By Guy Page

800 news organizations want to interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his media staff told Vermont Daily Chronicle during his Wednesday night visit to Vermont. No surprise! A dark horse candidate when he announced in March, the son of the 1968 challenger to an unpopular Democratic president is now President Joe Biden’s only serious contender for the Democratic nomination.  

The other media at the Ethan Allen Institute dinner and lecture Wednesday night asked standard presidential candidate questions: how would he reduce the national debt? Will his safe vaccines-only views hurt him at the polls? Rather than duplicate their efforts, VDC chose different questions. 

VDC: Does your vocal disability make you more aware of politically marginalized people’s frustration with being talked over and unheard?

RFK: I don’t know about that. I mean, I think I’m aware of that without having to…. I think if this were lifted from me, I would still have that awareness.

VDC: Your father prosecuted the mob. In the Megyn Kelly interview, you talked about how Tony Fauci’s big government budget bought him a lot of Omerta [Mafia word for the code of silence]. Are you consciously following in your dad’s footsteps, fighting Big Evil?

RFK: I’m not consciously doing that at all. I mean, [he grins] I may be genetically predisposed to do it. It seems to be an occupation that suits me. I’m happy in my life. I was raised in a family where we, I think all of us, were raised with the notion that our lives would be consumed in some great controversy, and it would be a privilege for each of us to be able to participate in some effective way in that kind of debate. So I feel like I’m doing that, and so it feels right.

VDC: You helped to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant [Entergy-owned sister plant to Vermont Yankee on the Hudson River in New York]. Do you think that nuclear power plants have any role in America’s future?

RFK: they may have a role in the future, but not right now. Nobody can argue that it’s safe, because the industry can’t get an insurance policy. And you know, the insurance industry, it’s not a bunch of hippies and tie-dyed T-shirts that are saying it’s not safe. It’s guys from Wall Street, AIG and Lloyd’s of London who are saying, ‘you are so unsafe and so dangerous that we are not even going to write an insurance policy.’ So the industry had to go to Congress in a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night to get the Price Anderson Act passed, which immunizes them from liability for accidents.

They’re not competitive. The last nuclear power plant built cost $14 billion a gigawatt. A solar plant right now costs a billion dollars, wind plant costs $1.2 billion.Then it’s free energy forever because the electrons are hitting the Earth for free. Once you build the nuke plant, you gotta mine the uranium, you got to turn it into fuel, have technicians to run the plant. You got to do periodic outages to service it, and then you got to store the waste the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history.

We can make energy by burning prime rib, if we want to. Why would we? Why would we choose the most expensive way to do it?

VDC: You’ve said in the program with Dane Whitington that geoengineering is as great a threat as climate change. Can you talk more about that?

RFK: We’re seeing these geoengineering schemes that are crazy. To fill the air with aluminum particulates – I think that’s one of Bill Gates’ projects – to fill the atmosphere to darken the sunlight on the earth. We have no idea what that will do to our atmosphere, and potentially that could be much more dangerous. I don’t like carbon capture. I think we should improve the resilience of our ecosystems by protecting, first of all, regenerative farming, which this nation is leading the world in, and by protecting habitats which give the climate resilience.

VDC: What do you admire the most about [mRNA vaccine inventor and Covid-19 vaccine critic] Robert Malone? 

RFK: I think Robert Malone has tremendous integrity and tremendous courage. And here’s a guy who’s spent his whole life at the center of the vaccine industrial complex, and invented the key technology of the mRNA vaccine, and was in a position where he could have made himself a billionaire during the pandemic. Instead, he took a much more difficult role that destroyed his relationships, that destroyed his credibility in his own industry that put him in a very challenging place economically. It takes a lot of guts. If you’re Bob Malone, every day of your life is really hard because people are coming at you from every angle.”

During his speech before a sold-out crowd of Vermonters of all ages and political preferences – who else could draw both Catamount Arts founder Jay Craven and conservative philanthropist Lenore Broughton? – RFK told a story about how he lost his tooth. When he was nine years old, his dad and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were skiing at Snow Valley in California. Suddenly the trio learned that Sec. McNamara’s father had died (probably via Secret Service walkie-talkie in those pre-cellphone days). A prompt descent to the base lodge was interrupted by a fall that cost Jr. his tooth. 60 years later, he bit into his salad at the Double Tree Wednesday night and lost his tooth, again.

Yet the same dinner gained him many volunteers for his Vermont campaign, including the young entrepreneur from Waterford I sat next to. With their help, Kennedy hopes to improve on his father’s second-place finish in the 1968 Vermont primary. A fair trade, indeed.