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    Why is the Trump administration obsessed with autism? – podcast

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    Archive: Good Morning America, NPR, NBC News, WHAS11, BBC News, CBS News, Jimmy Kimmel Live, LiveNowFox
    Listen to Science Weekly’s episode factchecking Trump’s claims about paracetamol
    Buy Carter Sherman’s book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over its Future, here
    Buy Jonathan Freedland’s new book, The Traitor’s Circle, here
    Buy John Harris’ book, Maybe I’m Amazed, about connecting with his son James, diagnosed with autism as a child, through music
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      The United States is witnessing the return of psychiatric imprisonment | Jordyn Jensen

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      Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as “modern mental health care”. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care.These proposals may differ in form, but they share a common function: expanding the state’s power to surveil, detain and “treat” marginalized people deemed disruptive or deviant. Far from offering real support, they reflect a deep investment in carceral control – particularly over disabled, unhoused, racialized and LGBTQIA+ communities. Communities that have often seen how the framing of institutionalization as “treatment” obscures both its violent history and its ongoing legacy. In doing so, these policies erase community-based solutions, undermine autonomy, and reinforce the very systems of confinement they claim to move beyond.Take Hochul’s proposal, which seeks to lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in New York. Under her plan, individuals could be detained not because they pose an imminent danger, but because they are deemed unable to meet their basic needs due to a perceived “mental illness”. This vague and subjective standard opens the door to sweeping state control over unhoused people, disabled peopleand others struggling to survive amid systemic neglect. Hochul also proposes expanding the authority to initiate forced treatment to a broader range of professionals – including psychiatric nurse practitioners – and would require practitioners to factor in a person’s history, in effect pathologizing prior distress as grounds for future detention.This is not a fringe proposal. It builds on a growing wave of reinstitutionalization efforts nationwide. In 2022, New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, directed police and EMTs to forcibly hospitalize people deemed “mentally ill”, even without signs of imminent danger. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s Care courts compel people into court-ordered “treatment”.Now, these efforts are being turbocharged at the federal level. RFK Jr’s Maha initiative proposes labor-based “wellness farms” as a response to homelessness and addiction – an idea that eerily echoes the institutional farms of the 20th century, where disabled people and people of color were confined, surveilled and exploited under the guise of rehabilitation.Just recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a sweeping restructuring that will dismantle critical agencies and consolidate power under a new “Administration for a Healthy America” (AHA). Aligned with RFK Jr’s Maha initiative and Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” directive, the plan merges the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and other agencies into a centralized structure ostensibly focused on combating chronic illness. But through this restructuring – and the mass firing of HHS employees – the federal government is gutting the specialized infrastructure that supports mental health, disability services and low-income communities.The restructuring is already under way: 20,000 jobs have been eliminated, regional offices slashed, and the Administration for Community Living (ACL) dissolved its vital programs for older adults and disabled people scattered across other agencies with little clarity or accountability. This is not administrative streamlining; it is a calculated dismantling of protections and supports, cloaked in the rhetoric of efficiency and reform. SAMHSA – a pillar of the country’s behavioral health system, responsible for coordinating addiction services, crisis response and community mental health care – is being gutted, threatening programs such as the 988 crisis line and opioid treatment access. These moves reflect not just austerity, but a broader governmental strategy of manufactured confusion. By dissolving the very institutions tasked with upholding the rights and needs of disabled and low-income people, the federal government is laying the groundwork for a more expansive – and less accountable – system of carceral “care”.This new era of psychiatric control is being marketed as a moral imperative. Supporters insist there is a humanitarian duty to intervene – to “help” people who are suffering. But coercion is not care. Decades of research show that involuntary (forced) psychiatric interventions often lead to trauma, mistrust, and poorer health outcomes. Forced hospitalization has been linked to increased suicide risk and long-term disengagement from mental health care. Most critically, it diverts attention from the actual drivers of distress: poverty, housing instability, criminalization, systemic racism and a broken healthcare system.The claim that we simply need more psychiatric beds is a distraction. What we need is a complete paradigm shift – away from coercion and toward collective care. Proven alternatives already exist: housing-first initiatives, non-police and peer-led crisis response teams, harm reduction programs, and voluntary, community-based mental health services. These models prioritize dignity, autonomy and support over surveillance, control and confinement.As Liat Ben-Moshe argues, prisons did not simply replace asylums; rather, the two systems coexist and evolve, working in tandem to surveil, contain and control marginalized populations. Today, reinstitutionalization is returning under a more therapeutic facade: “wellness farms”, court diversion programs, expanded involuntary commitment. The language has changed, but the logic remains the same.This moment demands resistance. We must reject the idea that locking people up is a form of care. These proposals must be named for what they are: state-sanctioned strategies of containment, rooted in ableism, racism and the fear of nonconformity.Real public health does not rely on force. It does not require confining people or pathologizing poverty. It means meeting people’s needs – through housing, community care, healthcare and support systems that are voluntary, accessible and liberatory.As budget negotiations in New York continue to drag on – with expansions to involuntary commitment still on the table – and as RFK Jr advances carceral care proposals at the federal level, we face a critical choice: will we continue the long history of institutional violence, or will we build something better – something rooted in justice, autonomy and collective wellbeing?The future of mental health care – and of human dignity itself – depends on our answer.

