Aug. 26, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:28:33
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| We're honored to announce that J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, is confirmed for a live tour stop in Hershey, Pennsylvania, next month. | ||
| Tickets are on sale at tuckercarlson.com. | ||
| We hope to see you there. | ||
| We'll be in cities all across the country starting next week. | ||
| But first, our interview with Bobby Kennedy Jr., his first since endorsing Donald Trump on Friday. | ||
|
unidentified
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Friday. | |
| Here it is. | ||
| So people were shocked to I know a lot of people you know well were shocked when you endorsed Trump. | ||
| I was not shocked because for all the areas where you disagree on specific issues, there's a consistent theme that I have noticed in both of your lives, which is you've both spent the majority of your life, in your case, your whole life in the American ruling class. | ||
| And both of you decided that it was corrupt and that you were going to say so out loud at great risk, at great risk to both of you. | ||
| And so it was probably just a matter of time before you aligned in some way. | ||
| Is that how you see it? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a bunch of realignments, political realignments, about four or five throughout American history. | ||
| And I think we're going through one right now with the Democratic Party and with both political parties really changing in this very dramatic way. | ||
| And you and I talked earlier about The transformation of the Republican Party into the party of environmentalism. | ||
| And, you know, the Democratic Party has one now, one environmental issue, which is his carbon orthodoxy, which ends up benefiting, you know, the oil companies and BlackRock and Goldman Sachs with offshore wind and carbon capture, $100 billion carbon capture projects, which is part of just the strip mining of the middle class. | ||
| And that's the only issue you can talk about in the Democratic Party. | ||
| I got into the environmental movement to do habitat protection, to do wildlife conservation, to get toxics out of our kids. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| And none of these are issues that the party itself. | ||
| Democrats care about them, but the party itself doesn't. | ||
| There's been these big, profound realignments, and it's not only on that issue. | ||
| It's really the domination of... | ||
| This corrupt merger of state and corporate power is happening in Washington, D.C. now, where our democracy has really been subverted by the industries that have taken over the regulatory agencies and transformed them into sock puppets or corporate profit-taking and basically wholly owned subsidiaries of the industries they're supposed to regulate. | ||
| And the Democrats, for a variety of reasons, and I watched it happen over many, many years, have clung to this illusion of these democratic institutions that they're still democratic, and we all have the capacity to judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. | ||
| I've been there! | ||
| And the Democratic Party judges itself, it sees itself, my friends who are Democrats, see themselves as part of the good guys, the white hats, and that, you know, it's kind of like the good guys who are in Fort Apache, surrounded by, you know, the forces of barbarism that are about to storm the gate, and they're the only ones, the only way to keep it at bay. | ||
| Is to elect a president who has dementia because you're voting for the apparatus. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you're not voting for, you know, or another president. | ||
| Then to handpick a presidential candidate without any elections to basically get rid of democracy in order to save it and handpick a candidate who in 40 days now has not given a single... | ||
| I think about when my uncle and father would think about that, you know, they prided themselves on being able to go on debate. | ||
| It was the centerpiece, you know, the whole, you know, function of democracy was to anneal ideas in the furnace of debate and have them rise up in, you know, the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| And the idea that, you know, and we had this British tradition of Churchill and the others and the House of Commons, you know, and being able to defend their policies and being forced to defend their policies articulately, eloquently. | ||
| And, you know, my uncle and father just thought ideas are important and we should be able to defend them. | ||
| And if you can't defend them, there's something wrong with you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, you know, why? | ||
| So we have a presidential candidate that was selected by the Democratic Party who can't do that. | ||
| And, you know, one of the things that my uncle and father were always thinking about is how do we look to the rest of the world, right? | ||
| They were conscious that America was the template for democracy. | ||
| When we created a modern democracy in 1789 or 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, we were the only democracy on Earth. | ||
| By 1865, during the end of the Civil War, there were five, and they were all modeled on America. | ||
| And by the time my uncle took office, it was about 150. | ||
| And by the time, by the end of the 60s, there's 190. | ||
| They're all based on the American model. | ||
| And, you know, we very much were the exemplary nation. | ||
| We were the example of democracy around the globe and people. | ||
| And they were very conscious. | ||
| They were, you know, they were embarrassed at first by the civil rights movement because they said, what is the rest of the world going to think about it? | ||
| And then they realized, well, we better correct, you know, the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because, but they, everything that they did, they were conscious that they were being watched. | ||
| What does the rest of the world think of American democracy right now? | ||
| We have in one party selected a man with dementia to lead the free world and then turned around and picked a person, a woman who cannot give an interview. | ||
| She cannot defend her vision or America's record in the world. | ||
| And then she gave this, you know, Vice President Harris gave this speech at the convention that was written by neocons. | ||
| And they had CIA directors talking at the Democratic convention, military people talking at the Democratic convention. | ||
| My father and my uncle were the party of anti-war. | ||
| My uncle was asked by his best friend, Ben Bradley, one of his two best friends who ran the Washington Post, What do you want on your graves, on your epithet? | ||
| And my uncle said immediately he kept the peace. | ||
| He said the primary job of a president of the United States was to keep the country out of war. | ||
| He said he didn't want children in Africa and Latin America and Asia, when they heard about the United States of America, to think of a man with a gun. | ||
| They wanted him to think of a Peace Corps volunteer and the Alliance for Progress and USAID. Which were programs that he created to build the middle class, to end run the oligarchs, end run the military hunters that used to receive a U.S. aid, and instead go directly to the poor and build institutions, | ||
| education and health, and all the institutions of democracy to continue to model it for the rest of the world and live up to what we were supposed to be doing, which is to encourage the growth of... | ||
| Of democratic rule. | ||
| So now you have a, you know, we have a system that's produced people who, you know, a candidate in the Democratic Party who can't even defend America's record in the world and who is... | ||
| Barotting this kind of warmongering, you know, military domination ideology that's gotten us in such trouble. | ||
| It's caused a calamity in our country. | ||
| It's gutted the middle class. | ||
| It's made us a pariah around the globe. | ||
| And it led to the rise of bricks. | ||
| It's leading to the rise of totalitarianism all over the world. | ||
| And, you know, I'd say this finally. | ||
| If you really look at what's happening in the Democratic Party today, it's a party that, the word demos in Greek means people. | ||
| But it's a party that's lost faith in the people. | ||
| It's a party that needs ironclad control. | ||
| So they didn't trust anybody to have a real election. | ||
| They got rid of the primaries because they didn't trust the people. | ||
| They then picked and picked. | ||
| Vice President Harris, with no election, no even pretense of election, because they didn't trust the people. | ||
| And, you know, you have, and they're the party now of censorship. | ||
| How can you have a democracy with censorship? | ||
| You cannot have a democracy. | ||
| They're absolutely incompatible. | ||
| And everybody knew that everybody, you know, you and I were raised reading Orwell and Alice Huxley and... | ||
| And, you know, Robert Heinlein and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and all of these other books that were part of classical literature that was taught in every American classroom. | ||
| It said the first step to totalitarianism is always, because with censorship, it's the first step down that slippery slope. | ||
| And there's no time that we look back in history and say the people who are censoring speech were the good guys. | ||
| They're always the bad guys because we knew, you know, we know that they're the guys who are going to end up cracking the whip on us all and, you know, being our overlords. | ||
| And then, you know, the whole thing about, like, you and I talked about that clip of Tim Waltz, Governor Waltz, saying that. | ||
| Government should be the ultimate arbiter of what is protected speech and what is not. | ||
| You know, he said if something that the First Amendment does not protect, misinformation and disinformation, but it does. | ||
| The First Amendment was written to protect not only true speech but false speech. | ||
