Elissa Slotkin's "War Plan": Democrats Need To Be More Like Dan Campbell

Plus, some format changes

Apr 25, 2025

I’ve been using the same link format and organization for The Transom for years, but never really leveraged some of the design choices available in the Substack model to break things up differently, given that when I started out it was for desktop/laptop folks, and now people read this newsletter overwhelmingly on mobile and via apps. So today, I wanted to try some new formatting and layout choices to break things up a bit. Let me know what you think! And another thing: I’ll have big news on the podcast front, hopefully as early as next week, which I can’t wait to tell you about… should at least be more exciting than the schedule scheduling announcement last night in Green Bay.

Today’s Transom:

Slotkin has a war plan for Dems
RFK wants to end Autism
Pregnancy surveillance state
Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum profiled

Slotkin: Be More Like Dan Campbell

Politico:

In the first of a series of speeches about the Democratic Party’s path out of the wilderness, the Michigan senator said she will span everything from strategy to tactics and tone, acknowledging public perception of the party as “weak and woke” needs to change. She is urging Democrats to “fucking retake the flag” with appeals to voters’ sense of patriotism, to adopt “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and to embrace an “airing out” of potential 2028 presidential candidates in a broadly contested primary.
Slotkin’s description of the speech as a “war plan” came in a recorded dry-run of the remarks viewed by POLITICO. In an interview, she hedged on whether she would continue to call it that, saying “it’s a military-style operational plan. I don’t understand how to rally us into a coherent approach if we aren’t on the same page on where we’re going.”
“Trump is doing a whole bunch of things that I think are a threat to our economy and a threat to our Democracy and I have a responsibility on behalf of my state to point that out and try to do something about that,” the first-term senator told POLITICO in an interview outlining her speech ahead of delivering it to an audience of home state Democrats and volunteers in Lansing on Thursday afternoon.
Of the stark and militaristic language featured in a draft version, she added: “I thought it was very important to put something down on paper, but it wasn’t to liken him to ISIS or anything like that. It was just to say if you want to counter something that you see as a problem, you got to have a plan or what else are you doing?”

I mean, it’s a nice frame for Slotkin to adopt — though I’m not sure how they’re going to pull this off, politically:

RFK Wants to End Autism

Tablet Magazine:

