House Democrats attacked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief party rival to President Biden in the 2024 race, Thursday by accusing him of trading in antisemitic tropes and spurring doubts about vaccines within the Black community even though he vaccinated his own children.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, moved to shut down Mr. Kennedy’s testimony at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in which GOP lawmakers invited the presidential candidate and others to testify on censorship by Big Tech and government officials.
“Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made antisemitic and anti-Asian comments as recently as last week,” Mr. Schultz said, referring to when Mr. Kennedy suggested the coronavirus might have been targeted at White and Black people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
She said Mr. Kennedy’s testimony before the panel on the “weaponization of government” could violate a rule against defaming others in congressional testimony.
Republicans rejected the move, saying Democrats were exhibiting the type of behavior that the GOP was trying to expose through the hearing.
“Is it the custom of this committee to censor viewpoints that we disagree with from witnesses?” Rep. Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said.
Mr. Kennedy, 69, is running for president as a Democrat. While he is seen as little threat to Mr. Biden’s front-runner position, he is attracting double-digit support in some polling, even reaching over 20%, underscoring dissatisfaction among some Democrats with the incumbent.
During House testimony, Mr. Kennedy said working-class people can no longer afford to live in this country. Speaking to the point of the hearing, he claimed he was de-platformed during his campaign launch speech in Boston.
“I didn’t talk about vaccines in that speech. I didn’t talk about anything that [people viewed as] a verboten subject,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I was shut down.”
Mr. Kennedy, the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, referred to his famous family multiple times during his testimony and outlined a broad vision of restoring comity and bipartisanship in Washington.
“We have to stop trying to destroy each other,” he said.
Mr. Kennedy is known for his pro-environment work and has done work for Children’s Health Defense, often characterized as an anti-vaccine group.
He rose to new prominence during the COVID-19 emergency by suggesting the vaccine wasn’t rigorously tested. Then came his virus comment this week.
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” Mr. Kennedy said at a dinner event in New York. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”
The incident sparked condemnation, including from within Mr. Kennedy’s family.
“I STRONGLY condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about COVID being engineered for ethnic targeting,” his sister Kerry Kennedy tweeted.
Democrats issued a letter before Thursday’s hearing urging Republicans to disinvite Mr. Kennedy from the hearing.
Pushing back at committee Democrats, Mr. Kennedy testified he did not say anything negative about Jewish people in his dinner remarks.
“If you think I said something antisemitic, let’s talk about the details,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Mr. Kennedy said he was referring to a scientific paper that looked at genetic susceptibility to COVID-19 and found distinctions between groups.
“Allow me to answer my question,” Mr. Kennedy told Ms. Schultz during one period of intense questioning. “You are slandering me incorrectly.”
Ms. Schultz objected, saying Mr. Kennedy did not point to a study in his dinner remarks, leaving a sweeping impression about demographic groups and bio-engineering. She also criticized him for past remarks that she said tied coronavirus shutdowns with Nazi Germany.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” Mr. Kennedy said at the time, though he later apologized.
Mr. Kennedy on Thursday bristled at the idea he is anti-vaccine, saying he is fully compliant with the vaccine schedule except for COVID-19 shots and that he vaccinated his own children.
Stacey Plaskett, a nonvoting House member from the Virgin Islands, said Mr. Kennedy is stirring doubts among Black Americans about the safety of the vaccines. She cited a Kennedy-linked film that highlighted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an infamous 20th-century experiment in which Black men were not informed about the scope of the study and left untreated.
Republicans invited Mr. Kennedy as part of a broader look at the nexus between government officials and online censorship.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, pointed to Biden administration officials who tried to censor a tweet about baseball star Hank Aaron’s death in 2021 and the fact he had recently received the COVID-19 vaccine.
Mr. Jordan said it was an instance of the administration working with Twitter to try and suppress tweets that included simple facts.
Democrats fumed over the session, saying people are free to say what they want but shouldn’t promote hateful rhetoric or conspiracy theories. They also said the GOP majority’s decision to invite Mr. Kennedy was conspicuous.
“Any attack on Joe Biden to get Donald Trump back in the White House is what they need to do,” Ms. Plaskett said.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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