The Eugenics Of It All

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Sydney Sweeney has great genes. An American Eagle ad with overtly racist undertones tells us that Sydney Sweeney’s genes are great because they’re blue like her eyes. Meanwhile a modern-day holocaust happens on the other side of the globe, with images of emaciated babies delivered direct to our phones while our president sets 500 tons of emergency food aid on fire. And Trump signs an executive order making it legal to forcibly institutionalize, detain, imprison, intern, choose your verb, anyone the regime determines is mentally ill. I made an episode a YEAR ago about how the right in America has rebranded eugenics to make it all part of the Make America Great Again Plan, warning that Trump 2.0 would systematize, under Project 2025, its approach to eugenics. Back then we were mostly hearing dog whistles. Today it is openly embraced. We’re going to connect the dots between these headlines today, and take a dive into how our eugenicist past has shaped the present moment, from Sydney Sweeney to the genocide in gaza to the targeting of mentally ill Americans.

First, Ms. Sweeney. Last week, American Eagle released a series of ads for their denim collection featuring Sydney Sweeney. Many of them were kind of run of the mill overt sexualization which could be a topic for a whole other episode but the one that garnered the most controversy was the one where she says genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining eye color, my genes are blue, with a voiceover of an old man saying “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” And if you were confused about whether they were meaning to make the double entendre of jeans with a j and genes with a g, there’s a separate ad of Sweeney pasting over a billboard ad of herself that explicitly says she has great genes with a g, crossed out with jeans with a j written over it. The implication being Sydney Sweeney’s genes are great because her eyes are blue, just like her denim. So buy American Eagle jeans I guess? And people are uncomfortable, to say the least, with the insinuation, and the right is of course laughing and laughing at the left for being sensitive little snowflakes about the whole situation.

Often, the way news outlets report on a story differs depending on the bias of the publication. And it’s hard to know how YOUR own perception of bias influences your interpretation of the news. This headline from Business Insider caught my eye “Sydney Sweeney is a meme stock icon now.” Turns out controversy is good for business, but we’ll get into that. Using the Ground News browser extension, I can see that in the US Business Insider is considered “left leaning.” To get a fuller picture of the story on all sides of the political spectrum I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

My partner on today’s video, Ground News, uses 3 independent monitoring organizations to assess the bias rating for each publication. Each news monitoring organization has their own methodology - including editorial reviews, blind bias surveys, independent reviews, and third party research. These are legit INDEPENDENT organizations, but they are limited by the data available to them: their analysis is done in the context of the U.S. political system. Our overton window has shifted so far right that Business Insider is considered “left leaning.” That tells you a lot about the context within which the media you’re consuming operates. And thanks to Ground News, I get even more context, including how factual each publication is and who owns it, giving me a well-rounded idea of the motivations, biases, and accuracy of the news I’m consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in America had that much information about the news they consume??

Because depending on where you or your family members get the news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture. I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

I’m always really impressed with Ground News and genuinely think they’re a great resource. If you want to stay informed on US Politics and more Subscribe through this QR code or our link below at ground dot news slash leeja for 40% off this unlimited access Vantage Plan. It comes out to $5 a month for unlimited access to ALL the features I’ve mentioned. Thanks Ground News!

Commentators on the right are laughing at liberal leftist snow flakes and saying it’s just an ad. The problem is that context matters, in art, in film, and yes even in ads, they exist within the context of the society in which they are being released. And American Eagle would not have made and released this likely incredibly expensive ad campaign if they didn’t think it would move product and convince today’s buyers to buy their jeans. So let me provide some context. I promise this is important for the other topics in today’s video, just bear with me.

