Author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, a NYT bestseller. The Taste of Salt, a history of cystic fibrosis, coming 2025.
Terry Gross of
@nprfreshair
is the best interviewer in the business. The transcript of my 2015 interview with Terry about my history of
#autism
and
#neurodiversity
,
#NeuroTribes
, is archived here. It was an honor to talk to her.
I know we're all numb, but it is ASTONISHING to me that a President who hobbled both the CDC and the FDA in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans is still in a contender in this election, instead of being perp-walked out of the Oval Office.
I'm just so tired, so terribly tired, so utterly, totally 100% exhausted of thinking about him. I want to start thinking about other things, like all the major problems on the planet we've been ignoring by servicing the black hole where his soul is supposed to be for four years.
Watching
@PeteButtigieg
refuse to step into traps laid for him by standard shallow media framing of complex issues is a beautiful thing. [via
@LadyRaynbow
]
Please don't spread this video of a student being dragged away by cops as she accuses Steven Mnuchin of engaging in "the politics of fascism." Mnuchin asked UCLA not to post it. Thank you.
As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I'll say bluntly: This is indistinguishable from the Nazi rhetoric that led to Jews, disabled people, LGBTQ, Romani and others being exterminated. This is America 2020. This is where the GOP has taken us.
"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." -- Trump
STOP dismissing Gohmert's suit to have Pence overturn the election as "far-fetched." It's sedition. Gohmert is guilty of attempted sedition, and should GO TO PRISON for sedition. Stop normalizing treason.
This Mike Pence "prayer" of thanks to Trump is excruciatingly, stomach-churningly uncomfortable to watch. The ritual submission and exaltation is nearly pornographic. This is not America.
We're all reading a ton of
#coronavirus
stuff, but each day I read a post or two that utterly stop me in my tracks. This was today's, from a doctor at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center, via
@avitalrachel
.
Everyone's giggling at this photo, but it's actually horrifying. America is in the grips of sick cult that makes Jonestown and Scientology look like bit players.
Now that it looks like Deutsche Bank disappeared Trump’s tax returns and scrubbed its servers, it seems like an appropriate moment to mention that Trump’s “special banker” at Deutsche was Justice Kennedy’s son (not mentioned in this recent news).
Make no mistake, this is no accidental visual. This is Vice President Mike Pence PERFORMING white supremacy, blandly sneering at caged brown men before turning his back on them. It's like racist pornography.
This image will go down in history. New video shows shows Mike Pence callously observing and turning his back on severe overcrowding of men in cages at a detainment facility in Texas.
I had two
@Uber
drivers cancel on me today for asking them to wear masks as I went to and from visiting my mom at the memory care facility. And I'm a high risk person myself. One said he didn't even have a mask.
@Uber
, you've GOT to be better. A masked option should be available.
Bluntly, this is a level of human evil I did not expect to see in my lifetime. If you ever wondered what sort of person would have yanked the gold out of the teeth of Jewish grandmothers before shoving them into the ovens, here she is.
.
@JennaEllisEsq
on the Club Q shooting. The “people killed in the nightclub that night, there is no evidence/that they were Christians. Assuming they have not accepted the truth/affirmed Christ as the lord of their life they are now reaping the consequences of eternal damnation.”
[1/3] Meet pastor Ronnie Floyd of the Southern Baptist Convention, who prayed with Trump in the Oval Office. Now meet Floyd again in the independent investigation of hundreds of cases of sex abuse in the SBC released yesterday, leading the coverup.
Exactly this. One reason the GOP stays in lockstep to keep the lid on Trump's treason is that if the flag-waving "America First!" base ever realizes they've been punked, suckered, conned, duped by Mitch McConnell to do Putin's bidding, they will freak out.
Ben Shapiro, 2019: Gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt because Mother's Day and Father's Day are separate holidays.
Ben Shapiro, 2020: Prominent Evangelical leader
@JerryFalwellJr
masturbating in a corner while a pool boy screws his wife is a "private matter."
Who could have imagined that Philip Gunn, MS Republican House Speaker who insists that 12-year-old girls raped by their fathers must bear their children, was personally involved in the coverup of pedophilia in the Southern Baptist Church.
After growing up a fan
@thedavidcrosby
's music, he became my closest older friend. I'm heartbroken to lose him. But the arc of our friendship was perfect. Please listen to the
@Osirispod
series we created together, with tons of rare music. Goodbye, buddy.🙏
As a historian who has written about the Holocaust, I'll tell you: Trump and
@FoxNews
pundits praising the goons who tried to run the Biden/Harris bus off the road is straight-up fascism. It's not "like" fascism. It's fascism.
Let me remind anyone depressed about the pace of social change that when I was a teenager, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness and I could be institutionalized for kissing my boyfriend. Now I'm legally married and protected from discrimination at work. Keep fighting!
So beautiful: Polish mothers leave empty strollers at the train station for Ukrainian moms escaping the war with their babies. [via
@cyndipzsanchez
]
#standwithUkraine
This tweet, just boosted by Elon Musk, is one of the most vicious online attacks on
#autistic
people I've ever seen. I honestly feel sorry for any autistic folks who ever took him as a role model. Not only is he not any kind of "savant," he's a standard-issue eugenicist.
"I don't want prayers. I don't want thoughts. I WANT GUN CONTROL. No more guns!" - mother of Telemachus Orfanos, who survived the Las Vegas shooting to die last night in
#ThousandOaks
.
Audience at Chris Licht's MAGA freakshow on
@CNN
was instructed not to boo or express disapproval of
#Trump
. Licht should be immediately fired. He has gravely damaged
@CNN
's brand.
