“When I die, please don’t say that I’ve crossed over into the spirit realm, gone to the Other Side, moved on to a better place, rejoined my ancestors, or any other of those comforting fables,” he wrote. “Just selfishly or selflessly use my own impermanence to WAKE UP to your own.”

“A scientific lie had become a pillar of genocide in just 20 years.”

Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "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." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

We have entered a new stage of erasure of children, of the disabled, and of the vulnerable. Healthism and its sibling, eugenics, have been unapologetically espoused during the COVID pandemic by our country’s leadership.

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I believe we are watching, in real time, the development of a new system of permanently burdening people we do not value. This experience causes me to see more clearly the many inequities we have long endured as somehow normal, even though they could easily have been addressed. Why do we not have adequate ventilation in schools? Why do we allow evictions to occur without an immediate provision of social services to protect those who lose their homes? Why should a diabetic ever go without the best medicine to control their blood glucose levels? Why do we allow drinking water to be polluted? Why is our built environment so hostile to people who do not fit within our narrow norm of ability? Because this is who we are.

There are two kinds of eugenics. The first is positive eugenics, related to selective breeding. One frequently cited example is the Nazi SS matching its members with “worthy” Aryan women to improve the German stock. But positive eugenics is also inherent in opposition to immigration, race mixing and desegregation. White leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, for example, worried about the “mongrelization” of the Anglo-Saxon race.

The other eugenics, the negative kind, involves actively preventing certain individuals from living or reproducing — in other words, removing them from the gene pool. The Holocaust is an extreme example, but the basic concept was embraced in the United States early in the 20th century. Laws permitting forced sterilization of women, the mentally ill, gay people and those considered child rapists were passed across the country; they intended to purify the population.