Eugenics and the elimination of “weakness” is very literally at the core of every fascist regime that has ever existed. The Nazis were famous anti-science and the very first people they imprisoned were the disabled and chronically ill. This is absolutely classic fascism.
It’s because fascists hate the weakness in themselves so they want to extinguish it in everyone else. This is why comedy is so important in the face of a fascist, they cannot tolerate being the subject of laughter.
And people they considered "mentally deficient".
RFK is working through the avian population now with his theory - the fittest of the group will survive and go forth and multiply. The weak will die. We’re next!!!
Kinda weird how often the “survival of the fittest as policy” people are supported by the “evolution is just a theory” crowd
They believe in Social Darwinism but not Actual Darwinism. Those who even bother to think about it probably justify it as believing in “microevolution” but not “macroevolution”, which is basically like believing in inches but not miles.
Oooo, I love that last analogy. Consider it yoinked!
Feel free, I yoinked it myself!
Not just imprisoned, the first people they executed were the disabled.
The Nazis used the killing of the disabled, a program named T4, as a test balloon for how far they could go killing minorities under the very eyes of the German population.
Trump was planning a "big win" by executing all the Death Row inmates before Biden commuted the sentences of all but a few. He's trying to reverse the sentences and sent the inmates to ADX. People finally noticed Georgia and Florida are on a Death Row execution spree and wonder why.
And many prisoners are disabled. This country is not above executing people with severe intellectual disabilities.
Trump is in love with the idea of all the people he dislikes no longer existing in "his US." Criminals, brown immigrants, black immigrants, Muslim immigrants, "drug dealers", the openly weird, the loudly outspoken, and the disabled.
trans people are high on that list.
Most of us fall under "openly weird" and "loudly outspoken".
yeah, but my point was that this admin has very specific "target #1s" and they are immigrants, trans people, and the disabled. cis folks listening every target class under the sun but failing to name trans folks is....sus?
It's like they're trying to all lives matter this shit, but in reverse. They really don't want to acknowledge who is first up for this.
thank you. this was my point. like I'm not being crazy here am I? it felt like op went out of their way to avoid saying the word trans.
The list is long.
anyone who isnt a straight cis white man above the age of 40 who worships him like the golden calf is on that list
Also nazis focused heavily on autism at first
Appreciate the post, but I need to correct one detail. The Nazis didn’t “imprison” disabled people. They were already imprisoned in asylums & institutions when they took power. The Nazis murdered them using injections, gas vans, & sometimes starvation & neglect. Google “Aktion T4” for details.
I believe it’s worse. Not the first imprisoned. The first killed.
THANK YOU. Literally the fucks had PROGRAMS to do this very same thing. I don't know what OP is on about.
📌
The media portrayal of Nazis has melted so many brains. They were brute unthinking savages.
And the mentally ill, though they often go hand in hand with the disabled in cases like this. Still - mental illness was used as a justification by the Nazis to imprison lgbt+ and others.
Disabled people have been warning about this EXACT SCENARIO since 2016 and raising the alarm that if Trump installs a fascist government *this is what would happen* We very literally predicted all of this. None of it is a surprise. People just don’t listen to the disabled so you are caught off guard
Well said. I saw the original post because it was reposted by Alt CDC. Very disappointed in them for that. Do better, @altcdc.altgov.info!
Hi! Always aiming to do better but what did we do wrong in this case?
Hi please scroll up and read my thread, I explain in detail. The issue here is the attempt to separate eugenics from fascism, when what RFK is doing is in not any way unique to fascism and in fact explicitly part and parcel. And suggestions otherwise is deadly to the disability community.
I would assume it’s choosing to share a post that blames this administration’s attacks on public health as due to mental illness instead of being intrinsic to fascism—especially since mentally ill and disabled people are in fact the favored targets of fascism
Yep the ableism of connecting evil to “madness” is a huge problem.
Yes, all of that, and the fact that disabled ppl have been sounding the alarm about this for FOREVER. Eugenics and fascism go hand in hand. Disabled people know this! If anyone is surprised by RFK Jr's eugenics at this point, that just means they haven't been listening to disabled people. /1
And for Alt CDC to share that post comes across like they haven't really been listening to disabled people, either. Not listening = not valuing and not respecting, IMO. Just discouraging to see from an account that describes itself as being run by public health experts. 2/2
They don't listen to trans people either 😕 They don't listen to anyone who's actually affected by these policies
I don’t know how we could possibly be louder. There’s no explanation other than they’re intentionally muting our voices.
