Ep. 560: RFK Jr. on Polluters, Falconry, and Assassinations

Who's making a bid for the White House. We do not have a hell of a lot of politicians on the show, but it does happen now and then by the best of our recollection.

So that's a third party category. So our first third party category independent category, and I'll point out I think it is a welcome category because I get a little fed up with the two party system that has enjoyed a monopoly on the office of the President of the United States of America since get this eighteen fifty six. Now, I understand, we've got a hotly contested presidential race coming up here, and we have candidates who have entirely different

world old views, entirely different priorities, entirely different personalities. Now, I don't want anyone to get their panties in a bunch about us having on one candidate and not the others. All Right, So I'm telling you this. If you don't hear from Trump or Biden on the Meat Eater Podcast, it ain't our fault. I would love to have them on if they come on. If you come on, I promise a friendly conversation. All you gotta do is reach out to our producer Krin, which is what RFK Juniors

people did, and we will have you on. We'll have a friendly conversation that sticks to personal background, the outdoors and natural resources issues. If you jam some other stuff in there, you'll probably be okay. But we're gonna try to focus on those three things. Now, let's get out at the show and learn some stuff right about pollution,

assassination and the ways in which our future. Let me put this way, the ways in which decisions we make now are going to impact the future of natural resources and the management of the lands and waters where you hunt and fish. That's what we're going to talk about now. And we will be looking for our emails from the Trump and Biden campaign, and when they reach out, they will come on the show.

I sticked out a position in the middle. I said that when I announced a year ago, I said, I'm not I said, you know, we have this toxic polarization in the country that is more dangerous than at any

time since the American Civil War. It's it's amplified by the social media algorithms, which have learn the way to keep eyeballs on the site is to four to five people's worldviews, and that fees into this polarization because if you're a Republican and you live next door to a Democrat and you ask the same question of Google, you're likely to get a different answer because they know that if they reinforce what you already believe, you're going to

stay on that site longer. So they're feeding you. They're manipulating us all with these algorithms, and those algorithms, which are now no longer even under the control of Google or any of these other sites, are feeding this polarization. And to me, it's very, very dangerous because you can't see any good end to it. And so what I said is when I announced, is that I was not going to feed into the polarization. I was not going

to vilify and marginalize my opponents. I was going to instead of focusing on these sort of cultural worry issues that are used to keep us all apart, and I was going to try to identify the shared values at unite Americans and make people forget that they're either Democrat or Republican, and make us all remember that were all Americans. And I think I've been pretty successful at doing that. My favorability ratings are better than President Trump's, President Biden's.

I have the best highest favorability of any political leader in the country than anybody else they measured. And Zogby just did this huge poll that's twenty six thousand people, that's ten times the size of any other polled on It has a margin bror of practically zero, and it shows that and I head to head race, I beat President Trump narrowly about three electoral votes. And I had to head race, I beat President Biden by a landside

thirty nine states. He wins eleven. And so I think there's a lot of Americans who would like to vote for me, but they're the strategy of the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign is to make you hate the other guy, make you fear that if Biden gets elected, it's going to be the end of the Republic. If Trump gets elected, it's going to be the end of the Republic. You can't you can't vote for anybody else

except for the Democratic or Republican nominee. And that's you know, that's something I have to over the next five and a half months. I have to persuade Americans that they can vote for Hope instead of voting out of fear.

I'm riddled with parasites. And one of my colleagues who I was with today, we both had trick and osis. And when I heard that, I felt like it made me like you more because it just makes me feel like someone makes me feel like someone from the from the trenches man, like, like you know, it's like outside of a coddled existence, like when you travel and stuff, you just expose the things. So when I saw that, I didn't have any I didn't have any sense of

I didn't have any sense of a want. And I saw the nighttime comedy whatever you call them, the nighttime TV hosts having a field day with it, and I just felt like, I don't know, man, I reminded me of my own things, that my own stuff I've encountered from traveling in the developing world.

a short term memory and even long term memory. And a friend of mine, I was in prison for the summer of two thousand and one in maximum security prison in Puerto.

And my uncle had just died from glioblastoma and he had had surgery on the gleia, which is a brain tumor, and so and because my uncle Teddy was the chairman of the Health Committee in the United States Senate for fifty years. We knew, my family knew every doctor, you know, every great doctor at least in North America and really all around the world. And Teddy had had when he got his glioblasphema as a very complex tumor. It looks

like a spider web in your brain. And he got a list of these, you know, the best surgeons in the world, and they were all on speed dial. And then he passed away. And this is a few months after his death, and I found out about this thing, and so we had all of these great euro surgeon on speed dial, and we sent the films to all of them and they all said, yeah, it's a tumor you got, so you have to have surgery. So I was going to use Teddy's surgeon who was down at

Duke in North Carolina. And I was not believed me looking forward to it. And you know, when Teddy got his surgery, he was awake during the whole thing, and they just they took off the top of his his skull and they would the doctor would press the flat part of the scalpel against certain parts of his brain where the tumor was, and then he'd ask him a series of mathematical and language questions and if he could answer those questions, he'd cut out that little piece of brain.

What yeah, and if he couldn't. It was like Silence of the Lambs. Did you ever see that box? It was? It was very much like reminiscent of that. And that's how they do it. So I was going to go to that same guy, and I went down. I was supposed to get my surgery on a Tuesday morning, and I went down to Columbia Presbyterian to pick up my films. It was a young Irish doctor. Remember every great doctor in the world said that's definitely a tumor. You need

to getst surgery. And it was a young Irish doctor in the office. And he and I struck up a conversation with him, because you know, he was from Ireland and we were talking about all and then he said, what are you doing here? And I said, I've got to go get brain surgery. I got a tumor. I'm here picking him my films. And he said to he might if I take a look at him. I said,

not at all. And there was a light box in the room, and he put one of the pictures up in the light box and he looked at it a long time, and then he turned to me and he said, I don't think you've earned surgery. And I said, tell me more, and he said, I don't think there's a tumor. And he said, what you ought to do is we ought to take very precise measurements of it and then come back in six weeks and see if he has grown at all. And I did that in six weeks

it was exactly the same size. And he said, come back in another six weeks, and we did it again. It was exactly the same size. And that's when he said, this is this is a parasite. It's eaten part of your earth brain and then died. Oh and I remember seeing that Twilight Zone when I was a kid, about the about the you know, the earwing curls and the guys and then they and they finally get it out, but then they discovered it was a female and it had laid eggs in there. So I was one of those,

you know, those classic Twilight Zunes. But anyway, it's gone. And then what I found out after that is that my mercury levels were off the chart. There are ten times with Heba considered safe. Because I eat a lot of freshwater fish and a lot of saltwater fish. I had mercury off the charts, and I fished, you know,

in the summer almost every day. Oh and I eat the fish, and you know I just had and their predatory fish, the freshwater fish in this country are having huge, huge mercury levels, And so I get the mercury key laid out. My brain fog went away. So I don't think it had anything to do with the braine worm. But anyway, it was good copy for a couple of days.

you know, concerns about mercury in the water. And then it's been explained to me too that even though we've reduced how much mercury we're putting.

