In this conversation, Beatrice Adler-Bolton—disability justice advocate and co-host of Death Panel Podcast—says something twice:"Under capitalism, you’re only entitled to the survival you can buy." Her forthcoming co-authored book is called, provocatively, Health Communism. Part of its argument is that we have to imagine a society in which everyone is entitled to the survival we can share.How disquieting it is that the natural instinct we have as individuals to ask: "What is this going to cost me?" is microcosmic to neoliberal obsessions—austerity, productivity, and dreams of a better future purchased with moral sacrifices in the present. It’s microcosmic to the brutal decisions our societies are now making about who is worthy of protection and who isn't, and which political constituencies we can't afford to piss off by appealing to the small amount of generosity and humility it takes to wear a mask. We're living in a culture of What is it going to cost me? And that's not really a culture at all.If we don't do better, then how exactly are the conspiritualists wrong? Not about the details, but about the existential condition. They imagine a Cabal at the top of everything, making nefarious decisions, and this is easy to dismiss. Less easy to dismiss is the feeling they articulate, that many of us share: that unseen and impersonal forces are working against the spirit of human generosity. They know that sometimes we all feel ourselves participating in that process, which means we have to do something—perhaps as radical as waking up. Not to the magic of turmeric, or the realization that we’re starseeds. Something far more radical than that, and much more mundane: that we can organize ourselves in more fair and loving ways.Beatrice Adler-Bolton is a blind/low vision and chronically ill artist, writer, and disability justice advocate. Beatrice studies radical patient groups and the capitalist political economy of health as an independent researcher and is earning a master's in Disability Studies at CUNY. She is the co-host of the Death Panel podcast with Artie Vierkant and Phil Rocco.Note from Beatrice: If you'd like to give your listeners a little more info on Disability Justice (DJ), I would recommend this link from Sins Invalid, which is a short and foundational DJ text and a really quick primer on what it is written by Patty Berne and Sins Invalid: tinyurl.com/DJ10Principles.
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And you can become a supporter at Patreon backslash Conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you'll receive access to two years now of bonus content and our regular weekly bonus episode, which drops on Mondays.
By supporting, you can help keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever service you use.
Episode 101, Eugenic Pandemic with Beatrice Adler Bolton Throughout this pandemic, my family and I have been meticulously careful.
We've tended towards, as they say, an abundance of caution. - We've listened carefully to the best guidance that we can get access to.
We track predicted spikes and waves.
We've kept tabs on local hospital capacity.
Our politics about it have been generally pro-social, I'd say, but I'll get to some caveats in a bit.
And our reasoning has always been that it's better to be safe than sorry, not only for ourselves, but for everyone else.
In the first year of the pandemic, my mother was dying of cancer, and we had to go to heartbreaking lengths to protect her.
It prevented the family from meeting until the very end when I bubbled in the home hospice and then quarantined at home when it was all over.
There are three surviving grandparents in our circle and we've been very careful to protect them as well.
We live in Toronto, Canada, where vaccines have been fairly accessible and the vaccination rate is high.
And so in short, we've done everything that we can within our sphere of possession to remain safe and conscientious.
And so far, quite fortunately, but also so far as we know, we have avoided being infected with COVID.
That could easily change.
And I would be lying if I said that this wasn't an outcome that I feel happy about or lucky about, but it's a dirty kind of happiness and luckiness.
Because the fact is that I've been able to make those decisions based upon raw stores of privilege.
The self-employment income of our household has allowed us to have our children at home for longer lengths of time than other families, even while the schools were open.
We were able to buy a device for the younger one to do online school.
Bubbling with two of the grandparents has meant that we've enjoyed more help with childcare than other families have had access to.
We've had N95 masks for the whole family, we're maximally vaccinated, and we've been able to afford boxes of 20 rapid tests at a time.
Now, I was never a big science student in school, but my general education has been robust enough that I've been able to navigate the chaos of COVID information with a certain amount of patience and circumspection.
I've had time to read the news and sort out conflicting reports.
And each of these benefits has been like a kind of money in the bank.
And even here in a country like Canada, where we have the great advantage of so-called universal health care, that money in the bank has made a huge difference.
And that tells us something about how universal our care actually is.
In a country with universal healthcare, one of the countless ways in which inequality plays out is that I've been able to drive my car to the grocery store after placing an order for grocery pickers to pick up, and they'll bring it out to the car in a cart, and then they'll go back to work in the store where they have higher exposure rates to COVID than I am willing to risk.
And that same car has allowed me to take the children on outdoor trips where the risk was lower than with indoor activities.
So anyway, I'm describing a list of activities and actions that I have personally taken because I've been able to by no merit of my own.
And that's not the conversation that a global pandemic should provoke.
In this upcoming interview with Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton, she says something twice that I'm going to preview here for emphasis.
She says that under capitalism, you're only entitled to the survival you can buy.
That's why her upcoming co-authored book is called, provocatively, Health Communism.
It's not out yet, but I gleaned that the argument is that we have to imagine a society in which everyone is entitled to the survival we can share.
Now, the fact that my family and I haven't had COVID over the last two plus years is an indication of the kind of survival we've been entitled to buy.
And my interview with Beatrice is about the fundamental unfairness of that system and that landscape, the inhumanity of it, and how it relegates everyone less than young, less than able-bodied, everyone who does not meet an arbitrary benchmark of economic productivity to a lower class status.
Part way through this interview, you'll hear me own a part of my own history and psychology that being 50 years old and having grown up in a far less disability-aware culture than we now inhabit, I instinctually othered disabled people out of a defensive sense of shame that had, I think, two parts to it.
There's probably more, but these are the two parts that I can identify.
The disabled person I encountered showed me my own vulnerability.
And secondly, the fate of the disabled person showed me the pervasive lack of generosity that governs the culture, but that also sometimes I can feel lurking in my heart.
It's the problem of what are we really willing to do for those who are more vulnerable?
Now, I imagine some of us can feel this, that when we're assessing our own positions against a backdrop of apparently limited resources, I think that many of us can feel how easy it is for this thought and this feeling to come up inside in relation to having to protect ourselves.
And that thought is, how much is it going to cost?
The fact that the question comes up at all says something about the miserliness of the culture we inhabit.
It's the question that says we've accepted the premise that we're only entitled to the survival we can buy.
But it's also told me something about my own selfishness.
It's told me about my own self-regard.
And I'm not saying this in any abstract way or to be self-flagellatory.
I'm saying it in the real, concrete way of noticing how easy it is for me to default to the instinct of self-protection.
Even down to, and I hate to admit this, that when a family member becomes ill, I have to check within myself A resentful feeling of, oh, now I have to take care of you.
Oh, how much is this going to cost me?
And I'm not going to lie, I could feel myself doing this with my own mother.
