Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Part 2): From Event 201 to Dark Winter, the Pandemic Simulations That Foreshadowed Our New Reality

Previously, in part one of my interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., founder and chief legal counsel of the Children’s Health Defense, we discussed glaring conflicts of interest in our health agencies and what he describes as a coup-d’état against American democracy and the Bill of Rights.

Now in part two, he explains how U.S. government tools developed for influencing overseas populations were deployed on Americans.

We also take a look at the string of pandemic simulations conducted in the last few decades—detailed in his book “The Real Anthony Fauci”—and the eerie similarities he discovered.

What does Kennedy think about allegations the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy?

And at a time when many have lost faith in the American system, how do we restore power to the American people and rekindle American ideals?

Looking for PART ONE of this interview? Watch it here. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:
One of the big worries of the people who made the Constitution is that through demagoguery, fear, and essentially propaganda, that demagogues and tyrants would easily be able to persuade, particularly an uneducated public, to relinquish the rights that the founders had fought and in some cases died for. We were the first country with mandatory public education. They understood that an uneducated public could easily be manipulated through propaganda to relinquish those rights.

Today, unfortunately, we have the mechanism by which people are being educated are social media and the legacy media, which is shriveling and dying right now. But the social media is, as we saw, completely controlled by the intelligence agencies, and by military interests, and by the government, and by the regulatory agencies who were orchestrating this whole coup d’etat against democracy.

The social media companies, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos and all the others initially promised us that social media was going to democratize the world. We watched in one year as it became the primary instrument by which totalitarian interests tyrannized us.

Jan Jekielek:
So many things I want to talk about here, but one of them is that you said the educated are supposed to be able to notice the demagoguery and the propaganda. Actually, it was the truckers, ostensibly the less educated. who were able to see through this.

Mr. Kennedy:
That’s a very good point, and it was shocking. It was shocking to me that the most educated people and the people who had traditionally been the most tenacious about their defense of the Bill of Rights against all attacks during the McCarthy era, during the Vietnam War, during the Iraq war, the people who stood up and said, “We need to be able to criticize our government,” suddenly became disabled. Their capacity for critical thinking became disabled by this incredibly skilled propaganda push.

You and I have talked about this in the past. The CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], of course, has for decades perfected these techniques for mind control. This isn’t paranoia, by the way. Their program was called MK-Ultra in the original one, MK-NAOMI, MK-Dietrich in the other ones. MK stands for mind control. That was the code for mind control. They were devising ways to control individuals and get people to become unwitting assassins, what they call Manchurian Candidates.

All this is well documented because of the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission and many, many others. What I’m saying now is not the ravings of a paranoid anti-vaxxer. I don’t think these are even controversial concepts because they’re so well documented. But they were also devising ways to control whole populations.

How do you impose centralized control on an indigenous population of a foreign country? First of all, you disable institutions by using propaganda to sow fear by polarization, deliberate polarization of the population by sowing the country with chaos agents, and all these techniques for creating chaos in developing countries so that you can come in. The CIA was involved in coup d’etats or attempted coup d’etats between 1947 and 1997 against a third of the nations on Earth.

Most of them were democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does coup d’etats. That’s what they specialize in. During that period of MK-Ultra, they were paying social scientists to devise ways of social control, and some of those were on individuals. They were using psychedelic drugs like LSD. They were using sensory deprivation, torture techniques, fear and propaganda, authoritarian messages, and experimenting with all these things to figure out what worked.

Around 2016 with the election of Trump and with Brexit, it seems like at that point the intelligence agencies made a decision to turn all of those weapons on to the American people. We saw this extraordinary propaganda campaign at the beginning of the pandemic. To the extent that people just say, “The CIA wouldn’t do that to America. It’s illegal to propagandize in America,” it isn’t anymore.

During the Obama administration, essentially that old law that had forbidden this was overridden. It was also overwritten in the Patriot Act in 2001 during the Bush administration. The CIA has gained all of these increasing powers. They propagandize American people and use these techniques on Americans. More and more we’re seeing the control of the press in our country, the resurrection of Operation Mockingbird, which is the operation where they controlled hundreds and hundreds of reporters and editors of the most important papers in our country.

