The Eric Metaxas Show - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Continued)
Episode Date: July 15, 2024We continue our conversation with lawyer, activist, and Independent Presidential candidate Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Socrates in the City stage ...
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Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blob, starring Steve McQueen?
The Blood-Curdling threat of The Blob.
Well, way back when Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because the blob was supposed to eat them.
But he kept spitting him up.
Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster.
Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.
Eric the Texas!
Folks, welcome to the Eric the Taxes Show.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with RFK Jr. for Socrates in the City.
Please go to Socrates and the Cityplus.com for this and other incredible conversations.
And now my interview with RFK Jr.
You know, greed, it's hard to pretend like it's okay.
I mean, everybody wants money, everybody wants to get a pension.
But what you're describing has done unspeakable evil to many, many human beings.
And you, it seems to me that you're part of the answer to my, the second part of the question,
where did this come from, that you were willing to speak out against these kinds of things?
Was your awareness of this?
And by that, do you mean...
For you to become outspoken on this.
What inclined me?
Or what discovery was it that made me say, hey, the building is burning down?
Not just that, but to be willing to be called, to be vilified, to be called a conspiracy theorist by, you know, the entire establishment, to be willing to suffer those slings and arrows, you know, why were you willing to do that?
a sense that it was right and that you had to be a voice for those people.
Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. One is, I was, I think I was raised in a milieu where, you know,
you were, I've told this story before, but my dad, about two weeks before he died, my dad
gave me this book to read by Camus, which is called The Plague, and it's about a dog.
That's not a typical dad move.
You're aware.
I know, but he would give me periodically books to read or poems to read.
But he gave me this book with a special intent and he said,
you need to read this.
Oh, I never read it before he died.
And after he died, I read it several times in order to kind of decode, you know,
what the message was that it seemed like an important message that he was trying to give me.
The book is about a medical doctor in a quarantined city in northern Europe, and there's a plague ravaging the city.
I have a very, very high infection fatality rate.
Nobody knows how to treat it.
And a lot of the beginning of the book is the doctor having a conversation in his own head.
Should I go out of my apartment?
Because if I do, I'm probably going to die.
I'm not going to be able to help anybody anyway.
So isn't it just the most prudent thing to lock by yourself in here and wait this out?
and eventually he goes out and he does his job
consoling people, et cetera.
And Camus was an existentialist.
He was the legatee of the ideology of stoicism,
which was a Greek and Roman,
a philosophy, a very, very beautiful approach to life.
And that my father really,
was heavily influenced by after the death of his brother.
My father was always a Roman Catholic.
In order to process his brother's death
to make sense of this disorderly universe,
he began exploring other philosophies.
He read the Greeks.
He read the, you know, Edith Hamilton,
he read the poets, he read Shakespeare,
and a lot of existentialists.
And he really integrated stoicism into his own character,
And the kind of iconic hero of stoicism is Sisyphus.
And Sisyphus was a man who had done a favor of humanity
that the God that had displeased the gods.
They cursed him to push him older up the hill all day long, every day for eternity.
And his job was to push it over the hill, but he could never get over the top.
When he got to the top of the hill, just before he pushed it over,
it would roll back on him and mangle him.
and then roll down the hill, and he'd spend all night long walking back down the hill to the boulder,
and then he'd push it up again.
And in the view of many people, Sisyphus would have been a miserable person.
But in the view of the Stoics, he was an insanely happy man,
because he had a job, he knew what it was, and he put his shoulder to the stone.
Did Camus write a book called The Myth of Sisyphus?
Yeah.
And he wrote about
since his smiles.
And it was,
the message was that, you know,
life is not supposed to be easy.
Life is supposed to be hard.
And it's,
and but that out of that hardship,
that pain is the touchdown
for spiritual growth.
That we do not grow without a hardship,
without discipline.
And that in doing and taking our own task,
and performing that task, even if it's unpleasant,
even if you're surrounded by people who don't like you or hate you or deride you,
that you're bringing order to a chaotic universe,
and you're kind of throwing down a gauntlet at the gods
at the absurdity of life,
and you're bringing order to it,
and you're bringing ultimately a kind of joy to it.
