Fire Engineering Politics and Tactics with Frank Ricci and PJ Norwood
RFK Jr. and firefighters PJ Norwood and Frank Ricci delve into critical issues that impact the American Fire Service, ranging from forever chemicals in our gear, dignitary protection for Presidential candidates, and RFK Jr.’s stance on mandates — affecting first responders from New York City to Seattle.The pandemic is over, but many careers are, too; the mandates have been lifted, but a significant number of firefighters have been forced to retire or outright fired. As of today they still have not been brought back to work.PFAS live in our homes, firehouses, and the protective clothing we wear. RFK Jr. has been fighting against PFAS issues in our communities for over forty years. We discuss the high cancer rates among firefighters and RFK Jr.’s fight to provide safer and healthier environments for firefighters.We also discuss RFK Jr.’s vision for his administration and pressing issues such as censorship, First Amendment rights, and the status of his ability to participate in the upcoming presidential debates.Frank Ricci and P.J. Norwood are grateful to Fire Engineering, Editor in Chief David Rhodes, Director of Video Mark Haugh, Online Content Manger Pete Prochilo, David Whiteside, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the opportunity to speak to a U.S. presidential candidate about issues that impact firefighters across the country.
Hey everybody, we're doing another firefighter podcast today.
I've got two great guests, Frank Ricci, who is a former union leader from the Firefighters Union from New Haven, and P.J. Norwood, another Connecticut firefighter.
I'm retired, and this is the biggest firefighter podcast in the country, but we're playing it simultaneously on my own podcast.
So I want to thank both of our guests.
They're going to be asking me questions today.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you, Frank.
Thank you, BJ. Welcome to my show.
Honored to be on your show, sir.
Thank you very much.
And make sure you check out the book, Command Presence, Increase Your Influence.
Welcome to Politics and Tactics.
We have a great show for you today.
PJ, can you introduce our distinguished guests?
We have a guest today that has continuously been fighting for our health by fighting against corporations for over 40 years.
He is someone who is not afraid to rock the boat.
He's been so successful against corporate America, the media and the government have worked very hard to silence him, which has not worked out so well.
So now they attack his character.
These attacks have not stopped him, but yes, has impacted the public opinion of our guest today.
Today is our high honor to have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
on our show, a man whose unwavering commitment to the environment, science, and upholding our founding principles enshrined in the First Amendment has left a permanent mark on our nation.
Born into a legacy of public service, RFK Jr.
faced significant adversity and challenges throughout his life, but yet he has persevered with remarkable resilience.
His fight to clean up America's rivers and hold chemical companies accountable for their pollution required not only immense political courage, but also an unyielding dedication to the well-being of our communities and natural resources.
RFK Jr.
encourages healthy debate and honest conversation.
He was involved with one of our friends, Attorney Rob Bulat, who held 3M accountable for the deception of the environmental and health impacts from PFAS. This fight was highlighted in the movie Dark Waters.
RFK Jr.
has also demonstrated immense courage in questioning political narratives, pushing back against those who pervert science for their own advantage.
His staunch defense of the First Amendment and his relentless advocacy for transparency and truth have further solidified his reputation as a fearless champion for America.
Through his tireless efforts, RFK Jr.
has shown that one's perseverance can indeed make America a better place.
RFK Jr., thank you for joining us today.
As president, please highlight what is your vision for your administration and how does that vision benefit members of the fire service?
Yeah, thank you very much, BJ, and thanks, Frank.
For having me on this show.
I've been looking forward to this.
As you know, I represented a lot of the firefighters during the pandemic on mandate issues in Los Angeles.
We helped out in Chicago.
We won the case in New York.
And I've worked across the country on the PFAS issues and, you know, beginning with Rob Bellat's case and then One of my organizations, the Tennessee Riverkeeper,
brought the case against 3M. 3M has now agreed next year to stop producing PFAS and PFOAs and all these Forever chemicals that it's been selling to us and poisoning firefighters for many years.
Firefighters now have probably the highest cancer rate of any profession.
67% of firefighters will get cancer.
It's astronomical and clearly a lot of that is from the PFAS. I hope we...
I'll get to talk more about that later in the show.
In terms of my presidency, I ran for president.
I didn't intend to run for president.
I wasn't sitting around waiting for an opportunity to run for the White House.
I ran because I saw our country abandoning its values, particularly during COVID when we saw this use for the first time of government-enforced censorship.
We saw the violation of The First Amendment right to worship when all the churches were closed for a year with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation.
We saw property rights in the Fifth Amendment abandoned as the government closed down 3.3 million businesses again with no public hearings, no environmental impact statements, no Oh, scientific citations.
And then they got rid of jury trials.
The Seventh Amendment guarantee of jury trials and the Fourth Amendment prohibition against warrantless searches and seizures with all this track and trace surveillance.
And firefighters across the country were at the front line.
Firefighters and cops.
And we had this wonderful...
Police Chief John Catanza in Chicago who said, my men and women are not going to get vaccinated.
And 1,500 of them threatened to walk off the job and they just – the city just backed down and said, OK, cops and firefighters don't have to take the jab.
So I saw that happening and then I saw so many other things.
I saw my party, the Democratic Party, that I've been a lifelong member, abandon the middle class, abandon cops, abandon firefighters, abandon labor unions – And become the party of big tech and these kind of global elites.
I saw the destruction of the middle class in this country, particularly during COVID when we kept Walmart open, we kept Amazon open, we closed down.
All these 3.3 million businesses, 41% of black-owned businesses will never reopen.
I saw this explosion of chronic disease that we're seeing now in our country.
When my uncle was president, 6% of American kids had chronic disease today and 60%.
When I was a little boy, a typical pediatrician Would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime, in a 40 or 50 year career.
Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic and nobody's asking why is this happening.
The autism rates, well you all know kids with autism Our parents, kids with autism, we didn't know that when I was a kid.
I knew nobody, and I was at the spear tip of the battle to get rights for people with intellectual disabilities.
My aunt, Eunice Shriver, Founded Special Olympics.
I worked in Special Olympics from when I was 8 years old.
We never saw any autistic kid.
In fact, in my age group, 70-year-old men, the autism rates today are 1 in 10,000 today.
In my kids' generation, it's 1 in every 34 kids, according to CDC, 1 in every 22 boys.
Something happened.
We're mass poisoning this generation of kids with autoimmune disease, neurological disease, obesity.
Kids didn't suddenly get lazy and start liking food.
This is poisoning that's happening and we are killing them and we're killing our firefighters with, you know, with the turnout gear, with the Aqueous foams with the burning furniture that is loaded with PFOA. So I want to end this toxic assault on the American public and the chronic disease epidemic that's now costing us $4.3 trillion a year, five times our military budget.
Speaking of the military, I want to wind down our military commitments abroad.
The forever wars are destroying our country.
They're destroying our economy.
They're destroying the safety and undermining the safety of and the reputation, the moral authority of America across the globe.
When my uncle was president, he made the resolution not to get America into wars, but instead to project economic power abroad.
And that's what we're going to do under the new Kennedy administration.
There is no more because of my uncle's commitment.
He told his best friend, Ben Bradley, who asked him, what do you want in your gravestone?
And my uncle said he kept the peace.
He said the primary job of a president of the United States is to keep the country out of war.
And, you know, he kept us out of Laos in 1961.
He kept us out of Cuba in 1961, out of Berlin during the Checkpoint Charlie crisis in 1962.
He kept us out of Cuba again in 1963.
He refused to send combat troops to Vietnam despite the demands of everybody in his administration, the intelligence apparatus.
The brass at the Pentagon, they said that we needed 250,000 combat troops in Vietnam where the government was going to collapse, and he said it's their government.
He ended up under pressure sending 16,000 military advisors, mainly Green Berets, and they weren't allowed to participate under the rules of engagement in fighting, but they did anyway.
And in October of 1963, He learned that Green Beret had been killed and he asked Walt Rostow to give a full casualty list.
And Walt Rostow brought him a casualty list that showed that 75 Americans had died.
And he said, that's too many.
I'm bringing them all home.
And that afternoon, October 22nd, 1963, he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all U.S. military personnel home from Vietnam by the end of 65, with the first thousand coming home in November, so the next month.
The end of November, just before that evacuation happened on November 22nd, one month after he signed that order, he was murdered.
President Johnson came in, remanded the order, sent 250,000 troops to Vietnam, and it became our war.
And Nixon brought that up to 560,000.
My father ran against the war in 1968.
He was killed.
Martin Luther King, who became a primary peace activist in our country, was killed a month before my father.
And we sent all the, you know, 560,000 Americans over there.
56,000 never came back, including my cousin, George Skagel, who died in the Tet Offensive.
But my uncle refused to send troops abroad anytime, combat troops abroad, anytime during his administration.
But he said he didn't want African kids and Latin American kids when they heard the United States of America to think of a man in a military uniform.
He said he wanted to think of a Peace Corps volunteer and the Alliance for Progress, USAID, which he started to raise up and run the oligarchs and raise up the military to give aid directly to the poor, to build the middle classes in those countries and the economic stability that would create the foundation for middle class, for stable middle class in those countries.
As a result of that, there's now more statues to my uncle, more boulevards named after him, more hospitals, schools, universities, parks, neighborhoods in Africa, Latin America, and Asia than any other the US president, probably more than and Asia than any other the US president, probably more than any other All the other presidents combined And that, you know, was the power, the moral authority of our foreign policy when we project economic power abroad and not military power.
Oh, I'm going to do that.
I'm going to end the chronic disease epidemic.
I'm going to get every American kid into a home.
I'm going to build 10 million homes a year.
We've got a housing shortage now.
Of the American middle class.
If our kids can't get into homes, that means they can't get equity.
Which means they can't borrow money and they can't start a business.
They can't pursue their entrepreneurial impulses.
And we go from being an ownership society to a rental society.
And that's a colonial model, it's a feudal model, and it's not what America's supposed to be.
We need to get all of these kids into homes, and that is going to be the primary thing that I do, and to end the chronic disease epidemic.
And we need to stop spending money on the military.
We now have $34 trillion in debt.
We're paying more for the service of that debt than our entire military budget.
Within 5 years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we collect in taxes is going to go to servicing that debt.
Within 10 years, 100%.
And the two guys who are running for president against me, they can't fix this because they're the ones who ran up the debt.
President Trump said he's going to balance the budget.
Instead, he spent more money, eight trillion dollars in four years, more money than every president in the United States history combined, since George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years of history.
And President Biden is in a race to catch up with him.
President Biden is now running up another trillion dollars every 90 days.
So, you know, we're dead.
This is existential to our country and neither of these guys can fix it.
I'm going to fix it.
So those are, I'd say, you know, I also want to end the division in this country, end the polarization.
I think my campaign has been all about that, and that's why I attract roughly a third for Republicans, a third Democrats, and a third Independents, because I've refused to engage in the vitriol The hatred, the polarization, the finger pointing.
You know, I said when I gave my announcement speech, if I'm successful at the end of this campaign, a lot of Americans are going to forget they're Republicans or Democrats and just remember that they're Americans.
And that's, you know, that's one of my objectives.
Robby, I applaud you for talking to everybody.
And here today, you're talking to the American Fire Service.
You're talking to career firefighters and volunteers.
So here, you took time from your campaign to speak to the middle class.
Because firefighters make up that middle class.
You know, you look at any...
The men and women of the fire service, they would...
Make their spouse a widow and their kids orphans for the community they serve.
They're out there answering the call every day.
And I always say that the American Fire Service represents the very best in America.
You call 911 and they just show up.
No paperwork, just ready to help.
But yet, we find chemicals in our gear that were put in there not to help us, but what I believe was to give chemical companies a To protect their advantage and to reduce competition.
