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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Run for U.S. President, Announcement Event April 19
BOSTON, MA—APRIL 6, 2023—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who hails from one of the most famous families in American political history, will announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States on Wednesday, April 19 at Noon, at the Boston Park Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts.
Kennedy campaign representatives Wednesday filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to move the campaign forward.
Kennedy is a nationally known trial attorney who has successfully championed numerous environmental causes over his long career.
Kennedy is the second eldest son of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who in 1968 mounted a major campaign in a tumultuous primary that dislodged the incumbent Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s uncle, as was Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Announces Run for President of the United States to Overflow, Standing-Room Crowd in Boston
BOSTON, MA—APRIL 19, 2023—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today announced his bid to run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States to an overflow, standing-room-only crowd at the Boston Park Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts.
In his speech, Kennedy emphasized priorities of clean government, civil liberties, peace, and economic revitalization. Above all, he invoked the theme of unity.
"During this campaign and during my administration my objective will be to make as many Americans as possible forget that they are Republicans or Democrats and remember that they are Americans," Kennedy said. "We need to focus on the values we share instead of the issues that divide us."
Strongly committed to civil liberties, Kennedy emphasized the importance of honest government and freedom of speech.
"The government/media strategy of censoring dissonant voices is not only antithetical to our most fundamental values, it is counterproductive in that it fuels the flames of polarization, alienation, and anger,” Kennedy said.
On a related note, he observed that "the blizzard of misinformation that is now inundating our democracy will end only when the government and the media start telling the truth to Americans."
Kennedy was born on January 17, 1954, in Washington, DC, and is the third of 11 children of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. He is the nephew of America’s 35th President, John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy has carried on his family’s legacy of public service by devoting himself to environmental causes and children’s welfare. He struck those themes in his speech, stating, "Good environmental policy is always identical to good economic policy if we measure our economy based on how it produces jobs over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community."
His reputation as a resolute defender of the environment and children’s health stems from hundreds of successful legal actions. TIME Magazine named Kennedy its “Hero for the Planet” for his leadership in the fight to restore the Hudson River.
Kennedy is an award-winning writer and New York Times’ bestselling author.
Today, I Declared Myself an Independent Candidate for President
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.
OCT 9, 2023
Today, I declared myself an independent candidate for President of the United States of America.
And more than that, I joined my voice with all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful, to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
Today, I declared my independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government to milk us for profit.
I declared independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists who now outnumber members of Congress 20 to 1.
Watch my speech here
I declared independence from the mercenary media that forever urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
I declared independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, I declared independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses. If left unchecked, they will commoditize our air, water, food, labor, and children, and turn the American Dream into desperation and dust.
I declared my independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us? How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent to preserve its power? And how can we pursue happiness when our nation's families are imprisoned by debt and hunger and jobs that will never pay the bills?
And so today I declared my independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for one another. And to do that, I had to declare my independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
Read my entire speech below (as prepared):
Thank you, Lewis GrassRope, for that beautiful blessing. Lewis is a tribal elder from the Lower Brule Sioux, the grandson of a signer of the 1876 Fort Laramie treaty.
My father visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in May of 1968 and spent the entire day there. A local political operative cautioned him that they mustn’t keep the crowd of 20,000 waiting in Rapid City, commenting that “Indians don’t vote.” My father told him sharply, “You don’t understand your candidate.” When he saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out heap of an automobile, he wept. Word of his tears swept across the reservation and on June 5, Sioux voters turned out in historic numbers and made my father victorious in South Dakota.
On my many trips to Pine Ridge over the decades, the elders always take great pride in recounting that almost 100% of the Sioux vote went to RFK. Only three votes in Pine Ridge were tallied against him. They always end the story by saying, “We are still looking for those guys.”
It is a hopeful sign that we now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. It shows that we are ready as a nation to tell untold histories and to finally include the dispossessed people who have long languished on the margins.
Today, as corrupt powers have overtaken our government, the ranks of the dispossessed have swelled beyond indigenous and Black people to include tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck in financial desperation. The dispossessed also include the legions of the chronically ill, the addicted, the depressed, and the 80% of the country that can no longer afford a normal middle-class lifestyle.
A rising tide of discontent is swamping our country.
There is danger in this discontent, yet there is also promise.
The danger is that demagogues will hijack it toward fascism. Or, that our rulers will divert it onto an external enemy to start yet another war.
But the biggest danger, which we’ve seen unfold in real-time, is that we will direct our discontent at each other. As Abraham Lincoln observed, quoting Jesus Christ, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” A polarized nation is easy for corrupt powers to manipulate and strip of its wealth, its freedoms, and its dignity.
Those are the dangers, so, what is the promise? The promise is of reunion. We are told that our nation is hopelessly divided. But I’ve found it less divided than it seems.
The most hateful voices are usually the loudest. But quietly, Americans are looking with disgust at the vitriol, the name-calling, and the venom. They want it to end. They want us to get along.
The loud, hateful controversies obscure vast areas of agreement.
Most of us agree that we should take care of our veterans at home and seek peace abroad. We agree that teachers deserve decent salaries, and that housing should be affordable, and that corporations should pay their fair share.
We agree that we want a clean environment and wholesome communities for our kids.
Yet these universal yearnings stand alongside a broad agreement that our nation has lost its way.
Americans are weary of the culture war, the phony slogans of politicians, and the partisan blame game that has us all at each other’s throats.
And people suspect that the divisions are deliberately orchestrated, and that getting us to hate each other is part of the scam.
And they’re fed up with being fooled, and they are ready to take back their power.
There is no other explanation for the enthusiasm I see every day in the people flocking to our campaign. Sometimes it gives me goosebumps. Their minds may tell them the situation is hopeless, that the elites are too entrenched, that the corruption is too deep. But their hearts say otherwise. I know that because I meet scores of people every day, even those in the hardest circumstances, who haven’t given up on America.
Learn more at Kennedy24.com
I've walked the picket lines In Los Angeles with hotel workers who live in their cars because they can’t afford rent.
I've visited mobile health clinics on the back roads of Georgia, where families get their medical care from traveling nurses in the back of a bus.
I've planted gardens in the food deserts of Watts and Cleveland.
I’ve sat amongst migrant children at the border, and I’ve met social workers and doctors in Yuma who treat these immigrants with kindness and heartbreaking generosity.
I've walked the fields with farmers in Kansas who can't drink from their own pesticide-poisoned wells.
I've sat at kitchen tables in Pennsylvania with parents working every hour God gives them to afford a home of their own, only to get outbid by hedge funds making cash offers.
I've worked out with veterans who served in foreign wars with honor, only to come home to a country bankrupted by those wars.
I've eaten with small business owners who had to board up their dreams as Amazon cashed in.
I've talked with moms from Nevada to New Hampshire, who lie awake at night juggling unpayable bills, choosing between gasoline and groceries. I've met senior citizens who cut their pills in two to stretch out their prescriptions.
I've pulled dead fish from rivers clogged with chemical run-off and I’ve read stories to children devastated by chronic disease.
It can look pretty dark, all these people cycling from despair to rage and back to despair again. This country sits atop a bubbling cauldron of fury. Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.
But I’ve also seen hope. I’ve traveled millions of American miles in my career. And, to quote Tennyson, “I am a part of all whom I have met.”
For 40 years Americans across the country have fortified me with their courage and idealism.
But this year, I have witnessed an upwelling of optimism such as I have never seen in my lifetime.
Optimism is not the same as denial. We have to acknowledge the truth. We face a decaying infrastructure, and record levels of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. We face entrenched political corruption and an inequality of wealth not seen in a hundred years.
But the good news is that finally, people are fed up. Something is stirring that says, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
People stop me everywhere I go, at airports and hotels and on the street, and remind me that this country is ready for a history-making change. They are ready to reclaim their freedom and independence.
And that is why I am here today. I am here to declare myself as an independent candidate for President of the United States.
And that’s not all. I am here to join all of you to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government.
We declare independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists.
We declare independence from the mercenary media that fortifies corporate orthodoxies, and urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses.
We declare our independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us?
How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent?
And how can we pursue happiness when debt and low wages imprison so many of our nation’s families?
And so I have come here to declare our independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for each other.
But to do that, I must first declare my own independence. Independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
Learn more at Kennedy24.com
I haven’t made this decision lightly. It is painful for me to let go of the party of my uncles, my father, of my grandfather and of both of my great-grandfathers — John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor, and Patrick Kennedy, a Boston ward boss, who together, launched my family’s political dynasty more than a century ago.
But MY sacrifice is nothing compared to the risk our founding fathers took when they signed the Declaration of Independence 247 years ago right over there.
THEY knew that if their revolution failed, every last one of them would be hanged. They chose to place everything on the line.
When John Adams put his pen down after adding his signature to the Declaration, he turned to those present and said, “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, from this day on, I’m with my country.”
I make that same pledge today, so that I may stand before you as every leader should — free of partisan allegiance and backroom deals — a servant only to my conscience, to my creator, and to you.
Today, we are turning a new page in American politics.
There HAVE been independent candidates before. But this time is different. This time, the Independent is going to win.
Three-fourths of Americans believe President Biden is too old to govern effectively. President Trump faces multiple civil and criminal trials. Both have favorability ratings deep in negative territory. That is what two-party politics has given us And that is why we need to pry loose the hammerlock of corrupt power over Washington D.C. and make this nation ours again.
