Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks the truth about the authoritarian pandemic response that continues to threaten democracy and liberty as we know it. It’s cost him friendships and 40 years of political contacts, not to mention loss of income and business relationships.
But the threats to his reputation and credibility, as the media have attacked him and his message, don’t feel like a sacrifice, Kennedy says, as he feels called upon to advocate for this issue.
In an interview with journalist Kim Iversen, Kennedy explains, “I look at it as a gift. I was raised in a milieu, in a family, where we assume that our lives would be consumed in some controversy, and that it would be a privilege if we were able to take some meaningful role in that.”1
Living Through a Real-World Milgram Experiment
Kennedy is part of the estimated 30% of the population who remained skeptical of the mainstream narrative throughout the pandemic. The majority, however, were not, instead buying fully into the fear and propaganda being sold to them.
He references the now-infamous experiment conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1962, during which he tested the limits of human obedience to authority. The Milgram experiment was conducted following the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who used the Nuremberg defense, or “befehl ist befehl,” which translates to “an order is an order.”
The Milgram experiment clearly showed that people would act against their own judgment and harm another person to extreme lengths simply because they were told to do so.2 It was associated with the CIA’s top-secret MKULTRA project, which engaged in mind control experiments, human torture and other medical studies, including how much LSD it would take to “shatter the mind and blast away consciousness.”3
MKULTRA was just one of a number of mind control experiments conducted by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Kennedy:4
“The CIA did a lot of experiments with universities, almost 200 universities around the country with social scientists to study humans, human behavior, and they were experimenting with all kinds of things like psychiatric drugs, with psychedelic drugs, LSD, etc., with torture, with sensory deprivation, and all kinds of means for controlling not only individuals, but entire populations with propaganda, fear, all these things.
So you had all of these universities getting hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars from the CIA or from CIA front groups for programs that were called MKULTRA. The reason it’s called MK is that’s code for mind control. So MK Dietrich, MKULTRA, MK Naomi, Operation Artichoke, Operation Bluebird, many, many others, were all about funneling money to universities to study controlling human behavior.”
Yet, even during the Milgram experiment, 33% of the people got up and walked out, refusing to violate their ethics.
“They may be from a whole range of political backgrounds and parties, who just … maintain that capacity for critical thinking, and is not subject to … that override from authority,” Kennedy said. “And it seems to me … that we’re all now in the grips of this huge Milgram experiment, where we have a Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is this trusted authority, telling us to do things that we know are wrong, like censor speech.”5
Fear Is the Enemy
Fear is the enemy, as it allows totalitarian systems to take control of people, destroying democracy in the process, Kennedy says.6 It’s commonly used by people in authority to exert further control, like shot mandates and lockdowns. Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded, has filed more than 50 lawsuits, many of them addressing COVID mandates.
In the beginning, even judges were too frightened to rule against the state dictates, leading to “really crazy decisions that … made no sense,” Kennedy says. They’ve since made some progress, including in New York, where a judge said since the shot doesn’t prevent transmission, you can’t have a mandate for it.7
But he points out that a government will not only not relinquish power, but will also abuse any power it has to the maximum extent possible. Just because the pandemic is over, the desire to control won’t go away. He explains:8
“People should keep in mind that nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarian regime rules. So, if you think that you know, by abandoning these rules, that somehow things are going to get better or it’s going to satiate the need to control you, it’s not. It’s just going to embolden them to do something worse.”
Unprecedented Times, Technology Threaten Democracy
Kennedy also states that we’re facing a situation we’ve never been in before. It’s not that democracy hasn’t been threatened, and lost, in the past, but now the technological tools are available for widespread surveillance:9
“There have been many times when we lost democracy. There has been polarization that was this bad before, particularly during the Civil War. But other times in our history, there have been very, very toxic polarization.
There’s been times when we lost democracy and that large corporations, particularly during the Gilded Age in the 1880s and 1890s … — you know, the big oil companies like Standard Oil — were running our country, and that we really did not have a functioning democracy.”