It was uncovered in 1973 and the CIA said, “Okay. We won’t do it anymore in the United States,” but they’ve been doing it abroad. Again, that’s not controversial. The CIA admits it. They fund these programs at billions of dollars a year mainly through USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. The U.S. government is the biggest financier of journalism throughout the world. We’re not funding journalism that is neutral. It is journalism that supports the U.S. agenda.

We’ve been doing that all over the world, and almost certainly we’ve been doing it surreptitiously in our country for many years too. All of a sudden, those techniques have been turned against our country. By the way, in my book, the Fauci book, I talk about this event called Event 201, which was a pandemic simulation that took place in October 2019 in New York.

It was sponsored by Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and by the Chinese CDC. George Gao was there. The social media companies were there and the pharmaceutical companies were there. The big corporate PR firms were there.

Mr. Jekielek:
The current DNI [Director of National Intelligence] was there?

Mr. Kennedy:
Yes, the current DNI, Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, who’s the top spy in the world now. At that time she was the former deputy director of the CIA. Avril Haines made her bones at the CIA by covering up the Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay torture tapes and covering up the illegal destruction of those tapes, and then, covering up the illegal wiretapping of the United States Senate by the people who had destroyed those tapes or who were trying to protect the people who destroyed those tapes.

She’s like an impresario at cover-ups. She’s President Biden’s top spy. She was the former deputy director of the CIA and she is at this simulation. What is the CIA doing in a pandemic simulation? They’re not a public health agency. As I said, they’re an agency that does coup d’etats. If you look at what they did, that agency is simulating a global coronavirus pandemic that killed 60 million people, a lot more than the actual one which we learned about two months later, although it was already circulating in October of 2019.

We didn’t know about it until January 8th, 2020. What are they talking about? They’re not talking about public health. They’re not talking about how we get vitamin D to everybody to build their immune systems? How do we keep them outside healthy? How do we get people to lose weight? How do we quarantine the sick and yet protect constitutional rights and protect the vulnerable and all of those kinds of things that you would normally talk about?

No, what they’re talking about is using this pandemic as a pretext for clamping down with totalitarian controls. The first thing they said is, “We have to limit free speech. We can’t allow people to criticize government policies and particularly, we cannot allow people to talk about a lab leak.” They’re doing this in October of 2019 before anybody of us had ever heard of Wuhan.

If you look at it during that part of the discussion, which is the fourth part, Avril Haines is leading it.

Speaker 3:
How can governments, international businesses, and international organizations ensure that reliable information is getting to the public, and prevent highly damaging and false information, to the extent that’s possible, about the pandemic from spreading and causing deepening crises around the world.

Speaker 4:
Every time there is something that comes out that is in fact false information that is starting to actually hamper our ability to address the pandemic, then we need to be able to respond quickly to it. One of the things we want to do is work with telecommunication companies to actually ensure that everybody has access to the communications that we’re interested in providing, because that’s going to be critical for dealing with obviously the explosion of the disease.

Speaker 5:
There’s misinformation and there’s some belief. People believe this is man-made, a pharmaceutical company made the virus. So we only need to train the health workers, healthcare workers. They are accessed to the places, to the public and make sure they got the right information.

Speaker 6:
And so I think we really need to make sure, one, from a news perspective, that that information is being disseminated correctly and that we have the right resources out there to provide this information.

Speaker 7:
It’s not just about handing people a piece of knowledge, it’s also about how we incentivize them to manage their behaviors, which in any communicable disease outbreak behavior of one sort will minimize your chance of getting a disease versus behavior of another sort, which may maximize that chance.

Speaker 8:
This is a step up from the part of the governments on enforcement actions against fake news.

Mr. Kennedy:
George Gao, who’s the Chinese CDC director, must know at that point that this virus is already circulating, because he is the Chinese expert on coronavirus. He has to know it’s circulating in Wuhan. By the way, in September of 2019, the Wuhan lab removed all 22,000 viral samples from the website. So, it’s clear at that point. Meanwhile, the satellite shows that the hospital is already filling up. In the chatter that was monitored by Harvard, Brown, and BU [Boston University], they’re all talking about the symptoms of coronavirus.

