The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Great Partisan Shift | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Episode Date: September 26, 2024Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discuss the development of Donald Trump’s political team, how the team plans to tackle foreign affairs and the ongoing health crisis, Kamala Harris�...� inability to unify the country (let alone police the broader world), and the detrimental metamorphosis of the Democratic Party which has left it scrambling and scheming for a shot at the presidency, despite the clear will of the people. This episode was filmed on September 18th, 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a writer, attorney, activist, and politician who has had a career-spanning focus on clean water, environmental, and public health issues. RFK Jr. is the founder of the WaterKeeper Alliance — the world’s largest clean water advocacy group — and has served as its longtime chairman and attorney. In this role, he spearheaded the New York City Watershed Agreement, which has come to be considered an international model for sustainable development and stakeholder consensus negotiation. RFK Jr. was named Time Magazine’s “Hero for the Planet” for his efforts to restore the Hudson River, which along with other achievements has led to more than 300 WaterKeeper organizations taking root across the globe. As nephew of the United States' beloved 35th president, he has dutifully earned his own acclaim across decades of formative work. - Links - For Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On X: https://x.com/robertkennedyjr On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@TeamKennedy24 On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rfkjr/
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello everybody.
So today I had the privilege of round two with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The first time we had a discussion, which I enjoyed a lot and thought was very worthwhile,
the powers that be at YouTube decided
that it was okay for them to eradicate it,
which was not something that I was happy with
and still remain unhappy about.
We'll see if the same thing happens this time.
So we covered, a lot has changed since that first interview,
most markedly that RFK is now allied with Donald Trump.
And that's quite a strange turn of affairs.
We have a coterie of disaffected Democrats
running on the Republican side against Kamala Harris.
And what did we talk about?
Well, we talked a lot about why RFK
has become disenchanted with the Democrats.
And I had pushed him on that issue in our first discussion,
asking him, for example, when the left goes too far,
we finally have the answer to that question.
That's in this podcast,
because RFK outlined five different ways
the left has gone too far.
So highlighting, highlighting what?
Highlighting their lack of care for free speech,
highlighting the fact that they're now the party of war,
highlighting the fact that they're no longer
the party of the working class.
Well, there's three ways that the left has gone too far
and that just, what is that?
It's the tip of the iceberg.
We talked a fair bit about, well, the policy issues
that Kennedy has been discussing with Trump,
concentrating particularly on the health crisis,
on free speech and on international peace.
And those do strike me as three major issues
that we need to contend with.
We talked about the development of Trump's new team,
which is a remarkable occurrence.
The fact that he has Musk, the fact that he has Ramaswamy,
Tulsi Gabbard and of course Gabbard and of course Kennedy himself. That changes
the political landscape dramatically, something the Trump team hasn't yet capitalized on.
We talked a little bit about what the union might look like under a Trump administration
with all these remarkable people in it. So join us for all of that. YouTube sensors allowing.
So I'm very curious about the alliance
that you formed with Trump.
I'm curious about whether you ever imagined
that such a thing was a likelihood.
And then I'm curious about why you decided
it was a good idea.
Yeah, I never imagined such thing was likelihood.
In fact, I was reading a statement that I had forgotten
I made, but I made it repeatedly in the 18 months,
during the 18 months when I was running after my,
after declaring that I was going to run.
When people oftentimes ask me, why don't you run with Trump?
And I would say, uh, and then on several occasions, I was approached by the
Trump campaign about running as his VP.
And, and, um, my answer to that was always that, uh, that would result in a divorce
with my wife, even if
I had the inclination to do that, because it's something that just constitutionally
she at that point could not have handled and would have, I think, impacted her job and
would have, and it would have entered friendships, her relationships, her family, et
cetera.
But a lot, we both
learned a lot during the
election.
I saw this
metamorphosis of the
Democratic
Party.
The party that I
was born and raised in,
my family has been
involved in the
Democratic Party since all
of my great grandparents
came over in 1848
during the potato famine
and landed in Boston
and it was the Democratic Party
that they came over
penniless and friendless
and it was the Democratic Party
that provided for them, that made sure
that they got food, that they the Democratic Party that provided for them,
that made sure that they got food, that they got jobs,
that protected them against the reigning hierarchy of power
in Boston at that time, which was run by what they call
the Brahmin class, which was very hostile to Irish Catholics in particular.
And my great grandfather was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston, the first, let me
put it this way, Irish Catholic ghetto mayor.
There was one mayor before him that was Irish Catholic, but he was chosen by the Brahmins. And he was the first one who was, you know,
part of the rebellion of the Irish
and the ultimate takeover of Boston
and many of our other urban areas
by Irish Catholic politicians.
My grandfather, John Fitzgerald, was called Honey Fitz
because he had a beautiful singing voice
that sounded like honey.
And his contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was a state legislature and a political boss
in Boston. Their children married by, Rose Fitzgerald married by grandfather.
Joseph Kennedy, he was the treasurer for Franklin Roosevelt's campaign. He was the only Wall Street figure who supported Roosevelt.
And then he became the first commissioner of the SEC.
He had political ambitions of his own,
but he ruined those ambitions by his anti-war position,
both in World War I and then World War II.
He served as the US ambassador to the
court of St. James under Roosevelt to Great Britain. And then his children, his son Joe,
who was killed during the war, gave a speech, you know, would have run and my grandfather,
ambitions for him to
be the first Irish Catholic president, he spoke, he gave a keynote address at the Democratic
convention in 1940. My uncle John Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic president of the United
States. My father served as Attorney General in the United States Senate and then died, was assassinated
in his own run for president.
My uncle Ted Kennedy was the second longest serving member of the United States Senate.
And so, you know, my family, the DNA of the Democratic Party was baked into my own character,
my identity. I grew up in the party. I began campaigning when I was
six years old on my uncle's campaign. I attended the convention in Los Angeles that year,
and I've attended almost every Democratic convention since then, worked in probably
a hundred campaigns. And I was a stalwart in the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party that I grew up with
changed dramatically.
It changed the last year.
The Democratic Party I grew up in was the
Party of Peace.
My uncle, John Kennedy, he was asked by his
best friend, one of his two best friends, Ben Bradley, who was then
the editor of Washington Post, what do you want in your gravestone? And without skipping a beat,
my uncle said he kept the peace. He said the primary job of a president of the United States
was to keep the country out of war. He said he didn't want children in Africa and Latin America, when they heard about the
United States, to think about a man in a military uniform with a gun.
He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer.
He wanted them to think of the Kennedy milk program, which provided nutrition to millions
of malnourished kids around the world.
He wanted them to think of USAID, of Alliance for Progress, and these other programs that my uncle created to protect economic power rather than military power abroad.
My uncle was under tremendous pressure to go to war in Laos, which he resisted in 1961,
to go to war in Germany during the Checkpoint Charlie crisis in 62, to go to war against
Cuba in 61 during the Bay of Pigs, and then again in 63 during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
and then to go to Vietnam.
Virtually all of his advisors were telling him he had to send 250,000 troops to Vietnam
or the government was collapsed, he said it's their government,
we cannot fight their war for them.
He ultimately under great pressure said 16,000 military advisors and then who were not under
his rules of engagement allowed to participate in combat.
Some of them did. In October of 1963, he learned that a green beret had been killed in Vietnam.
And he turned to his aide, Walt Rostow, and he said, I want the casualties, a list, a
complete list of casualties, of US casualties.
Rostow came back to home an hour later with, and there was 75, 76 Americans had died at
that point. My uncle said it's too many and that
afternoon this October 22nd 1963 he signed national security order 263
ordering all military personnel US military personnel out of Vietnam by
1965 with the first thousand coming home and by December.
So that would have been six weeks later.
And then he was killed 30 days to the date
after he signed that order.
