Ever since he rose to prominence as the campaign director for Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings political career has been defined by controversy.

Boris Johnsons senior adviser is seen by his supporters as an unconventional but highly effective strategist, while his opponents have labelled him arrogant and anti-democratic.

This weekend, Mr Cummings found himself in the most high-profile scandal of his career so far after reports claimed he broke lockdown rules twice by travelling from London to Durham.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

A strategist who has long claimed the elite in Westminster are out of touch with voters has now found himself on the wrong side of public opinion, according to a YouGov poll on Saturday which suggested 52 per cent of Britons thought he should resign.

As his position as one of the UKs most powerful political advisers is under threat, here is an overview of some of Mr Cummings most controversial moments.

As the campaign director for Vote Leave (the official pro-Brexit campaign), Mr Cummings was the man behind the widely-disputed campaign bus claim that the UK would give 350m a week to the NHS after leaving the EU.

The claim We send the EU 350m a week, lets fund our NHS instead was later proven to be untrue, but it is still considered to be one of key factors in helping the Leave side win the referendum.

In February 2017, Mr Cummings suggested the bus was one of the key reasons why the Leave campaign was successful.

Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without 350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no, he said.

Would we have won by spending our time talking about trade and the single market? No way.

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Following the fallout from the EU referendum, MPs called for Mr Cummings to appear before a parliamentary committee investigating fake news to answer questions about his work at Vote Leave.

When he failed to appear for questioning, he was found to be in contempt of parliament and accused of showing a total disregard for the authority of the committee by Damian Collins, then-chair of the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee.

Mr Cummings claimed he was willing to speak to MPs but said he told Mr Collins to get lost after he was sent a summons.

My offer to give evidence to MPs remains open. As does my reasonable demand that ALL OF US ARE UNDER OATH TO TELL THE TRUTH. I hope they take it up but am not hopeful, he wrote on his blog.

In August last year, Mr Cummings fired Sonia Khan a special adviser to the Treasury without the permission or knowledge of then-chancellor Sajid Javid.

Ms Khan was escorted from Downing Street by a police officer after being accused of misleading Mr Cummings about contact with the former chancellor Phillip Hammond.

Dal Babu, former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, called the incident a shocking abuse of armed officers and Ms Khan launched an unfair dismissal case this year.

In a meeting following the sacking, Mr Cummings is reported to have told a team of special advisers: If you dont like how I run things, theres the door.

In March, a government special adviser called Lynn Davidson was also sacked after she confronted Mr Cummings over his unkindness towards ministerial aides.

Last month, it was revealed that Mr Cummings had attended the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) an independent body which has been advising the government on its response to coronavirus.

The attendance raised concerns about Sages political independence and about whether Mr Cummings had been interfering in the meetings.

Downing Street said it was factually wrong and damaging to sensible public debate to suggest that scientific advice was affected by government advisers attending the group.

However, Sir David King, a former government scientific adviser, told The Guardian: If you are giving science advice, your advice should be free of any political bias. That is just so critically important.

Earlier this year, Mr Cummings also denied a report in The Sunday Times which claimed he had set out the governments strategy as herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.

In January, Mr Cummings sent out a call for misfits and weirdos to apply for jobs in government to help shake up the system.

That call is understood to have led to the hiring of Andrew Sabisky, an aide whose past comments on eugenics, race and the enforced uptake of contraception sparked outrage.

Sky News found comments under Mr Sabiskys name in 2014 which suggested there could be genetic reasons for differences between races in intelligence and suggested this could be taken into account in immigration policy.

The aide eventually resigned from his post over the backlash, citing media hysteria over his old comments which he said had become a distraction.

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Dominic Cummings: Five of the most controversial moments from Boris Johnsons senior adviser - The Independent

A group of U.S. citizens whose parents are undocumented immigrants are suing the government for being denied relief money from the coronavirus stimulus bill that was signed into law in March.

The group filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday, arguing that their exclusion from the relief package is unconstitutional.

"The refusal to distribute this benefit to U.S. citizen children undermines the CARES Acts goal of providing assistance to Americans in need, frustrates the Acts efforts to jumpstart the economy, and punishes citizen children for their parents status punishment that is particularly nonsensical given that undocumented immigrants, collectively, pay billions of dollars each year in taxes," their lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit was filed in Maryland's federal district court by the Georgetown University law school's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection on behalf of the group.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act pays out up to $1,200 to eligible adults and up to $500 for each of their children. But in order to receive the money, beneficiaries must have Social Security numbers, which undocumented immigrants lack, meaning their children can't obtain the stimulus checks even if they are American citizens.

The lawsuit argues that undocumented immigrants have been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic's toll on the economy. They largely work in low-wage jobs and are ineligible for unemployment insurance, making the $500 relief payments crucial for families headed by undocumented parents, the class-action complaint argues.

One of the plaintiffs, identified only as Norma over security concerns, says that she lost her job in a restaurant that was shut down because of the pandemic and she has no way to get relief money for her son who was born in the U.S.

I have lost my job, and in my home three adults have the coronavirus; none of us are working, Norma said in a statement released through her lawyers. My son is an American citizen, and we need him to receive the CARES Act benefit to provide food and a roof over his head until this difficult moment passes.

The lawsuit alleges that the exclusion violates the equal protections in the Fifth Amendment and asked the court to rule that the group is eligible for relief payments.

A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which is named in the lawsuit as a defendant, did not immediately respond when asked for comment.

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Government sued over immigrant children not receiving COVID-19 checks | TheHill - The Hill

Its a question I never dreamed I would even have to think about, but the Covid-19 health crisis has created a level of concern I didnt expect. Will my brother and others with disabilities be considered expendable lives in this war on Covid-19? My brother has intellectual disabilities, but does that make his life less valuable? Is the price of a life pro-rated according to IQ?

I made a last visit to see my brother right before the care facility where he lives went into lockdown mode. I seriously considered bringing him to live with me until the risk passed, but based on many factors, I decided he was better off at his home. He loves to visit me, but after a night at my house, he is always more than ready to go back to his home. Home is the key term here. He loves the home where he lives, and he needs the structure, routine, and familiarity it provides. The fact there is nursing care 247 is an essential issue also.

Despite knowing he is in the best place to ride out a pandemic, I have lost many hours of sleep worrying about him. People in care facilities and nursing homes are at high risk for the Covid-19. My brother is 57 and has been hospitalized twice for pneumonia, two factors that increase his risk. Ive worried about whether they would allow me into the hospital to be with him if he does become ill. He doesnt understand anything about the virus, and he has a limited ability to communicate. The thought of him being alone, sick, confused, and scared in an ICU unit has caused more than a few anxious, sleepless nights for me. Having the responsibility of making end of life decisions for him is a heavy responsibility. But never once in all these wild thoughts did it enter my mind my brother would not be given the same level of care as any other person.

Hitler euthanized at least 200,000 people with disabilities during WW2, an atrocity that shocked the world. The United States also has a shameful record of eugenics through forced sterilization. As recent as 1977, North Carolina had forcible sterilization for anyone with an IQ of 70 or below. I thought we had made progress in the way we viewed people with disabilities, but a pandemic tends to bring out peoples true colors, both good and bad. Unbelievably, it seems the inherent value of people with intellectual disabilities is once again a topic open for debate.

The Federal Americans with Disabilities Act prevents discrimination based on disabilities, but weve never tested it against a pandemic like Covid-19. Many advocacy groups are concerned the pandemic will push the medical system past its limits and the Americans With Disabilities Act will not be respected when it comes to rationing equipment. Already, more than 400 organizations have asked the U.S Department of Health and Human Services to specifically address how the federal anti-discriminatory laws will be enforced in case of rationing.

At this point, we are assured Oklahoma has plenty of hospital beds and ventilators to take care of everyone, but weve discovered uncertainties are the norm in these stressful times. What if medical personnel are forced to make choices? In Italy, doctors were in the horrifying position of choosing who would live and die based on the available supply of medical equipment. There were too many people dying and not enough equipment to save them all, so heartbreaking choices had to be made. Medical staff are stretched to their absolute physical and mental limits responding to the pandemic. Being asked to play God, choosing who will live and who will die, would be further traumatizing.

One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. Every night I pray my brother will survive this crisis, and I also pray for each and every vulnerable member of our society. People with disabilities are valuable members of our society deserving of our respect, our care, and a ventilator.

Im hoping my brother has many more happy birthdays ahead of him!

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What is My Brother's Life Worth? - tulsakids.com

When the influenza virus first struck down a soldier in March 1918 on a military base in Kansas, much of the country was mesmerized by The Black Stork, a silent film advocating the elimination of children born with severe illnesses or disabilities. The eugenics movement the effort to improve the human gene pool by isolating and sterilizing those considered unfit to reproduce was in full swing. Today, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant theme is saving lives, regardless of the economic cost. Yet a century ago, medical and scientific authorities, egged on by religious leaders, supported a violent form of social Darwinism.

Soon after Charles Darwin published his evolutionary theory based on the survival of the fittest, anthropologists such as Francis Galton seized upon its social implications: Use the tools of science to improve the human species. What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly, Galton told a London society in 1909. Galton coined the term eugenics good birth to promote his social vision. It must be introduced into the national conscience, he said, like a new religion.

Eugenics advocates proceeded with missionary zeal. A year after Galtons speech, Charles Davenport, a professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, with grant money from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, created a national Eugenics Record Office. The aim: to gather scientific data to support the eugenics agenda. Beginning in 1912, a series of international conferences was held in London and New York, creating a global venue for a burgeoning class of eugenicists and their supporters. They built ties to institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia universities and New Yorks Museum of Natural History. What began as a fringe, pseudo-scientific idea became mainstream thinking in premier scientific and academic institutions.

The 1918 influenza pandemic, despite killing the young and healthy as easily as the old and sick, did nothing to curb enthusiasm for eugenics. In Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu and How It Changed the World, Laura Spinney writes that one of the big lessons of the catastrophe was that it was no longer reasonable to blame individuals for catching an infectious disease. Thats not exactly right: The lesson for many scientific authorities was that the racial stock was in grave danger of degeneration.

In fact, it appears that the devastating effects of the influenza virus killing at least 50 million people worldwide in a matter of months stirred an apocalyptic gloom in educated circles. Book titles in the 1920s tell the story: The End of the World; Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. Population planning was promoted by psychiatrist Carlos Paton Blacker, longtime general secretary of the Eugenics Society, who warned in a 1926 book, Birth Control and the State, of a biological crisis unprecedented in the history of life.

To many religious leaders, the science of eugenics was a progressive solution to a raft of social, moral and spiritual ills. Writing in the journal Eugenics, Harry F. Ward, a professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in 1919, explained that eugenics, like Christian morality, was aimed at removing the causes that produce the weak. In a 1928 winning entry for a national eugenics sermon contest, Rev. Kenneth MacArthur intoned: If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords. The Rev. W.R. Inge, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University and one of the best-known clergymen of his day, was a devout believer in eugenics. In books, essays, and a weekly newspaper column, Inge complained about humanitarian legislation that assisted these degenerates, who possess no qualities that confer a survival value. They posed a mortal threat to Western civilization, he argued, and should be quarantined and eliminated.

The scientific community used its immense cultural authority to persuade democratic lawmakers to get on board. The American Eugenics Society founded in 1922 and supported by Nobel Prize-winning scientists hoped to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population. California led the way, using its 1909 sterilization law to target the unfit and feebleminded, i.e., the poor, the infirm and the criminal class. Today, in battling the coronavirus, California has scrambled to acquire more hospital ventilators and even considered the mass release of its inmate population. But in the aftermath of the influenza outbreak, groups such as the Human Betterment Foundation lobbied for the involuntary sterilization of thousands of California residents in state hospitals and prisons. Thirty-two other states adopted similar eugenic policies.

What turned the tide of opinion against eugenics? The racist barbarism of Nazi Germany the cries of the victims of Auschwitz revealed to the world the appalling logic of eugenics. Yet there were other voices as well: the conservative and traditionalist Christians who never were taken in by the promises of a human biological paradise. In 1922, the influential Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils, the only book of its time unabashedly opposed to the movements claims and objectives. Indeed, Chesterton anticipated the totalitarian direction of the eugenic agenda, which he derided as terrorism by tenth-rate professors.

William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian often caricatured for his opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial is also worth recalling. The textbook that Bryan denounced, A Civic Biology, openly promoted the ideology of eugenics. After reviewing case studies of families with significant numbers of feeble-minded and criminal persons, the books author rendered a judgment: They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites. In his closing argument in the trial, Bryan insisted that he was not opposed to science, but to science without the restraints of religious belief.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals, he explained. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.

