The Skinny: Stop and Breathe
Stop and Breathe: April 20th – 23rd
Don’t Believe “We” Don’t Care About Climate Crisis
Over the course of my adult life, I have on multiple occasions had borderline nasty arguments with people who excuse climate crisis inaction by stating confidently and emphatically that “we” don’t care about climate crisis. The trick behind understanding that argument is to ask “who is “we” in this scenario?” Unsurprisingly, reactionary billionaires don’t care and neither do the governments and for-profit media outlets they own; but everyday people increasingly living in the fallout of an unfolding climate catastrophe certainly care – and polling has been bearing that reality out for almost two decades now. This is particularly magnified if you study opinions about climate crisis and the need for action on a global scale instead of just in the so-called West, as a recent study reveals:
The 89%: New Media Collaboration Calls Attention to ‘Climate Change’s Silent Majority’
“Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.”
Look, I’m all for a global project to speak the reality that humanity as a whole is worried about, and wants solutions to the climate crisis and our boiling world. By that same measure however, I don’t think any analysis that doesn’t incorporate the reality that our ruling classes and the institutions they own are absolutely planning on running the species right off the ecological cliff while claiming it’s our fault because we didn’t want change hard enough or something, can truly be considered complete. These people mean to kill you and your children for five pennies a share and they’re more or less openly admitting it now. So signing up all the progressive media orgs and the one corporate outlet that does take climate catastrophe seriously to talk more about why humanity does care about climate crisis, isn’t going to change the fact that the guys who own everything know all that, and have picked genocide over surrendering the capitalism that’s killing us.
With all that having been noted however, I still support promoting this discussion for the same reason I’m sharing this article with you; it’s important to understand that literally 89% of the people on the planet do not support going gently into that good night so billionaire nazis can keep doing capitalism. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m pretty confident that 89% of roughly eight billion people is more than enough people power to overthrow a capitalist order controlled by less than four thousand billionaires. The question then becomes: how bad does that 89% want to solve this life or death crisis? And how long will they wait before they accept that the ruling class isn’t going to do anything to mitigate climate catastrophe, but is rather building out fascist police states, curtailing our civil rights, and hardening borders to stop us, that 89%, from doing anything about the shallow graves they intend to lay billions of us in for the money god?
For all our sakes, let’s hope the answer to that question isn’t “too long.”
Civil Rights Reform For Christian Nationalists
One of the reasons I have no problem characterizing the Trump regime as an openly Christian Nationalist government, is the administration’s stated attempts to turn roughly seventy years worth of civil rights laws on their head to instead fight against made up fascist moral panics like “reverse discrimination,” “the assault on religious liberty,” and “gender ideology turning our kids trans.” This plan, which the fascists have articulated in the open multiple times, revolves around repurposing the language of social justice to argue that actually, the state should be punishing folks who infringe on the “liberty” of the *real* victims in our society; rich, straight, and white fundamentalist men. Conceptually the arguments for all this are absurd, but these ideas have been widely adopted (for cynical reasons) on the American right, and the promise to use the government to go after the enemies of an increasingly fundamentalist white American volk is absolutely one of the reasons seventy-five million or so fascists voted for the Trump regime last fall.
Now we’re getting a clearer understanding of how this fascist unreality is going to work in real time. New mission statements for the Department of Justice’s civil rights division have been leaked to The Guardian, and they make it pretty clear that the Trump regime is going to weaponize the Justice department and subvert the civil rights of non-white, LGBTQ, or otherwise marginalized Americans to re-entrench white supremacy as official state policy, and the dominant ideological position in our legal discourse.
Trump ally pushes DoJ unit to shift civil rights focus, new messages show
“The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.
The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them give only glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.”
