The Lesson

The Lesson

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One

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics, or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible. 

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

In this lies almost the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

 The distinction may seem obvious. The precaution of looking for all the consequences of a given policy to everyone may seem elementary. Doesn’t everybody know, in his personal life, that there are all sorts of indulgences delightful at the moment but disastrous in the end? Doesn’t every little boy know that if he eats enough candy he will get sick? Doesn’t the fellow who gets drunk know that he will wake up next morning with a ghastly stomach and a horrible head? Doesn’t the dipsomaniac know that he is ruining his liver and shortening his life? Doesn’t the Don Juan know that he is letting himself in for every sort of risk, from blackmail to disease? Finally, to bring it to the economic though still personal realm, do not the idler and the spendthrift know, even in the midst of their glorious fling, that they are heading for a future of debt and poverty?

Yet when we enter the field of public economics, these elementary truths are ignored. There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom. 

But the tragedy is that, on the contrary, we are already suffering the long-run consequences of the policies of the remote or recent past. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. The long-run consequences of some economic policies may become evident in a few months. Others may not become evident for several years. Still others may not become evident for decades. But in every case those long-run consequences are contained in the policy as surely as the hen was in the egg, the flower in the seed.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate hut at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Two

Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups. 

It is true, of course, that the opposite error is possible. In considering a policy we ought not to concentrate only on its long-run results to the community as a whole. This is the error often made by the classical economists. It resulted in a certain callousness toward the fate of groups that were immediately hurt by policies or developments which proved to be beneficial on net balance and in the long run.

But comparatively few people today make this error; and those few consist mainly of professional economists. The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the “new” economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole. The “new” economists flatter themselves that this is a great, almost a revolutionary advance over the methods of the “classical” or “orthodox” economists, because the former take into consideration short-run effects which the latter often ignored. But in themselves ignoring or slighting the long-run effects, they are making the far more serious error. They overlook the woods in their precise and minute examination of particular trees. Their methods and conclusions are often profoundly reactionary. They are sometimes surprised to find themselves in accord with seventeenth-century mercantilism. They fall, in fact, into all the ancient errors (or would, if they were not so inconsistent) that the classical economists, we had hoped, had once for all got rid of.

Three

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only “classicism” or “laissez-faire,” or “capitalist apologetics” or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.

We have stated the nature of the lesson, and of the fallacies that stand in its way, in abstract terms. But the lesson will not be driven home, and the fallacies will continue to go unrecognized, unless both are illustrated by examples. Through these examples we can move from the most elementary problems in economics to the most complex and difficult. Through them we can learn to detect and avoid first the crudest and most palpable fallacies and finally some of the most sophisticated and elusive. To that task we shall now proceed.

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Economics in One Lesson 

Henry Hazlitt

The First Amendment Cannot Stop Pavel Durov’s Arrest in America

The First Amendment Cannot Stop Pavel Durov’s Arrest in America

By Brownstone Institute   August 29, 2024   Censorship, History, Law   

The arrest of Pavel Durov in France last week offered yet another distressing sign for the dire state of free speech in the West. 

As we’ve repeatedly seen in the United States, parties that once dedicated themselves to free expression are now the leading proponents of “content moderation.” The largest newspaper in France – Le Monde – celebrated Durov’s arrest as a “defense of the rule of law rather than an attack on freedom of expression.” The Washington Post reported that “authorities detained Durov as part of a preliminary investigation that focused on the lack of content moderation on Telegram.”

But the French prosecutor’s charges against Durov show that his persecution is not just for freedom of expression; it is for enabling any activity beyond the reach of bureaucratic tyranny. Durov has been charged with twelve crimes, including “providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration” and five counts of “complicity” for what users posted on Telegram. 

Defenders of Durov, including Elon Musk and David Sacks on X, cited the paramount importance of the First Amendment in the United States, suggesting our Bill of Rights will serve as a bulwark against this looming global tyranny. Implicitly, they argue that the Framers’ guarantees will safeguard our liberties from the encroachment of the state.

