Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the nation’s 35th president and son of the former U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate, is waging an independent run for the presidency with ideas seldom discussed by the major party candidates. But can he get elected? And if he does, can he govern?<\/p>\n
Kennedy, whose father died from an assassin’s bullet while running for the Oval Office in 1968, was educated at Harvard and the London School of Economics before achieving his law degree at the University of Virginia and going on to a career in environmental law and child health advocacy. That’s where he’s taken on some big issues (and companies). He also has had his share of controversies: a one-time heroin addict, accused (wrongly, he says) of being an anti-vaxxer and, of course, there’s the so-called brain worm.<\/p>\n
He sat down with The Detroit News Editorial Board, which is extending invitations to all major presidential candidates, to discuss what a Kennedy administration would look like.<\/p>\n
(This text has been edited for clarity.)<\/p>\n
Question: We’re talking with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., independent candidate for President of the United States. Mr. Kennedy, why don’t you start by telling us why you got in this race?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I got it in the race because I saw that my country was going in a direction that was troubling to me and that neither the Democratic nor Republican Party seem to be capable of dealing with the decline of our country, particularly of the American middle class. Neither of them were talking about the addiction to war, about the existential threat (of the) deficits that we’re running, the $34 trillion debt that’s increasing by a trillion dollars every 90 days, the chronic disease epidemic.<\/p>\n When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. That is 60%; it is this epidemic. It is existential to us, and it’s the biggest cost now in our federal budget. It’s about $4.3 trillion a year. It’s five times our military budget and, you know, there’s no other country in the world that has this at the level that we’re going through.<\/p>\n We had 16% of the COVID deaths in the United States. We only have 4.2% of the global population and the way that the CDC explains that is that the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. In other words, they had obesity, diabetes, asthma and that kind of thing. And that’s really what killed them. And there’s no other country that has this kind of a chronic disease burden. The irony is we spend more per capita on health care than any country in the world.<\/p>\n We spend two to three times with Europeans spend and we’re 79th in health outcomes. We’re behind Mongolia. We’re behind Nicaragua. We’re behind Costa Rica in many of these indices, and nobody’s talking about. Why is it that autism rates have gone from one in 10,000 in my generation \u2014 I’m a 70-year-old man \u2014 to one in every 34 people in my kids’ generation? And according to the CDC data that’s filed in the states, it’s one in 22 boys and nobody’s talking about why this happened.<\/p>\n When I was a kid, the average pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his career, juvenile diabetes it was that rare. And in a 40- or 50-year career today, one out of every three kids who are through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. That category of mitochondrial dysfunction is now costing us more than our military budget. And nobody is asking these questions. Where did the food allergies come from? Where did this cascade of autoimmune diseases … you know I hardly meet a kid in my children’s generation that does not have some kind of neurological injury or autoimmune disease, and this just was not true. Children aren’t supposed to look like this, and yet nobody’s talking about it.<\/p>\n Congress actually told the EPA: Tell us what year the autism epidemic began. The EPA is a captive agency. It is captive by the oil and coal industries and big ag and the chemical industries, but not by pharma. And it came back with, actually, an honest study, and they said that 1989 is the red line as the year it started. Well, a lot of these other injuries started that year \u2014 the tsunami of autoimmune diseases, the food allergies, the peanut allergy, the eczema, the explosion of asthma.<\/p>\n My brother had asthma, and he was told by a doctor, his doctor, that there will never be a cure for asthma because it’s so rare nobody will ever study it. And today, one out of every eight Black children in our municipal areas have asthma, and nobody’s asking why this is happening. And, so, you know that’s easily discernible. It’s easily fixable, and yet nobody is even acknowledging that it’s a problem. And it’s a devastating existential problem.<\/p>\n More: <\/strong>Black children are more likely to have asthma. A lot comes down to where they live<\/a> <\/p>\n And the budget deficit that we’re running is $34 trillion; we’re now paying more for the interest to service that debt than our military budget. Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that we collect in taxes is going to go to servicing the debt, within 10 years 100%. It’s not just stainable. And yet nobody’s talking about and the two guys who are running are the people who did more to contribute to that debt than anybody in history. … President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget, and he printed $8 trillion in currency. President Biden, also. President Trump said, ‘I’m going to run the country like business. I’m going to balance the budget,’ and he ran up the biggest budget deficits in the history of our country. And printed more money, the two of them, than all the presidents combined from George Washington to George W. Bush. President Biden is now on track to beat President Trump in terms of expenditures.<\/p>\n Q: Mr. Kennedy, we’ll come back to these each of these issues, but I wanted to ask, you are a lifelong Democrat and started this race as a Democratic candidate. Why did you drop out of the Democratic race and switch to an independent campaign?