Summary
RFK Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.
The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases, including “prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.”
Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals. He has called autism “preventable” and claimed “he can find a cure for the condition by September.”
A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I’ll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.
First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It’s entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.
I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.
This might sound absurd, but we’re seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into “criminals”, “gang members”, and “terrorists” by similar logic.
Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other “diseased offspring” long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.
How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don’t like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK’s set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.
Lists are not neutral; they are tools of social hierarchy and ideological enforcement.
Creating a national database of autistic people could grow from “support services” to stigmatizing surveillance or work farms—especially if the one proposing it has a history of pseudoscientific views or conspiracy ideation, as RFK Jr. does.
Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps.
Let’s not demonize him, the whole point he separated the “Asperger syndrome” from the more notable parts of the spectrum is to prevent some of those children from being killed.
“Let’s not demonize the Nazi, didn’t you know he undertook the arduous and benevolent task of creating a special category just for those of you that were exploitable for your labour? Sure he had a bunch of you exterminated but he sterilized and saved some for work and that should count for something.”
Utterly repugnant worldview. If at any point you find yourself coming up with reasons to defend a Nazi, and you don’t take a moment to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what the fuck you’re doing, you’re failing as a human.
Someone who actively participated in the mass murder of children might have redeeming qualities (and I’d argue the one you think you’re highlighting isn’t one at all), but none of them will ever outweigh the fact that they are monstrously inhuman.
Do you have any idea how profoundly his work has negatively impacted every autistic person since? We’re still trying to excise all the fucked up useless gendered concepts his perspective injected into the diagnostics. The notions that we lack empathy, have some kind of extreme “male intellect” and/or psychopathy, that the way we’re born is some kind of defect in humanity that must be studied and purged, that’s his legacy.
He was one of the first to try to identify and categorize us, not out of altruism, but because he saw us as a diseased branch of humanity that was situationally useful but ultimately unworthy of life. If that’s not worthy of demonization then I don’t know what is.
