Dem Governor Launches Plan to Counter RFK Jr.’s Autism Registry

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has a plan to protect autism-related data from RFK Jr.’s absurd plans to create a disease registry tracking autistic people. 

Pritzker plans to sign an executive order Wednesday that will prevent state agencies from obtaining or disclosing data that personally identifies people with autism, unless it’s required for medical care or legal matters, according to a copy of the order obtained by the Chicago-Sun Times. 

“Every Illinoisan deserves dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As Donald Trump and DOGE threaten these freedoms, we are taking steps to ensure that our state remains a leader in protecting the rights of individuals with autism and all people with disabilities.”

Pritzker’s order comes as RFK Jr. announced the National Institutes of Health is collecting private medical data from government and commercial databases to create a registry of people with autism in the United States. The data will be collected from prescription records, lab testing, and private insurance claims. While the NIH denies it’s a “registry,” RFK Jr. used the word again just this week. 

The announcement sparked widespread outrage among autism advocacy groups across the country. A petition against the registry garnered thousands of signatures within 24 hours. 

“They are building a list. A list of people like my children. A list of autistic individuals— tracked, labeled, and filed under the guise of public health,” Ryan Smith, the petition starter, wrote in the petition’s description. “This is not support. It is surveillance.”

RFK Jr. has long dehumanized people with autism and spread unbacked claims about the disorder. “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use the toilet unassisted,” Kennedy said at a press conference in April.

The lifelong vaccine skeptic has compared the rising rates of autism diagnoses in the U.S. to a preventable epidemic. Autism is not an infectious diseas; it is a lifelong developmental disorder.

With Pritzker’s executive order, Illinois will become the first state to legally restrict the sharing of autism-related data—a clear message to RFK Jr. that every American, even those he looks down upon, has the right to privacy. 

Donald Trump’s quest to conquer Greenland is becoming increasingly serious.

The intelligence community directed intelligence agency chiefs to conduct a spy campaign on the Denmark-controlled island territory last week, issuing a “collection emphasis message” for information pertaining to Greenland’s independence movement, as well as an examination of local attitudes regarding “American resource extraction,” reported The Wall Street Journal. It also tasked agencies to identify individuals living in Greenland and Denmark who support the Trump administration’s goals for the island.

The directive came from several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to the paper, but Gabbard was not happy to hear that the news of the initiative had gotten out.

“The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information,” Gabbard told the Journal in a statement. “They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”

The Greenland order, which went out to multiple departments including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency, is the first tangible step the Trump administration has made to satiate the president’s desire to own the self-governing island.

One intelligence official explained to the Journal that because collection resources are “inherently limited,” they are typically used for “perceived threats, not allied countries.”

The order is just another reminder that American voters should take Donald Trump at his word. In an interview with NBC News that aired Sunday, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of taking Greenland by force.

“I don’t rule it out,” the president said. “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”

The White House National Security Council has met “several times” to make Trump’s desires for the arctic island a reality, The New York Times reported in early April. At the time, a U.S. official claimed the council had sent “specific instructions to multiple arms of the government.” But those instructions never specified the use of military force.

Another effort by the Trump administration to win over Greenland involves using federal dollars on advertising and social media campaigns with hopes of persuading Greenland’s 57,000 residents to basically annex themselves for America.

But Greenlanders have not taken kindly to Trump and his associates’ sudden interest in acquiring their land. After months of heavy pressure from the Trump family, including an embarrassing stunt in which Donald Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food, and an effort in the U.S. Congress to rename the territory “Red, White, and Blueland,” Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences in March to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders, and we want our own independence in the future,” Demokraatit Party leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Sky News the night his party won a decisive majority in Parliament, making him prime minister. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”

A late-January poll by pollster Verian found that 85 percent of Greenland’s residents do not want to become part of the United States. Just 6 percent were in favor of the switch, while 8 percent were undecided, according to The Guardian.

That disinterest became more apparent in late March, when second lady Usha Vance’s trip around Greenland was gutted and canceled after American representatives were spotted walking around Nuuk, the island’s capital, failing to find residents who would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife.

But none of that has squashed Trump’s interest. In a meeting in March with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump claimed that the U.S. needs Greenland “for international security,” reasoning that the “whole area is becoming very important” because there are “ships all over the place.”

