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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Monday that President Joe Biden is a bigger threat to American democracy than former President Donald Trump. Now, whether you’re a supporter of Biden or not, any reasonable person must be asking themselves how the president who has not led a propaganda campaign to delegitimize a legitimate election in order to remain in power or instigated an insurrection to further that same agenda is more of a threat to democracy than the president who did do those things—and that would be a great question to ask.
“I can make the argument that President Biden is the 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, so to censor his opponent,” RFK said during an appearance on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront.
Well, OK, that makes sense. I mean, obviously, if Biden is having federal agents take his political opponents out into the street and publicly flog them or worse just for saying things he doesn’t like then that’s not only a threat to democracy, it’s an all-out threat of fascism. How can any person call themselves the leader of the free world and engage in such violent and oppressive censorship of American citizens?
Nah, I’m just messing with y’all—RFK thinks Biden is a bigger threat to democracy because he got banned from social media platforms.
From CNN:
Kennedy pointed to his removal from social media platforms, which he attributes to pressure from the Biden administration, as evidence of the president’s efforts to censor political speech.
Kennedy’s Instagram account was suspended in 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines” but was reinstated last year shortly after he announced his presidential campaign. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, cited his White House bid as the reason for restoring Kennedy’s account in a statement.
In December, the Supreme Court blocked Kennedy from joining a challenge to a case brought by the Missouri and Louisiana’s attorneys general concerning the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about posts the government views as disinformation. Kennedy currently has a similar case pending in a lower court.
So, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got barred from IG for spreading dangerous medical misinformation during a deadly global pandemic, and because of that, he appears to believe a presidential administration can unilaterally ban people from privately owned social media platforms. In reality, just last month, the Supreme Court set new standards for when government employees are allowed to do so much as delete comments or block social media users from official government-owned social media accounts.
But even if Biden could personally block a person from using all social media platforms, which he can’t, would that be a bigger threat to democracy than, say, an actual blatant attempt to upend democracy? Kennedy doesn’t appear to be sure.
“I think that is a threat to democracy, (Trump) overthrowing — trying to overthrow the election clearly is a threat to democracy,” Kennedy said. “But the question was, who is a worse threat to democracy? And what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question. But I can argue that President Biden is because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important.” (Sounds like he did answer the question, but whatever.)
See, the problem here is folks like RFK are still not connecting with the sheer insidiousness of what Trump tried to pull off at the end of his presidency. I wrote about this before:
Think about it: In the 21st century, a sitting president of the United States responded to losing his bid for reelection by throwing an extended and very public temper tantrum and embarking on possibly the most transparent propaganda campaign in modern politics.
The idea that the election had been rigged — that voting machines had been programmed to abracadabra Trump votes into Biden votes; that dead people were being registered to vote blue in masses the size of zombie herds from “The Walking Dead” — was allowed to persevere despite the fact that it had no validity.
Dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court joined the former head of election cybersecurity, Trump’s own attorney general and the Department of Justice in saying clearly and unmistakably that there was no evidence of a rigged election.
Trump put forward not just a lie, but a stupid and obvious lie, a silly lie that should have been dismissed as easily as though a toddler were trying to convince his mother that his father said he could have an extra cookie. (In fact, that serves as a fairly close analogy for what Trump actually tried to do.)
And yet, at least 253 key political leaders across red-state America believed or pretended to believe the lie, and 147 Republican legislators voted to overturn a legal election based on the lie. White conservatives rioted at the U.S. Capitol over that lie.
Now, THAT is a true and demonstrable threat to democracy. Yet, RFK is defending the people who still perpetuate the lie behind it all.
“People who say that the election is stolen…we shouldn’t make pariahs of those people. We shouldn’t demonize them. We shouldn’t vilify them. What we should be doing is saying, let’s all get together, Republicans and Democrats, and fix the election system,” he said.
But where is the proof that the “election system” needs to be fixed? Virtually every study has shown that voter fraud in America is extremely rare. Hell, while Trump was still president, he launched a voting integrity commission, which he swiftly disbanded after they failed to find any evidence of widespread voter fraud, which didn’t stop him from spreading the baseless propaganda anyway.
Getting banned from social media platforms (especially when it’s only a temporary ban) doesn’t prevent one from participating in the democratic process, an attempt by a sitting president to cancel democracy when he loses does. There’s really no plausible argument to be had here, and RFK’s self-serving nonsense only perpetuates the normalization of lending credence to obvious delusion while denying provable truth.
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