But the recent examples of Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, VDARE, Roger Ver, and their brazen persecutions debunk this theory at the outset. Mere words can do little to stifle the ambitions of the self-assured. The separation of powers, and its resulting checks and balances, is far more critical to preserve the liberties of the West. 

Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, possibly in advance of a court judgment against the Biden administration, has admitted to acquiescing to censorship demands. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree…I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

The Framers understood this, but our modern myths surrounding the Constitution abscond their concerns. Since World War II, Americans have elevated the Bill of Rights to a status of secular scripture, but most citizens would have had no familiarity with the term just a century ago. 

The following is not a pedantic history lesson. Enemies of liberty understand that the struggle is one of realpolitik and ascension to power. They are organized, monolithic, and increasingly global in scale. We cannot delude ourselves into believing that words – no matter how honorable their principles may be – can save us from our enemies’ tyrannical ambition. Rather, it is imperative that we develop alternative sources of strength, whether they be financial, informational, or militaristic, to preserve the liberties that our forefathers bestowed upon us. 

For one hundred and fifty years, liberty in the United States featured very little reference to the first ten amendments to our Constitution. 

The term “Bill of Rights” did not become popular until the 1930s, when the FDR Administration overhauled the American systems of federalism by arguing that it had the right to take any action that the “Bill of Rights” did not prohibit. 

The “Bill of Rights” was paid so little attention that the original document was housed in the basement of the State Department until 1938 and did not go on public display until 1952 (163 years after its drafting). 

Following World War II, the newly renowned Bill of Rights became cited as a source of American exceptionalism, a claim that a brief survey of international law could quickly debunk. 

The Chinese Constitution promises “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession, and demonstration” and assures that “all areas inhabited by ethnic minorities shall practice regional autonomy.” The Soviet Union’s Constitution guaranteed rights to “freedom of speech,” “freedom of the press,” and “freedom of assembly.” The Iranian Constitution professes to ensure “political and social freedoms.” 

The Framers would have understood these rights, as well as our Bill of Rights, to be mere “parchment guarantees.” Justice Antonin Scalia explained:

They were not worth the paper they were printed on, as are the human rights guarantees of a large number of still-extant countries governed by Presidents-for-life. They are what the Framers of our Constitution called ‘parchment guarantees,’ because the real constitutions of those countries—the provisions that establish the institutions of government—do not prevent the centralization of power in one man or one party, thus enabling the guarantees to be ignored. Structure is everything.

Liberty Versus the Consolidation of Power

Now, in France, we learn that lesson again. The Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which describes “the free communication of thoughts and opinions” as “one of the most precious rights of man” offers no safety for Durov. He is a political prisoner, in jail for disobedience to the regime. 

From government to industry to public health, the enemies of liberty are increasingly global in scale. The Canadian truckers’ protest was a demonstration of the consolidation of their power. 

Three of the charges against Durov concern use of “cryptology,” meaning securing private communications in the digital sphere, which presents a direct affront to his enemies’ consolidation of power. It is nothing but math, a series of numbers in a configuration that foils the surveillance state. Nothing more. 

Musk, Sacks, and others dedicated to the preservation of liberty cannot afford to rest on the laurels of our First Amendment. Instead, we must act to create the cultural, social, and intellectual infrastructure that will allow us to maintain those freedoms. 

Math cannot be against the law. Science cannot be controlled from the center. Power should never be permitted to override the speculations and experiments of entrepreneurs and intellectuals. And yet that is precisely what is happening in today’s world. There is nothing more alarming to the powers-that-be than an individual with an emancipatory idea that can and should disrupt prevailing regime habits and ideas. 

All forms of centralized compulsion and control today stem from a revanchist ethos, whether from the right, left, or center. The efforts to prosecute freedom of speech are doomed to fail eventually. 

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This Is Not Capitalism

This Is Not Capitalism

Jeffrey A. Tucker   August 27, 2024   Economics, Government, Society   

The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse. 

