Opinion | The painful autism claims of RFK Jr. and Nicole Shanahan

Publish date: 2024-07-29

Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers’ grievances — pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week’s Free for All letters.

Regarding Glenn Kessler’s April 7 Fact Checker column, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate falsely implies vaccines cause autism”:

On behalf of all the parents of neurodiverse children in the world, thank you for debunking the myth that vaccines cause autism. Perhaps the most insidious message from those people is that somehow the parent of a child on the autism spectrum is to blame for their child’s condition.

As the father of a 21-year old who was diagnosed as autistic 16 years ago, I spent every day wondering why, how. Was it something we parents did?

Last month, we did a genetic test and found that he has a deletion at the 16p11.2 chromosome. It explained everything. The speech delay. The developmental delay. His autism spectrum attributes. That discovery wiped away years of guilt and fear because, for the first time, we could accept that his challenges were genetic, no different than the color of his eyes. That we parents did nothing wrong.

So shame on Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, for continuing to push the myths. They are causing incalculable grief and guilt on top of what is already an extremely hard issue to deal with.

And kudos to Kessler and all the other journalists holding them to account. Keep it up.

John Williams, Seattle

From accidents of birth to accidents of death

Regarding the April 5 front-page article “Arms deal greenlit on day convoy was struck”:

This headline and article conflated two entirely unrelated topics. Accidents happen in war, and they do not necessarily dictate a change in national policies. For example, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, more than 432,000 civilians were killed in America’s post-9/11 wars. None of these accidental deaths deterred the United States from pursuing its military objectives.

It is in the national interest of the United States for Israel to defeat Hamas. A Hamas victory would embolden terrorists everywhere to commit the same kinds of depraved atrocities Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7. An Israeli victory depends in part on continued U.S. military support. And contrary to the misguided idea that fighting terrorists only produces more terrorism, it is the appeasement of those who support and inflict terrorism, such as the Iranian regime and its Hamas proxies, that encourages terrorists — and terrorism.

Daniel H. Trigoboff, Williamsville, N.Y.

Death notices at death’s door

First, Robert Thomson, a.k.a. Dr. Gridlock, left The Post. Then, John Kelly took a buyout. And now, the number of death notices in the daily paper has dwindled to a trickle. These three mainstays allowed readers to grasp the flavor of the Washington area without having to read about crime or tragedy.

Take the reminiscence of a Foreign Service officer’s wife who went with her husband to embassies around the world, with their five children in tow, or the notice for a 90-year-old woman who came to work for the federal government from a small town in the Midwest during World War II. Even tidbits about the departed, such as the observation that one man “was a voracious reader of the Washington Post, keeping issues for weeks and even months to make sure that he read every word from the front to the back page,” have lingered with me.

As an avid reader of them, I mourn the continued dwindling of these tributes to local human beings. That’s a shame, especially given the amount of money The Post charges to place these announcements.

Betty Lawson Walters, Rockville

Last rites for the last rights

I am a big fan of Ann Telnaes, a gifted editorial cartoonist with a keen ability to capture the political zeitgeist. But I must take issue with her March 29 cartoon, “The right wing’s to-do list.”

She was all too correct about the right wing’s goal of eroding many rights that Americans have enjoyed for decades. But putting “voting rights” at the bottom of that list was incorrect. It is precisely by eroding voting rights at each and every opportunity that conservative Supreme Court justices, members of Congress and state and local officials will further eradicate our other rights. Once we lose unfettered access to the ballot, our most fundamental right, the rest of our rights will be at risk. Let’s hope Americans realize what is at stake in this year’s elections and vote.

Arina van Breda, Alexandria

Apples and oranges

In their April 3 Wednesday Opinion essay, “The Taliban’s oppression of women is apartheid. Let’s call it that,” Melanne Verveer, Karima Bennoune and Lina Tori Jan rightfully argued that gender apartheid should be recognized as a crime against humanity.

May I respectfully request that writers not distract us from their important points by giving us math homework? This essay presented statistics from before 2021 in absolute numbers of women and girls, and from after 2021 as “7 percent” and “2 in 10.” Comparing these statistics requires researching the populations of women and girls in Afghanistan in those years to get a sense of the scale of this crime. Apples to apples, please!

