RFK Jr. Doubles Down on Assertion That Biden Is ‘Much Worse Threat to Democracy’ Than Trump

President Biden is ‘the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech,’ the independent presidential candidate is arguing.

AP/Patrick Semansky
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies on Capitol Hill on July 20, 2023. AP/Patrick Semansky

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doubling down on his arguments that President Biden is a “much worse” threat to democracy than President Trump. 

“President Biden has done something that no other president in history has done, which is to order media, particularly social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google — to censor his political opponents,” he said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning. 

The independent presidential candidate acknowledged that President Trump’s election denials and efforts to “overthrow” the results are a threat to democracy. Yet, he added, “it is not the worst threat undermining the First Amendment of our Constitution,” referencing Mr. Biden’s pandemic-era censorship of social media platforms.

Mr. Kennedy was reiterating arguments he made first on Monday during an interview on CNN.

“I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy,” he said on Monday, adding that the reason was that “President Biden is the first candidate in history — the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

Mr. Kennedy said that the “greatest threat” to democracy is not “somebody who questions election returns,” but rather is someone who uses the office to force social media platforms to give access to their portals to federal agencies. 

“I can say that because I just won a case in the federal court of appeals, now before the Supreme Court, that shows that he 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,” he said. 

Mr. Kennedy said that the First Amendment is the most important protection to democracy. 

“Adams and Hamilton and Madison said we put the guarantee of freedom of expression in the First Amendment because all of our other constitutional rights depend on it,” he said. “If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has license for any atrocity.”


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