RFK Jr. Addresses Libertarian National Convention
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (00:08):
Can you hear me? I am very, very happy to be here today. I’m going to speak about the United States Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. A lot of people don’t realize that the Articles of the Constitution don’t grant citizens any rights or freedoms whatsoever. That was a real problem to some of the Founding Fathers, particularly to George Mason. Mason wrote a pamphlet during the Constitutional Convention that opposed the new government. And that pamphlet was so convincing that the other Framers of the Constitution felt that it was too much of a hazard and that the Constitution was in danger at that point of not being ratified. And that’s when James Madison came to the rescue by drafting the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution.
(01:26)
Originally, Madison felt that the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because it was obvious to him that the government couldn’t exert powers that the Constitution had not assigned to it. But everybody in this hall knows governments don’t like to limit themselves. Instead, they’re constantly moving to exert and appropriate new powers. But the Patriots in 1791 vividly remembered the British tyranny and they knew that every power that a government takes, it will never voluntarily relinquish. And every power a government takes, it will ultimately abuse to the ultimate extent possible. And that’s why the delegates to the Constitutional Convention balked at a Constitution that only enumerated government powers but nowhere limit them. And so thanks to George Mason, the Bill of Rights was enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. The main Articles of the Constitution enumerate what the government can do. The Bill of Rights is the opposite; it enumerates what the government cannot do.
It’s the Bill of Rights that earned America the reputation as the Land of Liberty. The problem is the Bill of Rights is only a document. It doesn’t have any magical powers to force government officials to respect it. And I’m sorry to say that again and again throughout our history, our leaders have failed to respect it. Again and again they have cited some pretext to suspend and violate our constitutional rights. There’s always a reason why right now the rights are an inconvenience that we can’t afford. It was the Red Scare in the 1920s. It was Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. It was civil rights protests and the Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s. It was the War on Drug in the 1970s. It was the War on Terror after 2001, and most recently it was the COVID pandemic. Maybe a brain worm ate that part of my memory, but I don’t recall any part of the United States Constitution where there’s an exemption for pandemics. And in fact, there’s not one of the Amendments of the Bill of Rights as a preamble that says, except when officials choose to declare a public health emergency. They all say very simply, the government shall not infringe on these rights no matter what. If the government can take them away at will, then they’re not rights at all. They’re really just privileges that are granted and revoked by an authority. Is that the kind of country that you want to live in?
Speaker 1 (04:58):
No.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (05:01):
And every time they suspend rights and then pretend to give them back again, they establish a dangerous precedent. The rights they give back are never quite as strong as the ones that they took away.
Obviously, it’s not the piece of paper called the Bill of Rights that protects our freedoms. We have to actually believe in it. Our leaders have to believe it with sufficient loyalty to counterbalance the temptations of power. And even more importantly, our citizens have to believe that their rights so loyally that they stand up for them even when it means taking a personal risk. After all, the Constitution isn’t just a legal document; it’s also an inspirational document. And that’s why if you treasure your freedom, you better elect leaders who are inspired by it and who will wield it to inspire others. Leaders who believe in freedoms and hold the Bill of Rights in reverence.
(06:19)
I’m sorry to say that neither President Trump nor President Biden pass this critical examination. Neither of them upheld the Constitution when it really counted. Let’s start with President Trump. I think he had the right instinct when he came into office. He was initially very reluctant to impose lockdowns, but then he got rolled by his bureaucrats. He caved in and many of our most fundamental rights disappeared practically overnight. It all started with the social media and the mainstream media, apparently without any government prompting, began censoring any speech that departed from the government’s official orthodoxies. It’s critical to the survival of any democracy that the free press maintains a posture of fear skepticism toward government pronouncements and towards large agglomerations of government and political and economic and corporate power.
But suddenly, America’s free press was no longer speaking truth to power. Instead, it made itself a vessel for government propaganda. It began suppressing the voices of dissents and silencing and gaslighting the powerless. Oh, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams said that they had put the right of free expression into the First Amendment because all of the other rights depended on it. A government that has the capacity to silence its critics has license for any kind of atrocity.
(08:17)
I grew up reading Aldous Huxley and Robert Heinlein and Arthur Koestler and Franz Kafka and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and George Orwell. And the consistent theme in all of those works was the presumption that censorship of speech was always wrong, that it was always the first step down on the slippery slope toward tyranny and totalitarianism. There is no time when we look back at history and we say that the people who were censoring speech were the good guys. They’re always the bad guys.
