As much as I hate to sully the pages of such an esteemed source as The Skeptic with something as vulgar as geometric details on how one should go about fucking RFK Jr. in the ass with a Honda CR-V, his latest swerve into anti-autism eugenics more or less demands it. So, with apologies to those with overly developed visual imaginations, it should be done by backing the CR-V in slowly with all four doors open. Because a regular “go fuck yourself” would fall gravely short of the moment. RFK Jr. needs to go fuck himself as hard as “himself” can get fucked. He needs to go fuck himself right in the brain-worm with the whale corpse and the chainsaw.
Of course, my standard level of ire for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is quite high. He is an anti-vax, science denying, fear-mongering conspiracy theorist who has a disturbing history with the corpses of megafauna. So it came as a surprise to me just how much more hatred I was able to muster for him on April 16th, when he launched a dangerously misguided crusade against autism. The opening bid of which was a grotesquely inaccurate speech that pushed the common alternative medicine refrain that the increased prevalence of autism is the result of some environmental toxin rather than the increase in testing people for autism. In the speech, Kennedy pledged to find the “cure” for autism by September, and he vowed to do so with a wildly unethical collection of private medical data from people’s doctors, pharmacies, insurance companies, and wearable devices.
The speech, which was occasioned by a new CDC report that noted an uptick in rates of autism, was ripe with misinformation. Kennedy dismissed the prevailing science about genetic inheritance, declaring it a “dead end” — on no scientific authority other than that which he gleaned in law school; accused the public and the media of succumbing to a “myth of epidemic denial,” and thereby implied that the scientific community was perpetuating a myth of denial; and in so doing, he grossly disparaged people with autism. He described children with on the spectrum as:
“[K]ids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
And, of course, much of the immediate response consisted of people pointing to all those tax-paying, baseball-playing, job-holding, poem-writing, date-going, unassisted shit-taking people with autism that so very clearly disprove his point. But as instinctual as that might be, it subtly plays into the Nazi-esque framing that he’s crafted around the issue.
Because yes, there are some places on the autism spectrum where people can’t use the bathroom unassisted. But so what? Do we value human beings now based on how hard it is for them to take a shit? How much their existence inconveniences us? And why the hell are the first two items on that list about “productivity to the state”? Paying taxes and having jobs? Is that how Robert Kennedy sees human beings? As potential contributions to the state?
As terrifying as Kennedy’s “conclusions-first” approach to science is, the far more concerning element here is the eugenic presumptions that undergirds his presumptions; this idea that what we want is a world without autism. But a world without autism is a world without so many of the people that I love. And even if you could somehow extract the autism and leave the person, you’d be siphoning away a lot of the “them” that I love.
But as we all know in the skeptical community, this seam of eugenics runs beneath a lot of the alt-medicine scene; never acknowledged openly but always just below the surface. It’s there in the bigoted horror some parents feel when they realise their genes could be faulty enough to make a kid with autism and scramble for some external villain to blame. It’s there in all their ableism about us making our health in our minds; a mindset that necessarily excludes those with congenital conditions and necessarily ostracises anyone unfortunate enough to develop a chronic condition after adopting this worldview. And it’s there in RFK Jr.’s presumption that neurotypical is an ideal that we should be trying to funnel people into.
Everything about RFK’s position is terrifying beyond belief, but nothing is more terrifying than the eugenics groundwork he’s laying by defining people with autism as leeches on the state who need to be cured and prevented. I know a lot of people who can’t play baseball or hold a job or write a poem or take an unassisted shit. What will Kennedy’s cure for them look like?
