this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Genuine question. What is their obsession with autism? And why if they are so obsessed, did they cut the actual scientific research grants and budgets? And why come up with all these unsound theories? What's the underlying reason?
https://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-statistics-asd
You might not want to promote Autism Speaks (Wikipedia)
Yeah, that's a hate organisation, don't give them airtime.
They're incredibly stupid but need to feel like they're smart which they have zero chance of doing except in a room of people more stupid than they are.
They grew up in a time when People with Autism were called retarded. While also first hand experiencing people with Autism being way smarter than them... hehe.
I think their frame of reference for people diagnosed with autism is on the extreme end of the spectrum: nonverbal, can't stand to be touched, etc. They never kept up with the concept of a spectrum.
This is why RFKJ says things like, "An autistic child will never write poetry." Because in his mind, an autistic child needs a significant amount of care, possibly in an institution.
Most people who would be on the spectrum by today's standards were just considered "geeks" or "nerds" or "awkward" 30+ years ago.
Like my 80-year-old uncle, who has always skipped most family gatherings and only shows any kind of excitement when discussing electronics. His particular interest is ham radio, and he has spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment. He's way too old to have a proper diagnosis, but I'd bet my bank account that he's on the spectrum. The rest of the family just thinks he's "geeky."
Right wingers despise deviation from the norm especially visible deviations or ones that require accommodation. They can't admit that people naturally vary because that destroys their entire view of how society works, so they see it as some sort of moral failure that needs correction.
Hey, just like the Nazis.
Its a major conspiracy theory, sparked by a fraudulent paper in the Lancet in the 1990s claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Which was brought into the public consciousness by an obnoxious ex model named Jenny McCarthy. Who went on every media outlet she could lie her way onto, to spout the nonsense found in that single fraudulent paper. Even when the paper was publicly discredited by several medical journals and the bulk of the medical community, she still continued to spout it as fact. She is single-handedly responsible for the majority of the antivax movements in the US. Most antivaxxers have deluded themselves into thinking that somehow that single paper was valid and the entire rest of the worldwide medical community is wrong.
And Jim Carrey supported McCarthy, his then girlfriend, all the way.
I think it’s just the start of bad thinking and being anti science and against medical practice, so if they ever admit they are wrong their house of cards collapses and they’d have to begrudgingly admit maybe they don’t actually know anything about science and their whole worldview is based on lies and they’ve been misled. And then maybe they’re wrong about gay people being bad for society and climate change is real and they’ve been being stubborn asshats making problems for everyone.
Autism is another boogie man. A few decades ago, it was being gay.
Others have given much more thorough responses, but I truly think the gist of it is that women like Jenny McCarthy and other anti vax moms hate their autistic kids and need someone to blame. The autistic child goes against their perfect "American dream" lifestyle and makes them feel embarrassment and shame.
Autism is a condition which can be very difficult for parents to deal with in their child. As our understanding of it has changed in the past few decades a lot more people have been added to the spectrum, which can look like rates are skyrocketing. Furthermore autistic children are abnormal and easily infantilized, alongside often needing additional support of varying levels (part of why it's difficult for parents). And because it's a spectrum people can fill in the blanks with their fears for their kid worrying about a high support needs child rather than picturing a kid who just won't stop talking about dinosaurs and can't catch a social cue.
All this plays really well with the neo-volkish suburban moms that comprise the maha base. They want all natural "motherly wisdom" to ensure their kids grow up to be healthy, strong, and normal. They've been panicking about autism for a long time. There's a fake autism cure industry that's had some behind the bastards episodes on it, and the industry has done everything from accidentally killing kids in hyperbaric chambers to using bleach enemas as an attempt to cure autistic children
They think autism is worse than death. I've seen one say they prefer a dead baby from preventable disease than an autistic living child. I don't know why they hate us so much, we're just trying to live our lives same as their other victims.
It’s a spectrum, and I may be on it. I’m also normalish.
It’s probably they don’t like the elevated intellect of some autistic people and feel dumb and that makes them feel threatened because they may be outmoded.
I think it’s a combination of guilt, shame, helplessness, and an inability to connect with their autistic children that makes them hate it so much.
