Joe Biden once called Robert F. Kennedy “the man who I guess I admire more than anyone else in American politics.”
The former attorney general’s namesake does not provoke similar feelings in the president.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Erin Burnett in a very fair — and therefore novel for cable news — and mesmerizing interview Monday evening, the Biden administration still refuses to give him (the son of an assassinated presidential candidate) Secret Service protection.
While the interview did CNN (and the candidate) much credit, the distorted coverage of it told everyone what they already knew about the media. Though Kennedy offered, “I’m not going to answer that question,” in response to whether Donald Trump or Biden posed the bigger threat to democracy, many media outlets ignored that caveat and recrafted Kennedy saying he could make a case for Biden as him categorically labeling Biden the worse threat. He actually said:
“I can make the argument that President Biden is a 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. I can say that because I just won a case in the federal court of appeals and now before the Supreme Court that shows that he started censoring not just me — 37 hours after he took the oath of office — he was censoring me. No president of the country has ever done that. The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH to censor his political critics.”
Kennedy, despite sounding as though he’s 145-years-old and not the youngest of the five presidential candidates registering in polls, garners anywhere from 3 to 15 percent in recent national surveys.
The candidate wondered to Burnett, “What president in history has ever tried to censor political opponents?”
Few as brazenly as Joe Biden — and the federal government blocking Kennedy’s posts on ostensibly privately controlled social media sites undoubtedly motivates his run. But students of history grasp that Joe Biden did not merely plagiarize the speeches of President Kennedy and his attorney general.
The Censorship State aggressively overseen by Joe Biden traces its genealogy to the same places Robert Kennedy Jr. traces his.
During Kennedy’s uncle’s presidential administration, his father authorized warrantless wiretaps on various political enemies. Targets included a congressional staffer and lobbyists connected to efforts to restore sugar imports from the Dominican Republic.
The president and his brother sicced the Central Intelligence Agency on several journalists who invoked the administration’s ire, including Pulitzer Prize–winner Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times. When an aide at a meeting attended by both the president and his attorney general suggested bypassing the FBI for the CIA in investigating these American citizens, John Kennedy responded: “That’s a very good idea. We’ll do that.”
Matthew Dallek in Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right wrote of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s interest in the John Birch Society that “the FBI under his command opened an investigation of the movement with an extensive undercover operation.” This included Anti-Defamation League activists surreptitiously running credit reports on JBS members, posing as Birchers to join white supremacist groups, and transcribing license plates in parking lots outside of the group’s meetings. The ADL “Birch Watchers” sent reports to the FBI.
Most infamously, President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy authorized bugging and other surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., the results of which — like the dirt gathered on the Birchers — not-so mysteriously wound up in the hands of journalists.
To put this in context, President Kennedy went down a trail blazed by predecessors Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom used wars as justifications to silence, harass, and bully political enemies. It did not start with John Kennedy and his brother Robert. The Biden administration’s censorship of RFK Jr. shows it did not end with them, either.
Good for Robert Kennedy Jr. for highlighting the Censorship State on a cable channel long acting as its booster sheet. But to effectively fight something planted as deeply as the Censorship State, it helps when one can accurately trace its roots.