So moving beyond the very obvious issue with declaring that blue eyes are preferable genes when your literal actual brand name is AMERICAN EAGLE? The ads themselves were a very clear homage to a series of incredibly infamous Calvin Klein ads from 1980 starring a then-15 year old Brooke Shields. Everything from discussing the science of genes [insert clip] to the very creepy babyish vocal fry meant to sound simultaneously sexual and vulnerable [insert clip] the Sweeney ads were a direct imitation of the Calvin Klein ads, almost to the point of lacking any original creativity. And while it is creepy to emulate a series of ads roundly condemned at the time for being incredibly inappropriate, some were banned in many countries, for sexualizing a literal child, unlike the 15 year old Brooke Shields, Sydney Sweeney is 27 years old and, as far as we know, though like I said a think a whole separate episode could be made on this, likely consented to the portrayal. She also read the script and was like hell yeah blue eyes are good genes I’m ready to put my face behind that sentiment and go all in on the creepy baby voice. So her complicity in this is pretty clear.

And I think the more important context is the history of eugenics as it relates to fascism not only in 1940s Germany but also yes, here, in America, because Nazis, including the mustache man himself, actually took a hell of a lot of inspiration from American eugenics.

The term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a contemporary and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton argued that mental and physical traits are equally heritable. Therefore, it should be possible to selectively breed better humans.

From the start, eugenics was a tool of social control masquerading as a science, and its elitist logic quickly took hold in America.

At the turn of the 20th century, the US was changing at unprecedented speeds. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration — largely from eastern and southern Europe— made the elites who considered themselves “NATIVE” Americans (because their ancestors came over from different parts of Europe slightly less recently) fear that their way of life was at risk. Two parallel arms of eugenics sprung up simultaneously to combat the threat of dirty foreigners and dumb dumbs polluting the gene pool and destroying society — ”positive” and “negative” eugenics.

In so-called “positive eugenics,” the focus was on getting people with superior genes to breed with one another. To further enshrine eugenic thinking into American minds, a propagandist organization called the American Eugenics Society turned it into a game.

The first “Fitter Families for Future Firesides” contest was held at the Iowa State Fair in 1911. At their peak, such contests were held in 40 states. The competitions drew participants from miles around for a primer on eugenics disguised as wholesome entertainment. Each contestant would submit to a rigorous three-hour inspection that included a physical exam and a detailed family history. Points were awarded for things like straight, healthy teeth, musical talent, or a family history of longevity, while points were deducted for every epileptic uncle, hysterical sister, and untimely demise in a lineage. And the idea of “breeding better humans” wasn’t just popular in the US —in 1935, Germany took the fitter family concept to the extreme with its Lebensborn program, in which doctors and so-called “race examiners” matched the best of the best “Aryan stock” and sent them to special camps to conceive and care for large families in a utopian environment.

Then there was “negative” eugenics, meaning efforts to restrict anyone considered UNdesirable from reproducing. The Germans took a lot of inspiration from Americans on this, too. The 1935 Nuremberg race laws denying citizenship to Jews and criminalizing intermarriage between Jews and ethnic Germans were modeled in part on US laws banning interracial marriage, black suffrage, and immigration of undesirables.

The whole idea of a “nordic race” is made up, and its popularity can be traced back to American lawyer Madison Grant. Madison was disgusted and offended by the “unwashed masses'' crowding the streets outside his New York City law offices, and decided to channel all his bigoted energy into writing a book in 1916 in which he invented the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed “Nordic race” and argued that as (supposedly) the most recently evolved of all the races, Nordic genes were fragile and therefore had to be protected from more “primitive” races, lest their genes overwhelm the superior but not yet stable genes of the Nordics. Hitler read Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race” while he was in jail, and once he got out, wrote a fan letter to Madison Grant, calling the book his “bible.”

In 1907, the state of Indiana became the first government body in the modern world to enact an involuntary sterilization law. Under the so-called Indiana Program, the state could sterilize any person deemed “unfit” to reproduce — specifically, “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” And at the beginning of the 20th century, the person’s “fitness” would almost always be determined by an incredibly biased intelligence test.

In the US, categories of incompetence were codified by a psychologist named Henry Goddard. Goddard was sent to test immigrants at Ellis Island in the 1910s. Through his scientifically dubious mental intelligence tests, he found that a whopping forty percent of all the Jews, Italians, and Hungarians tested qualified as “morons'. Instead of pausing to consider that maybe something was wrong with his little test, Goddard doubled down, writing, "we know that it is never wise to discard a scientific result because of apparent absurdity." The following year, deportations for so-called “feeble mindedness” doubled. And in 1917, Congress enacted one of its first broadly restrictive immigration laws. It required immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, increased taxes on arriving immigrants, and allowed immigration officials to exercise more ~discretion~ when deciding who to reject.

By 1919, intelligence testing had been adapted into the National Intelligence Test, which sold half a million copies in a single year and was used to filter out undesirables by businesses, schools, and law enforcement. This National Intelligence Test included questions like: "The Knight engine is used in the Ford, the Pierce-Arrow, or the Lozier car?” As though a question about car engines is an accurate way to test intelligence as opposed to just trivia knowledge. How well a person performed depended entirely on their level of education and how attuned they were with middle-class culture. The data collected from Goddard’s tests was garbage, but would nonetheless prove extremely useful in furthering the eugenic cause.

And nobody used flawed data better than this guy — Harry Laughlin, the eugenics movement’s most persuasive lobbyist and the assistant director of the Eugenics Records Office, the national hub of eugenic research and outreach. Between 1920 and 1924, Harry Laughlin testified before Congress three times, using flawed, misleading data to claim that rates of insanity were different among immigrants and certain nationalities had greater proclivity for criminality. He also claimed that the US was a nordic or northern european country and therefore immigrants from other parts of the world would never be able to fully assimilate.

And it is in this context that forced sterilization and anti-immigration laws flourished in the early 20th century and beyond, often overlapping and commingling in a fascist playground of truly hideous proportions. In 1922, Harry Laughlin published his eugenicist magnum opus titled Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. Both a history book and an instruction manual, the text compiled every sterilization law ever passed and every case ever brought, then laid out Laughlin’s own Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, designed to withstand due process challenges. It would be put to the test in 1927.

The woman selected as Virginia’s involuntary sterilization guinea pig was a teen mom by the name of Carrie Buck. Buck was sent to a Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded after giving birth at age 14. She’d been assaulted by her foster family’s nephew, but rather than deal with…any of it, they just labeled her an “imbecile” and dropped her off at the same facility holding her birth mother. Carrie’s biological mom had been at the colony since 1920 when she was diagnosed as “feebleminded” — a diagnosis based less on medical evidence than on the doctors’ impression of her sexual behavior. The best way to deal with tarts, floozies, and harlots? Lock em up!!!! It’s for their own good!!!! Despite the lack of solid scientific footing, Carrie Buck and her mothers’ “diagnoses” were treated as factual when brought before the Supreme Court in 1927. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. rendered the verdict in favor of sterilizing Carrie Buck, writing, "It is better for all the world, [...] if instead of waiting "to execute degenerate offspring for crime, "or to let them starve for their imbecility, "society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit "from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Though subsequent testing would find that both Carrie and the daughter she birthed at 14 were of average intelligence, it was too late. Carrie Buck was the first person of thousands who would be involuntarily sterilized under Virginia’s eugenics laws. Laughlin’s model law was a success. And his example not only went on to help shape the Nazi party’s 1934 “racial hygiene” law, but also informed 27 additional state sterilization laws in the US. In the two decades leading up to Buck v Bell, about 6,000 sterilizations had been performed in the US. In the six years following the decision, that number would more than double. By the close of the 1930s, more than 30,000 Americans had been involuntarily sterilized nationwide.