Perhaps civilization has learned that lesson, at least partially. The heroic efforts to rescue as many people as possible from the current pandemic regardless of their age, identity or physical condition is evidence that the teachings of Jesus, the Nazarene, have not been fully forgotten.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the Kings College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for his forthcoming documentary film based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JosephLoconte.

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Pandemics and the survival of the fittest | TheHill - The Hill

To the editor:

John Wades letter to the editor (Does the president want us to kill ourselves? Voice of the Public, April 28) hits the nail on the head.

Donald Trumps pattern of separating children from their families and keeping them warehoused inhumanely; making health insurance impossible for many to obtain; ignoring the advance of coronavirus and evidence that it affects older adults and people with disabilities disproportionately; inadequate funding for cities with a larger portion of minority populations; recommending the use of hydroxychloroquine with the side effect of deadly heart complications; and finally, his suggestion to ingest disinfectant is an ominous paradigm.

We know he praises white supremacist groups, adopts their language and calls them good people. Consistent with the goals of the eugenics and white supremacy movements, he implements policies to eliminate people of color, immigrants, poor, disabled, old, and sick. Its not exactly murder, but it is death-making.

Donald Trump is not ignorant or a buffoon; he has a purpose and it is sinister.

Bertha Young

Attleboro

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Letter to the editor: Donald Trump's sinister ways - The Sun Chronicle

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and Robert Law, chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), played roles in drafting Trumps order, The New York Times noted on April 21. Both Miller and Law have close connections to anti-immigrant hate groups, helping underscore the influence racist think tanks have had in shaping U.S. policy during the Trump era. Trump signed the order into law on April 22, marking an unprecedented step for restricting immigration into the U.S. in the modern age.

Miller promoted material from the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)to conservative website Breitbart News in 2015, prior to becoming Trumps de facto immigration czar. He also shared a link from the white nationalist website VDARE to Breitbart around the same time, and pitched scores of racist stories to their editors, as Hatewatch previously reported. Law is a former lobbyist for the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform(FAIR), having served as their lobbying director and director of government relations from 2013 to 2017. He is a Trump-era appointee of USCIS and joined that agency in 2018.

President Donald Trump speaks during the daily briefing of the coronavirus task force at the White House on April 22 in Washington. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The late John Tanton, a notorious racist and eugenicist, founded FAIR and provided critical support in the creation of CIS. Both are non-profit groups that have gained significant access to influential policymakers during Trumps first term. Each group has also promoted the writing of white nationalists and far-right activists who traffic in debunked pseudoscience purporting to connect race to intelligence in humans. As an example of their often-overlapping worldviews, both CIS and FAIR have argued during the COVID-19 pandemic that immigrants trapped in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention should be kept there, despite threats to their lives and safety caused by the virus.

Trumps order, which is scheduled for 60 days but can be extended, is being executed under the auspices of protecting American workers during COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this claim, the order does not impact foreign-born guest workers entering the U.S., only those applying for green cards. The administration has also blocked asylum seekers during the pandemic. ProPublica reported on April 2that this is the first time asylum seekers have been denied an opportunity to make their case in court in 40 years.

Trump first announced he would be signing the order on the night of April 20 through his Twitter account, and white nationalists and neo-Nazis on that website immediately celebrated the news. Extremists have long trumpeted the notion of a moratorium on immigration as a crucial step towards building a country for white non-Jews only.

Trump should sign the immigration moratorium order at the Statue of Liberty, white nationalist pundit Scott Greer posted to Twitterin the immediate aftermath of Trumps announcement, mocking a favorite cultural target of the racist right.

Hatewatch reached out to the White House for comment about Miller and Laws connection to hate groups but did not immediately receive a response.

Hatewatch obtained more than 900 emails Miller sent to Breitbart News editor Katie McHugh during 2015 and 2016, when he was working as an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and later, working as an adviser on Trumps presidential campaign. Miller demonstrated an interest in white nationalist and nativist literature in those emails, as well ramping up deportations of the undocumented, and stopping legal immigration into the U.S. outright.

Miller discussed the subject of stopping legal immigration on Aug. 4, 2015, in an email exchange with Garrett Murch, who also served as an aide to Sessions at that time.

Murch, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:22 p.m. ET: [Talk show host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.

Miller, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:23 p.m. ET: Like [Calvin] Coolidge did. Kellyanne Conway poll says that is exactly what most Americans want after 40 years of non-stop record arrivals.

Miller expressed admiration about President Coolidge in his emails to Breitbart News because he signed into law the 1924 Immigration Act. Based on eugenics, the act placed race-based restrictions on who could immigrate into the U.S. Adolf Hitler also praised the act for this reason in his book Mein Kampf.

Miller emailed to McHugh a link from VDARE, a white nationalist website that has long called for a complete halt to immigration into the U.S. Peter Brimelow, the groups founder, wrote a post on April 21 titled Trump Has Put an Immigration Moratorium In Play. Not Enough But Something, referring to the order. He noted in his commentary that halting immigration in 2012 would have played a role in preserving a white majority in the U.S., a central goal of white nationalists.

And whites known until the 1965 Immigration Act as Americans would have been 68% of the population, instead of 63%, Brimelow wrote, analyzing the imagined impact of what stopping immigration during the tenure of President Obama would have accomplished.

The 1965 Immigration Act, also known as Hart-Celler, put an end to the Coolidge-era racial quota laws that both Miller and Hitler praised. Miller derided Hart-Celler in his emails to Breitbart News and urged that publication to write articles criticizing it.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in 2017, Law served in multiple rolesat FAIR, including as the lobbying director and the director of government relations.

Robert Law of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (Photo via Western States Center)

FAIR founder John Tanton consistently promoted racist views about immigrants. In a Jan. 26, 1996, letter to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA about Californias immigrant population, Tanton questioned whether minorities could ever run an advanced society. He believed in eugenics, a pseudoscientific practice embraced by Nazi Germany, which purports to instill superior genes in humans through the process of selective breeding. In a letter to the late Robert K. Graham, a California-based multimillionaire and eugenicist, on Sept. 18, 1996, Tanton expressed his belief that less intelligent individuals should logically have fewer children.

From 1985 to 1994, FAIR received approximately $1.2 million in assistance from the Pioneer Fund, a eugenicist organization founded in 1937 for the purpose of pursuing race betterment by promoting the genetic blueprint of white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the constitution.

Dan Stein, FAIRs current president, articulated beliefs that mirror those expressed by Tanton. During an Oct. 2, 1997, Wall Street Journal interview with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson about The Intellectual Roots of Nativism, Stein asked, Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible and not subsidizing those with high ones?

While Law was employed with FAIR, working under Stein, he lambasted sanctuary cities in a 2017 FAIR legislative update, writing that they allow criminal aliens to be released back into communities, often to recommit crimes. He also harshly criticized the Obama administrations Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, an executive order implemented to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.

[DACA recipients] parents made the choice to bring them here and defy our immigrations laws and just because you have children doesnt mean that you have a human shield that exempts you from any form of enforcement, Law said in a FAIR podcast in 2017, Media Matters reported.

Law co-authored a FAIR report, Immigration Priorities for the 2017 Presidential Transition, in November 2016 that outlinedthe type of anti-immigrant legislative agenda the group wanted to see the Trump administration enact.

[The Trump administration] must lead the nation in formulating an immigration policy that sets and enforces limits on legal immigration; eliminates to the greatest extent possible illegal immigration; and protects American workers, taxpayers, and our most vulnerable citizens, the co-authored report stated.

The report argued for limiting legal immigration into the U.S., including measures targeting the number of immigrants admitted via Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the refugee and asylum programs. TPS is an immigration status given to foreign nationals present in the U.S. who cannot return to their country of origin due to events such as armed conflict or an environmental disaster. In early 2018, the Trump administration took steps to block residents of majority non-white countries from receiving TPS, specifically from Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Haiti is roughly 95% black, according to government statistics. Trump referred to these nations as shithole countries during a closed-door meeting with lawmakers, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In November 2019, Stein remarked on the Trump administrations employment of former FAIR staffers, saying, It certainly is delightful to see folks that weve worked with in the past advance and contribute to the various efforts of the administration, most of which we support.

Historian Carly Goodman wrote in The Washington Post on April 22 that the Trump administration was capitalizing on the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to enact an anti-immigrant agenda.

Why suggest an immigration ban? Goodman wrote in her analysis. Because times of crisis create opportunities for anti-immigration advocates to cast blame on outsiders and transform policy in ways they have long sought, to arrest what they perceive as demographic change and the loss of a white America. Trumps emergency measures therefore could outlive his presidency.

The Trump administration has enacted a flurry of policies targeting immigrants since the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, including: suspending all routine visa services at U.S. embassies and consulates on March 20, expelling all asylum seekers at the U.S. border with Mexico as of March 21, temporarily suspending refugee admissions as of March 19, banning undocumented college students from receiving emergency assistance as of April 21, and ordering a 60-day temporary ban of access to green cards for specific groups of people from abroad as of April 22.

Despite the ongoing public health crisis created by COVID-19, the Trump administration is also projectedto issue 340,500 deportation orders in the year ending Sept. 30, 2020, an increase from 215,535 in 2019, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group that tracks the impact of government policies.

As with Trumps initial announcement of an immigration order, these policies have been welcomed by far-right extremists.

Photo illustration by SPLC

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Trump's Immigration Order Was Drafted by Officials With Ties to Hate Groups, According to Report - Southern Poverty Law Center

Larry Summers watches Barack Obama and Joe Biden speak at the White House. (Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis via Getty Images)

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In his bid to consolidate support within the Democratic coalition, Joe Biden keeps signaling that hell govern as a progressive. In an interview with Politico published on Saturday, Biden declared that the $2 trillion spent so far on stimulus needs to be a a hell of a lot bigger. According to Politicos Michael Grunwald, Biden sounded like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in calling for much stricter oversight of the Trump administration, much tougher conditions on business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.Ad Policy

I think theres going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time, Biden told Grunwald. Milton Friedman isnt running the show anymore.

These are welcome words to anyone who believes recession-wracked America needs a massive injection of Keynesian spending, ideally structured around a Green New Deal to help tackle climate change. But can Biden be trusted to keep his word? After all, his own long record as a Wall Streetfriendly centrist makes it hard to credit his newfound economic populism.

Further, some of Bidens top advisers are anathema to progressives. As Grunwald notes, This week, Biden has taken flak from the left for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on internal calls.

Larry Summers, a Harvard economist who held senior posts under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, has a record that is even more dismaying than Bidens. Going back decades, Summers has opposed big stimulus spending, regulation of Wall Street, and pushes for economic equality.

There are two main objections to Summers: his personality and his politics. He has a well-documented history of being an overbearing boss, a know-it-all with a habit of publicly humiliating his underlings and colleagues. Christina Romer, who served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, complained that Summers treated her like a piece of meat.

Summerss stormy tenure as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006 was cut short by a faculty revolt, motivated by his browbeating of African American professors such as Cornel West, his claim that women werent doing well in the sciences because of innate cognitive inferiority in their math skills, and his support of a protg who had run roughshod over conflict-of-interest regulations while running an economic reform program in Russia. (In recent years, a fresh controversy has emerged from Summerss tenure as Harvard president involving donations from the notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstein).Current Issue

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As appalling as Summers might be on a personal level, his politics are even worse. Joe Biden might be ready to bid adieu to the era of Milton Friedman, the right-wing economist who was one of the major architects of neoliberalism, but Larry Summers most definitely is not.

In a 2006 New York Times opinion piece written on the occasion of Friedmans death, Summers wrote, I feel that I have lost a heroa man whose success demonstrates that great ideas convincingly advanced can change the lives of people around the world. Making a small demurral over Friedmans lack of concern for social justice, Summers aligned himself with the neoliberal thinkers worldview. Not so long ago, we were all Keynesians, Summers wrote. Equally, any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites.

Summers was not merely being polite out of respect for a recently departed eminence. Rather, he was being candid in describing himself as a Friedmanite Democrat, someone who belongs to a left-of-center party but constantly tugs it to the right.

Summerss Friedmanite politics can be seen in virtually everything hes done in public life. During the Clinton administration, he opposed the efforts of Asian countries to impose capital controls during the economic crisis of 1997. He also pushed for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a deregulatory move that allowed commercial banks to run hog wild with risky investments, a major factor in the 2008 economic crash.

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As Michael Hirsh noted in National Journal in 2013:

As a government official, [Summers] helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obamas chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a cramdown that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans.

According to Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, Hirch paid a price for documenting Summerss history. Kuttner claims that after Summers personally complained to David Bradley, then the publisher of Atlantic Media, which owned National Journal, Hirsh was advised to seek other workhe ended up moving to Politico and then to Foreign Policy, though no errors were ever found in the Summers piece and no correction was ever issued.

Underlying all of Summerss actions is a firm belief in the fundamental rightness of the existing economic order and the enormous inequality it produces. During the early days of the Obama administration, Summers told a reporter, One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that theyre supposed to be treated. Summers opposes a wealth tax. In October 2019, he made the strange argument that if the wealth tax had been in place a century ago, we would have had more anti-Semitism from Henry Ford and a smaller Ford Foundation today. In fact, Henry Ford spent lavishly on anti-Semitism. Nor did Fords philanthropy make up for his bigotry. The two sometimes went hand in hand, as with the Ford Foundations support of eugenics in the early 20th century.

When Barack Obama floated the idea of nominating Summers to be chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2013, the move was opposed not just by progressive senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown but also by their moderate colleagues like Jon Tester and Heidi Heitkamp. Summers was simply too tainted.

If Joe Biden wants to prove his bona fides to progressives, hell have to cut his ties to Larry Summers.

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Larry Summers Is a Dead Albatross Around Biden's Neck - The Nation

The University of Iowa recently began work with SPARK for Autism, a research organization of which the UI has been an extension site for three years, on a project that aims to map the heterogeneous medical complexities of autism, causing concern for some UI community members and student organizations.

SPARK representative for Iowa Jacob Michaelson said SPARKs endgame is to organize a pool of more than 50,000 individuals with autism, and their families in order to better understand autism across the spectrum and address medical issues that can be developed from having autism, such as eating and sleeping disorders, and not to find a cure.

However, some UI students are skeptical about the partnership between the university and SPARKs intentions, fearing that a wide database could be used for early identification of autism and preventing it.

UI senior Adrian Sandersfeld, a member of the autistic community, said in an email to The Daily Iowanthat their initial reaction to the partnership was one of alienation and anger.

I feel like the University of Iowa does not really care about autistic students at all, Sandersfeld said. This partnership between the UI and SPARK will only make us feel more alienated. Money that could be spent improving the academic environment for neurodiverse students is being wasted on [a] eugenics project. Answering questions for this article is the closest Ive ever come in having my voice heard on this matter by anyone in power at the University of Iowa.

Sandersfeld mentioned that UI students created the ABAL Therapeutics, a designing software to assist parents of children with autism by providing at-home ABA therapy.

Sandersfeld said they believe the partnership threatened not only autistic students, but UI Hospitals and Clinics patients as well. As both, Sandersfeld said, it makes them suspicious of their doctors and angry at university administrators.

Sandersfeld added that autism is a disability, not a disease.

Michaelson said SPARK has been met with some controversy as some believe the organization wishes to find ways to cure autism and develop methods to suppress it, but the research would lead to higher acceptance of those with autism throughout the community, which would in turn be essential to the fulfillment of SPARKs mission.

I think there are some people who are afraid of the unknown, Michaelson said. There are a lot of unknowns with autism. You cant have increased acceptance in the face of a total mystery. We are not looking for a cure for autism. The whole point here is fundamental science understanding at the personal, biological, and community level. Understanding is the best hope we have to improve the lives of those with autism and their families.

Michaelson said the established SPARK team at the university is now focusing on the medical issues that can be developed from having autism, such as eating and sleeping disorders. He said UIHC put out a call for 5,000 individuals or families of someone with autism that also had eating or sleeping disorders to participate in the study. Now, the group is offering saliva kits delivered to home as COVID-19 social-distancing recommendations are in place.

He said the UI autistic community has a seat at the table by having members on the advisory committee, so perspectives from stakeholders in the conducted research can be heard and the right questions can be asked.

RELATED: Iowa City Autism Community distributing Calm Kits to high-need elementary schools

Before the existence of SPARK, many smaller studies were conducted, made up of about 100 participants, to distinguish certain types of autism, he said. Researchers have failed to find a concrete answer.

[SPARK] will hopefully be a resource for researchers and scientists for the next 20 years, Michaelson said. Researchers can reach out to the community and ask for specific volunteers for their studies, since the spectrum for autism is [wide]. It can span inability to communicate to being high-functioning, where they can have a conversation and you would not know right away that they had autism.

UI masters student Andrea Courtney, treasurer for UI Students for Disability Advocacy and Awareness, said she had not heard of the UI partnership with SPARK before being contacted by the DI, but she said she was hesitant to believe the intentions of the autism study at UIHC were pure based on knowledge of other autism research groups.

I know people who have autistic siblings and I have worked with those who will probably receive a diagnosis in the future, Courtney said. There are ways to improve the quality of lives of those with autism without looking for a cure, like improving accessibility to education and the workforce.

She said hearing that the university had decided to collaborate with SPARK made her feel as though officials were making a choice about how autism should define individuals.

[This study] seems like its coming from a perspective that the person is the problem, she said. Not the environment or the barriers that society has created. Have they reached out to those on the opposing side? Its societys ableism that needs to be fixed.

Director of the University of California Davis MIND Institute Len Abbeduto said the neurodiversity movement is a reminder of the value of individuals and no one is more or less valuable to society. He said SPARKs work applies to understanding societal challenges that those with autism may have.

We focus on words such as disease and disorder so much that it can appear to have a negative connotation, Abbeduto said. In the case of autism, it is less about autism itself and more about the challenges that come from autism, such as limits to being independent and medical disorders.

He said the research the UI is conducting with SPARK, and autism research in general, is to understand the basis of medical challenges from autism and treat them, not about finding a cure.

Abbedutos work at the MIND Institute focuses on language and communication challenges for autistic individuals and providing therapy options for parents to use with their children.

[At the MIND Institute], we work to teach parents to create an opportunity to foster their childrens language skills, he said. We want to coach parents in their homes, so therapy is more accessible and more personal. They will be more active agents of change and it will reduce the burden of travel. They enjoy it and feel empowered when their children make progress.

Abbeduto said that while developing ways to defeat challenges created by autism is important, it is essential for the research community to recognize the conversations between those with autism and organizations such as SPARK.

[Researchers] are better off focusing on maximizing opportunities instead of looking too hard at the challenges, he said. Its about removing challenges, so everyone has the best chance of taking advantage of their communities and their choices. The disability community has been great with allowing families and individuals to have choices.

Michaelson said SPARK strives to assure autistic individuals that they are accepted not only in their community but in society as well. He said there are many outreach programs to connect the autistic community with SPARKs research opportunities, from information booths at the Iowa State Fair to hands-on experience.

We have undergraduate researchers in our lab and many of them have a loved one with autism or have autism themselves, Michaelson said. So, come and see. There might be an opportunity to investigate and learn what SPARK is doing to have a human connection with the research and the science.

Original post:

UI partners with autism research organization amid community concerns - UI The Daily Iowan

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Future Tense Newsletter: Celebrity Designer Babies, Climate Change in the Pandemic, and More - Slate Magazine

Home-care nurse Flora Ajayi is thanked by a clients daughter as she departs from a home during the coronavirus outbreak, New York City, April 22, 2020. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)Lets consider designating their developmentally disabled residents a legally protected class.

Last week the New York Times reported that 105 persons had died in group homes in the New York City metropolitan area. Now the number is over 200. People living in group homes are five times more likely to die where they reside than are those living in nursing homes. The situation has been addressed also in an opinion piece in the New York Daily News.

The history of how the developmentally disabled have been treated is reprehensible. One hundred years ago psychologist Robert Goddard, affiliated with the eugenics movement, used intelligence tests to determine those who should be sterilized. Many involuntary medical operations robbed people of the gift of bearing children, becoming a father, and creating a home for a family.

Horrible treatment continued into the latter half of the 20th century. Robert Kennedy, visiting a New York institution, called them snake pits. In 1972, Channel 7 in New York City aired Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, hosted by Geraldo Rivera. One ward at Willowbrook housed 80 people, supervised by one nurse. The documentary showed people crouching on floors, naked or half-naked. But it was the smell that truly horrified Rivera, the smell of death and disease. Soon afterward, Governor Nelson Rockefeller implemented the Willowbrook Decree, which brought immediate money to state-run programs, mostly large institutions of up to 6,000 people, and smaller programs administered by charities. The decree gave special legal protection to anyone who continued to live at Willowbrook or was transferred to another placement. From 1972 until the beginning of the 20th century, there was continued improvement and increased financing by federal and state governments, in addition to Medicaid. In the past two decades, budget cuts in all of these sources have crippled the services, whose quality has increasingly diminished.

To reduce the disproportionate fatality rate in group homes, the federal government as well as state and local governments should give them immediate special funding to reduce the number of infections and deaths. At the same time, the homes need ongoing financial help at an increased level, during the pandemic and afterward. Where might that help come from?

The immediate emergency situation can be traced to several factors, and there can be interventions for each. Many of the group homes are small, and so their cubic air capacity is much less than in most nursing homes, making the air itself more virulent. The behavior of the developmentally disabled makes true social distancing nigh impossible. Many have repetitive behaviors such as scratching the face on their skin until it bleeds. They are prone to hug and also to roughhouse, which brings them into close contact with others. And how can they social-distance if they cant understand the reason for it?

Medical problems and the treatment they necessitate add to the spread of infection. Many residents, often owing to obesity or hypotonia (which restricts air intake), need to be on compressed-air machines. Their lungs do not work well, making the virus more deadly for them. The CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines need to be thoroughly cleaned. It is a herculean task for the workers.

Meals are fertile breeding grounds for the virus. Many need close hand-over-hand physical guidance to bring food from their plate to their lips. This makes the job dangerous for staff. Owing to their muscle and bone structure, some residents have severe problems with eating and need the help of highly trained speech and language pathologists to do the feeding and to instruct others on how to do it. This never was a glamorous or sought-after job, and in the aftermath of the pandemic it will become even less so.

The travel of staff back and forth between the group homes and their own residences may be the worst source of the virus. A single infection brought into a group home can spread fast. The temperature checks and other tests are imperfect, and infected workers may pass them and enter the home. Once that happens, a medical crisis occurs quickly, followed by deaths.

A major question is how to keep the staff free of the virus so that the spread of infection in the homes can be stopped. Police and fire departments, certain businesses, and now meatpacking plants have developed procedures for employees to be transported to a hotel or safe living environment between shifts. At the meatpacking plants, employees can live safely on the premises, run on twelve-hour shifts, and stay quarantined.

A staffer for Senator Charles Schumer (D, N.Y.) is considering add-on legislation to a bill affecting nonprofit social-welfare organizations. The bill, which would supersede the CARES Act and its iterations, would be administered by FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and provide for federal grants that agencies could apply for. The funds received could be used for any procedures that will help keep the virus out of the group homes. Extra hazard pay for the staff would be included in the bill. Most importantly, the bill would ensure funding for transportation of staff between the group home and an uninfected site, such as a college dorm, that could be donated for use. There just isnt enough money to pay for hotel lodging (which some police and fire departments use), so other nonprofits, large county venues, or other workable places need to be found. Partnerships will emerge.

As someone who has worked as a clinical psychologist in this system for decades, and is father to a young man with Down syndrome, I think that the above federal grant would be lifesaving for many people. It would protect the lives of the staff as well.

What of the day-to-day work of the agencies? There will be much more to do throughout the period of flattening the curve as well as, perhaps, during any period of developing herd immunity and vaccine interventions, neither of which the scientists can guarantee will happen. Medicaid funding of the agencies has been reduced over the past ten years. Ratios of staff to clients are much lower than in earlier eras. In one state with over 150 agencies serving the developmentally disabled, it is well known that an orchestrated pattern of squeezing certain agencies financially is forcing some to close or merge.

A crucial need is for more funding for staff salaries. Whereas Public Law 94-142 and other, subsequent congressional acts have meant rather rich funding for those students with special needs up to age 21, their situation changes dramatically afterward. Neither agencies nor workers receive a level of funding that is anywhere comparable to the funding for services for special-needs students from birth to age 21. Sadly, the pay can be so low that many staff need to work second or even third jobs.

This may be an issue on which both major political parties can join together in bipartisan efforts. There are about 7 million people with developmental disabilities in the United States. When one includes parents and families and those who work with them, at least 25 million Americans, I would estimate, have a stake in these individuals, who are among the most vulnerable in our population, and who have suffered so much blatant abuse and neglect in the past. It might not be asking too much to consider designating group-home residents as a legally protected class of people. That would contribute to the protection of their rights and to their enhanced protection, now and in the future, throughout their lives.

Editors Note:This article has been updated to clarify that legislation to fund social-welfare organizations is being considered only by a staffer for Senator Schumer.

