A son from one of America's most famous political families, Kennedy is trying to get to the White House – and he may do that with or without the family's preferred Democratic Party. In fact, it was the Democrats who opposed Kennedy's appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The topic at hand was free speech as Republican chair Jim Jordan and the majority party alleges collusion between the biggest social media companies and the Democrats, and that it needs to stop.
Kennedy, no stranger to attention because of COVID-19 vaccine views, returned to the epicenter of free speech discussion last week at a Manhattan dinner party when – according to a New York Post report – he told guests there is reason to believe the virus was "ethnically targeted" to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
The Post story compared Kennedy's remarks to anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of COVID-19. This literature began to appear online amid the rise of the pandemic, according to The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry in 2021.
It's not the first time Kennedy has gotten crossways with Jewish groups. Early in 2022 he apologized for an Anne Frank reference in a speech delivered at an anti-vaccine rally in Washington, DC.
In that speech, Kennedy compared pandemic restrictions in America to Hitler's Germany and referenced Anne Frank, a Jewish teenage girl who kept a diary of her family's two-year stay in the attic of an Amsterdam home during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.
Rep. Stacey Plaskett, the ranking Democrat on the committee, questioned why Chairman Jordan would give Kennedy a platform. She called his comments "hateful, evidence-free rhetoric."
Kennedy fought back.
"I'm the only person who has publicly objected to the $2 billion payout that the Biden administration is now making to Iran, which is a genocidal program. I'm the only one who's objected to that," Kennedy claimed.
"I have fought more ferociously for Israel than anybody, but I am being censored here through this target, through smears, through misinterpretations of what I've said, through lies. This is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited and dispensed with after the [Joe] McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But those same weapons are now being deployed against me to silence me," he charged.
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Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) says House Democrats clearly were trying to censor one of their own party's presidential candidates in Thursday's congressional hearing. 
"We had the Democratic Party basically try to shut down debate and frankly exclude Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a hearing that was focused on the silencing of speech. You can't even really make it up," says Roy. "This is where we are, right? We've got Democrats who don't want to have any actual outright conversation about the things that we're facing as a society – including, in this case, Mr. Kennedy's perspectives on COVID vaccinations, as well as other issues. He laid out fairly clearly and distinctly that you've got them clamping down on speech." Roy says Democrats "just don't care" about free speech. "It's one thing for them not to like President Trump's policies – and it's one thing for them to think that he got certain things wrong, he should have acted differently or whatever," acknowledges the GOP lawmaker. "But they're literally trying to suppress information … that was critically important for voters to hear and that polling shows [potentially] would have changed the outcome of the [2020 presidential] election." Roy made his comments Thursday on Washington Watch with Tony Perkins. |
Viewpoint discrimination
According to the Democratic presidential hopeful, today's hearing wasn't the first time his speech has been squelched. He explained that YouTube cut the feed minutes into his speech to announce his candidacy two months ago. He charged the social media giant with pulling the plug because it disagreed with previously expressed views.
"I didn't talk about vaccines in that speech. I was talking about my campaign and things, the conversation we ought to be having with each other as Americans, but I was shut down. That's why the First Amendment is important … debate, congenial, respectful debate is the fertilizer, it's the water and sunlight for our democracy. We need to be talking to each other," he said.
Kennedy offered up his uncle, the late Senator Ted Kennedy, as an example of bipartisanship.
"My uncle, Edward Kennedy, has more legislation with his name on it than any senator in United States history. Why is that? Because he was able to reach across the aisle; because he didn't deal in insults; because he didn't try to censor people. He was effective because he understood that respect and kindness and compassion and empathy for other people is the only way that we have to restore the function in this chamber," Kennedy said.
In a rebuttal, Rep. Plaskett said social media companies are right to silence viewpoints they deem offensive – and that Thursday's hearing was nothing more than a political power play by Republicans.
"They want to bully the experts into abandoning their work on disinformation. They want to give expression to the most vile sorts of speech here in this committee room because it prepares the ground for their own conspiracy theories and pseudoscience," she stated.
"And they apparently don't care how many people are hurt or die as a consequence of their actions, either through lies about vaccines or threats to the safety of witnesses – because nothing, nothing is more important to them than power."
7/21/2023 - Sidebar added.
