Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Enough With the Sick Crap About Race-Based Genetics

Donald Trump has once again invoked the debunked and bigoted notion of race science, this time in a interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.  While criticizing President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration, Trump claimed that some migrants who enter the United States via an “open border” (which doesn't exist, btw) have “bad genes.”

In the interview Trump claimed, "How about allowing people to come to an open border—13,000 of which were murderers—many of them murdered far more than one person. And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now."

Race science is the long-debunked racist notion that certain negative human traits are inherent to one race over another. In the United States, this was one of the justifications used to keep Black people as slaves.

Trump’s most recent argument echoes the claim he made in December 2023 when he said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

False arguments that Jewish people were “poisoning” blood were perhaps most infamously used by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime to justify the mass murder of millions of people in the Holocaust.

Trump has also promoted the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which argues that Latino immigrants are being allowed into the U.S. to vote and replace white people.

Trump’s race-science rhetoric has been widely criticized by Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris.  “It is language that I think people have rightly found similar to the language of Hitler,” Harris told MSNBC in December. “I think it’s just critically important that we remind each other, including our children, that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based not on who they beat down, but who they lift up.”

 

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