Quick Take: an Easy Red Pill
Show the normies a bald faced lie that can be verified in four minutes.
Do you have friends or family members who believe the mainstream media? I have a cure, an example of the media doing a coordinated Big Lie campaign extending even into the the entertainment media. There are entire lengthy articles beating up a strawman based on an easily verifiable bald faced lie. And the media are willing to jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people just to score some cheap points against anyone associated with Trump.
Do a Google search on RFK Jr.'s autism speech. The venom is everywhere, and much of it based on a lie. A particularly egregious example can be found on the People Magazine site: RFK Jr. Says People with Autism 'Will Never Pay Taxes, Hold a Job, Go on a Date,' Sparking Fierce Backlash This article is built around the claim that RFK Jr. said that all autism victims are completely handicapped and cannot live anything like normal lives. That is, they quote RFK Jr. out of context thus:
Kennedy is also facing backlash for the stark, yet demonstrably false, claims he made about life for children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
"Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this," he said. “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."
The article goes on to cite stories of the austic progeny of various celebrities who have gone on to live lightly assisted lives, pay taxes, etc.
Here's the Big Lie: RFK Jr. was referring to the 25% of autism cases that are severe. Have your Blue Pilled friend/family member watch the first four minutes of the actual speech.
(I could only find a Fox video of the press conference on YouTube, but you can send people directly to the C-SPAN video here.)
Three minutes into the speech Mr. Kennedy clearly stated that 25% of the autism cases are severe and went on to describe the symptoms of severe autism. These are the people he was referring to in the quote above. There was no denial of milder cases of autism. The People Magazine article is thus built entirely around taking a quote out of the context of the entire speech, and the beginning of the speech at that.
QED. The mainstream media proven to be lying scum. Red Pill administered.
Go forth and enlighten. Or read on for more analysis of Mr. Kennedy's press conference.
Fumbling on the Five Yard Line
While on the subject, a critique of the press conference is in order. Much of the conference was devoted to debunking the notion that the growth in autism is just due to better diagnosis and a broadened definition of autism. Most of his effort in this regard consisted of citing impressive sounding studies and calling in experts to back up his thesis.
But late in the conference he comes close to delivering a rhetorical kill shot. He asked the question: Where are the institutions for the autistic of his generation?
Close, but no cigar. There are institutions with autism victims of the Baby Boomer and early Gen X age cohorts. Every state has general institutions for the severely handicapped, and that includes people with autism under the old, very narrow, definition. There just aren't that many autism cases from those older age cohorts, because autism was rare. (Also, most of those cases were institutionalized from sometime in childhood and have been largely forgotten save by close family members. And people don't live as long in such institutions as in the wild for multiple reasons, so many have already died off.)
He should have asked the question: "Where are the people of the older generations who have been clinically diagnosed with autism as an adult? Show me the 1 in 31 autistic Baby Boomers using today's definition."
This should be enough to shut people up, but there are people out there who have a very sloppy expanded definition of the autism spectrum in their heads. So let's debunk that using some simple logic.
Nerds vs. Autists
I am not a psychologist nor have I read the latest diagnostic manuals on the subject of autism. But I can make a case based on simple logic to show that equating being a nerd with being on The Spectrum is questionable. My argument is simply this: to be on The Spectrum, one should show some characteristics in common with full blown autism under the old definition. Maybe only a subset, and usually milder, but at least similar.
We can work with two old school definitions. We can look at what Mr. Kennedy called severe autism -- which used to be called simply autism. These characteristics include:
Weird sensory reactions. Extreme sensitivity to some stimuli and/or extremely weak reactions to other stimuli.
Obsessive self-stimulation.
Obliviousness to social norms.
Extreme difficulty in communication.
Self harm, such as head banging.
Serious temper tantrums over things normal people consider minor.
The above list describes most autism a half century ago, something like 90%, vs. 25% today. Milder cases were rare. For our milder case definition, let's just go with Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Rain Man. For this proxy for mild autism back in the day, we dial down the above list and add:
Obsession over one or a few real subjects/skills, usually without full context. Think Rain Man's knowledge of airplane crashes.
