The Dictatorship
RFK Jr. tried to apologize for this horribly racist remark —without actually owning it
In an episode of the “High Level Conversations” podcast that premiered on June 30, 2024then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told host 19Keys (also known as Jibrial Muhammad), “Every Black kid is now, just as a standard, put on Adderall, [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors]benzos, which are known to induce violence.” Kennedy, who later ended his campaign, endorsed President Donald Trump and later became his health and human services secretary, went on to reveal a dystopian vision: “And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”
And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.
robert f. kennedy jr. in 2024 speaking about black children prescribed aderrall
Appropriately, Kennedy’s threat of reparenting Black children on “wellness farms” was met last week with intense pushback when he testified multiple times on Capitol Hill last week. Sen. Angela AlsobrooksD-Md.; Sen. Rafael WarnockD-Ga.; and Rep. Terri SewellD-Ala., all expressed outrage. California Gov. Gavin Newsoma Democrat who’s considered likely to run for president in 2028, also demanded answers from Kennedy regarding his horribly racist remark.
Initially, Kennedy vehemently denied making it. But on Wednesday, he offered a non-apologetic apology.
“I would have to see, hear that recording,” Kennedy told Alsobrooks after she quoted his remark to him. “I have no memory of saying anything like that.”
“If I said it, I apologize but I’d have to see the transcript,” he added.
As public health professionals, we demand that apology, even if Kennedy manages to avoid looking at the transcript. His words were offensive and inexcusable.
Kennedy misrepresented studies that have made some connections between violent behaviors and varied psychiatric medications in children. New-age antipsychotic medications, in fact, are shown to reduce aggressionnot induce aggression. And Black children are often underdiagnosed, if not misdiagnosed. Sewell, to her credit, used her time questioning Kennedy to call out a truth far more nefarious: the long history of the government separating families of color. To be clear, we are not talking about separations that were the collateral damage of other policies, but explicit policies of separation.
From slavery to Indian boarding school to immigration enforcement policies to even mass incarceration and the rules governing child protective service agencies, removing children from their families — if not also their culture, language and history — is what America does. Kennedy’s remark about Black children being reparented, then, was not pulled out of thin air. It was his expressed desire to repeat some of the worst of this country’s history.
The period of enslavement in the United States, during which half of all children were ripped from their families, begets a still-visible pattern for the removal of Black children from parental care. Indeed, half of all children held in juvenile facilities before or after criminal trial are Black, while half of all Black children will have an investigation opened by child protective services. As a result, Black children are removed from their homes at a disproportionate rate relative to their peers. The idea, then, to reparent an untold number of Black children may sound like an isolated and strange suggestion from a political candidate-turned-government public health official, but our various branches of government have been removing Black children from their families.
But not just Black children. At this point we are more likely to think of Latino families when we think of children being separated from their parents. In 2018, the Trump administration made it a felony to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and, in a cruel effort to discourage Central American migrants from traveling north, the administration separated hundreds of parents from their children. Because no investment was made in tracking the families, many of those parents have yet to be reunited with their children. And while family separation as a border enforcement policy was halted that summer due to public pressure, mass deportation efforts across the country have continued to remove parents from their homes, forcing some children into the same child protective services system that have separated so many Black families.
There’s more history, still. Church- and state-run boarding schools resulted in the removal of more than 100,000 Indigenous children from their families between the late 19th and early 20th century. This reparenting attempt to force Indigenous youth to adopt the morals and character of a “superior” culture resulted in a host of negative psychological-, cognitive- and health-related outcomes. The horrors of those schools have been made evident in the unidentified remains that have been unearthed during recent land excavations. The inability of so many Indigenous children to make it out alive, and the schools’ pattern of prohibiting cultural expression, has resulted in intergenerational trauma within Indigenous communities.
Life in the home, with parents, siblings, cousins and larger community, is where children learn the language of their culture. And, perhaps most pertinent to the current discussion, it is where they learn about the power structures that have oppressed their people and learn how to do something about them.
