A House subcommittee hearing Thursday on censorship quickly grew heated as Democrats attacked Republican lawmakers for giving Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a public platform just days after he floated a baseless conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is “ethnically targeted” to disproportionately attack white and Black people while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are most immune.

Just after Kennedy gave his opening remarks, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., argued Kennedy’s appearance violated House rules against allowing testimony that “may tend to defame, degrade, or incriminate any person.” She called for a vote to bring the meeting into executive session for further discussion.

“Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments as recently as last week,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Republicans in the majority voted to table the motion.

“This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort, with a formal motion from the other side of the aisle, to censor Mr. Kennedy,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.

The fireworks, however, began even before then. 

Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, blasted Republicans for inviting Kennedy to testify.

“It's a free country,” Plaskett said. “You absolutely have a right to say what you believe, but you don't have the right to a platform, public or private. We don't have to give one of the largest platforms of our democracy, Congress, this hearing. 

The son of former U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, RFK Jr. has in recent years built a reputation as an anti-vaccine activist, often spreading debunked conspiracy theories. Last year, Facebook and Instagram banned the accounts for Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense for spreading medical misinformation.

“Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy, [subcommittee] Chairman [Jim] Jordan affirmatively chose to give this a platform. They intentionally chose to elevate this rhetoric.”

After Kennedy’s remarks about COVID-19 being “ethnically targeted,” a group of 102 House Democrats this week urged McCarthy and Jordan to disinvite the presidential hopeful. McCarthy said he disagreed with Kennedy’s remarks but didn’t think censoring somebody from a censorship hearing was the answer.

Kennedy denied being antisemitic, racist and anti-vaccine. 

“These are the most appalling, disgusting pejoratives, and they're applied to me to silence me,” he said.

Kennedy said characterizations of his comments have been distorted and insisted he was only discussing a peer-reviewed paper that examined genetic susceptibility of COVID-19. That paper, published in July 2020 during the early months of the pandemic, makes no reference to the virus being “ethnically targeted.”

Kennedy made the controversial comments while claiming the United States and China are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop biological weapons that target certain ethnic groups.

Republicans on the panel were more focused on social media companies’ decisions in October 2020 to suppress a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop and a federal judge’s ruling earlier this month ordering the Biden administration to no longer flag specific posts to the platforms or request reports about their efforts to remove the content.

"Help us expose and stop what's going on — this alliance [of] big government pressuring private entities to censor Americans," Jordan told the witnesses testifying.

The New York Post reported in 2020 that a copy of a laptop left at a Delaware repair shop and later provided to the newspaper by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, included potentially damaging material about the Bidens, including an email suggesting that Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, whose board the younger Biden served on, to meet with Joe Biden while he was still vice president and in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

Joe Biden has repeatedly denied having any involvement in his son’s business affairs.

Days after the Post report, more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter saying emails found on the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” A former CIA official testified to lawmakers earlier this year that Antony Blinken, an adviser to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign who is now the secretary of state, was “the impetus” of the public statement. 

Emma-Jo Morris, one of the New York Post reporters who wrote the article, said, “What was more scandalous than the reporting itself, though, is the fact that it exposed the unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms and legacy media outlets.”

“What this relationship between the U.S. government officials and American corporations represents is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment — the right to think, write, read, say whatever we want,” said Morris, who now works for the conservative news outlet Breitbart.

Morris and Republicans insisted the New York Post’s reporting was entirely accurate. Outside analyses have yielded mixed results. 

Two security experts told The Washington Post last year that thousands of emails found on the laptop appear to be authentic, but those emails are only a small fraction of the data on the computer. The vast majority of content could not be verified, and the experts found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial Post articles and long after the laptop had been handed over to the FBI in December 2019.

However, an independent review commissioned by CBS News showed no evidence of tampering or fabrication of data on a copy of the laptop provided to federal investigators.

Republicans and Democrats sparred over testimony given earlier this week by Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. 

GOP lawmakers said, citing Dehmlow’s testimony, that FBI officials met with Twitter the day the Post article broke. One Twitter employee asked the FBI if the laptop was real, and the FBI official said, “Yes, it was,” before another participant stepped in and said, “No further comment,” according to House Republicans.

But Democrats accused Republicans of omitting key context in which Dehmlow also said that anyone who claimed she testified that the FBI concluded the laptop had not been manipulated would be “misrepresenting what I said because I don’t have much knowledge of that.”

Republicans argue that if the story’s reach had not been limited on social media and by other media, it could have impacted the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“Do you believe that this government censorship was election interference?” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked Morris.

“Yes, any censorship of speech prevents your ability to think clearly,” Morris responded.

In ordering the Biden administration on July 4 to limit its contact with social media companies, Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana cited a wide range of topics he said were suppressed on social media at the urging of administration officials, including about COVID-19 vaccines, the origin of the virus, the 2020 presidential election and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week paused Doughty's ruling "until further orders of the court." 

Friday's brief 5th Circuit order put Doughty's injunction on hold "until further orders of the court." It called for arguments in the case to be scheduled on an expedited basis.“Censorship is not about truth,” John Sauer, special assistant attorney general in Louisiana, testified Thursday. “It is about power —  preserving and expanding the power of the censors and the political narratives they prefer.”

Democrats, meanwhile, argued government is not censoring speech but rather has worked to alert social media companies about misinformation and other content that could lead to violence, compromise the health Americans who believe false medical information and help foreign governments interfere in U.S. elections.

“It's not censorship to try to correct that record,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency has routinely met with social media companies, testified last week, "We're very clear that it's up to the social media companies to decide whether to do something.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously labeled presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nephew of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy rather than his son. This has been updated to rectify the error.