Did you catch the congressional hearings on censorship yesterday? (The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.) Bobby Kennedy Jr said the word “Jewish” and so the DNC came after him. Will he escape the trap? It’s a pathetic spectacle, one way or the other.
This is what happened. There was footage of Kennedy speaking about the alleged COVID virus at an informal gathering. Why was there footage? Well, I imagine that the Democratic Party establishment will be filming his every utterance, looking for evidence with which to cancel him. (Of course, they don’t have to do this with Joe Biden because that guy seldom says anything remotely intelligible. The DNC already knows that and is okay with it. In fact, the less footage of Biden available, the better.)
They are going with the old stand-by: antisemitism. Just to be clear, all you have to do is say the word “Jewish” and the media will spin you into oblivion. Just imagine if Kennedy were to utter the word “Zionist.” I doubt he ever has.
I think that Kennedy will weather this storm. I may be wrong, but I think people are getting bored with the slur of antisemitism. This one was really clumsy. There is no way that what Kennedy said could be honestly construed as anti-Semitic.
They’ve been pulling out all the stops for Kennedy. They started with anti-vaxxer. That’s not working so well either, since there is so much evidence that the COVID vaccines have been deadly. Even more than most vaccines. But maybe these slurs are nothing more than excuses to shut him out of the media. That’s what Kennedy argues.
I listened to a few social-media commentators. They all went to town on the irony of a committee hearing on censorship trying to censor a guest invited to discuss his experience of being censored. Several Democrats, notably Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, tried, unsuccessfully, to use procedural tactics to force the hearing to meet in camera. She claimed that Kennedy’s words would threaten the security of Jews and Asians. (That was pretty funny.)
But that criticism – that a hearing on censorship tried to censor – barely scratches the surface of how censorship is operating here.
Kennedy was heroically eloquent in his call for fully open and honest debates in all areas of public and political life. There must be no restrictions on the First Amendment. But let’s look at how public discourse actually works.
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First, Kennedy vigorously defended himself against the charge of antisemitism. He claimed that he has always been Israel’s staunchest ally. He was truly passionate in his self-defence of his defence of Israel. What should we make of that?
Anyone who has never criticized Israel has turned his back on the Palestinians. Since 1948, Israel has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The violence that it has perpetrated on Palestinians physically repulses me. I feel queasy even typing these lines, because so many abominations are being called up to my consciousness.
But Kennedy calls for an open and honest debate. Good. I will take him at his word. Let’s lay out the crimes of the state of Israel for all to see. In the Congress of the USA. In the media. At the United Nations. In Parliaments around the world. Let’s deal with this issue with the compassion and respect that Kennedy champions.
He seems sincere, doesn’t he? He seems honest. So, how can a highly educated and privileged man born into such a politically-active family mount such a defence of a foreign state in countless violations of international law? I don’t know. But I suspect that we are witnessing how our thoughts and opinions are shaped by the discourses that we live in.
The real irony is this: Kennedy’s impassioned defence of the primacy of the First Amendment is needed precisely to guard against his political position of support for an apartheid state like Israel.
They accused him of turning his back on Israel and he ran to its defence. Someone else will have to represent the Palestinian case. So, when the dust settled on this spectacle, Israel was left all the stronger, even as it destroys Palestinian lives in Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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Likewise, we see the limits of discourse in his defence of his position on vaccines. “I’m not anti-vax!” he passionately assures the Congress. Holy cow! I am. They’re not putting vaccine gunk into me. Not COVID. Not nothing. So, if you want to respect the First Amendment, let’s begin with whether or not viruses have ever been demonstrated to exist. If we don’t address that question, someone else is controlling the debate. I’m not interested in a debate where my questions are forbidden.
I did, once, hear Kennedy’s response when asked whether viruses exist or not. It was interesting. He kept contradicting himself in a charming way. His thoughts took him here: of course viruses exist, don’t be silly. And then, on a dime, he realized that he had no evidence of that and, so, he admitted that he couldn’t really answer the question. I recall that he waffled back and forth between certainty and doubt several times in the course of a couple of minutes. So, he’s smart enough to be skeptical of consensus science.
In any case, just like the affirmation of the atrocities of the Zionist state, we are left with the reinforcement of the virus hypothesis. Oh boy.
Anyway, once you step into the political arena, powerful interests have already framed the debate. More and more of us are realizing that the whole system is set up to exclude our best questions. Our honest questions. Our First Amendment questions. But these are foundational questions. In politics, the parameters are already set to exclude honesty.