HOW very foolish GB News were to ‘lose’ their outstandingly best and most professional interviewer and presenter. If that needed underlining it was by Mark’s new programme, The Mark Steyn Show, on Monday night. He interviewed Robert Kennedy Junior who, just two weeks ago, launched his campaign to be Democrat nominee for the White House. The discussion lasted nearly an hour, keeping the viewer gripped for the duration, and was the most significant political interview I have seen in years.
Kennedy surveyed the fast-changing state of world politics and power distribution from the period before the ‘pandemic’ to the present and implications for the future in a way no other politician has articulated. You might not agree with some of the detail, but the broad-brush strokes are undeniable on the rise of the pharmaceutical industry’s control of public health, and on the massive multinational transfer of money to billionaires during the ‘pandemic’ in a corrupt merger of state and corporate power that saw the demise of thousands of small independent businesses. Alone among well-known politicians, Kennedy is clear about our coming serfdom unless we wake up. He is not just a breath of fresh air but the man in whom our hope for a free and democratic future now seems to rest.
You can watch this important interview here, some choice quotations from which I hurriedly tweeted on Monday night.
But here is a full transcript for you to pick your own from!
MARK STEYN: Hey, welcome along to The Mark Steyn Show. Unusually for me, we’ve got such a packed show today I’ve got no time for my usual tedious book plugging. But I will say this, that my satirical confection, The Prisoner of Windsor – as you know, it’s set in London on the eve of the coronation of a not terribly popular monarch, imagine that – but as an aside, it has a passing reference to the concurrent American President, who is a scion of a famous American dynasty, the Kennedys, and just as an awful lot of my satirical fancies from that book have proved correct, so it seems that it’s at least possible we could have a Kennedy back in the White House at the end of this US election season.
My guest was last on the show just under a year and a half ago, and two things have happened since then. First, on the main subject of our conversation back then, Covid and the vaccines, the facts have moved relentlessly in his direction with every week that passes. The Scandinavian nations were the first withdrawing the vaccines for the under-18s, the under-50s, the under-65s, and then Switzerland just cut to the chase and ceased recommending them to anybody. The things I talked about with Robert F Kennedy Jr 18 months ago, and that got him kicked off his social media platforms, things like for example, the fact that Tony Fauci and his cronies were doing gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, have now been broadly conceded, and Commissar Fauci himself is furiously airbrushing the records . . .
ANTHONY FAUCI: First of all I didn’t recommend locking anything down.
MARK STEYN: Are you sure about that?
ANTHONY FAUCI: I recommended to the President that we shut the country down.
MARK STEYN: So that’s the first thing that’s changed since Robert F Kennedy and I last spoke – the official narrative has collapsed. The second thing that’s changed is that RFK Jr has now joined his father and two of his uncles and is a presidential candidate.
ROBERT F KENNEDY, JR
MARK STEYN: Especially if there’s essentially a uni-party establishment in Washington. If you’re Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell, you’re not going to like the new Kennedy platform.
ROBERT F KENNEDY, JR
JOHN F KENNEDY [archive]: The cost of freedom is always high. But Americans have always paid it.
MARK STEYN: How’s that message resonating with his fellow Democrats? It’s early days, there’s not yet a lot of polling. But look at this. Joe Biden’s numbers are very soft for an incumbent with his own party, and there’s a solid fifth of Democrat voters who support the Kennedy campaign. Last time he was here Robert F Kennedy Jr had managed to pull off a neat trick, a blockbuster New York Times bestselling book, even though the New York Times nor any other newspaper deigned to review the book, or so much as mention it, so anxious were they to suppress its very existence. Now the US media seem determined to do the same to his presidential campaign, notwithstanding those 20 per cent poll numbers. My friend Tucker Carlson interviewed RFK a couple of weeks back and five days later, he was off the air for good. So it’s a great pleasure to have Robert F Kennedy Jr back with us.
{Addresses Kennedy] Your family has something of a tradition of challenging incumbent presidents of your own party. Your father ran again Lyndon Johnson in 1968, your uncle Ted ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980. I wonder though, if this is actually something bigger, because it seems to me it’s not so much about policy differences, it’s the sense that a system of supposed self-government no longer works for the American people.
