The Eugenics of the Big Beautiful Bill

Ten years ago when he was campaigning in Iowa the man who twice became president said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and wouldn’t lose any votes. You might ask yourself whether he would lose any if he shot 51,000 people a year on Fifth Avenue. We now have the answer. He would not. 

We have proof, both of the number of people who will die every year because of the president’s Big Beautiful Bill, and the polling that followed. Polling shows that while the bill is opposed by more Americans than support it, the numbers are similar to the president’s negative approval rating, which never kept him from twice getting elected. And if you knock off the polling from disloyal pinko communist states like Vermont, New York and the West Coast’s Treasonous Three, he comes out ahead. Lock and load. 

In June, researchers from the Yale School of Public Health sent a letter to the Senate summarizing their analysis of the Big Beautiful Bill’s effects on healthcare. They found that withdrawing or making Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage more restrictive will cost 51,000 lives a year by 2034, including nearly 9,000 lives just from restrictions on Obamacare and 13,000 lives from the rollback of minimum staffing rules in nursing homes (we could call it the Shirley Jackson Lottery Rule).

It’s one way to reduce the government’s liability for lives on the dole. Don’t just remove them from federal benefits. Eliminate them. Kill them off. They’re all poor and probably minorities anyway. It’s like reviving the eugenics movement of 100 years ago, the eugenics movement that luminaries such as Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended. 

Our word “eugenics” comes from the Greek word “eugenios,” meaning nobility of birth, or well-born. The word’s modern application is less noble. It is, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition.” The word got its English coinage from Francis Galton–Charles Darwin’s first cousin–in 1883, but was nowhere more enacted than in the United States. 

A hundred years ago the Babbitts of America thought they were on the glory side of history when they thought of eugenics as groundbreakingly essential as we think of, say, AI today. The Immigration Restriction League founded by Harvard racists to keep out shithole country migrants loved eugenics. A character in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith advocated for a Secretary of Health and Eugenics cabinet post in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt was a big fan, “for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive,” he wrote in 1916, calling it “the capital sin of civilization” when men of “good birth” had their gonads snipped. 

We’re coming up on the centennial of one of Holmes’s most famous majority decisions, when he ruled forced sterilization constitutional: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime,” he wrote, “or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind….Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” It wasn’t throwing defective babies against rocks as in the days of Sparta so much as the codification of natural selection Holmes could be proud of while sipping his afternoon Madeira. 

Thirty states enacted sterilization programs. California’s was so successful that Hitler used it as a model. What we’re doing with health care is not as explicit, just as the president isn’t standing in the middle of an avenue mowing people down. But the end result is the same or worse. 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 Yale researchers’ grim actuarials don’t include the draconian cuts to SNAP, the food stamps program, the cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and the deregulation of safety from planes to trucks to pollution and greenhouse gas-belching factories, the cuts to scientific research and to the National Institutes of Health, all of which dig their own mass graves. 

The cover story of a recent Economist was about the great successes in the war on cancer, that war Richard Nixon declared in 1971 just before he declared the less successful one on drugs. Childhood leukemia went from a near-death sentence to a 90 percent 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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