I thought you were going someplace when you mentioned that you're
gave you the plague by Camus. That's the book that he gave you. And that you were going to say
something about the plague or whatever. But also, I should interject. Well, Camus, I followed Camus
to try to figure it. Right. Now, you know what almost no one knows, and it's in the book that I gave
to you, published by Skyhorse, our mutual publisher, also Woody Allen's. Camus at the end of his
life became a Christian. No one knows this. And I talk about it in my book, just a note.
But to go back to what you're saying, because there's so much here, there are nefarious,
you know, forces at work. The way they have tried to silence you on these issues, what many of us
have lived through in the last, you know, since the, since COVID, it's, it's a very, it's
It's dark stuff, but I think that as a result of what happened very recently with COVID,
a lot of people have woken up and a lot of people have begun to ask questions.
And I think that what we today might call the deep state, I mean the vast bureaucracy
that insists that you go along with a certain narrative, Eisenhower called the military
industrial complex.
And it seems to me, just going back to kind of where you got something.
of your instincts from to stand against this.
It seems to me that your uncle and to some extent your father were in the 60s at war with these
forces.
And I think you have said that you believe that the CIA was involved in your uncle's murder.
I mean, most of us grew up in a world where we kind of thought, yeah, that's probably
conspiracy theory. It's too complicated. We'll just go along with it. Yeah, yeah, the Warren
Commission's probably wrong, but we don't want to go there. But in more recent years,
people like me, I think increasingly have gone there and have said, what's going on?
What's the narrative beneath the narrative? We've been told this and this and this, you know,
and I think more people are waking up to that, more people are receptive to the idea that
if the medical establishment says take that jab or that vaccine or whatever, that may be
you shouldn't. Maybe you should think for yourself. Maybe you should be careful what you eat.
So I want to go back to the murder of your uncle. At what point did you realize what we're talking about?
Because I just want to say, as a patriotic American, the idea that there would be forces in our own government
capable of that, very, very hard to process. At what point did you begin to think about that?
Well, I'll say something about this, that Eisenhower gave that speech on January 17, 1961.
It was my birthday.
It was three days before my uncle took the office, which I was present for.
Eisenhower didn't do that on my birthday deliberately.
He was...
And they're not having the debate on my birthday deliberately.
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You sheltered me from home.
It was his farewell address.
It was this extraordinary speech.
And incidentally, if you read that speech,
was very short.
And he warned the emergence of a military industrial complex
that it would subvert democracy
and destroy all of our values
and destroy our country from within.
In the next paragraph, he said,
and equally bad, the rise of a federal medical scientific establishment that would destroy
public health and destroy the credibility of science, et cetera. It's very, very prescient,
really brilliant speech. And to me, it should be required reading for every kid in the school
kid. My uncle spent three years battling his military industrial complex.
refusing to go to war.
He refused to send troops to allow us.
He refused to in the 61.
He refused to send troops during the Bay of Pigs in 61.
He refused in 62 to go into Berlin and the checkpoint Charlie crisis.
He refused to go into Cuba again in 62 during the 63 in the missile crisis.
And then he refused to send combat troops to Vietnam.
He said, he ended up, they wanted 250,000 combat troops, and he said, no, I'm not going to do it.
And then he ended up sending 16,000 advisors who weren't allowed to participate in combat.
He found out in October, they did anyway, they mainly green berets and helicopter pilots.
He found out on October 22nd, 1962, he learned that a green beret had died.
he asked Walt Rausel for a casualty Liz
and Rausel came back and said
75 men have died
and he said that's too many
we're bringing them all home
that afternoon he signed
National Security Order 263
ordering all
U.S. military personnel
out of Vietnam with the first thousand
coming back
the following in December
30 days to the day that he signed that order
he was murdered
and a week later President Johnson remanded that order
and ended up sending 250,000 troops
my father ran against the war in 68
he was killed during that campaign
and then Nixon came in and sent 560,000 and 56,000
never came home including George Skakel who's over here
we have another cousin called
George Skakel who died in the Tet Offensive, so he was one of the people who never came home.
But my uncle, when my uncle, you asked when I first occurred to me, it occurred to me while I was
standing in the East Room in the White House in November 24, 1963, with my uncle's casket.
And President Johnson came in and said that the person who killed my uncle, Lee Harvey-Azwell,
had just been shot and killed murdered in the police station by a man named Jack Ruby.
And, you know, when they, when Johnson turned around, I was with my mother with Jackie and my father at the time.
