I’ve recently taken over preliminary healthcare for my 60-year-old brother, who has what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome (before folks learned Asperger was a big ol’ Nazi). He is undiagnosed, with almost no medical record. I need to secure him SSI ( which means getting him a psych eval and labeling him) but am reticent to “out” him in these times. We need the financial support for him, but man it puts him squarely in the headlights of any “list” that’s drawn up. I have to move forward for him, and hope for the best, but it’s a terrible position to be in.
Jessica, I've been a fan for a while and I had thought you wouldn't, possibly couldn't, outdo yourself, but you have. This is beyond excellent. Thoughtful, thoroughly researched, well written measured. Reserved, even, given the horror of your subject.
Yet, there they are. Out in plain sight ever since Darwin's cousin coined the term 'eugenics'.
This isn't new. I suppose it could be a myth, but I was taught that in ancient Sparta newborns perceived to be defective were left out on a hillside to die in the Greek sun,
Here's a similar story. Equally true. I once researched the fact, and I did find it to be a fact, that starting somewhere in the 1880s, if memory serves, public school curriculums (curricula?) began to be dumbed down in order to insure that the budding United States mass-manufacturing industry would be assured an adequate supply of minimally educated workers to man the machine in the factories they were beginning to build. Smart enough to read, write and count change, but denied access to a complete or higher education or the honed ability to think for themselves. I swear remnants of these ideas still survive in the schools and textbooks of today. If you look for it, you can see it.
I firmly believe that if this wasn't true, and if high schools had sufficiently vigorous courses in high school Civics, Donald Trump would never have become president, and we would not now be having to figure out how to surgically remove the poisonous tissue that now infects American democracy and a frightening portion of the electorate I firmly believe the system is self-healing, but this cure is going to take a while.
I agree 100 percent. Having worked in education since my early 20s, everything I saw and heard, especially from administrators, indicated that they wanted to pay lip service to universal education but very often held the deepest, meanest preconceptions about who actually deserved a good education. Someone I knew wrote an entire thesis documenting the conception that community college existed to "cool out" the working class's aspirations and divert their time and money into a pointless maze of "courses" that ultimately left them no better off. That could be its own article. Maybe I should write it.
Many of us have vivid recollections. Here's one of my favorites. I was frustrated and bored the first two years, with a mid-C average, but then in my very first 3rd year course on the very first day of class, Junior year, one of my professors came in rubbing his hands together, and said, and I think is an exact quote: "OK. We've been trying to run you off for two years, but you're still here, so now we're going to try to teach you something." I had mostly As and Bs' from then on, and made the semester Deans' Lists more than once.
Hmmmm..while I agree our education system was designed to keep us uneducated, racism and sexism are the foundation of America. Until the genocide of the Native Americans and Slavery of Black people are acknowledged and reparations made, America will continue its apartheid and enslavement of Black and Brown and Poor people. In other words, this is and always will be America.
The right has planned this campaign for fifty years. Since being freaked out by the hippy's takeover of the youth and the threat to the staus quo.
They've planned carefully and fought for it. (Check Rachel Bitecofer on the amount they've spent on media training good looking kids to spout right wing lies (all those pretty Republican blonde girls. No accident)
So let's not take anthing for granted. Get organised and fight back
Absolutely agree. I send little bits of money here and there, and blue video clips around around. Right now I'm 99% ready to go to war with two of the Trumpy members of my family, my sister and my ex, no matter the outcome. (Jessica has inspired me here. She wrote about this, not long ago.) Not all of them. There are some, one especially, that I can't bear the thought of losing. I especially like Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who's now running for the US Senate. Google 'Mallory McMorrow viral clip' (or viral rant). I don't know whether I can post clips on here. PS Everybody watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night (5/12/2025). Trump appears to be spiraling even further out of control, inspired by the world's leading angry incel, Stephen Miller, who is behind a lot of this, especially the immigration and the clearly unconstitutional unitary executive BS. (Yes, yes, I know the Supreme Court granted him near absolute immunity. That won't last, either. "This too shall pass (away).") (I have tried and failed to find the clip of Stephen Miller's first appearance on 'Morning Joe', the one at the end of which Mika said, very slowly, in a low stunned voice: "Oh. My. God." That was after Miller's insane rant in which he forcefully argued that the president can do anything he wants, any time, and no one can do anything about it, because, according to Miller, all of the executive power of the United States is vested in the president. He that "cannot be denied". Parse that and it makes the president a King. No, yeah, it really does. That's the Far Right's "Unitary Executive" manifesto.)
