by Alex Christoforou, The Duran:
On May 3rd, RFK Jr., whom I had wanted to primary against Obama in 2012 but declined, gave his first in-depth interview as a candidate, now 12 years later, for the 2024 U.S. Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination against Joe Biden, answering the questions of the excellent interviewer Freddie Sayers, at The Unherd, and here are representative samples from it:
“Robert Kennedy Jr: America needs a revolution”
The 2024 outsider on Biden, Ukraine and Covid misinformation
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
3 May 2023, BY FREDDIE SAYERS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY89a_zXi9s
https://web.archive.org/web/20230503185803/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY89a_zXi9s
RFK Jr: I’m talking about issues that I think most Americans and probably most Democrats are concerned about: the systematic gutting of the middle class; the elevation of corporations — particularly polluting corporations; and, from the financial industry to the military-industrial complex, the corrupt merger of state and corporate power. Through wars, bank bailouts and lockdowns, we’ve been systematically hollowing out the American middle class, and printing money to make billionaires richer. During the Covid lockdown, there was a $4.4 trillion shift in wealth from the American middle class to this new oligarchy that we created — 500 new billionaires with the lockdowns, and the billionaires that we already had increased their wealth by 30%.
That’s just one of the assaults, and then you go to the bailout of the Silicon Valley Bank, and the war in Ukraine, which is costing us $113 billion; the war in Iraq and the wars that followed that have cost us $8 trillion. The total cost of the lockdowns was $16 trillion, and we got nothing for any of it. Is it any wonder that we don’t have a middle class left in the United States of America? Unless we rebuild the middle class, and rebuild our economy, our national security is going to fail, and our democracy is going to fail. …
Climate has become more polarised than ever, and with good reason. The crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted — by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos — the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls and to stratify our society, with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls.
And then you also see, with climate, there’s been a shift — from habitat preservation and regenerative farming to trying to reduce the power of the carbon industry — towards corporate carbon capture, which can be monetised by the corporations and exploited without seeing any real benefit on the ground. And also with geoengineering solutions, which I oppose. It tends to be that the people who are pushing them also have IP rights — in other words, patent rights in a lot of those technologies. There is definitely an optic of self-interest.
He’s the only prominent public figure who speaks about the hypocrisy of billionaires and “Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos.” And:
FS: That takes us to this pressing question: one thing you talk about a lot is that America is in a permanent state of war and you want to put an end to that. With regard to Ukraine, how do you propose to do that?
RFK Jr: Settle it. The Russians have repeatedly offered to settle. If you look at the Minsk accords, which the Russians offered to settle for, they look like a really good deal today. Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, “exhaust”? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 of them. The commander of the special forces unit in the Ukraine, which is probably the most elite fighting force in Europe, has said 80% of his troops are dead or are wounded and they cannot rebuild the unit. Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of either 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe. …
We should have listened to Putin over many years. We made a commitment to Russia, to Gorbachev, that we would not move NATO one inch to the east. Then we went in, and we lied. We went into 13 NATO countries, we put missile systems in with nuclear capacity; we did joint exercises with Ukraine and these others for NATO. What is the purpose of NATO? This is what George Kennan asked; this is what Jack Matlock asked. All of the doyens of US foreign policy were saying: “Russia lost the Cold War. Let’s do to Russia what we did in Europe when we gave them the Marshall Plan. We’re the victors — let’s lift them up. Let’s integrate them into European society.” …
FS: So you would have had Russia inside NATO?
RFK Jr: I think that that’s something we should have considered. What is the purpose of NATO other than to oppose Russia? [Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin requested for Russia to receive an invitation to join, but both requests were snubbed by the U.S., never considered.] If you’re addressing Russia in a hostile way from the beginning, of course their reaction is going to be hostile back. And if you’re slowly moving in all of these states, who we said would never become part of NATO. What happened in the Ukraine is that the US supported essentially a coup d’etat in 2014, against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine. We have telephone call transcripts of Victoria Nuland, one of the neocons in the [Obama] White House, handpicking the new cabinet that was hostile to the Soviet Union [he meant there “Russia”]. If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia’s position, and you say: “Okay, the United States, our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy, has now taken over the government of a nation and made them hostile to us, and then started passing laws that are prejudicial to this giant Russian population.” If Mexico did that and then started killing — they killed 14,000 Russians in Donbas, the Ukrainian government — if Mexico did that to expatriate Americans, we’d invade in a second. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents. And it doesn’t mean saying that Vladimir Putin is not a gangster — he is. Or he’s not a thug — he is. Or he’s not a bully — he is. But going to war is not in his interest, either. And he repeatedly told us: these are red lines, you’re crossing.
His publicly calling Putin “a gangster” and “a thug” and a “bully” causes me to ask, “Would Putin publicly say that George W. Bush and Barak Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden are ‘gangsters’ and ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’, or has he instead been above doing that?” He has been above, and beyond, the public usage of such pandering political terms — especially against a national leader with whom he might end up negotiating, and who has always had far higher approval-ratings from the Russian public than any of those American Presidents have had from Americans. But no one is perfect, and only fools would demand any of them to be. Not even RFK Jr. (and Col. Douglas Macgregor, who would probably be his best V.P. choice, and whom I hope will soon be endorsing RFK Jr.’s candidacy). I think that he was unfortunately influenced by his own conservative son, Conor, who strongly supports America’s policy on Ukraine and volunteered to go to Ukraine to help Ukrainians kill Russians. Conor told him that, as RFK Jr, recounted to PEOPLE magazine, on 26 October 2022: “I knew his views about the war were not aligned with mine. … He doesn’t like Putin. He thinks he’s a gangster and a bully and he doesn’t like bullies. He’d been arguing vociferously for the U.S. intervention and he didn’t want to be one of these people supporting a war and sitting on the sidelines.” Obviously, the influence ought to have been in the reverse direction there; but, in any case, RFK Jr.’s being now a Presidential candidate, his terminology in this matter was inappropriate, whatever his beliefs about Putin are.
FS: Speaking of truth, and returning to the subject of vaccines for a moment, do you acknowledge that you went too far at any stage? Do you think that you yourself might have lost perspective?
RFK Jr: Here’s what I would say: show me where I got it wrong. Show me one fact that I’ve said in all of my social media postings that was factually erroneous. If you show me that, I’ll fix it, I’ll change it. And if it’s appropriate, I’ll apologise for it. But, that’s not what’s happened. What’s happened is, the media has said: “Oh, he passes misinformation.” And I say: “What piece of misinformation?” Everything I post is cited and sourced to government databases, and to peer-reviewed publications. I have probably the most robust fact-checking operation in America today. I have 320 MD physicians and PhD scientists, including, until recently, Nobel Prize-winner Luc Montagnier, on our advisory board looking at everything I post. If I get something wrong — and I will ultimately get something wrong — but so far, nobody’s been able to show me anything that I’ve gotten wrong.
He even volunteered to say of the U.S. intelligence agencies, “There’s no accountability and these agencies need to be accountable, and I would break up the CIA in a way that would make them accountable.” How likely is a serious contender for the U.S. Presidency who speaks the truths that he speaks, to become assassinated?
If U.S. Government policies are not (and long have not) been intended to serve the public on the basis of truth, instead of to serve billionaires on the basis of lies, then how likely is it that what will happen to him, will be what happened to his father, and to his uncle, and to Martin Luther King, and to Abraham Lincoln?
