Few figures within the Democratic Party have been more thoroughly rejected by the party than Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has been repeatedly excoriated by the left — including members of his dynastic family — in recent years for remarks about vaccines and other hot-button issues. Most recently, multiple media outlets seized on his remarks at the Food and Drug Administration headquarters, taking one word out of context and depicting it as an anti-handicap slur. As Breitbart reported: 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.” Many of the usual anti-MAGA suspects were quick to regurgitate the misleading claims: During remarks to FDA employees today, RFK Jr touted his work for the Special Olympics but shocked several FDA employees when he said he spent 200 hours in high school working with “the retarded.” https://t.co/aCZwDCpdAt — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 11, 2025 And speaking of irony, some of Kennedy’s critics managed to falsely accuse him of using the R-word before immediately using it against him: Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “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” Too bad I blocked that “find retards” MAGA degenerate, because I found one in RFK, Jr.. — Old Man Lefty (@OldManLefty1) April 12, 2025 BizPac Review also covered some of the other remarks Kennedy made during his address: Friday, Kennedy made his first joint appearance with the new Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, during a trip to the agency’s Maryland headquarters. While the secretary sought to reverse the course that led it and other agencies to “become a sock puppet for the industry,” anonymous complaints accused the cabinet official of inappropriate use of the word “retarded.” “President Trump always talks about the deep state, and the media disparages him and says that he is paranoid or a conspiracy theorist,” said Kennedy, according to transcripts obtained by multiple media outlets. “But the deep state is real and it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the destruction of humanity. It’s more insidious than that. It’s institutional pressures.” “Like every agency,” the secretary lamented amid references to experiments conducted by the CIA, the FDA, “at one point really became a sock puppet for the industry it was supposed to regulate.” “All of us are subject to those gravities of agency capture,” he went on as he warned the FDA employees to “be conscious of that gravity because it’s going to be pulling you every single day of your career. We want to break away from this so we can make our kids healthy.” The remarks came the day after Kennedy had participated in President Donald Trump’s latest cabinet meeting and asserted the cause of the autism epidemic would be confirmed by September. He also promised new data would be released to show that the number of children diagnosed had climbed to 1 in 31 rather than 1 in 36 and that HHS’s findings would allow for the dangerous exposures to be eliminated. Kennedy recently embarked on a nationwide campaign amid a rise in measles cases: