Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of Democrat politics, suspended his campaign for president and threw his support behind Donald Trump. His speech explaining why he made such a monumental move sent shockwaves through the political establishment and will live on as a turning point in U.S. history. The South Shore Press recognizes its impact in the race for the White House and excerpts it here:
August 23, 2024–Phoenix, Arizona: Sixteen months ago, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father and my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.
I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960. And back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.
As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big AG, and big money.
When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent. In an honest system, the system that my father and uncle thrived in, I believe that I would have won the election. A system with open debates, with fair primaries and with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, and a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.
In the name of saving democracy, a Democratic Party set itself to dismantle it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of the signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably awful debate performance precipitated a palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based on nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced circus. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answers. It did it by weaponizing the government agencies. It did it, abandoning democracy. It did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.
What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of the federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with, or outright coerces, media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.
The DNC prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot. And our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me. During the sixteen months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks instead, they ran a continuous deluge, hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power. A federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House’s censorship project: “The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” His 155-page decision details how, just 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal, and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA, which is a censorship agency, the center of the censorship-industrial complex, DHS, the IRS and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.
Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place: free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children. Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it is a victim of the West, both Russia and the West. We have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids, all of whom we should be mourning, have died. And Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed. War has been a disaster for our country, as well. We have squandered nearly $200 billion already. And these are badly needed dollars in our suffering communities all over our country.
President Trump telephoned me, and in a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. And in those meetings he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We are aligned with each other on other key issues as well, such as ending 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 and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections. I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war, for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside, and for finally protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children, above all things.
Considering the grievous human cause of the tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say: it is crippling the nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent $0 on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it’s double the military budget, and it is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, at least 4 trillion dollars, five times our military budget. And that’s a 20% drag on everything we do and aspire to. Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. People worry about DEI or about bigotry of any kind. This dwarfs anything. We are poisoning the poor; we are systematically poisoning minorities across this country.
Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power, and our children will be the ones who suffer the most. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic and happier. I won’t fail in doing this.
After eight years of a President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and his closest friends all support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there’s even a small chance of saving these kids.