RFK, Jr. Makes the Case that Biden is a bigger threat to Democracy than Trump
I could make the argument that Biden is a worse threat to democracy than Trump. Biden is first president in history that has used federal agencies to censor the speech of his political opponents. … 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me. No president in the history of the [US] has done that. The greatest threat to democracy is not someone who questions elections but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force social media companies to open a portal and give access to [it] to the FBI, CIA, IRS and NIH to censor his political critics. Biden is the first president in history to use his power to deny Secret Service protection to one of his political opponents [pointing at himself]. He is weaponizing federal agencies to … [Burnett interrupts RFK, Jr.].
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to CNN’s Erin Burnett, April 2, 2024
Naturally, RFK, Jr.’s statement of the obvious to CNN’s Erin Burnett that he could make the case that Biden is a worse threat to democracy than Donald Trump caused a great deal of distress in the Democrat News-media Colluders (hereafter the DNC) because JFK, Jr. strayed from The Company Narrative. It never seemed to have occurred to Burnett that an administration that works with social media companies and the alphabet agencies to censor his political opponents and whose “Justice” Department has indicted his political opponent in 2024 for, essentially, the same thing he himself did, might be seen by the peasants as a threat to democracy. To understand Burnett’s distressed reaction, in which she tries to get him to walk back his remarks, and in which she makes several false statements, recall that a few years ago she had a long segment convicting Trump for his alleged Haiti-Africa “s**thole” remark when, in fact, we don’t even know if Trump said that or, if he did, what precisely he said. It was CNN and Burnett herself, after all, that ran “the walls are closing in” in the media’s Trump-Russia collusion hoax as if they actually knew something. They didn’t.
JFK’s statement that Biden could be seen as more of a threat to democracy than Trump is certainly significant. However, there are other aspects of the RFK, Jr. and Burnett interaction that are at least as important but have not been stressed. It is, however, necessary to describe the context in which this interaction took place first.
When Burnett began to push back on RFK, Jr’s claims about Biden’s threat to democracy, she made the false claim that Trump is the first president who has tried to overturn an election. RFK, Jr. fires back that this is not true. Indeed, a quick glance at Wikipedia, if Burnett can manage such an intellectual feat, lists the history of presidents attempts to overturn presidential elections. RFK, Jr’s example is Bush vs. Gore in 2000 where he believes that it was Bush who successfully overturned the election. The other side would maintain that Gore, at least, tried, ridiculously, to overturn the 2000 election. RFK, Jr. also claims that the election was “stolen” from Kerry in 2004. Some people will disagree. However, it is RFK, Jr’s reaction to these bitter disagreements that is emphasized here.
We shouldn’t make Pariah’s of those people. We should all get together, Republicans and Democrats and fix the election system so this cannot happen again. Las Vegas is built on machines that can count and can’t make mistakes. Can’t we make …
Burnett interrupts him again, that being her one skill, saying,
“I understand that one should make election most secure possible,” Burnett says while interrupting Kennedy again. “But when you raise that point aren’t you opening the door to … people saying … Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying, [that] the machines miscounted [in 2024].”
Well, one certainly cannot have “journalists” “opening the door” to asking questions when their job nowadays is to close the door on distressing questions, as Burnett is herself doing here, by Republicans.
RFK, Jr.’s response, in which he actually, unlike Burnett, remembers what he said, is priceless:
I don’t worry about how people [like Burnett] might misinterpret my words. I [unlike you] am careful about how I use language. What I am saying is that … we ought to have machines and we ought to have paper ballots and we ought to have a very low threshold to get a recount of the paper ballots. That’s just common sense. If we have that we won’t have Americans at people’s throats [over who won elections]. [Lets] have an election system that even the 10% of crazy people won’t question.
At this point Burnett interrupts RFK, Jr’s common-sense point to distract him about what exact percentage threshold, not essential to his point here, he thinks should trigger a recount. That is, since Kennedy understands that Republicans will always say this election was stolen and Democrats will always say that one was stolen, lets change the system in easy and “common sense” ways to make elections so secure with Las Vegas-quality machines and paper ballots so that we can get people off each other’s throats!
Burnett, tellingly, will have none of this, saying, “People are always going to question [elections] though, apparently not grasping that if one has Las Vegas quality machines and paper ballots that show clearly who voted for who, yes, one will have a few people who still disagree but they will mostly be the ones who fly in UFO’s and have regular chats with Elvis.
Summarizing this part of the argument, RFK, Jr. actually wants to solve the problem going forward. This goes right over Burnett’s head, perhaps because, despite what the media say, they like the bickering because that is how they capture eyeballs. Although what remains of our “news” media love to accuse Trump of being divisive, it is no wonder that nearly three-quarters of Americans blame the “news” media for dividing the nation and think it is “doing more harm than good.” Got that Burnett?
It is worth pointing out another false statement Burnett made during her propaganda session, that “Every single analysis has shown that that [voter fraud] did not happen [in 2020].” In fact, there have been many “analyses” that argue that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, including, “analyses” that allege that ballot machines might have malfunction in this case. Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, a security expert who has worked with some of the alphabet agencies, alleges precisely this and cites, among other things, J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist who has shown how easy it is to corrupt these machines. So, when Burnett says there are no alternative analysis that support Trump’s claim what she really means is that there are no alternative analyses that fit the DNC’s mandated narrative. Unfortunately, that is not journalism.
Finally, Chris Cuomo (from prominent Democrat family) who, in 2014 said, “we [the media] couldn’t have helped [Hillary] more,” wrongly claimed that RFK, Jr. walked back his remarks to Burnett. RFK, Jr. correctly responded: “No. What I said was that I can make this argument. I didn’t say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy.” It would be useful if “journalists,” even the ones from Yale, could learn to read.
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McDonough’s article reveals a dialogue where one party (Kennedy) is simply making observations about how to improve election practices and thereby reduce conflict over the results, but the other party (Burnett) has an agenda of making Trump and his followers look bad because of there unhappiness with election practices in 2020. Her inability to address the topic without a bias clearly lacks integrity and objectivity. To me, she is wretchedly partisan.