I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals. 

The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in which economic systems of the industrialized world have made a hard turn against the whole ethos of voluntarism in the commercial sector. 

Still, let’s pretend we can agree on a stable description of a capitalist economy. Let’s call it the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning.

It is, ideally, the economic system of a society of consent. 

This is obviously an ideal type. So described, it is inseparable from freedom as such and forbids state planning, expropriation, and legal privileges for some over others. How does the status quo match up against that? In uncountable ways, our economic systems utterly fail the test, with all the results that one would expect. 

What follows is a short list of all the ways in which the US system does not comport with some ideal type of capitalistic marketplace. 

1. Governments have become a main customer of tech and media platforms, instilling an ethos of political deference and cooperation, resulting in surveillance, propaganda, and censorship. This happened gradually enough so that many observers simply did not notice the turn. They held onto their reputation as go-getting capitalist companies even as one platform after another fell to become minions of state power. It began with Microsoft, extended to Google, came to Amazon with its web service in particular, and made its way to Facebook and Twitter, even as taxes, regulations, and intense enforcement of intellectual property consolidated the entire digital-tech industry. 

In the course of the change, these companies somehow still held onto their reputations as disruptors with a libertarian ethos, even as they were ever more deployed in service of regime priorities. When Trump took office in 2016, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and UK’s Boris Johnson seemed to be forming a populist resistance force, the crackdown began. With Covid lockdowns, all these platforms swung into action to feed public panic, silence dissent, and propagandize for untested and unnecessary shots of an experimental technology. The deed was done: all these institutions became faithful servants of an emergent corporatist empire. 

Now they are full cooperators with the censorship-industrial complex, while the few outliers like Elon Musk’s X and Rumble are facing enormous pressure to conform and get on board. The CEO of Telegram has been arrested simply for not providing a backdoor to Five-Eyes governments, while NATO nations are investigating and arresting for the act of posting disrespectful memes. Digital tech is the most notable and thrilling innovation of our times and yet it has been browbeaten and distorted into a main tool of state power. 

2. The US has a medical cartel that works with regulatory agencies and official institutions to impose poisons on the public, charge outrageous prices, cooperate with business cartels to block alternatives, and promote addiction and ill health. The interventions in the sector are legion, from licensing to employer mandates to mandated benefits packages to government funding to financial support from patent-protected and indemnified pharmaceutical companies that fund and control the very agencies that are supposed to regulate them. 

The signs and symbols of market economics still exist but in a highly distorted way that makes independent medical practice nearly impossible. It’s not socialism and it’s not capitalism but something else, like a privately-owned medical cartel that works hand in glove with coercive power at public expense. And the coercion is not about promoting health but promoting subscription-based dependency on pharmaceuticals, which have evaded normal liabilities that would otherwise pertain in a genuine marketplace. 

3. The US has an educational system that is mostly government-funded, blocks competition, forces participation, wastes students’ time, and pushes a political agenda of compliance and indoctrination. Public schooling in the US has late-19th century origins but the compulsory features came many decades later, alongside bans on teen work, and this later mutated into state-funded universities that enlisted ever larger shares of the population into the system, eventually saddling several generations into vast debt that cannot be paid. The families seeking alternatives end up paying many times over: through taxes, tuition, and lost income. State intervention into educational services is massive and comprehensive, blotting out all normal capitalistic forces and leaving comprehensive state planning. 

The whole system is so bad that when the Covid lockdowns took place, teachers, administrators, and many students too welcomed the chance to give it all a rest. Many teachers have not come back and the system as a whole is now worse than ever, with private alternatives popping up everywhere and homeschooling now more common than ever. But even so, regulations and mandates prevent the full flowering of a market-based system, even though no sector is more obviously governed by markets as they were in most of human history. 

