Let me say up front: While I am naturally disposed to think well of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his renegade, anti-corporate, anti-big pharma, pro-free speech primary campaign against President Joe Biden, I thought his secretly recorded comments at a New York City dinner last week were hideous. Awful. Scandalously stupid. Something only a total crackpot would dare say out loud without slam dunk evidence — and RFK Jr. is surely bright enough to understand the implications of all this.

I often applaud him for “going there” on several fronts because, on a crucial point, he couldn’t be more correct: If we are unwilling, or, God forbid, unable to discuss hard things in a public forum, our democracy is doomed. The path of corporate -sponsored censorship is the quickest path to Civil War II.

JFK'S GRANDSON SLAMS RFK JR'S WHITE HOUSE BID AND ENDORSES BIDEN

So even when he’s said things I’ve found difficult to reconcile with reality (which is less often than the legacy media would have me believe), I’ve been willing to chalk it up to overenthusiasm and brush it aside. I’m even willing to take him at his word over his horribly stupid comments about COVID-19 being engineered to spare Jews, though he’s on thin ice with me going forward. And he’s lucky for that — I can think of a few people I never spoke to again after trying to sell me on the idea that Jews were warned to stay out of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

The reason I’m willing to be generous to RFK Jr. in this regard is twofold. For one thing, running for president is exhausting, something only a maniac would attempt. It’s at least plausible that he misspoke after a long day and a cocktail. It’s plausible that he didn’t mean “engineered” as intentional but simply as the result of natural processes.

The second reason is that the very people with their knives out for RFK Jr. are some of the biggest and most despicable liars and manipulators who’ve ever walked the Earth. And because they run the legacy media establishment, we haven’t had the luxury of tuning them out despite the many times they’ve tried to sell us crazy, unsubstantiated, and brazenly manipulative disinformation. Unlike RFK Jr.’s comment, ugly as it was, their lies have done real, demonstrable damage to our democracy.

I’d encourage readers to remember that the very same legacy media talking heads or Democratic Party politicians now arguing for the cancelation of RFK Jr. are the same exact people who once told us that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian psyop; that former President Donald Trump was compromat because the Russian government had a video tape of him getting peed on by a prostitute; that any suggestion of COVID-19 being the product of a lab-leak in Wuhan, China, was a racist conspiracy theory; that we were in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” since, according to them, the mRNA vaccines stopped the spread of the virus; that masking as a public policy was effective and outweighed the long-term psychological effects on the public, and particularly on children; that ivermectin was a horse dewormer; that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; that Jussie Smollett was targeted and beaten out of racial animus by a pack of MAGA fanatics in downtown Chicago; and on and on and on, seemingly endlessly. The legacy media and the Democratic Party politicians they protect lie worse than Trump’s combover.

No, we’re not doing this "cancellation" thing anymore. The public is tired of hyperbolic complaints from hypocritical politicians. If it isn’t a thing for lying liberals, it isn’t a thing for anyone. If, for example, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) wasn’t canceled for attempting to smear Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary by emphasizing his Jewish heritage to Southern voters, she doesn’t get to cancel RFK Jr. over this.

I hope RFK Jr. has learned from the past week and proceeds forward without saying anything hideously stupid. Lord knows he’s got plenty of ammunition available on these people without having to dig too deep into the loony bin.

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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.