RFK: I mean, I think the condition of our democracy – and by the way, thanks for having me back, Mark, it’s good to be back with you – I think the condition of our democracy and our status as a moral authority as an exemplar nation has devolved really dramatically since my father ran in 1968. My dad was in kind of the same position I am today. He was fighting the party apparatus. He was running against an incumbent president of his own party. He was running against a war. He was very isolated in the party. He had run his brother’s campaign eight years earlier, his brother, John Kennedy, and at that time, all the unions were with my uncle, but the only unions he had were the United Auto Workers and Cesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers. He had all the newspapers were against him, the liberal infrastructure was against him, The New York Times, The Village Voice, liberal democratic clubs, all the big city mayors who had been with him in 1960, were against him, including Mayor Daley, who had been critical to President Kennedy’s election. The university students were against him because they were with McCarthy. And he really had kind of, had to build a coalition from the ground up, working against his own party. Even though the New Frontiers men, the people who he had brought into office, were now all working in the Johnson administration. So they were opposed to him. So he was very isolated in the same way that kind of I started out, but it’s been heartening to me to see the support I’m getting within the Democratic Party, but also from independents and Republicans.
STEYN: But even granted those comparisons, it seems to me that America in 1968 wasn’t quite as hostile a culture toward free speech as it is now. Where for most of the media, and most of the newspapers, and social media – I mean, we didn’t have Facebook, and that kind of thing in 1968 – and these guys today seem to be able to just deny your very existence, which is not something they were able to do to your father back in ’68.
RFK: No, I think you’re right about that, Mark, the polarisation was very, very similar in ’68 to what it is today, it’s probably even worse today. But the censorship that we experience today would have been unthinkable in 1968. I think most Democrats would not have believed that, you know, that 40-50 years later that the White House would be collaborating with publishers, social media titans to censor political opponents, or to censor critics of White House policies. But that’s what you’re seeing. And you know, these social media sites promised us that they were going to be . . . that they were going to democratise the internet, democratise the world. And instead, they’ve turned out to be these very kind of potent weapons of totalitarianism. And it’s ironic that the sites that were censoring us, Facebook and Amazon and Google, that the CEOs and the owners of those sites made billions and billions of dollars from the pandemic. The Oxfam study that just came says that the billionaires who exist in the United States prior to the pandemic increased their wealth on average by 30 per cent. So you know, you had Jeff Bezos, who was censoring books that were critical of the lockdown, including one that I published. You had Mark Zuckerberg, who was deposing . . . he was evicting me for criticising lockdowns, etc. from Facebook, was deplatforming me on Instagram. And he was making billions of dollars from the same lockdown that he was censoring. All he was censoring was the critics of that lockdown so it’s, you know . . . And we created 500 new billionaires, a billionaire a day during the pandemic, there was this tremendous shift in wealth, $4trillion from the American middle class to this new, you know, aristocracy of oligarchs and plutocrats who rose up during the pandemic and really changed the nature of American democracy and the economic profile of our country.
STEYN: And at the same time as there was that transfer to these multinational billionaires, there were mom and pop businesses shutting, up and down every main street in every small town across America. It’s this alliance between government and these global corporations that you see as the basic motivator for your campaign?
RFK: I mean Amazon, essentially by censoring criticism of the lockdown, was colluding in a government project to close down all of its competitors. So the government shut down 3.3million businesses in our country, many of them will never reopen. 41 per cent of the black-owned businesses in this country will never reopen, many of those businesses had two or three generations of sweat equity, of economic equity and they’re gone forever. And the people who profited were the people who were censoring, you know, criticism, which was Mark Zuckerberg, got everybody to stay at home and you know, watch screens all day, and Amazon, which essentially just replaced all of the main street and you’re right, I mean the theme of my campaign and my candidacy is going to be to re-democratise America, and to dismantle this corrupt merger of the state and corporate power that is destroying our values, our economic map model, and our democracy ultimately.
STEYN: You know, when you say the merger of state and corporate power for some of us, we think back to being in school and learning about what Mussolini did in Italy, just about a century ago. The thing about that, though, is it was all confined, as Mussolini saw it, it was like, well, you know, mom and pop fascism, it was all confined within Italy, as it were. When you look at some of the people you’ve spoken out against, particularly Big Pharma, corporations like Pfizer, they are now beyond any nation state, and increasingly, the fellows who rule us appear to be part of some, you know, international cookie-cutter, interchangeable cabal, they all meet up at Davos, and they all agree on everything that matters. Is it actually possible to solve it within the swamp of Washington?
