Below marks my first critique of politics, and you’ll see why. For background: I have no political affiliation and do not care for party politics. Years ago I became deeply disenchanted with parties of all stripes. I do not seek a packaged bundle of beliefs or positions—I have my own. I care what works, one issue at a time, and I’m open. What I cannot stand, the attribute that repels me most, is the abuse and distortion of truth.
On Tuesday the New England Journal of (oddly partisan) Medicine published two opinion pieces on autism—a favored topic of RT! The first addressed Trump and RFKjr’s September press conference on prenatal Tylenol, while the second discussed vague claims by FDA officials implying a chemotherapy drug can now treat autism.
To jump into this cesspool of exaggerators and distortionists, we must first acknowledge an uncomfortable but obvious truth: When, on the campaign trail, you promise frenzied crowds that, once in office, you will quickly discover a cause and treatment for autism—a poorly defined neuro-developmental condition that has eluded researchers for decades—you have two options. Fail and concede, or fail and pretend.
Guesses, anyone?
After months of fishing through a swamp of poorly supported but rhetorically convenient pseudo-theories, RFKjr landed on the one entertained by stoner neuroscience grads munching funyuns at 3am. (Duuude. It’s totally the Tylenol.)
I walked through the Tylenol-autism data in October, and last week a review published in a prominent journal confirmed: Put simply, Tylenol has—provably—zero connection to autism. This was self-evident to anyone who actually read the relevant studies.
And yet, September 22nd, 2025 the Health Secretary, FDA head, NIH director, and President, acted out an SNL-ready skit, a tragicomedy of performance art. Speaking in the imperious tones of concern for their people, the four most powerful authorities in public health made a claim that wasn’t just weak—it was palpably b******t.
The irony is thick. After years of furiously and publicly condemning Anthony Fauci and others for a crisis of public trust, they offered something far more corrosive than technocratic arrogance: A display of knowing dishonesty. This wasn’t confusion or misplaced confidence. It was the deliberate use of scientific authority to launder a claim that everyone involved knew was indefensible.
That isn’t a mistake. It’s contempt—for evidence, for the public, and for the idea that science is anything more than a prop.
Which is why recent FDA maneuvers around leucovorin, folate autoantibodies, and ‘folate deficiency associated with autism’ cannot be viewed in isolation. They sit in the same epistemic ecosystem. Once again a small, messy batch of weak studies became a nonsense narrative.
To be fair, the folate-autism story is not proven nonsense—yet. It is, um, unfinished. Hypotheses deserve testing, not regulatory implication or political theater. The recent Lancet review, like mine months ago, showed what happens when you slow down and let the data breathe (scary headlines evaporate). And I have little doubt the brain-vitamin narrative will dissolve. But there’s work to be done.
Bottom line? Autism doesn’t yield to deadlines. It yields to patience, rigor, and a tolerance for ambiguity—three necessary tools for science, ones in desperately short supply right now. When science is forced to perform certainty on command, what it produces isn’t truth—it’s theater.
And this is the kind of theater that doesn’t merely fail to rebuild trust, it finishes it off. This administration didn’t set out to heal the public wound of scientific overreach. They inherited that wound and began poking at it deliberately. Trust wasn’t restored, because restoration was never the point. Control was. And a government that treats science as a stage prop shouldn’t be surprised when the audience stops believing anything it says.
