To be clear, the news media did not imply intent on the part of manufacturers, but I would like to remind everyone that breakfast cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg was part of a coalition of powerful American eugenicists who aggressively pushed abortion and forced sterilization policies since the 1910s, before handing off leadership of the (grotesquely racist) global eugenics movement to Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s after an outraged American public started pushing back. Kellogg’s version of Hitler’s later policies were advanced by his own organization, the Race Betterment Foundation.

If you’re wondering why so many people suddenly need IVF services today to procreate that their numbers can skew elections, perhaps you have your answer – or a partial one: The elites have once again been caught replacing the natural world and its processes (think Monsanto) with artificial ones that, conveniently, also generate income for themselves. (The craven, highly profitable “transgender” surgical industry is another glaring example.)

Ever since Thomas Malthus predicted (falsely) in 1798 that human population would soon outstrip food supplies, “Malthusianism” has been a central tenet and motivator of the global elites. The two obvious questions Malthusianism raised were 1) how to produce more food, and 2) how to limit population. In the present era, Kellogg’s now multinational conglomerate apparently figured out how to do both simultaneously.

But a third obvious question arose among the elite aristos of Malthus’ era (who in many cases were literally “en-titled” members of royal dynasties) who assumed for themselves the right to set laws and social policies to steer the world toward their vision of the future. That question was “If population must be reduced, who do we keep and who do we get rid of?” Out of the contemplation of that question was born “eugenics,” formalized by Charles Darwin’s nephew Francis Galton and expanded worldwide through international conferences and networking. The meme and motto of the movement emerged in the Second International Eugenics Conference (1921) in the form of the infamous “Eugenics Tree” logo, captioned “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution.”

It is widely believed that eugenics ideology died out after World War II due to its association with Nazi Germany, but in reality it just faded into the background where, due to technological advances in genetics, robotics and artificial intelligence, it slowly but fully morphed into “transhumanism.”

From antiquity in Judeo-Christian civilization, human fertility had always been considered both a personal blessing and a social priority. “Be fruitful and multiply” was one of God’s first commands – and it has never been rescinded despite what people may think under the ever-rising pressure of Malthusian anti-family propaganda by Bill Gates and his ilk.

Biblically speaking, in vitro fertilization is not evil in itself. In at least one instance, when the normal fertilization failed in the Bible, God endorsed an alternative. The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38:1-10 indicates that surrogate impregnation of a woman by a close male relative of her husband was socially expected, even mandated if her husband died. Indeed, when Judah’s son Onan deliberately spilled his seed on the ground during sex with Tamar to avoid his procreative duty to his deceased brother Er, God killed him for it!

Onan’s crime was not masturbation as some teach, but refusal to impregnate Tamar for the perpetuation of Er’s line. It was an anti-fertility crime – as is the presumed elite population-control campaign using anti-fertility chemicals. Let’s not forget that Gates (whose father was a Planned Parenthood board member) and the ultra-corrupt WHO stand accused of putting such chemicals in tetanus vaccines for women in Africa. Leftist media “fact checkers” dispute that, but who believes anything from them after the Twitter Files exposé? Follow the money and the ideology to find the truth.

Prior to advances in anti-fertility chemistry by Big Pharma, surgical sterilization was the primary preventive measure of the eugenicists, and abortion (pre-birth infanticide) was their back-up system. These were relatively small-scale operations from the 1920s through the ’40s, centered on ethnic minorities, but then in the 1950s the elites launched the “sexual revolution” to divorce sexuality from fertility (and family) as a universal social priority and to fully normalize every form of anti-fertility and anti-family practice and policy. The porn industry, the no-fault divorce movement, radical feminist ideology, the abortion industry, the LGBT movement and the pharmaceutical birth-control tsunami were all elements of this strategy that made supposedly “consequence-free” (meaning pregnancy free) sex the highest aim of Western civilization. It has always been about population control.

