Edward Curtin on “RFK Jr. vs. the American Political Wasteland” (full transcript)

Some folks have let it be known that they would rather read than listen (while others like to do both). So here is a full 7000-word transcript of Friday’s interview with Edward Curtin. -KB

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm Kevin Barrett, broadcasting live on Revolution Radio, the finest listener sponsored free speech network, which you can support by going to Revolution.Radio. My website is TruthJihad.com and I have a Substack, KevinBarrett.Substack.com where you can subscribe and get early access to the archives of these shows.

Tonight's show features a debate on the future of American politics. I think we all agree that the present is — well, there isn't even a word that covers it. It's gone from bad to worse to far beyond that. Is there any hope? Could it be turned around? In the second hour, Alan Sabrosky, the most censored man in America, says probably not. We'll hear it from the horse's mouth when he comes on. He's kind of given up on politics at this point. And he thinks even RFK Jr is not going to do it.

But I'm not so sure. I think there's..you just never really know. Allah can pretty much make anything happen. Stranger things have happened then an RFK Jr candidacy taking off. In the first hour Edward Curtin will discuss his new article Robert F Kennedy Jr: To Heal the Great Divide. It's an inspiring piece that's even more optimistic than my guardedly optimistic article Can RFK Jr Defeat the Media? And it's brilliant, as is pretty much everything that Ed Curtin does, and it's pretty much on the money in terms of why RFK Jr's candidacy, whether it succeeds or not, is incredibly courageous and inspiring and has that spark that you never know when it could light a fire that could burn down the bad guys. So let's talk about it. Welcome, Ed Curtin. How are you doing?

Edward Curtin: Good, Kevin. Thank you for having me.

Kevin Barrett: Great to have you back. You're right at the very top of the list of my go-to Internet writers. And your new piece, I thought, was really, well, inspiring. You got what I said pretty much the couple of weeks before that: RFK Jr's candidacy is a real, very rare bit of very good news: that a brave man has decided to put it on the line by trying to make things better in this country. And I appreciate that you really sounded that note and played it out beautifully.

Edward Curtin: Well, thank you. Yes, I think his candidacy is the first sign of hope within and beyond the electoral system that we have had in a long, long time. I think he has been addressing many of the most important issues of our time for many years. Not just what he's had to say on COVID 19 and the vaccines and all of that stuff, but on many other issues. And I think by his stepping forward, he has introduced a lot of hope into a very dreary, dark time. And I have great hope that he is going to find success. I think many people are going to be very surprised by how he garners support over the next six months. They're going to be quite startled, I believe, contrary to all the pundits who say he has no chance.

Kevin Barrett: Well, it's, of course, the media that says "he has no chance because we say he has no chance, because you will believe what we say. You will stay within the Overton window that we lay out and don't even think about stepping outside of it." They tried that with Donald Trump and it didn't work too well. But maybe they think they've learned their lesson and they can contain RFK Jr. Why do you think that they can't?

Edward Curtin: Well, I think they can't because I think contrary to Donald Trump, he is going to speak eloquently, calmly, let me use the word lovingly, across the divide. He is not going to stir the pot except to speak truth and to speak it calmly, the way he does speak. And his very brilliant mind and his command of the facts are rather extraordinary, far different from Donald Trump. And I think they're going to have a lot of trouble with him because the Democrats have no one who can counter his eloquence and his positions. So we'll see what happens. I mean, he's he's working within the Democratic Party structure right now. And they will have all the knives out to get him, the Obama and Clinton people and their neocon friends and associates who run the Democratic Party with Joseph Biden as their puppet. They're going to have a hard time containing his message because many people are sick of all the damn lies that they've been telling all these years.

And Bobby Kennedy, he's not been involved in electoral politics his entire life and he's now stepping into the fray. And he's spoken his mind, as in Boston when he opened his campaign: "I've been just saying what I think is true for years. I haven't been trying to get elected to any office. I'm not really a politician in that sense." Trump wasn't a politician either. But he had a lot of baggage. Bobby Kennedy has said, "I have a lot of skeletons in my closet, too. If they could all vote, I'd get elected right away." And the Democrats and the media will, of course, bring them out. But he's already brought them out himself. So he has little to hide and a lot to gain. And he's an eloquent voice and a very courageous guy. So I think they're going to be very, very surprised. And I think he's already surprising them. And they're going to go into a panic as the months go by.

Kevin Barrett: I think one of the big advantages he has is that he's running against Biden, who is not a very impressive candidate. And you mentioned in your article that there are historical parallels between this upcoming election and the 1968 election. In both cases, we had a very unpopular president who was presiding over a war that was going south and was indeed in bed with the forces that had killed President John F Kennedy, that deeply entrenched corruption at the top of the heap. And so when RFK challenged Johnson in 1968, there was a breath of fresh air in the country that came out of nowhere, as RFK Jr said in that incredible speech. That was a really good, inspiring speech, whether you agree with every single bit of it or not, whether you would have said different things or not. It's not exactly my speech. And I didn't cheer for every single word of it. But it was the most inspiring political speech from any mainstream party candidate I can remember. So you've got an inspiring Kennedy running against a deeply repugnant, really unpopular war president. And in that situation, even with the media totally against him as they were against his father, it doesn't seem impossible that his campaign could suddenly take on a life of its own and break out of the containment.

Edward Curtin: I agree. If you go back to 1968, many of the issues that were alive then have only been exacerbated over the years, as everyone who knows a little bit of history knows. But in 1968, when Senator Robert Kennedy entered the race, he was considered an upstart, someone who was stepping on the toes of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was challenging Lyndon Johnson and was doing very well. And Senator McCarthy was a fine candidate. But Bobby Kennedy or Senator Robert Kennedy, I should refer to him that way, in 1968, felt that he had a much better chance of of winning the presidency. But he did not have a lot of backing except among poor Americans, people who were deeply antiwar as they were for Senator McCarthy, a lot of black Americans at that time who were fighting for civil rights. And I think today, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is running against a very, very weak candidate. I think Biden will in the short term declare his candidacy. But I think the Democratic insiders will find out that Biden is very weak and will lose to Kennedy and they will make sure that he doesn't continue. And my guess is that they will replace him with someone else at some point because they will start to panic because Bobby Kennedy Jr is gaining. So I think that's how it's going to work out.

Kevin Barrett: That would be like 1968 with Johnson forced out of the race by Robert Kennedy.

Edward Curtin: Johnson quit the race two weeks after Senator Kennedy entered the race. And then after the California primary, it became quite apparent that he was going to win the nomination and he'd be the next president. And that was simply unheard of. It could not happen. So the CIA made sure that he was shot in the back of the head.

Kevin Barrett: They didn't waste any time getting rid of him, did they?

Edward Curtin: No, they didn't. They didn't. But they had that assassination planned well in advance. They knew he was on the horizon and he was a very dangerous man. Uh, and so, you know, they got rid of him. And we know the results: Nixon, who was fixing the whole Vietnam story and was lying through his teeth, got elected twice. And the rest is history. And ever since, every American president has been a warmonger and in the pocket of the CIA.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, the CIA seems to have gotten even more into the halls of power in terms of picking presidents. They started by killing JFK and installing Johnson and and then taking out Robert F Kennedy Senior. And in more recent decades, it seems that that's only gotten worse. George Bush senior, of course, was not only CIA, but he was almost certainly involved in killing JFK. He's one of the three men in America who didn't remember where they had been on November 22nd, 1963. And all three of them, it turns out, had been in Dallas. And that would be Richard Nixon, E. Howard Hunt, and George Bush senior. So yeah, Bush senior was was not only handpicked by CIA, but he had his whole team of CIA bad guys spooks who put him in office in part by orchestrating the October Surprise against Carter. And of course Bill Clinton helped the CIA smuggle drugs from Central America through Mena, Arkansas. That's how he got his job. And then, of course, Bush Jr is part of that CIA Bush clan. Obama's first job out of graduate school was with the CIA. He went to Pakistan in some sort of unofficial CIA position.

