Originally published at: How Trump’s Racist Talk Of Immigrant ‘Bad Genes’ Echoes Some Of The Last Century’s Darkest Ideas About Eugenics - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his…
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These guys missed the entire Olympic Games.
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On the one hand, the press has been largely derelict in not flagging this – and explaining its history – each time Trump goes to this. On the other hand, there are no creatures on Earth in whom genetics makes no difference between individuals. Eugenics theory, plainly evil as it was an is, first flourished when most were still farmers.
Farmers know breeding makes large differences. Eugenics is wrong about the distribution and valuation of differences, not about the genetic contribution to differences. So the more naive anti-eugenics argument is too easily discounted by – well, anyone who knows one breed of canines from another.
There’s a whole lot fundamentally wrong with considering human groups as “breeds.” Our mates are not selected for us in order to produce, say, floppy ears or a certain set of the jaw. That’s where the truer argument might be made, to show how wrong eugenics is. Claiming that genetics makes no significant difference seems like the right thing to say in the context of repudiating eugenics. But, scientifically, genes make differences. That’s what genes are.
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I can’t believe the Orange Asshole(and draft dodger) has the nerve to talk about “bad genes” when he and various skanks have produced the greatest collection of pond scum to ever surface in the shallows of the gene pool Oh well, even if he’s elected, I give him a max of 2 years before he’s forced out under the 25th amendment (Unlike Trump who is stupid and dangerous, Vance is pretty sharp and dangerous). Also, there would always be the chance that some brave patriot would remove him!
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Trump is a fount of every bad idea we have had over the last two centuries, from eugenics to tariffs. I would be willing to bet most of it came from his dad and the rest came from Roy Cohn. He is remarkably stupid and his transparent attempts at being clever make it all the more unbelievable that anyone can buy this shit.
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Exactly right. I was thinking the other day that he already has a Hawley in the Senate—now just needs a Smoot!?! 
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Trump likes to brag about his great genes.
His uncle was a “genius” professor at MIT.
His father had dementia.
Pick one, Donald.
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By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”
Which did not prevent us from coming up with the usual sort of ethnic jokes about “these guys from somewhere ‘away’ who talk funny” at the expense of the Scandinavian immigrant waves.
My favorite one (you know I have to go there) about the Swedes (which I claim license to, being half Swedish in origin myself) goes something like this:
A gent out for a drive in the countryside suffers a breakdown. As he’s fussing about with the engine, the farmer who was plowing a nearby field comes over to see what’s going on.
“Do you happen to have a monkey wrench” asks the motorist.
The farmer scratches his head, and replies: “Yiminy. I bane got brother over to St Cloud, he gots cattle ranch. I bane got uncle back in Wisconsin, he gots ostrich ranch. But too cold here for monkey ranch.”
The Germans didn’t escape either, by the way. Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Done originally included mocking German immigrants as buffoonish drunks.
(Caution: includes reference to immigrants eating pets)
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The guy at the end of the bar, but he has money. Sad AF.
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Eugenics appears to be at the root of Elon Musk’s philosophy as it is with his breeder father. He shares this with a number of Tech Bros although they typically avoid calling it by name; e.g., transhumanism.
Musk and Trump both have daddy issues among other ills.
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“I don’t care what his cult says, I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.” – Mary Trump
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He only ever picks what he thinks you want to hear…
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Trump shares half his genes with his father, but only a quarter with his uncle, and those are the dregs.
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“ Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.”
I’d say rationalize is closer to the mark than justify.
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So you specifically equivocate between the evil that eugenics is, and yet you state “there are no creatures on Earth in whom genetics makes no difference between individuals.”
That’s about the most perniciously evil way I’ve ever seen of tossing together two distantly related ideas as a way to somehow legitimize eugenics. Yes, genes make us all different, but to even suggest that there’s causality between your two ideas simply throws the door wide to anyone who wants to exploit that tiny crack of daylight. There’s a very small step from “genes make us different” to “my genes make me good” to “their genes make those people bad.” They’re very tiny steps and they’re easily taken if that’s what you want to do. I suggest you rethink the connections you were making.
And yes, I read your whole post and I get what you’re trying to say, but I don’t think you realize that despite where you ended up you started by laying the groundwork for eugenics.
I’m certain eugenics is family gospel in the gilded shithole Fat Donnie calls a home. Remember, Friedrich Drumpf (Fat Hitler’s grandfather) was both German and a coward, escaping to America rather than join the Kaiser’s army. So by the time the actual Hitler came along it seems his kid Fred was already well steeped in Nazism as a Klan member in good standing.
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So smart he doesn’t understand how tariffs work. So smart his staff had to make the PDB a powerpoint show of favorable news reports. If smart is in the blood, please explain Jr and Eric.
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i lived in KY at one time.worked at the state capitol…a short distance away was a’home’ for the’retarded’. the women/girls who were confined there, were routinely sterilized , no legalities involved. at the time. it was rumoured that the politicians visited’ the hopsital…this was approx. in the 1950s.
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Well, that would pass the sniff test, so to speak.
Hitler was, of course, a big fan of eugenics.