The past week has been a whirlwind. The inauguration of Donald Trump to the Office of the U.S. Presidency on January 20 will go down in history as a flashpoint that precipitated sweeping social and cultural shifts in the United States and beyond. Already we have witnessed the promulgation of executive orders from the highest office of the U.S. administration and public pronouncements across social media that seem to confirm all the arguments that Jason Stanley has made for years now about fascism and its creep(y)(ing) spread: Attacks on perceived threats to the heterosexual matrix and the gender binary that it (re)produces; prohibitions against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and the threats that they pose to white supremacy; restrictions on the operations of the NIH and the allegedly value-neutral science research that it advances; immediate mass deportations.

Indeed, conservative (and Conservative) forces in Canada have seized the moment. For example, when, on January 22, Pierre Poilievre (the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada) was asked by the host of a CP24 news program about the executive order that Trump signed declaring that the U.S. would henceforth officially recognize only two sexes, Poilievre replied that he is “only aware of two genders” and that if the host knew of others that he should consider, they were “welcome to tell [him] right now.” On January 20, furthermore, an article appeared in The Tyee, an independent news source in Canada, that signalled the U.S. right’s influence on Canadian perspectives and policy, documenting “anti-woke” Poilievre’s promises to end DEI initiatives (including for university and research funding)–which he has referred to as “garbage“–give unbridled reign to so-called “free enterprise,” increase deportations, and move in the direction of minimalist government through massive cuts to public service and hence the removal of public service employees.

Philosophers have reacted in a variety of ways to some of these developments. In a post on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY contributor Mich Ciurria’s Facebook page, for example, a discussion took place about the merits of DEI initiatives, the NIH, and whether they were in fact worth saving. Some of the commenters to the post argued that DEI initiatives were ineffective and should be eliminated; others argued that they were flawed but should be preserved because no better alternatives were available; and, in response to one comment about the need to preserve the NIH for this reason, I pointed out that the NIH has consistently produced naturalizing and medicalizing work on disability.

Indeed, David Wasserman, Kevin Mintz, and the other bioethicists, political theorists, and philosophers who work for, or receive funding from, the NIH consistently advance conservative views about disability that feminist and other leftist and counter-hegemonic philosophers should work to expose and oppose. Consider, for example, this recent article by Mintz, Stramondo, and Tabor that misunderstands what a structural analysis of disability comprises, naturalizes the apparatus of disability, and in particular misrepresents the kind of philosophy of disability that I, Melinda Hall, and other feminist philosophers of disability have produced, all while servicing the requirements and agenda of the bioethics institute that published it.

On a recent post in the Teaching Philosophy Facebook group that drew attention to the vile nature of Trump’s executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship, dozens of members pledged that they eschew the notion that the philosophy classroom should be a neutral arena, with some pointing out the neoliberal conceit of this claim. Yet the Teaching Philosophy group repeatedly operates as a prominent site for the neoliberal production of a supposed neutrality with respect to ableism and disability. Scarcely a semester goes by without a post requesting recommendations for readings in bioethics that sympathetically present arguments on “both sides” for “debates” about euthanasia, selective abortion, and other matters that directly affect disabled people, bolstering academic ableism. (Invariably, these requests receive some of the largest number of responses given to posts in the group.)

But who cares about the state of (philosophical) research on/of disability and the social situation of disabled people anyway? Not as many as you may think, it seems. Jason’s ongoing exclusion of the central role that eugenics occupies in the futures that fascists envision renders his analyses flawed and inadequate. Why haven’t (other) philosophers pointed out this lacuna? The profession of philosophy systematically excludes disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability, and did so long before Trump or Poilievre arrived on the scene. Why haven’t philosophers addressed the structural issues that perpetuate this state of affairs? How have DEI initiatives in philosophy worked for you?