And every single fish. Oh and you know, of course the predatory fish like well i and and you know trout like trout, those kind of fish that are eating that are high end editors are have have just you know, and have what they call bullis doses really, you know, just very very high dose, doesn't It occurred to me when that study came out that we are now living in the science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of every other American and now no longer engage

in the seminole primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father mother in the local fishing hole and then come home and safe eat the fish. And you know that is It's just it's when you think of when I thought about it that age, I was breath taking. I see that the same thing today with lime disease. Lime disease is you know, I spend I go, you know, I'm in the woods every day, right and my whole life I've done that, you know,

training hawks and stuff. You have to fly them every day.

another one of these incredible stories. You have them developing a military weapon there and and then just poisoning everybody, American ruining it. There's not a single Faulkner that I know that does not have lime disease, you know, and you can't think of any I remember coming home one day, standing in the bath. I've been taking twenty nine deer ticks off myself and you know, in the springtime, I'd

get them every single day. And it's just you know, the woods used to be for me, were a safe place to go, and now you know, you have to think twice before you go in the woods.

man had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And I said to my mom when you know, when the conversation ended, I said to my mom, why did he shoot you know, the man who killed uncle Jim act that he did? He love our family? Because even then my mind was like, you know, this is a bizarre story. And and that story, you know, of course, was never adequately explained. And Jack Ruby, the man who Shotley R. V. Oswold, was an associate of the of the of the Chicago Outfits, which is

Samjan Connor's mob. But he was directly associated with Carlos Marcello, who was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and who was you know, he was one of the three big mob bosses. There were three mob bosses who were recruited, recruited by the CIA to kill Castros santostraf Conte in Tampa, Carlos Marcela in Dallas and New Orleans, and then Sam and Conne in Chicago. And the reason they targeted these three

is they all had casinos in Havana. And so then the CIA basically became one organization with these you know, with these mob families, and that there's so much evidence now on the you know, the agency involvement in my uncle's death. There's hundreds of books written about it, and you know, there's millions of pages of evidence, and there's in probably over the thirty confessions by people who were involved.

So I always assumed that my uncle was, you know, that his death and Congress when they actually looked at it, you know that of course, the Warrant Commission was run by Alan Dallas, who's the head of the CIA, who my uncle had fired. So they, you know, they said, yeah,

it's just one shooter, Lee Arvy Oswald. But then five years later, Congress reinvestigated in the Congressional Committee, the House Select Committee on Assassination said no, his death was from a conspiracy, so and that you know, most Americans believe that, and the evidence is now overwhelming. But I always believed. I always believed that my father had been killed by Surhan and then a man who one of my dad's

best friends, a guy called Paul Scharade. He was a United Auto Workers deputy director and he had recruited Shaves to the labor movement, and he had introduced my father to Shaves, and that had become one of the most important political relationships and personal friendships that my father had. All Charde was walking next to my father when my father was shot and Paul and they were walking into

the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. Al Sharade was walking beside him, about a foot behind him and Surhan and they were being led to the ambush site to where Surhan was ending in front of the steam table. Surhan fired two shots at my father and one of those shots hit Paul sch Rate in the head. He said he felt like he was being electrocuted. He didn't know what it was. He just felt like he had stepped on an electric wire and and he went down, but he lived to be almost ninety years old. He died

about two years ago. And then the other shot that Turrnan fired at my father went past my father and hit a door jam, a wooden door jam behind him, and it was later removed. The bullet was later removed by the LAPD. Then Sir Ann was grabbed by five men by you know, Rosie Greer.

be spying on him, so he said no thanks. And then the LAPD had a very bad reputation at that time for racism, and oh they were they were not.

They were not part of it. So he was being protected essentially by football players, by the fearsome forceome guys from the Dallas Cowboys and from the Oakland Raiders, and they chased down or they immediately grabbed her hand after the second shot, and they took his hand and they they they bent him over the steam table on his back, and they took his gun hand and they pointed it in the opposite direction away from my father. So and ray For Johnson later told me that he, you know,

Rave was a big guy. He's like six foot four and he'd been the best athlete in the world, and he said he was and Sir Hann is this tiny, tiny little guy, but he said he had superhuman strength and they could not get that gun out of his hand. Sir Ann was able to. It was a revolver twenty two revolver and there were eight shots in it, and Sir Ann was able to squeeze off six more shots and empty the you know, the viral and uh and

those shots all hit people. So one person, I think an ABC reporter, got hit twice, once through his pant's leg and another time in the istomic. But all those shots hit people. So we know what happened to every single shot in Sir Han's gun. And he never had a chance to reload. My father was killed by four

shots from behind. And the reason I know this is be guyse Paul Schrey ten years ago told me, you got to come to my house and pacity and read the autopsy report, which was Tomas Neagucci, the most important coroner in American history. And he did the and so and I did. It's not something I wanted to do, to read the autopsy report from my dad, but Paul Shrey, I couldn't really say no to him. He'd been shot with my dad. He was his loyal friend. So I

sat down and read it. And if you read it, you're like he innescally escapable conclusions that her hand could not have killed my father, which is what Nagucci concluded Nogucci when he did the autopsy. He knew what had happened in Dallas with the autopsy was all you know, the critique of that autopsy is is notorious. So he wanted to make sure that he did an autopsy that nobody would ever criticize. So he called it chief Corners all the five branches of the arm services and had

them sitting in the theater observing him. And in the medical literature, his autopsy in my dad is called the perfect autopsy, and what he found is my father was shot four times from behind and all of them. One of the shots passed harmlessly through the shoulder pad of his suit jacket, two of them hit him in the back, and then one of them was fired from directly behind his ear into his head, and all of them were contact shots.

shots fired. There were thirteen distinct booms on that and all of the shots were contact shots, meaning that the barrel of the gun was either touching my father's skin or less than a half inch or quarter inch from the skin, because they all left carbon tattoos on his body, and they were all fired at an upward angle, in other words, that somebody was standing right behind him concealing a gun and holding it, you know, against him, but slightly upward, and all of them were fired at that.

And then the guy who almost certainly fired those shots was a guy I'm called Eugene Thane Sazar, who was a He worked for a security agency, he called a security and he had gotten the job only two or three days before, after my father's schedule was already known, and he was the one who grabbed my father by the elbow and then walked him toward the ambush where

Sir Hann was raided waiting. And the opposition is that when Sir Hann was firing those shots and all eyes were upon him, there were seventy seven people in the room, and he drew his gun and was actually firing the kill shots. And when my father fell, he fell backwards

onto Saysar. But he must have known that he was being shot from behind because he twisted around and he grabbed Seesar's tie and it was a pull clip on high and if you see the pictures of my father, the initial pictures of him lying on the ground, he has that clip on tye in his head. Azar got up, pushed my father off, and got up from under him with his gun visible. There's a dozen eyewitnesses that showed

his gun was drawn. His gun was drawn, which says or never denied, and the police has some weeks later, I was your gun drawn? He changes history many times, you know, he said he was firing and my father, I mean firing at sir hand, which of course he wasn't.

And as it turns out, there's a woman, an historian called Lesippes who's done a deep dive on saysar and and his his employer was was uh Hughes Aircraft, which is a defense contractor, you know, which was owned by a Hour to Use who is deeply involved with with the Las Vegas mob and then Bowing or Lockey. He worked at a locky plant in la and he had top secret clearance and he identifies himself as a CIA employee.