| And speech, it wasn't there and it's unnecessary. | ||
| To protect the kind of speech that everybody wants to hear. | ||
| It's there to protect the kind of speech that nobody wants to hear. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And especially speech that is critical of the people in charge. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so in their current formulation, misinformation is defined as any speech that criticizes the job that they're doing. | ||
| So with that in mind, you see the Biden administration encouraging France, Macron, to arrest the owner and founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, who's now, as of right now, in a French prison. | ||
| That seems like, I mean, that's the hallmark of dictatorship, it sounds to me. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, we've lost Europe. | ||
| Europe is now, does not have free speech. | ||
| You know, look what's happened to Elon Musk. | ||
| Elon Musk should be the hero of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Of the old Democratic Party, he wouldn't be the hero. | ||
| Somehow he became a villain because he was actually the only platform that would allow free speech on his platform. | ||
| And he's now become a villain because of it, because the Democratic Party does not believe in the people. | ||
| If you don't believe in free speech, it means because you don't trust the people. | ||
| You don't trust them to figure it out on their own, you know, to have information on which they can base their ideas and their notions and their beliefs. | ||
| And their votes. | ||
| And their votes, and that the government has to protect them from dangerous information, from things that might put bad ideas into their heads. | ||
| And it's very patronizing, but it's also very manipulative and conniving, and really, it's exactly the opposite of democracy. | ||
| And you will not find a single Democrat who will... | ||
| Who will criticize it? | ||
| It's really astonishing to me because the Democrats always, like, you know, when I endorsed Trump, the big, you know, the big, kind of the fulcrum of the centerpiece of the text of hatred that I got back, this kind of seething anger on so many Democrats was, well, look what he did on January 6th. | ||
| Okay, January 6th was a bad day in American history. | ||
| And what President Trump did there, in my view, was very bad. | ||
| It was reprehensible. | ||
| But was the republic really at risk? | ||
| We have the U.S. military. | ||
| We have the National Guard. | ||
| We have all the institutions. | ||
| We have Congress. | ||
| All these institutions of government, and there was a mob of people, most of them who probably didn't know what was happening. | ||
| Some of them were very badly in tension and were breaking the law. | ||
| But it wasn't a threat to the republic. | ||
| What is a threat, and this is what you cannot explain to a democrat now, and it's astonishing to me. | ||
| What is a threat is when the government is censoring your speech. | ||
| Political speech. | ||
| And, you know, I just won Tucker last week. | ||
| But that was the centerpiece of democratic ideology, was free speech. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, the word liberal means free speech. | ||
| That's where it comes from. | ||
| That must be weird for you, being named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and spending your entire life in this world. | ||
| Like, what's that like? | ||
| I mean, let me just say this. | ||
| I won a lawsuit. | ||
| I won a new judgment in my lawsuit, Kennedy v. | ||
| Biden, last week. | ||
| And Kennedy v. | ||
| Biden was part of two lawsuits that were brought, one by the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, and the other by me, for the same issues, which was the Biden administration's censorship of speech. | ||
| And so there's a series of decisions. | ||
| There's a 155-page decision. | ||
| The Attorney General's case went up to the Supreme Court and was rejected because the Supreme Court found that those Attorney Generals didn't have a standing to sue because they weren't directly harmed. | ||
| My case this week, the federal judge Doty said Kennedy does have a standing to sue. | ||
| And he reissued his injunction against the Biden administration. | ||
| So I have an injunction right now against the Biden White House and join them from censoring me, which they've been doing. | ||
| The 155-page decision by Judge Doty details everything that happened. | ||
| 37 hours after he took the oath of office, President Biden's White House opened up a portal for the FBI to begin to have access to social media posts on all the different social media sites. | ||
| And the FBI then invited in the CIA, DHS, the IRS, and CISA. CISA is this new agency that is the center of the censorship industrial complex that is in charge of making sure Americans don't hear things that their government doesn't want them to hear. | ||
| And those agencies and other agencies, including the health agencies like CDC, were given access to go into the social media sites and change posts and slow walk things and shadow ban posts. | ||
| It was part of that effort. | ||
| They removed my Instagram account. | ||
| I had almost a million followers. | ||
| They say it was for misinformation, but they could not point to a single post that I ever made. | ||
| That was factually erroneous. | ||
| And they actually, Facebook pushed back in the email chain, you can see Facebook pushing back at the White House and saying, wait a minute, he's not, this isn't misinformation. | ||
| This is not factually erroneous. | ||
| What they're saying is actually true. | ||
| And they had to invent a new word which was called malinformation. | ||
| Which is information that is factually true, but nevertheless inconvenient for the government. | ||
| And that became disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| Isn't that illegal? | ||
| Yeah, and the emails show that Facebook, the people said, they were saying about the White House and their private emails with each other. | ||
| These people are cynical, terrible people, and they knew what they were doing was breaking the law, but they were under tremendous pressure. | ||
| Facebook has all these deals with the government, as do all the media companies with the intelligence agencies and elsewhere. | ||
| Plus, the White House was overtly telling them that they were going to, if they didn't comply, That their Section 230 immunity was in jeopardy. | ||
| Section 230 immunity is just so that your listeners know what it is. | ||
| I used to write for the New York Times regularly. | ||
| Every time I wrote an article, lawyers would call me and fact-check everything in that article. | ||
| Because if I wrote something that was defamatory in that article, and somebody was defamed, that person could sue me, but they could also sue the New York Times. | ||
| So the social media site said, we cannot hire lawyers to look at every post and call the people and check on it on Facebook or Instagram. | ||
| So if this industry is going to function... | ||
| We need to be able to not be liable for what is published on our site. | ||
| And that is called Section 230 of the Communications Act. | ||
| Congress said if you are just a platform, a mere platform, that for other people to publish, like Facebook is, like Instagram, like Twitter or X, that you're immune. | ||
| Nobody can sue you. | ||
| They can sue the person who wrote the post, but they can't sue. | ||
| Facebook. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg said, if they take away our Facebook, our Section 230 immunity, it is existential, meaning we will no longer exist. | ||
| And so they were terrified because Congress was actually considering removing Section 230 immunity, and the White House was telling them, if you don't censor our political critics, we're going to take away your Section 230 immunity. | ||
| If President Trump did that, The Democrats would go berserk. | ||
| Well, that's criminal behavior. | ||
| Anyone who does that is a criminal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're violating the First Amendment, the Constitution, for starters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's what happened. | ||
| And, you know, my idea is that if somebody does something bad, it shouldn't matter whether they're Democrat or Republican. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You know, we should all be going after them, and we should be going after them as a society. | ||
| How much does it cost you to use the internet? | ||
| Well, it's free, right? | ||
| Google's free. | ||
| Facebook is free. | ||
| Instagram, totally free. | ||
| That's what you've been convinced of. | ||
| But it's a trick. | ||
| None of it is free. | ||
| In fact, you're paying with your data. | ||
| Everything you do online can be seen and sold. | ||
| Not just to companies, but to governments, including foreign governments, and often is. | ||
| So how do you reclaim your online privacy? | ||
| It's important. | ||
| Well, there is one way. | ||
| It's called encryption. | ||
| Strong encryption protects your right to privacy online and defends you from your many potential enemies online, including your own government. | ||
| And it gives you back the freedom to read what you want, to write what you want, without prying eyes spying on you. | ||
| So how do you get this freedom through encryption? | ||
| I'll tell you how we do it. | ||
| ExpressVPN. | ||
| ExpressVPN reroutes 100% of our online activity through secure encrypted servers. | ||
| Now, normally, if we didn't use it, internet providers would be able to read and see everything that we do online. | ||
| In the United States, they could even sell it, as we said. | ||
| But because we use ExpressVPN, they can't see any of it. | ||
| 0% approximately. | ||
| We also use it when we travel abroad, because that same encryption shuts out hackers and might try and steal what we're doing. | ||
| Things like... | ||
| Passwords or credit card details over sketchy Wi-Fi. | ||