Children of color deserve to live in homes where these traditions live on, in communities where they are seen and in a country where their existence is not perceived as a threat. They should be in the capable hands of parents and families who are not written off as negligent for following a pediatrician’s advice. As public health research has shown time and time again, individuals are best able to thrive when they are allowed to be with their families — families that are healthy, happy and whole.
These children don’t need to be reparented. They already have exactly the parents they need.
Riana Elyse Anderson, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and community psychologist, associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and affiliate with Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in Partnership with National Black Child Development Institute.
William Lopez, Ph.D., is a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is the author of “Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance,” and “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid.” Lopez is a regular media contributor to public discussions on deportation, diversity and Latino culture. He is on the boards of Health in Partnership and The Latino Newsletter.
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices rose, and stock markets dropped in shaky trading worldwide Wednesday after President Donald Trump raised doubts about the temporary truce in the war with Iran.
The S&P 500 fell as much as 1.1% after Trump said the ceasefire agreement was “over,” but the index then trimmed its loss to 0.3% after Trump said recent fighting did not mean a return to full-scale war. They’re his latest mixed messages on what will happen with the war, which threatens to worsen inflation for the world.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 576 points, or 1.1%, while the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2% after erasing an early loss.
The action was stronger in the oil market, where the price for a barrel of Brent crude climbed 5.2% to $78.02 and briefly topped $80.
That’s still below its peak from earlier in the war, when the price for the most actively traded contract reached nearly $120. But the jump is unsettling because oil prices had just dropped back to where they were before the war.
The worry is that a continuation of the war will block the Strait of Hormuz and prevent the delivery of crude from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. That could worsen inflationwhich economists expected would ease with oil prices, and in turn force the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates.
Higher rates can keep a lid on inflation, but they also slow the economy and hurt prices for all kinds of investments.
On Wall Street, stocks of companies in the housing industry helped lead the way lower. They were hurt by worries that rising Treasury yields in the bond market will mean higher rates for mortgages and chill the industry.
Builders FirstSource, which sells countertops, windows and other building supplies, fell 5.4%. Homebuilders PulteGroup fell 5.4%, and D.R. Horton sank 4.6%.
Companies with big fuel bills also sank. American Airlines lost 4%, and cruise operator Carnival fell 3.9%.
Helping to offset those losses was a steadying for some influential stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry. They’ve been under pressure in recent weeks on worries that their prices shot too high and that AI may not produce enough productivity and profits to make all the investments in chips and data centers worth it.
Their swings carry a lot of weight on Wall Street because AI stocks have grown into some of the U.S. market’s biggest, giving their movements more effect on the S&P 500 than other stocks.
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Nvidia rose 3.7%, for example, and was the strongest force pushing upward on the S&P 500 because it’s the largest stock on Wall Street.
Close behind was Broadcom, which climbed 4.8% after Apple announced a multiyear commitment where Broadcom will design and produce custom components for its products. Apple said the agreement’s value could top $30 billion.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 21.14 points to 7,482.71. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 576.76 to 52,348.39, and the Nasdaq composite rose 51.96 to 25,870.65.
In the bond market, Treasury yields rose with the price of oil. The yield on the 10-year Treasury briefly got near 4.60% before pulling back to 4.57%. That’s up from 4.55% late Tuesday and from just 3.97% before the war with Iran began.
In stock markets abroad, European markets turned sharply lower after Trump said, “For me, I think it’s over” about the status of the ceasefire. He added that U.S. representatives can continue negotiations, “but I think they’re wasting their time.” Germany’s DAX lost 2.2%, and France’s CAC 40 sank 2.2%.
In Asia, South Korea’s Kospi dropped 5.3% and continued its sharp swings amid seesawing worries and euphoria about the AI stocks that dominate its market.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was an outlier and rose 3%. Shares that trade there of Chinese AI startup Zhipu, known also as Z.ai and traded as Knowledge Atlas Technology, jumped 13.4%.
A six-month lock-up period for “cornerstone” investors following its January trading debut in Hong Kong expires this week. China National Radio reported late Tuesday that nearly 70% of Zhipu’s cornerstone investors are committed to stay on, despite previous worries that the lock-up period expiration could trigger a sell-off.
