RFK Jr’s National Disease Registry Is an Dictator’s Dream

Ultimately, the road to greater wealth would involve getting rid of “parasites.”

It would appear as though Elon Musk is out, since White House insiders are now referring to him in the past tense. The world’s wealthiest man is explaining his departure differently, saying DOGE is nearly done and continuing to run on autopilot. I say AMF.

As to the impact of his cost cutting efforts, the Trump administration has already spent more money than the Biden administration in their first three months. Oh, and the DOGE website’s claims about cost savings are down to $160 billion, a number that might seem significant until examination of the lack of receipts available to back that claim.

I’d sum up the Rule of DOGE era as ensuring the money kept flowing to Musk’s enterprises, inflicting misery on tens of thousands of government and contract workers, degrading services available through the federal government, and ruining the extant measures designed to protect the privacy of American citizens.

It’s the last item on Musk's team's accomplishments that’s among its most dangerous accomplishments. At every federal agency they visited, the DOGE gang gained control of computer systems, exported huge amounts of data, and installed back-doors allowing for future intervention.

There is no way of determining how successful they have been with using the retrieved information, in part because it intersects with the government-wide purge of sociological and science-based data. Making America White, Male & Ignorant Again (MAW-MIA) has notably overstepped its bounds, simply erasing parts of history and statistical analysis.

The most basic functions of government involve counting, collating, and analysis. The founders even included constitutional language about performing a census of the population on a regular basis. It used to be that the ultimate utilization of data collected by governments was in creating budgets.

Now, with your passport application virtually next to your medical records, governments have the capability of using all that data to control the daily lives of its citizens. China is already using a system that rates its residents, called a social media score. And such cross referencing will be a crowning accomplishment for the AI (not the steak sauce) models sucking up huge amounts of investor cash.

We’re not there yet, as can easily be proved by asking Google to search for the meaning of a nonsensical list of words, like, say, “you can’t lick a badger twice.” (Already used, in a Wired article, so that particular AI has discovered the ruse)

There are already a multitude of areas where egregious events have unfolded due to the inability to analyze data (or humans screwing with it): immigration lawyers getting threatening letters telling them to self-deport, citizens personal electronic devices being searched at the border, thousands of migrants being reclassified as dead without regard for their status, and, most famous of all, the FAA flight control system.

A really dangerous effort involves the collection and dissemination of health data. I remember back in the Tea Party days, when “death panels” were bandied about as a consequence of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, is proposing a national disease registry. It’s a harebrained idea from an individual who has no medical expertise, no background in data collection, and who is ridden with conspiracy theories that influence his perception of corporeal beings.

Kennedy has repeatedly referred to an autism "epidemic" in the United States, claiming the rising number of diagnoses is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors—claims disputed by many researchers and advocacy groups.

Dr.Jay Bhattacharya, nominated to run the National Institute of Health:

• “Sec. Kennedy has asked me to initiate a study on the cause of the rise in autism. It's a question that is at the front of the minds of so many parents … yet scientific progress on this has been slow because scientists are frankly scared to ask the question.”

Mumbo jumbo alert! Got any proof, doc? Are MAGA types sending death threats to scientists in the field? Are Donald Trump’s minions appearing on Fox to spread lies about this research?

FYI- Scientists have known since the 1970s that genetics contribute to the development of the neurodevelopmental disorder known as autism.

In his first news briefing as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr, addressing a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about rates of autism among children in the US, his observations were jam packed with falsehoods.

After referring to a study that calculated the “cost of treating autism in this country by 2035 will be a trillion dollars a year,” he said,

• “Autism destroys families, but more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. And 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

I don’t know why they’re even bothering with studying autism. It’s clear that HHS intends to produce predetermined research supporting Kennedy and Trump’s pre-existing beliefs in a connection between autism and vaccines.

Why else would RFK jr promise to have answers in record time. At a cabinet meeting he promised that “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.”

The promised database of private health information is supposed to provide secure access to teams of researchers selected by the NIH for studying things like autism, for which there would be a separate registry within the database.

