RFK’s Deep Thoughts on...Circumcision?

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Bulwark Takes
Episode: RFK’s Deep Thoughts on...Circumcision?
Date: October 10, 2025
Hosts: Sam Stein (Bulwark Managing Editor), Will Sommer (Author of False Flag)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into RFK Jr.’s surprising claims during a recent Trump Cabinet meeting, where he suggested a correlation between early childhood circumcision, Tylenol use, and autism. Hosts Sam Stein and Will Sommer analyze RFK Jr.'s statements, discuss the dubious science behind these claims, and reflect on the consequences of airing such speculation from positions of authority.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Cabinet Meeting Bombshell

• [01:00] Sam Stein sets the stage, noting that most Bulwark staffers steered clear of this topic due to discomfort.

• [01:58] A clip plays where RFK Jr. claims:

  "There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol. Oh, you know, none of this is positive, but all of it is stuff that we should be paying attention to."
  — RFK Jr. at the Cabinet meeting

• Cabinet members’ reactions:

  "Oh, my God. Half of the cabinet members aren't looking at him. They're just like, stare straight ahead."
  — Sam Stein [02:41]

• Commentary on the novelty and awkwardness of discussing circumcision in such a setting.

  "I’m gonna go on a limb and say that’s the first time circumcision has been brought up in a Cabinet meeting."
  — Sam Stein [02:41]

2. The Ethics of Health Policy Rhetoric

• Stein and Sommer emphasize the dangers of senior officials riffing about unverified medical theories:

  "If it's not dispositive, then don't say it... people are going to look to you as a person of authority and... take your lead."
  — Sam Stein [03:27]

• Comments about RFK Jr. and Trump’s style in discussing public health:

  "These guys seem to sort of just shoot off whatever they want, and they're just like, I could be wrong though. Who cares?"
  — Will Sommer [04:21]

  "Don't snip your kid's dick and give them Tylenol... as opposed to, you know, wear a cloth mask."
  — Sam Stein [04:49]

3. The Actual Science

• [05:02] Stein summarizes the Danish study RFK Jr. cites:
  • Methodology was disputed; unclear if circumcision or general pain were causal.
  • Possible Tylenol link not determinative.
  • Later studies further undermined the initial findings.

  "...that’s what we’re going on. It's like two random studies that are not dispositive, and RFK Jr just jumps in and says, yeah, this could be it."
  — Sam Stein [05:56]

4. Context of Medical Claims in Politics

• Drawing contrasts with pandemic-era messaging and the troubling tendency for speculation at high levels.

  "If RFK thinks it's real, let's do a press conference, let's issue some white papers or what have you, rather than, oh, you didn't hear about the circumcision thing? Maybe you should have been watching the Trump Cabinet meeting."
  — Will Sommer [06:42]

5. The Cuba-Autism Claims

• [06:59] Stein recounts RFK Jr.’s assertion that low Tylenol use in Cuba leads to lower autism rates, and Trump’s claim that "there was no autism at all in Cuba."
  • Cuban doctors and others have refuted these simplistic assertions:

  "...Cuban doctors have come forward since then to refute the idea that there is no autism on the island. So there is autism on the island. Yeah. It's just the world we live in."
  — Sam Stein [10:03]

6. The Pregnant Women & Tylenol TikTok Stunt

• [07:50] Discussion around viral videos of pregnant women “defiantly” taking Tylenol, possibly as a protest or meme — likened to the Tide Pod challenge.

  "I don't think people were really eating all of these Tylenols. But then Republicans acted like it was totally real... liberals are truly..."
  — Will Sommer [08:00]

7. Broader Commentary on Bad Science and Anecdotal Policymaking

• Critique of using anecdotal sources instead of empirical data, referencing the Cuba and Amish autism claims.

