The Michael Knowles Show - January 29, 2025


RFK Jr. Confirmation Hearing REACTION


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

196.17776

Word count

1,136

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Robby Kennedy Jr.'s confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services Secretary are over, and it looks like he's on his way to getting the job. But will he be able to get it through the Senate? And will it be enough to get him confirmed?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.320 RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearings for HHS Secretary are over.
00:00:03.940 Here's my immediate reaction.
00:00:06.520 I'm feeling good.
00:00:08.140 I'm feeling good.
00:00:08.920 I thought Kennedy, with one exception, which we'll get into on the show tomorrow,
00:00:12.460 I thought he performed very, very well.
00:00:14.680 Very hostile questioning from Democrats.
00:00:17.400 Ron Wyden is the ranking chairman for the Democrats on the committee,
00:00:21.280 or ranking member, rather.
00:00:22.580 And I think he sounded more like Ron Wyden.
00:00:25.260 Am I right?
00:00:26.160 Am I right, huh?
00:00:27.600 But he didn't really land a blow on him.
00:00:30.000 The best part about the hearing, as far as I'm concerned,
00:00:33.400 came from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
00:00:36.260 Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat senator, but he's an old buddy of RFK Jr.,
00:00:41.340 so it puts him in a really tough position,
00:00:43.000 because Kennedy's confirmation is supposed to be party line.
00:00:46.360 This is going to be the white shirts versus the red shirts.
00:00:50.100 That's going to be the vote.
00:00:51.360 Except that Bobby Kennedy is a Democrat, and he's from the Kennedy family,
00:00:55.900 which is one of the most prominent Democrat families in the country,
00:00:58.000 and he's got longstanding Democrat ties, one of them apparently to Sheldon Whitehouse.
00:01:02.740 To me, the signal that Sheldon Whitehouse will vote for Kennedy, if it comes down to it,
00:01:08.440 if enough Republicans defect, came in his refusal to ask Kennedy a question.
00:01:15.020 So if you were just listening to the tone, or even just listening to Whitehouse's words,
00:01:18.360 you would say, oh man, this guy's really going after Kennedy.
00:01:21.440 Man, he's got a lot of complaints about Kennedy.
00:01:23.280 But notice what he didn't do. He didn't ask him any questions.
00:01:26.300 All the other Democrat senators were trying to catch Bobby Kennedy in a screw-up.
00:01:30.720 Whitehouse opened his questioning. He said,
00:01:33.520 and listen, I've got a lot of concerns. You're just going to have to listen to me,
00:01:37.280 which was a great gift to Kennedy, because there's no gotcha moment there.
00:01:40.640 So to me, that was Whitehouse tipping his hand, saying, look, I'll let this go through.
00:01:45.300 If you lose Collins, if you lose Murkowski, if you lose McConnell,
00:01:48.440 if it really comes down to it, I'll vote for him. The most ridiculous part of the hearing was this
00:01:55.200 woman, what's her name, Tina something, some senatrix that no one had ever heard of. 1.00
00:01:59.680 And she went after Bobby Kennedy, because Kennedy was criticizing SSRIs on some podcast or in some
00:02:08.000 paper or sometime years ago. He pointed out that he's got members of his family who are on SSRIs,
00:02:12.720 there's mental illness in the Kennedy family. And he said, there's some real questions about it.
00:02:16.860 I mean, now it's what is it? One in five American women are on SSRIs. And they've got all of these
00:02:22.000 negative side effects. And it's just, I don't know, there are a lot of questions about it.
00:02:25.880 So this woman goes out there, she says, in this unhinged rant, screeching, screaming, 0.99
00:02:30.280 not seeming like the most stable person. She said, and I've been on SSRIs. And I'm essentially,
00:02:35.440 I'm the proof that SSRIs work. I think that undercut her argument. Okay, just judging by her line
00:02:41.180 of questioning, I would probably ban SSRIs from ever being used anywhere in the country.
00:02:45.640 Otherwise, you had softball questions from the Republicans. We're waiting to see if any
00:02:50.900 Republicans were going to tip their their hat hand that maybe they weren't going to vote for
00:02:54.560 Kennedy. It all went perfectly fine. They were starting to get into the weeds, even the way
00:02:59.360 Elizabeth Warren is pretty tough in these hearings. Even the way Elizabeth Warren was talking, 0.99
00:03:03.680 she seemed to be questioning him as if he were going to get the job to try to get him on record to
00:03:08.660 say, you know, will you go work for the pharmaceutical industry after you leave HHS? To which Kennedy
00:03:14.600 replied, no, they hate me. There's no, no, don't worry about that lady. And she was trying to nail 1.00
00:03:19.980 him on some other things. But it was, it was as if it were already a fait accompli that Kennedy were
00:03:25.000 going to get the job. So I felt fairly confident going into the hearing that Kennedy would be
00:03:31.720 approved, especially after Pete Hegseth sailed through. Hegseth was really the canary in the
00:03:35.580 coal mine for the controversial nominees. Now we're getting to Tulsi, Kash Patel and Bobby Kennedy.
00:03:40.560 I think Kennedy is going to make it through, barring some unforeseen last minute surprise.
00:03:47.100 And I don't know what kind of last minute surprise is there with Kennedy. We've heard about the
00:03:50.080 affairs. We've heard about his heroin addiction. We've heard about all the kind of crazy stories
00:03:53.780 over the years that hasn't tanked his nomination. So then the last question for the Republicans is,
00:03:59.040 will Kennedy be good for us? Do we, do we conservatives want Kennedy to be the HHS secretary?
00:04:04.460 And the big holdup was over abortion. Kennedy is a Kennedy. He is a Democrat. He has been 0.51
00:04:11.300 pro-abortion for his whole public life. The Democrats really tried to nail him on this
00:04:17.740 in order to drive a wedge between Kennedy and the Republicans and pry away some GOP votes,
00:04:21.760 not the squishy votes, but actually the conservative votes. And Kennedy said,
00:04:25.000 I think every abortion is a tragedy. I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy.
00:04:29.520 And this contradicts previous statements he's said, but what we know about Kennedy is that
00:04:34.800 Kennedy is at least ostensibly a Catholic. And Kennedy is a Democrat. He comes from a big
00:04:41.500 Democrat family. And those two things are in opposition, especially on the issue of abortion,
00:04:47.360 which the Catholic church teaches is not just one issue among many, but is a non-negotiable
00:04:52.440 fundamental right from which all the other rights emanate and on which the other rights depend.
00:04:57.400 I know for a fact Kennedy used to go to the church that my grandmother went to for 60 years. Okay. So
00:05:03.100 I know that he actually does take it somewhat seriously. And it seems that between his two
00:05:06.860 conflicting religions of liberalism and Catholicism on this issue now, especially with the political
00:05:12.100 pressure from the Republicans, he seems to be leaning more into the latter, which is good. And I feel
00:05:18.500 confident, especially with this administration, the most pro-life administration ever that Kennedy will
00:05:24.500 protect life at HHS, especially knowing some of the other people who are, who are in the department.
00:05:28.420 So overall, I think a big win for Kennedy, big win for the Republicans, Democrats hardest hit.
00:05:32.880 We will go into these specific moments and what this means. And the one, the one big mistake Bobby
00:05:38.380 Kennedy made during the hearings tomorrow on the Michael Knowles show, 830 AM central daily wire plus,
00:05:45.040 and you can get it afterward here on YouTube.