The Chinese government had to know this. George Gao had to know it. He’s there in October of 2019 with the CIA former deputy director talking about how we quiet people when they start talking about a lab leak. And she says, “Not only do we need to censor them, but we need to flood the zone with authoritative voices,” which means propaganda.

Speaker 4:
If you have a trusted source, I believe in the idea that we shouldn’t be trying to control communication but rather flood the zone in a sense with a trusted source that is talking with influential community leaders as well as health workers.

Mr. Kennedy:
Of course that’s exactly what they did. In researching the book, as you know, because you read my last chapter, I found that it was not a one-off pandemic simulation. The CIA had been conducting these simulations since 2001, five months before the anthrax attack, and predicted everything that would happen. In each one of these simulations there are high level CIA personnel taking part and running them like James Woolsey, the deputy director, and Ruth David and Tara O’Toole and other people from In-Q-Tel and the CIA.

Again and again, they’re practicing how to use the next pandemic to execute a coup d’etat against American democracy and against the Bill of Rights. How do we dismantle the Bill of Rights? And that is very, very worrying because everything that they bottled, they did.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s interesting how you are framing this right now because as I was reading those last few chapters that talk about all these different simulations that were run by wargaming out what a pandemic response would look like. They all have a very similar character to them, the nature that you’ve been describing. They don’t talk about all of the methods that we do know historically have been effective. That’s what I find fascinating.

It’s almost like an indoctrination that this is the way pandemic response should be done going forward. It feels like a jump to say, “This is a plan to run a coup d’etat internally in America.”

Mr. Kennedy:
I can’t say it was or it wasn’t, because I can’t look in these people’s heads. I can say this is very strange to think that they were doing this and then they were such extraordinary soothsayers that they precisely predicted exactly what would happen. By the way, some of these simulations are called Operation Lockstep. We saw this pivot right after about March of 2020 when all the liberal democracies in the world pivoted and turned against constitutional rights and free speech.

If you look at these simulations, Event 201 only involved a handful of very, very powerful people. If you look at the other ones, they involved hundreds of thousands of people and they were first responders from cities all over the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and other countries.

Even China participated in some of them. They were secret or top secret, but the people who would participate would be low level. They would be mayors of cities. They were first responders, firefighters, hospital systems, public utilities, police, the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Marshals, all of these different agencies who were all being drilled that this is what you do when there’s a pandemic.

What I would say is normally if they were just asked to respond to a pandemic and somebody said, “What you do when there’s a pandemic is you get rid of the First Amendment and the Constitution and start stifling speech,” people would react and say, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t seem right to me. Why are we doing this?” There would be dissent in the ranks and questioning. But if you drill that again and again and again and again and everybody just gets in this lockstep and they say, “Okay, this is what we do. This is what the experts say.”

Each one of these pandemics had some respected person running it who is the figurehead like Madeleine Albright or Tom Daschle or Sam Nunn or Bill Gates or somebody that gave it the imprimatur of legitimacy. Most of them were probably useful idiots who didn’t even know what they were doing there. They were just trying to be helpful. But it legitimized, as a very, very strange response to pandemics, that the way you do pandemics is getting rid of the Bill of Rights.

Of course, one of the things Eisenhower said in 1961 during his military industrial complex speech, is that we need to figure out how to balance these needs; the military, the scientific research, and always keeping constitutional rights as the forefront of everything that we do. That last part was completely forgotten. You don’t try to save America by destroying America. And what is America? We’re the purple mountains majesty. We’re a collection of people from different races from all over the world.

The thing that holds us together and gives the quality and definition to who we are is the United States Constitution. It’s something we all say, “Okay, no matter what, this is what we’re going to all believe in. We’re not all going to be in the same religion. We’re Muslims, we’re Jews, we’re Falun Gong. We’re everybody. We’re not going to agree on a lot of things. But we’re going to agree on this. Everybody is going to agree on these ten amendments of the Constitution, whether there’s a war, there’s a plague, there’s starvation, or whether there’s a depression.

