Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/13/23 EXCLUSIVE: RFK JR Returns To Breaking Points

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Krystal and Saagar are joined again by RFK Jr to discuss his 2024 presidential run and a range of topics concerning Biden's age, Elon and Freedom of Speech, UFO's and more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and we need to talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone

breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops.

They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. All right, guys. Very excited to welcome back to the program RFK Jr. He, of course, is presidential candidate, activist, and author. Great to see you, sir.

Good to see you, sir. Thanks for having me back. It's wonderful to be back with you. Yeah, it's truly our pleasure. Wanted to get off the top your reaction to breaking news. Of course, we have new charges filed against former President Trump with regards to his handling of classified documents and alleged obstruction. Just wanted to get your reaction to those indictments. You know, I don't know enough about them. I mean, I would say this, and I'm not giving you anything special,

any kind of special inside information or insight. I thought the New York case was a very weak case. And if I had been a prosecutor, I would not have brought it, mainly because it's the president of the United States. And so you have to kind of tiptoe through the minefields of your prosecutor because you want to avoid the optics that this is a political prosecution.

In the United States, we've always tried to avoid those optics. But this case looks much stronger. And the reason, to me, it's surprising is because the judge penetrated the attorney-client privilege, which almost never happens. And, you know, normally the conversations between an attorney and a client are privileged and no court can look at those. But in this case, the exception is if the attorney and the client are plotting a crime together or involved in sort of some kind of criminal conspiracy, then the courts will allow that to be penetrated. And once the determination is made and that threshold is passed, where the court says,

okay, you can now look at conversations between the client and its attorney, it is really, really, it'll be mayhem for the client because a client was having those conversations assuming nobody would ever see them and that he could say anything he wanted. I think that makes this case look very real and I think very dangerous for President Trump. Sir, would you ever consider a pardon for President Trump? I wouldn't even talk about that at this point. Got it. Gotcha. We wanted to ask you, too, a little bit about your views of current President Biden. So

one of the concerns among the general public and among Democratic primary voters as well is about his age and his just ability to perform the job that is entailed as president of the United States. Do you personally think that Joe Biden is fit to serve as president for another four years? You know, I don't I don't have any idea. I think people around him should be giving him good advice on that. If they think that there's a lack of mental acuity or lack of capacity to deal with crises or lack of independent, you know, an ability to exercise the independent and very good judgment. I think that they have his family and his counselors have an obligation to our country to tell him to step down. But I don't have any kind of insight. And, you know, I see some of the films and stuff. Right.

And you know him, don't you? Yeah, but I haven't seen him in years. And when I had interactions with him, he was always very sharp. And so I don't know what he's like now behind the scenes. I mean, we see him in these kind of bubbles. And so I have no idea how to assess that. Yeah. Well, that's why it'd be good to have debates so that the American people how to assess that. Yeah. Well, that's why it'd be good to have debates so that the American people could assess for themselves.

I agree. Sir, one of the interesting things in primary differences between yourself and President Biden that you've been talking about is the way that you would approach the war in Ukraine. So I'm curious. Right now, we see recent polling have in front of me about 79% of Democrats say, according to Axios Ipsos, say that they support continuing military aid to Ukraine. Since you are a Democratic candidate, how do you plan on changing some of people's minds within the Democratic base about the U.S. approach to Ukraine? I mean, my only way of doing that is to continue talking about it and continuing to sort of get people to, you know, I don't think you even have to change people's minds about whether, you know, clearly Putin is, you know, broke the law. He's a gangster.

You know, this was a brutal invasion that could have been avoided. And I don't think you need to change people's minds about that. I think we all want peace. And the number of Ukrainians who have now died, some estimates are over 350,000 of the kids, Ukrainian kids on the front lines, and then 14 or 15,000 civilians. And that's not good for anybody. And then 100,000, 30 to 80,000 Russians. And, you know, nobody, it's just not good for anybody. We should be looking for paths to peace. And I think most America, if you frame the polling question, should we be looking for paths to peace. And I think most America, if you frame the polling question,

should we be looking for paths to peace? I think most people will agree that we should be, that this is not good for anybody. And it's definitely not good from a geopolitical strategy for us because it's, you know, we said, well, we're going to bankrupt Russia, but we're really destroying the economy in Europe and pushing Russia into the embrace with China, which is the worst geopolitical outcome that we could possibly have. So I don't think this is good for us. It's not good for America, certainly. of the war is enormous, $113 billion so far. The entire budget of EPA is $12 billion a year. The budget for CDC is $12 billion. We have 57% of Americans who cannot put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency. We've just cut food stamps, the SNAP program, to 30 million Americans by 90%. I have a friend who is a commercial fisherman, worked his whole life building his business, but he doesn't have benefits.