And a week after that, President Johnson,
his successor, remanded National Security Order 263.
Johnson then sent 265,000 Americans to Vietnam.
It became our war.
My father ran against that war in 1968,
and he also was killed in that process.
And then Nixon took over and sent 560,000 Americans
to Vietnam.
We killed a million of them, maybe two million.
They killed 56,000 of our children,
including my cousin George Skakel
who died in the Tet Offensive.
And America then went down a different path
toward becoming a feature of the military industrial complex, which Eisenhower
had warned against three days before my birthday in 1961. Three days before my uncle took the
office Eisenhower made that warning and my uncle spent three thousand days of his presidency
keeping us out of war and keeping the military industrial complex at Bay.
This was one of the defining features
of the Democratic party.
We were the party that was against war.
Republicans were the pro-war party.
We were the party that was for civil rights,
including constitutional rights
and particularly freedom of speech,
which is the backstop for all the other rights
of the United States Constitution, a country that has the capacity to censor its critics
and has the license for every kind of atrocity.
My father understood that.
My uncle understood that.
That was one of the, that was the bedrock assumption
of the Democratic party that free speech was,
if any constrictions on free speech was the first step down
the slippery slope of totalitarianism.
So is it fair to say then that you found the Democrats
and at the present time you've alluded to peace and-
They're now the party of war. the Democrats at the present time, you've alluded to peace and under Trump-
They're now the party of war.
They're now, you know, they're about to get us into a war with Russia.
Putin has said this week that if we send missiles into Russia, that he will consider himself
to be at war with NATO and the United States of America.
And you know, and he's got more weapons than we've got. He will consider himself to be a war with NATO and the United States of America.
And he's got more weapons than we've got.
This is the biggest nuclear power in the world.
He has 1200 more nuclear warheads than we do, and they're better than ours.
And his electronic warfare system is a generation ahead of ours.
As they've shown in Ukraine, they can shoot down almost anything that we send against
them.
And Kamala Harris during the convention made this extraordinarily belligerent speech that appears to have been written by the neocons. And then before she went on, a CIA director spoke immediately
before her. And they had military people speaking at that condition. This was inconceivable when I was growing up.
And Kamala Harris in recent days
has touted her endorsement by Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney was like Darth Vader.
If you were a Democrat in 2004,
practically the qualification
for you being a Democrat
is to consider Dick Cheney a war criminal.
Dick Cheney was a war criminal.
And he was a great Democrat. And I think that's the, the qualification for you being a Democrat
is to consider
Dick Cheney a war criminal.
Dick Cheney and John Bolton,
who she also touted her endorsement by,
and 225 other neocons
who came out and supported her that day,
Dick Cheney and John Bolton
were the people who gave us the Patriot Act.
They are the ones who launched
the surveillance state, the censorship state, the censorship state, the censorship state, Dick Cheney and John Bolton were the people who gave us the Patriot Act.
They're the ones who launched the surveillance state, the censorship state.
The legalized spying by the CIA and propaganda by the CIA against the American people never
happened before.
It's in their chart if they can't do that.
And Dick Cheney, and then they gave us the Iraq War, which was the greatest foreign policy cataclysm
in American history.
We destroyed Iraq, which was our bulwark against Iranian expansion.
The October 7th invasion were a direct result of our destruction of Saddam Hussein.
Iraq is now no longer a bulwark against Iran. It is now a proxy of Iran thanks to our war,
which is exactly the foreign policy outcome
that we've been struggling to avoid for 30 years.
We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein by far.
We turned Iraq into a war enculter of Sunni and Shia
death squads.
We created ISIS. We sent with that Iraq and
the spillover war in Syria, we sent between 2 and 4 million immigrants into Europe and destabilized
every nation in Europe for a generation. The emergence of totalitarianism in Europe that
right now, the abolition of free speech in Europe
is a direct result of the Iraq war.
Brexit is a direct result of the Iraq war.
It was a cataclysm.
If you ask Dick Cheney,
Dick Cheney who gave us torture
for the first time in American history,
we had this tradition in this country against torture.
George Washington, even when the British
were torturing Americans and murdering them
on prison ships in Manhattan, off Manhattan Island,
Washington was asked about torturing a British prisoner
who had critical information, military information.
He said, I'd rather lose the war than do that.
If we lower ourselves to that level, then what's the point? Abraham Lincoln was presented with the same dilemma
during the Civil War and said, no, we're not going to do that. And he wrote guidelines against torture
for the US military that later became the basis for the Geneva Convention. That is our legacy to the world, the Geneva Convention.
You don't torture people.
And Dick Cheney introduced that extraordinary rendition,
it's openly torturing people, bragging about it.
If you ask Dick Cheney today,
do you disavow any of those policies?
He would say, no, I embrace them.
War in Iraq was a great thing.
We got rid of Saddam Hussein. It's insanity. And he has not changed. So why is he endorsing
Kamala Harris? It's not because the neocons have changed. It's because the Democratic
Party is now the party of the neocons.
When I interviewed you last time, I asked you a question that I've asked almost,
I think, every Democrat that I've spoken to or former Democrat, which was,
when does the left go too far? And you answered that not question. You said,
when they align with Dick Cheney, they've gone too far.
That's where they are now.
Yeah. Well, so this is, so how do you, how do you explain, I'd like to know what happened.
By the way, I could go on with that list
of departures from the Democrat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm curious about-
Extraordinary inversion.
And you know, I studied American history in college,
and you know, one of the ways
that we study American history is according
to these four big realignments that happen
among the parties during different parts of our history.
And we're going through one of those realignments today with the Democratic, you know, the Democratic
Party was the party of civil rights has now become the party of censorship, the party
of surveillance.
Yeah.
It was the party of that that was fighting against the subversion
of American democracy by big corporations, by Wall Street,
and corporate robber parents and titans.
Today, the Democratic Party is the party of Wall Street,
is the party of big pharma, big tech, big ag,
a big food of the military industrial complex. When I was a kid, the Democratic Party was the party of big pharma, big tech, a big ag, a big food, of the military industrial complex.
When I was a kid, the Democratic Party
was the party of the poor.
The Republican Party was the wealthy party.
That's where most of the wealth in this country,
70 or 80% was in the Republican Party.
We were the party of the firefighters, the cops,
the union leaders.
And it was very interesting that the Republican
convention, you had for the first time in history
John O'Brien, the president of the
James Sturges Union, speaking to great applause.
This was unheard of. I was on tour
recently with JD Vance.
And we spoke at the Firefighters Convention in
Boston. And he was touting about the importance of the Republican,
today's Republican party for collective bargaining, which was a criminal
act in the past to the Republicans.
During the 2020 election, Jordan, roughly 50% of the people in this country
voted for Trump and roughly 50% voted for Biden.
The 50% who voted for Trump own 30% of the wealth
in this country.
The 50% who voted for Biden own 70%.
So the Republican party has now switched more
to the poor, the party, the working class,
the working poor of unions.
And the Democratic party has become the party of billionaires.
Donald Trump
chased the billionaires out of the Republican
Party and they've all gone off to chase
the neocons out of the Republican Party.
And I would also argue
the Republican Party is now the party
of true environmentalists.
The fixation that
and this is the space that I came out of.
And I got is the space that I came out of,
and I got into, you know, environmental work, working for commercial fishermen on the Hudson
River and then rivers all over the country, protecting habitat, protecting water, clean air,
protecting our children against toxins. And it's, the underground disruptors, there's a
protecting our children against toxins. And it's, the endocrine disruptors, there's a chemical now, the second most used chemical
in this country, pesticide in this country is atrazine.
It's banned in Europe, banned all over the world, but we use it here.
It's in 63% of our drinking water.
There's a famous African American scientist named Tyler Hayes, who's at the University
of Berkeley.
