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Former president Donald Trump, in his inimitable way, has done at least one service to the cause of honesty. In his blundering ramblings, he regularly exposes the racism, and its science-flavored pseudoscientific companion, eugenics, that still wounds America.
“You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said this month on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, amid one rant against immigrants, by far the most popular target of hate for his fans. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he added.
The line is straight out of eugenics, the deeply dishonest scientism that in the early 20th century convinced many people that criminality, poverty and a host of other ills were all inherited. Embraced by many scientists, and publications that included Scientific American,“the science of breeding better men” led to rampant state sterilizations of poor women and inspired Nazi rationalizations for the murder of Jews, Romani, Poles, Ukrainians and others in death camps during World War II.
Though eugenics has been discredited in science, the language related to...