So PJ, can you ask a question about Forever Chemicals and kind of bring this in focus?
Because what I really appreciate and admire about Bobby Kennedy is that you give the little guy the voice.
Like David Whiteside, it's about the fishermen on the side of the river.
Who's depending on that water.
The mom who has to give the kids breakfast in the morning.
It's about clean water and you give a voice to those who wouldn't have a voice.
The middle class.
The ones that couldn't afford to buy that high, get that high dollar law firm.
PJ? Yeah, Bobby, thank you.
And you know, as you've already mentioned, and we've talked about in your intro, you fought really hard to clean up our rivers, especially with your work with Tennessee River Keepers and David Whiteside, who even sued DuPont for PFAS issues, and they won.
As firefighters, we know the cancer rate is automatically higher than the average citizen.
What we did not know is the mere gear, the protective clothing that we wear, is also loaded with those same PFASs contributing to those high cancer rates that you already mentioned.
Thankfully, through a mutual friend, Diane Cotter, and her quest to make sense of her husband's Paul's cancer diagnosis.
Today, PFAS is a daily conversation in firehouses across America.
You have already put a lot of work in on this, but as President of the United States, what would you do to further eliminate PFAS and how will that directly impact our firefighters?
Yeah, I mean, here, first of all, let me just talk about PFAS for a while.
We brought, I think it was 2015 or 2016, we brought the case that was, you know, that Mark Ruffalo, Mark Ballad, who is my law partner, Brought the case against – in Cleveland, Ohio or Cincinnati, Ohio on the original PFAS case and Mark Ruffalo made the movie about him, Dark Waters.
We took that case at Waterkeeper.
Waterkeeper is the group I co-founded.
It began on the Hudson River in 1966 with a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized to reclaim the Hudson River from its polluters.
When I started working there in the early 80s, the Hudson was catching fire.
It was Turning colors every week, depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown.
It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City, south of Albany.
Zero dissolved oxygen in the water.
The fish were gone.
Today, it's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.
It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean, north of the equator, and the miraculous resurrection of the Hudson River.
Inspired the creation of river keepers all over our country and the rest of the world.
We now have 350 water keepers, river keepers, sound keepers, bay keepers, lake keepers.
We own the keeper name.
We license these groups to get started.
Each one has to have a patrol boat.
They each have to be willing to sue polluters and they each have to have a full-time water keeper.
We have one of those on the Tennessee River in Nashville, the gentleman that you mentioned, David Whiteside.
And David discovered high, high levels of PFAS in the fish in the river and in the southern states, particularly Tennessee.
We have the highest levels of fish consumption in the country.
They have big, big recreational fishing communities and people and subsistence fishery.
And people are being poisoned, methodically, systematically poisoned by the 3M plant and DuPont is the other big maker.
Well, this is a huge profit center for them, and they market it as a flame retardant.
So they put it in.
It's the basis for the aqueous foams, the firefighters.
Firefighters get hit in three different ways.
One, it's in all of our furniture, you know, beginning in the 80s and 80s.
It's in all of our, it's in foam rubber, it's in our childhood's pajamas, Churchill's pajamas, and when firefighters go into those buildings, they are breathing, you know, when it incinerates, that stuff gets in the air.
That's one.
Number two, it's in the acquiescent foams that the firefighters use, particularly at airports, etc., but they practice with those foams, so they're there, and it volatizes out of those foams very easily.
So they're breathing it and it's getting on their skin and there's dermal penetration and there's all these other kind of factors for getting into your body that's highly, highly carcinogenic.
The last place and probably the largest factor It is the turnout gear and you mentioned Paul Cotter and Diane Cotter.
Diane is an incredible activist who went to war when her husband got testicular cancer.
This is a very active, life-loving man who is engaged in everything and he got these terrible cancers which are now very common with firefighters.
Cancers most associated with PFAS, testicular cancer, kidney cancers, bladder cancers, prostate cancers, and ultimately brain cancers as well, and firefighters have the highest cancer rate of any profession right now.
Cancer is the second biggest killer of firefighters after cardiac arrest, and it's approaching Cardiac arrest.
And it's, you know, we believe and the science shows that, you know, firefighters of other vectors who can't because they're breathing smoke all the time.
There's all kinds of carcinogens and incinerated material.
Probably the biggest.
And you're looking at these particular kind of cancers.
Testicular cancer and a lot of times firefighters will notice that there's a deterioration in their crotch area of the turnout gear that these little holes form and that's that those PFAS volatizing deteriorating and they're going into your skin.
So with that turnout gear that's supposed to protect your life, it's actually killing you.
And Diane has been this extraordinary activist exposing this to the American public.
And people are waking up to this.
And 3M, because of the litigation, 3M has pledged that they're getting out of the business.
But if you look at, you know, they've known for a long time that this person, they've hit it.
And they go, you know, they seduce the firefighters because they go, they finance the firefighters' conventions.
These companies put up their, you know, their booths and they proclaim the fact that they're paying.
There's advertisements in all the firefighters' magazines saying, we got your back.
Well, you know, we got your back pocket because we're taking your money, but we don't have your back.
We're killing It's really great about exposing that to the American public.
What I'm going to do as president, I recognize the power that these industries Have over Congress, over the – they own the regulatory agencies.
All of these agencies have been captured by the industries they're supposed to regulate.
There's been this corrupt merger of state and corporate power.
I've sued all these agencies.
I've sued CDC, NIH. I probably sued CDC more than any other attorney.
I've sued EPA repeatedly.
I've sued FDA. I've sued the USDA, which is giving us, the Department of Agriculture, all this poison process.
There's a thousand ingredients in our food in this country that are illegal in Europe.
Illegal.
And we have the highest chronic disease epidemic.
And nobody else has anything like this.
In fact, during COVID, we had the highest death rate of any country in the world We had 16% of the COVID deaths in the United States.