Along with providing pseudo-science to back up incredibly harmful and bigoted sterilization and procreation policies, eugenics also offered a scientific-sounding rationale for the rising anti-immigrant sentiment in American society at the turn of the 20th century. Even the Irish, so recently despised themselves, jumped in to shit on these new immigrants and lobby for federal restrictions on how many people from the “undesirable” countries could come in. Meanwhile, labor organizations stoked fears that working-class Americans would lose their jobs to cheap immigrant labor (SOUND FAMILIAR??), and anti-communist factions warned of the impending "red tide" from Russia and Eastern Europe. All that pressure culminated on May 26, 1924, when President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act into law. It set devastatingly limited quotas on immigration to the US among Southern and Eastern Europeans and Asians that would reduce immigration by 97%. This prevented the immigration of large swaths of European Jews who would later be massacred during WWII.

Along with forced sterilization, eugenics found its way into our legal system through “habitual criminal” laws. In the early 20th century it was believed that criminality was a heritable trait, and numerous racist eugenicists tied race to inherited criminality. And so, to punish repeat offenders and root out what they determined were “habitual criminals” whose criminality was so a part of their DNA that it could be inherited by their children, habitual criminal laws were passed, such as three strike rules, in an attempt to keep repeat offenders imprisoned for longer. The idea being, explicitly, that if we cannot sterilize them, we can at least imprison them for longer, during their procreative years, to avoid their continued mating. Anti-miscegination laws, that is laws that banned marriage between whites and blacks, also included prohibitions on marriages of habitual criminals. Loving v. Virginia famously struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegination law, which included a prohibition on marrying habitual criminals. To obtain a marriage license, grooms had to make a declaration that neither party was a habitual criminal. And our friend Henry Goddard, who came up with the bunk science behind national intelligence testing, took it a step further when it came to habitual criminals, publishing a report in 1913 saying “it is not a question of segregation OR sterilization, but segregation AND sterilization.” Here, the Nazis took further inspiration from the use, passing in November 1933 the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals which allowed for life imprisonment for people convicted of 3 offenses and aimed at the quote “eradication of permanently worthless human material from the national community.”

And while the market crash of 1929 put a damper on the whole idea that poor people were genetically inferior, because now Harvard graduates were unemployed and in line waiting for food handouts, and then the revelation of the horrors of the holocaust made overt eugenic ideas rather taboo, eugenics never went away in America, it just got a minor rebrand. Habitual offender laws remain on the books in 49 states in the US, as well as the federal statutes, some largely unchanged in the last century. Throughout the 20th century, forced and coerced sterilizations were performed on immigrants and people of color both in and outside of institutional custody, often by vigilante surgeons, always under the guise of the greater good. But the goal was the same as the eugenics movement: decrease the “dependant population” of undesirables. For example:

- Between the 1930s and the 1970s, 37% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized. Many of them had been pressured into the procedure by doctors who presented it as the only means of contraception, never bothering to mention that the procedure is irreversible.

-In the 1940s, Dr. Clarence Gamble (as in, Proctor & Gamble), launched a sterilization campaign through his nonprofit, Birthright in North Carolina. The campaign would continue well into the 1970s — decades after the state ended its formal sterilization programs. In 1948 alone, records show more than 150 sterilizations, mostly performed on young black women who were neither institutionalized nor mentally deficient in any way. Sterilization procedures were also regularly snuck into other operations— particularly apendectomies— regardless of state law. According to the New York Times, “The practice of being sterilized, including during unrelated surgery, grew so common among poor Black women in the South that it came to be known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”

-The Indian Health Service was founded in 1955 to provide educational and medical resources to indigenous Americans living on reservations. Yet the people sent to care for Native Americans didn’t always provide care. According to historian Jane Lawrence, “Some of [the IHS doctors] did not believe that American Indian and other minority women had the intelligence to use other methods of birth control effectively and that there were already too many minority individuals causing problems in the nation.” A rash of forced sterilizations began in the 1960s and continued through the 1970s, even after new regulations were passed. It’s estimated that between 1970 and 1976, as many as 50% of Native American women were sterilized, devastating their communities both personally and politically. In addition to divorce and deep depression, Lawrence connects the tribes’ loss of political power to their dwindling numbers, rooted in these forced procedures.

-In the early 1970s, obstetricians in California working in federally funded family planning programs sterilized immigrant Mexican women without their consent— often while they were getting Cesarean sections.

