RFK Jr. Lashes Out Over His Own Quote on Re-Parenting Black Kids

Two years ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that Black children prescribed depression or ADHD medication should be “re-parented.” When confronted with that statement on Thursday by Representative Terri Sewell—a Black Democrat from Alabama—he denied ever saying it.

“In a 2024 podcast interview, you suggested that Black children on ADHD medication should be ‘re-parented.’ You said: ‘Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,’ and that those children are going to have to go somewhere to get ‘re-parented,’” Sewell said. “Have you ever ‘re-parented,’ or parented, a Black child?”

RFK Jr. immediately went on the defensive.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it,” he replied.

“It’s just a yes or no answer,” Sewell responded.

“I doubt that I said that phrase, no. Not gonna answer something that I didn’t say.”

“You absolutely said it.”

“I’d like to hear the recording.”

Kennedy is completely wrong here, and he said what Sewell is accusing him of saying nearly verbatim. Here’s the recording:

“My Peace Corps program is going to be wellness farms, rehabilitation facilities that I’m gonna start in rural areas all over the country, where people—any American—can go for free,” Kennedy said, painting a utopian picture for his solution to the prescription drug epidemic. “Psychiatric drugs, which every Black kid is now just standard put on—Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence—and those kids are gonna 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.”

Even with the utopian framing, it’s impossible to ignore that Kennedy is pushing for Black children to be separated from their families and taken to farms to do God knows what—all because they’ve been prescribed depression or ADHD meds. That alone is extremely troubling given Kennedy’s position as health secretary and his lack of any kind of medical expertise. The fact that he denied even saying it during a congressional hearing—when there is clear evidence proving otherwise—is just as troubling.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quoted the fake Bible verse from Samuel L. Jackson’s monologue as Jules Winfield in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, apparently believing it was completely real.  

The moment came at one of Hegseth’s Pentagon sermons on Wednesday morning. 

“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17,” Hegseth erroneously said, saying the lead planner of the Combat Search And Rescue operation in Iran shared it with him.

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads … “the path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Almost every single line from Hegseth’s prayer is ripped from Jackson’s iconic recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 in Tarantino’s film, not the prophet Ezekiel as ordained by God.

Here’s what the original verse in the Bible actually reads:

I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them.

That’s it. The flowery language, the allusions to destruction of evil—all come from Tarantino. 

But if that wasn’t bad enough, Hegseth added his own spin on a Bible verse that was already fake. Compare Hegseth’s monologue to the version in Pulp Fiction: 

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. 

It’s hard to parse how incredibly stupid this is. Why is the former Fox News alcoholic turned defense secretary even holding sermons at the Pentagon in the first place? And no one thought to let him know that the verse he so poetically interpreted was a blasphemous one? Did he even care? And to make matters even worse, this blatant display of religious ignorance comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV for his opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. 

Donald Trump reportedly discussed the AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ with an adviser before he posted it to Truth Social.

The president sparked national outrage among his base on Sunday when he shared an image of himself as a haloed messiah cupping light into a bedridden individual (who, by apparent coincidence, looked almost identical to comedian and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart).

But the idea may not have been his own. Trump reportedly discussed the picture with Bill Pulte, the controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, before he shared it online, insiders told Axios.

Pulte and Trump were both in south Florida over the weekend. Pulte reportedly saw the image first and decided to share it with the president.

“Everyone thought it was a joke,” one person that advised the president about the image told Axios.

The Christian faction of the MAGA movement did not find it funny, however. Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: While Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)

Trump deleted the image the day after he put it online, telling reporters that he believed it portrayed him as a doctor healing people.

It was a particularly bad time for the president to make a religious flub. That Sunday was Easter Sunday for Eastern Orthodox Christians. The previous Sunday, which was Easter for Catholics and Protestants, Trump threatened to completely annihilate Iranian civilization and wrote on Truth Social, “Praise be to Allah.”

Trump is also in the midst of a feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings by advocating for world peace. Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his “State of the World” address. Since then, the White House has issued several barbs directed at the pontiff, including claims that the religious leader is “weak on crime.”

Pope Leo XIV continued preaching a message of peace Thursday, telling an audience in Bamenda, Cameroon, that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

The pope is touring Africa, and delivered his speech in a country in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people and displaced over 500,000. But the comments also come just days after President Trump, upset that the pope vocally opposes the war in Iran, called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

Though the pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he condemned leaders who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

It’s a continuation of the pope’s response to Trump on Monday, when he told reporters that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.”

“We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker,” the pope said on Monday. “I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.”

One would think that a man who claims he ended multiple wars wouldn’t get offended if the pope calls for peace, but Trump has not engaged in any religious introspection this week, instead inciting a backlash from his Christian supporters by posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which he later deleted, and then reposting a picture of Jesus hugging him. He probably knows deep down that he is actually a major source of conflict in the world right now.

What is it with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and roadkill? The guy can’t seem to get enough of the stuff!

A new biography called RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, by Isabel Vincent, includes a journal entry describing an instance where the health secretary left his kids in the car so he could cut the sexual organs off a dead raccoon on the side of the road, TMZ reported Wednesday. 

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members turned out to be,” the journal entry read. 

This is hardly the first gag-worthy story to surface involving Kennedy and dead animals. 

In August 2024, Kennedy revealed an incident 10 years earlier, when he’d picked up a bear cub carcass off the side of the road, and then ditched the body in Central Park when he didn’t have time to take it home. Before he abandoned the body, he mutilated it to make it look like it had been hit by a biker because he thought it would be funny.

In a 2012 interview, Kennedy’s daughter Kick spoke about a wild excursion the family had taken to Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, when she was 6 years old. Kick claimed that her father had used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a beached whale. He then proceeded to tie it to the roof of his family’s minivan and drive it five hours back to Mount Kisco, New York. 

And ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, his daughter Caroline wrote a letter to the Senate describing how he used to put baby chickens and mice in the blender to make food for his hawks. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets,” Caroline wrote, “because he himself is a predator.”

When the first dead animal story comes out, you cringe. When the second one comes out, you gag. When the third one comes out, you seriously question the state that our country is in. But when the fourth one comes out, well, all you can do is laugh.