We only have 4.2% of the global population.
We literally had the worst record of any country in the world.
Whatever we were doing in this country was wrong.
People should run away from it.
CDC, when you ask them, they say, oh, it wasn't our fault.
It was because Americans are so sick, which is weird because they're the ones who are in charge.
They've presided over this.
They said the average person who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic disease.
So they had asthma, they had maybe obesity, they maybe have asthma, and one other thing.
No other country in the world is anything like this.
We are literally the sickest country in the world.
We spend more on healthcare than any other country, and we have the sickest population.
And it's because they're mass poisoning us.
And so how do you stop that?
It's very difficult to do it through legislation because, you know, when I brought the Monsanto cases, we had 40,000 clients Who were home gardeners, mainly, who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup, which the active ingredient of Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate.
And everybody said, even if you can prove that glyphosate causes these cancers, you can never get rid of it, because 95% of the herbicides in the world are that one Roundup, and they own the Corn industry, they own Cargill, they own Monsanto, these are the biggest corporations in the world and they own the agricultural committees and it's impossible to challenge them, they own the regulatory agencies.
Here's how we did it.
We had 40,000 people who got home gardeners who got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup.
We brought multi-district litigation against them.
We had enough science by that time, about 15 or 20 studies that all said they were animal studies, epidemiological studies.
Clinical study, observational studies, bench trial studies, all of these different mishmash of studies that all said the same thing, that this causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Once you get that critical mass of studies, you can surpass the threshold That's called the Daubert threshold in federal courts where a federal judge, before he lets you go to a jury with a case in which you're saying a chemical exposure caused such and such an effect,
he has to make an independent determination that sufficient science, a sufficient threshold of science, a critical mass of a whole different blend of studies is out there that supports this.
So that's called the Daubert threshold, and we just surpassed that with Monsanto.
Once we did that, we were able to go to court.
The way that multidistrict litigation works is you get a whole bunch of cases, and then you try them one at a time until somebody says uncle.
The first case we tried in San Francisco, we won $289 million.
The second A school superintendent, African-American, who had been forced, against his will, to spray Roundup with a leaky backpack.
He got nine Hodgkin's lymphoma all over his body.
The second case we tried in Oakland, we won $89 million.
The third case was a couple of home gardeners that had been spraying together for years.
First, their laboratory retriever, who was with them every day in the garden, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
And the two of them got it at the exact same time.
And we asked the jury in that case for a billion dollars.
And they came back with 2.2 billion.
And at that point, Monsanto came to the negotiating table and said, we're done.
Let's settle this.
They settled it for 13 billion and they agreed to take Roundup or to take glyphosate out of Roundup for home gardening purposes.
So that's how you beat them.
You get enough science out there.
And right now, CDC is looking at all these chronic diseases.
What's causing rheumatoid arthritis epidemic?
What's causing the juvenile diabetes epidemic?
What's causing food allergies?
Why did food allergies suddenly appear in 1989?
Peanut allergies and all these other allergies, anaphylaxis, eczema, all of them appear around 1989.
Something happened.
All these neurological disorders that appeared around 1989, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy, all of these things that we never heard of when I was a kid.
Suddenly exploded around 1989.
Kids who were born after 1989, their epidemic.
What happened?
And so there's a whole bunch of different exposures that could explain it.
There's high fructose corn syrup.
There's PFOAs and PFASs.
The forever chemicals that are not only in firefighter gear, they're in Teflon.
They're in that we started cooking with.
You know, they're in all of our pots and pans.
They're in polar bears and polar bears haven't been eaten firefighters, but they just put more of it in the firefighting gear.
And I just got to echo what you say.
Thank God and bless Paul and Diane for bringing this forward because...
At the time, and I applaud the unions for what they're doing now, but at the time, she had to face some of that tough adversity that you faced in your life, but without the family legacy, without the law on her side and just pushing and persistence and just trying to bring this issue to the forefront, and everybody questioned her, but her persistence.
We brought it through, so we really thank Diane for bringing this up, and we thank you for always questioning science, because that's what science is, looking at the data.
We looked at Detroit, LA, New York City, New Haven, and we're like, well, why aren't the cancer rates higher in these cities?
Where firefighters are exposed more often to the products of combustion.
And we know because of those flame retardants that we're breathing in a chemical cocktail of hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide, acrylin, all of these nasty reactors.
But yet our cancer rates are across the board from paid and career firefighters.
And it was Diane who really made us look and said, well, what's the commonality between all these firefighters that have these PFAS and these forever chemicals We're good to go.
President Kennedy went to Choate Rosemary Hall in our town.
So that's a source of pride in Wallingford, Connecticut.
But he was also part of the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and himself.
And I think the debates are so important to the fabric of America.
And we've seen this institutional debate.
We kind of witnessed this institutional norm diminished a little bit when we found out through emails that Donna Brazile was caught giving Hillary the questions.
We're hoping that these debates are engineering to keep you out of the debates to further diminish this critical part of fair elections.
Can you tell firefighters in America what's the status of getting you in the debates?
Because I think your voice needs to be heard because I think you're willing to talk to anybody.
Yeah, I mean I'm willing to talk to anybody.
But they ought to let me on the debate.
I meet the metrics that they've talked about.
I'm at 15 percent in the polls that they want me to be in.
They asked for four polls.
We gave them five from a specific list of polling firms.
And I'll be on the ballot, and by June 20th, I'll have enough signatures to get on the ballot and enough states to earn 340 electoral votes, and they only want 270.
And incidentally, President Biden, President Trump won't be on any state at that point because they have an expectation that they're going to get the Democratic and Republican nomination.
We don't know.
But they themselves are not on the ballot anywhere, and I am.
So I actually qualify more than they do, and we have filed a complaint with the FEC, which if it was an honest agency and not a captured agency, they would order me on the debate stage.
But, you know, neither of these gentlemen, neither President Biden or President Trump wants to debate me.
