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Source: Racket News
Stacey Plaskett's McCarthy Homage
Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s appearance before the House Weaponization of Government Committee descends into madness
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testified before the House Weaponization of Government Committee yesterday, ostensibly about censorship. Having sat in the same chair and experienced the same questioning from the same members on the same topic, I expected things to get weird. But I’m not sure I’ve never seen anything as bizarre as the spectacle that broke out in that hearing room. (For a new Twitter Files by Andrew Lowenthal on the subject they were supposed to discuss, click here or here).
Now, RFK, Jr. has said some controversial things in his time. He’s also among the most censored people in the country, having been removed from Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms in recent years. The Republicans control the House, and the chair of the Committee wanted to explore the censorship issue, using Kennedy as a witness.
The Democrats could have handled this situation in a number of ways. One would be to sit politely with clasped hands and patient smiles, ask the occasional probing question, then knock off early for a quiet night of Xanax, Netflix, and certain muted press coverage.
The other way would be to snarl like Fangoria cover creatures and engage in a crazed, coordinated zombie attack of a witness who’s not only running for president as a Democrat, but whose father and uncle are sainted Blue-Party icons, to the point where the DNC has been running pale Kennedy facsimiles for federal office for over half a century — from Gary Hart to Bill Clinton to John Edwards to Beto O’Rourke to a member of that very committee, New York’s imbecilic Dan Goldman.
How weird did the proceedings get? There are people living in jungles in Bangladesh or deserts in Sudan who’ll be learning the names Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and especially Stacey Plaskett well into this weekend and beyond. The former handed the Republicans a blowout win on their central premise before the affair started, by trying to move the hearing to executive session, “because House Rules prohibit testimony that degrades or defames people.” They were trying to censor the hearing!
Lest anyone think this is an exaggeration, Plaskett later tried to clarify by saying they weren’t trying to censor RFK, just remove the discussion to a more private setting, as rules permit if there is a threat a witness might “defame an individual.” Plaskett continued: “No one was trying to stop him from testifying, but not to give him the megaphone that this group allowed him to have.”
Translation: we don’t object to him speaking, we just don’t want it to be in front of other people! (And not just other people: an audience a legally elected congressional committee decided to give him.) This would be an interesting tactic if Wasserman-Schultz’s motion had not been not guaranteed to fail. Since it did fail, and the hearing continued, all the stunt accomplished was putting on video for the whole world to see a failed, weirdly emotive/unhinged effort to gag a presidential candidate pulling as much as 20% of your own party’s electorate in polls.
When Plaskett spoke it was like being transported to another realm, where rhetoric works upside-down, or sideways maybe, or speech of any kind is an inscrutable, anarchic process without meaning. She thundered, at length, about things that had nothing to do with Kennedy or the topic at hand. There were diatribes about things Kennedy specifically denounced, like election denial, white supremacy, and “the riots of January 6th,” but more frequently she just plunged into rants about things that had no connection to anything at all. Toward the end she laid out a Unified Field Theory of MAGA-Putin-RFK-Iran-Nazis:
The MAGA Republicans are trying to scare social media companies into not taking down blatantly false information… when conspiracy theory succeeds, so does Donald Trump. Russia interfered in our 2016 election. They attempted to interfere in 2020 and they’re going to try to interfere in [2024]… We note that Russian trolls sought to suppress the black vote by unleashing deterrent of social media posts designed to stoke racial tensions and spread incorrect voting information. In 2021, our national intelligence agencies found that proactive information sharing between the government and social media companies facilitated the expeditious review and in many cases, removal of social media accounts covertly operated by Russia and Iran.
You could almost hear RFK thinking: Iran? I recognized the incredulity because the same look came over my face when I was in that room, although he was dealing with something crazier than being called a “so-called journalist.”
The mind of the modern Blue-Anon politician — and Plaskett may be the purest specimen in the country now, surpassing even Adam Schiff — is like the last hole of a mini-golf course, where no matter what shot you hit, the ball ends up in the same bucket. The political equation is essentially [ANYTHING BAD = TRUMP = RACISM = RUSSIA INTERFERED = SHUT THE FUCK UP]. Even Joe McCarthy at his most boozed-out and paranoid didn’t see this many goblins flying around his head at the same time. Kennedy, Jr. tried to protest on a few points, noting for instance he had nothing to do with replacement theory, but arguing against this thought process is like trying to fight in a dream. The blows bounce off the madness-vortex. How does one answer the charge that protesting your own censorship means supporting covert Iranian information operations?
There will always be loony characters in politics — the Bush era was full of them — but this current crop of Democrats is unique. Where are they going with this? Or are they just this nuts?
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