“So, we’re going to have to make a deal on that, and Denmark is not able to do that, and you know, Denmark is very far away, and really has nothing to do. What happened? A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it, I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t think it is, actually,” the apparent anti-colonialist activist said at the time.

In an address to Congress in March, Trump clarified his intention: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”

The MAGAsphere is reeling as Republican Senator Thom Tillis seems likely to tank Trump’s nominee for D.C. attorney due to his legal and political support for January 6 insurrectionists.

Tillis came out against Ed Martin—who has been described as a “far-right election denier” and a “conspiracy theorist”—on Tuesday.

“Mr. Martin did a good job of explaining the one area that I think he’s probably right, that there were some people that were over-prosecuted, but there were some [200 to 300 of them] that should have never gotten a pardon,” Tillis told reporters Tuesday, referring to the Capitol riot insurrectionists. “I have no tolerance for anybody who entered the building on January 6.”

This has led to widespread anger among Trump supporters, particularly those on the farthest right.

“I was sentenced to nearly 3 years in prison—not for violence on J6, but for standing my ground and refusing to bow to a rigged political prosecution,” wrote Jon Strand, an insurrectionist who said he was “with the first dozen patriots” to storm the Capitol building.

“Now Senator Thom Tillis is opposing Ed Martin, one of the few men who actually understands the injustice that I and hundreds of others have endured. This isn’t politics, it’s a coverup,” he continued in the video attached to his post, with dramatic music playing in the background. “If Tillis won’t support President Trump’s nominee, a man clearly dedicated to justice, then I will dedicate myself to ending Thom Tillis’s career…. Make sure Tillis knows, we see him. And we won’t forget this.”

Mike Benz, head of a conservative “free speech” group, completely dismissed January 6 as an issue on Steve Bannon’s War Room show.

“This is not just an ancient memory, it’s settled. Done. For [January 6] to be invoked as the reason to block Ed Martin suggests something much darker to me.” Benz went on to accuse Tillis of being a member of the deep state who can’t accept the “fedsurrection,” a MAGA conspiracy theory that the insurrection was a planted, false flag event.

“Get off your high horse. Quit worrying about your feelings, and vote for President Trump’s people,” Senator Tommy Tuberville said Tuesday on Newsmax. “Seventy-seven million voted for President Trump. I just don’t understand how people put themselves first and not their constituents.”

Tillis received even more flack on Truth Social.

“Thom Tillis voted for Merrick Garland but won’t vote for Trump’s picks,” one MAGA account with a large following wrote. “You wouldn’t do this unless you’re in on the D.C corruption.”

“If Thom Tillis wont vote Ed Martin out of committee then he needs to be REMOVED from the committee and replaced with someone that will vote to confirm,” wrote far-right activist Charlie Kirk on X. “Its not that tough, @LeaderJohnThune. Man up and do what needs to be done.”

Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that Russia was “asking for too much” in its negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

During a Q&A at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, Vance lobbed a rare criticism at Moscow over its lengthy list of demands required to end its invasion into Ukraine, when asked whether he thought Russia was serious about ending the conflict.

“I wouldn’t say—I’m not yet that pessimistic on this—I wouldn’t say that the Russians are uninterested in bringing this thing to a resolution. What I would say is right now the Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions, in order to end the conflict,” Vance said. “We think they’re asking for too much.”

Russia’s list of demands have remained largely the same since its full-scale invasion first began in 2022. In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Russia requires full control of five Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea. Lavrov also insisted that Ukraine must be demilitarized, banned from entering NATO, and that Kyiv would need to introduce legislation to restore the state of Russian language, culture, and religious institutions.

The vice president claimed Wednesday that the next step for the U.S. was to facilitate a face-to-face meeting between the two warring governments. “It’s very important for the Russians and Ukrainians to start talking to one another,” Vance said.

This comes little over a week after Lavrov said that Russia wanted to lift a ban on Kyiv’s ability to directly negotiate with Moscow. Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, said that Russia was essentially telling Trump to “get lost.”

Vance made it clear that in negotiations, the United States was still playing by Russia’s rules. After Russia refused to agree to a 30-day ceasefire, Vance said that the U.S. was abandoning those hopes as well. “We’ve tried to move beyond the obsession with the 30-day ceasefire,” he said.