I don't think either of them can talk about the really big issues that are facing the existential issues that are facing this nation.
You know, LGBT rights, and they'll talk about abortion, and they'll talk about guns.
They'll talk about the border, which is a really critical issue, and they do differ on that.
I think we should need to shut down the border right away.
But the really big issues, the big issues that are going to destroy our country, the debt, the $34 trillion debt That is, you know, growing exponentially.
The chronic disease epidemic, the addiction to war, the polarization, the emergence of AI, okay?
And, you know, neither of them is going to talk about that AI. Anybody who looks at what's happening with AI right now should be terrified.
AI has this tremendous potential to help our country, to help humanity, but it also has the potential to enslave us.
And, you know, Elon Musk famously said, AI first, it's going to take our jobs, then it's going to kill us.
It's going to give our intelligence agencies, intelligence agencies all across the world, the capacity to manipulate human behavior in ways that nobody even understands, to change our perceptions of reality in dramatic, dramatic ways.
And we need to regulate it.
We need to regulate it in a very thoughtful way because we want to make sure that the industry, the innovators, the entrepreneurs stay here in the United States because there's tremendous growth potential.
So you can't over-regulate it here.
But we need to make agreements with other nations about how it's going to be regulated and make sure to protect humanity.
This is really a spiritual warfare and it's a war not between Republicans and Democrats.
The conflict between Republicans and Democrats are orchestrated.
This is really a battle by elites against the rest of us.
And it is a spiritual battle.
And AI is going to play critical.
AI is either going to be used by the public to hold government responsible, or it's going to be used by the government to subdue and enslave the public.
And we need to make sure that it's used in the way that actually benefits humanity and democracy.
And I don't think President Biden or President Trump has ever even considered anything about it, and it's going to happen in the next three years.
We need to make sure that we have somebody in office who can deal with this with a level of sophistication and concern and sensitivity that I don't think either of them is capable of.
Speaking of the dangers to the Republic, as a battalion chief retired in New Haven, I oversaw special operations and I had the distinct honor of being on the protection detail for former President Carter when he came to give a speech at Yale.
Where are we at with Secret Service protection for you?
If we can't protect our candidates in America, how can we expect America to be that shining city on the hill?
We've tragically lost your uncle.
We lost your father.
I'm sure your father would be very proud of your accomplishments today.
But here you're running for president to give a voice to the middle class, and yet As far as I know, you still haven't been given Secret Service protection.
Can you speak to that?
Because that's a concern for the fire service, because we're the ones that answer the calls when things go wrong.
Yeah, and I'm the first candidate.
You know, the Secret Service protection was only given to nominees of the parties after their conventions prior to 1968.
And my father, of course, was assassinated that year.
And that year, Immediately after his shooting, all of the presidential candidates, Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon were immediately given protection.
And that's been – Congress then passed a rule that all candidates 120 days out are – who meet certain metrics – Our polling metrics are entitled to Secret Service protection, but prior to 120 days, the president has discretion to give it to people who, you know, who need it.
So I've been, you know, the Secret Service actually was very good when they dealt with us and we gave them a 68-page threat assessment that showed numerous death threats to me and then also, you know, since I announced There have been several attacks on my home.
There's been three people who have made it into my yard or one of them, a mentally ill person, who made it to the second floor of my home.
I'm worried not about my own safety.
I'm worried about my family's safety.
I'm worried about bystanders and every presidential assassination attempt, there's been virtually every one of them, there's been bystanders injured.
You know, there were six people shot with my father, including one of his best friends, Paul Schrade, who took a bullet to his head.
When my uncle was shot, there were numerous other people, including Governor John Conley, who was also shot at that time.
And I've made this clear to the Biden White House.
President Biden has a bust of my father behind him at the Oval Office.
I'm sure he knows what happened to my father.
I've had, in fact...
I show up a couple of months ago at one of my speeches in Los Angeles who was carrying concealed weapons that were fully loaded, pistols, two-shoulder holsters, numerous knives, other weapons.
A dozen ammunition clips, a laser-guided pistol in a backpack, or laser-sighted pistol, and he had fake ID from the U.S. Marshal badge, and he had fake federal ID on his belt, photo ID, and he asked to see me in my green room.
And luckily one of the private security firm, Gavin DeBecker Associates that I've hired at great cost, noticed that his US Marshal badge was shinier than it ought to be.
And they questioned the guy and they found all these weapons on him and he had no good explanation about whether He wanted to see me.
He had opened an Instagram account that morning, or a TikTok account, and he made one post, and the post was a goodbye post to his friend saying, I'm going on a mission now.
I may not make it back alive.
Here's what you do.
Report to your commander-in-chief, Donald J. Trump, if I don't make it back alive.
So, you know, there's a lot of indicia that he was ill-intentioned toward me.
All of these things.
Even before that happened, the Secret Service looked at the number of death threats that I get on a daily basis and said that I was at an elevated risk.
And yet the White House has refused to give me protection.
The White House blames Senator Schumer, who's on this.
There's a committee of three in the Senate, and they say that Senator Schumer is the one who is, and the other two people on this committee are the ones who are recommending that I don't get protection.
But the whole process is obscure.
There have been 33 presidential candidates Who've been given Secret Service protection.
Everyone who's ever asked for it.
I'm the first person in history who has requested it and not gotten it.
And most of the people who've gotten it before me do not have my polling performance.
You know, Pat Buchanan had 1% of the votes.
Shirley Chisholm had less than 1%.
You know, Barack Obama got it over a year early.
My uncle, Ted Kennedy, got it before he even declared, 550 days out.
Jesse Jackson, look at all these candidates.
And many of them had polling numbers, a tiny fraction of mine, and they were given it We've made six requests to the White House with extensive documentation including the Secret Service own assessment that says I'm at elevated risk and they've made a decision not to give it to me.
I think you have to assume that's a political decision.
I don't think it's good for our country.
I'm worried about my family.
