Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Well, I had no interest in being a vice president. If you're a vice president, it's a, you know, I grew up in politics and vice president is the worst job in Washington. You have no budget. You have no staff except what, your budget actually all comes through the White House. If you do something that offends the president, he can literally, you know, he can take away your plane.

He can take away your staff. And the only thing you really have is the Naval Observatory, which is the official residence of the vice president. And he can essentially put you under house arrest. And, you know, I have very strong views on issues. And I, you know, I felt like if I took that job, I'd be on house arrest probably on day three. So, you know, I was never interested in that.

Sorry, Bobby, keep going.

Yeah, it was a very hard-wrenched decision. But, you know, my whole kind of journey was over the past 17 months was just kind of a series of very, very difficult transitions, you know, away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was... My family is one of the central pillars of the Democratic Party.

My family has been in the Democratic Party since 1848, since my great-grandparents came over. My great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. His contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was a state senator and political boss in Massachusetts. My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was FDR's treasurer. He was the first head of the SEC.

He was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, deeply, deeply immersed in Democratic Party politics. All of my uncles, Joe Kennedy, who was a delegate to the 1940 convention, who spoke there, a featured speaker, and then was killed in World War II. My uncle John Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.

My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, who was one of the longest, I think the second or third longest serving member of the United States Senate, his name on more bills than any other senator in United States history. And then, of course, my father, who was attorney general and A sort of walk away from that party was, you know, I guess it was very, very difficult for me.

And I was actually the last person in my campaign to understand the necessity of that. The Democratic Party was not going to allow me to compete fairly. They had rigged the system against us in ways that were really quite extraordinary. They had just walked away from democracy. They were canceling primaries. They had

They had chosen their candidate and it was going to be President Biden and I was really a nuisance to them. And so my voice was not allowed out there. And so that was difficult. And then leaving, you know, I declared independence in October. And joining Trump, President Trump, I burned a lot of bridges. I burned my boats, let me put it that way.

Well, you know, I do want to say that I feel like I didn't really leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me and left the ruins of the infrastructure that I think my uncle and father had, that had made them Democrats. If you went down a list of all of the priorities that Robert Kennedy, that John Kennedy had, I would check every box. They were anti-war, they were anti-censorship.

They were against the corporate control of our country. This corrupt merger of state and corporate power that now has emerged as a dominant governing model in our country. The Democratic Party has changed demographically. When I grew up in a Democratic Party that was the party of the working class in our country, that was a party of Small businesses, that was the party of the poor.

In the last election, President Biden got roughly half of the country voting for him, but that half controlled 70% of GDP. And President Trump got about half the country voting for him, and that half represents about 30% of GDP. So we've had this inversion where the Democratic Party has become the party of wealth, of elites, and I would say very insular elites.

And the Republican Party is now the party of the poor, the working class. And it's been, you know, for me to watch that, I've been on the front lines. of watching it. And, you know, the values that held the Democratic Party together are no longer there. It's held together by a sense of tribalism and a great, great sense of what I would say orchestrated fear of Donald Trump.

It's the only value that really dominates any discussion If I talk about censorship to a Democrat, they'll say, yes, but Donald Trump is going to become a dictator. If you talk about children's health, they'll say, never mind that. Donald Trump is the only thing we can worry about. If you talk about the history of the Democratic Party's opposition to war, they'll say, forget all that.

The only thing we can focus on is Donald Trump. That's a very, very dismaying and, I would say, dangerous form of orchestrated tribalism. And one of the other features of the Democratic Party is this need to control, this mistrust of the plebiscite, mistrust of the demos. You know, demos is a Greek word for people, and the Democratic Party doesn't trust the people.

That's why they have to get rid of elections. That's why they had to get me off the ballot. Oh, my God. I did something everybody said, all the pundits said could never be done. So I got on the ballot in every state. I got a million people that signed their signatures petitioning me on the ballot. And the Democratic Party's strategy, rather than to use the $3 billion it had,

amplify a message and inspire people and talk about a vision and the virtues of its candidates. Instead, use that money to try to get me off the ballot, to get Cornell OS, to get Jill Stein, to use the courts, to use the enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI. to try to rig the election.

And it ultimately comes down to this mistrust of the people, which we're seeing now all over. We're seeing the kind of two big forces emerge. One is a populist force and the other is a force of control, of ironclad control. We saw Europe has already fallen. You saw the arrest of Pavel Durov last week, which was extraordinary.

The arrest of the guy who founded Telegram because he was hosting political dissent. And, you know, the European Commission is already openly censoring content. So they did not need to arrest him. They can take off whatever they want. They went through the trouble of actually, and probably with U.S. encouragement, you know, catching him when he happened to land for a refueling stop in France.

France has this extraordinary tradition of free speech that, you know, began with the French Revolution. And then again in the 1880s, they passed all these incredible laws. their commitment to free speech is as robust as that in the United States. And yet now, you know, and two weeks before that, you had this crazy European commissioner, Thierry Breton,