CIA influence
(01:20:03) And then for most of its life, the CIA was banned from propagandizing Americans, but we learned that they were doing it anyway. So in 1973, during the Church Committee hearings, we’ve learned that the CIA had a program called Operation Mockingbird, where they had at least 400 members, leading members of the United States press corps, on the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera, who were secretly working for the agency, and steering news coverage to support CIA priorities. And they agreed at that time to disband Operation Mockingbird in ’73. But there’s indications they didn’t do that.
(01:20:56) And they still, the CIA today, is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID. The United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. It owns newspapers, it has journalists on it, thousands and thousands of journalists, on its payroll. They’re not supposed to be doing that in the United States. But in 2016, president Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, we can’t look at the Ukraine War and how the narrative has been formed in the minds of Americans, and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.
Lex Fridman (01:21:46) Well, what is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it’s indirectly?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:51) Through the press.
Lex Fridman (01:21:52) Indirectly through the press, or directly by funding the press?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:55) Directly through. I mean, there’s certain press organs that have been linked to the agency, that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Shachtman, has deep relationships with the intelligence community, Salon, Daily Kos.
Lex Fridman (01:22:19) But I wonder why they would do it. From my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:22:30) I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years, because it’s become, the principle newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition of… When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamil, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and courage, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed that the function of journalists, was to maintain this posture of fear-skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority, that people in authority lie, and that they always have to be questioned, and that their job was to speak truth to power, and to be guardians of the First Amendment to free expression.
(01:23:57) But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the major press organs in this country were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually censoring the speech of dissent, anybody who dissent, of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy, and the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative. And some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it, and they agreed not to print stories or facts, that departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative.
(01:24:59) It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it, was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from governmental orthodox. And the way it worked is, the UPI, the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news news around the country, and the Washington Post, would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden’s laptops, it was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or that they had stuff on there that was compromising.
(01:25:39) And by the way, what I’m telling you is all well documented, and I’m litigating on it right now, so I’m part of a lawsuit against the TNI, and so I know a lot about what happened, and I have all this documented and people can go to our website. There’s a letter on my sub-stack now, to Michael Scherer of the Washington Post that outlines all this, and gives all my sources, because Michael Scherer accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely, or labeling them conspiracy theorists.
Lex Fridman (01:26:26) I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between as we talked about, you can understand the intention of such a thing being good, that in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic, there’s a lot of risk to saying untrue things. But that’s a slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about, is completely sacrificed, and then you can deviate from truth.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:26:54) If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name’s Jessica, Jennifer, Cecil and you can go on our website and see her statement. She says, the purpose of this is that we’re now… Actually, she says, when people look at the us, they think we’re competitors, but we’re not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now all over the network, and they’re hurting public trust in us, and they’re hurting our economic model, and they have to be choked off and crushed. And the way that we’re going to do that, is to make an agreement with the social media sites, that if we say, if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will de platform it, or they will throttle it, or they will shadow-ban it, which destroys the economic model of those alternative, competitive sources of information. So that that’s true.
(01:27:58) But the point you make, is an important point. That the journalists themselves, who probably didn’t know about the TNI agreement, certainly I’m sure they didn’t, they believe that they’re doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there’s a danger to that. And the danger is that, once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what’s true and what’s not true, then there’s really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself, because now your job is no longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule, rather than the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of journalism and a democracy.
2024 elections
Lex Fridman (01:29:05) You’re running for president as a Democrat, what to you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:29:18) I would say protection of the environment, and the commons, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership, the landscapes, our purple mountain majesty, the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the middle class, and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor, bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to-
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:30:03) … bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to choose or an individual’s right to endure unwanted medical procedures. Peace. The Democrats have always been anti-war. The refusal to use fear is a governing tool. FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” because he recognized that tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. The freedom of government from untoward influenced by corrupt corporate power. The end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is now I think, dominating our democracy. It’s what Eisenhower warned about when he warned against the emergence of the military industrial complex.
