Why is Kennedy so hung up on autism?

r/

Is it just a means to rally against vaccines or why is he so hung up on that topic?

Comments

  1. A1sauc3d Avatar

    Because he’s a conspiracy theorists and grossly under qualified for any job in the medical field, let alone the top spot. He only got there because he sufficiently brown nosed trump hard enough.

    But yeah, he’s just unintelligent and uninformed and prone to hot button conspiracy theories. It gets people riled up. It’s a go to political strategy in general, but especially on the right and especially these days. Stoke up some culture war nonsense to make everyone distracted so they don’t notice the real criminals sitting at the top robbing everyone blind. Most of the people at the top stoking these issues don’t even care about them, it’s just a tool they use to manipulate the public and keep them voting against their own best interest. Keep people scared and confused and distrustful of their neighbors and you can get away with pretty much anything.

  2. CantConfirmOrDeny Avatar

    It’s all the anti-vax bullshit. He wants to “prove” that vaccines cause autism, therefore, vaccines are bad. It’s complete and utter garbage.

  3. WorldTallestEngineer Avatar

    RFK Jr. Pushes all kinds of insane conspiracy theories.  He also says AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, which is absolutely insane.  He gets the attention of his idiotic followers by spreading these lies and misinformation.

  4. Ancient-Actuator7443 Avatar

    Must be the brain worm

  5. JohnnyFatSack Avatar

    Maybe he should ask Musk since he and Elon are both public about his autism and they are both on team “let’s destroy the USA”.

  6. SignalDifficult5061 Avatar

    He aspires to be a quack from 10 years ago.

    Just go on a 6 month bender and then try to be relevant, start from there.

  7. medium1080 Avatar

    You know what’s the saddest part of all of that? Kennedy is probably the only one in the Trump administration that truly believes in what he says. He’s just an absolute brainrotten maniac

  8. Kamuka Avatar

    His law firm makes money suing people based on this false view.

  9. username_is_taken_93 Avatar

    The autism-vaccine myth is hard to combat.

    Showing ASD traits and/or the realization that your kid isn’t neurotypical, can hit very suddenly. And it happens at the same age you get a lot of the vaccines.

    So you have these distraught parents who 100% believe that the vaccine “took away their child”, and go around being very loud about it. Extremely moving testimonials: “I took my kid to the doctor and it came back autistic.”

    This is powerful.

    And of course the drive to protect children is strong.

  10. Apprehensive_Lunch64 Avatar

    To be fair, so were Nazis, so…

  11. GrinningPariah Avatar

    Like other modern anti-science movements, antivaxxers feel compelled to still speak the language of science. They want you to believe they’ve got the real science.

    Thing is, in looking for science supporting an anti-vaccine viewpoint, they all end up in the same place: A study by then-doctor Andrew Wakefield linking a specific vaccine to autism in children.

    (That study is, incidentally, horseshit. Its methods were obviously flawed, and abusive. It’s been widely debunked since. Wakefield himself was mired in conflicts of interest, he actually sold a competing vaccine to the one he was linking to autism. It is how it sounds.)

    But still, that study exists and that’s all that matters to antivaxxers. They only need the appearance of scientific methods. And so they fixate on that one study, because that’s all there is. No other study has ever found any widespread danger to vaccines. So they’re stuck with the autism thing.

  12. airconditionersound Avatar

    In addition to what other people have said, there is also a lot of hate for autistic people. He’s capitalizing on that

  13. RoamingDrunk Avatar

    One of his kids has a pretty intense version of ADHD. He started off trying to find the “reason” for this and refused to believe it was genetic. He’s such a narcissist that he felt saying it was genetic was a way of blaming him. Then he heard crackpots blaming autism on vaccines and kinda just expounded that out to all neurodivergence being caused by vaccines. So, just like all the people involved in this administration, it’s a lethal level of stupidity combined with profound narcissism.

  14. Unicorn_Warrior1248 Avatar

    Because he can only focus on the buzz words to get people’s attention. He doesn’t know anything about what he’s talking about, ever.

