A Conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - Sunday Fireside Chat

Hey there, this is Marissa Streit. I am the CEO of PragerU, and you are about to listen to a special edition of Fireside Chat with Dennis Prager. Those of us here at PragerU are continuing to do the very important work that we've been doing with him for over 10 years. We are educating millions of young people online. We have state partnerships to bring our content into schools and so much more. You can head over to PragerU.com to see the progress that we've been making. Also, I'd love to invite you to support our mission by donating to our 501. It is a nonprofit. Your tax-deductible donation will go to an institution of higher learning that actually shares your values. So enjoy your podcast and thank you so much for all your support.

Hi everybody. Welcome to Fireside Chat number 308. As you all know, it's always you and me. Or you and I, to be grammatically correct. On rare occasions, I have a guest, someone I really believe you need to meet and I have so many questions for. In this case, it's Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known to everyone right now as a candidate for president of the United States on the Democratic side. I actually have admired him well before he ever announced that he would run for office. I had him on my radio show well before that, to give an example. And I'd like to tell you why. And that is, as I have so often said, the rarest of all the good traits. There are many kind people, sweet people, loyal people, honest people, but there are very few courageous people. And goodness on earth cannot prevail without courage. I will talk to him about that in a moment, but that, that is a big factor in my wanting to have Mr. Kennedy here. I'd like to remind you or tell you, this is one of his recent books, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. And it is well worth your read, whatever your position on any of these matters. So, Robert, welcome to my home and to the fireside chat.

Thank you so much for having me, Dennis Prager.

It's a delight. So I'm going to tell you something. I am not even sure my wife knows this, but I think this will touch you. And it may make me a tiny bit angry at my mother because I think she threw this out along with my baseball card collection because mothers like clean rooms, you know. I actually have a letter. I had a letter from your father. When I was a freshman or sophomore in college, my hobby was shortwave radio listening. And I got mail from Radio Peking. It was not yet Beijing. And it had been opened by the post office. And I wrote him saying, in America, they let you get your mail unopened. And your father sent me a personal letter back. I told him I was a college student. And that letter is gone. Imagine if I could have showed you that letter now. And I just thought it would be sweet to tell you of that one interaction that I had with him.

And do you remember what he said?

Oh, he totally agreed with me. He thought it was clear. He, I think it was clear. He signed it. It was not a pro forma letter. Thank you for writing Senator Kennedy. It was, I lived in New York, obviously. He was my senator. Oh, I think that he was disturbed by that fact.

Yeah. Well, I know, you know, when I'm sure you remember this, that when we were back in those days, really in the '60s, '70s, and I believe in the '80s, it had on our passports that we weren't allowed to visit certain countries like Cuba, China, North Korea, North Korea, etc. And my father was very much disturbed by that. And he thought, why can't Americans visit any country they want? And he didn't like any kind of intrusion on our rights. He said, other people can tell us not to visit there.

Why is our government telling us who we can't visit? That's how I feel. I hated the communist government in China. I hated communism from almost when I could breathe freely, or certainly speak. But I should be able to get mail from there. That would have been your father's position. He was no fan of communism. He was a fan of freedom.

But he also thought we should be able to hear whatever the communists wanted us to hear.

Yes, exactly.

Because our system ought to be able to triumph in the marketplace of ideas. And if we couldn't win the argument in the marketplace of ideas, then, you know.

Then the travel bans will be useless.

Yeah.

That's exactly right. So I just, I just thought I'd share that with you. So I want to talk to you about you for a moment because of the courage issue. And this is not to heap praise upon you, it's because I'm actually deeply interested. Are people— this is one of my questions about life— are people born with courage or do they yearn to develop it? How would you answer that for you?

I don't know. You know, I don't even, I don't really think about it in those terms. I just, you know, at one point in my life, I decided really, I made a conscious decision that I was just going to do the next right thing, whatever happened. And that that was important to me. And so, I feel like I have a very fortunate life. I have, you know, there's a lot of things that, a lot of difficulties that I've encountered because of some of the choices that I've made and a lot of friendships I've lost, a lot of opportunities that I've lost, but I feel very privileged. I was raised in a milieu where we believed that our, all of my brothers and sisters and cousins believed that our lives would be consumed in some great controversy and that it would be a great privilege for us if we could have an effective role in it. And so I don't feel like You know, the sacrifices that I've made are— I feel like everything, you know, that I'm— I've lived a lucky life.

Well, your answer doesn't surprise me. A lot of people who do remarkable things don't think they're remarkable. But let me just say, it's pretty obvious that the positions you have taken, for which you were best known prior to your running for office— now you're known for many positions— were with regard to vaccines, and particularly with vaccines and the potential relationship, childhood vaccines and autism. I mean, that was a very unpopular position. And let me say, for me, I knew of you, but it didn't, I didn't think ill of you, and I didn't think positively. I just thought, okay, this is, a man with a position, and I didn't take it seriously. I want to tell you why I now take your positions on the potential danger and the potential relationship to autism of childhood vaccines. And that is the amount of lying done to me by the medical and pharmaceutical establishments in the last few years has completely changed my view about whether or not they will tell me anything that is true. This is— it's actually, as an American, it is painful for me to tell you this, that so much of importance. The American Medical Association— and this has nothing to do with autism or vaccines— announced that it is wrong to put the sex of a child on the birth certificate because there's no such thing as, uh, as gender. It is it is something that the child will decide later. That's the American Medical Association, and then I'm supposed to believe them on vaccines? So I want you to know, I have come to you burned on the issue of my government not telling me the truth, and particularly the medical authorities. So if you feel free to react to that, or we can continue on the vaccine issue.

Well, I had, you know, I came into the vaccine and public health issue as an environmental attorney who'd spent 30 years suing big polluters, but also suing the government agencies that are supposed to regulate those polluters and witnessing firsthand time and time again how those agencies had been captured by the industries they were supposed to regulate. And they had in fact become sock puppets for the industry that they were supposed to regulate. So I saw that, you know, with EPA and with a lot of the state agencies. You know, when I sued Monsanto in this historic lawsuit, we came across emails in the discovery documents between the head of the pesticide division at Monsanto, a man named Jess Rowland, who was there for over a decade, and the top executives of Monsanto for whom he was secretly working. So we were paying him as taxpayers, but he was taking his orders from Monsanto. And he was, they were ordering him to kill certain studies that they didn't want performed because those studies would show, were likely to show a link between exposures to Roundup, which is their flagship pesticide, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma or other cancers. And at one point they asked him to kill a study. They asked him to falsify science, to ghostwrite studies, to do, you know, all of these really very, very dishonest and deceptive tasks. And at one point they asked him to kill a study that was done by an entirely different agency that was outside of EPA, an agency called ATSDR. And it's the Agency for Toxic Substance Research. And it's not in EPA. He said, "I'm gonna do this, but if I do this, you need to give me a gold medal 'cause it's not even my agency." And he in fact was able to kill it. What he was doing there is actually the rule rather than the exception. You know, the highest levels of many of the divisions and branches of our environmental agencies are being run by people who are secretly working for industry.

So you were burned, and as I was, on these more recent issues.