Dang, y'all have got me all fired up this morning. Got my blood flowing and cleaned out my sinuses. Feels good.
Yep, I think it's finally starting to become obvious to some people what we've been saying for years now, and often branded as conspiracy theorists over: The elite have fantasies about destroying the world and being the only survivors.
A true fantasy. “The elite” died from covid. The elite die from cancer. The elite die from the effects of covid. The elite explode in handmade submarines. The elite die in Boeing planes. The elite die - like the rest of us. No one lives forever. I will outlive RFK, as I outlived Regan and Nixon.
Brilliant article - thank you! Imani (crutches and spice) has been talking about this exact issue on socials - and pointing out that *anybody* can be considered disabled or inferior by those in power, as and when it suits them to label more and more groups of people as ‘unfit’. We’re seeing similar actions being taken here in the UK - by the supposed left wing party currently in government, who’re all but calling disabled people ‘useless eaters’. They’re taking away all financial support from those who need it under the excuse of helping disabled people back to work, while simultaneously cutting all funding for back to work programs and introducing a MAID style program. Interestingly the government is literally saying the quiet bit out loud in their explanations, as they keep stating that ‘disability levels have skyrocketed since the pandemic’. Yet no one is making the clear connection that successive interchangeable governments forced everyone back to work in unsafe conditions, while normalising the idea that we shouldn’t have to protect the vulnerable, and encouraging people to see vulnerable people as burdens on society. Governments have accelerated fascism by bringing eugenist beliefs even further into the mainstream and now it’s been normalised are casually enacting blatantly eugenicist policies. It’s absolutely shocking to me that people fail to see an attack on one group as the beginning of a very slippery slope of eradication of large swathes of society.
I've been hearing some of this from Britain, but I agree it's important to understand this isn't just happening in the U.S. It's a worldwide phenomenon. I've also seen reports of similar moves in Canada. On some level they realize the medical journals were right, and their negligence on Covid created an "unfathomable" wave of vulnerable people, but instead of owning their decisions and creating support networks, they're going in the opposite direction, and by the time they realize they've labeled everyone as "unfit," it will be too late. I don't know everything we need to do to stop them, but any resistance starts with blunt descriptions of what's going on.
Agreed! I think, just as you’ve written in this article - that this was the plan all along - at least from the parasitic billionaire class. And those in government are so utterly corrupt, venal, power hungry and ethically lacking that they’ll do whatever is asked of them without a second thought. It’s wonderful to have this place to know there’s a community of people who see the reality of the situation too!
Hi, Selina. I agree with you about what’s happening in our country 🏴 I felt it first with the disastrous response to the covid pandemic. Headlines that basically said the economy was too important to shut down and if a few old people died then that was a price ~they~ were willing to pay. I kept saying “they want to kill us all”. I never thought that would be the case under a Labour government and yet here we are. I suppose the good news is that politicians seem to be cooling off over the assisted dying bill, although Starmer won’t actually be in the country to vote (conveniently?) We are not actual human people to the government and the wealthy, we are merely units of labour and if we are unable to fulfil that duty, we are expendable. And, yes, it’s not just here in the UK or over in the US. Look at what’s happening in Gaza and Afghanistan.
Thank you Jessica for putting into writing what I have been thinking ❤️
“It (eugenics) provided the affluent with a strong reason to do what they'd always wanted, to declare war on those they already considered inferior.”
This is it exactly! The ruling class is only interested in science or the law if they can use it as a means to their ends.
It wasn’t till recently that I learned that Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, as part of his theory of Social Darwinism. Once again, it took off because it was a way for the robber barons to justify their hoarding of wealth and the subjugation of the working class.
