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John Stossel Interviews Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Vaccines, War, Debt, and Why He Ran for President
John Stossel sat down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before President Biden dropped out of the race to discuss Kennedy's independent presidential campaign. Kennedy makes the case for ending America's addiction to war, cutting military spending by $300 billion, addressing the chronic disease epidemic he claims is bankrupting the nation, and his controversial stance on vaccines. The two clash over fracking, climate subsidies, nuclear power, and Kennedy's assertion that autism is caused by vaccines. Kennedy also addresses his hoarse voice caused by spasmodic dystonia, apologizes for once calling Stossel a traitor over climate change, and explains why Democrats fought harder to keep him off the ballot than Republicans. Stossel fact-checks three major Kennedy claims at the end.
Why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ran for President
John Stossel begins by asking Kennedy the fundamental question: why should he be president? Kennedy's answer focuses on what he sees as the narrow focus of both major party candidates.
Kennedy argues that Donald Trump and Joe Biden operate within a limited framework, focusing primarily on culture war issues like guns, the border, abortion, and trans rights. Meanwhile, Kennedy claims the truly existential issues go unaddressed by both candidates. He points to the $34 trillion national debt, which he says both Trump and Biden are largely responsible for, noting that Trump spent more money than every president in United States history combined at $8 trillion, and Biden is on track to surpass that.
Kennedy's Voice and Spasmodic Dystonia
Stossel asks Kennedy about his distinctive hoarse voice. Kennedy explains he has spasmodic dystonia, a neurological injury he acquired at age 46. He had a very strong voice before that. The condition causes his voice to sound strangled. Kennedy underwent surgery in Japan about a year before the interview, which helped significantly, and he continues treatments. He acknowledges the irony of the impediment since so much of his professional life depends on speaking in courtrooms, on television, and on radio.
Ending the War in Ukraine
On foreign policy, Kennedy states he would end the Ukraine War through negotiation. He claims President Putin has repeatedly tried to negotiate peace, with one primary concern: NATO expansion into Ukraine. Kennedy provides historical context, explaining that Russia has been invaded three times through Ukraine, with Hitler's invasion killing one out of every seven Russians.
Kennedy recounts that in 1992, the United States made a commitment to Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union allowed German reunification under NATO and withdrew 450,000 troops, the U.S. would not move NATO one inch to the East. Secretary of State James Baker made this promise. However, Kennedy claims neocons subsequently pushed NATO eastward because every time NATO expands into a new nation, that country must conform its weapons purchases to NATO specifications, generating billions for defense contractors like Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed.
Kennedy references peace negotiations in April 2022 where Putin made what Kennedy characterizes as tremendous concessions. According to Kennedy, Zelensky wanted to negotiate a peace agreement but the United States would not help. Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Turkey's Erdogan assisted in negotiating a treaty in Istanbul. The primary requirement was keeping Ukraine permanently neutral to prevent NATO membership. Kennedy claims Putin began withdrawing troops and agreed to leave Donbas and Luhansk as part of Ukraine, but Joe Biden sent Boris Johnson to Kiev to force Zelensky to abandon the agreement. Kennedy says 600,000 people have died unnecessarily since then, including noting his own son fought in Ukraine with the foreign legion during the Kharkiv offensive.
Kennedy emphasizes his uncle John F. Kennedy's approach to foreign policy, noting that JFK realized in 1962 he was surrounded by war hawks who knew nothing about Khrushchev. JFK began corresponding secretly with the Soviet leader, exchanging 26 letters and installing a hotline. Kennedy recalls that hotline being in their house at the Cape. JFK's philosophy was that to achieve peace, you must understand your adversary and be able to talk to them. Kennedy criticizes Biden for never talking to Putin about the conflict.
Israel, Hamas, and Gaza
Kennedy describes himself as very pro-Palestinian, which he defines as believing Palestinians should have control and sovereignty over their own destiny. However, he does not blame Israel for what is happening in Gaza. Instead, he blames Hamas, which he characterizes as a proxy for Iran and a genocidal organization whose only objective is to annihilate Israel and exterminate Jews. He also calls Hamas a kleptocracy that steals from the Palestinian people.
Kennedy explains that Israel is fighting an existential five-front war against Shia militias funded by Iran in Iraq and Syria, against the Houthis in Yemen, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. He believes Israel must close out the Hamas front because of its vulnerability. Kennedy argues it would not be right to micromanage Israel's battle against Hamas.
When asked if America should continue providing arms and money to Israel, Kennedy responds affirmatively, warning that without such support, there may be no Israel within five years. He describes Hezbollah as perhaps the best guerilla army that ever existed on Earth, possessing 250,000 missiles, many of them guided. Kennedy states he does not believe it would be in U.S. national security interests to live in a world without Israel or where there is no barrier against Iran's expansion in the Middle East.
Military Spending and the Debt Crisis
Kennedy proposes cutting military spending from $800 billion to approximately $500 billion during his first four years as president. He notes this represents what he calls the Eisenhower minimum, putting spending at the same level in 2024 dollars as during the height of the Cold War. Kennedy argues that if that level was sufficient to protect America during the Cold War, it should be sufficient now.
He contends that most military money now involves tremendous waste and is not about protecting America but about dominating the globe, which he calls a losing bargain. Kennedy believes America should project economic power abroad, not military power, echoing his uncle's approach. He states that JFK said the primary job of a President is to keep the country out of war, and that JFK wanted on his gravestone that he kept the peace and never sent a combat unit abroad to fight.
Kennedy notes JFK kept the U.S. out of Laos in 1961, out of Cuba in 1961, out of Germany in 1962, and out of Cuba again in 1962 and 1963. Regarding Vietnam, JFK only sent military advisors. Kennedy explains that 30 days before his assassination, JFK signed National Security Order 263, ordering all 16,000 military advisors home from Vietnam after learning that 75 men had died, which JFK considered too many.
Kennedy emphasizes that JFK did not want children in Africa, Latin America, and Asia to think of a man with a gun when they heard about the United States. Instead, JFK wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, the Alliance for Progress, and USAID—programs designed to build the middle class, end-run oligarchs and military dictators, and put America on the side of the poor.
The Chronic Disease Epidemic
Kennedy identifies treating chronic disease as the biggest cost to America at $4.3 trillion, which is five times the military budget. He states that when his uncle was President, 6% of Americans had chronic disease, but today it is 60%. Healthcare costs have risen to almost 20% of GDP from about 6%, and Americans are the sickest people in the world. Kennedy argues this is one reason America had the highest death rate from Covid of any country in the world.
He lists chronic diseases including neurological conditions like ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delays, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism spectrum disorder. Kennedy notes autism has increased from 1 in 10,000 in his generation to 1 in every 34 kids in his children's generation, or 1 in every 22 boys. He also mentions autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, and juvenile diabetes. Kennedy states that when he was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in a lifetime, but today one out of every three kids walking through a pediatrician's office is pre-diabetic or diabetic.