He did a famous experiment that anybody can look up on the internet.
And he put 70 African water frogs in an aquarium.
He put atrazine in the water of that aquarium that was less than EPA's level.
So it's less than the levels we have
in 63% of our water supply.
60 of those frogs became sterile.
They're all male frogs, 60 became sterile.
10% of those frogs turned female
and they were able to produce fertile eggs.
So it changed their sex.
And of course, normally, you know, when you see
something like that in an animal model, the first thing you want to do is test it in a
mammalian model and a human model. Those tests were never done, so we don't know what impact
it's having on our children, if any. But I think those studies ought to be done. I've been trying for 40 years
to get Republicans in Fox News and elsewhere
to pay attention to this threat of
entrecine disruptors.
And they ridiculed me, derided me,
and just ignored me.
Dr. Carlson did an extraordinary documentary
a year and a half ago on entrecine disruptors
and basically said all the things I just said. Dr. Carlson did an extraordinary documentary a year and a half ago on entrochromic disruptors and
basically said all the things I just said.
And he was absolutely attacked by the left and by
the mainstream environmental community of this.
And then, you know, the other big issue with
mainstream environmental is this fixation on carbon
alone and all the
things that brought us into the environment.
People become environmentalists not because they're scared of a line on a graph and you're
going to be dead after, you know, at this point in history if you don't behave.
We got involved because of love, because of love of the habitat, because of love of the
environment, because of love of our purple mountains, magesies, our rivers, streams,
and understanding.
We're not protecting nature for the sake of the fishes and the birds.
We're protecting it for our own sake because nature enriches us.
And this has been forgotten by the environmental movement and they've simply become fixated
on carbon alone, and
that is the only issue.
And I'm watching the outcome of that now on the coast, the Atlantic coast of North America.
If 21 offshore wind farms being built, it's privatized 5,000 square miles of land between the Gulf of Maine and North Carolina.
And they're pounding into the sediment 2,200 turbines.
Turbines are unspeakably large.
Just the blades on those turbines are 1,000 feet long.
They're bigger than the Eiffel Tower.
They're all made in China.
And when they explode, which one did off in Nantucket
a month ago, they put shards into the water
so you can't swim without getting caught.
You can't go to the beaches in Nantucket
because of the shards on them.
They're killing the whales.
Nymphs of national marine fisheries
have warned that the turbines are
going to cause the collapse of the cod fishery because
they're in the spawning grounds.
No, the environmental movement doesn't care.
They build these and they are destroying the whale populations and everybody knows it.
In two years we've had, you know, on average there was about four groundings a year.
We've had 109 whale deaths unexplained
over the past two years alone.
Since 2016, we've been averaging 16 to 20 a year.
And these are right whales.
There's only 368 left in the world,
only 70 fertile females,
minke whales, humpback whales,
and other large whale species, and
they're being exterminated.
And everybody's pretending it's not the wind farms, but nobody's, there's no other explanation.
There's been no other changes.
And the federal environmental agencies that regulate this also regulate oil production
in the Gulf of Mexico. The rule is that if
there's a single whale death within 50 miles of an operation, everything comes to a halt
till it's explained. They've waived that rule. And they've refused to investigate the deaths.
They refuse to do proper necropsies of the dead whales to keep us in the dark about what's
actually causing this,
but everybody knows what's causing it. And the big environmental groups, the inside the Bellway
groups, including my group that I love, which is NRDC, but Sierra Club and Greenpeace,
they're all pretending it's not happening. You have the small environmental groups on the coastline,
the 17, you know, these little environmental groups
that are going crazy protesting and demanding investigations, but they have been excluded now
for the process. And then you're seeing the same, you know, all of those, these wind farms are all
being built by foreign companies, right? The foreign, nobody would build a wind farm,
offshore wind.
I'm very much in favor of onshore wind.
I built onshore wind.
My brothers in that business, you know,
onshore wind is very efficient and very, very effective.
And we have the best onshore wind in the world
here in the United States.
Onshore wind can provide wind power
at about 11 cents a kilowatt hour. Offshore wind about 11 cents a kilowatt hour.
Offshore wind, 33 cents a kilowatt hour.
The average price of energy in this country is about 14 to 16 cents a kilowatt hour.
Onshore wind is more than double that.
I mean, offshore wind.
So no utility in the world would ever build one of these towers unless it wasn't funded
billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tax
breaks.
The foreign
companies, because they're
foreign, they cannot take
advantage of U.S.
tax breaks.
So they get
the big financial houses
from our country to finance
them so they can take those
tax breaks.
So the big players
are BlackRock, Goldman
Sachs, Morgan, Ced breaks. So the big players are BlackRock, Goldman Sachs,
Morgan, Citibank, Wells Fargo, all the big
contributors to the Democratic Party.
And they've gotten the tax breaks from the
inflation reduction act, which was Joe Biden's
signature environmental accomplishment.
But it's not actually protecting the environment.
It's all about subsidies, these giant boondoggles
for huge players that are destroying the environment.
The other big, $79 billion of subsidies
are going to carbon capture,
which is tearing up the Midwest farmland.
Oh, this is a boon to big oil companies,
to big methane companies, to big ag,
to take the carbon from methane plants
and then inject it into deep wells, oil wells
in the Bakken Shale and in Southern Illinois
to bring out the last drops of oil.
So instead of reducing carbon,
they're actually increasing carbon in
the environment. It's just this extraordinary and it's 79 billion dollars in subsidies
to do something that is an absolute boondoggle and there's no other way to describe it.
I'll tell you one other thing. There's one of the byproducts of carbon capture is sulfuric acid, which the Woods Hole Marine now has a contract to dump 2 million metric tons
of this material, which destroys any form of life.
It actually destroys your genes
and destroys the cellular level.
They dump it into the ocean off in Nantucket.
And it's part of this process
and they're all going along with it because they've
all been paid off.
And it really is kind of, it's sickening, it's criminal.
And it's, you know, and that is somehow, as I said, there's been this huge inversion
where the Republicans are opposing that.
Republicans are focused on protecting the environment, protecting habitat, protecting our children from these toxic
chemicals. And the Democratic Party and the associated
environmental groups have forgotten about that mission.
So you pointed to this inversion. You described the
failure on the Democrat side to continue standing for peace.
You're very skeptical about the environmental movement
in relationship to Democrat policies.
You talked about free speech.
I'm curious how that inversion played out as well
in your more personal experience
while you were running for president.
Because the last time we talked,
you were more or less embarking on your campaign.
And so I presume that you-
As a Democrat.
Yes, as a Democrat.
And so I presume that, and I know for a fact, that you had all sorts of misadventures, let's
say, on the campaign route.
So I'm curious what you encountered practically speaking in terms of impediments to your campaign.
Because you were, as we all know, you were trying to, what, rehabilitate the
Democrats, to pull them to the center, to put yourself forward as a credible candidate.
So I imagine, and maybe I'm wrong, that there were things that you experienced practically well,
because you've been in the realm of abstraction to some degree, that you experienced practically
while you were on the campaign trail, that also, what would you say, made you much more cognizant
of how the political process actually works,
particularly on the Democrat side?
So what was that like?
Well, yeah, and that is the ultimate irony
that the other part of the inversion
as the Democratic Party has now come out
essentially against democracy.
And I saw that firsthand because I saw
I was not normally
in order to choose
the president when my father wanted to
run in 68
he challenged the president of his own
party just like I did
but there was primaries
and he was allowed to challenge
them and it forced Johnson to step down.
I think if I had been able
to challenge them in the same situation,
President Biden, that he would have been
forced to step down much earlier
because he would have been forced to debate
me, people would have seen his
impediments much earlier.
