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Back in the days when the grown-ups ran things, there was a gag about an elderly woman who called the cops on her neighbor for standing naked in his window on the tenth floor across the street. When the officer arrived, he looked out the window and said, “I can’t see any naked man.” The old lady scoffed and said, “Of course not! You’re not using the binoculars!”
Until the peevish, thin-skinned, self-selected cultural hall monitors took over the culture, I never dreamed that such preposterous, invented affronts could be taken seriously enough to be sanctioned as “hate speech” against politically selected “victims,” and subjected to censorship, abuse, and harassment.
What we used to call “political correctness” ––a phrase from the Thirties frequently used to compliment fanatic adherents of totalitarian regimes––as damaging as it was, pales next to the sheer stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous big lies that have flourished during the Trump decade and the left’s political meltdown. Their complaints and attacks with obsessive ad Hitlerum fallacy are dog-bites-man stories, and usually are just traffic noise for normal grown-ups.
But recently, the “woke” Stasi outdid themselves with their attack on actress and model Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement for American Eagle’s new line of jeans. In one video, Sweeney changed an American Eagle billboard featuring her tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” by crossing out “genes” and replacing it with “jeans.”
Passionate intensity ensued, some haters calling the ad “a dog whistle for eugenics.” Things got worse when Sweeney commented, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” This obvious truth really riled up the permanently offended race-hacks, who whipped out their ideological binoculars and took off virtue signaling. They discovered that Sweeney’s comments and visuals were all about eugenics and “white supremacism,” along with a nod to Nazism’s crackpot race theories.
This juvenile tantrum reveals the “woke’s” trademark ignorance of history. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin who invented the term eugenics, applied Darwin’s theory of “fitness for survival” to the mind, morals, and character of human beings. Galton, Robert Zubrin points out, saw human nature “almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder’s will,” and said the “unfit” must be kept from procreating, for “if these continued,” Galton warned, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”
Eugenics, then, was an extension of Darwin’s idea that evolution gives only some people the “survival of the fittest,” while the others, the unfit, should be forbidden from procreating. For “if these continued,” he went on, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”
Presented as a “science” rather than a hypothesis, and supporting Jim Crow laws, eugenics didn’t take long to become a powerful political idea. New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson said “sterilization or racial disaster,” and Teddy Roosevelt warned of “race suicide” if eugenics was not practiced. But eugenics also permeated popular culture, magazines, and books–– Stanford president David Starr Jordan, in 1902 published The Blood of a Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit. In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard wrote The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, and Madison Grant, in 1916, The Passing of the Great Race. All were best-sellers. Adolf Hitler called Grant’s book his “Bible” and sent him a letter.
More despicable, in 1927, the Supreme Court’s decision Buck vs. Bell legalized forced sterilizations, which Oliver Wendell Holmes rationalized by quipping, “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The idea that some humans inherited traits that made them fit to survive, while others were unfit and destined for extermination, were embraced by the educated in our best universities, as well as Progressive technocrats who considered those ideas as what we call “settled science.”
Others who rejected those ideas were slandered as dangerously ignorant, sentimental, naïve humanitarians, and Christians––all “deniers” of science who believed in superstitions, and the unscientific belief that all humans are inherently valuable and bestowed with unalienable rights and freedom. As Darwin warned, “The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”
Eugenics, moreover, was studied by the Nazis who created race-policies, and learned much from Americans “scientists.” That research contributed to the Nazi’s “final solution” for eliminating the Jews. As Hitler during a dinner said, “We are a member of creation and children of nature, and the same laws are valid for us as for all living organisms. And in nature the law of struggle reigns from the beginning. Everything that is incapable of life and everything weak is eradicated. Only humans, and especially the church, have made it their goal to artificially preserve the weak, the unfit for life, and the inferior.”
Many scientists and politicians in the U.S. agreed that what the Nazis called “life unworthy of life” should not be allowed to reproduce, and unfit women should be forced to be sterilized. Allowing the unfit to have children was a threat to the nation’s interests and security, one so dangerous that it would cause “race suicide.” Eugenics––an inhuman, unconstitutional, and unscientific crackpot idea––was the rationale for forced sterilization. Yet this violation of Constitutional rights was taught, researched, and promoted by our most prestigious universities, and endorsed by other cognitive elites who boasted that they “follow the science.”
By the way, Darwin’s “scientific racism” also provided an argument for colonialism: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” And, like most fans of Darwin and eugenics, Darwin was a racist. For example, in The Descent of Man (1871), Robert Zubrin writes, “Darwin said that the Negro and the European were of such ‘distinct’ races that a naturalist might consider them two different ‘species,’ and that the evolutionary break between animals and man was between the ‘Negro’ and the ‘gorilla.’”
Finally, the eugenics that “woke” critics of Sidney Sweeney accuse her of endorsing, was the project of Progressives who believed that technocrats and scientists in federal agencies should replace Judeo-Christian morality and the Constitution’s unalienable rights, and divided powers that give citizens the responsibility to choose policies with their votes.
The Progressives who gave us eugenics is still producing policies and laws that violate our rights and damage our economy. Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming, the claim that human carbon emission will destroy the planet, professes that “settled science” supports this idea, and those who challenge the science are “deniers” ––just like believers of eugenics fancied itself as a proven “science,” and disbelievers were ignorant or unscientific, superstitious rubes.
The warmists also have damaged people’s lives in underdeveloped countries that don’t have the cheap fossil fuels that created the rich and powerful West––the warmists’ dubious and expensive promotion of “Net-Zero Carbon”; multiple billions of taxpayer dollars spent on subsidies for intermittent solar and windmill energy; and economies damaged by expensive “green energy” and unpopular EV’s. The “woke” who assault an actress advertising blue jeans have no problem believing in some of history’s silliest bad ideas.
