8.23.24 – Real Clear Politics and ABC 15 Arizona
“RFK, Jr. Exits Race, Endorses Trump, Wants To Stop America’s Health Crisis”
By Real Clear Politics, ABC 15 Arizona
Full Video of RFK, Jr.’s 8.23.24 Speech and Full Transcription
Excerpts:
RFK, Jr. added: "Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues: censorship, war, and chronic disease.
I want everyone to know that I’m NOT terminating my campaign. I am simply suspending it, not ending it.
My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris.
The same applies in red states. I encourage you to vote for me…
"But, in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I have started that process. I urge voters in those states not to vote for me."
EXCERPTS FROM 8.23.24 TRANSCRIPTION OF RFK, JR.’S SPEECH -- AMERICA CAUSING HEALTH EPIDEMICS FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS
…Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone.
I was in Las Vegas. Calley is the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy.
Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused this epidemic.
Calley had been working on these issues for my campaign and advising me on them since the beginning. These subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 years.
I was delighted when Calley told me that day that he had been advising President Trump.
He told me President Trump had been anxious to talk to me about chronic disease and other subjects, and to explore avenues of cooperation.
He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump called me later that day.
I met again with President Trump, his family members, and close advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.
In those meetings, he suggested we join forces as a unity party.
…That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately, even fiercely if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.
I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which I continue to have very serious differences.
However, we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the Forever Wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, as well as interfering in our elections.
AMERICA WITH ALL ITS WEALTH – SICKEST IN CHRONIC DISEASES
…In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is regarding chronic disease, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School.
…Today, we spend more on healthcare than any country on earth -- twice what they pay in Europe -- and yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation.
We rank around 79th in health outcomes, behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mongolia, and other countries.
Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we do.
During the COVID epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world.
We accounted for 16% of the COVID deaths while only making up 4.2% of the world’s population.
…The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. These were people with immune system collapse and mitochondrial dysfunction, and no other country has anything like this.
CHRONIC HEALTH ISSUES IN U.S.
Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues.
Fifty years ago, that number was less than 1%.
We have gone from 1% to 66%.
OVERWEIGHT, OBESITY, DIABETES IN U.S.
In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese.
Fifty percent of our children are overweight.
…In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%, compared to 50% here.
Half of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
…Today, one out of every three kids who walk through a doctor’s office door is diabetic or prediabetic.
ALZHEIMER’S, AUTISM, NEUROLOGICAL DISEASES IN U.S.
The mitochondrial disorder that causes diabetes is also causing Alzheimer’s, which is classified as diabetes and is costing this country more than our military budget every year.
There has been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid: ADD, ADHD, language delay, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500.
Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 according to the CDC nationally.
…One out of every 22 kids in California has autism.
This is a crisis: 77% of our kids are too disabled to serve in the United States military.
What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day?
No other country in the world is experiencing this, this is only happening in America.
In my generation, among 70-year-old men, the autism rates are about one in 10,000.
In my kids’ generation, it is one in 34.
In California, it’s one in 22.
WHY IS AMERICA SO SICKLY?
About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. That is like one out of every five.
That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly.
Cancer rates are skyrocketing in both the young and old.
Ovarian cancers are up 79%.
MENTAL HEALTH DISEASES IN AMERICA
One in four American women is on antidepressant medication.
Forty percent of teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, with half a million children on SSRIs.
FIRST CULPRIT CAUSING THIS SUFFERING IN U.S.
I will name two culprits.
First, and the worst, is ultra-processed food.
About 70% of American children's diets are ultra-processed.
That means industrial manufacturing.
These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
Laboratory scientists who previously worked for the cigarette industry—companies that purchased the big food corporations in the 1970s and 80s—deployed thousands of scientists to figure out chemicals to make foods more addictive.
These ingredients did not exist 100 years ago, and humans are not biologically adapted to eat them.
Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe but are ubiquitous in American processed foods.
SECOND CULPRIT CAUSING THIS SUFFERING IN U.S.
The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment.
Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies.
The impact on our children's hormones is relentless.
Many of these chemicals increase estrogen.
