Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the leaders of the modern anti-vaccine movement, falsely insisted he was not opposed to vaccinations during a House hearing Thursday that quickly descended into a culture war circus.
The hearing, held by the chamber’s special subcommittee on the purported “weaponization” of the federal government to target conservatives, was meant to give Kennedy a chance to expound on a long series of complaints about social media platforms censoring his anti-vaccine views, as he mounts a long-shot bid to unseat President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.
“I am being censored here,” Kennedy told lawmakers in Washington at one point during the hearing, which aired nationally on C-SPAN. Democrats had tried unsuccessfully to force his testimony behind closed doors.
Republicans spent much of the hearing promoting Kennedy while Democrats largely belittled him, peppering him with questions about his recent claims that the COVID-19…