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May 24, 2024 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:05:56
RFK Jr Joins LIVE At The Libertarian National Convention Talking Trump, Biden, 2024 | Timcast IRL
Participants
Main voices
l
luke rudkowski
07:30
r
robert f kennedy-jr
01:23:17
t
tim pool
25:47
Appearances
h
hannah claire brimelow
02:41
p
phil labonte
03:55
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Speaker Time Text
tim pool
Alright everybody, welcome.
We are at the Libertarian Party National Convention in Washington, D.C.
Literally behind us is the main convention hall.
It's been particularly interesting already.
We have a great show tonight, and instead of wasting any time with any big stories or anything, the big story is here today.
As the Libertarians are figuring out who's going to be the candidate.
And we have RFK Jr.
as well as Donald Trump who have attended and spoken to this crowd.
So we're going to be having a conversation on the current state of the election, politics, and policies.
Before we get started, head over to castbrew.com, pick up Cast Brew Coffee to support the show.
Appalachian Nights is everybody's favorite.
And head over to timcast.com, click join us to become a member and support our work directly.
Joining us tonight, of course, is presidential candidate RFK Jr.
robert f kennedy-jr
Thanks for having me, Tim.
tim pool
I really do appreciate it.
Everybody knows who you are, so we're really excited that you're here so we can discuss, I think, a lot about the Libertarian Party, your speech, what you're hoping to accomplish, as well as I've got a million questions about your policies and your plan for 2024, so I appreciate you being here.
We have Luke, Phil, and Hannah-Claire.
luke rudkowski
You guys want to just quickly... Yeah, very ironically, YouTube actually deleted my video today where I actually featured a clip from you on Joe Scarborough.
So, very ironically, good to have you here.
Thank you so much, Tim, for taking the risk, for having this conversation.
This is a very important conversation.
Check out my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash WeAreChanged.
We just had Dave Smith on today.
Probably we're going to have Ron Paul on Sunday, and we're doing a big nature hike this Sunday for members of lukewinfilter.com.
Phil, how are you?
phil labonte
How you doing?
I am Phillip Bonte.
I am the lead singer of the heavy metal band All That Remains.
I'm an anti-communist and a counter-revolutionary.
How you doing there, Hannah-Claire?
hannah claire brimelow
I'm excited.
I think it's a good Friday show.
I'm Hannah-Claire Bremmel.
I'm a writer for scnr.com.
That's Scanner News.
I'm so grateful to be a part of this.
Let's get to it.
tim pool
Right on.
My first question just has to do with us being at the Libertarian Party National Convention, and I know that you spoke.
I'm curious.
Wow, the LP is getting a lot of attention right now, and I'm wondering what compelled you to come down here and speak to the people here.
What are you thinking?
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, I've always had an affinity for libertarians.
My approach to the environment was always a free market approach.
I started working for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River, a blue-collar community on the Hudson River.
Most of my career has been working for commercial and recreational fishermen who were capitalists, free marketeers.
And I understood pollution to be a subsidy and an assault on the market.
That was always my approach.
I've talked about it for 40 years.
I'm anti-war, which is one of the key sympathies of libertarians.
I believe in personal freedoms, the Constitution, So, you know, I think that libertarians themselves are not united about anything.
I actually had a friend.
I had a friend called Peter Beuth who ran Greenpeace.
For many, many years, I went camping with him for about three weeks.
We had a camp hanged out in Mexico years ago, trying to stop Mitsubishi from building a big salt mine and a whale sanctuary down there.
And I ended up in a tent, got to be very close to him, and he ran Greenpeace.
I said, On one point, what's it like running Greenpeace?
And he said, it's like being in charge of 1.2 million people and the only thing they have in common is they all despise authority.
And to me, the Libertarians always seem like that.
It's a very democratic and kind of chaotic version of democracy.
It's the opposite of the duopoly, you know, which are now these kind of top-down, tyrannical systems that are run by corporations, by BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard.
And the pharmaceutical companies, and the big war companies, and the big military contractors, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, and the oil and coal companies, they're all taking money from the same people, and it's all this kind of very, very top-down systems, and the libertarians are the opposite of that.
They're bottom-up.
They're all iconoclastic.
There's no unifying, real unifying theme except for freedom, which I like a lot.
tim pool
And their view of freedom is very differently.
robert f kennedy-jr
Very differently.
tim pool
Some people here think there should be no borders.
Some people here think there should be strong borders, and they both argue that it's freedom.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, that's right.
The kind of extreme versions, first of all, I think their minds are really interesting because You know, first of all, they're very thoughtful.
They do critical thinking.
They are completely, fiercely skeptical towards authority, which I like a lot.
They're skeptical about any orthodoxies or official pronouncements, which I enjoy.
And then they have, you know, the really extreme libertarians.
Have this kind of system worked out in their heads that works for them where everything should be privatized.
tim pool
I don't agree.
robert f kennedy-jr
No, I don't agree either.
I don't think you can privatize the commons.
Capitalism works with private property, but there are certain assets that are, just by their nature, they're shared assets of communities, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands.
And, you know, if somebody tried to privatize the Hudson River, it wouldn't be a good thing.
You want public access to it.
You want people to be able to use it for all different kinds of purposes.
And so I think it falls apart.
The philosophy, to me, falls apart in the commons, but I always enjoy talking with them about it.
tim pool
Are you thinking that you're going to convince some of them to join you, vote for you, support you?
robert f kennedy-jr
I think a lot of them are supportive.
We've gotten good support from the libertarians from the beginning, so I don't think, I don't know how much convincing they need.
I think there's, people are adamantly against me because of my position on Gaza.
I think that from the outset, you know, that most of them are very, very supportive of my position on Ukraine, and I was one of the first national political figures to come out and say this war is a hoax.
And so, and I think that, you know, they like my free market approach to environmentalism and a lot of other stuff that I talk about.
So we've gotten from the beginning when I was campaigning in New Hampshire a year ago, the biggest, you know, we were going to Freedom Fest and the biggest groups that were, you know, were we getting the best crowds, the most enthusiastic crowds, were libertarian crowds.
I lost a lot of them on Gaza.
tim pool
What's your Gaza position?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm against war, but I think in the last hundred years we've only fought one war that I would call a moral war, which was World War II, because we were attacked.
It was a defensive war.
We were attacked by an enemy, an implacable enemy that was committed to the obliteration of our values, systems, our country, etc.
And so, to me, World War I was a bad war, was a war of choice.
My grandfather protested it, lost all of his friendships, lost a lot of relationships and business opportunities because of that.
But I think the Gaza war, from Israel's point of view, is a defensive war.
You know, they were attacked.
They were attacked not just on October 7th, but they were attacked for 16 years since Hamas took over Gaza.
I'm very pro-Palestinian.
I have friends in Gaza.
I've been to the West Bank.
I met with the Palestinian Authority leadership.
I have an organization in Israel that's the only organization, it's a water protection group on the Jordan River, and it has Palestinians, Jordanian Arabs, and Israel Jews on it.
I'm very, very supportive of the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
I think Hamas is the biggest enemy of the Palestinian people.
And you know, Palestinian people have, I'll just tell you this, have received more money, more than almost 20 times what Europeans received during the Marshall Plans.
Between 1944 and 1948, we sent, we rebuilt 17 nations that had been destroyed in Europe after World War II.
We spent to do that We spent, in 2023 dollars, $626 per capita for all the people in those countries.
In the last 30 years, international aid agencies have pumped $8,600 per capita to every single person in the Palestinian Authority, including a lot of people who aren't really there.
luke rudkowski
As the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA counts people who left long ago in order to continue to... So would your position be not to send them any money, and would you also not send any money to Israel then, as President of the United States?
robert f kennedy-jr
No, what I would do, what I think we should be doing is diplomatic solutions, but we should You know, I think we need to do a Marshall Plan for Gaza after the war, but I don't think that the war can end until Hamas is eliminated.
I don't think you can be giving money to Hamas.
luke rudkowski
So today the United Nations top court actually just ordered Israel to immediately halt its operations in Rafa.
The United States and the Biden administration asked them not to do this, and Israel just did it anyway.
How would you handle the situation as President of the United States?
Would you allow them to continue that?
Would you allow American service members to be there?
robert f kennedy-jr
American service members aren't there?
luke rudkowski
Israel is there.
Yes, they are.
They're actually in the water.
They actually set up a pier and a port, and now they're being attacked.
So, as President of the United States, how would you handle the Rafah situation, and would you put our American troops there, like they are currently?
robert f kennedy-jr
No, I would not send American troops to Israel.
I would support Israel with arms and weapons.
The International Court of Justice, part of the United Nations, the United Nations just has an ingrained hostility to Israel.
The United Nations has, you know, has issued, I think, 14 condemnations in the last five or six years against Israel, one against North Korea, none against, you know, any of these other nations that are, you know, that are actually committing Human rights abuses all the time.
Israel is the only democracy in the Mideast.
It's the only place where everybody can vote, whether you're Arabs or Jews.
You have all equal rights.
Arabs in Israel can run for every political office.
There's 10 Arabs serving in the Knesset.
They're serving on every level of the judiciary.
They have freedom of speech, they have freedom of religion.
In fact, there's 27 Asians in the Mideast, and 26 of them have official religions.
But the question is, what would you do for Rafa?
luke rudkowski
What would you do for Rafa?
I've never answered the question.
tim pool
Real quick, I want to pull this up.
This is important to what you're asking.
This is from USNI.org.
unidentified
U.S.
tim pool
soldiers critically injured during Gaza pier operation.
Two other service members hurt.
These are non-combat related injuries.
But this is U.S.
service members.
They are armed.
Lloyd Austin said that they are allowed to return fire.
They are currently under fire from Hamas in Gaza.
And so, based on what Luke was asking, I'd ask, knowing that the U.S.
is doing this, they're building a pier, should you get elected, would you call these troops back and cancel the construction of this pier?
robert f kennedy-jr
You know, I would have to look at the whole Peer Project.
I've been ambivalent about that project from the beginning.
I'm not sure that it's necessary.
But, you know, I would have to understand it better.
I read both the literature, propaganda coming out of Israel and the propaganda coming from Hamas.
And it's unclear to me how, you know, what Israel says There's plenty of supplies going into Gaza.
That there is no shortage of supplies.
That the problem in Gaza is that Hamas is stealing the supplies rather than distributing them.
luke rudkowski
Well, the Pentagon is also reporting just two days ago that the aid is actually not getting through to the people of Gaza.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, well, and that's what Israel's been saying, that they can't.
The problem is not A lack of supplies, the problem is that Hamas won't allow anybody to have access to the supplies.
phil labonte
That's the same reason Gaza hasn't had waters because of Hamas, you know?
luke rudkowski
Well, no, Israel shut off the water and electricity.
They took some of the water pipes, correct, but then Israel did shut off the water and did shut off the electricity to two million people, not just combatants.
robert f kennedy-jr
Israel, first of all, Israel only controls about 9% of the water.
Most of the water, about 91% of the water in Gaza comes from six desal plants, desalinization plants.
Those plants are dependent on oil, on fuel and bunker fuel.
And what Israel says is there is plenty of that fuel in Gaza, But they're using it to fire rockets into Israel rather than to operate their diesel plants, and there's plenty of evidence of that, because Israel's been hit by about 20,000 rockets since October 7th, and they consume a tremendous amount of fuel.
So, what Israel says is they've got plenty of oil, they're just not using it.
They are starving their own people, and we see this, you know, this scapegoating all the time, where Jews are the only Jewish nation that is being blamed.
Or for crimes that Hamas is committing.
If a bank robber robs a bank...
And grabs a hostage and is firing over the hostage's shoulder at the police, and the police fire back and hit the hostage.
You don't blame the police, you blame Hamas.
luke rudkowski
But at the same time, we don't blow up Times Square if there's a terrorist inside of Times Square.
So that's another kind of situation that would counter your situation.
But back to the question about Rafa.
unidentified
It depends on how many terrorists are in Times Square.
robert f kennedy-jr
When we went into Ramallah, when we went into Mosul, we killed a lot more civilians than Israel is doing here right now.
There's a war going on in Yemen.