The Framers didn’t write the First Amendment to protect convenient or desirable speech. They wrote it to protect the kind of speech that nobody wants to hear. They wrote it to protect incendiary speech. They wrote it to protect insults. They wrote it to protect misinformation and disinformation and malinformation and even lies. All of those are protected by the First Amendment. There were no exceptions. The Constitution doesn’t have exemptions for wars or resurrections or financial crises or pandemics. The Framers wrote the Constitution for hard times.
(10:01)
During the American Civil War the Confederate states were sending up agents provocateurs to the northern cities like Boston and New York and inciting draft riots and they were destroying northern morale at a critical time during the war. This was a war that almost destroyed our nation. For three years, that war, nobody had any idea whether the United States of America would exist after the war was over. There was even money on it. There were 659,000 Americans who died during that war. It’s the equivalent of 7.2 million today.
So Lincoln and the northern military knew who these agent provocateurs were as soon as they entered the cities, and they began arresting them before they could give these speeches. And the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, said, you can’t do that. That is an assault against free speech and habeas corpus. And he said, “Even if the life of the nation is at stake, even if hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, you cannot suppress our Constitution. It is above everything.” So they wrote it for hard times. They didn’t write it for easy times. The United States Bill of Rights was written for the most difficult times, and no matter how difficult they are, they are indomitable. We’re not allowed to suppress them.
(11:39)
But the moment the White House officials satisfied themselves that the American people would accept censorship by the end of February of 2020, they took hammer and tongs to the rest of the Constitution. President Trump allowed his health regulators to mandate a science-free social distancing, which undermined our First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly. We could no longer peacefully gather. So that was the first two legs of the First Amendment, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. And they went after the third leg of the First Amendment, which is freedom of worship. They closed every church in this country for a year with no due process, with no scientific citation, with no public hearings, no notice and comment rulemaking, no environmental impact statements. All of the process of democracy that I’ve been suing companies and governments for 40 years because they forgot to do one of those things, and all of our constitutional rights were plowed under.
(13:00)
They closed all the churches, but they kept open the Walmarts and the liquor stores. And the Fifth Amendment says that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property unless convicted of a crime. Yet President Trump shut down 3.3 million business. President Trump said that he was going to run America like a business, and he came in and he gave the keys to all of our businesses, to a 50-year bureaucrat who’d never been elected to anything and had no accountability. He closed down 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment. With the lockdowns, the mass mandates, the travel restrictions, President Trump presided over the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known. He didn’t stand up for the Constitution when it really mattered.
Next, President Trump’s beloved Operation Warp Speed shut down jury trials for any corporation that was involved in COVID countermeasures. Here’s what the Seventh Amendment says: No American shall be denied the right of a trial before a jury of his peers in cases or controversies exceeding $25. There is no pandemic exception.
And by the way, the framers knew all about pandemics. There were two pandemics during the Revolutionary War, one that decimated the armies of Virginia, the other that destroyed for a long time the army of New England at the very time when Benedict Arnold’s army had conquered Montreal. So they had gone into the inner city, taken away from the British, and they owned it, but they had to withdraw because they did not have the troop strength to defend it because of the smallpox epidemic. Otherwise, Canada today would be part of the United States. And all of the framers knew that. And between the end of the war, the Revolutionary War in 1780, ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, there were pandemics in every city in our country, Boston Philadelphia, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, all the major cities had cholera epidemics, yellow fever epidemics, malaria epidemics that killed tens of thousands of people, almost all of the framers and had family members or friends who died in those pandemics. Yet they did not put a pandemic exemption in the United States Constitution.
And the waiver of the Seventh Amendment for corporations that were involved in countermeasures meant that no matter how reckless the corporation behaved, no matter how negligent it was, no matter how toxic or unnecessary the ingredients, no matter how shoddy the testing, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue that company. They had a ticket to make anything they want without any kind of accountability.
(16:44)
The Trump White House also went after the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against warrantless searches and seizures with this intrusive track and trace surveillance systems that obliterated our rights to privacy in this country. The only amendment that did not come under attack during the COVID pandemic was the Second Amendment, and many Americans believe that the reason for that is because we have a Second Amendment.
Incidentally, President Trump also assaulted the First Amendment, failed to defend press freedom when he continued President Obama’s persecution and prosecution of Julian Assange. Assange should be celebrated as a hero for doing exactly what journalists are supposed to do, which is to expose government corruption. We shouldn’t be putting them in prison; we should have a monument to him here in Washington, DC.
The same is true for Edward Snowden who exposed illegal spying by the NSA. Congress went ahead and passed legislation because of the findings of Edward Snowden. If he hadn’t told us, we wouldn’t know about it. He’s a hero, not a criminal. So I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to do what President Trump should have done. On my first day in office, I’m going to pardon Edward Snowden and I’m going to drop charges, all charges against Julian Assange.
