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Andrea Pitzer
Let's take you to the White House.
Paul Lombardo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who's a fantastic. Where are you, Bob?
Andrea Pitzer
Over here.
Paul Lombardo
He always makes it difficult.
Andrea Pitzer
It's hardly news that the current administration and its allies include any number of wild eyed extremists. But when it comes to the harm they're actually doing. Health insurance premiums are expected to more than double or triple for some 20 million people, pricing many out of health care coverage entirely. And what's happening in the realm of public health?
Paul Lombardo
Does anyone. Elon Musk cut all the support that we normally would have been giving to respond to that Ebola outbreak.
Andrea Pitzer
It's as consequential as any part of the destruction that's being unleashed at home and around the globe. The World Food Program warning that if the crisis doesn't finish by the end of June, 45 million people will be at risk from hunger and starvation worldwide. The key face of that sabotaging of existing productive public health efforts.
Paul Lombardo
And we need to talk about bio
Andrea Pitzer
levits is the embrace of a new kind of eugenics with deep links to past forms.
Paul Lombardo
Eugenics was proposed as the scientific solution for social problems. It was a combination of hope and aspiration on one side and on the other side it was about fear, in some cases about hate.
Andrea Pitzer
A lot of comparisons get made to Nazi rhetoric on this front.
Paul Lombardo
We think about Anne Frank dying in a concentration camp because the Germans thought the Jews were genetically inferior. But to some extent, and Frank died in a concentration camp because the US Congress believed that as well.
Andrea Pitzer
We see the use of pseudoscientific language around demonized groups like immigrants.
Paul Lombardo
An American biologist, Charles Davenport, penned a letter to a friend. Can we build a wall high enough around this country, he wondered, so as to keep out these cheaper races as
Andrea Pitzer
the basis for unleashing massive state violence.
Paul Lombardo
On the receiving end of Davenport's letter, we was Madison Grant, a zealous convert to the eugenics cause with a sterling American pedigree and an abiding preoccupation with endangered species.
Andrea Pitzer
As many of you know, the US has had a broad and deep eugenics movement that predated Nazi Germany.
Paul Lombardo
Right here at home, colleges and universities taught eugenics, Medical societies confirmed it. Clergymen preached it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie funded it. And some of the most prominent people in America championed it. Margaret Sanger and Alexander Graham Bell, even Helen Keller.
Andrea Pitzer
England had its own as well.
Paul Lombardo
Davenport arrived in London on a sort of pilgrimage. A meeting with the world renowned gentleman scientist Sir Francis Galton. Galton was borrowing ideas and kind of riffing off of the work of his half cousin Charles Darwin. Galton really turns that idea on its head and says, you know, natural selection isn't working very well. We need to do a form of selection. We need to intervene.
Andrea Pitzer
Today. I want to look at how deeply invested Trump and his allies currently are in retrograde ideas gussied up.
Paul Lombardo
When Madison Grant walks out the door of his Wall street law office, he is accosted by foreign speaking peasants. They don't know and they don't care that Madison Grant's ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. And he is offended.
Andrea Pitzer
As new and common sense.
Paul Lombardo
He invents this race called the Nordics, this tall, blond haired, blue eyed race. According to granted, the Nordics are the most recently evolved of all the races,
Andrea Pitzer
when really they are anything but.
Paul Lombardo
Madison Grant takes eugenics, which had hitherto been concerned only with survival of the fittest individual. And he says we need to be concerned with the survival of the fittest race.
Andrea Pitzer
Along with Stephen Miller, whose obvious support of eugenics shows up almost daily.
Paul Lombardo
You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West.
Andrea Pitzer
We have RFK Jr. Who has the most unhinged eating habits.
Paul Lombardo
The President,
Andrea Pitzer
whose role as Secretary of Health and Human Services makes his actions likewise extraordinarily consequential.
Paul Lombardo
Oh, you know, the interesting thing about the President is that he eats really bad food.
Andrea Pitzer
For Kennedy, be in charge of administering federal public health efforts is a disaster.
Paul Lombardo
I think he actually does eat pretty good food usually. I mean he's got his incredible health.
