Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. responded to multiple attacks from fellow Democrats during a House hearing Thursday, fervently denying claims of anti-Semitism and telling Fox News he feels like he is in an "upside-down world" as he watches his own party "twist" past remarks and try to censor him.
"All of those statements [accusing me of anti-Semitism] are taken out of context. And those statements themselves, I have literally and I said this under oath, and I've never made a single anti-Semitic statement in my life or racist statement in my life," he told anchor Martha MacCallum on "The Story."
"And these statements that are being twisted and distorted to make them seem like I said these controversial things are is simply another way that the DNC, etcetera, and its allies are using to silence me, to marginalize me to make me look crazy, to make me look like a bad person."
Kennedy, who is running for president against President Biden, was invited by Republicans to testify at a hearing at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. After his opening remarks, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., moved to take the hearing into executive session to discuss Kennedy’s alleged violation of a House rule aimed at banning testimony that defames or degrades others. Her motion was denied, but Kennedy – who has shocked the party by garnering around 20% support against Biden in recent polls – faced an intense grilling afterward.
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"I was read a series of these slanders without being allowed to reply to any of them," he said, adding that Republicans actually invited him in response to a now-administratively-stayed federal court decision involving the Biden administration and the states of Missouri and Louisiana on censorship.
"[Judge Terry Doughty] for the first time in history ordered the White House to stop, to actually cease all communications with the social media networks because they were manipulating information," he said. "The first person they silenced was me since he president, Biden, came to office."
Kennedy underlined that while Biden and his circle have censored him, Trump does not purportedly have a clean record on censorship either.
Kennedy's fiercest questioning Thursday came from Wasserman-Schultz,, Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett, and Virginia Rep. Gerald Connolly.
Early in the hearing, Plaskett said "hateful, abusive rhetoric does not need to be promoted in the halls of the People’s House," and suggested the GOP, by inviting Kennedy, "cosigned on idiotic, bigoted messaging."
An exchange between Plaskett and Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sparked laughter in the chamber when he remarked Plaskett was trying to censor a witness at a censorship hearing, when she wondered why Kennedy had been allotted 10 minutes for speak instead of the customary five minutes
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On "The Story," anchor Martha MacCallum cited the particularly combative back-and-forth between Kennedy and Wasserman-Schultz. The Florida lawmaker claimed Kennedy "floated a baseless conspiracy theory" that COVID-19 was an ethnically targeted contagion that provided notably low risk to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kennedy said Wasserman-Schultz' allegations were slanderous, as MacCallum noted that she did not allow the witness to fully respond. He said he was simply referencing a study from America's own government about susceptibility to the coronavirus for certain ethnic groups.
"Actually the study [I cited] don't say that it was suggested that it was deliberately manipulated. And I never suggested that it was deliberately manipulated. In fact, I said the opposite," Kennedy said.
"What the [NIH] study said is that certain races were more affected by COVID and other races. And there was a long list of the races that were minimally affected and those that were maximally affected. So I was not saying that this was something that had been deliberately done. I was just describing the results of this study."
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Later in the hearing, Rep. Daniel Goldman -- a Democrat from New York City who previously served as lead impeachment counsel under Rep. Adam Schiff during former President Donald Trump's impeachment -- asked Kennedy if he should be concerned about his "genetics, as an Ashkenazi Jewish person who contracted COVID in 2020."
Goldman said he was one of the earlier contractors of COVID, to which Kennedy said, "not at all" and that Goldman presented only a "truncated version" of a larger video clip in that regard.
Other Democrats criticized Kennedy during the hearing, including Connolly, who lamented that Kennedy purportedly brought "shame on a storied name that I revere," and that he was invited for "cynical reasons to be used politically" by Republicans.
Kennedy remarked near the end of the hearing that "a government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity – it is the beginning of totalitarianism."
Kennedy said a major censorship tool today is the use of the term "malinformation" as a reason to censor – which he defined as factually-accurate information that is "inconvenient to or clashes with official orthodoxies."
Kennedy told MacCallum that his presidential campaign announcement speech earlier this year in Boston only lasted 5 minutes on YouTube before it was taken down.
"I never mentioned vaccines. I never mentioned anything. I was talking about Paul Revere," he said, leading the host to quip that Revere – who famously warned colonial Bay Staters of the impending British Army offensive – was probably "riding down the street with a lantern without a license."
