To believe this election is about personalities is naive. Behind the personalities are corrupt machines on both sides.
What follows are highlights of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, answering the question; “Why did he break from the Democratic party, and equally important; why is he asking all of us to not vote for the Democratic establishment? (Which means the other guy.)
From his unique world-view and history, like no other, Kennedy believes that democracy, the very ideal, is standing on the gallows. If the current regime has its way, that idea will die. Here’s why.
BTW: Tristan Harris and Asa Raskin of ‘The AI Dilemma,’ frame 2024 as ‘The Last Human Election.’ In the future AI will take control of how we think and vote. https://ttfuture.org/blog/our-increasingly-dangerous-world/
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K: When I came into this in this campaign there were three major issues. One was the censorship. And you and I feel the same way, that any government that can silence its critics has license for any kind of atrocity.
TC: Can I repeat that? Any government that can silence its critics has a license for any kind of atrocity. Put that on your refrigerator, because that’s true.
K: Hamilton, Adams and Madison said that we put the freedom of speech in the First Amendment because all the other rights are dependent on it. And sure enough, when the government found out, discovered, that it could censor our free speech in early 2020, silenced doctors, silence mothers, silence people who were hurt. Scientists were saying, wait, there are other alternatives to what you are doing. Lockdowns aren’t going to work. The masks have no science behind them. Or social distancing. Those people were silenced. They were marginalized. They were vilified. They were demonized. As soon as the government figured out that it could get away with that, it went after all of the other constitutional rights.
The first thing it did, it went after the other leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of religion. It closed every church in our country for a year with no scientific citation. It went after that third leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of assembly, with these very bizarre social distancing regulations that they now admit were not science based.
They went after the Fifth Amendment, which is property rights. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation, no notice and comment rulemaking, no public hearings. All the things I’ve been suing governments and corporations for 40 years, all the indicia of democracy that government officials have to go through before they deprive us of rights, none of that happened. And they went after the Seventh Amendment. The seventh amendment gives us the right to jury trial. It’s very simple. No American shall be denied the right of a trial before a jury of their peers in case their controversies exceed $25. That’s all it says. There’s no pandemic exception.
And by the way, the framers of the Constitution knew all about pandemics. There were two epidemics during the Revolutionary War. One of them a malaria epidemic that decimated the army in Virginia, and a smallpox epidemic. It decimated the armies of New England at the very time when Benedict Arnold, who was our greatest general, conquered Montreal. We were in the inner city of Montreal. We controlled Montreal, which meant we controlled Canada. He had to withdraw his troops. He could not hold the city because so many of his troops were down with smallpox. Otherwise, Canada today would be part of the United States, but for that smallpox epidemic. The framers (of the Constitution) knew that when they gathered nine years later in Philadelphia to ratify the Bill of Rights.
Between the end of the revolution and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1792, there were epidemics in every city. It killed tens of thousands of people. Malaria epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera. They all knew about epidemics, yet they did not put an epidemic exception in the Constitution. They wrote a document for hard times.
V: This is one of the things I loved about your candidacy. Bobby leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent. That allowed you to do what more of us in either party need to be doing, that is to question the orthodoxies of both parties, and go back to first principles, what is in the US Constitution. You must have the same shoe fit the other foot, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. And that’s one of the things I love about the way you run your campaign.
K: Thank you. I saw Vice President Harris this week give a statement where she said two things. She said one, that Elon Musk better watch out, because if he abused free speech on Twitter, he would get that privilege taken away.
V: It’s not a privilege.
K: It isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. And, she gave a press conference in which she said that these companies need to be punished for putting disinformation and misinformation and hate speech up on the internet. And her vice president candidate, also said, the First Amendment does not protect disinformation and misinformation. But that’s not correct. The First Amendment protects disinformation and it protects misinformation. It protects lies. It protects all speech. It was not written to protect the speech we all want to hear. It was written to protect the speech that nobody wants to hear.
Now we have a Democratic party, the party I grew up in… And the word liberal is a derivative form of the term for free speech. So, free speech was the central core of its party when I was growing up. My father, and my uncle, loved his country so much because of it. They loved the freedom to debate, have a free conversation. This idea that the free flow of information was the sunlight, it was the soil, it was the water for democracy. Without it, democracy would wither and die. And they knew that.
I have a case right now against the Biden administration. I was just granted an injunction in federal courts. Kennedy vs. Biden. And Judge Terry Doughty, the federal judge, wrote in an earlier decision. He wrote a 155-page decision that details what we now know about the Biden White House’s censorship program. Judge Doughty details: 37 hours after he (Biden) took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment, he (Biden) opened a portal and ordered the social media companies; Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter to begin censoring his political critics on medical information, and also other information, including criticism of the Ukraine war.
I was the first person they ordered Facebook to censor. Facebook actually pushed back. Facebook complied and took down my entire Instagram account, almost a million followers. But they couldn’t find a single factual misstatement or error on my account. And Facebook, during the email exchange, which we now have, pushes back at one point and says,” This is actually not factually erroneous information” (meaning it was all true). So, they had to coin a new word, which was mal-information, which are factual assertions that are technically correct but are nevertheless, inconvenient for the government. And they ordered Facebook to censor misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.
The Biden White House turned over that portal to the FBI to manage. So, you have the FBI participating in the censorship of American citizens engaging in political speech. The FBI then invited the CIA, CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), which is a group that you may not have heard of, but it is the center of the censorship industrial complex, the DHS, the IRS. I don’t know what they were censoring. And NIH, CDC and FDA to participate in this censorship project. I now have an injunction against the White House preventing them from doing this to me any longer.