Edward Curtin: He worked for Business International.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. So so Trump was really the first non-CIA president in a couple of decades. I mean, not just non-CIA-approved, but just not CIA, not from the CIA.

Kevin Barrett: All the rest of them were actually part of the CIA. And so the drug dealing wing, the really nasty wing of the CIA, that interfaces, by the way, with the Mossad and its organized crime assets — and that's a big part of the story of who killed the Kennedys, in my opinion. We don't have to go there if you don't want to. But anyway, we've had a series of CIA coups. And whatever you say about Trump, and I've had a lot of terrible things to say about him, he wasn't CIA, nor was he even CIA approved. And I think the Trump people are not barking up the entirely wrong tree in saying that he was taken out in a coup d'état. A lot of their details about how the election was rigged are probably wrong, but it was rigged in various ways. The media wouldn't even cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. So we just had this bizarre Trump presidency, the first time that somebody had not only beat the media, but also beat the CIA, after a series of CIA presidents. And now we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who's not only running directly against the CIA, who's made it very plain what he thinks of the CIA, and he knows that the CIA killed his brother and his uncle. And I don't know if he's talked about his cousin, JFK Jr, but he might as well have. Now, that's raising the ante on Trump's challenge to the CIA and its lapdog media.

Edward Curtin: Yeah, well, I'm not sure Trump raised any ante on the CIA.

Kevin Barrett: RFK Jr. is the one raising the ante in that.

Edward Curtin: Yeah, he is very, very conversant on the history of the CIA, on all of its shady operations around the world, its coups d'etat, it's the support of wars everywhere. And, of course, the assassinations. He wrote a book a few years back, and I'm one of the only people who ever reviewed it, called "American Values: What I learned from my family." And all the mainstream media totally shunned the book, as if the book did not exist. And the book was not only a family history of his grandfather, his grandmother and so forth, his father, his uncle, President Kennedy, but in particular, there was one long chapter about his father and President Kennedy in which he details and indicts the Central Intelligence Agency like no one had before who had an establishment name. It's an extraordinary chapter in that book, and that's why the mainstream media just made sure that it wasn't reviewed. And it befell someone like me, a minor character, a minor writer, someone who who has no name, to write a review of it.

Edward Curtin: And so this is what they do. They try to and this is what they will do. It will be a  vicious attack on the man. But I think he will be able to withstand it because he's a tough guy. He's no one's fool and he's not a coward. And he has a spiritual dimension to him that will sustain him. And this is something that many people may not know, but it is true. He has a strong spiritual core.

Kevin Barrett: And maybe you could tell us a little more about that, because the Kennedys are widely viewed as a bit like Joe Biden, as kind of lapsed liberal Catholics who are so liberal that they're hardly Catholic and not very religious. Many of us know the story of how John F Kennedy had some possibly LSD-induced spiritual experiences during the last year or two of his life and may have had his turn towards peace as a kind of a spiritual revolution that ended up getting him killed. Yet the most of the Kennedy family are considered, like Biden, as not really Catholics. Interestingly, today, Biden faces a lot of opposition from religious people on the abortion issue. That's one of these divisive issues that RFK Jr. wants to overcome. And I wonder if you could tell us more about his spiritual and religious background and how he's well-placed or not to help overcome that kind of divide.

Edward Curtin: Well, I can't tell you any specifics about his personal spirituality or religious convictions. I can say this, that President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were inspired by their religious beliefs. Not in the sense of conventional Christianity. Urban, Irish, Catholic liberals, they're not really religious in any deep sense. They're conventional Christians, which is almost in contradiction to being spiritually inspired in the Kierkegaardian sense of really being committed to belief in God and the spirit. But President Kennedy was — you could talk about his LSD experiences, but don't think that was the essential thing. And RFK was and Bobby Kennedy Jr. Is, too. I believe he thinks — I know he thinks that his candidacy is in the hands of God, not that God is going to be intervening or pulling any deus ex machina nonsense.