(01:31:07) And then I prefer to talk about the positive vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is I see that the corporations are commoditizing us are poisoning our children, are strip mining the wealth from our middle class and treating America as if it were business in liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible and creating or exacerbating this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class and creating a Latin American style futile model. There’s these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below, and that’s a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably. And we’re supposed to be modeling democracy, but we’re losing it.
(01:32:11) And I think we have ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world. Restores America as the embodiment of moral authority, which it was when my uncle was president. And as a purveyor of peace rather than a war-like nation. My uncle said he didn’t want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia when they think of America to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, and he refused to send combat soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad and into combat. He sent 16,000. He resisted in Berlin in ’62. He resisted in Laos in ’61. He resisted in Vietnam. Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops.
(01:33:22) And he sent to get James Meredith into the universe to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One black man, he sent 16,000. And month before he died, he ordered them all home. I think it was October 2nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died. And he asked his aid for a list of combat fatalities. And the aid came back and there was 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, “That’s too many. We’re going to have no more.” And he signed a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans, home from Vietnam by 1965 with the first thousand coming home by December ’63.
(01:34:13) And then in November he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, president Johnson remanded that order. And then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And it became an American war. And then Nixon topped it off at 560,000. 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin George Skakel, who died at the Tet Offensive. And we killed a million Vietnamese and we got nothing for it.
Lex Fridman (01:34:51) So America should be the symbol of peace?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:34:57) My uncle really focused on putting America on the side of the poor, instead of our tradition of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria. If you said you were against communists, and of course the people were with the rich people, our aid was going to the rich people in those countries and they were going to the military juntas. Our weapons were going to the juntas to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, “No, America should be on the side of the porn.” And so he launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest people and those, and build middle classes, and take ourselves away.
(01:35:42) In fact, his two favorite trips while he was president. His most favorite trip was to Ireland, this incredible, emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. But his second favorite trip was when he went to Colombia, he went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite country. And I think there were 2 million people came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd. And they were just delirious cheering for him. And the president of Columbia, Lleras Camargo, said to him, “Do you know why they love you?”
(01:36:22) And my uncle said, “Why?”
(01:36:24) And he said, “Because they think you’ve put America on the side of the poor against the oligarchs.” And my uncle, after he died, today, there are more avenues and boulevards and hospitals and schools and statues and parks commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it’s because he put America on the side of the poor. And that’s what we ought to be doing.
(01:37:01) We ought to be projecting economic power abroad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook and we’ve spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war and its aftermath. The wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We got nothing for that money. $8 trillion. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is much worse off than it was when Saddam was there. It’s an incoherent, violent war between Shia and Sunni death squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years.
(01:37:53) We created ISIS, we sent 2 million refugees into Europe, destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. And we’re now seeing these riots in France, and that’s a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, the Chinese spent 8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities.
(01:38:42) And now the Chinese are out-competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you, and there’s no strings attached and they’re pleasant to deal with. And as a result of that, Brazil is switching the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching. Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner that we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there. And now they’re saying, “We don’t care what the United States think.” That’s what Mohammed bin Salman said.
(01:39:24) He dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a US inflation spiral. They’ve never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral. And then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran, which has been the enemy that we’ve been telling them to be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, “We don’t care what the United States thinks anymore.” So that’s what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short term friends. And we have not made ourselves safer. We’ve put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world. You have to wait in lines to get through the airport. The security state is now causing us $1.3 trillion, and America is unsafer and poorer than it’s ever been. So we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do, and the policy that China has now adopted.
Jordan Peterson
Lex Fridman (01:40:37) So that’s a really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see US should be doing geopolitics and the way you see US should be taking care of the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I’m speaking with you. “Given everything you’ve said, when does the left go too far?” I suppose he’s referring to cultural issues, identity politics.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:41:10) Well, Jordan trying to get me to badmouth the left the whole time I was in, I really enjoyed my talk with him, but he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to say bad things about the left and that’s not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite. I’m not going to badmouth the left. I was on shows this week with David Remnick from the New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people, and baiting me to do it. And of course there’s a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but I’m trying to find values that hold us together and we can share in common, rather than to focus constantly on these disputes and these issues that drive us apart.
