Wisconsin's Weekend Morning News
Robert F. Kennedy Jr Reflects on His Father's Assassination and the Secret Service
I had the opportunity to talk with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about a wide range of topics, including his relationship with his extended family. Let's begin with his thoughts on our current president. Robert, we've all had a couple days to absorb what happened with the debate last week. As you're looking back, who do you think is running this country? I don't know, you know, I had misgivings about that beforehand because I've done President Biden for 40 years, and he's always been a decent man and a good friend. I don't want to make this personal because this is a minor issue compared to the other crises our country is going through, but his decision to deny me secret service protection during this campaign was uncorrect or his second inconsistent with anything that I know. I mean, even if he understood I was his adversary, you know, when my uncle Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter, they were sworn enemies in 1980, and Carter gave him a secret service protection 540 days out as soon as he started talking about announcing, and President Biden has a bust on my father behind him at the Oval Office. He knows what happened to my father. He knows I'm entitled to the secret service protection. I'm the first candidate in history that has, since my father's dad, when they gave first gave secret service protection to all the presidential candidates, the first one to ask for it and to be denied. So, and it always occurred to me that, you know, maybe President Biden is not making these decisions, and I've had family members who've talked to the President about it, and it seemed those discussions seem to go nowhere. So, it occurred to me then that the decision-making at the White House over important issues may not be with the President, and I think after the debate performance last week, I think a lot of Americans are having the same misgivings. Have you had any major Democrats reach out to since the debate, asking you if there's a way to support you? No, I haven't, but my numbers are now show that I'm the only candidate in the country who can be President Trump, President Biden in every configuration. If I'm in the race, if I'm out of the race, if I'm in the race, he lose, if I'm out of the race, he loses texture of the states. And the biggest poll taken today, which is the Zogme poll, which is 26,000 people, 10 times the size of a normal poll, that shows maybe both President Biden and President Trump in head-to-head races. So, I think, you know, if the Democrats want to win the way to raise against President Trump, they might think about reaching out to me. Originally, you filed to run in the Democratic primary. In light of all of this, are you regretting that decision? No, because the Democratic primaries were rigged. By the DNC, the way that the delegates were selected, I would have had to win between 70 and 80 percent of the delegates to win the nomination. And that was just mathematically impossible. And then when I started looking like my performance was strong, they began canceling primaries. So, there were some 60 different rule changes that they initiated to make sure that nobody could challenge this president. You know, I'll give you an example of one of them. I was campaigning in New Hampshire very early, and they adopted a new rule that said that any candidate who stepped into the state of New Hampshire following, you know, to pursue a presidential nomination, that any vote cast for them in that primary would count for President Biden. So, even if I won 100 percent vote in New Hampshire, all of my delegates would have gone to President Biden. And I think one of many, many of these really crazy policies that the DNC adopted in order to keep any adversary from challenging this president, they were, it was really like the the old Soviet system where, you know, they have elections in the Soviet Union, they have them in Iran, they have them in, you know, Vladimir Putin runs them in Russia today, just 180 percent of the vote, because his adversaries aren't allowed to ballot, and because the president is controlled. Well, as it turns out, we're doing the same thing in this country. How do your policies differ from the other candidates? Well, you know, I'm talking about the issues that are existential, actual solutions for how do we get young people into houses, which is absolutely critical for democracy, is the first generation of young people who will not own their own houses because they're so unaffordable. And the reasons for that are, you know, are very clear and they can be remedied, but it means going up against these big investment houses, Black Rock State Street, Vanguard, Black Stone, which own both the Democratic and Republican Party, so nobody will do it. I, you know, we need it, we need to deal with inflation, which is killing our country right now, and the only way to deal with that is to start living within our means, to cut back our military, and I'm going to cut it in half to end the chronic disease epidemic, which is $4.3 trillion a year. It's five times our military budget, and I'm going to deal with that. I'm going to end the chronic disease epidemic. We're now the sickest country in the world. We have the sickest children. When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans think chronic disease today, 60% too, and it went from health care as a result has gone from absorbing 6% of our GDP to almost 20%, and it's unsustainable. I'm going to end the toxic division that is tearing our country apart. Neither of these presidents can do that because they're the ones who feed it and who profit from it. I'm going to I'm going to dial back the budget deficit. We're now at $34 trillion, President Trump promised a balance of budget. Instead, he ran up to be bigger debt than all presidents in the United States. History combined from George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years. President Biden is on track to beat him. We're now adding a trillion dollars every 90 days to the deficit, and within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar we collect in taxes is going to go to servicing that debt. I'm going to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power, which both of these presidents presided over. I'm going to stop the