Kennedy v. Google & YouTube

The presidential candidate takes on U.S. Government-Tech Leviathan

This week, as I studied RFK, Jr.’s soon-to-be-released new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, and his legal complaint against Google and YouTube, I marveled at the sheer effort the presidential candidate has exerted to defend the rights of citizens against corrupt state power. 

As one who enjoys reading history, I found myself wondering if there is a historical precedent of a figure who was as enterprising and energetic in his pursuit of truth and justice in public affairs. The Roman lawyer and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, came to mind. In 69 BC, he made the bold and dangerous decision to prosecute the Sicilian Governor, Gaius Verres, for multiple acts of corruption. Cicero was the clear underdog in the contest. His friends thought he was crazy for taking on Verres—a powerful patrician who counted multiple friends on the jury. Nevertheless, Cicero’s true grit as an investigator, lawyer, and orator carried the day.

The Wuhan Cover-Up is an extraordinary illumination of the singularly dark and terrible enterprise of bio-weapons research that unleashed SARS-CoV-2 on mankind, inflicting untold death, suffering, and incalculable economic damage. Despite the mountains of evidence that the causative agent of COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, the United States government continues to avoid conducting a full and proper investigation of the catastrophe. And so RFK, Jr. did the investigation himself. The Wuhan Cover-Up is a meticulous work of scholarship that reads like a thrilling crime story. I suspect the book is destined to be one of the most significant in history. 

The legal complaint—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Google & YouTube—filed on August 2, 2023 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is another magisterial work of investigation and civic-minded scholarship. At the heart of the complaint is the abundance of evidence that Google and YouTube are colluding with the Biden Administration to violate Kennedy’s First Amendment right to speak freely in the public forum—both as a U.S. citizen and as a presidential candidate.

The matters of fact and law presented in the complaint are clear. YouTube (and its parent company, Google) flagrantly censored RFK, Jr.’s political speech by removing recordings of his full address at Saint Anselm College and his interviews with popular podcasters Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan.

Since it was founded in 2005, YouTube has become the most popular video sharing platform in the world. As we learned in the 2016 election, a large portion of the electorate goes to YouTube to obtain information about political candidates and their communications with the public. As Kennedy’s complaint correctly points out:

YouTube has become an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day, a place where people can communicate about matters of public concern.

Because it’s now been almost twenty years since popular internet platforms such as YouTube and Facebook were founded, it’s easy to forget that the companies explicitly promoted their services as offering ordinary citizens a means of communicating without having to go through TV network newsrooms. During the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010-13, social media was hailed for its vast democratic, political utility in providing citizens a collective means of circumventing state-operated media channels.

With this in mind, I was shocked the first time that YouTube censored me after I spent an entire day filming and editing an in-studio interview with Dr. Peter McCullough in which he spoke about his efforts to treat COVID-19 patients. I posted the interview on YouTube in May 2021 and it quickly went viral. Just a few hours later, YouTube removed it for purportedly violating the company’s “Community Guidelines.”

My friends were sympathetic to my frustration, but a few pointed out that YouTube is a private company and should therefore retain the right to redact material that its directors and shareholders regard as undesirable. The trouble with this reasoning is the significant evidence that the U.S. government has, in recent years, played a decisive role in crafting “Community Guidelines” and directing censorship operations.

As the Epoch Times reported at the beginning of this year, White House COVID-19 Digital Director, Clarke E. Humphrey, and White House Director of Digital Strategy, Rob Flaherty, sent e-mails to Twitter and Facebook executives. These messages directed them to censor content posted by RFK, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and others whose voices the Biden Administration has targeted for elimination from the public forum.

Such revelations of the Executive Branch’s violation of the First Amendment emerged during discovery in the lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden. As co-plaintiff, Aaron Kheriaty, MD, told me in a recent interview for the Kennedy Beacon, the lawsuit has uncovered evidence of extensive collusion between U.S. government agencies and big tech to censor any opinion or content that displeases the government.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Google & YouTube is, like Missouri v. Biden, a legal action for stopping the U.S. government from violating the constitutional protection of free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly stated that “the right to think is the beginning of freedom” and that “speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”

No one should be more sympathetic to Kennedy’s lawsuit than writers and journalists. I was therefore appalled to peruse the so-called reporting in popular outlets such as the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone. In plainly editorial tones, both reporters expressed shocking bias against the plaintiff. The Rolling Stone report, written by Kory Grow, was especially egregious. According to the author’s bio posted on the magazine’s site and Amazon page, Grow is a hard rock and heavy metal reporter. His article on Kennedy’s lawsuit is little more than series of assertions and stated assumptions that the plaintiff is wrong about everything.

One wonders what Mr. Grow thinks about the daily drumroll of information confirming that SARS-CoV-2 did come out of a lab. Back in 2020, the U.S. mainstream media adopted lockstep conformity in its insistence that anyone who even pointed out the grounds for suspecting a lab leak was a “conspiracy theorist.”

And what happened to Rolling Stone? The magazine that was once home to hard-hitting investigative journalists such as Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Loder, Tom Wolfe, and Matt Taibbi now seems scarcely distinguishable from an organ of propaganda.

In 69 B.C., when Cicero won his judicial triumph over the plundering Sicilian Governor, Gaius Verres, he also won the enduring gratitude of the Sicilian people. I hope that someday the American people will feel gratitude to RFK, Jr. for his tireless efforts to defend their constitutional liberties.