CBS News reports: “Between 10 and 20 outside groups of researchers will be given grant funding and access to the records to produce Kennedy’s autism studies.”

David Geier, the man who RFK Jr. hired to run his autism study, doesn't have a medical degree, ran experiments where he injected autistic children with a puberty-blocking drug, and was fined $10,000 by the state of Maryland for doing all this without a medical license. The Washington Post politely referred to him as a “vaccine skeptic”; this is the main guy playing chicken little over the vaccines cause autism conspiracy theory.

Let’s mix all these conspiratorialists up with the Inclusion and Access parts of DEIA that the administration is working so hard to eliminate. Via psychologist/doula Réka Morvay:

• The initiative sounds good on paper, but raises serious concerns about privacy. To create this “real-world data initiative,” as described by the new NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH plans to link medication records from pharmacy transactions, results from lab testing, genomic data from Veteran Affairs (VA) and the Indian Health Service, Medicare and Medicaid claims, private insurance billing, and even data from wearables like smartwatches, according to The New American, which is a hyper-partisan right-leaning source of mixed reliability, but even they raise red flags concerning this database and privacy rights:

• “Critics across platforms condemned the move as a step toward eugenics — a term that resurfaced with disturbing frequency. While no government official has explicitly endorsed such intent, the historical context is hard to ignore. Registries built around perceived genetic ‘abnormality’ were central to some of the darkest policies of the 20th century.

• This isn’t fringe paranoia. Creating a federal list based on neurological diagnoses raises serious alarms — especially when so little is known about how the information will be used, or by whom.”

Secretary Kennedy promotes the idea that autism is a tragedy, a disease to be prevented, like a measles outbreak. This reinforces the idea that autistic people are undesirable, lack value, and need to be eradicated.

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has insight on where this line of thought leads:

• It is disgusting that Secretary Kennedy is calling for efforts he believes will reduce the amount of autistic people who exist, whether through a “cure” or “prevention.” Our existence is not a “cataclysm,” as he called autism in his Fox News interview. There is no evidence that autism is actually becoming more common (rather, we as a society are getting better at identifying it, and diagnostic standards have appropriately been widened). Even if it were however, autistic and other disabled people belong in our society. To claim otherwise, and to speak as though our existence is some kind of calamity that must be eliminated, is a form of eugenics–the dangerous ideology based on the idea that “some people are born to be a burden on the rest.”

• Such ideas led directly to disabled people being incarcerated and forcibly sterilized in this country, and murdered in Nazi Germany, and it is profoundly disturbing to see this administration bringing back yet another hallmark of authoritarian policy.

• Eugenics is also deeply ingrained with racism—and, right on cue, Secretary Kenendy Jr. specifically mentioned rising rates of autism diagnosis among Black children as a particular cause for concern, something particularly worrying in light of his prior comments about sending Black young people to “wellness farms.”

Let’s put the ‘some people are trash’ logic into the context of class struggle. The “network states” typical to techbro utopian fantasies aren’t concerned with services that don’t create additional wealth. Ultimately, the road to greater wealth involves getting rid of these “parasites.”

In the Trump/Project2025 world, programs for people covered by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have –by an executive order of questionable legality– from the Education Department to Health and Human Services.

From Disability Scoop:

• Moving IDEA to the Department of Health and Human Services would promote a medical model of disability that could only lead to stigmatizing, segregating, and ‘othering’ children with disabilities,” said Robyn Linscott, director of education and family policy at The Arc. “HHS is not equipped to work directly with state education agencies who are delegated the responsibility to oversee local implementation of IDEA in school districts; nor is HHS able to provide essential technical assistance to parents as is currently conducted.”

Short version: Individuals with disabilities are being kicked out of general education classrooms and shunted to ‘special’ education.

The RFK Jr study won’t “cure” autism. But it will go a long way toward diminishing our understanding of the human condition. Neurodivergent humans will end up being “otherized,” as part of a list of people not worthy in the MAGA/techbros utopia. The mystical world of quack science and the return of evil spirits (or something of the sort) are all logical conclusions to the timeline of conspiracists.