And we could have had
real democracy, you could have
had other people come into the race,
not just me, but Gavin Newsom and Amy
Klobuchar and Vice President Harrison,
other people would have run. But instead they just called off the Gavin Newsom and Amy Klobuchar and Vice President Harris and other people
would have run.
But instead, they just called off the primaries.
They literally cancelled the primaries and they gave the election to President Biden
without ever coming out of the White House.
They did not want them to debate clearly because they did not want to see some of the, you
know, they're probably to see some of these efficiencies.
So you had a kind of apparatus that was running a candidate who was unqualified for the job.
And everybody now recognized that.
But they wanted him in there anyway, because they needed a figurehead who could win the election.
And who's they?
Well, you talk about the military-industrial complex.
Well, yeah, but I'm not even going to go into, you know,
the deep state analysis, but I would just say, I don't know
who made the decision.
You know, clearly there were people around him, you know,
and it could be Anthony Blinken and, you know, Sullivan,
and even, you know, who knows who else,
but who were, whoever was calling the shots.
And, you know, there was a really,
really unbelievable moment at the,
or poignant moment during the Democratic National Convention
moment at the point in moment during the Democratic National Convention,
when Chris Cuomo points up into the bleachers of the arena, you know, where the convention was taking place and there was these high seats, the box, the owner's boxes up in the upper rim of the
and he said those are the boxes that cost a million, a million and a half to be in that
box right now.
And those are the big donors, the Democratic Party, the corporate donors, the Black Rocks,
these kind of groups that are up there, the military industrial, the big pharma.
He said we don't even know who they are, but they're the ones that are making all the decisions
here on the floor.
And, you know, those are the people that ultimately anointed
Kamala Harris, who I don't think is,
I don't want to be mean-spirited,
and I've been very disciplined about not name-calling.
To me, it's a disqualifier to be President of the United
States if you don't believe in freedom of speech.
And Vice President Harris has repeatedly said
that the First Amendment is a privilege,
not a right.
That the government has a duty
to censor what she calls
misinformation and disinformation.
That's not protected by the First Amendment.
That's a very dangerous word,
misinformation.
First of all,
the First Amendment protects all speech.
It protects lies. It protects dangerous word, misinformation? First of all, the First Amendment
protects all speech.
It protects lies.
It protects, you know,
it was passed not to protect
convenient speech, but to protect
the speech that nobody wants to hear.
And when the government takes
upon itself the right to decide
what's true and what's not true,
then you have a totalitarian system. Because, of true and what's not true,
then you have a totalitarian system.
Because of course it's gonna, you know,
and we saw this during COVID where the government
was really the biggest propagator of misinformation,
of factual, factually inaccurate information.
That it then uses the control of information
to manipulate the public.
And by the way, protecting lies is important because a lot of the assumptions that we have
about life and policy and politics and war and peace and the economy, started out that now we believe as consensual
truth, started out as hypotheses or suppositions that people consider dishonest or lying or
wrong or erroneous or misinformation back then.
The whole process of democracy is a dialectic in which, you know, new ideas that are unpopular,
that appear manipulated and dishonest, challenge existing realities.
And in that dialectic, you know, in the furnace of debate and the, of dialogue, of conversation,
these ideas are annealed and in a true democracy, functioning
democracy, they rise in the marketplace of ideas and become policies if they survive
that process.
Nobody should be an arbiter at the beginning, at the outset as to what you can talk about,
what you can't. And then the impulse of the
Democratic Party to censor debate is part of a larger disease which has to do with centralized
control of democracy and the mistrust of the people, the mistrust of the demos, which is the people, which is what
democracy is named after.
They believe that the government needs to
control what people hear so that they don't
become infected with dangerous ideas.
And, you know, it was dangerous ideas that
launched the American revolution, an idea that
people could actually govern themselves, which
was considered a lie back then. And I think that's a very important point. It was dangerous ideas that launched the American Revolution, an idea that people could actually
govern themselves, which was considered a lie back then.
And they won the revolution.
And then our nation has been about trusting people and avoiding centralized mechanics
of control. And now the Democratic Party is all about the central mechanics of control.
And now the Democratic Party is all about the centralization of control.
It's about surveillance.
It's about controlling the flow of information.
It's about top-down policies that are dictated
by an oligarchy, and it's the opposite of democracy.
And so I saw that first hand,
and I saw it in the Democratic Party alone.
This is an irony.
From the beginning, our polls were showing,
and all the national polls were showing,
or almost all of them.
And I was hurting President Trump.
About 57% to 60% of the people who said
they were going to vote for me said that if
I left the race, they would switch their votes to Trump.
So me being in the race was actually helping the Democrats.
It was the Democrats who were trying to destroy my campaign, who were trying to, you know,
sued me.
Despite that.
Yeah.
And it's very strange, right?
Because I was helping them.
The Republican Party made no effort to keep me off a ballot.
They didn't make efforts to discredit me.
I mean, President Trump said obligatory bad things about me, that I was a left-wing radical
and all of this stuff, but they weren't mean-spirited things.
And they weren't, you know, there was no effort to keep me from speaking.
The Democrats kept me from speaking.
And their allied media outlets.
When Rosemary Rowl ran in 1992, Jordan, he was 10 months in the race
and he had 34 interviews on the mainstream media,
on ABC, NBC, CNN, et cetera.
Right.
And the 18 months that I spent in the race,
I had two live interviews.
And how long were they?
How long were the interviews?
Well, they weren't long.
I mean, the longest one was with Aaron Burnett, which was
I think 22 minutes, maybe 27 minutes. So you got about five interviews. So they can't, you know,
they can't censor it. If you do a taped interview, they cut out whatever they don't want the public
to hear. Oh, I had two live interviews during 18 months compared to 34 interviews in 10 months that he had.
I wasn't allowed to write letters to the editor, to the Washington Post, the New York Times,
any of the mainstream, sort of the Democratic periodicals, or publish editorials, none of them.
I could not speak to that constituency.
And that's really why I had to withdraw ultimately, and then they wouldn't let me on the debate stage.
Yeah, right.
And that was a collusion too,
because if you'd had the old debating commission
that was run by originally for the first 15 years,
my uncle at the first televised debate, 1960.
And for 20 years after that, it was run by the League of Women Voters, which was independent,
unbiased and they had their own rules for letting people in, they would have let me
in under their rules.
And for the next, you know, after 1980, it was run by the Commission on Presidential
Debates, which was also unbiased.
But now President Biden and President Trump said we're not going to use the Commission
on Debates.
Now we're going to make a separate deal with CNN.
And we now know what happened in that.
New York Times reported in their conversations where President Biden said, we are not going
to be on the stage with Robert Kennedy.
We want you to keep him off.
If you have rules that let him on, then we're not coming.
And for CNN, it's tens of millions of dollars for that debate.
And then they're going to get hundreds of millions.
Why did Trump agree to that?
And they're going to get hundreds of millions.
Well, he went back and forth on it.
So the Republicans were not entirely good on that.
But he did say publicly, I think he should be on the debate.
Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
And then the same thing happened with ABC.
And they adopted rules that actually I was
able to reach their metrics, their thresholds, but they still kept me off the debating stage.
And that's illegal, clearly it's illegal under FEC rules.
You're not allowed to deliberately exclude another candidate from the debate without
neutral rules.
And you're not allowed to develop rules specifically
to keep somebody off the debate.
Otherwise, the debate itself becomes
an illegal campaign contribution.
And that's why Trump's lawyer went to jail for that.
So what they were doing was criminal.
The FEC is an anemic organization
that is half the commissioners are
Republican, half are Democrats.
None of them care about it
independent.
So they just didn't act on it.
About, I don't know, three months ago
President Biden and Kamala Harris
gave this statement about
Vladimir Putin where they said
they were going to be the first President Biden and Kamala Harris gave this statement about Vladimir
Putin where they said they were
ridiculing him because he had won
the Russian election with
88% of the vote.
