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Do you really have ADHD — or do they want to medicate you into conformity?

Everybody has a diagnosis these days.

Not just adults — kids too. It doesn’t matter if you’re 8 or 38, there’s someone somewhere waiting to explain away whatever’s different about you.

Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

It’s not a quirk of your personality or a flaw in your character or a wound in your soul. It’s a illness. Never mind that the symptoms are vague or the evidence that it’s a discrete medical condition are lacking — a pharmaceutical cure will fix it.

Just pop this pill, and you will be like everyone else. Isn’t that what you want?

All the rage

All the kids these days have ADHD or autism. Which often makes me wonder if any of them do. Or if these conditions exist at all.

Autism certainly seems real in its extreme forms, but I am not at all convinced that it’s at the far end of a continuum. I don’t really think being a little “on the spectrum” is a thing. Those people are just a little weird and need stronger guidance on how to get on in life.

I have a friend who was an engineer at Google. He told me half the people he worked with claimed to be “on the spectrum,” and according to him, it was all bull. They didn’t have medical problems; they had personal problems. They were guys who never learned how to interact normally, so they just ended up being kind of weird and rude.

As for ADHD, it’s so obscenely overdiagnosed that it’s essentially fake at this point. The market has been so oversaturated by ridiculous and erroneous diagnoses that whenever I hear about another kid with ADHD, it tells me more about the doctors and the “system” and less about the kid.

Boys will be boys

Are some kids better at sitting down at a desk for three hours at a time? Sure. Are more girls than boys better at doing it? Yes. Is there a gender factor here when it comes to diagnosis? Absolutely.

Boys don’t learn the same way girls do. But much of modern education ignores this fact. So when boys fidget or get bored, it gets chalked up to ADHD. This is more or less common knowledge by now. So the only thing a boy being diagnosed with ADHD tells me is that he doesn’t get enough recess.

Of course, there are extreme cases. There are kids who genuinely don’t seem to be able to focus at all. Something like actual ADHD exists in a small number of boys, but that doesn’t negate the broader truth: Instead of seeing people as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, we decide to overmedicate when someone isn’t exactly like everyone else.

My mom worked with special ed kids. Some of them had mild disabilities, some more extreme. In some cases, it was clear they would need supervised care their entire lives. But in other cases, it wasn’t clear just what, if anything, was wrong — besides a certain learned helplessness reinforced by doctors and parents.

Pill and chill

Nowadays ADHD diagnoses aren’t just for kids; adults are getting in on it too. Believe it or not, an increasing amount of men and women, especially women, in their 30s and 40s are discovering that they too have ADHD — a discovery that inevitably “explains everything.” My wife sees reels on Instagram all the time, along with ads selling various solutions.

What’s that? You couldn’t focus at your computer, clicking on an excel spreadsheet, sending pointless emails for seven hours at a time? Shocking. No, you don’t need ADHD medication. You need to do something else with your life. Perhaps you find your work excruciatingly boring and hard to care about precisely because it is excruciatingly boring and hard to care about.

Overmedicalization and overdiagnosis is a deep problem in our society. Not just because the result is an increase in prescription drug use, but because the individual human being is lost or suffocated a little bit at a time. Everyone is different. Everyone has skills, and everyone has weaknesses. Everyone learns in a different way, and everyone focuses on different things too.

RELATED: Drugged for being boys: The TRUTH behind the ADHD scam

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Free agency

Some people are just a little awkward, a little weird, a little absent-minded, or a little dry. Sure, they should try to meet society halfway in some reasonable sense — but that happens through early teaching, parental guidance, community expectations, and personal effort, not through a pill you pop every day. For most of the 20th century, we relied far more on those nonmedical supports.

All the pill-popping flattens our individualism and undercuts our own agency as humans. It presupposes that one cannot make oneself better, one cannot work to act right, and that one doesn’t have any control. This is a lie. Yes, of course, there are people who suffer with truly debilitating problems who need medication, and they should get that medication. But it is a small fraction of the population. Most people can make themselves better when they set their minds to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-psychiatry. I’m not into alternative medicine or any of the hippie stuff. I’m not denying that there are people with problems who are helped most effectively with medication. I’m thankful for the blessings of modern medicine and the advancements we continue to see every year.

But we have a problem with overdiagnosis in our country. We have a problem with losing sight of the individual. We have a problem with people who want to give up their agency and turn it all over to a pill, and we are worse off because of it.

​Men’s style, Family, Lifestyle, Health, Adhd, Autism, Big pharma, Pharmaceuticals, Fatherhood, The root of the matter 

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Despite terrorist designation, Antifa still runs wild — and conservatives want real action

Antifa radicals have been causing chaos throughout America for years and have finally been designated as a terrorist network by the Trump administration.

However, they’re still getting away with crimes.

“Antifa radicals in Berkeley, California, disrupted a Turning Point USA event outside of UC Berkeley, punched a conservative in the face. The conservative gets arrested,” BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo tells co-host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“But our policy prescription is, the administration has to dismantle the left-wing terror networks, whether it’s Antifa, other organized militant groups. They have to actually get mugshots, case numbers, inmate numbers,” he continues.