4. Agricultural subsidies that build vast industries that crush smaller farming and capture the regulatory apparatus and foist bad food on the public. Anyone in farming knows this. The system has gone the way of these other sectors like tech and medicine to become heavily cartelized and working hand-in-glove with government regulators. Daily small farms are being driven out of business with compliance costs and investigations, to the point that even sellers of raw milk fear the knock at the door. In the name of disease mitigation, millions of chickens are being slaughtered and ranchers fear so much as one positive test of some infectious disease. This of course has further consolidated the industry which is ever more dependent on patented pharmaceuticals, insecticides, and fertilizers, the producers of which also get rich at public expense. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and so many others, speak about a public health crisis in the US, the food system from production to distribution plays a large role, which in turns feeds the medical cartel mentioned above. 

5. A wildly complicated and confiscatory system of taxation that punishes wealth accumulation and blocks social mobility in all directions. The federal government alone has seven to ten major forms of federal taxation in main categories like income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and various fees. Depending on how you count them, there are 20 or more. This is remarkable given that only 115 years ago, there was only one source of federal financing: the tariff. Once the government got its fingers into incomes with the 16th Amendment – before that, you kept every penny you earned – the rest followed. And that doesn’t count state and local financing. They are deployed as methods of planning and control, with no industry immune from the need to bow and scrape before their taxing masters to grant abatements or breaks of any sort. The net result is a form of commercial and industrial servitude. 

6. Fiat paper money floating exchange rates (born 1971) give the government unlimited funds, create inflation and currencies that never rise in value, and provide foreign central banks investment capital to make sure international accounts never settle. This new system has blown up government power, which expands without limit, and disrupted the normal functioning of international trade. Treasury debt floated by governments with central banks evades all normal market forces and risk premiums, simply because they are guaranteed by the power to inflate a public expense. This gives the politicians, warmongers, and totalitarians among us a blank check to do their dirty work with endless bank bailouts, subsidies, and other financial shenanigans.

It is precisely this regime change, together with the manipulation of interest rates, that has given rise to what is called financialization, such that big finance has eaten so much of what was once a healthy industrial sector in the US in which people actual made things for sale in the consumer marketplace. In the old days, the price-specie flow mechanism (described by every free trader from David Hume to Gottfried Haberler) balanced out accounts to ensure that trade would result in mutual benefit.

But under the dollar-dominated fiat money system, US debt has come to serve as an infinite source of financing for international industrial buildup that has wrecked countless US industries that once thrived. In 2000, $1.8 trillion, or 17.9% of total debt, was foreign-owned. By 2014, this grew to $8.0 trillion, or 33.9% of total debt — the highest percentage in US history, and this has remained so for the last ten years.

This is not free trade but paper imperialism and it ends in producing a backlash like we see in the US. The solution being offered is, of course, tariffs, which turn into another form of taxation. The real solution is a fully balanced budget and a shutdown of the Federal Reserve’s money spigot but that is not even part of the public conversation. 

7. The court system invites extortionist litigation and can only be fought with deep pockets. Litigation these days is merely about playing the long game in a wicked match that can be over absolutely anything, real or imagined, that any would-be plaintiff can assemble into a court case. Business people, especially small ones, live in daily fear of this constant threat. And this has become the means by which DEI hiring standards have become normalized; they are instituted by risk-averse managers in fear of bankruptcy by litigation. The irony is that the real wrongdoers, such as pharmaceutical makers, are indemnified against legal action, leaving the courts as playthings for the rapacious. 

8. A patent system that grants private industry production cartels and stops competition for everything from pharmaceuticals to software to industrial processes. This is a subject too big for this essay but know that there is a long history of free market thinkers who regarded the patent power as nothing but a tool of industrial cartelization, wholly unjustified by any standard of commercial freedom. “Intellectual property” is not property as such but the creation of fake scarcity by regulation.

