RFK Jr’s recent speech announcing his support for the Trump campaign is a brilliant example of leadership and persuasion.
His audience was a complex mix:
- His supporters, many of whom would be disappointed – even furious – about his decision to drop out of the race.
- Trump supporters, many of whom disagree with RFK Jr’s policies and past criticism of Trump.
- Politically unaligned swing voters.
- Likeminded Democrats.
His goals were to build support for his decision and seize the national conversation.
Let’s see how he did. To analyse this, I’ll be drawing on my OPIS System for creating influential presentations. RFK Jr didn’t use my system to write this speech – I’m just using my system to analyse it.
Sixteen months ago in April of 2023 I launched my campaign for president of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, which is the party of my father and my uncle. It is the party which I pledge my own allegiance to. Long before I was old enough to vote, I attended my first democratic convention at the age of six in 1960, and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights.
This is a strong start, one that aligns well with my OPIS System. The O stands for Orient to the Problem – if you’re trying to change minds, you must start here.
RFK Jr’s biggest problem is a perception around loyalty. This will come up a few times during his speech. His decision to run as an independent – let alone endorse Trump – could be seen as disloyal.
Not only has he been a life-long democrat, but so has his family – one of the most famous families in US history.
He must acknowledge this and he must do it fast. It would be cowardly and unpersuasive to try to ignore this problem. Skilled leaders first lean into the problem – it’s the only way to overcome it.
His audience won’t forget his prior commitment to the Democratic Party, so he can’t ignore it. If he tried to, it would have festered in their minds, a distraction that would undermine his credibility.
There’s a reason so many great speeches start by describing the problem – and why it’s part of my OPIS System.
The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of 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 know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that 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 canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.
The P in the OPIS System is to Pause the Problem. Defang it. Explain why the supposed problem isn’t really a problem.
In just a few minutes, RFK Jr removes the disloyalty issue. He hasn’t betrayed the Democratic Party because he was never loyal to them, only what they and his family stood for.
The Democrats are the real traitors, abandoning their core beliefs. RFK Jr had the courage and conviction to stay loyal to his ideals, not simple tribalism.
Consider what this short message accomplishes. It appeals to his Republican audience by painting their rivals as fickle, corrupt and without morals. It appeals to his supporters by reminding them why they backed him in the first place. And it even speaks to the wider public. Anyone alive in the ‘90s remembers when Democrats were the opposite of that they are now.
Most Americans agree with his thinking here. They support the working class, the environment, government transparency, peace, small businesses and freedom of speech. They hate corruption, war and Big Industry.
It’s a specific enough stance, yet vague enough to have mass appeal. Perfect for politics.
The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said that it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses an insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million signatures, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle all the legal challenges from the DNC.
The naysayers told us that 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 100,000 volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline.
The OPIS System isn’t a 4-step process. It’s nested, working against every problem.
Another problem RFK Jr faces is that his campaign as an independent was hopeless. Sure, he didn’t have to win to succeed – more about that later – but it still seemed foolhardy. The common perception is all an independent can do is waste time and spoil a “real” candidate’s chances.
Here, he Orients to the Problem and Pauses the Problem in rapid succession. In describing the problem, he paints himself as an underdog against the corrupt media, political system and DNC.
But he’s no hopeless scraper. With some potent metaphors that paint a clear vision, he shows he’s a real candidate with many passionate supporters.
Many worked 10 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 churches and farmers markets. They canvassed door to door in Utah and in New Hampshire.
Volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, to take off their gloves and to sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me that he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat.
Those stories are just incredible. They paint his supporters as stoic, passionate and persuasive heroes.
To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave up their part of their social security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those millions of signatures and more. No presidential campaign and his political, American political history has ever done that, and so I want to thank all of those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat.
The problem was that RFK Jr was never a serious candidate with a real shot. The I in the OPIS System stands for Instilling New Thinking. A simple but powerful influence technique is proof. You can’t write him off as hopeless after he achieved objective and verifiable feats no other candidate ever has.
Those stories about supporters enduring extreme weather to score signatures are persuasive but they don’t prove anything. He might have aonly had a doen hardcore supporters.
This part of his speech proves otherwise.
Your accomplishments were regarded as 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, and I’m never going to forget that, not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because you love our country.
You showed to everyone that democracy is still possible here, it continues to survive in the press and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath a canvas of neglect and of official and institutional corruption.