Thanks for this roundup of references. I've known for some time about the history and depth of eugenics in the US (the SARS-2 pandemic certainly is an ongoing reminder of what I learned during the worst of the HIV times) and it's great to have a resource to give others when they express skepticism on the topic.
That's good to hear. People need to stop seeing eugenics as some kind of conspiracy theory and instead see it as a widely documented and widely lionized ideology that has thrived in western culture for generations, and currently a driving force behind policy decisions.
Thanks, Jessica, for diving into the history for us. I wonder how the good Christians who voted for and support this government will spin the eugenics angle.
Yes. I have been saying this since 2020. And don’t forget, eugenics was practiced on Black people and Native Americans in America. California’s genocide and enslavement of the Native Americans was eugenics.
1851, California Gov. Peter Burnett declared that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged … until the Indian race becomes extinct.” In 1852, U.S. Sen. John Weller — who became California’s governor in 1858 — went further. He told his colleagues in the Senate that California Indians “will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man,” arguing that “the interest of the white man demands their extinction.”
Wow. Just Wow. Woke up to this this morning. The essay answers the question I scream at the TV news every day now, "How can people be doing this to people?" and, since Trump's unspoken mantra is clearly "Just try to stop me", I think I've broken through some understanding block and can move ahead with some clarity about what's going on. Thanks again, Jessica. Your medicine is hard to swallow.... but it works!
I’ve recently taken over preliminary healthcare for my 60-year-old brother, who has what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome (before folks learned Asperger was a big ol’ Nazi). He is undiagnosed, with almost no medical record. I need to secure him SSI ( which means getting him a psych eval and labeling him) but am reticent to “out” him in these times. We need the financial support for him, but man it puts him squarely in the headlights of any “list” that’s drawn up. I have to move forward for him, and hope for the best, but it’s a terrible position to be in.
Agreed, they've put you in a horrible situation.
Unbelievable. I'm sorry you are in this position.
Well…the millions of Americans on the spectrum are already identified. No doubt, your brother has this in his medical records…
True. His medical record is brand new, though—it’s his only identifier for ASD. I’m just hesitant to amplify it.
Jessica, I've been a fan for a while and I had thought you wouldn't, possibly couldn't, outdo yourself, but you have. This is beyond excellent. Thoughtful, thoroughly researched, well written measured. Reserved, even, given the horror of your subject.
Yet, there they are. Out in plain sight ever since Darwin's cousin coined the term 'eugenics'.
This isn't new. I suppose it could be a myth, but I was taught that in ancient Sparta newborns perceived to be defective were left out on a hillside to die in the Greek sun,
Here's a similar story. Equally true. I once researched the fact, and I did find it to be a fact, that starting somewhere in the 1880s, if memory serves, public school curriculums (curricula?) began to be dumbed down in order to insure that the budding United States mass-manufacturing industry would be assured an adequate supply of minimally educated workers to man the machine in the factories they were beginning to build. Smart enough to read, write and count change, but denied access to a complete or higher education or the honed ability to think for themselves. I swear remnants of these ideas still survive in the schools and textbooks of today. If you look for it, you can see it.
I firmly believe that if this wasn't true, and if high schools had sufficiently vigorous courses in high school Civics, Donald Trump would never have become president, and we would not now be having to figure out how to surgically remove the poisonous tissue that now infects American democracy and a frightening portion of the electorate I firmly believe the system is self-healing, but this cure is going to take a while.
I agree 100 percent. Having worked in education since my early 20s, everything I saw and heard, especially from administrators, indicated that they wanted to pay lip service to universal education but very often held the deepest, meanest preconceptions about who actually deserved a good education. Someone I knew wrote an entire thesis documenting the conception that community college existed to "cool out" the working class's aspirations and divert their time and money into a pointless maze of "courses" that ultimately left them no better off. That could be its own article. Maybe I should write it.