They are not just muting us, they’re deliberately ignoring us. They’re imitating ostriches.
“Of course you would say that, it’s in your best interests, therefore I can dismiss it as self-serving dishonesty without guilt” is such a basic white Christian mantra justifying anything.
Stunning that five years into a pandemic that has killed *checks* 7,099,904 people, and people aren’t conscious of the influence of eugenics on government health policies
Btw if anyone wants to check for themself, I got that from the who. data.who.int/dashboards/c...
I’m genuinely baffled by this take and I also think trying to separate RFK from fascism and pin it on mental illness is really, really dangerous.
I mean, why do they think all these people were specifically chosen to be in these positions? It all serves the purpose, this is all by design.
No accidents
Tbh, feels like the take of someone who agreed with, or at least was cool with, eugenics when it was targeted toward significantly disabled people only, and is now suddenly concerned/noticing once the criteria for who RFK wants to murder is expanding...
...and there is more....
Except academics have been calling out Trump the most. The press have been far more problematic in their acquiescence and enabling of Trump's fascism.
This guy isn’t an academic he’s just a clown
A clown who thinks he's an academic
He wrote one of the most detailed books of the Rwandan genocide. He’s not a clown at all. A lot of fascism scholarship is focused on the ways explicit violence is enacted not disability rights. Asshole take here to discount his work because his research is different from other commenters. Sheesh.
His "research". I learned that shit in high school history decades ago.
You read about the Rwandan genocide in high school? I must be older than you are. I found his book to be very moving and still find insights about it. Shocking to see someone minimize the tragedy in Rwanda as “that shit in high school history”
No. I read about WWIi fascism's in high school and knew about its connection to targeting disabled folks. Your obsession with Rwandan is frankly weird. No one was talking about that.
I’ll bet that at least one of the belligerent factions had some sort of mythology fabricated out of superstition and some precolonial sense of identity that they used to justify their atrocities
You're kinda just an asshole for snearing at people, especially disabled people, who are more informed about fascism and don't turn a blind eye to the inherent eugenics (read: ableism) of it. Sheesh.
oh wow he wrote a book one time about a different thing nowai
FWIW, nobody is born a clown. A clown is something we become.
A person can know a lot about one thing. That doesn’t make them an expert in everything and that also doesn’t preclude them from saying wildly ignorant and ableist things. And if a person is an expert then they SHOULD be including an understanding of disability and not doing that is just ableism.
Isn’t giving any white male “expert” carte blanche to just say anything and believe them without a second of skepticism something that we are moving away from as a society? His comments are blatanty false and very dangerous and it is completely reasonable and in fact necessary to correct him.
And also: “A lot of fascism scholarship is focused on the ways explicit violence is enacted not disability rights” is an absolutely horrific and bigoted hateful omission and not a reflection of reality. That should be a red flag not a justification for ignorance.
People aren't discounting his work. They're dismissing his bs take like they should. I get we were raised to think everything about the US is special and unique. But our fascism is just standard issue fascism.
I think calling him “a clown who thinks he’s an academic” is discounting his work. The Rwandan genocide he wrote about was not marked by the state dismantling the public health system. It’s possible to treat people with dignity when their background knowledge is different from our own.
Again. High school knowledge of WWII is sufficient. Save your attempted condescension for your students. Bet they love it. 👋
Imagine a well celebrated and published physicist who specializes in particle physics. Now imagine they said that "Venus isn't a planet, it's obviously somethings else" Would they NOT be a clown? They're published in the field! We should treat them with dignity as they double down on lunacy!
Nobody said anything about the Rwandan genocide except you.
Would it be a shock to consider that some academics who just study an issue, miss critical details that people who actually live in the issues know? Due to willful bias or sloppy research, which includes not listening to people they don't consider "academic enough" to listen to and learn from.
If he's that knowledgeable and educated, then that makes his take even worse than it already is. You understand that, right?
The fact he's a genocide scholar and doesn't know this makes it more embarrassing, not less. Thanks for that addition. I'm more shocked and horrified now.
As for his “scholarly” credentials, highest attained degree is an MFA in creative writing
Saying that destroying scientific and medical institutions and the people that rely on them isn't fascism sure is creative writing. He's doing his degree proud there. He's creating fascist apologia.
i....... how do you call the way fascism expresses its violence and how it treats the disabled different categories?
