Ep 2 | The Monster Masterminds of Eugenics | The Beck Story

This episode explores the historical and ideological connections between eugenics and influential figures like Madison Grant, with a focus on their impact on both past and contemporary issues.

1. Madison Grant's ideologies profoundly influenced both American and Nazi eugenic policies.
2. Eugenics has historically been intertwined with racism and elitism, affecting immigration laws and public policies in the U.S.
3. The podcast connects historical eugenics with modern issues, such as transgender rights and healthcare policies, suggesting a continuing legacy.
4. The episode discusses the role of pseudoscience in shaping public policy and personal ideology.
5. It urges skepticism towards expert opinions that may lead to restrictive or harmful policies.

1: The Foundation of Eugenics

Overview: This chapter discusses the origins of eugenics with Madison Grant's influence, detailing how his beliefs permeated U.S. and Nazi policies. Quotes:

• Host: "Madison Grant's writings not only influenced Nazi ideology but also shaped U.S. immigration laws."
• Guest: "Eugenics was cloaked as a science to justify racial purity."

2: Carrie Buck's Story

Overview: Focuses on Carrie Buck, a victim of eugenic policies, to illustrate the personal impact of these ideologies. Quotes:

• Host: "Carrie Buck's story is a tragic example of how personal freedoms were crushed under the guise of scientific advancement."
• Expert: "Her case shows the dangerous intersection of law, science, and prejudice."

3: Modern Implications

Overview: Explores how remnants of eugenic thinking linger in contemporary issues like healthcare and social policies. Quotes:

• Host: "Today's policies on transgender rights and healthcare can reflect old eugenic ideologies under new guises."
• Analyst: "We must be vigilant about how science is used to justify policy."

1. Educate Yourself: Learn about the history and ongoing impact of eugenics to recognize its modern forms.
2. Critical Consumption: Scrutinize scientific claims used to justify policies, especially those affecting human rights.
3. Advocate: Support policies and initiatives that promote equality and challenge pseudoscientific bases.
4. Community Engagement: Participate in discussions and forums to raise awareness about the misuse of science in policy.
5. Support Transparency: Encourage open and transparent policy-making processes to avoid the influence of flawed science.

This is the story of Madison Grant, a wealthy conservationist, influential progressive, and one of the fathers of eugenics in the U.S. His 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” prompted a flattering letter from Adolf Hitler about the book, which Hitler called his “bible.” Progressives regarded eugenics as cutting-edge science, but in the hands of “experts,” this “science” led to unspeakable horrors, the consequences of which are still felt today.


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People

Madison Grant, Carrie Buck

Companies

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Books

"The Passing of the Great Race"

Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

Discusses themes of racism, eugenics, and historical injustices.

Speaker A
Every synagogue contains an ark, a sacred location where the scroll of the Torah is kept. These arcs often resemble a large wooden cabinet.

One such arc is on display at the museum in Frankfurt, Germany. It came from the synagogue of a small town outside of Frankfurt. Across the top of this ark, there are words painted in Hebrew, except these words are mauled and jagged cuts and deep slashes in the wood, the obvious work of people with hatchets and daggers.

The hebrew lettering is so defaced that it's almost unreadable. The damage came from the nazi agents on the night of broken glass in 1938, when hundreds of synagogues across Germany were vandalized and set on fire.

The hebrew inscription that the Nazis deface reads, know before whom you stand.

At the heart of the so called science of eugenics, which fueled the Holocaust, was profound atheism.

Science was the new God.

That's the voice of Doctor Carl Brandt making his final statement on the stand at the Nuremberg trials in 1947.

Doctor Brandt was hitlers personal physician. Hitler also put him in charge of the Nazis euthanasia program that began in 1939, less than a year after the night of broken glass. The program was kind of a trial run for the final solution, which would begin two years later.

To the Nazis, euthanasia was entirely scientific and practical. It was about achieving the so called racial integrity among true german people.

It involved killing people who were institutionalized or had disabilities.

These were the genetically impure that needed to be purged in order to cleanse the gene pool to create a more perfect race.

Under the Nazis euthanasia program, german doctors, nurses, and midwives were required to report all children under the age of three that showed any sign of physical or mental disability.

Once identified, parents of these children were urged by authorities to admit their children to pediatric clinics for specialized care.

But inside these clinics, trained staff murdered the children either by starvation or lethal overdose.

Just a few months after these killings began, the Nazis extended the program to include disabled youth up to 17 years old.

Conservative estimates are that over 10,000 german children were murdered under this program.

As part of his defense at the Nuremberg trials, Carl Brandt presented a curious piece of evidence, excerpts from a book titled the passing of the great race.

One of the excerpts, read aloud in the courtroom, says, false faith in the.

Speaker B
Sanctity of human life will result in preventing the extermination of inferior children, as well as the sterilization of such adults who are worthless or detrimental to the community.

Natural law requires extermination of the incapable, and human life is only valuable if it is of use to the community.

Speaker A
Or the race monstrous. Carl Brandt and his lawyer emphasized that this book was written by a renowned zoologist, an influential man who had perhaps done more than anyone to advance the science of eugenics.

Hitler himself even wrote to the author of the passing of the great race and said, this book is my bible.