But the Trump administration, which is doing battle with this climate scientism, has released “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel column about the Review provides a useful catalogue of global warming’s dubious “settled science”:
“Global warming has risks, but also benefits, including greater agricultural productivity. We still don’t know the extent to which human activity plays a role in warming, given natural variability, data limitations, uncertain models and fluctuations in solar activity. Models predicting what is to come remain all over the map. U.S. historical data doesn’t support claims of increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Climate change is likely to have little effect on economic growth. U.S. climate policies, even drastic ones, will have negligible effect on global temperatures.”
The “Woke” Dems’ juvenile attacks on those who don’t take them seriously have been steadily losing traction for months. Hopefully they will figure out that the 100 years of the progressives’ replacement of the Constitution with sketchy scientism just might be past its sell-by-date.
Did it ever occur to any of the AMERICAN advocates of eugenics that, if eugenics had been practiced in Europe in the 16th 17th 18th and 19th centuries, THEIR ancestors would have been sterilized or exterminated? The people who came to America couldn’t make it in Europe. Remember Dr. Johnson: “The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and should be grateful for anything we give them, short of hanging.”
Eugenics did not need to be practiced in Europe in those centuries. Before Europeans invented modern medicine and water sanitation, people often did not survive long enough to reproduce. Lives were shorter and much nastier.
The American’s couldn’t make it in Europe where at least there were shops, roads, water, taverns, transportation and food? So those weak people got into wooden ships, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived at a wild land without the slightest marks of civilization and managed to forge a new one.
Funny how those who “couldn’t make it” in Europe built a civilization that has eclipsed Europe in every measurable way and has now carried Europe on its back for the last 85 years.
Seriously!
Although… I wouldn’t be completely against sterilizing psychopaths, convicted child molesters, rapists and murderers. Who wants the next generation to be procreated by these sick humans? But then, some might say that’s opening a Pandora’s box and would ask “And who’s to decide who lives and who dies?”
States do. Only they call it the death penalty. Which I heartily support for them 👆👆👆
And now, centuries after that debunked “settled science,” about race and humanity, the same mind set is with us for so-called climate change and WAS with us during the pandemic lockdowns, the vaccinations, transgenders, and so much else that the woke imposed upon us.
Europeans long considered those who went to America to be the trash of Europe escaping from failure or scandal. Samuel Johnson was against the American Revolution.
You are correct. Britain did send many of its undesirables here. Australia was even more popular.
The first paragraph “an elderly woman called the cops…..” and the last paragraph ” woke dem juveniles” are the substance of the piece. The biddies have no one paying attention to them therefore their entire focus is on their personal electronic entertainment device. They are not necessary and resent it.
The woke juveniles are walking the same path as the biddies. They desperately are attempting relevance with the crisis of the day. They are obviously failing. This brings us to the connecting factor of both generations. Home Owners’ Associations. The biddies only function is to try to get attention through control. The nerds are quite similar. Our government has descended to the level of HOAs. How unfortunate!
Without the stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous lies of wokeness, democrats wouldn’t have anything to say and certainly not worth listening to. Listening to a them spew their convoluted woke bullsh*t is the same as listening to a chicken coop full of peevish hens cluck and cackle all day.
I don’t speak chicken but I’m sure it makes more sense than what those democrat “woke-tards” say.
I’m curious what woke bullshit are you talking about and which democrat spewed it.
Take look at the examples Thornton mentioned. Actually read the article. And add DEI, critical race theory, white oppressors and black oppressed, intersectionality, communism, a person can be any sex they want, etc. All championed by the Dirtbagocrat party. Look no further than the Squat for a good example.
The D-Bags are the party of “woke.”
Well, I guess we can start with Pete Moss, and work up from there.
The people who promoted the Progressive movement that first developed in the early 20th century believed it was a “modern” philosophy that combined science with government and would therefore improve the human condition. They’re still trying. And still failing.
And still making the human condition worse.
This was predictable once there was no serious pushback to PCness.
And since the source of the “woketards” and their hate mongering madness and stupidity are the universities and colleges, which are practically lunatic asylums yet the government still funds them.
why did the hall monitors get into power?
Ask Hillary Clinton about the great queen of Eugenics Margret Sanger. Planned Parenthood’s own child sacrifice founding mother. .
Isn’t it funny that the only people who can hear those “dog whistles” are leftards, while conservatives and libertarians remain completely oblivious to them.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.”
Sweeny is absolutely correct. Genes absolutely determine the physical characteristics of people and animals and they absolutely are inherited from parents.
White supremacism? There is no such thing in America although there are plenty of black ones: the Congressional Black Caucus, BLM, the New Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, those crazy black Hebrew guys, and many others. Eugenics? The only people who endorse eugenics are the D-Bag woketards but they don’t understand it so they just want to sterilize MAGA supporters and other conservatives.
Just so the woketards know, blacks also inherit their genes and physical characteristics from their parents. It’s just that their hair is always black and their eyes are always brown unless they’re part white. It’s always black and white with the woketards.
And Hitler admired the D-Bag party because it promoted eugenics. He got a lot of his ideas from his fellow monsters in that party.
Hollywood Halfwit Richard Geer has said WAR HAS NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING all except making America a Free Nation just shows us that Hollywood in Populated with whole lot of total Know-nothings on too much Dope and Booze
And stopping the genocidal Nazis and mass murderers of Imperial Japan.
Lie-beralism is a mental illness…..Clot Shot anyone ?!