 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ruffled feathers this week when he told CNN's Aaron Burnett that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump. Let's watch. But do you really believe that when people talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses, do you really think that that is equal to Biden? Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy. And the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech so to censor his opponent. So I can say that because I just won a case in the federal court of appeals and now before the Supreme Court, it shows that he started censoring not just me, 37 hours after he took the other office, he was censoring me. No president in the country has ever done that. The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who used the power of his office to force the social media companies, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, to open a portal and give access to that portal to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the CISA, the NIH to censor his political critics. Representative Ro Khanna, meanwhile, was in for a surprise when speaking to his former school history teacher in a new feature for the Atlantic. He asked his teacher what he thought about former President Trump and this is what the Atlantic wrote happen next. Quote, perhaps Khanna was expecting his teacher to talk about the threat Trump poses to democracy. Instead, he revealed something Khanna didn't know. Longo, the teacher, voted twice for Trump. He praised Trump's business background and told us that he worries about urban crime. In 2017, his daughter and son were struck by a driver under the influence of heroin as they were standing on a sidewalk in New Jersey. Longo's son spent months in intensive care and his daughter, who was seven months pregnant, didn't survive. Under state law, prosecutors couldn't charge the driver with a double homicide because Longo's granddaughter wasn't born. The driver pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of vehicular homicide is due to be released from prison next year. The tragedy hardened Longo's views on crime and abortion. Quote, I could not vote for President Biden, he said. So that's a, I think, counter to what Ro Khanna expected from hearing that. You know, we're talking about issues that Joe Biden is confronting as he runs for reelection. Let's go back to the top. RFK Jr., I think surprising Aaron Burnett. I was just surprised that they actually played the entire clip because the mainstream media is now used to just cutting off RFK Jr. sometimes when he like veers off script or something. What did you make of his, what he said? I'm actually shocked that they had him on in the first place, let alone actually played the entirety of what he had to say. But he hits on something incredibly important, which is what I've been saying for years now. And it's that the Biden DOJ is perhaps the most politicized Department of Justice in modern history. You not only have the Biden administration being shot down by the courts for coordinating with big tech companies to censor Americans, but you also have the FBI targeting parents who protested school board meetings, people who attend traditional Catholic mass or Catholic churches. There was an FBI member that came out of the Richmond field office that revealed they wanted to basically infiltrate Catholic churches because they thought that they could be places where they were breeding domestic extremists, essentially. They orchestrated a kidnapping scheme against the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, had been arresting pro-life activists for allegedly violating the Faces Act. I mean, across the board, if you put all these things together, it becomes pretty obvious that they have been weaponizing the DOJ against their political opponents. And so I think RFK is 100% correct. Yeah, I've talked about that a lot. I've written about that for a reason, particularly the social media pressure campaign that was underway by the Biden White House, by the CDC, by the FBI, by DHS, and obviously it's being litigated at the Supreme Court right now. And I'm hopeful, although not particularly optimistic, unfortunately, that they're going to slap the administration down and say that they can't exercise this pressure. So I think RFK Jr. was speaking to something obviously that has impacted many Americans, CNN and MSNBC, so narrowly focused on the kind of rhetoric Trump has engaged in and the legal things he did well relating to the election that were very bad and that have gotten him in trouble. But that's not voters' only concern. Obviously, they're concerned about their rights being violated, they're concerned about the economy, they're concerned about other things. I think probably the case that RFK Jr. can make, because he's running against them both, because did Trump do enough, or frankly anything, to de-escalate or turn down these out-of-control administrative agencies that he's now running against? He's trying to convince voters that, well, we didn't get him last time, but this time I'm going to be really worked up about it. I don't know if that's a convincing sell. Because RFK has the advantage of going against Trump on COVID the way that Florida Governor Rod DeSantis really wanted to and Trump sort of neutered him in the womb, so to speak, before he was even able to announce his campaign. But RFK Jr. obviously is very big on sort of natural wellness. He's been speaking out about Big Pharma and a lot of the mistakes that were made during the pandemic in terms of the government restrictions. And Trump, of course, was the executive then. So, I mean, a lot of voters that do have sort of COVID amnesia at this point, but if it does come up during a campaign where the majority of Americans don't like either of the two major party candidates, that could be an issue that RFK could really capitalize on. So I heard a rumor that he had asked Tulsi Gabbard, but she turned him down to be VP for RFK Jr. And now we do have an actual VP for RFK Jr. It's Nicole Shanahan, who's a kind of Silicon Valley tech figure, very wealthy ex-wife of Sergei Brin, one of the Google co-founders, but basically a card-carrying Democrat until at least COVID. I think that's their major overlap in their opinions for an RFK Jr. It's definitely not, I would say it's not a selection designed to win like me over. Obviously, there was some speculation that he was going to maybe join with the Libertarian Party, or continuing this flirtatiousness. There were some elements of the Libertarian Party that wanted him to be the candidate. This pick has, I think, frustrated some of that, or even the voices within the Libertarian Party who were wanting him to be the candidate. You know, this is a play, or maybe it's just that... I mean, she's a nice person, I'm sure. It has a lot of money to help get him on the ballot or pursue the campaign, but I don't know that it speaks to issues that contrarian, libertarian, independent-minded people had. Is it a play for their votes? It doesn't seem like it to me. Yeah, if anything, I think it pushes back against the popular media narrative that RFK is a tool of the right and that he's sort of in the Joe Rogan right-wing extremist camp. That's how they've been trying to paint his candidacy. And then