But there is a sacrifice that everyone, including myself, has to make if we are to unite America.
We will have to surrender a kind of political addiction that is at the root of our divisions. It is the addiction to taking sides. Our nation’s renewal begins with listening to each other again — with respect.
Only then will we be able to step outside our tired, stuck debates.
We will ask the questions no one thought to ask. We will discover solutions that were right in front of our face. We will listen, not just to the other side, but to those apart from any side.
In a two-sided conflict, both parties have a kind of mutual dependency. Each depends on the other to define themselves as the good guys, in contrast to the other side, who are, of course, the bad guys. Well, if you are Team Good, then you’ll do anything, however unscrupulous, to defeat Team Evil.
And that’s why we have seen both parties sacrifice their own values — and the canons of democracy — in an all-out battle for power.
In the war against Evil, any means justifies the end. The result is that you become evil yourself. The child obsessed with hating a parent becomes that parent.
As I’ve surrendered my attachment to taking sides, I’ve been able to listen with new ears to people with whom I disagree, and see solutions that would otherwise have been invisible.
I’ll give you an example. Six months ago, I thought that an open border was a humanitarian policy, and that sealing the border meant you were a xenophobe or perhaps even a racist. I was wrong.
How did I learn I was wrong?
It wasn’t just that I listened to the other side. It was when I actually visited the border and listened to the people who weren’t on either side.
My views changed as I spoke to border patrol officers, to local officials, to aid workers, and to the migrants themselves.
I saw that no one party has a monopoly on wisdom, and no simplistic narrative contains the whole truth.
My promise to you as President is that on every issue, I will listen to stakeholders from every side and beyond any side.
I will uphold MY moral convictions absolutely, but I will also hold my opinions lightly.
I will look at the evidence and the arguments, and choose not the easy path, not the established path, but the right path.
In making an independent run for President, I take inspiration from the one other President who was not a member of a political party. That President was George Washington.
In his farewell address, Washington issued a prescient warning about the disastrous potential of party politics.
Inevitably, he said, political parties will be taken over by a “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled” minority who will serve the interests of the party rather than the interests of the nation and “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Washington’s dire prediction has certainly come true.
I intend to wrest the reins from both parties and return them to the American people.
For years, pundits have been asking, “How do we get young people to engage in politics?” These experts are asking the wrong question.
The problem isn’t the young people. The problem is what my generation has allowed politics to become.
The millennials and Gen Z are repelled by the toxicity, the pettiness, and, more than any of that, by the dishonesty.
They crave authenticity. So no, the problem isn’t the young people. The problem is the politics.
I am committed to inaugurating a politics worthy of their engagement.
I want to share with you a hopeful sign. I am proud to say, my supporters include pro-lifers and pro-choicers.
They include climate activists and climate skeptics.
They include the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
They include people on both sides of our culture war.
Why? Because more and more Americans are beginning to understand, that for the good of the country, one cannot insist on getting one’s way on every issue.
They understand that people can disagree and still respect each other.
Learn more at Kennedy24.com
You can be pro-choice, and not think that pro-lifers are woman-hating zealots. You can support the Second Amendment, and not think gun control advocates are totalitarians who hate freedom.
This is what I mean by independence. It’s more than being independent of the two existing parties. It is also independence from tribal thinking. It is freedom from the reflex of taking sides.
Instead of “Which side are you on?” I’m going to ask, What do you care about? What do your children need? What is it like to be you? Because, our country is never going heal if the formula is for one-half of the population to beat the other in pitched battle.
I am happy to say, the old political alignments are dissolving.
Right and left have become all mixed up anyhow. It used to be the DEMOCRATIC Party that opposed censorship.
It was the Democratic Party that wanted to rein in the military and the CIA.
It was the Democratic Party that fought corporate influence.
Remember when Wall Street and the big corporations all supported the Republicans?
Who is liberal now, and who is conservative? Who is left and who is right?
These labels make less and less sense. Yet out of habit, we group ourselves around the empty husks of old alignments and threadbare ideologies.
But now that habit is breaking down. That’s why half of the electorate no longer identifies with any political party, and 63% of Americans want an independent to run for President.
The outer structures of the parties still dominate the political landscape, but they’ve hollowed out from within like a building ridden with termites.
What kind of new political structures might emerge from their ruins? What will politics look like when it’s no longer us-versus-them?
American democracy should be more than just picking between two candidates anointed by shadowy institutions.
Big Oil funds the Republicans. Big Tech funds the Democrats. Big Pharma and the military contractors make sure to donate to both.
Instead of two parties, we have a uniparty, a monster with two faces loudly bickering with itself as it lumbers over a cliff.
At the bottom of that cliff lies the destruction of our country.
Neither party has offered meaningful resistance to the endless wars that have sucked dry our wealth.
Neither has done anything to reverse the erosion of the middle class.
Both are powerless to rein in our exploding deficits.
They have contributed equally to the corporate giveaways, the corruption in Washington, and the surveillance state.
Yes, there are good and honest people within both parties, even among their leadership. But the system itself is hopelessly corrupt.
Now let me tell you what an independent Presidency will look like.
Because I am independent of the military contractors, I will be able to pursue a foreign policy of peace and diplomacy.
Because I am independent of wealthy donors, I will be able to close the loopholes and giveaways that bloat our budget.
Because I am independent of Wall Street, I will be able to rescue debtors instead of banks.
Because I am independent of the big polluters, I will be able to clean up our soil, air, and water.
Because I am independent of the corporations, I’ll be able to unravel the capture of our federal agencies.
And because I am independent of the two political parties, I will be able to enact bold policies that are outside the partisan conversation.
Let me be clear though, being independent of the two political parties is not to be their enemy.
Dogmatic opposition is just as much a form of dependency as dogmatic loyalty.
As President, I will work with officials from both parties who join with me in serving the nation rather than their narrow partisan advantage.
Every President enters office talking about uniting the nation and working with people from the other party. None of them ever does. They can’t. They are already on a side.
Well, I’m not going to have that problem. I’m going to build coalitions from both sides of the aisle.
What that means is that members of Congress will start working together across party lines in ways we’ve barely seen for a generation.
I promise you, it is going to be hard to tell whether our administration is right or left.
Is it right or left to support small farms?
Is it right or left to pull back from the brink of hot war with Russia?
Is it right or left to implement a tamper-proof election system that also guarantees that no one is denied a vote?
Locked in their habitual debates, the two parties are often blind to commonsense solutions.
This formula has left them barely able to govern. Practically every year, we verge on default or government shutdown. And that’s just the most obvious example of the paralysis of our two-party system.
The system runs on inertia, year after year, decade after decade. It’s like a runaway bus full of teenagers fighting about who should take the wheel, not realizing that the driver merely follows the GPS set by the crooked insiders and corporate lobbyists.
I’m not just going to take the wheel. I’m going to reboot the GPS. And do you know who is going to set the destination? You are.
Because as I have traveled this great nation, I have listened to your hopes for its future. Together we will set the GPS toward the promise of America that Jonathan Winthrop foresaw from the deck of the ship Arbella in 1630.
He predicted that we would become an exemplary nation, a city on a hill, a lamp to all the other nations of the world.
We came close to fulfilling that vision post World War II, and it lives on today as an ideal.
It is an America with a prosperous middle class, where if you work hard, you can afford a house, take a summer vacation, and put something aside for retirement.
It is an America with an education system that is the envy of the world.
It is an America that treasures and preserves its stunning natural beauty.
It is an America with incorruptible regulatory agencies and dedicated public servants.
It is a bastion of the rights enshrined in its Constitution. And it is a champion of peace and freedom that the whole world looks to for moral leadership.
That is the America that is possible when we declare independence from the deadlocked party establishment.
That’s the America that is possible when we declare independence from the war machine that devours a trillion dollars a year.
That’s the America that’s possible when we stop fighting each other.
And that’s the vision of America I will serve when I become President of the United States.
The media pundits will tell you we have no chance.
They say my only impact will be to draw votes from other candidates.
The Democrats are terrified I’ll spoil the election for President Biden. The Republicans fear I’ll spoil it for President Trump. The truth is — they’re both right!
But only their inside-the-beltway myopia deludes them into thinking we have no chance to win.
I've seen the polls that they won't show you.
I've sat at the kitchen tables they don’t bother to visit.
I’ve shaken hands with tens of thousands of Americans over the past six months. And I can tell you, our campaign has ignited a movement that has been smoldering for years, a movement to reclaim democracy and resurrect the promise of our republic.
That’s the real reason the party elites and the Washington insiders are terrified of my candidacy.
They recognize an authentic challenge to their power when they see one.
There have been anti-establishment candidates before, but none who understand how to get that job done.
Unlike President Trump, I’ve been fighting corporate corruption and suing government agencies for 40 years.
I know how they work and I know how to clean them up.
And unlike any President since 1963, I will stand up to the military-industrial complex.
I will cash in the peace dividend, and bring our troops home with honor. I will rebuild America’s strength from the inside out.
What really terrifies the elites, though, is not me. It is what I represent—a populist movement that defies the left-right division.
I am merely the bowsprit of a ship that will cut through the armadas of corruption, secrecy, and lies.
Except for the small minority of public officials who are actually corrupt, I am no enemy to the people in the two-party establishment, because guess what? They don’t believe in it anymore either.