During the Great Depression, there were a lot of people who wanted to throw out the Constitution. President Roosevelt gave this famous speech in his first inaugural where he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Speaker 9:
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed effort to convert retreat into advance.

Mr. Kennedy:
The reason he said that is because he knew that fear was the tool of tyrants, and that he saw that the depression was a worldwide depression. He saw what was happening in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy where totalitarian fascists had used the depression and the fear from the depression to take over with totalitarian and authoritarian control. He saw in Russia the same depression was being used to fortify the communist regime.

In some Eastern European countries that was happening too. There were also people in the United States. Huey Long, who a third of the people in our country loved, was saying, “It’s time for revolution. This isn’t working.” A lot of people had lost faith in capitalism and they had lost faith in democracy.

What he said to us is, “The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. We’re going to get through this and we’re going to rebuild these institutions,” which is exactly what he did. But he said, “You have to calm down.” That’s the great thing that he did for our country is he calmed everybody.

That was the centerpiece of the Democratic Party. We’re home of the brave, land of the free. We’re land of the free, because we’re the home of the brave and we’re not going to get disabled by fear. All of a sudden, for the first time in our history, we had a government that was drumming up fear, that was trying to make us scared, and they were all in line with the mainstream media and the social media pumping fear into us every single day. “The virus is going to get you. It’s going to kill you. It doesn’t matter what age you are. You’re going to die. Stay away from your neighbors. They’re biohazards.”

“Put on the mask, do what you’re told, obey.” That fear has this capacity to disable our capacity for critical thinking. That’s why it’s the tool of tyrants and they weaponized it.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s two things that come to mind, actually three things. The first one is, and you write about this in the book, that we’ve experienced the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. That is profoundly disturbing and a decimation of the middle class at the same time through COVID. This is basically in every western country that implemented these shelter-in-place policies.

The second thing is as you talk about what the CIA has done and what our country did with the suspension of the Bill of Rights. This is music to every tyrant here, such as the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping is very happy to be hearing America being taken down a peg. They’re going to be using this and saying, “Look, America has lost its moral high ground. We’re the ones that you should be looking to.”

Vladimir Putin is already using the exact same talking points. The third thing that you’ve been talking about is a love of America and this country. The question is, “Is there a future for America in all of this? I can’t help but feel very down about America as we’re talking here. Let’s start with the first thing. Let’s start with what happened with this upward transfer of wealth.

Mr. Kennedy:
Yes. During COVID, in the U.S. alone, there was a 3.8 trillion shift in wealth upward, largely from the middle class and the poor in our country to at least in part this new oligarchy of billionaires. There were 500 new billionaires created during the pandemic. A lot of the money ended up concentrating ironically or coincidentally in the social media companies that were actually benefiting from the lockdowns, and that were simultaneously censoring criticism of lockdowns. Those companies have strong entanglements with the Pentagon and also the intelligence agencies. A lot of those companies were created in Silicon Valley with participation from In-Q-Tel which is the CIA investment firm.

It was the Pentagon and DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] that created the ARPANET [Advanced Research Projects Agency Network] in 1979. They created the internet and then began seeding these companies with very, very secretive investments. A lot of the time, a lot of those high level CEOs in those companies, high level C-suite people in those companies, signed state security agreements with the agency in exchange for investments in the company, which made them essentially a pawn of the agency.

Almost all of them have huge contracts with the military and with the CIA or with the other defense intelligence agencies or the other agencies. There are all these kinds of financial and power entanglements. And then, the poor just got hammered in this country. Children lost 22 IQ points according to the Brown University study, the younger children during the pandemic. You had suicide rise and alcoholism rise.

If you were wealthy in this country, the lockdowns were a pajama party. Your kids got to stay home. For me, it was wonderful, because my kids were home with me. I have seven kids. I never thought they’d all live at home again, and we got to go outside. We spent a lot of time outside because I live adjacent to a wilderness and near a beach where we could surf. But if you lived in Compton, or Harlem, or Watts, the police went in there and padlocked the playgrounds.

