Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | The Man Who Could Be President

29:38And my uncle wrote him back from Hyannisport a couple of weeks later and at the time we were playing around him And he describes us on his lawn and he says, I'm looking at these children who are my children and their cousins and thinking of what right do we have because of a political dispute that we don't have the intelligence to solve to destroy these children who have nothing to do with it. And all the other children on the globe who are innocent because we have been failures as leaders. and we need to figure out a way to bring the Cold War to an end. They ended up over the next year and a half, 18 months, before my uncle was killed, exchanging 26 of those letters.

30:28And in the end, that exchange of letters ended up with a nuclear test plan ban treaty, which was probably one of the greatest accomplishments of President Kennedy's administration. They jammed that treaty through without consulting the State Department. They went right to the American public and they found enormous support for it, even in the right-wing enclaves like Utah. And they were able to railroad Congress and the State Department and the military to accept the Tasman Treaty. Khrushchev then sent a final letter to my uncle saying, let's right now cut our military dramatically. Let's put our production capacity instead of producing weapons.

31:22Let's produce food for people. Let's produce educational materials. Let's stop competing militarily and let's start competing in a way that will benefit all of humanity. And he wanted to go to the moon together, which my uncle agreed on, and to end the Cold War. And my uncle was killed. That letter was never delivered to him. It was captured by the State Department and never given to him. and immediately after my uncle was killed, after my uncle was killed, Khrushchev walked around his dacha for three days in tears and he never really recovered from the shock. And he was deposed shortly after that for trying to make peace with the United States and he was replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin and all the others who were part of that military industrial complex.

32:38Would you say that, you know, starting with your uncle and then, and also with your father, that there's an almost Kennedy doctrine which correct me if I'm wrong, I'll try to summarize it in like two points. One, that the role of government is to help people who cannot help themselves. And number two, in terms of foreign policy, not use American power as a police force, but help countries achieve the same level of development and democracy that America has, as opposed to the many times governments have been overthrown because they were maybe against U.S. interests, which is not exactly the same as saying, let's support countries, whether they're for or against America, that they have the same kind of philosophy of democracy and so on.

33:29Yeah, I think my uncle was not an isolationist at all. He was the opposite of an isolationist, but he did not believe that the military, he believed it was the least optimal option to use the military as a foreign policy tool. And we should not be engaged in overthrowing governments, fixing elections, murdering foreign leaders, or any of the things that the CIA was then involved in. My uncle did not know about the assassination programs, but he would have been horrified if he did. And he was – it was years – it was almost a decade before America and even President Johnson learned of the extent of those programs.

34:10Why did they all keep CIA Director Dulles around? Well, my uncle fired Dulles. But initially, like why didn't he fire him like the second he came in office? He fired him. Well, he did. He fired him immediately after the Bay of Pigs, which was, you know, the moment he came into office. And he fired Bissell and he fired Cabell, who were the, you know, the, but the entire infrastructure of the CIA at that time was very secretive. They were extremely dishonest. They did not believe that they had a duty to tell the truth to an American president. And particularly the clandestine divisions were a government to themselves.

34:55They created the Vietnam War. They created problems all over the world. They overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1954. Mahmoud Mossadegh, the first democratic government in Iran in 4 ,000-year history of that country, and we were supposed to be supporting democracy around the world. But Mossadegh threatened to nationalize the oil companies and Eisenhower and Dulles, Dulles who had worked for the oil industry before coming into office, overthrew them. The following year, they overthrew Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala. Again, the most democratic government ever elected in Latin American history because Arbenz was trying to nationalize 80 % of the arable land in the country was controlled by United Fruit who kept the land fallow and people out of work in order to keep labor costs low and to keep the price of bananas high.

36:02So they deliberately were undermining the interests of Guatemala and Arbenz nationalized that and offered, incidentally, offered to pay the fair market value of that land to United Fruit. United Fruit refused because Arbenz determined the fair market value based upon what United Fruit had been claiming the land was worth while it was paying taxes over the previous 20 years. They claimed the land was only worth$16 million. But when they threatened the nationalizes, they said, no, it's worth$160 million. And Arbenz said, well, you've been saying when you talk to our tax department, you've been saying it's only worth$60 million.

36:47So that's what we're offering you. And Adaliz had been the attorney for United Fruit. So as a favor of the company, he overthrew the government of Arbenz. And he did this all over the world. There were over 100 coup attempts by the CIA. And the rest of the world knew this, although Americans who were very idealistic did not believe that their government was involved in these kind of nefarious circumstances. My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, sat on a commission by President Truman, which looked at the CIA's conduct. And my grandfather recommended the abolishment of the plans division, which is the secret clandestine division of the CIA.