Many of us have vivid recollections. Here's one of my favorites. I was frustrated and bored the first two years, with a mid-C average, but then in my very first 3rd year course on the very first day of class, Junior year, one of my professors came in rubbing his hands together, and said, and I think is an exact quote: "OK. We've been trying to run you off for two years, but you're still here, so now we're going to try to teach you something." I had mostly As and Bs' from then on, and made the semester Deans' Lists more than once.
So go for it. Write it.
Also, thanks for the support. :) It's nice to hear it when I'm doing a good job.
Jessica you most definitely ARE doing a great job! We love you!!!
If you hear a silence, it is deep appreciation
Hmmmm..while I agree our education system was designed to keep us uneducated, racism and sexism are the foundation of America. Until the genocide of the Native Americans and Slavery of Black people are acknowledged and reparations made, America will continue its apartheid and enslavement of Black and Brown and Poor people. In other words, this is and always will be America.
I understand how you feel, but it was not always that way. It's a pendulum. It will swing back. May you live to see it.
It only swings back when we fight.
The right has planned this campaign for fifty years. Since being freaked out by the hippy's takeover of the youth and the threat to the staus quo.
They've planned carefully and fought for it. (Check Rachel Bitecofer on the amount they've spent on media training good looking kids to spout right wing lies (all those pretty Republican blonde girls. No accident)
So let's not take anthing for granted. Get organised and fight back
Absolutely agree. I send little bits of money here and there, and blue video clips around around. Right now I'm 99% ready to go to war with two of the Trumpy members of my family, my sister and my ex, no matter the outcome. (Jessica has inspired me here. She wrote about this, not long ago.) Not all of them. There are some, one especially, that I can't bear the thought of losing. I especially like Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who's now running for the US Senate. Google 'Mallory McMorrow viral clip' (or viral rant). I don't know whether I can post clips on here. PS Everybody watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night (5/12/2025). Trump appears to be spiraling even further out of control, inspired by the world's leading angry incel, Stephen Miller, who is behind a lot of this, especially the immigration and the clearly unconstitutional unitary executive BS. (Yes, yes, I know the Supreme Court granted him near absolute immunity. That won't last, either. "This too shall pass (away).") (I have tried and failed to find the clip of Stephen Miller's first appearance on 'Morning Joe', the one at the end of which Mika said, very slowly, in a low stunned voice: "Oh. My. God." That was after Miller's insane rant in which he forcefully argued that the president can do anything he wants, any time, and no one can do anything about it, because, according to Miller, all of the executive power of the United States is vested in the president. He that "cannot be denied". Parse that and it makes the president a King. No, yeah, it really does. That's the Far Right's "Unitary Executive" manifesto.)
Dang, y'all have got me all fired up this morning. Got my blood flowing and cleaned out my sinuses. Feels good.
“Let the weak die” is a very pre-Holocene or pre-civilization instinct.
Hunter gatherers were forced to leave the sick and elderly behind.
These evil goons actually want to do it to justify their vast wealth as “natural superiority.”
Yep, I think it's finally starting to become obvious to some people what we've been saying for years now, and often branded as conspiracy theorists over: The elite have fantasies about destroying the world and being the only survivors.
A true fantasy. “The elite” died from covid. The elite die from cancer. The elite die from the effects of covid. The elite explode in handmade submarines. The elite die in Boeing planes. The elite die - like the rest of us. No one lives forever. I will outlive RFK, as I outlived Regan and Nixon.
"The elite explode in handmade submarines." Indeed they do.
Theresa You GO GIRL :))
Starting to really think our whole moral structure of good v evil is just stable climate v unpredictable climate behavior
Brilliant article - thank you! Imani (crutches and spice) has been talking about this exact issue on socials - and pointing out that *anybody* can be considered disabled or inferior by those in power, as and when it suits them to label more and more groups of people as ‘unfit’. We’re seeing similar actions being taken here in the UK - by the supposed left wing party currently in government, who’re all but calling disabled people ‘useless eaters’. They’re taking away all financial support from those who need it under the excuse of helping disabled people back to work, while simultaneously cutting all funding for back to work programs and introducing a MAID style program. Interestingly the government is literally saying the quiet bit out loud in their explanations, as they keep stating that ‘disability levels have skyrocketed since the pandemic’. Yet no one is making the clear connection that successive interchangeable governments forced everyone back to work in unsafe conditions, while normalising the idea that we shouldn’t have to protect the vulnerable, and encouraging people to see vulnerable people as burdens on society. Governments have accelerated fascism by bringing eugenist beliefs even further into the mainstream and now it’s been normalised are casually enacting blatantly eugenicist policies. It’s absolutely shocking to me that people fail to see an attack on one group as the beginning of a very slippery slope of eradication of large swathes of society.
