All Episodes
May 27, 2023 - Conspirituality
32:14
Brief: RFK Jr., The Anti-Vax Candidate

Another Kennedy is running for President. But discussion of his anti-vaccine activism often overlooks how it affects people with autism. Julian talks to Eric Michael Garcia, political correspondent for The Independent, and author of We're Not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation, about the human cost. Show Notes We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation — Eric Garcia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, Conspiracuality listeners.
Julian Walker here with you for this brief, and I'm joined by Eric Garcia.
On April 5th, it was reported by CNN and Politico that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
had filed the necessary paperwork to run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
A few days later, Kennedy took to Twitter to invite his followers to donate $24 toward his 2024 campaign, which he said would officially announce on April 19th at an event in the Boston Park Plaza.
Back in February of 2021, Kennedy's Instagram account was shut down for posting anti-vaccine misinformation.
At that time he had 800,000 followers there and only 200,000 on Twitter where he now boasts over
900,000. In March of 2021, so a month later, he was identified by the Center for Countering
Digital Hate in their Disinformation Doesn't report as one of the 12 people collectively
responsible for over 60% of anti-vaccine content on social media.
Yeah.
Their follow-up report, called Pandemic Profiteers, showed how the anti-vax industry at that time generated over $1 billion for big tech and earned its top influencers, Kennedy among them, at least $36 million collectively a year.
But the blue blood son didn't start peddling dangerous pseudoscience during the pandemic.
His turn into being a prominent anti-vax activist began in 2005, about 20 years into an accomplished career as an environmental lawyer and an adjunct professor at a New York law school.
As with other contrarian influencers riding a pandemic wave of fame and fortune, though, this did lead him to being on stage at a 20,000-strong anti-quarantine rally in Berlin alongside Holocaust deniers who later tried to storm their capital.
It also found him headlining the Defeat the Mandates rally in January of 21 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where, topping a who's who roster of conspiracists and pseudoscience peddlers, he compared those refusing COVID vaccines to Anne Frank escaping the Nazis.
And he claimed that Bill Gates had plans to set up an authoritarian technological surveillance state.
RFK's vaccine misinformation has led directly to dangerous measles outbreaks in Samoa, Minnesota, and Brooklyn, New York, where his Children's Health Defense Organization has specifically targeted minority communities with understandable mistrust of the establishment power structure.
He's also been a mouthpiece for the discredited CDC whistleblower claim of a cover-up around MMR vaccines being more harmful to black and brown kids.
He's recycled the false claims of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, the originator of vaccines cause autism allegations, which he later admitted to fabricating.
But those still won't go away.
So, I'm joined today by Eric Michael Garcia.
He's the senior Washington correspondent for the British newspaper, The Independent, and the author of the book, We're Not Broken, Changing the Autism Conversation.
Eric, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here with you.
All I can say is, wow, this guy is a potential presidential candidate.
Yeah.
You know, first, as an advocate for people with autism, What was your thought on hearing that RFK Jr.
had filed the paperwork to run for president?
Oh, as an autistic person, it made me want to slam my head against my desk.
You know, I think it's important to recognize that he has, from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, he also has a lot of ties to Steve Bannon, and Steve Bannon has kind of gassed him up, so it doesn't really surprise me that he was doing this.
But on top of that, I think it should be noted, I should say, his father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., is one of my political heroes.
Yes.
And his uncle Ted is obviously the co-author, one of the authors, of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Kennedy family Obviously had a very disgraceful history with lobotomizing their daughter, Rose Kennedy, I believe, but then became some of the biggest advocates for people with disabilities with the ADA.
Robert F. Kennedy Sr., of course, exposed the Willowbrook home in the 1960s.
So, let's start there.
That's why I think it's really scary to think.
But I think when I think about when I saw the reaction, it just made me want to shriek internally.
And in many ways, what it did is it reminded me of what happens when you let a lie go unchecked for the better part of a decade and a half.
Because Andrew Wayfield's study came out in 1998, and It didn't get retracted until 2010, the Lancet study, and he didn't lose his license until 2010.