The parking lots where people from inner city can come and park and go to the beach were all shut down. The skateboard parks, they threw sand on them. This is a disease that spreads indoors, and yet we locked everybody indoors. They were ticketing surfers on the beach. The police were down there ticketing them a thousand dollars. You’re not going to get COVID out out there. You’re going to get sunshine that’s going to protect you against COVID.
The playgrounds that they couldn’t close, they removed the basketball hoops. If you lived in a poor neighborhood, you got locked indoors. A lot of those kids, the only hot meal that they got was at school and they closed the schools. The only indicia of poverty and social deterioration that actually improved was child abuse.

Child abuse by a lot of the registries went down during the COVID. That was an artifact of reporting, because most child abuses reported by the schools and they closed the school and they locked the abused child in with their abusers.

50 percent reported some form of abuse, physical or verbal abuse. I think 9 percent of physical abuse doubled or tripled from former levels. This was an attack on the poor. It was a war against the poor. There were 10,000 kids in Africa that were dying of starvation every month because of lockdowns. All over the world, kids were dying because of lack of access to medication for dysentery and malaria.

It was a war on the poor all over the world. According to Larry Summers and the Harvard study, the cost of the lockdowns were $16 trillion. How are we going to pay that? We’re going to pay it by printing money, the same way that we’re going to pay for the Ukraine war with a hundred billion. We’re going to print money.

When you print money, you get inflation and inflation is a tax on the poor. It’s another way of transferring wealth to the banks and to the rich by destroying the pensions, by destroying the value of your social security check, by destroying the bank account, and your life savings. All of that gets eroded and wealth is transferred to the very, very rich. Was it purposeful? I can’t say that, but it’s very, very bad for our country.

Mr. Jekielek:
Many Americans, many Canadians, and many people in western nations are looking at what has happened to America. Is this really a democracy here? People are asking these questions and I often have to tell them, “Yes, absolutely, compared to communist China.” Some people say, “We’re just like communist China. We’re just like Russia.

I reply, “No, actually we’re not just like that. Maybe if we keep going down this road, we’ll get there.” I hear two sides. You say there’s been a coup. At the same time, I hear you have a heart for America. Where do we go from here?

Mr. Kennedy:
I would not be fighting this fight if I didn’t think that there was hope for restoring democracy and value to our country. That is kind of central to what I do with my life. I don’t know what form that will come in, but I know that my job is to fight for it. The way that that’s going to happen is if enough individuals take personal responsibility for making that happen. For me, I don’t make predictions and I try not to get invested in outcomes.

The only thing I control that I actually have control over is this little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes. The way that I live my life is I try to let go of the outcomes and not get invested in them. But I know I have to get up every day and say, “Reporting for duty, sir,” look in the mirror and go out and get on the barricades and fight for democracy, and fight for human dignity, and fight for human rights and freedom and tolerance, and patience and kindness, and all the things that my God wants me to fight for.

I was in the environmental movement as a leader for 40 years. I’m just an environmentalist. But if you’re an environmentalist, every victory is temporary, and every loss and defeat is permanent. If you lose a species, it’s gone forever. If you lose a piece of landscape, God isn’t going to replace it with something. If you pave it over, you never get it back.

A lot of environmentalists burn out because they feel defeated. Their souls get crushed and they feel hopeless. I just made the decision at the beginning of my career after seeing a lot of people burn out that I was not going to do that and I wasn’t going to get invested in results. If you don’t have expectations, you’ll never get disappointed. If they’re not capable of disappointing you, they can’t defeat you and you become relentless.

That’s what makes somebody like me dangerous. No matter what they do to me, I’m going to stand up and fight them again. That’s one of the things that makes Hong Kong a threat to the Chinese government. You have a lot of individuals who say, “We don’t have expectations except from ourselves, from our own souls, from our own duty to do the right thing. We’re going to do it no matter what you do to us.”

All of us have to have that attitude, because that is what is ultimately going to give us victory, and we cannot be defeated. If you just know what you’re going to do, you let go of the outcomes and you can never be beaten.

