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The unhuman roots of RFK JR's autism fixation [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-15

In recent news from HHS, RFK Jr has revived the idea that using Tylenol during pregnancy is causing autism (it isn’t). This claim has been floating around for years and the research providing the correlation between Tylenol and autism has been widely criticized and a large scale study in 2024 found no link between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism. Despite that, Kennedy just can’t give up an opportunity to blame mothers for causing autism, whether it’s backed by good science or not. Everything with him and his obsession with autism is about finding a simple, environmental cause for autism that will allow it to be prevented, or better yet, cured altogether. He’s never concerned with how life is going for real autistic people, or how policies might be changed to help them, or changing society to be more accepting. It’s never about helping autistic people. He just wants to find a way, any way, to make sure they stop popping up. His entire project with the anti-vax pseudoscience, the HHS autism registry, his quest for an environmental cause, rejection of mainstream science, everything seemingly, revolves around “NO MORE AUTISTIC PEOPLE.” Weird, isn’t it? Why is that? It didn’t arise out of nowhere.

Autistic people have long been treated as undesirables and even less than human in many cases. As part of the Aktion T4 program, the Nazi’s opening act of the Holocaust, Hans Asperger helped funnel autistic children into “clinics” to be euthanized. The killing involved starvation and medication overdoses, but the clinics also served as the testing grounds for the gas chambers that would later be deployed to the more infamous death camps. Before the Nazis took on the task of exterminating Jews in earnest, they were shuffling autistic and other disabled people into gas chambers to perfect the instruments of industrialized murder. You may recognize the name Asperger since Asperger’s Syndrome was named after him before his connection to the Nazi’s was uncovered. Autistic kids who could speak and were deemed to be intelligent enough were held back from the T4 program and provided the model for what became known as Asperger’s Syndrome.

In friendlier times, here in the US, Ivar Lovaas, a psychologist who pioneered the technique of administering electric shocks to autistic kids to torture them into compliance, had this to say about autistic children:

..you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose, and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.

That was in 1974, but using dehumanizing language to describe autistic people didn’t stop then, unfortunately. Dehumanizing language about autistic people was common with researchers and academics, and has only been addressed as a real problem in recent years.

In his 2002 book, The Blank Slate, linguist Steven Pinker wrote

A mind unequipped to discern other people’s beliefs and intentions, even if it can learn in other ways, is incapable of the kind of learning that perpetuates culture. People with autism suffer from an impairment of this kind. They can grasp physical representations like maps and diagrams but cannot grasp mental representations … Together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism remind us that cultural learning is possible only because neurologically normal people have innate equipment to accomplish it.

When it comes to understanding culture, often regarded as a distinctly human attribute, Pinker categorizes autistic people with robots and chimps. A 2005 paper titled Language Impairments in ASD Resulting from a Failed Domestication of the Human Brain argues that autistic brains have not “self-domesticated” as typical human brains have, which can explain language deficits. Like Pinker, a comparison to great apes is made:

We expect that the same factors that prompted the transition from an ape-like cognition to our specific mode of cognition are involved in the etiology of cognitive disorders involving language deficits and, particularly, of ASD

Another paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2005 also provided an exhaustive comparison between great apes and autistic children in the context of cultural cognition. You may be noticing a pattern. Dehumanization in academic literature was widespread and not just limited to comparisons to animals and robots.

The issue of dehumanization and ableism in autism research has been recognized as a problem more recently after years of pressure from autistic self-advocates, and as autistic scientists have become more prevalent and vocal themselves. It’s still a problem, to be sure, but progress has been noticeable and Kennedy’s attitudes are no longer accepted as the norm nor met with applause. One of the other benefits is that autistic perspectives are increasingly being included in research. Historically, autistic people have been treated as research subjects and their experiences have been inferred based on observation. This is one reason that misguided beliefs about theory of mind and autistics’ incapacity for empathy were once so prevalent. Autistic people were treated as unreliable self-observers: their statements about their own experience of the world were rejected out of hand. That practice, also, is beginning to change.

When the anti-vax panic of the 2000’s took hold, parent-led autism advocacy organizations began gaining traction. Although they were steeped in anti-vax pseudoscience, they also prioritized finding a cure for autism and supported research to further those goals. It was natural for them to adopt the dehumanizing language and attitudes prevalent in the scientific community of the time. Kennedy followed suit. In a 2013 talk at an Autism One conference, he had this response to a question about why the CDC did not refer to autism as an epidemic (video):

To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids. 1 in 31 boys in this country, their minds are being robbed … I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.

This line of thinking continued in a 2015 speech in California:

They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.

So you can see, speaking about autistic people as being mindless, comparing being autistic to something like being forced into a concentration camp and marched into a gas chamber was not just a random, inarticulate thought in 2013. This is how he thought about autistic people, and how he continues to think about them. Just like Lovaas, he views them as having bodies, but being otherwise unhuman. They move about and make noise, but have no thoughts or feelings or capacity for love. These statements are even more chilling considering what the Nazi’s actually did to autistic people. Although there was some criticism of Kennedy when he made those statements, there were many who agreed with his sentiments.