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Group Homes, Vulnerable During the Pandemic, Need Help - National Review

The coronavirus epoch has offered some heartwarming stories among the viral horror and its shut-in, relentless-grey-regrowth-Zoom-meeting-apocalypse gloom.

The well-compensated stars of American professional basketball are subsidising the lost salaries of casual venue staff. In Scotland, cafes are making deliveries of free food packages to vulnerable and elderly people, while Melbourne restauranteurs are feeding frontline workers. The Italian tenor serenading his locked-down city of Florence singing Nessun Dorma and other opera classics from his balcony is glorious. So is the Spanish taxi driver taking coronavirus patients to the hospital for free.

But amid the kindness pandemic and determined acts of caring, the times have provoked a simultaneous infection of self-absorption, pettiness and dangerous-foolerism. Sure, ordinary folks can make bad decisions in extraordinary times. But there are those who should know better who dont do better, through sheer force of wilful shitheadedry. They should not be spared shaming. They should be given the recognition they richly deserve. So, without further ado:

The 2020 awards for the very worst people of coronavirus so far

WINNER, the Neville Chamberlain Award for Catastrophically Misreading the Situation: prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson

On 3 March, British PM Boris Johnson bragged at his readiness to shake hands with local coronavirus patients. On 17 March, France locked down and he suggested instead that coronavirus sufferers stay indoors a week and elderly Britons cancel holiday cruises. This strategy was herd immunity ringfencing the most vulnerable of the population and allowing the disease to take its course. Without a vaccine, that means allowing masses of people to die. If you think that sounds like eugenics, your opinion is shared by the worlds leading specialists in infectious diseases.

Its since been revealed Johnson missed five critical meetings in February that may have made him more aware of the strategic risk to his country, and himself because by 27 March, Johnson himself had coronavirus, and British infections were following the tragic trajectory of Italy. As I write this, more than 18,000 people in the UK have died.

Im most relieved that Boris Johnson is not one of them. Had he perished, he would most earnestly deserved our sympathy. Now hes on the mend, he can rightfully be served our scorn.

WINNER, the Roger Stone Award for Thinking the Rules Dont Apply to You: New Zealand health minister, David Clark

Woeful behaviour is not entirely the preserve of one side of politics; health minister of New Zealand, Labours David Clark, broke his own governments strict coronavirus lockdown rules on its first weekend.

New Zealand Labour prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, moved quickly to a national shutdown early in the pandemics progression. Her strategy of virus elimination with rigorous stay-at-home regulation and widespread testing has been feted throughout the world; of today, 16 local coronavirus deaths are recorded.

This has been made possible because the New Zealand citizenry complied with the draconian rules rules Clark blithely ignored when he took his family on a car trip to the beach the first weekend of lockdown. He was separately photographed going for a lovely bike ride.

Ardern swiftly demoted the minister, who made a grovelling public apology. It says much about her leadership that she resisted temptation to make a bicycle seat from his skin.

WINNER, the Tiger Woods Award for Making Us Feel We Hardly Know You: Sweden

Think Sweden, think Scandinavian social democracy; cradle-to-grave welfare and generous social support systems. But Swedens response to the pandemic has not been universal self-sacrifice, New Zealand-style.

On the recommendation of an epidemiologist at the independent Public Health Agency, the Social Democrats/Greens coalition government have instead pursued a herd immunity strategy theyre calling a trust-based approach to the virus. Social distancing is voluntary. Schools for under-16s, gyms, restaurants, bars and Swedens borders remain open.

As a result, it now has one of the highest proportional death rates from the virus in the world nine times higher than next-door neighbour Finland, larger even than the United States.

Since half of the countrys aged care facilities found themselves struck by coronavirus, Sweden has quietly started moving towards greater gathering restrictions. Like any apology, it doesnt count for much when people have been left for dead.

WINNER, the Donald Trump Award for Billionaire Shamelessness: Richard Branson

This was a hotly contested category. As lockdowns, shutdowns and the illness itself have wiped out the economy-as-usual across the globe, individualist profiteers of the good times are suddenly collectivists in the misery.

The old story of those who live to privatise the profits and socialise the losses really deserves a Netflix reboot perhaps centred on a protagonist like Virgin billionaire Richard Branson. Hes holding thousands of ordinary peoples jobs hostage to demands that taxpayers refinance his failing business. In the reboot, lets rewrite this storys traditional ending to make sure taxpayers are repaid for their involuntary generosity with proportional ownership of these companies. Especially since Branson is demanding a bailout in his ostensible home of Britain, where he has avoided paying income tax for 14 years.

WINNER, the Abe Simpson Award for Yelling at Clouds: Sam Newman (and friends)

Whether there could be any social identity more pathetic than that of a D-list Australian conservative is an outright no. Desperation for relevancy inspired a recent Twitter campaign demanding the extermination of bats.

But the clear category winner was the faded sports personality who defied Australias (highly effective) lockdown, taking a one-man protest to the steps of the Victorian parliament, demanding his uninhibited human right to play golf.

A video provides so many things to enjoy. A MAGA-style hat! Eye-blinding trousers! Incomprehensible raving! Most of all, theres rapture in seeing the animation of a cliche about privileged white male narcissism that didnt a) require a cartoonist or b) involve someone getting hurt.

The cumulative effect of the protest was to convince observers like myself that even if golf is at the safer end of activity, the ban should be maintained just to extend this mans personal frustration.

WINNER, the Walking Dead Award for Reminding Human Beings Our Greatest Threat is One Another: anti-lockdown protestors in the US

From California to Michigan and yet, coincidentally always in districts Republicans are heavily campaigning anti-lockdown protests have bloomed across the US, drawing social-distance-defying crowds in the hundreds, sometimes even the tens.

Egged on by the US president in impassioned ALL CAPS tweets, extraordinary photographs have appeared of patriots hanging out of cars screaming at the public-serving healthworkers who counterprotest in full PPE. Joshua Bickels photo of howling Ohio protestors pressed against glass doors deserves its own separate, serious, grown-up award for warning the world that its all getting a bit Shaun of the Dead in the US-of-A; one of the yawping mouths belongs to a Republican state Senate candidate.

It would all be hilarious if states such as Michigan werent burying the coronavirus dead in their thousands. Supply shortages, the disaster of piecemeal, privatised healthcare and structural poverty have intersected with ill-prepared and incompetent presidential leadership, compounding the effects of coronavirus across America.

After the coronavirus protests, Kentucky saw its largest spike in cases.

GRAND WINNER: President of the United States, Donald Trump

Like Boris Johnson, he ignored international warnings about the coronavirus when meaningful action could have slowed its spread. He held public rallies even while experts begged for social distancing. Hes used press conferences to attack reporters, repeat lies and push treatments that some studies now suggest may be unproven cures at the same time hes demanded praise. Hes promoted people who dont know what theyre doing, allowed the demotion of others who desperately do, hes abused leaders whove taken responsibility for their citizens, and adamantly taken none himself. Hes talked about his TV ratings while Americans were buried in mass graves.

The only award in which hes not competitive is one for failing to meet expectations because nobody whos watched Trump for five consistent minutes is surprised by this disaster at all. America outstrips the world for coronavirus infection. There have been more than 842,000 cases there. More than 46,000 Americans are dead.

Donald, you blitzed this competition. Its your crowning achievement! Now, go put a glittering corona on your head!

Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist

Link:

Here are the 2020 awards for the very worst people of coronavirus - The Guardian

Image: Planet of the Humans

Michael Moore is a dude known for provocation. Every documentary he drops is designed to paint a world of sharp contrasts with clear bad guys. Theyre designed to get a reaction and get people talking, so in some ways, him dropping a documentary he executive produced trashing renewable energy on Earth Day makes total sense.

Planet of the Humans is directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs, a self-proclaimed photographer, campaigner, adventurer, and storyteller who has co-produced some of Moores films. The documentary came out on Earth Day, positioning itself up as some tough, real talk not just about renewable energy but environmental groups. And by real talk, I mean it cast renewables as no better than fossil fuels and environmental groups as sleek corporate outfits in bed with billionaires helping kill the planet. As Emily Atkin put it in her HEATED newsletter on Thursday, [e]ntertaining good-faith arguments about how to stop climate change is my job, and I have no reason at present to believe Moore and director Jeff Gibbs argued in bad faith. Indeed. So I decided to listen to what they had to say.

Ill leave the film criticism to those wiser than me (though I will say I feel like I didnt watch three acts but three separate movies), but I will say this: The moviewhich is available for free on YouTube and is currently on the services trending list with 1 million views in 24 hoursis deeply flawed in both its premise, proposed solutions, and who gets to voice them.

The movies central thesis is that we are on the brink of extinction and have been sold a damaged bill of goods about all forms of renewable energy by environmental groups motivated by profit. Essentially, the argument is were all dirty and the stain will never come out no matter how hard we try.

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There are a few issues at play. One is that much of the issues the film takes with solar and wind are based on anachronistic viewpoints. PV Magazine, a solar trade publication,notes that its difficult to take the film seriously on any topic when it botches the solar portion so thoroughly. Although the film was released in 2020, the solar industry it examines, whether through incompetence or venality, is from somewhere back in 2009.

The film also goes through great lengths to throw solar and wind in the same boat as burning biomass for power. The latter relies on serious carbon accounting bullshittery to be carbon neutral. A critique of biomass is fair and something I would honestly have watched a whole film about. And ditto for the films critique of large environmental organizations, which rely on large funders that may provide money with strings attached (though Bill McKibben, one of the films targets and founder of 350.org, came out strongly critiquing how he and the organization were portrayed).

The film, for example, highlights the Sierra Clubs Beyond Coal campaign, which has helped shutter more than 300 coal plants around the U.S. The programs biggest donor is Mike Bloomberg, who sees natural gaswhich has replaced much of that coal capacityas a bridge fuel (which it is decidedly not).

And this is where the narrative Gibbs tells and the one we need to be telling diverges. Gibbs is happy to trash the unholy alliance between big green groups and big dollar funders who have, in some cases, made their fortunes on extractive industries and the system that relies on their existence. That can lead to conflictsreal or perceivedabout how green groups spend their time. And frankly, Im there with him.

Gibbs uses this situation to take the leap to population control as the only solution. Yes, renewables are bad and so are billionaires and the corporate-philanthropic industrial complex so, Gibbs concludes, we should probably get rid of some humans ASAP. Over the course of the movie, he interviews a cast of mostly white experts who are mostly men to make that case. Its got a bit more than a whiff of eugenics and ecofascism, which is a completely bonkers takeaway from everything presented. If renewables are so bad, then what does a few million less people on the planet going to do? Oh, and who are we going to knock off or control for? Who decides? How does population control even solve the problem of corporate influence on nonprofits and politics?

Those questions lead to a dark place. Weve already had a glimpse of what that ideology looks like in the hands of individuals. The alleged manifesto penned by last years El Paso shooting suspect sounds an awful lot like Gibbs movie, arguing that extractive companies are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources and that we to get rid of enough people to get things back in balance. Which is a whole lot of nope.

I dont mean to say Gibbs is therefor an ecofascist. But to see an ostensibly serious environmental movie backed by an influential filmmaker peddle these ideas is genuinely disturbing, especially at a time when were seeing it pop up elsewhere in response to the coronavirus. Also side note that its also incredibly myopic that Gibbs goes after environmental nonprofits for taking corporate money while ignoring the Sierra Clubs and other early conservation groups history of support for racist ideas about population control he nods to as a solution (it should be noted some groups are trying to make up for past misdeeds today).

Whats most frustrating about Gibbs film is he walks right up to some serious issues and ignores clear solutions. The critique of the compromised corporate philanthropy model is legit. We should absolutely hold nonprofits to account when they dont live up to their missions. But the solution isnt to take the leap to population control. Its to tax the rich so they cant use philanthropic funding as cover for their misdeeds while simultaneously filling government coffers to implement democratic solutions.

Theres a reason that Breitbart and other conservative voices aligned with climate denial and fossil fuel companies have taken a shine to the film. Its because it ignores the solution of holding power to account and sounds like a racist dog whistle.

We also should absolutely interrogate the systems and supply chains of renewable energy. The lithium industrys violent toll on land and people in Latin American countries with vast reserves is real. Letting corporations run the show promises to lead to future violence, regardless of how many people live on Earth. The film doesnt interview any of the new wave of environmental leaders who see the fight against these injustices and the climate crisis as intrinsically linked. Its too bad since thats a message Gibbsand the rest of the worldneed to hear now more than ever.

