(NewsNation) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went off Thursday while testifying at the invitation of Republican leaders on the House Weaponization Committee on everything from censorship to his distrust of vaccines and his comments that COVID-19 may have been targeted to protect Chinese and certain types of Jewish people.
“I’ve never been antivaccine, but everyone in this room probably believes that I have been, because that’s the prevailing narrative,” Kennedy said. “Antisemitism, racism. These are the most appalling, disgusting pejoratives, and they’re applied to me to silence me. In my entire life, and while I’m under oath, in my entire life, I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic.”
I guess it depends how you define the words. He’s again claiming he’s somehow the victim of misinterpretation.
“I am being censored here through this target, through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association, which is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited, dispensed with after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But those same weapons are now being deployed against me to silence me,” Kennedy said.
Including now by his own family members, by the way.
RFK Jr. was the star witness at the hearing with Chairman Jim Jordan citing a 2021 email that came to light in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet where Kennedy suggested without evidence that baseball great Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.
The tweet was not taken down. A medical examiner confirmed Aaron’s death was unrelated to the vaccine.
But YouTube has taken down videos of RFK Jr. spreading what it called vaccine misinformation. Instagram in the past has banned him for similar reasons.
I think much of what he says is total nonsense or worse, but that still doesn’t mean he should be deplatformed.
Yet, Democrats attempted to move the hearing behind closed doors, precisely because they were concerned with giving him a platform, which seems ridiculous and counterproductive.
Look, the hearing actually did raise important questions about free speech, misinformation and government overreach. But instead of focusing on saying, ‘Look, I’ve said controversial things, I think I shouldn’t be deplatformed.’ Kennedy touched on that, but he devoted much of his comments to denying allegations that he’s antivax and antisemitic.
Now, RFK Jr. can argue all he wants that he’s not antisemitic. But what he can’t argue is that he has said many things in the past that are offensive, not just to Jewish people, but just generally offensive or ignorant. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., called him out on that.
“If this were a slip of the tongue, Mr. Kennedy, or a one-off comment, we would all move on, but there’s a deeply disturbing pattern. In 2015, you apologized to all those ‘whom I offended by my use of the word Holocaust to describe the autism epidemic.’ When discussing efforts to encourage others to get vaccinated for COVID-19, you said Nazis did that in the camps in World War II. They tested vaccines on gypsies and Jews. That was a quote. Like before, you apologized for invoking the Holocaust, saying ‘To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.’ These are not real statements of contrition or remorse. They are passive aggressive non-apologies that blame the listener for reacting to the lie you just read,” the congresswoman told Kennedy at the hearing.
Kennedy is on the defensive after the New York Post reported on comments that Kennedy made arguing that COVID-19 may have been genetically engineered to not affect certain Jewish or Chinese people.
“COVID-19, there’s an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Kennedy said. “And we don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted that (way) or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethic differential impact.”
He said it. Period. But when confronted again by Wasserman Schultz, rather than just own up to his idiotic comments and apologize, he seems to be denying that he even said it, claiming he was just citing a study. Of course, he has a history of misstating studies and often facts. In essence, what he was trying to say is what he said isn’t what he meant. OK, then just say that.
The fact remains RFK Jr. has repeatedly raised questions about vaccine safety and testing, even though all the credible scientific evidence doesn’t support it. And while he denies being antivax, he still manages to insert dubious claims about the COVID-19 vaccine and that widespread essentially doesn’t work.
“In fact, our country had … one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and the worst health outcomes,” Kennedy said. “We have 4.2% of the global population. We had 16% of the globe’s COVID deaths. Blacks in Haiti with a 1% vaccination rate were dying at a rate of 15 per million population.”
This the kind of game he plays, right? But the vast majority of scientists attribute the lower death rate in the populations RFK Jr. cited as largely the result of strict travel rules, younger populations less prone to known COVID complication risk factors including obesity, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, etc. Not the vaccines.
Yet again, I do think that Kennedy should be allowed to say those things?.
“Censorship is antithetical to our party. It was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson. As the chairman referred to, it is the basis for democracy,” Kennedy said.
On that, I agree with him. We live in divisive times. People say things we don’t agree with, that we strongly disagree with. And I believe they shouldn’t be deplatformed.
The way to combat it is by exposing it and talking about it. Let him say it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.