The weakest link in the eugenicist game plan has always been women, because God designed them as baby-makers and nurturers, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Turning women against their own nature has always required massive effort and expense by the elites, with limited success. Time and life experience has always been on the side of nature with even many of the most virulent self-centered feminists in their teens and 20s later escaping the net and reconnecting with their mothering instincts. I think the attack on women we’re seeing by these same elites using transgenderism is in fact punishment driven by frustration and rage that the Malthusian’s methods just aren’t working. Yes, there is still a large pro-abortion contingent in the electorate, even including women who have otherwise reverted to a more natural version of themselves, but it’s not unbreakable.

I believe the answer to all of it is for men, individually and collectively, to start affirming true femininity and natural womanhood with all the confidence of a conquering army and the passion of an election campaign. Bypass the battlegrounds the left has chosen for themselves and go right to the women, letting them know they are valuable and needed just as God made them. Because the only real antidote to the culture of lies and artificiality enslaving our society today is honest interactions among real people who speak plain truth and pursue a return to the God’s natural order in their own lives. Neither Malthusianism, nor eugenics, nor transhumanism have any place or power in that world.

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“There’s no issue with flying,” the pilot could be heard saying, “but we need to go back to New York as we can’t resecure the horse.”

Apparently, animals escaping on planes isn’t all that unusual. Last month, an otter and a rat caused mayhem on a flight from Thailand to Taiwan. Earlier this month, a young bear managed to escape on a flight from Baghdad to Dubai.

Animals don’t belong on airplanes. They don’t feel at home high in the sky, it’s unnatural. They have to be heavily sedated to get them through the terrifying experience. I guess they didn’t give those animals enough drugs.

It made me think about what I’m writing today. The governments, corporations and scientists that invest our money (and pay themselves billions of our dollars in the process) to research and experiment on our bodies by altering the very language of life, our DNA, are sure they have everything under control. But what makes them think they can control life and mold it to their will when they don’t even know how it started or the mystery of that spark.

And perhaps one day we ordinary humans will regret giving ourselves over so naively to be analyzed and dissected by these greedy, short-sighted and power-hungry overlords. They promise that their experiments are for our own good, to make us safer, healthier and happier, when their real desire is to extract every bit of information from our DNA in order to create something new and improved—and synthetic.

It was exactly one year ago at the G20 Summit in Indonesia that world leaders signed a “Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports”, as well as amendments to its pandemic treaty that would “require swift action by countries and the WHO during an emergency and give the WHO greater powers to act during a crisis”. The plan was to “introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel”.

The G20 promised that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization (WHO) standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May of 2023.

“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So, for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr. Sadikin said.

What exactly some movement of the people means remains to be seen.

In a statement, the leaders affirmed two goals:

• Their respective countries’ support of the WHO mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines. (I wrote about these hubs in Building the mRNA Empire.)
• Their commitment to a globalized ‘vaccination passport’.

True to their promise one year ago, on June 2, 2023, the WHO announced the launch of a landmark digital health initiative to be rolled out in Europe:

WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics.

So far, the U.S. doesn’t have a national inoculation database. However, there are many other ways that our DNA is collected, often without our knowledge or permission.

As early as 1990, the FBI began building its treasure trove of DNA. Since then, it has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the FBI’s request to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year.

What started as a way to monitor violent criminals or sex offenders, is now a way to collect the DNA of any “person of interest”.

But that isn’t all.

Over the years, scientists have been perfecting their methods for collecting DNA and have turned their attention to environmental DNA, or eDNA.

An inexpensive tool for ecologists, eDNA is everywhere — floating in the air, water, snow, food, your last cup of coffee. The eDNA technology is used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens.

A study demonstrated that scientists could recover medical and ancestry information from minute fragments of human DNA lingering in the environment. DNA of specific individuals can be recovered from spaces such as office buildings, apartment buildings, airports, restaurants.

