07/30/2023 / By JD Heyes
Once upon a time, the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech, free thought, and free expression were vitally important to the Democratic Party and worth fighting for, but over the past decade or so, that has changed.
Democrats now behave like the authoritarians they claimed to be fighting against beginning in the 1960s and they now embrace the kind of censorship of ideas and thought that is common in dictatorships and tyrannical regimes like Cuba, China, and North Korea.
Just ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Democratic presidential contender was repeatedly mocked, censored, and ridiculed by members of his own party during a House hearing last week to discuss — among other things — online censorship. But when Kennedy was through with the hearing, he accepted an invitation to discuss the situation on Fox News.
“So, it was very interesting watching this unfold this morning. You’re running as a Democrat. The Democrats came after you hard. The Republicans were sticking up for your right to say what you want to say,” host Martha MacCallum noted, asking: “Do you feel like you’re, as a Kennedy, sort of in upside-down world when you’re sitting there this morning?”
“I do. I felt — I felt like I was really in an upside-down world,” RFK Jr. responded. “I want to say something, because they — the charges that I made these statements that were antisemitic, all of those statements are taken out of context. And those statements themselves — I have — I have literally — and I said this under oath today. I have never made a single antisemitic statement in my life or racist statement in my life.”
“And the statements that are being twisted and distorted to make them seem like I said these controversial things are — is simply another way that I’m being — that the DNC, et cetera, and its allies are using to silence me, to marginalize me, to make me look crazy, to make me look like a bad person,” he added.
“I was not allowed to talk. I was not allowed to defend myself. I was read a series of these slanders without being allowed to reply to any of them. So, I was invited to speak there because a recent federal court decision, which is a monumental decision, Judged Doughty in a federal court in Louisiana, which for the first time in history ordered the White House to stop, to actually cease all communications with the social media networks because they were manipulating information,” Kennedy continued.
“And the censorship continues today. When I made my campaign — my announcement speech on April 19 in Boston, YouTube took it down after five minutes. So I was not — I never mentioned vaccines. I never mentioned anything. I was talking about Paul Revere,” he said.
Before the hearing, Kennedy was at least able to give his opening statement without Democrats interrupting him, where he also addressed the subject of left-wing censorship now being championed by Democrats, especially during the pandemic on social media platforms.
“There was an effort to suppress information not, in fact, if you read the Twitter Files and the email correspondence between Facebook and the White House, there was an acknowledgment that they were being asked and they were complying with censoring information that everybody knew to be true, or highly likely to be true,” he said.
“The term misinformation did not denote falsehood or veracity, rather it was a euphemism for any information that departed from government orthodoxies. It was very dangerous,” said RFK Jr.
“A Congressman a minute ago said a million people have died because of misinformation about vaccines in this country. But in fact, our country had one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and the worst health outcomes,” he said.
“We needed information. Trusting the experts is not a function of science, it is not a function of democracy. It is a function of religion and totalitarianism. And it does not make for a healthier population,” he concluded.
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authoritarianism, big government, cancel Democrats, Censorship, Congress, democrats, First Amendment, free speech, freedom, hearing, House Democrats, Liberty, online censorship, RFK Jr, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., silenced, testimony, Tyranny
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