Andrea Pitzer
And nearly every aspect of that disaster ties into backward looking ideas that have been discredited for decades.
Paul Lombardo
COVID 19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are
Andrea Pitzer
as com Jews and Chinese or even centuries.
Paul Lombardo
He ends up going right into the anti Semitic DNA of conspiracy theory.
Andrea Pitzer
Kennedy has claimed that no one knows how many people died from COVID here in the US I don't think anybody knows when the toll has clearly been established at well over a million. CNN's reporting the food and Drug Administration is considering putting a black box warning on COVID 19 vaccines. A warning reserved only for drugs that can cause death. He and his staff have worked to suppress evidence of the extraordinary efficacy of COVID vaccines.
Paul Lombardo
Dr. Paul Offit is a world renowned scientist, an inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and someone who Kennedy accused of being part of a vaccine conspiracy and other
Andrea Pitzer
vaccines with even longer track records.
Paul Lombardo
Here's what he does. He either quotes studies that don't exist or he misrepresents the studies that do. He has this religious belief that vaccines are doing harm, period. And it doesn't matter what you say to him scientifically to show that he's wrong, he will not believe you.
Andrea Pitzer
But looking toward the past, RFK also seems to reject the two most significant parts of global and US Public health successes in all of history, vaccines and the germ theory of disease. I will submit this for the record because we don't have that much time. Mr. Kennedy has questioned the scientific basis for germs causing disease and the power of vaccines and antibiotics.
Paul Lombardo
I've never questioned that.
Andrea Pitzer
He seems to have adopted some sense of inherent fitness to the Volk in their natural state.
Paul Lombardo
As measles cases rise across the U.S. health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has said that infections could
Andrea Pitzer
bring health benefits later in life, as underpinning public health.
Paul Lombardo
Measles can be deadly for children and the disease is easily prevented by a
Andrea Pitzer
vaccine, with an odd implicit suggestion that those who die are fated to die.
Paul Lombardo
But in a recent interview on Fox Nation, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Said, quote, There's a lot of studies out there that show if you actually do get the infection, you're protected later in life against cancers and other diseases.
Andrea Pitzer
All this is bound up with eugenics through the ideas of purity culture and and fitter genes.
Paul Lombardo
Does getting measles prevent other diseases later in life? Well, no.
Andrea Pitzer
Purity culture suggests that things that don't occur naturally are inherently corrupting.
Paul Lombardo
When we reached out to the author of that study, he said it does not support RFK Jr. S claim and he's not aware of any definitive research
Andrea Pitzer
that does, making any number of medical interventions suspect.
Paul Lombardo
But numerous studies have shown harmful effects of getting measles, including that it weakens the immune system to other diseases that our bodies would otherwise be able to fight off.
Andrea Pitzer
And warped ideas around genetics suggest that genes reliably predict social and physical outcomes and even human value.
Paul Lombardo
These are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date.
Andrea Pitzer
These are two areas where Trump's and RFK's Venn diagrams on public health overlap to the degree that they have any coherence at all.
Paul Lombardo
My son's got the greatest genes in history. I'm a big believer in genes. By the way, I will tell you,
Andrea Pitzer
with the emergence of public health as a field in the 19th century, government took on a pretty significant role in beginning to think about protecting the public and that there are measures that it would be reasonable to impose. These things included clean water, clean air and sanitation methods. I've mentioned before that modern concentration camps, the ones introduced post mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons, were a technological shift and an exacerbation of prior detention tactics. But they were also very much part of this 19th century public health movement. The idea of contagious diseases and quarantines, key to arresting the spread of contagious disease in many illnesses, itself became the motivating idea behind holding targeted groups in detention. There's a whole wartime element too, of national security that usually goes hand in hand with this public health idea. But the more insidious one that is extremely activating to those vulnerable to authoritarian rule is an idea that a certain group of people are unclean physically or psychologically or culturally, and that having this fundamentally foul condition is capable of corrupting or damaging the people that they come into contact with, the people that the eugenicists see as the heart of the foundation of the nation. This could be through association, but the rhetoric of bloodlines is often used.
Paul Lombardo
A man named Henry Ford. Good bloodlines, good bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.