Today, I’m here to tell you that. I will not allow your efforts to go to waste. I’m here to tell you that I will leverage your tremendous accomplishments to serve the ideals that we share, the ideals of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of health, all the ideals that motivated my campaign.
I’m here today to describe the path forward that you’ve opened with your commitment and with your hard labors.
Listening to this speech the first time, the above stood out to me. “You”, “you”, “you”, “you”. None of these records or achievements are his – they’re yours.
In psychology, there’s something called the IKEA Effect. IKEA furniture isn’t better than other furniture. People buy it because it’s simple and cheap.
But they often come to love their IKEA furniture despite that.
When people invest effort into something, they gain a greater sense of ownership over it. IKEA furniture isn’t something you buy – it’s something you help build.
It’s the same thing with packet cake mixes. They could easily add powdered egg and powdered milk to the packet – then all you’d need to do is add water and bake it. Those sell poorly though. By adding your own eggs and milk, you feel as though you’re actually baking the cake.
If RFK Jr’s accomplishments are yours, even in part, you’re more likely to vote for him.
There’s more to it than that. RFK Jr is a politician who comes from an aristocratic family. He doesn’t talk like it. This level of humility is rare in politics.
Now in an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election, in a system that my father and my uncle thrived in a system with open debates, with fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debate, with fair primaries, and with a truly independent media, untainted by government propaganda and censorship and a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.
After all, the polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates, both in favorability and also in head-to-head matchups. But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media and for our government, and most sadly at all for me, the Democratic Party.
“My father and my uncle” – that’s a phrase he uses a lot. He doesn’t name them, even though that uncle was a generally liked president.
I don’t think this is a mistake. Dropping their names would add a lot of legitimacy to his efforts. On the other hand, he’s his own man. Most of the living Kennedys have denounced him. Using a light touch here is probably smart.
Anyway, he doesn’t need the legitimacy – here, he combines objective facts with a story of him being an underdog oppressed by corrupt establishments.
In the Name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it, lacking confidence in its candidate that his candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth.
The DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions. 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 primary that was 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.
One smaller challenge RFK Jr faces is explaining why he teamed up with Trump. He has a lot more to say about this, but here is a tidy explanation. The Democratic Party has gone crazy and corrupt, using undemocratic tactics against both him and Trump. Common enemies draw people together. It paints this decision like a band of unlikely adventurers teaming up to fight a great evil.
They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.
My uncle and my father both relished a debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe to toe with any opponent and the battle over ideas, they would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days.
This is profoundly undemocratic. How are 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 my uncle were always conscious of America’s image abroad because of our nation’s role as the template for democracy, the role model for democratic processes, 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 nothing, no policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in highly produced Chicago circus.
RFK Jr says a lot here. He manages to portray the modern DNC as undemocratic, corrupt, cowardly, incompetent, a global embarrassment and a betrayal of the DNC of “his father and his uncle”.
This attack on Harris paints her as unlike JFK. It’s based on facts – or, at least, an interpretation of them.
In Chicago, the Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day of the convention. Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?
In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.
More facts, more contrast, more describing him and Trump as inevitable allies, not unlikely ones.
It also paints the DNC as hateful and childish, while the RNC are focused on more important things than Biden.
I do interviews every day. Many of you have interviewed me. Anybody who asks gets to interview me. Some days, I do as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated and won 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?
Love them or hate them, both RFK Jr and Trump are working hard and taking the election seriously. Being interviewed is hard work. It’s even harder when a single poorly phrased response could dominate the news cycle until election day.
We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters.
What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is they resort to censorship and media control, and the weaponization of the federal agencies. When a US president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right, a free expression, and that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.
One of RFK Jr’s problems was perceived disloyalty to the DNC. Through much of the speech so far, but especially here, he’s done a great job of defanging the issue.
The I in the OPIS System is to Instill New Thinking. As another Kennedy once famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”. Here, RFK Jr is going for a similar reframe: Don’t ask about my disloyalty to the DNC; ask about the DNC’s disloyalty to America.
Given these facts, he’d have to be insane and corrupt to still support the Democrats.
President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.
Here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot. Our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs over the course of more than a year.
Putin is a bogeyman among the DNC – they paint him as evil incarnate. Here, RFK Jr paints them as hypocrites of the highest order.