RFK: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, US economic leadership in the world is still I think, you know, intact. It’s definitely in decline. But, you know, I think if we . . . there are things that we can do in the United States that I think will have a democratising effect on the rest of the world. And, you know, as President, I will use that office as a bully pulpit to talk about what’s happening in Davos and to talk about, you know, we shouldn’t have a billionaires boys’ club dictating policies in the liberal democracies around the world. And I think, you know, I can have a real impact, because I understand the danger of, you know, having billionaires dictate policies in our nation states and particularly, you see their policies that increase their profits, that centralise power, when we should be looking to decentralise it, when we really need to be strengthening democratic institutions across the globe. Because the rise of these new technologies, Mark, these surveillance technologies now are giving governments and powerful industries, intrusive powers over our lives to control us, to control our conduct, our movement, our relationships, our spending, everything about us in ways that no totalitarian system has ever had in the past. We’re constructing this kind of turnkey totalitarianism, that if, you know, if you do not simultaneously strengthen our democratic institutions and enunciate our rights, the lines that cannot be crossed, no matter what, we are going to lose those rights. We’re going to lose our freedoms. We’re going to be serfs. I mean, the digitalisation of currency is frightening. You saw what Justin Trudeau did in Canada.
STEYN: Yeah.
RFK: There were truckers who were engaged in peaceful, congenial, respectful protests in Quebec. And they had people go out and photograph their license plates, and then close down their bank accounts and make it so they couldn’t buy food for their children. And you know, these people were not tried, they weren’t convicted of a crime, they were simply, you know, manipulated by the manipulation of currency. And so we know they can do that, we know that they’re willing to do it, that this was kind of a model, you know, a try-out for the rest of the world. And that is the . . . I mean that freedom of currency is as important as freedom of speech. Because if you can control somebody’s currency, you can starve them to death. And when they get rid of paper money, which they’re all trying to do, and switch to the digitalised dollar and digitalised currency, we are going to be in the power of the big banks and the government in a way that nobody has ever experienced in history.
STEYN: That was certainly true in the Canadian case, where people who were just deemed to be associated with the Canadian truckers suddenly had their accounts frozen. We interviewed on this show a guy who couldn’t pay his alimony to his ex-wife so she was furious. And it all became about scraping together, you know, a few $20 bills to get you through. And yet, as you say, the governments around the West are determined to abolish those $20 bills, so money itself will just be something that the government in effect licenses to you. I mean, if I were to make a generalisation here, it would seem that all the powers that government took to deal with jihadists 20 years ago, that 24/7 surveillance state, they’re now actually applying to their own citizens.
RFK: Yeah, I agree. I talked to a banker the other day, you know, who is very, very upset about and very concerned about this trend to digitalise currency. And he said that he was in a meeting a couple of years ago with Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorgan Chase], who’s the most powerful banker in America, and that Jamie Dimon had said that, you know, ‘We want to look into making it so that credit cards won’t work at you know, gun shops and tobacco shops and other places where you know, that we think people should not be making purchases.’ And, I think we have a huge gun problem in our country, and I certainly don’t like tobacco. But I am really worried that, well, I mean, once you give a government a power to do that, there’s no end in sight, they’re going to push it as far as they can. And, you know, it will go to pornography next, and it will go to . . . and then you know, what kind of food that you want, what kind they want you to have. And, you know, I don’t eat Twinkies, but I think people have the right to buy them. And, you know, I don’t like this kind of a high level of social engineering, because I know where it’s going to end, we all know where it’s going to end. Anybody who’s read history, anybody who’s read, you know, George Orwell, or Aldous Huxley, or, you know, or any of the other kind of literature that was required reading when we were going to school, knows where this is going to end. And it’s not in a good place. Every power that the government takes from us it will never relinquish voluntarily. Every power they take from us will ultimately be abused to the maximum extent possible. And the third rule is that nobody’s ever complied their way out of totalitarianism. The only thing you can do is to resist it and to make sure that governments do not have this power in their quiver, in their arsenal.
STEYN: Well I, I . . . you’re quite right, that in the end you have to shoot your way out of totalitarianism. But there seems to be a large proportion of formerly free peoples who are content with the trade-off between liberty and convenience. So for example, mobile telephones are basically like an electronic ankle bracelet that everyone’s walking around with. GPS in your motorcar is the same thing – the government can basically access where you are on the planet at any moment of the day. But people seem willing to put up with it because of the convenience.