Andrea Pitzer
I did my first reporting on US history and eugenics back in 2007, before I had even begun my research on concentration camps. Back then I wrote about Kerry Buck. Now to look at what's been described as one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history. Who was institutionalized and forcibly sterilized in Virginia a century ago for being what was called feeble minded. A poor young woman then confined in the Virginia state colony for epileptics and the feeble minded, though she was neither epileptic nor mentally disabled back then. I spent several days traveling to sites in Virginia from Carrie Buck's past with Paul Lombardo looking at how we do and don't remember this history. Her mother Emma, as well as Carrie's daughter Vivian, then only eight months old, were deemed similarly deficient. In 1927, the US Supreme Court upheld her sterilization with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Claiming that three generations of imbeciles is enough. The decision resulted in 60 to 70,000 sterilizations of Americans considered unfit to reproduce. Lombardo had just written a book on her and he was the person who originally found Buck's report cards at her old elementary school, showing that the accusations against her as feebleminded were dishonest. The Supreme Court decision had its origins in the eugenics movement then thriving in the United States. To be clear, having a cognitive disability would have justified none of the treatment of her, but he exposed the basis of the case itself as dishonest and illegitimate. The 1924 Immigration act was passed with similar intent to prevent immigration by Jews, Eastern Europeans, and countless others in an attempt to improve the genetic quality of the American population. I was reporting for a feature back then, but Lombardo and I have stayed in touch in almost two decades since, and he is currently an emeritus professor at Georgia State University, an expert on both the legal system and the history of individual rights, bioethics and law. I reached out to him this week to ask about the current administration's approach to public health and the degrees to which it echoes the eugenics of the past. Here is his whole reply, because his has been a really essential voice in this field for the last several decades.
Paul Lombardo
I have been studying the history of eugenics since 1980 and during that time I've heard the term eugenics used to critique new technologies or to condemn racist practices, or to highlight discriminatory policies towards people with disabilities because those activities, those being criticized, might be motivated by the same kind of toxic bigotry we associate with the history of eugenics. Sometimes I thought the analogy was appropriate, other times not so much. But for the first time in my memory, government officials, people in this administration from the top down, invoke the language, sometimes in nearly exact quotation, that was used in the early 20th century to advocate for eugenic policies. They recycle century old eugenic talking points to stoke fears of immigrants who they say are poisoning the blood of America, blaming crime, ill health, poverty and all other social problems on bad genes that generate high taxes. They repeatedly attack opponents, particularly people of color, as low iq. They argue that the US is under babied and use pronatalist talking points to oppose abortion. Just as the eugenists shouted race suicide when they talked about abortion or blamed women for choosing higher education over teen pregnancy, they rail against spending taxes on public health interventions because it would save the wrong people, like children with autism whom they falsely claim will never pay taxes. It is possible to overuse the word eugenics, but what we are being told to believe from the government today is not merely like eugenics or comparable to eugenics when an official echoes with precision the same arguments that were used successfully to weave eugenic reasoning into the fabric of American life and law for decades. It is eugenics.
Andrea Pitzer
In looking abroad, though, it appears some Doge staffers thought the U.S. agency for International Development was all about abortion.
Paul Lombardo
More than a year ago, Nicholas Enrich, who at the time was an official at the United States Agency for International Development, wrote an internal memo warning about the consequences of Donald Trump and Elon Musk stopping foreign aid for global health programs.
Andrea Pitzer
The agency was responsible for delivering life saving treatments that addressed maternal health and HIV, food insufficiency and more.
Paul Lombardo
Thirteen months later, Nicholas Enrich says that more than 750,000 people have died, most of them children, as a result of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's destruction of usaid.
Andrea Pitzer
Just days ago, we learned that the CDC will end most technical support for PEPFAR by September 30th of this year.
Paul Lombardo
As you mentioned, over 750,000 people have already died. And again, it's important to note that those are unnecessary deaths. They would not have died if USAID had still existed.
Andrea Pitzer
That decision, combined with prior USAID cuts, will be devastating for millions, including hundreds of thousands of children with hiv.
