The Republican Lust for Eugenics

For decades, the Republican Party has cast itself as a force for morality — the home of the “pro-life” movement and the representative of “Christian values.”

However, in private, some Republicans seem more attracted to 21st-century eugenics — a movement designed to improve the white race by eliminating millions who are not white, not straight, not disabled, and not Christian.

The Trump administration wants some of us to go away.

The History of American Eugenics

After World War I, eugenics was seen as a way to end the burden of caring for the sick and mentally ill. Eugenicists figured that if they could breed undesirable traits out of animals and plants, why couldn’t they apply those same principles to the human race?

They could simply prevent the birth of the sick, the feeble-minded, and supposedly unassimilable minorities.

The influx of immigrants before World War I had raised anxieties about demographic shifts. Foreigners — or so the thinking went — were bringing crime and poverty. Bad traits were supposedly being smuggled into the country in the very blood of immigrants.

Eugenicists wanted more breeding among people thought to possess genes for leadership and honesty, and less breeding among those believed to carry genes for low intelligence and depravity.

The supposedly dangerous groups at the time included Germans, Poles, the Irish, and Italians — including the ancestors of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

In the 1920s, American authors like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were praised by the founders of the Third Reich.

The movement stopped, of course, at the end of World War II. The association of eugenics with Nazi medical abuses ensured that public support for eugenics would no longer be tenable.

But the eugenic impulse remains.

COVID-19 and the Politics of Survival

Just go back to 2020 and COVID-19. The Republican plan was to let COVID rip in order to save the economy.

COVID deaths would remove unwelcome people and disposable workers — Black or brown, poor, or living with disabilities — from the rolls of the social programs Republicans dislike.

Disease and death would once again become a sorting mechanism.

The recent “Big Beautiful Bill” allowed funding cuts to safety-net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These programs serve the most vulnerable U.S. residents — people with disabilities, those experiencing poverty, and those already struggling to access adequate healthcare and nutrition.

The Global Consequences of Cutting Aid

It doesn’t stop with the unwelcome in America.

The Trump administration’s closure of USAID removed humanitarian and development assistance from people around the world living in the worst conditions.

As many as 95 million people could be denied basic healthcare and nutrition, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths per year.

The halting of funding for USAID, as well as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), could cause an additional 4–11 million new HIV infections and up to 2.9 million HIV-related deaths between 2025 and 2030.

Eugenics and “End-Times Fascism”

Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein have co-authored the book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. They describe “end-times fascism” as an alliance of wealthy elites and reactionaries who profit from societal collapse, the climate crisis, and technological disruption.

The three primary groups include:

• Religious end-timers: Christian nationalists and extremists who welcome or attempt to hasten apocalyptic prophecy.
• Tech end-timers: Silicon Valley billionaires and “tech bros” driving unconstrained AI development while building private bunkers or planning off-planet escapes.
• Ethnonationalist end-timers: Populist and white supremacist movements that treat the nation itself as a gated, exclusionary bunker against a dehumanized “other.”

These groups view mass suffering as inevitable or even desirable — a sorting mechanism.

Liberals, of course, will automatically reject any social program or law enforcement policy that results in death. The liberal mission is completely based on “empathy” in all its forms. Liberals automatically take the side of the oppressed.

But some Republicans find this too timid and too sentimental. They do not mind seeing a little “thinning of the herd.”

The Republican mission is based on “winning” — including laughing at the weak and taking joy in inflicting pain.

The Republican Rejection of “Woke” Culture

Republicans hark back to an age when “men were men,” and no one worried about using the right pronouns or showing sympathy for the “underprivileged” hordes.

When Elon Musk was told that one of his daughters planned to come out as transgender, he said that she was now dead to him.

The real enemy of Republicans is every aspect of “woke” culture — the pronouns, the smarmy sympathies, the shackles on the police, and the apologies for what they consider rightful violence.

Eugenics is but a part of their real will to power.