(19:51)
I’m curious to know how President Trump is going to defend his attacks on the Constitution when I meet him on the debating stage. I invited him to debate in front of you, in front of the members of this party, but he declined. At some point, I hope that he has the courage to stand up there so that we can all talk about these issues and to make sure that these assaults on our Constitution never, ever happen again. We need to have a civics lesson for the American people to make sure this is never repeated. When President Trump left office, the assault on the Constitution intensified. President Biden violated a freedom so fundamental that James Madison didn’t even think to put it in the Bill of Rights. He never imagined that the government could mandate medical procedures to unwilling Americans in violation of bodily autonomy. But that’s what happened during the pandemic, a program of coercion and information chaos and information control that prevented the public from making fully informed choices.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. He put the power of his office behind the assault of the one freedom upon which all their freedoms rely: the freedom of the press. We now know from the Twitter Files, from the discovery in the Murthy V. Biden case, and from my own case, which is now in front of the Supreme Court, Kennedy V. Biden that 37 hours after he took the oath of office, President Biden was colluding with the FBI to coerce the social media sites, Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram to open portals to allow the federal agencies to censor political speech of Americans. The FBI opened this portal to the CIA, to CISA, to NIH, to the IRS, to the CDC, to the DHS, and about a half dozen other agencies in a obscene orgy of federal censorship that was unprecedented in the American experience.
(22:45)
It started with what they called medical misinformation, and it wasn’t even misinformation. There’s a dialogue between Facebook and the White House at that time in which Facebook is saying a lot of this information, including from me, the stuff that they were suppressing is actually factually accurate. And the White House, they coined a new name, a new word called malinformation, which is information that is factually accurate, but is nevertheless inconvenient to government authorities. And pretty soon an entire censorship industrial complex had grown up, which was billion dollars spent that involved the government agencies, the universities, NGOs and tech companies, and the stuff that they censored, they started with medical, so-called medical misinformation. They then widened that to all kinds of political issues, including censorship about criticism of the war in Ukraine and other government programs.
Going back to at least the FISA Act under President George W. Bush, Democratic and Republican administrations have taken turns assaulting our Constitutional rights and freedoms. You know that, that’s why you joined the Libertarian Party. Well, I stand with you in valuing personal liberty, and I promise you that when I’m President, I’m going to protect your right to speak freely. I’m going to protect your right to assemble peacefully. I will protect your freedom to worship. I will protect your right to keep and bear arms. I will protect your right to a trial before jury. I will protect your privacy against unreasonable searches and seizures. I will protect your private property and your right to operate a business. And that’s not all.
Two of the most overlooked amendments in the Bill of Rights are the ninth and 10th. And those amendments essentially say that just because we’ve listed all of those rights by name, it doesn’t mean that those are all the rights that you have. That any power, they say everything else, right, any power that is not explicitly given to the federal government remains with the individual or the states, and I will always protect those rights.
(25:54)
As I mentioned before, the Constitution is more than a legal document. It’s meant to inspire us. It’s a recitation of the most fundamental moral truths that govern human conduct. It reminds us of the central proposition and only under a system which maximizes the personal freedoms that God intended for us when He gave us free will and we achieve our potential for creativity, for prosperity, for the ultimate elevation of the human spirit. The Constitution embodies the very soul of our nation as first invoked in the Declaration of Independence. Let me read you now its most famous passage, which comes in the second paragraph. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I get goose bumps when I read those words. Those words change the world forever.
The Bill of Rights endowed them with a legal existence and a legal reality, but we need to take them further. Some people argue that it’s fine for social media platforms to censor speech. After all, they’re private companies, and they can do as they please. Well, that argument falls apart when the government is bribing, threatening and cajoling them to censor speech and to deplatform dissidents. It also falls apart if they have monopolistic control over the public space. But aside from that, yeah, they do have a legal right to censor. It is legally acceptable, but is it morally acceptable? Is it socially acceptable?
Crowd (28:08):
No.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (28:08):
It shouldn’t be in an authoritarian country like China or Japan, or sorry, Iran, censorship is socially acceptable. People take it for granted. It’s in the air they breathe. In this country, to the extent that we still cherish the spirit of our founders, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, we do not take it for granted. Instead, we greet censorship with outrage. We greet it with indignation. We greet it with contempt. We fiercely reject it. If the day comes when we do not, our descent into tyranny is inevitable.
What disturbed me most during the pandemic was not what the government was trying to do and what it succeeded in doing, it was really how the public complied.
Crowd (29:09):[inaudible 00:29:13].
