OPINION:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump is a marvel to behold. It is astonishing that a prominent member of America’s quintessential Democratic family embraced the most conservative Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan.
If a majority of Mr. Kennedy’s roughly 6% of likely voters support Mr. Trump on Nov. 5, they could make up the numbers that he might need to edge out Vice President Kamala Harris in a photo finish.
But Mr. Kennedy should add value beyond Election Day. If reelected, Mr. Trump should ask him to chair a new commission to make free speech great again.
Mr. Kennedy and his commissioners should investigate federal assaults on the First Amendment, most notoriously Washington’s election interference campaign to censor news coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential campaign.
“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Monday. After the Oct. 14, 2020, New York Post exposed Hunter’s laptop and its evidence of the Bidens’ dodgy international deals, “we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
After conferring with Biden-Harris campaign aide Antony Blinken (now secretary of state), former acting CIA Director Michael Morell recruited 50 other former intelligence officers. They signed an open letter that dismissed the Post’s exclusive for containing “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Biden-Harris campaign allies and other deep state denizens used the former spies’ communique to dragoon Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants into censoring the Hunter story. In fact, pre-Elon Musk Twitter (now X) padlocked the Post’s account for 15 days.
Meanwhile, in his final debate against Mr. Trump that Oct. 22, then-candidate Joe Biden used the former spies’ bogus letter to denounce the Post’s true story as “a bunch of garbage.”
Mission accomplished. Millions of voters never learned about the Biden family corruption that haunted Hunter’s laptop. Within days, Mr. Biden had captured the Oval Office.
“In 2021,” Mr. Zuckerberg added, “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
The Biden-Harris Justice Department sicced the FBI on “domestic terrorists,” specifically parents who complained to school boards about critical race theory and transgender ideology. The administration proposed that a Disinformation Governance Board patrol the internet for undesirable “misinformation” and then deplatform and punish Biden-Harris’ detractors.
While public ridicule doomed the board, Biden-Harris reportedly still coerce tech giants to silence the administration’s critics. Biden-Harris’ FBI also spied on “violent extremists,” namely Catholics who preferred attending Latin Mass.
These unconstitutional policies also oppressed Mr. Kennedy. As the pandemic continued, his concerns about COVID-19 vaccines got buried.
“What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of the federal agencies,” Mr. Kennedy said on Aug. 23 in Phoenix as he suspended his campaign. “When a U.S. president colludes with, or outright coerces, media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression.”
As a victim of this censorship, Mr. Kennedy is ideally suited to investigate their war on the First Amendment. The Kennedy commission should identify every federal employee who perpetrated these unconstitutional outrages. Mr. Trump then should tell these totalitarians: “You’re fired!” The attorneys among them should be disbarred and their law licenses shredded. Those who violated federal law should be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned.
And on Day One, Mr. Trump should revoke the security clearances of those 51 lying former spies. This would signal that censorship is dead and free speech is alive and well.
What a beautiful, bipartisan victory this would be for America, courtesy of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican Donald Trump.
• Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
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