Harming disabled people was always part of the project.
I'm really concerned because a lot of people I talk to, or see posting in forums or on social media, seem to not realize that disabled people are being targeted by anti-DEI and anti-woke policy.
I keep seeing people saying things like that they're stopping funding for disability services at schools and such because "transition" or other "woke" terms related to trans kids etc are in some paperwork. And there's some amusement about this apparently. But this isn't just a paperwork gaffe. I'm just really concerned people still are not getting it. DEI is DEIA and the A is for accessibility, which is a term which refers to disability accessibility, and policies and programs around this accommodate disabled people. The disabled people, and caring about disabled kids or disability issues is itself considered "woke" as much as trans issues or civil rights or environmental protection. And they want to stop ADA, civil rights, and they have effectively already stopped funding environmental cleanup of former abandoned coal mine lands.
So I guess I"m just going to keep saying this, in different ways, about different aspects, and hope that somebody in the void hears this. And maybe someone out there, you will think to mention this to someone you know who you may now suspect doesn't realize the implications are real. This isn't just about stopping people "sounding woke", it's about the actual material conditions of people as a result of these (unlawful) edicts coming out of the White House and Elon Musk, but a lot of people do not realize this. It's easy to really think that of course everyone's on the same page so you can just joke about this. I assure you though – often they are not! They think it's just superficial gripes about "woke words" and as long as you avoid saying those woke things, nothing really changes. but that's not true.
I'm really concerned because a lot of people I talk to, or see posting in forums or on social media, seem to not realize that disabled people are being targeted by the anti-woke anti-DEI policies and propaganda. Diversity includes disabled people, and these people hate anything to do with including anyone who's disabled. Recently Chris Rufo who sets the agenda for these right-wing cultural revolution projects apparently said they should get rid of ASL interpreters!
Opinion | Criticizing sign language interpreters as wildfires rage is heartless and outrageous - Eric Garcia - Updated Wed, January 15, 2025 at 10:46 AM EST On Friday, Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who played a major role in whipping up people against critical race theory, quote-tweeted a video of a press conference by the Los Angeles County Emergency Management about the area wildfires that included a man using American Sign Language. “I’m sorry, but we have to stop with the ridiculous sign language interpreters, who turn serious press conferences into a farce,” Rufo wrote. “There are closed captions on all broadcast channels and streaming services. No wild human gesticulators necessary.” Users added community notes to refute Rufo’s claims, saying accurately that closed captioning is not universal nor universally effective and that ASL captures nuance that captioning misses. Richard Hanania, the right-wing commentator who previously wrote for white supremacist websites under a pseudonym, jumped on this, saying “that the process has been captured by the disability lobby,” a phrase that is laughable in that disabled people don’t have a lobby. Disabled people have some advocates, of course, but none with the power of Washington’s real power brokers.
Hurting disabled people, including disabled children, was always part of Project 2025. (And no, Project 2025 was not a liberal conspiracy – I've been hearing this for a year now from people and I finally found out one of the sources of this misinformation.)
Last year CAP made a list complete with references to pages in the Project 2025 document detailing just how Project 2025 impacts specifically disabled people and their intent and concrete plan to remove civil rights protections, put up barriers to resources and services, cut major health programs, make it harder to get ADA accommodation in the workplace, and restrict access to disability benefits.
CAP - Oct 28, 2024 The Top 5 Ways Project 2025 Would Hurt Disabled People
I want to note that this is why they want to get into Social Security. It doesn't matter that they're hackers and not forensic accountants or even people with financial auditing experience, or doctors, because of course it's a farce. I've heard from people who talk to Trumpers, and apparently the message being passed around in MAGA propagandaland manufacturing consent is that the justification for Elon Musk's dog hacker team is all about rooting out the legendary "moochers and takers" getting SSD.
And yes, many of the people who are totally on board with this are in fact not just Social Security recipients, but actual SSD recipients themselves. Hear me out, because I've had to explain this to people before many times. Not everyone who gets benefits realizes they're included in the mythical "moochers and takers" contingent.