We're our allies, where the United Arab Emirates, the Saudis, are bombing civilian targets.
They've killed already 350,000 civilians.
People only complain when Israel kills civilians.
I completely agree.
luke rudkowski
Well, they're working with Al-Qaeda, too.
They're working with Al-Qaeda in Yemen, as well.
hannah claire brimelow
I think the question is actually, should this be America's priority right now?
Is this the thing that America should be considering over other domestic issues that we have?
I understand the humanitarian crisis, the loss of life is tragic, but as president, I wonder, is this the thing that you prioritize over the more serious domestic issues like the border, like our own, you know, economic crisis?
robert f kennedy-jr
I would say, I would say this, you know, my priority is, as president, is going to be with the United States.
I wouldn't be sending any money to Ukraine.
At all.
Not a penny.
Because for all the reasons, Ukraine's a war of choice, it's a war that we help provoke, it's a war that Putin has been trying to settle on terms that are very, very favorable to us, and we keep on making Zelensky tear up the agreements.
So the question is, do we have an interest in supporting Israel?
And does the U.S.
have a legitimate interest or an important national interest in supporting Israel?
And I would say the answer to that is yes.
We give a tiny fraction to Israel.
A large amount of the money that we historically send to Israel goes to the Iron Dome.
The Iron Dome is this unique system, a defensive system, so that Israel will not have to invade Gaza.
Nobody else would do this.
Since Hamas took over Gaza, they fired an average of 2,000 missiles a year onto civilian centers in Israel.
People say Gaza has one of the highest population densities in the world.
That's not true.
Tel Aviv has twice the population density as Gaza.
And that's where Hamas is sending missiles, onto a civilian population.
There's a million Israelis who live in bomb shelters.
And Israel, any other nation that was attacked by a smaller, less powerful nation that was committed to its destruction, its annihilation, the extermination of its people, would go in there and carpet bomb it from the air and destroy it.
unidentified
Yep.
robert f kennedy-jr
Israel didn't do that.
Israel built an iron dome so it would not have to go in, and that is where, you know, a large percentage of the money that we send to Israel is going to that iron dome.
So I believe, and Israel for us in the Mideast, is a bulwark for democracy, it's a bulwark for U.S.
interests. If Israel was a woman, a Palestinian friend of mine told me this the other day, he
said, you know, many Palestinians understand that we need a strong Israel because if we, if
Israel ceased to exist, we would be at the mercy of Iran.
And Iran doesn't care about us.
Iran does not care about the Palestinian people.
Look what they've done with Hamas.
They've built 300 miles of tunnels for fighters and not a single bomb shelter for civilians.
tim pool
We can certainly loop back to this, but I do want to make sure we can get it... I don't want to just turn into an hour-long debate over Israel, because that's usually what happens, but I'm curious about domestic issues, and it does pain me a little bit to have to ask the really boring and obvious question, but it's the one that matters most to people, and that's...
Currently, people are struggling.
They can't afford groceries.
The media keeps saying there's nothing to worry about.
The inflation is fine.
And then when working class people try to feed their kids, they're finding that it's harder and harder to actually buy groceries.
I wonder your view on the economy and what you could do as president that would change this for the American people.
robert f kennedy-jr
I mean, I think that there's an assault on the middle class in this country.
And it's been going on since 1980, but it really exploded during COVID when we shut down 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation.
We shifted four trillion dollars upward from the American middle class.
We obliterated the middle class to this new oligarchy of billionaires.
We created a billionaire day globally in 500 days, 500 days, 500 new billionaires.
And you know, a lot of those businesses will never reopen.
41% of black-owned businesses will never reopen.
And a lot of them had three generations of equity in them.
And then, you know, because we've spent Eight trillion dollars on war since 2001.
We didn't have that money.
We borrowed it from China and we printed the money.
And that is why we're having inflation.
And that's why we have four dollar bread, four dollar milk, and six dollar gasoline.
tim pool
Do you think that's irreversible then?
Do you think that cutting the war funding might alleviate some of this tension?
robert f kennedy-jr
It's complicated because you can't cut... First of all, we have to make dramatic cuts.
And essentially what our orphaned investments, which is war is an orphan investment, you spend a million dollars on a missile, $60,000 on a backpack missile, a million dollars on a tank, you send it somewhere to get destroyed and it doesn't produce any kind of economic benefits.
If we're going to, we cannot, we're at a point now, $34 trillion in debt.
Eight trillion of that is from Trump.
Another seven trillion is from Biden.
And Trump ran up a bigger debt, spent more money than every president before him, from George Washington to George W. Bush in 283 years.
Neither of them are gonna deal with this issue.
It's so large right now, we're spending more on servicing that debt than our entire defense budget.
Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we collect in taxes is gonna go to the debt.
Within 10 years, 100%.
So it's existential.
You need to cut dramatically spending, and those cuts will come from the military, which we need to cut down to about $500 billion a year from $900 billion.
We need to close most of the 800 bases that we have abroad, which are just invitations for new wars.
The biggest savings is going to come from ending the chronic disease epidemic, which is now the biggest part of our budget, $4.3 trillion.
It's five times the military budget.
It was 6% of GDP when my uncle was president, and it's about 20% today.
We've gone from 6% of kids having chronic disease in our country to 60%.
We're the only country that has this.
We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.
You can't just cut it and solve the debt problem.
You actually need to cut it and then invest it in things that are going to expand the economy.
You have to grow your way out of this existential crisis.
Not just cut your way out of it.
phil labonte
Mr. Kennedy, even beyond that, everyone knows that the mandatory spending is the actual driver of all of our major economic problems.
So, considering nobody's going to touch Medicare and Medicaid, how do we have a plan that can actually fix the problem of Medicare and Medicaid without leaving seniors and people that are planning for it, which there's too many Americans that are planning for it now, but the people that are actually planning for it, how do we fix the problem for them without leaving the mine dry?
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, you know, the places where we need to get about four or five billion from the military,
we need to reduce chronic disease from 4.3 billion a year to, I mean, 4.3 trillion a
year to about a quarter of that.
And then we can do cuts, you know, particularly with AI, we can identify ways.
I'm going to also use blockchain to make our entire budget transparent so that everybody
can identify ways.
And that's where I'm going to get the money.
I'm not going to cut Medicare.
I'm not going to cut Social Security.
That's a contract with the American people.
What I'm going to do is reduce the cost of treating illness in this country.
Everybody else talks about, when they talk about health care, they're talking about Whether it's Obamacare or single-payer or, you know, public-private hybrid or whatever, but it's all about, that's all of those propositions, the big battles that are fought about moving tech chairs around on the Titanic.
A whole ship is sinking, and it's sinking because of the explosion of chronic disease.
phil labonte
So you think, basically, you think that we can essentially innovate our way into a position where... I think we can eliminate chronic disease.
hannah claire brimelow
Do you think former President Trump and President Biden talk enough about this issue?
robert f kennedy-jr
It seems to me... I think they talk zero about this issue.
The issue is, people always say that Trump and Biden, we have to choose.
There's this, you know, this apocalyptic choice.
Between these two guys, and if you look at them, they are very different.
Their personalities are different, their dispositions are different, their ideologies, the way they approach issues and people.
If you actually look at the issues that they dispute on, it's a very narrow Overton window.
It's all these culture wars, it's abortion.
Guns, the border, trans rights, all important issues, but none of them are existential.
The existential issues they will never mention because they can't do anything about the budget deficit.
They cannot fix that because they're the ones that created it.
They can't create, you know, one other, the chronic disease epidemic they presided over.
The war machine, they're both, you know, they're both warmongers now.
Trump says he's not, but, you know, he just gave a bear hug to Speaker Johnson and then, you know, a kiss on the cheek to Biden and sent all that money to Ukraine.
Polarization, which is more toxic now in this country than any time since the American Civil War, and poisonous, and destructive, and it's all amplified by social media algorithms, and nobody even understands how they're working anymore.
They're all designed pour concrete on that polarization and divide us farther
and farther until we go into civil war.
Somebody's got to step in the middle and say I'm not just doing that. And neither of them can do it because they're
both the products of the polarization. They're both telling us to hate the other
guy and hate the other side.
unidentified
They can't end it. I don't know how anyone could end it to be honest.
robert f kennedy-jr
Look at my campaign.
I've got an equal number of people who are Trump, Biden, Republicans, Democrats, Independents.
I'm almost evenly divided.
I beat both Trump and Biden among Independents, which is now the biggest political party this year.
Independent, self-identified, for the first time in history, self-identified independents, 43% of the American public.
unidentified
That's huge.
robert f kennedy-jr
27% are Democrats, 27 Republicans, and I get them.
I beat them among people under 35.
And the reason, the way that I've done this is by not feeding into the vitriol, not feeding into the anger, not feeding into all of this.
hannah claire brimelow
But you were, I mean, you initially launched your campaign as a Democrat.
unidentified
I guess my question would be, when did you stop being a Democrat?
hannah claire brimelow
Or are you still, how do you classify yourself?
robert f kennedy-jr
Don't look at my announcement speech.
My whole announcement speech is, I'm not going to feed into this.
I'm not going to go to the culture war issues.
I'm going to focus on the values that hold Americans together, rather than these little issues that are orchestrated to keep us at each other's throats so that all the money continues flowing upward to BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, which own today 89% of the S&P 500.
They're now trying to buy all the real estate in our country, and they're going to turn us from an ownership society into a rental society, and they love us hating each other because it keeps it all flowing upward.
tim pool
I think you're right in identifying exercise crises, Black Rock State Street, etc.
But I do think that the culture war issues are another form of existential crisis.
Perhaps it's easier to say, if BlackRock buys up all the homes, it's harder and harder for working class people to get homes.
If there's collusion between big banks, Federal Reserve, and the government, they're gonna strangle out the working class and money overseas to wars we shouldn't be involved in, military bases.
But there are deep concerns about the birth rate, fertility rate, and that is abortion.
Abortion is an existential crisis, especially when we're looking at less than replacement rates.
robert f kennedy-jr
First of all, I don't disagree with you on...
Abortion.
I want to do everything we can to end abortion.
Our plan, which is more choice, more life, is about addressing the fact that 52% of abortions in this country are among women who say that one of the major factors was Their inability to afford a baby, and I want to make sure that that is not their consideration.
But let me ask you this.
When you say the fertility problem is due to abortion, what do you mean by that?
tim pool
Well, it's compounded by it.
robert f kennedy-jr
So... You mean it's because fewer people are having babies?
tim pool
Yeah.
I don't think abortion is the principal reason we're facing a replacement-level price problem.
robert f kennedy-jr
There's a global fertility issue right now.
I would say that, you know, that has to do With toxics in the environment.
tim pool
Plastics in the balls.
luke rudkowski
Well, there's a lot of stuff.
tim pool
That's true, that was in the news!
luke rudkowski
No, no, no, there's PFAs, there's forever chemicals, there's astrazine, there's microplastics in male testicles, there's fluoride, there's glyphosate.
Out of all these things, what do you think is the biggest concern?
Because there's a lot of things in our environment.
When it comes to our larger health crisis, do you think it's PFAs, forever chemicals, astrazine, fluoride, microplastics, glyphosate?
What is the top concern for you, biologically?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'll tell you something interesting which might answer that.
that. There are the you know the odds that we've got crises in four categories
diseases. Obesity which is sort of linked to diabetes, autoimmune disease,
Obesity's gone from when my uncle was president to about 13% to 50% of kids today obese or grossly overweight.
Autoimmune diseases with juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, lupus, all these exotic diseases.
Diabetes, when I was a kid, the average physician saw one case of diabetes in his lifetime.
Over 50-year career.
Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic, and the cost of diabetes, which is mitochondrial dysfunction, is now larger than the military budget, and nobody's asking where this is coming from.
Neurological disease, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette's syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism.
When I was in my generation, 70-year-old men, The rate of autism is 1 in 10,000.
In my kids' generation, it's 1 in every 34.
According to CDC, 1 in every 22 boys.
So what happened?
And there's one other category, which is allergic diseases.
Um, which is peanut allergies, eczema, none of these.
I had 11 siblings and 70 cousins.
