McCarthy Brazenly Defends RFK Jr. After Racist Covid Conspiracy Theory

Kevin McCarthy thinks that speaking out even remotely against a state that is committing apartheid is morally objectionable—and even worth censure. He also thinks RFK Jr. saying Covid-19 was specifically designed not to harm Jews is tolerable. Got it?

The speaker of the House made his stance clear on Monday while answering questions from the press.

McCarthy called out the Democrats, telling the party to “take action” against members like Representative Pramila Jayapal, who called Israel a “racist state.” Then, in the next beat, McCarthy defended inviting to Congress a presidential candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories.

As a reminder, last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while sparing those who are “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Conversely, as a reminder, Israel has committed decades of human rights abuses, engaged in land dispossession and home demolition, upheld separate systems of law, and maintained a militarized police state against Palestinians.

McCarthy finds criticism of the latter deplorable, but apparently it’s still OK to welcome RFK Jr., a Republican pawn spreading antisemitism, to a House committee meeting next week on the federal government’s role in censorship.

“I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here,” said the House speaker behind the successful Republican-led effort to remove Representative Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee for the high crime of speaking out against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

The episode comes as a few Democrats speak out against the U.S. Congress rolling out the red carpet for Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who once called Jewish intermarriage “a plague.”

Herzog is set to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday, where he will stand in front of Vice President Kamala Harris, who, as Palestinian-American writer and political scientist Yousef Munayyer pointed out, is married to a Jewish man.

The bipartisan group of prominent Democrats and Republicans formed recently to fight the outside group No Labels’ efforts to prop up a third-party presidential ticket has taken a big step in showing it’s ready to go to war: It created a new super PAC to raise money to stop No Labels.

The super PAC, called Citizens to Save Our Republic, also announced new polling results on Monday, the same day Senator Joe Manchin is in New Hampshire for an event with former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. The event is part of No Labels’ rollout of a set of moderate policy positions on hot-button topics like abortion.

Citizens to Save Our Republic’s polling of 5,700 registered voters nationwide showed that in a three-way race among Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and a No Labels ticket, Trump would win with 40 percent of the vote while Biden got 39 percent of the vote, with the No Labels candidate getting about 21 percent of the vote.

No Labels has maintained that its work to prop up a “Unity Ticket” is not meant to scuttle Biden’s chances of winning a second term, but polling—except that done by No Labels—has consistently shown that such a ticket would effectively only boost Trump.

Citizens to Save Our Republic is led by former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. It also announced that it has recruited some big names to its cause, like former Defense Secretaries Chuck Hagel and Bill Cohen and former senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley. The letter in which the polling results were released was signed by more than a dozen Democrats and Republicans, including Stuart Stevens, Joe Trippi, Matt Bennett, Sam Brown, Howard Gutman, and Bill Kristol.

The super PAC’s formation is yet another sign of just how serious the prospect of a No Labels ticket is to the outcome of the 2024 election. Other groups, like the center-left Third Way and the progressive MoveOn.org, have been eyeing No Labels’ move to set up a third-party ticket. Thus far, No Labels has not landed a candidate, but Manchin’s decision to headline a No Labels event in New Hampshire is a clear sign that he’s toying with the idea of running for president on the No Labels ticket rather than running for reelection in West Virginia, where he trailed GOP Governor Jim Justice by more than 20 points in a late May poll.

Democrats are forcing Republicans’ hand on George Santos after introducing a resolution on Monday to censure the embattled freshman congressman.

The resolution, introduced by Representative Richie Torres, is privileged, meaning it has to be acted on. If Torres calls for a vote on the measure, then a vote must be held within 48 hours. This is the second time Democrats have introduced a privileged resolution on Santos over his many, many lies, moving in May to expel him from Congress. Republicans managed to refer that resolution to the House Ethics Committee.

“I have a message to House Republicans who, for too long, have been protecting Mr. Santos, who has disgraced the United States Congress,” Torres said when announcing the censure resolution on Twitter. “Stop treating Mr. Santos as untouchable. The time has come for Congress to hold him accountable.”

The resolution lists more than a dozen of Santos’s many lies, such as his fabricating the bulk of his professional and educational résumé—including that he received a volleyball scholarship for college. The resolution also calls out Santos’s lies that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, his mother died in the 9/11 attack, and four of his employees were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting. He also lied about founding an animal rescue charity and producing the disastrous Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Santos has been federally charged with 13 counts of various types of financial fraud, to which he has pleaded not guilty. He agreed to a deal with Brazilian authorities investigating him for financial fraud, and he is still under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Republicans, who have stood staunchly by Santos, were able to squash the previous resolution against him by arguing that the Ethics Committee probe hadn’t yet concluded. But the motion to censure has no effect on the Ethics Committee’s work, so it will be harder to argue down.