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (29:13):
But now, except for the people in this room.
Crowd (29:17):
[inaudible 00:29:22].
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (29:29):
I’m going tell you something that when I was researching my book on Dr. Fauci, I did a chapter on these old CIA programs at MKUltra, MKUltra, MKNaomi, MKDietrich. These were the MK stands for, “Mind control,” and they were a series of experiments that the CIA, they had other programs too, Operation Bluebird, Operation Artichoke, that were all designed to manipulate human behavior, individual behavior through the use of hypnosis, through psychiatric drugs, through sensory deprivation, through noise torture, through information, confusion, and the experiments in how to manipulate entire societies in order to impose control from above. They were doing all these weird experiments and creating Manchurian candidates, and it all came out in 1973, between ’73 and ’77 with the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
One of the famous experiments that I during in my book was able to connect to MKUltra was the Milgram experiment. The Milgram experiment was, as many of you know, it was an experiment that was part of this program. It was conducted by a young associate professor at Yale University who recruited about 70 people from every walk of life, Blacks, whites, teachers, students, business people, laborers, and he would put the subjects on a chair in one room and they had a dial on the table in front of him, and they were told that that dial was applying a shock, an electric shock to a subject who sat in the other room who was actually a confederate of Dr. Milgram. He was an actor, but he pretended to be tied to a chair. And when the electricity went up, he would scream. He would see what level it was and scream appropriately, and struggle, and plead and beg and cry.
And many of the subjects, when they were told to do it, Dr. Milgram would stand behind him with his white lab uniform on and all that, or the iconography of authority, of medical authority. He’d stand behind them and he’d say, “Turn it up, turn it down, turn it higher, turn it down, or turn it higher.” Many of the subjects were weeping. They were pleading with him, “Don’t make me turn it up more.” And when he told him to turn it up, they did so anyway, and 67% of the people, the subjects who he recruited, turned it up to 250 volts where it was marked potentially fatal. And what Milgram concluded is that most people, 67% of the people will allow people in authority to overwhelm and subvert their most closely held values. They all knew it was wrong, but they did it because they were told to do it. The good news is that 33% of those people stood up and walked out of the room, and I think that those were the Libertarians-
Crowd (32:57):
[inaudible 00:33:01].
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (33:00):
Those are the people in this room. Most Americans accepted the orthodoxy and we watched this happening with dismay. We watch families separated and fighting with each other. I know you all knew people whose relationships changed because of your skepticism and their feeling of safety when they were subsumed in that orthodoxy, and now things are changing. Tens of millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that they were lied to, the fact that they were manipulated, that they were gaslit, except for a narrow elite that’s still promoting it, mainly in the media. Americans have lost all trust in our public institutions. Today-
[inaudible 00:34:03] About two months ago, the CDC made an official recommendation for the ninth COVID booster. 90% of Americans are saying, “We’re not going to do it.” Do you want a government that is telling you you can’t go to work unless you submit to that? But that’s what they did to us two years ago. And now most Americans are realizing, are losing their faith in those institutions and with good reason, and I’m going to restore faith in those institutions. I’m not going to do it by telling people, “You ought to be censored. You ought to believe in it.” I’m going to do it by making them tell the truth, and giving us good science and changing the corrupt cultures that have put them under the control of corporations. The President of the United States is more than just a legal authority occupying the bully pulpit. He sets an example for the nation, for good or for ill. So I want to tell you the kind of example that I’m going to set for America. Yes, I’m going to uphold the Constitution, and protect every freedom and the Bill of Rights. I’ll also strive to represent the principle that animates those freedoms. And I believe this is the same principle that lies at the heart of the libertarian philosophy, it is the principle of respect. It is the respect for each individual as a full and sovereign being. Think about it; censorship for example, is just another form of disrespect. It says, “I’m going to decide which kind of information you should and shouldn’t hear. I’m going to protect you from dangerous thoughts.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (36:01):
I’m going to protect you from subversive information. It’s patronizing, right? All of our cherished rights embody respect for the individual. That’s why we uphold equality under the law. No one is to be locked up arbitrarily. No one is to be deprived… Happy to talk afterwards. No one is to be deprived of their property. No one is to be subjected to humiliating searches without reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. No one is to be prevented from worshiping God in the manner that they believe. Why is that? Because I respect your right to explore and define your own relationship with God. And no one is coerced into submitting to unwanted medical procedures. No one is required to participate against their will in scientific experiments. And each person is trusted with a responsibility to bear arms by default unless he violates that trust.