So when I came to public health, it was easy for me to see what was happening. And then I saw that it was actually agency capture on steroids because I was shocked to learn that FDA, almost 50% of FDA's budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. And, you know, I was dumbfounded because as bad as EPA is, If it was getting half of its money from the coal industry, it would be a lot worse. So, you know, this is like agency capture on steroids. And then NIH has this relationship on the, there was this act passed called the Bayh-Dole Act back in 1984 that allows not only the agency, NIH is a $42 billion budget and it, uses that budget now. It used to do science, a lot of science. Now it basically, a lot of what it does is developing new drugs for the pharmaceutical industry, which it gives to them essentially for free in many cases. And it is just a, it's a terrible arrangement. But what, but what they, they, the Bayh-Dole Act said is that if you are a scientist who works for NIH and you work on developing a new drug, that you can get margin rights to the patent. So you can collect royalties on that drug for the rest of your life and your children get, as long as that product's on the market, you're gonna get royalties. Oh, NIH itself gets royalties. They can take about half of the royalties on some of the, like the Moderna vaccine, they own half of the royalties. So they'll get billions and billions of dollars. Not only that, but there's 6 individuals who work for NIH who were Anthony Fauci's deputies, who each got margin rights for the patents. So they own royalties. So that, so, you know, I looked at this and say, this is pretty astonishing because these are the regulators that are supposed to be looking for problems with these drugs before they give them to us to protect us. But, you know, they know that they're, they're all their mortgage, they're gonna pay their mortgage if this drug does well. They're gonna pay for their boat, they're gonna pay for their children's education, they're gonna pay for their alimony or whatever. And as long as that drug is being sold to people, they can make a profit. So the last thing they wanna do is find problems with it. And the mercantile potential that is inherent in that kind of conflict has completely overwhelmed the regulatory function of these agencies.

Right. So that leads me then to the, a related question that I don't know what you'll say to this. This I knew and I think I knew thanks to you, but I don't know what you'll say to this. So that explains the moral corruption in the FDA and the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies. Namely money. How do you explain the New York Times and the Washington Post? They're not— are they getting money from Big Pharma? Why are they so angry at you for alleging the possibility of a relationship between autism or other problems and vaccines?

That is, you know, that's a— I would say that's a complex question. And part of it, I think, is the dynamic that, you know, that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest advertisers now. I think it was $9.6 billion in advertising. We're the only country in the world other than New Zealand that allows pharmaceutical advertise— pharmaceutical companies to advertise medical products directly to the consumer. It's unthinkable in most other countries. And Europeans, when they come over here and see the pharmaceutical ads on TV are generally expressing—

So that's why I specifically avoided TV. Is that true for the New York Times and Washington Post?

Oh yeah, they do get pharmaceutical advertising as well. But I think it's more, complex than that. And, you know, it's interesting to me because I talked to a lot of the reporters and the reporters themselves would deny that there's any kind of censorship or any kind of editorial, you know, prodding. And they, they will say, well, you know, we're, we're, we're accepting the science and the science is what CDC says it is. And I say to them, "You know, the science, science is not what CDC tells you." That is a logical fallacy because it's an appeal to authority. And that's not, you know, that doesn't get you to the truth. But, you know, they're so, journalists, journalism is supposed to be a search for existential truths. Like every profession really, but journalism specifically is supposed to are supposed to be the guardians of our civil rights. They're supposed to be speaking truth to power, large aggregation of power, wherever it is. Journalists are supposed to maintain a posture of fierce skepticism toward government officials. And what's happened to journalism in the last couple of years in this country is really extraordinary, is because they're now doing the opposite. They have become propagandas or the government. Now, why is that happening? You know, I think it's a very, very complex dynamic because you can't just say they're being bought off by pharmaceutical companies.

That's why I asked it. That's right.

There are other things happening too. And some part of that dynamic is a lot of influence by the intelligence agencies throughout the press. And, you know, we've done a lot of research and exposés on that, you know. And traditionally, historically, the CIA ran a program called Operation Mockingbird, which in 1973— Operation Mockingbird, actually, I think, I think Carl Bernstein published a piece for Rolling Stone that year which was which came out of the Church Committee hearings and the House Select Assassination Committee hearings. There was a lot of information about the CIA's activities suddenly available to the American public. And that article showed that there were 400 leading reporters and editors in our, you know, the most auspicious newspapers and television stations in our country who are actually secretly working for the, who had signed state secrets security agreements with the CIA and were working for the CIA and were propagandizing the American people, which was illegal at that time. And the CIA at that time said, okay, we're going to stop doing that in the American press. We're going to still do it abroad. And the CIA is the largest funder today of journalism around the world. Mainly funded through USAID. They spend about $10 billion a year funding journalism around the world. But in 2016, President Obama— there are two things happened. One, the Patriot Act, and then in 2016, President Obama issued an executive order that allowed the CIA to begin propagandizing Americans again. And we saw at that time—

I want to get that clear. President Obama signed a bill.

No, it was an executive order.

An executive order that what exactly?

In 2016, it allowed the CIA to begin propagandizing the American public. See, it was when the CIA was created in 1947, it was illegal for them to propagandize Americans. They were allowed to propagandize people in other countries. And that was part of their function and that was being done through, you know, Radio Free Europe and through a lot of other organs. And, you know, ultimately the CIA took over USAID and USAID's, one of its principal functions is propaganda, propagandizing abroad, you know, controlling journalism and promoting US interests abroad and US foreign policy. Priorities, but they're not supposed to be doing it here in the United States. But in 2016, President Obama changed that rule, and we started seeing then press organs become overt kind of propaganda vessels for CIA. And, you know, specifically, there are a number of journals that very, very much evidently started pushing CIA propaganda tropes. The Daily Beast is one, Salon, Rolling Stone, which was taken over by a guy with very, very strong, when John Wenner sold it, with very strong intelligence agency connections, a guy called Noah Schachman. John Avalon, who was running Daily Beast, has strong intelligence agency connections. And then But also journals like the Scientific American and National Geographic, if you—

They're as woke as you can get today.

And I don't know why, but anyway, there are a number of things that are happening.

By the way, you didn't include the Washington Post, New York Times in your list.

I would say, I don't know, and I can't tell you. That, you know, how it's happening, because of course it's obscure. But I think it's pretty clear that most journalists will tell you that the Washington Post is essentially an asset of the CIA and the New York Times is a State Department asset. So the point is that for whatever reason, and it's probably a conspiracy of different reasons or confluence of different reasons, They tend to promote official orthodoxies right now rather than challenging them. And we know, we saw during the Iraq War, Judith Miller, who clearly is an intelligence agency asset, promoted the Iraq War, was very, very dishonest about it. And the New York Times subsequently had to apologize for it publicly. But they did the same thing with the Ukraine War and nobody's apologizing now, but it's the same.

Well, we'll get to that later. I wanna understand though, I don't, I don't understand exactly the connection between the CIA and vaccines. I understand the CIA and war, the CIA and elections. I don't understand what on God's earth the CIA cares about vaccines.

