Hey fam: I got a little hot after watching Trump and RFK Jr. yesterday. Their discussion of autism, Tylenol, epidemiology, “weak” mothers, and inconvenient children made me angry. Angry enough to leave this edition unlocked. If you have anyone in your life who needs to hear this stuff about autistic kids and our duty to open our arms wider, I hope you’ll share it with them. Or hit the 🤍 button so this Triad finds its way to other kindred spirits on Substack. And as always, if this feels like a time for you to jump in and join our community, I hope you will. We’re all trying to be our best selves here. Autism, MAHA, and the Face of GodOne part junk science, two parts incompetent government, and with a dash of blasphemy, for seasoning.
1. EugenicsThe executive branch is speedrunning ethnonationalism:
Yesterday we moved on to the dysgenic portion of the program with Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s press conference on autism where the MAGA/MAHA nexus made it clear that they view autistic people as mistakes; unfortunate victims of weak mothers who must be “cured.” I can’t adequately summarize the event; you should see it for yourself. But I can offer some highlights. President Trump said that childhood vaccines should be spaced out further than the current vaccine schedule: “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace. . . . This is based on what I feel.” Trump claimed that autism is caused by pregnant women taking Tylenol, and he excoriated the weak mothers who take the over-the-counter medication:
Trump and his appointees variously called autism an “epidemic” and a “horrible, horrible crisis.” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary said that it is “hard to watch” kids with autism and that “we can end the suffering” and that autism “may be entirely preventable.” What a grotesque way to talk about human beings; about children. “Autism” is not a disease. It is not a sickness. It’s category of neurodivergence that’s so broad there’s a running joke about it in the community: If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. But the MAGA/MAHA alliance does not like autistic people; it finds them unsettling. “Hard to watch.” It would like to stamp out autism. So it has now officially—from the White House podium—blamed mothers for bearing autistic children and offered the possibility that they can cure these defective people. This is wrong. Wrong on the science. Wrong on the reality. And wrong on the humanity. Let’s start with the “epidemic” aspect of autism. Kennedy says autism is increasing in the population, as if it were a viral episode, like measles.¹ Here he is last April:
This view is so foolish as to beggar belief. It is true that the rate of diagnosed cases of autism has risen greatly over the last thirty years. That’s because the diagnostic criteria for autism evolved during that time and access to screening increased dramatically. This is just the flip side of Trump’s idiotic take on COVID testing from June 2020: “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” So yes, in 1992 when our understanding of autism was limited and very few children were screened for autism, there were many fewer diagnoses of autism than there are today. This is a meaningless statistic. In the 1820s, precisely zero Americans were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This year 67,000 Americans will be diagnosed with it. Do we have an epidemic of pancreatic cancer? No. We had advances in scientific understanding that discovered cancer of the pancreas, followed by the creation of testing technologies to find it, and finally increased access to health care.² For the love of God, just look at Kennedy’s own numbers: Does he actually believe that some environmental factor in California causes double the autism rate for boys there compared to the national average? The world has always been full of autistic people; we just didn’t have a name for these neurotribes. We would say that autistic people were “difficult,” or “eccentric,” or “emotional.” Sometimes we’d call them geniuses. In cases where autistic kids were nonverbal, they’d be ignored or sent away to institutions. Out of sight, out of mind. The uncomfortable truth is that our society is not designed to accommodate people who are out of the ordinary. We do a better job of accommodation today than we did thirty years ago—but we’re still not great at it. For the most part, society requires neurodivergent people to fit in with neurotypical people. And yeah: That can be a heavy load.³ But the answer isn’t to stamp out neurodivergence or “cure” people of being who they are.⁴ It’s to widen our arms and be more inclusive so that they can find their place in the world a little more easily. The answer isn’t to look away when we see someone who is “severely autistic.”⁵ Instead, look right at them. See them. Include them. Love them. 2. About the HumanitySome years ago, there was an autistic woman who went to my parish. She was nonverbal, but she would be at the 10:00am Mass every Sunday with her mother. She sat not in the main sanctuary but in a pretty chapel in the back, where she could watch Mass from a comfortable chair through large glass doors. I imagine they chose to sit there because she would continually stim and they felt self-conscious about the movements and sounds. I liked to sit in the chapel with this woman and her mother at Mass; just a small act of fellowship so that they wouldn’t feel othered. The priest in charge of the parish got transferred, as they often do. The new pastor was a MAGA priest. He did not like having this woman at Mass. First he directed that the chapel be closed during Mass, in an attempt to discourage