(01:42:07) So me sitting here badmouthing the left or badmouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I really want to figure out ways that what do these groups hold in common that we can all have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like.
Anthony Fauci
Lex Fridman (01:42:25) Well, that’s music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steelman the case for the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:42:48) I don’t want to sit here and speak unfairly by saying the guy didn’t do anything, but I can’t think of anything. If you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that benefited people, that’s certainly possible. He was there for 50 years. And in terms of his principle programs of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits.
Lex Fridman (01:43:29) Do you think he believes he’s doing good for the world?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:43:31) I don’t know what he believes. In fact, in that book, which is I think 250,000 words, I never try to look inside of his head. I deal with facts. I deal with science and every factual assertion in that book is cited in source to government databases or peer reviewed publications. And I try not to speculate about things that I don’t know about or I can’t prove. And I cannot tell you what his motivations were. He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity and very deceptive. But we all have this capacity for self-deception. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. And we all have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is right. And not everybody lives an examined life. And it is examining their motivations and the way that the world might experience their professions of goodness.
Lex Fridman (01:44:45) Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of job well or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job, of being the central centralized figure that’s supposed to have a scientific policy?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:44:58) No. No. I think he was a genuinely bad human being. And that there were many, many good people in that department over the years. Bernice Eddy is a really good example. John Anthony Morris. Many people whose careers he destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of NIH were run out of that agency. But people listening to this, probably will, in hearing me say that, will think that I’m bitter or that I’m doctrinaire about him, but you should really go and read my book. And it’s hard to summarize. I try to be really methodical, to not call names, to just say what happened.
(01:20:56) And they still, the CIA today, is the biggest funder of journalism around the world. The biggest funder is through USAID. The United States funds journalism in almost every country in the world. It owns newspapers, it has journalists on it, thousands and thousands of journalists, on its payroll. They’re not supposed to be doing that in the United States. But in 2016, president Obama changed the law to make it legal now for the CIA to propagandize Americans. And I think, we can’t look at the Ukraine War and how the narrative has been formed in the minds of Americans, and say that the CIA had nothing to do with that.
Lex Fridman (01:21:46) Well, what is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative? Do you think it’s indirectly?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:51) Through the press.
Lex Fridman (01:21:52) Indirectly through the press, or directly by funding the press?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:21:55) Directly through. I mean, there’s certain press organs that have been linked to the agency, that the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast, now Rolling Stone, editor of Rolling Stone, Noah Shachtman, has deep relationships with the intelligence community, Salon, Daily Kos.
Lex Fridman (01:22:19) But I wonder why they would do it. From my perspective, it just seems like the job of a journalist is to have an integrity where your opinion cannot be influenced or bought.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:22:30) I agree with you, but I actually think that the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years, because it’s become, the principle newspapers in this country and the television stations, the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition of… When I was a kid, listen, my house was filled with the greatest journalists alive at that time, people like Ben Bradley, like Anthony Lewis, Mary McGrory, Pete Hamil, Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, and many, many others. And after my father died, they started the RFK Journalism Awards to recognize integrity and courage, journalistic integrity and courage. And for that generation of journalism, they thought, they believed that the function of journalists, was to maintain this posture of fear-skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority, that people in authority lie, and that they always have to be questioned, and that their job was to speak truth to power, and to be guardians of the First Amendment to free expression.
(01:23:57) But if you look what happened during the pandemic, was the inverse of that kind of journalism, where the major press organs in this country were, instead of speaking truth to power, they were doing the opposite. They were broadcasting propaganda. They became propaganda organs for the government agencies. And they were actually censoring the speech of dissent, anybody who dissent, of the powerless. And in fact, it was an organized conspiracy, and the name of it was the Trusted News Initiative. And some of the major press organs in our country signed onto it, and they agreed not to print stories or facts, that departed from government orthodoxy. So the Washington Post was the signature of the UPI, the AP, and then the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative.
