American Thought Leaders - RFK Jr. Takes on Trump and Biden Over Four ‘Existential’ Issues

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2In this wide-ranging interview, I get independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candid take on the biggest challenges he sees facing America today.What does RFK Jr. see as the path forward when it comes to the rise in chronic diseases among young Americans, big tech manipulation, the Israel-Gaza war, and the threat of communist China?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

the DNC is trying to make sure we don't get ballot access and they're litigating against us, but we've won every case so far. In this wide-ranging interview, I get U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candid take on the biggest challenges he sees facing America today. Our country is facing a series of existential issues. Neither of them can do anything about them. One of those is the debt. We have a $34 trillion debt. We've added a trillion dollars in the last 100 days. The chronic disease epidemic, 6% of kids had chronic disease when my uncle was president.

Today it's 60%. What does RFK Jr. see as the path forward when it comes to TikTok and big tech manipulation, the Israel-Gaza war, and the threat of communist China? Why would we allow a potential adversary of ours to control our food supply? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is

telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your IRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest rated firms in the country, with an A-plus rating with a Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377, that's 855-862-3377, or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Robert Kennedy Jr., such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me.

So you've said you're running to win. Most recent RealClearPolitics poll average is 41 for Trump, 39 for Biden, and 11 for you. How can you be running to win? Well, if you look behind those numbers, first of all, every poll that's been done that looks at me in a head-to-head race, two-person race with President Biden, I win. I win in a landslide. So if it was just me and President Biden in the race, I would beat him in a landslide. In head-to-head races of me against President Trump, I beat him. President Biden loses to him. And my favorability ratings are better

than either of those. So people would prefer all of these data indicate people would prefer to vote for me to the two of them. My challenge is the fear factor. If you ask people, why are you voting for President Biden? They will very rarely say, because he's brought great vigor and energy to the office, and we expect, you know, we expect great new things to happen in the next term. Almost, almost 100% of people will tell you

we're voting for him because we're scared that President Trump's going to get elected and it's going to be the end of the republic. The same is true to a lesser extent of President Trump. A lot of the people who are supporting him are people who fear that President Biden is going to get reelected and get us into a war or do some other, you know, or just deteriorate in office. And so people are voting generally out of fear. Eighty percent of Americans, between 70 and 80 percent, depending on what poll you read,

don't want to vote for either President Trump or President Biden. They don't want to see this contest again. They would rather vote for me. My challenge is, how do I get Americans to vote out of hope rather than out of fear? And that's my challenge over the next six months, to see really if democracy still works. Where President Roosevelt, in 1932, during the convention, said that the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.

And he was saying that because he was watching what was happening in Europe where this global depression had given rise to demagogues of the left in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and from the right in Italy and Spain and Germany and all of them were running on, we're using fear to manipulate public opinion. And that's why President Roosevelt said to the American public, whatever we do, we can't give in to fear. We have to have confidence in our system. What we're supposed to be, the home of the brave, or the land of the free, and the home of the brave. The're supposed to be the home of the brave, the land of the free,

and the home of the brave. The reason that we are the land of the free is because we are the home of the brave. That's always been the presumption. My job is to remind Americans that we can't be responding out of fear. You know, it seems as long as I've been kind of watching politics, people often vote for the sort of the lesser of the two or three or whatever it is, evils, right? It seems like that's a common theme. You're telling me there's barriers to the democratic process playing out here, right? Somehow. I mean, but by the polls, you're still really only polling 11%. One of the barriers is—and this isn't particularly to you—but there's, for example, all these legal cases against former President Trump, like this hush money trial right

now, which I know you've spoken about, and a gag order on him to be able to speak. It might be possible that he actually won't be able to run in the election. He might be in jail or something like that. I mean, that seems to be what a lot of our analysts will say. That's kind of the end game here. That would seem to be a barrier to the democratic process. But in that situation, based on what you're telling me, it's almost like you would actually perform well in that situation

because it would be you and Biden. I'm just curious. It occurred to me as you're saying all this that this is the situation. Yeah, I'm sitting around hoping that something happens to President Trump or President Biden, but it is a very bizarre election year. I'm looking at two candidates right now who are both very, very different by their dispositions, by their personalities, by their ideology, by the way that they relate to people. But on the issues that they really are different from, there's this very narrow Overton window. They differ on guns, they differ on abortion, they differ on transgender rights and the border and a few other culture war issues.

