Powerful speech by Robert Kennedy Jr.

"The appeal that I would make to Americans is that there's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.
Over 20,000 generations of human beings that have lived on this planet before us, the primary biological drive and spiritual drive has been to make sure that their kids were safe. And it's extraordinary today that these profit-making corporations have used their capacity to control our government and to control the media to turn us all against that most fundamental biological drive.
We are destroying our kids, and we're doing it because we're being manipulated to do it through all of the institutions of government. And as an environmental activist and attorney, it was obvious to me very early on, whenever you see the commoditization of the environment of human beings that there is always a subversion of democracy that is cotermist. And that's what we've seen. We've seen all of these institutions, the media, the health agencies, the agricultural agencies, the American press, the medical system, twisted to turn against their fundamental mission and our country is supposed to be the exemplary nation in the world. We've, we're in, in 18, 1776, we were the, we became, between then and 1792, we became the first democracy in modern history. By 1860, there were five democracies that were all based on the American model. By the time my uncle was president, 130 by the end of the 1960s, 190, and all of them were looking to us as a model. And we have now become the worst country in the world, from the key metric by which every, every success of a nation can be measured, which is are we giving our children a chance to live better lives than we do? And this, you know, our country, to me, is still the greatest country in the world, and we have an extraordinary resilience. We have the worst agricultural practices in the world. We have the best regenerative farmers, the best organic farmers, the best dry land agriculture, no-till agriculture. We're at the cutting edge of all of those things. So we have that entrepreneurial spirit that is still alive in our country. We have the worst healthcare system and the worst health outcomes in the world. We have the best functional medicine doctors, the best integrative medicine doctors. All the cutting edge work on those issues is being done in this country. We have some of the worst business practices in the declining economy. We have the best entrepreneurs in this country, of any country in the world.
So we have this inherent resilience in our country. And if we can, as somebody mentioned, I said, if we need to stop hating each other, and that's only gonna happen when we start loving our children more than we hate each other. And when that happens, we're gonna be able to recover and very, very quickly. And so I'm optimistic about it, despite this dark cloud that has been portrayed here tonight. You know, we could over the next two decades encounter terrible crises in this country. We could experience economic collapses from many factors. We could have other pandemics, other wars, and they could really devastate our country as long as we have that resilience.
We're always going to bounce back as Americans. We're not going to do that if our kids all have chronic disease. It's too much of an anchor on progress. If you have a child that's dependent on pharmaceutical medications for the rest of their lives, that is weakened, demoralized, dispirited, disheartened by these illnesses.
It's going to inhibit our capacity to function in any meaningful way in the world. If a foreign nation did this to our country, we would consider an act of war. It is un-American. These companies have been allowed, through the profit motive, to destroy everything that we value in America.
And this is not just economic warfare, it's not just chemical warfare. We're all involved in spiritual warfare. And we have to understand that and the core people who are here today, the leaders who have convened this, leaders from all of these different groups, from the medical profession, healthy foods, all of these advocates and the political leaders have all given us a reason for hope. And they're leading a battle, too, for the heart, for the soul of our country. And it's a spiritual battle. And that's something we all need to understand. The American Revolution started with a very, very small core of activists who were able to articulate these new set of values and they did something that nobody in the world could believe. A ragtag group of people brought to its knees the greatest empire in mankind. We can take our country back from these industries and we can restore not only our democracy and the integrity of it, but most important of all, we can begin restoring our children's health."