The CIA's, the CIA's first project when it was created was Operation Paperclip. So that was the first mission that it ever, that it was given. Operation Paperclip was the operation of getting, of establishing rat lines for Nazi war criminals and Japanese war criminals who were, who had scientific information. So they were bringing over missile scientists and bioweapon scientists and chemical weapons scientists from from Germany. A lot of them were people who were convicted of war crimes or who were wanted for war crimes, and they gave them new identities, and they brought them over here in exchange for handing their information to the CIA. Um, they were given new identities, and they were given immunity from, you know, from their, uh, war crimes tribunals. And, um, And they brought them mainly to Fort Detrick, which was a bioweapon, a new bioweapons facility that was created by the Roosevelt administration during the last years of the war. They recognized that the Japanese and Germans had, but particularly Japanese, had developed this extraordinary bioweapons capacity. The Japanese had killed 500,000 Chinese with bioweapons. They had this extensive complex in Manchuria where they were manufacturing every kind of bioweapon. They were doing essentially gain-of-function studies and they were doing human testing of the really, of stuff that is almost unspeakable what they were doing. They provided a, performed live vivisections on 3,000 people.

Like the Nazis did, but nobody knows about it.

Yeah, so the CIA's first mission was to get those guys, those scientists, and bring them to the United States and put them to work at Fort Detrick. When you're doing bioweapons research, every bioweapon requires a vaccine. Bioweapons research and vaccine research are the same. They're always identical because the bio— there's always blowback with bioweapons, unlike other weapons, unlike even chemical weapons. There you don't get blowback if the wind is in the right direction. But with bioweapons, there's always blowback. 'Cause if you infect your opponents, your adversaries, that infection is gonna spread to your troops. So you need to have the offensive capacity to use a bioweapon includes a vaccine that will immunize your own troops. And so every bioweapons project is always a vaccine project. And I'll just briefly tell you what happened. We developed, because of the CIA program, which they did with the Army and the Navy at Fort Detrick, they began, they developed an extraordinary bioweapons capacity in our country by 1969 that they said had, they bragged, had nuclear equivalency. So they had weapons that could kill more people than nuclear weapons at a lower cost. The cost, in fact, they estimated in one of their papers was 29 cents per death. And then suddenly, shockingly, Richard Nixon in 1969 went to Fort Detrick and declared the end of the bioweapons program. Unilaterally, we were gonna dismantle our bioweapons program. And he shocked everybody by doing that. And he did it because it was immoral. It was also, it was like a poor man's nuclear bomb. Once you figured out how to create a bioweapon, once that knowledge was there, anybody could do it. And you could do it for a tiny fraction of the cost that you could develop a nuclear weapon. And at that time, there were, I think, 6 nations that had nuclear monopolies. And they said, why are we creating this potential that can be then spread across the world. And it didn't make any sense strategically. And Kissinger and Nixon saw that and said, "These things are gonna be used against us and they can be developed very cheaply. Why are we teaching people how to do it?" So Nixon terminated the program in '69 and then got, over the next 4 years, got most of the world to sign on to a bioweapons charter. Had banned bioweapons, made it a criminal offense. And then in 2000— but those— before they closed Fort Detrick, before they closed, the CIA went in and took samples of all the cultures and stored them in warehouses, mainly in New York, and then— and continued illegally working with a big engineering firm called Battelle to develop bioweapons in violation of the Bioweapons Charter, but they did it very quietly. And then in 2001, there was an anthrax attack one week after 9/11. It was an anthrax attack on Congress. And they attacked— the anthrax attack was against the two senators who were fighting the Patriot Act, who were the most vocal trying to stop the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was a 342-page statute that they took off the shelf the day after 9/11 and then passed in the next 2 weeks. And it, you know, it basically was just a direct assault on the Constitution. And, um, but it had a very little-known provision in it that said, although we do have— we are a signatory to the Bioweapons Charter and the Geneva Convention, which fed which forbade bioweapons. From henceforward, no federal official can be prosecuted for violating the bioweapons treaties. And that, and so that was in the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act, the Patriot Act was being blocked by Patrick Leahy Dashiell. Those two men got anthrax in the mail in their offices. The anthrax was given— 22 people got sick. I think 4 or 5 people died from it. And it shut down Congress and shut down the debate on the Patriot Act. And the Patriot Act was passed and it relaunched the bioweapons program. The bioweapons arms race. The Pentagon in the initial years did not, was nervous about whether the Patriot Act was actually legal, you know, because the Geneva Convention, if you violated the bioweapons provisions of the Geneva Convention, it was a hanging offense. You'd be executed. And so the Pentagon didn't really, they were not jumping into it right away, but what they said is, okay, we're gonna start funding it, but we don't wanna fund it here, so we'll fund it through NIH. And they started diverting $2 billion a year to bioweapons development and they sent it all to Anthony Fauci's NIAID. So he became the bioweapons czar overnight after 9/11. Now what's interesting is that That anthrax attack was used as a pretense for invading Iraq. They said it came from Saddam Hussein, as Judith Miller told us that, and a lot of other people of the New York Times. But after a year of investigation, the FBI, after we'd already gone into Iraq, determined that the anthrax was actually a very, very sophisticated weaponized version of anthrax called Ames anthrax. And the only place that it could have come from was Fort Detrick, which was, you know, the CIA lab. And so somebody within the federal government had something to do with sending that anthrax in and had nothing to do with Iraq. But we passed the Patriot Act, we relaunched it, and Anthony Fauci was the guy who was the point man for bioweapons research in our country. He was given a 68% raise by the Pentagon to do bioweapons research. That's why he was the most highly paid person in the federal government when he left. He was getting $450,000 a year. The President of the United States gets $400,000 a year. So of all the 2.3 million federal employees, he was the highest paid of all of them. And it's because he was getting that you know, that bounce in salary that he got from doing bioweapons research. And the bioweapons charter, you can't do bioweapons research to develop bioweapons, but you can do what they call dual-use research, which means bioweapons research that is also necessary to develop vaccines. And so they were doing, you know— You answered it.

Okay, you answered my question.

Yeah.

The link. I'm glad I asked it.

And I'll just tell you the punchline of the story is that in 2014, 3 of Anthony Fauci's bugs escaped and they were high-profile escapes. Congress found out about them. They had hearings from 3 different labs. And 300 scientists wrote a letter to President Obama Dennis Prager saying, you got to shut down Anthony Fauci. He's doing all these studies that are bioweapon studies called gain of function. And one of these creatures is going to escape and cause a global pandemic. Obama declared a moratorium and ordered Fauci to shut down. He had 18 studies at the time, ordered him to shut them all down. Instead, Fauci transferred most of those studies to Wuhan. So he continued to do offshore and with the help of the Chinese government in a Chinese military lab. And so that's the, you know, that's the end of that story. But anyway, that's why the CIA, the biggest funder of gain-of-function research at Wuhan was not NIH. The biggest funder was the CIA through USAID and then EcoHealth Alliance, through which NIH was laundering all its money. We now know that EcoHealth Alliance was a CIA front.

So that will lead me to the first area we may differ. So if the government and the CIA and the medical establishment are not truth-oriented, Why do you believe them on climate change, that the world is coming to an end according to Al Gore every 12 years? But why would you not say that that's at the very least hysteria?