37:38and said these kids were running around the world doing things that nobody knew they were doing and getting into mischief and giving a bad name to our country. And the blowback from those activities was distorting all of U.S. foreign policy. My grandfather made a speech in 1947 called Fortress America saying we should use our military to make America too expensive to conquer. We should fortify our shoreline. We should fortify ourselves at homeboat. But, and he quoted John Adams, John Quincy Adams, we should not, which is something that Jefferson and Adams and Washington all believe, we should not be going abroad looking for monsters to slay.

38:25We should wish other nations who experiment with democracy our best. We should give them our prayers, our best wishes, our aid, if that was appropriate. we should not help them militarily. So bringing that, again, let's say calling that this Kennedy doctrine on foreign policy, bringing that into the current day and age, how do you think we should be behaving differently? Or are there some things we're doing well? Like what do you think of Trump, for instance, shaking hands with the leader of North Korea, which seems like something your uncle John F. Kennedy would have done. I actually think that's a good thing.

39:05I think we ought to be meeting and talking with foreign leaders. What I don't believe is – what I think is really bad for our country is the fact that we're using the military as the principal foreign policy tool and that we now have 668 bases, military bases in countries all over the world. and you know what my grandfather said and what my uncle understood and what generations of the of you know what the founders also understood is you can't be an imperial nation abroad and be a democracy at home that you become a national security state you become a garrison state and you know the reason that you and I when we travel have to go through an x-ray machine is because we've screwed up our foreign policy.

39:59The reason the World Trade Center got bombed is because we put troops, American troops in Saudi Arabia, and it offended the religious sensibilities of radical people who lived there, including Osama bin Laden. And the United States then had a target on it, and we became the enemy. Why should we be sending troops to Saudi Arabia to protect one of the worst dictatorships in the world, a dictatorship that jails women for driving a car, makes them wear veils in public, and won't give them human rights, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, that teaches its children and children all over the world in moderate schools to hate our country?

40:44Why are we going in there to protect their government and putting a military base there and alienating their population. All of the burdens of becoming a national security state are all a direct result of blowback from bad foreign policy errors that our leaders have made over the past 30 years and principally that the CIA and the intelligence agencies. They look at a country like Iran and say, we can fix this by getting rid of the leader. and what happens, we've now had a 50-year battle with Iran that's cost our nation enormously. We had a hostage crisis. We've had war after war after war and that's not good for our country.

41:30Why don't we, and my grandfather believed this, and if you look at the writings of great historians like David Kennedy from Yale, there's no relationship to my family, but he's written this extraordinary analysis of why empires fail And every time they do the same thing, they overextend themselves militarily in other countries. It hollows out and destroys their economy at home. And that's how they all fail. Well, that's exactly what we're doing. We're not, you know, why is it? We used to have the best educational system in the world in this country. We paid for people, you know, the veterans. We paid for all of our military personnel.

42:15And most students in this country could go to school virtually for free to higher education. We have the most educated population in the world. That's what made America strong. Now a child has to bankrupt himself to get a college education permanently. Do you think those two things are related, though? Of course they are. We've hollowed out the middle class in this country in order to pay for these military adventures abroad. But the cost of a B-52 bomber is you can build 130 schools. We pay for, I mean, a B for, you know, a stealth bomber, you can build 600 schools for. Why do we need a stealth bomber?

42:55A thing that makes America strong is a strong economy. And ultimately, it's an illusion to think, and, you know, Iraq, we saw this. We thought, you know, we had a President Bush who thought we're going to roll into Iraq. We'll be there. It'll be what he called, quote, a piece of cake because he thought we have the strongest military in the world. And they exposed it. The military over there was not what our military was next to useless over there. Yeah, we could roll through the country in three days. And you have 20 years of war that follow. and total destabilization in the Mideast, the creation of ISIS, which was a direct result of our invasion of Iraq.

43:43All these other problems that we have in the Mideast are a direct result of our military interventions. Why can't we just stay out of it? We can say, look, we're going to protect Israel, and we sign a treaty with Israel that everybody knows about it. If you attack Israel, you're attacking us. and that's completely permissible. But we don't have to put bases in all of those countries and basically create a foreign policy around our oil interests, the interests of oil country companies, which, by the way, is destroying the planet. If we put a tiny fraction of that money into building transmission systems here at home that could carry wind and solar power.