Kennedy attributes this epidemic to Americans being poisoned by processed foods containing thousands of ingredients, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals in water, specifically mentioning glyphosate. He references Congressional testimony where the EPA identified 1989 as the year the autism epidemic began, which coincides with when food allergies started emerging. Kennedy notes he had 11 siblings and 70 first cousins but never knew anyone with a peanut allergy, yet five of his seven kids have such allergies.
While acknowledging life expectancy has generally increased, Kennedy points out that over the past 10 years, America experienced the steepest drop in life expectancy in its history. He questions why America had 16% of Covid deaths despite having only 4.2% of the world's population, arguing that whatever approach the U.S. took was worse than any other country. According to CDC data Kennedy cites, the average person who died from Covid had 3.8 chronic diseases, typically including obesity, diabetes, asthma, and one other condition.
Kennedy emphasizes that Americans pay two to three times per capita what Europeans pay for healthcare yet rank 79th in health outcomes, behind Mongolia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Cuba. He attributes obesity itself to chronic disease rather than simple laziness, pointing to high fructose corn syrup as probably the biggest culprit. As evidence, he cites the Pima Indians, with one population in New Mexico having a life expectancy of 47 years with high rates of obesity, diabetes, and asthma, while Pima Indians across the border in Mexico have a life expectancy near 80 years, are skinny, have no diabetes, and are in good shape. Kennedy argues the difference is that Americans are eating processed foods that poison them.
Reforming NIH and Healthcare Spending
Kennedy claims NIH refuses to study the etiology of chronic disease because they do not want to offend pharmaceutical companies, processed food companies, and chemical companies. He explains that NIH has a $42 billion budget distributed to 56,000 scientists, mainly in universities. When Kennedy was young, these scientists studied questions like what is making Americans sick, but that changed in 1980 with the Bayh-Dole Act.
This law allowed NIH scientists to collect royalties on drugs they assisted in developing, and NIH itself could collect royalties. Kennedy provides the example of the Moderna vaccine, which he says is 50% owned by NIH and will generate tens of billions of dollars. Six individuals at NIH have patent rights and collect $150,000 annually as long as mRNA products remain on the market, including people Kennedy identifies as Anthony Fauci's closest deputies. He characterizes this as corruption, claiming the financial opportunity has subsumed the regulatory function of NIH.
Kennedy states that in 2016, FDA approved 220 new drugs, all developed by NIH. He argues that instead of identifying what causes chronic disease and ending it, NIH and the pharmaceutical industry are profiting from illness with little incentive to make people better.
Cutting Government Waste with Technology
Kennedy proposes using AI and blockchain to identify waste in government. He points to the Pentagon audit showing the Pentagon lost $4 trillion and has failed its audit every year for 20 years, primarily because they cannot account for their inventory. Kennedy suggests using AI to go through stockpiles and identify waste.
He references documents published annually by the GAO and Congressional Budget Office listing the most wasteful programs in government. These documents sit unused in the Library of Congress. Kennedy proposes going through them, picking the most wasteful programs, putting them all in one bill, and sending it to Congress for an up or down vote, similar to base closure commissions. He emphasizes that AI, while dangerous in some ways, offers opportunities to make government more accountable and transparent.
Eliminating the Department of Education
Kennedy states he would eliminate almost all functions of the Department of Education but would keep the research function. He believes it is important to know how kids are doing, to identify where kids are failing, and to understand how American children compare to those in other countries to learn what works elsewhere. He argues the data analysis and collection departments are important, but most other functions should be eliminated.
Climate Change and Energy Subsidies
Kennedy's approach to climate centers on free markets and eliminating subsidies. He claims there are $5.2 trillion in annual subsidies to the carbon industry. While acknowledging the oil depletion allowance, Kennedy points to highway subsidies in places like West Virginia and Kentucky where coal trucks weighing 90,000 pounds require 18 inches of asphalt costing millions of dollars per lane per mile. He also cites half a trillion dollars in respiratory illness annually from ozone and particulates from coal burning power plants, characterizing these as indirect subsidies.
Kennedy argues there is no justification for subsidies to mature industries, noting the oil industry is the second richest industry in the world. However, he suggests there may be justification for subsidizing nascent industries for national security reasons, citing George Washington's inability to find American-made clothing and the subsequent subsidizing of fabric factories and mills that created a massive industry.
Kennedy acknowledges building solar plants that received government guaranteed loans. He justifies this by arguing that if you are creating a new industry competing with the Chinese, who fully subsidize their industry, there are national security reasons for America to own pieces of that industry rather than being completely dependent on Chinese technology. He also argues there are national security reasons to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources like Saudi Arabia, which lead to wars that are themselves subsidies. Kennedy states that $8 trillion spent on oil wars should be reflected in gasoline prices in a true free market economy but instead are paid through taxes and inflation.
Apology for Past Climate Comments
Stossel confronts Kennedy about a past speech where Kennedy called Stossel and Glenn Beck flat-earthers, corporate toadies, and traitors whose actions constitute treason. Kennedy responds that this is not a statement he would make today. He explains that particularly after Covid, when elites around the globe used crisis to impose totalitarian controls, obliterate constitutional rights, and shift wealth upward, he has changed his perspective.
Kennedy describes how America closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process or just compensation, banned jury trials against corporations providing countermeasures, eliminated freedom of assembly with social distancing regulations, and suppressed freedom of speech through government censorship. Churches were closed for a year with no scientific citation, due process, just compensation, or environmental impact statements. Kennedy apologizes to Stossel for his past statement while maintaining he believes climate change is existential and human-caused, but emphasizing he does not insist others believe that and does not think people who disagree are unpatriotic or traitors.
Nuclear Power and Fracking
Kennedy states he would welcome nuclear power if it can be made safe and commercially viable, but argues it currently cannot. He cites the last nuclear plant built in Georgia with a 10-year overrun costing $34 billion, or $34 billion per gigawatt. While acknowledging that government regulation contributes to costs, Kennedy opposes deregulating nuclear power.
He points out that no insurance company will write policies for nuclear plants, so Congress passed the Price Anderson Act in what Kennedy calls a sleazy legislative maneuver, freeing nuclear plants from liability or capping it at minimal amounts. Kennedy argues this is not free markets but corporate crony capitalism. He questions what to do with waste and notes there is still no program for storage, with taxpayers stuck with the bill for storing material for 30,000 years, five times the length of recorded human history. Kennedy believes market actors should pay all costs of bringing products to market, including cleanup, and notes no utility on Earth will build a nuclear plant unless fully subsidized by government for construction, waste disposal, and insurance.
Regarding fracking, Kennedy clarifies he did not say he wanted it banned. He argues fracking should pay its costs, which it currently does not in most of the country. Kennedy describes visiting Dimock, Pennsylvania and seeing fire come out of faucets from fracking, with homes in affected neighborhoods becoming worthless without compensation. He notes that for every well, fracking involves about 4,000 truck trips weighing 40 to 90,000 pounds that destroy rural roads, with costs not borne by fracking companies.