Kevin Barrett: God isn't going to rig the election for him.

Edward Curtin: No, don't think so. And no, he doesn't think so. But he thinks that he has a vocation, a calling, in the spiritual sense of "stand up, be courageous." As he said many, many, many times, there are many things worse than death. A life where you don't stand up and face the killers and the warmongers and speak truthfully is a life not worth living. And he does not want to live that kind of life. And so he's willing to risk his life. Of course they will try to assassinate his character as much as they can. But he knows that if he goes further than that and he becomes a real danger, his actual life is at risk. But he's willing to take that risk. And there have been a lot of people who are willing to do that.

If you just look at the whole COVID story — the whole COVID story is trying to get to people's fundamental fear, the fear of death. But if you have a religious or spiritual conviction, you do not fear death. You believe that you are in God's hands. I know  you're Muslim, so "Allah's hands." But it doesn't matter what religious faith that you adhere to or even if you kind of a free floating person who believes in the spirit of God in some kind of general sense, you know that this is where the truth lies. And you know that your life is brief and we all get blown out like candles, but you're going to stand up and you're not going to be afraid even if they they say, "oh, you could die from this disease or you could be killed or you better shut your mouth or you better be a good boy or a good girl or be a conventional person." No, he's not like that. He's not like that. And that's why I admire him so.

Kevin Barrett: I think his father and uncle and cousin were like that too. There's a Quranic verse about jihad, one of these supposedly controversial verses — actually a number of them — that basically ask the rhetorical question, "are those who go out and put their lives on the line and put their resources on the line and risk themselves, are they the same as the ones who don't, who lag behind, who don't put themselves on the line, who don't risk their lives?" And of course that was originally in the context of defending the community in its war against the Meccan oligarchs. But that principle also applies to people in situations like the Kennedys, who, for all of their flaws and faults, at some point end up realizing that they're up against such evil that they have to make that decision of whether to put themselves on the line or not. And those who do are obviously immeasurably superior to those who don't.

Edward Curtin: Exactly. And, you know, we revere people who go to war, all the generals and all of those people, to fight and kill. But there are people who fight for peace who are just as brave. I'm not trying to say that the people who go to war truly believing in it are bad people. I'm against warfare. Totally. But those who fight for peace, nonviolently, are, I believe, more courageous.  They don't try to kill people. And we have a long line of those. But there are no — well, there are statues to Martin Luther King because that's a way of dismissing him. And their airports may be named for JFK — I was in Houston a couple of years ago, and coming out of the airport, the street that runs along the airport is called JFK Boulevard. And I thought, Jesus, this is crazy. The George Herbert Walker Bush airport. And next to it is the JFK Boulevard. This is just sick.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. We're living in a surrealistic nightmare society. But it is courageous people like RFK Jr. who give me a little bit of hope that maybe it could rise above itself. But history doesn't really support that. There are two analyses here, of course. The obvious analysis in my mind, of course, is maybe not yours, because we're coming different worldviews — I'm a bit more of a traditionalist, I think, than you are — and as I see it, this whole post-Christian Western civilization is deeply decadent and collapsing. Whether it's Spengler's notion of civilizations that rise and fall, that grow and collapse like other natural phenomena, like anthills. Giant anthills in Africa go up for 20 years, and then they kind of fall apart slowly for 20 years, and then they're gone. Same with human civilizations. And obviously, this Western one's anthill is just about ready to fully crumble. I think that's because its metaphysical grounding has decayed and the people no longer adhere to or are infused with the baraka or spiritual energy that came with the religious and spiritual tradition that animated that civilization.