They don’t believe their own posturing. They don’t believe their own rhetoric.
That’s why so many public figures, Democrats and Republicans alike, have told me confidentially, “I can’t support you publicly, but I really hope you win.”
They, too, want liberation from the system that has captured them.
Isn’t that what we all want? Liberation from the system that robs us of our wealth, our health, our hope, our patriotism, our ideals, and our sense of ourselves as a good and capable people.
Is that kind of freedom possible? Is the healing of our divided nation possible?
If we wait for someone else to liberate us and unite us, then no, it is not possible.
It becomes possible only when we believe it and take action.
People ask me, “Yes, but can you win?” I want to turn the question back to you. Will our movement win?
Will our movement to restore democracy, health, prosperity, freedom, and peace win?
I’m not asking you to make a prediction. I asking you to make a choice. It will happen if and when we the people choose it.
Democracy does not come as a gift when oppressive authorities finally relent.
Democracy comes when the people choose to exercise their power.
And so I ask you today to join me in exercising the sovereign choice of a democratic people. Are we ready to win?
That is what the new Declaration of Independence sounds like. Remember this moment. We've got a year and a month till the election. Let's go take our country back.
God bless you and God bless our soon-to-be Re-United States of America.
Source: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 2024 Website
Kennedy Welcomes Nicole Shanahan as His Running Mate
OAKLAND, CA—MARCH 26, 2024—Independent Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. today welcomed attorney, tech entrepreneur, and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan to the Kennedy campaign as his vice presidential running mate during a sold-out event in Oakland, California. Shanahan spoke for nearly 30 minutes sharing her excitement and reasons for joining the ticket following a 10-minute video about her life. [see remarks below
]
“There is only one moment in time and one candidate that I would step into this capacity for. That time is now and that candidate is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” the 38-year-old VP pick said.
“I believe, very strongly, that focusing on the health and well-being of our youth is the key to a strong America. That means honestly looking at the root causes of where childhood development is being sidelined. We have the tools to prioritize American wellness, we just need to use them.”
Kennedy introduced his running mate enthusiastically, describing how he “wanted a VP who will speak for millennials and Gen Z. Someone who cares about healing our children, protecting our environment, restoring our soils, and getting the chemicals out of our food, and who understands how technology will either enslave us or give us a path back to freedom and prosperity.”
“From our first meeting,” Kennedy said, “Nicole’s intellectual capacity left me awestruck. I knew right then I wanted her as my vice president and I knew America was going to fall in love with her.”
Shanahan’s work on behalf of honest governance, racial equality, regenerative agriculture, and children’s and maternal health has put her at the forefront of many of the country’s most urgent needs.
Today’s event reaffirms the key principles of the Kennedy campaign of restoring the middle class, ending the chronic disease epidemic, unwinding the war machine, and unraveling corporate capture of our government agencies.
The Kennedy campaign has launched a robust ballot access plan to ensure the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Kennedy is already on the ballot in Utah and has collected all the necessary signatures to be on the ballot in New Hampshire and Nevada. In Hawaii, the Hawaii Office of Elections has confirmed Kennedy supporters have collected the required signatures to establish the “We The People” party in Hawaii.
In addition to those states, the campaign is already actively collecting signatures in 17 states and is kicking off its petition gathering this week in 19 additional states that are open and require a vice presidential candidate, which includes Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Kennedy’s surging support across the country has made the election a three-way race. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows him leading Presidents Biden and Trump nationwide among voters under 35. An NBC poll shows 34% of people saying they could see themselves supporting RFK Jr. Another Quinnipiac Poll discussed on CNN shows Kennedy in a three-way tie with Presidents Biden and Trump among Latinos.
Kennedy leads Presidents Biden and Trump among independents. Independents continue to constitute the largest political bloc in the U.S., with an average of 43% of U.S. adults. In contrast, 27% of U.S. adults identify as Republicans and 27% of U.S. adults identify as Democrats.
Three months ago, Kennedy returned to Philadelphia, the birthplace of the United States, and declared his independence from the “bankrupt two-party system.” He did so with the National Constitution Center behind him and the words “We the People” etched into the building by his side.
“We the people” are the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. These words symbolize that our government draws its power from the people that it was created to serve.
On Oct. 9, Kennedy said, “Like the Founding Fathers declared their independence from the crown more than two centuries ago, today we declare our independence from the corrupting influence of Wall Street and corporate donors that have rigged our economy for the few at the expense of the many.”
# # #
Nicole Shanahan’s Remarks:
Hello everybody and thank you Bobby. It is so good to be here in Oakland.
This city will always have a special place in my heart.
I grew up just a few miles from this very spot. My mother is an immigrant from Guangzhou, China, and my late father was an Irish and German American. I want to tell you a little bit about them and my childhood, so you can understand the source of my politics and convictions.
My mother's first job when she came to the United States in 1983 was as a live-in caretaker to an elderly woman while attending school. By the time I was born, she worked as a secretary at a dental office. My father loved us dearly, but he was a troubled man, plagued by substance abuse, and couldn't really hold onto a job for very long.
From watching my father and his struggles, I learned not to be judgmental. He was doing the best he could. I think of him when I see the statistics on the millions of Americans, the tens of millions, who are addicted or depressed or suffering.
This is one of the real epidemics of our time. It affects nearly every American family. I wish my experience was unusual, but it is not. It has become part of my determination to do something for our country.
Every time my dad lost his job, our family just couldn't cover its expenses. Food, gas, clothing, upkeep…it added up to more than we had. I know a lot of Americans know exactly what that's like, to be just one misfortune away from disaster. I don't think we would have made it without food stamps. My mom worked hard, but without that help it just wouldn't have been possible to hold it together. Later in life, as you probably know, I became very wealthy, but my roots here in Oakland taught me many things. I have never forgotten that the purpose of wealth is to help those in need. And that's something I want to bring back to our politics too.
I went to high school at St. Mary's, also just a few miles from here. In my junior year I had another formative experience that is still a huge part of my political consciousness. I applied for a program to go live with families in El Salvador. In praying with these families and helping them rebuild from the civil war there, I learned what war really is. I learned how it rips lives apart, how it brutalizes children, how it visits unspeakable horror on the innocent. And I also learned of the resilience of the human spirit, and its infinite capacity to heal, to forgive, and to restore. El Salvador is where I came to understand war, but more importantly it is also where I came to understand peace.
That is what inspired me to my first political action. In high school, at the onset of the Iraq War, I became an anti-war activist. I didn't really know how to do it — I printed pamphlets and led a walkout. But I knew in my bones that violence begets more violence. I'd seen what that does to a society. And I didn't want my country, America, the country that I love, to be doing that in the world. So these are two of the political convictions I still hold today. To serve peace, and to help those in poverty. You can understand why I gravitated toward the Democratic Party. Because that was supposed to be the party of peace, the party of compassion. Many Democrats still believe in those ideals, but unfortunately, as an institution, it has lost its way. There is only one anti-war candidate today, one peace candidate, and you won't find him in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. He is an independent. He is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is his commitment to peace and to the welfare of hard-working people in America that drew me, as a person of compassion, to his candidacy.
As recently as a year ago, I didn't think much of Bobby Kennedy.
I didn't think much of him, because I didn't know much. All I had was the mainstream media narrative. But then a friend pulled me aside one day and said, "Nicole, please, do me a favor. Just listen to one interview with Bobby Kennedy. Just one."
So I listened to one. Then to another. And another. And I recognized a person who was the exact opposite of the media slander of his character. I saw a person of intelligence, of compassion, and of reason. I saw a fellow lawyer who had committed himself to finding the truth and fighting for the environment and for people. I discovered a person who speaks out on issues that, even though they are critically important to human health and welfare, are consistently ignored by our government. And for the first time in a long time, I felt hope for our democracy.
One of those issues also happens to be a passion of mine and a focus of my philanthropic work - chronic disease. I got into it through my own journey of reproductive health, followed by a steep learning curve of caring for my daughter who has an autism diagnosis. In that journey I discovered that women's fertility is in precipitous decline around the world. We are facing a crisis in reproductive health, and that's embedded in the larger epidemic of chronic disease. Because it has been so personal for me and my daughter, I got deep into the research and consulted some of the best scientists and doctors. Let me share what I found. There are three main causes. One, is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food, water, and soil, like the pesticide residues, the industrial pollutants, the microplastics, the PFAs, the food additives, and the "forever chemicals" that have contaminated nearly every human cell.
Second is electromagnetic pollution. You don't hear politicians talking much about that either, but it is something we need to look at. As Bobby says, we need to investigate every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic that is devouring our nation from the inside.
Third, I'm sorry to say, is our own medications. Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription after another after another, one shot after another and another, throughout the course of childhood. Conditions like autism used to be rare. One in ten thousand. Now it is one in 22 here in California. Allergies. Obesity. Anxiety. Depression. Our children are not well.
Our people are not well. And our country will not be strong for very long either if we don't heed this desperate call for attention.
I've spoken to our government agencies about this. I've spoken to senators. I've spoken to governors. They all know something is wrong, but none of them take any kind of action. There is only one candidate for President who takes the chronic disease epidemic seriously. It is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and I will be his ally in making our nation healthy again.