      Jordyn Jensen is the executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law More

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      Why does RFK Jr want to put my family on an ‘autism registry’? | Deborah Bloom

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      I always knew my parents operated on a different wavelength than most.For one, they are both exceptionally smart. My mother is a former mathematician, who studied the various levels of infinity as part of her master’s thesis. My father is a computer programmer who, at 17 years old, was one of the youngest people to ever be able to communicate with ships in morse code. They met at a party for members of Mensa, a club for the highly intelligent.But their gifts have come with challenges. My dad struggles with eye contact and can become easily overwhelmed in social settings, where emotion and nuance can short-circuit his systems. My mother has difficulty with executive function, and finds it tough to stay neat and organized. Regulating their emotions and reading social cues don’t come easily to either of them.My father was first diagnosed with what was then known as Asperger’s syndrome in his 20s. My mother has never been officially diagnosed as autistic, but identifies as such. When I was a child desperately wanting to fit in with others, I found their neurodivergence to be embarrassing. I wanted what I thought other kids had: parents who got them to school on time, who didn’t have unpredictable, emotional flare-ups or constantly messy homes.Now as an adult, living in a time when neurodivergence is more openly discussed and understood, I’ve come to see their quirks not as flaws but as unique features of who they are. I’ll call my mom when I’m struggling across a tricky math problem, knowing she’ll light up with excitement at the opportunity to assist me with her expertise. I love watching my dad pour himself into his ham radio community, where friendships are forged without the pressure of eye contact.That’s why, when I first heard RFK Jr vow to the Trump administration to find the cause behind the so-called “autism epidemic”, describing it as a “cataclysm”, I got scared. Was the person in charge of the federal government’s healthcare apparatus really describing my parents as victims of an illness that we, as a society, have let get out of control?Later that week, he doubled down, calling autism spectrum disorder a “preventable disease” that “tears families part”, citing the growing rates of ASD among children: one in 31 kids in 2022, compared with one in 36 kids in 2020. “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 a toilet unassisted.”Autism is, in fact, being diagnosed more than ever before, but scientists largely attribute this to increased awareness and a broader diagnostic criteria for the disorder. “When I started in this field in the late 60s, autism was a last resort diagnosis,” says Dr Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist whose primary focus is ASD. “It was primarily given to kids with intellectual disabilities.”It’s also true that people in my generation have more autism diagnoses than our parents. But there are plenty of us out there who suspect our parents may have been on the spectrum, even though they were never formally evaluated. “It’s rare for a parent first to be diagnosed with autism, and then a child realizes they are also autistic,” Lord says. “It’s much more common for a parent to realize they’re on the spectrum after their kid’s been diagnosed.”RFK Jr’s blanket description of 2% of the population fails to take into account the wide spectrum of symptoms that people with autism experience. Some have higher needs than others. Many are able to mask their symptoms. Some are non-verbal – about 30%, according to the National Institutes of Health. All deserve to live in a society where they are understood, recognized and supported – not categorized, as RFK Jr describes, as a “tragic” aberration that needs to be snuffed out.The federal government says it is committing resources to finding the cause behind ASD (a condition that has been studied since the 1940s and is overwhelmingly attributed by scientists to genetics) and that it is starting an autism database to track the private medical information of numerous Americans. At the same time, it is also poised to cut funding for autism research and support.Slashes to the Department of Education and National Science Foundation mean less money for special needs kids and intervention programs. Reduced funding to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration means autistic people, who are particularly vulnerable to mental illness, will have less access to mental health services. Meanwhile, there are concerns that Congress will cut Medicaid coverage, which would lead to less behavioral support for autistic people, especially children and low-income families. “It just seems so contradictory,” Lord says.By saying autism is a “preventable disease” rather than a complex neurodevelopmental disorder, RFK Jr further stigmatizes an already vulnerable population and threatens to set back a decades-long effort to bring ASD into public awareness and acceptance. Schools already struggle with how to incorporate autistic children into everyday learning, and few programs exist (let alone are publicly funded) specifically for neurodivergent kids. An infinitesimal percentage of workplaces recognize the unique needs of their neurodivergent employees, making it difficult for people with ASD to find and keep employment.Neither set of my grandparents understood their children were autistic, and so the support my parents received was limited. My mom’s parents shrugged their shoulders and categorized her as weirdly obstinate. My dad’s parents treated him like a prodigy, which, although a kinder approach, fostered a superiority complex and a host of anti-social behaviors, making it tough for him to find friends. As adults, both my parents struggled to hold down full-time employment at office jobs, presumably in part because their workplaces probably adhered to a rigid social compact and failed to recognize their unique needs.These days, my parents have learned to mask their autism to varying degrees. My father eventually taught himself how to sustain eye contact with others, and can now hold a conversation with minimal downward glances. They both, to a degree, have become more socially aware and work for themselves.So, no, autism did not ruin my family, as RFK Jr claims. If anything, their conditions have made me a more empathetic, understanding adult, which I believe makes me a better journalist, friend and daughter. But, I sometimes wonder: what would my parents’ lives have been like if society had made more room for them and others like them? I suspect that in a less ableist world, they would have led happier childhoods. And, I think, so too would I.

