The familiar partisan script of congressional hearings was inverted Thursday when Republicans praised presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while his fellow Democrats called him a menace to society who did not deserve the platform Republicans gave him.
The hearing encapsulated Kennedy’s unusual campaign, which has been promoted by conservatives and condemned by Democrats as a cynical ploy to derail President Joe Biden's re-election and promote conspiracy theories.
And it provided a microcosm of the larger partisan debates over free speech, which played out in real time as Kennedy and his GOP allies accused Democrats of trying to censor him whenever they objected to the content of his message.
“I am being censored here,” Kennedy told lawmakers during the nationally televised hearing after Democrats tried to force his testimony behind closed doors.
Republicans invited Kennedy to appear before their new Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. They praised his career as an environmentalist and held him up as a martyr of censorship by an alleged cabal of “big government, big tech and big media,” as the panel’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a top ally of former President Donald Trump, put it.
Kennedy was only too happy to play his part.
“I was the first person censored by the Biden administration,” Kennedy said, referring to a ban from Instagram for misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic that he insists was orchestrated by the White House.
Kennedy, who has long advanced conspiracy theories and dubious claims about vaccines to Wi-Fi, has come under renewed fire for recent comments suggesting Covid may be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
The comments were widely condemned by Jewish groups, Kennedy family members and even Republicans like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, who nonetheless allowed Kennedy’s testimony to go forward.
Kennedy set aside his prepared opening remarks to defend himself, saying, “I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic.
“After I announced my [campaign for the] presidency, it became more difficult for people to censor me outright. So now I’m subject to a new form of censorship, which is called targeted propaganda, where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax’ ... ‘antisemitism,’ ‘racism,’" he continued. “These are the most appalling, disgusting pejoratives, and they’re applied to me to silence me.”
Democrats played the role the GOP laid out for them by almost immediately trying to limit Kennedy’s public testimony.
Kennedy was initially given 10 minutes to make his opening remarks even though witnesses usually get only five minutes, prompting the top Democrat on the panel, Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, to demand the extra time be removed from the clock.
“If you want to cut him off and censor him some more, you’re welcome to,” Jordan replied.
Shortly after that, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, accused Kennedy of violating House rules on decorum after he said Democrats lied about him and pushed for the hearing to be moved to a private executive session behind closed doors.
A party-line vote quickly dispatched that motion, but Republicans got what they wanted from the exchange.
“They are at the same time denying that censorship is occurring while saying that more information needs to be censored,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. “This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort — a formal motion from the other side of the aisle — to censor Mr. Kennedy. They do not want him to speak.”
Wasserman Schultz, who is Jewish and represents a heavily Jewish congressional district, was not done.
She later accused Kennedy of flirting with antisemitic “blood libel” conspiracy theories and downplaying the persecution of Jews in history by repeatedly comparing the Holocaust to the alleged persecution of people who question vaccines and Covid social distancing.
“If this were a slip of the tongue or a one-off, we would all move on. But this is a deeply disturbing pattern,” Wasserman Schultz said, reeling off at least a half-dozen examples. “My own children have been the target of antisemites online. You fan those flames.”
Kennedy strongly denied having made the comments Wasserman Schultz cited, even though some of them — including his latest comments as reported by the New York Post — were captured on video. He accused Wasserman Schultz and their fellow Democrats of “slandering me.”
"Virtually every statement you made about me is 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 hidden by major social media platforms over questions about the veracity and origins of the salacious contents of the hard drive later confirmed to belong to the president’s son.
"It's a free country. You absolutely have the right to say what you believe. But you do not have the right to a platform,” Plaskett said in her opening remarks. “Even given what they know about Mr. Kennedy’s hateful, evidence-free rhetoric ... [Republicans] gave him a platform.”
“They have co-signed on to an idiotic, bigoted messaging,” she said of Republicans’ embrace of the Democratic presidential candidate. “They want to promote conspiracy theories because they think that’s the only way their candidate can win.”
