TRUMP'S ENTIRE PLAYBOOK WAS WRITTEN OVER 100 YEARS AGO.

Eugenicists behind the U.S.’s forced sterilizations during the last century also wanted a border wall.

"Most extreme white supremacists ever": Project 2025 contributors have a history of racism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6736015/

“One of the things that you see when you read Project 2025 is not just the racist dog whistles, but some ideas that were exactly lifted from some of the most extreme white supremacists ever,” author and historian Michael Harriott told USA Today.

Is this irony?

"A Time for Choosing" election speech October 27, 1964.

"You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Ronald Reagan.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?537472-1/president-trump-speaks-nabj-conference

The Ugly Origins of Trump’s “America First” Policy

Donald Trump is rallying at Madison Square Garden in New York City, sparking disturbing comparisons to a Nazi-aligned event from 1939. With his use of dehumanizing language and a location steeped in historic controversy, critics are sounding the alarm over Trump's increasingly authoritarian rhetoric. Has Trump crossed a dangerous line? Tony Michaels breaks down the rally, its symbolism, and what this means for America in 2024.

MAGA IS JUST THE KKK WITH A NEW PAINT JOB...

With this phrase, the former president is connecting himself to the Ku Klux Klan and outright fascist movements. By Lawrence S. Wittner | March 19, 2024

People’s choice of words can be revealing. That’s certainly the case with respect to one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans, “America First.”

In April 2016, Trump initially used the term in a campaign speech, proclaiming that “America First” would be “the major and overriding theme of my administration.” The following year, in his inaugural address, he promised that “a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first―America first.” Subsequently, he has employed the slogan frequently to describe his approach to foreign and domestic policy.

This approach is remarkable because, over the past century, “America First” has acquired some very unsavory connotations.

Although the seemingly innocent slogan goes back deep in American history, it began to develop a racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic tone after World War I. The Ku Klux Klan, which surged to some five million members at that time, employed it frequently for its terrorist mobilizations. Like the Klan, nativist groups took up “America First” as they used racist, eugenicist claims to press, successfully, for U.S. government restrictions on immigration. Appealing to an overheated nationalism, William Randolph Hearst used his newspaper empire to campaign, successfully, against U.S. participation in the League of Nations. Soon thereafter, he became a booster of other nationalist fanatics, the rising fascist powers.

Hearst’s newspapers, with “America First” emblazoned on their masthead, celebrated what they called the “great achievement” of the new Nazi regime in Germany. In 1934, Hearst himself scurried off to Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. Instructing his reporters in Germany to provide positive coverage of the Nazis, Hearst fired journalists who failed to do so. Meanwhile, the Hearst press ran columns, without rebuttal, by Hitler, Mussolini, and Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

This toxic brew of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia increasingly found its way into a growing isolationist movement that crested in 1940 with the establishment of the America First Committee. Bankrolled by several top corporate leaders, the America First Committee was determined to prevent the United States from becoming involved in what it labeled, disparagingly, “Europe’s wars.” And as fascist military forces swept from triumph to triumph, it emerged as America’s largest isolationist organization. Although the 800,000 America First members had a variety of political opinions, many of them held anti-Semitic views and sympathized with the Nazis.

Henry Ford, for example, a member of the America First executive committee, was a major backer of anti-Semitic and racist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan. Purchasing a Michigan newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, he used it to publish articles promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Jews controlled the American financial system, that they started World War I, and that they were plotting to rule the world. The newspaper eventually acquired a circulation of nearly a million thanks to Ford’s requirement that his car dealers distribute it. Ford has the distinction of being the only American Hitler complimented in Mein Kampf.

The most prominent leader of the America First Committee was Charles Lindbergh, who―thanks to his celebrated solo flight over the Atlantic―was also one of the best-known Americans of the era. Hitler, Lindbergh believed, was “a visionary” and “undoubtedly a great man.” Visiting Nazi Germany, Lindbergh liked its professed values―what he called “science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race.” Increasingly, he thought that the “strong central leadership of the Nazi state was the only hope for restoring a moral world order.” Addressing reporters, he said that he was “intensely pleased” by all he had seen while in Germany. By contrast, like other anti-Semites, he fretted over “the Jewish problem,” and blamed Jews for the shattered German economy that followed World War I. In 1938, Field Marshall Göring presented Lindbergh with a medal on behalf of the Führer.

Even after Hitler violated the Munich Pact by dispatching his troops to conquer all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Lindbergh thought Hitler’s justification plausible, and argued that France and Britain should form an alliance with the Third Reich. “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again,” he declared. “Our future depends on . . . a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back . . . the infiltration of inferior blood.” Returning from his European travels to the United States, Lindbergh argued that it was “imperative” for “the sake of Western civilization that America stay out of Germany’s way as [it] guarded against the West’s true enemies”―the “Asiatic hordes” of Russia, China, and Japan.

