David Badash,
The New Civil Rights Movement
September 9, 2025
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being criticized and mocked for his latest take on mass shootings, suggesting that video games and psychiatric medicines could be to blame, despite numerous studies that largely show otherwise.
The secretary, an attorney with no medical training who is widely regarded as a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, appeared to dismiss existing research on the potential effects of video games and psychiatric medications—studies that have found no link to mass shooting violence.
“Oh, there are many, many things that happened in the 1990s that could explain these” mass shootings, Kennedy claimed.
“One is the dependence on the psychiatric drugs, which is in our country, is unlike any other country in the world,” he alleged. Studies have shown that most teenage mass shooters had not been prescribed psychiatric drugs.
Kennedy also said that “there could be connections with video games, with social media, a number of things, and we are looking at that at NIH.”
Video games, however, have been found not to have a causal effect on mass shootings.
Brady, the nonprofit working to prevent gun violence, responded to Kennedy, writing: “Access to guns is the problem. Not mental illness. Not SSRIs. Not video games. Not transgender communities. These are hateful and dangerously misguided distractions from the only real solution: gun reform.”
Kennedy, in his remarks, noted that “Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago. We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours.”
Kennedy’s claim about Switzerland’s gun ownership is questionable, but reports have shown that a large number of Swiss residents rely on guns for hunting, sport, and prior military service.
He also declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now conducting studies “to look at the correlation and the connection, potential connection between over medicating our kids and this violence.”
Critics jumped on Kennedy’s remarks.
Journalist Jane Coaston mocked the Secretary, writing, “finally, we’re back at ‘video games did it,’ I love the 90s.”
“I am 28 years old,” wrote journalist Matthew Cardenas, “and have played games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War since I was a teenager. Not once have the video games motivated me to commit a mass shooting. This is such a lazy argument.”
“This is no different than asking a random person why shootings occur,” observed Robert E. Kelly, a professor of political science. “He’s obviously not read any work on the issue. He’s just grasping Trump’s refusal to choose people w/ topical expertise is maddening.”
Former defense journalist Kevin Baron blasted Kennedy, urging him to “just Google it.”
See the video and social media post below or at this link.
September 9, 2025
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being criticized and mocked for his latest take on mass shootings, suggesting that video games and psychiatric medicines could be to blame, despite numerous studies that largely show otherwise.
The secretary, an attorney with no medical training who is widely regarded as a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, appeared to dismiss existing research on the potential effects of video games and psychiatric medications—studies that have found no link to mass shooting violence.
“Oh, there are many, many things that happened in the 1990s that could explain these” mass shootings, Kennedy claimed.
“One is the dependence on the psychiatric drugs, which is in our country, is unlike any other country in the world,” he alleged. Studies have shown that most teenage mass shooters had not been prescribed psychiatric drugs.
Kennedy also said that “there could be connections with video games, with social media, a number of things, and we are looking at that at NIH.”
Video games, however, have been found not to have a causal effect on mass shootings.
Brady, the nonprofit working to prevent gun violence, responded to Kennedy, writing: “Access to guns is the problem. Not mental illness. Not SSRIs. Not video games. Not transgender communities. These are hateful and dangerously misguided distractions from the only real solution: gun reform.”
Kennedy, in his remarks, noted that “Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago. We’re having mass shootings every 23 hours.”
Kennedy’s claim about Switzerland’s gun ownership is questionable, but reports have shown that a large number of Swiss residents rely on guns for hunting, sport, and prior military service.
He also declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now conducting studies “to look at the correlation and the connection, potential connection between over medicating our kids and this violence.”
Critics jumped on Kennedy’s remarks.
Journalist Jane Coaston mocked the Secretary, writing, “finally, we’re back at ‘video games did it,’ I love the 90s.”
“I am 28 years old,” wrote journalist Matthew Cardenas, “and have played games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War since I was a teenager. Not once have the video games motivated me to commit a mass shooting. This is such a lazy argument.”
“This is no different than asking a random person why shootings occur,” observed Robert E. Kelly, a professor of political science. “He’s obviously not read any work on the issue. He’s just grasping Trump’s refusal to choose people w/ topical expertise is maddening.”
Former defense journalist Kevin Baron blasted Kennedy, urging him to “just Google it.”
See the video and social media post below or at this link.
'Children have died!' Trump admin hatches scheme to prove Covid shots harm pregnant women
Robert Davis
September 9, 2025
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Robert Davis
September 9, 2025
RAW STORY
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President Donald Trump's administration has hatched a new scheme to determine whether the Covid-19 vaccine harms pregnant women, according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that top officials under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are working to "waive privacy protections" around data related to the Covid vaccine, citing "people familiar with the matter." The new scheme was revealed just days after Kennedy's Senate hearing, where he repeated falsehoods about vaccines.
"The push to collect the data is an extension of a broader effort," the report states. "Last week, Makary said he is preparing a report on child deaths he said were caused by the Covid vaccines."
