For anyone who doubts what I said about how dangerous the likely pseudo-scientific mixture of Malthusian economics with the biological study of evolution which is natural selection, though she didn't use the word in any of her program last night, every single thing that Rachel Maddow brought up as policy from the Trump regime is either directly attributable to the thought of Charles Darwin, as stated in his own words, or is an indirect reflection of his supposedly scientific use of the depraved class-based theory of Thomas Malthus and giving it a far more dangerous form taken as credible and enforced orthodoxy within science. That is as true of the "herd immunity" mentality put into the coo-coo clock mind of Donald Trump by FOX as it was the involuntary, eugenic sterilization of women reported at for-profit ICE prisons in Georgia.
Nothing in what has been revealed about the depravity of the Trump regime's "herd mentality" policy is a surprise to me, almost twelve years ago I wrote this, setting off a firestorm of denunciation on the secular left who responded:
Darwin used a metaphor to describe the unchecked breeding of the “weaker members” of the human species and the bad results it would have for future generations. He said:
"Thus the weak members of civilised 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. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
He introduced the idea that it was stupid to allow certain people to have children after lamenting that they would survive to child bearing age. By comparing people to farm animals in this context he was clearly lamenting that people wouldn’t be treated like animals in a commercial breeding operation.
Let me stop here to ask, isn’t that outrageous enough in itself? Not even animals in the wild, but comparing human beings to animals in a commercial breeding operation? Where else have we seen that idea not only posed by carried out?
Darwin’s Defender didn’t seem to realize that animals selected as not to be bred are not kept as pets on a farm but are marked for early slaughter. I’ll point out that this is entirely in keeping with the earlier part of the paragraph where Darwin laments that human beings will survive long enough to breed.
The mechanism to prevent this happening in the human population, the one he approves of, the one he heartily approves of among the ‘savages’ is through the deaths of the “weaker members”. That the gentleman's son, Charles Darwin, would leave the culling to the 'savages' signifies absolutely nothing.
By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, where the passage comes from, he was a very experienced writer who was used to having his language dissected by both those hostile to science and by scientists. To think he didn’t mean what he wrote is the kind of double-talk you get from idol worshipers, ironically, it is tantamount to saying he was ga-ga when he wrote it. I think he knew what he was writing and that it is clear he knew what happens to animals on the farm, he cited exactly the practices of commercial animal breeding in his work and would have known about its enormous usefulness to his great idea, which isn’t evolution but natural selection. The subsequent and dishonest assertion of his humanity does nothing to dissuade me that he knew the horrible conclusions that had to come from believing what he had just written.
For anyone who further doubts that Charles Darwin introduced the idea that letting millions of people die from infectious disease was salubrious, increasing the health of the survivors, they could only maintain that by not reading him, especially in The Descent of Man in which he said just that.
It is often claimed that the ass-cover that Darwin provided himself, even as he maintained that depraved position as hard science is enough to excuse his central role in producing exactly the proto-Nazi style depravity that is FOX-Hoover Institute style public policy in the Federal Government as I type this but the surest evidence that those who knew Charles Darwin best understood they were to take his dire warnings seriously as they ignored his fig leaf cover for his shame is seen in the abortive political carreer of his own son, Leonard Darwin who ran in opposition to universal vaccination against small pox on explicitly eugenic terms as he would go on to head the British Eugenics Socieity, only one of at least four of C. Darwin's children and many later Darwin descendants active in promoting eugenics, maintaining that in doing so he was carrying on his father's work, saying to his fellow Eugenicist, Karl Pearson, that he was certain his father would have wanted him to do his best in promoting eugenics.
The entire scientific superstition of eugenics is directly attributed to Charles Darwin by its official inventor, Leonard Darwin's predecessor as the head of the British Eugenics Society, Francis Galton who published Charles Darwin's letter supporting his earliest eugenics writings, as, indeed, Charles Darwin cited those and even more extreme eugenics "science" from the fabric merchant turned scientist, W.R. Greg and the direct link to Nazi biological theory, Ernest Haeckel. Nazi biological theory, the basis of not only their own forced sterilization policy, eugenic mass murders - not a little of which was not in gas chambers or through firing squad but through allowing conditions where disease killed huge numbers - was done with the scientific guarantee that the physical health and intellectual status of the survivors would be superior. And their own literature proves that the theory of natural selection was the basis of that.
When you hear people wonder where Scott Atlas, where Richard Epstein, two of the mainstays of Trumpian "herd mentality" come from, I'm afraid the answer to that is they come from a conventional understanding of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection, which, in turn, comes from his own twist (and it is quite a twist) on the depraved, British class-system codification equations of Thomas Malthus.
As long as natural selection is believed to be credible, as long as it is the enforced framing through which not only evolution but things such as public health policy are talked about and imagined, people are going to die from it.
The irony that so many "white evangelicals" for whom the name "Darwin" is anathema are thoroughly true believing Darwinists through Trump and FOX and the Murdoch style of "free press" is striking. Though no more ironic than their claims of "christianity" which they thoroughly reject except for the words and the trappings. They are thoroughly materialistic in that. They swallowed the lies of the Prince of Liars through Murdoch's porn-financed media company.
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