RFK: Yeah, and that is always going to be true. So the important thing that we need to be doing right now is strengthening these democratic institutions and the democratic structures and constitutional guarantees to, to . . . at the same rate, because we know that they have all these tools for subjugating us now. And those are not going to go away, that people are going to make that trade-off for convenience and security and it’s just going to happen. And it’s really important, therefore, not to be eroding constitutional rights. And so that was why it was so alarming during the pandemic, when they, you know, in our country, they started . . . got rid of, basically, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and the government began directing publications, private publishers, to censor people like me. And not for misinformation because I was not . . . you know, listen, if I was spouting disinformation, show me where it was, you know, show me one instance of something that I said that was factually wrong, and I’ll correct it. You don’t have to censor me. Nobody’s ever showed me something that I said that was factually wrong. You know, the government began that, and it closed all the churches for a year, we have a guarantee in the Constitution of freedom of worship, and there was no scientific citation, there were no public hearings, there was, you know, there were none of the guarantees of democracy that are supposed to accompany government mandates. Then they did social distancing. So there goes our freedom of assembly. And then they went after a jury trials, they got rid of the Seventh Amendment guarantee of jury trials for anybody who sued a pharmaceutical company, or anybody else who provided a countermeasure. And they went after you know, they went after . . . we have a guarantee in our country against warrantless searches and seizures, people aren’t allowed to ask you your medical records or anything else. And yet, you know, you couldn’t go out of the house, you couldn’t go into a public building or a bar without showing your private medical records. And they got rid of property rights, they closed 3.3million businesses with no due process, no, just compensation. So the entire Bill of Rights, the American Constitution, was essentially dismantled – with the exception of the Second Amendment, which is the gun amendment – was dismantled in a single year. And you know, with no fight, with people going . . . with the liberals of my party, the Democrats, the word ‘liberal’ is supposed to mean freedom, and particularly freedom of expression, and nobody complaining, their silence is very, very shocking to me.
STEYN: Well, when you look at things like the partial modified limited hangout, as President Nixon would have said, with regard to, you know, Fauci saying, ‘Oh, I never called for lockdown’, no matter that there’s video evidence he did. Do liberals, do members of your own party recognise that something went badly wrong these last three years?
RFK: I don’t know, Mark, it’s really kind of interesting to see how a kind of orthodoxy like that unravels. And it certainly has not unravelled. There are huge amounts of people in this country that think that vaccines saved millions of lives, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And you know, we had the highest death rate of any country in the world. And there were countries that were unvaccinated like Nigeria, which had a death rate 1/200th of ours, and Haiti, 1/200th of ours. And they had a 1.5 per cent vaccination rate. And all the evidence from Johns Hopkins, from Case Western, from the big medical institutions that have said no, that vaccines didn’t work. In fact, you’re more likely to get Covid if you’ve got a vaccine after the seventh month, you know, all of this evidence that is just science, very, very good science, and it has not really penetrated the consciousness of a large percentage of Americans at this point. And I don’t know whether that will change in the future. But you know, maybe my candidacy, if it gets traction, and it appears to be getting traction, will help accelerate that unravelling.
STEYN: Well, when you talk about the pharmaceutical companies and as you say, you know, there are these people who get the two shots and they get the booster then they get another boost and another booster. And you notice that the world leaders who go on camera and show themselves getting boosted, like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden get Covid, you know, with almost monotonous regularity. Joe Biden got . . . the last time he got Covid, he was then cleared for Covid. And he got what they’re now calling ‘rebound Covid’, and conveniently enough, Pfizer makes a product that covers you for rebound Covid. If you recall, the German health minister . . .
RFK: It actually gives you rebound Covid, which they admit.
STEYN: And the German Health Minister said Pfizer should use its profits to ameliorate Pfizer’s vaccine damage by selling, inventing a product that corrects Pfizer’s vaccine damage, so they can get you coming and going. I don’t think anybody . . . you’ve been on this for a long time, for I think it’s 18 years now. But none of us, I think, who weren’t as involved as you were really on top with this idea of a kind of public health industrial complex?
RFK: Yeah. Well, that’s what we have. I mean, you know, NIH [the US National Institutes of Health] really does not do public health any more. And public health in our country has declined precipitously. We have, when Dr Fauci came into office, 6 per cent of the children in our country had chronic disease. Today 54 per cent do. So that’s not a good record. You know, by chronic disease I mean neurological diseases, autoimmune diseases and allergic disease. We didn’t have peanut allergies when I was a kid. I mean, they were so rare I didn’t know anybody. Why do five of my kids have allergies?
STEYN: Yeah, yeah.
RFK: Eczema,all of these that appear . . . all of these injuries that appeared in 1989, suddenly appeared. You know, autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation, it’s still one in 10,000 in my generation, you know, in my kids’ generation one in 34. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, narcolepsy, ASD, and then the autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes; I didn’t know anybody who had these diseases. I had 11 siblings, and about 70 first cousins and, you know, I didn’t know anybody who had these. And today, every classroom has, you know, epi pens and diabetic syringes, and all the kids are on Adderall and Ritalin and Concerta and, you know, and anti-seizure medication and you know, this is the sickest generation in history.