Doctor Brant argued that he had simply carried out the rational science that was laid out by a non german author.

It would be hypocritical for the international court to condemn Nazis for putting into practice the science that came from an allied nation.

The author quoted at Nuremberg was as Yankee Doodle Dandy as they come.

An American from New York named Madison Grant.

Ever wonder why things are the way they are in America? Welcome to the Beck story. My podcast on how our past informs our present charts our future. How did we get here? The first season is about the cult of expertise in America, how it permeated our government, how this allegiance to so called expertise has far reaching implications for our nation right now.

A remarkably consistent through line extends from the original progressive movement right through to the actions of left wing elites. Today.

If there was a hall of fame for the most influential Americans that most people have never heard of, Madison Grant might be one of the first inductees.

He had an outside effect on american history, and unfortunately, on world history, too.

Yet his influence has been largely brushed under the rug by many progressive organizations that he started because today they're too embarrassed to acknowledge that their founder was such a passionate racist and eugenicist.

Madison Grant was born into the New York City aristocracy in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. His family could trace their lineage all the way back to the first English Puritans that populated New England.

This lineage gave Grant the nativist claim that would drive so much of his life's work.

He was from the original stock that created the United States. Therefore, he couldn't bear to see that original stock diluted and, in his mind, overtaken by what he considered inferior people.

To Madison Grant, that meant anyone who was not a very specific type of white person.

He earned a degree from Yale and a law degree from Columbia, but he never practiced law. He didn't need to work because of his inherited family wealth, so he never held a traditional job. Instead, he became an expert community organizer, and his community included the wealthiest, most powerful men in New York City.

Because Grant didn't have to work, he devoted himself full time to his two passions, hunting and activism.

In the late 18 hundreds, big game hunting in the western US required tons of time and money, and Grant had plenty of both.

Hunting in the wilds of America became the alpha male respected thing to do among Grant's wealthy social tier in New York City.

No one drove this elitist hunting culture more than Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, in fact, created an ultra exclusive hunting club called the Boone and Crockett Club, whose primary aim was, quote, to.

Speaker C
Promote manly sport with the rifle.

Speaker A
The club was limited to 100 members, men only, and to even be considered for a membership, you had to kill an animal from at least three different north american species, including Bear, buffalo, caribou, cougar, and several others.

Madison Grant was invited to join the club in 1893 and became a very good friend of Teddy Roosevelt.

Because the Boone and Crockett club members were among the only Americans who could afford extensive big game hunting trips, they viewed America's backcountry as their special domain.

They felt proprietary ownership of these hunting grounds, and Madison Grant believed passionately that it was their right and duty to protect this land.

Grant and his fellow club members were concerned that the most prized trophy animals were dwindling too fast and had to be conserved before it was too late.

America needed laws to protect animals from overhunting so that Grant and his fellow elites would never run out of the best animals to hunt for sporting. So Grant almost single handedly created modern hunting laws. He began his activism in his home state of New York, getting a law passed to regulate deer hunting in the Adirondacks. But just a few years later, he angered Alaskans by lobbying the US Congress to pass the Alaska game bill, which banned commercial hunting in the territory and created seasons and limits for sport hunting.

Grant never ran for public office. He didnt need to to get what he wanted.

He had the time and the money to perfect the art of twisting arms and became a master lobbyist.

Grant was a devoted progressive, so taking personal passion projects and seeing it through to federal legislation came very naturally to him. It only took him six months to get the Alaska game bill passed. He worked his contacts, including some congressmen who were members of the Boone and Crockett Club. And once Congress passed the bill, his good friend Teddy Roosevelt, who by then was president, signed it into law.

Madison Grant articulated an important part of the progressive philosophy when he wrote, the.

Speaker B
Law itself must be in advance of public opinion.

Speaker A
That philosophy still courses through progressive strategy today. You see it in things like the Biden White House policies related to fossil fuels. According to a Pew Research center study in 2023, the vast majority of Americans, 68%, are not in favor of completely phasing out fossil fuel use. Yet President Biden signed an executive order mandating that 50% of all new vehicles sold in the US be electric or zero emission vehicles by 2030.

Speaker D
Folks, the rest of the world is moving ahead.

We've just got to step up government, labor, and industry working together, which you're seeing here today.

We have a playbook, and it's going to work. Today, I'm announcing steps we're taking to set a new pace for electric vehicles.

Speaker A
In this case, the president's executive order on EV's is well behind public opinion, but the left is determined to force it anyway. A progressive with a playbook who insists it's going to work whether you like it or not, should make every american nervous.

Through his hunting expeditions and love for the outdoors, Madison Grant became an amateur zoologist. He was actually credited with discovering several north american mammals. The scientific name of one species of alaskan caribou was even named after him. Grant turned his love of animals into the co founding of the New York Zoological Society and the Bronx Zoo in 1899. Both are still in operation today.

Grant was either president or on the executive committee of the Zoological Society. For the rest of his life, he maintained tight control of the society, appointing several Boone and Crockett club members to the board. And while he was more than happy to accept money from jewish donors, he made sure no jews were allowed to serve on the board.