Speaking frankly, I find this article’s “will he or won’t he” tone pretty disturbing, but if you actually read through what the Trump regime is proposing it’s pretty much entirely nightmare fascist shit. For example, they’re repurposing the voting section away from protecting the enfranchisement of marginalized people, to rooting out non-existent voter fraud. The regime also wants to stop enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act; presumably to make it easier for rich crackers to refuse to rent to nonwhite or otherwise marginalized tenants. The entire sections on women’s rights, educational rights, and disability rights are about persecuting trans people now. Finally the regime wants to reassign the Housing and Civil Enforcement section to focus on protecting the rights of members of the military, and religious land use; so you can expect fundamentalist Mega Churches to start petitioning the Justice department to make it illegal to stop them from spreading their hateful ideology anywhere they like, while simultaneously kissing consumer and lending protections for anyone who isn’t a straight white dude who thinks Trump was sent by Jesus to save us from planetary-crisis levels of DEI and “wokeness,” goodbye.
Unsurprisingly many of the “Very Serious People TM” who have been minimizing how dangerous the regime’s “reforms” are already, are once again treating this like “Trump being Trump” and noting that it’s unclear how far the Trumpenreich will be able to progress its Christian Nationalist plans; especially in the face of what will no doubt, be some opposition from career civil servants in the Department of Justice. Given however that the Trump regime is also moving forward with plans to purge the US government of ideological opposition through a new form of Schedule F, and recently secured almost a billion dollars of pro-bono work from cowardly DC law firms for causes Trump supports, I think this attitude is woefully shortsighted. This is all very real, and very dangerous. The regime has already been quite successful installing fascist unreality based on its reactionary conspiracy theories, and until proven otherwise I don’t see any reason to believe they will be less successful in a Department of Justice being run by a Trump-humping nazi bootlicker like US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.
Purging the Government of People With a Conscience
As I’ve mentioned in a few other blogs, the Trump regime is undoubtedly aware that there will be opposition inside the US federal workforce to its plans to repurpose the machinery of state to accomplish objectively fascist objectives. Which is of course why they’re also working to give Der Leader the power to purge anyone who won’t enact their heinous ideology in government, and presumably replace them with Heritage Foundation-trained obedient little nazis; as was leaked during Trump’s 2024 election campaign.
As this Common Dreams article notes, the mechanism to purge their ideological opposition in the federal government was originally called Schedule F when Trump tried to enact it near the end of his first term, but the fascists haven’t abandoned the project here in his second term because it’s a vital step in enacting their reactionary, Christian Nationalist agenda. Now Trump is attempting to progress this ideological purge and restacking scheme forward under a new title, “Schedule Policy/Career,” to ensure nobody with a conscience inside the government sticks around long enough to object to their fascist activities.
Trump Advances Plan to Fill Federal Government With ‘Political Cronies’
“Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said Friday’s announcement was the latest “in a series of deliberate moves by this administration to corrupt the federal government and replace qualified public servants with political cronies.”
“President Trump’s action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government’s merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on,” said Kelley. “Politicizing the career civil service is a threat to our democracy and to the integrity of all the programs and services Americans rely on.”
On some level what the regime is attempting to do here amounts to a “jobs for cracker Republicans and nobody else” program, but none of the stories about Trump politicizing the American government can be properly contextualized in a vacuum. The fact is that this is a authoritarian regime attempting to repurpose the entire US government to enforce a fascist “unreality” on society that would justify and enable their Christian Nationalist plans and intentions. Every single horrible thing Trump wants to do, every single idea the nazis want to turn in its head to harm rather than help people, becomes easier if the regime can purge its ideological opposition from the government, and stack thousands of civil service positions with folks who will happily support all this fascist bullshit.
Governing By Fascist Conspiracy Theory
My friends please forgive me for stating the obvious, but perhaps running an authoritarian government based on enforced unreality and fascist conspiracy theories is actually not a very good idea? A US government website that used to post publicly-accessible Covid information has been edited to promote the lab leak theory and prosecute reactionary anti-vaxer grievances about former Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Trump White House replaces Covid website with treatise on ‘lab leak’ theory
“The Trump administration has replaced Covid.gov – a website that once provided Americans with access to information about free tests, vaccines, treatment and secondary conditions such as long Covid – with a treatise on the “lab leak” theory.
