In April 2025, the United States health secretary stood at a news conference and listed what autistic children would never do. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said autism “destroys families” and suggested many autistic children would never hold a job, never pay taxes, never go on a date. Holly Robinson Peete has a son who was diagnosed in 2000, at three years old, and she has spent the years since building the case against that sentence.
On November 7, she said so out loud. At the HollyRod Foundation’s DesignCare gala in Los Angeles, Robinson Peete named the ground that has been gained and who she thinks is trying to take it back. “We’ve made so many strides in the autism community and just really normalizing diversity and neurodiversity,” she said. “And then here comes a guy in the ‘health and human services’ to tell us all the things our kids will never do.”
She founded HollyRod in 1997. Her son RJ was diagnosed three years later, at the age of three, which makes the foundation’s work on autism a quarter of a century old.
Robinson Peete described the posture the job has required of her in a phrase. She called herself “a bit of a gangster mom.”
That is more than a joke about a mother at a school meeting. Getting services, schooling, and a future for a child a system was prepared to write off does not happen by being agreeable, and she is naming what other people politely call advocacy.
The reason a sentence from a cabinet secretary lands differently from an ordinary insult is that he is not a stranger with an opinion. He runs the department that funds the research and sets the federal guidance, which means his list of nevers arrives in front of the next family as something close to official. Robinson Peete is not arguing about his manners. She is answering a man with a budget.