Grant and his fellow influencers in the wildlife protection movement evolved from wanting to protect animals for hunting to protecting animals so they wouldn't go extinct.

Grant helped start the American Bison Society, and his tireless lobbying efforts led to the creation of the first federally controlled national wildlife refuge for bison.

From there, Grant's vision evolved to protecting natural wonders. He founded the Save the Redwoods League, another organization still going today. Those efforts led to the California State Board of Parks dedicating the largest known tree in the world to Madison Grant and two of his cohorts in 1931.

Grant was also heavily involved in the creation of several national parks, including Denali, Olympic, Everglades, and glaciers. Crucially for Grant and his friends in his new conservation movement, their efforts became all about keeping the environment pure. But much of this drive for purity would soon encompass much more than the environment.

There is only one definitive biography written about the life of Madison Grant. It's a fascinating book called defending the Master Conservation, Eugenics, and the legacy of Madison Grant. It was written by historian Jonathan Spiro, and as Spiro put it, quote, the conservation movement mirrored the progressive's enthrallment with scientific management.

Hmm. Where have we heard that before.

In case it doesn't ring a bell, make sure you catch episode one of this season and find out how progressive became obsessed with scientific management.

Well, Madison Grant, who was a leading pioneer in the concept of wildlife management, experts in charge of managing nature.

But sometimes that effort brought unintended consequences. For instance, in the early 19 hundreds, the protection of elk in Yellowstone led to the overpopulation and the inability of the elk to find enough food to survive.

The elk then had to be scientifically managed, which meant killing several thousand of them annually to ensure the survival of the species.

Jonathan Spiro put it, quote, wildlife management in some was the penultimate progressive idea.

According to Madison Grant in an article he wrote in 1909, natural selection had led to man's complete mastery of the globe, and that meant his generation had.

Speaker B
Quote, the responsibility of saying, what forms of life shall be preserved?

Speaker A
Tragically, grant in his progressive generation would end up going much, much further with that idea.

I hope you love this series of podcasts as much as I do. I can't wait for you to hear the whole series. But history teaches us to have at least a little bit of skepticism for the so called experts and what they tell us at any given time. In fact, it's best to have as many of our decisions that get made about you and your family in your own hands, not theirs. For instance, what about life saving medications?

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Jace Jace medical take your family's health into your own hands. Jace.com enter the promo code beck at checkout for a discount on your order. It's promo code beckase.com dot the huge crowd roared with laughter. Children squeezed through to the front of the hoard for a closer look.

Some peered anxiously from behind their parents legs.

Madison Grant's Bronx Zoo. It had a brand new exhibit in the primate section, a unique caged specimen which this rowdy New York crowd had never seen before.

The four foot eleven, 103 pound specimen suddenly rushed towards the bar of the cage, baring its sharp teeth, which looked like they had been chiseled to a point.

The crowd of gas and young children recoiled. Then everybody laughed and clamored for more.

New Yorkers were enthralled with this african pygmy tribesman that recently arrived from the Congo.

A 23 year old man named Ota Benga.

Benga ended up in the Bronx zoo in a roundabout way. In 1904, he traveled to the US with a white explorer named Doctor Samuel Werner, who had purchased Benga at a slave market in the Congo.

The belgian army had recently destroyed Benga's village, and his wife and children died in the massacre. Doctor Werner bought Banga to be part of an authentic african exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair.

After the fair, they went back to Africa for a year. When Werner made plans to return to the US, Banga requested to go with him.

Werner agreed, and their first stop was New York, to see if Madison Grant and his zoo colleagues wanted to buy a chimpanzee, which they had brought with them from Africa. The Bronx zoo indeed purchased the chimp. Doctor Werner also asked if Ota Banga could help out around the zoo for several weeks. While Werner took care of some personal business down south.

The zoo's leadership agreed. So for several weeks, Benga lived at the zoo and assisted the zookeepers with chores.

Eventually, someone, we don't know exactly who, suggested Benga enter an empty cage in the primate house. And he did.

Well, it didn't take long for a crowd of spectators to turn into a throng. The New York Times headline the next day declared, Bushman shares a cage with Bronx park apes.

Fango was an instant hit with visitors. Soon after his debut in the cage, thousands of New Yorkers flooded into the zoo just to see him.

Zoo leadership put a sign on the cage noting Benga's age, height, weight, and where he was from. Not unlike the labels on animal enclosures throughout the zoo. The sign also noted that he would be, quote, exhibited every afternoon in September.

Otabenga was so popular with visitors at the zoo that zoo leadership extended his run into the fall and added an orangutan to his cage. The New York Times report described one of the things that kept the crowds laughing was that the pygmy was not much taller than the oregantang, and one had a good opportunity to study their points of resemblance. Their heads are much alike, and both grin in the same way when pleased.

Historian Jonathan Spiro notes that when a reporter asked the zoo's director whether he saw anything wrong with putting a man into a monkey cage. The director assured him that everything was being done with the full approval of Madison Grant. And that, quote, the little black man is really very comfortable there.

Speaker B
The little fellow has one of the best rooms in the primate house.