Getting tired, feeling put upon, thinking about cutting corners, wondering when I would get mine, willing myself to do more.
Now, I'm pretty sure I kept a mask on those feelings, and I discharged my duties well, and I was present and giving for the key moments, but sustained change and care requires a real, robust spirit, and it doesn't seem right that we expect to be able to do this alone.
So these pangs of avoidance that I see in myself and that might be somewhat natural in human relationships, they seem to profit us, as long as we're healthy, when we scale them up to the level of policy.
But at what expense to our own dignity?
So you're going to hear a lot of rich and sometimes dense analysis from our guest today, but perhaps keeping this single thought in mind will be like a lit candle.
Whatever instinct you have to say, what is it going to cost me, is simply scalable out to the neoliberal governmental fascination with austerity, productivity, and dreams of a better future purchased with present sacrifices.
It's scalable to the brutal triage decisions that our societies are now making about who is worthy of care and who isn't, about which political constituencies we can afford to piss off simply by appealing to the small amount of generosity and humility it takes to wear a mask.
It's scalable to what it means for Elon Musk to spend $44 billion on a social media platform when he could pay off everybody's diabetes medication, maybe in the world, or even buy the patents and give them away.
We're living in a culture of what is it going to cost me, and that's not really a culture at all.
And if we don't do better, then how exactly are the conspiritualists wrong?
Not about the details, but about the existential reality.
They imagine a cabal at the top of everything, making nefarious decisions, and that makes them easy to dismiss.
Less easy to dismiss is this feeling they articulate, and that I think many of us share, that unseen and impersonal forces are working against the spirit of human generosity, and we can feel ourselves participating in that process, which means we have to do something, perhaps as radical as waking up.
Just not to the truths of A Course in Miracles or the realization that we're starseeds, but something much more radical than that, much more mundane as well, that we can actually organize ourselves in more fair and loving ways.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is a blind, low-vision, and chronically ill artist, writer, and disability justice advocate.
Beatrice studies radical patient groups and the capitalist political economy of health as an independent researcher, and she's earning a Master's in Disability Studies at City University of New York.
She is the co-host of the Death Panel podcast with Artie Vierkant and Phil Rocco.
Beatrice's first book, which is called Health Communism, A Surplus Manifesto, is co-authored with Artie Verkant and it'll be published by Verso Books in the US and UK in October of 2022.
Health communism argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and health.
Beatrice Adler Bolton, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
One of the real gifts of DEATH PANEL is this depth of background research and disability rights that you and your co-hosts bring to the table.
And, how that history can inform your analysis of COVID public health policy, especially in neoliberal settings.
So, you come with analysis, you come with receipts, and some of our listeners will share some of that knowledge, but for those who don't, I just wanted to start with a lightning round on some basic definitions in history, if that's okay.
Yeah, of course.
Why is your podcast called Death Panel?
So our podcast is about the political economy of health.
And we are in the United States, which is the health capitalism leader of the world.
So the name Death Panel is appropriating one of the greatest myths in recent memory of American health care policy, which became a major narrative that dominated the fight over the Affordable Care Act throughout the 2010s.
So in December of 2009, PolitiFact named death panels the first ever recipient of their Lie of the Year award.
And this widespread lie is often the first thing invoked when people are arguing against removing profit from systems of care or when people are advocating for socializing health finance or socializing health resources like hospitals.
So, the name is a reference to the myth of the death panel, and now there's a real death panel, it's us, and we're trying to give people the tools to see through these myths.
Okay, this is a great introduction, a great place to start.
A more broad question now, because it's a theme that comes up over and over again in your episodes, what is eugenics and how has it changed over time?
Yeah, eugenics is the belief that science must intervene at a population level or else the vulnerable will overwhelm the strong, leading to the destruction of society.
Obviously, as a historical movement, eugenics became popular in the late 1800s and became dominant in American scientific thought and philanthropy by the 1920s.
Eugenics has often collapsed into a very ahistorical frame and people will say that it's only about attenuating reproduction or forced sterilization or that eugenics ended with the Nazi regime But eugenics never ended or disappeared after World War II.
It simply transformed.
It was rebranded and its legacy remains in our political economy because it was, as I write about in my forthcoming book, it was a weaponization of a much older idea about the economic valuation of human life.
So, for example, To say, for example, a oncoming wave of COVID won't be bad because the most vulnerable have already been hospitalized or died is eugenic logic.
It is saying that the landscape of health is different as a result of a specific portion of the body politic being called.
And the, you know, eugenics lives in the institutions and systems that we use to compare populations, that we use to statistically value life, to regulate labor.
It lives in places like policy abandonment and in the lack of environmental policy.
And in all of these kind of places where Where the sort of worth of life is measured.
Eugenic logic plays a tremendous portion in many aspects of our current healthcare system, particularly in the United States.
Related question, what is ableism?
So I would say typically if you're thinking about how this would be defined as a term, people usually typically refer ableism to refer to You know, social level and structural level discrimination towards people who are disabled or towards people who are chronically ill or anyone who differs in some capacity from a norm.
And a lot of ableist rhetoric is often oriented towards trying to take someone who does not fit into a dominant norm and either critique them for not fitting into it or pressure them to fit into it, but obviously it's a much broader concept, but sort of as it's most often used, it's usually used to refer to specific instances of disability discrimination.
Now, does ableism tend to have a politics to it?
Absolutely, and many types too.
Beyond exclusion, discrimination, or the justification of slow death, or the justification of the inaccessibility of the built environment, the primary political economic function of ableism is as a justification for austerity.
Our society is driven by contingent logics of austerity and under the kind of constant artificial pressure that there will never be enough care to go around and that you're only entitled to the survival that you could buy and honestly that in and of itself is a kind of political statement about the cost of taking care of people Who might be more dependent on others who might need a little extra help.
Right.
And it's sort of instead of buying into essentially a kind of like narrative of us being interdependent, that we live in a society together and that communities are built are built through mutual support.
It's more a embrace of the kind of rugged American individualism, a very pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of ideology.
Right.
I just wanted to pause and ask for the unpacking.
I think you did it a little bit, but you used a phrase that I wanted to ask about, the contingent logics of austerity.
Can you say a little bit more about that?
So austerity is obviously a kind of historical approach of government where you are essentially defunding things.
It's also a general way of thinking about public funds and thinking about what we sort of have, what we owe to one another, for example.
So contingent logics of austerity are things like welfare reform.
There are things like work requirements for Medicaid.
These are ideas that sort of project as if there are all these people trying to steal benefits that they're not owed.
And I think one of the best people who, one of the best ways that this is theorized is through the idea of an administrative burden, for example.
