Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called out establishment media attacks against him in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, saying that he believes “it’s always ironic how the liberal media weaponizes woke cancel culture to safeguard the interests of Big Pharma and Big Food.”
Kennedy was responding to a baseless onslaught after several publications misquoted him Friday in his use of the word “retarded” to evoke the proper name of a New York state mental facility.
The deluge of condemnation came after reports of the Secretary’s remarks to a gathering of the staff of the Food and Drug Administration at the agency’s headquarters in White Oak, Maryland.
Mediaite spun his appearance with the headline: “FDA Staffers Dish on Unhinged Meeting With RFK Jr. Where He Called Special Olympics Athletes ‘Retarded.’”
The Daily Beast headlined it: “Staffers Walk Out of RFK Jr.’s Slur-Ridden Speech About Deep State.”
Kennedy told Breitbart News the coverage is yet another demonstration of the axiom by 17th century satirist Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”
The mischaracterization of Kennedy’s remarks came from the 33-minute mark of his 40-minute speech where he was explaining his passion for solving autism and other mental health issues. There, according to the speech’s official transcript, Kennedy said:
Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school. So, I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism. We, you know, we prided ourselves on Special Olympics about being able to take care of every child, no matter how.
The HHS Secretary said Politico reporters first mischaracterized his remarks, writing he’d used a disparaging term for the mentally disabled. Early versions of the story were corrected after Kennedy’s staff repeatedly complained to editors there. However, using anonymous sources, Politico is still reporting:
“The remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience, who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. By the end of the event, billed as a welcome from the new commissioner, Marty Makary, several FDA staffers had walked out of the rooms where the speech was being broadcast…”
In fact, Kennedy was talking about the New York state facility in Wassaic that’s gone by several names over the decades, including for many years the “Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded.” It was founded in 1931. Other historical names could be considered equally outdated, including the school for “Feeble Minded Children” and the “School for Mental Defectives.”
As late as 1973, the New York Times was calling it the “School for the Retarded” in its headlines.
“I was referring to an institution,” Kennedy told Breitbart News. “They turned it into a vile slur of a vulnerable group that my family has spent generations championing.”
The HHS Secretary was no doubt referring to his aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics in 1968. His uncle President John F. Kennedy also pushed research into intellectual disability, including the establishment of the “President’s Panel on Mental Retardation.” The word “retarded” eventually fell out of favor as a medical term.
Politico, meanwhile, clarified its coverage of RFK Jr.’s remarks in a mid-afternoon Friday post on X:
“For the record: This article and headline have been updated to make clear that Kennedy was referring to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded where he worked in high school, not using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities.”
By then, however, the out of context reporting had taken flight in damning copycat headlines, tweets and comments under stories featured on news websites.
More generally, this fake attack on Kennedy comes amid a broader debate on the use of the word “retarded” and whether it should be acceptable. While Kennedy’s use of the word does not seem to fit into that debate–he was literally using the proper name of a major institution when he said the word–podcaster Joe Rogan has argued it should be culturally acceptable to use the word in a manner to describe undesirable things. Rogan has called the word’s renewed acceptance culturally in that framing as a cultural victory against cancel culture:
Even with its clarification, the Politico story and others painted a negative picture of the Kennedy FDA appearance. Its Friday story also implied Kennedy insulted his audience by telling FDA employees they were the “sock puppet” of industry and that he was a conspiracy theorist for saying the “Deep State is real.”
According to the official transcript of the speech, Kennedy was referring to the immense influence the food and drug lobby has had on the FDA as well as its revolving door of directors who have come from and gone back to those industries.
Kennedy told attendees: “It (the FDA) was created out of the most idealistic impulses. But it, like every agency, became captured by the industry and at one point really became a sock puppet of the industry it was supposed to regulate.”
Kennedy laughed when Breitbart News asked him about his emotional reaction to the coverage. He’s had to develop a thick skin. “It’s not the first time,” he told Breitbart News.
Kennedy has long been attacked by the establishment media, even before he abandoned the Democrat Party to first run as an independent for president last year and then endorse now-President Donald Trump.
Loosely portrayed for years as an “anti-vaxxer,” Kennedy continues to maintain he’s not opposed to shots but is for “safe vaccines” and wants them studied more thoroughly.
After a 2019 speech at a rally in Washington he was called an antisemite because he said the state surveillance ability with modern technology was far more powerful than the secret annex Anne Frank had hiding from the Nazis.
When he suggested the COVID virus was hatched from a lab in Wuhan, the Scientific American labeled Kennedy an anti-Asian racist and “known conspiracy theorist.”
Legacy Media took him to task for arguing that scientific papers showed COVID-19 was attacking certain races disproportionately, specifically blacks and Caucasians, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese had higher immunity. Kennedy later had to refute reports that he was hatching a bioweapon conspiracy, saying he never implied one was engineered to target groups.
Other disparaging stories in 2024 reported Kennedy went looking for a job with a future Kamala Harris administration, was rebuffed, and settled for Donald Trump. Kennedy has said it was never about a job, which would pay much less than what he made as an environmental attorney, but who would commit to bringing the USA back to good health.
Any other version could be nothing further from the truth. Ironically, for many years he was a harsh Donald Trump critic.
“Every morning I prayed for 19 years,” he’s said in several settings. “I have been praying every day when I get out of bed that God will put me in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic so we can restore health to our children. And God sent me Donald Trump.”
Kennedy added in his conversation with Breitbart News about all this that he was “lucky” he didn’t mention the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) or the United Negro College Fund in his speech at the FDA. “The media outrage would have been predictable,” he said.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.