A half century of troves of very rich data from multiple sources across multiple systems and examining all levels of autism emphatically point to a true increase in autism rates. Despite rampant speculation about “just noticing it better,” the research does not support this conjecture, though it could explain some effects around the higher-functioning edge. Some key data points to consider:
Even limited to cases of autism with intellectual disability, or ID (formerly called mental retardation, and meaning IQ of 70 or under), childhood autism rates have skyrocketed, from about 0.01 percent to 0.05 percent of children in the 1960s based on early studies to about 1.28 percent of 8-year-olds in 2022, per the latest CDC data.
Even in 4-year-olds, who tend to have greater impairments than those diagnosed later in childhood or adulthood, prevalence has more than doubled over a short period, reaching 2.93 percent for the recent 2022 surveillance, up from 1.34 percent in 2010, when the CDC began tracking preschoolers.
Autism cases in our most populous state, California, have exploded. Its developmental disability system—which serves only significantly disabling forms of autism—has seen autism cases rise from about 4,000 in 1989 to about 206,000 in 2024. That’s a 51-fold increase over 35 years, while caseloads of ID and other categories remained fairly flat.
Careful epidemiology in the state of New Jersey conducted by the respected Rutgers University researcher Dr. Walter Zahorodny (who gave invited remarks at the RFK Jr. press conference confirming the existence of a true increase) has reflected sweeping increases in autism prevalence in the state, to the point that in some regions, about 7 percent of 8-year-olds have autism. Dr. Zahorodny told me the case definitions did not change over time.
Autism cases are up sharply in special education across all states. To be eligible for special education, a student must demonstrate significant impairments that interfere with learning, and they require specialized instruction as a consequence. For example, in California, cases grew from about 4,000 in 2000-21 to about 167,000 in 2023-34, while cases of ID remained steady. In 2019, Massachusetts reported that its schools were serving four times as many students with autism as they did 15 years prior. In Minnesota, autism cases surged exponentially beginning in the 1991 school year, with the researchers finding “diagnostic substitution does not largely explain the increasing trends.”
The largest U.S. study of autism prevalence in hospital and medical care systems shows rising autism prevalence across birth cohorts. Autism in adults over the age of 65 was shown to be extremely rare, in the range of .02 percent, compared to rates of about 3 percent for children aged 5 to 8 in 2022. When RFK Jr. says he’s never met anyone his age with significant autism, he’s not wrong. The data, especially from the robust California developmental disability system, show they hardly exist.
Autism rates are skyrocketing in our adult Medicaid and Social Security safety-net systems, where the disorder is by definition limited to more severe cases. In Medicaid, the prevalence of young adults with autism more than doubled from 2011 to 2019. For SSI, we see staggering autism growth of 336.6 percent from 2005 to 2019, while cases with ID and other mental disorders decreased by 45 percent.
Further evidence it’s not a game of diagnostic switcheroo: The CDC has found that the prevalence of children with developmental disabilities generally, including ID, has increased over time.
The word epidemic is appropriate to describe the ascension of autism, Alexander MacInnis, MS, an independent epidemiological researcher who has published on California autism data and who has a daughter with profound autism, told me. “Epidemic has a definition, and not just for infectious disease,” he said. “It can be a disorder where more cases are occurring than what you would expect based on history. We have massively increased birth cohort prevalence from every data source I can find showing very consistent increases, even within studies, which removes bias. Overall we see about a 7 percent increase in autism cases per birth year. Does this meet the definition of an epidemic? It does.”

The Pregnancy Surveillance State

The New Yorker:

It might come as a surprise that this tribe of biohacking control freaks is so blasé about outsourcing the work of gestating a human being to other, presumably less optimized vessels. And in fact the venture capitalists Malcolm and Simone Collins, who are the unofficial First Couple of American pro-natalism, have not used gestational surrogates for their children. Otherwise, though, they exemplify a hyper-rationalized faith in genetic determinism: that the message, in the form of DNA, trumps the medium. The Collinses have enlisted Genomic Prediction to run background checkson their embryos and another DNA-testing company to assess the data and then rank ideal candidates for onboarding according to criteria such as potential I.Q. and risk of developing anxiety or “brain fog.”
Within this paradigm of preselection, the work of raising children is, to some extent, completed upon implantation, and allows for what Malcolm calls “intrinsically low-effort parenting.” As depicted in a viral profile of the family in the Guardian last year, this parenting style accommodates unlimited iPad time at age two and the occasional smack across the face.
The Collinses demonstrate how advances in reproductive technology are resulting in unexpected political, social, and even aesthetic realignments. In many respects, they resemble the neo-Quiverfull, self-isolating, homeschooling families who populate so much of the Christian-MAHA sector of social media, and who overlap with the freebirthers who command Hess’s attention in “Second Life.” But the couple’s embrace of avant-garde science and medicine, Simone’s C-section births, and their autistic identities—Simone and two of their children have autism diagnoses—put them at odds with the same group, which rejects the medical establishment and fetishizes maternal impression and “natural” birth, and whose antipathy to vaccines is rooted in an irrational fear of autism.
The collision of these stridently individualistic ideologies is manifest in an online homeschooling platform that the Collinses developed, Parrhesia.io, which sounds like a disease in a Pynchon novel, and is, per an introductory video, “Using AI to Create a Free Alternative to the Education System.” The online marketing includes a few photographs of what we can take to be young homeschoolers using the platform, and, aptly, they all appear to be alone at their screen, as if they’d been programmed from conception for self-sufficiency.

✍️Feature

The New Yorker profiles Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum.

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“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”

— Buckminster Fuller