It's not about a new pill. It is not about "finding the cure." We know the cure is cleaning up our environment and providing the basic public goods that are the foundational conditions for health and healing. It is about a shift in our priorities. It is about compassion. Chronic disease, addiction, poverty, depression… this is where Americans are hurting the most. It is time for politicians to listen.
So here is how the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is going to end the chronic disease epidemic. While Bobby is focused on ending the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, I am going to assemble some of the best technologists and scientists in the world and we will use the latest in AI and computation and examine the health records
databases of our nation and those of other countries who are also on the quest to solve chronic disease. We will find unbiased answers to our most pressing health concerns within weeks and not decades. It is time to move out of the dark ages of medicine. We can solve the mysteries guarded by corporate influence. We can move from bandaid solutions to root causes, and we can end the chronic disease epidemic.
My sense is that most American Moms and dads already know the truth of the matter, and it is long overdue that the duty of care owed to the American family is actually given. We CAN find the answers, conclusively. I have a background in tech, so I tend to think in terms of data. In my tech days, I developed AI-powered software to automate affordable legal services. Well, the CDC and research institutions have the data we need. We can apply technology to figure out what environmental factors are making us sick. We just have to ask the right questions, do the right research, and apply the right tools. We have to rid science of the corporate bias that contaminates it today. Then we can put the chronic disease epidemic into reverse.
Actually, the first political issue to which I applied my tech background was criminal justice. It was across the Bay in San Francisco, where the district attorney's office needed help examining thousands of police records thought to contain evidence of racial bias, wrongful arrests, and patterns of prejudice. I put together a team of computer scientists to develop a computational method to collate all these case records, and design a method for analysis. In short, I got to see the sorry state of criminal justice in our country. It isn't just about policing. It is about the school-to-prison pipeline. It is about a broken and dismally functioning infrastructure. And it is about recidivism. How do we provide alternative paths? How do we make prisons places of rehabilitation not punishment? These questions don't have easy answers, but they ARE the right questions, and Bobby Kennedy is the only Presidential candidate who is asking them.
I'd like to mention one more issue close to my heart. My interest in health and solving climate issues led me into the realm of agriculture. I realized that a nation's health comes down to its soil and the people who work it. Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. It is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem and a healthy climate. It is the foundation of a healthy economy. But what politician, besides Bobby Kennedy, do you hear ever talking about soil? I've produced two films on this issue — Common Ground is the latest. I've talked to Congresspeople and Senators, but all I've ever gotten is vague promises that never amount to real change. Republicans and Democrats alike have fallen under the sway of the big agrochemical companies and food conglomerates. They might invoke the ideal of the family farm, but they have betrayed it again and again. So I'm entering politics myself. I've met some of America's most innovative farmers. Their methods rebuild soil, sequester carbon, recharge aquifers, and revitalize the farm economy. We don't have to force anyone to imitate them. All we have to do is change our system of regulation and subsidy to support those methods, instead of extractive corporate agriculture.
I hope you all understand now what has brought me into politics as an independent candidate for vice president. I am leaving the Democratic Party to do it, as Mr. Kennedy has himself. And I want to say two things about that. First, even though I'm leaving the party, I believe I am taking its best ideals and impulses with me. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of compassion and peace. It is supposed to be the party of diplomacy and science. It is supposed to be the party of civil liberties and free speech. And most importantly, the party of the middle class and the American Dream. While I know those ideals still abide within many Democrats, I want to point out that the party has lost its way. In its leadership, in its institutions, it has become interested in elitism, celebrity and winning at all costs, even if that means turning a blind eye on issues they all know to be true. I know because I've been in those circles for the last 8 years and have grown increasingly tired of it. It wasn't until I met Bobby and the people supporting him, that I felt any hope in the outcome of this election.
As I've reexamined my Democratic Party assumptions, I have seen conservative voters with new eyes too. I have met hunters and farmers that are some of the staunchest conservationists I have ever known, who understand ecosystems better than most. I have met mothers protecting their children who are searching every possible avenue for their health. And yet the Republican Party, like the Democratic, is letting them down because the actions of the party are diverting from the values that actually support individual freedom. In fact, the very failure of both parties to do their job to protect their founding values has contributed to the decline of this country in my lifetime. Maybe that's why I see so many Republicans disillusioned with their party as I became disillusioned with mine. If you are one of those disillusioned Republicans, I welcome you to join me, a disillusioned Democrat, here in this new movement to unify and heal America.
This independent movement comes at a time of extreme division in America that threatens to tear this country apart. It is time for a re-alignment. It is time, as Bobby Kennedy says, to focus on our unifying values rather than our divisions. And so, if anyone is listening who never considered an independent candidate, I want to extend the same invitation, the same plea to you that my friend did last year. Please, listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words. Take a close look at his vision for America. It is a vision that I share too as I back his campaign, and focus the next 7 months of my life getting him on each and every ballot in this country!
The vision we share is a vision of national healing. It is an America that leads the world, no longer through force of arms, but through the power of example. It is an America that wages peace through diplomacy. It is an America that had become the sickest industrialized country on earth and turned it around. It is an America where everyone who works hard can afford a decent life. It is an America where people of all races receive fair and equal treatment under the law. It is an America whose freedoms are the envy of the world. It is an America with honest and transparent government institutions. Can you imagine that — a country whose government doesn't lie to you?
People talk about my age. It is true, I will be the youngest vice president in American history. Let me tell you why so many of us young people have turned away from politics. It's because we lost hope that change would ever come from inside the system. After all, whichever party wins with promises of hope and change, or to drain the swamp, things proceed as normal, declining bit by bit with each passing year. So that's one reason. But the other reason is that we can't stand the phoniness. We can't stand the lies. We can't stand the inauthenticity. And that's why Bobby Kennedy leads in polls among young people, we are hearing our voice in his.
So I come to you today as a former Democrat. I come to you as a woman not quite 40. I come to you as someone who has experienced sickness and health and poverty and wealth. And finally, I come to you as a mother. Most of the philanthropists I work with are women, other mothers. Initially, it was as a mother that I came to support this campaign. I never thought in a million years that I would be running for vice president. No, I joined the many, many groups of mothers who support this candidacy. They are Republicans and Democrats and independents. They read the labels in the supermarket and wonder how to keep their kids healthy. They watch in anguish as their children suffer from chronic disease. They cry silently as their teenagers deal with depression, anxiety, and addiction. They do their best to hold it together. If you ask me who my heroes are, that's who, it's the moms trying to make a normal life for their children in a world that has gone crazy.
As a mother myself, who knows firsthand the challenge of a special needs child, my promise to you is to make this world a little less crazy. I will work with Bobby Kennedy to make America once again a country of peace, a country of compassion, a country that is prosperous and free. This won't happen overnight. But I have seen the miracles that the human spirit can accomplish. I have seen its resilience. I have seen its tremendous capacity to heal. What is possible for the human being is possible also for our nation.
So please join me and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the healing of America.
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Remarks:
I am honored to accept the Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe’s endorsement of our campaign, and I appreciate the trust the Chairwoman and the tribal council place in me.
They know the battle for justice and healing for indigenous people has occupied a large part of my energies and of my professional and personal life.
This work will continue when we are in the White House. The Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe and other tribes unfairly deprived of federal recognition deserve to have their status legitimized.
My father spent a lot of time in Oakland, conducting hearings for the poverty program here in 1967 and campaigning here in 1968.
During his presidential run, he made an unscheduled visit at Oakland’s Taylor Memorial Methodist Church with Willie Brown to meet with NAACP leadership, members of the Black Panther Party, and other local activists.
It was a rancorous meeting, and John Glenn and Rafer Johnson urged my dad to walk out as he weathered insults and threats from some of the crowd.
My dad refused: “This is between them and me. I need to hear them out.”
He heard them out, and the next day virtually all of them signed up to his campaign and the Black Panther Party volunteered as his security detail.
The last time I was in Oakland was when I served on the trial team in the Monsanto case. We tried two cases in this city, and I lived here for several months.
The Monsanto case was my latest in a lifetime of battles to get poisons out of our food and our farms and restore our soils.
The effort has consumed much of my life — I wanted a vice president who shares my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, regenerative agriculture, and good soils, and I found one.
Among other things she has used cutting-edge technology including AI to calculate the catastrophic health consequences of toxins in our soil, air, and water.
Technology has been a lifelong passion of my future vice president.
This is important because I also wanted a VP who shares my indignation about the participation of Big Tech as a partner in the censorship, surveillance, and information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people.
That is why I’m bringing on someone with deep insider knowledge about how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public. I want a partner with strong ideas about how to reverse this dire threat to our democracy and freedoms. I managed to find a technologist at the forefront of AI. She has spent the last decade relying on neural networks, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge science to identify abuses in our government.
She understands that the health of every American is a national security issue — her work has proven time and again that health drives our economy, that it is the foundation of our mental health, our national happiness, and our ability to lead the world in innovation, prosperity and peace.
I also wanted an athlete who could help me inspire Americans to heal and get them in shape. I'm happy to report that my vice president is an avid surfer who attended school on a softball scholarship.
I wanted someone battle-tested, able to withstand criticism and controversy, and all the defamations and slanders and perjuries that are thrown against anyone who embarks on a presidential campaign.
I wanted an advocate who has seen corruption of our regulatory authorities firsthand and shares my indignation about the way it allows regulated industries to commoditize our landscapes, our food, our wildlife, and our children.