Speaker A
But after much pressure from a group of black ministers, Madison Grant finally relented and Benga was no longer displayed in a cage, since Benga was still living at the zoo. While he waited for doctor Werner to return for him, thousands of New Yorkers continued flocking to see Benga walking around the zoo grounds. The crowds followed him everywhere and constantly harassed him.

Aside from the main fact, the zoo used Benga to sell a lot more tickets. He was also useful to Madison Grant and the zoo's leadership in another vital way, as a live example of their belief in Darwin's theory of evolution and that black people were the missing link between apes and humans.

The New York Times was all in on this view, saying, quote, evolution in.

Speaker B
One form or another is now taught in the textbooks of all the schools. And that is no more debatable than.

Speaker A
The multiplication table for those early 20th century experts. You might say the science was settled around evolution.

Sound familiar?

Speaker E
The shift to a cleaner energy economy.

Speaker A
Won'T happen overnight and it will require.

Speaker D
Some tough choices along the way.

Speaker C
But the debate is settled.

Speaker A
Climate change is a fact that was then President Barack Obama in his 2014 State of the Union address. That's what we're still being told every day about climate change.

A group called Covering Climate now was founded in 2019 to insert climate change into as many news stories as possible around the world.

Under this groups guidelines on best practices for climate journalism, they say, quote, there is simply no good faith argument against climate science that really distills the modern progressive ethos. If you dont agree with the experts, you must not be arguing in good faith.

One misconception about the history of racism in America is that it was primarily a southern sin.

The reality is that the racism of northern progressive elites fueled the nativist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Madison Grant was their ringleader.

In 1916, Grant put his grand racist theories into a book called the passing of the great race.

It's the book I mentioned at the start of this episode and the one that the Nazis used in their defense at the Nuremberg trials. In his book, Grant said that white people from northern and western Europe, whom he referred to as Nordics, had evolved in a harsh climate which helped make them physically and mentally superior to all other races.

He claimed that the greatest human achievements and progress were work of the Nordics.

According to Grant, this nordic race was in danger of extinction thanks to the pollution of nordic blood. He said this was happening because of the invasion of alpine, mediterranean and jewish populations who were overtaking them. He called Slovaks, Italians, Syrians and Jews social discards.

Immigration and intermarrying were causing all of societys problems.

Grant lived through the Ellis island era, the massive immigration boom of the late 18 hundreds. He witnessed the transformation of his beloved New York City. According to Grant, the so called inferior races were ruining his city and ruining America.

He was angry at, quote, being literally.

Speaker E
Driven off the streets by the swarms of polish Jews.

Speaker A
Thats why America, he said, desperately needed immigration restrictions.

Somehow, Grant never got around to explaining why a master race that was smarter and stronger than all the other peoples on earth needed special government protection from these invaders.

Grant wrote that a wave of sentimentalism for black slaves developed out of the abolitionist movement in the mid 18 hundreds. That caused nordic racial pride to take a hit.

That sentimentalism caused the tidal wave of immigrants with inferior race value.

In Grant's own words, these immigrants adopt.

Speaker B
The language of the Native American. They wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.

And while he is being elbowed out of his own home, the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

Speaker A
And as for black Americans, Grant said they were valuable as long as they.

Speaker B
Remained willing followers who ask only to obey and to further the ideals and wishes of the master race.

Speaker A
Grant considered his 476 page book to be a serious scientific exploration of race.

It was not scientific, of course, but Grant had the veneer of scientific respect thanks to his work and the organizations that he founded in the fields of conservation and zoology, and his vast network of wealthy progressive elites helped prop him up as a legitimate man of science.

There were glowing reviews in the scholarly journals like Yale Review and the American Historical Review, which applauded Grant for espousing much solid scientific and historical truth with dignity and clearness.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Grant, calling the passing of the great race, quote, a capital book, in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize.

The Saturday Evening Post was the most widely read magazine in the US at the time, and its editor had gone to Yale with Madison Grant. The magazine went out of its way to promote Grants book, endorsing his racism and anti immigrant stance. One article even declared, quote, every American who has at heart, the future of America owes it to himself and to his children to get and read carefully the passing of the great race. End quote.

Less than a year after Grant's book was published, he worked his magic, lobbying Congress to restrict immigration by passing a literacy bill that required all adult immigrants to pass a reading test before they could enter the US.

The literacy bill was a good start, but it wasn't enough for Grant.

Speaker B
He said no one should be allowed to enter the United States unless a visitor or traveler except white men of superior intellectual capacity, distinctly capable of becoming valuable american citizens.

Speaker A
Grant put his money and his time where his mouth was. As vice president of the immigration Restriction League, he lobbied hard for the Emergency Quota act, which would set strict quotas based on national origin, which meant much lower numbers of those so called alpine and mediterranean types that he loathed from eastern and southern Europe and Africa. Immigration from Asia and the Middle east was totally banned. Grant actually assisted Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, a progressive Republican, in drafting the bill. Congressman Johnson gave a passionate speech before Congress in favor of the bill, in which he used research that Grant gave him. He even read excerpts from Grant's book on the House floor.

The Emergency Quota act of 1921 passed the House 276 to 33. It sailed through the Senate, 78 to one.

Madison. Grant convinced the US Congress that the great race in America really was in danger of passing away. But Grant's appetite for trying to get rid of people he considered inferior was never to be satisfied.