Sure, Putin has done worse than a little media manipulation, but tying Biden and the DNC to him is a clever piece of persuasion.
In a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high 20s, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near perfect embargo on interviews with me during this 10 month presidential campaign.
In 1992 Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the sixteen months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN combined, gave only two live interviews from me. Those networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks and colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
Combining verifiable facts with a common distrust of the mainstream media puts RFK Jr as a heroic underdog opposed to a corrupt system.
Representatives of those networks are in this room right now, and I’ll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility: the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and to always challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining that posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, your institutions have made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.
No one goes to journalism school for the money – there are better ways to get rich, even as a writer. They do it because they want to bring truth to the readers and fight the power. Most people enter journalism school as idealists.
Even now, journalists portray themselves this way. Folks don’t believe it anymore. This is in a way a personal attack on each journalist in the room but, without naming names, few folks feel sorry for them.
The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was even more of a naked exercise of executive power. This week, a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden calling the White House’s censorship project, quote, “The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” The 155-page decision details how just 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal and then invited the CIA, the FBI, and CISA, which is a censorship Agency. It’s the center of the censorship industrial complex, DHS, the IRS and other agencies, they censor me and other political dissidents on social media.
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 still attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate. They said that violates community standards, their community standards.
The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, and has joined this systemic attack on democracy. The media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combating misinformation, but governments and oppressors don’t censor lies. They don’t fear lies. They fear the truth, and that’s what they censor.
Most folks hate censorship but they also think social media platforms should crack down on lies. It all comes down to how you word the question.
RFK Jr has a fresh take on that. He points out that it’s not about freedom of speech vs being accountable for sharing lies. He says it was never about misinformation at all.
This reframe explodes the debate. Arguing about free speech vs misinformation is tired and boring. Here, he explains the real debate is between fairness vs tyranny – a different debate with only one side worth supporting.
And I don’t want any of this to sound like a personal complaint, because it’s not. For me, it’s all part of a journey, and it’s a journey that I signed up with.
Nice. No one likes whingers, but stoic champions of the people? Those we can get behind.
But I need to make these observations, because I think they’re critical for us doing the thing that we need to do as citizens in a democracy, to assess where we are in this country and what our democracy still looks like and the assumptions about US leadership around the globe, and are we living up? Are we really still a role model for democracy in this country, or have we made it a kind of a joke?
And 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 voters and independent voters thanks to the alternative media.
Now, this is interesting.
He’s talking about media and social media censorship of his campaign. Then he chunks up to a broad, unpleasant topic – America’s fading relevance and respect on the global stage. Then he chunks down and gets specific with a positive message – how censorship can’t keep a good idea down.
This is a rollercoaster, emotionally and intellectually. Great speakers seem to do this on instinct. They switch from talking about broad trends to specific case studies, from topics of despair to topics of hope.
It’s engaging. It’s almost hypnotic.
And then, with some minor mental whiplash, he changes the topic so smoothly I didn’t even notice the transition first time around:
Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler that would alter the outcome of the election, but has no chance of winning.
In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control. So I cannot, in good conscience, ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House.
Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot and the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the most existential issues, censorship, war and chronic disease.
This is the key of his speech – the decision to drop out is why he’s giving the speech at all. Handle this topic badly and it torpedoes his reputation. He needs to be both clear and persuasive on this point.
So we spend some more time on the rollercoaster. He gives a specific and tangible reason for dropping out: because he owes it to his supporters and donors. Then he gives a high-level reason: because him staying in the race is an existential threat.
I want everyone to know that I am not terminating my campaign. I am simply suspending it and not ending it. My name will remain 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 and red states, just the same will apply. I encourage you to vote for me, and if enough of you do vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 votes, which is quite possible. In fact, today, our polling shows them tying at 269 to 269 and I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election.
But in about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me, it’s with a sense of victory and not defeat that I’m suspending my campaign activities.
“With a sense of victory and not defeat”. He’s not quitting and it’s not hopeless – a key takeaway from a speech like this.
Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, we changed the national political conversation forever, chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics.
I said earlier that RFK Jr didn’t need to win the election to succeed. This is part of what I meant.
You might not remember what 2015 was like, but a big focus of the discourse was around income inequality. Trump couldn’t have won on a topic like that – no policy would be good enough to shake his image as the billionaire real estate guy. So he made comments about Mexican criminals crossing the border and suddenly everyone was talking about immigration – a topic he could win on.