They're all important issues. But our country is facing a series of existential issues and neither of them has even an opinion on them and neither of them can do anything about them. One of those is the debt. We have a $34 trillion debt. We've added a trillion dollars in the last hundred days. It's growing exponentially. The cost of servicing that debt now exceeds our defense budget. Within five years, the cost of servicing the debt will absorb 50 cents out of every dollar that the federal government collects in taxes. Within 10 years, 100%.

So this is existential for our country. It means defaulting on the debt or taking some other radical course that will be devastating to the middle class, to ownership, to everything that we believe in. And yet President Trump and President Biden have no capacity to deal with that issue. And why is that? And why do they never discuss it because those presidents ran up a bigger portion of that debt than any other president in history president trump in just four short years ran up eight trillion dollars which is more than all the

presidents combined from george washington to george w bush 283 years of history. And President Biden is in a rush during his four years to match that. That's an issue neither of them have the capacity, it's an existential issue neither of them has the capacity to resolve. The polarization of our country, which is existential, people look at that and say, how is this ever going to have a good ending? It's worse, it's more toxic than probably any time since the American Civil War,

but it's driven now by these social media algorithms, which are self-executing and self-learning. And those algorithms have discovered that the way to keep people's eyeballs on the site, which is their money-generating capacity, is to feed people a worldview, to feed people information that fortifies their existing worldview. If you're a Republican, you're living next door to a Democrat, and you ask the same question of Google, you'll get two different answers. And each one of you will feel that the answer that you got actually fortifies your, pours concrete on the things you already believe. And so the chasm between us gets deeper and deeper and harder and harder to bridge.

And, you know, something's got to happen. And neither President Trump or President Biden are capable of ending that polarization because both of them are the products of it. Both of them feed it. Both of them are telling their followers, you have of them feed it. Both of them are telling them, telling their followers, you have to vote for me because that person is evil. The chronic disease epidemic, which is gone, 6% of kids were at chronic disease

when my uncle was president. Today it's 60%. Diabetes, which is mitochondrial dysfunction, is now larger. The costs of dealing with it are now larger than our defense budget. Our autism has gone from 1 in 10,000, 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 10,000 in my generation. 70-year-old men today,

1 in, depending on what study you believe, 1 in 10,500 or 1 in 10,000 in my generation, 70-year-old men today, 1 in, depending on what study you believe, 1 in 10,000 of us or 1 in 2,500 of us has full-blown autism. In my kids' generation, it's 1 in every 22 boys, 1 in every 34 kids. This is existential. It's not sustainable, and it's getting worse and worse exponentially.

Both of these presidents were part of the COVID response. They're incapable of challenging the institutions that could actually end that chronic disease epidemic. And if we're going to survive as a nation, we need to end it. Military recruiting is now down, I think, 41 percent this year. And they can't find the people who are capable of just serving anymore. That's just one issue. But the impact on our budget is, again, existential. The addiction to federal to forever wars is existential. President Biden is he's for all these wars.

He's not you know, he's a big proponent of war. If as the as the leading option in U.S. foreign policy, President Trump, on the other hand, has said that he is anti-war, leading option in U.S. foreign policy. President Trump, on the other hand, has said that he's anti-war, but he just colluded with Speaker Johnson and with President Biden to increase the $61 billion to Ukraine.

And when he was in office, he came in office on an anti-war platform, but he appointed John bolton to run nsa and he and mike pompeo to run the cin the state department these are neocon warmongers oh you know if people want more of the same which i don't think anybody wants they can vote for one of those two candidates. I think more and more Americans over the next six months, you know, our job is to say to people you have an option. You don't have to choose those people. And more people want

to vote for me, but they know they're not going to vote because they're scared of wasting their vote and letting one of the other guys win. My job is to convince people that I can win, and once people are convinced that I can win, then I will win. I want to talk a bit about the polarization issue because I noticed you tweeted recently about how you intend to challenge the constitutionality of this new TikTok divestment bill that the president just signed. Now, that's interesting to me because TikTok is, you know, the greatest cedar of that polarization by a regime that is literally, in the language of its dictator, running a people's war against America. And this is arguably one of its most potent weapons, influence weapons.

So I find it difficult to understand why you would view this as a free speech issue if the platform can exist, just not in the hands of a malign regime that seeks to destroy this country. I don't think it's a good thing that China owns part of TikTok. The company that owns TikTok is partially owned by the Chinese government. But I don't think it's a major engine of polarization. I think all the social media sites, I think Instagram is used, Facebook, Twitter, they're all being used. And so the fear is that I haven't actually heard that China is manipulating through TikTok. What I've heard is that they're harvesting data. And that was the justification.

And, you know, there are much greater intrusions by China in our economy that I worry about a lot more. China controlling our food supply, for example, our agricultural landscape, China owns Smith food supply, for example, our agricultural landscape on Smithfield Foods, which I think is a real national security issue. And I don't think we should. It's a colonial model. Smithfield is up to all kinds of mischief on our landscapes and poisoning rivers and streams, poisoning aquifers all around the country, and it controls 30 to 40 percent of our pork production.

So, you know, why would we allow a potential adversary of ours to control our food supply? There is a lot of other things China is doing that we, to me, I think our priorities, you know, I think it's a balance with TikTok. And what I see is that TikTok is for 150 million American users per month, and they're mainly young people. For many of them, it's become a gateway for their entrepreneurial impulses. There are millions and millions of jobs that young people have created on TikTok. I think that's important for this generation. It's critical that they have those kind of options

as the other options are now closing for them. It's also become a vehicle for free speech. A lot of them get their news from that. They communicate with each other. And I think every avenue we have for exercising our free speech is important. And I would preserve it, even looking at the danger that it's being used,

that information is being harvested by China and I have to tell you this, I am worried about China but I'm equally worried about our own intelligence agencies harvesting our data and propagandizing us and in 2012 and 2013, we got rid of the Smith-Mundt Act in this country that forbade the CIA from harvesting data and from propagandizing American citizens. And we know that the CIA has strong, strong ties with Facebook, with Twitter, with Instagram, with Google, with YouTube, with all the other ones. And I think we all have to, everybody just has to assume that any social media that they use, that there are multiple governments that are taking our data and that are doing all kinds of nefarious things with them. And it's, you know, I see what happened in TikTok as this kind of empty posturing by the political classes where they can all flex their muscles and say, I did something against China.

But I don't. I don't think China cares that much about it. And there are things that it gives the illusion that they're doing something real about China when it's just, to me, an empty gesture. And if we're going to worry about defense or intelligence apparatus from various countries mining our data, we should start with the United States. There's a lot of other stuff to worry about. You know, the arguments that I've heard about, you know, the concerns about this TikTok divestiture, forcing it, would be that it would become, you know, another tool of the blob or the

security state or something like that. And that's, I can see why people would be concerned, given the record we've seen over the last few years. Just it strikes me as kind of nihilistic to leave that power in the hands of the Chinese regime, which by the way, the algorithm for TikTok is actually not just a proprietary secret for TikTok, but it's a state secret for China. You know what I would say then would be a better way to handle that, is to make it mandatory for all of the social media companies to have transparent algorithms.