I wanted someone who would honor our traditions as a nation of immigrants and to also understand that — to be a nation — we need secure borders.
I wanted a partner who was a gifted administrator but also possessed the gift of curiosity and an open, inquiring mind, and the confidence to change even her strongest opinions in the face of contrary evidence.
I wanted someone with a spiritual dimension and compassion and idealism, and above all, a deep love for the United States of America.
I found that person in a woman who grew up here in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants, who overcame every daunting obstacle and went on to achieve the American dream.
So that is why I am so proud to introduce you to the next vice president of the United States — my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, and fierce warrior mom — Nicole Shanahan.
Nicole’s personal story began here in Oakland, the daughter of impoverished immigrants. She grew up on food stamps and welfare in this city, beset by many other unique challenges, all of which she overcame. Her very American journey took her to a career as a patent attorney and as a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Stanford University fellow.
Like many of us, Nicole assumed our government was working for our people, that our defense and intelligence agencies wanted peace, that our public health agencies wanted us to be healthy, that the USDA supported wholesome food and family farms, that the EPA would stand up for clean air and clean water, that the Fed wanted a prosperous America, that the Democratic Party was on the side of the middle class, the working poor and Main Street small business owners, that scientists were incorruptible and that science was an exalted search for truth, and that the president would defend free speech.
I used to believe that too. Do you remember those days?
She will tell you that she now understands that the defense agencies work for the military-industrial complex, that health agencies work for Pharma, that USDA works for Big Ag and the processed food cartels, that EPA is in cahoots with the polluters, that scientists can be mercenaries, that government officials sometimes act as censors, and that the Fed works for Wall Street and allows millionaire bankers to prey upon Main Street and American workers.
This is why Nicole and I both left the Democratic Party. Our values haven't changed, the democratic party has.
The things we love are the same. We love our families, our children, and our faith.
We love clean air, clean water, productive soil, and good food. We love the wilderness and our purple mountains’ majesty.
Above all, we love our country. We want America to live up to her highest ideals. We want her to be an exemplary nation again — a global leader in freedom, opportunity, and responsible government. We want America to be a peacemaker and a moral authority.
We want our children to grow up as I did, in a country for which they feel love and pride. We want them to be healthy and to feel safe, and to have every opportunity for dignity, prosperity, and community.
We want them to have confidence in their futures. We want them to have the best education. We want America to be friendly to farmers and entrepreneurs. We want America to honor its veterans and its teachers. We want our scientists to stand up for science, and our government for free speech.
Nicole and I share all these values, and you know what, despite our artificially orchestrated divisions, nearly all Americans share do these values with us.
I am grateful that Nicole has put her self-interest aside and made the momentous and difficult decision to embark with me on this extraordinary crusade to save our country.
I am happy she is a young person, only 38 years old, because I want Nicole to be a champion for the growing number of millennials and Gen Z Americans who have lost faith in their future and pride in our country. Many in her generation have stopped believing that the older people — who have been running our government for so long — understand them or represent their interests.
That older generation that now dominates Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House is the same generation that ran up a $34 trillion debt.
Millennials and Gen Z and their children will shoulder the burden of that debt.
It was my Baby Boom generation that unleashed the epidemic of chronic disease that has made America the sickest country on earth.
The only response to this calamity by government officials is to gaslight us into pretending that it is all normal. Nicole and I both share doubts that the corporate-captured Uniparty can produce leaders capable of imagining a different version of America — a hopeful vision of the future.
We both have doubts that either the Democratic or Republican nominees are capable of dealing with the complexities and fulfilling the great promise of a technology-driven economy.
In the right hands, technology can be America’s salvation. It can give us the path out of debt, chaos, environmental ruin, and chronic disease.
But we both fear that in the wrong hands, technology may turn its power against humanity. We don’t think that President Trump or President Biden understand either the promise or peril of technology sufficiently to direct its trajectory toward light, freedom, healing, and prosperity.
We are now witnessing a dismaying contest between the two oldest presidential candidates in history.
Those two men, during their terms as president, both worked to close our Main Street businesses for a year without scientific evidence or democratic process.
Their policies transferred 4 trillion dollars from the middle class to a new oligarchy of billionaires. Their lockdowns helped create a new billionaire each day for 500 days. Together, they ran up a greater debt burden than all previous presidents combined since George Washington.
They each want us to hate and fear the other guy — but to young Americans, they look like two sides of the same coin. If we vote for either of them again, we can expect — and we will deserve — more of the same: the annihilation of the middle class and the further impoverishment of the working poor, more chronic disease, more environmental destruction, more debt, more war, and fewer constitutional rights.
I’ve asked Nicole to use the platform of the vice presidency to speak for ALL the invisible, voiceless Americans who feel let down by our government. As your vice president, Nicole will represent the working poor who feel forgotten, who sink every day deeper in debt. She is going to fight for all those Americans who know what it’s like to skip meals to pay for gas, and who watch food prices spike ever higher and wonder how they are going to get through the grocery store checkout line.
I want her to stand for the children who are receiving substandard education, and the veterans who are feeding their families at soup kitchens. And the 1.1 million children whose parents served in Afghanistan and Iraq and whose families are silently struggling with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
I want her to represent the mothers who struggle to protect their children from bad chemicals, bad pharmaceuticals, and bad food. As vice president, she will stand between them and Big Ag, Big Pharma, the chemical industry, the processed food industry, and the government regulators who are colluding to poison our kids for profit.
And as vice president, she will stand up with me against the military-industrial complex and the Neocon interventionists and their forever wars.
In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt appointed my grandfather Joseph Kennedy to run his new Securities and Exchange Commission. My grandfather had been a stock manipulator and FDR wanted a chairman who knew the stock market inside and out to reform it.
In a similar vein, Nicole will stand up to Silicon Valley, which she knows inside and out.
And she is going to stand up to Wall Street, the Big Banks, and the larcenous K Street lobbies, the regulatory czars, the unbridled central bank money-printers, and the crony capitalists. These are the actors who have displaced democracy with greed.
Their cupidity drives our corrupt campaign finance system, which is nothing more than a system of legalized bribery. This is the system that put agency capture on steroids and made our government regulators sock puppets to industry.
The corrupt merger of state and corporate power now straddles our nation’s capital like a mythical harpy, sucking the economic, social and moral vitality out of the nation’s polity of free citizens, gorging itself on the bleaching bones of the American middle class.
Nicole is going to help me free our country from that predatory cabal.
Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.
Now let me tell you what Nicole and I are up against, and how we are going to win.
The New York Times estimates a final Democratic Party war chest of $3 billion, allowing it to spend more than any presidential campaign in history. Incidentally, the Republican Party will raise about the same.
Does anybody here think that these big-money donors are giving out of a patriotic impulse? No.
They are investing in the Uniparty because political contributions have a proven return on investment.
The campaign finance system has transformed our government from a model democracy to corporate kleptocracy.
So we are up against powerful financial interests.
We also face a determined campaign to keep us off the ballot by fair means or foul. Evidently, the Democrats have little faith in their candidate’s ability to win the old-fashioned way — in the voting booth.
We will overcome these financial and legal challenges. But I want to talk about another obstacle that is even more important.
It is the obstacle of cynicism. It is the obstacle of fear. It is the deeply ingrained habit of voting for someone you have little passion for, because he is the lesser of two evils.
Because you are so afraid the other guy will win.
Well don’t you want to vote FOR someone, not just against someone? Don’t you want to vote for a candidate and a country you can be proud of?
I know you do, because some 70% of Americans say that they don’t want to choose between President Trump and President Biden.
They don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils.
They especially don’t want to choose between the two men who brought us a $34 trillion debt, the endless wars, censorship, chronic disease, and the corrupt merger of the state and corporate power.
Republicans and Democrats have taken turns in office for over 30 years now and all these problems have just gotten worse.
That’s why those same polls show my approval ratings far above those of Presidents Trump and Biden.
Both Democratic and Republican parties are looking at those polls and devising ways to keep me off the ballot. They are the ones who are afraid, and so they try to make you afraid too.
Their principal technique is to call me a spoiler and instill fear in Americans that voting for me will get some terrifying candidate elected.
Our campaign is a spoiler all right.
It is a spoiler for President Biden AND for President Trump.
It is a spoiler for the war machine.
It is a spoiler for Wall Street, Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, the corporate media,and all of the corrupt politicians and corporations.
That’s why they are trying to keep us off the ballot and frighten you into choosing between the two tired and unpopular heads of the uniparty.
Millions of Americans will not vote at all if they are not given another choice.
Well, Nicole and I are giving you another choice.
The Democrats and Republicans are trying to divide America. They tell us to hate each other, to mistrust each other, to accuse each other of treason, and to warn us in apocalyptic terms that democracy itself is doomed if the other side wins.
They turn families against each other and neighbors against neighbors.
They are trying to divide America. But Nicole and I will unite America. That is our path to victory. That is how we will win. We will forge an unstoppable coalition of homeless Democrats and homeless Republicans who are ready to look to the universal values that unite us, all those things that I want, that Nicole wants, and that every conscientious American wants too.
If we can persuade enough Americans to vote out of hope rather than of fear, we will win this election in November.
If you want more of the same, vote out of fear.
If you want genuine change, take the risk and join Team Kennedy. Join the new American Revolution.
What that means is to vote from your conscience. From your heart. Vote out of idealism and optimism for this country. Refuse, above all, to vote from fear!