And he openly hated my father. He thought that my father was going to turn the country over to black people, which he complained about a lot. So I actually tried to interview him. I tried to go meet with him. He left the country after that and he went to live in the Philippines, and I contacted him and said, you know, would you be willing to sit down and talk to me. And he initially said I'll do it for ten thousand dollars, and then he raised it. When

I said okay, he said fifteen thousand. And then when I was, you know, planning my trip, he said twenty five thousand. I realized that he was that dude. This was an andless game that he was going to play. And and then he died during the pandemic. I mean, I don't know why he died. You know, I don't mean to imply that he died of COVID, but he died during lockdowns.

father and said I'm representing him. And he was the one who persuaded who would not look at the listics evidence, and then persuaded Sirin to plead guilty. Sir is when they were when he was working at that they they got him to go on a horse one time, which is crazy. He'd never been on a horse, and they asked him to put him on. He five feet tall, right, he's tiny.

he's he kind of by then. I think he was almost eighty years old, seventy seven or something, and he uh, and he's been in prison for six years. Oh, in the story of you know, of his story is interesting, but you know, I know we got other things to talk about. But anyway, it's uh, how how he uh you know, his road is a really interesting road.

a white water enthusiast. Yeah, did your and then you've worked like I said, you worked on behalf of fishermen against polluters who are polluting waterways, destroying fisheries. Were you Did you come into that love of water through environmental work or did you come into that love of water through outdoor experience?

going to check my traps. I was going to you know, turn over rocks, climb trees, take a baby, grow, all this kind of stuff that I was doing. Catching snakes. I had My room was filled with aquariums with animals that I caught, and from when I was little, that's what I wanted to do. So and then my father, you know, was brought us, taught us how to kayak Askma role and we were very very young kids. We went on all the big western whitewater rivers at the time,

and you know, that's pretty common now. I think we were told that we were among the first two or three hundred people to go down the Colorado River. We went with Hatch Brothers Expeditions, which was the first whitewater company, and we did the Colorado, We did a little Colorado, we did the middle fork of the zam and my dad took us on the amp.

I'd ever been in my life. And we swam, you know, there was ice in the river and my brother and I tipped our we had a tobo duo kayak and we tipped it over and you know, uh and this way that was really cold, and so you know, I he got us into that whitewater from when we were really young, and then we did a lot of backcountry skiing. We were my dad really loved the wilderness and I

and then I started training hawks. I was raising homing pigeons from when I was seven years old, and I was like a serious uh hobby or sport where I you know, where I lived. And then when I was nine, I got my hawk. I got a read Tellahawk and I had read a book. You know, my uncle was president and there was books around about Camelot and there was a book by T. H. White called The Once

Future King and I read it. EH White was a brilliant author, but he was also a fulconer, and he was a British falconer, and he has a chapter and the Once a Future King is about the young King Arthur. It was a chapter in it about Arthur apprenticing as a fulconer when he's a little boy. And I read that and I said, this is what I got to do. And I told my dad. My dad knew of a falconer who lived about a mile from my house. He

was I called Alvin. I was one of the pioneers of American falconry, and he had been an All American football player at Penn State. He had then gone to work designing jets for the Pentagon. But the state department knew about him because whenever there was visiting Arab dignitaries, they'd always send them over to fly birds with them,

because the Arabs are crazy for Fulton. And so my dad knew about him, and my dad took me over there and then I apprenticed under him, and I, you know, I became a master faulk and ear at a young age. I actually wrote the exam that people take seriously, Yeah, what was bird? My first was a red tallowk. But I'll tell you what I got. I got I think probably one of the first Harris Hawks that anybody ever trained. That Harris hawk is now the preferred hawk or globally

for ground quarry. If you if you train hawks, which is what I actually prefer, you're taking ground quarry or or you know, they can catch a pheasant on the rise, or you know, occasionally occasionally, if they're really lucky, a duck on the rise, but they could never catch it in a tailchain. Duck flies ninety miles an hour. They they can't nothing could take take it in a tail chase.

hawk that flies that hunts communally. And in fact, when Audubon first saw them in the desert Southwestn't he named him after his friend, who is, you know, an ornithologist named Harris. He assumed they were carrying eaters, because there's no other predatory bird that eats in packs. I didn't know this, Yeah, and and and so you'd see six of them down on a quarry like a jack rabbit or something, and you assumed they were you know.

you're hunting the squirrels, you'll see them ladder up. One will ladder up from the bottom up, you know, up the up, the branches and the other one will ladder

down and squeeze the squirrel. They can't catch the squirrel on it and it's on the tree because they don't have a tight enough turning radius, and the squirrel will the bark look behind him and keep an eye on where the hawk is, and right before the hawk hits him, they'll go to the other side of the bark, the other side of the tree, and the hawk can there's no hawk that has that kind of turning radius. They can dodge hawks a whole day just by staying on

that trunk. So for a hawk to catch the squirrel, that has to get it off the trunk and onto a branch. And so that's what they'll do. You'll see them do it. And all of a sudden, the Harris hawks are so smart, like I've hunted red taillahawks my whole life. And if it red tellahawks, he's a squirrel going to a squirrel dray right the nest. What do

you call the dray, Yeah, squirrel tray. So he sees them going to the dray for the red taillahawk, which has been here for you know, at least since the place is seen in ice age is probably a million years before that. But that squirrel in the in the mind of Red Tallahawk, that squirrel just disappeared, and that's the end of it. Harris Hawk. If he ever sees the squirrel going to a squirrel dray, he knows that that animal is still.

in They're like golden pheasants, silver pheasants. I just gotta think, and the pheasants would eat all the grass inside them run and they just stick their head out of it. I had turkey wire which is about the diameter of the pheasants had so they can squeeze their head to that turkey wire to get the tall grass that you couldn't get with them more there was you know, tight up against the side of the pheasant run. They'd eat that that deep green grass and they stick their heads

were there to get it. But because it was a tight fit, they couldn't pull their head right out immediately. They had to kind of, you know, work it out. And that Harris hawk went to the and and it sat in a tree above that pheasant run, and one at a time he took the head off of every

one of my pheasants. And I came home from the school and all my peasants were dead in the peasant run, and I realized what happened, and I was like, I got to catch that hawk and train it, because this is like a really smart bird.

that point. They just thought, okay, hawks are the enemies of farm you know, of chickens, so exterminating them is a good thing. And they didn't realize the hawks were also controlling the rodents and controlling you know. They just didn't understand the kind of the complexity sure of ecosystems, and they still don't, by the way, you know, otherwise

we wouldn't be using so many petticides. But yeah, the Audubon Society and the game clubs and hunting clubs, the the conservation apartments would sponsoring these hawkshits every year so we could go out and just drap hawks and fly them. And then the Eastern paragrine went extinct in nineteen sixty three and people started worrying about them then, and in nineteen seventy two they passed the Migratory Birds Treaty Act.

of eggs, three eggs. Take that away from them, she'll she'll recycle, lay three more, take those away, and she'll recycle a third time. And then so you have nine eggs from the same bird every year, and you can then incubate those and you can get the mother to raise them because you're you're you know, handling handing her unlimited food, so she can take care of nine offspring. And we started mass producing them and then releasing them

to the wild. So the arrogrants that you see now on the East coast are they're a little bit of hybridized from some of the other subspecies, but you know there are still there's a lot of them. Are you know pure bread Eastern atoms? There were bread and captivity and then released.

I had gone into prosecution the way that he and I. I realized that I was not authentic for me, that I really belonged doing something in the woods and in the waterways, and you know that that's where I was happy and that's what I wanted to do with my life. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist or a vet or to do you know, something like a field biologist. It's somebody who was outside all

the time. And so I decided to take you know, my legal education and meld it with you know, in some way with doing environmental environmental protection, environmental advocacy, and I ended up working for a blue collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen on the Hudson River and who were trying to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters. We have on the Hudson the oldest commercial fishery in North America.