15 years after he got the emergency quota bill passed, and nearing the end of his life, he committed to creating a $10,000 annual endowment, the equivalent of over $222,000 today, that would pay for the lobbying effort to convince Congress to deport the 12 million black Americans who lived in the US at the time back to Africa.

Well, eventually, with help, Ota Benga made it out of New York and away from the cruel crowds and primate house at the Bronx Zoo.

He remained in the US for several years, learning English and converting to Christianity.

He had the opportunity to attend school in Virginia and later worked in a tobacco factory.

But he longed to return to the Congo.

Just when he thought he might have the opportunity to do so, world War one broke out, and travel to the Congo was prohibited.

As the war dragged on, Benga fell into a deep depression, and in 1916, he stole a pistol and killed himself.

For Grant and his fellow progressives, who have set themselves up as experts in conservation and in the supposed science of race, it was an easy natural progression from managing animals and land to managing humanity.

They would even invent a new expert sounding, very scientific sounding term for this exciting new field, eugenics.

I hope it's obvious to you by now that when it comes to decisions that directly affect you and the people you love, it's sometimes not as good to leave things in the hands of the experts.

Years ago, when I was dealing with almost daily horrible pain in my hands, I sought the advice of a lot of experts, and they were really good. They were the best in the world.

You know what that got me? Huge, huge medical bills, no easing of the pain. Nobody could figure it out.

That was before I started taking relief factor. Things changed for me forever once I started taking it. I had such bad pain in my hands, I had no hope. But I got my hope back, my joy back. I got my whole life back. And you know what? I'm no expert either, so don't take my word for it. If you're living with aches and pains, see for yourself how relief factor, a daily drug free supplement, could help you feel and live better every day. Join over the 1 million people who have turned to relief factor and you could start feeling better in three weeks or less. It's relieffactor.com dot relieffactor.com are called 800 for relief. 800 the number four relief.

Carrie Buck.

She was the victim of a conspiracy by american experts in the brand new field of eugenics.

The state of Virginia had labeled her morally delinquent and diagnosed her as a middle grade moron.

She was 17 years old.

Carrie was mostly raised by foster parents who often rented her out to do household chores for other families. When Carrie was 16, her foster mother's nephew raped her, and Carrie became pregnant.

To save face, Carrie's foster parents had her officially declared mentally deficient.

She was allowed to give birth to her baby, a girl she named Vivian. And then Carrie was shipped off to join her own birth mother at the Virginia colony. For the epileptic and feeble minded, by the way, a prominent feature of progressivism has always been its command of and spread of strategic language.

The word moron was a technical term invented by the top eugenic scientists of the time who were on a committee appointed by the American association for the Study of the feeble minded.

This committee created a scale for rating feeble minded people.

Idiots had the equivalent intelligence of a two year old. Imbeciles had the intelligence of a three to seven year old. And morons, well, they were the equivalent of an eight to ten year old.

The superintendent of the colony where Carrie Buck was sent to live was a devout eugenicist, he was eager to find a test case, someone that could set a legal precedent that would allow Virginia's new sterilization law to proceed without barriers.

A case that would give these experts iron clad permission to sterilize whomever they deemed necessary.

Carrie Buck presented that perfect option.

Her birth mother had already been declared feeble minded and was committed in the same colony. And now Carrie had a daughter, Vivian, who by then was eight months old.

A eugenics expert from an organization called the Eugenics Records office in New York was brought in to evaluate Vivian.

Now, how do you test to see if a baby is officially feeble minded?

Well, this expert waved a coin back and forth of the baby's face to see if her eyes tracked it. According to this expert, baby Vivian failed the coin test.

Well, the superintendent now had the proof he wanted that feeble mindedness was genetic, passed from one generation to the next through what the experts called defective bloodlines.

The board of Virginia colony for the epileptic and feeble minded mandated that Kerry Buck had to be sterilized. Then the board arranged for a lawyer to defend Carrie in court and oppose the boards decision to sterilize her.

It was a total setup.

The lawyer that the board arranged for Kerry was Irving Whitehead. He was a former member of the colonies board and a close friend of the colonys. Superintendent Whitehead barely pretended to mount any defense on Carrie's behalf in court. He didn't question her foster parents or bring up her rape, or question the absurd so called expert evidence of her feeble mindedness. He didn't call a single witness, even though he could have called her elementary school teachers to testify. Gary could read and write because she attended school through the fifth grade and was reportedly a very good student until her foster parents didn't let her go anymore.

Carrie Bach, predictably lost in court, just like her expert overseers had designed. Her lawyer submitted a sham appeal, and she lost there, too. The only thing that could stop the now 18 year old from being sterilized against her will was the US Supreme Court.

Now, the term eugenics is adapted from a greek word that means well born or good in stock.

A british man named Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883 to apply to the rising belief at the time that a major way to improve society is to regulate human reproduction.

Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton took Darwin's survival of the fittest concept and applied it to people. Thus, certain races of people were more involved, more fit to survive, and therefore superior to others.

Madison Grant's nordic race of white people were at the top of this pyramid. In 1865, Galton published a book titled Hereditary Talent and character, which historian Jonathan Spiro calls, quote, the founding document of the eugenics movement.