And all the while, you had a lot of people become, gain notoriety for promoting this very dangerous idea.
And I don't think, and you and I could talk a little bit more about this, it's not a coincidence that his activism as a lawyer, as an environmental lawyer, led to him going off the deep end on this?
Yeah, I mean, I think what you see, so I should say, I grew up in Southern California,
which I'm sure your listeners know is kind of like the central hub of these kind of,
these kind of crunchy people.
I think for a long time, and you and I were discussing this on the phone,
a lot of people thought that they were liberals and they might've been coded as liberal
because they were, they had yoga, they wore yoga pants and everything like that,
but they were very, people who were kind of, I guess you could say your mainstream casual
kind of California liberal types who worry about toxins in the environment
or worry about very unnatural things entering into our body.
These are people who eat vegan or who try to return to nature as natural.
And so, it doesn't surprise me that, from what I understand, his main argument was the opposition of the addition of thimerosal into MMR vaccines and mercury into vaccines.
So as a result, it doesn't really surprise me that his origins begin in environmentalism and then enter into this unnatural thing that is entering into children's bodies is causing them to be autistic.
Yeah, yeah.
So if we have, uh, if we have toxins in the rivers and like actual legitimate, um, pollution that is happening, uh, through like big corporations and their, their ways of figuring out how to get government to sign off on them, continuing to just, you know, rampage through some sort of, uh, uh, environmentally toxic capitalistic, uh, strategy, then you can see that the overlap into, Oh, what about toxins in the bloodstream?
What about, Yes.
You know, these unnatural things and, and some way that maybe that's also being covered up.
So it's from a charitable point of view, it's like, okay, he's, he's done some good work on the front lines exposing very real problems.
Yeah.
But then that is sort of going too far into this more conspiratorial mindset.
Exactly.
I think that's exactly what happens.
I think you see a lot of, you see a lot of this.
I mean, I think that you and I have discussed this.
I think that there has always been this, and if I could just put on my political reporter hat on for a little bit, I think that's why you brought me on, is that I think that a lot of people tend to think That, oh, the anti-vaccine movement started left and then moved right.
And that's somewhat true.
You always did have some Robert F. Kennedy types, your Dennis Kuciniches and people like that, who were kind of, you know, good government folks who wanted government to oversee the pharmaceutical companies in the pharmaceutical industry and oversee, you know, caring for the environment.
But really, More than anything, it was always kind of the place where the fringes of both ends of the political spectrum met, really, if you think about it.
Because the first person who brought Andrew Wakefield to testify before Congress was a guy by the name of Dan Burton, who was the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and he was the guy who was really promoting conspiracy theories about that Vincent Foster didn't commit suicide didn't kill himself that he was shot by and killed by the Clintons.
There was a hearing where like he shot like a watermelon or a cantaloupe to show that Vincent Foster was murdered.
So it always existed on the fringes of the far left and the far right.
It wasn't it was just that I think that the far Left anti-vaxxers tended to have more social capital, I think.
You see it because of the fact that there were a lot of them in Hollywood and a lot of them in places like California and places like Marin County.
Places where the masters of the universe live.
And they were getting a platform on Oprah.
Yes, they were getting a platform in Oprah with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.
So you had these celebrities, very visible celebrities coming out.
And then you have, you know, I think that RFK was very much a part of that.
And that you have this scion of, you know, a liberal's most beloved political family talking about these toxins.
That amplified this idea on the left.
It always existed on different polls.
I think conservatives tended to just dislike the idea of mandates as a whole.
Yes.
As an affront to libertarian kind of freedom from government.
Yeah, as an affront to libertarian ideals.
And I think liberals, it kind of went against, it created this very perfect David versus Goliath idea of like, the big pharmaceutical corporations are poisoning your children.
It fit into the liberal schema, I think.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really good overview.
I wanted to loop back around to this piece, if you don't mind, because I feel like there's this really nasty ableist exploitation at the heart of a certain kind of anti-vaxx rhetoric, right?
