RFK Jr: Address to the Nation
UNIFY AMERICA!
For the first time, in many, many years, I have hope again, for my own future and for that of the entire world.
TRANSCRIPT (Emphases, my own)
16 months ago in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle; the party which I pledged my own allegiance to, long before I was old enough to vote.
I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six, in 1960 and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class.
The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the Party of Democracy.
As you know, I left that party in October, because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money.
When it abandoned democracy by canceling the Primary, to conceal the cognitive decline of the Sitting President, I left the Party, to run as an Independent.
The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible, even to get on the ballot as an Independent, because each state poses 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.
The naysayers told us that we were climbing a glass version of "Mount Impossible". The first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong!
We did it, because beneath the radar of Mainstream Media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than 100,000 volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation's decline. Many worked 10-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat.
They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep, month-after-month, energized by a shared vision of a nation, healed of its divisions. They set up tables at churches and farmers' markets. They canvassed door-to-door.
In Utah and in New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, to take off their gloves, and to sign legibly.
During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall athletic volunteer, who cheerfully told me that he had lost 25 pounds, collecting signatures in 117-degree heat.
To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave up part of their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those millions of 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!
Your accomplishments were regarded as impossible. You carried me up that Glass Mountain. You pulled off a miracle! You achieved what all the pundits said could "never be done". You have my deepest gratitude, and I'm never going to forget that, not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made, because you love our country.
You showed everyone that democracy is still possible, here. It continues to survive in the breath and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive, beneath a canvas of neglect and of official and institutional corruption.
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Today, I'm here to tell you that I will not allow your efforts to go to waste. I'm here to tell you that I will leverage your tremendous accomplishments to serve the ideals that we share; the ideals of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of health – all the ideals that motivated my campaign. I'm here, today to describe the path forward, that you have opened with your commitment and with your hard labors.
Now, in an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election, in a system that my father and my uncles thrived in; a system with open debates, with fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with fair primaries, and with a truly independent media – untainted by government propaganda and censorship – and a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards; everything would be different.
After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates, both in favorability and also in head-to-head match-ups.
But I'm sorry to say, that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, and for our government – and most sadly of all, for me, for the Democratic Party.
In the name of "saving democracy", the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence in its candidate; that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.
Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of 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. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail.
It ran a sham Primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor – also, without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters, that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party Presidential Nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days.
This is profoundly undemocratic! How are people to choose, when they don't know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world? My father and my uncle were always conscious of America's image abroad, because of our nation's role, as the template for democracy, a role model for democratic processes, and the "Leader of the Free World".
Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a "surge of popularity" for Vice President Harris, based upon – well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced Chicago circus.
There, in Chicago, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times, just on the first day. Oh, who needs a policy, when you have Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.
I do interviews every day. Many of you have interviewed me. Anybody who asks, gets to interview me. Some days I do as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated and won an election, also does interviews, daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?
We know the answers: They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.
What most alarms me is how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and the weaponization of the federal agencies. When a US President colludes with – or outright coerces – media companies to censor political speech, it's an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that's the very right upon which all of our other Constitutional Rights rest.
President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin's 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here, in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot and our television networks expose themselves as Democratic Party organs.
Over the course of more than a year in a campaign, where my poll numbers reached, at times in the high 20s, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintain a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me.
During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews from me.
Those networks, instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
Representatives of those networks are in this room right now, and I'll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility; the duty of a Free Press to safeguard democracy and to challenge, always the party in power.
Instead of maintaining that posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, your institutions have made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You didn't, alone cause the devolution of American democracy – but you could have prevented it.
The Democratic Party's censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of Executive Power. This week, a federal judge, Terry Doty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
Doty's previous 155-page decision details how, just 37 hours after he took the Oath of Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal and then, invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA – which is a censorship agency, it's 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 or YouTube get messages, that "This content violates community standards." Two days after Judge Doty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was still attaching warning labels to an online petition, calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate. They said that "Violates community standards" – their community standards.
The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles and has joined this systemic attack on democracy. It also – the media – justifies their censorship on the grounds of "combating misinformation". But governments and oppressors don't censor lies. They don't fear lies. They fear the truth. And that's what they censor.
And I don't want any of this to sound like a personal complaint – because it's not. For me, it's all part of a journey and it's a journey that I signed up with. But I need to make these observations, because I think they're critical for us doing the thing that we need to do, as citizens of democracy, to assess where we are, in this country and what our democracy still looks like and the assumptions about US leadership around the Globe.
And are we really still a role model for democracy, in this country? Or have we made it a kind of a joke?
Here's the good news: While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn't shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young voters and independent voters, thanks to the alternative media. Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race, if I became a "spoiler".
A spoiler is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory, in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control.
So I cannot, in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House.
Furthermore, our polling consistently showed, that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues: censorship, war, and chronic disease.
Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine War, to tackle chronic disease, to protect Free Speech, our Constitutional freedoms; to clean corporate influence out of our government or to 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 then 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, advising me on those subjects since the beginning, and those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years.
I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation. 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.
In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. 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, while working 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 ending the Forever Wars, ending the Childhood Disease Epidemic, securing the Border, protecting Freedom of Speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the US 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'm convinced that it's the best hope for ending the Ukraine War and 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.
For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The Chronic Disease Crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for President, along with ending censorship and the Ukraine war.
It's the reason I've made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I'm meant to do, and that certainty gives me internal peace – even in storms.
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. Ultimately, the future, however it happens, is in God's hands and in the hands of the American voters – and those of President Trump.
If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.
This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer, through hard-nosed logic, and I asked myself, "What choices must I make, to maximize my chances to save America's children and restore national health?"
I felt, that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror, knowing that I could have saved lives of countless children and reverse this country's Chronic Disease Epidemic.
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. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach, forever.
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. My joining the Trump Campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children – but worthwhile, if there's even a small chance of saving these kids.
Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.
That's why I launched my campaign to Unify America. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation, not so much because of any particular policies that they promoted, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by ideals.
They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans, Blacks and whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans, and inspired affection and love and high hopes and a culture of kindness that continued to radiate among Americans from their memory.
That's the spirit on which I ran my campaign and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us – the goals that we could achieve, if only we weren't at each other's throats.
The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.
Thank you all, very much.
Running Time: 25 mins
'For the first time, in many, many years, I have hope again, for my own future and for that of the entire world.'
At the risk of tempting fate... me too!
I am thankful for your willingness to collaborate together for our children and the many common ground goals. I am beginning to, even if timidly, feel a gradual shift in the hope for our Nation to stand and once again be strong!