She Blinded Me With Science!

"Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type."

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)

So "faith" is believing what "ain't so." And it is bad because it creates blind adherence to ideas which damage people and then society.

"The American Experience" reviewed, in two hours, the history of eugenics in America, a history that starts with Darwin and creates the word "eugenics" (coined by an American from Greek, the word means "well-bred." Listening to the scholars on the show talk about the desire to secure utopia that eugenics was supposed to deliver, one wishes they would remember Thomas More coined that word from Greek, too. It means "nowhere."), an idea that all too quickly exploded into law and national policy in the 20's and 30's. It rose as church affiliation fell to its lowest point in the century. Trust in God replaced by trust in science. God will not improve the world, but science will. William Jennings Bryant, the man mocked in the movie about the Scopes trial, actually opposed the abuse of people in the name of science. He was a very religious man, not the man of science Darrow was, and yet we still only remember Bryant as a caricature. Although science eventually rejected the idea of eugenics, it didn't reject the reasoning behind it.  And it wasn't science that turned the public against it.

Do you know the story of Carrie Buck? She was in the state foster care system of Virginia, raped by an adult, and made a test case by a prosecutor and a court appointed lawyer who wanted her case to set the law of the land by the Supreme Court. The idea they were promoting was forced sterilization.  Like Mr. Snopes (who was never in any danger of imprisonment), Carrie Buck was simply a pawn in a game of would-be kings. They got her case to the Supreme Court where Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Antonin Scalia of his day, thundered that "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." The opinion opened the floodgates of forced sterilization across the land.  In the 6 years before it, 6,000 Americans were sterilized.  In the six years after, that number was doubled.  Before the practice was finally repudiated decades later, as many as 60,000 had been forcibly sterilized.  The commonest denominator was their social class. They were poor.

The documentary mentions a Hollywood movie from the '30's, in which our heroine, young and photogenic, is forced to undergo sterilization because her family is nothing but criminals, prostitutes, and the impoverished.  She is spared the indignity at the last moment when it turns out, not that that law or science is wrong, but that she's adopted!  No inherited taint!  Thus did society start to reject the laws of eugenics; they shouldn't apply to innocent young beautiful white women.  We held on to the reasoning, we just thought ourselves more careful about applying it.  We didn't crucify mankind on a cross of gold. We sterilized them in the name of science.  Eugenics laws remained on the books long after we rejected their premises. We forgot why we did, but we kept doing it. And we keep the notion alive to this day:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) weighed in on what a DNA test could potentially reveal about his ancestry on Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends,” awkwardly quipping: “I’ll probably be Iranian. That would be like terrible.” 

Blood determines who you are; and wouldn't it be awkward to have even "one drop" of the wrong blood?

And when did our public fascination with eugenics end? It began to crack in the Great Depression, when the "best" people were poor, too.  Of what good were "good genes" and "pure blood" if you wound up in the bread lines? It became a pseudo-science when the Nazis took this very American science (we did invent it) and our eugenics laws, and turned it into the Holocaust. We repudiated it as quickly as we had embraced it.  Science didn't stop it or correct it in America; horror and humanity did.  Even Gene Roddenberry recognized the power of it, as he posited a "Eugenics War" in his "Star Trek" universe.  It gave rise to one of the Kirk's most famous adversaries ("KHAN!!!!!!"), but it's largely disappeared from the ST canon.  What we don't remember we are doomed to repeat?  Probably Roddenberry thought so.

Interestingly, after WWII American church attendance exploded to levels not seen since the Puritan colonies had made it mandatory. Correlation does not equal causation, but what an interesting set of coincidences it is.

Seems we can put our faith in science to our detriment, too.  Because the basis for the rejection of eugenics is obvious:

Here was a way to use science and some apparent common sense to make the world safer, more rational, and more efficient. This objective measurement scheme would force inefficient judicial institutions to abandon ineffective approaches and help law enforcement and lay citizens alike to know who to hold in suspicion. It would, in short, make the world a better place. The problem was that this approach, in trying to map the coordinates of human nature onto an “objective” matrix, merely reinscribed colonial and imperial racial and sexual logics, as well as an endemic bourgeois hatred of the working classes. Lombroso, of course, didn’t think of it that way. Substituting his best intentions for serious inquiry, he imputed a value system designed to stratify people through biology.

Trust us!  We're scientists!  Besides, we left that all behind in the 30's, right?

Physiognomy was eventually debunked, but its legacy of what Cedric Robinson calls racial thinking has lived on in Silicon Valley’s cultural imaginaries. Lombroso’s theory was, like a great deal currently coming out of the world of tech, an engineering “solution” in search of a problem. It’s no surprise that all types of Victorian theorizing, often translated into more contemporary languages (think “genetics” instead of “racial atavism,” or “evolutionary psychology” and Jordan Petersen’s lobster tales instead of the “feminine sphere” or the “weaker sex”) so animate research and product development that, to quote Virginia Eubanks, the tech industry is “automating inequality.” Physiognomy and related bunk sciences like phrenology have never truly left, and the heavily capitalized project of turning the world into a datafied engineering project means that it is more central than ever before.

The progenitor of eugenics was physiognomy; when that was debunked, eugenics took over.  Eugenics was eventually rejected, but the driving forces behind both attempts at science are still with us, indeed, still present in our science and our faith (trust) in science.  And the real problem is, science never really rejects the premises of "bad" science; it just declares the extremes "pseudo-science," but it keeps the basic reasoning and applies it in new and improved ways:

“Science” here functions as a corrective for those technologists who seek to push possibilities too far. “Better” science and “better” ethics do not ask too much of their technologies. This posits digital physiognomy as overreaching, redeeming the more sober mundanities of biometrics in general.

To talk about phrenology “reappearing” in contemporary technologies misses the fact that its underlying logic never left. To the extent that “science” debunked the most egregious elements of physiognomy, it did so by driving the same premises of deducing character from physical characteristics deeper into the body. Rather than look for a person’s essential nature in their face, research looked for it in DNA, in hormone levels, in imperceptible but nonetheless determinate physical materials. This process, often against the aims of the researchers, has had the predictable effect of re-encoding racial taxonomies in genomic studies, rigidifying sexuality as “genetic,” and legitimating class exploitation as a product of physiological inheritance. The widely derided criminality and the sexuality studies both rely (spuriously) on this type of “legitimate” research to justify their claims.

Just to carry that argument forward to its conclusion:

Most refutations of the criminality study included as part of their argument an explanation that “criminality” is likely driven by a combination of biological and environmental conditions. In particular, testosterone levels have been shown to contribute to the type of “risky” behavior that leads to criminality. This correlation between testosterone and behavior seems to hold across a number of animal species, but animals do not commit crimes. Testosterone levels might be correlated with certain types of behavior, but the biological tells us literally nothing about “crime,” a category of human social organization.