Kennedy states he does not think America should allow LNG facilities for exporting fracked gas. He argues fracked gas should be used domestically to rebuild American industry, as otherwise America shoulders all costs while gas is shipped abroad so Europe can outcompete the U.S. He contends that companies exporting gas are not necessarily owned by Americans and do not benefit America while imposing huge costs. Kennedy argues America should get the benefit of cheap gas for the time being, noting wells are depleting faster than predicted. If fracked gas runs out, Kennedy warns America will be reliant on Iran, Qatar, and Russia for the next 50 years.
Kennedy emphasizes that America currently has the cheapest energy in the world and should keep it domestically to rebuild the manufacturing base, noting that crude oil export was illegal for many years for the same reason. He argues that when LNG is shipped overseas, money goes to boards of directors of companies that may be Canadian owned, not back to Americans or communities bearing the burden of fracking that extracts enormous costs, changing communities forever by poisoning water, destroying roads, and requiring pipes cutting through homes, fields, and backyards.
Opposition to Cape Wind Project
When Stossel points out that Kennedy and his family opposed a wind farm near their home, Kennedy clarifies he opposes offshore wind anywhere except where it will not do damage. He claims offshore wind is exterminating Right whales in the North Atlantic, causing whale and dolphin kills, and is very destructive of wildlife and traditional fisheries.
Kennedy explains he was representing commercial fishermen on Cape Cod who said their livelihoods and 350-year-old culture would be destroyed if Cape Wind were built. He notes offshore wind is heavily subsidized, with costs of about 32 cents per kilowatt hour compared to 10 cents for onshore wind his brother was building. Kennedy questions why offshore wind should be built when America has the best wind on Earth and can build onshore wind much more cheaply. He characterizes offshore wind as a boondoggle to big companies like General Electric, Siemens, and Vestas that own Congress, destroying whale and dolphin populations while raising energy costs.
Vaccines and Measles
When asked if he would give his children the measles and mumps vaccine if they were young now, Kennedy answers no. He notes he and his siblings got measles and mumps as children. While acknowledging many people died from these diseases, Kennedy clarifies that about 10,000 Americans per year died in the early 1900s, but by 1964 only about 300 to 400 died, almost all severely malnourished kids mainly from the Mississippi Delta before the poverty program. He argues it is very hard to kill a healthy child with any infectious disease, particularly measles.
Kennedy states the World Health Organization now says vitamin A is an absolute cure for measles. He describes his childhood experience as a week at home watching Leave it to Beaver treated with chicken soup, with all 11 siblings getting it and being fine. Kennedy cites studies showing kids who get measles as children are much healthier as adults, more resistant to cancers, atopic diseases, allergies, and heart disease.
Regarding Samoa, Kennedy disputes reports that he convinced people not to get the measles vaccine resulting in 83 deaths. He explains that Samoa's Prime Minister stopped the measles vaccine after vaccines killed several people, including members of his family, so the ban was already in place when Kennedy visited. Kennedy claims nobody died in Samoa from measles but from a bad vaccine imported from Australia and given to people who already had measles, which is not recommended. He notes the same measles outbreak hit neighboring Tonga where nobody died because they did not receive the vaccine. Kennedy characterizes this as propaganda by the pharmaceutical industry to discredit him.
Autism and Vaccines
Kennedy maintains that autism is caused by vaccines. He references CDC's Verstraeten study from 1989 examining the hepatitis B vaccine using the vaccine safety data link database. According to Kennedy, children who received the hepatitis B vaccine during their first 30 days had an 1135% elevated risk for autism compared to those who received it later or not at all.
Kennedy dismisses larger studies, claiming they were done by what he calls biostitutes—people who do studies for money for CDC to create the illusion that vaccines do not cause autism. He points to Poul Thorsen, whom he identifies as the chief scientist of the most cited study on this topic. Kennedy states Thorsen is now wanted by Interpol for stealing millions of dollars from CDC that he claimed to use for the study but actually used to build houses, buy motorcycles, and live luxuriously. Kennedy calls Thorsen's study absolute fraud that CDC has not retracted, characterizing CDC as a dishonest organization.
Kennedy references his book, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, which he says contains 1,400 references and over 400 studies linking autism and other neurological injuries to vaccines. He insists there is no question about the link if you read the literature rather than CDC propaganda. Kennedy characterizes CDC as a captive agency intertwined with and owned by the pharmaceutical industry.
Democratic Opposition to Kennedy's Campaign
Stossel notes that Democrats fought harder to keep Kennedy off the ballot than Republicans, despite Kennedy seeming to pose more of a threat to Trump. Kennedy confirms that no Democrats will debate him or have him on their networks. The only live interview he did was with Erin Burnett. Kennedy understands why they want to avoid live interviews given the complex vaccine science discussions, but wishes they would at least post something afterwards indicating disagreement rather than refusing all engagement.
Stossel's Fact-Checking
After the interview, Stossel fact-checks three of Kennedy's major claims.
First, regarding Kennedy's statement about seeing fire come out of a faucet in Dimock, Pennsylvania from fracking, Stossel notes that while the anti-fracking movie Gasland publicized this phenomenon and also blamed fracking, both the movie and Kennedy are wrong. While faucet water sometimes can catch fire, there are many places in America where no fracking is done but water still catches fire due to naturally occurring gas already in the ground. The director of President Obama's EPA stated that in no case did they make a definitive determination that the fracking process caused chemicals to enter groundwater.
Second, Stossel acknowledges his question about Samoa was poorly worded and should not have suggested Kennedy's visit caused deaths. However, Kennedy is wrong when he says nobody died in Samoa from measles. A Lancet article documents more than 5,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. While Kennedy claims the real killer was a bad vaccine, and there were two deaths from local nurses incorrectly mixing vaccines, what killed more people was Samoa pulling its vaccine after those babies died. Immunization rates declined sharply, causing the measles deaths. Kennedy's claim that all deaths resulted from bad vaccines is wrong. Samoa now vaccinates children again.
Third, regarding Kennedy's repeated claim that autism is caused by vaccines with a 1135% elevated risk, Stossel finds no such evidence. Kennedy bases his claim on unpublished data. Once researchers controlled for other variables, they found no correlation. Many larger studies find no link between today's vaccines and autism, including one examining every child born in Denmark over 10 years. Stossel concludes that Kennedy's anti-vaccine messages hurt people and that vaccines save lives.
Stossel notes Kennedy's critics claim he makes things up, but Stossel did not find that to be the case. Instead, Kennedy misleads by ignoring bigger, better, more reliable studies. Despite their disagreements, Stossel praises Kennedy for being willing to appear and debate these issues, calling it unusual and noting that such engagement is what America is supposed to be about.
