Eugenics

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12 23

NO MERRI

SEE SCIENTIFIC RACISM LASKER

aha ish used as cudgel to go after planned parent b/c of Sanger, but it’s the neo-nazi who actually want to do it?!

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trump uses hitler nazi rhet, then others follow to normalize it?

see eugenics; trump sez immigrants have bad/ criminal genes?

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FAIL? JRNL?

AN 7 25

The New York Times on Thursday published a story questioning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's past statements about his racial background based on a tip it received from a proponent of "race science."

The Times piece in question focused on Mamdani's college application to Columbia University in which he listed both "Asian" and "Black or African American" as his race.

Although both of Mamdani's parents are of Indian descent, he was born in the African country of Uganda and lived there for the first five years of his life. Mamdani told the Times that he checked the box on the application for "Black or African American" because he considers himself an American who was born in Africa. He emphasized that he does not identify as Black and argued that he found it difficult to express the complexity of his racial background given the options on the application.

However, what is stirring controversy about the Times piece isn't so much its content but the source of its information. The Times acknowledges that the information on Mamdani was culled from a large hack of a Columbia database and that it received a copy of Mamdani's application from "an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X," whom it describes as "an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race."

A report from The Guardian's Jason Wilson published earlier this year shows that the Times is vastly underselling its source's extreme views on race. As Wilson documented, the "Crémieux" cited by the Times is a man named Jordan Lasker, whose writings regularly defend the work of "race scientists" who use I.Q. test results to argue that Black people are mentally inferior to other races.

IFrame Content

"Crémieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and I.Q.," Wilson explained. "A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment."

Another report from Talking Points Memo's Hunter Walker found that Lasker has regularly posted about a racial "I.Q. gap" and has even suggested that there are "genetic pathways of crime." On his X account, Lasker has mused about the differences in brain sizes between Black and white Americans and between women and men more generally.

Brandon McEuen, a historian at Wayne State University who specializes in teaching about the history of the eugenics movement, slammed the Times for not only relying on Lasker as its source for the story on Mamdani but also for granting him anonymity.

"The decision to keep Lasker anonymous is ridiculous since his name has already been published in other outlets that don't provide softballs for eugenicists," he wrote on his Bluesky account.

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an 3 15

The alt-right is reintroducing a dehumanizing slur that has its roots in 100-year-old eugenics, Justin Kirkland writes in the Guardian Monday.

“The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X,” he writes. “A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power underDonald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.”

One adopter of the word is none other than the Trump administration’s Elon Musk, who owns X.

“In the past year,Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X,” Kirkland writes. “Hethought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founderDustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.”

There was a 200 percent spike in use of the word on X in January, according to a recentstudy from Montclair State University.

Last year, Trump reportedly used the word to insult Joe Biden and Harris.

“I feel liberated,” an anonymous banker told the Financial Times when Trump was elected. We can say ‘r-’ and ‘p----’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

The slur has particular weight coming from Musk. “Musk, a man who launched aNazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities,has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking,” Kirkland writes. “Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts toeliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing. Early on, Musk set his sights onMedicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are looking toslash Medicaid spending to support Trump’s tax cuts.”

The word has its roots in a “diagnosis” tracing back to 1910 that meant, according to some doctors, a "feeble-minded" person was “incurable.” Leaders at this time also believed that people with disabilities, people of color, and queer people could be eliminated through selective breeding. People with disabilities, proponents of eugenics argued, should be institutionalized.

“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘r-------’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy, told the Guardian. “I mean, that’s the basis of eugenics. I’m a little fearful of seeing this word pop back up because it does have such a strong eugenic connotation."

“I see the rise of the R-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go," Kirkland writes. "And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough."

AN 3 25

From Vice President JD Vance to SpaceX/Tesla/X.com CEO Elon Musk, natalism is a high priority for the MAGA movement. Vance famously attacked Americans who don't have biological children as "childless cat ladies," and both Vance and Musk are obsessed with the idea that Americans aren't having enough kids.

A conference specifically focused on natalism and billed as the Natal Conference 2025 is scheduled for March 28-29 in Austin, Texas. And according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, the speakers include "promoters of race science" and "self-described eugenicists."

Wilson, in an article published on March 3, reports, "Natalism, in its current, often right-wing iteration, encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly, he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers."

The March 28-29 event's website, Wilson notes, embeds a tweet from Musk, who wrote, "If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end." The event is being organized by far-right natalist Kevin Dolan.

According to Patrik Hermannson of the U.K.-based nonprofit Hope Not Hate, the views being promoted at Natal Conference 2025 are influenced by "the modern race science movement."

Wilson quotes Hermannson as saying, "It's about having more babies, but it's important to ask whose babies. It's about promoting the idea that certain people should have babies that have been improved with positive eugenics."

Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 are going for $1000 for one person or $1900 for two people.

According to Wilson, "One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but The Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics. The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates."

READ MORE:[Alarm sounded as Trump’s recent moves threaten to upend the Constitution*

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AN 10 24

'Full eugenicist': Trump says 'bad genes' make immigrants more likely to commit murder

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uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-879

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## Anti-abortion media’s reaction to the story follows decades of likening abortion to eugenics

- The anti-abortion movement has long accused Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest provider of abortions, of supporting eugenics. In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood’s parent organization, rallied behind eugenics, but Planned Parenthood has publicly denounced Sanger and her views about race and eugenics for years. Media Matters, [10/3/22]

- After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some figures in right-wing media claimed that pro-choice advocates had a “eugenics mentality” and that they were “proposing … eugenics.” Media Matters, [6/24/22]

- When Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen commented that overturning Roe v. Wade “would have damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” right-wing media figures claimed that Yellen was advocating for eugenics and “getting rid of the undesirables.’” Media Matters, [5/13/22]

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charlie Kirk hosts white nationalist writer Steve Sailer to attack minorities

Sailer is the founder of an online “neo-eugenics” forum that promotes “selective breeding of the human species.” He also writes for the anti-immigrant and white nationalist-aligned website VDare.

WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ

:{:{PUBLISHED 10/11/23}:

During the October 11 edition of Turning Point USA founder’s The Charlie Kirk Show, Charlie Kirk hosted writer Steven Sailer – described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist and a proponent of scientific racism – to attack Black and trans people and promote his new book.

This is not the first time Kirk has hosted a white nationalist-aligned guest onto his show. And it’s not a surprise either, as The Charlie Kirk Showis produced by Blake Neff, a former writer for Tucker Carlson Tonight who was fired after CNN exposed his racist and offensive postings in an anonymous online forum.

According to the SPLC, Sailer founded the Human Biodiversity Institute, which has been described as “a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species.”

Sailer is also a columnist for VDare, an anti-immigrant and white nationalist-aligned blog that was founded by anti-immigrant, white nationalist activist Peter Brimelow. In one of Sailer’s VDare posts, he described former President Barack Obama as a “wigger” and, amid criticisms of his physical features, asserted that he was a “faux African-American.” Sailer has also appeared on the white nationalist radio show Political Cesspoolin the past.

Kirk opened his show by praising Sailer and describing him as “incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers in the country.”

(Kirk repeatedly used the terms “noticing” and “noticing things” throughout his interview with Sailer. The term has been used by antisemitic trolls online in the past to attack and push conspiracy theories about Jewish people.)

During his appearance, Sailer defended racial stereotypes and baselessly claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement has led to more Black people getting killed.

“If you see a stereotype in regular life, yeah, it probably shows up in the social science data in the federal government and academics,” Sailer said. “If there’s some sort of pattern going on nationwide that is showing up in the FBI crime statistics or the Center for Disease Control’s statistics for deaths, then you’ll probably notice it on your own street.”

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the October 11, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show

Sailer also pushed anti-trans talking points.

“This is a sex fetish,” Sailer said. “It’s basically something that happens to a certain number of boys when they get to puberty and they start to dress up in their mother’s lingerie and masturbate in front of the mirror imaging themselves as the perfect woman.”

