2023-04-29 23:41:38
From Breitbart the intervention of the presidential candidate Kennedy on freedom of speech and thought, which the West is increasingly active in repressing with the excuse of disinformation. But censorship itself implies that there are certain people, structures or institutions that possess the ultimate truth, and it is this truth that will be the criterion for evaluating any statement or even just thought. This is terrible, it is pure authoritarianism to substitute for the truth and it is amazing that this is still not clear:
di Rebecca Mansour – Breitbart
NThere’s never been a time in history where the people who censored speech were the good guys,” Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Breitbart News Sunday host Joel Pollak.
Pollak asked Kennedy about his defense of free speech against big tech censorship. The best-selling author, environmental advocate, and children’s health advocate has experienced censorship the hard way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Kennedy’s social media posts questioning the wisdom of the lockdowns have been labeled “misinformation.”
In his presidential announcement speech last week, the candidate said: “I’m suing Amazon for censoring one of my books. They censored people who criticized the blockades as they pocketed the blockade money.”
“I wonder if you can bring to our audience the common cause that as a Democrat you may have with many conservatives who feel rejected or otherwise censored or marginalized in public discoursePollak asked.
“It is more than personal suffering. This is really just a direct attack on our democracy“said Kennedy.
Kennedy explained that in drafting the Bill of Rights, the founders of America “they put the right to free speech into the First Amendment because all other rights depended on it – because a government that has the power to silence its critics has a license for all kinds of atrocities .”
“They also understood only theoretically that the basis of democracy is the free flow of information,” he said, adding that the advantage of democracy over government systems “tyrannical and royalist” is that “thanks to the free flow of information, the best policy can triumph in the market of ideas”.
“We are now in a situation where without freedom of speech, democracy simply withers and dies. Free speech is fertilizer; it is the light of the sun; it is water for democracy”, he continued. “There is no time in history where the people who censored speech were good people. It’s always the bad guys, because of course that’s the first and last step of totalitarianism: silencing the critics.”
Pollak noted that Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart “he used to say that we always need more votes, not less votes. The response to speech you disagree with is more speech, not less.”
Kennedy argued that “disinformation” and even “lies” were still constitutionally protected words. “There are some types of speech that are not protected. But you know, these things are.”
“What we should really be looking at is why? What is causing this blizzard and tsunami of disinformation that everyone is worried about?” Kennedy said. “And if you look at why that’s happening, it’s clear that it’s because people don’t trust the government anymore and they don’t trust because the government lies and the media lies.”
“22% of Americans now trust the government and about 22% trust the media. This is the lowest level in our history“, he said. “And the reason they don’t – there’s a very good reason – is because the government and the media, the mainstream media, the corporate-owned media, are now lying, just like that. For this reason, people look for other sources of information. And when these other sources question the government’s orthodoxy, the government’s response is to censor them or label them disinformation and say they’re dangerous.”
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