Robert Kennedy Jr. on the Changing Political Landscape | Phil in the Blanks

you talked about the Democrat Party as though you feel like it doesn't exist the way it existed a generation ago or two generations ago that there's not a Democrat Party as you knew it growing up is that an accurate read did I hear you right yeah it still has this kind of tribal identification um but the things that it stood for like you know the Kennedy Democrats my father my uncle's Democrat party was very different that Democratic party was any War it was you know Pro constitutional rights Pro civil rights starting with the Bill of Rights and the freedom of speech it was on the side of working people and cops and firefighters it was on the side of the environment but not just climate change and big you know offshore windmills and carbon capture it was protecting habitat in Wales which it's doing the opposite today and then it was on the side of of Main Street you know small business and it was the opponent of the corporate capture and this this merger of state and corporate power of big money Big Data big Tech big banking Wall Street but today that is the constituency of the democratic party it's the big powerhouses there the cops and firefighters are long gone and any kind of loyalty to to labor is proor I how was it hijacked who hijacked it I think you know the big change that happened came with the citizen United case so we had a law in this country that was passed in 1908 um that made it illegal for corporations give to Federal political candidates and we had prior to that we had really lost our democracy and there was a series of laws that happened you know that Teddy Roosevelt and and the muck raking journalists and the populists and the progressives at the beginning of the century really restored democracy from the guilded age when you know the rockefellow and the Morgans the K carnegies the Fricks took control of our government so they made direct election of senators they gave women the vote they made the 40-hour work week they banned child labor they implemented the first income tax so that wealthy people had to pay their sure and and corporate income taxes as well the most important thing that they did was they passed a law that made it illegal or corporations to donate to Federal political candidates well in 2010 102 years later a very business friendly Supreme Court said made a holding that donations are a form of free speech they're therefore protected by the First Amendment and this Unleashed a tsunami of of uh of corporate wealth into the American political process and it put all of these terrible Trends on steroids the total cause of the presidential campaign was was about a billion dollars this year this presidential candidate uh campaign will cost 15 billion and to run for Senate in New York it cost $300 million oh that the guy who's running today is spending his entire time calling up Millionaires and billionaires cuz that's the only thing he has time to do oh if you can't write that check he's not going to be talking to you and he just doesn't have time to do it because he needs to be Dialing for Dollars all the time and and you started to see after that all of these mechanisms put in place that have shifted wealth upward from the middle American middle class to the to this new oligarchy of billionaires and during covid you know was kind of the cigra of that Trend so covid we shut down all the Main Street businesses 3.3 million business inan and they didn't come back no and they 41% of black owned businesses will never reopen there and some of those are three generations of equity and them and who did we leave open Amazon and you know and Walmart and Facebook and they all made billions and billions because they got to close their competitors and there was $4.3 trillion do shifted upward from the American middle class to this you know new aristocracy that we have and we created in 500 Days a billionaire a day globally so you're seeing this concentration of well that you know between the citizens united case in 2010 and Co in 2020 10 years I think our go our government the political parties everything in our country was transformed and you're seeing more and more infiltration by the and evidence of the intelligence agencies manipulating the public controlling the media you know these really disturbing terrible trends that are going to now again accelerate with the introduction of AI what's your biggest fear if the Harris walls ticket is successful I think we're going to get more debt um we're going to get we're already at $35 trillion do debt the Biden Administration is is running up a trillion dollars every 90 days you know we're already spending more on our servicing that debt than on our our um on the military within 5 years 50 cents out of every dollar we collect in taxes is going to go to servicing the debt within 10 years 100% yeah never get anywhere right and and it's insane and nobody is talking about it nobody's doing anything about it I think we're going to see more Wars vice president Harris's speech was this you know extremely belligerent you know muscular pronouncement about American Empire it's all the stuff of you know the last century that we should be getting away from we should have a multipolar world where America can really shine but we're destroying ourselves we're destroying our moral Authority destroying our economy I think we're going to get more censorship and I don't think that vice president haris has any Consciousness or any you know worry about how AI is going to affect humanity and you know AI Dr Phil could be a really good thing for us it can you know solve all these medical problems solve poverty everything else and it can actually make government more transparent more responsive to the people but it also and it's more likely that it will be used by government to absolutely enslave us because you know they it gives these these secretive agencies the ability to warp our realities to control our Behavior to control our perceptions and you know to Monitor and to surveil us and so we need to be building the bull works of our Bill of Rights up higher and we need to all be conscious of what might happen and we need a president in there actually is going to be a meeting with all of the the right people meeting with Iran with China with Putin and saying okay let's do a an agreement on how we regulate this we can't over regulate it you can't over reggulator it we also need to make sure that it's it grows responsibly rather than you know grows into a something that's going to kill I mean Elon M said first it's going to steal our jobs then it's going to kill us and you know that is a very high highly likely outcome that was him being serious