One needs only read Fritz Machlup’s 1958 study to understand the fullness of the fakery here, or read what Thomas Jefferson said about the commodification of ideas: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

The corruptions that have resulted from the legislative manufacture of property in ideas cannot be overstated. In industry after industry, they have restricted competition, conferred privilege on would-be monopolists, hindered innovation, and truncated learning and innovation. This is obviously a hard subject but one impossible to avoid. In this connection, I highly recommend the sleeper of a monumental treatise by N. Stephan Kinsella: Legal Foundations of a Free Society. The capture of pro-capitalist thinkers by patent theory represents a serious breach in history and in the current day. 

9. As for authentic property rights, they are weaker than ever and can be overridden or even abolished with the stroke of a pen, such that not even landlords can evict tenants or small business can be open for business. Such was common in poorer countries with despotic governments but such a system is now common in the industrialized West such that no business owner can be certain of his rights to his own enterprise. This is the devastating consequence of Covid lockdowns. It is so serious that the various indexes of economic freedom have yet even to adapt their metrics to the new reality. Obviously there is no capitalism as such if millions of businesses can be shut on the whim of public-health authorities. 

10. A bloated federal budget supports 420+ agencies that lord it over the whole of commercial society, ballooning up compliance costs for entrepreneurs and creating vast uncertainty about the rules of the game. Slight attempts at “deregulation” cannot begin to fix the core problem. There is no product or service made in the US that is not subject to some form of regulatory diktat. If one happens to come along, such as cryptocurrency, it is beaten to pieces until only the most compliant firms survive the market competition. This has been going on in the crypto space since 2013 at least, and the result has been to convert a disruptive and stateless tool into a compliance-obsessed industry that serves mainly the incumbent financial industry. 

Please consider all these factors the next time someone denounces the US system as the best example of the depredations of capitalism. It might just be marketing that is on the hot seat. Marketing to the consumer was a revolution in the use of resources but it too has been corrupted to serve the interests of power. Just because something is available in the consumer marketplace does not necessarily mean that it is a product of the voluntary matrix of exchange that would otherwise profit in a genuinely free market. 

Again, I’m not here to argue about the meaning of a word but rather to draw attention to what everyone can surely agree is a hegemonic imposition on commercial freedom by state power, sometimes and even often with the willing cooperation of the dominant players in every industry. 

I’m not sure that such a system has a precise name in the 21st century unless we want to go back to the interwar period and label it corporatism or just plain-old fascism. But not even those terms fully fit with this new mode of surveillance-based and digitized despotism that has descended on the US and the world, one that provides healthy rewards for private enterprise that links up with state power and brutal punishments for those enterprises which do not. 

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  Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Telegram founder finds out that ‘freedom’ isn’t free

Telegram founder finds out that ‘freedom’ isn’t free

August 26, 2024

Pavel Durov, who fled his birth country refusing to cooperate with authorities, has discovered the limits of free expression in France

FILE PHOTO: Pavel Durov. ©  Social media

French officials have sprung into action with an arrest warrant that seemed to have been scribbled on the back of a napkin when they realized that the founder of the globally-popular online chat app, Telegram, was about to make the colossal mistake of landing in France, despite his company being based well out of the EU’s reach in Dubai. 

Russian Pavel Durov mysteriously managed to get French citizenship in 2021 without ever even living in the country. Normally, French citizenship requires proof of five years of residency, and seemingly more importantly to French authorities, five full years of paying income tax in France. Instead, Durov managed to get fast-tracked citizenship through a French Foreign Ministry initiative that awards naturalization based on some kind of action that contributes to the image, prosperity, and international relations of France. No one has been able to actually articulate what exactly Durov has contributed to France beyond badmouthing Russia, or having created the chat app that French media have long qualified as the top choice of French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage since at least 2016. 

Just as equally puzzling is the fact that just three years later, the judicial branch of the same French government that gifted him with a highly political shortcut to citizenship is now suddenly accusing him of taking an overly laid-back approach to his platform’s content.  French press reports have been citing anonymous judicial sources close to the case, alleging that the app has turned into a giant free-for-all for assorted scum of the earth (in addition the aforementioned elites): terrorists, money launderers, drug traffickers, pedophiles. 