If Nicole and I can get Americans to refuse to vote from fear, we will be in the White House this November.
Nicole and I are running to help heal the symptoms of an ailing America — heal our divisions, heal our economy, heal our mental and spiritual and physical health.
But we cannot do it alone.
We need you.
And now I have a governing partner who will fight for you and your family until the last corporate kickback is banished from our government; the last toxin is cleared from our water, soil, and air; until the last American child gets to live healthy and pursue their own happiness in this land of the free.
I’m confident that there is no American more qualified than Nicole Shanahan to play this role.
So I’m proud to introduce you all to the next V.P. of the United States, Nicole Shanahan.
Kennedy Welcomes Nicole Shanahan as His Running Mate
OAKLAND, CA—MARCH 26, 2024—Independent Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. today welcomed attorney, tech entrepreneur, and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan to the Kennedy campaign as his vice presidential running mate during a sold-out event in Oakland, California. Shanahan spoke for nearly 30 minutes sharing her excitement and reasons for joining the ticket following a 10-minute video about her life. [see remarks below
]
“There is only one moment in time and one candidate that I would step into this capacity for. That time is now and that candidate is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” the 38-year-old VP pick said.
“I believe, very strongly, that focusing on the health and well-being of our youth is the key to a strong America. That means honestly looking at the root causes of where childhood development is being sidelined. We have the tools to prioritize American wellness, we just need to use them.”
Kennedy introduced his running mate enthusiastically, describing how he “wanted a VP who will speak for millennials and Gen Z. Someone who cares about healing our children, protecting our environment, restoring our soils, and getting the chemicals out of our food, and who understands how technology will either enslave us or give us a path back to freedom and prosperity.”
“From our first meeting,” Kennedy said, “Nicole’s intellectual capacity left me awestruck. I knew right then I wanted her as my vice president and I knew America was going to fall in love with her.”
Shanahan’s work on behalf of honest governance, racial equality, regenerative agriculture, and children’s and maternal health has put her at the forefront of many of the country’s most urgent needs.
Today’s event reaffirms the key principles of the Kennedy campaign of restoring the middle class, ending the chronic disease epidemic, unwinding the war machine, and unraveling corporate capture of our government agencies.
The Kennedy campaign has launched a robust ballot access plan to ensure the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Kennedy is already on the ballot in Utah and has collected all the necessary signatures to be on the ballot in New Hampshire and Nevada. In Hawaii, the Hawaii Office of Elections has confirmed Kennedy supporters have collected the required signatures to establish the “We The People” party in Hawaii.
In addition to those states, the campaign is already actively collecting signatures in 17 states and is kicking off its petition gathering this week in 19 additional states that are open and require a vice presidential candidate, which includes Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Kennedy’s surging support across the country has made the election a three-way race. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows him leading Presidents Biden and Trump nationwide among voters under 35. An NBC poll shows 34% of people saying they could see themselves supporting RFK Jr. Another Quinnipiac Poll discussed on CNN shows Kennedy in a three-way tie with Presidents Biden and Trump among Latinos.
Kennedy leads Presidents Biden and Trump among independents. Independents continue to constitute the largest political bloc in the U.S., with an average of 43% of U.S. adults. In contrast, 27% of U.S. adults identify as Republicans and 27% of U.S. adults identify as Democrats.
Three months ago, Kennedy returned to Philadelphia, the birthplace of the United States, and declared his independence from the “bankrupt two-party system.” He did so with the National Constitution Center behind him and the words “We the People” etched into the building by his side.
“We the people” are the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. These words symbolize that our government draws its power from the people that it was created to serve.
On Oct. 9, Kennedy said, “Like the Founding Fathers declared their independence from the crown more than two centuries ago, today we declare our independence from the corrupting influence of Wall Street and corporate donors that have rigged our economy for the few at the expense of the many.”
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Nicole Shanahan’s Remarks:
Hello everybody and thank you Bobby. It is so good to be here in Oakland.
This city will always have a special place in my heart.
I grew up just a few miles from this very spot. My mother is an immigrant from Guangzhou, China, and my late father was an Irish and German American. I want to tell you a little bit about them and my childhood, so you can understand the source of my politics and convictions.
My mother's first job when she came to the United States in 1983 was as a live-in caretaker to an elderly woman while attending school. By the time I was born, she worked as a secretary at a dental office. My father loved us dearly, but he was a troubled man, plagued by substance abuse, and couldn't really hold onto a job for very long.
From watching my father and his struggles, I learned not to be judgmental. He was doing the best he could. I think of him when I see the statistics on the millions of Americans, the tens of millions, who are addicted or depressed or suffering.
This is one of the real epidemics of our time. It affects nearly every American family. I wish my experience was unusual, but it is not. It has become part of my determination to do something for our country.
Every time my dad lost his job, our family just couldn't cover its expenses. Food, gas, clothing, upkeep…it added up to more than we had. I know a lot of Americans know exactly what that's like, to be just one misfortune away from disaster. I don't think we would have made it without food stamps. My mom worked hard, but without that help it just wouldn't have been possible to hold it together. Later in life, as you probably know, I became very wealthy, but my roots here in Oakland taught me many things. I have never forgotten that the purpose of wealth is to help those in need. And that's something I want to bring back to our politics too.
I went to high school at St. Mary's, also just a few miles from here. In my junior year I had another formative experience that is still a huge part of my political consciousness. I applied for a program to go live with families in El Salvador. In praying with these families and helping them rebuild from the civil war there, I learned what war really is. I learned how it rips lives apart, how it brutalizes children, how it visits unspeakable horror on the innocent. And I also learned of the resilience of the human spirit, and its infinite capacity to heal, to forgive, and to restore. El Salvador is where I came to understand war, but more importantly it is also where I came to understand peace.
That is what inspired me to my first political action. In high school, at the onset of the Iraq War, I became an anti-war activist. I didn't really know how to do it — I printed pamphlets and led a walkout. But I knew in my bones that violence begets more violence. I'd seen what that does to a society. And I didn't want my country, America, the country that I love, to be doing that in the world. So these are two of the political convictions I still hold today. To serve peace, and to help those in poverty. You can understand why I gravitated toward the Democratic Party. Because that was supposed to be the party of peace, the party of compassion. Many Democrats still believe in those ideals, but unfortunately, as an institution, it has lost its way. There is only one anti-war candidate today, one peace candidate, and you won't find him in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. He is an independent. He is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is his commitment to peace and to the welfare of hard-working people in America that drew me, as a person of compassion, to his candidacy.
As recently as a year ago, I didn't think much of Bobby Kennedy.
I didn't think much of him, because I didn't know much. All I had was the mainstream media narrative. But then a friend pulled me aside one day and said, "Nicole, please, do me a favor. Just listen to one interview with Bobby Kennedy. Just one."
So I listened to one. Then to another. And another. And I recognized a person who was the exact opposite of the media slander of his character. I saw a person of intelligence, of compassion, and of reason. I saw a fellow lawyer who had committed himself to finding the truth and fighting for the environment and for people. I discovered a person who speaks out on issues that, even though they are critically important to human health and welfare, are consistently ignored by our government. And for the first time in a long time, I felt hope for our democracy.
One of those issues also happens to be a passion of mine and a focus of my philanthropic work - chronic disease. I got into it through my own journey of reproductive health, followed by a steep learning curve of caring for my daughter who has an autism diagnosis. In that journey I discovered that women's fertility is in precipitous decline around the world. We are facing a crisis in reproductive health, and that's embedded in the larger epidemic of chronic disease. Because it has been so personal for me and my daughter, I got deep into the research and consulted some of the best scientists and doctors. Let me share what I found. There are three main causes. One, is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food, water, and soil, like the pesticide residues, the industrial pollutants, the microplastics, the PFAs, the food additives, and the "forever chemicals" that have contaminated nearly every human cell.
Second is electromagnetic pollution. You don't hear politicians talking much about that either, but it is something we need to look at. As Bobby says, we need to investigate every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic that is devouring our nation from the inside.
Third, I'm sorry to say, is our own medications. Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription after another after another, one shot after another and another, throughout the course of childhood. Conditions like autism used to be rare. One in ten thousand. Now it is one in 22 here in California. Allergies. Obesity. Anxiety. Depression. Our children are not well.
Our people are not well. And our country will not be strong for very long either if we don't heed this desperate call for attention.
I've spoken to our government agencies about this. I've spoken to senators. I've spoken to governors. They all know something is wrong, but none of them take any kind of action. There is only one candidate for President who takes the chronic disease epidemic seriously. It is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and I will be his ally in making our nation healthy again.
It's not about a new pill. It is not about "finding the cure." We know the cure is cleaning up our environment and providing the basic public goods that are the foundational conditions for health and healing. It is about a shift in our priorities. It is about compassion. Chronic disease, addiction, poverty, depression… this is where Americans are hurting the most. It is time for politicians to listen.
So here is how the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is going to end the chronic disease epidemic. While Bobby is focused on ending the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, I am going to assemble some of the best technologists and scientists in the world and we will use the latest in AI and computation and examine the health records
databases of our nation and those of other countries who are also on the quest to solve chronic disease. We will find unbiased answers to our most pressing health concerns within weeks and not decades. It is time to move out of the dark ages of medicine. We can solve the mysteries guarded by corporate influence. We can move from bandaid solutions to root causes, and we can end the chronic disease epidemic.