I never knew anybody with a food allergy, a peanut allergy.
But five of my seven, why do five of my seven kids have it?
What happened?
Something happened.
Nobody's asking what it is.
And There's an EPA, or Congress said to EPA, tell us what year the autism epidemic began.
And EPA is a captive agency, but it's captive by oil and coal, not by big pharma.
So it actually did a real study and it came back and said it's a red line 1989.
So there's, and as it turns out, almost all of these diseases follows that timeline.
This explosion of chronic disease, we go from 6% to 60%.
And there's a famous doctor, a toxicologist in New York named Phil Landrigan, and I've used him on a lot of my cases, you know, suing all kinds of big industries for toxins.
He's one of the most revered toxicologists in the world.
He looked at this issue and he said, you have to figure out a toxin And these are being called because this disease is being caused by toxic exposures.
It can't be genes.
Genes don't cause epidemics.
You need aid, environmental exposure.
And you know, the genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need that toxin.
So what could it be?
That became ubiquitous in 1989.
And there's a couple of other flags identifying signals.
One of those that in neurological injuries affect boys at a four or five to one rate as girls.
So, So he went and looked at this and he came down with about, he's done a series of papers on this question.
I'm getting to your answer.
He came down with about 13 things, and among them are glyphosate from Roundup, which follows that timeline exactly, neonicotinoid pesticides, atrazine, which is now in 70% of our water supply, PFOAs and PFASs, which are flame retardants.
I litigated the biggest case on that, and they made a movie about my case called Dark Waters.
And I was starring Mark Ruffalo as a flame retardant that was put in all of our kids' pajamas, all of our furniture that year, and, you know, around that time, 1989.
Fluorides, you know, all of these byproducts, these endocrine disruptors that are part of plastics.
High fructose corn syrup.
tim pool
Oh, wow.
robert f kennedy-jr
Right?
And then cell phone radiation.
One of the exposures, ultrasound, which I don't think has a lot to do with it, but it became ubiquitous on exactly that timeline.
So, you know, the problem is that NIH will not let anybody study this.
If you're a scientist, you try to study this, you can't get funded.
And if you do manage to get funded, your career is over.
They will destroy you.
Oh, NIH, well, NIH has turned from when I was a kid, it did cutting-edge science, it was the gold standard science agency in the world, now it is just an incubator for pharmaceutical products.
tim pool
So, I want to go to the broader, because I want to try and get as many subjects in as possible, but back to abortion and the fertility rate, just to stay on that point and elaborate.
You mentioned existential crisis, the things that Biden and Trump aren't talking about, the things you are talking about, especially what you just talked about, I think, is one of the most important.
And I'll add this as an aside.
In our studio, we do have plastic bottled water, we do, but we have refillable glass bottles for people to take if you don't want to use the plastic for this reason.
And then we have plastic because it is ubiquitous.
It's like, what am I going to do?
unidentified
I'm going to order... It's hard to live without it.
tim pool
But we bought reusable glass bottles that we fill up with our own filtered well water, specifically because of the issue of, you know, biphenols and all of these things.
But the issue with abortion, there are people on the right who have, they've brought this up to us on the show, pro-lifers, people who want to see it banned federally in every capacity, saying when you're dealing with below replacement level fertility, Abortion just exacerbates the issue.
So to them it does seem existential.
I don't know that abortion is the principal reason for dropping infertility.
I think a lot of everything you brought up is actually a really good reason for this toxic exposure and all these things.
But my point ultimately was that abortion certainly is existential for a lot of people if baby's lives are being ended.
hannah claire brimelow
Yeah, I agree.
unidentified
I think we need a government that prioritizes the family.
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't think, I think the argument, you kind of lose me on the argument about abortion and the decline, fertility rate decline and decline in population that we need to force women to carry babies to term in order to keep a national population.
I don't think that's, to me that's not a compelling argument.
The compelling argument is the immoral argument that Abortion, at some point, particularly when the baby reaches viability, at the end of the term is like homicide, right?
And throughout, people have different arguments, different opinions of it, and I respect everybody's opinion, but there's a moral case from day one.
We're not doing it, and that moral argument to me is the most compelling argument, and the most difficult argument, the most complex argument.
The other argument that you made about, you know, replacement rates is a really important argument for all these toxics in our environment.
When it comes to, you know, there's so many other complexities are, you know, the state can tell a woman who does not want to bring a child to term that you're going to be, you're going to force them to do that.
So, you know, these are all kind of very complex, difficult, heartbreaking issues.
And every abortion is a tragedy.
Everyone is a trauma.
To me, there's no simple issue.
I come from a family that is split on it.
I've gone back and forth on the issue.
When I learn more material, my position has shifted slightly.
But it's because it's such a tough issue.
tim pool
I completely agree.
Of all the issues, this one has zero middle ground at all.
You got a lot of flack because you were in an interview where you said that the state and the federal government should not be involved in any capacity.
And you were asked, should abortion be allowed even up to full term?
You had said yes.
You had then changed your position.
Do you want to clarify?
robert f kennedy-jr
Do you want me to tell you the evolution of my thinking?
tim pool
Yeah, that'd be great, absolutely.
robert f kennedy-jr
So, you know, what I always say to people is you can never convince me of things by
telling me it's the politically, you know, beneficial thing to do or by calling me names
or by doing all the things that I've had, all the defamations and perjuries that have
been applied to me.
That's not going to change my mind about anything.
What will change my mind is the facts.
So my original position on abortion, which made sense to me when I was asked just off the cuff without thinking about it by an NBC When I was in Iowa, he said, what's your position?
And I said, well, I think it has to be up to a woman, 100% up to a woman, up to the point of viability, and then the state has an escalating interest in protecting that life.
So I got a tremendous amount of flack from the left and also at home from my wife, her sisters, her sister and her sister's wife.
We're big supporters of mine, but we're absolutely, it is always a woman's choice.
You know, in the state, you've been a medical freedom advocate for your entire life.
You've been fighting for people's bodily autonomy more than anybody in this country.
You've taken more flak from it.
Now you're trying to take that choice away from the woman.
And, you know, and so I then changed my position and said, it's a woman's choice right up to the end.
Now the question for me was, My assumption and my wife's assumption is there's no woman
who is going to get pregnant and carry that pregnancy to nine months and have
an abortion. You know, both ninth month, who would do that?
The only reason that would happen in my mind was if the, if either the baby had some illness that he was only going
to live for maybe 24 hours or two weeks and then have an agonizing death or if
the mother's life, there's a medical issue with the mother's life is at risk.
And in those cases particularly, I don't want to invite the state in to have anything to do with it.
I don't want a bureaucrat having anything to do with it.
The mother should be making that decision.
hannah claire brimelow
Even if she prioritizes herself over the unborn child?
robert f kennedy-jr
What?
hannah claire brimelow
Like, even if she prioritizes herself over the unborn child?
Because you're talking about bodily autonomy, but in this case, the baby wouldn't have bodily autonomy.
They wouldn't even have a choice.
robert f kennedy-jr
I would say that, yes, it's the mother in that situation.
If the mother has a risk of her life, and she has to abort the baby, or to save her life, I would say yes.
That's the mother's choice, always.
And you can differ with me on that.
To me, that is the moral and ethical position.
However, after I gave that interview, A number of people contacted me, including many from my campaign and many outside of my campaign, and they showed me that actually there are a fair number of thousands of elective abortions that occur in the eighth and ninth months.
And I showed that data to my wife and her sisters and they said, okay, we got it.
And so I changed my position, back to essentially my original position.
And I didn't say to my wife, I told you so, because that would have made my life even more difficult.
But I changed it back.
Original position, which is that the state has an escalating interest in that child once they retry it.
tim pool
I got some constitutional questions for you to elaborate on this and then to go into gun rights.
So the 14th amendment says in section 1, all persons born or naturalized in the United States are subject to the jurisdiction thereof and subject to jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
What I find interesting in this is that person and citizen is a distinction, and this has led to interpretations, as well as other amendments, that tourists, for instance, are protected under the Constitution because they are a person, not a citizen, but they shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property.
When I look at this, I feel like there's only one conclusion.
If the Supreme Court were to rule on the matter, I don't see how you would claim that a baby at nine months is not a person.
robert f kennedy-jr
Now you're talking a legal application rather than a moral application.
tim pool
Absolutely.
robert f kennedy-jr
Read me again, because I'm not seeing this.
Read me the first.
tim pool
The first line of Section 1 is, all persons born or naturalized in the U.S.
robert f kennedy-jr
and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens.
tim pool
It then later states, after a semicolon, nor shall any state deprive any person.
is born. No it's not. So it says all persons born or naturalized in the US
and subject to his jurisdiction are citizens. It then later states after a
after a semicolon, nor shall any state deprive any person.
There's a distinction between person and citizen. Okay well you if
robert f kennedy-jr
you're asking me to give you lawyers advice about whether that's a... I'm not
tim pool
asking you to interpret.
I'm saying that if someone is a tourist... You can make that argument.
robert f kennedy-jr
I get the argument.
Again, I don't think the legal argument is convincing.
I think the moral and ethical arguments are much more convincing.
tim pool
So my question is, the reason there's a distinction between citizen and person is that if someone is a tourist from, say, India to the United States, They have free speech.
They have many rights.
They're protected under the Constitution.
Speedy trial.
All of these things.
And it's why there's a distinction between person and citizen.
I believe that there's a philosophical conundrum on the issue of abortion, and I'm not saying you have to agree, and I'm not saying that this is absolute, I'm saying that when you look at, you have two women.
They have both been, they're both pregnant, they've been pregnant for an identical amount of time, nine months.
One woman goes into early labor and gives birth to her child, the other woman does not.
The babies are identical in every way, just hypothetically speaking, but one was born and one wasn't.
Right now in the United States, we recognize in some states the rights of the baby as it is in the womb.
Like, I believe in California, if a crime is committed against the woman that kills the baby, it's considered double murder, double homicide.
But, as an individual, only after birth, I see a legal conundrum there which presents an interesting challenge in the Constitution as to how the Supreme Court would rule on personhood.
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm just curious, your thoughts on, I suppose, maybe, I don't know, would you abstain on the issue, or do you think that a baby at nine months is a person, or not a person, or is it... Well, again, I don't think the leap, bringing in the legal definitions for me it's also it's not helpful to your argument because it says born and I understand you're making a distinction between if you're a citizen you have to be born and if you're a person it's ambiguous whether you're a person or persons the question is what does a person say right but anyway what I would say to you Tim is that for me
The question is not whether you want to untangle legal language and see if it's applicable.
If you want to do that, bring the lawsuit and go to the Supreme Court and see what they say.
And, you know, I can make a bet on what they'd say and you can make a bet.
We may bet the same, we may bet different.
But the question here that's difficult for me is not this question.
The question here is the moral question and the ethical question.
And I, you know, I'm not claiming to have resolved those.
I'm just claiming to have A solution that is, to me, is the most livable solution in a very difficult, impossible, ethical question.
tim pool
I think the main challenge, the reason why I bring this up, the reason why I go for the 14th is, when you look at a state like Oklahoma, they've banned abortion now, right?
When you look at Colorado, they've unrestricted it to the point of birth.
So, we were talking about hyper-polarization and, you know, launching off from the question of abortion, because I don't really want to have another, you know, five-year debate on abortion.
I understand, there's no middle ground, but you can see this polarization where, when I argue with progressives, basically a similar position to you, I mostly agree with your position, They say I'm pro-life.
When I say that if the baby can survive, there's no reason to kill it.
And, you know, I think elective abortion is wrong.
Like everything you said, it's a tragedy, it shouldn't happen.
I find challenges in how the law would actually step in to determine when abortions could or couldn't happen.
I don't have good answers for it.
Progressives call me pro-life for saying that.
And conservatives call me pro-choice.
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, I mean, I would think you'd be proud to be pro-life.
My cousin, Anthony Shriver, who's working on my campaign, is Radically pro-life, and he's proud of it, and, you know, Angelus and King.