he picks, as you've said, a card-carrying liberal Democrat, although she does kind of have that crunchy mom thing that is becoming more popular in right-wing and libertarian circles. I saw, she was talking about IVF recently, and she said something to the effect that IVF was one of the lies sold to women by feminism. Basically, this idea that no matter how old you are, you can have a baby and you can, you know, have your career and put off motherhood until you're 40, 50 years old because now we have IVF and all of these other scientific advancements. Oh, what's so wrong with that? It doesn't really work that way, though. No, I mean, any fertility treatment declines in efficacy as you get older because your womb necessarily can't implant the embryos that they create as well as you get older and you have a higher risk pregnancy so you're more likely to suffer from maternal mortality than some of the other complications that might occur with a high risk pregnancy. Well, I think it should be an option obviously for people who want to pursue it. That's their right in my view. Let's end with that Rokana anecdote that he talked about, his teacher having suffered a kind of criminal issue that has swung him further to the right. That framing of that article is about how the representative wants to position himself as like the next leader of the Democratic Party. You know, does it show that these kinds of figures are, I mean, the distrust I think of, frankly both major parties on handling a lot of bread and butter issues like crime and the economy. I think voters are looking for some new voice to show them like common sense policies to the problems they're experiencing in major cities and in other places. I think the story that he told about what happened to his son and daughter is really instructive about some of the pitfalls of criminal justice reform because in reality when you're talking about things like bail reform or lessening sentences and things of that nature, when you're actually going through the criminal justice process, there's a lot of ways that prosecutors use the current laws in order to make sure people are held accountable. So I'll give you an example. I was recently up in Suffolk County with the DA there, Ray Tierney, he's a very tough on crime prosecutor, and he was explaining why the New York laws regarding the Second Look Act and things of that nature that basically retroactively reduced sentences for people who are convicted of the most serious crimes are quite problematic because in a lot of cases if you're trying to get a homicide charge, you're not going to go for first degree murder, you might go for second degree murder or manslaughter, you might even do a plea deal on manslaughter such that the person gets 25, 30 years because you're worried that you might not have quite enough evidence to secure a conviction and you don't want to risk this someone you think is a murderer getting off the hook. But now if you have, you get 10, 15 years for manslaughter under these criminal justice reform laws, you have people who pleaded guilty down from a murder charge who are getting out super, super early and then potentially going on to recommit crimes. So you're kind of taking away a tool from prosecutors that they use to make sure that they're holding accountable the most serious offenders. There's this against people who are accused of far less serious offenses. It cuts both ways. People who have 20 or 30 or more years who have been languishing in prisons since the 80s or 90s for nonviolent drug offenses that we were trying to let out because of the First Step Act. We don't have the resources, the financial resources to keep these people in prison. These people are frankly not a threat to society whatsoever. Bail reform, we can have a discussion about that because I'm worried about the repeated mentally ill people on the street or drug addicted people who are punching people in the face and how do we keep society safe from them while still having a criminal justice process that you don't go to prison until you have to be convicted of something and that's how you live in a democracy that extends rights to people and it won't always be pretty or perfect but we can't just willy-nilly lock people up for decades on some kind of pretext. No, so specifically with the Second Look Act that have been advanced in places like New York, California and Washington, D.C. is that they basically say if you commit a serious crime and you're tried in an adult court as a minor that if you serve 10, 15 years then you have to be released. A judge doesn't even get to look at the nature of your crime, whether or not you're truly sorry. They don't really take into account the wishes of the victims, families, etc. and so you're basically talking about murderers, rapists, like it's not people who are in there on drug charges. Like these are by nature violent crimes that Democrats are changing through legislation the amount of time that those people have to serve and I think there's an argument as well for saying that we shouldn't just consider the likeliness to re-offend but we should also consider that sometimes people deserve punishment because they've hurt somebody else and it's justice for that person's family or that person for them to serve a long prison sentence. Yeah, I guess it comes down to philosophically what you think the role of the justice system. For me, I wanted to just basically just to keep people safe. Frankly, if there are people in prison who are not a threat to society anymore and because they've been rehabilitated then I don't want them taking up taxpayer resources being locked away. Now these are not always easy things to determine. So I think judges and juries should have more of a role in determining sentences I would say. There's the mandatory minimum sentences I've not been in favor of because that's been a tool for prosecutors to basically you have to plead guilty because you can't risk actually confronting a jury because then if you're convicted they're obligated to give you a certain sentence and I think judges and juries are the people best positioned to determine. Right, they might say in this case what you did is so reprehensible you deserve like a longer sentence where they might say there's some ameliorating factor here that the law wouldn't necessarily recognize but we could give you a lesser sentence and like those are the people directly involved is the kind of paradigm I would like to see. My pushback on that would be that sort of goes back to what you were talking about where we don't want repeat offenders to be let back out on the street constantly and not actually held for things that they're doing because if you don't have a mandatory minimum in a lot of these cases you basically do end up with people just getting tickets and going right back out on the street. That's one of the big things that's been happening in New York City with the repeat shoplifters is in New York you can't even actually arrest someone for shoplifting. You just have to give them a ticket to appear and then of course they either don't show up or whatever. They arrest the people who try to stop the shops first. Yeah, exactly, yeah. All right, well tell us what you think about this. Let us know in the comments. We'll be back with more content in just a minute.