Because young children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors, America’s puberty rate is now occurring at ages 10 to 13—six years earlier than girls reached puberty in 1900.
Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the Earth.
This is not because of better nutrition; this is not normal.
Breast cancer, which is also estrogen-driven, now strikes one in eight women.
MASS-POISONING OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS IN U.S.
Minority communities suffer disproportionately. People worry about DEI or bigotry of any kind, but this dwarfs those concerns.
We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country.
Industry lobbyists have ensured that most of the food in lunch programs, 70% of food stamps, and 70% of school lunches are processed foods.
There are no vegetables—nothing you would want to eat.
We are just poisoning poor citizens, and that is why they bear the highest chronic disease burden of any demographic in our country, and the highest in the world.
The same food industry lobbied to ensure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to commodity crops that are the feedstock for processed food.
These policies are destroying small farms and our soils.
We give about eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco as we do to fruits and vegetables…
GOOD NEWS: WE CAN CHANGE THIS QUICKLY DOING THREE THINGS
America can get healthy again.
To do that, we need to do three things.
First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies.
Second, we need to change the incentives in our healthcare system.
Third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.
WHERE TO START?
Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people with conflicts of interest. These are people from the processed food industry.
They are deciding what Americans eat, what goes into our school lunch programs, and what foods are recommended in programs like WIC and food stamps.
The people in control are corrupted and conflicted individuals working for giant for-profit corporations.
Seventy-five percent of FDA funding does not come from taxpayers; it comes from Big Pharma.
Pharma executives, consultants, and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies.
With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that.
WHAT SPECIFIC CHANGES TO MAKE
We are going to staff these agencies with doctors who are free from industry funding.
We are going to make sure that decisions made for consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.
A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry because when adults develop chronic conditions, they are put on medication for life.
EXAMPLE – OZEMPIC MADE BY NOVO NORDISK
Imagine what will happen when Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month.
It’s recommended for children as young as six for a condition—obesity—that is completely preventable and barely existed 100 years ago.
Seventy-four percent of Americans are obese.
If all of them took this prescription, it would cost $3 trillion a year.
This drug is made by Novo Nordisk, the biggest company in Europe—a Danish company.
The Danish government does not recommend it; they recommend diet changes and exercise to treat obesity.
In our country, the recommendation is for children as young as six.
Novo Nordisk’s entire value is based on its projections of what it will sell in America.
MUST DEFEAT WHITE HOUSE’S PRESENT BILL IN FRONT OF CONGRESS TODAY
The food lobbyists have a bill in front of Congress today, backed by the White House, Vice President Harris, and President Biden, to allow this to happen.
This $3 trillion cost is going to bankrupt our country.
For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for our families—three meals a day—and eliminate diabetes altogether.
We are going to bring healthy food back to school lunches.
We are going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with agricultural subsidies.
We are going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We are going to reform the entire food system.
We need new leadership in Washington.
MUST ELECT TRUMP
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are in bed with the big food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among the DNC’s major donors.
Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue.
Four more years of consolidating neocon power will cause our children to suffer the most.
…I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker.
I have 11 siblings and seven kids myself, and I was always conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends.
I watched these sick, damaged kids in that generation—almost all of them damaged.
Nobody in power seemed to care or even notice.
RFK, JR. FEELS CALLED FOR THIS DESPERATE MOMENT
For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity.
The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for my running for president…It is the reason I made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and support President Trump.
This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it will cause my wife, children, and friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I am meant to do. That certainty gives me eternal peace, even in storms.
If I am given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically.
We will make Americans healthy again.
Within four years, America will be a healthier country—stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I will not fail in doing this.
Ultimately, the future, however, it happens, is in God’s hands, in the hands of the American voters, and those of President Trump.
If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.
This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic.
I asked myself what choices I must make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health.
I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children.
I am 70 years old. I might have a decade to be effective.
…President Trump told me this is what he wants to be his legacy.
I am choosing to believe that he will follow through.
His son, his biggest donors, and his closest friends all support this objective.
My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but if there is even a small chance of saving these kids, I must take it.
Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.
…The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children.
If we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection and health and the future that they deserve.