But I just think it's bad for our country that we're now weaponizing the federal agencies and the enforcement agencies.
And I think this is a worry from both sides.
You know, when President Trump was running, he said, He was going to lock up Hillary Clinton, and now the Biden White House is trying to lock him up.
And it's not good when anybody does it.
We need to stop weaponizing our federal enforcement agencies and understand that we need to be fostering public support and public trust in these institutions and not subverting and eroding it.
Your safety is an American issue and your family's safety is an American issue and that should transcend politics.
So, you know, we need any political leader, President Trump, President Biden, you know, they should be advocating along with the senators and representatives to get your family the protection that you deserve.
Another thing that should transcend politics that has a huge impact on firefighters, but beyond firefighters, teachers, nurses, doctors, is that the fact that the pandemic's over, but so are individuals' careers.
And they're individuals that are from the middle class.
And we found that individuals that have important voices like your own have been shut down.
And we see, you know, individuals in New York City where you had Battalion Chief Tom LaPolla, one of the only Battalion Chiefs that had the courage to speak out for the rank and file, forced off the job.
You had firefighters like Andy Pittman with four kids with six years on the job in Seattle, Washington, forced out of the job.
And this is not a, you know, you talked about lowering the temperature and about getting away from divisive politics.
This isn't a red or a blue issue.
Connecticut, our governor, we're a very blue state.
We didn't have forced vaccinations.
You could have testing or the vaccination.
So Governor Lamont got that right.
Houston, Texas is a blue city and a red state.
The mayor...
And the fire chief worked hard to give a testing option to firefighters so that they wouldn't put in these draconian measures.
And I think one of the issues is when we silence dissenting views, we can't have that cogent policy debate.
And sometimes it slides in.
I was talking to Matt...
Matt Conner from New York City this morning and he met you when you were out talking to teachers who lost their job and firefighters in New York City.
We know that this issue for you isn't about political expedience, but you're actually giving a voice to people who need to have a voice and this needs to be an issue.
Can you weigh in on why the political class in this country has gotten so caught up in the right and the left instead of just saying, wait, you can get hired in all these fire departments without a vaccination now?
We know that the public policy was based off a faulty premise that if you got the shot, you couldn't spread it.
So now that we know you can get the shot, and I was vaccinated, and I gave it to my lovely wife, Christine, even after getting the three shots, So we know now that, wait, this isn't narrowly tailored.
It's not a compelling government interest.
What's your message to the firefighters, the cops, and the teachers and the hospital workers who feel like the pandemic's over and they're for God?
Yeah, and let me add something to your question, which is this.
Right now, CDC is recommending a ninth booster.
So that's where we are, ninth booster.
There's fewer than 10% of Americans are going to do that, a lot fewer.
That means that over 90% of Americans have completely lost faith in CDC. CDC was recommending the first vaccine, you know, way back when.
In 2020, and we were all told, you know, you can't go to your work.
You're gonna get fired if you don't take it.
You can't get on an airplane.
You can't.
Your rights are no longer rights.
They're now privileges contingent on you obeying, on you submitting to an unwanted medical intervention and participating in a mass experiment that they were lying about constantly.
I knew back in 2020, The vaccines weren't going to prevent transmission.
Why did I know that?
Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, which is what I was called, but because I was actually looking at the monkey studies.
And in the monkey studies, you know, they gave half the monkeys vaccine and half were not, and then they exposed them to COVID. And at the same time, the monkeys had the same level of concentrations of COVID virus in their nasal pharynxes.
Well, they knew that they didn't prevent illness and they didn't prevent transmission.
And yet for a year, they were telling us, yeah, if you get the vaccine, your grandma will be protected.
And they were lying.
And they all admit it now.
Now that is mainstream dogma.
But you have to think this.
What if CDC said today, you know, we want you to take your ninth.
If you don't take it, you can't go to work.
Well, that's, you know, that is the way that we need to think about this.
So we represented Bravest for Choice in New York.
I represented Firefighters for Freedom in LA, and we won that suit.
We won the big suit for the teachers where the firefighters were also included in New York that illegalized the mandates and said you can't do that.
And we're still representing firefighters all over the country who were fired.
And, you know, the big case are now in front of the Second Circuit in New York.
Sujata Gibson is our attorney in those cases.
And we financed a lot of those cases for the individual firefighters.
And the courts have said to date...
That they're entitled to be rehired and they're entitled to their pass pay.
But so far, we don't know of any of them who've actually collected.
So that's where we are on that.
One of the saddest cases is a firefighter named Velasquez who was being represented by Cristina Martinez.
And he refused to get the vaccine.
And they said, well, we're going to fire you unless you did it.
He then went and got it, and he was permanently and catastrophically disabled.
And that, unfortunately, has been the story for many, many, many people.
And, you know, the levels of, unfortunately, we're still seeing in the media censorship of The injuries, you're not allowed to talk about vaccine injuries on the media.
The media now no longer sees itself as a vessel for speaking truth to power, a vital democratic institution that should maintain a posture of fear skepticism toward Official proclamations of government authority, that is the function of the press in a democracy.
But unfortunately, during COVID, they all saw their role as manipulating the public into compliance, repeating again and again government propaganda, frightening the public.
And thank you for pushing for cogent debate.
And, you know, I wrote an article for the Daily Caller for the Yankee Institute, and I found a quote from Benjamin Franklin that I think says it all.
And he said, in apologies for a printer, he said, And when truth and error have fair play, the former is always overmatched for the later.
It's so important for our republic to be able to have cogent debate.
We wouldn't have had the learning loss that we had with our kids losing education over the pandemic.
The fact that they silenced or throttled down your social media accounts so that we couldn't talk about what Robert Kennedy was talking about.
This is Trump says a lot of things, but this was actually done by the Biden administration where they used proxies to silence dissenting views.
And that's one of the things that your uncle, whether it was the lion in the Senate, whether it was your uncle that was president, has always fought for was to protect the First Amendment.