Video Transcript
If you want things to completely change, you’re going to support me. [Applause] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just dropped out of the presidential race. He’d done pretty well for an independent candidate. At one point, polls had his support in double-digits. You should vote for me. [Applause] Kennedy knew what to say to appeal to libertarians. Real patriotism means protecting the United States Constitution. I liked hearing that, but would he have really done that? Who is RFK Jr.? Well, here’s our full interview, taped before President Biden dropped out. Plus, at the end, my own fact-checking on three important points. Why should you be president? Who are you? Why are you superior to the other two guys? Well, the other two, their approach to politics are different, their disposition. Yeah, I don't care about that. Why should you be President? But they're operating within a very narrow Overton window. If you look at what they argue about, what they're disputing about, it's mainly culture war issues. It's guns, it's the border, it's abortion, trans rights, and these issues, the really existential issues neither of them can talk about. And that's what I'm talking about. The national debt is $34 trillion. That President Trump and President Biden are responsible for, largely. President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget, and instead he spent more money than every president in United States history. $8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him. The addiction to war that we have in our country, at present, particularly the Ukraine War, which was a war of choice, it's an immoral war. It was an unnecessary war. And both of them were involved in creating that war. So let’s bring— The division in our country, this toxic polarization that is tearing our country apart, that's worse than any time since the Civil War. Let’s, we'll cover these ideas but— These ideas are feeding on it. We're going to talk for a while, so first, tell the audience why you sound hoarse. I have a disease called spasmodic dystonia, and I got it when-- I had a very, very strong voice until I was 46 years old, and I got this, it's actually a neurological injury, and it causes my voice to sound kind of strangled. I actually, it was much worse than this for a long period of time. I had surgery on it in Japan about a year ago and that helped me a lot. And then I'm doing some treatments now that are helping me, but you know, my voice stinks. I can't listen to myself. I feel sorry for people who have to listen to me. It's an ironic impediment because so much of my life and profession is based upon me talking in courtrooms, on television, on radio. It’s ironic. Well, let's make it worthwhile for people to listen to you. You raised two big issues. The debt and war. Start with war. What would you do about Ukraine? I would end the Ukraine War. I would negotiate a peace. President Putin has repeatedly tried to negotiate a peace. There's one issue that worries him, and it's an issue that he should be worried about, which is us moving NATO into Ukraine. Russia has been invaded three times through Ukraine. The last time when Hitler invaded it, he killed one out of every seven Russians. We made a commitment to Gorbachev, to the Soviet Union back in 1992 that if we were allowed to reunite Germany, East and West Germany, under a NATO army, and the Soviets moved out 450,000 troops, and we moved ours in, which there was an extraordinary concession for them, the one condition he asked for is that if he allowed us to do that, we would not move NATO to the East. And James Baker, who was then Secretary of State for George Bush, famously told Gorbachev, we will not move NATO one inch to the East. And then the neocons got ahold of the White House starting with Zbigniew Brzezinski, and they started moving to the East. Because every time they move into a new nation, that nation has to conform its weapons purchases to NATO specifications. So, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed, make billions of dollars. And so, there's a huge drive in Congress to try to continually move NATO to the East. There is a war machine. But what would you do as president? I would negotiate a peace and, you know— You would say, “Russia, you could keep the territory you've conquered?” Well, I'm not going to say exactly what my, my endpoint would be on negotiations. I negotiate for a living. I've negotiated ends to hundreds of lawsuits, and that's not how you do it. But Putin made tremendous concessions in April of 2022. And he agreed when he had just moved in and he, and Zelensky wanted to sign a, negotiate a peace agreement, we wouldn't help him, United States would not help him. So, he went to Israel and got Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to help and Erdogan in Turkey. They negotiated a treaty in Istanbul. And that treaty, the primary thing that Putin wanted was to keep an agreement to permanently keep Ukraine neutral, to keep NATO out. And everybody agreed on it. Putin began withdrawing his troops, left Donbas and Luhansk as part of Ukraine and Joe Biden got Boris Johnson to go to Kiev and forced Zelensky to tear up that agreement. And since then, 600,000 kids have died unnecessarily. My own son fought in Ukraine for the foreign legion. He fought in the Kharkiv offensive. All of those Ukrainians shouldn't have died. They've lost the war. We were told they were going to win the war. Most of us knew, who understood what was happening, there was no way that we could ever win that war and that it was a catastrophe. But the White House, Anthony Blinken and Avril Haynes-- Right, but you're giving me history again. I'm just not clear on what you would do. Pull, stop giving any money to Ukraine? Putin asks, almost every time he's in public, to negotiate. So, you go, you at least negotiate. My uncle realized in 1962 that he was surrounded by war hawks in his intelligence apparatus and his military brass. And he realized that they knew nothing about Khrushchev and that they were telling him things about Khrushchev that they didn't know and that he needed to begin talking to Khrushchev directly. He began corresponding with him secretly. They exchanged 26 different letters, and then he installed a hotline so that he could talk to him directly. And I grew up with that hotline in our house at the Cape, but he always said, if you want peace, you got to understand your adversary. You've got to be able to talk to them. And Biden has never talked to Putin about this and it's criminal. Putin has repeatedly said, “I want peace. I want to negotiate." And nobody's there to negotiate. In fact, Zelensky has now passed a law that makes it illegal to negotiate with Putin. I mean, imagine that. It’s, nobody wants that except for extremists, the very, very right-wing extremists in Ukraine. What about Gaza? What about Israel, Hamas? What would you do? It's heartbreaking what's happening. I consider myself very pro-Palestinian, but Israel is— What does that mean to be very pro-Palestinian? It means that I believe that Palestinians should have a, should have control and sovereignty over their own destiny. And I also don't blame Israel for what's happened in Gaza. I blame Hamas. Hamas is a proxy for Iran. It is a genocidal organization by its own statements. Its only objective is to annihilate Israel and to exterminate the Jews. And it's a kleptocracy. It steals from the Palestinian people. Israel now, is in an existential fight. It's on a, it's fighting a five-front war against Shia militias that are funded by Iran in Iraq and Syria, against the Houthis in Yemen, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against Hamas in Gaza, so I, and Islamic Jihad and a bunch of other, you know, smaller groups that are all funded by Iran. And I don't think that it's right to micromanage Israel's battle against Hamas. I think that Israel has to close out that front because it's very vulnerable right now. America should keep giving arms and money to Israel? Yes, of course we should. If we don't do that, we should be contemplating that there may be no Israel within five years. Israel is facing indomitable strength now with Iran and the groups like Hezbollah is not, this isn't the Hezbollah that it fought in 2000. This is the best guerilla army perhaps that ever existed on Earth. And they are a very formidable foe. They have 250,000 missiles, many of them guided missiles, and they work hand in hand with Iran and with Hamas and with all these other organizations. And their purpose is to obliterate, to annihilate Israel. And you know, I don't feel that it would be good for the United States, or in our national security interest, to live in a world where there is no Israel, where there is no barrier against Iran's expansion in the Mid East. But you're the unusual presidential candidate to acknowledge the debt. And you don't want to cut this spending. What would you cut? Well, the Israel spending is rather minor. We've spent $8 trillion on regime change wars. And I would not have brought, I think every war that we've brought for the last hundred years, with one exception, has been a war of choice and an immoral war. The only exception is World War II. World War I was an immoral war. My grandfather fought it and lost a lot of his relationships because of that. A lot of his friendships. Every war since World War II, immoral? No, even before World War II. For the last hundred years. Vietnam, immoral? Vietnam was an immoral war, of course. Grenada, immoral? All of them were. They’re all wars of choice. They're wars that we shouldn't be involved in. We are not the policemen of the world. John Quincy Adams, he said, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Eisenhower said the same thing on my birthday in 1961, January 17th, in his farewell address. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. He said the biggest threat to America is the emergence of a military industrial complex that will take control of our foreign policy and then destroy democracy from within. And that's exactly what's happening right now. We have the intelligence apparatus in this country that has been captured by the military contractors, and its job is to lie to the American people and to create these super villains every couple of years, Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin. So, you would cut the military. I would cut the military. $800 billion now, you'd cut to $400 billion? I’d cut it to about $500 billion during my first four years. And by the way, that is the Eisenhower minimum. That is, that would put us at the same level, in 2024 dollars, as we were during the height of the Cold War. And if that was sufficient to protect America during the height of the Cold War, it ought to be sufficient now. But I've also got great military advisors who say this, most of the money in the military now, a lot of tremendous amount of waste. But also, it's not about protecting America, it's about dominating the globe. And that is a losing bargain. We should be projecting what my uncle wanted to do, project economic power abroad, not military power. My uncle said— Which uncle? John F. Kennedy, he said the primary job of a President of the United States is to keep the country out of war. He said he wanted on his gravestone, he kept the peace and he never sent a combat unit abroad to fight. And he kept us out of Laos in ‘61. He kept us out of Cuba, ‘61. He kept us out of Germany in ‘62. He kept us out of Cuba again in ‘62 and ‘63. And he kept us out of Vietnam. He sent only military advisors. And 30 days before he died, he ordered and he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all military, 16,000 military advisors home from Vietnam so, because he heard that a Green Beret had died, and he learned that 75 men had died at that point. He said, that's too many. And 30 days later, he was assassinated. And he said he didn't want kids in Africa and Latin American and Asia, when they heard about the United States of America. to think of a man with a gun, he wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer. He wanted them to think of the Alliance for Progress. He wanted them to think of USAID. These programs that he created to build the middle class and end run the oligarchs and the military dictators and go and aid directly the middle class to try to build a middle class, put America on the side of the poor. So, you've saved us $300 billion, but the deficit is much bigger. Most of it is— Well, the biggest— The biggest is? The biggest cost is treating chronic disease. Well, it's Social Security and Medicare, is the biggest cost. The biggest cost is chronic disease. That's $4.3 trillion. It's five times our military budget. There's nothing like it. And it's gone from, when my uncle was President, 6% of Americans had chronic disease, today, it’s 60%. And the cost of healthcare, as a result of that, has gone up to almost 20% of our GDP from about 6%. We have the sickest people in the world. There's nobody else who has a chronic disease burden that we do. And that's one of the reasons we had the highest death rate from Covid of any country in the world. Chronic diseases like? Neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language like tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD. Autism has gone from 1 in 10,000 in my generation, to 1 in every 34 kids in my kids' generation. One in every 22 boys. Autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes. When I was a kid— You say this is caused by— Let me say this, when I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic. Because Americans got fat. Well, no. Americans are getting poisoned by processed foods. Thousand ingredients in our processed foods. So it’s partly vaccines, partly processed foods— It’s processed foods. Chemicals— It's pharmaceuticals, it's chemicals in our water. Specific chemicals, glyphosate. You can see the timeline because Congress actually said to the EPA, tell us what year the autism epidemic began. And EPA came back and said, it's a red line, 1989. Well, that's the year all the food allergies started. I never knew anybody, I had 11 siblings and 70 first cousins. I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy. Why do five of my seven kids have those kinds of allergies? Mine too. Right. Autoimmune disease. This is not normal, John. This is from mass poisoning our children. But you say, look at the trend. Here's the trend. We're living longer than ever. No, over the past 10 years, we've had the steepest drop in life expectancy in American history, a dramatic drop over the past 10 years. We had a dramatic, yeah the drop is shown here, but this is— Yeah, that's the drop. This is white men overdosing and Covid. It's chronic disease as well. And by the way, why did we have the highest death rate from Covid? Here's what CDC says, we had 16% of the Covid deaths. We only have 4.2% of the world's population. So, whatever we were doing was worse than any country in the world. Because we're overweight, because we have— What CDC says is that the average person who died from Covid had 3.8 chronic diseases. They had obesity, as you point out, had diabetes, they had asthma, and one other thing. That's why we're dying. We're the sickest group of people in the world. We pay more for healthcare, two to three times per capita, what Europeans pay. And we're 79th in terms of outcome behind Mongolia, behind Nicaragua, behind Costa Rica, behind Cuba. Oh, somebody needs to explain this. What's happening? And we know what's happening. Anybody who's— My understanding, it's because Americans are overweight. We drive more and kill each other on the highways. Why are we overweight? and we shoot each other more often. We're overweight. Do you think people just got lazy or do you think something is happening? All of these neurological disease, obesity is a chronic disease. Caused by chemicals that we’re being exposed to? It's caused by, yeah. Probably the biggest culprit is probably high fructose corn syrup. If you look, for example, you look at the Pima Indians. The Pima Indians are in New Mexico, and then there's another population in Mexico. The Pima Indians in New Mexico have a life expectancy of 47 years. The Pima Indians right across the border have a life expectancy of almost 80 years. They're skinny, there's no diabetes, they're in good shape and they live forever. On our side of the border, they die like flies. And they're obese, they're diabetic, they're asthmatic. They have all kinds of cardio diseases. Why is that? It's because they're eating processed foods and it's poisoning them. Let's come back to that and we can debate that. But the big exciting thing you say is you acknowledge that we have a horrible debt and that this is going to be a problem. I don't see what you're willing to cut. Well, I'm going to end the chronic disease epidemic. I'm going to end it very quickly, and that is going to dramatically reduce healthcare. I'm going to cut— You’re going to just stop all chemicals from being used? No, I'm going to, right now, John, NIH refuses to study what the etiology of chronic disease is. And why did they? Because they don't want to, they don't want to offend the pharmaceutical companies, the processed food companies, the chemical companies that are at the core of it. They offend them all the time. They reject 90% of their submissions. The big, rich companies are terrified of the FDA and the NIH. The NIH has a $42 billion budget. It distributes that money to 56,000 scientists, mainly in universities around the country and then some outside of the country. When I was a boy, they were studying science. They were answering questions like, what is making Americans sick? What are the health threats? In 1980, we changed the law. We passed the Bayh-Dole Act. And that law said that NIH scientists could collect royalties on any drug that they assisted in developing. And that NIH itself could collect royalties. So, for example, the Moderna vaccine is 50% owned by NIH, and they will make tens of billions of dollars on it. And there are six individuals at NIH who have margin rights for the patent who were Tony Fauci’s closest deputies, and they collect $150,000 a year forever. As long as mRNA products are on the market, they will be collecting that. They're paying for their mortgages, their boats, their children's education, their alimonies. And that financial opportunity has subsumed the regulatory function of NIH. NIH now, has become the biggest incubator for pharmaceutical drugs. And 2016, FDA approved 220 new drugs. All of them were developed by NIH. And this is the very, very corrupt. And what they're doing is, instead