Senator Delivers Blistering Rebuke to RFK Jr.: ‘Just Shut Up’
Tina Smith had no patience for the health secretary’s suggestion that antidepressants were behind the school shooting in Minnesota.
Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith excoriated Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for suggesting that antidepressants could have caused the deadly shooting at a church in Minneapolis.
“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” Smith wrote. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bulls--t. You should be fired.”
The Democratic senator was responding to comments Kennedy on Fox & Friends Thursday, where the health secretary was asked whether hormone therapy that transgender people undergo for treatment of gender dysphoria could have contributed to the shooting, which killed 2 children and injured 17 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Alleged shooter Robin Westman is transgender.
“You are dealing with a person who is trans, who was transitioning,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said. “Are you going to be examining at all any of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happening, to see if it plays a role?”
Kennedy instead spoke about a common type of antidepressant, SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors).
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“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence,” Kennedy said.
Parents walk with their children away from the scene after the shooting at Annunciation Church on Wednesday morning. The shooting killed two children, ages 8 and 10, and wounded 17.
, August 27, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minn. Two children were killed inRenee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune/Getty Images
It isn’t known if Westman was taking either SSRIs or undergoing hormone therapy.
“Many of them have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation,” he added during the interview about SSRIs. “We can’t exclude those as a culprit, and those kinds of studies we’re doing.”
There is no warning on antidepressants about “homocidal ideation,” a phrase similar to one that Kennedy Jr. used during his Senate confirmation hearings.
The MAHA champion has attacked the efficacy and safety of antidepressant drugs for years, despite his claims being debunked by leading experts.
He claimed in January that SSRIs, which are the most common treatment for depression and are taken by over 30 million Americans, can be more addictive than heroin.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at his Senate confirmation hearing in January. At that hearing, Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed that antidepressants are highly addictive and linked to deadly violence.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
His suggestion on Thursday that antidepressants could fuel school shootings is not new. Last year, he told Elon Musk that “prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events.”
Keith Humphreys, a leading addiction expert at Stanford, has said that antidepressants and heroin exist in “different universes” when it comes to addiction risks.
A 2019 study that examined FBI data from 2000 to 2017 found no evidence that antidepressants are linked to school shootings.
“It appears that most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications,” the authors wrote. “Even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned on Wednesday against using the shooting at the Annunciation School to attack trans people: “Anyone who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.”
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Kennedy Jr. is the latest MAGA voice to try to shift the discourse about the Minneapolis shooting away from guns and toward a panoply of other culprits, from the “trans movement” to “demonic forces.”
Conservative influencers from Benny Johnson to Barron Trump’s buddy, Bo Loudon, have harped on the fact that Westman filed for a name change from Robert to Robin in 2020 and identified as female.
They also fixated on Audrey Hale, a trans person who killed six people at a Nashville elementary school in 2023.
A report by the Violence Prevention Project analyzing almost 200 mass shootings between 1966 and 2024 found that Hale’s attack was the only one committed by a trans shooter.
A week ago, Kennedy Jr. laid off 100 employees from the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Violence Prevention, which researched ways to prevent community violence like the type that devastated Minneapolis on Wednesday.
That decision came less than two weeks after a shooter attacked the CDC, killing a police officer, after expressing vaccine-skeptical views in line with Kennedy’s.
The Daily Beast has contacted HHS for comment.
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