The Side Effects Include Stupidity

You’ve got to hand it to a man who insists he can hang a medical theory on a cotton thread and call it proof. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. strolls into a Cabinet meeting and drops the claim that early circumcision plus a dose of Tylenol somehow double your kid’s odds of autism. That’s not science. That’s a carnival pitch.

In RFK Jr.’s America, facts are tedious, so he drags out a pair of fringe studies — half-baked, barely peer-reviewed — and calls it proof. The same way charlatans used to sell lead paint and prayer cloths. He’s not interrogating authority; he’s impersonating it.

The story here isn’t autism or Tylenol or foreskin. It’s credibility collapse — the steady corrosion of a public that can’t tell the difference between a study and a story, between evidence and echo. Kennedy’s pedigree once meant trust. Now it’s camouflage. He isn’t breaking news — he’s breaking faith.

And behind the spectacle are parents, terrified and exhausted, combing the internet for a reason their child is different. They deserve better than a theory scrawled in crayon and delivered with a surname. They deserve truth that stands up in daylight.

The claim is absurd. But the disaster lies in giving absurdity a microphone.