If we’re looking for a real “root cause” of “criminality,” we should look not to biological factors but to politics, which organizes how a society decides what is and is not a crime and how punishment is to be administered. The sort of risk taking and violence associated with testosterone is, after all, just as often lauded or ignored as it is considered dangerous. Politicized attitudes about race, class, and sex tend to determine whether biological factors are seen in one way or another.

Arguing that physiognomy and phrenology were dominant until “of course, science happened” is a misrepresentation. It wasn’t “science” that happened; it was the civil rights movement. The root problem with the recent phrenology and physiognomy studies is their political implications: that they could give a scientific-seeming alibi for monitoring, impoverishing, or incarcerating people, much like earlier social Darwinism helped legitimate racial regimes. If that is the main problem with the “pseudosciences” of phrenology and physiognomy, we need to consider how biometrics in general — routinized facial recognition, gait recognition, and “behavioral” biometrics to list just a few — performs these same core functions.

Or how much of the same core functions of eugenics are still with us as science, even as eugenics is considered a "pseudo-science"?*  What do we trust, and why?

If you watch the PBS documentary, you'll see how much the proponents of eugenics and immigration control, sound exactly like Donald Trump.  You'll see how much hasn't really changed.  A famous actress in the 1920's told the nation that without immigration control, (the control of immigration from central and southern Europe, Catholics rather than the Protestants of northern Europe and Britain.  Now it's Muslims and people from South America.), the nation as they knew it would cease to exist. Everything old is new again.  The past isn't over; it isn't even past.

Link to "Controlled Measures" courtesy of Thought Criminal.

*This issue is actually underscored in the documentary itself.  It begins with Dr. Charles Davenport, who coined the term "eugenics," traveling to England to meet with Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin.  Davenport and Dalton agreed that "survival of the fittest" meant some humans were more fit than others.  This is presented, almost immediately, as a distortion of Darwin's work, rather than the logical extension of it which Galton championed and Darwin approved of.  The connection to evolution and eugenics is maintained, but evolution itself is cleansed of any "genetic" taint.  It turns out eugenics was an orphan, not a descendant!  How convenient, and how trusting.

Nones

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope. --James Carroll

I’ve read that quote many times, and only now does it occur to me to stop at “the complicity of a larger culture.” Because American culture was complicit in “demonic Hitler’s antisemitism” even then.

As I've pointed out before, the laws Hitler & Co. drew up to oppress, suppress, and finally exterminate Jews and other "undesirables," were modeled on laws on the books in this country, and based on the science of eugenics.  Which only became a "pseudo-science" after the Holocaust.  It was scientific enough to base many laws requiring forced sterilization, until it wasn't.  And please don't knee-jerk me with "religion did it, too!"

"The American Experience" reviewed, in two hours, the history of eugenics in America, a history that starts with Darwin and creates the word "eugenics" (coined by an American from Greek, the word means "well-bred." Listening to the scholars on the show talk about the desire to secure utopia that eugenics was supposed to deliver, one wishes they would remember Thomas More coined that word from Greek, too. It means "nowhere."), an idea that all too quickly exploded into law and national policy in the 20's and 30's. It rose as church affiliation fell to its lowest point in the century. Trust in God replaced by trust in science. God will not improve the world, but science will. William Jennings Bryant, the man mocked in the movie about the Scopes trial, actually opposed the abuse of people in the name of science. He was a very religious man, not the man of science Darrow was, and yet we still only remember Bryant as a caricature. Although science eventually rejected the idea of eugenics, it didn't reject the reasoning behind it.  And it wasn't science that turned the public against it.

Science didn't reject the reasoning behind eugenics; just the use of it in law.

The documentary mentions a Hollywood movie from the '30's, in which our heroine, young and photogenic, is forced to undergo sterilization because her family is nothing but criminals, prostitutes, and the impoverished.  She is spared the indignity at the last moment when it turns out, not that that law or science is wrong, but that she's adopted!  No inherited taint!  Thus did society start to reject the laws of eugenics; they shouldn't apply to innocent young beautiful white women.  We held on to the reasoning, we just thought ourselves more careful about applying it.  

Which I can't help notice sounds somewhat like this:

"He is going to use the power of the state," [Rick] Wilson explained. "All my libertarian friends should be paying attention: the power of the state to achieve his personal, political vengeance on people who he believes have wronged him."

"This is not America, to quote David Bowie," he continued. "This is something much darker and much different and much more dangerous. We have to pay attention to it, we have to listen to it." 

Be afraid, well-off white people!  Be very afraid!!  "This is not America"?  Takes me back to Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock on SNL the weekend after Trump won in 2016; shaking their heads sagely as the white people in the apartment lost their shit because the blatantly misogynistic racist had won the Presidency.  Chappelle and Rock were not surprised.  Three guesses why, first two don't count.

"The power of the state to achieve....political vengeance on people"?  Yes, I altered that statement slightly.  It's scarier when it's personal; at least to people not used to being on the receiving end of the power of the state.  But this is America.  We've always used the power of the state against people; we just usually defined them as "not people."  After all, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough!"  It’s not quite the same when “people” replace “imbeciles” there, is it?

What has changed, really? No, we don't forcibly sterilize people now; but we do want to drive the "undesirables" away from "polite society."  The conservative stance in my home state is to give people public money so they can abandon public schools.  What brought that on except Brown v Board?  As Faulkner said, the past isn't over; it isn't even past.  But we want it to be over, and passed, and remove its dead hand from us.  So college students (a few, frankly; a vanishing few. I came across this video of a student (and some off screen) chanting about an end to war in Gaza.  I don't see any students joining the chant, or giving a rat's ass.  Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. What I'm quite sure those students don't want, is the dead hand of history mucking up their ignorant myopia*.) complain about the present situation in Gaza. We have expunged from popular memory our complicity in the Holocaust, and not just in not invading Germany on a humanitarian mission to stop it from proceeding, or even getting started.

Our racism is entirely our own; we just sometimes share it, in a cruel synchronicity, with other countries.  Reflected back to us, it is ugly.  But we don't like to acknowledge it is a reflection we see.

Trump wants to set loose that “irresistible current of nihilism” Carroll also referenced. Despite our own sordid history, and our determination to ignore it, we are very well poised not to let him. Not only is MAGA not an electoral force, racism is still not an acceptable idea. We aren’t free of it; but half a loaf is better than none. And “none,” or good old fashioned nihilism, is all that Trump is offering. There’s no real sign enough people in America are accepting that offer.

*Besides, as the man said:

When my generation shut down entire universities for days, it was brave free speech. When yours interrupts classes for a few minutes, it’s woke DEI fascism.

“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.

“Everybody Outta The Gene Pool! We Gotta Scrub It Down!”

 The reigning theories are:

A) Trump appointed Kennedy because Kennedy endorsed him.

B) Trump appointed Kennedy because MAHA is a power base in MAGA.

RFK Jr. pushed a conspiracy theory that “the quarantine” was used as cover to install 5G cell phone networks and claimed digital currency “is the beginning of slavery.”