(01:24:59) It was started by the BBC, organized by them. And the purpose of it, was to make sure nobody could print anything about government that departed from governmental orthodox. And the way it worked is, the UPI, the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news news around the country, and the Washington Post, would decide what news was permissible to print. And a lot of it was about COVID, but also Hunter Biden’s laptops, it was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or that they had stuff on there that was compromising.
(01:25:39) And by the way, what I’m telling you is all well documented, and I’m litigating on it right now, so I’m part of a lawsuit against the TNI, and so I know a lot about what happened, and I have all this documented and people can go to our website. There’s a letter on my sub-stack now, to Michael Scherer of the Washington Post that outlines all this, and gives all my sources, because Michael Scherer accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, when he was actually part of a conspiracy, a true conspiracy, to suppress anybody who is departing from government orthodoxies, by either censoring them completely, or labeling them conspiracy theorists.
Lex Fridman (01:26:26) I mean, you can understand the intention and the action, the difference between as we talked about, you can understand the intention of such a thing being good, that in a time of a catastrophe, in a time of a pandemic, there’s a lot of risk to saying untrue things. But that’s a slippery slope that leads into a place where the journalistic integrity that we talked about, is completely sacrificed, and then you can deviate from truth.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:26:54) If you read their internal memorandum, including the statements of the leader of the Trusted News Initiative, I think her name’s Jessica, Jennifer, Cecil and you can go on our website and see her statement. She says, the purpose of this is that we’re now… Actually, she says, when people look at the us, they think we’re competitors, but we’re not. The real competitors are coming from all these alternative news sources now all over the network, and they’re hurting public trust in us, and they’re hurting our economic model, and they have to be choked off and crushed. And the way that we’re going to do that, is to make an agreement with the social media sites, that if we say, if we label their information misinformation, the social media sites will de platform it, or they will throttle it, or they will shadow-ban it, which destroys the economic model of those alternative, competitive sources of information. So that that’s true.
(01:27:58) But the point you make, is an important point. That the journalists themselves, who probably didn’t know about the TNI agreement, certainly I’m sure they didn’t, they believe that they’re doing the right thing by suppressing information that may challenge government proclamations on COVID. But I mean, there’s a danger to that. And the danger is that, once you appoint yourself an arbiter of what’s true and what’s not true, then there’s really no end to the power that you have now assumed for yourself, because now your job is no longer to inform the public. Your job now is to manipulate the public. And if you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule, rather than the opponent of it. And it becomes the inverse of journalism and a democracy.
2024 elections
Lex Fridman (01:29:05) You’re running for president as a Democrat, what to you are the strongest values that represent the left-wing politics of this country?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:29:18) I would say protection of the environment, and the commons, the air, the water, wildlife, fisheries, public lands, those assets, they cannot be reduced to private property ownership, the landscapes, our purple mountain majesty, the protection of the most vulnerable people in our society, people which would include children and minorities, the restoration of the middle class, and protection of labor, dignity, and decent pay for labor, bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to-
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:30:03) … bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to choose or an individual’s right to endure unwanted medical procedures. Peace. The Democrats have always been anti-war. The refusal to use fear is a governing tool. FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” because he recognized that tyrants and dictators could use fear to disable critical thinking and overwhelm the desire for personal liberty. The freedom of government from untoward influenced by corrupt corporate power. The end of this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is now I think, dominating our democracy. It’s what Eisenhower warned about when he warned against the emergence of the military industrial complex.
(01:31:07) And then I prefer to talk about the positive vision of what we should be doing in our country and globally, which is I see that the corporations are commoditizing us are poisoning our children, are strip mining the wealth from our middle class and treating America as if it were business in liquidation, converting assets to cash as quickly as possible and creating or exacerbating this huge disparity in wealth in our country, which is eliminating the middle class and creating a Latin American style futile model. There’s these huge aggregations of wealth above and widespread poverty below, and that’s a configuration that is too unstable to support democracy sustainably. And we’re supposed to be modeling democracy, but we’re losing it.
