Achi news desk-
At the end of January 2021, with thousands of people dying from covid-19 every day and the first vaccines targeting the coronavirus being introduced, baseball legend Hank Aaron died.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose political activism in recent years had focused on promoting vaccine skepticism, saw it as an opportunity.
“The tragic death of #HankAaron is part of a wave of questionable deaths among the elderly near the administration of #covid #vaccines,” Kennedy he wrote in a social media post. “Received the #Moderna vaccine on January 5th to inspire other Black Americans to get the vaccine.”
There was no “wave of questionable deaths” among elderly Americans. Instead, a deadly virus – which proved especially deadly to older people – was raging around the world. And then there were people like Aaron, 86, who died of old age. But the argument, while obviously dubious, fits Kennedy’s political goals. So he offered it with the veneer of authority that his last name had provided him his entire life.
That tweet in particular is why Kennedy – a long-shot independent candidate for the presidency – declared on CNN Monday night that President Biden could be a “worse threat” to democracy than Donald Trump, someone who tried to overturn the results of a democratic election .
Kennedy was being interviewed by CNN host Erin Burnett. Burnett asked Kennedy if he really felt there was no important difference between Biden and Trump.
“I can argue that President Biden is a far worse threat to democracy,” Kennedy replied. “The reason for that is that President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history who has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, therefore to censor his opponent.
“The greatest threat to democracy is not someone who questions election returns,” he added a minute later, “but the president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to open portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, to the CIA, to the IRS, to CISA, to NIH to censor his political critics.”
Burnett pressed him on the point, noting Trump’s response to his 2020 loss and its obvious implications for democracy.
“I can argue that President Biden [a worse threat], because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” Kennedy replied. “But Adams and Hamilton and Madison said, we guarantee freedom of expression in the First Amendment because all our other constitutional rights depend on it.”
Everything Kennedy said in the quotes above is false or misleading.
Let’s start with that last point, about the Founding Fathers and the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment is not first because it is most important. This is firstly because the first two proposed amendments to the Constitution – ones that spell out the size of Congress and how lawmakers were paid – were not ratified. This relatively abstract point is a good example of how Kennedy works: He thinks of a bit of rhetoric and is indifferent to its accuracy.
Kennedy’s claim about Biden “using the power of his office” to “force the social media companies” to “censor his political critics” is also false. Thanks in part to the rampant spread of misinformation during the 2016 election, the government – including during the Trump administration – worked with social media companies in 2020 and 2021 to combat false claims about the election and the pandemic. But they were not “forced” to act.
Kennedy inadvertently proved that point.
“Thirty-seven hours after he was sworn into office,” he told Burnett, “[Biden] was censoring me.”
It was not. Kennedy was referring to Aaron’s tweet, which a White House staffer pointed out to Twitter staff (now X) in an email. “COMMENTS WE CAN MOVE ON THE PROCESS OF BEING DELETED ASAP,” the email read.
But the post was not deleted. He was later banned from Instagram for spreading misinformation about the vaccine but remained on Twitter, sparking third-party criticism of the platforms for not acting in response to his false claims.
When House Republicans began trying to turn these efforts to fight misinformation into a political grist, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also pointed to the White House’s response to Kennedy’s tweet as somehow problematic.
“Misinformation is when you don’t have the facts right; you’re saying things that aren’t true,” Jordan said at a hearing in July. “When you look at Mr. Kennedy, there was nothing in there that was factually incorrect. Hank Aaron, a real person, a great American, died after he got the vaccine. Pointing out – just pointing out facts. “
This was when Kennedy was running as a Democrat, so it was useful for Jordan and his party to elevate his grievances. But Jordan’s presentation is nonsense, ignoring the “wave of questionable deaths” bit, which is Kennedy’s point.
As soon as Kennedy declared himself an independent, of course, Republicans changed their presentation of his arguments. For example, the host of Fox News, Sean Hannity, went from being sarcastic to being critical as Kennedy went from being a threat to Biden to threatening the candidates of both major parties. A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows Kennedy pulling away from both Biden and Trump. That could have different effects in different states, if Kennedy took part in the ballot.
But the damage Kennedy can do to Biden is not just electoral. Remember his argument for why Biden is perhaps a worse threat to democracy than Trump – that Biden censored his opposition, which he didn’t, while Trump just… tried to subvert democracy. (Never mind the other threats posed by Trump, such as his legal argument that presidents should have legal immunity.) Kennedy’s claim about Biden is rooted in misinformation (about the supremacy of the First Amendment) that it applies to misinformation (about restricting the White House speech) about misinformation (his post about Aaron).
Burnett’s question about Biden and Trump was based on Kennedy warning Ralph Nader in 2000 that there was an important difference between the major party candidates that year that Nader’s third party bid threatened. Kennedy’s rhetoric about Biden and Trump – rooted entirely in exaggerated or false claims – similarly blurs the differences between the candidates, possibly with similar effect.
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