Guilt because autism is partially genetic and they blame themselves (of course, many genuinely stupid/brainwashed people think they caused it with vaccines). Shame because they’re too close minded to be proud of children who aren’t like them. Helplessness because there’s no cure for it and the symptoms can be incredibly severe. The inability to connect could be due to the severity of their child’s symptoms, but it’s more likely because their child doesn’t respond the way they expect and they and their child don’t recognize each other’s emotions from their body language.
All of that is made even more difficult if they themselves are on the autism spectrum and reject that.
I’m autistic and I come from a family of high functioning autistic people. My dad doesn’t think any of us are autistic, even though it’s very clear (he and I used to bond over our mutual love of excel and he has always been uncharacteristically thoughtful about my absolute intolerance for the sound of knife sharpening). I think part of the block for him is accepting that his own family history of ham radio operators, train engineers, and cryptographers might not be totally neurotypical.
He has accepted his ADHD, but it’s a hard diagnosis to disagree with when you’ve literally had over 60 jobs. Another barrier is that he feels like it’s “too many things” to have more than one mental health diagnosis, even though he is aware of the existence of comorbidities. Because he thinks he’s normal, he thinks everyone struggles with social cues, overstimulation, and changes in routine. Even though he knows he has ADHD, he got a master’s degree and had a successful career (despite changing jobs a lot), so he feels like people who struggle with ADHD are weak or lazy.
It’s fucked up, but it’s also a predictable reaction to growing up in the environment he did. Luckily, none of his kids takes his opinion on this to heart, and he was always good and reasonable enough to help us seek treatment for our mental health. My siblings are raising their neurodivergent children with much more acceptance and support than what we got as kids, just as he raised us with more than he got. Hopefully my family is not alone.
RFK in particular was an environmental lawyer who spent a lot of time looking into how corporations are poisoning the populace. So he is tuned to see increases in a disease and look for a culprit.
Trumps wealthy donors don't want him going after the extractive industries that are actually causing disease so they sent him on this quest to find the mythical environmental cause for autism.
He's also surrounded and supported by rich white people who think this is the most pressing "epidemic" because it effects them. They don't care about the poor black people getting poisoned in cancer Alley because they never see them, meanwhile they see karen and her autistic son who she's ashamed of every day.
Did he also used to get it wrong all the time, or is it a more recent development?
Crying autism works wonders among magats because of that BS paper from 2 decades ago
Every now and then modern medicine will focus on some disease,, study it more, try to understand what it is and what causes it, and why it is so severe.
Before, they didn't diagnose many people with autism unless it was super obvious, like someone who had the most severe symptoms, nonverbal, smearing poop, etc. They would maybe call that autism.
Back then, if a child was nonverbal they might just say "oh yeah my brother is a little 'slow', he doesn't understand what you're asking him".
And when they study it more, try to find out all the symptoms, they find out it's a range of symptoms that are more present than we realized. They discover that the same nonverbal behavior might show up in a much wider population but go away earlier for most, and some of those people exhibit other symptoms that were mostly being ignored.
So suddenly a lot more people start getting diagnosed with autism because they understand the wider range of symptoms and that it's a larger spectrum of things. Shit, maybe multiple issues that are comorbid. Maybe ADHD is its own class of thing that is often comorbid. Maybe there's a better way of treating people if they just show ADHD. Maybe some symptoms aren't worth treating. Etc
So you end up with conservative folks who were like, "why is autism so common now? It wasn't so big back in my day. Must be something causing this autism."
Well shit it's hard to say because it's likely they just realized how to diagnose it now, and also they diagnose more people with it who would have been ignored before.
Lack of understanding of the underlying issue is part of the problem, plain ignorance. The other aspect is if you accept it's a spectrum and understand the symptoms more, they diagnose it more if someone comes in with less symptoms. So yeah they see it a lot more places.
People used to demonize those that went to psychiatrists and psychologists. You didn't go unless you were "crazy". Depression wasn't a thing. They freaked out that depressed people were seeking treatment. For some people, they really just don't like change.
Same reason for criminalizing homelessness; “justification” for rounding up autistic people and putting us into labor camps.
They do this anyway with immigrants, native peoples, and black USians but theyve been looking to expand that dragnet even further to all disabled people as well.
See also: targeting trans folks, putting critics in prison for 100+ years over having a box of old zines in their home. The out-group will always get bigger.
Also, it's theater to pretend like they care about mental health so they don't have to do anything about mass shootings.
But mostly what you said- it's incredibly dehumanizing, which suits their grand project of having targets to blame for their incompetence.