RFK Jr. Touted as 'Unfit' After Rant About Lack of Autism in 'Older People': 'He Cannot Be This Stupid'
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. incited backlash after questioning why autism is "only happening in young people" during a televised news briefing.
He’s been unfit since he got in.
When I hear something along the lines of "there is no way someone can be that stupid." I think about 2 things.
There's this thing called the internet:
I would be pretty proud to be the number 1 on this search result.
Of course he can be that stupid. If you don't think you can be that stupid, you are as out of touch as he is. There is no known bottom to human stupidity.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Congress too, we need them to step down. The rich are afraid of taxes, congress needs to be more afraid of us than they are of taxing the rich. they still need to get food. They still have family that live in our communities. They should feel as safe as an illegal immigrant smuggling thought crimes across the border.
He was touted as unfit before that, too
the former husk is just a meatsuit for the worms.
Touted 'Unfit'
By senators prior to his appointment?
No, by some anonymous posts on social media last week
So will this result in any actual consequences?
Absolutely not
Great
Are people just realizing now that he's unfit for his job?
Yeah. That's how stupid America really is. Worse than Carlin ever thought possible.
Hey, that 65 year old neighbor with the $200k model trainset? Yeah, probably autistic.
But in his defense, trains are cool.
In his defense, he probably got that train without paying taxes.
Absolutely.
'He Cannot Be This Stupid'
He's even more stupid than they are acknowledging.
Yes, I was going to post "hearing CAN be that stupid".
"He was in fact, exactly that stupid..." - Ron Howard
He's dumber than most people can imagine. Jack, Ted, and Bobby might have been morally bankrupt but they weren't stupid. Something went seriously wrong with this one.
heroin and worms was downfall.
Somehow JFK is still beating him in the brains department
Short answer: if they got it bad, they're dead or in a nursing home. That's why they aren't walking in a mall. They ran out of health.
Long answer: in recent times, there seems to be lower threshold of diagnosis.
But if he truly thinks he can pinpoint exposures that increase autism - things like the exposure to tetraethyl lead which probably increased criminality and decreased mental health - good luck for combing scientific studies. There may be some. But if he's gonna rewind the age old "vaccines cause" record and replay it, nah, I won't be listening.
It's not that there's a lower threshold. It's that the definitions and our understanding of Autism changed. People who formerly would have been labeled with Asperger's are now labeled (correctly) with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plus we've learned how Autism can present differently in other communities that aren't white male children. Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).
The truth is that there are likely a ton of people out there with undiagnosed Autism, because they wouldn't have met the criteria to be diagnosed as kids based on our understanding at the time. It's why there are so many adults now getting late life diagnoses.
I was a scientist and have tested on the spectrum myself. And I think a whole lot of my colleagues would have too. Except if you're high functioning and productive, there is little reason to test you. The misery of being on the spectrum and not being able to easily socialize with other people or to detect their emotional states is unimportant to society as long as one meets the performance standards society sets for you. Not that I'm complaining but I might have felt better about myself if I had known why I wasn't able to do those things until I was an adult. I suffered depression largely because I was "weird" growing up and was bullied until I became an accomplished wrestler and it became dangerous for others to bully me. I truly think sport saved me. And taught me how to act more normally. Not everyone on the spectrum is so fortunate.
They're going to blame flouride for sure
Way too many rural (i.e. well water) cases for that to even make a good scapegoat.
I'm sorry but if you can listen to RFK speak for longer than 10 seconds without becoming enraged then you really are just fucking dumb.
I love how this is the hill people finally die on, and not the other absolutely wild shit this guy has said before he even got this gig, like collecting roadkill or his extremely well documented conspiracy-esque, anti-vaccine history.
The worm ate deeply _ although I doubt there was much to eat.
What there was was junk food.
"No one in my generation had autism"
Sure thing. Uncle Barry, who collects every issue of Mechanics Monthly, and has spent over $10,000 on his model train set that is a perfect scale recreation of King's Cross Station, is completely neurotypical.
This response vexes me because while Uncle Barry here is certainly an example, what these people are forgetting (and what this thing about Uncle Barry glosses over) is that until the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the fights from the 70s onward, if a family in the US had a child with an IQ of under 70, they were often shipped off to an institution.
Deinstitutionialization didn't really begin to gain steam until relatively recently in our collective history- here in Tennessee we still had one of these facilities open until the nineties. These people didn't believe there were people with severe mental disabilities, because our society hid them away!
Look up Clover Bottom. But don't, because it's horrifying. I've met people who lived there their entire lives. What was done to them was disgusting.
It is awful what was done to them. But it's awful that people with a greater severity of condition, a greater need for care, are often glossed over in these comment sections. It feels like they're made invisible in these conversations just like they were in those institutions! And I'm terrified that assholes like RFK Jr will disappear them for real!
State institutions are still hellholes.
