President Biden has
a bust of your father in the Oval Office.
When you see that.
What do you think
Well, I'm honored by it.
And, you know,
I have a lot of admiration for
President Biden
for the service that he is
given to our country.
I've known him he's
been my friend,
my close family friend for 40 years.
And, you know, there's
nothing personal about this campaign.
I am not a mean spirited campaign.
In our personal campaign
against President Biden.
He and I are really dramatically
on issues like the war, like Senator
like
the control of Wall Street
and the big corporations
of our federal government
and the pharmaceutical companies,
and also the use of fear
as a governing tool.
And
I think our country is
headed in a bad direction
and that's why I'm running,
but not
because I don't
have a lack of personal affection
for President Biden.
Is he
too old to have a second term
I don't you know, there's
I don't think age is
should be a metric for us
limiting presidential power.
I mean, Bernie Sanders is 81
and you know
a lot of people would support him.
So I think it really
you know,
the only question that we have
when you get to a certain age is
do you have the mental acuity.
And I and I judge President Biden's
medical acuity mental acuity.
I'll leave that to other people.
I've just seen a poll
that says you're at 19%
among Democrats in a race
against President Biden.
At what point
do you think he's obligated to debate you
I'm mindful of the fact that
if it were a general election,
the Commission on Presidential Debates
has a threshold of 15%
I mean, I think there should be debates.
I think, you know, particularly, Michael,
at this time in history,
there's so many Americans
who are worried about election integrity,
who have lost faith in election integrity
and feel like the whole system,
including the election
system, is rigged against them.
I mean, there was
riots by people on Capitol Hill
because of that.
You know, that driving conviction.
So I think the political party
both parties ought to be doing
everything that they can
to convince
the American public
that we really have a democracy
in this country
and that, you know,
our politicians are running
are talking to people,
are doing
retail politics,
are engaging in debates and town halls.
And
it's not just a rigged system
or where the candidates are chosen,
either political party,
the way that was done
in the Soviet Union.
So I'm hoping,
you know,
even if I had 5%,
I think it's important to do debates.
But, you know, that's okay.
Do you as a choice that so far over
understood but would you go
so far as to say
that he has an obligation to debate you
if you have a respectable
showing in the polls
and 19% is respectable
I think he has an obligation
the democracy to debate anyway.
And I would hope that he does that.
But I mean you're a lawyer
and I'm a lawyer
There's no legal obligation
that the president has.
I can't say for it
is that it's a decision by the party.
And I would hope
that the party would put democracy with,
you know, treasure
and value our democracy.
And at least
I think
a lot of
people are feeling like you know, the
the shroud
has been lifted off of Democracy
Now and that, you know,
it's all kind of fake
and it was all rigged.
And I think we need to be doing
everything that we can
to persuade Americans that democracy
in this country is real.
I watched your
announcement speech from Boston.
All 2 hours of it
at about the 48 apologize
nine minute
mark at about the 48 or 49 minute mark.
You said this is what happens
when you censor somebody for 18 years.
I got a lot to talk about
who censored you and why
Well, most recently the
you know the networks also
and including this network
I'd most recently
and I think most offensively
the White House was asking
the social media sites to censor me.
There were also
attorney generals
I think 18
or 13 Democratic attorney generals who
contacted the social media sites
and asked them specifically to censor me.
But you know,
we now have because
of the Twitter files
and because of these email dumps,
we now have clear evidence
that there were White House
personnel who were ordering
the social media companies to censor me.
And it had nothing to do
with misinformation.
In fact,
nobody's been able to show
a single statement that I've ever met
made on my Twitter or any social media
that is factually inaccurate.
It was because I was dissenting
from government policies.
And, you know, in this country,
we built this country
to allow our citizens to complain
about our public officials
and offered to me
a clear violation of the First Amendment.
So let's go there.
The New
York Times
then reporting on your announcement
said this Mr.
Kennedy is the latest
in a history
of fringe
presidential aspirants from both parties
who run to bring attention to a cause
or to themselves.
Do you embrace that label, Fringe?
And if not, what does Fringe mean to you?
Well, I'm
not running to bring
attention to a particular cause.
I'm running
because I believe I'm going to win
I have a good chance of one,
a good enough chance of winning.
To endure all the hardships that,
you know, a
campaign imposes on me and my family.
And I can tell you this, Michael,
because I know that
you're a big fan of my wife.
But if she did not think
if I had not convinced her
that I can win this race,
I would not be in it because she's the
ultimate boss.
Okay, listen, I do love your wife.
I'm team Sheryl.
Having said that,
she called you out
on that Anne Frank reference.
Even in Hitler's Germany, you could
you could cross the Alps to Switzerland.
You can hide in an attic
like Anne Frank did.
I did it in 1962, East
Germany with my father
and met people who had climbed the wall
and escaped.
So it was possible
I drove it, but it is possible today.
The mechanisms are being put in place.
I will make it.
None of us can run and not at.
And I You then apologized.
Can you and I agree that Nazi
or Holocaust
references are never appropriate
because then they diminish
what truly transpired in the Holocaust
Well,
first of all, Michael, in that case,
I was
first of all, let me
say I agree that we have to be careful
about how we invoke the Holocaust.
But, you know, it's difficult, isn't it?
It's
just on a theoretical
or hypothetical basis.
I don't know if you can have kind of hard
and fast rules
about that
because,
you know,
I grew up in a generation where,
you know, right after World War Two,
where everybody was saying,
you know, never again.
And the only way that
we make sure that that kind of barbarism
doesn't happen again
is if we're allowed to talk about it
and if we're allowed to. Right.
If we are able to recognize
all the milestones of tyranny
and that exercise may require it
at some point, it may be useful
to invoke historical wrongs,
including a Holocaust,
you know,
American native genocide, black slavery
and the many atrocities in history
but I want to say something
about that case
in that case,
and that's a good example of censorship.
I never compared the cove.
Amanda it's
the government response to the Holocaust
that was a media canard,
something that the media made up
and charge me with.
And what I was making
a completely different point about that
is the emerging rise
of artificial intelligence
and surveillance technology,
which was creating an infrastructure
at in the future totalitarian systems
would be able to
surveil was and intrude and
control our lives.
In ways
that had never happened in the past.
And so I know.
But when you invoke what you need.
Let me just finish.
You invoked Anne Frank.
Let me just
vote You're not comparing a Holocaust
to the COVID, to the Soviet
mandates. I wasn't doing that.
That's what the media reported.
That was not true.
And I ultimately, because of the damage
that was happening to my family,
because I was living in a world
where nothing I said was reported,
so I was not allowed to defend myself.
In fact,
this is the first time I've ever been
allowed to talk about it on TV.
Nobody would talk to me
nobody would allow me
and nobody would invite me and say,
why did you say that?
And ultimately, I had to apologize for
something I never said.