Ben Shapiro, 2017: "A first-trimester fetus has moral value... more value than just a cluster of cells. If left to its natural processes, it will grow into a baby. The real question is, where do you draw the line?"
Ben Shapiro, 2020: Your grandmother should be dead already.
Ben Shapiro: "If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19...If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, that's tragic and it's terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80"
Looks like the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for prominent
#traitor
and
#criminal
Donald Trump, who is still somehow at large, has received some recent enhancements.
The fact that a flagrantly demented pathological liar who faked a note from his doctor was able to convince voters that his female opponent was not healthy enough to be President tells you everything to need to know about what women in politics are up against.
Make no mistake: Pompeo's meltdown, Trump's rants, the continuous "outrage" of Trump's lawyers, the Kavanaugh whinefest - it's all the same trick: using explosive male rage to intimidate people asking smart questions about their crimes.
I'm rarely here in this degraded place, but wanted to tell my friends that my mom Leslie, a beloved college teacher, has died. She had difficult last few years with
#dementia
, but in her last 48 hrs told my sister and I that she loved us, and died listening to Joni's "Woodstock."
Chillingly apt: "If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." - from
@DavidFrum
's upcoming book "Trumpocracy"
I often love
@nytimes
, have written for
@nytimes
, but this is so egregiously awful and wrong, the person who wrote this headline should resign immediately with profuse apologies, look in the mirror, and take stock of their role in journalism.
This is a hell of a way to say DeSantis won’t meet with Biden. Do you see any wording in the headline or the lede that states clearly that it’s DeSantis who is refusing to meet with Biden?
Love and well-wishing to President Jimmy Carter, who is in hospice. Imagine if the public face of Christianity looked more like this - humility, service, love - and less like nasty, snarling
@GOP
bigots banning books and attacking
#trans
kids and loving
#LGBTQ
+ couples.
It's impossible to watch ten seconds of the Trump rally without thinking that America is going to go all the way, all the way down into fascism. The whole thing has the stench of mass psychosis, murderous rage, and a fatal disconnect with reality. It's Jonestown but much worse.
The reason for this sideshow at the border is that the GOP just murdered half a million Americans and they don't want you thinking about that. That's it. That's the tweet.
Trump, who openly mocked a disabled reporter during his campaign, said today he finds the Paralympics “tough to watch.” Has there ever been a President who so openly disdained disabled people?
Let me get ahead of the game here: monkeypox is a hoax leaked from a lab in Africa by Soros, Fauci, and a team of crisis actors to distract from Madison Cawthorn being robbed of his House seat by a coven of lesbian witches who teach Critical Race Theory.
Am I
@FoxNews
-ready yet?
This is how much we've been degraded: the President of the United States says there were "airports" in 1776 and everyone shrugs. AND THOSE FUCKING RACISTS WHO "ELECTED" THIS CRIMINAL USED TO MOCK OBAMA FOR USING A TELEPROMPTER. FUCK THEM ENTIRELY.
Trump standing in the ashes of the most deadly wildfire in California history, blaming the state for not "taking care of the floors" or some random nonsense, while adults stand around him trying hard not to blurt out 'WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU BABBLING ABOUT?'
Note: Every single time someone says that getting a
#COVID19
vaccine should be a "personal decision" - even if they also got the vaxx - they're reinforcing the sociopathic notion that public health is not our collective responsibility. We should be caring for one another.
To avoid bad publicity, Cedar Heights Middle School principal Erika Hanson is quietly pulling LGBTQ books from library shelves while encouraging other principals to do the same. I think Erika Hanson should get TONS of publicity for endangering LGBTQ youth.
Trump's GOP is not a party. It's a cult, like Scientology: a closed-loop reality-distortion field, with its own pre-fab "thoughts" and self-reinforcing jargon, purveyed on
@FoxNews
and other outlets. I'd love to read interviews with cult deprogrammers reflecting on this.
This photograph will go down as one of the most profound betrayals of America in its 243-year history. I can barely imagine what Russia experts all over the world are thinking. Thanks, Republicans. May your grandchildren spit in the dirt when they hear your names.
Should a President and Congress that were installed by acts of high treason be allowed to totally rewrite the US tax code to favor the ultra-rich, while condemning millions of poor and middle-class Americans to illness, bankruptcy, and death? Because that's where we're at.
DC Police Robert Contee just explained that they had "no intelligence" that a raging mob of MAGA terrorists was going to descend on the Capitol yesterday. It must be because their leader is careful to stay on the down-low and only communicates with his followers in subtle code.
Melania blaming "both sides of the aisle" for children being taken from their parents by the US government does not make her more human or compassionate. It makes her a shameless, vile liar like her husband.
Just found what I think is Wynn Bruce's FB profile, and it's heartbreaking. He was a
#Shambhala
Buddhist disturbed about climate change, posting photos of Thich Nhat Hanh and other teachers. May those who loved him find peace.
There's more wisdom, compassion, humanity, and hope in this photo of autistic climate activist
@GretaThunberg
and primatologist Jane Goodall than there is in the entire Trump administration.
I'm so old I remember when it would have been considered a career-ending outrage, if not high treason, for a Congressman of either party to make a statement supporting a bomb threat against a federal building, as Rep. Mo Brooks just did.
[2/3] It's extraordinary just how *many* people in Trump's support circle are credibly accused of sexual abuse, pedophilia, and elaborate coverups, from Jeffrey Epstein, to Jim Jordan, to Matt Gaetz, to Brett Kavanaugh, to Ronnie Floyd. You'd almost think Q stuff is misdirection.
A major decade-long study of 650,000 children has found there is no link between the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine and autism, even among children with other risk factors for the disorder. via
@smh