"Bible of scientific racism": The origins of Donald Trump's obsession with genes

[marmar]

“Bible of scientific racism”: The origins of Donald Trump’s obsession with genes
Trump’s racial purity project echoes our nation’s eugenical past

By Joel Edward Goza
Published October 13, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump started his week on the campaign trail Monday talking about the “bad genes” carried by immigrants — just one of many comments he’s made in recent months that align genetic makeup with essential value as a human being. On Friday, he traveled to Colorado, a state not even in contention this cycle, to whip up anti-immigrant fervor that he’s long stoked.

Link to tweet

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(Madison) Grant was an aristocrat from New York who worked at the cutting edge of the eugenics movement by penning “The Passing of the Great Race” which became, in the words of his biographer Jonathan Spiro, “the Bible of Scientific Racism.” When it comes to the influencers who molded our nation’s racial consciousness and public policies, Grant and his movement have few equals during the first half of the 20th Century. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, racial scientists labored to transform the myths of the age of slavery and the more modern racist fictions of the Ku Klux Klan into scientifically verified facts. Grant and his eugenicist comrades strove to make America’s public policies as brutal as the racial science’s coldhearted facts.

For eugenicists, everything traced back to one’s genes, and their policies proved as classist as they were racist. No provisions for the poor were to be provided, for destitution was demanded to drive inferior people to productivity. Deep investment in public education was seen as a waste of public resources and segregation was demanded as a necessity for national survival. Most importantly, no tolerance for immigrants could be allowed, for they would threaten the blood of “the master race” and the genetic fabric that undergirded America’s exceptionalism.

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Yet, since Germany learned so much from America, to truly understand Trump and the forces that continue to make him a unique and generational threat to the future of democracy in America, no transatlantic trip to Europe is needed. The truth is that for the past decade, Trump has given a platform for America’s most deeply-seated racist and classist convictions and fears. His playbook is cut from Madison Grant’s American-made eugenical cloth. Like Grant, Trump has committed himself to making America’s racism more explicit, transparent, and politically powerful. Like Grant, Trump has weaponized his racial fears to war against democracy itself and our nation’s most vulnerable people. Like Grant, the cruelty was and is the point. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/13/bible-of-scientific-racism-the-origins-of-donald-trumps-obsession-with-genes/

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. In my lowly opinion, it has nothing to do with the bible, but everything to do with

Hitler.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Oh, PUHLEEEAZE ... ***PSEUDO***scientific at best.

Pseudointellectual garbage dressed up in the language of, and imitating the form of, science.

Bad premises, sloppy logic, unrestrained speculation do not constitute "science".

The Salon article is a good, albeit short, read, marred only by the clumsy phrase "racial science’s coldhearted facts." These were "alternate facts", long before that phrase was created.