Trump and his appointees variously called autism an “epidemic” and a “horrible, horrible crisis.”So taking Tylenol is not good. All right, I’ll say it. It’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol used during pregnancy unless medically necessary.
That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out. You can’t do it. I guess there’s that. It’s a small number of cases I think.
This view is so foolish as to beggar belief.“The autism epidemic is running rampant. One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California it’s 1 in 12.5.”
More than 30 years ago, Daniel Henninger wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal headed “No Guardrails”. It was about the gunning down of an abortion doctor in Florida by a man named Michael Frederick Griffin. The murder showed “how small the barrier has become that separates civilised society from uncivilised behaviour in American life”.
“In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalised people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: ‘Just do it.’ Michael Frederick Griffin just did it,” wrote Henninger.
The 1993 editorial – which apparently hangs in the conference room where Journal opinion writers meet – explored the lowering, in some cases the removal, of the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.
We reached another “no guardrails” milestone these past few weeks. And it’s nothing to celebrate. When civil societies – meaning we, the people – chip away at the norms of behaviour that keep us civilised, something really bad usually follows. Like the murder of Charlie Kirk.
The next thing that happens when self-restraint is no longer regarded as a virtue is that government steps in with a sledgehammer. In this case, Donald Trump is determined to get rid of people in the media who don’t like him. His reaction damages a couple of things that civil society depends on – self-restraint and speaking freely without being censored by a government. The two are not inconsistent.
Given his views about both, Kirk would presumably have been one of Trump’s biggest critics.
The other thing that happened, this time at least, is that legions of people on the left bloviated about the importance of free speech.
“It’s pretty huge,” ABC journalist Laura Tingle said on Insiders, speaking about the censorship that unfolded this past week.
You don’t say.
To Trump’s critics, I say come on in. It’s good to have you on the side of liberalism. The door has always been open to hear from the left when governments try to regulate – translation: censor – what people can say. Alas, not many members of the political left have stepped up. Until now.
It’s easy to get enthusiastic about free speech when a thin-skinned Trump, in his familiar bombastic manner, says that people in the media who say nasty things about him should be kicked off the air. It’s just as easy to get riled up when Trump’s man at the Federal Communications Commission threatens Disney and its affiliates if they fail to punish late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for an inane statement – and Kimmel gets booted off air.
Kimmel, a progressive luvvie of late-night TV, is back on air this week after his on-air shenanigans claiming Kirk’s suspected killer was part of the “MAGA gang”. We were all doing fine, sifting through the drivel, rebutting the factual errors. A thriving and healthy marketplace of ideas made sure that Kimmel, apparently a comedian, was exposed as a fool who wasn’t funny at all. Surely that was enough.
Kimmel became a martyr when Trump and his crony at the FCC stepped in threatening to punish people who say things they don’t like. It’s a far nobler pursuit to defend free speech when you’re not defending one of your own. That exercise requires defending a principle. Not as sexy as defending a fellow traveller who echoes your views, to be sure. Principles are just unwritten norms, ideas that won’t protect us unless enough people defend them. Guardrails, if you like.
When your distaste for Trump or Kirk or any other political warrior drives you to say crazy things, it’s another little dent in the guardrails that keep us civilised. Sadly, there will always be some people who don’t understand why tolerating others is important. When guns are freely available, that’s a recipe for murder. But let’s not pretend that suspect Tyler Robinson’s belief that “some hate you can’t negotiate with” came out of nowhere.
A decision by Robinson allegedly to pick up a gun was steeped in the morality-tinted intolerance of our so-called progressive society. Though not an absolute rule, those on the right disagree by calling their opponent’s ideas stupid or, on occasion, their opponent stupid too. By contrast, those on the left are more inclined to say their opponent is immoral. Cloaking disputes in terms of morality invites and justifies extreme responses. Robinson allegedly killed a man rather than try to defeat his ideas.
Sections of the right are calling for government regulation of “hate speech”. “Hate speech” is a term open to abuse, a weapon that one side uses to shut down ideas and people they hate. Similar calls have gone out for government to crack down on “misinformation”.
Lowering the guardrails of liberty will create an ugly beast common in authoritarian regimes – government censorship. Why did it take the antics of Trump and others on the right for many on the left in the US and here in Australia to wake up to this?
Some might say we should reserve judgment on the new hyperventilating fans of free speech on the left. Plenty of Democrats have, over the years, called for the FCC to have greater powers to regulate the media. In Australia, the left has shown an equally limp attachment to free speech and a free media.
In 2011, the Gillard government and communications minister Stephen Conroy were eager to regulate the media, with a de facto licensing scheme that would have invited government pressure. Facing an intense period of criticism for its incompetence, the Gillard government responded after Greens leader Bob Brown dubbed this newspaper the “hate media”.
