicans could take money from anybody, from the NRA, from the tobacco industry, from the chemical industry, from the oil, coal. | ||
| They're rolling in money all the time. | ||
| But Democrats can only take money from trial lawyers and from unions, right? | ||
| So they didn't have any industry that's helping them. | ||
| And now they got pharmaceutical money and they could take it and nobody's going to get mad at them. | ||
| So they started taking it even more than Republicans. | ||
| And that's when the arc started changing. | ||
| And then when Trump ran in 2016, three times during the election, he said, I know women who had perfectly healthy babies. | ||
| Who took the vaccines got autism. | ||
| Something's wrong and I'm gonna look at it. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| The Democrats then took that statement and put it in the same anti-science dumpster as Trump's climate stuff. | ||
| So Trump became the anti-science guy The proof of that was, one, he didn't believe in vaccines. | ||
| He believed they may cause autism, which, of course, that's all been debunked, which, of course, it hasn't. | ||
| And then he also believed, you know, he didn't believe in climate. | ||
| And so then it became part of the tribal ideology. | ||
| And after that, you know, it was a test of whether you're a Democrat or Republican. | ||
| If you didn't have 100 percent faith in vaccines, You are right wing nut, anti-science, anti-vax. | ||
| You know, and so that I, that's, I watched that whole thing happen. | ||
| I watched that whole arc happen. | ||
| And it makes a lot of us, I guess, anti-science nuts. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You guys gave us the signal here. | ||
| I feel like we just got started, but let me, so let me ask you one other question and maybe you can answer it from two angles. | ||
| So it seems to me that let's say Biden has 30% of the country that's going to vote for Biden, no matter what. | ||
| And Trump probably has 30% that's going to vote for Trump. | ||
| No matter what. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's say that's about 60%, but that means that there's 40% that could probably be swayed either way. | ||
| So what, what would be your pitch to somebody that's probably voting for Trump, but could be moved? | ||
| And then maybe if you could do it on the other side, someone that's probably going to vote for Biden and could be moved. | ||
| Is it the same pitch to both or how do you? | ||
| No, no, it would be a different pitch because I think with my pitch to Trump voters is that President Trump was well-intentioned, but he doesn't have the patience or the disposition or the self-discipline to actually do the things that he said he was going to do. | ||
| For example, he said that he was going to run the country like a business. | ||
| He was a business guy. | ||
| He was going to run it like a business. | ||
| And he comes in, he knows the lockdowns are wrong. | ||
| He says, I don't want to do them. | ||
| It's only going to be two weeks. | ||
| You know, at most it's not, this is, I'm not going to do this. | ||
| But then he got rolled by his bureaucrats and he locked us down for a year. | ||
| He shut down 3.3 million businesses. | ||
| He gave the keys to your business, Anthony Fauci. | ||
| And I would never have done that. | ||
| And you know, my uncle, when he was, During the Bay of Pigs in 1962, he had 13 members of the Ex-Cont Committee, which the committee my father was on and Bob McNamara, the Joint Chiefs. | ||
| Dean Acheson, all these gray beards from the diplomatic corps who were on that committee, who were meeting in the White House, sometimes 24 hours a day. | ||
| My father got a cut, slept in the White House, didn't come home for 13 days. | ||
| The 13 most dangerous days in human history. | ||
| You know, we were this close. | ||
| There was a couple of days when a lot of people went to sleep thinking they were going to wake up dead. | ||
| Right, the whole country, 30 million Americans. | ||
| And 11 of the 13 people on that committee on the first day wanted to invade Cuba and bomb the missile sites. | ||
| My uncle said, okay, there's 64 missile sites. | ||
| The Russians have moved in 64 launch pads and their missiles are on them. | ||
| Are the missiles armed? | ||
| The CIA didn't know. | ||
| And he said, who are the gun crews? | ||
| Are those Cuban gun crews or are they Russian? | ||
| And they said, we think they may be Russian. | ||
| My uncle said, if we go in there and kill those Russians, isn't Khrushchev going to have to come into Berlin, which would have been the beginning of a nuclear exchange. | ||
| And they said, we don't think he has the guts to do that. | ||
| My uncle said, I'm not going to go on your gut feeling. | ||
| And he stood up to his bureaucrats, and the last day, they took one last vote. | ||
| And the last vote, they said it was eight. | ||
| And this isn't in any book, right? | ||
| But I know this from Bob McNamara and from other friends. | ||
| My uncle did a last vote. | ||
| The last vote was eight to six. | ||
| Eight saying, we need to bomb the missile sites and go in. | ||
| Six saying, no, we should do the embargo. | ||
| At that point, they had an option. | ||
| And my uncle took the vote and then he said, the sixes have it. | ||
| So he was overruling his bureaucracy. | ||
| The job of a president is to listen to experts, listen to good advice, listen to wise people, but to make up your own mind. | ||
| And Trump was not able to do that. | ||
| And he did the same thing on the vaccine, you know, on all of these issues that were really critical to what we, what he wanted to do himself. | ||
| You know, he said he was going to end the war machine, but then he brought in John Bolton. | ||
| He said he was going to drain the swamp. | ||
| He brings in a swamp creature. | ||
| Who is at the spear tip of, you know, of these manufactured wars every three or four years. | ||
| And so I don't think that, you know, I think that many of the things that president Trump said that he wanted to do, he was earnest and seared, seared about it, but he just, I don't think he has the discipline to do it. | ||
| I think he had his chance. | ||
| He was unable to do it. | ||
| And I, I won't let my bureaucrats rule me. | ||
| I know how to handle these bureaucracies. | ||
| I've spent 40 years. | ||
| I'm suing them, and I can get down in the trenches with them and go granular, and I can beat them in an argument, and I don't think he's willing to do the reading, the studying, the understanding. | ||
| Do you think you'd be able to staff properly, that you could align the right people? | ||
| because I think that's the other problem that Trump is going to have, even if he could do all of it, | ||
| to get the right people to be willing to work for him at this point. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and that's a really good question. And because you can't just bring in people who | ||
