The Trump Administration really seems to have a thing for genocide, and I don’t believe this statement to be hyperbolic even if it is a tad theatrical. Whether they’re launching nationwide dragnets to preserve the racial purity of the endangered American factory, militarizing the Rio Grande, or openly conspiring with Benjamin Netanyahu to hollow out the Gaza Strip for luxury condominiums, the second MAGA junta seems to be defined by grand and expansive schemes to erase problematic populations with massive government programs.

This drive towards demographic hygiene in the name of national revival extends towards Trump’s domestic social programs as well, with executive orders explicitly defining transgender people to be little more than a contrived ideology and calling for that ideology to be eradicated by eliminating the presence of inconvenient non-persons like me from the public sphere.

The fact that a political movement built on a foundation of demonizing refugees and Muslims would evolve into a cabal that seems to find a final solution to every problem they manufacture isn’t exactly new or even all that surprising but that doesn’t make it any less revolting, especially when you find yourself existing at the cross section of multiple genocides. On that note, apparently, it’s just my lucky day, because the latest target of Trump’s conspiracy to make America pure again is the neurodivergent and he’s backing a thinly veiled approach to eugenics to erase us.

Cue Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; professional imbecile, craven opportunist, and somehow Secretary of Health and Human Services. This morally derelict nepo baby has fashioned a career out of two things, squatting beneath the squandered vestige of his family name and demonizing autism as a scourge against suburbia. It was really only a matter of time before he used his position in Trump’s new cabinet to turn his hobby into a jihad and apparently that time is now. This April, in tandem with the CDC’s latest inconclusive report on childhood autism rates, Kennedy launched a series of ambitious proposals to fix his pet crisis once and for all.

After chopping up a few poultry observations from the latest report and mixing them up with a hodgepodge of mischaracterized data from other more outdated studies, Kennedy painted a portrait of a community which includes most of the members of my own found family that bares absolutely zero resemblance to reality. Once he was done pulling numbers out of his ass to suggest a scientific basis for his wholesale character assassination, Kennedy drew his violin and sang a sad song about autism, describing the phenomenon as an “individual tragedy” that “destroys families” before painting a picture of the people I love that renders them to the status of useless, otherized, husks draining an otherwise productive society of its resources.

RFK Jr., a junky trust fund baby who has never contributed anything of value to society in his entire life other than the screeching sound of his own overprivileged existence, declared that most autistic people 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…” They’ll never use their bootlegging connections to rig an election, they’ll never have the leader of a foreign proxy state executed, they’ll never drown their latest mistress in a luxury car, beat a teenager to death with a golf club, or shoot heroin in a limousine… You get the picture; they’ll never be a fucking Kennedy.

But never fear, a white knight from Camelot is here to rid us all of this horrid affliction faster than you can say fraud. Kennedy has announced a bold mission to cure what he describes as a “preventable disease” over summer vacation, stating “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.”

Let me just rip the needle off the record right now and set a few things straight. The first and most important one being that there is no goddamn “autism epidemic.” Whole governments and international medical bodies have already dumped billions of dollars and decades of time into identifying the causes of autism and this is what the data finds; while autism rates have risen dramatically since 2000, all the available evidence suggests that these numbers are simply the result of the increased awareness that comes with broadening diagnostic criteria and making early childhood screening routine.

RFK Jr., who has spent years blaming vaccines for the frightening rise of weird people, has labeled this commonsense data interpretation an “ideology of epidemic denial” and has claimed that he had never met an autistic person in his youth. I actually don’t deny the second slur but that’s likely because autistic people were just labeled as “retards” back then and left to languish in a Thorazine coma in the kind of maximum-security government asylums the Kennedy Dynasty kept up and running with the taxes they never had to pay.

An American Academy of Pediatrics study in 2021 actually found that 60% of people diagnosed with autism have an IQ in the average range or higher and a 2017 PubMed study found that 61% of people on the spectrum are employed. This is because autism is not a disease or even necessarily a disability. It is a vast spectrum of complex neurological differences that effect the way the people who experience them experience the world around them in multiple ways, most of them non-debilitating. In other words, autistic people just aren’t “normal” and that terrifies WASPy little one percenters like RFK Jr. and his suburban fan club of pearl-clutching, new age, Karens.

Autisitic people, much like Queer people, are simply biologically driven to reject the status quo and considering how fucked up our genocidal status quo is, we could use a lot more of them.

Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely an epidemic going on here, but it is an epidemic of neurodivergence, a rapidly expanding umbrella community that includes all of the pieces of the puzzle that pricks like the Kennedys couldn’t jam into the homogenized purgatory of western civilization. This is a radical epidemic of neurological outsiders racked with stultifying diagnoses like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and OCD. An epidemic which overlaps significantly and uncoincidentally with the parallel epidemic of transgenderism which also boldly questions the core assumptions of a deeply polluted society.

I am a proud part of both of these epidemics, only I prefer to think of them as a revolution. My own neurodivergence takes the form of multiple personalities or what is commonly diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder. I had to develop this “disorder” as a survival mechanism against the trauma I experienced at the hands of the Catholic Church. The only way for me to exist as an individual in a space so fundamentally unsafe, especially for a transgender child, was to evolve into five separate individuals.

I do not believe that autism is fundamentally dissimilar. We are all hostages of a rapacious capitalist superstructure that demands total conformity to an order that is literally destroying the planet. The only way to truly be an individual in such a deeply sick environment is to be fucking crazy and when people like Kennedy talk about “curing” us they are really talking about erasing us, regardless of whether they do it with prostate medication or genome editing.

This ploy may be patently fascistic but the most infuriating thing for a plural genderfuck bumpkin like me is that there isn’t even anything particularly conservative about it. In fact, there is nothing particularly conservative about any of MAGA’s genocidal policies, all of which smack of the kind of belligerent, right wing, social engineering that defined big government progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The kind of cosmopolitan psychopaths who forcibly sterilized over 70,000 Americans, turned public schools into prisons, and started a World War just to revitalize American greatness.

This is also the same line of uber statist thinking that inspired the Nazis to take it one step further, and Donald Trump doesn’t strike me as the kind of man afraid to take that next bold step into the abyss of the recycling bin of human history.

Ironically or not, neurodivergent people are actually our greatest hope against this threat. We are already the product of an over-regimented society, the battle-hardened casualties of the stultifying social engineering of big business, big government, and big religion, of compulsory schooling, constant surveillance, and abusive psychiatry.

Most of the people I love fall somewhere on the wilder side of this spectrum of neurological outlaws and the biggest problem that most of us grapple with is the trauma that comes with growing up weird in a conformist society. But we are all survivors. Neurodivergence is evolution through radical individualism and the bigger the MAGA state becomes, the more neurodivergent individualists will evolve out of surviving it.

In other words, keep governing us, normies. You’re only building an army too strange to tame.

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