I turned to my mom and I said, why did he do that? Did he love our family?
So my brain was already, this doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, later it turned out that he was.
gun runner for the mob, you know, and was involved in the Cuba operations, et cetera.
Now, I won't try to convince anybody that the CIA killed my uncle.
There's 100 books on it at least.
The best book, an extraordinary scholar who does a really good job
at distilling all of the, you know, the millions of pages of research,
the 100, I think at least 30 people who were involved directly in the murder
have made full confessions, a lot of them on their deathbeds.
And the person who distills that, I think, better than any of the other books, is Jim Douglas
in his book, which is called The Unspeakable.
So anybody who's curious about that, and you want to just read one book, that would be,
to me, the book to read.
My father, and then, you know, the CIA has, for 60 years, prevented the release of the documents.
And we know the agents involved.
We know Bill Harvey was involved.
We know David Adley Phillips.
We know exactly what they were doing.
And then there's things that we don't know.
But E. Howard Hunt, who made a full confession,
deathbed confession, and many others.
My father's death, I always assumed,
was that Sir Anne, Sir Rand killed my father.
He made a full confession, and he was then, there were 77 eyewitnesses.
And so it never, ever occurred to me that he did not kill my dad.
And then a guy called Paul Schrad, who was a union leader.
He was the number three guy at the UAW, the United Auto Workers, a very close friend with my father.
He had recruited Cesar Chavez to the labor movement.
And Cesar Chavez became one of my father's closest personal friends and political allies.
And Paul Shraid was standing next to my father when he was shot.
And Paul took the first bullet in his head.
He lived to be 95 years old, and he died about two years ago.
And the last 20 years of his life, he was fighting to get Sirhan out of jail.
He asked me to come to his house and read the autopsy report,
which believe me was the last thing I wanted to do.
Because of his closeness to my father
and because of this sacrifice he made,
I ultimately went there
and I sat down at his kitchen table and read this report
and that was the first time it occurred to me
that Surahan had not killed my father.
And the autopsy report by Thomas Gucci,
Noguchi was the most important coroner in American history,
that autopsy is known as the perfect autopsy
because Noguchi knew what had happened in Dallas,
where there was all this, you know, screwy stuff of the autopsies.
And he was determined that would not happen in Los Angeles.
So he invited the chief coroner of all the branches of the armed service
to observe and other famous coroners to observe his autopsy.
And they were all in the theater at that time,
and he did this autopsy that is extraordinary.
And what he found was that,
Suran
fired
Surin was waiting
for my father
in front of a steam table
in the
kitchen of the ambassador
hotel.
It was a rude
my father
was not supposed
to have taken.
He was supposed to
go out through the
ballroom,
but someone led him
through the kitchen
and directly
into this ambush.
Suran was waiting
and fired two shots
of my father.
The first shot
hit Paul Shraid.
The second shot
hit a door jam behind my father at head level and was later removed by the LAPD.
He was then grabbed by six men, including the DeKatalan, 1960 decadalant champion Rayford Johnson,
who was among my father's best friend, Roosevelt Greer, who was one of the fearsome for some of
other people. They grabbed him and they pointed his gun. They grabbed his hand first,
bent him over the steam table.
So he was on the steam table
on his back and they forced
his arm away from my dad.
Raver
Johnson later told me, although
Surin as a tiny little guy,
he had
superhuman strain and that he could
not pry the pistol from his
hand. And Sirhan
squeezed off six
more shots and emptied
the gun. The only eight,
there was a revolver.
only eight shots in it.
He never reloaded.
All six of those shots hit people.
So we know what happened every shot in the gun.
The audios show 14 shots being fired.
My father was killed by four shots from behind.
Sirhan was always five feet in front of it.
And there were 77 eyewitnesses.
And he was always in front of me.
He never was behind my dad.
that.
The larger question
is who, in other words,
so I'll wait
if you give me one minute, I'll finish, and I think
I'm going to answer your question.
All of those shots, according to Noguchi, were
contact shots, meaning that the shots
were, the gun was touching
my father's body
and left a carbon tattoo.
And they were
fired from behind the man who was standing
there was a man named Eugene. They'd say,
who was the security guard who had led my father into the ambush.
And he had one hand, his right hand was holding my left,
my father's left elbow.
He was standing behind him, and he had his gun drawn.
He later, he was witnessed with it.