Well, you know, my position on climate change has always been consistent. I believe that climate change is real, and I see, I mean, it's clear to me that the Earth I see it. I've been an outdoorsman my whole life. I've watched the ecosystems that I grew up with change. In fact, I, in many, many ways, I've seen animals' ranges change. I can name you a dozen animals where I live that have increased their ranges north since I was a boy. I've watched the Arctic melting. I don't think it's— there's any argument that the globe is not heating that is credible to anybody who spends any time outdoors. The question is, is it being caused anthropogenically through release of carbon?

That's one. The other question is, is it an existential, that means the threat to the existence of humankind? That's the claim.

Well, no, but I, you know, I don't know that that's, you know, that's not a claim that I would make. And it's not a claim that, you know, I think it threatens civilization because I think the disruptions that, you know, that are gonna be caused by, for example, the Nile Delta flooding and, you know, Bangladesh, there's billions and billions of people who are gonna be displaced or harmed. You know, you have the water supply, you know, You have, listen, I've been to Glacier National Park in Montana, there's no glaciers left. It was called Glacier National Park because there were hundreds of glaciers there, and 100 years ago, there's no glaciers. I've watched the snow, the snowpacks, I spent a lot of time in high altitude and I've watched snowpacks retreat across the world, and I've been in the Andes, the Rockies, the Himalayas, all over the world, I've been in Africa, the high peaks in Africa, you don't see it. And I've been to the Arctic and watched it melting. There's no— yeah, it's going to be catastrophic and it could be, depending on what happens with the ocean currents, it could be beyond any kind of calamity that humanity certainly has ever experienced. I don't, you know, is it being caused by carbon or is there some natural sunspots where, you know, that are causing it? I can't tell you that I've read all the science and understand all the science completely. I know that the vast majority of scientists say, "Yes, it is." But I also know that the vast majority of scientists is not always right. They weren't right about COVID And I know federal scientists— That's my point. Right? But so let me just finish what I'm saying. Oh, I don't, I believe that climate change is happening, that it's existential. I don't insist that other people believe that. I fought carbon, the industry, Throughout my career. But I don't tell people I'm doing that because of climate change. 'Cause I don't think, I think it's a, people, it's a divisive issue. And I also know this, at like every crisis, it is gonna be used by elites to clamp down totalitarian controls and to shift wealth upward. And I'm watching that happen right now. You know, I'm fighting projects, these carbon capture projects, projects. Those are just huge boondoggles for the carbon industry. What I say to people is, I don't care what you believe about that. We need to get off of carbon anyway. We need it no matter what you feel, whether climate change is real or not. All the things that we need to do to reduce carbon are, are things that we ought to be doing anyway, because look at what coal is doing to Appalachia. We have cut down the coal industry, Peabody, Massey, Consol are blowing up, I think, 200 tons of ammonium nitrate explosives a week. It's a Hiroshima, it's the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb a week in the Appalachian Mountains. We've blown up the 500 tallest peaks in the Appalachian are gone. They're gone. There's 1.4 million acres that are flattened. These aren't purple mountains majesty. You know, the landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed, that, you know, it was the richest ecosystem in North America. It was the only place the forest survived during the Pleistocene ice ages, and all of North America was receded from that refugium. There's 86 species and the dominant species in Appalachia compared to 3 in Vermont or any other forest because It's the mother forest for all of North America. We cut it down. It's gone. There's 2,200 miles of rivers and streams that have been buried by, you know, by toxic mine tailings and rubble. No American, any American who flies over there like I've done would be sick to their stomach. This is not a good result. We see burning coal has poisoned every freshwater fish in America with mercury. Every fish, according to FDA and National Academy of Sciences, now has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh. The Appalachian Mountains have been, the forest covering the high peaks of the Appalachians have been eliminated. And from Georgia to northern Quebec, acid rain. I grew up in the Adirondacks. 20% of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized, no life in them. 'cause as it rained, and I'm watching the coast now, the bivalve populations, the clam and oyster populations collapse all over the coast because of the acidification of the ocean. So we don't, you know, and that's from coal. So, you know, if coal were forced to internalize those costs, nobody would buy it. It would be so expensive. Right now they sell you coal and they say, "Look, it's only 11 cents a kilowatt hour." And compared to, you know, 16 cents the average. Well, but if they internalize those costs of the damage that they're doing to our country, they'd be, you know, $50 a kilowatt hour. Nobody would buy it. Oh, I'm for free markets, but I think everybody should, that we should have real free market capitalism in our country. All the industries should be forced to internally— we should eliminate subsidies. And every industry should be forced to internalize the cost of bringing their product to market. And then we should—

So let me revisit a comment you made about— that you didn't spend much time on, understandably. But you fear, if I'm correctly paraphrasing you, a certain use of all of this in a totalitarian way.

Yes.

That was— so that's what I fear. I don't— I feel very similarly to you. I have no issue with those who believe X or Y on climate change. I fear the use of climate change to suppress liberty and to ruin the economy.

You and I have no disputes there because I absolutely— I'm watching it happen now. We all are. As the World Economic Forum is using it to provide moral gloss to this system of socialism for the rich and the vicious, barbaric, savage kind of capitalism for everybody else. Oh, and that's what they're going to do with any crisis. That's what they did with COVID Amazon shut down all of its competitors, 3.3 million businesses in this country. Amazon is a plunder organization. It paid $0 in federal taxes last year. It shut down 41% of Black-owned businesses, will never reopen. The government shuts it down. Amazon is censoring books like mine that criticize the lockdowns. Oh, they're raking in billions and, you know, they're shutting down the American middle class. And that, you know, as well as Facebook and all of the other ones that were censoring us while they're raking in massive money.

So one would think, given, given your views on carbon that you would be a big fan of nuclear power, but you're not. And that's—

I'm all for nuclear power if you can ever make it safe or if you can make it— well, if you can make it— if you listen—

it's like saying to me, that's like saying I'm all for pedestrians if you could ever make it safe. There's no such thing as safe. There's no reason of safety. What, what, what is the bad record of nuclear power that I should worry about.

It does. You don't have to believe me that it's not safe. The people who make that decision is the insurance industry. And the insurance industry, you know, these are people on Wall Street with, you know, dark suits and three-piece suits. And they're saying this industry is too dangerous to insure. When I say the nuclear industry, Get an insurance policy like everybody else. Right now, they had to pass— no insurance company will write them a policy.

Right.

It doesn't make sense. And the insurance industry is the ultimate opportunist.

So putting the insurance industry aside, after all, France has a serious amount of electricity from nuclear power.

And they got a serious problem with nuclear waste.

What is the serious problem?

Disposing of it without dumping it in the ocean. Which is—

Well, they shouldn't dump it in the ocean. Okay. Okay. There are other ways of getting rid of nuclear waste. Like what? Like truly burying it. I mean, seriously burying it under a mountain.