44:32We got it for$3 trillion. We completely rewire this country and decarbonize it so we don't need oil anymore. So we're creating clean energy for the rest of the globe. That would be the best national security choice to build solar energy and get us off the deadly addiction of oil So we don't have to have anything to do with these sheiks who hate democracy, who are despised by their own people, who won't let women drive a car. Why do we want to be defending those systems over there? I agree. I think the dependence on oil, particularly Middle Eastern oil, has skewed all of our relationships there.

45:19And I'm not a scientist. I don't really know all the history. I do know solar power to some extent and wind power and some of these other renewables do get subsidized while the technology increases and the technology will get there. Well, the subsidies to oil and coal today are a thousand times the subsidies to wind and solar. What about nuclear, though? You can build – well, look, here's the math. Today, you can build a utility-scale solar plant in this country for a billion dollars a gigawatt. The cause of building a new coal plant is$5 billion a gigawatt. And then once you build the solar plant, it's free energy forever because photons are hitting the earth every day for free.

46:04There's no fuel costs. Once you build that coal plant, now the big cost begins because now you've got to go cut down the Appalachian Mountains, ship it across the country in rail yards, poison. You know, coal-burning power plants cost$350 billion a year and health care costs for Americans to make us sick as hell. Oh, and those are all part of the cost of coal. Okay, now a gas plant costs about from$4 to$6 billion for a dual turbine gas plant. Again, it's six times what we'd be paying for wind or solar. And again, we have to now pay for the gas, and we're bringing that in. Now we can produce it here, but it's still it's poisoning the planet and you have to pay for the gas forever you don't have to pay for wind and solar because it's all free oh we could give our country and then nuke is the most ridiculous calculation the last nuclear power plant built was nine billion dollars a gigawatt and then you have to store the waste for 30 ,000 years which is five times the length of recorded of human history.

47:14Oh, it makes that is an absurd. I mean, we could create energy in this country by burning prime rib. Why would you use the most expensive and inefficient ways of doing it to create an energy system in our country? The only reason to do that is because the guys who are making money on those systems own our government. If we were acting rationally, if we had true free market capitalism and we would be using wind and solar and we wouldn't be using any carbon-based fuel. So it's interesting. So government's always going to be influenced one way or the other. But like you say, free market capitalism will kind of direct things in the right ways, like maybe a switch from oil to these alternatives or other choices, you know, less military involvement overseas and so on.

48:12Obviously, the U.S. is set up as a or supposed to be set up as a capitalist society. What do you think is the best way to move us in that direction now? The best way is to get money out of government. That's the only thing that will work. You got to get money out of the political process and then we can have true free market capitalism. And if you want a clean environment, you have true free market capitalism. Why is that? Because a true free market promotes – and we don't have free market capitalism in this country. We have corporate crony capitalism. We have the same kind of capitalism essentially that they have in China.

48:46It's a merger of state and corporate power and a reward system to cronies of people in political power, people who pay off the politicians. So a true free market promotes efficiency. And efficiency means the elimination of waste. Pollution is waste. A true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources. And it's the chronic undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. In a true free market capitalism, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor.

49:31They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. In a true free market, what we need is a true free market. A true free market rewards good behavior, which is efficiency, and punishes bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste. We have a system that is rewarding inefficiency and corruption and punishing efficiency. So what would be the first, like, three steps to get there? All you need is one step. Get rid of the Citizens United case and ban corporate money in politics and have the same system that other democracies in the world have.

50:15which is to limit the amount of the control that wealthy people and large corporations have over our politicians by banning donations. This is really important because one thing— And there's a million ways to do that, by the way. You can have publicly financed elections. Well, okay, so let me ask you about this because there are many candidates who don't have money, don't have resources, and yet have good values and would be good elected officials. And then there are many self-funded candidates like billionaires and so on who they don't need to worry about corporations donating to them because they have the money.

50:55They could self-fund their campaigns. How do you kind of level the playing field there? Well, there's a million ways to do it. I'm not going to suggest a system because all these other nations, European nations and Canada, all have systems that work. You just have to choose one. Now, I mean, publicly funded campaigns is one of those. You get your campaign publicly funded, but that means it limits the amount of money that you can put in. Oh, if you're an individual who's very wealthy, you can – then you don't get any of that publicly funded. You don't get any of that public funding. You can still run, and this is one way to do it.

