Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start — I want to put aside my written statement, for a moment, and address one of the points that was brought up — I think an important point by the Ranking Member — that this body ought to be concerning itself with issues that impact directly the American people: the rising price of groceries, 76 percent over the past two years for basic food stuff, the war in Ukraine, inflation issues, the border issues, many other issues that concern us all as a nation. We can’t do that without the First Amendment, without debate.

When I gave my speech — my announcement speech — in Boston two months ago…I talked about all those issues. I focused on groceries. I focused on the fact that working class people can no longer afford to live in this country. I talked about inflation — all the issues that deeply concern you, and that you’ve devoted your career to alleviating those issues. Five minutes into my speech, when I was talking about Paul Revere, YouTube deplatformed me. I didn’t talk about vaccines in that speech. I didn’t talk about anything that was a verboten subject. I just was talking about my campaign and things — the conversation that we ought to be having with each other as Americans.

But I was shut down. And that is why the First Amendment’s important. Debate — congenial, respectful debate — is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our Democracy. We need to be talking to each other.

Now, this is a letter that many of you signed — many of my fellow Democrats. I’ve spent my life in this party. I’ve devoted my life to the values of this party. This — 102 people signed this. This itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.

The charges in this — and by the way, censorship is antithetical to our party. It was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, to Harry Truman, to Thomas Jefferson, as the Chairman referred to. It is the basis for democracy — it sets us apart from all of the previous forms of government. We need to be able to talk. And the First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.

And I was censored — not just by the Democratic administration — I was censored by the Trump administration. I was the first person censored by the — as the Chairman pointed out — by the Biden administration, two days after it came into office…And by the way, they had to invent a new word, called “malinformation,” to censor people like me. There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. Everything I put on that account was cited and sourced with peer reviewed publications or government databases. Nobody has ever pointed to a single piece of misinformation that I published. I was removed for something they called “malinformation.” Malinformation is information that is true, but is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear. And it’s antithetical to the values of our country. //

Now I want to say something, I think, that’s more important, and it goes directly to what you talked about, Ranking Member, which is the need, this toxic polarization, that is destroying our country today. And how do we deal with that? We are more — this kind of division — is more dangerous for our country than anytime since the American Civil War. And how do we deal with that? How are we gonna — every Democrat on this committee believes that we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you, you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem.

We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity — to this chamber and to the rest of America. But it has to start here. //

This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to villify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion. And above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times. And that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities. Thank you very much.