“It Sounds Very Woo Woo”

Last March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crowded into a sweat lodge near Austin, Texas, with about 40 other people including a regenerative farming advocate and a nutritional supplement entrepreneur.

“We were front to back, side to side, you couldn’t move,” Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota legal activist, later recalled on a podcast. “I was like, man, I want to get out. I got to take a break. And then I was thinking, I’m the only Lakota in here…. My whole nation’s riding on me over here.” He stayed in.

The sweat lodge was the closing event of the American Wellness Summit, a one-day fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Those in attendance had come in search of spiritual healing and cleansing renewal, yes, but also access to worldly power.

And indeed, one of the peo

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