Just to be clear

You know what eugenics is: the theory that Darwin’s demonstration that species change over long periods of time (evolution) opened the way for purifying a race by preserving its good qualities and getting rid of the bad. Germany’s attempt to rid Europe of Jews was justified by belief in eugenics. So was their long-running program of forced sterilization and extermination of “unfit” people who, by eugenic thinking, were presumed to “weaken” or “dilute” the “race.” A very thorough summary of this (Aktion T4) program can be found in Richard J. Evans’ review of the book The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s 20^th Century by Dagmar Herzog. See https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/richard-j.-evans/alien-to-the-community .

Less well known is that the Nazi government’s anti- Jewish Nuremberg Laws modeled its eugenic policy on American eugenic laws, tradition, and customs in treating Blacks, native Americans, pigmented foreigners, including how to calculate and define “whiteness” based on the proportion of “inherited” coloration. See Wikipedia’s very thorough history of “Eugenics in the United States,” from which I’ve extracted much of the following.

After Sir Francis Galton’s invention of eugenics (he argued that statistics proved that the English upper class carried and passed on genes that endowed its male members with superior qualities such as intelligence – he invented IQ as a statistical measure – moral behavior, diligence, etc.), it was America, the land settled by people seeking the new Eden, enamored with perfectionism, and gifted with enthusiasm for social reformation out of self-formation, that expanded Galton’s notion of selective breeding into pragmatic venues for creating a new world. On Galton, see Nicolas W. Gillham, “Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics,” in Annual Review of Genetics, 2001: you can download the pdf at (PDF) SIR FRANCIS GALTON AND THE BIRTH OF EUGENICS.

Throughout the late 19^th century and until the 60s of the 20^th century, high American culture adopted methods to further the idea that society could be rid of its problems by somehow limiting the numbers of inferior people, problem people, the indolent, the poor, the stupid, the degenerates, the alcoholics and the addicts, because these traits and characteristics supposedly were in-born, genetic. Initially, men of science introduced Galton’s ideas to America. Well known public scientists (Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank, Charles Davenport) promoted the study of desirable and undesirable traits, assuming them to be controlled by heredity. It was all about proper breeding (as in the Jane Austin sense of marriageability)

In America, the federal government created anti-immigration laws originally barring all non-whites but which evolved into specific prohibitions for specific nationalities and ethnicities eventuating in the complex of the quota system (a period much lauded by recently assassinated Charlie Kirk as the best years of our lives). Meanwhile, state governments created marriage laws prohibiting “epileptic, imbeciles, and feeble-minded” from marriage, forbade inter-racial marriages, engaged in sterilization programs of Blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, and other undesirables (Virginia did not repeal its law allowing the sterilization of patients in the state mental institutions until 1974). In the private sector (supported by mainstream money: the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation) solid, liberal organizations flourished pursuing eugenic programs. The National League of Women Voter, for example, partially achieved the passage of the 19^th Amendment by arguing that white women votes would counter the Black and immigrant male vote, or Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger promoted abortion among Black women as a tool for white supremacy. While much of the impetus for American eugenics was idealistic, much of it was also traditional racism and a mental set conditioned by the Confederate defense of slavery.

Those “good old days” of active purification ebbed with much better science and genetics, with greater understanding of human and cultural variety, with the study and understanding that valued traits were not “natural” values but created by us humans within cultural continuities. Yet, eugenic cliches continued their currency in American thinking, as is the nature of cliches.

Take, for an example, the positive attitude we have for certain kinds of genetic engineering: genetic testing that leads to pregnancy terminations (selective abortions) in order to avoid giving birth to babies with disabilities such as Down Syndrome.

Or, another example, much of the natural health movements – and commerce – depends on an underlying notion that illness is unnatural (caused, presumably, by human tampering) and a sign of individual weakness. When I catch a cold, people tell me that it’s because my immune system is weakened by stress, not that I happened to encounter an accidentally large concentration of cold viruses. Yes, stress (but what kind?) does affect the chemistry of the immune system (but we don’t know how or how much or in which direction, greater or lesser protection), but it’s the virus that gives us colds. That thinking which draws upon the binary metaphor of strength vs. weakness is a tiny bit of eugenic thinking that sticks to us.

In spite of the ebbing of the eugenics movement in the US in the second half of the last century, under our president’s flagrant power displays of his personal likes and dislikes, in a culture taught from grade school on to value opinion as a sign of identity and therefore more important than thought or understanding, eugenic cliches have re-emerged as significant governmental policy. Pop-eugenics is where we now are.

