Optional Until It’s You: The Quiet Dismantling of Autistic Support Under Budget Cuts
What the “One Big Beautiful Bill” reveals about abandonment, class betrayal, and the rising solidarity of those left behind.
This bill doesn't just cut funding—it cuts lives. Medicaid's "optional" services are lifelines for autistic people. Now vanished. This is systemic abandonment, not oversight. We must organise, not plead. Revolutionary love is the way forward.
Introduction: The Hidden Threats in the US Budget Bill
The budget bill was signed into law on 4 July, in a stroke of timing so sharp it almost reads as satire. Whilst the nation draped itself in flags and toasted the idea of freedom, the government quietly gutted the very programmes that make freedom possible for millions. I’ve spent the days since poring over the text, the fiscal notes, the strategic silences—trying to grasp the full scale of what’s been set in motion. Both the macro and the micro. What this means for autistic people across the United States, and what it means for me. For my family. For my students, and for theirs. For the fragile, under-resourced, over-promised systems we all depend on. The headlines talk about fiscal responsibility. They talk about preserving care for vulnerable children. They talk about hard choices. But none of that holds up when you examine the structural mechanics of what’s been quietly removed.
Here’s the truth: this legislation enacts more than a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and CHIP over the next decade—roughly $120 billion a year. These aren’t abstract figures. This is the slow collapse of the infrastructure that holds disabled lives together. These are the supports that keep people at home, in school, in community, alive. The bill claims, in its language, to protect children with disabilities. But what no one wants to say—what I’ve seen spelled out only in budget tables and waiver technicalities—is that even if a child remains technically eligible for care, the services they rely on may vanish anyway. Why? Because most of those services are legally classified as “optional.”
Optional. It sounds innocuous—almost generous. Like flexibility. Like choice. Like something a state could offer if it wanted to, or not, if things get tight. And now, things just got tight. In the logic of the Medicaid system, “optional” doesn’t mean unnecessary. It means expendable. And that category includes nearly everything autistic people need to survive: in-home support, various therapies, assistive technology, AAC access, 1:1 classroom aides, mental health care, trauma-informed counselling, transport to medical appointments. Essential, life-shaping, safety-enabling services. All of them vulnerable. All of them now placed on the chopping block without technically violating anyone’s rights.
The bus still shows up on the schedule. You’re still “allowed” to board. It’s just that no one’s running the route anymore.
This is how the dismantling happens—not through overt bans or denials, but through administrative disappearance. Through funding cuts that render existing protections meaningless. It’s not presented as cruelty. It’s dressed up in the language of oversight, local control, state flexibility. But the effect is the same: lives come undone. Parents burn out. Children suffer. Autistic adults fall into crisis, lose housing, disappear into homelessness. The services we fought for—the ones that were already rationed, inconsistent, and exhausting to access—are now being stripped away entirely, because someone, somewhere, decided they were optional. And because far too many people will never notice until it’s them.
What Does “Optional” Mean in Medicaid?
To understand how this can happen—how essential supports for autistic people can be stripped away while officials insist that no one’s rights have been violated—you have to look at the structure of Medicaid itself. This is a point of confusion for many, and deliberately so. Medicaid is not a single national programme. It’s a federal–state partnership, and like all partnerships, it only works when both parties show up. The federal government sets out the framework, offers matching funds, and defines what’s required. States then build and administer their own systems—like Medi-Cal here in California—within that framework, offering a mix of required and optional services.
But what happens when the federal partner quietly files for divorce?
That’s essentially what this budget bill does. More than a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and CHIP over the next ten years means the federal government is pulling out of the agreement—not completely, but strategically, and at a scale that will force states into impossible decisions. California alone stands to lose between $10 and $20 billion annually. Most states will not be able to absorb that loss without slashing services. And under current rules, they’re required to protect only the mandatory ones.
This is where the distinction becomes deadly. Medicaid divides services into two categories: mandatory and optional. Mandatory services include things like hospital care, physician visits, and basic screening for children—bare minimum interventions that keep the system technically compliant. Everything else—nearly all the supports autistic people rely on—is legally classified as optional.
That includes in-home care, respite services, home nursing, speech and occupational therapy, assistive technology, transportation to medical appointments, personal care aides, and communication supports like AAC devices. It also includes the funding mechanisms schools use to provide 1:1 aides, school-based therapists, and Medicaid-reimbursed IEP support. These are not frills. They are the infrastructure that makes it possible for autistic people to live outside of institutions, to attend school, to express themselves, to survive.
