RFK Jr.'s Congressional testimony was a tour de force
Despite their best efforts to defame him, Kennedy outshone House Democrats
There are times when people get so caught up in a tactically driven narrative that they can’t perceive when it’s led them into blatant hypocrisy that proves the counter-narrative beyond a doubt. That happened yesterday when Democrats tried (and failed) to block Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s testimony in a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.
Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie pointed out the astonishing irony and cognitive dissonance on the part of Democrats: denying that government censorship was occurring while frantically trying to silence one of the Biden regime’s most eloquent critics through contrived charges of bigotry and similar attempts at character assassination.
Firebrand Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had led the effort, issuing a letter signed by 102 House Democrats to the Republican leadership requesting that they “rescind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invitation to testify”. They disingenuously claimed he harbored antisemitic and anti-Asian views due to his recent comments on a 2020 NIH-funded Cleveland Clinic study that found “unique genetic susceptibility” to Covid-19 in certain populations.
On July 15, the New York Post had released a video of a conversation in which Kennedy said Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people and that the most immune were Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews. After the backlash that followed, RFK tweeted that he had “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews”. He said the context was a discussion about U.S. and other governments’ alleged attempts at developing ethnically targeted bioweapons, a claim some have called “science fiction”. Kennedy said he was pointing out that the Cleveland Clinic study shows Covid-19 could serve as a sort of proof of concept for such weapons.
The Cleveland Clinic study did in fact find that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews had a particularly low prevalence of a set of DNA variants in the ACE2 receptor gene (2-10% and 0%, respectively) that could make them less susceptible to Covid, while those cited as having the highest prevalence of such variants, and thus theoretically the highest susceptibility to Covid, were African/African-American and Non-Finnish European populations (39% and 54%).
Regardless of what one thinks of Kennedy’s views or speculations, on this topic or any other, no one who’s done a basic level of research on him as an activist, candidate, or person could legitimately think he was antisemitic or racist in any way. He’s almost pathologically pro-Israel, often minimizing the abuses and excesses of the State of Israel and harping on his alignment with its perceived interests. His politics align almost perfectly with those of his assassinated father and uncle, both of whom (especially his father) embodied the 1960s liberal ethos of inclusivity, equity, and empathy in the public arena. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” Kennedy said. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who signed this letter who believes I’m antisemitic.”
But in this age of “gotcha” politics in which a comment taken out of context — a poor choice of words — is by far the weapon of choice to discredit, disgrace, and de-platform anyone whose views are unwelcome to the prevailing regime, the truth hardly stands a chance against the propaganda narrative. The quote often (mis-)attributed to Mark Twain is apt: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on”.
Wasserman Schultz, perhaps most famous for losing her job as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee when it was revealed she rigged the 2016 Democratic Primary process to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, wasted no time wielding the weapon of character assassination. Repeating claims from the letter she had orchestrated, she attempted to move the committee to executive session to hide it from the public and shut Kennedy down when he attempted to respond to her slander by explaining the context of his remarks and the study.
It’s to their great credit that the Republicans held their ground on RFK’s invitation. Branding someone antisemitic is one of the most radioactive things you can do to a person in polite society, or, for that matter, in DC, so their fortitude was admirable. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the committee chairman Jim Jordan and RFK’s campaign manager Dennis Kucinich, a former longtime liberal Democratic congressman, have long been friends. Kennedy used that as an example of how two people with vastly different political views could still have that kind of warm and respectful relationship. Perhaps they also knew enough about RFK to be confident he would dismantle any such nonsense.
And dismantle he did. Kennedy explained that in taking orders from federal government agencies to censor or deplatform people like him, social media companies had to come up with a new term: malinformation. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” refer to information that (ideally) is known to be false. The terms differ only in the intent behind the communication.
“Malinformation”, Kennedy said, had a different meaning entirely. It was a term “coined to define information that the social media companies understood to be true but that the White House and other agencies wanted to be censored.” This included findings of peer-reviewed studies and information from government databases that undermined the pronouncements of public health agencies and the claims of pharmaceutical companies during Covid. And it wasn’t just the Biden Administration that was doing the censoring. Trump’s White House had done the same, he pointed out. “There’s never been a time in history when we look back and the guys who were censoring people were the good guys.”