And you're doing something actually that's real. And, you know, I've spent a lot of time with Jack Dorsey, and I said to him on a number of occasions, what is the best thing we can do to stop this manipulation? Because we're all being manipulated by social media, of course. And it's dangerous, the level at which, and particularly as AI develops and they can figure out how to stimulate this neuronal activity in the reptilian core of our brains, and manipulate us in ways that we don't even understand,

and then bend and distort reality so that all of our perceptions are now under their control and in doubt. It's really terrifying. And I said to Jack Dorsey, how do we deal with that? And he said, you've got to make the algorithms transparent. So we're still going to be manipulated by them, but people will have a choice. Somebody can say, I want a Republican algorithm. Somebody will say, I want a Democratic algorithm. Some will say, I want a Chinese algorithm or an anti-Chinese, whatever.

But at least we'll know how we're being manipulated. And I said to Jack Dorsey, that's kind of ingenious. And it seems like common sense. I said, why doesn't Congress do it? He said, I've testified five times. I've told them the same thing every time. And it doesn't make a ripple. So I think the point you make is a good one. but we should apply it across the board. Yeah, that seems reasonable. I want to talk about, at the beginning, you were talking about this democratic process that we're in. And like you said, we're being manipulated all the time.

I mean, Dr. Robert Epstein, off the top of my head, has shown that you can manipulate people's vote using a Google-like system if they were undecided without them even realizing they've shifted their view. Our election processes are constantly being influenced in all sorts of ways. And in your situation, it seems like you've got quite a few large entities against you. And I just want to understand how that's playing out. You're fighting for ballot access in all the states. I don't know how that's going. Are you being stopped in these areas? I know there were problems. The Democratic Party is trying to make sure we don't get ballot access, and they're litigating against us, but we've won every case so far

and we're on track to get ballot access in every case. By the time this show airs in a week from now, we'll have three, we already have nine states where we've collected enough signatures to get on the ballot. We'll have another three by the time this show airs in major states, and we're holding them because we wanna give the DNC as little time as possible to go through and challenge our signatures. Or maybe, you know, in some cases, they've actually called up people who have signed

one at a time to get them to change their minds. And that's been upheld by, you know, by one of the courts. So we don't want to give them those opportunities. Fascinating. And then, you know, in terms of other kinds of manipulation, we see the mainstream media, which is very much aligned with the DNC, which is, you know, under a constant attack on us. We see a lot of sort of fingerprints of, you know, nefarious activities by intelligence

agencies and others that are, you know, seem to be very hostile to our campaign. But there is no way for us to ascertain exactly what is happening with those kind of interventions. What is the most damaging thing that your faith, your campaign is facing, would you say? And what would be a solution to it? I mean, some of it is just sort of systemic corruption with the media. I mean, honestly, Epoch Times is one of the last readouts of real journalism in this country. And I'm not saying that to

flatter you you know I've said that to you before and I read the Epoch Times every day and I do that because it's very rigorous about you know about good reporting and about ethical reporting and truthful reporting, and almost everybody else now is agenda-driven. It used to be that the mainstream media, in my view, that Fox News was the first of the networks to really just openly do agenda-driven news, and now they all do it. And worst of all, the mainstream media is unquestioning about government pronouncements now.

It used to be that the job of the media was this fear or skepticism toward government pronouncements and toward the pronouncements of large accretions of power like corporations, not just government. But today their job, and particularly during COVID, we saw this great shift in the media where their to ask questions of government officials, not to constantly assault you with the mantra that you should trust the experts, trust the experts, trust your government, trust the institutions and obey them. Trust and obey, the good people do that. I saw so many times when people were chided by, by comedians, or doing their own research, by Stephen Colbert and the people who used to be,

the Lenny Bruce that was always, comedy was about questioning governments and looking at the, and ridiculing the absurdities of, you know, large accumulations of power. And now they've become the ridiculers of little people who question power. That's dismaying for democracy. And that hurts your chances. That hurts our campaign because we're an insurgency. And if you look at who runs the Democratic Party and Republican Party now and who funds it. It's these giant corporations, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, which own all the defense companies, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, State Street and Vanguard.