They said, well, that's because
he didn't let anybody else run
against him and because he
controlled the media.
So that's not really democracy.
Well, that was not really democracy.
Well, that was the same system they put in place over here.
So the whole thing was an irony,
but you know, that is also the fact
the Democratic Party abandoned democracy
was another part of this inversion that has taken place.
And you know, my wife saw that process firsthand And I think that abandoned democracy was another part of this inversion that has taken place.
My wife saw that process
firsthand.
And I think
it changed some of her
worldview and made her
she wasn't happy about me
endorsing President Trump at
all.
And did not want me to do it.
But it became, I think,
tolerable for her.
And that was important want me to do it, but it became, I think, you know, tolerable for her, where she...
And that was important for me to have her on board.
So can I ask you a little bit about what I've seen as a major transformation on the Trump side?
And it's allayed some of my concerns hypothetically about
the manner in which he might conduct an administration.
I think he made a major error in the debate with Harris,
not stressing continually the makeup of the team
that he's gathered around him.
At the moment, I was joking with some people earlier today
about the fact that if I was an American, which I'm not,
I would vote for Trump merely because Musk said
he would head a commission on investigation into inefficiencies in government.
And to me that's a stunning opportunity because Musk has shown time and time again that he can do exactly that sort of thing.
He has Musk, he has you, he has Tulsi Gabbard, he has JD Vance, he has Vivek Ramaswamy.
I mean, first of all, these are unlikely Republicans, to say the least, and they're also remarkable people.
And so, it seems to me that along with the inversion of the Democrats that you described and laid out in multiple dimensions,
there's also been a transformation not only of the Republicans in the way you said, but also in the Trump, in the team that's gathered around Trump himself. And so, while I'm curious what you think about Trump per se,
you've met with him many times now,
and you guys have obviously cobbled together something
approximating a functional agreement.
He obviously listened to you on the health front,
but then there's these other people that are surrounding him
at the moment too, that seem to be,
well, they remind me in some ways,
they remind me in some ways of you.
They're not the typical political players, they're much more entrepreneurial, they're
certainly not classic Republicans.
And so, what do you, how are things going with you and Trump?
You said a bunch of things about the Democrats that were critical, but you haven't yet elucidated
your opinions with regards to Trump
and the team that's around him now.
So I'm curious about your sentiments in that regard.
Yeah, I mean, I had multiple discussions.
I got a call from about two hours
after President Trump's shooting in Butler.
I got a call from, I call Kelly Means,
who is really a genius who's been on the forefront
of reforming our food system
and dealing with the chronic disease epidemic.
He and his sister Casey Means,
who did this wonderful interview with Tucker
that introduced a lot of people to them. He called me
and he said to me, are you interested
in talking to the Trump team
about some kind of a partnership
about perhaps unifying your parties?
And he
and I said no immediately.
And then I actually called my family
members and talked to another
member of the Trump team
and they said, no, I then I actually called my family members
and talked to a number of my immediate family members.
And they said, you should talk to him.
My wife said, you should talk to him.
But she was not thinking about unifying the party.
She was just thinking that he had just been
shot.
And that, you know,
because I came from a background where my
uncle, my father,
were killed by assassins,
it would be a compassionate thing to
talk to him.
But my kids were, you know,
you should talk to him about, you know,
about hearing him
out on what he has in mind.
And so I ended up
, I then sent
Kelly Means a text saying, you know, I'm
interested.
And then a few minutes later
I got a text from
, a three-way text from Tucker Carlson with an
unknown number that was President Trump's
cell phone.
And he said, you know, will you guys talk?
And then I said yes.
And a few minutes later I got a call from
President Trump.
And we talked probably for 30 or 35 minutes.
And we talked about a whole lot of
issues, different issues, about
shooting and about the issues that I
was interested in.
And he expressed a kind of
a, at that point, which was a
conformance with me on some of the
alignment with me on some of those issues.
And we agreed to meet the next day
and we ended up meeting the next day. And we talked about the issues that we I was in a con formance with me on some of
those issues.
We agreed to meet the next
day and we ended up
meeting in Milwaukee and we
had probably about two and a
half hours together.
At that point we
talked about the food
system, we talked about the
chronic disease epidemic, we
talked about the
neocons and the
addiction to war.
I was impressed by his
, I would say,
visceral revulsion
about the neocons
and about their view of an
imperial abroad
and a national security state at home.
Which go hand in hand
because imperialism abroad
is inconsistent with democracy
at home. And with also his which go hand in hand because imperialism abroad is inconsistent with democracy.
And with also
his abhorrence for censorship,
which he was again, it was visceral with him
and I think part of that is because he's seen
it in action.
He's been the target of censorship
the same as I have.
And so then we agreed
that maybe there was a, there was grounds to meet on.
They wanted me to do something at the convention, the Republican convention, and I was not ready
to do anything.
And then after that, I actually contacted the Harris campaign to see if she would have
a conversation with me.
And she just said,
out right now.
And then...
Why do you think that was?
You think a conversation would be...
I don't know.
To me, it's unimaginable that, you know,
you wouldn't have a conversation,
that kind of conversation,
particularly because, you know, my, because
the race can be so close, it's going to be within two or three points.
And I had a following enough that was large enough to swing it one way or the other.
And at least theoretically.
So, you know, I wouldn't...
Is it guilt by association? Is it something like that?
I mean, I've had a lot of experience with Democrats who have talked to me.
I think I became so radioactive in the Democratic Party.
And also, they believe their own publicity,
so they're all reading the New York Times and watching CNN.
And if you're living in that information ecosystem,
first of all, you'll never see me talk,
explain my own issues.
What you'll hear is that, you know,
I'm anti-vax and that I'm anti-science
and that I'm a crazy person and that I'm a lunatic
and all the other things that are just
are kind of the standard defamations
and perjuries about me on the Democratic control media
or aligned media.
So, and they're probably believing parts of that.
And so who knows?
I can't look into her mind and explain what they did,
you know, why they did.
I could speculate a lot, but you know, what's the point?
And then I continued having conversations
with the Trump campaign and with President Trump himself
in a number of personal conversation.
and with President Trump himself
in a number of personal conversations.
And I ended up
going to Mar-a-Lago
with my daughter-in-law
who runs my campaign.
And we sat down
with Don Jr.
and with President Trump
and Susie Wiles' campaign manager
for several hours,
and talked through these issues. And we agreed to do a unity campaign where we would,
like they have in Europe, where there are, you know, there's coalitions where you don't give up your own independence or your capacity to criticize your allies on things
with which you don't agree with them.
And he was very agreeable to that
on the things that, on the issues that we don't agree on
that I would continue to criticize him
and he could criticize me without penalty
to our alliance and that
the issues that we did agree on,
he agreed to make them
priorities and to
involve me in some way
in helping to choose the new
government and helping to
give emphasis to the policies
that I was concerned about.
And the three policies were children's health and the chronic disease epidemic, which involves
the food system and getting the corruption out of the public health agencies and out
of USDA. Second, ending the censorship and surveillance.
And number three, ending the warfare state, ending the Ukraine war immediately.
And all of those are issues that he had come to on his own. I think he appreciated my insights
on some of those issues and my passion
for some of those issues.
And my knowledge about
some of those issues
and expertise.
And he welcomed
my involvement.
One of the things,
you asked me about what I had come to
discover about President Trump
and he said to me
a number of things that were very
interesting.
I mean,
I think he was very I mean, one of the things, you asked me about what I had come to discover about President Trump,
and he said to me a number of things
that were very illuminating.
One is that he and Donald
Jr.
and
JD Vance
were absolutely
had
extraordinary
antipathy
toward
what the neocons
have done to our country.
