Republicans in Congress brought Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. up to Capitol Hill Thursday to help them amplify one of their core political messages: They have been victimized by a conspiracy between shadowy forces in the government and big tech.
Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, had long been a critic of vaccines before the COVID-19 vaccine was developed.
But during the coronavirus pandemic, Kennedy became a hero to those who questioned the vaccines. Kennedy’s vaccine-critical group, Children’s Health Defense, saw its revenue double in 2020 to nearly $7 million, and visits to its website went from less than 150,000 a month pre-pandemic to more than 4.5 million a month, according to an AP investigation.
He appeared Thursday before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Kennedy Lauded by Republicans
Kennedy was welcomed to the hearing with a lengthy, almost reverential, introduction by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, began the hearing by claiming that Kennedy had been censored by the Biden administration just a few days into President Biden’s term. He pointed to an email sent January 23, 2021 by a mid-level staffer in the Biden White House to a Twitter official.
Biden aide Clarke Humphrey wrote that she "wanted to flag" a tweet from Kennedy wrote the previous day about the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron at age 86 being "suspicious" because he died a few weeks after receiving the Moderna vaccine for COVID-19.
Aaron's death was ruled by the Fulton County Medical Examinations office to have been due to natural causes.
Humphrey asked Twitter to "get moving on the process for having [the tweet] removed ASAP."
Jordan, the Republican committee chair, used this as an example of “big government” colluding with “big tech” to silence views they don’t like.
Kennedy claimed he was "the first person, as the chairman pointed out, censored by the Biden administration."
Kennedy noted that he was also “censored by the Trump administration,” though he did not provide an example.
It took hours for any Democrat on the committee to point out that, in fact, Kennedy's tweet about Hank Aaron was never removed. It remains on Twitter to this day.
“How can the government actually censor anyone if there's enough freedom within these companies ... that they reject whatever request that government makes?” asked Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y.
Kennedy’s personal Instagram account was suspended in February 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” and the Facebook and Instagram pages for the Children’s Health Defense were suspended in August 2022. Both have since been restored.
But Kennedy told The New Yorker recently that his Instagram account was "taken away from me … at the behest of the White House."
Kennedy under fire for 'despicable' comments
Democrats, meanwhile, castigated Kennedy for comments he has made recently in which he said that the COVID-19 virus was "ethnically targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people" while sparing "Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."
"We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not," Kennedy said at a recent dinner in New York City, as first reported by the New York Post.
There is disagreement inside the U.S. government over whether the COVID-19 virus escaped from a Chinese lab due to an accident or whether it emerged on its own.
But Kennedy was speaking about work that he claimed was ongoing by both the U.S. and Chinese governments to develop “ethnic bioweapons.”
He later backtracked, saying, “I certainly don't believe that they were deliberately engineered.”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla., called Kennedy’s comments “despicable” and lambasted Jordan for giving Kennedy the platform of a congressional hearing to amplify his views. She made a motion to move the session into a private setting, which Republicans said was an attempt to “censor” Kennedy.
Wasserman-Schultz also mocked Kennedy’s past comparisons of government mandates meant to limit the spread of COVID-19 to the totalitarian controls of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
"Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did," Kennedy said last year. He later apologized for the remark.
Kennedy has also spread debunked claims about links between some childhood vaccines and autism.
“Was it as hard to wear a mask during COVID as it was hide under floorboards or false walls so you weren't murdered?” Wasserman-Schultz asked Kennedy.
Kennedy grew flustered under her questioning. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I never made that comparison.”
A Democratic lament
The most bracing critique of Kennedy came from Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va. Connolly told the environmental lawyer that he got into politics because of Kennedy’s father, who ran for president in 1968 and was assassinated June 6 of that year after a campaign speech in California.
“I revere your name,” Connolly told Kennedy. “I began my political interest with your father.”
But Connolly said the hearing made him “profoundly sad.”
“You are here for cynical reasons, to be used politically by that side of the aisle, to embarrass the current president of the United States,” Connolly said. “You’re an enabler in that effort today. And it brings shame on a storied name that I revere.”