This is very troubling me, for the reason I just mentioned – what just happened in Brazil. We’re seeing an emergence of totalitarianism in all the Western democracies, like nothing I could have ever imagined. Europe no longer has free speech. The European Union is officially censoring information on the internet. The head of the European Commission, a man named Thierry Breton, recently sent a letter to Elon Musk saying that if he aired an unedited version of a live interview with President Trump on X, he would be fined as much as 6% of the value of the company. Then France, a week later, arrests Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, when he landed on a fuel stop in France.
This is particularly alarming because France had as robust passion and tradition for free speech, as we had in this country during the American Revolution. During the French Revolution, 1789, the French Republic adopted very, very strong laws, guaranteed freedom of speech. And then in the 1880s, they passed others laws that protected free speech. They guarded, and nurtured free speech as much as we did in this country, as much as any country in the world. So, to see France, do this… And by the way, there’s no reason for them to arrest Durov, because he’s a citizen of Abu Dhabi. France has an extradition agreement with Abu Dhabi, so they can act. Furthermore, the European Union is already censoring content. They want this extra step to arrest and punish this person and put him in prison to send a message to all of us – who’s in charge. That is terrifying to me. Those attacks on free speech are a genuine existential threat to democracy and to the republic.
TC: Amen. So, the question is; I think you’ve correctly described, and I hope you will say it every time you speak publicly, and I hope to do the same, that we’re watching the transformation of the free world into a totalitarian system. I don’t think that’s an overstatement.
K: At the convention Kamala Harris gave a speech that was bellicose and belligerent. It was a kind of speech that is written by neocons and the CIA. For the first time in history, the Democratic party had a former CIA director, Leon Panetta, speaking right before her. They had military people speaking at a Democratic convention. As you know, Democrats were the anti-war party, the pro Constitution Party, the party that was against Wall Street. They represented the little guys, the cops, the firefighters, union and labor people. You and I talked about this last week. In the 2020 election, roughly 50% of the people in this country voted for Donald Trump. But that group represented only 30% of the wealth in our country. The 50% of the people that voted for Joe Biden represented 70% of the wealth.
There’s been an inversion. The Republican Party has become the party of the common man, of working people, of the middle class. And the Democratic Party has become the party of Wall Street, of the military industrial complex, a big pharma, a big agriculture, big tech, the big banking systems and all of that, what Donald Trump calls the deep state, which is this web of financial interests that isn’t a little conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy of self-interest that functions together in tandem to shift wealth upward, to clamp down totalitarian controls, and to transform this country from the world’s exemplary democracy, into a corporate kleptocracy and a very, very oppressive oligarchical system. The kind of system we fought a revolution to overthrow in 1776.
TC: Wow! Bobby, why are you doing this?
K: What I see is a devolution of American democracy, how it’s turning into something that I would describe as a totalitarian system. Because of what I have been doing for 20 years, working on chronic disease issues, and what I did for 20 years before that, working on environmental issues, I see how these powers, these economic aggregations, can commoditize everything. They commoditize the water. They steal it from the public, they turn it into a commodity. When General Electric-Hudson was privatizing all the fish in Hudson they turned them into its own private property. How they privatized landscapes, the purple mountains majesty. When I started fighting on public health issues, I saw how they’re privatizing our children. They’re literally stealing their health.
We now have in this country the sickest children in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden of any nation on earth. When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Today almost 60% have chronic diseases. When I was a boy, we spent zero on chronic disease. Today this country spends 4.3 trillion on chronic disease. And that money is going upward into the pockets of certain people. Mainly it’s the pharmaceutical industry.
The most valuable asset in America today is a sick child. If you can get a child sick when they’re young and get them dependent on Ozempic and Adderall and insulin, and seizure medication, you have a client for life. Each sick child is potentially generating thousands of dollars a week in revenue for these interests. I see how they are commoditizing everything. They’re stealing everything we value. And ultimately, that comes from being able to overrun our constitutional rights.
During COVID I saw the whole thing in miniature, compressed in time, exactly what they’re up to. I remember in August, 2020, I was giving a speech to 1.3 million people in Berlin, who had come from all over Europe. It was like Woodstock, but for political freedom. Because they saw what was happening with these mandates. They came from every nation in Europe to protest. I ran into an NBC film crew. They were all wearing masks. And they said to me, “why aren’t you wearing a mask? You’re in this big crowd shaking hands. Are you scared of dying?” And I said, “there’s things that scare me a lot more than dying.” “Like what,” they asked? “Losing my constitutional rights,” I said. Having my children grow up in an America where they cannot speak freely and criticize their political leaders.”
We had a whole generation of people in 1776, men and women gave their fortunes, their property, their status, and their lives to give us this Constitution, giving us this incredible gift. And we became the template for the rest of the world. In 1776 we were the only democracy on earth. By 1865 there were five. By the time my uncle was president, there were about 130. By the end of the 1960s there were 190, all based on the American model. We truly were the exemplary democracy. We were the hope, the light for the whole world.
Today we’ve lost our role as a model. Nobody wants the system we have. We’re no longer a moral authority. We’ve eroded that through this dynamic. I don’t want that for my children. I want my children to grow up with a love for this country that I had growing up.
In 2013, there was a poll where they asked young Americans under the age of 35, are you proud to be an American? 85% said yes. The same poll taken six months ago. 17% said yes. We have a whole generation that’s lost their pride in being an American citizen, and they’ve lost hope for their own futures.
We had a generation in 1776, 20,000 of them died, a huge number, like a million people today, to give us our Constitution. And they said to us that every generation must water the Tree of Liberty with its own blood, if you’re going to hold on to this.
(Why am I doing this?) It’s not something that I want to do. I have a really good life. I had a great family that loved me. I still have a nuclear family that loves me. And I have a big, big family now too (the audience). But, you know, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I felt that I have to just do this for the same reason people left their homes at 1776, to do something for an idea. And I want to keep that right for my kids.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