They haven't figured that out. But let me tell you this, first of all, not only— they had to pass the Price-Anderson Act, which is an act that says if there is an accident at a nuclear power plant, I lived 6 miles from a nuclear power plant. If there's an accident at that plant, that I'm so— that my insurance policy, my home insurance policy, does not insure me against that event. So I am responsible, I have to self-insure against their negligence. And that particular plant is leaking tritium into the Hudson River every day. So, you know, that's one thing. If they're safe, then get an insurance policy. Stop saying you're safe if you can't get an insurance policy. It's absurd. The insurance industry is the ultimate arbiter of risk. Second of all, they're not economic. Right now, the cost of building a solar plant in this country is $1 billion a gigawatt. The cost of building a coal plant is $3.6 billion a gigawatt. The cost of building a nuke plant, $14 billion a gigawatt. You could build, you can burn, we could generate energy by burning prime rib if we wanted. But you know, it makes no economic sense. And by the way, that cost is the construction cost. It does not account for the disposal. We now have to take the waste. The company's not paying for the disposal, the taxpayer does. We have to dispose of that waste for 30,000 years, which is 5 times the length of recorded human history. How do you, you know, how do you justify that cost to generations of humanity? Not only that, but every nuclear power plant requires vast subsidies for its construction. There is no utility in the world Who will build a nuclear power plant unless its construction is completely subsidized by government? So you got, you have, you know, every part—

Electrical cars are subsidized by government.

But, and listen, I don't believe in subsidies. I think we should eliminate subsidies. I think the time that subsidies are justified are, you know, for nascent industries that The government is trying to cultivate for national security reasons or commercial reasons. For example, when George Washington gave his inaugural address, he could not buy an American suit because we did not make material, fabric in this country. We made the raw material, the British made us ship that over there. They had all the mills in Britain and then they sold us the material. Washington said that's not a good thing for our country. He began— federal government began subsidizing the development of mills in New England. We developed our own industry. After a couple of years, they were able to not do that anymore. And this became, you know, a very, very important industry for our economy. So, so I'd say you're against carbon and you're against nuclear.

So what is your— what is your solution? You don't believe in fracking, presumably. You don't— you don't want natural gas. So, so what would you like to do? In order to maintain Western economy. Because frankly, I infinitely more fear the collapse of Western economies because Hitler was elected because of economic reasons. And I'm a Jew who wrote two books on antisemitism. I taught it at Brooklyn College. I know why Hitler was elected. It was because of the economy of Germany, not because he hated Jews. He hated Jews, but that was not what, what he ran on. He ran on, we've been ruined economically because of inflation. I far more fear the devastation to the economy of the West than I do nuclear power.

Well, do you believe in free market capitalism?

Totally.

That's what I believe in. I think we should get rid of subsidies, and if we got rid of subsidies—

Well, there would be no electrical cars if we got rid of subsidies. Who would buy it? It would be so expensive.

Here's the thing. If we got rid— if everybody had to internalize their costs, first of all, we'd get rid of coal and oil. The price of gasoline would go up to You know, if the oil industry had to pay the true price of gasoline, which would include— we give them right now $5.2 trillion annually in subsidies to carbon in total, $1.3 trillion to oil. And that does not include the cost of oil wars, which they should pay for. We shouldn't pay for them. Why should we pay for their wars? Asia, we should— that should be reflected in the price of gasoline. Hear me out. That should be reflected in the price of gasoline when you pull up the pump. If they had to pay the true price of that gasoline that we're now paying, the oil industry would have to be charging $20 a gallon. For us to buy fuel. If they were paying that, everybody would be using electric cars with no subsidies. So if you, you know, the marketplace is rational, it sends rational signals, and it's subsidies that make it irrational. And I believe that we should use the cheapest form of energy. The cheapest form of energy is gonna differ depending on where you are. But I believe also at the government—

What would the cheapest form of energy in America be?

Well, the cheapest, it depends where you are, but here's the thing. Here's what I believe that the government should be doing. We should be creating an economic grid that creates a marketplace that can then choose the cheapest form of energy. Right now we have a grid system that is underbuilt, that is extremely inefficient and can't carry energy. And let me give you some examples. We have enough wind power in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas to provide 100% of the energy for all of North America. North Dakota farmers want to put wind turbines on their cornfields because cornfield— I haven't checked the price recently, but the cornfield, you know, I'd say 5 or 6 years ago was about $500 an acre in North Dakota. And with was out of wind turbine. It was 3,200 acres with a wind turbine. The farmers all want it. It's a good thing. It, um, it, um, it reinvigorates rural economies, which we want to do. And, um, and it gives farmers a, a, uh, an income source that's going to keep them on their land, which is important for our country. Every North Dakota farmer wants to put wind turbines They can't do it because we don't have a grid that can get those electrons from North Dakota to St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New York, and New Orleans. And that's what we should have. We should have a grid that will do that, that will turn every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant. And that will feed our energy system based upon America's industrial genius and the huge abundance that we have. Have of electrons in this country and not on Saudi Arabian oil or Appalachian coal. And, you know, we have enough solar in the desert Southwest, if an area 75 miles by 75 miles to provide energy for the entire North American energy grid. You wouldn't do it that way because if a cloud passed over Arizona, you'd have blackouts. But We have this huge abundance of energy in this country. It costs very, very little to build solar energy and all we need is a grid system. And let me give you an example. We built in 1979, we built an ARPANET grid. America built the canal system. We built, when you and I were kids, Eisenhower built a highway system as a national security and for commerce and to bring our nation together. The job of the federal government is to build these infrastructures that provide marketplace. In 1979, we built an ARPANET grid, which is the base for the internet. At that time, IBM said, got out of the personal computer business. 'Cause the CEO of IBM said, Dennis Prager, personal computers are a dead-end technology. Well, we built a grid. Oh, everybody's got a computer. And what happened to the cost of information, of bits and bytes? It went to zero. So, you know, Ted, 20 years ago, if you wanted to look up something, if you wanted a piece of information, and you know, you're a big reader and you're a seeker, let's say you wanted to know what is Mao Zedong's favorite lunchtime meal. That it was really important for you to find that out, right? You'd have to go to the Library of Congress and weeks going through the stacks trying to find that piece of information if you could ever find it. It would cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. Now you just punch it into your phone and that answer pops up miraculously.

Well, I know the answer, the wheat that he stole from peasants.

Yeah. Well, so the cost of information of bits and bytes went to zero. And that's what's gonna happen to electrons as soon as we build a grid for energy. In 1996, we built a grid for telecommunications. Bill Clinton, all the baby bells, you have to integrate your line, you can't deny access, the lowest cost provider will prevail in the marketplace. That marketplace that we created, that national grid system for telecommunications created a revolution in communications technology, including cell phones. The iPhones we have are the product of that construction, that grid. And what happened to the cost of telecommunications? It went to zero. So you and I remember when if you wanted to call Europe, you had to pay $50 to do it. Now it's free. And that's what's gonna happen to electrons as soon as we build an electric grid in this country.

Okay, all right, we'll move on 'cause there's so much I want to talk to you about. So you, you, we could have a very long discussion and I don't want to only because of time factors about Ukraine, but I just want to establish in a nutshell, do you believe that we should not have aided Ukraine at all? Do you believe in a little aid? I know you don't believe in the amount we have given. Do you believe we should not have given anything?

I think we should have settled the war from the outset. You know, when the Russians offered to settle it, we should have settled it twice.

Right. I happen to agree with you. But, but in the, in the meantime, there was an invasion. And if there was no, no help to Ukraine, I don't know why Russia would have sued for peace if they didn't think that if they thought that they could prevail without having any peace agreement, they would have. But that's okay. I just want to know your position.

The Russians didn't want to go into Ukraine.