Changing the national political conversation is huge. Now, more people are aware of toxic additives, pesticides and how Big Pharma wants a nation of sick people.
This isn’t RFK Jr’s surrendering. This is him consolidating his victories to date.
I can say to all who have worked so hard the last year and a half, thank you for a job well done.
Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily, and these are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent and now to throw my support to President Trump.
People don’t like inconsistent politicians. “Flip flopper” is among the worst insults, even though it describes a person reasonably changing their mind.
He’s showing that though his circumstances have changed, his values have remained steady.
The causes were free speech, a war in Ukraine and the war on our children.
I’ve already described some of my personal experiences and struggles with a government censorship industrial complex. I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The Military Industrial Complex has provided us with a familiar comic book justification, like they do on every war. At this one is a noble effort to stop a super villain, Vladimir Putin, invading the Ukraine, and then 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 US neocons or American global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options.
A new topic: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. RFK Jr wants to change people’s mind about it.
Again, the OPIS System explains his approach. He Orients to the Problem. The war is bad – everyone can agree with that, so that’s his starting point.
The war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia, a hostile act.
The credulous media rarely explained to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two Intermediate Nuclear Weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear where any ages missile systems in Romania and Poland. This is a hostile act that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle this war peacefully.
Ukraine war began in 2014 when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected Government of Ukraine and installed a hand-picked, pro-Western government that launched a deadly civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In 2019 America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement, that had been negotiated between Russia and Ukraine by European nations.
And then in April of 2022 we wanted the war. In April of 2022 President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were withdrawing troops Kyiv and Donbas and Luhansk.
And that peace agreement would have brought peace to the region, and would have allowed Donbas and Luhansk to remain part of Ukraine. President Biden stated that month that this object, that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia, his defense secretary, Lloyd Austin simultaneously explained that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army, to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else in the world.
These objectives, of course, have nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine is a victim in this war, and it’s a victim of the West. Since then, we end of Russia, and both Russia and the West.
Since then, we have since tearing up that agreement, forcing Zelensky to tear up the agreement, we’ve squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth, as many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids and over 100,000 Russian kids, none of whom, all of whom we should be mourning, have died, and the Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed. The war has been a disaster for our country as well. We squandered nearly $200 billion already, and these are badly needed dollars in our communities, suffering communities all over our country.
Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which form the bulwark of us, national security, a strong Germany with a strong industry is a much, much stronger deterrent to Russia, and a Germany that is deindustrialized and turned into a just an extension of US military base. We pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran were closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any time since 1962 and the neocons and the White House don’t seem to care at all. 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.
There we have RFK Jr Pausing the Problem, as my OPIS System would have predicted he would. He can’t say the war isn’t a problem without sounding like a lunatic. Here, he expresses it simply:
The war isn’t the problem – it’s a symptom of the deeper problems of neocons, warmongering, media manipulation and reckless American aggression.
This is a first-class calamity for our country. 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, and President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president, this alone would justify my support for his campaign.
Here we have the first major mistake in the speech: the phrase “President Harris”. Given Harris’s unpopularity and obscurity – for a presidential candidate, I mean – it’s hard for the typical voter to imagine her winning. Referring to her as President Harris, even as a hypothetical, makes it easier for people to imagine it.
The DNC made a similar mistake back when a “President Trump” was unthinkable.
Better phrasing would be: “…we can assume Harris would be an enthusiastic advocate…”
But back to the OPIS System – here we see the culmination of Instilling Different Thinking. This section and the parts before it reframe the war quite simply:
Harris wants the war to continue, so she won’t even try to fix it. Trump – the legendary negotiator – will find something a peace that he, Putin and Zelenskyy all want.
Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end of the Ukraine war, to tackle chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government, or to defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. Yes, 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. I’m speaking of course, of Donald Trump.
Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination. Calley Means called me on my cell phone I was then in Las Vegas. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, for soil regeneration and for ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying America’s health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA and the NIH, the HHS and the USDA that has caused the epidemic.
Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects since the beginning, and those subjects have been my primary focus for the last 20 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 advisers in Florida in a series of long, intense discussions. I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.
More Instilling New Thinking from my OPIS System. Voting for the DNC just means more of the same problems America has faced recently. Voting for the RNC means change – real change for maybe the first time in a generation.