STEYN: No, I couldn’t get . . . actually couldn’t . . . my kids were educated in American grade schools, in a small American town, and I actually couldn’t get over, from the moment they got into kindergarten, how many of their classmates were medicated and in fact, the school prioritised the medicalisation of its pupils, just simply as a fact of life. And just to tie this into a point you made the last time you were on the show, when you quoted that line that Roger Ailes said to you, that 76 per cent of the advertising on American news channels is from pharmaceutical companies. The extreme connection between the relentless promotion of pharmaceutical products and the medicalisation and declining health of American children no one even looks at them. No one even talks about it.
RFK: Yeah, I know, nobody talks about it. And you know, the pharmaceutical companies are financing our network news now. And it allows them also to dictate content. So nobody is asking these questions about . . . these really obvious questions, ‘Why are our children so sick?’ Nobody is asking them. NIH is supposed to fund the studies to find out and they’re pretty easy. We know it’s an environmental toxin. Because genes don’t cause epidemics. So whatever is causing this environmental toxin, and it’s probably a collaboration, our kids today are swimming around in a toxic soup. But along that timeline, there’s a famous study by Dr Phil Landrigan, who’s probably the leading toxicologist in America, he’s at Mount Sinai in New York and he said, you know, from that timeline, which is basically these epidemics all beginning around 1989, and there’s only a certain number of things that became, of exposures, that became ubiquitous and he goes through them. And you know, there’s a limited number, there’s like 11 or 12, there’s cell phones is one, there’s glyphosate which is in Roundup, which became ubiquitous then, pesticides, PFOA flame retardants, ultrasound, you know, a bunch of other kind of interventions that again, you saw exposures in every demographic, from Key Biscayne, Miami to Alaska, and you have to look for something that has those characteristics. And, you know, the question is, why aren’t we studying them? And, of course, vaccines, the vaccine schedule during that period went from three vaccines that I got as a kid to the 72 doses that my kids got. And so you have to look at these and NIH’s job – and NIH has a budget of $42billion a year, and that money goes to university scientists who then study things like this – but nobody is funding those studies, because they know no matter what the answer, it’s going to offend a big shot, either the pharmaceutical industry or Monsanto, the chemical industry, Big Ag, the oil industry, or some industry they don’t want to know the answer to. And you know, the same is true, Mark, with all these shootings. Nobody is looking at the pharmaceutical contribution to that. Anecdotally, it appears that almost every one of these shooters were on SSRIs, or some other psychiatric drug, and you know, this is only happening in America, where all these people are, you know, are taking these psychiatric drugs, we take four times as many as any other country, than the average European country. And there’s no time in history, I mean, we’ve always had guns in this country – Switzerland has more guns per capita than we do and you don’t see that happening there – and, you know, I’m not defending all the guns everywhere, but I’m just saying something happened. Prior to the introduction of Prozac these kind of . . . those shootings were almost unknown. And now they’re, you know, they’re an everyday affair. But NIH will not study that, because it will offend the pharmaceutical industry. And it’s something that, you know, we ought to be studying.
STEYN: Well, let me ask you about that, though. Because I think it’s true that, you know, one thing we’ve learned is that the public health bureaucracy is corrupt, so that there’s a lot of money for bureaucrats if they simply do the pharmaceutical industry’s bidding. But I noticed, for example, when you gave your speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics a couple of hours south from where I am right now, when you gave that speech, big shot . . . at least one big shot Granite State Democrat, declined to appear – Deborah Arnie Arneson, who at one point, whatever it was 20 years ago, ran for governor in New Hampshire – because she thought you were anti-science, you’re anti-vaccine, you’re anti this, you’re anti that. And whatever you say about her, I don’t . . . I would find it very unlikely she was on the take from Big Pharma. So it seems to me that there are, actually, large numbers of Democrats who reflexively react to criticism of things like the pharmaceutical industry, as if you’re just some irrational, voodoo type who’s scared of modern medicine.
RFK: Well, I mean, I, obviously I’m not anti-science. I’m happy to debate. If you show me where I’m wrong on my science, I’ll change my position. But that’s what you’re going to have to do. You can’t tell me that I’m wrong because CDC [the US Centers for Disease Control] says I’m wrong or WHO, that’s called an appeal to authority. It’s a logical fallacy, that is not science. What your doctor tells you is not science. Science is what you find on peer reviewed publications on PubMed. And, you know, even those you have to read critically. So you know, and that’s what I do for a living, and I’ve done for my whole career. I read science because you know, I litigate scientific issues constantly. And I’m cross-examining scientists, and I have to be able to argue with them and to understand the concepts and to read science critically. What I am ‘anti’ is I’m anti-the pharmaceutical industry’s control of our government. And you know, you can say, okay, you know, you can say FDA [the US Food and Drug Admiknistration], you know, it’s wrong to disagree with FDA. FDA was the agency that brought us the opioid crisis. It told all the doctors in this country that opioids were not addictive, and that they were safe and effective. And as a result of that, we have 56,000 American kids dying each year in overdoses, more children than were killed in 20 years in Vietnam, but every year. So we’re having a Vietnam every year in our country from overdoses, because the FDA got the whole population addicted. The FDA and CDC told us all that Vioxx was safe when they knew it was a lie. They knew that it caused heart attacks. Merck was out there selling a headache medicine, that, you know, and not telling its customers that that headache medicine could kill you, when Merck knew it, and FDA knew it, and CDC knew it. And they all went ahead because the profit offered from those products was more important to them than public health. So if they did it to us with opioids, and with Vioxx, and with hundreds and hundreds of other drugs that have the same kind of lethality and efficacy, why do you think they’re telling the truth about vaccines? Don’t you think you should look into that personally?
