Addressing the "RFK, Jr. Hates Autistic People" Article in Salon

More Obnoxious Neurodiversity Propaganda

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is currently serving as an important hate figure for the mainstream media and establishment, due to his run for US President and his opposition to the mRNA/adenovirus vector covid ‘vaccines’ and scepticism of the CDC childhood vaccination schedule. In particular, his belief that vaccines cause autism is unacceptable to the establishment. That establishment, a fundamental pillar of which is the vaccine cult, finds the idea of truths stated by RFK, Jr. about vaccines becoming more widespread impossible to countenance. However the establishment has a huge problem: they have overplayed their hand with Covid by pushing such a deadly, obviously unsafe, and obviously ineffective product. This has caused many previously pro-vaccine people to be open to ideas such as ‘vaccines cause autism’ in a way that simply wasn’t the case before 2020. The establishment has now gone into defensive mode to protect the vaccine cult, as the idea that vaccines cause autism, and thus have completely destroyed lives, is something the establishment cannot admit because it will be a very big blow (possibly fatal, we can live in hope) to the vaccine paradigm.

As such, the establishment needs as many hit pieces on RFK, Jr. as they can muster. The latest anti-RFK, Jr. article is out, written by Matthew Rozsa, an autistic man very fond of the neurodiversity paradigm, claiming that RFK, Jr. hates autistic people.

I have posted a couple of responses to him on Twitter, pointing out the reality of those who are severely impaired by autism, but so far have been ignored.

So let’s break the article down. As usual, the only way I will be able to deal with such weapons-grade bullshit is by chucking some sarcasm in there. For those who happen to be new to this page, I have an autism diagnosis so I have personal experience of the lies this guy is trying to sell.

Let’s start with the subheading:

RFK Jr. says he advocates for the marginalized, but built his career spreading harmful lies about autistic people

Kennedy hasn’t ‘built his career’ talking about the issue of vaccines and autism, since this ignores all of Kennedy’s environmental work before he got into the vaccine issue and realised that mercury in vaccines was causing harm alongside the mercury in the air and water.

[E]xperts agree on one thing: The views that RFK Jr. espouses cause significant harm to real-life autistic individuals.

As opposed to what? Non-real life fake autistic individuals?

I haven’t been harmed in any way by Kennedy or anything he has said.

Autistic people have been victimized by RFK Jr. for decades.

‘Victimized for decades’. Because he agrees that vaccines cause autism. Get a grip, honestly, if you are that sensitive.

RFK Jr. has never retracted his views or apologized for his incorrect statement that thimerosal in childhood vaccines can be linked to a rise in autism. 

Because there is no reason to retract them. Mercury is toxic and causes harm to the brain. This is proven. That there is some sort of ‘good’ mercury that doesn’t harm the brain is provaxxer nonsense.

Quite to the contrary, he has started applying his formula of “use bad science to persecute marginalized groups” in brand new ways, such as falsely stating that the rise in “sexual dysphoria” is caused by “chemical exposures” despite there being extensively documented historical and scientific validation of transgender identities.

Oh we have got to get at least one reference to ‘trans women are the most marginalised people on the planet’ have we?

The so-called ‘historical’ validation of ‘transgenderism’ usually amounts to pointing to societies that had special categorisations for same-sex attracted males that classified them as some third group (and not as male). They were not considered to be actual women. The implication that these ‘third genders’ were in some way politically progressive – when they are based on homophobia and misogyny – is also false. The other argument for ‘historical’ validation of ‘transgenderism’ I have seen used is claiming that women who disguised themselves as men due to sexism to access certain positions were actually ‘transgender’, or women who had a stereotypically male role, such as Joan of Arc, were actually ‘transgender’. This is obviously regressive nonsense based on stereotypes and just a way to claim a historical lineage for modern ideas.

Also, as argued by 4thWaveNow, the phenomena of ‘trans kids’ who will die if not ‘affirmed’ has no historical basis:

Try as I might, I was unable to discover any evidence of ancient trans kids who so hated their own bodies that they demanded either psychological or medical interventions. No records of boys wanting to hack off their penises or girls desperate for “top surgery” to remove their despised breasts. It’s quite certain, given their zeal for surgical interventions, that the ancient physicians [in Greece and Rome] would have been more than happy to oblige; after all, if they could perform surgeries to treat urethral strictures and cataracts, a double mastectomy or penile remodeling would not have daunted them. Even experimental attempts would have been documented.