<\/strong> <\/p>\n A: Because the Democrats had rigged the process so that I could not possibly win. And, for example, you know somebody published online an inventory of 60 changes that the Democrats had made to make sure that nobody could challenge \u2014 rule changes, the Democrats had made \u2014 to make sure that nobody could challenge President Biden.<\/p>\n I’ll just give you one example. I’ve been campaigning in New Hampshire, and we felt we were going to do very well in New Hampshire. President Biden was not popular there, and it’s very independent and you have to do a lot of work in New Hampshire. You have to go to the barber shops and the nail salons and walk the streets and or the hotels and, you know, the restaurants and people want to meet you and president, we didn’t think, was able to do that. And, you know my numbers in New Hampshire were good and the Democrats changed the rules so that anybody who stepped into the state of New Hampshire, any candidate who stepped in the state, would not be able to get any delegates from that state. So, whatever I won in the state, all my delegates would go to President Biden.<\/p>\n And they got rid of, you know, they moved New Hampshire, they tried to move it behind South Carolina to rig it because South Carolina was the state that Jim Clyburn controlled, and he could deliver that to President Biden. So, they got rid of by the Hampshire campaign. The Iowa caucuses were a mess anyway and they got rid of those as a first starter and then they compress all the schedules.<\/p>\n And when my father ran, the big states like California and New York were at the very end. I ran my uncle’s campaign, Teddy in 1980, in the southern states and you could build up momentum. You could lose some of the initial primaries and then over time and you could build up enough momentum so that you could actually win at the election, even if you lost some upfront.<\/p>\n They front-loaded all the big primaries like California and New York, and then they front-loaded them further by giving mail-in ballots a month ahead of the campaign and it was all compressed to derail any independent, any candidate, that was not chosen by the DNC. And they ended up in the end just blatantly getting rid of some of the primaries, like Florida, ended up just cancelling them and saying we already have our candidate.<\/p>\n So, I was the last one in my campaign … Dennis Kucinich, (who) was then managing my campaign, said at the beginning, “The Democrats are not going to let you win.” But I’m a lifelong Democrat. I didn’t want to leave the party of my father, my uncle, my uncles, my grandfather, two great-grandfathers who were both, you know, central players in the Democratic Party, Honey Fitz and Patrick Kennedy, in their time. My great grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston and his contemporary, Patrick Kennedy, was a state senator and a political boss in Boston. And so, I didn’t want to leave that party. But you know, I at that time I collected a lot of money, and I had a lot of followers, and they wanted to see a real competition, so I moved to independent.<\/p>\n Q: So, what is the status of your campaign in terms of ballot access at this point?<\/strong> <\/p>\n A: We now have enough signatures to get on the ballot in every state. We’re still collecting a few signatures in a couple of states just to give us a cushion. We try to have two times or three times the number of ballots we need because the Democrat, the DNC, is so aggressive, they appear to be on track to litigate us, perhaps in every state. We won all those cases so far and we will continue to win them all. But we’re not on the ballot in those states simply because the rules of those states say that the certification doesn’t take place until August and in a couple of cases until early September. But by the end of August, we will be on the ballot in every state, I think. But we have the signatures for every state as of today.<\/p>\n Q: Do you think you’ll get on the debate stage in September?<\/strong> <\/p>\n If they do it fairly, we should be on. Because the two criteria that they use at CNN was if you’re on the ballot, you need to be on the ballot in enough states to get 270 (electoral college delegates, the number needed to be elected), and at that point we had enough signatures to get, I think, 343. We were the only candidate that was on the ballot in any state. President Trump (and) President Biden were not on any ballot. So, they, you know, they adopted these, and I was the closest to complying with that threshold of anybody. And then the other threshold was that you needed to have four polls from among the 12 chosen polling companies that had to be over 15% in the last, I think, 90 days.<\/p>\n And we had six polls, but they disqualified three of those polls. We think it was illegal. We know because the Washington Post did an expose on it that there was that were conversations between the Biden team and CNN and the Trump team and CNN saying that they didn’t want me on the stage and that’s illegal. The FEC regulations say you cannot adopt rules designed to keep a certain person off the stage and these clearly were. And they said if you do do that then the debate itself becomes a campaign contribution and it’s illegal. And that’s what Michael Cohen went to jail for. So, what they did we think was illegal.<\/p>\n What I worry about is that the mainstream press is now commissioning polls that are designed to diminish the appearance of support for me. The way they do these polls is they ask about two-horse race. So, the initial question you’ll get is … Would you prefer to vote for Trump or Biden? And then if you say “other,” then you’re brought to a separate field and they give you a choice between me, Jill Stein or Cornell West. Sometimes they leave me out altogether so that you have to write me in. And it’s designed to diminish the appearance of my support. When the polls are saying and now, I get 8 or 9%. When the polls are taken where the subject of the poll is shown the same field at the outset, that they’re going to see on the ballot, then I get 15 to 20%.