And it often gets overshadowed by its scientific dishonesty, the danger that it puts children and babies into because they're not going to get vaccinated against dangerous diseases.
But if we go back in time a little to the late 90s, where We were at in terms of making progress scientifically, socially, and culturally around autism.
And then what, what kind of impact Andrew Wakefield had as well as, you know, those who followed in his footsteps on the lives of people with autism?
So I call this, I tend to call this the lost autism decade because, um, What happened was, and it's important to remember, until 1980, autism didn't get a separate diagnosis from schizophrenia until 1980, right?
Wow.
So, that's important to remember in the DSM.
As I like to joke with a friend of mine who's gay, I say, like, yeah, we lived in a world for a long time, there wasn't a separate autism diagnosis in the DSM, but there was homosexuality in the DSM.
So, it's important to remember that in 1988, it gets a separate diagnosis.
Then, of course, you get things like PDDNOS, which is Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, I believe.
Then you get Asperger's Syndrome.
This is what I was diagnosed with at the time in the 1990s.
And so, the diagnostic criteria was changing.
And on top of that, science was largely binning the idea that autism was caused by unloving parents, which was a thing that was discussed for a long time, up until the 1970s.
It was the popular science up until the 1970s.
Really.
Which sort of overlaps with the way that they thought about schizophrenia in those times, that it was because of having a cold mother or something, right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Yes.
So it's important to recognize that this was the primordial soup.
And then what happened was in 1990, as I mentioned, Robert F. Kennedy's Uncle Ted comes past the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And then there's also another, and I would argue equally important legislation, which was the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
And that was a reauthorization of what was then called the Education for Handicapped Children Act.
Hold on one second, I'm going to pull it up for you.
When Congress does these big pieces of legislation, it usually does these kind of concurrent reports that really are telling about what...
Congressional tax usually it's really boring. This is why I didn't go to law school
But there's usually a concurring report and what was interesting was that it said that
Was it said autism has suffered from an historically and accurate?
identification with mental illness unquote and that the idea of including autism in the IDEA which is the
individuals with disabilities education act What it means is that now autism is included as a covered disability.
and not as a form of mental illness."
So what does that mean?
What it means is that now autism is included as a covered disability.
So therefore, schools have to report the number of autistic students that they serve.
So what happened?
What happened was we saw an increase in diagnosis because schools had to report the number of students that they had, the autistic students that they were serving.
And unfortunately, I think that what happened, and this is where good intentions can go awry, is that for so long parents had been blamed.
for autism and for their children becoming autistic, that it gave them an out.
It says no not to blame.
It's the doctors who are forcing our children to do this.
But if you think about it, that increase in diagnosis, could have led to us saying, okay,
well, we have all these autistic people.
How do we serve them?
How do we make sure that they go to college?
How do we make sure that they live independently?
How do we make sure that they have, if they can't live, if they need 24-hour care?
How do we spend the money the right way to make sure that they have their lifespan issues?
That they can be healthy throughout their lifespan?
You know, for a long time, the autistic life expectancy rate was around 34 or 35.
How do we expand that?
All of these questions could have been answered.
And instead, um...
The UK and the US largely, but other places, moved toward panic.
And Andrew Wakefield offered a very, very simplistic answer.
And to be clear, that panic is, oh my God, there's this rapid increase in how many kids have autism.
How do we explain this?
Right?
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
There were, there were tons of stories in the New York Times.
There were stories in CBS.
There were, there were all these stories about like, there's this autism epidemic that was the discussion.
Um, and, and what, What it said was that underlying all of it is this idea that autism is bad and autism is to be avoided.
And how do we fix it?
And how do we change it?
And I think that, you know, the less sinister, but still kind of ableist ideas is that,
you have to remember in the 2000s, you know, so shortly after Andrew Wakefield's proliferation,
there was this real movement to promote autism awareness.
And we're talking in April, this is like when Autism Speaks was started,
when the Autism Society, when Autism Awareness Month really kicks off,
and then the whole Light It Up Blue campaign, you start seeing puzzle pieces.