HIPPOCRATES ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE: IN SEARCH OF THE DYSPHORIC TRANS TWEENS OF YORE

The ‘scientific’ validation studies are generally brain scans, claiming that men who call themselves women have more similar brains to women than men. However these studies often don’t control for homosexual attraction and if a man has already taken female hormones that will affect his brain. Of course a male having a stereotypically ‘feminine’ brain (if such a thing even exists) doesn’t make him a woman since every cell in that brain is a male cell with XY chromosomes, etc.

On the other hand, Kennedy’s assertion that certain chemicals could cause gender dysphoria, or contribute to it, is scientifically plausible. We know that phthalates mimic estrogen, for example. That this mimicking could be a factor affecting gender dysphoria in boys or men is certainly possible. I think there is a large social/monetary aspect to this, so I don’t think endocrine disruptors are the only cause of the ‘transgender’ insanity we see today. However that they could contribute is plausible (even the article linked by the writer claims that Kennedy ‘in part’ blamed chemical exposures).

Furthermore, do you care to comment on the obscenely high amount of autistic people going in for ‘gender transition’? In fact, being as you think that autism is genetic and the fact that ‘gender’ treatments like puberty blockers followed by wrong sex hormones sterilise children, shouldn’t you be calling this eugenics?

It is very common for autistic people to encounter anti-vaxxers who claim that their neurology is somehow a mistake. Because they buy into the perennial RFK Jr. assertion that vaccines cause autism and other neurological disorders, they make the next logical leap that another person’s autism is “wrong.”

Of course it is ‘wrong’. It’s a disability, therefore it involves inferior functioning in some way. That’s what the word ‘disability’ means. The implication here is that calling autism ‘wrong’ is some sort of moral judgement on the vaccine-injured person but that is not the case.

Even if this attitude is intended sympathetically rather than contemptuously (which is definitely not always the case), the anti-vaxxer logic still causes neurotypicals to ablesplain about how autism really works — or to outright discriminate against them.

You are assuming that there are two groups, neurodiversity promoting autists and ‘neurotypical’ antivaxxers. But autistic people can also be antivaxxers. I know I am one. We can also recognise that our problems come from vaccines. I do.

So do you want my back-of-a-fag-packet explanation of autism?: Autism is a form of iatrogenically induced brain/gastroenterological inflammation, in most cases created by the toxicants in vaccination such as aluminium.

Many autistic people have a dim view of RFK Jr. for that reason.

I don’t.

Steve Silberman, author of the book of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,”

Who isn’t an autist and knows nothing about the misery of autism. I thought you didn’t want non-disabled people explaining autism to disabled people. Or is it ok if the non-disabled person wants to glamourise autism for money/clout/woke points?

Silberman ticked off two of the most infamous examples: RFK Jr. regularly using the term “vaccine-injured” to refer to autistic people

Because we are vaccine-injured. Honestly why are people so offended by this? If I refer to someone who lost a leg in a car crash as car-crash-injured no-one is going to give a shit.

and in 2015 describing vaccinated autistic children to Bill Maher by saying “their brain is gone.”

Maybe not the best turn of phrase but you know damn well what he means. You know damn well he is referring to those children who were developing normally, were given vaccine/s and horrifically regressed, lost speech, lost eye contact, lost the capacity to use toilet alone, starting having seizures, had severe gastrointestinal issues, etc.

“Grotesque statements like this present people on the spectrum as entirely lacking in humanity, agency and the potential for development — as if they were zombies,” Silberman explained. 

Nothing Kennedy has said has even implied autistic people are not human. That is a lie.

As for ‘agency’ and ‘potential for development’ well it really depends on the severity of the vaccine injury. The reality is that severely autistic people have very little agency or potential for development. If someone is so severely impaired they need 24/7 care what agency and potential do they have? You can call this statement ‘ableism’ till you’re blue in the face but it’s just fact. Of course, that may change if they receive treatment for their vaccine injuries and recover some capacities destroyed by vaccines, but you are against treatment for autism so what else do you suggest?

“He compares autistic people to Holocaust victims, which does a grave injustice to both autistic people and Jews. And even in apologizing for that comparison, he described autism as ‘shattering’ families, when some of the most loving and supportive families I know are the families of autistic people.”

Silberman isn’t the mother of those children so he can walk away at any time. I have no doubt some of these parents are genuinely supportive but he needs to try and consider the reality of caring for a severely impaired child 24/7/365. For example, they may require 24 hour supervision, cannot use the toilet alone, can have seizures (which includes risk of death). Furthermore they grow up. Imagine you are a 5′ 5″ mother attempting to subdue your severely ill, autistic, 6′, 20-year-old son when he is lashing out in a fit of violent rage due to sensory overload and then get back to me.

