The Atrocity Loop: Is America Finding New Ways to Justify the Unthinkable?

From eugenics and AIDS denial to border kidnappings, the same cold logic endures: if the victims suffer enough, the powerful can call it order…

America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty.

Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: “law and order,” “family values,” “national security.” Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering.

From the actuarial tables that justified the deaths of Black people a hundred years ago, to the silence that let gay men die in the 1980s, to the unmarked vans prowling our streets today, the design remains the same. The faces change; the purpose — upholding straight white male supremacy — never does.

While many Americans are shocked by the cruelty and brutality of Trump’s/Miller’s/Vance’s ICE and CPB thugs against Hispanics in the United States, such attempts to “purify” the country are really nothing new. Hopefully, though, our response to them will be different this time.

One of the most shocking things I learned when I was writing The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich was how much American policy was driven by white men in power who were trying to decrease the Black population, both by deportations, like James Monroe tried, and through actually genocidal domestic healthcare policies.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the vice president of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, published a widely cited “scientific” book claiming that Black people were so biologically inferior that they would “eventually die out.” He argued that if white society simply refused to extend medical care, social support, or public health infrastructure to them, their extinction would “occur naturally.”

It was an extraordinary act of pseudoscientific cruelty: a man with corporate and political power using the language of statistics and medicine to rationalize genocide by neglect. Hoffman’s 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — one of the best-selling books of the early 1900s — became the actuarial and intellectual foundation for denying healthcare to Black Americans to this day, giving white policymakers cover to block public health investment while claiming to be guided by “data.”

Hoffman’s claim is why there’s a 20% hole in traditional Medicare: it was created at the demand of white racist southern senators so elderly Black people — who couldn’t afford the 20% co-pay — wouldn’t show up in then-whites-only hospitals and doctors’ offices.

That same brutal logic — intentional genocide by state action or inaction — reappeared when the AIDS crisis erupted in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s response to the disease was defined by silence and contempt. As tens of thousands of mostly gay men got sick and died (several of them close friends of ours), America’s bigoted President Reagan refused even to utter the word “AIDS” throughout his presidency.

— His press secretary laughed, from the official White House podium, about gay men dying .

— Conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan called the disease “nature’s retribution” for “immoral” homosexuality, and Senator Jesse Helms successfully banned federal funding for educational materials about safe sex and AIDS that he said might “promote homosexual activity.”

— William F. Buckley Jr. (who also wrote about the supposed genetic inferiority of Black people) proposed tattooing people who had AIDS so they could be identified, discriminated against, and segregated from the rest of us.

The message from Republicans in power was unmistakable: the queer victims of HIV were morally defective, they deserved their excruciatingly painful deaths, and government had no duty to save them.

It was Hoffman’s calculus all over again, dressed up in the language of religion and “family values” instead of racial eugenics.

Now that same monstrous pattern is repeating itself both along our border and border towns, as well as across the interior of the United States. The logic of white racial and cultural superiority reflected by Republican rhetoric has today metastasized into open brutality.

The so-called Kavanaugh stops — made possible by a morally evil shadow-docket ruling written by Brett Kavanaugh for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — have effectively given Trump’s agents permission to seize and detain people based solely on the color of their skin or the way they speak, just like the Klan could do in the Old South.

Under this blatantly unconstitutional decree, masked federal goons can snatch anyone they choose, hold them without due process, and claim they’re “immigration suspects.” There are already reports of U.S. citizens, including fathers and mothers driving their kids to school, being pulled from their cars, cuffed, and dragged away by men in black or camo tactical gear with no badges and no warrants.

One video shows a terrified child screaming as her father — a US citizen, brutalized in broad daylight — is shoved into an unmarked van, because he looked Hispanic. They then kidnapped the terrorized child and held her for much of the day.

This is not law enforcement. It’s state terror. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “The cruelty is the point.” Stephen Miller and his colleagues in the Trump White House appear to have designed these policies precisely to maximize fear and suffering.

During Trump’s first term he bragged to colleagues that family separation worked as “deterrence.” Children were warehoused in cages, parents deported without them, and about a thousand have vanished to this day through a shadowy network of pop-up “Christian” foster homes that vanished after they got the kids from the Trump administration.

The trauma was — and is — intentional, an explicit message to would-be brown-skinned migrants that America would destroy their families if they came here. Now Trump, et al, are expanding that same logic nationwide, empowered by corrupt white Republicans on a Supreme Court that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of hateful, bigoted ideology and obedience to the party that appointed them.

What we’re witnessing right now is the third great chapter in a grim American tradition: define a population as “lesser,” withhold or weaponize care, legalize and expand harassment, and watch the consequences unfold — people brutalized, children traumatized, citizens terrified — while pretending they’re inevitable and the cause is noble.

Hoffman’s statistical analyses justified abandoning Black Americans to early death by refusing them healthcare. Reagan’s silence and cuts to government funds allowed a generation of gay men to die untreated. And Trump’s immigration machine now turns suffering into policy.

In each case, the people inflicting the harm claim moral superiority — that they’re protecting the “real” America from impurity or invasion — while what they’re really doing is institutionalizing cruelty and brutality as governance while being cheered on by their bigoted white supremacist base.

This is not hyperbole. When a Supreme Court packed with rightwing ideologues uses an unsigned opinion to strip away constitutional rights and green-light racial profiling, we’re no longer operating under a system that respects equal protection under the law.

When federal agents are masked, unmarked, unaccountable, and armed, snatching US citizens and peaceful protestors off the street, we’re living in a police state. And when our national conversation treats all that as normal, we’re back in Hoffman’s world; the world where suffering isn’t an error to be corrected but a strategy for how the powerful maintain straight white male supremacy.

We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations.

They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice” for straight white men and a society that claims they should exclusively be in charge.

The outrage of the Kavanaugh stops isn’t just about immigration or policing. It’s about whether the United States still recognizes limits on government power.

It’s immoral. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic evil that once hid behind actuarial tables and “family values.” Rightwing leaders in past fascist regimes have used it to justify the wholesale destruction of a people.

We must not let history repeat itself again. We know where this road leads: to children in cages, to communities terrorized, to hospitals turning patients away, to families burying their dead while officials shrug.

Hoffman — a Republican who openly celebrated the death of FDR — thought Black extinction would come naturally if white men in power simply withheld care. Reagan thought the gay community would vanish if government refused to help. And Trump’s America First ideologues continue to argue that nonwhite people will “self-deport” if the state makes life unbearable enough as they welcome white South Africans.

In every case, the goal is erasure of “undesirable people” through pain.

We have the power to stop it, but only if we refuse to normalize it. Every senator, every judge, every journalist, every citizen must confront the reality that the machinery of cruelty is running again in our names.

Once a nation accepts pain as governance, democracy becomes performance and compassion becomes treason. Republicans have perfected the unthinkable. The only question left is whether America will finally refuse to justify it.

Silence is complicity. Outrage is the only moral response, and action the only cure. Tag, you’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Atrocity Loop”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social