Meg Brosnan, Redwood City, Calif.

Apples and oranges and shrooms

The Post’s cartoonists need a refresher on the Book of Genesis, it seems. A “Rhymes With Orange” cartoon featured prominently in the March 30 Free for All cited Eve, of biblical renown, saying, “The trouble didn’t start after I ate the apple. It was after I ate the mushroom — that’s when the snake started talking.”

On first glance, I didn’t even get the cartoon. It was only after seeing it for the second time that I realized it was alluding to psychedelic mushrooms, not the regular kind, with which I am more familiar. But that closer glance also revealed the comic’s basic ignorance of the sacred text. As almost every beginning Sunday school pupil knows, the snake started talking to Eve before she ate the apple, not after.

Steven P. Levine, Bethesda

Our heads are out of joint

The March 30 front page featured this headline: “‘We train joint. We fight joint.’”

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I thought I might learn more about this awkward headline in the first paragraph, but the phrase didn’t reappear until the third paragraph from the bottom of a very long article. I had to assume it had something to do with the Marines pictured near the headline testing antitank missiles. Readers should be informed by headlines, with no need to assume or guess the meaning.

Peggy Douglas, Rehoboth Beach, Del.

Why the cap on dunce caps?

The April 2 front-page article “Trump ramps up his attacks,” about Donald Trump’s rants against the judges overseeing his various trials, included this sentence:

“And in a lengthy post on Easter Sunday, Trump wrote in all caps: ‘Happy Easter to all, including crooked and corrupt prosecutors and judges that are doing everything possible to interfere with the presidential election of 2024, and put me in prison.’”

Please, please quote Trump’s all-caps rants in all caps, just as he typed them. Why are you cleaning them up? With that stylistic choice, readers can’t get the full flavor of the former president’s social media rages.

Fred Kelemen, Philadelphia

Patron of the arts — or artist of patronage?

The April 3 front-page article “From Calif. billionaire, a lifeline for Trump” dove deeply into the background of Don Hankey, a wealthy California business owner who lent Donald Trump the money to satisfy his $175 million appeal bond in the New York civil case judgment. Hankey described the loan as a good business deal and also said he provided it, in the words of The Post, “because he agreed with the former president’s defense in the New York civil case.” The tone of the article was critical of Hankey’s business of offering high-interest loans to car buyers with poor credit and warned: “If Trump is elected, their relationship could come under new scrutiny if the government is involved in matters affecting Hankey’s business.” Fair enough.

But contrast this article with The Post’s coverage of Kevin Morris, also a wealthy California business owner, whom the Jan. 24 news article “Hunter Biden’s art pieces garnered $1.5 million” described as “one of Biden’s closest friends while also acting as an attorney and financial benefactor.” Morris purchased 11 of Biden’s paintings for $875,000. Morris’s connection to the Biden family was treated almost as an aside, though the article did quote a few parts of Morris’s House deposition in which he admitted to lending Biden approximately $5 million.

Lending millions to a client facing lengthy prison terms in tax and gun cases, and no apparent ability to repay, is an ethically questionable move for a lawyer and a financially questionable deal for a businessperson. That article noted that “ethics experts have questioned whether buying Hunter Biden’s paintings could be a dubious way for individuals to curry favor with the White House.” Why no equally deep dive into the background of Kevin Morris?

Joseph A. Capone, Oakton

The patron saint of artistic freedom

As one might expect, the March 28 obituary for Richard Serra, “Steelworker turned sculptor left a legacy defined by massive masterworks,” discussed the controversy surrounding the installation of his “Tilted Arc” sculpture in front of the federal building in Lower Manhattan. However, the obituary failed to mention that the removal of the sculpture in 1989 is generally credited with instigating the passage of the Visual Artists Rights Act in 1990. The law gives the artist the right to protect his or her work of art from modifications, including wholesale removal that was the fate of “Tilted Arc,” during the creator’s lifetime and for 50 years after. The law was a watershed in establishing an artist’s control over his or her artwork after it was turned over to the patron. The removal of “Tilted Arc” didn’t merely help make Serra’s reputation, as the obituary noted. It helped protect all artists who followed him.