It's three hundred and fifty years old. Many of the people that I represent come from families that have been fishing the river continuously since Dutch colonial times. It's a traditional gear fishery, so they use the same fishing methods that were taught by the Algonquin Indians city the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and then passed down through the generations and one of enclaves. But the commercial fishery is a little village called Crotonville, New York.

the same fishery in the Hudson. You know, the blue crabs come up to the Hudson as well. We have a lot of the anagmus fish come up to the Hudson, include.

Jewish holidays, it is a popular. So we have a mixture of freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and an adremus fish and an amus fish, the fish that evolved in fresh water, but they figured out how to go to the salt water to feed themselves in fat and they but their eggs will not survive in saltwater. They have to come back up into the freshwater their natal stream to spawn because the eggs would die if they were in salt water.

And so and those are called a nadumant fish. And they're also admous fishing, the HUDs, and those are fish American American eel, of course, and they have the oddest life cycle because they go out to the middle of the North Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea and they meet their European cousins there and then they breed and they

all go back to their natal streams. And you know, of course an eel can breed air as well as water, so they that's why you find them in ponds when there's rainy, whether they go across the landscapes, you know, at night during the rain and get in isolated ponds and places. The incidentally, carp can also breed air and

catfish can you know the bullhead's kind of you. If you ever if you leave a bullhead or a catfish in two inches of water and there were four inches of water in the bottom of your of your you know, bait bucket, it will it will drought, it will die asphyxiate because it'll use up the option. But if you leave it, and if you just take all the water out and throw it in there, it will live because it can breed air. Yeah, it just like a lot of carp can do that too. But anyway, that's a

real serious digression. I went on in nineteen sixty six and Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and a half foot pipe in the Croton Harmon rail yard, and the oil went up the river and the tides and blackened the beaches, and it made the shad taste of diesel. The fishermen couldn't sell them in New York City. The fload and fish market and all of the people in Crotonville came together and the only public building in

the town, which was the American Legion Hall. This was a very patriotic community.

fish again, and they found it was up polluted. They came together that night in March of nineteen sixty six, and there were three hundred people in the Parker Bale American Legion, all leaning against the rifle racks hanging from the rafters, men and women, furious about what was being stolen from them, because then, you know, the Hudson was everything.

It was there. It was there, not just their recreation, it was their livelihoods, it was their property values, it was it was their backyard, and it was being stolen from them by these large corporate entities over whom they had no control. And they had been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, to the Corps of Engineers, the State Conservation Apartment in the

Coast Guard, and they were given the bombs rush. Richie Garrett, who was the first president of the of what was then called the Hudson Fishermen's Association later became River Keep. He was a grave digger from Austin, New York, and he was a combat veteran from Korea. Really yeah, and he used to say about it. He used to say to his new fellers, I'll be the last to let

you down. Because he was a grave digger, but he was also he was He went with another another marine named Mark Glalco, who was at that point an Eastern Airlines pilot. He went to the corp of Engineers a dozen times, begging the core Colonel to do his job and shut down the Penn Central Pipe, and the core colonel finally told them an exasperation, these are important people. We can't treat them that way, speaking of the Penn

Central Board of Directors. Oh. By this evening in March of nineteen sixty six, virtually everybody in Crodenville had come to the conclusion that government was in Cahouesi with the pluters, and the only way they were going to reclaim the river for themselves is if they confronted the polluters directly. Somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil slick coming out of the Pen Central pipe. And burnt

up the pipe. Somebody else said they should roll a mattress up and jam it up the pipe and flood the rail yard with its own waist. And then somebody else said they should float a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point power Plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day on its intake screens and taking food off their family tables. And a guy stood up whose name was Bob Boyle, and he was a famous fly fisherman and spin fisherman.

He written dozens of book books on fly He has a bunch of flies named after him. He was the outdoor editor of the Sports Illustrated for sixty sixty five years. He was a combat veteran from Vietnam. He actually was at at the training camp. He was a roommate of Robert Bork this, you know, the federal judge. But he had been he was a first lieutenant, had eighty percent mortality in Korea, and he had come back from Korea. And he wrote about sports, mainly outdoor sports, for Sports

Illustrated for sixty five years. Two years earlier he'd written an article about angling in the Hudson. There's some real odd balls who fish in the HUDs. And there's these sewer fishing clubs in Manhattan, you know that fished through

the Greats. And he was writing about all these these weird sort of cultures of people who found, you know, wilderness experience in the HUDs and you know, walked off a pavement in New York and were renewing themselves spiritually and in all these other ways through this contact with the water. And it was a beautiful article. And in researching that article, he came across an ancient navigational statue

called the eighteen eighty eight Rivers in Harbors Act. That statute said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States. You had to be a big penalty if you got caught. But also there was a bounty provision that said that anybody who turned in the polluter

got to keep half the fine. And Boyle was stunned when he read this, and he sent a copy of it to the libel lawyer, said Time magazine, Time Ink, which owned Sports Illustrated, And he knew those guys, they were the only lawyers he knew, And he said, is this still good law? And they sent him a memo back saying it's still good law, but in eighty years

it's never been in force. And that evening, when all these men and women were talking about violence, he stood up in front of him with a copy of that memo and he said, we shouldn't be talking about breaking the law. We should be talking about in force here. And they resolved that night they were going to start a group that was then called the Hudson River Fishermen's Association later became a River Keeper, and they were going to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter

on the Hudson. Eighteen months later, they shut down the Penn Central Pipe, elected the first bounty in the United States history against the corporate polluter. They got to keep two thousand dollars, which was a huge amount of money.

In Crotonville, New York in nineteen sixty eight, they were two weeks of wild celebration in the town and they used the money that was left over to go after see Baguygee tuc tape, Standard brand, American cyanimid the biggest corporations in the country and winning, collecting tens of thousands of dollars in bounties, and then in nineteen seventy three, they collected the highest penalty in the United States history

against the corporate polluter. They got two hundred thousand dollars from Aniconda Iron Cable for dumping toxics at Hastings, New York. They used the money to build a boat, which they called the River Keeper, and they began patrolling the Hudson, tracking down polluters and litigating against them. And then they

hired using bounty money. In nineteen eighty three, they hired their first full time river keeper, a commercial fisherman named John, and he hired me a year later using bounty money as the first attorney and a full time attorney for them. And I, you know, I started a clinic at a local law school called Pace where my students were allowed to practice law under my supervision. I got a special court order, and you know, we just started litigating against

hundreds of polluters. We brought over five hundred lawsuits against hundred river polluters. We forced polluters, just meant five and a half billion dollars remediating the Hudson. Today, the Hudson River is an international model for ecosystem protection. There's a river when you know, when I started working on it. It was dead water for twenty miles stretches zero dissoltd auction from New York City north and twenty miles from

New York City south, I mean from Albany south. It was dead water, no auction, you know, essentially no auction breathing life, and it caught fire. It turned color every week depending on what colors they were painting the trucks at the GM plant and Arytown. And today the Hudson is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any of the waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north

of the Equator, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's the last major rivers has some left on both sides of the Atlantic, and all throw it in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Marmer Sea, all these other waterways. There's only one river left that still has strong splilnting stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish. And the Hudson is Noah's Ark. It's a species warehouse. It's the last refuge for many

of these animals that are going extinct elsewhere. The miraculous resurrection the Hudson inspired the creation of river keepers elsewhere. So we had a bunch of commercial fishermen come down and ask me to seho the you know, all of the sewer plants in Connecticut. There were stor destroying the oyster fisheries. And I issued every city. I sued Greenwich, Norwalk, Branford, Stanford, and all the way up down, all the way up

and down, you know the rail line. I sued every city on the coast of Connecticut, and we started collecting hundreds of thousands dollars from them. We started Long Island Soundkeeper, the commercial fishermen there. We got the surfers coming from the West coast, you know, with the same thing, and within a few years we had a couple of hundred river keepers. We started a new group called water Keeper Alliance to manage the licensing of these new groups, to

make sure we can protect the brand. And today we have five hundred water We're the biggest water protection group in the world. We have five hundred water keepers from forty six countries and and you know there are there. It's a law enforcement group. Most countries have laws that forbid water pollution. The water belongs to people. It doesn't belong to the government. It doesn't belong to you know, corporations or big ag or you know the mining companies.

It belongs to the people. Everybody has a right to use it. Nobody can use it in a way that diminishes or injures. It's used in enjoyment by others. This is an ancient law, goes back to Roman times. It's in the Code of Justinian, it's in the Magna Carta, and it's in the laws of most countries. The problem is those laws are almost never enforced. And what we do, a function we serve and water keeper is, you know, is to enforce those laws on behalf of people who are injured by pollution.

They felt they didn't you know, there was a lot of antagonism. There was a lot of antagonism of our public lands issues in the world West. And you know, whether you know, public lands should be managed exclusively for game or wi should they be managed for hunting and fishing, and you know, and these were all farming or ranching,

These were all areas of conflicts. And then there was you know, you know, a lot of environmentalists were kind of liberal and you know, and and maybe leaned a little bit towards antique gun and so you had that conflict, you had those areas of antagonism.

mistakes of the environmental movement has made. The biggest mistake is to become the kind of carbon fundamentalists and to forget about the issues that made us all environmentalists, which is, you know, saving the oceans and saving the soils and saving habitat and keeping our kids safe from toxins. And if you talk about climate today, you're gonna you're gonna cause a fistfight. And because you know, and with good reason,

one is because it's a it's an issue. You know, I found this for the fishermen very early on, and they didn't really want to talk about it. Because if you're being asked to give up to something because of a line that somebody shows you on a graph that says you're going to be daddy here, and they're asking you to give up income, you know that's going to help your family, You're going to push back against that.

But if you ask somebody to make a sacrifice to keep toxics out of their food, to keep their water clean so there's no mercury in the fish, they will pay anything to do that. And you know, when we were fighting the lead contamination in the water in Flint, Michigan, we had Hell's Angels standing shoulders shoulder with urban blacks. When we went to you know, at Standing Rock, we had business people, Republicans, union people, democrats, every kind of

person was at Standing Rock for the Keystone pipeline. Because we didn't market it as a climate isge. He marked protecting sacred places, and you know, purple mountains, majesties and Americans will do anything to protect their sacred place. You know, I've been fighting the coal industry for forty years, but I don't focus on climate. I focus on things that are tangible to people. I focus on, you know, the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are the ridges

ecoism terrestrial ecosistm in North America. And the reason for that is during the places in ice age, when they were two and a half miles of ice over where my house was in Mount Kisso, New York, the forest disappeared in America. North American continent turned into a tundrad, and the forest disappeared almost all together except in a couple of tiny refuge ins, and the biggest one of those was Appalasia. Oh and then when the ice melted and withdrew all of North America was receded from the

Appalachian Mountains. So that's why you know, if you go up to a forest and you know in upstate New York or the Hudson Valley or New England, there's typically three dominant species and an applash there's eighty six dominant species. You know, the diversity is extraordinary. We're exploding I think twenty eight hundred tons of ammonia nitrate explosives a week. It's the equivalent of a Hirosima bomb once a week

by by these big companies Pebity Coso Massacre. They're blowing the tops off the mountains to get at the coal seams beneath. There's they've leveled one point four million acres. That's bigger than the state of Delaware. If you drive in West Virginia today, you drive on a road and you'll see these beautiful mountain sides and eats either side. But if you fly over it in a helicopter, they're just Hollywood sets behind them. There's just one hundred square

miles of devastation. It looks like a open quarry. And they can never refill them. They can never rebuild them. And if Americans knew what was happening, there would be a revolution about it because people don't want to see that. These are the landscapes where you know Daniel Boone and Davy Krock It came into bluegrass music came out of it. Nests are racing, so much of our culture has tied

up in this Purple Mountain's majesty. They filled twenty two hundred miles of rivers and streams with mining tailings and you know, destroyed the water, destroy the fisheries, destroyed the you know, the health of the population. It's the sickest, sickest people in our country. And you don't need to ever talk about climate. You talk, you know, you talk about asset rain as it rain has destroyed the forest

cover on the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec. You know, I grew up in the Adirondacks, which is the oldest protected wilderness on Earth. It's it's it was protected since eighteen agers the Lincoln protect that it or you know, since the eighteen eighties it's been protected. And I'm thinking of Yosemite with Lincoln, but the Adirondeck since eighteen eighties. You know, when Roosevelt was governor, it got protected, and we had an expectation of rite to believe that the

Appalachian Mountains would be unspoiled for ever. It's called forever while that's the act. And I, you know, I grew up believing my children, then their children, their children would be able to enjoy it. But today twenty percent of the lakes and the Adirondacks is sterilized from acid rain

and nobody wants that, right. And you know, we're losing the oyster fisheries in Washington where you've lived in Oregon, because the oceans are now becoming so acidic that the bivalves like oysters and mobilized calcium out of the water column to build their shells. And this is this is terrifying.

And and then we have mercury and all the fish in our country and nobody wants that and that so if you all you're going to talk about is carbon And then you know, we just went through COVID a lot of Americans and they saw out totalitarian elements within

our society. Kind of elites use these crazies to clamp down totalitary and top down totalitarian controls and to and to shift wealth upward, and you know, the same thing is happening with climate, you know, and I see it with you know, even with with what Biden's done in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is his big climate Act, that the money is going to carbon capture projects hundreds

of billions of dollars, which are just a scam. It's a boondoggle for the oil industry, for the methane industry. And then to offshore wind farms which are producing energy at five times the couse of onshore wind farms, and they were exterminating the whales and the marine mammals that you know, we all we were drawn to the environmental moment out of love, not out of fear, out of love for these creatures. And you know, and we're now

sacrificing those on the altar of carbon fundamentalism. And the real way to deal with the carbon is is is to deal with soils, is to restore our soils, because they we got to. If we do regenerate agriculture across this country, we absorb one hundred percent of our carbon budget.

That's what we ought to be focusing on. And so I'm not you know, I think climate change is existential I think it's linked to carbon, but I, you know, I do only insist you believe that, and I think the approach should be more words, we're habitat protection, reducing toxics, restoring our soils, and then using markets to regulate our you know, using markets to regulate energy use. So instead of top down controls, we get rid of the subsidies.

We're giving five point two trillion dollars at subsidies to carbon every year. We should get rid of. We should get of all subsidies to you know, to mature industries and then let let you know, let the different energy sources, of generation sources compete in the marketplace, and we'll get the cheapest energy and we'll get the most environmentally sound energy policy. People's say free market capitalis capitalism is the enemy of the environment. It's not in it. We don't

have free market capitalism. We have corporate chrony capitalism, and we have capitalism for the rich, and this very kind of or socialism for the rich, and that's very brutal, kind of barbaric capitalism for the poor. In a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, and without it rich in your community. A true free market which promote efficiency, and efficiency means the

elimination of ways and pollution is ways. In a true free market, we would be required to properly value our natural resources. And it's the undervaluation of those resources that cause us to use them wastefully. And like I said, in a true free market, if you want to make yourself rich, you're going to make your neighbors rich too, in your community rich. What polluters do is they make

themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living with themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market, force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always somebody who's getting a subsidy.

