The Eugenic Bitterness Of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Earlier today, possibly while I was sleeping, Wormwood spoke about autism through the lens of misreading a new study from the Centers For Disease Control about the increase in rates of diagnosis, or “prevalence”. In the end, whether that misreading is willful or ignorant isn’t especially relevant as the effect and impact will be the same.
“Autism destroys families, but more importantly it destroys our greatest resource which is our children,” he said. “And 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.”
He was speaking here of those needing more or less constant and consistently high levels of support, which he terms those with “severe autism”. It’s only that I’m a stickler for accuracy that I point this out, since much of the social media reaction from autistics and their allies elides this to make it sound like he’s simply talking about all autistic people, period. I mean, yes—he does in fact hate all autistic people, but consider it an autistic special interest of mine to need accuracy even in these reprehensible things.
(The newerfangled term in use by an alliance of the aggrieved and put-upon Autism Mom community and some medicalized autism researchers is “profound autism”—a term I’d initially supported but backed away from in due, if delayed, course.)
My own reaction to Wormwood’s ignorant litany of complaints is somewhat severalfold.
First, the reality is that I do not pay taxes; have held but do not currently hold, and am incapable of again holding, a job; broke my arm the only time I tried to play baseball; have in fact written more than one poem; and do not go out on dates. He’s not, as I noted above, talking about me, but nonetheless he’d almost certainly still look at these things as reasons to view autism as a disease.
Second, any someone who never pays taxes, never holds a job, never plays baseball, never writes a poem, and never goes out on dates nonetheless still has worth and value simply by virtue of existing as an alive human being to whom and for whom we all are responsible. None of these things, or any of the other things they’re meant to implicate or inculcate in your imagination, are in and of themselves somehow the signifiers of dignity.
Third, and this was I think my first response on Bluesky to all of this, I’m almost more squicked by the idea of children as “resources” than I am by anything else in all of Wormwood’s monstrous, morally-malformed tirade. All of this nonsense is nothing more than bootstrap mythology, which in the end goes hand in hand with eugenicism.
(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that at one point during all this relentless focus on children, Wormwood rhetorically asked, “If the epidemic is an artifact—a better diagnostic criteria or better recognition—then why are we not seeing it in older people?” Hello, I am right here. We literally are seeing increased diagnosis in adults, and rendering us invisible won’t help us survive, let alone thrive. Again: this is eugenics. Of course, what he meant was why aren’t we seeing an increase in diagnosis of “severe” autism in adults, which is a completely ludicrous thing to ask.)
One of the reactions on Bluesky suggested that he’s implicitly framing autistic people as a burden on society and on their families. I have a complicated relationship with this contention because, as I’ve said, in fact I am a burden upon my family and upon society. It’s just that I’m one that my family in full and society in part has deemed worth the carrying. The issue isn’t burdendom, per se, but the feeling that some among us aren’t worth the effort of that carrying.
It does take in some cases an extra if not substantial effort to keep this, that, or the other person alive in dignity. The point isn’t that we should be denying the burden but that we should be embracing its carrying. The effort and the empathy is worth it because people are worth it, inherently and intrinsically.
This is something that Wormwood simply does not understand, and likely is incapable of comprehending even in part. The only thing about autistic people that he sees is the burden they cause to the bootstrap myth, because that fundamentally eugenicist myth rebuffs any and all belief in the natal dignity of each and every person.
Some of us require more effort on the part of others to keep in this world. Notwithstanding the paradox of tolerance, anyone who argues that some people in fact just aren’t worth it should be concerned that we will take that as a cue to think that of them.
Addenda
- Somehow I glossed right over the fact that after initially mentioning autistic adults in the context of diagnosis, he did then proceed to wonder why we don’t see ”severe” autism out in the world, like walking around the mall. Nonetheless, this is as ridiculous a statement as the other.