Daniel Feil, Fairfax

Patronizing the arts

The March 28 Style article “In a shift, Rubell will go without local leader,” about a management change at the Rubell Museum D.C., characterized the Washington regional “art scene” as “marked by two extremes — giant cultural treasuries on the National Mall and tiny nonprofits with shoestring budgets.” As artists, art professionals and board members of arts institutions in the area, we feel this description was both inaccurate and derogatory.

Of course our regional nonprofit visual arts centers have smaller budgets than the Smithsonian Institution. Despite their varying budgets, even the midsize and smaller regional nonprofit visual arts organizations in our area make sizable and very significant cultural contributions to a wide range of communities and audiences. Area residents are lucky to have access to a large, diverse ecosystem of nonprofit visual arts centers offering a wealth of visual arts activities that enrich the cultural life of greater Washington.

Richard L. Dana, Bethesda

Helen Frederick, Silver Spring

June Linowitz, Bethesda

Nancy Sausser, Glen Echo

It is large, it contains multitudes

After reading the March 31 front-page article “Last hours of Baltimore’s Key Bridge: Dark, quiet, then calamity,” I wonder whether The Post could help readers resolve what to some will seem like a disconnect between photographs and words.

The cargo ship Dali has a known capacity of just under 10,000 “twenty-foot equivalent units,” or TEUs, a shipping business measurement. The article said it was loaded with “only about 4,700” containers. But in photos, the ship does not appear to be half-full; it appears to be full. Articles might be unclear because actual containers are confused with TEUs.

A 40-foot container counts as two TEUs. I did a rough count from photos of the visible stack of mostly 40-foot containers (19 athwartships, by 9 or 10 high, by 16 rows bow to stern) and calculated more than 3,000 boxes. Add in an approximation of the containers hidden from view within the hull, and that might add up to approximately the claimed 4,700 containers, a figure that when multiplied by two is in the neighborhood of the almost 10,000 TEUs the fully loaded ship can hold.

If The Post consistently explained to readers the difference between a ship’s capacity in containers and in TEUs, and the difference between the number of containers the Dali had on board and how fully they were loaded, it would leave readers more informed about both the shipping industry in general and this disaster in particular.

Brad Thompson, McMinnville, Ore.

There’s even more under the surface

Regarding Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Praveena Somasundaram’s April 1 Retropolis column, “A cleanup crane has origins in Cold War CIA”:

The Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 that was partially salvaged by the heavy lift ship Hughes Glomar Explorer — as part of the secret Project Azorian — carried a crew of 99 men, including its captain, not “at least six crew members” as this piece stated.

The CIA undertook the salvage attempt in an effort to recover the one-megaton warhead of one of the three nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles carried by the K-129. The two other missiles were destroyed in the disaster that befell the submarine.

Because of damage to the Glomar Explorer’s lift claws during the attempted salvage, only 38 feet of the bow section of the K-129 were recovered. That section contained two nuclear torpedoes and the remains of six Soviet sailors. Their remains subsequently were buried at sea with military honors. A film of the burial was passed to the Russians after the fall of the Soviet regime at the end of 1991.

Project Azorian was the most ambitious maritime salvage effort ever attempted. The ballistic missile warhead that was the goal of that effort was not recovered.

Norman Polmar, Alexandria

The writer is co-author of “Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129.”

Not even a straw man could keep his cool over this

According to Mark Athitakis’s March 31 Book World review, “Don’t worry, be stoic,” “modern Stoicism finds itself somehow settling into Successories-style aphorisms, screw-your-feelings machismo and the ends justifying the means. This is many things, but it’s not a coherent moral philosophy.”

This claim is many things, but it’s not a coherent critique of Stoicism. The hollow “modern Stoicism” Athitakis criticizes seems more like a phantom philosophy of his own imagination than the philosophical movement as I’ve experienced it. He does not engage with meaningful contributions from the likes of William B. Irvine, whose 2008 book, “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy,” is arguably a linchpin in the renaissance of this philosophy as practiced today. Had he done so, Athitakis might have encountered more of the modern Stoics who continue to emphasize duty and discipline, character and joy. Marcus Aurelius’s invocation that we “dwell on the beauty of life” might be “bumper-sticker” fodder. But it also happens to be a valuable insight.

Olev Jaakson, New York

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