During an appearance on this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned of the dangers of government censorship.
Earlier in the week, Kennedy testified before the House Judiciary Committee on censorship.
Kennedy told host Maria Bartiromo that if the government could censor its critics, “it has a license for any atrocity.”
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: So what went on in that hearing? Censorship has been an issue for several years now. We talk about it every day on this program and on my program on FOX Business. What should be done about it? What can you do to stop it?
KENNEDY: Me — I mean, this should not be a partisan — or this needs to be bipartisan. And the Democratic Party has always fought very hard, my father, my uncle, and throughout its history.
The word liberal means freedom and applies specifically to freedom of speech. But we can’t have a democracy if we don’t have freedom of speech. It is the cornerstone of our democracy. That’s why the framers put it in the First Amendment. It is — as I said, it’s the sunlight, it’s the water, it’s the soil of democracy.
Without free speech, democracy will wither and die. And everybody knows that. We have been warned about that by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tessler, Heinlein. Everybody —
BARTIROMO: Yes.
(CROSSTALK)
KENNEDY: Everybody knows —
BARTIROMO: It’s the beginning of totalitarianism.
KENNEDY: Yes.
The people who censor speech, when we look back in history, they’re never the good guys.
BARTIROMO: Yes.
KENNEDY: And it’s inevitable that, if you do start censoring speech — because government abuses every power that it’s given.
And if government suddenly has the capacity to censor its critics, it has a license for any atrocity.
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