- How pediatricians deal with Trump’s advice;
- How the shooters aren’t necessarily right-wing or left-wing, but simply internet trolls (and anyway, Trump is lying);
- While there are right-wingers vowing to take out “progressive leftism”;
- Headlines about Trump’s corruption, Hegseth’s warrior culture meeting, that kerfuffle about the UN escalator, why people still fall for predictions of the Rapture, and two items about autism and Tylenol.
Let’s do this one first. It’s not about politics, per se, it’s about how to understand the world.
Slate, Dua Hassan, 26 Sept 2025: I’m a Pediatrician. Here’s What I Tell Parents When They Bring Me RFK Jr.’s Claims., subtitled “Fact checking doesn’t work.”
We’ve long since established that explaining the evidence doesn’t change anyone’s mind, as the subtitle says here. You have to go deeper. Yes, this is triggered by Trump and RFK Jr. and acetaminophen and autism.
As he continued, Trump delivered the foundational principle of feelings-based medicine: “based on what I feel,” he explained, apparently having skipped the chapters on peer review and controlled studies in medical school. (To be fair, he also skipped medical school.) Then came the masterstroke, the moment that will surely be taught in feelings-based medicine programs for years to come. After launching into a casual, tangential tirade against vaccines—you know, just typical MAHA fun—he offered this reassuring conclusion: “It may not have that much of an impact, but it may have a big impact.”
This rhetoric has real consequences in real exam rooms like mine across the country. As a pediatrician, I’ve had multiple conversations this week that started the same way: “I saw what Trump said about …” And each time, I find myself not just correcting medical facts but explaining how we determine what’s actually true in medicine.
And goes on with a very ordinary point that I’ve made specifically and repeatedly.
The core problem with RFK Jr. isn’t just that he gets the facts wrong. He approaches medicine like a lawyer, starting with a conclusion like “Vaccines cause autism” and working backward to find supporting evidence. Science works the other way around. We begin with data, test hypotheses against it, and accept only conclusions that clear a very high evidentiary bar. If the data contradicts us, we have to change course.
Trump and RFK Jr promised an answer to the cause of autism months ago, by the end of this year. They had a goal, not research, in mind. And they succeeded! With a simplistic, wrong answer. But it enables Trump to claim that he fulfilled a campaign promise. And the more credulous of his followers will believe him.
Real science tolerates messiness. Sometimes it finds a signal, sometimes it doesn’t, and the job is to sit with the contradictions until the truth emerges. What Trump and RFK Jr. are doing is something else entirely: starting with a conclusion, then rummaging through the evidence for anything that looks supportive. That isn’t medicine. It isn’t science. It’s a methodology problem.
This represents one of the oldest debates in human thought: rationalists vs. empiricists. Rationalists—like lawyers relying on “common sense” reasoning—believe we can deduce truth from first principles. Empiricists—like modern doctors and medical researchers—insist we must test our ideas against observable reality.
Modern medicine is possible only because of the rise of empiricism—the idea that we must base conclusions on careful observation and experimentation rather than on ancient authorities or logical deduction alone. This approach became the foundation of the scientific method, which underlies all modern medical practice.
(There’s a subtle point here — rationalism, like logic, works only if the premises are valid. With invalid premises, you can use logic to prove anything.)
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NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, 26 Sept 2025: Trump Is Lying About Left-Wing Terrorism
This isn’t about statistics. This is about how people tell who’s on the left or on the right. Or is just an internet troll.
Over the last 10 months or so, a frightening new pattern has emerged. First, in December, Luigi Mangione became an internet icon after allegedly assassinating the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in New York City. Messages left on the bullet casings seemingly alluded to the way insurance companies refuse coverage. The sniper who murdered Kirk left messages on his bullet casings as well, though in his case they appear to have been a macabre sort of trolling. …
Violence that at least looks left-wing really does appear to be on the rise. In The Atlantic, Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe wrote that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.” Yet the men committing the highest-profile left-coded killings have little discernible connection to progressive politics, on or offline. Neither Mangione nor Tyler Robinson nor Jahn was a registered Democrat or, as far as we know, was involved in activism of any kind. They’re less men of the left than men of the internet.
(Once again, how do they tell that more attacks are left-wing? That they’re not wearing MAGA hats? Or because their targets were religious or establishment types?) Goldberg goes on:
Since I’m a liberal, I imagine that this might seem like a rationalization. But no less a Republican partisan than Chris Rufo, a man who rarely misses an opportunity to demonize progressives, appears to see something similar. This week he wrote an essay called “Radical Normie Terrorism,” about both Robinson and Robin Westman, who killed two children at a Minneapolis Catholic school in August. Looking at the online spaces they inhabited, Rufo described not hubs of political radicalism, but of “memes, attitudes, copycatting, in-jokes and irony.” Jahn seems to have dwelled in a similar milieu. The journalist Ken Klippenstein, who interviewed several of Jahn’s friends, wrote, “He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life.”
…
It should go without saying that Trump’s plan to wage war on his enemies will do precisely nothing to address this building crisis. But as long as America is a country awash in guns and choking on hatred, full of people retreating into the disembodied half-life of the internet, it’s hard to see what will.
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Meanwhile, you do have pieces like this, and not pieces about left-wing groups vowing to take out MAGA.
People for the American Way / Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 25 Sept 2025: Doug Wilson Says Charlie Kirk’s Murder Represents An Opportunity To ‘Put A Bullet In The Neck Of Progressive Leftism’
Nothing here worth quoting. It’s drivel.
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Shorter items, noted by headline.
- The Bulwark, Andrew Egger, 26 Sept 2025: Trump Doesn’t Care If You Think He’s Corrupt, subtitled “With the indictment of James Comey, Trump drops the fig leaf.”
- Timothy Snyder, 26 Sept 2025: Hegseth puts us all at risk, subtitled “Why put all the American commanders in one room?” (The least alarming possibility I’ve seen today is that he wants to instill a “warrior culture” among the US military. And Trump wants a Nobel Price for Peace!)
- JMG, 23 Sept 2025: Leavitt Demands UN Fire Whoever Stopped Glorious Leader’s Escalator (It Was Someone In His Entourage). The latest I’ve seen about this is that a photograph ran up the escalator steps ahead of Trump, and caused so much imbalance that the escalator stopped as programmed. But you can’t deflect Republicans from their conspiracy theories with facts! Especially since they have the radical left to blame for everything!)
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 24 Sept 2025: The Rapture didn’t happen (again). Why do some people keep falling for it?, subtitled “A South African preacher’s viral prophecy fizzled, but the real story is how these lies keep finding an audience” (Well, to be delicate, this says something about the credulousness of the religious mindset.)
- Politifact, 23 Sept 2025: Fact-checking Trump’s claims on Tylenol, autism and vaccines
- LA Times, 24 Sept 2025: RFK Jr. wants an answer to rising autism rates. Scientists say he’s ignoring some obvious ones. We’re getting redundant here. But each of these pieces is very good.Trump’s latest go-to phrase is to blame everything on the “far left” never mind any evidence whatsoever. The left is Trump’s bogeymen of choice.
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Listening to Ligeti. I need to find that YouTube video of a live performance of “Atmospheres”…