“The tangible evidence that these left-wing terror networks, which are essentially saying that we can control the streets in places like Portland, we can veto peaceful conservative speech in places like Berkeley — we have to ensure that they can no longer do so and can no longer exert control through violence,” he adds.

While Rufo points out that Antifa is still out there disrupting whatever it can, Lomez notes that it was a “huge step in the right direction” that it has at least been designated as a terrorist network.

“The administration is making the right moves and/or saying the right things. What’s missing is the conspicuous action so that your average American, let alone Trump supporter, but just your average American goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t like Antifa, and the administration is doing something about it, and that’s good,’” Lomez says.

But the next step is taking the terrorist designation and doing something with it.

“Let’s just take this case at UC Berkeley, this recent event. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a great tweet,” Rufo says.

“Antifa is an existential threat to our nation. The violent riots at UC Berkeley last night are under full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. We will continue to spare no expense unmasking all who commit and orchestrate acts of political violence,” Bondi wrote.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, and pursuant to his Executive Order designating Antifa as a domestic terror organization, the Department of Justice and our law-enforcement partners are dismantling violent networks that seek to intimidate Americans and suppress their free expression and First Amendment rights,” she added.

While Rufo is glad to see Bondi using such strong wording, he’s skeptical.

“Why hasn’t UC Berkeley been defunded? Just say, ‘Hey, we’re withholding funds until you can establish a basic environment of civil discourse,’” Rufo says.

“You have to make sure that the directive that comes from the, you know, FBI director’s office, the attorney general’s office, you have to make sure that it means something at that regional level, at that agent level,” he explains.

“And I am not convinced that the current leadership, that the current structure, the current techniques that they’re using has sufficiently done that,” he adds.

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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How the Senate’s phony ‘deliberation’ crushes working Americans

The United States Senate is broken, and most Americans know it — including President Donald Trump. A chamber that once passed laws with a simple 51-vote majority, a practice that held for more than a century, now demands 60 votes for nearly anything of consequence.

Defenders call this the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” guarding minority rights. In reality, the 60-vote threshold is a rule the Senate invented in the last century — and one it can discard tomorrow.

The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.

Article I lists exactly seven situations that require a supermajority: overriding vetoes, ratifying treaties, convicting in impeachment, expelling members, proposing constitutional amendments, and two obscure quorum rules. Passing ordinary legislation is not on the list.

The Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate — the seed of modern filibusters — wasn’t designed to create a supermajority requirement. It was an accident.

In 1806, on Aaron Burr’s suggestion that the Senate rulebook was cluttered, the chamber deleted the “previous question” motion, the mechanism the House still uses to end debate and vote. No one understood the implications at the time. Filibusters didn’t appear until the 1830s, and even then they were rare because they required real endurance. Senators had to speak nonstop, often for days, until they collapsed or yielded.

How the filibuster became a weapon

Everything changed in 1917. After 11 anti-war senators filibustered Woodrow Wilson’s bill to arm merchant ships on the eve of World War I, the public revolted. Wilson demanded action. The Senate responded by creating Rule XXII — the first cloture rule — allowing two-thirds of senators to end debate.

Instead of restraining obstruction, the rule supercharged it. For the first time, a minority didn’t need to speak until exhaustion. They only needed to threaten it. The majority now had to assemble a supermajority to progress.

The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.

The Senate has rewritten its filibuster rule many times since. In 1975, it lowered the cloture threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths (60 votes). In 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for most presidential nominees; in 2017, Republicans applied that same exception to Supreme Court justices.

These changes all point to the same reality: The filibuster is not a sacred tradition. It is a standing rule, created and amended by simple-majority votes. The Senate can change it again any time.

The myth of ‘unprecedented change’

Filibuster defenders insist that ending the 60-vote rule would be radical.

It wouldn’t. In reality, it would restore the practice that governed the Senate for its first 128 years — unlimited debate, yes, but no supermajority threshold for passing laws.

RELATED: Democrats reject ‘current policy’ — unless it pays their base

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Defenders also claim the filibuster forces compromise. History says otherwise. The biggest legislative achievements of the last century — Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — all passed when the filibuster was weakened, bypassed, or irrelevant.

What we have now is not deliberation. It is paralysis: a rule that allows 41 senators, representing as little as 11% of the country, to veto the will of the rest. The Senate already protects small states through equal representation and long tenures. Adding a 60-vote requirement for routine governance is not what the framers intended.

The fix

The solution is straightforward. The Senate can return to simple-majority voting for legislation. It can keep unlimited debate if it wishes — but require a real talking filibuster that ends when the minority runs out of arguments or public patience. Or it can leave the system as it is now and watch President Trump’s America First agenda stall for another generation.

The filibuster is not a 230-year constitutional safeguard. It is a 108-year experiment born in 1917 — and it has failed. The Senate invented it. The Senate can un-invent it.

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