"Behind the scenes" hopium peddling needs to stop. Savior syndrome, normalcy bias, and apocalyptic hopium, it's all a bamboozle. Chloe Humbert Dec 02, 2024 It reminds me of the welfare recipients who spout off right-wing nonsense complaining about “moochers and takers” because they never seem to understand that they are “the moochers and takers” being demonized and denigrated and they’re repeating the talking points of the people who are disparaging them.
They think they're being short-changed and would get MORE SSD themselves, because they know they deserve more, which is true they do – but so then they truly think, wrongly, that the Republican plan is to root out the "fraud waste and abuse" that they believe, wrongly, actually exists, when in fact it's of course rare and not really a thing. But they believe it's rampant because Republicans and people with big platforms parrot these talking points decade after decade.. And so people who buy into this, because they're conservatives, they believe if only they could get rid of all those moochers and takers, there would be more to go around for the deserving disabled people like them. The SSD process is ridiculously difficult, where people need lawyers, and doctors even shun or dump patients who are seeking to qualify for disability because nobody wants to do this paperwork and healthcare providers don't want to be in the hot seat, and no insurance codes seem to pay for anything like the kind of assessments people need to qualify. So you need to go into debt to even get into the process. So people don't even try unless they have no other choice. But strangely, conservatives don't see this as evidence that fraud would be rare in this circumstance because you would need doctors and lawyers all going along with it. Instead, conservatives take this as an indication that there's not enough to go around so they have to make it hard, or that somehow the system is set up to make it so the fraudsters are able to navigate this but it's hard for other people. It's a conspiratorial mindset, but of course we know that's certainly not unheard of in MAGAland because hullo, remember Qanon?
I've heard every one of these bizarre pretzel logic ideas personally from a disabled conservative at one point or another. Also just poor conservatives who get welfare benefits or conservative middle class people who've needed benefits at some point. Conservatives find ways to exempt themselves or their own kids out of the "undeserving" category. Occasionally reality breaks through, and I'm sure some come to realize what's up, but often they just double down because as Carl Sagan described it: the bamboozle captured them.
I've tried to explain this to people so many times before this is seriously their thinking. They have NO idea that to most Republicans saying this, the moochers and takers are in fact including them. They have no idea that Republicans, their in-group after all, their religious in-group in some cases, are in fact eugenicists who might think they should be given other alternatives, and that includes the nursing homes who just happen to be getting caught up in this stuff by coincidence right…
Don't fail to communicate. Don't Wait For Everybody - Episode 017 Chloe Humbert Feb 10, 2025 But they don't realize that when they say they're going to crack down on welfare moochers and takers, that they're going to get hit with cuts. And in fact, a lot of these people are surprised when there are cuts to things like food stamps or when they can't qualify for Medicaid. That's a reality, is that they don't. They are right there with it. They're conservative. They're, in many cases, a Trumper. And they are right along there saying, moochers and takers, moochers and takers. Meanwhile, they're on six different public benefits.
Senior citizens are also an identity group that's not favoured by eugenicists. Once you're too old to work or produce babies a lot of these people see someone as a "consumer" in fact that's the word a lot of home caregiver businesses use nowadays for their clients. They say "consumers" and I've heard it said with a distinct connotation. I really feel like people need to remember that often disabled people are often attacked in any context, but also early and hard in authoritarian regimes and mistreated in disasters. Disabled people as a group were left out of the genocide convention for similar reasons that political groups were also left out of the genocide convention.
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust - Disabled people Severely mentally and physically disabled people, as well as those perceived to have disabilities, were targeted because of Nazi beliefs that disabled people were a burden both to society and to the state. From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a programme of ‘euthanasia’, known as the T4 programme. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address from which the programme was coordinated.
More of my ranting on the failure to communicate the true nature of the anti-DEI agenda: