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RFK Jr says he will cut gov’t funding of Big Pharma, restore America’s middle class if elected president – LifeSite

(LifeSiteNews) — Medical freedom champion and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spelled out his governing priorities in a Tuesday interview, further carving out a reputation as a populist challenger to the political establishment.

With the national Democratic Party having announced that it has “no plans to sponsor primary debates,”  RFK Jr., attorney and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, is left to argue his case for presidential election on independent platforms like Freddie Sayers’ UnHerd. 

Kennedy explained to Sayers, who posed as a skeptic, how he intends to reclaim the interests of the American people in government affairs, which he criticized as having been corrupted by mega-corporate influence.

According to Kennedy, this state-corporate merger is “systematically hollowing out the American middle class, through wars…bank bailouts…lockdowns,” and more. To put the federal government back on track, Kennedy intends to end the war machine, strengthen civil liberties, reorganize U.S. intelligence, and disentangle regulatory agencies from the businesses they’re supposed to keep in check.

He pointed out that the COVID lockdowns cost a whopping $16 trillion, and shifted $4 trillion in wealth “from the middle American middle class to [a] new oligarchy of billionaires.” In addition, recent American wars, including the war in Ukraine, have cost a total of $8 trillion, for which Americans are getting a return of “worse than nothing.”

So that’s $24 trillion in total. Is it any wonder that we don’t have a middle class left in the United States of America? And unless we rebuild the middle class and rebuild our economy, our national security is going to fail, and our democracy is going to fail,” said Kennedy.

A key priority of Kennedy’s — restoring the integrity of U.S. regulatory agencies — is informed by 40 years of experience litigating against those agencies, he pointed out. 

As an example of their corruption, he cited one of the trials he was involved in, during which they found that “the head of the pesticide division at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was secretly working for Monsanto, and was running that agency to promote the mercantile ambitions of that business rather than the public interest,” in part by “killing studies” and “ghostwriting studies.” 

“And that’s true throughout the agencies,” Kennedy added, going on to note how the Food and Drug Administration “gets 50 percent of its budget from Big Pharma,” and the National Institutes of Health “collects royalties when [a] pharma company sells [its] product.”

“The Department of Transportation is run by the railroads in our country, and by the airlines. The banks have utterly corrupted the Securities and Exchange Commission. And…the worst, media has corrupted the FEC (Federal Election Commission),” he went on.

Kennedy maintains that environmental concerns, another opportunity for imposing what he believes are justified regulatory safeguards, are also being exploited by an elite class for more wealth and control, as they took advantage of the COVID outbreak “to make themselves richer [and] impose totalitarian controls on society.”

“Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls,” said Kennedy. 

Kennedy indicated that he wants to even more thoroughly disrupt the military-industrial complex, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies, which he believes have been captured by the former.

He laid out a strategy by which he would put an end to the war in Ukraine, which he sees the U.S. as having thus far used to “maximize bloodshed.”

Kennedy told Sayers he would use the Minsk Accords as a “groundwork for a final settlement”; remove the Aegis Missile systems from their placement 70 miles from the Russian border, and “agree to keep NATO out of the Ukraine,” something the Russians have specifically asked for.

I think we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents, and it doesn’t mean saying that Vladimir Putin is not a gangster — he is — and [that] he’s not a thug — he is…But going to war is not in his interest either. And he repeatedly told us, these are red lines you’re crossing,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy said that his approach is informed by the experience of his uncle, JFK, who “realized during the Bay of Pigs crisis [that] the CIA had devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the military industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars.”

I think the CIA needs to be reorganized in a way,” Kennedy went on after Sayers asked him about the issue. While he believes “most of the people who work at the CIA are patriotic Americans,” he sees a “need to separate the espionage functions of that agency” and the operations division “that actually does dirty tricks, that kills people, that makes wars…because what happens is, the operations tail begins to wag the espionage dog.”

“And very early on Allen Dulles essentially corrupted the purpose of it by getting the CIA involved in assassinations and fixing elections. And the CIA has been involved now in fixing coup d’etats or attempted coup d’etats in about a third of the countries in the world, most of them democracies,” he continued.

“I would break up the CIA in a way that would make them accountable,” he added.

When asked about his stance on cultural issues, Kennedy declined to answer, explaining that he sees them as “divisive,” and that he doesn’t “feel the need to take a position on every issue.”

Kennedy describes himself as a “traditional liberal,” but noted that there is a “growing coalition…of populist forces on the Left and Right” that are “finding common ground.”

“I think that that really is probably the only thing that is gonna rescue American democracy,” he added.

“I think there’s a rebellion happening in our country now. There’s a populist rebellion, and if we don’t capture that rebellion, or the forces of idealism, and the forces of generosity and kindness and making our country an exemplary nation again, somebody else is going to hijack that rebellion for much darker purposes.”

Kennedy’s vocal opposition to COVID vaccines and mandates has recently made him an unlikely ally of many conservatives, although he remains aligned with mainstream liberals on social issues.

He has said in the past that he favors legal abortion, opposes repealing Obamacare, and supported the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions. 

While a USA Today/Suffolk University poll claimed that support among Biden voters for Kennedy is scant, a recent Rasmussen Reports survey indicates otherwise, showing that 52 percent of Democrats support Kennedy’s candidacy, with 32 percent opposed, and 16 percent unsure.

Kennedy’s weighty support could spell an upset of Biden’s 2024 run, considering the presidential incumbent’s polling weakness. During the 20th century, sitting presidents have generally lost general elections after being weakened by a primary challenger.

Kennedy recently criticized the Democratic National Committee for setting up a “rigged” primary system. He also argued that the Democratic Party wants to eschew primary debates to ensure President Joe Biden makes it through the primaries without any real challenge.

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