But because these services are optional under federal law, states are not required to continue them when budgets tighten—and now, they are being set up to fail. That’s the cruelty of it: the federal government gets to claim it hasn’t cut any individual’s entitlements, whilst state systems are left to deliver services they can no longer afford to offer. The eligibility remains on paper. But the funding to make it real is gone.
It’s like being told you still have a seat on the bus, only to discover that the entire route has been cancelled. The depot has been shuttered, the drivers laid off, the fuel cut off at the source. But the system insists you’re still welcome to ride. It’s a legal fiction. And autistic people are being asked to live inside that fiction.
This is not simply a technical reclassification. It’s a quiet undoing. It’s a policy design that frames abandonment as flexibility, and calls critical lifelines a matter of state discretion. And unless that framing is confronted directly, the consequences will be lethal—not just in theory, but in practice, as services disappear, families break under pressure, and autistic people are pushed further into crisis or confinement.
The Services Autistic People Rely On: Almost All ‘Optional’
The truth is stark: nearly every service autistic people rely on to live safely, communicate effectively, and access education or health care is classified as “optional” under Medicaid. These aren’t luxuries. They are the structural conditions of participation—what makes it possible to be included, to be heard, to stay alive outside of institutions. And yet, in the wake of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” it is these supports—because they are optional on paper—that are now the first to be pulled. The categories below are not exhaustive, but they offer a clear view of what’s most at risk, and what that loss will mean.
Communication and Language
Autistic communication is diverse. For some of us, speech comes in bursts, delayed or echolalic. Others rely on AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) devices, text-based tools, or scripts built from gestalt processing. All of these require specialised support to be sustained. But the services that enable this—speech-language therapy, AAC device funding, scripting integration, language support for GLP learners—are optional under Medicaid. There is no mandate that states provide them, and no guarantee they will continue without federal reimbursement. For autistic people with limited expressive speech, this is not just inconvenient—it is silencing. The infrastructure for communication vanishes, and the expectation to perform “normalcy” remains.
In-Home and Family-Based Supports
So many autistic people depend on daily living support that falls outside traditional medical definitions. In-home aides, personal care attendants, respite care, skilled nursing, and parental support stipends are all provided through Medicaid waiver programmes—specifically Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS). These services allow families to keep autistic loved ones at home rather than institutionalised—or unhoused. But HCBS is entirely optional. When state budgets are strained, these services are often scaled back or frozen entirely. Waitlists balloon. Hours are cut. Families are left to absorb the cost or break under its weight. What’s being dismantled here is not just policy—it’s the right to live at home, in safety and with dignity.
Educational Access
Public education is supposed to be a right, but autistic students often rely on Medicaid to make that right real. Through programmes like School-Based Services (SBS) and Medicaid Administrative Claiming (MAC), schools receive reimbursement for critical supports: 1:1 aides, paraprofessionals, speech and OT, mental health staff, and school nurses. These services are essential for the implementation of IEPs and disability-inclusive classrooms. But all of them are Medicaid-optional. When federal funds disappear, schools—especially underfunded ones—are unlikely to foot the bill alone. The result is fewer aides, longer delays, unmet accommodations, and an increase in exclusionary practices like restraint, seclusion, or forced outplacement. The student is still “enrolled,” but their access has been hollowed out.
Mental Health and Crisis Care
Autistic people are more likely to experience trauma, anxiety, depression, and suicidality—but far less likely to receive accessible, affirming mental health care. Medicaid is one of the few systems that funds neurodivergent-affirming therapy, behavioural support (non-ABA), and trauma-informed care. These are often delivered through HCBS or state-funded waivers—again, optional. In many states, the few providers who understand autistic needs are already overburdened. When reimbursement disappears, many will be forced to close their doors or stop accepting Medicaid altogether. The crisis becomes structural. Mental health care, already hard to find, becomes impossible.
Assistive Technology and Transport
From sensory tools and adaptive communication devices to medical transport and mobility supports, assistive technology enables participation across environments. Many autistic people—especially those in rural or under-resourced areas—rely on Medicaid to fund both the equipment and the transit needed to access it. All of it is optional. All of it is at risk. And all of it compounds: without a device, you can’t communicate. Without transport, you can’t reach the provider. Without funding, neither exists.
