Eugenics

Kennedy and his anti-vaccine colleagues don't just minimize the dangers of the measles, but often slip into talking about this horrific disease as if it's a good thing to put children through. As I wrote about last week, he celebrated families in Texas who chose infection over vaccination, even though two of them lost daughters to measles. His anti-vaccine group had one set of parents explain why that's a good thing because "she’s better off where she is now." He romanticized measles as a "great week" for kids, because they get to skip school and eat chicken soup. On Fox News on Thursday, he insisted about measles, "We need to do better at treating kids who have this disease, and not just saying the only answer is vaccination."

You don't need to "treat" a disease you don't get, but clearly, Kennedy prefers kids get measles. The "treatments" he recommends have echoes of the Geiers' ugly treatment of children. He's been telling parents to overdose kids with vitamin A, which can cause liver damage. He's been pushing the steroid budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, both of which can have side effects. None of these treatments work, and they all risk making the situation worse.

Kennedy exploits the language of the "wellness" industry, with its misleading emphasis on "natural" health care and "letting" your body heal itself. What's ironic is that's what vaccines do. Vaccines work by stimulating the body's natural immune response, so that it prevents infection using the body's own resources. All these "treatments" Kennedy touts aren't just ineffective, they're not "natural." They're blitzing a child with often overwhelming amounts of medication, which won't work but could make the kid even sicker.

Racism is foundational to reproductive control, and the United States eugenics movement shared and inspired much of the Nazi philosophy of “racial hygiene” that sought to maintain the dominance and “purity” of the white race. Today’s conservative reproductive agenda is little more than racial hygiene’s modern iteration.

Transgender people pose a grave threat to this agenda, because they resist the idea that women are defined by an innate female essence rooted in reproductive biology, and that being mothers is, therefore, their nature and destiny. If someone born with ovaries and a uterus can escape the call of motherhood and if someone born without can be a woman, the white supremacist message falls apart. If gender is “just a feeling,” as some conservatives put it, then how can we say that women’s purpose is to bear and raise children? If people can “mess with” their reproductive organs, how can reproduction be the pinnacle of human life? Gender-affirming care poses a challenge to the reproductive imperative. It must be suppressed to sustain white supremacy, or, in the words of Conservative Political Action Conference speaker Michael Knowles: “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

By rigidly policing gender norms and sexuality, anti-trans legislation reinforces the message that the proper and natural role of women is to bear children within a nuclear, heterosexual marriage. That is why the same bills that would ban gender-affirming care expressly allow nonconsensual surgeries on intersex newborns, because those interventions reinforce rather than undermine gender essentialism.

To white conservatives, womanhood is rooted in the reproductive body, and its achievement is motherhood. That message, in turn, serves to encourage reproduction with the aim of maintaining white demographic dominance. In other words, transphobia is a by-product of misogyny, which is a corollary of white supremacy. Anti-trans laws trace their roots back to racism.

The foundation, originally known as the “Pioneer Fund”, was relaunched and rebranded in 2022 as the “Human Diversity Foundation” (HDF) by Danish eugenicist Emil Kirkegaard.

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The aim has been to normalise the Pioneer Fund’s Nazi-aligned scientific racism in the mainstream through the notion of open debate and ‘free’ inquiry. Scientific racism has been rebranded as the story of ‘human biodiversity’.

The key funder supporting this initiative was revealed to be American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru, who donated $1.3 million to the HDF. Around the same time, Conru was also funding the most influential conservative voices attacking DEI and ‘critical race theory’ – Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian, and Richard Hanania.

HDF’s magazine, Aporia, was founded by British far-right activist Matthew Frost. Conru’s donation provided him with a 15% stake in the group. It has defended Richard Lynn’s pseudoscientific racism, published an interview with Nazi sympathiser Jared Taylor, and in 2024 claimed that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.

Hope Not Hate’s undercover reporting recorded far-right activists associated with the HDF calling for “remigration” – the ‘mass removal of ethnic minorities’.

The Trump administration cruelly and abruptly stopped the distribution of live-saving antiretroviral drugs to almost 26 million people worldwide. The program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR—is the global health program started by Republican president George W. Bush in 2003. He celebrated the 20 year anniversary in 2023 at his presidential library.

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Without the drugs for any length of time, HIV will replicate inside the bodies of these HIV-infected people in poor countries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere, who have been living and thriving, as HIV has thankfully become a manageable illness because of the drugs. HIV will be able to transmit from them to others—transmission is suppressed while taking the drugs—and more powerful strains could emerge.

And they will develop full-blown AIDS, suffer immensely, and die.

It’s as simple as that.

Let’s be clear, for Trump this is eugenics, killing off the non-white people in the “shithole” countries who he surely believes we shouldn’t be spending money on.

Trump has promoted eugenics—spouting off about “good genes” and “bad genes” in talking about immigrants he wants to deport who he says are “poisoning the blood” of Americans—and, according to his own nephew, said disabled people should “just die” in the context of his nephew’s own son.

The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability. We conclude by urging researchers to work on defined tasks for which we can develop safety protocols, rather than attempting to build a presumably all-knowing system such as AGI.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.