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Eugenics, Trump and the Contemporary GOP [1]

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Date: 2025-03-01

I don’t recall when it was that I was first made wise to the phenomenon of eugenics. I was aware of it by late in my undergrad career, certainly, but I have no memory of it prior to that. It’s entirely likely that it came up in Mr. Kelly’s junior year AP US History class. He was a damn decent man and, looking back, a solid liberal/progressive, and was keen to inform his classes of the struggles of those who came before to give us the system we have (had?), as imperfect as it may be (have been?); regardless, we can count on its having been infinitely better than what’s coming. Either way, by the time I was in grad school, I was acutely aware of it and its legacy in America, if for no other reason than my own experience trying to navigate the US insurance system (though it was more than just that). For the uninitiated, and I doubt there are many here, eugenics is a pseudoscientific notion that originated in the U.K. in the latter half of the 19th century, though really found its footing in America in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It holds, to very broadly sum it up, that there are some folks who just aren’t quite human, that criminality is an inheritable trait and that it would be better for all the world if some “degenerates” (recognize that word from the MAGA lexicon?) were simply denied the opportunity to “breed,” either through forced sterilization or through extermination. It reached its apex in America in the form of forced sterilization programs at the state level, and the 1924 Immigration Act, and in Germany, to which we exported it, in The Holocaust.

Eugenics never REALLY went away, though. Sure, the term has fallen out of favor (at least in the mainstream; there are cabals on the right that are still quite high on it), but components of it live on in our immigration and social welfare laws. States were still openly and forcibly sterilizing prison inmates well into the ‘90s, on the same theories that animated early eugenicists. I am of the mind, based on my own experience and the experiences of those close to me with the US insurance and medical systems, that aspects of it endure in both. I know we don’t need to brought up to speed with the right’s full bore embrace of white supremacy and all its tenets, but therein also exist strong echoes, if not open embraces, of eugenics. “Replacement theory” itself has strong eugenics components. Whites, and in particular whites from Western and Northern Europe (sorry, Slavs, Italians, etc.) are superior, and everyone else possesses defective “germ plasms” that cause them to be criminals, degenerates, sub-humans, and so on. The natural and inevitable outcome is extermination of those not of good breeding stock.



Fast forward to Trump, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, et al. Mexicans, of course, and Latinos broadly, are all criminals and rapists. Blacks aren’t quite human in their view, and, to paraphrase Dred Scott, possess no rights that the white man is bound to respect. So too with Arabs, AAPI folks, South and East Asians, and so on. This appears to have gone uncommented on in the wide MSM, but everything they’re doing, every policy, every act of sabotage, reek of eugenics. Their defunding, as unconstitutional as it may be, of USAID, of programs that provide food to starving children in developing countries, all scream eugenics to me. That is, they have in mind the increased hardship, suffering, misery and death of non-white folks, in particular. And it’s clear to me from my interactions with MAGA folks in my deep red corner of CA that they’re on board with this. “We spend trillions on foreign aid each year,” a paraprofessional I work with remarked to me recently. “That should be spent at home.” An obscene notion, both in its falsity (obviously we don’t spend trillions on foreign aid each year) and LOL @ the notion that Trump will redistribute that money to people domestically, but also in its cold-heartedness: that we shouldn’t provide aid both as a humanitarian imperative and, more cynically, for our own self-interest in preserving a semblance of stability in developing countries.

None of this is new. I was keenly aware of the proto-MAGA agenda by the time I was in my early teens, circa 1994. I heard the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Michael Weiner, and all the other right-wing fuckfaces out there poisoning folks’ minds and mainstreaming old school eugenics notions. By the time I was in my early 20’s I knew that a Trump-like figure, with his shock jock tendencies and utter disregard for decency, the social contract, and liberal democracy, was inevitable as the leader of the GOP. I was just naive enough to think that the country at large would reject him. Boy was I wrong. This country is so clearly up to its neck in white supremacy that Trump is at least palatable to 49.9% of voters. Trump’s references to his opponents as vermin, his regular dehumanization of non-whites, and the policies that his admin is currently pursuing, are 100% eugenics notions. It flummoxes me that the MSM/legacy media, or any Democratic politicians, have not seen fit to call it such. And I firmly believe that the likes of Stephen Miller have in mind the extermination of non-whites and even whites of undesirable stock. We’d be naive not o acknowledge this.

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