...who is working on my campaign, who's a close advisor to me, um, is radically pro-life, and she's proud of it, and I respect them, I respect their commitment, I'm not claiming I'm right about this, you know, morally, I'm gonna have to talk to God at some point, and justify my positions, and I'm just doing my best with it, I'm not, but I, I, what I want to do is have, do the best I can to have people just stop hating each other on this issue.
tim pool
I agree, I agree.
luke rudkowski
We could agree to disagree.
I'm pro-life, but we thank you for kind of explaining your thought process going through it.
If you could, could you also do that with the Second Amendment?
tim pool
That's what I was going to ask next.
luke rudkowski
Because last year you were arguing for an assault weapons ban.
It does look like you changed your position on that.
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't think I was ever arguing for an assault weapons ban.
luke rudkowski
No, no, you did.
You said, quote, if we can get consensus on it, if Republicans and Democrats agree to it, and it passes Congress, I would sign it, specifically talking about an assault weapons ban.
So it does look like you changed your position.
Why did you change your position, and was there a legitimate reason, or is this kind of electioneering?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, I don't do electioneering.
Oh, and anybody who looks at my Record over, you know, 40 years.
I think it's pretty obvious that, you know, I'm not swayed by, you know, by the political winds, or I would have done, I would have lived my life very, very differently.
I've taken on very difficult issues my whole life, and I've stuck with them even when the entire world was against me.
So that's not what I do.
You know, on this issue, My position and what I said is that I'm not going to take anybody's guns away.
I don't believe and I don't think it's the right.
I just don't think it's right.
Thinking on a lot of these issues evolved after, during COVID.
So, you know, I would say during COVID, you know, I saw this assault on the Constitution and understand that, you know, it's something that we really need to be worried about in the Second Amendment.
It's part of the Constitution.
I'm a Constitutionalist.
What I said is that if I'm not fighting for an assault weapons ban, if both houses of Congress, bipartisan, Republicans and Democrats, all of a sudden came with a bill that they'd already passed, am I going to veto it on some kind of gun control measure, some kind of assault weapons ban?
Do you see that that will ever happen?
I don't think so.
luke rudkowski
Well, if the Democrats take Congress, they could, and it does look like the Democrats will.
tim pool
Well, but it wouldn't be bipartisan.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, like a bipartisan bill.
I've always said that.
So let me just, can I give you, you know, my idea about something?
You can always just slide it forward, too.
I think the big issue Or that makes this such a toxic issue now is because of all the school shootings and the mass killings that involve weapons, involve, you know, firearms.
I look at this issue the same way I do to the chronic disease epidemic, and I say to myself, why is it happening?
There's been no increase in guns since 1970.
I think there's been one increase in the gun per household since 1970.
There's been no legislation that changed guns ownership.
When I was a kid, at my schools, we had gun clubs.
People brought their guns to school.
Nobody was shooting children.
Nobody was shooting strangers.
Something happened.
Something happened.
When they change it, and it's happening in this country, and it's not happening elsewhere in the world.
Switzerland, which has comparable numbers of guns, it's like maybe half or 70% or whatever it is.
The last mass shooting in Switzerland, there's guns in every house in Switzerland.
It's a law that requires it.
The last mass shooting in Switzerland was 21 years ago.
We have one every 21 hours.
So what is causing it?
The guns are a co-variable, but it doesn't fit.
hannah claire brimelow
So what is causing it?
luke rudkowski
It's usually gang-on-gang violence.
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm talking about school shootings, not gang-on-gang violence.
What I would say is there's some kind of exposure that's happening.
And, you know, when the Columbine attacks occurred, five of the families sued Prozac.
And ever since then, there have been studies, although this is not an issue that is studied enough, and it's not studied using federal funding, but the impact of SSRIs and Benzos on the potential impact on gun violence. This is one
possible thing that needs to be studied.
Every, all of those products have black box warnings on them.
That say that they may cause homicidal or suicidal behavior.
So they have that on their on their labels, on their manufacturers inserts.
So obviously that should be a suspect.
And the timeline, there's 120 million SSRA prescriptions every year, 120 million benzo prescriptions, and then there's other 120 million Adderall prescriptions, right?
And it says on the box.
Now we don't know, we don't, it's very hard to tell, it's hard to do studies.
One is, There was a law passed in 1997 and a policy adopted by NIH to not study the ideology or the origins of gun violence.
So there's really almost no studies out there.
tim pool
So you're saying that the issue of gun violence is an issue of mental health and toxic exposure?
robert f kennedy-jr
And something else.
Look, just use your common sense.
Maybe it's social media.
Social media could be video games.
It could be Benzos.
It could be SSRIs.
Why are we studying these things?
hannah claire brimelow
I mean, you've all parents are suing a video game maker in response to this.
robert f kennedy-jr
I would say, to me, the most likely, the thing that we should be studying is SSRIs, and nobody can really study it because of the HIPAA laws.
When there's these mass shootings occur, You never know if the guy was on SSRIs, but it's impossible to find out, but NIH could find out.
tim pool
So, I agree.
I think probably we all agree on toxic exposure, drugs, benzos, SSRIs, all of these things are worrisome, but ultimately for me, You know, I lived in New Jersey, and we had a guy try to break into my house.
I'm not a- I- I- They say I can have a gun.
They made it as hard as possible for me to have a gun.
The cops told me when they came to my house after I called the police, they said, if it were me, I'd have answered the door with a shotgun.
And I said, oh yeah, well, if I could get one.
And so, when I was finally able to get one, I was informed by the police that in New Jersey, you have a duty to retreat from your own home.
So I'm in my own home in New Jersey.
Someone breaks in with a gun and yells that they're going to kill me.
I am legally required to seek exodus from my own home.
And I asked the cop, I was like, where would I go?
It's my house.
And he goes, well, if you say that, you're telling the court you'd rather kill a man than stand outside in the cold.
And they're going to put you in prison.
I asked him, what would happen if someone broke into my house with intent to kill me and I defended myself with a weapon?
He says, easy.
You'd be arrested, charged with felony murder.
You'd go to prison.
You'd have your bail hearing.
If you don't get it, you wait in jail until... You don't go to prison, you go to jail.
You wait your hearing until you get your day in court with your affirmative defense of self-defense.
Good luck with that.
You had a woman who drove from PA into Jersey, an older, middle-aged woman, going to Atlantic City, got pulled over, told the cop, this is a famous story in Jersey, that she was a law-abiding citizen, and she said, I just want to let you know that I have my gun on me, and he said, out of the car, you're under arrest, felony charge.
I moved to West Virginia, constitutional carry.
And you know, for me, and you know better than anyone, the threats that, you know, with crazy people who are trying to cause harm.
So for me, I understand all the stuff about drugs and gun violence and mass shootings, but I won't tolerate, because of the escalation in crime and violence, me losing my right to defend myself and my family and my property.
So my point ultimately is, Outside of the issue of toxic exposure and shootings, what's your position on 2A, preserving gun rights?
robert f kennedy-jr
I believe in the Constitution and I believe in the right to bear arms.
tim pool
My argument then goes beyond and says we have to repeal the National Firearms Act and its add-ons.
I believe it's unconstitutional.
I can ask you a simple question right now, actually.
Do you think private entities in the United States should have the right to own nuclear weapons?
But they do.
And this is something, whenever I talk to anybody in office, they always say no.
It should not be of the person.
Lockheed Martin maintains and produces nuclear weapons.
They're a private entity, and they do it internationally.
So it's always been in the United States that there are privateers, there's Corsairs, individuals are able to own warships.
While we have made many strides, like D.C.
v. Heller, the right to keep and bear arms, we have these laws that restrict the individual while allowing these massive, multinational, warmonger corporations to have nukes.
Why can't I have... Look, I live in my house.
I want a short-barreled rifle with a suppressor so that I'm less likely to cause harm to people, so that I can target only on those who are threatening my life.
But it's damn near impossible, because of the NFA, for me to actually get a weapon that is appropriate, safer.
So I'm curious, would you go beyond, would you work to repeal these laws, or you keep it as is?
Would you repeal the NFA and red flag laws?
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't know enough about the NFA, and I'm not going to make a...
tim pool
Fair point, fair point.
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm not going to make a statement about something I know absolutely nothing about, and I would like to look, I would need to look at a lot of data and all that, but you know.
phil labonte
Mr. Kennedy, one of the things you mentioned, you're talking about SSRIs and mass shootings and stuff.
Most of the time when you're talking about mass shooting, or when mass shootings are discussed in press or in the media, it's not the type of mass shooting that tends to come to mind when you hear the term.
So anytime more than two people are shot, They consider that a mass shooting, but that could be someone, you know, that could be drug violence, gang violence and stuff like that, which is different than the massacre type where you get someone with a rifle going into a school or something like that.
tim pool
But he was referring to schools specifically.
phil labonte
And fair enough.
tim pool
Let me draw the distinction.
phil labonte
So I do think that whereas mass shootings as a concept is something that we have to worry about, but what do you think are the best policies to fix the I don't want to sound callous, but the everyday gun violence that we see, the stuff that happens daily in cities across the country, because as much as the mass shootings that we see, the rifles and stuff like that, the schools, hospitals, whatever, they're horrifying and they're terrible and they get attention.
The real death toll is the people that die every day in your violence in the cities.
So what do you think, what would your plan be to combat that kind of stuff if there is a role for the federal government?
robert f kennedy-jr
I mean, listen, I'd love to hear what your solution is.
my solution is good policing. You know, I think we need to, one, we need to reduce
the interactions, the negative interactions between police and
minorities, which is a big issue in this country, but we don't do that by
defunding the police.
We need a strong police force.
The way that I would work it is that I would, you know, the same way that I work schools and charter schools, is to give the police chiefs of these municipalities a lot of power but also tremendous responsibility so that if there are racial incidents while you are police chief that you know you get you get three strikes and maybe and you're out and you're banned from from being a police chief in the next town.
And so you give responsibility to them, but you also give the power to them to protect people, but you hold them responsible.
And I think that that's the way to clean up some of the problems in the police force.
But I would not do it by defunding the police.
That doesn't seem to me like a good idea from day one.
hannah claire brimelow
Do you think our culture values police, or do you think attitudes towards policing has declined since COVID and all the rioting over the summer?
robert f kennedy-jr
Do I think what?
hannah claire brimelow
Our culture values police.
robert f kennedy-jr
Cultural values?
hannah claire brimelow
Like, does our culture as Americans value police officers?
Because you saw a backlash to the police, especially after George Floyd's death.
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, I mean, I do.
So, you know, I grew up with My father was the chief law enforcement officer in the land.
I grew up with a lot of affection for police and firefighters.
And that's my orientation.
And a lot of my friends are cops, but I'm not blind to the fact that there are racial problems also in these.
If you're a black kid, you're much more likely to get arrested, and I don't think that's right.
I think we have to try to fix that, what's wrong with the police, but we don't do that by making All police feel badly, and I think we need to support the police.
They put their lives on the lines every day, and we need to support them.
We need to give them good work environments where, you know, the people who are the bad apples are taken out, and where they're given good training on de-escalating, you know, difficult situations.
And, you know, I know a lot of this.
I've seen enough of these studies that You know, there's two groups that are responsible for these kind of bad incidences, and one is bad apples, who have a disproportionate number of them, and then young cops who just don't know how to de-escalate.
They go into a situation where they're unfamiliar in a territory, a part of the city, they're frightened.
And they don't have the skills or the training to de-escalate, so I think that needs to happen, too.
tim pool
So, a lot of the things you say, I agree with.
You know, I'm a... I guess disaffected liberal is the way that I usually describe myself.
Post-liberal in some ways.
The left just calls me right-wing or whatever, fine.
You know, Elon Musk posted that meme, I don't know if you saw it, where the guy's standing on the left, but then the left moves super far away.
But, you know, you had called Columbus Day Indigenous People's Day.
And for me... When was that?
You had a rally, I believe it was on Columbus Day, in which you referred to it as Indigenous Peoples Day.
hannah claire brimelow
I thought that was when you announced you're running as an independent.
tim pool
Yeah, was that?
I just checked, I just made sure that, you know, I had the statement correct.
October 10th, 2023, the examiner reported on you referring to Columbus Day as Indigenous People Day, saying that you spoke about Your father's visit to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1968, gratefully the renaming of Columbus Day as Indigenous People's Day, shows that our country is now ready to explore and to tell each other the untold histories of those dispossessed people who have previously languished on the margins, Kennedy said.
