(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
RFK Jr. says he knows autism didn't use to exist because in school he worked with the "retarded" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-11
On Friday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a pep talk to FDA employees. These meet-the-new-boss meetings are usually pep talks designed to energize the rank and file, instill organizational unity, and share the new leader’s vision for the future. Instead, RFK showed in person that he is indeed as damaged as he appears on TV.
RFK is the quintessential MAGA. He is a man convinced he knows things despite evidence demonstrating he is pulling stuff out of his ass.
In one statement, he proved to his audience that he was anti-woke and a moron — further burnishing his MAGA cred. After touting his work for the Special Olympics, he told the FDA’s hapless employees that he could prove autism was a brand new concern because he had never come across it as a high schooler despite spending time working with the intellectually disabled. In his words:
“Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours ... with the retarded when I was in high school. So I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time. I never saw anybody with autism.”
Kennedy’s language horrified many of the FDA’s staffers. Several walked out of the rooms where the speech was being broadcast at the agency’s White Oak, Maryland headquarters. If their jobs weren’t on the line, I imagine that ‘several’ could easily have been ‘most.’
How the teenage Kennedy was able to know he hadn’t seen a person with autism is anyone’s guess. Kennedy has no medical education or experience. And I am not sure how many teens would know autism if they saw it. Especially as in the early 1970s, when Kennedy was at the Palfrey Street School in Boston, children with neurodiversity were generally kept under wraps.
Also, while his aunt Eunice Shriver, inspired by her older sister Rosemary’s mental development issues, founded the Special Olympics , there is no record that RFK had any official role with the organization. Perhaps he showed up a few times and cheered.
Kennedy may have congratulated himself for being blind to the world around him in 1970, but the word ‘autism’ was coined in 1911 . And while it took time for scientists to understand that autism was not an infantile form of schizophrenia, by the 1940s, they were beginning to appreciate its separate nature.
When Kennedy graduated high school, people had a good handle on autism’s causes and expression. In large part because they had studied thousands of sufferers. It is certainly not a new disease.
Kennedy’s assertions of involvement with “the retarded” were not the only howler he let loose during his visit. He also insisted that the MAGA fantasy of a clandestine opposition to the official government was reality-based. In his words:
“President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the media, you know, disparages him and says that he’s paranoid. But the Deep State is real. And it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the, you know, the destruction of humanity.”
Kennedy is looking for something in the shadows that, if it does exist, is right in front of him. The last two months have shown that if there is a bunch of nefarious individuals plotting the destruction of humanity, they are the current administration — including RFK himself. Let’s ask who has spent a career warning parents they shouldn’t give their children safe drugs to prevent fatal illnesses.
Not that Kennedy sees it that way. He said, “every institution that’s created by human beings” is inevitably captured by powerful interests. And he told his listeners that:
“All of us are subject to those gravities of agency capture.”
He challenged the audience to:
“be conscious of that gravity because it’s going to be pulling you every single day of your career. We want to break away from this so we can make our kids healthy.”
He’s not wrong that powerful interests are interested in capturing agencies to benefit themselves. However, he is once more guilty of misdirection — proving once again that every accusation is a confession. It is he, his boss, and their paymasters who are the powerful interests who want to ignore the science and corrupt the government. Although, in fairness, I doubt RFK has read Project 2025 .
RFK added that to keep his guard against bad actors, he would listen to “dissidents.” However, I suspect that Kennedy’s definition of a dissident is someone who agrees with him regardless of the facts.
Kennedy dug deep into the CIA’s sordid history to find examples of a government beholden to shadowy forces run amok. He referenced the spy agency’s MKUltra project . This was a disgraceful affair, but it was shut down 52 years ago.
In addition, he mentioned the Milgram experiment , a well-known study meant to test people’s willingness to obey authority even if it meant inflicting pain on others. However, that experiment was conducted in 1961. And it was hardly a clandestine effort by a government. Stanley Milgram was a Yale University psychologist who published his results in 1973. No government agency in sight.
In Kennedy’s misfiring and kaleidoscopic psyche, one decades-old mind control effort by a government agency, and an academic study proving that many people are easily led by authority, are proof of a deep state. This brings me to what should be the lawyer Kennedy’s strength: understanding evidence. Based on his current performance, it is hard to see how he managed to get a law degree or pass the bar.
Maybe he was saner when he was younger.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/11/2315978/-RFK-Jr-says-he-knows-autism-didn-t-use-to-exist-because-in-school-he-worked-with-the-retarded?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