government from lying to people. That's why nobody trusts the government anymore because it lies constantly, and they were lying during the impeachment, one lie at one hopper after another. And on the day I get into office, I'm in issue an executive order that any federal official who lies to the American public in conjunction with his job would lose that job. And I'm going to stop government from lying to us and start transparency. So all of these are issues that neither of these presidents want to address because they played such a critical role in creating the problem to start off with. Robert, you mentioned the chronic disease epidemic, and you were essentially canceled because of your views on vaccinations. Why did the media hold you up to such ridicule? Well, I think there's a number of reasons. Well, on the media days, increasingly partisan. And so, you know, I'm a threat out of the Democratic Party superstructure into the pharmaceutical companies and the big banking concerns who profited from the COVID pandemic. And they don't want to, they don't want, you know, their role in that debate or their record in that debate. And the mainstream media also gets a disproportionate amount of its revenues up to 70% of evening news shows revenues come from pharmaceutical companies. And of course, people like Anderson Cooper and Anderson Cooper reportedly has $22 million a year salary. But most of that money, ultimately, is coming from Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical companies who are purchasing advertisements on his show. So they know who is buttering their bread. They know who is signing their paycheck. And, you know, and they, and those companies, those pharmaceutical companies are buying platform to market their products, but they're also buying content on the evening news. And they're doing that across the media. So, and then, you know, a lot of the media today is controlled by the intelligence agencies. We have had a resurgence after 2014 of Operation Machinberg, where it's become permissible for intelligence agencies to live illegal for the first time for them to profit-gendize the American people. The intelligence agencies are the major, the U.S. CIA through USAID is the largest funder of journalism in the world, $10 billion a year. And, you know, it was committed for a long time just to interfere with foreign journalism. But, you know, there's been a series of reports recently that show how deeply embedded it is in America's leading newspapers, journals, and television stations. Will you be on the ballot in all 50 states, including Wisconsin? Yes, I will, babe. We started Wisconsin with a late opener, and it just started this week. And we've been, I think yesterday was the first day, and we've been on the ground there, and we will have all of our signatures. We already have enough signatures to get on the ballot, more than half the stage. And by the end of this month, we will have enough signatures to get on the ballot in every state. You mentioned your dad, and you were there when he was assassinated. What would he say about your campaign? Well, obviously, I would not have launched this campaign if I didn't think that it met all of my values. And those values are largely the values that, you know, that I derive from my dad. I think if you went down the checklist of every issue that was a priority for him, that I would check every box. I don't think there's any issue that I am advocating that he wouldn't be proud of. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this. I had your cousin, Patrick, on a few months ago, and he's not supporting you. He's supporting President Biden. Are you disappointed that more of your relatives, more of your family, aren't backing you. Well, you know, we have a complicated family, and I love my family. You know, we were all raised to oppose, to argue with each other, to argue with intensity, with passion, but also to love each other. I wish, on my country, the same thing, there's five members of my family who are working for the Biden administration and many others who have NGOs that are entangled with the administration. And so I understand, and my family has a 40-year relationship with Joe Biden. So I understand that a lot of them are upset. I also have close to half of my family is supporting me. Many of them are working on my campaign. My cousin, Anthony Shribers, running the state of Florida for me. But you know, even with something like Patrick, Patrick has been opposed by running, but he's been very supportive of me personally. And in fact, he's been fighting with the administration very, very vigorously to get me secret service protection. And that's been done out of love and concern for me and for my safety. And, you know, I think at this point, he's very angry at the administration for not providing it to me. Robert, one final question. Will you win in November? Yeah, I wouldn't be in this race if I didn't intend to win. So ultimately, you know, I'm not very good at spin. I don't like to do it because it feels dishonest. But the results of this election are ultimately in God's hands. And I'm going to work as hard as I can to make sure I win. You know, the mainstream media has set from the beginning that my campaign is untenable and predicted on a weekly basis that it was about the close, but and that the things that we were achieving like ballot tried to achieve like ballot access were completely insurmountable. And yet everything that they've said has turned out wrong and everything, you know, that we've done my numbers continue to climb to historic levels. You know, there's a sogby poll showing me beating and it had to had raises both President Trump and President Biden. There's no independent candidate in history losing numbers like that. So as you've seen, we're on a week, you know, the whole country as a tiger by the tail right now. And we don't know where this is going to end up. We don't know what's going to happen to President Biden. But I think increasingly people are seeing that his candidate is he is untenable. And 70% of the American public do not want to have to choose between President Biden and President Trump. And, you know, I have popularity, favorability ratings in the country. So he has so far so good. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A pleasure to talk with you, sir. You too. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.