Whatever you might think of such sentiments, it is not the stuff of Republican campaign rallies.
I'm not a fan of the Confederacy by any means, but tearing down the statues unilaterally through activist efforts was terrifying.
Not only did they tear down the statues through violent force without any kind of democratic process or legislative process, they tore down statues of Hans Christian Haag, who was a Union soldier fighting against slavery, wasn't even an American, didn't own slaves, and they tore down Frederick Douglass, who was a former slave, who was amazing, and fought against slavery.
When I see things like this, it's particularly worrying to me because erasing our history doesn't do anything but make us repeat it.
It dooms us.
robert f kennedy-jr
So I'm curious your thoughts on ideas like this, what people would refer to... Well, first of all, I don't think I ever said we should get rid of Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous People Day, but I've spent 20% of my career defending and representing the tribes in the United States and in Canada and Latin America suing big corporate polluters who are destroying their land, suing governments who have stolen their land, and making sure that they're treated fairly.
And you know, I think it's important for us to be part of a community where we can recognize all kinds of people.
We can recognize Italian-Americans don't whom that is an important holiday.
And at the same time, we can recognize the indigenous people were, you know, made the ultimate sacrifice of one of the greatest genocides in history.
And that, you know, they're right.
You know, my father always believed that our country would never live up to its ideals if we didn't make some kind of amends, meaningful amends to the, you know, to the group that was exterminated.
In order for us to settle in this country, and I think it's a good aspiration for every American.
I don't think it should be a left-wing or right-wing.
I agree with you about the statues.
I don't think...
I don't think it's a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase its history.
hannah claire brimelow
So would you condemn Charlottesville melting down the Robert E. Lee statue?
They gave it to the African American History Museum and then you got those horrifying photos.
robert f kennedy-jr
I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues.
I mean, I grew up in Virginia.
I know that there were heroes in the Confederacy who didn't have slaves, and I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history.
I don't like it.
I think we should celebrate who we are.
And that, you know, we should celebrate the good qualities of everybody.
If we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history.
And, you know, values change throughout history.
We need to be able to be sophisticated enough to live with, you know, our ancestors who didn't agree with us on everything and who did things that are now, you know, regarded as immoral or, you know, or wrong because they, you know, maybe they had other qualities that we want to celebrate.
And clearly, Robert E. Lee had extraordinary qualities of leadership.
And, you know, I don't think that I wouldn't have done that.
tim pool
You, uh, so it was your announcement as running as an independent candidate.
You said, it's a hopeful sign now for our country that we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.
It shows that we're ready as a nation.
It shows that our country is now ready to explore and to tell each other the untold histories of those dispossessed
people who have previously languished on the margins.
robert f kennedy-jr
You have problems with that?
tim pool
With changing the name of our holiday?
robert f kennedy-jr
I didn't say we're changing the name.
tim pool
But, so, you did.
robert f kennedy-jr
People are welcome to call it Columbus Day, but it's also called Indigenous Peoples Day.
tim pool
It's not.
robert f kennedy-jr
This country's big enough for a lot of different people.
tim pool
Sure, but the idea of Indigenous Peoples Day was literally to take the name Columbus away from it.
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, that's your idea, it's not mine.
tim pool
Well, the activists literally said they were changing the name of Columbus.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, but that's not my idea.
It's your, it may be, Or maybe activists who want to do that, but you know, I feel like the indigenous people should have a day, if it don't overlap, there's many many holidays that overlap with each other and that, you know, we shouldn't be taking away from one group to give to another, but I do think
we need to make a larger commitment to indigenous people because they have been systematically robbed
and cheated and we need to do what we can as a country to make sure that there's some kind of
tim pool
amends for that past. I agree that an Indigenous People's Day is fine,
but it literally did start as a counter to Columbus Day.
robert f kennedy-jr
That's your beef, you know.
tim pool
Absolutely it is.
It's not the way that I look at it.
I respect that you stand by it.
I think for a lot of people, these are the cultural issues that we feel is existential.
To have a holiday that we grew up with, to understand why it was good, despite bad things about Columbus, for sure, and colonization in general, we celebrate the good things, we try to condemn the bad and maintain the good.
robert f kennedy-jr
I grew up, it was an Italian holiday.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that that's kind of the justification for We're keeping it not, you know, whether Columbus was a hero or a villain, but the fact that this is a way, like we have St.
Patrick's Day for the Irish.
It's an Italian holiday, and I'm not saying it should stop being an Italian holiday.
We can celebrate the contribution of the Italians, their country, and we can celebrate Contributions to the indigenous people of this country.
tim pool
Perhaps on the next speech you give, you can say, on this Indigenous People's Day and Columbus Day, we are here to say... I'm not going to let you write my speeches for me.
Well, I mean, the concern is, if your worldview is shifted, that Columbus Day is no longer the day you're celebrating.
You're celebrating the counter-protest.
That says a lot about how you see the world.
robert f kennedy-jr
Let me tell you something, Tim.
I respect you a lot.
But I think what I've tried to do in this campaign is to not get sucked into culture war issues that I consider distractions.
I think the big issues that we should be talking about, which you started with, is the fact that 57% of the people in this country cannot put their hands on $1,000 because if there's an emergency in their family, and if you are in that cohort, And the engine light comes on in your car, it's the apocalypse, because you know you can't afford that mechanic, you're not going to be able to get to work, and you're not going to be able to pay your rent, and you're going to end up on the side of the local homeless, and you're going to be circling a drain.
And, you know, what BlackRock wants is for us to ignore the contribution they've made and the Fed has made and all of these big Wall Streets made to this situation and keep us fighting about Columbus Day or Indigenous People's Day.
I'm not feeding into that.
These are economic issues and that's why I'm running.
I'm not running to feed into culture war issues on either side.
You can dispute these activists any way you want.
I'm not going to get involved in that issue.
tim pool
But my point is, I completely agree with you about Black Rock State Street, Vanguard, all of these companies, the foreign influence on our social media.
Before it was TikTok, we had concerns about Saudi investors with pieces of... Look, I'm more concerned about the NSA and Facebook.
robert f kennedy-jr
You know, and the CIA scraping all of our information, Facebook as much as the Chinese are scraping, you know, posts about teenage girls' kitty cats.
You know, we have all the things that Edward Snowden told us, that these companies are The CIA, if you have an abuser who's outside of your house, it's scary.
And if you have the abuser inside of your house, it's much more frightening.
And I'm more scared, more concerned about the CIA and the NSA manipulating public perceptions, censoring us, propagandizing us, using these social media sites to do that.
And I am against the Chinese.
Listen, if we're really concerned about the Chinese, Here's what we should be concerned about.
I've litigated against Smithfield Foods for years for polluting vast, vast landscapes in this country.
Smithfield controls 30-40% of pork production in this country and the landscapes in states like North Carolina, Iowa, all over this country.
They're now 100% owned by the Chinese.
That is a threat.
You know, the Chinese are buying our landscapes, they're buying our food, they're controlling our universities, they're giving billions of dollars to universities and, you know, scraping information, high technology information.
They're deeply embedded with NIH and getting, you know, making bioweapons with them.
They are the principal creditor now in every nation in Latin America, because we're spending $8 trillion on wars, and they're bombing bridges and ports and schools and universities.
Over that same period, they've spent $8 trillion building ports and roads and schools, and they're projecting economic power abroad, and we're projecting military power, and they're killing us because of that.
And we ought to be actually dealing with the real threat from China.
And not about silly issues like TikTok.
You know what?
I don't think, personally, I give you advice, which I know you won't take and you don't need, but this kind of issue I think detracts from your credibility.
Let's talk about this.
You got into this because of...
Because of Wall Street.
tim pool
and i think it's fair to say that we waited an hour and fifteen minutes before bringing up issues
like this for a reason. Why i say in the beginning we start with war and and and like spending issues
because i do recognize those are important but we talk about uh there's a reason why tiktok is in
the news. Tiktok's algorithms manipulate people's brains and it is a digital toxin that these kids
are that kids are being exposed to. The same is true for uh less so x now but x is a huge porn
problem now and people are wondering why you know elon is struggling with this and they're hoping he
takes care of it. Facebook has algorithmic manipulation all of these things affect the
underlying culture of our of our next generation so when you have i agree 100 percent
robert f kennedy-jr
What do we do about it?
It's not getting China out, it isn't going to take it, isn't it?
tim pool
Well, I think when I look at the issue of social media manipulation and TikTok, for instance, at the very least we have seen FOIA requests of the US government, which has resulted in, we learned, Twitter, when it was still Twitter, was in regular communication with the federal government to suppress and censor negative information.
Alex Berenson, for instance, That came from my lawsuit.
Absolutely, fantastic work.
robert f kennedy-jr
You know, Trudy Verges Biden, our discovery, just showed what they're doing.
tim pool
And that's one of the most important things that's happened in my lifetime, so I appreciate the work you've done on that.
And on top of that, however, we can't do those same things to TikTok, which is outside of the U.S.' 's control.
So whatever your solution may be on that issue, the same thing that we see with Twitter, Maybe X less so now, but Facebook especially, and YouTube, is happening with TikTok.
No question, only it's a foreign adversary now.
So it is something we have to deal with.
And I think it is more pressing because, you know, your lawsuit proves we can fight back and we can win to a certain degree.
And I think your position here right now actually shows that we can win tremendously.
How do we deal with China doing the exact same thing to us?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'll tell you what, I would not ban TikTok.
First of all, I believe in freedom of information.
I think that everybody should be able to get information from any source.
I don't think we should be banning Al Jazeera.
I don't think we should be banning RTTV.
I want to hear everybody's information, everybody's position on all these different issues.
And allow me to make up my mind.
Here's the way that I would handle it.
Because I think the problem that you talked about is a universal problem.
It's not just TikTok.
It's not just China.
It is Facebook.
It's Twitter.
It's YouTube.
It's all of these.
It's Google.
We're all being manipulated by Algorithms that are extraordinarily powerful propaganda devices.
luke rudkowski
And they're influenced by the intelligence agencies domestically inside of the United States.
It's not just influence, they are, you know... They're running it and they're banning people and they're censoring people and they have censored you before as well for expressing your speech and expressing larger concerns.
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm probably the most censored person in the country.
luke rudkowski
And you were right about a lot of the things that you were censored for.
hannah claire brimelow
We're on the list.
I don't know if you're the most censored person.
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, who would be more?
Arguably, I would say I am.
I mean, I won the lawsuit, and even in the Murphy v. Biden lawsuit, if you read Judge Doty's decision, 155 pages, the bulk of it is about me, because I was the first one that they officially started to censor 37 hours after he took the oath of office.
The White House was directing Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube.
Remove me from their platform.
They took off my, you know, my Instagram account and they were obsessed with censoring me from the beginning.
luke rudkowski
I agree.
robert f kennedy-jr
Let me just say this.
What I think that the way that I would handle this if I was, you know, the king of the world is that I would, I think, That all of them should be forced to have transparent algorithms.
Because any algorithm that you have is going to manipulate you.
So if you pass a law that says if you're going to operate in this country, you need a transparent algorithm, then you, Tim, choose your own.
You choose a libertarian algorithm.
Right now, if you're a Democrat, you're living next door to a Republican.
And you both ask the same question of Google or whatever, you're going to get two different answers, because they're going to give you the answer that's going to keep you on the site the longest.
And they know that people like, that they'll stay on longer if you're fortifying their worldviews.
So they're bought poor and concrete.
But if you can choose your own algorithm, then at least you know how you're being manipulated.
You choose a Republican algorithm, a Democratic algorithm, and then you can say that.
to TikTok and it's not about China, it's about, hey, if you want to operate in this country,
you use a transparent algorithm because we're a democracy and we don't, we want to avoid all
kinds of manipulation, whether by our intelligence agencies or by yours.
tim pool
I agree, that's something we should absolutely do, but that is still akin to putting the label on,
you know, you buy a pack of cigarettes and it's got a diseased lung on it,
people are still going to buy them. So my concern with...