Whilst many of these essential supports face immediate threat, one area that appears—at least temporarily—less affected is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA). Despite falling under the same optional HCBS umbrella, ABA often receives preferential policy treatment due to its entrenchment in state Medicaid plans and its designation as “evidence-based” by policymakers. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” does impact ABA indirectly—through provider taxes, stricter eligibility redeterminations, and long-term budget shortfalls—but in the short term, it has not been singled out for cuts at the same rate as other services. This is not a reflection of its quality or ethics, but of how firmly it has been institutionalised. As other services vanish, families may be left with ABA as the only remaining option—whether they want it or not.
The irony here is hard to ignore: communication tools are optional. Mental health care is optional. Autistic-led supports are optional. But surveillance-based compliance therapy, still controversial and widely criticised by autistic adults, remains funded—not because it’s safer, but because it’s more legible to the system. What’s essential is being decided by people who will never use the services themselves.
Case Study: California & LAUSD
To understand how the numbers play out in practice, you don’t have to look far. The consequences of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” are already mapped across California’s public health and education systems—even if they haven’t been widely acknowledged yet. Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid programme, is projected to lose roughly $164 billion over the next ten years, which works out to an annual loss of about $16.4 billion in federal support. That kind of shortfall is not just difficult to absorb—it’s impossible without structural retrenchment. And it places thousands of disability-related services at immediate risk.
California, to its credit, has historically funded a wider range of optional Medicaid services than many other states. But that flexibility was only ever possible because of robust federal matching funds. With those funds about to evaporate, the state will be forced to make a set of brutal decisions. Programmes funded through HCBS and Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT) waivers—already strained by administrative backlog and staffing shortages—will be squeezed further. Even with temporary stopgaps like the state’s Managed Care Organisation (MCO) tax, the scale of the loss will far outpace any local effort to plug the gap.
And in education, the fallout is already visible on the horizon. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second-largest district in the nation—currently receives more than $20 million annually in Medicaid reimbursements for school-based health services. These funds support 1:1 aides, various therapists, mental health clinicians, nurses, and administrative staff who make Inclusive education more than a slogan. With federal Medicaid funding slashed by 19%, LAUSD stands to lose approximately $3.8 million per year from this stream alone. That’s not a rounding error. It’s hundreds of support positions at risk.
When these roles disappear, the impact is not evenly distributed. It hits hardest in the schools already struggling to meet IEP mandates. It hits in the early education classrooms where aides are the difference between participation and meltdown. It hits in the crisis counselling sessions that are already booked out for weeks. And it hits the autistic students who require skilled, consistent, regulated support to access the classroom at all.
On paper, these students will still have rights. Their IEPs will still exist. The legal entitlements won’t change. But the actual delivery of services—the presence of a trained aide, the regularity of therapy, the availability of a staff member who knows how to de-escalate—will quietly erode. We’ve already seen this play out during staffing shortages, when aides were pulled to cover classrooms or therapies were “banked” indefinitely. Now imagine that trend becoming permanent, and system-wide.
What this bill ensures is not just service loss—it ensures the institutionalisation of delay, deferral, and denial. The infrastructure will not be formally eliminated. It will simply stop functioning. Like the bus line that’s been cancelled without notice, the route still appears on the map, but no one is coming to take you where you need to go.
This is the shape abandonment takes when it’s dressed up as reform. And for every child left without the support they need to stay regulated, to access learning, to be heard—the cost will be incalculable.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
The numbers are abstract until they’re not. Until they show up in someone’s inbox. Until a support worker stops returning calls. Until a therapist sends a final message explaining that the clinic no longer accepts Medi-Cal. Until the service plan remains unchanged, but the service itself disappears. This is what policy violence looks like on the ground—not as a sweeping headline, but as a quiet unraveling in the daily lives of real people.
Consider a student I’ll call Julio. He’s six, bright-eyed, and loves the shiny Beyblade he got as a hand-me-down from his older brother. He communicates through AAC—an iPad-based system that he’s spent two years learning to navigate with the help of his speech therapist. Aidan’s language is richly patterned, deeply relational, and built through scripts he’s developed over time, some drawn from books, others from daily life. He’s a gestalt language processor, though that term isn’t used in his file. What’s in the file is an IEP that mandates weekly speech therapy and access to his device at all times. But when the school loses its Medicaid reimbursement for speech services, the therapist’s hours will be reduced. Then she’ll leave. The device will malfunction, and no one will know how to fix it. The IEP will still say he has a right to expressive communication. But his voice—painstakingly built—will be unplugged.