That September, with the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Lindbergh became America’s foremost isolationist, telling a radio audience: “Our bond with Europe is a bond of race…It is the European race we must preserve…If the white race is ever…threatened, it may then be time for us to take our part in its protection, to fight side by side with the English, French, and Germans, but not with one against the other for our mutual destruction.” Only after Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 did Lindbergh and the America First Committee shut down their isolationist campaign.

Given this record, when Trump revived the “America First” slogan, the Anti-Defamation League urged him to reconsider, pointing to the slogan’s bigoted and pro-Nazi history.

But Trump has continued to invoke “America First” in his statements.

Why? It’s clear that he agrees with this slogan’s connotations. After all, Trump’s top emphases have been barring and deporting minority group immigrants from the United States, attacking “migrant crime,” inflaming Christian Nationalism, and ridiculing international cooperation and organizations. When one adds his obsession with genetic superiority and blood purity, plus his admiration for dictators, it’s an all too familiar pattern.

Indeed, Trump is the heir to America First and its fascist proclivities.

https://fpif.org/the-ugly-origins-of-trumps-america-first-policy/

An analysis from USA Today found that at least five of the manifesto’s contributors have made racist comments..

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/31/most-extreme-ever-project-2025-contributors-have-a-history-of/

Mr Trump, A Century Ago, America Built Another Kind of Wall.

The Last Time the US Wanted a Wall, 70,000 People Were Sterilized.

Eugenicists behind the U.S.’s forced sterilizations during the last century also wanted a border wall.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-last-time-the-us-wanted-a-wall-70000-people-were-sterilized/

There was a time when even Ivy League scientists supported racial restrictions at the border.

https://www.conchology.be/?t=9001&id=16758

It was an ugly time. The eugenics mania that swept the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to forced sterilizations and the passage of laws in 27 states designed to limit the numbers of those considered genetically unfit: immigrants, Jews, African-Americans, the mentally ill and those deemed “morally delinquent.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/29/abortion-laws-bans-by-state

This video covers the history of eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” in Germany and the United States throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The discussion between Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Dr. Lutz Kaelber (University of Vermont) explores several sources that display how eugenic practices paved the way for sterilization, and in the case of Nazi Germany, murder, of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce. Ultimately, Dr. Heberer Rice and Dr. Kaelber expose the racism, antisemitism, and ableism that underpinned the eugenic practices that took place before, during, and after World War II.

It’s no surprise that complacently comfortable white folks conceived and promoted this scheme of biological discrimination. According to eugenicists, if you weren’t of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage, your genes were second rate. Even if you were white, if you happened to be epileptic, mentally ill, illegitimate, unemployed, homeless, a sexually active single woman, an alcoholic, a convicted criminal, or a prostitute—all signs of “feeblemindedness” or “hereditary degeneracy”—you were a threat to the purity of the nation’s gene pool. Eugenicists advocated three ways of dealing with the perceived problem of bad genes: immigration restrictions, the prevention of “unfit” marriages, and involuntary sterilization of “defective” individuals in state care, chiefly mental patients and prison inmates.

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. (or - signs of things yet to come) “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities.

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

They started swarming across America’s border, millions of desperate families fleeing poverty or seeking political asylum.

But many people were repelled by their presence. Some warned that the country was facing a “genetic invasion” and that whites were “losing the demographic game.” Another said, “There will no longer be an America for Americans.”

But one leader (Charles Benedict Davenport - 1866 TO 1944) even thought of a radical way to keep them out.

“Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races?” he asked. They started swarming across America’s border, millions of desperate families fleeing poverty or seeking political asylum.

Charles Benedict Davenport.

Behind every movement there’s a powerful personality. The eugenics crusade had Charles Davenport, a slender, Ivy League-educated scientist whose dignified demeanor exuded an air of authority. A PBS film shows why Davenport was the right man to spread the wrong idea.

He was ambitious, a shrewd manipulator of the media, and he knew how to attract the support of wealthy patrons to spread his eugenics ideas to powerful politicians. It was Davenport who called for a wall to be built around America to keep out the “cheaper races.”

Davenport was president of the American Society of Zoologists in 1907 and 1929. In 1910 he founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, and he appointed Harry H. Laughlin to direct it.

Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943)

Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation. Although Laughlin suffered from epilepsy, he advocated for breeding out specific populations from the general population, including epileptics, the physically disabled, the mentally disabled, alcoholics, the blind, and the deaf.

Laughlin lobbied to keep immigration barriers enforced during the Nazi Holocaust, preventing Jews from reaching safety in the United States. A biographer has described Laughlin as "among the most racist and anti-Semitic of early twentieth-century eugenicists."

The University of Heidelberg in Heidelberg, Germany, granted Laughlin an honorary master's degree in 1936 for his work. Harry Hamilton Laughlin was a principal architect of the American eugenics movement from 1910 to 1940.

