Capitalist Dictionary: Decoding RFK Jr.’s Autism Rhetoric

A Decoder Ring for RFK Jr.’s Autism Rhetoric—and How Capitalism, Eugenics, and Exploitation Speak the Same Language

RFK Jr.’s autism rhetoric isn’t about freedom or equality—it’s about enforcing capitalist exploitation. This piece decodes his words and exposes the deeper system that devalues autistic lives.

Introduction

Earlier this month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech about autism—and his proposed ‘autism registry,’ now hastily cancelled—set autistic social media ablaze. Many were left reeling, not only at the audacity of the proposal but at the deeper hostility laced through his words. Yet for all the outrage, there remained a lingering uncertainty: how were we meant to interpret what we had just heard? It is in that spirit that I offer the following ‘decoder ring’—a way of understanding the true language at work beneath the surface.

Capitalist Dictionary:
FREEDOM: serving the rich.
EQUALITY: everyone gets to serve the rich.
HAPPINESS: liking how you serve the rich.
FAILURE: your life’s work isn’t useful to the rich.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks about autistic people, it is important to recognise that he is not truly speaking about people at all. He is speaking about capital. Beneath the emotive language of crisis, burden, and urgency lies a colder calculus: the economic disruption posed by autistic existence to a system that prizes compliance, productivity, and profitability above all else. His lament is not over the lives of autistic individuals, but over the perceived loss of units of labour, of consumers, of compliant citizens who might otherwise serve the needs of capital without resistance or cost.

In this article, I offer a different way of hearing his words—a decoder ring for the rhetoric he deploys, grounded in the ‘Capitalist Dictionary’ that governs so much of the discourse around disability, difference, and worth. Through this lens, we can see that what is framed as freedom is in fact the freedom of the wealthy to extract and exploit; what is framed as equality is the demand that all bodies become equally useful to capital; what is framed as happiness is the internalisation of servitude; and what is framed as failure is the refusal—or the inability—to meet the system’s ruthless standards of utility.

RFK Jr.’s words do not simply betray a misunderstanding of autism. They reveal something far deeper: a vision of society in which human value is conditional, fragile, and expendable. To truly understand the threat his narrative poses, we must first understand the language it speaks.

FREEDOM: Serving the Rich

When RFK Jr. speaks of autism, he often frames it as a threat to “freedom.” Yet the question that is rarely asked is: whose freedom is he talking about? It is not the freedom of autistic people to live authentically, nor the freedom of families to imagine different, liberated futures for their children. Rather, it is the freedom of corporations and the wealthy elite—the freedom to maintain an unbroken supply of compliant, profitable labour.

In Kennedy’s framing, autistic existence represents a disruption to the capitalist ideal of the “perfect worker:” someone who is endlessly productive, easily managed, and shaped to the needs of the economy without resistance. Autism, with its profound differences in communication, perception, and relational priorities, threatens this ideal. It refuses conformity. It reminds the system that not every body can—or should—be conscripted into the machinery of profit.

Thus, when Kennedy speaks of autism as a “crisis,” what he is mourning is not human suffering, but the disruption of capitalism’s expectation that every life must be monetised. His call to “defend freedom” does not concern the flourishing of individuals, but the preservation of a system in which freedom is the exclusive privilege of capital to extract and exploit without interruption.

This is not a new sleight of hand. It mirrors the larger mythology that the United States has long told about itself: that it is the global protector of “freedom,” standing guard against tyranny wherever it appears. Yet history tells a different story. Time and again, American military might has been deployed not to safeguard human liberty, but to secure access to markets, natural resources, and cheap labour. Nations unwilling to serve the interests of U.S. capital have found themselves the targets of coups, invasions, sanctions, and economic strangulation—all in the name of “freedom.”

Kennedy’s rhetoric is simply the domestic application of the same imperial logic. Autism is framed as an internal threat, an insurgency within the nation’s own children that must be neutralised so that the economic machine can continue unimpeded. True freedom—the freedom to exist outside the terms dictated by capital—is rendered invisible, even dangerous.