Mr. Jekielek:
Very quickly, do we live in a democracy? Do we live in a constitutional republic today in your view?

Mr. Kennedy:
I would say right now in name only. We don’t have free press in the United States anymore. We have the forms of democracy. We have elections, but do individuals really have any bearing over most of their political officials or against the agencies of government? I would say no, those are controlled by money. Now, there are things that you can do. There are simple reforms that can restore America and meaningful democracy in this country.

One of those is to get money out of the electoral process. We had that rule for 100 years in our country. We passed it in 1908 and then with the Citizens United decision in 2008, it was thrown out by the Supreme Court. That is key, because otherwise you have a corporation. Listen, to run for New York State Senate today, our U.S. Senate in New York, costs $50 million.

That means that if you’re running, you have to be calling hundreds of people every day and asking them for $10,000, $25,000 contributions. When you get into the office and they call you back, you have to take their phone calls. That means you don’t have any time left for the little guy who’s getting trampled by the government.

It’s not really a democracy anymore. It’s more of an oligarchy or a plutocracy that only is responding to the needs of the rich and to the needs of corporations who are paying the lobbying election costs of the politicians, who then become their indentured servants on Capitol Hill.

That’s one of the issues. The issue of corporate capture of our regulatory agencies is also fairly easy to fix. If you have an executive, either a governor or a president who is determined to do it and who knows how to get into the weeds and do those things, the NIH would be an easy agency to fix.

You don’t have to burn it to the ground. There’s ways of doing it. The same with the CDC and FDA. You have to get the money out. You have to get the pharmaceutical money out. The CIA is easy to fix too. My father was going to fix the CIA. When he was running, his intention was to return the CIA to what it was supposed to be, which is an espionage agency, which means gathering information and doing analysis and providing that information to the executive.

What really took the CIA in a wrong direction was that Allen Dulles manipulated it to allow actions in what they call the plans division, which is assassinating leaders, which is fixing elections, and doing all this monkey business around the world. Because they’re both in the same agency, the tail, which is the plans division, begins wagging the dog, which is the espionage and information division becomes an extension of the paramilitary division, and its function now is to justify these paramilitary interventions and to cover them up and to make sure there’s no accountability.

What you need is a separate agency that is looking over the back of the plans division and saying, “What is the cost of the blowback?” The cost of the blowback is never measured. Look at the Iraq War. The CIA manufactured evidence for the Iraq War, the weapons of mass destruction. George Tenet told George Bush, “It’s a slam dunk. We go into Iraq and then that leads us into Syria.” The Syrian war leads to 2 million refugees that go into Europe, and then democracy collapses in Europe. We have Brexit.

Those are all part of the cost of blowback. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran, and we’re still paying the price of that with the Iranian government, and with the tensions in the region. Nobody has to account for the cost of blowback. You need to have an agency looking over and being critical and saying, “This was a huge mistake.” Unfortunately, the CIA has become a government within our government and really a tumor on our system, and we need to fix that.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve been talking a lot about propaganda originating in the government, supported by the government, and endorsed through social media. One of the criticisms of the American system that different dissident groups have is that there isn’t enough pro-American propaganda, like, “America is an amazing place. These are the principles of America.” It’s almost like the propaganda arms are not pro-American on the surface.

Mr. Kennedy:
What I would say is that we should worry less about propaganda and worry more about policy. My uncle, President Kennedy had some ideas about foreign policy. One, that we should support nationalist groups. We should support national sovereignty against the traditional colonial powers. America should be a posture against imperialism by anybody. We should win by ideas and not by the military, by having our ideas drive in the marketplace of ideas.

The viewpoint of children in Africa and Asia when they hear about Americans should be Peace Corps volunteers and not men with guns, and that the arm of America should be USAID, which at that point was actually aiding the poor before the CIA took it over, with the Alliance for Progress and the Kennedy Milk program. When I go to Africa, I run into so many people whose name is Kennedy, because they’re named after my uncle.