Now, let’s bring up that word that we’re not supposed to hear: eugenics. Once genetics were discovered, supposedly smart people had the thought that it was possible and desirable to breed superior humans. Northern Europeans were considered to be the most desirable specimens.

Social eugenics policies came to full fruition with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which blocked the entry of millions of Eastern and Southern European and Asian immigrants for the following 40 years.

Via Wikipedia:

• Because class status designated some more fit than others, eugenicists treated upper and lower-class women differently. Positive eugenicists, who promoted procreation among the fittest in society, encouraged middle-class women to bear more children. Between 1900 and 1960, eugenicists appealed to middle class white women to become more "family minded," and to help better the race.

• To this end, eugenicists often denied middle and upper-class women sterilization and birth control. However, since poverty was associated with prostitution and "mental idiocy," women of the lower classes were the first to be deemed "unfit" and "promiscuous.

Gosh, I wonder if there’s any connection between these determinations and the “family friendly” advocates of the techbro and MAGA cliques.

The US supreme court’s 1927 decision to uphold forcible sterilization in Virginia has never been overturned. It remains legal in at least 31 states and Washington DC to forcibly sterilize a disabled person. California was responsible for 20,000 non-consensual sterilizations; the program didn’t end until 1979.

Germany moved from sterilization to euthanasia with a boost from the arts. A popular 1941 movie, I Accuse, caused a spike in the belief that euthanasia was an act of kindness toward disabled people. In the film, a man euthanizes his beautiful, disabled wife as an act of love, asking the court: “Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?” The court acquits; the movie’s final scenes declare “love is medicine”. (h/t The Holocaust Encyclopedia)

I’m not saying RFK Jr has any intention of facilitating mass murders. But he is the type of willing follower of an authoritarian state who can and will provide justification for abhorrent acts.

Trump targets college accreditation process in new executive order by Betsy Klein and Samantha Waldenberg at CNN

• President Donald Trump took aim at the college accreditation process with a new executive order Wednesday, his latest move to exact control over America’s higher education institutions.

• The order, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, targets the federal government’s process for deciding what colleges and universities can access billions of dollars in federal student loans and Pell grants – a significant source of indirect revenue for many of those institutions.

• The executive order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act,” a White House official told CNN ahead of the signing.

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Rep. Sara Jacobs gets an earful as hundreds attend town hall by Kristen Taketa at The Union-Tribune

• About 300 people packed U.S. Rep. Sara Jacobs’ town hall this week in El Cajon, many looking for answers and reassurance from the Democratic congresswoman about how to push back against President Trump’s agenda.

• Constituents wanted to know: What can we realistically do to fight Trump administration policies? Are recent protests actually working? Will any Republicans in Congress stand up against Trump?

• “Who’s our leader? We are marching, we are writing postcards, we are knocking on doors, we are making phone calls and we feel defeated,” Annemarie Sundquist, a Jamul resident and leader of a local advocacy group, asked Jacobs during the Tuesday event. “We’re looking for a leader who’s going to fight for us and lead us and tell us what we need to do to keep fighting, to keep moving. Are you a leader?”

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Trump Dangles $5,000 DOGE Checks in Fundraising Emails by J.D. Wolf at Meidas News

• Trump's campaign has been sending a series of fundraising emails heavily promoting the idea of "$5,000 DOGE dividend checks." These emails use subject lines like “Do you want a DOGE check?” and “They really hope you don’t open this email,” and suggest that the checks — framed as a rebate or dividend from government savings — could be directly linked to donations or responses.

• The emails, discovered by MeidasTouch in the Archive of Political Emails, may not explicitly state that a donation guarantees a $5,000 DOGE check, but they strongly imply a connection between support for Trump (alongside donations links) and personal benefit. One message reads, "It’s your money anyway, I’m just giving it back to you," while another subject line asks, “Would you take a check, Chris? I’ll even sign it!”

• The language suggests that those who participate or donate are contributing to the effort that could eventually lead to receiving the proposed checks, blurring the line between political engagement and a personal financial reward. "My team tells me that gathering ONE MILLION RESPONSES TODAY is the best way to send these so-called ‘representatives’ a message they won’t be able to ignore,” another email urges.