MAGA is also about an attack on the disabled

The list of words the Trump administration is banning tells us all we need to know about their attack on civil rights. But a couple of words have gotten less attention than the rest. Included on the list are "accessibility" and "disability." They've made it abundantly clear that their fight isn't just about DEI, it is about DEIA (the "A" is accessibility for the disabled). 

We all learned about Trump's disdain when he mocked a reporter with a disability during the 2016 campaign. The president recently  implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions.”

Elon Musk's favorite attack on people he disagrees with is to call them a "retard." He's done so more than 16 times in the last year. It's spreading to his followers on X, where use of the term increased 200%. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

But it's not just about words. Both Musk and House Republicans have set their sights on defunding Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Similarly, the administration's promise to eliminate the Department of Education would deal a death blow to funding for students with disabilities. 

Here is a description of what was happening in the United States prior to the 1970s:

As of the early 1970s, U.S. public schools accommodated 1 out of 5 children with disabilities. Until that time, many states had laws that explicitly excluded children with certain types of disabilities from attending public school, including children who were blind, deaf, and children labeled "emotionally disturbed" or "mentally retarded."...More than 1 million children had no access to the public school system, with many of them living at state institutions where they received limited or no educational or rehabilitation services.

With passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990, the federal government required public schools to create educational opportunities for children with disabilities and pledged to cover 40% of the average per-student cost. The latter promise has never been fulfilled, with the federal government currently covering only 13% of the costs. 

If the Trump administration eliminates the Department of Education, there will be no guarantee that even these minimal funds (should they survive) would go towards the education of students with disabilities. And, as the Trump administration shows preference for private schools, it is important to note that they are not required to provide special education services.

Justin Kirkland links all of this to eugenics - which is a powerful accusation. So it's important to take a look at how he justifies such a claim.

Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Advocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.

We've already seen a return to eugenics from Trump in his description of immigrants. 

Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Here's where MAGA's attacks on empathy come into play. To return to that kind of cruelty towards people with disabilities, they can't allow themselves to identify with the suffering caused by the eugenics movement. 

In order to prevent a return to our pre-1970s past, we need to learn more about this recent history, recognize what's going on right now, and stand up for the rights of people with disabilities.  A good place to start would be to watch the documentary "Crip Camp" and celebrate the heroes who brought us the Americans with Disabilities Act.