51:38Another way would just be to, you know, ban personal contributions at all. I would say the fair way that is the easier lift in this country would be to allow wealthy people to run, but they spend their own. Once you surpass a certain threshold and you're on your own and you're not entitled to any publicly funding, you've got to go all the way on your own dime. That's a disincentive to do it. And, you know, it makes it so that you're allowed to use your money to run for political office, but you still have a fair system, a relatively fair system. Again, like, you know, you're... Incidentally, we had a system, you know, this happened to our country in the 1880s and 1890s where corporations took over our government.

52:26And they literally, you know, at that time, there wasn't a direct election of U.S. senators. The senators were chosen by the legislatures. The legislatures were literally owned by these big trusts, Standard Oil, the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust. All of them had, and the Railroad Trust, interlocking boards with the same guys on them, the Carnegie's and the Morgans and the Frick's and the Rockefellers. And they were literally trading state legislatures as chess pawns. we had essentially a peaceful revolution in this country where you had movements. You had an agrarian movement, the progressive movement, which was liberal.

53:09You had a populist movement. The populist movement was agrarian. The progressive movement was in the cities. And they joined together. You had labor and women's movements and women's suffrage movements. And then you had these great journalists, these muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell and Optin Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and many, many others who were exposing the corruption of the trust. And then you had one really strong leader, which was Teddy Roosevelt. And they, you know, in those first years of the 20th century, we passed all of this legislation that was designed to restore democracy in the country.

53:56We passed the first labor laws, the first child labor laws, the first laws that created the five-day work week. So you couldn't work people seven days a week. Minimum wage laws for the first time. Most importantly, we passed a graduated income tax and corporate income taxes. So wealthy people in corporations, before that, they paid the same income tax if you were Rockefeller. as a guy who was laboring, you know, a bricklayer. Al Rockefeller had to pay his part of the, you know, of paying for the national well-being, you know, which we're paying for him. The roads all benefited him, the railroads, et cetera.

54:42He now had to pay his share, and corporations had to pay their share. We passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. and allowed Roosevelt and other presidents to go after and to break up these trusts, to take away some of the political power. And we passed the direct election of senators and we gave women the vote and did a lot of other things that restored democracy. And then, of course, we had the New Deal, which was a continuation of that process where we started giving power to labor unions to counterbalance the enormous power that corporations had in our society. And we really had this extraordinary democracy by the end of World War II that was the model for the world.

55:25And it initiated a period that is now known as the Great Prosperity, the biggest, the longest bout of prosperity in the history of the world. We created the American middle class. us. We had people, working people going to college, owning their own homes, owning their automobiles, owning, and you didn't have these huge gaps between rich or poor. Those were essentially banned. We had a 90 % income tax. When my uncle was elected president, last year of Eisenhower's presidency, we had a 90 % income tax in this country. What that meant is you couldn't have, you know, people like Bill Gates and these, you know, these super ultra billionaires who now are turning America into this kind of, you know, this old style aristocracy, which is really just a, it's no longer democracy.

56:21It's a corporate kleptocracy and it's not good for anybody. You know, just speaking of Bill Gates, what do you think of his efforts on charity and his, the pledge that he spreads to get all billionaires to donate at least half of their money to charity. And he's certainly done a lot for malaria in Africa and solved some huge problems. I think Bill Gates has done more harm to the planet than probably anybody, arguably anybody in history. And a lot of it is just misguided. I don't think it's deliberate. But I think the programs that he's had in Africa are programs that have the illusion of applying technology to solve health problems.

57:05And what we really need in Africa is economic development. That's what solves health problems. You can't give people – there's just been a huge study by the Danish government that is called Morgensen and all that shows that the DPT vaccine, which Gates has been giving to every child in Africa, is the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine that is actually killing far more children, mainly girls, but far more children than diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis combined. In fact, the vaccinated kids have 10 times the death rate as unvaccinated kids. And that's Bill Gates. That's millions and millions of children dead.

57:50I think he thinks he's doing a good job. He's basically made a pact with the pharmaceutical industry, and he is following their lead. And he believes, you know, I think he has this belief that you can get health in a syringe, good health, and it's an illusion. When you look at the science, it has been catastrophic, and it's been catastrophic for Africa. He's taken the cheap way out by giving vaccines to African children that are loaded with mercury and aluminum. two of the most neurotoxic elements in the universe. In fact, mercury is the most neurotoxic element in the universe that is not radioactive, that is known to human beings.

