The familiar partisan script of congressional hearings was reversed Thursday as Republicans praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while his fellow Democrats called the presidential nominee a threat to society who didn’t deserve the platform Republicans gave him.
The hearing summed up Kennedy’s unusual campaign, which has been promoted by conservatives and condemned by Democrats as a cynical ploy to derail President Joe Biden’s reelection and promote conspiracy theories.
And it provided a microcosm of the largest partisan free speech debates, which played out in real time as Kennedy and his Republican allies accused Democrats of trying to censor him every time they objected to the content of his message.
«I’m being censored here,» Kennedy told lawmakers at one point during the nationally televised congressional hearing, after Democrats tried to force his testimony behind closed doors.
The Republicans invited Kennedy to appear before their new Federal Government Arms Subcommittee. They praised his career as an environmentalist and singled out Kennedy as a martyr to censorship by a so-called cabal of “big government, big tech, big media,” as the panel’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, put it.
Kennedy was very happy to play his part.
“I was the first person censored by the Biden administration,” Kennedy said, referring to a instagram ban for misinformation about the pandemic that he claimed was orchestrated by the White House.
Kennedy, who has long put forward conspiracy theories and dubious claims about everything from vaccines to Wifihas come under renewed criticism for recent comments suggesting that Covid may be an «ethnically targeted» bioweapon designed to save «Ashkenazi and Chinese Jews.»
The comments were widely condemned by Jewish groups, members of the Kennedy family and even Republicans such as Chairman Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who nonetheless allowed Kennedy’s testimony to go ahead.
Kennedy set aside his opening remarks prepared to defend himself, saying, «I never uttered a sentence that was racist or anti-Semitic.»
«After I announced my [campaign for the] presidency, it became more difficult for people to openly censure me. So now I’m subjected to a new form of censorship, which is called targeted propaganda, where people apply pejoratives like anti-vaccine… anti-Semitism, racism,» Kennedy continued. “These are the most hideous and disgusting pejoratives and they are applied to me to silence me.”
The Democrats played the role assigned to them by the Republican Party by almost immediately trying to limit Kennedy’s public testimony.
Initially, Kennedy was given 10 minutes to make his opening remarks despite witnesses usually only having 5 minutes, prompting the panel’s top Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, to demand that the extra time be removed from the clock.
“If you want to cut it down and censor it a bit more, you can,” Jordan replied.
Shortly after that, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, accused Kennedy of violating House rules on decorum after she said Democrats lied about him and pushed for the hearing to move to a closed-door, private executive session.
A party-line vote quickly dispatched that motion, but the Republicans got what they wanted from the trade.
“At the same time, they are denying that censorship is taking place and saying that more information needs to be censored,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. “This is a hearing on censure that began with an effort, a formal motion from across the aisle, to censure Mr. Kennedy. They don’t want me to talk.»
Wasserman Schultz, who is Jewish and represents a majority-Jewish congressional district, was not done.
He later accused Kennedy of flirting with anti-Semites. blood libel conspiracy theories and minimizing the persecution of Jews in history by repeatedly comparing the Holocaust to the alleged persecution of people who question Covid vaccines and social distancing.
“If this was a slip of the tongue or something one-off, we’d all move on. But this is a deeply disturbing pattern,” Wasserman Schultz said, rattling off at least a half dozen examples. “My own children have been targeted by anti-Semites online. You fan those flames.
Kennedy strongly denied making the comments Wasserman Schultz quoted, despite some of them, including his latest comments as reported by the New York Post – being captured on video. He accused Wasserman Schultz and his fellow Democrats of «slandering» me.
«Virtually all the statements you’ve made about me are false,» Kennedy said. «My views are constantly misrepresented.»
Other Republican witnesses included conservative journalists involved in publishing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which were initially blacked up by major social media platforms due to questions about the veracity and origins of the obscene content on the hard drive that was later confirmed to belong to the president’s son.
«Is a free country. You absolutely have the right to say what you believe. But you are not entitled to a platform,” Plaskett said in his opening remarks. [Republicans] it gave him a platform.”
“They have adhered to an idiotic and bigoted message,” the Democratic lawmaker said of Republican support for the Democratic presidential candidate. «They want to promote conspiracy theories because they think that’s the only way their candidate can win.»