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.”

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.

Despite a court loss and sanctioning by state regulators, California’s home insurer of last resort continues to deny smoke damage claims from the January wildfires — even when toxic substances have been found in homes, according to a Times review of denial letters.

The California FAIR Plan Assn. has rebuffed policyholders seeking to have their smoke-damaged homes remediated through professional cleaning or the replacement of structures and fixtures such as drywall, insulation and lighting, the half dozen letters and email exchanges sent during July and August show.

In denying the claims, the plan initially cited language deemed illegal by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge in a landmark June decision that had required policyholders to show that their property suffered “permanent physical changes.”

Last month, the plan changed the wording and told policyholders with smoke damage claims that they must show “distinct, demonstrable and physical alteration” to their property — citing a 2024 state Supreme Court case that established that threshold in an insurance dispute over a COVID-related business closure.

Hilary McLean, a spokesperson for the FAIR Plan, said the insurer is no longer applying the language at issue in the June court decision and has been “updating all customer communications to ensure they consistently reflect the correct language.”

“Our goal is and continues to be to provide fair and reasonable coverage for wildfire-related losses while maintaining the financial integrity of the FAIR Plan for all policyholders,” she said in an emailed statement.

But attorney Dylan Schaffer, who represented the plaintiff in the June decision and shared the correspondence reviewed by The Times, said whatever the language cited by the plan, the result is denials that are unfair to policyholders.

“This stuff is going everywhere and it’s not dirt — it’s toxic,” he said, referring to smoke damage. “And you tell me that some 82-year-old is going to get up in the attic with a hazmat suit on, rip out the insulation and start vacuuming around?”

On Friday, Gov. Newsom called on the FAIR Plan to “expeditiously and fairly” process smoke damage claims arising out of the fires, saying the state has received hundreds of complaints from policyholders.

The January fires have been the worst catastrophe in decades to hit the FAIR Plan, which is operated and backed by the state’s licensed home insurers, including State Farm, Farmers and Mercury.

The plan estimates losses of $4 billion and it has assessed its member carriers $1 billion in order to pay claims.

In recent years, the plan took on hundreds of thousands of policyholders as insurers began pulling out of the state’s fire-plagued homeowners market. Enrollment in the Eaton and Palisades fire zones nearly doubled to 28,440 from 2020 to 2024, according to a Times analysis.

Schaffer believes the plan may have received more than 2,500 smoke damage claims given how many the plan reported it received for partial losses, indicating the structures were still standing.

McLean said the plan could not say how many smoke damage claims it has received due to the fires, nor the number rejected or paid.

The smoke damage policy has been controversial for years and sparked multiple lawsuits, but it wasn’t until June in a case brought by a Northern California homeowner that a judge found the policy violated state law.

That decision by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stuart Rice found that the FAIR Plan’s requirement that smoke damage result in “permanent physical damage” violated the insurance code because it provides less coverage than what is required by the state’s Standard Form Fire Insurance Policy. The case is pending.

Consumer advocates had hoped the decision might prompt the plan to alter how it handled smoke damage claims, even though the ruling wasn’t issued by an appellate court. However, in several letters denying the claims, the plan said the decision had no bearing, noting in one letter “it is not controlling legal authority.”

“Trial court decisions have no precedential value in California; they bind the parties but not another court,” noted James Fischer, an insurance law expert and professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.

After the decision, the state Department of Insurance took legal action on July 31, threatening the FAIR Plan with a cease-and-desist order over the language. It also accused the insurer of failing to investigate claims fairly and denying legitimate claims without a reasonable basis.

The plan has denied wrongdoing and is seeking an administrative hearing to dispute the allegations.

In one smoke damage case, the plan acknowledged that it had received a report from a policyholder’s industrial hygienist that found a home in Pacific Palisades had been exposed to “toxic” levels of carcinogens, chemicals and particulates, according to a letter sent to the homeowner in August viewed by The Times.

The firm recommended the removal of drywall, plaster, wooden floors and other building materials, according to the letter. However, an expert hired by the plan concluded the home only needed to be cleaned and so the smoke claim was rejected.

“Under the terms of your dwelling property insurance policy, coverage for smoke damage is available only when there is a direct physical loss, which is defined in California law as a distinct, demonstrable and physical alteration of covered property,” the letter stated.

“If the hygienist recommendations call for cleaning, including cleaning of lead and/or asbestos, and there is no direct physical loss to the property, there is no coverage,” it went on to say.

The plan did offer to reinspect the home if cleaning was not successful in removing the contaminants.

Schaffer said he expects that the new language will become a point of contention in the dozens of lawsuits that he and other attorneys have filed on behalf of fire victims against the FAIR Plan.