Edward Curtin: I completely agree with you. We don't disagree on that in the slightest. I've written about that. I think that's fundamentally true. Nothing could be truer. I think our major problem today is the spiritual problem. Without a renewal of that spiritual core of human existence, we are doomed. I think Robert Kennedy Jr. knows that. But it cuts across so many different issues, many which he's been concerned with for years. But I agree with your analysis, Kevin. I was a trained in theology, and as a sociologist, my  specialty is the sociology of religion. And so I have seen this happening over many, many decades. And most so-called religious people, conventional people of whatever faith or institution, are not really spiritual. They're basically materialist secularists who just go along to get along. And religion is a social kind of thing. So I agree. You know, this is Nietzsche's death of God: "This is what's coming if you keep moving in this direction." And he didn't like it. Many people think he was endorsing it. No, he was not. He was anguished by it. But he said "this is what's happening. Take a look, folks. This is what's in store." And we're there now. But there are counter-forces at work. That's where my hope lies.

Kevin Barrett: Talk a little more about about the counter-forces. From that strictly Spenglerian perspective, if we're at that point where the anthill is collapsing, can one ant on the anthill, RFK, Jr or whoever, somehow change that? From a deterministic perspective, if the civilization is collapsing, it's hard to imagine something just coming out of nowhere that's really going to radically change it or transform it. But on the other hand, the spirit bloweth where it listeth. And so we can't really define what could happen and what couldn't happen. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you would counter somebody who said, like a lot of my Muslim friends — I'm thinking in particular of Arash over in Tehran and many others — who would say "Western civilization is hopeless. You're crazy to think somebody like RFK Jr. can really make a difference."

Edward Curtin: Bobby Kennedy is not going to do it all by himself. But I think he's a symbol of what can happen. And I don't hold that dark, gloomy view that everything is hopeless, because once in a while miracles do occur. And as you said, the spirit blows where it wills. And if you have faith in God, let me just use a simple word, and you walk that path of courage and the vocation, the spiritual human vocation, you never know what will happen. I agree that the one-dimensional world is is collapsing. The multipolar world is coming into being. And that's all to the better as far as I'm concerned. A multi-polar world: a world in which many countries should be treated as equals and one should not dominate over the other. I think in his heart of hearts, Bobby Kennedy Junior believes in that, too. And so I'm not as pessimistic. I will say this: I have not voted for a president of the United States since 1972. And that was because I thought the system was impossible, it was irredeemable. I voted for the friend Senator Robert Kennedy, George McGovern. And after that, I just gave up. But now I have a renewed sense of hope. It's not that Bobby Kennedy is a savior, but that he is going to speak about things that matter, come what may. How far he gets, I don't know. I think he's going to surprise people. But I think he's going to talk about the fundamental things. And that's why I have a glimmer of hope. Again, I've never given up totally on hope because I've learned throughout life that things are never totally hopeless if you have faith.

Kevin Barrett: My voting history parallels yours. I was too young to vote in 1972, but I would have voted for McGovern. And in 1976, I was too young for that election, too. I wasn't very impressed with Carter, who was essentially put in office by the Trilateralists to try to roll back democracy. And then in 1980, the first election I ever could vote in, I wrote in Bonzo for president because I was so disgusted with the choices. And I haven't voted for a mainstream candidate ever since. And then in 2020 I wrote in RFK Jr. I thought that was just a protest vote, for all of the symbolic reasons that you've discussed, as well as the real reasons: He is a very smart and well intentioned guy. I thought that was a great protest vote, but I didn't really imagine that he would actually launch a campaign. So I had the same kind of history there as you.

And one of the appealing things about him is that he's doing what you might call anti-politics: if you accept the (Carl) Schmitt view of politics as the art of scapegoating and divisiveness, of essentially bringing people together in hatred of some outsider or designated scapegoat. That's that's how Schmitt defines politics. And whatever else you're doing, he said, if it's not that, it's not politics. And then Leo Strauss took that and ran with it and created neoconservatism and gave us all of these philosophical psychopaths who've been driving the United States off the cliff for the past couple of decades.