It is no wonder that many people of color, disabled people, and others have been saying that America has always been a fascist state, we’re just screaming about it now because the fascism is also affecting white, able bodied people under Trump. Because the reality is that even though these forced sterilizations led to numerous lawsuits, and most states eventually repealed their eugenic sterilization laws, that doesn’t mean we’ve STOPPED forcibly sterilizing the undesirable populations in the United States. Now we just do it to imprisoned people instead. Not only those people who are inmates in our state and federal prisons, but also immigrants detained at immigrant detention centers. I could cite to NUMEROUS examples of counties and states where prison inmates are offered reduced sentences in exchange for agreeing to permanent sterilization. In 2009, a 21 year old mother in West Virginia had her tubes tied as part of her probation for marijuana possession. In 2014, a Virginia man agreed to a vasectomy in exchange for a lighter child endangerment sentence. And increasingly former and current inmates, most of them women, are coming forward to say they were given full hysterectomy while in prison undergoing a completely separate procedure. One woman in California claimed she underwent a procedure to remove two growths on her cervix in 2005, only to later be told she was given a full hysterectomy. In fact, in 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 132 women were sterilized through tubal ligations without the necessary approval in California prisons between 2006 and 2010 and possibly 100 more dating back to the late 1990s.

And during Trump’s first term, reports of forced sterilizations of immigrants being held at ICE detention centers proved that the abuse is widespread including for people being processed through a CIVIL, NON CRIMINAL immigration system. In 2020, a whistleblower complaint alleged that a doctor at a private ICE facility in Georgia had been performing a large number of hysterectomies on Spanish-speaking immigrants without their consent. Unfortunately, that whistleblower complaint was filed with the DHS’s Office of the Inspector General. Usually an inspector general is an independent watchdog overseeing an agency’s activities to make sure they are ethical. Unfortunately, the DHS inspector general is a man named Joseph Cuffari, appointed during Trump’s first term, who has been the subject of several credible ethics violations probes of his own, with substantial evidence to suggest he has abused his power and wasted federal funds retaliating against officials that filed complaints against him. That’s the independent watchdog overseeing our entire Department of Homeland Security, you know the one that just got an unprecedented injection of federal funds in order to increase the number of agents and detain more immigrants than ever. He’s the one making sure they do so ethically. The lack of a meaningful watchdog combined with increasing refusals to allow members of Congress to tour ICE facilities, which they are legally allowed to do, means there are likely substantial abuses happening in ICE facilities that won’t be unearthed for a very long time. Given our history I wouldn’t be surprised if those abuses include forced sterilization.

Which brings us to the executive order Trump signed last week which we talked about on Friday but bears further discussion. On Friday I talked about the aspects of the order that criminalize homelessness but there is a deeper insidiousness to this order that needs its own segment. Because the order not only calls for forced civil commitment for homeless people, it also calls for forced civil commitment for quote “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public.” That is whether or not they are homeless. It also requires that the DOJ evaluate whether homeless people arrested for federal crimes are “sexually dangerous persons” and, if so, that they be civilly committed. Meaning after they’ve fully served their sentences for federal crimes, they can still be held against their will indefinitely in civil commitment facilities. To be clear, this is not a new idea, civil commitment is already a tactic used to put mentally ill people away, often into abusive and opaque settings. But Trump is calling on the practice to be amped up and for more resources to be thrown at the problem while also condemning routinely used more humane treatment options. Basically, calling for civil commitment of those deemed a danger to themselves or others allows for the federal government to once again get around pesky due process requirements and continue to hold people against their will indefinitely without ever charging them with anything.

The way this works is that a judge orders a person to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital or a supervised outpatient treatment facility without their consent, if the judge finds they pose a danger to themselves and others. This is typically done by states, not the federal government. In most states, not being able to provide for one’s basic needs counts as being a danger to yourself. In theory there should be due process here, because they must go before a judge, but the practice historically has allowed for the abuse of due process rights of vulnerable populations. This executive order implicates not only federal prisons and federal-level civil commitments but also federal funding for state-level civil commitment.