Recently, researchers descended on the small town of St. Augustine, Florida and, from a “soda-can-size sample of water from a creek”, recovered “enough mitochondrial DNA — passed directly from mother to child for thousands of generations — to generate a snapshot of the genetic ancestry of the population around the creek…. One mitochondrial sample was even complete enough to meet the requirements for the federal missing persons database. They also found key mutations shown to carry a higher risk of diabetes, cardiac issues or several eye diseases”.

Scientists assure us that such eDNA samples will only be used for good by helping to predict pandemics, or uncovering mutations that cause a disease within a community.

Yet, those same eDNA samples could equally be used to find and persecute ethnic minorities or people who are prone to certain illnesses. If you carry it a step further and into the realm of biowarfare, certain groups could purposely be infected with illnesses while the rest of the population would not.

“This gives a powerful new tool to authorities,” said Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who studies the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics research. “There’s internationally plenty of reason, I think, to be concerned.”

Countries like China already conduct extensive and explicit genetic tracking of minority populations, including Tibetans and Uighurs. Tools like eDNA analysis could make it that much easier.

Knowing the DNA of an ethnic group means that they could be targeted with biowarfare.

An NIH article Biological Warfare: Infectious Disease and Bioterrorism puts it like this:

Although we rarely perceive it this way, infectious disease is just another manifestation of biological warfare that is ubiquitous throughout life. The evolutionary relationship between hosts and pathogens is essentially a never-ending arms race. When a pathogen evolves a new toxin, the host evolves a response to it. Humanity has taken this arms race one step further by utilizing technology such as vaccines and industrial-scale manufacturing of antibiotics. However, the microbes are fighting back.

Scientists think they can control nature. But they have no idea the long-term consequences of their actions. As humanity’s natural immune system is destroyed by toxic chemicals, drugs, and the very technology that we are promised will save us, experts aren’t suggesting we return to natural remedies and a healthier lifestyle, rather we must ingest more and more of the synthetic drugs perpetuating our illnesses.

Those who get richer and more powerful thanks to the drug and surveillance industries, know very well the dangers this course poses for humanity, yet they keep doing it anyway. It is a way to keep the populace docile and under their control.

Any DNA floating around can be used by authorities to track the populace, to incriminate a person, or to biologically attack them.

Recent developments in synthetic biology—which the National Academy of Sciences defines as “concepts, approaches, and tools which enable the modification or creation of biological organisms”—pose a profound threat. Synthetic bioweapons (SNBWs) can be engineered to target very specific populations or individuals.

Once your DNA leaves your body, it is no longer yours. What are the rules of privacy then? They do not exist. It is a free-for-all.

“Just by breathing, you’re discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you,” Lewis said.

If authorities collect your DNA, it doesn’t just affect you, it also affects “family members and, in some contexts, communities,” said Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, a biomedical ethicist at Columbia University.

“DNA tracks to your extended relatives, tracks forward in time to your children, tracks backward in time to your ancestors,” Ms. Murphy added. “In the future, who knows what DNA will tell us about people or how it might be used?”

Which leads us to the CDC’s announcement of its new Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program.

International travelers arriving at participating airports can volunteer to self-collect nasal swab samples which are then shipped to a laboratory network. Samples that test positive for SARS-CoV-2 undergo whole genome sequencing to determine variants.

However, do not think this is in any way just about Covid. Covid was the excuse to set up a system tracking and monitoring ordinary citizens.

The CDC and Gingko Bioworks are leading the Future of Disease Surveillance:

According to Ginkgo’s press release:

Concentric by Ginkgo, the biosecurity and public health unit of Ginkgo Bioworks, and XpresCheck by XWELL, are partnering to expand their work with the CDC to monitor more than 30 new viruses, bacteria, and antimicrobial resistance targets including several seasonal respiratory pathogens, such as influenza A and B, RSV, and SARS-CoV-2. The partners continue to help the CDC grow TGS’s capabilities to detect pathogens as early as possible, allowing for the best public health response.

