Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasted media institutions in the United States, who he said have abandoned their role of challenging power to shill for Democrats and suppress political opposition. 

Kennedy, a Democrat turned independent, commented on the state of American media during remarks in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday, where he ultimately announced the suspension —  not the end — of his presidential campaign, urging blue state residents to vote for him while throwing his support behind former President Donald Trump in battleground states. 

“How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?” he said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris’s ongoing practice of hiding from the media. 

“We know the answers. They did it by weaponizing the government agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising American voters,” Kennedy continued. “What most alarms me is not how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship and media control and a weaponization of the federal agencies.”

Kennedy added, “When a U.S. president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, and that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.”

He noted:  

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88 percent landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin already controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.

But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic party organs. Over the course of more than a year and a campaign where my poll numbers have reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC aligned-mainstream media networks maintain a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me.

Kennedy pointed out that he has only been asked to sit for a few interviews with corporate media — all while the left-leaning press ran hit pieces on him and while those same networks worked with the DNC to keep him from joining the debate stage.

“Some of those networks are in this room right now, and I’ll just take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that your institutions have abdicated this really sacred responsibility, the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and to challenge, always, the party in power,” he said. 

“Instead of maintaining that posture of fierce skepticism of authority, your institutions have made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it,” he said. 

Kennedy later added that while the mainstream media was “once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles,” it “has joined this systemic attack on democracy.”

“The media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combating misinformation,” he said. “But governments and oppressors don’t censor lies. They don’t fear lies. They fear the truth — and that’s what they censor.” 

WATCH: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Rips Democrats, Media, Kamala Harris