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and vaccines chief Vinay Prasad are leading what Makary described to CNN as a "proper investigation."
“There have been children who have died from the Covid vaccine. We’re doing a proper investigation,” Makary told CNN. “We think the public deserves to have that information. It wasn’t released in the last administration and it should have been.”
Read the entire report by clicking here.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that top officials under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are working to "waive privacy protections" around data related to the Covid vaccine, citing "people familiar with the matter." The new scheme was revealed just days after Kennedy's Senate hearing, where he repeated falsehoods about vaccines.
"The push to collect the data is an extension of a broader effort," the report states. "Last week, Makary said he is preparing a report on child deaths he said were caused by the Covid vaccines."
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and vaccines chief Vinay Prasad are leading what Makary described to CNN as a "proper investigation."
“There have been children who have died from the Covid vaccine. We’re doing a proper investigation,” Makary told CNN. “We think the public deserves to have that information. It wasn’t released in the last administration and it should have been.”
Read the entire report by clicking here.
Progressives Blast MAHA Report That 'Echoes the Pesticide Industry's Talking Points'
One critic called the report "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Brad Reed
Sep 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration's Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.
According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a "cautious line" on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work "with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency's] pesticide robust review procedures."
As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it "reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto."
Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that "we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report," even as she praised other parts of it.
Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.
"The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag," said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. "Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated."
Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks "any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide" and called it "shameful but not surprising" that the report barely mentioned so-called "forever chemicals" contaminating drinking water "while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled."
Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report's section on pesticides.
"Laughably, the report calls the EPA's lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process 'robust,'" she said. "This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered "a few crumbs" to health advocates, but was mostly filled with "hollow rhetoric."
George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report's claims about the EPA having a "robust" procedure for approving pesticides.
"There is nothing 'robust' about EPA's regulation of pesticides," he said. "In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties."
Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy's past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.
"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," he commented. "Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they'd protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow."
Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as "grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington."
One critic called the report "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Brad Reed
Sep 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Health and environmental advocates are hammering a new report issued Tuesday by the Trump administration's Make America Health Again Commission for papering over dangers posed by pesticides and replicating the positions of powerful corporate interests.
According to StatNews, the MAHA report takes a "cautious line" on pesticides, and even includes a section recommending that the Environmental Protection Agency work "with food and agricultural stakeholders... to ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in [the Environmental Protection Agency's] pesticide robust review procedures."
As StatNews noted, this section in particular drew the ire of organic food advocate Elizabeth Kucinich—the spouse of Dennis Kucinich, who served as presidential campaign manager for Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who said that it "reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto."
Zen Honeycutt, founder of the pro-MAHA group Moms Across America, similarly told StatNews that "we are deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report," even as she praised other parts of it.
Public interest advocacy groups, meanwhile, slammed the MAHA report, which they called wholly deferential to major industries.
"The MAHA Commission report is a gift to Big Ag," said Food & Water Watch senior policy analyst Rebecca Wolf. "Its deregulatory proposals read like an industry wish list. The truth is, industrial agriculture is making us sick. Making America healthy again will require confronting Big Ag corporations head on—instead, the Trump administration has capitulated."
Wolf added that the MAHA report lacks "any real action on toxic pesticides linked to rising cancer rates nationwide" and called it "shameful but not surprising" that the report barely mentioned so-called "forever chemicals" contaminating drinking water "while disregarding how elsewhere in the administration common-sense water safety rules are being weakened and canceled."
Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, was even more scathing in her assessment of the report, which she called "a slap in the face to the millions of Americans, from health-conscious moms to environmental advocates to farmers, who have been calling for meaningful action on pesticides."
Like other critics, Starman heaped particular scorn upon the report's section on pesticides.
"Laughably, the report calls the EPA's lax, flawed, and notoriously industry-friendly pesticide regulation process 'robust,'" she said. "This, in spite of the fact that EPA currently allows more than 1 billion pounds of pesticide use on US crops each year, including the use of 85 pesticides that are banned in other countries because of the serious risks they pose to human health and the environment."
The Center for Food Safety (CFS) said that the MAHA report offered "a few crumbs" to health advocates, but was mostly filled with "hollow rhetoric."
George Kimbrell, legal director and co-executive director of CFS, also called out the report's claims about the EPA having a "robust" procedure for approving pesticides.
"There is nothing 'robust' about EPA's regulation of pesticides," he said. "In reality it is the antithesis of robust: it is an oversight system filled with data holes and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get EPA to do its most basic duties."
Environmental Working Group co-founder and president Ken Cook said that the report made a mockery of Kennedy's past promises to use his power to take on powerful industries.
"It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission's agenda," he commented. "Secretary Kennedy and President Trump cynically convinced millions they'd protect children from harmful farm chemicals—promises now exposed as hollow."
Cook also took aim at the leaders of the MAHA movement, whom he described as "grifters exploiting the hopes and fears of health-conscious Americans in their quest for power jobs in Washington."
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