this woman and her mother from sitting there. When these two women continued to go to the chapel on Sunday mornings during Mass, the priest assigned an usher to physically blockade the chapel and prevent them from entering it. The mother asked the priest if he might reconsider letting them sit in the chapel. His compromise was to put a single, hard wooden bench in the church vestibule, which was hot in the summer and cold during the winter. This woman and her mother stopped attending Mass at their church. I left the parish shortly after. I tell this story because I believe the onus is on us to accommodate ourselves; not the other way around. And because compassion isn’t “curing” autistic people. It’s accepting them and making room for them. I also tell it to show how ingrained the impulse is to recoil from discomfort. Even from figures who should know better. Another impulse that is ingrained: to assign blame for the existence of discomfort. If someone is autistic, then there must be a fault. Some person or thing who caused it. Like Tylenol. Or weak mothers who failed their children by not “toughing out” fevers, or pain, illness. When it comes to human dignity, causality is a dangerous way of thinking about the world.⁶ You probably know this passage from the Gospel of John, even if you aren’t Christian:
Neurodivergence is neither a punishment nor a failing.⁷ It simply is. Autistic people—all people—exist as works of God to be loved, cherished, and respected. Trump, Kennedy, and their confederates aren’t just doing bad science, bad government, and bad public health. They’re dabbling in blasphemy. Put all of that in a blender and the concoction you get isn’t just grotesque. It’s dangerous. 3. Stove-TouchingThis is a fantastic piece from the Washington Post. I hope you’ll read it. I often hear from people who have loved ones, or close friends, who are under the sway of Trump. Their question is: How do I navigate this relationship? How do I pull them away from this darkness? This story about the Beckham family in Nevada is one of the most powerful pieces of witness I’ve read. The short version is this: Brandon Beckham lives in rural Nevada. He used to work for the Bureau of Land Management. He has three children. He had taken leave from his job to care for his wife while she was in hospice. He voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024. And when DOGE began chainsawing the federal government, Brandon was one of the casualties. You should absolutely read the long version, though, because the details are extraordinary. Brandon is a man struggling with grief, and faith, and the thousand logistical problems that come with losing your spouse while trying to provide for your family. He’s reflective. He’s earnest. And yet . . . he is still pulled to give Trump the benefit of every doubt. The other main character of the story is Brandon’s oldest child, Elias, who tries to gently pull his father back while dealing with the same grief. They take long drives together. They talk for hours. And he never stops loving his dad. Please, go read this piece. It doesn’t have the ending I wanted it to have—but it still gave me hope. What I’d like you to talk about today is how we can love people back into communion with liberalism. 1 It is darkly funny that Kennedy does not care about actual epidemics, like COVID or measles, but obsesses about a fabricated “autism epidemic.” 2 I am not comparing autism to pancreatic cancer. I’m merely illustrating the line from Mystery, to Discovery, to Technology, to Adoption that marks all scientific progress. 3 Society is, almost by definition, not designed to accommodate outliers. It can be harder if you’re left-handed, or 7 feet tall, or have an IQ of 200. Hell: Just imagine how hard life was for anyone with bad eyesight before glasses were invented in the thirteenth century. You could be the smartest, strongest guy in your village, but if you had terrible vision, you were consigned to digging ditches. 4 The least problematic part of yesterday’s event was the administration’s promotion of leucovorin as a therapeutic for some autistic kids. The research on efficacy for leucovorin in this use case is less clear-cut than the administration presented, but pursuing a promising therapeutic is a good idea nonetheless. In general, I’m in favor of having pharmaceutical therapeutics available for everyone in cases where they’ve been shown to be safe and effective. The administration’s embrace of leucovorin does, however, highlight the illiterate nature of MAHA’s approach to pharmacology. People such as Kennedy latch on to experimental or unproven therapeutics like leucovorin or (in the case of COVID) ivermectin. They are clearly huge fans of certain classes of steroids. But they disdain many therapeutics that have deep wells of research behind them, simply because they are in common usage: MAHA hates SSRIs, the methylphenidate family of drugs, and vaccines. They’re against Tylenol now. MAHA’s approach to pharmacology seems driven in large part by conspiracism and/or contrarianism: Treatments widely accepted by the scientific establishment are viewed as dangerous, while treatments viewed skeptically by the scientific establishment are dogmatically embraced. 5 I hate that phrase, but the MAHA people use it, so I’m using it here as a reference to Makary’s statement. 6 Causality is important for science, but not for Christianity, which is controlled by Divine Mercy. 7 It is possible that someday we might discover factors that contribute to neurodiverse development. But to date, no such reliable evidence exists. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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