of telling us what's causing the chronic disease and ending it, they are profiting from it. And the pharmaceutical industry is profiting from it. They're making tons of money on our illness and they have very little incentive to make us better. Well, this is news to me, and I can't argue with you. I'll investigate this, but exciting as it is to hear you talk about saving us by cutting the debt, I just don't hear the details. And when I look at your campaign videos, you're going to add new things. That's not going to add anything to the debt. If you read how we're going to finance that. But that's a giveaway. It's a loan guarantee, and it is funded by the issuance of 3%, by 3% treasury bonds that are tax free. But that's a giveaway. Listen, we have to, well, that's not a giveaway, but what we need to do, everything I spend, every nickel I spend, every dollar that I spend as President, is going to go toward building our economy. And if we don't do that, we are going to be destroyed by the debt. Because when the debt is this large, you cannot cut your way out of it. You have to cut dramatically and I'm going to do that. But where? Well, I am going to cut the military in half. I'm going to cut the chronic disease epidemic, and then I'm going to do massive cuts of waste, and I'm going to use AI and blockchain to identify that waste. Right now, the Pentagon audit— Alright, some more specifics? I'll give you an example, the Pentagon audit. But with the Pentagon, we've already got $300 billion. Well, I'm going to give you, it's just an example of the waste in the federal government. The Pentagon Audit just came out. The Pentagon lost $4 trillion. So, they failed their audit. They can’t, they don't know what happened. They fail every year. They don't know what happened to it for 20 years. They fail. The big failure is they don't know what happens to their inventory. And we can get AI walkers to go through the stockpiles, identify all of that waste. Every year, the GAO publishes and the Congressional Budget Office jointly published a list of the most wasteful programs in government. Those documents are this thick, and they go and sit on a shelf in the Library of Congress. I'm going to go through those documents and I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, and I got to put them all in one bill, and I'm going to send them to Congress with an up and down vote, the same way we did with the base closure commissions. I'm going to identify, using AI, which has never been done before. AI is very dangerous for us, but it has big opportunity. It can make government more accountable, more transparent. And that's how I'm going to use it. And we're going to identify the ways and I'm going to eliminate it. I'm going to eliminate almost all the functions of the Department of Education. Why not kill the whole department? Who needs a federal department? I would keep the research function of that because we want to know how kids are doing. We want to be able to identify the places where kids are failing. We want to be able to know how our kids are doing compared to kids in other countries to find out what's working in other countries as well. So, I think the research department, the data analysis and collection departments need to, are important for us. But as I said, any expenditure I make is going to come from cuts. And it also is going to be designed to increase GDP. That's the only way out of this debt disaster that is facing us. I thought what increases GDP is when government gets out of the way and lets greedy entrepreneurs invent things. We can't cut our way completely out of the debt. If you spend a million dollars on military arms, which we're now spending eight, almost actually now, $9.4 billion, you create two jobs on weapons. If you spend a million dollars on childcare, you create 22 jobs. And that increased GDP. And so, anything that I do, I'm going to ask the Congressional Budget Office in advance, is this going to produce more revenue, more GDP than we're spending? And if it's not, I'm not going to do it. One area we're spending a lot is trying to fight climate change. My approach on climate has always been about free markets. And what I would do and what I've advocated for many, many years is get rid of the subsidies. So, you cut, there's $5.2 trillion in subsidies that are given annually to the carbon industry. Trillions to the carbon industry? 5.2, well— They get an oil depletion allowance, but I'm not aware of subsidies. The oil depletion allowance is a very, very small part of it. There's also, the highway subsidies in places like West Virginia and Kentucky, you need 18 inches of asphalt on the highway, or 12 inches, 10 inches. They cost millions of dollars per lane, per mile. And the coal, because the coal trucks weigh 90,000 pounds. That's a subsidy. And there are many, many other subsidies. I mean, for example, ozone in particulates from coal burning power plants cause about half a trillion dollars in respiratory illness every year. That's a subsidy. That's an indirect subsidy. Coal burning power plants are a problem, but they’re disappearing. No, they're not disappearing. There will probably never be a new one built in this country, but they're being built elsewhere in the world, in those countries. Right. Because we don't have market-based approach. Those coal plants are valuable because they're fully amortized. And so, they can burn coal all day without paying interest on them. And if you look just at the plant, the capital investment of the plant, your utility is not going to want to replace it. So right now, to build a new coal burning power plant, it's about $3.6 billion a gigawatt. To build a solar plant is about $1 billion a gigawatt. To build a coal— I'm not being taxed to build coal. No, you’re not. I am being taxed to give you and other politically connected people, subsidies for solar. Oh, you're being taxed for a coal plant too, and you're being taxed for oil. There's all the deductions that they can— So we should stop all these subsidies. Yeah. Including the ones that— You know, I can say, I would say this, John, if you want to be philosophical about this, I would say there's no justification ever for subsidies to a mature industry. And the oil industry is the second richest industry in the world. Why are we giving them any subsidies? You might want to give subsidies to nascent industries for national security reasons. For example, when George Washington became President, he could not find a suit. He wanted to find a suit that was manufactured in the United States. There was no such thing. He had to bring in an Italian tailor and British cloth. And they began subsidizing at that point, the seeding of fabric factories mainly, and mills, mainly in New England. And it created a massive industry in our country after a few years of help from the government. So, I think there is an excuse for seeding industries with subsidies for strategic reasons, for national security reasons, but no, mature industries should never get subsidies. I'm against it, but we also need to build— But you have a solar plant that got a government guaranteed loan. Big one. Yeah, I built a lot of solar plants and I built, and I've been involved in the wind industry. We were my— Why should you get a government subsidy? Well, like I said for that same reason, if you're going for national security reasons, if you're going to reduce, if you're creating a new industry, you're competing with the Chinese. The Chinese are fully subsidizing it. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry, which is going global. There's a reason to do that. So, that we're not completely dependent on Chinese technology. There's national security reasons to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources like Saudi Arabia, which get us in wars, which are a subsidy. We spend $8 trillion on oil wars, that should be, in a true free market economy, those costs would be reflected in the price of gasoline at the pump. But they're not. They're getting it for free. It's not free though, we're paying from it, but a different pocket, we're paying for it in our taxes and our kids are paying in inflation. It is another subsidy. You and I clearly have different opinions about what we should do and climate change and, because once you made a speech saying: Next time you see John Stossel or Glenn Beck, these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies, lying to you. Companies like Exxon that consistently put their private financial interests ahead of American interests. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors. Now, I don't really think you want to have me executed for treason, but maybe you do. But my argument was that it's not a crisis that we need to throw money at you for. The Dutch built dikes years ago to keep the water out, we can adjust to climate change, it's a problem. But most of the stuff we're doing now, including subsidizing you, isn't going to make any difference while China is building those coal plants. I'm not in that business anymore, John. And I think that statement that I made, I don't know how many years ago, but it is not a statement that I would make today. Good. Well, I think you wouldn't be talking if it were. Well, I would be talking anyway because I'll talk to anybody. But I would say it was an imprudent statement at that time. I definitely wouldn't make it today, particularly after Covid, when we saw the use of a crisis by elites around the globe to clamp down totalitarian controls, to obliterate our constitutional rights in so many different ways, and to shift wealth upward. In our country, we closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation. We closed, we banned, we ban jury trials against any corporation was providing countermeasures. We got rid of freedom of assembly with social distancing regulations. We got rid of freedom of speech. The government was censoring critics. They began censoring critics of Covid. They ended up by censoring critics of the Ukraine War and other government policies. We got rid of, we closed all the churches for a year with no scientific citation, no due process, no just compensation, no environmental impact statements, none of, no notice-- It was awful. We totally agree and thank you for— And so, I understand, I think climate is existential. I think it's human caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. And I don't think that people who say, who disagree with that are unpatriotic or traitors. So, I apologize to you for saying that about you years ago. But what difference will it make if we spend billions on solar plants, if China builds coal plants? And India? Well, first of all, I don't really want to get in that argument with you. Alright. Let me drop it. I can make that argument and you and I can talk about that all day, but-- You oppose nuclear power. I'm arguing for free markets. I think we should create a national grid which allows all kind and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace. And I believe those will be the most efficient, which means the least polluting providers. But we should end all the subsidies, including the environmental subsidies, and let the market dictate. In a true free market economy, would promote efficiency. Efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution is waste. A true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources. And it's the undervaluation of those resources that caused us to use them wastefully. In a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, without enriching your community. Everybody wins. What polluters do, is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production cost. And that's, I think that's my approach to environmental regulation, is markets. Good. And America has reduced our carbon output more than other countries, but it did it by fracking for natural gas which you want banned. You don't want nuclear power either. I don't see how this jives with— Both those statements are wrong. What I've said about nuclear power is that I would welcome nuclear power if it can be made safe and if it can be made commercially viable, efficient. Right now, to build, the last nuclear power plant built is, instance, the one in Georgia, which is up around, it's got a 10 year over run at $34 trillion or $34 billion. It's running $34 billion a gigawatt, I believe. Because of all the government regulation, they couldn’t, but you’ve got— Well, if you're saying we should deregulate nuclear power, I would depart from you on that because in the industry, first of all, people say it's safe, right? If it's safe, they should get an insurance policy. They can't. There's no insurance company that will write them a policy. So, they went to Congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and they passed the Price Anderson Act that frees them from liability or caps at minimal trivial amount, their liability for accidents. So that's not free markets, that is corporate crony capitalism. And I don't believe in it. How does France do it? And what do we do with the waste? They're storing the waste. There's still no, there's still no program for that. That is all put on the backs of the taxpayer. We are stuck with the bill for storing this stuff for 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. And that, I believe that actors in the marketplace should pay all the costs of getting their product to market, including the cost of cleaning up their mess, which was a lesson we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten. And the industry cannot, there's no utility on Earth that will build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized by the government. And the waste disposal is fully subsidized by the government and the insurance is fully subsidized. Oh, it's all subsidizes. If they can pay their own way, if they can buy an insurance policy, I'm all for them. Where are we going to get power? You wanted fracking banned. No, I didn't say that I wanted fracking banned. What I said is that fracking should pay its costs. And right now, it's not doing that, in most parts of this country. There are so many costs attended, right, listen, I was in Dimock, Pennsylvania a couple days ago, watching fire come out of a faucet from fracking. And every home in that neighborhood has, when they can literally light up a cigarette lighter under their faucet, turn their faucet on and it'll flame like a lighter. That's from fracking. Now those people's houses are now worthless. That was made famous in a movie. Well, yeah, but I was there two weeks ago and it's still there. And they've never been paid compensation. The water trucks, there's about, for every well, every time they frack, it's about 4,000 trips in trucks. Those trucks weigh from 40 to 90,000 pounds. They destroy the rural roads in places like Pennsylvania. Who pays for that? Who should pay for that? Shouldn't it be the fracking company? Yeah, I think— That's what I would say. But-- They're imposing the cost. They should pay for it, but they don't have to. So, you want them to be able to operate? You did not propose banning them? Of course, if they can, if they're paying all of their costs and they're not externalized in their costs, then they should be allowed to operate. And what I've said, the one regulation that the fracking industry is mad at me about is that I don't think we should allow LNG facilities for exporting frack gas. The frack gas should be used in this country. It should be used to rebuild our industry in this country. Otherwise, we're shouldering all the costs and then we're paying for it to be shipped abroad. But they give us money when we ship— So, that Europe can outcompete us. These aren't companies that are owned necessarily by Americans and they're not benefiting us, and they're imposing huge costs on us. And we should get the benefit of those costs by having cheap gas in this country for the time being. The gas is going to run out very quickly in this country. The wells are depleting much faster than anybody predicted. If we run out of fracked gas, we're going to be reliant on two countries, Iran, Qatar, and Russia for the next 50 years. And that's not a good thing for America. Right now, we have a tremendous advantage, if we want to rebuild our industrial base in this country, our manufacturing base, we have the cheapest energy in the world here, and we should keep it in this country. For many years it was, until two or three years ago, it was illegal to export crude oil for the same reason. Because we should be using that here to build our industrial base and give us an advantage around the world. But when we ship LNG, that's liquid natural gas, overseas, they give us money which— Oh, they don't give us money. They give that money to the— Company, which spends it— Board of directors which is Canadian owned or you know. It's not coming back here, John. And it's not coming to the people on whom the burden of fracking falls. And any community where fracking is done, it extracts an enormous burden. It changes those communities forever. It poisons the water, it destroys the roads, it changes the culture, and you have to pay for the pipes. And those pipes are cutting through people's homes, through their fields, through their backyards. And that is imposing a cost in this country. What I'm saying is that if Americans are going to put up with those costs, we should get the advantage of it. And it's not just the shareholders of a company that could be owned by the Chinese. To pay for the pollution, gas should cost $12 a gallon? Pollution cost, and that was reflected in the price of oil, then we’d be paying $12 at the pump and we’d be sending the correct signals to the marketplace. If that's the cause, the pollution. And then people will choose the cheaper form of energy, which is the most, that's how free market capitalism works, John. But when a company proposed a wind farm near your home, you and your family opposed it. Seems hypocritical. I oppose offshore wind anywhere except in places where it's not going to do any damage. But right now, we're exterminating the Right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms. You're seeing these whale kills, dolphin kills. It's very, very destructive of wildlife. It is destructive of these traditional fisheries. And I was representing the commercial fishermen on the cape and they said their livelihoods and their culture, which we've had 350 years of commercial fishermen on Cape Cod, and they said if they built Cape Wind, they would be out of business. And I'm happy to talk about all the reasons for that, but when offshore, and also it's heavily subsidized. So, it was costing the cost of kilowatt, per