In the capitalist dictionary at work here, freedom is not a universal right. It is a resource to be hoarded, a justification for violence, and a weapon wielded against any body, community, or nation that dares to define value on different terms. Under this logic, autistic people are not citizens to be cherished, but deviations to be corrected—or erased.

EQUALITY: Everyone Gets to Serve the Rich

When RFK Jr. turns to the subject of equality, he frames rising autism rates as a new form of social injustice—as if autistic existence itself produces inequality by creating children who are “less able” to compete in the economic race. It is a seductive argument, designed to appeal to those who view life as a perpetual contest, where worth is determined by performance and profitability. Yet beneath the surface, it reveals a chilling truth: in Kennedy’s vision, equality is not about valuing every life; it is about ensuring that every body is equally useful to capital.

Kennedy almost certainly knows that autism is not an epidemic. He is a lawyer, after all. He understands that the term “epidemic” refers to diseases that spread through contagion—a definition that has no bearing whatsoever on the neurodevelopmental realities of autism. Diagnostic criteria have broadened; awareness has increased; those historically excluded from recognition are finally, if imperfectly, being seen. But Kennedy’s use of the word “epidemic” is not an accident. It is a deliberate choice, crafted to speak to a particular constituency: the same groups now advocating for the creation of a “profound autism” diagnosis, designed to split the spectrum and hoard resources for a select few.

The push to carve out “profound autism” is not about providing tailored support. It is about gatekeeping. It is about establishing a hierarchy of deservingness, wherein a small subset of autistic lives—those deemed visibly, profoundly impaired—are positioned as worthy of support, pity, and funding, whilst the majority, particularly autistic adults who do not fit narrow stereotypes of dependency, are quietly cast aside as inconvenient or fraudulent. At its core, this project is not one of compassion, but of scarcity management and profit protection. Those autistics with “Level 3” support needs are the most lucrative to the institutions and industries that have grown rich from servicing disability—what some now rightly call Big Autism. In this model, the most impaired are commodified as perpetual clients, while those who might advocate for themselves, resist pathologisation, or question the system’s motives are erased. Public sympathy is carefully cultivated for those easiest to present as tragic and in need of intervention, all the while reinforcing capitalism’s deeper demand: that only those whose existence can be monetised, managed, or made useful are deserving of investment at all.

Under Kennedy’s logic, equality does not mean recognising and honouring the diverse ways that people think, move, communicate, and connect. It means standardising every body until it can meet the expectations of a ruthless market. It means viewing difference as a defect, and diversity as a crisis. Equality, in this distorted vision, is not liberation—it is assimilation by force.

Real equality would require dismantling the very systems that demand compliance as the price of dignity. It would require recognising that value is inherent, not earned through service. But that is not the equality RFK Jr. is selling—and it is not the equality the capitalist dictionary allows.

HAPPINESS: Liking How You Serve the Rich

When RFK Jr. speaks of intervention, treatment, and “healing” autistic people, he frames these efforts as necessary steps toward happiness—as if to be autistic is, by definition, to be in a state of perpetual suffering. Yet once again, the question must be asked: whose definition of happiness is he invoking? And to what end?

In Kennedy’s vision, happiness is not about authentic flourishing. It is not about creating a world in which autistic people are free to live according to their own needs, values, and ways of being. Instead, happiness is recast as acceptance of one’s role within the capitalist order. A “happy” autistic person, in this model, is one who has been sufficiently moulded—through therapy, intervention, or force—to participate without disruption in a society that demands uniformity, speed, compliance, and emotional self-management. A “happy” autistic person is a productive one: able to work, consume, and perform social acceptability on command.

True happiness—the deep, lived experience of self-determination, connection, and purpose—is invisible in this framework. It is irrelevant. What matters is the outward performance of contentment, the visible signals that an individual has adjusted to the demands of the marketplace. In Kennedy’s framing, interventions are not about easing economic suffering so that autistic people might find their own joy; they are about erasing difference so that autistic people might better serve the needs of others.

This vision of happiness is deeply corrosive. It demands that autistic people internalise the values of a system that was never designed with our humanity in mind. It asks us to see our own exploitation as fulfilment, our own erasure as healing. Rather than challenging the structures that alienate, exhaust, and discard those who do not conform, Kennedy’s project seeks to reshape autistic people until they can withstand those structures without protest.

In the capitalist dictionary, happiness is not a feeling, a right, or a relationship to the self or to others. It is a performance. It is the appearance of satisfaction under conditions of unfreedom. And it is, above all, a requirement for survival.

FAILURE: Your Life’s Work Isn’t Useful to the Rich

In RFK Jr.’s rhetoric, autism is repeatedly framed as a "burden," a "tragedy," a vast loss of potential. He speaks of autistic lives as if they are failed projects—evidence of something having gone terribly wrong. But beneath the emotive language lies a far more brutal standard of judgement: the standard of economic utility. In Kennedy’s framing, a life is only a tragedy if it cannot be rendered profitable. Failure is not defined by the presence of suffering or injustice, but by the absence of market value.

This view is neither accidental nor novel. It is deeply embedded in the capitalist dictionary that shapes public consciousness. Lives are assessed not by their intrinsic worth, their relationships, their creativity, or their capacity for joy, but by their ability to contribute to the machinery of production and consumption. A “successful” life is one that generates wealth for others. A “failed” life is one that demands care, accommodation, or resources without a corresponding return on investment.

Autistic existence challenges this brutal calculus. It refuses to neatly align with expectations of endless growth, effortless compliance, and extractable labour. Many autistic people need different kinds of support, different rhythms of work, different measures of success—differences that capitalist structures view as inefficiencies to be corrected or costs to be minimised. When Kennedy mourns the “tragedy” of autism, he is not mourning the loss of human possibility. He is mourning the loss of profitability.

This is why so much of the language around autism in political and corporate circles focuses on “lifelong care costs,” “lost productivity,” and “burdens on the healthcare system.” It is an accounting exercise masquerading as compassion. It tallies bodies in spreadsheets, weighs lives in profit margins, and pronounces failure wherever a human being dares to exist outside the narrow demands of the marketplace.

In the capitalist dictionary, failure is not falling short of one’s own hopes or potentials. It is failing to serve the rich. It is failing to be economically useful. And in Kennedy’s framing, autistic lives that resist exploitation are not lives to be cherished, but problems to be solved.

Final thoughts …

RFK Jr.’s narrative about autism is not a cry for liberation. It is a blueprint for exploitation, masked in the language of concern. His vision is not one in which autistic people are free to exist on our own terms; it is one in which we must be reshaped, disciplined, and made economically useful in order to be permitted value at all. Every invocation of freedom, equality, and happiness in his rhetoric serves not to expand the human spirit, but to confine it within the brutal expectations of a market that recognises only profit.

True autistic freedom does not lie in therapies designed to increase compliance or interventions aimed at making difference invisible. It lies in dismantling the systems that demand productivity as the price of dignity. It lies in refusing to measure human worth by the standards of usefulness to the rich. It lies in rejecting the idea that care must be earned, that belonging must be proven, or that the right to exist must be negotiated.

If, reading these reflections, the spectre of eugenics seemed to whisper from the shadows, then let it be said plainly: you heard it correctly. The language of capitalist exploitation and the language of scientific racism, eugenics, and structural oppression are not distant cousins. They are parts of the same monstrous whole. Both rest on the same brutal premise: that some lives are more valuable than others, and that the worth of a body, a mind, or a people can be reduced to a ledger of usefulness.

Freedom, equality, and happiness—real freedom, real equality, real happiness—cannot exist within a system that demands servitude to wealth as the price of being allowed to live. To imagine a different future, we must first refuse the false definitions offered by the powerful. We must write a new dictionary—one that recognises the intrinsic, inviolable worth of every life, exactly as it is.