| are ideologues. | ||
| You need people who can actually, you know, who have managerial skills. | ||
| Or because at every level of those bureaucracies, there are low-level bureaucrats who are capable of doing civil disobediences that will, you know, bring life to a halt and embarrass the president. | ||
| You can't let the electricity go out, right? | ||
| You need to keep the lights on. | ||
| No, I think that is an issue. | ||
| I also feel like I have enough managerial skills and I have enough knowledge of the agencies, the important ones, and I'm going to be able to actually Um, manage them myself, manage their trajectories would change their trajectories by itself. | ||
| But yeah, I, you know, I spent 40 years developing relationships with people of other ways of running these agencies. | ||
| So I, I'm going to be able to establish them, but it's not going to be easy. | ||
| That's, that's a huge challenge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So the Biden side of that, that same question, what do you say to the person that is, that is probably you have even 10 years ago, that's been a lifelong Democrat now sees the radicalism there or sees what's going on with the president cognitively or whatever the reason is there, they're ready to move. | ||
| What's the case? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, I, I would go issue by issue on that. | ||
| I would say, You know, there's not going to be a better environmental president in history than me. | ||
| And I've been doing this all my life. | ||
| And President Biden says that, you know, he's he's good on climate, that that's his big priority, that that's his big win is, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| But you look at the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| And it's all about carbon control. | ||
| It's all about carbon capture. | ||
| It's all about these huge multibillion dollar projects. | ||
| that are actually just subsidies for the industry. | ||
| And it's all about top-down controls, which are driving people apart and, you know, making people feel like, oh, this is another manufactured crisis that they're using to take away our freedom and clamp down totalitarian controls. | ||
| I, you know, I've spent 40 years actually understanding the issue and whether I believe climate change is existential. | ||
| I don't insist anybody else believe that. | ||
| The things that I'm going to do are things that are going to help alleviate that crisis, but they're things that everybody's going to want to do for other reasons, because people want clean air. | ||
| They want clean water. | ||
| They want regenerative agriculture. | ||
| They want to restore our soils. | ||
| They want better food. | ||
| And they want our Purple Mountains majesty. | ||
| They don't want our Appalachians cut down. | ||
| There's now in part of the Appalachians 1.4 million acres larger than the state of Delaware that has now been flattened. | ||
| The 500 biggest mountains in Appalachia have been cut down. | ||
| These are the landscapes where Daniel Boone, Rome, or Davy Crockett, Rome, you know, the landscapes where bluegrass music came out of, where Nets are racing, where, you know, so much of our heritage, nobody wants to see those cut down. | ||
| And, you know, so what I, what my approach to all environmental issues is, is free markets. | ||
| Let's get rid of the subsidies. | ||
| You get rid of the subsidies, you have true free markets. | ||
| True free market promotes efficiency. | ||
| Efficiencies mean the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste. | ||
| And a true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that cause us to use them wastefully. | ||
| In a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, without enriching your community. | ||
| But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. | ||
| They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. | ||
| You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. | ||
| I'll show you a fat cat, Using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs. | ||
| That's what all pollution is. | ||
| Right, because otherwise they'd be in jail, basically. | ||
| What? | ||
| Because otherwise they'd be in jail, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So that's how you're skirting around everything. | ||
| I mean, I'll just give you a quick example of that. | ||
| The General Electric Company was, for many years, dumping PCBs illegally into the Hudson River. | ||
| It was illegal, always illegal. | ||
| The state of New York tried to stop them, two governors, Governor Kerry and Governor Rockefeller, and Jack Welch, who is the head of GE, and this is how he made his bonds. | ||
| This is how he became the head. | ||
| He said, if you make us fix, if you make us properly dispose of PCBs, which is going to cost us more money, and we'll have to then increase the price of our capacitators and the transformers we're making, We're going to shut down that plant. | ||
| We're going to fire 60,000 workers, and we're going to move across the river to New Jersey, and we're going to employ workers over there. | ||
| They're going to get the taxes. | ||
| They're going to get the jobs. | ||
| We're still going to dump the PCBs in Hudson, just their side of it. | ||
| You figure out what you want, and Rockefeller and Kerry broke down. | ||
| Oh, you know, 20 years later, Jack Welch closed those factories. | ||
| Workers are all gone. | ||
| There's not a single GE worker in New York state. | ||
| Everybody in the Hudson Valley has General Electric's PCBs in their flesh and their organs. | ||
| They cause endocrine disruptors. | ||
| They cause, you know, severe changes in sexual development. | ||
| They cause cancer and they cause brain injury. | ||
| And we all have that in our body. | ||
| That's a trespass. | ||
| So, and now it's cause, the cause of removing them from the, that's 4.6, $4.3 billion, which nobody has. | ||
| And so General Electric, you know, was doing something that, you know, free drew free market. | ||
| If you're an actor in the marketplace, you pay all the costs of bringing your product to market, including the cost of cleaning up after yourself. | ||
| Which was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in kindergarten. | ||
| What polluters do is they figure out ways to get the public to shoulder their costs of production, and they then are able to out-compete their competitor and prevail in the marketplace by distorting the marketplace. | ||
| And what I say is, let's end those kind of indirect subsidies, make everybody pay their full cost, make everybody comply with the law, and then we will get the best products for the least money. | ||
| I don't often end an interview by asking for a favor, but my favor is this. |
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