During the Q&A, Vance waxed poetic about how important it was to truly understand each side, even if you didn’t agree with them, but he also took a moment to whine about all that pesky historical context he’d had to endure.

“They hate each other so much that if you have an hour conversation with either side, the first 30 minutes are just them complaining about some historical grievance from four years ago, or five years ago, or 10 years ago,” Vance said.

Speaking of history, one might flash back to Vance’s humiliating display in the Oval Office in February, when he lost his temper as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy explained Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday raided a restaurant in Washington, D.C., owned by the husband of CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell.

Early Tuesday morning, immigration officers dressed in Homeland Security uniforms busted into the American fare restaurant Chef Geoff’s and demanded to see employees’ work authorization, Fox5 reported. No one was taken into custody, marking yet another pointless, fearmongering raid from ICE.

O’Donnell is a senior correspondent for CBS News and a contributing correspondent for the network’s 60 Minutes, which Trump has targeted ever since the network did an interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. It’s unclear whether ICE knew that O’Donnell’s husband, Geoff Tracy, is the owner of Chef Geoff’s.

ICE also raided at least seven other restaurants in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, including Millie’s, Pupatella, and Chang Chang, to demand I-9 forms, The Washingtonian reported.

“We were under the impression that they were focusing on trying to find criminals,” Bo Blair, the owner of Millie’s, told The Washingtonian. “And this is just a whole new level of harassment to our hardworking, law-abiding employees.” The ICE agents informed staff at Millie’s that they will return on Monday to collect the remainder of the I-9 forms verifying employees’ identity and work authorization.

According to data from the Independent Restaurant Coalition, immigrants make up 22 percent of all U.S. workers in food services. Restaurant workers have long been bracing for ICE raids, and it looks like the GOP’s crackdown on yet another industry that relies heavily on immigrant labor is in full force.

Donald Trump made the “Gulf of America” so great again that he’s considering implementing a similar rebrand for another body of water—this time, one thousands of miles away from U.S. territory.

The president is considering renaming the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf,” mere days after his family announced billions of dollars in forthcoming real estate deals in the region.

Those plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial Coin.

The family also revealed in December that they would be expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.

The Trumps have held deep financial ties to the region for years. After Trump’s first term, Saudi Arabia invested $2 billion in a firm belonging to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Trump is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia next week, where it’s anticipated that he’ll make the announcement publicly, according to two officials who spoke with the Associated Press.

As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments. The White House has contested that the deals are not a conflict of interest since the president’s assets are managed by his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. But Trump’s pockets will undoubtedly be lined by the deal—even if he has to wait a handful of years before he’s out of office to see the cashflow. In the meantime, he’ll receive myriad personal benefits from his relationships in the Middle East for arranging the deal.

Seven other nations surround the body of water, including Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Persian Gulf has been the body’s predominant name since the sixteenth century, but its moniker has also been regionally contested by other countries in the Middle East, where it is mainly referred to as the “Gulf of Arabia” or “Arabian Gulf,” according to The Daily Beast.

Referring to the inlet as the Arabian Gulf hasn’t served Trump’s diplomatic relations well in the past. During one such instance in 2017, former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the U.S. leader that he needed to “study geography.”

“Everyone knew Trump’s friendship was for sale to the highest bidder. We now know that his geography is, too,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote online at the time.

Former President Joe Biden doesn’t think the election would have been any different if he’d dropped out sooner.

“I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Biden told the BBC, in his first interview since leaving the White House. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. And it was a hard decision.… I think it was the right decision. I think that … it was just a difficult decision.”

Biden dropped out a mere four months before Election Day, in the midst of mounting fears regarding his mental acuity. The White House insisted over and over again that he was as sharp as ever. Senator Chuck Schumer called the fears “right-wing propaganda,” former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said he was “at the top of his game,” and Senator Bernie Sanders said that Biden “seemed fine” to him. But the truth came out at the first televised debate between Trump and Biden, in which Biden delivered perhaps the worst performance of all time—a bumbling, sad, and incoherent showing that made it clear that he was not mentally prepared to run again.