Zhipu’s share price has risen more than 1,300% since its debut.
___
AP Business Writers Matt Ott, Chan Ho-him and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed to this report.
In the three weeks since Donald Trump declared that a “deal” between the United States and Iran was “complete,” the president and his team have been dogged by a series of difficult questions. Why does Iran have to make so few concessions under the memorandum of understanding? Why have prominent members of both parties slammed the agreement as inadequate? Why is Trump’s deal so much worse than the Obama-era Iran deal?
Now, however, the world is confronting a qualitatively different kind of question: Does Trump’s deal still exist?
On Tuesday, U.S. Central Command announced a new round of strikes against Iran, following reports of attacks on merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump administration simultaneously said it was reinstating sanctions on Tehran, which had been eased as part of last month’s MOU.
Soon after, Iran’s military said it had fired missiles and drones targeting U.S. military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait in retaliation for the strikes confirmed by CENTCOM hours earlier.
As for the tenuous ceasefire and peace process, it’s increasingly difficult to be optimistic. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday from the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump called Iranians “scum” and “evil people.” He added, “Frankly, we’ve wasted a lot of time with them. I think we should just do our business.”
The Republican didn’t elaborate as to what that “business” entails, but in context, he appeared to be referring to additional military strikes.
And then he kept going.
Asked specifically whether the ceasefire is over and the peace framework is dead, the American president told reporters, “To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. … They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people. … As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. … As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. … They’re liars. … There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo.”
Right on cue, oil prices jumped and stock market indexes started falling. There’s no great mystery as to why: If the ceasefire is over and the peace framework is dead, then we’re right back to where we were when the hot war was still underway.
The trouble, however, is that Trump is erratic and easily confused. It’s effectively impossible to know whether he’ll take the opposite position at any given moment, opening the door to new diplomatic talks or making matters vastly worse.
Either way, the truce appears to be unraveling.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy isn’t officially over yet, but as the Maine Democrat hemorrhages supporthis campaign has canceled fundraising events and scheduled ad buys. What’s more, Platner’s team acknowledged Tuesday that it had reached out to the Maine Democratic Party to discuss the process for possibly replacing him on the ballot.
That process, should it proceed, will apparently not be smooth: State party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson accused members of Platner’s team late Tuesday of “trying to put their thumb on the scale” of the process to find his replacement, even though the scandal-plagued candidate has yet to withdraw.
The Maine Democratic Party chief added that Platner would have “no role” in the selection process.
In the meantime, as the candidate faces new allegations of sexual misconduct, Platner’s would-be Democratic successors are taking unsubtle steps to make clear they’re interested in getting the nod for the general election race against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
As for what to expect if Platner exits, Axios reported that Republicans “are preparing to welcome a potential Graham Platner replacement in Maine’s Senate race with $8 million in negative ads, aiming to introduce a new Democratic nominee to voters on their own terms before Democrats can.”
* It’s too late for Maryland to redraw its district map ahead of the midterms, but the Democratic-led legislature is moving forward with plans for a special legislative session next month to overhaul its congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election cycle.
* In Colorado’s Republican gubernatorial primaryVictor Marx, a controversial religious nonprofit leader, is ahead of state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer by roughly 2,000 votes in the latest tallies, but it might be a while before the race is officially called.
* Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida has faced a great many scandals of late, but last week, one of his primary rivals filed a formal legal complaint alleging that Mills improperly notarized his candidate documents, making him ineligible for the ballot. (Mills did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment about the allegations.)
* As if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t have enough troublesthe Republican Senate candidate is now facing mockery after spending July Fourth in Europe with a woman who is not his estranged wife.
* And a year after congressional Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill to significant partisan fanfare, it’s Democrats who are eager to tell voters about the regressive package ahead of November’s elections.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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- Jordan Wood joins crowded Maine Senate race
- In 60 years of independence, Botswana has refuted the authoritarian development myth
- Trump’s escalating attacks on Iran pose risks at home
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- Nirav Shah, governor primary runner-up, jumps into race to replace Platner
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