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the October 11, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show

Later in the interview, Sailer praised racist eugenics scientist and white nationalist Charles Murray, describing him as his “idol.” Sailer also recommended to Kirk’s audience that they read Murray’s books.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the October 11, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show

To end the interview, Kirk and Sailer promoted his new book titled “Noticing.”

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the October 11, 2023, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show

VDare celebrated Sailer’s appearance on Kirk’s show by reposting a screenshot of the program on X (formerly Twitter).

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/groomer-speech/

edit bd

Something I’ve been meaning to tell you. My dad is a pedophile. I’m not the victim. As always, though, there’s never just one. The ties that bound my family have largely come undone. Pain is now a feature, not a bug, of our lives. It’s a story without ending, nevermind a happy one.

So you can imagine what it felt like to see Republicans in the United States Senate using the word “pedophile” (as well as “child-predator”) during the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Their use of it was loose, irrelevant, warped and worse. The purpose was advancing conspiracy theories already spreading. The goal was smearing the new Supreme Court justice with the smell of evil.

Worst of all, by overusing it, they watered down the word. They hollowed out its primary moral essence. They created conditions in which my dad and other pedophiles can now plausible say their crimes aren’t as bad as they say. Just look at what the Democrats are doing.

Child abuse, predation, child molestation and rape – these are real problems responsible citizens much find humane ways of addressing while serving the often conflicting needs for rehabilitaton and justice.

These are real social, political and criminal problems.

By belittling them, the Republicans insult us.

They piss into the wounds of real victims, too.

That’s what you’d expect from a political party operating on the edge of political violence. Justice Jackson’s confirmation hearings were a case in point, according to Gabriel Rosenberg, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke. During our interview, Professor Rosenberg walked me through the four stages of “groomer speech.”

“You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.”

On Twitter, you offered an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay legislation. That rhetoric seems to weaponize words like “pedophile” and “child predator” and other things beyond the pale. You outlined four items. Can you explain?

The basic thesis of what I'm calling the “groomer panic,” which I think is coherently understood as a moral panic, or sex panic, is that has the capacity to be significantly more dangerous than comparable sex panics in the past in which similar sorts of rhetorical weaponization of the terms “pedophile” or “child predator” had been deployed.

It has the possibility of spilling into actual political violence.

I made four points.

First, “groomer speech” is using the metaphor of child sexual abuse to describe educational content that rightwing forces disapprove of.

This metaphor of violent physical harm is being used to describe a disagreement over educational content and the underlying speech acts constituting that content. There is a confusion about different kinds of harm and a confusion about the difference between speech and act.

Second, this confusion means concrete evidence of child sex abuse is no longer necessary. Instead, the evidence is the speech act itself.

It becomes the case then that anyone can be credibly accused of being a “groomer,” not because there's evidence of grooming, but because such person has dissented from a preferred framework among conservatives for the understanding of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.

“Groomer” describes dissent from conservatism writ large.

There is specificity to the claim about “pedophile” that is itself unique and dramatic. I describe it as having an eliminationist intention.

Third, “groomer speech” is distinguishable from “subjugating speech.”

“Subjugating speech” might incite violence. It's possible. It has before. But broadly, it’s intended to justify social and political inequalities.

“Pedophile” is a specific term, however. It carries, at least in rightwing communities, a claim that the individual in question is pathologically invested in harming the most vulnerable members of society.

There's no interest in governing such individuals.

It's not about establishing them as second-class citizens.

It's about putting them to death.

That separates it from a general class of what I’m calling “subjugating speech” intended to degrade or lessen a person but isn't necessarily a suggestion that they and all people like them ought to be eliminated.

Fourth, “groomer speech” is not being directed at minorities.

At various points in American history, conservatives have accused gay people and other sexual (and sometimes racial) minorities of intending to prey on kids – they behave in a predatory fashion toward children.

What's interesting about “groomer speech” and what's most alarming about its use by the right is the charge being directed at powerful people who cannot by any measure be identified with a minority.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene said Mitt Romney is “pro-pedophile,” she's talking about the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

When James Lindsay called Nate Hochman, a writer for National Review, a “groomer,” he's talking about a conservative in good standing, or was. He's saying this individual also wants to abuse children.

This is radically different.

It's now about disciplining ingroup versus outgroup identity within conservatism writ large. It’s about reformatting and hardening the line between people who are conservative and people who are not.

In the end, conservatives are the good ones. They're anti-pedophile. Anyone who dissents from the conservative framework is therefore pro-pedophile. They constitute individuals who must be eliminated.

Ted Cruz used to talk about “San Francisco values.” Others talked about “the gay agenda.” Those are more abstract than “pedophile.” You’re saying we’ve arrived at a new and more explicit point in the evolution of conservative rhetoric. Is that accurate?

That's generally correct.

I would add that on the right, they're open to the idea of people who prey on children deserving the most extreme forms of violence.

I don't think anybody on the far right is trying to hide that.

That’s fundamentally important.

“Groomer speech” is deployed to advance virtually anything that fits within the broader political program of the conservative movement.

Right now, it's about targeting people who dissent from a particular kind of orthodoxy around interpretation of educational content.

But then we saw it coming into play in specious arguments about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record – that she was “pro-pedophile.” Therefore Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski [“moderate” Republican senators who voted for her confirmation to the Supreme Court] were also “pro-pedophile.”

It's spilling into confirmations of Supreme Court nominees.

That's a break from the past.

That speaks to the flexibility and centrality of the charge eventually becoming the basis of things like criminal policy, militarization, policing, tax policy and labor policy. It can become a basic rhetorical strategy the far right uses to justify whatever they want to justify.

You're with us and the children.

Or you're on the other side with the pedophiles.

I’m thinking of eugenics. The antipathy toward LGBTQ people comes from the idea that LGBTQ-ness infects white people. As a result, they don't have enough babies. With too few white babies, white people risk becoming a minority. How would you understand that?

During the early human eugenics movement, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the United States for coercive sterilization of anyone who exhibited homosexual tendencies or who desired sex with men.

There was this idea that homosexuality constituted a dangerous social contagion that needed to be eliminated from society regardless of whether it could be passed on as a congenital defect. It was that grave.

Immediately after World War II, there was something the Lavender Scare period in which heightened concern about male homosexuality resulted in the creation of a lot of criminal psychopathology laws.

These law created legal justification for jailing and sterilizing gay people under the auspices of gay people preying on innocent children.

So the far right isn’t punching down. It's punching sideways – or even up in the case of senators. Is there a link historically between that and a leap into political violence? Do they go hand in hand?

I think Judge Jackson's confirmation hearings clearly illustrate how this works. The Republican Party did not want to see anyone vote for her. Various Republican senators fixated on a specious charge that she'd been light on sentencing people who possessed child pornography.

It was so specious that Andrew McCarthy, who is a notable and extremely right wing figure with National Review, basically labeled it “demagoguery.” He said there were better reasons to oppose her.

The right mobilized after labeling her “pro-pedophile.” From there, they disciplined GOP apostates by labeling them “pro-pedophile,” too. They wanted to show as much opposition as they could.

Actual sexual harm to children had nothing to do with it.

But once it got invoked, it became a disciplinary tool.

You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.

That kind of irresponsibility, with no bottom, carries with it its own momentum. It can become more and more difficult to control.

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getting mixed up in great replacement human de-pop BS: ===

MRC has only a few headers but one is: https://www.newsbusters.org:{/latino}:

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/jeffrey-clark/2022/02/17/ap-climate-army-four-leftist-big-money-orgs-fund-ap-eco

gmail

The Associated Press recently celebrated an $8 million cash infusion from left-wing mega-donors to fund a small army of eco-journalists.

The Associated Press (AP) declared on Feb. 15 that “it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues.” The announcement of the $8 million in funding marked the “largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants” in AP history.

