On Thursday, during congressional testimony, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was questioned on his past remarks promoting the “re-parenting” of Black children being treated with mental health medication.

Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Alabama), one of several lawmakers who questioned Kennedy during the hearing, referred to a 2024 interview in which he made the comments.

In that podcast interview, Kennedy claimed that “every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence.” He suggested the best way to treat children in those situations is to have them be “re-parented” into a community where they will have no access to technology.

“There is a lot to unpack in that comment,” Sewell said, asking Kennedy whether he himself had ever parented or re-parented a Black child.

Kennedy denied having made the comments at all, accusing Sewell of “just making stuff up” and claiming he doesn’t “know what re-parenting means.”

“I am absolutely not making this up,” Sewell said.

Sewell noted that there is a “long and painful history of separating Black children from their families” in the United States, pointing to the country’s centuries of enslaving Black people, the Jim Crow era, and current disparities in modern institutions.

“For you to suggest that Black families are not capable of raising their own children is deeply offensive,” she added.

Kennedy’s denial is disproven by video evidence of him making the comments in question.

In addition to the comments Sewell cited, the YouTube interview shows Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, suggesting changing the Peace Corps program to allow re-parenting, which would involve sending children to camps to fix their supposed problems.

“The basis, the model for this, is a community that I had direct contact with because a family member of mine went there. And it’s called San Patrignano, in Italy,” Kennedy says in the interview.

The program he refers to, however, has been widely criticized, including in a 2020 Netflix documentary that showed people at the program were allegedly held in shackles or imprisoned in cages.

“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,” Kennedy asserted in the 2024 interview.

“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,” wrote The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson, reacting to the House hearing. “That alone is extremely troubling, given Kennedy’s position as health secretary and his lack of any kind of medical expertise.”

During Kennedy’s testimony, he was also asked to address criticisms of his management style at HHS, including his use of department funds to produce a video featuring himself and Kid Rock in a home gym.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon), who noted that Kennedy had “flatfunded” child care aid as HHS secretary, questioned whether the video was a good use of department funds.

“How does it enhance the health and well-being of children to spend HHS’s limited resources and taxpayer money on a video of you drinking milk in a hot tub with Kid Rock, and how much did it cost to prepare and produce this video?” Bonamici asked.

“Whatever it cost, I consider it waste, fraud and abuse, and that’s money that should have been invested in our nation’s children,” she added.

Kennedy tried to justify the expenditure. “So many people have come up to me to say, ‘That inspired me to workout,'” he maintained.

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