Galton hoped eugenics would become the new religion of the 20th century. If that wish didn't fully come true, it wasn't for the lack of elite congregants in America. And one of the top disciples of the eugenics religion was Madison Grant.

Grant threw himself into supporting and promoting the eugenics movement with the same fervor he devoted to animal and land preservation. To him, nothing less than the preservation of his race was at stake.

In 1918, Grant co founded the Galton Society.

Named after the founder of the eugenics movement. Grant frequently hosted meetings of eugenics organizations in his Manhattan townhouse. He served for a time as the president of the Eugenics Research association. He co founded the American Eugenics Society in the parlor of his home.

Within two years, the society, which had promoted eugenics education and policies, had over 1200 members from 45 states. Grant helped organize and fund the international eugenics congresses. Twice hosted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he happened to be on the museum's executive committee.

Grant was the ultimate insider and stealthy behind the scenes operator when he backed an effort like eugenics. He wasn't just a cheerleader. He didn't just sign a pledge card or give a few bucks. He was the guy who created the organization, helped draft that organization's constitution, handpicked the organization's board members and letterhead and held a top position in the organization himself. He hosted fundraising dinners and personally lobbied countless state and federal lawmakers. He was the brain behind the operation.

Remember, he was independently wealthy, so he never had to work a traditional job.

Activism was his lifes work. He was kind of like an early 19 hundreds version of George Soros, devoting his wealth and his time to his progressive passions.

In his infamous book, the passing of the great race, Grant wrote a rigid.

Speaker B
System of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit. In other words, social failures would solve the whole question in 100 years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime. But the state, through sterilization, must see to it that his line stops with him.

Speaker A
Within a decade of his co founding the American Eugenics Society, the group's legislation committee had helped create laws in 41 states. Banning the marriage of feeble minded and insane.

17 other states also prohibited marrying epileptics. By the late 1920s, 75% of american universities offered eugenics courses. Eugenics was considered top edge science.

Madison Grant and his peers in the booming american eugenics movement were opposed to improving health conditions for the segments of the population they considered unfit.

They were concerned that modern food and medicine were interfering with the law of natural selection. In other words, unfit people weren't being allowed to die off from disease and poverty, like nature intended. And even worse, these unnatural survivors were reproducing.

Well, to help solve that problem, Grant recommended mandatory sterilization for, as he put.

Speaker B
It, an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

Speaker A
Remember Grant's pioneering efforts in wildlife management? How sometimes you have to cull the herd to ensure its survival?

The eugenics experts carried the same principle over to humans, especially the physically and mentally disabled. To these experts, this was simply logical. Human conservation. And there was probably no more radical crusader in this human conservation movement than a woman named Margaret Sanger.

Speaker C
The Mike Wallace interview when Misses Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States back in 1916, birth control was a dirty word. The police threw her into jail, as they were to do seven more times during her crusade, a crusade that still faces the reasoning, but unalterable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Speaker A
In January 1914, Margaret Sanger finally landed on the right name for her cause. She would call it birth control.

She wrote.

Margaret Sanger
We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control.

Then someone suggested drop the rate. Birth control was the answer. We knew we had it.

Speaker A
She started a magazine called Birth Control Review, in which she boiled down the essence of her work, more children from.

Margaret Sanger
The fit, less from the unfit. That is the chief issue of birth control.

Speaker A
Of all the american eugenicists, Margaret Sanger's legacy extends the most prominently into our present. In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League. Today you know it as Planned Parenthood. The National Council of Sanger's American Birth Control League included many key members of the American Eugenics Society. Sanger called eugenics and birth control the.

Margaret Sanger
Right and left hand of one body.

Speaker A
One of Sanger's dreams, which was fortunately never realized, was her proposal for a federal bureau of applications for the unborn.

Her plan would have forced married couples to apply to the government to become parents.

You could have a baby if you had a government license.

This is how Margaret Sanger described her cause in an article she wrote for the New York Times in 1923.

Margaret Sanger
Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of defective stocks, those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of american civilization.

Speaker A
This is the sinister truth underlying Planned parenthood and the abortion industry from the beginning. More than being about a woman's right to choose or female empowerment, it was racism, in Sanger's own words. It was about cultivation of the better racial elements of our society.

It was all about white supremacy.

In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted whether she meant to or not, what abortion and the Roe versus Wade decision was really all about. She said, and I quote, frankly, I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth, and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of, so that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

Wow.

Despite the racist, eugenics based underpinnings of abortion in America, Planned Parenthood presented the Margaret Sanger Award annually to recognize, quote, leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement. The award appears to have been discontinued after 2015, but past winners include Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Jane Fonda.

After the BLM riots in the summer of 2020, the Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed Margaret Sanger's name from the Manhattan clinic due to what they called her racist legacy.

One might say that after a century, they finally grew a conscience.

But they're still killing babies. So the Sanger mission continues.

Planned Parenthood continues to be wildly successful in carrying out Sanger's vision. Just since Roe versus Wade passed in 1973, there have been an estimated 20 million black american abortions. According to the CDC, black women currently account for the largest share of 38% of all us abortions.