  "We're seeing a lot of sort of an abandonment of what we might call empirical evidence in favor of, like, I heard it from someone..."
  — Will Sommer [09:09]

  "...in Cuba... I think it's fair to say they probably don't have the most rigorous testing. And also... there's an incentive... to not be maybe mass identifying everyone with autism, because that would mean more money has to be spent."
  — Will Sommer [09:24]

8. Notable Bonus: The Andrew Yang Flashback

• [10:44] Sommer recalls when Andrew Yang made waves by discussing his personal experience and political opinions on circumcision:

  "...when we worked together... Andrew Yang came out against circumcision. My first kid was circumcised, second kid wasn't and it was like, whoa, okay."
  — Will Sommer [10:44]

• Stein:

  "Please do not take your circumcision advice from us or from RFK jr. Talk to your doctors..."
  — Sam Stein [11:12]

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Memorable Quotes

• "I would. I'm gonna go on a limb and say that's the first time circumcision has been brought up in a Cabinet meeting." — Sam Stein [02:41]
• "If it’s not dispositive, then don’t say it." — Sam Stein [03:27]
• "Don’t snip your kid's dick and give them Tylenol." — Sam Stein [04:49]
• "Maybe you should have been watching the Trump Cabinet meeting." — Will Sommer [06:42]
• "It reminds me of when... Andrew Yang came out against circumcision. My first kid was circumcised, second kid wasn't and it was like, whoa, okay." — Will Sommer [10:44]
• "Please do not take your circumcision advice from us or from RFK jr. Talk to your doctors..." — Sam Stein [11:12]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:00] — Intro to RFK Jr.'s Cabinet comments
• [01:58], [02:27] — RFK Jr. Cabinet clip(s) replayed
• [03:27] — Critique of RFK's approach as top health official
• [05:02] — The science and the Danish study explained
• [06:06] — Reflections on medical policy in the Trump era
• [06:59] — The Cuba-autism connection claim
• [07:50] — Pregnant women & Tylenol TikTok narrative
• [09:09] — Critique of anecdotal science in public policy
• [10:44] — Andrew Yang circumcision anecdote

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Tone & Takeaways

The hosts mix serious concern with sardonic humor as they highlight the hazards of political leaders making off-the-cuff medical pronouncements. The episode is brisk, irreverent, yet thoughtful, urging listeners to rely on medical professionals and empirical evidence—not Cabinet room riffs or viral stunts—for health decisions.

Transcript

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[Will Sommer]

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[Will Sommer]

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[Sam Stein]

Hey guys. Me Sam Stein, managing under at the Bulwark. I am here with Will Sommer, who is the author of False Flag. The reason Will's with us is because every other person on staff refused to talk about this topic that we're going to talk about. It was just too hot an issue, too uncomfortable a topic of conversation for anyone other than me and Will. I speak of RFKJR's latest discourse around autism, this time that there may be a correlation between early circumcision and autism. This was during a Cabinet meeting today. I'm not going to be totally dismissive. He's not, you know, he's not speaking completely out of his ass. There are some studies, but as usual, it's incredibly complicated and he's distilling it into something that is wildly misleading. But Will, let's play the video of it and I don't know, let's just talk about it after the fact. Let's roll the tape of RFK talking about circumcision at the Cabinet meeting.

[McDonald's Announcer]

There's two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they're given Tylenol. Oh, you know, none of this is positive, but all of it is stuff that we should be paying attention to.

[Will Sommer]

Doug Burgum sitting next to him, like, I don't know.

[Sam Stein]

Did he say I missed that? Can we play that again? I want to see Bergam.

[Will Sommer]

No, no, he's just Sort of like, what is this guy talking about?

[Sam Stein]

Yeah, I want to play it again. Let's play it again if we can. I want to actually look for the.

[McDonald's Announcer]

There's two studies that show children who are sur. Circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they're given Tylenol.

[Sam Stein]

Oh, my God. Half of the cabinet members aren't looking at him. They're just like, stare straight ahead. Don't. Don't look. Don't look. I would. I'm gonna go on a limb and say that's the first time circumcision has been brought up in a Cabinet meeting. Unless I'm missing something. But what did you make of RFK just going for it?