      Deborah Bloom is a text and video journalist who covers breaking news and human interest stories about gender, culture, mental health and the environment More

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      Advertising giant WPP cuts diversity references from annual report

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      The British advertising giant WPP has become the latest company to cut the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its annual report as the policies come under attack from the Trump administration.The agency, which counts the US as by far its largest market, boasts the storied “Madison Avenue” agencies J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy and Grey among its top brands.In WPP’s annual report, which was released on Friday, the chief executive, Mark Read, told shareholders that “much has changed over the last year” due to political events.“In today’s complex world, a pressing question for brands and organisations is whether to engage on social issues in a more contested public arena, and how to navigate the expectations of different audiences with competing views on sensitive topics,” he wrote.The same document axed all references of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “DE&I” and “DEI”. The policy attracted 20 mentions in the previous year’s report. The earlier document mentioned three times that the company was seen as a “diversity leader”.The omissions, which were first reported by the Sunday Times, included changes to how the company reports on measuring top executives’ non-financial performance, which contributes to the size of their short-term bonuses. In the new report, the phrasing has switched to “people and culture”.WPP declined to comment on whether the new wording was a response to anti-DEI policy moves by the Trump administration. The company said that, while the phrasing in its annual report had changed, the way in which executives’ short-term bonuses are calculated was unaltered.Within his first few days in office, Donald Trump instructed US government agencies to shut down their DEI programmes and federal employees working in diversity offices were immediately put on paid leave.Trump signed two executive orders targeting DEI programmes within the federal government. The first executive order largely scrapped the DEI efforts that took place under Joe Biden, who had ordered all federal agencies to come up with equity plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second executive order effectively ended any DEI activities within the federal government. This order overturned a handful of executive orders from past presidents, including one from Lyndon B Johnson that was signed during the civil rights era that required federal contractors to adopt equal opportunity measures.The Financial Times recently reported that more than 200 US companies have removed references to “diversity, equity and inclusion” from their annual reports since Trump’s election. More

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      Justice department removes disability guidelines for US businesses

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      The Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines for US businesses on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including some that deal with Covid-19 and masking and accessibility.The ADA was signed into law in 1990 and is the key civil rights law that protects Americans with disabilities from discrimination.Updates have already been made to the ADA.gov website to reflect the removal of the guidances. Multiple pages were removed from the ADA’s archive website, including one page that explained how retail businesses are required to have accessible features and another on customer service practices for hotel and lodging guests with disabilities.In a webpage titled “Covid-19 and the Americans with Disabilities Act”, the justice department removed five out of seven questions that were listed on the page as recently as recently as early March.The removed guidances include questions about whether the justice department issues exemptions for mask requirements and resources to help explain an employee with a disability’s rights to an employer during the Covid-19 pandemic.In a press release, the justice department called the guidance “unnecessary and outdated”.“Avoiding confusion and reducing the time spent understanding compliance may allow businesses to deliver price relief to consumers,” the press release said.The justice department said it will highlight tax incentives that will help businesses cover the costs of making accessibility improvements for customers and employees.The department referred to a 20 January executive order as the reason why it was removing the ADA guidelines.In the executive order, Donald Trump pointed vaguely at government regulation as the reason behind inflation. The White House said the Biden administration “made necessary goods and services scarce through a crushing regulatory burden and radical policies designed to weaken American production”.“Unprecedented regulatory oppression from the Biden administration is estimated to have imposed almost $50,000 in costs on the average American household,” the White House claimed in the executive order.At the time, the order did not specify what regulations the Trump administration would remove but directed agencies to evaluate business regulations.“Putting money back into the pockets of business owners helps everyone by allowing those businesses to pass on cost savings to consumers and bolster the economy,” said the acting US assistant attorney general Mac Warner in a statement.This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to curb the ADA for the sake of making it easier on businesses. In 2017, Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would have made it harder for Americans with disabilities to bring lawsuits against businesses and employers. More

