“Three Generations Of Imbeciles Are Enough!”

RFK JR: And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted pic.twitter.com/8T3hcYYn9O

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2025

Per the National Archives:

The supposed “imbecile” in question was Carrie Buck, by then a 21-year-old woman from Charlottesville, Virginia. At the age of 17, Carrie Buck became pregnant, which was later reported to have been the result of rape, allegedly by a relative of her foster parents. Following the birth of her child, Carrie was committed to the “Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded” (the same institution that housed Carrie’s birth mother, Emma Buck) on the grounds of “feeble-mindedness.”

Around that time, Virginia’s legislature had just passed a new law calling for “the sterilization of mental defectives.” Passed during the height of the eugenics movement in the United States, this law stated that sterilization would promote “both the health of the individual patient and the welfare of society.”

The superintendent of the Virginia Colony, Dr. Albert S. Priddy, chose Carrie Buck to be the first test case of the legality of this new statute. In his filed Petition, Priddy evaluated her as “unfit to exercise the proper duties of motherhood” due to her “anti-social conduct and mental defectiveness.” However, he believed that if sterilized, her “good physical health and strength” meant she could leave the Colony and “enjoy the liberty and blessings of outdoor life [and] become self-supporting.”

Left unmentioned in that report is that “imbecile” was not a general pejorative in Holmes’ statement; it was a legal term of art. The others were “idiot” and “moron,” each carefully distinguished and defined, as the law is wont to do. And each as ignorant and damning of reality as Secretary Kennedy’s description of those on the autism spectrum.

As the article says, this was at the height of the eugenics movement in America. The Nazis would, shortly after, turn to these laws and our race laws as models for their own savage inhumanity. We quickly abandoned eugenics after the war, erased it so thoroughly from memory we called it a “pseudo-science” (it was “scientific” enough to base involuntary sterilization laws on). The race laws? Well….

Kennedy thinks he’s making an argument against environmental causes for autism:

RFK JR: And clearly there are industries, this is coming from an environmental toxin. And somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, or our medicines, our food, and it's to their benefit pic.twitter.com/roJ1tCRZLl

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2025

But all he’s doing is making the same kinds of arguments documented in the court records and preserved for our education in what NEVER to do again, at the National Archives.

Though these testimonies might sound irrelevant to the specific case of Carrie Buck, during the height of eugenics beliefs in the United States, this was evidence that proved Carrie’s condition was due to an inheritance of inferior traits. This and other similar details could let Justice Holmes state that three generations of imbeciles were enough.

Several months following Holmes’s opinion and the Supreme Court decision that upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act, Dr. John H. Bell performed Buck’s sterilization by salpingectomy (removal of the Fallopian tubes) on October 19, 1927. She was the first person involuntarily sterilized under Virginia’s law for the sterilization of persons considered “unfit.” An estimated 8,300 Virginians were sterilized under the state law, which was in effect until 1972.

Yup. We erased eugenics from our memories as quickly after the war as we could. We only erased it from our laws nearly 30 years after that.

We don’t need any excuse to bring it back again.