[Will Sommer]

Well, you know, it is a lot to bring up in a Cabinet meeting, as you said. I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's the RFK war on Tylenol. I mean, clearly, he. He made this promise that they were going to get to the bottom of autism by, I think, September. They made the big announcement about women, pregnant women taking Tylenol. And now he's. I mean, it's sort of a part of this where, you know, the science on this is very mixed, and we can get into it. Uh, but he's just like, you know, there it is. It's the circumcisions. That's what's causing autism.

[Sam Stein]

Yeah, I think that's what gets me a bit. And we will get into the science because. Well, I'm not a scientist, but I did actually do a little research on this. But it's like the idea that the top health official in the country would just kind of riff out in a Cabinet meeting about, like, very important things like childhood autism and circumcision. And. And then, of course, the qualifier, it's not dispositive. He said that twice, actually, about whether Tylenol is linked to autism. Well, if it's not dispositive, then don't say it. Like, just don't say it, because people are going to look to you as a person of authority and the chief medical officer in the country, and they're going to take your lead. And if you're not 100% sure of what you're about to say, then you might as well just not say it, or at least let someone with more credibility say it. But that's not how these people roll. So, you know, you get RFK saying things like this in front of a CAB meeting, and it's going to cause real Harm.

[Will Sommer]

You know, it is funny. You take. You think about RFK and a lot of the sort of COVID people's grievances with the way HHS and CDC was run during the pandemic. And a lot of it was, you know, they would. Well, Dr. Fauci told us to wear cloth masks, but really that wasn't so effective or that the vaccines would stop the spread. And maybe they didn't and then. But now. But these guys seem to sort of just shoot off whatever they want, and they're just like, I don't know, I could just be making. I could be wrong, though. You know, who cares?

[Sam Stein]

Don't. Don't snip your kid's dick and give them Tylenol. Like, let's just, you know, let's just, you know, not do that as opposed to, you know, wear a cloth mask. It's a good point, Will. It's very. It's very interesting.

[Will Sommer]

Thank you. I come with the trenchant analysis. Absolutely.

[Sam Stein]

I. Yeah. Well, this is why we got you on whenever the topic is male circumcision. So what is the science? Okay, so look, I'm not going to pretend like I'm the authority here, but there was a Danish study that appears to be what RFK is referencing among the two studies. And it looked at whether rates of autism for kids who were circumcised was higher, more elevated. And, you know, the methodology of that study was sharply disputed, in part because it wasn't clear if they were looking at whether circumcision was responsible or pain in general was responsible, because it's possible that, for instance, UTI urinary tract infections were, you know, by their methodology, related as well. In that study, there was suggestion that perhaps it was the use of Tylenol that was related to autism, but they never made determinative links between that and autism. In fact, several studies since then have questioned whether whether the study was accurate or not. But that's what we're going on. It's like two random studies that are not dispositive, and RFK Jr just jumps in and says, yeah, this could be it.

[Will Sommer]

I mean, it really does take you back to the initial Tylenol press conference that him and Trump held, where they would say, well, you know, there's mixed science. Maybe let's hold off on doing Tylenol. And Trump would just say, stop taking Tylenol right now. If you're pregnant, if you might become pregnant, don't do it. There's nothing else for it. But too bad. I mean, the, the idea is, and, and, you know, the cdc, the hhs, the fda, we expect these, I mean, this is like life or death decisions here. And you would expect them to really, if they're going to make a pronouncement, really sort of mull it over. But, but instead you have RFK kind of just spouting off, you know, whatever he wants. And in weird forums, too, right? I mean, if this circumcision thing is real, if RFK thinks it's real, let's do a press conference, let's, let's issue some white papers or what have you, rather than, oh, you didn't hear about the circumcision thing. Maybe you should have been watching the Trump Cabinet meeting.

[Sam Stein]

Exactly. It's the Cabinet meeting where Donald Trump pontificates alongside rfk. The other thing that's notable. So that was just a snippet of what we played, no pun intended, by RFK in the Cabinet meeting. Earlier in the same meeting, he was talking about Cuba and autism rates on the island. And I did notice something. He was like, well, you know, the rates of autism in Cuba are much lower, lowest in the world, and they have much less use of Tylenol in Cuba than anywhere else in the world. Therefore these two musings must be correlated. And I remember Trump, actually, this is, you know, this is different than what Trump said. Trump said there was no autism at all in Cuba. He was definitive zero autism at all in Cuba. So, you know, there's just not real much consistency there. The other thing that RFK complained about was that there's some, apparently some viral video of some Columbia professor or something like that, like pregnant, eight months pregnant, just like downing Tylenol.

