RFK Jr.’s Exit

Why did Kamala Harris refuse Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s request for a meeting? He was hoping for a role in her administration. Why didn't she grant him the courtesy of a meeting? Her disrespect was felt by everyone who had taken him seriously – especially the volunteers who collected signatures to get him on the ballot(s). What was she thinking?

Apparently Kamala left the thinking about RFK Jr. up to the Democratic Party masterminds. As explained in the NY Times August 14, “Public and private polling has found that as he spent the summer attacking President Biden, he began to draw more support from voters otherwise predisposed to back former President Donald J. Trump. Now Ms. Harris does better in some surveys when Mr. Kennedy is included than when she is tested in a head-to-head matchup with Mr. Trump.” (Emphasis added by your correspondent.)

And so the Democrat masterminds, in thrall to Big Pharma citing their polling data and focus groups and consultants in the great tradition of Dick Morris and Mark Penn and John Podesta and James Carville, decided that RFK Jr. should be marginalized as a nut. Meeting with him would imply that Kamala took him seriously. So the answer had to be nix.

Her opponent met with him and offered him a job. So on August 23 RFK Jr. announced he was withdrawing from the race in 10 battleground states, and supporting Donald Trump for President.

I caught his withdrawal speech on Fox and was impressed by most of what I heard. (What a shame that his voice is shot.) D. came by and I started to paraphrase Bobby's line on Ukraine. D., a progressive, interrupted with a comment about “the worm in his brain.” On the TV set in the kitchen, pundettes were giggling about “the worm in his brain.” They were designating RFK Jr. as “weird” on behalf of the DNC.

Dismissing people as weird is almost like putting them in a basket of deplorables. And y'all know how well that worked for y'all in 2016.

I myself happen to be a weirdo (though I try to pass for straight). And I wouldn't be surprised if other voters identify as weird in some respect.

This year's presidential campaign has weird overtones of 1968, and not just because Bobby's kid is involved. Norman Solomon has insightfully compared Kamala Harris's support for the Zionist war on Gaza with VP Hubert Humphrey's support for the US intervention in Vietnam. Not distancing himself from Lyndon Johnson cost Humphrey the Presidency.

There are also strong overtones of 2000, when the Democrat masterminds excluded Ralph Nader from the one presidential debate. Nader would have looked like the brainiac on the left, Bush the doofus on the right, and Gore would have been the sensible man in the center. Without Nader, Gore was the snob who used big words and sighed disdainfully, while Bush was the guy you supposedly could have a beer with (although he supposedly gave up booze when he supposedly found Jesus).

Also in Y2K, Assistant District Attorney Kamala Harris was gratuitously dissed by San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan, and resigned. Hallinan would have benefited from their ongoing connection (even if Kamala's Ambition led to conflict two years hence). Heeding the advice of a political mastermind instead of his own heart, he drove her out.

Flash forward to Early August, 2024. If Kamala had asked my advice, as once upon a time she did, I would have said By all means meet with RFK, Jr. and figure out an appropriate position for him.

Add weird quotes:

RFK Jr. began his withdrawal speech by over-glorifying his father, his uncles, and the Democratic Party of yore. He had quit the party, he said, because “It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big Ag, and big money.” How weird is that?

“Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state imposes an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million signatures: something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved. And then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC…

“More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action… Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that. And so I want to thank all of those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat… I will not allow your efforts to go to waste.

“Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of the signatures needed to get on the ballot the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work, and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions….

“Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me. During his ten month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the sixteen months since I declared ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN, combined, gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks instead, they ran a continuous deluge, hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage…

“The Democratic Party censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power… Just 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal, and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA, which is a censorship agency, the center of the censorship industrial complex, DHS, the IRS and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.

Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook, YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards…

“Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily. And these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump. The causes were free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children.

“I’ve already described some of my personal experiences and struggles with the government censorship industrial complex. I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial-complex has provided us with that familiar comic book justification like they do on every war. And this one is a noble effort to stop a super villain, Vladimir Putin, invading the Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe.

“In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options, but the war is Russia’s predictable response. The reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia is a hostile act. The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear missile systems in Romania and Poland.

“This is a hostile, hostile act, and the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle this war peacefully. The Ukraine war began in 2014, when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-Western government. They launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement, that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations. And then in April of 2022, we wanted the war. In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelenskyy to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed. The Russians were withdrawing troops from Kiev, Donbas, and Luhansk. And that peace agreement would have brought peace to the region and would have allowed Donbas and Luhansk to remain part of Ukraine.

“President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army and to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world. These objectives, of course, had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.

“Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it's a victim of the West… both Russia and the West. Since then, we have forced Zelenskyy to tear up the agreement, we’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning, have died. And Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.

“War has been a disaster for our country, as well. We have squandered nearly $200 billion already. And these are badly needed dollars in our communities suffering all over our country. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which form the bulwark of U.S. national security. A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much, much stronger deterrent to Russia than a Germany that is de-industrialized and turned into just an extension of a U.S. military base.

“We’ve pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962. And the neocons in the White House don’t seem to care at all. Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency.

“This is a first class calamity for our country. Judging by the bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other neocon military adventures. President Trump says he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes President. This alone would justify my support for his campaign.

“Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and our constitutional freedoms, clean corporate influence out of our government, or defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration. I’m speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

“Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. I was in Las Vegas. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, for soil regeneration, and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, the NIH, the HHS, and the USDA that has caused the epidemic.

“Calley had been working on and off for my campaign and advising me on subjects since the beginning. Those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years. I was delighted when Calley told me that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me that President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects and to explore avenues of cooperation. Then he asked if I would take a call from the president.

“President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day. A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and close advisers in Florida. And in a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. And in those meetings he suggested that we join forces as a unity party.

“We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely, if need be, on issues over which we differ, and also work together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences.

“But we are aligned with each other on other key issues, like the ending of forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections. Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.

“Suspending my candidacy is a heart-rending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war, for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside, and for finally protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children, above all things…

“Today we spend more on healthcare than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe. And yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation in the world. We’re about 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have. During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the COVID deaths even though we only have 4.2% of the world’s population.

“The CDC says that’s because we are the sickest people on earth. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died from COVID had on average 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction. And no other country has anything like this. Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. So we’ve gone from 1% to 66%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There were case reports about them. Obesity was almost unknown. In Japan the childhood obesity rate is 3% compared to our 50%.

“Here, half of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, when I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire 40 or 50-year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks into his office is diabetic or prediabetic, and the mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is now classified as diabetes. And it’s costing this country more than our military budget every year. There’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism… In the year 2000, the autism rate was 1 in 15. Now autism rates in kids are 1 in 36, according to the CDC. Nobody’s talking about how 1 in every 22 kids in California has autism, and this is a crisis that 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military.

“What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day? There’s nobody else in the world who is experiencing it. This is only happening in America. And by the way, there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes likes to say to say there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence. In my generation, 70-year old men, the odds are about 1 in 10,000. And in my kids generation, 1 in 34… I repeat, in California, 1 in 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children? These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them?

“About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That’s like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%, and one in four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children are on SSRIs.

“So what’s causing this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First and the the worst is ultra processed foods. 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed, which means industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains and seed oils. Laboratory scientists, many of whom formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and ‘80s. They deployed thousands of scientists to invent new chemicals to make the food more addictive. And these ingredients didn’t exist a hundred years ago, humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe. But they are ubiquitous in American processed foods.

“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. These assaults on our children’s cells and hormones are unrelenting. And to name just one problem: many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth. And no, this isn’t because of better nutrition. This is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen-driven and now strikes 1 in 8 women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults.

“Considering the grievous human cause of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy; but I’ll say it is crippling the nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it’s double the military budget, and it is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole – costs at least $4 trillion, five times our military budget. And that’s a 20% drag on everything we do, and everything we aspire to. Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately.

“People worry about DEI or about bigotry of any kind. This dwarfs anything. We are poisoning the poor, we are systematically poisoning minorities across this country. Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food stamps, and 70 or 77% of school lunches are processed foods. There’s no vegetables. There’s nothing that you would want to eat. We are just poisoning the poor citizens. And that’s why they have the highest chronic disease burden of any demographic in our country and the highest in the world. The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feed stock of processed food industry. These policies are destroying small farms and they’re destroying our soils.

“We give about eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco than we do to fruits and vegetables. It makes no sense if we want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this and we can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things: first we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change the incentives in our health care system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again. 80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. Virtually everybody who Joe Biden just appointed to a new panel at the NIH to decide food recommendations, they’re all people who are from the industry or all people who are from the processed-food companies… The recommendations on the food pyramid, what goes to our school lunch programs, which goes to the the food stamp programs, they’re all corrupted and conflicted individuals.

“These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, CDC, all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children are sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medication for their entire life.

“Imagine what happens when Medicare starts paying, for example, which costs $1,500 a month. That’s being recommended for children as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. 74% of Americans are obese. The cost if all of them are put on prescriptions is $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe – it’s a Danish company. The Danish government does not recommend it. Instead, it recommends a change in diet to treat obesity, that and exercise. In our country the recommendation now is for children as young as age six. Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of the Ozempic it’s going to sell to America.

“And we have the food lobby. We have a bill in front of Congress today that is backed by the White House, backed by Vice President Harris and President Biden, to allow this to happen. This $3 trillion cost is going to bankrupt our country. For a fraction of that amount we could buy organic food for every American family, three meals a day and eliminate diabetes altogether.

“We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system. And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big AG, which are among the DNC major donors.

“Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and union power, and our children will be the ones who suffer most. I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose or wanted to. It was essentially thrust upon me; it was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement. I was an essential leader at the time. But it was widely ignored by all the institutions including the NGOs who should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphan issue, and I have a weakness for orphans. I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I had 11 siblings and 7 kids myself. I was conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends. I watched sick kids, these damaged kids in that generation, almost all of them were damaged and nobody in power seemed to care or to even notice…

“If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years we will watch the chronic-disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic and happier. I won’t fail in doing this…

“I’m 70 years old. I may have a decade to be effective. I can’t imagine that a President Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these dire problems… President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, his closest friends, all support this objective.”

So they say. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has chosen to believe them.