By not believing disabled people are people.
I’m saying that a guy who studied a rapid genocide by a people group who didn’t seize the apparatus of government has a blind spot around fascist regimes who did. Admittedly wrote that sentence poorly. Character limits, no edit button, and comment threads are not great ways for me to communicate.
fair enough, but “he’s speaking from ignorance” isn’t really a defense so much as an explanation, especially if he styles himself an expert on fascism and has such major blind spots about it
he should stop doing clown shit
Oh so he’s a dilettante, even worse
Good call, it’s this exactly — folks who seethingly hate the disabled now worrying that the able will get treated like the disabled
wait until they learn that if we live long enough we all will become disabled ableists freaking out now that the poem is playing out and they realize we're 4/5ths of the way through it
And we are super duper past the point of letting chuds like Philip say stuff like that without saying “yes we know what your deal is”
Aktion-T4 anyone?
I know it's a trope at this point but even "1984" explains the shutting down of scientific institutions
People always want to blame destructive behaviors on mental illness. It's easier for them to deal with if those behaviors are caused by something "other" and beyond human control. Meanwhile, it's almost always because of choices we have made as a society. 1/3
Eugenics is learned superiority and indifference/dehumanization. It's not even hate, really. It's just seeing certain people as lesser. Prejudice is learned hatred. Violence and aggression are often caused by environmental factors that we can eliminate, but choose not to. 2/3
So much of what we see that causes pain and suffering is a choice. It doesn't have to be this way. But we let it happen. Admitting that means being responsible for the pain we see, though. That's a lot. 3/3
I’ve known since high school (graduated 1982) that fascists target the disabled, as well as various ethnic groups, religions, LGBTQ, any perceived opponents, etc. It’s a travesty that history is not well taught.
Just a bizarrely ignorant thing to post with such confidence. You don't have to dig deep *at all* to find eugenicist and anti-medical science views among any given 20th century fascist regime.
you don't even have to dig deep to find eugenics in half of the liberal regimes
I really think people are trying to justify fascism to themselves. Like there are only issues because Trump has evil viziers.
Otherwise Democrats might be forced to confront the many evil things they’ve done as proto-fascist.
These takes come from people typically who have a very venomous attitude about the disabled. Folks who want the disabled to all die for the parking space, but also shriek “vote blue no matter who” etc for their “side’s” clicks
Seriously dangerous. Co-signed, Erin. Thank you for this.
And reprehensibly shameful
It also aligns with sociopathic affluenza - they're so rich & utterly detached from reality that they're callously apathetic and/or clueless on the impacts of their greed. Cutting cancer research & vaccine production to shovel more money to their donor owners. Disappearing innocent people, esp kids.
Nietzsche managed to die just in time cause he was weak, sickly, and beholden to his mom and sis who made his work famous. He was the Un-Ubermensch!
It's only a matter of time before we start hearing the phrase "useless eaters" bandied about. 🤬😫
OP needs to look up the terms "life unworthy of life" and "useless eaters" to understand just how much this is 100% classic traditional fascism, from the Fascism region of Fascism.
First targeted group of mass executions tbh
Thank you! Holy hell is that person out to lunch.
Philip clearly does not have a single disabled person on his following list.
Nor has he read up on history. I learned about some really fucked up eugenics of the Nazis in HIGH SCHOOL (in the 90's). The Lebensborn program alone proves him wrong.
Philip wrote one of the best books on the Genocide in Rwanda. It almost read as fiction. I think he was using literary license to describe the situation here, not academic language maybe. He's consistently described the Trump era as fascist.
that’s worse then. he should know better
That makes this take from him even worse then, and it was already extremely embarrassing.
I couldn’t even formulate a response, I was too stunned. Thank you for putting words to my thoughts because I couldn’t articulate anything beyond “what the hell are you on about!?”.
Respectfully, anyone - including white nationalist Christian Trump loving GOP voting MAGAs - can get long covid And measles doesn’t care who your parents vote for. As Aryan eugenics destroying vaccine infrastructure has some flaws
They don't particularly care who lives, as long as THOSE people die. The elites will still get vaccinated, they just want to make vaccines prohibitively expensive so WE all die.
The “weakest should go to the wall” philosophy has been around….for a while.