Also, discreetly referencing the near-assassination is good. That more than anything bolstered Trump’s image.
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 and furiously, if need be on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration. There are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences. Still, we are aligned with each other on other key issues, like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the US intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections.
Most Americans want this. They’re desperate for it. They’re sick of politics, stagnation and incompetence. All they want is for their leaders to lead.
It might sound unthinkable to many folks, which is why referencing Lincoln is smart. He’s generally liked and it proves this Unity Party idea is possible – it’s happened before.
Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open similar discussions with Vice President Harris. Vice President Harris declined to meet or even to speak with me.
A theme in this speech is the DNC are petulant children and sore losers, unwilling to compromise but willing to cheat.
Suspending my candidacy is a heart-rending decision for me, and I’m convinced that it’s 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 finally, protecting free speech.
I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children above all things. In case, some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I would urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr Casey Means, who is the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School.
This is an issue that affects all of us far more directly and urgently than any culture war issue and all the other issues that we obsess on and that are tearing apart our country, this is the most important issue, therefore it has the potential to bring us together.
This is another great reframe. A bad way to win an ongoing argument is to choose a side in it. A great way is to rise above it and show there are better things to discuss. Forget the woke and anti-woke mobs screaming at each other – our children are dying!
So let me share a little bit about why I believe it’s so urgent today, we spend more on health care than any country on Earth, twice what they pay in Europe, and yet we have the worst health outcomes of any nation the world.
Again, transcending the debate. This isn’t socialised medicine vs private medicine – the taxpayer already spends more than what socialised medicine should cost, only without the benefits.
We’re about 79th and health outcomes behind Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden like we have. And during a covid epidemic, we had the highest body count of any country in the world. We had 16% of the covid deaths, and we only have 4.2% of the world’s population. And CDC says that’s because we are the sickest people on Earth.
We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth, and the average American who died with covid had 3.8 chronic diseases. So these were people who had immune system collapse, who had mitochondrial dysfunction, and no other country has anything like this. Two thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues 50 years ago, that. Number was less than 1%
Oh, we’ve gone from 1% to 66% in America. 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, and 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. There literally were case reports done about them.
Obesity was almost unknown in Japan, childhood obesity rate is 3% compared to 50% a year. Half of Americans have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. When my uncle was president, I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively non existent.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his entire career, a 40 or 50 year career today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic, and the mitochondrial disorder caused diabetes, also causing Alzheimer’s, which is now classified as diabetes, and it’s causing this country more than our military budget.
Every year there’s been an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, Autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.
One in every 22 kids in California has Autism, and this is a crisis that 77% of our kids cannot are too disabled to serve in the United States military. What is happening to our country, and why isn’t this in the headlines every single day?
There’s nobody else in the world that is experiencing this. This is only happening in America about 18% and by the way, you know there has been no change in diagnosis, which the industry sometimes like to say there has been no change in screening.
This is a change in incidents. In my generation, 70-year-old men, the autism rates are about one in 10,000. In my kids’ generation, one in 34. I’ll repeat in California, one and 22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our children?
This deluge of facts is meant to change your thinking about the entire issue. The current state of things isn’t normal. It’s not following a trend that all industrialised societies go through. This is wrong, something is broken and it’s a crisis.
These are the most precious assets that we have in this country. How can we let this happen to them? About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease. That’s like one out of every five that disease when I was a kid, only affected late-stage alcoholics who were elderly, cancer rates are skyrocketing, and the young and the old, young adult cancers are up 79%,
Calling children “assets” is correct in some senses but is awful persuasion.
Saying that typical children now are as healthy as elderly alcoholics a few generations ago is excellent persuasion. It’s a horrifying thought, but it’s undeniable.
One in four American women is on antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis, and 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall, and half a million children on SSRIs.
So what’s causing this suffering? I’ll name two culprits, first and the worst is ultra processed food. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra processed that means industrial manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
Laboratory scientists who form many of them formerly worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies in the 1970s and 80s, deployed 1000s of scientists to figure out chemicals, new chemicals, to make the food more addictive.
People generally like science. If you sell a workout routine and call it “scientifically optimised”, people like that.
But not in everything. Food is something we prefer to be natural, organic and unscientific.
“Laboratory scientists” is generally a positive image. In the context of food, it’s unnerving. Add how they used to work for cigarette companies and it’s an even more disturbing image.