STEYN: No, you’re right, but just to extend the thought of that appeal to authority, which as you said a moment ago, is a logical fallacy. Perhaps the most alarming change in recent years is the way that a significant segment of your fellow Democrats appear to believe that even the deep state, the CIA and the other intelligence agencies, that too, is an appeal to authority. There’s a chap called Julian Assange, who’s one of His Majesty’s Australian subjects, so he owes no allegiance to the United States, and if the United States can’t keep its secrets, he’s certainly entitled to publish them on the other side of the world. But in fact, he’s been rotting in prison, because the CIA and Homeland Security and all the rest of them, just want to get him for basically, embarrassing them. You’re one of the few Americans who has actually spoken up in defence of Julian Assange. And I would have thought that would have been a no-brainer for the average Democrat 40-50 years ago, you’re being screwed over by the CIA. You’re not even American. And yet, none of the American media, liberal media, speak up in his defence.
RFK: Yeah. And it’s shocking, because, you know, Julian Assange is not a whistleblower, who was like Edward Snowden. And by the way, I think Edward Snowden is also a hero. And if I get into office, I will pardon Edward Snowden. And Edward Snowden, you know, listen, what Edward Snowden released as a whistleblower Congress went and acted on, because he was telling us things that nobody knew, that the CIA was illegally spying on us. And Congress went and, you know, passed a law to make sure they couldn’t do that again, or at least, you know, that was the alleged purpose of that law. So what he released was important for our government, for our democracy, he was doing a service to American democracy. And he did it at great personal cost to himself. And that’s, you know, what we need to do in our democracy, and we shouldn’t be punishing him, we should be recognising that what he did was important. But Julian Assange has even more dramatic kind of weirdness about it, because he’s just a publisher. You know, what they’re doing to him they could do to any publisher in this country, who, you know, if somebody, for example, leaked something, and a publisher then publishes it, that publisher can now be put in jail for life essentially, like Julian Assange. Why aren’t all the publishers in this country, the New York Times and Washington Post coming forward in his defence and expressing their outrage daily that he should be released? And Mark, if I am elected, on day one I will pardon Julian Assange.
STEYN: Well, I certainly hope he’s still around to enjoy the benefit of that because his health has declined precipitously and you know, if he ever gets put on a plane to the United States, that will be a one-way ticket into that jail cell and I would be very surprised if he comes out alive. Let me ask you, let me just broaden that out a bit, because one of the issues you’re running against is the idea – I mean, it’s the last speech any president gave before your uncle took office, which was Eisenhower’s famous speech on the military industrial complex – what happened in Kabul was a fiasco. You spent 20 years, and you lose to goatherds with fertiliser, and it’s an American humiliation. They get . . . the useless Chiefs of Staff back in Washington take a 20-minute tea break, and then decide that Ukraine is going to be the new Afghanistan for however many years they can get out of that.
