Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is learning that, as an enemy of the state, everything he says can and will be held against him. Democrats are learning, however, that RFK Jr., unlike most of their targets, is no punching bag. He can and will punch back.

During a press event at a New York City restaurant a week back, Kennedy introduced the concept of ethnically targeted bioweapons. He began this discussion with the phrase “There is an argument that,” thus distancing himself a bit from the validity of the claim to follow, namely that the People’s Republic of China is developing bioweapons to target Blacks and Caucasians.

In this discussion Kennedy noted that the people seemingly most immune to the COVID-19 virus were Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Although he confessed his uncertainty about whether Blacks and Whites “were deliberately targeted,” he strongly suggested that China was capable of doing just that. He never implied that Ashkenazi Jews, who are uniformly Caucasian, were in any way involved in the plotting. Kennedy did say, however, that the United States has been doing similar experiments in regards to the Chinese, an assertion that should have taken race out of the conversation.

It did not. The Democrats have no other card to play. At the House hearing on government weaponization on Thursday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused Kennedy of making “despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.” She was also behind the letter writing campaign urging Republican leaders to disinvite Kennedy from the hearing.

Kennedy, of course, never accused Jews of anything other than having good immune systems, and his remarks about “Asians” were directed at the People’s Republic of China. By Democrat rules, one can accuse Russia and Russians of almost anything, but perversely, China remains off limits.

“You are slandering me. This is dishonest,” Kennedy shot back at Schultz after one of her many impressively cheap shots. Schultz seemed to forget that the person she was insulting was a Kennedy. The moral force that Schultz could muster as a member of a historically persecuted minority was usually enough to silence another white person, at least on things Jewish. Kennedy, however, is no ordinary White person.

He is the nephew of an assassinated president and the son of an assassinated senator. He pulled enough moral power from their martyrdom to confront even the Black ranking Democrat on the weaponization committee, Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands. Like Schultz, Plaskett grotesquely misrepresented Kennedy’s comments and accused him, by inference, of “hateful, abusive rhetoric.”

Kennedy would have none of it. He put aside his prepared remarks. “I’ve spent my life in this party. I’ve devoted my life to the values of this party,” he reminded the Democrats on the committee.  Waving the letter signed by 102 congressional Democrats demanding his exclusion, he said defiantly, “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

“Censorship,” Kennedy argued, “was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, to Harry Truman, to Thomas Jefferson.” This, of course, was not entirely true. Among the more recent deviations from this rule was the lawless seizure of former U.S. Army General Edwin Walker by agents of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy objected to Walker’s speeches on the University of Mississippi campus during the protests and riots of 1962. Once snatched, Walker was committed against his will to 90 days in a psychiatric institution and effectively silenced. Democrats, knowing none of this, had to have been humbled by Kennedy’s evocation of the party’s icons.

His claim that his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, “didn’t deal in insults” also played better with Democrats than it should have. Republicans remember Uncle Ted for his demagogic assault on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,” said Kennedy, “blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids…" and on and on.

Not surprisingly, too, Kennedy has absorbed the orthodox narrative on the late Sen. Joe McCarthy. At Friday’s hearing, he used it against his Democrat attackers, accusing them of smears, misinterpretations, guilt by association, and outright lies. This “targeted propaganda,” said Kennedy, “is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited and dispensed with after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.”

That rare Democrat who knows history might have pointed out that Kennedy’s father served as counsel on Joe McCarthy’s Senate committee and honored McCarthy by having him serve as godfather to his first child, Kennedy’s sister, Kathleen. But to attack RFK Jr. on this point would be to risk fracturing one of the few remaining pillars in the Democrat pantheon.

To be sure, RFK Jr. has much history to unlearn. He has, however, learned a whole lot in a hurry about how the contemporary Democrat-media complex works. The only person in recent years who has endured more racially charged calumny is Donald Trump, but Trump is the classic “other,” the figure of scorn against whom all righteous Democrats can unite in their facsimile of good conscience.

For Democrats, Kennedy is the more troublesome of the two. He is the Thomas Becket to Biden’s King Henry II, the vassal whose commitment to truth telling threatens the lies that sustain the power of the king. And for Democrats, no lie is more essential than that their enemies are racists.

If Democrats were wise, they would try to co-opt Kennedy and make him their nominee. He’d be hard to beat in the general election. Wisdom, however, is not the Democrat’s strong suit. For a generation, with the help of their media accomplices, they have gotten along just fine on character assassination.

Kennedy got a taste of it on Thursday. But try as hard as they might, his enemies have not rid themselves of RFK Jr. quite yet.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethic Flight from America’s Cities, is now available in all formats.

Image: John S. Quarterman