All of this is, whether it's anti-vaxxers, and we can talk a little bit more about Autism Speaks
and the anti-vax connection a little bit there, and, yeah.
And the general just idea of curing autism or finding a cure to autism and making that the priority for autism.
That becomes the focus of any kind of autism discussions.
Rather than taking, I guess you could say, the spirit of the ADA and the spirit of the IDEA and saying, how do we adapt the world to these people?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so it's like, it sounds to me like there are these two competing narratives.
One narrative is saying, Oh, it must, this, this autism is bad and it must be caused by these environmental factors or, you know, by vaccines.
The other narrative is saying, autism is bad.
We have to figure out how to, how to cure it because there's, there's all of these kids being diagnosed, diagnosed with it.
Nowhere in that, Competition.
Is there anyone saying, these are people who happen, their brains happen to develop in this way.
How do we, you know, include them in our society?
Yeah, that wasn't even remotely being discussed, at least on the high levels.
And what you saw was, and I read about this in the book, is that this reached, you know, the point that I make is that You know, in 2008, it got so high up that both John McCain and Barack Obama talked about vaccines in their speeches, you know, vaccines and autism.
And, you know, because like the point that I wanted to make when I wrote about that was that, you know, I think everybody remembers Donald Trump saying that stuff in 2015.
And that was very much a preview of his how he would approach the pandemic.
But So just for clarity, Eric, you're saying Obama and McCain refuted the link between vaccines and autism and Trump?
I have it right here.
So, what's interesting is that, so in around 2008, Obama was giving a speech in Pennsylvania, where he said, quote, we're seeing just a skyrocketing autism rate.
Some people are suspicious that it's connected to advanced vaccines, this person included, and he pointed to someone at a crowd at a rally, and then he says, the science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.
Then, at a rally in Texas, John McCain said it's indisputable that autism is on the rise on children, and we had to go back and forth And there's strong evidence that it's got something to do with the preservative in vaccines.
Oh, wow.
And, you know, it's funny because, I mean, I've, you know, I interned for Barack Obama and I talked to John McCain a few times before he passed away as a reporter, as a young reporter.
Both of them are very smart men.
Both of them are very savage about either men.
They're both very honest and honorable and decent men.
John McCain, of course, a patriot who broke his body for his country and Barack Obama, the first black president.
And what that said to me was that this was something that spread to the highest levels, not necessarily out of malice, but that was just the predominant conventional wisdom at the time.
Of course, things changed later.
Barack Obama, of course, nominated two openly autistic people to serve in his administration, but, you know, that was the predominant.
Okay, so yeah I really take your point that this had become so widely propagated that even these two figures who maybe later would have changed their mind or maybe did not themselves have sort of anti-vax tendencies had gotten this idea in their head that more research was necessary because you know it could be the thimerosal Yeah, even Senator Tom Harkin, the other author of the ADA, he'd had questions about it later on.
I interviewed him for my book and he retracted his ideas.
He said that that was what he was doing at the time, but he realizes it was wrong.
But this was just becoming very, it had become so ingrained and it had become so entrenched that even well-meaning, very smart, very wise Yeah, I mean that leads us into what I wanted to talk with you about next, because it's kind of, you're talking about a period in which we're seeing a preview, right, of what was to come.
We're seeing that certain kinds of misinformation can become Such a part of the cultural conversation that most people who are not that well informed start to go, well, you know, there's an equivalency there.
There's this there are these people who say the the evidence says that vaccines are safe, but then I've heard all these other things and, you know, we need to be very careful about this.
So I know you do most of your reporting on D.C.
policy and politics.
How would you contextualize this trend toward increasing mainstreaming of conspiracy theories?
Of course, you know, QAnon was the big story for a couple of years there.
Anti-vaccine tropes are a big part of it.
And then you have all of this, like, artificially generated hatred for real public servants like Anthony Fauci.