It’s easy to play the “what if” game in hindsight. But it’s painfully obvious that Biden dropping out sooner would have allowed the Democratic Party to have an actual primary, in which a diverse field of candidates would have been able to sharpen their positions and differentiate themselves from one another. Instead there was no primary, no differentiation between Harris and Biden, and a brutal loss to show for it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a message for a hypothetical little girl worried that she won’t have more than two dolls because of Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy.

“I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said, during an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night. “That you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which, working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.”

“Your family will own a home, you will be able to advance. You will have a good education, you will have economic freedom,” Bessent continued.

“Confident” is an interesting choice of words for Bessent, after consumer confidence sank a whopping 7.9 points in April, to its lowest level since May 2020.

The beleaguered Bessent has been desperate to rebrand Trump’s isolationist America First economic policy as a Buddhist-like maxim on desire as the root of all suffering. In March, Bessent claimed that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” In fact, being able to afford to live is a huge part of the American dream, and abundant consumer conveniences have become baked into our national identity.

But Bessent and Trump are insistent that they’re playing the long game—a little pinch in the present to make way for an expansive future they haven’t deigned to actually progress toward yet.

Small consumer grievances may illustrate the present-day realities of Trump’s tariffs, but they should not be used by the administration to obscure the larger picture. If we’re really going to play with hypotheticals, then we should imagine how a little girl’s “economic freedom” might be hurt by the collapse of her family’s soybean farm. Maybe then she can get a job in one of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s factories, and then her children can work there, and her children’s children. By then, maybe they’ll have dolls to play with.

The Trump administration is planning to use a military plane to deport immigrants to Libya in a cruel, arbitrary escalation of its mass deportation campaign. The deportations could happen as soon as Wednesday, and the nationality of the immigrants remains unclear. 

The situation in Libya is so unstable that the State Department dissuades its citizens from traveling there “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.” 

The detention centers where these migrants would be held are even worse. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation found “horrific violations” in the prisons there, calling them a total “hellscape.” The organization’s Middle East deputy director, Diana Eltahaway, noted that prisoners are “immediately funnelled into arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labour and other exploitation with total impunity.… The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its core and must be dismantled.”

This comes months after the administration pulled a similar move by sending Venezuelan immigrants to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador—an extrajudicial  move that is still being debated by the court.

The president’s Make Alcatraz Great Again pitch just got more fuel from one of his subordinates.

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested Tuesday that alleged international drug traffickers, “if convicted,” should stay in American prisons—“maybe Alcatraz,” she added with a smile.

Other Republicans have similarly scrambled to make Trump’s bizarre Sunday evening order to “rebuild, and reopen Alcatraz” sound like a bright idea. Senator Eric Schmitt vaunted the plan as “very smart,” and Senator Markwayne Mullin endorsed it on X, while Representative Mary E. Miller got to work itemizing the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote, referring to the pandemic-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In reality, there is practically zero possibility that the famed prison would reopen to house more prisoners. Alcatraz—which operated for just 29 years—was shut down in 1963, in part due to how expensive it was to operate. Data from the federal Bureau of Prisons shows that housing inmates at Alcatraz was three times more expensive than at other jails thanks to the fact that it was located on a remote island, requiring all of its resources, such as water, food, and fuel, to be shipped from the mainland.

“An estimated $3-5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open. That figure did not include daily operating costs,” according to the Bureau of Prisons.

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz history who previously served as an Alcatraz park ranger, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday that the building is “totally inoperable” and has no running water or sewage.

“It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini told the paper, noting that the building would need to be torn down and completely rebuilt to house prisoners again. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

Meanwhile, the tourism centering around the former island prison rakes in $60 million in annual revenue, hosting 1.6 million annual visitors, according to the National Park Service.

Bondi must not have known this before throwing her weight behind Trump’s idea. Speaking with Fox Business Monday, the attorney general said she was “all for” putting prisoners back in Alcatraz, claiming that it would provide “cost savings.”

But Trump’s rationale for keeping the prison open apparently has nothing to do with nickels and dimes. Speaking with reporters at the White House Monday, Trump claimed an uncharacteristically picturesque attachment to the facility.

“It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. It’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting,” he sentimentalized.

Speaking of pictures, Trump’s mysterious sudden fascination with the prison suspiciously coincided with weekend reruns of a 46-year-old Clint Eastwood movie, Escape From Alcatraz, on WLRN—a PBS affiliate that services the area around Mar-a-Lago. Go figure.