Biden's First Priority as POTUS: Censoring Kennedy

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

A new report, published May 1 by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, details hundreds of instances in which the Biden administration directly coerced big tech companies to censor the free speech of American citizens, including a presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Following the rolling publication of the Twitter Files and the Missouri vs. Biden lawsuit (now known as Murthy vs. Missouri), the Committee issued multiple subpoenas to companies and federal agencies. The information obtained via subpoena forms the basis of the report which offers fresh insights into the breadth and depth of the Biden administration's cloak and dagger approach to censorship. 

On the Third Day 

The inauguration of President Biden was far from typical. Weeks earlier, the now infamous January 6 riot broke out at the Capitol. Days before, the outgoing President Trump had been impeached for a second time. Supporters of Trump accused Biden’s side of rigging the election while Biden’s team accused Trump of leading an insurrection. 

Amidst this chaos, it would be logical to surmise that the new president would have many important priorities involving attempts at healing a broken nation, in which many states were still partly shut down due to Covid restrictions. 

Instead, the Biden administration found it fit to request the online censorship of Kennedy on the new president’s third day in office. According to the Committee report, “on just the third day of the Biden Administration, the White House emailed Twitter (now X) personnel to demand that a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be ‘removed ASAP.’ In the same email, the Biden White House also asked Twitter to also ‘keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre’.”

While it has become well known that the Biden administration engaged in the censorship of citizens that multiple courts have deemed unconstitutional, the timing of the order to censor Kennedy and those in his same “genre” proves that censorship of social media was a priority for the Biden administration. It further proves that the Biden administration saw Kennedy as the proverbial tip of the spear in the wider public debate for truth and transparency about Covid. 

The significance of the timing of Biden’s censorship of Kennedy goes even deeper than an administration prioritizing censorship in the first 72 hours of its time in power.

Biden Was “Anti-Vaxx” in 2020

It is important to catalog Biden’s ever changing views on Covid vaccines. In November of 2020, the first mRNA Covid-19 vaccines received federal approval under emergency authorization approved by the Trump administration.

Trump remains proud of his “operation warp speed” which rushed the development of novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Trump’s stance on the vaccine has remained unchanged ever since. Likewise, Kennedy remains consistent in his scientific skepticism of the safety and efficacy of such vaccines. 

Biden’s views, however, fluctuated between late 2020 and mid-2021. In September of 2020, Biden expressed strong concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines whose rushed development he blamed on Trump, a man whom he described as untrustworthy, as reported by The New York Times. 

Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was even more robust in her vaccine skepticism. During a Vice Presidential debate in October of 2020, she said, “If Donald Trump tells us to take it [the vaccine], I’m not taking it.”  

At the time the Biden administration ordered the censorship of Kennedy, vaccine mandates were a fear among many Americans and Biden insisted that such suggestions were “conspiratorial.” In December of 2020, when he was President Elect, Biden specifically said that he would not introduce vaccine mandates. 

He soon dramatically changed his position. It took merely nine months for this “conspiracy theory” to become official policy. 

Biden’s Mandate 

While Trump never mandated the vaccines he encouraged Americans to take, the Biden administration introduced mass vaccine mandates impacting millions of Americans in September of 2021, causing many thousands to lose their jobs or to take a vaccine that subsequently injured some of them. 

The administration continued to target Kennedy for censorship later in 2021, as reports of vaccine injuries were circulating. After first targeting Kennedy’s Twitter account in January of 2021, by March 2021 executives at the company now known as Meta reported to the administration that they had censored Kennedy’s Instagram account. Much of this vaccine mandate was struck down by the Supreme Court in January 2022 after judges found it unconstitutional for the government to mandate vaccines for employees of large companies. However, those in the healthcare industry and military still fell under the mandate according to the Court’s decision. 

The Big Picture

The 881-page Committee report details evidence of state enforced censorship through the coercion of executives at Amazon, Google, Meta and Twitter. Thousands of Americans were directly impacted by this while millions were deprived of access to the speech of their fellow citizens in what the report refers to as a digital “public square.” 

When first announcing his run for president in April 2023, Kennedy said that one of his motivations was to get his voice heard after suffering years of censorship. Even this week, Meta censored posts of a documentary short on Kennedy called Who is Bobby Kennedy? American Values 2024 (AV24), which purchased the film from its creators, filed a lawsuit against Meta in response to the censorship, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon. 

The authors of the Committee report describe the Biden administration as having a “chilling” effect on Kennedy’s right to free speech. After reading the details of how the censorship was ordered, it is difficult to conclude otherwise.