Born in 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, he worked as a high school teacher and principal before being tapped by Charles Davenport to run the new Eugenics Record Office, founded in 1910 at what is now Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on the north shore of New York’s Long Island.

Laughlin built the ERO into the epicenter of American eugenics, training “fieldworkers,” collecting pedigrees and other family data, publishing articles both scientific and popular, and lobbying on behalf of the need to prevent the reproduction of the “unfit”—the diseased, the infirm, the antisocial and immoral, and especially the feebleminded, a broad term that could include all forms of subnormal intelligence but which was often applied to those of near-normal IQ.

He was a staunch advocate of sterilization, institutionalization, and birth control as means of limiting the numbers of the socially undesirable. In 1922 he drafted a “model sterilization law” that became the basis for California’s sterilization law and which in turn informed the 1933 sterilization law in Nazi Germany.

In 1936, Laughlin proudly accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, a gesture of recognition by Hitler’s Germany of Laughlin’s contributions to eugenic health. Once an inspiration to eugenicists across the land, the ERO sank in reputation through the 1930s and became an embarrassment.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington, which administered the Office, shut it down at the end of 1939, sending Laughlin into retirement. He died on Jan. 26, 1943, in Missouri, with his wife Patsy, but childless and with epilepsy. His thanatography will have to await future scholarship…

https://www.hli.org/resources/harry-laughlin/

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/harry-hamilton-laughlin-1880-1943

2 STEPS FORWARD - 3 STEPS BACK?

Donald Trump calls migrants 'animals' during US-Mexico border speech.

The country was gripped by a demographic panic. That fear, along with mounting anxieties about crime and poverty, led to one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-united-states-independence-day-fear/

The negative approach to eugenics flourished in the United States thanks to the financial support of major philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution, as well as a pool of wealthy backers that included breakfast cereal tycoon John Kellogg and railroad fortune heiress Mary Harriman.

Respected public figures the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell supported the aims of the American eugenics movement, and courses in the subject were taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and other top universities. (Many colleges adopted Charles Davenport’s 1911 textbook "Heredity in Relation to Eugenics," a book filled with inaccurate, oddball opinions about inherited traits within families.)

What’s indisputable about the eugenics movement in this country is that it was driven by racial and class prejudice. At the dawn of the twentieth century, white Protestant Americans feared being overrun by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, people who traditionally had large families. Groups such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the American Eugenics Society stoked those fears by suggesting that the superior traits of industrious Anglo-Saxons were being undermined by the lazy, degenerate masses showing up on their shores. Charles Davenport articulated the goal of encouraging white Americans to have more children and stemming the invasion of undesirables in his “eugenics creed”.

Davenport’s weird doctrine was worthy of Jack D. Ripper, the mad general in Dr. Strangelove who raved about a communist conspiracy to pollute “our precious bodily fluids.”

https://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/hitlers_favorite_american_biological_fascism_in_the_shadow_of_new_york_city/

At first, Davenport only wished to bar the immigration of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

Davenport was president of the American Society of Zoologists in 1907 and 1929. In 1910 he founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, and he appointed Harry H. Laughlin to direct it.

We like to think that the eugenics movement is far behind us and a campaign only of Nazis. Not so. Rhetoric about immigrants "poisoning our blood" harks back to America's extremely popular eugenics movement of the early 1900s.

By the time eugenic sterilizations were phased out (most of the laws had either been repealed or were no longer being enforced by the 1970s), between forty thousand and seventy thousand Americans had been sterilized against their will. Roughly 40 percent of those sterilizations took place in California, where the eugenics movement had a cadre of rabid supporters, among them the first president of Stanford University and members of the University of California Board of Regents and the State Board of Charities and Corrections.

In addition to lobbying for forced sterilizations and strict immigration laws (such as the highly prejudicial Immigration Act of 1924), the eugenics movement advocated legal restrictions on interracial marriages. “Race mixing” was a perceived threat to the genetic purity of white America. True to form, Charles Davenport did all he could to convince the world that mixed marriages produced inferior offspring. In 1929, he published a book called "Race Crossing in Jamaica," a study of racial mixing and its supposedly negative effects. Now cited as a classic example of scientific racism—the attempt to prove racial superiority through pseudoscientific methods—the book drew numerous unfounded conclusions.

The Nazis based their own sterilization law partly on the sterilization laws passed by a majority of U.S. states, partly on model legislation crafted by American Harry Laughlin. Hitler called The Passing of the Great Race, by American Madison Grant, his "Bible." U.S. immigration restrictions of the time, which prevented many Jews caught in the Nazi scourge from finding refuge in America, were in part an outgrowth of the eugenics movement.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-last-time-the-us-wanted-a-wall-70000-people-were-sterilized/

https://ariarmstrong.com/colorado-eugenics.html

https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014/

A Story of Courage and Faith: Bonhoeffer.