RFK Jr. Has a Terrifying Obsession With Autism

During his first major speech since inauguration back in early March, President Trump attacked autistic people, providing a mishmash of incorrect statistics to forward his stated goal to “get toxins out of our environment” in order to decrease autism diagnoses. He appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the biggest disseminators of misinformation about autism, as the new head of the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to carry out his plan.

RFK Jr. began his tenure as HHS head by incorrectly stating that “autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate,” repeatedly using the word “alarming” with the intention of imploring listeners to believe autism is a public health emergency. He claimed that autism is “a preventable disease … We know it is environmental exposure. It has to be.” But his words are his opinion, not a statement of fact. When he contended that “it has to be,” he revealed that he has no data to back up his opinion; he is pushing a conspiracy theory.

 He also compared autism to a measles outbreak, which is ironic since he has spent his career spreading misinformation about false dangers of the measles (MMR) vaccine—including how it causes autism. (Even though he testified during his Senate confirmation hearing that all his kids are vaccinated.) He founded the Children’s Health Defense, a litigation and activist organization whose main mission is to spread conspiracy theories about vaccines. When he visited the families of dead children of the current Texas measles outbreak, The Atlantic reported that he told one father, “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore,” spreading more lies even in the face of a preventable, tragic death.

What’s worse, he is calling autism “catastrophic for our country” and an “individual tragedy” because “autism destroys families.” He contends that “these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job.” To RFK Jr., autism is a disaster for our economy.

And when a government official makes such assertions, they’re setting up something truly terrifying: They’re making an argument to eradicate autism—that is, autistic people.

It goes without saying that RFK Jr.’s “scientific” opinions are wrong; however, they’ve had a devastating impact on neurodiverse families like mine. I’m an autistic mother of two autistic children, and the administration’s new policies toward autism terrify me. With every piece of misinformation about autism’s “causes” (e.g., vaccines, environmental toxins) and every statement about how autism is catastrophic for the nation and tragic for families comes the fear that our lives are at risk. 

Does that sound overblown? Maybe. But maybe not. As DAME recently reported, among his other policies, Trump wants a “baby boom,” with a plan to offer money to married, heterosexual couples who have babies. This natalist policy is regressive; it is “not about children. It is about the power to remake America.” 

But what kind of babies do natalists like Trump—and Elon Musk, who currently has 14 children and counting, and wants to pay women to bear him more—want? Not ones like mine. 

Ironically, back in 2021, Musk made a self-serving claim that he is autistic. He used his autism diagnosis as an excuse for his poor behavior in public; as Slate reported, “Apparently [for Musk], Asperger’s syndrome [a type of autism] means never having to say you’re sorry.” 

When viewed through the lens of Trump’s natalism, the illegal deportations of unwanted brown people to state-sanctioned concentration camps, and the inviting of white “refugees” from South Africa to be “quality seeds” who will “bloom” in the U.S., RFK Jr.’s role in these plans come into focus: It’s all about eugenics. 

Eugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that purports to improve the human race through selective breeding. Eugenics evokes images of Nazi Germany, which sought to breed the perfect “Aryan” human while murdering millions of people—Jews, gay people, and disabled people—and among them, autistic people. 

Hans Asperger, a German doctor, is credited with discovering autism as we know it—and even named it. But some ugly facts about Asperger recently have come to light—he actively assisted the Nazis in destroying the autism community by “publicly legitimizing race hygiene policies” through forced sterilization of disabled people and “euthanasia”—murder—of thousands of children with mental and physical disabilities. Including autistic children.

What many people don’t realize is that eugenics was invented in the U.S. and remains an American philosophy. Although our government didn’t exterminate people by the millions, they did sterilize them en masse.

Forced sterilization came to a head in the U.S. Supreme Court opinion Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the plaintiff, Carrie Buck, was deemed a “feeble-minded woman.” Virginia law allowed—and still allows—forced sterilization of disabled people with a court’s oversight. In this case, the state argued that Buck’s sterilization should take place for the “health of the patient and welfare of society.” Buck’s lawyers argued that she was denied due process.

In an 8-1 opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the court that forced sterilization was firmly constitutional. He sealed the opinion with these memorable words: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The “imbeciles” in question? None of them was mentally disabled in any fashion. Carrie Buck, the plaintiff, was a rape victim who got pregnant. Yet the state sought to sterilize her because it deemed her “promiscuous” and “man crazy.”

But what if Carrie Buck had indeed been disabled? If she’d had autism, say, or dyslexia? The state had, and remarkably still has, the power to force sterilization. The U.S. has targeted forced sterilization on immigrants, poor people, people of color, incarcerated people, and disabled people—all predominantly women.