Climate Depot founder Marc Morano put it best: “The AP will now have zero 'obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government' and instead be approved messaging lapdogs to their paymasters. Will the AP ever offend [its] donors and look critically at the UN IPCC climate panel? Or NASA? It's a laughable thought.” The organizations that opted to exchange cash for influence included left-wing organizations like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Quadrivium Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

AP referenced an earlier time, when it suggested news agencies were more independent: “For many years, Journalists and philanthropists were more wary of each other. News organizations were concerned about maintaining independence and, until the past two decades, financially secure enough not to need help,” [emphasis added].

So what changed? AP explained the journalism industry’s need for “philanthropy” since its “financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.” But this flies in the face of independent journalism. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states journalists should “[a]void conflicts of interest, real or perceived.”

The Hewlett Foundation gave at least $583,165,182 in grants to the ClimateWorks Foundation from 2008 to 2020, according to Foundation Directory Online. ClimateWorks has been linked to the “‘greening of the Belt and Road Initiative,’ global trade infrastructure project pushed by Chinese President Xi Jinping to link the communist country with the rest of Eurasia,” according to investigative think tank the Capital Research Center.

The Rockefeller Foundation has a sordid history of extremism. The Rockefeller Archive Center, a research center and grantmaking organization, documented the group’s f:{unding of population control research in the past. Additionally, “Dean Rusk, who served as Rockefeller Foundation president in the 1950s, led an effort to dramatically expand federal population control funds when he served as Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,” Influence Watch reported.}:

The Walton Family Foundation of Walmart fame also got in on the climate action. It awarded at least $64,597,090 in grants to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The EDF held a string of events in 2020 that exploited the Marxist Black Lives Matter protests and riots to rail how “[c]urrent demands for racial justice have put the spotlight on environmental racism.”

Quadrivium is another environmentalist sponsor. Under James Murdoch, the son of News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Quadrivium flexed its climate change financing muscles. Quadrivium gave at least $14,250,000 to the same radical EDF from 2013 to 2019.

Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Associated Press at (212) 621-1500 and demand it reject climate alarmism.

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aha RW conveniently gets their tyranny totalitarian mixed up eg NAZI are socialists b/c it's in the name when nazi killed union leaders and leftists; don't know or won't admit eugenics favored by mainstream and gop rockefellers; sanger gets tagged b/c a woman and birth control and that's close enough to abortion/women's rights to make her target/extremist

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August 26, 2016

Doug Domenech appeared on the Bill Martinez show where he talked about global warming and environmentalism. Domenech’s talk was titled “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” [23], [24]

“The essence of the way environmental people think, when you really boil it down, is that the way we can protect our kids is not to have them in the first place,” Domenech told Martinez.[23]

Referring to professor Travis N. Rieder from John Hopkins University, Domenech said Rieder was lecturing students and claiming that “for us to protect ourselves from global warming, and especially to protect kids and people in Africa, that we should have fewer kids in America.”

Domenech said this was “a complete turning over of the principle that people are our most important resource.” [23]

Bill Martinez went on to discuss abortion, which said was eliminating “some 56 million plus of our labour force [..] because of the eugenics movement, Margaret Sanger, and Planned Parenthood.” Martinez asks, “Is this the same type of philosophy, just in a different shape and form?” to which Domenech replies: [23]

“Well, it is. And you might remember Paul Ehrlich, he’s a noted environmental guy, wrote The Population Bomb. And as well as Margaret Sanger and her eugenics. And Lester Brown is another name—he’s just written a book called Full Planet, Empty Plate. […] The essence of the philosophy of these people is that we need to return the Earth to its pre-human state, and that’s the only thing that’s going to satisfy them.” [23]

Domenech lumps global warming in with a list of supposed non-problems, including global cooling, mass starvation, resource depletion, and species extinctions: [23]

“Back in the 70s, one of the great failed environmental predictions wasglobal cooling,” he said. “In the mid 1700s we were still in the midst of alittle ice age, and cooling was a very significant problem, and it remains a big problem. And, of course, that led us to talking about overpopulation—that has not really been a problem.” [23]

He says another “non-problem” is mass starvation, as “our food production is bigger than ever.” [23]

Talking about resource depletion, Domenech pointed to fracking as the reason why “we’ve got more oil and gas than ever.” [23]

“Mass extinction of species – and that has really not happened,” he said. [23]

“That, of course, leads us to global warming, where we are today. These are all these big constructs that we need to worry about, and this is just the latest.” [23]

Domenech had written an article covering similar issues a day prior in RealClear Energy titled “Your Damn Children are Killing the Planet.” [25]

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1220 an

horrifying American roots of Nazi eugenics

History News Network

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."

But the concept of ...

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trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

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hysterectomies?

ICE whistleblower’s horrifying account of forced sterilization raises fears of eugenics and genocide

Lisa Newcomb / Common Dreams

Human rights advocates sounded alarms Monday following a whistleblower complaint that alleges an alarming number of hysterectomies were performed on detainees at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-truth-behind-the-british-eugenics-scandal/

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been known to have an interest in eugenics, but despite the persistence of support for this discredited idea over the years, eugenics is a scientific and moral failure.

In February, an adviser to Johnson resigned when some old racist posts he wrote in 2014 emerged. The contractor, Andrew Sabisky, called himself a “superforecaster” by trade and trafficked in theories of race and intelligence. Footage resurfaced of Boris Johnson talking about genetic inequality and IQ in 2013. Articles announce that “eugenics is back” every few years (2018, 2016, or 1989), so it is probably the case that eugenics never left. With the political right in the ascendant in many parts of the world, it is inevitable that the pseudoscience of eugenics would be on the rise with it.

Some academics will also follow, as they have from the days when craniometry justified the British Empire. Richard Dawkins, a retired Oxford biologist active on Twitter where he was called a “tedious old racist” in 2018, tweeted in February what was likely a reaction to Sabisky’s eugenics scandal:

“It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”

The comparison of human “races” to dog breeds is so pervasive that it should be answered comprehensively, and the tweet should be picked apart in detail. The comparison has nothing to do with science, as I will show, and should be abhorred by the scientifically minded.

dawkins’ posture is one where he claims to want to distance himselffrom eugenics “on ideological, political, moral grounds,” while suggesting that the “facts” are in favor of eugenics. The “facts” in this trope aren’t a matter of argument and evidence but some kind of secret magic that only those with a strong stomach can handle. The less brave and bright resist the “facts” out of fear that they will clash with our “ideological, political” commitments. But as far as eugenics goes, there are no “facts”: eugenics has been an intellectually corrupted project from its inception in the 19th century. Eugenics comes to us from a time when the British Empire was plundering the world and its proponents went looking for evidence to prove racist conclusions they already believed. No one who understands science fears that racists will abuse eugenicist “facts.” As anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes in his book Is Science Racist?: “[T]here is no fear of potential abuse of knowledge. There is simply the collection and dissemination of intellectually corrupted information. That is the legacy of scientific racism.”

Like climate deniers who work in fields of science other than climate and make public statements to try to pretend there is no consensus on the topic, Dawkins used his authority as a retired biology lecturer to tweet claims outside his area of expertise. A scientific organization that has authority on the topic, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), made the following three points in a 2018 statement:

“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”
“Genetics exposes the concept of ‘racial purity’ as scientifically meaningless”
“[T]he invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”

Dawkins’ defenders might now argue that his tweet had nothing to do with racism and that it is just about eugenics. That the entire pseudoscientific history of eugenics, pervaded and corrupted with racism, is irrelevant to his claims about “practice” and “facts,” by reference to other species. Dawkins mentioned the breeding of “cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses.” There are different flaws when each of these comparisons is put under the microscope.

Roses? Spraying fertilizer on roses helps them—does it help us? There is almost nothing that works for the plant Rosa gallicanae that also works for us, so that can be quickly dispensed with.

