Autism spectrum disorder and resisting the crybullies
Equating medical research to help neurodivergent people to Nazi eugenics programs is totally absurd. This rhetoric should be rejected and rebuked.
A crybully is someone who either exploits legitimate suffering or fabricates victim hood to silence opinions and facts they find to be inconvenient to their argument or agenda. Victim status has become a valuable commodity, and even "conservatives" are embracing this destructive trend. One place where crybullies are coming out of the woodwork is with the autism spectrum. (And it is a spectrum. Not all people with autism are the same and some are more severely neurodivergent than others.)
The idea promoted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that we will know the cause of autism by September is ridiculous. That is not how science works. Science does not work on deadlines. Science works by collecting evidence, testing hypotheses and theories, and collecting more evidence. Science is a process, not a deadline. The scheme to "find" a cause by September looks like someone trying to reach a preordained conclusion.
With that said, we need to reject the attempt to make autism spectrum disorder into a victim group. Autism is called a disorder for a reason, and many people with autism struggle to adjust to social and societal norms and expectations. It is called a "spectrum" for a reason: Some people are much more severely affected than others and will need more accommodations, while some may need fewer or even none at all. The legitimate suffering of neurodivergent people is not something to be celebrated, any more than the suffering of people with any other disability.
We should also reject and rebuke the crybullies who are trying to silence legitimate inquiry into autism spectrum disorder. I have actually seen people arguing that looking into the causes of or finding a treatment or "cure" for autism is "dehumanizing" neurodivergent people, or advocating eugenics. No, RFK Jr. is not a Nazi who is going to load neurodivergent people onto trains and send them to concentration camps for extermination. That is utterly absurd. Some of this is a hysterical overreaction, and some of it is outright and shameful lies. The latter group is beneath contempt.
Do I trust Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, to honestly examine the causes and treatments for autism? No, I do not. This "inquiry" does merit close scrutiny, as it would be very easy for this to slide into quackery. Is it a good thing to research this disorder in order to help neurodivergent people and future generations? Absolutely yes. We should not permit the crybullies to become a modern Inquisition, persecuting autism researchers the way Galileo Galilei was ordered to abandon the (now scientifically proven) heliocentric model. We should not allow the crybullies to stifle scientific inquiry because it is "heretical" to the religion of Political Correctness.