The Dictatorship
RFK Jr. makes autism testing sound terrifying. For me, it was a relief.
Between Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent false claims that autism “destroys families” and the reports of a since-abandoned plan for a an autism registry tracking diagnosed individualsgetting tested for the condition may feel like an especially fraught decision right now. I absolutely understand these concerns. But forgoing an autism diagnosis poses its own risks, while also denies the person invaluable insight and support — both of which I received when I was diagnosed with autism last year.
I always felt different from my peers in ways that my ADHD and anxiety diagnoses couldn’t seem to fully explain.
Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I always felt different from my peers in ways that my ADHD and anxiety diagnoses couldn’t seem to fully explain. Although I had a large social network, I struggled to feel at ease in my friends’ presence, craving closeness but lacking the ability to open up emotionally as easily as they did. When I did speak more freely, my words came out too loud and too fast, with a fervency that often blocked out social cues.
At both work and school, I thrived in areas I enjoyed but had immense difficulty grasping and completing tasks outside of my narrow lane of interest. As a teenager, my poor grades in math and science made me feel dumb; in adulthood, I excelled as a writer and editor but felt embarrassingly ignorant of some important life skills. And I never, ever felt at home in my own body. It was all a confusing mess; sensations like cold or hot weather wreaked havoc on my mood, bodily signals for hunger or illness (“interoception“) often went unheard, and physical actions like near-constant knuckle cracking ( Mood) and T. rex arms (a self-soothing strategy during periods of sensory overload) made me feel embarrassed in public.
Not wanting to be seen as “weird,” I tried to mimic the behaviors of neurotypical people by masking. Yet while this helped me blend in with my friends and colleagues, it didn’t stop the feelings of shame and inadequacy. Why couldn’t I just be “normal”? Despite my impressive career and loving marriage, I felt certain there was something deeply wrong with who I was.
Getting diagnosed with autism, however, erased that feeling. The process started in late 2023, when my then-therapist gently suggested I get tested, explaining that several of my symptoms aligned with the condition. Although I understood her reasoning, I hesitated. No one I knew was openly autistic, and the autistic adults I’d seen in the media were typically portrayed as awkward, painfully honest loners whose lives didn’t at all look like my own. Because I’m an extrovert with a wide social network, I didn’t believe my issues were enough to warrant an actual diagnosis. Yet when a neuropsychologist and a neurologist both echoed my therapist’s recommendation, I realized stigma and misinformation had clouded my perception of what autism “looks” like. I signed up for an evaluation.
Six months and multiple intensive meetings with specialists later, I was officially diagnosed with autism at age 30. I felt tremendous relief. Finally, there was a reason for why I’d felt so different my entire life, and it wasn’t because I was less-than or not good enough. As the specialists explained, my brain just wasn’t wired the same way as those of my neurotypical peers — a simple fact of science, not a reason for shame.
Crucially, the diagnosis also allowed me to feel more comfortable asking for help.
While the revelation didn’t entirely erase my insecurities or longing for normalcy, it did significantly boost my confidence and lower my anxiety — especially when I revealed my diagnosis to my friends and loved ones, all of whom expressed both support and gratitude that my normally closed-off-self trusted them with the information. My friends gained a clearer understanding of who I am, deepening our bonds, while multiple members of my family with similar behaviors to my own started their own important processes of self-reflection. Connecting with other autistic folks (especially those who also had ADHD) both in person and online has provided new avenues for self-reflection and community, as well.
Crucially, the diagnosis also allowed me to feel more comfortable asking for help. I’m fortunate enough to not require any major accommodations or additional care, unlike many people on the spectrum, and I work from home rather than on an overstimulating office floor. Still, there are times when my brain messes with my abilities, both big and small. Cooking, for instance, has always been a challenge due to my weak senses of smell and taste, my overall disinterest in the activity and my subsequent tendency to make mistakes.
Luckily, my husband is a fantastic chef, but my inability to make the occasional meal understandably caused him frustration — which in turn led to guilt and unproductive arguments. After my diagnosis, I felt better equipped to explain exactly why I struggled in the kitchen and we were able to work together on a system that made cooking easier for me and took some of the pressure off him.
A year after my diagnosis, I can confidently say that testing for autism was the best thing I could’ve done for my mental and emotional well-being. And while I cannot speak for people who require more care (or who have children who require it), I do know that a diagnosis can provide access to essential, life-changing accommodations and support at school, the workplace and at home.
I’m glad that the National Institutes of Health already walked back plans for an autism registry that advocates worried would lead to even more stigma and anxiety, not to mention questions about health privacy. This is not a condition — or a diagnosis — that needs to be hidden, avoided or feared.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.
More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.
“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.
“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.
In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.
“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.
Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.
“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.
Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.
“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.
The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.
“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.
That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.
Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”
Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”
Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.
But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.
“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.
Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.
“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
- Iranian diplomat blasts ‘pseudo-VAR’ interventions after World Cup exit
- Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff
- ‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering
- In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality
- Jeffries congratulates NYC democratic socialists on their House primary wins
- Iranian drones attack Bahrain and a ship is struck in the strait after U.S. airstrikes
- World Cup attendance: The potential 2028ers
- ‘Héros canadiens’: Carney cheers Canada’s late win
- AI regulation group is biggest spender on World Cup TV ads
- The robots are coming … for the beautiful game
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship10 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words