A most interesting (and ghastly) article in The Guardian by Portland writer Derek Beres on “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed“. It points out how significantly the Trump administration is influenced by (soft and not that soft) eugenics ideas. Starting with (the US Secretary of Health) Robert F Kennedy Jr’s MAHA (“make America healthy again”) movement that centres on “natural” selection of the fittest and healthiest members of the community, from his anti-vax positions to his insistence on health being a personal responsibility, to his denying the genetic roots of autism (or letting those impacted disappear from the gene pool), and to stopping NIH funding of research on HIV, vaccine hesitancy, vaccination rate disparities, and COVID-19, all pointers to this selection by (at best) passivity from the State.
Similarly, Elon Musk’s and Trump’s fascination with IQ tests and levels need not much arguing towards eugenism when recalling that IQ was intrinsically linked with eugenism (as for instance setting the IQ bar in many US States forced sterilisation programs that ran till the 1980’s). Same for the current natalist discourse that mimics the one of the earliest eugenists like Galton, Pearson and Fisher. Trump’s proposal of a baby bonus echoes 1930’s Fisher’s call for an allowance so “that the standard of living of the competent will rise, and that of the incompetent will fall”. And the defunding of USAid, Head Start, HHS and other programs that contribute to children health, nationally or internationally, follows the same furrow that the resulting (numerous) deaths and diseases will only impact the “unfit” part of their Brave New World.