With no time to respond to a litany of ad hoc smears rattled off by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett, Kennedy said that all of them were inaccurate and that such defamations were meant to “prevent people from listening to the real things that I’m saying.” He pointed out that not only his children but he himself was fully compliant with the federal vaccine schedule, except for the Covid vaccine. He claimed he’s not anti-vax and that vaccines are not even one of the primary issues on which he’s running.
The only thing he’s asked for with respect to vaccines, he said, is that they be tested with the same rigor as other medications. He claimed that through FOIA litigation against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) he confirmed that of the 72 childhood vaccine doses currently recommended (for all intents and purposes, mandated), none of them had undergone pre-licensing safety trials that tested them against inert placebos, the gold standard of safety testing. Instead, all trials were against other pharmaceutical products previously deemed to be safe and effective, many of which have their own alleged safety issues.
As RFK has pointed out before, when you test candidate vaccines only against other vaccines with questionable safety and efficacy profiles of their own, you create the perfect conditions to camouflage safety issues in potentially very profitable, and patentable, new vaccines. In contrast to non-vaccine pharmaceuticals, the incentive to do so is amplified with vaccines (and mRNA therapies defined as vaccines) because their manufacturers are shielded from liability by law if their products kill people.
"Trusting the experts is not a function of science. It is not a function of democracy. It is a function of religion and totalitarianism, and it does not make for a healthier population."
But Kennedy did more than just dismantle the Democrats’ paper-tiger smears. He did what statesmen do: he elevated the discourse and captured the essence of the moment at hand, and the possibilities for rising to the occasion in the moment.
“The First Amendment was not written for easy speech; it was written for the speech that nobody likes you for,” he pointed out. His primary concern, he said, was “this toxic polarization that is destroying our country today”, more dangerous than at any time since the Civil War. Asking rhetorically, “how do we deal with that?”, his solution was as clear as it was enlightened, and he addressed it to the sullen fellow Democrats arrayed before him:
“Every Democrat on this committee believes we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem. We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity to this chamber and the rest of America. But it has to start here.”
Recalling his late uncle, the legendary Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, RFK pointed out that more legislation was attached to his uncle’s name than almost any other person in Congress precisely because he reached across the aisle to so many whose views differed from his own, sometimes profoundly. Having been an environmentalist from a young age, RFK recalled how put off he had been that his Uncle Ted once brought former Senator Orrin Hatch to the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts to collaborate on legislation. RFK considered Hatch to be no friend to the environmental cause.
This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to vilify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion, and, above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times. And that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.
This statement was followed by applause from the gallery, to the clear irritation of the Democratic committee members whose job it was to take out the opposition’s witnesses by all rhetorical means. Their fear of Kennedy’s knowledge and skill was such that they had almost unanimously denied him the opportunity to respond to their accusations when they held the floor.
Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr.’s greatest weakness is not his views on vaccines. Following years of Covid lies, many people are at least receptive to a skeptical point of view on that topic. When people take the time to listen to him or to read his excellent book “The Real Anthony Fauci” on America’s corrupt public health agencies and their capture by Big Pharma, they realize his knowledge, eloquence, and passion on the topic, gained from decades of litigating against federal agencies on both environmental and vaccine safety matters.
RFK’s greatest weakness is his voice. Stricken years ago with a condition known as “spasmodic dysphonia”, his wavering voice is gravelly and difficult to listen to, especially to those newly exposed to him. For those like me who have admired his work for years, it’s evident that the clarity of his speech has greatly improved in the last several years as he’s learned to deal with his condition.
But if one looks through the comments on any RFK-related post or article, among the many positive responses to his hopeful and inspiring message you’ll inevitably find a handful saying they simply can’t listen to the man. For these people, the condition is just too distracting. And that’s a shame. If we were still a serious country, we wouldn’t let so petty a distraction keep us from hearing what serious people have to say.
Still, for a man with such an impediment, who’s so vilified by the respectable establishment, to poll a consistent 15% in the primary race against the sitting president at this early stage, is remarkable.
It just may indicate that what he has to say is worth hearing.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.