He now works for Trump who sells 5G phone plans.
pic.twitter.com/cxSlCj1tLw

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 4, 2025

Or could it be because Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist?

RFK Jr: “Conspiracy theories are often the truth.” pic.twitter.com/k1xZ1lNLGr

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 4, 2025

RFK Jr. once claimed vaccinated children are “damaged,” “poisoned,” have lower IQ, and “are socially awkward,” while unvaccinated children in comparison have “bright eyes,” “engagement,” “curiosity,” and “affection.”
pic.twitter.com/b1q0zI437i

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 4, 2025

Promoting eugenics?

RFK Jr. said it’s “mythology” to claim that vaccines eliminated polio and suggested the banning of DDT is what actually eliminated polio, not vaccines.
pic.twitter.com/5XAcf3vqc6

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 4, 2025

And trying to "clean" the gene pool?

RFK Jr., speaking to a guest: “I get your point, …viruses are our friends.”

This is who Trump put in charge of our nation’s health.
pic.twitter.com/6ufqdMKrEI

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 4, 2025

Warnock to RFK jr: "For the first time, we are seeing deaths of children from measles. We haven't seen that in two decades. We're seeing that under your watch. You are a hazard to the health of the American people." pic.twitter.com/H8E82bTBRj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 4, 2025

Kennedy was explicitly okay with that.

“Every child who gets measles gets a headline,” Kennedy said during the visit alongside Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “When I was kid, there were 2 million measles cases a year and nobody wrote about them.”

Over the last few months, Kennedy has been criticized for his response to the measles outbreak, which has been largely centered in Texas. He has questioned the role measles had in the deaths of three individuals confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control this year. He has praised private medical providers who have used alternative treatment methods on measles patients, to ease some symptoms including vitamin A and budesonide, an inhaled steroid typically used for asthma but does not “cure” measles.

Racism is usually concerned with purity. Stephen Miller wants to remove all the non-white people from America that he can.

Stephen Miller: "For generations we used our military to engage in action against terrorists in the Middle East and in Africa while leaving unharmed the terrorists in our own hemisphere who are responsible for so many more American deaths ... we've been occupied by cartels for… pic.twitter.com/mhxwy7lGxz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 5, 2025

He doesn’t mean “occupied” by white people.

Trump is a notorious racist.

Trump: Millions. They were coming in, you could look at them and you could say, big trouble. And that's what we have in our country. pic.twitter.com/J3ea0HiAGD

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 5, 2025

Kennedy is a notorious eugenicist.* Eugenics is just racism dressed up as science.

Maybe the reality is not that Trump thought he owed Kennedy, nor that he’s trapped by MAHA and can’t stop Kennedy. Maybe the reality is, that Trump is fine with Kennedy.

Ron Johnson hypes a hearing he's holding week that he claims will show unvaccinated children are actually healthier than vaccinated ones pic.twitter.com/r0vD2akk28

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 5, 2025

It’s a GOP thing. Birds of a feather, and all.

*

The causes of autism spectrum disorder, a range of neurological and developmental conditions that usually center on how people interact, communicate, learn and behave, have already been identified as genetic in the vast majority of cases.

Even so, Kennedy announced at a cabinet meeting last week that the new study had been launched.

“By September, we will have some of the first answers. Within six months of that, we will have definitive answers,” Kennedy said.

Smith worries that the database and research could worsen stigma around autism, and it could keep individuals and families from seeking diagnoses and care.

“And at worst, I worry that we’re on a slippery slope to eugenics,” Smith said. “My mind immediately goes to history and things that happened in Nazi Germany. That’s extreme, but it feels like a possibility.” Disabled people were the first to be targeted then, he pointed out.

Opponents also wonder about privacy and security measures, which have not been detailed by health agencies, and how individuals’ information could be used against them.

“Are you going to use this as an excuse to take away my rights, to hold me against my will, to prevent me from having children, to take away my right to manage my own finances?” Marschall asked.

The reference to the Nazis is ironic, because America put eugenics into law first. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough!” Buck v Bell concerned a state law requiring persons below a statutory IQ limit be involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis studied our laws to write their own.

It “can’t happen here”? It already has.

Same as it ever was

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”--Oliver Wendell Holmes

So, the other day, I found this:

“If Randers wanted to avoid 15 years in prison,” Barchenger writes, “Randers would have to agree to a condition. Sterilization.”

Why sterilization?  Because she'd "struggled with mental health issues" since she was a teenager, and because her infant daughter died of unexplained causes in 2012.  After two years of investigation into this "plea deal," she was transferred from jail to a mental health facility.

The infamous Carrie Buck case involved mental health issues.  Ms. Buck's allegedly low intelligence was leading her to get pregnant out of wedlock and create burdens on the state of Oklahoma.  You might have thought we were finally beyond such attitudes.  Nope:

“Over a 10-year period, that isn't a huge amount of money … compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

That 10-year period was from 2003 to 2013.  The California law allowing the practice of forced sterilization was repealed in 1979.  It was the law of California for 70 years.  Many states repealed their laws in 1979, it appears.  But as in the case of Ms. Randers, it still goes on.  The only change is cosmetic:  we don't call it eugenics anymore, because:

Eugenics is the now-discredited movement that sought to improve humans' genetic composition by preventing those seen as defective from reproducing. These supposed defects included mental disabilities and characteristics seen as making someone socially inadequate or unfit.

It didn't start with Nazi Germany, however.  Actually, the Nazis learned it from us:

Virginia's Sterilization Act became a model for similar legislation passed around the country and the world, including Nazi Germany. Nationwide, 65,000 Americans were sterilized in 33 states, said Mark Bold, executive director of the Christian Law Institute, which has been advocating the cause of the Virginia victims since 2013. In Michigan, more than 3,000 people were involuntary sterilized, according to a January 2009 article in the Michigan Bar Journal.

The Nazis hated Jews; we hated the poor.  There, I've proved Godwin's Law for you.  Forced sterilization was enforced against the poor, because this is America, and we have always feared the poor.

It's fair to say eugenics simply hasn't been discredited enough.  We dropped the word and continued the practice.  We don't even need to say it's "science," anymore; we just need to say it's simple economics:

People are too damned expensive.  As the LA Times noted:

... the intent of eugenical sterilization laws like California's was not simply to deprive victims of children, but also to ensure that they and their posterity ceased to exist. It was the state-sponsored means of eradicating entire classes of people. It is only when the victim dies that the stated objective is accomplished.

That may no longer be the stated objective; but it's still the intent.

“Three Generations Of Imbeciles…”

JUST NOW: @realDonaldTrump leans heavily into race science by telling @hughhewitt that you can tell whether migrants are predisposed to committing murder by "their genes."

"We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now," he adds. pic.twitter.com/t722iYq4Hm

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 7, 2024

Eugenics started in Europe, made its way to England, where it undergirded the “superiority” of whites over non-whites for the sake of the empire, then made its way to America where it was written into law, which gave the Nazis their blueprint for new German laws.