The audience at the Autism One conference applauded his opinion because dehumanizing language about autism was rampant within “advocacy” organizations at the time (primarily led by non-autistic people). In the 2006 documentary Autism Every Day, a mother even mused about filicide in front of her autistic daughter. Many autistic people will be also be familiar with an ad made by Autism Speaks in 2009, entitled I am Autism. If you aren’t autistic, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it, have a view or read the transcript below:

Here’s the transcript of the first half for anyone who doesn’t want to view the video.

I am autism.

I’m visible in your children, but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it’s too late.

I know where you live.

And guess what? I live there too.

I hover around all of you.

I know no color barrier, no religion, no morality, no currency.

I speak your language fluently.

And with every voice I take away, I acquire yet another language.

I work very quickly.

I work faster than pediatric aids, cancer, and diabetes combined

And if you’re happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails.

Your money will fall into my hands, and I will bankrupt you for my own self-gain.

I don’t sleep, so I make sure you don’t either.

I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, birthday party, or public park without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain.

You have no cure for me.

Your scientists don’t have the resources, and I relish their desperation. Your neighbors are happier to pretend that I don’t exist—of course, until it’s their child.

I am autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness.

I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams. I will make sure that every day you wake up you will cry, wondering who will take care of my child after I die?

And the truth is, I am still winning, and you are scared. And you should be.

I am autism. You ignored me. That was a mistake.

On its face, this might appear somewhat softer than Kennedy’s statements, but the real problem is that it demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for the experiences of autistic people. It’s ironic that autistic people are stereotyped (incorrectly) as having no empathy, but those who insisted on advocating on our behalf 15 years ago felt no need to exhibit empathy themselves. Many autistic people view autism as intrinsic — it’s core to how we experience the world and how we exist. If I had cancer and it was cured, I would be the same person, but without cancer. The same is not true for autism. If my autism could somehow be “cured” away, I wouldn’t be the same person any longer. “I am Autism” isn’t about autism — it’s about being autistic and the the pain that it imposes on everyone else who wishes that we weren’t. Kennedy wasn’t involved with producing I Am Autism, but you can see parallels with the language he uses and the narratives he peddles: autism is represented as a tragic disease that will destroy families and lives.

When Kennedy isn’t dehumanizing autistic people, he also traffics in pseudoscience and ableist tropes about autism to promote his ideas about an autism epidemic and the need to find and eliminate environmental causes for autism. He did this efficiently on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2023:

I bet that you’ve never met anybody with full-blown autism your age. You know, head banging, football or helmet on, non-toilet-trained, nonverbal. I mean, I’ve never met anybody like that my age. But in my kids’ age now one in every 34 kids has autism and half of those are full-blown, meaning that description.

I’m not even going to list out evidence that autistic people have been around for a long time, even before the Nazi’s got a chance to kill some, because the belief that they didn’t exist before vaccines came along has been debunked plenty of times before. Aside from the incorrect suggestion that half of adult autistic people have to wear helmets, are non-verbal and can’t use a toilet, there are some other good reasons it used to be uncommon to encounter autistic people with severe disabilities out in public. For one thing, they used to be routinely institutionalized and kept out of view. Also, the life expectancy of autistic people is about 17 years lower than it is for typical people. There are a lot of reasons for that, including childhood accidents, accidental poisonings, an elevated suicide risk and a high risk for co-occurring health conditions. All of these risks are greater in people with high support needs, so especially in past decades not a lot of them made it to an advanced age. But none of that is important to Kennedy — his goal is conveying an image of disgust: full grown adults wearing helmets, soiling themselves and unable to speak. That’s what he wants us to believe will be coming for society if autism isn’t stamped out.

It’s certainly true that some autistic people have problems with self-injury, toileting, or are non-speaking, but that isn’t all there is to them. They also have thoughts and feelings. They communicate even when others have trouble understanding. They have have the capacity to love and to be hurt. And we have found that many non-speaking individuals are able to communicate quite well with assistive technology. To Kennedy’s horror (if he could be bothered to know), some of them are even published poets. It turns out that even people who live with challenges and who experience the world differently than typical people can still have gifts and can do human things.

Of course, people with those traits only represent a fraction of autistic people. By stating that such a narrow range of behavior is “full-blown autism” and represents half of all cases, he’s effectively sweeping everyone else under the rug and drawing a line between who’s really autistic and who isn’t. There’s no such thing as “full-blown autism.” Every autistic person has a unique mix of autistic traits and most have some limitations and some degree of disability (although not all consider themselves to be disabled). Some autistic people are able to manage themselves with minimal support in adulthood and some require lifelong support, but all of them are fully autistic.

One sign of a true ally is a desire to prioritize acceptance and support for autistic people who are alive now. Kennedy has shown no interest in that. He sees autistic people as objects of disgust, the unhumans using up resources and wreaking havoc on unfortunate host families. Support and acceptance are not needed because according to his conception, autistic people cannot have lives worth living. This is why he has a singular focus on preventing autism and preventing more autistic people from existing. It isn’t to help, but to alleviate his own disgust.

A final note on the I Am Autism video and the state of the modern research community… Autism Speaks finally apologized for producing the video after 15 years. They have asked that people refrain from reposting it, but I feel that it’s important to maintain a record of the stigma that autistic people have been working against for so long. Similarly, the quotes from scientific literature were included to give an idea of how widespread dehumanizing language was when RFK Jr began his own autism agenda. Unlike Kennedy, the scientific community has listened to autistic people and now includes many allies. There are certainly problems still because change can be slow, but the positive progress should be recognized.

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