What RFK Jr. Doesn’t Understand About Autism

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET on May 22, 2025 Expressing concern can sometimes be a delicate endeavor. One can intend to be empathetic, but the target of concern hears only condescension and pity. So it is with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently talked about how much autistic children suffer. These poor kids, he said at an April 16 press conference, would never “pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll…

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While Virginia Govs Gather to Commemorate Desegregation, Wilder Protests End of DEI

Until this past weekend, there was only one place you had a chance to see all of Virginia’s living governors come together in the same place, and that was at the inauguration of the next one. But on May 17, in commemoration of the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating schools and commemorating Virginia’s role in that case, there they all were, Democrats and Republicans sitting together, sharing the commonality that comes from being part of a group of only 74 Virginians that…

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Following House Committee Vote, MoveOn Announces Ads Against Johnson & Republicans Opposing Harsh Medicaid Cuts

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the House Budget Committee’s vote to rip away health care from more than 13 million Americans and eliminate food assistance for millions of families to hand out tax cuts for billionaires, MoveOn Political Action announced a slate of digital ads and billboards in high-traffic areas targeting Speaker Mike Johnson and vulnerable House Republicans as they return home for Memorial Day. This week MoveOn members will make calls to House Republicans, and ads will launch targeting the following members of Congress: Speaker Johnson (LA-04) Rep.…

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Senate Democrats seek to restore, strengthen PMF program with new legislation

Two Senate Democrats hope to reinstate the recently eliminated Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program and permanently secure the nearly 50-year-old effort for recruiting and retaining federal talent. The Training Aspiring Leaders Emerging Now to Serve, or TALENTS Act, which Sens. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced Thursday, would reestablish the PMF program. The bill comes in response to President Donald Trump eliminating the PMF program by executive order in February. Under the TALENTS Act, the PMF program would not only be restored, but also codified in federal regulations, effectively…

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Return of the Shaman

Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market. It’s a panoramic survey:…

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