Cows and pigs are bred to be docile, to pack on as much edible meat as possible in a short amount of time, and ideally to go quietly to their deaths. Unless Dawkins envisions a cannibal future, cows and pigs are irrelevant to this analogy with humans. (It is worth mentioning that these are also two of the planet’s three most abused animal species—the chicken, of whom 69 billion were slaughtered in 2018 compared to 1.5 billion pigs and 302 million cows, wins this heart-rending competition.)

That leaves horses and dogs.

Horses were once our choice animal for transportation. Now that we use fossil fuels, most horses today are involved in what the Equine Heritage Institute calls “recreational horse use,” in which the horse is made to carry a person on its back and run fast for our entertainment.

With the other animals eliminated, Dawkins’ argument comes down to the comparison between humans and dogs. Dog breeding has been done for many thousands of years, and dogs have been bred for many jobs.

Does it “work”? Specifically, since the idea is if it works for dogs it could work for humans, does breeding work for the species being bred (dogs, or in Dawkins’ implicit proposal, humans)? Of course not. From the perspective of the dog, it is a nightmare.

A couple of popular internet memes sum up what thousands of years of dog breeding have achieved for the bred species. In one, a stunning photograph of a wolf is shown thinking: “Humans at a campfire… It’s cold and I’m starving, maybe I should ask for some scraps. What’s the worst that could happen?” Below, captioned “10,000 years later,” is a photo of a pug in a knitted hat made to look like a birthday cake. Similarly, photos of a wolf and a pug are used in another meme, where the photo of the wolf says “product of evolution,” and the photo of the pug says “product of intelligent design.”

This latter meme reveals the irony that Dawkins of all people should make the eugenicist claim that dog breeding “works.” In The God Delusion as well as much other work, Dawkins’ principal argument against the existence of God is that evolution can produce more complex forms of life (including human intelligence) than any divine intelligence could. Similarly, the artificial selection of dog breeding has—as the humorous memes demonstrate—propagated traits that are disadvantageous to dogs compared to what natural selection was able to do for the wolf.

The 2008 BBC documentary “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” investigated the UK’s Kennel Club and the breed standards that have led, by breeding exclusively for appearance, to a dog population with hundreds of genetic diseases. What is called “breeding” to achieve these traits is better called “inbreeding,” with brother-sister, mother-son, father-daughter, and father-granddaughter matings regularly made—there are no incest taboos, no health considerations, and no concern for genetic diseases made in awarding prizes at dog shows. Perfectly healthy puppies—like Rhodesian ridgeback puppies that don’t have the ridge, which actually brings with it additional health risks—are killed at birth to maintain the “purity” of the breed. Kennel Clubs and breeders were offended by comparisons of dog breeding to racism, but the shared history is beyond dispute. Kennel Clubs were founded in the late 19th century, after Carl Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, and Arthur de Gobineau had laid the intellectual foundations of scientific racism, and there was the freest exchange of ideas between eugenicists and dog breeders. Also in the late 19th century, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, whose statues have had travails in Montreal and Toronto leading to scolding and arrests, said that “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics… the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful.”

In “Pedigree Dogs Exposed,” the documentarians show old photos of breeds like German shepherds and bulldogs that had long legs and upright postures, contrasting them with the top dogs in those breeds today, whose legs get shorter and shorter as their mobility decreased. Those are the “show dogs.” But “working dogs” aren’t beyond question either. Bulldogs were bred, as the name indicates, for fighting with bulls for entertainment. Pit bulls, for fighting one another. Dobermans, for protecting a rent collector. Is this work that should be done? In reality, breeding dogs for these jobs was of dubious benefit to human society; trying to make the case that it was beneficial to the dogs, as a species, is preposterous. And if that is true for dogs bred solely for work, how much sadder is it for the pedigree dogs bred solely to meet circular aesthetic criteria (one breeder, asked about the morality of killing puppies who lack the ridge, responded: “Well, if it doesn’t have the ridge, it’s not a ridgeback, is it?”)?

Perhaps Dawkins envisions a well-funded eugenics department that could overcome incest taboos and ethics reviews, as well as the small matter of human reproductive freedom, to use inbreeding to create human breeds. But what most eugenicists are really interested in is not such a scientific project. They are interested in the idea of racial differences in intelligence.

But dog breeds provide no insight into how this aspect would work for humans either. Dogs, the outcome of artificial selection, have breeds that can be identified by their genotypes. A paper about the differences between dog breeds and human “races” that appeared in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach in July 2019 stated that about 27 percent of dogs’ genetic variation could be explained by breed. Humans are the outcome of natural selection, and most genetic variation occurs within human groups. Classifications of humans by genotype don’t match up with what racists think of as the different human “races.” The closest science can get to the racist position is the trivial point that people who are close together geographically are (relatively) close together genetically. And even this regional variation can explain only 3.3-4.7 percent of human genetic variation, according to the paper.

It is this regional variation that is being exploited by mail-order genetics companies like 23andMe, which Marks calls “science-lite,” because its users accept the findings they like and reject the ones they don’t, which is probably the intended way to use the test. As for “race,” there is no such thing, except for racism, which is the unscientific belief that there are such things as distinct human “races.”

So, is dog breeding successful? Dog breeding has been disastrous for the dog as a species. Does dog breeding provide evidence that eugenics could work? The analogy between dog breeds and human “races” is broken.

If racists want to push eugenics, the rest of us should realize that they do so without the backing of science, which has moved on, leaving the detritus behind.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

bizzaro-world mirroring? Plandemic conspiracy recycling stew

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conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”

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https://kpfa.org/episode/education-today-february-07-2020/

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// IQ test?

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A young scholar talks about the participation of Stanford professors in the Eugenics movement, which was the bedrock of both U.S. racial education tracking and Hitler’s ideology about race. Lewis Terman was a very important but little known figure in these developments in the Bay Area

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/dont-let-this-maniacal-presidential-pickpocket-use-cruel-verbal-assaults-to-distract-you-from-the-truth/

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no lnx

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Don’t let this ‘maniacal’ presidential pickpocket use cruel verbal assaults to distract you from the truth

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Written by Michael Winship / Common Dreams July 22, 2019

Every presidential election year, Frontline, the superb investigative TV series on PBS, produces an in-depth look at the Democratic and Republican candidates. It’s called “The Choice,” and invariably offers some insights that likely you won’t see anywhere else.

When I first watched the 2016 edition, three things struck me as revelatory—aside from that now infamous Omarosa Manigault soundbite from the program that began, “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump.” Yikes.

Today, after two and a half years of a Trump White House, these three remembered moments seem more pertinent than ever. First up was journalist Marie Brenner, who recalled Trump’s brother Robert telling her, “Donald was always the kid in the family who would start throwing birthday cake at all the parties, that you would build up a tower of blocks, he would come knock your blocks down.”

Second were the memories of fellow cadets at New York Military Academy, where young Donald was sent to deal with his behavior issues. One said that as a teenager, Trump “had a very Hugh Hefner Playboy magazine view of success.” Another agreed: “Our lives came from Playboy magazine. That’s how we learned about women. That was all of my adolescence. And that’s why getting out of military school was difficult. You had to realize that you couldn’t just follow the Playboy philosophy.”

He added, “The things that we talked about at that time in 1964 really are very close to the kind of way [Trump] talks now.”

But the third thing, the one that especially stuck in my head, is something Frontline reported Trump had learned from nature’s own Nazi, his martinet of a father Fred. It was a theory, according to the narration, Donald “especially liked.”

Interviewed for the documentary, Michael D’Antonio author of The Truth about Trump,says, “This is a very deep part of the Trump story. The family subscribes to a race horse theory of human development, that they believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.”

In other words, he embraced eugenics—the science of human selection that’s just a hop, skip and a 23 and Me saliva test away from advocating the primacy of a master race.

Which is why what we’re seeing now, less than a year and a half before the 2020 election is no surprise. You know the litany: Trump and his father’s housing business censured by the Justice Department for racial discrimination; publicly attacking the young Latino and black men of the so-called Central Park Five, even after they were found innocent; ludicrous birther slurs flung at Barack Obama; the Muslim travel ban; offhand bigoted references to “shithole countries,” Nigerians in huts and Haitians with AIDS; Charlottesville.

