Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?
For all the talk of how incompetent our elites are, there’s one area where they show remarkable skill and determination: relentlessly creating conditions to shorten the lifespans of the disabled, poor, and working class.
Let’s look at just a few of the many examples before examining potential reasons it’s becoming so much more brazen.
In the US, policies to hurt the working poor and disabled are nothing new, but they’ve exploded in scope in recent years. Elites have collectively memory-holed an ongoing pandemic that has thus far officially killed more than 1.2 million (although that number is likely much higher), disabled many more, and fallen disproportionately on the working class and disabled.
At the same time, any assistance is being snatched away. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was falling as policies on homelessness and addiction to wages and healthcare were designed to ensure working class Americans break down mentally and physically and receive little to no assistance once they do.
The US might not have assisted dying like other countries (as we’ll see here in a minute), but there is no shortage of booze and pills that perform the trick. And what Angus Deaton and Anne Case first called “deaths of despair” in 2015 has only been getting worse with time.
We’re now embracing salmonella in food and even have a homeless industrial complex because of course there’s always money to be made even during a culling of the herd.
Despite the MAGA and MAHA slogans, social policy is now officially entering an era of eugenics as the unifying theme of the Trump administration is an embrace of the idea that the “strong” will survive. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” currently making its way through Congress is designed to force the most vulnerable to sink or swim on their own. Here’s just one example from Ohio:
Earlier this year, the Ohio House passed a budget proposal with a dangerous provision: If the federal government ever reduces its contribution to Medicaid, Ohio would immediately revoke health insurance for more than 750,000 Ohioans.
I understand the desire for fiscal responsibility — but eliminating life-saving programs isn’t responsible. It’s cruel.
I’ve lived with cerebral palsy my entire life. I rely on 10 hours of Medicaid-funded home care each day through Ohio’s Individual Options (I/O) waiver. This care helps me live independently at Creative Living, a supportive community in Columbus for people with disabilities. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, manage my health, or live on my own.
My income is $1,528 per month from Supplemental Security Income (SSI). That modest amount covers my rent, groceries, and basic needs. Without Medicaid, I’d lose my independence — and possibly my home. I’d be forced to rely on my aging parents, who can’t provide the kind of intensive care I need.
Losing Medicaid would introduce a huge unknown into my life. I have a loving family I could lean on — but many people don’t. I honestly don’t know what my life would look like without it: no home care, no therapy, no transportation, no housing. I’d lose rental support, medical care, and the freedom to move or live like any other bachelor in his mid-30s.
Even my wheelchair could become a luxury — something easy enough to axe.
The US official line is now openly that such weak people simply aren’t worth the investment:
In the telling of RFK Jr. and friends, public healthcare coddles the weak, which is real soft Nazi stuff. As Derek Beres puts it:
By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.
But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one:
And helped pave the way for our ongoing eugenics project:
It’s a similar story across the rest of the West.
In Canada, even the UN is weighing in recommending that the country stop offering its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), writing that the Canadian government will provide suffering people with disabilities access to death, without making sure they have the support they need to live.
And Canada’s MAID industrial complex stands alongside the homeless version in the US as pillars of North American eugenics:
In the UK, the government is looking to cut disability benefits and deny pensioners winter fuel assistance — although the Starmer Labour government might be backing down a little on the latter (or just trying to get it out of the news cycle for a time).
At the same time, London is also considering an assisted dying bill for the terminally ill, although it is facing pushback over the fact that a broken healthcare system could push people to end their lives rather than enjoy a proper informed choice.
The cuts to disability benefits will decimate quality of life, erode services, and lead to earlier deaths, but that appears to be the point. Again, though, this is nothing new. A report published last year by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, finds that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 premature deaths were recorded among individuals living outside the wealthiest 10% of areas in England mostly due to poverty and austerity measures.
Across the EU, years of austerity were causing a decline in life expectancy among the poor even before the pandemic, which made matters worse. The European elite are determined to keep going, however, with “rearmament” coupled with more social austerity, ostensibly to pay for the weapons that will grant Europe “security.”
The following is from Canada but I think is largely correct and applies across much the Western world:
Why So Brazen?
What is central to all these Western countries? Neoliberalism. Is it surprising that an ideology that says markets are more important than people would completely hand over social policy to the wealthiest and embrace eugenics?
At the same time it is being turbocharged by the pandemic, climate change, and the rise of hierarchical tech weasels.
Let’s look at these converging and reinforcing threads one by one.
Neoliberal Ideology
A recent government analysis of the impact of a bill to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales suggested that public bodies could save more than 100 million pounds a year in health and social care costs, benefits and pensions.
A 2020 report from Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office estimated savings at $87 million – a fraction of Canada’s $264 billion healthcare costs that year.
These types of analyses—as well as suggestions from the MAHA crowd that the sick and disabled are failing the nation—treat life as dollar figures on a spreadsheet, and those that don’t offer sufficient return aren’t worth the investment.
It’s reminiscent of a chapter in the formative days of Israel, which is fitting considering the West’s current support for genocide in Palestine and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism.
As Laura Robson puts it in her book, Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work, many of the survivors left in the [concentration] camps after the war would be unfit as laborers of any kind, anywhere. And so the leaders fighting for land that would soon become Israel were faced with loads of unproductive Jewish Holocaust survivors being a drain on the soon-to-be state. What did they do?
In the battle for Latrun during the 1948 war, the Israel Defense Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ military training, dooming many of them to instant death. In postwar reckonings, critics would charge over and over again that even Ben-Gurion—even Israel—had seen these remaining Jewish refugees as little more than “cannon fodder.”
That seems an apt description for how the most vulnerable are increasingly treated today. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of social values, and the choice for elites across the West is clear.