| Free Wi-Fi. | ||
| That's not free either. | ||
| It also shuts out foreign governments and might try and spy on us or censor what we're doing online. | ||
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| We have to trust them. | ||
| They've actually opened up their servers to professional auditors at PwC and KPMG, as well as independent security experts to evaluate the claims they're making about what they're doing, their privacy policy and their trusted server technology. | ||
| So people are watching them. | ||
| So it's a carefully designed server architecture that runs on volatile memory only. | ||
| That means it never stores user data because it cannot store user data. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| It's private by design. | ||
| They couldn't keep your stuff if they wanted to. | ||
| So, in a world where it seems like every corporation wants more and more of your private information to sell and manipulate, It's nice to find a company that actually goes the extra mile to protect it. | ||
| That's their business, protecting your privacy. | ||
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| That's express, E-X-P-R-E-S-S, vpn.com slash tucker. | ||
| What I don't understand, and it is baffling to me, having known a lot of Democrats, but you've been in that world your whole life, how do they not see that? | ||
| How do people who say they believe in civil liberties suddenly think it's okay for the government to prosecute its political opponents and silence them? | ||
| How do they think that? | ||
| You know, to me, I've thought a lot about that. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| And it's about tribalism. | ||
| You know, that people put themselves in these tribal categories, and we're hardwired for tribalism. | ||
| That's why orthodoxies are so popular, that, you know, people get sucked into various kind of orthodoxies, whether it's ideological orthodoxies or religious orthodoxies. | ||
| And that impulse is really, it's not a religious impulse. | ||
| It's a biological impulse, and it's an impulse. | ||
| That's hardwired in us from the 20,000 generations we spent wandering the African savannah and tiny little groups that were warring each other, where there was always a male leader, where the women were traded as chattels because you couldn't marry your sister. | ||
| So you knew from the beginning she was going to be a trade good, and you were going to trade her for somebody else. | ||
| She had no power. | ||
| And where you all had to ascribe to an orthodoxy and see no problems with people who were within your in-group and people who were outside were subhuman and they could be killed. | ||
| And if they made a mistake, you know, you wanted to talk about it. | ||
| Everybody would talk about it. | ||
| We're all hardwired that way because that's where our wiring comes from. | ||
| And when somebody gets subsumed in an orthodoxy... | ||
| It's very, very difficult to unravel. | ||
| And there are all kinds of psychiatric treatises about how do you deprogram somebody? | ||
| How do you talk somebody out of an orthodoxy? | ||
| And the little that I know about it is that if you challenge them directly, it pours concrete on it. | ||
| And it makes them less... | ||
| Able to move off. | ||
| They get very defensive. | ||
| And the way to approach them, there are ways to approach them. | ||
| There's deprogramming protocols. | ||
| And they usually include a lot of Socratic method of asking them questions about their belief. | ||
| But it's a one-on-one project enterprise. | ||
| And it's not something that you can do with the whole Democratic Party overnight. | ||
| Something has to happen that's going to make this tribal thinking unravel because it's really destroying our country. | ||
| And the polarization, which is happening on both sides, is put on steroids by these social media algorithms that reward people for... | ||
| Staying on the site as long as possible. | ||
| All the algorithm knows is I've got to keep as many eyeballs on the site as possible. | ||
| It turns out that the way people stay on the site is if you fortify their existing opinions. | ||
| If you feed them information that consolidates their worldview. | ||
| And so, you know, we have this problem now where it's not just polarization like the Civil War, but it's polarization on steroids because you've got machines that are manipulating us to hate each other more every single day. | ||
| So knowing all this as you do and have for a long time, you know, the most radical step you can make if you're a Democrat is endorsing Donald Trump. | ||
| So there are political calculations involved, there are ideological calculations, but there are also, of course, personal calculations. | ||
| So you know once you do that, you've burned your boats. | ||
| Like, that's it. | ||
| You're not going back to wherever you were 10 years ago. | ||
| How hard a decision was that for you personally? | ||
| It was an obvious decision for me. | ||
| It should have been. | ||
| But it was a very, very difficult decision. | ||
| And we had, you know, I have a very, very good team around me. | ||
| And I was most worried about my wife, who was, about Cheryl, you know. | ||
| Who, you know, was not comfortable with it. | ||
| She's a, you know, lifelong Democrat. | ||
| She comes from not the aristocracy. | ||
| She comes from a very, you know, I would say poor family in North Florida. | ||
| But she found her way through idealism to the Democratic Party. | ||
| And that... | ||
| And she shares a lot of those values. | ||
| And her industry is very, very much aligned with the Democratic Party, probably more than any industry in our country and more than any town in our country. | ||
| So this, for me, was likely to have huge impacts on her. | ||
| And ultimately, if she had told me, you can't do this, I wouldn't have done it. | ||
| I'm very grateful that she allowed me to do it. | ||
| She was not embracing it, but she said, I understand why you have to do this. | ||
| And we had a four-day meeting up in Hyannisport, in my home, where kind of everybody, my family members, my kids, many other people, Tony Robbins. | ||
| I attended remotely, and a number of other kind of spiritual leaders, just people who cared deeply about our country, chimed in and made cases on both sides. | ||
| People from the campaign organization did. | ||
| Here was the calculus that ultimately was persuasive for me. | ||
| If all of our internal... | ||
| Polling showed from the outset that if I stayed in the Democratic Party, I was going to get Vice President Harris elected. | ||
| 57% to 60% and even more, sometimes up to 66% of my voters, my followers said that if I withdrew from the election, they were going to vote for Trump. | ||
| Which is ironic, by the way, Tucker, because... | ||
| President Trump and the RNC did nothing to prevent me from being on the ballots. | ||
| They didn't have a big major organization sending private eyes out. | ||
| You know, the Democratic Party was interviewing literally everybody I've ever met in 70 years to go like, turn on me. | ||
| I got a call. | ||
| They've been doing that, I know for a fact, for over a year. | ||
| Yeah, and they were open about it. | ||
| This is what we're going to do. | ||
| They put a person in charge of it named Liz Smith, who's, you know, that's the kind of person she is. | ||
| This is what she does. | ||
| She does negative research on people and tries to characterize it. | ||
| Liz Smith, Elliot Spitzer's old girlfriend? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And she was in charge of that team. | ||
| And then there was other people as well. | ||
| Mary Beth Cahill had been my uncle, Teddy's chief of staff, who I know. | ||
| Liz Smith was in charge of the negative research, what they call negative research euphemistically. | ||
| And I got calls from, for example, a guy that I met at an AA meeting 40 years ago. | ||
| And he received a call. | ||
| Most of my family members received calls, contacts, either text or telephone calls from people who said, I'm doing intelligence for the DNC and we'd like to... | ||
| Talk to you about Robert Kennedy, and if you have any negative information about him. | ||
| So I was getting that. | ||
| What could possibly be the justification for that? | ||
| Well, they didn't want me running, and that's the thing, is it's not democratic. | ||
| It wasn't, you know... | ||
| That's such a mafia tactic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, but the point is... | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It was not smart because I was actually helping the Democrats. | ||
| And if they just let me stay in and they didn't run this campaign against me, they probably would win this election. | ||
| And because I was hurting Trump, oddly, Trump didn't do anything about it. | ||
| He made a couple of statements about me, that I was a communist, etc. | ||
| They were sort of good-natured, you know, the stuff that you're like, okay, that's okay. | ||
| They weren't, like, calling my old girlfriend and saying, you know, what did he do, or, you know, whatever. | ||
| They were asking him. | ||
| But the DNC was up to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Were you shocked by that? | |
| Was I shocked? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I was, I'm, I feel like I'm, I'm in a place now where nothing surprises me anymore. | ||
| I bet you are. | ||
| So, but, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, anyway. | ||
| They're going to drop all that stuff now. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Right? | ||
| What? | ||
| Are they going to get rid of Liz Smith and put her on some other project? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You sort of wonder how does Liz Smith live with herself? | ||
| I mean, that's so repulsive. | ||
| Like, how does she justify that to herself? | ||
| I mean, I've met her. | ||
| She's not stupid. | ||
| But that is disgusting. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, you've lived a life, famously, and... | ||