This is the spiritual principle. Prior, even to the Constitution, all men are created equal. It originally applied just to property owners, then to just white men, then to all men, and then to women. Today we understand that right to include every human being. My promise to you is that as president, I will uphold the principle of respect for each human being as an equal before God and an equal before the law. That’s why my campaign never paints our opponents as monsters. That’s why I never weaponize. I will never weaponize the justice system, the federal agencies like the IRS, the FBI, or the CIA, or the Secret Service against my political adversaries.
(38:15)
Everyone is equal under the law, period. No special favors for the big banks or the corporations. No more regulations tilted to destroy small businesses. No more extravagant subsidies to mature industries. No more corporate welfare. No more surveillance of private citizens. No more propaganda. No more secrecy and no more lies. My first day of office after pardoning Snowden and Assange, I’m going to issue.
I’m going to issue an executive order forbidding the National Security Agency or any of the intelligence agencies from propagandizing of the American people. I’m going to issue an executive order against any federal employee from collaborating with media or social media to censor Americans. And I’m going to issue an executive order that any federal official who lies to the American people in conjunction with his official duties will immediately be fired.
Let me add that respect for the sanctity of the sovereign individual knows no national boundaries. Murder is not okay anywhere in any form. That is why I will end the forever wars. I will end the regime change wars, the wars that have bankrupted our nation and ruined our reputation abroad. Finally, I want to say one thing about authority. I don’t know what libertarian philosophy says about it, but I believe in a healthy respect for authority. However, authority must be earned, not forced. We must not confuse respect for fear.
(40:31)
This has been the mistake of American foreign policy. I grew up in an era when people around the world were hungry for American leadership that they understood the difference between leadership and bullying. And that’s a lesson that our leadership, both Republicans and Democrats have now forgotten. Other nations may fear us today, but they no longer respect us. And why is that? Because we’ve waged a series of unjust wars, because we violated our own principles of freedom and democracy. We have forfeited our moral authority because we have supported dictators and corrupt regimes and subverted democracy around the globe.
And just as we have lost respect globally, we’ve also lost it at home. We have lost respect for ourselves. American children overwhelmingly say that they are not proud to be Americans. There was a poll that came out in 2013 in which Americans under the age of 35 were asked, “Are you proud of the United States of America?” 85% said yes. The same poll taken five months ago. 18% said yes. So somehow in the administration of the last two presidents, this young generation has completely lost faith in our country and they’ve lost hope for their own futures. Now is the time to restore that hope, that admiration, that pride and respect. The only way to do that is to return to the founding spirit of our country, to return to the spirit that animated the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. If we’re faithful to those, we will regain our pride as a nation. We’ll regain our prosperity. We’ll regain the respect of the world and we’ll regain our self-respect. We gain self-esteem by doing estimable things and that means complying with our own constitution above all.
(42:40)
In the summer of 2020, I traveled, this was at the height of the pandemic. I traveled to Berlin to speak to a group about 1.3 million people from all over Europe in a peaceful demonstration. And an NBC film crew came up to me during that convocation and they asked me why I wasn’t wearing a mask, which nobody was except for the NBC film crew. And they said it wasn’t I scared of dying of COVID. And I said to them, “There’s a lot worse things than dying.” And they said to me, “Like what?” And I said, “Like living like a slave. Like having my children grow up in an America where the Bill of Rights is just an empty piece of paper.”
In 1776, it was a generation of Americans that were willing to sacrifice their lives, their jobs, their property, their fortunes to give us this bill of rights. And upwards of 20,000 of them died to give us this gift, and we managed to keep it for two centuries. And then in eight short years during the administrations of two presidents, we gave it all away without putting up a fight. Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of every generation, but we don’t have to die to preserve our Bill of Rights, but we have to be willing to make sacrifices. And the sacrifices we’re being asked to make are very, very trivial compared to what they made in 1776.
(44:38)
We’re being asked to endure the scolding or the disapprobation of the public, the defamation of the press, the antipathy of our government. That’s not a big deal. We all need to be able to put our self-interest aside if we’re going to maintain these rights for future generations. And all of you who come here for the Libertarian party, you all disagree about many things. Many of you don’t disagree who don’t agree with me on a lot of stuff. We all agree on one thing, which is we have to fight with a Bill of Rights… Without the Bill of Rights, we have nothing in this country and we all need to be united because there are a lot of people out there that don’t understand what America is supposed to look like. And the people in this convocation do. Our public officials have forgotten that vision for America and it’s time that we remind them. We can only do that by electing leaders who understand the necessity for personal sacrifices to preserve the Bill of Rights. That’s the path to restoring our national greatness. That will be my promise to you as President of the United States. Thank you all very much and God bless you.