All right. Okay, so it's a very important and long discussion. What I am more curious is about, about you generally. You might be president of the United States, and I want to understand though your, your general view of America coming to the aid of beleaguered countries. So for example, if China invaded Taiwan, what would you have America do?

Oh, I, I, first of all, our policy should be to project economic power abroad. And that is the policy that's gonna make us strongest. And let me just tell you, let me summarize what happened in Ukraine so that you understand what my position is. We overthrew with USAID's $5 billion, of funding the Maidan rebellion, which ended in the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine, which was leaning toward Russia. It was trying to stay neutral, but we didn't like that. We wanted to put in a government in the Ukraine that would be pro-NATO. And why are we moving NATO to the east? Because every time we promised in 1992 when Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union and Gorbachev came to us and said, I'm gonna do something that's gonna destroy my reputation in Russia. I'm never gonna go back. I'm gonna pull our troops, 400,000 Soviet troops out of East Germany. I'm gonna allow you to reunify Germany under NATO. I want one promise from you. He said this to Bush and Tony Blair and he said, I want your promise that you're not gonna move NATO any further to the east once you get into Germany. James Baker famously said to Gorbachev, "We will not move NATO one inch to the east." And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who's the first of the neocons, says, "We want to move NATO into all the Western countries." Why do they want to move it there? Well, you know, there's an ambition that the neocons had for global hegemony after after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also every time we move NATO into a new country, they have to conform their weapons purchases to NATO standards, which means they have to buy from Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed, and the big US military contractors. So there's a huge drive to put NATO to the east. Well, the Russians don't want us moving to the east. The Russians specifically said we can't tolerate that. And in fact, George Kennan, who was the chief architect of the containment policy, the most important diplomat probably arguably in American history, said that if you move NATO to the east, he said this to Clinton, you are going to provoke a violent response from Russia. They cannot take it. They have been invaded 3 times through the Ukraine. Last time, 1 out of every 7 Russians died. Hitler killed 1 out of every 7 Russians. You can't go into Ukraine. We went into 14 countries. We moved NATO 1,000 miles to the east. We put nuclear-capable missile, Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland. 12 minutes from Russia, from Moscow. We could decapitate the entire Soviet leadership in 12 minutes. Do you think we would tolerate that if they put them in Cuba, or if they put Aegis missile systems?

Okay, look, I didn't want to get into Ukraine, but I'll, I'll just answer that. I don't think there's a symmetry between the threat of what was then the Soviet Union, or Russia today, to the United States equivalent to that of Western democracies to Russia. I don't think there's a symmetry. I don't think it's a— I think it's emotional and emotions are huge in the— I know Russian language. I studied under Brzezinski at Columbia. He was my professor at the Russian Institute. So this is an area I know a great deal about. The Russians are somewhat paranoid. And you could say even paranoids have enemies. I fully understand that too. But the thought that they will be invaded by Finland or Sweden or Latvia is laughable, truly laughable. Where it is not laughable that we would be invaded by a Russian— By Cuba?

Hmm? By Cuba?

Well, not by Cuba, by Soviet weapons in Cuba, unless you believe that it was a silly threat.

They were putting US weapons in Poland and Romania and Latvia.

Right, but again, I don't I don't believe that those countries want to invade. The last thing they want. So I'll just ask one question, which I— since we—

can I just say one thing? Is that the Russians in Donbas and Lugansk, after we overthrew the government in 2014 and they put in a government that then killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in Donbas and Lugansk, Donbas and Lugansk voted 90 to 10 to join Russia. Putin said, "No, we don't want you." He said, "Let's sign a treaty that stops the government from killing you and that guarantees that NATO won't come into Ukraine." France agreed, Germany agreed, England agreed, and Russia agreed. Zelensky ran in 2019, Here's a guy who's an actor and a comedian, no political experience. He runs and wins with a landslide, 70% of the vote. How? He promised to sign the Minsk Accords. He gets in there and pivots. Why did he pivot? Why did he say, "I ran on that issue, now I'm not gonna do it"? Clearly because Victoria Nuland and ultranationalists within his own country told him they were going to kill him if he did it. Now, he then, he gets in there, the Russians say, okay, we're not going to let Ukraine, this new pro-US government that the US has put in Ukraine, come into Vladivostok and Crimea and take the port that is our only warm water port for 340 years. So they go into Crimea without killing one person because the Crimeans welcome them. Then the Russians said, let's sign a peace treaty, let's sign the Minsk Accords in March of 2022. We already sabotaged it once. We won't help Zelensky put together a peace treaty. So he goes to Turkey and Israel. Israel helps negotiate a peace treaty. Zelensky signs the peace treaty, and it's the same thing. It's the Minsk Accords 2. Zelensky signs it, the Russians initial it, and Putin starts withdrawing all of his troops from Ukraine. What happens? Joe Biden sends Boris Johnson over there and tells him to tear up that agreement.

Well, I looked this up and it's true. So, okay. So that's why I, my concern is you and your views, not Ukraine right now. But since you got to Ukraine, just one quick question, although that may not end up that quick, I've learned.

No problem, it's a quick answer.

Is why, this is truly an open question. Why would Sweden and Finland, who have been neutral since the Cold War, since World War II, why have they decided to join NATO if Putin is not a great threat?

There's lots of reasons why European countries join NATO. They get a huge advantage from us and they come under huge U.S. pressure to join NATO.

So, you know, you know, it's our ability to pressure Sweden strikes me, given their opposition to America during the entire Vietnam War and their neutrality in the Cold War. I'm a bit dubious about our ability to pressure Sweden.

Yeah, well, you know, I— there may be lots of reasons why. Okay.

Anyway. All right.

It was—

it's an open question. So I want to go back to Taiwan. You're running for president. So we need to know. The world needs to know. Would you help Taiwan militarily if China invaded them?

I would never answer that question, and no serious candidate for the presidency will ever answer that question. Our official policy on that question is strategic ambiguity, and that is the policy of any serious candidate who's running for president.

So you don't— you won't say no and you won't say yes. Okay, that's fine. But you won't say no.

Exactly right.

Okay. All right. And same with Israel. Iran attacks Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah and all of the surrounding nations of Israel.

We have strategic obligations to Israel that I would, that I would defend fiercely. I think the existence of Israel is has to be one of the most important strategic priorities of the United States. And it has been since my uncle was president, and I would continue that policy. It's the only democracy in the Mideast. It's our most important strategic ally in the Mideast. And we have guaranteed Israel's borders. And we get a lot from that relationship. And, you know, I, my position is that we, you know, that the United States and Israel are bound together and that we need to.

So I Googled, I Googled, you'll get a kick out of this. In preparing for this, I Googled weird positions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I wanted to see what those—

That's got to be a long one. As long as that book. Yeah.

No, actually, it only— no matter how much I did, I got 4 to your credit. And by the way, I could answer them on your behalf. That's the irony. If this is— I have to say, if this is what they have to paint you as a conspiratorial nut, they don't have much. So we'll begin.

The—

your comments by Number one, the comments on bioweapons and disproportionately not affecting Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. And listen, I'm a very committed Jew. I was on the board of the Holocaust Museum. My life has been devoted in many ways. The most popular English language introduction to Judaism I mean, this matters to me. That was not anti-Semitic. And Shmuley Boteach, Rabbi Boteach, defended you. And he's, he's gung-ho on Jewish issues. They're his life. You, you were smeared, in my opinion, on those comments. Why don't you explain briefly what you said?

