Wild-eyed extremists running our government have resurrected hateful pseudoscience.
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This week, "Next Comes What" looks at the various ways that the administration has adopted discredited historical views on eugenics and turned them into policies that have already killed hundreds of thousands of people. From RFK Jr. undermining vaccine programs and environmental regulations here at home to DOGE cutting lifesaving USAID programs abroad, the US government is actively dismantling the nation's public health apparatus.
Andrea Pitzer talks about her reporting decades ago on the history of American eugenics and the legendary Buck v. Bell case that the US Supreme Court used to allow involuntary sterilization of people deemed defective. The episode has a cameo from someone Andrea met back then: Paul Lombardo, a leading US voice on bioethics and the history of eugenics. Lombardo frames the current administration's policy as not just influenced by our eugenic legacy but as actually adopting eugenics.
Andrea also addresses the ways that current obsessions with fertility, purity, and genetic superiority are reanimating discredited principles of eugenics. Though the federal government's footprint in public health is too massive a lift for local programs to replace through small-scale efforts, the episode closes with ideas on how to keep a record of what's happening, push back politically, and stem the effects of the current eugenic tide until this administration can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
0:11 — MAHA's American Eugenics: How Trump and RFK Jr. Are Reviving a Dark History
2:26 — The Origins of American Eugenics: From Francis Galton to Madison Grant
4:57 — RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary: Anti-Vax, Germ Theory Denial, and Public Health Sabotage
6:17 — Purity Culture and Pseudoscience: The Eugenic Logic Behind MAGA Health Policy
10:01 — Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell: The Supreme Court Case That Enabled Mass Sterilization
12:27 — What a Leading Eugenics Scholar Says About the Trump Administration
14:40 — USAID Cuts and Global Eugenics: How Foreign Aid Destruction Fits the Pattern
16:50 — Pro-Natalism, Birth Rates, and the Billionaire Push to Control Who Reproduces
21:55 — Negative Eugenics in Immigration Detention: Disease, Neglect, and Population Control
28:59 — What You Can Do: Protecting Public Health in Your Community