The numbers are abstract until they aren’t. Until the options available to a family narrow to just two: burnout or abandonment. Until a school team must choose between meeting one student’s needs and keeping the lights on. Until an aide is removed not because the child no longer qualifies, but because there is no longer a budget line to justify their presence. This is what policy violence will look like on the ground—not as a single catastrophic event, but as a steady accumulation of impossible decisions forced on those with the least power to shape them.
Take Jasmine’s family. Jasmine will be nine and requires round-the-clock supervision due to a complex set of medical and behavioural needs. Her mum works part-time, made possible only through the support of an in-home care worker funded by Medi-Cal’s waiver programme. That support is already fragile—delayed, underpaid, and subject to frequent turnover. But as the cuts roll in, the hours will be reduced, and the agency will explain, with apologetic professionalism, that they’re unlikely to find a replacement when the current worker leaves. Jasmine’s mum will face a choice: quit her job and shoulder the care alone, or pursue institutional placement. There will be no third option. No accommodation. No stopgap. Only grief dressed up as paperwork. If she quits, the family’s income will vanish. If she doesn’t, Jasmine will be moved to a residential facility hours away. Her routines will collapse. Her regulation will spiral. And she’ll cry in the driveway of a building that isn’t home, not understanding why her mum isn’t coming with her.
Then there’s Miguel. He’ll be in the tenth grade, autistic, and thriving with the support of a 1:1 aide and weekly check-ins with the school counsellor. His IEP lists these supports clearly. And they’re working—his attendance is solid, his anxiety low, his engagement in class stronger than ever. But when the district loses its Medicaid reimbursement for school-based services, the budget won’t stretch far enough to keep paraprofessional staff in every classroom. The principal will face a choice: keep Miguel’s aide, or retain the reading interventionist. The aide will be let go. The counsellor will be reassigned. Miguel’s support system will vanish by attrition. The IEP will remain unchanged, but the staff who once delivered it will no longer be employed to try. He’ll begin missing school. Eventually, the team will shift him to a shortened day, not because he’s less capable, but because he’s been left unsupported. It will all be presented as temporary. It won’t be.
These scenarios won’t be outliers. They will become the shape of ordinary life under a system that forces families, schools, and districts to ration care, to make cruel calculations under the guise of compliance. The choices will be structured as if they’re individual. But they will not be free choices. They will be the logical outcomes of a policy designed to disappear support whilst keeping eligibility intact.
This is how abandonment will be masked: as triage. As reallocation. As necessary prioritisation. But at its core, it will be a refusal to fund the conditions that allow disabled people to remain in school, at home, in community. And it will unfold not in sweeping announcements, but in delayed callbacks, hollowed-out IEP meetings, and quietly vanishing services.
Because so much of it will happen incrementally, it will be easy to miss each decision in isolation. A staffing issue here. A coverage gap there. A temporary reassignment. But step back, and the pattern will be unmistakable: families and schools will be left to make choices no one should have to make—because the system has already made its choice about who counts.
You’ll still be allowed to stay enrolled. Still be told you’re eligible. Still have your rights listed on a sheet of paper. But you won’t be given what you need to stay.
Policy Sleight of Hand: Exemptions Without Infrastructure
One of the cruelest tricks built into this legislation is its insistence that the most vulnerable have been protected. The language of the bill assures readers that “children with disabilities” remain eligible for care. It points to legal exemptions, to maintained entitlements, to the preservation of access. On paper, nothing has been taken away. But in practice, what’s been gutted is the infrastructure that makes those essential services real.
This is policy sleight of hand. It presents eligibility as a guarantee, when it is in fact only a classification. The right remains, but the delivery mechanism is gone. A student may still be entitled to speech therapy under their IEP, but if there’s no therapist left on contract, what does that entitlement mean? A family may still qualify for in-home care, but if no agency will accept Medi-Cal reimbursement, what are they supposed to do? These are not protected rights. They are paper rights—symbolic, unenforceable, inaccessible.
And it’s not just an oversight. It’s by design. This is how systemic abandonment is dressed up as administrative reform. The state gets to maintain the illusion of care whilst severing the flow of resources that once sustained it. The structure remains standing, but hollowed out from within. Families and schools are left navigating a ghost system—one that gestures toward support while delivering nothing.