<\/p>\n And some of these companies like Quinnipiac, have done it both ways, so you can see what it does to my support in real time, if you look at those polls. So, the system is, the mainstream media, is unfortunately today very partisan. You know, when Ross Perot ran, he was on CNN, and you may remember this. He was on CNN two or three times a week. He was on Larry King, he was everywhere, all across the media. I have been on CNN once for a live interview with Erin Burnett. I’ve been on two short-taped interviews with Michael Smerconish and that’s it. And I was this week on a taped interview with Garrett, with Major Garrett, at CBS, which is the first interview I’ve been given by any mainstream media outlet during this entire campaign except for Fox. And ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC will not allow me on.<\/p>\n Q:<\/strong> You have a lot of support from across section of Americans. What are your answers on the debt and spending issue? What are your ideas to rein this in? Like you said, it’s unsustainable.<\/strong> <\/p>\n First of all, you can’t cut your way out of this size debt. You need to grow your way out of it. I’ll say this at the outset, the spending is not the real issue. The real issue is how you spend their money. Are you spending it in ways that are going to grow the GDP? If you spend $1 million on military, you create something like two jobs. If you spend it on childcare, you create something like 18 jobs in United States. And the military spending is really an orphaned asset. It doesn’t create wealth. It doesn’t create goods and services; it creates bombs that are blown up and destroyed. It’s like paying somebody to dig a hole and then fill it. It creates the illusion of economic activity, but it’s not actually growing your GDP, so I would cut the military budget \u2014 the straight military budget \u2014 in half, down to about $500 billion a year from, I think it’s $940 this year (billion), and that would put us at the same expenditures in real dollars as we were at the height of the Cold War, it’s called the Eisenhower minimum.<\/p>\n More: <\/strong>US national debt hits record $34 trillion<\/a> <\/p>\n So why do we need to spend today double what we were spending at the height of the Cold War? And the answer to that is that what we’re spending now is not for National Defense, it’s for global domination. We have 800 bases around the world. The Russians have one and a half the Chinese have one. And you know, each one of those is about exercising U.S. muscle and they’re all, you know, a platform or a pipeline to make war. So, I would cut the military budget in half and the other big savings that I would achieve would be with ending the chronic disease epidemic, which I can do very, very quickly.<\/p>\n Q: Let’s let’s stick with the the military aspect. You said we have an addiction to war. If that’s true, how do we break it?<\/strong> <\/p>\n We focus on national defense, on protecting our, you know, arming ourselves to the teeth at home but stopping this projecting military power abroad and instead projecting economic power abroad, which is what my uncle tried to do.<\/p>\n My uncle never sent a combat troop abroad to die and he said the principal job of the president of the United States is to keep the country out of war. He didn’t want children in Africa and Latin America and Asia when they heard about the United States of America to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun, but to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, to think of the Alliance for Progress, to think of USAID, which are programs that he started in order to put America on the side of the poor and grow the middle class in those countries and end run the military juntas and the oligarchs. And today, as a result of that, there are more statues to my uncle in foreign countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, more parks named after him, more roads and avenues and boulevards and universities and hospitals than any other American president, probably more than all presidents combined. This is a good foreign policy. It’s a policy of economic competition with China. China, of course, wants world domination. They don’t want a hot war, and I’m not scared of competing with them on the economic landscapes. That’s what America should be doing, and that’s what we’re good at, and that’s what my policy would be.<\/p>\n Q: Would you continue to support aid to the Ukraine and to Israel?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I wouldn’t. I would end the war in Ukraine immediately. It is war of choice and my view, it’s an immoral war.I think most of the wars that we’ve fought over the past century are immoral wars. The one moral war was World War Two. World War I was not, it was a war of choice. And you know, my grandfather lost a lot of his friendships, his business relationships because he opposed that war and it was a war to benefit bankers and arms dealers. And I think most of our wars today are the same thing.<\/p>\n And the Ukraine war is a war that we could have settled. We had two great settlements that Putin offered us. One was the Minsk accords (2014) and the other was in April of 2022, a really wonderful agreement that was negotiated between Zelensky and Putin. And that was refereed by the Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, ex-prime minister, and Erdogan in Turkey. And Putin and Zelensky signed it.<\/p>\n The one thing that Putin wanted, which he’s always said, is he just wants commitment to keep Ukraine neutral, not to move NATO into Ukraine, which is an existential threat to Russia. And it’s a reasonable request, in my view.You know, Russia has been invaded three time, the last time, with Hitler, one out of every seven Russians died. And they don’t want Aegis missile systems, or Tomahawk missiles, in Ukraine. And we shouldn’t either because it destabilizes the region.<\/p>\n We promised in 1992 not to move NATO to the east after Gorbachev allowed us to reorganize Germany under NATO, which was a huge concession for them. They moved out 450,000 Soviet troops and allowed our troops to move into their barracks. The one promise he extracted from John Major and George Bush was we would never move NATO to the east. James Baker, who was Secretary of State then, famously said to him: We will not move NATO one inch to the east<\/a>. Well, the neocons came in and they moved 1,000 miles to the east into 14 countries. We put nuclear-ready Tomahawk systems into Poland and Romania 12 minutes from the Kremlin. We could decapitate the entire Soviet leadership within 12 minutes. And that’s not good for region. And then we walked away from the two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviets. Unilaterally, Trump and Obama started funding integration with NATO.<\/p>\n What Putin has said from the beginning is that, “I want to protect the ethnic Russians who are being slaughtered in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea and I want to make sure that NATO never goes in (so) we don’t have a hostile army, and we don’t have the U.S. Navy in Sevastopol, which has been our port, our only warm water port for 347 years. It’s a reasonable request.<\/p>\n In 1962, when the Russians put nuclear weapons in in Cuba, which I remember, you know, like it was yesterday.It was being moved \u2014 me, personally \u2014 to these caverns in West Virginia at that time and doing duck-and-cover drills, etc. We said that we’re going to go to war to stop that. We would go to war with Cuba if they didn’t remove them. My uncle figured out, you know, because he was actually talking to (Soviet leader Nikita) Kruschev, which nobody else was doing, and he was talking to (Anatoly) Dobrynin, who was then the ambassador, was the reason the Russians put them in Cuba was not an act of aggression, but it was to counter the Jupiter missiles that we then had in Turkey. So, my father and uncle made a deal with him, a secret deal, we’ll pull ’em out of Turkey and you pull it out of Cuba. And we’ve left that region nuclear free, and we signed two agreements with them to not put intermediate range nuclear weapons in those regions because it’s a threat to Russia.<\/p>\n And so, these administrations and neocons are absolutely blind to that and, you know, (Russia) offered us this really, really beneficial deal and both parties signed it, then Joe Biden sent Boris Johnson over there in April 2022 and forced Zelensky to tear up the agreement.<\/p>\n And since then, 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died on the front line. My son fought over there. My son went over without my knowledge and joined the Foreign Legion, he fought in the Kharkiv offensive, and all the people who were in this unit are now dead. Every one of them. And they’ve lost an entire generation, now, that have been fed into this abattoir of our geopolitical ambitions.<\/p>\n And when Lloyd Austin in April, when they forced him to tear it up, Lloyd Austin was asked, well, why are we in Ukraine? And he said our purpose there is to degrade the Russian army and exhaust its capacity to fight anywhere else<\/a> in the world. And Biden, the same month, asked the same question, he said it’s because we want regime change in Russia. So that’s not for Ukraine. This is been terrible for Ukraine and I would end it and I would end it very, very quickly.<\/p>\n And then with Gaza, we need to support Israel. It’s a defensive war. It’s a moral war. Israel was attacked by a neighbor.<\/p>\n Q: China seems to be becoming more ambitious and more aggressive. What is our role in checking China and how do you do it?<\/strong> <\/p>\n There’s almost a delusion right now that we can have a hot war with China and we would win that war. There was a Pentagon report that came out this week that said we are not ready to, we are not capable of fighting a global war. The reason for that is because we’ve exported our entire industrial base.<\/p>\n You know this being from Detroit, during World War II, we were able to dominate the globe because Henry Ford and the big auto companies had built this giant industrial base, in your state and around the country and we were able to repurpose it to build 56,000 airplanes a month, and, you know, tanks and a ship a day. But we are no longer capable of doing that. We do not have the industrial infrastructure.<\/p>\n We don’t even have the people who are capable and working in those kinds of environments. We stopped teaching trades in high school 20 years ago and the kids that we have today can’t hammer a nail. There’s a whole generation that just is completely divorced from any kind of industrial activity. And where did all that industrial base go? It went to China.<\/p>\n So, China, now, the next war is going to be fought with drones and with hypersonic weapons<\/a>. China has one company, just one of their many drone companies, one of their companies produce 75% of the drones on Earth. They’ve got hypersonic weapons and missiles that could put every … We have 12 aircraft carriers. They only have two, but those hypersonic missiles cannot be defended against, and they’ll put every one of our aircraft carriers at the bottom of the ocean within the first 24 hours of a war. So, if they’re allied with Russia and Iran? We’re not in a position to fight a three-front war against them, and that’s what we’ve created now. We’ve created this alliance that never existed in history before or in the entire Cold War. Russia was never allied with Iran. So, we have to get real about what we can and cannot do.<\/p>\n We also can’t fight, or we cannot win, a war in the Taiwanese straits or the South China Sea. Our nearest base is Guam. So how are we going to do that? We can’t even get troops across the ocean anymore. The whole idea of NATO is now, you know, kind of irrelevant because we can’t get a million troops across the ocean because these hypersonic missiles can sink the troop carriers, and the American people won’t put up with that kind of death tolls at sea.