Which caused Europe and America to erase all memory of eugenics, and label what they had embraced, “pseudo-science.”

Don’t get me started….

Trump’s embrace of it is hardly surprising. I find that, as people age, they become more and more nakedly, who they are. Children play with identity, especially in play. Adolescents struggle with it, as they move to take on adulthood. Young adults argue with themselves, determined not to be their parents. In some ways it is inevitable that they do; in other ways, they make their own choices. But as disinhibition grows (Trump’s public profanity is an example), the cover erodes and the base material appears.

Trump has always been a white supremacist. Openly embracing eugenics is just part of his disinhibition. Time to remember the President is a diplomatic role, as well as servant of all Americans. Trump is not, and has never been, fit for either.

He’s not getting worse. His disqualifications are just getting more obvious.

Next step is identifying the master race and then distinguishing it from inferior races https://t.co/kXMjNVhyVP

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) October 7, 2024

It’s cute that he thinks Trump and Stephen Miller haven’t already done that.

"Your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea"

Per pool: Trump called the terror attack a "horrible, horrible thing" and said he called the PM to convey US "sorrow," then turned to “crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border.” He added, "People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 15, 2019

Compassion is a subversive act.  And is the problem really a problem?

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he does not see a rise in white nationalism but it may be an issue in New Zealand, where a gunman who is believed to espouse those views killed 49 people at two mosques.

Asked by a reporter if he sees an increase in white nationalism, Trump said: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people.”

Trump also said he had not seen a manifesto in which the suspected gunman denounced immigrants and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

The manifesto also reportedly cites the potential loss of absolute gun rights under the 2nd Amendment.  The killer was inspired internationally (figures from Sweden and France have been mentioned in news coverage), but he also wanted to incorporate as many people as he could, in hopes of sparking the "race war" that people like Dylann Roof were looking for, as well.  Is this the point where we point out Hitler was inspired, in part, by a book from America published in 1916:  "The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe."

Yes, kiddies, we did all this long before electronic communications were widespread or even global.  Now pardon me while I run a bulldozer over Godwin's Law; because this is the start of the conversation, not the ending of it:

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

How we came to forget this chapter in American history (rather like we forget the true evils of slavery, or genocide of the natives here) is described in the very next paragraph, with its own dollop of that elision of our sins included in the passage itself:

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form seems to imply the vision was not grotesque already, and only became so because Nazis were monsters, not us.  Nice work, if you can get it; and we get it so very easily, and so very often.  I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free to deny any of our national, historical sins.

The language of Richard Spencer described as "vintage Grant" is, of course, also vintage Trump.  Problems of evil are problems for other people; never for Trump and "his" people.  Problems of evil are always "over there," even if "there" is only the other side of the street; or the tracks; or the opposite river bank.  This is not a uniquely American sin, as another quote from Serwer provides (indeed, this article is almost Nostrodamic in its prescience, given what has happened in the last 24 hours):

Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

Everything old really is new again; ideas really are bulletproof.  As another example (it's hard not to turn this post over to this article), consider this if you think the courts are bad today:

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship. 

Serwer gives an example of that:

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

"What we now hold is that the words 'free white persons' are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word 'Caucasian' only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is. 

We need, finally, to return to Hitler, especially in light of the President's comments today:

It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission. 

So here we are, back again at the beginning, and in our end is our beginning.  I said this article by Serwer was eerily prescient.  It is so in the way the Hebrew prophets (though under very different inspiration following a wholly different purpose) could seem prescient:  because when you see what is right in front of you, it suddenly appears.  Consider these concluding words from Serwer, and how frightfully true they turned out to be:

When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows. 

The only response now is subversive acts, like compassion; like Lent. 

“Three Generations Of Imbeciles Is Enough!” Again.

 Crime a problem? Try the Final Solution!

Last week, one of the department’s top prosecutors argued that, in the pursuit of cracking down on criminals, eugenics could be a useful tool.

The prosecutor in question was Ellis Boyle, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Boyle was appearing on a local conservative livestream, NC Chats, to discuss—among other things—the administration’s investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, as well as the indictments of a handful of noncitizens for having allegedly voted illegally in the 2024 elections in North Carolina. Eventually, however, the conversation turned to crime, the supposed enabling of it by liberals, and how frustrating it is to see violent criminals get off on an insanity defense.

Let me stop here to say that no one “gets off” on successful application of the insanity defense.  The convicted is consigned to a mental healthcare facility. No one walks away scot-free for asserting an insanity defense.

“I’ve suffered with PTSD for most of my life,” host Cassie Clark said in the October 21 episode. “I also disassociate with it whenever it hits real bad. And you know what I’ve never done? I’ve never hurt anybody. Not one single time. It’s never even crossed my mind to hurt anyone, even at the worst of it, because I know right from wrong.”

Boyle seemed persuaded.

“What I’ve observed is, you know—it occurs to me, and this is not a new thought, I heard someone else say it, and I started looking, and if you look, you see it,” he replied. “Five percent of the population cause 90 percent of the crime.”

So far, so whatever—it’s true that most violent crimes are carried out by a proportionally small segment of the population. But Boyle didn’t stop there:

I think there’s a big component—if you took out [the] 5 percent of the population that’s bad and removed them from society, so they don’t create mayhem and create, you know, babies with the gene pool of more bad, then I think, in two, maybe three generations, think of how great this population would be.

“But,” he finished, “that’s something that takes willpower.”

Would we apply this to the Trumps? Why not? And who decides who the “5%” are? And do we forcibly sterilize them? Again?

We’ve done this before, you know. Pretty sure we’re not going to do it again. Not after the Nazis took our eugenics laws and created the Holocaust. But that’s what Boyle wants to do again.

The DOJ is going to be the new Augean stables.

The Children's Crusade

I want to address what was brought up here, so this is more in the nature of an extended comment than a stand-alone blog post.

My response is prompted not just by the comments of the host, but by this article at Salon, which reports on "a suspected illegal drug trial" conducted from 1930 to 1936 involving over 2000 children in several Irish care homes, most (all?) run by the Catholic church (to be fair, the article at Salon doesn't make clear that all the homes were Catholic institutions).  This is a truly distressing episode, and it is not excusable.  However, as Michael Dwyer of the Cork University School of History said:

“The fact that no record of these trials can be found in the files relating to the Department of Local Government and Public Health, the Municipal Health Reports relating to Cork and Dublin, or the Wellcome Archives in London, suggests that vaccine trials would not have been acceptable to government, municipal authorities, or the general public. However, the fact that reports of these trials were published in the most prestigious medical journals suggests that  this type of human experimentation was largely accepted by medical practitioners and facilitated by authorities in charge of children’s residential institutions.” 

To put this in some context:  the first child labor laws in the U.S. on the federal level were passed in 1938, largely because adults were desperate for work, not out of a new concern for child labor.  Woodrow Wilson had signed an early bill into law, but the Supreme Court ruled that it regulated intrastate commerce and the law was voided.  So child labor has not been regulated for yet 100 years in this country (and Newt Gingrich thinks that's been not quite a century too long; but that's a topic for another day).

