RFK's plan to make America healthy again? Send people with mental health conditions to farms

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "make America healthy again" motto is meant to convey that he is sincerely interested in helping Americans avoid getting sick in the first place. During his Senate confirmation hearing for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, all Kennedy and his newfound Republican supporters could talk about was how in love he is with "prevention." "We should be moving to value-based care, which includes prevention," Kennedy confidently declared. The committee chair, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, described Kennedy as "passionate" about "preventing and managing chronic disease, improving health outcomes, and reducing health costs."

It should have always been self-evident that Kennedy is not pro-prevention, since he built his career as a vaccine denialist. Yet much of the press seems to have been snookered. So it's especially noteworthy that Kennedy kicked off his new role with a broad attack on drugs people use to prevent depression, diabetes, and other such conditions.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that echoes Kennedy's lie that he wants to "make America healthy again." HHS is ordered to "assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs." But it's clear from the context that no good faith assessment is intended, as the order repeatedly cites a preordained conclusion that there is an "over-utilization of medication" and an "over-reliance on medication and treatments."

Kennedy has long had it out for these drugs, and repeatedly argues that the only prevention most people need is better willpower. Kennedy occasionally tosses a red herring about "environmental" causes of illness, but mostly he frames the issue as a matter of personal failing, focusing on people's diets and exercise habits as the "root causes" of nearly all illnesses. He regards anti-depressants as an "addictive drug," falsely claiming people have "a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they have getting off of heroin." 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Instead of letting people have drugs that keep them healthy, Kennedy's "solution" looks very much like punishing them for perceived personal failures by putting people into labor camps, which he euphemistically calls "wellness farms." As Mother Jones reported in July, people would be relegated to these "farms," where they would be denied their prescription medications. They would also be barred from having cell phones, computers, or other means to contact the outside world. They would be put to work full-time, presumably for little or no pay, growing organic food. He claims this process would "reparent" supposedly broken people, again framing mental health issues as not a medical issue, but a personal failure. 

The racism underlying this vision of labor camps isn't just vibes, either. Kennedy has explicitly argued that Black kids need to "get reparented," ideally in a "rural area" where they are denied most contact with family and friends. 

"Treating" Black youth by making them do unpaid agricultural work isn't exactly subtle, as far as racist fantasies go. This is why it's so frustrating to see mainstream journalists, as Reuters did Friday, blithely argue there's a "clash" between Kennedy's "long to-do list" and Trump's alleged eagerness to cut back on federal spending. When it comes to Trump's fascist inclinations to "purify" a country he repeatedly describes as having "bad genes" and "poison" in its "blood," price is no object. Trump has been bragging about his plans to create a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay for immigrants he wishes to purge. While money is being illegally slashed from research, foreign aid, and regulatory agencies, Trump openly seeks to boost funding and other resources to his plan to deport millions of immigrants, both documented and undocumented. 

Trump is hyper-focused on the racial "purity" aspects of his fascistic vision, but Kennedy's contempt for people he views as physically unfit fits well with the larger MAGA agenda. Fascism is always an ideology based on the belief that modern society has become weak and degenerate, and that the cure is purging certain people. Along with racialized minorities, fascists typically target queer people, so-called cosmopolitans who have feminist or socially liberal views, and people with disabilities. Kennedy doesn't even bother to hide his dehumanizing view of those he deems "unhealthy," a group he estimates is over half of Americans. "A healthy person has a thousand dreams," he declared during his hearing. "A sick person has only one," he added, reducing those with diabetes or depression to people who have no lives. He didn't call people with imperfect health the "Untermenschen," but the implication lingered throughout the hearing, as he repeatedly framed them as ignorant, lazy, and parasitical. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in New York Tuesday, "The administration has even added an 'A' to its DEIA code, indicating 'abilities' for extra-eugenicist oomph."

Kennedy's ugly attitudes keep getting sane-washed by the press as merely an interest in "promoting" healthy eating, which is nonsense on every level, starting with his belief that beef tallow is somehow better for your heart than olive oil. But it's also important to put his views in the larger context of what is increasingly looking like an all-out assault by the Trump administration on the lives of people they view as "weak" members of society.

Over the weekend, tech billionaire and shadow president Elon Musk launched a full-blown attack on Social Security. He and his "Department of Government Efficiency" are demanding access to the private records of all Americans held by Social Security offices. Musk claims Social Security is "the biggest fraud in history," and is pushing false claims that millions of people are drawing checks illegally. This is both obviously false and has been repeatedly debunked, but Musk persists, making it unavoidable that this is a lie instead of mere confusion. The purpose of the lie isn't too hard to suss out, either. Musk is building up a pretext to stop payment on checks that many elderly people need to survive. Characterizing their identities as "waste" and "fraud" works like Kennedy's disparagement of disabled people: It dehumanizes anyone fascists view as sapping the "strength" of American society. This goes hand-in-hand with Musk's obsession with raising birth rates and his fixation on the neo-Nazi "Great Replacement" theory. It's like Musk took a bunch of ketamine, watched nothing but Leni Riefenstahl film reels of blonde musclemen marching in parades to illustrate Aryan fitness, and mistook that for a reality he could will into being. 

There's no need to take Kennedy's banal chatter about "healthy food" at face value, and not just because every American is educated in the concept of a "balanced diet" from well before they can eat solid food. Scratch the surface even a millimeter, and it's evident Kennedy has a hostile, even eliminationist attitude towards anyone he has decided doesn't meet his esoteric standard of physical fitness. The food gambit is so that, when health care is taken from people, he can say it's their own fault for not taking his "advice" on how unpaid farm labor is the cure for bipolar disorder. It's fascist rhetoric rebranded as "wellness."