Why Does Kennedy Hate Autistic People?

It goes hand in hand with antivaccination beliefs

April 16, 2025

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. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.

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The epidemic is real. [Autism] destroys families and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, our children.

-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Press Conference, 4/16/2025

Many people are aware that there is an antivaccine movement. What they may not know is that this movement has a long history of hatred for autistic people. Ever since Andrew Wakefield published his fraudulent study linking vaccines to autism, antivax activists have treated autism and autistic people as if they have no intrinsic worth, as if they are less than human. And some of the things they have done in the name of “controlling” or “curing” autism have been criminally horrific.1 

Autism exists as a spectrum. Some autistic people easily pass as “neurotypical”; some are profoundly impaired and, like many people with disabilities, require a great deal of care. The stress of raising an autistic child can range from very little to terribly difficult. But unlike the Nazis, who routinely murdered autistic and other disabled children, our society likes to think we value all human beings, regardless of abilities. While that’s never been as true in action as it is in words, it is aspirational. But all some activists like Kennedy can see is “broken” people who are a burden on their families and on society.

Kennedy’s current speech was apparently in response to the CDC’s recent report on autism. This study added to our already-robust knowledge base about the rise in autism diagnosis. Words are important—autism prevalence is increasing, but much of that increase is due to improved diagnosis, not necessarily any increase in the occurrence of autism. In other words, numbers are going up because we are better at recognizing it.

The anti-vaccine movement is dangerous for obvious reasons—kids are dying needlessly of measles, here, in the US, in 2025. Another danger is the use of autistic people to advance the antivax cause. In order to do this, antivax activists must present autism as something destroying families and society as a whole; and this requires dehumanizing autistic people. Dehumanization of disabled people has a long, ugly history.

If you want to learn more about autism, talk to autistic people—they know more than you do; read books that treat autistic people as human beings.2 Speak out against the sort of hateful, dangerous language spouted off by Kennedy today. Educate yourself, and don’t stay silent.

Stay well.

-pal