Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting down with independent 2024 Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for an hourlong interview.
Our interview started with me asking Mr. Kennedy why, if you don’t follow the mainstream media narrative, you are automatically painted in a vile and unfavorable light. He told me: “I think a lot of it is driven by, or fortified at least, by financial interests. Upton Sinclair made this very, very useful statement that it's almost impossible to persuade a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.”
“And we know that the media is dependent on the people that I've been suing and critical of for many, many years: the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, big oil and coal, the carbon incumbents and big polluters, processed food companies like Kellogg's, and the people who are poisoning a generation of American kids,” he continued.
“People who challenge that narrative are outsiders. They become heretics. You cannot debate a heretic; you have to burn them down at the stake. You have to punish them.”
He continued, talking about pushback from the Covid era: "And I think the way that I look at this, a lot of what I experienced, what a lot of dissenters experienced during COVID or during the McCarthy era or other parts of our history, or, you know, you can see this in countries all around the world, is that dissenters have to be silenced.”
Listen to the full hourlong exclusive interview here.
“And, you know, one of the ways you do that is through character assassination by applying pejoratives to them that marginalize them. Pejoratives like 'anti-vaxxer,' 'conspiracy theorist,' 'anti-science,' 'quack'—all of these pejoratives that have been applied to me—it's a way of silencing me so that nobody has to listen to me because I'm a lunatic, I'm a crazy person,” he told me.
Explaining further, he said: “And really, what I do, what they call 'conspiracy theories,' is me saying, 'Well, wait a minute. Are you sure these COVID vaccines are going to prevent transmission?' Which I said in, you know, March of 2020 or May of 2020. And I was saying that because I was looking at the monkey studies, and in the monkeys, they did not prevent transmission.”
“And yet, Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates and, you know, all of the panjandrums of the medical cartel were up there saying, 'Do what you're told. You're protecting grandma. Protect society. If you take it, it will not spread. You cannot spread it to others.' And I was looking at the monkey study and saying, 'There is nothing in these studies that indicate that's true.' But when I raised it, that became a conspiracy theory,” he told me.
He added: "When I suggested that glyphosate, which is the active ingredient of Roundup, was carcinogenic, that was a conspiracy theory — until we won a $2.2 billion jury verdict."
Mr. Kennedy continued, explaining that the mainstream media drove the narrative during Covid: “We heard from the outset of COVID, repeated again and again on CNN and all the other networks, MSNBC, that you have to trust the experts. Don't do research yourself. Shut off your capacity for critical thinking. People who go and actually do their own research on the Internet are contemptible, you know, for this.”
Then he explained why this logic simply doesn’t make sense: “And it was such a weird thing because that 'trusting the experts' is not a thing. It's certainly not a feature of democracy. It's not a feature of science. It's the opposite of science. In science, you're supposed to question everything. In democracy, you're supposed to question authority. It is a feature of totalitarian governments, and it is a feature of religion."
When I asked Mr. Kennedy how we can more fairly assess and debate issues in the future, instead of having to wait for the official narratives to fail — as just happened with Chris Cuomo and ivermectin, as well as the pulling of the AstraZeneca vaccine off of the market — he told me: "We need to raise our children, we need to educate our public to sniff out that bias. And, you know, bias can be financial conflicts of interest, but there are all kinds of biases. There are biases that come from being raised in certain areas, raised in certain neighborhoods, members of certain clubs, and just, you know, the bias that we all have.”
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Kennedy summed it up: "If we're really going to live fulfilling lives and lives of enlightenment, we have to undergo a process of self-questioning, of self-examination to eliminate biases.
"And as a country, as a democracy, if we're going to fulfill our destiny as the world's exemplary nation, we need to be educating our citizens to have that practice about government institutions.”
I then asked for Mr. Kennedy’s response to Joe Biden’s recent decision to withhold aid from Israel. He told me: “I think Israel's war is a moral war. They've been attacked for 16 years by Hamas. And then, on October 7th, in this, you know, extraordinarily brutal invasion, every nation has a right to self-defense. And, you know, self-defense means destroying Hamas.”