Trump says what he thinks: he says he wants his critics muzzled. Though prime minister Julia Gillard and her ministers were more circumspect, some might say crafty, the outcome of muzzling critics would have been the same.
But hang on, where were the ardent opponents of government censorship on the left back then? Do they really require Trumpian directness to spot an attack on media freedom?
There was no impassioned defence of free speech when the Albanese government introduced a bill to prohibit “misinformation”. Lies and misinformation may be bad for us, but what’s far, far worse for us is allowing people in power to control the flow of information using a subjective weapon like “misinformation”.
The lesson here for the left is obvious. You might enjoy handing government the power to regulate “misinformation” when it’s a left-wing government doing the regulating.
But once you arm any government with the power to censor speech, you can’t control where it ends. If you give this power to an Albanese, you can’t then complain if it ends up being wielded by an Australian version of Trump.
Alas, Americans are more likely to work this out ahead of us because they’re having a serious debate about it. One might even call this a culture war that will land them in a more sensible place. Unlike the more precious types over at The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere who bemoan the culture wars and wring their hands whenever those with consistent and genuinely liberal ideas fight back.
paracetamol is not prescribed.....it is mass consumable supermarket product even given to infantLook, if women take paracetamol everyday when pregnant, there would be some risks, like if they drunk 3 glasses of Scotch a day there would be risks, but to say that properly prescribed doses of paracetamol CAUSES autism is not backed up by the science.
People can abuse any drug, who knows what drug abuse causes to embryos. Moderation in everything.paracetamol is not prescribed.....it is mass consumable supermarket product even given to infant
i do not know if it is a cause, even a major cause or not but actual science is not giving it a clean OK.
i like the fact the US are now daring looking at all studies and not only the convenient ones.
Two points:And NOW @SirRumpole after gloating that @wayneL blocked him, he has yes BLOCKED me
View attachment 209350
Look, if women take paracetamol everyday when pregnant, there would be some risks, like if they drunk 3 glasses of Scotch a day there would be risks, but to say that properly prescribed doses of paracetamol CAUSES autism is not backed up by the science.
Well we are asking the same thing now, after the globalisation movement of Governments in the 1980's, what came after that.Lots of professionals and learned people who work/ research in the area of autism have said that there is no known link to paracetamol.
But of course the Cult needs fuelling every day the zone needs filling with hyperbole rubbish such is the insanity that we are even talking about this.
Sad Australians actually buy into the madness and then defend the stupidity.
Sigh…. What comes after Trump thats the real problem.
Thanks for only contributing invectives.Lots of professionals and learned people who work/ research in the area of autism have said that there is no known link to paracetamol.
But of course the Cult needs fuelling every day the zone needs filling with hyperbole rubbish such is the insanity that we are even talking about this.
Sad Australians actually buy into the madness and then defend the stupidity.
Sigh…. What comes after Trump thats the real problem.
Donald J. Trump understands two things: first, that much of what has been happening in the modern West is economic and societal suicide; and second, that there’s no office in the world with more power to change it than the US presidency. And on Tuesday at the UN in New York he made it patently clear that he’s not going to die wondering whether he could have made a difference.
Whether it’s using tariffs to force policy change, occasionally using US military force to devastating effect, or telling the world – bluntly – what it very much needs to hear, he is deploying every instrument in a president’s power to reorient his country and the wider world in what he thinks is a better direction.
His speech to the UN was devastating to the climate activist ecosystem that has enjoyed 30 years of grifting courtesy of taxpayers that it has bludgeoned into submission and the indoctrinated generations that grow in its woke funding pipeline. I doubt there has ever been a more powerful public denunciation of what Trump regards as the two most insidious failures of modern public policy: namely, destroying energy sovereignty in an attempt to combat climate change; and allowing barely controlled mass migration, notionally because of the economists’ Ponzi scheme of “any growth is good”, but in reality because governing elites in the West have become morally queasy about their own Judaeo-Christian foundations.
Trump’s speech wasn’t so much a salvo as it was a bunker-busting bomb at the very epicentre of a global governance structure that is crippling Western civilisation.
It was a direct repudiation of the two policy directions that have been at the heart of the left’s agenda; that have been partially accepted even by much of the mainstream right; and that have massively accelerated over the past decade, especially in the Anglosphere, and including in Australia under the Albanese government.
Perhaps it’s because our Prime Minister senses that his US counterpart is the antithesis of almost everything he holds dear and is working towards that it has taken him so long to arrange any face-to-face contact; in contrast, with his apparent greater comfort with the current leadership of communist China.
