Name: Robert Kennedy, Jr. On Suing Monsanto and The Dangers of Round-Up
Uploaded: 2023-06-15T17:08:20.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert Kennedy, Jr. On Suing Monsanto and The Dangers of Round-Up' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert Kennedy, Jr. On Suing Monsanto and The Dangers of Round-Up' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-15. Transcript available.

When we sued Monsanto, there's many many diseases that are linked to
glyphosate exposure, including non-alcoholic fatty liver cancers are
very very closely linked, a lot of kidney diseases, and then severe damage to
the
microbiome because it's designed to kill plants and it and there are there are
structures in your in your gut biome that are critical structures in your gut
biome which have plant-like metabolisms which are destroyed by glyphosate and
so
you know what happened is glyphosate and glyphosate was a it was originally
developed as a tank scalant so to to scale the calcium and other
deposits metal deposits rust deposits from the inside of you know underground
tanks
and in 1973 Monsanto had to stop producing DDT because you know we passed the
laws at that
time and if that was its flagship product it needed another product and I
figured out
that glyphosate somebody at some point apparently threw some glyphosate on that
you know you know out in the back in the yard and everything green died where
they
touched it where it touched glyphosate and so somebody said oh this will be a
good herbicide
because it kills all plants originally Monsanto developed it as a as a as a
herbicide but the way that
was applied initially from 1973 to 1993 was in backpack sprayers so guys would
walk down the
corn field corn rows early in the season when the corn was competing with
nearby weeds for sunlight
and they would shoot the individual weeds and then in 93 somebody figured out a
way that that
glyphosate there was certain bacteria that glyphosate would not kill and they
said we could take a gene
out of that bacteria and put it into a corn seed and develop a corn that cannot
be killed by glyphosate
so they developed roundup ready corn and that corn you could pour glyphosate
all over it and it will do nothing
to it so now you could fire all of those workers who were expensive and you
hire one airplane and they fly
over the fields they saturate the entire landscape with glyphosate everything
dies except the roundup ready
corn and within a couple of years roundup ready corn was now on 90 percent of
the corn
95 percent of corn in the united states is now roundup ready corn and so but it
was still being and then
they developed it for soybean and for um and for barley for sorghum for a lot
of other plants but it was
still being applied early in the season and then in 2000 around 2006 they
discovered that if you sprayed
it on wheat late in the season it would desiccate the wheat in other words it
would dry it out
and one of the big losses for farmers in wheat is if it rains during the
harvest season
you can't harvest it because it gets moldy
and so if you can spray a desiccate on it and dries it out and kills it you can
harvest it right away and it won't get moldy
so all the wheat in our country started being sprayed that year in 2006 with
glyphosate and that's the year you saw this explosion of celiac diseases and uh
you know gluten allergies and all of this stuff that
people you know you may have noticed around that but they also did the first
time they were and excuse me the first time they're
they're spraying it directly on food because it used to be they were spraying
it early in the season
and it would you know it would wash off and the and the corn would get higher
than the weeds and you
wouldn't have to do it but now they're spraying it directly on our food sorry
no it's okay um so
what they
when they when they started doing this is there's a
direct result like you can see the increase in celiac disease you can see is
this like documented
well no these are
no that's not documented i mean but these are there are there's a whole range
of diseases that are now
you know that people are are that science different levels of science
have linked to glyphosate exposure here's the thing in when you litigate you
when you when you're suing
somebody for a chemical exposure you have to go through a a pro a threshold
called the dalbert
hearing and the dalbert hearing is a hearing that says is there sufficient
science that it's now
considered kind of mainstream that um we can show this to a jury and the judge
has to make that decision
because the judge doesn't want people saying you know coming in and saying uh
you know uh
a loud noise has made me crazy right right you there has to be before and and
then a good attorney
might be able to convince a jury that yeah this my client got crazy because he
heard a loud noise
so the judge needs to make a threshold decision about whether there's
sufficient science to show a jury
and that is a very high threshold so of all of the diseases that are probably
caused probably almost
certainly caused by glyphosate the only one to pass that threshold was the case
that we bought for um
for hodgkin non-hodgkin's lymphoma so at that point we had enough rat studies
enough human studies we had
about 10 of each and we were able to go to the judge and say this we got enough
science on this now to
show that it's uh that that non-hodgkin's lymphoma is being caused by glyphosate
so that those were the
only cases we brought the other thing but there are a lot of of you know really
interesting studies that
show links between injuries to children and the um and the amount of glyphosate
in a woman's urine and the mother's urine
you know including a lot of uh um including um sexual development it's an endocrine
disruptor
so um you know similar to phthalates phthalates are an endocrine disruptor
probably the most disturbing
endocrine disruptor and this is something we should all be looking at is atrazine
yeah because atrazine which is now ubiquitous it's everywhere but you can take
atrazine and there you
know there's you you what is this jamie jamie young jamie you can look up you
can look up this study i
think the guy the scientist name is tyler i think and that might be his first
or second name but they
took atrazine and they put it in a tank with 40 frogs for yeah three years they
put it below the
exposure levels that epa considers acceptable to humans and 30 of those frogs
they were all male frogs
and they were double z you know male frogs so they were super males and 30 of
those frogs were chemically
castrated four of them turned into females and produced fertile eggs so they
took male frogs gave
them atrazine 10 of them turned into female and produced fertile eggs and we're
subjecting our
children to exposure to that every day what is atrazine it's in the water it's
a it's a pesticide
here it is report toxic herbicide found in many texans drinking water
that's it that's from 2018 november 20th yeah and what you know what does this
do to sexual
development and children nobody knows because we know what it does to frogs