<\/p>\n And so, everybody is focused on a war that we fought 20 years ago and 30 years ago. That is going to be completely different than the kind of war that we fight today. These are complex issues, but we need trade. A lot of the Republicans are now saying we need to be independent from China, but independence makes it more likely that we get into war. It’s the interdependence with China on some trade issues, but not all of them \u2014 we ought to have tariffs on some of the industries that we require in this country like ball bearings and sheet metal and some industrial production \u2014 otherwise, we want to be trading with China because that keeps the words because China does not want a hot war with us.<\/p>\n It would be a terrible war, but what really keeps China from going to war is they can’t win that war. Why? Because their economy is completely dependent on Walmart. Their economy collapses the day that Walmart stops buying stuff from them. Also, they are utterly dependent on Mideast oil, and we could stop the oil from going there. The one strategic asset in Taiwan, it’s TSMC, which produces all the microchips that are in our refrigerators, our cars, our airplanes and our missiles.<\/p>\n But if we did get in a war, the first bomb that we sent would hit TSMC, and that would be over, and they lose that asset and all of the engineers. TSMC would be figuring out ways to get a new operation paper clipped to get to the United States to start doing it here. So, the war makes no sense. The only way hot war is going to happen is if we continue to escalate. And, you know, and force China into that corner. And I’m not going to do that. I’m going to be tough with China on trade issues, and I’m not going to allow them to continue to pilfer our intellectual property. And I’m going to have tariffs in certain areas that allow us to rebuild our industrial base in this country and foster and nurture the growth of industries that we need and stuff that we’re good.<\/p>\n Q: We’d like to shift to some domestic issues, if we could.<\/strong> Can we shift to the southern border in the U.S.?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Let me say one other thing just about China, because this is kind of an interesting piece of history. In 2018, Trump went to Korea, and he did something extraordinary, which is he walked across the border and he met with with Kim.<\/p>\n And you know, the Democrats and everybody went crazy and said, “Oh, he loves dictators and that’s why he’s doing it.”<\/p>\n But out of that meeting came an agreement between (South Korean President) Moon Jae-in, who is at that point the liberal ruler of South Korea, and Kim, to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula<\/a>. And (Chinese leader) Xi (Jinping) approved of it.<\/p>\n So you had China, North Korea, and South Korea all agreeing to denuclearization, and that’s what needs to happen and what a great thing that would be. That’s what needs to happen in order to eventually reunify North and South Korea.<\/p>\n People have a big misapprehension that China likes North Korea. They don’t. They hate ’em. China sees them as unstable, as a bad business partner, and they want to be trading with South Korea. But we won’t let South Korea go.<\/p>\n And we want the nukes there. And there’s certain elements within our government \u2014 and it was Larry McMasters, and it was Mike Pompeo and John Bolton \u2014 because Trump originally approved the agreement, so it was going to go through. But those three guys and the neocons came in and told Trump to walk away from it. Think of how great the world would be if we denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. How much safer we’d all be?<\/p>\n Q: We’d like to turn to domestic issues now. So the border is a bit more under control today, which begs the question, why did we let it get so out of control for the past few years? So, what is your approach to solving that?<\/strong> Is it something that’s been done before or do you have a new approach?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I would do some things that have been done before and something that has never been done before. You need to fix the border immediately. You need infrastructure changes, policy and personality changes. Infrastructure changes would be to plug the 27 gaps in the wall. You don’t need a wall 2,200 miles from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego.<\/p>\n You need the physical barrier in densely populated areas where people can get across and disappear very quickly. If you go down there, the building material to complete and all the sitting there on the ground rotting because when the Biden administration came in, it said that’s the Trump wall and we don’t want it. I could tell you stories about it that would make your hair curl. Then you need to do some other infrastructure changes: Re-put up the posts, the long-distance cameras, the night sensors that were in the rural areas that the Biden administration took down.<\/p>\n And then there needs to be some access road repairs and construction to complete, to make it like Israel, or so nobody can get across the fence until there’s an organized effort. But you can build a fence, and nobody can get across.<\/p>\n And No. 2, we need personnel, we need about 2,300 more border guards and they can’t hire people now because they’re so demoralized. Nine of them have committed suicide in the last year. I’ve spent a lot of time at the border, and the former head of the Border Patrol is part of my campaign because we put such a priority on this issue. We need to put asylum court judges down there in sufficient numbers so that case scan be adjudicated on the day people come across rather than waiting seven years, which is one of the big problems. I would change the catch and release program to catch and return. I would reinforce the Migrant Protection Act that requires people who are coming from other countries through Mexico that they adjudicate their case in Mexico before coming across the border, so those are the three basic issues.