In every capital in Africa, in Latin America, and many in Asia, there are boulevards named after my uncle, as well as medical schools, and colleges and universities. There are statues of him in major places in those cities. I would say it’s hard to measure, but there are lots of polls about who the best president is. If you want to use as a metric the number of place names that bear the name of a certain president, my uncle would top them all.

It’s because there is a hope around the world by most people that America will be the America that lives up to its promise and its ideals. When we have a president that actually does that, we get credit. It’s not because of propaganda, it’s because people see the goodness of America and their lives. That’s what we should focus on, rather than inventing ways of convincing people of things that may or may not be true.

Mr. Jekielek:
When it comes to your uncle, John F. Kennedy, and his assassination, what is it that we actually know at this point? People have seen the Tucker Carlson episode, he’s alluding to some involvement that wasn’t denied. What do we actually know?

Mr. Kennedy:
That is a big question. There are millions and millions of documents now that link the CIA to my uncle’s death, and summarizing them would be almost impossible. The thing that Tucker was referring to was for some people a revelation, but not for me, because I’ve been reading these documents for years, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset.

He was recruited. He had been a U.S. Marine radar operator at the Atsugi Air Force base in Japan, which is where the U2 spy plane flew out of. He was recruited by James Jesus Angleton to do a fake defection to the Soviet Union.

The reason they wanted to do a fake defection is because they knew that there was a mole at Langley who was giving all of the information on the CIA spying programs in the Soviet Union to the Kremlin. All of our spies were being killed as soon as they got over there or as soon as they defected.

They wanted to find out who it was. Angleton believed that if Oswald defected with this very high level, high profile defection that the Kremlin would worry about whether or not he was a spy, and would ask their spy at Langley to check his file.

There was a trigger system on that file that would reveal anybody who checked it. That was the purpose of getting Oswald sent to the Soviet Union. Of course nothing happened. Two years later, he came home with no punishment. The State Department paid his ticket and he was sent to Dallas where he was picked up by George Mohrenschildt, who was a CIA asset, and by other people in the CIA, and he got the job at the Texas Book Depository.

But there are many, many, many other details that are hard to summarize. The CIA had denied it for so long, and the FBI had denied it, when they knew that it was true that he was a CIA asset.

Mr. Jekielek:
Would now be a good time to declassify this information?

Mr. Kennedy:
It was legally supposed to have been declassified a long time ago. The question is why aren’t they declassifying it? All the people who are involved are now dead. Clearly the reason is about institutional protection.

Mr. Jekielek:
Institutional protection is something we’re hearing a lot about from numerous institutions. This is what I wanted to ask you about. There’s a new subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. What are your recommendations to them?

Mr. Kennedy:
Addressing censorship is the most important thing, and addressing the suppression of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin and early treatments. The United States had the worst record of any country in the world on how we manage COVID. It’s hard to understand why Anthony Fauci is still a hero. We have 4.2 percent of the global population and we had 16 percent of the COVID deaths, so that’s not a good record. We had a death rate of about 3,000 people per million population from COVID. You can look at one of the countries that was using Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine; Nigeria had 14 people per million, one 200th of our death rate.

You can say, “Those are young populations, and COVID is disease of the old,” which is true. But the oldest population in the world is Japan, which also allowed access to hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Their death rate was one 1/10th of ours.

You go around the world and there’s such a clear direct correlation, and the studies are so clear. There were a lot of Americans who died who should not have died, probably around 650,000 according to Harvey Risch and other biostatisticians who have looked at the studies, which are clear. The studies consistently show, over 100 studies, that 85 percent of the people who died should not have died, because they were denied early treatment.

That’s a really important issue to address directly. Of course, the origins of the virus at Wuhan lab and the coverup of that should be addressed, but censorship is the most important thing. If you don’t have censorship, and if you have the press doing its job, these things would not have happened.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a lawsuit out right now against the Trusted News Initiative.

Mr. Kennedy:
We have a lot of lawsuits on censorship right now.

Mr. Jekielek:
Arguably, what you call the legacy media, it’s like their mandate has changed. Truth seeking is no longer the mandate. What are you hoping these lawsuits will accomplish? I’m thinking of this one specifically against Reuters and Washington Post, what can these lawsuits accomplish about this mandate being changed?