And these ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago. Humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are now banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in American processed foods.
The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine, in our environment, pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies.
Disturbing on many levels – and difficult to ignore.
These assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting and name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen because young. Children are ingesting so many of these hormone disruptors. America’s puberty rate is now occurring at age 10 to 13, which is six years earlier than girls were reaching puberty in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates of any continent on the earth.
And no, this isn’t because of better nutrition is not normal. Breast cancer is also estrogen driven, and now strikes one in eight women. We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults, considering the grievous human cause 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 the nation’s finances.
Calling this analysis crass goes some ways to fixing his earlier mistake in calling children assets.
When my uncle was president, our country spent $0 on chronic disease. Today, government health care spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it’s double the military budget, and it is the fastest budget, a growing budget item in the federal budget, chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, cost at least $4 trillion – 5 times our military budget. And that’s a 20% drag on everything we do and everything we aspire to.
More disturbing facts, focusing on a global, big picture problem. We’ve swung from specific imagery around mentally ill teens with livers like alcoholics to big, abstract numbers that paint a horrifying picture.
Or in minority communities suffer disproportionately. People who worry about DEI or about, you know, bigotry of any kind, this dwarfs anything. We are poisoning the poor. We are systematically poisoning minorities across this country.
Industry lobbyists have made sure that most of the food stamp lunch program, about 70% of food stamps and 70 or 77% of school lunches are processed foods. There’s no vegetables. There’s nothing that you would want to eat. We are just poisoning the poorest citizens, and that’s why they have the highest chronic disease burden of anybody, any demographic, in our country, and the highest in the world.
The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies owed to commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. These policies are destroying small farms, and they’re destroying our soils. We give about, I think, eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco and we do to fruits and vegetables.
If RFK Jr’s social media team is smart, they’ll play the above as a clip as much as they can.
Conservatives and libertarians agree with the above, but that – more than anything – will appeal to left-leaning voters. RFK Jr shows he’ll help minorities, poor children and the environment, all while the DNC just pay lip service to those issues.
It makes no sense if we want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this. We can change it very, very quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that, we need to do three things.
First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change incentives in our health care system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.
80% of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. Joe Biden just appointed a new panel to NIH to decide the food recommendations. And they’re all people who are from the industry. They’re all people who are from the processed food companies. They’re deciding what Americans you know here is healthy and the recommendations on the food pyramid and what goes to our school lunch programs, which go to the, you know, the program, the Swiss program, the Food Stamp programs.
They are all corrupted and conflicted individuals. These agencies—the FDA, USDA, and CDC—are all controlled by giant for-profit corporations. Seventy-five percent of the FDA funding doesn’t come from taxpayers; it comes from pharma, and pharma executives, consultants, and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies.
With President Trump’s backing, I’m going to change that. We’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors and patients are informed by unbiased science. A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry on American children or adults get sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medications for their entire life.
“It’s bad when corporations hijack governments to line their pockets and enforce their will on the people.”
Everyone agrees with that. Full-blown Marxists hate that and radical libertarians hate that. Democrat and Republican – and independent – voters hate that.
By pledging to do something about it, even in just this one context, RFK Jr paints a second Trump administration as something everyone can get behind.
Imagine what happens when Medicare starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month, and it’s being recommended for children as young as six. To offer it for the condition of obesity that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago, and 74% of Americans are obese.
The cost if all of them took their Ozempic prescription is $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that is made by Novo Nordisk, the biggest company in Europe. It’s a Danish company, and the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends change in diet to treat obesity and exercise.
And in our country, the recommendation now is for Ozempic to children at age six. Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually its entire value is based upon its projections of what it’s going to sell, of the Ozempic it’s going to sell to America and we have the food lobbyists have a bill in front of Congress today that is backed by the White House, backed by Vice President Harris and President Biden to allow this to happen, this $3 trillion cost that is going to bankrupt our country.
Emotionally and intellectually disturbing. This creates a real sense of a looming crisis. From there, skilled communicators offer a clear path to a solution, like this:
For a fraction of that amount, we could buy organic food for every American family three meals a day, and eliminate diabetes altogether. We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food we’re going to reform the entire food system, and for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big Ag, which are among the DNC’s 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 most.
We’re towards the end of the speech, so we’re starting to see the emergence of the S from the OPIS System: Shift into Action. After stirring emotions and changing minds, good communication then gives the audience a clear direction forward.