<\/p>\n I would do something that nobody else is doing, which is the kind of thing or program that an independent candidate can propose and get passed because it doesn’t belong to either political party, so it’s not sort of contaminated by the tribal stigmas. The first day in office I’m going to order the Passport office, the Post Office and the State Department to issue passport cards to any American who can’t afford one. Right now, there’s tens of millions of Americans who do not have a government-issued photo ID. That has terrible implications, one for their own lives, but because if you don’t have a photo ID, you’re a second-class citizen. You can’t get open a bank account, 10% of your money is going to check cashers, you can’t get on an airplane, you can’t go to a hotel. You can’t, you know, visit your children at school. But they don’t want to go to DMV and pay a high price and endure the torture you get to get a driver’s license. Mainly they’re elderly people who no longer drive, they’re Blacks and Hispanics in cities who don’t need to drive. And they’re students. So, they’re all Democratic constituencies.<\/p>\n This solves three problems. One is they’re no longer second-class citizens. If you issue this, there are 33,000 post offices in this country, you can go there and get a photo with proof of citizenship, you can get it. Now you’re going to be able to get it for free.<\/p>\n The second thing is it allows us to fix the voting system. Republicans have a lot of anxiety about letting people vote who don’t have ID. The Democrats don’t want that because it will disfranchise tens of millions of their constituents because all those constituents are Democratic. So, there’s a battle over the integrity of the system. We have negotiated with Al Sharpton with Andy Young and with other members of the civil rights movement that if I issue these password cards, they will withdraw their objection to showing a voter ID at the voting booth. So, it solves that problem, removes that tension and allows us all to feel comfortable that our votes actually have integrity.<\/p>\n But most importantly, right now it is already illegal in this country for employers to hire illegal aliens, undocumented aliens, but all they have to do is show a social security card, which are easily fabricated.<\/p>\n You can get them on the Internet, they’re passed hand-to-hand at job sites, construction sites in New York. And it’s long as the employer can check off that they’ve seen that Social Security card, then they’re immune from liability. So it’s just a big scam. And what I’ll do is say you can’t do that anymore. You have to show a federally-issued or government-issued photo ID, either driver’s license or passport card, or you can’t work in our country. And if you hire somebody without seeing those things, you go to jail and that will dry up the employment opportunities for undocumented aliens. And that alone will stop the flow at the border \u2014 90% of it.<\/p>\n Q: Mr. Kennedy, a big issue here, of course, is the future of electric vehicle future of the auto industry. The Biden administration has put in place a series of mandates to push people into electric vehicles.What is your position on EV’s?<\/strong> And you know, you come out of the environmental movement on the Green New Deal in general?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I have a different approach than the Green New Deal and I’ve always had a free-market approach to these issues. I’ve been involved with EVs. I was a partner in Vantage Point, which was the biggest green tech venture capital firm in the country. We were the biggest initial, actual, funder for Tesla. And so I believe in electric vehicles, I don’t think it’s realistic or beneficial to have 100% electric vehicles. And I think as with a lot of environmental innovations, if there’s a perception that they’re environmental a lot of the environmental flaws are ignored or papered over. And in particularly with electric vehicles, are these really cataclysmic mining practices for metals for lithium and for rare earth metals.<\/p>\n My approach to the environment is to is to eliminate as much as we can subsidies and that includes externalities. If we had a true free market, free-market capitalism is actually the best thing that could happen in the environment because in a true free market you promote efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution is waste and in a true free market, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich without enriching your community.<\/p>\n What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor and they raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline in the free market and for externalizing their costs and forcing the public to pay their production costs.<\/p>\n So, you know, I built power plants. The biggest power plant in this country would not have been built except for the work that I did on it \u2014 the Ivanpah (Solar Electric Generating System). So, I know what the costs are, the cost of a solar plant, because you’re asking about the Green New Deal, is about a billion dollars a gigawatt. The cost of a wind plant is about 1.2 billion a gigawatt, the cost of a coal plant is $3.6 billion. The cost of a nuke plant is 16 billion. You could make energy by burning prime rib. Why wouldn’t you take the lowest cost? And the lowest cost options are mainly variable power.<\/p>\n The big problem that we have in this country is we do not have a market, we don’t have an electric grid, where people can buy and sell energy. That is going to be my moonshot program, to complete the electric grid so that South Dakota farmers with the windiest place on Earth at sea level can sell it. A South Dakota corn field yields about $300 a year in profits for corn. But if they have a wind turbine on it, it’s $8,000 a year for that farmer. Every farmer in North Dakota wants to put wind turbines on their property. There’s huge amounts of capital. There’s Siemens, Vestas, General Electric that want to funnel the money there. The problem is they cannot get their electrons to markets in Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit, New York. Because in the current lines, which are archaic, they’re 18 lines, they will disperse before they’ve traveled \u2014 you’ll lose 100% of the energy in 100 miles. So, we need to build a bridge, a national grid system where everybody can buy and sell energy on that grid, and that will turn every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant. And that will drive down the cost of energy in this country, and that’s how we should be doing it using markets rather than using top-down controls. That’s the summary. I could talk about that for the next six hours.