We need to be able to have these conversations, these courageous conversations.
And we need to be able to ask simple questions.
And that's one of the reasons like even you coming on this show today means so much to the fire service, because we normally don't get access to a presidential candidate who takes his time to come in and finds value in talking to volunteer and career firefighters and middle class America.
Often it's all caught up in the talking points.
But you try to break through that.
And I think how you even been treated in the press, you talk about, you know, the press talking truth to power.
I've seen so many interviews where the the person Bill Maher, OK, who I watch it.
I'm a conservative, but I watch Bill Maher.
Instead of just asking you a question, he put out a faulty premise first, and so here you had to defend your position.
I just think it's unfair what we're doing in our republic.
We need more honest conversations in our politics.
So if you'd like to weigh in on the First Amendment, I really appreciate it because I think you're a valuable voice in America.
Yeah, I mean Hamilton, Madison, Adams said that they put freedom of speech in the First Amendment because all of the other rights depend on it.
If a government has the capacity to silence its critics, it has license for any atrocity.
And, you know, listen, we all read, at least I did growing up, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Robert Heinlein and And Kessler and all of these other authors who talked about – we were taught in civics class and literature class.
They all talked about a future kind of dystopian totalitarianism.
And we thought, yeah, that might happen sometimes, but so far in the future, you know, it's fun to think about it, but it's never going to happen to us.
And then we saw it happening to us.
And, you know, what they were saying is that the first step toward totalitarianism always begins with the censorship of speech.
American democracy is rooted in this assumption of the free flow of information and that, you know, democracies are less efficient than totalitarian systems where you can just have one guy making all the decisions with no Congress, no regulatory agency, just, you know, just top-down, you know, and it's much more efficient.
Democracy is sloppy.
It's difficult.
It goes, you know, inches and fits and starts two steps forward, one step back, etc.
But the big advantage it has is that the free flow of information annealed in the furnace of debate yields these policies that have triumphed in a marketplace of ideas.
And that's what all of the founders talked about.
You need free flow of information.
And when you stop debating things, You're on a bad path.
There's no time in American history When we look back and we say the people who were censoring speech were the good guys.
They're always the bad guys.
They're always the people who are trying to manipulate the public to try to increase their power, increase their wealth.
And, you know, that's what we saw during COVID. We saw systematic censorship and it was taking place in the Trump administration and it was taking place in the Biden administration and all of it ultimately was designed To shift wealth and power upward.
The Trump lockdowns which were continued during the Biden administration lasted 500 days and created a billionaire a day for 500 days and shifted 4.3 trillion dollars Upward from the American middle class to just strip-mined the American middle class and created this new oligarchy of billionaires and the people who profited were Bill Gates and Jeffrey Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and all
of these tech overlords, the robber barons.
Who, you know, now are locked in our homes.
They were giving surfers right up the road here $1,000 tickets because they were surfing out on the ocean.
And they closed the playground so kids couldn't get sunlight.
They couldn't go outside.
They poured sand on the skate parks, the half pipes down in Venice, which is a few blocks from here, to make sure that nobody could go skateboarding.
So they knew at that point that COVID was not spreading outside.
It only spread indoors, and yet they were locking us all indoors.
They were getting us out of the vitamin D, promoting sunlight, the fresh air, all the stuff that would have kept us...
They're sending us home.
They eat potato chips and gain weight, and the people who were dying were the people who were eating potato chips and were overweight.
So this was not a public health effort.
It was an exercise in control.
They were testing us.
To see if we put up with this.
And unfortunately, we did.
You know, I think a lot of Americans are now coming out of that and saying we're never going to do that again.
It's not going to happen the next time.
So I'm hoping that that was the result.
Because once they take away it right, even when they give it back, it's never as strong as it was before they took it away in the first place.
And that's what I worry about.
I worry about We're living in this era now, these emerging control technologies, facial recognition systems.
We have 415,000 low-altitude satellites that have now been given permits that are going to look at every square inch of the earth every hour of the day, know exactly where you are.
We have technology that can look through walls so you can't hide in your house.
We have, you know, Alexis is in your house, right?
And Siri.
You think they're working for you.
They're not.
They're working for Bill Gates and they're working for the NSA and they're getting all of your information every time you sneeze.
That's recorded somewhere and somebody then is monetizing that to sell you a drug.
When you say, I didn't sleep last night, you get mattress ads.
All of that stuff, you know, they're harvesting the data.
They are mining your data, stealing it from you, not paying you for it.
They're monetizing it in these big Data centers that Gates and the other ones are building all over the desert southwest, and then they sell it to the NSA. And so that gives them not only, you know, a new flows of income, but it also gives them this capacity to To control us and to monitor us.
And that's frightening.
You know, governments never...
The ambition of every totalitarian regime in the history of mankind has been absolute control over every aspect of human behavior.
All of our interactions, our movements, what we read, what we talk about.
They've never been able to do it in the past.
People have been able to keep parts of their lives secret.
Every purchase.
They know about it.
You go buy a porn magazine or look on the internet.
They know you did that.
They know it, and it gives them all these opportunities to control human behavior in nefarious ways.
Bobby, I want to be respectful of your time because you've been so generous today.
I want to just give you an opportunity to just clear something up because you did make a comment about immigration.
And I don't want somebody to just pull the clip and kind of paint it in a different light.
I think we agree that we need controlled immigration because we need a quality safety net in America.
And if we just open the gates and we have so many people coming in.
I mean, I work in a socioeconomically deprived city and there's so many wonderful people that have either fallen on high time, hard times, substance abuse or mental illness that we need to have that quality safety net.
Do you want to just expand on your answer?
Thanks for letting me do that.
America needs to continue to be a compassionate country and to welcome immigrants who come in legally.
So we have a long line of people.
I intend to widen the gates so that legal immigration is easier so that all the – there's 10 million businesses that are looking for workers from abroad with certain skills.