And Don Moynihan and Pamela Hurd do great work on this where they talk about how administrative burdens sort of become baked into all sorts of policies and essentially they reproduce these logics of austerity that are not only difficult for the person who's trying to seek benefits or seek support, they're also really demotivate and devote
Sorry, demotivating as well as costly from a sort of overhead perspective.
So the sort of social and emotional tolls of austerity are so much higher than we ever talk about, especially when we're talking about austerity as being a kind of budgetary measure of saving money and sort of preserving society through tightening the belt.
Turning to history just for a moment, what are some landmark moments in the history of disability rights in the U.S.
and globally?
So, one of the early landmarks that we covered recently on Death Panel is the 504 sit-in, which was a very early action in the history of the disability civil rights movement.
And is largely sort of responsible for getting national attention to the need for disability policies and from that movement was birthed a whole series of protests and policy initiatives and trainings
And it really has become this kind of story of the origin of disability rights and disability rights activism in America that would lead to things like later big moments like the Capitol Crawl, which happened in the, you know, in the sort of end of the 80s towards the 90s, where you have people advocating for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
So, you know, we talk about Section 504 in the sort of more accurate historical context than a lot of people often talk about these things.
People talk about big victories as if they're sort of magical moments where, for whatever reason, maybe something's in the air, Or it's just the magical energy of a city that has a history for radical politics that all of these forces sort of come together and policy magic happens and the law is passed and everybody goes home happy.
But, you know, honestly, that's not how history works.
It's much more complicated.
And these movements, particularly the Section 504 movement that we covered recently, They were only successful because of this intersectional organizing that was actually coming together.
So a lot of disability history, as it's understood, kind of takes on this magical romantic perspective of things kind of happening or things being fixed or being in the past.
But the struggle for disability rights is ongoing.
And actually, most people now in current movements would differentiate themselves from this earlier generation of activists by calling themselves disability justice activists.
Advocates, not disability rights advocates.
And I suppose not only is the process never quite complete, but the general public, the able-bodied population, can have the impression that it is when it starts seeing More accessibility ramps, or it knows that it has to do more permitting work because it opens a business.
And on the surface level, it can appear as though the society has transformed.
But what I get from your work on the podcast is that it's never really over and that rights are sort of, there's always a struggle for them.
Right, absolutely.
And I think one of the sort of failures of the early movement was that it was really focused on negotiating rights for people who were disabled and seeking employment.
And it didn't so much focus on creating these avenues that, for example, like forced or mandated accessibility or provided funds for it.
It was more of a free market solution and a free market influenced approach to policymaking, which is why, as I was saying, many people now who are people who work and think about disability call themselves disability justice advocates, because that reflects the original sort of intersectional approach to thinking because that reflects the original sort of intersectional approach to thinking through disability, not just as an issue of identity, but as a sort of political economic issue that goes way beyond some of the ways that we're taught to think about disability through the laws that exist that
but as a sort of political economic issue that goes way beyond some of the ways that we're taught to think about disability through the laws that exist that tell us how to think about disability, that tell us that the sort of realm for negotiating disability is in the courts, right?
And that it's up for debate and it's not a kind of mandated approach to wanting to welcome disabled people into society by making sure that people, Both the built environment and our structural and institutional frameworks are accessible broadly and it's you know it's about two completely different approaches and I think the current movement now has done a really good job of looking to the past and looking to past victories and also failures and shortcomings of those victories
To try and rethink how disabled people sort of approach the politicization of their lives and how we even approach and think about what civil rights even mean, right?
Because if we say that we've achieved these civil rights victories for disabled people, But they haven't fixed the problem, right?
Then clearly the answer needs to be so much more than a mere assertion that disabled people too have civil rights.
We have to actually try and create solutions that don't just reform, but actually completely overhaul, eliminate, abolish, or transform systems of subjection.
Which leads me to the tagline for your podcast, which is Medicare for All, Solidarity Forever.
So I'm wondering, you have elaborated, but can you say a little bit more about that?
Well, I'd say that the sort of most important part of my sign off is actually the third part, which is Stay Alive Another Week, because they kind of go together, the three statements, Medicare for All Now, Solidarity Forever, Stay Alive Another Week.
It's something that, you know, if you think about this framework, it's about trying to think about how we can work to build dual power towards not just the immediate reforms and immediate changes we need to make.
For example, like Medicare for All, which would be a overhaul of health finance and how health care is paid for in the United States.
But Medicare for All is only one policy change and beyond Medicare for All, we have to fight for so much more.
And there's also obviously a need to build community and find ways to survive in the meantime.
So, you know, with what we talk about on the show, It just kind of happened one day that that's how I ended the episode.
And this was many, this was before the pandemic.
This was in 2019.
And when it came to the next, it just sort of came out and I just said it.
And then when it came to the next episode and I didn't say it, my co-host turned to me and they're like, well, aren't you going to say the sign off?
Aren't you going to say the thing?
Yeah, like, aren't you going to say the thing?
Because it just kind of turned into, like, yeah, that is the sentiment that every episode should be capped off at.
This is the kind of thing that you should be reminding yourself of at the end of every one of these conversations.
And it also doesn't just help to remind the people that are listening, but it helps to remind us and recenter us and remind us what's the point, right?
At the end of the day, what's the point?
I have to own something, which is that you're absolutely right, Stay Alive Another Week is there at the end of that tagline every single episode, and yet when I thought about what the tagline was, that's the part that I left out, and that has to reflect something about my able-bodied view on the world, because that's not a phrase that I need to think about on a regular basis.
Well, and I think it's a frame that has been very Invisibilized for people, too, who don't have any direct experience with disability or who may not know that people in their lives are disabled or chronically ill before, you know, the mid-century, mid-20th century.
Most disabled people were not in view in public life.
The deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1950s.
It continues to this day.
It is a problem that is not solved.
But before this, most disabled people lived their entire lives in institutions.
Obviously, there were exceptions for wealthy disabled people who often lived at home and were sequestered.
A great example of this is John F. Kennedy's sister, who nobody knew about until after the presidential campaign, right?
He had this sister.
He was in politics for many years.
She was institutionalized.
She had, you know, been labeled with an intellectual disability label.
At a young age, and the family was well-connected, and so they hid her.
And most of the public had no idea that the Kennedys had this disabled sister.
And that was the norm.
That was the standard, right?
Out of sight, out of mind.
Not a part of the community, not considered the kind of person who would be a part of society, and not You know, assumed to be someone that would be accessing public life as a person that would need to go to the grocery store, go to the movies, right?
There was very much this assumption that disabled people were outside of society.
They were not formally a part of the body politic, even down to the point of there being many, many debates for decades about whether or not Disabled people who were institutionalized, who lived in congregate facilities like state hospitals or asylums, whether or not they should be allowed to vote because they could represent this kind of large political group that was being held captive in certain areas.