| If you have a team of researchers digging into it... | ||
| And I have not led a careful life, by the way. | ||
| I know! | ||
| I said, you know, my first... | ||
| During my announcement speech, I said, you know, I had told my wife this, told Cheryl this a couple days before, I said, I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I could run for king of the world. | ||
| I know stuff's going to come out about me because I led, let me put it, a colorful life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, people have all kinds of stories about me. | ||
| So I'm ready for, you know, I'm ready for... | ||
| Listen, I've never done anything criminal in terms of, like, stealing money or self-enrichment. | ||
| I did a lot of stupid stuff and a lot of... | ||
| Have you gotten rich off pointless foreign wars? | ||
| No, I have not done that yet. | ||
| Oh, you haven't? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You haven't forced people to inject substances in their bodies? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, I've never done any of that. | ||
| But anyway, so it became clear to me that if Kamala got elected, the issues that I cared about, which is ending the foreign wars, you know, the unjust wars, the immoral wars, the wars of choice like Ukraine, Stopping the censorship, which I think is existential for our democracy, and then protecting children from this extraordinary, exploding chronic disease epidemic. | ||
| Those are the three reasons that got me into the campaign. | ||
| That's why I ran for president. | ||
| Those are the three reasons. | ||
| If she got elected, I'm 70 years old, that eight years from now our kids are going to be lost, and that... | ||
| And if she's present for eight years, my chance to do anything about it would be gone. | ||
| And then I got a contact from Callie Means, who you know well. | ||
| You've made one of the best shows ever put on TV, ever aired, was your interview with Callie and his wife. | ||
| Casey and Callie, for those of you who haven't seen the show, his show is an expert, a genius, brilliant. | ||
| Articulate, eloquent, and encyclopedic knowledge on the food system and what is corrupting it, what is causing the corruption at FDA, at USDA, that the capture of those agencies by the processed food industry, by the chemical industry, by the pharmaceutical industry, that actually profit on sick children. | ||
| One of the things that Kelly says... | ||
| There is nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child because all of these entities are making money on them. | ||
| The insurance companies, the hospitals, the medical cartel, the pharmaceutical companies have lifetime annuities. | ||
| Any child, and the earlier that kid is sick, they don't want to kill him. | ||
| They want him sick for the rest of their lives. | ||
| And we have now a whole generation when my uncle is president. | ||
| 6% of Americans had chronic disease. | ||
| Today, it's 60%. | ||
| When my uncle was president, do you know what the annual cost of treating chronic disease was in this country? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| There weren't even any drugs invented for it. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Today, it's about $4.3 trillion. | ||
| And none of it is necessary. | ||
| What was the autism rate in 1960? | ||
| In 1960, the autism rate... | ||
| There's about four, five studies, and the highest rate, say, about 1 in 2,500, 1 in 1,500, 1 in 10,000. | ||
| So that, you know, it was somewhere between 1 in 1,500 and 1 in 10,000. | ||
| Today, it's 1 in every 34 kids, according to the CDC, and in some states, like California, I think maybe Utah and New Jersey, 1 in 22. One in 22 kids. | ||
| And, you know, these kids should be healthy. | ||
| These kids should be our highest performing kids. | ||
| And they instead are, you know, have this extraordinary disability that's going to keep them dependent. | ||
| And not, you know, a lot of these, if you're full-blown autism, you know, it's a non-verbal, non-toilet trained, head-banging, stimming, toe-walking. | ||
| These are kids that will never throw a baseball. | ||
| They'll never graduate high school. | ||
| They'll never take a girl on a date. | ||
| They'll never use the toilet alone. | ||
| They'll never write a play. | ||
| They'll never write a poem. | ||
| They'll never vote. | ||
| Never have children. | ||
| Never pay taxes. | ||
| Here's something you may not have known. | ||
| Back in 2015, the Congress of the United States repealed something called the... | ||
| Country of Origin Labeling Act. | ||
| Now, why is this relevant to you? | ||
| Well, it means, among other things, that when you buy beef at the supermarket that says Made in the USA, it may not actually be. | ||
| In fact, it could be, likely is, from a foreign country. | ||
| It means that repackaging foreign meat can be enough to get the Made in the USA designation. | ||
| It's a lie. | ||
| It's an absolute lie. | ||
| Most people don't even know what's happening. | ||
| So how can you be sure that the meat you're eating is from the United States and has been raised with the highest quality standards and is the tastiest? | ||
| It's truly made here. | ||
| Well, it's simple. | ||
| You can go to our friends at Meriwether Farms. | ||
| Meriwether Farms is an American small business. | ||
| It's based in Riverton, Wyoming. | ||
| We know the people who run it, and they're great people. | ||
| And they have great meat. | ||
| They ship the highest quality meat raised free from growth hormones and antibiotics directly to your doorstep. | ||
| It's delicious. | ||
| We eat it a lot, including at this table. | ||
| These are Americans. | ||
| These are American-made products. | ||
| And because they're cutting out the grocery store middlemen, their prices are actually cheaper, 10% to 30% cheaper for the best meat. | ||
| They are the real deal. | ||
| Again, we eat that meat at this table from Riverton, Wyoming. | ||
| They're the best. | ||
| Merriweatherfarms.com. | ||
| Use the discount code TUCKER10 and you get an extra 10% off. | ||
| Again, that's Merriweatherfarms, M-E-R-I-W-E-T-H-E-R, farms.com. | ||
| It's worth it. | ||
| So that just seems like such an emergency. | ||
| For me, if I could save one of these kids, it would be worth giving my life for. | ||
| I'm 70 years old. | ||
| To save one kid at birth, it would be worth dying for. | ||
| And to the opportunity and need for me to save all of these kids, I would do anything for. | ||
| I would literally do anything for it. | ||
| We were telling you, Breakfast, I'm sure your perception is different because we're talking about you. | ||
| But, you know, for 15 years anyway, there was not a single story about you that didn't dismiss you as a dangerous crackpot for questioning why autism is much more common than it once was. | ||
| Much more, I mean exponentially more common. | ||
| And you've written a lot about this and you were attacked. | ||
| I don't see those attacks very much. | ||
| Well, they're still in the mainstream media. | ||
| That's still part of the, you know, the litany of my crimes. | ||
| But, you know, anybody who uses their hand, and that's one of the reasons they won't let me speak on the media. | ||
| I mean, when Ross Perot ran, he was running for 10 months. | ||
| He was on mainstream media 34 times interviews. | ||
| And you remember him. | ||
| It seemed like he was on Larry King every week. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I got, in 16 months, I had two live interviews on all of those networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, too. | ||
| And, you know, they're just basically mouthpieces now for the DNC. And there was this obligatory litany of defamations and pejoratives that were used to describe me any time my name was mentioned. | ||
| I'm not a crackpot. | ||
| I was like a supervillain. | ||
| And I'm not complaining because that's just... | ||
| I knew what I was getting into. | ||
| But anyway, the idea... | ||
| I had these meetings with President Trump, and they were partly because of you. | ||
| You were the one who... | ||
| Callie Means called me about, I'd say, three hours after President Trump was shot. | ||
| Callie Means called me, although it doesn't seem possible because... | ||
| But I think it was only three hours after his shooting. | ||
| It was Saturday night. | ||
| Yeah, Saturday night. | ||
| And Callie Means said to me, you know, he told me, Callie had been advising me for a long time in my campaign. | ||
| He told me that night I've also been advising President Trump, which delighted me because I thought, oh my gosh, there's another candidate beside me that is listening to the truth. | ||
| And he said that... | ||
| That there was interest in the Trump campaign by the president of including me. | ||
| Then he talked about vice president, which I wasn't interested in. | ||
| But he said, you know, would you be interested in talking with President Trump? | ||
| And I said, I don't think so. | ||
| And part of this was I just thought it was an on-start with Cheryl. | ||
| And I called Cheryl up, and she said to me, you should hear them out. | ||
| And I immediately called Callie. | ||
| I texted Callie back and said, I'm interested. | ||
| And then I got a text from you. | ||
| And you and I have each other's cell phones. | ||
| And you had an unknown cell phone number, which you had linked me into, which was President Trump's number. | ||
| And you said, you know, he's waiting for your call. | ||
| And so I called him that night. | ||
| I had a great conversation with him. | ||
| And then we decided to talk. | ||
| And I met him the next day. | ||
| He was at that point at Bedminster, which is his golf course and home in New Jersey. | ||
| And he'd driven there from Butler, where he had been shot. | ||
| And then I went to... | ||
| And so I flew out to Minneapolis the next day, and I had probably a two-hour meeting with him and Amaryllis, who's my daughter-in-law, who is running my campaign, the smartest person I've ever met, and Cheryl and Susie Wiles. | ||