There needs to be a federal investigation in to Oklahoma’s congregate care homes. Kids still get shipped off to institutions, which are unsafe and unregulated.
I have a staunchly leftist but older co-worker who thinks no one she knew growing up had autism.
"I still think something is causing it" despite being pro-vaxx.
The propaganda is extremely effective unfortunately
What's causing the rise in cases is actual diagnosis. For many generations. Theirs and mine included. Either you were institutionalized. Or you were undiagnosed. People would just refer to you as Quirky or eccentric. There was no Spectrum to be on. It was treated as largely binary. Only in the last 40 years at the earliest did they start to fully understand the condition. And even now they still have a long way to go. But they've at least started recognizing the larger condition.
Thinking that the rise in diagnoses at this point is some sort of crisis/pandemic or Healthcare emergency that needs to be addressed. Is like blaming the Exterminator coming out and finding your house is filled with termites. It wasn't filled with termites before they came just a few odd little ones that you saw skittering about on the surface. All these other ones must have been brought by them or someone else right? It's not like they could have been there all along and we just didn't notice?
looks like she bought into the partly anti-vax prop, probably heard jenny mcarthny once about vaccines and she was hooked.
I really do think autism and cancer have gotten much more common. And it's very likely something is causing it.
Not vaccines. Vaccines are fine.
Could be plastic. Could be pfas (forever chemicals). Could be lots of things, or a combination. But there's most likely an environmental cause rather than genetic or just an increase in diagnosis. (Though the increase in diagnosis and recognition is also real.)
and shoots steroids regurlarly, and is obssesed with playing with animal carcasses.
It's so funny because you look at the guy and think he's fit. But I saw a video of him doing pushups and it's honestly so unimpressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOGNznbJPY0 like all that gear to not be able to do 10 full straight pushups? Ok dude
Look, he's killing people. He should be arrested and go to trial for criminal negligence and manslaughter. Like the rest of the bunch.
But they can't even say it lol. "oh, some people touted!"
There was a thread on reddit that had someone speculate that he is an indirect serial killer. Meaning he tries to influence people into doing 'healthy' things that are anything but and keep bullying them into them until he results in their health declining to the point that they die. He had a relative that he did this to. The justice system isn't built for that kind of stuff and proving it there would be damn near impossible unless he somehow confesses to it.
Something like Munchausen by proxy?
The inside of RFK Jrs head be like…..
Yeah, I don't think The Brain is in there.
the worm made sure of that
Could be just pinky
Don't insult Brain like that! He is legitimately smart and does what he can given his circumstances (he is a literal lab rat in a lab that he has to escape from every night... and his only companion is barely functional).
The moment has reignited broader concerns about Kennedy's qualifications and judgment...
He has no qualifications and an exactly equivalent amount of judgement.
🙄 🤡 🖕 🖕
He may have 0 qualifications, but I wouldn't say his judgement is exactly equivalent. His judgment goes much more into the negatives, since everything he says and every decision he makes is actively causing harm. We would be better off simply having the role vacant, or giving the job to someone in a coma.
Ironically, even the most profoundly autistic people, the ones that resemble his characterization of the condition, would still be better at the job than he is.
his worms are doing all the talking./
He is a cis white male. Pretty sure thats all the qualifications he needs unless you are one of those "woke" people who think we should have experts running things.
Not even. Older people got the mercury-stabilized vaccines he's ranting about, they should be more autistic according to him.
He's just fucking stupid.
Plenty of older people have ASD. I know a couple personally. They have childhood stories of being beaten, yelled at, difficulty with teachers and peers. They claim to be fine today, but telling horror stories of your trauma as a kid really says otherwise. If ASD was bad enough to be “retarded”, they were kept from society and/or put in State Homes. RFK is ADHD, and the only thing that kept him out of jails due to the untreated effects when he was younger is hs family name and wealth.
oh so now he's unfit?
Narrator: Indeed, he can
Methinks the "doctors" fucked up his so-called brain worm incident...
Evidently, they removed what there was of the brain and left the decaying dead worm in its place.
🤷♂️
I read that in the voice of Ron Howard
The lady doth protest too much...... I'm calling it now, some psychiatrist tried to diagnose Rfk Jr with autism and he lost his fucking shit about it. I mean the dudes been obsessed with dead animals since he was a child always been known as "eccentric".
One of Donald's cabinet? Unfit?!?
Again?
All the people who made the boomer neurodivergents disappear either have dementia or are long gone. Easy scapegoat.
Not to mention that there are heavy correlations between queer identities and Autism. A lot of neurodivergent Boomers likely died during the AIDS epidemic, unfortunately.
A friend of mine learned she had adhd at 65, and autism very recently at ~78. She said that her behavior and interests finally make sense.
"cannot be this stupid?" This is a kakistocracy, it's only stupid.
