More than 100 House Democratic lawmakers are urging Speaker Kevin McCarthy to rescind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invitation to testify before Congress this week, after the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer made antisemitic and Sinophobic remarks about COVID-19. They also say he employed a technique “used by Hitler.”
“We request that you rescind your invitation for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify as a witness before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday, July 20, 2023,” the letter, dated Tuesday and led by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and others states. “Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly and recently spread vile and dangerous antisemitic and anti-Asian conspiracy theories that tarnish his credibility as a witness and must not be legitimized with his appearance before the U.S. Congress nor given the platform of an official committee hearing to spread his baseless and discriminatory views.”
The group pointed to a video published by the New York Post over the weekend, “in which Mr. Kennedy asserted that COVID-19 was bioengineered to target certain races,” the Democrats said.
“Specifically, Mr. Kennedy floated the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was purposely bioengineered in a lab to target Caucasians and Black people—but to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. These false claims echo centuries of Jews being scapegoated and held collectively responsible for illnesses like the Black Plague—often as a precursor for massacres and pogroms, and Chinese immigrants being blamed for plague outbreaks since the mid-1800s.”
They says the COVID conspiracies Kennedy promoted have no “basis in scientific evidence.”
“By promoting the unfounded notion that scientists are developing bioweapons that can target certain races and exempt others, while referring to Jews as a separate race, Mr. Kennedy is employing a pernicious form of antisemitism that has been used for centuries.”
“This technique was used by Hitler claiming that there are biological differences between ethnic or racial groups to portray Jews as a lesser form of humanity, a steppingstone to justifying the annihilation of the Jews during the Holocaust. Additionally, by referring to Jews as a separate race, Mr. Kennedy promoted a conspiracy theory that asserts that Jews have the ability to cause or avoid harm that is inflicted on other people.”
The group also accuses Kennedy of having “a history of making statements minimizing the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. In January of 2022, he suggested that life was more difficult today than it was for Anne Frank and those attempting to flee Nazi Germany. A few years before that, Mr. Kennedy compared mask mandates during the pandemic to Nazi medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps by saying that ‘Nazis did that in the camps in World War Two – they tested vaccines on gypsies and Jews.’ Even last week, he referred to the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine, which is currently fighting a Russian invasion under the leadership of a Jewish president.”
On Monday, McCarthy refused to act.
“I disagree with everything he said,” McCarthy told a reporter, referring to RFK Jr.’s remarks. “The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censuring somebody is actually the answer here,” he said, possibly meaning “censoring.”