RFK Jr. Wants to Exterminate Autistic People

It feels perverse that I should have to write this piece. It is perverse. I should not have to explain to anyone, least of all those who joyfully sing from his hymn sheet, that Robert Kennedy Jr. wants to exterminate autistic people.

I should not have to explain it to anyone because it should be obvious from any moderately critical examination of how he has spent the last two and a half decades of his life.

RFK Jr., son of the late Bobby Kennedy, initially built his career as an environmental lawyer, bringing cases against polluters, but around the turn of the century, he was taken in by the fraudulent claims of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, who essentially kickstarted the modern anti-vaccine movement by falsely linking the MMR vaccine to autism as part of a money-making scheme.

Since then, RFK Jr. has dedicated his public life to campaigning against vaccines, not linking them exclusively to autism, but primarily to autism, and the reason he does it is very simple.

RFK Jr. believes it is better to die of a preventable illness than to be autistic.

I shouldn’t need to explain this further. RFK Jr. thinks vaccines cause autism, and that you therefore should not vaccinate your children, even though that significantly increases their otherwise very low risk of dying from a completely preventable illness.

He would rather children die slowly choking on fluid filling their lungs than be different from a non-autistic person.

It is axiomatic that anyone who believes this believes that autistic people are better off dead, and that even from their own twisted point of view, what they are advocating is a world where vastly more people die vastly more often from painful diseases and the upside is that there are no more autistic people.

The extermination of autistic people is not a side effect, in other words, it’s the whole point.

I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone. It’s obvious. You only have to listen to the way RFK Jr. talks about autistic people. In 2015, while campaigning against a California bill to remove non-medical exemptions to childhood vaccine mandates, he said:

“They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

He later apologised for comparing autism to the Holocaust, but not for comparing it to not having a brain, because he believes that. He literally thinks that autistic people are subhuman burdens on “ordinary” society whose mere existence is a tragedy.

I know, because he said so in his apology:

“I employed the term during an impromptu speech as I struggled to find an expression to convey the catastrophic tragedy of autism which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families.”

I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone. It’s obvious. RFK Jr. went to Samoa in 2019 to promote an anti-vaccine campaign backed by his anti-vaccine organisation Children’s Health Defense, and when 83 people, mostly children, subsequently died as a result of a measles outbreak, he called it “mild”. People usually describe this as RFK Jr. downplaying how bad it was, but I disagree. I think RFK Jr. genuinely believes those deaths were perfectly acceptable collateral damage in his crusade against vaccines, because they may be dead, but at least they aren’t autistic. I think when he calls it “mild”, he means it, because he thinks those dead children were spared the much worse fate of potentially being autistic.

I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone. It’s obvious. And yet, even as he spent the last two years creeping his way towards power, I have rarely seen it acknowledged, even by those who oppose him, that RFK Jr.’s entire worldview is based on the assumption that autistic lives are not worth living and autistic people should be exterminated. Even when they notice he hates autistic people, they can never quite bring themselves to the conclusion that observation demands.

I’ve watched mass media handle this scumbag with kid gloves my entire life. I’ve watched the liberal political establishment support and enable him for decades, his affiliation only drifting rightwards as the politicisation of COVID made vaccine denialism increasingly unfashionable among those aligned with the Democratic Party. It may be Trump’s GOP who finally ushered him into a position of official power, but RFK Jr. is a monster of the liberal ruling class, and always has been.

In a world with some modicum of justice, every single person who paved his way would spend the rest of their lives as shame-filled recluses, puttering around their mansions and pissing in mason jars like Howard Hughes. His confirmation as Secretary of Health was so obviously evil that Mitch McConnell voted against it.

His supporters no doubt see this as evidence of RFK Jr.’s anti-establishment bona fides, that he’s such a threat to the system he can unite the Democrats and their old nemesis to (try and fail to) stop him.

I see it as evidence that Mitch McConnell is a polio survivor who has lived long enough to see how transformative vaccines have been for human health.

RFK Jr. has announced he intends to find the “cause” of autism by September, and once he’s identified it, to eliminate it, and therefore “stop” any more children “becoming” autistic. I am not going to bother explaining why that’s impossible. It’s obvious, and also irrelevant. No one sets a five-month deadline for a scientific discovery unless they’ve already decided what the results will say, and if he was concerned with what’s possible, he wouldn’t believe vaccines cause autism in the first place.

No one has ever produced remotely credible evidence of any link between vaccination and autism. The paper that started the MMR vaccine scare in 1998, written by disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, is the closest anyone has come, and it was a carefully orchestrated hoax perpetrated as part of a money-making scheme. It was commissioned by a lawyer hired to sue pharmaceutical companies by a tiny group of cranks who blamed the vaccine for their childrens’ autism. Wakefield fabricated the results and invented a fake disease to provide “proof” for the lawsuit, then planned to profit himself by marketing an alternative vaccine and testing kits for his made-up disease.

I want to stress the Wakefield paper was a hoax, not just an error, because I want you to understand that when he ordered a battery of unnecessary, invasive and dangerous medical procedures on young children as part of the study, he did so knowing the tests would find nothing. He ordered the torture and abuse of children – many of them autistic, one of whom almost died – so he could make money selling lies, and we only know that because of the dogged, rigorous work of a single reporter, Brian Deer, who relentlessly pursued the truth about Wakefield while the rest of the media spent years largely portraying him as a heroic champion fighting against the medical establishment.

The Wakefield hoax is the founding myth of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and it is not only conceptually based on contempt for the humanity of autistic people, it is literally built on the torture and abuse of autistic children.

RFK Jr. has spent two and a half decades fostering and funding this movement, a movement for people who force feed their children bleach to “cure” their autism, and now he’s preparing to usher in the messianic age of widespread fatalities from preventable disease he and his followers have sought for so long.

He won’t succeed in exterminating autistic people, but what does failure mean to a man for whom the deaths of children are just the cost of doing business?

And it is business, at the end of the day. RFK Jr. has made millions from his anti-vaccine crusade, including from referral fees for lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, the exact same fucking grift that started it all.

I should not have to explain this.

I should not have to explain that a man who just went on television and said “autism destroys families, but more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children” hates autistic people.

But here I am, explaining it all the same, because it is long past time he was recognised not only as an anti-vaxxer, but a eugenicist, and the de facto leader / primary funder of a global anti-autistic hate movement that has grown comorbidly with the anti-vaccine movement, like two distinct but related cancers.

I won’t pretend to know what RFK Jr. (or any member of the second Trump administration, for that matter) is going to do or undo next, but I know the ramifications will be felt far outside the US’s borders, and long after RFK Jr. has shuffled off this mortal coil.

I hope you’ll remember, amidst the horror to come, that we’re paying the price of a genocidal dream.

I hope you’ll remember he didn’t dream it alone.