It's an administration of "well, I haven't seen it, so obviously it isn't real."
It's an administration made up of people who aren't smart enough to get better jobs, which assures their loyalty. There's definitely other people who love trump who are actually qualified for these positions, but they would have said no to some of this at some point.
Unfortunately lots of old folks think this way, actually today in the morning this same topic was brought up at breakfast by my mom, she was not being disrespectful necessarily but still is incredible how she cannot see that herself might be autistic and just never got a diagnosis
I still... maybe it's my years working construction, but when I look at RFK Jr. - his mannerisms and gestures and speech patterns and connection (or lack thereof) to reality - I see a tweaker, clear as a bell.
He has done (and sold) a lot of drugs. So, no surprise there.
Maybe… if we make vaccines illegal, he’ll tell people to start taking them. /s
alcohol too, he was such a menace he drove his former wife to suicide.
He did heroin for over a decade so you’re not far off
'sharks don't get cancer' - same train of thought.
He looks like that old stress squeeze toy
That thing looks the killer in a horror movie franchise.
Don't give Hollywood any new ideas.
"Have you ever seen anyone...71 years old, with full-blown autism?" Kennedy asked. "Head-banging, nonverbal, non-toilet trained, spinning, toe-walking...these other stereotypical features?"
"Where are these people walking around the mall? You can't find them," he said. "They're not in homes, there are no homes for them, there are no institutions... anybody can look around and see that this is a canard."
I keep seeing the Forest Gump quote overlayed over him whenever I see one of his posts, "I am not a bright man."
Also, there very much are older people like this. My mother worked with severe people my entire life. The elder autistic exist.
You would think he’d know from his aunt Rosie’s tragic example about how our society puts inconvenient people out of sight.
She’s was a woman though, they don’t get autism. Autism only looks like a nonverbal little (white) boy in an Autism Speaks commercial who can only eat chicken nuggets.
oh yes he can be, just look at that face
Back in the 60s I was just "slow".
yes, he absolutely CAN be this stupid
Came here to say this lol
Everyone in Donald’s Admin is fucking stupid. Donald blaming dei… as everyone else is saying merit.
It must be A1. It’s all computer!
The steak sauce? Mmmmm yummy.
So, how old is the ol' muskrat?
Coming from Silicon Valley, I can assure RFK, my friends with autism are absolutely crushing it out here.
I look at their homes and families and think “fuck, carve me off a slice of that spectrum.”
All someone on the spectrum needs to be successful is to get a special interest in a lucrative field.
Respectfully, this is a vast oversimplification. There are many successful people on the spectrum in tech, but that doesn't always translate to success or money. Communication is a huge part of a development job and communication with others is usually fraught for autistic people.
That being said, a bunch of folks on the milder end of the spectrum have certainly had great success in the field, myself among them.
THIS MAN HAS A WORM IN HIS BRAIN.
How we allowed him to lead the HHS is beyond me.
Honey, he's a worm in a meatsuit. I'm not quite sure how much of the man was left.
The brainworm he has in his skull died as a result of his stupidity so yeah… he’s that stupid.
Lack of nourishment it seems... And it shows...
l
or still alive, parasites are pretty hard to kill because they have ways of shielding themselves from the immune systems. thats why its a bad idea if a parasite dies suddenly(your immune system goes into overdrive)
He is a crank.
No shit. Next they're gonna drop a bombshell report that sometimes dogs are brown.
RFK: “Oh yes I can! In fact, I can be even more stupid! JUST WATCH ME!”
None of the twits in the current regime are fit for running a roadside fruit stand. Dumb, mean, divisive... these are some of the worst asinine people the world unfortunately has...
People started having kids at later age. My parents were 36 and 37 when I was born, so here I am, mildly autistic.
On top of that, I'd never have known if I didn't go to a psychologist and ask my doctor.
My dad likely is autistic too. Just never went to a psychologist in his life. (He's the last child of 6 kids, so his parents were likely old at that stage too)
If it's not causing serious impairment, people won't seek information about it. There's a ton of people with neurodivergency that live perfectly fine lives.
It's the overactive amygdala that caused me the most impairment anyways, not autism. Luckily, that can be helped with a simple medicine.
I don't understand the downvotes here. Parental age has in fact been identified as a risk factor for more than a decade.
But also, just being on the spectrum is not problematic. And, as you point out, a lot of people are probably somewhere on the spectrum but are undiagnosed because (in the US, at least) we generally don't seek medical attention unless we're experiencing some sort of crisis.
Y-u know guys at some point you just have to roll with this shit because it’s too absurd. I mean I remember I used to be outraged far far in the past when I still treated these seriously
Now it’s just hilarious. Outrage to entertainment pipeline
What you can do is laugh and be entertained because such stupid people at the top will probably never happen again for decades. It’s your chance to soak up all the entertainment potential
That's a very privileged viewpoint.