Trump Tech Bros pushing eugenics and genetically engineered babies
In the movie Gattaca, a 1997 dystopian science fiction work starring Ethan Hawke as the lead character, we learn of a future society driven by eugenics where babies are produced via a genetically engineered selection process to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. But if Donald Trump and his Tech Bro buddies have their way, such a scenario will no longer be a storyline in a sci-fi movie . . . it will be reality.
Trump’s tech bro coalition is actively exploring ways to genetically engineer embryos and to get around banned practice in the US (via The Daily Beast):
Silicon Valley heavyweights Sam Altman of OpenAI and Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong are among the notable names investing in a mysterious startup called Preventive. It claims to have secured $30 million in investments to delve deeper into the complex world of embryo engineering.
Genetically engineering humans by tinkering with the genes in embryos is banned in the U.S., as well as in a range of other countries around the world—but not all of them.
The MIT Technology Review reports that Preventive’s work would mean DNA could be “modified by correcting harmful mutations or installing beneficial genes. The goal would be to prevent disease.” (Emphasis mine)
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Preventive is exploring countries that would be hospitable towards its research; one of those countries being the United Arab Emirates.
The Tech Bros identified are some of the closest people living within Donald Trump’s inner circle.
When Trump launched the “Stargate Project” shortly after his inauguration, one of the first companies in line was Open AI, the company that proclaimed that the project would create a highly autonomous AI system that “outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” Also present at the Stargate announcement was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who proclaimed that “the result of [this] investment will be vaccines that prevent cancers, personalize medicine. [We will] never again run into a problem like COVID 19 before it occurs because we get an early warning.” (Emphasis mine)
One of Trump’s major emphases in his second term has been crypto, and Brian Armstrong is one of his favorite crypto Tech Bros. Coinbase is a major donor to Trump’s East Wing ballroom demolition project. Coinbase’s presence on the donor list cements its efforts to align with political power while pushing for favorable crypto laws. Through the ballroom initiative, Coinbase has positioned itself as a serious player in long-term national policy conversations.
On November 6, Armstrong wrote on X how proud he was to be a part of the development of “embryo editing” technology:
“Excited to be an investor in Preventive! More than 300 million people globally live with genetic disease. Foundational research should be done to determine if safe and effective therapies can be developed to cure these diseases at birth. It is far easier to correct a smaller number of cells before disease progression occurs, such as in an embryo.”
While Trumpists hate Hitler comparisons being made when discussing their mango messiah, eugenics and genetically engineered babies comes right out of Adolf’s playbook courtesy of another proponent of eugenics — Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
The eugenics movement was aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. The word eugenics — it means “well-born” — originated in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a British scholar and the cousin of Charles Darwin. It was Galton’s belief that the condition of the human race could be improved via the selective breeding of individuals possessing desired traits. This type of eugenic science came to be known as “positive eugenics.”
Even though Galton’s plans never came to fruition, the United States picked up where he left off in the late 19th century. However, unlike their British counterparts, eugenicists in America adopted “negative eugenics” which focused on preventing the reproduction of people with undesirable traits. This led to the creation of the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in 1911, an agency used to identify the poor, those in low social standing, immigrants, and minorities as unfit to procreate.
It was around this time that Margaret Sanger arrived on the scene as a birth control, population control, and eugenics activist, and she fully embraced “negative eugenics” as a basis for creating what we now know as Planned Parenthood. In her rejection of “positive eugenics,” Sanger stressed the connection between birth control and eugenics when she wrote:
“Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end, but they lay emphasis upon different methods. Eugenics without Birth Control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.”
In the 1930’s, Sanger created the “Negro Project” to “kill off the black race.” It was this particular aspect of Sanger’s philosophy concerning eugenics that inspired Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, culminating in the slaughter of over six million Jews.
Some of Sanger’s ideas are employed by Planned Parenthood today. For example, current technology makes it easy for these baby murderers to identify certain undesirable traits, such as being the wrong sex, being the wrong race, or possessing so-called genetic defects such as Down’s Syndrome.
As a Christian constitutional conservative, it would have been nice to assume that today’s “pro-life” Evangelicals would be first in line against genetically engineered babies and eugenics, but that’s highly unlikely.
In the summer of the 2016 presidential campaign, I wrote an article about the similarities that existed between the American religious leaders and the Nazi Germany religious leaders responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, and I revisited the idea again in the summer of the 2020 presidential campaign. In both posts, it documented the many ways that the spiritual condition of the 21st century American church so closely resembled that of 1930s Germany that it was highly likely that we’d see our great nation fall into the hands of a Hitler-like leader.
If Donald Trump and his inner circle of Tech Bros have their way, “life” will be put in the hands of an army of men and women with a god complex so extreme that they will use eugenics and genetically engineered babies to design a child’s genes before birth in order to erase hereditary disease or choose traits like stronger bones or sharper minds.
Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler would be so proud.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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