Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ripped President Biden for his effort to censor his opposition, calling it “anti-American.”
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Kennedy was asked about his previous comment that Biden was a “much worse threat to democracy” than former President Donald Trump.
“By the way, I said I could make that argument, and I think it is an argument that we ought to be having,” Kennedy began. “President Biden has done something that no other president in history has done, which is to order media, particularly the social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google, to censor his political opponents.”
“You know, I can say this because I just won a lawsuit in the federal court of appeals, now before the Supreme Court, because he began censoring me 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to defend the Constitution,” he recalled. “White House officials were on e-mail with Facebook, saying to them, ‘You have to take down his post.’ Facebook actually pushed back saying, ‘There’s no misinformation here. Actually, what he’s saying here is accurate,’ and they had to make up a new term called ‘malinformation,’ which is information that is accurate, but nonetheless inconvenient to — you know, politically inconvenient.”
“The First Amendment was put in the Constitution —Madison, Hamilton, Adams said, ‘We put free expression to guarantee the First Amendment because all the other rights are dependent on it,”’ he noted, adding, “If you have a president who can censor his political opponent, he is licensed for any kind of atrocity. That is a genuine threat to our democracy.”
“I think what President Trump said about questioning the election … to the extent that he engaged in an effort to overthrow that, of course that’s a threat to democracy, but it is not the worst threat undermining the First Amendment of our Constitution,” he stated, then turned back to Biden: “And then weaponizing the federal agencies to get his opponents off the ballot, and in my case, I’ll just say particularly, denying me Secret Service protection, that’s never happened in history before.”
“Does he know that your dad was assassinated?” Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade asked.
“He has a bust of my father behind him,” Kennedy answered. “It’s just not right … the use of the courts, the use of prosecutors, the use of all these federal agents to change our political landscape is wrong and we should be debating about it. You know what? What President Biden did with his censorship project is … he told the social media companies, ‘We’re going to bring anti-trust cases against you and we’re going to withdraw your Section 230 immunity — which is existential for those companies — if you don’t give us a portal to censor.’ And then who did he give access to that portal? The CIA, the FBI, CISA, the IRS, NIA. So you had all these federal agencies that were now able to silence people who were questioning their policies.”
“And that is really anti-American and anti-democratic,” he concluded.