Here's the speech in its entirety. Forgive me if there are
errors; I tried to catch them all.
I'm sorry to keep everybody waiting. Sixteen months ago, in
April of 2023, I launched my campaign for president of the United States. I
began this journey
as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party
which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.
I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of 6 in
1960, and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and
of civil rights.
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 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
1,000,000 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 wanna 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. 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 farmer’s 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.
To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch
money, and senior citizens gave up part of their social security checks. Our
50-state organization
collected those millions of signatures and more. No
presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that. And so I wanna thank all of
those dedicated volunteers and congratulate the campaign
staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat.
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 gonna forget that,
not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you
made because you love our country.
You showed 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.
Now, in an honest system, I believe that I would have won
the election in a system that my father and my uncles thrived in—a system with
open debates with
fair primaries... and with a truly independent media
untainted by government propaganda and censorship. In 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 of all for me, the
Democratic Party.
In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set
itself to dismantling it; lacking confidence... that its 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.
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 debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to
go toe to toe with any opponent in 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, a 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, well, nothing.
No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and
mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There in Chicago, a
string of Democratic
speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first
day.
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. 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 ten.
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? We know the answers. 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 the resort to censorship and media control and the
weaponization of the federal
agencies.
When a U.S. president colludes with or outright coerces
media companies to censor political speech, it's an attack on our most sacred
right of free expression,
and that's the very right upon which all
of our other constitutional rights rest. 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.
But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from
appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as
Democratic Party
organs. Over the course of more than a year in a campaign
where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied
mainstream media
networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews
with me.
During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross
Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16
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
then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.
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 challenge always the party in power.
Instead of maintaining that posture of fear and 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.
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."
Doughty’s previous 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 invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA—which is a censorship agency, it's the
center of the censorship-industrial complex—DHS,
the IRS, and other agencies to 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. The mainstream
media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles,
and it's joined
this systemic attack on democracy. It also — 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. And I don't want any of this to sound like a personal complaint
because it's not.
I, for me, it's all part of a journey, and it's a journey
that I signed up with, 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 U.S. leadership around the globe, and
are we living, are we really still a role model for
democracy in this country?
Or have we made it, you know, a kind of a joke? Here's the
good news: while mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, it didn't
shut down my ideas
which have especially flourished among young voters and
independent voters, thanks to the alternative media.
Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would
withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler. A spoiler is someone who will
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 in 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.
Oh, 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. In red states, 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 gonna
remove my name, and I've already started that process and urged voters not to
vote for me.
It's with a sense of victory and not defeat that I'm
suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by
collecting a million signatures,
but 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 can say to all who've 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.
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, that this one is a
noble effort to stop a supervillain, Vladimir Putin, from invading 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 U.S. neocons for American global hegemony.
I'm not excusing
Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But 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... Aegis missile systems in
Romania and Poland.
This is a hostile, hostile act. And then the Biden White
House repeatedly spurned Russia's offer to settle this war peacefully. Ukraine
War began in 2014
when U.S. agencies overthrew the democratically elected
government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked 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 Zelenskyy to tear up a peace agreement that he and
the Russians had
already signed, and the Russians were withdrawing troops
from 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... 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 and of
Russia and both Russia and the West — since then we have, since tearing up that
agreement, forcing
Zelenskyy 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, 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. The Nord Stream
pipeline sabotage and the sanctions have destroyed Europe's industrial base,
which formed the
bulwark of U.S. national security.
A strong Germany with a strong industry is a much, much
stronger deterrent to Russia and a Germany that is de-industrialized and turned
into just an extension
of a U.S. military base. We've pushed Russia into a
disastrous alliance with China and Iran.
We're closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any
time since 1962, and the neocons in 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.
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. Last
summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the
Ukraine war,
to tackle the 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.
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, 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 advisors in Florida. In a series of long intense
discussions, I was surprised
to discover that we are aligned on
many key issues.
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 fiercely if need be on issues over which we differ while working together on
the existential issues upon which we
are in accordance.
I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his
first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we
continue to have
very serious differences. But 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 U.S.
intelligence agencies
out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and
surveilling Americans, and interfering with our
elections.
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. Suspending my
candidacy is a heartrending decision for me, but 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
of 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. So let me share a little bit about why I
believe it's so urgent.
Today, two-thirds—we pay, 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 in the world.