The program expansion will launch at four of the program’s seven major international airports (New York, JFK, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC, Dulles).

The TGS program has proven to be an agile and beneficial asset to public health officials in the United States—quickly adapting to an evolving pandemic in real time since it launched in 2021. As of October 2023, TGS has enlisted over 370,000 travelers and maintains an ongoing enrollment of around 6,000 volunteer travelers weekly. The program covers travelers from all World Health Organization regions and more than 135 countries. Since its inception, the program has sequenced more than 14,000 samples and made the genomic data available on several public health platforms to enable further analysis. The expansion will enhance the program’s ability to monitor and change focus as needed to identify priority pathogens. The TGS program can augment global surveillance systems, especially as testing and sequencing information become limited as Covid-19 monitoring wanes.

“We thank the volunteers who elect to swab their noses in service to our national security and public health.”
ExpresCheck CEO Ezra Ernst

So, what is GINKGO BIOWORKS?

It’s a one-stop-shop that describes itself as “BIOLOGY BY DESIGN”. You can go on the website and “explore Ginkgo’s capabilities for therapeutics and vaccines, agriculture, nutrition and wellness, and more”.

Since 2015, when Gingko was the first biotech company to be accepted for seed funding by Y Combinator, Ginkgo has raised $429 million, which includes $275 million in funding from Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment and others. Ginkgo is reportedly now worth over $1 billion.

Ginkgo Bioworks is the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, providing flexible, end-to-end services that solve challenges for organizations across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to pharmaceuticals to industrial and specialty chemicals. Ginkgo’s biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, is building global infrastructure for biosecurity to empower governments, communities, and public health leaders to prevent, detect and respond to a wide variety of biological threats.

Here are some of the ways Gingko Bioworks is extending its reach:

• Gingko Bioworks is partnering with Penn State University to “integrate its biosurveillance capabilities into the university’s research of 58 wildlife species for SARS-CoV-2 to monitor potential spillover to humans”.
• It is setting up a BIO4 campus in Serbia, an initiative that has already gathered “more than 1,000 PhD scientists from 17 scientific institutions, and the campus itself will open in 2026. BIO4 brings together the research centers of companies active in biomedicine, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biodiversity. Partnerships have already been signed with AstraZeneca, BGI, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, and more.
• To feed a rapidly growing population on a warming planet, society needs to develop innovative new technologies to grow and distribute food. At Ginkgo, we are working towards a future where genetic engineering can help make foods that are sustainable, healthier, delicious, and accessible to everyone.
• In 2017, Gingko acquired Gen9, where scientists “manipulate DNA” to create “new life forms that do things we tell them to do”. They are “building nanobot factories that will produce microscopic biological machines programmed to make things more efficient and effective”. They are “dissecting organisms and putting them back together to make biological nanobots that perform functions for their creator”.

One of these legendary creators, and a founder of Gen9, is George Church, who in 2018, co-founded Nebula Genomics, a personal genomics company that offers a “whole-genome sequencing service”.

In fact, the company is developing its own blockchain. It claims it will help you “decode all your genes and identify mutations”, “learn about the genetics of your mind”, “use genetic information to extend your life”, and so on. All of this can be yours, in exchange for your “genomic and personal data” so that you can “contribute to future discoveries”.

Yes, everyone wants your data, they are just salivating to get it.

Bill Gates is another one of those creators who is investing big in genomic surveillance and genomic sequencing, along with Gingko, the US CDC and Africa CDC.

Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative, which launched in 2020 as a joint initiative of the Africa CDC and member states of the African Union.

Dr. David Blazes, Deputy Director on the Gates Foundation’s Global Health team: We’ve really seen this initiative take off in the past year. For example, at the start of 2021 there were about 5,600 sequences of SARS-COV-2 in existence and by the end of 2021, there were over 60,000. The initial plan was to phase-in labs in 20 countries over four years, but the initiative has already expanded to 45 countries.

