What’s Democratic About Censoring Free Speech?

By David Talbot, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

The Democratic Party has long snubbed challengers. But there is a special vitriol to the relentless attacks on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  

That vitriol was on full display last week. Over 100 Democratic members of Congress signed an outraged ––and outrageous––letter calling on Republican Congressional leaders to censor RFK Jr. from a censorship hearing. Among the Democratic signatories were such stalwarts of the left as Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Jamie Raskin, Katie Porter and Rashida Tlaib. 

As the understandably exasperated Kennedy told the Congressional hearing, he knows many of these members. They know he is not anti-Semitic or racist. In fact, as he reminded the panel, his whole career has been dedicated to stamping out these noxious prejudices. 

We live in “upside-down” times, as RFK Jr. put it last week. It is the Democrats who tried to silence Kennedy during the hearing who will go down in infamy for their intolerance of free speech. 

But it was Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, who gave Kennedy a platform to air his views on censorship last Thursday. Yes, that Jim Jordan—the fire-breathing Trump supporter and January 6 rioters’ defender. It was Fox News hosts and other conservative voices who argued that RFK Jr. had a right to speak. Of course, Jordan and the GOP are trying to cause commotion and chaos in the Democratic ranks. But Democrats are doing a wonderful job of encouraging this divide-and-conquer tactic by trying to silence anyone whose views are not considered acceptable by the liberal establishment.

As Kennedy said during his impassioned, spontaneous opening remarks before the subcommittee, he has spent his entire life in the arms of the Democratic Party—it’s part of his family’s political DNA. And censorship was “antithetical” to his uncles John and Edward Kennedy, the “lion of the Senate” who reached across the aisle to Republicans like Orrin Hatch to forge legislation, as well as his father, Robert, and other luminaries of the party.

“Toxic polarization is destroying our country today,” Kennedy told the subcommittee. “This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War. And how do we deal with that? Every Democrat on this committee thinks we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I tell you that you cannot. That only amplifies and aggravates the problem. We need to start being kind to each other, to start being respectful to each other. We need to restore comity to this chamber and to America ––but it has to start here.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, failed to heed RFK Jr.’s plea. On Sunday, Pelosi—the Democratic representative from San Francisco, a woman whom I’ve voted for numerous times—ridiculed the hearing, telling CNN’s Dana Bash, “What a ridiculous clown show, again, (staged by) the Republicans. What do they do, bring in Kennedy talking about censorship, that he’s being censored—as he’s talking to the world in a Congressional hearing.”

So much for Pelosi’s heralded “San Francisco values”— the values of tolerance and dissent.

Democratic leaders like Pelosi are spearheading an obvious, concerted effort to “silence” Kennedy, as he charged, to use “pejoratives” and “smears” and “lies” to drive him from the presidential race, instead of engaging with him on the fundamental issues he’s raised. Among those issues: corporate capture of the federal regulatory system, the U.S. addiction to permanent war, the crushing of the middle class under the weight of military spending, the profit-driven destruction of our planet—and, yes, the campaign to censor prominent critics of the status quo.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has even ruled, in dictatorial fashion, that there will be no Democratic presidential debates this primary season, even though Kennedy has polled at 20 percent in one survey and in the teens in others. In contrast, the Republican Party has decided that one percent is the polling cutoff for candidates to participate in the first debate next month in Milwaukee.

There is nothing new about this corporate Democratic campaign to condemn and shut up party dissidents. Florida’s Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the ringleaders of the RFK Jr. censorship effort, was forced to resign as DNC chair on the eve of the 2016 Democratic Convention, after leaked DNC emails revealed that the party establishment heavily favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The Democratic elite and big media also targeted Jesse Jackson and RFK Jr.’s father when they challenged party leaders’ picks for the presidential nomination.

Why attack RFK Jr. so ruthlessly? Perhaps it’s because he’s a renegade from a hallowed family. Nearly all of his relatives have remained safely in the political fold, and some have even earned extra points by publicly attacking him, even though his father and uncle, President Kennedy, showed the same courage in confronting the conventional political wisdom of their day.

The liberal punditocracy likes to denounce conservatives for their book banning crusades across the country, which generally target titles that grapple with racial and gender issues. (Some targets of book bans, like Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus, apparently offend by forthrightly depicting the horrors of Hitler’s rule.) These and similar efforts to sanitize our nation’s past — like Florida’s overhaul of African American history standards in schools and universities throughout the states—should be scorned by all free-thinking people, “woke” or not.

But it’s the liberal war on free speech that has become equally worrisome in recent years. The frenzy to drive RFK Jr. and other political renegades from social media platforms. The lynch mob mentality that makes it impossible to distribute movies by Woody Allen in the United States, even though he has been cleared of legal charges and ranks as one of the great filmmakers of his generation. The book industry censors who cleanse literary classics of “offensive” language and seek politically correct conformity. These are some of the sorry examples of liberal intolerance.

Even though RFK Jr. sustains multiple attacks each day, there’s some evidence this character assassination is not working.. American Values 2024, the super PAC that supports Kennedy’s presidential bid (and publishes The Kennedy Beacon), reported that his Congressional testimony last Thursday prompted an impressive $5 million worth of donations. “The censorship, vilification, and targeted propaganda playbook that the DNC used so effectively against Bernie Sanders won’t work against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Tony Lyons, the superPAC’s co-chairman, said.

Perhaps Kennedy is right. Americans are tired of the bitterness and division. They want to hear something different from their leaders. The truth.

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David Talbot is the author of the New York Times-bestselling The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.