Even the timing of the cuts reveals the underlying cynicism. Many of the deepest rollbacks won’t begin until after the next midterm elections. That delay isn’t logistical—it’s strategic. It ensures that the most devastating consequences will not be felt until the politicians responsible have had time to polish their platforms, rebrand their records, and campaign on the illusion of fiscal responsibility. In the meantime, school districts will quietly restructure. Families will quietly fall apart. The public will be told that nothing has changed—until it has.
This is how ableism operates in policy: by hiding harm behind language. By treating autistic people—and disabled people more broadly—not as stakeholders in public life, but as burdens to be contained or quietly disappeared. By reframing essential care as discretionary spending. By rendering people optional through accounting.
The worst part is that the mechanism is so banal. There is no spectacle. No dramatic moment of repeal. Just a steady withdrawal of funds, a slow disintegration of access, an erosion of presence. The law still says you belong. But the system no longer builds a place for you.
This isn’t just bad policy—it’s erasure. It’s a deliberate shift in narrative, where the state says, “You still have rights,” while quietly ensuring those rights can’t be exercised. And unless we name that for what it is, the disappearance will continue—hidden in footnotes, budget lines, and the void between what’s promised and what’s possible.
The Violence of “Optional”
“Optional” is a word that doesn’t sound like harm. It sounds like flexibility. Like something you could include, or not. A choice made on the margins. But in the context of public services—especially those that sustain disabled lives—“optional” is a weapon. It is a mechanism of rationing, exclusion, and slow violence dressed in administrative language. It tells you, without saying it outright, whose needs are considered negotiable.
In this system, almost everything autistic people rely on has been placed in the “optional” category. Not because it isn’t essential—but because the people who depend on it are not considered politically essential. Communication support, mental health care, in-home assistance, access to education through aides or therapies—none of these are guaranteed. They exist at the discretion of budget committees, actuarial tables, and shifting political tides. They are the first to go when funding is tight. And under the new law, funding is tight by design.
This is not a passive oversight. It is a calculated act of structural violence. Not loud, not flashy—just steady and deniable. It’s a violence with no perpetrator, no villain to point to in the town square. And that’s the point. It’s what Arendt called the tyranny of nobody—a system in which harm is diffused so thoroughly through institutions, regulations, and procedures that no one can be held accountable. Everyone involved insists they are just following policy. Just responding to budget pressures. Just working within the rules. But those rules were written by people. And they reflect choices—about whose needs matter, and whose don’t.
The category of “optional” is one of those choices. It allows the state to maintain the appearance of rights whilst ensuring those rights remain out of reach. It creates a hierarchy of human worth, encoded into reimbursement tables and eligibility charts. It makes abandonment feel like a neutral outcome. But nothing about this is neutral. Optional is a judgement. Optional is a verdict. Optional is the quiet way systems decide whose suffering is acceptable.
And in practice, the consequences are clear. Autistic children lose communication. Autistic adults lose independence. Families lose stability. Schools lose the capacity to include. What gets treated as optional determines who gets to live in community and who gets isolated, who receives support and who is blamed for falling apart, who survives and who doesn’t. These aren’t abstractions. They’re outcomes.
When you’re told the services you rely on are optional, you’re being told—politely, administratively, procedurally—that you are optional.
And that, more than anything else, is the violence we must name.
What We Can Do?
What we can do is not what we’ve been told to do. The calls to contact our representatives, to attend public comment sessions, to write politely-worded emails to people who have already sold us out—these are rituals of a dying democracy, meant more to pacify than to protect. Study after study confirms what we already know in our bones: elected officials in the United States do not respond to their constituents. They respond to donors. To capital. To the industries underwriting their campaigns. The rest is theatre.
The system is not broken. It is working precisely as designed.
This budget bill is not an aberration—it is the logical outcome of a settler-colonial, capitalist, imperial system in decline. A system that no longer even needs to disguise its priorities. Under the logic of late capitalism, the disabled, the poor, the neurodivergent, the sick, the very young and the very old are all increasingly viewed as surplus population—people who are no longer needed to generate capital, and whose existence therefore becomes a fiscal inconvenience to be managed, reabsorbed, or erased.