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      ‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word

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      I got into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.Trump reportedly used the word to denigrate both Joe Biden and Harris in private conversations during the 2024 election. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother. And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the R-word does the trick, according to Dr Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 2000s, disability advocates waged a moderately successful social campaign to stop kids (and everyone else) from using the slur. Now, its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob (like the insults “libtard”, “fucktard” and “gaytard” before it).“Conservatives are empowered … People struggle with holding back what they actually want to say, so there’s something psychologically ‘freeing’ for this group of empowered people to be able to be like: ‘I’m going to punch up my words with something edgy and get attention,’” said Wright, whose work focuses on self-censorship, or the ways we limit ourselves when speaking.“[It is used] in a ‘please see me’ way.”They are getting seen. A recent study from Montclair State University found that Musk’s use of of the slur in early January correlated with a 200% spike in usage of the word by users on X, the platform Musk owns, in the days following.“There’s this whole generation of people who did use it in a more neutral way in the beginning, especially when we were younger,” Wright said. Now, “it’s like, ‘Oh, this other person who I identify with is using it.’ It gives people permission.” Cut to inauguration weekend, when the tech right and Maga youth descended on DC, throwing around the slur as they celebrated their win over the left. Just this week, Musk responded to a critical post on X: “I’m tempted to call this guy a retard, but I won’t because I’ve used that word too many times.” (Ironically enough, X’s own AI chatbot outlined the slur’s offensive history in the replies.)But the R-word isn’t just a rallying cry. It’s an attack on someone’s personhood.We’ve seen this before. Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.View image in fullscreenAdvocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘retarded’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” said Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His focus is disability theology, including the words used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, and he spends much of his days working with this community. “I mean, that’s the basis of eugenics. I’m a little fearful of seeing this word pop back up because it does have such a strong eugenic connotation,” he continued.Today, approximately 7.4 million people in the US have an intellectual or developmental disability. Vocational services have connected them to employment in service, healthcare and food industries. Madeline Stuart, a model with Down syndrome and autism, walked her first runway in 2015 after falling in love with modeling at a fashion show. The chef Adam Libby, who has Down syndrome, treats his 2.6 million TikTok followers to cooking demos and recipes (pizza sauce and dough, all from scratch). Stories like these are everywhere, chipping away at the stigma around intellectual disabilities. But this is a highly vulnerable community, and their recent successes have hinged in part on government support systems put in place to foster growth and independence. This progress is still so fragile.Musk, a man who launched a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities, has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking. Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts to eliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing. Early on, Musk set his sights on Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are looking to slash Medicaid spending to support Trump’s tax cuts. When the Trump administration temporarily froze federal funds in its second week, programs like vocational rehabilitation and disability housing assistance were put into jeopardy, according to the American Association of People with Disabilities, which condemned the move. One source told ProPublica that even one more spending freeze could keep their organization from delivering hot meals to people with disabilities.Trump, who has used eugenicist language to describe undocumented immigrants, implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions”, dragging disability into his anti-DEI crusade.And Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, could be disastrous for children with disabilities, reports the New Yorker, as the department helps fund special education programs across the US. It’s also likely that McMahon would advocate for school choice, redirecting tax dollars to private schools that are not legally required to accept students with intellectual disabilities.According to Endress, people who use the slur “understand at a deep level that there is a bottom rung to our social hierarchy, and that is intellectually disabled people. And so because the word ‘retarded’ still links to them and pretty much to them alone, it becomes the worst insult you could give somebody,” Endress says.If the government were to withhold care from our most vulnerable, leaving them unhoused and uneducated and without healthcare or employment, it would make it easier to point a finger at them and say: “What a burden.”“It [suggests] you are the worst of the worst … You don’t deserve to be part of our social fabric,” Endress said.Casey works at a Wendy’s in our hometown – he’s been employee of the month twice (I have to brag about him when I can). We talk on the phone weekly, and he recently told me that, unfortunately, someone called him a “retard” late last year. One of his coworkers jumped over the counter and laid into the guy. Again, one person in the right place at the right time.In that way, I see the rise of the R-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go. And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough. More