And it's the same kind of debate that you often have seen as well about whether or not we should allow prisoners to vote and people who are incarcerated.
So you had this whole system essentially that was designed to Warehouse disabled people to hide them and it's actually relatively recent that disabled people have been sort of even visible in society, right?
And so this understanding of how precarious survival actually is, is a kind of I think it's a relatively recent thing for a lot of people who haven't been exposed to this before.
You might have thought that disabled people have their needs met.
We passed the ADA.
People like to say the United States has like, you know, the best standards for treating disabled people throughout the country.
And sort of, if our standards are the best, right, what a low bar to set!
Uh, for the rest of the world because it's so far from the truth.
And this is kind of the, this is the long struggle of, uh, you know, disability in America.
When you, when you have the Section 504 protests happening in 1977, you know, disabled people are really trying to push for their right to go to college.
for their right to access education.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, most colleges are still incredibly inaccessible.
And it is very difficult to, you know, achieve a college degree and actually go through the four years and get the accommodations that you're entitled to by law, recognized by the university.
Like, most people don't have their accommodations recognized.
It exists in theory, not in practice, not tangibly, not materially in people's lives.
And part of why, you know, we started Deaf Panels, we wanted to try and make these, you know, we wanted to try and contextualize like these struggles for survival within a broader policy context outside of the sort of realm of being sort of purely in we wanted to try and contextualize like these struggles for survival within a Sort of purely in the abstract, right?
That these are, these are tangible things that are connected to decisions that people have made, to values that are embedded in our decision making and in our thinking and biases and assumptions that people are so, you know, clinging so hard to.
And they not only undermine, you know, disabled people actually being included in society, they also undermine things like our ability to respond to a virus like COVID-19.
Well, this is where exactly where we're headed.
But through the lens of the work that we do on our podcast, I had a couple of not lightning round questions, but more discussion oriented questions.
The first of which is that we have noticed For decades in the wellness, yoga, new age spiritual space that we now investigate, that illness and disability are framed not only as needing to be bypassed or made invisible, but if they're recognized at all.
That they're recognized as moral and spiritual failings that should exclude individuals from participation in society and full personhood.
And I just want to ask you, is this an idea that is resonant, familiar with you?
I imagine it goes way back.
Absolutely it does and it you know it's one of those things that goes back before um before the eugenics movement it's very much a part of early christian frames of disability as being either a punishment um by god on the individual or a punishment um like that has been taken out on the child perhaps if someone was born disabled that it was like a sins of the father written on the son kind of framework
And so you have all of these ideas about disability that have echoed throughout history, right?
And I think sometimes that leads people to the conclusion that, oh, well, these ideas, they're permanent in some sense, and this echo of them in the wellness industry, this is just, you know, time is a flat circle and history is repeating itself.
But I think it's important if you look a little deeper than that, and if you kind of lift the rock a little bit to see what's underneath, You actually start to notice that this idea of disability being a kind of punishment, that the person brought it upon themselves, that it represents aberrance or a refusal to sort of be bent to the will of perfection, right?
And that it's this kind of inherently flawed and corrupting kind of trade.
This not only sort of fits into like a system of social stigma, it also serves as a justification for why certain magical realities don't work, right?
And it serves this purpose for Christianity as well as it serves this purpose for wellness.
So, for example, take someone who is like a person who is a Instagram influencer, let's say, who is really into celery juice trends, right?
Right.
Like, we all know someone like that.
So like, let's say that person is telling people, I'm going to cure your autoimmune disease, you just have to follow my very strict diet about eating celery juice this one specific way.
And ultimately, if you fail to have results, which you will fail because, you know, celery juice does not treat autoimmune diseases the way that people say it does, because that's not real.
Um, it's not the practitioner's fault.
It's not the fault of the process or the idea or the hypothesis or the celery.
No, it's the fault of the individual, right?
That individual just didn't want it hard enough, were non-compliant perhaps.
And so you have these parallels, right?
Of sort of how, um, this kind of excuse of like disability as this I guess sort of failing or for example or that disability is brought on by our failings to live up to what we're asked to do to take care of our bodies.
That serves also as a sort of explanation for you know why Certain things don't work, whether it's within medicine or without medicine and within religion and wellness culture, right?
We blame patients all the time for their bad outcomes, whether it's their fault or not, right?
We blame people who cannot access their insulin and have to ration it because of cost for their own deaths.
So there's actually very little difference between a wellness influencer who's blaming someone who couldn't like lose 10 pounds on celery juice if they didn't do it properly and a doctor who says that you know my patient is non-compliant because they can't afford their medication.
That's a stunning comparison.
I want to get to the second part of that in a moment, but just to go back to the celery juice influencer for a bit, the thing about it not being a real treatment and therefore the responsibility can be laid on the patient or the person who is suffering with the autoimmune disease, condition is that the nature of the condition is itself metaphysical.
And so, the unreal celery juice cure, you know, it will interact with the metaphysical proposition of the disorder or not, but not based on whether there's a mechanism of action, not based on whether or not, you know, there's anything testable about celery juice.
It's like, The celery juice is just a ritual to engage the sort of metaphysical test of whether or not the person is worthy of surviving their disorder.
Right.
So, it's kind of perfect that way.
The celery juice guy doesn't have to bring their studies because ultimately it's about the patient's soul.
Absolutely.
The burden is on their selves to comply with the normativity that's being asked of them, right?
And this, you know, and this is how it actually kind of does connect back to these older ideas, right, of real How disability has been represented throughout history as punishment, as a shortcoming, as a fault.
You have this within the Greek gods, right, where Hephaestus is sort of punished.
He's the disabled.
He's cast out of Mount Olympus.
He's loved by the goddess of love and everyone, no one understands why because he's so quote-unquote ugly.
You know, these are the kinds of tropes that Many people naturalize and say, no, this is just the way humanity is.
This is just social Darwinism.
This is survival of the fittest.
This is how humans have evolved throughout centuries to, I don't know, what do like evolutionary psychiatrists say?
Like, oh, we've evolved throughout decades to like select the best mates.
And so we just, you know, we select against disabled people.
And this is just our prejudice is absolutely natural.
And frankly, that's just bullshit.
I mean, it's not anything other than sort of passing the blame on society for not being accessible and using the sort of justification of individual responsibility and personal narratives of success, failure, punishment, And compliance to try and undermine any critique that might look towards the structural reasons that someone might not be quote-unquote living up to the sort of standards of society.
Well, I wanted to return to your doctor example because this is not something that I have encountered before or perhaps understand yet, which is you're saying that when the celery juice guy, you know, is able to blame the client for not
Complying well enough with the celery juice protocol, not taking enough celery juice, not having it ripe enough, or I don't know, not just drinking enough glasses, that there's a connection between that and the structure of a healthcare system that kind of throws up its hands and says to the diabetic, well, you know, You might not have enough access to insulin, but you had some and so it's kind of on you.
