It’s just an ideology, and a bad one based in accelerationist hopium and ableism, and racism.
Mother Jones – January 2, 2025 – Eugenics Isn’t Dead—It’s Thriving in Tech – A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley. – Julia Métraux The US psychologist and eugenicist Henry Goddard played an especially critical role. He first introduced the term “moron” in medicine to establish a multi-tiered classification for the “feeble-minded”. With fellow eugenicists, he strove to prove low intelligence as the primary indicator of deficient self-control, criminality, alcoholism, laziness, prostitution, and even political dissent. He advocated intelligence testing for all US immigrants to exclude so-called “unfit” arrivals. In 1913 he began an infamous study on immigrant intelligence that included as assessment questions that he delivered in English to respondents: “What is Crisco?”—the US-made cooking product introduced just two years earlier as an alternative to butter, and “Who is Christy Mathewson?”—an American [baseball] player. Based on responses to such questions, he classified over 80 percent of his respondents as feebleminded—confirming, as Goddard wrote when the study was published in 1917, “that a surprisingly large percentage of immigrants are of relatively low mentality.” Goddard ended the article by proudly sharing the dramatic expansion in deportations of mentally defective populations from Ellis Island—by 350 percent and 570 percent in 1913 and 1914, respectively—that his study had triggered.