In 1903, Mother Jones led a "Children's Crusade" march from Kensington, Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York, summer home of then president Theodore Roosevelt.  The march was to demand laws to get children out of factories and mines and into school.  Roosevelt refused to meet with them, and yet to this day TR is lionized, and no one mentions his indifference to the horrors of child labor.

And, of course, there is the infamous Buck v. Bell opinion, where in 1927 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that "Three generations of imbeciles is enough!"  He was using legal, not pejorative, language; language considered, at the time, quite scientific.

Which is what brings me back around to the comments I wanted to respond to.  It was science that assured Justice Holmes people could be soundly legally classified as "imbeciles" and "morons."  It was the pursuit of science that convinced Burroughs Wellcome there was no problem with administering experimental vaccines to 2000 babies without consent of anyone but the institutions  where they were living.  It was science that convinced people this was not only good, but necessary.  And, frankly, it didn't really end until science achieved its nadir, in the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany.

Eugenics was behind Justice Holmes' comments; eugenics that led the state of Oklahoma to forcibly sterilize certain of its citizens, based more on the fact they were not socially desirable, than on the fact of their actual mental or physical conditions.  ("Feeblemindedness," itself a legal term, was associated more with social class than with actual mental ability.  If you were rich enough, you were merely "eccentric.")  There is evidence that Carrie Buck was the victim of poverty, not of diminished mental capacity; and more evidence the state of Oklahoma was only too willing to find some of its residents more worthy of respect and autonomy than other of its residents.  What finally ended such arrogance was the horror of Dachau and Auschwitz, the realization of what the Nazis had done and why.

I can remember my parents reporting on a lecture they attended decades ago when the first "artificial heart" was in the news.  My father was a heart patient, and the topic was of great interest to them.  The doctor speaking condemned the experiment then in the news, the attempt to make an artificial heart work by implanting it in a man who had no hope of survival with it (the major mechanism of the heart, the pump, was actually located outside the body.  It was the functional equivalent of being hooked to a dialysis machine 24/7, with no hope of ever removing it.)  He pointed out that humankind had universally banned human experimentation after discovering what was done in Germany under Hitler.

So times have changed, but the change did not come about because of science, but in spite of it.  It was not science that told the world what was done by Nazi doctors was wrong; it was humanity.  It was the utter revulsion that made human experimentation so revolting.  It is true, in the example I cite, that there is a difference between consent and non-consent to participate in the trials; but it still a dubious thing when we experiment on people, when we diminish any individual's quality of life merely for the sake of information.  It is a dubious thing, but science alone can say nothing about it.

I mention this because I agree with the analysis that what was done in Ireland from 1930 to 1936 was foul; but it was also very scientific.  I want to join in the condemnation of the church that the Salon writer indulges:

In other words, the Catholic institutions that these women and their children were forced to turn to as their only refuge viciously turned their backs on them — treating them, quite literally, as garbage. This is abuse of the highest order. Abuse in life, abuse in death. Carried out by religious orders so warped, so perverted in their utter lack of mercy that they participated in the suffering of an unfathomable number of babies and children. This is what the Catholic church of Ireland is capable of, when it is given free reign over the bodies of its most vulnerable members.

But, as TC points out, this was done as much by the British government as by the Catholic church.  It seems especially heinous when carried out by a Christian institution (or even a religious one), but the sterilization laws of Oklahoma were not protested by any Protestant denomination, and no institutional church movement championed the cause of children in 1938, or before.  If they did, their efforts have been lost to history (which would not surprise.  The UCC is active in many movements for social justice, but whether it even deserves credit it doesn't  receive is unknown and virtually unknowable, largely because no one pays attention).  To this day Martin Luther King, Jr. is credited with leading a civil rights movement that actually led him; it existed before he took the leadership role, and continued after his death, and was rooted in churches all across America.  Oddly, when a church is caught in complicity with a policy we belatedly condemn, that failing is noticed.  When a church is in the midst of a great struggle we belatedly affirm, the actions of the church are ignored and swept aside.
And science, as ever, gets to claim the public ground of virtue and the greatest benefit for the greatest number, and set itself as the opponent of ignorance, usually championed by some religiously connected figure or another (usually pastors of independent or quite singular churches, seldom people speaking for a denomination; or just figures who claim to know God's mind and will).

It is curious that religious orders are warped, but never science.  We once had "mad scientists" and scientists so myopic they were blind to the horrors their science might unleash.  Now we only have dangerous religious fanatics and no true Scotsman can be a scientist who does wrong.

UPDATE:

The underlying scandal here is the alleged 800 bodies found in a septic tank on the grounds of a former home for unwed mothers in Tuam, Ireland.  The problem with that scandal is that almost everything about it has been misreported.

Catherine Corliss established, through painstaking research, that 796 children died at St. Mary's between 1925 and 1961, all from natural if lamentable causes (no foul play is alleged, in other words).

She also discovered that there were no burial records for the children and that they had not been interred in any of the local public cemeteries. In her article she concludes that many of the children were buried in an unofficial graveyard at the rear of the former home. This small grassy space has been attended for decades by local people, who have planted roses and other flowers there, and put up a grotto in one corner.

Which is where the story gets interesting.   One man, a boy of 10 in 1975, is quoted as saying he and some other boys found a slab of concrete on the grounds of the former home (details are in the article) and lifted it to see several skeletons underneath.  800?  No, more like 20.  In a septic tank?  No, probably not:

When Corless was researching the home she looked at old maps of Tuam. One was an 1840 Ordnance Survey map that shows the then workhouse. At the rear of the site is a space she believes to be the sewage tank for the workhouse, although it is not labelled as such. Later maps have “sewage tank” written in the same space.

That's where the notion of a "septic tank" came from; but why couldn't all the bodies be buried there?

Even if a number of children are indeed interred in what was once a sewage tank, horrific as that thought is, there cannot be 796 of them. The public water scheme came to Tuam in 1937. Between 1925, when the home opened, and 1937 the tank remained in use. During that period 204 children died at the home. Corless admits that it now seems impossible to her that more than 200 bodies could have been put in a working sewage tank.

So where were they buried?  In unmarked graves, apparently; and how that reflects on any Catholic practices of the time, I will not venture to say.  However, at the church I pastored here there is a cemetery that dates back to the mid-19th century.   One section of it is undisturbed, a large space noted in church records as a common burial plot.  The story is it was where victims of a yellow fever epidemic were buried, because the bodies had to be interred as quickly as possible, and there were so many of them.  They were not "dumped," and there were not 800 of them, but no one knows who is buried there, or how many bodies there are.

Was there a scandal attached to the church about childcare or unwed mothers, however, I'm sure that large blank place in the graveyard could be attached to some imagined horror very quickly.