I suppose I'm trying to understand that connection a little bit better.
So, there is an idea called the social determinants of health, right?
Which are sort of like all of the things that are outside of what we typically think of as health under medicalization.
So, the kinds of health that you get When you go see the doctor, surgery, hospital care, right?
That there are reasons that we end up in circumstances where we need care that are way more complex than just our biology and our behavior alone.
Right.
But that is not reflected in the way that we finance health care.
The way that we finance healthcare is oriented around a very different concept that believes that all interventions, like if they pass through the system of being approved and be put into practice, that those are sort of implicitly Successful interventions or therapies, right?
And it doesn't really account for the variation in someone's life, whether that's their access to safe housing, food, the air that they breathe, the water that they have access to, right?
Or their socioeconomic position, their position with their job, You know, how much money they make, what their education is.
These are all things that have tremendous impacts on what someone's health outcomes are going to be.
But many doctors, and this is obviously not all doctors, but there was for many years a, you know, a real pedagogical bent towards saying, you know, if your patient is not responding to treatment, it's not on you, it's on them.
Right, it's that oh well you know maybe the patient just needs to quote-unquote lose more weight or oh if the patient just took their medicine correctly they wouldn't be having this problem but as as you know I sort of pointed out and why I use the example of someone who's diabetic who's having a hard time financially
accessing insulin for example is that often it's kind of obscured through these like these lenses like financialization like whether or not we can afford something or not right and it kind of takes that that blame right and it it does shift it in a way that kind of hides what's really going on which is that it's not a patient's fault if they can't afford medicine it's society's fault right we've made decisions that have resulted in that it's not
That an individual could have worked harder, you know, and avoided that.
And another example of this is a concept called financial toxicity, which comes from oncology, and it refers to the ways that the cost of cancer care can be as deadly as cancer.
And the way is that cancer care as it exists as a financial instrument and a financial commitment, right?
There are many people who are underinsured and when they get cancer it can be an absolute financial ruin for them and there are Downstream impacts on what their outcomes are going to be as a result of the financial pressures that they feel because financial pressures are not happening in a vacuum.
They're happening in someone's life that has a socially determined context.
That person sits at the intersection of a lot of different factors and that's not even like to talk about how race and gender and sort of all of those other structural biases that we often think about then layer on top of these kind of more hidden financial intersections of where people
run into problems with accessing healthcare that in turn end up being blamed on someone for maybe not doing enough screening, you know, appointments before, not getting their colonoscopy like they were supposed to, or not taking their medicine as prescribed.
You know, these have much bigger implications beyond the individual, but we're often told to think about it in the realm of individual and individual blame.
This is kind of blowing my mind and I don't want to belabor the point but just to simplify it a little bit for myself, I think what I'm hearing you say is that where the wellness alternative medicine world will directly and overtly responsibilize the patient and say it's your karma or it's your sort of spiritual journey to deal with this autoimmune disease and if the celery juice didn't work then That's really on you.
The neoliberal healthcare system with its sort of hidden financial predations doesn't have to say it overtly by ignoring the social determinants of health.
It's doing the same thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Wow, alright.
Yeah, this is a new sort of insight for sure for this platform and I'm really grateful for it because I think that our listeners will get a lot out of that.
Now, moving on to something a little bit, I don't know, closer to the bone, a little bit more emotional.
The exclusion that we see in wellness and alternative medicine spaces towards those who are marginalized by a disability is often tinged with a kind of disgust.
And so I want to ask if being made into a target of disgust is like a palpable and like a known, a disgust feature of disabled experience.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, I think probably, you ask anyone who's experienced even temporary impairments, how often and pervasive this is, I think people don't feel comfortable when they're reminded of their own precarity or their mortality.
And oftentimes, if your disability is visible, or even actually in the example of I was chronically ill for a couple years before I was disabled, I now consider myself both.
And in those years before I identified as disabled, when I just identified as chronically ill, and I was still sort of coming to terms with that myself, even though I wasn't visibly disabled and you couldn't look at me and tell, right?
That disgust still came in in terms of like a social attitude and a kind of expectation of, well, why are you still sick?
Like, why haven't you gotten better yet?
And this is a kind of, um, you know, I think feeling that a lot of disabled people have, which is like, obviously like frustration because you kind of have this constant exposure to a mixture of Disgust and pity and ableist misunderstanding of what your life could be, right?
Which is a very limited perspective of what disabled survival is.
People often tell disabled people, if I were you, I would, you know, kill myself.
I don't know how you live like this.
Like, is this even a life?
And there are people like the philosopher Peter Singer, who is well known for being someone who called, he's an effective altruist.
So he says, you know, we've got to like, Donate to support poor people across the world.
He is a vegan.
He is against the devaluation of non-human life.
And yet to Peter Singer, he feels that intellectually disabled people are not human beings.
And this is a debate that he has had publicly and proudly with disability rights activists and bioethicists.
There are very famous debates that he hosted at Princeton, where he told, you know, he was debating basically the value of a disabled life.
And that was all oriented around this kind of Feeling that someone's life if they are disabled is so intrinsically naturalized as being miserable and devalued and it kind of forecloses on the possibility of disabled life being anything else in people's imaginations, right?
If you're only thinking of disabled people as being this kind of disgusting or pitiful or tragic or you would kill yourself if you were in that position, then your idea of like what a disabled person's life could be like is really Quite narrow.
And I think a lot of disabled people begin to realize quite quickly, like, how frustrating it is, but also how alienating you start to feel from the rest of society and sort of how strong that pressure is of people telling you over and over, you know, you do not belong.
You're not a part of this broader demos of this body politic.
You're not a part of our community.
You're without.
You're from without.
And, you know, your being here makes me uncomfortable, and people are constantly reminded of that, and it takes a toll, right?
It is a social determinant of health in and of itself, actually.
I do not know Peter Singer of Princeton, but this is somebody contemporary?
This is not like an old-time eugenicist?
Oh, no, he's contemporary, and a lot of your listeners may like his other work.
I mean, whenever we talk about Peter Singer, there's always somebody that goes, wait, what are you talking about?
And I'm like, yeah, unfortunately, like, look up, like, look up these, like, very famous bioethicist debates that basically where he's saying, like, people with intellectual disabilities, that there's a rationale for, you know, selective abortion and sort of making sure that
We have the resources as a society to support those forms of life, which he kind of sees as like, I think even in one instance, he compares to people keeping disabled family members as pets.
It's really offensive stuff.
Trigger warning if you look into the sort of Peter Singer disability debates, but it's a very famous thing that you if you're learning about disability history, my background is disability studies.
