It’s very well known that RFK JR is an industry shill for quack cures of all sorts whether it’s for plagues or Autism.
Something that pinged on my radar is if he is a shill for public school defunding and privatizing.
Because these aren’t entirely unrelated.
If you can redefine Autism as predominantly made up of uneducable people and reassign the rest back to “normal” then a lot of the legally mandated educational support for neurodivergent children and the associated overhead falls away.
There’s been what I would consider a self reinforcing virtuous cycle happening:
Autism gets less stigmatized.
Parents are more likely to get their kids tested.
More Autistic children show up for school, diagnosis in hand.
That diagnosis comes with legal requirements for a more individualized and higher touch education.
In order to meet these obligations, schools need to hire more staff, and can rationalize more training and resources overall that frequently have knock on benefits for neurotypical students.
It’s not unheard of for school obligations under ADA and IDEA to be unfunded mandates but usually the schools can unlock pools of money set aside by states and federal grants.
Schools become motivated to encourage parents of children experiencing difficulties in school or otherwise displaying stereotypical behaviors to get tested.
Loop starts over from the top.
The problem isn’t the increased Autism, it’s that it takes a diagnosis to get the education that kids more broadly deserve but often don’t get because of how poor and even middle income areas have to stretch every dollar.
But if your goal is to subcontract out education, it needs to be run cheaper and the legal obligation to provide the best possible education in the least restrictive environment for neurodivergent kids needs to be shrunk down as much as possible because private schools don’t have the same legal responsibility.
Tinkering with diagnostic criteria is not solely about Eugenics and caste systems, there’s money to be saved in denying children education and money to be made in commodifying education.
