Democratic presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to Capitol Hill on Thursday and emphatically stated that he was neither anti-Semite nor racist, while fervently defending free speech and accusing the Biden administration and his political opponents of trying to silence him.
Mr Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who turned to anti-vaccine activism and traded conspiracy theories, referred to the storm that erupted after The New York Post published a video in which he told a private audience that Covid-19 is “disproportionately attacking certain races” and may have been “ethnically targeted” to harm white and black people more than Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
A scion of the Democratic political clan, Mr. Kennedy appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — a panel created by Republicans to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of federal law enforcement and national security agencies. He said he had “never been anti-vax” and had taken all recommended vaccines except the coronavirus vaccine.
Thursday’s hearing was devoted to allegations from Mr. Kennedy and Republicans that the Biden administration is trying to censor people of different views. It was rooted in a lawsuit filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana known as Missouri v. Biden, which accused the government of collaborating with social media companies to suppress free speech on Covid-19, elections and other matters.
The subcommittee chair, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, opened the hearing with a email that popped up in that case, in which a White House official asked Twitter to remove a tweet in which Mr. Kennedy suggested — without evidence — that baseball legend Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.
The tweet, which was not deleted, said Mr Aaron’s death was “part of a spate of suspicious deaths among the elderly” following vaccination. There was no such spate of suspicious deaths. Like much of Mr. Kennedy’s writing, his language was carefully worded; he did not explicitly link the vaccine to the deaths, but rather said the deaths occurred “closely after #COVID #vaccines were administered.”
Thursday’s session had all the makings of a spectacle in Washington. By the time Mr. Kennedy arrived, a long queue had formed outside the interrogation room in the Rayburn House office building. Kennedy supporters stood outside the building with a Kennedy 2024 banner and homemade posters. “Abolish the war,” read one.
Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about freedom of speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to stop the spread of untruths?
Democrats accused Republicans of giving Mr. Kennedy a forum for bigotry and pseudoscience. “Freedom of speech is not an absolute given,” said Virgin Islands Representative Stacey Plaskett, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. “That has been determined by the Supreme Court. And the freedom of speech of others that is allowed – hateful, abusive rhetoric – need not be promoted in the halls of the Volkshuis.
Even by Mr. Kennedy’s standards for stirring up controversy, his recent comments about Covid-19 have been shocking. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat who is Jewish, unsuccessfully tried Thursday to force the panel into a board meeting; she insisted that Mr. Kennedy had broken house rules by making “despicable anti-Semitic and anti-Asian remarks”. She also helped organize Democrats to sign a letter urging Republican leaders not to invite him to the hearing.
Mr. Kennedy waved the letter during his opening remarks. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” he said. “I don’t believe there is a single person who signed this letter who believes I am anti-Semitic.”
Mr. Kennedy has drawn supporters from the margins of both political parties. He has made common cause with Republicans and Trump supporters who accuse the federal government of colluding with social media companies to suppress conservative content.
Thursday’s hearing was billed as a session to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case, and Big Tech’s conspiracy with government agencies gone wrong to silence speech.” One of the attorneys involved in that case, D. John Sauer, also testified, as did Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Showing a flash of the old Kennedy style, Mr. Kennedy invoked his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a legislative giant who often worked across the aisle. He called for kindness and respect and recalled how his uncle Orrin G. Hatch, the Republican from Utah with whom he worked on important legislation, came to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.
And Mr. Kennedy was joined by a former congressman: Dennis J. Kucinich, who served in the House as a Democrat from Ohio and is Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager.
“We must take to the next level the Constitution of the United States, which was written for troubled times,” Mr. Kennedy stated at one point, “and that must be the main compass for all our activities.”
Amidst the vitriol, members of both parties converged around a lament from Virginia Democrat Representative Gerald E. Connolly.
“I’ve been in this Congress for 15 years and I never thought we’d descend into this level of Orwellian dystopia,” Connolly said.
Representatives Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Harriet M. Hageman, Republican of Wyoming, nodded and smiled. “I agree,” they said in unison.
