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U.S. President Donald Trump answers questions after making an announcement on“ significant medical and scientific findings for America’ s children” in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Sept. 22, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Federal health officials suggested a link between the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy as a risk for autism, although many health...
(Getty Images)
MAGA says no to Trump & Kennedy’s junk science
Oct 03, 2025
President Trump stood at the White House podium, addressing a room full of reporters.
“First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians that the use of…ah-said-a…well…let’s see how we say that.”
As he struggled again to say “acetaminophen,” and asked someone off camera, “Is that OK?” when he finally managed to get his lips around the word, the moment was a perfect encapsulation of the dumbing down of expertise and the political corruption of science under this administration.
He said that taking acetaminophen, or Tylenol, while pregnant has been associated with a “very increased risk of autism,” a claim pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy with little to no basis in scientific fact.
“Taking Tylenol is not good,” Trump declared, as if anyone in their right mind would take medical advice from a guy who suggested injecting disinfectant to treat coronavirus.
Scientists — people who, unlike Trump and Kennedy, have actual expertise in these matters — objected. Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at Boston University called the announcement “appalling” and “a very significant distortion” of what science says about any possible links.
The Coalition of Autism Scientists said: “The data cited do not support the claim that Tylenol causes autism and leucovorin is a cure, and only stoke fear and falsely suggest hope when there is no simple answer.”
And Sura Alwan, a clinical teratologist at the University of British Columbia, said, “The evidence does not support a causal link between acetaminophen or vaccines and autism.”
The absurdity of Trump and Kennedy doling out medical advice, when the former promoted taking anti-malaria medication hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19 — and then contracted COVID-19 himself — and the latter believes chemicals in drinking water can make someone gay or trans, should not be lost on anyone.
Everyone should ignore these crackpot Looney Tunes and trust their doctors and pediatricians, not two politicians cosplaying at science, whose long and sordid history of bad advice could lead to serious injury or death.
And while MAGA-world usually falls in line quickly to defend even Trump’s worst impulses — see Jan. 6, see Russia, see tariffs — this time Tweedledum and Tweedledee aren’t getting quite the support they’re used to. That’s how bad this is.
Less than a day after Trump made his announcement, his own administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mehmet Oz, went on MAGA favorite Fox News to walk it back.
“So the message is not, ‘Never take Tylenol,’ ” he said, contradicting Trump’s own words. “It’s, ‘Take Tylenol judiciously.’ Take it by talking with your doctor.”
Also on Fox, the network’s own senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel asked and answered the question pretty definitively. “Does acetaminophen during pregnancy cause autism? People out there need to know there’s absolutely no proof whatsoever that that’s the case.”
In Congress, there’s been some rare pushback, too. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN he was “very concerned” and insisted, “science ought to guide these discussions.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a licensed physician, posted on X, “HHS should release the new data that it has to support this claim. The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case.”
And Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal blasted Trump and Kennedy’s anti-Tylenol campaign, pointing to lawsuits against the maker of Tylenol and what may be personal interests in those outcomes.
“What’s going on here has less to do with healthcare than with a campaign by the plaintiffs bar,” wrote the Journal’s editorial board. “If a drug company made the unproven claims aired at the White House, the Food and Drug Administration would threaten legal action.”
“So why the sudden alarm, complete with a presidential presser?” it continued. “The Occam’s razor answer is the influence of RFK Jr., who is carrying water for his friends in the plaintiffs bar. A who’s-who of lawsuit shops are pushing the Tylenol-autism link in federal court. The transparent goal is to drum up more claims to drive a bigger damage award or settlement.”
I’m not even sure Trump believes all of the garbage he spewed on Monday. In his inimitable way, he seemed to distance himself from what he was selling, saying, “This is based on what I feel,” and “You know, I’m making these statements from me, I’m not making them from these doctors,” and “I’m not a doctor, but I’m giving my opinion.”
So when asked if it was appropriate for him to tell the public what to do, given it was based on his “feelings,” he answered it was “absolutely appropriate.”
Chef’s kiss.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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New Orleans fights a facial recognition ordinance as residents warn of privacy risks, mass surveillance, and threats to immigrant communities.
Getty Images, PhanuwatNandee
On Live Facial Recognition in the City: We Are Not Guinea Pigs, and We Are Not Disposable
Oct 02, 2025
Every day, I ride my bike down my block in Milan, a tight-knit residential neighborhood in central New Orleans. And every day, a surveillance camera follows me down the block.
Despite the rosy rhetoric of pro-surveillance politicians and facial recognition vendors, that camera doesn’t make me safer. In fact, it puts everyone in New Orleans at risk.
