Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy detailed his concerns Tuesday that President Joe Biden posed a threat to democracy and the First Amendment, because of his administration’s efforts to censor social media.
In an interview with NewsNation’s CUOMO (weeknights, 8 p.m. ET), Kennedy cited his own legal case against the Biden administration arguing that the president had unlawfully violated the First Amendment by working with Meta, Google, and Twitter to censor posts on social media. A similar legal case was filed by Missouri and Louisiana.
‘What those cases show is that 37 hours after he took the oath of office high White House officials were meeting with the social media companies with YouTube, Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter and ordering them to censor President Biden’s political opponents,’ Kennedy said to host Chris Cuomo.
Kennedy argued that the Biden administration unfairly weaponized the powers of the federal government to coerce private companies to censor speech.
Kennedy accused President Joe Biden of threatening the First Amendment and Democracy by trying to censor social media
‘The leverage the White House had, it was saying, if you don’t do that we’re going to bring a trust case against you and we are going to revoke your section 230 immunity,’ he said, calling the government’s actions an ‘existential threat’ to social media companies.
He said that government agencies demanded the censorship on select posts from him and other users about public health and the Covid-19 vaccine but also posts criticizing Biden’s Ukraine policy and even a parody video of First Lady Jill Biden profanely heckling children while reading to them.
‘It was existential threat and the the social media companies and went ahead and censored us,’ he said.
In February, Kennedy’s case won a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration preventing them from taking actions to ‘coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.’
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy argued Biden threatened Section 230 lawsuits against social media companies if they did not comply with their demands
Kennedy warned that it was a bad precedent for the Biden administration to have access to social media companies with the goal of censoring political opponents.
‘Once you establish that precedent, the next president, whoever he is, even President Trump now has that power at his fingertips, and he now can use that to censor political opponents,’ he warned.
The Supreme Court took up the case brought by the state of Missouri and Louisiana, but turned down Kennedy’s request to join the case.
Despite signs of early success for the cases, a majority of Supreme Court justices were skeptical about the free speech arguments made by the states of Louisiana and Missouri and individual plaintiffs during the court hearings.
During his interview with Cuomo, Kennedy complained that CNN digital and other media outlets unfairly clipped his quote when he indicated that Biden could be considered more of a danger to democracy than former President Donald Trump because ‘that’s the way it made me look crazy to liberals.’
“What I said was that I can make this argument and I didn’t say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy,’ he said.
He said he did not believe that either Biden or Trump could actually destroy democracy.
Kennedy’s full quote, as reported by DailyMail.com, was:
‘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,’ he said.
Kennedy added that although both Biden and Trump did things to threaten Democracy, he did not believe they would actually destroy it.
‘I didn’t say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy, I did say that I don’t believe either of them are going to destroy democracy,’ he said.