In March, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued a bulletin advising insurers that the Supreme Court decision does not state “smoke damage is never covered as a matter of law.” A department spokesman declined to comment further, citing the litigation with the plan.

Altadena homeowner Maral Donoyan, 59, who spoke to The Times in April about her difficulties in dealing with the plan, said she and her husband were only able to move back into their smoke-damaged home in June after taking out a Small Business Administration loan.

The plan denied the couple’s smoke damage claim, even though their garage partially burned, she said. That forced the couple to spend close to $200,000 of their own money on remediation, with the bedroom above the garage still needing work, said Donoyan, who is a plaintiff in another lawsuit against the plan.

“Toxic, traumatic, bad faith, immoral,” is how she describes her interactions with the plan.

An unlikely corner of one of L.A.’s once-famous/now-dead malls is open for business again this week as residents move into luxury apartments on the spot that used to be a Macy’s parking lot.

The Westside Pavilion was one of the city’s premier shopping venues and a cultural touchstone for generations of Angelenos, appearing in movies, television shows and music videos.

Built on the site of California’s first drive-in movie theater, the center played prominent roles in the 1995 film “Clueless” and the video for musician Tom Petty’s 1989 hit “Free Fallin’.”

But like many other indoor malls, the Westside Pavilion fell out of favor in the 21st century before closing in 2019 to be converted to offices for rent.

Now the former mall also has housing, which is even more in demand than offices these days. New residents will be allowed to start moving in this week.

On a spot once occupied by what the developer called an “absolutely horrible, obsolete” parking structure, there are now 201 luxury apartments — a six-story complex that includes townhouses with front doors that open onto a residential street.

“You have your own stoop,” developer Lee Wagman said of the townhouses. “It’s kind of like a brownstone.”

Developer Lee Wagman of GPI Companies in the rooftop lounge area at the Overland & Ayres apartments.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Wagman is managing partner of GPI Cos., the Los Angeles real estate company that built the Overland & Ayres apartments and converted the mall’s former Macy’s building into the West End office complex. The combined cost of both builds was $350 million.

Wagman said the company got the temporary certificate of occupancy for the apartment complex just last week and move-ins can start as early as this week.

The rest of the former mall was in the process of being converted to offices for rent to Google when it was purchased last year by UCLA. The university is turning the old shopping center into a nearly 700,000-square-foot research center that will focus on immunology, quantum science and engineering.

The biomedical research center, which is set to open as early as next year, will be trying to tackle towering challenges such as curing cancer and preventing global pandemics.

The pool area at Overland & Ayres.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

The new apartments will be convenient for people working at the research center or other nearby job centers, such as UCLA in Westwood, Century City or Culver City.

As has grown more common for buildings competing at at the top of the apartment market, Overland & Ayres has amenities such as a gym with a resort-style pool deck and spa, an outdoor lawn for working out, a sauna and a cold plunge tub.

It has a large rooftop space with both indoor and outdoor lounging, dining areas and gas grills. There is a game room and two event kitchens. The building also includes an outdoor dog park and a spa for pets.

The dog park at the Overland & Ayres Aapartments.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Services available to tenants for a fee include personal training and private yoga instruction, dry cleaning pickup and delivery, car washing, dog walking, grocery delivery and housekeeping. Plans also call for commercial tenants along Overland Avenue that would serve the building, such as a restaurant or Pilates studio.

Rents range from $3,800 per month for a studio apartment to $8,500 per month for a townhouse.

The mall makeover is part of a decades-long trend of repurposing dead shopping centers, devastated by the pivot to online shopping.

Once the kings of retail, indoor shopping centers fell out of favor and lost customers to e-commerce, as well as outdoor “lifestyle” centers — places such as the Grove and Westfield Century City, which feature fancy restaurants, entertainment and pleasant spaces to hang out, even if you’re not buying anything.

The kitchen and living room area of a two-bedroom den unit at the Overland & Ayres apartments.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

The Sherman Oaks Galleria, a legendary indoor mall used in the filming of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Valley Girl,” is now mostly offices.

Lakewood Center, one of the largest enclosed malls in Los Angeles County, spanning 2 million square feet, has been sold to developers who plan to transform it by adding housing, green spaces and entertainment venues.

“A lot of malls now are going towards mixed use,” said Wagaman, who helped turn an indoor mall in Pasadena into an outdoor mall with apartments more than two decades ago.

It is not just old mall space. Struggling office buildings are also looking at transitioning to residences.

With downtown L.A.’s office rental market struggling with high vacancies and falling values, stakeholders are lobbying for city support to convert high-rises to housing. The hope is that this could help address the city’s persistent housing shortage.

Among the suggested targets for conversion are elite Financial District towers that commanded top rents before the COVID-19 pandemic’s stay-at-home orders shut down offices, leaving many buildings more than one-third vacant.