I was surprised
when I heard that President Trump had extraordinary antipathy toward what the neocons have done to our
country.
I was surprised about that,
how knowledgeable they were and
how passionate.
And
JD Vance is a soldier.
And so his understanding of the
neocons comes out of his own
service abroad and his own
military service.
And then Donald Trump Jr.,
I don't know exactly who he was,
but he was a soldier. And he was Trump Jr. I don't know exactly how he came to his antagonism toward them
but it is, it is very, very heartfelt.
That gave me a lot of confidence as well
that he is surrounded by people
who are close to him and his family
and that are going to be involved
in the fight for freedom.
And I think that is a very important
thing that we need to do. And I think that he's surrounded by people who are close to him
that are in his family and that are going to be involved
in his administration who agreed with me.
And we talked at that time about,
in fact it was an issue that I brought up
about bringing Tulsi onto the team.
And they were very, very welcoming of that idea.
And that, of course, another one who had tremendous trouble with the Democrats.
Not only, and she was the deputy director of the Democratic National Committee,
you know, four years ago. She was a core Democrat,
and a Democratic presidential candidate,
Democrat Congresswoman.
Yeah, a formidable figure.
Yeah, and very, very formidable.
And somebody that I like personally a lot,
and I've had a long and very, very friendly relationship
with, and then, but he also said something to me.
He said, last time that I was in, you know, in 2016,
he said, I was, we got elected.
And he said, we didn't really expect
that that was going to happen.
And I was not prepared for it.
And he said, you know, we launched
the Transitions Committee in January.
And I was immediately surrounded by
business people and lobbyists and saying,
you pick this guy, pick that guy, pick that guy.
And he said, and I did it. I did what they said.
He said, I later came to regret it.
And a lot of those people were bad people.
He talks about that.
He said they were bad people.
And he said, I don't want to do that this time.
I want to do something completely different.
And he said, we're going to launch a transition
committee starting this week.
So normally, the transition committee is paid for by the GAL,
by the general accounting office,
and you don't launch till after the election.
With him, he got private donors
to pay for the transition committee,
and he's starting it four or five months early.
So that they can actually put a government in place.
And then another thing he said is,
one of the big complaints against president Trump
has been that he's sort of a captive
of the heritage foundation and project 2025.
And he said to me, he said,
project 2025 they keep trying to stick that to me.
That I've never read it.
I never heard of it until people started telling me
that I was behind it.
And he said, I was written by a right-wing asshole.
This is what he said to me.
And he said, there are left-wing assholes
and there are right-wing assholes
and that was written by a right-wing asshole.
And so in that way, you know,
he kind of, you know, disavowed this kind of ideological
pigeonhole that they're trying to put him in.
And I think his administration's going to be really
interesting because like you said,
he's surrounded by people who are entrepreneurial,
who really are common sense
people who want to do the right thing for our country.
And I also came to understand President Trump
in a different light, and it's easy for me to understand
because I've been vilified and demonized by the press
and the view of me across the kind of the liberal
landscapes is that I'm this really insane,
crazy person.
And, you know,
but a lot of people,
I take that for,
as gospel as reality.
And, you know,
I think a lot of the things that have been said about
President Trump are the same thing. They're things that are
propaganda tropes. They're very simplistic characterizations among that myth, some of
the richness of his character and of his personality.
Yeah, well, that seems to be especially the case now that he has this quite remarkable team around
him. So let me steel man the Democrats for a second and tell me what
you think of this. I have a number of Democrat contacts and they've been making a case to me
that things have genuinely shifted since Harris took the reins and they point to things such things
as relatively less emphasis being placed, for example, at the DNC on the climate crisis and carbon dioxide,
a relative shelving or siloing
of the more radical leftist movement within the Democrats,
which in my experience, they've declined to even admit
that that exists, which has been a kind of blindness
that to me is nothing short of miraculous.
It's like, is it possible that there is a shift towards the centre in the Democrat party?
And have we seen that since Harris took the reins?
And do you have any hope in that regard?
Or was your experience, your personal experience with their machinations and the problems that you detailed out so comprehensive that you think that that,
what was that? Is that is too little too late or not real at all, I guess?
Well, it's hard to look into somebody else's head. So, and so I make a practice of not doing it.
But what I would say is a couple of things. One is that both
Tim Walz and Kamala and I made this point before and then Hillary yesterday, who's
kind of the bellwether for, you know, who the Democratic Party is all have been very,
very vocal about censorship,
about their enthusiasm for government censorship
and about how they're going to crack down
on the social media.
Nobody has spoken out about the censorship
now taking place in Europe or in Brazil.
Do you see that as characteristic of Newsom's new bill,
for example?
Yeah, the bill that they have here in California,
but the ban on Twitter in Brazil,
the arrest of Pablo De Rove in France,
which is an extraordinary event,
that the head of Telegram would be pulled off his plane
when he stopped for refueling,
stopped and put in jail.
And there's no reason to do that
because Europe is openly
censoring content already.
And by the way, they do have,
you know, Pavlitarov
is a resident of Abu Dhabi
and France has
an
extradition treaty with Abu Dhabi and France has a
extradition treaty with Abu Dhabi
so they could arrest him any time they wanted.
And it was,
it seemed to be like a
deliberate signal to the world
about if you mess with the machine,
you are going to be chewed up and spit out.
And also, you know, I think having to do with Ukraine
war because Telegram is widely used in Ukraine and also
Russia and there are listservs or groups in Ukraine
that are pro-Ukrainian and in Russia that are anti-Ukraine
war.
Or pro-Russian any Ukraine war.
Or, you know, or pro-Russian in that war. And I think that it was probably a US instigated.
France has this robust, an attachment to freedom of speech
as we have in our country.
In 1789 during the French Revolution,
they passed all of these bills that are still on the books
that give a, that make freedom of speech sacred in France.
And then in the 1880s, they passed another slew of bills
that reinforced and fortified the tradition
of freedom of speech.
So it was as robust their attachment
of freedom of expression as it is in this country.
And yet they abandoned it overnight.
And if America really was the exemplary nation,
if we were the promoter of democracy around the world,
we would spend less time overthrowing
democratically elected governments
and more time defending
freedom of speech as the Western democracy is abandoned.
We would be objecting and we would be saying, you know, this is bad for you, but it's also
bad for Americans.
I mean, you add this, you know, somebody I would consider an insane person, Terry Breton,
the commissioner of the European
Commission. He quit this week. Oh, thank God. Yeah, yeah. Who threatened Moscow, criminal and
civil prosecution if he allowed. I know, I know. Without getting permission from me.
With the former president of the United States, who is the, you know, who's the
former president of the United States, who is the nominee of one of our two big political parties.
You can't listen to him give a live interview,
he has to protect the people of Europe against that threat.
And we should be objecting to that.
The United States, a real president, President Biden,
President or Vice President Kamala Harris,
would be coming out waving flags saying,
you don't do that.
You know, where we're-
No matter what.
No matter what.
No matter what.
No matter what.
Yeah.
It's absolute.
You do not do that.
You're not a democracy if you do that.
And calling them out on it, there was none of that.
I think that if you don't understand that
censorship is incompatible with democracy,
that that is a
disqualifier for being president of the
United States.
I worry that
the things that
the things that
Vice President Harris
said she is for
seem to be politically
driven and not heartfelt.
For example,
her big promise,
her promise to the United States that she is that Vice President Harris said she's for seemed to be politically driven and not heartfelt.
For example, her big promise,
her promise about taxing tips,
which she took from President Trump,
and it seemed like a last minute,
I'm going to do this because it's politically savvy.
Her change on the border,
her failure to explain why she didn't do that before,
all of the inconsistencies in that seem again
not heartfelt but politically driven.