But what Kennedy is doing, it seems to me, is a kind of anti-politics. It's the opposite. Rather than dividing people and whipping up hatred of scapegoats and outsiders and so on, he's trying to bring people together. And  instead of the politics of making people get really angry at each other and scapegoating each other, he's trying to find some common ground, while pointing the finger at the real culprits who, of course, are never the ones who are being scapegoated by the politicians who represent those real culprits. And so that anti-politics of of trying to find common ground in a super-polarized society is a really interesting project. And I wonder how both the media and the public will deal with that. The media may really hate it, and they may hate RFK Jr worse than they hated Trump, who was at least doing politics, doing Schmidt's politics in spades, whipping up scapegoating and hatred, bringing people together in anger and hatred at some designated enemy. And if RFK Jr is kind of doing the opposite of that, I wonder if they'll be able to figure out what's going on. The New York Times article about his candidacy the other day was just the most insanely evil, propagandistic piece in the Times I can remember seeing, which is really saying something. So they they seem to be unhinged by his anti-politics. And I wonder if that anti-politics, that bringing people together across these divides thing — if that catches on, that could be really interesting.

Edward Curtin: That's why I titled my article "to heal the great divide." And you may have noticed that  Bobby slogan "Heal the Divide." When he declared his candidacy in Boston, they handed out like 500 or so signs with with the slogan Heal the Divide. And he's going to take the high road. You said that in your article and I said it also. Trump took the low road and he got great, great, great publicity, as you recall, until he won the election. And then they were outraged: like, "holy shit, what happened? We gave him all this publicity because he was so outrageous in the things he was saying. And then he won. And now, oh, my God, what did we do?" And with Bobby Kennedy, he's not going to be outrageous. He's going to try to unite people. And I think his appeal goes beyond Republicans and Democrats. It extends out beyond the borders of what we consider traditional politics, because he's just going to be saying what he's been saying for a long time. Of course, they'll have the knives out for him. The New York Times — It's not just the liberal media. It's the conservative media, too. The New York Post has trashed him. Rupert Murdoch...I could go through a long list of lies they've told about him. I did mention a couple that The New York Post said for years "he says that Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of his father, is innocent and he didn't kill his father, and he's just lying." Well, he's not lying, because Sirhan did not kill Senator Robert Kennedy, who was killed from behind with three bullets behind his right ear at about three inches between the nozzle of the gun and his head, and Sirhan was way in front of him. He could not have shot the president.

Kevin Barrett: He was about to become president.

Edward Curtin: Excuse me. Yeah. He would have become president after winning the California primary. And so Bobby Kennedy Jr. Has said my father was killed by the CIA, just like my uncle was. He hasn't touched the JFK Jr. issue, and I understand why. He has enough of his family lined up against him.

Kevin Barrett: That raises the question, why is his family lined up against him? Because he's telling the truth about what happened to his most illustrious family members. This just boggles my mind, Ed. Like with the Wellstone family, after Dick Cheney delivered what amounted to a death threat against Wellstone, and less than a week later, Wellstone's plane went down, killing him, his wife, his daughter and his entire campaign staff. And a poll was taken that showed that the majority of Minnesotans said when they were given a choice, who killed Senator Wellstone, what caused his death? Was it the weather? Was it the plane mechanics? Or was it Republicans? The majority chose Republicans. But his family wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, even though it just stunk to high heaven. The media concocted a story about bad weather when there was no bad weather. It was very obvious that that plane was destroyed by some kind of energy device delivered from a van parked in the woods not very far from the airport the plane was heading. And so that was all so obvious. And Wellstone's family wouldn't touch it. And likewise with the Kennedy family, most of them won't go there about what so obviously happened to their family members. What the hell is wrong with them? If somebody messes with my family members, I'm going after them. Are these people cowards? Are they fools? Are they psychopaths? What's wrong with them?

Edward Curtin: Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call them cowards. I would say they're afraid. Why don't they go into the assassination stuff? I would say they're afraid. And Bobby Kennedy Junior is not afraid because that's what he's like. The other issue is why do so many of them support Biden and Obama? Caroline Kennedy was Obama's ambassador to Japan. And now you've got so many supporting Biden against their brother. That's another issue. It's really hard to fathom that side of it, because Biden is a warmonger. That's his entire history. And the US is waging war in Ukraine. They're waging war all around the world, in Syria, in Sudan. And everyone knows this. And Biden has been a front man for this his whole career. So why are the extended Kennedy family supporting a warmonger? I have no idea. You'd have to ask them. Why are they so against their brother? I don't know the answer to that either. I do know that in families there are a lot of underlying issues that don't surface in public. And maybe there's some things there, but it seems outrageous to me.