We're about 79th in health outcomes behind Costa Rica and
Nicaragua and Mongolia and other countries. Nobody has a chronic disease burden
like we have.
And during the 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 of
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. Fifty 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. A hundred and twenty years ago, when somebody
was obese as they
were, they were
sent to the circus.
There were literally case reports done about them. Obesity
was almost unknown. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%, compared to 50%
here. Half of
Americans have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my
uncle was president, and I was a boy, juvenile diabetes was effectively
nonexistent.
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 has caused diabetes and is also causing Alzheimer's,
which is now classified
as diabetes, and it's costing 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 syndrome,
narcolepsy,
ASD, Asperger's, autism. In the year 2000, the autism rate
was 1 in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are 1 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 or 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 likes to say,
there has been no change in screening. This is a change in incidence.
In my generation of 70-year-old men, the odds and rates [or
autism] are about one in 10,000. In my kids’ generation, one in 34.
I'll repeat: in California, 1 in
22. Why are we letting this happen? Why are we allowing this to happen to our
children? 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 in the young and the old. Young
adult cancers are up 79%. One in
four American women is on antidepressant medication, 40% of teen 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 factories. These foods
consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
Laboratory scientists who have formed many of them formerly
worked for the cigarette industry, which purchased all the big food companies
in the 1970s
and ‘80s, deployed thousands of scientists to figure out
chemicals, new chemicals, to make the food more addictive. And these
ingredients didn't exist
100 years ago.
Humans aren't biologically adapted to eat them. A hundred of
these chemicals are now banned in Europe but are
ubiquitous in American processed foods. The
second culprit is toxic chemicals
in our food, our medicine, and our environment. Pesticides, food additives,
pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate
every cell of our bodies.
This assault on our children's cells and hormones is
unrelenting. And to 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. This is not
normal. Breast cancer
is also estrogen-driven, and it 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. When my
uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today,
government healthcare
spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it's double
the military budget, and it is the fastest-growing budget item in the federal
budget.
Chronic disease costs more to the economy
as a whole, costs at least $4 trillion—five times our military budget.
And and that's a 20% drag on everything
we do and everything we aspire to.
Poor and 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 about 70% or 77% of
school lunches are processed foods.
There's no vegetables. There's
nothing that you would wanna eat. We are just
poisoning the poor 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 are 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, we give about, I think,
eight times as much in subsidies to tobacco
than we do to fruits and vegetables. 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 healthcare system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy
again.
Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts
of interest. These are the people virtually everybody who sits — you know who
Joe Biden just
appointed a new panel to NIH to decide 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,
hear is healthy. And the recommendations on the food
pyramid, and what goes to our school lunch programs, which would go to the, you
know, the program,
the SNAP program, the food stamp programs, they're all
corrupted and conflicted individuals.
These agencies, the FDA, USDA, and CDC — all of them are controlled by giant for-profit corporations.
Seventy-five percent of the FDA's funding doesn't
come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma
executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies.
With President Trump's
backing, I'm gonna change that.
We're gonna staff these agencies
with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We're gonna 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. When American children or adults
get sick with a chronic condition, they’re put on medication
for their entire life.
Imagine what will happen when Medicare starts paying for
Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month—and it's being
recommended for children as young as 6—all
for a condition, 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 6.
Novo Nordisk is the biggest company in Europe, and virtually
its entire value is based upon its projections of what it's gonna
sell, of the Ozempic it's
gonna 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 to
allow this to happen.
This $3 trillion cost is gonna
bankrupt our country. 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 gonna bring healthy food back to school lunches. We're gonna stop subsidizing the worst foods with our
agricultural
subsidies.
We're gonna get toxic chemicals
out of our food. We're gonna 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 the neocon power,
and our children will be the ones who suffer most.
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 had a weakness for orphans.
I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker. I had 11 siblings, and I have 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.
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 the
censorship and 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'm 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
the 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. 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.
This is a spiritual journey for me.
I reached my decision through deep prayer, through a
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. I
can't imagine that a President Harris would allow me or anyone to solve these
dire problems. After
eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to
fix the problem will be out of my reach forever.
President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his
legacy. I'm choosing to believe that this time he will follow through. His son,
his biggest donors,
his closest friends all support
this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for
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.
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. They inspired
affection and love and high hopes and a culture of kindness that continue to
radiate among
Americans in 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. The 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, the health, and the future that they deserve. Thank you all very much.