Former Missouri congressman Todd Akin believes he was unfairly targeted by the speech police when he said victims of "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant during his 2012 Senate bid.
Appearing on HuffPost Live on Friday, the Republican was asked to respond to George Will's incendiary column on sexual assault, which touched off a firestorm last month.
Akin, who is making the media rounds to promote his book Firing Back, suggested that criticism Will and himself had endured threatened to turn the country into a restrictive society like that of North Korea and Soviet Russia.
"Do you think when you go after people too severely for things they say, do you think eventually that's going to backfire and you're gonna get to get to a point where there is in North Korea or used to be in Russia where everybody's afraid to say anything because if you say the wrong thing they're going to come put you in jail?" Akin said.
"Do you think we're gonna get to a point where we start to censor free speech, we start getting rid of the First Amendment? Do you think we get to that point if people are too jerked up all the time anytime they say something that isn't right out of the statistical norm? Don't you think there's some room for people to have opinions that are just different?" he added.
Watch the whole segment above.
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