In a hearing marred by contentious interruptions and attempts by House Democrats to remove him as a witness, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense (CHD) testified before a U.S. House hearing organized by Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The subcommittee, operating within the House Judiciary Committee, said today’s hearing was intended to “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans,” “Big Tech’scollusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech” and the ongoing Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleging government censorship.
Other witnesses who testified today included D. John Sauer, special assistant attorney general for Louisiana, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case, Breitbart journalist Emma-Jo Morris, who in 2020 first revealed the now-infamous “Hunter Biden laptop story,” and Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Government censorship and alleged First Amendment violations on the part of the federal government featured prominently in today’s hearing. “We need to be able to talk,” Kennedy told the committee. “And, the First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”
Morris testified about the threats to a free press, saying:
“What this relationship between the U.S,government officials and American corporations represent is, is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment, the right to think, write, read, say whatever we want, and how we respond will determine whether we see a free press as inalienable or as optional.”
In his testimony, Sower referred to the July 4 ruling by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, which barred the White House and federal agencies from censoring social media posts. He said:
“The government likes to claim that social media platforms acting on their own would apply their policies and censor all this content. … The Louisiana Court found that the platforms would not have suppressed this speech, but for the fact that the federal officials were pushing for it.”
Calling the scope and reach of the federal censorship efforts “staggering,” Sower added:
“Millions of social media posts and speakers [were censored] all across America. It affects virtually every American who reads, listens, engages, or posts on social media about great disputed political and social questions that federal censors have stuck their fingers into …. Federal officials’ censorship efforts are in full swing and they’re expanding to new frontiers.”
‘Attempt to censor a censorship hearing’
Efforts by Democrats to prevent Kennedy from testifying began earlier this week. On Monday, Reps. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Judy Chu (D-Calif.) sent a letter signed by 102 House Democrats to House Republican leadership, requesting they “rescind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invitation to testify.”
Kennedy, in response to the accusations levied against him, set aside his prepared testimony for the hearing. Referencing the letter, he told the committee, “The 102 people that signed this [is] itself evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”
Comparing the efforts to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, Kennedy said he is being censored “through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association,” adding that “While I’m under oath, in my entire life I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or anti-Semitic.”
Rep. Thomas Massey (R-Ky.), in an impromptu interview after the hearing, said:
“The irony and cognitive dissonance from the other side of the aisle, it’s deafening. You could cut it with a knife. They are at the same time denying that censorship is occurring, but suggesting that there’s more material that needs to be censored.”
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