“This memo is giving state, county, and local governments cover to segregate people with disabilities and not to invest. They can say, we don’t have the money, so we don’t have to do anything — and people will die. This is not hyperbole. I’m just speaking facts.”
~ Nieta Greene ~
The day before Juneteenth, late at night, the Department of Justice released a memo reinterpreting the 1999 Olmstead decision — the Supreme Court ruling that secured the right of disabled people to live in their communities rather than be locked away in institutions. It is not a law. That, this episode argues, is exactly the danger. Paige Beauchemin — a New Hampshire state representative, psych nurse, and Democratic candidate for the state’s second congressional district — joins founder and CEO of Disability Community for Democracy Nieta Greene, alongside Nick and Beth, to explain why a memo can be more dangerous than a statute. They’ve given it a name: “Crip Crow,” a deliberate echo of Jim Crow, and the spine of a rolling call to action.
The first thing the conversation establishes is the mechanism. A memo doesn’t repeal Olmstead; it changes how Olmstead gets enforced. “The memo does not change law, but it changes enforcement,” Nieta says, “and I think people don’t understand that piece.” Paige, drawing on her clinical background, reads it as a deliberate opening move — “this isn’t even a change in law, right? This is just a memo. But they do that to get us to not have a big response to it.” Nick keeps returning to the historical pattern: forced institutionalization in the hands of a hostile state becomes a tool for labeling dissent as disease. He calls it the Nazi playbook; Nieta corrects the timeline without softening the point, noting that America practiced this — “psychosis, protest psychosis” — long before the Nazis existed.
From there the episode widens into who actually absorbs the harm, and this is where Nieta is sharpest. Disability, she argues, is the marginalized identity it remains most socially acceptable to discriminate against — “the disability identity is the one that is still the most acceptable to be ableist” and to practice eugenics around, and all of it, she reminds listeners, is white supremacy. She connects the memo to the rollback of Temporary Protected Status, pointing out that much of the home-care and personal-care workforce are immigrants, and to executive actions criminalizing homelessness and substance use. The thread tying them together is intersectionality — a concept she insists the people “supposed to be on our side” still haven’t done the work to understand. Her direct challenge to Paige: would you support expanding the Americans with Disabilities Act? The answer is yes.
Paige’s response grounds the alarm in policy and place. She frames the whole fight as a class war rather than a left-right one — “there’s more of us than them” — and lays out a single-payer, Medicare-for-all position that would roll coverage out to the most vulnerable first, naming the disability, mental health, and addiction communities as the starting point rather than the afterthought. Nick reframes New Hampshire’s own motto to make the stakes local and unmistakable: “Do you want to live free or die under an oppressive thumb of forced institutionalization?” For a candidate in the “live free or die” state, that’s not rhetoric — it’s a campaign line with a body count attached.
The fourth movement is the ask, and the show is unusually concrete about it. Call, email, and fax your House member and senators about the Olmstead memo every single day — three calls, five minutes, scripts and templates provided. Talk about it at your own dinner table in terms of the specific person in your family who would be hurt, because that, Nick argues, is what makes it land. Beth adds the gentlest entry point: watch Crip Camp. And the coordination is real infrastructure — a sign-up page at app.broadbanner.com/crip-crow that gathers district-level data so the coalition, working with groups like Courage for Democracy and Disability Community for Democracy, can target pressure and avoid duplicating effort.
What this episode adds to the Chronically Illing Out arc is visibility as resistance — the refusal to let a rights rollback pass quietly because it was written as a memo instead of a law. Paige and Nieta model the coalition they’re asking for, two organizers deciding out loud that the work is shared rather than owned: “we’re not stealing anybody’s thunder, we’re sharing this thunder — we’re gonna make this a bigger storm.” The memo bets on silence. This conversation is the early refusal to give it one.
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!.