<\/p>\n Q:<\/strong> To follow up on a couple of things … the amount of spending on military to get to the debt issue. Would the other half of that portion then apply toward the debt to try and pay down the debt, is that the idea?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Some of it would go to paying down the debt, but as I said, you can’t pay down the debt. You cannot solve this debt crisis by cutting. Let’s say you can create $2 in revenue from increased tax of increased GDP, so it’s better to do that than spend $1 by cutting the debt. So, investing in childcare, investing in infrastructure, investing in things that are going to expand our GDP, and then you grow your way out of the debt crisis. And that really is what we need to do. As President what I’m going to do is to make sure every dollar that we spend is designed to grow GDP. And then I’m going to stop the war that we have against … We need new industries in this country. We did this. We grew our way out of a debt crisis in the early 2000s, with Silicon Valley and the ARPANET grid. We need to do the same thing, and the obvious industries are blockchain and AI and right now government is mounting a war against those two industries, and I would end that war and bring those industries back and make America the hub of those industries. And that’s the most important thing that we can do.<\/p>\n Q:<\/strong> The other thing I wanted to follow up on was chronic disease. You said you could easily solve the chronic disease problem that we have in the United States. What would be your approach?<\/strong> <\/p>\n Well, NIH is a $42 billion annual budget and distributes that annual grant-making so it distributes that money to 56,000 scientists around the country, mainly at universities, and then some research centers. And when I was growing up, I was only 15 minutes from it, I used to visit there as a kid all the time because I loved science. When I was growing up, it was the premier scientific research organization in the world. In 1980, we passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act and that said that anybody who works at NIH and works at drug development can collect royalties on whatever products they work on, and that the NIH itself can collect royalties, up to 50% of the royalties, the profits generated by that profit.<\/p>\n So, for example, the Moderna vaccine, NIH owns 50% of the profits. It’s making billions on it and there’s six individuals at NIH who make $150,000 a year, forever, their children, their children’s children. And so that has warped NIH and it no longer is actually looking for doing the research to tell us why we are the sickest kids in the world and it’s developing drugs to treat those sicknesses and everybody’s getting rich. The sicker we are, the richer pharma and its business partners and NIH get. It’s a perverse incentive system, so I’m going to end that. I can do that by executive order.<\/p>\n For example, in in 2016, I think it was 2016, there were 220 new drugs approved by FDA and every one of them came out of NIH. So, it is now no longer doing scientific research, it’s an incubator for the pharmaceutical industry and a business partner with pharma and it doesn’t want to know where these diseases are coming from.<\/p>\n There’s a great scientist, probably the most important toxicologist in this country, at Mount Sinai. His name is Phil Landrigan, and I’ve used him in a lot of cases as my expert witness and he’s done a series of studies that show the culprits in this explosion of chronic disease. Following the timeline, it began in 1989. So, you have food allergies, autoimmune disease, all these neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, ticks, Turrets syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD\/autism all explode this year and rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, all these exotic diseases that we never heard of when I was a kid. Suddenly everybody’s got them.<\/p>\n And 1989 is the red line. But NIH doesn’t want to study it, one, because it they want to put their money into drug development (and) two, because they don’t want to offend industries that are powerful. NIH for example has long had a rule that they can’t study gun violence. What is the ideology of gun violence? Because they don’t want to offend the gun industry. Well, they have that for the drug industry, for big ag, for processed foods. We have 1,000 ingredients in our food and are banned in Europe and we’re giving these to the poor people. The food stamp program is almost entirely spent on poison food. Ten percent of it goes to sugar drinks. We’re poisoning all the poor people in this country. Mass poisoning of them. And that’s why they have the highest diabetes, highest asthma.<\/p>\n So, what Landrigan showed, he said, is that if you follow this timeline and the symptomology that we’re looking at, there’s only about 13 culprits. It’s glyphosate, which is in Roundup, which follows precisely that time. It’s nonactinide pesticides. It’s atrazine. It’s aspartame, which is the sweetener in all our drinks. It’s in some cases fluorine. It’s PFAS, PFOAS, which is the flame retardants that were put in all of our furniture in our children’s pajamas in that timeline. It’s high fructose corn syrup. Cell phone radiation. All of these things follow that timeline.