  15. Plus-Ad-5853 Avatar

    It’s his fixation….

  16. anonymousscroller9 Avatar

    do you think MORE autistic people is a good thing

  17. Responsible-Sale-467 Avatar

    Oh, so now it’s bad for someone to have a special fixation/interest?

    ETA: Sarcastic reply offered by a neurotypical redditor who nevertheless really likes trains.

  18. DrProfessorSatan Avatar

    The worst thing about people like him on autism is this notion that people with autism are broken and need to be fixed.

  19. grayscale001 Avatar

    Conservatives think they can kill anything they don’t like by saying it’s “for the children.” It’s been that way since the Reagan era and before.

  20. Lopsided_Repeat Avatar

    Talking point to divide people

  21. gamergirlpeeofficial Avatar

    Make no mistake: fascists see autistic people as another class of undesirables to be dealt with and purged from society.

  22. BlissfulWizard69 Avatar

    Incredibly small and exploitable population that isn’t well understood, kinda like how they hyperfixate on trans people. It’s easy to lie about obscure things to stupid people.

  23. PoopTransplant Avatar

    RFK Jr. is just a meat suit. Years ago, on a heroin and supplement fueled bender, Kennedy ate road kill, as all stable people do, and got a case of the wormsy brain. These brain worms took control over RFK and have been using his body since to bring down big pesticide. Now for autism, RFK needs to have someone to blame to get rid of dewormers around the world. So to your answer, he has holes in his brain from worms eating it, and vitamin a and cod oil won’t fix stupid. 

  24. ye_esquilax Avatar

    Because once a conspiracy theorist latches onto an alternative theory, they don’t want to let it go. It’s theirs. It’s a piece of forbidden knowledge that has been granted to them, and it makes them feel special. It makes them feel more knowledgeable than the average person.

    Most people hate being wrong, but it goes further than that. If they give it up, it would mean acknowledging the mainstream experts were right all along, and this goes against their worldview that those in authority cannot possibly be looking out for our best interests.

  25. wanderingdg Avatar

    Seeing a lot of vitriol in this thread & that’s fair, but I think it’s worth acknowledging the seed of truth that any good conspiracy theory starts with.

    All my friends are having kids right now, and they’re all a little bit afraid of autism & ADHD, not because they won’t love their kid if they have it, but because they want to give their kid the best chance at a good life and have no idea what causes these issues & why it’s increasing. Any growing & mysterious problem spawns lots of conspiracy theories until people get answers, so the anti-vax people have an easy issue to latch onto here. Acting like it’s illegitimate to worry about autism just pushes more people to the fringes.

  26. wwaxwork Avatar

    The first people the German Nazis came for were the disabled, they practiced everything they were to do later to the Jewish on the disabled first. So this whole thing makes me very nervous.

  27. whiteorchidphantom Avatar

    The roided up brain worm guy who eats rotting dead animals is trying to convince people that those with autism are not normal.

    I also enjoyed when he said autistic people don’t pay taxes. That’s not only a lie but also not something that should be considered a negative based on who his boss is.

  28. yukonwanderer Avatar

    I don’t understand why people care so much about it. I guess they are thinking of the severe type of autism that makes communication and functioning in our society extremely difficult. Otherwise the autistic people I have been exposed to are, for the most part, extremely charming, refreshing in their honesty, we need more of these people in this world lol. So I guess people just don’t like differences in general, especially the right.

  29. TheBaggyDapper Avatar

    It’s because he’s a fucking idiot. 

  30. joemac1505 Avatar

    I see many comments about how he’s crazy but I don’t see too many mentioning that it probably actually would be a good thing to find out why autism rates are high and getting higher.

  31. retardborist Avatar

    Because he has fucking brain worms

  32. _ism_ Avatar

    Why isn’t he responding to all the backlash? Has he made any kind of acknowledgement to all the autistic adults writing/calling in, making media about it? Has anyone sent him some snarky poetry (bc we can’t be poets he says)?