Robert Kennedy Jr. is a crackpot who is running for President as a spoiler. His name may draw the votes of some disappointed Democrats. His penchant for conspiracy theories may draw some disaffected Trump voters. He has no chance of winning but he has an opportunity to drain away 15% or so of the votes.

His choice of Nicole Shanahan as his running mate guarantees him a sound financial footing. She is the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and is probably a billionaire. She is a lawyer but has no experience in politics or government.

The New York Times reported that Robert Kennedy said that Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than is Trump. That’s because the Biden administration has tried to persuade social media companies to eliminate misinformation, such as the false claims about the dangers of vaccines. Since Kennedy is a vaccine critic, he sees this campaign to combat misinformation as a direct threat to freedom of speech, far more dangerous to democracy than attempting a coup.

Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew fresh scrutiny this week after he said in an interview on CNN, “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, to censor his opponent.” He repeated himself on Fox News on Tuesday, saying that a president like Mr. Biden was “a genuine threat to our democracy.”

The remarks by Mr. Kennedy, who carries the name but not the support of a storied Democratic family, were an escalation of his attacks on Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party — and he quickly backtracked, saying in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation on Tuesday night that he had been misunderstood. “What I said was that I could make this argument. I didn’t say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy. I did say that I don’t believe either of them are going to destroy democracy….”

But several scholars who have studied democratic governments and the ways they can backslide told The New York Times that it was nonsensical to suggest that social media moderation — which the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold as a legitimate goal of government — posed a greater threat than what Mr. Trump has done.

They pointed to his refusal to accept an election loss, his stoking of political violence, and his efforts to consolidate executive power and undermine public confidence in independent sources of information.

The two most fundamental tenets of democracy are that politicians “must always unambiguously accept the results of elections and must always unambiguously reject political violence,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who co-wrote the book “How Democracies Die.” “I don’t think you’ll find a democracy expert in the world who will claim that the mild efforts to regulate social media in the United States are somehow equivalent or worse than an effort to overturn an election or the encouragement of political violence.”

Kennedys family members have endorsed Biden. RFK Jr. disgraces his family name. A man with a tragic family history. Sad.