The difference was that, back then, “we started cutting away at this monolith of corporate and government power, the merger of corporate power that had abolished democracy,” and were able to restore it. What’s different today is that we now have the technology available to control human behavior at a large scale:10
“The problem is that we’ve now got these instrumentalities, these technologies, for human behavioral control that we never had before. The ambition, the intention of every totalitarian regime in history is to control every aspect of human behavior — our speech, our thoughts, our transactions, our movements, everything that we do — but they’ve never been able to do that, because nobody, no government, has ever had that reach.
But today, we have facial recognition systems all over the place. We have satellite systems. Bill Gates says his satellite system, which is 61,000 satellites … will be able to look at every square inch of the Earth 24 hours a day. We’re now beginning on the road to adopting digital currencies, which is economic slavery. As soon as that happens, we lose all rights because they will be able to starve you.
And we already have an example of that with a trucker strike, and in our demonstration in Toronto, Trudeau sent people out to look at the license plates for these truckers and then froze their bank accounts. So they couldn’t pay their mortgage, they couldn’t put their kids in school, they couldn’t buy food for their family. None of them were charged with a crime.”
There’s No ‘Pandemic Exemption’ in the Constitution
Kennedy also makes the point that the framers of the Constitution did not add any exemptions due to pandemics. They were well aware of them, having experienced multiple epidemics during the Revolutionary War. But the Constitution was protected and allowed to function as intended. Adding exceptions is something new. Kennedy notes:11
“There were epidemics in every city that killed tens of thousands of people — yellow fever, cholera, smallpox and many others. So, the framers knew all about it. But they didn’t put an epidemic or pandemic exception in the United States Constitution. It’s a new thing … we had a civil war and Lincoln — at a time when our country was really ‘this far’ away from being destroyed, 669,000 Americans died. It’s like 20 million people died today.
And yet, when he tried to get rid of Habeas Corpus, the Supreme Court said, ‘You can’t do that.’ There’s no exemption for war … there’s no exception for pandemics. We had a Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 and that killed 50 million people. And yet, we did not stop the Constitution from functioning.”
Censorship Destroys Democracy
Kennedy says the remedy to stop totalitarian control is democracy. But, “My father always said that democracy was completely dependent on the free flow of information.”12 Open debate, allowed for by free speech, leads to the best ideas and solutions that allow a country and its population to thrive.
“If you shut off the free flow of information and start censoring things,” Kennedy says, “we lose the one advantage that we have. And, of course, once you start doing censorship, you are on the slippery slope to totalitarianism.”13 Right now, we’re facing institutional corruption, with the military industrial complex at the helm.
“I think if you removed Anthony Fauci … he’s going to be replaced by another Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy explains.14 Meanwhile, he says, it’s the military industrial complex, which also owns the press, that we need to take democracy back from:15
“We’re living in the era that Dwight Eisenhower warned us against on January 17, 1960 … in his farewell speech, Eisenhower gave probably the most important speech … in American history, where he warned Americans against the emergence of the military industrial complex — the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the associated industries, and he included the scientific bureaucracy.
He specifically spent a lot of time in that speech arguing about the federal scientific bureaucracy, meaning NIH, that they would be the authors of the destruction of American democracy if we allowed them to do that … And then 9/11 … turned America really into the beginnings of a surveillance state. And COVID completed the task.
… and the job of the CIA is to develop a pipeline of new wars that America could fight to feed this machine, the military contractors, and look what happened in COVID — 138 companies were involved in manufacturing and distributing the vaccine.
They’re all military contractors. The Pentagon and the National Security Agency ran the entire pandemic response. Pfizer and Moderna don’t really own those vaccines. They slap their labels on them, but it was a Pentagon project. And so, you know, we’re dealing with a military industrial complex.”
Can Democracy Withstand Turnkey Totalitarianism?
With totalitarian forces angling to control every aspect of human behavior, the time for dissent is now. The first step is waking up to the truth. The next is to stand up for what you believe in. The ultimate outcome, however, remains to be seen. According to Kennedy:16
“The levels of control that they have now over human behavior are greater than we’ve ever seen. It’s what I call turnkey totalitarianism … we’re trying to educate the public and build our army to restore democracy.
And they’re rising at the same time to put this infrastructure in place that will give them total control, destroy dissent and disable any kind of insurgency or subversion or any difference with the official government narrative, and the orthodoxies … when they put that in place, it’s really hard to predict whether democracy will have the resiliency to restore those institutions.”