Excerpt from:

Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism - Gizmodo

"Invisibilia" co-creator, "Radiolab" contributor, and NPR reporter Lulu Miller had her first existential crisis at age 7 when she asked her father about the meaning of life. Her world was forever rearranged by his cheery, but to her,bleak response: "Nothing!"

Perhaps armed with this outlook, Miller has continued to seek something that would offer hope or understanding of howothers navigatethe world. Through her reporting, she'soften delved intoscience todecode aspects of human nature, but it took an almost unbelievable story to inspire her first non-fiction book, "Why Fish Don't Exist: A Tale of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life" (April 14, Simon & Schuster).This is no ordinary fish tale, but instead relates the real-life story of a 19th-century American ichthyologist, a possible murder cover-up, and the horrifying reality of eugenics in America.

David Starr Jordan had spent his life discovering new species of fish, which he then threw in a jar along with a tin tag giving all necessary identifying information. These jars were stacked high at Stanford University when the 1906 earthquake hit, bringing his catch of the decades to a shattering end. Or it would have been for a lesser man. Undaunted, Jordan took needle and thread and began to stitch the tin tags directly onto as many fish as his memory could match.

Was it a Herculean task or a Sisyphean one? Miller found herself intrigued with this fishy folly and began to trace Jordan's life to see if she could unlock the mysteries of what could make such a man impervious to even the greatest setbacks. Whence came his unshakeable faith that he could succeed in the face of overwhelming disaster? Did this man of science know of a meaning other than "Nothing"?

What she discovered at first was charming an intellectual obsessed with learning the names of stars, wildflowers, and later as an adult, marine life. Jordan also experienced multiple tragedies of losing family members close to him, but always remained unfazed. He eventually became the first president of Stanford University and a vocal leader of the eugenics movement, even writing publications about genetic cleansing.

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It's a wild ride, with Miller imbuing suspense into this story from a bygone era as each revelation about Jordan becomes more appalling than the last.

Along the way, Miller also shares her own personal journey from attempting suicide, and losing and rediscovering love, to finding somesense in her own life through a surprising fish-inspired philosophy(fish-losophy?) that resulted from her research.How she makes peace with the idea of a man who haddone both marvelous and monstrousthings involves the book'scoup de grce that upends our idea of what fish (and we)are in the grand scheme of things.

In a wide-ranging interview with Salon, Miller discussed it all, from the aquatic to the existential. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was unfamiliar with David Starr Jordan. When you were looking into him, was it purely because you found this person interesting or did you know all along that there was some sort of story there?

I truly knew nothing. I had heard this little anecdote about the earthquake and how after the earthquake, whoever was in charge of the fish started sewing the label on. So I just knew that someone reacted to destruction in this really confident, almost brazen way. I had no idea who that person was.

And then I literally just wanted to write a pristine little one-page essay of like, man versus chaos, a battle of the little guy against all of chaos. I imagined it would just be a parable like, what was his end? Did he end well? Or did he end poorly? It was an almost foolishly simple question. And then I started to learn about him, and pretty early on just from Google I could see, oh, okay, he became a eugenicist. But I didn't know the extent. I think there's kind of this narrative of, "Well many a decent scientist became a eugenicist in that era. It was just an accident of science, you know, like a misstep." I was like, okay, there's definitely some darkness and some folly but it didn't show the hand of how passionately he was a eugenicist and how much he did for the movement. Then I had no clue about the murder involvement whatever, I had no clue about how interpersonally violent he could get, so those were truly surprises that came the more and more I read about him.

Yeah, that's a lot.

It really spiraled when I saw his fat, giant memoir. Just for me reading it, I started out charmed. I was like, totally he's a loner, he loves nature, he's getting taunted ... and ugh, I love him. And then it was just, like, ugh just dark. It just got so bad.

Jordan's instructor Louis Agassiz, the renowned naturalist, as soon as I started reading his ladder hierarchy theory, it started making me cringe that idea that there's a moral component,a moral hierarchy to the natural world and even among humans. Of course this leads eventually to various ideas of eugenics that people like Jordan was embracing. Was it obvious, this connection of even how they were talking about the value of marine life that it also relates to the waypeople are classified and treated today?

Right, I think what happened for me was I realized, "Oh, wow, this guy was involved in eugenics." I got to learn about the eugenics movement, and how it really got going here. That was the next discovery, of how much a part of American history that was and how popular it was and how the Nazis were putting up posters that said, "We don't stand alone," with an American flag on it because we passed the [eugenics] laws first. So then I had my mini like, "Oh my God, we are dirty with this history. Why did I not know that?!"

And then, I still had the sense that this is past, that we've moved past those policies. But I was living in Charlottesville for almost 10 years, and and we're very close to the park where the Unite the Right rally went down. That morning, short buses full of these young and it wasn't old people young men with Nazi flags and the swastikas on shields, were parking in our lawn. Literally they are saying, "It's just a matter of science that certain races are better." They're using the same argument.

To not see that you'd have to be blind, but then just all the insidious ways and even the reporting on the coronavirus when it was just happening in Wuhan. No one cared about the effects of the isolation on the people living there. These aren't people with the same emotional lives to investigate how they're impacted. It was seen only as this blight, just this disease that's being either handled or not. Or today how people who are disabled are in many states . . . they are being just casually, soberly considered to have less valuable lives, that they shouldn't be the ones getting ventilators.

We think we're passing in the hierarchy, the moral hierarchy, but we're not. There are these decisions everywhere, left and right. You hear it in the news, you see it in policy every day where we're still making this failure of logic, where we still believe there are little moral hierarchies. It's so alive. And that's what's been really astounding to me.

The title of the book, while I know it's very irritating to people in certain ways what do you mean, fish don't exist? the point is "fish" is symptomatic of a false hierarchy, a lower rung that I'm saying doesn't exist. And that is the kind of slip of language and slip of logic that we're making all the time with people. It's cartoonish and easier to talk about in fish, but . . . we're not past it and it really could be dangerous.

You explain it fairly simply in the book, but how did you get to the point of revelation that "fish" doesn't exist as a category of animal, of understanding what the cladists were proposing? It was a radical idea that upset over a century of how we viewed the natural order of the world, and honestly how many people still think. Fish are fish, or so we assume.

Mostly the way in was Carol Yoon's beautiful book, which is "Naming Nature." She was the perfect person to explain it because she lived through the revolution in science. She was literally a biology major and then the cladists came into her classroom, pointing out these truths, like the fact that fish don't exist. And so I just remember reading that book, right as I was learning about David Starr Jordan and kind of seeing his story darken. I thought, "Oh my god, this is such a cool poetic justice for the universe to take away his fish." I remember having this little part of me that still craves meaning, like the little girl on the deck with my dad, that still wants cosmic justice for a bad guy, to watch science itself do him in. There was something that felt like really thrilling and important to me, in a way that I still have trouble articulating, but it felt like, "Oh my god, every now and then, chaos itself spits out a parable for heathens. Every now and then we actually get moral instruction that's even about our rules; it's about chaos. There was something that just felt like, "Oh my god I've stumbled onto the coolest, epic parable for heathens." I felt really thrilled.

But then to truly understand it, took me years, andI had all these, moments of like, "But then what are they?" It took a lot of clumsy conversations with scientists and a lot of doodles on folders of me trying to draw and just make it simpler. It took a lot of slow unscrewing of my own logic, and that was slow. It was slow to get there but but it is cool. I see. Like, do you think do you believe fish as a category doesn't exist?

Oh, yes I wish there was a way to still say "fish" but acknowledge that is not a category like, "phish," but unfortunately, there's already a band named Phish that starts with a "P." But "phish"would stand for "phony fish." It would be helpful.

Oh my god I love that. I love that. Maybe we could just call it that. PETA suggested calling them sea kittens. I like "phony fish." I might borrow that from you and credit you. But it's like, "Sure, you can still call [fish]that. It's just not scientifically accurate. But of course, you can call them that."

You weave in your own personal experiences and trying to find meaning in the book. There's something that I really identified with, which was having this sort of existential crisis when you're in childhood. . . . You pinpoint when your father told you that nothing matters in life. It's all meaningless. It's the worst epiphany ever. Do you recall what your life was like before that moment? How you viewed life before that conversation?

That felt like a shock to me. I must have just intuitively thought that there was meaning or purpose to life . . . just like I marched off to nursery school each morning; we must be marching into life with a purpose. I do remember the Church of the Latter Day Saints commercials that were big in the '80s. It was like, cute little mishap and then at the end, some sort of smile and coming together and then it would be like, "Join the church of Latter Day Saints that discovered the purpose of life." It was like each of them ended with this promise that if you joined, you'd get it.

I think I pictured the meaning or the purpose of life like this little fortune cookie fortune that if you ask the right person or were in the right place, you would learn it and then you'd be okay. You'd be armed with this magical thing to warm all the confusion. I definitelyhad this sense that there was a meaning that was maybe hard to articulate or hard to find out but that it was there. And so for my dad to just so nakedly and completely saying no, and that everyone else who tells you there is, is lying or trying to comfort themselves. It did feel like a blow. I must have thought that there was some huge universal point to it all.

I could see any other number of children going through this conversation with their father and not taking it in like you did. Their illusions wouldn't be shattered despite what an authority was telling them. David Starr Jordan, he had this way of viewing life with these illusions that he embraced and allowed him to forge ahead. What is it in people that you think are make them able to embrace illusions versus people who believe otherwise?

I think a lot goes into it. I do believe that most of us do believe that evolution hasgiven all of us that"gift" of some degree of delusion. Because I do think, with consciousness, if we didn't get a little dash of that with awareness, without some sense of optimism or delusion, we would just be completely paralyzed. So I do think like, we all have that ability just to get through our day, just to even block out the fact that we're all going to die. Like, how else do put on our pajamas or make the coffee?

I don't know, but I think that there's just a scale of how much we let ourselves give in and probably all kinds of things go into how much we let ourselves give in. So probably for me being surrounded by a parent, who is joyfully, devilishly wanting, forcing me to look at the bleakness every morning probably has reared me as someone who's more looking at a darker, more accurate worldview. Whereas if you're constantly sunny and things work out for you, and that optimism, that delusion keeps working for you, you're probably going to keep doing it. Whereas I can imagine if you embrace some form of delusion in yourself or how things work, and then you got humiliated by it, you might be wary of it.

Maybe that's too wishy-washy, but I do think it's like we all have a little [delusion]. And then our life determines how much we're going to hold onto it. And I do think there are some people who are just intuitively more self-deluded. Like David Starr Jordan even talks about how he always had a shield of optimism, and it was so strange and noticeable that people commented on it all throughout his life. So I think maybe he was just spat out that way. Yeah. And being like a white man, relatively well-connected white man, and in the 1800s probably helped reinforce that vision.

Do you think that he might be a sociopath because of that and how easily he lies about everything?There are hints and strong suspicions of murder and there's the violence Jordan advocates.

I didn't go that far because the way he behaves I see as far more common. But he did seem to have a shockingly small amount of remorse. Remorse was utterly un-findable in his autobiography. Every hint of self-deprecation is a backdoor brag, like, "I lost the prize because I was I was so ethical," or because "I was so magnanimous, I wanted a poorer student to win the money." Maybe that that goes as far as a sociopath but I feel like I've encountered people like him who don't care much about the effect that they may have on other people. Why should they if there's not cosmic justice? Why not?

You see a lot of people sometimes getting ahead and have never been really punished for their sins because maybe actually karma and cosmic justice don't really exist, and that unfortunately is the truth of our world. We have all these religions telling us it does exist to spook us into being better. Actually, I think that's one of the great purposes of religion.

Returning to your part, what were the challenges of doing such a personal story for yourself? You go over experiences and actions that most people keep under wraps, not just in the book, but then you recorded an audiobook. So you had to narrate these secrets in your own life out loud.

There's two engineers there's the producer on the phone and then the sound guy at the studio here in Chicago where I was recording it and I'm reading the most naked five paragraphs about myself in the third chapter where I'm like, "Ah, yes, here's my depression, suicide, bullied sister, cheating," really all in three pages.

And it was like, "Wow, I'm just doing it. I'm putting this out there." The cheating and also the suicide, those aren't things I really talk about with that many people. It is a little scary.

In the process of writing and editing, you have to revisit the same ideas over and over and over again to refine them. So in some ways, did that make it more comfortable for you after a while because you're owning it?

Yeah, actually, I do think time helps. In the original pitch of this book, I had no idea I was going into this stuff . . . but my editor was just like, "This is interesting material but why do you care about this guy?" So I did some real crappy free-writing around it, and then all this stuff came out. It was years of work.

Also, in my work, a lot of the interviews I do is asking people to share huge parts of themselves and I think that I'm healed by that. I know listeners are healed by people being that vulnerable, so maybe it's time for me to do it too. But it is scary. It's given me new compassion for people that I just call up and have them feel really dark stuff.