On and on. And now, these attacks on four women of color, four members of the United States Congress told by the president to go back where they came from, even though only one was born in another country and all four are US citizens. While a few of his Republican colleagues voiced disgust at Trump’s tweets, most chose to remain silent, equivocate or to double down like the toadying Lindsey Graham, who screamed that Alexandria Octavio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are “a bunch of communists”—sounding not like his late mentor John McCain but a raving, spittle-hurling Joe McCarthy.

(Lindsey and his man crush Trump would do well to heed—but won’t—the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in a 1929 dissent wrote, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”)

So yes, Donald Trump is a racist, a white supremacist, a misogynist, a right-wing extremist, and as he goes full tilt into maniacal campaign mode, with nary a GOP voice raised in protest, it’s only going to get worse. This is how he thinks he can win reelection and so these current ravings were inevitable. Recent and intentionally misconstrued comments by the women may have sped the onslaught up a bit. As per The Washington Post, he thinks the four are “good foils.” But this always was going to happen. Always. Ignore not the ICE raids and the new rules restricting asylum requests and the continuing deplorable conditions in the detention centers, the separation of undocumented families, the failed attempt to cook the census. And keep your eye on which candidates are offering viable plans and solutions for climate change, immigration, health care, the opioid crisis, education and student debt, infrastructure, income and racial inequality.

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As for those of you among Trump’s vaunted base, the ones to whom he’s pitching this poisonous snake oil, do you honest to God think that being given license to attack or mock a person’s skin color or religion is more important than having a job, a roof over your head and food and clothing for you and your family? Do you truly believe that Trump’s trade wars, tax cuts aimed at his rich cronies and slashing regulations to satisfy corporate fat cats are giving you a better life?

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Is having a president who jabs his thumb in the eye of all who don’t fawn over him here and abroad and who lacks a moral or honest bone in his body preferable to a leader who is respected here and overseas, who’s not a white nationalist but a patriot with an informed worldview embracing diversity and expertise?

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Trump needs to return where he came from, and I say that with some hesitation only because that would be New York City and I live here. Even if he’s defeated in 2020 we won’t have heard the last of him, of course, but at least the power and bully pulpit of the presidency will be denied the bully who currently lives in the White House. We’ll put him in a special room where he can throw all the birthday cake and knock over all the toy blocks he wants. Just send him back.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-18-2019/

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Eugenics is the science of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool. In the 19th century there was a great deal of support for eugenics, and the ones seen as the lesser beings were the European immigrants trying to get to America, particularly the Jews. Today, we have a conversation on the history of anti immigration policy and its connection to eugenics in the late 19th Century with Daniel Okrent.

Guest: Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He has written several books including Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, as well as his most recent and the topic of today, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Laws That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/3/clarence_thomas_cited_this_authors_book

Justice Clarence Thomas sparked harsh rebuke last week after claiming that abortion rights can be traced back to the 20th century eugenics movement. He made the comments in a 20-page opinion after the Supreme Court declined last week to take up a provision of an Indiana law that bars abortions based on the sex, race or disability of the fetus. The decision keeps in place a lower court injunction on the measure. But Justice Thomas indicated that he supports the law, writing in his opinion, “Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement.” To make his case, Justice Thomas cited a book by Adam Cohen titled “Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.” We speak with Adam Cohen, who has since refuted the justice’s claims. In a piece for The Atlantic titled “Clarence Thomas Knows Nothing of My Work,” Cohen writes, “Thomas is absolutely right that we need to remember our eugenics past and make sure that we do not make the same mistakes again. He is absolutely wrong that individual women making independent decisions about their pregnancies are the eugenicists of our time.”

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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172066

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State efforts to recriminalize abortion are an echo of America’s eugenics past

Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states passed laws permitting state…

:{:{In 1942, 18-year-old Iris Lopez, a Mexican-American woman, started working at the Calship Yards in Los Angeles. Working on the home front building Victory Ships not only added to the war effort, but allowed Iris to support her family. ...However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history.}:

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At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized.

Iris wasn’t alone. In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed “unfit” infertile.

California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people—one-third of the national total—were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled.

To better understand the nation’s most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, our research team tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people. We wanted to know about the role patients’ race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as “unfit”?

Racial biases affected Iris’ life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.

.....

Eugenics was seen as a “science” in the early 20th century, and its ideas remained popular into the midcentury. Advocating for the “science of better breeding,” eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce.

Under California’s eugenic law, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized. Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.

Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years.

Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like anti-miscegenation laws and the Immigration Act of 1924. Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a “lower racial level.” Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, “hyperfertile” and criminally inclined.

These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as “immigrants of an undesirable type.” If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction...

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/california-targeted-latinas-forced-sterilization-180968567/ Smithsonian magazine}:

confirmation:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7sx2xtjGEC&dq=eugenics+america+gray+gamble&source=gbs_navlinks_s

hmmn wacko publisher/

http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7sx2xtjGEC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=eugenics+america+gray+gamble&source=bl&ots=DN1QFIeljk&sig=EBhBZu5HMG9FRrdbRp5zrt1VmdA&hl=en&ei=ULtNTIPjC4G-sQP95L3-DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CC0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1920sp6.html

There was a more sinister aspect that arosed alongside racism in the early part of the 20th ^Century, that of eugenics. Eugenics as it was applied in the 1920s can be defined as the creation of the prefect Aryan race and the elimination of all inferior individuals and races. Sometimes preceding racism, and at others lagging, eugenics generally paralleled the development of racism in the 1920s. Both are so intertwined in America that they are impossible to separate. The tentacles of eugenics were spread far and wide in the 1920s and 1930s. IQ tests were developed as an offshoot of the eugenics movement, as was Planned Parenthood. Moreover, eugenic laws passed in the United States served as model laws for the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. Most Americans have little understanding or an incorrect understanding of the eugenics movement. Indeed its association with the Nazis and the Holocaust has distorted the true nature of the movement as surviving groups sought to distance themselves from a movement associated with the Nazis. Almost all Americans incorrectly assume that the movement died beside the Third Reich. Such an assumption is not only wrong ,but also dangerous, as the eugenics movement is still alive and well today.

Author Edwin Black has traced the origins of eugenics back to biblical times and the Judeo-Christian concept of charity. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the Canones Arabicia Nicaeni mandated the expansion of hospitals and other institutions for the needy in 325 A.D. Such institutions were needed in England and the church supplied them. During the early 1500s, agriculture underwent a change in England from small estate farming to large expansive estate farming, idling thousands of small estate farmers and contributing their numbers to the masses of needy. In 1530, King Henry VIII seized church property for the church’s refusal to allow his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Charity had now become a state responsibility. Although tending to the needs of the poor was expensive, the alternative of riots and revolutions was less appealing to the nobility.

By the end of the century, a distinct pauper class had emerged in England. Compulsory poor law taxes were assessed to each community to pay for housing the poor. The pauper class was viewed largely as arrogant and ripe for riots or revolution. The problems of the pauper class were only compounded by the advancing Industrial Revolution. Along with the Industry Revolution, the poor became concentrated in urban slums. Sweatshops sprung up to exploit the cheap area. For three hundred years after King Henry, numerous reforms were made in England’s poor laws. The ruling class became ever more resentful of being taxed to support the poor. By the 1800s, the ruling elite looked down on the poor as subhuman.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus, an English economist, published a watershed theory on the nature of poverty and the social economic system at play. Malthus concluded that while the population was growing at a geometric rate, the food supply was only increasing at a linear rate. As a result of his theory, he called for population control. Malthus continued that charity promoted generation to generation poverty. Many of those that supported Malthus ignored his complaints of an unjust social economic system and instead embraced the rejection of the value in helping the poor.