It's only bad when Nazis do it....*

In 1926, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, this happened:

Carrie Buck was a feeble minded woman who was committed to a state mental institution. Her condition had been present in her family for the last three generations. A Virginia law allowed for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions to promote the "health of the patient and the welfare of society." Before the procedure could be performed, however, a hearing was required to determine whether or not the operation was a wise thing to do.

Which presented this legal question to the Supreme Court in 1927:

Did the Virginia statute which authorized sterilization deny Buck the right to due process of the law and the equal protection of the laws as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Court heard arguments on April 22, 1927, and dispatched the matter by May 2, 1927:

The Court found that the statute did not violate the Constitution. Justice Holmes made clear that Buck's challenge was not upon the medical procedure involved but on the process of the substantive law. Since sterilization could not occur until a proper hearing had occurred (at which the patient and a guardian could be present) and after the Circuit Court of the County and the Supreme Court of Appeals had reviewed the case, if so requested by the patient. Only after "months of observation" could the operation take place. That was enough to satisfy the Court that there was no Constitutional violation. Citing the best interests of the state, Justice Holmes affirmed the value of a law like Virginia's in order to prevent the nation from "being swamped with incompetence . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

And the issue is back: in Virginia, the assistant commonwealth attorney offered a plea bargain to Jesse Lee Herald which included a vasectomy "he had seven or eight children, all by different women, and we felt it might be in the commonwealth's interest for that to be part of the plea agreement."  Herald had previous convictions for minor crimes, none of which were related to fathering too many children; and his present arrest connected to children only because he flipped a car with a three year old in it.  Not a nice thing to do, but not exactly grounds for sterilization.  Still, his lawyer agreed to it, and so it shall be done.

But should it?

If you read the comments at the link and at Slate, the overwhelming answer seems to be:  "Yes."    Apparently allegedly fathering "too many" children renders Mr. Herald no better than a horse or a cow, and he must be castrated for the good of the herd (vasectomy is just a kinder, gentler form of castration; the goal is the same), or rather for the good of the "owners."  There's something a little frightening about that, about using public health as a justification for castrating an individual who might or might not be an inconvenience to the state, as Carrie Buck was.

And I think it shows the truth of Lt. Gen. Russell Honore's statement about the cleanup in Katrina, and the national reaction to it:  we are afraid of the poor.  It should be true that ideas don't matter; things don't matter; people matter.

Unless there is an idea that causes us to reduce people to objects; then ideas matter more than people. And it's especially easy to sink poor people beneath the level of our ideas; which shouldn't matter more than people, but they do; because they are ours.

And people are scary; especially poor people.

*No, not Godwin's law; as the Slate article points out, eugenics was widely supported in America until the Nazis gave it a bad name.  Even now, we don't have a definitive Constitutional argument against eugenics (as we do for slavery, say, or even racism, to some degree); it's mostly the aversion of the Nazis that makes us turn away.  Until it doesn't.....

The Foul Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

No, old times there are not forgotten:

You have five children. You are in the pen for car theft. You should have a tubal ligation. End of story.

Comment to this story.

The receiver has overseen medical care in all 33 of the state's prisons since 2006, when U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ruled that the system's health care violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The receiver's office was aware that sterilizations were happening, records show. In September 2008, the prisoner rights group Justice Now received a written response to questions about the treatment of pregnant inmates from Tim Rougeux, then the receiver's chief operating officer. The letter acknowledged that the two prisons offered sterilization surgery to women. But nothing changed until 2010, after the Oakland-based organization filed a public records request and complained to the office of state Sen. Carol Liu, D-La Cañada Flintridge. Liu was the chairwoman of the Select Committee on Women and Children in the Criminal Justice System. Prompted by a phone call from Liu's staff, Barnett said the receiver's top medical officer asked her to research the matter. After analyzing medical and cost records, Barnett met in 2010 with officials at both women's prisons and contract health professionals affiliated with nearby hospitals. The 16-year-old restriction on tubal ligations seemed to be news to them, Barnett recalled. And, she said, none of the doctors thought they needed permission to perform the surgery on inmates. 

Eugenics is alive and well and living in America.

Adding: I would be remiss not to note all the posts at Thought Criminal on the topic of eugenics.

Mirror, mirror

I'm really tired of the "religion is the source of all evil" argument that's making the rounds of the ignorati (I consider Sam Harris a dangerously stupid man), largely because it's yet another attempt to move responsibility from us, human beings all, to some abstract which, if we can just eliminate "it," all our problems will be solved.

In concreto the argument is that we just need everyone to think like, say, Sam Harris; and then O what a paradise it will be!  Or we could all just think like Richard Dawkins and, like the true Brit he is, lord it over, if not still rule over, the benighted peoples of the world who aren't clever enough to have won as many Nobel Prizes as Englishmen have.  Because in the end, what's a better marker of  superiority, eh?

So when I read something like this, I simply have to quote it with approval:

Obama’s comments about Christianity were much more reserved than they could have been. In the winter of 2015, we should not lose sight of the vast and gruesome horrors rendered in the name of the Christian God following 1615. Arrogance reigned, anxiety soared and the people of Europe died in huge bloody numbers. The source of terrorist acts in our era is not Islam any more than Christianity was the cause of the thousands upon thousands who died in the Thirty Years War. The source of such religiously motivated violence is a volatile mixture of intolerance, ignorance, fear, economic disadvantage, and political machinations. The president's comparison between Islam and Christianity is important: any religion can be used to promote crimes against humanity.

You could remove "religion" from that last phrase, and say "any damned idea at all."  It wasn't exactly a religious crusade that sent Hitler on his quest for a "Final Solution."  There was an old religious element to the anti-Semitism he exploited, but he acted in the name of the Aryan race and the thousand year Reich, not in the name of the God of Abraham, or even of Martin Luther (who, as the professor points out in that linked article, was no choir boy.  Luther's anti-semitism was particularly ugly, of a piece with his anti-Roman attitudes, attitudes which continue to infect Protestantism almost 600 years later.  Ideas are indeed bulletproof, more's the pity.)  Economic disadvantage, fear, ignorance, political machinations, intolerance:  sounds like the major themes of the rise of the Third Reich, to me.  Do we blame Hitler on Christianity?  Or on being all too human?  We don't like the latter, but I've seldom heard anyone seriously conjecture it was the former.

Science?  Science:

brought us eugenics and the Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known but don’t look that great. 

Yes, some those were abuses of science, (even though eugenics was part and parcel of the law of the land of these United States, at least until the Nazis embarrassed it out of us), some just failures to think much about consequences; but no less was the violence done in the name of the God of Jesus an abuse of religion.  And science didn't reach out and compel Harry Truman to bomb Hiroshima with atomic fire; or whisper in the delicate shell-like of Oliver Wendell Holmes that "three generations of imbeciles is enough!"; or tell the Nazis "Why not use gas?  And why not on people?  Think of the efficiencies!"  Any more than religion said "Chop their limbs off!  It's the best way!"