You know, this is like when you're talking about the contemporary bioethical debate about the value of disability and whether or not disabilities sort of should qualify or disqualify you for citizenship and membership in society.
The Peter Singer framework is like the first thing that you're going to sit down and learn about and this is like a very popular and pervasive idea.
This is like one of like Bill Gates's like favorite philosophers.
This is like someone that like You know, Steven Pinker loves and like Cass Sunstein, you know, this is someone who's like a very popular figure.
He just won like a huge award from a big foundation for, you know, a lifetime achievement of, of like his theories about charity being this great positive contribution to the human race and the progress of the human race.
Right.
And straight up, like, yeah, like, no wonder he's a eugenicist, like alive well today and tenured at Princeton University.
You know, I'm expressing disgust, but I have to own up to my own ableist upbringing.
I'm 50 years old.
In which I remember looking down on disabled people.
I remember thinking that disabled people were fundamentally different from me.
And I have the sense, having reviewed that, you've pinged some of these thoughts already, is that that attitude is not just intergenerational and it's structural and it performs like an economic function.
But internally, it also does seem to be a defense mechanism against two things, and one is this primal thought that you've pinged already, which is that the disabled person presents a reality that you as an abled person could very well be living with yourself.
And if it's terrifying, you have to psychologically distance yourself from that person by believing that they're just not part of the game or not part of your world.
And then the second, more advanced version of that distancing is that I think it's very clear, it's almost obvious to recognize that the disabled person might need more help than you're willing to give.
More help than the society is set up for.
And so it might be easier to dehumanize the person than to deal with that guilt and shame.
It's just easier.
Now, you know, your job is not to empathize with the able-bodied, but do these reflections track with you?
Yeah, I mean, and I appreciate you being so frank about your own sort of past assumptions and how you've come to sort of reconcile and attempt to question actually what is making them up, right?
And exactly why you were made to feel that way.
And I think one thing that I always try and emphasize, I know when people think of like, oh, like disability, and it's a lot about correct language and political correctness and representation.
Right, as though, as though, as though those, yeah, as though, I mean, yeah, it's important things.
Certainly, like, important discussions.
I mean, there is a huge body of work that looks into how stigmatizing language has all of these knock-on effects in people's lives, right?
And there is, this is the body of research that is the social determinants of health, as we've been mentioning.
But so that obviously is important and I don't mean to sort of downplay that but it's not all about it's not all about reforming language.
It's not all about sort of visibility, right?
It's about economic rights and disability has always been not just a culturally devalued category, right?
Not just a category of persons that are sort of not welcome or ostracized or targeted by dominant society for exclusion.
They're also economically put in this position where they are excluded, where they are extracted from, where they start to become more profitable as bodies that occupy beds than as human beings.
This is Something that is a kind of idea that isn't even really necessarily like a really popular idea within disability studies, but this is what the work that I do is, which is looking at, you know, the political economy of disability, health, and the policies which dictate how those things are financed and how those resources that people need are allocated.
Because within Those decisions about how we're going to allocate things, various values like the same values that are embedded in language decisions, they're embedded in our decisions about how we're going to allocate resources, who deserves what and who deserves, you know, an economic life within our society.
And so What I try and always think about is that, you know, it's not, you know, people feel like they're coming into this, it's a subject they don't know, they know they should care about disability, right?
And so they're coming in maybe feeling apprehensive that they're going to be judged, that they're going to say the wrong thing.
But I think at the end of the day, you know, what I hope that people can come away with is An understanding that disability is so much more than an identity.
It's about how we're legally constructed as citizens or not by the state in a similar way to how we think about, you know, policies like voting, right?
Where we're talking about Is this a sort of enfranchisement in society or disenfranchisement?
And they have these sort of implications larger than just the sort of immediate moment of one individual making another individual feel prejudiced again, you know, or feel bad with using, you know, bigoted language or, you know, stigmatizing language in order to make that person feel unwelcome.
It's so much more than these individual actions, but I think in our neoliberal society, right, in our sort of capitalist construction of how rights and politics works, it all reflects back into this echo chamber of sort of everything being about the individual and personal responsibility, right?
So instead of thinking about disability as an opportunity for economic justice, as an opportunity for structural critique, of society, of our political and economic choices, I think people are sort of put and backed into a corner where they think they're supposed to think about this in terms of individual rights.
But it's actually so much bigger than that.
And most disabled people, if they're really angry, they're not necessarily angry at you, they're angry at the fucking system.
They're angry at the broader structural forces in their lives, and they're probably also really annoyed that you can't see that, or that you are more concerned about being judged than about hearing them out and hearing what they have to say.
So it's, you know, it's...
You know, I just hope that people feel like this is something that is okay to learn about and to make mistakes on, but that most importantly, like, number one thing at the end of the day is you have to listen to people who are talking about their own experiences.
You have to recognize people's embodied expertise.
You have to recognize when people say things about themselves and believe them that they're telling the truth about what their life is like and what they need, and what they need from you as an ally.
And something about that interpersonal and intimate exchange in which you're really listening to the other person has to also sort of bootstrap itself into a structural understanding of the general environment because I think what often happens is that the focus of what that should be on
picking apart a system of individualistic desires and needs and solutions gets compacted by often sort of social media discourse in which the most important thing is whether the individual feels like they're using the right language or whether they are having good interactions with the people that they want to appear progressive in front of instead of thinking about the larger contexts and the bigger structures at play.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, you know, I understand why that's also sort of intimidating structure to try and find a way towards understanding, right?
Because it is very different from the ways that we're taught that advocacy works and change works and that, you know, people are made to understand the relevance of issues beyond their immediate life.
But it's about learning how to care for someone other than yourself, not necessarily about learning how to use all the right, the language right from day one, right?
It's a process and we're all doing this learning together.
Somehow you just made that sound a lot simpler and I'm happy about that.
Although it's not.
Now, moving to our area a little bit more deeply, one of the awful consequences that we cover emerging from Conspiracy theorizing is the fact that it misdirects empathy.
Absolutely.
The people we study, along with, you know, folks that are appealed on QAnon, they'll claim, for example, to be very concerned with child sex abuse, with trafficking and so on.
But in reality, they actually do nothing to address these problems.
They may want to, but they actually don't.
Now, are there ways in which the ableist dominant culture that you're describing does the same thing?
In other words, present itself as being progressive and caring to cover for a kind of apathy and negligence?
Absolutely, and I think the example that came to mind first as you were speaking just now The way that people tend to police the boundaries of disability, and it's so beside the point, right?
I think a good example of this was after the slap that happened with Will Smith defending his wife, who is Alopecia, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Right.
And after the slap, the discourse, part of the discourse focused on, well, is alopecia a disability or not?