| And it was a really interesting meeting because he was so open about... | ||
| I'm about, first of all, not liking the neocons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I never imagined that because, you know, for me, he was the guy who brought John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into office and, you know, but he was really disillusioned with them, to say the least, you know. | ||
| And then, you know, he was deeply interested and well-informed as much as he is on any subject about what's happening to our kids, chronic disease. | ||
| And then he was absolutely adamant about stopping the censorship and, you know, and making sure that we had free speech. | ||
| And so we talked a little then. | ||
| I didn't really come to any, you know, talked about the possibility of working together. | ||
| After that, and then we put it on hold. | ||
| They wanted me to do something at the convention. | ||
| I said, no, I'm not going to do that. | ||
| And we still, at that point, there was still a chance that I could get into the debate. | ||
| That chance was diminishing. | ||
| And because I was not allowed on any media, And because, you know, my only chance of winning the election, I believe I would have won if I had gotten on the debate stage. | ||
| But my only chance was to get on the debate stage. | ||
| And that possibility was vanishing. | ||
| And so I was looking at kind of my options. | ||
| I then contacted Harris's campaign because I thought... | ||
| I should talk to them and see if they're interested in any of these issues, which I suspected they were not because Kamala was still an empty slate. | ||
| Kamala, excuse me, was an empty slate. | ||
| She's pronounced it both ways herself, so it's okay. | ||
| You know, I want to respect people and give them, you know. | ||
| So I reached out to her, and I reached out to a number of people, including some relatives of mine, who are very, very close to her personally and to the Democratic Party, and they just said, that's a non-sorter. | ||
| There's no way in the world that she can talk to you. | ||
| And they said, we can get you a meeting with a low-level campaign official. | ||
| And I said, okay, I'm not interested in that. | ||
| Why wouldn't... | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Why wouldn't... | ||
| Kamala Harris, meet with you. | ||
| Maybe the same reason that she hasn't given an interview. | ||
| I think it seems to me that there's a lot of handlers involved. | ||
| And even when you talk to Democrats about, do you really think it's a good idea to be electing somebody who cannot give an interview? | ||
| They say, well, you're not electing her. | ||
| You're electing the people around her. | ||
| You're electing the apparatus. | ||
| And the apparatus. | ||
| But the apparatus is an apparatus I don't have any faith in. | ||
| It's an apparatus that are neocons like, you know, like Anthony Blinken and who are, you know, running us right up into World War III. And there are people who, you know, who mastermind the censorship from inside the White House. | ||
| That's the apparatus. | ||
| That they want to re-elect. | ||
| And to me, that's an apparatus that has no appeal. | ||
| These are the people who are censoring me. | ||
| These are the people who try to throw me out of the party, who canceled the primaries. | ||
| That's the apparatus. | ||
| You know, if it was a Democrat who said, I can think on my own. | ||
| I understand what this country is supposed to look like. | ||
| I understand what democracy is supposed to look like. | ||
| Then I think that's great. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| But it's strange from her perspective. | ||
| First of all, electing an apparatus is not how democracy works. | ||
| That's an oligarchy, just in point of fact. | ||
| But as a political calculation, your presence in the race running third-party hurt Trump. | ||
| No one disputes that. | ||
| The polling's really clear on that. | ||
| So if you're the Harris campaign, kind of a win, right, to get some alignment with you. | ||
| Even human curiosity, you'd think, would compel her to want to meet with you. | ||
| Like, take a meeting. | ||
| Like, why do you care? | ||
| But she didn't even talk to you. | ||
| I think it's very weird. | ||
| It's weird, but not, I mean, I can't stress that not being able to give an interview, I mean, your whole life is in public life. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| That is the currency. | ||
| I give, you know, this day is a really slow day because I'm doing one interview with you. | ||
| On a typical day, I do about seven or eight interviews. | ||
| Some days, ten or twelve. | ||
| And I do that every day, and I've done that for 16 months. | ||
| If anybody wants to, I mean, we have a list now, 4,000 people want to interview me, but I'm interviewing as many people as possible. | ||
| So I want to get my voice out, my vision out, my concerns out. | ||
| And it's incomprehensible to me that you would be in public life. | ||
| And President Trump does the same thing. | ||
| He's not scared of an interview. | ||
| No, he likes it. | ||
| He's on you. | ||
| He does anybody. | ||
| He does people who don't agree with him. | ||
| He's not censoring you. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's talking to reporters who write crappy articles about him all the time. | ||
| You know, from New York Magazine. | ||
| Maggie Haberman at the New York Times. | ||
| New York. | ||
| Maggie Haberman has never written a nice word about Donald Trump, and he talks to her how often? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot. | |
| Yeah, a lot. | ||
| So, you know, my Uncle Teddy, who was exactly opposite of Ronald Reagan, ideologically, and he ran against Carter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Teddy did. | ||
| And Carter and he had an antipathy toward each other that was almost like nothing I'd ever seen. | ||
| Teddy didn't hate people, but he really, I would say, loathed Carter. | ||
| He had complete disdain for him. | ||
| And he then liked Reagan. | ||
| Because I was more ideologically aligned at that point. | ||
| I'd say to him, you know, why do you like Reagan? | ||
| And he said, because even though I don't agree with anything he said, he was able to invigorate our country. | ||
| He was able to inspire people. | ||
| He got people excited about his vision and proud to be Americans. | ||
| And that is one of the functions of a president, is to explain to us why we should be proud of each other, and why we're part of a community, and why our country is great, and what our future is going to look like, and inspire all of us with that vision. | ||
| And that is what a real leader does. | ||
| How in the world can you do that if you cannot give an interview? | ||
| To a news organization. | ||
| To a friendly news organization. | ||
| They can't even do a set-up interview in 40 days. | ||
| I saw the only interview she did that was unscripted was when she got off a plane. | ||
| I think it was at Andrews Air Force Base. | ||
| And there was a reporter waiting there with one question. | ||
| When are you going to do an interview? | ||
| She said, I've told my team to try to get one done. | ||
| Before September. | ||
| This was the 3rd of August. | ||
| And I'm doing, you know, seven or eight interviews a day. | ||
| Tells you a lot. | ||
| And I'm not, you know, blowing my own horn or anything. | ||
| I'm just saying that's what you do if you're in public life. | ||
| And what's the point of being in public life if you don't want to promote your vision? | ||
| If you don't want to inspire people. | ||
| I mean, so... | ||
| I'm sure this is a sensitive subject, but I can't help but notice that you ran for 15 months with no Secret Service protection at all. | ||
| You were denied that by the Biden administration. | ||
| Trump, during the convention in Milwaukee last month, noted that in public. | ||
| They immediately, under pressure, responded and gave you Secret Service protection. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now they've withdrawn it. | ||
| You're without it again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Meanwhile, Tony Fauci has it. | ||
| He's not a federal employee anymore. | ||
| I think Mike Pompeo has Secret Service Protection, former CIA director. | ||
| But you don't. | ||
| How is that? | ||
| I think the, you know, I'm technically still running for president. | ||
| I'm running for president in 30 states, 40 states. | ||
| So I'm not, you know, I did not terminate my campaign, didn't you? | ||
| Did you know this? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, I'm running in the... | ||
| There's 10 states where I hurt President Trump, and they're battleground states. | ||
| Oh, I've taken my name off the ballot in those 10 states. | ||
| But in the blue states, all blue states, all red states, I'm on the ballot. | ||
| And I could technically win a contingency election if the other two vote, you know, and if the other two get... | ||
| 269 apiece. | ||
| And then Congress cannot work out a compromise, which is entirely possible. | ||
| They have to go to the third vote-getter, which would be me, and that's why I left my name on the ballot in those states. | ||
| And so, you know, that's highly unlikely to happen, but it has happened twice before in American history. | ||
| And actually, our polling now shows them at exactly 269 to 269. It is possible that it would happen in this campaign. | ||
| We worked this out with the Trump campaign. | ||
| They only wanted us off in 10 states. | ||
| Because that's the states we heard them in. | ||
| The other states, people can vote for me, and they're not going to hurt their candidate. | ||
| If they can vote for me, even if they like... | ||
| Vice President Harris, and without hurting her, and they can vote for me if they like President Trump, without hurting him, because we already know what's going to happen in those states. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So all the more reason that you should have what Tony Fauci has, and what Mike Pompeo has, and a lot of other, by the way, non-current federal employees have, which is government bodyguards, but they withdrew them immediately from you. | ||
