Source: Cato Institute
by Adam Omary

“For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist. Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged.” (02/11/26)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/autism-epidemic-myth

Source: The UnPopulist
by Irina D Manta

“Martina Navratilova is ‘pissed off as hell.’ She fled totalitarian Czechoslovakia for the United States only to watch too many Americans now give up on freedom without a fight. She is speaking up as part of an ad campaign for an organization that shares the stories of those harmed by Donald Trump. My family and I fled Romania for the West. The contrast between our two countries, during the twilight of communism and in its aftermath, offers a stark lesson for Americans confronting threats to democratic norms today.” (02/11/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/czechoslovakias-lesson-for-america

Source: spiked
by Maria Reglero

“When Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans to ban social media for under-16s earlier this month, Spaniards could be forgiven for suspecting his real objective was not to limit children’s screentime. Indeed, just days later, Sira Rego, the youth and children’s minister, admitted that the next step would be to ‘restrict and ban’ X (formerly Twitter) for all Spanish users, whose ‘fundamental rights,’ she claimed, ‘are being violated’ by the platform. The prime minister and his so-called progressive coalition have long sought to narrow the boundaries of free speech in Spain. … Former vice-president Pablo Iglesias, whose hard-left Podemos is a junior party in Sánchez’s coalition, has openly proposed expropriating major private social-media platforms and replacing them with a state-owned or publicly controlled network. This has been presented as ‘democratising the space in which public communication occurs.’” (02/11/26)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/02/11/spains-ban-on-x-is-a-tyrannical-attempt-to-silence-the-people/