From Inquest:
In an October interview with Hugh Hewitt, President-elect Donald Trump decried the alleged influx of immigrants under the Biden administration, asserting that many were violent criminals. “You know, now, a murderer—it’s in their genes” he told Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” This remark is consistent with Trump’s longstanding fascination with genetic determinism, going as far back as his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, where he wrote: “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In both instances, Trump’s comments echo the discredited science of eugenics.
Eugenics, a pseudoscience widely accepted in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, sought to improve society by breeding undesirable genetic traits out of the population. Marginalized groups—including the poor, people of color, disabled people, and other targets of criminalization—were subjected to coercive policies such as compulsory sterilization, which aimed to eliminate their “defective” genetic stock. Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” stated preference for Nordic immigrants, and endorsement of “great replacement theory” all evoke archaic eugenic tropes.
But Trump’s rhetoric linking eugenics with criminality and business acumen also reflects this dark history. In my book Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime, I demonstrate how eugenics shaped key features of the U.S. criminal justice and regulatory systems. During the Progressive Era, U.S. lawmakers drew on eugenic ideas to design dual justice systems—a punitive one to punish marginalized communities deemed biologically defective and predisposed to crime, and a regulatory one designed to monitor corporate lawbreakers without punitive measures. Continue reading >>>
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