Is that disability valid?
Right?
And so often conversations like, you know, I'm sure that there were some people that wanted to have a conversation about, you know, why that wasn't a funny joke from the perspective of someone with a disability, right?
But instead, you know, those people are all basically tied up and their energy and their intellectual focus And whatever their posting is for the day is tied up in refuting these false frames, right?
And I think this is another thing that conspiracy theories do, is they're not only ways that ideas get put out into the world and then, like, how those ideas sort of grow and are reproduced, they not only seed ideas, But they also take up time in a counter-insurgent way.
It's a time sink.
It requires people to put the thought into refuting and to direct their energies towards debunking, right?
And one of the things that conspiracy theories do is they also drain energy from movements and sort of sow doubt, right?
But I think a really good example of that is how so often people are more invested in policing whether or not someone's disability is for real than they are invested in knowing whether that person is being persecuted by the state or supported in the way that we're told disabled people are supported and their needs are taken care of, right?
But instead, if you see a disabled person online calling out, you know, my benefits on SSI are capped at $700 a month.
And if I make any money, then that's deducted from my total and I can't have more than $2,000 in savings.
And my, you know, I'm out of medication for the month because some of it, like I lost some of it while I was traveling.
And now I have to pay out of pocket for this refill and I don't have money for that and food.
you're inevitably going to get someone saying, well, this person's faking.
This person's just grifting.
This person's just asking for money.
Is this person really disabled?
You know, or, you know, oh, this person should go get a job, right?
That they don't deserve the help.
But I think that that kind of is this person for real.
The kind of malingerer hunters, as I like to call them, who feel that they are the only ones who can be the sort of true arbiters of true disabled people and not disabled people, as if those are stable categories, right, that are readily perceivable externally.
You know, that that in and of itself is one of the absolutely most harmful ways that this kind of dynamic manifests around disability in particular.
And this is, as someone who's low vision blind, For example, I have some sight.
People who are blind aren't like all blackout.
That's something that not a lot of people know.
There's like a huge range and spectrum of blindness.
I am blind because of my autoimmune disease, because of something called optic neuritis, which is supposed to be transitory, but for me it's like I'm having all of these constant attacks, so I always can't See, and it's been like this for years and I use a white cane like many other low vision people to navigate.
I can use my phone still as well, right?
But I'm really nervous to be on the street holding my white cane and having my phone out because it's totally possible that someone could take a picture of me and put it online and be like, look at this blind person faking they're on their phone.
And this happens all the time.
And these are the kinds of things that like you would never think that people would do, but people do this and people do it all the time.
And it's one of those things that you might not ever think about, but that disabled people have to think about constantly.
But if you never had in your system the potential for that person to be on SSI and running out of money and not able to fill a prescription and having to do it out of pocket and having to go online to actually post their Venmo account or ask for help in some way.
If that was taken care of from the beginning, the questions directed at them about whether or not they're lying, they just wouldn't come up.
It wouldn't be that wouldn't be that wouldn't be come to the to the fore.
So actually, there's a structural condition that's created a kind of conspiracy theory around the welfare queen or the fake disabled person.
Yeah, we call this waste, fraud, and abuse because that's frequently how it occurs in policy language.
You know, people be like, oh!
You know, the problem isn't that we're, you know, we're spending all this money on Medicaid and there's still a lot of people that aren't covered who need it.
It's that there's all this waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid.
And it's not just talking about fakers that are at the individual level on the patient side who are using these systems to get benefits they are supposedly not entitled to.
But it's also used to sort of demonize, like, all providers as inherently greedy and ready to take Advantage of any kind of like socially financed health system too.
And it plays into all of these different larger myths that are stood up every time people make a really loud demand and say something has to change when it comes to how we pay for health care.
We saw this happen when Medicare was passed in the 1960s.
We talk about this in our episode, Death Panel History of Medicare.
We also talk about this in our episode, A Death Penal History of Socialized Medicine, which covers the time before Medicare, when you really had this debate over, can the United States really afford to not have a socialized healthcare system?
And instead, you know, we ended up with the system that we have, right?
And even now, many, many, many years later, when disabled people now, when working people now, when they say, I demand Better healthcare.
I deserve it.
I am entitled to it.
These same lines are stood up to try and stand in the way, to try and stand as roadblocks, to try and undermine and discredit people making these demands, and just because it happens over and over does not mean that it's always fated to happen that way.
It's just that it's been naturalized as the way things are, and it takes a lot of intellectual labor to undo that, which is sort of what I mean in terms of, like, How these things act as counterinsurgent frames, not just sort of taking up the energy and putting misinformation out there, but then requiring the energy to refute, requiring the political education to undo.
That is also a resource, and that is also part of what, you know, conspiracy theories, QAnon-pilled people, and people who like the Great Barrington Declaration, who put out all sorts of, you know, ideas about the pandemic that are So eugenic and harmful and useless and have only helped to prolong the pandemic, right?
That they also, in addition to putting out misinformation, they suck the time and the life out of people who are forced to refute them over and over again.
So, I'm still working through your catalog, it's huge, but I actually jumped out of my skin when you remarked on one episode that even Democratic politicians in the US, as they lift mask mandates and other COVID mitigation measures, they're also, along with Liberal center journalists starting to like retcon their own policy decisions in a way that lines up with conspiracy theorists.
For instance, it seems they're willing to more openly question whether mask mandates were effective.
And this really kind of made me jump.
So can you walk through that with us a bit?
Absolutely, I mean I guess to be kind of in a way to sort of attempt to make this like brief and digestible because this is like an incredibly huge and detailed topic that we cover like twice a week on Death Penalty so I could go for like hours on this topic but to spare you all that, essentially I would say the sort of
I think the most obvious example of this actually is exactly masking, and masking right now, and the debate around masking, and particularly the removal of the transit mask mandate by the order of one crank judge in Florida who, like, we talked about this on our episode about this, but she Was like quoted saying that she's like doesn't believe that money is real in the past.
She is like a real like textual old-school Federalist Society kind of like crank conservative legal person, right?
And she single-handedly basically halted the transportation mandate through one ruling and that's being allowed to sort of exist as this Valid challenge to the law, right?
As if this challenge is with equal weight to the demands of immunocompromised, medically vulnerable people, people with long COVID, people who don't want to get sick and have a right not to get sick, as well as parents of children under five who cannot yet be vaccinated because they're too young and we don't know when that approval is going to come through for that vaccination, right?
These are all the people who are not just in need of protection On airplanes, but most importantly, on buses, on subways, on the actual places where people commute, right?
And yet, when this mask mandate was rolled back, you had so many liberal pundits and commentators, from Matt Iglesias to Lena Nguyen, who were saying, well, you know, people, when they wear masks, like, they don't do a good job wearing masks.