Short term goals involved Covid, but Covid was just the beginning. As Dr. Blazes explains,

“In the medium-term, we hope that the initiative is able to also address cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Longer term plans include building links between genomic surveillance and local manufacturing of diagnostics, medicines and vaccines. We’ll also be eager to see the types of networks that are built between labs—as well as ministries of health and the Africa CDC.”

How far are we willing to go in giving up our data to the Vast Machine and those who are feeding it. We cannot even breathe without our DNA being collected and analyzed. But don’t worry, it’s all for the greater good, just like George Church assures us.

Prof. George Church’s the Human Genome Project-Write is developing technologies for large-scale engineering of human genomes. Thanks to advancements in synthetic biology, he dreams of reviving the woolly mammoth by inserting mammoth DNA into elephant skin cells which can then be turned into stem cells and used to produce embryos.

This is called “creating the world of tomorrow”.

But it’s not really about making you or me healthier, it’s not really even about bringing woolly mammals back to life, although that’s a great selling point. Once again, all roads lead back to the elites wanting to live forever—and using us as lab rats to do so.

Here’s the scruffy, bearded, elderly Church telling Stephen Colbert how he expects to live forever.

Church excitedly tells Colbert how he’s demonstrated age reversal in animals and Colbert jokingly asks if he cuts a check could he maybe get on the list of folks who will be made younger?

“It’s who you know, that’s how you live forever,” says Colbert.

It’s a joke, but it isn’t really.

Nope, your DNA isn’t being collected at the airport because the government cares about your health and safety and whether or not you have the flu and if you might pass it on to someone else.

It’s all about collecting masses of DNA from the populace, feeding it to the Vast Machine to read and interpret it, using CRISPR to edit it—which I didn’t go into here, but I have in other essays such as Techno Eugenics—so that a new race can be born that will live forever.

No matter which way we turn, all roads seem to lead to this unattainable destination. Just like the horse let loose at 30,000 feet, they aren’t going to be able to put this genie back in the bottle.

About the Author

Karen Hunt [aka KH Mesek] is an author and illustrator of 19 children’s books, the YA series Night Angels Chronicles and the science fiction novel, LUMINARIA: Tales of Earth & Oran, Love & Revenge, to be published in August. She recently returned from living in Luxor, Egypt where she started the first boxing club for girls. Having lived and traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, she is devoting her time to writing essays related to the loss of freedom in the West. You can read more of her work, or sign up to her newsletter, here. You can’t follow her twitter any longer, as she’s been banned.

There is a real history here to consult.

There’s no better case study than the use of eugenics: the science, so called, of breeding a better race of human beings. It was popular in the Progressive Era and following, and it heavily informed US government policy. Back then, the scientific consensus was all in for public policy founded on high claims of perfect knowledge based on expert research. There was a cultural atmosphere of panic (“race suicide!”) and a clamor for the experts to put together a plan to deal with it.

The American Society of Human Genetics recently issued a report apologizing for its past role in eugenics. The statement is fine as far as it goes and provides a brief overview of eugenic history. However, the report, if anything, is too narrow and too weak.

Eugenics was not merely bigotry with a gloss of science. Over time it became the driving force behind segregation, sterilization, labor-market exclusion of the “unfit,” the careful management of immigration, marriage and procreation licenses, demographics, and far more. The underlying presumption always concerned the biological health of the whole population, which these elites imagined to be their exclusive purview. Based on that core idea, eugenic ideology came to be deeply embedded in ruling-class circles in academia, courts, elite media, and finance. Indeed, it was so orthodox that it was hardly disputed in polite company. Eugenic dreams filled the pages of newspapers, journals, and magazines – nearly all of them.

Let’s start with Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward (1867–1931), who is credited with holding the first chair of climatology in the United States. He was a consummate member of the academic establishment. He was editor of the American Meteorological Journal, president of the Association of American Geographers, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Meteorological Society of London.

