DCDD Executive Director Esther Warwick sat down with Dr. Joan Braune of Three Way Fight a few weeks ago to talk about the intersection of anti-democracy movements and disability communities and the Three Way Fight. You can read the interview here.
“Warwick: I think in terms of trends in fascism, it’s really important to understand that we were in this moment ten years ago, where there were a lot of heterogeneous views on disability on the right. That’s where I started with my project, explaining all the different ways that the right viewed people with disabilities. But this all really coalesced in the Biden era, towards outright hatred of people with disabilities, and towards identifying disability with the left and identifying disability as an enemy within the country that it was necessary to eliminate. Now this has been challenged a little bit by the inclusion of the MAHA movement, RFK Jr., and his weird crowd of anti-vaxxers in the Trump administration. We’ll see how that affects policy and rhetoric. But overwhelmingly the right’s rhetoric has turned towards outright hatred and hostility towards people with disabilities and glee at being able to say the r-slur, for example, and adopting a complete “we should just kill them” sort of idea, or that people with disabilities are dangerous. So, it’s very similar to how they talk about unhoused people, which has always been intimately tied with discourses on disability.”
Photo Credit: Steve Rhodes, Disability rights activists risking arrest to protest cuts in front of State of CA building (June 2009), Creative Commons license via Flickr.
Disability Communities Defending Democracy 