Yeah, I was talking about, first of all, it was a private conversation. The only reason I say that is because it's a study I probably would not have— it was a curiosity, and it was a study that I probably would not have referred to in a public setting because of the potential that people would— there are hostile people there. There's a huge rise in antisemitism right now, and anybody who can latch on to something they can turn into a blood libel. Will do that. So it's not something that I would've talked about in a public setting, but it was all I was referring to. I was talking about the development of ethnic bioweapons, which is a strong priority for the US military and intelligence agencies and for China, Russia, Iran, other places in the world. And ethnic bioweapons are weapons that can be targeted to impact an ethnic group. And they're the perfect bioweapon according to military strategy.

Right, 'cause it doesn't affect your own.

Yeah, so it's the only one you don't need a vaccine for. It kills people of a certain genetic, it can't affect you.

So I'm just curious.

And what I had said in that context I said, even COVID-19 impact, you can develop ethnic bioweapons and even COVID-19 had a disproportionate impact on certain ethnicities according to an NIH-funded study in 2021. NIH.

What is that study? That's all I was curious.

Oh, I cited that study and it, you know.

Do you remember the name?

I can't remember the author, but it's easy. And in fact, it's on on our website. There were a bunch of studies and the studies said that we don't, the study was not an epidemiological or observational study. And so we can't say that COVID-19 hurt certain groups and not others. You can't say that. But what that study said is that the docking site on the furin cleave was perfectly suited to the ACE2 receptors of people of African descent and people of Caucasian descent and was much less compatible with—

And that wasn't deliberate?

No, no, no. There was never—

That's right. That's important to know.

Yeah, there was not.

And you didn't claim it was deliberate?

No, I never claimed it was deliberate. But I was just describing a study that is out there. The people who it's least compatible with are people from Finland, and then ethnic Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.

But you didn't mention the Finns in that private discussion. It's not a big deal. I'm just noting. I'm happy you know. It's okay. So let's go to number 2 where you're considered over the top by Forbes and New York Times. Uh, let's see. So antidepressants and mass shootings. You are quoted as saying, prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events. So what, what do you mean?

Well, what I said is we should— on mass shootings, we, you know, mass shootings are unacceptable. We need to stop them. Um, um, we— the mass shootings You know, you can't blame it completely on guns. There are other countries that have almost the same amount of guns as we do, and yet they don't have mass shootings. I think Switzerland has, I don't know, something like 80% of the guns that we do per capita. But they don't— the last mass shooting they had was 21 years ago. We have them every 21 hours. What's happening? We didn't have them, you know, when I was a kid. We had gun clubs at our schools where the kids would bring their rifles to school and leave them in the car and, you know, bring them into the school and nobody was shooting people. Why did these shootings suddenly start? And there's a number of things that changed. And one of those things is, you know, video games. There's a lot of kind of potential culprits that should be studied. These are the kind of studies that NIH should be doing. One of the correlations that has been widely spoken of, in fact, there's been litigation about it after Columbine, was SSRI drugs and benzos, which are now widespread. And those are psychiatric drugs. And in the, on the drugs, on the manufacturer's inserts for those drugs, there's warnings that they may cause suicidal and homicidal behavior. So shouldn't that be something that we should look at? Because suddenly, at the same timeline as those guns, as those drugs became ubiquitous.

So do you think they're so—

I didn't say this is definitely the cause, right?

But it's worth looking into.

Yeah, it's worth it.

So, right, which I, I happen to think is totally rational. So my suspicion is then that the reason they're angry at you for even saying it should be studied is that anything that doesn't say it is guns and essentially only guns, they get angry at?

Well, they get angry at anything I say also, just for sure.

Yeah, okay, fair enough. Yeah.

And so, you know, anything I say that they can say, oh, he's crazy. You know, it's a, uh, it's one of his crazy conspiracy theories. You know, then it just, it adds to that narrative and, you know, and—

Yeah, but even if somebody else said it, you're right, they're not fans of yours.

It becomes part of the culture war, tribal, you know, cosmology.

Okay, next. You said in a— this is again New York Times— 2006 Rolling Stone article that you're quote unquote convinced that voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election allowed former Republican President George W. Bush to steal the victory from Democrat John Kerry.

I think that's true. Oh, and you know, anybody who, um, who disagrees with me should go read that article. You know, that at that time there were, there were many, many people in Congress, including them, you know, my campaign manager Dennis Kucinich, who were demanding an investigation. And, you know, my article is totally fact-based. It shows what happened in 6 counties in Ohio and how specifically those counties were manipulated. The votes in those counties were manipulated. And that those 6 counties alone changed the results of the election.

Do you think there was cheating in 2020?

I don't know, because I didn't, you know, with that election, I think there was cheating in 2001. And I think there was cheating in 2000 or yet in 2004. So I think that, and I don't, I haven't studied what happened in that, you know, I assume Biden won, but I haven't studied it. And I've got a lot of other things that I'm working on. So I haven't looked at all of the back and forth and all of the evidence. But what I think is that people should not be vilified for saying that election in this country can be fixed. And the Democrats were saying that in 2001 and 2004. And now it's Republicans saying it was fixed and we shouldn't be saying You know, you can say it wasn't fixed. Here's the evidence. And I don't think you should say that people are unpatriotic because—

It's an honorable position.

Okay, that's fair. And by the way, what I would say is let's stop talking about, you know, let's stop litigating the history. Let's fix the election system so everybody agrees it can't be fixed.

Which raises another quickie for you. Do you characterize January 6th as an insurrection? Is that a word you would use?

You know, I don't know. I've seen all kinds of, you know, sort of contrary evidence. And I don't— I have not again drilled down on it. I think there were parts of it that look like, like a, you know, a— that people were trying to break into the Capitol and commit crimes.

But that's not the same as an insurrection.

Well, yeah. And I'm against the word.

I'm I'm not for what they did.

Were they trying to overthrow the election?

Or the government, which is what insurrection is about.

Or overthrow the government. I can tell you this, that I'm worried about our democracy. And I'm worried, you know, I'm worried that the White House is using is censoring information, censoring criticism of the president. And that is an assault on our democracy that we should be at least equally worried about.

At least.

At least equally worried about. So, you know, when I try to stay away from a lot of the sort of culture war issues that inflame people and just try, I'm trying to focus in my life.

Okay, in light of that, so let me tell you, I am—

don't you have any other, any other weird things?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Okay, so the— there were two other weird things, uh, just— I don't, I don't want to take too much time with it. Uh, they claim it's weird that you said that the CIA was involved in the assassination of your uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

Yeah, well, you know, the House Select Committee on Assassination, um, The Warren Commission, of course, said that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, which I don't think anybody in this country seriously believes. I mean, anybody who looks at the evidence seriously. The House Select Assassination Committee did a much more thorough job than the Warren Commission in 1979, so 15 years after the Warren Commission. They had a lot more witnesses. They had a lot more documents to look at. And they came to the conclusion that my uncle was killed by a conspiracy. Senator Schweitzer, who was the initial head of that, stated that the CIA was involved in the death of John Kennedy. And most of the people I've talked to, the staff of that committee, and most of the people on that staff also believe that the CIA was I thought this, I thought this was crazy till a few years ago.

