Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the censorship of speech arguing that, “there is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys.”
In an interview with Breitbart News host Joel Pollak, Kennedy discussed censorship of alleged “misinformation.” Kennedy has experienced censorship first-hand for questioning measures taken during the pandemic.
“I’m wondering if you can make a pitch to our audience about a common cause that you, running as a Democrat, may have with many conservatives who feel that they’ve been canceled or otherwise censored or marginalized in public discourse,” Pollak asked.
“It’s more than a personal aggrievement. It’s really just a direct assault on our democracy,” Kennedy said.
According to Kennedy, when the founding fathers drafted the Bill of Rights, they “put the right to free expression in the First Amendment because all the other rights depended on it—because the government that has the power to silence its critics has license for any kind of atrocity.”
“They also understood just theoretically that the whole basis for democracy was the free flow of information,” he continued, adding that one great benefit of democracy over dictatorship is that “through the free flow of information, the best policies can triumph in the marketplace of ideas.”
“We’re now in this situation where without free speech, democracy just withers and dies. Free speech is the fertilizer; it’s the sunlight; it’s the water for democracy,” he added. “There is no time in history where the people who were censoring speech were the good guys. They’re always the bad guys because, of course, that is the first and last step of totalitarianism: silencing critics.”
Kennedy further noted that misinformation and falsehoods are protected speech.
“There are certain kinds of speech that are not protected. But, you know, those things are.
“What we really ought to be looking at is why? What is the cause of this blizzard and tsunami of misinformation that everybody is worried about? And if you look at why this is happening, it’s clear that it’s happening because people don’t trust the government anymore, and they don’t trust it because the government lies, and the media lies.
“Twenty-two percent of Americans now trust the government, and about 22 percent trust media. That’s the lowest level in our history. And the reason they don’t—there’s a very good reason—is that the government and the media, the mainstream media, the corporate-owned media, they are now lying just as a matter of course. And because of that, people are looking for other sources of information. And when those other sources challenge government orthodoxies, the government’s response is to censor them or to label them as misinformation and say that they’re dangerous.”
Listen to the full interview here.
