Democrats try to censor, remove RFK Jr. at hearing on censorship

House Democrats on Thursday tried unsuccessfully to remove Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from a hearing on federal government censorship, after claiming he was in violation of House rules aimed at preventing defamatory or degrading testimony.

That effort and others by Democrats to silence him at the hearing prompted Kennedy to say, "This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing."

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. But after Kennedy's 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.

Wasserman Schultz said the witness made "despicable" antisemitic and anti-Asian comments in the last few days, referring to his comment that COVID may have been "ethnically targeted" because those who are most immune to COVID appear to be Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy later said he was not accusing anyone of deliberately engineering COVID to spare certain ethnic populations.