The craziest story to come out of Florida lately emanated from Rebekah Jones, a rabid leftist and Ron DeSantis opponent, who claimed that the DeSantis administration had “kidnapped” her 13-year-old son. The actual facts were disturbing, tragic and, for lots of American children, ominous. Her son, who was allegedly taking psychotropic drugs, repeatedly promised to shoot up his school. It’s those drugs that are a serious warning to all American parents.

Jones first came to America’s attention in 2020, when she was fired for insubordination. She claimed, though, that she was a victim of whistleblower discrimination because she had shown that Governor DeSantis was gaming the COVID numbers to defend his refusal to bow to lockdown madness. In fact, Jones was lying about what happened on the job.

Image: Adderall by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.

Undeterred by exposés about her conduct on the job, her truthfulness, and her criminal past, in 2022, Jones ran for Congress in Florida, challenging Matt Gaetz’s seat. She lost.

Since then, Jones has tried to be a burr under DeSantis’s saddle. Her latest effort was to claim that DeSantis’s minions “kidnapped” her son:

[I]n a Twitter thread, Jones claimed her son Jackson was “kidnapped on the governor’s orders” as retaliation for her filing a lawsuit last month to try to win her job back, and had been cleared as “not a threat” by police and school officials.

“That’s what they do in Florida: steal your children as political punishment,” she wrote.

The police who arrested her son told a different tale, this one of an angry boy posting threats to shoot up the school:

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office says 13-year-old Jackson Jones was arrested on Wednesday for intimidation, a second degree felony.

[snip]

A search warrant also recovered messages sent from the account on Feb. 9 and 12 that said:

“I want to shoot up the school”

“If I get a gun I’m gonna shoot up hnms lol”

“I always keep a knife on me so maybe I’ll just stab ppl idk”

“Nah if I do kill people I’ll just kill myself”

Jones claims her son was just reposting memes for the amusement of his fellow Snapchatters, and the boy state he didn’t intend to do anything, but the police really had no option but to arrest Jackson for that kind of content.

The most interesting message that Jackson allegedly posted, though, comes from another article:

“Okay so it’s been like 3-4 weeks since I got on my new antidepressants and they aren’t working but they’re suppose to by now so I have no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school.”

If Jackson wrote that, and if the facts in it are true, he’s yet another American child taking psychotropic drugs. The common side effects of Prozac, the most frequently prescribed psychotropic antidepressant, include suicidality, anxiety, agitation, emotional lability, severe depression, hostility, hypomania, mania, personality disorder, and something called “thinking abnormal”—and that’s just a partial list. Ritalin, which is a much-prescribed drug for ADHD, has similar side effects.

According to an article that looked at data in the IQVia Total Patient Tracker Database for 2020, the number of children ages 0-17 on psychotropic drugs (everything from Prozac to Ritalin) was 6,155,852. With roughly 74 million children aged 0-17 in America, that means almost 1 in 10 children are being medicated with drugs that have severe side effects that could lead them to commit mass murder. That should terrify all of us.

We live in a very stressful world, and being Rebekah Jones’s child can’t be easy, just as I doubt it’s easy to be the child of any leftist. After all, leftism means apocalyptic visions about the earth’s imminent end, the certainty that everyone is a dangerous racist, and the fantasy that children’s bodies and brains are in a war that can be resolved only through potentially deadly drugs and mutilating surgery. That’s enough to make any child depressed and dangerous (and it does). If you add psychotropic drugs to that naturally occurring condition, the combination can be truly deadly.