The site includes intense criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, who helmed national Covid policies under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the World Health Organization (WHO) and state leadership in New York.”
Look, I don’t do hagiography here and I’m not going to pretend that ignoring Covid and just letting people die wasn’t eventually a bipartisan position in American politics. But for the Trump regime to replace one of the few supports for the public that the government was bothering to offer with some winger conspiracy nonsense about the lab leak theory and two minutes of hate about Fauci is both disgusting, and definitely a kind of fascist propaganda operation designed to generate an enforced unreality. If the truth be told, I’m not even a huge fan of Dr. Fauci’s work as a public health official, but I can absolutely fucking guarantee you these nazis aren’t upset over a general failure by the US government and health apparatus to respond adequately to the AIDS/HIV crisis or the decision to pretend Covid is over and send everyone back to work in a still quite deadly pandemic. The fascist American right literally wants to hang that guy because he made them take a vaccine, full stop.
As for the so-called “lab leak” theory, I think the Guardian is being far too generous. Every scientist or medical observer I’ve ever talked to or heard speak about the origins of Covid has said the only reason to believe the lab leak conspiracy is because it cannot be absolutely disproven, as it’s hard to prove a negative; but the vast and overwhelming body of evidence points to a zoogenic or spillover origin. For the White House to take down a useful anti-Covid resource, and replace it with a conspiracy theory only relevant because “you can’t prove it’s *not* true beyond a shadow of a doubt” is both irresponsible, and ideologically revealing.
And to what end? Well promoting this conspiracy theory and discrediting a medical establishment that disagrees with everything your HHS secretary is trying to push as public policy, has value to the Trump regime. This is an administration that absorbed the reactionary anti-vax conspiracy movement into its base years ago, and rode that base to what Trump clearly considers absolute power; Der Leader already put a guy who thinks vaccines cause autism in charge of the entire American state health apparatus. They’re anti-science and support private medical care, even if that “care” comes from discredited quacks or unlicensed personnel. Furthermore, Trump is currently in the middle of a trade war with China that he’s characterizing as an existential struggle for the survival of America, and the lab these crackpots claim leaked Covid into the world is located in Wuhan, China.
And in the end that’s why it doesn’t really matter if the regime is right about the lab leak theory; they most certainly aren’t, but the fact is that promoting these ideas as official government positions was never about right or wrong in the first place. The Trump administration is governing by fascist conspiracy theory because those reactionary conspiracies further their reactionary goals. The truth was never, and will never be a factor in these decisions.
Making a Killing Selling Respectability to Nazis
While its certainly true that part of why so much of the US mainstream establishment, particularly in the private sector, is willing to collaborate openly with the fascist Trump regime is because they prefer fascism to sharing, it’s also true that there are clear material benefits to legitimizing and supporting the Trumpenreich administration. In what reasonable people would describe as “open corruption,” Federal Election Commission data shows that the administration has dropped or frozen federal enforcement cases against “at least 17 corporations that donated to the president’s inaugural fund.”
‘See How This Works?’: Trump Drops Cases Against Corporations That Funded His Inauguration
“Public Citizen found that corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement lawsuits donated a combined $50 million to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. Trump raised a record sum of $239 million for his second inauguration, the new FEC filings show.
“Corporations facing federal lawsuits and investigations aren’t giving millions to Trump’s inauguration out of the kindness of their hearts,” said Public Citizen researcher Rick Claypool. “They are trying to buy good will. And when you’re a corporation under investigation or facing prosecution, that means the government dropping enforcement actions against you. In some cases, it may even mean receiving pardons in cases in which guilty pleas have already been entered, or retractions of settlements already entered into.”
Bank of America, Capital One, Coinbase, DuPont, and JPMorgan are among the corporations that donated to Trump’s inauguration and subsequently had federal enforcement cases dismissed.
Public Citizen noted that Google, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, could benefit from the Trump Justice Department’s decision during an ongoing antitrust case to scrap part of a “proposed breakup plan requiring Google to sell off AI businesses.”
As the article notes, dropped federal enforcement cases against corporations that paid millions to kiss the ring at the Klepto Kaiser’s inauguration isn’t the only way large corporate actors like Apple, Google, and Coinbase have directly benefited from fascist collaboration. Apple in particular must be delighted with Trump’s decision to exempt most of its imports from his absurd tariffs; which seems like a ridiculously good return on its investment of a million dollars for Der Leader’s inauguration. Finally, while I personally don’t care that much about the regime’s decision to monetize the Easter Egg Roll by accepting corporate sponsors, it does speak to the crass levels of greed and corruption the administration and its lawless president are willing to indulge in.
On some level I understand that right now it’s hard to care that much about bog standard open corruption between the Trump regime and corporate actors happy to normalize and facilitate fascism for five points a share. The Pork Reich is snatching protestors off the street, fighting a war that doesn’t exist against a gang that isn’t invading us while trafficking migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador, and Elon Musk is firing thousands of federal workers in a scheme to pay for billionaire tax cuts that will absolutely get people killed. There’s a lot going on, and “rich capitalists are doing something terrible for their own financial benefit” almost doesn’t rate as “news” in an environment like the one we’re living in.
The fact is however it’s precisely because of all the other evil fascist shit is going on that private sector collaboration with the Trump regime is such an important story. As I’ve explained elsewhere: fascism costs American society a horrifying toll both financially and in terms of human suffering, but the installation and operation of a fascist regime can be quite profitable for some. These companies, many of whom also contribute to Republican election funds and political action committees, absolutely know what Trump is and what he means to do. How do I know? Because Downmarket Mussolini and his minions say the quiet parts out loud on the regular. These rich prick CEOs just don’t give a fuck, and are happy to help a fascist government normalize its authoritarian activities and odious ideology by touting the support they receive from respected American corporations; as long as doing so pays off on their bottom line.
There are many reasons for the rise of a successful fascist movement in an America that has always embraced what today we recognize as fascist ideology; trying to pin it down to one specific factor is a fool’s errand. But if and when the history of this era is written, I’m willing to bet that rampant greed and a ruling class that lusts for power over the rest of us will rank pretty highly on the list of contributing factors to this political moment.
Anti-Trans Politics Affecting Canadian Election
The fascist right’s war on trans existence is both opportunistic and ideological, and as such it is not bound by imaginary lines on a map. The successes of the anti-trans pogrom in one Pig Empire nation, furthers the goals of anti-trans bigots in every other Pig Empire nation as well. Now the all-too-often bipartisan support of an anti-trans pogrom in both the US and Britain is having a distorting effect on Canadian politics; just as that country approaches its next federal election.
We must be ready to counter the right’s obsession with trans people
“The 2025 Canadian federal election campaign is underway, and it arrives in a moment where it seems like conservative media and politicians just can’t get enough of trans people. They’re seemingly addicted to discourse about pronouns and bathroom access. They’re fixated on high school girls’ volleyball, gender markers on passports, puberty blocker prescriptions or even haircuts. They accuse their opponents of forcing “radical gender ideology” onto young people, as they strip away peoples’ rights to healthcare and self-identification.
The first part of this century saw progressive politicians campaign on expanding LGBTQ2S+ rights—see: Obama-era expansions to marriage equality or Canada-wide “X” gender markers—while their right-wing opponents largely remained silent. But the script has flipped. Now, Donald Trump has won an election on the back of campaign ads like “Kamala is for they/them” and turned questions about the very existence of trans people into a Day One executive order. We’ve seen bad science like the Cass Review in the U.K. guide public health policy in that country and beyond, and U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer campaign on restricting trans women from women’s spaces. Yes, the current anti-trans movement was born in the United Kingdom and United States, but make no mistake: it has found roots in Canada too.
Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre has embraced much of the anti-trans discourse from abroad. Last year, he spoke out against puberty blockers for young people and trans women in women’s spaces, arguing that “female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for ‘biological males.’” And this January, following Trump’s inauguration, he parroted the U.S. president’s stance about being aware of “only two genders.”
Reading this piece through the lens our present anti-trans pogrom in America was difficult because it reminded me of a time only years ago, when the anti-trans pogrom and the fascist right’s obsession with genitalia was still a marginal issue in US politics, and spurned on by an establishment that doesn’t give a damn about trans people, our society missed a golden opportunity to stand up for trans rights and shove these weird nazi underpants police into the proverbial locker. Although I won’t claim the Canadian ruling class cares any more for trans lives than the UK and US establishments do, it’s very clear to me that the reason Canadian public figures in the fascist movement have to play a double game of admission and denial around the subject of trans rights is because the political establishment in Canada has at least made a stab at defending trans people’s right to exist in society; with the exception of s few governments in fascist controlled areas. Indeed as recently as the fall of 2024, three “conservative” parties in Canada fought provincial elections on the back of anti-trans propaganda and all three of them lost.
This contrasts of course with the British and American trans experience, which has seen bipartisan support for anti-trans policies and the complete surrender of the mainstream “liberal” center on the issue of trans rights. This capitulation to fascist arguments about why trans people don’t deserve the same medical and participatory rights as cis people do has in turn, not only accelerated the anti-trans pogrom but perversely allowed fascist political movements to win entire elections on the back of drummed up moral panics about trans people. The Canadian example (so far) demonstrates that the only way forward that doesn’t end in both trans eliminationist politics and victory for fascist political forces at the ballot box, is to fight back against the anti-trans narratives driving these moral panics. Which is probably a lesson we shouldn’t have to learn from Canada in the US at least, because our fascists were losing elections fought on these subjects too until the liberal establishment decided to abandon trans people to our present fate.
Of course, I would strongly advise Canadians not to get too confident in their country’s support for trans rights precisely because of our American experience. If the rise of the anti-trans pogrom that helped put Trump in office did nothing else, it demonstrated that these freaks aren’t going to just go away because they lost the debate on trans rights a few times; it takes constant vigilance and pushback to keep these nazis in the weirdo genital inspector box where they belong.
Trump Would Burn the World for Capital
It certainly isn’t a big secret that Trump and the larger Pork Reich are no friends to our environment or the struggle against climate crisis, but I’m not sure your average American is aware of how much this administration resembles cartoon supervillains in an old episode of Captain Planet. For example, just over a week ago Downmarket Mussolini signed an almost certainly illegal executive order trying to rewind so many years of environmental laws and regulations, that it speaks directly to the vast scope of his plans to burn the planet to ash for profit as quickly as possible.
“Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was “beyond delusional” for Trump to attempt to repeal “every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order.”
“Trump’s farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident,” said Hartl. “This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court.”
Let me assure you that you’re not hallucinating and you read that quote correctly; with the stroke of a pen Trump literally tried to wipe out five decades worth of laws like the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, by essentially demanding various departments of the government “sunset” environmental protection regulations and cease enforcing them by September 30th, 2025. Furthermore while absolutely none of this is legal, the government is once again asserting a rarely used procedural authority to try and expand its power to act unilaterally and in direct violation of the law.
“In a memo, the White House wrote that “in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act.”
“That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'” said the White House.”
As the article notes, it is shockingly disingenuous and absurd for the Trump regime to argue that regulations on air quality, fossil fuel production, environmental pollution control, and nuclear fucking waste are “contrary to the public interest.” Unfortunately that really doesn’t matter because once again it’s clear that the public interest was never the point of the president’s order. The crass level of corruption and self-serving exercise of power the Klepto Kaiser regularly partakes in makes it obvious that this is all just a way to reward his capitalist donors; without having to tolerate pushback from a public that cares very much about clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and a world on fire. Fascist is as fascist does I guess.
