▪️In 1907, Indiana enacted its first eugenics law, requiring sterilization for any women in state custody who displayed "criminality, mental problems, or pauperism."
Indiana sterilized 2,500 women before the final repeal in 1974.
▪️Virginia passed its eugenics law in 1924, taking it to the Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision.
"It is better for the world," Holmes said, "if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."
▪️In 1929, North Carolina established a Eugenics Board to sterilize poor, unwed, and/or mentally disabled women, children, and men.
65% of North Carolina's 7,600 victims were black women, even though only 25% of the state’s female population is black.
▪️Between 1937 and 1965, one-third of all Puerto Rican women between 20-49 were sterilized. The U.S. so successfully promoted the idea of sterilization among poor Puerto Rican women, it became known as simply "la operacion."
▪️The Indian Health Service, under the control of the U.S. Public Health Service, began providing "family planning" services to Native American families in 1965.
By the 1970s, 25% of Native women between 15-44 had been sterilized.
▪️A total of 32 states enacted eugenics laws during the 20th century, resulting in the sterilization of 70,000 people.
▪️Between 2006-2010, 150 women in California prisons were sterilized without informed consent.
▪️An unknown number of immigrant women have been forcibly sterilized in a Georgia internment camp.
None of this is new. Fascism, racism, and eugenics are woven into the fabric of our nation.
This is your America. So what are you doing to do about it?
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If you give voice to the perpetual frustration and sadness that go along with being American, someone will bring up the huddled masses.
How bad can it be when so many would give anything to be here?
Checkmate.
Except we know that in the grand and global scheme, we are richer and more comfortable, better fed and freer than billions of others around the world.
We know.
We also know that compared to comparable countries, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality, greater wealth inequality and lower quality of life. It is more violent, more fractured, less educated.
I know many places are infinitely more difficult. And I am grateful for my privilege. But we are fed the story of the “greatest country on earth” from the second we leave the womb.
We’re told LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.
well, I’d like to, Chip.
We’re the only country I know of where people have to constantly whoop and remind each other where they live. MERICA!!!!!!
Then I look around at this failing, willfully ignorant nation, shot through with poverty and suffering, and I think
I hear people saying we need a true people’s party to bring left populism to a desperate nation. And goddammit, I could not agree more.
But right now, we’re out of time.
Enemies aren’t at the gate; they’re through it. White nationalists, assisted by law enforcement and government, armed with napalm and the easy comfort of privilege, will stomp their feet in every state in the union.
It’s a holy war for them.
And if you don’t think innocent people will die, you’re as deluded as they are.
People are starving, looking over the horizon to homelessness, dying. That gap is growing, and the vulnerable are falling in.
Hong Kong closed its entire school system yesterday, after 38 of the 66 new cases of COVID-19 were identified among students and parents.
Yesterday we reported 59,880 new cases, yet the White House and any impotently raging, scientifically illiterate buffoons who still take their word as anything other than deliberate perversity are still pushing for schools to open in the fall.
Don't let anyone tell you this is about education.
American scores consistently ranks among the lowest in the developed world for math and science.
A few days ago Trump received a letter from Mark Grenon, self-styled "religious" leader and peddler of medicinal bleach, if that's a thing which it most certainly is not.
Grenon's group, Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, was targeted by the Justice Department just this month, and the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida issued a temporary injunction halting the sale of their "Miracle Mineral Solution"
(fucking bleach) as a solution for COVID-19. (They also tout it as a cure for Alzheimer’s, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and multiple sclerosis.)
“Dear Mr President, I am praying you read this letter and intervene.”
I see #BernieBros is trending. Let me tell you something about us:
We are women and men and non-binary, Black, white, Hispanic, asian. We are the most diverse group of supporters of ANY candidate. We are not a monolith you can describe with an insulting, alliterative nickname.
We are young. We are old. We are poor. We are, by and large, without healthcare. We are idealistic. We are angry. We are afraid.
You have spent more time hating us than hearing us, so let me tell you what it looks like from inside here.
I have never met a group of people — strange and diverse as we may be — who are more ready to fight for the well-being of those around them.
Who are more dedicated to the health and welfare of this nation.
Who believe more passionately that a better world IS possible.