I admit it. I don't think it's crazy any longer. I, I, yeah, well, too much. And by the way, there's one on your behalf, there's one unassailable challenge to those who consider this crazy. Why don't you release the report? Yeah, why is there so much that is still hidden from the American people 70 years later, or whatever it is, 60 years later? 60 years.

I mean, even the New York Times, you know, made these incredible concessions recently acknowledging that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset. Do you think the Warren Commission would have— if they knew that, uh, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, if they would have tolerated Allen Dulles running the Warren Commission? Uh, so, you know, But also, you know, this recent revelation by the Secret Serviceman Landis about the magic bullet.

Right.

Even the CIA, even the New York Times, which has been the bulwark of the orthodoxy, the Warren Commission orthodoxy, has said, okay, maybe the, you know, maybe John Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy after all.

So this after 60 years of denying, calling people like me The final, the final weird position, quote unquote, I could find: gun ownership in Switzerland is similar to the United States. U.S. civilians possess an average— so they say, you've said that, and they counter— U.S. civilians possess an average of 120.5 firearms per 100 people, the highest per capita rate in the world, compared to 27.6 in Switzerland, according to the Small Arms Survey in Switzerland. Poland.

Yeah, well, I was wrong about that.

Okay, fair enough. That, that's, that, that's easily, uh, answered then. Okay, so one, one last arena, uh, and this has to do with the cultural divide. So you say, this is something you said, I think we have a lot more in common than what the media portrays. That is, we Americans, correct? Is that an accurate quote of yours?

Yes, right.

So my response is, I wish you were right. So I will give you a list, and I— this is not by any means a full list of just a few of the things upon which I don't think the media has made up the divide in America. It's a very real one. For, uh, for example, A substantial number of Americans thinks that it is okay for a man who says he is a woman to compete in women's sports. I don't see how you can bridge that divide. The divide is— the word existential doesn't apply, but it's that large. If you think it's fair for a man who says he's a woman to compete in women's sports, we don't have much in common. It's not the New York Times manufacturing— New York Times agrees with you that men can compete in women's sports, but they didn't manufacture it.

Are you attributing that view to me now?

No, no, not in the least.

Yeah.

No, no, no. I attribute to you the view that we have a lot more in common. And I'm going to give you position after position to show you The divide is very real. It's not— it may have been manufactured by the media in that there are many Americans who believe crazy things like men can compete with women if they say they're women. But the divide is real.

Yeah, no, I know. I understand there's a lot of these, you know, what I would call culture war issues that I don't think go kind of to the heart of who we are. And by the way, I have always said that men should, if you're born biological men, you shouldn't be allowed to compete in any consequential sports. I mean, if it's an intramural sports, whatever. But if there's, I have a niece, first of all, my uncle Ted Kennedy created Title IX and fought for it and passed it, You know, which for a long fought, finally gave women the opportunity to have equal recognition.

But it's been expanded to gender identity from justice.

Well, yeah, what I'm saying, my uncle passed it to give women a fair— Yes, yes. I have, you know, I have a niece who now, who worked her whole life to play, and she got a full scholarship at BUC for softball. And you know, when she was growing up, Cheryl, girl's knees, but I've known her since she was a 7-year-old girl. And she didn't come on ski vacations with us. She didn't come on summer vacations to the Cape because she was doing softball with the intention that one day she could pay for her college through that scholarship. And it would be to me absolutely criminal if a boy could walk off a baseball field and go onto her field and take her spot. It doesn't make any sense. But you know, here's what you can, you don't need to go through that whole list. Okay. Because I know there's a lot of things that, right. And those are all exploited by, I'd say, the elites in our country. And it's the jangling the keys, you know, look over here. There's somebody bad using your restroom. There's somebody, you know, doesn't want you to own a gun. There's somebody, you know, differs with you on the month that abortion should take place, whatever. Look over here. And meanwhile, they're robbing the bank over here. And what's really important is they're keeping it out of sight by keeping us at each other's throats on trivial issues that really don't impact us. The stuff that really impacts us, do we care for our veterans? Should we be caring for our veterans? 300,000 veterans in this country injured, or 23 committing suicide a year. Do Republicans and Democrats all agree we should be taking care of them? Yes. Does everybody want a clean environment? Does everybody want to make sure that we're giving our children communities that give them the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, prosperity, and good health as the communities that our parents gave us? Yes. Do we all want to have Do we want to have fair treatment of people of every race in our country? Yeah, we want that. We want a justice. We want our institutions to work. We want government to treat us honestly. Do we want, you know, do we want common sense to prevail? People agree on those things and then they disagree at the fringes and that is why those disagreements are inflated, they're exploited, they're amplified by people who do not want us to get together because when the king and queen look over the trellis of their castle and they see all of their subjects fighting each other, they go back and they pop champagne corks and celebrate. Because as long as they're fighting each other, nobody's coming over the wall. And what I want to do is unify Americans so we can storm the fortress and take it back.

I know you do that, and God bless you for it, but I will say To me, it's not a fringe issue when 5-year-olds are told that sex is not binary, that, that let's watch a drag queen story hour where a guy is dressed as a woman and dances in front of you. I, I, I just wouldn't characterize that as fringe. I think that that goes to the heart of the ability to raise a child in, in an innocent and safe environment, and it's being ruined in most of our schools. And I think a lot of Americans agree with me that, that, that's pretty substantive.

Yeah, I, I'm, you know, I, I, I don't think that the scenario that, um, that you just described makes any sense. Oh, but again, I would say that, you know, I think the issues on which we agree are larger than the issues on which we disagree.

So, on a happy note, and well, I think it's a silly question, but every reporter asks I may regret having asked it, but do you have a thought of what you would do your first day in office if you're elected?

Yeah, I have a lot of, you know, thoughts about that. I mean, for one thing, one thing I know I'm going to do is I'm going to pardon Julian Assange. I'm going to pardon Edward Snowden. And I'm going to issue an executive order forbidding any interference, any cooperation with any government agency in any effort to censor American speech. That's what I'll do on day one. And then I'm going to take a walk down to our car over to Bethesda and I'm going to talk to the people at NIH and say, let's focus now on solving the chronic disease epidemic in our country. And let's find out what's causing all of these. Why did autism go go from 1 in 10,000 in my generation and your generation to 1 in every 34 kids in our kids' generation, you know? And why did peanut allergies suddenly appear? And why did autoimmune disease explode in 1989? Let's figure that out. It's an environmental exposure. We know that genes don't cause epidemics. But, Let's figure out what the exposures are and let's eliminate them and start protecting our children.

You're a credit to your name and to the country.

Thank you very much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you. Tomorrow on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

We have made Memorial Day and July 4th into picnics and banquets, and that's lovely, but it's not enough. And I would ask ask all of you listening anywhere to just take a minute of silence today if you're having a picnic or a barbecue and think about the people who died, almost all of them very young, for the cause of keeping a free America and keeping a better world. Remember, a lot of Americans have died for others. I always make that point.

Join us tomorrow to hear more on Timeless Wisdom. With Dennis Prager. This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.