And he's now on disability, and he's been surviving on $280 worth of food stamps a month. He got a call on March 1st that that was cut to $25 a month. And try to feed yourself on 90 cents a day. And meanwhile, because we're paying for all these wars and $16 trillion for the lockdowns, we have spiraling inflation, which has driven the cost of primary foodstuffs 76% in two years. So he's dealing with this rising cost of food,

and his food stamps getting cut to $25. That same month, we topped off Ukrainian aid at $113 billion, and we printed $300 billion more for the Silicon Valley banks. And so we got lots in the rich and for the war machine. And yet Americans are really in a place of terrible, terrible hardship. If we took that money that we're giving to the Ukraine, we could pay for all of the food stamps for every American without any cuts at all. And so those are the choices we're making.

We're going to starve people in our country in order to do something that I think we also need to look behind the sort of comic book depictions of this war, that it's a black and white war, which is the same kind of comic book depictions they give us to justify every war. And we need to look at the U.S. role and the series of U.S. provocations that without which this war would probably never have happened. I want to ask you a little bit more. That doesn't exclude Vladimir Putin. It doesn't exclude Vladimir Putin. But we, the neocons in the White House, bear a lot of responsibility for this conflict. Yeah. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about, OK, so if you're president, you're going to cut back the military aid. You're going to seek a diplomatic solution in Ukraine.

What would you do to bolster the economic prospects of the American people? For example, do you support things like a federal jobs guarantee? Do you support a universal basic income? What would your economic platform be to help working class Americans? I mean, my primary platform is to cut the costs on the military, you know, to get what we were told was a peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War in 1992. We were going to cut our military budget from about $600 billion a year to $200 billion

a year. And that, instead of making, you know, a billion-dollar stealth bomber that can't fly in the rain, we were going to take that money and invest it in schools and infrastructure and in rebuilding America. And instead, you know, we've had the military industrial complex running our foreign policy and the neocons. And instead of going down to $200 billion, we're now at $1.3 trillion if you look at all the costs associated with the military. And we need to cut that back to the levels that we were promised, somewhere around those levels. Of course, we need to protect our country. But we can do that by building Fortress America, arming ourselves to the teeth at home, and then spending that money to rebuild the industrial base in this

country and rebuild the middle class. I mean, my job is to rebuild the American middle class. We had a period in this country that I was lucky enough to grow up at the height of, beginning at the end of World War II to about 1980, that's called, economists call it Great Prosperity. It was the, you know, the largest economic growth in the history of the world. We had the biggest and most robust middle class. We had, the middle class was an economic engine that generated half the wealth on the face of the earth from the American middle class. And people wanted our products. People, you know, loved our country, by the way. We were really worshipped around the globe and looked to for moral authority and leadership.

And, you know, and I would like to get back to that kind of America where we focus on building our economy at home rather than wars abroad. And does that, just to clarify, do you support either a federal jobs guarantee or a universal basic income as part of that program? I don't know about that. I need to look at those things, you know, and see, and I need to talk to a lot of economists and talk about the ups and downs of those issues. You know, I can see a lot of problems with those issues, which I think are obvious to anybody. And it's a real departure from American free market capitalism. I'd like to try to give this system a chance to work. What do you think the minimum wage should be, sir? And let me say something about that.

