Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money recently emailed me this pdf of a 1975 article in which Garry Wills, the famous author, argued that George Wallace should be disqualified from running for president due to his “infirmity.” [Update: The great Rick Perlstein gave me the link to the Google News archive of the column, …
The shooting of Charles Kinsey and the subsequent disclosure that his client, Arnold Rios Soto, was being kept in a psychiatric ward in the hospital, sparked some very good writing. Here’s four related pieces by people of color that should get more attention. First, Finn Gardiner, Manuel DÃaz, and Lydia X. Z. Brown wrote: “Charles Kinsey’s Story Is About …
I will be writing more fully on this elsewhere, but here’s a storify of Dr. Jill Stein’s tweets about autism and vaccines. I was initially very pleased, but have been convinced that “I’m not aware” is still trying to walk the lines between anti-science conspiracy mongers and the rest of the electorate. Worse, Stein allegedly …
Ever since “political correctness” jumped into mainstream public discourse as first a threat against higher education, then against free speech everywhere, and – with Trump’s campaign – a threat against the very security of our nation, I’ve been making one argument: Power matters. Mostly, it’s not a problem when marginalized people ask for others to …
Donald Trump is an erratic man with poor impulse control, a temperament that belong nowhere near the White House, and self-centered to a degree unusual even among politicians. He lies routinely. But does he lie pathologically? Are his lies related to a mental health condition which makes it difficult for him to tell the truth? …
In my second piece for Playboy (safe-for-work but might mention the existence of sex in the click throughs), I wrote about the details of Clinton’s disability policy. I wrote: When Donald Trump took to the stage in South Carolina last November and made fun of a disabled New York Times reporter, he won my vote…for Hillary …
Superhero (and related) comics are packed full of disability narratives, both good and bad, whether it’s the analogy between mutation and disability within the X-Men (not Professor X, but mutation as disability) or characters who have “real” disabilities of various sorts, though they often deal with them in high-tech ways. I wrote about Daredevil and …
Content Notes: Abuse of an Autistic Individual On Monday, a police officer shot Charles Kinsey, a black therapist who was trying to help his client – a young Latino man named Arnaldo Rios – not get shot. Rios had walked away from his group home and someone called 911, claiming that a man was suicidal …
I have a new piece up at CNN on the shooting of Charles Kinsey, protected a Latino autistic man named Arnaldo Rios [Edit: See below for correction information] and the intersections of racism, ableism, and the #CultOfCompliance. Kinsey later told reporters, “I was really more worried about him than myself. I was thinking as long …
Yesterday, this New York Times story went around on Trump’s plans to empower his Vice-President. ‘One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March …