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      Top Republicans disavow Trump’s ‘mentally disabled’ attacks on Harris

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      Senior Republicans distanced themselves Sunday from comments made by Donald Trump at campaign stops over the weekend that opponent Kamala Harris was born “mentally disabled” and had compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on Trump’s remarks, which came in what Trump himself admitted was a “dark” speech.“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy.”Graham’s comments came as immigration and border security remained the top domestic issue on Sunday’s political talk shows. Trump made his comments during a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday amid remarks on Harris’s actions on those issues as vice-president.“Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.Trump added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer, a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team, told ABC News: “I think we should stick on the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues.”But Maryland governor Larry Hogan struck back, telling CBS News that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.“I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan added.Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly address Trump’s comments, widely criticized as offensive, but said Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.Trump’s comments joined a long list of personal attacks against opponents that supporters at his campaign eagerly lap up. Democrats have their own reductive articulations, calling Trump and Vance “weird”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the use of mental disability to describe Harris’s faculties has been widely seized upon. Democrat Illinois governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”.“Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” Pritzker said. Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, said Trump’s comments indicated “cognitive decline”.“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities.Town said in a statement to the Washington Post that Trump’s comments “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability”. More

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      Thanks to Donald Trump, Apple’s new AirPods will make America hear again | John Naughton

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      Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.” The new generation of the headphones will be able to serve as clinical-grade hearing aids later this autumn. More importantly, they can be bought over the counter (OTC in the lingo of the healthcare industry) and they will sell for $249 in the US (and £229 in the UK). Compare that with the prices of hearing aids sold by, say, Specsavers, which start at £495 and go all the way to £2,995 for the Phonak Infinio Sphere 90.Now of course price comparisons can be misleading. Vendors of conventional hearing aids will stress that customers get the undivided attention of an audiologist etc. And for customers with severe hearing difficulties, that’s fine. But for people with “mild to moderate hearing impairment”, even the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has concluded that the customisation software provided by Apple will be adequate.It works like this. You take an on-demand hearing test on your iPhone’s health app, which causes the earbuds to ping each ear with different frequencies at varying volumes. You tap the phone screen if you hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphs your hearing deficits and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids. Alternatively, you can upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by an audiologist.Neat, eh? And also a nice example of engineering ingenuity. But, as with most things, the technology is only part of the story. The healthcare industry in the US is tightly controlled by the FDA, which insisted for years that any device that goes into a human ear needs a prescription. As Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and campaigner, points out, since 1993, campaigners have been calling for the FDA to loosen its stance on these devices and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the president’s council of advisers on science and technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.But eventually, in 2017, Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, proposed by senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley and requiring the FDA to allow hearing aids without a prescription – and Donald Trump signed it! The act imposed a deadline of 2020 on the FDA, but the agency continually prevaricated until 2022, after the Biden administration compelled it to act with an executive order. Only then did the dam that had been building up since 1993 break.The moral of this story, in Stoller’s words, is simple: “How we deploy technology is not a function of engineering and science as much as it is how those interplay with law, in this case a law that fostered a hearing aid cartel and then a different law that broke it apart. So it’s not outlandish to say that Joe Biden designed Apple’s new hearing aid AirPods, with an assist from Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Grassley and Donald Trump. It’s just what happened.”This is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it captures an essential truth that Silicon Valley would prefer to ignore: technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the ways it is deployed and developed are shaped by social and political forces. Social media companies escape liability because of a 26-word clause in a 1996 law, for example. And millions of people in the US suffering from hearing impairment could have had hearing aids at affordable prices at least a decade ago. The problem was not that the technology didn’t exist, but that it wasn’t in the interest of the healthcare-regulatory establishment to make it available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingBad pressJeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and City University of New York emeritus professor, has an insightful analysis on his blog titled What’s become of The Times & Co? about why US mainstream media has gone wrong.Top MarxThe Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece is a marvellous introduction by Wendy Brown to a new translation of Das Kapital.Head case A lovely essay by Erik J Larson is The Left Brain Delusion, which argues that we’re too governed by one side of our grey matter. More