What Lenin wrote of imperialism abroad now applies internally: the ruling class has turned its extractive violence inward. The spoils of empire are now wrung from our bodies—through austerity, enclosure, dispossession, and abandonment. Mao reminds us that we must investigate the contradictions—and this is the one we live inside now: a government that claims to protect disabled children whilst simultaneously defunding the structures that allow them to survive. A state that promises care but delivers containment. A system that uses “rights” as a cover for withdrawal.
Fanon showed us how settler colonialism is not just a foreign policy but a domestic logic—one that classifies life by its usefulness to the state, that disciplines difference through scarcity, that makes war on the conditions required for liberation. That same logic governs American disability policy. It is not coincidence that the services being defunded are those that allow autistic people to communicate, to live outside of institutions, to remain in community. It is by design.
And the truth is, there is no reform that can realign this system with justice. We do not need more workshops on advocacy. We need class consciousness. We need solidarity across disability, race, gender, and geography. We need organising grounded in the long view of liberation—not just preservation of crumbs, but transformation of the table. Because this system will not save us. It was never meant to.
The path forward has already been mapped. We have the texts. We have the thinkers. We have the ancestors and the elders who have lived through worse and taught us how to endure. We do not need permission to organise. We need courage. We need each other.
And we need to understand that what we are facing is not just a policy problem, but a material crisis of survival and value under late-stage capitalism. The only answer is collective refusal. Not refusal to care—but refusal to be broken, divided, or gaslit into believing that the suffering we face is our own fault or our private burden to carry. It is not. It is systemic. It is designed. And it can be dismantled.
There is no saviour coming from within the halls of power. But we have each other. And that has always been enough to start.
Closing: Narrative Sovereignty
You’re still allowed to take the bus. That’s what they’ll say. Your eligibility remains. Your rights are intact. The schedule’s printed, the route marked. But the bus doesn’t exist. The depot’s been sold off, the drivers laid off, the fuel cut, the line erased. And still, they hand you the map and insist the system is working.
This is the gap between narrative and infrastructure. Between what’s said and what’s materially true. And the question it demands is this: Who gets a real bus? And who gets the illusion of one? Whose needs are met, and whose are quietly declared optional?
For disabled and neurodivergent people, that question has never been abstract. We’ve long lived in the space between the story and the structure. We know what it means to be told we are supported whilst watching the ground fall away beneath us. But now, something else is happening. That gap—the space between promise and presence—is becoming visible to others, too.
The teachers. The social workers. The speech and occupational therapists. The nurses, case managers, and clerical staff. The special educators, programme coordinators, and public sector professionals who once saw themselves as proximate to stability. Those who were told that if they worked hard, got the degrees, took on the student debt, played by the rules—they’d be protected. But they’re not. The Budget Bill makes it plain: they were never meant to be.
The services they deliver are being defunded. Their positions will be eliminated. Their caseloads will become impossible. And all the credentials in the world won’t shield them from unemployment when the federal reimbursements dry up. They are discovering—some with rage, others with grief—that they are no longer needed by the ruling class. That their degrees do not guarantee value. That the labour they were trained for is now a line item to be cut. That even as they drown in non-dischargeable student debt, the state sees them as disposable.
And then what? What will happen when tens of thousands of licensed professionals find themselves out of work in the next five years—qualified, indebted, and structurally obsolete? When the system they helped uphold collapses beneath them too? The ruling class may believe they can weather the fallout. But they may have made a fatal error: they’ve pushed the professional class into class consciousness. And from that clarity, there is no going back.
This is the moment of convergence. The contradictions are sharpening, just as Mao taught us they would. The settler-colonial state, as Fanon warned, has turned its internal policy against its own labourers. Lenin’s imperialist logic now devours the domestic. And the Marxist analysis—so often dismissed in boardrooms and brunches—has come home to roost in the lives of those who once believed themselves safe. The lines are being redrawn. Not just between parties, but between the people and the systems that extract from them.
But this is not a moment for despair. It is a moment for revolutionary love.
We don’t need to mourn the loss of institutions that were never built to hold us. We need to build new ones—together. Across class, across neurotype, across credential and rank. We need to organise not around saviours, but around each other. Around mutual aid, narrative sovereignty, and the belief that survival is a collective act. That care is not optional. That no one is disposable.
Let them say the bus still runs.
We know better now. We’re done waiting at stops that never mattered.
We’re walking together—toward each other, toward solidarity, toward the world we’ve always deserved and will build, together, from the ruins they leave behind.