Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the warning at the first Turning Point USA conference following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kennedy knows about government censorship firsthand. During the Biden years, he became one of the most prominent Americans targeted by the federal government’s campaign to pressure technology companies over disfavored speech.
Now Kennedy has his hands on the machinery that was once pointed at him.
As President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy inherited a department deeply entangled in the censorship apparatus Media Research Center spent years exposing. Kennedy arrived with the power to do something about it. And he has.
MRC’s Free Speech Award should recognize someone who has used his position, influence, and authority to protect people’s right to speak. Kennedy has built exactly that record.
During the Biden administration, HHS agencies repeatedly became involved in efforts to suppress, flag, or discredit speech deemed objectionable by government officials. MRC documented 57 censorship initiatives connected to the Biden administration, including activity involving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of the Surgeon General, and other parts of HHS.
The machinery operated in several ways.
The National Library of Medicine spent $1.5 million on research involving algorithms designed to identify speakers based on their “intent and belief.” Federal money supported projects studying how so-called misinformation should be identified, corrected, or suppressed. HHS agencies communicated with major technology platforms about online speech, while contractors and outside organizations received taxpayer dollars for work connected to government efforts against alleged misinformation.
Government censorship in the modern era rarely requires a bureaucrat standing at a podium ordering a citizen to shut up. Money moves through grants. Pressure moves through bureaucracies. Academic researchers and contractors provide intellectual and technical cover. Technology companies carry out the suppression.
By the time Kennedy arrived at HHS, an entire infrastructure had been built. Almost immediately, Kennedy started tearing the censorship machine out by the roots.
One of Kennedy’s most consequential moves has been targeting federal funding that sustained censorship-related programs. His department moved to end or block grants connected to efforts to study, identify, or counter alleged misinformation.
Among the projects affected were grants involving “Examining Misinformation Correction Strategies” at Indiana State University and research at Texas Woman’s University on “Mitigating the Spread of Misinformation and Disinformation About COVID-19.”
Academic language can make the projects sound harmless. The programs belonged to a much larger ecosystem in which federal agencies funded research, tools, and organizations devoted to identifying disfavored speech. Kennedy changed the incentive structure. Taxpayer dollars should never be used to build systems capable of targeting taxpayers for expressing politically inconvenient opinions.
Kennedy also redirected NIAID resources toward work with the Defense Department involving therapeutics and protective equipment for service members. HHS money belongs in legitimate public-health programs, not in an infrastructure designed to police speech.
Money matters. Personnel matters just as much.
Kennedy brought free-speech advocates into authority, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most prominent critics of government censorship during the COVID era. The appointment carried real consequences.
Enormous power had accumulated inside agencies operating with little political accountability. Cabinet secretaries frequently found themselves nominally in charge of bureaucracies whose permanent leadership pursued its own priorities.
Kennedy worked to change the balance. Several senior NIH and NIAID officials associated with the previous regime were removed, reassigned, or offered relocation. The group included senior officials who served under Anthony Fauci or within the leadership structure presiding over COVID-era censorship controversies.
Kennedy also pursued a broader restructuring of HHS, reducing the workforce and increasing political leadership authority over agencies that had become difficult to control. Kennedy knew the bureaucracy would not reform itself, so he changed the people running it.
In the resolution of the long-running litigation arising from Murthy v. Missouri, federal agencies agreed to restrictions governing communications with technology platforms over constitutionally protected speech.
The significance extends far beyond one lawsuit.
Government censorship in the digital age operates through pressure, access, grants, regulation, and leverage over private companies. The COVID era exposed how easily informal coercion becomes censorship. Protecting free speech requires changing incentives, removing machinery, and erecting barriers against future administrations tempted to treat inconvenient speech as a public emergency.
Kennedy has pursued all three.
During the 2024 campaign, Kennedy described the federal censorship operation as “an obscene orgy of federal censorship” and made an essential point: “The Framers didn’t write the First Amendment to protect convenient or desirable speech. They wrote it to protect the kind of speech that nobody wants to hear.”
CANCEL CULTURE COMES FOR HALLOWEEN
Free speech becomes most important when government officials believe a speaker is wrong or dangerous. Kennedy understood the principle before taking office, and once given power, he acted on it. He cut funding, changed personnel, restructured institutions, backed safeguards against government pressure on technology companies, and began dismantling the censorship system built inside his department.
Plenty of politicians know how to give a good speech about free speech. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has used power to defend it. For MRC, that record deserves recognition. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has earned the Free Speech Award.
David Bozell is president of the Media Research Center.