Edward Curtin: And just to go back quickly off of the Kennedys, I remember the day that Paul Wellstone died. And I remember very, very well the four assassinations: JFK, RFK... when I heard that... I was asleep when he got shot, because I was on the East Coast and it was late at night, but when I woke up... And MLK, I remember that vividly. And I remember where I was when Paul Wellstone's plane went down. I was coming to a stoplight here in town. And I thought, "Oh, shit, you know, the CIA just killed him. I mean, they just got him." He was a dangerous guy. He was someone I respected a lot. So I don't know, it's hard to explain why the extended family members... But he's not going to criticize them, as he said in his announcement: "I love them." And I'm sure that is totally sincere. He does. But I'm sure he's pained by it. But he's going to take the high road. And the high road is not Trump's road. And the high road is where Americans want want a leader to go to unite them across the divides.

Kevin Barrett: We're going to hear from Alan Sabrosky in the second hour. And I don't think he's anywhere near that optimistic. But I sense that whether or not Americans are inherently, good and will prefer the guy taking the high road in all cases, I do think that right now people are getting sick of this divisiveness. It's gotten so extreme that it's become really kind of distressing and disgusting and even kind of boring. The reason fads come and go is because something seems fresh and new and it catches you and you can't resist it for a while. And then suddenly that hula hoop thing, just doing that hula hoop thing over and over and over starts getting a little bit boring. You move on to the next fad. People go through video games and genres of art and literature. All these things have these fads that come and go. And they seem fresh for a while. And then, Oh, that's old hat. And right now this extreme divisiveness over culture wars issues and all these things that RFK Jr is trying to transcend, I think it's gotten to that point where people are really getting tired of it, getting bored with it. And that actually sets it up such that suddenly you could get a whole lot of people glomming on to this: "Let's get past it, let's get over this thing. We're tired of this politics of divisiveness." And here's this glamorous Kennedy guy running. And even people who may not agree with him or would be inclined not to, people who got their vaccines and never read his book and probably never read any books and so on, all sorts of people that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be following every stage of the Kennedy saga like you and I do, those folks might see the appeal of it and and move towards it. So I don't think it's impossible. I just don't see how this ultra-divisiveness thing can really continue in the direction it's going that much longer. The pendulum needs to swing back, and he's in a position to ride it back.

Edward Curtin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I said in that piece that I wrote: The American people are severely depressed. They're drugged up, they're depressed. They're tired. They're disgusted. And that that goes back to his work on health issues, not just on vaccines and the COVID stuff, but his whole environmental work. The rivers are polluted, the lakes are polluted by the damn chemical companies, by the big power companies, people's bodies are polluted. And the the establishment, the pharmaceutical companies, the media and the government have made sure that two thirds of the American population are on antidepressant drugs for reasons that are ridiculous.

Kevin Barrett: I'm sorry, did you say two thirds of the American population are on antidepressants?

Edward Curtin: Well, on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. Let me correct it. I don't know what the exact statistics are...

Kevin Barrett: It can't be that bad.

