In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said, “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” he said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”
On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.
Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised. “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, their marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding; the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.” Kennedy has suggested in the past that 5G cell phone technology could cause health problems.
The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD.
I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.
Last year, Kennedy posited during a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings.
The Kennedy campaign didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the remarks that Kennedy made during this event.
Okay you’ve still lost me, I don’t know who this guy is
Ted Kaczynsky, the Unabomber
Right wing crank ecofascist shithead who probably got MK Ultra’d as some kind of domestic Gladio scheme
What’s a gladio scheme? I’ve vaguely heard of the Unabomber but I don’t really keep tabs on crimes that happen in America. There are too many mass casualty events for me to acknowledge at this point.
“Strategy of Tension” stuff as covertly perpetrated/managed by the CIA and their affiliates in Europe post-WW2 to prop up right wing governments there and insure socialists/communists/anarchists could never take power there through “legitimate” means.
Basically
-Covertly arm and train (often mafia affiliated) ex-fascist partisans
-They carry out some shooting or bombing, preferably against some left wing group for a win-win for them, but random stochastic violence works too
-The public is terrorized and more sympathetic towards right wing “tough on crime” candidates and expanding and emboldening the security state to target political enemies to “keep the peace.”
A lot of those groups grew out of WW2 Axis aligned forces as OSS/CIA supplied “stay behind” groups that could act as irregular paramilitary forces against Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces in the event the Cold War went hot in Europe and the Red Army rolled across the Iron Curtain.
A lot of parapolitics scholars and historians have speculated and shown some evidence of similar strategy of tension tactics applied domestically in the US through MK Ultra patsies and cultivated through CIA assets embedded or adjacent to shit like the Manson Family, Symbionese Liberation Army, OKC bombing, etc. Kaczynsky was linked to probable MK Ultra shit from a psychiatrist he saw in college prior to becoming the Unabomber. The Kennedy assassinations, MLK and Malcolm X assassinations and the attempted assassination of Reagan all have some shady connections to that kind of thing too. It’s a lot of different rabbit holes to go down that all converge into one big subterranean rabbit warren that span the whole Cold War and lead into the WTC basement bombing, 9/11 and the GWOT.
Yuuuuuup