Public bodies are increasingly cash-strapped as money goes to “supporting” Ukraine and cutting taxes for billionaires. And so, as Disability News Service puts it, they’re incentivized “to suggest the option of an assisted suicide to a terminally-ill patient or service-user as a cheaper option than continuing to provide them with expensive health and social care services.”
While RFK Jr. and company worry about the disabled needing assistance, here’s a breakdown of the US budgetary priorities from the “big, beautiful bill::
And here’s some of the data on America’s obscene wealth inequality, courtesy of ZZ’s Blog:
● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.
● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.
● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.
● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).
● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).
● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.
Silicon Valley Hierarchicalism
The eugenics flowing out of Silicon Valley these days have always found fertile ground there dating back at least as far as the founding of Stanford University in 1885. Let’s take a moment to compare Leland Stanford’s horse breeding with the Valley’s current greatest success story: the world’s richest man Elon Musk. Malcolm Harris includes the fascinating and frightening horse-breeding activities of Stanford around the time he founded the university that bares his name. From our review of the book last year:
Stanford didn’t particularly care about horses or their well-being:
Stanford was not content to own horses, nor was he content to own the fastest horses in all the land. He saw himself engaged in a serious scientific campaign regarding the improved performance of the laboring animal –– hippology, or equine engineering. For Stanford the capitalist, the horses were productive biological machines, and in races he could analyze their output according to simple, univocal metrics.
Stanford figured that if he could increase the value of each horse by $100, that would be worth $1.3 billion (more than $30 billion in 2022 money) to the US, which had approximately 13 million horses.
And he wasn’t even concerned with the horses’ adult speed; he instead had his farm optimize the horses for visible potential. He disrupted the horse industry. Sure, by forcing colts to basically run before they could walk, there were plenty of snapped tendons, and “good material” was “spoiled,” but in Stanford’s eyes this weeded out the weak.
The university helped transfer this idea from horses to humans, and this type of thinking remains prevalent in Silicon Valley. Musk, with his megaphone, is simply the loudest voice among this crowd. And while he decries falling birth rates, his idea of pronatalism is like Stanford’s equine engineering but for all of us:
The tech billionaire frequently invokes IQ, a flawed and long-debated measure of intelligence. His fever dream of a crumbling civilization can only be salvaged when “smart” people pump out more babies. What constitutes a smart person, he doesn’t make explicit, though in tech-natalist circles they usually mirror the entrepreneurs declaring the mandate. To that end, Musk has personalized his advocacy for pronatalism by challenging himself to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence”.
Climate and Resources
In January 2020, the Climate Declaration of over 11,000 climate scientists called for policies to reduce population growth stating:
Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. . . . therefore, we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies. . . . [T]he world population must be stabilized–and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on [greenhouse gas] emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women.
Perhaps there is a responsible, human-rights-protecting way to do this, and maybe it’s necessary, especially if the world’s wealthiest— the top 10% caused two thirds of global warming since 1990—refuse to adjust their lifestyle. But with policy in the hands of a neoliberal, tech hierarchical elite, it’s not looking good.
The recent embrace by some liberals of Trump’s screw-the-poor policies for their climate tailings omits any mention of how such actions fall disproportionately on the poor and disabled. One wonders if depopulation factors into their support, yet their sophistication doesn’t allow them to mention it while they admire Trump for openly doing the dirty work.
And in the US, Democrats embrace eugenics just the same, albeit in different, focus-grouped language, which is this go-round solidifying around “Abundance.” It’s sold as less red tape to build more housing and a bright future for more. In reality, it’s simply doubling down on servitude to the new tech lords and the power of the market—the same forces currently driving our eugenicist dystopia.
The parties remain one of the same despite the howls of Trump racism, but as Quinn Slobodian puts it, Trump and the Silicon Valley crowd are “less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line”.
Panic
As Western governments fail to try to contain the rise of countries like China, Western capital looks to have settled on a strategy to find a way out of its profitability crisis.
Source: Michael Roberts’ Blog
Even if Western oligarchs don’t necessarily hold fascist positions, the quest for profit would likely pull them in that direction. David de Jong’s 2022 book Nazi Billionaires follows five families – the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piëchs and the Oetkers – through their closeness to the Nazi regime and postwar, where they remained among the country’s wealthiest families.
What stood out was that they weren’t necessarily believers in anything at all to do with Aryan superiority or Jewish inferiority. They believed in money. And thought they could make more with Hitler, and as Adam Tooze has pointed out, they did – for a time:
SS planners hoped for even more as they prepared to capitalize on the fruits of victory and the exploitation of the defeated as the biggest prize of all was to be Russia. Alas it was not meant to be, and it doesn’t look as though it will come to pass this go round either as you saw those same hopes today for the breakup of Russia in order to return to 1990s-style plunder when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country with devastating results.
And so we’re now witnessing an acceleration of the effort to exploit local populations, maybe best summed up here:
Boredom
It’s worth a mention. Perhaps another in the long list of reasons to tax billionaires out of existence is to prevent them from having too much time on their hands to become connoisseurs of young blood (ala Peter Thiel) and develop grand designs for population re-engineering.
Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, the CEO and general counsel of Palantir, respectively, wrote in their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, about some of the engineering we’re already seeing. Here’s Unpopular Front on The Technological Republic:
It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.”
…To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”
While these Silicon Valley weasels are no doubt delusional enough to believe that engineering a nation of “high-IQ” individuals will help lead to eventual victory over China and Russia and global domination, for now “defending the West” means from those in its midst who aren’t “contributors” or those who oppose its support for genocide in its imperial outposts. As Edward Ongweso Jr. writes after a January visit to CES, behind all the ridiculously obvious AI and crypto scams lurks the very real danger of the self-reinforcing neoliberal structures built by the titans of death:
It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.