The same claim has been the mainstay of the Republican Party ever since the 1980s. Throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s there was no shortage of food, coal, or any of the necessities for a normal living standard for everybody. There wasn’t even a money shortage. In short, the depression was the result of an inequitable distribution of wealth with no means of delivering the food to the hungry other than through private charity soup kitchens that were overwhelmed.

In the 1850s, Herbert Spencer published Social Statics. Spencer argued that man and society followed the laws of science and not the laws of a caring God. He popularized the familiar term: "survival of the fittest." He argued that the fittest would continue to prosper while the poor would become more impoverished until they died out naturally. Spencer denounced charity and aid to the poor. In 1859, Charles Darwin published Origin of Species.In 1863, Spencer published Principles of Biology in which he argued that heredity is under the control of physiological units. In 1886, Gregor Mendel published his classic experiments with peas from which he constructed a predictable heredity system.

The basis for eugenics was now firmly established. In 1869, Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, published Hereditary Genius. Galton had never finished his medical studies at London’s King College, but instead had studied mathematics at Cambridge where he became a devotee of the emerging field of statistics. Gallton distinguished himself by recognizing patterns. In his publication Galton had studied the genealogies of eminent scholars, artists and military men. He found that many of them were descendents of the same family and concluded the frequency was too impressive to ignore. Galton then concluded that not only physical characteristics were hereditary, but mental, emotional and creative qualities were also hereditary. Further, Galton reasoned that talent and quality could be sharpened by judicious marriages in a few generations into a race of highly gifted individuals. Galton suggested that by selective breeding of the very best, mankind could evolve into a superlative species. Gallatin hoped to develop a regulated marriage process where members of the finest families were only married to carefully chosen spouses.

Galton had developed a protoscience in search of vindicating data. Galton’s ideas of marriage became known as positive eugenics. However, by the time the 20^th Century arrived, a new form of eugenics had developed. Called negative eugenics, it called for the sterilization of the unfit. The spotlight of eugenics was soon to shift from England to the United States, where it immediately took on a racist characteristic.

Breeding humans had been part of America from before colonial days, in the slave trade. Only the strongest could survive the journey from Africa. On their arrival the slaves would be paraded about on the auction block so they could be physically examined. Following the Civil War, America was primed for eugenics. In 1865, in upstate New York the utopian Onedia Community declared in a headline that human breeding should be the foremost question in that age. As news of Galton’s work reached American shores a few years later, the Oneida community began its first human breeding experiment with fifty-three female and thirty-eight male volunteers.

As the number of emigrants from eastern and southern Europe increased, as the new century approached, eugenics became more popular as a means to purify American society. However, one would be amiss to blame the rise of eugenics in America solely on the massive immigration during the last half of the 19^th Century. Contributing to its rise was a good deal of racism and group hatred. American Indians were being isolated on reservations. Such isolation of groups deemed as unfit became a cornerstone of negative eugenics. In the southwest, a great deal of race hatred stemmed from the Mexican-American war and the absorption of thousands of Mexicans in the territory ceded to the Untied States. On the west coast, the race hatred took the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act barring immigration from China and blocking naturalization of those already here. In the south, race hatred reached a feverish peak, and a network of Jim Crow laws were past to keep society pure.

In 1891, Victoria Woodhull, a leading feminist of the day, published a pamphlet, The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit. The pamphlet called for both positive and negative eugenics. In 1896, former census director Francis Walker published the article, "Restriction of Immigration" in Atlantic Monthly, calling for restricted immigration before the nation committed racial suicide in response to the rising tide of immigration of non Anglo-Saxons. Roughly eighteen million immigrants arrived between 1890 and 1920.

By the turn of the century, women were still barred from voting. Racial hatred was the norm. Native Americans had been segregated on reservations Blacks and Asians were considered second class citizens and undesirables. Vigilantes often dispensed what passed for justice at the end of a hangman’s rope. From 1889 until 1918, 3,224 people were lynched. More often than not, the victim was black although 702 of the victims were white. Moreover, the hangings were carried out for trivial reasons such as staring at a white girl, offensive language, or other such minor infractions.⁹²

Eugenics would soon become a cure all for society’s problems. Criminal analysis would move racial hatred and criminal behavior into the realm of heredity and eugenic cleaning. Disease and physical afflictions, such as tuberculosis and epilepsy, were also considered hereditary disorders.

One of the first benefactors of eugenics in the United States was the Carnegie Institute. Following an infusion of bonds and other assets totaling $14 million from the founder in 1901, the Institute was rechartered by a special act of congress in 1904. Under the charter, the institute was established to be one of the premier scientific organizations of the world. Twenty-four eminent individuals from science, government and finance were selected as trustees including Elihu Root, Cleveland Dodge, and John Billings. John Merriam was appointed president of the institute. The institute soon added a new science to their principal areas of investigations, negative eugenics.

Charles Davenport would soon emerge as the driving force behind the American eugenics movement. Davenport was a sad character with a Harvard degree in zoology. He came from a long line of Congregational ministers. His father was a real estate man and had founded two churches and was a deacon in one and an elder in the other. He raised his family harshly, forcing family members into long hours of Bible study.

Davenport approached the Carnegie Institute in 1902 to fund a study of evolution at the biological experiment station at Cold Spring Harbor where he worked. In 1903, Davenport approached the American Breeders Association (ABA), a group created by the Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experimental Stations. He was elected to the five-person permanent oversight committee. Davenport was also successive in pushing the ABA into adopting the views of negative eugenics. In 1904, the Carnegie Institute formally inaugurated the evolution center at Cold Spring Harbor with Davenport as director.

Davenport’s work impressed the wealthy elite of New England and soon attracted more funding from the Carnegie Institute and additional funding from Mary Harriman, the widowed heir to the railroad fortune of E.H. Harriman. Others that jumped aboard the movement included Henry Ford, John Kellogg, Clarence Gamble, J.P. Morgan, and E.B Scripps.

Davenport soon enlisted the help of Harry Laughlin, a schoolteacher from Missouri. Laughlin, like Davenport was a minister’s son. Davenport structured the Eugenics Records Office to further enable Laughlin’s career. Laughlin was soon at work at the eugenic records office at Cold Spring Harbor. He first set about to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, which he estimated to be about ten percent of the population. He toured Sing Sing and obtained the records of the inmates to prove for all times criminal behavior was hereditary. After obtaining the records from Sing Sing, Loughlin proceeded to tour New York’s State Asylum to obtain the records of those committed. He also toured the Connecticut school for the feeble minded for the records of their charges. Laughlin then set about training field workers to generate additional eugenics records. Besides targeting criminals and the feeble-minded, Laughlin targeted epileptics as well.

In early May 1911, the ABA created a special committee to study the best practical means of cutting off the defective germ-plasma of the American population. The stage was now set for removing the undesirables. Laughlin was appointed secretary of the committee. The advisory panel included Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the chief of the Bureau of Statistics, O. P. Austin, and immigration expert Robert DeCouncy Ward among other prominent advisors.

In mid July 1911, the special committee met in Manhattan and systematically plotted a campaign to purge the blood of American people of the deteriorating influence of these undesirable anti-social classes. Ten classes of the socially unfit were identified. The classes were as follows in the rank given by the committee: feeble minded, pauper, alcoholics, criminals including petty criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, those predisposed to certain diseases, the deformed, and finally the blind and deaf. Not only did the ABA target the individuals afflicted, but also targeted their extended families as well. The group agreed that sterilization of the extended families was desirable.

The eugenic committee had endorsed a very ambitious plan. The plan prioritized the sterilization of those receiving custodial care, including those in poor houses, insane asylums, prisons, and any others under state care. This group contained approximately one million people. The plan called for the further sterilization of borderline cases of some seven million people deemed by the ABA to be totally unfit to become useful parents or citizens. The estimated eleven million people targeted for the first wave was more than ten percent of the population. After the first wave was completed, the plan called for the sterilization of the extended families of those deemed unfit.

Moreover, the committee sought to bypass the court system in ordering the sterilization. They attempted to define the sterilization as a police function. In their view, once a eugenic board had ordered the sterilization of an individual, the police would simply enforce the decision. Additionally, Laughlin and his committee suggested polygamy and systematic mating to increase the bloodline of the desirables and draconian laws preventing births from any deemed unfit. They called for restrictive marriage laws, forced segregation of undesirables, and compulsory birth control. Nor did they confine their views to just the United States; they envisioned a global movement.

It was only a short step from theory to implementing the plan. The sterilization of undesirables first occurred outside the law and paralleled the development of eugenics. The first cases of sterilization occurred in Kansas, where F. Hoyt Pitcher surgically asexualized fifty-eight children confined in the Kansas Home for the Feebleminded during the 1890s. Kansas’s citizens denounced the doctor, and he was reluctantly removed by the board of trustees. The board staunchly defended Pitcher and defended his work. The doctor did not face any charges.

About the same time, Dr. Harry Clay Sharp was castrating inmates at the Indiana Reformatory to cure convicts of masturbation. Again, the procedure was conducted outside of the law. In 1899 Sharp read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The article, written by Dr Albert Ochsner advocated the sterilization of all convicts with vasectomies. After reading the article, Sharp performed the procedure on scores of inmates without anesthetics.⁹³

By 1906, Sharp claimed to have performed 206 vasectomies, even though the procedure was still not legal. While Sharp was very influential in the passage of Indiana’s sterilization law, he was by no means alone. Reverend Oscar McCulloch, the pastor of the Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was a leading reformer and advocate of public charity while harboring a deep hate for the poor. Indiana law specified a compulsory servitude for its paupers. They could be farmed out to the highest bidder. MuCulloch performed his own genealogical survey of Indiana’s wandering tribe of paupers called the Tribe of Ishmael. MuCulloch’s survey of the Tribe of Ishmael quickly became a centerpiece of eugenics studies. MuCulloch preached to his congregation that the paupers were parasites and preordained to be nothing more.

The reader maybe wondering about a connection between religion and eugenics as three of the most influential people in the early development of eugenics came from deep religious backgrounds: Laughlin, Davenport, and MuCulloch. While there were a large number of evangelical ministers that served as officers in the eugenic movement, and more were members, the connection seems more informal than formal and dependent solely upon the individual minister involved. At the same time, few ministers spoke out against eugenics and those that did so waited until the 1930s, after eugenics had been discredited and associated with the Nazis. The connection between eugenics, the Klan, and religion is an area open to further research.

David Jordan, president of the University of Indiana, lectured his students that paupers were indeed parasites. In 1902, in his book Blood of a Nation he first proposed the concept of blood as the immutable basis for race. Jordan left Indiana to accept a position as the first president of Stanford University.⁹⁴

In addition to Jordan and MuCulloch, Indiana’s State Board of Health was headed by Dr. J. N. Hurty, a staunch believer in eugenics. Hurty would later rise to become head of the American Public Health Association. In 1907, at the repeated urging of Sharp and Hurty, Indiana became the first state to pass eugenic laws calling for the sterilization of undesirables. Indiana, however, was not the first state to have had eugenic sterilization laws introduced in the legislator.

Sterilization laws were first introduced in the Michigan legislator in 1905, and again in Pennsylvania in 1906. Both measures failed, however, the Indiana law was modeled on the Pennsylvania bill. The bill passed the Indiana House by a margin of 59 to 22 and the Senate by 28 to 16 votes. The vote was proceeded by little debate in both chambers.

In 1909, Oregon’s Governor George Chamberlain vetoed a sterilization bill noting that’s it didn’t require enough safeguards. Moreover, eugenic sterilization laws failed in several other states in 1909, including another attempt in Michigan and a first attempt in Wisconsin. However, sterilization laws did pass in three states in1909. Washington State passed a bill mandating sterilization of habitual criminals and rapists. Connecticut passed a law allowing the medical staff to examine patients of two asylums for the feebleminded and their family trees to determine if the patients should be sterilized.

California enacted a bill that allowed castration or sterilization of convicts and residents of the state home for the feebleminded.

In the next two years, additional states passed eugenic sterilization laws. Iowa passed perhaps the most inclusive law, allowing the sterilization of criminals, idiots, feebleminded, imbeciles, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, and moral or sexual perverts. Nevada, New Jersey and New York were among the states to pass sterilization laws.

Nonetheless, the American Breeders Association and the Eugenic Record office remained frustrated with the progress of eliminating undesirables from the gene pool. Although several states now had laws allowing for forced sterilization, few people were ever sterilized. Only in California, where more than two hundred were sterilized, had the law been applied to more than a couple individuals. Moreover, public sentiment for the enforcement of the sterilization laws was lacking across the nation.

Following the death of Galton in 1911, the First Eugenic Conference was organized to be held in London. Winston Churchill was scheduled to introduce the king at the conference and was reportedly concerned about the rising number of people judged to be mental defects. The organizers wanted the Secretary of State, P.C. Knox to send an official delegation. However, the state department could not comply because the conference was a non-governmental meeting. However, Knox did send official invitations to prominent American leaders on official letterhead. Knox, who had been a former lawyer for Carnegie Steel, effectively used the state department as the eugenics post office. American racial theories dominated the conference held at the University of London.

The next big stride forward for the American eugenic movement came with the US entry into WWI. Officials struggled with the task of classifying the three million draftees. Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, gathered other eugenic activists around him and pleaded for intelligence testing of the new draftees. They developed two tests for the army, the beta test for those that could read and write English, and a pictorial alpha test for those that could not read. The questions centered largely on pop culture. Hence, urbanites could pass the exam easily, while draftees coming from rural population, and isolated from theaters and large cities with the newest consumer items, failed the test miserably. Even the questions in the pictorial tests were drawn from the latest pop culture. In the pictorial test, the subject was to draw in what was missing. One such question featured a picture of a bowling lane and the subject was expected to pencil in the missing bowling ball. America was still largely rural with many areas almost isolated as the only means of transportation at the time depended upon the railroads and horses. With such questions, one can easily see why a large number of rural recruits failed the exam. Predictably, the results were dismal: 47 percent of all whites failed and 89 percent of all Blacks failed. However, Yerkes claimed that feeblemindedness was the lowest in the following Anglo groups: 0.1 percent in the Dutch, 0.2 percent in Germans and less than 0.05 percent in Swedes.⁹⁵

The war years proved fruitful for eugenics. During those years, eugenic groups proliferated in America. The Race Betterment Foundation, founded by Dr. John Kellogg, was organized in 1914. Kellogg was a member of the state board of health. The newly founded group attracted some of the most radical elements in the eugenic movement.

The next big advance for eugenics came on May 2, 1927, in a Supreme Court ruling of Buck v Bell. The case revolved around Carrie Buck and the sterilization law of Virginia.

Previously, Carrie’s mother, Emma had been confined to the home for the feebleminded shortly after WWI. After the war, Virginia had a well establish program of sweeping social outcasts into homes for the feebleminded. Carrie’s mother was a widow. She also was destitute and had been convicted of prostitution, making her an ideal candidate for the home of the feebleminded. She would remain in the home for the rest of her life.

Carrie had been her only child while she was married and was placed in another family. Her school records showed she was a good student. The Dobbses family, with whom she was living, withdrew her from school when she reached sixth grade. In 1923, Carrie became pregnant. She claimed it was rape, but the Dobbses would not listen to her explanations and filed commitment papers, declaring Carrie to be feebleminded.

In 1924, Virginia passed a sterilization law for the feebleminded. The case attracted the attention of Laughlin and other prominent individuals from the eugenic movement. To further their efforts and strengthen their court case, they had Carrie’s child declared feebleminded at the age of three. Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court with the Chief Justice being William Howard Taft. Only one justice ruled against sterilizing Carrie, Justice Pierce Butler. The opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded with words that still echo throughout time; "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."⁹⁶

With the sterilization of Carrie Buck and the Supreme Court ruling upholding the decision, the eugenics movement had surpassed a milestone. From the passage of Indiana’s sterilization law until the Buck ruling, many states that had passed sterilization laws refrained from using it. Of the twenty-three states that had passed sterilization laws, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, South Dakota and Utah had recorded no sterilizations. Idaho and Washington State had recorded just one each. Delaware recorded five cases. Kansas had recorded 335, Nebraska 262, Oregon 313 and Wisconsin 144. California, however, recorded 4636 cases.