I, you know, the reason I wouldn't just say an outright no to the universal basic income and a guaranteed jobs program is because I don't really understand what AI is going to do to our country and what self-driving, I mean, you know, even with self-driving cars, and I talked to this, to Elon Musk about this a couple of weeks ago, I read an article, and I don't know if this is true or not, that over 40% of American jobs include driving. So if you cut away all the driving cars, which is what the intention and aspiration of this new technology is, I do not know what that's going to do to the American economy. I mean,

we've had big dislocations before, you know, the end of slavery, for example, in our country. And we had to do these big economic readjustments. And then the invention of the automobile, you know, around at the beginning of the 1900s, when you had, you know, if you were a buggy whip manufacturer, that job disappeared, right? Or if you were, you know, a buggy manufacturer, whatever, a stable, those jobs disappeared in a couple of years. But they were replaced by new jobs. And

in most cases, they were better jobs. They were manufacturing jobs in factories. Those were very high paying, and that's what supported the growth of the American middle class. Oh, I do not know. And I'm talking to people right now about this. I had a long talk with Jack Dorsey this morning, and I'm talking with a lot of people in the tech sector about how we're going to prepare ourselves for the AI economy when a lot of human jobs, even the writers in Hollywood, one of the reasons for this right now is that they have chat GBT, which can write a script for you in seconds. And a lot of people, even high-level white-collar jobs,

may be on the chopping block and may disappear. And we may face massive, massive unemployment over the next few years. And I think we really need the best minds in the world to come together and figure out how to protect ourselves against this. And so that's why I wouldn't instantaneously rule out, you know, some kind of universal income or guaranteed jobs, which normally I would be, I would have a lot of antipathy for that because I'm like a free market capitalism guy. But so I don't, you know,

so that's why I'm hedging on that. Gotcha. Just to return to the minimum wage question, assuming, you know, nothing does change. Do you have a specific number that you think the minimum wage should be? I don't have a specific number, but I think people should have a living wage in this country. You know, people should be able to feed themselves. Right now, is it that 35% of Americans could not, are not making enough money to pay for basic human needs? And that means food, transportation, and housing. And that means those Americans are sitting on the precipice of a cliff

that they're inches away from or on top of becoming homeless. And that's a catastrophe for our country. So we have to figure out ways. Raising the minimum wage is one of the ways that we insulate them or improve those or mitigate those outcomes, we ought to be doing that. To your point about when we had a growing middle class, when we had shared prosperity, part of that picture was much higher union density. And I know you've been a vocal supporter of – the writers are on strike right now, vocal supporter of labor unions in general. I wanted to get more specifics for you on what you would do to help rebuild union density and

union membership. As you know, right now, the system is so rigged against workers, it's so difficult for them to even exercise their rights to collectively bargain, exercise their rights to form a union. Do you support things like the PRO Act? Are you at all interested in the sectoral bargaining that Gavin Newsom has been experimenting with in California and that other countries do as well? What are your views there? I mean, we need to rebuild unions in this country because it's one of the key ways that we can counterbalance this. The domination of our government by corporate power, the unions of all ways. When I was a kid, 45% of the labor force was unionized. Today,

it's less than 10%. And that was a counterbalance to corporate power at the national level. And now that is gone. Even the unions that are active are not participating in the way that they used to in politics and the political system, which they need to get to be involved in. We need to protect collective bargaining. The right to work laws are damaging to that. I oppose those. And I support, you know, any way that makes sense of growing the strength of, you know, worker solidarity.

Sir, I've noticed you've gotten quite a bit of support recently from Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs. You had the Twitter spaces with Elon Musk, and at least some of these people are supporting your campaign. Given your support amongst them, how are you going to approach technology companies and whether they should be broken up or not? Well, oddly enough, you know, like the conversation I had with Jack Dorsey this morning was exactly along those lines. And, you know, I'm impressed, and I know a lot of people don't feel this way about Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, but I really find them incredibly patriotic and incredibly committed to democracy. And, you know, I didn't, a lot of those activities

and their behavior was kind of obscure to me while I was on the, I've been on the other end of the censorship. But I did take note very early on in the pandemic that when the White House and Adam Schiff were asking the tech companies to censor people like me who were challenging, you know, a lot of the orthodoxies, the one company that stood up was Twitter. And I also, although Elon Musk is now vilified by the left, which he shouldn't be, he should be, to me, he's a hero. He's a guy who came in and restored free expression on Twitter.

And, you know, I think the left sees that and they say, well, you're letting Donald Trump talk now. But that was not his intention. His intention was to let everybody talk. You know, because he made that choice, he lost billions of dollars. And, you know, he said to me in our conversation, when I asked him about that, he said, it's worth every penny that I lose because we need free speech in America. Because if we don't have free speech in America, we don't have democracy in

America. And if we don't have democracy in America, it's the end of the world. And I feel like he feels that way and that he's going to be a good ally for me when I'm in office and that Dorsey is too, because they have this very, very natal commitment to free speech. And I think they saw these, you know, I mean, you guys remember, we were all promised that the, you know, at the outset of the one that social media was selling itself to us that it was it was going to become the instrument it was going to democratize communications around the world and instead they become the instrument for totalitarian control and it's very ironic but i do think that you know some of these guys at least the ones that I'm talking to, including David Sachs, are absolutely committed to figuring out how to make censorship-proof social media sites.

And they're doing that with Noster. Noster, I think, is the first one, and I think that's really promising. And some of this blockchain technology that's coming out of Bitcoin will be very, very useful. And by the way, you know, I understand that some of my fellow liberals don't like Elon Musk because they think he's giving a voice to Donald Trump and to some of the, you know, Donald Trump supporters. Well, let me speak to that a little bit. I just want to remind you this. In 1977, there was a march by Nazi, by the Nazi, American Nazi party in Skokie, Illinois, through a Jewish neighborhood. And the liberal infrastructure,

including the ACLU and everybody else, turned out to support their right to march. Right. And nobody is agreeing with what they're saying. What they're saying is appalling and repulsive and repellent. But, you know, we need to be willing to die in our country for their right to say those things, because if somebody can censor them, they can censor the rest of us too. And that's just going to end up, you know, benefiting the oligarchy and the military

industrial complex. Well, we actually interviewed Jack Dorsey yesterday, so this is really relevant. And I'm on the left, and I support free speech and anti-censorship as well. I supported bringing Donald Trump back onto Twitter. What has concerned me about Elon Musk's leadership is the places where he hasn't met his free speech commitments. And I'll give you a few specific examples. When he censored journalists who were critical of him, when he bent to demands from the Turkish government ahead of a critical election there to censor journalists who were digging into what Erdogan was up to, also bending to requests from the Modi government in India as well. So what do you say to those critiques of Elon Musk that he actually hasn't lived up to his commitment and his stated principle that he is in favor of free speech

absolutism? Well, you know, I'm not going to, you know, my job is not to defend Elon Musk. But I would bet you this, Crystal, that if you asked him those questions, that he would have a pretty good answer for them. And I can guess that part of it, you know, I don't know why he censored the people who were criticizing him. I know that he did respond to that, but I don't recall what his response was. But one of the things that Dorsey talked to me about this morning was the difficulty of operating in foreign countries. And now all across Europe where they're demanding censorship. Right.

And so you have to make a choice in some of these countries. And, you know, Turkey is not a freedom of speech country. You have to make a choice. Am I going to continue to operate this institution, this country, and bring some of the benefits that it does and the revenue to, you know, my shareholders and my company? Right. Or I'm going to, you know, make a stand here and die on this hill and, and, and, and, you know, report the truth and then be shut down the next day. So I, you know, I don't know what he would say, but I can imagine that those are some of the really difficult choices he was, he was forced to make. Yeah. Well, that is actually what he did

say in response is that his commitment to free speech goes as far as the laws of a certain country provide, which raises a lot of questions. This is actually what Jack Dorsey brought up with us yesterday, is that when Dorsey was head of Twitter, he tried to take a more global approach. This is in his words. So he received requests from the Indian government. They either threatened or actually did raid his offices, according to him. They pulled staff from the country and were They either threatened or actually did raid his offices, according to him. They pulled staff from the country and were, you know, concerned about operating there, but they didn't accede to the demands. So what is your view of the way that those things should be handled? Because, you know, if you look at any sort of totalitarian government, they're going to have egregious anti-free speech laws on the books. Is the responsibility of

someone who claims to be a free speech advocate to stand up to those governments or just to abide by whatever the law is and whatever that authoritarian government demands? Yeah, Crystal, I think that's a really good question and it's a really troubling issue. And I think the, you know, right now it's becoming more and more difficult because there are competitors within those countries that have the ability to completely replace, you know, institutions like Twitter. Twitter and, you know, some of these other social media companies are now no longer all powerful. You know, if you go to China, each one of them has competitors there. And if you drive the American companies out, is the country going to be, and is free speech more likely to be protected or not?

