(Article by Peter Barry Chowka republished from AmericanThinker.com)
But in terms of a one-day nuclear shutdown of an American citizen and his rights to free speech, I have never seen anything on the level of what was meted out to RFK Jr. yesterday — by both Democrats in Congress and the mainstream media, with the exception of FOX News. In fact, you'd have to go back to the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 to find such enmity in the halls of Congress. Even the bipartisan Watergate hearings of 1973 were tame in comparison.
Even before the hearing started yesterday, on Monday, as reported by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. in his excellent article on the hearing at The Defender, 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 the House Republican leadership, requesting they "rescind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s invitation to testify."
Once the hearing began at 9:30 A.M. EDT yesterday, Wasserman Shultz and several other Democrat committee members continued to demand Kennedy's ouster and, when that tactic failed, they fell back on a coordinated strategy to demean and libel him without according him the courtesy or right to answer or to respond to their attacks.
When questioned by Republican members, Kennedy was finally allotted some time to make his case. The best account of the hearing itself is the aforementioned article by Nevrardakis at The Defender, the newsletter of Children's Health Defense, the tax-exempt public and health policy organization that Kennedy founded and of which he is currently the chairman on leave.
Several hours after the end of Thursday's hearing, Kennedy appeared in-studio in Washington, D.C. for a live broadcast interview with Martha MacCallum on The Story (3 P.M. EDT; video here). Since FOX News gave him the opportunity to answer his Democrat critics who had earlier done their best to silence him, I decided to share here excerpts of his conversation with MacCallum as an addendum to the hearing itself.
By the way, the entire video of the four-hour hearing with Kennedy and several other witnesses can be viewed at YouTube. If nothing else, it's great television. C-SPAN has a page devoted to Kennedy's testimony with the complete video and selected excerpts.
Transcript of RFK Jr. on The Story provided by FOX News Media Relations.
MARTHA MACCALLUM, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: So, it was very interesting watching this unfold this morning. You're running as a Democrat. The Democrats came after you hard. The Republicans were sticking up for your right to say what you want to say.
Do you feel like you're, as a Kennedy, sort of in upside-down world when you're sitting there this morning?
I want to say something, because they — the charges that I made these statements that were antisemitic, all of those statements are taken out of context. And those statements themselves — I have — I have literally — and I said this under oath today. I have never made a single antisemitic statement in my life or racist statement in my life.
And the statements that are being twisted and distorted to make them seem like I said these controversial things are — is simply another way that I'm being — that the DNC, et cetera, and its allies are using to silence me, to marginalize me, to make me look crazy, to make me look like a bad person.
I have been stronger — my support on Israel has been stronger than any Democrat in that chamber. I'm the only one that's spoken out against the $2 billion transfer that President Biden has made to Iran, which is going to be used for genocidal purposes, to develop nuclear weapons. And nobody else has dared to stand up against that.
I was not allowed to talk. I was not allowed to defend myself. I was read a series of these slanders without being allowed to reply to any of them. So, I was invited to speak there because a recent federal court decision, which is a monumental decision, Judged Doughty in a federal court in Louisiana, which 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.
What the 155-page decision records is this unprecedented effort by the White House to silence its political opponents. The first person they silenced was me. So, President Biden came to office. And, by the way, President Trump had censored me too, not for any misinformation, but for what they called malinformation.
That means information that, while true, is inconvenient to the White House and inconvenient to or clashes with official orthodoxies. President Biden came into office on January 21, 2021. Two days later, the White House ordered Instagram and Facebook to censor me, and my — my entire account was taken down three weeks later.
Oh, and the censorship continues today. When I made my campaign — my announcement speech on April 19 in Boston, YouTube took it down after five minutes. So I was not — I never mentioned vaccines. I never mentioned anything.
I was talking about Paul Revere.
At this point, a brief moment of humor was called for before the conversation returned to the more serious subjects at hand.
MACCALLUM: Well, it's highly controversial, Paul Revere.
KENNEDY: I don't know what part...
MACCALLUM: Riding down the street with a lantern without a license, apparently.
KENNEDY: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
MACCALLUM: Here's part of that exchange with you and Debbie Wasserman Schultz earlier today, if people missed it. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KENNEDY: I was describing an NIH-funded study.
REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D-FL): No, no, no, you didn't cite any...
KENNEDY: I was — I was describing an NIH-funded study by Cleveland Clinic scientists.
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time.
You did not reference...
KENNEDY: And you...
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Reclaiming my time.
KENNEDY: Published in USC Medical, which is one of...
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Mr. Chairman, the time is mine. The time is mine. I'm reclaiming it.
Please ask the witness to stop talking.
