YouTube deplatformed him five minutes into his announcement that he was a Democrat presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, Jr. said Thursday, while defending himself from attacks by fellow Democrats during a House hearing.
A hearing, which was supposed to be about the weaponization of government through censorship, quickly detoured into vicious efforts to smear Kennedy and prevent him from testifying against censorship of viewpoints opposed by the Biden Administration.
Kennedy provided a personal account of how his candidacy announcement had been censored in real-time by YouTube:
“When I gave my speech my announcement speech in Boston two months ago. YouTube, I talked about all those issues, I focused on groceries; I focused on the fact that working class people can longer afford to live in this country. I talked about inflation, all the issues that deeply concerned you. And that you've devoted your career to alleviate those issues.
“Five minutes into my speech when I was talking about Paul Revere, YouTube de-platformed me. I didn't talk about vaccines in that speech. I didn't talk about anything that that was a verboten subject. I just was talking about my campaign, things, the conversation that we ought to be having with each other as Americans. But I was shut down. And that is why the First Amendment is important.”
Kennedy said that a “new form of censorship” has been weaponized against him ever since he announced his plans to run against fellow Democrat, Pres. Joe Biden, to become his party’s 2024 presidential candidate:
“After I announced my presidency, it became more difficult for people to censor me outright, so now I'm subject to this new form of censorship, which is called ‘targeted propaganda,’ where people apply pejoratives, like ‘anti-vax.’
“I've never been ant-vaccine. Everybody in this room probably believes that I have been because that's the prevailing narrative.
“‘Antisemitism.’ ‘racism’ - these are the most appalling, disgusting pejoratives and they're applied to me to silence me, because people don't want me to have that conversation about the war, about groceries about inflation, about the war on the middle class in this country that we need to be having.”
Kennedy also suggested that Instagram had suppressed his content by deeming it malinformation.
“Big Tech and the media are desperately trying to censor @RobertKennedyJr to protect Biden. Stop interfering in our elections!” Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell tweeted, reacting to Kennedy’s testimony.
Later in the hearing, Breitbart News’s Emma-Jo Morris testified that Big Tech had, indeed, interfered in the 2020 presidential election through censorship, in order to skew the results in Biden's favor.
Morris cited results of a MRC post-election poll of seven key swing states, which found that former Pres. Donald Trump would have won reelection, if reports revealing the contents of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” had not been censored shortly before the 2020 presidential election.
Fully 45.1% of Biden voters said they were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son, Hunter (a story infamously censored by Twitter and Facebook, as well as ignored by the liberal media). According to the poll, full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving Trump 311 electoral votes.
Ms. Morris cites the MRC poll that shows 45% Biden voters were not aware of the Hunter Biden Laptop story.
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) July 20, 2023
The poll revealed the censorship of the story may have changed the outcome of the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/JgNnkfsBpi
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published on MRCTV.org