I love Kate Samworth's scratchboard illustrations that she does with, of all things, a sewing needle. So when did you decide that you wanted this visual component for each chapter? How did that collaboration come about?

From the moment I set out to write what I thought was an essay, in my head I had this picture of man versus chaos man holding a sewing needle toa tornado of chaos. I wanted readers to see that because I wanted them to understand how I was seeing his story as this almost like Odysseus putting the stakes in the giant, that kind of battle. It just was always in my head that readers might need the visual so they could understand metaphorically what what I was seeing in this otherwise seemingly arcane tale.

When I pitched the book, I wanted her to do it. I've known her work for a long time and she works in all forms these wild oil paints, stop animation, and watercolor. But I'd seen on her Instagram these little scratch drawings and they just reminded me of fairy tale books and where each story gets one drawing. You fall into it as a little kid at the beginning and you don't know why there's like a key and a lion, but you want to read it to find out. Then you go back [to look at the picture]. I saw his story as an epic and I wanted to heighten that quality . . . and to play up the parable quality.

You've been doing a lot of publicity for this book, but in your regular everyday life, do you think about David Starr Jordan or fish not being fish?

I do think about fish not being fish a lot, a lot with reporting, just in terms of like, "Who am I going to? Who's my first impulse of who to include in the story? Who am I putting on the hierarchy towards the top as experts? Do I need to immediately rethink that? Do I need to include a different kind of voice? Do I have a bias?" I can't really see it because that's the problem with a blind spot or with an assumption; it's so basic you don't even think it's a bias you need to question but I think it's something that increasingly, my ears are pricked to what categories are people asserting.

This is a small example, but the Lynchburg facility, the colony where Carrie Buck was sterilized was in operation until exactly a week ago. Over 100 years later, the last person finally left because COVID hastened it. At first I was like, "Oh, this is such a happy story. This bad place, finally, no one has to live there, the epicenter of eugenics." But then I thought, "But where are they going? Is a group home better? What is the freedom?" So just to even think about like the category of freedom or a better place. Is it really? That's maybe too convoluted, but yeah, I think "Are fish, fish?" is something that has made me hopefully a better reporter, a little more a little more skeptical and just having curiosity about about the truth of categories and about the people who are stuck in them.

As for David Starr Jordan, I think he's complicated. I think about him in this moment, actually, because he'd be the kind of person who would probably react with creativity. He was good at that, even though he used it for evil. He was really creative in the face of utter destruction. He didn't spend a lot of time looking back. And so I think like, Are there parts of him that I actually do want to be more like? Are there parts of him to emulate?

Read more:

"Why Fish Don't Exist" explores eugenics in the US, a Hawaiian murder plot, and the meaning of life - Salon

Toward the end of the 19th century, the superintendent of Georgias State Asylum, T.O. Powell, developed a theory to explain rising numbers of tuberculosis and insanity cases among the states African American population. The problem, he asserted, was that Emancipation eliminated the slave systems healthful effects a remarkably ahistorical claim that ignored not only slaverys brutality but also a similar post-war epidemic in white people.

As his racist ideas informed public-health efforts, the consequences reached far beyond the dangers to his charges at the asylum. Today, as the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, Powells story is a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing prejudice to override the lessons of science. In an era when essential workers of color are among the least paid and protected, when many of Americas national leaders declare viruses foreign (feeding a spike in anti-Asian violence), and when shocking recent data shows that African Americans are disproportionately dying from the epidemic (making up more than 70% of Chicagos deaths, for example), Powells choices should strike us as frighteningly familiar.

Heres how it played out in Georgia. After making his pro-slavery claims about African Americans health, Powell went on to boost his antebellum-inspired ideas with a simplistic understanding of heredity, which he credited with creating 90% of the cases of insanity within asylums. At a southern professional meeting in 1895, Powell and his fellow superintendents asked themselves: Has Emancipation Been Prejudicial to the Negro? and answered this remarkable query with a resounding YES!!! Two years later, Powell was elected President of the American Medico-Psychological Association, giving him a national platform to spread his attitudes. Powell would soon ally these fatal ideas with new eugenics technologies, including sterilization of his female patients, who were deemed morally unfit.

Crucially, Powells eugenic ideals left him ill-equipped to handle the public-health emergencies raging within his own institution. In his fascination with heredity, he ignored the medical revolution ushered in by the germ theory of disease, particularly Edward Kochs discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882a lethal, willful ignorance. Powells yearly reports documented a range of diseases in his asylum that had far less to do with heredity and far more to do with the epidemic conditions created there by his own policies. TB spread rapidly through the air especially in the Colored Building with its 900 black patients. The crowded conditions that allowed that spread were his primary responsibility in a job that he himself called lunacy administration. His patients were also suffering from pellagra from their starvation diet, as the U.S. Public Health Service would later prove.

Adding insult to injury, Powells writing boosted the idea that mental illnesses and TB were the result of degenerate populations too morally depraved or unmanly to survive. When Powell died in 1907, he was proclaimed Georgias greatest philanthropist.

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Fed by a triumphant Jim Crow and a new wave of imperialism, white supremacists continued to promote racist theories of tuberculosis. These grew quickly into such deadly libels as Powell had espoused. Frederick Hoffmans Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro and Rudolph Matas The Surgical Peculiarities of the American Negro (both published in 1896) became standard medical texts in the new century. In the early 20th century, the American eugenics movement also fed these racist libels from its base at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, funded by the Carnegie Institution and supported by major American universities in the years before Hitlers Nazi Party made the consequences of eugenics all too clear in its program of mass extermination.

Comparing Powells story to the novel coronavirus might sound extreme. But 1.5 million people (as of the end of 2017), disproportionately people of color, are incarcerated in crowded cells in U.S. jails and prisons and an average of more than 50,000 people per day are detained in immigration centers. The virus has already begun its spread for inmates and detainees in conditions of forced proximity with little sanitation. Meanwhile, New Yorks Governor and New York Citys Mayor are left pleading the federal government for help against the rising death rates in the multicultural and international metropolis; even within the city, the areas hit hardest are those with high immigrant, Hispanic and African American populations. And we havent yet seen the virus really hit those countries underdeveloped for centuries by conquest and colonialism.

Allowing these forces to play themselves out is one choice. It is called eugenics, fed by both historic racist animosities and willed ignorance. But there are always better options. On the side of public health in Georgia, African Americans in Atlanta in the early 20th century declared that germs have no color line and tracked TB through neighborhoods, traced contacts, opened clinics, and educated their people on prevention and treatment.

Surely today we should chose the second set of practices over the first. But will we?

Mab Segrest is the author of ADMINISTRATIONS OF LUNACY: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, available now from the New Press.

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History Shows That When Prejudice Overrides Science, Public Health Is at Risk - TIME

Bold thinking is an essential part of Dukes approach to scholarship, and three ongoing projects show the unexpected results.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Gabriel Rosenberg, and Aarthi Vadde have been named 202021 National Humanities Center Fellows. They will spend a year away from their regular teaching duties as resident scholars at the Research Triangle Parkbased center, researching and writing new books. Chosen from 673 applicants, they join 30 other humanists from the U.S. and four foreign countries working in 18 different disciplines.

Here are the books theyre working on.

In 1985, a Black San Diego resident named Sagon Penn was pulled over by the police. The encounter quickly turned violent. Fearing for his life, Penn shot and killed one officer while wounding another and a civilian who was riding with them.

Penn was charged with murder, and his trial highlighted the rampant racial tensions of 1980s southern California, which would explode with the assault of Rodney King six years later. Though he was eventually acquitted, Penns life deteriorated. He was later arrested on charges of domestic abuse, among other things, and, in 2002, he committed suicide.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of History

The basic story itself is riveting and heartbreaking, said Adriane Lentz-Smith, whose project, The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights, centers around the case. It has you think about the ways in which state violence becomes more personalized types of violence and travels throughout a community, touching all kinds of folks.

By writing about Penns life in the era of Black Lives Matter, Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of History, hopes to provide historical context to now familiar debates about policing and racism. The Civil Rights Movement didnt begin with Brown vs. Board nor end with the Voting Rights Act, she said. She will use Penns experience to connect individual victims of state violence to the national history of policing, border policies and white supremacy, showing how the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement continue today.

Approaching the topic this way also allows Lentz-Smith to humanize the issues. When you make it not an abstract debate, but a life that we see destroyed, that takes his loved ones and his children with it to see it as tragedy, and not just an individual tragedy but Americas that seems significant, she said.

Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

According to Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, if you want to understand why eugenics and race science were widely popular in the United States in the early 20th century, you cant just look at intellectual debates over the theorys scientific merits (or lack thereof). The actual answer, he says, can only be found on farms.

There are really intriguing and interesting institutional ties between eugenic organizations and the livestock breeding industry, Rosenberg explained. This is a well-known empirical fact about the history of eugenics, but its often sidelined as a peculiarity.

Rosenberg aims to make it central, because thats what it was at the time. In the early 1900s, most Americans lived in rural areas, surrounded by farm animals. In fact, in 1900, the nations livestock was worth more than the countrys railroads combined. The only asset worth more at the time was land.

As a result, eugenics the practice of selectively mating people with specific hereditary traits was a familiar idea, Rosenberg argues. Many accepted the theory because it mirrored the way they bred their livestock. All that was needed was to apply the same logic to humans with horrific consequences.

By placing farming practices into the history of eugenics, Rosenberg is also making broader arguments about the forces shaping our world. The practice of making meat at these truly world historical levels is reformulating human social relations with each other, fundamentally restructuring human societies, he said. Were creating a new ecology that confines and conditions our own social relations. In other words, the supply chains and husbandry practices that define how we treat animals and nature also define how we treat ourselves.

Is fan fiction a form of literary criticism? Should people who love literature care about self-published novels, Instagram poetry or the millions of words written, read and shared on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit?

Aarthi Vadde, associate professor of English

By turning to popular digital forms of writing, associate professor of English Aarthi Vadde is taking questions typically asked by scholars of Internet culture and examining them with a literary lens. The new perspective raises the very question of what makes writing literary, asking what impact its form and venue of publication have even the device on which its read.

Vadde points out that while curling up with a good book is still many readers ideal way to consume literature, its not the predominant mode of reading in the 21st century. I didnt feel like enough people were talking about the actual sociological circumstances of the way literature is consumed today, Vadde said. You cant assume that people are reading the physical book. And if they are reading the physical book, you still have to take into account the ecology that the book exists in.

That ecology is defined by the Internet. We spend most of our reading time on digital devices, reading not just news articles and e-books, but social media posts, reviews and other kinds of everyday writing. And writing them ourselves. Writing is eclipsing reading as a literacy skill, Vadde said. Its so important to write in all areas of work and play these days. Thats something that is very different than the old idea of the reader and writer having a very clear boundary between them.

Titled We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, Vaddes project examines how the social web is changing the relationship between literature and literacy, or the broader understanding of how people read and write today. She will examine works of literature that probe the conditions of reading and writing, make creative use of digital platforms and reflect upon the computing technologies shaping our interaction with all kinds of art, including Teju Coles Twitter fiction, Jarett Kobeks self-published satire I Hate the Internet and more.

In doing so, Vadde will analyze how the principles and rhetoric of Web 2.0, alongside its tech, influence the form and circulation of literature.

Learning to use digital tools is not enough, she said. Humanists should more pointedly address the philosophies behind those tools. We the Platform will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.

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The Police State, Livestock Breeding and Web 2.0: Research by 3 Duke Professors - Duke Today

Scrolling through my Twitter feed is one of the only things getting me through this quarantine right now. I get to see lots of memes and videos, and I also get to be informed of things going on around the world. In such a time of uncertainty, Twitter can be a way to escape. However, because information spreads so fast, some things trending on Twitter are making my blood boil. Its a love-hate relationship I have with Twitter. Its definitely a huge cause of frustration for me because Ive been seeing many misinformed things go viral.

One of my least favorite tweets that have gone viral in the past month are tweets that claim The planet is healing itself. We are the virus, with some relevant hashtags. Some tweets even contained pictures from fish returning to canals in Italy and the water finally clearing up. It is beautiful to see nature thriving, but spreading this kind of idea about humans being the issue in our world in the midst of this deadly pandemic is irresponsible.

This movement is defined as ecofascism, and its becoming a new kind of plague. Grist reports that this is The promotion of authoritarian, fascist ideologies for environmental good. While it is valid that carbon emissions and pollution have decreased around the world due to the widespread lockdowns and quarantine, the idea that this virus is good for the world is foolish. I am an environmentalist myself, and I would never even think about saying anything like this, because it diminishes the loss of many lives around the world due to this pandemic.