And they have the contracts to destroy Ukraine. And then Blackstone got the contracts to rebuild it. So they're digging the hole and filling it up and making money on both ends. And pharmaceutical companies are all owned by those same giant investment firms and the pharmaceutical companies are making people sick and then selling them the treatments for lifelong chronic disease and the government is their partner and you just it's this extraordinary growth of really a corporate kleptocracy of an oligarchical or colonial or feudal style of government rather than the exemplary democracy that America is supposed to be. I've heard you say this a number of times in interviews I've

watched with you that President Trump vowed to drain the swamp, but he failed to drain the swamp. Now, the swamp, so to speak, acted very aggressively against him. We have the Russia gate. You can imagine a Russia gate going on, how that would, let's say, limit your ability to act as a president and change policy and do the so-called draining and so forth. Or now you have all these different lawsuits, which I think a lot of people believe are politically motivated. How would it be different for RFK Jr. presidency, you know, given what we know is possible and frankly, it's happening as we speak? Well, you know, I agree with you. I think that there is, you know, particularly the enforcement agencies, very disturbing how they become politicized. and I can see it with my own

campaign in the Secret Service protection has been denied me and it's the politicization of an enforcement agency but also in my cases you know my case against Kennedy versus Biden which I've won now in the United States Court of Appeals, where we saw all these agencies involved in censoring Americans. I was one of those Americans, but I'm not talking about this as a personal issue. You had the CIA, the FBI, the CISA, the IRS, you had the NIH, CDC, and FDA all involved and all given access to portals to the social media sites where they could go in and manipulate people's postings and remove

people and slow walk them and shadow ban them. That's frightening. The government is now politicized to that extent. I think the thing that opened my eyes up most was when all those CIA agents, current and former, signed the letter to the American public about assuring us that Hunter Biden's laptop was a fake. And right before the election, that was election manipulation by the intelligence agencies who are supposed to stay out of politics. And as it turns out, the laptop was real. And yet the CIA, the most powerful people in the CIA were assuring the

American public at a critical time in our history at time that was calculated to influence the result of the election that it was that it was fake and so and we saw this you know all over as you sayagate, and I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's. This is terrible for America. My father, when he got into the Justice Department his first week, he brought all the branch chairs and division chairs and he said, number one rule, we stay out of politics. We never ask whether somebody is Democrat or Republican, if we're going to prosecute them. We keep politics completely out of this institution.

And that, you know, was more or less, with some exceptions, during the Nixon administration, when Nixon tried to, you know, get the CIA and the FBI to do, you know, to get involved in politics, but that was scandalous at the time. People, everybody in our country was outraged when that came out, but now it's become, the liberal media embraces it and says, yeah, they should be involved because it's the only way to stop Trump,

and they're creating presidents that, you know, really harken the end of our, you know, of our democracy. I'm very, very worried about that. We're seeing it now every day. I get, you know, it is a tough question, right, to answer. I certainly don't know the answer of how to prevent that if the system doesn't like you as a candidate. Well, yeah, and that was your question that I didn't get to. I feel that I have more competence in actually addressing the issue as president if I get in there. I've spent my career litigating against

these agencies so I'm not intimidated against them. I've said before that when you sue an agency like NIH, FDA, EPA, USDA, all of which I've sued, you get a PhD in corporate capture and you understand how to unravel it. And I know in many of those agencies, the individuals that have to be moved. I know I'm aware of the perverse incentives that have to be dismantled that put corporate capture on steroids. For example, FDA gets 50 percent of its budget from outside sources, mainly pharmaceutical companies. And IH scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs they develop.

