The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is OK! [View all]
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Death Is OK!
From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn’t really government’s business anymore
Liza Featherstone at the New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/193290/trump-musk-cancer-nuclear-bird-flu?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily
"SNIP........
Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.”
Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced.
Our nation’s founders would not have agreed. The point of human society and government, wrote John Locke, the seventeenth-century Enlightenment theorist from whom Thomas Jefferson and other American founding thinkers got many of their ideas, was that people need to band together in community to protect each person’s “life, liberty and property.”
Screw that—especially the “life” bit, is what the political right has been saying for a while. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s “duty to protect” its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the “duty to protect” found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda.
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