Mr. Kennedy:
Our objective, ultimately, is to make censorship so embarrassing or otherwise expensive for them that they’ll stop. It’s really extraordinary to me that you have all these young reporters who went to journalism school. They were captured by idealism, the excitement of pursuing existential truths and then exposing them to the public. They knew the importance of the free flow of information to democracy. It’s the sunlight, it’s the fertilizer, and it’s the water for democracy. Without it, it withers and dies. The free press is important.

Totalitarian regimes in the short term are almost always more efficient than democracies. Democracies are messy. They’re slow. They’re sloppy. They’re infuriating and inefficient. Over the long term we think they’re more efficient than the short term. The U.S. in its history has shown that. If you want to kill people who are your enemies and get policies done, you can operate like the Chinese operate, and you can have a certain short term efficiency in that.

But the framers of the Constitution argued that the one advantage that we really have over the short-term advantages of a totalitarian regime is that with the free flow of information, the best ideas rise in the marketplace of ideas and they triumph, and they have been forged in the furnace of debate.

Those ideas will ultimately make better policies. Policies that are the product of consensus get a buy-in from the population, and you get a more stable electorate, because they feel that they have been consulted and they’re part of this.

These young reporters understood this. They all came into journalism school with the idea that they were going to get a chance to speak truth to power, and stand up for the little guy and against powerful governments. Now, they have become the tool, the bullhorn for those powerful governments to bully and subjugate the little guy.

They’re living against their conscience. You have to imagine they’re living against their values. We need to give them a chance to honor the values and the aspirations that called them to journalism in the first place. We need to do that by embarrassing their bosses and making censorship expensive for them.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a New York Times article talking about how your family is embarrassed by you, if I recall correctly. The Epoch Times has been attacked in all sorts of ways with all sorts of very unfortunate monikers. In fact, what drives me insane is that when we get attacked, they don’t usually really attack us. They attack our founders who are Falun Gong practitioners, one of the most persecuted groups in the world, and they use Chinese Communist Party propaganda to do it. There is a big cost to trying to go after the truth today. Do you feel that?

Mr. Kennedy:
I feel like there is a cost, but I don’t feel like I have anything to complain about. We’re all given a job to do and that having a difficult life or having these challenges is ultimately a gift. My dad, right before he died, handed me a book by Camus called The Plague. He called me into his bedroom and gave it to me and he said, “I want you to read this,” with this kind of peculiar intensity.

After he died, I read it several times trying to unlock the reason why he felt so strongly about this book. The book is about a doctor in a quarantined city where there’s a plague going through it, and nobody can go in or out. Nobody knows what the plague is and they don’t know how to treat it. They know it’s contagious, and if you’re exposed to it you’re highly likely to die.

A lot of the book is the doctor having a conversation with himself in his bedroom saying, “I don’t want to leave, because I’m going to die. And yet, I’m a doctor, so I’m supposed to be helping people, but I don’t know how to help people. There’s no treatment for this. There’s nothing I can really do.”

And in the end, he goes and ministers to the sick, to the dying, to the discomforted, and he does his job. Camus wrote another book. Camus was an existentialist and he was the inheritor of the Roman and Greek philosophy of stoicism. He wrote a book about the stoic hero, the iconic stoic hero, Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was cursed by the gods to be pushing a stone up the hill all the time, a giant boulder. But when he gets to the top of the hill, he can never get it over. He almost gets it there, but it always rolls back on him, and then he has to start again. He has to do that for eternity.

It sounds miserable, but in the minds of the stoics, Sisyphus was a happy man because he had a job and he was always striving to go upward. He was putting his shoulder to the stone and he was doing his duty. That’s where happiness and satisfaction and peace comes from. A lot of times the things that we consider penalties or injuries or misfortunes are actually gifts to us and they’re touched on. Pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth.

I feel very happy with my life and peaceful about the choices I’ve made. I have compassion for family members who don’t agree with me on a lot of issues, and I don’t have hard feelings toward anybody. I know what I have to do and I do my best to do it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Kennedy:
Thank you very much, Jan, for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.