Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized Wednesday for past comments he made about “re-parenting” black children even though he was recorded doing so, but he did not make those comments.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) asked Kennedy if he could admit that he planned to send black children to rural rehabilitation centers where they could be “re-parented.” Rep. Terry Sewell (D-Ala.) brought up these past comments when Kennedy appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee last week.
In both cases, Kennedy denied ever making those comments, even saying Sewell didn’t know what the term “re-parent” meant.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy appeared on the “High Level Conversations” podcast in which he said, “Psychiatric drugs, which every black child is now just standard, Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to incite violence, and those kids will have a chance to go somewhere and not be re-parented on a screen in the community; you have to actually talk to people.”
“I’ve got to see that recording, I’ve got to hear it,” Kennedy told Alsobrooks after reading her past comments. “I have no recollection of saying anything like that.”
“But if you ask me what I think, I don’t believe that every black child should be re-parented on a welfare farm or whatever, and I’ve never believed that,” he added. “I’m telling you, I don’t believe it. That’s not my vision for our country.”
“I’m sorry if I said this, but I have to see the transcript,” Kennedy said.
“Prior to his time as secretary, he described these communities as places where individuals, especially young people, could take a form of ‘reparenting’ to deal with rising rates of isolation, mental health challenges, and depression,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill.
“In psychotherapeutic terms, recovery involves the development of emotional regulation, discipline, boundaries, and self-worth that may not have been established in childhood, through ongoing care, accountability, and supportive relationships,” they added.
Kennedy has a history of making comments based on race. During the pandemic, he shared a conspiracy theory at a dinner in New York City that the COVID-19 pandemic was aimed at protecting ethnically Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
“We’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into racially targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19 — there’s an argument that it’s racially targeted. COVID-19 disproportionately attacks certain races,” Kennedy said in the recording, adding that the virus may have been developed to specifically target black and white people.
He later denied endorsing the theory, writing on social media, “I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was targeted to protect Jews. I correctly pointed out – during an off-the-record conversation – that the US and other governments are developing racially targeted biological weapons.”
“I do not believe and have never implied that the racial impact was deliberately engineered,” he added.
He had previously suggested that black people should not follow the same vaccination schedule as others because “their immune systems are better than ours,” he stood up when confronted by Alsobrooks last year.
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