KENNEDY: You asked me...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MACCALLUM: All right, she wouldn't let you do it, so I want to let you do it right here.
This recording of a video from a dinner that you had with some journalists from The New York Post, in it, you talked about — I'm going to let you put it in your own words, because, in the video, you say that — you do say studies and reports indicate that there may have been some genetic direction for this virus, if it was manipulated.
Explain.
KENNEDY: Yes, I — actually, the — the studies don't say that it was — suggested that it was deliberately manipulated. And I never suggested it was deliberately manipulated.
In fact, I said the opposite. What the study said is that certain races were more affected by COVID than other races. And there was a long list of the races that were minimally affected and those that were maximally affected.
So I was — I was not saying that this was something that had been deliberately done. I was just describing the results of this study.
MACCALLUM: So, do you believe that there is bioweapons work going on in China and in the United States that is trying to determine if these genetically cleaved, changed viruses — you know the terminology better than I do — could be used in that way as a bioweapon targeted towards certain populations?
KENNEDY: There's been a long history of our nation and other countries trying to develop ethnic bioweapons.
And, today, because of the developments of synthetic biology, CRISPR technology, genetic editing techniques that were never available to earlier scientists, those kind of studies are much — or those kind of weapons are much more likely to be developed, and along with a host of other weapons.
And what I have said, and the point of that talk that I was giving, is that we used to have a bioweapons treaty. We signed it in 1973, and people were generally complying with it. In 2002, when we passed the Patriot Act, we revoked that treaty. And that has launched a bioweapons arms race.
All of the major countries are putting major money into bioweapons. And one of the first things I'm going to do as president is to re-sign that treaty and to enforce it, to have provisions that make it transparent, that make it enforceable, and end that whole area of study. We don't need it. It does no good for the world, and it's very, very, very dangerous.
MacCallum next asked Kennedy about a lawsuit that Children's Health Defense has brought against several major mainstream media outlets, alleging a "conspiracy" to silence critics like him.
KENNEDY: Yes, among — one of the most insidious kind of censorship — and I'm going to use a word very cautiously — conspiracy, but it actually is a conspiracy, a number of press organizations led by BBC, that include The Washington Post, Reuters, United Press International, and Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook, signed an agreement to censor — to agree on a censorship regimen, so that they would censor and deplatform competitive news organizations that printed stories or posted stories that clashed with the official government proclamations.
MACCALLUM: It doesn't sound like the United States or the democracy that this country was founded on, does it?
KENNEDY: No. And it's really crazy.
And part of the reason they did it is — and this is clear in the papers. We have discovery documents. And the BBC, who organized it, said, in truth, CNN and BBC, a lot of people think we're competitors, but the real competitors are the thousands of new news organizations that have sprouted up like mushrooms on the Internet that are eroding public trust in us and that are destroying our business model.
MACCALLUM: It's a loss of control.
KENNEDY: Right.
And so we need to now choke them.
MACCALLUM: Right.
KENNEDY: And the way that we will do that is by deplatforming anybody, any of these organizations that doesn't follow our story.
We are suing them under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Later on Thursday, when I watched MSM outlets like CNN and read the New York Times, I was sickened — though not surprised — at the fake news, the false accusations, and the outright lies they used to report on Kennedy and what went down on Thursday.
A personal note: I have followed Kennedy's and his colleagues' work at Children's Health Defense (CHD) closely since the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. As a journalist reporting on science and medical topics — including the politics of health care — for many years, I was continually impressed with the work of CHD — which was always science-based, with frequent annotations, references, and links to credible primary sources. Contrast that with the lies and misrepresentations of Fauci, the CDC, the NIH, and (dare I say) both the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic including the effectiveness of masks, lockdowns, and vaccinations.
I have read most of the critical literature and reporting about RFK Jr., as well as several of his books, his interviews, and other material. In 2021, when I had the opportunity to guest-host eleven of John B. Wells's nationally syndicated talk radio programs on the Salem Radio Network, I had as a guest on three of the programs Mary Holland, Esq., who was then the president of Children's Health Defense. She is now RFK Jr.'s deputy campaign manager and one of his closest advisers. In the three and a half hours total on the programs of mine that she appeared, I did not disagree with a single thing she said about COVID-19 and the power and influence of the U.S. medical-industrial complex.
At this time, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the only candidate among all of the other current contenders for the presidency in 2024 who understands and says he is willing to challenge the stranglehold on health and public policy that Medicine, Inc. and Big Pharma currently exert on the body politic. For that reason alone, which helps to explain the flak he is getting on all fronts, I am interested in following and continuing to report on his candidacy and more than willing to hear him out.
Read more at: AmericanThinker.com
Please contact us for more information.