And then you have, you know, stuff like stuff like Stop the Steal, where I think, what, you have 32% of the population still thinks that the big lie was actually the truth.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that the anti-vaccine movement There was an article in the New York Times back in like 2021, which said that, like, the anti-vaccine movement was waiting for something like this.
And I remember thinking to myself, I remember there was an article in the Washington Post during the early days of the pandemic.
And what it did is it made me think, like, I was like, oh, like, you know, on one end, I was hopeful, like a lot of people, that there would be a vaccine soon.
And thank God there was a vaccine really soon.
Especially when you consider how long it's taken to approve other vaccines.
But I remember thinking to myself, reading an article in the Washington Post, and I remember sitting down and reading it, I don't remember the exact article, but I remember seeing this, I remember tweeting it out, and I said, I'm worried that the efficiency that this vaccine is being approved at, could give credence to these anti-vaxxers and the reason I had is because at this point I was so deep into researching my book and I was so deep into looking at how these um charlatans had capitalized off of very real fears um that I had that that that I was like wait I understand a little bit not as well as some other people but a little bit about how these folks work and I remember thinking
If public health officials are not careful, if they are not smart about their messaging, This could play directly into the anti-vaxxers' hands.
And part of me thinks that there was nothing they could have done to stop it.
You know, bad people are going to do bad things.
But other parts of me think, what if we had, you know, if they had gotten out ahead and said, this is not expediting, this is not, you know, but this, and, you know, people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lot of other people, Andrew Wakefield, who are now promoting anti-vax ideas, they've earned their own.
Yeah, Dal Bigtree.
He spoke at a rally in D.C.
literally like the day, I think, before or after, or like the day before or the day of, at January 6th.
He didn't speak at the main rally where Trump spoke, but he spoke at another one.
While the insurrection was happening, he was speaking on a stage.
While the insurrection was happening, yeah.
It was the seed, you know, it was that kernel, you know, it's a very perverse inverse of the faith of a mustard seed, so to speak, you know.
It's just this one little thing that allows for all these other lies to blossom.
Yeah, I mean, when we talked ahead of time, you referenced the famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics, and it seems like, you know, this has really come home to roost with not just anti-vax, but all of these different expressions of that type of conspiracism, some with apocalyptic fundamentalist religious Underpinning some with new age crunchy granola underpinning.
They've all gone from the margins into the mainstream.
Tell me your thoughts about that.
Yeah, it really worried me because like, you know, about I would say like about a month and a half ago, I was at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, I think as most people know it.
And it was surprising just hearing how many people just outright spouted, like it was being, it flowed like water.
How many people just talked about anti-vaccine rhetoric and, you know, you had a whole panel on it about people just dying suddenly about vaccines.
And, you know, you had Robert Malone on the panel, another person I'm sure your listeners are very familiar with these days.
He was there.
And what it said, and it was interesting, is that I think, oddly enough, and this is just one, is that I think that Trump being so dismissive of public health, you know, he wanted to reopen the country as soon as possible.
I think what that did is that kind of caused the scales to fall off a lot of liberals eyes on anti-vax stuff.
And then they're like, wait, hold on, hold on, you know, pump the brakes for a minute.
We're supposed to be the, we believe in science, you know, the refrain during Trump's presidency was science is real when it comes to climate change and things like that.
And in the same way, I think that a lot of liberals were kind of like, wait, we should probably put some trust in these vaccines.
Because they're very rigorously studied.
But at that point, it's just become so rooted.
And it's very hard, it's almost impossible, I think, to untell a story once it's been told.
Yeah, and I wanted to say too that this most recent CPAC, not only did you see that it was just wall-to-wall conspiracy theories, but the wall-to-wall conspiracy theories in, in, in, you know, keeping with everything that we talk about on our podcast, were only interrupted for endorsements of different products and for, you know, URLs to websites you could go to, to, you know, be part of like basically giving your money to, to all of the affiliate marketing sort of setups that were already in place.
Yeah, absolutely.
It felt very much like Fox News sponsored by HGTV or the Home Shopping Network.
It was very much a mix of those two kind of streams.