My sense is that most American Moms and dads already know the truth of the matter, and it is long overdue that the duty of care owed to the American family is actually given. We CAN find the answers, conclusively. I have a background in tech, so I tend to think in terms of data. In my tech days, I developed AI-powered software to automate affordable legal services. Well, the CDC and research institutions have the data we need. We can apply technology to figure out what environmental factors are making us sick. We just have to ask the right questions, do the right research, and apply the right tools. We have to rid science of the corporate bias that contaminates it today. Then we can put the chronic disease epidemic into reverse.
Actually, the first political issue to which I applied my tech background was criminal justice. It was across the Bay in San Francisco, where the district attorney's office needed help examining thousands of police records thought to contain evidence of racial bias, wrongful arrests, and patterns of prejudice. I put together a team of computer scientists to develop a computational method to collate all these case records, and design a method for analysis. In short, I got to see the sorry state of criminal justice in our country. It isn't just about policing. It is about the school-to-prison pipeline. It is about a broken and dismally functioning infrastructure. And it is about recidivism. How do we provide alternative paths? How do we make prisons places of rehabilitation not punishment? These questions don't have easy answers, but they ARE the right questions, and Bobby Kennedy is the only Presidential candidate who is asking them.
I'd like to mention one more issue close to my heart. My interest in health and solving climate issues led me into the realm of agriculture. I realized that a nation's health comes down to its soil and the people who work it. Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. It is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem and a healthy climate. It is the foundation of a healthy economy. But what politician, besides Bobby Kennedy, do you hear ever talking about soil? I've produced two films on this issue — Common Ground is the latest. I've talked to Congresspeople and Senators, but all I've ever gotten is vague promises that never amount to real change. Republicans and Democrats alike have fallen under the sway of the big agrochemical companies and food conglomerates. They might invoke the ideal of the family farm, but they have betrayed it again and again. So I'm entering politics myself. I've met some of America's most innovative farmers. Their methods rebuild soil, sequester carbon, recharge aquifers, and revitalize the farm economy. We don't have to force anyone to imitate them. All we have to do is change our system of regulation and subsidy to support those methods, instead of extractive corporate agriculture.
I hope you all understand now what has brought me into politics as an independent candidate for vice president. I am leaving the Democratic Party to do it, as Mr. Kennedy has himself. And I want to say two things about that. First, even though I'm leaving the party, I believe I am taking its best ideals and impulses with me. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of compassion and peace. It is supposed to be the party of diplomacy and science. It is supposed to be the party of civil liberties and free speech. And most importantly, the party of the middle class and the American Dream. While I know those ideals still abide within many Democrats, I want to point out that the party has lost its way. In its leadership, in its institutions, it has become interested in elitism, celebrity and winning at all costs, even if that means turning a blind eye on issues they all know to be true. I know because I've been in those circles for the last 8 years and have grown increasingly tired of it. It wasn't until I met Bobby and the people supporting him, that I felt any hope in the outcome of this election.
As I've reexamined my Democratic Party assumptions, I have seen conservative voters with new eyes too. I have met hunters and farmers that are some of the staunchest conservationists I have ever known, who understand ecosystems better than most. I have met mothers protecting their children who are searching every possible avenue for their health. And yet the Republican Party, like the Democratic, is letting them down because the actions of the party are diverting from the values that actually support individual freedom. In fact, the very failure of both parties to do their job to protect their founding values has contributed to the decline of this country in my lifetime. Maybe that's why I see so many Republicans disillusioned with their party as I became disillusioned with mine. If you are one of those disillusioned Republicans, I welcome you to join me, a disillusioned Democrat, here in this new movement to unify and heal America.
This independent movement comes at a time of extreme division in America that threatens to tear this country apart. It is time for a re-alignment. It is time, as Bobby Kennedy says, to focus on our unifying values rather than our divisions. And so, if anyone is listening who never considered an independent candidate, I want to extend the same invitation, the same plea to you that my friend did last year. Please, listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words. Take a close look at his vision for America. It is a vision that I share too as I back his campaign, and focus the next 7 months of my life getting him on each and every ballot in this country!
The vision we share is a vision of national healing. It is an America that leads the world, no longer through force of arms, but through the power of example. It is an America that wages peace through diplomacy. It is an America that had become the sickest industrialized country on earth and turned it around. It is an America where everyone who works hard can afford a decent life. It is an America where people of all races receive fair and equal treatment under the law. It is an America whose freedoms are the envy of the world. It is an America with honest and transparent government institutions. Can you imagine that — a country whose government doesn't lie to you?
People talk about my age. It is true, I will be the youngest vice president in American history. Let me tell you why so many of us young people have turned away from politics. It's because we lost hope that change would ever come from inside the system. After all, whichever party wins with promises of hope and change, or to drain the swamp, things proceed as normal, declining bit by bit with each passing year. So that's one reason. But the other reason is that we can't stand the phoniness. We can't stand the lies. We can't stand the inauthenticity. And that's why Bobby Kennedy leads in polls among young people, we are hearing our voice in his.
So I come to you today as a former Democrat. I come to you as a woman not quite 40. I come to you as someone who has experienced sickness and health and poverty and wealth. And finally, I come to you as a mother. Most of the philanthropists I work with are women, other mothers. Initially, it was as a mother that I came to support this campaign. I never thought in a million years that I would be running for vice president. No, I joined the many, many groups of mothers who support this candidacy. They are Republicans and Democrats and independents. They read the labels in the supermarket and wonder how to keep their kids healthy. They watch in anguish as their children suffer from chronic disease. They cry silently as their teenagers deal with depression, anxiety, and addiction. They do their best to hold it together. If you ask me who my heroes are, that's who, it's the moms trying to make a normal life for their children in a world that has gone crazy.
As a mother myself, who knows firsthand the challenge of a special needs child, my promise to you is to make this world a little less crazy. I will work with Bobby Kennedy to make America once again a country of peace, a country of compassion, a country that is prosperous and free. This won't happen overnight. But I have seen the miracles that the human spirit can accomplish. I have seen its resilience. I have seen its tremendous capacity to heal. What is possible for the human being is possible also for our nation.
So please join me and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the healing of America.
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Remarks:
I am honored to accept the Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe’s endorsement of our campaign, and I appreciate the trust the Chairwoman and the tribal council place in me.
They know the battle for justice and healing for indigenous people has occupied a large part of my energies and of my professional and personal life.
This work will continue when we are in the White House. The Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe and other tribes unfairly deprived of federal recognition deserve to have their status legitimized.
My father spent a lot of time in Oakland, conducting hearings for the poverty program here in 1967 and campaigning here in 1968.
During his presidential run, he made an unscheduled visit at Oakland’s Taylor Memorial Methodist Church with Willie Brown to meet with NAACP leadership, members of the Black Panther Party, and other local activists.
It was a rancorous meeting, and John Glenn and Rafer Johnson urged my dad to walk out as he weathered insults and threats from some of the crowd.
My dad refused: “This is between them and me. I need to hear them out.”
He heard them out, and the next day virtually all of them signed up to his campaign and the Black Panther Party volunteered as his security detail.
The last time I was in Oakland was when I served on the trial team in the Monsanto case. We tried two cases in this city, and I lived here for several months.
The Monsanto case was my latest in a lifetime of battles to get poisons out of our food and our farms and restore our soils.
The effort has consumed much of my life — I wanted a vice president who shares my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, regenerative agriculture, and good soils, and I found one.
Among other things she has used cutting-edge technology including AI to calculate the catastrophic health consequences of toxins in our soil, air, and water.
Technology has been a lifelong passion of my future vice president.
This is important because I also wanted a VP who shares my indignation about the participation of Big Tech as a partner in the censorship, surveillance, and information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people.
That is why I’m bringing on someone with deep insider knowledge about how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public. I want a partner with strong ideas about how to reverse this dire threat to our democracy and freedoms. I managed to find a technologist at the forefront of AI. She has spent the last decade relying on neural networks, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge science to identify abuses in our government.
She understands that the health of every American is a national security issue — her work has proven time and again that health drives our economy, that it is the foundation of our mental health, our national happiness, and our ability to lead the world in innovation, prosperity and peace.
I also wanted an athlete who could help me inspire Americans to heal and get them in shape. I'm happy to report that my vice president is an avid surfer who attended school on a softball scholarship.
I wanted someone battle-tested, able to withstand criticism and controversy, and all the defamations and slanders and perjuries that are thrown against anyone who embarks on a presidential campaign.
I wanted an advocate who has seen corruption of our regulatory authorities firsthand and shares my indignation about the way it allows regulated industries to commoditize our landscapes, our food, our wildlife, and our children.
I wanted someone who would honor our traditions as a nation of immigrants and to also understand that — to be a nation — we need secure borders.
I wanted a partner who was a gifted administrator but also possessed the gift of curiosity and an open, inquiring mind, and the confidence to change even her strongest opinions in the face of contrary evidence.
I wanted someone with a spiritual dimension and compassion and idealism, and above all, a deep love for the United States of America.
I found that person in a woman who grew up here in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants, who overcame every daunting obstacle and went on to achieve the American dream.
So that is why I am so proud to introduce you to the next vice president of the United States — my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, and fierce warrior mom — Nicole Shanahan.