It is also true that the strain of severe autism on a family can lead to divorce, the severely disabled child requires all the attention 24/7 so siblings are neglected, etc. Again, this is fantasyland stuff from Silberman.

“The main problem that autistic people and their families face is the lack of support and resources across the life span, but Kennedy condemns the ‘crippling’ cost of providing disabled students with access to education, using an ableist slur to complain about resources that were fought-for by generations of disabled people and their families,” Silberman pointed out.

So this man, who isn’t autistic, is telling autistic people what our ‘main problem’ in life is. While this article preaches about ‘non-disabled people explaining autism to autistics’. Yeah piss off.

‘Crippling cost’ of so and so is a pretty stock phrase. Neurodiversity activists want to have this both ways. They want to claim autism is a disability when they want accommodations or money but then want to glamourise & claim it’s just a ‘difference’ and does not imply inferior functioning. These two claims contradict each other. Pick one.

“It increases vaccine hesitancy and people choosing not to give their kids vaccines, and that increases the resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases,”  Zoe Gross, director of Advocacy at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, told Salon. Perhaps the most prominent instance of this occurred in 2015, when nearly 200 people were sickened with measles despite the disease having been eradicated 15 years earlier due to parents not vaccinating their children.

Yes the point of vaccine scepticism is to try and get people to not give their children poison injections, well done for figuring that out.

I said this with Covid and I’ll say it again: ‘cases’ of a disease are irrelevant. If someone gets sick for a week with measles, so what? This nonsense that we can simply eradicate disease with the needle and we never have to be sick from anything ever is a ridiculous provaxxer fantasy.

Also do I need to bring up the graph of measles mortality decline before vaccination?

“You can see that these are people who would rather have their kids get vaccine-preventable diseases and potentially die than do something that they think erroneously risks their kids becoming autistic. That’s a pretty bleak view of autism.”

Reality is a pretty bleak view of autism.

Life expectancy of 36-39.5 for the low functioning cases, 58 for the high functioning ones, 78% unemployment rate, misery of sensory issues, high anxiety, loneliness, non verbal, seizures, can’t use the toilet on their own, gastroenterological problems…yeah why would a parent not want that for their child? If you’re offended by this, you’re offended by reality. Feel free to go off in the corner and be offended by reality but the rest of us don’t have to take you seriously.

As a result, Waltz described how in the 1990s the “‘do your own research’ crowd” created a climate wherein “autistic children were written off by most schools and psychologists, parents were left without the services they and their children needed, and autistic adults weren’t even in the conversation.”

Yeah the reason that autism got no funding was antivaxxers, because we all know that antivaxxers are all-powerful & control the reins of the government purse.

They also encouraged the view that autism is an “epidemic,” so that research goes toward “curing” it instead of things like “local charities and services that were helping children, families and adults, and diverted funds away from the research into education, social care, family support, housing and employment that would help actually existing autistic people and those who care about them.”

How is this not an epidemic? Please explain with a rational argument, and not ‘those mean antivaxxers said it’.

Again, antivaxxers aren’t the ones controlling the money. I know you all think we’ve all got mansions and shit but for the vast majority of us: no.

“His insistence that autism is a recent phenomenon caused by vaccines or chemical pollutants erases generations of autistic people who were often misdiagnosed with conditions like childhood schizophrenia, and subjected to cruel ‘treatments’ including lobotomies and brutal punishments for autistic behavior that included electric shocks,” Silberman observed.

Except those treatments were very late 19th/20th century (lobotomy) or became popular in the second half of the 19th century with origins in the 17th/18th century (electroshock), so they have been mostly used well into the vaccine & pollutant era. Schizophrenia is also quite a modern term, coined in 1900. In fact, like vaccines, these ideas are largely an invention of the modern Victorian medical paradigm. So this does not prove the long history of autism. You need to be proving the mass cases of regressive autism among peoples like the Greeks and the Romans to prove it’s normal (I say Greeks and Romans because they had good records so it would be possible to prove, but completely non-settled pre-agricultural societies where there would be little/no exposure to mercury would be best).

Furthermore, electroshock therapy is still used by psychiatry. Does Silberman consider that to be barbaric as well? I don’t have a problem condemning it, but it involves condemning the modern medical establishment and well, we can’t question ‘The Science’. We wouldn’t want to be considered ‘conspiracy theorists’ now would we?

“That’s precisely the opposite of the truth — in fact, study after study has shown that the broadening of the diagnostic criteria was instrumental in boosting estimates of autism prevalence, as I discuss at length in my book NeuroTribes.”