I've been hearing some of this from Britain, but I agree it's important to understand this isn't just happening in the U.S. It's a worldwide phenomenon. I've also seen reports of similar moves in Canada. On some level they realize the medical journals were right, and their negligence on Covid created an "unfathomable" wave of vulnerable people, but instead of owning their decisions and creating support networks, they're going in the opposite direction, and by the time they realize they've labeled everyone as "unfit," it will be too late. I don't know everything we need to do to stop them, but any resistance starts with blunt descriptions of what's going on.
Agreed! I think, just as you’ve written in this article - that this was the plan all along - at least from the parasitic billionaire class. And those in government are so utterly corrupt, venal, power hungry and ethically lacking that they’ll do whatever is asked of them without a second thought. It’s wonderful to have this place to know there’s a community of people who see the reality of the situation too!
Hi, Selina. I agree with you about what’s happening in our country 🏴 I felt it first with the disastrous response to the covid pandemic. Headlines that basically said the economy was too important to shut down and if a few old people died then that was a price ~they~ were willing to pay. I kept saying “they want to kill us all”. I never thought that would be the case under a Labour government and yet here we are. I suppose the good news is that politicians seem to be cooling off over the assisted dying bill, although Starmer won’t actually be in the country to vote (conveniently?) We are not actual human people to the government and the wealthy, we are merely units of labour and if we are unable to fulfil that duty, we are expendable. And, yes, it’s not just here in the UK or over in the US. Look at what’s happening in Gaza and Afghanistan.
Thank you Jessica for putting into writing what I have been thinking ❤️
“It (eugenics) provided the affluent with a strong reason to do what they'd always wanted, to declare war on those they already considered inferior.”
This is it exactly! The ruling class is only interested in science or the law if they can use it as a means to their ends.
It wasn’t till recently that I learned that Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, as part of his theory of Social Darwinism. Once again, it took off because it was a way for the robber barons to justify their hoarding of wealth and the subjugation of the working class.
Thanks for this roundup of references. I've known for some time about the history and depth of eugenics in the US (the SARS-2 pandemic certainly is an ongoing reminder of what I learned during the worst of the HIV times) and it's great to have a resource to give others when they express skepticism on the topic.
That's good to hear. People need to stop seeing eugenics as some kind of conspiracy theory and instead see it as a widely documented and widely lionized ideology that has thrived in western culture for generations, and currently a driving force behind policy decisions.
Thanks, Jessica, for diving into the history for us. I wonder how the good Christians who voted for and support this government will spin the eugenics angle.
Bravo.
Yes. I have been saying this since 2020. And don’t forget, eugenics was practiced on Black people and Native Americans in America. California’s genocide and enslavement of the Native Americans was eugenics.
1851, California Gov. Peter Burnett declared that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged … until the Indian race becomes extinct.” In 1852, U.S. Sen. John Weller — who became California’s governor in 1858 — went further. He told his colleagues in the Senate that California Indians “will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man,” arguing that “the interest of the white man demands their extinction.”
...and Puerto Rican women in the 1970s.
Others noticing this too https://qasimrashid.substack.com/p/structural-eugenics-part-ii-trumps?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r769
Thanks for sharing. What a list.... jeez...
The ugly side of the American society which has yet to be eradicated.
Wow. Just Wow. Woke up to this this morning. The essay answers the question I scream at the TV news every day now, "How can people be doing this to people?" and, since Trump's unspoken mantra is clearly "Just try to stop me", I think I've broken through some understanding block and can move ahead with some clarity about what's going on. Thanks again, Jessica. Your medicine is hard to swallow.... but it works!