Paul Lombardo
But when you think about the individual families that were involved, when you think about mothers or pregnant women who are unable to access emergency childbirth services because clinics were closed, or families who had to choose between which of their children to feed because USAID's food supplements were no longer available to them, it's those. You know, multiply those stories by hundreds of thousands and then we start to see what that impact really looks like around the world.
Andrea Pitzer
These massive cuts to global public health reject the long held understanding that not only is such funding smart government policy for global powers, but actually has domestic benefits in terms of suppressing the spread of contagious disease as well as saving lives worldwide.
Paul Lombardo
This is the cruelest thing, the specifically cruelest thing that Donald Trump and Elon Musk did together.
Andrea Pitzer
These cuts, too, are part of the current eugenics project. One of the ways you can see eugenics play out in the larger public conversation here at home among Trump allies and oligarchs alike is an obsession with birth rates.
Paul Lombardo
I think for most countries, they should view the birth rate as the single biggest problem they need to solve.
Andrea Pitzer
In the warped black mirror version of public health we're living through, instead of the government having obligations to the larger public, the public has obligations to the power holders in our society.
Paul Lombardo
I want more babies.
Andrea Pitzer
In the United States of America, this includes producing children. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal cited people familiar with Musk who say he believes he's helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence. But most fertility types seem to be focused on the basic maintenance of a large background servant class. In a broader sense, billionaire tech giants like Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are reportedly throwing some of their fortunes into and technology that could help pronatalists like Musk achieve their fertility goals, as well as the prioritization of reproduction or sustaining a white ruling class or dominant culture in other countries. This as some conservatives openly trumpet pronatalism as a way to protect traditional, even far right values as more and more women prioritize their education. In the heyday of US eugenics a century ago, this took two forms. The idea was that the bad people have to stop reproducing and the good people need to reproduce more. In one, the fitter families movement, people seen as physically or genetically superior were encouraged to reproduce simultaneously. In a majority of states, the government assumed the power of sterilizing whole categories of humans who had been deemed dead weights on society, poor people who were seen as unproductive, the blind, the deaf, those declared feeble minded, which was a very elastic category, and many others.
Paul Lombardo
33 of the 48 states would eventually enact eugenics laws mandating the forced sterilization of wards of the state deemed physically or mentally unfit.
Andrea Pitzer
The forced sterilization movement echoed past more openly genocidal impulses in American history by turning away from murder itself, but giving a more clinical and scientific veneer to population control.
Paul Lombardo
The last of these statutes was removed from the books in 2014.
Andrea Pitzer
Historically, the paranoia over producing children that obsesses some eugenics focused regimes has also led to the persecution of LGBTQ communities. If the state's goal is to promote reproduction to sustain itself, when taken to extremes, that policy can reinforce second class status or even punishment for those who choose not to have children or whose queerness is seen as a fundamental threat to traditional gender roles. We see the natural affinity of Maha cultures obsession with purity in its relentless discussion of eating healthy, avoiding processed foods, and viewing vaccines as polluting the body. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Did not really talk about food until the end of 2024. That was not really a top talking point for him until you saw the Maha movement get launched. But in the end, there seems to be little actual interest in health on this front. It was somewhat of a rebrand for him, so to speak, and a very populous one at that.
Paul Lombardo
Nobody gets a standing ovation like that. What's going on over here?
Andrea Pitzer
Red meat is pushed as if it were medicine, though it's more likely to be tied to disease, severely afflicting the US population, which frankly, is already consuming an awful lot of beef.
Paul Lombardo
Any clinician will tell you that regularly consuming large amounts of red meat and fatty cheeses and is about as wise as skipping sunscreen, drinking more alcohol and taking up smoking.
Andrea Pitzer
The Maha movement also has vague ideas around ultra processed foods.
Paul Lombardo
There has been no workable definition of ultra processed food before we came in here. That's regulatory malpractice. We now have. There has or hasn't? There has not. Never.
Andrea Pitzer
Which it talks about, but often fails to follow through on the well, why don't you do it?
Paul Lombardo
With respect, why don't you do it?
Andrea Pitzer
The use of drugs like antidepressants for medical care is likewise called suspect by them. But Kennedy has skated on his own use of recreational drugs and even uses his past as giving him some kind of authority in these matters.
