| This week was full of absurdity. RFK Jr. launched an attack on a new false culprit for autism: Tylenol. As our public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves explained, running a fever while pregnant poses more risks to one’s fetus than the pain reliever ever could. In making a claim to the contrary, RFK Jr. and Trump have done something wildly irresponsible—shocking!
Meanwhile, after ABC announced that it was kicking Jimmy Kimmel off his late night-show and Trump joked that he would replace him with Marco Rubio, the studio swiftly reversed its decision. “It’s not worth it to appease a bully,” Ben Schwartz surmised. “The company may have come to the belated conclusion that simply doing the right thing and keeping Kimmel on the air would prove cheaper than facing a never-ending regress of Trump administration shakedowns.”
If that weren’t enough, the right continues to make false claims that trans people are “prone to violence,” a dangerous statement that swirled about this month after politicians and media organizations made baseless allegations about perpetrators of mass shootings this month. As our senior editor Jack Mirkinson wrote, people across the establishment are making this worse. “The only thing” that will stop the persecution of this marginalized group is if the rest of us refuse “to join this elite war of extermination.”
-Alana Pockros
Associate Editor, The Nation |