(01:32:11) And I think we have ought to have a foreign policy that restores our moral authority around the world. Restores America as the embodiment of moral authority, which it was when my uncle was president. And as a purveyor of peace rather than a war-like nation. My uncle said he didn’t want people in Africa and Latin America and Asia when they think of America to picture a man with a gun and a bayonet. He wanted them to think of a Peace Corps volunteer, and he refused to send combat soldiers abroad. He never sent a single soldier to his death abroad and into combat. He sent 16,000. He resisted in Berlin in ’62. He resisted in Laos in ’61. He resisted in Vietnam. Vietnam, they wanted him to put 250,000 troops. He only put 16,000 advisors, which was fewer troops.
(01:33:22) And he sent to get James Meredith into the universe to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. One black man, he sent 16,000. And month before he died, he ordered them all home. I think it was October 2nd, 1963, he heard that a Green Beret had died. And he asked his aid for a list of combat fatalities. And the aid came back and there was 75 men had died in Vietnam at that point. And he said, “That’s too many. We’re going to have no more.” And he signed a national security order, 263, and ordered all of those men, all Americans, home from Vietnam by 1965 with the first thousand coming home by December ’63.
(01:34:13) And then in November he, of course, just before that evacuation began, he was killed. And a week later, president Johnson remanded that order. And then a year after that, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, we sent 250,000, which is what they wanted my uncle to do, which he refused. And it became an American war. And then Nixon topped it off at 560,000. 56,000 Americans never came home, including my cousin George Skakel, who died at the Tet Offensive. And we killed a million Vietnamese and we got nothing for it.
Lex Fridman (01:34:51) So America should be the symbol of peace?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:34:57) My uncle really focused on putting America on the side of the poor, instead of our tradition of fortifying oligarchies that were anti-communism. That was our major criteria. If you said you were against communists, and of course the people were with the rich people, our aid was going to the rich people in those countries and they were going to the military juntas. Our weapons were going to the juntas to fight against the poor. And my uncle said, “No, America should be on the side of the porn.” And so he launched the Alliance for Progress and USAID, which were intended to bring aid to the poorest people and those, and build middle classes, and take ourselves away.
(01:35:42) In fact, his two favorite trips while he was president. His most favorite trip was to Ireland, this incredible, emotional homecoming for all of the people of Ireland. But his second favorite trip was when he went to Colombia, he went to Latin America, but Colombia was his favorite country. And I think there were 2 million people came into Bogota to see him, this vast crowd. And they were just delirious cheering for him. And the president of Columbia, Lleras Camargo, said to him, “Do you know why they love you?”
(01:36:22) And my uncle said, “Why?”
(01:36:24) And he said, “Because they think you’ve put America on the side of the poor against the oligarchs.” And my uncle, after he died, today, there are more avenues and boulevards and hospitals and schools and statues and parks commemorating John Kennedy in Africa and Latin America than any other president in the United States, and probably more than all the other presidents combined. And it’s because he put America on the side of the poor. And that’s what we ought to be doing.
(01:37:01) We ought to be projecting economic power abroad. The Chinese have essentially stolen his playbook and we’ve spent $8 trillion on the Iraq war and its aftermath. The wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And what do we get for that? We got nothing for that money. $8 trillion. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. Iraq today is much worse off than it was when Saddam was there. It’s an incoherent, violent war between Shia and Sunni death squads. We pushed Iraq into the embrace of Iran, which now become essentially a proxy for Iran, which is exactly the outcome that we were trying to prevent for the past 20 or 30 years.
(01:37:53) We created ISIS, we sent 2 million refugees into Europe, destabilizing all of the nations in Europe for generations. And we’re now seeing these riots in France, and that’s a direct result from the Syrian war that we created and our creation of ISIS. Brexit is another result of that. So for $8 trillion, we wrecked the world. And during that same period that we spent $8.1 trillion bombing bridges, ports, schools, hospitals, the Chinese spent 8.1 trillion building schools, ports, hospitals, bridges, and universities.