Science and religion, you see, aren't animate objects; they aren't even animals, much less people.  They are human frameworks; human ideas; human categories.  Ecce homo.  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

And ashamed of that mirror, we keep blaming the mirror for the image it shows us.  I'm not sure what science and empiricism have to say about that; but I know what Christianity has to say.  And if Jeremiah Wright had been heard saying what Obama said at the prayer breakfast, he would have been no less scorned for saying it.

Mostly because he, too, would have been right.  And we really cannot bear very much reality.

The Deep Distrust of Place

Because we deserve our place, do we blame the parent for this girl's pain?

A friend of mine speaks truth:

Finally, two haunting questions: What are these families running from, or to, that they are willing to risk so much? And, how far back does their family lineage on this continent go, compared to mine?

And asks the pertinent question in doing it.  What is going on here, that our hearts are so hardened to the sufferings of others?  More particularly, what is going on here that we assert our primacy of place and our supremacy of power against people whose family lineage on this continent goes back to pre-Columbian days?  Is that a factor?

How is it not?

I don't mean the blatant racism of Trump and his talk of infestation, or the subtle racism of his supporters, that we we will be overrun if we don't "control" our borders.  The further from the border you get, the louder that clamor grows.  But on the border they understand the complexity of place; they understand the supremacy of power, and they prefer to deal with both in ways we don't, we who live far from the frontier.  I've told the story about a businessman on the Texas border, a man of obvious Brooklyn ancestry, who broke into Spanish when a customer entered his store during our interview.  He told me he had to know Spanish to live there; he thought nothing of it.  Elsewhere in the country in that decade "English Only" was as divisive and contentious a topic as DACA or immigration is now.  The border makes its peace with such issues, because on the border you can't argue such issues:  it simply won't let you.

So how far back does you family lineage on this continent go?  I know mine goes back barely 150 years; but Europeans have been on this continent for 400 years.  People were were when the Europeans got here; and Europeans immediately asserted supremacy of power to claim primacy of place.  Our racism is rooted in those two claims, and it is what we are defending every time we worry about "border protection" or "border security" or even why we should not feel the heartstring tug of crying children (all children in all cultures make the same cries; have you ever noticed?  They all communicate pre-verbally in one voice, a voice we all understand and respond to.).  Whether we are confrontational racists or just want to assert our privilege to be comfortable and not afflicted, we are asserting our primacy of place and our supremacy of power.

It is no accident that the most virulent and violent racists are the people with the least social and even physical power.  It is also no accident that people who think they aren't even racist at all can still be so concerned with protecting their place, and not losing it to "invaders" and "immigrants" and "infestations." Or just to "illegals," because the law is the law and it must be followed; especially when following it protects their place, in space or in society.  Their concern is based in part on legitimacy:  legitimacy under the laws of this nation, but also legitimacy under the eyes of God.

Which is to say, the broader human society.  Legitimacy in the eyes of God is a contentious issue all on its own:  a battlefield of theology and exegesis and philosophy and competing systems of ethics (not to be confused with competing systems of morality).  Legitimacy in the eyes of humankind, however, is the legitimacy we all ultimately crave.  We appeal to humanity for our "right" to place.  We appeal for "justice," and justice means we have rightly wielded power to get for ourselves a comfortable position, among people and on the earth.  One such appeal is based on lineage; if ours is not long enough, we have to appeal to power to come out on top.  We have to appeal to law.

Law protects us because it is a tool, and we understand that.  We treat it as a power, as an objective standard, as justice itself to which we must all bend, but secretly we know better.  Law is a tool, and those with the power wield it.   It is the law that says those people entered the country "illegally."  Are the laws on immigration the product of racism and racist intent?  It doesn't matter; it is the law that demands a pound of flesh from these immigrants, not us.  That's just fair.  And if the action of the law defends our place, our position, our personal integrity against sharing too much of our space with people with greater historical claim to this land, then so be it.  The law is just; the law is fair; and most importantly, the law is with us.

And that's power.

Being the law, it purifies the racist animus that sponsored it; the dross of pettiness is refined away in the flame of authority to do what we want.  The eugenics that got into the law of immigration is the same eugenics that got into the laws of this land ("Three generations of imbeciles is enough!") and spread like an evil vine across the Atlantic until it came back to us in the foul shape of Nazism and the "Final Solution."  And so we disavowed those laws and cut off our historical memory of them, just as we forgot the stories of how we treated the slaves and the Native Americans and the poor; we forget our connection to great crimes, the better to justify our sense of place and the privilege of power.   But we know it all rests on such a precarious foundation, on such a trembling soil, that we have to remind ourselves, again and again, of just how vicious we can be if we have to:

Common theme: A Trump supporter in Duluth, one of many waiting in a long line outside tonight’s rally location, just told me she has compassion for separated families but ultimately believes that the detainment center photos and videos are fake and photoshopped.

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) June 20, 2018

We feel sorry for them, but it's fake news so really, it's okay in the end.  Our place is re-secured, our power has protected us.  Our legitimacy is assured; not because we have any, but because the crisis doesn't, either.

Where does justice come from?  Where does righteousness come from?  From God?  From human society?  Either basis finds no justice in what we have done.  If justice comes from human society, these people have a greater claim to the land than we ever could, and we have a duty to share it with them, to make the injustices of history right.  If justice comes from God, the God who commanded Israel to share everything with the widow and the orphan and the alien among you, to declare a year of Jubilee and start the whole business of property ownership over again (even Israel wasn't ready for that one, so God tried again, teaching us to be first of all by being last and servant of all), from God who can overturn the power and pull the mighty from their thrones, and raise up the poor and powerless (and where's the justice in gaining power then?); well, then, the question of who was here first is still a legitimate question seeking a legitimate answer.

And we still are no further along in providing one.

“Irrefutable“ = “No Evidence At All”

Crime of the century alert from the President of the United States pic.twitter.com/nUKXDVJhsl

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2025

Oops: On Joe Rogan’s podcast in September 2018, Tulsi Gabbard acknowledged that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Rogan called it “amazing” that it took until 2016 for foreign election influence to become a major issue in the U.S. pic.twitter.com/LHtorSYdNm

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) July 22, 2025

"Irrefutable evidence!”

Now, do the Epstein files. pic.twitter.com/rzlub3WucQ

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) July 21, 2025

Miller: Nobody voted to turn Los Angeles, which was once one of the crown jewel cities, into a third world failed city…

Who voted to put them here? Who voted to destroy our public education system, our public healthcare system, our hospital system? Nobody voted for it.

They… pic.twitter.com/kPNdTsFe49

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 21, 2025

They voted for Trump to clean it up and he is cleaning it up everyday.

More irrefutable evidence! Of really disgusting racism and fear of a brown planet. But I repeat myself.

MILLER: If you look at photos of the Empire State Building being built, you don’t see any illegal aliens. When you look at the photos of the NASA control room during the moon landing, you don’t see any illegal aliens.

Americans built, sustained, and powered this country for two… pic.twitter.com/CGMUNlSAG8

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 21, 2025

Americans built, sustained, and powered this country for two and half centuries.