On Aug. 21, a live facial recognition ordinance was withdrawn by the New Orleans City Council, after months of community organizations fighting back and loudly opposing this dangerous ordinance. A council member's office confirmed that it was removed, pending edits, suggesting that a new one will be introduced. If this or a similar surveillance ordinance is approved, Louisiana would become the first state in the nation with a city-wide biometric surveillance network capable of tracking hundreds of thousands of residents in real time.
That’s not a step we want to take. Once invasive surveillance technology like that ends up in the hands of the government, there are no guardrails or oversight mechanisms powerful enough to protect our freedom and our privacy from bad actors, corrupt politicians, hackers, and anyone who doesn’t have our best interest at heart.
Expanding real-time facial recognition to all city cameras would set an unprecedented shift in mass surveillance for the whole country. It would build the infrastructure for a database that would record our facial features, personal characteristics, and our whereabouts, every time we stepped outside our front doors. All of that data, even if eventually deleted, can be used to train artificial intelligence to get better at recognizing and tracking us over time.
Disturbingly, a collection of cameras positioned across New Orleans is already capable of tracking residents’ every move, recording our data, and trying to match our faces to databases of millions of images of people. These cameras were never approved by the people of New Orleans. They were set up by Project NOLA, a crime prevention nonprofit group, which we now know because of bombshell revelations in the Washington Post. Project NOLA has been secretly spying on New Orleans residents with live facial recognition cameras for years. These cameras are at undisclosed locations around the city, and most importantly, police use of this technology has been outlawed since the local community rallied behind a surveillance ban in 2021.
Enough is enough. Time and again, New Orleans has been used as a testing ground for disempowering programs against our Black and brown communities––not only for secretive racist mass surveillance tech but also for a racist charter school system that has deteriorated our youth’s education. We have been treated as a sacrifice zone for oil, gas, and plastic plants to destroy our ecosystem and poison our health, causing us to have the highest rates of cancer in the country. We are not guinea pigs, and we are not disposable.
As an immigrant, I am desperately sounding the alarm about how devastating this surveillance ordinance would be for all New Orleaneans, including our migrant communities. All over the country, our people are being snatched off the street, our families are being separated, and in New Orleans, even our U.S. citizen babies with cancer are being deported. If we roll out real-time facial recognition in New Orleans, we have to expect that our facial recognition data will be demanded by ICE, requested by Louisiana police, or even hacked by anti-immigrant groups—empowering Trump’s agenda of terrorizing and violating our immigrant communities' fundamental human rights.
Instead of doubling down and investing in costly, racist technology, we should refocus on the root causes of crime and harm. 26% of all adults in New Orleans have low literacy levels. At 22.6%, our poverty rate dwarfs the national average of 10%. Dystopian face surveillance doesn’t solve those problems, but it does put us all at risk. The good news is we already know how to do better. Just last week, The Advocate editorialized about the many community programs and nonprofit efforts that are successfully reducing crime in Louisiana year by year.
Our elected officials have a duty to their constituents: to protect our freedoms, defend our dignity, and keep us safe. Our problems can’t be solved with more cameras and surveillance; they have deep systemic roots that have to be addressed.
Edith Romero is a Honduran community organizer with Eye On Surveillance, a researcher, writer, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.
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Proof of Citizenship, No Proof of Safety
Oct 02, 2025
Claudia, an immigrant from Chile who lives in suburban Maryland right outside Washington, D.C., watched closely as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign during the spring (Claudia, not her real name, asked to be identified by a pseudonym because she is afraid of federal immigration agents).
She went online and watched countless videos of masked, heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents breaking the car windows of immigrants to wrestle them out of their cars, and detaining people at their workplaces, like restaurants, car washes, and agricultural fields. Many of her friends told her about ICE sweeps in heavily Latino apartment complexes near her home.
While Claudia is a naturalized citizen with full legal status to be in the United States, in April, she started carrying her passport in her car in case ICE agents confronted her. Claudia works for herself, cleaning houses and individual apartments, and has never been in trouble with the law. Still, because she “looks” Latina, with darker features than some fair-skinned Latinos, she believes ICE agents would target her for questioning and even detainment if their paths should cross.
“They (ICE agents) are racial profiling,” Claudia tells palabra. “I feel this about people who are in office trying to make this country white. Every week, something happens to good people who are just trying to work. At this point, I don’t feel safe even with my passport. They’ve picked up citizens. ICE agents are acting with a lot of hate. They don’t care if you show them a passport; they don’t want to see it. They’re using violence against people walking on the street or driving in their cars.”