No-one is saying that this is completely irrelevant, but the idea of something going from 1 in 10000 to 1 in 36 just because of extra diagnostic criteria is absurd on its face.

But let’s just quote Toby Rogers:

Well perhaps the increase in autism prevalence is just the result of better awareness (and what’s called “diagnostic expansion and substitution”)? The state of California funded two multimillion dollar to examine sharply rising prevalence in the state and whether it was the result of social factors. The first study was led by pediatric epidemiologist Robert S. Byrd at UC Davis who directed a team of investigators at UC Davis and UCLA. The investigators concluded that, “The observed increase in autism cases cannot be explained by a loosening in the criteria used to make the diagnosis” and “children served by the State’s Regional Centers are largely native born and there has been no major migration of children into California that would explain the increase in autism” (Byrd et al., 2002).

The state of California revisited this question in 2009 with a study led by the top environmental epidemiologist in the state — Irva Hertz-Picciotto at the UC Davis Mind Institute. This study concluded that changes in diagnostic criteria, the inclusion of milder cases, and earlier age at diagnosis explain about a quarter to a third of the total increase in autism (Hertz-Picciotto & Delwiche, 2009). In a subsequent interview with Scientific American, Hertz-Picciotto explained that these three factors “don’t get us close” to explaining the sharp rise in autism over that time period and she urged the scientific community to take a closer look at environmental factors (Cone, 2009).

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AUTISM

The entire conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism can be traced back to 1998, when a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a study in the medical journal The Lancet claiming that children who were given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine) developed autism.

Oh goodie the obligatory Wakefield-bashing. Do they ever get tired of stating the same shit? Where would provaxxers be without Andy Wakefield to bash a few more times?

The Wakefield Gambit, as used by provaxxers, is something like this: Andrew Wakefield said that the MMR vaccine causes autism and he is a bad man and a fraud so therefore vaccines don’t cause autism. Despite obviously being fallacious, the main purpose of this argument is to erase other doctors or experts that have researched this topic (Dr. Exley, Dr. Thomas, Dr. Bradstreet, for example) by implying it’s only Dr. Wakefield who said it and then that if they can discredit him they can discredit the whole thing. Perversely this argument then ends up giving Andy Wakefield all the credit as the single handed destroyer of vaccine ‘science’ which is probably the opposite of what they want to achieve given how much they hate him.

Let’s address the actual argument. If I have said this once, I have said it a hundred times. The people who claimed that the children developed autism after the MMR vaccine were the parents of the children. Wakefield was simply willing to listen rather than automatically gaslight the parents. Read the goddamned Lancet study.

Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children

WAKEFIELD ETAL. ILEAL-LYMPHOID-NODULAR HYPERPLASIA, NON-SPECIFIC COLITIS, AND
PERVASIVE DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDER IN CHILDREN

“That’s not the same as saying that autistic people and their families are always just fine,” Waltz clarified. “We’ve created a society that excludes more and more people from the norm, and we could do something about that by changing our attitudes and behaviors regarding human diversity. But of course there is also that one-quarter to one-third of the autistic population who also have intellectual disabilities, and there are those with very severe sensory perceptual issues or additional medical needs (for example, due to seizure disorders, which are more common in autistic people).”

Oh now you acknowledge those severely impaired by autism. Right at the bottom. Because they aren’t glamourous enough for ~neurodiversity~.

Also the framing on these things annoys me as it tries to minimise the problem of the autism, and makes the problem about ‘lack of acceptance’. No the problem is the damn autism. Funnily enough no-one’s expressed any real hate towards me for autism but that hasn’t managed to magically cure my severe anxiety and my sensory issues (fortunately I have managed to cure the severe anxiety with Dr. Chris Exley’s method) but the neurodiversity activists pretend that if people are nice to me I would have little or no problem. That’s without even mentioning severe autism.

These individuals need help in the form of social services. What they definitely don’t need, Waltz said, is “to be someone’s ‘experiment of one’ to be put through potentially harmful therapies and treatments, not someone to be over-medicated for behavior control rather than medical need, not someone to be institutionalized or abused.”

Where has Kennedy suggested ‘over-medicating’ autistic children? I’m guessing given Kennedy’s stance on Pharma, he’d be opposed. Isn’t it the establishment who think drugs for every ‘mental health’ problem are good and that if you object you are ‘pill shaming’? This article is meant to be criticising Kennedy and well if it isn’t a claim Kennedy has made I don’t see the relevance.

Image source: Photo by Mateus Henrique on Pexels.com