Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A senile reality TV star and a publicity-seeking nepo baby walk into a press conference and announce that a widely used pain reliever may cause autism …

Punch line? No punch line. It really happened, though few would have noticed if the senile reality TV star (Donald Trump) wasn’t the president of the United States and the publicity-seeking nepo baby (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) wasn’t a member of that president’s cabinet.

Because of their identities, I guess we need to talk about whether what they’re saying is true, and about why they’re saying it now.

Guess what? What they’re saying MAY be true.

At least some studies have indeed found at least some correlation between acetaminophen use by pregnant women and subsequent diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in their children.

Correlation is not the same thing as causation, and studies have yet to establish the latter at any significant level of confidence. It might well turn out that the underlying causes of the pain, rather than effects of the drug used to alleviate the pain, are responsible. Or the correlation could just be random statistical noise.

But it does seem like an investigation that’s worth pursuing.

And it does seem like a legitimate reason for pregnant women to consider solutions other than acetaminophen for their pain relief needs.

In fact, it’s just one more in a long line of reasons for everyone to avoid acetaminophen. The drug has been CONVINCINGLY linked to liver damage (especially among drinkers) and kidney damage (among long-term users).

Maybe there’s really no  causal link to autism/ADHD; maybe there is. But with any number of pain relief options out there, does it really make sense to continue using a drug we already knew was bad for us?

While a senile reality TV star and publicity-seeking nepo baby might not be the best spokesmen for an anti-acetaminophen advocacy campaign, those of us who care about our own health and the health of our loved ones should probably just take the “I learned something today” win here.

As to reasons for the sudden, and obviously fast-tracked, rollout of the Trump/RFK campaign, we can plausibly infer that it’s of a piece with other recent publicity plays, from Trump’s murder campaign in the Caribbean, to the making of a podcaster into a partisan martyr, to the “cancellation” campaigns against anti-Trump media.

What ties all those things together? Donald Trump’s quest for distractions from the matter of his close personal relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

He’s “flooding the zone with sh*t,” as Steve Bannon put it, in hope of making that controversy go away.

Release the Epstein files.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr said on September 17. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“This” #1 was talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s claim that “the MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who [allegedly] murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

“This” #2 was Carr’s threat, as chair of the US Federal Communications Commission, against the broadcast licenses of the 200+ television stations which, as affiliates of Disney-owned ABC, carried Kimmel’s show.

Within hours, two multi-station ABC affiliates — Nexstar and Sinclair — fled in terror, announcing that in the future they would pre-empt Kimmel’s program with other content. Shortly after that, Disney capitulated to Carr’s extortion and suspended the show “indefinitely.”

There’s nothing new about “jawboning,” the practice of politicians and bureaucrats using political condemnation, often coupled with regulatory or legal threats, to bludgeon private sector actors into submission.

The term comes from the Bible. Samson, we’re informed in Judges 15, “found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.”

The Biden administration jawboned social media platforms, in public and secretly, to suppress dissenting opinions (supposed “misinformation”) on the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that refusal might jeopardize those platforms’ liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Republicans! — condemned that kind of jawboning when Biden and Co. did it.

Everyone with so much as a smidgen of morality and/or common sense — and even most Democrats! — condemns it when Trump and Co. do it.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass is Biden or Trump.

It doesn’t matter whether the ass’s jawbone is Jen Psaki or Brendan Carr.

It doesn’t matter whether the target is famous or unknown, rich or poor, right or wrong, good or evil.

Using government threats to suppress discussions the government doesn’t want us to have is both an evil in itself and a reversal of proper roles. It’s not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to decide what the rest of us may think or say, it’s our job to tell the politicians what they may or may not do.

Carr’s ability to take down — or, more likely, temporarily inconvenience — someone Donald Trump doesn’t like, because Trump doesn’t like him, belongs in the “may not do” category.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump and his allies will understandably want to use the event to call out a tide of left-wing intolerance and violence. But they need to strike the right tone — or they risk squandering Kirk’s legacy.”

Value, with legacies as with everything else, is subjective. Whether you’ve invested well, or squandered, a legacy comes down to what you’d prefer to accomplish with that legacy and whether you succeed or fail at it.

In a perfect world, Charlie Kirk’s supporters would focus on, and mine the legacy value of, his reputation as an advocate of free speech and debate. Whatever one thinks of the views he promoted and defended, there’s 24-karat gold in the notion that verbal argument is, in both moral and practical terms, better than physical violence as a means of resolving disputes.

We do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, prominent figures on the “MAGA” right — including but not limited to the president and vice-president of the United States — look at Charlie Kirk and see their very own Horst Wessel.

Like Kirk, Wessel was an accomplished advocate and public speaker for his political party: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party, aka the Nazis. Unlike Kirk, Wessel was also a violent “stormtrooper” who engaged in street violence against the Nazis’ opponents.

Like Kirk, Wessel was murdered at a fairly young age. Like Kirk (for the moment, anyway), the motives behind his murder were unclear.

Joseph Goebbels immediately and successfully began promoting Wessel as a martyr to the Nazi cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Adolf Hitler’s political opponents.

Goebbels’s MAGA equivalents are already hard at work promoting Kirk as a martyr to their cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Donald Trump’s political opponents.

For years, I’ve heard from some quarters that Trump is “literally Hitler.”

We’re about to find out whether, and if so to what extent, that’s true.

If he and his underlings continue with the Horst Wessel approach, and use Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to call for more heads on more pikes in Kirk’s name, it’s almost certainly true.

If he and his underlings take a few deep breaths, examine their own motives and souls, and turn Kirk’s funeral into a celebration of free speech and open debate, it probably isn’t.

Either way, they’ll only have squandered Kirk’s legacy if they don’t manage to squeeze whatever they’re after out of that legacy.

As for the rest of us, we avoid squandering it by paying attention to how it’s used.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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