Many states had simply been waiting for the ruling in the Buck case before proceeding with sterilizations. From 1907 until 1940, the totals increased at a horrific rate. In North Carolina 1017 cases of forced sterilization were recorded. Michigan recorded 2145, Virginia recorded 3924, and California recorded 14568. In total, no less than 35878 people were sterilized, most of them after the 1927 court ruling.⁹⁷

Throughout the 1920s the eugenics movement attracted people from diverse causes. The leading proponent of birth control, Marget Sanger, was committed to social darwinism and eugenics. Through her efforts, she turned her noble movement into a tool for the eugenic movement. Through her radical oratory and her publication, Birth Control Review,she help to legitimize the appeal of eugenics.

Another leading figure of the time, Lucien Howe, a pioneering ophthalmologist, was also attracted to the eugenic movement. Howe was one of the leading experts in blindness and was well aware that hereditary blindness was rare and not a leading cause of blindness. However, Howe advocated the sterilization of the blind and the banning of marriage of anyone blind. Moreover, Howe also lead the charge that the sterilizations should not be confined to just the blind person, but extended to their relatives.

With the gathering strength of the eugenic movement, Harry Laughlin sought to integrate the movement inside various government agencies. One long-standing target for Laughlin was the Census Bureau. The Bureau, however, would not cooperate with the eugenic movement. In the 1920s the bureau turned a blind eye towards Laughlin’s suggestion that each person should be classified by race, such as German Jew or Dutch Jew.

However, the Census Bureau did allow Laughlin to conduct a survey of those in state custodial and charitable facilities, as well as jails.

Unable to gain further inroads into the Census Bureau, Laughlin turned to other government agencies. He found ready acceptance in Virginia, largely due to Walter Plecker, the registrar of vital statistics. Plecker was an extreme racist. Plecker would soon use his hatred of race mixing, or mongrelization, of the white race by lesser races into one of the nation’s most restrictive marriage laws. With the help of Anglo-Saxon clubs, the 1924 Virginia legislator passed the Racial Integrity Act, declaring anyone having blood that was more than one-sixteenth non-white as a non white. Originally, the act called for one sixty-fourth, but was amended in the legislator because too many of the leading families of Virginia boasted of having Indian blood. The penalty for falsely registering one’s race was a year in jail.

Plecker was particularly incensed by the reduction of Indian blood. His fury was further inflamed when Congress granted citizenship to all Indians not already naturalized less than two weeks from the passage of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Plecker believed that the problem stemmed from Indians mixing with both whites and blacks and that under the act, they could then claim exemption based on their Indian blood. Most of Virginia’s Indian population were poor and lived in rural areas, making them an easy target for reclassification as Negroid, despite vigorous protest. In one case, Plecker ruled that if a comb passed through the hair of an individual, that person would be classified as Indian if not as Negroid. The comb test was perhaps as good as any other method Plecker used in reclassifying Virginia’s native Americans. He used his racist tactics to expunge the Indian as a racial classification in Virginia.

While for the most part the eugenic movement was unable to penetrate the federal government and affect policy decision, the most notable exception was the immigration law. Since 1890, the American eugenicists considered the immigrants arriving from Europe to be genetically inferior. Their fears were enhanced by the mass number of the people fleeing Europe. More than eight million immigrants arrived between 1900 and 1909. The newly arrived came mostly from southern and eastern Europe. A large number of them were Catholic and Jewish. The influx of immigrants contributed to the urbanization of the country. The 1920 census revealed for the first time that more people lived in urban rather than rural areas. The resulting reapportionment of the legislator would be hard fought. The House increased the number of representatives to 415 to preserve as much as possible the old districts and power structure. The Red Scare and the rise of the Klan added further fuel to the fury.

A key figure in the success of the eugenicists in changing immigration policy was Albert Johnson. Johnson had been raised at the northern edge of the Mason Dixon line in Illinois during the turbulent Reconstruction period. He later became a big city newspaperman before moving to the small town of Hoquiam, Washington. It was from here that Johnson ran for congress and was elected to the House in 1912. Johnson was a fanatic racist and eugenicist. In 1919, he began a twelve-year tenure as chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization subcommittee in the House.

While there had been restrictions in immigration prior to Johnson’s chairmanship, the restrictions were reactionary in nature and not eugenically motivated. Johnson viewed any immigration as a negative factor. One of his first actions was to appoint Laughlin as his eugenic expert before his committee. Laughlin and other eugenicists had long urged the classification of immigrants along strict biological and racial lines, as well as advocating intelligence testing of immigrants before they left Europe. Their goal was to restrict immigration based on quotas before the mass arrivals started in 1890.

Laughlin’s inflammatory rhetoric helped along by funding from the Carnegie Institute, began producing results in congress. Due to the political explosiveness of the issue, congress wavered back and forth. In 1923, Labor Secretary James Davis signaled a willingness to cooperate in setting up an overseas eugenic network. Laughlin then toured Europe as a special immigration agent. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. The act called for vast changes in immigration. For instance, the Italian quota had been cut from 42,000 per year to just 4,000. The act limited immigration to just two percent of the reported national origin of the 1890s census. Thus the eugenicists were successful in rolling back immigration to the 1890. However, the act produced a firestorm in congress, as many argued the validity of the data used to set the quotas. Thus the act required that the Census Bureau report to a quota board their methodology in establishing the base figures. The quota board was made up of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and Secretary of Labor, James Davis. In 1927, the quota board submitted a letter to President Coolidge, cautioning that the figures were not entirely satisfactory.

Laughlin was only partially successful in setting up his European testing centers. The system was installed in Belgium, England, Ireland, Holland, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. The system, on average, eugenically inspected roughly eighty percent of would-be immigrants from those countries and rejected about 88 applicants out of every 1000 as mentally or physically defective. However, Laughlin’s inspections were short lived due to a shortage of funding and governmental objections from Europe.

Nevertheless, Laughlin’s major achievement in establishing eugenics as part of immigration was the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act and the establishment of quotas. Both stood as national policy until 1952.⁹⁸

The American Breeders and the Eugenic Society were not content with just sterilization and segregation methods as a means to eliminate the defective. By 1910, they were also proposing euthanasia using a lethal chamber. The so-called lethal chamber was the forerunner of the modern gas chamber and was believed to be humane. Euthanasia was listed as the eighth of nine methods of eliminating the defectives from society. While many prominent, professional people in both medicine and psychology came to advocate euthanasia, one noted exception was Margaret Sanger. Others within her birth control movement however, were advocates.

On November 12, 1915, euthanasia and eugenics became front-page news across the country. Dr. Harry Haiselden had refused to provide treatment for a newborn baby suffering from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities. There was a question if the baby could be saved. Nonetheless, the Dr. withheld treatment. Emboldened by some favorable press coverage, the Dr. admitted to previously to euthanizing others. Haiselden later brought to light the case of the Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded in Lincoln. Patients were fed milk from Lincoln’s own herd of cows that were known to be harboring tuberculosis. Eugenicists believed death from tuberculosis was the result of defective genes.

However, the real story behind the gates of this home for the feebleminded was euthanasia by neglect and was repeated across the nation in hundreds of other such homes. The real story lies hidden in the records of Lincoln’s staggering death rates. Between 1904 and 1909 the death rate of residents was as high as 12 percent. Often after being admitted as many as 30 percent of the epileptic children died within eighteen months. A large number of the residents of Lincoln died before reaching the age of ten. In 1930, the life expectancy of those judged to be feebleminded was just 18.5 years; today the rate for those that are mentally retarded is 66.2 years.¹⁰⁰