He also had an avocation. He was a founder of the American Restriction League. It was one of the first organizations to advocate reversing the traditional American policy of free immigration and replacing it with a “scientific” approach rooted in Darwinian evolutionary theory and the policy of eugenics. Centered in Boston, the league eventually expanded to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Its science inspired a dramatic change in US policy over labor law, marriage policy, city planning, and, its greatest achievements, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act. These were the first-ever legislated limits on the number of immigrants who could come to the United States.

“Darwin and his followers laid the foundation of the science of eugenics,” Dr. Ward alleged in his manifesto published in the North American Review in July 1910. “They have shown us the methods and possibilities of the product of new species of plants and animals…. In fact, artificial selection has been applied to almost every living thing with which man has close relations except man himself.”

“Why,” Ward demanded, “should the breeding of man, the most important animal of all, alone be left to chance?”

By “chance,” of course, he meant choice.

“Chance” is how the scientific establishment regarded the free society with human rights. Freedom was considered to be unplanned, anarchic, chaotic, and potentially deadly for the race. To the Progressives, freedom needed to be replaced by a planned society administered by experts in their fields. It would be another 100 years before climatologists themselves became part of the policy-planning apparatus of the state, so Professor Ward busied himself in racial science and the advocacy of immigration restrictions.

Ward explained that the United States had a “remarkably favorable opportunity for practising eugenic principles.” And there was a desperate need to do so, because “already we have not hundreds of thousands, but millions of Italians and Slavs and Jews whose blood is going into the new American race.” This trend could cause Anglo-Saxon America to “disappear.” Without eugenic policy, the “new American race” will not be a “better, stronger, more intelligent race” but rather a “weak and possibly degenerate mongrel.”

Citing a report from the New York Immigration Commission, Ward was particularly worried about mixing American Anglo-Saxon blood with “long-headed Sicilians and those of the round-headed east European Hebrews.” “We certainly ought to begin at once to segregate, far more than we now do, all our native and foreign-born population which is unfit for parenthood,” Ward wrote. “They must be prevented from breeding.”

But even more effective, Ward wrote, would be strict quotas on immigration. While “our surgeons are doing a wonderful work,” he wrote, they can’t keep up in filtering out people with physical and mental disabilities pouring into the country and diluting the racial stock of Americans, turning us into “degenerate mongrels.”

Such were the policies dictated by eugenic science, which, far from being seen as quackery from the fringe, was in the mainstream of academic opinion. President Woodrow Wilson, America’s first professorial president, embraced eugenic policy. So did Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who, in upholding Virginia’s sterilization law, wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Looking through the literature of the era, we are struck by the near absence of dissenting voices on the topic. Popular books advocating eugenics and white supremacy, such as The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, became immediate bestsellers and for many years after publication. The opinions in these books — which are not for the faint of heart — were expressed long before the Nazi experience discredited such policies. They reflect the thinking of an entire generation, and are much more frank than one would expect to read now.

These opinions were not just about pushing racism as an aesthetic or personal preference. Eugenics was about the politics of health: using the state to plan and curate the population toward its biological well-being. It should not be surprising, then, that the entire anti-immigration movement was steeped in eugenics ideology. Indeed, the more we look into this history, the less we are able to separate the anti-immigrant movement of the Progressive Era from white supremacy in its rawest form.

Shortly after Ward’s article appeared, the climatologist called on his friends to influence legislation. Restriction League president Prescott Hall and Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office began the effort to pass a new law with specific eugenic intent. It sought to limit the immigration of southern Italians and Jews in particular. And immigration from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Asia did indeed plummet.

Immigration wasn’t the only policy affected by eugenic ideology. Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003, 2012) documents how eugenics was central to Progressive Era politics. An entire generation of academics, politicians, and philanthropists used bad science to plot the extermination of undesirables. Laws requiring sterilization claimed 60,000 victims. Given the attitudes of the time, it’s surprising that the carnage in the United States was so low. Europe, however, was not as fortunate.

Eugenics became part of the standard curriculum in biology, with William Castle’s 1916 Genetics and Eugenics commonly used for over 15 years, with four iterative editions.

Literature and the arts were not immune. John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (2005) shows how the eugenics mania affected the entire modernist literary movement of the United Kingdom, with such famed minds as T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence getting wrapped up in it.

Remarkably, even economists fell under the sway of eugenic pseudoscience. Thomas Leonard’s explosively brilliant Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016) documents in excruciating detail how eugenic ideology corrupted the entire economics profession in the first two decades of the 20th century.

Across the board, in the books and articles of the profession, you find all the usual concerns about race suicide, the poisoning of the national bloodstream by inferiors, and the desperate need for state planning to breed people the way ranchers breed animals. Here we find the template for the first-ever large-scale implementation of scientific social and economic policy.

Students of the history of economic thought will recognize the names of these advocates: Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, Irving Fisher, Henry Rogers Seager, Arthur N. Holcombe, Simon Patten, John Bates Clark, Edwin R.A. Seligman, and Frank Taussig. They were the leading members of the professional associations, the editors of journals, and the high-prestige faculty members of the top universities. It was a given among these men that classical political economy had to be rejected. There was a strong element of self-interest at work. As Leonard puts it, “Laissez-faire was inimical to economic expertise and thus an impediment to the vocational imperatives of American economics.”

Irving Fisher, whom Joseph Schumpeter described as “the greatest economist the United States has ever produced” (an assessment later repeated by Milton Friedman), urged Americans to “make of eugenics a religion.”

Speaking at the Race Betterment Conference in 1915, Fisher said eugenics was “the foremost plan of human redemption.” The American Economic Association (which is still today the most prestigious trade association of economists) published openly racist tracts such as the chilling Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Frederick Hoffman. It was a blueprint for the segregation, exclusion, dehumanization, and eventual extermination of the black race.

Hoffman’s book called American blacks “lazy, thriftless, and unreliable,” and well on their way to a condition of “total depravity and utter worthlessness.” Hoffman contrasted them with the “Aryan race,” which is “possessed of all the essential characteristics that make for success in the struggle for the higher life.”

Even as Jim Crow restrictions were tightening against blacks, and the full weight of state power was being deployed to wreck their economic prospects, the American Economic Association’s tract said that the white race “will not hesitate to make war upon those races who prove themselves useless factors in the progress of mankind.” Crucially, the concern here was not just raw bigotry; it was purification of the population from inferior poisons. The dirty races needed to be separated from the clean one, and ideally eliminated altogether – essentially the same rationale behind the exclusion of the unvaccinated from public accommodations in New York City only two years ago.

Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association, advocated segregation of nonwhites (he seemed to have a special loathing of the Chinese) and state measures to prohibit their propagation. He took issue with the very “existence of these feeble persons.” He also supported state-mandated sterilization, segregation, and labor-market exclusion.

That such views were not considered shocking tells us so much about the intellectual climate of the time.

If your main concern is who is bearing whose children, and how many, it makes sense to focus on labor and income. Only the fit should be admitted to the workplace, the eugenicists argued. The unfit should be excluded so as to discourage their immigration and, once here, their propagation. This was the origin of the minimum wage, a policy designed to erect a high wall to the “unemployables.”

Another implication follows from eugenic policy: government must control women. It must control their comings and goings. It must control their work hours — or whether they work at all. As Leonard documents, here we find the origin of the maximum-hour workweek and many other interventions against the free market.

Women had been pouring into the workforce for the last quarter of the 19th century, gaining the economic power to make their own choices. Minimum wages, maximum hours, safety regulations, and so on passed in state after state during the first two decades of the 20th century and were carefully targeted to exclude women from the workforce. The purpose was to control contact, manage breeding, and reserve the use of women’s bodies for the production of the master race.