| So what's the message of that? | ||
| Well, the message, I think, is a bad message, which is that our federal enforcement agencies have been weaponized against the American people. | ||
| I mean, again, politically, weaponized politically, not against the American people, but politically. | ||
| When my father took office in the Justice Department, and my father was appointed a U.S. Attorney General in 1961 by my uncle, his brother, And my father, the first week in office, he had run my uncle's campaign, so he was a political guy. | ||
| He called together all the division chairs, all the branch chiefs in the DOJ, and he made it into his big cavernous office, and he said to them, we're going to make one rule here, which is there is no politics. | ||
| We never ask whether... | ||
| Potential defendant is Democrat or Republican. | ||
| The people of this country have to know that their enforcement institutions, the Department of Justice, that justice is blind here. | ||
| We are free of any kind of political prejudice or bias or favoritism. | ||
| And they started putting in jail. | ||
| He prosecuted my uncle on my mother's side for antitrust violation. | ||
| He prosecuted friends of his, friends of his father's, whose father did not want him to prosecute. | ||
| And they just said, it doesn't matter. | ||
| We've got to apply it even annually because the American people need to understand that their institutions are... | ||
| We need to respect them and know that they're not biased in one way, and we're losing that now in our country, and the Biden administration has really accelerated that. | ||
| The most shocking thing to me, and Democrats can't even hear this story because it touches so many sort of culture war buttons, but it's a true story. | ||
| People need to understand it and appreciate it. | ||
| In the 2020 election, There was 100 Biden's laptop a week before the... | ||
| And we only know this whole story recently because of a release of documents. | ||
| But when President Biden's... | ||
| 100 Biden's laptop suddenly became an issue about a week before the debate. | ||
| And Anthony Blinken, who is now the Secretary of State... | ||
| And who was then the director of President Biden's campaign, went to Gina Haspel, who is the head of this director of the CIA, and said to her, we need help with this. | ||
| She then got 51 CIA current and former CIA officers to sign a public letter, which they published, I think, in the New York Times, but they published it somewhere. | ||
| That said that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian hoax. | ||
| That was part of a Russian disinformation effort to tamper with the presidential election campaign. | ||
| So you had the CIA, which is forbidden by its charter, from involving itself in anti-American politics. | ||
| And you had 51 top officers. | ||
| Former and current, who now do a disinformation campaign against the American public to tamper with the election, while accusing the Russians of tampering with the election. | ||
| And then a week later, President Biden, when he's asked about his laptop on the debate, he says that has been debunked by the CIA, by the CIA officers. | ||
| And that was the end of the issue. | ||
| Because it was debunked. | ||
| All the newspapers picked that up. | ||
| And it's highly likely that that had an impact on the election. | ||
| So, you know, that was the entree of President Biden getting into office. | ||
| And again, you know, Democrats who hear me say this story are going to say, oh, he's just saying that because, you know, he's a Republican now, right? | ||
| Which I'm not, but that's what they're going to say. | ||
| But it's not that. | ||
| It's just that this was wrong. | ||
| The big tech companies censor our content. | ||
| I hate to tell you that it's still going on in 2024, but you know what they can't censor? | ||
| Live events. | ||
| And that's why we are hitting the road on a fall tour for the entire month of September, coast to coast. | ||
| We'll be in cities across the United States. | ||
| We'll be in Phoenix with Russell Brand, Anaheim, California with Vivek Ramaswamy, Colorado Springs with Tulsi Gabbard, Salt Lake City with Glenn Beck, Tulsa, Oklahoma with Dan Bongino, Kansas City with Megan Kelly, Wichita with Charlie Kirk, Milwaukee with Larry Elder, Rosenberg, Texas with Jesse Milwaukee with Larry Elder, Rosenberg, Texas with Jesse Kelly, Grand Rapids with Kid Rock, Hershey, Pennsylvania with J.D. Vance, Redding, Pennsylvania with Alex Jones, Fort Worth, Texas with Roseanne Barr, Greenville, South Carolina with Marjorie Taylor Green. | ||
| Sunrise, Florida with John Rich, Jacksonville, Florida with Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| You can get tickets at TuckerCarlson.com. | ||
| Hope to see you there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you Thank you. | |
| So the CA, I mean, a lot of roads lead back, unfortunately, to our most powerful intelligence agency. | ||
| If you were asked, would you run it? | ||
| Would you become CA director if you were asked? | ||
| I would never get... | ||
| Yes, I would, but I would never get... | ||
| Senate confirmation. | ||
| As you know, the intelligence agency are protected by very, very powerful committees in the Senate and in the House that are already into the project. | ||
| And the people who serve on those committees are people who wouldn't – they would not – they're just safeguarding that directorship. | ||
| And I would be very, very dangerous for those committees. | ||
| So I don't think that – And yet in his – in your joint appearance on Friday, President Trump introduced you by saying that he plans to, if elected, establish a commission to declassify the remaining documents around your uncle's murder in 1963. | ||
| And I think everyone at this point knows the truth, which is the CIA is implicated in that. | ||
| Those documents protect CIA, maybe among others. | ||
| Well, whether they do or not, it's odd that they've not allowed them to be released. | ||
| What could possibly be the explanation? | ||
| More than 60 years after my uncle's death. | ||
| Almost 65 years. | ||
| Oh, it was 62 years after his death. | ||
| And none of the people who were... | ||
| Implicated in that crime are alive now. | ||
| The last ones have died off in the last year or two. | ||
| And so it clearly is to protect the institution. | ||
| And that's wrong. | ||
| It's just wrong. | ||
| And it's wrong for a Democrat. | ||
| It's wrong for a Republican. | ||
| It's just interesting, though, that a bipartisan list of presidents, lo, these six decades, have kept those files classified. | ||
| Well, you and I have both. | ||
| I was astonished that Trump... | ||
| Didn't declassify him because he promised to during the campaign. | ||
| That was Mike Pompeo who did that. | ||
| Yeah, and I talked to President Trump for the first time about that this week. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said that Mike Pompeo begged him to, and I don't think I'm telling tales out of school here. | ||
| No, I think he told the same thing to you. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But he said, Mike Pompeo called him and said, this wouldn't be a catastrophe to release these. | ||
| You need to not do it. | ||
| I want to say again, I think Mike Pompeo is a criminal. | ||
| So that's my view. | ||
| He's threatened to sue me for saying that, but I hope he will, because it's true. | ||
| But that kind of tells the whole story right there. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That the CIA is... | ||
| Why would the CIA be trying to keep these files classified if they had nothing to do with the murder? | ||
| I don't really get that. | ||
| Yeah, but the subject we were talking about was the weaponization of the federal agency, and that's just one of them, and then they get... | ||
| Then they open up these censorship portals 37 hours after President Biden takes office, where now you have the FBI involved in American politics, which we ran them out in the 60s because we were outraged that they were bugging Martin Luther King and the Black Panther Party, and Americans were indignant about that. | ||
| Why have we gotten to the point where it's so normalized and now we're okay with the FBI running a portal to censor political speech in our country and then inviting in the CIA and the IRS. I don't know what they were doing in there. | ||
| NIH and CDC and all these other agencies. | ||
| DHS. Which all had a hand in censoring American speech. | ||
| So that was another thing. | ||
| And then the use, you know, which we saw for the first time in American history of the judiciary to get rid of candidates. | ||
| You know, what they tried to do to me, they're suing me now in a dozen states. | ||
| I've been in trials for the past three weeks. | ||
| You know, I've spent most of my time not campaigning. | ||
| But sitting in court in cases that are trying to get me off the ballot. | ||
| So I had a million people, a million American citizens sign petitions more than any candidate in history. | ||
| Everybody said, I'd never do this. | ||
| The impossible would be in the ballot in 50 states. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| We got on the ballot in 50 states. | ||
| And we did it by getting a million citizens to sign petitions saying that they wanted to vote for me. | ||
| And the Democratic Party now is suing me in all those states to make sure that those people cannot vote for the person they want to. | ||
| When I was growing up, the Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party that was fighting for voting rights. | ||
| It was fighting to make sure that every American could vote for the candidate of their choice, no matter whether they're black or white or where they lived or Democrat or Republican. | ||
| Now the Democratic Party, today's Democratic Party, feels so unconfident about the candidates that it's putting forward. | ||