According to reporting from the Prison Policy Initiative, civil commitment facilities are often called “shadow prisons” because of the lack of oversight they receive. In many states, civil commitment centers are housed under the state's department of human services and not technically classified as prisons, which means they’re not subject to the same level of oversight as traditional prisons are. And you already know massive levels of abuse are happening in prisons even with oversight. Because of this, documented incidents of quote “horrific medical neglect and abuse proliferate in these shadowy facilities.” It also means access to data about people confined in these facilities is hard to get and not easy to aggregate as civil commitment facilities are housed under various different agencies from state to state. Because of this we don’t even know the actual total number of people who are civilly committed at any given time.

A 2022 report of civil commitment facilities in Illinois found that civil commitment disproportionately impacts already marginalized groups. Black people were detained in civil commitment facilities at twice the rate of white people. According to Prison Policy Initiative, quote “Further, the overrepresentation of LGBTQ+ and disabled people in these facilities reflects obvious biases that are “baked into” the civil commitment decision-making process. Many states use risk assessment evaluations to assess whether or not one should be civilly committed. These actuarial tools use outcome data from previously incarcerated people and conclude that, because past studies found groups with specific characteristics more likely to re-offend, individuals that match those criteria must be continually confined. Risk assessment tools are generally problematic and frequently make incorrect predictions. Chicago attorney Daniel Coyne says that in sex offense cases, risk assessment tools are 58% accurate, or “not much better than a coin toss.”

Illinois and many other states use the Static-99/99R, which predicts individuals’ risk using data about groups that come from overwhelmingly unpublished studies. This risk assessment tool is notably homophobic, as it assigns a point (and thus, a higher risk value) to those who have a “same-sex victim.” The Williams Institute writes:

In addition to normalizing violence against women, this a priori assigns gay, bisexual, and MSM [men who have sex with men], who are more likely to have a male victim, a higher score, marking them as more dangerous than men who have female victims regardless of any other characteristics of the offense.”

The report goes on to say “Since having a “mental abnormality” is a criterion for admission, measuring the overrepresentation of disabled people in these facilities is challenging. By the logic of civil commitment, 100% of people inside have a psychiatric disability. In the Illinois report, 26% of Rushville respondents self-identified as having a disability, compared with 21% of the Illinois population. Low levels of educational attainment (i.e., having a high school degree or less) were also very high, at 48%. Anecdotally, survey respondents reported that many of their peers inside could not complete the survey because they were illiterate or had cognitive impairments that prevented them from reading and filling out a paper questionnaire, so disabled respondents’ voices are likely underrepresented.”

Also, quote “Two-thirds of respondents inside Rushville in Illinois report that they have been sent to solitary confinement, a (potentially permanently) psychologically damaging practice. Rushville, like other civil commitment facilities across the U.S., also uses archaic treatment and evaluation technologies, including the penile plethysmograph, a “device [that] is attached to the individual’s penis while they are shown sexually suggestive content. The device measures blood flow to the area, which is considered an indicator of arousal.” Rushville detainees are subjected to chemical castration, or hormone injections that inhibit erection and have been linked to long-term health impacts. Further, their progress through treatment is measured using a variety of highly questionable evaluation tools, including polygraph lie detector test results which have been inadmissible in Illinois courts since 1981. The technologies that these facilities rely on look a lot more like medieval torture devices than the supposed “therapeutic tools” that they claim to utilize.”

Does this not ring some alarm bells that these practices are happening in the present day, considering the history I just laid out for you of eugenics in this country and in 1940s Germany??