<\/p>\n It’s probably a combination of all of them, because if you look at the … they all follow similar biological pathways and the biological mechanism for this collapse of our immune systems and our neurology is all connected to mitochondria, that mitochondria in your cell, and all of these exposures attack the mitochondria. So, what I will do is, it’s impossible to use the legislative process to ban glyphosate or to ban high fructose corn syrup. They’re too politically powerful, so here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to create enough science identifying these exposures and the impacts of them (so) that then the lawyers will come in and sue. I was part of the Monsanto team that took out glyphosate and we did it because we got 15 studies and that allows us to go to take that case to a jury.<\/p>\n There’s a threshold in federal court called the Daubert threshold. You need a certain amount of studies before you can bring the case. And I’m going to create those studies at NIH for all these exposures and then the lawyers will do the rest and we’ll eliminate the exposures very very quickly.<\/p>\n Q: There’s been a lot of said about you in terms of your stability that you’re anti-vaxxer and a lot of discussion about the parasite you, you described and in terms of your brain. What’s your response to those characterizations?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I would have to take these things one at a time. I’ve never been an antivaxxer. I’ve always said I want vaccines that are safe and effective and have the same rigorous testing that is applied to every other medicine. Unfortunately, vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing safety testing, so the kind of placebo-controlled large-cohort long-term studies that are required prior to approval for other medications simply do not exist for vaccines. They just don’t exist and we’ve fully litigated this. And I’ve won. But I’m called an antivaxxer because that’s a pejorative that when it’s applied to me, it silences me. Nobody listens and they say, oh, you don’t have to listen to legitimate questions he’s asking about vaccine safety and advocacy because he’s a crazy person. He is against all vaccines. I’ve probably said it 1,000 times in speeches. I used to begin every speech by saying I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I had all my children vaccinated. I took all my vaccines, and the rest what I’m saying is something that the industry and the medical regulators do not want to hear and so they’re able to brand me with that defamation.<\/p>\n I’m in terms of my parasite, this is a 15-year-old deposition that was dug up by the New York Times. They already branded me as an insane wacko and they and they used this as now an organic explanation about why that might be true.<\/p>\n I actually learned because of all the publicity about my so-called brain worm that there’s 1.6 billion people who have the same parasite, that’s a very, very common parasite. It’s like one out of 10 people have it, and in this country actually more than that \u2014 like 2 out of 10 people, one out of every five people has it. And it’s not something that probably ever affected my cognition.<\/p>\n I was having cognitive issues then. I had severe brain fog, and I don’t know what was causing it. There was a number of things happening in my life then, but one of them was I also had extremely high levels of mercury, 10 times EPA-approved mercury levels, and I got that key chelated out and the brain fog went away. This is just something that’s like all of these things that are said about me. They’re mischaracterizations of what I said that are designed to make me look erratic or crazy or marginal or whatever. And I think most people who listen to what I say about these issues would agree that my approach is pretty common sense and pretty middle of the road.<\/p>\n Q: Are you a spoiler in this race? And if so, who do you think of the major candidates now, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, that you draw the most support from?<\/strong> <\/p>\n I don’t think I’m technically a spoiler because when I’m pitted against either of the other candidates, most of the polls show me winning, nationally. And a spoiler by definition, is somebody who cannot win but who is going to upset the expectations of somebody who can. But I think right now, according to all the polls I’m seeing and all we do internally, it’s pretty even, but I take slightly more away from President Trump.<\/p>\n Q: Mr. Kennedy, is your intention then to stay in the race until November? There have been reports you might drop out and endorse Trump. Have you had those discussions<\/strong>?<\/p>\n No. I went and met with President Trump, and I would meet with President Biden if he asked me to meet with him, I’d meet with Vice President Harris if she asked me to meet. My whole campaign is about talking across the divides to people. So, I’m going to meet with anybody who asks me to meet with them. You know, my intention is to stay in the campaign till the end. I think people need a different option. Seventy to 80% of people in this country say they don’t like the choice that they’re being given right now.<\/p>\n Q: We’ve enjoyed speaking with you today. Thank you for your time and good luck with your campaign.<\/strong> <\/p>\n Thank you very much. Thanks to all of you. It was a fun discussion.<\/p>\n \u00a92024 The Detroit News. Visit detroitnews.com<\/a>. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.<\/a> <\/p>\n KeyWords:: bc5981fa-67e0-5452-92b9-ba8d68937d57 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the nation’s 35th president and son of the former U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate, is waging an independent run for the presidency with ideas seldom discussed by the major party candidates. But can he get elected? And if he does, can he govern? Kennedy, whose father died […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245865"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245866,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245865\/revisions\/245866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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