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, okay, so what's your solution? Shut them all down?
tim pool
Well, I think with the TikTok bill, the idea that a foreign adversary, namely one of,
one of, I think it's five countries, can't have investment in specifically TikTok.
I don't see as, I see as a net positive.
The thing that concerns me is, you know this morning we did an interview with Tuan who escaped the Chinese Communist Party and they talked about their strategies, their worldview, how they operate, and we can see a lot of that reflected in how TikTok promotes certain content.
So you've got teenagers being fed content where guys are saying, hate your parents, don't talk to your parents.
You've got individuals that are living, they're encouraging self-harm and things like this.
You mentioned why are, why is Tourette's is one of the mental afflictions on the rise.
There was a study that found women, young girls, were watching viral TikToks and Instagrams of a woman with Tourette's And then began adapting this as a social, uh, I guess, uh, contagion of some sort.
Started developing Tourette's on their own from it.
China is absolutely invested in causing friction, at the very least, and harm, in the worst case, through these platforms.
I think when the divestiture bill, aka the ban bill, gets passed, the response from TikTok immediately was, we will never sell, we will never back down, we will lay off our staff before we let you take this from us.
I think shows that there's a great degree that this is more of an economic weapon than it is just a social media platform business they have.
I mean, it's crazy to me that We learned from the CEO, what did he say, 175 million people use the app and many of them are U.S.
businesses.
Why do we allow the CCP control over any portion of our economy, especially to that size?
So I don't want them buying farmland, I don't want them buying real estate, and I don't want them buying a digital portion of our market that we can't regulate or control.
So the transparency is good, but...
robert f kennedy-jr
The control that China has of our market, because of TikTok, it's like a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in U.S.
dollars that they own.
tim pool
Totally agree, totally agree.
And BlackRock's way worse.
robert f kennedy-jr
There's a million things that China's doing that are worse than TikTok.
Listen, I'm an absolutist when it comes to free speech.
I think that we ought to have, and there's other reasons that we want to preserve TikTok, which is it's a gateway for young kids.
We have a whole generation of kids who have no entree, they have no equity, and they're never going to own a home.
They have no way to get into business, the finance business, and they're building businesses on TikTok.
And I don't want to take that away from them.
I see so many hopeless people who come up to me and say, I made a life for myself.
I made a place for myself.
I have self-esteem because of it.
And now the government is going to shut me down.
80% of TikTok is owned by Americans.
tim pool
Well, because Douyin is the Chinese alphabet.
robert f kennedy-jr
There's two, yeah.
unidentified
And theirs is all patriotism.
robert f kennedy-jr
Listen, I agree there is an issue, but for me, you and I are going to differ on this, because I just am a free speech absolutist.
This is feeding into the neocon narratives that we need to be in a war posture against China.
tim pool
I don't disagree, but I feel like it's kind of like saying I'm a free market absolutist.
I don't mind that China is sending fentanyl over the southern border because people have a right to buy whatever they want.
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't agree with that.
I don't think this is fentanyl.
phil labonte
Mr. Kennedy, you mentioned the transparency of algorithms, and it brought to mind something that is an issue that we are facing with China, and that's intellectual property.
And I know, interesting here, talking about intellectual property at the Libertarian National Convention, but there is a problem with China and with Industrial espionage and stuff.
Do you think that there's a role that the federal government should play in trying to assist corporations that are US-based or try to give some kind of incentive to have corporations to be less, I guess, in bed with China or a little more opposed to Being so easy to work with China, considering the threat that China's... Well, China bought off the Biden administration.
They effectively instituted a lot of the policies for them already, and then... Yeah, Mr. Kennedy, what do you think, what do you think about the, about the industrial, about industrial espionage stuff?
Do you think the federal government has a role in it?
robert f kennedy-jr
I think China has a system that has been in place for since Deng Xiaoping.
I've written chapters about this in my book about Wuhan.
I think it's very, very worrying.
I think they've infiltrated most of the universities in our country.
At their systematically stealing patents.
I've done business in China and you know, the whole business model is to steal patents from Western companies.
Most of the business that I've dealt with will not deal in China because of this kind of, because of the patent issue.
And you know, you have companies like Microsoft.
Microsoft has sold its soul to China.
It's developing all of the, surveillance and the control and the compliance technologies in China.
Bill Gates could not attract enough innovators in the United States to compete against his competitor Apple and you know the other Google and all the other competitors.
luke rudkowski
And Bill Gates is building many nuclear reactors right now with the Chinese government.
I want to talk about Bill Gates a little bit because he kind of bragged about going after you inside of the Trump administration.
But it's also the CIA that worked with China, especially when it came to Echo Health Alliance and the Wuhan Laboratory.
So there's a lot of other connections here that do deserve to be made.
But Bill Gates was one of the few individuals that actually came out on national television and he said that he was able to thwart your efforts.
That you had private meetings with Donald Trump And you were working towards achieving some goals together on helping the American people specifically regarding health.
Bill Gates said he came in there and then he was able to influence Trump not to do what you wanted.
Is there anything else that you could speak to about this?
Because it does seem like he does have a larger influence over Trump.
robert f kennedy-jr
No, I mean, I don't know exactly what happened.
Bill Gates in January of 2016 asked me to come to New York and to meet with him.
I spent the day with him and with his sons, Steve Bannon and Hope Hill and Kellyanne Conway
and Mike Pence.
And they asked me to run a vaccine safety commission, to chair it and put together,
you know, esteemed, respected scientists from all over the world to look at the testing
protocols for vaccines, to make recommendations about how to improve them.
And this made huge headlines when it was announced.
And Pfizer immediately gave President Trump a million dollars.
And President Trump then appointed two Pfizer nominees, Alex Azar, who came out of Eli Lilly to run HHS, and then Scott Gottlieb, who is Pfizer's business partner.
to run the FDA and Scott Gottlieb did a hundred billion dollar favor for Pfizer with a vaccine
and then left FDA to go back to work for Pfizer and collect his payoff and at the same time so
I don't know whether it was the million dollars from Pfizer and those are the two guys who shut
down the commission. Bill Gates, there's a tape out there where Bill Gates is bragging that he got
Trump to disavow me.
But I can't look into his head and I can't look into Trump's head so I can't tell you exactly what happened.
tim pool
A couple minutes before we go to audience superchats, just the obvious one, my understanding is that you have said that Can you use the restroom?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
luke rudkowski
I can?
tim pool
Of course, of course.
robert f kennedy-jr
So I can step away for a second?
tim pool
Just come back as soon as you're good and we'll start reading Super Chats while you're running.
It's a lot harder here at the LP National because there's no immediate bathroom.
But we'll do this.
We'll grab some of the Super Chats and I'll save some of the bigger questions.
I was literally going to ask him if the CIA killed his uncle, but we'll...
hannah claire brimelow
Save that one.
Save it.
luke rudkowski
I have the CIA question loaded up.
I have MKUltra.
I have all that loaded up.
I'm ready to go.
And then there's so many other questions with Epstein as well that I want to ask.
tim pool
I love how polarizing the chats can be.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, the chat's going off.
They love and hate.
They're hot and cold.
tim pool
Yeah, but I tremendously respect his position so far.
He's crossed his arms and pushed back and stood for what he wanted to stand for, and I respect when he said, I don't know enough about the NFA, I can't answer.
I'm like, well, I don't know how you expect someone to answer if they don't know what it is.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, he's taking, you know, the conversations.
He's having a tough conversation, but at least he's having it, and we appreciate it very much for him doing that.
tim pool
Yeah, we've had a lot of politicians come on this show, and only a handful, I can say, have Seemed real.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
tim pool
I certainly think it's fair to say that there's a few questions where he's going to be a little bit more political.
I think that's reasonable to assess when you're hearing his answers.
But I do respect when he points to things and says, it doesn't matter, I don't care about this.
I think he's got a great point on Indigenous People's Day as one of the least important things in terms of what's going on in this country.
But to be fair, that's why I said that's why I waited an hour and 15 minutes before I brought it up.
hannah claire brimelow
I loved all his stuff about environmental toxins.
I love the comments about SSRIs.
You do see that a lot.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, no, that's a major issue.
hannah claire brimelow
And I think it would be interesting, I mean, when he comes back to this room, if he weren't to win this election, if he would take a position in the cabinet as the head of the Health and Human Services Department.
Because there are so many conversations that he's bringing up that I think are important.
You guys all probably know the questions I want to ask him.
We haven't gotten there yet.
Get in there.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, we don't take it easy on politicians.
And there's still the reparations question.
I still need to ask the Epstein question.
tim pool
The reparations question we have to ask.
And the CIO one I think is a little bit more silly.
luke rudkowski
Maybe we could go longer and take Super Chats afterwards, after talking to him?
tim pool
I think what we should do is... Because he has a schedule until 10.
Exactly.
unidentified
So I think for the Super Chats... No, no, he could go at 10 when he's supposed to go.
luke rudkowski
We could take Super Chats without him.
tim pool
Or I'm... Well, a lot of superchats are for him.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
tim pool
So what I'll try and do is I'll try and grab a couple.
Kyle has the question on asking about reparations, so I think that's the first one we should ask.
So Kyle asked about the reparation plan for black farmers and whether a DNA test will be needed to prove the lineage or baseline skin color.
So let's do that one.
We absolutely...
Uh, the CIA one is kind of like, that's the big one, but he has talked about it before, so I'd love to hear his response.
Um, I think he, of all people, needs Secret Service protection.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
And they will not give it to him.
So, anyway.
But, uh, you wanted to ask about Epstein.
luke rudkowski
Epstein, absolutely.
He flew on Epstein's plane, twice.
tim pool
Oh, that's right.
Didn't he talk about it?
luke rudkowski
Yes, he did.
I want to talk to him about that.
tim pool
Oh, man.
luke rudkowski
I know there's so many issues that I want to go at.
tim pool
Do you think it's possible that there were people who didn't realize what they were flying on?
luke rudkowski
We could ask him that question.
We'll see what he says.
Because, you know, that's such an issue.
unidentified
Do you think people didn't realize what they were flying on?
luke rudkowski
You look at what Cindy McCain said, and I'll bring it up.
hannah claire brimelow
What do you think?
luke rudkowski
I think they absolutely knew, and because it was very obvious.
hannah claire brimelow
So he knew what he was lying on?
luke rudkowski
You look at the victim's testimony, they were describing him being absolutely brutal and awful to children and to himself and to, yeah, specifically Epstein.
He was absolutely a man who didn't hide what he was doing at all.
hannah claire brimelow
So anyone who flew on it would be aware, in your opinion?
luke rudkowski
Absolutely.
Like, there's stories of him literally, like, taking off his pants mid-flight and then needing to do stuff every two hours.
There's crazy stuff.
tim pool
I want to stress this soon.
luke rudkowski
But if there's any Super Chats for us, we should get them now.
tim pool
They're mostly just for him.
There's some that are, you know... Guys, do you want to talk to us tonight?
hannah claire brimelow
Rude.
tim pool
No, there's a lot of howdy people.
hannah claire brimelow
I'm just teasing.
tim pool
But the other thing, too, is everyone always asks him about COVID, lockdown policy, Big Pharma, and all that stuff.
And I feel kind of like we should ask him, take the opportunity to ask about literally whatever we can that people are missing.
So Epstein's big.
luke rudkowski
CIA's big.
tim pool
CIA's big.
hannah claire brimelow
He's back.
tim pool
Reparations.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
tim pool
So we've got some questions for you that I think are pretty good.
One of our users asked about your reparation plan for black farmers, and Kyle wonders, will there be a DNA test needed to prove lineage, or will it be based on skin color?
And that's, I think that was recent, the news came out about your reparation plan?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, that was again kind of the mainstream media distorting something that I said.
What I said is that there's a certain program in the USDA which is supposed to be available to small farmers.
So it's small farmer loans and grants and as it turns out the guy who was running that program for about 40 years was systematically not giving farmers in that program the grants that they were entitled to.
So he would give it to white farmer neighbor But not the Black Farmer, and he just happened to be like a racist who was running the program, and he unfortunately ran it for many, many years.
So ultimately, the Black Farmers Association brought that case to court, and they won.
