HE’S NOT EXACTLY CORRECT, BUT HE’S NOT EXACTLY WRONG: CNN faceplanted themselves by assuming that RFK Jr. would agree with their supposition that Trump represents a greater “threat to democracy” than Biden. As The Good Professor pointed out here, RFK wasn’t buying it.

But history matters. RFK erred wildly in saying Biden was “the first and only president to censor political speech.” That’s just not so. I wouldn’t expect a dope from CNN to challenge him on this, but any of us who studied US history, let alone the First Amendment, know that President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law in 1798. According to the Bill of Rights Institute:

“Federalists enacted the Sedition Act of 1798 to silence the opposition of the partisan Jeffersonian-Republican press. Most newspapers were favorable to one of the parties, and although parties had emerged early in the decade, there was no idea in American politics at the time of a loyal and legitimate opposition. Members of both parties considered the other party to be enemies of the republic. The new law prohibited publishing or saying anything “false, scandalous, and malicious” against the federal government, the president, or Congress. Those convicted were fined up to $2,000 (an enormous amount in the 1790s) and imprisoned for up to two years. Congress passed the Sedition Act, once again along party lines, with Federalists supporting and Jeffersonian-Republicans opposed.”

Newspaper editors who did not toe the government line were imprisoned. Moreover, eerily predictive of the “threat to Democracy” line espoused by Adam Schiff (D-Crazyworld) and others, none other that Abraham Lincoln’s government ordered arrests of editors who were accused of “supporting” the Confederacy by publishing dissenting views:

“In New York and New Jersey, two grand juries drew up presentments against newspapers that had been critical of the Union effort, which one paper called the “unholy war.” One grand jury presented a list of newspapers that encouraged the rebels, explaining, “The Grand Jury are aware that free governments allow liberty of speech and of the press to their utmost limits, there is, nevertheless, a limit. If a person in a fortress or an army were to preach to the soldiers submission to the enemy, he would be treated as an offender. Would he be more culpable than the citizen who, in the midst of the most formidable conspiracy and rebellion, tells the conspirators and rebels that they are right, encourages them to persevere in resistance and condemns the effort of loyal citizens to overcome and punish them as an ‘unholy war’?”

So, to be clear, I agree with RFK that the Obama-Biden regime presents a far greater threat to democracy than we’ve seen in centuries, but I wish politicians did their homework. I suppose it’s asking too much that so-called “journalists” do the same.