You know, a General Electric dumped its PCBs into the Hudson. It was escaping the discipline of the market. The market. A true free market, every actor in the marketplace should pay one hundred percent of the costs up bringing his product to market, and that includes the cost of cleaning up your mess, which was the lesson we were all supposed to learn the Kindergarten. What polluters do is they figure out a way to externalize those costs and get

the public shoulder their costs. So General Electric dump its piec of bees in the river. It it. You know, when the State of New York said we don't want you to do that anymore, that gee said to the governor, Governor Carry and Governor Rockefellery, if you don't let us do that, we're going to move our plant to New Jersey. It'll get the taxes, it'll get the employment, and you're still going to get the pollution because we're going to

do it from that side of the river. And so they caved into them, and then you know, twenty years later, General Electric left the Hudson Valley, left New York. They don't have a single employee left in New York. They're not paying any any tax revenues. They left behind a four point five billion dollars cleanup problem that nobody in the Hudson nobody can afford to clean up. And you know, everybody in the Hudson Valley is General Electrics PCBs and our flesh and our organs. They put out a business

all of my clients. You know, when I started, we had a twenty five hundred fishing families in the river. Today there's one left, you know, and the Hudson. The abundance of the Hudson has never been more better. You can't eat the fish because they got PCBs in them. And you know, so they stole those fish from us. We paid to clean up the river, and General Electric privatize the Hudson. And now you know the Constitution of New York says the people that stayed on the Hudson,

they own all the fish in the Hudson. But we don't own them anymore. The General Electric Company owns them because they privatize them. And that's what all pollution is. It's somebody making a grab to privatize part the commons, you know, part of the commonwealth, is part of the public trust, and privatize it. And that's a subsidy. I want to give rid of the subsidies. And that if you talk about pollution that way, everybody nodds their head, you know.

it's the right thing. We're gonna exploit a bunch of Bureau of Land Management properties, and then ten years down the road, twenty years down the road, thirty years down the road, we will see that we have not moved the needle on carbon, and we will have developed and

industrialized portions of our landscape. That's a roundabout way of asking that, how if we pursue moving away from coal, if we pursue moving away from oil, how do you picture doing it where we don't need to have a net new or a radically net new usage of landscape to generate.

commercial fisherman there, and you know the problems. It destroys the commercial fishery and we have a sustainable commercial fishery and Nantucket Sound, you know, we have we have small business people who are the heart and soul of America, who've been the oldest industry in our country, three hundred and fifty year old industry. And you know, you put up these turbines and first of all, it kills the whales, It kills the zeals. There's no doubt that that's what's happening.

You know, we're seeing these around.

with their ears bleeding, you know, and uh. And it's it's happening so reliably and so consistently around all the places where there's this construction. It's just a cataclysm. And then the other thing is it's non market base. It's all the subsidy based. Nobody would be buying that. Nobody would be building these if they actually had a market,

if we had a free market. They're buying them because you know, President Biden is giving them hundreds of billions of dollars of free money to build these very lucrative towers. And then they're charging a minimum three times the price I'm on shore win and usually six times the price. So it's going to turn the whole public against green power because they're going to be paying more for electricity than they are today. None of it makes any sense, you know. And I, by the way, I know a

lot about this. I know because I built power plants. I was on the board of them or as a partner in the biggest green tech venture capital firm in the country for a decade, and we built the ivanpap plant, which is the biggest solar thermal plant in North America. Another of my company has built the PVC plan at I mean not the BVC, but the solar plant at as Susanne Marie, which is the biggest you know, solar panel plant in the in then North America. And I've

I've participated in wind power in all kinds. My brother, you know, sells wind power for a living. I know what the cauts are. And the price of wind power on shore wind power right now is about eleven cents of killo white hour and these offshore plants are you know, are getting forty or more forty cents a kilo hour or more. And nobody wants to pay that for energy. It's destructive. So you know what I think is everything

should be market based. I think COLS should have to internalize its costs and if it did, it be the most meaning internalized.

on energy and everybody thinks this is really cheap. If it actually had to internalize the cause it wouldn't be cheap. It would be the most catastrophically expensive way to boil

a pot of water that's ever been devised. Because you know, because if they actually had to pay the real costs of the acid rain of the mercury in our fish of half trillion dollars a year in respiratory injuries from hozone in particulates destructure of the Appalachians that you know, the destruction of habits that if those were quantified and then build their account. You know, the coal burning energy costs forty to fifty cents, I'll kill one hour. Nobody

could be using it. There's no single solution to this. The mining that's associated with these new technologies is extremely destructive, and you know, with the rare earth minerals, et cetera, it is extremely disruptive to some of the most beautiful habitat place like the Congo, these like Alaska, you know, which are going to get devastated by rare earth mining. And those costs have to be assessed and they have to be internalized. And then if you do that, you know,

and that's the way to do it. And what what we'll get is we'll get a lot of localized power production. We'll get you know, not one big bullet solution, but we'll get a lot of smaller solution. And then there's you know, listen, I'm not you know, I've always said about nuclear power that.

until they can buy an insurance. So they had to go to Congress and get this act pass called the Price Anderson Act, and a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night to give them immunity from liability. So if they're they're plant blows up, yeah, and you're you go look at your home owners policy. You'll have a line in it. This policy is not protect you from from from nuclear radiation from powerful And I lived eighteen miles from Indian points, so I saw that and

it was a possibility. This is going to happen and I lose everything and I'm self insured for that insurance company. You're not gonna pay me. Oh that's you know. What I would say, don't get show is that you can get an insurance policy like other industries and then we'll

believe you're safe. But you know, because nobody wants to argue it with you, just get the insurance policy like everybody else does, and then you know, I mean, the other problem is they don't really know what to do with the ways it's they it keeps when they when they first said they said, we'll figure that out by the time we need to, but they never have. And there's you know, they have to set you have to store this stuff now for thirty thousand years, which is

five times the length of recorded human history. So how could that be economical? Right, You're just shifting the cost to a future generation. And but I understand there's new technologies that are promising and if that happens, what I would say to you, what I will do as present is the big problem in our country is we don't have a market markets or energy real markets. Oh, in North Dakota. You, North Dakota is one of the windiest

places on Earth at the sea level. There's enough Scientific American to a study that showed there's enough harnessable to wind in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas to provide one hundred percent in the North American energy grid. Now, there is enough solar energy in the desert in an area seventy five miles by seventy five miles in the desert

southwest provide one hundred percent of the energy. You wouldn't do that because if a cloud passed over Arizona, you'd black out the country, right, But it shows you that it's out there and available.

the sun shines the period you wanted the sun. But you know, the twelve o'clock is peak energy use, and that's the time you're getting peak sunshine. So it actually and then if you throw in a lot of rooftop solar and everybody is feeding into a marketplace, you have abundance of energy to manage the system. And let me let me just you know, finish this kind of thought. In North Dakota, I think the revenue typicult revenue from an acre of corn is about maybe two hundred dollars

a year. You're gonna get revenue if you have a if you have a winter termine on that acre of corn.

