Snipped Logic: RFK Jr.’s Latest Cut at Autism Science
Eugenic Frame Under Government Authority
I'll try to be be (ahem!) sharp and incisive here as I approach the latest nonsense coming from the mouth of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. With just a single sentence, he has outdone even his own conspiracy résumé. During a Trump cabinet meeting this week, the Health Secretary claimed that children who are circumcised have double the rate of autism, most likely because they were given Tylenol.
Let that sink in.
Autism, in his telling, is no longer a neurological difference—it’s a side effect of postnatal pain management and surgical ritual. In a single statement, he collapsed medicine, religion, and eugenics into a soundbite. And Trump nodded along, calling the claim a matter of “tremendous proof,” because of course he did.
Cutting-Edge Pseudoscience
The harm here isn’t just the falsehood. It’s the frame: autism as injury, as damage done to an otherwise perfect child. That logic has powered every bad theory from refrigerator mothers to mercury. Each time, it promises control—that if parents and governments just find the right culprit, they can cut the risk out of existence.
This week, the scapegoats were Tylenol and foreskin.
Kennedy cited a widely criticized 2015 Danish study that claimed a correlation between circumcision and autism. He conveniently skipped the part where the authors admitted the data showed no causal relationship. But correlation is never the point of these theories. The point is fear — fear that sells.
The structure of harm is textbook for this kind of institutional framing: a state official invoking pseudo-science to define autistic people as preventable errors. When the nation’s top health officer uses his platform to spread that message, it moves from ignorance to institutional violence. What gets legitimized next? Denying pain relief to pregnant people? Policing medication choices under the guise of protecting unborn minds?
Collateral Damage, Real and Imagined
Medical disinformation doesn’t stay rhetorical. It alters what people do when they’re scared. Pregnant women have already begun posting videos online — some defiantly swallowing Tylenol, others swearing off it out of fear. In both cases, they’re reacting to a government that turned public health into moral theater.
This is what eugenic framing looks like in 2025: not laboratory sterilization campaigns, but bad press conferences flaunting their deliberate denial of common sense. The harm isn’t hidden. It’s televised.
Meanwhile, every autistic adult hears the same subtext we always hear: you shouldn’t have existed. You were a mistake of chemistry or surgery. We are the living evidence that terrifies the people who can’t accept that human variation isn’t a malfunction.
Sharper Questions
- What happens when the Secretary of Health calls neurological difference a wound to be avoided?
- How much longer will scientific authority be repurposed as spiritual panic?
- Who profits when autistic life is reduced to a preventable accident?
Final Cut
Every era invents its own superstition to sound like science. In the 1950s, it was cold mothers. In the 1990s, vaccines. Now it’s Tylenol and circumcision.
You can almost hear the scissors: snip, snip — another century, another theory trying to cut autism out of existence.
But what keeps getting trimmed away isn’t autism. It’s credibility, empathy and any pretense of scientific ethics.
That’s the real wound. And it’s self-inflicted.