It might have been the single most important HHS press conference ever, and it was one of the best chances to learn media’s reprehensible narrative tricks in years. Yesterday, CNN ran the story headlined, “In first news conference as HHS secretary, Kennedy says autism is an epidemic in the US.” Specifically, Kennedy persuasively argued that autism must be caused by an “environmental toxin,” and he announced an urgent series of new studies to get to the bottom of it. Media instantly deployed its secret soldiers to discredit him.
OMG. HHS Sec. Kennedy reveals that the autism rate among 8-year-olds is now 1 in 31.
Among boys, autism diagnosis can reach as HIGH as 1 in 12.5. Autism rates have INCREASED by 480% since 1990. pic.twitter.com/wni4RtL0f9
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 16, 2025
To begin, they badly misquoted the new HHS Secretary. For mysterious reasons that historians will surely someday study, the media completely omitted Kennedy’s shocking autism statistics from the most recent CDC and state surveys. The autism rate continues increasing relentlessly, now up to 1 in 12.5 boys in the most recent California survey, which Kennedy called “an unrelenting upward trend.” That should have been the headline.
In other words, the fussy, selective media reporting misrepresented the urgency and specificity of his argument, since the California figure was a key piece of evidence Secretary Kennedy used to challenge the official ‘diagnostic’ narrative. Not only didn’t they headline that appalling statistic —the most recent data— but they whitewashed it altogether.
It gets worse.
Media also misdescribed Kennedy’s focus. He wasn’t talking about kids with quirks or trouble reading social cues, euphemistically labeled “neurodivergent.” Those are the fortunate ones. Kennedy was laser-focused on the left-behind: “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,” he explained.
Autism ‘activists’ focus on the most lightly affected, but the HHS Secretary noted that an astonishing “25% of diagnosed children are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and exhibit severe symptoms like headbanging and sensory sensitivities.” They certainly can’t advocate for themselves.
Also ignored by reporters, Kennedy made the commonsense point (2:03) that we Gen-Xers and Boomers never encountered these stratospheric numbers of profound autism. “It’s difficult to find any widely prevalent cases of full-blown autism in older generations,” he said, adding, “you can’t find these people in homes— there are no homes for them.”
Parents of the profoundly autistic report an all-too-familiar conspiracy of silence, of enforcement and cancellation, designed to browbeat them into silence:
Eileen isn’t alone. A 2023 Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders study found that 40% of parents of severely autistic children experienced ostracism or harassment in online autism communities after sharing their struggles, and were discredited as “ableist” or “anti-autistic.” I found many anecdotal reports evidencing the reprehensible treatment of autism parents.
For example, @AutismMom23 wrote, “I shared my nonverbal son’s daily struggles, and activists called me a bad mom, saying I’m harming the community.” Other parents report doxxing or coordinated campaigns to discredit them, such as @SevereAutismDad, who posted, “Activists leaked my address after I supported cure research.”
It’s the extreme, coordinated cancellation crusade we helplessly watched sprouting like kudzu during covid. A 2022 Autism in Adulthood article highlighted cases where parents lost speaking engagements or sponsorships after being labeled “anti-neurodiversity”— just for discussing severe autism’s challenges. For instance, @AutismCaregiver2024 posted, “I lost my job at a nonprofit after activists called me out for ‘pathologizing’ my son’s autism. I was just asking for more support for nonverbal kids.”
Despite Kennedy’s clear focus on profound autism (e.g., “25% of diagnosed children are nonverbal, non-toilet trained”) and his obvious appeal to parents who feel ignored, as parent Eileen Lamb posted (“those voices are too often ignored”), no corporate media articles quoted any parents or organizations supporting Kennedy’s call for more studies.
There are lots of pro-Kennedy people media could have quoted, and they are easy to find. Groups like the NCSA, which advocate for research into the causes of severe autism, and parents like @fedupmom12 on X—“It’s truly unreal that there are parents of kids with autism who don’t support Kennedy”— were completely AWOL from yesterday’s mainstream coverage.
Not only did corporate media fail to quote parents of profoundly autistic children, but they also forgot to solicit any direct perspectives from the many researchers whose studies Kennedy cited, such as the 2010 EPA study identifying 1989 as a potential inflection point for rising autism diagnoses. Instead, all the big platforms consistently chose to quote neurodivergency activists and anti-cure doctors.
For me, I’d bet a card-counting Rain Man that the ‘neurodivergency activists’ busily canceling parents get tons of NIH grant money. Last year, the National Council on Severe Autism (NCSA) complained that only 20% of the 2024 Autism CARES Act’s $1.2 billion targeted severe autism, despite those needs being much more urgent and compelling.
I’ll let you guess at the reasons why the media coverage was so one-sided. Either way, media bias was as plain as the kid hitting his head against the wall in the corner.
The takeaway for resisting the media’s spider-like narrative spinning is to focus on the obvious bias generally, and then zero in on the lack of any mention of profound autism versus media’s monofocus on quirky neurodivergency. That’s the giveaway.
Secretary Kennedy offered reporters an intriguing clue. “There’s a timeline,” he said. “Something happened. In fact, Congress ordered the EPA to tell us what year the autism epidemic began. The EPA scientists came back and said it happened in 1989. So you have to find a toxin that became ubiquitous around that time period and that affected every demographic.”
That EPA study, ordered to be done by Congress, was completed fifteen years ago in 2010. Think about that.
But yesterday, urgency became the word of the day. “We don’t wait two years to react to a measles epidemic … or any kind of infectious disease. We shouldn’t have to do that for diabetes or autism,” Kennedy stressed. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism – whether we call it an epidemic, a tsunami or a surge of autism – is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors,” he continued. “We need to address this question seriously because, in my opinion, for the last 20 years, we’ve collected data but not made real progress in understanding what causes autism or how to effectively prevent it or treat it effectively.”
Big Autism not only denies that there is any cure for the syndrome, it insists that no cure is needed. It’s just a different personality type, neurodivergency activists argue, claiming the condition is completely explained by genes. Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, explained that seeking a cure “is a message that is very detrimental to the self-concept, self-esteem of young autistic people.”
Kennedy flatly rejects that hypothesis, and even spent half his presser making the point. “Genes do not cause epidemics. It can provide a vulnerability. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy stressed.
Adults are back in charge of the health agencies. We’ll see if they can push through the institutional bureaucratic resistance and make progress. Kennedy says he’ll have at least some answers by September. We shall see.
Media grade: F-.
The M.S. Media have been ina big mess ever before 2016 and its getting worst for them
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