RFK: Yeah, well, the Ukraine, that’s right. I mean, we’re in the Ukraine war for the same reason that we were in Afghanistan. The real reason . . . I mean, listen, American people are in Ukraine, are supporting the Ukraine war, for all the right reasons, because, you know, they were sold this idea that it was a humanitarian mission. But you know, President Biden himself has let it slip that the real reason for being there is to depose Putin. And his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that the reason we’re in Ukraine is to degrade the Russian army, and exhaust it so that it is incapable of fighting anywhere else in the world, which is an old neocon aspiration. And so they’re using the Ukraine as a pawn in this geopolitical machination. And, you know, listen, Zelensky got election with 70% per cent . . . he’s comedian and an actor, and I’m not saying that in a disparaging way, I’m just saying that he had no political experience and no business getting elected to run a country. The reason he got elected is because he ran on a peace policy, and he promised that he would bring peace, that he’d keep his country out of war. Ukrainians gave him 70 per cent of the vote; they didn’t want to go to war. And Zelensky was pressured into this war by the, you know, the Neo-fascists in Ukraine, and by the United States White House, who, you know, who had overthrown the government of the Ukraine in 2014 and then had pumped $5billion into the protests that ended up in the coup against the . . . the violent coup against the democratically elected government that was pro-Russia, and we installed our own government that was extremely, you know, belligerent towards Russia, and began this century of, you know, pogroms against the people, the Russian ethnic population of Donbas. Which, naturally, the Russian . . . the people of Russia, you know, would be upset about that. But there were many, many other provocations that followed, including, you know, flaunting the fact that we were going to bring the Ukraine into Nato, which, which we promised we would never do. And now we’re saying we’re going to do it. We put the Aegis nuclear capable missiles in Romania and Georgia, and basically pushed Zelensky into war. And something happened really interesting this week, you know – and the Russians . . . now, 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died. Kids, children have died. 14,000 civilians and they’re not being straight about this. The US government and the Ukrainian government are not telling us the cost of this war on the Ukrainian people. There’s 60 per cent unemployment in Ukraine, the infrastructure has been destroyed in that country, and it’s been destroyed as a nation. You know, if they had just signed the Minsk Accords, they would have everything that they’re fighting for today. The Russians did not want Donbas. Russia said even when Donbas voted to join Russia, Russia said, ‘No, we don’t want it. You’re a nation, be a nation, but just don’t, you know, protect the people, the Russian ethnics from government-sponsored violence and make it clear that you’re not going to join Nato.’ And they refused to do that, and we pushed Zelensky into war. So here’s what happened interesting this week, is that Zelensky, who now knows, I mean, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of apparently around eight to one. Why is that? Because the Russians have ten times the artillery, and this is an artillery war. So they’ve lost. The Russians, depending on who you believe, have lost 30,000 dead, up to maybe 100,000 at most, which I don’t think is credible. But I think the best numbers are 30,000 to 60,000. Ukrainians have lost 300,000. And the Russians have unlimited man- . . . the Russians cannot lose this war, it is existential to them, they will not lose it, and they’re not going to lose it. And they have brought the spring offensive, this highly touted spring offensive from Ukraine to a standstill. So what did Zelensky do last week? Without asking permission from his neocon handlers in the White House, he reached out to President Xi of China and asked him to settle the war.
STEYN: Yep, yeah.
RFK: So you know, that shows that he knows that he has been played, that his nation has been used as a pawn in this, you know, and turned into an abattoir by the neocons in the United States White House, for their own geopolitical reasons.
STEYN: That’s what’s so interesting about that, is when Zelensky turned to Xi, Xi hasn’t spent . . . Xi hasn’t been burying Ukraine in money. He’s spent like $1.79 there. Washington has showered billions on Ukraine. I don’t even know what you would spend that on. It has the lowest average wage of any European nation. I was there a year ago, stayed in lovely hotels that were, like, seven euros a night. So you’d give them a 10 euro note and they thought you were a big shot. I have no idea where all those billions from Washington are going. And there appears to be no basic bookkeeping about where it’s all going.
RFK: Yeah, there’s been a lot of complaints about that, that we don’t know, we have no idea. I mean, we’ve sent now, or committed $113billion. Most of that, of course, is just money that’s laundered, you know, to US weapons producers. You know, it goes over there and it goes back to Lockheed or General Dynamics or, you know, the people who build all these weapons systems. And it’s just a money-laundering scheme for them. But you know, there’s a lot of money that’s being lost along the way, and nobody has . . . there’s no accounting, and it’s a bizarre thing, because even the Iraq War, which was tremendously wasteful, I remember when they were losing, you know, $100million pallets of cash that just disappeared. But in this war . . . but there was an effort at accounting there, and the American people were seeing publications of some of that accounting, and none of that is happening here. It’s just completely out of control.
STEYN: Let me let me switch and ask you about your strategy. There doesn’t appear to be any American strategy in Ukraine. But let me ask you about your campaign strategy. I would have thought – those are the beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire behind me – and I would have thought that’s a perfect state for you. If you’ve got, like, a purplish state that has an open primary, you could inflict real damage on Joe Biden in New Hampshire and similar states. Is that what you’re thinking about?
RFK: Well, I’m going to run hard in New Hampshire, but as you know, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] . . . President Biden is not popular in New Hampshire and the last time he came in fifth.
STEYN: Hmm, that’s true.