The big signature economic reform
that she promised during the convention,
to give every new business in this country
a $50,000 gift, okay, well, you know,
that's just laughable because in New York
there are 1,000 new,000 gift. Okay, well, you know, that's just laughable. Because
in New York, there are 1000 new businesses starting a day. I would be 50 million a day just
for New York businesses. And if you gave that money, there'd be 2000 or 3000.
No kidding. That would be so fast, you could hardly imagine.
And so, you know, she's talking about hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
And where's that money going to come from?
And then, you know, her other idea, which is just a half-baked, discredited,
terrible idea about price controls, you know, and wage controls.
Every time that's been tried, it's been a catastrophe.
There's no place. Because no one's ever done it's been tried, it's been a catastrophe. There's no place ever.
Because no one's ever done it right.
No, it can't be done right.
And so none of these seem to be well thought out.
None of them seem to be part of a coherent
and consistent ideology or thought process.
None of them seem to be common sense.
And I think, so I don't, I think that, you
know, she did very well on the debate, but anybody can do well on that debate. Anybody
who can pass the bar exam, which she did, you know, doing that debate.
The bar for her was low, too, to be fair.
The bar was low, but you know, she did all right.
But anybody can do, you can anticipate every question
that you're going to be asked, or 95% of them.
And if you're surrounded by good people,
they can write you up a good 90 second sound bite.
So she had these 90 second sound bites
and she delivered them well.
But I think her understanding of issues
seems to be an inch deep and a mile wide.
And that, you know, what I would really like to see is her going on long-form interviews
like has.
I'd like to see that too.
And being asked a second question, a third question, why did you do this?
Explain this.
How is this consistent?
What was your evolution? Just asking
the kind of questions that any curious
interviewer would ask and make her
explain that and she can't do it.
And this is somebody who is supposed to
be President of the United States, they're
supposed to be able to go toe-to-toe
with our critics around the world to
explain our vision, to explain our record,
to explain her aspirations for her country.
It seems like she does not understand the use of
the power and we're seeing that, you know, her
support of the Ukraine war and of nuclear war,
you know, the risk of nuclear war, I don't think
she has any comprehension.
I don't think she has the ability to talk to
foreign leaders. I haven't seen she has any comprehension. I don't think she has the ability to talk to foreign leaders.
I haven't seen any evidence of that.
And I think that she is susceptible
to manipulation because she doesn't
have firm ideas about her own.
I think she's susceptible to manipulation
by the deep state.
I are people who want the war by the neocons
that run the White House now
and run the foreign policy apparatus
that the state has. I am people who want the war by the neocons that run the White House now
and run the foreign policy apparatus
at the State Department.
And I think, I fear that she'll be manipulated by them
and that those entities actually want a nuclear war.
So like they did in my uncle's time
and like they've done for many, many years,
they want a confrontation with Russia
that will fragment Russia and give
us access to its natural resources and eliminate our big competitor in the West. And all of their
policies have been bad. That's a dire prognostication, that's for sure.
Yeah, so that's why I'm worried about her. I'm worried she won't protect our civil rights,
our constitutional rights at home,
and she will allow herself America to be dragged
into really catastrophic wars abroad.
And at this point in history, I think that's,
we've got the emergence of all these surveillance
technologies of AI.
This time in history, if we get a president like that,
for the next four years, it may be too late for our country to ever recover.
So you laid out three policy areas where you felt that you could work with President Trump
very effectively, health, speech, and peace. And we've spent a fair bit of time concentrating
on free speech and on peace and war.
And I think we'll turn to that more,
the peace and war issue on the daily wire side
in the conclusion of our interview.
But maybe we could close up, if you don't mind,
with some more thoughts on the health crisis.
Because one of the things you've done
that I think is unprecedented,
and that's become perhaps more part of the public discussion since you've teamed up with Trump,
is to make public health a political issue.
And so you talked about the public health crisis, and maybe you could lay out the dimensions of that crisis.
I mean, I know there's an obesity epidemic, there's a diabetes epidemic, these are very, very serious problems. And so, but you've concentrated on that in a way
that just isn't characteristic of anybody
on the political landscape at all.
Now it's become an issue that's front and center.
And so I'd like to hear more about your thoughts,
why you think that's such a fundamental priority,
compared to say free speech and war and peace, why health?
And what you see see lay out the landscape
of the problem and also the landscape of potential solution.
Yeah, so we are now the sickest country in the world.
We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.
When my uncle was president, I was a 10 year old boy,
about 6% of Americans
had chronic illness.
Today 60%.
My uncle was present.
We spent zero in this country on
chronic disease.
Zero.
And today,
for many chronic diseases,
first of all, there weren't even diagnoses
and there weren't drugs available.
Today we spend $4.3 trillion, so about 95% of our health budget is the biggest, and it's
five times our military costs.
It's the biggest item in our budget and it is the fastest growing.
And not only that, it's destroying our country economically, absolutely debilitating it.
All of our other issues are small towards it.
If you just measure its economic impact, it has other impacts.
77% of American children are no longer eligible for the military because of chronic disease.
And is that obesity related with kids?
Obesity is one of them.
Obesity, when my uncle was president, was 3.4% today, and 74%.
And what do you think is driving the obesity epidemic?
It's been such a transformation.
Yeah, I mean, it's being driven by poison food.
You know, by process, ultra-processed wheat, sugar and flour, seed oils, soy, canola, sunflower, and then wheat and corn, which are all heavily subsidized.
So those 90% of farm subsidies, the crop insurance, etc., go to those three categories of soy,
corn, and wheat.
And those are the feedstocks for all of our processed foods.
They turn into sugar, they're nutrient barren.
You know, the original crops were nutrient rich,
but the GMO crops are nutrient barren
and they're heavily dependent on pesticides.
The point of the way that the reason GMOs are so popular
is because they're resistant to pests. The because they're resistant to pests.
The reason they're resistant to pests is because they are resistant to pesticides like glyphosate.
So you can saturate the whole landscape with glyphosate from airplanes and that only thing
that's green is GMO corn, which is roundup ready.
It's called roundup resistance corn.
Because of that, it's also very heavily laden with pesticides.
Wheat glyphosate is also used as a desiccant, which means it dries out wheat.
It's sprayed on the wheat right at harvest,
which means it's going right into the food.
And when that began in 1993,
that's when you saw the appearance
of all these gluten allergies and celiac disease
and wheat allergies that you don't have in Europe.
You can eat spaghetti here and you're going to get eczema
and all of these stomach complaints. Then you go to Italy and you eat it and you're going to get eczema and all of these stomach complaints
then you go to Italy and you eat it and you get thin.
And then the corn is turned into high fructose corn syrup which is just a formula for making
you obese and diabetic.
And Americans, diabetes is one of the diseases. When I was a kid, the average
pediatrician saw one case of diabetes in his
lifetime.
So a 40 or 50 year
career, he may see one case of juvenile
diabetes.
Today, one out of every three kids who
walks through his office door is diabetic or
pre-diabetic.
And we spend more on diabetes than
our military budget.
So that is, you know, and nobody's talking about this.
Yeah, right.
You know, and then these are the,
all of these autoimmune disease, diabetes,
autoimmune disease, Alzheimer's is a form of diabetes.
It's type three diabetes.
It comes from poison food.
So is it, how much of it do you think
is the toxin load per se?
And how much of it do you think is over hydrate?
It's the overload of sugars
because all of those grains turn into sucrose
and they're very low in nutrients.
So we're malnourishing.
You're seeing high levels
of obesity and in the same people,
people who have high levels of obesity,
there's also high levels of malnutrition.
The most malnourished people in this country
are the most overweight.
Right.
Because they're eating food like,
food like substances.
Yeah, and then,
That's a good phrase.
And then they're covered with chemicals and pesticides Food like substances? Yeah, and then, that's a good phrase.