My father, when he died, fell, and I was with my dad when he died,
when he fell, he fell backwards onto Cesar, and Cesar was on the floor below him.
And my father must have known that he was being shot from behind because the last thing he did was reach around and pull off Caesar's clip on tie.
And the photographs of my father on the floor have him with that clip on tie in his hand.
And Caesar then pushed him off and got up with his gun drawn, which everybody saw.
He later told the police that he had been firing at Sirhan.
But nobody ever saw that.
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My father was shot four times.
One of the shots went through his shoulder bat harmlessly and into the ceiling.
The other shots were fatal.
The worst shot was the one behind his ear, but it left a carbon tattoo.
And there's a recent book about Eugene Stenzer.
I had communications with Eugene St.zer who died during COVID.
But I was talking to him at that time and seeing if I could come visit him,
he'd moved to the Philippines. He was an avowed racist. He hated my family. He had gotten the job
two days before as a security guard at a security company and never been employed as security
guard before. His real job was at the Lockheed and formerly the Hughes Airplane
plants in Los Angeles, which are CIA operations.
Lisa Pease, who's the most thorough book on my dad's murder,
found documentation where Zaser identifies himself as a CIA agent.
So I don't know, and I can't say there's, you know.
Well, the larger question, I mean, because I don't think anybody here would dispute what you're saying.
The larger question is, who is so interested in keeping,
this information from coming out. In other words, we're talking about
extraordinarily dark forces in our own government
that are operating to this day,
it seems to me. And it seems that's part of your
passion in doing what you do, even running for president.
Do you have any sense that this swamp could be drained? Any sense
that these forces could be exposed? I mean,
you know, whether we're talking about the NIH,
whether we're talking about the CIA,
it's dramatic to think that our tax dollars are funding this kind of thing.
And I think many Americans are rather recently waking up to what we're dealing with.
I mean, you called at some point for the end of NATO.
There seems to be an awakening that the narrative that we're
we've gone along with is one that we've been duped, basically, and that we need to
have a deeper understanding of things than we've had, basically. But what is your sense of whether
it's possible? I mean, is this utterly quixotic, or is there any sense that it's possible
for us to, you know, uncover some of these bad actors? And,
call them to account?
Yeah, I mean, I'm very confident
if I'm elected president that I
can dismantle the deep state.
And the reason that I feel
uniquely
able to do it is because it really
you're seeing
this corrupt merger of state and corporate
power that includes the military industrial
complex, includes the pharmaceutical industry,
but includes all of these other industries
that have captured the agencies
that are supposed to regulate them.
Those agencies have become,
I'm sock puppets for the industries they're supposed to regulate, and the CIA is a captive agency
of the military industrial complex.
They're not working for you and me.
They're working for Raytheon and General Dynamics and Lockheed and Boeing and North of Grumman
and Black Rock, which owns all of those companies and owns Pfizer, you know, BlackRock,
State Street, Vanguard, own 88% of the SCB 500, and they own all the pharma, including
they're these three major owners of BlackRock.
They're the same people who control the Fed,
and they control all of the, you know,
they've got the contracts not only to destroy Ukraine,
but the contracts to rebuild Ukraine.
You know, BlackRock's got all those contracts
and all that Biden signed with them.
And so they're doing it right in front of us, right?
And they don't even care that we know about it anymore.
But I've spent 40 years litigating against these agencies, and each of the agencies have their own unique cultures and their own unique problems and their own captors.
But I have been thinking about for 40 years how to unravel that corporate capture.
The most difficult ones, the CIA, the person who's running my campaign is Emeraldus Fox, who's, you know, somebody told me it was my daughter-in-law.
Somebody said to me the other day, she is the smartest woman I've ever met.
I said, no, she's the smartest person you've ever met.
And she's absolutely brilliant.
But she spent her life in the CIA and came out and went there idealistically after 9-11,
served as a spy in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Program, saw the real role of the CIA
and has spent the rest of her life fighting against it and fighting to dismantle the
the state my father had was very acutely aware of this problem my uncle had tried to appoint my father's head of the
CIA because he said it is brought my father my uncle famously realized during the bay of big's invasion
that alan dallas and george kubal and richard bisonal and george kabel who was the military leader the
CIA had all lied to him.
And that they knew
that the men were going to die
on the beach and they were hoping that would
make him send the Essex, the
aircraft carrier, and he refused.
