That a 69-year-old rookie politician who can hardly speak above a whisper is polling as high as 21% against his party’s incumbent president is testament to the remarkable weakness of said incumbent. That the Democrats and their media trucklings are also feverishly committed to censoring the upstart politician is even more so.

During a weekend interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ABC News censored his views on COVID-19 vaccines to, ostensibly, protect viewers from being exposed to his “false claims.”

During the network’s antagonistic 14-minute session with Kennedy, interviewer Linsey Davis “grilled the candidate on not just his vaccine beliefs, but also his willingness to take on President Biden as the Democratic nominee, his criticism of government agencies, and his appearances on conservative media shows.”

Heaven forbid that a Democrat appears on the most highly rated cable news network in the nation. But Kennedy’s thoughts on vaccines were apparently too much for ABC viewers’ impressionable ears: “RFK Jr. is one of the biggest voices pushing anti-vaccine rhetoric,” Davis said, “regularly distributing misinformation and disinformation about vaccines, which scientific and medical experts overwhelmingly say are safe and effective based on rigorous scientific studies.”

If only the networks were as committed to ferreting out the Democrats’ far more consequential disinformation campaigns, Joe Biden probably wouldn’t be president, and RFK Jr. certainly wouldn’t be a candidate.

As National Review’s Noah Rothman notes: “He was an avid proponent of former British doctor Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 study that purported to establish a causal link between the ubiquitous measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. More than a decade’s worth of cohort and case-control studies refuted Wakefield’s findings, but RFK Jr. remained unmoved. He persisted in his claims that not only are vaccines a ticking time-bomb coursing through the veins of their unwitting adopters, they are also the vehicles through which elites introduce an ‘injectable chip’ or ‘subdermal biometric tattoos’ into their subjects.”

We aren’t inclined to trust our government farther than we can throw it these days — and for good reason — but we tend to draw the line well north of unwittingly injected chips and subdermal biometric tattoos.

In case anyone thinks that only Kennedy’s views on vaccines are — shall we say — novel, Rothman rattles off an incomplete litany of the many conspiracy theories the Kennedy scion has promoted at one time or another:

Kennedy has promoted the view that the Covid vaccines were concocted only to enrich the medical establishment, that 5G cell towers are designed to “control our behavior,” and that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is engaged in an effort to “genetically modify” humanity. He’s called for the imprisonment of the “treasonous” Koch brothers “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He’s said that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.” He once called for jailing skeptics of the climate-change consensus, thereafter moderating merely to embrace the forced liquidation of assets owned by America’s “soulless, nationless oil companies.” He has advocated annulling the charters of conservative and libertarian advocacy groups that take advantage of their First Amendment rights in ways he dislikes. He has even accused the GOP of engaging in “a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election” in 2004.

Yikes — he’s even an election denier.

These sorts of stances put the Democrats in a bit of a bind when it comes to being The Party of Science™, no?

Still, the larger point isn’t the veracity of Kennedy’s views — it’s the unwillingness of our mainstream media to trust the American people to assess those views for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Auburn men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl made precisely this point about ABC’s censorship of the Kennedy interview.

“How is this Ok?” Pearl tweeted. “How can the media simply edit or censor what a candidate has said about a topic, in this case COVID, because ABC says that it’s dangerous or misinformation? Isn’t it our job to hear a candidate and determine that for ourselves?”

It should be our job in a free society, but our mainstream media nannies don’t trust us to do it — and that bodes ill for a healthy republic. And it shouldn’t fall to a college basketball coach to point it out.

RFK obviously differs from the statist Biden on vaccines and on the broader issue of civil liberties, but also on corporatism, censorship, government corruption, war policy, and “transgender” men playing women’s sports.

These views — all of them — should have an airing in the marketplace of ideas. They shouldn’t be silenced by an oppressive and condescending media.