Edward Curtin: It's very, very, very bad. Kevin. I'll look it up when we get off this interview, but the number of people taking antidepressant drugs is off the charts. And the drugs don't help them. But they were convinced, decades ago, that they were not free, that there was no free will, they had no spiritual core, and that everything was materialistic and material, including their minds and their bodies. So if you felt depressed, it was for some kind of chemical reason, which is a complete lie and it's been proven to be a lie. And yet they kept taking the drugs. And people turn into machines and they lose their souls. But I think we've come to a point where people are starting to wake up. They're starting to see the lies about COVID, the propaganda crap. They're starting to realize  "Wait, we've been taken for a ride here by the pharmaceutical companies, by the chemical companies, by the warmongers. Something is really wrong here. Really deeply, deeply wrong. And we're sick of of all the lies." And that's why I think...Bobby Kennedy has been doing this stuff at different levels down through the years, and it's all twisted and tied together. Pharmaceutical drugs. The destruction of the rivers, the lakes, the environment with chemicals. Health issues. Peace. Peace is not just the absence of war, is it? It's also the enrichment of the culture of the society through through good food, through health care, through art, through joy and everything else that goes to having a peaceful world. And I think he's been talking about this. That's why I think he's very unusual.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it's a great moment. Maybe we will look back in the future and say, hey, you know, we were a bit ahead of our time in catching on to this, with my write in vote for him in 2020 -

Edward Curtin: You're way ahead. Yeah.

Kevin Barrett: You mentioned in your essay that he was deeply influenced by The Plague by Albert Camus. And it's interesting that that novel uses the plague as a metaphor for World War II craziness. And it seems that it prefigured the COVID craziness in a certain way. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit.

Edward Curtin: Sure. In fact, many, many commentators have used used. Albert Camus, who's one of my favorites. I've written a lot about him. They've used that book, The Plague, to support the whole COVID narrative. But actually, in the Plague... I wrote an article called The Plague Is Us: a play on words meaning not just this society, because the plague runs through every institution of this society.

Kevin Barrett: "We've met the plague and he is us." -Walt Kelly.

Edward Curtin: Yeah. Good one. But the plague is in people, too. And the plague is just this depression. It's the mind control. It's all of the lies. And what do Dr. Rieux and the others in in The Plague do? They say "we have to keep fighting." It seems hopeless. And the plague will return. But we must fight against it now. And that's what Bobby Kennedy's father was trying to tell his son: "This book is so profoundly important because, 'hey, they might kill me' (which they did) but we have to fight. What is the point of being alive if you don't fight against evil?" There is no point to it. To just  breeze along with the breeze and act as if it's not happening.

Kevin Barrett: It's been a long time since I read The Plague. As I recall it was kind of a metaphor for for the totalitarianism pre-World War two. And most people were just kind of going along with the majority and actually sort of facilitating the plague. And the hero and the handful of people who were standing up against it were like dissidents. They were the the minority. They were like the COVID skeptics. And so, yeah, you said that the mainstream told us that the plague was about COVID and the good guys are the people who are trying to stop COVID by forcing everybody to get vaccinated. But that's, of course, the exact opposite of the real scenario of the novel.

Edward Curtin: That's true. I've read it so many times. I know Camus backwards and forwards.

Kevin Barrett: Interesting. I went through a Camus phase myself. Since then I've gone through different worldview orientations. That The Stranger as I recall, is by a North African Jew who has his hero just shoot an Arab, just an anonymous, faceless Arab, for no particular reason — you do have to sort of wonder about that. And it does offer itself up to various interpretations, including that Camus was blind to a lot of things, including the evils of Zionism.. But he was certainly a brilliant guy. And he died too young.

Edward Curtin: Yeah, well, that's it's a really fascinating subject about Camus and the Stranger. There is a book written by a Muslim writer in which he reverses the scenario.

Kevin Barrett: Um, if just somebody just randomly shoots a Jew and nobody cares, the author doesn't care either. Yeah, Can you imagine that?

Edward Curtin: Yeah, I forget the title of the book. But I don't think Camus was enthralled by the Zionists.

Kevin Barrett: Let's let's do a show on that down the line, because we hear the bumper music now, so we can't do it tonight. He deserves a lot more than than 15 more seconds over the bumper music. Well, thank you. That was a really good conversation. Ed Curtain, I appreciate your wonderful new article. Robert F Kennedy Jr.: To Heal the Great Divide. It's inspiring, just like RFK Jr's candidacy and his work is inspiring. So hey, keep it up and I'm sure we'll touch bases pretty soon.