When the real Americans got here and displaced the natives and exploited the poor and brought slaves from Africa and made and kept racism as American as violence and cherry pie.

I mean, every time you think he can’t get lower, he gets a bigger shovel. I’m just waiting for him to start talking about final solutions.  Until then, we have the Administration “corrections” of history:

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the National Park Service (NPS) removed historical context from signage that explained the role women played in the creation of the Muir Woods National Monument and highlighted the racist ideologies of some of the men associated with the site.

A ranger for the monument confirmed that the information removed last week originated from an initiative by NPS officials called “History Under Construction” that filled in gaps in the timeline of the park to offer a more comprehensive history of the monument in Marin County, California, which is known for its old-growth redwood trees.

An article on the National Park Service (NPS) website explains what new information park officials had added to the interpretive signs in 2021. This had included highlighting the work of a women’s club, called The California Club, which launched the first campaign to save what was then known as Sequoia Canyon.

The updated text also detailed the racist backgrounds of otherwise celebrated men associated with creating the monument. For example, it added the political views of William Kent, who was credited with buying and later donating the land that would become the national monument to President Theodore Roosevelt. The additions referenced that he worked on anti-Asian policies during his time in Congress, which laid the groundwork for Japanese mass internment during World War II.

It also pointed out that important conservation figures of that time like Gifford Pinchot, who was appointed chief of what is now the U.S. Forest Service in 1898, was also a eugenicist who believed the human race could be improved by “selective breeding.” He served a 10-year term on an advisory council of the American Eugenics Society.

The additional text also highlighted the original caretakers of the land, the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo tribes, as well as pointing out that their lands were stripped from them and later became places like the national monument.

And what’s everyone paying attention to? Hunter Biden on a podcast.

And if they aren’t talking about that, NYT and WaPo and CNN and Politico are talking about how Trump has turned the tide with MAGA on the Epstein files. Funny thing about that:

The Times cited "Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House adviser to Mr. Trump and influential leader of the MAGA base," who told the paper that "the Murdochs’ bizarre assault on the president galvanized his base" and that "we are united as Trump goes on offense — against the Murdochs, the courts and the deep state." (The Murdoch family owns the Wall Street Journal.)

The Washintgon Post cited "Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who hosts a daily talk show popular with Trump’s MAGA supporters," who told the paper that "MAGA is now united, because they can see there’s a common enemy," which he described as "the Deep State, with their media partners, led by Murdoch."

CNN cited a certain Steve Bannon, identifying him as a leader of the MAGA movement. "'We are finally on offense,' Bannon, Trump’s former aide and a leader of the MAGA movement, said via text message to CNN. 'President Trump has had enough and is fighting back – against his real enemies.'"

Politico cited and reprinted the quote that Bannon gave to the Washington Post.

What do they call that? “Herd mentality”? Or is it “irrefutable evidence”?

Jeffrey Epstein shut down Congress. pic.twitter.com/a0fMFUyzsF

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2025

The House will be in recess from August 2nd to September 8th, in accordance with the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970.

Today’s Update for MAGA:

Trade Deals: NO

Epstein Files released: NO

Obama arrested: NO

Jerome Powell fired: NO

Hillary Locked Up: NO

James Comey arrested: NO

Threats and Social Media Posts: MANY

Attempt to rename football team: YES

Attempt to put sugar in Coke: YES

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 21, 2025

And so we’re back where we started:

No Obama indictment, Coke hasn’t switched from corn syrup to sugar, Washington & Cleveland haven’t changed their team names, no new trade deals, the woman catching the snake on the video he posted is AI, & he’s still stonewalling on Epstein. But these will distract some cultists. pic.twitter.com/VysSmlMZLe

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2025

Or at least distract the cultists at NYT, and CNN, and WaPo and Politico.

“Because Birth Tourists Are Polluting Our Bloodlines”

Americans all over the country are getting ready to celebrate July 4. But in this small Alaskan fishing village, home to a swanky historic hotel, they’re getting ready for something else: the arrival of vacationing Supreme Court justices

— NYTPitchbot (@DougJBalloon) June 30, 2026

My three-year-old was reading the Trump v. Barbara decision when she turned to me gravely and asked "Daddy, why do the nice salmon fishing men think children born here aren't citizens?" And when I told her "Because birth tourists are polluting our bloodlines," she started crying.

— NYTPitchbot (@DougJBalloon) June 30, 2026

The Constitution says that children born in the United States are citizens of the United States. A guy who jokes about pubic hairs on Coke cans says that they are not. For busy Americans, it can be hard to know who to trust.

— NYTPitchbot (@DougJBalloon) July 1, 2026

One of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court. American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration. https://t.co/qZuwzZq5tr

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 30, 2026

He means “white people.”

THIS ENTIRE GOVERNMENT says you can ignore SCOTUS.

Protestors in the Midwest have been indicted for less. https://t.co/Mp6MhdNARA

— EU says Elon should not lie abt my blue check (@emptywheel) June 30, 2026

This is bringing all of the racists out of the woodwork.

At least it’s easier to identify them, now. What’s the current number? 60% of Americans can’t pay their bills? How many can’t afford housing? And yet immigrants are racing here to pop out babies who are “anchors”? In the country with the least support for children, childcare, and maternity, in the industrialized world?

Ossoff: "We've see in just the last six months more than 300,000 Georgians lose their health insurance altogether. It's a disaster for health in Georgia. And Mike Collins, just like he voted for war and for tariffs, he voted for these healthcare cuts." pic.twitter.com/vL3Ftrlo8F

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

Yeah; this can’t possibly be about racism.

DOJ vows to prosecute birth tourism after SCOTUS ruling https://t.co/3V0yaS3y2x

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) June 30, 2026

What crime is that? Non-white women visiting America?

Rep. Randy Fine accuses SCOTUS of "facilitating the invasion of this country," adding that "we're gonna have to reduce immigration of all kinds, because if we say that once you get off the plane and hide for a while and you have a baby, that baby is American, we're not gonna be… pic.twitter.com/12StA22Ili

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

Rep. Randy Fine accuses SCOTUS of "facilitating the invasion of this country," adding that "we're gonna have to reduce immigration of all kinds, because if we say that once you get off the plane and hide for a while and you have a baby, that baby is American, we're not gonna be able to let people come here"

Literally afraid of a nation of immigrants.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claims Chinese women are traveling to the United States with "one week" left in their pregnancy to give birth pic.twitter.com/sUq1aeeevw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

"Reason for visit?”

“To pollute American bloodlines with Chinese babies. Oh, and US. v Ark, 1893.”

Brian Kilmeade suggests to an agreeing DHS Secretary Markwayne Mulling that pregnant foreign women should be barred from traveling to the United States pic.twitter.com/NpdXexSDcC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

Working hard to resurrect eugenics.

Rep. Randy Fine: "We gotta fight in my party, in the Republican Party, to not let crazy people take over" pic.twitter.com/F580HZiQ8r

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

🤔