Asked for a response about the fear experienced by many people who are in the country legally, the ICE press office provided this comment via email:
“In the United States, immigration laws mandate that all non-U.S. citizens carry proof of their authorization to be in the United States. This requirement, rooted in the Immigration and Nationality Act, emphasizes the importance of having immediate access to documentation that verifies one’s right to be in the U.S. Whether you are a visitor, a student, or a permanent resident, understanding and complying with this law is crucial for navigating daily life in the United States without legal complications. Stating that a fear of law enforcement is the main reason for carrying such documents, which are required by law, is like saying the reason you carry a driver’s license on your person while driving a vehicle is because you are afraid of the police. Bottom line: it's the law. What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”
White House Border Czar Tom Homan said in an interview earlier this year that ICE agents don’t need probable cause to detain people briefly, explaining that an individual’s appearance is reason enough for immigration officers to detain someone.
“People need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol do not need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” Homan said on “Fox and Friends.” “They just go through their observations, get articulable facts, based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.”
Illustration by Olivia Abeyta for palabra
There are countless examples on YouTube, on X (formerly Twitter), and on TikTok of ICE agents aggressively questioning – and sometimes handcuffing and detaining – people who are in the country legally.
ICE agents have detained U.S. citizens as well as permanent legal residents.
Some examples:
- In early August, ICE agents conducting a raid at a car wash in Anaheim, Calif., about 26 miles southeast of Los Angeles, tackled and detained U.S. citizen Isaac Domínguez. Domínguez told the local NBC affiliate and KCAL News that he was driving to the car wash when he saw ICE agents and pulled over. “That’s when I got upset because I think to myself, they’re just attacking Hispanic people. They tackled me to the floor and put the cuffs on me, hands behind my back.”
A Department of Homeland Security official released a statement accusing Domínguez of tossing an object at a government law enforcement vehicle and of trying to punch ICE agents who approached him, which he denies. After several hours, authorities released him without any charges.
- In June, ICE agents in Los Angeles detained U.S. citizen Andrea Vélez. The woman said her mom and sister dropped her off on a downtown street where masked, plainclothes men were “going after” people. One of them grabbed her, and when she tried to tell him she’s a U.S. citizen, he accused her of impeding him. When she asked for his badge number or identification, he responded that she didn’t need to know any of that, she said in an interview with the Los Angeles NBC affiliate.
Vélez said she told other ICE officers she is a U.S. citizen and showed them her real ID, but they didn’t believe her. A report on the news program Democracy Now! showed video of an ICE agent carrying Vélez, who is 4’11. She spent two days in a detention center and had nothing to drink for 24 hours. In a criminal complaint, federal prosecutors alleged Vélez stepped into an agent’s path and extended an arm in an apparent attempt to prevent an ICE agent from catching a man he was chasing. Authorities released her after 48 hours, and prosecutors dropped the charge against her.
- In April, at the request of federal immigration officials, authorities in Florida held Juan Carlos López-Gómez in a local jail in Leon County, which is in the Florida Panhandle region. Local authorities detained him even after his mother presented his birth certificate and Social Security information to a local judge. Florida Highway Patrol officers, who have been deputized by Gov. Ron DeSantis to conduct immigration enforcement, acted on a request by ICE and took the 20-year-old to jail following a routine traffic stop for speeding - he was a passenger in the car and was coming to Florida from Georgia for work. López-Gómez was born in Georgia.
He was released after the case received widespread media coverage.
ICE’s aggressive tactics have even sparked fear among some non-Hispanic, white immigrants who are in the country legally.
For example, Katia, a white South African immigrant who is a naturalized citizen and lives in Fairfax County, Va., says ICE’s approach prompted her in recent months to always carry her U.S. passport inside her bag. (Katia is not her real name; like Claudia, she asked to be identified by a pseudonym because she fears retaliation from ICE). She worries about how an ICE agent would react if they heard her speak and noticed her South African accent.
Katia, who is in her 50s, works in communications for a social justice organization. She came to the U.S. in the early 1990s and became a naturalized citizen in 1994.
She says that the type of tactics ICE is currently using was common in South Africa, which had an apartheid government at the time she emigrated to the U.S. “It was common practice for (South African) authorities to pull people off the street and ship immigrants off to their home countries. I didn’t think I’d ever see that happen in the U.S.”
When she became a U.S. citizen, “Americans were so lovely to me. People I would tell would give me a hug,” she says. “Randos would congratulate me. It seemed they were touched that I would want to become an American citizen. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Illustration by Olivia Abeyta for palabra
The Trump administration’s mass deportation program is not the first time the U.S. government has carried out a campaign to expel immigrants on a mass scale.
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback” to send Mexican immigrants, including some who were American citizens, to their native country. Border Patrol officers carried out the program, which lasted several months. At the time, Border Patrol officers claimed that 1.2 million people of Mexican descent were either arrested or left the U.S. on their own, but some researchers believe that number was exaggerated, and that the true number was in the hundreds of thousands.