kilowatt hour of offshore wind was about 32 cents. If you buy, my brother was building wind plants at that time and he was charging 10 cents a kilowatt hour. And why would we build it offshore when you can, we got the best wind on Earth in our country? And you can build onshore wind for 10 cents a kilowatt hour. And why in the world accept a boondoggle to the big companies like General Electric, Siemens, Vestas, that own Congress. So, they're getting these subsidized construction of wind farms offshore that are destroying whale populations, destroying dolphin populations, and are raising the cost of our energy. It makes no sense. Alright, I would love to talk about that more, but we're low on time and I want to get to vaccines. If your kids were young now, would you give them the measles, the mumps vaccine? No. I got measles, mumps when I was a kid. It was— Lots of people died from them, used to die from those diseases. Well, you know what? They died in the 1900’s, or early 1900’s. There were about 10,000 Americans a year died. In 1964 there was about three or 400 who died and they were almost all severely malnourished kids, mainly from the Mississippi Delta. This was before the poverty program. So, there was a lot of starving children in our country. It is very, very hard to kill a healthy child with any infectious disease, but particularly with measles. And the World Health Organization now says vitamin A is an absolute cure for measles, which we didn't know about back then. Back then, we were treated with chicken soup and it was a week at home watching Leave it to Beaver. And every kid caught it. Every single kid got it. And I had 11 brothers and sisters and we all got it and we were all fine. And there are lots and lots of studies out there now that show that kids who get measles as a child are much healthier when they grow up, that they're much more resistant to cancers, to atopic diseases, to allergies, and to heart disease. You went to Samoa. You convinced people not to get the measles vaccine. An outbreak resulted in 83 deaths. Yeah, well that the story is not true. First of all, the Prime Minister of Samoa stayed the measles vaccine after measles vaccines killed a number of people in Samoa, including members of his family. So, when I went to Samoa, the ban was already in place and I visited people in Samoa. I didn't make a, I didn’t, no, there was no policy that resulted from my going to Samoa. Secondly, nobody died in Samoa from measles. They were dying from a bad vaccine. And the vaccine was imported from Australia and given to people who had measles, which is not recommended. The same measles outbreak hit Tonga, which is the neighboring island, and nobody died because they didn't get the vaccine. So, this is more propaganda by the pharmaceutical industry, which is drumming up a lie to try to discredit me. But if you actually look into it, John, you'll find that it is not true. And you still say that autism is caused by vaccines? Yeah, autism is caused by vaccines. And by the way, CDC’s own data, you know, they did a study called the Verstraeten study in 1989, and they looked at the hepatitis B vaccine. They looked at children, and from the biggest database in the world, the vaccine safety data link. They looked at children who got the hepatitis B vaccine during their first 30 days, and they compared those to kids who got it later, or didn't get it at all. And there was a 1350% elevated risk for autism among the people who got the vaccine. There may well be, but there are studies with millions of people, you ignore the big studies. Look, you have this wrong. There's a series of about 13 studies that were done by people we call biostitutes there. One of them was the leading one who are people who do these studies for money for CDC. Who were paid for by CDC in order to create the illusion that vaccines don't cause autism. The chief scientist was a guy called Poul Thorsen who CDC late, and his study is the most cited study for this proposition. And Poul Thorsen is now a fugitive. He is wanted by Interpol. He stole millions of dollars from CDC that he had claimed to use on this study, but he was building houses, buying motorcycles, and living a life of luxury. And his study is absolute fraud. And yet it is, they have not retracted it because CDC is a dishonest organization. It continues to be cited in the literature. And there, by the way, John, there are hundreds and hundreds of studies. I've written a book if you're interested, called “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” that has, I think, 1,400 references and over 400 studies cited that link autism and other related neurological injuries to vaccines. There is no question about it. If you actually read the literature, if you listen to what the propaganda that CDC tells you, yeah, vaccines don't cause autism, but it's propaganda. This is a captive agency that is intertwined and owned by the pharmaceutical industry. You could really drown in the weeds about this. I'm struck by how the Democrats, you seem to lately be more of a threat to Trump, but the Democrats are fighting harder to keep you off the ballot. And the stuff from Joy Reid on MSNBC. The dangerous forces behind his bid for the Presidency and Labor Secretary Robert Reich is saying you're sending out Nazi dog whistles. Have you seen his video he posted? It's crazy. He’s a dangerous nutcase. His vision for our future is tainted by his endorsements of hateful conspiracy theories. He's been kind of not in touch with reality and completely unwilling to kind of engage me. He won't debate you? No, nobody will. None of them will. They won't have me on any of their networks. No but, the only live interview I did was with Erin Burnett. But nobody else will do a live interview and most of them won't do any interviews at all. I can see they want to avoid a live interview because you get into the weeds of vaccine science and they feel, we feel not all of it's true. Yeah, well, if it's not true, then argue with me or post something afterwards that just says we differ with this. Well, I wish we could talk more about this, but I'm told we're out of time. Thank you, Robert Kennedy. Thanks for having me. And thank you for being here today. His campaign limited our interview to one hour. If we’d had more time, I would have pushed him harder on some of his claims. Now, he did say: If it's not true, then argue with me or post something afterwards that just says we differ with this. I’ll do that now about three things. First, Kennedy said this about fracking: I was in Dimock, Pennsylvania a couple days ago watching fire come out of a faucet from fracking. This anti-fracking movie, Gasland, publicized that and also blamed fracking. But the movie and Kennedy, are wrong. It’s true that faucet water sometimes can catch fire, but it’s wrong to blame fracking. There are many places in America where no fracking is done, but-- Whoa! Water still catches fire. This happens because of naturally occurring gas that’s already in the ground. The director of President Obama’s EPA said: In no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater. Also, during our interview, I said to Kennedy: You went to Samoa. You convinced people not to get the measles vaccine. An outbreak resulted in 83 deaths. Well, that story is not true. First of all, the Prime Minister of Samoa stayed the measles vaccine after measles vaccines killed a number of people in Samoa. So, when I went to Samoa, the ban was already in place. That is true. My question was poorly worded. I shouldn’t have quoted this magazine article that suggests that his visit caused the deaths. But Kennedy is wrong when he says: Nobody died in Samoa from measles. Many did die. A Lancet article says there were more than 5,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. Kennedy claims the real killer in Samoa was a bad vaccine, and there were two deaths because local nurses injected babies with incorrectly mixed vaccines. But what killed more people was Samoa’s pulling its vaccine after those babies died. Immunization rates declined sharply. That caused the measles deaths. Kennedy’s claim that all the deaths resulted from bad vaccines is just wrong. Fortunately, today, Samoa vaccinates kids again. Finally, about Kennedy’s repeated claim that— Autism is caused by vaccines. There was a 1350% elevated risk for autism. No, there isn’t. Kennedy bases his claim on this paper which found more autism among vaccinated kids. But this was unpublished data. Once researchers controlled for other variables, they found no correlation. And many, many bigger studies find no link between today’s vaccines and autism. One even looked at every child born in Denmark over 10 years. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine messages hurt people. Vaccines do save lives. Now, his critics claim he just makes things up. We didn’t find that. He doesn’t just make things up, but he misleads because he ignores bigger, better, more reliable studies. So, Kennedy and I disagree about a lot, but he’s unusual in that he will appear here and debate these issues. Good for him. That’s what America is supposed to be about. [Swoosh] If you like my interviews with politicians, make sure to subscribe below, and that way, you’ll get more of these videos. [Music]
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