Leonard explains:

American labor reformers found eugenic dangers nearly everywhere women worked, from urban piers to home kitchens, from the tenement block to the respectable lodging house, and from factory floors to leafy college campuses. The privileged alumna, the middle-class boarder, and the factory girl were all accused of threatening Americans’ racial health.

Paternalists pointed to women’s health. Social purity moralists worried about women’s sexual virtue. Family-wage proponents wanted to protect men from the economic competition of women. Maternalists warned that employment was incompatible with motherhood. Eugenicists feared for the health of the race.

“Motley and contradictory as they were,” Leonard adds, “all these progressive justifications for regulating the employment of women shared two things in common. They were directed at women only. And they were designed to remove at least some women from employment.”

If you doubt this, see the work of Edward A. Ross and his book Sin and Society (1907). This eugenicist combined pseudo-science and secularized puritanism to argue for the total exclusion of women from the workplace, and to do so in the New York Times of all places.

Today we find eugenic aspirations to be appalling. We rightly value the freedom of association, or so we believed before Covid lockdowns imposed stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business and church closures, and so on. It all came as quite the shock because we thought we had a social consensus that freedom of choice does not threaten biological suicide but rather points to the strength of a social and economic system.

Following World War II, there developed a social consensus that we don’t want scientists using the state to cobble together a master race at the expense of freedom. But in the first half of the century, and not just in Nazi Germany, eugenic ideology was conventional scientific wisdom, and hardly ever questioned except by a handful of old-fashioned advocates of human principles of social organization.

The eugenicists’ books sold in the millions, and their concerns became primary in the public mind. Dissenting scientists — and there were some — were excluded by the profession and dismissed as cranks attached to a bygone era.

Eugenic views had a monstrous influence over government policy, and they ended free association in labor, marriage, and migration. Indeed, the more you look at this history, the more it becomes clear that eugenic pseudoscience became an intellectual foundation of modern statecraft.

Why is there so little public knowledge of this period and the motivations behind its progress? Why has it taken so long for scholars to blow the lid off this history? The partisans of the state regulation of society have no reason to talk about it, and today’s successors of eugenic ideology want to distance themselves from the past as much as possible. The result has been a conspiracy of silence.

There are, however, lessons to be learned. When you hear of some impending crisis that can only be solved by scientists working with public officials and other commanding heights to force people into a new pattern that is contrary to their free will, there is reason to raise an eyebrow, no matter the excuse. Science is a process of discovery, not an end state, and its consensus of the moment should not be enshrined in the law and imposed at gunpoint.

We need only look at current US law on the right of foreigners to visit this country. The US does not allow the unvaccinated even to come see the Statue of Liberty in person. But unvaccinated US passport holders can, all in the name of public health. It’s a strange mix of nationalism and bogus health claims. And they say that eugenics is no more!

We’ve been there and done that, and the world is rightly repulsed by the results. Keep in mind: we have solid historical and contemporary proof that eugenic ambitions are capable of sweeping up the most elite intellectuals and policy circles. The dream of curating the population by force to make it more fit is a historical reality and not nearly as discredited as people tend to believe. It can always make a return in new guise, with new language, and new excuses.

I’m sure you can think of many signs that this is happening today. The driving force of eugenics was not merely racism or bogus theories of genetic fitness for living a full life, as the American Society of Human Genetics claims. The core was a broader assertion that one scientific consensus should override human choice. And that consensus implausibly centered on issues of human health: one central agency knew the way forward whereas regular people and their choices in life represented a non-compliance threat.

How deep this fixation runs and how far they will get before popular moral revulsion stops them is the question. In the meantime, we need not take consolation from the high-profile statements by professional organizations that they are done with dividing the population by those who are fit to live freely and those who are not.

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Article cross-posted from Brownstone.