This isn’t so clear yet, but the message is to vote in Trump at the next election.
I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to or wanted to. It was essentially thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement. I was a central leader at that time, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions, including the NGOs, who should have been protecting our kids against toxins.
It was an orphaned issue, and I have a weakness for orphans. I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I had 11 siblings and I had seven kids myself. I was conscious of what was happening in their classrooms and to their friends, and I watched these sick kids, these damaged kids in that generation, almost all of them are damaged, and nobody in power seemed to care or to even notice.
There are a few things going on here. One is that, again, RFK Jr is the underdog. More importantly, though, he’s uniquely qualified. A common sentiment among voters is “it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same!” Overcoming that idea scores you a lot of votes.
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 my running for president, along with ending censorship in the Ukraine war, it’s the reason I’ve made the heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign, and to support President Trump.
This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends, but I have the certainty that this is what I’ve meant to do, and that certainty 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 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 in doing this.
Struggle and hope – a powerful combination.
Struggle alone turns off many people who just want things to be easy. Hope alone is too passive to get people to vote. But people can endure a lot of struggling when they feel hope for the future – and RFK Jr is showing strong leadership on that.
Ultimately, the future, however it happens, is in God’s hands and in the hands of the American voters and those of 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.
“… if President Trump… honors his word” is another mistake. It undercuts the optimism just established and it reminds everyone that politicians make a lot of big claims in election season. It also gives RFK Jr wiggle room to dodge his commitments here.
Political speeches are rough. He’s about 45 minutes in at this point, so a slip of the tongue is understandable. Persuasion is an unforgiving discipline, though. The tiniest thing can turn folks away from you.
This is a spiritual journey for me, I reached my decision through deep prayer, through hard-nosed logic, and I asked 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 myself in the mirror, knowing that I could have saved lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.
I’m 70 years old. I may have a decade to be effective.
A nice touch of virtue towards the end. Mentioning his spiritual journey after laying out all the facts and logic is the correct order – going the other way invites some folks to question your motivations and reasoning.
I can’t imagine that President Harris, a President Harris, would allow me or anyone to solve these, these dire problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.
This is the same “President Harris” mistake only much, much worse. It’s easy for me to say – I’m just writing up my commentary, but even I’m getting tired and clumsy towards the end here. Still, I must offer this as better phrasing: “… I can’t imagine Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these dire problems. After another election cycle or two, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. …”
A shame after such a powerful speech so far. It’s not over yet, though.
President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy.
Good stuff.
I’m choosing to believe that this time he will follow through on this…
Oh no.
…his biggest donors, his closest friends and all support this objective.
Okay, stuck the landing there. Could have been worse. But, again, casting doubt on Trump’s commitment and integrity is an obvious mistake.
My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice or my wife and children, but worthwhile if there’s even a small chance of saving these kids. Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.
My second memo to RFK Jr’s social media team: that last sentence. Go. Play that. That’s a catchy phrasing for an idea that an exhausted and demoralised America yearns to hear.
That’s why I launched my campaign to unify America.
My dad and uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation, not so much because of any particular policies that they promoted, 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 ideals.
They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans and to unify a national populist movement of Americans: blacks and whites, Hispanics, urban and rural Americans, and inspired affection and love and high hopes and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate among Americans from their memory.
That’s 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 that we could achieve if only we weren’t at each other’s throats.
Most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children, if we all unite around that issue now, we can finally give them the protection, health, and the future that they deserve.
Thank you all very much.
Beautiful ending. After an emotional and intellectual rollercoaster, going out of a hopeful high like this is just wonderful. It’s why so many campaign speeches end like this.
But it’s missing something.
Keep the emotional high, yes, but you don’t want your audience to just feel something. You want them to take action. The final S in my OPIS System is Shift into Action for a reason.
Feelings fade, but actions last.
Imagine if somewhere in that crescendo, RFK Jr had said something like this:
“As grateful as I am for your support, I’m not going to call for your support right now. Instead, I invite you to start a conversation. If anything I’ve talked about resonates with you, then discuss those issues with your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues and your family. We all agree on wanting our children to be happy, healthy and free. Talk about this – you might find it bridges political divides you thought were impossible to cross.”
Maybe a message like that is still to come. It would have fit nicely in here, though.
William T Batten 