According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), 31 states and Washington, D.C., have laws allowing forced sterilization of disabled people. “Under these laws, a judge can decide whether to sterilize someone.”

A recent New York Times article discussed contemporary forced sterilization of disabled people in Europe, including Iceland and France, where forced sterilization of mentally disabled people is permitted. One gynecologist defended the practice, telling the journalist, “When we say ‘sterilization of the disabled,’ we might sound like Nazis, but this completely ignores the diversity of disabilities, the gravity of certain disabilities, and the distress of parents. … While in generations past, governments around the world sterilized disabled people as a matter of policy, today it is parents and caretakers who seek out the surgery—saying they have the women’s best interests at heart,” it reported.

But do they? Or do they seek to make their own lives easier at the expense of disabled people? Much harm to neurodivergent people has been done in the name of benevolence.

Autistic people in the U.S. were already at risk of having their bodies violated by the state. But now, under Trump and RFK Jr., things are getting worse.

In implementing RFK Jr.’s plans, the HHS stated that it planned to create a “registry” of all autistic people in the country under the guise of aiding research. They would pull information from a variety of places, including private medical records. Although the HHS has since rolled back its “registry” language, the HHS still says it will create a “real-world data platform” to support autism research.

As I point out in my book Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider’s Companion to Raising Neurodiverse Children, ableism is “the discrimination against disabled people, including neurodivergent people, on the basis of their disability or neurodivergence. Ableism permeates the fabric of our society.” An autism registry, or anything like it, will only weaponize ableism.

Taking a historical perspective, when an oppressed group such as disabled people is forced to join a registry, we end up targets for abuse, not for assistance. And RFK Jr. has given us a real reason to fear such abuse.

For example, while he was campaigning, RFK Jr. discussed “Wellness Farms” for neurodivergent people, including people he called “addicts” for taking antidepressants, ADHD medicine, and other medicine for mental health disabilities. Under RFK Jr.’s plan, these “addicts” would go to the technology-free farms for three or four years and grow produce. Although he never outright said that people would be forced to go, the implication is clear: RFK Jr. believes that people with mental health disabilities should be isolated in camps where they will either improve, or stay gone. As The Cut pointed out, “the concept had a whiff of ‘reeducation’—of internment camps and the Federal Indian Boarding School initiative, in which the government forcibly removed Native children from their homes.”

RFK Jr.’s initiatives are aimed at eradicating neurodiversity because of his wrongheaded beliefs. Of course he is wrong to say that autism destroys families. What destroys families is the lack of support by our government, leaving autistic adults and parents without the tools they need to survive.

Autism has only made my family stronger. There are strengths and struggles to autism, just like there is for any neurodivergence. I have close relationships with my kids, who understand better than most the difference between right and wrong, helpful and unhelpful. I allow them the freedom to chase down their interests and they return with treasures in the form of artwork, computer code, costume designs, and stories.

But, because our public schools have failed us, we have not been able to send our kids to what we call “outside school,” and instead have had to homeschool, which is not something that every family can do. For one thing, it requires a parent to be present during the day, and that means not being able to work or work as much, so there is a loss of income. And then come the expenses of paying for tutors or school supplies.

Homeschooling, in other words, costs a lot. But we had no choice because autistic middle- and high-school students are victims of bullying at a rate of 67% compared to the neurotypical student rate of 20 percent. Worse, research shows that teachers often do not intervene, in part because they believe that the neurodiverse kids deserve it. The kids are annoying, or weird, or don’t behave like victims.

But what about families whose children have more support needs than mine do? Suppose they have greater intellectual or developmental disabilities. Some children with autism grow into adults who cannot live on their own without assistance, who cannot drive, who cannot “work” the way a capitalist society imagines work to be.

By RFK Jr.’s own words, autistic people are a drain on resources—another concept that invokes the Nazis. As Dr. Jennifer Gunter has pointed out, the Nazis called disabled people “useless eaters.” That’s the message behind RFK Jr.’s arguments that autistic people will never pay taxes or hold down a job.

A person cannot be a “drain” on resources. It is the purpose of a society to care for its members. That’s literally what it means to live together in a society. Autistic children and adults are not a burden, they are people, and they deserve to have their needs met. 

Autism cannot be cured, in part because it is not a disease. The best way to help autistic Americans—both children and adults—and their families is not to waste money looking for a cure or cause that doesn’t exist. It is to provide the support we need to live fulfilling, joyful lives.

But those in power do not want joyful lives for autistic people. They want us to no longer exist. When you consider how cynical this government is—the cabinet appointments, the wholesale slashing of federal agencies and jobs and research, the “deportation” of people who haven’t been given fair hearings to prisons in other countries—you can only imagine the plans they have for us. And that is utterly terrifying.