Read more

#FreePavel: Elon Musk reacts to Durov’s arrest

No explicit mention of people who happen to just have opinions that the establishment doesn’t particularly like, and whose online proliferation European officials are always whining about and threatening these platform operators about publicly – the most recent being X platform owner Elon Musk. TikTok, owned by China? National security threat that the West wants to ban – unless they hand over data management and access to the US. Huawei? National security threat, mostly for honing in on the turf of Western competitors who struggled to compete. RT and other Russia-linked platforms? National security threat offering alternative views and information to the EU’s official narrative on Ukraine. Now we’re down to French media outlets like C8 and CNews being threatened like they were Russian – because they haven’t fallen in line with the French regulator’s content demands. 

Durov’s arrest was apparently enough to incite the Canadian founder of another free speech platform, Rumble’s Chris Pavlovski, to grab his go-bag and get the heck out of dodge. “I’m a little late to this, but for good reason – I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Pavlovski wrote on the X Platform.”France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.”

Pavlovski previously opted to outright geoblock Rumble across France rather than censor content that the French government had asked him to – like RT for example. But Durov was singing a tune that the West really liked for a while, about how he was pressured by the Russian government over content control and backdoor access and how he basically just flipped them off heroically. His persecution by Russia was such that he was never actually arrested or charged with anything there, and Telegram is still operational in Russia while Durov is free to go around the world promoting himself as a professional victim of his homeland. Durov even fell right in line with top-down EU demands to censor RT and other Russian media. But there has been a significant shift recently. He had started to change his tune to one that probably wasn’t such a crowd pleaser for the Western establishment, suggesting a few months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson that the FBI tried to convince one of his engineers to basically start installing Western-friendly backdoors that would allow intelligence services easy access to encrypted Telegram content. He added that they seemed particularly interested in infiltrating groups that opposed Covid mandates and jabs. 

Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev said in the wake of Durov’s arrest that he previously warned him that he’d have problems in virtually any country where he didn’t want to cooperate with the authorities on major crimes. Not that people denouncing Covid mandates are committing major crimes, which makes you wonder how much of this is really just France playing up the major crime element in order to tackle much lesser things that they consider a threat to their own power rather than to society. 

Durov may now be on the verge of learning that despite his anti-Russian rhetoric, Russia could actually start looking not too bad by comparison the minute that his new pals decide that they’re fed up with him – and your app goes from being the toast of the Elysee to the trash bin. 

Read more

Moscow calls out Western human rights groups over Durov arrest

Just ask that Russian artist, Peter Pavlensky, whose “art” consisted of arson. He sets fire to the door of the Lubyanka office of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow, for a tableau called “freedom,” walks away with a fine and runs off to France where two years later, in 2017, he decides that for his next masterpiece he’d set fire to the Bank of France’s windows – because art these days just means being a raving douchebag, apparently. He ends up spending enough time in French prison to try his hand at the “art” of hunger striking. 

Of course there’s no actual proof that this has to do with free speech, but the Western establishment does have a nasty habit of cloaking authoritarianism in national security or serious criminality, which makes it impossible to rule out that being the case here, as well. And once the authorities get access or control under the pretext of wanting to curtail serious crime, they then have that access for absolutely everything. 

Based on prior reporting out of Germany and the Netherlands, Telegram has indeed been responsive to court orders for disclosure of information on national security grounds in limited cases of immediate threat to life. But there’s no shortage of people watching all this right now and thinking that it could just be a way to use coercion to push open the window to a lot more cooperation from the app than they would have been able to get otherwise. 

Makes you wonder how governments ever managed to investigate crimes before mobile apps and the internet came along, if they’re so desperate to rely on them to figure out what’s going on. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has routinely been accused by American officials of not reeling in sex pests on his app. As if these guys running the platforms are somehow responsible for every creep lurking behind a computer screen. Good luck with that game of Whack-a-Mole. Zuckerberg has never been arrested though. Surely it’s just a coincidence that he’s constantly genuflecting to power and caving to demands. Perhaps Durov will be directed by French authorities to the local Decathlon sports store here in Paris where he can invest in a nice pair of knee pads. 