In 1927, Carrie Buck's sterilization case finally made it before the Supreme Court. Kerry was 21 years old by then. But in that dangerous era of scientific racism and eugenics, the pseudoscience spurred by Madison Grant, Margaret Sanger, and scores of other academic and medical elites of their time, Kerry Buck never had a chance.

The US Supreme Court was dominated by progressives, as it would be for the next century. Justices included Louis Brandeis, whom youll remember from episode one of this season.

The court ruled against Kerry Buck eight to one the radically progressive justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion.

Speaker E
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.

Speaker A
In justifying Kerry's sterilization, Holmes also wrote in the opinion, it is better for.

Speaker E
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.

Speaker A
Later that year, Carrie Buck went under the knife against her will.

A doctor in the Virginia colony for the epileptic and feeble minded removed part of her fallopian tubes.

It was the first state mandated operation. Under Virginia's new sterilization law, there would be 65,000 more Americans sterilized by state government mandates before the last of these laws was finally repealed in the 1970s.

Two years after her operation, Carrie Buck was released from the colony. But she was never reunited with her daughter, Vivian.

Vivian was adopted by the couple who had been Carrie's foster parents, the ones who had had Carrie committed to the colony in the first place.

The eugenics expert had been totally wrong about Vivian. She was not feeble minded at all. In fact, she was an honor roll student in elementary school.

Tragically, Vivian died of an intestinal infection when she was only eight years old.

Two decades after the Supreme Court's decision in Kerry Buck's case, the nazi SS officer read the summary of the decision from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as part of the nazi defense at the Nuremberg trials.

See, the nazi leaders, in effect, were saying, we didn't invent the playbook for weeding out undesirables, and they weren't entirely wrong about that.

The Nazis euthanasia program was well underway in 1939 when a german steamship called the St. Louis, flying a nazi flag, loitered just off the coast of Miami.

There were over 900 passengers on the St. Louis, most of whom were Jews.

The night of broken glass had happened just seven months earlier, and it was more than enough reason to flee Germany. The St. Louis was never supposed to be near Miami. The ship first stopped in Havana, Cuba. Most of the jewish passengers planned to stay in Cuba while they waited to be admitted to the United States.

They had purchased a cuban visa in Germany. But when they arrived in Havana after the two week journey across the Atlantic, cuban officials informed them that their landing permits had been canceled. The jewish refugees were not allowed off the ship.

The ship then remained in Havana for a week, but Cuba refused to budge and finally forced the St. Louis to leave.

The passengers decided to head to Miami to try their luck with the american authorities. They sent a desperate petition to the White House asking for sanctuary.

But President Roosevelt ignored the cable.

The US slammed its door shut to the jewish refugees. Congress had passed the emergency quota bill almost 20 years earlier, the bill spearheaded by Madison Grant, the bill that was designed to admit the right kind of white people.

Sorry, the St. Louis passengers were told us law only allowed a combined 27,000 people from Germany and Austria per year, and that quota was already filled for 1939, and the waiting list was years long.

In the end, the St. Louis had no choice but to return to Europe.

Close to one third of the jewish passengers made it to great Britain and survived the war.

But it was a death sentence for all the rest, most of whom ended up in nazi concentration camps. 254 of them died in the Holocaust in 1989. A survivor of the St. Louis remembered the tantalizing view of Miami's palm trees by day and the city's lights at night from their ship as it bobbed off the Florida coast.

She told the Miami Herald, we were not wanted.

Margaret Sanger
We were abandoned by the world.

Speaker A
Nearly a decade before the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, Hitler told the New York Times, quote, it was America who taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations.

The Nazis had a slogan that is often credited to Rudolf Hess, who was one of hitlers deputies. The slogan went like, national Socialism is nothing but applied biology.

When Hitler came to power, one of the first laws passed under his rule was the german sterilization law. Within six years, 400,000 Germans had been sterilized.

Those numbers led one Virginia doctor who had testified in Kerry Buck's sterilization case to complain, the Germans are beating us at our own game. End quote.

Throughout the 1920s and thirties, Madison Grant corresponded regularly with top nazi academics and researchers in the field of eugenics. In 1936, the nazi government made grants book the passing of the great race, one of only two non german books on an official reading list for german scientists studying human heredity.

In his book, Grant wrote, man has.

Speaker B
The choice of two methods of race.

He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization.

The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or the race.

Speaker A
The Nazis euthanasia program that began in 1939 quickly grew to include much more than physically handicapped babies and children.

They soon graduated to killing adults, at least 70,000 of them whom the state deemed infirm, insane, or incurably ill.

It was murder, but the preferred nazi term was disinfection.

The program used lethal injections at first. Then it moved to gas chambers, showers, mental hospitals. Nurses removed any gold from the victims teeth before the bodies were cremated. It was all dress rehearsal. Rehearsal, or the exponential escalation of carnage that soon followed.

In fact, as Germany's psychiatric hospitals ran out of patients because they'd been killed, the staff and equipment were transferred to nazi death camps, including Treblinka, Sobor, and Auschwitz.

In 1937, Hitler's chosen successor, Hermann Goering, had a great idea, an international hunting exposition to be held in Berlin. It would be a three week long festival to promote goodwill among elite international hunters. Goering was a great admirer of American Madison Grant, so Grant was invited to attend, and he was even on the vip shortlist to go hunting with Goering himself.

Grant was making preparations to attend gering hunting extravaganza when he died of kidney disease.

Grant was 71.

Even though Grant devoted the last half of his life to preserving the supposedly endangered white race, he never married and he never had children. Historian Jonathan Spiro rightly points out that neither Madison Grant nor any other eugenicist, german or american, can be said to have caused the Holocaust, but they certainly provided the scientific justification for what occurred.

For such an influential figure in the conservation and eugenics movements, the extent to which Madison Grant has been erased from history is remarkable.

Though Grant co founded the New York Zoological Society, now called the Wild Life Conservation Society, there's no mention of him in its history or on its website.

At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Grant was on the executive committee for years, and where he twice hosted the International Eugenics Congress, his name also has vanished without a trace.

In 2021, an excavator removed a large stone monument that had stood since 1948 in California's Prairie Redwood State park.

It was a monument, a monument to Madison grant for his tireless efforts to save California's redwood trees.

World War Two opened America's eyes to the evil of eugenics and torpedoed the movement as mainstream science.

However, it did not completely destroy eugenics.

The true believers, like Margaret Sanger, refused to let it die.

Here's Sanger in 1957, in an interview with Mike Wallace.

Speaker C
Do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?

Margaret Sanger
I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being. Practically delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just mocked when they're born. That, to me, is the greatest sin that people can commit.

Speaker A
Now, eugenics rears its head in technology like genetic screening so called designer babies. A 2022 US Senate committee report estimates that 60% to 90% of children diagnosed with down syndrome through prenatal testing are aborted in the US.

In Iceland, where prenatal testing is even more widespread, almost 100% of pregnancies that receive a positive test for down syndrome are killed.

Eugenics is also back in the form of euthanasia, but now it's referred to as medical assistance in dying or death care.

Death care is now legal in Australia, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, as well as in ten us states so far.

In a creepy nod to the original eugenicist, the conditions that doctors deem to be an appropriate reason to die keep expanding. Hearing loss, autism, post traumatic stress disorder have qualified patients to die recently in Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Australia and Canada are mandating that death care be offered or hospitals can lose their government funding. Just as blatantly unscientific as Madison grants repulsive theories on race superiority is the pseudoscience of transgenderism, especially in how its aimed at children.

Like with grants theories and the eugenics movement, the academic, medical, and political establishment on the left have moved in concert at lightning speed to legitimize the latest pseudoscience.

This was President Joe Biden's message from the White House in 2022.

Speaker D
To everyone celebrating transgender day of visibility, I want you to know that your president sees you.

Jill, Kamala, Doug, our entire administration sees you for who you are. And we're committed to advancing transgender equality in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, in our housing and healthcare systems, everywhere. Simply everywhere. To parents of transgender children, affirming your child's identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.

Speaker A
Fortunately, there are still some doctors who have not jumped on this bandwagon and are willing to speak out against the madness. This is Doctor Miriam Grossman testifying before a congressional committee in 2023.

Doctor Miriam Grossman
I'm going to use my time to respond to Doctor McNamara.

First, I'm struck by her use of the phrase sex assigned at birth. Sex is not assigned at birth.

Sex is established at conception, and it's recognized at birth, if not earlier.

Doctor McNamara claims that her views are science based, but to claim that sex is assigned at birth is without any scientific basis whatsoever. Its language misleads people, especially children, into thinking that male and female are arbitrary designations and can change that is simply not true.

I'll end by quoting Jamie Reed, the courageous whistleblower from the children's gender clinic in St. Louis. I believe that that hospital receives the medical education funding that we're discussing today.

She said that doctors at that clinic said, we are building the plane while we are flying it.

We are building the plane while we are flying it. That's how they described the treatment at their gender clinic. Our precious tax dollars should not support such a perilous experiment.

Speaker A
Planned Parenthood is playing a large role in this perilous experiment. They are now the second largest provider of transgender related services in the US.

Planned Parenthood's website tells visitors, quote in most cases, your clinician will be able to prescribe hormones the same day as your first visit.

No letter from a mental health provider is required.

Apparently these transgender services are great for business.

The latest numbers available at the time of recording of this episode show that in 2022, revenue over expenses was almost $205 million. And it's also great for staying true to Margaret Sanger's vision. What a better way to expand birth control than to render healthy people unable to have children? Thanks to cross sex hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgeries, it is sterilization just under a different name.

100 years of scientific and technological advances has not increased our moral enlightenment over Madison Grant, Margaret Sanger and their fellow eugenicists.

Less than a century ago, the world's elite thinkers believed that there was legitimate scientific bases for inferior races.

Today, an elite class of thinkers believe it is best practice to give gender dysphoric children puberty blockers.

Ideology disguised as science is insidious.

From the moment of its invention by Francis Galton, eugenics, in all of its iterations, was and continues to be an anti life movement. It is twisted philosophy rife with elitism, self styled experts, and the progressive obsession with government control.

When a government invokes science to justify policy that restricts freedom, or worse, healthy skepticism of that science is a must if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is to survive.