| And it feels the only way it can win the election is by getting rid of the opponents. | ||
| And, you know, either using the courts against President Trump to lock him in jail and to embarrass and humiliate and discredit him, or using the courts against me just to throw me off the ballot, even though the voters, you know, in New York's aid, I had to get $45,000. | ||
| Ballot signatures in 13 congressional districts. | ||
| I got 137,000 in all 26 congressional districts. | ||
| I did twice when anybody wants, and we did it easily because people wanted to see my ballot. | ||
| New Yorkers wanted to see me on the ballot. | ||
| Why is the Democratic Party suing me in frivolous cases? | ||
| On what ground? | ||
| I spent a whole week in trial. | ||
| For that case, for two cases they brought, and another week in another trial, or another case. | ||
| And you had to pay for this? | ||
| It's costing me $10 million to defend myself. | ||
| But on what grounds are they suing you? | ||
| Like, they don't like you, so you don't have a right to be on the ballot, or what? | ||
| In New York State, they're suing me by, they can't challenge our signatures, because we got five times as many signatures as we required. | ||
| So, you know, normally what they were doing in the first states, We're taking our signatures and they were calling everybody. | ||
| They can get their numbers and they can get their cell phones, etc. | ||
| We're contacting everybody and trying to talk them out of it. | ||
| Trying to get them to say, you know, you're hurting democracy and you should, you know, weren't you fooled when you did this to try to get it? | ||
| They never succeeded. | ||
| In New York State, they're suing me because they say that I don't live in New York State. | ||
| I have three residences. | ||
| One is in New York. | ||
| One is in my home in Massachusetts, which is part of my family compound that we've owned for 100 years. | ||
| And then in California. | ||
| Where I live with Charlotte. | ||
| So I moved with Charlotte, California in 2014, so 10 years ago. | ||
| But I lived in New York all of my life. | ||
| I lived there since I was 10. My father ran for Senate there and was the senator. | ||
| I moved there when I was 10. I've only voted in New York. | ||
| I've always considered myself a New York resident. | ||
| I've lived in the same town. | ||
| For 40 years in Bedford, I've lived in 13 different residents in that town at various times. | ||
| But I always wanted to stay there. | ||
| And when I moved out west with Cheryl, I made an agreement with her that when she retires, we're going to come back to New York because I feel like I'm a New Yorker. | ||
| I didn't want to vote in California because I don't know anything about the politics out there. | ||
| I was raised in New York. | ||
| I know all the politics, all the politicians. | ||
| And so I wanted to vote. | ||
| So I kept an address there. | ||
| I voted that address. | ||
| That's my only place I've ever voted. | ||
| My car is registered there. | ||
| My driver's license is there. | ||
| My law office is there. | ||
| I pay income tax. | ||
| Almost all my income tax is from New York State. | ||
| My law license is there. | ||
| I don't have a law license in California. | ||
| And my hunting license is there. | ||
| My fishing license is there. | ||
| Most importantly. | ||
| My falconry license is there. | ||
| So I have all my birds there. | ||
| You know, I keep them there. | ||
| And so, you know, but they're suing me saying I'm not a real New Yorker. | ||
| I'm, you know, I contrive the address out of fraud and it's a sham. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Is that I consulted a lawyer when we declared independent and began getting ballot signatures. | ||
| I consulted the best ballot access attorney in the country, Paul Rossi. | ||
| And I said, I get these three different residences. | ||
| Which one do I put on the ballot? | ||
| You have to put the same residence in all 50 states. | ||
| So you can't choose another resident. | ||
| You know, I can't put California in one state and Massachusetts in another state in New York. | ||
| I have to tell the people, otherwise I'm lying to somebody, right? | ||
| So in a couple of states, for example, Maine, where we are right now, and in New Hampshire, those states say the only place you can put down as your domicile is the place where you vote. | ||
| And in New Hampshire, I actually had to take an oath. | ||
| In front of a notary that I voted in New York because otherwise they couldn't have put it down. | ||
| So I had to put New York in every state because I had to put it in Maine and New Hampshire and a bunch of others because you have to put the place you vote. | ||
| Anyway, the DNC is suing me saying I defrauded the public because I really live in California. | ||
| And they got a judge who was right out of the Democratic machine. | ||
| And who violated the Constitution and every precedent to say, yeah, they're right. | ||
| So, you know, I lost in the lower court, which is what happens. | ||
| We're doing that. | ||
| We're losing in these lower courts, and then we win in the appeals. | ||
| There's a 100% chance I'll win in the appeal, but they don't care. | ||
| Because it's going to take me a while, and they got the headlines saying he was thrown off for fraud. | ||
| So these, I mean, I saw Kamala Harris just the other night at her convention speech talk about how voting access is like a... | ||
| I know. | ||
| While she was doing that, I was in court in New York, you know, trying to get on that ballot. | ||
| While she, while that, you know, the entire... | ||
| The John Lewis Voting Access Act, we're going to get through. | ||
| Everybody has a right to vote. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Except for their opponents. | ||
| So does this, it feels to me like this is, you know, obviously it's a big political story. | ||
| You're endorsing Trump. | ||
| It's a big, big change in your life as a lifelong Democrat, still a Democrat. | ||
| But it also feels like, as you said at the outset. | ||
| Well, I'm an independent out, so I registered as an independent when I ran. | ||
| And when I talk with President Trump. | ||
| You know, the thing that we talked about is that, you know, we were going to do a unity government with the independent, not the kind of endorsement that a lot of people make, an endorsement like Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals, where we would be able to continue to differ publicly on issues, but that we would, on the issues that we agree on. | ||
| That we were going to strive to get into government together in order to make sure that those issues are, you know, are the priority for our country. | ||
| And, you know, he was really good about that and about, you know, me being able to continue on there's some issues. | ||
| There's a lot of issues like the border where we agree and, you know, censorship, the wars, the neocons, the, you know, forever wars, child health epidemics. | ||
| Those are the most important issues. | ||
| There's other issues that I'm going to disagree on with President Trump, but he was happy with that, and that's how our country ought to be. | ||
| We ought to be able to. | ||
| So what is this realignment that you mentioned at the outset? | ||
| Because this does feel like it's bigger than just this November. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's been a series of these realignments throughout American history, and there's history books that are written about the realignments. | ||
| I think there's about five of them. | ||
| And one of those is clearly happening now because you see on so many issues, you've had an inversion. | ||
| The Democratic Party has become the party of the elites. | ||
| It used to be the party of the poor and the working class. | ||
| In fact, there was a study that came out just recently that I saw that showed that 70% that the people who voted for Biden... | ||
| Own 70% of the wealth in this country. | ||
| The people who voted for Trump own 30%. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're seeing this realignment happen where the elites, where Wall Street, where the big tech, big pharma, the big banking houses are all now democratic. | ||
| And that the working class, the middle class, the cops, the firefighters... | ||
| Sean O'Brien, head of the team, you know, spoke. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Great, great guy. | ||
| Really love him. | ||
| But he spoke at the Democratic Convention. | ||
| I mean, the Republican Convention rather than Democratic Convention. | ||
| So you're seeing this just this big alignment. | ||
| And even on environmental issues, it's so weird to me because the Democrats have become subsumed in this carbon orthodox. | ||
| And you and I have talked about this. | ||
| The only issue is carbon. | ||
| And what that's done is it's forced them to do something that you should never do if you're an environmentalist, which is to commoditize and quantify everything. | ||
| So everything is measured by its carbon footprint, how many tons of carbon it produces. | ||
| And, you know, you're basically, you're putting everything in that kind of... | ||
| Box of being able to quantify it and explain its value numerically. | ||
| And the reason that we protect the environment is just the opposite of that. | ||
| The reason that we protect the environment is because there's a spiritual connection. | ||
| There's a love that we have. | ||
| I got into the environment because I wanted this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales. | ||
| And the Purple Mountain's majesty. | ||
| I understood the way God talks to human beings through many vectors, through each other, through organized religion, through the great prophets, through the wise people, the great books of those religions. | ||
| But nowhere with the kind of detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation. | ||
| And when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine. | ||
| Understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings. | ||
| I hope what you just said, by the way, is chopped up and put all over every social media platform in the world. | ||
| When we destroy nature, we degrade our own ability to experience the divine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that, you know, it's not about quantifying stuff. | ||
| That's what the devil does. | ||
| He quantifies everything, right? | ||
| And that is, you know, what he wants us doing. | ||
| Put a number on it. | ||
| And the reason we're preserving these things is because we love our children. | ||
| And it's because nature enriches us economically and spiritually and culturally and historically. | ||
| It connects us to those 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before they were laptops. | ||
| And it connects us to the most important spiritual lesson. | ||
| All of the organized religions that we know of today, the central revelation of every one of those religions always occurred in the wilderness. | ||
| Moses had to go into the wilderness to listen to hear God's voice and see the burning bush. | ||
| He had to go to the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the commandments. | ||
| Muhammad, who was a city boy from Mecca, had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hera. | ||
| On a camping trip with his kids and wrestle the angel Gabriel in the middle of the night and have the first stances of the surahs of the Koran squeezed from him, Buddha had to go into the wilderness to sit under the, you know, and wander for years and then sit under the Bodhigaya tree to get his first revelation of nirvana. | ||
| And Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to discover his divinity for the first time. | ||
| And his mentor was John the Baptist, who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and ate honey of wild bees and locusts. | ||
| And then all of Christ's parables come from nature. | ||
| I'm the vine, you are the branches, the mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the fallow ground. | ||
| Because that is where we sense the divine. | ||
| God talks to us through the fishes, the birds, the leaves. | ||
| They're all words from our Creator. | ||
| And that is why we preserve nature. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not because of the, you know, it's not because the, you know, the quantity of carbon. | ||
| And by the way... | ||
| It'll stop the flooding. | ||
| It'll give us healthy food. | ||
| And that's what our national policy has to be. | ||
| It has to be restoring the soil. | ||
| And that is, you know, everybody, listen, if you want to unite America, then talk about these things. | ||
| Talk about the fishes, the birds, the wildlife, and just talk about ending mountaintop removal mining. | ||
| Talk about ending the mountain cutting. | ||
| Talk about... | ||
| Getting rid of, you know, the Democrats are putting these offshore wind farms that are exterminating the whales. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Most of us got into this because of the whales. | ||
| And they're about to extinguish the right whales, the last ones on Earth, with these monstrosities that are, you know, that are costing us three times the amount. | ||
| We don't need them. | ||
| They cost 33 cents a kilowatt hour when you can get onshore wind for 10 cents a kilowatt hour. | ||
| And who's making the money? | ||
| Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, foreign governments. | ||
| And the other thing that they're funding, hundreds, billions of dollars. | ||
| This is what climate has turned into, is these climate capture pipelines that are wreaking havoc with the agricultural lands across the Midwest, stealing people's property rights with eminent domain. | ||
| And who's making the money? | ||
| BlackRock. | ||
| And it's a useless technology that does not work. | ||
| It's just all a boondoggle. | ||
| And that's what's become the environmental movement in this country. | ||
| And if you depart from that orthodoxy, you're expelled from it. | ||
| If you want to make Americans fight each other, talk about carbon. | ||
| If you want to bring Americans together, talk about habitat protection. | ||
| Yeah, nature. | ||
| It's a little weird. | ||
| I mean, you literally spent your life with river keepers as an environmentalist and environmental lawyer in the environmental movement. | ||
| I mean, that's your life work product. | ||
| Have you been expelled from the movement? | ||
| Pretty much, yeah. | ||
| You know, the weird thing is I think of you as a radical environmentalist. | ||
| Well, I definitely am. | ||
| Yeah, you are. | ||
| I haven't showered inside in 10 years. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I feel it so strongly. | ||
| Also, you know, you love nature. | ||
| You're against these big projects that are destroying it. | ||
| And, you know, you talk about toxics. | ||
| And the environmental movement no longer talks about toxics anymore. | ||
| They don't care about it. | ||
| They don't care that we're mass poisoning our children. | ||
| It's so weird to me. | ||
| You know, I saw you, for 40 years, I've been fighting against endocrine disruptors. | ||
| Endocrine disruptors are a class of chemicals that change, they alter us hormonally, and they can change sexual conduct, they can change sexual development. | ||
| They can affect fertility, and we've already lost 50% of our sperm count. | ||
| You know, we're having girls in this country that are achieving puberty on average between 10 and 13 years old. | ||
| That's six years less, younger than they were, you know, 80 years ago. | ||
| We have the lowest puberty levels on any continent in the world here because we're just bombarding our children with endocrine disruptors. | ||
| And, you know, there are chemicals like PCBs, polychlorinated bifenols, atrazine, which can turn male frogs into females and produce fertile eggs. | ||
| That's how potent they are as an endocrine disruptor. | ||
| And it's in 63% of our water supply. | ||
| PCBs, which I've been fighting since the day I became an environmental lawyer and getting them out of the Hudson. | ||
| And for 40 years, I've been trying to get Republicans to talk about it. | ||
| I talk with Roger Ailes all the time, who both of us know, who would lend me occasionally onto Fox News to talk about it. | ||
| But there was so much hostility from the Republican Party because it was like you're attacking corporate profit-taking and that these are chemicals, they're molecules, who cares? | ||
| They can't hurt you. | ||
| And then you do this incredible show on endocrine disruptors. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my God, Tucker Carlson has just done the best show that's ever been done, showing what's happening with endocrine disruptors and how they're just destroying us. | ||
| And the Democrats went after you and the environmental movement. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| This is what we've been trying to get for 40 years, the Republicans to care about these issues. | ||
| And they said, oh, he's saying that chemicals turn people gay and he's anti-gay and all this stuff. | ||
| And that wasn't what you said at all. | ||
| And that's not what anybody said. | ||
| What we're saying is we're destroying our children. | ||
| That's what we're saying. | ||
| Yeah, and God's creation, which is not ours to destroy. | ||
| Your description of why we protect nature and its role in our lives and what happens when you're cut off from nature and animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Being part of nature is the best I've ever heard, ever. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| I mean it. | ||
| And when that, you know, when it becomes a matter of quantifying things for profit, then that kind of corrupts the whole enterprise. | ||
| So where do you, my last question, what happens now? | ||
| You had this kind of amazing announcement with Donald Trump on Friday. | ||
| It's now Monday, I think, which is three days ago. | ||
| How do you spend from here until Election Day? | ||
| I'm going to work to get him elected. | ||
| And, you know, I'm working with the campaign. | ||
| We're working on policy issues together. | ||
| I've been asked to go on to the transition team and, you know, to help pick the people who will be running the government. | ||
| And I'm looking forward to that. | ||
| And, you know, I'm going to fight. | ||
| I don't know what would happen to me if we lose. | ||
| Well, that's kind of it. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people I know personally and I'm friends with have gone to prison. | ||
| One of them is in prison right now, Pavel Jouroff. | ||
| There are others. | ||
| Like, what happens if he loses to you? | ||
| If Trump loses and Kamala Harris becomes president? | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| But I mean, listen, I know. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I never really think about that. | ||
| What I think is, okay, here's what I've got to do today. | ||
| Get up every day and say, reporting for duty, sir, and then go do that. | ||
| Nothing's a crisis. | ||
| Everything's a task. | ||
| So that's what I'm going to be, kind of a happy warrior. | ||
| I know what I have to do, so I'm going to do it. | ||
| Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you. | ||
| That was a blessing. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Shocking. | ||
| That in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear. | ||
| But it turns out it's happening. | ||
| So what can you do about it? | ||
| Well, we could whine about it. | ||
| But that's a waste of time. | ||
| We're not in charge of Google. | ||
| Or we could find a way around it. | ||
| A way that you could actually get information that's true. | ||
| It's not intentionally deceptive. | ||
| And the way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel. | ||
| Subscribe! | ||
| And you'll have a much higher chance of hearing what we say. |
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