According to GQ, ecofascism is the idea that there is only one way to deal with the climate crisis and that is through the use of eugenics and suppressing immigrants/migrants. A man named Madison Grant was the founder of it all. He created the very first organizations dedicated to preserving the Cali redwoods and the American buffalo. While he gave rise to a movement that couldve been great, he was also a huge supporter of race science, the idea that races exist biologically, thus, racists attributing people of other races as different species or different breeds, inferring a racial hierarchy, which was wrong and unfounded.

As Luke Darby of GQ wrote, Eco-fascism relies heavily on a concept called deep ecology, the idea that the only way to preserve life on Earth is to dramatically forcefully, if necessary reduce the human population. Unfortunately, due to ecofascism, some individuals have taken actions to reduce the human population into their own hands. On Aug. 3, 2019, a mass shooting occurred at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, causing the loss of 22 individuals, and the injuries of 24 more people. Before the shooter committed this act of terrorism, he produced a manifesto, in which he talked about stopping the Hispanic invasion of Texas. In this he wrote, If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.

While these tweets arent explicitly stating things or engaging in acts of promoting the loss of individuals, claiming humans are the virus promotes the belief that humans dont have the ability to fix the climate crisis. Essentially, these tweets implicate that mass death is an appropriate solution to climate change. Many eco-fascists attribute the climate crisis to overpopulation when this is simply not the case. Global Justice reports that overpopulation is not the main reason behind the climate crisis, it is in fact, the rich corporations and people that produce the most emissions.

According to the Global Justice article and OXFAM International, it likely draws its claim from, The carbon emissions of just one of the worlds richest 1% of people are equivalent to 175 of the poorest. 50% of the worlds emissions are coming from just 10% of the people. This isnt about population it's about greed. Shrinking the population wouldnt solve the problem.

Quite simply, money controls everything. It equals power, and having power in a world full of greed allows you to break the rules, and not worry about the effects you have on the Earth. Eco-fascists spew ideas of ignorance about individuals who dont even have that much of an impact on the climate crisis, it is hypocritical. If they truly believed in helping the planet, they would attack these wealthy corporations and the system that allowed for the crisis to become so severe.

All in all, ecofascism is a movement that should be put to an end. In society, it is too often where individuals find a scapegoat to blame their problems on. It is unfair to place the weight of the world on individuals who contribute little to nothing to the climate crisis. They are equally struggling and blaming them is not going to solve this issue. What must be done now is stop spreading the notion that humans are the virus when we really are the cure. The 1%and wealthy corporations must be held accountable for their crimes against society. They are aware of the effect they have, and are selfish and will not stop unless people speak up. So, by rising against these individuals, change can foster, and the climate crisis can be mended.

Originally posted here:

OPINION: We are not the virus | Opinion - N.C. State University Technician Online

Meanwhile, New Yorks health-care system was sinking into chaos, as COVID-19 cases swamped hospitals. That day, there were more 911 calls than there had been on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers, however, felt that it was important not to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or media reports, or to fall for the Chicken Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program Mad Money, on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets, and of arguments about them, is numbersdata and their deployments. Reliable data about COVID-19 have been scarce, mainly because, in the shameful absence of widespread testing, no one knows how many people have or have had the virus, which would determine the rate of infection and, most crucially, the fatality rate. The numerator (how many have died) is known, more or less, but its the denominator (how many have caught it) that has been the object of such speculation. If I had a roll of toilet paper for every finance guys analysis of the death rate Ive been asked to read, Id have toilet paper. Most of these calculations, it seems, are arguments for why the rate is likely to be much, much lower than the medical experts have concluded. The less lethal it is, the better the comparison to the flu, and therefore the easier it is to chide everyone for getting so worked up over it. As Lawrence White, a professor of economics at George Mason University, tweeted, Almost everyone talking about the #coronavirus is displaying strong confirmation bias. Which only goes to prove what Ive always said.

Still, its hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings. Whats the trade-off? How many deaths are tolerable? Zero? Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or whatever number it is that will keep us from slipping into a global depression? The public-health hazards of deepening unemployment and povertymental illness, suicide, addiction, malnutritionare uncounted.

Financial people love to come at you with numbers, to cluck over the innumeracy of the populace and the press, to cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the superior risk-assessment calculus of the guy who has an understanding of stochastic volatility and some skin in the gameeven when that skin is other peoples. But while risk and price are intertwined, value and values are something else entirely. It can be hard to find the right math for those.

In the months following the first tidings of COVID-19 from China, Trump played down its potential impactattempting to jawbone a virus, or at least the perception of it. But a virus, unlike a President, doesnt care how its perceived. It gets penetration, whether you believe in it or not. By the time, later in March, that he acknowledged the scale of the pandemic (and sought to convince those who hadnt been paying attention that hed been paying attention all along, except to the extent that hed been distracted), it had long been abundantly clear that he cared more about the economic damageeven if it was only in relation to his relection prospects, or to the fate of his hotel and golf-resort businessesthan about any particular threshold regarding loss of life or the greater good. Others, perhaps on his behalf, have tried to expand his position. For a few days, the message, reinforced by the likes of Glenn Beck (Id rather die than kill the country) and Dan Patrick, the soon-to-be-seventy lieutenant governor of Texas (If thats the exchange, Im all in), was that we might have to sacrifice our elders for the sake of the economy. The politics of it were perverse. Many of the same people who had cited death panels in the fight against Obamacare were now essentially arguing the opposite. One mans cost controls are another mans eugenics.

For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. Hes obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isnt the economynot even close. As were now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activitytravel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugsmeans no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. Thats the economy.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the viruss victims, the economy had a prexisting conditiondebt, instead of pulmonary disease. Corporate debt, high-yield debt, distressed debt, student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, sovereign debt. Its as if the virus is almost beside the point, a trader I know told me. This was all set up to happen.

The trader was one of those guys who had been muttering about a financial collapse for a decade. The 2008 bailout, with the politically motivated and, at best, capricious sorting of winners and losers, rankled, as did the ongoing collusion among the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties. Hed heard that the smart money, like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by Marchs end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit linesa revolver frenzy, as the financial blog Zero Hedge put it, in publishing a list of the companies that managed to get their money in time. Corporate America had hit up the pawnshop, en masse. In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down just $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapseshaircuts for baldheadsleading to more defaults. The market in distressed debt has already ballooned to about a trillion dollars.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didnt have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions, as landlords sent threatening reminders. Would property owners, without their monthly nut, be able to finance their own debts? And what of the banks, with all the bad paper? In the last week of March, an additional 6.6 million Americans filed jobless claims, doubling the previous weeks record. In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

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The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker

David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University. He was also one of the most influential eugenicists of the early 20th century.

Over the past few months, my Eugenics on the Farm series has dealt with various eugenicists associated with Stanford University and examined their relationship with eugenics, the racist and ableist scientific belief in the improvement of the human race through restricting the reproduction of the unfit, typically disabled people and people of color. For Jordan, however, Im going to do something a bit different.

Ive written extensively on Jordans role in the American Eugenics Movement elsewhere, including in a request to rename Jordan Hall. To summarize, David Starr Jordan founded and worked with many of the most influential eugenic organizations in the United States: the Eugenic Research Organization, the Human Betterment Foundation and the Committee of Eugenics the first eugenic organization in the United States. He popularized eugenics in talks, textbooks and books for general audiences, such as his 1911 Hereditary of Richard Roe, and he promoted the forced sterilization of disabled people. Jordan was the kingpin of early American eugenics, creating networks and organizations deeply influential to the success of eugenic policies in the United States and abroad.

I am not going to write about any of that here. Instead, I am going to focus on Jordans complexities, because Jordan was certainly a complex man. He is still often praised for many aspects of his life: his research as an ichthyologist (fish researcher), his activism in various peace movements, etc. However, at the same time, it is impossible to separate his promotion of eugenics from any of these parts of his life. Eugenics was not a mere footnote in Jordans life; it was a central aspect.

The piece has a practical point, too. The prominent psychology corner on the right side of the front of Main Quad, one of the first things one sees as they walk up from the Oval, is named after Jordan. When we see that, despite Jordans complexities, a central legacy of his has been one of deep harm, it becomes clear why Jordan Hall should be renamed.

Jordan was a passionate anti-war activist. He participated in many anti-war campaigns, such as the World Peace Congress and the World Peace Foundations. Jordan supported other prominent peace campaigns, such as Jane Addams Womens Peace Party and Henry Fords Peace Ship. As an anti-war campaigner, Jordan fought adamantly against the participation of the United States in World War I, a position that cost him many friends and earned him many enemies.

While pacifism is certainly a noble position, Jordans anti-war beliefs stemmed in large part from eugenic theory. Jordans main contribution to eugenic research was on the impact of war on racial health. After studying various historical and contemporary wars, Jordan concluded that war, through the deaths of the brave and survival of the cowardly, reduced the overall ability of the race. In his 1915 book War and the Breed, for instance, he wrote that war involves what real students of this subject call reversed selection in which the best are chosen to be killed, and the worst are preserved to be the fathers of the future. Jordans opposition to war was in the name of eugenics in order to prevent the degradation of the race.

Jordan was also an adamant anti-imperialist and fought against the expansion of the American empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American imperialism was on the rise, the most famous example being the Spanish-American War of 1898. During and after the war, the question of turning the Philippines (previously a Spanish colony) into an U.S. colony was on the mind of many Americans. Jordan, though, fought against the expansion of American imperialism and called for the removal of American forces from the island.

His reason was neither benevolence nor belief in the self-determination of indigenous Filipinos, however. Jordan, a believer in the supremacy of white races, simply did not think the inferior Filipino races could comprehend governance. In his 1901 Imperial Democracy, Jordan wrote that Filipinos were as capable of self-government or of any other government as so many monkeys. Jordans racism was the foundation of his anti-imperialist stances.

Jordan donated to and supported a few Black colleges. During his life, he donated a considerable amount to the Tuskegee Institute, a historically Black university founded in part by Booker T. Washington. Jordan was a fan of the institute, though in a rather paternalistic way. In his autobiography, he wrote that he enjoyed the universitys primative yet delightful negro spirituals.

Beneath that support, however, was intense racist reasoning. Jordans motivation behind supporting Black universities was his belief in the racial inferiority of Black people. In The Heredity of Richard Roe, Jordan argued that citizenship required a foundation of intelligence and claimed that Black Americans lacked that foundation. Because of this, he called Black suffrage an evil. Jordan thought that Black universities could, if barely, alleviate this dilemma: In a 1910 speech to the London Eugenics Education Society, Jordan lectured that education could help alleviate the negro problem. And for Jordan, there was a clear negro problem: his textbooks and writings regularly portray Black people as evolutionarily closer to apes than their white peers: blue gum negroes, blue gum apes, one read. Despite sending money to a Black university, Jordan only did so based on racist logic, and he actively taught and spreadracist ideologies, framing Black people as a problem to be solved.

Jordans best known academic legacy, besides Stanford, was his research on fish. Many ichthyologists today can trace their academic lineage back to Jordan. Jordan collected fish from across the world, and over 30 fish are named after him. He was especially fascinated with the evolution of fish: his 1923 A Classification of Fishes sought to place all fish species on a linear evolutionary line, tracing their evolutionary progression.

Even this, however, is difficult to separate from his eugenic beliefs. Many scientists of this era applied their studies to human eugenics: for instance Luther Burbank, a botanist and acquaintance of Jordan, similarly applied his botanical research to the eugenic breeding of humans. Jordan, too drew connections between his research on fish and eugenics. Jordans fascination with fish was a fascination with taxonomies and evolutionary progress: creating categories and sorting fish into them, labeling and studying the qualities of each fish, and tracing the path of evolution. Jordans eugenic research was no different: creating eugenic taxonomies of human value, ranking and categorizing human lives, to improve the human race and manufacture evolution. Jordans ichthyology research, like that of many scientists of his time, was inseparable from his eugenics research and taxonomization of humans.

In our current moment, we are living in a pandemic that has, in many ways, revealed obfuscated aspects of our society. Again, just as in Jordans time, the lives of disabled people are being portrayed as fundamentally less. Again, disabled people are living under the threat of being denied medical care due to their disabilities. Again, certain races are demonized as diseased and unfit. Again, eugenics and its hierarchies of human lives are rearing their ugly heads. Eugenics and the ideologies it perpetuates are being again brought to the forefront in this time of social crisis. It is more important than ever to reject eugenics and to bring attention to its harmful history.

