Eugenics: The Disgusting Pseudoscience of White Supremacy

“Equal Justice Under Law.” “Justice the Guardian of Liberty.”

I was 19 when I first saw those words engraved in huge letters under the pediments of the east and west wings of the U.S. Supreme Court. I remember thinking to myself then that those words were serious enough to believe in. And all these years later, like millions of other Americans, I still do.

One of the deepest sorrows of 2025 is the growing awareness that many of our fellow Americans do not feel that way, never have felt that way and probably never will. They believe that white men, and the well-to-do, are more “equal” than everyone else. Their sense of decency and empathy has been poisoned by a concoction of aristocratic hubris, xenophobic paranoia and the propaganda of eugenics.

These racist and misogynistic elites make up most of the current leadership of the Republican Party that’s learned how to win elections despite its numerical minority. Using massive disinformation campaigns and mastering the geographic subtleties of the electoral college, they’ve bested from time to time a majority that thinks their view of America and humankind is hateful. It’s a majority that still believes in an activist and compassionate government that strives to meet the needs of all Americans, be they rich or poor, man or woman, black or white, healthy or disabled, young or old, or the descendants of Puritans or more recent immigrants.

Lately, an even deeper sorrow comes from the realization that some conservative think tanks that fuel the programs and the rhetoric of the Republican Party, champion the morally nauseating view that some humans are less human, and less worthy of justice, than others.

For all their tricky language disguising their belief in the theory of eugenics, well-funded, pseudoscientific research organizations like the Pioneer Fund, Aporia, the Human Diversity Foundation, the Ulster Institute for Social Research and the New Century Foundation have managed to appeal to mainstream conservative donors despite having been proven conclusively to be scientifically bogus and just plain cruel and wrong.

There is no such thing as genetically inferior and superior human beings. The International Human Genome Project has mapped all genes in the human genome and found conclusively that human beings, all of us, are 99.9% genetically identical, and that “race” and racism have no basis in genetic reality. 

The theory of eugenics is diametrically opposed to those findings. It is at the root of Nazi racial “science,” and ideas like “ethnic cleansing.” It theorizes that human populations can be improved — like vegetables and cattle — through selective breeding, selective liquidation, and other brutal forms of genetic engineering including forced sterilization, the political neutering of academics, the liquidation of artists, poets, reporters and other undesirables, as well as the euthanasia of the old, the infirm and the disabled.

Eugenics and other theories of forced “improvement” provide the “intellectual” underpinnings of those political theories that see ideas like equal justice under law as being detrimental to the racial, gender and social hierarchies upon which their power rests.  That eugenic think tanks exist in our country at all is almost unfathomable to those of us who were raised to believe in the “inalienable rights” of every human being.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the genetic and gender hierarchies implied by the theory of eugenics are part of the propaganda fuel that empowers the pernicious Trumpian Republican agenda. What else would account for xenophobic and bigoted policies that are directed at starving, impoverishing, under-educating, sometimes even kidnapping and abandoning millions of Americans who don’t meet the criteria of Naziesque genetic and social standards? Eugenic think tanks are designed to give bigots the language and arguments they need to convince other disgruntled Americans that there really are bad and unworthy pseudo humans to blame for the wrecking of their world.

The New Century Foundation, for instance, promotes what it calls “racial realism.” One of its publications, “The Color of Crime,” uses fictional science to link criminal behavior and poverty in America to biological differences that allegedly show white people to be less prone to suffer economic hardship caused by inherent criminal and motivational propensities than “other” Americans.

The pseudoscience practices used to justify a belief in eugenics include an oversimplified and willful misunderstanding of genetic science, claiming that genes exclusively control intelligence, morality, social status and economic prowess, completely ignoring the role of culture, family, history and the environment. Eugenicists tend to misuse simple Mendelian genetics that apply to peas and other plants, claiming that social behavior and personal morality can be

changed or eliminated by genetic engineering. Eugenicists are notorious for inventing statistical proofs and jerry-rigging anthropological data.

Aporia, for instance, is a part of the Human Diversity Foundation which has, some claim, modified Nazi propaganda techniques and data manipulation to create an intellectual atmosphere that automatically associates intellectual abilities and mental disabilities with genetic predestination. Aporia’s main goal is to do expand something called the “Overton window,” a phrase that describes what is socially acceptable to talk about in public. It wants to make racist genetic theory, and its hideous labeling of “disfavored” races and “defective” people suffering from physical maladies a normal part of American public discourse.

Eugenic theory enflames prejudice and fuels hate. It doesn’t take a news junkie to realize that racist hate crimes are on the rise in our country. Incidents of Anti-Asian violence, for instance, have soared in this year, according to an organization called Stop AAPI Hate (Anti-Asian and Pacific Islander). AAPI reports that anti-East Asian slurs and other acts of disrespect have jumped by 54% in the last year owing to the normalization of Trumpian xenophobic rhetoric and policies. Anti-Asian hate has been directed even at Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, who is of Indian descent, and at former Republican presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy. It should go without saying that such thinking has no legitimate place in a nation that claims to value Equal Justice Under Law.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it