58:35And he's giving megadoses of that to every child in Africa from the day of birth. And it's destroying an entire generation. What about, though, like let's say the measles vaccine, which has pretty much eliminated measles in Africa as far as we can tell? I mean, again, I'm not a scientist. Oh, it hasn't eliminated measles in Africa. You know, measles still kills lots of people in Africa. You can say the measles vaccine, we have a measles vaccine in this country, but measles used to kill back in the early 1900s. It used to kill a lot of Americans. By 1960, everybody in this country was affected by measles.

59:19There was 4 million measles cases a year, but there was only 400 people dying. Your chances of dying of measles was 1 in 500 ,000. The 400 kids who died were almost all badly malnourished. We now know that if you give a child vitamin A, that it's almost impossible to die from measles. Of the measles vaccine, we don't know. The decline in measles had occurred prior to 1963, prior to the introduction of the vaccine. 98 % of the measles decline was prior to the introduction of the vaccine, and it had to do with sanitation, with nutrition, with chlorinated water, and with other engineering developments.

1:00:07It had nothing to do with vaccines. It's not me saying this. This is CDC who says there's a CDC study that says vaccination had less than 1 % effect on the decline of these infectious diseases. I know it's a mythology to say that it cured polio and smallpox and measles, etc., but it's just not true. Why do you think so many people disagree with that? And again, I don't want to make this... Why do they disagree with it? Because I think the pharmaceutical industry is making money and people are not listening to this science. People don't let informed debate. Now, let me just tell you about the measles vaccine.

1:00:47The MMR vaccine, which is the current, which is a Merck product, in order to get that monopoly, they have a monopoly in this country, in order to get that monopoly, they had to show FDA to keep Glaxo. Glaxo has a competitive product. They wanted to keep Glaxo out. And the FDA said, well, in order to do that, you need to show us that each component of that vaccine has 95 % efficacy. So the measles portion, the mumps portion, and the rubella. Merck could not get anywhere near 95 % on the mumps portion. They could only get 69%. So they awarded their top two scientists, John Kralin and Joanna Washkowitz, to take antibodies from rabbits and put them in the human blood files and hand those to FDA and lie to them.

1:01:44And that's how they got the vaccine. That's how they got it. And that's the vaccine that we're giving to our kids today. And what it means is that the vaccine will protect you against mumps for five or six years. But then you become vulnerable again. You don't have any antibodies. And that's why we're seeing mumps outbreaks in college-age kids, in prisoners, in military personnel who are fully vaccinated. People are all upset because there were 700 measles cases this year, but there were 9 ,200 mumps cases. We have a mumps epidemic in this country right now, and it's not among young kids. Mumps is harmless to young kids.

1:02:26It's something, it was part of, it was a, it was just a rite of passage of childhood. It was a mild self-limiting disease. That's a quote from CDC. Every child was expected to give it, I get it, and when you got it, you got lifetime immunity. What you don't want is to have mumps when you pass puberty because it can shrink male gonads and it can sterilize both males and females. Now we have mumps epidemics all over this country and adults are having the same thing in measles because the measles vaccine wanes. Within 20 years of getting that vaccine, 30 % of the people no longer have immunity. That's dangerous because it means mothers are not passing immunity to babies.

1:03:15And older people and very young people are getting measles. And those are the ages you don't want to get them. Oh, you know, those are some of the issues with that vaccine. It's much more complex than people present it as. This is an argument that people ought to have. I ought to be able to sit on this show opposite a doctor or a scientist and have this discussion in a civil way. But this discussion never occurs in the media because this discussion is banned on social media. It's banned on the internet and we can't publish articles about it. Why do you think, I mean, and again, I don't mean to make this because you're right.

1:03:53I'm not a doctor. I don't know. But why do you think there's such dissent? Like two of your siblings wrote an article even saying vaccines are necessary, herd immunity is necessary, you know, they specifically mentioned you as kind of the opposite, saying the opposite of them. Why do you think there's this dissent even among your own family? I think it's orchestrated dissent of people that there's an orthodoxy that has been manufactured by pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry, four companies, are making$50 billion a year on the 72 vaccines that are now mandated for our children.

1:04:32Now, if you look at the history of that, when I was a kid, I got three vaccines. and I was fully compliant. And there was not outbreaks of hepatitis B and rotavirus that were killing lots of Americans. We didn't even know what those were. Oh, in 1986, Congress made it illegal to sue a vaccine company. So no matter today, no matter how negligent that company is, no matter how grievous your injury is, no matter how toxic the components of that vaccine, you cannot sue them for your injuries. These companies have zero incentive to make those vaccines safe, but they did have an incentive to make more vaccines because suddenly you have a product where there's no marketing required and no advertising because it's mandated for 76 million kids and it's very high margins.