And then they're covered with chemicals and pesticides,
but some of those are part of the food processing,
but some of them are pesticides, et cetera.
There's a thousand ingredients in our food
that are illegal in Europe and other countries.
So we're just mass poisoning us,
and nobody has chronic disease epidemic
like we do in our country.
That's why one of the reasons.
We had the highest death rate from COVID.
We had 16 percent of the COVID deaths in this country.
We only have 4.2 percent of the world's population.
So we did worse than any other country.
CDC explains that it's not our fault.
It's because Americans are so sick.
CDC said the average American who died from COVID
had 3.8 chronic diseases.
So it wasn't COVID, it was killing them.
It was chronic disease, right?
And we have the sickest,
we have the highest chronic disease burden,
we have the highest COVID death rate.
But it's not just, it's those autoimmune disease
like rheumatoid arthritis, human altivitis,
lupus, Crohn's disease, all this IBS.
All of these things had suddenly appeared in the mid-80s.
I never knew anybody with any of those disease
when I was a kid.
Yeah, right?
The neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech-related language like tics, Tourette's syndrome,
narcolepsy, sleep disorders, Tourette's syndrome, ASD, autism, autism rates.
In my generation, 70-year-old men is about one in between one in 1,500 and one in 10,000.
That's what it is today.
between 1 in 1,500 and 1 in 10,000. That's what it is today.
My children's generation is one in every 34 kids,
according to CDC, one in every 22 in California.
So, you know, and it is devastating, our generation.
It's our economy.
It's going to cause autism alone.
There's a recent paper by Mark Blacksell
that shows it will cost a trillion dollars a year by 2030.
And then the allergic disease again,
which I never saw as a kid, I had 11 siblings,
71st cousins.
I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy. I have my seven kids with allergies.
So you're up against some big, some major forces
in fighting that particular battle.
I mean, first of all, you have to sway public opinion in that direction, and then there's going to be
a massive force arrayed against any possible interventions,
that's for sure.
So tell me what you think you could do,
and also tell me why you don't think you would be stopped.
Well, I think they're going to try to stop us,
but I've been thinking about this for 40 years.
So I know how to do it.
And I have worked with
Mark Hyman and Kelly
Means and Casey
Means and a lot of other
people to figure out how to do
it without having to go to
Congress.
To do it all with executive
orders and policy changes.
I will give you one example.
You can get Florida out of the
water by executive order.
Out of the water systems all
over the country. That is a big issue with public health. example, you can get Florida out of the water by executive order, out of the water systems all over
the country and that is a big issue with public health and cancer, etc. But there are other things
like, it would be very hard, you never get congressional approval to ban glyphosate,
which is causing all kinds of health problems
and cancers all over this country.
But here's what you can do.
You can, NIH has a budget of $42 billion a year,
and it distributes that money to 56,000 scientists
who are at research centers, mainly universities in North America,
in Canada, the United States, and some in Europe.
And they're supposed to be doing basic science,
but what they really do nowadays is they do drug
development for the pharmaceutical industry.
So NIH is now the primary incubator
for new pharmaceutical drugs.
And it changed that, that rule, that changed.
NIH used to be the primary scientific agency in the world.
It changed, that changed in 1980 because we passed a bill
called the Bayh-Dole Act that allowed NIH itself and NIH
scientists to collect royalties on any pharmaceutical product that they developed.
So now they follow the money and now what NIH does is they're in a partnership with
pharma, they develop new products to treat chronic disease and anybody who tries to study
the etiology, the origins, the causes of chronic disease, that scientist will be black
bald forever.
And so what I'm going to do is change NIH and say
we're going to make the primary purpose of this
agency to develop science on what's causing
chronic disease.
Right now there's very little science that says
high-fructose corn syrup causes diabetes.
That's deliberate.
We don't have that science
because the agency does not want to see that science.
I'm gonna make sure that science happens.
Not one study, but not just 20 studies, but 100 studies
that show that now what happens when you have
100 studies. There is a rule in the federal courts in this country called the Daubert rule.
And that says that if you believe you got sickened by a product, like say you think Coca Cola made
you obese, you can't sue Coca Cola unless there's at least a critical mass of studies, maybe 20
or 30, that say that that's what it does.
So it's a liability enhancer?
Well, the judge has to make that decision about whether you've passed the Daubert threshold
before he allows you to go to a jury.
Oh, in a big case like when I was,
tried the Monsanto case, I was part of the trial team.
The big threshold is can you pass Daubert?
And we had about 20 studies that showed that Monsanto,
that Roundup caused non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
And we had mouse studies, we had brat studies,
animal studies, bench studies, observational studies,
epidemiological studies, so a good range
of all different kinds of studies
that show that once you get that critical mass,
then you can go to a jury.
And once that happens, the product is through.
So when we sued Roundup, we had 40,000 home gardeners
who had gotten non-Hodgkin's lymphoma So when we sued Roundup, we had 40,000 home gardeners
who had gotten non-Hutchkinson foam up from using Roundup with their backyards.
And the way that you try multi-district litigation,
you try one of those cases at a time, right?
And one after the other in rapid fire.
Till somebody says, uncle, you either lose them all
and then, you know, you run
out of money because it costs a lot of money to try a case or you win them all.
And the maker of that product then has to come to the negotiating table and settle it.
We won $289 million in the first trial.
We won $89 million in the second.
The third trial we asked for $1 billion. We got $2.2 billion in the second. The third trial we asked for a billion dollars
and we got 2.2 billion from the jury.
And then Monsanto came to the negotiating table
and we settled the cases for 13 billion
and they agreed to take ground up,
to take glyphosate out of home gardening products.
That's what you do.
Once enough science is out there, you don't have to legislate it against high fructose
corn syrup.
The lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork and they're going to be representing a million
kids with diabetes and the company is going to say, we're not going to make this product
anymore.
All right.
Well, we should, you're on a tight timeline.
I'm going to continue this discussion
on the daily wire side.
I think I'm gonna drill down more into foreign policy
and the state of the world with regards to the, what,
eternal state of warfare that we seem to have
drifted into yet again.
I'd like to talk about Israel and Gaza
and about Ukraine and Russia.
There's other issues as well.
So if you're inclined to join us on the daily wire side,
that's what's going to happen. And so I guess the other thing I'd just like to mention is we're
going to see each other again in about two weeks at in DC, I believe at the rescue the republic.
Rescue the republic.
Yeah, yeah, that's been put together by Brett Weinstein and
everybody should come to that. That's going to be one of the,
if you care about the slide of America into censorship, surveillance and
totalitarianism, you want to be at this event because this is going to be like the march
on the Pentagon back in the 60s.
It's going to be the biggest march ever, the biggest event ever, protesting this really
ugly descent apocalypse for democracy. Right, right. this really ugly...
Dissent.
Apocalypse for democracy.
Right, right.
Well, all right, sir.
Thank you very much.
Hopefully the powers that be at YouTube will let this interview stand because they took the last one down, which I wasn't very happy about.
So I hope you didn't trans...
I hope you have a copy of it somewhere.
Oh, definitely.
I hope we didn't transgress against any of the invisible rules, but we tried to.
So thank you very much for coming to see me.
It's much appreciated.
And well, good luck with your continued negotiations with Trump.
That's quite the twisting turn of affairs and it's going to be quite something to see
how this all plays out in the next 50 days.
That's for sure.
So everybody who's watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention and give some consideration to coming to Washington,
D.C. on September 29th for this Rescue the Republic event. It should be quite the thing,
quite the celebration. That's how Weinstein characterized it. There's music there as well as
speeches from people whose ideas you actually might want
to hear.
So that's a once in a generation event.
So you know, make your way there.
Thanks again, sir.
Thank you, Jordan.