The federal government’s anti-immigration policies – under cover of going after the “worst of the worst” – is simply removing from the American gene-base as many non-northern Europeans as possible (while welcoming white Afrikaners). Remember the 2020 Georgia incident when ICE was accused of forced sterilization of migrant women in detention. The subsequent investigations found unusually large numbers of women in ICE detention had nonconsensual invasive gynecological treatments. On the general issue of reproductive rights of migrant women, see Paul Fleming and Alma Le Brón’s editorial, “History and Contemporary Reproductive Justice at the Border and Beyond,” American Journal of Public Health:pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7002941/pdf/AJPH.2019.305517.pdf .

As another reminder of the eugenicist’s ideology, we may remember the man with the chainsaw — who so prominently ensures the continuation of his superior genes by impregnating as many women as he can find — was charged by our president (under cover of efficiency) to make sure government services will be unable to help the “weak” survive, as is also the aim of the destruction of Medicaid in the Big Beautiful Bill.

And let us not forget the person charged to make America healthy by throttling medicine, from hindering the administration of medications and impeding access to vaccines to halting the search for new cures: let the strong survive, while all the weak die, then America will be healthy again. Read Julia Doubleday’s RFK Jr.’s “MAHA” movement doesn’t want to eliminate chronic illness. They want to eliminate the chronically ill.

This year, as of the 17^th of September, there have been 1,491 confirmed measles cases in the country, a drastic uptick from the 285 cases for all of last year. See Measles Cases and Outbreaks | Measles (Rubeola) | CDC. With rising hesitancy among parents, continuous bogus governmental misinformation, and government created difficulties of access, measles cases will increase even faster, until deaths from measles will become again significant in the population, functioning as an eugenic instrument of racial cleansing. Of course, measles is simply one of many illnesses (Covid surged this summer as the country dismantled all protections) which will be happily revived under pop-eugenics.

It should be clear what all these folks are up to. However, pop-eugenics is not “pure” Galtonian eugenics. The natural course of time and history makes return impossible except in the addled thoughts of the AGAIN people. Galton considered those traits and characteristics he valued to be universal, but with greater perception of cultural diversity, pop-eugenicists have fallen back to a defense of “traditional” Western culture as conjured up in the great replacement paranoia. But also, because today’s eugenics finds its leader in our president, pop-eugenics has taken on the kaleidoscopic aspects of his daily whims, pet-peeves, rancors, or tantrums as well as his casual support of whatever odd or controversial ideas people tell him.

Galtonian eugenics was elitist, based on the limited genetics of the 19^th century (before atoms and molecules, and the DNA, almost before modern science), but pop-eugenics has combined that genetic focus with American anti-elitism (anti-intellectual, anti-schooling, anti-government) to create a theory of natural inequality (so much for the Declaration of Independence). Rejecting human equality, pop-eugenics embraces competition, and thus has turned a government (which exists only to serve the people’s needs) into a business, the largest and most powerful corporation among other corporations, whose purpose is profit, for itself and its minions, not for the people. It engages in competitive business practices (normally including bribery and coercion, says our president), making deals with allies and flattening competitors, and every word it utters is PR. A pop-eugenics country thrives on a literal understanding of that commonplace high-school coach’s game-opening pep-talk: “Go out there, men, and punish them!” It’s a crime to be on the opposing team.

Remember that nine months ago, we abolished equity, diversity, and inclusion. We are a country defined now by inequality, a single superior race, and exclusion. So, let’s be clear. The issue today is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, not about the interim elections, not even about democracy and autocracy. It’s about the terror of not belonging, and we are terrified. Everyone seems to fall in line, as those who screamed about their personal liberty during Covid find themselves happily taking away the freedom of others. Read with what dismay a veteran Silicon Valley reporter describes the way in which the tech world has fallen into step with the national business: I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong | WIRED. Or read the beginning of this article from the French newspaper Le Monde before the paywall kicks in: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/m-le-mag/article/2025/09/07/fashion-retreats-from-diversity-we-are-again-being-openly-asked-for-caucasian-models_6745111_117.html.

The sense of national superiority so basic to pop-eugenics is not so distant from Galtonian social perfectionism, and in America it is an easily held belief. We are a large nation, meaning that just by accident we have large numbers of fast runners, talented people, smart scientists, wealthy business people. National superiority is not personal; even people with low self-esteem can revel in it. A friend once pointed out to me that the overwhelming number of western Nobel prize winners demonstrates the superiority of western culture, not ever stopping to remember that these categories of science, physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, are western inventions and that the rest of the world has only been studying them recently. Similar amnesia produces the feeling of national superiority when the US basketball team wins the gold at the Olympics.

Indeed, sports is one of the ways our culture promotes competition and the feeling of superiority generally. That feeling can then be theorized into a doctrine of natural inequality, the conceptual heart of eugenics. As a result, pop-eugenics idolizes strength and the show of force. Its ultimate model of competitive superiority is victorious warfare, and everyone loves a winner.