Amid Robert Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has become a hero to some conservatives due in part to his claims the government is censoring dissenting voices who have contrarian beliefs. Democrats, though, are harshly criticizing him despite his lineage, lampooning his past statements and denigrating him as a “tool” of the GOP. 

During a raucous hearing on Thursday conducted by the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, Mr. Kennedy was questioned sympathetically by Republicans about his experience being censored by social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Numerous statements by Mr. Kennedy on social media have been taken down by tech companies due to his controversial theories about vaccines and autism. In June, YouTube also took down a video of Mr. Kennedy speaking on the podcast of a provocative Canadian professor, Jordan Peterson, citing “vaccine misinformation.”

“Congenial, respectful debate is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our democracy,” Mr. Kennedy said in his opening statement. “We need to be talking to each other.” He then held up a letter that had been signed by many Democratic members of the House asking Speaker McCarthy and the chairman of the committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, to disinvite Mr. Kennedy from the hearing. 

“This itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address,” he said, waving the letter in the air. “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

Mr. Kennedy spent much of the three-hour hearing defending himself from attacks launched by his fellow Democrats, who accused him of being racist and antisemitic. The ranking member of the committee, Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, highlighted Mr. Kennedy’s controversial public statements that have been made over many years about vaccines, autism, and the Holocaust. 

“Free speech is not absolute,” Ms. Plaskett said in her opening remarks. “Abusive rhetoric does not need to be promoted in the halls of the people’s House.” 

“Even what they know about Mr. Kennedy’s hateful, evidence-free rhetoric … Speaker McCarthy and Chairman Jordan affirmatively chose to give this a platform,” Ms. Plaskett continued. “They intentionally chose to elevate this rhetoric to give these harmful, dangerous views a platform in the halls of the United States Congress.”

Mr. Kennedy most recently claimed that Covid could have been “deliberately targeted” to attack white and Black people while sparing, to a larger extent, Jews and the Chinese. Mr. Kennedy also claimed in his film “Medical Racism” that unvaccinated Americans were treated worse than Jews were in Nazi Germany. In 2021, Mr. Kennedy claimed the legendary baseball player Hank Aaron’s death was part of a “trend” of people dying after receiving the Covid vaccine. 

Alongside Mr. Kennedy sat two conservatives who claim that the government is illegally interfering with social media companies in order to suppress Americans’ speech. One was the politics editor of Breitbart News, Emma-Jo Morris, who helped write the October 2020 article in the New York Post that first disclosed the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. Twitter suppressed postings of the article, calling it “misinformation.” The laptop was later proved to be authentic.

Ms. Morris decried the “unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets” that allowed for the laptop story to be suppressed in the first place. The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook at the time, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, have both said that they were contacted by government officials who said the laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation operation and that the two men should work to limit the spread of the story on their platforms. 

Twitter barred the link to the article from being posted on its platform or sent in private messages. Mr. Zuckerberg said his company limited Facebook users’ ability to see or share the article after he spoke with the FBI. 

Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Morris were also joined by an attorney, John Sauer, who previously served as the deputy attorney general in both Missouri and Louisiana. Mr. Sauer has been one of the lead attorneys for plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case that barred federal officials from contacting social media companies about content moderation issues, as was common practice during the Covid pandemic. 

Originating in the Western District of Louisiana, the lawsuit led Judge Terry Doughty to issue a sweeping injunction that bars government officials from interacting with social media companies after the jurist found that the two entities had engaged in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” in moderating content in that comported with government views. 

The Fifth Circuit has since placed an administrative stay on the Missouri decision pending appeal. Mr. Sauer said that Judge Doughty “found based on overwhelming evidence that federal officials are the cause of the censorship of the viewpoints they disfavor,” describing the scope of censorship as “staggering.”

Seated behind Mr. Kennedy was a fellow Democrat, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who is managing his presidential campaign. Mr. Jordan acknowledged the iconoclastic Mr. Kucinich from the dais, calling him a “good friend,” which Mr. Kennedy quickly used as a launching off point to talk about the value of free speech in a democratic society. 

He asked that committee members be “respectful” and “congenial” in order to better advance the American people’s interests. He noted that his uncle, Senator Kennedy, got along with even the most conservative colleagues and also pointed out that Messrs. Jordan and Kucinich — despite their vastly differing political viewpoints — have been friends for years. Mr. Kucinich used to attend basketball games with Mr. Jordan and even attended Mr. Jordan’s daughter’s wedding. 

Mr. Kennedy said that “the vibrancy, the vigor” of free speech are the most foundational principle in the United States Constitution. “We are supposed to be the exemplary democracy,” but are not acting like it, he said.