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By Rachel Marsden, a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.

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Source

https://www.rt.com/news/603075-durov-french-arrest-telegram/

Why I am suspending my campaign for President

Why I am suspending my campaign for President

Transcript of my address to the nation

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Aug 23, 2024

Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. 

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. 

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign. I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.

In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different. After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup. 

But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party. 

   In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. 

My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.

Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.

I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. 

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. 

Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” 

Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden's White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

But here’s the good news. While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young and independent voters thanks to the alternative media. 

Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler. A “spoiler” is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of relentless, systemic censorship and media control. I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them we have a path to the White House.

Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the existential issues of censorship, war, and chronic disease. 

I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so. And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. 

But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. 

It is with a sense of victory, and not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, but we changed the national political conversation forever. Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard for the last year and a half: “Thanks for a job well done!” 

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place. These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.

The cause of free speech.

The war in Ukraine.

The war on our children.

I’ve already described some of my personal experiences with government censorship-industrial complex.

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. 

In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.

The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement that had been negotiated by European leadership.

In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace treaty with President Putin that would have brought peace and left Donbass and Ukraine as part of Ukraine.

President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. 

His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else.

These objectives of course had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Since then, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died and Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.

The war has been a disaster for our country. We squandered nearly $200 billion badly needed dollars. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any other time since 1962.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other Neocon military adventures.

President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. 

Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and restore our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of government, or to defy the Neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration to tackle those issues. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children. 

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects us far more directly and urgently than the culture war issues that are tearing the country apart. Therefore, it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share just a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.

Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one percent. 

In America, 74% of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50% of children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. 

Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. The average pediatrician would see a single case in their lifetime. Today, one of every three kids who walk through their office door is diabetic or prediabetic.

There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed. 

About 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%. 

One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs. 

So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed — industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting hormone disruptors, the average girl in America is reaching puberty at age 10 to 13 — six years earlier than girls were in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates on any continent. And no, this isn’t because of “better nutrition.” This is not normal. Breast cancer, an estrogen-driven cancer, now strikes one in eight women.

Considering the grievous human cost of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say, it is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was President, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And chronic disease costs the economy as a whole at least $4 trillion. Probably more when you consider the indirect costs. That’s a 20% drag on everything we could aspire to. And it is the fastest-growing cost.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again. 

Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. 

With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science. 

 A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life. Imagine what will happen when Medicaid starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month and is being recommended for children as young as six. All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the costs could be as high as $3 trillion a year. With a fraction of that money, we could buy organic food for every American and get rid of diabetes altogether. We will bring healthy food back to school lunches. We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system.

And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are in cahoots with the food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among their major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power. And our children will be the ones who suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to. It was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions that should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue — I had a weakness for orphans. 

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker in front of my eyes. And nobody in power seemed to care or even notice. For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for running for President. Along with ending the censorship, and the Ukraine war, it is the reason I have made this heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes to my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do and that certainly gives me internal peace even in storms. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won’t fail. Ultimately the future is in the hands of God, the American voters, and President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I ask myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health? I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.

I’m 70 years old. I have maybe a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine that a President Harris will allow me or anyone else to solve these problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me he wants this as his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and closest friends also support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there is even a small chance of success.

Ultimately the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other. That’s why I launched my campaign to unify this country. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation not so much because of any particular policy, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by shared ideals. They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans, and to unify a national populist movement of all Americans — of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics, urban and rural. They inspired affection, love, high hopes, and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate from their memories. 

That is the spirit on which I ran my campaign, and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals we could achieve if only we weren’t at each others’ throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around this issue now, we will finally give them protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.

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Source

https://robertfkennedyjr.substack.com/p/why-i-am-suspending-my-campaign-for