Jordan was clearly a complex man with complex beliefs. Like I wrote in the introduction to this series, I do not believe it is useful to rashly judge figures such as Jordan and paint them in simple strokes.This pandemic, among other things, has shown that eugenics is not a mere historical artefact it is something to be actively confronted. Jordans eugenicist and racist ideologies undeniably permeated through all of his work in ways both obvious and subtle. If the role of the historian is to learn from the past (and it certainly is), historians must also judge the past and recognize the harmful influences of such ideologies. That starts by renaming Jordan Hall, by recognizing that Jordans legacy is that of deep harm. And there is nothing complex about that.

Contact Ben Maldonado at bmaldona at stanford.edu.

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Eugenics on the Farm: David Starr Jordan - The Stanford Daily

From his bleached mullet and shiny outfits to satin thrones, from condoms with his face on to intimate piercings, Tiger Kings central character, Joe Exotic, is an affront to good taste. Likewise, the hot-mess sprawling narrative of addiction, sexual coercion, exploitation, theft, murder, suicide, obsession, guns and explosives. Not to mention the tragic backdrop of inexplicably gratuitous numbers of majestic, dangerous, big cats.

Aesthetically, Tiger King is a documentary of excess. Too many exotic animals in captivity, too many guns and sequins, too much desperation and methamphetamine, too many storylines, too many villains, too, too much. It is addictively engrossing as a result, its popularity during lockdown hinging on revelling in the weird horrors of tasteless, Hicksville excess. Plunged into a weird, crazy world so Other to our own, we feel normal. Witnessing the extraordinarily dangerous combination of caring for big cats, while playing with unregulated guns and explosives, while on meth, makes us feel comparatively safe. What more could we want in lockdown, while the apocalypse rages outside?

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

But this comfort, this reassurance that we are comparatively sane, normal and safe, depends upon an us and them logic that is dangerous. Taste is classed. Taste is political.

Writing about the way we stigmatise working-class celebrity, sociologistsImogen Tyler and Bruce Bennettsaw our media as a class pantomime offering community-forming attachment to a bad object. That is, these characters define what we are glad not to be, giving us the opportunity to affirm our comparative superiority through the pleasure of collective scorn.

The cast of Tiger King is depicted in the white trash archetype, a stock character with a long history going back to the US Eugenics RecordOffice who, between 1880 and 1920, attempted to demonstrate scientifically that rural poor whites were genetically defective. The rural class entered the public imagination as dirty, drunken, criminallyminded, and sexually perverse people. This was used to end welfare and introduce involuntary sterilisation and incarceration. SociologistsMatt Wray and Annalee Newitz argue the stereotype of the incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid redneck persists over a century later. This reads true of the characterisation constructed in Tiger King. While their big cat businesses may turn over huge sums, the sneering pleasure of watching their financial mismanagement reeks of the schadenfreudeof being proved right about who does and doesnt deserve wealth. This is exactly the logic of the eugenics white trash label.

The term white trash has always existed to blame those suffering social ills for their situation, suggesting it is a product of their own poor judgement and intrinsic inferiority, not structural inequality. The main characters of Tiger King are horrendous: murderous, abusive utterly reprehensible. But, beware the pleasures of disgust. Trash designates the dregs, dirt or refuse of society. That which should be disposed of.

Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness, Official Trailer

Why does this matter? Because eugenics is back. From the eugenicist views of former advisor to Downing Street, Andrew Sabisky, to herd immunity. From reassurance that coronavirus only kills the elderly or those with underlying conditions, as if underlying conditions was code for less than fully a person, to do not resuscitate orders signed against patients wishes. From certain groups being told not to go to hospital,saving beds for those with higher chances of survival, to the criminal, political, deliberate underfunding of our health service. These show our leaders strategically callous belief in the disposability of human life. Forcing doctors into a position where they must decide who lives creates the most violent discrimination. Beware comforting entertainment predicated on us and them logic which imagines them to be disposable and not us, when our government in a time of health crisis is doing exactlythe same to us.

Dr Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in media and culture at Oxford Brookes University

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Tiger King is popular because we love to laugh at white trash heres why thats dangerous - The Independent

This essay contains discussions of scientific racism, forced sterilisation, and racist reproductive violences against people of color.

By Adrie Rose

There is nothing new about eugenics. Its certainly undergone rebranding, PR campaigns, re-naming, and re-working to give it a shiny new, gilded patina, but whether its called the social hygiene movement, the racial hygiene movement, or population controlits eugenics. Its an attempt to stop the socially illthe poor, the mentally ill, the houseless, drug users, and people of colour from procreating and outnumbering the inbred upper-/middle-class, well-educated white masses.

With walking, talking, moldy ham steaks like Richard Dawkins extolling the virtues of eugenics, its no surprise that this racist, pseudoscientific backwater is considered, almost solely, the domain of men. In fact, it feels like a concerted effort on behalf of white women to ignore and outright deny the racist history of feminismwhite feminism, specifically. And while there is a certain ostrich-like quality inherent to white feminism, the denial cannot continue. Although the truth of the past has been partially buried, the roots of that evil have continued to grow, tripping up and grabbing at the bodies of unsuspecting Black and brown people simply trying to survive. The past, and how it informs the present, must be acknowledged and confronted head-on if we are to end the violent legacy of reproductive interference in the global southmost specifically Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Southern Asia.

In 1926, the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales (now the Family Planning Association) was founded by Lillie Goodisson and Ruby Rich of the Womens Reform League. Until 1928, the association was known as the Racial Improvement Society. During their tenure, Gooddisson and Rich advocated for selective breeding of future generations with particular emphasis on the elimination of hereditary defectsincluding mental illness, venereal disease, syphilis, a predisposition to criminal behaviour, and non-whiteness. Thanks to their literary propaganda, Australia passed legislation designed to sterilise Aboriginal and Indigenous people across the continent without their consent or knowledge. The Sexual Sterilisation Act of Alberta (1928) and the Sexual Sterilisation Act of British Columbia (1933) allowed for the forced sterilisation of all manner of social outcasts, leading the United Nations to condemn the country and its legislature for continued violations of human rights law. The Alberta act was repealed in 1972 after more than 4,000 people (most women and children of Eastern European, First Nations, and Metis descent) were surgically and permanently sterilised without their consent. The British Columbia act was repealed in 1973 after the formation of a Board of Eugenics was formed to unilaterally strip bodily autonomy from any person it deemed to have a tendency to serious mental disease or mental deficiencylargely Aboriginal people.

In January 2012, reports surfaced that Project Prevention, a United States-based organisation that pays drug users to use long-term, implantable birth control, was paying women in Mbita, Kenya with HIV to have IUDs implanted and had been since at least May 2011. A report detailing these allegations tells the story of women being told to sign consent forms for tubal ligation while in labour, women whose husbands signed consent forms for what they thought was a cesarean section but actually gave permission for them to be sterilised without their knowledge or consent, and women whose mothers were told that their disabilities and HIV+ would make them bad mothers, despite having already given birth. Women in their early and mid-20s whose husbands left them, sometimes taking the children, after learning that they could no longer fulfill their duties, women who were berated and shamed for their HIV status by doctors and nurses that refused to aid them unless they agreed to sterilisation, and women who signed documents in confusion because doctors and nurses would only speak to them in English.

In December 2014, five Kenyan women sued the Kenyan Health Ministry, Medecins sans Frontieres, the French arm of Doctors Without Borders, and Marie Stopes International for sterilising them without their consent. Marie Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to fund her building of birth control clinics across the United Kingdom. After Stopes death, these clinics coalesced under the umbrella known as Marie Stopes International. The first overseas location for MSI was established in New Delhi, India, carrying the dark cloud of its prior mission to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.

In her writings, Stopes espoused a particular hatred for mixed-race (half-caste) people and advocated for their sterilisation at birth (Sorry mum and dad, I guess youll only have cats for grandchildren if these folks get their hands on me). Stopes was contemporaries with women like Gertrude Davenport, who argued that allowing no less than 5% of the population to be incompetent thru [sic] such bad heredity as imbecility, criminality, and disease cost American taxpayers around $100 million annually. Stopes and Davenport shared similar ideas as Rita Hauschild who conducted Bastard Research in the Caribbean between 1936 and 1937, studying Chinese-Negro, Chinese-Indian, and Indian-Negro hybrids in Trinidad and Venezuela. Hauschilds work on racial identification of embryos was a particular favourite of Nazi scientists and doctors in World War II-era Germany.

An ocean away in India, the United Kingdoms Department for International Development was funneling at least 166 million ($215,995,615) to rural clinics for the purposes of birth control, despite complaints that the money would be used for forced sterilisation. Both men and women in India alleged being dragged off the street and into clinics where they were operated on by torchlight. Reports of deaths from horribly botched operations, patients thrown out onto the street still bleeding, and people miscarrying or suffering stillbirths after being ignored when they told doctors that they were pregnant. Some clinics claimed to be incentivised with promises of 1500 (rupees) for each completed sterilisation with a bonus of 500 per patient for performing more than 30 operations in a day.

Do I think white women are actively forming organisations and non-profits with the clear aim of furthering eugenics in some dystopian plot to eradicate brown people? Not intentionally. But I think its very likely that white women and their supporters have internalised centuries-old ideas of white purity and the white (wo)mans burden. To be fair, white women are not, nor have they been the sole arbiters of eugenic thought and action in the global south. The transnational movement to eradicate Black and brown bodies is nothing new, nor was it solely the domain of German Nazis as parroted in liberal circles. Buck v. Bell, a 1927 United States Supreme Court case that has never been overturned, allowed for the compulsory sterilization of the unfit in the interest of protecting the state. But why this enduring ragethis disdain for the reproduction of visibly non-white bodies? What engenders such a visceral reaction that the Center for Investigative Reporting found 150 cases of Latinx and Black women being sterilised in California prisons without consent? Its fear. The fear is two-fold, but plain and simple, fear drives and has driven the need to cease population growth by any means necessary.

Look to the narrative of King Kong for that fear made visual. In his earliest incarnation, Kong is a slavering beast, nothing more and nothing less. He is every fear of Black male aggression come to life. Given the era of its production, its not surprising that the film never approaches more than a modern-day PG rating, but I always expect to see some grotesquely oversized depiction of vaguely human genitalia as Kong thrashes about. Well-endowed, blessed with endless energy, lacking the genteel restraint of their civilised white counterparts. Even the smallest display of sexual agency or interest from a Black person, real or imagined, is immediately twisted into a vile, perverse display of animalistic lust. Its evidence of our complete lack of humanity, no matter how well-bred we are. In the 1930s, the fear stoked by Birth of a Nation (1915) was still alive and well. Dark-skinned men, literally lurking in shadows, were a scourgestalking white women and stealing their purity away, supplanting it with literal and figurative darkness.

The fear of the hulking beast of Black sexuality is somewhat farcical, I suppose. But less comical, easier to visualise, more deeply ingrained is a very real concern that white domination will soon be usurped by the growing numbers of non-white bodies across the globe. White people are the global minority, not just in places like Asia and Africa, but in America and Europe as well. 20 years ago, non-Latinx whites were just 49.8% of the California population. The US Census Bureau predicts that the rest of the United States will follow suit in another 20 years. And white people are terrified at becoming the minority in a world they built to fulfill their needs, wants, and desires at the expense of Black and brown bodies. That terror is less associated with the horror of seeing more non-white faces in a crowd. To be sure, there is a sick fascination in white communities with rooting out those who dont belong, those immediately identifiable as outsiders by virtue of their skin. But more than that, eugenic obsession is fueled by the idea that white people will become the minority and subsequently, the victims of retribution.

To picture white women carrying the mantle of eugenic discourse and violent action, little suspension of disbelief is required. In a world where white femininity is rewarded, coddled, and purified its not actually difficult to envision the beneficiaries of the same internalising the racist baggage that comes with pink pussy hats. The same world where haphazard monuments dedicated to the memory of Susan B. Anthony are erected in a mad dash to immortalise a woman prostrate before the altar of the eradication of foreign Black and brown people. Eugenic thought and action can go through a name change and a spit shine, but there will always be a fuck it, mask off moment where the truth will out. White women continue to unironically champion the cause of ethnic cleansing by shouldering the white womans burden, even though no one asked, because it is both their historical prerogative and unspoken objective.

Further Reading:

Adrie is a Sociology grad student and freelancer living in Pittsburgh. She primarily writes about sex work, social media, race, and gender. When shes not writing or grading, Adrie works as an artist and photographer. Her great loves include the glitter accent nail, Bojack Horseman, Disenchantment, and her two cats: Misty (15) and Oscar (5).

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Sterilisation and Eugenics In The Global South Are Championed By White Women - Wear Your Voice