And he came out of that meeting in the middle of the night.
And he said to his
aid, he took publicly, took
blame for the Bay of Biggs invasion, but
privately he said to his aides, I want to take
the CIA, shattered
it into a thousand pieces and scatter
it to the winds. And then he
tried to appoint my father.
My grandfather told him he couldn't do it.
He said it's a very dangerous precedent.
Have the brother of the president of the United States
running this secret police organization.
You can't do it.
So they brought in a very pious Catholic.
John McCone, who was a Republican business guy,
who they thought would have,
because of his real moral center,
that he would be able to, you know, change the culture of the agency.
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I was with Mike Pompeo.
Very strange dinner that I had about two months ago with Mike Pompeo, Hillary Clinton,
Karl Rove, Bill Bear, Boris Johnson, the five of us at a table.
And really the weirdest dinner I've ever had.
But Mike Pompeo said to me, and I never liked Mike Pompeo.
Excuse me, who put this dinner together?
Mike Pompeo said to me, I never liked Mike Pompeo because I thought he's just a warmonger,
but I got to like him personally because he's really smart.
He's very, very thoughtful.
He has a very, very different view of America's role in the world than me,
but I thought that he was very sincere and very patriotic.
he said to me during that meal
he said my biggest regret in life is that I did not fix the CIA
and he said I had an opportunity and I didn't do it
and then he said the entire upper echelon of that agency
are made up of individuals that do not believe in the democratic institutions
the United States of America
oh my father saw the same thing my uncle saw the same thing
my own my father had a plan
for fixing the CIA, which I think I know, which is the same plan that will work today,
which is to separate the espionage division from the plans division.
Aspenage we need.
That is information gathering and analysis.
The plans division is the dirty tricks division.
They are assassinating leaders, fixing elections, coup d'etas,
all of this stuff that's gotten us into a mess all over the world.
And the fact that those two are married and allow.
allows the plan to spy on us and to control the narrative
before and after their actions is really what has made them so, so dangerous.
And those two functions need to be separate.
And as it turns out, the last tranche of documents that was released
from the Kennedy assassination papers, you know, Trump promised he'd release them.
He didn't.
Why?
If you ever get him up here, you should say,
him, why did you not release him?
Because he promised he would.
Biden promised he'd release him, and he wouldn't.
He didn't.
The last tranche that was released included a document
that was written by Dick Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger,
to him my uncle's most trusted aids
about how to dismantle the CIA,
and it's almost exactly what my father had planned to do.
It's what I'll do when I get into office.
Were you?
Yeah.
On the off chance that you're not elected in November,
and that Donald Trump is elected,
would you be willing to work for him in some capacity
to do what you're talking about?
I don't think so.
I mean, I would listen to a proposal, but I don't think so.
I don't think.
You wouldn't serve your country.
Well, I'm not confident that I could do that
if I had that confidence, I would.
I think, I don't think.
Anyway, what you've been talking about, I mean, the backstory, because we don't have the time,
but we're talking about America.
And when I interviewed your cousin, Caroline Kennedy, at one point we were talking about
how your uncle Teddy would, he would exhort you cousins to memorize
Longfellow's poem, Paul Revere's ride.
And it reminded me of a different America.
You know, because when people talk about, say, I'm a Kennedy Democrat,
that's pretty dramatically different than what the party has become.
There was a love of country, and I think that when you talk about your uncle's desire,
your father's desire to write these wrongs.
There's something noble about that,
and it's hard not to admire that.
And to think that we're six decades along
and that we're still dealing with this stuff.
Most Americans still aren't awake to the narrative.
I mean, you're giving us chapter and verse
on where the bullets were, and most Americans think,
oh, Sirhan, Sirhan, you know, Lehar Avaya.
And again, not that that's the most important thing,
but it points to the deeper truth that we're supposed to be a self-governing people.
And it seems that some of the forces that you've been working against have been,
they're taking great pains to demonize anybody like you that would question the narrative.
And so it seems to me that you have to have hope that people are waking up.
I mean, did the 51 people who signed that document denouncing the Hunter Biden lapop as Russian disinformation?
I mean, I think that there are many Americans that are aware that something very nasty is going on,
that we've got to do something about it.
And I just think that whether you are in the White House or outside of the White House,
that you're uniquely appointed to be working for this.
