Eugenics & Statements

September, 1921 was unusually hot and New York was sweltering. For the many immigrants who crowded the city's tenements and pavements, one of the few places for relief from the incessant heat was the American Museum of Natural History. That summer the museum presented a new exhibition with rows of human skulls, snapshots of patients in psychiatric institutions, and the preserved brain of a serial killer. It was all terribly macabre. The immigrants among the museum's visitors who read the leaflet distributed at the entrance soon discovered that this exhibition was all about them.

Society and education are inherently ableist. Disabled people are routinely excluded from education, or have poorer outcomes within educational systems. Improving educational experiences and outcomes for people of color has required educators to ...

Society and education are inherently ableist. Disabled people are routinely excluded from education, or have poorer outcomes within educational systems. Improving educational experiences and outcomes for people of color has required educators to design antiracist curricula that explicitly address ra …

RFK Jr.’s recent statements about autism are not only inaccurate—they are profoundly dehumanizing. In this letter, I want to address its impact on our community.

Congress created the grants in the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The goal was to help schools hire mental health professionals, including counselors and social workers.

Watching RFK Jr.—Trump's newly appointed Health Secretary—spread dangerous autism conspiracy theories from one of America's highest medical positions has pus...

RFK Jr. claims that he will find the cause of autism by September.Show notes at https://www.microbe.tv/btn/btn-062/Become a patron of Beyond the Noise at htt...

Autism rates are rising, but RFK, Jr. is wrong about the reasons. Here’s what the science says

Autism activists are behind a journal's decision to retract a paper claiming a preservative once routinely used in vaccines is responsible for the condition. Brian Deer examines the facts

Today in a cabinet meeting, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised that “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.” This alarming claim is untrue, impossible, and ableist. Like the hiring of David Geier, RFK Jr.’s comment…

April 17, 2025, Washington, D.C. – As national organizations dedicated to advancing the well-being of Autistic individuals, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Autism Society of America, Autism Speaks, The Arc of the United States, Autistic Women and Non-Binary Network, Autistic People of Color Fund, and partners across the disability and…

The role of environmental factors in autism spectrum disorder might be minimal, but we should try to figure out what they are.https://www.medscape.com/viewar...

A Republican U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania with ties to a racist former Trump official came under fire Tuesday for minimizing the more than 1000 deaths of children who died from COVID-19. “Many of these children had pre-existing – I’m sorry, had underlying medical conditions,” said Rep. Guy Reschenthaler on the House floor, “making them more vulnerable to […]

In the United States, this pandemic could be almost over by now. The reasons it’s still going are pretty clear.

False comparisons have again been drawn between Nazi Germany and Covid-19 pandemic measures, this time prompted by the introduction of a lockdown for people in Austria who are not fully vaccinated. About two million people in Austria, or one-third of the population, were placed in lockdown on Monday, November 15, with the country facing a […]

Autism diagnoses surged by 175% in the United States from 2011 to 2022, with the greatest relative increases in young adults, women, and children in multiple racial and ethnic groups.

"We were very hands-on parents. But in our dealings with his teachers and school administrators, there always seemed to be something left unsaid. It was like there was an elephant in the room that we didn’t know about." View Entire Post ›

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed har...