House Republicans now own Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s antisemitism
by kos for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 2:58:04p PDT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...-own-Robert-F-Kennedy-s-antisemitism#comments
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the set of "Fox & Friends," which is totally a thing a "Democrat" would do
Last week, pretend presidential candidate and all-around Nazi conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. thrilled his Nazi friends by claiming COVID-19 was designed to spare Jewish people. This was just the latest in a long string of antisemitic beliefs that have characterized the lesser Kennedy.
Funnily enough, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has extended an invitation for Kennedy to whine about liberal “cancel culture” at a House subcommittee hearing on Thursday. You see, Kennedy has been canceled so much, Republicans can’t help but shine a light on his plight! Weirdly, they didn’t invite Anheuser-Busch officials to cry about being canceled by right-wing mobs over the inclusion of a trans person in an Instagram story. What a weird oversight, huh?
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Of course, what McCarthy calls “cancel culture” is people like you and me pointing out that Kennedy is a Nazi antisemite who traffics in dangerous conspiracy theories that are literally causing untold suffering and deaths. Now, McCarthy has weakly condemned Kennedy’s antisemitism … yet won’t rescind his invitation.
There are many ways to measure the damage that Kennedy is causing the country, but none is more visceral to me than this anti-vaxxer, who is needlessly causing pain and suffering to her 3-year-old:
Kennedy is a vile merchant of disinformation and misery, hence earning the adoration of Republicans in the House. Not even his overt antisemitism has them backing off. “Steve Scalise defends the House GOP majority's decision to invite and platform RFK Jr. at a committee hearing, as they criticize anti-semitism,” tweeted NBC reporter Sahil Kapur. Scalise said, "He's a Democrat that's coming before — talking about how you're seeing a collective shutdown of opposing viewpoints by the Democrats."
Ah yes, we’ll keep pretending that Kennedy is a “Democrat,” even as he parks his ass among his adoring fans on extreme right-wing media and talks to the worst of the worst like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, and Alex Jones. Kennedy himself knows damn well he’s not a Democrat, but he’d get a fraction of the attention in the Republican field as he thinks he’s getting by “running” against President Joe Biden.
To be clear, I am absolutely in favor of a “collective shutdown” of Kennedy and his dangerous conspiratorial and antisemitic views. We’re not talking about political disagreements over tax rates for billionaires: We’re talking about trafficking in patently false information that has consequences to people’s health and safety.
Yet when you lie with dogs …
McCarthy now has to somehow distance himself from Kennedy’s antisemitism, while pretending that he actually cares about “censorship.”
By platforming Kennedy, McCarthy is complicit in Kennedy’s anti-semitism. There’s no other way around it. Is McCarthy “censoring” me by not inviting me to also speak to Congress? Of course not; that would be ludicrous. Free speech rights don’t guarantee anyone a platform. Rescinding a Nazi antisemite’s invitation to speak wouldn’t be “censoring” him, as Kennedy has had no problem getting his views out to the world.
But Republicans are expending serious money and effort to make Kennedy a thing, hoping he can soften up Biden in the primary battle. He is Steve Bannon’s project as an agent of chaos. And while it’s not working—because Democrats don’t embrace the fringes like Republicans do—it won’t stop them from continuing to try.
There is, of course, another irony in Kennedy talking about “censorship”: He has been engaging in a lengthy and expensive lawsuit to force Daily Kos to disclose the identity of a community member who wrote a critical story about him speaking at a Nazi-organized rally in Berlin. Here’s the quick summary:
A coalition of New York media heavyweights, including The New York Times, have filed an amicus brief in support of our position.
Well, we just found out that somehow, Kennedy’s lawyers and investigators have discovered that community member’s real identity and are suing him personally for defamation. It is my understanding that Public Citizen is continuing to represent that individual against this frivolous and ludicrous attempt to—gasp!—censor opposition.
Seriously, what goes through Kennedy’s head? He wants to cry about censorship, yet is using his army of high-priced lawyers (David Boies’ law firm) to target a critic.
What’s weird is that I have personally written everything that this community member wrote about Kennedy—and worse!
The complaint claims that “Mr. Kennedy files this action to publicly establish the truth, to rehabilitate his name and reputation, and to seek appropriate remedies for the harm caused by Defendants’ intentionally false statements.” I have done more, with a larger audience, to explicitly brand Kennedy as the Nazi that he is. Yet he weirdly isn’t going after me, but after someone who wrote a community story with a fraction of my own audience.
So why go after relatively small fry, and not after every single other person (and there are lots of us) calling him a Nazi throughout the entire media landscape? It is positively bizarre, to the point where we wondered if there was a personal connection between Kennedy and the community member, but there doesn’t appear to be any.
For our part, the lawsuit continues. Daily Kos is not just fighting his efforts to reveal whatever identifying information we may have on that account, but trying to establish new legal media protections, while also pushing a legal counterclaim based on anti-SLAPP laws that prohibit the use of the courts to engage in “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” That is, Kennedy is trying to use the legal system to squash legitimate public participation by our community member, and it has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend. It needs to cost him more than the million dollars he reportedly spent to unmask our community member (which includes the lawsuits targeting Daily Kos).
We have been able to go toe-to-toe legally against Nazi Kennedy, Nazi-enabler Boies, and his merry band of legal mercenaries because the Daily Kos community has financially backed us the entire way. It’s easy to fight for the First Amendment and against Nazi conspiracists like Kennedy when so many people have our back. The fight will continue until the day Kennedy loses on all grounds, abandons or loses his lawsuit against our community member, and pays everyone’s legal fees. Your continued support makes all of that possible.
Meanwhile, Nazi Kennedy is the toast of McCarthy and House Republicans, because they love his antisemitism, his disdain for science, his hatred for the truth, and his peddling of dangerous conspiracy theories. He is the essence of today’s fascist Republican Party, and no matter how much Kennedy tries to pretend he’s a Democrat, all you have to do is look at the company he keeps.
By inviting them into their house, Republicans own everything Kennedy says. No attempt to hide behind “free speech” can mask that.