So I'd like to think that that America would mean enough to you.
And by the way, if Biden should win,
I don't think you're getting a call from him, by the way.
No, I'm not.
But I do want to just emphasize what you just said about
those people here may not know what you're talking about.
I think most of them do, but there were 51 high-level acting or inactive CIA officials
who signed a letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, which was a lie.
It was tampering with the U.S. election what they were doing.
And it was the CIA tampering with the U.S. election.
that, you know, I mean, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's,
and one of the reasons that I don't think I'd go to work for him
is because he offered me a job in the last administration,
and then he took a million dollars from Pfizer,
and then...
I mean, I've heard that story,
and I think a lot of us were in a different place at that time.
A lot of us have a very different view of Pfizer and Moderna than we did at that point.
And actually a very different view of many things than we did at that point.
When somebody looks you in the eye and tells you, I want you to do this,
and then, you know, it was a big cost for me to go announce that I'm joining the Trump administration on the Normans' costs.
I know that you've got your reasons.
These things that are pleased.
You know, in this day and age, to say that sincerely,
it's a beautiful thing.
That's why people applaud.
And I don't,
you know, bluntly, I don't see that
coming from today's Democratic Party.
I'm glad you're an independent
because it's very confusing
to Americans who grew up at a time when
you know, Tip O'Neill was
the face of the Democratic Party when we could
talk. And I think
we're living in difficult times.
I'm afraid we are out of
time.
Can I ask you
in closing, just to say a word about your faith journey.
I know that you were at one point an atheist
and in the course of dealing with your heroin addiction,
something happened.
Can you say before we close?
Yeah, I mean, I was never an atheist ever.
But I was raised in a deeply religious family,
and I integrated that.
We went to church twice a day.
We went to, we said the rosary at least once a day, at least.
We prayed before and after meals.
We read the lives of the saints with the Bible every night.
And it wasn't just my 11 siblings and parents all 20-9 of the cousins were raised the same way.
And, you know, we would all see each other at church every morning, et cetera.
So it was a really important part of my life.
But when, you know, I became, my dad was killed when I was 14.
I became a heroin addict when I was 15.
But I was always fighting my addiction.
I was taking heroin without my own permission,
and I was doing that for a lot of years.
And when you're doing that,
when you're living against conscience,
which is what happens when you're an addict,
you tend to push any kind of notion
of God over the periphery of your horizon.
So, you know, God had become a very, very small thing in my life.
And then I had this, you know, I was struggling.
I had, by the way, I had very iron willpower in my always from when I was a kid
and very good discipline.
I gave up candy for Lent when I was 13.
I never ate candy again until I was in college.
And I gave up desserts for Lent when I was 14.
and I never had another dessert until I was in college,
and I was bulking up for sport, for rugby.
And I felt I could do anything with my willpower,
but this compulsion, the drug compulsion,
was just impervious to it,
and it was cunning, baffling and demoralizing.
And to me, the most immoralizing feature of addiction
was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself.
I would tell myself at 9 o'clock in the morning,
I'm never going to do that again,
and at 4 o'clock I'd be doing it.
And it was baffling to me that I could not bind that person
who I was going to be later on in the day to do anything.
And I knew when I got sober that I did not,
I had to change in a deep fundamental way who I was.
And because I didn't want to be an addict,
but just be white knuckling it and be miserable all the time
and wanting a drug.
And I wanted to be just wake up
and not want any drugs.
And I knew that that was going to require a spiritual awakening.
I knew from reading the lives of the saints
that there had been people who had been living in all kinds of depravity.
St. Augustine was one, St. Francis, another,
who had these spiritual awakening and just walked away from addiction.
And I had a friend who was a friend of my little brother
who died of this disease with David, who was a year of difference than me.
And he became, he took heroin the same way I did.
with the same enthusiasm and compulsion.
He became Amuni.
He joined the Unification Church
and became a follower of Reverend Son Young Moon.
And he didn't want to take drugs anymore.
And he used to just all hang out with us,
and we would take drugs right in front of him,
but he was zero interest.
He was completely indifferent to him.
And he would chatter about all of his stuff
from the Unification Church.
and when I got sober in September of 83,
I would think about this guy all the time
and I'd think I'd rather be dead than be a mooney.
That's what I was thinking at that time.
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