Thursday brought about another hearing on the weaponization of the federal government on Capitol Hill. In an ongoing affair as of this writing, Robert Kennedy Jr. is testifying before the select committee.
Kennedy has been the topic of recent controversy after he claimed that COVID-19 may have been bioengineered to be less harmful to those of Chinese and Jewish descent. That was immediately claimed to be an antisemitic comment, with even his own family denouncing him.
I’m not a fan of Kennedy (I think his record shows him to be a far-left hack who has whispered a few sweet nothings into conservative ears), but I think that charge is really unfair. I don’t believe he was trying to suggest Jews were somehow behind engineering COVID-19. He was citing a study, albeit he cited it incorrectly. Certainly, you can criticize him for that, but that doesn’t amount to antisemitism.
Regardless, in one of the most ironic moves I’ve ever seen occur in Congress, House Democrats voted to censor Kennedy in a hearing on government censorship. You quite literally can’t make this stuff up. Reality is too absurd.
Every Democrat on the committee voted to try to silence Kennedy for supposed antisemitism. They did so in a hearing in which he is testifying on the federal government’s attempts to censor him. Did no one think through the optics of that? Heck, they could have gaveled the hearing over at that point and the point would have been made without Kennedy uttering a word.
Democrats always struggle to win arguments on the merits. Their preferred tool of choice is to simply shut down their opposition. We saw that during the 2020 election with the Hunter Biden laptop story, where FBI agents, knowing the laptop was real, still prompted social media companies to treat it as Russian disinformation. There are many more examples, though.
In this case, it’s especially laughable that Democrats cited supposed antisemitism as the reason to censor Kennedy when just days prior they all refused to even directly condemn their own colleague for her anti-Semitic comments. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who leads the progressive caucus, ended up issuing a tepid apology after the amount of backlash she received. You’ll also forgive me for questioning Democrat sincerity on the issue when the party has spent years excusing the antisemitism of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
So yeah, Democrats can sit all the way down with their faux virtue signaling. Kennedy may have issues, but I have little reason to believe he’s bigoted against Jews. I have plenty of reasons to believe that actual members of the Democrat caucus in the House are anti-Semitic, though. Where’s the vote to bar Tlaib from speaking during hearings?
With all that said, I still can’t get over the fact that they actually voted to censor someone during a hearing on government censorship. It’s just so on-brand.