US

[wenchbarwer]

Makes Kim Jong Il's 38 under for his first game of golf seem suddenly possible, in comparison.

[Booney]

Opinion: Trump’s fake take on autism actually affects lives
Donald Trump’s comments on autism undo years of strident efforts to destigmatise the condition, writes Baz McAlister.

Donald Trump continues to blindly, cruelly stomp his way through the fields of disinformation, kicking over truths and leaving panic in his wake.

However, his latest gormless assertion – that paracetamol use among mothers-to-be causes autism – hit me like a gut-punch.

Not because the claim has merit – it does not, that’s just science – but because of what it does to families such as mine: it drags us back into a morass of stigma, guilt and ignorance, and unpicks decades of progress in just a few syllables.

As the father of a young child with autism, I am angry.

Like all of Trump’s statements, this one does not live in a vacuum. His off-the-cuff remarks carry real harm, mostly because of the cult of adoring adherents ready to take every word he says as gospel, but also because of the near-impossibility of interrogating his glib quips with any kind of rigour.

The good journalists at least try, and the bad ones chuckle at his antics from the back row of the press room, but he simply evades, obfuscates, and moves on to the next distraction.

Trump’s comments on autism undo years of strident efforts to destigmatise the condition, to educate communities that our children are not broken, not the result of some parental failure.

Autism is not some disease a child contracts in the womb because his mum popped a pill, as Trump and his sidekick RFK Jr would have us all believe. It is a lifelong neurological difference, rooted deeply in genetic wiring.

Numerous studies have estimated the heritability of autism to be extremely high. There may be other environmental factors in the mix, but certainly nothing credible points to a blister pack of Panadol as the cause of autism.

I’ve felt enough grief already. I grieve that my boy’s childhood will not be normal and his journey through life will be anything but typical, strewn with challenges to overcome, every day a relentless bombardment of the senses.

Couple that with constant worry for the future, dealing with bureaucracy, navigating therapies, accepting that my son will have to endure school in a dated education system that is inadequate to his needs and screaming for reform, and relentlessly being his champion and advocate.

And these demands on me pale in comparison to the demands neurotypical society is placing on my child, every day. He has a beautiful, magical superpower, but it’s one the world finds hard to deal with, hard to accept.

To have – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – the “Leader of the Free World” casually blame things on a simple pill throws the door open wide to finger-pointing at parents for causing their child’s autism through carelessness.

It turns every parent’s private middle-of-the-night worry of having done something wrong into glares and whispers in the street. And it undermines trust in credible medical advice, just as much as when Trump claimed that glugging a horse de-wormer called Ivermectin cured Covid-19.

I worry for mothers-to-be, too – will some avoid seeking any kind of pain relief, now, out of fear?

Hasn’t the authority of women over their own bodies been eroded enough in Trump’s Gilead?

Will this lead to doctors being harassed by MAGA cultists for prescribing painkillers to women in desperate need of relief? Or worse? In the divided, bloodstained, screwed-up soap opera that is the modern United States, anything can happen.

This indignity around autism is blatantly just the latest attempt by Trump to shift the news cycle away from something he dislikes by floating something he knows will grab headlines. “Muzzle velocity”, his former adviser Steve Bannon calls it – flooding the zone with juicy tidbits for the media to dive on, while the real agenda continues in the shadows.

It shouldn’t be given oxygen – but it has. The thought bubble is loose among the credulous masses, and the damage is done. It’s just one more ridiculous trope that families experiencing autism have to weather. Just one more punchline in a cosmic joke.

I hope this bizarre claim will be quashed in the weeks to come by the rigours of science, but in a world that increasingly distrusts experts, I accept that my hope may be misplaced.

Families living with autism need empathy, support, patience, goodwill, some malleability of established systems, and an iron-clad guarantee that all public figures speak responsibly on matters of health, rather than spewing dubious claims that sound like the spiel of a slimy huckster hawking vials of snake oil out of the back of a wagon in 1880s Deadwood.

This dangerous misinformation Trump is peddling casts new uncertainty over lives that are already difficult enough.

Baz McAlister is a night editor for The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail

[wenchbarwer]

I love his use of "gormless"

[woodublieve12]

Maga are going to cancel escalators now

[dedja]

FFS, will the US Supreme Court uphold the lower court ruling that most of the Orange Imbecile’s tariffs are illegal and that he has no power to issue them.

2 of the 9 Supreme Court justices are basically corrupt, so need 2 of the remaining 4 conservative Justices to side with the 3 Liberals.

In normal times the Supreme Court most likely wouldn’t even take up the case, but here we are.