Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has a plan to protect autism-related data from RFK Jr.’s absurd plans to create a disease registry tracking autistic people. 

Pritzker plans to sign an executive order Wednesday that will prevent state agencies from obtaining or disclosing data that personally identifies people with autism, unless it’s required for medical care or legal matters, according to a copy of the order obtained by the Chicago-Sun Times. 

“Every Illinoisan deserves dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As Donald Trump and DOGE threaten these freedoms, we are taking steps to ensure that our state remains a leader in protecting the rights of individuals with autism and all people with disabilities.”

Pritzker’s order comes as RFK Jr. announced the National Institutes of Health is collecting private medical data from government and commercial databases to create a registry of people with autism in the United States. The data will be collected from prescription records, lab testing, and private insurance claims. While the NIH denies it’s a “registry,” RFK Jr. used the word again just this week. 

The announcement sparked widespread outrage among autism advocacy groups across the country. A petition against the registry garnered thousands of signatures within 24 hours. 

“They are building a list. A list of people like my children. A list of autistic individuals— tracked, labeled, and filed under the guise of public health,” Ryan Smith, the petition starter, wrote in the petition’s description. “This is not support. It is surveillance.”

RFK Jr. has long dehumanized people with autism and spread unbacked claims about the disorder. “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 the toilet unassisted,” Kennedy said at a press conference in April.

The lifelong vaccine skeptic has compared the rising rates of autism diagnoses in the U.S. to a preventable epidemic. Autism is not an infectious diseas; it is a lifelong developmental disorder.

With Pritzker’s executive order, Illinois will become the first state to legally restrict the sharing of autism-related data—a clear message to RFK Jr. that every American, even those he looks down upon, has the right to privacy. 

Donald Trump’s quest to conquer Greenland is becoming increasingly serious.

The intelligence community directed intelligence agency chiefs to conduct a spy campaign on the Denmark-controlled island territory last week, issuing a “collection emphasis message” for information pertaining to Greenland’s independence movement, as well as an examination of local attitudes regarding “American resource extraction,” reported The Wall Street Journal. It also tasked agencies to identify individuals living in Greenland and Denmark who support the Trump administration’s goals for the island.

The directive came from several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to the paper, but Gabbard was not happy to hear that the news of the initiative had gotten out.

“The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information,” Gabbard told the Journal in a statement. “They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”

The Greenland order, which went out to multiple departments including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, is the first tangible step the Trump administration has made to satiate the president’s desire to own the self-governing island.

One intelligence official explained to the Journal that because collection resources are “inherently limited,” they are typically used for “perceived threats, not allied countries.”

The order is just another reminder that American voters should take Donald Trump at his word. In an interview with NBC News that aired Sunday, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of taking Greenland by force.

“I don’t rule it out,” the president said. “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”

The White House National Security Council has met “several times” to make Trump’s desires for the arctic island a reality, The New York Times reported in early April. At the time, a U.S. official claimed the council had sent “specific instructions to multiple arms of the government.” But those instructions never specified the use of military force.

Another effort by the Trump administration to win over Greenland involves using federal dollars on advertising and social media campaigns with hopes of persuading Greenland’s 57,000 residents to basically annex themselves for America.

But Greenlanders have not taken kindly to Trump and his associates’ sudden interest in acquiring their land. After months of heavy pressure from the Trump family, including an embarrassing stunt in which Donald Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food, and an effort in the U.S. Congress to rename the territory “Red, White, and Blueland,” Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences in March to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders, and we want our own independence in the future,” Demokraatit Party leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Sky News the night his party won a decisive majority in Parliament, making him prime minister. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”

A late-January poll by pollster Verian found that 85 percent of Greenland’s residents do not want to become part of the United States. Just 6 percent were in favor of the switch, while 8 percent were undecided, according to The Guardian.

That disinterest became more apparent in late March, when second lady Usha Vance’s trip around Greenland was gutted........

© New Republic