It's an AC grid that's incapable of doing a long haul transportation of electrons if you had the grid there. There are huge amounts of capital from you know, General Electric, Seamens, Vestas, all these giant companies that want to pour my capital into building, into renting turbine, building turbines on those farmers lands. So the capital is there to do it, and it would provide a huge source of revenue for American farm families,

which we want to keep on the farm. We want to keep them on the land and make sure that they're prosperous. And you know that Main Street is prosperous, et cetera. We have three different energy grids in our country. They're not unified, and they none of them are capable of doing these things that we need them to do. We need to build that energy grid and that, you know, the same way that we built a canal system in

this kind. We built a canal system in eighteen twenty five, and you know, within a few years New York went from a backwater to being the biggest port in the world because you could the Erie Canal allowed Midwestern farmers to put their produce on a barge and it would never get off a boat until it went to Europe. So all of a sudden, you didn't have to haul stuff over the Appalachians. The government built that canhouse system, the government built the highway system.

brought tremendous prosperity to our country. And so we need to invest in building this grid system and we need to you know, right now, we have an energy market that is I'm governed by fifty public utility commissions, one hundred and twenty control districts with these byzantine rules, this very bulk and high system that operates under under rules that were written by the incumbents by coal and oil to reward. The dirty is filthy, is most poisonous, most toxic.

War mongering feels from hell. Other than the cheap glean green, A wholesome and patriotic feel feels from heaven. Well, we need to create a market that. Now, I'll give you an example. I had a house in Mount Kisco, New York, and I had a state of the art solar system on the roof, and I had a geothermal system in the basement. Every day of the year at home was

producing more energy than I was using. Why can't I sell that access back onto the grid and get the same price the utilities are getting, right, Why can't every American do that?

we have such a pundan energy resources. We have some of the best solo in the world in this country. We have the best wind of any big nation in the world, and we ought to be exploiting that, but we can't do it until we build an energy grid. And let me give you an example of what's going to happen. We built an Arbaet grid for the Internet in the Defense Department. Dart pub built the Arpanet grid, which is was the beginning of the Internet in this

country in nineteen seventy nine. A year after we built it. In nineteen eighty, the CEO of IBM said that IBM was getting out of the personal computers because he said it was a dead end technology. Dell did that. There's a lot of other companies that got out of the business then because they didn't see what was about to happen. Within a few years, virtually every American has a personal computer. And what happened because we built a grid, we built

a marketplace. And what happens happened to the cost of information. It went to zero. Oh imagine you asked me it was important for some reason for me to find out the answer to some obscure question, like, uh, you know, what was Malose Tongue's typical lunchtime, favorite lunchtime meal. Let's say I.

would prevail. In the marketplace, you couldn't exclude people anymore. And that created a telecom revolution, and all these little devices that we now have, like self, are the offspring of that revolution. But what happened to the cause of phone calls and went to zero? Yeah? I worked in a university, you know, at law school, and.

use your phone? It was great, That's what it was like, right, And now that call is free, and it's because we built the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen to electronsity as soon as we do this. My solution is a bigger solution rather than hand picking you know, wind, solar, hydro, nuke. What we do is we create a market and let the market pick it, and we we get rid of

the subsidies we enforced. We make sure you can't pollute the environment because that's a subside, and then we take the lowest costs form of energy in each you know, in each district that that and and that is going to you know, create an economic boom the way that the Internet did, but we got to invest in that in that marketplace.

I think really efficient the big dams. I you know, my inclination is to take dams down, but I'm most mindful of competing interests, So I would I don't know enough about all of the Columbia River dams to see which one should be removed, which ones you know can and then what happens when you remove him, because now they've got all this sentiment that's you know, forty or fifty feet high behind him, And what does that do to the river when you just when you blow the dam and release all.

you know, whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting. And anytime you start talking about Western water, you're you know, people want to kill you because there's so much economic equity by you know, built into perverse economic systems, systems that are encouraging people to do bad things with resources just because of the way the West was settled, you know, it was first in use, first, first in time, first and right and all these other rules that and then

use it or lose it. So you know, if you're if you're an agricultural interest, and you don't use your entire water allocation, you use it, so it encourages you to use the most wasteful water, wasteful you know, grow cotton and alfalfa in the desert because so you you know, I mean if you if you had to design it

from the start, you would not design those rules. And now you know, now you've got one hundred and fifty years of development that's based upon these perverse incentives, and you have entire municipalities and you know, like Scottsdale and Phoenix and that are all essentially unsustainable.

Jean McCarthy all got it immediately. As soon as my father was shot and Congress passed the law is saying everybody is entitled to it who gets certain poll numbers one hundred and twenty days outside of the election from the election. In other words, one hundred and twenty days. We're now we're now five months in eighteen days, so one hundred and twenty days is what that's four months? Right?

to my second floor with my family all home. And on another occasion, a guy showed up at my at one of my rallies in Los Angeles, and he had he was you know, he was covered with concealed weapons. He had two shoulder holsters with loaded magazines. He had a backpack filled with guns, including a laser sighted pistol that was fully loaded, a couple dozen extra ammunition clips, and a lot of other weapons, knives and all this other stuff he had.

in the the the green room. And so my guys thought, is a US Marshall badge looked too shiny, and they detained him, and then they found all these other weapons on him, and they called the police. The police came in and arrested him and released him, you know, the next day. So despite the fact he had all all this fake idea on them. And so there's been a number of things like that that have happened, and you know, President Biden has made a decision not to give me

Secret Service protection. And I'm pretty sure the reason, although I don't like to look into other people's minds, is that they know this is, you know, my security team is causing our campaign a million dollars a month, and they'd rather be spending that on security than on you know, advertising on ballot access. The answer to your original question, they've tried to make it insurmountable. We have an amazing team, and we have now one hundred thousand volunteers. We have

more volunteers out there than any other campaign. And people are very, very very happy about signing my signatures. In fact, the professional ballot the professional signature gatherers, and there's a

whole industry that that's all they do. They charged typically about ten bucks to fifteen bucks a signature, and it's a big industry, and they're all saying that this is the easiest campaign that they've ever done for any purpose, commercial campaigns, referendums, that people are you know that there's an enthusiasm for signing to give me on the ballot. Whether people want to vote for me or not, I don't know, but they people want to see me on

the ballot. So we've done the two hardest states. We've done California, the three hardest we've done Texas, which is the hardest of all. We only have forty six states to get one hundred and I think one hundred and thirteen thousand signatures in forty six days, and we got a quarter million.

trillion dollars upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires. They created a billionaire a day in five hundred days, you know, and they just devastated a lot of these all businesses that they with the hard and soul of our country, you know, are gone and they're never coming back. Forty percent of black owned businesses, you know, will never reopen. Many of them had three generations of equity in them. And you know, we're turning now from a ownership society

into a into a into a rental society. And you know, when we do that, we're going from being citizens to being subjects. People don't have homes if they don't have equity, access equity where they can pursue their entrepreneurial impulses. You know, our country is then on a feudal model. It's not a colonial model, not you know, not American democracy anymore. And you know, I would really I would love to if I was on a debating stage with them, you know,

I would drill down on that issue. And you know, why in the world would they close the business press? And Trump knew that it was wrong, he said it, he said, I'll never do that, and then you know, he went ahead and did it for a year, and they did it for five hundred days, the two of them, and it was just agony for small business people. So you know, that's I guess. I mean, there's a million other things that you know, I think the issue with

President Trump Prisent Biden is that they're very different. People have different dispositions, they different personalities, they have different ideologies, they're rhetoric. The whole way they interact with the public, with the world is you know, it couldn't be more different. But the actual issues that they that they're disputing each other on, it's a really narrow Overton window. It's like guns, abortion, order, security,

trans rights, et cetera. It's all you know, they're all important issues, but they're kind of marginal with accepted to the border, which I think is really a big, big issue. But the existential issues, the issues that are critical to our survival is a nation. They never talk about that. You know, we have a thirty four trillion dollar debt now and we're spending more on our national We spend more servicing that debt every year than our defense budget.