But yeah, I mean, I think that it's important to recognize, I think that What really, I think, ultimately what I said is that like, I mean, I think that at the same time, and while I don't want to be completely doom and gloom, I think what had happened was that I think a lot about how that affected, because now you're seeing this first generation of kids who their parents blame the vaccines growing up, you know.
My parents, you know, I mean, that wasn't something that we really, that thankfully my generation didn't really have.
But like, you know, I interviewed one woman, or no, one non-binary transmasc person now, they've since come out as transmasc, and they told me that their parents blamed the vaccine for them being autistic.
You know, and that is something that sticks with me because like, think about how many, think about how many people, like this person, his name is Aaron, I believe their names, pronouns are they, he, his name was, their name was Aaron Starr, and they were, they're autistic, they're like a decade younger than I am.
And think about how many of them had it drilled into their heads that the vaccine made them this way, and therefore their parents blamed themselves.
Think about what that does to a teenager's psyche.
When you're coming up and when you're speaking.
And think about how that affects how you view your autism.
How you view yourself and the way your brain works.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I wanted to ask you about that.
Your book is titled, We're Not Broken, Changing the Autism Conversation.
It was published in August of last year.
Why did you write this book and who is it for?
Who are you trying to reach with it?
It's funny.
On one end, it's for everyone.
But the reason why I started writing it was because what happened was, if you remember in 2015, there was that measles outbreak at Disneyland.
And then at the same time, a few months later, Donald Trump took the stage and they asked him about his old tweets about vaccines and autism.
And he said, autism is an epidemic.
And he blamed the vaccine.
He talked about the vaccines.
And then later on, I realized that I learned that, you know, he was really close with Bob and Katie Wright.
You know, Bob Wright, of course, the head of NBCUniversal and the founder of Autism Speaks.
Katie Wright, of course, one of the biggest promoters of anti-vaccine rhetoric.
I'm sure your listeners know Katie Wright very well.
And then what, you know, what it said to me is that, OK, you know, Well, the political conversations, again, speaking as a political journalist, they usually began and ended with vaccines, like for the longest time as a reporter, I would hear any discussion, or they would talk about curing.
And what they said to me was like, look, I'm autistic, but then also I knew a lot of other autistic people.
And I was like, that is so divorced from what autistic people really need.
That's not going to help them get a job.
That's not going to help them live independently.
That's not going to help them live a full life.
You know, one of the things I think about, one of the biggest, the biggest killers of Autistic people, I think the biggest killer of autistic people is epilepsy or epileptic seizures, like death from epileptic seizures, I think.
And the biggest killers of autistic people without intellectual disabilities are heart disease and suicide.
And I thought, so I thought, you know, all this talk about vaccines is so divorced from what we as autistic people need.
And so I think what I did is I really just want, I really just wanted to, again, change and reframe the conversation to say that this is what autistic people say that they need to be able to live.
Yeah, yeah, I'm so glad that you wrote this book.
If RFK Jr., I should be clear, Jr., were to read your book, what's the one thing you'd most want him to take away from it?
I think I wanted to say that, you know, your father gave one of my favorite speeches, which is the speech after Martin Luther King Jr.' 's assassination, where he said, let us aspire to do what the Greeks said, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
I have memorized that speech, you know, so much.
It's my favorite speech in politics.
You know, and it made me believe that, you know, there's this higher idea of what politics could be, the art of the possible.
And why do you spend so much time promoting really just hate, outright hate, about autistic people?
And why spend that much time doing it instead when you can improve the lives of autistic people, and really set out to do what your father Bobby did, your uncle Jack did, and your uncle Ted did.
I love it.
Thank you so much for joining us, Erica.
You're actually joining us from an office that is in the Capitol complex.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm talking to you in a phone booth in the Capitol.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
Thank you everyone for listening.
Remember, you can join us on patreon.com for ad-free listening.
Bonus episodes, live streams and behind the scenes videos are there too.
And would you please go and pre-order our book, Conspirituality via the link in the show notes.
It helps us to get the word out.
Export Selection