These are the regulators who are supposed to be looking for problems in those products and protecting us against them. But now they're getting $150,000 a year forever on that product and they're paying for their boat and their car and their children's education and their mortgages and you know their alimonies or whatever with that money and that has necessarily or inevitably as a corrupting influence. And we have to get rid of those, what I call preserves incentives.

The most difficult agency to reform is the CIA. And that really is kind of the core of deep state. And my father had a plan for reorganizing the CIA. In fact, the plan that he had was originally developed by my uncle, by President Kennedy. Interestingly, that document was recently released. It was a memo by Arthur Sledge and Dick Goodwin recommending how to reorganize the CIA to make it conform to American democratic priorities rather than what it has become, which is a government, a secret government, into itself with secret budgets and zero accountability, zero assessment of blowback from all of its operations,

and able to now work domestically to propagandize our people because the CIA doesn't have any barriers anymore because the dismantlement of the Smith-Montag Act is no longer strictly illegal for them to do that. If, theoretically, President Trump is not able to run or not allowed to run or something happens. How would you react to that situation? Well, it depends. First of all, even if President Trump were convicted, he would still be able to run. There's, you know, there's only three requirements in the constitution for running for president, one is that you're born in this country, two that you're a

citizen in this country, and three that you're over 35 years of age. Oh, you could theoretically be serving time in prison and be elected president. There's nothing in the Constitution that prevents that. I think the polling shows that if he is convicted that he does lose some of his, a significant number of his followers. I don't know how that bears out in real life, but you know, six months from now is light years from now. I'm just taking it one day at a time, and keep trying to tell the truth to the American people. And if there is an appetite for the truth in our country,

I will be president, and, you know, I'll be elected next November. You seem to go out of your way not to say overly bad things about anybody. That's my observation. Recently, I want to give you an opportunity to respond to something that President Trump said. He said, I take Biden over Jr. You've read this, I'm sure. But specifically, his views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy. How do you react to that? I mean, my reaction is that, let's debate that. Let's have a congenial, respectful debate. President Trump is arguably the best debater,

at least in modern political history, and probably since Lincoln-Douglas debates. Even more devastating, the way that he went through 16 Republican candidates you know as somebody who um who had no political experience previously and just you know uh it was like a you know like a bullfighter and he got up there and masterfully just dispatched every single one of his opponents. So I think he's certainly the most formidable debater that we've seen in this century. And, you know, he shouldn't be intimidated about voting or about debating me on the stage.

I know that he's been calling for President Biden to debate him. But I'd like to talk about those issues with him. I'd like to talk to him about why he came into office saying that he was going to treat the government like a business. And he had a special argument for that. And then he closed down all of our businesses during COVID after saying he wasn't going to do it. Why did he run up the biggest dent in history? Why did he shift 4.3, his policies shifted $4.3 trillion from the American middle class, the super rich?

He knew during the pandemic that hydroxychloroquine worked. He said it, and then his bureaucrats rolledloroquine worked. He said it. And then his bureaucrats rolled him, and he let them do it. And that's the problem. I think he has good instincts about a lot of the things that he wants to do. But he doesn't have the ability to stand up to his bureaucracy. That's why I will argue to him when I'm on the stage with him that he should not be given a second chance at the presidency. We have this Israel-Gaza war that's happening right now. On the other hand, in America itself, we have these protests that are happening. Columbia University has been the one that

