The twice-elected president claimed ten years ago that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and kill someone without losing any votes while running for office in Iowa. One could wonder if he would lose any if he shot 51,000 people on Fifth Avenue annually. We know the solution now. No, he wouldn’t.
We have evidence, both from the polling that followed and the number of individuals who would perish annually as a result of the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Although more Americans hate the measure than favor it, polling indicates that the figures are comparable to the president’s low approval rating, which has never prevented him from winning reelection twice. Additionally, he wins if you exclude the polling from disloyal pinko communist states like Vermont, New York, and the Treasonous Three on the West Coast. Load and lock.
Yale School of Public Health academics summarized their findings about the Big Beautiful Bill’s impact on healthcare in a letter to the Senate in June. They discovered that by 2034, removing or tightening Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage will result in the loss of 51,000 lives annually, including 13,000 lives from the repeal of minimum staffing requirements in nursing homes (also known as the Shirley Jackson Lottery Rule) and nearly 9,000 lives from Obamacare restrictions alone.
It’s one method of lowering the government’s responsibility for the lives lost. Don’t simply deny them federal assistance. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. In any case, they are all likely minorities and impoverished. It’s similar to bringing back the eugenics movement of a century ago, which was supported by notable figures like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
The Greek term eugenios, which means nobility of birth or well-born, is where our word “eugenics” originates. The current use of the word is less honorable. According to Merriam-Webster, it is the practice or support of carefully regulated selective breeding of human populations (such as through sterilization) in order to enhance the genetic makeup of the population. The first cousin of Francis Galton Charles Darwin coined the term in English in 1883, although it was never used more widely than in the United States.
The American Babbitts believed they were on the right side of history a century ago when they viewed eugenics as being as revolutionary as, say, artificial intelligence today. Eugenics was a favorite of the Harvard racists who created the Immigration Restriction League to keep out shithole country migrants.One of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith campaigned for a cabinet position in the White House as the Secretary of Health and Eugenics.Theodore Roosevelt was a huge supporter because, in 1916, he argued that having men of good birth have their gonads amputated was the “capital sin of civilization,” arguing that the true point is to encourage the fit and discourage the unfit to live.
We’re approaching the centennial of one of Holmes’ most well-known majority rulings, in which he declared forced sterilization to be constitutional. He wrote, “It is better for all the world if society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility.”It’s enough of three generations of idiots. The codification of natural selection was something Holmes could be proud of while enjoying his afternoon Madeira, but it wasn’t as much as tossing malformed newborns against rocks as it had been in Sparta.
Sterilization initiatives were implemented in thirty states. California’s prosperity was so great that Hitler took inspiration from it. Just as the president isn’t mowing people down in the middle of an avenue, neither is what we’re doing with health care. However, the outcome is either worse or the same. People will die unnecessarily every year so the wealthy can get their tax cuts and the ideologues can cut costs as indifferently as they cut down lives implicitly considered less necessary.
The severe cuts to SNAP, the food stamp program, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the deregulation of safety from trucks to airplanes to factories that emit greenhouse gases and pollution, as well as the cuts to scientific research and the National Institutes of Health, all of which create their own mass graves, are not included in the grim actuarials of the Yale researchers.
The cover story of a recent Economist was about thegreat successes in the war on cancer, that war Richard Nixon declared in 1971 just before he declared the less successful one on drugs. Leukemia in children was once considered a death sentence, but now it has a 90% survival rate. Cervical cancers and the kind of throat cancer I had are approaching eradication simply through vaccines. Those successes have resulted in large part from the billions of dollars the U.S. government has invested in the National Institutes of Health and in American universities, both of which have been on the cutting edge of life-saving discoveries. But those investments, too,are getting slashed.
The administration s fans call it doge. More accurately, it s turning back the clock to preventable mass deaths. It s like living through a cold civil war, the chosen ones on one side, the losers on the other.That s the land of opportunity for you. It is not even Holmes. It s back to Sparta, and not just with babies.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
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