And they won a settlement that was the amount of money that would have been given to them if they were white.
Was not.
So, and then Congress failed to, Congress wouldn't appropriate the money to make the payment.
So that's the issue.
It's not race-based in terms of, you know, it's just money that was stolen from them and it's getting that money to them that the courts have already awarded them.
tim pool
Do you want to ask about the CIA or Epstein?
luke rudkowski
Well, there's a lot of things.
The two kind of connect because the intel agencies... We'll start with one.
Make it easy.
The intel agencies were extensively running an extortion operation on a lot of high-profile politicians through Jeffrey Epstein.
You talked about flying on his airplane before.
Is there anything else you could tell us since there's individuals like Cindy McCain that have come out and talked about how Everyone knew what he was doing.
He was hiding in plain sight, that people were afraid of him.
Is there anything else you could tell us?
Is there some speculation about some people saying that you might be getting extorted potentially yourself?
robert f kennedy-jr
No, I mean, I've been very open and frank about it.
My experience with Jeffrey Epstein, I, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was a figure in New York.
My wife had a relationship with, my wife, who took her own life in 2014, had a relationship with Glenn Maxwell, I think, through my wife's old fiance, who had been a Greek, who had been raised in Britain.
And on one occasion, In 1993, either she asked or Glenn offered her a ride.
My wife wanted to go down to visit my mother on Christmas with our kids.
And she said that Glenn had offered her a ride on the plane because they went down there from New York to Palm Beach every weekend.
So I wrote on that.
We were on there.
I was on there with my wife and my children, two children.
I think Mary was pregnant at the time.
And then I took a second plane ride, I think a year later.
We went to South Dakota For the day to do fossil hunting.
And this was 13 years before anybody knew anything about Jeffrey Epstein.
Me, I didn't know anything about him at that time.
I had a conversation on that airplane that made me think that, and I saw him do something on that airplane ride to South Dakota that made me think that he was a very bad person.
hannah claire brimelow
What?
luke rudkowski
See this is what we were just talking about this when you're in the bathroom There's a lot of accounts of a people's of people saying he did really awful.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, I know I know I'm leading up to it well, I I mean it's got a cause of me, but I had I I was asking him how he made his money and he told me because he said that he had been a math teacher at Dalton and Which was a school I knew about in New York.
unidentified
I don't know much about it, but I know it's a school for wealthy kids.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, so he told me a story, though, that seemed to me not credible.
He said he was, and I said, okay, because I knew he owned a city block in New York, and that he was, to me, The only thing I really knew about him was he was the money manager for Les Wexler, right, who owns The Limited.
And that's all I knew about him at the time.
And of course, you know, he's a big shot at New York.
He goes to the Robin Hood dinner, which is, you know, they raise $40 million a night, and he was one of the big donors there.
So people know him.
If you went out, you could see him, you know.
Anyway, I asked him, how did you go from being a math teacher at Dalton to having all this money?
And he said that he'd been approached by some Chinese businessmen and that they had been ripped off by a con artist in the United States.
And they asked him to find the con artist.
And he succeeded in doing that, and that led to other opportunities.
That's what he told me.
unidentified
Wow.
robert f kennedy-jr
And that made me think that he was lying.
And then I asked him about a stock, and this is the first time I've ever met him, and he said, I never invest in stocks unless I have inside information.
I'm an attorney, I'm a district attorney, and he says this to me, so it's a weird thing.
hannah claire brimelow
Do you think he felt untouchable?
robert f kennedy-jr
What?
hannah claire brimelow
Like, he said that to you knowing that you were a district attorney.
robert f kennedy-jr
He's like... I wasn't at that time, but you know, it's an odd thing to tell me.
Yeah.
A stranger who, you know, you don't know.
hannah claire brimelow
Unless you're really confident you don't get in trouble, right?
robert f kennedy-jr
Were there any young children in there?
No.
My kids were there.
But on all my flights, the four flights, which are back and forth from Palm Beach and back and forth from Rapid City, my kids were on board on all of them.
But then we touched down and we were supposed to go from Rapid City to New York City.
And instead, the plane landed in Chicago, which was unannounced, and he never told us he was landing in Chicago.
And he said, when we land in Chicago, and I'm looking out and saying, this is not New York, and I didn't recognize it because it wasn't.
O'Hare, it was the other little airport.
unidentified
Midway?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, Midway.
tim pool
Really?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah.
You know, he's landing in a private jet.
And I think there's private jets, that's where they go in.
tim pool
There's a few smaller regional ones?
robert f kennedy-jr
Midway's... It may have been those.
I don't know where it was, but it was O'Hare.
tim pool
Was it Chicago?
Was it surrounded by gray walls?
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't remember.
So this would have been...
1993, so that's 31 years ago.
Okay, I have no, I have very little memory.
I do remember what happened, which is he said, oh, I have to make a trip to Europe, and you know, unanticipated.
And he gets off the plane and there's a beautiful, like, you know, very, I would describe her as a hot blonde with a lot of kind of biological exuberance, let me put it that way, who was waiting on the tarmac next to a white Mercedes.
And he goes down the stair and gets in the Mercedes and then he went over to, he drove over to another jet, private jet, and got on there.
And Glenn said nothing, but she was just sitting there crying.
Woah.
So, you know, I just thought this is a very bad guy.
tim pool
The plane didn't take you home then?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, and then we took off and went home alone.
luke rudkowski
So him lying was the awful thing, or did he do anything else that was awful?
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, I mean, he was this woman who we assumed was his girlfriend.
And he was, you know, treating her sort of, you know, horrendously in front of us.
And that seemed to me very, very cruelly.
So I thought from then on, I thought he's a bad guy.
tim pool
We were honored to have Dr. Ron Paul on our show last year.
He said the CIA killed your uncle.
Do you think so?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Why?
robert f kennedy-jr
Why do I think that?
tim pool
I mean, it's pretty well documented.
robert f kennedy-jr
I would say if you have, you know, there's a hundred books about my uncle's assassination.
The best book, which is an extraordinary distillation of probably a million pages of documents and also the many confessions of people who were involved in the murder.
I mean, the CIA is still blocking the release of documents.
Not only in the murder, but in the cover up.
But the best book is a book called The Unspeakable by James Douglas.
And it's a riveting book, but it's also just he's a scholar and it's an extraordinarily well documented history.
And are you asking why they killed him?
tim pool
Yeah.
robert f kennedy-jr
You know, the group that killed him was a group from the Miami station.
And they were angry at him beginning with his failure to overthrow Castro.
And they were angry with him because he was pulling out of Vietnam.
He had signed an executive order bringing all troops home from Vietnam by the beginning of 65.
tim pool
This was related to Operation Northwoods?
robert f kennedy-jr
No, Operation Northwoods was another thing that, you know, that was, this is all part of his battle with his military industrial complex.
But after the Bay of Pigs, he fired the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles.
And Alan Dulles did not stop being involved with the governance of the agency after that.
And then when my uncle was killed, Alan Dulles got himself put on the Warrant Commission.
And in fact, he was running the Warrant Commission.
And steered all the Warren Commission investigation away from the CIA.
Either way, this isn't a conspiracy theory.
This is when Congress investigated, the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated my uncle's death 10 years later.
They said, yeah, it was a conspiracy.
And most of the people, all but the senior counsel at that time, Bob Blakey, All the junior counsels believe that it was the CIA, and particularly this group, E. Howard Hunt, David Attlee Phillips, Bill Harvey, who ran the Miami station, and David Morales, and then operating with mobsters, whereas Sam Giancana, who was in the Chicago outfit,
Andres Trafficante, who ran the Tampa family, and then Carlos Marcello, who ran Dallas and New Orleans, and my father prosecuted all of them when my uncle was president.
They all had casinos in Havana, and they were working hand-in-hand with the CIA on the assassination of Castro.
So they were people who were, and you know, they were partners with the The program is called Alpha 66.
tim pool
Was that in any way related to the story of the film Casino?
You're familiar?
robert f kennedy-jr
Where the crooked mobsters in Chicago... A lot of the mobsters... The mobster who was the liaison between the CIA and Bill Harvey was the guy who was directing this program.
And the mob who got the three families involved, his name was Johnny Roselli.
And when he was subpoenaed by the committee, by the House Select Assassination Committee, he was subpoenaed once he testified, but then they brought summons back to testify.
And he was murdered on his way to testify, and he was cut up into small pieces and then put in a 55-gallon oil drum.
I was found floating two days later in Biscayne Bay in Miami, and at the same time, Sam Giancana, who was the head of the very, very powerful mobster whom my father had prosecuted, and who I actually sat in a hearing room When I was five years old and watched him take the fifth, I think 127 times while my father was interrogating about a month before my uncle became president.
My father was ridiculing him and saying, you're laughing like a little girl, you're giggling like a little girl.
So they hated each other.
Wow.
And Giancana, Um, who was, you know, also involved in the assassination.
He, um, he was also subpoenaed by the committee and he was murdered, um, just before he was supposed to appear.
He was, uh, executed in his basement.
tim pool
But the good news is that the CIA has since been reformed and these bad guys... Absolutely.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, they were held accountable.
hannah claire brimelow
We can trust the government now.
luke rudkowski
You know, Iran-Contra, MK-Ultra, they take over the mainstream media, they take over social media, the Russian collusion hoax, you know, it's not like they all organized it and orchestrated it.
But my question is, you know, if the CIA assassinated and took out a sitting US president many, many years ago, what are they doing now, since it looks like their power is only increasing with their influence over social media?
robert f kennedy-jr
And the worrying thing is, you know, with AI, at the power that that will give them to really just to
bend reality and to control our perceptions and to activate our neuronal path in the reptilian core of
our brain to light up these neuronal passages, pathways that control human behavior. And I think
it's really important that we have a strong common, we begin fortifying our constitutional
rights right now and that we go back to the Smith-Muntz Act and that we go back. Yes.
unidentified
The Church Commission.
tim pool
It's in the CIA charter, too.
phil labonte
I'm so happy you mentioned that.
in the NDA of 2012 I think it was that that made it legal for the federal
government to propagandize the American people. It's in the CIA charter too.
I'm so happy you mentioned that. I harp on that a lot. I asked Chad Bama, threw those out.
tim pool
I asked our good friend Chad Chepetee, did the CIA infiltrate U.S.
news media?
It said, yes, they did.
Mockingbird.
And then I said, are they still doing it?
And it said, it's unclear, possibly.
luke rudkowski
Well, it was the Church Commission hearings that that information came out, not Mockingbird.
tim pool
No, Mockingbird was the name of it, wasn't it?
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, Operation Mockingbird was the name, and in fact, there's... And Church Commission revealed it.
There's a 1973 article by Carl Bernstein, ironically, because His party, he was one of the two Watergate journalists, you know, Bob Woodward, who was himself a national security plant.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote an article in Rolling Stone in 1973 that disclosed that 400 of the leading journalists in our country and the leading editors in our country, including the New York Times and Washington Post, all the television networks were all CIA assets.
And then the CIA then said, okay, we will stop.
And they continue to be the biggest funder in the world of journalism.
They spend $10 billion a year which they funnel through USAID to fund journalism.
They own some of the biggest magazines in the developing world in Europe, etc., and newspapers and television stations, etc.
But they said we're gonna stop Operation Mockingbird in the United States.
We're gonna stop propagandizing and spying and, you know, and censoring.
But then in 2014, Obama passed an executive order, or issued an executive order, that allowed it to start again.
And so there's some very interesting articles recently by CIA historians.
Dick Russell, who wrote one for The Defender, about the infiltration of the CIA, CIA control of certain U.S.
journals, including Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, the guy who runs Rolling Stone, Noah Schlachman, comes out of the national security community, Salon, Slate, Daily Kos, I think, the National Geographic, Scientific American.
tim pool
Those are all liberal outlets.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah, and then there's another I guess the CIA historian who wrote the best biography of Allen Dulles, it's called The Devil's Chessboard, he wrote a book about the assassinations as well, about CIA involvement in the assassinations, called Brothers.
He's an historian named David Talbot.
He was the founder of Salon, actually, and he's written some really good articles about About the CIA control of, you know, a whole another group of journals.