First, climate change. Trump skewered the UN on the consistency of so-called expert scaremongering that has become increasingly hysterical over time but rarely accurate. He pointed to the UN’s own 1982 declaration that “by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe”. First, he said, it was “global cooling will kill the world, we have to do something, then they started saying global warming will kill the world, so then it started getting cooler, so they called it climate change. And so that way whether it goes higher or lower or whatever the hell happens, it’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
Directly addressing the current leaders of the EU, Britain, Canada and Australia, Trump said: “And I’m telling you if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”
Whack!
President Donald Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Second, and as if he hadn’t already pulled off enough of a rhetorical king hit, he continued on the subject of mass immigration: “And if you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. I’m the President of the United States but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake and they cannot let this happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct and you’re destroying your heritage.”
Pow!
Because this was a precision assault on the two great political pieties of our time, there will be a furious reaction. But because what Trump is saying is essentially true, just possibly this could be the wake-up call the West needs. We can but hope.
As Trump said: “I just want to repeat that immigration and the high cost of green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of the planet. Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Because what Trump has said is so totally at odds with the animating instincts of the Western political establishment, there will be a renewed and even more concerted effort to ridicule the man and to destroy his presidency. Initially, at least, this speech will feed the narrative that Trump is a Neanderthal throwback. But because the so-called green transition is going so badly in all the countries that are taking it seriously and because there are few citizens, particularly in the Anglosphere, who aren’t asking themselves “How is this happening to my country?”, Trump’s speech will resonate.
Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong and Anika Wells attend the opening of the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly.
In the short term, it will present a dilemma for Anthony Albanese, whose government has presided over three years of historically high immigration and who has just announced hyper-ambitious economy-wrecking and society-changing emissions reductions targets for 2035. Almost inevitably, he will say that the problems the President highlighted don’t apply to Australia, even though they clearly do. Given he has only just secured a formal meeting with Trump on October 20, Albanese will not want to jeopardise it by directly disagreeing with the President’s blistering critique of what is Australia’s current policy direction, no less than that of Britain and Europe. And he won’t want to have AUKUS cancelled on the spot by a President disgusted by the weakness of his Australian interlocutor. But whatever the public pleasantries, Trump’s message is at odds with our Prime Minister’s entire public life, and that has grave potential consequences for our US alliance.
But it’s also at odds with much of the Liberal Party, too, and the British Conservatives. After the previous Coalition government initially scrapped the carbon tax and declared that the emissions obsession was over, the Liberals reversed course under Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, eventually adopting net zero on the grounds that it would be damaging to our international standing and harmful to chances of regaining teal seats not to take climate change seriously.
Not only has lurching left failed to make a scrap of difference in teal seats but it also has cost the Libs credibility with conservatives, as the recent 27 primary vote in Newspoll makes plain.
And while the opposition’s disastrous defeat was mostly due to its lack of policy fight, Labor pinning the Trump-lite label on Peter Dutton didn’t help because the Trump style doesn’t often play well outside the American heartland. The Coalition base, already restive at Sussan Ley’s lack of policy direction, will be further fired up by this latest Trump broadside, even though his MAGA movement won’t directly translate into successful politics here, given our somewhat different culture, institutional structures and voting system. But the challenge for the Coalition is to take his message in his words and recraft a platform that’s radically different to the current Labor-lite offering focused on the potent beachheads of energy and immigration.
Still, a fortnight after global conservatism was rocked by the public execution of Charlie Kirk, Trump’s response has been an eviscerating attack on everything Kirk was trying to stop.
Make no mistake, like the man or not, this is a speech for the ages.
According to screeching and fulminating Democrats, free speech in America is under threat. This is hysterical nonsense. As a public service, I will explain to them why their claims are baseless.
So pay attention Democrats and other excitable left-wing types. Let me begin by reminding you there is no such thing as free speech absolutism in a democracy.
For example, governments not only have the right but also the responsibility to outlaw speech that incites violence. The left’s joyous reaction to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is proof US President Donald Trump must act to restore order.
The government has been clear about what is and is not permissible. As Attorney-General Pam Bondi said last week, “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech”.
She is correct. Hate speech is not free speech. The left’s rabid animus towards Trump and Republicans in general threatens to destroy social cohesion and has emboldened violent and anti-democratic ideologues.
Trump himself was the subject of two assassination attempts last year.
Make no mistake. This is not a free speech crisis. It is a hate speech crisis caused by the left’s attempts to usurp the democratic process.
For those Democrats incensed about Bondi’s distinction between hate speech and free speech, I refer you to the words of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former Democratic National Committee chair.
