What is eugenics?

Where it came from

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, derived the term from the Greek word meaning "good in birth" or "good in stock," and first used it in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. A popular eugenics movement then emerged in the United Kingdom and spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and most of Europe.

The science it claimed to rest on was always wrong. Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of "racial improvement." They believed they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity, using methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion to rid society of people deemed "unfit."

What it looked like in practice

The American eugenics movement focused on sterilizing the "feebleminded" while also promoting the racial ideology that white Anglo-Saxons were the "superior" race. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 forced sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions alone. And it did not stop there. Nazi Germany took eugenic ideology further than any other state in history, using it as one of the core justifications for the Holocaust.

The connection to white nationalism and Stephen Miller

This is why the question matters. Eugenics has always been the intellectual skeleton underneath white nationalist ideology: the claim that some people are biologically superior to others, and that society should be arranged around protecting that "stock."

VDARE, the white nationalist site Miller promoted, regularly publishes the work of eugenicists, nativists and other extremists. Miller's emails to Former Breitbart tout eugenics and white nationalist conspiracy theories and offered news tips on how to cover immigration and amplify stories about Black and Hispanic crime. Miller also referred to legislation by former President Calvin Coolidge that limited immigration to the United States based on eugenics. A US Senate resolution introduced in response to these revelations noted that Miller encouraged Breitbart to incorporate white supremacist, racist and eugenics ideologies in its news coverage.

Eugenic ideology has also appeared in the language of highly influential politicians: during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump referred to "bad genes" when discussing immigrants.

Why it is not science

Eugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations, and its implementation has caused widespread harm, particularly to populations that are marginalized. Every serious scientific institution, including the National Human Genome Research Institute, rejects it. Human traits like intelligence, character and behavior are shaped by an enormously complex interaction of genes, environment and experience that no selective breeding program can predict or control.

The practical application of eugenics has, without exception in history, ended in atrocity: forced sterilizations, ethnic cleansing, genocide. That is not a coincidence. It is what the logic of the ideology produces when it reaches power.