Within five years, fifty cents that have every dollar that's collected in taxes, we'll go to the servicing the debt within ten years one hundred percent is existential and nobody you'll never hear President find or President Trump talk about what they're going to do. Why is that because they ran up the debt in each of them four years off as half of that debt belongs to them a president.

the wars the future. We're right now spending nine and a half nine you know, half a trillion and a half billion, nine hundred and fifty billion dollars a year preparing for wars that will never be fought again. And you know the whole and it's wrong, and we need it's existential. If we don't solve the debt. We have the biggest area that we can have saving this is the chronic disease epidemic that's costing US four point three trillion dollars. We can end that very very quickly, four

point three trillion dollars, five times our military. But when my uncle the president, six percent of Americans had chronic disease. Today is sixty percent to why is that? Why did autism go from one in ten thousand in my generation today one in every ten thousand seventy year old man has autism and my kids generation one in every twenty two boys. Why did that happen? And why did obese that he go from thirteen percent when my uncle was president,

of fifty percent of our kids today? Why is diabetes? When I was a kid, a typical pediatrician saw one case of diabetes in a fifty year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre diabetic or diabetic. Why is that happening? Nobody's answering those questions. Why did food allergies suddenly appear? In nineteen eighty nine? I have eleven brothers and sisters. I had seventy first cousins. Nobody, nobody I knew had

a peanut allergy? Why do five my seven kids have food allergies? Something happen and we know the year it happened because EBA answered that question nineteen eighty nine. Something happened that year that ruined our health. And we have the highest chronic disease burden in the world today. Nobody else has this happening like us. We had sixteen percent of the COVID deaths in our country, the highest body count on earth. We only have four point two percent

of the world's population. What were we doing? Whatever we did was wrong? And CDC says, well, it's just because Americans are so sick. Well, that's you know, why aren't they telling us why the CDC's had The average American who died from COVID had three point eight chronic diseases. They had obesity, they had diabetes, they had asthma, and one other thing. Why do we have then nobody else in the world has that, And you know, we know it was something that happened in nineteen eighty nine or

there a ballots. And there's a very famous toxicologist in New York who I've used as an expert in many of my cases. His name's Phil Landrigan. He's looked at this issue and he said, it's there's only about thirteen things it could be. It has to be an environmental toxin because genes don't cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental exposure. And he said, here's what it could be. It could be life estate from roundup,

which follows that timeline near nicotoid pessis. It's follow that timeline aches in, which is another pestis on all of our water, seventy percent of our water. Now, it follows that timeline pfoas and PFAS is a class of what they call forever chemicals. I litigated on them. They made a movie out of my case called Dark Waters or in Mark Ruffalo. If those are those chemicals are in all of our furniture. They're in our child pajamas, you know.

And get around that timeline high fruitose corns here, okay, follows that and nobody else allowed.

Arthur wright Is, juvenile diabetes loop is Groan's disease. All these exotic autoimmune disease suddenly appeared. And then the allergic these punt allergies, food allergies, EXMA. I never knew anybody what ezma. Every classroom has kids with EXEA now asthma and uh anaphylaxis and then obesity. All of those are listed as side effects, so you have to look at those. Part of it. Probably what's happening is all of those exposures. Our kids are swimming around in the toxics of today

and we're there. Their immune systems are constantly being challenged and rechallenged because a lot of these toxics operate along those same biological pathways. Oh and it's the kids probably who have poor mitochondrial function to start off with. The mitochondrials, the energy systems are asel and if you if you if you target them enough, it paralyzed them and you go into a cascading effect where you end up with

brain damage or with autoimmune disease or whatever. So we're probably challenging and reaching challenge and the kids who just have a weaker system who were born with you know, mitochondrial dysfunctions which would never show in typically human but if you challenge them enough, they're assault their immune sism enough that's going to happen. And so you know, I know how to fix it, and I'm going to fix

it very very quickly. And you know, you fix it by doing real science, and i AGE by doing good science. And i AGE when I was a kid, was the premiere scientific agency in the world. It was gold standard. There's no other country in the world that has anything like it. And they were doing, you know, groundbreaking on every issue. And in nineteen eighty we passed a law that said called the Blood Bidole Act, that allowed NIAGE scientists to collect royalties on any product that they regulated.

If you can imagine that. So, for example, and i AGE itself, the more dear in a vaccine was created by NIH and they own half of it. So they're making billions of dollars on sales of a product that they're promoting, that they're mandating. They're telling you you can't go to work unless you take this product, and they're not telling you they're making billions of dollars on it. The sixth top scientists at an ihe are making one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year personally on that product.

So they're paying for their mortgages, their boats, their schools, that their kids' education, their alimonies, and you know, these are the guys who are supposed to be funding problems in those products and protecting us from them. Instead they're you know, they're they're getting rich on them. And when you have those kinds of conflicts of interest, therese perverse incentives. They it makes people turn a blind eye to some of the problems. So I'm going to go into NIH

my first week in office. I'm going to get all of that and what happened. And they after they passed that act, NIH went from doing this cutting edge science, tell us why you know how to keep ourselves well? And they became an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. I think it was in twenty twenty sixteen. There was two hundred and twenty new drugs or something like that approved by FDA, and one hundred percent of them came We're incubated through NIH. So NIAH is now just a drug

development company. And what I'm going to do is go over there and say we're going to give drug development a break for if they have they have a budget of forty two billion dollars, they distribute that to fifty six thousand scientists at universities who also collect royalties on

new drugs. And I'm going to say, from now on, we're not going to do anything until we figure out why we have the sickest kids on earth, and what are the products that are causing that, And then you know, I'm going to generate enough science on those to make sure that we can put an end to those exposures. Now you're gonna say to yourself, see that even if you figured out that high fruitose corn syrup was the culprit, and you still could never get rid of it because

the forces behind it are so powerful. It's Monsanto, it's Cargill, a million farmers who are tied up in its production, and you know, entire industries and all that's true. But the way that you do it is you produce enough science enough in different kinds of science, epidemiological studies, clinical studies, observational animal studies and and you know, and patriotage studies,

all of those. Once you get enough science, then the lawyers come in and they do the work for you, because then they come in if you prove high fruitose corn syrup is behind the childhood diabetes epidemic, and the lawyers were round up ten thousand kids with childhood diabetes to the company and that's the end of the show. That's what I did with Monsanto. Everybody said you'll never

you'll never get rid of Claife essay. But we had forty thousand clients, all of them a home gardeners, almost all home gardeners, who had gotten non Hodgkinson foma from using roundup.

million from Monsanto. The second case we won eighty nine million. The third case, we asked the jury for a billion and they came back with two point two billion. At that point, Monsanto came to negotiating tables and we want to end this. They settled the case for thirteen billion dollars for all of the cases, and they agreed to take life and say out of home gardening products. So

you can stop them. You just need the right science because once you get the right science, the courts will allow them to be you know, you go to front of a jury. And that's what I'm going to do with all of these different exposures. There's only thirteen of them.

couldn't do it. She makes me funny, which is and I'll tell you one thing she will not allow, which is a dead rabbit in the house or a dead dead squirrel.