(01:38:42) And now the Chinese are out-competing us everywhere in the world. Everybody wants to deal with the Chinese because they come in, they build nice things for you, and there’s no strings attached and they’re pleasant to deal with. And as a result of that, Brazil is switching the Chinese currency. Argentina is switching. Saudi Arabia, our greatest partner that we put trillions of dollars into protecting our oil pipelines there. And now they’re saying, “We don’t care what the United States think.” That’s what Mohammed bin Salman said.
(01:39:24) He dropped oil production in Saudi Arabia in the middle of a US inflation spiral. They’ve never done that to us before, to aggravate the inflation spiral. And then they signed a deal, a unilateral peace deal with Iran, which has been the enemy that we’ve been telling them to be a bulwark against for 20 years. And two weeks after that, he said, “We don’t care what the United States thinks anymore.” So that’s what we got for spending all those trillions of dollars there. We got short term friends. And we have not made ourselves safer. We’ve put Americans in more jeopardy all over the world. You have to wait in lines to get through the airport. The security state is now causing us $1.3 trillion, and America is unsafer and poorer than it’s ever been. So we should be doing what President Kennedy said we ought to do, and the policy that China has now adopted.
Jordan Peterson
Lex Fridman (01:40:37) So that’s a really eloquent and clear and powerful description of the way you see US should be doing geopolitics and the way you see US should be taking care of the poor in this country. Let me ask you a question from Jordan Peterson that he asked when I told him that I’m speaking with you. “Given everything you’ve said, when does the left go too far?” I suppose he’s referring to cultural issues, identity politics.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:41:10) Well, Jordan trying to get me to badmouth the left the whole time I was in, I really enjoyed my talk with him, but he seemed to have that agenda where he wanted me to say bad things about the left and that’s not what my campaign is about. I want to do the opposite. I’m not going to badmouth the left. I was on shows this week with David Remnick from the New Yorker, and he tried to get me to badmouth Donald Trump and Alex Jones and a lot of other people, and baiting me to do it. And of course there’s a lot of bad things I could say about all those people, but I’m trying to find values that hold us together and we can share in common, rather than to focus constantly on these disputes and these issues that drive us apart.
(01:42:07) So me sitting here badmouthing the left or badmouthing the right is not going to advance the ball. I really want to figure out ways that what do these groups hold in common that we can all have a shared vision of what we want this country to look like.
Anthony Fauci
Lex Fridman (01:42:25) Well, that’s music to my ears. But in that spirit, let me ask you a difficult question then. You wrote a book harshly criticizing Anthony Fauci. Let me ask you to steelman the case for the people who support him. What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:42:48) I don’t want to sit here and speak unfairly by saying the guy didn’t do anything, but I can’t think of anything. If you tell me something that you think he did, maybe there was a drug that got licensed while he was at NIH that benefited people, that’s certainly possible. He was there for 50 years. And in terms of his principle programs of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits.
Lex Fridman (01:43:29) Do you think he believes he’s doing good for the world?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:43:31) I don’t know what he believes. In fact, in that book, which is I think 250,000 words, I never try to look inside of his head. I deal with facts. I deal with science and every factual assertion in that book is cited in source to government databases or peer reviewed publications. And I try not to speculate about things that I don’t know about or I can’t prove. And I cannot tell you what his motivations were. He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity and very deceptive. But we all have this capacity for self-deception. As I said at the beginning of this podcast, we judge ourselves on our intentions rather than our actions. And we all have an almost infinite capacity to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is right. And not everybody lives an examined life. And it is examining their motivations and the way that the world might experience their professions of goodness.
Lex Fridman (01:44:45) Let me ask about the difficulty of the job he had. Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of job well or is it also a fundamental flaw of the job, of being the central centralized figure that’s supposed to have a scientific policy?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr (01:44:58) No. No. I think he was a genuinely bad human being. And that there were many, many good people in that department over the years. Bernice Eddy is a really good example. John Anthony Morris. Many people whose careers he destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of NIH were run out of that agency. But people listening to this, probably will, in hearing me say that, will think that I’m bitter or that I’m doctrinaire about him, but you should really go and read my book. And it’s hard to summarize. I try to be really methodical, to not call names, to just say what happened.