I've been following the closest. Some pretty extreme views being voiced, not even from the river to the sea, but people actually saying, you know, death to the Jews and this kind of stuff. It seems like there's something bigger going on than just a war over there. I was wondering how you view that whole situation. Well, I mean, my views on the Gaza war are, you know, I'm very much on the record saying, I am against war, but there are a few moral wars. World War II was a moral war. I don't think any of the other wars we fought in the last hundred years, there have all been wars of choice, including World War I. We were attacked by World War II by an implacable enemy that was sworn to the destruction of

all the Western institutions of democracy and humanitarian considerations. I think Israel is in the same position now. It's, you know, Hamas is an implacable enemy that's content with nothing but the annihilation of Israel. It's been attacking Israel for 16 years, 2,000 rockets a year. Israel has exercised extraordinary forbearance by not going into Gaza earlier

any other nation would have. And that, you know, Hamas has, part of its charter is that it's against Islamic law to even negotiate with Israel and accept as a ruse. How do you have a ceasefire with an organization like that that's pledged to your destruction, the extermination of your people? The question you asked is a more difficult question. To me, there's a clear moral right and wrong in this case. But, and I think there's a tremendous amount of moral confusion on the US campuses. There's a tremendous amount of ignorance about the history.

There's clashing narratives and Hamas is winning the international propaganda debate on US campuses. And how do you deal with that without interfering with free speech? That's a huge question because I'm a free speech absolutist. And I think the answer is different on private campuses versus state campuses. The private campuses have all kinds of rules that are designed to protect non-white people. I think they're good rules. They're community standards. If you're a private organization, you can do that.

And if you have those rules, then you ought to have the same rules applied to Jewish students. So the things that, you know, those kind of statements that you mentioned are punished and punished, you know, with very certain discipline. I think it's harder when you're a state school because the government, when the government gets into the realm of censorship, there's a lot of other problems. So it's more complex. Okay. I want to read your statement. You said, we ought to have foreign policy that restores America as the embodiment of moral authority around the world. What is it that would that would give america that moral authority back without endangering the world yeah or ourselves correct i would cut the military budget we we now spend more than the next 10

nations combined and we can't afford it and that you know the real strength of a nation as my grandfather always pointed out comes from a strong economy. And the other strengths follow, but you have to have a strong economy and we're bankrupting our country now. And we're spending much more on the military than we need to. We need to arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders, make ourselves too expensive to ever invade. We need enough money to earn enough investment to you know protect the sea lanes protected to protect neutral areas like the Antarctic and to have a

two-strike capacity around the world but During the height of the Cold War We had the equivalent which was when Eisenhower was president. we had the equivalent military budget of about $500 billion today. If I can jump in just for one second, you said a couple of things. One is that you want to decrease the military budget. On the other hand, we should arm ourselves to the teeth, i.e. is this peace through strength? That's what I heard when you said that, to protect ourselves. At home, around our borders.

As opposed to doing military interventions outside. That's kind of what I'm the corollary. But we have communist China, biggest adversary financially by a long margin, arming itself to the teeth in a, let's say, proactive direction. Some people might contend with this idea that we have to reduce the budget, but we have to actually spend on protecting ourselves. Have you actually made that equation work? I think there's a number of problems with our military in the modern era. And the things that we're spending money on and the deterioration of the American military.

Our equipment doesn't work, our planes don't work, we're not recruiting enough people, our recruitments are way down below a safety level and the money that is getting spent is being spent wrongly. There's a lot of things that have to be rethought. Our whole relationship with NATO is based upon the idea that we can get a million men across the Atlantic to deal with the war in Europe. And today with hypersonic missiles, it's doubtful that we can do that, that our entire 12 aircraft carrier fleet will be at the bottom of the Atlantic within the first 24 hours.

China and Russia have those missiles. We need a capacity that actually works. That's the most important thing. But also, we're overextended all over the world. We have 800 bases. The Chinese have one or two. Russia has one or two. China has made itself an expert at projecting economic power abroad.

We've lost the war with them in Latin America. They're now the primary creditor in almost every nation in Latin America. The same is true in China. The rise of BRICS is an illustration of the bankruptcy of our single-minded reliance on military. It's weakening us against China. I'm not scared of going head to head with China in economic,

projecting economic power and competing with them. I think we can out-compete them. But, you know, the way that we're competing now, which is, you know, solely leading with the military, I think is actually weakening us. Okay. Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

Happy to come back anytime, Jan. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.