In conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy’s Ukraine position is unusually personal: his son left law school secretly, joined Ukraine’s Foreign Legion and fought as a machine gunner, yet Kennedy said he would use US leverage to force a ceasefire. He would take NATO expansion off the table and reject open-ended military support, arguing Ukraine cannot continue without US backing.

Kennedy refused to promise that the United States would defend Taiwan if China invaded. He said such a pledge would pre-commit the country to a potentially catastrophic war and reduce room for negotiation, preferring de-escalation and strategic ambiguity.

On the federal debt, Kennedy admitted he did not yet have a concrete path back to a balanced budget. He would target defense, homeland-security and surveillance spending, while treating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as red lines and rejecting debt-ceiling brinkmanship.

Kennedy framed the “deep state” not as a secret cabal but as systemic regulatory capture tying agencies to powerful industries. He also said he believes the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination, recalled his father immediately asking the CIA if it was responsible, and favored separating intelligence gathering from covert action.

Kennedy argued that the pandemic response was shaped by military and pharmaceutical incentives, including an alleged motive to suppress early treatments that could threaten emergency vaccine authorization. Friedberg directly challenged Kennedy’s evidentiary method, saying some of his claims turn correlation or circumstance into causation without adequate proof.

Kennedy’s nuclear position was more conditional than a simple anti-nuclear stance: he said he supports safer new technologies if they can compete without shifting accident or waste costs to taxpayers. His preferred near-term energy bet was expanded wind and solar connected by a modern long-distance grid.

Kennedy offered unusually specific anecdotes for his belief that pharmaceutical money distorts media coverage. He said Roger Ailes told him drug advertising supplied 70% of prime-time news revenue at Fox, and separately said Jake Tapper told him a vaccine-related story they had worked on for 21 days was killed by corporate management.