Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy took part in a discussion on Twitter Spaces Monday, promoting his campaign as he challenges President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for 2024.
Kennedy appeared on Twitter after Instagram temporarily blocked his campaign account due to his anti-vaxx comments. Twitter owner Elon Musk invited Kennedy to appear on his platform in response.
Kennedy is considered a long-shot for the nomination. While he is the son of monumental Democratic figure Bobby Kennedy, his views also set him at odds with many in his party.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election
- Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more
- If elected president, Kennedy will issue an executive order forbidding federal agencies from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public
- Kennedy is adamant about stopping the ever-growing influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border and is currently formulating policies to make the border “impervious,” while simultaneously opening up legal immigration pathways
- Kennedy also wants to shut down gain-of-function research and bioweapons development
June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, venture capitalist David Sacks, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger and securities attorney Omeed Malik, about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election.
Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more.
Also you can mark your calendars as I and Dr. Pierre, Kory, Dr. Patrick Gentempo, Del Bigtree, Mikki Willis and others will be participating in a Health Policy Roundtable, where we will be able to grill Bobby about your concerns. It will be Tuesday, June 27 at 7:00 PM EDT.
Media Bias
Not surprisingly, the liberal media chastised Kennedy for championing “right-wing ideas and misinformation” during the interview. In fact, that was The New York Times’ headline.1
The NYT went on to smear Kennedy as “a leading vaccine skeptic” who promotes “conspiracy theories” and “sounded like a candidate … in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.” Translation: He’s a rational realist who doesn’t shy away from difficult truths and inconvenient facts.
“He said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to ‘try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,’ called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians and said pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise of mass shootings in America,” The NYT complained, adding:
“He claimed, without evidence, that ‘COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.’ American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case.”
Similarly, CNN wrote Kennedy off as a “marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims,” complaining he “attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance.”2
I suggest listening to the discussion for yourself, as most mainstream media reporting on it didn’t do it justice. Below, I’ll review some of the key issues discussed, with a focus on Kennedy’s stances and election promises, seeing how the establishment is doing everything in their power to prevent people from learning what he stands for.
Kennedy on Social Media Censorship
Proving the ties between the Biden administration and Big Tech are still alive and well in the post-COVID era, Instagram recently suspended Kennedy’s official presidential campaign page, after reinstating his personal page, which had been banned for the last couple of years. Kennedy commented:
“I was evicted from Instagram … in the spring of 2021. The day I was evicted, I had about 770,000 [followers], but I had been up to 900,000. Whenever I hit 900,000, they would cut them back to 800,000 or 700,000, so I was losing followers all the time.
They said it was because I was promoting misinformation. But the term is ‘information,’ and [has] nothing to do with … factual accuracy or inaccuracy. It was simply a euphemism for any statement that departed from the government orthodoxies and government proclamations …
Since I’ve declared the presidency [run], now we have about 50 people working for the campaign, and each of those people has an Instagram handle — for example, my daughter-in-law is Amaryllis@TeamKennedy.com — and when they attempted to register, Instagram would send them a flag saying ‘You’ve been suspended for 180 days.’
So, none of them were allowed on. And, of course, that’s illegal under Section 413 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which regulates speech. It protects speech during presidential and other federal election campaigns …
But I don’t want to be pointing the finger at Meta right now, because I think it’s time for healing in this country. I’m happy that I’ve been reinstated, and they gave me back all my old posts, and all my old followers …“
If elected president, Kennedy vows to call the heads of all social media companies into the Oval Office and “not walk out until we have figured out how to make this work and make it consistent with democracy.”
Like Sachs, Kennedy doesn’t believe that social media companies want to censor any of their users. Rather, they’re pressured to do so by advertisers and the government itself, which is using private companies to circumvent the U.S. Constitution. Were social media companies to continue censoring anyway, then turning them into common carriers could be one solution.
“I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist,” Kennedy said, “and I think the remedy for misinformation is more information, and the remedy for bad speech is more speech. It’s never censorship. Censorship is by far the worst solution. There are forms of speech that are not protected, [such as] inciting violence [and] pedophilia … and you can censor those.
But if it’s protected speech, I don’t think it should be censored. But I think in any case, we should understand the logic, the algorithms and the methodologies, and we should all have access to those. That’s key, because these institutions are now the public square. They are a place where speech takes place … and we have to figure out a way to integrate them into our democratic values system.”
Musk is also adamant about the need for free speech. “I think if we don’t protect free speech at all costs, we don’t have a functioning democracy. If we don’t have a functioning democracy, nothing else matters,” Musk said. Ironically, since his acquisition of Twitter, the Democratic Party and its press allies have routinely portrayed Musk as a “threat to democracy,” primarily based on his support of free speech.