Santos could well be censured, as many of his fellow Republicans have called on him to resign over his falsehoods. This vote could actually prove important for Republican representatives, particularly from New York, who won in districts that went for President Joe Biden in 2020.

The majority of Santos’s constituents and New York voters in general want him out. New York Republicans who don’t vote against him could face a reckoning next November.

Robert Kennedy Jr. made a lot of people scratch their heads when he announced he was running for president as a Democrat. But even more bizarre is his list of donors, who are almost entirely Republican.

The bulk of Kennedy Jr.’s donors have previously given only to Republican candidates, according to the investigative newsletter Popular Information. Despite the conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer running on the Democratic ticket, less than a quarter of his donors have a history of donating blue.

Kennedy Jr.’s campaign received the maximum donation of $6,600 from 96 individuals through the end of June. Among those donors, 37 previously have only given to Republican federal candidates, according to a Popular Information analysis of Kennedy Jr.’s Federal Election Commission filings. Thirty have no history of political donations, and only 19 of those donors are Democratic.

One donor is Mark Dickson, an aerospace businessman who has donated more than $450,000 to the GOP since 2015. A hefty $400,000 went to Donald Trump’s committee Trump Victory alone. Another donor is Keith Sheldon, a car dealership executive who donated to Trump in 2016 and 2020, as well as to Trump-endorsed candidate Herschel Walker in 2022.

Kennedy Jr. has also received donations from Purple Good Government, a PAC controlled by David Sacks. Sacks moderated the bizarre Twitter Space between Kennedy Jr. and Sacks’s good friend Elon Musk, and he has publicly backed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.

It’s actually no surprise that the right loves Kennedy Jr. He has openly embraced many of their talking points, such as that vaccines cause autism and that Covid-19 is the fault of Chinese people and Jewish people. He also initially agreed to speak at the far-right Moms for Liberty summit, although he ultimately backed out.

“We’re in a holy war. And I will tell you this: Because we’re willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war.”

This is what neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who had dinner with Republican front-runner Donald Trump less than one year ago, said at an “America First” rally in West Palm Beach on Sunday.

“They will go down—we have God on our side—and they will go down with their Satanic master,” he continued. “They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.”

Again, Fuentes had dinner with Trump in Florida last November. Neither Trump nor DeSantis—nor most of the Republican Party, for that matter—criticized Fuentes after learning what he stands for.

Fuentes’s comments on Sunday were livestreamed to some 5,000 people on Rumble. It’s unclear how many people were actually in the crowd, but in-person tickets for the rally went at $50 a pop, with $1,000 netting guests a special private dinner too. And the room of largely socially isolated boys with apparently nothing better to spend their money on roared in applause at Fuentes’s pledge to “make them die in the holy war.”

Elsewhere in the rally, Fuentes kicked out a heckler who questioned his previous support for far-right conspiracy theorist and January 6–inciter Ali Alexander, who allegedly propositioned teenage boys for sex and solicited nude photos and videos from them.

“Oh, security, get him out,” Fuentes said, with his finger pointed, unsurprisingly not engaging with the question. “Thank you, everybody,” Fuentes said to the crowd, appreciating the mob’s boos to drown out the uncomfortable inquiry.

Fellow far-right streamer Ethan Ralph—who was convicted of disseminating “revenge porn” of the mother of his child and ex-girlfriend, and separately is on bad terms with Fuentes—claimed that there were “36 cars total at Fuentes Rally 2 lmfao,” guessing there were about “144 ppl.”

Meanwhile, the rally seems to have, perhaps, given others some concern too. “!!” Elon Musk replied to a tweet with screenshots of the event’s comment section on Rumble.

The comments included remarks such as, “HITLER FAILED US BY NOT FINISHING THE JOB,” “WITHOUT LIES ISLAM DIES,” and “Jew rapists,” as well as eager use of a vicious slur against Jewish people.

But given the content, one may wish Musk’s consequent amplification of the tweet would’ve included more explicit concern than just an exclamation.

Fuentes’s comments, of course, are not aberrant. Fuentes was previously banned from social media outlets for violent rhetoric about people of color, women, Jewish people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Covid-19, and much more. He has also proudly said he’s “just like Hitler” (whom he has also called “a pedophile … also really fucking cool”), and that “Catholic monarchy, and just war, and crusades, and inquisitions” are much better than democracy.

Such a character is set to be headlining a College Republicans convention at the end of July.