So what's the point?
Masks weren't really effective anyways.
What's the point of mandating masks if people don't wear them properly or not everyone wears them?
And this is kind of something that on the face, right, is an argument that they all seem to be getting away with and that we see often.
And this is an argument that we first saw By the Great Barrington Declaration, folks, and by all the anti-vaxxers very early on, like Mickey Willis, who is the guy who made the Plandemic documentary, and all of these, you know, cranks who you really can't trust any of the logic that underlies a lot of the points that they make, right?
And we know this.
And yet, for some reason, this idea of, oh, well, masks never worked anyways, because People don't wear them perfectly all of the time.
They're not 100% effective, so they don't work.
That obviously just does not logically track, right?
That doesn't actually make sense.
It's about layered protections.
It's about Risk over time.
It's about overall volume of virus in the air, but this is again a sort of misdirection, right?
Where you have it sort of, oh no, well if masks aren't perfect, so they're worthless.
And it's like saying, oh well, you know, that chemotherapy, you don't have a 100% chance of getting rid of the tumor, so why bother fighting your cancer in the first place, right?
It just doesn't work.
Now this argument that is being made sort of post-hoc that maybe the masks didn't work, it's coming at the freedom angle from the opposite direction.
The conspiracy theorists, you know, Mickey Willis was worried about sort of the coming of autocratic rule through masking mandates and forced vaccinations, quote-unquote, and so it was a future-oriented Paranoia.
And I think maybe the difference, without a distinction really, is that if the governmentality now turns around and says, well, maybe masks weren't really that effective, or we have to adjust to You know, the existence of COVID-19 anyway, and we better get on with it.
They're making the same argument, but in order to justify their own failures, I guess.
Well, it's their own failures or It's more to justify any absolving themselves of any responsibility to do more.
I think that there's an assertion that this was a problem that was the government's responsibility and that the Biden administration was invested in transitioning that responsibility from the government To the public from government responsibility to personal responsibility.
And I think despite the fact that we've, you know, seen so many people like Mickey Willis, like Stéphane Barrault, like Francois Ballou, like
Like Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Vinay Prasad, ZDoggMD, all of these COVID minimizers who have all gone with this line of like, COVID protections are authoritarian encroachments on our freedom, and we have the right to sort of like get rid of these mask mandates, they don't do anything, this is all useless.
Those people are all asserting that the freedom of healthy, quote-unquote, healthy people, non-vulnerable people, is actually more valuable than the freedom of people who need those protections now, right?
It also ignores the fact that it's not just the vulnerable people who are vulnerable to COVID, it's actually everyone.
And COVID isn't just an issue in terms of how it makes people suffer and sick and gives people long-term disabilities through long COVID or kills people, right?
COVID is also a labor issue.
COVID is also an issue where it's putting people in a position where they're being deprived of income, right?
And it's being fueled by all of these people who are arguing that our freedom is so important that we can't be made to wear a mask, that layered protections, because they're not 100% effective, That they're pointless.
And these are also the same people who, at the end of the day, are also advocating against vaccination.
And it's a wonder, you know, that we've actually ended up with any pandemic response at all, right?
Because this messaging is everywhere you look.
Last question, and this is really about approaches and tone, and I think as people who examine conspiracy theorists do this work going forward, especially if they have a political analysis, one thing that I've noticed, especially for myself, is that while
Conspiracy theorists will preach that the deep state, for example, is out to control bodies in debilitating or disabling ways when they say that, you know, vaccines are poisonous serums that will make you obedient to the state or viruses are created so that antidote drugs can be sold.
They're talking about our interactions with healthcare as being proxies for interactions with the surveillance state and The irony is that they're not entirely wrong.
State negligence is a thing.
Many people have good reason to believe that they're not being well cared for.
So what separates the conspiracy theorists' distrust of institutions from the disability rights activists' skepticism that our healthcare systems are entirely benign?
Or another way I can put it is, how can a disability rights activist, a disability justice activist do good work without falling prey to a kind of conspiratorial thinking?
Right, and I think this is very important because as much as some of those structural critiques do ring true, right, that there is coercion in medicine, that there are, you know, corrupting power relationships between pharmaceutical capital and patient populations, right?
We see that, though, in ways that are much more banal than you'll hear people like Mickey Willis explain it, who says, like, it's because of petroleum medicines and a conspiracy that, like, you know, the Ford family is trying to poison America and, like, all drugs are Like those people are just, you know, they are taking this kind of critique, right, that's very valid about the
actual power structures, the biopolitical dynamics of healthcare and how we sort of care for and pay for all sorts of things in society and they're warping it into this highly individualistic frame actually where it becomes a kind of personal intent and assault like that the institution has a consciousness and that it itself makes the decision to behave in such a way that is
extractive that is quote-unquote evil and it's actually way more simple than that and we kind of have a maxim on death panel which is it's not conspiracy it's hegemony right it's not that pharma is sitting together in a room saying we're going to cook up a global pandemic to sell a vaccine Right?
It's that some of the same dynamics that pharma has demanded in order to facilitate their accumulation of capital, their business practices over the last 50 years, those things have gone hand in hand with all sorts of other extractive capitalist processes like, you know, the fossil fuel industry which has contributed to climate change.
It has, you know, manifested in ways where we've seen policy abandonment and things like The Citizens United decision, which allowed money to flood into advertising.
We see it in policy decisions of people being allowed to advertise pharmaceuticals direct to patients in the United States, which is not common in other countries at all.
And for a long time, was not only taboo, but basically illegal, self-enforced by the industry itself, the pharmaceutical industry, was incredibly anti-advertising for a long time.
We talked to Alexander Zaitchik about his new book, Owning the Sun, for a recent interview on Death Panel, which is a people's history of the pharmaceutical industry.
And it's a fascinating read and I love Alex's work and we've talked to him a bunch over the course of like two years on the show and you know Alex I think really makes this great case of how these kind of echo chambers right they create the perception that this kind of extraction is personal or intentional or conspiratorial but as we say on the show this is just a normal You know, operating modality of capitalism.
In capitalism, you work, you earn a wage, and you are only entitled to the survival that you can buy.
Barely anything more than that, right?
And anything above and beyond that is really sort of subject to um being described as like the realm of a sort of utopia right or um in other instances like people like Mickey Willis would describe that probably as an autocratic dictatorship right because to him what's more important is the right to profit off of people's suffering than our sort of right to have our suffering alleviated and to
live in a world that supports our survival or beyond our survival, our actual thriving, experiencing lives that we can only hope to imagine for ourselves, which is, you know, possible resource-wise.
It is, however, a matter of political will and a matter of political economy at the end of the day.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much.
It's been so nice to be here and have this conversation.
