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Commentary: 'Eugenics' comes out of the shadows in recent political rhetoric
On Sept. 2, in a comment from the White House aimed at justifying sending federal troops into Baltimore, President Trump said this about his targets:
“These are hard-core criminals. …They’re not going to be good. In 10 years, in 20 years, in two years, they’re going to be criminals. They were born to be criminals. Frankly, they were born to be criminals. And they’re tough, and mean, and they’ll cut your throat and they won’t even think about it the next day, and they won’t even remember that they did it and we’re not going to have these people.”
Not a few Americans probably took Trump’s words at face value, given public stereotypes of the urban underworld and the exaggerated fears of urban downtowns that the administration has excited.
But for students of race and class warfare in America, Trump’s words evoked a line from one of the most notorious opinions ever delivered by the Supreme Court: Oliver Wendell Holmes’ decision in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law aimed at the “feeble-minded.”
Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.
— Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, explaining his resignation from the CDC
Holmes wrote of the plaintiff, “Carrie Buck is a feeble minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony. She is the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Holmes’ words were a quintessential expression of “eugenics,” a pseudoscientific notion that social problems can be alleviated by focusing on heredity, and sequestering, forcibly sterilizing or even murdering those whose genetic heritage jeopardizes civilization. In other words, “guilt by geneological association,” biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1984.
Eugenics fell out of favor when the Nazis used it to rationalize the Holocaust and other genocidal policies.
But it has come out of the shadows in recent political rhetoric.
“Many eugenic ideas that may have been under the surface for a while are back with a vengeance,” says Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor of English and history at UCLA who is one of our leading historians of the eugenics movement.
Trump’s relentless campaign against transgender people (including banning transgender individuals from serving in the military and defunding gender-affirming care coverage in government programs), for instance, has echoes of eugenicists’ traditional hand-wringing about those deemed defectives infiltrating society.
“Eugenics was initially focused on disability, intellectual incapacity, mental illness,” Stern told me. “Now we see the idea that there are ‘fit’ people and there are ‘unfit’ people — there’s a bit of the idea of ‘survival of the fittest,’ that those who have natural immunity will rise to the top and will survive; and for those who before needed to be coddled by the state, that will no longer be an option.”
The implications of this kind of thinking aren’t lost on legitimate scientists.
“The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer,” Demetre Daskalakis wrote last month in his resignation letter as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”
Before digging deeper, let’s examine the history of eugenics thinking. I’ve asked the White House and Department of Health and Human Services for comment on the echoes of eugenicist thinking in contemporary government policies but haven’t received replies.
The term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, who aimed to apply the findings of his cousin, Charles Darwin, to better society. Galton “advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to hereditary endowment of parents,” Gould noted in his classic 1981 book “The Mismeasure of Man.”
Eugenics became popular among the educated elite in the 1920s and 1930s. As I reported in 2020, among its advocacy groups was the California-based Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated “eugenic sterilization.” California became one of the first states in the nation to enact a forced sterilization law, in 1909. By 1938 its more than 12,000 involuntary sterilizations accounted for nearly half of all those nationwide.
Among the foundation’s members and trustees were Caltech President Robert A. Millikan; Rufus von KleinSmid, then the president of USC; Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist who pioneered the study of IQ; and Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
Their affiliation with the foundation ultimately became institutional embarrassments. Caltech announced in 2021 the removal of the names of Millikan, Chandler and four other foundation members from its campus. USC removed von KleinSmid’s name from a campus building in 2020.
Current eugenics rhetoric is, like its forebear, fundamentally incoherent. Trump’s targets when he talks about people who are “born to be criminals” are chiefly low-income non-whites, but the conservative campaign against abortion results in fewer low-income women having access to abortion, while the better-heeled are better positioned to find means of terminating their pregnancy.
Justice Clarence Thomas tried to characterize abortion itself as tool of eugenicists in an concurring opinion to an abortion case in 2019, citing what he said was the historical record. But his claim was roundly refuted by experts on eugenics history. In interviews with the Washington Post, they noted that eugenicists were traditionally and overwhelmingly opposed to birth control and abortion.
“They knew that the women who would use it were the type of women they would want to encourage to reproduce, so-called ‘better’ women — upper-middle-class women,” said historian Daniel Kevles.
Today’s eugenic thought does deviate from the version that prevailed in the 1920s.
“Eugenics, after all, implies the active removal of those thought to be inferior, either through sterilization or outright killing,” observed the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski. “Say what you will about RFK Jr. and the antivaccine movement, it’s difficult to accuse them of actively doing that. What the antivaccine movement does — and has always done — is basically ‘let nature take its course’; i.e., let nature do the culling. The child who survives was ‘fit,’ and the child who doesn’t wasn’t. “
Gorski and others prefer the term “soft eugenics,” which the podcasters Derek Beres and Matt Remski defined as “more of a shrug and sigh than a battle cry,” as when “you hear someone … talk about only malnourished children dying of measles and healthy children have nothing to worry about.”
The “survival of the fittest” agenda permeates the cutbacks in food stamps, housing and heating assistance, which are based on beliefs about the “undeserving poor” — those who are supposedly lazy, or unmotivated, or greedy.
That’s also the core of the GOP’s efforts to drive “able-bodied” people off the Medicaid rolls — by which they mean beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which brought childless low-income adults into the program. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicare and Medicaid, asserted on Fox News in July that “Today the average able-bodied person on Medicaid who doesn’t work, they watch 6.1 hours of television or just hang out.”
There’s no factual basis for that assertion. The truth, as detailed by KFF, is that almost all Medicaid recipients who aren’t receiving disability payments of some type or aren’t on Medicare are working (64%), caregiving (12%); sick or disabled (10%); retired or unable to find work (8%); or attending school (7%).
But those facts aren’t what the conservatives want the public to know.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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