Paul Lombardo
I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine
Andrea Pitzer
off of toilet seats for Malha folks. Disease in the right populations is seen as an act of God or inevitable because of that population's weakness or degeneracy. This has implicit parallels in the views that allow massive cuts to usaid. Disease is sometimes encouraged indirectly in genocidal terms, which is what always underlies eugenics. In immigration detention, we see disease outbreaks and horrific medical conditions. But public health is not the goal. Vaccines are denied and medical staff have gone unpaid for more than half a year in these facilities because this is negative eugenics, the subtraction of the undesirable population via negligence. Negative eugenics says sterilize the wrong people, snuff them out, and that's the eugenics
Paul Lombardo
that the Nazis would pick up on.
Andrea Pitzer
Eugenics is the public facing acceptable view of genocidal goals through medical language and means, or even medical inaction?
Paul Lombardo
Yeah, that's correct. I think especially the doge side of things. We were mostly dealing with what I referred to as buffoons. They were uninformed, they were unqualified. They came in on a mission to destroy the agency without having any idea
Andrea Pitzer
what it did in larger society. RFK and his associates encourage people to be skeptical of a pharmaceutical industry that has sometimes put profit over the needs of sick people. But rather than hold pharma to account or press for more widespread access to vetted medicines, Kennedy undermines best medical practices.
Paul Lombardo
Now he's calling for the removal of routine recommendations for vaccines, including influenza or rotavirus metacoccal diseases and hepatitis A.
Andrea Pitzer
He promotes dubious remedies under the guise of fostering wellness and undercuts both independent scientific research and the scientific method.
Paul Lombardo
He argues these vaccines should be optional rather than universally recommended, a shift experts warn would be devastating, especially for low income families.
Andrea Pitzer
So these are just a few of the eugenic ideas behind the current hijacking of U.S. health policy. But in the end, there's an important difference between today and the past. This 21st century version of public health is grifts all the way down.
Paul Lombardo
I know that seems like a pretty big leap. How can drinking celery juice lead you to become an anti vaxxer?
Andrea Pitzer
What? These eugenic impulses, anti vaxx movements, purity culture, and paranoia over the presence of immigrants and the existence of queer folks are. They are the triggers used to activate Trump's base.
Paul Lombardo
But get this. There's a tight knit group of wellness influencers who have been radicalizing their followers into believing the healthcare system is intentionally making people sick.
Andrea Pitzer
By creating a public force against effective public health and delegitimizing real experts, they make it possible to redirect resources in a crony system that relies on patronage.
Paul Lombardo
Here's the thing. Toxins are just the scapegoat distracting from the real causes of America's health problems like poverty, lack of access to health care, and nutritious food.
Andrea Pitzer
It turns out that purity culture has its limits.
Paul Lombardo
Rather than meaningfully address those issues, these influencers push their expensive detoxification products when convenient.
Andrea Pitzer
Trump and his allies have backtracked on the use of pesticides as well as mercury levels in the atmosphere.
Paul Lombardo
It's not something that I was particularly happy with, let me put it that way, mildly. But I also understand the President's point of view.
Andrea Pitzer
There was at least a little naivete involved with some proponents of eugenics. The progressive movement said we can use state power and expert advice and knowledge to solve things like poverty, to solve things like alcoholism. You saw progressive types and scientific leaders who took up the cause of population control, superior genes, sterilization and such. So that was an incredibly hopeful and optimistic idea. Eugenics was part of that. They did so in part because of underlying bigotries, ableist mythologies, and a sense of entitlement in which they believed they could arbitrarily use science to reshape society, even at tremendous cost to specific communities. But now we know where this kind of eugenic thinking can lead, not only in a Nazi setting, but right here in the US with forced sterilizations, institutionalization, and denial of rights to whole groups. So to embrace this same thinking a century later is doubly depraved.
Paul Lombardo
A bunch of millionaires and billionaires were
Andrea Pitzer
driven to get RFK Jr on the
Paul Lombardo
ballot in all key states across the country. Doing a majority of the legwork here is the super PAC's biggest donor, Timothy Mellon.
