PSINKTOBER_DISCHARGE-REPORT-1
Subject: Election
This is the first of what will be three follow-up posts to the PSINKTOBER series I recently completed. These follow-ups will contain minimal drawings, because they're supplements to the original comic essays.
On the one hand, recent events will enable a cascade of unique menaces for people with disabilities and disorders, including but not limited to incarceration, eviction, assault by police and vigilantes, loss of autonomy, financial, personal, and bodily exploitation, and death.
Known side effects of Project 2025 and a Trump presidency include intensified incorporation of highly fallible Large Language Models into healthcare "to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse," repealing the Inflation Reduction Act (which affects the price of prescription drugs)1, rescinding equity tracking requirements in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as well as deregulating allocation of funding from the act2, more or less eliminating Medicaid3, and reducing the number of conditions veterans can make benefit claims for4…
…plus the promotion of someone who claims fluoridation and vaccines cause I.Q. loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and autism to a central role in deciding public health policy5.
On the other hand, these policies will hurt many more people than those discussed in my comics6. I would argue, as I argued in several of last month’s essays, that the triple function of disorder as a simultaneously oppressed, privileged, and excluded position means I'm less worried about pathologization than criminalization, which can target anyone and has no such functional nuance. The aforementioned changes to IDEA will target students of color in the Special Education system as though they were prisoners7, while the anti-queer policies all over the administration’s plans incentivize punishment and terror over repression and coercion—out of the conversion therapy frying pan and into the prison fire, so to speak8.
Besides, Kennedy has brain worms, Trump has dementia and NPD—they can’t be that ableist9.
As usual, disorder is both outside of and woven through the given subject. How convenient for me to turn into content, now, and inconvenient for everyone, soon.
"Health Care.” StopProject2025Comic.org, 2024. https://stopproject2025comic.org/comic/health-care/.
Ives-Rublee, Mia, and Casey Doherty. “The Top 5 Ways Project 2025 Would Hurt Disabled People.” Center for American Progress, 28 Oct. 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-top-5-ways-project-2025-would-hurt-disabled-people/.
Armour, Stephanie. “How health care could change under the new Trump administration.” NPR, 6 Nov. 2024. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181861/2024-election-trump-kennedy-health-care.
Seeberger, Colin. “Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks and Balances Harms Veterans.” Center for American Progress, 22 Aug. 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025s-plan-to-gut-checks-and-balances-harms-veterans/.
Tumin, Remy. “R.F.K. Jr. Lays Out Possible Public Health Changes Under Trump.” The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-health.html.
Really, if you’re not within three degrees of Donald Trump, you’re not safe. And even if you are, you’re still probably not.
Yes, I realize Special Education is already closely tied to the school-prison pipeline. My point is how much worse it can get.
Though both options will presumably remain available.
I feel the need to add a footnote to be crystal clear that this is sarcasm.
As usual, you say it so very well. The election is still sinking in. The consequences are quite terrible in every sphere of life.