[Will Sommer]

Oh, yeah, can we talk about that, by the way? Can we talk about that?

[Sam Stein]

Yeah. What is that?

[Will Sommer]

I was shocked when I heard it. But this is the world. This is the world I live in. So did you. So, right.

[Sam Stein]

So.

[Will Sommer]

So after the press conference in September saying, you know, pregnant women stop taking Tylenol, then you would have videos of pregnant women saying, you know, F U R F K and taking a Tylenol because they were in pain or in some cases, I think it's kind of like the Tide Pod challenge. I think people were, they would take the bottle and go, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. I don't think people were really eating all of these Tylenols. But then Republicans acted like it was totally real. And they would say, oh, my God, these, these liberal women, they're on a Death mission just despite Trump. There is this one that got, like, a ton of attention where one of the women who was very opposed to pregnant women taking Tylenol said, I just got a call from a man whose wife guzzled a whole thing of Tylenol to spike Trump. And now they're in the ER and da, da, da. And it's like, why would you, like, okay, my wife's in the ER because of this TikTok stunt gone wrong. Now. Now let me find this MAGA person on Twitter. Give her a call. I mean, people are saying, wow, liberals are trul.

[Sam Stein]

Yeah, well, it did seem a little bit too ridiculous to be true, honestly, that someone would just be on the street videoing themselves being like.

[Will Sommer]

Can I also just jump off the Cuba thing? We're seeing a lot of sort of an abandonment of what we might call empirical evidence in favor of, like, I heard it from someone, or there's a lot. There's a lot of focus on societies where I think it's fair to say the detection may not be so good. You know, I think in Cuba. I'm not an expert on autism in Cuba, but I think it's fair to say that they probably don't have the most rigorous testing. And also, I think there's an incentive to not be, you know, because it's a government health care system to not be maybe mass identifying everyone with autism, because that would mean more money has to be spent. This, this recalls in the September press conference when Trump said the Amish have no rates of autism, and that. Where did that come from? An Amish guy who was on the Theo Vaughn show and said, we don't have. We don't know what ADHD is. Now. This guy was not really a medical expert in any way, but this is. This is how our medical policy is getting shaped.

[Sam Stein]

I will just note that Cuban doctors have come forward since then to refute the idea that there is no autism on the island. So there is autism on the island. Yeah. It's just the world we live in. And on the issue of circumcision, the other thing to note is, like, kids aren't often given Tylenol post circumcision. It's. It's true that there's doctors in my feed. Being like, this is just doesn't comport with reality, but this is our reality. So, yeah, we gotta watch these cabinet meetings for big scientific breakthroughs from RFK Junior. Well, thank you for.

[Will Sommer]

He is in the lab. He's like, I've emerged.

[Sam Stein]

Yeah, seriously, it's unbelievable. Thank you, buddy. I appreciate this. It wasn't that bad talking for what, 11 minutes about circumcision, was it?

[Will Sommer]

It reminds me of when we worked together at a previous publication and Andrew Yang came out against circumcision. Oh my God. And related every he's had. You know, my first kid was circumcised, second kid wasn't and it was like, whoa, okay. All right.

[Sam Stein]

I forgot about that Yang. That's a good recall. Why did he. He like ran on a weirdly anti.

[Will Sommer]

Circumcision someone someone on Twitter or Reddit asked him what's your take on circumcision? He said, well, let me tell you.

[Sam Stein]

Oh yeah, I remember that. And then I called him up and we talked about it. So funny. Those are the good old days. All right, man. Take care, buddy. Thank you guys for watching this. I'm sure this was illuminating. Please do not take your circumcision advice from us or from RFK jr. Talk to your doctors, subscribe to the feed.