Possible mental super powers. Idiot savant was the term used back in the day. For Rain Man it was some incredible counting and arithmetic skills.
Being overly literal.
So, has there been an increase in behaviors that resemble the old school autism behaviors listed above? Absolutely!
The Snowflake phenomenon is a screaming example -- literally. I suspect that most you reading this blog have seen videos of college students screaming and shaking like toddlers upon hearing a conservative say something that doesn't match the protester's worldview. That's classic autism behavior. And notice how colleges are building cuddle caves and other calming/sensory deprivation zones instead of just intramural sports and parties as entertainment. This is a perfectly logical response for dealing with a student body that includes many people with partial autism.
And I hear stories of young women cutting themselves when they feel blue. Self-harm upon frustration is a classic autism symptom.
Even the explosion in transgenderism could be partially caused by autism. Teach an overly literal thinking person repeatedly than they can be any gender and some will act on it. (I don't believe this is the only cause. We also have hormone disruptors, and giving really really gay guys permission to play dress-up are also factors.)
Consider those men who undergo hormone blockers in order to play in women's sports. The behavior makes sense for an autistic man whose obsession is winning -- while oblivious to the context of what winning in sports is about, while oblivious to such social norms as sportsmanship, while oblivious to the self-harm caused by taking hormone blockers.
Finally, let's look at someone who gets described as on The Spectrum who is the exact opposite of autistic: Elon Musk. While he does maintain a long term focus on being the Heinlein novel hero who turns humanity into a multi-planet species, he is anything but obsessed in the mode of an idiot savant. Musk is a hyperactive polymath notorious for taking side quests, from boring tunnels to selling flamethrowers.
His engineering advances are due to extremely holistic thinking. Look at Tesla. He got his engineers to figure out how to distribute high voltage electricity to thousands of the small lithium cells used to power laptop computers, and how to keep those packed together cells from overheating. He put a lot of thought into charging infrastructure, manufacturing, and even into taking on legacy car dealers.
He's extremely sensitive to what society thinks of his actions. He was giving the eco-goodthinkers what they wanted right from the beginning of Tesla. He repeatedly polled his followers on Twitter and acted on the results. He open sourced most of Tesla's technology back in the days when patent trolls were the villains.
And while he is not eloquent, he is a master communicator. He has played Twitter (and later X) like a master musician. He built the Tesla brand to the point that Tesla had a market cap equal to nearly all the competing car brands put together -- before Tesla was building a significant number of cars.
True, he trashed most of that branding by throwing in his support for Trump, but even that is an example of serious holistic thinking. He saw how the Left was morphing from liberal to something nasty and dangerous -- akin to the French Revolution or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but with an even deeper cultural death wish. He realized that you cannot launch a spacefaring civilization without civilization, so he made the risky political transition.
Where he seems truly weird is his tendency to eye roll during interviews. This is less weird than you think. All I have to do is dust off a Neuro Linguistic Programming book I bought 40 years ago:
and Boom! right on page 25 is a diagram relating eye movements to which sensory system a person is accessing.
Mr. Musk is simply putting more of his attention on the question being asked than the body language of the person asking the question. He is going deep into his head to craft answers. That's it. Not autistic. (Also note that those politicians who maintain a grin while staring into the camera during interviews are not doing so naturally. They are coached into acting that way.)
A Better Argument Yet
You might find my arguments above a bit clunky and hand-wavy. I may have fumbled the ball as well. And even if I succeeded, you cannot send normies to a Fabius Minarchus article! This is an inreach/coaching blog, not an outreach blog!
But I do have a friend from my Libertarian days who had deep personal experience with autism and has written a post that does successfully make the case RFK Jr. tried to make. He put the post on a normie friendly blog, so you can show it to your friends and family members. (Just don't hat tip me!)
I'm putting the link behind the paywall, as I don't want to curse my friends with association with my over the top Fabius Minarchus persona. For those of you unwilling to pay up, just send me a private message and I'll give you the link that way.