The federal government at some point will pay a steep price in court for the overzealous tactics of ICE and the Border Patrol, a civil rights attorney says.
"The U.S. government will face significant financial liability in court for ICE’s aggressive tactics, says Cary J. Hansel, a civil rights attorney in Baltimore. Hansel adds that civil lawsuits on behalf of those unlawfully detained by ICE, alleging ICE is violating the 14th Amendment – which grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and provides “equal protection under the law” in addition to prohibiting the government from depriving individuals of due process – will lead to large jury verdicts or settlements.
“There will be a tremendous price to pay for this kind of lazy and unconstitutional conduct. In a democracy that values freedom, people should not have to show their papers to prove they belong. This conduct turns the Constitution on its head.”
Ruben Castañeda is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist with more than three decades of experience as a reporter and an editor.
Proof of Citizenship, No Proof of Safety was originally published by Palabra and is republished with permission.
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Why Constitution Day Should Spark a Movement for a New Convention in 2037
Oct 02, 2025
Sept. 17 marked Constitution Day, grounded in a federal law commemorating the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787. As explained by the courts of Maryland, “By law, all educational institutions receiving federal funding must observe Constitution Day. It is an opportunity to celebrate and discuss our Constitution and system of government.”
This week also marked the release of an important new book by the historian Jill Lepore: “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” (as reviewed in the New York Times in a public link). Here’s an overview of her conclusions from the publisher:
Challenging both the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of “originalism,” Lepore contends in this “gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past” that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly, deliberative, and democratic process.
Lepore’s remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore “has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.” At a time when the Constitution’s vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.
But, far from Thomas Jefferson’s vision that Americans should come together every generation to forge a new constitution, we rarely come close to even modest amendments. With the powerful movement for “originalism” further limiting the evolution of our Constitution through Supreme Court interpretation, our difficulty in amending the Constitution creates even greater challenges for a 21st-century superpower.
Writing this week in the New York Times, Lepore highlighted our history with state constitutional change:
Since 1776, the states have held nearly 250 constitutional conventions and adopted 144 constitutions, or about three per state. Every state constitution in place has an amendment provision. Since 1789, of more than 10,000 proposed amendments to state constitutions submitted to voters, nearly 7,000—well more than two out of three—have been ratified. But Americans have stopped holding conventions. No state has held a full-dress constitutional convention since 1986. No movement to call for a second federal convention has ever succeeded, and none is currently likely to.
Lepore then suggests that perhaps we could break free of our fears by focusing a constitutional convention solely on the implications of artificial intelligence. Others, for years, have organized efforts to get states to pass applications calling for a federal constitutional convention under Article V, where applications from 34 states would trigger a convention. Indeed, 49 states over time have passed such applications, including recent efforts associated with calls to consider term limits and a balanced budget requirement.
For actions starting in Congress, the most popular change might be to establish upper bound age limits for service in federal office in tandem with the power bounds established for service in the House (25 years old), Senate (30), and presidency (35)–Richard Albert this week in the Fulcrum highlights how 76% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans support an upper age limit for federal office. American Promise has conducted effective state organizing in support of a constitutional amendment to allow states to regulate and limit the influence of money in politics, which a recent poll found has earned supermajority support from both Republicans and Democrats.
Over my three decades as a democracy reform leader, I’ve focused on ambitious statutory change more than constitutional change, bound by pessimism about constitutional change in the modern era. But as I observe plans to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, I see value in a bold suggestion: Rather than fear that a constitutional convention would “go rogue,” what if we collectively embraced Jefferson's vision to think big again with an embrace of holding a new convention? But accepting it would take time to prepare for such a convention through citizen engagement, study, and education. What if we planned to start the constitutional convention on Sept. 17, 2037, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution?
Many fear that such a convention might roll back our rights. But they too easily dismiss the fact that no constitutional provision will become law without three-quarters of our state legislatures—that means 38 out of 50—approving the change. They also overlook that it is deeply dangerous when the Constitution becomes a straitjacket that weakens consent of the governed, rather than embracing government of, by, and for the people.
As we get ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let’s consider using that anniversary as a launch for a drive for Congress and states to act toward federal and state conventions in 2037. It indeed may be revolutionary to believe that Americans remain up to the challenge of self-government, but that is one true test of an enduring democracy.
This piece was featured in the Expand Democracy 3, a weekly briefing on breakthrough reforms and promising practices to promote a healthy democracy. Here is a link to the Expand Democracy newsletter archive
Rob Richie is the president of Expand Democracy and a FairVote co-founder and senior advisor.Keep ReadingShow less
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