Independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that President Joe Biden is a “worse threat to democracy” than former President Donald Trump because Biden is weaponizing federal agencies to target free speech.
CNN's Erin Burnett asked whether the “threat to democracy that Trump poses” is “equal evil to Biden.”
“Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech,” Kennedy said.
“I can say that because I just won a case in the Federal Court of Appeals, and now before the Supreme Court, that shows that [Biden] started censoring not just me — 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me. No president in the country has ever done that,” the independent presidential candidate continued. “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who used the power of his office to force the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH, to censor his political critics.”
Pushed to condemn Trump by Burnett, Kennedy said while he believes “if you — [Trump] overthrowing, trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy, but the question was: who is a worse threat to democracy.”
“I'm not gonna answer that question, but I can argue that President Biden is because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” Kennedy said, according to Mediaite, adding Biden is “weaponizing the federal agencies.”
[READ MORE: Leftists Bragged About 'Fortifying' The 2020 Election. Now They're Flaunting Plans To Do It Again In 2024]
2020 was hardly the first instance of a politician questioning election results — just ask Hillary Clinton, Jamie Raskin, and the dozens of others who called Trump an illegitimate president. But if ever an election was worth scrutinizing, it would be the one that saw hundreds of millions of private dollars, last-minute decisions by bureaucrats to ignore state election laws, a propagandist media, and yes, election-meddling censorship from Big Tech help to rig the results.
Weaponizing federal agencies to censor dissidents and opponents, as the Biden administration is doing, chips away at the foundations of this constitutional republic.
James Madison once said “public opinion sets bounds to every government.” But under the Biden administration, the government sets bound to public opinion through censorship.
Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction last summer lambasting federal agencies for their alleged attempt to “blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech” in what he said “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history.”
This was evidenced, in part, by the White House's Jan. 23, 2021 request to Twitter to remove a tweet from Kennedy that criticized Covid-19 vaccines.
“Hey folks – Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” a Biden official wrote, according to the injunction.
Two weeks later, Twitter provided the White House with a “Partner Support Portal” that, according to the injunction, “expedited review of flagging content for censorship.” The portal was a result of the White House sending an exorbitant number of censorship requests to Twitter.
Coincidentally, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began targeting Twitter just months after Elon Musk purchased it and pledged to roll back the company's censorship of free speech.
Twitter and the FTC operated under a consent order established in 2011 after Twitter was accused of violating the Federal Trade Commission Act. After Musk — whose release of the “Twitter Files” showed widespread government collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans — took over, the FTC began “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern” and giving itself “new tools to ensure compliance.”
The agency's demand for information from the platform about new initiatives like Twitter Blue and workforce reductions coincided with Democrats' meltdown over losing control over speech.
“The timing, scope, and frequency of the FTC's demands to Twitter suggest a partisan motivation to its action,” a March 2023 report from the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government found.
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