These are the places Trump has promised to send homeless folks and anyone with a mental illness that the government has deemed a threat to themselves or others. That’s going to include anyone who can’t provide for themselves, so poor people, plus any number of other groups of people that the regime already has a history of targeting and labeling as predators or mentally ill. Drag queens. Trans folks. The list goes on. Supreme Court precedent requires that a higher standard of proof, clear and convincing evidence, be provided in order to civilly commit someone, but what that really means in practice, especially in a regime that doesn’t follow judicial orders, doesn’t care about due process, and has the supreme court in its back pocket, remains to be seen. This paves the way for severe curtailment of rights especially for already vulnerable populations, up to and including indefinite forced confinement in often private for profit institutions that are known for being shadowy and abusive. In fact, when I was doing research for this video I found it incredibly hard, impossible really, to find any information on the actual locations where people are sent in Minnesota when they are civilly committed, let alone who’s in there, where their sources of funding come from, and more. That is, I believe, entirely the point, especially for the Trump regime, intent on removing as many undesirables as possible and locking them away or deporting them to purify America.

This is a pattern that is easily recognizable from history that is now becoming vogue again in America. To be clear, it never went away, but now that you can publicly declare yourself a fascist and then raise tens of thousands of dollars from people who support you for it, we have reached a level of comfort with fascist ideologies that is so clear and in vogue that American Eagle made a bet that they could recycle it and sell us jeans. And their stock saw a 15% bump in value in the wake of the controversial Sydney Sweeney ad, with conservatives lauding the actress for bringing about the end of woke advertising. So even while they’re trying to gaslight us into thinking we’re overreacting because it’s “just an ad” in the same breath they are acknowledging that the messaging in the ad signalled the end of woke advertising. So you admit it. You admit that the ad was fascist.

And it makes sense that we’re seeing this pro-eugenics ideology flourishing right now. Things are lining up in ways very similar to the beginning of the 20th century. Income inequality is higher than it's ever been. Because of that, people feel like they’re fighting over scraps, so outsiders coming in to take what little is left for them are seen as an existential threat. The ruling elite exploit that fear by playing into racist stereotypes, building an us vs them mentality that distracts us from gaining any sense of class consciousness and instead gets the dominant majority to fall in line behind racist talking points and bunk science in favor of an authoritarian leader who is the only one that can protect them from the onslaught of the masses. The fear has reached such a fever pitch that people are willing to support policies and say things that just a few years ago would have been so utterly rejected by society that those people would have become pariahs. Instead they are now so in vogue that fast fashion retailers are adopting fascist talking points in order to be “edgy” and sell jeans. Fascists rely on bunk science and misconstrued data in order to convince us that their programs and ideologies are based in anything other than fearmongering in the name of greater control and power. They need eugenics, adopted into the cultural zeitgeist and rebranded as totally normal and above board, something so mundane it can be used to sell blue jeans, because it helps to dehumanize the regime’s victims so that mass resistance goes away and we’re all willing to turn a blind eye. Because those people aren’t really people, not like us. They’re subhuman. They’re terrorists. They’re criminals. They’re so inherently violent it’s in their DNA, they shouldn’t be allowed into society or to procreate. What the state is doing is right and good because it protects the correct people from the subhumans that make the world dangerous and bad. Ignore the data that proves immigrants commit less crime. Ignore the science that disproves inherited criminality. Ignore the war crimes. It is happening on a global scale, it is happening to the people in Gaza who are being systematically starved into a mass casualty event, on purpose, under the assumption that the world will look the other way, and it is an ideology that has been perfected in the United States and exported around the globe. Trump perpetuates it with his hateful executive order criminalizing mental illness and homelessness, and American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney are complicit in normalizing fascist ideology in popular culture and turning a massive profit on it.

What do we do? Continue speaking out about it. Don’t look away, not from Gaza but also not from your neighbors starving in the streets of the richest country on earth. And a lot of the policies Trump is proposing in this executive order rely on state compliance to enact, so if you live in a red state I would think long and hard about getting the fuck out, at least to a blue state if not out of the country entirely.

If you want to support my work, all my videos are completely ad free and uncensored over on Patreon, Patreon dot com slash leeja miller.

Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, R_H, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Wednesday about how the Trump regime is eroding the media.

Leeja Miller
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