“We all have a responsibility to denounce hate speech in any form before the consequences become deadly,” she wrote in 2016 following a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
But Democrats are selective about condemning violence. When the US House of Representatives moved a resolution that deplored Kirk’s assassination and honoured his “life and legacy”, 58 Democrats voted against the motion.
Contrast that lack of bipartisanship with the House’s 424-0 resolution in June condemning the assassination of a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband and the wounding of a state senate colleague.
One of the Democrats who opposed the Kirk motion was California representative Maxine Waters. You might remember her. In 2018 she called upon her supporters to “absolutely harass” members of Trump’s cabinet in public, whether they be “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station”.
This is a mentality that bullies and intimidates those who refuse to acquiesce in left-wing ideology. Consider when in 2022 pro-choice protesters published online and descended on the private addresses of conservative justices during the US Supreme Court’s review of the Roe v Wade precedent. Despite these activities breaching laws prohibiting intimidation of judicial officials, White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to condemn the protests.
As part of his administration’s plan to combat hate speech, Trump should consider commissioning an expert panel with inquisitorial powers to ascertain why this phenomenon is endemic in the Democrats. The inquiry should also cover issues such as why party members and supporters are so easily led, particularly their susceptibility to identity-based grievances and material envy.
There is also the issue of the so-called progressive media’s fostering and running cover for left-wing extremism, as evident by the reaction of its prominent members to Kirk’s assassination.
To address this, Trump must establish an independent statutory authority – let’s call it say the Public Interest Media Advocate – to ensure reporting is fair and impartial. In conjunction, Republicans and their supporters should lead a sustained campaign to discourage hate speech in journalism by forcing an advertising boycott of left-wing media organisations.
And spare us the ridiculous claims that Disney’s (brief) suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel was a “retaliation” against free speech and proof the US has entered a “modern McCarthy era”. Kimmel had, at the very least, recklessly and falsely implied that one of the “MAGA gang” assassinated Kirk. This was misinformation that vilified all MAGA members. Misinformation is not free speech.
Nothing in the First Amendment prevents a private sector employer from sanctioning an employee who engages in hate speech. And too bad about leftist outrage over Republicans urging others to report those who celebrated Kirk’s murder to their employers. Words have consequences.
I have a suggestion for those ostracised and shamed for publicly welcoming Kirk’s death. Post lengthy messages on social media acknowledging your wrongdoing. Tell the world you have reflected on your conduct and now realise how much hurt you have caused. Declare that you will educate yourself and learn from the experience. Apologise profusely and say you will do better in future. Will it save your career? No, but your self-abasement serves as a warning to others.
Enough with the complaints about destroying people’s livelihoods. If you do not want to be accused of engaging in hate speech, start by not doing something that involves hate speech. Any questions?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I can hear the protests already. My apologia is a combination of partisan hackery, fallacious reasoning, hypocrisy writ large, selective stereotyping, and censorious opportunism, you say? Not at all. This is about ensuring tolerance and social cohesion by holding to account those who incite violence and cause offence. Have I got the narrative down pat?
Enough of this insufferable pretence. Bondi’s plan to “absolutely target” the utterers of so-called hate speech was an abuse of office. A US Attorney-General who does not understand the First Amendment is unfit for the role.
Such was the backlash to these remarks that Bondi has ‘clarified’ her statement, claiming she was highlighting “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence”. Give it up. You lose all credibility as a defender of libertarian principles when you employ that arbitrary and subjective term.
Reassuringly (but not surprisingly), conservative media organisations, Republican figures and even MAGA influencers were among the loudest in calling out Bondi. But ask yourself this question. How many on the left would have done the same if it were a Democrat Attorney-General who acted so?
Having gleefully used the resources of the state for many years to impose their militant ideology on conservatives, Democrats have discovered the laws and policies they championed can also be used against them.
If only someone had warned them.
Surprise Surprise I believe he is right. Mass immigration has destroyed cultures that had developed over hundreds of years. Green energy should be the supplement not the main drive."Trump’s speech wasn’t so much a salvo as it was a bunker-busting bomb at the very epicentre of a global governance structure that is crippling Western civilisation."
Literally read the study. No one cares about tds idiots running out and bleating to score points.Lots of professionals and learned people who work/ research in the area of autism have said that there is no known link to paracetamol.
But of course the Cult needs fuelling every day the zone needs filling with hyperbole rubbish such is the insanity that we are even talking about this.
Sad Australians actually buy into the madness and then defend the stupidity.
Sigh…. What comes after Trump thats the real problem.
From 2017Literally read the study. No one cares about tds idiots running out and bleating to score points.
We saw the same stupidity during covid.
That kind of looks fake...From 2017
View attachment 209440
Had to double check:That kind of looks fake...
What kind of big pharma doesn't recommend using drugs?
It also wasn't called X in 2017...
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