I don't know. I think all of those, I don't think at this point, there's probably any hard and fast answer. And I suspect, although I'm not an expert on this, that Jack Dorsey, it was an easier decision when he made it than it probably is for Elon today because of the changing landscapes of social media and the growth of indigenous companies within those, you know, I say, tyrannical systems. Sir, just two last questions for you. I'm curious what your view is of corporations like Bud Light getting involved in Pride Month and in trans issues. I would say those are strategy choices for them. And my understanding of Bud Light is that they probably regret having made that choice because there was such a strong consumer reaction.

And that's probably the best way to work things rather than, you know, for them to make their own decisions about how to operate and how to keep their consumers. I mean, listen, I would love companies to do the right thing on the environment, even if it's against their economic interests, you know, and I'd love it if we had law. But it's not a reliable way to change policy. You know, you need laws that are actually enforceable, that do what, you know, what laws in a democracy are supposed to do, which is to encourage support and reward good behavior and then to punish bad behavior. Sure. If we want to do it in a reliable way,

we need to do it through legislation rather than to rely on, you know, corporate goodwill. If corporations want to act in ways that are sociable, you know, I commend them, but... Can't rely on that. Yes, certainly. Point well taken. Last question on my pet issue

that I know a lot of people want to know. Will you declassify all UFO-related documents as president? Yeah, let me ask you something. Oh, please. Did you see this article last week about the guy, about the military? We've covered it extensively here, yeah. And do you think that that was a psy-op or do you think that that was real? I believe it was real based upon a lot of credible people who I know who have spoken with him and

have vetted him. What do you think? Why don't you tell people what we're talking about? Sure, sure. Yeah. For those who don't know, Dave Grush, he's a whistleblower, came forward through the intelligence community process. He says that multiple alien spacecraft are in the possession of the United States government. The inspector general of the intelligence community says that he is highly credible and is bringing forward urgent information. And actually, several representatives in Congress were asked about it just 30 minutes or so before you and I spoke.

And many of them, including Senator Gillibrand, Senator Hawley, bipartisanship, if you will, all said that they were credible and that they had asked the intelligence community about that and it, quote-unquote, rang true, at least in some cases. Yeah, well, I can't wait to be president of the United States and dig into that one. That's really, that is fascinating. What is your view of the UFO phenomenon? Just your personal view.

I don't really, I mean, I don't know anything about it other than I'm very, very good friends with Dan Aykroyd, who's kind of devoted his life to studying that phenomenon and is you know very very convinced of it but i've never seen a ufo and uh but you know i also the stuff that i've read you know of people you know particularly the navy pilots who have you know who have recorded these encounters seem uh you know, I'm certainly not going to dismiss it. It seems like it's real, but I don't have a good grasp on it. But I mean, that article you were talking about

was fascinating because it was just exactly what Men in Black said is actually happening, that, you know, they gave us Velcro and all of this other stuff. Yeah. Well, I always say, I mean, I try to keep the skeptic hat on and say it's hard for me to imagine that they'd be able to have this cover-up across multiple governments, across multiple decades, administrations, all these years. But I have a feeling you might dispute the possibility of such a cover-up occurring. Exactly, especially what happened to your own family.

Sir, I know your staff says you've got to get out of here, so I just want to say thank you very much for joining us. It was really a pleasure to speak with you again, and you are welcome back on the show anytime. Love talking to you. Thank you, sir. I love coming on the show, so thank you very much for having me. Thank you, sir. It's our pleasure.

Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month and We Need to Talk is tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide listen to we need to talk from the black effect podcast network on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast i know a lot of cops they get asked all the time have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart Podcast.