Will he get away with it? Well let’s hope not; but at the intersection of Trump’s emergency powers granted by invoking made up crises, and the unorthodox weaponization of procedural rules towards purposes they were never intended for that we’ve seen the regime already employ, Der Leader has gotten away with an awful lot of fascist bullshit I for one thought was strictly illegal. Given that, I can’t say I’m sleeping confidently at night now that this world-burning executive order exists.
Why Ultra-Wealthy Americans Love Trump
If you want to understand why extremely wealthy people in American society are lining up behind the Trump regime’s fascist order, consider the situation from the perspective of a billionaire surrounded by billions of people victimized by their extractivist way of life, on a boiling planet that’s running out of time to avoid a climate apocalypse. These rich pricks have no intention of surrendering the capitalist order, and the ultra-wealthy know they’ve hoarded so much of the wealth that it’s only a matter of time before the peasants show up at their castles with pitchforks; and as such one of their few options to prevent stop uprisings against their rule without having to surrender their ill-gotten wealth, is eliminating civil rights and building out a fascist police state. Trump isn’t good at many things, but ignoring the constitution and empowering a police state certainly is among his limited number of talents.
Top 19 ‘Truly Superwealthy’ US Families Grew $1 Trillion Richer Last Year: Analysis
“A new analysis by a leading chronicler of the United States’ exploding inequality shows that the 19 richest American households added $1 trillion to their collective fortunes last year and saw their share of the nation’s wealth jump at a record-shattering pace.
The analysis by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the 19 wealthiest U.S. families now control 1.8%—or $2.6 trillion—of the nation’s total household wealth.
In 2024, those ultrarich households saw the largest single-year wealth increase on record.”
Please understand that while the maintenance and increase of this level of wealth inequity is certainly political, I’m not trying to imply it’s partisan. These numbers are from 2024 when Biden was president, but I think it’s safe to say the figures under a Trump administration that is absolutely willing to burn your grandparents on the pyre of capitalist accumulation, won’t be significantly different. These guys stack wealth under neoliberal Democrat presidents, and build fortresses with public money during fascist Republican presidencies; when you’re rich and powerful enough in a free market fundamentalist society, it’s pretty easy to engineer advantageous outcomes no matter what political factors do to the markets. Furthermore, given the propaganda about “crime” in our society it’s easy enough for wealthy donors to guarantee that no matter who wins a given election, the police state that will protect them from the folks they’ve stolen a livable existence from, only grows stronger.
Perhaps most importantly however, the material realities of our present global situation don’t change when power shifts from neoliberal parties, to fascist ones; or vice versa. The planet is still on fire, capital accumulation still depends on the fossil fuels that are killing us, and billions of lives still hang in the balance. The reality that capitalism goes, or a planet that can comfortably support eight billion human beings does, has not changed under either neoliberalism or its kissing cousin fascism. The ultra-wealthy know that its only a matter of time before the billions of people they intend to sacrifice to keep the line going up even during a climate apocalypse, realize what’s going on and come for them; because they have no intention of surrendering the way of life that gives them so much luxury and power, and that makes class uprisings inevitable.
Understood through that lens then, the uber-rich’s support for the fascist Trump regime makes perfect sense. They want your civil rights curtailed, they want it to be illegal to assemble in protest, they want a fascist police state that polices resistance ideology; all for the purpose of keeping the people they’re commodifying and intend to sacrifice to the money god, afraid to act. They might object to Trump’s most absurd economic policies, but the ultra-wealthy know he’s going to harden borders, empower a fascist police state, and strip the civil rights of their class enemies – and they’re counting on that strategy to get them through the literal end of the world.
