RFK Jr. Pretty Sure Anything He Didn't Know About As A Kid Is Not Real

Also, if he covers his eyes, he's invisible and you can't see him.

The Aviator, c. 1914

An especially curious thing about the MAGA mindset, you may have noticed, is the fervent belief that the only things that are real and true are the things they knew about and understood as children with a child’s somewhat narrow view of the world. Science hasn’t progressed, history isn’t slightly less pleasant than stories about George Washington’s cherry tree, and transgender people don’t exist. Or, if their moms let them watch Dog Day Afternoon, they exist but are all in cahoots with bank robbers.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Barber Surgeon General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. complained about all of the diseases and conditions people have now that definitely did not exist when he was a kid — the point of which was to suggest that somehow, we are being made sick by vaccines, food dyes, and unidentified “toxins.”

“ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism — all of these are injuries I never heard of when I was a kid, were not part of the nomenclature, they weren’t part of the dialogue. There was zero spent in this country treating chronic disease when my uncle was president, today it’s about 1.8 trillion dollars annually. It’s bankrupting our nation. Seventy-four percent of American kids cannot qualify for military service. How are we going to maintain our global leadership with such a sick population?

“We have all these autoimmune diseases, these exotic diseases again, I never heard of. Juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, and a hundred others that, again, were just unknown when I was a kid.”

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So, first of all, people in those days — particularly in circles like the Kennedys’, and particularly in New England — didn’t talk about those kinds of things much because it was considered unseemly. Men, especially, didn’t want it known that their children had any health or neurological issues, because they thought it reflected poorly on the quality of their sperm. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

ADD, ADHD: The term “ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) with or without hyperactivity” was added to the DSM in 1980. Prior to that, it was known as hyperkinetic disorder or “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood,” and prior to that it was usually just classified as a learning disability, hyperactivity or something similar. Does this mean that we, as a nation, defeated the scourge of hyperkinetic disorder? No. It just has a different name now.

That being said, the symptoms we now recognize as ADHD were first described in an official capacity by English pediatrician Sir George Frederic Still … in 1902.

Speech delay, language delay: Not only did these things exist, but his Aunt Rosemary had them and was sent to a special boarding school for children with learning disabilities. Which, incredibly, existed at the time. Though, to be fair, no one in the family knew about it, because, again, people felt ashamed by those kinds of things.

Tourette Syndrome: Well, Georges Gilles de la Tourette died in 1904, so I’m pretty sure people had Tourette Syndrome when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a child. Also, Dan Aykroyd has it and they’re around the same age.

Narcolepsy: Winston fucking Churchill had narcolepsy, my dude. Or “was famously believed to have had narcolepsy,” because people didn’t talk about those things back then.

ASD, autism: For the 80 millionth time, Autism Spectrum Disorder was not coined until 2011, and up until then, there were different names for things. The term was first coined in 1911 by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, and later studied more fully by Leo Kanner and Nazi Hans Asperger, which is why, for a long time, people who would now be considered on the Spectrum were said to have Kanner’s Syndrome or Asperger’s Syndrome.

Juvenile Diabetes: Mary Tyler Moore had Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. Jerry Lewis had Type 1 diabetes. Carol Channing? Type 1 diabetes.

To be fair, I think that a good number of the years Mary Tyler Moore spent raising awareness of Type 1 diabetes were the same years when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was high on smack.

I could go on, but I won’t. The idea that people in the past were fabulously healthy and mentally perfect, while we are all feeble and sick and neurologically damaged, is completely ridiculous. Families used to have a ton of kids because many of them would die in childhood (probably because they had things like juvenile diabetes and were not treated for it). Part of the reason there is more “chronic disease” now is literally because people live so much longer than they used to. Another reason is that people know they have these chronic illnesses, because they have more access to health care. In the 1960s, less than half of all elderly people had health insurance and “of the members of the general population who reported they had ‘pains in the heart,’ 25 percent did not see a physician.” That is why, in 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation creating Medicare (and Medicaid).

This idea that everyone way back when consumed only pure, whole foods with no bad additives or used anything with bad chemicals in it or bad dyes is completely insane. Victorians had freaking arsenic wallpaper. Arsenic everything! Hell, I am currently looking straight at some Victorian medicinal/cosmetic containers on my bureau and it’s all arsenic and strychnine all the way.

One thing that has to throw just a bit of a wrench into RFK Jr.’s theories, or would if he ever thought about things for more than two seconds before he said them, is a little thing called Grey Gardens, the famous documentary about Jackie Kennedy’s cousins, Little Edie and Big Edie Bouvier-Beale.

If you haven’t seen it, here is Little Edie’s opening monologue, in which she describes her “revolutionary costume.”

“This is the best thing to wear for today, you understand. Because I don't like women in skirts and the best thing is to wear pantyhose or some pants under a short skirt, I think. Then you have the pants under the skirt and then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt. And you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape. So I think this is the best costume for today.”

Big Edie was disinherited by her father for wearing an “opera costume” to her son’s wedding, which is why the two lived in relative poverty in a dilapidated house eating cat food and thinking it’s paté.

Now, I’m not saying that either of these women were necessarily autistic per se, but I do think it’s safe to say that they’d probably be diagnosed with something today, if not simply treated with more understanding. If anything, it’s just an example of how people who were different at that time were frequently pushed aside and ignored by society and even their own families. They were abandoned like the Beales or shoved into institutions like Rosemary Kennedy, with their siblings never even told where they went or why. I doubt anyone took a young Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to go visit Jackie’s cousins in the Hamptons. I doubt he was ever taken to St. Coletta's School for Exceptional Children (known prior to that as the “St. Coletta Institute for Backward Youth”) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where Rosemary Kennedy lived out her days. He was, more than likely, sheltered from all of that.

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The world was just a little bigger than what 10-year-old Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have known about or understood.

That being said, of course we have health concerns that we didn’t have 60 years ago, just as some of the health concerns we had back then do not exist now (or that, like measles, shouldn’t exist now). They also don’t diagnose women with hysteria for having opinions now, either. With changing lifestyles come changing health concerns. With scientific advancements come greater understandings. Unless you are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in which case you are simply glad they finally found a cure for bicycle face.

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