The Eugenics of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and MAGA
Eugenics Is Connected to Racism and Sexism. All Are Biocidal.
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Robert Kennedy, Jr., who last week thought it a grand idea to allow bird flu’s spread through the United States’ poultry farms, wants to imprison me in his concentration camp.
Actually, he uses the Orwellian newspeak of “wellness farms.” What reason would he give for his proposed crime against humanity? Like nearly 13% of the American population, I take prescribed antidepressants to treat my clinical depression.
Along with this illness, I live with multiple sclerosis that can also cause depression. On one of RFK Jr.’s “wellness farms,” he would deny me my antidepressant and Kesimpta--my MS disease modifying therapy that slows MS progression--and force me to do physical labor. The same attitude would apply for the disabled whose Medicaid benefit is being stripped.
I am one of the 35 million women living in the U.S. with a disability. I also belong to a demographic of women who find difficulty in finding work at a living wage that can accommodate them. RFK, Jr.’s “wellness farms” and ending Medicaid for millions are not just ridiculous. They are inhumane, racist and misogynistic.
Mind you that RFK, Jr. holds no medical or scientific degree. Despite his lack of medical qualifications and credibility, he believes his and MAGA’s vicious policies would fulfill his ableist and inhumane mission to cure and fix me.
Before 77 million American voters and 86 million non-voters returned the adjudicated insurrectionist, adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump to the presidency, RFK, Jr.'s proposed “wellness farms" could just be considered a sick joke. But now his ableist and eugenicist ideas are no laughing matter. Instead, they have become a terrifying reality for disabled women like me.
Worst of all, RFK, Jr.’s ghoulish and dystopian ideas feed into Trump’s ableist and eugenicist stances that he’s held for decades. Eugenics is founded on racism and misogyny. It rejects disabled women and reinforces the patriarchal idea that women are mere vessels for reproduction to produce “superior” offspring.
My fear is not hyperbole nor misplaced. During the 2024 Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris warned that Trump would unleash the military on peaceful dissenters and immigrants. That promise has now been fulfilled. Yet while he chickens out of his harsh and ridiculous tariffs, he never chickens out of his cruelty especially toward women and other marginalized communities.
His big, bad and biocidal bill that passed two weeks and he signed into law on July 4 will harm the chronically ill and disabled. Back in February, The Nation published “Donald Trump’s Next Diversity Target: People With Disabilities.”
The author Sam Gustin addressed funding cuts for disability and Medicaid benefits, eliminating federal programs that help the disabled, executive orders that roll back DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) and Trump’s own history of embracing and promoting eugenics. Matthew Borous, a political sociologist in disability, concurred in his essay for The Conversation published a few weeks later.
Trump’s welcoming of RFK, Jr. and Elon Musk, the latter of whom has formed the new America Party (one letter off from the late segregationist George Wallace's American Independent Party), into his Nazi 2.0 fold should not be surprising and should not be ignored. All three men have promoted ableism and eugenics almost as long as Trump. After his Trump-regime expulsion, Musk used the word “retard” in a juvenile hate Tweet.
By viewing illness and disability as flaws to be repaired or eliminated, RFK, Jr. embraces the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. Almost as galling is that he has compared those prescribed antidepressants and ADHD medications to recovering drug addicts like himself.
For Musk, in addition to his racist and misogynistic Great Replacement desire to populate the world with his white-race brood, his non-transparent Neurolink wants to “cure” the disabled. Despite Neurolink killing test monkeys, the FDA still allowed him to insert his Neurolink devices into human subjects.
Trump, RFK, Jr. and Musk are not outliers in their desire to erase and fix the disabled. For centuries, the lives and voices of the disabled have been silenced or disregarded. Karen Yoshida in her 2014 article for Disability & Society noted how objectifying the experiences of the disabled denies and silences their voice. In turn, this silence and denial ultimately designs a cultural viewpoint that disability and chronic illness equal defective.
Decades after the evils caused by eugenics, i.e., the Buck v. Bell U.S. Supreme Court ruling and Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 euthanasia program, people still advocate that eugenics work and remain viable. In a now deleted Twitter/X thread, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued that eugenics work in humans like it does in animals.
Even medical ethicists parse language to defend eugenics and promote scientific advancement. Nicholas Agar in his 2018 Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics article claimed gene editing needs to be viewed as “morally problematic” instead of always “morally wrong.”
Medical historian Miriam Rich vehemently disagrees though. Her work focuses on health disparities regarding race and ability. While a doctoral student at Harvard University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory awarded her its Sydney Brenner Research Scholarship. She asserted during her oral presentation that past eugenics use to achieve human improvement “fail[ed] to consider the specific social and political context [that] allowed [past scientists] to ignore that in practice, these eugenic interventions were reinforcing and exacerbating existing discrimination based on class, race, immigration status, disability.”
On July 17’s Good Trouble Lives On protest and march, the disability community, caregivers and disability justice allies and accomplices must join the collective dissent. It can be by protesting and marching in public. If one is unable to join a march, protest can be accomplished by posting on social media or donating to variety of organizations that support and boost disability justice, such as the Consortium for Constituents with Disabilities (CCD), the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and the National Disability Rights Network.
The 1941 Nazi eugenics propaganda film I Accuse (Ich klag an) normalized the extermination of the physically and intellectually disabled along with those battling mental illness that occurred in Nazi Germany’s Aktion T-4 Program. The woman featured in the film who committed suicide lived with multiple sclerosis like me. The Nazi’s euthanasia program has often been viewed as The Final Solution’s rehearsal.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously declared in his acceptance speech, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
In any peaceful way we are able to, we all need to call out and work to end to Trump’s eugenicist and racist regime that raised a “red flag alert for genocide” from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security on the first day of his second term. Every human being has a moral and ethical obligation to ensure that his redux term also be his last.
He is insane and depraved. He is emblematic of the depths to which this country has descended.