We need to be able to give them that flow so that we can build our economy, so that we can grow our way out of the $34 trillion debt, so that we can pay for the Social Security and it's not going to go insolvent and that we can continue to live up to our highest ideals.
But I've been down to the border in Mexico and I originally was a critic of Trump's walls but I turned around when I saw what's happening there.
I watched 300 people come across Between 2 a.m.
and 4 a.m.
On my first trip there to Yuma, I've been back since then.
I spent three days down there talking to the Border Patrol, talking to local law enforcement, to ranchers, the people running the rape centers, the hospitals, everybody in these incredibly kind-hearted communities.
They made me so proud to be American because this problem has been dumped on them.
And they're rising.
They're rising with compassion to where the immigrants are coming in.
But the immigrants themselves, I interviewed.
I watched 300 come across.
They brought to the border all night long in these big white buses that are owned by the Sinelon drug cartel.
They weren't coming from only two the whole night.
I saw from Latin America who both had asylum claims, one from Colombia, one from Peru.
The rest were all from that.
The first 110 were from West Africa, all young men of military age.
The second two buses were all coming from Asia, from China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Nepal, Tibet, some from India and Bangladesh, but mainly China.
And I asked them, you know, why are you here?
And they said, we're here for a job.
It's illegal.
But they knew exactly what was going to happen to them because the Sinaloa cartel is advertising on TikTok and YouTube all over the world and it says, you send us $10,000 and you get on a plane to Mexico City, then you...
We will get you a visa when you get to Mexico City for internal flights, domestic flights.
And you fly to Mexicali.
We will pick you up in the airport at Mexicali.
We'll bring you to the wall.
We will walk you across the wall.
When you get there, you will be fingerprinted by the Border Patrol.
And then if you don't have a criminal record, you'll be brought to the Yuma airport and put on a plane at U.S. taxpayer expense at any destination that you want to go to.
110,000 have ended up in New York City.
They're living on the streets.
They can't legally work so they're victimized by predatory employers who are hiring them to do construction sites or, you know, hotel maze or $6 an hour.
And those companies are bidding against union shops that would be paying $35 an hour or $40 an hour for, you know, more skilled wages.
And everybody gets hurt.
The taxes aren't getting paid.
The social safety system is being crushed.
And, you know, what I say is we welcome immigrants in this country, but every country needs a secure border.
Otherwise, it's going to cease to exist.
And this is existential for us.
And by the way, the immigrants themselves, the stories I heard from them were harrowing.
Many of them are raped.
Most of the ones that I talked to have been robbed by the cartels.
There's a tree right across the border which is famous.
It's called the rape tree.
And the Border Patrol says this is where the cartels extract final payment from women, from children who they bring to the border.
And it's just, it's horrific.
I talked to a Peruvian family.
They had paid their $10,000 and then, you know, just before they got to the border, they were searched by the cartel and all of their lifetime savings was taken from them.
And then they show up in America, they can't pay what they're supposed to pay to the cartel.
So they're sent to a job in specific places and then they have people from the cartel who come visit them to make sure to collect their paycheck every week.
And they're essentially slaves in this country.
This is not a good situation.
Anybody who tries to defend this, you know, I'm just telling you, whatever you think, you're wrong if you think this is defensible.
No, I can't agree more.
It's not compassion.
We can't incentivize.
We still have a terrorism risk.
We have so many kids that have died for fentanyl overdoses.
We need to control the border so we can have that safety net.
I just want to really thank you for your time.
If you want to give us the last 30-second or 60-second pitch on why you should be president of the United States, and then I'll have PJ take us off.
And again, thank you so much for talking to the American Fire Service.
We need to rebuild the middle class in this country.
I grew up during my Uncle President Kennedy's administration when America was the richest country in the world.
We owned half the wealth on the earth.
The American middle class became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
And some of that was because we still had an industrial base after World War II when Europe had been flattened.
But the other part was we got everybody into a home.
We got, you know, we got through the veterans bill, a lot of other bills, through the highway system, etc., We made sure every American could get in a home.
The housing prices then were roughly one year's salary.
With one year's salary, you could get into a house.
You could take a summer vacation.
You could raise a family.
You could put something aside for retirement on one job.
And today that is gone.
I have seven kids.
They all went to the best colleges and none of them is going to be able to get a home.
And you know, it's, housing prices have doubled in the last year and the interest rates have doubled in the last year and they're competing against BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, these big investment houses that own 89% of the these big investment houses that own 89% of the S&P 500, those three houses.
And now they're trying to buy all of our land and all of our houses.
And, you know, when you own a house, you care about your community.
You care about your firefighters, your police.
You go to the PTA meetings.
You care about the appearance of your home.
You care about your neighbors.
But most importantly, you have equity.
So you can borrow money.
If you want to start a bowling alley or a sporting goods shop or a bar or a yoga studio, you can get the financing to do it.
And so you can pursue...
Your entrepreneurial impulses.
And right now, we got a generation of kids who's never going to see the inside of their own home.
They're turning into renters.
And we're turning this society from a democratic society into a feudal society.
And our people are going to go from being citizens to being subjects.
And I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen.
You heard it here from RFK Jr.
himself.
Honored to have him on the show.
Remember, Speaking out matters.
Right now, the unions have failed in protecting these firefighters and cops and teachers and hospital workers that lost their jobs.
Remember, if you're a union leader out there, one of your responsibilities is to protect due process.
Sometimes, even if you disagreed with the action, invoke your inner John Adams and support these Seattle firefighters, New York City firefighters.
We need to make this an issue because the pandemic's over, but these workers cannot be forgotten.
Bobby Kennedy, honored to have you on the show.
PJ, can you take us off?
RFK Jr., thank you.
Thank you for joining us and speaking to the fire service and highlighting your vision for America's firefighters.
Wow.
What a great show, highlighting an individual who fights for our health and safety.
As a reminder, FDIC 2025 deadlines for submissions is June 17th.
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