Andrea Pitzer
In fact, more than half of the $38 million raised by American Values this cycle has come from Timothy Mellon alone.
Paul Lombardo
So what's his deal?
Andrea Pitzer
Mellon was Trump's top donor in 2020. My sense is that the Maha movement is part of a political coalition building attempt to bring Maha and Maga together.
Paul Lombardo
That was a huge part of it because Kennedy had so many supporters even in many states. He was like bordering like 25, 30%, which is really crazy for an independent. And when he went over to Trump and then all those people like, oh my God, I have hope now.
Andrea Pitzer
The fusion may well be an attempt to combine these constituencies and allow a corrupt political cult to persist even after Trump dies.
Paul Lombardo
That should give all of us hope.
Andrea Pitzer
I think that will be harder than it might seem, which they also seem to think because we've recently seen the expulsion of some of Maha's best known characters from office, acknowledging the unpopular nature of many of these policies in the face of upcoming elections. A lot of these moms held their nose and voted for Trump in 2024, and they're not sure that they're willing to vote red in the midterms again. We can remember our history and we can see what they're onto, which is lining their pockets. Yet what the administration is doing is already exacting a real toll on vaccine programs they've targeted and on other medical care by extension. Just look at the vitamin K shots that have become the default for newborn babies to get to help prevent brain hemorrhages. In this fraught atmosphere around vaccines that has been fostered by RFK and Trump, among others, parents are rejecting even this vitamin shot, with fatalities happening as a direct result. What can you do? You can shore up vaccine efforts in your community. You can work to do education, outreach in schools, at libraries, work with your church and your workplace to organize free clinics. State policies can have a huge effect even when the federal government is undermining them. And remember that eugenics extends to more than just medical care. See where the polluters are in your community and who is bearing the burden of toxic health conditions. Take names and monitor what you can. Bringing it to light. The federal government has had such a huge role in public health in my lifetime. There is no way that the efforts to sabotage clean air, clean water, access to vaccines, and more can be undone by us in our own communities at this moment. But by storing up your community and raising awareness, we will make it easier to reestablish and expand public health efforts in the future when we usher in leadership that rejects eugenics and understands the value of public health at home and abroad. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.
Host: Andrea Pitzer
Guest/Contributor: Paul Lombardo
Release Date: May 21, 2026
In this episode, Andrea Pitzer examines the resurgence of eugenic thinking within current U.S. health and immigration policy, focusing on the Trump administration and the rise of the "MAHA" (Make America Healthy Again) movement. Through discussion with legal and bioethics expert Paul Lombardo, the episode draws stark parallels between early 20th-century American eugenics and today’s political rhetoric, particularly as it relates to public health, the demonization of marginalized groups, and policy choices that prioritize selective population control over collective well-being. Pitzer issues a strong call to action for grassroots public health advocacy and vigilance against eugenic currents reemerging in modern policy.
Paul Lombardo on the deep-rooted rhetoric:
“...government officials, people in this administration from the top down, invoke the language, sometimes in nearly exact quotation, that was used in the early 20th century to advocate for eugenic policies.” [12:29]
Andrea Pitzer connects then and now:
“We see the use of pseudoscientific language around demonized groups like immigrants as the basis for unleashing massive state violence.” [01:30]
Paul Lombardo on the mechanics of policy:
“They recycle century old eugenic talking points to stoke fears of immigrants, who they say are poisoning the blood of America, blaming crime, ill health, poverty and all other social problems on bad genes...” [12:39]
On forced sterilization:
“Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” (Justice Holmes via Pitzer) [10:58]
On the present and future:
Andrea Pitzer closes:
“But by storing up your community and raising awareness, we will make it easier to reestablish and expand public health efforts in the future when we usher in leadership that rejects eugenics and understands the value of public health at home and abroad.” [End]
Andrea Pitzer’s episode is a powerful reminder that eugenics is not some distant, forgotten American shame but a living, dangerous ideology resurfacing through modern policy, rhetoric, and political coalition-building. Listeners are urged to fight back through community public health advocacy, vigilance, and education, protecting the hard-won gains of collective good over selective, exclusionary policy that historically leads to immense suffering.