Nicole’s personal story began here in Oakland, the daughter of impoverished immigrants. She grew up on food stamps and welfare in this city, beset by many other unique challenges, all of which she overcame. Her very American journey took her to a career as a patent attorney and as a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Stanford University fellow.
Like many of us, Nicole assumed our government was working for our people, that our defense and intelligence agencies wanted peace, that our public health agencies wanted us to be healthy, that the USDA supported wholesome food and family farms, that the EPA would stand up for clean air and clean water, that the Fed wanted a prosperous America, that the Democratic Party was on the side of the middle class, the working poor and Main Street small business owners, that scientists were incorruptible and that science was an exalted search for truth, and that the president would defend free speech.
I used to believe that too. Do you remember those days?
She will tell you that she now understands that the defense agencies work for the military-industrial complex, that health agencies work for Pharma, that USDA works for Big Ag and the processed food cartels, that EPA is in cahoots with the polluters, that scientists can be mercenaries, that government officials sometimes act as censors, and that the Fed works for Wall Street and allows millionaire bankers to prey upon Main Street and American workers.
This is why Nicole and I both left the Democratic Party. Our values haven't changed, the democratic party has.
The things we love are the same. We love our families, our children, and our faith.
We love clean air, clean water, productive soil, and good food. We love the wilderness and our purple mountains’ majesty.
Above all, we love our country. We want America to live up to her highest ideals. We want her to be an exemplary nation again — a global leader in freedom, opportunity, and responsible government. We want America to be a peacemaker and a moral authority.
We want our children to grow up as I did, in a country for which they feel love and pride. We want them to be healthy and to feel safe, and to have every opportunity for dignity, prosperity, and community.
We want them to have confidence in their futures. We want them to have the best education. We want America to be friendly to farmers and entrepreneurs. We want America to honor its veterans and its teachers. We want our scientists to stand up for science, and our government for free speech.
Nicole and I share all these values, and you know what, despite our artificially orchestrated divisions, nearly all Americans share do these values with us.
I am grateful that Nicole has put her self-interest aside and made the momentous and difficult decision to embark with me on this extraordinary crusade to save our country.
I am happy she is a young person, only 38 years old, because I want Nicole to be a champion for the growing number of millennials and Gen Z Americans who have lost faith in their future and pride in our country. Many in her generation have stopped believing that the older people — who have been running our government for so long — understand them or represent their interests.
That older generation that now dominates Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House is the same generation that ran up a $34 trillion debt.
Millennials and Gen Z and their children will shoulder the burden of that debt.
It was my Baby Boom generation that unleashed the epidemic of chronic disease that has made America the sickest country on earth.
The only response to this calamity by government officials is to gaslight us into pretending that it is all normal. Nicole and I both share doubts that the corporate-captured Uniparty can produce leaders capable of imagining a different version of America — a hopeful vision of the future.
We both have doubts that either the Democratic or Republican nominees are capable of dealing with the complexities and fulfilling the great promise of a technology-driven economy.
In the right hands, technology can be America’s salvation. It can give us the path out of debt, chaos, environmental ruin, and chronic disease.
But we both fear that in the wrong hands, technology may turn its power against humanity. We don’t think that President Trump or President Biden understand either the promise or peril of technology sufficiently to direct its trajectory toward light, freedom, healing, and prosperity.
We are now witnessing a dismaying contest between the two oldest presidential candidates in history.
Those two men, during their terms as president, both worked to close our Main Street businesses for a year without scientific evidence or democratic process.
Their policies transferred 4 trillion dollars from the middle class to a new oligarchy of billionaires. Their lockdowns helped create a new billionaire each day for 500 days. Together, they ran up a greater debt burden than all previous presidents combined since George Washington.
They each want us to hate and fear the other guy — but to young Americans, they look like two sides of the same coin. If we vote for either of them again, we can expect — and we will deserve — more of the same: the annihilation of the middle class and the further impoverishment of the working poor, more chronic disease, more environmental destruction, more debt, more war, and fewer constitutional rights.
I’ve asked Nicole to use the platform of the vice presidency to speak for ALL the invisible, voiceless Americans who feel let down by our government. As your vice president, Nicole will represent the working poor who feel forgotten, who sink every day deeper in debt. She is going to fight for all those Americans who know what it’s like to skip meals to pay for gas, and who watch food prices spike ever higher and wonder how they are going to get through the grocery store checkout line.
I want her to stand for the children who are receiving substandard education, and the veterans who are feeding their families at soup kitchens. And the 1.1 million children whose parents served in Afghanistan and Iraq and whose families are silently struggling with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
I want her to represent the mothers who struggle to protect their children from bad chemicals, bad pharmaceuticals, and bad food. As vice president, she will stand between them and Big Ag, Big Pharma, the chemical industry, the processed food industry, and the government regulators who are colluding to poison our kids for profit.
And as vice president, she will stand up with me against the military-industrial complex and the Neocon interventionists and their forever wars.
In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt appointed my grandfather Joseph Kennedy to run his new Securities and Exchange Commission. My grandfather had been a stock manipulator and FDR wanted a chairman who knew the stock market inside and out to reform it.
In a similar vein, Nicole will stand up to Silicon Valley, which she knows inside and out.
And she is going to stand up to Wall Street, the Big Banks, and the larcenous K Street lobbies, the regulatory czars, the unbridled central bank money-printers, and the crony capitalists. These are the actors who have displaced democracy with greed.
Their cupidity drives our corrupt campaign finance system, which is nothing more than a system of legalized bribery. This is the system that put agency capture on steroids and made our government regulators sock puppets to industry.
The corrupt merger of state and corporate power now straddles our nation’s capital like a mythical harpy, sucking the economic, social and moral vitality out of the nation’s polity of free citizens, gorging itself on the bleaching bones of the American middle class.
Nicole is going to help me free our country from that predatory cabal.
Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.
Now let me tell you what Nicole and I are up against, and how we are going to win.
The New York Times estimates a final Democratic Party war chest of $3 billion, allowing it to spend more than any presidential campaign in history. Incidentally, the Republican Party will raise about the same.
Does anybody here think that these big-money donors are giving out of a patriotic impulse? No.
They are investing in the Uniparty because political contributions have a proven return on investment.
The campaign finance system has transformed our government from a model democracy to corporate kleptocracy.
So we are up against powerful financial interests.
We also face a determined campaign to keep us off the ballot by fair means or foul. Evidently, the Democrats have little faith in their candidate’s ability to win the old-fashioned way — in the voting booth.
We will overcome these financial and legal challenges. But I want to talk about another obstacle that is even more important.
It is the obstacle of cynicism. It is the obstacle of fear. It is the deeply ingrained habit of voting for someone you have little passion for, because he is the lesser of two evils.
Because you are so afraid the other guy will win.
Well don’t you want to vote FOR someone, not just against someone? Don’t you want to vote for a candidate and a country you can be proud of?
I know you do, because some 70% of Americans say that they don’t want to choose between President Trump and President Biden.
They don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils.
They especially don’t want to choose between the two men who brought us a $34 trillion debt, the endless wars, censorship, chronic disease, and the corrupt merger of the state and corporate power.
Republicans and Democrats have taken turns in office for over 30 years now and all these problems have just gotten worse.
That’s why those same polls show my approval ratings far above those of Presidents Trump and Biden.
Both Democratic and Republican parties are looking at those polls and devising ways to keep me off the ballot. They are the ones who are afraid, and so they try to make you afraid too.
Their principal technique is to call me a spoiler and instill fear in Americans that voting for me will get some terrifying candidate elected.
Our campaign is a spoiler all right.
It is a spoiler for President Biden AND for President Trump.
It is a spoiler for the war machine.
It is a spoiler for Wall Street, Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, the corporate media,and all of the corrupt politicians and corporations.
That’s why they are trying to keep us off the ballot and frighten you into choosing between the two tired and unpopular heads of the uniparty.
Millions of Americans will not vote at all if they are not given another choice.
Well, Nicole and I are giving you another choice.
The Democrats and Republicans are trying to divide America. They tell us to hate each other, to mistrust each other, to accuse each other of treason, and to warn us in apocalyptic terms that democracy itself is doomed if the other side wins.
They turn families against each other and neighbors against neighbors.
They are trying to divide America. But Nicole and I will unite America. That is our path to victory. That is how we will win. We will forge an unstoppable coalition of homeless Democrats and homeless Republicans who are ready to look to the universal values that unite us, all those things that I want, that Nicole wants, and that every conscientious American wants too.
If we can persuade enough Americans to vote out of hope rather than of fear, we will win this election in November.
If you want more of the same, vote out of fear.
If you want genuine change, take the risk and join Team Kennedy. Join the new American Revolution.
What that means is to vote from your conscience. From your heart. Vote out of idealism and optimism for this country. Refuse, above all, to vote from fear!
If Nicole and I can get Americans to refuse to vote from fear, we will be in the White House this November.
Nicole and I are running to help heal the symptoms of an ailing America — heal our divisions, heal our economy, heal our mental and spiritual and physical health.
But we cannot do it alone.
We need you.
And now I have a governing partner who will fight for you and your family until the last corporate kickback is banished from our government; the last toxin is cleared from our water, soil, and air; until the last American child gets to live healthy and pursue their own happiness in this land of the free.
I’m confident that there is no American more qualified than Nicole Shanahan to play this role.
So I’m proud to introduce you all to the next V.P. of the United States, Nicole Shanahan.