RFK Jr is Creating a Eugenicist Nightmare
The problem with discussing RFK Jr’s attacks on autistic Americans is that we’re talking about two separate, but deeply intertwined issues. Kennedy is indisputably pushing a reactionary conspiracy theory about vaccines causing autism to justify a HHS “study” that will undoubtedly “confirm” his conspiracy. Furthermore the Health and Human Services Secretary’s comments about autistic people are factually wrong, ablest, eugenicist, and dehumanizing. In other words, even if you believe there’s nothing but sheer ignorance and hubris behind RFK Jr’s behavior, everything about his fraudulent quest to “fix” autism is insulting, reactionary, and dangerous.
The truth however is that none of this is happening in a vacuum; Kennedy does work for a fascist regime employing eliminationist rhetoric, Kennedy himself has already demonstrated a profound disregard for human lives, and the unhinged eugenicist themes in RFK Jr’s arguments about autistic children in particular, do point to an even darker purpose behind his odious actions. Listening to Kennedy speak, one is forced to wonder what he intends to do when, not if, it turns out he can’t “fix” the existence of autistic people? Which is why news that the National Institutes of Health is now compiling highly sensitive and identifying medical records, as well as creating “a national registry to track Americans with autism” is extremely alarming.
RFK Jr. Seeks Broad Access to Health Records for “Autism Research”
“Disability advocates argue that rather than investing in surveillance-style data collection or reviving long-debunked theories, the federal government should be focusing on supporting the needs of autistic people. This includes funding home care, accessible education, and individualized services. However, the Trump administration has stalled disability rights cases, moved to cut health care funding, and is attempting to dismantle disability protections in public schools.”
Hey, if so-called “conservatives” want me to stop comparing the Trump regime to the Nazi Party, they should stop doing the exact same things Hitler and his minions did on the road to Auschwitz. There are literally no good reasons whatsoever for the US government to be compiling a “national registry” of autistic Americans, and that’s without even considering that the HHS Secretary seems to regard them as something less than human and a drag on “productive” society.
The first thing a fascist government has to do if it wants to mass target specific groups of people in our society for confinement, suppression, or elimination is to establish lists of targets; which is why the Trump regime is funneling previously restricted government data on migrants to ICE, and anti-trans eliminationist GOP officials keep demanding the medical records of trans people. Now I’m supposed to pretend its totally fine to give identifying medical data on autistic Americans to a fascist collaborator conspiracy crank who doesn’t care if his woo nonsense kills children, and considers autistic people to be broken and in need of fixing? Are you fucking kidding me? There is no way you can convince me that this story ends well.
I can’t predict the future, but everything about Kennedy’s time in government so far tells me that dismissing him as a woo-reactionary crank is a mistake. We’re talking about a guy who claims to be trying to “solve” autism, while simultaneously lying about, demonizing, and dehumanizing autistic people on live TV. Kennedy knows his anti-vax rhetoric is bullshit, and he knows that he’s not going to “cure” his “epidemic.” If he didn’t know these things before he took the job, there were plenty of actual doctors at HHS already who told him so; to say nothing of the numerous advocates, rights agencies, and autistic people themselves who’ve pointedly told Kennedy how harmful and unwelcome his efforts to “help” have been.
So if RFK Jr knows without a doubt that none of this ends in helping autistic people at all, what’s his plan here? Let me make that question even easier; can you think of any possible way whatever Kennedy is trying to do is about helping autistic people, or protecting public health? You don’t build a surveillance apparatus to monitor a targeted group in the broader society unless you intend to use it. What about anything Kennedy has said or done suggests to you that he intends to use it to accomplish anything good? Right, the best case scenario I can come up with is legalizing quack “therapies” to prey on parents willing to try and “torture the autism out” of their kids, and every other possibility I can think of is arguably even more fascist, eliminationist, and terrifying.
Everything about Kennedy’s behavior so far points towards something horrifying and sinister; RFK Jr isn’t your drunk uncle, he’s a danger to us all that must be stopped before its too late to dodge a eugenicist nightmare.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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