Oh, it's, you know, I think Operation Mockingbird is up and running.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
Well, the psyops that they're doing now make MKUltra look like child's play.
robert f kennedy-jr
Yeah.
luke rudkowski
So I kind of want to ask you, is there any way that, you know, people outside of politics could not fall for these PSYOPs?
Is there, anything from your experience, any way to kind of resist against this larger kind of takeover of society?
robert f kennedy-jr
I would say the way to do it is to elect me president because I will dismantle this system.
unidentified
It's a simple solution.
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't think anybody else has the capacity to do it.
tim pool
How many people are you going to fire on day one?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm not, you know, what I'm going to do There's certain people who need to be fired, particularly in the public health agencies, the EPA and others, who I know because I've litigated against all those agencies, and I know who is very, very corrupt.
I know their names and, you know, the people that need to be moved.
You know, when I sued Monsanto, we found discovery documents that showed that the head of the pesticide division for a decade was, a guy called Jez Rowland was secretly working for Monsanto all the time and concealing and twisting all the science and bringing in these mercenary scientists from the pharmaceutical industry, we call them biostitutes, you know, to do the studies.
And so, and there are people like that in all of the agencies, but it's not just firing people, it's getting rid of the perverse incentives Absolutely.
That put agency capture on steroids.
You know, 50% of FDA's budget comes from pharma.
NIH is allowed under the Bayh-Dole Act to collect, NIH scientists collect $150,000 a year on products that they regulate.
And NIH itself, I mean, NIH owned the Moderna vaccine.
So getting billions of dollars in profits, and there are six guys at NIH, top dogs, who get $150,000 a year forever because they worked on that vaccine.
These are the guys that you want looking for problems in the product.
You don't want them, you know, you don't want them being incentivized to overlook stuff, which is what they did.
tim pool
Are there any agencies that you think should be abolished completely?
robert f kennedy-jr
Abolish completely.
tim pool
There are memes such as, you know, Thomas Massey routinely files a bill to abolish the Department of Education.
People say abolish the ATF.
The left says more, abolish the police.
luke rudkowski
He just did one with ending the U.S.
Federal Reserve, and it's pretty clear the Federal Reserve is printing us into poverty.
They're the ones giving BlackRock and State Street all the money, and the Fed, yes or no.
tim pool
Infinite money.
luke rudkowski
Infinite money.
tim pool
It's insane.
luke rudkowski
ATF or the Fed?
Or both?
Would you get rid of them?
robert f kennedy-jr
No, no.
The Fed, I would, you know, listen, the Fed... The Fed is the center of all problems, including all the war machine.
You know, without fiat currency, we couldn't drive the war machine.
And it's, you know, it functions to funnel money to Wall Street away from the American middle class.
It functions.
To destroy local controls, local economies, main streets, small businesses, and to financialize our economy and to send all of our industry abroad.
So it needs to, you know, fundamental reforms.
My uncle saw that.
That's why my uncle launched the silver certificate, the gold certificate.
He understood what, you know, what it was doing was corrupt.
And that, you know, he was trying to figure out a way to get us at least a little bit back toward base currencies.
hannah claire brimelow
If elected, sorry, I don't want to cut you off, but I do want to ask a question about immigration.
If elected, would you end birthright citizenship?
robert f kennedy-jr
Birthright citizenship?
I don't know.
I would have to look at that.
I mean, I think there's a... Isn't there a constitutional provision that said if you're born in this country that you're a citizen?
Is that what you're talking about?
tim pool
We read it.
The 14th Amendment.
All persons born in the United States.
robert f kennedy-jr
But the argument is that it says... So you're talking about amending the U.S.
Constitution?
hannah claire brimelow
Yeah, I think birthright citizenship incentivizes illegal immigration.
tim pool
Wait, wait, wait.
Real quick.
robert f kennedy-jr
I would shut down the border, let me put it that way.
tim pool
There you go.
The argument is that the 14th Amendment says... I'll tell you exactly how.
The amendment says if you're born here and subject to our jurisdiction, you're a citizen.
Some have argued you are, you're here.
Others have argued, no, you're a foreign national.
But, I digress.
Yeah, what's your border plan?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm going to do a couple of things.
One is just actually shut down the border you need.
Infrastructure policy and personnel.
Infrastructure is we need to complete the 27 gaps in the wall that you know in the urban area you don't need to build a wall all the way from about 2,200 miles from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego.
In the urban areas where immigrants and where illegal immigrants can quickly disappear you need a big physical barrier and I've been down there multiple times and we need to fill those gaps.
We need in the in the more urban rural areas The reality is you need to make sure that you need to complete the fencing, you need to have the long-distance cameras, the night lights, the sensory devices that President Biden removed, and there's a few miles of access roads that need to be completed.
In policy, we need to reinstate the Migrant Protection Act, which requires that people, migrants who are coming in from other countries, and have an asylum claim that they adjudicate those while they're still in Mexico before coming to the United States and change the catch-and-release program back to catch-and-return program.
We need personnel.
The Border Patrol roster, because of demoralization, because of all the unfair criticism they've been getting, is now at bare minimal levels.
We need to revive that and we need to send probably 300 asylum court judges to the border.
I have another program that I think will be more effective, which is I'm going to order the State Department and the Post Office to provide passport cards to every American who can't afford them.
And that means that you'll be able to walk down to any post office with proof of citizenship and you're going to be able to have a federally issued photo ID.
It's going to do three things.
One is the big dispute between Democrats and Republicans about showing photo ID at the voting booth.
The reason Democrats don't like that is because there are a lot of people in this country, millions, tens of millions, who don't have driver's licenses.
And they're almost all Democrats.
So they're elderly people whose licenses have expired.
They're urban minorities who don't drive.
And they're students who don't have their license yet.
Growing numbers of students don't have their license.
And for a lot of those people, going to DMV is just torture.
They're not going to do it.
And so they don't have IDs.
They're never going to get IDs.
And if you require that they If they don't have an ID to vote, it means they've disenfranchised 10 million Democratic voters.
That's why they fight so hard.
We've got Reverend Al Sharpton, Andrew Young, a bunch of other civil rights leaders who agree that if I issue photo IDs to every American, that they will withdraw their objections to requiring a photo ID at voting booths.
We eliminate this big source of tension.
It does a couple of other things.
Let me just finish.
One is that if you don't have a photo ID in this country, you're a second class citizen.
You cannot open a bank account.
You cannot check into a hotel.
You can't see your child at school.
You can't get on an airplane.
And so it makes being poor even worse.
It takes care of that issue.
And then finally, it's illegal already in this country for an employer to hire an illegal undocumented immigrant.
But they all do it because all you need to do is check off, check a box that says,
I saw their social security card.
The social security card doesn't have a picture on it.
They're easy to fabricate.
They're passed hand-to-hand at work sites in New York.
Oh, I'm gonna make it that everybody to get a job, you need to show a federally issued photo ID.
If you can't do that, and the employer hires you, he is going to go to jail.
And that will end the border overnight, because nobody's coming in here.
99% of those people, when I interviewed, I only interviewed 300 people in one night.
All except for twos, and I'm here for a job.
tim pool
So you're saying everyone would need a federal ID, or is a state ID good as well?
I mean, we have real IDs.
robert f kennedy-jr
You just need a government issued photo ID, okay?
And it's not an ID where you're...
Medical records, your financial records, anything else, it's just a photo ID from the post office.
It's a passport card.
tim pool
But so this would also, you're saying, so for voting you would need a voter ID, but... You would need any kind of government issued photo ID.
I like that, I do.
That's great.
And we get voter ID and you make it easy to get IDs.
That's fantastic.
Passport cards are great, by the way.
I got one.
unidentified
Useful.
tim pool
Yeah, federal ID.
I suppose we are just about at time, and I really do appreciate you coming and hanging out with us.
robert f kennedy-jr
I enjoyed talking with you.
tim pool
I have tremendous respect.
I'll give you my honest take.
I think some of your answers are viewed a little politically.
But I think a lot of it is... I think your answers are respectable.
I think when you're asked about questions you didn't know, you simply said, I just don't know.
And that means a lot.
My last question for you will probably just make everyone angry, but I'm gonna ask you anyway.
Have you ever heard the song Kennedy by Kill Hannah?
robert f kennedy-jr
I don't know.
I don't know.
tim pool
It's probably, it's probably no one knows what it is, it's a Chicago band and the song is literally him saying,
I want to be a Kennedy and live fast in cars and basically describing your family, but I thought that was funny.
robert f kennedy-jr
What they think is my family.
tim pool
What they think is your family and the tabloids and all that.
So, is there anything else you wanted to add as we wrap up?
Anything you want to shout out?
robert f kennedy-jr
I'm grateful to you, Tim, and Luke, and Phil, and Anna Claire.
hannah claire brimelow
Thank you for getting a full name.
robert f kennedy-jr
Thank you all very much.
luke rudkowski
Where can people find out more information about you and your campaign?
robert f kennedy-jr
Kennedy24.com.
And, you know, we're collecting signatures in most states right now.
We just got on the Florida ballot today.
Yeah, so if people want to volunteer or help with the campaign, we'd love that.
tim pool
One last serious question, though.
I heard you say in an interview that you believe before the CNN debates you will have enough states to qualify.
You already have the polls.
robert f kennedy-jr
Well, the weird thing about CNN is CNN made, I think, a big mistake, which is that it offered two criteria.
One criteria was that That you need to be on the ballot in sufficient states to get 270 electoral votes.
Well, by that date, we will have enough signatures to get, by the June 20th date, which is the cutoff date, we will have enough signatures to get 343.
So we will be able to qualify.
Guess who can't qualify?
Biden.
Biden or Trump.
Because they're not going to be on any ballots.
They're the presumptive nominee.
Their parties own the ballot slots, but they don't own them yet.
tim pool
This is why Biden's not on in Ohio.
He's not going to be on the ballots.
robert f kennedy-jr
He's not going to be on the ballots.
That's crazy.
I don't know.
I can't believe they're not going to figure it out.
hannah claire brimelow
DeWine said everyone has to come in on Tuesday and fix this, so we'll see what happens.
tim pool
All right, all right.
Thanks for hanging out.
You guys want to shout anything out before we go?
luke rudkowski
Yeah, thank you so much for having the conversation.
It was, you know, we agreed on some things, we disagreed on some things, but we at least had the conversation.
We thank you so much for coming in here and taking our questions.
Really appreciate it.
I thought the conversation was fascinating.
If you want to support me, and if you like the shirt that I'm wearing that says Trust God, Not Government, get it on thebestpoliticalshirts.com.
And we're raising money for our new studio called Seamus' New Liver on saveirishman.com.
Saveirishman.com.
Check it out.
phil labonte
Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Kennedy.
We appreciate it.
robert f kennedy-jr
Thank you, Phil.
phil labonte
I am PhilThatRemains on Twix.
I'm PhilThatRemainsOfficial on Instagram.
The band is All That Remain.
You can catch us on tour this summer with Megadeth and Mudvayne on the Destroy All Enemies Tour starting, uh, what is it?
Oct- August 2nd, going through September 28th.
You can check out our new single, Divine, on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, and Deezer, Dozer, whatever.
Deuzer.
Yeah, that's what it is.
I mess it up all the time.
hannah claire brimelow
You know the internet.
phil labonte
You know the internet.
Anyways, in the Left Lanes for Crime.
See you guys later.
Hannah Clare.
hannah claire brimelow
What a cool job.
This is a very fun show.
I'm Hannah-Claire Brimlow.
I'm a writer for scnr.com.
That's Scanner News.
Follow all of their work at TimCastNews on Instagram and Twitter.
I'm really appreciative that you came out tonight.
It's so fun to have you here.
If you want to follow me personally, I'm on Instagram at HannahClaireB and I'm on Twitter at Instagram at HannahClaire.B and I'm on Twitter at HannahClaireB.
Thank you guys for everything you do for us.
Bye, Tim!
tim pool
We're back Monday with a special pre-recorded episode because we're here at the LP National and it's Memorial Day, so everyone's off, but we're going to have an episode for you guys.
Thank you all so much for being members at TimCast.com.
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