RFK: He does not want to run in New Hampshire and so they have taken New Hampshire for the first time in 100 years out of the line-up. That’s bad . . . I think it leaves people with a really bad taste. New Hampshire is a really interesting state because it’s always been the first primary state and it serves kind of as a . . . it’s very cheap to campaign in New Hampshire, there’s only one, you know, you’re in the Boston market for part of the state but it’s very cheap to buy media. And then you do a lot of retail politics, you can’t go there and just buy ads, people will not vote for you, you need to actually go meet people, you need to answer questions, you need to shake hands. And they have these town halls in every town where the Presidents have to go, and people don’t make up their mind until the very end. So there’s this vetting process that takes place that, really, they vet candidates for the rest of the nation, because the rest of that states, you don’t even really have to visit any more. You can just you know, aerial bombard them with money and buy advertising and that’s it. You can’t do that in New Hampshire. You’ve got to go there, and you’ve got to answer questions. And you have the old lady in a nail salon or a diner who reads The Economist every week and you know, Financial Times and she’s asking a question and a follow-up question and another one, that The New York Times will never ask you, CNN will never ask you. And then everybody’s listening. And you know, they really kind of measure your character. And they provided this vetting service for the whole country. And they, you know, and they . . . but President Biden and the DNC are taking that away from them because they know, you know, clearly, I don’t think that he, at this point, wants to go up and go through with that.
STEYN: Let me just ask you a final question here, because you’re talking about it as a normal political campaign. You know from your own family history, what happened to your father in 1968, you’re going up against powerful entrenched interests. There must at the back of your mind, when you look at recent American history and your own family history, are you fearful about what might be the cost of this campaign to you?
RFK: That’s not something I worry about that I, you know, it’s not something that I spend time worrying about. I know that’s a risk because, you know, I was raised in a family where it would be nuts to not think that that was risk. But I don’t, you know . . . I think this is important. And there’s things that I’m a lot more frightened of, Mark, than death. And one of those would be you know, to have my children grow up in a country where they didn’t have freedom of speech. And I’m worried, you know, all of our values that we’ve enjoyed in this country and that it made me proud to be an American are, you know, are degraded or gone. And there was a generation of Americans in 1776, that, you know, that put their lives at stake and their property and their reputations and their fortunes, to give us these constitutional rights, the Bill of Rights, and you know, and many of them died in the process, so that we could have those things. And I don’t think it’s, you know, I think we have to be willing to make sacrifices to keep them if we have to, to hold on to them.
STEYN: Well, amen to that. And God bless you for doing this because the tired old right/left paradigm, the frozen party system for the 150 years since the Civil War doesn’t seem to apply any more. Thank you very much for joining us, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and good luck to you stumping around New Hampshire, you’re quite right, that all the little old ladies expect to talk to you personally, and in some cases, expect to be able to dance with you at the county fair. So you have your work cut out on that.
RFK: I’m looking forward to that.
STEYN: Okay. And we will follow that with great interest. Thank you very much, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.
Before we go time for the most important part of the show, that is you. Sal Tessio, who’s a New Jersey member of the Mark Steyn Club, says: ‘RFK Jr. His presidential candidacy speech from Boston is worth a watch. I certainly don’t endorse his platform as a whole. But RFK does have some interesting things to say regarding the relationship between corporations and government and how crony capitalism damages the middle class. The trough in DC is deep, but not so wide and that’s why you keep hearing the same names over and over, both on the legislative side and the corporate side. Who if anyone will end that unholy alliance?’ Yeah, it’s interesting the way that as he was just saying about Ukraine, you know, the same names crop up over and over such as Victoria Nuland, you know, administrations come and go, but she keeps popping back up and there is no polling station on earth that you can go to vote out Victoria Nuland. Scott, who’s a first month member of the Mark Steyn Club from Pennsylvania, says ‘I used to believe’ – this is what we were saying just a moment ago – ‘I used to believe in that right versus fight and was cheerleader for the GOP team. That was a mistake though once I realised the fight is really between control and liberty. The elites want to control us and restrict any type of freedom. The left versus right fight pushed by the mainstream media is meant to be a distraction.’ Yeah, it’s almost like it’s just some cheapo Punch and Judy show to distract the masses. Scott continues, ‘I may not agree with everything Naomi Wolf or RFK Jr have to say on all the issues. If I agree with him 51 per cent of the time, then that is a threat to the elites and the world the elites want to force upon us.’ Yeah, that’s very true. It was an interesting conversation. He’s running on the issues we talk about on this show and the issues that Tucker talked about on his show, until suddenly his show wasn’t there any more. Robert F Kennedy Jr, New Hampshire’s Democrats are determined to defy their national masters and hold an early primary. And the question then becomes whether Joe Biden will decline to play along and if so, what the consequences of that will be. That’ll do it for us. We’re back tomorrow. Stay safe, stay free.