1:05:25There's no liability. Not only that, so you can injure people, you can kill and injure as many people as you want, and nobody can sue you. There's no consequence. Not only that, but most people don't know this. They don't have to do the safety testing. So it's the only medical product that doesn't have to be safety tested. Why is that? It's an artifact that CDC used to be called the Public Health Agency, which was a quasi-military agency. That's why people at CDC have military ranks like Surgeon General, etc. etc. The vaccine program was conceived as a national security defense against a biological attack on our country.

1:06:08They wanted to make it that if the Russians attacked us with anthrax or a biological agent, we could immediately get a lot of vaccines out to them. We could develop them, manufacture them, and deploy them quickly. So they wanted to get rid of the regulatory impediments. So they said, if we call it a medicine, you need to test it for safety first. We don't want to do that because that takes years. So we're going to call it a biologic. And then we want it to test it. So you have something that's not tested, safety tested, that is not, it's not a single of the 72 vaccines has ever been tested against a placebo.

1:06:43None of them. They have no liability. There's no incentive to make them safe. And you have a mandated audience. Now, these four companies that make them are serial criminals. Over the last 10 years, Merck, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Laxo have paid$35 billion in penalties and fines and damages for their other medical products. And they, for defrauding regulators, for falsifying science, for lying to the public, are killing hundreds of thousands of people. Vioxxalon, which is another Merck product, killed 120 ,000 people. It was a pill, and Merck was telling people it was a headache pill, and they knew it caused heart attacks.

1:07:32They knew they were going to kill half a million people. They didn't tell anybody. They sold it anyway. Now, what kind of cognitive dissonance does it require for us to believe that the company that will do that kind of behavior with that one medical, with all their other medical products. When it comes to vaccines, there's no liability, there's no chance they'll ever get caught that they suddenly find Jesus, and they're not doing it there. Well, I can tell you they are. And the problem is they control the press. They spend$25 billion a year on direct consumer promotions and doctor promotions.

1:08:11So So they're giving the networks$9 billion, the biggest advertisers for the evening news, and Anderson Cooper is sponsored by Pfizer. Aaron Burnett is sponsored by Pfizer. Lester Holt is sponsored by Merck. You think that they're going to have a bad story about vaccines, which are the biggest products? And what happened is because they passed that law in 86, in 1989 there was a gold rush, and they went from the three vaccines that I have to the 72 vaccines that kids have to get today. And suddenly, beginning in 1989, you saw this explosion of chronic disease in this country. Why is it that I had 11 brothers and sisters and I had, you know, over 50 cousins.

1:09:05I did not, a single one of them have food allergies and my kids, I have seven kids and they all have allergies. Why is it that all of these things appeared in 1989, food allergies, asthma exploded. Autism went from one in 2 ,500 to one in 34 kids today. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, which we never heard of. Tourette's syndrome, never heard of it. Autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, juvenile diabetes. Nobody knew about these things. Rheumatoid arthritis. All of them began in 1989, the year something happened, environmental in 89. So let me ask this because I want to respect your time and, and we've covered so many different issues, but I always want to get back to this idea that your, your family almost philosophically has kind of stayed consistent about their principles and their influence in the sixties.

1:10:11Obviously your uncle and your brother had a lock on the political system. You know, the last question, why aren't you or any of your cousins or siblings, whatever why are any of you president like what's what why why has there been you know you're all statesmen you're all have an influence why isn't anybody kind of people just did different things with their lives and you know i think there's a whole new generation of kennedys that are coming up all of them are interested in politics and public service you know almost everybody i'd say most of the people in my family are in public service many of them have been in politics I have a nephew now, Joe Kennedy, who we're all very proud of.

1:10:55He was a congressman from Massachusetts. My brother was in Congress. My sister was lieutenant governor of Maryland. I have another cousin, Patrick, who was in Congress. So a lot of our family has remained in politics. We're all involved in politics. I do what I do because I love what I'm doing. Thank you for having me. well Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thanks for coming on the podcast and I really enjoyed your book American Values and all of your writings and so on thank you very much people can follow me on Instagram that's what I would recommend and hope for what's your Instagram handle? it's Robert F.

1:11:34Kennedy Jr. alright thanks

1:11:45You