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Trump and RFK blame acetaminophen for childhood autism. I couldn’t find a transcript yet, but the meandering press conference is recorded here. Was this on anyone’s bingo cards?
I’m confused. I vaguely knew that the Trump campaign had decided to fight autism at some point, but I always figured it was appeasement for the antivaxxers. Is there an untapped pool of Tylenol haters out there? Is this a stalking horse for a broader wave of FDA guidelines targeting the usual suspects?
Maybe there’s some sort of political smokescreen going on. We don’t appear to have started any new wars, and domestic hate for Trump looks more or less like it did since last week. If it’s a distraction, it’s not a very efficient one; I had a hard time finding reporting on it, and all the sites that bothered were also eagerly blasting his abuses of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. That leaves the old-fashioned political motive of throwing meat to the base. Maybe Trump is just checking off campaign promises. But again, it’s so niche.
I suppose there could be some sort of personal beef. If Trump is trying to tank someone’s stock, uh, this is still a pretty weird way to do it.
That’s not even touching the medical case. The administration doesn’t appear to have provided much substance behind their claim. This will dissuade approximately no one. Enjoy your fresh CW battleground.
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
It's simple, over the last decades, the left has succesfully taken over multiple fields through academia, including medicine, and there is a fear from conservatives that this political capture is tainting the quality of the science that comes out of it. In some fields of medicine, particularly those at the intersection of hard sciences and social sciences, for instance study of the transgender phenomena, it's hard to argue that the conservatives don't have a massive point. In more hard science aligned ones, such as which drugs are effective/dangerous, it's less legible, but the conservatives do have (IMO) a smaller point that the left relishes the power to force public policy and is not wielding it objectively. The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
I'll try to explain this cultural gap as someone with a bit of familiarity with both American and European (I assume that's where you're from) conservative culture. To massively generalize, for American conservatives, the purpose of law and order is to enable the liberty of law-abiding people. Strong law enforcement, yes, but of laws written to be relatively minimal and with a common-sense focus on "real crime", with the goal to enable people to freely live a "normal" (i.e. productively employed, not using drugs, etc.) life. Red Tribers are often happy to break laws they see as unnecessary government overreach if they can get away with it. They're concerned about the breakdown of law and order, but just as concerned that abuses of state power will crush that freedom to live one's American life. Covid measures were a question of the latter issue to American conservatives. They don't see what MAGA is doing in terms of law and order, like ICE raids, as authoritarian because it's going after people who have broken what they consider just and reasonable laws, but lockdowns were unjust.
As for MAGA's populist economics, yeah, in many ways it's no longer a movement of 80s free-market economics. The more hardline economic populists will tell you that the left-wingers advocating those policies a hundred years ago were the real populists back then, and they were wrong to give up economic populism in the 20th Century in order to fight over culture and long march through institutions - they'll even be gleeful when leftists point that out.
There remains a fairly large contingent of traditional law-and-order conservatives, the kind who believe every regulation is a good thing and to be followed, that if you were arrested you are guilty and in any conflict between an individual and authority, authority is right. Rather overrepresented among police officers (who of course see themselves as authority), but rather underrepresented among online conservatives, "second amendment people", and MAGA.
I'm sure that's true, also among older conservatives in red states. I've only known big-city cops, who generally take a somewhat cynical attitude to their department and a relaxed attitude to common-sense violations of regulation because both are necessary for their job.
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