“It's not Israel's fault that Hamas uses civilian shields. Any other country, any nation faced with this kind of onslaught from a militarily superior nation, would give up and surrender to save their civilian population. Why is Hamas not doing that?" he added.
"Hamas has no negotiating position. It says that the only concession that Israel could make is the annihilation of the Jewish state. And it actually has, in its charter and in all of its public statements, said that any negotiation with Israel is a violation of Islamic law, except as a ruse.”
Mr. Kennedy continued, explaining that Israel has “no choice” but to destroy Hamas: “So people are out there demanding a ceasefire, but there have been five ceasefires, and every ceasefire Hamas has used to regroup, to rearm, to hoist the banner, and then to do another surprise attack. Well, I don't see that Israel has any choice but to destroy Hamas.”
Speaking about the collateral damage of the war, he commented: “Of course, it's horrible. The civilian deaths are horrifying to all of us. But look, if you have a bank robbery and one of the robbers takes a hostage, is holding a hostage in his arms as a shield and firing at the police, and the police fire back and the hostage by mistake is killed, you don't blame the police. The law and public opinion blame the bank robber. And the same thing is true in Gaza. Hamas is victimizing the Palestinian people. It's pursuing an agenda by Iran, and the Palestinian people are suffering. Gaza should be one of the, you know, it should be a Mecca of economic development.”
Responding directly to President Biden withholding aid, he commented: “President Biden pulled a kind of bait-and-switch, and I think the longer they prolong the war—and U.S. policy, President Biden's policy, has, I think, prolonged the war and amplified the human suffering. I think the best thing for Palestine, for Gaza, is if the war ends quickly, which means the elimination of Hamas as quickly as possible and with as little civilian casualties as possible.”
"And, you know, President Biden went to Congress with a $23 billion aid package, and now he's not, on that pretense that he was going to get weapons, allowing the purchase of weapons by Israel."
Putting the conflict in context, Mr. Kennedy told me: "It's weird that people say that the only country that shouldn't be doing this is the one Jewish state. And by the way, there are much bloodier battles with much higher civilian casualties going on right now. In Yemen, I think 300,000 kids have been killed. In Syria, the Uighurs in China, there are conflicts happening all over the world right now, and nobody talks about them, and nobody cares. In the Congo, a million people have already died, and nobody talks about it.”
"The only thing people want to talk about is when Jews start defending themselves, and there's something very disturbing about that."
When I asked Mr. Kennedy how he plans on managing the country’s budget, given all of our foreign aid, and how he plans on protecting the sanctity of our country’s economy and the U.S. dollar, he explained: “You know, we need to cut our military budget probably in half. We need to cut chronic disease in our country, which is our biggest expense. That's $4.3 trillion a year. We need to cut waste in government, and there are ways we can do that now that AI can actually help us do in ways we've never been able to before.”
"I'm going to use all of those tools, but we also need to understand that we need to make investments in America's future and grow our economy. You can't just cut your way out of inflation. We need to create new industries, we need to reindustrialize our economy, and we need to make our economy larger so that the budget deficits become proportionately smaller.”
"But, you know, we need to start by making the cuts, and that needs to happen very, very quickly."
When I asked him about sound money and possibly returning to a gold standard, he told me: "One of the issues that we're toying with now is a Treasury bill that is based at least partially—maybe starting at one percent and increasing it—on a hard currency. On base currencies, like maybe a basket of currencies that include platinum, gold, silver, and Bitcoin. You know, my uncle tried to do something like this just before he died with the silver certificate and the gold certificate, to give Americans a hedge against inflation.
"And there are lots of ways we can do that. We're talking about making, for example, Bitcoin available and stopping the war against Bitcoin so that middle-class people, working-class people who want to hedge against inflation can do that. They don't have to rely on fiat currency.”
“And that will insert a discipline into the printing of money. If Americans have a choice, it will inject a discipline into the printing of money that we do not have right now.”
You can listen to the full hour long interview audio at this link.
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