RFK Jr. Is Wrong - Autism Isn’t an Epidemic, Individualism Is
and Why His Rhetoric is Dangerous
In 2022, I gave a guest lecture to a public health policy class at a university in Washington, D.C., and was asked to talk about mental health and the sociopolitical response to the COVID-19 pandemic from a narrative lens. In it, I presented data and a critique of the impacts that messaging and policies had on public health outcomes, mental health, and health inequities.
I called it “False Narratives and Hidden Plagues”. Yes, I did deconstruct the manufactured end of a pandemic that continues to kill and disable people at alarming numbers. And yes, I also documented how it was moving the Overton window to encourage people to accept and ignore the deaths, disabling, and disappearing of vulnerable groups of “others” when the government told the masses - and even healthcare entities - that they no longer needed to be concerned about or protect the people in these groups. (And yes, it also moved the window of normalizing and minimizing illness by making a lot of early assumptions and assertions about a new, novel virus when its impacts were not - and still aren’t - fully understood…and many of those reassurances have since been disproven many times over.)
But at the end of the lecture, I pointed out the thread that kept getting missed, and which has continued to be dismissed for years while people in these vulnerable groups have begged their family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens to listen.
“Your-struggle-isn’t-my-problem”-individualism like this was always going to be a slippery slope. It doesn’t draw a line in the sand to silently (or exuberantly) accept policies and laws that limit or remove rights, access, or physical and psychological safety when they only apply to one group of people. It shows that there is no line.
What we needed was people to hold the line. To say “not without them.” To actively embody purported values of intersectionality, “loving thy neighbor”, and knowing that our “liberation is bound up” together. To refuse the rolling back of accessibility like virtual gatherings and work, and to advocate for better air quality in all the spaces we need to and want to spend time. To show up in everyday life, continuing the preventative health practices that we know protect the vulnerable and benefit the entire collective.
Instead, what these vulnerable groups have gotten was a celebration of no longer being required to consider or be inconvenienced by them. Instead of care, protection, and support, they have been bullied, assaulted, silenced, and abandoned.
In my most generous mindset - when I can access it - I have some sense that a degree of this response is informed by the collective trauma of the pandemic. Trauma that essentially no one has dealt with because culturally, societally we have been encouraged to forget it and get back to being good little workers and consumers. Systems are going to operate in the ways they are set up to operate, and mass media PR blitzes are going to be convincing.
But I foolishly, optimistically allowed myself to believe that more of us had realized these systems weren’t set up for our benefit and that we had to stick together. I guess I underestimated the power of privilege, individualism, and ableism.
Starting to understand this now, I am deeply concerned as we watch this new-to-modern-America, first-in-many-of-our-lifetimes degree of dehumanization and assault on human and civil rights in such quick succession. The onslaught of attacks on personal freedoms and long-standing protections is incessant on purpose with the intent to overwhelm. And overwhelm it has. In the process, I fear these vulnerable groups who have been warning of this likelihood will again be cast aside and ignored, at a time when there is so much at stake to their lives and quality of life.
There are plenty of people writing about how to understand and dismantle the twisted and false narratives being spun about autism, and clarifying what data has already established and the agenda for ignoring this science, so I won’t repeat that. But I do need to say as plainly as I can - the way people with mental and physical health conditions are being dehumanized and talked about sounds like a page ripped straight out of the eugenics playbook.
”Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children…..These are kids 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.” -RFK Jr.
"I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms, drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country….I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it.” - RFK Jr.
His statements both do not represent many people with autism, but they also devalue and create stigmas about the people for whom these things may be true, due to autism, another condition, or life circumstances. And while he was asked later to clarify his remarks on “wellness farms” (that some have pointed out sound an awful lot like labor camps) and claimed these would be optional and not “compelled”, the actions of this administration in the last several weeks give zero reassurances that personal autonomy, civil rights, or choice are of concern if they deem an citizen a problem.
And the list of who is problematic is growing quickly. Many of us worry that not enough people know the history of eugenics and “medical advancement” and don’t recognize the echoes.
”It’s a largely unwritten chapter in Holocaust history. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi doctors, under the guise of medical advancement, killed 300,000 disabled children and adults. Throughout German cities and townships, disabled “patients” were identified by clinicians, psychiatrists and social workers, and required to register with Nazi officials. Diagnostic records characterized them as “useless eaters,” “lives unworthy of living” and “burdens upon themselves and the nation’s resources. They were loaded into vans with black-painted windows—nicknamed “death buses” by local children—and transported to the killing centers, countryside hospitals and institutions just outside of picturesque cities….The killings began with disabled children as young as three, many of whom were starved to death…”-from The Holocaust Killing Centers: An Historical Nightmare for the Disabled
Amidst the overwhelm and everything competing for your attention, please do not lose sight of this. These communities - and anyone who does not conform to a particular norm of “health” and “productivity” - are very likely going to be targeted if these assaults on civil liberties are allowed to continue. Many people have been warning about the chance of history repeating itself ever since COVID hit, as past pandemics have led to a rise in extremist ideas and nationalism.
Vulnerable people - and the loved ones and allies committed to protecting them - have been sounding the alarm and advocating tirelessly for years, asking not to be forgotten. Since shit has gotten really-real recently, we have asked to be included - for the organizing efforts, mutual aid, and “community” to be accessible to us in various ways. We’ve largely been heckled, ignored, and ghosted.
Individualism is alive and well, and it threatens to move the Overton window even further at this crucial time. So who is willing to hold the line this time?