Robert F. Kennedy Jr: “No Time in History Where the People Who Were Censoring Speech Were the Good Guys”

RFK Jr., responding, described the media’s attempts to silence him and people like him as a “direct assault on our democracy” and then went on to note that when they crafted our Bill of Rights, America’s Founders “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.”

Continuing, he noted that the free flow of information is necessary for our system to function well, saying, “They also understood just theoretically that the whole basis for democracy was the free flow of information,” adding that our system’s advantage over more authoritarian systems is that “through the free flow of information, the best policies can triumph in the marketplace of ideas.”

So, in his view, “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. here 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 then argued that both “misinformation” and even “lies” are still protected by the First Amendment, saying, “There are certain kinds of speech that are not protected. But, you know, those things are.”

And, in his view, the supposed “misinformation” comes from people not trusting the government because it squandered its credibility. Speaking on that, he said, “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.”

Giving more details on that, he said, “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.”

Continuing on that point, he said, “And so now you’ve got this terror, particularly on the left, that misinformation is somehow going to destroy our democracy. And it’s kind of a bait and switch because the real threat to our democracy is that our government is lying to us. And people don’t trust the institutions of our democracy anymore and with very good reason.”

Returning to his campaign and what he hopes to do and in what legacy he hopes to follow, Kennedy said,  “Every nation, every individual has a darker side and a lighter side. The easiest thing for political leaders to do is to appeal to those darker instincts—the greed, the anger, the fear, the bigotry. But people are able to hear a different message if they’re spoken to honestly. And my father did that, and he was ruthlessly honest, and it allowed people—even people who did not agree with him on all the issues—it allowed them to take the risk of seeing themselves transcending their own narrow self-interests and their fear-driven lies and seeing themselves as part of a larger community, as part of this noble experiment that we have in this country of being in self-governance [and] of being the world’s exemplary democracy, and summoning people to find the hero in themselves and really feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

He then said that, during the Covid pandemic, cable news hosts were “telling us in these very plaintiff voices, we’re all in it together. But they were working and getting their $12 million salaries, and yet other people in our country were being put out of work and were being compelled to do things that they didn’t want to do to accept these interventions and these mandates. It became very clear that we weren’t all in it together, that that was just a lie. And people know when they’re being lied to. People like leadership; they don’t like bullying, and they don’t like liars. And the people unfortunately who are running both political parties today spend a lot of the time saying things that are not true.”

This isn’t the first time that Kennedy has spoken on his fight for free speech and against censorship. For example, he said, in his presidential announcement speech last week, “I’m in a lawsuit involving Amazon for censoring one of my books. They were censoring people who criticized the lockdowns while they were raking in money from the lockdowns.”

Additionally, in his announcement speech, Kennedy stood against the extreme divisiveness the current political situation has created and pledged to try to find a path forward that Democrats and Republicans could get behind, saying:

“When I talk to both Republican friends and Democratic friends, they talk about this division in almost apocalyptic terms. Nobody can see a safe way or a good way out of it, and people are preparing for a kind of a dystopian future.”

“One of the principal missions of my campaign and of my presidency is going to be to end that division. And I’m going to try to do that by encouraging people to talk about the values that we have in common rather than the issues that keep us apart. And also—and this I think is the most important thing—I’m going to do that by telling the truth to the American people.”